Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Bloke found dead in his room. Blood all over the place. Door locked from the inside. A real Sherlock Holmes-er. Get over there before the locals leave their footprints all over the shop - message timed at seven forty-four. The local bobby reckoned he’d been found about six thirty. Police Surgeon’ll meet you there.’

  Troy wanted desperately to ask where Wildeve was, when he could get back to Wayne, whether Tom Henrey had solved his cases. Only the last seemed workable, but Onions was ahead of him.

  ‘Take Wildeve – or leave the lad a message. He’s nowt else on at the moment.’

  Troy looked again at the mountain of paperwork.

  ‘Tom cracked Golders Green and Hyde Park?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Onions said. ‘Your lad did. Tom’s grateful, but embarrassed, if you know what I mean.’

  Troy knew exactly what he meant.

  The battery on the Bullnose Morris was flat. Troy waited while it was jump-started. Wildeve came rushing into the garage as the engine spluttered to life and flung himself into the passenger seat.

  ‘Sorry. Overslept.’

  ‘Sleep of the just, eh?’ said Troy, easing the car out on to the Embankment.

  ‘You heard? I can’t help the feeling that I’ve somehow blotted my copybook.’

  ‘Solving crimes is your job. Never apologise for it. It’s Tom’s problem, not yours. Comes the day you run rings around me, then you can worry.’

  ‘I do hope that’s a joke, Freddie.’

  68

  Troy knew the voice at once. It was the same Police Surgeon who had bandaged his eyes and removed his stitches in another lifetime and another place.

  ‘I hope you’re rested, Sergeant,’ he said.

  ‘I feel fine.’

  ‘You look a damn sight better than you did the last time we met.’

  Troy peeled back the grubby white sheet that covered the corpse. A man in his twenties lay in a sticky, crisping pool of blood. Face down, hands buried beneath him, elbows sticking out. He was barefoot, collarless and had rolled up his sleeves. It should have been the old familiar slipper waiting to receive his foot – it chafed like best boot on worst bunion.

  Troy looked all around the room, his attention drawn by the sound of gently trickling water to the basin opposite the door, and slowly brought his gaze to rest on the doctor.

  ‘You can carry on,’ he said.

  Troy sat on a chair by the door, watched the doctor turn the body, stiff with rigor mortis. The room hummed with layers of noise – the sense rather than the sound of the water, the endless creaks of a wooden inn that had swayed with the wind on the same spot for centuries, the stagy whispers from the staircase, and a thunder that to Troy seemed to sound from somewhere deep within him.

  ‘Not dead long, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’

  ‘Can you put a time to it?’

  ‘Midnight at the outside. Say four o’clock this side.’

  Troy glanced at his watch. It was half past eight.

  Wildeve hovered in the doorway, behind him a crowd of a dozen or more pressed for the ghoulish glimpse of a corpse. Troy told him to take them downstairs and start questioning – anything to keep them out of the way. Troy looked at the body, upturned like a beetle, stuck on its back, the legs and arms frozen where they’d locked in death. The doctor was cutting away at the shirtfront.

  ‘Stabbed,’ he said. ‘Right through the heart. I’d’ve said death was instantaneous.’

  ‘Any other wounds?’

  ‘Hard to tell. You can’t get at ’em when they’re like this, and I can hardly take a mallet to his knees now can I?’

  The doctor stood, wiping his hands. He dropped the towel into his open case.

  ‘I’ll have to get him back to the lab, though, to tell the truth, I’d rather leave him till he loosens. He’ll not fit on a stretcher the way he is. You can take a look all you want, but you’ll see no more than I did.’

  Troy knew damn well he could. If death was instantaneous why were his legs twisted together as they were? The man had walked two or three paces and fallen crossing the room when death took him. What was the white stuff in his right ear? Why was the tap still running? He moved to the basin and turned off the tap. Suddenly the room was free of its subliminally dominant noise, and he could hear the doctor grunting softly as he forced the latch on his Gladstone bag together, and beneath that surface sound the slow drumming in his own blood that seemed to him like a syllable beating forth to utterance. He ran his hand around the edge of the basin and looked at a brown ring of fuzz that gathered on the end of his fingers.

  Downstairs Wildeve was shouting to make himself heard, but appeared to be getting somewhere.

  ‘This chap – the potman – raised the alarm when he found blood dripping through the ceiling. He and the landlord – that’s the little fat chap knocking back the brandies in the corner – forced the door. They both swear the key was turned in the lock on the inside. Trouble is this isn’t the sort of place that asks any questions or signs registers – they haven’t the faintest idea who he was. Do you suppose it was suicide?’

  Troy steered Wildeve away from the saloon and into the snug. With the door closed the hubbub muted. Wildeve was accelerating with the excitement of mystery. Bright-eyed and breathless.

  ‘I tell you, Freddie, this one’s a stinker.’

  ‘No – it’s not.’

  ‘Door locked. Dead in the middle of the floor. Good God – it’s straight out of Sherlock Holmes!’

  ‘That’s what Onions said. You’re both wrong.’

  Wildeve looked perplexed and was about to speak again, when Troy’s hand came up to wave him into silence.

  ‘The doctor reckons he died between midnight and four a.m. Let’s presume the latest possible hour. He died about five o’clock. And he was murdered. It’s pretty damn difficult to stab yourself through the heart. And he was stabbed with a sword.’

  ‘What?’ Wildeve was agog with disbelief.

  ‘With a sword. As he shaved. At the basin in his room. Through the panelling that divides his room from the next. He has shaving cream in his ears, the tap was on, and he was about to rinse the basin when someone shoved a sword or something as long as a sword through the gap in the boards. There’s blood on the edges of the boards just below the mirror. He took two steps back, clutching his chest, which stopped the blood spraying out, turned to try for the door and fell dead with his legs still crossed. He was a merchant sailor. He was getting ready to sail on the six o’clock tide. Check the charts; if high tide isn’t somewhere between six and seven at this time of year I’ll eat my hat. If you go through his possessions you’ll find papers or a pay-book of some sort. Find out who was in the next room. He’ll be long gone, but at least we’ll get a description. Pass the description – a name if we’re that lucky – to the River Police. Have them stop any ship that sailed on the high tide. Whoever killed him knew him. I’ll be at the Yard.’

  Troy stood up and reached for the door.

  ‘Freddie – you can’t do this. You can’t strip the damn thing to the bone and then just bugger off. It can’t be that simple.’

  ‘Believe me, Jack; that’s what happened. I never said it was simple.’

  He walked out.

  Wildeve called after him, ‘Freddie, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you don’t have to prove it to me!’

  But the only word Troy could hear was ‘Wayne’ as it pounded in his blood and filled his ears with its suffocating beat.

  69

  Troy sat all day in his office. He stared at the mountain of paperwork on Wildeve’s desk and did nothing about any of it. He watched the sun dance the diamond dance of coming summer on the Thames. Coming? He glanced down at the unemptied waste-paper basket, stuffed with discarded pages from his calendar. Coming? It was June the 1st. Summer was already here. God in heaven – how long had he spent in the pit?

  At five o’clock he walked along to the Savoy, showed his card and was admitted to
the Lady Diana Brack suite, with its view across the river, empty and clean and smelling ever so faintly of Je Reviens. He sat on the edge of the bed and inhaled deeply – not certain of the reality of her presence or the power of his imagination. He sat until dusk – then he ran ragged through the drawers and cupboards. The silks and the satins spilled out pooling a shimmering lake of dresses and stockings, slips and pants on to the carpet. He let a stocking run liquid through his fingers. Buried his face in a slip, felt the rasp of silk on his five o’clock shadow, searched for the familiar and smelt only soap flakes.

  There was no man’s clothing anywhere to be found. Wayne had left not a trace behind.

  Back home, he waited to see if she would come that night. She did not.

  Wildeve caught up with him in the office the next morning as they sifted paperwork over eight o’clock tea. Troy thought he was sullenly nursing his grievance. Then he spoke up.

  ‘Of course. You were absolutely bloody right, but that’s hardly the point is it?’

  ‘Isn’t it?’

  ‘No it bloody well isn’t.’

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Stoker Alan Bone, bound for Lagos on the SS Good Hope. Steamingly angry, denying the lot and guilty as hell. But that still isn’t the point!’

  ‘Where are you holding him?’

  ‘Wapping Old Stairs, with the River boys. Freddie, will you stop playing the boss and just for five minutes play the copper?’

  ‘Of course, Jack. If you like.’

  ‘I mean . . . ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I mean . . . what would Onions say?’

  ‘He’d congratulate me on the art of delegation, and you on a quick solution.’

  ‘But I didn’t solve the damn thing. You did. But . . .

  ‘But?’

  ‘But . . . not in the right way.’

  ‘Jack, I’m afraid this is a little beyond me. There are no right or wrong ways. Only solutions. Shouldn’t you get over to Wapping and give Mr Bone a bit of a roasting?’

  Wildeve left. Troy thought the exit fell only marginally short of storming out. He looked at the mountain of paperwork on Jack’s desk, and knew it would find itself ignored for another day.

  He left the building by the Whitehall exit and caught a bus to Kensington Gore, alighting at the Albert Hall, close to his uncle’s office at Imperial.

  70

  Mid-evening he sat indoors, craving the darkness that June nights denied. He had not even bothered to take off his jacket or turn on the wireless. He mulled over the mass of fact and guesswork that had been his day with Nikolai. Around nine, still cheated of all but the merest touch of twilight, he saw the front door pushed gently open and Brack framed herself in the doorway.

  ‘Where are you? It’s black as coal in here,’ she said.

  ‘Over here, by the fire.’

  He could see her quite clearly. She was dressed to the nines. A black, shoulderless dress, crêpe de Chine or some such, emphasising the length of her neck, the tightness of her waist, the breadth of her shoulders, and topped by a touch of frivolity that scarcely seemed in character – an ostrich-feather boa. She put her cloak down on the chair by the door and spun round for him, smiling, seeking approval.

  ‘You look dressed to kill.’

  ‘No. I dress down to kill. For the Berkeley I dress up!’

  ‘We’re going to the Berkeley?’

  ‘Damn right we are.’

  ‘I . . . I haven’t got the togs. I don’t have evening dress any more. The moths got it.’

  ‘Troy, when did you last go to the Berkeley or anywhere like it? Men haven’t worn evening dress since 1940! Mufti is quite acceptable. Just put on a clean shirt and we’ll toddle off for a cab.’

  ‘I can’t match that. That dress looks as though it cost a packet.’

  ‘Of course it cost a packet! Why do you think we’re going out? I’ve waited six months for this dress. I ordered it from Victor Stiebel before Christmas. I’ll be damned if I won’t go somewhere and be seen.’

  ‘That’s what bothers me,’ he said, and sloped off upstairs for a clean shirt.

  Slamming the door behind him, he thought that they never had been seen. He found himself simultaneously contemplating the risk and knowing he would do nothing whatsoever about it. She raced to the end of the alley to hail a cab. He followed quietly. At the kink in the alley he thought he heard a sound behind him. He turned, two hands thrust him sharply back against the wall, and a tall man loomed over him.

  ‘Freddie, you fool. You complete and utter bloody fool!’

  ‘Let me go, Jack,’ he whispered back.

  ‘What on earth do you think you’re playing at?’

  Wildeve did not wait for an answer.

  ‘I knew it. I knew it. Damn me, why didn’t I see it sooner? Have you taken leave of your senses?’

  Troy could see his face now. He looked up into his eyes, expressionless. Wildeve relaxed his grip. Troy heard the familiar squeal of cab brakes from St Martin’s Lane.

  ‘Troy,’ she called from the street. ‘Do get a move on!’ He turned his back on Wildeve and walked away.

  ‘Freddie, you can’t. You can’t.’

  Troy did not turn. Wildeve did not follow. He could see Brack now, by the open door of a cab. She could not stand still. She seemed almost to be skipping from one foot to the other. Out of the deepest shadows he heard Ruby’s voice say ‘Who’s a lucky boy then?’

  He sat in the back of the cab. She took his hand in hers, and laid her head upon his shoulder. As the cab rounded Piccadilly Circus he could hear his heartbeat. The Circus was almost empty of people. A few people out on the town and apart from the usual gathering outside Rainbow Corner, very few in uniform. One thought intruded, one feeling caused his pulse to race – in his mind’s eye he had seen Wayne not Wildeve in that first split second as Jack’s hands had grabbed him. He had told himself for weeks now that he would always be ready for Major Wayne. And he had been taken completely by surprise. Worse than this one thought was the doubt about her that had surfaced and sank in that split second, without thought.

  ‘When did you last go there?’ she asked.

  ‘To the Berkeley? I’ve never been to the Berkeley.’

  ‘Were you really such a stuffy old fish, Troy?’

  ‘I suppose I was,’ he said to avoid a better answer.

  He had found in the police a convenient escape from the social exigencies of class and caste. His brother had accepted what was offered and gone up to Cambridge. His sisters had been presented at court, and had returned giggling at the confusion they had fostered by pretending to be one twin or the other, and agreeing that Queen Mary was ‘a bit of an old trout’. One morning in 1931 his father had looked up from the lectern on which he propped his morning paper – ‘his’, Troy thought, ‘his’ was always someone else’s, the opposition – and asked of the young Troy, ‘Well, my little Englander, will you play the English at their game?’ It was as though he knew that Troy would not, as though he accepted that his last child was different in some way from his elder children. It was not his habit to force things on any of his children, but in this instance he seemed to be clearly anticipating the response.

  ‘Don’t know,’ Troy had replied, and left it at that for several years, until the day he announced that he had been accepted into the Metropolitan Police Force.

  ‘Are you sure?’ his father had asked. Was all he had asked. And Troy wondered now about the pain he might have given the old man. What had Driberg meant by that remark?

  It was not the game – it let him free from the social round. He could do as he wished and to hell with the dreary traipsing around the circuit of sophisticated London. He had not been in a nightclub in years. All in all being a copper was the most marvellous excuse for selfishness he could ever have thought up.

  The cab drew up at the corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street, opposite the Ritz Hotel. The head waiter at the Berkeley knew Lady Diana Brack by sight
and by name. He greeted her as though she were a valued, too rarely seen patron and told her that he would see she got her usual table. They were shown to a green-upholstered banquette.

  ‘Thank you, Ferraro,’ she said, ‘I don’t suppose you could manage a bottle of champagne?’

  He disappeared, with her cloak over his arm, saying he would see what he could do. She smiled at Troy across the top of the menu.

  ‘Is this an occasion?’ he asked.

  ‘It is and it isn’t. I wanted to go out. I was desperate to go out. We seem to have spent a lifetime indoors.’

  A lifetime?’ he queried.

  She buried herself behind the menu.

  ‘Of course there’s no real choice. A five-bob menu is a five-bob menu. I came for the music. Before the war there was such marvellous music. Marvellous music.’

  Troy looked across at the empty bandstand. The music stands displayed the name Romero in an italic slant. The name meant nothing to Troy. He’d have known Lew Stone’s band or Harry Roy’s, but few others. The club was full - as she had said, few men if any wore evening dress, and most were in uniform – an even match of naval officers and RAF types with a smattering from the army.

  Five bob translated into soup and fish. A soup so watery it could have passed for Oliver Twist’s gruel. The fish was good, fresh river trout, crying out for what they’d never get, fresh Jersey potatoes. The champagne made up for everything. Looking at the golden glow, the racing bubbles in the fluted glass, Troy realised that she too was bubbling in a way he had rarely seen her do.

  She told him of her week. It verged on gossip, it approached chatter. She had been to see H. G. Wells at Hanover Gate. Stuck for a response Troy asked simply how he was.

  ‘Old,’ she replied.

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘He must be eighty.’

  ‘Seventy-seven, actually. But I meant old old. He has been young so long. I had begun to think age would never catch him. Now I think he might not see out the war.’

  ‘It’s almost over.’

  ‘Do you really think so? I’ve been thinking so much lately about after the war.’