Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘I was just trying to tell the doctor, sir –’

  ‘I’ve spoken, lad. It’s my case.’

  ‘He’s one of yours?’ said Troy with a nod at the corpse.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then I’ll leave you to it.’

  Troy walked out. For a second they exchanged glances. Cal found himself looking straight down into the black eyes as he passed, ebony mirrors reflecting back at him – and then he was gone. Down the stairs, past Mrs O’Grady still lamenting such a ‘to-do’.

  Stilton now bent over the body.

  ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

  The doctor clicked his bag shut, took one more look at his watch.

  ‘Important, was he?’

  ‘You could say that. Now, before you dash off to whatever’s made you look at your watch three times since I came into the room, cause of death. A professional opinion, if you please.’

  The doctor actually blushed a little. Not so stupid as not to know when he was being bawled out. Cal slipped in behind Stilton as he stood up to tackle the doctor and looked at the body for himself.

  ‘Neck’s broken. Death was instantaneous. No marks to indicate any struggle. Your man on the door says he saw no-one come or go. Only other person in the house was the landlady. Ergo, I conclude the poor sod tripped on the top step, tumbled all the way to the bottom and broke his blasted neck. Happens all the time. Houses like these are death traps. If it wasn’t for the war we’d have ’em all shut down as health hazards.’

  ‘Thank you. You can get off to your dinner now. It was your dinner you were anxious not to miss wasn’t it?’

  The doctor said nothing. Picked up his trilby, jammed it on his head, last symbol of his damaged pride, and left. Stilton bent to the body again. Side by side with Cal. Cal had only ever seen a body once before, his maternal grandfather laid out in his casket – black suit, combed hair, mortician’s make-up, eyes shut. This man’s eyes were shut. He was almost prepared to bet that the young cop had closed them himself. In seven years as a soldier he’d never heard a shot fired in anger, unless it was Gelbroaster’s the other night, and he’d never seen a body that had just collapsed instantly into death like this. The heap that was death. A grim human puzzle. Take these parts, these tangled limbs, and rearrange them into human form.

  ‘You seen many corpses in your time, Mr Cormack?’

  ‘No,’ said Cal. ‘No, I haven’t.’

  ‘This is one Jerry I’d hoped to see live just a while longer. Long enough to find out what he was up to.’

  They found Troy outside, leaning against the bonnet of his car, collar up. Hands deep in his pockets.

  ‘Was there something else, Sergeant?’

  Troy stood upright. It made little difference to his size up against Stilton, but it indicated the right amount of deference to rank.

  ‘You know that’s no accident, don’t you?’

  ‘Mebbe.’

  ‘I’d recommend a full PM and Forensics out at Hendon. Whoever he was, and I’m sure you know better than I, he needs the works.’

  ‘I’ve handled suspicious deaths before, lad. I’ve seen dead bodies before.’

  ‘And I see them all the time. Forgive the plainness of this, sir – but murder is my business.’

  ‘Thank you, Sergeant. ’Appen you’re right. And right now we should both be about our business. Dobbs!!!’

  Stilton strode across the road to where Dobbs was hastily stepping on another butt.

  Troy opened the door of his car. Looked straight at Cal.

  ‘Are you working with Mr Stilton?’

  ‘I guess I am,’ said Cal.

  ‘Then I wish you luck,’ said Troy.

  He drove off. Cal could hear Stilton bawling out Dobbs. Half London could hear Stilton bawling out Dobbs.

  ‘You were in the pub. Weren’t you? In the Lion. Supping ale when you should have been watching the door!’

  ‘Boss, it was so quiet. Nothing was –’

  ‘While you were wetting your slimy gizzard, someone slipped in and topped the bastard. Do you hear me Dobbs? We’ve lost him. He’s dead. Or did you think the Murder Squad sent Troy out to check his ration book? You stupid, stupid bugger!’

  ‘Honest, boss, it won’t ’appen again!’

  ‘Too bloody right it won’t. Cos if it does they’ll be using your bollocks for target practice down at Bisley. Get in there now. Calm down old Peg before she bursts a blood vessel. Get hold of the meat wagon and get matey carted off. Do a house to house. Talk to the whole damned street. When you’ve done all that, get back to the Yard. Write out a full report of everything you’ve seen and done in the last seventy-two hours and have it on my desk before you go home tonight. Do I make myself clear, Mr Dobbs?’

  When he came back to Cal, there was the whisper of a grin beneath the moustache.

  ‘That looked like fun.’

  ‘Oh it was Mr Cormack, I enjoyed every second of it.’

  ‘Good. Because I have a little advice for you.’

  Stilton laughed out loud.

  ‘Come on, lad. Let’s hear it.’

  ‘That young cop is right.’

  ‘I know damn well he’s right.’

  ‘Then why did you ignore him?’

  ‘Let’s just say I don’t like being taught how to suck eggs by the likes of Frederick Troy. He may be Scotland Yard’s wunderkind,but as far as I’m concerned he’s still wet behind the ears.’

  ‘Then you’ll order a full autopsy?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘The Works?’

  ‘You’re beginning to learn the jargon. But why do you ask?’

  ‘This is the bit you won’t like.’

  ‘Try me.’

  ‘This dead German was a hit man, right? An assassin?’

  ‘A Dutchman, but yes, an assassin.’

  ‘What kind of man gets the drop on a trained killer?’

  ‘I don’t know. You tell me.’

  ‘Another trained killer?’

  ‘You think there’s another one?’

  ‘One? Maybe. Or do you have a whole bunch of trained killers on the loose?’

  It was Stilton’s turn to look at his watch.

  ‘We’ve missed my Czech for tonight. Do you fancy a spot o’ dinner?’

  ‘You know a good restaurant?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of a restaurant. I was thinking – would you like to come home? Have something to eat with me and the wife?’

  Cal said nothing. He was almost too startled to speak. He’d primed himself for an eruption of bad temper, and he wound up with an invitation to dinner. He’d never been inside an Englishman’s home before. He’d heard they all thought of them as castles.

  ‘You can tell me your theory on the way over to Stepney.’

  Stilton grinned over the word ‘theory’. Cal accepted silently and got back into the car.

  § 23

  Cal had no grasp of London’s geography, but even the walk around London last Sunday morning, after the big raid, had told him that it lacked order. Following your nose only worked if you weren’t going anywhere. What London needed was a grid. True, the Washington streets he’d grown up with had nothing as romantic as Piccadilly or as historically obscure as Rotten Row – the best they could come up with was a prosaic Avenue C or M Street, and you’d never while away a lazy five minutes wondering about the origins of ‘M’ – but they led somewhere. Major L’Enfant, Washington’s genius, had taken the stripes off the flag, drawn them as a grid across a swamp in Maryland, thrown the stars at them, one for each of the fifteen states at the time of the city’s inception, and where they hit declared a road junction and linked up the diagonals. What could be simpler? An easy-to-use city, with a few statues thrown in.

  It was scarcely beginning to get dark as Stilton steered him across the urban chaos that was the East End, but blackouts were already being pulled tight in the houses they passed. One or two of the oncoming cars had put on their dim, hooded headlights. In re
al darkness, enough to see each other coming, not enough to see where you were going. A sense of caution seemed to have grown into the British motorist as a consequence. Cal doubted that Stilton clocked more than twenty miles an hour the whole way. He realised he would come to crave real darkness soon enough.

  ‘You’ve said nowt,’ Stilton said after about ten minutes of crawling along the half-empty streets.

  Nowt? Cal tried to think of a rhyme, the key to meaning, unwilling to admit he didn’t know what the man meant.

  ‘You were going to tell me your theory about the killing.’

  ‘Oh, I see. Let’s get back to Stahl for a moment. I, I mean we, don’t know what Stahl is looking for. We don’t know why he doesn’t simply come in. It’s been implicit from the start that he’s running. But running from what?’

  ‘From the Germans, of course. I should o’ thought that’s pretty bloody obvious.’

  ‘Sure, and if he’s running, why shouldn’t they be chasing?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘If Stahl has been blown. If Germany knows he’s an American agent – then they’d try to kill him before he told us whatever it is he has to tell us. They’d have sent someone after him, wouldn’t they?’

  ‘Smulders?’

  ‘Was that the guy’s name?’

  ‘Said he was a Dutchman, a master printer from Delft. He may well have been Dutch. There’s plenty of Quislings around.’

  ‘Suppose it was Stahl he came to kill?’

  Stilton said nothing to this. Cal could almost hear him thinking.

  ‘You mean like a hypothesis?’

  ‘Sure . . . if that helps, think of it that way.’

  ‘OK. I’m listening.’

  ‘The hypothesis is that Smulders came to kill Stahl.’

  ‘If you say so.’

  ‘And if he did, then the implications are serious.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Think about it. He came after Stahl. Came to kill Stahl – but wound up getting killed.’

  ‘OK – I get your drift.’

  All the same Cal spelt it out to him.

  ‘Suppose Stahl got to this guy before he got to him. And at that right under the nose of your man Dobbs. Think what it means. It means Stahl’s one step ahead of the Germans and two steps ahead of us. If he doesn’t want to be found . . .’

  Cal let the sentence trail off.

  ‘There is one thing,’ Stilton said after a while. ‘We lost Smulders. Just for one night, you understand. But for more than two hours we’d not a clue where he was. If he encountered Stahl in that time . . .’

  Now Stilton had no conclusion to his sentence.

  ‘Doesn’t bear thinking about, does it?’ said Cal.

  Stilton paused again. Another breathing, thinking space as he pulled the car off Mile End Road and headed down towards the river.

  ‘Mind – like you said, it’s just hypothetical . . .’

  ‘If you say so.’ Cal echoed his own caution back to him.

  ‘You know, Mr Cormack, you’re not as green as you are cabbage-looking.’

  Now what the fuck did that mean?

  Stilton stopped the car in a side street. Pulled up the handbrake between the seats.

  ‘Are we there?’ said Cal.

  ‘Welcome to Jubilee Street.’

  They got out. Stilton dug into his pockets looking for his keys. Cal looked around. For all he had seen in the last few days, nothing had prepared him for what he now saw. He had seen public ruins, ruins on the grand scale. Public places blasted into vacancy, open to the sky. This was different. These were homes, human habitations. And in all the street only one house still stood. Alone in a desert of rubble stood the home of Chief Inspector Walter Stilton. A big, five-storey double-fronted house, once the centrepiece of a late Victorian terrace – that surely, was the Jubilee celebrated in the street’s name? Even his passing knowledge of British history covered Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee of 1887 – and its windows were patched in cardboard, its paint peeled back to raw elm, and its walls were jagged as a row of rotting teeth, where they had once locked neatly into the house next door. But there was no house next door. Next door, in the literal sense, looked to be the best part of quarter of a mile away. What remained of the surrounding houses appeared to be sunken pools. Cellars into which the structure of the houses had collapsed upon impact from a bomb – ‘pancaked’ was the local jargon – only to fill up with rain in the days and weeks that had passed. Cal had learnt on Saturday night just how flimsy – how unexpectedly flimsy – London was. He’d watched bombs slice through houses from top to bottom like they were made from nothing more substantial than tinfoil. Unexpected – because London was old. Older than America. Older than his family home in Fairfax County – and that had withstood a three day siege by the Union Army. London, so elegant, so redolent of lived history, seemed to him to be no more than an Anacostia shantytown. Hitler huffed, Hitler puffed and he blew your house down.

  Over the slaughtered houses a tall factory chimney stack was visible – as prominent among the ruins of the East End of London as the Washington Monument in the great fields of the Mall. How had they managed to miss it? Whatever the Luftwaffe left standing propelled Cal to wondering how? Why? Why this building? Why not that? Why wasn’t London razed from East to West and North to South. How did they stand it, how did they survive, how, put simply, did they live?

  ‘It’s nowt grand, you’ll understand,’ said Stilton fiddling at the lock with his key chain. ‘We live plain.’

  The door, warped in its frame, jammed. Stilton muttered ‘’alf a mo’ and put his shoulder to it. The door scraped across the linoleum with a shriek and Cal found himself in a long corridor, with stairs ascending and descending, and the steamy smell of cooking wafting up from below.

  ‘That you, Stinker?’ a woman’s voice yelled.

  ‘Who else would it be? You’re not expecting your fancy man, are you?’

  ‘’E don’t comeround Thursdays!’

  Stilton clumped down the wooden stairs, Cal trailing after, into a huge kitchen. Hot with cooking, a dozen aromas mixing in the air. A fat, fiftyish woman in a flowery apron, grey hair pinned up in a bun, stood by a large cast-iron cooker, the like of which Cal had not seen before. It was four or five feet across, and six or seven pans stood bubbling on two giant hotplates, their covers hinged back against the chimney breast. She flipped a couple of pan lids. Stirred their contents with a wooden spoon.

  Stilton crept up to the woman, hugged her around the waist. Lifted her gently off the ground and whispered in her ear. She prised him off less than gently. Rapped his knuckles with her spoon and said ‘’Ands orf. Can’t you see I’m busy?’ Then she noticed Cal.

  ‘You daft so-an’-so. You didn’t say we’d got visitors.’

  One hand unconsciously smoothed down her skirts where Stilton had ruffled them, the other clutched the dripping spoon.

  ‘This is our Mr Cormack. Mr Cormack is a Yank. First one we’ve ever had. Mr Cormack, the missis. Our Edna.’

  ‘How do you do, Mrs Stilton?’

  Before Edna Stilton could answer Stilton said, ‘You can fit in another for dinner, can’t you Ed?’

  ‘Comes the day we can’t! O’ course we can. But you’re early, Stinker, I’m all behind tonight. What with Kev and Trev home, and Kitty says she’ll be along later, there’s been a lot to do. You’ll have to make yourself scarce for half an hour. I can’t be doin’ with you under me feet.’

  Out in the street once more Stilton said, ‘We’ll go for a swift half.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘We’ll go to the pub.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘I don’t mean the same pub. There’s plenty of pubs.’

  It was, Cal knew, a classic British understatement. They were, Stilton professed, just ‘nipping round the corner’, but this still entailed passing what looked to Cal like a perfectly decent pub. But pubs, as he was learning, were a matter of ambience and nuance. It was not for
the uninitiated to pronounce.

  ‘We’ll kill twenty minutes in the Brickie’s Arms,’ said Stilton. ‘You’re going to love this. A real treat this time o’ night.’

  Stilton pushed at the door of a blacked-out, glazed-brick and red-tile building on the next corner. Inside it was warm and moist and brown. The room was not large, but it was pretty well full, and it existed in nondescript hues of brown, from the oak and mahogany of the furniture to the dirty sawdust on the floor and the nicotine mist on the ceiling, to the faded, featureless pattern in the forty-year-old wallpaper. It might once have been red, but it was brown now. Above the bar a portrait of the Prime Minister took pride of place and contributed the only splash of colour with its trailing ribbons of red, white and blue.

  ‘Evening Stinker,’ said the barman. ‘What’ll it be?’

  ‘Two halves o’ best. You don’t want stout again, do you Mr Cormack? I doubt Eric’s got an aspidistra to water.’

  Cal did the merest double-take at this and accepted the offer.

  ‘Chief Inspector . . .’

  ‘Call me Walter, lad.’

  ‘Why do they call you Stinker?’

  Stilton grinned. ‘It’s not what you were thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking anything.’

  ‘Cheese, lad. Cheese. Where I come from, up north, Derbyshire way, they make four or five varieties of cheese. Two of ’em called Stilton. A white one and a blue one. The blue does niff a bit.’

  ‘Niff?’

  ‘Stink.’

  ‘Derbyshire?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘So you’re not a cockney?’

  ‘Nay lad, or did you think I talked like this for the fun of it?’

  ‘I thought you talked like that guy on the radio.’

  Stilton took this quizzically.

  ‘What guy on the radio?’

  ‘The late-night guy. Priestley. J.B. Priestley.’

  ‘No, no. He’s Yorkshire. Not the same thing at all. They still live in mud huts in Bradford. Now, the wife’s a cockney though. She was born in that house we live in, and all her brothers and sisters along with her. And all our kids too.’

  They carried two brimming halves of best bitter to a table. Three chairs, one of them occupied by a morose-looking man with a glass of flat beer in front of him, as though he had spun it out since opening time and now given up on it.