Riptide

by Lawton, John

  It was a little like looking into a mirror. A short, slim woman, thick black hair – pulled back with a working-day severity – pale skin like his, and eyes like his – black as coal.

  ‘Frederick Troy. Murder Squad.’

  It sounded like the most unattractive calling card in the world – indeed, Troy kept calling cards without rank or job just to drop on the silver plate without causing alarm – but she said, ‘I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot of you, then?’

  No, he thought. Kolankiewicz had got through so many stenographers and assistants since the war started. This one would not last. They none of them did. She’d volunteer for the ATS or the WRNS or go off to wear jodhpurs and dig spuds in the darkest shires. A pity. Married or not, she was a looker.

  ‘You get sick of the sight of him,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Now, whatever it is, spit it out.’

  ‘I was wondering about a body. A Dutchman found dead in Hoxton Street last night.’

  Kolankiewicz whipped back the sheet.

  ‘This fucker?’

  Troy found himself staring once more at the unearthly, drained, white-beyond-white corpse of Jeroen Smulders, fresh stitching loosely holding incisions Kolankiewicz had made. He glanced sideways at Mrs Pakenham. She was not reacting, either to the corpse or to Kolankiewicz’s lapse into plain speaking. She had the makings of a good Kolankiewicz assistant. Blanch not at the bodies nor the beast.

  ‘Yes. That’s him. Are you done? Do you know how he died?’

  ‘This not your case, Troy. That big bastard Stilton, the one with the silly accent, sent him over. I had him on the phone at crack of dawn this morning.’

  ‘I know. I checked with his office. I’d just rather know for myself than wait for him to tell me. It was my case. I was the one who was called out to the scene. I have a feeling about this one.’

  ‘Two hunches in two minutes? I’ll have arrowroot biscuit with my tea. Anna?’

  ‘It says . . . violent pressure on the head and neck, clockwise twisting of the neck, evident in subcutaneous bruising. At least I think it says “clockwise”. I’m terribly new to shorthand.’

  The contrast between the formal, procedural English of an autopsy, and Kolankiewicz’s colloquial mode never ceased to startle Troy.

  ‘Enough?’ he was saying. ‘Enough for a nosy rozzer?’

  ‘I was wondering about the hands.’

  ‘Hands?’

  ‘Hands.’

  ‘What about his hands?’

  ‘If you fall down a staircase conscious you try and stop yourself. You grab onto something. You flail about. Chances are there’ll be marks on the hands. Bruised knuckles. A torn nail.’

  They both looked at Mrs Pakenham.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘No bruises. Nothing.’

  ‘And,’ Troy went on, ‘if you fall down dead, you don’t. As simple as that really.’

  ‘He was dead, believe me, Troy, he was dead.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I tell you what I tell Stilton. The killer was right-handed. Taller than this bloke, but not necessarily stronger. It’s more of a knack than brute force. Snap a neck in a single movement. Death was instantaneous. A pro job. You happy now?’

  ‘Happy?’ said Troy. ‘No, I’m not happy. I just have a feeling that this one will come back to me.’

  ‘Three hunches! I’ll have buttered scone and jam dollop too.’

  § 27

  That afternoon Alex Troy was in his study. He would have liked to take a walk on the heath, but it was unseasonably cold for May. He would have liked to meet the world, if only for half an hour, but the telephone rang and the world came to him.

  He picked up the phone.

  ‘Alex? It’s Max.’

  A short syllable to introduce a short man with a long handle – Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, proprietor of the Daily Express and Minister of State, until recently Minister of Aircraft Production, in Churchill’s government.

  ‘I held a lunchtime briefing for the Fleet Street editors at Claridge’s today. I half expected you’d be there.’

  So, that’s what ministers of state did. They gave briefings.

  ‘Half? You are such an optimist, Max. Perhaps if you were to expect me a sixteenth or a thirty-second you would be less disappointed in me.’

  ‘I was wondering. Would you care for a drink at my club tonight?’

  Beaverbrook usually asked him round for one or both of two reasons. He knew something you didn’t and wanted to lord it. What, after all, was the point in being a lord if you could not lord it? – as far as Alex was concerned this might as well be the Beaver’s motto in life. Or he had some crackpot theory he wanted to air, partly, as with the first reason, to remind you that he was close to the powers that be, and partly because it was not the sort of thing he could air in his newspapers without being guilty of the kind of rumour-mongering and defeatism the government deplored in the common people and would deplore the more in one of its own.

  The last time they’d met had been May Day. Max had bored him silly with ‘The balloon’s up. We’re backs to the wall now, Alex. The war has turned ugly for us. I’d say two or three days at the most. Invasion is imminent.’ – when it transparently wasn’t. It made Alex wonder how much the Prime Minister really told him. Bugger all, it would seem. That he could not see for himself was shocking. The RAF had won the battle for Britain. Won it with the planes the Beaver had churned out as Minister of Aircraft Production. A job that had enabled him to rally the nation’s housewives into giving up their pots and pans to be melted down into aeroplanes. Alex had never been certain whether this was anything more than a morale-building stunt – ‘Women! You too can do your bit!’ – but ever after he’d thought of Beaverbrook as Lord Saucepans. There probably was a Beaver Brook, somewhere in the wilds of Ontario, probably several, along with Moose Gulch and Wild Ass Pass – they none of them managed to sound real when appended to the word ‘Lord’.

  Alex had no desire to go to the Beaver’s club – to any of his clubs, the Carlton or the Marlborough, the former political, the latter royal in basis.

  ‘How about my club?’ he said.

  ‘The Garrick? Fine,’ said Beaverbrook.

  They fixed a time and rang off.

  Alex was going by the counter-theory of that applied by single women: ‘Never invite him in. Go back to his place, then you can always leave. Far easier than throwing a man out.’ He was taking Beaverbrook to his club – watering hole of old hams and young pretenders, where a distraction could always be arranged without the necessity of walking out, and where they were unlikely in the extreme to meet any other ‘gentlemen’ of Fleet Street – but, then, that was precisely why he had joined, to escape the ‘gentlemen’ of Fleet Street.

  § 28

  Stilton’s three hours had become half a day. It was close to three in the afternoon before he returned to Claridge’s. Cal had sat in the lobby, watched Lord Beaverbrook’s entourage breeze in and out like visiting pashas, read every newspaper he could get his hands on and drunk coffee till he felt he was floating on the stuff.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Walter. Do you know what time it is?’

  ‘Aye, aye. Couldn’t be helped. Might’ve known it would be a waste of time in daylight. But I had to look for my Czech – Hudge. The sooner we find him the better.’

  ‘But you didn’t find him? Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No – a bit of a night owl really. Still. There’s always tonight.’

  Cal looked at his watch.

  ‘You’re not telling me we have to wait for darkness – in May, in double summertime? I’ve been stuck on my butt all day.’

  ‘Oh – there’s things to do, don’t you worry. Now, did Poppy – that is, Miss Payne – get done?’

  Cal handed over the sketch that had cost three pots of coffee, a morning of his time, a stream of London gossip and much of his tolerance of flirtatious upper-crust English women with names like Poppy. Stilton looked at it.

  ‘Is it hi
m?’

  ‘Oh, it’s very him.’

  ‘Good – let’s nip over to the Yard shall we?’

  § 29

  Beaverbrook always reminded Alex of a monkey. He had a monkey’s round face, wide mouth. A monkey’s stature. A monkey’s sense of mischief. Most people bore passing resemblance to their own caricature – Beaverbrook was the spitting image of David Low’s cartoon – no caricature, no exaggeration seemed too grotesque. The big head on the little body, the grin that seemed to split it like a watermelon struck with a shovel.

  He was in the foyer of the Garrick, being helped out of his overcoat when Alex arrived.

  ‘You missed a good lunch,’ said the Beaver.

  ‘No, I missed a free lunch. And I find I can never afford your free lunches.’

  Beaverbrook laughed at this and let Alex, by much the older, slower man, set the pace as they went upstairs to the bar, a panelled room lined with portraits of long-dead hams, a patina of age and cracked glaze across most them – indeed, as Alex often thought, across most of the members too. He was not a club man. It was too English a notion. But since one had to belong somewhere, this was better than most, oblique as it was to his own calling. When he was seated, had got his breath and ordered a drink, he said, ‘What was the occasion?’

  ‘Hess. What else?’

  ‘I suppose you told Fleet Street to dampen it down?’

  ‘No, quite the opposite. Winston wanted to make a statement. I talked him out of it last night. I think we should all speculate, each paper with a different angle. Make as much of this as possible, throw out every possible reason Hess could have for what he did. Get the maximum possible propaganda value out of it.’

  ‘A licence to lie, Max?’

  ‘I wouldn’t put it that way. Shall we say a licence to gild the lily?’

  ‘Words, words, words. You were still asking them to lie. You’re asking me to lie now.’

  ‘Think about it, Alex. Why do you think he’s come? Don’t you think that’s an honest question? Don’t you think that’s an honest question to put before your readers?’

  ‘No. I do not. It’s no more honest than the German papers. On Tuesday they all carried the same headline to the letter – Hess in Tragic Accident. The accident being the long-awaited onset of madness.’

  ‘Do you think he’s mad?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. I met him just the once and that was years ago. But it does seem that until he finally tells someone what he’s up to, then both sides will find equal cause to dismiss him as mad.’

  There was a pause. Alex could almost hear the Beaver timing it like the true ham he was.

  ‘I asked Winston if I could see Hess, you know.’

  Ah. At last the nub. Beaverbrook was rubbing his nose in it.

  ‘Did he say yes?’

  ‘He didn’t say no.’

  At the back of his mind Alex felt vaguely certain he’d heard this repartee before somewhere.

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Later. He said later. When the Foreign Office are through with him.’

  ‘Well Max, there you are, another scoop.’

  Beaverbrook did not react to the sarcasm.

  ‘Who have they sent?’ Alex asked.

  ‘Kirkpatrick.’

  For a second all Alex could think of was a young American journalist who’d been in London covering the war for one paper or another – Helen? Hannah? H-something Kirkpatrick. Then he remembered – Ivone Kirkpatrick, the diplomat at the Berlin embassy who’d come to the attention of the British press when he’d been stuck with the unenviable task of translating for Chamberlain at Munich.

  ‘He’s not the man for the job.’

  ‘Do you know him? He’s considered an expert on Berlin.’

  ‘No, I’ve never met the man. But it’s not a job for a career diplomat. It’s an expert in interrogation they need, not an expert on Berlin. They should send in the toughest nut they have. An English Yezhov or aBeria,ifthere is suchabeast.Ernie Bevinonabad day. And if that doesn’t work I would not be at all surprised if Winston didn’t just put the bugger up against a wall and have him shot.’

  Beaverbrook grinned, Beaverbrook chuckled, Beaverbrook guffawed. The monkey face split from side to side – head back, eyes popping. It was unthinkable – but Churchill might just do it. The wave of laughter subsided in him. He wiped the corner of one eye and indulged in another meaningful pause.

  ‘If you were interrogating Hess now, what would you want from him? If you could ask him just one question, Alex, what would it be?’

  And yet more – Beaverbrook was rubbing his nose in it at the same time as he sought to pick his brains. Alex saw no point in lying to the little sod. There could only be one plausible answer.

  ‘I would want to know the intentions of the Third Reich towards Russia. To be precise, I would want the date and the battle formation for Hitler’s invasion of the USSR. I would want to know when the lunatic proposes to lead his country into mass suicide.’

  ‘Do you really think it would be that? Most of my Cabinet colleagues seem to think Russia would last three weeks. A month at the most.’

  ‘Have a little faith, Max. Think of Russia’s power to resist. Almost a passive quality. But what a power! Remember Napoleon. Read War and Peace. It will be suicide on the grand scale. If Russia comes into this war, then Germany is doomed. And Russia will pay the price in suffering that we British seem to have been spared thus far.’

  ‘We British,’ said Beaverbrook, grinning. ‘A Canadian and a Russian.’

  It seemed to Old Troy to be neither statement nor question. He answered in kind.

  ‘We British. A couple of wogs. A baron and a baronet – rewarded for nothing more significant than our wealth and influence. What a curious country this is.’

  Sarcasm was so often wasted on the Beaver.

  § 30

  ‘The Yard’, as in ‘Let’s nip over to the Yard’, was a cheering phrase –amovie cliché to rank with ‘Let’s form a posse’ and ‘Come out with your hands up, we’ve got you surrounded.’

  In reality it had meant more sitting on his butt while Walter had the sketch copied by Scotland Yard’s photographic section. Cal had dreamt of a day when you could stick a piece of paper in one end of a machine and get a copy out the other end in two seconds. It was like something out of H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley. It went with food synthesisation and the Feelies. He even had a name for the machine – the Instant Image Replicator, very catchy. If he knew the first thing about science he’d’ve doodled a sketch and dashed to the patent office. Instead he had sat, getting angrier and angrier, until Walter reappeared with a bundle of photos, stuck one in his hand and said, ‘Pubs’re open.’

  In the car, heading north up the Charing Cross Road, he said to Stilton, ‘Does everything take place in pubs?’

  ‘Pretty well.’

  ‘How many are there?’

  Stilton laughed. ‘God knows. I’ve never counted and I couldn’t begin to guess. Mind, I did once count every pub, church and chapel in the town I grew up in. As I recall, thirty-five pubs and seventeen assorted churches and chapels.’

  ‘For how many people?’

  ‘Not a lot. A few thousand.’

  ‘Jesus. Is that what the English do, sin all Saturday and repent on Sunday?’

  ‘Pretty well,’ said Stilton.

  When they pulled up in front of the Marquis of Lincoln, Cal asked ‘Why this one?’

  ‘The one time we lost Smulders, it was a few yards from here. It gets its fair share of refugees. Time to ask who was in that night.’

  Considering the public house appeared to be the pivot of English social life, Cal was surprised they were not more friendly. More friendly, more clean, more warm – more everything. By and large this one did little to alter his first impression of the night before – they were grim places. Worse still, a bit of mugging to the wireless notwithstanding, they were joyless places. The wall of faces that now faced him across the ranks of
half-empty pint glasses on every table looked to him like gargoyles. The barman was no exception – a nose like Punchinello, bright enough to light his way home and constitute a breach of the blackout regulations.

  Stilton called him ‘Ernie’ and beckoned to him.

  ‘Mr Stilton. What brings you in, might I ask?’

  ‘Business, Ernie, business. Were you on, Monday night?’

  ‘I’m on every night.’

  Stilton laid the sketch of Stahl on the bar.

  ‘Was this bloke in?’

  ‘Dunno,’ said the barman.

  Stilton put a photograph of Smulders next to it.

  ‘Nor ’im. Look Mr Stilton, why don’t you ask some of the regulars? They got nothing better to do than look who’s new and who ain’t. Me, I’m pullin’ pints all night.’

  Stilton turned to Cal, said, ‘Have a seat for five minutes. I’ll just have a word with this lot.’

  Cal watched him move from table to table, watched his face run a gamut of hammy theatrical expressions, each one donned and doffed like a Commedia del Arte mask. One man needed to be cajoled, another bullied and another wheedled. It took him ten minutes or more, but one way or another every look of suspicion with which they greeted him was overcome or outflanked. Stilton moved among these shabby little men – and it was men, not a woman in the place – like a colossus among the threadbare remnants of a tatty, defeated army. The weight of the word sank into Cal’s imagination. There was misery here. For the first time the English looked defeated – as he had thought when he first walked in, joyless. He’d often heard the phrase ‘crying into your beer’ – maybe that’s what beer was for?

  His attention came to rest on a couple in the corner. A blind man and his minder. A stout old man in a ragged blue overcoat. A few wisps of white hair seemed to stand up on his skull as though blown by the draught. His eyes were lost behind glasses that were not simply dark, but utterly opaque. Stilton was making his way across the room to them now. Cal followed, picking his way between the whispering, surly faces at the tables.