Riptide

by Lawton, John

  ‘But,’ said Nailer, ‘it’s bent to buggery! You said so yourself.’

  ‘Trust me. I’m a smartyarse.’

  It occurred to Troy that working for the Branch did not often bring Crawley into contact with the old immovable object that was Kolankiewicz. He spoke to him as though he’d been accosted by a particularly rude fishmonger who’d had the sheer neck to ring at the front door clutching six months of unpaid accounts. It came effortlessly, unconsciously perhaps, to men like Crawley to use a tone of voice that directed you to the tradesman’s entrance.

  ‘Let me understand you. You’re saying you can run tests on this?’

  ‘Yes. Difficult, but not impossible, so yes.’

  Troy heard Stan draw in breath as though about to speak. But Nailer spoke first, reddening once more with anger and exasperation.

  ‘’Scuse me sir, but this is bollocks. We shouldn’t be playing around with useless blobs of lead with what we’ve got. He was there, he had a gun, and he’s no explanation that adds up to piss in a tea-strainer as to why he was there or why he was with Walter at all. This immunity he seems to claim, this mission he says he’s on – it’s all bollocks. He did it. I know he did it. The Yanks know he did it. He’s a villain and they’ve disowned him. I say forget the damn tests and charge him now.’

  It was a speech that left every man in the room, save Kolankiewicz who did not appear to be listening, slightly stunned.

  Crawley jerked his chin off his chest, slowly turned to face his Chief Inspector and said, ‘Enoch, are you quite serious?’ in the same tone in which he might have said ‘Are you quite mad?’

  ‘Charge the bugger, charge him now!’

  Onions turned to Troy – the injunction of silence lifted.

  ‘Mr Nailer,’ Troy began. ‘Does the phrase “diplomatic incident” mean anything to you?’

  Nailer did not answer. He glared at Troy.

  ‘Has it occurred to you that far from being disowned Cormack might merely have fallen foul of the internal politics in what is known to be a very factional embassy, and that when they finally work out the mess he’s in they’ll want him back in one piece? You’ve held him for a couple of days. It’s his rotten luck that of all the English people he’s named I’m the only one available to speak for him, so you’ve had a romp watching his alibis topple like ninepins. But tomorrow or the day after the Americans will tire of playing games and they’ll ask for him back.’

  Nailer glared still, and it seemed to Troy that he’d not understood one word of what he’d just said.

  Crawley stood, stiff-necked, adam’s apple bobbing in his collar – head of house and captain of the first eleven rolled into one.

  ‘I’m fed up with this. I’m putting an end to it now. Mr Kolankiewicz, do your tests and send me the report.’

  Publish and be damned. Nailer said nothing. Troy said nothing. Onions muttered the platitudes of rank. Chairs scraped back. Legs stretched. Kolankiewicz was out of the door in a flash, closely followed by Troy and Nailer.

  Past Madge’s office, at the head of the stairs, Nailer tapped Troy on the shoulder. He was not about to let him go easily. The finger that tapped the shoulder now prodded him in the sternum.

  ‘You cheeky young bugger! I’ve been a copper since you were in nappies. I’ve been a copper more’n twenty years –’

  ‘Then,’ Troy cut him off, ‘it’s a pity that in twenty years you’ve learnt fuck all.’

  An inarticulate noise burst forth from Nailer – nothing clearer than ‘Wuuurgh!’ He lunged at Troy, fist clenched, missed and fell against the wall – purple in the face, a blood vessel in his forehead throbbing furiously. Troy ran down the stairs, chasing after Kolankiewicz.

  He caught him on the ground floor, short, fat legs hurrying against the grain of his character.

  ‘You’re off to Hendon? I’m coming with you.’

  ‘You are welcome, my boy – but it is not to Hendon I go.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘You want your proof, don’t you? The death of a fellow flatfoot bothers you as much as it bothers Crawley’s creeps, does it not? Then we should go to the top. You may believe in the necessity of good forensics, but Nailer is typical not only of many of your colleagues but also of the Metropolitan Police bureaucracy. You know how I got my first comparison microscope? I built it myself. In 1934. I’m still using it – and in all the equipment with which the misers at the Yard have supplied me, there is nothing that I would grace with the words “state of the art”.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So we go to the top man. Tell me – have you ever met Mr Churchill?’

  § 66

  Troy had never met Mr Churchill, but he had long wanted to. It was an irresistible invitation. He followed Kolankiewicz at a cracking pace. It seemed the little lunatic really had the bit between his teeth. Out of the Yard, across Whitehall, and down Downing Street.

  At the end of Downing Street he turned right across Horse Guard’s Parade, over the Mall, up Carlton House Steps into Lower Regent Street, across the Haymarket, right into Orange Street, and at the junction with St Martin’s Street he stopped outside a small shop. If Troy’s knowledge of geography served him aright, they were at the back of the National Gallery, and if his knowledge of the underworld served him aright, pretty well opposite one of the most notorious brothels in London.

  ‘You understand, I hope,’ Kolankiewicz was saying, ‘that we’re going private. You’d better have your chequebook on you.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy. ‘It’ll be worth a few quid to wrap this one.’

  Kolankiewicz yanked on the bell. A black-coated gentleman’s gentleman opened the door to them, a figure from another era, perhaps Dickensian – he put Troy in mind of Wemmick, this was how he’d always seen Wemmick – and if not Dickensian, then certainly of the other century.

  ‘Mr Chewter,’ Kolankiewicz said.

  The man’s Victorian face cracked into a smile. ‘Professor Kolankiewicz. My, but it’s been a while. Is the Guv’nor expecting?’

  ‘No. But if he is free I would be grateful for an hour of his valuable time.’

  Chewter cranked the handle on the side of the phone and announced them.

  ‘Professor Kolankiewicz, Guv’nor and –’ He turned to Troy.

  ‘Sergeant Troy,’ said Troy, and then added, ‘of the Yard,’ as though explanation were needed.

  ‘Quite all right. Would you gentlemen care to go up?’

  Chewter opened the cage door on an impossibly small lift. Troy found himself all but belly to belly with Kolankiewicz whilst staring down at the top of his head. The lift stopped at the second floor, and there stood another short, stout man, wiping his hands on an oily rag to extend one dry if grubby hand to shake Kolankiewicz’s. He looked every inch a Churchill – the girth, the thinning hair, the jowls – but with a moustache, and the best part of ten years younger. Even Lord Haw-Haw had been known to confuse them.

  ‘You’ve brought me a new copper, then, Ladislaw.’

  Nobody called Kolankiewicz Ladislaw. There were people at the Yard who’d known him since he first landed in England who probably did not know his Christian name.

  ‘My old friend Sergeant Frederick Troy, my even older friend Bob Churchill.’

  They shook on the dubious connection of lasting friendship with the Beast of Lodz.

  ‘Troy,’ Churchill said. ‘One of the Devon Troys?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Hertfordshire.’

  ‘Oh, I see. One of the Alex Troys. I knew your father once upon atime.’

  Troy loved the expression, as though the two had met in some distant fairy tale – the constant tin soldier and the ugly duckling. It often seemed to Troy that his father had stepped out of something no more nor less credible than a fairy tale of his own weaving.

  ‘I’m a Dorset man meself. That lot over at Blenheim are a junior branch of the family. Now – what can I do for you?’

  Kolankiewicz held up Cormack’s gun. Chur
chill took it from him.

  ‘Good Lord, a Smith and Wesson .35. Haven’t been made for about twenty years, been a while since I saw one. Small, dark and brutish,’ he said, and led the way through to the front room.

  Troy had never seen anything like it. Every surface, every wall, held guns, guns by the dozen – guns in racks, guns in bits, and guns not yet built – walnut stocks, gunmetal barrels, leather cases. Down the length of the room ran a large table covered in red baize and littered with some of the most beautiful shotguns Troy had seen. The workmanship was exquisite. But all in all, it was pretty much what he might have expected to find on the premises of the finest gunsmith and ballistics expert alive. On a bench behind the table was a large, ugly, black, greasy machine gun as testament to the times in which they lived. They had clearly interrupted Churchill in the business of stripping down his Bren gun.

  Churchill seated himself at the head of the table and whipped out the magazine from Cormack’s gun.

  ‘Automatic with a seven-shot magazine in the grip, a large pistol grip relative to the barrel size, as you can see.’

  Troy did see. The pistol reminded him of nothing quite so much as a spud gun – a childhood toy capable of propelling a chunk of raw potato all of six feet.

  ‘Spring recoil mechanism with a hidden hammer. They stopped making ammunition for this last year. Full metal jacket bullet – lead centre with guiding sheath. Six grooves in the barrel giving a right hand twist to the bullet. You’ve a spent bullet from this, I take it?’

  Kolankiewicz handed him the wodge of cotton wool. Churchill put a jeweller’s glass to his eye and looked at it.

  ‘Victim died, did he? Head shot, I suppose?’

  Troy answered. ‘Yes. A policeman, as a matter of fact. I saw the body. The entry wound was just above the right ear.’

  ‘Exit wound?’

  ‘Wasn’t one. The bullet was recovered in the post mortem.’

  ‘Well – bone does that to a bullet. I suppose you want a comparison?’

  ‘If it’s possible.’

  ‘Oh, it’s possible all right. Did you recover the shell?’

  ‘No – I was the second person on the scene, and it had gone. I think we’re dealing with a scrupulous killer.’

  ‘Well – they’re few of them scrupulous enough. If you ever join the other side, Mr Troy, and find yourself clutching a smoking gun, destroy it. That’d be my advice. Now, if you gentlemen would care to join me in the cellar, we’ll bang off a few rounds.’

  Kolankiewicz stepped into the lift. Only when Churchill tried to follow him in did it become clear that it would not hold two bellies of such rotundity. For a few seconds they jiggled around like a pair of hippos in a hat box, until Troy said ‘We could all walk,’ and they descended the steps to emerge below street level in a converted wine cellar.

  ‘This is the set-up,’ Churchill said, pointing off at a tunnel leading out under Orange Street. ‘We’ve fifteen hundred-gauge, twelve-bore cartridge cases, packed with cotton wool. Behind them, iron plate, behind that a few tons of rubble. We could fire an elephant gun at this lot without ricochet.’

  ‘Why fifteen boxes?’ Troy asked.

  ‘Largely,’ said Churchill, ‘because I’ve yet to find the gun that can fire a bullet through more than a dozen. Mauser’ll penetrate eleven or twelve, standard issue Webley no more than five or six. If, as you say, this bullet penetrated a human skull and spent itself in the cranium, then I’d say no more than two boxes.’

  ‘Can we simulate the effect of passing through bone?’

  ‘Indeed we can.’

  Churchill picked up a square piece of oak. It looked to Troy to be about half or two-thirds of an inch thick. Churchill slotted it in front of the first case. Then he clipped the magazine into the butt of Cormack’s gun, and handed it to Troy.

  Troy had no idea what to do.

  ‘I’m not really a gun person,’ he bleated.

  ‘Just point it and fire.’

  Troy held the gun at arm’s length, just like they’d taught him at Hendon in his obligatory weapons training. That had been in 1935. He had not held a gun since.

  ‘No, no,’ said Churchill. ‘Not like that. Use your body.’

  ‘My body?’

  ‘That thing between your arms and your legs.’

  Churchill took the gun from him, tucked his elbow into his hip, the gun-butt wedged into his belly, swung to face the boxes and fired, all in a single swift, almost graceful motion – startling to see in such an ungainly-looking man. Not only that, he’d hit the first box dead centre. If the box had had a target scrawled on it, this would have been a bull’s-eye.

  Churchill walked down the tunnel to the second box, and flipped down the wooden side. He rummaged around and eventually said, ‘Nothing doing.’

  The same pattern repeated itself with the third and fourth boxes. At last his hand emerged from the fifth, clutching a white ball of cotton wool, and inside it the bullet. He peeled back the layers and showed the spent bullet to Troy.

  ‘It’s intact,’ said Troy. ‘It isn’t bent at all!’

  ‘We’ll fire another just to be sure.’

  Churchill banged off a second round, hitting the oak barely half an inch from the first, and retrieved the bullet from the fifth box again.

  ‘Now,’ he said, grinning like a schoolboy, ‘the fun really begins.’

  On a bench at the far side of the cellar stood Churchill’s comparison microscope. He was not the inventor of this device, but he had modified it and refined it. And, as much as was possible when dealing with a body of men as naturally conservative as the English police, he had popularised it. He had proved its worth over the last ten or more years from the witness box at the Old Bailey. He had argued its merit in the pages of the Daily News only to find himself answered by a lengthy correspondence in the Mail from no less a figure than Bernard Shaw. All the same, men as sceptical as Onions or as ignorant as Nailer still deprecated its role. The only other such microscope Troy had ever seen was Kolankiewicz’s, which, compared to this, looked like it had been cobbled together from a Meccano kit. This was big, like a pair of binoculars on stilts, feeding two images into a single eyepiece. Churchill set the bullet that had killed Walter Stilton on the left hand plate, and one of the test bullets on the other. A flick of a switch and both specimens were flooded with light.

  ‘Before I do anything,’ Churchill said, ‘just take a look.’

  Troy peered down the microscope. It was a blur, the shapes did not match.

  ‘OK?’

  Troy didn’t have a clue what was OK and what was not.

  Churchill took over. One eye at the eyepiece, his left hand at the plate that held the deadly bullet. He changed the angle of the light. He twisted a mirror to the right of the bullet, and changed the alignment of the plate.

  ‘Take another look.’

  This time the bullets were in alignment, the bent bullet miraculously unbent by the mirror. The two did not line up perfectly and the composite image was still blurred. Then Churchill turned a wheel at the base of the microscope and suddenly the bottom halves of both bullets fused into one.

  ‘Ignore the centre where the bullet’s bent. And for now ignore the top. Just concentrate on the bottom. Well, what do you see?’

  ‘The rifling. The twists. They’re curling in the same way, a bit like bindweed, but they don’t match.’

  Churchill turned the wheel the other way. The top of the bullet came into focus. The markings no more matched than they had at the bottom.

  Churchill looked again. ‘Of course,’ he was saying, ‘there’s a limit to how much you can compensate for damage with mirrors, but as long as you can get a section of the twist lined up . . . Bob’s your uncle, if you’ll forgive the boast. It’s a lengthy process to be able to say a pair of bullets match, but a bit quicker to say they don’t. And these two don’t match at all. No doubt about it, fired by two different guns. The gun you brought me did not fire the fatal bullet.’


  ‘Would this hold up in court?’ Troy asked.

  Churchill feigned outrage, ‘Mr Troy!’

  ‘Sorry – I’m being dense. What else can you tell me?’

  ‘Depends what you want to know.’

  ‘Well . . . why didn’t the test bullet bend, why did it fire through five boxes when you estimated two?’

  This did not seem to require any thought on Churchill’s part. The answer was on the tip of his tongue.

  ‘Granted identical weapons, I’m inclined to conclude a different load. The bullet that killed your chap was probably fired on a low load. A bullet designed for work at close quarters, but otherwise practically useless. In fact, about as effective as a popgun. That’s why it distorted when it hit bone and the test bullets didn’t when passing through oak. Of course, you’ll appreciate that oak and bone don’t behave exactly the same . . . but then . . . I don’t have a heap of skulls lying around just to test bullets.’

  Troy was intrigued. ‘Why would anyone want a low load?’

  ‘Well,’ Churchill mused, ‘if you know what you’re doing with any handgun you won’t try and shoot someone at a hundred yards. You’d be better off at six feet. Most handguns outside the hands of marksmen are pretty inaccurate at much beyond a few feet. Jesse James once emptied his Colt .45 in a bank raid, at pretty well point blank range, and missed every time. So having to get in close is no real disadvantage – and you have the added bonus of knowing that you won’t kill the chap on the other side of your target by the bullet passing right through the target – and of course, “popgun” is really rather apt. That’s what it’d sound like, a sort of popping. You want to shoot some poor devil where there are likely to be people around . . . well, with any luck no-one would hear, and if they did they’d think little of it. A car backfiring would make a damn sight more noise.’