A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

“Ach, you won’t get prints off this.”

  “There won’t be any. He’d not have thrown it away if there were.”

  Kolankiewicz wiped the gun clean. What appeared was a small, black-painted automatic that fitted into the palm of the hand. It was scarcely more than three inches long from butt to barrel. The paint was matte black—household paint. Kolankiewicz scraped at it with a penknife to reveal grey gunmetal.

  “Odd thing to do,” he said. “As though someone wanted to disguise it. A gun still looks like a gun even if you paint it sky-blue-pink.”

  “May I?”

  Troy took the gun, turned it this way and that, took Kolankiewicz’s penknife, and scraped away at a hollow point on the butt.

  “There’s about a dozen of these; what do they look like to you?”

  “I seen some fancy guns in my time. Some even jewelled. To me they look like the settings on my mother’s engagement ring, as though they once held gemstones or some such. See, just by the trigger guard, a convex point remains.”

  Troy scraped too clumsily at the protrusion and it came away in his hand.

  “Damn!”

  “No matter; let me see.”

  Kolankiewicz rinsed the object, held it under a spotlight, and scraped the last of the paint away with his thumbnail. It gleamed, red and radiant.

  “My God. It’s a ruby.”

  “Correct, my boy. Now, smartyarse. Tell me who would want to paint over rubies?”

  This was where Troy’s expertise outstripped Kolankiewicz’s, if only in the field of popular culture. He doubted Kolankiewicz had been to the pictures since they added sound.

  “There was a film during the early part of the war,” he said. “You won’t have seen it. Bogart, Peter Lorre—”

  “Ah . . . him I remember. The little German with the fish eyes.”

  “—and Sydney Greenstreet.”

  The name did not register with Kolankiewicz.

  “It was called The Maltese Falcon, and the title referred to a statue studded with precious stones that had been passed around Europe for centuries disguised in black paint.”

  “Save one, this has been stripped of its jewels.”

  “That’s because, first of all, someone needed to move it around without its worth being recognized, and then they needed to cash in.”

  “But missed one?”

  “Quite.”

  Kolankiewicz flipped out the magazine.

  “It’s empty. I would say it held only three bullets. Did you find the spent case.”

  “No. I was lucky to find the gun. The case may be on the tracks, too, but to get it I’ll need to close down the Northern line. I’ll get lynched for even asking. Can we work with what we’ve got?”

  “What we’ve got is that bag of mashed potato you brought in.”

  Kolankiewicz tipped the bag onto a sheet of blotting paper. Pushed a rubber-gloved finger around in the mess. Then he bent down and sniffed at it.

  “We been calling this mash, right?”

  “My word was baked.”

  “Okay. Baked, mashed, shmashed . . . whatever. What do you think cooked it?”

  “No idea.”

  “Look here, at the end of my finger.”

  Troy looked at black stains on white mash.

  “Dirt?”

  “Gunpowder residue.”

  “Bloody hell. You don’t think—”

  “Not yet, I don’t. Let’s examine the body before you leap to any conclusions. If you’re coming in, scrub up and find an apron.”

  §94

  “What’s this green stuff under his fingernails?” Kolankiewicz asked.

  Troy peered over the naked body of André Skolnik.

  “Paint, I should think. He was a painter.”

  “As in house?”

  “As in art.”

  “Art, shmarrt . . .”

  Kolankiewicz looked to the stenographer on her stool in the corner.

  “Ready?”

  “When you are, professor.”

  To Troy he said, “This is all very well, but when the Yard gets around to a new laboratory could we have a thing that records what I say?”

  “Thing?”

  “No matter. Just nag the bastards. I work with two classes of tool here—out of the ark and homemade.”

  So saying, he sliced the flesh over Skolnik’s heart down to the bone. Troy handed him the rib spreader and watched as Kolankiewicz cranked the rib cage apart to see the stilled heart itself. Kolankiewicz inserted his right hand.

  “It’s not here. Must be lodged in one of the chambers of the heart. Scalpel again, I think.”

  Troy gave a couple more turns to the rib spreader. Kolankiewicz sliced the heart free of arteries and veins—a little, Troy thought, like prising another jewel from its setting—and laid it on the slab above the head.

  “Entry wound is in the left ventricle.”

  He sliced the heart open, spread the left ventricle out like a dog’s dinner, and said, “I see it now. I’ll hold. You take the tweezers and remove it.”

  Troy held up the smallest bullet he’d ever seen. Air rifles fired bigger shot than this.

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” said Kolankiewicz.

  “Amazing,” Troy said, “that anything so small could have killed him.”

  Kolankiewicz took the tweezers and bullet from him and rinsed them off in the sink.

  “Anywhere else and it would not have done. Puncture a lung with this and, short of drowning in your own blood, you’d live. Almost anywhere on the torso there would be limited damage, and short of hitting your man right in the eye, I doubt such a bullet would penetrate the skull. God knows, in winter it might have bounced off his overcoat.”

  “Can you match it to the gun?”

  “With what? The magazine was empty. You think I have bullets like this in stock? The smallest I’ve ever seen is .17, and does this not look smaller? At that bore there’ll be no rifling. Matching a bullet, impossible. Matching a cartridge case, maybe, but that you don’t have. If this merely fits the gun, I think that will be all the evidence you need.”

  So saying he took measuring calipers and read the bullet’s bore.

  “Point 15 or near as damnit. 3.75mm. I do not know of anyone who makes ammunition this small.”

  “The gun’s an antique,” Troy said. “Looks donkey’s years old. Perhaps they made .15 bullets once upon a time?”

  “Once upon a time. How very apt, my boy. You bring me a gun that has been encrusted with jewels, that fires what I can only describe as toy bullets, and you speak to me of ‘once upon a time’—a fairy tale, is it not?”

  “Maybe,” said Troy. “But you’re not telling me it’s a dead end?”

  “I can do no more with the gun. I think you need to go and see Bob Churchill. But before you do, give me hand to turn the body.”

  They returned to the corpse.

  Kolankiewicz peered into the entry wound. For all the world it looked to Troy as though Skolnik had merely been stuck with a knitting needle.

  Kolankiewicz eased in his tweezers, gently slid them out again, and held up his find with a glimpse of triumph in his eyes.

  “Mashed potato,” he said almost gleefully, the bushy eyebrows rising up to meet the bald head in scornful pleasure. “Do you know what this means?”

  “The potato was on the end of the gun.”

  “Like . . . ?”

  “Like a silencer? But . . . but would it silence the gun?”

  “I don’t know. You had better take the gun to Churchill. But given the low load of cordite in the bullet and the hubbub of the London Underground, would it have taken much silencing? And that’s why your spud is part mash, part baked, and part raw. It was cooked where it was in contact with the gun and the bullet. The firing of the gun blew the potato apart, scattered it across the platform, where, without flattery, in the hands of dimmer plod—and you know how dim some of your colleagues can be—it would have been dismissed as lunchtime litter.”
<
br />   “Clever, eh?”

  “Perhaps. Perhaps just crude.”

  The hint of schadenfreude vanished. Kolankiewicz slipped back into the routine of the job, bustling around his laboratory, leaving Troy still more than a little baffled.

  “I shall do all the usual things, brain, guts . . . it’ll all be in the report.”

  Troy batted back.

  “Oh, I can tell you what will be in the stomach.”

  “You can?”

  “Five bob on Earl Grey and Battenberg.”

  “Suddenly you’re cocky?”

  “He’d just had tea in Hampstead.”

  “So? Is Hampstead above rationing?”

  §95

  It was a massive house, just south of Hampstead village. Gates and a drive—gates that hadn’t been claimed in some spurious metals campaign during the war, a drive that hadn’t even been tarmaced let alone built over. A house that wasn’t partitioned into flats. Troy would put the house at about 1880. Perhaps of its era, not quite the Edwardian villa—only a villa in the Italian sense, as in Villa Cimbrone—but post-war, even in a borough of big houses, this one seemed absurdly grand. What new money had been pumped into this? What new money had lasted long enough to get old here? How did they run a place on this scale without servants on the Victorian scale. He’d find out. He had rung from Hendon and “was expected.”

  He left his tatty Bullnose Morris next to a shining black Daimler. He’d bet even money that it had spent the war up on blocks just like his father’s Rolls. But they, whoever they were, were running it now. His brother Rod was looking forward to the day they could get his father’s 1922 Silver Ghost, the one with the cream paintwork and burgundy upholstery, running again—petrol permitting, and Rod’s image as a Labour MP most certainly not permitting. He’d have liked the car himself, but coppers didn’t roll up in a Rolls, only the Wimseys and the Campions would ever get away with that. Whatever he had next, he’d wait until the Morris fell apart first.

  The “girl” answered the bell. Black and white uniform, cap awry, tongue ababble.

  “Miss Laura says to go straight up, sir, top floor, only I can’t come meself as there’s only been me and cook since Dunkirk when Mr. Spiggot and Stanley Moon joined up, only Spiggot never come back and Stanley Moon says he’d sooner drive a tram than work for toffs again.”

  Well, that was one question answered, but as Troy set off up the wide, winding staircase another arose. When had he been here before, climbing these stairs to an attic room? A tidal surge of memory and he could see himself aged five or six, in 1920 or 1921, warily making his way to a children’s party that only the propellant force of his mother could make him attend. This house had belonged to the Gore-Neames. Now, what had been their daughter’s name, the one that was about a year older than him, whose party it was. Louisa, Lorna . . . Laura?

  He was at the top now. A half open door, a child of four or five dashing out to say, “Mummy’s in here!”

  Not a child such as he had been—frail, small, pale. This was a robust, clumping, coffee-colored child. Another question answered. Narayan was indeed an Indian name.

  “I say, you’re Frederick Troy aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I used to be Laura Neame. Surely you . . . ?”

  Yes. He did. About his height, blonde, blue-eyed, beautiful, but she’d put on weight. That was the first thing that struck him, how unkind time had been to her in piling on the pounds.

  “When you said ‘Inspector Troy,’ I didn’t make the connection.”

  “Really? I thought I’d scandalized half London when I joined the police.”

  “And I thought I’d scandalized the other half when I married Indra Narayan, and you don’t seem to have noticed that anymore than I noticed you’d gone for a copper.”

  She led him into her studio—top floor, north-facing, stuffed with clutter: canvases finished, canvases half-finished, canvases terrifyingly blank, a huge, fading red, Bakhtiar carpet spattered with paint.

  He’d bet she’d scandalized London society marrying an Indian—or as society undoubtedly tagged him, “a nigger.” It was the sort of thing he’d have noticed if he paid more attention to the gossip his sisters doled out but it was precisely because they were his sisters, hedonists to the point of banality, litanists of who fucks who, that he didn’t pay any attention. One could get away with being a copper—if needs be it was a job that could be passed off as a “profession”—but young women, “gels,” didn’t get away with marrying niggers.

  She plucked another child, half the size of the first, off the carpet and took a paint brush from his mouth.

  “I’d say stay for lunch, but as you can see the studio is also a nursery and, given the situation downstairs, the most I could run to is a cup of tea except that I think the milk’s off—summer after all—and I rather think André polished off the cake . . . but . . . of course . . . I’ve waffled right to the point haven’t I? André. Do sit down . . . Inspector.”

  “Troy will do,” said Troy.

  She balanced on the edge of a wicker chair, the toddler still in her arms. Troy sat on a spoon-back Victorian nursing chair and, as he felt one wonky leg shift under him, he knew in an instant what the situation was. In this England of the New Socialist Era, the England of the Five-year Plan, no one in a respectable area would rent to a mixed marriage with babies doubtless referred to as half-caste, and in all probability no one would give her husband a decent job. Laura had moved into her parents’ attic and was utilizing all the junk of centuries stored up there. He was sure she had made a point of using junk as a symbol of an independence she didn’t have, and he was sure it half-suited her parents, not having a woodpile, to hide the niggers in the attic. Why they didn’t just bankroll her was not a question he’d ask. Maybe the Daimler represented the last of the old money and no one was making the new?

  She read his mind.

  “Daddy died eighteen months ago. The death duties have been crippling. I’d love to have my own flat. But during the war . . . well, you know how it was . . . and since then, well, waiting for probate . . . taxes . . . I teach a little, you know, everything helps.”

  It was the cue he had wanted.

  “And I gather André taught you?”

  She looked startled.

  “Taught me? Is that what he told you?”

  “I never met him.”

  “Oh, silly me.”

  She set the toddler down upon the worn Persian rug to crawl and chew once more, brushed a stray lock of hair from her eyes, and Troy could see that the nearer they got to the purpose of his visit the nearer she was to tears.

  “No. André didn’t teach me. I’d nothing to learn from André. I taught him.”

  Troy was not much when it came to art. He knew enough never to say, ‘I may not know much about art, but I know what I like,’ and that, in part, was because he didn’t know what he liked. He could see enough of Laura Narayan’s work scattered about the room to see that she had a gift for portraiture, and to know that she had, mercifully, learnt more from Matisse than Picasso. She loved color. That much was obvious.

  “And that was why he was here yesterday?”

  “Yes. A free lesson. No money again. He arrived about 2.30 and left sharp at 4.30. I saw him to the door. The last I saw of him he was walking up the hill towards the tube station. And that’s about all I can tell you. He wasn’t behaving oddly at all. He didn’t seem bothered by anything. Didn’t mention what he was doing with the evening. I assumed he was just going home.”

  “How did you meet?”

  “Chap name of Gibbs . . . lives in the same house as André . . . works in Collets. Now, my husband is rather left-wing . . .”

  Another reason to hide him in the attic, thought Troy.

  “. . . he’s sort of the Mr. Toad of politics . . . rowing boats, canary-colored caravans . . . poop, poop . . . you know, that sort of thing. At heart he’s a complete anarchist, but he will flirt with organized poli
tics. There was a brief spell, I suppose it would be about the time Russia came into the war, we were all feeling so patriotic, when he thought he might be a Communist. He took to spending all our money in places like Collets. That’s where he met Malcolm Gibbs, and when Indra told him I was a painter somehow the two of them cooked up that André and I would get on like a house on fire if only they could contrive a meeting, which of course they did.”

  “At Collets?”

  “I don’t think wild horses or Russian tanks could have dragged André Skolnik into a communist book shop. Politics bored him. When Indra gets on his hobby horse I’ve known André to actually fall asleep with boredom. No, dashed if I know where we met, but we did and we clicked. He may have been a third-rate painter—Good Lord, here I am talking ill of the dead and the poor man’s not been dead twenty-four hours—but he talked art rather well. He was a lovely man—a charmer.”

  “If I told you I’d heard he was a scrounger?”

  Her head jerked up, the reverie of grief suddenly curtailed.

  “Then I’d say you’d been talking to an enemy.”

  “Did he have enemies?”

  Something in Laura’s spirit sagged. She covered her eyes with her palms for a moment.

  “Silly word. Double silly when talking to a policeman, I suppose. No, André didn’t have enemies, and I can’t think of anyone who’d want to harm him, let alone kill him. Yes, there was an André that was forever borrowing money. But he always paid me back, every last farthing. I could not afford to give it away. He has a studio near his flat—I suppose you know that—I paid the rent for the first six months. I got it all back. I divvied up for three months last year and got that back, too. André’s fortunes ebbed and flowed. There were times when he was flush, and when he was flush he was generous.”

  “And the nude modelling? Does that not sound desperately poor to you?”

  “No, it doesn’t. We all do it. All us painters pose for one another. If we didn’t, we’d end up paying rather than paid. I’ve done it myself. If he hasn’t sold it, and André rarely made a sale, somewhere in his studio there’s a nude of me when I was seven months gone with Raman. I’m sure I’d’ve been a more successful model than André, if I’d wanted. Painters like big women, you see. I should be glad somebody does. And André was always so skinny.”