by John Lawton
‘I need a witness, Wally.’
‘Collington is not your man. I begin to wonder who is. This pair seem to scare the living daylights out of everyone they meet. You need a very brave man, a very foolish man . . . or else you should be praying they do something utterly stupid.’
‘I’m working on that,’ said Troy.
He bought Wally another vodka, left two fivers under the glass, saw the gloved hand make them disappear like a music-hall conjuror, and went back to the Yard.
§ 87
’Nothing doing,’ said Milligan. ‘The couple in Skelmersdale wouldn’t let my mate over the threshold. They slammed the door in his face as soon as he asked the question. I had better luck. I got past the front door – but Devanney practically chucked me out of the house once he realised what I wanted. His wife was more willing. I could see she wanted to talk. But for the old man she might have done. But your guess was right. The rage had motive. Kept banging on about “no son of mine” and all that malarkey. The boy’s a poof all right. In fact, I don’t think he ran away, I rather think the old man threw him out.’
‘Does the old man work?’
‘Foreman in a cable and wire works.’
‘And the wife?’
‘Oh, no. “A man’s not a man who can’t keep his wife” . . .’
‘And all that malarkey. Fine. Go round there in the morning and have another go at her. If I’m not at the Yard I’ll be in Stepney.’
§ 88
The last call of the day was overdue, and unexpected. It disturbed Troy to think that out of sight was ever out of mind.
‘Where’ve you been?’ Kitty said.
Concern or small-talk? He replayed her voice in his mind’s ear looking for signs. ‘I’m back at work,’ he replied, racking his brains to remember when he had last seen her. ‘And you?’
‘Scotland. London got so damned Singapore, didn’t it? Danny whisked me away to a breezy castle on a Scottish loch for a couple of weeks. You know what a loch is?’
‘A large static body of—’
‘Don’t be so literal. It’s a lazy river. That’s what a loch is, a really lazy river.’
‘So you finally found it?’
‘I wouldn’t say that exactly.’
‘Which one was it?’
‘God knows. Ickle or Muckle. I wouldn’t have a clue. It might even have been the one with the monster in it, for all I know. Just west of Glasgow and east of the sun – and it was bliss. For a while it was bliss.’
‘I’ve been east,’ he said, wondering if she’d take the bait.
‘East,’ she said. ‘East? You mean Stepney?’
‘Yes.’
He counted the beats as she paused.
‘You’re going after Danny’s brothers, aren’t you?’
What did it matter if he told her? As he had said to Godbehere, they knew he was there. He wanted them to know he was there. What did it matter if they found out by a second route, a roundabout route, that he was on to them? If Mary McDiarmuid was right and the Ryans had him in their sights, what did it matter if they knew he had them in his? They would expect nothing else.
‘Did you think I wouldn’t?’
‘No . . . of course not. You’re a copper. It’s just . . . it’s just that it’s got nothing to do with Danny.’
‘I know.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Good. Because I’m keeping out of it. I’m not going to get involved and I’m not going to let Danny get involved.’
§ 89
Insomnia was nagging at him again. That light tearing of the flesh. That random searing of the mind. That tumbling cascade of faces. Foxx as he had last seen her in the midst of her confusion. His sister standing lost and baffled in his room, wondering where her clothes were. The long stare his wife had given him across the room in the Café Royal – the wide-open, nut-brown eyes. Then every image blurred and resolved down to one. Diana Brack, hand outstretched, fingertips touching his, leaving him – all those years ago on the dance-floor of the Berkeley, leaving him. And then, when everything turned to black . . . Kitty’s voice, the cadences in her questions.
Last . . . the repetitious nature of Mary McDiarmuid’s questions. Less now the product of insomnia than the cause. ‘Somewhere we wouldn’t think of looking?’ Somewhere we wouldn’t think of looking? Where would we not . . . ?
Around four a.m. he reached for the telephone and called Bonham. ‘When did Bernie Champion disappear?’
‘Wot?’
‘Bernie Champion. He vanished, what, two months ago?’
Troy could hear Bonham struggling from sleep to waking, but he’d hardly struggle with dates. He’d already reached the age when the most interesting thing in any newspaper was the obituary column.
‘More like three, nearer thirteen weeks.’
‘And when did Edna Stilton die?’
‘Same week.’
‘And the funeral was the week after?’
‘We was there, Freddie. If you can’t remember that—’
‘And the old boy who came hobbling up to us to tell us his wife’s grave had been vandalised?’
‘Arthur. Arthur Foulds.’
‘And have there been other, similar attacks since?’
‘No. I’d’ve heard. After all I go to a soddin’ funeral there at least once a fortnight. Or it seems as though I do.’
§ 90
‘Alice, it’s Troy.’
‘God almighty, Troy, do you know what time it is?’
‘You did say to phone first.’
‘I know, but not at this bleedin’ time. You’ll wake me shvartzers.’
‘Ally, there’s a car on the way for you.’
‘To take me where?’
‘St George’s churchyard.’
‘What? The one in Shadwell? If you think I’m gettin’ up at five o’clock in the mornin’ to traipse back to the bleedin’ East End you can—’
‘Ally, I could have called you or I could have called Millie Champion.’
‘What have you found?’
‘Nothing yet, but I want you there when I do. You’ll want to be there when I do.’
§ 91
The coroner was probably no happier about Troy’s morning call than Alice Marx, but he made less fuss. Troy had a police motorcyclist collect the exhumation order, and asked George Bonham to bring a spade and a shovel off his allotment. The only person he didn’t have to knock up was the verger of St George-in-the-East. He wondered about the protocol of telling Arthur Foulds they were about to dig up his wife’s grave, and thought better of it. If he was right, they’d not even hit the lid of her coffin. The exhumation order was a legal cover note for the police arse and nothing more.
He had roused Mott Kettle himself, but it was obvious Mott had not slept, and from the fug that washed over Troy when he opened the cell door it was just as obvious he’d smoked the night away. All he said was, ‘Don’t I get breakfast first?’
‘Only if you’re prepared to lose it later.’
At the graveside they waited. Troy, Godbehere, Bonham, Mazzer, Shrimp Robertson and Mott Kettle. Waited until Troy’s Bentley pulled up at the Cable Street gate, and Ally Marx got out. Headscarf and dark glasses, slacks and a flowing silk coat. Every inch the film star. Except that, Troy was certain, Elizabeth Taylor would not have had the kingsize cigarette hanging off her bottom lip. ‘All you boys waiting for me. I don’t know what to say. But I reckon “Ready when you are” should about fit the bill,’ she said.
They all looked at Bonham. Bonham handed the spade to Mazzer and the shovel to Robertson. Troy hadn’t suggested this, but it was a touch he relished. Let Mr Mazzer be the one to get London clay on his Carnaby Street suit. Old Arthur had restored his wife’s grave. The polyanthi were blossomless now, but stood in ranks like toy soldiers on some miniature Waterloo making up the British square – and not a weed in sight. Whoever had messed with the grave three months ago had left it alone since.
Now the police were the vandals. But Troy knew it hadn’t been vandals in the first place.
‘Did it have to be so early?’ Ally whispered to Troy.
‘Any later and we’d have an audience.’
Robertson carefully set Arthur Foulds’s plants to one side and leaned on the shovel while Mazzer dug. It took him less than two minutes to hit something.
‘It’s soft,’ he said.
‘Then go carefully.’
Bernie Champion had always been a dapper man. Not tasteful exactly, but neat. The first thing Troy recognised were the silver buttons on his blazer. The thug whose pose was to look like a retired RAF officer – blazer, grey cavalry twill trousers, brown suede shoes. He never had looked like a thug: he’d looked more like a professional cad who hung around the seaside resorts of the south coast preying on rich, susceptible widows.
Several weeks underground hadn’t done wonders for his appearance. But for the clothes Troy would have been uncertain as to whose rotting remains they had exposed. But Ally Marx knew him. The fag was dropped, the handkerchief withdrawn from a sleeve and pressed first to her mouth and then to her eyes. And Mott Kettle knew. The ashen look on his face was not the general, disturbed face of a man shown a corpse, it was the blood-drained face of a man finally confronting what he had denied for so long.
Troy walked to the edge of the grave, knelt down, scraped a bit more earth off the decaying face, and beckoned Mott closer. ‘Look,’ he said.
‘I don’t need to look no more. I can see from here. I don’t know him. How could anyone know him?’
Alice Marx screamed, ‘It’s Bernie, you fucking idiot! It’s Bernie! Tell him it’s Bernie, Mott, or are you going to be a complete fool all your fucking life?’
Mott muttered, ‘I don’t know him, Al, honest I don’t.’
She grabbed Mott by one arm, twisted it and shoved him at the grave. He tripped over the spade, fell full length into the dug earth. Troy took a step backward and caught him only inches before his face would have crashed headlong into what remained of the corpse’s.
‘Take a good look, you fucking moron,’ Ally yelled. ‘It’s Bernie. It’s Bernie! What have those Irish pricks got over you that you can’t see it?’
Mott recoiled as though he’d been burnt, scrabbling around on the grave until Bonham extended the bear’s paw and yanked him to his feet.
‘It’s Bernie, you stupid little putz. It’s Bernie!’
Before anyone could stop her Ally reached down to the corpse with both hands, tore open the flies to show a blue, purple, black and swollen circumcised penis.
‘Now do you believe me? Or do you think they make a habit of burying kikes in a place like this?’
§ 92
Mott drank black coffee and smoked his tenth cigarette of the morning. Hacked into his fist for the hundredth time, the sound of sputum stuck in his throat, a redness with the effort that almost brought tears to his eyes.
‘It could be anybody.’
Troy was scarcely listening any more.
‘I mean . . . it could be anybody. Ally always did have a way with words. I mean there’s plenty o’ Jews in London. Why does this dead Jew have to be Bernie? For all we know Bernie’s done a runner with a bit o’ totty. He was always a ladies’ man was Bernie. That’s probably it. He’s holed up in Bournemouth or Eastbourne with some tart. That’d be old Bernie, wouldn’t it, Mr Troy? It could be anybody. I mean anybody. Don’t have to be Bernie. Stands to reason. It don’t have to be. Could be anybody.’
‘Wearing Bernie’s clothes, with Bernie’s cheque book in his pocket? Of course.’
‘Planted, Mr Troy. Planted to make you think it’s Bernie.’
‘Mott, nobody planted anything. They hid him in the last place anyone would look. You’re familiar with the old adage “can’t see the wood for the trees”? That’s what the Ryans did. Hid him where we would not see him for looking. Once we found him, if we found him, what did it matter that it was Bernie? Nobody planted anything. They set him up, they topped him, then they dug a hole and shoved him in it. They could have done it to any one of you. Then they came to you lot, you miserable bunch of yes-men, and told you they were taking over and anyone who didn’t like it would be taking a hike to the bottom of the Thames. And you, Mott, you just rolled over and said, “Walk on me”, didn’t you?’
Mott flicked the ash from his fag on to the knee of his trousers and rubbed it in. The ashtray was only a foot away from his hand and still seemed too far for the effort. ‘Mr Troy, what is it you want me to say?’
Silently Troy weighed up the man who faced him across the table. Kettleman looked even more pathetic than he had yesterday. A scruffy ragbag of clothes posing as a man. A scarecrow made of straw that somehow lived and breathed his foul breath over Troy. A life hardly worth the living. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘You can’t say anything because you don’t know anything. You never did.’
‘I spent most o’ last night telling you that.’
‘And I believe you, Mott.’
‘Then I can go now, right?’
‘Right. You can go. I’ll need about five minutes. You finish your cigarette.’
Next door Alice Marx was bashing away at an old Met-issue Smith-Corona and scattering as much fag ash as Mott. Shrimp Robertson sat across from her.
‘He’s supposed to type it for you,’ Troy said.
‘The boy types with two fingers. I’d be here all day if I had to wait for him. I can touch-type. Or did you think I’d never done a day’s work in me life?’
Troy let Robertson go.
Ally stopped typing, tore her statement and its carbon from the roller. ‘I never wanted to do this. I told you that. You’re a bastard. But Bernie’s dead now. No two ways about it. There’s nothing left to lose. I suppose,’ Ally said, ‘that you’re gonna tell me there was no other way to do this?’
‘There wasn’t.’
‘Fine. I won’t break yer bollocks over it. But there’s gotto bea quid pro quo.’
‘What do you want?’
‘Don’t send a squad car roaring round to Millie Champion’s with some tosser of a copper to tell ’er ’er ’usband’s dead.’
‘I wasn’t going to.’
‘Let me do it. I don’t want to do it. But I have to. If you see what I mean.’
Troy did. ‘My driver will take you to Millie’s. When you’re through she’ll take you back to your home. And I’ll put a copper from Hendon on your door until this is over.’
‘And that shitbag, Mott?’
§ 93
Troy released Mott Kettle, returned to Godbehere’s office and sent for Mazzer. He was witnessing Ally’s statement when Mazzer walked in. The sweeping, overlarge, quasi-Cyrillic sprawl of his own signature. Big enough and long enough for Mazzer to have no doubt about what he’d just done.
‘Mott’s at the desk picking up his possessions. Tail him. If you have to stay up all night, tail him and don’t lose him.’
He put Ally’s statement into a brown folder marked ‘Kettleman’ and dropped it into a desk drawer. Mazzer was still standing there.
‘Yes?’
‘Nothing, sir, nothing.’
‘Keep me posted. I’ll be back at the Yard most of today.’
§ 94
Onions appeared in his office again. A bad day. A day in uniform. All those oak leaves and silver trim. Troy could see the seething anger at life and fate and nothing in his eyes. Occasionally he wondered how long Stan would stick the job. The bitterness of it was overwhelming. Too late in his career to be effective, too tied up in red tape for a man like him to slice through. The pinnacle of any copper’s career amounting to no more than the biggest frustration of that career. Brock had made the right move. He’d tried in his way to tell Stan as much. Brock might – no, would have been happy on his allotment. But once you’d reached the absurdity of being Sir Stanley Onions how could you ever put on your overalls and your hob-nailed boots and earth up spuds on your allotment again?
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br /> Onions lit up a Woodbine, popped the buttons on his tunic and heard Troy out in silence. ‘You’re getting a warrant?’ he said at last.
‘I don’t think I am,’ said Troy.
A deep drag on his cigarette. ‘You’ve enough to pull ’em now.’
‘It’s too soon.’
A splutter of coughing, a fleck of tobacco picked from his tongue. ‘Too soon? Too soon for what? The sooner those buggers are off the street, the sooner the toffs and the wankers are off my back. You may get the press and the back-bench timewasters, but I still have to answer to the Home Secretary and every junior minister who wants to have his two penn’orth. And I still have to read the editorials every day. “A Sea of Crime in the East End”, “Scotland Yard Losing Control”, “The Country Going to Hell in a Handcart”. The toffs want to hang me out to dry, can’t you see that?’
This required tact. If Stan was open to tact he was, and if he wasn’t he wasn’t. ‘Stan, we’ve lost them once. Surely you can see that the next time we pull them it has to stick? There can be no loopholes. We have a reversal of their alibi. That will be meat and drink to their brief. He’ll argue that we coerced Ally Marx into withdrawing one statement and making another. He’ll say it here and he’ll say it in court.’
‘It’s hardly going to wash with a jury, though, is it?’
‘We don’t have the luxury of waiting for a jury. We have to be one hundred per cent certain before we put those two in front of a jury. Alice’s statement does nothing to mitigate the confusion of Jack’s two eyewitnesses and what happened at the line-up. It’s a bit less of a mess but it’s still a mess.’
Just when he thought Onions was about to launch himself into another tirade Troy was saved by the bell. He picked up the phone and Onions silently took his cue and left.
