Black Out (19 page)

Tosca slipped on her battledress, peered into the wardrobe mirror, running a slither of bright red lipstick across her pout. She blew him a kiss and headed for the door.

‘Let yourself out, copper. Slam it good and hard. And when you finally decide to tell me Jimmy’s been monkeying with food coupons, let me know. Maybe I could help. Same time tonight?’

Before he could answer she was gone. Troy heard her feet dance
down the stairs, and felt the house shake as she banged the street door. He reached for the coffee, sipping cautiously at it, wondering what he was going to tell her and why Huck Finn should remind anyone of New York and feeling that familiar, troubling mixture of guilt and happiness wrap itself upon him.

As a child Troy was much troubled by his sisters. He had no way of grasping the twists, the utter volte-faces of character that could inflict such vicissitudes upon him and upon the family as a whole. Only when his brother gave him an edition of Saki for his thirteenth birthday did he realise that Sasha and Masha were each both Aunt and Clovis within a single, shared character. They could be, beyond all prediction, first authoritarian, displaying a governessy lack of humour, and then mischievous, undermining all they might stand for as Aunt with a Clovis-like taste for trouble and an acid wit.

Now they turned up on his doorstep in the first calm of early evening. Solicitous of his welfare. They’d called the Yard only to be told he was off sick. Now Masha fussed about his kitchen, opened the doors of all the cupboards and made herself insufferable. Sasha tidied his bedroom, picking his clothes off the floor and lingering nosily over his shirt, clucking sternly over the lipstick on the collar, and warning him off women who wore cheap perfume. Then the twist – just what he was not expecting.

‘We’re going out.’

‘What?’

‘Out, my boy. Out, out, out! There’s a new concert on at the Adelphi. The new work from this Tippett chap and you shall accompany us.’

The ‘shall’ was a defining archaism. It allowed of no possible disagreement. Every so often the social bug seized one sister or the other out in Hertfordshire where they had lived in self-imposed exile with Troy’s mother since their husbands volunteered – Hugh for the navy, where he now captained a minesweeper, and Lawrence
for the army, for whom he did some mysterious staff job at the War Office – and they would breeze manless into London feeling deprived and out of it, insistent on knowing what was what, and where anyone who was anyone was to be found. Not that Troy knew, so they would whisk him off to one of their traditional haunts, to the Four Hundred in Piccadilly, the Millroy in Berkeley Square or the Bon Viveur in Shepherd Market, to wave at minor royalty and to be hugged and smothered by the expansive bodies and personalities of European exiles. Troy hated every minute of it. Became easily bored with the Count of this or Prince that. Hated any restaurant or club they chose, almost on principle, and found nothing cheering in the latest craze to hit the sisters -contemporary music. He would often take calls at the Yard from them in the Wigmore Hall or the National Gallery, for which they expected him to drop everything, murder included, for the pleasure of lunchtime with Myra Hess. He usually declined and knew he could risk their displeasure by hanging up, as they had the combined memory span of the average dog. He had never heard of a composer called Tippett but he knew it meant a tuneless evening of scraping catgut.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve something else on.’

‘Oh,’ said Sasha. ‘Miss Lipstick I presume?’

He had silently promised to see Tosca at nine. He realised this only as he tried to think of a lie to tell them. He had recalled only his silence not the assent which it had become for him. He had no idea what Tosca expected, but knew now that left to his own devices he would turn up at Orange Street at nine. He could not use the truth, however fresh from the mould of thought, as an excuse. The last thing he wanted was his sisters’ involvement in any further aspect of his life.

They arrived at the Adelphi with ten minutes to spare, and he found they had taken a box from which to see and be seen by all their friends. He hated their eccentricity, for much the same reasons he relished Nikolai’s and even Kolankiewicz’s. It was so very unEnglish. They swung their moods with a Russian whimsicality, overbearing or overfriendly, and dressed in a manner that was a joke. They looked like little Anna Kareninas, identical to a T in their blacks and velvets, in their high-laced boots and their winter
muffs. He would not play piggy in the middle and sat on Masha’s left.

In the little time they had left she endeavoured to explain to him what the music was about.

’A Child of Our Time
is about this Polish-Jewish refugee fleeing the Nazis.’

The notion that music was or could be ‘about’ something was not an idea Troy readily accepted, but he listened patiently to the music and much to his surprise he found he rather liked it. Then the choir came in with a chorus of Negro spiritual – singing ‘Steal away’.

He leaned close to Masha. ‘I thought it was about the Jews,’ he said.

‘It is. This is sort of about slavery and freedom. The Negroes sort of stand for the Jews in this bit.’

‘Stand for?’

‘They are the Jews, then. The composer sees them as symbolic of one race enslaving another. Taking away their status as human beings.’

‘That’s what I call a strained analogy,’ said Troy.

He looked around from the near-global vantage point they had given him by taking a centre box in the dress circle.

Across to the extreme right a woman had leaned forward resting her hands on the balcony rail and her chin on her hands. Troy leaned across his sisters and took Sasha’s opera glasses from her lap. He focused on the woman across the pit. Her eyes were closed, she was smiling serenely as though enraptured by the power of the music, the undeniably dramatic swell of voices – ‘Steal away, now, Steal away’ – and it was Diana Brack. And just behind her was a man, smoking a cigarette, halfway into the shadow of the box.

The house lights rose with the applause at the end of Tippett’s piece. Troy picked up the opera glasses again. Brack sat back and the lights revealed the face of Major Wayne, chatting to her and doing up the buttons on his mackintosh. Troy dropped the glasses and ran. He estimated three doors from the end of the row to correspond to the box they sat in, and as he rounded the curve in the corridor he could see that the door was open. He took the steps three at a time and reached the ground floor just as the stalls
released a flood of people into the foyer. He elbowed his way through the crowd and rushed out into the unlit street. He looked up the Strand and down it. He could see no sign of the American. A needle in a haystack would be understatement. He stood on the steps, reluctant to give up the pursuit as a bad job. The audience flowed out to either side of him, swamping the street in the sound of chatter. A hand pinched at his upper arm, Masha tugged him gently in the direction of the foyer,

‘There you are. I wondered where you’d got to. Now you do remember Diana, don’t you?’

She was looking off over his shoulder. He turned around and there was Brack, pleasantly nodding and smiling at Sasha’s inane banter. She smiled him her wide smile – the perfect teeth again – and Masha simply bridged the gap by asking the same question.

‘Diana. You do remember my little brother, don’t you?’

Brack extended her hand. He had little choice but to take it.

‘Of course I remember Freddie. Though it must be years and years. My how you’ve grown. I should think it must be twenty years. No, no. I have it. I have it. It was the year of the strike. 1926. I was sixteen, you must have been eleven or twelve and you’d been given a bicycle for your birthday. The girls brought me home from school to stay for a fortnight that summer, and you had such a tussle learning to ride that bike. You fell off and grazed your knee and you cried so and I bathed it and bandaged it for you. Surely you remember?’

He remembered the pain. What she called a graze had required eight stitches. He remembered a young woman with gentle hands and exotic scent who hand-cleaned the wound in warm water and disinfectant and embarrassed him with the fuss and had kissed him not on the cheek but on the lips when she had done and turned embarrassment to sexual confusion. He remembered the bicycle and the smell of the carbide lamp, and with it the added memory of that stinking charnel house in Stepney that had reeked of carbide gas. What he did not remember was Diana Brack.

He felt more than faintly foolish to realise that she had known all along who he was. It had, he was sure, no real bearing on the case, but it made him feel more and more that her calm and assurance when he had interviewed her was the sang-froid, the
arrogance of someone who was playing a game for two people in the conceit that only one of them knew the rules. How far did her arrogance go? Above the law? Pursuit now was pointless. Brack would be looking over her shoulder and he could not let her see him following Wayne. Knowing about Wayne was the one thing he had that she didn’t. It was not to be wasted fighting through the crowds of West End theatreland as discreetly as a bull in a china shop. For the while he had lost Wayne – again. He looked at his watch. It was just after ten. With any luck he could put his sisters in a cab to his father’s town house in Hampstead and be in bed in half an hour. The idea that he was due, overdue, at Orange Street had slipped completely from his mind.

Wildeve had a good mental image of Major Wayne. Although what use Troy’s description of him as having ‘bedroom eyes’ was to be in the blackout was altogether another matter. But mostly he was sitting down the area steps in Tite Street on the assumption that any tall man emerging from number 55 was likely to be the American. He sat all evening on the rashness of such assumption, uncertain as to whether Diana Brack was in or out. The mist slid off the Thames curling up the street to put a chill in his bones, and he was nodding off at about ten thirty when the slam of the door opposite woke him. He peeked out above the pavement. A cab was moving off and the light behind the door was momentarily visible before the blackout was smoothed down. Dammit, he thought, someone had come in and he’d not so much as caught a glimpse. Half an hour later he heard the door open again. A tall man emerged and walked off towards the river, a wraith vanishing into mist. He stepped quietly into the street. Wayne was standing at the corner of Tite Street and the Chelsea Embankment. As long as he stood there Wildeve could hardly move. Wayne’s hand shot up. Wildeve saw a cab pull over to him, and the American got in. Wildeve raced for the Embankment to see the taxi slowly pulling
out into traffic. By sheer good luck there was another cab cruising slowly towards him only a dozen yards away. He flagged it down.

‘Where to, guv?’ said the cabman.

‘Follow the cab in front,’ said Wildeve.

The man looked back at him in silent, contemptuous disbelief.

‘Honestly. I’m a policeman,’ said Wildeve without the strength of conviction.

Wayne’s cab turned into Chelsea Bridge Road. The traffic was light at this time of night but the mist that had wafted off the river now seemed to have the makings of a London pea-souper, and the two cabs in tandem moved slowly up Sloane Street to emerge in Knightsbridge. The smog took on the characteristic yellow hue of a killing cloud.

‘This ain’t easy you know,’ the cabman said over his shoulder to Wildeve. ‘You can’t see your hand in front of your face, let alone another bleedin’ cab!’

Wildeve said nothing. He rolled down the window to see out, but all he achieved was to let a dogtail of the smothering London smog slither in. For all his protestation the cabman seemed to have cat’s eyes. Wildeve was no longer sure where they were in the tangled streets of the city. He felt that the level of traffic noise after a right turn was probably fair indication of Park Lane, but he soon lost all sense of geography as the cab cut a zig-zag course across the small streets of Marylebone to the north of Marble Arch. He felt tempted to ask.

‘We haven’t lost him have we?’ he said, leaning over to the glass divide.

‘You can thank your lucky stars if we haven’t. I reckon that’s your man just up ahead, but I’m not about to swear on a Bible.’

‘Do you know where we are?’

‘Manchester Square, guv’nor. That I will swear to.’

The cab inched around the north-western corner of the square and ground to a halt in the stalled traffic. The smog was so thick that most sat it out in silence. Only the odd burst of pointless honking punctuated the enveloping stillness. Anxiously the young policeman slipped open the door and leaned out to see what he could see. Odd points of light bled into the darkness like running watercolours. He could tell nothing from it. The door was yanked from him and as he fumbled to keep his footing he was blasted back into the seat by a gunshot. He was dead before he hit the leather. A yellow tongue of creeping smog curled in through the open door to lick the corpse.

Troy slept a rich, warm, painless sleep. A fierce hammering at the door fought through to him – more like the rattle of dried peas on a tin drum. He found himself in bed in his underpants and socks. He grabbed a blanket and all but fell downstairs. He pulled back the door a fraction and the night was a mustard cloud wrapping itself around the colossal bulk of a night sergeant from the Yard.

‘Mr Troy. You’d better get dressed. There’s been a murder in Manchester Square. I’ve a car at the end of the street waiting for you. I did try to phone but you’ve not been answering.’

‘Sorry,’ said Troy, and let the door swing back as he headed for the stairs. Pulling on his trousers he yelled down, ‘Where in Manchester Square?’

‘In the Square itself. I’m told it was right in the street. I can give you the details as we drive.’

Troy fumbled around for the rest of his clothes, pulled a grubby shirt over his head and caught a faint whiff of scent. Tosca’s? He had picked up the shirt Sasha had dropped disdainfully on the bed. It was strange how the scent lingered and provoked. He had not
noticed it at all on Tosca. Whereas Brack’s was as vivid as an image. He had only to think the smell to feel it. Only to feel the smell to see the woman. But then he wasn’t thinking of Tosca as a suspect for anything – he knew scent much the same way Kolankiewicz knew human offal. He snapped out of the reverie and looked at his watch. He had come in from the concert with his head splitting and fallen straight into bed. It was nearly midnight. He’d been asleep for less than an hour, but it had felt like five years on another planet.