Black Out (25 page)

‘That’s our man,’ he said.

Kolankiewicz dropped the paper and scuttled across the room, looked up at Wayne, fixing his spectacles to his nose with one hand.

‘Nasty piece of work,’ he said.

‘How can you tell?’

‘A mean expression.’

‘Which one?’

‘All of them.’

‘That’s great. You should be a detective.’

‘Don’t be so fucking cocky. When you seen what I got you’ll be bloody impressed.’

He pulled open his briefcase, and set three Cellophane bags on Troy’s desk.

‘I have good news. I have bad news. First shell, second and third shells, bullets from Manchester Square. You keep them. What can vanish once can vanish twice. The bullets are forty-five. The shells as you so rightly said were fired from an automatic. There are spring-loading clip marks on the sides, the like of which you do not get with a revolver. Now the good news.’

He took out two large photographs and pinned them to the board next to the myriad faces of Wayne.

‘Now, in the absence of any other bullet with which to make any comparison I did all I could with the shells. These enlargements will show you what I mean. If you take the clip marks as indicating nine o’clock, then the firing pin in each case would appear to have hit at ten past two – in archery terms an inner. So far, so thin. I don’t rate such evidence. There is too much room for coincidence. But … ’

He took two more photographs from his briefcase and tacked them over the first set.

‘Look at these. Blown up to the power fifty. Look at the pattern of the pin upon the cartridge case.’

Troy looked as closely as he could.

‘They’re identical.’

‘Quite so. Presuming the same place on the clock, the two shells, from Stepney, from Manchester Square, bear the marks of being detonated by the same firing pin – or at worst two firing pins that have worn in precisely the same way.’

‘That’s … that’s brilliant!’

‘Effectively the two shells were fired by the same gun. Not as conclusive as having the bullet that killed Herr Cufflink, but … scientifically far from inexact. Now the bad news … ’

‘Bad news?’

‘It won’t stand up in court. At least, it’s never had to, because no one’s ever tried it.’

‘Shit,’ said Troy.

‘Think how many points of similarity you need with fingerprints. Think how likely it is that your man has ditched the gun.’

‘Think how often we catch them with it. Almost a sentimental attachment – killers for their weapons. They go on clutching it long after they’ve fired their last bullet at you, even though it’s as damning as Bill Sykes’s dog.’

Kolankiewicz shrugged. ‘I offer this for what it’s worth. My feeling is that to date we have only circumstantial evidence, piss in wind. This, this I will go into court with. But we’d be the first.’

Troy bent to look more closely at the photographs. He felt Kolankiewicz’s hands on the back of his head, probing in his hair.

‘What are you playing at?’

‘I heard you been in the wars. That’s quite a lump you still got. When was it?’

‘It was … it was … ’

Troy realised he could not remember when he had been in Holborn station when the bomb had hit. He remembered the pain in his head and the blood-red cloud and the thought of them now seemed to bring both back. But he could not in honesty say whether the bomb had been last week or last month, and for a second or two could see Kolankiewicz only through a red mist, hear him only through the drumming of a blood-vessel somewhere over the left eye.

‘It was the week before last,’ said Wildeve.

As little as that? Kolankiewicz looked all around Troy’s head, umming and aahing a little, and then took his head in both hands, twisted his face to the window and looked deep into his eyes.

‘You got eyes like a Polish peat bog,’ he said. ‘But the bad news is they let you out too soon.’

‘They didn’t let him out. He discharged himself,’ Wildeve said.

‘You’re a smartyarse.’

‘So you keep telling me.’

‘Bangs to the head can be trouble. You get any headaches?’

Troy did not answer.

‘I see,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Troy, see your doctor. As a favour to me. Don’t fuck with the head. It’s too near the brain.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Troy lied, ‘I will.’

The silver moonlight picked out Cable Street in every crack and pot-hole. What there was of intact road surface shone as though the tarmacadam had been Brylcreemed, throwing the piercing silver gleam back to the roving moon in its cloudless sky.

Troy and Wildeve left the Bullnose Morris by Leman Street Post Office and walked along Cable Street parallel to the arches of the London to Tilbury line out of Fenchurch Street. Two drunks swayed towards them from the Shadwell end. One silent and giddy, the other raucous and leaping from pot-hole to pot-hole.

‘By the light of the silvery moon, we’ll sit an’ spoon, honeymoon, honeymoon, hunny wossaname … ’

He stopped mid-puddle.

‘George, I’ve forgotten the bloody words.’

George seemed hardly to care. He broke wind loudly and contemplated the dilemma.

‘Gizzanother then. Gizz bluebirds over the white fuckin’ cliffs of fuckin’ Dover. I ain’t ’eard that since this mornin’ at least. Wossa fuckin’ war comin’ to. I arst yer. Just when you want Vera fuckin’ Lynn an’ ’er white fuckin’ cliffs of white fuckin’ Dover there’s never one around. Just like fuckin’ coppers.’

‘Right you are, George. There are bad times just around the corner, just you wait an’ see. There’ll be Messershmitts over the white fuckin’ cliffs of wossname, just you wait an’ see … ’

Troy and Wildeve parted around the songbird who teetered at the end of a nine-foot crater of a puddle. He took one step and sat down hard on his backside in a foot or more of water.

‘Aagh! I’m wet. My arse is all wet!’

For the first time he seemed to notice his onlookers.

‘Gizzahand mate,’ he said to Troy.

Troy looked down into the drunken, pleading eyes. ‘Sorry, mate,’ he said. ‘There’s never a copper about when you want one is there?’

A wail of self-pity went up. As loud as any siren. They walked on, deftly side-stepping George, and followed the line of arches.

‘Freddie, what exactly are we looking for?’

‘Signs of life.’

‘You don’t mean that people actually live in these?’

‘Not exactly, but Bonham reckons Edelmann has a shelter here.’

When the Blitz first hit, the provision of shelters was appalling. Sydney Edelmann, Communist and local councillor, had kicked up a fuss about the conditions, persuaded MPs and the press down to the East End to look at the way the East-Enders had to live. Striking into the heartland of privilege he had even led a march on the Savoy to protest about the private shelter constructed deep underneath the famous hotel for the exclusive use of patrons. Dozens of Stepney’s disaffected crowded into the hotel at the sound of the alert; demanded shelter only to be met with the police. Reading an account in the papers the following day Troy had laughed out loud at the news of Edelmann rightly meeting and defeating the challenge by invoking the Innkeeper’s Act. In his way he was the subtlest of barrack-room lawyers. Without his agitation Troy doubted that proper provision would ever have been made by way of mass shelters. The poor would have gone on spending their nights in stinking cellars with no lavatories and no water. But, victory achieved, on the return of the bombers for the ‘little’ Blitz Edelmann would not use the new shelters himself, preferring, it was said, the privacy of his fortified railway arch.

They had passed and looked over more than a dozen arches. Most had been covered in with sheets of corrugated steel and served as scrap-metal yards – ‘Help Build a Spitfire’ was daubed in peeling paint across the doors of one arch, a relic from the summer of the Battle of Britain – or garage workshops, but from one high arch a narrow chimney emerged in a serpentine twist, puffing plumes of white smoke into the brilliant night air. Troy stopped and tugged gently on Wildeve’s coatsleeve.

‘I think we’ve found it.’

Wildeve looked blankly at the steel doors. The smoke abated between puffs, and he saw no sign of life.

‘Couldn’t we just catch him at home?’

‘I’ve never known Edelmann to knowingly admit a copper without a warrant – look there it goes again.’

The chimney breathed, exhaling its wisp of smoke towards the sky.

‘And you reckon they spend all night in there?’

Troy thumped on the door. They heard the slow unslipping of bolts and chains and the door opened a fraction of an inch. ‘Who’s there?’

‘It’s old Bill,’ said Troy.

‘I don’t know anyone called Bill,’ came the reply.

So much for the value of our native argot, thought Troy.

‘Tell Sydney it’s Sergeant Troy of the Yard.’

The door closed on him. A minute or more passed. A train roared overhead drowning out any sound from the interior of the arch. The door opened once more, wide in its dark welcome. From the depths a disembodied voice called to Troy.

‘As I live and breathe, Mr Troy!’

A small dark man shuffled into the moonlight, his back bent under the perpetual burden of a hunch, spine twisted so badly that he looked up at Troy and Wildeve with his head at a painful angle, one eye popping, one eye almost closed.

‘Lads, lads. It’s my old friend Constable Troy!’

Edelmann gestured expansively with his hand, flinging the door open, knuckles of the hand only inches from the ground. Troy walked in. Wildeve followed, wide-eyed in a foreign land. They entered through an inner door into a colossal metal box spanning out its square within the circle of the brick railway arch. Half a dozen men sat around a central fire, some playing cards on the top of a packing case, others reading until disturbed by this palaver. The walls were lined with bunks. Eyes like foxes stared out at them from the depth of their burrows. It was clean, carpeted, wellordered and, but for the present intrusion, friendly and homely. Sound vanished easily into the vastness of space giving it the soft whisper of worship, a steel cathedral.

‘It’s Sergeant Troy now, Sydney,’ said Troy.

‘My my, but you’ve come up in the world, my boy. I always said you’d do well.’

Could we knock off the Dickens impersonations? You’re not a patch on Bransby Williams, and I’ve come on business.’

‘O’ course. O’ course. ‘Orace, you get Mr Troy and his friend a cuppa char. I shall be with the Sergeant in my office.’

He shuffled ahead of Troy, leading the way into a cubicle made by the arrangement of a small group of packing cases.

‘Business you said.’

Troy laid out the photograph of von Ranke on a packing case. ‘Looks very dead, poor sod,’ was all Edelmann said.

‘You didn’t know him?’

‘No.’

Troy put down the photograph of the young Brand blown up from Nikolai’s group shot. ‘ ’Im neither.’

‘You’re certain?’

‘If I knew I’d tell yer. There’d be no ‘arm in that. On account of whatever your next question was I like as not would tell you to get stuffed.’

Troy laid down the third photograph. One he had had enlarged from the dozens Tosca had given him. Edelmann said nothing. He looked down, he looked up and he looked back at Troy.

‘And what would your next question be, Mr Troy? Afore I tells yer to get stuffed that is.’

‘My next question would be did you know you’d been infiltrated by the opposition?’

Edelmann drew in his breath with a faint whistle. He uncocked his head, the squint vanished from the half-closed eye, and he leaned back as though appraising Troy.

‘Just supposin’. Just supposin’ I should go along with this. What proof can you offer?’

Troy jabbed at the photo of von Ranke with his forefinger.

‘He did that. Shot him in the face.’

‘Nasty.’

‘He did for him too.’ Troy pointed to Brand. ‘Chopped him into little pieces.’

Edelmann shook his head slowly from side to side. Troy had no idea whether it meant disbelief or despair.

‘And I think he also killed this man.’

Troy slapped down a blow-up of the young Peter Wolinski, like a card-sharp playing a trump. Edelmann got up and walked out. Troy sat still and waited, heard his voice boom across the partition.

‘ ’ Orace, where’s that bloody tea?’

Troy heard Edelmann shuffling around the room. As near as possible for a man so misshapen he seemed to be pacing the floor. After several minutes he returned carrying two half-pint mugs of tea. He sat down opposite Troy.

‘I’m listening,’ he said. ‘You have my attention.’

‘I think Wayne – you do know him as Wayne, don’t you?’

Edelmann nodded.

‘I think he’s a hit man, a military assassin for the American army. I know he killed these two. They’re old colleagues of Wolinski’s from before the war. I think he killed the first man a year ago when he tried to reach Wolinski. I think he killed the second man as he got to Wolinski. And that’s when he killed Wolinski.’

‘Nobody’s seen ‘im,’ said Edelmann simply. ‘Not for weeks. He was always a risk. I kinda guessed. Knew, if you like. What I never knew was why.’

‘Nor do I. When did you last see them?’

‘February. The twenty-fourth.’

‘How can you be sure?’

‘Study group meeting. Same time every month. I saw Peter in the afternoon. He said he’d be there. Wayne was there. He’d been coming on and off for about nine months.’

‘Why did you let him in?’

‘Bona fides. ‘E ‘ad ‘em, didn’t ‘e. Letters from my sister’s brother-in-law in Pennsylvania. Saying as ’ow ‘e’d been a member of the United Workers of the World back in the thirties. Truth to tell I was quite pleased. It was another arm for the movement. Not one you expect. Russians and Poles we got by the dozen. It was heartening to be getting news from America. Made us feel we were getting somewhere. He’d give us all the news, all the gen on the unions over there. What a con the new Deal was. All that kinda stuff.’

Edelmann seemed for a moment to have wound down to silence. ‘And Diana Brack?’ Troy prompted.

‘She come along with ‘im. That helped. Added to his bonas. I
knew ’er. She’d been at conferences and meetings I’d been at. You expect the odd toff or two. Some are slummin’, some are serious. Believe it or not it was H. G. Wells introduced me to ‘er. I think it was ‘is way of testin’ out both of us. A quick ‘allo and a handshake. Wells calls me the Stepney Quasimodo. She smiles. So I ‘ave to. Bastard.’