Black Out (3 page)

‘I hear you found something,’ McGee said again.

‘Mick, you know damn well that’s not the way we play things.’

McGee set his cap on his knees and wiped a cowlick of hair from his face.

‘Wolinski’s gone,’ he said flatly.

‘Gone,’ said Bonham. ‘What d’ye mean, gone?’

‘I mean no one’s seen him for three days.’

Bonham inclined his head slightly, looking down at Troy as they stood side by side, backs to the fire.

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ he said. ‘No one’s reported him missing.’

‘Who’s Wolinski?’

‘Lives above.’ Bonham aimed a giant forefinger at the ceiling. Troy spoke directly to McGee. ‘Why didn’t you report this?’

McGee simply shrugged.

‘Wolinski’s one of the comrades,’ Bonham put in. ‘Works down the George V docks, with Mr McGee here, when he’s a mind to. And when he’s a mind to he’ll take off. True, I’ve not heard a peep from upstairs, but I paid it no mind. He lives alone, doesn’t make a lot of noise.’

‘So he just vanished three days ago and no one’s said a word until now?’ Troy’s tone was a touch incredulous.

‘He’s like that,’ said Bonham. ‘They’re all like that. Suspicious of the police. We’re enemies of the people. And all that malarkey.’

McGee shrugged this off.

‘Word is you’ve found a body down by Cardigan Street.’

‘Not strictly true,’ said Troy.

‘But you found something all the same.’

‘You think it might be Wolinski?’

‘How can I know till I see it?’

Troy paused to change tack. ‘How long have you been a docker, Mr McGee?’

‘On and off since the bottom fell out of brickeying in twenty-nine.’

‘And Mr Wolinski?’

‘Almost as long I reckon. He came here from Poland in thirty-four or thirty-five I think.’

‘Hold out your hands.’

McGee gave Troy a puzzled look but did as he was asked, palms upturned on the oilskin tablecloth. From the corner of his eye Troy could see that Bonham too was taking his questions with a quizzical pinching of the eyebrows. McGee’s hands were a mess of old scars, fresh blisters and thick yellow callouses, as large as the corns on a beat policeman’s feet.

‘The body is not Wolinski,’ said Troy. ‘The hand I examined has no callouses. The dead man never worked in a dock or at any form of manual labour – ever. Mr Wolinski may be alive or he may be dead – but we haven’t found him or any part of him. Now – do you want formally to report him missing?’

The legal-sounding precision of Troy’s phrasing seemed to unnerve McGee for the first time. He looked to Bonham for help.

‘Why don’t you give it a day or two, Mick. Peter’s been gone
and come back a dozen times. This is no different like as not, and he’ll not thank you for involving me.’

McGee seemed unwilling to accept reassurance, as though it was less than dutiful, less than justice.

‘You might at least look,’ he said obscurely.

‘Look,’ said Bonham. ‘At what?’

‘The flat. You’re supposed to look for clues or something, ain’t you?’

McGee dangled a set of shiny keys in front of him. Bonham finally flipped the top off his stout and said it was all a waste of time, but for Troy this was an invitation to simple nosiness that he could scarcely refuse, beautifully blurred as it was by the line of duty.

Refugees, almost regardless of origin, played forcefully on childhood’s memory, of family legends, of nursery stories and a wealth of nonsense about the old country. That part of Troy’s mind that was ready to dismiss such nonsense was perpetually in thrall to the power of such myth-making.

McGee sat purposefully out of the way on an upright chair, just inside the living room – as if trying neatly to avoid disturbing anything Troy might eventually term evidence. Room for room an identical flat to Bonham’s, the contrast in content and décor could not have been more startling. At a glance Troy would have said the room held five or six thousand books, on all four walls, window-sills included, floor to ceiling. Where space had run out Wolinski had neatly tied books into bundles and stacked them under chairs. Under the table were hundreds of
Daily Workers, Picture Posts, Manchester Guardians
and the odd copy of
Pravda –
all tied up neatly with string and stacked clear of the knees.

Troy glanced over the shelves. The entire
Comédie Humaine
of Balzac – in French. Most of Dostoevsky – also in French. The twenty-four-volume Tolstoy of 1913 – in the original Russian.
Das Kapital
in German. Odd volumes of Kropotkin in English (almost heretical for a Marxist thought Troy) and on and on and on. There scarcely seemed a major work of literature in any European language that had not been read, or at least owned, by Peter Wolinski. The second room held a desk – a pen, ink and a blotter arranged with military precision – and yet more shelves of books.
Physics, chemistry – all double-Dutch to Troy, but a pattern emerged as Troy’s eyes followed the shelves round to the desk, and dusty long-unopened volumes in German gave way to newer works in English, mostly dealing with stress in metals or the dynamics of chemical propulsion. On one wall Wolinski had found room for photographs. Two or three dozen or more, some no bigger than postcards, some as large as dinner plates. Young men outside pavement cafés, a young man in black gown and mortar board clutching a symbolic scroll, a mixture of old men and young men arranged as though to commemorate some academic gathering – a familiar mixture of the social hours and formal occasions in the life of a pre-war student, a Pole abroad in the Weimar Republic.

Troy stared at a striking photograph of the Führer in full flight and fury – gesturing with rigid index finger to the heavens in one of his stage-managed pieces. It bore the caption ‘Hey you up there in the gallery!’ It seemed so remote to think back to the days when Hitler had been a figure of fun. Next to it Wolinski had caught the transition in a shot of startling emptiness and chilling beauty. Early summer morning in the street of some unnamed Bavarian town, not a human figure to be seen, just the houses with their decking of flags stretching down to infinity – a long silent tunnel of swastikas.

Troy called out to McGee, ‘What did Wolinski do before he came here?’

‘He taught in one of them German colleges.’

‘University?’

‘Same difference. Munich I think it was. Till ‘Itler drove ’im out.’

Only the bedroom remained. Had not the previous two rooms shown him a man of meticulous habits, Troy would have said this room had been ransacked. The twisted and grubby sheets, the dust on every surface, the clothes in higgledy-piggledy heaps. Nowhere to sit, scarce enough room to stand and just enough to lie. It seemed Wolinski ignored everything for the life of the mind. Troy could not have slept a wink in dust and dirt such as this. On the bedside table, spine upwards, was Wolinski’s bedtime reading. Troy smiled –
The Code of the Woosters
by P. G. Wodehouse, in which whilst in hot pursuit of his Aunt Dahlia’s cow-creamer, Bertie Wooster manages to defeat British fascism.

‘Mr McGee, come here please.’

McGee called back from the first room, ‘Won’t I mess things up?’

‘You can hardly make more of a mess than I’ve done. Just try not to touch anything.’

McGee ambled into the bedroom.

‘Is it always like this?’ asked Troy.

‘Yeah. He always did live a bit like a pig.’

‘Would you know if any of his clothes were missing or if he’d packed a suitcase?’

McGee pointed to the top of a cracked and blistered mahogany veneer wardrobe.

‘His case would be up there. If it was here, that is.’

Troy led McGee back to the kitchen.

‘And his razor would be here?’ Troy pointed to the tiled strip next to the sink. ‘Mr Wolinski is still clean-shaven I take it?’

‘Oh yeah,’ said McGee. ‘Sometimes he treats himself to a proper barber-shave down the Mile End Road, but he’s got a safety. I’m sure of that.’

‘Do you see it?’ asked Troy.

McGee shrugged again.

‘Then I think we can assume that Mr Wolinski has gone wherever he’s gone of his own accord. Kidnappers and murderers don’t usually ask you to pack for the occasion. And the Luftwaffe doesn’t much care whether it bombs the unshaven or not.’

‘So Peter’ll be back?’

‘He didn’t abandon a houseful of books in Munich. I hardly think he’ll do the same in Stepney’.

Rather than reassured McGee seemed deflated by Troy’s words.

‘What do I do then?’

‘Give the keys to Sergeant Bonham and if Wolinski isn’t back by the end of the week report it properly at Leman Street. He can hardly swan around England for long these days.’

‘Of course,’ McGee said thoughtfully. ‘There’s a war on.’

‘I had heard,’ said Troy.

Troy stood and shivered outside the ground floor back and watched his breath form clouds in the air.

‘And don’t give Uncle George no cheek,’ Mrs Flanagan instructed her son Terence, alias Tub.

Troy and Bonham exchanged glances over the Uncle George. Mrs Flanagan did up the boy’s coat buttons and straightened his socks in the wrinkle zone between knee and ankle.

‘Doesn’t pay to scare off the kiddies,’ muttered Bonham.

‘If you say so, Uncle George,’ Troy muttered back at him.

‘It got us the arm didn’t it?’

Mrs Flanagan was speaking directly to Bonham.

‘If he’s any trouble just give ’im a back ‘ander, George.’

‘Will do, Patsy,’ Bonham replied.

The child squinted up at Bonham – almost seven feet tall in his helmet – like a squirrel surveying the prospect of an oak. His one visible eye roved actively, the other hid behind a fresh slab of Elastoplast. He moved off towards the street without a backward glance at his mother. On the step, out in Union Place, a grim prospect greeted Troy and Bonham. Seven small boys ranged across the pavement, all looking expectantly towards Bonham.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘What do you lot think you’re up to?’

No one spoke. The expectant looks seemed fixed somewhere between joy and tears. Sergeant Bonham held power over the greatest, the most mysterious event in their short lives. Troy looked down at a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, outsize jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding-basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps. Such an amazing array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs that only the peach-fresh faces challenged the image of them as seven assorted dwarves. Out on the end of the line, a grubby redhead, doubtless called Carrots, juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, an improvised portable furnace. Troy wished he had one of his own.

‘You’re supposed to be in school, you know that,’ Bonham persisted. ‘Now come on. Clear off!’

The boys stood their ground. A classic Mexican stand-off.

A lifetime spent on the sidelines, excluded but observant, had left Tub in no doubt about how leadership should behave when occasion arose. He knew the occasion and he knew how to rise to it. He stepped out from between Bonham and Troy and the mass of boys parted before him as surely as if they’d been struck by Moses’ staff. He led off in the direction of Cardigan Street. The boys followed in their own pecking order – none of them overtook or even tried to draw level with Tub in his magisterial progression. He didn’t speak and he didn’t look back. Bonham and Troy followed on the end of the line, feeling faintly foolish and Brobdingnagian. Troy thrust his hands deep into his pockets to keep the stabbing nip of frost from his fingertips and wondered if the carrot-headed child could be persuaded to part with his invention for a shilling.

Tub stood on a level patch of fresh snow, and waited as Bonham and Troy struggled across the rubble and into the ‘garden’. The boys lined up, respectfully not setting foot on their hopscotch patch, forming a hellish gauntlet that Troy would have to run to get to Tub. Troy stumbled to a halt at the end of the column.

‘Here?’ he asked. ‘Do you mean you found it here?’

Tub nodded. Troy looked around. In all its ups and downs the bombsite seemed indistinct and uniform under its coat of snow. Bonham lumbered up, wheezing.

‘If he’s leading us on a wild-goose chase—’

Troy cut him short. ‘How can you be sure?’ he asked Tub.

Tub scraped at the snow with the toe of his boot, revealing a blue quarry tile. As if to some invisible cue everybody suddenly began to kick at the snow, scattering it clear of the old floor. Troy offered to hold the tin while the carrot-top worked, but he clutched it tightly to his mackintosh and scowled at Troy, hacking away all the time with the metalled heel of his boot.

Troy looked down at the kitchen floor and its fading hopscotch squares.

‘Here?’ he repeated.

‘This is where we was,’ said Tub.

‘Yes, but is this where you found it?’ Troy was reluctant to name the object, but eight pairs of eyes seemed to be daring him to do it. ‘The arm,’ he conceded. ‘You found the arm here?’

‘Nah,’ said Tub. ‘This is where we was when the dog give it to me.’

Troy heard Bonham mutter a faint ‘Jesus Christ’.

‘What dog?’ he asked.

‘Dog,’ said Tub, as though this in itself were sufficient explanation.

Troy looked at Bonham, Bonham looked at Troy – both feeling more and more like Mutt and Jeff.

‘First I’ve heard of it,’ said Bonham. Troy was beginning to find the phrase all too familiar.

‘Another fine mess, Stanley,’ he whispered back. ‘Are you telling me a dog came up to you and gave you the hand while you were playing here?’

‘He wasn’t playing,’ chipped in the biggest boy. ‘We don’t let ’im ’cos he trips up.’

‘So you didn’t find the hand at all?’

‘Yes I did,’ Tub protested. ‘It was me. Just me. Wasn’t none of this lot. Dog came up and give it me. He didn’t give it no one else. He give it me!’

‘Do you have any idea where the dog came from?’

Tub seemed not to understand.

‘Where did you first see him?’

Tub pointed to the wall between Cardigan Street and Alma Terrace, to where odd bits of houses still stood, to where a few dozen bricks remained in the order the brickie had lain them.

‘Show me,’ said Troy. The same ritually structured procession moved off towards Alma Terrace. Troy looked over the stump of wall. The morning’s fall of snow had covered any tracks the dog might have left.