Black Out (34 page)

‘What’re you staring at?’

‘Just staring. Just pleased to be able to do it.’

He watched her eat, left his egg untouched, touched as he was by what he saw as the grace of every movement she made. She was only spooning egg, but to Troy, watching in soft focus, she might have been making all the hand-passes of a Japanese ritual. Precise and positive and incomprehensible.

‘Eat your egg,’ she said.

And he bent to breakfast, wondering what it was that he could see in her and put no words to. A face to kill or die for – that had been his first reaction to her that day in Tite Street. But that was a world away. He could no longer see quite what he had meant by the notion.

‘Have you looked in a mirror today?’ she asked as he finished. ‘You have a week of stubble.’

Troy put a hand to his face. He had not attempted shaving and had all but forgotten what he must look like.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’m not up to that yet.’

She went up to the bathroom and returned with his strop, his cut-throat and his badger-hair shaving brush. She whipped up a foam at the sink and set a bowl of hot water in front of him. The towel was tucked around his throat before she stated the obvious.

‘I shall shave you.’

‘Have you done this before?’

‘Yes.’

She lathered his face. Troy closed his eyes and searched for the last tinge of burnt cinnamon that still clung to her. Felt the silky rasp of the blade across his throat, gliding up his cheeks, gently shaping itself to his top lip. She said not a word. Troy became acutely conscious of her breathing, a deep slow rhythm softly reassuring him, resolutely seducing him. She wiped him dry. Her fingers rested a moment on his left cheek an inch below the eye, the ball of her thumb playing firmly over the same spot. The steel touched his face again, held still, poised, and then in a quick, hard action bit into his cheek. He opened his eyes, felt the trickle of blood start out across his face, saw her bend down to kiss the wound.

She stood back. Licked her lips, a smear of his blood still clung to the lower. She smiled, but he knew it had been deliberate.

Three days later, his eyes functioning normally again, the cut on his face a tiny ribbon of scabs, the red cloud a troublesome memory, Troy returned to work.

It was too early for Wildeve. His desk was neat and piled high in paperwork. Troy’s desk was neater still – empty but for his blotter and his calendar. He reached across the desk and picked up the calendar, pages unturned for weeks, the date stuck like a stopped clock at the day of his last interview with Brack. He tore off the thick wadge in a single gesture, and as the pages fluttered down into his waste-paper basket he heard the tap of a hand on the frame of the open door.

‘ ’Bout time. I was beginning to think I’d imagined you.’

Onions rested his weight against the door jamb. As much as Onions did, he smiled.

‘If ever I needed you it was today.’

‘Trouble?’ Troy asked hopefully, feeling a dark whisper begin to start up in his blood.

‘D’ye know the Black Swan, East India Dock Road?’

Troy shook his head.

‘Bloke found dead in his room. Blood all over the place. Door locked from the inside. A real Sherlock Holmes-er. Get over there before the locals leave their footprints all over the shop - message timed at seven forty-four. The local bobby reckoned he’d been found about six thirty. Police Surgeon’ll meet you there.’

Troy wanted desperately to ask where Wildeve was, when he could get back to Wayne, whether Tom Henrey had solved his cases. Only the last seemed workable, but Onions was ahead of him.

‘Take Wildeve – or leave the lad a message. He’s nowt else on at the moment.’

Troy looked again at the mountain of paperwork.

‘Tom cracked Golders Green and Hyde Park?’

‘Not exactly,’ Onions said. ‘Your lad did. Tom’s grateful, but embarrassed, if you know what I mean.’

Troy knew exactly what he meant.

The battery on the Bullnose Morris was flat. Troy waited while it was jump-started. Wildeve came rushing into the garage as the engine spluttered to life and flung himself into the passenger seat.

‘Sorry. Overslept.’

‘Sleep of the just, eh?’ said Troy, easing the car out on to the Embankment.

‘You heard? I can’t help the feeling that I’ve somehow blotted my copybook.’

‘Solving crimes is your job. Never apologise for it. It’s Tom’s problem, not yours. Comes the day you run rings around me, then you can worry.’

‘I do hope that’s a joke, Freddie.’

Troy knew the voice at once. It was the same Police Surgeon who had bandaged his eyes and removed his stitches in another lifetime and another place.

‘I hope you’re rested, Sergeant,’ he said.

‘I feel fine.’

‘You look a damn sight better than you did the last time we met.’

Troy peeled back the grubby white sheet that covered the corpse. A man in his twenties lay in a sticky, crisping pool of blood. Face down, hands buried beneath him, elbows sticking out. He was barefoot, collarless and had rolled up his sleeves. It should have been the old familiar slipper waiting to receive his foot – it chafed like best boot on worst bunion.

Troy looked all around the room, his attention drawn by the sound of gently trickling water to the basin opposite the door, and slowly brought his gaze to rest on the doctor.

‘You can carry on,’ he said.

Troy sat on a chair by the door, watched the doctor turn the body, stiff with rigor mortis. The room hummed with layers of noise – the sense rather than the sound of the water, the endless creaks of a wooden inn that had swayed with the wind on the same spot for centuries, the stagy whispers from the staircase, and a thunder that to Troy seemed to sound from somewhere deep within him.

‘Not dead long, wouldn’t you say, Sergeant?’

‘Can you put a time to it?’

‘Midnight at the outside. Say four o’clock this side.’

Troy glanced at his watch. It was half past eight.

Wildeve hovered in the doorway, behind him a crowd of a dozen or more pressed for the ghoulish glimpse of a corpse. Troy told him to take them downstairs and start questioning – anything to keep them out of the way. Troy looked at the body, upturned like a beetle, stuck on its back, the legs and arms frozen where they’d locked in death. The doctor was cutting away at the shirtfront.

‘Stabbed,’ he said. ‘Right through the heart. I’d’ve said death was instantaneous.’

‘Any other wounds?’

‘Hard to tell. You can’t get at ’em when they’re like this, and I can hardly take a mallet to his knees now can I?’

The doctor stood, wiping his hands. He dropped the towel into his open case.

‘I’ll have to get him back to the lab, though, to tell the truth, I’d rather leave him till he loosens. He’ll not fit on a stretcher the way he is. You can take a look all you want, but you’ll see no more than I did.’

Troy knew damn well he could. If death was instantaneous why were his legs twisted together as they were? The man had walked two or three paces and fallen crossing the room when death took him. What was the white stuff in his right ear? Why was the tap still running? He moved to the basin and turned off the tap. Suddenly the room was free of its subliminally dominant noise, and he could hear the doctor grunting softly as he forced the latch on his Gladstone bag together, and beneath that surface sound the slow drumming in his own blood that seemed to him like a syllable beating forth to utterance. He ran his hand around the edge of the basin and looked at a brown ring of fuzz that gathered on the end of his fingers.

Downstairs Wildeve was shouting to make himself heard, but appeared to be getting somewhere.

‘This chap – the postman – raised the alarm when he found blood dripping through the ceiling. He and the landlord – that’s the little fat chap knocking back the brandies in the corner – forced the door. They both swear the key was turned in the lock on the inside. Trouble is this isn’t the sort of place that asks any questions or signs registers – they haven’t the faintest idea who he was. Do you suppose it was suicide?’

Troy steered Wildeve away from the saloon and into the snug. With the door closed the hubbub muted. Wildeve was accelerating with the excitement of mystery. Bright-eyed and breathless.

‘I tell you, Freddie, this one’s a stinker.’

‘No – it’s not.’

‘Door locked. Dead in the middle of the floor. Good God – it’s straight out of Sherlock Holmes!’

‘That’s what Onions said. You’re both wrong.’

Wildeve looked perplexed and was about to speak again, when Troy’s hand came up to wave him into silence.

‘The doctor reckons he died between midnight and four a.m. Let’s presume the latest possible hour. He died about five o’clock. And he was murdered. It’s pretty damn difficult to stab yourself through the heart. And he was stabbed with a sword.’

‘What?’ Wildeve was agog with disbelief.

‘With a sword. As he shaved. At the basin in his room. Through the panelling that divides his room from the next. He has shaving cream in his ears, the tap was on, and he was about to rinse the basin when someone shoved a sword or something as long as a sword through the gap in the boards. There’s blood on the edges of the boards just below the mirror. He took two steps back, clutching his chest, which stopped the blood spraying out, turned to try for the door and fell dead with his legs still crossed. He was a merchant sailor. He was getting ready to sail on the six o’clock tide. Check the charts; if high tide isn’t somewhere between six and seven at this time of year I’ll eat my hat. If you go through his possessions you’ll find papers or a pay-book of some sort. Find out who was in the next room. He’ll be long gone, but at least we’ll get a description. Pass the description – a name if we’re that lucky – to the River Police. Have them stop any ship that sailed on the high tide. Whoever killed him knew him. I’ll be at the Yard.’

Troy stood up and reached for the door.

‘Freddie – you can’t do this. You can’t strip the damn thing to the bone and then just bugger off. It can’t be that simple.’

‘Believe me, Jack; that’s what happened. I never said it was simple.’

He walked out.

Wildeve called after him, ‘Freddie, I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you don’t have to prove it to me!’

But the only word Troy could hear was ‘Wayne’ as it pounded in his blood and filled his ears with its suffocating beat.

Troy sat all day in his office. He stared at the mountain of paperwork on Wildeve’s desk and did nothing about any of it. He watched the sun dance the diamond dance of coming summer on the Thames. Coming? He glanced down at the unemptied waste-paper basket, stuffed with discarded pages from his calendar. Coming? It was June the 1st. Summer was already here. God in heaven – how long had he spent in the pit?

At five o’clock he walked along to the Savoy, showed his card and was admitted to the Lady Diana Brack suite, with its view across the river, empty and clean and smelling ever so faintly of Je Reviens. He sat on the edge of the bed and inhaled deeply – not certain of the reality of her presence or the power of his imagination. He sat until dusk – then he ran ragged through the drawers and cupboards. The silks and the satins spilled out pooling a shimmering lake of dresses and stockings, slips and pants on to the carpet. He let a stocking run liquid through his fingers. Buried his face in a slip, felt the rasp of silk on his five o’clock shadow, searched for the familiar and smelt only soap flakes.

There was no man’s clothing anywhere to be found. Wayne had left not a trace behind.

Back home, he waited to see if she would come that night. She did not.

Wildeve caught up with him in the office the next morning as they sifted paperwork over eight o’clock tea. Troy thought he was sullenly nursing his grievance. Then he spoke up.

‘Of course. You were absolutely bloody right, but that’s hardly the point is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’

‘No it bloody well isn’t.’

‘What have you got?’

‘Stoker Alan Bone, bound for Lagos on the SS
Good Hope.
Steamingly angry, denying the lot and guilty as hell. But that still isn’t the point!’

‘Where are you holding him?’

‘Wapping Old Stairs, with the River boys. Freddie, will you stop playing the boss and just for five minutes play the copper?’

‘Of course, Jack. If you like.’

‘I mean … ’

‘Yes.’

‘I mean … what would Onions say?’

‘He’d congratulate me on the art of delegation, and you on a quick solution.’

‘But I didn’t solve the damn thing. You did. But …

‘But?’

‘But … not in the right way.’

‘Jack, I’m afraid this is a little beyond me. There are no right or wrong ways. Only solutions. Shouldn’t you get over to Wapping and give Mr Bone a bit of a roasting?’

Wildeve left. Troy thought the exit fell only marginally short of storming out. He looked at the mountain of paperwork on Jack’s desk, and knew it would find itself ignored for another day.

He left the building by the Whitehall exit and caught a bus to Kensington Gore, alighting at the Albert Hall, close to his uncle’s office at Imperial.

Mid-evening he sat indoors, craving the darkness that June nights denied. He had not even bothered to take off his jacket or turn on the wireless. He mulled over the mass of fact and guesswork that had been his day with Nikolai. Around nine, still cheated of all but the merest touch of twilight, he saw the front door pushed gently open and Brack framed herself in the doorway.

‘Where are you? It’s black as coal in here,’ she said.

‘Over here, by the fire.’

He could see her quite clearly. She was dressed to the nines. A black, shoulderless dress, crêpe de Chine or some such, emphasising the length of her neck, the tightness of her waist, the breadth of her shoulders, and topped by a touch of frivolity that scarcely
seemed in character – an ostrich-feather boa. She put her cloak down on the chair by the door and spun round for him, smiling, seeking approval.

‘You look dressed to kill.’