Black Out (41 page)

‘Is the boy known to you?’

‘No – we’ve nothing on him.’

‘Did you keep him overnight?’

‘No, I took him out the back, and I thrashed the shit out of him.’

Troy wondered what deal they had been able to reach with the boy. Let off in return for a statement against Pym?

‘How old was he?’

‘Sixteen. If he’d been any younger I’d’ve taken your mate out and thrashed the shit out of him too.’

Pym had been lucky – lucky not to get a beating – although if he had it would have given Troy a better position from which to negotiate – lucky to have picked on a boy the right age, though he doubted that had mattered to Pym at the time.

‘He’s not my mate.’

‘Isn’t he? You’re a poof’s runner for queer bastards you don’t even know?’

If Troy had had any illusions that rank would matter to this man, they vanished. He could not be reasoned with, cajoled, and Troy doubted very much whether he could be bullied.

‘I know why you’re ’ere,’ he went on. ‘I can hear it in your
voice. You’ve got the same accent. He’s one of your own, isn’t he? What is he, an old mate from schooldays? Eton was it?’

‘Harrow,’ said Troy pointlessly.

‘And that puts you above the law, does it? A poncey education and you think there’s one law for the rich and one law for the rest of us? Is that it? Well sod it, Mr Troy, that’s not the way it’s going to be. I know you, Mr Troy – I shouldn’t think there’s a copper in the Met that doesn’t know you – you’re known as one of the best – time was everyone was talking about you – towards the end of the war you were the stuff of legend – there were more stories in circulation about you and the Tart in the Tub case than there were about Dr Crippen and the Edinburgh body-snatchers put together. You’re known, Mr Troy – you’re a character – but this is beneath you, and I’ll tell you to your face, you should have better things to do with your time than running errands for queers. He’s going down, Mr Troy, and that’s all there is to it.’

‘Neville, it’s Troy. Not good news I’m afraid. The man won’t budge. If he were a constable I could consider going over his head, but no local Inspector is going to risk overruling one of his sergeants – the rift it would create in the nick would be ruinous.’

‘I see,’ Pym said in a breathy, exhausted way. ‘So it’s I who shall be ruined?’

‘We could try for the best brief.’

‘The best briefs are not likely to want to touch a case of this nature, are they? I thank you, Troy,’ an arch huffiness crept into his voice, ‘but I don’t think there’s much else
we
can do.’

Pym rang off and Troy was left holding a dead line. The ‘we’ had been emphatic, cutting even. Troy did not think that he had deserved it.

Days passed. Troy thought about the matter, but found it made him angry – and he pushed it to the back of his mind. Less than a week before Christmas Pym called him on his home number.

‘I don’t suppose you could come over to Albany?’ he said.

‘No, Neville, I don’t think I could.’

‘Please, Troy. It’s important.’ He paused. ‘Shall we say nine o’clock? It’s the last thing I shall ever ask of you.’

Troy should have heard the warning.

The door was off the latch. Pym was in the fireplace with his brains all over the wall. He had put the barrel of his service revolver to the roof of his mouth and pulled the trigger. A blood-spattered envelope with Troy’s name on it stood propped against the clock on the mantelpiece. Troy flicked a piece of grey matter off one of the circus-red chairs with the edge of the envelope and sat down to read the letter. It was dated 19 December 1948 and Pym had inserted the time, for good measure, as 8.35 p.m.

Dear Troy,

I take the easy way out – I trust you will not think it the coward’s way. I have posted letters to Driberg and to my father. If you could see that news of my death does not reach them before my letters do, I would be grateful.

There is a little I can do for you in return – Wayne’s real name is John Baumgarner. He’s a Colonel in the Central Intelligence Agency – which is what they call the OSS now. They were jolly pissed off with him for letting that mad bitch walk around with a licence to kill, but really he was too important for them to let you have him. He’s under strict orders never to set foot in Britain again. At the moment he’s running the airlift in Berlin.

Yours,

Pym.

‘I need you to get me on a flight to Berlin.’

‘What?’

‘Rod – I have to go to Berlin.’

‘Are you mad? Stalin’s got the city sewn up like a camel’s arse!’

‘Why do you think I’m phoning you?’

‘Freddie – we’re airlifting every damn thing except tap water or they’d starve. Dammit, man, we’re even flying in coal!’

‘That’s why you have to do this for me. I can’t get a civil flight. You have to get me on an RAF flight.’

‘Official, is it?’ Rod asked.

‘Would I be asking if it weren’t?’ said Troy.

‘OK. OK. Leave it with me. I make no promises but I’ll see what I can do.’

Troy put the telephone back in its cradle. Wildeve was staring at him. Tapping his teeth with a pencil and staring.

‘I’ve been thinking.’

‘I can see that.’

‘What jurisdiction do you think we have in Germany?’

‘I’ve a warrant. Signed by a British JP. Part of Germany’s British. Part of Berlin’s still British.’

‘Yes – but that’s subject to military law. Not civil. Besides, what are your chances of catching Wayne in the British sector?’

‘Bugger all I should think,’ snapped Troy.

‘Quite,’ said Wildeve. ‘In fact, while you’ve been busy with the coroner and chasing flights I had the whole thing legalled. Freddie, you can’t lay a finger on Wayne— ’

‘Baumgarner!’

‘Baumgarner,’ Wildeve went on. ‘At least not while he’s in Germany.’

‘I have to try, Jack. Can’t you see that?’

‘Indeed I can. I think you’ve been very lucky in ever picking up the scent again. Luckier still that Onions has decided to spend Christmas in Warrington, sampling the delights of black pudding and hot-pot.’

‘If I fail, he need never know. If I pull it off, then nothing succeeds like success.’

‘Quite,’ Wildeve said again. ‘I just think we need a little help as well as a lot of luck.’

‘Such as?’

‘I’ve a chum who’s just been assigned to liaise with Interpol. Let me see if I can come up with a name. What we need is someone on the Berlin Force. Someone with just that spark of imagination
on which you and I have come to pride ourselves but which we know all too well is sadly lacking in your average man about the beat.’

Wildeve grinned hugely. ‘Leave it with me.’

Rod came through for Troy. Found him a place on an RAF Douglas Dakota out of Brize Norton, bound for Gatow Airfield in Berlin, via Hannover, late in the afternoon of 22 December.

Rod walked Troy out to the aeroplane, across the black tarmac. Lit only by the lights buried in the runways and swept by a bitterly cold wind, night on an airfield gave Troy the sense of Christmas as though the hundreds of lights were candles that miraculously refused to flicker with the wind. He felt fat and heavy wrapped in an RAF sheepskin flying jacket, on top of his own overcoat and jacket – a bizarre black Santa Claus waddling out to the waiting sleigh. The Dakota’s twin propeller engines were already turning over as Rod helped him into the vast cargo bay and sat him on one of the hard wooden benches that lined the fuselage. It was barely possible to hear him speak, but he seemed hell bent on trying.

‘It’ll be bloody cold once you get airborne.’

‘It
is
bloody cold! And we’re still on the ground!’

‘Don’t be an ass, Freddie, I mean cold like you’ve never imagined. I found the important thing was to keep the hands and the ears well covered. The pilot will ask you to put the helmet on just before take-off. It lets him talk to you, and it adds another layer.’

‘Why would he want to talk to me?’

‘It’s not a passenger flight, Freddie. He talks to his crew. Technically that includes you. All I’m saying is do as you’re told. By the way,’ Rod shouted, ‘this came for you. Phoned through to the CO’s office about ten minutes ago!’ He stuffed a small brown envelope into Troy’s hand. Troy tore it open. It read, ‘Dieter Franck. Inspector at the Uhlandstrasse Police Station. Brit. Sector.
Speaks good English. Honest as the day is wotnot. Expecting you this p.m. Best. Jack.’

A flight sergeant stuck his head in the door and saluted.

‘There’ll be a slight delay, sir. Another six or seven minutes.’

‘Thank you,’ Rod said. ‘You know, Freddie, it’s still second nature to expect to be saluted. I don’t suppose the habits of wartime will let go easily.’

‘I know. You told me. You had a good war. History was good to you,’ said Troy flatly.

‘And you didn’t.’

‘Doesn’t much matter one way or the other in my business, does it?’

Rod weighed this up. The engines lowered their revs. Troy could hear himself think for the first time.

‘I used to think,’ Rod resumed, ’that you’d had a lousy one.’

Troy said nothing. To shrug was pointless, it would be a gesture lost beneath the multiple layers that swathed him. He tried very hard to assume an expression of utter unresponsive blankness.

‘Just after the action – around 1945, suppose, I thought you were going completely potty. But I started to think about it and for the first time I looked at the way things had gone for me, and yes you’re right, I do think I had a good war…’

‘Imprisoned by the British, shot down by the Krauts and bunged a couple of gongs as a consolation prize!’

‘Not at all. I felt no bitterness about being interned. As for being shot down. I spent a couple of hours in the drink off Sheerness and got picked up. Not a mark on me. On the whole I got off lightly. The war was, as you put it, good to me. I rather think I enjoyed it. But you didn’t did you? You got shot -’

‘Twice.’

‘Stabbed.’

‘Four times.’

‘Bombed.’

‘Twice again.’

‘Beaten up.’

‘More times than I can count. Look, Rod, what’s the point you’re trying to make? You’re not telling me all this tosh just to let me know I missed a trick by not volunteering.’

‘I really thought you’d had an awful time …’

‘Of course war’s an utter fucking picnic! Millions get slaughtered for the benefit of the nostalgia of the survivors …’

‘Not what I meant at all. I thought you’d been battered every which way for a while. Then, looking back, I remembered my first command. My first squadron in forty-one. The chaps I had under me then used to astound me. The way they ran to those crates, the sheer eagerness to get in there, into the thick of it. I wondered if I’d ever been like that. I knew I hadn’t. I realised what they had that I hadn’t. What they were that I wasn’t. They had the killer instinct. And I knew that because I’d seen it in you. I’d seen it in you even when we were kids. You hated me for years after I pushed you off your bike, and for a dozen other things that should have been inconsequential. Nothing petty or spiteful or momentary, but unremitting hatred. That unforgiving, relentless pursuit.’

‘That’s the business I’m in. Some call it justice.’

‘Just as well. I’d hate to think you were on your way to Berlin just to settle an old score.’

‘Rod, I’m a policeman. The sweetest, the most beautiful words in the English language are “I arrest you in the name of the law”, I don’t have to kill him. I don’t have to kill anybody. The law is the law and that should be enough.’

Rod patted him on the side. On the coat pocket. Right where Troy had his revolver.

‘No harm in asking though, was there?’

The Dakota picked up revs again. The sound of the propellers swamped them. There was no space in which to say any more. Rod smiled and climbed down the steel ladder to the runway. Troy wrapped his hand around the gun and asked himself why God had so ordered the world as to make elder brothers into know-alls.

A stout, miserable corporal, buried beneath an army greatcoat, met Troy at Gatow field.

‘I’ve gorra a jeep and the CO sez I’m to take you anywhere you want to go,’ he said in best Birmingham misery.

‘Thank you, er … ’ Troy looked at the stripes on his arm. ‘Corporal … er.’

‘It’s Clark, sir. Lance-Bombardier Clark actually, sir. Artillery.’

‘Known as Nobby?’ Troy ventured.

‘Swifty,’ the man replied. ‘On account of me being five foot six an’ fifteen stone. I’m a translator. Anything you need to say – just put it through me. I’m fluent in German.’

Troy found this hard to believe. The man scarcely seemed fluent in English.

‘Do you know the Uhlandstrasse Police Station?’ Troy asked.

‘Indeed I do, sir.’

‘I’m meeting an Inspector Franck.’

‘I know. He phoned to say he’s gone home.’

Troy sighed.

‘You are two hours overdue, sir. He said he’d see you around noon tomorrow.’

Troy sighed again. Half a day lost already.

‘I’d better find somewhere to stay,’ he said.

‘All taken care of, sir. You’ll be at the Officers’ Club on the Kurfürstendamm.’

By noon Troy and Clark were waiting for Inspector Franck in his office. It was hardly warmer inside than out. Troy put a hand to the radiator – it was stone-cold. Clark flipped the lid on an old iron stove.

‘There’s a spark of life here, sir. I imagine the main boiler’s out of fuel. This looks a bit like a make-do-and-mend job to me.’

‘Are we going to hear that phrase the rest of our lives?’

‘Now if we had a bit of wood …’

Troy looked out of the window. A ragged army of navvies was clearing up what was left of the building across the street. A large
man in a fawn mackintosh was gathering an armful of wood – he scurried back across the rubble and out of sight. A uniformed constable brought in two cups of coffee. He said something to Troy. Troy looked at Clark.

‘He says this will warm you up, sir.’

Troy sipped at the coffee – hot it was, but it tasted as though it had been used and reused for days, squeezing the last drop of life from the bean. He pulled a face.