Black Out (5 page)

‘All that from an arm?’

Troy shrugged.

‘Are you saying we’ve got a maniac on the loose?’

Even on Onions’s lips the words had the unmistakable ring of the popular press.

‘Far from it, Stan. We’ve a calculating killer on the loose. That’s not mania in my book.’

Onions paced the floor between the window and the desk and paced it back again – practising as he did so one of his habitual gestures, slicking his palms along the sides of his head as though a rich mane of hair were there rather than the grey bristles of his short back and sides. Usually it implied thinking.

‘What about Trafalgar Square?’ he asked at last.

‘Was the American robbed?’

‘No. More than fifty quid in his wallet.’

‘Was he black or white?’

‘White.’

‘Age?’

‘Twenty-two.’

‘I think you’re looking at two possibilities. Americans have two vices – they sell from their own stores on to our black market and they have affairs with English women. Either one could lead to this.’

‘Black market?’ Onions weighed up the idea. ‘If Corporal Duvitski had crossed a spiv they’d have got him in an alley somewhere. Even in the blackout no racketeer would risk murder in a place as public as Trafalgar Square.’

‘Then I think it’s best to talk to the men in his platoon. They’ll hang together for a while, but soon enough they’ll tell us who Duvitski’s girlfriend was. Somewhere around there’ll be a husband or a lover. He’d have had to have followed the victim from the pub, perhaps even trailing him for a day or two, so there’ll be witnesses who can identify him.’

‘Open and shut, eh, Freddie?’ Onions raised a pepper-and-salt eyebrow quizzically at Troy’s rapid breakdown of the case.

‘No,’ Troy answered, leaning back on the window-sill and sinking his hands into his pockets. ‘Not open and shut. Just routine.’

‘It doesn’t need a detective?’

‘Well – no – it just doesn’t need me.’

‘In the meantime you’ll want to be getting on with your puzzle, putting the Stepney corpse back together, I suppose.’

‘With your permission, sir.’

‘Do you ever think that one day you’ll overreach yourself, Freddie?’

Troy shrugged again and said nothing. Onions clapped him on the shoulder, called him a cheeky bugger and headed for the door. Halfway out he paused, looking back at Troy.

‘And if this isn’t a
crime passionnel?
If it’s spivs and wide boys?’

‘Then I’ll call in my narks.’

Onions left. Troy warmed his hands in front of the fire, now glowing freely, and wondered how much of what he’d told Onions was really true, how much of it he might eventually prove. Every
fibre of his instinct, every shred of intellect told him it was true, but it was still guesswork.

Sooner than Troy had anticipated Kolankiewicz telephoned.

‘I done all I can with your arm,’ he said. ‘I’ll give you the details now, the report you can pick up tomorrow.’

Troy reached for a notepad and switched on the desk lamp. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Fire away.’

‘He was dead when they did this to him. Too much blood still in the vessels for any other interpretation. Though, obviously, there was some loss of blood. I’d say he was cut up within an hour or so of death – but I make no promises about that. And don’t ask me how he died. Apart from being able to say he didn’t die of having his arm chopped off I got fuck nothing. I’d put his age at forty-five, though I could be out ten years either way. An arm is not the best organ from which to make such judgements. If you find his liver, then we’re talking. Height and weight, I can do better. He was a skinny little guy. About five foot four, less than nine stone. Not very muscular, never used his muscles to earn his living.’

Kolankiewicz paused. Troy could hear the rustle of papers as he looked among his notes.

‘Ah – yes – the burns. The burns on the jacket are consistent with those on the hand. The hand was burnt repeatedly. Some scars are months, even years old. One or two only a matter of weeks. And they were caused by acid not flame. The edges are too neat. You getting all this?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘Now – the clothing. The jacket is woollen, good condition, no darns or patches, no shine to the elbow. The way people wear things out these days, I’m forced to conclude it was fairly new. Who can afford to keep a jacket and not wear it? Only the guy who prints the coupons. The weave is very distinctive. A herringbone pattern favoured by the Bavarians. The cufflink backs
us up there. There’s a Munich hallmark on the back, which dates it to 1907 and the initials W.W.L. If there weren’t a war on it would be a simple matter to write to the silversmith’s guild and find out who made it and for whom. As it is … ’ Kolankiewicz let the sentence trail off.

‘The last inch of the sleeve, at the wrist, is peppered with microscopic fragments of metal. All I can say is it looks like some sort of alloy. To be certain would require tests I don’t have the facility to do. The entire sleeve is dusty with coal dust and coal ash. His blood group was O. And I got a clear set of prints for you. Lots of very distinctive scars. That’s about all I can tell you. You want I should keep the arm on ice till you find the rest?’

‘If you could. Thank you.’ It seemed appropriate to say ‘thank you, Ladislaw’ but Troy had never heard anyone address Kolankiewicz by his Christian name.

‘How’s your arm? Still sore?’

‘No … it’s fine,’ Troy lied.

‘OK, I keep the meat. The report and the prints I trust to God and dispatch riders.’

He rang off. Troy sat and stared at his notes. Dumbfounded by what they told him. A German in Stepney? There were hundreds, thousands of Germans in Stepney, but not one of them could have a new German jacket.

As darkness fell Troy began to feel that he had at last got his office in order – made some headway with the pile of paperwork that had accumulated while he followed Onions’s orders and recuperated from the attack of the Uxbridge axeman. Itchy of foot, he was thinking he might drive over to Stepney again when Bonham rang.

‘Dig into your pocket, Freddie,’ he said, ‘you owe one of the little perishers half a dollar.’

‘George! You found it!’

‘Well, it isn’t an it and it wasn’t me. It was young Robertson. The one they call Shrimp.’

‘What do you mean it isn’t an it? Is it in pieces?’

‘Worse,’ said Bonham, ‘it’s a bloody jigsaw. Come and see for yourself.’

The same picket of urban cowboys met Troy at the lost junction of Cardigan Street and Waterloo Place. The same child’s stare, suspicious of any adult, met his greeting to the boys. They were eight hours older, aeons wiser and waiting to be richer. Clearly it was
de rigueur
not to hold out the hand – demeaning almost, the posture of the beggar – seven pairs of hands stayed firmly in the pockets of jackets, while the eighth still juggled the smoking cocoa tin.

Bonham and Troy went into a huddle, backs to the boys, as they sorted out the change in their pockets. Then Bonham walked down the line with a stack of sixpences and passed them out like a priest of mammon at unholy communion. Hands flashed like the tongues of lizards, deftly trousering the loot. Troy approached the boy Bonham had pointed out to him, thanked him for his efforts and handed him a worn Edward VII half-crown. Shrimp Robertson produced a gleaming Ever Ready bullseye torch from under his jacket and flashed at the silver that had crossed his palm. He looked back at Troy – a bold, challenging eye-to-eye stare that Troy had often wished he possessed himself. If he could look like that he’d be the hard man of the Yard in no time.

‘It’s the real thing,’ Troy said. ‘Just a bit worn.’

The cowboys galloped off on imaginary horses, slapping thighs and whooping. Shrimp wandered slowly after, occasionally looking back at Troy as though he thought he’d been gypped. Troy could see the beam of his torch darting over the ground. It wouldn’t be long before some old fool in an ARP helmet told him to put it out.

Bonham was pointing at a hole in the ground. A couple of battered doors had been pushed aside to reveal a stone staircase descending into the guts of the earth.

‘I doubt I’d’ve found this,’ he said. ‘Young Robertson went home for his dinner at half-twelve and came back with his prize possession – that torch of his – kicked this lot aside and went down. He’s got some nerve, that boy. That stack over there -’ Bonham waved casually to where a forty-foot stump of blackened factory chimney jutted out of the rubble like Ozymandias’s leg, ‘connects up with the cellar. Not that I’d’ve thought of it. I wouldn’t.’

He switched on the beam of a huge chrome torch and led the way down. A strong smell of carbide wafted up to Troy’s nostrils, deepening the impression that he was approaching the first circle of hell. Hell surely stank as well as roasted? A uniformed constable was kneeling by a lamp, adjusting the flow of water – half a dozen carbide lamps were arranged in a rough semi-circle across the floor of the cellar, casting a hazy bluish light that flickered constantly in the draughts. The remains of the ceiling littering the floor threw giant, jagged, jumping shadows across the walls.

The constable stood almost to attention – hands pressed to the seams of his trousers. He could not be more than nineteen or twenty – a tall thin streak of a youth, his Adam’s apple prominent and bobbing above the top button of his tunic. For a moment Troy looked at the constable the way he knew the older generation of blimps looked at him – any minute now this man, this child in police blue, would get his call-up for the big push, for Calais or Normandy or whatever strip of sand and slaughter Eisenhower had decided on. In that respect, thought Troy, death had already set its mark upon him.

‘Bloody hell, Corker,’ Bonham delivered his reprimand. ‘Is this the best you could do? This lot must’ve come out of the ark.’

‘Sorry, Sergeant,’ the constable shrilled back. ‘ARP took all our good stuff last month. It’s all I could find.’

The smell was becoming familiar, nostalgic rather than demonic, reminding Troy of his first bicycle in 1926, and his brother’s first home-made bomb in 1927.

‘See,’ Bonham was saying, ‘they even dug a bullet out of the wall.’

Halfway up the far wall the dirt and mould had been scraped clear in a wide circle around a hole the size of a fist. Troy pushed his hand into the hole and crumbled brick dust between his thumb and finger.

‘Neat,’ he said. ‘Almost scrupulous.’

He could see an old brass tap on a twisted lead pipe snaking up out of the floor in the corner where a stone gulley led to a small iron grating.

‘God,’ he said to Bonham, ‘this place is tailor-made for murder. I don’t suppose there’s any sign of a cartridge case?’

Bonham waved dismissively at the pile of rubble that had once been the ceiling, now rotten with rat shit and decay. ‘You must be joking,’ he said. ‘Even supposing it was an automatic … ’ He let the sentence trail away to nothing.

As best he could, Corker adjusted the angle of each lamp in turn, aiming their beams at the large Victorian cast-iron furnace which took up one whole wall of the cellar. This industrial dinosaur had once powered a small factory and bore across its front the proud, cusped inscription Wrigley and Butterworth, Runcorn 1888. At about hip height was the firebox door. Bonham wrenched it open and handed Troy the ash rake, a long rod of steel ending with a welded half-moon plate.

‘See for yourself,’ he said.

Even with Bonham aiming his torch it was almost impossible to see into the brick cavern of the interior. Troy raked blindly and a few handfuls of flaky, grey ash spilled out on to the sacking at their feet, speckling Troy’s shoes and Bonham’s boots. Corker came closer, looking expectantly from the pile of ash to Bonham to Troy, faintly smiling in his nervousness. Troy locked on to what appeared to be something solid in the belly of the furnace. He hooked it and pulled sharply. A bone flew out of the firebox and broke in two on the sacking.

Corker’s mouth opened silently.

‘It’s a femur,’ Troy told him.

Corker looked blankly back at him.

‘A thigh bone,’ Troy added.

He delved into the furnace, once more stirring up a cloud of fine ash as light as talcum powder and with the fresh, tantalising
smell of cooked meat. Tibia, fibula, clavicle, patella, humerus and a myriad of vertebra and tiny bones from ankle and wrist poured down in a stream of dust and death, swathed in the deceptive scent of Sunday lunch. All that remained of a human life cascading into a small heap at Bonham’s feet.

Silently Troy and Bonham exchanged glances. As the minutes passed Corker had turned white. It seemed to Troy that whatever briefing Bonham had given him Corker was only slowly making the connection between this brittle carnage and a corpse.

‘Let’s get it over with,’ said Bonham.

In less than ten minutes they had almost a full skeleton in disarray on the cellar floor. Many of the bones were broken or burnt through, others indistinguishable one from another save to the trained eye of an anatomist. Yet, Troy felt certain, they were all pieces of a single body and he’d seen nothing to dissuade him from the theory that there was only one arm in the pile. The amateur surgeon had done his job well. Nothing but dust remained of the victim’s clothing, and more solid evidence, such as a gold tooth or the silver right-hand cufflink, would have melted into shapeless blobs – unidentifiable even if they persisted day and night with the mountain of ash.

Something solid, very solid, was jammed up against the back of the firebox. Troy jiggled the rod and pulled hard. A white ball shot out into the cellar. Instinctively Corker caught it like a rugby ball. He looked quickly at his catch and the smirk of achievement faded from his face. He screamed, threw the skull to Troy and ran to the iron grating in the far corner.

‘Not there!’ Troy yelled. ‘For Christ’s sake. Where do you think they got rid of the blood!?!’

Corker changed his aim in the last split second and puked into a green mass of rotting lath and plaster.

Troy held up the skull to the light of Bonham’s torch. It was still warm to the touch. The lower jaw and part of the left cheekbone were gone. There was a large hole in the back of the skull and a smaller one at the front. Slivers of baked brain still clung to the inside of the cranium and a glossy gel of melted eye coated the sockets.