Black Out (6 page)

‘Straight between the eyes,’ said Troy. ‘Took the back of his head off on the way out.’

‘Nasty,’ said Bonham without feeling.

The sound of Corker’s retching cut through the reverie of discovery. Bonham weighed up the young man – he had turned from white to green – and sent him outside to wait and breathe in fresher air.

‘It’s his first time,’ he said to Troy. ‘I tried to tell him … but it’s no use me telling him he’ll get over it. I never have.’

Troy still held the skull cupped in one hand, playing Hamlet at Yorick’s graveside. Jigsaw, Bonham had called it. It seemed a classic understatement and put him in mind of his own statement to his squad commander.

‘You know, George, I’ve just told Onions we haven’t got a maniac on our hands.’

‘You think this ain’t the work of a nutter?’

‘It’s the most meticulous nutter I’ve ever seen.’

‘Doesn’t mean to say they’re not nutters. Not half a mile from here, not ten years before I was born, Jack the Ripper carved up brasses and got clean away. That took planning – being meticulous as you call it. And there’s a lot round here still remember it.’

Troy tried the brass tap. It wouldn’t turn. A sliver of icicle clung to the spout. He prised up the grating and reached down into it. His hand came up brown and sticky from a foul-smelling mess.

‘Jesus Christ!’ said Bonham.

Troy turned his hand slowly before his eyes as Bonham turned the torch on him. A coagulant slime clung to his hand from the fingertips to the heel of his palm, and began its viscous slither towards his wrist.

‘Tap frozen. Drain frozen. Not enough heat from a burning corpse to thaw the place out, so they couldn’t flush the blood away,’ Troy said, smiling at the small success and holding out his hand to Bonham.

‘Leave it out, Freddie.’

‘Which means he was killed some time during this recent freeze up, some time during the last week.’

‘Less than that,’ said Bonham. ‘Didn’t freeze up till five days back.’

Carefully Troy drew a clean linen handkerchief from his coat pocket, wiped his hand on it and dropped it into the bag of bones. At the top of the steps they found Corker, helmet off, cigarette between his lips, the colour slowly returning to his face. He dropped the cigarette and attempted to stand straight up in the presence of the two sergeants, but his stance weakened as his eyes were drawn almost magically to the sack in Troy’s hand.

‘Finish your ciggy, lad, and then gather up your lamps,’ Bonham told him sympathetically. ‘We’ve done all we can for now.’

Troy placed the sack in the boot of the Bullnose Morris. As he turned round he found the Shrimp not a dozen feet off – still staring intensely at Troy, hands thrust deep in the pockets of his shorts.

Troy knew, had always known, that he had no gift, no way with children.

‘Should you be out at this time of night?’ he asked lamely.

Shrimp turned over a piece of broken brick with the toe of a brown boot and looked at the ground.

‘I can look after meself,’ he said.

Troy didn’t doubt it.

‘Was there something?’ he persisted gently.

‘You sound like that berk on the wireless,’ the boy said.

‘What berk?’

‘Sam Costa.’

‘Look, do you want something or not?’

‘Depends.’

‘On what? You’ve had your half-crown. You can eye it all you like – it’s coin of the realm. You can blow it on all the bullseyes your ration book’ll run to.’

‘’S’awright,’ the boy mused. ‘’S’awright. Money’s no problem.’

‘Well, it’s all you’re getting.’

Troy turned the key in the car door, yanked it open and made a move to get in.

‘Like I said,’ the boy continued. ‘It all depends.’

‘Depends on what?’ said Troy with a foot already in the door.

‘On how much you want what I got.’

Troy slammed the door and squared off to the little extortionist.

‘You’ve got something? Something you found down there? I told you not to touch anything.’

The boy shrugged – beyond intimidation.

‘Withholding evidence is not only stupid it’s illegal.’

‘I couldn’t give a toss. What I got’ll cost you another half-dollar or you can whistle. And don’t try any rough stuff … my dad has coppers for breakfast.’

How often, Troy thought, had he heard such phrases?

‘This had better be worth it.’

The boy shrugged again.

‘Let’s see the colour of your money.’

Troy held out half a crown at arm’s length. The boy moved up to striking distance. Troy snatched his arm away. Slowly the boy’s hands came out of his pockets. Two clenched fists, knuckles upward. He held out his hands, tapped his fists together lightly and opened the right. It was empty. He tapped again. Opened the left. It too was empty. At the third tap he opened the right fist again and grinned. There was a balled-up child’s handkerchief crushed into the grubby little palm. Troy picked up the bundle, spreading its snot-encrusted folds across his palm. There in the middle was a gleaming copper cartridge case – a huge bore – .45 or .44 at least from the look of it.

Troy placed the half-crown in the boy’s open hand. It was trousered with the speed of a salamander.

‘See,’ he said, ‘I never touched it.’

Troy dropped the shell into an envelope and gave the handkerchief back.

‘Where?’ he said.

‘Next to top step,’ the Shrimp replied. ‘It was what made me go down. Be seein’ ya.’

And he walked off into the night. From somewhere the bullseye torch appeared once more and bobbed like Corker’s Adam’s apple. It seemed to Troy that it waved in mockery all the way up Stepney Green.

A cold coming out. Hendon was dark and deserted. Troy had to bang loudly on the door before the night-watch roused himself from his jobsworth’s sleep of the just and gruffly consented to sign for the sack of bones. A cold getting back. Troy left his car at the Yard and cut a night-walk; a convoluted, nosy policeman’s route home that defied the flight of the crow and took him where his feet led rather than his mind decided. Coming up Lower Regent Street into Piccadilly Circus he was reminded that it was Friday night. There were queues for the Eros Newsreel Theatre and for the London Pavilion. A warm hum of inviting human noise came off the Criterion Restaurant, and the same sense of life and release oozed from the other end of the social scale through the blackedout windows of the Lyon’s Corner House. The doors of The Monico, next to Saqui and Lawrence, and home of the 1/6d afternoon tea, banged ceaselessly with the flow of people in and out. The Luftwaffe scarcely needed to see the lights of London, surely they could hear it? He refused the invitation and headed towards Coventry Street.

He had been back at work only two days and it seemed to him that the weekend ought to be logically still further off. It also occurred to him that if this was Friday then he was due in court the next Monday. Just when he should be getting his teeth into the Stepney case. At the top of Haymarket, passing the Gaumont cinema, next to the long-defunct, boarded-up offices of Air France, he thought he heard someone call his name and turned to look back, but could see nothing in the blackness, as people blundered about trying to avoid each other, or not trying to avoid each other – depending on the urgency and promise of a Friday night in wartime. War, along with the inevitable increase in crime, had brought a new darkness and a new sexual licence – a freedom from one care flung out in defiance of all the others. At its crudest, do it now for we may be dead tomorrow. Troy crossed Leicester Square to Wyndham’s Theatre, over into St Martin’s Lane via the alley at the back, and turned into the entrance of Goodwins Court – a gate so strait Sidney Greenstreet could not have passed – to the small house
in which he had lived since leaving Stepney. A sign of the times – the prostitute who usually stood guard at the corner of the Court and St Martin’s Lane was walking off in the direction of Trafalgar Square, her arm hooked through the arm of a man in uniform, so indistinct that Troy could not tell if it was a Pole or a Canadian, an airman or a soldier. Her sashay, the swaggering buttock roll, was unmistakable, even in the blackout. Before the war any whore would have had ten times the discretion and ten times the need. Ruby felt and acted as though she was safe from reproach and restraint – she knew damn well Troy was a policeman, and when she wasn’t trying to flirt with him was offering to fix him up with a friend, as she liked ‘all her friends to be friends’, which, it seemed, was how she regarded Troy.

The evening meal was a vague prospect. Troy could cook and clean better than most men of his age. Bachelorhood was not a waiting time to wallow in the pleasurable filth of one’s own incompetence. The youngest of a family of four he had been accustomed from an early age to rely on his own resources and his own company – a much older brother being beyond his reach and twin sisters virtually a world unto themselves – and all Ethel Bonham had had to do was play upon the tendency to self-sufficiency that was all but natural in Troy. The trouble was, self-sufficiency could not make a meal of snoek or whalemeat. By comparison, five loaves and thirteen fishes were more malleable. Troy, like the nation, was bored and irritated by the wartime shortages. The longer the war went on, the worse, it seemed, the diet became. The national loaf, his uncle assured him, was nutritionally almost perfect, but it tasted like wet newspaper. Occasionally and bizarrely the diet was enlivened by the sudden short-lived availability of various fruits. Once, years ago, it had been cherries, then it was oranges and for days afterwards the streets of London were littered with peel as a reminder of the orgy. Troy turned to the kitchen cupboard and sought his salvation in a box of eggs given to him by his mother. Out on the heights of Hertfordshire, Maria Mikhailovna had turned her east-facing lawn into a chicken run and had quadrupled the size of the kitchen garden the day war was declared. In the spring of 1941 she had forsaken fripperies for the duration and given the orchid hothouse
over to tomatoes. In the depths of 1942 she had surrendered her much-prized south lawn from the windows to the ha-ha and turned it over entirely to potatoes. By 1943 she felt there was little else one woman could give. Her regular treat for her children was a half-dozen eggs at any time, bolstered by fresh leeks all through autumn and a long summer of changing varieties of fresh, earthy smelling potatoes. At odd, unexpected moments one sister or the other would arrive on his doorstep tooled up with what appeared to be half a barrowload of Covent Garden’s finest, from common spud to uncommon capiscum straight out of one of the greenhouses, thrust them at Troy and tell him he neither called nor visited often enough. Masha in particular would go through his kitchen cupboard and berate him for not meeting her standards. Troy felt that was entirely his business and none of hers and asserted that he looked after himself quite well.

The cupboard yielded an onion, greening a little on the outside, a couple of King Edwards and three speckled, large brown eggs. It called, Troy told himself, for a Spanish omelette – oh, for a capiscum out of season! – a meal that would be a treat in any restaurant, but for the fact that few restaurants in town would now run to a three-egg omelette. Such was the desperation to fill a menu nowadays that he knew of more than one restaurant that had served roast rook. Under the sink he had several bottles of wine from a cellar laid down by his father before the war. On his death late in 1943 Troy’s mother had offered the cellar half each to her sons. Troy had paid no attention on those frequent occasions when his father had tried to teach him about wine, or when he had merely drunk enough to become lyrical on the subject. What discrimination brother Rod showed Troy didn’t know, all he tried for himself was to remember whether such and such a year had been a good summer, and to follow the vaguest rule about fish and meat – not that this said anything about eggs. He reached for a Pauillac ‘27 with no recollection whatsoever of the weather, only that it was most certainly the summer his brother had blown up the old potting shed with the device he had cobbled together out of carbide gas and cocoa tins.

He had drunk his first glass – so fine a wine that he felt sure he was violating a long-held cache of his father’s, knocking back some
special reserve – and had softened the vegetables in a pan, when there was a knock on the door. A blast of cold air rushed in. Constable Wildeve stood on the doorstep sniffing the scents that wafted out from the kitchen and smiling expectantly.

‘I thought it was you. I’d just stepped out of Joe Lyon’s and I thought it was you. I called out but you probably didn’t hear me.’

Troy swung the door back.

‘Come in before all the warm air goes out.’

Wildeve followed Troy back to the kitchen still sniffing, smiling and hinting. ‘Good Lord. Eggs. Real eggs. Do I see real eggs?’

‘Yes. And if you hadn’t just eaten your fill at the Corner House I might say it would stretch to two.’

‘Ah … I haven’t you see. She stood me up, so I paid for my solitary cup of scummy tea and left. That’s when I saw you.’

Troy reached for a second plate, set another glass down before Wildeve and pushed the bottle towards him.

‘I thought you weren’t due back until Monday,’ Wildeve said.

‘I felt fine, and I got a call from Stepney. My old station sergeant with a body on his hands. Onions didn’t object. Although he did try to stick me with another case. I had expected to see you. I presume you had your head down?’

‘In court. Two days cooling my heels at the Bailey.’

Troy tipped the eggs into the sizzling pan. Wildeve picked up one of the half-shells and fondled it.

‘Real shells!’

Wildeve could be infuriating and inspired by turns. He could gossip at a moment that demanded high concentration, and drop acute insight into conversation as though it were scarcely relevant and he thought it worth a quick mention in passing. He picked at the gossamer lining of the shell in fascination.

‘Just look at the speckles on this eggshell. I’ve seen nothing like it in, well … months. I say, and that’s real onion!’

Troy decided not to take the bull by the horns. He set the meal in front of Wildeve, let him eat, drink and prattle about the beautiful Wren who had left him with a cold cup of tea on a Friday evening, interspersed with the business of the day that had taken him into the witness-box at the Old Bailey. He rolled the omelette around his palette as though it were either scalding him or was as scintillating as
the finest claret, and swigged finest claret like it was ginger beer.