Black Out (8 page)

It was Thursday morning before Troy got back to the Yard. Kolankiewicz had not spoken to him for nearly three days. Wildeve was out, but there was a message on his desk – ‘Anna Pakenham called. Still can’t find files. We have more German refugees than sheep in these islands. JW.’

Troy called Anna.

‘What was the verdict?’ she asked.

‘I didn’t wait to find out. Kolankiewicz’s evidence made me look like a fool.’

‘No, Troy, he’s the fool. He’s going to have to explain how a full dossier can just vanish. All I’ve got are my shorthand notes and I’m afraid they don’t make too much sense. I use a pencil, which can look rather grubby twelve months on, and I only learnt when we lost the regular girl to the ATS.’

‘The calibre of the bullet would help.’

‘Forty-five. Numbers always go down in plain English.’

‘Automatic?’

‘Can’t be sure. And before you ask the bullet was with the clothes and personal effects, such as they were, and they’ve gone too.’

‘Kolankiewicz didn’t mislay anything,’ said Troy. ‘Doesn’t this sound more like they’ve been stolen?’

‘I don’t know. We’ve been burgled once and I put that down to a moonshiner. All we lost were fifteen quarts of pure alcohol. There’s no value in the dossier on an unidentified man.’

‘Unless of course you want to be certain he stays that way.’

The weather broke. January had been unseasonably mild, February the aberrant frost, and now March seemed to offer the promise of an early spring and a wet one. At City HQ Troy sat in a damp
basement while the desk sergeant burrowed into the stacks for 1943’s file on an unknown man found dead on Tower beach, and watched the winds of March blow the rain in sheets down the dirty glass, thick as milk-bottles, set high up the wall at pavement level, while the snows of winter dissolved and ran in clanging streams down iron pipes en route to the Thames.

He heard the heavy uneven step echoing down the stacks long before Sergeant Flint limped into sight.

The man stopped by the table where Troy sat and set down a bundle of foolscap folders nearly a foot thick. He was breathing heavily and slumped into his chair sighing with relief.

‘You weren’t limping the last time we met,’ said Troy.

‘Bit o’shrapnel,’ the sergeant replied. ‘1941. Doctors said I’ll never walk right again. Afore the war o’course that would’ve been the end of bein’ a copper. But … things bein’ what they are.’

He cut the stack in two like giant playing cards.

‘If you wouldn’t mind … I’ve narrowed it down, but I just couldn’t lay me hands right on it. Odd that, seein’ as ’ow it’s recent. Good job Mr Malnick is gone. Stickler for order he was. I let something slip he’d give me a rocket.’

Troy was already tearing halfway through April, setting files aside at three times the speed the sergeant could muster.

‘Where did Mr Malnick transfer to?’ he asked.

‘It wasn’t a transfer. He got accepted for the RAF.’

‘What? At his age? He must be fifty. He was turned down by the RAF when I was here during the invasion of Poland.’

‘That wasn’t the first time neither. His wish was granted.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think someone pulled a string for him. He was out of the force with a speed that took everyone by surprise. I remember the Super commenting on it. He was a copper on Friday and a flight lieutenant on Monday.’

‘When was this?’

‘Straight after the case we’re looking for. I suppose it must have been May last year.’

Troy had finished his pile and watched as Flint picked over May. He was painfully slow, as though to look and talk at the same time were beyond him.

‘It surprised all of us, I can tell you. Mind, I wasn’t sorry to see him go. I worked with him for eight years. Well, you saw what he was like yourself that time they sent you over when you was still wet behind the ears.’

‘Thanks,’ said Troy.

‘Aunt Fanny we called him. A fusspot. Not even a good fusspot. Couldn’t find a truncheon in his trousers without a torch – well, you know how they talk in a locker room.’

‘But meticulous?’

‘Oh yes. That all right.’

Flint had resorted to licking finger and thumb to get a better grip, and was slowly working his way down towards the end of May.

‘Anything Mr Malnick left would be in good order?’

‘Oh yes.’

Troy waited, trying to show patience with a man clearly not in the best of health, trying not to rush the obvious. After all, it was not so far away.

‘Odd,’ said Flint, ‘it’s not in your bit … ’

‘And it’s not in yours.’

‘Stripe me.’

‘I’m not surprised, but I am curious. What kind of power, what kind of access does it take to make all trace of a man disappear?’

Flint sucked in his breath, pretending appraisal of a situation that was beyond his experience.

‘You don’t,’ Troy ventured, ‘by any chance know what airfield Mr Malnick is serving on?’

As it happens I do. He sent us a card this Christmas just gone. Said he couldn’t tell us where he was, but to let us know he was engaged on work of national importance.’

‘Aren’t we all.’

‘But it had a postmark. Bradwell in Essex. An’ I know there’s an RAF outfit there, ’cos my sister’s boy ‘Enry is on it. Mostly Poles and Canadians he reckons. A few English to … liaise … I think he calls it.’

It took Troy most of the following morning to persuade the motor pool to fill up his Bullnose Morris with enough petrol to get him out to Bradwell-on-Sea and back. In the garage at the Yard, a man in greasy overalls had looked over his chit as though he thought Troy had printed it himself.

Troy was in his office stuffing a briefcase for the trip when the phone rang

‘Ah. Found you,’ said Anna. ‘I have a definite match on blood group. That disgusting handkerchief you left is clotted with type O. Kolankiewicz is still being unspeakable, but says to tell you the bones in the bag could be part of the same body as the arm – that is there are no left arm bones in the bag, and the right arm is the same size, although many other smaller bones are also missing. Should stand up in court.’

‘What news on the Tower beach corpse?’

‘Worse. Everything. Every single damn thing is missing. The only option left was the body itself, so I enquired about the possibility of exhumation. Forget it. The cemetery took a direct hit six weeks ago.’

‘So much for a fine and private place.’

‘Sod Marvell,’ she said, ‘more like Hieronymus Bosch. A charnel house in the mud. Sorry.’

‘Where is Kolankiewicz, by the way?’

‘Scrubbing up for a dissection. Cambridgeshire constabulary have a tricky one for him. He spent part of the morning with that arm of yours and kept muttering about trousers.’

‘Trousers?’

‘That’s what it sounded like to me.’

Troy rang off, hoping that when Kolankiewicz finally surfaced from his Polish misery it would all yield something constructive. Troy rooted around in his desk drawer to see if he still had toothpaste and a razor for a possible overnight. He looked up. Silently Onions had entered the room. He was clutching the chit. He sat in the upright chair on the far side of Troy’s desk and scratched at his cheek with the hand that held the chit.

‘I take it you can’t handle this by phone?’ he said.

‘You’ve met Malnick. Any answers I can get out of him will mean nothing if I can’t see his face when he speaks.’

‘Do we call our fellow officers liars?’

‘No. But I do call this one stupid and devious. And that’s a bad combination.’

Onions took a fountain pen from his breast pocket and scribbled his signature across the chit. Troy closed his briefcase, and hoped he could make a getaway. The fringes of London could jam solid with troop convoys these days and a journey could take twice as long as it used to before the war.

‘Hendon?’ Onions asked simply, and Troy knew he had no quick escape.

‘Everything’s gone. Not a paper-clip left in place.’

‘Ah … so you smell conspiracy?’

‘Smell it? Stan, I can touch it, it’s tangible, solid, inescapable. If Malnick is part of it, which I very much doubt by the way, he’ll be as slippery as an eel. As it is he’ll play up his injured innocence and think I’m directly accusing him.’

‘Which you’re not?’

The door burst open. A breathless Wildeve rushed in and began to gabble before he had even noticed the presence of Onions.

‘Do you know how many Germans and Austrians and other assorted enemies there are in this country?’

‘About seventy-five thousand,’ Troy replied.

‘Oh. You do know.’

Onions stood up. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.

Troy could have sworn that Wildeve blushed as Onions looked directly at him. He recalled that in his early days Onions’s gorgon gaze had been utterly mysterious, as likely to be mere curiosity as silent reprimand.

‘My brother was interned,’ Troy continued. ‘I looked into it. What have you found?’

‘Well, they only fingerprinted those they interned in 1940, that is largely people in categories A and B, and that’s less than a third of the total. Even then they reckon there were well over five hundred they never even caught up with. They said they couldn’t
mount a search themselves, but I’ve got a uniform on it, so it’s being done.’

‘How long?’

‘Days. Perhaps a week. At least. Nothing in CRO. Whoever he was he had no form.’

Onions thrust the chit at Troy and left without another word. ‘Have I upset him?’ said Wildeve.

‘No – I’ve just confronted him with a situation he hates. I think we can count Hitler and the Luftwaffe out of the conspiracy,’ Troy said, ‘but everybody else in.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean,’ Troy said, ‘that the plot thickens. Unfortunately a lot now depends on Malnick, which is why I’m not giving him any warning. If I phone him he can get off the line and cook up a story. I’m playing it down for Stan, but I wouldn’t trust Malnick to see old ladies across the road.’

‘You don’t surely think a policeman would destroy files?’ Wildeve almost whispered the sentence, as though it were a heresy best unuttered.

‘Somebody did.’

Troy took the Bullnose Morris through the battered fringes of East London once more, a snaking crawl around pot-holes and debris out via the boroughs on either side of the Lea Valley where entire streets stood roofless and windowless, houses quilted in cardboard and tarpaulin, shops that had gone from being more open than usual – one of the war’s more short-lived jokes – to being simply, perhaps permanently shut. He found it hard to believe a second time in the political daydream of homes fit for heroes – the heroes, as he saw it, had by and large been the civilian population, sixty-odd thousand of whom had died, and, heroism being a finite resource, many had fled from the Blitz never to return. He wondered what inducement other than the familiarity and illusory
safety in one’s own origins would lure people back, found it impossible to imagine East London recovering. Beyond this where London met Essex were places like Hornchurch, swamped by the RAF and the USAF, whose aerodromes were scattered up the east coast, shattering the nights of the sleepy dormitory towns of the thirties and the rural outposts of Langham and Bentwaters and Bradwell. The countryside purred with the sound of engines.

It was almost dusk. The sign of the Green Man swung in the wind blowing off the North Sea. Troy pushed on the door marked Snug and glanced around the bar. It thronged with young airmen, mostly Canadians and New Zealanders, and mostly looking as fresh-faced as schoolboys. There were only two faces over thirty, and they were making the least noise, the barman and a morose-looking figure who sat alone at a table in the bay with a glass of sherry in front of him. His hair rose up in ridges like corrugated cardboard and although only fortyish he was assuming the jowlly look of a lugubrious bloodhound. He stared directly at Troy and seemed not to recognise him. Troy knew him at once although he had not seen him since the days of his father’s pre-war dinner parties when the old man had tried to woo him from his job at Lord Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
to his own
Evening Herald.
It was Tom Driberg, now MP for somewhere or other, better known as William Hickey. He had turned Alexei Troy down, but had gone on allowing himself to be wooed and dined on many occasions. Troy had no idea that Driberg had any connection with Bradwell. He approached cautiously, knowing his reputation, but telling himself he was too old and most certainly the wrong class to appeal to Driberg’s cultivated taste.

‘Do I know you?’ he said bluntly.

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Frederick Troy. I’m Alex Troy’s son.’

‘Yes … yes … ’ he mused. ‘Didn’t you join the RAF?’

He motioned to the empty chair opposite, and his face began to shed its demeanour of thinly concealed misery.

‘No. The police.’

Troy thought Driberg flinched, and was certain he saw the blood drain from his face. By way of reassurance he added quickly, ‘I’m here to see an old colleague who’s joined up. I thought he might be here.’

‘Can I get you a drink?’ Driberg said, composure regained. ‘The dry sherry’s passable and they keep a red wine just for me, not that I’d recommend it – but the thought counts. God knows where they get it.’

Troy asked for a glass of Indian tonic water and took the seat opposite Driberg. Over his shoulder he could see the bar, and that what he had taken for a large mirror behind it was in fact the view across the pumps and optics into the saloon bar. There was another crowd of RAF servicemen, almost a mirror image of the present crowd but for the presence in their midst of an older man who appeared to be holding forth on some subject that swung his young audience between laughter and derision. Tall, angular and at least twenty years older than anyone else around him, Inspector Malnick had traded one shade of blue for another and had teased out a clipped moustache into something approaching a parody of a handlebar. Troy watched in fascination, so pointedly that Driberg squirmed around in his seat to see the object of Troy’s bad manners – Malnick’s bony hands flattened out into the wings of an imagined aircraft swooping and rising as he told some tale that Troy thought was bound to be improbable. He thought he caught the word ‘prang’ filtered through the hubbub and urged on him by wishful lip-reading. On the chests of most young men around Malnick were the wings of pilots or the winged Os of the observers, and the ribbons of colour splashed against the pale blue of battledress where medals had been awarded. No such adorned Malnick’s blouse. He was clearly ground crew and just as clearly hated it. As his hand brought his plane up into a sharp ascent his eyes met Troy’s and they locked in a long, intent gaze shot through with fear, regret, suspicion and plain embarrassment. The hand froze. He snatched it back and shook it as though he had just been burnt. He blushed and the crowd of youngsters roared with laughter. One or two of them slapped him on the back, someone called out for ‘another pint for the old bluffer’. Malnick continued to stare silently back at Troy through the row of optics, almost oblivious to the noise and the centrality of his own place in it, and Troy knew at once how he should handle Mr Malnick.