Old Flames (37 page)

‘For the ride.’

‘Some ride. He faints. He throws up. Ach, ach!’

‘This will be fairly clean, won’t it? Hardly be bodily fluids left after five months.’

‘Clean? Troy, you seen this fucker? He’s a complete mess. They could not have done a better job if they’d deliberately set out to make him unrecognisable.’

‘That’s my point.’

‘Eh?’

‘It’s too good to be true. It’s all just a bit too neat.’

‘Neat? I tell you, smartyarse, when Wildeve sees this one he turn green!’

He led off into the surgery. A modern room, all Formica and washable surfaces, strip lighting and plastic
trim. As up to date, in its way, as Cockerell’s living room. The unknown, numbered corpse tagged ‘Cockerell?’ lay on the stainless steel ‘slab’, a low sink more than
six feet long with a spider web of radiating runnels to drain off blood and things worse, far worse. Whiter than white, he struck Troy as bearing only a passing resemblance to anything that might
once have lived. He was neater than last time. A look of sterility rather than death. A wax impression of the parts of a man joined up with black thread. And it smelt of nothing. The room had the
faint chemical trace of formaldehyde that was inescapable in a post-mortem surgery, but the smell of death and decay, the open gut, spilt shit and drying blood smell that so often surrounded death,
was missing. Months on ice had reduced it almost to the clinical, the inanimate to the never-human. The body had been cleaned and, unlike the last time he saw it, did not look as though it had been
washed up only hours before with seaweed stuck between the toes. The head and face were a black hole set in a rim of white bone. The absence of hands made him seem dwarf-like, a doll of a man. And
there was a raised seam down the chest and abdomen like the rough stitching that held sacking together—it reminded Troy of the sackcloth body bag in which Edmond Dantés was dumped from
the Château d’If, and in his mind’s eye he could see the hand that held the knife emerging to slit the stitches, to burst into freedom and second birth, and a new life as the
Count of Monte Cristo. An apt image, he thought, for the devious Commander Cockerell. Was he even now swanning around as the Count of Jasmine Dene, ducking his creditors and cheating his wife?

On top of a low cupboard to the side stood half a dozen glass jars, the pickled remains of the corpse’s vital organs: stomach, duodenum, colon, liver
et alia.
Pickled, they had lost
the fresh, roseate colour, the sheen of near-vitality, the rubescent light of lites—lost to a dun brown. All the same, Jack turned green.

‘Out!’ Kolankiewicz barked.

‘No,’ Jack protested feebly. ‘I want to know.’

‘You puke, I fuckin’ kill you!’

‘I won’t puke. I’ll just sit here. Quietly.’

He took a canvas and steel tube chair off a stack and sat by the wall, head tilted back, his eyes closed, his pallor unearthly.

Kolankiewicz slipped the loop of his rubber apron over his head, rolled up his sleeves and scrubbed up.

‘He’ll be fine,’ Troy lied, thinking of all the times he had waited while Jack discreetly threw up in bushes at the scenes of murders.

‘You better be right, smartyarse. Now tell me what you looking for.’

‘I’m not looking for anything.’

‘Give over.’

‘Honestly, I just need to know.’

‘Know? That’s what puking Willy said. What you mean “know”?’

Kolankiewicz was right. Jack had not said ‘see’ he had said ‘know’. He had
definitely said ‘know’. The choice of word struck Troy as odd. As odd as him showing up exactly when he did.

‘I mean precisely what it says. Who is this bloke? I need to know.’

Kolankiewicz snapped on his rubber gloves and worked his fingers down to the tips.

‘You mean you got no new evidence?’

‘No, I haven’t.’

‘You going to screw my reputation, you know. Here I am down from the high and mighty Yard, redoing a job by the local bones without a shred of a reason. A little evidence would not have
come amiss. All I have to go on is your suspicion that this isn’t Cockerell, am I right?’

‘No. I didn’t say that. I don’t know who it is.’

It was a fudge and Troy knew he had not got away with it. Kolankiewicz eyeballed him, raised the bush of grey hair that passed for an eyebrow.

‘But you’re pretty damn certain it isn’t?’

‘No.’

‘Troy, you full of shit, as ever. OK. OK.’

They stood facing each other across the near-luminous white mass of the body. Kolankiewicz tapped the microphone suspended a foot above his head. Troy had not seen such a device before. The
Yard, in the forefront of the science of detection, still had stenographers perched on stools with their shorthand notebooks. He looked around. There behind a glass panel in the wall was a young
man equipped with one of the new Grundig magnetic tape recorders. He gave Kolankiewicz a thumbs up and returned to looking at his dials and switches.

‘Why don’t we just take everything the first report has and check it item by item?’ Troy said.

‘Fine,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Who’s on first?’

‘We take the head first.’

‘No, this is where you say, “I don’t know.” Then I say, I don’t know’s on second. Who’s on first.’

‘What?”

‘No, Watt’s on third. Who’s on first.’

‘Eh?’

‘Forget it. Sometimes you so damn English I can hardly believe you real.’

Troy turned the first page of the post-mortem report. Kolankiewicz forsook Abbott and Costello and plunged a rubber finger into the skull.

‘As I recall, cause of death was given as a blow to the head, shattering top of spine, killing brain stem. No water in lungs. Ergo he was dead before he hit the water.’

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘However, very little of back of head left. Does our man describe the impact wound?’

‘No. Just gives the blow to the head as probable cause. Remarks on the shattering of the skull. Possibly by propeller blades.’

‘He’s right. Sliced like a boiled egg. But below the cut is compression of skull and tissue I would not personally ascribe to the same action that sliced the skull. Upward motion
sliced his head, entered via the face, hence no face, exit rear of skull, but the compression here is down. Hit from the back. What does our man say?’

‘Nothing.’

‘OK. It’s easy to miss. Most of the actual wound is missing. And it could be that it
was
caused by the action of a propeller. It is in the nature of things that they swirl you
around, clobber you over and over again. It’s only my opinion. But if the blow that killed him was from the propeller you might deduce that he was alive when it hit him. But we know he
wasn’t. So what killed him? A prior blow? Ergo we look for evidence of a prior blow.’

‘Sounds logical to me.’

‘I could not make this stand up in court, but—’

‘I hate sentences beginning that way.’

‘But—I think he was hit once from behind with a round object.’

‘Round? What happened to our old friend “blunt”?’

‘He’s at first base. No—I say round. I mean round. Like he been sapped. Good and hard. But as I say, with so much of the wound missing and with such violent action to the skull
as a whole I’d have difficulty swearing to it. Now ze nick! Ze fangres, ze bilbow, ze nick! As our old pal Shakespeare put it.’

From Abbott and Costello to
Henry V
in a few short moves whilst poring over a corpse. Troy had to admire Kolankiewicz’s sang-froid. He had wisecracked his way through a thousand
autopsies.

‘His wife mentioned a mole.’

Kolankiewicz turned the head around. The sliced side faced Troy and reminded him of nothing so much as an open oyster.

‘There’s no mole here. We lost a bit of the right-hand side of the neck, but there’s no mole on what’s left. Dig into my bag. Pass me the magnifying glass.’

Troy handed him a huge round glass, the kind Sherlock Holmes was often to be seen with on the lurid covers of paperback books, and watched his piggy eye blow up to a brown moon.

‘Again, right on edge of remaining tissue, shiny patch.’

‘Shiny?’

‘Like recent scar tissue. Tiny. Maybe a thirty-second of an inch long.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘You going to hate this too. I can’t swear to this either, being so close to an injury that tore off half his head and bits of his neck, but it looks like plastic surgery to me. If
your man had a mole, it is conceivable he had it removed. Vain sort of bugger was he?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then let us press on.’

They worked down the corpse from the neck to the feet. Kolankiewicz reopened the chest cavity, and gazed through a glass darkly at the organs in the pickling jars. Every so often Troy would read
out a section of the report and Kolankiewicz would say ‘Correct’, and every so often Troy would hear Jack sigh softly in the corner. ‘Correct’ became irritating. By the time
they reached the toes, via hands, knees and sexual organs, tempers were frayed.

‘There must be something.’

‘What you mean, must be something? What you fuckin’ want I stick on pieces like he was a puppet? Fingers where he got no fingers. Face where he got no face? What you think this is,
Punch and Judy? Muffin the Mule?’

‘All I meant was—’

‘I know what you meant. What I don’t know is what you want. You want it to be Cockerell or not? I don’t know what you want, I don’t know why you get me down here, but
don’t ask me to invent evidence where there is none. The guy done a good fuckin’ job. If I say he got it right, he got it right.’

‘He missed things.’

‘No—he refused to speculate on two points that are scarcely big enough to measure. You pissed off with him, you pissed off with me because you want us to label the corpse, you want
it tagged as Cockerell or not-Cockerell. I can’t do that. Don’t ask.’

‘Speculation is the business we’re in. Can we get on?’

Kolankiewicz leaned in close. Horseradish and roast beef on his breath. They faced each other across the corpse.

‘Get on? Troy. We reached the feet. Beyond the feet he don’t exist! How many men you met exist past their feet? The feet are where we touch the planet, beyond the feet is only Mother
Earth.’

‘All I’m saying is—’

Kolankiewicz blazed into anger, snatched the report from Troy’s hand and shook it in his face.

‘What you want me to say, cocksucker? I no longer know what you want me to say. That it is Cockerell or it isn’t Cockerell? Fuckit Troy, I don’t know what you want me to do.
You jigger me every which way arsehole to elbow. I tread all over toes of local man for you. I make enemies faster than Hitler at a Jewish wedding. I tell you the man did a good job!’

He gave up shaking the report and began to leaf through it, turning the pages till he found what he wanted, stabbing at it with his stubby, rubber-gloved finger.

‘I tell you Troy, this is all the evidence you going to get. The man is good. We quibbling over insubstantial matter. Every damn thing is here. Every last damn detail, the cuts to the hand
and feet, the contents of the lungs, the dreadful condition of the liver, right down to the contents of the man’s stomach and intestines. Dammit Troy, he even lists what the bastard had for
his last meal.’

He threw his head back, rolled his eyes, and waved his hands in the air in mock horror.

‘Ach! Ach! This is disgusting. Christ almighty, what kind of a man eats fish and eggs and rice mixed up altogether for his breakfast?’

Troy seized Kolankiewicz by the straps of his apron and bodily lifted him to eye level, suspended him over the corpse, all but nose to nose, speaking softly, scarcely more than a whisper in the
wake of Kolankiewicz’s racket.

‘A certain kind of Englishman, that’s who. It’s a delicacy of the Raj. It’s called kedgeree. And I saw Cockerell demolish a plateful for breakfast and then start on the
toast and marmalade.’

Kolankiewicz smiled sheepishly, as much as he could, suspended by his braces, feet dangling, he shrugged—palms upwards in surrender to the logic on offer.

‘Kedgeree, schmedgeree …’

‘Yes?’

‘Then it’s him,’ Kolankiewicz said quietly.

Troy put him down. Heard the click as his heels hit the floor.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s him.’

He turned round to jack.

‘It’s him,’ he said softly.

Jack sat very still, the colour only just returning to his cheeks.

‘Can we go now?’ he asked.

Kolankiewicz seemed not to bear the grudge. Out in the car park, dignity and hat restored, he stuffed his
News Chronicle
into his pocket and assumed a job-well-done
affability. It was a moment Troy had been waiting for, and if he blew up at him now it would have little immediate consequence.

‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you,’ Troy said. ‘You know, about that night in Stepney with Khrushchev.’

‘No, no,’ Kolankiewicz said quickly. ‘There is no need. I quite understand your motives. Indeed, I did at the time. It requires no explanation. Since neither you nor I have the
courage or the morality that would enable us to put a bullet through the man’s head, a little education was perhaps the best thing you could have done for him, for you, for the world. I just
hope you had a long spoon.’

He grinned wickedly at Troy over the last phrase.

‘No,’ said Troy, treading carefully. ‘That isn’t really what I meant. I wanted to ask what you and he talked about.’

‘Poland, of course! He told me he could envisage a day when the Russian soldier need not stand one inch beyond the Russian frontier, that he could foresee a time when Poland would be free
to call its own elections, elect its own government. And he could see this because he had no doubts that they would elect a Communist government. It was the inevitability of history’s
purpose.’

‘Aha. And what did you say?’

‘Oh—I called the bastard a liar to his face.’

In his mind’s eye Troy saw Khrushchev rising red-faced from his seat at exactly the moment Eric the landlord had appeared with his handbell to cry, ‘Aven’t you lot got homes to
go to?’ It seemed to him now that both he and Kolankiewicz had been saved by the bell. The surprise was how quickly Khrushchev had recovered from what must undoubtedly be the worst abuse
anyone had heaped upon him since the death of Stalin. Between Stepney and Claridge’s he had slipped smoothly from the surly to the affable to the downright chatty.