Rag and Bone (40 page)

B
IG
M
IKE TOOK
the steep hairpin turns up to the castle like a race-car driver. He had to brake at the last turn for a column of soldiers and a couple of constables. I recognized one of them from last night, the fellow who’d organized the Home Guard search for Germans. I told Big Mike to stop.

“Constable,” I said. “Any luck?”

“Don’t know if I’d call it luck, sir. We found one Jerry, straightaway. Gave himself up peaceably enough. But then that Russian fellow got himself lost, and we spent the whole night and most of the morning searching for him.”

“What Russian?” I asked.

“Captain Sidorov,” he said. “He asked if he could join us as we were forming up. I saw no harm in it.” There was a defensive tone in his voice, as if he expected me to blame him for something.

“Where is he now? Didn’t you find him?”

“Well, he got himself killed, sir. You were with him last night, weren’t you? Were you a friend of his? I’m very sorry.”

I didn’t know what to say. I stared at the constable as the weary Home Guard men stood around our idling jeep, obviously wanting to get home. They were wet and mud soaked, having gone out without rain gear, not knowing that they’d be gone long enough to get caught in a channel squall.

“I knew him” was the best I could say. I remembered I’d seen a pack of unopened Luckies in the glove box, so I got them out and passed them around, which brightened spirits considerably. “Tell me what happened.”

“The captain got lost, after we sent two of the lads back with the prisoner. We kept on with the search, figuring we had a good chance of finding him as well as the rest of the Jerries.”

“How did you know there’d be more?”

“It was a Heinkel 111 that was shot down. Crew of four, and they all bailed out. Searchlight crew saw ’em, had ’em in their beam all the way down. It promised to be an easy night, if they all came in like that first lad.”

“Sidorov?” I said, trying to get him back on track.

“Right you are. Then the rain started up, and we figured he must’ve looked for shelter.”

“Showed him the place meself, just the other day,” one of the Home Guard said. He wore corporal’s stripes and looked about fifty years old, thin and wiry, strong in spite of his gray whiskers. “I was with his group on the tour we gave, showing them Russians around our invasion defenses and all.”

“Showed him what?”

“The bunker. He must’ve gone in to get out of the rain. It’s supposed to be locked, but maybe we left it open by accident after the tour. Or if he had a knife, he could have pried it open.” Nods greeted his assertion, the sad sort of nod that gives off a silent
tsk tsk
.

“What the hell happened?”

“The bunker was stocked with about one hundred No. 76 Special Incendiary Grenades,” the corporal said. “Sounds impressive, but they’re nothing more than pint glass bottles,
filled with phosphorus and benzene. The mixture ignites when it comes into contact with the air.”

“Don’t tell me one broke,” I said.

“He must’ve tripped in the dark and knocked a case down. The bottles are stored in wooden crates, half filled with sawdust. If just one went, it would have set them all off,” the corporal said. “Horrible, it was. The sky lit up with the flames, and we all took off at a run, but it was already too late. A concrete bunker with one small door and three firing slits, well, that makes for one intense fire when a hundred of them incendiaries go up.”

“You found his body inside?”

“What there was left of it, we did. He must’ve tried to get out, since we found him half out the door. If it wasn’t for his cap, in that bright blue color, we wouldn’t have known. It must have blown off his head from the force of the explosion. A small mercy, but quick at least. There were bits and pieces of his uniform left, a few you could see were that same color. And his pistol.”

“What condition was that in?” I asked, thinking about how small a mercy indeed.

“Take a look yourself,” the constable said, handing me a blackened piece of metal that had a resemblance to a revolver at least. The wooden grip was gone, and the cylinder was misshapen from the rounds exploding within it. The stamp of the Soviet star was still visible on one side. I handed it back to the constable and wiped the black from my hands, trying to put things together, listening to that small voice at the back of my head that was warning me about something, something about the dream I’d had.

“What kind of ammunition does that take?” I asked, aware of the eyes on me. The men were almost finished with their cigarettes and were losing interest in my question. “Anyone know?”

“That’s a Nagant M1895, Lieutenant,” the corporal said. “Fires a 7.62mm round. There were some on his belt as well, but they all cooked off.”

“I bet,” I said. “Is that pretty much the same size as a .32-caliber bullet?”

“A little larger, but close. Why do you ask, sir?”

“Just curious,” I said. “Did you recover any of the slugs?”

“No reason to look for them, was there?” The constable was looking at me a bit strangely now. “In any case, the heat was so intense in that enclosed space, they probably melted past recognizing. What’s your point, if you don’t mind me asking, Lieutenant?”

“I was a police detective, before the war. Makes me suspicious of everything,” I said, thinking of Dad sitting in his armchair, waiting for the answers to come. “So, you ran to the fire, found there was nothing you could do, and went on with your search, right?”

“I posted two of the lads at the bunker, and then we continued, yes.”

I tried to imagine the scene and work backward. Sidorov blindly stumbling into a bunker he knew to be filled with unstable incendiary grenades did not fit well into my vision of the events. Then it came to me, and I had to resist the temptation to snap my fingers.

“And you found only two of the three remaining German fliers, right?”

“Why, yes, how did you know?”

“It came to me in a dream.”

CHAPTER
•
TWENTY-EIGHT

I
FOUND A
Russian officer wearing a Nagant revolver, and asked for one of his bullets. He evidently didn’t believe in reverse Lend-Lease, since it cost me a five-pound note. I’d sent Big Mike to make a call to Harding and then find Bull and see if Inspector Flack was still around. I waited in the same room where Flack had interrogated Kaz and me, playing with the 7.62mm bullet, rolling it around my fingers.

Big Mike had pestered me to tell him what I was cooking up, but I told him to wait a few minutes so I could think it through and explain it to everyone together. I had most of the pieces put together, and could guess at the rest. Proving them would be harder, but right now what I wanted was to throw as much doubt on Kaz as Vatutin’s killer as I could. I knew that was going to be an uphill fight as soon as Flack came into the room.

“This had better be good, Boyle,” Flack said, standing across from me, arms akimbo. “I’ve been on the telephone explaining to the Foreign Office how come two Soviet officers have been killed within hours of each other. And that was after explaining it to the commissioner, ten minutes after I explained it to Detective Inspector Scutt. So I am in no mood to waste time with you.”

Bull and Big Mike sat. I gestured to the remaining chair and tapped the table with my Russian bullet, waiting for Flack to sit. He had a right to complain. I didn’t envy his role as messenger when the news was all bad and he was the messenger delivering it up the chain of command. Finally, he sat.

“I want to start at the beginning, as much as I can. This began
with Gennady Egorov found bound and shot in a manner suggestive of the Polish bodies found at Katyn. A map showing the route of a Russian supply truck was discovered on him, hinting at his involvement with recent hijackings. Plus, he was found on Archie Chapman’s turf.”

“Correct,” said Flack.

“In the course of that investigation, I stumbled onto an informant for Captain Kiril Sidorov. Eddie Miller, of the Rubens Hotel, who provided Sidorov with information on the Polish Government in Exile. Then Eddie was found dead. You suspect Kaz, but I think Eddie was poisoned, then stabbed, by Sheila Carlson.”

“We’ve been over all this,” Flack said, drumming his fingers on the table.

“We know that Egorov was shot with a dumdum bullet. You recovered fragments that indicated a .32-caliber slug.”

“Which fits the weapon Lieutenant Kazimierz carries,” Flack said. “Remember, we also found a dumdum round in his desk, with the neatly filed
X
on top.”

“Yes, so convenient. All you were missing was a big red sign that said, ‘Look Here.’ Tell me, does Kaz strike you as stupid?”

“No, he does not. But anyone can make a mistake.”

“Sure. But think for a minute. If Kaz didn’t kill Egorov, who put the bullet there?”

“Eddie Miller, perhaps. He was working for Sidorov.”

“OK, same question. Did Eddie strike you as stupid?”

“From what I heard, he was not the brightest fellow. Gullible, certainly.”

“The kind of guy to be entrusted with a key piece of incriminating evidence, to frame Kaz?”

“We’ll never know, will we? Please come to the point, Boyle.”

We were interrupted by an orderly with a pot of coffee and a tray of cups. It was perfect timing. The coffee smelled good, and as Flack dumped in a healthy spoonful of sugar, I knew he’d stay as long as the coffee lasted.

“Two things have bothered me about this case. First, Sheila Carlson. We know she worked for MI5, for an operative known as Mr. Brown. Mr. Brown seems to have gone to extremes for king and country, and Sheila was happy to oblige, plotting to kill Tadeusz Tucholski with a poisoned cake. She might as well have, too. Everyone else was connected to each other: Sidorov, Egorov, Kaz, Radecki, Vatutin, Tad, Archie, and Topper. They all had a connection, no matter how slim.”

“Sheila was connected to Eddie,” Flack said. “She lived and worked with him.”

“Exactly,” I said. “And she killed him as well.”

“So you say,” Flack said, sipping his coffee. “Brown seems to have gone too far, even by MI5 standards. Cosgrove told me he’s been reined in, transferred elsewhere.”

“Good. And I hope you had the contents of Eddie’s stomach tested,” I said.

“As a matter of course, yes, but I haven’t heard anything yet. It is not a priority with everything else we have on our plate: murdered Russians and German aircrews running about.”

“Sheila was the one person who stood alone, after she killed Eddie. Eddie was the only one who knew her, who might have an idea of where she’d gone. Even Brown and his MI5 henchmen couldn’t find her. Think about that,” I said, leaning over the table, staring into Flack’s eyes, willing him to see it as I did. “She needs her identity card and her ration card. How hard should it be for MI5 to find someone in England these days?”

“Your point?”

“She killed Eddie for a reason. To eliminate anyone who knew anything about her. If she was simply an MI5 agent, why would she worry about that?”

“Lucky for her she did,” said Big Mike.

“Right, but how was she to know Mr. Brown had gone off the reservation and needed to get rid of her?”

“So she had another reason,” said Bull, looking to Flack as if to coach him. Flack was silent.

“Yes. And that reason connects to the other thing that bothered me. The information on the truck hijackings had to come from within the Russian Embassy. They laid out the routes for the delivery trucks. But what was in it for whoever did it?”

“Money, of course,” Flack said as Big Mike poured him more coffee. I made a mental note to get him promoted to sergeant.

“Sure, maybe for the produce and booze. A little extra to spend in London. But what good are dollars or pounds back in the Soviet Union? He couldn’t bring them in and deposit them in a bank.”

“If I had to go back to Russia, I should be glad of extra money while I was in London,” Flack said.

“But what if you didn’t have to go back?” I asked, and watched Flack think that one through.

“We are Allies with the Soviet Union, Boyle. We couldn’t let one of their officers defect. What is the point, anyway? We have three dead Russians; no one is defecting!”

“No. You have two. Egorov and Vatutin, both murdered by Kiril Sidorov. With help from his lover, Sheila Carlson.” I sat back and took a sip of coffee. It was good.

“What?” Flack and Big Mike said at the same time.

“Sheila was working both sides of the fence. Maybe Sidorov recruited her through Eddie, but I don’t think Eddie knew. She was working for MI5 and saw no reason not to supplement her income. But it went further than that. Maybe they fell for each other, or maybe it’s all about the money.”

“What money?” Flack said. “They can’t have earned a fortune from tipping off the Chapman gang.” I knew I had him interested at last. He wasn’t sarcastic, he was working the problem.

“That was just for expenses. They needed it for forged identity papers and ration cards. There have been cases of papers stolen from bodies recovered after the bombings. I bet some of those match the descriptions of Sheila and Sidorov. Part of their deal with Archie Chapman. The real payoff was information
about the gold shipment.” I told him about the half million in gold coming from Scotland.

“And you’re certain about Sheila and Sidorov?” Flack said.

“Certain enough,” I said. “I remembered that Sheila had been wearing a beige utility coat and a blue scarf when we first met her. When I was tailing Sidorov, before he met with Eddie, I saw him bump into a woman wearing the same coat with a blue scarf over her head. She dropped her pocketbook and he picked it up. I bet they were close to the end of their game, and using spy craft to be certain no one saw them together. But they had to have a way of communicating. Passing notes on a busy sidewalk would do the trick.” I didn’t mention I’d remembered the coat and scarf in my dream, and that it had been Dalenka wearing them.

“That’s something to chew on,” Flack said. “Have you alerted anyone about the gold shipment?”

“Yes, my boss, Colonel Harding. He’s sending an escort of a couple of armored cars.”