Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (38 page)

‘How can you be so sure? Or is this where I tell you I think English policemen are wonderful?’

‘Deduction. And a little inside knowledge. There is another character in
Great Expectations
called Wemmick. He’s a solicitor’s clerk, he’s the man who knows
everything and fixes everything. He moves through the book almost like a secret agent. One of the most curious characters Dickens ever created, and that’s saying something. At one point in
the book, when Pip is in danger, Wemmick leaves the same note at all four entrances to Barnard’s Inn. And when he knows Pip has received one he goes round and collects the rest. I think
Walter was having difficulty finding you. I think he left a note at both places you were likely to be.’

‘I was in the embassy at five p.m. There was no note.’

‘Then he left it later. In the meantime someone, the same someone Stahl saw, was able to read it and realised what it meant.’

‘Jesus, Troy. That’s a hell of a lot from two lines.’

‘If I’m right, the note will still be there. After all, Walter never went back for it.’

‘Why? Why wouldn’t the killer just destroy it?’

‘Because he doesn’t know what’s in the note you have. You might be expecting to find the copy. And if you didn’t it might give you a lead. After all, it’s easy
enough to read it and put it back unmarked.’

‘It is?’

‘Calvin–you’re aspy. How do you open letters?’

‘With a paperknife.’

Cal left Troy sitting in his car in Grosvenor Square while he went into the embassy. Ten minutes later he came back, sat in the passenger seat and handed Troy an envelope
addressed to Captain Cormack.

‘Where was it?’

‘Would you believe I have an in-tray?’

‘What did your colleagues have to say to you?’

‘Nothing. The place was almost deserted. If I’d run into Major Shaeffer, well, things might have been said. He’s the guy who dumped me into the tender care of Chief Inspector
Nailer. I’d have a bone worth picking with him.’

Troy held the envelope up to the windscreen.

‘Well – it hasn’t been steamed.’

He examined the edges, sniffed the paper, then he tore it open and let the letter sit on the palm of his hand. It looked to Cal like a comic-book impression of a private eye. More Hercule Poirot
than Nick Charles.

‘Observe the way it curls.’

‘That mean something?’

‘Yes – whoever our man is, he extracted the letter without breaking the seal by inserting two small knitting needles into the top seam and rolling the letter around them until it was
small enough to pass through the gap at the top where the gum has failed. When he’d read it he put it back the same way. It’s as old a trick as they come. I’m surprised you
didn’t learn it in spy school. Alas for you spooks, the tension thus exerted remains in the paper rather as it would in a watch spring. Hence it curls. Would you care to read it?’

Cal read it. It was exactly the same as the other one.

‘Does this really get us anywhere?’ he asked.

‘Yes – of course it does. For one thing, it backs up what Stahl said. We’ve moved from odds-on that it was someone from the embassy to it being a dead cert, wouldn’t you
say?’

‘I guess I would. But – what now?’

‘Now, a short list of probable suspects would help.’

‘Why not start with Shaeffer?’

‘Why not start without obvious prejudice? How many people work in that section of the embassy?’

‘A lot. Twenty, maybe thirty. A lot more than did before the war. I don’t even know some of their names.’

They sat an hour or more. Hardly anyone entered the embassy.

Cal said, ‘I hate to slow us down, but we’d have better luck if we came back and sat here from six until seven. Catch
’em as they leave.’

Cormack had run off so many names. Troy was writing them down and trying to find a mnemonic in two or three words that would fix a face in his mind. It struck him that the
United States of America might have a little difficulty entering into a European war. It was too partisan a notion. Cormack had so far pointed out Lieutenant D’Amici – Troy had written
down, short and ugly – Lieutenant Corsaro – short and handsome – Major Shaeffer – tall and broad, a bit like Johnny Weissmuller in
Tarzan
– two Sergeants Schulz
– both as stout as Eugene Pallette – a Corporal Pulaski and a Captain Pulaski – they could have been twins – a Colonel Reininger – tall and thin, a bit Raymond Massey
– a Captain Berg – utterly nondescript, his own mother couldn’t pick him out in a line-up, Troy thought – a Sergeant O’Connor and a Corporal Schickelgruber.

‘You’re kidding?’ said Troy.

‘Nope. Used to work with me in Zurich up to the new year. Absolutely won’t consider changing his name. Born Adolf Schickelgruber, he says, and he’ll die Adolf
Schickelgruber.’

‘Adolf? His parents christened him Adolf?’

‘He’s in his twenties. Probably born in the last war. The only person who’d heard of the other Corporal Adolf Schickelgruber then was the paymaster in the Austrian
infantry.’

‘Couldn’t you promote him? Anything but a corporal.’

‘Sure. If we live through this I’ll see to it personally. Hold on, here come another two.’

Troy peered out. A tall soldier and a short soldier were approaching, side by side. The tall one looked up at the sky and said something Troy could not hear or read. He’d bet they’d
picked up the English habit of filling silence by talking inanely about the weather.

Cormack said, ‘Don’t know the tall guy, but I hate to tell you who the little one is.’

‘Let me guess, Corporal Mussolini?’

‘Close – that’s Joe Buonaparté. He accents the “e” and never fails to tell you there’s a “u” in his name. You’ve played this before,
haven’t you?’

‘I’m grateful for the education into the great American melting pot, but I rather think this is getting us nowhere,’ said Troy. ‘There’s simply too many of them.’

‘I don’t see what else we can do.’

‘I can,’ said Troy. ‘We can set a trap for our chap.’

‘Trap? What sort of a trap?’

Troy stood outside a large block of working-class flats – the East London Dwelling Company’s Cressy Houses in Union Place, E1 – a few yards from Stepney Green, a few more from the Stiltons’ house in Jubilee Street, a mile or so from Leman Street police station, where he had served as a uniformed constable
before the war, and home to his old station sergeant, the recently widowed George Bonham. Troy climbed to the second floor and rapped at the door. Bonham towered over him, a duster in his hand, a
floral pinny on his chest, a look of surprise on his face mingled with the unremitting sorrow which seemed to Troy to have been his lot since the Blitz and the death of his wife Ethel.

‘Freddie, long time no wotsit. Come in, come in, what brings you to this neck of the woods?’

Troy followed him to the sitting room, a box no more than ten feet by eight – the warm heart of a tiny flat in which George and Ethel had raised three sons. George had the china cabinet
open. His wife’s collection of Crown Derby set out on the dining table.

‘I was just giving ’em a bit of a going over. Didn’t like to see ’em gathering dust.’

Troy was sure they never gathered dust. This room was kept as a shrine to Ethel Bonham. In the six months since her death, George had changed not a thing. Troy would bet money that her clothes
still hung in the mahogany-veneer wardrobe in the end bedroom, and that George still slept on one side of the bed only with two pillows side by side upon the bolster.

‘It’s almost six. Will you stay and eat?’

It was too early to eat – besides, Bonham was a dreadful cook. No man of his generation, and few of Troy’s, were in the slightest way capable of looking after themselves. Widowers
were uncommon creatures, floundering through the latter life like beached sea monsters.

‘I’m afraid I can’t, George. It’s business. In fact I need your advice.’

Troy knew how flattered George could be by a simple lie, the slightness of exaggeration.

‘O’ course, Freddie. But I’ll put the kettle on all the same.’

Once the magic word ‘kettle’ had been uttered it was pointless trying to stop him. Tea was the
universal salve – birth, marriage, death and all stations in between. Troy wondered how long Bonham’s tea ration lasted him. He made tea for two, black and sweet and of the consistency
of molasses. You’d need a torch to see through it even before you put the milk in.

‘Well then, ask away. It’s not often you come to your old boss for a bit of advice.’

‘George, this has to be a secret. I’m investigating the death of Walter Stilton.’

‘Nuff said,’ said Bonham, nodding, tapping the side of his nose. Troy knew now that wild horses, let alone Scotland Yard, would not get him to talk. ‘He was a good ’un,
was Walter. A prince. And poor old Edna, left alone with all them kiddies. I’ve known Edna since I was a tot, y’know. Redmans Road Board School, 1894. Anything I can do for Walter, just
name it.’

‘I need a private place.’

Bonham looked blankly at him.

‘Somewhere where we won’t be overheard or interrupted. Somewhere quiet.’

Bonham’s expression did not change.

‘Somewhere I can bend the law a little without old plod lumbering in.’

‘I see,’ said Bonham.

Troy wondered if he did.

‘You used to walk Tallow Dock down on the Isle of Dogs when you was on the beat, didn’t you? Well it got blown to buggery by the Luftwaffe just before Christmas. Hardly a house left
with a roof on. Most of the warehouses are deserted now. You could set off a bomb down there and no-one would hear.’

Bonham paused as the word ‘bomb’, and the frequency with which they did go off these days, sank in.

‘There’s only one intact building left. Still got its roof – it was in use till last week. Might suit.’

‘Could I see it?’

‘Now?’

‘Car’s outside.’

Bonham stood. Troy tried and found a sharp pain shooting through his chest where Kolankiewicz had stitched him up.

‘Wossup?’

Troy prised himself off the chair by its arms, breathless and flushed.

‘Been in the wars, have you?’

‘Something like that.’

‘One day, Freddie, they’ll have to bury you in bits.’

Bonham swapped his pinafore for his police blue tunic and took his pointy hat off the sideboard where it sat like a horned tortoise. Driving down to Tallow Dock, he sat with his knees up to his
chin, bent double in the little car, the hat clutched on his lap more like the world’s biggest cricket box.

Troy found himself staring. All the way across Stepney and down into Limehouse. The devastation was not unimaginable, but it was on a scale he had not bothered to imagine. He looked out at
mountains of rubble – the detritus of lives lived and homes abandoned. Bonham looked at him.

‘You been up West too long.’

‘Eh?’

‘If this has come as a shock, then it’s ’cos you don’t get down here enough. When was you last here? Ethel’s funeral?’

That had been over five months ago.

‘No – I’ve seen you since then . . . surely . . . ?’

Bonham wasn’t helping.

‘I was here in February. I’m sure it was February.’ The making of an argument was curtailed as the Bullnose Morris reached the junction of Tallow Dock Lane and Westferry
Road.

They turned right towards the river and pulled up about six hundred yards further on, within sight of the Thames and outside a vast warehouse. The company name was stencilled in white down the
side of the building in letters ten feet tall – ‘Bell and Harrop. Import Export. est. 1837. London, Shanghai, Hong Kong.’

They stepped out onto shards of broken slate and glass. The only sign of life a roaming, skinny, mongrel dog. Bonham slipped on his helmet and tucked the strap into the dimple of his chin. It
was a moment that never failed to strike awe into Troy. A man of five foot six, too short to be a copper except by a waiving of the rules, confronted by a man nearly seven foot tall from his boots
to the little silver knob on top of his pointy hat. It was one of the reasons Troy had been so glad to become a detective in plain clothes. Bonham looked like a giant, a Greek warrior, Achilles or
Agamemnon, Troy had looked like a gnome who’d lost his fishing rod.

‘Are we going in?’

‘Sorry, George. I was miles away.’

Bonham led off. Prised a door open with his giant’s paw, swung it back on its hinges with a mighty, metallic clang. Troy looked around. Once the echo of the clang had dwindled away, and
the dog bolted, nothing stirred – and the only sound he could hear was the occasional hooting of ships on the Thames. George might be right. This could be just what he needed.

Inside, the ground floor was open to the second, a ceiling twenty feet high had mostly collapsed.

‘It’s the top floor I was thinking of,’ said Bonham. ‘Used to be old Georgie Bell’s office. We finally talked him into leaving a few days back. Or is that not what
you want?’

‘No, that sounds fine. As long as there’s another way out.’ Bonham and Troy wound their way up the stone staircase to emerge right under the roof. A suite of low office rooms.
A huge glass skylight, its coat of blackout paint peeling off in strips. A battered steel desk with a dip pen and inkwell, looking as though their owner had just stepped out for lunch. A forgotten
Burberry on the back of the door.

‘I don’t want to be surprised,’ Troy said.

Bonham looked puzzled.

‘Is there another way in and out?’

Bonham yanked off one of the blackout screens, slid up a sash window and pointed down the fire escape.

‘Goes all the way down to the first floor. After that you’d have to jump into the alley. But I reckon nobody could get up that way. O’ course you’ll have to be careful of
the light if there’s a raid on – but don’t worry about wardens, they’ve given up on Tallow Dock.’

‘You mean there’s electricity?’

Bonham flicked the light switch on and off to show him. It was a bonus. Troy had been dreading having to catch a murderer by the dim glow of a bull’s-eye torch.