Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (47 page)

Churchill issued his last warning on June 10th.

When this news reached Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin, he did not wish to know. He had just dispatched the Artillery Corps tractors eastward, away from the front line, to help with the grain
harvest – besides, he’d been warned already. Not only by the British Ambassador Sir Stafford Cripps, but also by Count Werner von Schulenberg, the Reich ambassador to Moscow, who had
risked treason to warn the Soviet Union – nor would his treason be the last.

On June 18th, a Wednesday, Private Gunther Bruhns, recently demoted and posted to the Waffen SS on the Eastern Front by Heydrich for one cheeky remark too far, fearing that there was yet worse
to come, chose a rash means of escape. He crossed the German lines into the Soviet Union, offering to trade information for sanctuary – his father had been a good communist and he’d
always had some sympathy for the cause himself.

‘You’ll be invaded at dawn on the 22nd,’ he said. ‘If you don’t believe me, and the tanks don’t come, you can shoot me.’

Stalin did not wait for the tanks and had him shot at once.

On June 22nd, the shortest night of the year, 2,700 planes, 3,600 tanks and three and a half million Axis troops poured into
Russia.

Barbarossa.

What have I made up? Most of it – that’s what fiction’s for. But there is a brick foundation to this. Umpteen people tried to warn Stalin, and Churchill
issued warnings on April 23rd and June 10th 1941. I found out about the first from an English translation of A. Rossi’s
Deux Ans d’Alliance Germano-Sovietique
,published in 1949,
the source for which was the collected papers of the Nuremberg trials. I’ve forgotten where I found the second noted, but it was at that point that I started to think of a story that would
end with and ‘explain’ that second warning. Until fairly recently it had, I think, been assumed that the source of the British information on Barbarossa had been Rudolf Hess, but as
Hess did not land until May 10th the warning given to Mr Vyshinsky by Sir Stafford Cripps on April 23rd must have been perplexing if not actually fatal to the theory. However, the role of Enigma
has since become if not clear then somewhat clearer. It is the most likely source.

The battle plan of Barbarossa is taken from Alan Clark’s (1966) book of the same title (Penguin), the German scheme for the subjugation of the USSR from the essay ‘What If Nazi
Germany Had Defeated The Soviet Union?’ by Michael Burleigh in
Counterfactuals
(ed. Niall Ferguson, Picador 1997).

The principal written sources for life in London at this time are
The London Observer: The Wartime Diaries of General Raymond E. Lee
, the London head of US Intelligence (Hutchinson 1971),
and the
Diaries of Sir John Colville
, Churchill’s private secretary (Hodder & Stoughton 1985). Also fairly useful were
Berlin Diary
by William L. Shirer (Knopf 1941) and
Hess
by Peter Padfield (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1991).
Backs to the Wall
by Leonard Mosley (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 1971) was indispensable.

I’ve bent a few bits of history. Clothes rationing was not introduced until June 2nd, after the sinking of the Bismarck – Churchill thought a major victory might soften the blow of
clothes rationing and held it off until he’d got one. Food rationing was more severe than I’ve suggested – I doubt any restaurant would have served Reggie with the meal he orders
at the Dorchester as late as June 1st 1941. And to the best of my knowledge the US Embassy never supplied coffee beans for the exclusive use of its officers billeted in London hotels. I made that
up too. Al Bowlly did die in a German air raid in the small hours of April 17th 1941, but the reciprocal raid on Berlin did not begin until after midnight and lasted nearly three hours (which
wasn’t quite as useful for this fiction) and I’ve no idea whether the raid, targeted on the Alexanderplatz, hit any building in Kopernikusstrasse, a mile or so to the east – I
just liked the name.

Lastly, Robert Churchill really existed and his life and work were recorded by MacDonald Hastings in
The Other Mr Churchill
(Harrap 1963). I’m grateful to my brother Frank, who
knows more about guns and bullets and things that go whizz or bang than most people alive, for reminding me of Robert Churchill’s shop in Orange Street, and for a wealth of knowledge on the
Smith and Wesson .35.

A grim prospect greeted Troy and Bonham. Eight small boys ranged across the pavement, all looking expectantly towards Bonham. No one spoke, the expectant looks seemed fixed
somewhere between joy and tears. Sgt Bonham held power over the greatest, the most mysterious event in their short lives. Troy looked down at a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, outsized jackets
tied up with string, brown boots, pudding basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps. Such an amazing array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs that only the peach-fresh faces challenged the image of
them as eight assorted dwarves. Out on the end of the line, a grubby redhead, doubtless called Carrots, juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, an improvised portable furnace. Troy
wished he had one of his own.

Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him. Preserving innocence seemed a
fruitless ideal.

‘How would you like to make some money?’ he said.

‘How much?’ said the biggest.

‘A shilling,’ said Troy.

‘Half a crown,’ said the boy.

‘You don’t know what it’s for yet!’

‘It’ll still cost you half a dollar,’ the boy replied.

‘OK, OK,’ said Troy, ‘Half a crown to the boy who finds the rest.’

‘Freddie, for God’s sake,’ Bonham cut in. ‘You can’t!’

He gripped Troy by the shoulder and swung him round into a huddled attempt at privacy.

‘Are you off yer chump?’

‘George, can you think of any other way?’

‘For Christ’s sake they’re kids. They should be in school!’

‘Well they clearly have no intention of going. And they don’t exactly look like freddie Bartholomew do they?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Bonham said again.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy.

‘On your own head be it.’

Troy turned back to the boys, ranged in front of him in a wide semicircle.

‘I want you to look for . . .’ he hesitated, uncertain what to call a corpse. ‘For anything to do with what Tub found. OK?’

They nodded as one.

‘And if you find it don’t touch it. You come straight back and tell Mr Bonham, and nobody, I mean nobody, goes near it till he’s seen what you’ve found.
Understood?’

‘You know, Freddie,’ Bonham said softly, ‘There are times when I think there’s nothing like a long spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

Short, nasty and brutish.

Troy stared.

‘Go on,’ said Churchill.

Still Troy stared.

‘Go on. Pick it up.’

Troy hefted the gun in his left hand. Sawn off at the barrels and stock, it had become less a shotgun than an outsize handgun. He felt the weight, thought the alterations did nothing for its
balance and less for its looks. ‘I hope this didn’t start life as one of your hand-mades,’ he said.

‘Far from it. I helped myself to it after a trial a few years back. The court wanted it destroyed, naturally, but I pleaded its . . . educational value.’

Churchill smiled at Troy over this last phrase. Down the tunnel Hitler and Göring watched with fixed gazes. Tempting him.

‘My education, I suppose?’ Troy said.

‘As it happens, yes.’

‘You know,’ Troy went on, ‘it’s appalling a policeman should ever have his hands on such a weapon.’ He tucked the stubby stock into one hip and fired. The first
shot cut Adolf in two, the second set fat Hermann spinning. Straw and sawdust everywhere.

Churchill sighed. ‘What have I told you, Frederick?’

Troy recited: ‘Every shot counts. Speed isn’t everything.’

‘And?’

‘And a wounded man can still kill you.’

‘Quite,’ said Churchill. ‘If old Göring had been anything more than a cut-out from
Picture Post
and a sack full of straw you’d be dead now. Shall we do it
again with a little more accuracy and a little less haste?’

‘Again.’ It seemed to be Churchill’s motto, and it seemed to Troy that he was no further on than the day Churchill had walked back into his life three weeks ago.

D
ECEMBER
1944

In the summer of 1944 Lady Diana Brack had shot Detective Sergeant Troy in the gut. He had lost part of one kidney, and had been lucky not to lose a length of small intestine.
He had been off work for six months. Six months that to him seemed far more than enough and which he ascribed as much to his superintendent’s desire to punish him as to the rigours of passing
the medical. Every time he reported for duty, Onions sent him home. Not long before Christmas he had finally got back into his oldoffice,behindhis olddesk, andattempted to slip on the old skin he
had sloughed off in June.

A week later he was back in hospital, rushed to the Charing Cross with internal bleeding as a result of a massive haemorrhage, the first he had known of which had been pissing blood. Sergeant
Wildeve had picked him off the bog floor, flies gaping, cock out, slewed in a crimson slick of blood and piss.

His family came to drive him mad.

His mother sat at his bedside and distracted him from the prospect of death by reading aloud to him, much as she had done when he was young. He had been a sickly child. Now that he was a sickly
grown-up, he was happy to have her read; he wished only that she had chosen something more cheery than Rimbaud’s
Un Saison en Enfer
.

He could understand why. French was her first language. Like many Russian toffs, Russian, to her, had been a language for talking to servants, and, unlike her husband, she had never found it in
herself to embrace the irregularities of English with the passion one could only ever muster for something so perverse. French it had been, French it was – but Rimbaud. Mother, please.

‘
J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité.
’

Oh, bloody hell, he thought. Waiting for God? Was that what he was doing? But help was at hand. His sister Masha had appeared at his mother’s shoulder: ‘There’s two chaps
waiting to see Freddie, Maman. As he’s only allowed two visitors at a time . . .’

His mother stuck a bookmark in the pages of the battered Rimbaud and told him they would continue tomorrow.

‘Anyone I know?’ Troy asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said his sister, and as she walked out Kolankiewicz had walked in, followed closely by a face that made Troy think for a moment. Churchill, Bob Churchill. Good
Lord. He didn’t think he’d seen Bob since his father’s funeral.

Lady Troy offered a cheek for Churchill to peck. Troy couldn’t help feeling she would have preferred a handshake, but that would have meant surrendering the grip on one or other of her
walking-sticks. For eighteen months or so now they had kept her mostly upright and moving against the tortuous twists and stabs of arthritis. All Kolankiewicz got was a mumbled, ‘Good
evening.’ She had never liked Kolankiewicz, but then so few people did – so few could or would get past the foul exterior and the fractured English. Besides, Poles and Russians . . .
They had history.
Taras Bulba
was not a novel or a name ever to be mentioned around Kolankiewicz.

Churchill had gained weight – a family trait, perhaps. He was almost as rotund as his distant cousin Winston, and when the mood took him the same mischievous Churchillian glint could be
seen in his eyes.

No one spoke as Troy’s mother walked to the door, sticks clacking arrhythmically across the linoleum floor. When she had gone Churchill said softly, ‘Your mother was fine the last
time I saw her. Has all this come upon her since your father’s death?’

Troy’s father had died late in 1943. He had watched his mother slip into sudden ill-health, her limbs seizing up as the most important limb of all had been cut from her. A physical parody
of her mental state. It was not Troy waiting for God, it occurred to him, nor was it a poem read for his benefit – it was his mother, and there were times he thought God could not arrive soon
enough for her liking.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s little to be done. She seems almost to relish the affliction. It’s her punishment for letting the old man slip.’

‘You been reading that bugger Freud again?’ Kolankiewicz said.

‘Let’s change the subject, shall we? I’m sure I don’t owe this honour to your desire to argue the toss about Freud or Bob’s concern for my mother’s
health.’

Churchill and Kolankiewicz looked at each other, and Troy knew he had hit the mark. It was indeed an honour – a visit from the greatest gun expert on Earth and from London’s finest
forensic pathologist. If the two of them had got together to visit him in his sick bed they must be up to something – the static between them flashed out ‘conspiracy’ to Troy.