Black Out (2 page)

‘You must be near frozen,’ Bonham said again.

‘George,’ Troy said, hoping his impatience with the ritual wasn’t obvious. ‘Could I see it straightaway?’

‘It’s not going anywhere.’

‘All the same I’d like to see it.’

Bonham ambled over to the window, flicked the catch and brought a long brown paper parcel in from the window-ledge.

‘Not having any ice I thought that was about the best place for it. It’s not likely to go off on a night like this, is it now?’

He set the frost-glistened package on the centre table and tugged at one edge of the paper. The contents rolled stiffly out on to the table-top. It was a human arm, male, hacked off crudely just above the elbow. It was a left arm, complete down to the fingers, the third of which still wore a gold ring. The forearm was covered by a coatsleeve in some woollen dog-tooth pattern. Beneath that a greying shirt cuff stuck out still held by a silver cufflink. Troy stared. Then he circled the table twice. He stopped, turned the arm over so that it was palm up and studied the hand. Several minutes passed in silence. As he leant back against the cupboard and took his eyes
from the arm for the first time, the kettle whistled into the calm. Bonham slooshed out the teapot and pared off a portion of his diminishing tea ration.

‘Who found it?’ Troy asked.

‘Kid. Late this afternoon.’

‘Where did he get it?’

‘Bombsite. Off east, towards the Green. Just came in, plonked it and ran. But that don’t matter none. I’ve known him since he was in nappies. We’ll have no trouble finding him again. His parents have a flat in the same block as me.’

‘I’ll have to talk to him.’

Bonham set down the pot and two cups next to the arm and looked down at Troy.

‘Not tonight, surely, Freddie? It can’t be that urgent.’

‘How urgent can murder be?’

‘Who said anything about murder?’

‘Who sent for Scotland Yard?’

‘That’s just a precaution. I was worried when it didn’t turn out to be one of ours.’

‘No bodies without arms?’ Troy said.

‘I’ve accounted for everyone. I mean everyone. It’s not local. I’d swear to it.’

‘There’ve been heavy raids all month. London is littered with bodies. We could build up a wall with our English dead.’

‘Not one of ours. That I can tell you.’

‘People dying all over London, George.’

‘Not this one. We’ve lost a few this week. Poor sods too slow or too stupid to get into the shelters. But they’re accounted for. On my patch there’s no one missing. We’ve dug out and identified every body. And nobody with their arm blown off.’

‘This wasn’t blown off or torn off, it was cut off.’

‘I thought better o’ lookin’ that close meself. ’

‘Four strokes of the blade at least.’ Troy leaned closer to the cut end of the stump, his elbows propped on the table. ‘Something heavy, single-edged and broad. Tapered at the front.’

‘Meat cleaver?’

‘More like a machete or a bowie knife.’

Bonham handed a cup to Troy. The numbness in his hands shot
into painful life against the heat of the cup. He winced and turned back to the arm. The fingernails were neat and trimmed, neither broken nor bitten. The tips of the fingers were heavy with nicotine – Troy could almost swear he’d found a Capstan smoker – but the curious thing was the number of tiny marks, darkened patches of stained and roughened skin. Burns or scald marks of some sort. Well-healed for the most part, but one or two somewhat fresher – perhaps a month or so old at the most. Troy felt the prick of pain in the split tip of his thumb. He sipped at the distasteful brew – only faintly reminiscent of a good pre-war cuppa. He circled the old elm table once more and stopped next to Bonham – shoulder to shoulder, but for the fact that Bonham’s shoulder was way above his.

‘Oh,’ Troy added, ‘and he was dead when whoever it was did this to him.’

Bonham slurped loudly at his tea.

‘Bugger,’ he said softly.

‘Where’s the bombsite?’ Troy asked.

‘The kids call it the garden. It’s over towards Stepney Green. Most of it used to be Cardigan Street, before Mr Hitler.’

‘I used to walk that as a beat bobby.’

‘Well, you can walk it again tomorrow.’

‘The boy lives in your block?’

‘Ground floor back. Terence Flanagan. Otherwise known as Tub. No trouble that I know of. His old man’s a bit of a one for the bottle, but he’s more inclined to spoil the boy than take his belt off to him when he’s the worse for it. You know the sort. Showers the kids with everything that’s in his pocket from a farthing to a silver joey when the mood’s on him. But the mother’s a good sort. Keeps him on the straight and narrow’.

‘I can talk to him in the morning?’

‘If you’re up early enough. Stayin’ the night are you?’

‘If that’s all right with you, George.’

‘No trouble, bags o’ room. The place is half-empty after all.’

Troy knew better. Bonham and his wife Ethel had raised three sons in as many rooms. Two walk-through bedrooms and a living room less than ten by ten, with a galley kitchen that also held a bath. The only reason it seemed less than cramped to Bonham was
because he’d never lived anywhere else, and the only reason he termed it half-empty was that his three sons were in the navy and his wife had been killed in the Blitz of 1940. Troy had eaten many times with George and Ethel Bonham in the late thirties – arriving in their lives just as the youngest boy had signed his papers for Portsmouth. The Bonhams had fostered, fed, and, as Troy saw it, educated him throughout his first year as a constable.

Bonham tucked his helmet under his arm like a ghost’s head and prepared to leave. Troy picked up the arm.

‘You’re jokin’?’ said Bonham.

‘No, let’s take it.’

‘Suit yourself.’

Troy rolled the arm back in its brown paper and tucked it under his own arm like a stick of French bread.

Bonham opened his locker and scooped a small, bloody, newspaper-wrapped parcel into his upturned helmet.

‘A bit o’ somethin’ special.’ He smiled at Troy. The smile became a knowing grin. ‘The butcher’s a pal o’ mine. He’s seen me right this week. Should stretch to two.’

He tapped the side of his helmet, much as he might have tapped the side of his nose, as though sharing some vital secret with Troy.

‘I’m OK,’ said Troy, tapping the frozen arm.

‘Now you are jokin’,’ said Bonham.

Bonham lived in Cressy Houses, a few yards from Stepney Green. A splendid, if blackened, redbrick and red-tile exterior, rising four floors and bearing the proud plaque of the East London Dwellings company. Where the building met the pavement in Union Place it was still shored up with beams and scaffolding – relics of the raid that had claimed the life of Ethel Bonham.

‘Shan’t be a tick,’ said Bonham, shoving a set of keys at Troy, twisting his giant’s frame out of the car. ‘You let yourself in and
get the kettle on. I’ll just have a word with young Flanagan’s parents.’

Troy climbed the steps to Bonham’s front door on the second floor. The flat seemed more than half-empty. It smelt faintly of boiled vegetables, and while spotlessly clean and tidy seemed lifeless – occupied rather than lived in. He stepped into the tiny kitchen and lit the gas. He was struck by the first thing in which he recognised the hand of Ethel Bonham – a knitted bag for clothes pegs hanging on the back of the door. It pointed up just how little remained, as though Bonham had deliberately removed all trace of his late wife. The glass display cabinet that had once held an assortment of china, from a plaster dog to a couple of hideous red and gold crown Derby plates, stood empty against the living-room wall. In the spring of 1936 Troy had been the rawest of raw recruits, so fresh from the country that the tram and the taxi looked more likely as threats to his life and limbs than any criminal. Ethel had taught him city life, where and when, if not how to shop; how to darn socks, how to crack an egg with one hand and how to flip it without breaking the yolk. In the October of the same year Bonham had carried him home from the battle of Cable Street, when the police commissioner had been rash enough to try and clear a path for Mosley’s fascists by sending the entire Metropolitan mounted corps against the overwhelming odds of a hundred thousand Londoners. Out of control and terrified, a horse had caught Troy above the left eye with its iron hoof. Ethel bathed and bandaged the wound. Troy still bore the scar, almost invisibly following the course of his eyebrow. Ethel had taught him self-sufficiency, had unwittingly encouraged him in the life of the city solitary which he now knew to be, irrevocably, his nature.

‘All in order,’ Bonham shouted from the kitchen. ‘Tub gets a morning off school to show us where he found the arm.’

Bonham filled the doorway between the hall and the living room, ducking his head under the lintel. He unbuttoned his tunic and hung it on the back of a dining chair. He stood in his shirt and braces, unknotting his tie, the high-waisted regulation trousers, tight against his ribs, emphasising the belly-rise of a muscular man relaxing softly into his fifties. Troy hated being in uniform. Loved the anonymity of his plain black overcoat.

‘A nice bit o’ beef,’ Bonham said simply, and flipped the back stud on his collar. ‘I’ll slip it in the pan. A few spuds. A few greens. And we’ll open a bottle while they do. Come on, Freddie, get your coat off.’

He knelt by the gas fire and set it hissing and roaring into life with a Swan Vesta, as Troy pulled carelessly at the buttons of his overcoat.

Bonham sat before the fire, knees almost up to his chin, huge hands delicately cradling a glass of stout.

‘You ain’t lost anyone yet. Hope you never do. But because you ain’t, you won’t know. It takes some people different ways. With me … well, I found it easier to accept being on my own, after twenty-three years a married man, without all the knick-knacks and the paraphernalia. Like I say, you won’t know.’

‘Sooner or later we’ll all know,’ said Troy.

Bonham took the loose abstraction for something specific.

‘You mean the war’ll go on and on and on?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘The opposite. The war’s nearly over. London’s filling up with soldiers. You can’t get on a train at a main-line station without seeing queues of soldiers. More and more often they’re Americans. I think you can take Eisenhower’s presence in England as a sure sign - there’ll be a second front soon.’

Bonham spoke for Europe. ‘ ’Bout time,’ he muttered into his glass.

‘And maybe then old men will stop giving me the white feather.’

‘What? Literally?’

‘No, but any face under forty looks to any face over forty as though it should be in uniform. I get it all the time.’

‘Copper’s a copper,’ said Bonham with a sense of finality.

Not once had Troy been tempted to enlist. Not that anyone else had started a rush. The second war did not slavishly follow the first. It nurtured its own brand of confusion. Part of which was a wave of xenophobia leading to the round-up of thousands of aliens after Dunkirk and the fall of Norway. Amongst these had been Troy’s eldest brother – eight years older than Troy and unfortunate enough to have been born in Vienna (part of the Reich since the Anschluss of 1938) to Russian parents, inching their way across Europe in the wake of another great confusion known to history
as the revolution of 1905. Released in the autumn of the same year, rearrested two months later, and released again in the following winter, Troy’s brother now served King and Country as Wing Commander on the newly developed Tempest fighter. The grudge he did not bear his adopted country had, by some unknown mechanism, descended to Troy, who knew no other country, but which, for a number of reasons he would not dream of articulating outside the family, he would serve in no other way than as a policeman.

‘I cannot understand why you’re not angry,’ he had said to brother Rod.

‘No point,’ came the reply. ‘No point in rejecting Britain for its treatment of me. Count it merely as an accident.’

‘An accident!’ Troy had protested.

‘Exactly, an honest mistake. Whatever I may subjectively feel about my adopted country,’ he paused emphatically. ‘My home – objectively it is on the side of the angels.’

‘Fight the good fight?’ Troy had sneered at his brother.

‘If you like.’ The characteristic family trait of
laissez-penser.

‘It all leaves rather a bad taste in the mouth, don’t you think?’

To this the elder Troy had made no answer.

‘Homeless,’ said Troy.

Rod had waited, wondering exactly what his brother was driving at.

‘Doesn’t mean much. None of it means much,’ Troy had said. ‘Home, patriotism. It none of it means much to the homeless.’

‘I know,’ said Rod, thinking that Troy had at last reached coherence.

‘Homeless in the heart,’ Troy had added, blowing all coherence.

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

It had been Troy’s turn to have no answer.

Boiled beef, no carrots, spuds and greens of indeterminate species left Troy grateful for Bonham’s generosity and wondering why the late Mrs Bonham had not passed on her skills to her husband in quite the same measure she had passed them on to Troy. Bonham had picked up a second bottle of stout and was rooting around for the opener when someone banged on the door.

‘Evening, Mr Bonham.’ Troy heard a man’s voice at the threshold, hidden from his view by Bonham’s back. In a block of dockers, costermongers, rag-trade workers and chars, Bonham stood for law and order, for the decency in which all believed but occasionally could not practise – one of us but not one of us. The voice was respectful without deference. The ‘mister’ was Bonham’s undisputed right.

‘I hear you found something.’

Troy stood up as quickly as if he’d been stung. Bonham was telling the man he’d better come inside, just so long as he wasn’t wasting anyone’s time. A short man in a ragged jacket and heavy, canvas trousers stepped slowly into the room. He was almost as wide as he was tall – almost a yard across at the shoulder – five and a half feet of stacked muscle.

Bonham introduced Detective Sergeant Troy of the Yard and Mr Michael McGee, and pointed the man at a chair.