Black Out (29 page)

It was obvious to Troy that Fermanagh had no wish to apply for the writ. Now he could read the man and the game he played. He wasn’t here to save his daughter, he was here to save the family name. He didn’t, Troy concluded, give a damn about her. Any halfway decent father would have asked about her well-being before playing police politics with him, and as the ‘sooner or later’ showed the old bastard probably thought a day or two in the cells was good for a wayward daughter he had all but disowned ten years ago. Troy knew that he had no case on which to hold Brack, that Fermanagh could walk out of Scotland Yard with his daughter, that he could obtain a writ of habeas corpus almost at the snap of his fingers, but he also knew that he wasn’t prepared to push the matter to a court appearance. He had gambled on Troy not recognising a bluff, gambled on the intimidating power of class and title. And he had lost. Troy got up – ‘If you’ll excuse me, sir,’ he said to Onions
and left. He could hear Fermanagh barking his name all the way down the corridor.

Troy relieved the WPC, pulled over an upright chair and sat six or seven feet away from Brack. She acknowledged his presence by looking up once. Her make-up ran in black rivers down her cheeks. Her sobs, though subdued, were still audible, and as he sat waiting for the time to begin again they seemed to swell to fill the room with the bottomless depths of her grief.

Twenty minutes or more passed to this single sound. Then she looked up again.

‘He didn’t do
that,’
she whispered. ‘He couldn’t do …
that.’

Troy returned her look without blinking. ‘Oh yes he did,’ he said at the same whisper pitch. ‘And you and I are the only people alive who know that. The only people who know him for what he is.’

Her green eyes flashed. She bowed her head and resumed the slow rhythmic sobbing. The door opened. Onions jerked his head at Troy to summon him outside.

Troy pulled the door to quietly behind him. ‘What’s Fermanagh saying?’

‘Lot of tosh about how he has respect for the due process of the law, greased with knowing the Prime Minister … ’

‘Winston won’t lift a finger for Fermanagh.’

‘… Half the cabinet, not to mention the Met commissioner – “but all the same, the law is the law”. He’s full of “on the one hand, on the other” kind of malarkey. I think he’d dearly love to strangle you, but he’d prefer it if I did. He’s implying a lot and saying nowt.’

‘Will he call the commissioner?’

‘No, I don’t think he will. But -’ Onions paused. ‘I’m going to have to let her go.’

‘I’m not prepared to do that.’

‘You misheard me, Sergeant.
I’m
going to let her go!’

‘Stan, there’s no need. Fermanagh’s bluffing. He won’t chase a writ. He doesn’t even have to do that. All he has to do is stand on his dignity and raise hell and he’ll walk out of here with her, writ or no writ, because I haven’t a leg to stand on and he knows it. But that’s not all there is to it. He doesn’t want to walk out of here
with her. In fact, he doesn’t even want to see her. He’s enjoying tossing points of law around with me and pissing all over his own solicitor. He won’t go for that writ.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because he knows bloody well that I have only to pick up the phone to the editor of anyone of my father’s papers to have it splashed across the lot, with every other daily to follow, that Old Fermanagh’s daughter’s been held under Emergency Powers with all that implies, and there’s not a thing he or his team of libel lawyers can do about it. He came here hoping that we’d just give in at the first whiff of grapeshot, a title and a reputation. God knows it’s probably worked for him all his life. I’d imagine rural chief constables jump when he barks. But I don’t and nor do you. So he opted to mix the bluff and bluster with a little fact and negotiation – and there’s the rub. That mixture doesn’t work. It’s so thin it’s transparent. He hasn’t the guts or, more importantly, the will to fight for his own daughter. He knows her well enough to know she’s been up to something, and whatever he thinks it is he doesn’t want it made public. He came here to learn what I knew, not to set his daughter free. The truth is he cares more for his own reputation than he does for her. After all, what’s a few nights in a cell when your idea of punishing a child was to beat her senseless with a leather strap and lock her in the coal cellar overnight.’

‘How the hell do you know that?’

Troy was startled. He had no idea how he knew. A distant, fogged memory of conversations overheard between his sisters and the young Diana Brack? Conversations that until now he could not have said he remembered in the slightest detail.

‘That’s not the point. The point is we’ve still got her until he makes us give her up. And he hasn’t done that yet.’

‘What more do you expect to get out of her?’

Troy knew the truth would be pointless. That he had no idea what she might say next and that therein lay the point. Onions would not deal in such intangible stuff as Troy’s certainty that Brack knew Wayne was guilty and if she could be made to admit this ‘who knows what might follow?’ He offered a mundane matter of fact. ‘Her movements and Wayne’s the night Brand died.’

‘She knows where Wayne was?’

‘I’m damn certain she does.’

Onions pushed the door open. Brack had not moved. She lay curled in her dying-swan position, puddled in black. Soft sobs came from her. She had wept a full hour or more.

‘Well. There’s more than one way to beat them senseless and I don’t think you’ll get another bloody thing,’ he said softly and firmly. ‘That’s my opinion, and I’m acting upon it. She walks.’

Onions recalled the WPC. She helped Brack to her feet. Onions and Troy stood looking on. Next to the WPC, even hunched in her despair, Brack seemed lithe and powerful. The WPC did her best to steady the larger woman, to steer her into the corridor, back to the front desk where she could collect her belongings.

She passed Troy with her head down, stepped two paces past him, turned and caught him on the cheek just below the left ear with a well-aimed right hook that wrenched her free from the WPC’s guiding hand and sent Troy crashing to the floor. She stood at last at her full height, breathing deeply, staring down at the floored Troy through her tears. The blow had been aimed with all the skill of a man but not with the force. Troy lay amazed but unhurt and watched her disappear into the corridor. Onions said nothing, but left without extending a hand to help him up. It seemed to Troy that the gesture had overtones of ‘I told you so’. He lay on the floor and stretched out in tiredness, cursing Onions for his unpredictability and his decency and that the two should ever so meet.

Later than he liked Troy set off for home. At the entrance to Goodwins Court, Ruby the Whore stood sentry duty. Back from one commando raid and awaiting fresh orders. She propped a ladderless nylon-stockinged leg against the wall and blocked the narrow alley.

‘You won’t be needing me tonight then, Fred?’

Troy never did. There was a silent pause as Troy waited for her to drop the leg and let him pass. Nothing on earth would have induced him to grab hold and simply lift it out of the way. The joke milked, Ruby straightened up and brought her heels together with a click, and her lips together with a mocking pout. She blew a kiss. Six feet on he stopped. Something in the music-hall routine of her regular mickey-take was out of joint. The question. The fact that she was telling not asking.

‘What do you mean?’ he asked, turning back to look at her.

‘She’s a looker, my boy, an’ no mistake.’

‘Who is?’

‘Dunno. But she’s been hanging round your door a good hour and a half.’

There was no light to see by. He walked as quietly as leather soles would allow up to his front door. No sound or movement rippled the air. The alley was pitch black, breathless and deserted. He stuck his key in the door and a hand closed over his.

‘I have to talk to you,’ she said only inches from his ear.

‘You’ve had three days of talking to me. Isn’t that enough?’

Her hand tightened on his, forcing him to turn the key in the lock or physically shake her off. The door swung open.

‘I have to talk to you,’ she said again.

Troy said nothing. Stood on the doorstep, turning towards her to see her shape and features resolve out of the blackness. A voice became an outline, an outline a shadow, and when the shadow spoke, he saw the merest flash of white teeth. He could not see the eyes, but knew they were locked on his.

‘He has gone.’

‘Of course he’s bloody gone. I’ve had half the coppers in London looking for him for days.’

‘No. I mean gone gone, really gone. He was in our apartment at the Savoy. But now he’s not. This time he’s really vanished.’

Troy muttered ‘Jesus Christ’ and stepped inside. He crouched over the gas fire in the living room and put a match to it. He heard her follow softly behind him, and reached for the light switch. It was dead.

‘The power’s off all over the West End,’ she said.

She materialised out of blackness by the pink roar of the gas fire. She knelt and held out her hands to it.

‘I’m frozen to the marrow. I was an age out there.’

‘I couldn’t give a damn. Why didn’t you tell me about the Savoy this afternoon.’

‘Do you think I have no loyalty?’

‘To a killer?’

‘I don’t accept that.’

‘Then why are you telling me now?’

‘I have nowhere to go.’

She slipped her cloak from her shoulders and curled her feet under her. Troy stood with his hands in his pockets. Coat on. To sit or to take off the coat would be tacit acknowledgement that she was there on his say so rather than against his will.

‘You’ve a bloody expensive house in Tite Street, a lodge on the old man’s Irish estate and a cottage in Suffolk.’

‘I mean no one to go to.’

There was a long silence as Troy avoided her meaning and gave rapid thought to picking her up and throwing her into the street. She sighed deeply several times. If she was on the brink of tears Troy was no more likely to be moved at home than he was at the Yard.

‘My father,’ she began, ‘my father took the Savoy apartment in 1938. He was terribly afraid of the Blitz. We all were. He foresaw London in ruins. And of course the Savoy has one of the strongest shelters in town. When he went back to Ireland in 1940 he passed on the lease to me. Not out of generosity – he’d simply been unable to sell it. Truth to tell I never used the shelters. Once a raid started I was rooted to the spot. I used to turn off the lights and stand in the window and watch the bombers across the river. Then I stopped using it at all. Until I met Jimmy and we needed somewhere to be together. Somewhere away from people, from time to time. When you came along with your silly allegations it seemed the perfect place. No one else knew I had the apartment. Not even the servants.’

‘Not the Americans.’

‘Certainly not the Americans. He stayed there while you looked
for him. I could only visit when your men slipped up. Which they did often enough.’

She paused and breathed deeply.

‘Naturally I went straight there from Scotland Yard. I walked along the river. No one followed me and I was there in minutes. And he was gone.’

Troy was angry and exasperated. He flung himself down in the chair by the fire. She was almost sitting at his feet.

‘I suppose you think I’m a bitch. It’s the only lie I told you. If I had told you where he was…’

Troy leaned forward as though about to throttle her, hands outstretched, his voice strained almost to shouting. ‘If you’d told me where he was I would have arrested the murdering bastard!!! Can’t you see the danger you’re in?’

She seized both hands in hers. He had transgressed, crossed the narrow line that separated them. He should never have allowed the creature so close. She leaned her forehead against the backs of his hands. He heard the swift intake of breath that presaged tears and as she roved across his knuckles and fingers with her face he felt the hot wet tears fall upon his hands. He told his arms to withdraw and they did not move. He told his fingers to disentangle from the web and and they were paralysed. He told his legs to stand and they cheated, pitching him forward on to the floor. Almost nose to nose with his adversary, like two enquiring dogs. She let go of one hand and pushed her fingers into his hair at the temple. He had transgressed.

‘When I was a girl I was fascinated by the darkness of this boy. Your hair so black and thick, so low on the brow. It still is. And the blacker black of your eyes. The darkness, the nothingness, the strength of silence. Was this child real, did he exist? Eyes let you see into the person. Yours just reflect back at the beholder and give nothing. I look into your eyes and I see myself as in a lookingglass. In a child that was disturbing. It seemed as though I must find a way to force a response out of you, out of silent eyes.’

That smothering kiss. Troy thought of the clear, fleckless brown of Tosca’s eyes which smiled at him regardless of her expression. Of Wildeve’s innocent, wide-eyed washed-out blue – the blue of jackdaws’ eggs. And Brack’s own bottle-green. He never, he
realised, looked into a mirror except when he shaved. The nothingness she spoke of scarcely surprised him but he passed most of his life unconscious of its effect.

‘That smothering kiss,’ he said out loud, and in the utterance offered an invitation that could not escape her. She pressed her lips upon his. A momentary glance as their eyes met before she closed hers and time past overflowed into time present and the smell of her scent threatened death by drowning and with it the awful, inescapable stench of carbide gas and the brief glimpse of the swirling dust of carnage before his overloaded senses forced it from his mind and the touch of Brack drenched him.

He put out a hand to her breast. Cupped it. Enveloped it, small as it was. Her tongue ran hard across his lips, searching out his mouth. He reached down to her calves, bunching up the fabric of her dress, riding it up across her thighs, under the loose silk of her knickers to rest his hand warm and wet upon her cunt. He gripped her pants and began to drag them down towards her ankles. Her mouth withdrew. Her eyes opened once more, staring into his. She raised her knees and curled her legs and pulled at her pants and with her free hand tossed them behind him.