Black Out (9 page)

‘You will excuse me, won’t you,’ he said to Driberg. ‘But I think I’ve found what I was looking for.’

‘Don’t let the fool buttonhole you all night. The Raf turfed me out of the Lodge, but I’ve a cottage down on the quay these days. Come and have a nightcap. Bed for the night if you need one.’

Malnick turned his back on his audience and headed for the door. Troy met him in the hallway between the two bars.

‘I’m so sorry, Mr Malnick. I really didn’t mean to drag you away.’

‘You have all the same. I take it this is of some importance?’

Troy stopped himself from reacting to the pomposity of the man. A little flattery in circumstances where Malnick was accustomed to none might yet yield a dividend.

‘Truth to tell I rather need your advice about a matter. Can I get you a drink?’

‘No,’ said Malnick. ‘It’s time I was heading back to the Lodge. If it’s as important as you say you’d better come up.’

Troy could hear Bradwell Lodge before he could see it through the evening gloom. It was as raucous as the Green Man. A child of nineteen or twenty came haring down the drive, trouserless and pursued by half a dozen others waving pillows and cushions. It was, Troy recalled, known in his schooldays – a time he looked back on with loathing – as a scragging. Malnick stepped swiftly aside, not even pausing in his polemic on the strategic importance of a ground crew and traffic controller to the national war effort – but England had long since overflowed with such people. Troy met on a daily basis men for whom the war had inevitably come down to a personal conflict between themselves and Hitler.

They had scarcely made it to the front door of the Lodge when the same pursuit swung full circle and the trouserless officer nipped smartly between the portals only to collide with another buffoon who had thought it a good wheeze to slide down the Adam staircase on a tin tray.

‘And what’s worse,’ Malnick appeared to have changed the subject, ‘I’ve known the bastards to spend an evening chucking a chamber-pot full of beer from one end of the hall to the other!’

It occurred to Troy that perhaps the source of Malnick’s indignation was that no one had asked him to join in. It must be a soul-searing experience, he thought, to want so much to serve your
country, in one guise or another, and to do so only in the capacity of a misplaced and unrespected housemaster.

Malnick flung open the door to what appeared to have been a breakfast room and now served him as an office. A wooden label on the outside said ‘Mess Officer’ but the word Officer had been crudely crossed out.

Malnick stretched himself out behind the huge expanse of a partner’s desk that took up half the room, swinging gently on the revolving chair, revelling softly in the attention and deference Troy was fighting to remember to pay him. He flipped the button on one of the hip pockets of his battledress. He drew out a cigarette-rolling machine and a flat, round, worn tin of rolling tobacco. Another affectation of youth. When he and Troy had last met he smoked Black Cat cork-tipped from a packet. Malnick sprinkled the tobacco down the groove of the machine and rolled in a white paper, using every gesture to emphasise that Troy was waiting on his words. Troy wasn’t. He was wondering how to get around to the subject of the man’s identity.

‘You were a constable, weren’t you?’ Malnick asked.

‘Yes. I’m a Sergeant now. Perhaps I’ll be an Inspector one day.’

‘One day,’ Malnick retorted. ‘Now, what’s on your mind?’

‘Well … Yes, couldn’t think who else to turn to. A rather tricky case.’

Malnick bristled with unrestrained pride. A flick of a minute lever on the side of his machine and a thin, bent specimen of tobacconist’s droop popped pathetically to the surface. He lit it all the same.

‘It’s one you know already. A man was found shot in the face on Tower beach. About a year ago.’

‘I knew it,’ he exclaimed. ‘I knew it. They couldn’t crack it! They had to call in the Yard.’

Malnick chortled almost into open laughter. Troy could not be sure how much of it was fakery, but the pleasure in other people’s failure seemed real enough.

‘And here you are!’ Malnick revelled.

‘And here I am. They told me at your old nick that you might be here, so I … ’ Troy let the sentence trail off, hoping that Malnick was at least reassured as to his motives.

‘Quite, quite,’ muttered Malnick, blowing smoke towards the ceiling.

‘What I was wondering … ’ Troy struggled for the right measure of helplessness and flattery, ‘was about your notes.’

Malnick stared back, the smile of smugness fading fast. Troy knew at once he had wrong-footed himself and quickly threw in a qualifier.

‘We all know things we don’t put in notes. Certain feelings and suspicions that don’t quite work on paper. Copper’s intuitions, that sort of thing.’

‘Of course.’ Malnick paused. ‘There was an element of the macabre.’

‘Macabre?’

‘A touch of sadism, I’d say.’

‘Sadism?’

‘They shot him twice, you see. Got him out on the beach and put one through his leg. Just for the fun of it if you ask me.’

Troy wondered. Was this just lurid fantasy? It so sharply deviated from the cool, scientific analysis that Anna Pakenham had offered.

‘As though one of them wanted to hurt him. Deliberately wanted to hurt him.’

‘What makes you think there were two of them?’

‘Nothing. Just a feeling. As you say, not the sort of thing you’d put down in notes.’

‘No footprints?’

‘Tide had been in and out before we found him. I’m not surprised you’re baffled. It was one of the trickiest I’d come across. Scarce a thing to go on.’

‘It would help enormously to hear your reactions to the one concrete fact we do have. The body.’

‘You’ve seen the picture.’

‘There’s a world of difference between a photograph and the flesh. It’s how you saw it, how you first reacted to it that would help me now.’ In for a penny, thought Troy, and ventured as offhandedly as he knew, the one question that mattered, ‘Perhaps you could describe the corpse?’

Malnick seemed convinced by this preposterous bluff. He set down the damp stub of his misshapen cigarette and reached behind
him to where a mountain of cardboard folders were neatly stacked on the shelves. He pulled down a volume that looked to Troy like a child’s stamp album, or at least very like the one he had had himself, thick and tattered, bound in green leatherette with faded gold leaf lines on the spine and cover. Malnick laid the book on the desk, with the word Album facing Troy.

‘I’ve kept this over a number of years. Never quite sure of its value, but pretty certain that one day the record of an honest job done by a serving police officer might be of some contribution to the science of detection.’

He flipped open the cover. Troy could not believe his eyes. The man kept a scrapbook of his cases! The arrogance of it! Furthermore the arrogance of a scrapbook not merely of his successes but of his failures, which he scarcely seemed to see as failures. Malnick flipped the pages, and the book lay open at the Tower beach murder of 1939 – the case of the drowned child. There was a clipping from a local paper of a proud Inspector Malnick outside the court. In the background, Troy was certain, the small man with his back to the camera was himself. Page after page of testimony to Malnick’s egotism rolled by. Troy hoped the look on his face managed to pass off incredulity as awe. Malnick flipped on to a brown, fading chunk of newsprint depicting himself and the haul from a bullion robbery in 1941.

‘Now,’ Malnick was saying, turning a fat wadge of pages, ‘you take a look at chummy here.’

An eight-by-eight police photographer’s black and white filled a whole page. A close-up of a man’s face, a man who had been shot in the left cheek. Troy heard the whistling intake of his own breath and masked his surprise. He could not believe that Malnick had kept a copy of this photograph. Nor would anyone else, particularly anyone who thought they’d successfully eradicated all trace of the victim from police and forensic records. He was in awe, not of Malnick’s meticulousness or efficiency but of his own blinding good fortune. Malnick prattled again, taking Troy quite literally and offering a fanciful appraisal of the victim’s character, where all Troy had been hoping for was a description, but Troy had ceased to listen. He turned a page. There was a full-length shot of the body as it had first been found, lying on its left cheek, with
one arm flung out behind it and one leg twisted under the other. The grotesque puppet that was death.

‘That chap in Hendon tried to tell me he was German,’ Malnick was saying. Troy glanced up at him. ‘Stuff and nonsense, of course. Since I’ve lived on the coast I can tell you there are rumours of Jerries landing almost on a daily basis. Not one of them has ever proved to be true.’

Troy noted that the eight-by-eight print was held in place by black gummed corners. It would be but the work of a moment to tease it from its page and stuff it up his coat.

‘Quite,’ he said, echoing Malnick’s vocabulary. ‘I thought as much myself, but it does leave us with a problem. Who?’

He prised the print from its corners and paused, looking up at Malnick with the open invitation to speculation, knowing full well that the picture itself was worth a thousand theories or fanciful descriptions.

‘Crime isn’t what it was.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.

‘It organises differently.’

As far as Troy was concerned this was hardly a revelation. The fact that crime organised at all was a back-handed tribute to wartime efficiency.

‘Gangs,’ said Malnick with a melodramatic emphasis. ‘I’m talking about gangs. I felt quite certain that this was a gang killing.’

Troy closed the book and let the photograph slide silently on to his lap.

‘I’ll need a name.’

‘The Spider.’

Troy was startled. Was the man an avid reader of Edgar Wallace? The Ringer, The Fixer, The Twister – The Spider?

‘The Spider?’ he said, hoping that it didn’t sound like mimicry.

‘The
nom de plume
or what have you of Alfred Maxwell Golding. I talked to him only the day before my posting came through.’

Did Malnick really see no connection between the case he was on and the suddenness of his acceptance into the RAF? Had he so deceived himself that he could pass it off as mere coincidence?

‘Denied it, of course, but smirked like the cat that got the cream. Kept saying “go on, copper, prove it. Just you try.” ’

It was easy to see just how much Inspector Malnick intensely disliked being called copper. Troy had long ago accepted it as by far the least offensive, most convenient term – but then he had got out of uniform in record time. Malnick had worn his, with undoubted pride, from his first day on the force to his last. He had taken the jeering of children and the contempt of clever, briefed criminals and the blue had written itself into his soul like Blackpool through a stick of rock. It had rendered him as upright as a truncheon and about as flexible – and therein lay his problem. Who or what was Alfred Spider Golding? Was Troy witness to another of Malnick’s fantasies – or had twenty years a-coppering given the man some insight into the villains on his own patch?

‘A Mr Big I take it?’

‘The Mr Big. Holds court most evenings in the Cockle and Trumpet in Cary Street. King of the skivers, fence and receiver, Mr Five-bob-on-the-quid, dodged conscription from day one and recruited every other Tom, Dick and Harry that thought flogging nylons and forging coupons was more patriotic than doing a bit for one’s country. They’re more organised than they were before the war. So much of the competition’s out of the way, and the force is depleted.’

So far he was talking sense. Troy slid the photograph under his coat, a short step away from safe concealment in the armpit.

‘I’ve no firm evidence that he kills people who get in his way, but I know in my bones he’s responsible for two killings in the City district – he’s the sort of man that likes to make examples of people. Kill and let it be known. This has all the hallmarks of such a disciplinary killing.’

Troy risked the obvious.

‘Then why do you say it’s a difficult case? Why doesn’t the Yard’s failure surprise you?’

‘Because to anyone that doesn’t know the manor it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack. You were lucky in thirty-nine. Ninety-nine per cent of the time you can’t just breeze in from the Yard and put your finger on a quick solution. Can you buggery! Most of the time it’s down to local knowledge. To the kind of savvy you can only learn by the soles of your feet. This man was a minor member of some team, a firm as they call them, who got his come-uppance.
The only reason I didn’t get a chance to put a name to a face is that London, as well you know, is awash with new faces. There’s a sign up on the Great North Road – “Send us your bent, send us your crooked.” ’

‘You really don’t believe he was German?’

‘Twaddle,’ said Malnick with the emphasis of finality.

Troy feigned an itch to scratch and the photograph found home. He had what he came for, more than he came for. And if Malnick chose to fly in the face of the best forensic science in the world then he was a bigger fool than even Troy had thought. Malnick prattled, returned to his theme.

‘When they got that poor sod on the beach they punished him before they killed him. Someone on that firm really likes hurting people.’

It was the only part of Malnick’s argument that struck Troy as being worth a moment’s attention.

Driberg had burnt the toast. Twice. For the third attempt he handed the toasting fork to Troy and decided he was far better suited to uncorking the wine.

‘You’re the youngest, you say?’

‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Rod is eight years older than me, the twins five. I’m the afterthought. Their only English-born child.’

‘Would you say you knew your father well?’

Troy could not see what Driberg was driving at. The man had a penchant for gossip, but this, surely, was not simply his idea of chewing the fat? Not only did Driberg have a journalist’s nose – whereby there was no such thing as an idle question – he came from that same inter-war school of chequered, idealistic politics that characterised his own family. Troy knew for a fact that Driberg had been a card-carrying Communist – although why all Communists had to carry their cards instead of leaving them at home as
most people did their gas-masks Troy could never work out.