Orders from Berlin (8 page)

After taking out her key, she opened the door and stepped into the hallway. It took her a moment to get used to the darkness. Above her head somewhere there were voices – one soft, almost inaudible; the other angry, frightened, getting louder. She recognized the second voice – it belonged to her father.

‘No, I won’t. No, no, I tell you.’

Ava stopped with her hand on the newel post of the banister at the bottom of the staircase, craning her head to look up. There was a little light now up above where there had been none before. It was leaking out onto the landing two floors up, the landing in front of her father’s door. It had to have been opened, the noise drowned out by the sound of her father’s shouts.

Now all at once she could see two entangled shapes by the railing at the top of the stairs. They swayed back and forth, a contortion of shadows, and she tried to cry out, to make what she was seeing stop. But her voice wouldn’t come and her legs wouldn’t move, and she remained rooted to the spot, standing with one foot on the ground and one foot on the bottom stair as the smaller shape rocked back and forth in mid-air for a moment and then with an inhuman cry of agony fell down through the darkness, transforming itself into her father as he landed with a terrible thud, spread-eagled at her feet.

The noise released her. She screamed, a gut-wrenching cry torn from deep inside her body. But she knew in the same instant that her father was dead. She stared immobilized at his body, recording in an X-ray photograph seared forever on her mind’s eye the contorted way his limbs splayed out on the carpet as if he were some child’s discarded puppet.

The sound of running feet on the landing above her head recalled her to her surroundings. Her father had been pushed – he had been murdered. The man who’d done it was in her father’s flat. Now, in this instant.

She wanted to go up the stairs, but she couldn’t. Her feet wouldn’t move. People were coming up from the basement, saying things to her to which she could not respond. Someone was holding her; someone was going to call the police. And from far away, as if coming to her through water, she heard the sound of the all clear. The bombers weren’t coming to Battersea tonight, but then they didn’t need to. Somebody had already done their work for them, at least as far as Albert Morrison was concerned.

Not that he had any intention of admitting it, but Detective Chief Inspector John Quaid was on the whole rather enjoying the war. Perhaps he suffered from a lack of imagination, but it never seemed to have occurred to him that a bomb might actually land on him. Death was something that happened to other people – his role was to find out who was responsible. And ever since the bombing had started, he’d been busier than ever. The country might be coming together, uniting behind their defiant Prime Minister, but out of sight behind their blackout curtains the good citizens of London had been attacking each other in far greater numbers than ever before. For the criminal classes, the Blitz was a golden opportunity that might never come again. Glass shattering sounded the same if it was caused by a hurled brick or a bomb blast, and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns blotted out the sounds of illegal entry. Quaid had even had one case where a murderer had tried to pretend that his victim was a bomb casualty.

Tens of thousands of people were homeless, and the capital’s infrastructure had been torn apart. The demands on the police had mushroomed in a few short weeks and there wasn’t time now for days of plodding detective work, digging into witnesses’ accounts, trawling for clues. Instead cases had to be solved in a day or two or not at all. Policemen had to rely on their instincts, and Quaid had never had any trouble doing that; he liked to act quickly, to paint with a broad brush. His results were getting better all the time, and with a fair wind he’d make superintendent in another year or two. Not bad for a boy from the backstreets of Sheffield whose widowed mother had taken in washing from the local brothel to make ends meet after her husband died.

He breathed a sigh of satisfaction and slid his broad buttocks as far back as he could into the expensively upholstered driver’s seat of his big black Wolseley police car, holding the steering wheel tight in his leather-gloved hands with his forearms fully extended as he imagined himself for a moment a latter-day Malcolm Campbell racing his
Blue Bird
round the Brooklands Grand Prix track out in Surrey. Closed down now, Quaid remembered with a touch of sadness, thinking back to the summer afternoons he’d spent behind the crash barriers before the war, choking on the dust from the race cars as they chased one another around the hairpin bends. Some Nazi bastard had dropped a bomb on the place – just for the hell of it, probably. Nowhere seemed immune these days. They’d even had a go at Buckingham Palace a few days before – wrecked the royal chapel, so it said in the newspapers.

Quaid turned past Parliament and accelerated down Millbank, enjoying the heavy power of the purring engine under the dome of the sparkling bonnet and relishing
the rush of the
wind against the side of his face through the open window and the emptiness of the road ahead. Fewer cars were out in the evenings these days. Too many accidents in the blackout, he supposed, and not that many drivers had the petrol now that rationing was starting to bite.

He glanced over at Trave, sitting wrapped up in his thoughts in the seat beside him. He was a queer fish, this new assistant of his, Quaid thought. He was built like a boxer, with a square jaw and muscled arms, yet he was always reading poetry books in the canteen, looking as if he were a hundred miles away. As far as Quaid was concerned, Trave thought a damn sight too much for his own good, and it was a constant source of irritation the way he always had to have his own take on their cases. There was a dogged, stubborn look that got into the young man’s eyes when he didn’t agree with the line of an investigation, and sometimes his questioning of Quaid’s decisions was almost mutinous. He didn’t seem to understand that there was such a thing as a chain of command in the police force just as much as in the Army, and there’d been times when Quaid had seriously considered throwing the book at him. But then once or twice when the chips were down, the boy had more than stepped up to the plate – like the other week when they’d been called to a burglary in a jeweller’s shop in Mayfair and Trave had chased the perpetrator up the street and wrestled him to the ground, holding him down until Quaid arrived with the handcuffs. Quaid grinned, remembering how the two of them had had to get down on their hands and knees afterwards, searching for the rubies and emeralds that had rolled away into the dirty gutter.

This call sounded a lot less exciting – an old man fallen down the stairs in Battersea, the daughter saying he’d been pushed. Still, you never knew until you got there. Maybe the daughter would be pretty; maybe the old man had money under the mattress. The one sure thing was that whatever the case involved, he’d have it solved by the end of the week. That much he’d guarantee.

An old lady with a bent back, dressed entirely in widow’s weeds, answered the door almost as soon as they’d first knocked, but she didn’t step aside when Quaid showed her his warrant card. Instead she leant forward, warning them to tread carefully because the dead man or what was left of him was lying on the ground only a few feet behind where she was standing.

Inside the hallway, both policemen felt the bile rising in their throats. The corpse was a God-awful mess, but of course that was only to be expected when a man fell sixty feet down a stairwell. He was never going to be a pretty sight after that experience.

The fact that the only immediate light came from one weak bulb in a pale green art deco wall fixture on the side wall of the hallway made the crime scene seem even more macabre. Several people – other neighbours, obviously – were milling about at the back near where some stairs went down into the basement, and up above, a wide curving staircase with a thick mahogany banister wound its way up into murky shadows, broken only by a faint light visible near the top.

Suddenly a woman came out into the hall from a doorway on the right, swaying from side to side. She was wearing a knee-length brown woollen coat, as if she had just come in from outside, and a rose-patterned scarf had fallen back from her light brown hair to hang loosely around her
shoulders
. Her face was white with shock and her eyes were swollen from crying. She was one hell of a mess, but she was also pretty; Quaid had been right about that.

Instinctively guessing that the woman was the dead man’s daughter, Trave stepped quickly forward, blocking her view of the corpse, but she was looking up, not down, as if searching for something or someone in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

‘Someone pushed him. I couldn’t see who it was – it was too dark,’ she blurted out. ‘But I saw my father. He was struggling up there, shouting “no”, swaying backwards and forwards in the air, trying to stay upright, trying not to fall, and then – then he fell.’ Her voice came in gasps, words expelled between deep gulping breaths until she’d finished telling them what had happened, whereupon her eyes travelled down to the crimson carpet at her feet in imitation of her father’s descent, and she fell forward herself in a dead faint.

Trave had seen it coming – he leant forward and caught her in his arms.

‘Take her back in my flat,’ said the old lady, pointing to the open door through which the dead man’s daughter had appeared a moment before. ‘I told her to stay still, but she wouldn’t listen. It’s the shock – makes you do stupid things. I remember when my husband died. Put her there,’ she instructed Trave from the doorway once they were inside, pointing to a sofa across from the fireplace. ‘She’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.’

‘Did you see what happened?’ Quaid asked a little impatiently. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he felt a little envious of the way Trave had been able to step forward and catch the woman as she fell and then carry her away as if she weighed no more than a feather in his arms. For a moment, it made Quaid wish he were young again – not that he had ever had such an instinctive sense of timing as his assistant so clearly possessed.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said the old lady. ‘The caretaker’s nice. He lets us use his place down in the basement as a shelter when there are raids, and so I went down there when the siren sounded with the rest of the people who live here. Not Mr Morrison – he didn’t like it down there for some reason, except when his daughter forced him,’ she said, making the sign of the cross as she gestured with averted eyes towards the corpse. ‘And then a few minutes later we heard Ava screaming the house down. It was just when the all clear sounded, and it was like the two of them, her and the siren, were competing with each other, if you know what I mean—’

She broke off, realizing the inappropriateness of her comment, although it was obvious that she hadn’t meant to sound heartless. She seemed to be a kind woman.

‘Which is his flat?’ asked Quaid, pointing to the corpse.

‘Second floor on the left,’ said the old lady, pointing up into the shadowy darkness above their heads to where an upper landing was half-lit by some invisible light. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been up or down the stairs since I came up from the basement or I’d have heard them, but there’s a fire escape at the back. Whoever pushed him could have got away down that, I suppose.’

Quaid and Trave exchanged a look and took out their guns. Fire escape or no fire escape, there was no point taking any chances. The police had been issued firearms in the first year of the war, but neither the inspector nor his assistant had had occasion to use them yet. Quaid went first, with Trave just behind, both of them shining their torches up into the darkness. The stairs creaked under their shoes, but otherwise there was no sound.

Two flights up, the two policemen became more aware of the line of light above their heads, and when they turned the corner, they saw that it was a shaft coming through a half-open door on the other side of the next landing. Moving forward, their hearts hammering against their chests, they felt a current of cold air coming towards them.

Signalling to Trave to get ready, Quaid flattened himself against the wall behind the door and gently pushed it open, and Trave found himself looking down the length of an empty corridor lit by a single overhead light to where a metal curtain rail had been pulled down onto the carpet and a second door stood wide open to the night air. Quickly he ran to the end and then came to an abrupt halt. Outside, snaking down to the ground below his feet, a black iron fire escape clung to the back of the building like some parasitic creature missing its head and tail.

Trave shone his torch down into the shadows but saw nothing except the outline of a row of squat municipal dustbins behind a railing near the bottom of the ladder that looked for a moment like a line of men at a bar. Everything was silent – the killer was long gone. That much was obvious.

‘What can you see?’ asked Quaid, coming up behind Trave as he was examining the outside of the door frame.

‘Whoever it is got out this way—’

‘I know that.’

‘But I don’t think this is how he got in,’ said Trave, finishing his sentence.

‘Why do you say that?’

‘There are no signs of forcible entry, and the key’s in the door,’ said Trave, pointing. ‘And I don’t think the killer put it there.’

‘Why not?’

‘I just don’t see him going round the flat looking for it when he knew someone had seen him. He’d have been too desperate to get away.’

‘Maybe he knew where to look,’ said Quaid. ‘He certainly knew where to find the fire escape.’

‘Yes, but I don’t think that means he’s been here before,’ said Trave. ‘Most of these Victorian apartment blocks have fire escapes like this at the back.’

‘Well, aren’t you the expert?’ said Quaid sarcastically. And then apologized immediately when he saw how Trave recoiled, obviously offended. He hadn’t had Trave working for him that long, but there’d already been several cases where his assistant had noticed something that seemed minor at the time but turned out afterwards to be important. Quaid was an arrogant man, but he was clever enough to realize that two sets of eyes were better than one. After all, what did it matter who saw what, provided Quaid got the credit for solving the case afterwards. ‘Come on, William, have a sense of humour,’ he said, clapping Trave on the back. ‘I expect you’re right. Our dead friend probably had the door locked – unless he was too busy with his books and got absent-minded, which is always a possibility. Have you seen how many he’s got? The flat’s stuffed to the rafters with them. Come and take a look.’