Riptide (aka Bluffing Mr. Churchill) (31 page)

‘D’ye still have a note of what Chief Inspector Nailer was wanting?’

Thirty seconds later she put a memo sheet on his desk and left without a word to either of them.

‘Ah . . . I remember now. He’s holding some bloke for the murder of poor old Walter. Bloke says you can vouch for him.’

Troy was baffled.

‘What bloke?’

‘An American, name of Cormack.’

‘Stan, Cormack found the body. He was the one dialled 999. He was sitting with Walter when I got there.’

‘Mebbe,’ a typical Onions word. ‘But for the last thirty-six hours he’s been sitting in a cell downstairs. Turns out he had a gun on him. You didn’t search him, did
you?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No, I didn’t. I had the publican call the Branch straight away – and they sent Nailer. I just sat with Cormack until Nailer got there. Cormack
didn’t kill Walter. He was in shock. He was in tears.’

‘And that’s his alibi? It seems he’s telling Enoch that you knew he was working with Walter all along. Not that Enoch’s ready to believe him – he
isn’t.’

‘I saw them together a couple of weeks ago – you sent me to a body in Hoxton Lane. Walter unceremoniously turfed me off the case. The American was with him.’

‘That’s all? Did you talk to him?’

‘I can’t remember.’

‘OK, I’ll tell Enoch. Mind – it doesn’t prove much, does it?’

Troy had never done anything like this before. He had earned the enmity of one or two of his superiors by being right once or twice when they were so clearly wrong – but
he’d never deliberately set out to interfere in a case being conducted by a senior officer, to whom he was not assigned, and who was, moreover, a leading light of the Special Branch, who as
far as Troy could see were special merely in that they were the only bunch of plodding thugs allowed through the doors of Scotland Yard without being clapped in irons. It would require careful
handling.

He killed thirty minutes in the canteen in the hope of catching one of the few Branch coppers he knew personally – Sgt Peter Dixon, who’d started at the Yard the same day as Troy. He
got lucky. Dixon came in, took his cup of oily tea and sat at another table, eyes closed, as though sleeping upright, without even noticing Troy. Troy took his tea over, and sat opposite Dixon. His
eyes flickered open.

‘Freddie – long time no wotsit. How’s murder?’

‘You tell me, Peter. I hear you’ve got the case I was turfed off.’

‘Oh – the Yank, you mean. By God, it’s a rum one – running me ragged. Says he and poor old Stinker were on a secret mission together – would you believe he’s
asked half the nobs in Britain to speak for him? Either they won’t or they can’t be found. Even asked for poor old Bernie Dobbs. I suppose you’ve heard he’s asked for you?
Says you knew he was working with Walter.’

‘I know, I’ve just told Onions what I know. I saw Cormack and Walter together on the sixteenth. But as Onions said, I don’t know what it proves.’

‘Bugger all, as far as the Boss is concerned.’

‘You think he won’t let him go?’

‘No. It’s rum. I tell you, Fred, it’s rum. Nailer’s taking this one personally. It’s not as though he and old Stilton were mates. They weren’t. It’s
more . . . there but for the grace of God . . . as though the Boss thinks it could have been him. I’ve never seen him like this. He’s worked himself up into a right tizzy.’

‘What does he think he’s got?’

‘Two eyewitnesses saw him go up the alley . . .’

‘Peter, that’s hardly surprising, as he was still there when I arrived. In fact it’s hardly evidence. There’s more than one way into that alley.’

‘Through the Green Man, you mean? A London local? On a Tuesday, just about the flattest night of the week? Just try walking through a local London boozer on a Tuesday and not being seen or
remembered. If you wanted to commit murder that would be asking to get caught, wouldn’t it? You’d be setting foot in a nest of nosyparkers just waiting for something or someone to break
the monotony.’

Troy silently disagreed with this. He’d learnt early on in his time as a copper just how unobservant people could be.

‘You questioned them?’

‘Freddie – you teach me how to suck eggs and I’ll clock yer!’

‘All right. So what did your eyewitnesses see?’

‘Hold your horses . . . thing is, they didn’t see anyone else. Boss attaches a lot of importance to that. The way he sees it, we’ve got a foreign soldier, out of uniform, none
of his own people vouching for him – that’s just downright peculiar, but the Boss thinks it means something – and the gun. It’d been fired, y’see. That’s the
clincher. Catch a bloke with a smoking gun in his hand and you’ve got him . . . well . . . red-handed, haven’t you?’

‘It wasn’t smoking, Peter. I think I might have noticed that.’

‘Been fired recently, all the same.’

Troy found an Onionsism useful. ‘Doesn’t prove much, though, does it?’

Dixon shrugged and slurped noisily at his tea. Thought about it.

‘You seem pretty convinced of this bloke’s innocence, considering you met him only twice. Do you know something you’re not letting on, Fred?’

The man was more awake than he seemed. It was not a question Troy wanted to answer, so he didn’t.

‘If the boot was on the other foot, Fred, and it was your case, would I be sitting here telling you that catching a bloke with a discharged gun concealed about his person doesn’t
prove much?’

‘Concealed?’ said Troy. ‘Concealed where?’

‘Clip holster, back of his waistband. Just hooks onto the trousers. And there’s one other thing.’

Dixon leant in close as though about to reveal the deepest secret. Troy followed, almost nose to nose.

‘Boss ever finds out you got any of this from me, you’ll be going to the next policeman’s ball with yer knob in a splint!’

Back in his office Troy tackled that which might prove much. He called Kolankiewicz at the lab in Hendon.

‘Did you do the postmortem on Walter Stilton?’

‘No – Spilsbury was asked to do this one in person.’

Troy supposed it was an honour accorded the fallen – to be cut open by the best pathologist in the land.

‘All I got was ballistics.’

‘You mean you’ve got the bullet?’

‘Yep.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘How does it compare?’

‘To what? – for Chrissake – they sent me nothing to compare it with yet!’

Troy went back to Onions.

‘I need to talk to Nailer.’

‘You know where to find him then, don’t you?’

‘I mean . . . I need you to arrange a meeting with Nailer and Major Crawley.’

Crawley was the Superintendent in charge of Nailer – Onions’ opposite number. A former regular soldier, he was always referred to by his military rank – except among the
constables, to whom he was inevitably ‘Creepy’.

‘What?’

‘Nailer’s sitting on evidence. He hasn’t asked for a ballistics test on the gun you said Cormack was found with.’

‘You can’t call that sitting on evidence. Ballistics isn’t everything.’

There were ways in which Onions was an imaginative copper and ways in which he was thoroughly a
man of his generation.

‘Yes it is,’ Troy insisted. ‘Set up a meeting and get Nailer to bring the gun.’

Onions had been at best half attentive to the conversation. Now he pulled back. Put down his pen, ceased his jotting and looked squarely at Troy.

‘Oh God, Freddie. Don’t make me do this. Don’t make me tread all over Crawley’s toes.’

‘Stan – if I stick my nose into Nailer’s case without you standing behind my shoulder he’ll blast me into the middle of next week.’

‘Freddie – don’t make me do this.’

It was the middle of a luke-warm afternoon, May drifting towards June, by the time Onions assembled his cast.

Troy sat to one side of Onions’ desk, watching the
dramatis personae
take the stage. Onions, big, broad, blunt and Lancashire – on his feet glad-handing Crawley – an
austere, upper-crust copper with the throttled vowels of the Edwardian age, hair almost a coiffure, a pencil-line moustache written on his top lip – and Nailer, like every Special Branch
copper Troy had ever met, unimaginatively neat, but unimaginatively plain. The sort of copper happiest in boots, bowler and macintosh. The sort of copper who was careful to tip the dust out of his
turnups at least once a week. But he looked awful, as though he was strained to breaking by this case – his eyes limpid and bloodshot, the plain, good suit now creased and crumpled as though
he had slept in it, at odds with the near-military precision of his character. Dixon was right, he had worked himself into a ‘tizzy’. He looked to Troy to be teetering on the edge. All
he needed was a nudge.

Crawley seated himself, crossed his legs and set a box folder on the desk in front of him. Nailer sat, conveniently, as far away from Troy as he could.

‘This is irregular, Stanley,’ Crawley kicked off. ‘I do hope you’ve something positive to contribute to our case.’

‘A bit irregular, Dennis, but hardly a revolution. You’ve a murder on your hands. And when one of our own goes down in the line of duty it’s up to us all to rally round,
wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Quite,’ said Crawley, much as Troy might have said himself. Then, ‘I read the memo you sent round about the suspect, naturally.’ And turning to Troy, ‘I gather
you’re offering an alibi for the man, sergeant?’

Now they were all looking at Troy, and Troy was wishing Crawley had not used the word ‘alibi’.

‘I knew Cormack was working with Chief Inspector Stilton, yes. I can’t say that I’d call that his “alibi”. By coincidence I was also the officer called out to the
scene of the crime. What I saw has not led me to conclude that Cormack is the murderer. I felt it was time

I . . .’ (What, for God’s sake, was the euphemism for ‘blew you bastards
out of the water’?) ‘. . . time we . . .pooled our knowledge.’

‘I see,’ said Crawley noncomittally. He jerked his head sharply left as though stung by an insect. ‘Enoch?’

Nailer rattled it off. Terse, precise and fuck you. ‘I found this Yank . . . standing over the body . . . a recently fired gun in his possession . . . I have two eyewitnesses who saw him
go into Coburn’s Place about twenty minutes before . . . he was the only person to enter the alley in the timespan we’re concerned with . . . and no-one, ’cept you, is vouching
for the man . . . his line is that Walter summoned him there by letter . . . needless to say he can’t produce the letter . . . you don’t have to be Agatha Christie to solve this
one.’

‘Might I ask who your witnesses are?’

‘Couple of streetwalkers . . . pairo’prozzies . . . working Islington Green. They reckon they were stood there from about quarter to ten, and they were still there when I got there.
They say he walked right past them – inches away.’

Another involuntary twitch from Crawley. Clearly, he wasn’t too happy with this as testimony. No barrister in his right mind would relish putting a prostitute in the box and asking her to
swear a credible oath.

‘Did they see anyone else?’ Troy asked.

‘I’ve already said they didn’t.’

‘I mean anyone, anyone at all. You said they were there from about 9.45 and were still there when you arrived. That’s well over an hour, nearer an hour and a half. Who else did they
see go into Coburn Place?’

‘Nobody – they saw Cormack, that’s what matters! How big do you want the letters, Mr Troy? They saw Cormack!’

This was inverse logic. Cormack was found in the alley. Ergo, he had at some point gone up it. This scarcely needed witnesses. What mattered was what the two whores did not see.

‘They can’t have been that alert, then, can they? I went up the alley twenty minutes or so after Cormack. If they didn’t see me, who’s to say who they might have missed
twenty minutes earlier?’

‘It’s who they did see that matters.’

‘Has it occurred to you, sir . . .’ It seemed to Troy the right moment at which to throw in a ‘sir’. ‘Has it occurred to you that for a prostitute to admit to you
that she was off the street for any length of time might be seen by her as an admission of prostitution, and that the reason they told you they were there without break was because they did not
wish to admit openly to prostitution in front of a policeman? They weren’t there when I went up the alley. Either they were being dozy – which I doubt, since their trade depends on
spotting the single men – or else they weren’t there, and if they weren’t there when I got there, who’s to say where they were at 10 or 10.30? Most turns take less than five
minutes, they could have had three or four men in rapid succession and still have kept their patch on the street. But Walter’s killer probably needed less than one minute.’

Nailer went from grey to red. Troy had done more than he meant to do; he had begun the logical demolition of the man, and it wasn’t over yet.

‘That isn’t the most important thing. Of course they missed the killer –’

Crawley was looking hard at Troy, his discomfort self-evident.

‘– But they would also appear to have missed the victim.’

‘What?’ said Crawley.

‘Quite simply, sir, where were they when Chief Inspector Stilton went up the alley?’

It was so obvious, it was little short of calling Nailer stupid. Crawley tacked away from it. If Troy had been in his position, he thought, he would too – he would bat for his man.

‘There is, of course, the matter of the gun.’

And it was the intervention Troy had been all but praying for. For one of them to bring up the gun made it so much easier for him to say what he had to say.

‘Quite, sir, and I must say I’m baffled at the weight of evidence you seem to attach to it.’

‘I don’t follow, sergeant.’

‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve asked for no ballistic tests?’

The merest exchange of looks between Crawley and Nailer.

Crawley spoke.

‘We’ve only the gun and the spent bullet that’s lodged in Chief Inspector Stilton. We don’t have the cartridge case to match up.’

This was old-fashioned thinking.
This was the way ballistics had been until about nine or ten years ago. They could match cases; they had the greatest difficulty in matching or comparing bullets – even now it was a far from
perfect science, but it was doable, and to a policeman of Troy’s generation it was the first thing one would ask to be done.