Second Violin (53 page)

‘Shoval was my mistake. But I didn’t know he’d signed any petition at that point. After all, it was never published. But I’ve treated every single death since as
suspicious.’

‘Then why the fairy tales about heart attacks and road accidents?’

Why indeed? No one had specifically told him to fudge the truth – but it had kept the peace. He’d not had Steerforth on his back in ages. By the judicious use of a little fiction,
he’d been able to investigate murder without Steerforth sticking his two penn’orth in.

‘Special Branch’s thinking, not mine. I was asked in a fairly subtle way not to say outright that I was treating these three recent deaths as murder. I think perhaps they feared a
backlash of some sort.’

‘I don’t understand, but I suppose that doesn’t matter. But what bothers me is this . . . if the letter was never published, how does anyone know what names appear on
it?’

‘I don’t know. It went to several papers. All of which were told not to publish by the Home Office. I have no idea how many people read it before that decision was taken. But
somebody knows. Somebody’s working down that list and they’ve reached “Nader”.’

There were times when Troy thought
Who’s Who
might be better titled the Index of British Civil Servants and Colonial Officers. Chances were if you needed the dope
on someone urgently he wouldn’t be in
Who’s Who.
A minor baronet would be – indeed his father was, thereby gaining Troy entry as one quarter of ‘2s, 2d’. A
public figure from the wrong class would not. You’d learn nothing about the well-known novelist Mr J.B. Priestley or the music hall entertainer Monsewer Eddie Gray from looking in
Who’s Who.
Every Sir somebody would be there. Sir somebodies of such insignificance as to be immeasurable – the last interesting fact in their entry being the word
‘born’. All the same, he kept a copy in his office, rather thought he was the only detective who did, and had every expectation of finding an entry on each of the men his father had
named. He knew all there was to know about Lord Carsington, and had a good handle on Redburn, but he began with the one he knew least about. He’d never heard of Charles Lockett. He was not
disappointed.

Military Cross in the Great War – can’t knock his patriotism then, thought Troy . . . but the list of publications was chilling, a course set steady from the
nineteenth century’s half-baked obsession with assessing the mind from the body’s external features, to the paramountcy of racial theory in the dirty Thirties. Troy did not doubt that
professors of this, that or the other got where they were through merit and effort and even originality, but how easily they made fools of themselves with easy, lazy populism. In this they were no
different from politicians.

He looked up. Stan had appeared silently in his doorway only the whiff of a Wills Woodbine had alerted Troy to his presence.

‘Toffs again?’ Onions said.

Troy wondered how much to tell him.

‘I think I might be on a case in which every suspect is a toff.’

‘Which one’s this?’

‘The rabbis.’

‘So you still think they’re linked.’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’ve someone in the frame?’

‘Not exactly.’

‘Fine, tell me how exactly.’

Onions took his usual chair by the unlit gas fire, hunched over in listening mode. Troy told him a clipped version of his conversation with his father.

‘It’s all circumstantial, you know.’

‘I know.’

‘In fact, I’d term it a bit of a long shot. In fact, Izzy Borg’s death could well be an accident, as I’ve told you. Friedland – OK, no argument . . . the bugger
didn’t stab himself. But Adelson . . . You said yourself Klankiwitch reckons it was heart failure.’

‘Induced by . . .?’

‘I don’t know and neither do you. You’ve got one murder you seem hell bent on mekkin’ three . . .’

‘Er, four actually. I’m counting the chap who was found dead at the foot of an escalator in Bethnal Green Station last August. He was a rabbi too.’

‘And now you’ve got a list of suspects that reads like . . .’

‘
Who’s Who
?’ said Troy holding up the fat red book.

‘Zackly
Who’s
bloody
Who
.’

‘Does that bother you?’

‘Don’t be daft, lad. We’re the Yard, we haven’t tugged the forelock since the days of Sherlock Holmes and that thick copper – what was his name?’

‘LeStrade.’

‘Right. LeStrade. I’m not bothered a jot or tittle if you suspect a toff, I’m not bothered if you nick one.’

‘But?’

‘Do you really want to go up against Carsington again?’

In 1936, when Onions and Troy had first met, Troy had fallen foul of Lord Carsington, had suspected him of complicity in a crime, risked all to confront him with it and been firmly put in his
place. Onions had smoothed things out, had reprimanded Troy, and rewarded him with a promise. A promise he had kept last September when he had finally claimed him for the Yard.

‘I’ll tell you now,’ Onions went on, ‘it could look like a vendetta.’

‘It isn’t. It’s got nothing to do with any previous case. He was named in that letter to the
Post.
He is as much a suspect as any other person named.’

‘Being named doesn’t make ’em suspects. All it does is make ’em undesirables in the eyes of a bunch of cranky old rabbis.’

‘Who are now dying like flies.’

‘Don’t exaggerate. It doesn’t help. Just answer me this, if you get to see any of these nobs and toffs . . . Carsington . . .’

‘Redburn, Trench and Lockett.’

‘. . . What are you going to say to them? I can’t begin to imagine what your line of enquiry would be.’

‘Neither can I,’ said Troy, ‘but I’ll think of something.’

Onions thought. Lit up another Woodbine from the stub of the last.

‘Anyone with four ounces of nous will just show you the door, you know that, don’t you?’

Troy said nothing.

‘So, let’s cut the risk, contain the flames a bit, shall we? Don’t talk to Carsington. Only if you draw a total blank with the other three and only after you’ve come back
to me wi’ summat that points to Carsington do you talk to him? OK?’

Troy hated this. It was one hand tied behind his back. To disagree was not an option.

Onions was right. A simple ‘where were you on the night of . . .?’ would have any one of the names on his father’s list reaching for the telephone and asking
for their solicitor. It seemed to Troy that each required a different approach. What that approach might be he did not yet know, but as he made his way to Lockett’s office in a building on
Malet Street, the first such tactic occurred to him – that Lockett was as likely to be as interested in him as he was in Lockett; that the man, whilst undoubtedly a charlatan, would see
himself as some sort of criminologist. Troy had spent a couple of hours in the London Library, had dipped into
The Criminal Skull.
It had been his father’s advice, uttered to Troy when
he had been a reporter in the mid-Thirties . . . ‘Mug up on your man. Not just his
Who’s Who
entry, but the worst he has uttered or written and remind yourself that this is your
man at his worst. For the worst that can befall you is to find your man “charming” or “intriguing” and then you should silently tell yourself you have read him at his
worst.’ To read Lockett at his worst meant dipping into
The Case for Race
too. He had given it fifteen minutes and no more. Lockett could not, would not charm him.

He was huge, and he was woolly. Giant’s feet. A soft, warm handshake. Grey hair coiling up in wisps like burst springs on an old sofa. Nutbrown eyes smiling at him from behind pince-nez.
The bushiest eyebrows he had ever seen. Mr Chips writ large. Indeed, it was a bit like being back at school, in an office stuffed with books, talking to an old duffer spattered with chalk-dust
– but Troy had hated school.

‘So good of you to call, so good of you.’

As though he had sent for Troy.

‘I’ve been asking Scotland Yard for I-don’t-know-how-long to let me study a detective. So good of you to call.’

‘Professor Lockett. I’m with the Murder Squad.’

‘Capital, capital. Do sit down, Inspector.’

‘I’m a sergeant.’

‘Sergeant, quite.’

Troy took the proffered chair, found himself facing a large, white china head, patterned like a jigsaw puzzle, with mental and moral qualities marked on the cranium . . .
firmness,
benevolence, destructiveness.
And next to it on the desk, a fat, black book,
Races of Man: An Index of Nigressence.
What on earth was nigressence?

Lockett remained standing and, much to Troy’s annoyance, seemed to be buzzing around behind him.

‘I have measured many criminal skulls in my time, as I am sure you will appreciate. I would even go so far as to say I have measured more than either M. Vidocq at the Sureté or the
great Lambroso himself. But the point, the point . . . as I have been saying in the
Journal of British Criminal Anthropometry
for quite some time . . . is that we must also measure the
skulls of the police . . . ah . . . ah . . . erm . . .’

Troy felt the man’s fingertips touch his head above the right ear. It was shocking, but he resisted the impulse to flinch.

‘Of course, ideally, one should shave the head . . .’

‘Professor Lockett, I’m with the Murder Squad.’

‘So you said.’

The fingers travelled up the side of his skull, and back down again to rest lightly upon one ear.

‘Hmmm . . . secretiveness and destructiveness . . . in almost equal measure. Would you say you were secretive, Mr Troy?’

His own brother was wont to describe him as ‘the most devious little shit in history’.

‘No,’ Troy lied.

‘Destructive?’

‘Who would ever admit to that?’

‘Hmm . . .’

‘I’m on the Murder Squad . . . and I’m investigating a murder.’

Lockett looked puzzled, busied himself round to his side of the desk. Then the penny dropped.

‘You mean . . . right now?’

‘Yes.’

‘You mean that I am part of your investigation?’

‘Yes.’

Lockett looked oddly at him – it wasn’t his puzzled look, it was something else, and then as the smile spread across his face Troy realised it was excitement.

‘Thrilling, simply thrilling!’

Troy took out the letter his father had given him and laid it out on the desk. The pince-nez were pinched back into place. Lockett’s eyes scanned the page, then the pince-nez were removed
as he stared back at Troy.

‘Unbelievable. Simply unbelievable. Somebody wants to lock me up?’

‘Actually Professor, it was several somebodies and it was last year.’

Lockett jammed the pince-nez on again.

‘I don’t recall that the
Post
published this. I’m not a frequent reader of the
Post
, but surely someone would have told me?’

‘The
Post
didn’t publish it, Professor.’

‘I’m sorry. I don’t understand.’

And it seemed to Troy that he didn’t. He was looking at Lockett and the look on Lockett’s face seemed to him to be one of real bewilderment.

‘Lock me up? Why would they want to lock me up?’

Troy recalled the pages he had read in
The Case for Race
– on the inferiority of Jews and Negroes, and how this was easily discernible in the alignment of the jaw, the shape of the
forehead, indicating as they did a closer proximity to
Cro-Magnon
man than to
Homo sapiens
, and how the Irish were really black men with white skins – and thought there were
reasons aplenty to lock the old fool up. But the phrase itself was telling – the man was a fool, or else he was playing Troy for one.

‘Professor, where were you on the night of 19 June?’

‘I don’t know . . . but I’m sure if I were to find my diary . . .’

He was rummaging through a mountain of books and papers now. And he still hadn’t asked what murder Troy was investigating.

‘Or the 7th of August?’

Lockett was looking at him now. The thrill of being part of a Scotland Yard investigation visibly giving way to apprehension.

‘Or the 7th of September?’

The pince-nez were let fall. The eyes met his with a concentration the man had not seemed capable of mustering these last five minutes.

‘Everyone knows where they were on September 7th. I was at home, in my Anderson shelter, in my back yard.’

‘Alone?’

‘I live alone.
Ergo
, I shelter alone. Had anyone asked to be admitted . . .’

A hand gently waving in the air between them.

‘. . . But no one did.’

‘Reading by torchlight, I suppose?’

‘Quite. Sergeant Troy, who has been murdered?’

‘People to whom you gave no shelter.’

Lockett looked shocked. He had not missed the meaning of what Troy had said.

‘I take it that is a metaphor for my work?’

‘It is.’

Troy took back the letter, pushed back the chair.

‘Kikes and niggers, Professor Lockett. Kikes and niggers.’