Black Out (Frederick Troy 1) Page 17

  Onions leaned forward, elbows on the desk.

  ‘We’re stabbing at shadows, Freddie. Give him till tomorrow evening, or this evening as it now is. If nowt comes through, call him. And if you talk to him the way you talk to me he’ll knock your block off. Now if Sparky here can keep his eyes open we’ve a couple of hours for the pair of you to tell me everything before you and I have to set off to meet the spooks. And I mean everything.’

  He reached into his pocket and took out a packet of Woodbines and a box of Swan Vestas. He lit up and sat back in patient, authoritative, listening mode.

  41

  If looks could kill Pym would have assassinated Troy in the wink of an eye. He opened his office door to Troy and Onions looking white and drawn. Being up this early did not agree with him. Troy had not seen him in uniform before. The muted blue of the RAF contrasted sharply with the efflorescence of his off-duty image. The office was barely big enough for the number of people it now held. In front of Pym’s desk sat Zelig. On his left almost in the corner of the room was a woman in a charcoal-grey twin-set. Pym took the chair on Zelig’s right, which left two facing for Troy and Onions. It formed a tight, antagonistic circle.

  ‘There’ll be no introductions,’ Pym said. There was a weariness and a paper-thin tolerance in his voice.

  Troy did not know the woman. Apart from Onions she was the only one who looked at all comfortable or presentable at this ungodly hour. She was small, the wrong side of fifty, but it was still evident that she had been good-looking. The signs of age showed most clearly in the lines around her eyes and lips – the eyes of someone who had spent years with small print and reading lamps, lips that had drawn on too many cigarettes. It was not a face to have been destroyed by laughter lines. It had an intimidating, humourless look. Her arms were folded across a small bundle of buff-coloured foolscap files, grasped to her bosom like a deterrent barrier. If Pym was anxious to avoid revealing an identity it could only be hers. Zelig coughed and stared at the floor between them. He looked jaundice yellow and distinctly unhappy about the situation in which he found himself.

  ‘Colonel Zelig has a statement he wishes to read,’ said Pym.

  Zelig unfolded the single sheet he had sat clutching. He read in a hesitant, jerky voice, as though unfamiliar with the meaning of the words he used. He coughed frequently and had clearly skipped breakfast in his haste, as his stomach rumbled all the way through.

  ‘We have been informed by MI5 liaison that Scotland Yard is investigating a shooting that took place in Manchester Square last night at approximately eleven fifteen in the evening. We understand that you wish to interview in connection with this incident Major James Wayne of the Office of Strategic Services. The High Command of the United States Forces in Britain, and the Commander of the Allied Forces are anxious to co-operate in any way that will further the interests of justice. Between the hours of ten thirty p.m. on the night of the nineteenth of March and three a.m. on the morning of the twentieth Major Wayne was in a planning meeting of Operational Command in General Eisenhower’s Head quarters at Chenies Street, WC I with General Eisenhower and General Patton.’

  Zelig looked up, folded the statement away once more, and for the first time found himself looking straight at Onions, a pose he could not sustain more than a second. As his eyes darted across to Pym, Pym spoke.

  ‘I think that concludes our business, gentlemen. I do hope that answers your questions.’

  ‘That’s it?’ said Troy. ‘That is it? You cook up an alibi, a complete tissue of lies and tell me that’s it. Like hell it is. Where is Wayne? I want to talk to Wayne.’

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ said Pym.

  Troy leaned forward to Pym and said slowly and quietly, pegging back the anger he felt, ‘I have a witness who saw Wayne in Chelsea at eleven p.m. I saw him myself in the Strand at ten past ten. He was not in a meeting with Ike as damn well you know. If you do not produce this man I’ll swear out a warrant for his arrest on a charge of murder.’

  ‘That won’t be possible,’ Zelig echoed with a croak in his voice. ‘The Major isn’t your man. Don’t you see that? He’s innocent. This proves it.’ He waved the paper feebly.

  ‘Will Eisenhower sign an affidavit to that effect?’

  ‘Now you’re being silly,’ said Pym.

  Troy turned on him. ‘I didn’t come here to listen to this buffoon. What the hell do you think you’re playing at? This is murder. Not one murder but four. One man shot to death, another cut up into little pieces and burnt, a third simply vanished into thin air and now a London policeman shot in the face on the streets of London. You’re not hiding this man behind anything. There’s nothing big enough for him to hide behind.’

  Onions sat in silence, looking in turn at each speaker, with not a flicker of expression on his face.

  ‘You’re forgetting, Troy,’ said Pym, ‘that well-worn phrase, a matter of national security. Major Wayne, I am assured, by our allies, is engaged on work of national security. It will not be possible to hear his statement except in the form you already have.’

  Troy got to his feet.

  ‘For Christ’s sake this is murder! You can’t hide murder behind national security.’

  The twin-set woman spoke from the corner in a deep, assured voice, cutting through Troy’s anger, with the power of emphasis on his own name, seizing his attention without raising her voice even to a normal speaking pitch. ‘Mr Troy. While we’re on the subject of national security . . .’

  Pym looked at her in surprise. Zelig squirmed on his chair in an effort to see her face. Clearly neither of them had been led to expect any interjection from the chair in the corner. She took advantage of the unnatural hiatus and one by one tossed the foolscap files on to the carpet so that they lay facing Troy at Zelig’s feet. In letters an inch high they were labelled Troy—Sir Alexei, Troitsky— Nikolai, Troy—Rodyon and Troy—Frederick. The last slapped down on to the pile leaving Troy’s name for all to see.

  Zelig flapped visibly, chins wobbling, his gaze flying between the files and the woman. Pym sighed faintly, the weary sigh of a man seeing the best efforts of mice and men go astray. Troy glanced at the file, and stared back at the woman expressionless. Of course he had long suspected such files existed, there was less in the surprise than she might have thought. But then he did not think the gesture was being made for him in the first place.

  ‘What’s in a name, Mr Troy?’ she said simply.

  For half a minute there was total silence. Then Onions got up and opened the door.

  ‘Good day to you, madam, gentlemen,’ he said, as if nothing had happened, as if he had not sat through the entire meeting in utter silence, and walked out without looking at any of them. The woman smiled a self-congratulatory smile. Troy followed Onions. Behind him, a second before someone closed the door on them, he heard Zelig say, ‘Now what the fuck is going on here?’

  42

  Onions leaned down to the window of the car and spoke to his driver. ‘I’ll walk a while. Pick me up at the bottom of Carlton House steps.’

  They walked along King Street and around St James’s Square anticlockwise. Within sight of Norfolk House, and a conspicuous Constable Gutteridge, Onions at last spoke.

  ‘Who was she? Any idea?’

  ‘Muriel Edge,’ said Troy. ‘MI5. F4 section head.’

  ‘You know her?’

  ‘No. I’ve never set eyes on her before. But there’s only one woman in a position like that in the whole organisation, and if she’s got all the files on my family then it’s pretty obvious that she’s F4, which monitors British left-wingers, and F4 is Edge. Ergo she is Edge.’

  ‘How come I’ve never heard of her?’

  Tricky one, thought Troy. ‘I’d call it one of the few disadvantages of rank. At your level you don’t hear quite as much as a sergeant.’

  ‘Understood,’ Onions replied. ‘But why the bloody pantomime?’

  They crossed Pall Mall in the direction of Waterloo Place. On
ions walking at a steady pace, not looking at Troy. Troy let the silence run on a while wondering what reply he could possibly give.

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said lamely.

  ‘You wouldn’t be holding out on me would you, Freddie?’

  ‘There’s nothing to hold out. I’ve told you everything. The only reason they have a file on me is because they have them on my father and my uncle whose politics are a matter of public record. Mine aren’t. How I vote is nobody’s business and it isn’t important. And as there hasn’t been an election since 1935 it’s also irrelevant.’

  They reached the foot of Waterloo Place, the top of Carlton House steps. The squad car was already at the bottom, waiting in The Mall. Onions paused by the Duke of York’s statue.

  ‘They’re clutching at straws,’ Troy concluded.

  ‘They’re not the only ones.’

  Onions moved down one step and turned to face Troy, putting them almost eye to eye.

  ‘Your evidence is thin, you know that don’t you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You ask for a warrant you’ll get it but he’ll be on the streets again five minutes after his brief shows up.’

  ‘Habeas corpus?’

  ‘Open and shut. Charge him or let him go. I don’t reckon much to putting Wildeve’s identification of your Yank on a foggy night up against the word of the American General Staff. From what I gather, Wildeve had never seen the man before anyway. You saw him at ten past ten. Just leaves time for him to be in Ike’s bunker by half past. They were lucky. It fits their story as well as it fits the truth. If that lunatic Pole out in Hendon matches the shell you found in Manchester Square to the one you found in Stepney, all it tells us is that the same gun killed Brand and Miller. Wayne will have ditched the gun by now. We’d never be able to tie him to it. If we find the cabbie who drove the bastard last night, that might be something. But as of now we’ve got bugger all.’

  Troy did not know what to make of this. Onions was breathing deeply as he spoke, as though holding back feeling. Surely he was not turning over the prospect that the case was a dead duck? Surely he wasn’t revving up to telling Troy to drop it?

  ‘But I don’t like being lied to. I don’t like being fed a cock-and-bull story by a bunch of spooks who’ve appropriated the notion of what’s in the national interest entirely to their own interest. I won’t be told to ignore my job and my duty just because a brasshat with a Gabby Hayes accent waves a scrap of paper at me and tells me a murderer has a cast-iron alibi as long as I don’t push my luck. I’ll be buggered if the Metropolitan Police Force will be talked to in that way. I’ll be buggered if a shite like Zelig and a jessie like Pym can lie to a superintendent of the Yard with a smirk on their faces.’

  Onions was close to rage. His face was reddening by the second, his voice had risen almost to shouting. He waved a hand off in the direction of the Royal parks, and locked his eyes on to Troy’s.

  ‘Nobody shoots coppers on the streets of London and tells me to look the other way. Nobody shoots coppers on the streets of London and tells me there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. I want you out there. Bring me this bastard!’

  ‘You want me to find the evidence?’

  Instantly Troy regretted such a lame remark. Silence would have been smarter.

  ‘Find it? Right now, Sergeant, I don’t care if you have to invent it! Get out there and do your job!’

  Troy watched Onions’s back all the way down the steps and into the car, trailing shards of fury.

  43

  Troy jammed the telephone between his neck and shoulder and doodled on the blotting-paper while he waited for someone to answer. On the eleventh or twelfth ring someone did.

  ‘Special Branch.’

  ‘Chief Inspector Walsh, please.’

  ‘Who’s calling?’

  ‘Sergeant Troy.’

  ‘Hang on.’

  Troy heard muffled voices as the young man put his hand over the mouthpiece. He already had Zelig – Wayne . . . Brand on the blotter and added another dotted line and the name Edge, followed by a question mark. For good measure he underlined the name.

  ‘Walsh here.’

  A much deeper, older, more assured voice than the last. Troy felt he could read rank in it. If man diminishes himself to a mere surname he must be very confident of his status.

  ‘Sergeant Troy. I’m on Stanley Onions’s team.’ He paused, hoping Walsh would not make him spell it out. Walsh said nothing. ‘Look. I’m only two floors below, could I come up and talk to you?’

  ‘I’ve already spoken to your Super.’

  Yes, and you told him bugger all, thought Troy.

  ‘I’d like to talk to you myself’

  ‘You can talk to me, son, but not in this building.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘D’you know the Princess Louise, Holborn?’

  ‘No, but I can find it.’

  ‘Six o’clock tonight. Get ’em in. Mine’s a pint o’ mild.’

  ‘How will I know you?’

  ‘I’ll know you, Sergeant Troy.’

  He rang off. The ‘you’ had been emphatic. Troy tore the sheet off his blotter and thought better of throwing it in the bin. If whole files could just vanish, doubtless waste-paper bins could be searched. Late in the afternoon as he walked north along the Victoria Embankment, he scattered its pieces and let the March wind carry them out across the Thames.

  At six o’clock of a March evening the Princess Louise had not yet blacked out. It had been a clear if crisp spring day, and Troy felt pleased that he could see the last of it blowing westwards over the frosted glass and the inscription ‘Saloon’. It seemed unlikely to be a pub that had a trade of regulars – too far west to be a local, too far east for the night-life of Soho. Almost anonymous in its Victorian greens and browns. Troy thought Walsh had chosen it for precisely this quality and its emptiness – the exact opposite of the concealment Troy himself would have sought, a private conversation buried in a noisy crowd. Less mysteriously perhaps Walsh had chosen the pub for its open fire. The place was three-quarters empty and the half-dozen American airmen standing around the fireplace scarcely kept the barman busy. He seemed curiously engaged in conversation with what Troy always thought of as a Bill Sykes dog, with its black-eye patch, perched on the bar. He addressed all his remarks to the dog, and the man propped against the bar answered – neither seemed to look at the other as though the dog were present as an essential mediator – the dog said nothing, simply staring meanly at Troy as he asked for service. No sooner had the barman set half a Guinness and a pint of mild in front of Troy than a large, heavy man – unmistakably a policeman – swung in the door and sat without a word in the empty chair opposite. He looked to be of the same old school as Onions; bowler hat, heavy, worn overcoat, boots and a greying moustache that all but concealed his upper lip.

  ‘This one mine?’ He gestured at the pint.

  Troy asked himself if he could get what he wanted without Walsh resorting to whole sentences. Walsh even sounded like Onions, and Troy wondered if the same no-nonsense approach might lead to a brief statement of the facts in the same blunt, broad Lancashire tones.

  ‘Mr Walsh,’ said Troy by way of a greeting, with the right hint of deference. Walsh took an inch off the top of his pint and began to rummage around in his overcoat pockets. A frothy strand of beer clung to the ends of his moustache like candy floss. From one pocket came a straight-stemmed pipe, from the other a pouch of tobacco. Slowly he filled the pipe, glancing once or twice at Troy. Troy had always thought of pipes as a way of passing off vacuity as thought, the hollow man’s way of seeming less than hollow.

  ‘I’d like to compare notes with you, Mr Walsh.’

  ‘D’ye have a light?’

  ‘No.’

  Walsh unbuttoned his overcoat and laid his bowler on the third chair. Beneath the coat was a double-breasted grey jacket, beneath that a cardigan with small leather buttons like macaroons and, Troy realised, as Wals
h reached into it for a match, the man also wore a waistcoat. The swathed layers added much to his bulk, added to the sense of gravitas he so clearly wanted to create. Or perhaps he just felt the cold. He lit up and spoke to Troy through the first puffs of tobacco. A waft of Burton’s worst shag floated across the table at Troy.

  ‘You’ve nowt to compare – you’ve come up wi’ nowt.’

  ‘So you’re still in touch with my Super?’ Troy tried to make the obvious sound like a question.

  ‘Of course. It’s your investigation, d’you think I’d not know how you’re doing when it’s one of my own involved?’

  ‘But you are conducting your own investigation?’

  Walsh sucked deeply, paused and exhaled. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m not.’

  Troy almost started in surprise. ‘What? A Special Branch officer’s shot dead and you’re not investigating?’

  ‘Murder is your department. It is, is it not, the sole function of Superintendent Onions’s office to investigate the act of murder within the Metropolitan area and as otherwise requested?’

  He sipped another inch off his pint and sat back to look at Troy, making Troy feel that his patience was a limited indulgence.

  ‘That’s just nonsense. You always chase up your own.’

  ‘Always? Mebbe. But not this time.’

  Walsh leaned forward, injecting a touch of confidentiality into tone and gesture, the deeply nicotined third finger that had tamped his pipe prodding at the table-top. ‘I’ve been told. From this end it’s closed. Orders. You understand? Now, I say again, you’ve got nowt. You’ve not found the cabbie that drove this Yank – in the best part of twenty-four hours no one’s come forward – you’ve no witness, you’ve not found your Yank – and I gather he’s come up with an alibi. Even if I could investigate there’s not a lead I could catch hold of. What’s his alibi by the way?’

  ‘His CO says that he and Wayne were in a meeting with American High Command. A meeting so secret that he won’t tell me where or what, just conveniently when. Among the also-presents were Patton and Eisenhower, and nobody’s asking Ike if he wants to alibi a murderer.’