Black Out (27 page)

Tosca stirred in the tangled heap of sheets and blankets and pushed herself up on her arms like a stretching cat. She yawned and began to pull faces at him.

‘Um. Yah Worra. Yuch. Boy – icky is not the word. I feel like someone glued my legs together. Worse,’ she glanced down into the pit of sheets, ‘I think my tits have fused.’

‘When I was a boy I used to make models of Great War aeroplanes in balsa wood. Mayonnaise made a first-rate glue as I recall.’

‘You better be kidding!’

She staggered from the bed, grabbed a towel and opened the door. Across the landing was a bathroom. Troy put the kettle on, pulled on his shirt and trousers, allowed enough time to let her settle and then followed, clutching the green file. Tosca was almost up to her neck in bubbles, and the skylight steamed up, cutting off the rays of spring sunshine.

‘Bliss,’ she said. ‘I hate those days when there’s no hot water. Y’know a true romantic wouldn’t sit perched on the john. He’d drop his duds and get in the suds. You put the coffee on?’

Troy nodded. She closed her eyes and sighed with pleasure.

‘There was nothing on a man called von Ranke last April?’ Troy asked.

‘No. Just a lot of mayonnaise, a lot of chocolate and a black book with telephone numbers and girls’ names. I stole some of the chocolate. We ate it around midnight if you recall. I figured you meet enough hookers in your line of work not to need Zelly’s black book so I didn’t bother.’

Her eyes flickered open momentarily. ‘Do you still think Jimmy killed this guy?’

‘Yes.’

‘Does the file prove it?’

‘No. It adds to the weight of circumstantial evidence, but that’s never enough. I need a witness.’

‘Sorry, can’t help you.’

‘Why would the OSS send Jimmy to neutral countries?’

‘A whole bunch of reasons. What did you have in mind?’

‘He was in Sweden earlier this year. Just the once. He’s been to Switzerland half a dozen times since 1942.’

‘We have our man in Switzerland. It’s a handy place to watch the Krauts from. It’s also a handy place to do business with the Krauts.’

‘Business? With the enemy?’

‘Happens all the time. If you don’t have any way of talking to them how do you expect to know when they’re ready to call it quits? Sweden’s another matter. Low-key from our point of view. As a rule it’s nothing more than escaping refugees. For Jimmy to go in person they’d have to be someone special. He’s not into helping the victims of Nazism for the sake of his health. They’d have to have something he wanted. There was a major flap on about Sweden not so long ago. I don’t know what, but our people over there had gotten hold of something important.’

’Something
not someone?’

‘I’m certain of that. It was all coded stuff, but there’s ways of telling. There was a lot of ranting and raving from Zelly – “Where the hell is Jimmy? Just when we get a piece of the action he’s nowhere to be found!’

‘A piece of the action?’

‘His exact words.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘That’s kind of ambiguous. It doesn’t translate too good.’

She sank down into the foam, squeezed her breasts together to create a small mountain of white soapy bubbles and blew hard in Troy’s direction. Froth flecked his face and shirt. She started to giggle and he knew his audience was at an end. He made coffee and left. She did not ask when he would be back, but then Troy read the lack of a question as indicating her knowledge of the
answer. Wild horses, or more appropriately, wild murderers would not keep him away this evening.

Troy let Diana Brack wait – on the assumption that waiting itself was something to which she could scarcely be accustomed. He had one of Scotland Yard’s larger meeting rooms cleared and sat her in it, dwarfed by the emptiness, with only a WPC sitting by the door for company, which company had been minimised by Troy’s instruction that the WPC was not to converse with the prisoner.

‘I suppose you’ll tell me this is all psychology?’ Wildeve asked.

‘If you like,’ Troy replied without looking up from his desk.

By noon Brack had been cooling her heels for more than four hours, Troy was up to date on his paperwork and ready for her.

‘Come and get me in an hour,’ he told Wildeve.

‘Eh?’

‘Come and get me. Interrupt. Invent something. A telephone call. Anything.’

Brack was pacing the floor when Troy came in. Her anger was tempered by discretion. She had little intention of letting the cheap tricks of police work get to her. She did not use the opportunity to complain about the cell or the tea or the dreadful food.

‘I suppose,’ she began, ‘that you’ll tell me you have good reasons for this.’

Troy sat down at the trestle-table and gestured with an open hand to the vacant chair on the other side. She stood behind it but did not sit. A night in the cells had scarcely dented her. She still looked fresh. Troy hid his disappointment beneath his practised policeman’s blank expression, and carefully arranged a series of files in front of him on the table. They were all empty. Edge’s trick was worth the try.

‘And I suppose you’ll tell me chapter and verse of the law which lets you keep me here?’

‘Emergency Powers Act (Defence) 1939 and subsequent extensions
thereto,’ said Troy. ‘The word “defence” is in parentheses, by the way. Lady Diana, why don’t you sit down? The sooner you answer my questions the sooner you’ll be out of here.’

She hesitated. The look on her face told Troy she did not believe him. Then she sat, hitched her long black skirt up an inch or two, crossed her legs and slipped her cloak on to the chairback.

Troy went into the numbing routine of times and dates and places and bodies, and listened to her explanations and alibis. He found no reason to disbelieve her. If she said she went to bed early with a migraine on the night of 24 February, he was inclined to accept it. After all he could check with the housemaid and no amount of loyalty would enable the girl to withstand a few minutes of police badgering. The night Miller died he had walked with her and his sisters from the Strand to Trafalgar Square, stood awhile in the fog as they gossiped and then had seen her flag a cab, some twenty minutes after losing sight of Wayne, as she pointedly reminded him. But he had no interest in these answers any more than he had in the questions. Wayne was unlikely to have had any eyewitnesses to his killings – and certainly not such as Diana Brack – who would by now have torn themselves apart in reliving the nightmare. He pushed no further. After an hour Wildeve duly interrupted. Troy hesitated in the doorway and flung out over his shoulder the only question that mattered.

‘Where is Major Wayne?’

‘You tell me,’ she replied.

Troy left her to wait in silence once more.

In the afternoon Troy asked the same questions again, and again and again. He pushed her towards the point of exasperation. It was a long journey. She answered Troy’s questions with a firm air of being bored. Troy waited for her to say ‘tiresome’, but she withheld even that small satisfaction. The slight variations in her answers served to convince Troy that she was telling the truth. Exactitude would smack of rehearsal, of a planned, contrived story. At 6 p.m. he returned her to the cells, having asked only one meaningful question and having received no answer.

‘Why?’ asked Wildeve.

‘She knows.’

‘Knows what?’

‘Knows that Wayne kills. She knows it and conceals it and lives with it. That makes her tough. One of the toughest people I’ve ever had to deal with. I would prefer it if she were at her wits’ end when she tells me all about Wayne.’

‘What does she have to tell? You said she wasn’t a witness.’

‘She is a witness to the man not the acts.’

Troy went home – to Tosca.

Late in the morning of the second day Brack met the same inane questions with the first show of resentment.

‘I went to bed with a migraine! How many times do I have to tell you?’ she snapped.

This was fine with Troy. The first crack in the ice. He tapped on the table-top with his pencil. Stood, stretched and ran his fingers through his hair. The display of a man at a loss for words.

‘All right,’ he said in a tone of weariness. ‘Tell me about the Major.’

‘Tell you what?’

Troy resumed his seat, still stretching and yawning, and listening for every variation in the tone of her voice and the rhythm of her breathing.

‘Anything … how did you meet?’ he mused. ‘Yes. That’s it. Tell me how you met.’

For a moment Troy thought she might not take the bait, but she sighed and looked at the ceiling and began with a breathy air of indulgence, the hint of relief that the subject had changed.

‘I don’t see how this can possibly be of interest to you – we met at a Left Book Club discussion in a hall in Bloomsbury.’

‘I see. I wouldn’t have put the Major down as an intellectual.’

‘You wouldn’t put him down as anything because you don’t know him. And if you did you’d realise your suspicions are absurd. Instead I think you’ve been talking to Edelmann and you’re repeating his opinion verbatim. Jimmy is no intellectual. What of it?
He has an intelligence Edelmann would never perceive. A native intelligence. He’s curious about so many things. An … an animal intelligence, do you see?’

Troy saw exactly. Animal intelligence fitted his idea of Major Wayne very well.

‘Everyone I know describes you as a bluestocking. I’m at a loss to know what a woman like you would see in a man like Wayne. An ordinary soldier.’

‘He is far from being an ordinary soldier. As much as you are from being an ordinary policeman.’

‘What’s an ordinary… ?’

A voice in Troy’s head told him not to ask. Too late. She was going to tell him come what may.

‘What’s an ordinary policeman? A man who wears size-ten boots, a bowler hat, suits from a fifty-shilling tailor and has celluloid collars to his shirts. Your shoes are from Jermyn Street, a single pair would pay a bobby’s wages for a month. Your suit is tailor-made by a man in Savile Row with whom I expect your father opened an account as soon as you went into long trousers. Your shirts are handmade in St James’s Street or thereabouts and your hat if you were ever so conventional as to wear one would be from Cork Street. That’s pretty damn far from being a run-of-the-mill copper as you well know.’

Troy was surprised to learn she had observed him so closely. He assumed a face of prolonged boredom.

‘In his way Jimmy is as different from the run-of-the-mill as you are.’

She paused, as though unsure how far to go.

‘Imagine what it is like to be me. I spent a large part of my life surrounded by people who don’t think and being told not to think myself. I come from a class that substitutes acceptance for thought. Imagine my childhood. I was brought up by one of Britain’s unsung tyrants. A man who by the time I was twelve had turned his life into one long moan of resentment that he hadn’t been allowed to fulfil his promise. That fate or worse, his own party, had conspired to cheat him of leadership. As his first-born I deeply offended him by not being male, and by adolescence I compounded the sin by turning out to be the tiresome kind of child that asks
questions. His response was to bully. Not just me, but my brothers too. We did his bidding or we were thrashed. We thought as he thought or we were thrashed. Is it any wonder George and Johnny are drunks and lounge lizards? I have been a constant irritant to my father. The boys have been a constant embarrassment. Of the two he found embarrassment easier to handle. Pay their fines, pay off the mothers of their bastards and pay to have them dried out occasionally. What he could not handle were questions. My father didn’t want me to go to university. Women simply didn’t. If he’d known what Oxford was like between the wars he would not have found cause to worry. It was like belonging to a rather fashionable, inane club. If he’d read Evelyn Waugh he’d know that, but then reading isn’t his forte. When I came down in 1931 I think he had one last fantasy that I might make a good marriage and be off his hands, but I soon disabused him of that.’

Troy knew how she had disabused the old man. Wildeve had regaled him with gossip – her unpublicised but notorious affair with H. G. Wells, a man old enough to be her grandfather, must have driven Fermanagh to distraction. Compared to Wells, Al Bowlly would have been a welcome relief.

‘I was looking for challenges,’ she added simply.

‘You’re not going to tell me that in rejecting family and class you also rejected the high life?’

‘No. And I’m not going to answer gossip either. I wasn’t interested much in the social round. But it’s there. Let’s just say that it amuses me sometimes to play the game. After all there’s such pressure to do it that to give in from time to time eases the strain. I’ve never had much difficulty combining the dinner party with the political party. I’m surprised anyone should think them incompatible. If you want your politics crudely cooked, then you may turn to phrases like “it pays to know your enemy” or “to see how the other half lives” – I know how the other half lives. I am the other half. I can and do return to their world. But that’s not the point. The point is this world. Trying to describe that without making you sneer isn’t easy. I don’t think you and I have ever moved in quite the same circles. You would surely understand if we had. The Left Book Club, the Fabians, the Communists are
simply ways of meeting people who think. London is so full of people who don’t.’

She paused. Searching for a clincher.

‘Tell me. Have you ever met Sidney Webb?’

Troy had met so many people at his father’s table. The Webbs included.

‘He has a fine mind. The energy of a man half his age. But talking to Sidney is like discussing the state of the municipal drains with the borough engineer. And there are so many like him. Social planners for whom there is adventure in ideas but no idea of adventure. The sheer solidity of it weighs me down. I’d given Socialism ten years of my life. I was tempted. I was on the verge of giving up – not the belief – but the organisation. And then I met Jimmy. Jimmy is everything the Fabians aren’t. When he walked into that hall in Bloomsbury it was … electric. He moved unlike anyone I’d ever met. He had conviction with calm. He talked and he listened with a composure that was new. The dreadful thing about the Left is that they long ago mistook outrage and urgency for efficiency and conviction. The number of pointless rows I’ve witnessed. I was fed up with them beyond measure … when suddenly a man appears with … dammit, with life in him! Edelmann is right in only the most limited sense. Jimmy is intelligent, he has a way of going to the heart of a matter in a few simple strokes, a few questions. He brought a new way of looking at things, a new way of … I … I …’