Black Out (4 page)

‘George,’ he said, ‘we’re looking for a needle in a bloody haystack.’ He felt Bonham’s size fourteen tap sharply against his shoe, telling him to watch his language. ‘We’re going to have to search it all.’

‘Freddie, you’ve got to be joking. I don’t have the men for that.’

‘How else are we going to find anything?’

‘What do you expect to find?’

‘The rest of the body. Well, to be precise, bits of the rest of the body.’

Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him. Preserving innocence seemed a fruitless ideal.

‘How would you like to make some money?’ he said.

‘How much?’ said the biggest.

‘A shilling,’ said Troy.

‘Half a crown,’ said the boy.

‘You don’t know what it’s for yet!’

‘It’ll still cost you half a dollar,’ the boy replied.

‘OK, OK,’ said Troy, ‘half a crown to the boy who finds the rest.’

‘Freddie, for God’s sake,’ Bonham cut in. ‘You can’t!’

He gripped Troy by the shoulder and swung him round into a huddled attempt at privacy.

‘Are you off yer chump?’

‘George, can you think of any other way?’

‘For Christ’s sake, they’re kids. They should be in school!’

‘Well, they clearly have no intention of going. And they don’t exactly look like Freddie Bartholomew do they?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Bonham said again.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy.

‘On your own head be it.’

Troy turned back to the boys, ranged in front of him in a wide semi-circle. ‘I want you to look for … ’ he hesitated, uncertain what to call a corpse. ‘For anything to do with what Tub found. OK?’

They nodded as one.

‘And if you find it don’t touch it. You come straight back and tell Mr Bonham, and nobody, I mean nobody, goes near it till he’s seen what you’ve found. Understood?’

They nodded again.

‘Or the half-crown’s forfeit,’ Troy concluded.

Tub spoke up. ‘An’ a bob for me for findin’ and sixpence each for all of us for lookin’ or you can just bugger off,’ he said.

‘Done,’ said Troy, glad that things were now on a clearly established business footing.

‘I must get out to Hendon,’ he said to Bonham. ‘The sooner we get a forensics report the better.’

‘You’re leaving me in charge of this lot?’

‘Sorry, George.’

‘It’s a scandal, Freddie. If the mums kick up … ’

‘You know them, George. Is it likely?’

‘You know, Freddie,’ Bonham said softly, ‘there are times when I think there’s nothing like a long spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

‘Just doing my job. Call me at the Yard this afternoon if anything turns up.’

Troy picked his way across the bombsite back to his Bullnose Morris and the gruesome parcel in the boot. The boys scattered to the points of the compass, dreaming of riches beyond belief. Behind him Troy could hear Bonham offering the carrot-top sixpence for his hand-warmer.

Ladislaw Kolankiewicz had been a senior pathologist at the Police Laboratory in Hendon since it opened in 1934. One of the first recruits to the science of the gruesome, and bearing the recommendation of no less a figure than Sir Bernard Spilsbury, there were many who considered Kolankiewicz to be appropriately gruesome himself. Troy had come across him in 1937 and since then had watched his hairline recede to nothing only to re-emerge sprouting vigorously from his ears and nostrils and coursing along the backs of his fingers. He had grown stouter and more bent from his daily stooping over the dead and his English had not improved at all. Precise and flawless on technical matters, his colloquial use of the language was obscenely fractured. Policemen all over London and the Home Counties would relish visits to Hendon, simply because it replenished their fund of Kolankiewicz anecdotes, as he rolled words into each other in pointless, foul combinations along the lines of ‘Fuck bloody off bastardpimpcopper’, or as he now
uttered to Troy, ‘What the bollox you want, smartyarse?’

Troy was glad to see the room was empty. Too often Kolankiewicz had forced him to conduct conversations while he sawed away at a human skull or barked rapid summaries of a stomach’s contents to Anna’, his assistant and stenographer, perched on her stool in the corner. But today he was sitting quietly on the same stool, clean of apron, bloodless of hand, eating a spam sandwich and reading the
News Chronicle.
It was almost pleasant, despite the ever-present chemical reek that spelt out death to the senses.

Troy slapped his brown paper parcel down on the slab and pulled at the loose end. The arm jerked free and rolled halfway across the slab. Kolankiewicz shot out from his corner like a spider scuttling across its web. He seemed to stare greedily at the prize for a few seconds. Then he shrugged and looked up at Troy.

‘What this shit?’

‘It’s an arm.’

‘Mr bloody wiseguy,’ Kolankiewicz muttered. ‘I mean, smartyarse,’ he yelled, ‘where’s the rest of it?’

‘It’s all I’ve got.’

Kolankiewicz raised his hands to heaven. ‘Ach! Ach! Ach! What do you expect me to do with this?’

‘Anything you can. We’re looking for the rest now. There’s plenty of fabric. A cufflink, even.’

‘Ah! Cufflinks I like. Hallmarks. Craftsman’s initials. Distinctive proportions of fine metals to base – all very informative. What do you know about where it was found? What’s it been on or in?’

‘Not a damn thing.’ Troy stretched out a hand to hold down the arm as Kolankiewicz took a large pair of scissors to the woollen sleeve. A sharp stab of pain caught him in the upper left arm. He rubbed gently at the spot with his fingers. Bent double over the arm, Kolankiewicz looked up from beneath wild, bushy eyebrows.

‘Nice workmanship,’ he said. ‘High-grade silver. What’s the matter with your arm?’

A sentence in perfect English almost startled Troy. The absence of the ham element in Kolankiewicz’s voice made him momentarily unrecognisable as the demented dwarf he had known. Kolankiewicz straightened up. ‘Is that the one? Is that where you took the blow
with an axe? Very stupid of you.’ He came around the table, right up to Troy.

‘Let me see,’ he said.

‘It’s OK. I’ve seen a doctor.’

‘I’m a doctor.’

‘I know, but unlike most of your patients I happen to be alive.’

‘Fucking snobbery. If you’re in pain, show me. Don’t play the fucking hero.’

Troy plucked at his overcoat buttons and began to ease his shoulder out of the garment.

‘Would you mind washing your hands first.’

‘Eh?’

‘I don’t know what you’ve been doing with them, do I?’

‘I been eating spam sandwich and drinking tea.’

‘And before that?’

‘Jesus Christ. OK! OK!’

Kolankiewicz stood at the sink, rolled up his sleeves and made an ostentatious display of scrubbing up. Troy winced as the stubby, hairy, cold fingers poked at his arm.

‘You know you’re very lucky you didn’t lose the arm. That was a very deep wound. You had a good surgeon. Lovely job.’

‘Why does it hurt?’

‘You have your arm almost chopped in two and you ask why it hurts?’

‘Now. Why does it hurt now? What’s wrong?’

‘Swelling where the stitches came out – perhaps some minor infection of the needle holes, not the real wound. I’ll give you some surgical spirit and you wash it down for a couple of days. You’ll be fine. When did the stitches come out?’

‘Three days ago.’

‘Then you shouldn’t worry. What you should worry about is why you let yourself get locked up alone in a room with a lunatic axeman.’

Kolankiewicz took a small brown bottle off the shelf above the sink, splashed a little of its contents over a swab and bathed the four-inch scar.

‘This guy,’ he went on. ‘The one in the papers. Killed his good lady’s paramour. Chopped off two of the postman’s fingers. Broke
the wrist of a constable. And you walk into his house and tell him to give himself up. You’re crazy! This Oxbridge—’

‘Uxbridge,’ said Troy.

‘This Uxbridge axeman could have killed you.’

Kolankiewicz rolled down Troy’s shirtsleeve and fastened the button at the cuff in a gesture that was curiously paternal.

‘No – I don’t think so.’

‘Always the fucking hero.’

‘Heroics has nothing to do with it. It was all down to knowing the man.’

‘Psychology?’

‘If you like.’

‘Fucking guesswork I’d call it.’

‘Have it your own way. But once he’d nicked me—’

‘Nicked. Troy, you’re full of crap.’

‘Nicked me! – it was all over. He got what he wanted. He’d seen blood. The sight of blood was the culmination for him – it satisfied and defused him. After that it was a matter of simply sitting there and talking him out. He wasn’t going to chop me into pieces. The only person he was ever going to chop into pieces was his wife’s lover.’

‘And while you – Mr Smartyarse – were talking him out, where was the axe?’

‘On the floor between us.’

‘And what did you do? Sit there with a home-made tourniquet on, hoping he’d surrender before you bled to death?’

‘The old school tie. First use I’ve ever found for it.’

Kolankiewicz thrust the bottle at him. ‘Twice a day till the soreness goes. Now scram. I give you my report as soon as I can.’

The gas fire in Troy’s office sputtered at him and refused the match. All over London, gas-holders sat squat on the skyline like gigantic gibuses. One of them must have been hit in last night’s raid, Troy
thought. He twisted the tap on and off in the hope of jerking the fire into life. He heard the soft click of the door opening and looked up to see the Squad Commander, Superintendent Onions. Onions leaned on the edge of Troy’s desk and folded his arms.

‘Been asking for you,’ he said softly in his Rochdale baritone.

Troy stood up and flicked the dust off his trousers and wondered if this was a reprimand. Onions was a bull of a man – five foot nine of packed muscle – with a bull’s unpredictability, stubbornness and unprepossessing appearance. Troy had never been certain of his age, but guessed at fifty – the hair, long since grey, was ruthlessly clipped at the back and sides, leaving the stubble of a crewcut along the top of his head – the bright blue eyes still burned brightly in the lined face. Onions looked sharp and bullet-headed, the intensity of his gaze at odds with his sheer bulk and with his almost thoughtless appearance. He dressed habitually in the manner of the older generation; a heavy double-breasted suit in a dull shade of oxblood enlivened only by a thin scarlet stripe and wonderfully counter-pointed by regulation-issue black Metropolitan Police boots. It was, Troy reflected, the kind of suit Hitler favoured, but for the fact that the Führer seemed to have frequent difficulty finding the matching trousers first thing in the morning. Troy knew for a fact that in the complexity of Onions’s nature there lay an element of insecurity – he wore both belt and braces. Onions it had been who’d rescued Troy from Leman Street and made him a sergeant. His advocacy of Troy had brought Troy to the brink of an early inspectorship. It was expected any day. But the relationship could be fractious. Outguessing Onions was pointless. Most of the time, in the privacy of his office or Troy’s, they were on Christian name terms. But there were days when they weren’t. And if they weren’t they weren’t.

‘I’ve been to Hendon, Stan,’ Troy told Onions, sounding his mood. ‘I had to see Kolankiewicz.’

‘Does he improve?’

‘Foul as ever. You could never say he wears his heart on his sleeve.’

Onions unfolded his arms and laid his palms on the ripped and cracked leatherette of Troy’s desk. Certain now of his footing with
his chief, Troy took another shot at the gas fire and brought it hissing and spitting to feeble life.

‘He’ll have his hands full soon enough,’ said Onions.

‘A murder?’ said Troy.

‘That’s why I wanted you. During last night’s air raid an American soldier got his throat cut not two hundred yards from here.’

‘Onions’s words shot through Troy like electricity.

‘Where?’

‘Trafalgar Square. Of all places. An infantry corporal walked out of a pub in the Strand about tennish and was found half an hour later by the bobby on the beat with his throat cut to ribbons.’

‘Bottle?’

‘Fragments of green glass still embedded in the victim’s flesh.’

The gas fire popped and roared suddenly as the pressure returned. Troy put the matchbox back on the mantelpiece and moved round to the far side of his desk by the window, skirting the temporary beam that had been temporarily holding up the ceiling since the direct hit of 1941. He knew what was coming and he was wondering how best to avoid it. How best to state his case. In a game of stakes and odds, Onions held a full corpse to his one arm – he didn’t even have a pair.

‘This is murder too, Stan,’ he said.

‘What’s murder?’

‘The Stepney case. That’s why I was in Hendon. I took Kolankiewicz the arm.’

‘A bomb victim, surely?’ said Onions, turning to keep track of Troy as he paced across the window.

‘No. Murder. Sophisticated, brutal murder.’

Onions joined Troy at the window and looked out. People with views of the Thames seemed always to be looking out, expecting more from the promise than the view would ever deliver.

‘Sophisticated?’ Onions queried.

‘The victim was killed and then dismembered – fairly systematically I should say – in an attempt to dispose of the body. It wasn’t the heat of the moment, it wasn’t blind panic, it was coldblooded and calculated. Somehow, something went wrong. The arm got missed, or the dog stole it – or whatever – fortunately the dog didn’t eat it, and that’s a small miracle, and it came into our
hands. If it hadn’t some poor sod out there would simply have disappeared without trace.’

‘What’ve you got?’

‘Just the arm. Bonham’s searching the site now. Today or tomorrow I’ll get a forensic report and of course a full set of left-hand prints.’

‘It’s not much.’

‘It’s murder. Not the work of some angry, despairing man who lashes out and kills. The work of a planner, someone who means to get away with it, someone with ice in his veins and steel in his spine, enough to patiently dismember his victim. Enough to overcome the horror of his actions. Someone who does not flee from death. I’ve usually profited from the fact that most killers want to be caught. They are, in a sense, the perpetrators of some awful accident rather than killers. They run and then turn themselves in, or leave a trail I could follow with my eyes closed. They want me. I’m the redemption. I’m a necessary part of coping with what they’ve done. Even if I’m just one stage on the way to the gallows. I’ve known men who’ve sat there hugging the corpse, willing the life back into it, I’ve known men confess one day and deny the next – anything to undo the deed, anything to repeat the act of confession. This one’s not like that. Anyone who can do this once can do it again.’