Second Violin (51 page)

‘The Branch?’

‘The Branch.’

‘And Steerforth?’

A pause. The only sound the distant clicking of rotary dials somewhere on the phone line.

‘Fuckim,’ said Troy, and Onions did not argue.

Kolankiewicz called Troy about three hours later.

‘The fingerprints on the knife are blurred, but I suspect they all belong to the victim, and that the knife was simply picked up in the room. The only clear prints I have are on the tea
cup and the bible.’

‘George sent the bible over?’

‘George even sent the tablecloth. You should be pleased someone takes your orders literally.’

‘And the print is clear?’

‘Too clear, and alas it belongs to the victim also.’

‘How can a print be too clear?’

‘Is as though I had taken it myself, rolled the finger across the ink pad and then rolled it across the book. Except that the ink is blood in this case.’

‘You mean Friedland didn’t touch the book?’

‘Not while he was alive.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘No. But it seems highly likely. Besides what would an Orthodox rabbi be doing with an English translation of the bible? It would be like you reading Dostoevsky in English.’

‘I’ve been asking myself that all morning. So it wasn’t his? You think what? That the killer brought it with him?’

‘Yes. I think he brought it with him. And as there’s a Hatchards sticker in the end papers, I think he bought it at Hatchards.’

‘At last,’ Troy said. ‘Something resembling a clue.’

He was about to ring off when the meaning of the ‘clue’ struck him.

‘The print? Where was it?’

‘Index finger, right hand.’

‘I meant, where on the page?’

Kolankiewicz went to look. A few seconds later he picked up the telephone again and said, ‘Isaiah 34:8. “For it is the day of the Lord’s vengeance and the year of recompenses
for the controversy of Zion.” The print is on the second line, next to the word “Zion”. Does this help in any way?’

‘God knows. But it does seem like a message to us from the killer, doesn’t it?’

‘Such an arrogant message. Equating himself with God. That said, he could have plonked the finger down almost anywhere in this chapter and come up with something appropriate, meaningful
even. We would be compelled to see significance in a random act. It is all of it apocalyptic in the extreme . . . “the indignation of the Lord is upon all nations” . . . “the
sword of the Lord is filled with blood” . . . streams turning into pitch, dust into brimstone . . . smoke that rises forever . . . I might be tempted to think it was a prophecy fulfilled all
over London in the last twenty-four hours.’

It was Sunday. Troy could not call Hatchards until the morning. At dusk Kitty called him.

‘I won’t be over tonight.’

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m still at me mum’s. We got June Spendlove here. She ain’t said a word all day. In fact, we got half the street here. The electric’s still off and God knows when
we’ll get gas, but Mum cooks on coal so we’re OK. She’s been boiling kettles for everybody. It’s like we’ve opened a caff. Churchill come down the street this
afternoon. Mum and Aunt Dolly stood on the front step and chatted to him. They was thrilled to bits. More than if the King had come round. Mum asked him in for a cuppa but he told her he’d a
lot of people to get to see. I wanted to be thrilled to bits, but I couldn’t. I don’t know why. I just couldn’t. Aunt Dolly had a Union Jack to wave. God knows where she found it.
I took meself out for a bit of air afterwards – I almost said fresh air, but it ain’t fresh. It stinks. Like burning paint. Like . . . like rotten eggs. And it’s more than a smell
. . . it’s like it sticks to the back of your throat or something. Like you could cough it up, but you can’t cough it up. Anyway . . . there’s this big pile of rubble at the
bottom of our street. And someone had stuck a Union Jack on it. Like we’d just climbed a mountain. And we was proud of it and we was like claiming it for England. Like Jerry could see
it.’

‘Perhaps the Prime Minister saw it.’

‘You think he needs cheering up? If he needed cheering up he’d have had the cup of tea with Mum and Aunt Dolly, wouldn’t he?’

Troy ignored the sarcasm.

‘You’re staying on, aren’t you?’

‘Yeah. Just for a bit. I feel better knowing me mum’s OK, but I’ll spend a few nights here. My dad won’t be back for ages yet. He’s not got a free weekend until the
end of the month. She hates sleeping alone. And . . . I mean . . . you never know when
they’ll
be back, do you?’

Troy would not have been the one to tell her, but he was certain they’d be back any minute.

And they were.

Around ten o’clock, with no Kitty to restrain him, he did what she would not let him. He turned up the collar on his overcoat, stuck his hands in his pockets and walked east into the glow
of London’s burning, walked into the shooting stars, the whines and the whistles of London’s war – walked into ‘it’. And as night became day and silence burst around
him into noise that seemed to inhabit the skull, he was put in mind of Yeats’ best-known line, ‘A terrible beauty is born.’

He would have liked to be thrilled by a visit from Churchill, but the truth, the awful, the absolute truth, was that he was thrilled by this – by ‘it’. It was like the descent
into a dream. The descent from a dream. He would never be sure which.

The bloke in Hatchards was blunt.

‘That’s a very tall order. A rare book, a rare book bought on account, we might be able to tell you quite quickly. The bible? Do you even know the edition? We must sell dozens,
hundreds. Do you know when? Last week? Last year?’

Troy had one clue – and he’d just seen it run through his fingers like sand.

Kitty did not return. He found he did not much mind. He found bodies to preoccupy him. Was the gunshot victim found almost headless in a mansion block off Gloucester Road a
suicide or a murder?

Troy examined the body, sent for Kolankiewicz. They agreed on suicide.

The following day a man found pooled in blood in a shop doorway as wardens picked their way through Soho after the all-clear was found to have his throat cut. The wardens cried
‘murder’ and called Scotland Yard. Troy examined the body, took out his penknife, cut a sliver of shrapnel out of the wooden shopfront and sent it to Hendon with the body.

‘Poor bugger,’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘Takes shelter from the Hun and a piece of British shrapnel slit his throat for him.’

‘The blood groups match?’

‘They do. You’re not having a lot of luck, are you?’

‘Never a good body when you want one.’

Still Kitty did not return.

When the local warden, Cyril Spender, knocked on his door and asked if he could firewatch on the roof of the Coliseum Theatre in St Martin’s Lane Troy said that, duty permitting, he would.
He did not have the engagement of a uniformed copper – Kitty had been right about that – he had received no extra training, all that had happened was that he’d been issued with a
tin hat and a gas mask, neither of which he ever carried. Bonham had insisted on showing him how a stirrup pump worked, and he had paid no attention. Now, Spender taught him how to handle
incendiaries. He had a duff one to demonstrate. It looked to Troy like a thermos flask.

‘The trick is to smother it, stop it igniting in the first place. If it does, you’re stuffed ’cos it burns at 648.8°C.’

‘Hot, is it?’ Troy asked, not being able to think in anything but Fahrenheit.’

‘Hot enough to melt steel. Twice the temperature you’d need to burn yooman flesh!’

‘Interesting statistic.’

‘Yep. One o’ them little buggers gets to you there’d be sweet fa. left.’

Onions had been clear, ‘We’ve a big enough job on our hands as it is. We’re not auxiliaries to anything. Do you think crime stops just ’cos there’s a war on?
Don’t go volunteering.’ But to be so casually enlisted to firewatch on occasional nights was like being sanctioned – like being pardoned for the folly of his night walks, like
having his seat in the Gods paid for. The conflict of fear and curiosity resolved with simplicity.

Midweek, he sat three nights on the roof of the Coliseum and watched heaven light up with the terrible beauty that he found almost irresistible. Suffering and death, terror into beauty. The
suffering and death might next be his. Logic told him that; this was no more ordered than it was beautiful, it was random death and illusory beauty, but he was not a man wholly free from
superstition – every cell in his body told him he would live through this, and a voice in his head said, ‘who are you kidding?’

On the second night he had his only direct encounter with battle – an incendiary clattered down onto the roof and rolled towards his feet. He thrust it into a bucket of sand just as
Spender had taught him and thought no more about it. But the sound of the night had changed. The guns were nearer now and seemed almost to surround him. Anti-aircraft guns had been mounted on
trailers and dotted around the city, mounted on barges and towed into the Thames. He felt he could discern them as individual voices, as though each gun had its own unique sound. The battery near
Hungerford Bridge barked, the battery somewhere in Bloomsbury twanged like a giant bow at Agincourt, firing arrows. But each night, when dawn broke, he heard the same noise from the street below.
He had at first described it to himself as a hum, but now, from higher up, and closer to Trafalgar Square, it sounded more like a sigh – a gigantic sigh. And then he realised. It was London
breathing. The inhalation and exhalation of a city breathing. The same rattle of broken glass, the shouts and the ringing of steeled boots on paving stones, but over it all and under it all, the
inhalation, the exhalation, the great sigh of London drawing breath. A city licking its wounds and living.

On Saturday evening the gas went off all over central London. He could flip the iron upside down and fry an egg – he’d done that more than once when electricity
prevailed over gas. Or he could go on the scrounge. He phoned Hampstead. His father answered.

‘Yes, I have gas, I even have a meal on the go. What I do not have is a family. Your mother has retreated to Mimram. So, I dine alone.’

‘I’ll be right over,’ said Troy.

The old man served him rainbow trout and new potatoes – new-ish, they had been in store since the end of June. Raised by Troy’s mother – her favourite Aura second earlies
– and stored in sacks in darkness. She had rallied to the call of ‘Dig for Victory’ and rendered them almost self-sufficient in vegetables.

When they’d finished, and were settled in his father’s study, Troy asked almost idly, ‘Where did you get the fish? Almost seems like a novelty these days.’

‘From your mother.’

‘I thought she was at Mimram.’

‘Indeed. She posted them to me. They arrived in the second post this morning.’

‘She posted fish?’

‘Why not? The food parcel is now as ubiquitous as the umbrella . . . or perhaps I should say the gas mask. All over England people are posting meals to their relations on the assumption
someone somewhere is going short. But you did not drop in to talk about food, surely?’

‘No. I didn’t. I was wondering what you made of this.’

Troy took a sheet of paper from his coat pocket. He’d jotted down the verses of Isaiah 38.

Alex read it through, and said, ‘Savage stuff. The God of the Old Testament in all his wrath. It seems rather apt. It could be describing the Europe of today. Hardly among the most quoted
of verses, though. In fact downright obscure. Why do you have it?’

‘It was left at the scene of a murder.’

‘Then I’d say it was self-explanatory. Self-justification. The very arrogant assumption of divine vengeance. On whom?’

‘A rabbi. An East End rabbi named Friedland. And he isn’t the first victim. In fact, I think he’s the third. Borg, Adelson, Friedland. But only the last had this as a sort of
clue.’

Troy knew the look on his father’s face. The concentration of memory, the pride, the relentless pride, of an old mind determined to forget nothing at the point when the body is willing to
surrender everything.

‘Run those names by me again, would you, my boy?’

‘The first was Isaiah Borg, then . . . Aaron Adelson and the most recent was Moses Friedland.’

‘In that order?’

‘Yes.’

By now Alex was rummaging around in the centre drawer of his desk.

‘Can I help?’

‘No, it is here somewhere. I saved it, I’m sure I saved it. Though quite why . . .’

‘Perhaps because you save everything?’

‘I left so much behind in Russia. I will admit that to your mother’s dismay I have parted with almost nothing ever since. Every last scrap of paper came from Vienna, and every last
scrap from Paris, so this should be . . . Aah! I have it!’

He handed his son the letter.

‘The signatures, and the name typed after each one.’

Troy looked.

‘Daniel Shoval, Isaiah Borg, Aaron Adelson, Moses Friedland, Elishah Nader, David Cohen, Jacob Kossoff.’

Troy had met half these men in his time as a beat bobby – the old rabbis of East London. East European immigrants most of them and, in Kossoff’s case, a man as Russian as his father
– although his father spoke the better English. These were the parish priests of Judaism, serving the shifting, new, ever-renewing communities of the East End. Not one of them destined for
the board of Deputies. And, Troy felt, not one so much as wanting it.

‘Three of them,’ said his father. ‘Three of them on the list. Were it not for the oddity of the first not being among the dead, I’d have said someone might systematically
be working down it.’

It was one of those moments Troy hated. Much as he loved having the pieces on the table, there was often a moment when the voice in the head told him he’d been stupid and forced him to
backtrack.

Troy said, ‘Daniel Shoval is dead. Last August. A matter of days before the war broke out. I investigated myself. It was my last case before I left Stepney, before you phoned up to whisk
me off to Monte Carlo. Shoval was found dead in an Underground station. Fell on the escalator. No one saw him fall – middle of the afternoon, a Tuesday, hardly the rush hour – and, in
the absence of anything to the contrary, I wrote it up as accidental death. If I’d known about this letter then, I’d have had grounds for suspicion. Now . . . I’m beginning to
think I was hasty. But I’m also beginning to think a systematic killer of rabbis just a bit too bizarre. It’s like some Polish Gothic novel.
Der Golem Revisited
.’