Second Violin (52 page)

‘Then,’ said his father, ‘it is the other names on the list that should interest you the more. The people the rabbis wanted locked up. The word bizarre sums them up very
well.’

Troy read the letter out loud, racing quickly through the demand for the internment of, together with reasons for . . . until he came to the names.

‘Sir Oswald Mosley, Archibald Ramsay MP, Oliver Gilbert, Victor Rowe, Roland Rollason, Lord Carsington, Major Harold Haward-Pyke, Professor Charles Lockett, Sir Michael Redburn, Viscount
Blackwall, Geoffrey Trench MP.’

‘I received that letter last summer. The same day the Board of Deputies wrote to me calling for the suppression of Freud’s last book. It caused some initial confusion. I published
the letter about Freud. Freud would not have it otherwise. The letter from the East End rabbis I would willingly have published but for a request from the Home Office. I gather several other
newspapers received the same letter and the same request. No one published. A request and, I might add, a reassurance.’

‘What?’

‘I was told that these men, or at least those of them who really are dangerous, would be locked up as the rabbis requested when the time was right. MPs and all. Aristocrats . . . and
all.’

‘Well . . . that takes care of Mosley,’ Troy said with scarcely suppressed sarcasm.

‘You think we have not locked up enough?’

‘More that we have locked up the wrong people.’

Alex took the letter back.

‘As your illustrious predecessor Sherlock Holmes used to say . . . “let us eliminate the impossible, what remains is fact however improbable”.’

‘Probably my suspect, you mean?’

‘Quite. Now . . . Mosley, as you say, is interned for the duration. Rollason is dead, I wrote his obituary myself. Heart attack playing golf, as I recall. Blackwall volunteered as soon as
war was declared. Went to France with the Royal West Kent Regiment, the one I think they call the “Buffs”. He never returned from Dunkirk. I’ve had his obituary ready for weeks,
but there is no confirmation that he is dead.’

‘He might be a prisoner?’

‘That’s possible. Although I would have expected some news of him by now if he were. Haward-Pyke was interned in May on the same day as Mosley – Gilbert and Rowe about three
weeks after the war broke out – and Ramsay only a matter of weeks ago. Not long before Rod, as I recall . . . and, unless I’m mistaken as a direct result of that fracas at the Tea Rooms
that you and Nikolai blundered into. No one is quite sure why he was interned but . . .’

Troy merely shrugged and said, ‘I blundered. I doubt that Nikolai did. I think he went for the show.’

‘Whatever,’ his father continued. ‘That leaves only four . . . Redburn, Carsington, Trench and . . .’

‘Lockett,’ said Troy. ‘A professor of something, I gather?’

‘I had to ask myself. I’d scarcely heard of him. Indeed, I confused him with the reputable Lockett who runs the Psychoanalytic Society. Since it was necessary to talk to Freud that
day, I asked him. The men are brothers. Charles Lockett is the elder, Nicholas the younger. Charles is quite possibly the last practitioner in England of a fake science that was known as
“bumpology” when I was a boy, and even then so few people took it seriously. It’s proper name was phrenology, and its vile offshoot has been racial stereotyping – of which
the Nazis are so fond, of which we see so many crude examples in
Der Stürmer
. . . all those dreadful caricatures of Jews looking like a badly illustrated Merchant of Venice – it
all leads to eugenics, and that has followers galore. Even seemingly rational men, men without apparent Nazi-sympathies, will expound the need for eugenics. I would say I have sat at half the
dinner tables in London at one time or another – particularly in the years just before the last war – and listened to crackpot theories not necessarily on the superiority of one race
over another but most definitely on the “inferior type” and selective breeding and the culling of the mentally or physically disabled. They seem to have a problem uttering the word
murder.’

‘Well, one of them doesn’t seem to have any problem committing it.’

‘But which? Do peers of the realm stoop to murder? Do university professors?’

‘Yes.’

‘But which? Ah, well . . . I suppose that’s why you became a policeman, isn’t it? All those penny dreadful novels you read as a boy. It gave you a love of the chase . . . a
passion to know “who-dunnit”?’

‘No, Dad. Absolutely not. Who-dunnits are the lowest form of fiction. Somewhere between whelks and snails.’

‘Does not a killer who kills in the order of signature on a letter strike you as a mite novelletish? I mean to say, that is the conclusion one would draw, is it not? . . . these rabbis
have died in the order in which they signed.’

‘They have. And more than anything it strikes me as a paucity of imagination – the ticking off of names on a list.’

‘So, where will you start? Carsington, Redburn, Trench or Lockett?’

‘None of them, I’ll start with Elishah Nader. I have to tell him there’s someone out there who’s about to try and kill him.’

Sitting outside his father’s house in his Bullnose Morris, he looked at the letter his father had given him. Nader’s address was a show-stopper. A name you clocked once and never
forgot – Heaven’s Gate Synagogue, London, E.1. As if there could be such a place.

15 September 1940
Battle of Britain Day

Heaven’s Gate was in utter contrast to Elohim. The road frontage was tiny. A solid pair of doors, a set of rusting railings, wedged between two shop fronts, at most eight
or ten feet across. It looked more like the back entrance to a block of flats than the gates of heaven. Nothing screamed ‘God’ at the passer-by. You could look for this and still miss
it.

Troy pushed at the door. It opened into a long, dark corridor. He walked about fifty or sixty feet, finding it so dark, he needed to trace his way with one hand along the wall. It grew lighter
where a staircase branched off to either side and light filtered down from above. He found himself facing another set of doors. He pushed and daylight streamed through, bright as noon. He stepped
in and looked up instinctively. There were gaps in the roof – an empyrean, rich, cerulean ceiling, a promise of heaven through which the blue of the real heaven now peeked in a dozen ragged
holes – and a gap in the wall the size of a London double-decker bus. He could not swear this place had taken a direct hit, but if it hadn’t the building next door had.

There’d been some effort made to clear up. There were still broken tiles, roofspars and bits of blue plasterwork littering the floor, but the way was passable and most of the fittings
seemed to have survived. It was, he thought, a near-tragedy. Unlike Elohim, this really was beautiful, an intricate wooden maze in walnut, brass and glass, like being inside a chinese box –
it was layered, it was simple and complex, sturdy and delicate all at the same time. It was everything Elohim was not – it was subtle, it was intimate. At the back of the synagogue the ark
was flanked by two pastoral views, of what he took to be Israel. They were framed as though they were windows, a trompe l’œil that didn’t quite work, but a quality of
craftsmanship that compared well with anything he’d seen by Burne-Jones or Holman Hunt. He was contemplating this – maybe they were Holman Hunts? – did the pre-Raphaelites ever
paint synagogues? – when a figure popped up from behind the
bimah.

‘Can I help you?’

A young rabbi. About his age. All in black. Not quite enough beard about him. As though he had yet to grow into the part he was playing. Troy assumed he was the ‘curate’.

‘I was looking for Rabbi Elishah Nader.’

‘You found him.’

‘I was expecting an older man.’

‘Ah . . . you mean my father.’

The rabbi came round the
bimah
and extended a hand to greet Troy.

Troy shook the hand and said, ‘Sergeant Troy Scotland Yard.’

‘My father and I are both called Elishah. But if it’s him you want, it’s me you get. My father has been in hospital since the beginning of August.’

Troy wondered for a second if there’d been an attack he’d missed, but Nader said, ‘His heart. I doubt he will live long, but that’s not why you’re here, is it?
Heart attacks are hardly police business. It’s about the scrolls. You’ve found them?’

‘Scrolls?’

‘Scrolls of the Torah. Stolen the morning after the big raid. Come, I shall show you.’

He led the way over smashed tiles to the ark and slid open the doors. They glided past like silk running over glass – not a sound. The interior was huge, almost like a cabin on a sailing
ship – lined throughout in crimson velvet, it reminded Troy of his mother’s jewellery box. He knew it was the ark, Nader didn’t need to tell him that – but he’d no
real idea what an ark was for.

‘My father had this done early last year. So many refugees. We’d been taking them in since I was a boy. After Kristallnacht the trickle became a flood. So many of them brought
scrolls of the Torah from synagogues in Europe that had been closed, destroyed or simply abandoned. We had them stacked up all over – from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia. My father said the
place was turning into a museum. Then he decided. It was a museum after all. The Torahs were priceless, some of them centuries old. And he had the ark re-built and enlarged to store them safely.
Ventilated at the back with air bricks to prevent mould, and virtually fireproof at the front with three-inch thick oak doors and a solid concrete roof Fireproof, but not burglar-proof. On 7
September we all caught it. Jew and Gentile, God and Mammon. The bombs did considerable damage, as you can see. And, on the morning of the eighth, I came in to check the extent of the damage and
found the doors of the ark open and not a single scroll left. All thirty-one stolen. And you’ve come to tell me you haven’t found them?’

‘Rabbi Nader, I’m with the Murder Squad.’

Despite the nature of his tale, Nader had been smiling throughout. Troy’s words wiped the smile away.

‘Who’s been murdered?’

‘Izzy Borg, Aaron Adelson, and Moses Friedland.’

He’d get to Daniel ‘Digger’ Shoval later.

‘Of course. I knew about Rabbi Friedland, but Rabbi Borg was run over in the blackout surely? And Rabbi . . .’

‘Rabbi Nader, they were all murdered. Someone is killing East End rabbis.’

‘And?’

‘And?’

‘And why are you telling me this?’

‘Your father was next on the list.’

‘Ah . . .’

Nader looked down, stirred a few chips of dust and rubble with his shoe. Then he looked Troy straight in the eye.

‘Or do you mean, Mr Troy, that I am next on the list?’

They crossed the road to Nader’s house. He led Troy down the corridor to the back, past the open door of the front room, heavily Victorian, deep in its velvets and
chenilles, its oak and mahogany, its booklined walls, to sit at the kitchen table. It was like being in Rabbi Friedland’s kitchen. The same plain, square deal table. The same oilskin cloth
draped across it.

‘My father keeps the parlour strictly for the flock. But you’re not flock, are you?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘Think of it as a manse. Then think that we will both be more at ease at the kitchen table.’

Nader stuck the kettle on and shifted gear, saying simply, ‘What list?’

Troy told him.

‘When exactly?’

‘The letter arrived at the office of the
Post
the day after Russia announced the Nazi pact. That would make it 24 August last year. It’s dated the day before, the
23rd.’

‘My father never mentioned it to me. But I was in Manchester most of that summer. In fact, most of this one too. You know, it would be like my father to sign something like this, but not
to instigate it. I think the same was true of Rabbi Borg too. Yet you say his name was first in the signatures.’

‘No – it wasn’t. Rabbi Shoval was first.’

‘But he died . . .’

‘Last August – the 29th, five days after the letter arrived. I was a constable in Stepney at the time. I was called out to the scene. It looked like an accident.’

Nader poured tea and mused. Troy waiting to see where the muse led him.

‘Daniel Shoval was the kind of man to have organised a petition. He was a campaigner. Or am I telling you something you know?’

‘I heard of Rabbi Shoval. I’d never met him. Shall we say his reputation preceded him?

‘He was in the front line at the Battle of Cable Street, when Mosley led his Blackshirts into the East End in ’36.’

Troy had been there too – in uniform, on duty, but he wasn’t going to mention that.

‘And now you think his death was not an accident?’

‘It seems unlikely.’

‘And Rabbi Borg . . . it is widely believed he died in a road accident in the blackout . . . . Rabbi Adelson . . . I was told had a heart attack . . .’

‘And Rabbi Friedland?’

‘Well . . . that was shocking. Is shocking. The whole East End is reeling at that.’

‘But the whole East End didn’t reel at the the idea of rabbis falling like flies and think something is wrong here?’

‘“The Lord giveth, the Lord taketh away.”’

‘He’s taken rather a lot just lately.’

It was a stupid remark. Troy could have bitten off his tongue.

Nader said, ‘Are you talking dead rabbis now, Mr Troy, or the state of Europe? There are many among us who think God might have forgotten us altogether. But, yes . . . three dead rabbis in
as many months has caused comment. It’s one reason I came back to London. There’s a shortage. I am covering for Rabbi Adelson as well as for my father. Getting bombed out merely creates
an excuse to merge the services – Mile End synagogue has no rabbi, Heaven’s Gate has no roof. We double up and we get by. And while none of us worked out that the death of quite so many
rabbis might be a new plague, visited on us rather than Egypt . . . it would appear to have taken Scotland Yard a while to make their mind up too.’

Troy felt doubly crass. Sipped at his tea and bought a little time with honesty.