‘No-he’s out cold, but it’s just a graze. Reininger’s in a bad way, though.’
Troy undid the last knot. Cormack leapt to his feet and said again, ‘Troy-where the fuck have you been?’
Troy watched his eyes roll up in his skull, his legs buckle and his head hit the floor. He knelt down. The draught caught the door again and banged it shut. Troy let Cormack’s head loll against his hand-two bumps now instead of one-reassuringly warm, a pulse beating steadily, solidly in the neck. He’d fainted. The eyelids flickered, his lips opened, the merest of moans. Then the blast of a gun set the door shaking, swinging inward on its creaking hinges. Kitty stood framed in the doorway, head down, arm outstretched, a smoking revolver aimed steadily at the corner.
Troy crossed the room hoping she wasn’t completely mad, that she knew who he was and would not simply turn the gun on him.
She kept her gaze and her aim fixed. He looked at Reininger, lifeless in the corner, blood pouring down his face from the hole in his head. He looked at Kitty, blank and glassy-eyed.
‘Kitty,’ Troy said softly. ‘Give me the gun.’
Kitty seemed not to hear him.
‘Just give me the gun, Kitty.’
It was as though a light had gone on behind her eyes. A flash of attention. Suddenly she was looking at Troy, hearing him, the crazy stare gone from her face. She lowered the gun to her side.
‘Nah. I don’t think I’d better. You’re not wearing gloves.’
In the distance, faint as a whisper, Troy could hear the bells of a police squad car.
‘Give me the gun Kitty. We haven’t got a lot of time. We’ll need it to think up a story.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘You go.’
‘Go?’
‘There’ll be shit for this. You mark my words, Fred. They’ll want someone. Heads’ll have to roll for a cock-up like this. They’ll suspend us, bust us back to constables. Might as well be me. I’ll never be more than a sergeant. Never thought I would. You-you’re a hot tip to be Met Commissioner one day. There’s blokes at Bow Street running a book on you. Don’t disappoint ‘em. Nip down the alley while you can.’
She bent down. Pressed the gun into Stahl’s hand. It all looked so neat, so plausible. The grieving daughter on the trail of her father’s killer, arrives a moment too late to see rough justice done.
‘Cal’s all right, isn’t he? I mean he’s alive, isn’t he?’
‘He’s in the next room. A nasty lump on his head, but, yes, he’ll live.’
‘Then you’d better scarper.’
The bells of the police car rang louder now-at the most they could be only two or three streets away. The nearest nick was Millwall-if they came from the south they’d miss his car completely. If he stuck to the alleyways, they’d miss him too. Troy threw open the window to the fire escape, took a last look at Kitty, Kitty smiling faintly at him, Kitty among the carnage of a bloody night, and vanished into the dark and pouring rain.
§ 83
‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to lock you up.’ Cal relished the contrast. The first bobbies on the scene had burst in, truncheons up, yelling ‘Nobody move!’
Kitty was binding up the wound on Stahl’s head with strips she’d torn from her petticoat, like the solitary female in a John Ford western when the wagons have circled. She’d already licked her handkerchief and washed his face like a mother cat. Cal had never felt his wagons more circled.
‘Nobody is moving, you berk,’ she’d said. ‘Get on yer wireless and call an ambulance.’
Then they’d noticed the bloody heap that had been Reininger.
One dashed back to the squad car. The other stood and said ‘Jesus Christ’ over and over again, until Kitty said, ‘You don’t know what to do, do you?’
The ambulance arrived only minutes before a second squad car. They were loading Stahl onto a stretcher when two more cops walked in, a man in his late thirties and a younger one, younger even than Troy, who ran to the stairs and vomited at the sight of Reininger. Over the sound of his retching, the older man said, ‘Miss Stilton, isn’t it? Inspector Henrey, Murder Squad’-and turning to Cal-‘And you are?’
Cal told him, made the briefest of explanations, then Henrey said, ‘I’m awfully sorry, but I’m afraid I’m going to have to lock you up.’
§ 84
Cal told him a version of everything-everything except Troy’s part in it all. They sat in an office at Scotland Yard until it was nearly light. When Henrey asked him how ‘Miss Stilton’, as he insisted on calling Kitty, came to be at ‘the scene of the crime’, he was able to give his first wholly honest answer, ‘I don’t know.’ Eventually Henrey said ‘Is there anyone at the embassy I should contact in connection with this?’ Cal said ‘I don’t know’ again, and then Henrey really did lock him up and he crashed like a felled redwood. It was a different regime. In the morning they brought him a bowl of warm water, a razor and a cup of tea, then they brought him breakfast of toast with butter and that shredded orange jelly the English were so fond of and then, when he asked for coffee, they brought him coffee. Afterwards he lay on the cot all morning reading
The Times and the Manchester Guardian-Scotland Yard could not run to a copy of the Herald-Tribune. The Luftwaffe had bombed Dublin last night. The first raid in weeks and they’d missed by miles. He was beginning to think he could spend the rest of his life in jail and let the war go to hell above his head, they could let him out in six or seven years-in the meantime he could finish Moby Dick-never had managed that feat as a teenager-when the door opened and another, completely different cop strode in, shook his hand, introduced himself as Major Something-or-other ‘of the Branch’, and said, ‘I contacted your man as soon as I heard.’
‘My man?’ said Cal. ‘Who the heck is my man?’
‘I am, old boy!’
And Reggie Ruthven-Greene stuck his head round the door.
§ 85
On the way out Cal caught sight of Kitty. He wanted to stop and talk to her. He wanted to stop and put his arms around her, but she was being escorted-steered-across the courtyard by two policemen.
Out on the Embankment Reggie had his hand up for a cab.
‘Where are we going, Reggie?’
A cab pulled up.
‘I rather thought after a night in jail that you’d fancy a spot of lunch.’ Then he opened the door for Cal, leaned down to the cabman and said ‘Dorchester’.
After a sodden night the day had cleared beautifully, the sun shone. It was, Cal realised, the 1st of June and the prospect of summer preoccupied Reggie’s chat inanely all the way to Park Lane. There were questions Cal would have put to Reggie, but he knew he’d never answer them in the back of a cab.
‘My treat,’ Reggie said, as they were seated at the Dorchester. ‘Do you know, one can still get Krug ‘20 here. Amazing, isn’t it?’
Cal’s heart sank. He’d known as soon as he heard the word Dorchester that Reggie meant to splash out-but champagne? It was dry sherry and smoked salmon among the ruins all over again.
‘Are you ready?’ Reggie asked over the top of the menu.
‘Don’t wait for me,’ Cal said.
Reggie rattled off his order. ‘I think… yes… the foie gras, the Dover sole, the roast pigeon and a nice garlicky salad… and a bottle of Krug ‘20.’
He looked at Cal. Cal looked at the waiter.
‘Do you have any Brown Windsor soup?’
The waiter looked nonplussed. ‘Brown Windsor, sir?’
‘Yes, Brown Windsor. This is England. We are in a restaurant. We are in a restaurant in England. You must have Brown Windsor.’