Simon Tolkien - Orders from Berlin

Quaid turned past Parliament and accelerated down Millbank, enjoying the heavy power of the purring engine under the dome of the sparkling bonnet and relishing the rush of the wind against the side of his face through the open window and the emptiness of the road ahead. Fewer cars were out in the evenings these days. Too many accidents in the blackout, he supposed, and not that many drivers had the petrol now that rationing was starting to bite.

He glanced over at Trave, sitting wrapped up in his thoughts in the seat beside him. He was a queer fish, this new assistant of his, Quaid thought. He was built like a boxer, with a square jaw and muscled arms, yet he was always reading poetry books in the canteen, looking as if he were a hundred miles away. As far as Quaid was concerned, Trave thought a damn sight too much for his own good, and it was a constant source of irritation the way he always had to have his own take on their cases. There was a dogged, stubborn look that got into the young man’s eyes when he didn’t agree with the line of an investigation, and sometimes his questioning of Quaid’s decisions was almost mutinous. He didn’t seem to understand that there was such a thing as a chain of command in the police force just as much as in the Army, and there’d been times when Quaid had seriously considered throwing the book at him. But then once or twice when the chips were down, the boy had more than stepped up to the plate — like the other week when they’d been called to a burglary in a jeweller’s shop in Mayfair and Trave had chased the perpetrator up the street and wrestled him to the ground, holding him down until Quaid arrived with the handcuffs. Quaid grinned, remembering how the two of them had had to get down on their hands and knees afterwards, searching for the rubies and emeralds that had rolled away into the dirty gutter.

This call sounded a lot less exciting — an old man fallen down the stairs in Battersea, the daughter saying he’d been pushed. Still, you never knew until you got there. Maybe the daughter would be pretty; maybe the old man had money under the mattress. The one sure thing was that whatever the case involved, he’d have it solved by the end of the week. That much he’d guarantee.

An old lady with a bent back, dressed entirely in widow’s weeds, answered the door almost as soon as they’d first knocked, but she didn’t step aside when Quaid showed her his warrant card. Instead she leant forward, warning them to tread carefully because the dead man or what was left of him was lying on the ground only a few feet behind where she was standing.

Inside the hallway, both policemen felt the bile rising in their throats. The corpse was a God-awful mess, but of course that was only to be expected when a man fell sixty feet down a stairwell. He was never going to be a pretty sight after that experience.

The fact that the only immediate light came from one weak bulb in a pale green art deco wall fixture on the side wall of the hallway made the crime scene seem even more macabre. Several people — other neighbours, obviously — were milling about at the back near where some stairs went down into the basement, and up above, a wide curving staircase with a thick mahogany banister wound its way up into murky shadows, broken only by a faint light visible near the top.

Suddenly a woman came out into the hall from a doorway on the right, swaying from side to side. She was wearing a knee-length brown woollen coat, as if she had just come in from outside, and a rose-patterned scarf had fallen back from her light brown hair to hang loosely around her shoulders. Her face was white with shock and her eyes were swollen from crying. She was one hell of a mess, but she was also pretty; Quaid had been right about that.

Instinctively guessing that the woman was the dead man’s daughter, Trave stepped quickly forward, blocking her view of the corpse, but she was looking up, not down, as if searching for something or someone in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

‘Someone pushed him. I couldn’t see who it was — it was too dark,’ she blurted out. ‘But I saw my father. He was struggling up there, shouting “no”, swaying backwards and forwards in the air, trying to stay upright, trying not to fall, and then — then he fell.’ Her voice came in gasps, words expelled between deep gulping breaths until she’d finished telling them what had happened, whereupon her eyes travelled down to the crimson carpet at her feet in imitation of her father’s descent, and she fell forward herself in a dead faint.

Trave had seen it coming — he leant forward and caught her in his arms.

‘Take her back in my flat,’ said the old lady, pointing to the open door through which the dead man’s daughter had appeared a moment before. ‘I told her to stay still, but she wouldn’t listen. It’s the shock — makes you do stupid things. I remember when my husband died. Put her there,’ she instructed Trave from the doorway once they were inside, pointing to a sofa across from the fireplace. ‘She’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.’

‘Did you see what happened?’ Quaid asked a little impatiently. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he felt a little envious of the way Trave had been able to step forward and catch the woman as she fell and then carry her away as if she weighed no more than a feather in his arms. For a moment, it made Quaid wish he were young again — not that he had ever had such an instinctive sense of timing as his assistant so clearly possessed.

‘No, I didn’t,’ said the old lady. ‘The caretaker’s nice. He lets us use his place down in the basement as a shelter when there are raids, and so I went down there when the siren sounded with the rest of the people who live here. Not Mr Morrison — he didn’t like it down there for some reason, except when his daughter forced him,’ she said, making the sign of the cross as she gestured with averted eyes towards the corpse. ‘And then a few minutes later we heard Ava screaming the house down. It was just when the all clear sounded, and it was like the two of them, her and the siren, were competing with each other, if you know what I mean-’

She broke off, realizing the inappropriateness of her comment, although it was obvious that she hadn’t meant to sound heartless. She seemed to be a kind woman.

‘Which is his flat?’ asked Quaid, pointing to the corpse.

‘Second floor on the left,’ said the old lady, pointing up into the shadowy darkness above their heads to where an upper landing was half-lit by some invisible light. ‘I don’t think anyone’s been up or down the stairs since I came up from the basement or I’d have heard them, but there’s a fire escape at the back. Whoever pushed him could have got away down that, I suppose.’

Quaid and Trave exchanged a look and took out their guns. Fire escape or no fire escape, there was no point taking any chances. The police had been issued firearms in the first year of the war, but neither the inspector nor his assistant had had occasion to use them yet. Quaid went first, with Trave just behind, both of them shining their torches up into the darkness. The stairs creaked under their shoes, but otherwise there was no sound.

Two flights up, the two policemen became more aware of the line of light above their heads, and when they turned the corner, they saw that it was a shaft coming through a half-open door on the other side of the next landing. Moving forward, their hearts hammering against their chests, they felt a current of cold air coming towards them.

Signalling to Trave to get ready, Quaid flattened himself against the wall behind the door and gently pushed it open, and Trave found himself looking down the length of an empty corridor lit by a single overhead light to where a metal curtain rail had been pulled down onto the carpet and a second door stood wide open to the night air. Quickly he ran to the end and then came to an abrupt halt. Outside, snaking down to the ground below his feet, a black iron fire escape clung to the back of the building like some parasitic creature missing its head and tail.