John Lawton - Riptide

‘Casimir Wallficz?’ Cal said breezily.

The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.

‘Wod?’

‘You are Casimir Wallficz, the proprietor of this establishment?’

‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’

‘Calvin Cormack, US Intelligence. My colleague, Chief Inspector Stilton. You don’t mind if we join you?’

Cal snatched the plate from him. Slammed himself down in a chair and said, ‘The guy in number four. He checked out. When?’

‘How should I know?’

Cash Wally reached for the plate. Cal held it away from him at arm’s length, like a schoolyard bully teasing a child.

‘You know, Casimir, I think you know damn well, because you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets his lodgers do moonlight flits. Besides, you’ve two pound notes and a ten-shilling note stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece, so somebody’s just paid their bill.’

Cash Wally tried to look stubborn. He succeeded only in looking hungry. Cal picked up a sausage and bit into it. From the look on his face, Cal might just as well have bitten into Wally. It was agony, the tortured passion of the eating man.

Cal wolfed the sausage. Cash Wally moaned out loud. His head shook from side to side, his eyes rolled. As Cal finished the second, Cash Wally beat the table with his hands and screamed.

‘No. No. Nooooooo!!!!’

Cal took up the third sausage, worked it around in the neck of the sauce bottle, worked up a good head of gloop, and pointed at him with it. He dared not look at Stilton-so much as a smile from Stilton and he knew he’d corpse.

‘Wally. You’ve one sausage left. Now, you see this man here? This is Walter Stilton. One of the finest trenchermen in Scotland Yard. And he skipped lunch today. He’s a particularly hungry policeman. This is your last wienie. If you don’t tell me everything and right now, I’ll toss this wienie in the air and you’ll see the Chief Inspector catch it in his teeth like Pavlov’s dog. Then I’ll turn him loose on your mash. Very partial to a plate of mash, is the Chief Inspector. Now-the Czech guy. The guy who said he was Czech. When did he go and where did he go?’

Cash Wally put his arms on the table, his head resting lightly on them. It seemed to Cal that he was stifling sobs.

‘He left about four o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know where he gone. He gave me extra ten bobs just to say he never been here. He said at the beginning he would not be here more than ten days. Believe me-I do not know where he gone.’

Stilton spoke from the far end of the table, the brusque informality of the Metropolitan Police, the dull inevitability of procedure observed. ‘And did you tell the local nick you had an alien here?’

Cash Wally raised his head, red of face, bleary of eye, ‘Aliens? We’re all aliens. What one more mattered more or less?’

Cal didn’t doubt the sentiment-the pain which shot through his words, and the continental contempt for the very notion ‘alien’. He felt for Cash Wally-just a little-he also felt certain he’d got pretty much the truth out of the man.

He looked at Stilton, wondering if he felt remotely what he was feeling himself. ‘Well, do you want this man’s wienie?’

‘No,’ said Stilton. ‘Let him have his banger. I think we’ve got all we’re going to get.’

‘So do I.’

Cal stuck the sausage back in the mountain of mash and shoved the plate towards Cash Wally.

‘Eat up, Mr Wallficz. Nothing’s going to happen to you. But you’ll do as the Chief Inspector asks, won’t you? You’ll report every new foreigner to the police. Right?’

‘Right,’ sobbed Cash Wally. ‘Foreigners. Police. Police. Foreigners. Right.’

They sat in the car. Stilton seemed to be waiting for something. If only, Cal thought, for his own anger to subside. He’d looked grim from the minute they left Cash Wally’s kitchen.

At last he said, ‘Y’know, I didn’t think you had it in you. But I have to say… well done.’

‘You don’t think that maybe it was a little cruel?’

‘No I don’t. In fact he’s lucky I didn’t wring his neck. We check the local station reports every morning. If he ran a straight house and listed his foreigners we might have picked up Stahl days ago. As things stand we’re back to square bloody one. I think I’ll send the uniforms round in the morning just to see he gets the message. No-you played the bugger just about right. I couldn’t have done it better meself. Mind, I’ve never thought of myself as a trencherman before.’

He was smiling as he said it. The anger had passed. They were on level ground again.

‘So? What do we do now?’

‘What do we do now? We go back to Stepney and pray my missis has stuck summat tasty in the oven. You’ve had two bangers. I’ve had nowt.’

There was a note on the kitchen table. Cal felt Stilton must have seen it a few thousand times in the course of a thirty-year marriage-‘Your dinner’s in the oven.’

Stilton took a tea cloth, opened the lower oven and pulled out a dish half full of something indeterminate and crisp.

‘Dunno what it is,’ he said. ‘But it smells a treat.’

‘It’s fish pie, Dad.’

Reenie Stilton appeared in the doorway, and eased her pregnant bulk onto a kitchen chair.

‘My Maurice got a twenty-four-hour pass, so him and some of his mates ‘went fishing out past Southend somewhere. Came back with two lovely whole cod.’

‘Past Southend? That’s a restricted area.’

‘Leave it out, Dad. Who do you think Maurice is going to spy on? Old fellers diggin’ lugworm? You just be grateful you got some supper. Rest of us ate hours ago.’

Stilton dished up. The greens were boiled to death and dried out, but Cal could have eaten seconds and thirds of the pie. It was fresh and spicy and it hit the spot. Stilton ate with a practised fork action that improved his elbow speed and upped his rate of consumption. He was scraping the dish before Cal was halfway across his plate. And he’d never thought of himself as a trencherman.

‘Where’s your mother?’ Stilton said as Reenie plodded across the floor to stick the kettle on.

‘Went round to old George Bonham to give him a bit o’ cooked cod. Reckons he don’t eat proper any more. Then she was going on to Aunt Dolly. Her Dennis is constipated again, and you know they always ask for Mum like she was the family witch-doctor. She’ll dose the little sod.’

‘You know, Walter,’ Cal said, ‘the house certainly seems empty.’

‘Kev and Trev are back at sea. They sailed a day or two back, I should think. Rose and Tom have got their own home to go to, though most of the time you’d never know it.’

‘Tel’s gone down the Troxy,’ Reenie chipped in, leaving Cal to wonder what a troxy was.

‘And Vera’s gone with Mum.’

Over the hiss of the kettle Cal thought he heard a motorbike engine putter down to nothing. The missing name from the list. He heard the door slam. A slight pause in the steps along the hallway as she hung up her helmet-then a rush of feet dancing down the stairs-and the kitchen door burst open. Kitty’s hair bounced the way it always did, springy on her blue collar. Her eyes flashed, the way they always did. If she was surprised to see him sitting there, she didn’t show it.

‘Late again,’ said Reenie. ‘I don’t think there’s any left.’

‘Wot?’

‘You shoulda got here on time. You’re on reg’lar shifts. You don’t work daft hours like dad. I reckon Captain Cormack’s had yours.’