John Lawton - Riptide

‘That’s OK, Walter. I can look for “clues”.’

‘I’ll be about ten minutes. I’ll leave Dobbs out front to keep an eye open. Let’s just hope the buggers don’t take all night about it.’

Left alone, Cal sank down, his back against a chimney stack, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. He was not accustomed to death, but the body of a dead German-he had to be German, didn’t he?-held no terror. He looked at the face. Yes, he was very like Wolfgang Stahl-and now he understood the hesitation that both Hudge and Fish Wally had shown about the sketch. There was no scar over the left eye.

He began with the gun. Picked it up with the tip of thumb and forefinger. A Browning automatic. A gun very like his own, a medium-bore service weapon. What did you expect? said a voice in his head. A Luger? He sniffed the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently. Stilton would have been its first victim. The stream of blood from the hole in his forehead had covered his face. He did look like Stahl under the crimson glaze. Now the blood had reached his shirt, which soaked it up like blotting paper. Cal unbuttoned the jacket and looked for an inside pocket. A plain black leather wallet. A packet of Player’s Capstan. He opened the wallet. Letters-all from one Mavis Tookey of Riverside Villas, Leigh-on-Sea. A photograph-a girl in her late teens, presumably the aforementioned Mavis. And a handful of official documents. A National Identity Card. A War Office letter indicating Deferred Service. A Ration Book. All in the name of Peter Robinson-a name he took to be as anonymous here as John Doe might be at home-at an address in Cardiff. The Germans were past masters at this sort of thing. It would be a simple task for them to fit out this assassin with a plausible cover. They’d even given him the stub of a return ticket to Cardiff. The letters were probably real. There probably was a ‘Peter’ in some stalag in Germany, from whom they’d been stolen, and poor Mavis in Riverside Villas would never know the use to which her affections had been put. A sentimental moment seized him: to return the letters to Mavis, to put heart and head back together. Then the unsentimental sharp edge of reality-they’d got number two. The Germans had sent a two-man team to take out Stahl-one in the open and one undercover, left jab, right hook-and they’d got both of them. It improved the odds on Stahl’s surviving long enough for them to blunder into him. He’d have to think hard how to explain this to Walter. It was the sort of thing that Walter’s decency and plodding logic might have difficulty with.

He was reading Mavis’s letters-moved far more by this thin strand of life than he was by the lumpen fact of death at his feet-when Walter returned with two men and a sackcloth body bag.

‘You get everything?’ he asked simply.

Only when he flopped face down onto his bed in Claridge’s and felt the bulge in his pocket did Cal remember that he and Walter had said an exhausted good night, fixed a time for the following day and parted, without Cal handing over the package.

It was not a Kitty night. No telephone call, no gentle tapping at his door. He’d made her mad, but he couldn’t help that. He was glad. He needed the break. All the same it was of Kitty that he thought as he read the love letters of an English girl in an English seaside town to an Englishman in God-knew-where. He fell asleep. Still in his trousers and shirt, still clutching a letter, knowing what he missed-the simple, understated restraint of the way she signed off-‘luv ya xxx.’ He didn’t think Kitty knew the words.

Around dawn Troy felt Kitty slide from his bed, heard the rustle of her slipping back into her clothes, the wooden groan of a drawer being prised open.

‘Need a hanky. You don’t mind, do you?’

She plucked out one of his F-embroidered handkerchiefs. Troy said nothing.

Then the gentle click of the Yale engaging on the front door, and the roar of her motorbike ripping up the blackout in Bedfordbury.

Kitty roared home to Covent Garden. All of three streets away. She needed sleep before her shift. She’d got next to none in Troy’s bed. It was less than three hours later when her father phoned to murder sleep.

Cal was using Walter as his alarm clock. If he said he’d be there at eight thirty, he would be. Cal would get a call from reception, on the dot. Walter would order a second breakfast on Cal’s room number and happily wait for him. When he awoke at nine, he knew something was wrong-but all he could do was wait. For once, he’d be up and shaved and Walter would have to forego a second breakfast at his expense. He listened to the news as he shaved. The Bismarck was still loose in the North Atlantic. The battle for Crete dragged on-the British were getting hammered. Ever inventive, the Germans had mounted an airborne invasion, floating their soldiers in on parachutes. Nothing like it had been seen in the history of warfare. On the first day the British had picked them off like pheasants driven towards their guns by beaters. But the Germans had soon got the hang of it-Crete was going to fall.

At ten he switched on the radio again in the easy hope of further developments. He’d missed the opening headline, and it was so hard to tell from the tones of a BBC announcer just what you were listening to-the good, the bad or the indifferent…

‘…at six a.m. this morning the Bismarck and the Prince Eugen were sighted in the Denmark Strait and engaged by His Majesty’s ships Hood and Prince of Wales. HMS Hood opened fire at 26,000 yards…’

Good God, that was the best part of fifteen miles.

‘…but failed to find the range of the German ships. HMS Hood was hit by a salvo from the Prince Eugen, and on returning fire the Bismarck too was hit. After several exchanges of fire, the Hood was hit amidships by a shell from the Bismarck, exploded and sank. It is believed the German shell penetrated the ship’s magazine. The search is now under way for survivors. HMS Prince of Wales withdrew from action after receiving several direct hits. There are reports of casualties.’

The understatement was staggering. Was it the Navy or the British? You can’t say nothing, at the same time you can hardly tell the truth, so you end up with the half-truth of unhysterical understatement that becomes a lie in itself. ‘There are reports of casualties.’ Too calm. It was a time to get hysterical. What casualties? Men blown apart? Men blinded and maimed? God, he’d hate to be British this morning. You’d have to be stoic this morning. To be British… and then Cal remembered where he’d seen the name Hood before. Two sailor caps hanging on the back of the kitchen door in the big basement at Jubilee Street. Walter Stilton’s boys-Kev and Trev-served on the Hood.

He wanted to call Walter. To telephone him. To tell him. He wanted to call Kitty. To tell her what? But he had neither of their numbers. They came to him. One by day and one by night. He was not in control of this. They were.

Patience. All his training had taught him that. He went down to the lobby at lunchtime. Good form had vanished into the occasion. A radio was stuck on one of the tables-half a dozen or so residents clustered round it. He knew the type. Old men-Claridge’s seemed half full of well-heeled widowers at the best of times, old buffers who’d never learnt how to open an egg and could not bear the fuss of a housekeeper. A certain type of old man who wouldn’t leave for the country when the bombs started to fall. Most likely this lot were old soldiers, veterans of the last German war, determined not to miss this one even if it meant staying through the Blitz.