John Lawton - Riptide

‘Till last night, you mean. Who else knows you?’

‘My people at the embassy.’

‘Names.’

‘General Gelbroaster. He sent for me from Zurich. My immediate superior at the London Embassy-Major Shaeffer and his superior, Colonel Reininger.’

Nailer left him alone with another silent uniformed bobby for company. Half an hour later he was back.

‘I got this Major Shaeffer on the blower.’

‘Good,’ said Cal.

‘Not good. He says you weren’t working for him and he’s never heard of Walter Stilton.’

Cal recalled now what had not occurred to him once in the course of the night-‘You land in trouble and you’re on your own. Capiche?’ It had never crossed Cal’s mind that Shaeffer would go so far as to disown him. But he had.

‘Superintendent. I think there’s been some kind of misunderstanding here…’

‘No there hasn’t. He was clear as daylight. He doesn’t know why you’re in London. He knows nothing of any mission you say you’re on.’

‘Did you check with Gelbroaster?’

‘The General’s in Washington.’

‘Reininger?’ Surely Frank wouldn’t just dump him for the sake of diplomatic neatness?

‘On his way to Ireland.’

‘So nobody’s backing me up?’

‘Get smart, Captain Cormack-you’ve been thrown to the wolves. And I’m the one with the big teeth.’

‘There are other people who know I was working with Walter.’

‘Such as?’

‘Edna Stilton. Her daughter Kitty. They both met me.’

Cal had not thought this a provocative remark. When Nailer got up from his chair and grabbed him by his shirt front, he was genuinely surprised.

‘Shut your stinking gob-you toerag! Don’t ever mention the name of Edna Stilton to me again. That woman’s a saint! If you think I’m calling her or her family the day after their man got blown away by some cheap hoodlum with a shooter, you can bloody well think again! That woman’s in mourning. Her world just came to pieces. And you have the fucking nerve to suggest I call her? Get this through your Yankee skull-the embassy don’t know you-Walter makes no mention of you in his notes-you’re in the shit, and you’re going to have to come up with something better than that!’

Nailer dropped him back in the chair, shirt-buttons popping off. Yankee? My how the world had moved on since then.

‘The letter,’ Cal said.

‘What letter?’

‘The one Walter sent me. Telling me to meet him in Islington.’

‘Where is it?’

‘Your… your man… Sergeant Dixon. He took all my papers.’

Nailer sent for Dixon, and in front of Cal they sifted the papers from Cal’s pockets-everything he had turned out for Dixon last night and watched him slip into a cellophane bag. There was no letter.

‘Try again, Captain Cormack.’

‘I must have lost it. But he sent it to me. How else would I know to find the pub in Islington, either of those pubs?’

‘You tell me-but in the meantime, I’ll tell you that if this is the best you can do, you’re going to find yourself in hot water pretty damn quick.’

‘There is someone else who could alibi me.’

‘Name?’

‘Ruthven-Greene.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘MI6. He’s the man put me in touch with Walter. Reggie Ruthven-Greene.’

Another wait. This time, most of the day. At noon he was taken back to his cell, and half an hour later a meal of cold, greasy meatloaf and mashed potatoes was served to him. It was five before Nailer sent for him again.

Nailer’s face never seemed to give anything away-he had two expressions, surly and angry.

‘Well?’ said Cal.

‘There’s good news and bad news. This Ruthven-Greene bloke appears to exist. But he can’t be found. He’s incommunicado, as they say.’

‘I don’t believe this. I do not believe this. I’ve given you half a dozen names. Every one of these people knows me.’

Nailer put him back in the cells. Another two hours passed in silence. Then he was taken back to the interview room again. Nailer stood on the far side of the room, saying nothing, watching Dixon. On a clean, clear table Dixon set out the objects in the case, one by one, with a care and precision in their placing that forced Cal to look for meaning where there could be none. It was like checkers for the advanced student-little cellophane bundles, each piece an utterly unknown quantity.

‘Right,’ Nailer said at last. ‘You recognise this lot?’

‘What is this, a game?’

‘Right, it is-Kim’s game. Or don’t you Yankees read Kipling?’

There it was, that word again. Red rag to a tired bull.

‘You know, Chief Inspector, I could get mightily pissed off with you.’

The blow took Cal by surprise. The back of Nailer’s hand to the mouth-a split lip and the taste of blood.

‘Look!’

Cal looked. A pile of paper, a few pounds in change and notes, about fifty or so dollars in his billfold, his key ring, his driver’s licence, the bloody handkerchief-from somewhere they’d retrieved the map of London he’d covered Walter with: one of his thumbprints stood out clearly, a blood stained spiral in New Cross, now ringed in blue pencil. And his gun, split into component parts, the holster, the clip and the bullets flipped out and set next to it.

Nailer held one of the twenty-dollar bills up to the light. Cal felt like an idiot. He’d just pocketed them without thinking, that day in Silver Place.

‘The ink’s run on this,’ Nailer said. ‘Now, what would an honest American soldier want with a phony bank note?’

Cal said nothing. He could think of nothing that would sound remotely plausible.

Nailer picked up the gun with two fingers wrapped in a grubby handkerchief and held the barrel out to Cal at face height.

‘This gun’s been fired recently.’

‘Three or four days ago-if you want to call that recent?’

‘When exactly?’

‘The night before the Hood was sunk. I don’t remember the date. Twenty-third or twenty-fourth, I think.’

‘One bullet short in the magazine.’

‘I fired one round-yes.’

‘At whom?’

Cal didn’t know. And if he did-how could he explain it to Nailer? That he’d shot a man on a rooftop in the middle of London, and left Walter and his ‘binmen’ to dispose of the body?

‘I can’t tell you that.’

‘Just like you can’t tell me who the Jerry was you claim you were following.’

‘It’s my job,’ Cal said.

‘And this is mine. Dixon, take Captain Cormack’s fingerprints.’

Dixon set a blue inkpad next to the row of little cellophane bags and Cal let him roll his fingertips across it and then onto the numbered boxes of the print form. It was like being a child again. Literally in someone else’s hands. As the thumb of his left hand pressed into the pad, Cal found himself fixed on the corner of a handkerchief, visible through its transparent wrapping. An ‘F,’ neatly embroidered in scarlet thread. It must be Troy’s initial. Walter had called him Frank or Fred or something.

‘Wait a minute!’

Nailer was at the door, his hand already grasping the handle.

‘Well?’

‘Troy. Troy knows me. He saw me with Walter.’

‘Captain Cormack, I saw you with Walter. He was dead. He was dead when Troy saw you with him!’

‘No-I mean before that. The day Walter and I met. He was called out to a case in Hoxton. Troy was there too. Walter took over the case from him, just as you did last night. He asked me if I was working with Walter. I told him I was.’

Cal could hear the desperation in his own voice. He was beginning to feel no-one in London would ever admit to knowing him. Nailer took out his notepad and jotted down a couple of words, then paused with his pencil on the pad.