John Lawton - Riptide

‘I see,’ said Crawley noncomittally. He jerked his head sharply left as though stung by an insect. ‘Enoch?’

Nailer rattled it off. Terse, precise and fuck you. ‘I found this Yank… standing over the body… a recently fired gun in his possession… I have two eyewitnesses who saw him go into Coburn’s Place about twenty minutes before… he was the only person to enter the alley in the timespan we’re concerned with… and no-one, ‘cept you, is vouching for the man… his line is that Walter summoned him there by letter… needless to say he can’t produce the letter… you don’t have to be Agatha Christie to solve this one.’

‘Might I ask who your witnesses are?’

‘Couple of streetwalkers… pair o’ prozzies… working Islington Green. They reckon they were stood there from about quarter to ten, and they were still there when I got there. They say he walked right past them-inches away.’

Another involuntary twitch from Crawley. Clearly, he wasn’t too happy with this as testimony. No barrister in his right mind would relish putting a prostitute in the box and asking her to swear a credible oath.

‘Did they see anyone else?’ Troy asked.

‘I’ve already said they didn’t.’

‘I mean anyone, anyone at all. You said they were there from about 9.45 and were still there when you arrived. That’s well over an hour, nearer an hour and a half. Who else did they see go into Coburn Place?’

‘Nobody-they saw Cormack, that’s what matters! How big do you want the letters, Mr Troy? They saw Cormack!’

This was inverse logic. Cormack was found in the alley. Ergo, he had at some point gone up it. This scarcely needed witnesses. What mattered was what the two whores did not see.

‘They can’t have been that alert, then, can they? I went up the alley twenty minutes or so after Cormack. If they didn’t see me, who’s to say who they might have missed twenty minutes earlier?’

‘It’s who they did see that matters.’

‘Has it occurred to you, sir…’ It seemed to Troy the right moment at which to throw in a ‘sir’. ‘Has it occurred to you that for a prostitute to admit to you that she was off the street for any length of time might be seen by her as an admission of prostitution, and that the reason they told you they were there without break was because they did not wish to admit openly to prostitution in front of a policeman? They weren’t there when I went up the alley. Either they were being dozy-which I doubt, since their trade depends on spotting the single men-or else they weren’t there, and if they weren’t there when I got there, who’s to say where they were at 10 or 10.30? Most turns take less than five minutes, they could have had three or four men in rapid succession and still have kept their patch on the street. But Walter’s killer probably needed less than one minute.’

Nailer went from grey to red. Troy had done more than he meant to do; he had begun the logical demolition of the man, and it wasn’t over yet.

‘That isn’t the most important thing. Of course they missed the killer-‘

Crawley was looking hard at Troy, his discomfort self-evident.

‘-But they would also appear to have missed the victim.’

‘What?’ said Crawley.

‘Quite simply, sir, where were they when Chief Inspector Stilton went up the alley?’

It was so obvious, it was little short of calling Nailer stupid. Crawley tacked away from it. If Troy had been in his position, he thought, he would too-he would bat for his man.

‘There is, of course, the matter of the gun.’

And it was the intervention Troy had been all but praying for. For one of them to bring up the gun made it so much easier for him to say what he had to say.

‘Quite, sir, and I must say I’m baffled at the weight of evidence you seem to attach to it.’

‘I don’t follow, sergeant.’

‘Am I right in thinking that you’ve asked for no ballistic tests?’

The merest exchange of looks between Crawley and Nailer. Crawley spoke.

‘We’ve only the gun and the spent bullet that’s lodged in Chief Inspector Stilton. We don’t have the cartridge case to match up.’

This was old-fashioned thinking. This was the way ballistics had been until about nine or ten years ago. They could match cases; they had the greatest difficulty in matching or comparing bullets-even now it was a far from perfect science, but it was doable, and to a policeman of Troy’s generation it was the first thing one would ask to be done.

Nailer chipped in again. ‘Ballistics isn’t everything.’

Troy looked at Onions. He could have sworn the man blushed, ever so slightly, at the way Nailer betrayed their ages in the word-for-word repetition of what he had said himself. ‘I was on Murder for two years myself under Mr Onions’ predecessor. In my day if you caught a bloke with a gun in his hand at the scene of a murder you didn’t need to ask for the man in the white coat, you knew. Walter Stilton was shot just above one ear’ole. I should think you’d’ve noticed that for yourself. And I should think that when you’ve been in the job more than eighteen months, when you’ve done a bit more than spit and cough, when you’re not still wet behind the ears, you’ll know. When a small-bore bullet passes through that amount of bone it’ll bend-of course it’ll bend. A fat lot of use a bent bullet is. Where are you then, with the men in their white coats?’

Troy had always admired punctuality. It was a mark of civilisation-even in one so thinly civilised as the Polish Beast. Madge stuck her head round the door and said, ‘Professor Kolankiewicz is here, Mr Onions.’

‘Kolankiewicz? I didn’t send for him,’ Stan said blankly.

‘I did,’ said Troy.

‘You little shite!’ Nailer exploded. ‘You’ve fitted me up!’

‘Perhaps if you weren’t so keen to fit up the American, I wouldn’t have had to.’

Nailer got out of his chair, his right arm raised as though he’d thump Troy if there weren’t a superintendent and a desk between them. Crawley calmly pushed him back into it.

‘Mr Troy, I’ll thank you to treat my officers with more respect,’ he said without raising his voice. ‘Chief Inspector Nailer has served over twenty years in this force and deserves better.’

He turned his attention to Onions.

‘I deplore such tactics, Stanley. However, now that Professor Kolankiewicz is here we may as well see him.’

‘I agree,’ said Stan. ‘And Freddie, keep yer gob shut.’

Kolankiewicz bundled in, homburg pushed way back on his head, pockets bulging, a copy of the News Chronicle under one arm. He was not a serving police officer. Rank held no terror for him. He pulled up a chair, plonked it down next to Crawley and said ‘Which one you coppers got the gun?’

Troy could have sworn he heard a soft ‘Oh Jesus’ escape Onions’ lips. Crawley simply twitched again and jerked his head towards the box file on Onions’ desk.

‘It’s there. Sealed in cellophane. The suspect’s fingerprints are all over it.’

Kolankiewicz tore off the wrapper like a small boy attacking a Mars bar. He sniffed the barrel.

‘Smith and Wesson. Been fired.’

Nailer sighed at the obvious. Kolankiewicz ignored him and stripped the wrapper off the holster. A small black triangle of tough leather, a stainless steel clip on the flat side. Kolankiewicz sniffed that too.

‘It’s a closed holster,’ he said. ‘Unusual. It would complicate things.’

‘How?’ said Onions.

‘Bloke shoots some other bloke. Unless he stands around like Wild Bill Hickock blowing smoke off the barrel and boasting to every bugger that he’s Deadeye Dick, he puts it back in the holster straight away. In an open holster the barrel would protrude, the gases would be allowed to disperse at what I would term a normal rate. In a holster like this… well, you might as well put a cork up the barrel. Gases are trapped. Makes it difficult to say when the gun was fired. All you can say is that it was fired.’