John Lawton - Riptide

‘Ah… she died before I was born.’

She’d diverted him neatly. He wasn’t about to give up.

‘So. How do you feel?’

She prised herself up, out of the water, eye to eye, nipple to nipple-the touch of them on his chest brought him up in goosebumps-drew breath and spoke softly.

‘There’s a hole in my life I’ll never be able to fill. All I ask is fill the hole in me.’

He knew it could not possibly be as crude a notion as her phrasing made it seem. All the same, he would never understand it. Sex-that which had been her ravenous hunger had become her consolation, and he could not tell the two apart, could not grasp the shifts of mind that drove her from pillar to post and called both sex.

‘Just fuck me.’

He had never heard her use this word before-but then she had never used it, not since first acquiring its meaning on the edge of adolescence twenty years before.

‘Just fuck me and I’ll kid myself everything’s OK.’

As ever in the moment of hysteresis he reached for his eyeglasses. Cock down, glasses up, all passion spent, blind as a bat.

He’d not made a good job of it. He’d come too easily, blown his stack like a liquored-up high-school kid. Kitty did not seem to mind. She was smiling at him as she came into focus.

‘We’ll get through this, won’t we, Cal?’

One hand pulled lazily at a strand of his hair. It was more affectionate than any gesture he’d ever seen her make.

‘We will?’

‘Well-we got to. Ain’t we? I mean we’ll get through. We’ll catch the bastard, won’t we?’

It was an odd moment to pick, but perhaps now, for the first time, he could talk seriously to her.

‘Now you mention it, there are things I can do-things I have to do.’

‘Like what?’

‘I have to talk to my people. I can’t do a damn thing without I talk to them first.’

‘I thought you said they didn’t want to know.’

‘They didn’t. But they’re still the bosses. So I tell them what happened and then, if they say so, I can probably tell Nailer.’

‘Wot? Tell Nailer wot?’

The smile vanished, the other hand locked into his hair, held him like a wrestler. It hurt, but he didn’t move.

‘Kitty, I don’t know who killed your father. But there’ve been other people-the enemy-looking for the man he and I were chasing. It all revolves around him. I can’t name him without the say-so from my people, but if they do say so then my telling Nailer is the only chance he’s got of catching the killer. Without our man he doesn’t stand a chance. Without me he doesn’t stand a chance.’

She thrust him aside, leapt from the bed, naked and trembling with the force of her own anger.

‘Are you out of your bleedin’ mind? Tell Nailer! Nailer doesn’t want a result. All he cares about is the honour of the Met. And that’s not the same thing by a long chalk. You tell Nailer anything, you might just as well piss into the wind. You don’t want Nailer, you want a real copper, not one of those plodding berks.’

‘You’re the only real copper I know.’

‘Not me, you fool. I’m just plod, I am. A plonk in a uniform. You want… you want someone like… like an old boyfriend of mine.’

‘An old boyfriend?’

‘Chap I used to know on the Murder Squad. Flash as they come, but a first-rate copper.’

‘Aha.’

‘Yeah. Bloke I used to… go out with.’

Her mood had changed utterly. She wasn’t angry, it seemed, more cautious, almost coy.

‘A bloke?’ he echoed.

‘Troy,’ she said at last. ‘You want Frederick Troy.’

‘Kitty, come here.’

She sat down on the edge of the bed. He took her hands in his. She was calmer, but red in the face, still reeling from her own outburst.

‘Kitty. It was Troy got me out of the slammer. He was the cop the Yard sent when I phoned in the news of your father’s murder. He was the first to get there, the first to see Walter. Then Nailer came along and took over. At some point, he must have found out they had me and spoke up. If he hadn’t I’d still be in the cells.’

The look on her face told him not that she did not believe him, but that she would rather not believe him.

‘Little feller, black hair, black eyes, talks like a total joe ronce?’

Cal got up, searched through the pockets of his stinking, bloody jacket and fished out the bloodier handkerchief with its fancy, embroidered letter F.

‘This feller.’

He held out the handkerchief. She rubbed the scarlet letter between finger and thumb, felt the crispness of dried blood.

‘His blood? Your blood?’

‘Walter’s,’ he said simply.

‘So Troy knew my Dad was dead before I did?’

‘Before anyone but me.’

She crumpled the handkerchief, flakes of brown blood wafting onto the sheets, and put it to her cheek. She wept and cried, ‘The bastard. I’ll kill ‘im!’

Troy was flat on his back on the chaise longue. Kolankiewicz leaned over him, reeking of beer and black-pudding and tut-tutting him in three languages. Into Polish, into English and the odd word of Yiddish thrown in just for emphasis. He had cut away his shirt-a Jermyn Street tailor-made now fit only for dusters-cleaned the wound, though it bled still, and was swabbing it in the hope he could get it dry and closed enough for stitching.

‘Does it hurt, smartyarse?’

‘Of course it hurts.’

‘Good. So it should-it is practically through to the rib, and a little pain will make you wary next time.’

Over Kolankiewicz’s shoulder Troy saw the door open. Kitty Stilton entered, took her key from the latch and came up behind Kolankiewicz, hands sunk deep in her coat pockets. He did not care for the look on her face. White, tight and red about the eyes. It was too late in the day, he was in pain, he was bleeding. He did not need whatever bee it was that buzzed in Kitty’s auburn bonnet.

Kolankiewicz did not even turn.

‘If you are staying, angel from hell, then you must make yourself useful. Hold the edges of the wound while I stitch.’

Kitty did not bat an eyelid. She slipped between the two of them and gripped the wound between thumb and forefinger. It hurt all the more.

‘Bastard,’ she whispered.

‘Aaagh,’ said Troy, as Kolankiewicz sank in the needle. ‘I thought you said you’d localise it?’

‘I was lying,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Now, pretty woman, hold tight, because the bugger will squirm.’

Kitty gripped him as though she had pliers in her hands.

‘I was hoping for a word,’ she hissed.

‘Well, I can hardly not listen, can I?’ Troy hissed back.

She pinched him harder.

‘In fact I was hoping to make you squirm.’

Troy squirmed.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘Why didn’t I tell you what?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me my dad was dead?’

‘I thought the American would tell you.’

‘He was in chokey. How the bleedin’ ‘ell could ‘e?’

‘I didn’t know that. I only found out today.’

‘Troy, you should have told me. You should have come round to Jubilee Street and told me and me mum yourself. Can’t you see that? I shouldn’t have found out from a routine visit by a gobshite like Nailer. You should have told me. After wot we been to each other you should have told me. No excuse. I don’t care where you were, what you were doing, you should have told me.’

It seemed to Troy that the two of them had combined their efforts to torture him, that Kolankiewicz was punctuating Kitty’s sentences with every puncture of his flesh. When she finished, he finished, knotted the thread and snapped it off.

‘OK. We done. You got one more medal on your chest, copper.’