John Lawton - Riptide

‘You mean he was there when Walter died?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he says he didn’t do it?’

‘He says he saw…’

Again Cal searched for a word best chosen not to cause alarm.

‘He saw…’

‘The perpetrator,’ said Troy-a bland, unemotive police term-‘He saw the perpetrator?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he can identify him?’

‘No. But he gave us a lead. An American soldier out of uniform.’

‘How on earth does he know that?’

‘The shoes. Regulation US Army brown roundies. Just like the ones I wear.’

There was a prolonged silence. Cal could hear his own breathing, coming back to him through the earpiece above the crackles and static hiccups of the connection. Kitty walked around him, came back into view still staring at him out of no particular expression, nothing he could read. Then Troy said, ‘Let me talk to Kitty.’

Cal was startled. Troy was deducing far too much.

‘She’s there isn’t she?’

‘Well… yes.’

Cal handed the phone to Kitty.

‘He wants to talk to you.’

‘Wot?’ she said flatly, paring any feeling from her voice.

‘Was your father a Dickens reader?’ Troy asked.

‘Eh?’

‘Did he read the novels of Charles Dickens? To be precise, do you know if he’d ever read Great Expectations?’

‘Only every summer holiday. Two weeks at Walton-on-the-Naze. He’d fish off the end of the pier all morning and sit on the beach all afternoon with Pip and Joe Gargery. When I was a nipper he read it out loud to us at bedtime. Read it to all of us. One after another. Same battered book, reeked of fish. I still think of Pip whenever I smell cod.’

‘Wot larx, eh?’

‘Yeah. Wot larx.’

‘Tell Calvin I’ll be round in the morning, first thing.’

Kitty put the receiver back in its cradle, weeping silently-the dam burst-great, bulbous salt-tears coursing across her cheeks. Cal put his arms around her. Almost happier now that she proffered recognisable feeling to which he could react.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wot larx,’ she said, and wept the more. Cal still didn’t know what it meant.

She wept an age. His shirt was soaked. He lifted her head by the tip of her chin and said, ‘I love you, Kitty.’

She said, ‘Yeah. Great, init?’

Troy was having a very early breakfast when someone knocked on his door. At first he didn’t recognise the young woman clutching a large brown paper envelope. She thrust it into his hand, and then he knew. That new girl out at Hendon who worked for the Polish Beast. Anna something or other. She declined his offer of a cup of coffee, told him Kolankiewicz wanted it back and dashed. Troy had never thought of himself as a charmer. If he had, this might have punctured his ego. Pity, she was a looker.

He read the report over his second cup. It told him nothing he did not know and confirmed his rash assertion to Kolankiewicz that there were two distinct modi operandi for the deaths of Smulders and Stilton. There was precedent in Kolankiewicz’s argument, and logic, but everything about this case told him to look for two killers, not one. There was definitely a third man.

When he got to Claridge’s he found Cormack alone. The bed had already been made up. He’d no idea whether Kitty had spent the night there. He didn’t much care-what he didn’t want was to have to talk to both of them at once. If he was to do this, he never wanted to find himself in the same room as Kitty and Cormack.

Cormack said, ‘Do you still have that sketch I gave you?’

Troy took it out of his pocket. Cormack took a pencil and drew on it. Shaded the hair and sketched in a moustache.

‘He looks more like this now. Walter and I would never have found him with what we had.’

‘Older?’ said Troy.

‘Yep. Makes him look fortyish. All this time we were chasing a younger man with blond hair.’

‘The German you shot?’ said Troy.

‘Yep.’

‘My turn,’ Troy said. He took Stilton’s letter from his pocket. ‘Take a good look.’

Cormack glanced at it. ‘I know what it says. I know it by heart.’

‘Wot larx,’ said Troy.

‘I know. You’re going to have to explain it to me. You know what Walter meant by it, and so does Kitty. Only I didn’t feel I could ask Kitty, the state she was in. I feel like I’m on the outside of an in-joke.’

‘Not quite. It’s the catch phrase of a minor character in Walter’s favourite novel.’

‘Oh-I get it, this Great Expectations you were asking Kitty about. I never got past David Copperfield myself.’

‘It’s what a simple, good man by the name of Joe Gargery seems to say at every opportunity, to his innocent, ambitious apprentice, Pip.’

‘Innocent apprentice. That’s me in this equation, eh?’

‘If you like. But the clue is in two parts. Walter says “Hope this reaches you one way or another.”’

‘Walter left me clues?’

‘Not in the sense you mean, no. I mean simply that his choice of words reflects the way his mind was working. There’s nothing idle or throwaway about the phrasing he used. “One way or another”-it simply means he left you more than one note. He left one here and one at the embassy.’

‘How can you be so sure? Or is this where I tell you I think English policemen are wonderful?’

‘Deduction. And a little inside knowledge. There is another character in Great Expectations called Wemmick. He’s a solicitor’s clerk, he’s the man who knows everything and fixes everything. He moves through the book almost like a secret agent. One of the most curious characters Dickens ever created, and that’s saying something. At one point in the book, when Pip is in danger, Wemmick leaves the same note at all four entrances to Barnard’s Inn. And when he knows Pip has received one he goes round and collects the rest. I think Walter was having difficulty finding you. I think he left a note at both places you were likely to be.’

‘I was in the embassy at five p.m. There was no note.’

‘Then he left it later. In the meantime someone, the same someone Stahl saw, was able to read it and realised what it meant.’

‘Jesus, Troy. That’s a hell of a lot from two lines.’

‘If I’m right, the note will still be there. After all, Walter never went back for it.’

‘Why? Why wouldn’t the killer just destroy it?’

‘Because he doesn’t know what’s in the note you have. You might be expecting to find the copy. And if you didn’t it might give you a lead. After all, it’s easy enough to read it and put it back unmarked.’

‘It is?’

‘Calvin-you’re a spy. How do you open letters?’ a paperknife.’

Cal left Troy sitting in his car in Grosvenor Square while he went into the embassy. Ten minutes later he came back, sat in the passenger seat and handed Troy an envelope addressed to Captain Cormack.

‘Where was it?’

‘Would you believe I have an in-tray?’

‘What did your colleagues have to say to you?’

‘Nothing. The place was almost deserted. If I’d run into Major Shaeffer, well, things might have been said. He’s the guy who dumped me into the tender care of Chief Inspector Nailer. I’d have a bone worth picking with him.’

Troy held the envelope up to the windscreen.

‘Well-it hasn’t been steamed.’

He examined the edges, sniffed the paper, then he tore it open and let the letter sit on the palm of his hand. It looked to Cal like a comic-book impression of a private eye. More Hercule Poirot than Nick Charles.

‘Observe the way it curls.’

‘That mean something?’