John Lawton - Riptide

‘So-what you’re telling me is that you’ll be going in there on your own?’

‘Initially, yes.’

‘Then you’ll need this.’

Cormack reached into his jacket pocket, pulled out a handgun and slid it across the table to him. Troy just looked at it. Did not touch it. It wasn’t the same make as Cormack’s. It was an automatic, but it was bigger, a.38 at least. Cormack clutched his own gun in his right hand.

‘You’ll need to know how to speed load. Your life could depend on it. Our man will be armed. Goes without saying. He could have real stopping power. Standard issue is a.45.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘He’ll have a gun like yours.’

Cormack looked at him with incredulity.

‘What? How can you know that?’

‘Because Walter was shot with a.35.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me that?’

‘It didn’t seem important,’ said Troy. ‘And I didn’t want you to feel your brush with Chief Inspector Nailer had been quite as close as it was.’

‘Not many people use these, you know.’

‘I do know, and I think the fact is rather in our favour.’

‘Whatever. Just watch me.’

Cormack held a spare clip in his left hand. The flick of a switch and the old clip fell out, the new was banged in and he had racked a bullet into the chamber and levelled the gun.

‘Less than two seconds. Try it.’

It had seemed to Troy like the handiwork of a magician. One second he was watching Cormack’s face, the next he was staring down the barrel of a freshly loaded gun. The hand was truly quicker than the eye. Cormack was looking straight at him now, picking up on his incredulity.

‘Or did you think that because I wore glasses and did a desk job I somehow wasn’t a real soldier?’

‘Not at all,’ said Troy. ‘I was thinking more about myself. Sorry, I’m not a gunman.’

‘Picking up a gun doesn’t make you a gunman.’

‘Doesn’t it? Then what am I, a pretend gunman? I don’t live in your world of habitual pretence. I think I’d find pretence a dangerous illusion.’

‘Troy, this could be… no, goddammit, this is dangerous.’

‘Sorry. Can’t do it. Tell me I’ve been a London bobby too long, any cliché you like, but I can’t do it.’

He slid the gun back across the table to Cormack.

‘You mean you’re going in there with just a cop’s nightstick, that truncheon thing?’

‘Only detectives of Walter’s generation carry truncheons. I’ll have a pair of handcuffs and you’ll have a gun. That ought to be enough.’

It was pissing it down. It had been a cold spring and threatened to be a capricious summer. Troy stood in the doorway at Goodwin’s Court, hoping for a lull in the downpour. It didn’t ease. It was not quite torrential, but it was still the sort of rain to slice through his overcoat in the time it took to get to the car. He looked at his watch. He was ahead of schedule. He’d give it five more minutes. It was almost possible to see it as romantic-the onset of a short night, dusk scarcely fallen, the beat of rain hammering down in the courtyard and rattling the windows. Where was WPS Stilton in the romance of rain that made the scalp tense, the skin tingle, and wrapped you in its rhythm? He looked at his watch again. It read exactly the same time. The sweep hand was not moving. The damn thing had stopped. He reached for the phone and dialled the speaking clock and the clock-woman told him what he’d guessed. His watch had stopped twenty minutes ago. He wasn’t ahead of schedule, he was late.

He dashed to Bedfordbury, yanked open the car door. Kitty was sitting in the driver’s seat, buttoned up in her blue mac, hands in tight leather gloves gripping the wheel, her hair wet and flat and rain streaming down her face like tears. As if he had summoned her by thinking of her.

‘Kitty…’

‘Get in, Troy. Just get in.’

He ran to the passenger door, slammed it behind him, suddenly almost deafened by the pounding of rain on the tin roof.

‘You’re up to something. I know. He won’t tell me what, but I know.’

‘Kitty. If Calvin won’t tell you, then neither can I. Please, get out and let me do what I have to do.’

She turned on him, voice soaring to outshout the rain.

‘If you think I’m going to let him get blown away like me dad then think again. You’re up to something and I’m in. Like it or lump it, I’m coming, Troy.’

Troy froze. Simply seeing those gorgon-green eyes fixed upon him was enough to make his wits shrivel.

‘Well?’ she said at last.

Troy said nothing. He lurched across her, grabbed the keys from the ignition, tore his coat from her grasping hands and ran. Down Bedfordbury to Chandos Place, out into Trafalgar Square in search of a cab. He stood in front of St Martin’s church waving desperately at every cab in the hope that some dozy cabman had simply forgotten to put his light on. No one had. It was the perfect night to wave forlornly at the cabmen of olde London while getting soaked to the skin.

Then he watched as his own car crawled towards him, stopped at the kerb and Kitty leant over and pushed open the door.

‘Get in! Get in, you silly sod!’

He sat next to her as wet as she was, hair plastered to his skull, rain puddling at his feet.

‘How?’ he said.

‘Jesus H. Christ, Troy. Call yerself a copper and you don’t know how to hotwire a car.’

He looked at the tangle of wires she’d pulled out behind the steering column. A trick he’d never learnt. But then he’d never learnt to lock his car either. Kitty slammed into first.

‘Where we going?’

‘Limehouse,’ he conceded. ‘Tallow Dock Lane.’

She drove a car as furiously as she drove a motorbike. Troy was all caution and cock-up. Not a natural driver. Kitty flung the little Morris around corners and pushed it to its limit on the straight-even so, its limit was less than sixty miles per hour. With every landmark passed Troy ticked off another five minutes on his mental clock. He dared not tell Kitty that they were screwing up in precisely the way Cormack and her father had screwed up, so he said nothing.

Less than a mile from the warehouse, in Westferry Road, the car juddered and jerked and lurched and stopped. Kitty pressed the self-starter. It grunted at her and refused. She pressed again-it grunted, whined and died.

‘What’s wrong?’ said Troy.

‘How should I know? There were so many wires back there. I just joined up the ones that looked right.’

‘Kitty, we’re already late. For God’s sake make it go! Make it go!’

She bent down, the bundle of wires fell into her hand like a fat wodge of macaroni.

‘Oh, bugger,’ she said. ‘Haifa mo.’

There were no half mo’s. Troy got out of the car and ran. He’d no idea how late he was. His ‘half hour early’ was most certainly blown. Could he possibly get there before Cormack-before the killer? He turned the corner into Tallow Dock Lane and felt his sides begin to burst. It was like those forced school runs he and Charlie had always hated, the onset of stitch, the stab in the side that made running agony. The great white BELL AND HARROP sign loomed up. The steel door was wide open. He leant against it, put his head tentatively inside-all he could hear was the pounding of his heart and the roar of his own breathing. At the foot of the staircase all he could hear was the wind and the rain whistling down the shaft, amplified as though by a tunnel. He set off up the stairs as quietly as he could, flicking his bull’s-eye torch on and off as he went. A rat scurried across his path, slithered across the toecap of one shoe, and he felt his heart explode in his chest. Cormack was right. For the first time since he had gone into plain clothes, he missed his truncheon.