Simon Tolkien - Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy - Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds

‘Get where?’ asked Trave, interrupting.

‘St James’s Park Underground. He wouldn’t give me an address – got really cagey about it when I asked him. And then when we got there he wanted me to wait, but I wouldn’t. Told him I’d had enough of him poking at me, he wasn’t the only one in this town in a hurry.’

‘Did you see where he went?’

‘Some building on Broadway a few doors down. Couldn’t tell you which one except it was on the same side of the road as the Tube. He was running in there when I was turning round. Looked like bloody Professor Brainstorm,’ the cab driver added with a harsh laugh before he went back to his tea.

Trave was tempted to tell the man what had happened to the old bloke that he’d left stranded the previous day, but he knew there was no point. Maybe Albert had been followed home, maybe not, but there was nothing this cab driver was going to say that would change what had happened. And like Albert the previous day, Trave was a man in a hurry. He thought for a moment about asking the driver to take him to St James’s Park but dismissed the idea. He didn’t have the money for such luxuries.

He crossed the King’s Road, passing a tall nineteenth-century building in which the name of a school for boys had been engraved in the red-brick façade; but the school had been closed since the evacuation of children from the capital at the beginning of the war and had now been taken over by the council’s emergency housing department. Strange, Trave thought, the Victorians’ faith in the permanence of their institutions, a naive arrogance that two world wars had destroyed forever.

It was still too early in the morning for the housing office to be open, but already a line of families had formed a queue snaking back past the bus stop. Trave knew who they were. You could tell from the pushcarts and prams piled high with their remaining possessions – pots and pans and teddy bears, all that they had been able to salvage from the wreckage of their bombed-out homes. It was a nightmare existence they led, these urban dispossessed, shunted from one rest centre to another, surviving on inadequate rations until they were finally found somewhere to live, often in an area far removed from their previous home, where they knew nobody and nobody knew them.

Trave hurried past and made his way through the backstreets to South Kensington Underground, where the platforms had already been cleared of the hundreds who took shelter there every night. Every wall was covered with government information posters, ordering citizens to do this and not do that: look out in the blackout; we need your kitchen waste; the enemy is listening – careless talk costs lives. Was that what had cost Albert Morrison his life? Trave wondered as he waited for his train. Talking to the wrong man because he was in too much of a hurry?

Trave emerged out of the Underground into the morning light and began walking down the Broadway, knocking on doors. There was no response from an import–export company that looked as if it had seen better days – unsurprising with the U-boats wreaking havoc on the country’s merchant shipping – and the building next door was a bank, which wasn’t what he was looking for. However, the one beyond seemed like a possibility: tall and wide and grey, with a flat, featureless façade and blacked-out windows on every floor.

An old man answered the door, dressed in a grey overall that reached below his knees. He was thin almost to the point of being skeletal.

‘I’m a detective,’ said Trave, producing his warrant card. ‘I’m making some enquiries. It’s about a murder that happened yesterday – over in Battersea.’

The old man said nothing, didn’t even glance at the warrant card. He just stood blocking the doorway, waiting to hear what else Trave had to say.

‘The dead man was called Albert Morrison. We think he may have come here, and we need to know why and whom he spoke to.’ Trave noticed a definite reaction on the old man’s face to the name, but it was gone too quickly to tell whether it was one of pain or pleasure.

‘Well, dead or alive, ’e didn’t speak to me,’ said the old man. ‘I’m the one who opens the door and the only people who came ’ere yesterday were the people that have got a right to be ’ere – the people who work ’ere.’

‘What work? What goes on here?’ asked Trave, his curiosity aroused by the old man’s unnecessary rudeness.

‘None of your business,’ said the old man, beginning to close the door.

But Trave was too quick for him. He put his foot out and pushed the door back with his hand. The old man took a step back, looking furious.

‘Do you live here?’ Trave asked.

But the old man ignored his question. ‘I’m calling security,’ he said, but he made no move away from the door.

‘All right, I’ll take that as a no,’ said Trave. ‘The man I’m talking about – he came here late in the afternoon, so maybe you’d already gone home. Maybe someone else answered the door.’

The old man looked Trave up and down for a moment and then seemed to come to a decision. ‘I’ll check the book,’ he said grudgingly. ‘You wait ’ere.’

This time Trave did not stop the old man from shutting the door. He waited patiently on the step, resisting the temptation to knock again. Something told him that the old man might be cantankerous and unpleasant but that he was no liar – if he said he was going to check the book, then that was what he would do. Several minutes later, he was proved right when the door opened and the old man reappeared.

‘There were no visitors yesterday before or after I left,’ he said with sour satisfaction, turning to go.

But Trave hadn’t finished. ‘Does a man called Thorn work here?’ he asked. ‘Middle-aged, balding, no glasses—’

‘I know what ’e looks like,’ said the old man, interrupting.

‘Is he here? I need to see him.’

‘That’ll depend on if ’e wants to see you,’ the old man said laconically. ‘You’d better come in, I suppose.’

The old man stepped aside and Trave went past him into a wide, dimly lit entrance hall. There was a threadbare colourless carpet on the floor, and the walls, void of pictures, were badly in need of a coat of paint. There were several doors on either side, but they were all closed and probably locked, Trave thought, noticing the large bunch of keys attached to the old man’s waistband. Maybe one of them contained the visitors’ book, Trave speculated, but the old man didn’t ask him to sign anything. Instead he pointed to a hard-backed chair set against one of the walls; told Trave to wait, speaking in the same peremptory tone he’d used outside; and then went up the staircase at the back of the hall. Trave could hear the sound of the old man’s knee joints cracking even after he’d disappeared from view.

The sound faded away and then, after an interval of several minutes, began again – the old man was coming back down the stairs. But immediately there was the sound of quicker feet, and a man who matched Mrs Graves’s description was the first to appear in the hall. He looked tired and preoccupied, and his clothes were just as crumpled as she’d described them.

Trave got up and held out his hand, which Thorn took absently for a moment. ‘I’m Detective Trave,’ he said. ‘Are you—’

‘Thorn. Yes. Alec Thorn. Jarvis here said you wanted to see me. I haven’t got long, I’m afraid. I’ve got a lot of work to do today.’

‘Do you know a man called Albert Morrison?’

‘Yes. Why do you ask?’

‘Did you go and see him yesterday – at his flat in Battersea?’

Thorn paused, not answering. His eyes flickered over to the old man, who was standing listening to them at the bottom of the stairs. Trave had noted the look of interest in the old man’s eyes as well as Thorn’s when he’d mentioned Albert’s name.