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‘Anything else?’
‘Nice-sounding voice. I might remember his name if you give me a minute. He didn’t tell me it this time, but we had a chat once when he was here before and he wasn’t in such a hurry. Briars, maybe … no, something else that hurts – on plants.’ Mrs Graves scratched her head, searching for the word, and then abruptly found it. ‘Thorn – that’s it,’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘I remember because it wasn’t the right name for him. He wasn’t prickly or up on his high horse like Ava’s husband. She’d have done a lot better marrying this bloke if she was going to go for someone older, if you ask me—’
‘You said he was in a hurry today,’ interrupted Trave, trying to get the widow back on track.
‘Yes, a real hurry. Couldn’t wait for Albert to get back, and so I got him a piece of scrap paper and he scribbled something on it, leaning over on the ledge in the hall where we leave the letters, so I couldn’t see what he was writing even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, of course. It was none of my business. And then when he’d finished, he folded it up and made me promise to give it to Albert personally when he got back, which I did just as soon as he came in. I hope I did the right thing,’ she said anxiously, looking up at Trave for reassurance. ‘I hope that note didn’t have anything to do with what happened – you know, afterwards.’
‘I’m sure it didn’t,’ said Trave, injecting a note of certainty into his voice that he was far from feeling. ‘We just need to get the whole picture, that’s all. You understand.’
Trave sensed that he’d got everything from Mrs Graves that was worth getting and stood up to leave. But the widow wouldn’t hear of it, keeping him prisoner for half an hour longer while she plied him with more whisky and memories of her late lamented husband, who’d died of something unspecified at the time of the General Strike. And in retrospect, Trave didn’t know how he would have got out of her flat at all if it hadn’t been for the air raid siren that came to his rescue on the stroke of eight o’clock, sending Mrs Graves scurrying to the basement with the other surviving tenants of Gloucester Mansions.
This time it was no false alarm, as less than ten minutes later, just as he was approaching Albert Bridge, Trave began to hear the sound of distant explosions. There was no one in sight, and he felt for a moment as if he were looking at a surrealist painting of an inhuman world – the pale metal girders holding up the bridge on either side appeared in the moonlight like the carcass of some monstrous prehistoric ship, while up in the sky above Battersea Park, a second silver barrage balloon had been winched up to join its mate, so that now they floated over the trees like gigantic headless creatures, inhabitants of another planet.
Further up the river towards Lambeth, a red-white glow began to suffuse the eastern skyline, and Trave felt a stab of pity for the poor people who were being bombed, defenceless against the rain of incendiaries and high explosives pouring down on them from up above. Try as he might, Trave could see no sense in this indiscriminate bombing of families in their homes. He wondered where it would end or if it ever would.
A memory came unbidden into his mind of an old man in Oxford before the war who used to stand by the Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles, shouting at passers-by to prepare for the end of the world. Trave sighed as he remembered how he and his wife, Vanessa, had laughed at the crazy old fool back then, not understanding that he’d been quite right in his predictions. They’d been living in a fool’s paradise, with no idea of how little time they had left.
Trave shivered and turned his collar up against the cold as he stepped off the bridge and began to walk home along the deserted embankment, while behind him the bombs continued to fall.
CHAPTER 4 (#ulink_ca314bb6-d2fa-5ff0-943a-3da55f27c249)
Trave woke up in the grey light of the early dawn. Not that he could see the rising sun from the window of his dingy single-room basement flat on the wrong end of the New King’s Road. The view was limited to the twisted trunk and lower branches of a leafless beech tree and the brick wall of a neighbouring boarded-up house whose owners had fled the capital in the first year of the war and never come back.
He put some water to heat on the small gas ring in the corner and raised the window sash, reaching for the remains of yesterday’s pint of milk, which he had left outside on the ledge the night before. It was frozen half-solid in the bottle, and the rush of cold air into the room was as effective as a cold shower to bring him fully awake. Quickly, he pulled his greatcoat from off the hook on the back of the door and wrapped himself in it as he sat shivering on the edge of the bed and sipped at the scalding tea he had made using the last leaves of his weekly ration. He held the chipped mug in both hands, feeling the warmth travelling up his arms, and thought of helping the bereaved woman to drink tea in her dead father’s flat on the other side of the river the previous evening. He’d felt sorry for her, and she’d reminded him of his wife in some way that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. Something about her hair, or maybe it was just that all women had started to remind him of Vanessa. He missed her and missed his three-year-old son too with an ache that had wound itself around his heart and never seemed to go away. They were only sixty miles away, still living in the same little terrace house in north Oxford that had been their first family home until Trave’s transfer up to London in the early summer, but they might as well have been at the north end of Scotland for how often he got to see them now. There was never any time. Between police work in the day and his civil defence duties at the weekends, he lived his life in a state of permanent exhaustion. In the first weeks of the bombing, he’d dutifully crossed the park with the rest of the local population and gone down into the Underground at Fulham Broadway to take shelter, but now on his nights off he didn’t bother. He was too damn tired, and he would kick off his shoes and fall into bed in his clothes on his return home and sleep even as the bombs fell sometimes as close as a few streets away. And then wake like today in the cold dawn with the sensation of having forgotten something vitally important – vivid important dreams that his conscious mind couldn’t recover.
Trave rubbed his eyes, trying to concentrate on the case in hand. He hadn’t liked the woman’s husband, the fat doctor with the bow tie, any more than his inspector had. He knew the type – officious domestic tyrants expecting to be waited on hand and foot by wives who’d been brought up to love and obey by equally chauvinistic fathers. And Brive hadn’t denied knowing all about the old man’s will; he’d probably had a hand in persuading Morrison to add his name to his wife’s as co-beneficiary of the estate. It was going to be interesting to see how much Mr Albert Morrison was worth. Perhaps the son-in-law was in financial need. God knows that could provide motive enough to commit murder in these impoverished times. But then why would he go about it in such a stupid, messy way? Ava had made her father sound like a professional hypochondriac, and Brive was Morrison’s doctor. It would have been easy for him to poison the old man by persuading him to take some newfangled medicine that he’d specially recommended. Unless, of course, the murder was unplanned: the result of some argument between the two of them that had got out of control – over money, perhaps, or the dead man’s will.
And if Brive was the murderer, why had he returned so quickly to the scene of his crime and with such an inadequate explanation for his sudden appearance? Was it to get rid of something incriminating, or was it to fetch something that he’d left behind when he’d had to leave in such a hurry, running breathless down the fire escape and out into the night? He’d certainly tried to pick up the discarded papers from the floor before Quaid had stopped him. Ava had been adamant that they hadn’t been there in the afternoon, and Morrison’s will had been among them. That much couldn’t be denied.
Trave knew what Quaid’s take on the case was going to be. It was obvious that Brive had made a bad impression on the inspector from the moment he’d walked through the front door of Gloucester Mansions, and Trave had worked with Quaid long enough to know how much importance the inspector attached to first impressions. Once he’d latched on to a suspect, the legal burden of proof in any investigation tended to get stood on its head. Today he would get busy building a case against Brive, and he wouldn’t stop until he had enough circumstantial evidence to charge him with the murder. Evidence that led in other directions would be studiously ignored – like the strange handwritten note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket or Morrison’s sudden unexplained departure in the taxi in the late afternoon, shortly after Mrs Graves had brought him up the other note that the middle-aged balding man called Thorn had left for him while he was out.
The system worked well when Quaid had the right man in his sights, but sometimes Trave wasn’t convinced that the inspector had got it right, and there had been several occasions recently when his efforts to point out the holes in Quaid’s theories had led to angry clashes with his superior officer, who’d accused him of disloyalty and even sabotage.
Trave didn’t know why he cared so much. He looked at his pale reflection in the cracked mirror over the sink as he began to shave and felt he could make no sense of the thin, hollow-cheeked man staring back at him out of the glass. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of innocent people were dying in the city every night. Blown to pieces by high-explosive bombs so that sometimes there was not even a trace left of their bodies; or trapped underground, drowning in water or gas leaking from ruptured pipes. Why, then, should he spend his days worrying over whether Quaid had charged the wrong man with a crime? All he was doing was making Quaid hate him and pushing for the day he’d be kicked off the force and sent off to join the Army or what was left of it after the disaster at Dunkirk. Unless, of course, that was what he really wanted and his constant questioning of orders was no more than a protracted form of professional suicide.
When he was a boy, Trave had never had any doubts about what he wanted to be when he grew up. Other kids in his class at the local grammar school had fantasized about becoming fighter pilots or emigrating on a steamship to America like Charlie Chaplin and becoming stars of the silver screen. But as far back as he could remember, he had always known that he was going to be a policeman. Looking back, he supposed that his ambition was rooted in some ideal of fighting for the right side, making sense of a senseless world by bringing it order and justice; but where that idea had originated he could only speculate – perhaps in his vicarious experience of the First War, the one his father had fought in on the Ypres Salient twenty-five years before. Harold Trave had disappeared down the front garden path in his bright new khaki uniform with a smile and a wave of the hand one autumn day in 1915 and had come back three years later utterly changed. And from then on, it was as if he were somewhere else all the time, even when he was physically present in the house, living in a terrible unseen world entirely outside the boundaries of his family’s experience. Trave remembered as if it were yesterday looking up from his schoolbooks in the front parlour one afternoon in 1920 and seeing his father gazing sightlessly into the middle distance with tears rolling down his cheeks.
And he recalled how in the evenings after the Armistice his father would go to bed with the rest of the family but then get up quietly in the middle of the night, put on his shoes by the door, and go out God knows where until morning. Trave asked his mother about it once or twice, but she was harsh with him, telling him in that quick scolding voice of hers that she didn’t know where his father went – it was none of their business; something they had to accept; something his father needed to do. And now Trave thought that Harold had probably just walked and walked as so many other soldiers did in those years after they were demobbed, silently wearing out their shoes on the city streets, alone in the darkness with their memories until morning brought an end to their wanderings.
Once, in the summer of 1916, Trave’s mother had taken him down to Brighton for the day. He’d built sandcastles on the beach and paddled in the cold surf, but his heart hadn’t been in it. Over the sound of the waves, he could faintly hear the boom of the guns on the other side of the Channel and had known without asking that it was the war that was making the noise; it was where his father was. And now they were back where they had started – the war to end wars had kept the peace for barely twenty years.
Trave closed his eyes and was back in Oxford with Vanessa, listening to Neville Chamberlain’s sad, reedy voice coming over the radio from 10 Downing Street that hot summer’s day the year before: ‘This morning the British ambassador in Berlin handed the German government a final note stating that unless we heard from them by eleven a.m. that they were prepared at once to withdraw their troops from Poland, a state of war would exist between us. I have to tell you that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.’ At war with Germany. Trave had stood outside the railway station and watched the soldiers going off to fight and had seen them a year later coming back on the troop trains from the coast after Dunkirk with that same hollow, faraway look in their eyes that his father had had when he came home. And he had felt, still felt, that he should have been there with them.
Churchill was right: the civilized world stood balanced on the brink of an abyss, ready to fall into a new dark age. This new Germany was a terrible, frightening creation – all-powerful, all-conquering, certain of victory. Trave still found it hard to comprehend how easily France had crumbled. Hitler had accomplished in six short weeks what the German army had failed to achieve in four years of ceaseless fighting a quarter of a century earlier, so that now England stood alone with the panzer divisions massed on the other side of the Channel, ready to cross on the next good tide. Tracking down criminals on the London streets didn’t seem very important or worthwhile or even honourable when the destiny of the world hung in the balance, yet he didn’t know how to do anything else.
Trave gritted his teeth, forcing the negative thoughts out of his mind. He might doubt the value of his work, but it was not in his nature to simply go through the motions, and he needed to know where Albert Morrison had gone in the taxi on the last afternoon of his life. The words on the note that Trave had found in the dead man’s pocket kept echoing in the recesses of his mind: ‘Provide detailed written report. What are the chances of success? C,’ and then the name written underneath followed by the question mark – Hayrich or Hayrick. Quaid might not be interested, but Trave needed to know what the message meant and whom the strange name referred to and why Albert Morrison had written it down in such a hurry. First the careful, spidery handwriting and then the name scrawled almost illegibly. Why? It was as if Albert had written down the line, copied it from the note he’d received, maybe, and then suddenly realized what it all meant. Was it Hayrick he’d rushed off to visit in the cab, and if so, had he found him or had he met someone else, someone who’d followed him home?
Trave had questions aplenty but no answers, and if he was to find any, then the obvious place to start was at the cab office in Chelsea that Ava had phoned for her father’s taxi. It was still early, and if he was quick, he wouldn’t need any excuse for getting into work late. Or maybe he would turn up something interesting, in which case punctuality wouldn’t even be an issue. Whatever happened, Trave had worked hard to become a detective and he wasn’t prepared to just be Quaid’s errand boy. The job was too interesting for that.
Trave was in luck. The driver he was looking for came into the office only a few minutes after Trave had asked for him. He acknowledged Trave’s warrant card with a grunt, poured himself tea from a battered tin urn in the corner, stirred in sugar until his spoon stood up almost vertical in the cup, and then drank down the concoction noisily while warming his hands at a paraffin heater positioned under an army recruitment poster on the back wall that had begun to fray at the edges. It was cold, and Trave felt grateful for the warmth of his greatcoat.
‘Yes, I remember him. Of course I do. Old bloke in a mackintosh with no hair on the top and a lot on the sides. Looked like he was a mad scientist or something. And worked up something terrible, he was – I couldn’t go the quickest way because there was an unexploded on Horseferry Road and your lot had all the streets roped off round there. But he couldn’t sit still; kept tapping me on the shoulder, wanting to know how much longer it would take to get there.’
‘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.
‘We’d better go in here, I think,’ said Thorn, opening a door halfway down the hall – Trave had been wrong about them being locked. ‘That’ll be all, Jarvis,’ he added, shutting the old man out once Trave had gone past him into the room.
It was a small, primitive kind of waiting room. Two rows of armless, hard-backed chairs faced a wall on which a photograph of the King in his coronation robes hung slightly askew. There were no windows and there was no fire. Neither man sat down – Thorn stood with his back to the door, facing Trave.
‘I know you went there,’ Trave said quietly. ‘Mrs Graves, the neighbour downstairs, says she saw you. You left a note that she gave to Mr Morrison when he returned from a walk in the park, and after he got it he became agitated and came over here in a taxi. Did you see him here yesterday, Mr Thorn? I need to know.’
‘No. No, I didn’t,’ said Thorn adamantly. ‘What’s this about, Detective? You can’t come in here asking questions without telling me why. Has something happened to Albert?’
‘Yes, I’m afraid so. He died last night. I’m here because he was murdered—’
‘Murdered!’ Thorn looked thunderstruck and his face collapsed as if under the impact of a blow for which he had been entirely unprepared. He turned away, putting up his hand as if to ward off further attack, and then staggered to a chair and sat down.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Trave. He hadn’t been prepared for the intensity of Thorn’s reaction to the news.
‘Murdered!’ Thorn repeated the word, shaking his head to express his incredulity. ‘How?’
‘He was pushed over the balustrade outside his flat. His daughter saw him fall.’
‘Ava was there. My God! Did she see who did it?’
‘No, it was too dark. Could you please tell me how you knew Mr Morrison?’ Trave asked.
‘We were friends. We’ve been friends a long time. Oh God, poor Albert,’ he added, his voice cracking. He put a cigarette in his mouth but couldn’t light it because his hands were shaking too much. Trave had to help him with the match.
He inhaled deeply and then collapsed in a fit of coughing. The smoke filled up the airless, windowless room and Trave was tempted to open the door for ventilation, except that he suspected Jarvis was on the other side listening.
‘How did you become friends?’ asked Trave. ‘Did you work together?’
‘Yes, we used to.’
‘Here?’
Thorn nodded.
‘And what kind of work was that, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘I do, as a matter of fact,’ said Thorn. ‘It’s confidential.’
‘Well, perhaps you can help me with this, then: Why did you go and see Mr Morrison yesterday afternoon?’
Thorn didn’t reply right away, and Trave pulled out one of the chairs and sat down, willing to wait for an answer. Thorn seemed to have got over his original shock and was looking carefully at Trave through the haze of his cigarette smoke. It was almost as if he were assessing the policeman, seeing how far he could trust him.
‘I’m going to need an answer, Mr Thorn,’ said Trave quietly. ‘I need to know why he made that taxi journey and whom he came here to see. Confidentiality won’t wash, I’m afraid. This is a murder inquiry.’
‘It was a friendly call. That’s all. I hadn’t seen Albert in a couple of months and I wanted to see if he was all right.’
Trave was sure Thorn was lying. Yet the man’s surprise and grief when he’d heard the news of Morrison’s death had seemed genuine. It didn’t add up.
‘What about the note that you left him? What did that say? …
‘What did it say?’ asked Trave, repeating his question when Thorn didn’t answer. ‘I need to know.’
‘Nothing – just that I’d called and that I wanted to see him. Have you got it?’ Trave noted how Thorn mumbled his answer but then raised his voice when he asked his own question. There was an urgency there that sounded almost like desperation.
Trave shook his head. He hadn’t got Thorn’s note and he was damned if he was going to show Thorn the note in Morrison’s handwriting that he’d found in the dead man’s pocket. Not when Thorn was being so evasive. Trave decided to go on the attack.
‘You’re not telling me the truth,’ he said. ‘Do you really expect me to believe that you left a note saying nothing at all when receipt of that note made Mr Morrison so agitated that he got straight in a taxi and rushed over here?’
‘How do you know he was agitated? How can you know that?’ asked Thorn, looking agitated himself.
‘Because his daughter told us. She was there when he got the note. She was the one who ordered the taxi.’
‘Oh, poor Ava. It’s too awful,’ said Thorn, sounding genuinely distressed. ‘She must be in a terrible state. I ought to go and see her.’
‘What was in the note, Mr Thorn?’ asked Trave, refusing to be distracted by Thorn’s emotional outburst.
‘Nothing – I already told you that.’
‘And you’ll swear to that, will you?’
‘If I have to,’ Thorn said grimly.
‘And you didn’t see Albert Morrison here yesterday or anywhere else?’
‘No. If he came here, I didn’t see him. I swear it,’ said Thorn, looking Trave in the eye.
