Marshall Street was as close to the heart of things as could be. Regent Street was only few yards west, Oxford Street a few yards north. Stilton drove in silence. There was a new tenacity to the man – just when Cal thought they’d both been flagging, the prospect of getting close to the quarry had invigorated him. He wished he felt the same. He thought of the prospect of meeting Wolf again with a mixture of sadness and fear. He voiced none of it. Better by far to let silence prevail. Anxieties could only alarm Stilton – as would questions, and there was one question he was biting back. If he’d been the one to talk to Fish Wally, he’d’ve asked why total strangers came to him for help, and how they knew where to find him. Could be Fish Wally might not know the answer, but that did not invalidate the question. It nagged. It burst the logic of pursuit they had set up for themselves. Walter, after all, had been emphatic. Wally was clean. And if they really were only minutes away from catching up with Stahl, what did it matter?
23b Marshall Street was a ramshackle house, but at least it still stood. Cal estimated it to be about as old as his country. They were probably laying these bricks as Jefferson pondered life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Three items currently in short supply.
The door looked rotten, as though one good kick from Stilton would send it flying from its hinges. It wasn’t locked. Stilton pushed gently at it – a miasma of steam and frying fat filled the air.
‘Reckon we caught Cash Wally at his trough,’ Stilton whispered, and walked softly towards the back of the house with Cal treading on his heels. The trail of steam led them straight to the kitchen. It was a filthy parody of Edna Stilton’s kitchen. A big room, a centre table, strewn with dishes waiting to be washed. A patina of grease on every surface, into which months of dust had settled, giving solid, inanimate household objects an illusion of life – they had fur, so they might breathe or move also. In the fireplace stood a three-legged gas stove, propped up at its fourth corner by a pile of bricks. And on the hob a pan of potatoes boiled furiously, while three sausages nestled deep and crisp in a cooling pan of lard.
‘Good God,’ Stilton said softly. ‘How can he live like this?’
‘And where is he?’ Cal added. ‘It’s like we’ve pulled up alongside the Marie Celeste.’
Stilton beckoned to Cal, they stepped into the stairwell.
‘Is our man likely to be hostile?’ he whispered.
‘Walter – I’ve no idea. He’s on our side. If that makes any sense.’
‘Then we play it by ear.’
Cal rather thought that this was what they’d been doing for a week already. He followed Walter up the stairs, step for step, pausing as he paused at every crack and creak to listen for any response. The house was deathly silent, much as Cal resisted the adverb.
Stilton stood on the far side of the door. He rapped on it. There was no answer. There was no sound of any kind. He rapped again. Then he turned the doorknob and pushed. The door swung in onto an empty room, banging back against the wall. Cal put his head round the door jamb. Stilton leaned in from the other side.
‘Bugger,’ Stilton said.
They stepped into the room. In complete contrast to the kitchen this room had been cleaned and dusted. The bed stripped. Every surface wiped. You didn’t need Sherlock Holmes’ magnifying glass to know there’d be no fingerprints. Stahl had left no tracks. Not a scrap of paper, a burnt match or a bus ticket. It looked to Cal like a thorough, professional job. This man meant to vanish.
All the same, Stilton peeked under the bed, opened the closet, pulled out the drawers in the dresser and uttered the conclusion Cal had reached minutes before.
‘He’s flown the coop. Not so much as a toothbrush or a pair of socks.’
‘Always one step ahead of us,’ said Cal.
They heard the slam of a door downstairs. They looked at each other. Stilton all but tiptoed to the landing. The sound of someone banging about in the kitchen drifted up the staircase.
Stilton put a finger to his lips and set off down the stairs. At the next landing Cal grabbed him by the arm and whispered, ‘Let me do it.’
‘It’s not Stahl – that would be too good to be true,’ Stilton whispered back.
‘No matter. We’re a team, aren’t we? My turn.’
Stilton yielded silently and let Cal pass. Down to the ground floor on feet of glass. A gentle twist of the door handle, and a sudden thrust. A spidery, thin man in a tatty sweater, all elbows and knuckles, his hair standing up as though galvanised, was seated at the table in front of a plate piled high with mashed potato, the mash peppered with sausages – and a brand new bottle of the ubiquitous British brown sauce clutched in his hand ready to gloop.
‘Casimir Wallfiçz?’ Cal said breezily.
The man stared at him, his hand still poised over the base of the bottle ready to give it the baby-bottom slap that would send the sauce gushing over his feast.
‘Wod?’
‘You are Casimir Wallfiçz, the proprietor of this establishment?’
‘Proprietor?’ Cash Wally said, a much more heavily accented voice than his cousin’s. ‘Proprietor be buggered. Is my house, I own it lock, stock and sausage. Now who you and what you want? As if I couldn’t guess.’
‘Calvin Cormack, US Intelligence. My colleague, Chief Inspector Stilton. You don’t mind if we join you?’
Cal snatched the plate from him. Slammed himself down in a chair and said, ‘The guy in number four. He checked out. When?’
‘How should I know?’
Cash Wally reached for the plate. Cal held it away from him at arm’s length, like a schoolyard bully teasing a child.
‘You know, Casimir, I think you know damn well, because you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who lets his lodgers do moonlight flits. Besides, you’ve two pound notes and a ten-shilling note stuck behind the clock on the mantelpiece, so somebody’s just paid their bill.’
Cash Wally tried to look stubborn. He succeeded only in looking hungry. Cal picked up a sausage and bit into it. From the look on his face, Cal might just as well have bitten into Wally. It was agony, the tortured passion of the eating man.
Cal wolfed the sausage. Cash Wally moaned out loud. His head shook from side to side, his eyes rolled. As Cal finished the second, Cash Wally beat the table with his hands and screamed.
‘No. No. Nooooooo!!!!’
Cal took up the third sausage, worked it around in the neck of the sauce bottle, worked up a good head of gloop, and pointed at him with it. He dared not look at Stilton – so much as a smile from Stilton and he knew he’d corpse.
‘Wally. You’ve one sausage left. Now, you see this man here? This is Walter Stilton. One of the finest trenchermen in Scotland Yard. And he skipped lunch today. He’s a particularly hungry policeman. This is your last wienie. If you don’t tell me everything and right now, I’ll toss this wienie in the air and you’ll see the Chief Inspector catch it in his teeth like Pavlov’s dog. Then I’ll turn him loose on your mash. Very partial to a plate of mash, is the Chief Inspector. Now – the Czech guy. The guy who said he was Czech. When did he go and where did he go?’
Cash Wally put his arms on the table, his head resting lightly on them. It seemed to Cal that he was stifling sobs.
‘He left about four o’clock this afternoon. I don’t know where he gone. He gave me extra ten bobs just to say he never been here. He said at the beginning he would not be here more than ten days. Believe me – I do not know where he gone.’
Stilton spoke from the far end of the table, the brusque informality of the Metropolitan Police, the dull inevitability of procedure observed. ‘And did you tell the local nick you had an alien here?’
Cash Wally raised his head, red of face, bleary of eye, ‘Aliens? We’re all aliens. What one more mattered more or less?’
Cal didn’t doubt the sentiment – the pain which shot through his words, and the continental contempt for the very notion ‘alien’. He felt for Cash Wally – just a little – he also felt certain he’d got pretty much the truth out of the man.
He looked at Stilton, wondering if he felt remotely what he was feeling himself. ‘Well, do you want this man’s wienie?’
‘No,’ said Stilton. ‘Let him have his banger. I think we’ve got all we’re going to get.’
‘So do I.’
Cal stuck the sausage back in the mountain of mash and shoved the plate towards Cash Wally.
‘Eat up, Mr Wallfiçz. Nothing’s going to happen to you. But you’ll do as the Chief Inspector asks, won’t you? You’ll report every new foreigner to the police. Right?’
‘Right,’ sobbed Cash Wally. ‘Foreigners. Police. Police. Foreigners. Right.’
They sat in the car. Stilton seemed to be waiting for something. If only, Cal thought, for his own anger to subside. He’d looked grim from the minute they left Cash Wally’s kitchen.
At last he said, ‘Y’know, I didn’t think you had it in you. But I have to say . . . well done.’
‘You don’t think that maybe it was a little cruel?’
‘No I don’t. In fact he’s lucky I didn’t wring his neck. We check the local station reports every morning. If he ran a straight house and listed his foreigners we might have picked up Stahl days ago. As things stand we’re back to square bloody one. I think I’ll send the uniforms round in the morning just to see he gets the message. No – you played the bugger just about right. I couldn’t have done it better meself. Mind, I’ve never thought of myself as a trencherman before.’
He was smiling as he said it. The anger had passed. They were on level ground again.
‘So? What do we do now?’
‘What do we do now? We go back to Stepney and pray my missis has stuck summat tasty in the oven. You’ve had two bangers. I’ve had nowt.’