Left alone, Cal sank down, his back against a chimney stack, his weight balanced on the balls of his feet. He was not accustomed to death, but the body of a dead German – he had to be German, didn’t he? – held no terror. He looked at the face. Yes, he was very like Wolfgang Stahl – and now he understood the hesitation that both Hudge and Fish Wally had shown about the sketch. There was no scar over the left eye.
He began with the gun. Picked it up with the tip of thumb and forefinger. A Browning automatic. A gun very like his own, a medium-bore service weapon. What did you expect? said a voice in his head. A Luger? He sniffed the barrel. It hadn’t been fired recently. Stilton would have been its first victim. The stream of blood from the hole in his forehead had covered his face. He did look like Stahl under the crimson glaze. Now the blood had reached his shirt, which soaked it up like blotting paper. Cal unbuttoned the jacket and looked for an inside pocket. A plain black leather wallet. A packet of Player’s Capstan. He opened the wallet. Letters – all from one Mavis Tookey of Riverside Villas, Leigh-on-Sea. A photograph – a girl in her late teens, presumably the aforementioned Mavis. And a handful of official documents. A National Identity Card. A War Office letter indicating Deferred Service. A Ration Book. All in the name of Peter Robinson – a name he took to be as anonymous here as John Doe might be at home – at an address in Cardiff. The Germans were past masters at this sort of thing. It would be a simple task for them to fit out this assassin with a plausible cover. They’d even given him the stub of a return ticket to Cardiff. The letters were probably real. There probably was a ‘Peter’ in some stalag in Germany, from whom they’d been stolen, and poor Mavis in Riverside Villas would never know the use to which her affections had been put. A sentimental moment seized him: to return the letters to Mavis, to put heart and head back together. Then the unsentimental sharp edge of reality – they’d got number two. The Germans had sent a two-man team to take out Stahl – one in the open and one undercover, left jab, right hook – and they’d got both of them. It improved the odds on Stahl’s surviving long enough for them to blunder into him. He’d have to think hard how to explain this to Walter. It was the sort of thing that Walter’s decency and plodding logic might have difficulty with.
He was reading Mavis’s letters – moved far more by this thin strand of life than he was by the lumpen fact of death at his feet – when Walter returned with two men and a sackcloth body bag.
‘You get everything?’ he asked simply.
Only when he flopped face down onto his bed in Claridge’s and felt the bulge in his pocket did Cal remember that he and Walter had said an exhausted good night, fixed a time for the following day and parted, without Cal handing over the package.
It was not a Kitty night. No telephone call, no gentle tapping at his door. He’d made her mad, but he couldn’t help that. He was glad. He needed the break. All the same it was of Kitty that he thought as he read the love letters of an English girl in an English seaside town to an Englishman in God-knew-where. He fell asleep. Still in his trousers and shirt, still clutching a letter, knowing what he missed – the simple, understated restraint of the way she signed off- ‘luv ya xxx.’ He didn’t think Kitty knew the words.