37

A committed piece is one given a specific duty. It often becomes the focal point of an opponent’s attack.

Saturday, October 26th

It was a good thing that Jean had booked a table at Chez Solange because it was packed tight. The tables were garnished with tomato salads, slices of pâté and bowls of fruit. Grenade made his way through the wild French menu handwriting and kept patting his face with his table napkin.

‘… tool box in the Stroudly position,’ he was saying. ‘There probably aren’t more than half a dozen of them on the whole of British Railways, but we are boring Miss Jean.’

‘No,’ said Jean, equally gallantly. ‘It’s interesting when you talk about it.’

Grenade dabbed his lips again before finishing the sole. ‘That girl claimed to be an American citizen,’ he said. Jean pretended not to hear.

‘I told you she might,’ I said.

‘Said you had stolen her passport and wanted to phone the American consul.’

‘Made a fuss, eh?’ I said. I dipped a piece of bread into the sauce – it’s something I feel free to do in bourgeois French restaurants.

‘She wanted me to have a road patrol stop you and search you.’

‘Waste of time,’ I said.

‘That’s exactly what I told her,’ said Grenade cheerfully. ‘I said if it’s not true he has stolen your passport, then we will find nothing. If, on the other hand, it is true, he won’t be walking around with it in his pocket.’

‘She was happy about that?’ I said. I poured the last of the wine. ‘A lot of people like a fragrant hock with fish,’ I said to Grenade, ‘but I prefer something really dry.’

‘This Pouilly-Fuissé is perfect with sole,’ said Grenade. ‘Happy? No, she was demented with rage. She broke a heel kicking Albert’s shin.’

‘You should have let her have a go at your central heating,’ I said. ‘Where is she now?’

‘She told us that she wanted to go to New York, so we gave Pan-American airways a letter to say that if she was refused entry at Idlewild we would take her back. We never heard of her again.’

‘By the way,’ said Grenade. He searched in every pocket of his serge suit. It had many pockets. He finally found a wallet crammed with tickets, cuttings, money and letters; from it he drew a photograph. ‘Look at that,’ he said, ‘took it out of your friend Vulkan’s pocket. Forgot to give it back to him.’

It was a photograph of eight men. One man wore the uniform of an SS major. He wore metal-rimmed spectacles and stood with arms akimbo, thumbs tucked into a shiny leather belt. He was smiling. The other seven men wore the wide-striped pyjama-like uniform of concentration-camp inmates. They were not smiling. Behind the group there were two cattle trucks and a lot of railway lines.

‘Mohr,’ said Grenade, tapping the SS officer, ‘owns a lot of villas near San Sebastian. Terribly nice fellow, they say.’

‘Really,’ I said.

‘One of those others looks a lot like your friend Vulkan, don’t you think?’ Grenade asked.

‘These sort of old smudgy photos look like everyone,’ I said. ‘The man on the end looks a bit like you.’ Grenade smiled and I smiled but we both knew that neither of us was being fooled.

‘Well I’m glad it all worked out OK,’ I said. ‘I’ve just remembered something I must do this afternoon. Why don’t you two go off and look at trains and I’ll meet you for tea?’

‘Miss Jean doesn’t want to look at a lot of trains,’ said Grenade with irrefutable truth.

‘Nonsense,’ said Jean. ‘I’d love to come but I must get a warm coat from the office.’ I smiled at her and, because Grenade was looking at her, all she could do was smile back.

Straight from lunch I went down into Leicester Square Underground station. There was a group of children sitting on the stairs with painted faces and rattling tin cans. ‘Penny for the guy, mister,’ they repeated dully to each passer-by. I bought a threepenny piece from them and phoned the office. The Charlotte Street number gave the usual out-of-order sound before clearing automatically and ringing GHOST exchange. I gave the operator the week’s code: ‘I want the latest cricket scores.’ The operator said, ‘Are you a subscriber to the service?’ and I said, ‘I have country membership of two years’ standing – Mr Dawlish please.’

The operator was careless with the key and I heard him say to Dawlish, ‘He’s on an open line, sir, please remember.’ I made a note of the time in order to report the operator. Then Dawlish said, ‘Hello, you’ve finished lunch early, it’s only a quarter to three.’

‘They have phones on each table at the Caprice now,’ I said, and there was a silence while Dawlish tried to decide whether I was really at the Caprice or sending him up. ‘What is it?’ he said finally.

‘Gas and electricity at Samantha Steel’s old flat.’

‘Why?’

‘Just a hunch,’ I said.

‘Well, since the Home Office are in on this there can’t be any repercussions, so go ahead. I’ll tell Hallam.’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Thanks.’

‘We’ll see,’ said Dawlish. He was never enthusiastic.

Sam’s white Alpine car was parked outside. I turned in at the gate and crunched my way up the path through damp brown leaves. There was a small panel just inside the Gothic porch – it said ‘Flats 1–5’. Against the bell-push of number four it said ‘Steel’ in typewritten characters. At the foot of the metal plate it said ‘Caretaker – side entrance’. I pushed flat four’s bell and waited, watching the curtains. There was no movement. I went down the side of the house to where a cat was asleep on a crate of dirty milk bottles. I rang the caretaker’s bell. A man in a Fair-Isle pullover came to the door. In his bright red face was a small cheap cheroot.

‘I’ve gone out,’ he said. He sucked in his cheeks theatrically a couple of times. I got my matches. Stepping forward into the protection of the door I lit one and held it up. The red-faced man reached out and held my wrist steady using a little more pressure than was needed as he pushed his big red face forward towards the match. He sucked the flame into the open end of the cheroot and without removing it from his mouth exhaled.

‘Can I do for you?’

‘Flat four,’ I said. ‘I want the key.’

‘Do yer?’ he said. He grinned. He put one hand on the frame of the door and crossed one foot over the other resting it toe down on the floor. ‘And who are you – exactly?’ He was still looking at his toe.

‘Electricity Emergency Service’ I produced a small red printed notice which said, ‘Under the Gas and Electricity Boards Act 1954, the undersigned officer is legally entitled to enter any premises to which gas and/or electricity is or has been supplied to operate, service or disconnect equipment.’ From somewhere inside I could hear the gentle lowing of cattle.

The Fair-Isle pullover read this through. ‘You are holding it upside down,’ I said.

‘Regular joker, ain’t yer.’ He folded the card with his long dirty fingernails and handed it back. ‘Got no keys,’ he said.

‘Well that’s OK,’ I said. I flicked the hollow door with my finger. ‘It shouldn’t be difficult to bore a hole through this jerry-built jungle. It’ll just be another repair for you to add to the list. I’ll get you to sign here to say you know the entry has been forced.’

‘I’ll sign nothin’,’ he said. He uncrossed his feet and moved his shoulder up behind the door. The door moved slowly.

‘How would you like me to come in and disconnect your telly-palace?’ I said moving in through his doorway, taking the initial weight of the door on my arm. ‘I’ll …’

‘Nar then,’ said Fair-Isle pullover. ‘Don’t throw your weight about. I’ll get the keys to number four.’ He went off mumbling into the deep, dark Augean confines of his flat. The speculator’s face-lift had been more perfunctory here in the basement. Cobwebbed into a dark corner was an ancient house phone, a dusty pantry shelf and a shallow mahogany box with striped indicator flags marked, ‘1st bedroom, 2nd bedroom, dining-room, study and front door’. On the right was a room lit by the glow of a cocktail cabinet, the floor was bare boards and the only other furniture was a plastic covered armchair with a box of Black Magic chocolates on the arm and a twenty-one inch TV that was saying, ‘Making it one of the beauty spots of Shropshire,’ to the accompaniment of English documentary-film music and a picture of a flying buttress.

Fair-Isle pullover came jingling his way up the passage. ‘Don’t snoop in there,’ he said, ‘’sall paid for.’ He prodded me in the back and I walked along the side path and up the carpeted stairs to flat four. He pushed the chiming door-bell and twisted the key twice in the lock. I walked straight to the kitchen; but not so straight to it that it looked like I’d been there before. I looked at the big modern stove and sighed a long deep sigh. ‘We might have guessed it,’ I said. ‘We’ve had a lot of trouble with these.’ I turned to Fair-Isle pullover. ‘You’d better get a big spanner, or I can let you have one, I suppose, and you’d better have overalls on or you’ll get properly messed up. They look spotless these things –’ I leaned close to him ‘– underneath they are crawling.’ It had a good effect so I said it again – ‘crawling’. That put him off his Black Magic chocolates for the afternoon. I told him that it was the caretaker’s job to help, but he wouldn’t stay. He had to go downstairs to do something that couldn’t wait.

I started again. I went through each room very carefully. I didn’t take the furnishings to pieces but I lifted everything up and put everything down. The scientific equipment was missing. A woman had been in the flat fairly recently – there was still perfume on the sheets and towels. There was a tin in the kitchen that wasn’t quite rusty enough. In the front room there were some flowers that just weren’t old enough and the water tank just wasn’t hot enough. I looked in the mail-box behind the door. There was a small yellow telegram envelope that was unopened; inside the telegram said, ‘Confirming Monday. Have enough money with you. John.’ It was all so circumstantial even if Monday next was the day we were expecting to get Semitsa. This telegram could refer to any Monday and there were hundreds of Johns in Berlin.

I went to the back window and looked down. It was a fine example of a London garden: luxuriant concrete lawn. A gay section of trellis hid the dustbins. It was being tied into position with a length of string by Fair-Isle pullover who stood on a heap of sand and spent more time watching the back window than putting his finger on knots. I moved back from the window and jarred against the phone; when I looked into the garden again he had gone. I sat down in the only comfortable armchair. Outside, an ice-cream van chimed a twentieth-century carillon. Just suppose that no one had used the flat since the last time I had seen Samantha Steel? What else? A red-faced man in a Fair-Isle pullover doesn’t like me coming up into this flat. When I am here he doesn’t watch the front of the house – he watches the back of it. In any case he drags himself away from an afternoon of telly. Suddenly he goes back into the house.

Fool. Of course. I went back across to the telephone and followed the wire back to the junction box. I found a small freshly bored hole in the skirting board and as I stood up I took a Morley stretch Bri-nylon (11/12 fitting) full of wet sand across the side of the head. I knew what it was because the torn stocking and the sand were underneath me when I recovered consciousness.

It was a very well polished toecap that I saw first. It was prodding me not very gently in the chest. In an out-of-focus zone beyond I put together an image of a helmeted policeman and two men in belted raincoats. The shiny toecap said, ‘He’s coming round now – who did they say he was?’

I couldn’t make out what the other voice said but Toecap said, ‘Oh is he – I’ll electricity him,’ so I closed my eyes again. It was Keightley, the military liaison officer at Scotland Yard, who had them ‘yessiring’ and ‘threebagsfulling’ around. Jean had phoned Dawlish when I didn’t turn up for tea. Dawlish had told the Yard to come and sort me out.

Two of the Special Branch people broke in the door of the caretaker’s flat while I rubbed my sore head. On the TV, the quizmaster was saying, ‘And now, for a streamlined washing machine that will make every washday a pleasure. What is a secretaire?’

There was enough blue light for me to find a hard centre in the box of Black Magic. The two back rooms were papered with wallpaper that had a motif of motor cars and crash-helmets and contained some dark-stained furniture with coloured plastic handles, dirty underwear, three packets of cheap cheroots, two bottles of Dimple Haig, one sticky glass, an opened packet of Kraft cheese slices, half a pound of margarine and a packet of soft white bread slices with Wonderloaf printed on the wax paper. The tiny kitchen was almost empty, except for an enamel bowl full of dirty underwear and two large family-size packets of Tide. Three quart bottles of brown ale were standing in the sink among the tea-leaves. On the draining-board was a stack of books, some of them about enzymes.

On a slatted shelf in the airing cupboard there was a clean enamel bucket. The older Special Branch man with the shiny toecaps got it down gently. ‘Smell that,’ he said. ‘Strewth.’ I sniffed at the warm frothy contents. There was a strong yeasty sweet smell.

‘A drop of good home brew,’ said the younger man. ‘Used to be able to pinch them for that – brewing beer without a licence.’

Toecap said, ‘All beer and dirty underwear, this bloke,’ and the young one made a joke based upon the alimentary canal.

I pushed past the two of them to get to the bathroom. The white tiles shone brightly in the pink neon light. Across the bath there was a door placed to make a table top; drawn up to it was an old kitchen chair.

‘Naughty,’ said Toecap behind my shoulder, ‘very naughty.’ I looked at the layout; it seemed complete. There was a dark brown US Army surplus telephone handset, a small condenser and a wire leading to a pair of crocodile clips. Two GPO phone wires had been brought in from the back garden and could be attached to the handset or to a small Grundig tape recorder for amplification of the speech or recording the message. Also on the makeshift table there was a small Woolworth’s reading light, a large scribbling-pad and four ballpoint pens stuck in an empty cream bottle. A do-it-yourself telephone-tapping kit.

‘Makes me curious about the locked room,’ said the young SB man. He took off his roll-brim hat and put it on a chair. I said, ‘I’ll want a copy of the phone bill and the phone agreement and anything else you can think of – this flat and number four.’

‘We usually do the whole block in these sort of cases,’ said the cop.

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘We’ve got some Elastoplast in the squad car,’ he said. ‘You’d better get something on that cut.’

‘What, Dave?’ said the young SB man.

‘I said I don’t like the look of his head,’ said Dave.

‘No, nor do I,’ said the young SB man. Then they both looked at me quizzically for a couple of minutes. Finally the young man went and gazed at the steel padlock with the same forensic dispassion. There was a little glass pea set in the fresh black paintwork at eye level. When Dave had decided that he was trying to see through it the wrong way he said, ‘Well this won’t do,’ to the young man, who produced a large screwdriver from his raincoat pocket.

It took him only two minutes to rip the hasp out of the shoddy cardboard panels of the door. ‘Landlords who rent places like this,’ said the young SB man rapping the door, ‘that’s who we should be locking up.’ He raised his foot and gave the door a great superfluous smash of his boot that caved in one panel. The older SB man stepped inside and switched on the lights. He whistled very softly to himself.

It was a semi-basement room. It got any daylight that could be spared by the architect and God between them through four small slots set high along one wall. There was some cheap lino of large black and white squares carefully cut to shape but not nailed down. Across the long side of the room was a low bench with two Anglepoise lamps and a gramophone. Draped over the bench was a huge red flag with a white circle and a black swastika in it. Upon the very centre of the swastika was a plaster cast of a rather idealized head of Hitler; around it were a few books, including a signed copy of Mein Kampf, some ceremonial daggers and a box of medals and badges. There were a few travel brochures and a notice that said: ‘Hameln in Lower Saxony. Waffen SS Rally. Organized by the Welfare Association of former Waffen SS members. Members wishing to attend give in their names by next week. Friday 6.30 P.M. to 7.30 A.M. Monday. Comfortable hotel, all meals, a visit to a nightclub and attendance at the rally: by air both ways £30 inclusive.’

Behind the gramophone there were some records put out by an American company which gave the connoisseur a chance to hear Hitler speeches and Nazi bands in hi-fi, even if they couldn’t afford the thirty quid for the SS weekend. There were well-framed official portraits of the Nazi leaders on the wall, including one of the American Führer in his home-made uniform. There was army surplus seating stacked around the walls and a large very well-cleaned blackboard on an easel. Propped on the mantelpiece there was a piece of wrapping-paper with a message pencilled on it: ‘Tell Mrs Wilkinson there will be a big turn-out Thursday. Please order extra pint milk.’

‘Very nice,’ said the Special Branch man. ‘Did you expect that something like this was going on?’

From the next room I heard the telly shout gaily, ‘No, I’m afraid that it’s a writing-desk with pigeon-holes for keeping papers, but thank you, Mrs Dugdale of Wolverhampton, for coming along and being such a good sport …’

I said, ‘I heard him say, “Take that, Yid,” when he hit me.’ The Special Branch man nodded. The telly gave a great fanfare of trumpets and a descending series of chords on an electric organ.