Troy shook himself a dozen times. He’d boarded a tube train at Charing Cross, fallen asleep at Strand, woken up as the train pulled out of Warren Street, and only stopped panicking when he realized it had been Warren Street and that he still had two stops to go: Mornington Crescent, then Camden Town. And he knew he was at Camden Town from the size of the crowd and noise it was making. It was so unlike Londoners to talk to one another and this lot were babbling, looking pointlessly at their watches and speculating on how they might eventually get home to Streatham or Tooting or wherever, wishing they’d bought that house in Finchley or Neasden when they’d had the chance in ’46 or ’47 or whenever.
“Of course,” he heard as he flashed his warrant card, barged his way through to the southbound line. “When you nationalize everything and build nothing, what can you expect? No bloody houses and no bloody trains.”
A uniformed copper stood in the tunnel linking the platforms. He saluted Troy.
“Mr. Wildeve’s just ’round the corner to your right, sir.”
Jack was fifty yards or so down the platform, pacing up and down with his head low, searching. He looked up as he heard Troy approach.
“It’s a waste of time,” he said. “Anything you might grace with the name of clue has been under a thousand beetle-crushing shoes since this poor bugger copped it.”
So saying, he whipped an old macintosh off the corpse. That, too, looked as though it had been trampled underfoot.
“Y’know, I think a trainload of dozy dimwits walked around him or on him without realizing he was there or without realizing he was dead.”
Troy knelt down next to the body.
Jack was right. He was most certainly not lying as he’d fallen. He’d been kicked and shuffled by the homeward bound. It was even possible he’d been moved several feet from where he died—there was a streak of blood a yard long.
Troy looked at the face, one cheek flattened on the concrete, mouth forced open fish-like by the weight of flesh, pale blue eyes focussed on nothing, a thin, pencil-line moustache. A man in his early forties. A single bullethole in his back, right behind the heart.
“What do we have?” he asked simply.
Jack handed him the man’s wallet.
“No attempt to rob him. There’s over three quid inside.”
Troy opened the buff ration book. All you could ask for in the way of identity was there—name, abode, age, even the address of his butcher.
“André Skolnik. 101 Charlotte Street. Age forty-four. Buys his shilling’s worth of mince at Clays in Tottenham Street.”
Troy flipped through the rest. Two pound notes, three ten-bob notes, and a worn, wartime identity card indicating that the late Mr. Skolnik was a naturalized Pole.
“When do you think it happened?”
Jack paused as a train bound for Morden crawled by. Baffled faces pressed to the glass. The silent rage of rush hour.
“About an hour ago. One concerned citizen eventually noticed he wasn’t moving, she alerted the station master, he called the Yard, the Yard called me in the car. I was only in Marylebone Lane. Put my foot down. I’d say about twenty minutes between the alert and me getting here . . . so perhaps more than an hour, perhaps an hour and a half. The witness is on the surface, they’re giving her a cuppa in the staff room. I’ve left Gutteridge to take her statement but she’ll not be a lot of use. She got off a southbound train here and says the body was right by the door, which means she wasn’t even in the station when he was killed.”
“And everyone who was has left, either up the escalators or on a train.”
“Exactly. The chap who did this could have been at Leicester Square before the alarm went up.”
A noise behind them made them both turn.
The short fat form of the Yard’s forensic pathologist, Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, was bustling down the platform, leather soles resounding, Gladstone bag in hand, homburg pushed to the back of his head.
“OK, flatfoots, step aside.”
Troy was used to Kolankiewicz. Foul-mouthed, tender, abusive, avuncular. Jack was getting used to Kolankiewicz. Foul-mouthed, tender, abusive, avuncular . . . and sentimental about few things. Polishness, being Polish, was one of them and it occurred to Troy as Kolankiewicz set down his bag by the body that there was a chance he knew the man.
As Kolankiewicz reached out his arm to turn the body, Troy put his own hand over Kolankiewicz’s.
“There is just one thing,” he said.
“There always is.”
“He’s Polish.”
A moment’s hesitation. Troy’s hand still on Kolankiewicz’s.
“We have a name?”
“Skolnik. André Skolnik.”
A moment’s thought.
“No. I don’t know anyone of that name.”
And the body was turned. A tide of blood spilling out from the front of the shirt.
Kolankiewicz took a limp wrist and said, “No rigor yet. He was still alive at four o’clock.”
He took a clean cotton wipe from his bag, unbuttoned the shirt, mopped blood, and examined the chest.
Never one to stand the sight of blood readily, Jack looked away. Troy had, on occasion, known Jack, a sergeant of the murder squad with six years service behind him, to excuse himself and throw up. In six years Jack had learnt to throw up as quietly as possible.
Kolankiewicz turned the body back, examined the entry wound.
“I would say he died instantly. If he made a sound I’d be amazed. There is no exit wound, so I conclude the bullet is still lodged in his heart. I would also say the killer simply pressed the gun to the jacket and fired. Point blank seems scarcely adequate to describe it. There are some powder burns, but not consistent . . . and there is this . . . what you call it? . . . White mush.”
“Ah,” said Wildeve. “There’s a fair bit of that. Mostly about six feet back but I’ve found bits almost everywhere.”
Troy looked where Wildeve was pointing. There was a drying lump of white mush turning flaky only a foot or so from his own shoes. He bent down, stuck a finger in, and brought the finger to his lips.
“Careful, Freddie!”
Troy ignored this, tasted it, and stuck his finger under Kolankiewicz’s nose.
Kolankiewicz sniffed.
Kolankiewicz tasted.
Wildeve looked appalled.
“Do you two have any sense of risk?”
“Of course,” Kolankiewicz said, “mashed potato.”
“What?”
“He’s right,” said Troy. “But I’d go with baked rather than mashed. There’s still a bit of the skin on this and some of it’s still raw.”
Kolankiewicz smiled waggishly. “So your killer bring pack lunch. Search hard enough maybe you find gherkin and processed cheese, too. Best of British, flatfoots. Now, I take the stiff.”
Troy slipped the piece of potato into an envelope and handed it to Kolankiewicz. Two forensic assistants came down the platform from the escalator lugging a stretcher and a blanket for the body.
Another southbound crept by. Just in time for the curious to see the body lifted onto the stretcher.
“This’ll be in the evening papers before you can say Jack.” Jack yelled.
And when the train had gone, Kolankiewicz and his men had gone, too, and against the background noise of the three other platforms this one now struck Troy, in the words of a cliché, as deathly quiet. The pounding in his head had stopped. For the first time in hours, it was quiet in the skull.
“What did he mean by that crack about packed lunch?”
Troy shrugged it off.
“Nothing. The spud is part of the crime. Why else would it be on Mr. Skolnik?”
“Perhaps he fell in it?”
“He fell face down, Jack. Kolankiewicz said the potato was around the wound on his back.”
“Shot with a spud gun?”
“Not a weapon much favoured by anyone over the age of twelve. Now . . . if you’d just shot a bloke at close range, underground, in the middle of a crowd, what would you do?”
Jack didn’t hesitate.
“I’d just walk away. I might turn around and pretend I’d heard a bang just like anyone else, but I’d walk away. Straight up the escalator and out. I’d be very English about it and join all the others being very English and minding their own damn business.”
“Quite. And the gun?”
Now Jack did hesitate.
“It would sort of depend on how much I wanted to hang on to it . . . how much it cost . . . but we are a nation awash in guns, the war’s made them cheap . . . and whether I intended to use it again.”
“And if you didn’t?”
More hesitation, then, “I’d just drop it. After all, the body all but got lost under the tramping feet. A gun—”
Troy cut him short.
“—would be where you and I could see it now, or it got kicked into touch by those thousands of feet.”
“I searched the length of the platform while I waited for you.”
“Then you’d better give me a hand down to the track.”
Troy slipped one leg over the edge and stretched out a hand to Jack.
“Freddie, I closed the platform, not the service. There could be a train through any second.”
“I noticed.”
Taking Troy’s hand brought them closer than they’d yet been.
“Good bloody grief. You stink of scotch!”
Troy dropped to track level, let go of Jack’s hand, and said, “Well, nothing like death to sober you up is there?”
“Watch out for the live rail!”
“Which one is it?” Troy said, not looking.
“How the hell should I know? It could be any one of them.”
“Actually, Jack, it’s two, and I shall try not to step on any of them.”
Troy walked on slowly from the point where the body had lain, six, nine, twelve feet. There were cigarette packets everywhere and between the rails there was black, shallow, oily water—not deep enough to cover much. At fifteen feet a fat mouse scurried across the rails, unharmed by either electricity or water, leaping from the inner rail to the middle to the outer rail. Troy saw that it had landed on something black in between the rails, a small object not much bigger than the mouse and as black as the water itself.
He heard the hum in the tracks that preceded the arrival of a train. Heard Jack swear softly to himself.
He circled the black lump with his finger. Touching only the edge until he was certain he had found the barrel of a gun.
The tracks shook now, the blast of air down the tunnel lifted his hair and set his jacket flapping. Jack was holding out his hand to him now, urging him to get out. He looked into the headlights of the train; he could see the look of panic on the driver’s face. He grasped the gun between the forefinger and thumb of his left hand, grabbed Jack’s hand with his right, and let himself be plucked to safety by a six-foot former rugby player.
Jack held onto Troy as the train passed. Held him dangling in the air. “You arse, you complete arse.”
“Got it,” Troy said simply.