Orders from Berlin. Simon Tolkien

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       CHAPTER 2

      Not that he had any intention of admitting it, but Detective Chief Inspector John Quaid was on the whole rather enjoying the war. Perhaps he suffered from a lack of imagination, but it never seemed to have occurred to him that a bomb might actually land on him. Death was something that happened to other people – his role was to find out who was responsible. And ever since the bombing had started, he’d been busier than ever. The country might be coming together, uniting behind their defiant Prime Minister, but out of sight behind their blackout curtains the good citizens of London had been attacking each other in far greater numbers than ever before. For the criminal classes, the Blitz was a golden opportunity that might never come again. Glass shattering sounded the same if it was caused by a hurled brick or a bomb blast, and the noise of the anti-aircraft guns blotted out the sounds of illegal entry. Quaid had even had one case where a murderer had tried to pretend that his victim was a bomb casualty.

      Tens of thousands of people were homeless, and the capital’s infrastructure had been torn apart. The demands on the police had mushroomed in a few short weeks and there wasn’t time now for days of plodding detective work, digging into witnesses’ accounts, trawling for clues. Instead cases had to be solved in a day or two or not at all. Policemen had to rely on their instincts, and Quaid had never had any trouble doing that; he liked to act quickly, to paint with a broad brush. His results were getting better all the time, and with a fair wind he’d make superintendent in another year or two. Not bad for a boy from the backstreets of Sheffield whose widowed mother had taken in washing from the local brothel to make ends meet after her husband died.

      He breathed a sigh of satisfaction and slid his broad buttocks as far back as he could into the expensively upholstered driver’s seat of his big black Wolseley police car, holding the steering wheel tight in his leather-gloved hands with his forearms fully extended as he imagined himself for a moment a latter-day Malcolm Campbell racing his Blue Bird round the Brooklands Grand Prix track out in Surrey. Closed down now, Quaid remembered with a touch of sadness, thinking back to the summer afternoons he’d spent behind the crash barriers before the war, choking on the dust from the race cars as they chased one another around the hairpin bends. Some Nazi bastard had dropped a bomb on the place – just for the hell of it, probably. Nowhere seemed immune these days. They’d even had a go at Buckingham Palace a few days before – wrecked the royal chapel, so it said in the newspapers.

      Quaid turned past Parliament and accelerated down Millbank, enjoying the heavy power of the purring engine under the dome of the sparkling bonnet and relishing the rush of the wind against the side of his face through the open window and the emptiness of the road ahead. Fewer cars were out in the evenings these days. Too many accidents in the blackout, he supposed, and not that many drivers had the petrol now that rationing was starting to bite.

      He glanced over at Trave, sitting wrapped up in his thoughts in the seat beside him. He was a queer fish, this new assistant of his, Quaid thought. He was built like a boxer, with a square jaw and muscled arms, yet he was always reading poetry books in the canteen, looking as if he were a hundred miles away. As far as Quaid was concerned, Trave thought a damn sight too much for his own good, and it was a constant source of irritation the way he always had to have his own take on their cases. There was a dogged, stubborn look that got into the young man’s eyes when he didn’t agree with the line of an investigation, and sometimes his questioning of Quaid’s decisions was almost mutinous. He didn’t seem to understand that there was such a thing as a chain of command in the police force just as much as in the Army, and there’d been times when Quaid had seriously considered throwing the book at him. But then once or twice when the chips were down, the boy had more than stepped up to the plate – like the other week when they’d been called to a burglary in a jeweller’s shop in Mayfair and Trave had chased the perpetrator up the street and wrestled him to the ground, holding him down until Quaid arrived with the handcuffs. Quaid grinned, remembering how the two of them had had to get down on their hands and knees afterwards, searching for the rubies and emeralds that had rolled away into the dirty gutter.

      This call sounded a lot less exciting – an old man fallen down the stairs in Battersea, the daughter saying he’d been pushed. Still, you never knew until you got there. Maybe the daughter would be pretty; maybe the old man had money under the mattress. The one sure thing was that whatever the case involved, he’d have it solved by the end of the week. That much he’d guarantee.

      An old lady with a bent back, dressed entirely in widow’s weeds, answered the door almost as soon as they’d first knocked, but she didn’t step aside when Quaid showed her his warrant card. Instead she leant forward, warning them to tread carefully because the dead man or what was left of him was lying on the ground only a few feet behind where she was standing.

      Inside the hallway, both policemen felt the bile rising in their throats. The corpse was a God-awful mess, but of course that was only to be expected when a man fell sixty feet down a stairwell. He was never going to be a pretty sight after that experience.

      The fact that the only immediate light came from one weak bulb in a pale green art deco wall fixture on the side wall of the hallway made the crime scene seem even more macabre. Several people – other neighbours, obviously – were milling about at the back near where some stairs went down into the basement, and up above, a wide curving staircase with a thick mahogany banister wound its way up into murky shadows, broken only by a faint light visible near the top.

      Suddenly a woman came out into the hall from a doorway on the right, swaying from side to side. She was wearing a knee-length brown woollen coat, as if she had just come in from outside, and a rose-patterned scarf had fallen back from her light brown hair to hang loosely around her shoulders. Her face was white with shock and her eyes were swollen from crying. She was one hell of a mess, but she was also pretty; Quaid had been right about that.

      Instinctively guessing that the woman was the dead man’s daughter, Trave stepped quickly forward, blocking her view of the corpse, but she was looking up, not down, as if searching for something or someone in the shadows at the top of the stairs.

      ‘Someone pushed him. I couldn’t see who it was – it was too dark,’ she blurted out. ‘But I saw my father. He was struggling up there, shouting “no”, swaying backwards and forwards in the air, trying to stay upright, trying not to fall, and then – then he fell.’ Her voice came in gasps, words expelled between deep gulping breaths until she’d finished telling them what had happened, whereupon her eyes travelled down to the crimson carpet at her feet in imitation of her father’s descent, and she fell forward herself in a dead faint.

      Trave had seen it coming – he leant forward and caught her in his arms.

      ‘Take her back in my flat,’ said the old lady, pointing to the open door through which the dead man’s daughter had appeared a moment before. ‘I told her to stay still, but she wouldn’t listen. It’s the shock – makes you do stupid things. I remember when my husband died. Put her there,’ she instructed Trave from the doorway once they were inside, pointing to a sofa across from the fireplace. ‘She’ll be all right. I’ll look after her.’

      ‘Did you see what happened?’ Quaid asked a little impatiently. He didn’t want to admit it to himself, but he felt a little envious of the way Trave had been able to step forward and catch the woman as she fell and then carry her away as if she weighed no more than a feather in his arms. For a moment, it made Quaid wish he were young again – not that he had ever had such an instinctive sense of timing as his СКАЧАТЬ