Riptide

§ 34

‘St What?’ said Cal.

‘Alkmund. It’s Saxon. And it’s a whopping great church, one of the biggest in Shoreditch. They cleared out the crypt last November. Got rid of the dead to make room for the living.’

Stilton had stopped the car. Cal got out into another urban desert. The church stood like a redwood in wilderness-little else did, for what Cal estimated to be a couple of blocks in any direction.

‘Is it safe?’ he asked.

Stilton stared up at the spire.

‘Probably not. But where is, apart from down the Underground? Half a million tons of masonry held up by flying buttresses and prayer. Thing is, it feels safe-it’s well… reassuring.’

‘Give me sacred steel and God’s good concrete any day. We going in?’

Outside the main porch they passed a group of people sitting on a tomb. Cal heard the plummy tones of upper-class English voices. He’d heard that the English all ‘mucked in’, as they put it, but this lot were not the sort who looked as though they’d spend the night in a crypt except as a gag at Halloween. They were overdressed, as though they’d slipped out in the interval from a West End theatre, and they appeared to be sipping wine and eating sandwiches. Stilton’s feet clattered on the stone steps ahead of him.

‘Leeches,’ he said, cryptically.

‘Leeches?’

‘Well-mebbe not. More like voyeurs. Ghouls. Toffs coming East from Mayfair to see how the other half live.’

‘Die, how the other half die,’ said Cal.

‘Aye-whatever. Can’t stand the sight of ‘em. They should all have summat better to do.’

The crypt was on a scale Cal could not have anticipated-somehow he’d thought the word implied low and small. This was a cathedral beneath the streets, a cavern twenty feet high stretching into an infinity of half light, criss-crossed by arches, fragmented by alcoves. And full of people. Cal could not begin to guess. A thousand seemed arbitrary but suitably large. A sea of humanity pinpointed by flashes of light-a cigarette being lit, a portable stove fired up-punctuated by a thousand different noises and a dozen different smells. It hummed, literally and metaphorically. Only when Stilton shook him by the arm did he realise he’d stopped, and was just staring-not, he hoped, open-mouthed.

‘I know what you’re thinking.’

‘Do you, Walter, do you?’

‘How can people live like this?’

‘Well-how can they?’

‘Believe me, Calvin, this is a damn sight better than it was last autumn. Then there’d be two and a half thousand people crammed in here. That was before the government had the sense to open up the Underground at night. Mind, they only did that ‘cos folk from round here defied the authorities. Went in and wouldn’t leave. There was talk of’em even being turfed out by the coppers. You can imagine how well that went down. But it’s fine now. Us and the toffs. We understand one another a bit better. A few ghouls notwithstanding.’

Stilton pointed upwards with his finger, back towards ground level.

‘What’s the smell?’ Cal asked. ‘It’s pretty… pervasive.’

‘Chemical lawies, lad. Imagine how pervasive the smell was before we had them. Now-let’s be getting on.’

‘Sure. What do I do?’

‘Wait here till I find Hudge.’

‘Wait? Walter, I’ve spent a week waiting.’

‘Do you know what Hudge looks like?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Then leave this bit to me. I’ll not leave you out when I think there’s summat you can do. Trust me.’

Stilton took out his torch and walked off into the crowd. Cal felt stranded again. High and dry in a cavern that smelled like an accident in a high school chem lab. If Walter wanted him to wait, he’d do it outside. He didn’t much want to feel like a voyeur either.

On the surface, the small group of late night revellers had broken up. Only one woman remained, still perched on the tomb with, he noticed for the first time, a leather, squarish shoulder bag and an armband on her black jacket bearing a discreet red cross.

‘Are you lost?’ she said in an accent that rhymed lost with forced.

‘No, we-I mean the Chief Inspector and I-are looking for someone.’

‘Good Lord-I say, you’re an American, aren’t you? You’re the first American I’ve had pop down to see me.’

He hadn’t popped down to see her. He’d come up into the night for a breath of fresh air.

‘All sorts of chaps pop down, but I don’t think we’ve had an American down here since, well… since the autumn. Ed Murrow came. The chap who broadcasts for CBS. Do you know Ed Murrow?’

‘We’ve met. I wouldn’t say I knew him.’

She hopped off the tomb. A small woman, no more than five feet tall.

‘Daisy Hopton,’ she said cheerily.

Daisy, Poppy. Did the English upper classes name all their daughters after flowers?

‘Calvin Cormack. Would that be Miss or Missis Hopton?’

‘Neither, darling-Lady Daisy, actually.’

‘You’re married to a lord?’

‘No, Daddy’s one. Lord Scowbrook. That’s in Derbyshire. I don’t suppose you’ve heard of it?’

“Fraid not. Do you have estates there?’

‘No. Not so much as an allotment or a shed. All our land’s in Devon. But then all the Duke of Devonshire’s is in Derbyshire, so it all sort of comes out in the wash.’

Cal had heard of the Duke of Devonshire-who hadn’t? Half the women he met in Washington before the war wanted to marry a duke’s son or an earl’s. He knew one who’d memorised the name and title of every eligible eldest son in Debrett’s. Being a congressman’s son didn’t count for much among the belts and garters.

‘Look, there’s bags left over. Would you like something to eat?’

It was tempting. Walter had eaten his breakfast. He’d skipped lunch just waiting for him to show.

‘Sure.’

‘A little smoked salmon and a glass of sherry perhaps?’

She unwrapped a sandwich for him. It was white bread. White bread was scarce. It was prized.

‘You just have to know the right people,’ she explained.

Cal sipped at his sherry, looked around at the ruins half hidden in the darkness, felt the mixture of chemical sterility and human heat still wafting up the stairs from the crypt.

‘What exactly do you do here, Lady Daisy?’ he asked.

‘I sort of run a first aid post. I have my little bag of tricks, as you can see. And I have a tin trunk full of bandages and iodine and… stuff… yes, stuff, I’ve got lots of stuff, stuff of several different kinds, I should think. Absolutely oodles of stuff.’

‘And you tend to the wounded?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘There hasn’t been a raid for almost a week, and if people make it in here, they usually arrive before it starts. Short of a direct hit we don’t get a lot of injuries. I’ve taken splinters out of fingers, bathed a few cuts, but the biggest thing I’ve ever done is set a broken leg in a splint. Between raids they tend not to want to know me. I believe “fiercely independent” is the cliché. Does tend to make one feel a bit redundant.’

‘Then why do you do it?’

‘Well, one has to do one’s bit… and besides…’

Poppy Payne’s words came unbidden to Cal’s lips.

‘Besides, there’s no Season.’

‘How very perceptive of you, darling. Yes, that’s it in a nutshell. No Season. I mean, one would get awfully bored wouldn’t one?’

‘And in the meantime?’

‘And in the meantime I pursue this exercise in democratic futility.’

This threw Cal. He’d not the faintest idea what the woman meant. Just when he thought he’d got her pegged as a do-gooding social butterfly she tossed in a polysyllabic from an Economics Major. He thought better of saying anything.

‘I mean,’ she went on, ‘you hear all this guff about all being in the same boat. How the Blitz has formed us into a classless society. Isn’t true, of course. In fact it’s complete roundies.’

Roundies? Almost involuntarily Cal glanced at his shoes. He’d always called them roundies-it was military school slang. Complete shoes? It didn’t make sense?

‘Excuse me?’

‘Bollocks, darling. Complete bollocks. And you still don’t know what I mean, do you? Men’s roundies-balls, darling, complete balls. We’re one nation, strictly for the duration. We tolerate one another without liking one another. When this war’s over the poor will probably eat us.’

They were eating smoked salmon and white bread and sipping dry sherry. Suddenly it seemed to Cal less like a novelty and more like a skirmish in the great British class war. Now, he’d really no idea what to make of this woman. Kitty wasn’t exactly simple-but compared to this she was simplicity personified.

‘Your copper’s taking his time,’ she said.

‘A lot of people to look at.’

‘Who are you looking for? A criminal of some sort? God knows there’s enough of them down there.’

‘No-a nark, I believe that’s the term.’

‘A nark?’

‘A Mr Hudge.’

‘Darling, why didn’t you say so?’

‘You know him?’

‘Little chap, no taller than me? Club foot? Sort of clumpy limp?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never met him. Walter never described him. I just know the name-Hudge.’

‘Actually, darling, it’s Jaroslav Hudcjek. But Hudge is generally all most people can manage, so Hudge it is. I know Hudge, everyone knows Hudge, although I think the news that he’s a rozzer’s nark might come as a bit of a shock to more than a few people round here…’

‘You could always keep that to yourself.’

‘Discretion is my middle name, darling-or at least it would be if it weren’t Phoebe. As a matter of fact I even know where the little blighter lives.’

‘So do we. Got bombed out on Saturday.’

‘And by Tuesday he’d got himself somewhere else. I’m way ahead of you, darling.’

‘And you know where this somewhere else is?’

Daisy Hopton led him out of the churchyard and pointed off to the east, towards the only building still standing in the rubble desert. It reminded Cal of Jubilee Street where Stilton lived, but the devastation was the greater and the contrast the starker. This was a slender house, that at some point had been in the middle of a terrace. Standing alone it looked perilous, as gravity-defying as the tower of Pisa. As though someone had swept away everything else and at the end thrust a knife into the ground as a marker. He found himself wondering what kept it up.

‘He lives there?’

‘You bet. Everyone else got bombed out, the last family left in January, but when it was still standing after Saturday’s raid Hudge decided it was charmed. After all, everything else got flattened months ago, and then pounded to dust only last week. It does look miraculous. Dead lucky, he reckons. You’ll find him in there somewhere.’

As a child, Cal had been force-fed books. It was a maxim of his father’s that they should not forget the old country, be that old country the Scotland of his father’s family or the Germany of his mother’s. What his wife thought of this no one thought to ask. Cal, meanwhile, grew up on a diet of the Brothers Grimm, Goethe, Fontane, Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stepping into the silent gloom of Hudge’s chosen ruin he could not help but remember the scene in Kidnapped when David Balfour visits the House of Shaw and his Uncle Ebenezer sends him in darkness to climb a topless staircase. Cal set foot on the stairs, knowing they too might be topless, or middleless, and at any moment could send him crashing to earth. He wished for a torch. Tomorrow he’d go out and buy one, if regulations still permitted.

The stairs were intact, as far as the second floor. A chunk of the outside wall was missing-he walked twelve steps on a wooden hill without any visible means of support, and, in a blacked-out back room on the second floor, found what he was looking for. A naked light bulb dangled from the ceiling by a twisted thread of cable. A hammock had been strung across the room from nails banged into the wall at either end. Above this a large black umbrella diverted overspill from a leaky cistern away from the head of the sleeping occupant, a short club-footed man, clutching a book to his chest. Cal looked at the book. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus by Ludwig Wittgenstein. He’d no idea people still wrote books in Latin. Less that anyone might actually read them.

He must have made more noise than he thought. The eyes opened and a hand grabbed the book, trying to pull it from his fingers. The eyes opened wider. A rapid sentence in indecipherable Czech. Cal let go of the book, and the little man clutched it to his chest like a child grasping a torn shred of comfort blanket.

Cal spoke no Czech-it had always seemed to him to be one of the alphabet soup languages-but this could hardly be a problem. Most Czechs spoke German, surely?

‘Herr Hudcjek. Ich bin Captain Cormack. Amerikaner, mit Scotland Yard.’

‘Waaaaaaaaaghhhhh!!!!!!!’

Hudge rolled from the hammock screaming, banging around the room, his ironshod foot clattering down upon the floorboards. Wittgenstein landed in the dust, pages splayed. The umbrella flew off and landed down in a corner.

‘Waaaaaaaaaaaagggggghhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!’

He seemed to be circling-he certainly wasn’t making a dash for the door, and at the speed he travelled a dash was probably beyond him. Cal stepped in and headed him off, arms outstretched in what he hoped was a placatory gesture.

‘Ich komme von Scotland Yard. Ich arbeite mit Walter Stilton. Verstehen Sie? Mit Walter Stilton.’

Hudge collapsed in the corner. His hands fell upon the umbrella, which now became a shield between him and Cal.

‘Nicht schlagen Sie mich!’

What? ‘Don’t hit me!’ What on earth was he on about?

A flick of the wrist and the umbrella was transformed from a dripping parachute into a cudgel, with which Hudge began to beat Cal, yelling all the time, ‘Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen.’

It was like being hit with a rolled-up newspaper, soft and sodden. The blows fell upon his head with a sound like slapping meat. He backed away, blinded by the spray of water in his eyes, all but deafened by the rising volume of ‘Nicht schiessen.’ He backed into a pair of big hands which grabbed him, turned him and shook him.

‘What the bloody hell’s going on?’

‘Walter?’

Stilton shoved him aside, bent down to Hudge in his corner and spoke softly to him in Czech. Hudge replied in Czech, looking all the time from Stilton to Cal and back again.

‘No,’ Stilton said in English. ‘Not German. American.’

Hudge stared silently at Cal. Then he muttered a long sentence to Stilton, still unwilling to speak English. Stilton looked over his shoulder at him.

‘He thinks you’re Gestapo.’

‘What?’

‘You woke him up and spoke to him in German. You daft bugger. Did you want him to have a heart attack?’

Stilton came back to him, one hand on his arm, pulling him away from Hudge into a conspiratorial huddle, a whispered conversation.

‘He was in one o’ them camps. Oranienburg, the one near Berlin. He taught theology in university-one morning in 1934 they just came for him. Chucked him in the camp, beat the shit out of him for four months, then turned him out. Jobless, homeless, broke. He got the message. He was on a train to Calais before you could say Lili Marlene. And you have to sneak up on him and talk to him in German.’

‘Jeezus, Walter. I didn’t know. Why didn’t you tell me?’

‘How was I to know you were going to go wandering off on your own?’

‘Maybe if you didn’t leave me out of things I wouldn’t have the time to?’

‘Well-now isn’t the moment to include you. He’s scared to death. Even says you look like a Nazi.’

‘Must be the glasses.’

‘I’m glad you can see the funny side. Because if his dog hadn’t been killed on Saturday night it’d’ve ripped your throat out at the first umlaut! Now. Either stand still and say nowt or bugger off outside. Which is it to be?’

‘I’ll stay.’

‘Good.’

There was one chair in the room. Stilton set it upright, blew the dust off it and helped Hudge onto it.

‘We need a little help, old son.’

Stilton whipped out the photographs of Stahl and Smulders.

‘Did you see either of these blokes in the Lincoln last Monday?’

Hudge stopped glaring at Cal and looked. Another rapid sentence in alphabet soup.

‘In English, Hudge. For the sake of our friend here.’

‘Friend,’ Hudge said, as though Stilton had just introduced him to a new philosophical concept.

‘Oh yes. Definitely. Our friend. My wife thinks the sun shines out of his arse.’

‘The younk one. He was talk to Fish Wally. He write something down. Then he go. Maybe half hour later the old one come. He chat only few minute. Then he too go.’

‘And Fish Wally?’

‘He stay till chucky out. He buy me drink. He got money.’

‘Did he say anything about these blokes?’

‘No.’

Hudge looked at the photos again.

‘The younk one. Something not right. I think it the scar on eye. Cannot be sure. Maybe scar. Maybe not.’

‘Well Calvin, whatever you have to say, say it in English and smile.’

Cal thought he’d have to drag his voice up from his belly. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt so self-conscious.

‘It’s just a sketch,’ he bleated.

Hudge looked again.

‘Ja. Just so. Sketch.’

Hudge reverted to Czech. Stilton pointed at the book and motioned to Cal to pick it up. Cal dusted it and brought it to Hudge. He took it, clutched it to his chest once more.

‘Thank you,’ he said to Cal. ‘Not forget?’ he said to Stilton.

‘Oh no,’ Stilton replied. ‘We won’t forget.’

Clumping down the stairs Cal whispered, ‘What won’t we forget?’

‘The dog,’ said Stilton. ‘I told him we’d get him a new dog.’

They crossed the rubble plains to the car, Cal trying all the time to think of the right words to apologise to Stilton.

‘I’m sorry, Walter. I goofed.’

Stilton was silent for a few seconds, then said, ‘We both did. But I’ll do you a deal. You take your cue from me-whatever we’re doing-and I won’t leave you standing at the boundary. We’re a i, Calvin. Time we started to act like one.’

Walter throttled the Riley into life. They’d driven a quarter of a mile before Cal said, ‘Where are we going?’

‘Fish Wally’s house. He passed through Burnham more than a year ago. Real name’s Waldemar Wallficz. He’s a Pole. He was a civil engineer before the war-built bridges. But he was in the reserve. He went to fight the Germans-blew up bridges. And when the Germans won he was one of a band of diehards who wouldn’t surrender. Most of ‘em did die hard. Wally didn’t, he escaped. Went east. Crossed the line. Dodged the Russians as well as the Germans. He says he walked across the ice from the Baltic coast to Finland.’

‘Good God, do you believe him?’

‘Well-he’s got the worst case of frostbite I’ve ever seen. And the Squadron Leader saw fit to turn him loose. He’s lived a mile or so up the road ever since.’

‘Do you still-what’s the word?-observe him?’

‘I don’t-he’s clean. I’ve no doubt about that. He’s supposed to report to the local nick from time to time, but then they all are. Most of ‘em do. Some of ‘em don’t.’

The car took the hump of a narrow bridge, swung left into a maze of tiny streets and two-storey houses, right at an old Victorian school and pulled up.

‘We there?’ said Cal.

‘Yep. Chantry Street, Islington.’

They got out. One side of the street-the odd numbers-was intact, bar a few broken windows: the other side, the evens, wasn’t. It was in pieces. Some houses stood, some didn’t. None of them seemed inhabited. It was almost familiar. Cal was getting used to this. Could you go to any borough in the east and find most of it missing?

Stilton was leafing through a wire-bound spiral notebook, muttering ‘Bugger, bugger, bugger.’

‘Odd or even, Walter?’ said Cal. ‘We have a fifty/fifty chance.’

‘Here we are. Wallfigz. 20 Chantry Street… oh bugger!’

They found number 21 and stood with their backs to it. 20 was a heap. And there wasn’t much more of the house next door.

‘Saturday night’s got a lot to answer for,’ said Cal.

‘No. This is older. This looks like it happened weeks ago.’

In front of the ruin of number twenty-two an iron manhole was set in the pavement. A head appeared from it, level with Stilton’s boots. The dusty blonde head of a child. A filthy child. A child from The Water Babies, looking as though it had just been sent up to sweep the chimney. Stilton squatted down.

‘What are you doing down there at this time of night, young lady?’ he asked.

‘Who wants to know?’

‘I do. Chief Inspector Stilton CID.’

‘Dad says not to talk to coppers.’

‘Would that be because you’re looting?’

‘Looting! I ain’t nicked nuffink! It’s our house, this is. Dad sent me to get a bucket o’ coal.’

‘Bit young to be sent down a manhole, aren’t you?’

‘I’m ten! Besides, Dad don’t fit. Nor do none of me bruwers. ‘Ere, cop hold of this.’

Cal took the bucket from her as she pushed it up. Then her head and shoulders filled the manhole. Her hands found the rim and she flipped herself up to the pavement with the skill of a practised gymnast. She was in a vest and knickers, and black from head to foot.

‘Tell me,’ Stilton went on. ‘Did ye know the bloke who lodged next door?’

“Ow much?’ said the child ‘You want me to grass someone up, it’ll cost.’

‘A tanner.’

‘Bob.’

Stilton stuck his hands in his trousers pocket and dug out a few coppers.

‘Ninepence,’ he said, counting them out one by one.

The child stuck out her hand and said, ‘Done.’

‘Now. Did ye know him?’

‘Wot? ‘Im wot lived wiv Mrs O’Rourke?’

‘If she lived at number twenty, yes.’

‘Yeah, I knew Fish Wally.’

‘The raid? A while back, was it?’

‘It were in March. Day before me birthday. Mum’d saved up flour an’ marge an’ neggs for ages to make me a cake, then ‘Itler blew it to bits. I din’t get none of it.’

‘And Fish Wally-he was still here then?’

‘Oh yeah. We was all down the shelter, when the street got blown to bollocks. Dad told Wally he should come and live with us at Mum’s sister’s till ‘e got fixed up. But ‘e wouldn’t have none of it. Dug around in the rubble for a day or two. Found his razor and his spare trousers and off ‘e went. Dad says ‘e ain’t seen ‘im since.’

Cal could see that Stilton wanted to say ‘Oh bugger’ again but, however foul the child’s vocabulary, could not bring himself to add to it.

‘You know,’ he said, ‘I think it’s time you were in bed. And I think it’s time I had a word with your dad.’