Riptide

§ 76

He had drifted beyond his station-he was at Baker Street. At least a name he knew, but when he emerged at street level, to a darkening sky, it was not a part of Baker Street he recognised. He flagged a cab. The romance had suddenly gone out of tube travel. Where was Sherlock Holmes when you needed him?

When he got back to Claridge’s Kitty was sitting in the dark, curtains open, a summer breeze gently blowing. It seemed to him that she might have sat and waited in that position all day. Silently focused on him. Oblivious to all else. A poker face if ever he saw one.

‘Did it go all right?’

Cal did not know what to say to her. It was Troy he needed to talk to, and he did not know how to talk to Troy with Kitty present. He could not calmly discuss her father’s murderer with Troy whilst she was sitting there.

‘I guess so. I have to call Troy. Do you know his number?’

She picked up the phone, asked for a number and handed the receiver to Cal.

‘Troy-it’s me, Calvin Cormack.’

‘So soon,’ said Troy.

‘What?’

‘Never mind. I’m listening.’

‘I’ve just seen Stahl. He was waiting for me when I left your house. Cornered me on the subway.’

‘He was watching?’

‘Ever since I got here, it seems. He was… in Islington.’

Cal dearly wanted not to have to state the obvious. Let the place-name be enough for Troy and too little for Kitty. Kitty was watching him across the room, expressionless. Cal turned his back on her. Troy let him off the hook.

‘You mean he was there when Walter died?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he says he didn’t do it?’

‘He says he saw…’

Again Cal searched for a word best chosen not to cause alarm.

‘He saw…’

‘The perpetrator,’ said Troy-a bland, unemotive police term-‘He saw the perpetrator?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he can identify him?’

‘No. But he gave us a lead. An American soldier out of uniform.’

‘How on earth does he know that?’

‘The shoes. Regulation US Army brown roundies. Just like the ones I wear.’

There was a prolonged silence. Cal could hear his own breathing, coming back to him through the earpiece above the crackles and static hiccups of the connection. Kitty walked around him, came back into view still staring at him out of no particular expression, nothing he could read. Then Troy said, ‘Let me talk to Kitty.’

Cal was startled. Troy was deducing far too much.

‘She’s there isn’t she?’

‘Well… yes.’

Cal handed the phone to Kitty.

‘He wants to talk to you.’

‘Wot?’ she said flatly, paring any feeling from her voice.

‘Was your father a Dickens reader?’ Troy asked.

‘Eh?’

‘Did he read the novels of Charles Dickens? To be precise, do you know if he’d ever read Great Expectations?’

‘Only every summer holiday. Two weeks at Walton-on-the-Naze. He’d fish off the end of the pier all morning and sit on the beach all afternoon with Pip and Joe Gargery. When I was a nipper he read it out loud to us at bedtime. Read it to all of us. One after another. Same battered book, reeked of fish. I still think of Pip whenever I smell cod.’

‘Wot larx, eh?’

‘Yeah. Wot larx.’

‘Tell Calvin I’ll be round in the morning, first thing.’

Kitty put the receiver back in its cradle, weeping silently-the dam burst-great, bulbous salt-tears coursing across her cheeks. Cal put his arms around her. Almost happier now that she proffered recognisable feeling to which he could react.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘Wot larx,’ she said, and wept the more. Cal still didn’t know what it meant.

She wept an age. His shirt was soaked. He lifted her head by the tip of her chin and said, ‘I love you, Kitty.’

She said, ‘Yeah. Great, init?’