Authors: Laura Wilson
Stratton's War (13 page)
‘Bring him in, then. Don’t keep the Inspector waiting.’
George Wallace, framed by the doorway, looked larger than Stratton remembered. Smelled worse, too - Stratton caught a pungent whiff as the man advanced into the room and seated himself in front of the desk. ‘What can I do for you, Inspector?’ he asked. His voice was carefully neutral, but his eyes were as cold as Abie’s.
‘Just some questions,’ said Stratton, blandly. Turning to Abie, he said, ‘If we could have a few moments . . . ?’
Abie bowed his head. ‘Of course, Inspector. Just give me a shout if you need anything.’
‘Thank you.’
Marks closed the door behind him. Stratton, leaning forward, elbows on the desktop, said, ‘Take your hat off.’
Wallace’s impassive stare mirrored the innocent gaze of the doll behind him. ‘You’re indoors,’ said Stratton. ‘Might as well make yourself comfortable.’ Reluctantly, Wallace removed his trilby and balanced it on his knees, revealing a brilliantined slick of black hair.
‘That’s better,’ said Stratton, deliberately avuncular. ‘I hear you’re fond of the pictures, George.’
‘What?’
‘The pictures. Films.’
‘What about them?’
‘I was hoping you’d tell me. Where were you on Monday night, George?’
‘I was here.’ He nodded in the direction of the door. ‘They’ll tell you.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But you weren’t here all evening, were you?’
‘Who says I wasn’t?’
‘You paid a visit, didn’t you?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’
‘I think you do,’ said Stratton mildly. ‘You and your pal went to see a man called Vincent.’
‘No,’ said Wallace flatly. ‘We was here.’
‘Who’s “we”?’
‘The boys. Mickey, Danny, Johnny . . . Why don’t you ask them?’
‘And your pal? Shall I ask him?’
Wallace shrugged. Stratton, knowing that he was a far more accomplished liar than Joe, and knowing, also, that the men in the next room would swear blind that Wallace and the boy, whoever he was, had been in their company all night, if necessary, said, ‘You were seen.’
‘Who saw me?’
‘Mr Vincent, for one, and a couple of others noticed you in the street. Described you very well, as it happens. Both of you.’
‘They’re lying.’
‘Why would they do that?’
‘We wasn’t there. We was here.’
‘By “we”, I take it you mean you and your new chum. Why don’t you tell me his name, George? Or is he a very special friend?’
‘I haven’t got no special friend.’ Stratton saw that, under the impassive toughness of his exterior, Wallace was angered by the implication that he was queer.
‘So you keep telling me. Want to keep him under wraps, do you? Is that it?’
‘No. I don’t know what you’re talking about, and I’ve told you I was here. Can I go now?’
‘Not yet. These people I mentioned, witnesses, they saw you in the street with your best boy, outside Vincent’s house.’
‘There wasn’t anybody—’ Wallace stopped. Damn, thought Stratton. It had been an obvious trap - clumsy - but although the man was angry, he wasn’t angry enough. He stared at Stratton and shook his head slowly from side to side, a you-won’t-catch-me-that-way expression on his face.
‘I know that you and your friend went to see Mr Vincent on Monday night, and you threatened him and messed up his flat. What were you looking for?’
‘Nothing. I wasn’t there.’
‘You pinched a photograph.’
‘I never. I told you,’ Aware that he was on the home straight, Wallace sounded almost bored. ‘I wasn’t there.’
‘A silent film actress called Mabel Morgan. Favourite of yours, was she?’
‘Never heard of her.’ Wallace clapped his hat back on his head and stared defiantly at Stratton, his arms crossed. ‘That all?’
‘No.’ Stratton stood up, walked round the desk, leant against it, and lit a cigarette. He threw the spent match at Wallace’s feet and blew the smoke directly into his face. ‘Listen,’ he said, softly, ‘If you lot want to carve each other up, that’s fine with me. I don’t care what you do to each other. But when you start hurting decent people, that’s a different matter. If you, or any of that scum out there, lays one finger on Vincent, I will cripple you so badly you’ll think this,’ - Wallace jerked backwards as Stratton jabbed his cigarette at his scarred cheek - ‘was a birthday present. By the time I’ve finished with you, you won’t know which end to shit out of. Understand?’
Wallace nodded. Stratton leant forward and snatched the hat off his head. ‘I said, do you understand?’
‘Yes.’ He stared at Stratton with hot, furious eyes.
‘Good.’ Stratton threw the hat into his lap. ‘Now piss off.’
FOURTEEN
It wasn’t exactly a balls-up, thought Stratton, as he straightened, rubbed his back and looked down at the neat rows of little seeds, but it hadn’t been a roaring success, either. He’d gone to his allotment to try and forget his feeling of irritation at his failure to make headway with Wallace. Abie Marks, who had reappeared in the office a few moments after the man had left, had known better than to gloat, but the bastard had been unable to resist a reprise of his mine host routine, and that, compounded by his failure to make any sort of progress with his other cases, had left him in a thoroughly bad mood. He’d decided on the way home that a bit of sun and sowing the last of the spinach might improve matters, but so far it hadn’t helped much.
Picking up his trowel to cover the seeds with earth, he found himself thinking of his father, tending vegetables in the garden of the small, damp farmhouse where he and his brothers had grown up. He’d often wondered what the old man would have made of his life, and the people he dealt with on a daily basis. Working on the allotment, which was the closest he ever came to the country-side nowadays, always seemed to conjure him up - a carthorse of a man whose three sons had inherited his massive build; a man with warm, leathery hands, who wore a cap, black-rimmed with dirt and sweat, and had endless patience.
He’d always considered his life to be an improvement on his father’s with its familiar, instinctive pattern of work, relentless as the seasons - lifting, tugging, toting, trudging through day after day before dropping off to sleep by the fire after supper and waking just long enough to haul himself up the stairs to bed. His surviving brother, Dick, had returned to Devon in 1919, glad to be home, and had eventually taken over the running of the small farm, but for as long as he could remember Stratton had dreamt of uprooting himself from the grey, gluey mud and finding another sort of life. It wasn’t that he’d been unhappy. There were many things that he’d loved about the place - his family, the farm cats, the smell of hot horses, the warmth of the cows as they came in from the fields to be milked, dusty rectangles of light in the barn, excitement when a pig was killed - but he hadn’t wanted to stay there. He hadn’t grown up wanting to be a policeman. That suggestion, oddly enough, had come from Dick, who’d pointed out that it was an outdoor life with a pension at the end of it. At the time, it had seemed as good as anything. The decision to come to London had been a deliberate one, and, once he’d got over the initial shock of the crowded buildings, the roaring, grinding traffic and the teeming humanity, he’d discovered that he liked it.
Stratton pushed markers into the earth at the ends of the rows, pulled up a couple of onions to take home, then bent down to examine the marrows. The first one looked about ready. He grimaced. Bloody tasteless things, and the kids weren’t around to help eat them - not that they’d ever liked them, either, and now that they weren’t here to be set an example . . . Stratton shook his head at the direction his thoughts were taking. The cooking was Jenny’s business, and she thought marrows were good for you, kept you regular, or something. It wasn’t his job to interfere.
He harvested the marrow, tucked it under his arm, and headed for home. It was a great pity, he thought, that Pete and Monica hadn’t been able to go and stay with Dick in Devon, but with his sister-in-law being poorly it wouldn’t have been fair to expect her to look after two extra kids. Shame, because until a couple of years ago they’d all gone down there for holidays - loved it, too, helping out on the farm . . .
Thinking of Monica’s tears when it was time to come home, Stratton recalled how his father had wept unashamedly on their stepmother’s shoulder after they’d had the telegram about his eldest brother Tom, in 1917. He remembered standing in the kitchen doorway, watching as Auntie Nellie wrapped her arms around him and he sank against her, sobbing. That was the only time he’d seen them touch. Stratton’s mother had died when he was six, and Nellie, her spinster sister, had moved in as housekeeper, marrying his father - to the disapproval of the vicar, who refused a church wedding - a couple of years later. Now that he was older, Stratton occasionally found himself wondering about the nature of their union. They’d shared a bed, of course, a big, lumpy, sagging thing that rolled like the sea when you sat on it, but compared to himself and Jenny, the relationship had seemed . . . What? Functional. Workmanlike. But then his father had always been taciturn, using speech only when all other forms of communication - grunts, shrugs, lifts of the chin - had been exhausted. He smiled at the memory, then frowned as a half-glimpsed advert for Coca-Cola in a café window reminded him once more of the afternoon’s conversation with George Wallace.
Finding Lilian seated in the kitchen when he got home didn’t help matters. He deposited the marrow and onions next to her impressively large breasts - the best thing about her, in Stratton’s opinion - which were resting proprietorially on the table, then stumped upstairs to wash for supper, but not before he’d caught a glimpse of a particular expression on both women’s faces. It was a sort of determined serenity which meant that they had discussed the fact that both Reg and himself were, in their different ways, being ‘difficult’ about the children, and that the thing to do was to respond with an impenetrable front of wifely forbearance. This would mean that everything they said would act as a sort of reverse camouflage for everything they weren’t saying; except, of course, that neither, unless pushed beyond an acceptable point (thus making Stratton a swine and a bully and putting him thoroughly in the wrong), would admit it.
He dried his hands with unnecessary violence and decided he might as well go and lie down for ten minutes. Lilian would surely leave soon and Jenny, once alone, might be prevailed upon to drop it. He really didn’t think he could face another argument about the kids, not tonight. He stared out of the bedroom window across the gardens, and saw, in the alleyway that separated their row from the one beyond, the slim figure of a boy, bobbing up and down on the balls of his feet like a boxer warming up for a fight. A second glance told him that it was Reg and Lilian’s son, Johnny, ducking and weaving, outsmarting an imaginary opponent in a series of complicated sidesteps, before a volley of sharp jabs to the chin drove his adversary backwards and the boy administered the killer punch. Stratton, who’d done a fair bit of boxing when he was younger, decided that the invisible man must have had a glass jaw. He watched as Johnny raised his clenched fists in a salute of triumph, and danced out of sight behind an overgrown buddleia, then turned away from the window to take off his shoes and lie down, hands clasped behind his head. After a few minutes listening to the murmurs of conversation from the kitchen and wearily re-marshalling his arguments about why Pete and Monica should stay exactly where they were, his eyelids began to droop; a short time later, he turned over and fell asleep.
FIFTEEN
As she followed Mrs Montague down the hall, Diana, despite her thumping heart, noticed that her hostess had thick ankles. For some trivial and despicably feminine reason, this made her feel better about the task in hand. Another glance at the ankles - they really were rather awful - calmed her to the point where she felt, if not exactly confident, then at least able to put up a decent show in front of the coven of Right Club ladies who were waiting in the sitting room. This sense of self-possession was reinforced by her first, very uncharitable thought upon entering, which was that she had rarely encountered such a monotony of ugliness. Steered around by Mrs Montague to shake hands, she reminded herself that being ill-favoured did not mean you were stupid. This thought, by some devious reverse process, brought with it a sharp reminder of Claude Ventriss. Diana forced herself to concentrate: Lady Calne, Mrs Mountstewart, Mrs Chapman, Miss Taylor, Miss Blackett . . . How would she ever remember all the names?
There were no men present - presumably, thought Diana, because most of them had already been rounded up under Regulation 18B (1A), and quite right too - and all the women were considerably older than she was. Their expressions were kindly but curious. Diana smiled and nodded, careful not to appear too enthusiastic or fulsome, and, having been introduced to everyone, accepted a drink and subsided onto a plush sofa between sturdy Mrs Chapman and angular Miss Blackett, who gave off a strong impression, almost an odour, of genteel but hard-boiled virginity. Mrs Chapman engaged her, briskly, on the subject of gardening, followed by skirt lengths, vitamins, and tennis parties. Miss Blackett nodded emphatic agreement with all Mrs Chapman’s pronouncements and, to Diana’s relief, most of her own. They were joined for a short time by Miss Taylor, a small woman with worried eyes, who fidgeted a great deal and kept repeating ‘Dreadful, dreadful,’ before scuttling away to help Mrs Montague’s maid hand round more drinks.
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