The Berlin Crossing (13 page)

‘What was the weapon?’

‘It wasn’t a weapon, it was just a newspaper. The
Mail.
’

It had been lying on the seat opposite them on the tube. A half-page photo, the man caught in the act of dying, chest out
as if to breast the tape, or maybe shrink from the bullets, despairing left hand flung skyward, his peaked cap flying free
above the grey wall.
Another murder at the Berlin Wall
. They both looked at the grey photo, silent in the face of death; Terry had rolled the newspaper up and stuffed it in the
side pocket of his jacket.

‘You did all this damage with the
Mail
?’

‘I told you, he fell and hit his head.’

‘After your brother struck him?’

‘No, after I hit him.’

Ransom looked out over his glasses at the young fellow
opposite him. He didn’t know what was going on here. He didn’t even know why he was wasting his time on just one more drunken
case of GBH on a Saturday night/Sunday morning. Maybe he just didn’t want to go home to Hayes to Hilda’s endless carping about
how he should have opted for the government job after the war, like her smug fucking brother-in-law Desmond and that cow of
a wife Teresa. Or maybe he was just intrigued by this lying Paddy; he was lying, Ransom just knew it. Maybe the other silly
bastard
had
fallen on his stupid head but Roland what’s-his-name from Paddyland was lying through his teeth.

‘What’s the problem with your brother?’ he asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what I mean, you’re lying to protect him. Keep this up and you’ll go to jail for him. Why?’

Roland shrugged, studied a long crack near the door in the cream wall. ‘Can I see my brother please?’

‘Not now. What’s wrong with him?’

‘He gets nervous. He’s only eighteen.’

Ransom’s turn to shrug. ‘He’s old enough to go to work.’

He’s just a child, Roland. He shouldn’t be going with you at all. Promise me you’ll take care of him
. And all the rest of it, from his mother. On top of his father’s more practical objections.
It’s enough to have my eldest son swanning around London like a pasha, why have I to get my younger son to spend money over
there as well
? His father’s grasp of English failed him when he got excited, especially about spending money.
Terry should be to work going in the shop for these weeks before the university starts
. Over twenty years in Ireland and still sounding like a watchmaker who had fetched up from Berlin just the day before yesterday.

‘Terry has asthma,’ he said to Ransom. ‘He can get an attack anytime, especially when he gets nervous. He should have his
inhaler.’

‘So?’

‘The policeman took it.’

‘I’ll see that your brother gets it back.’

‘Why don’t you let him go? He didn’t do anything.’

Ransom permitted himself a slight smile. ‘We’ll know that soon enough. My colleague is talking to your brother right now.’

And Terry would spill the beans, Roland thought. Terry had always been small and had always been soft. In the school playground,
on the street. You’d think his size would have made him a good scrum-half or maybe a hooker, but his first school session
on the rugby pitch had been his last. From then on it was his stamp album and the Hardy Boys. And the gap between them – four
years – was too wide for Roland to be always at hand to take care of his kid brother.

Roland wondered if Terry had started wheezing yet. Maybe he should tell the truth, get it over with. Or maybe not. Miracles
could happen; maybe Terry could keep a grip on himself and his parents wouldn’t look accusingly at Roland.
Why didn’t you take care of him
?
You promised! You promised
!

Ransom had another question for him.

‘What are you and your brother doing here in London? Are you looking for work?’

‘I wish.’ Roland smiled wryly. ‘It’s just a bit of a holiday. My brother starts college next month.’

‘And you?’ The detective was intrigued: most of the Paddies he came across were labourers and tradesmen who excelled in boozing
and brawling. ‘What do you do?’

‘I work in my father’s jewellery shop. I finished college last year and I’d like to do something else but – you know what
fathers are like.’ Ransom didn’t: the house in Hayes had always been too big for him and Hilda but this young Paddy wasn’t
to know that.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘what fathers are like.’

Roland spread his hands.
They want things to stay the way they always were. They want you to spend your life selling watches and Claddagh rings and
stuff in Feldmann’s Jewellers on Shop Street. They want you to take care of your brother and bring him home safe, just the
way you promised
.

‘They don’t like change,’ Roland said to the detective.

‘You said “you wish” about looking for work. What do you wish?’
And what the hell was keeping Menton
?
Surely he’d got the truth out of the younger brother by now
?

‘Just something different. Maybe London, maybe America.’ All that dreaming behind the counter, the tedious hours when the
shop was empty. ‘Maybe even Germany.’

‘Germany?’

‘I have a degree in German, finished last year.’ He looked across at the detective. He’d heard that some of the old English
had long memories about the war. ‘My parents are German.’

‘Refugees? They went to Ireland after the war?’

‘No.’ Roland smiled. ‘My parents were lucky. My father went to Galway a few years before the war to train a couple of watchmakers.
He liked it there and sent for my mother.’ He smiled again. It was a story often told by his father when he was feeling expansive
after wine. ‘They weren’t married so they got married in Galway.’
Our whole life of family and marriage is here
, his father would say, when he was emphasizing his ‘Irish credentials’. Which didn’t stop him insisting that his two sons
and two daughters had private German lessons and speak the language at home. ‘They were lucky,’ Roland said again. ‘The war
started not long after that.’

Ransom could have struck him for that. The war was lucky? Try telling that to himself and his Lancaster crewmates flying bombing
missions over the Ruhr; tell it to the wives and girlfriends
of those who didn’t make it back. Or even to those who did. Like Ransom himself. Back to what? To ration books and drudgery
and the inescapable knowledge that what shaped your tomorrow was not yesterday’s war service but the way you spoke and where
you went to school.

And suddenly he was tired of this upstart in front of him. A half-German Paddy – with a fucking degree in Krautspeak. If he
didn’t get out for a moment, he really would thump the little shit.

‘I’ll give you a few minutes to consider your situation.’ He pushed his chair back and stood up, picking up his jacket. ‘When
I come back, I want the truth.’

‘Can I see my brother?’

‘Shut it.’ Ransom’s ferocity startled himself no less than Roland. He forced himself to close the door quietly behind him
as he stepped out into the stone-floored corridor. A lone shirt-sleeved constable sat at the end of the corridor, a runner
for the half-dozen interview rooms along the passage. Only one door hung open; Ransom wondered if the cops behind the other
closed doors were as pissed off at three o’clock in the morning as he was.

He nodded to the seated policeman: George of the great gut, growing bigger by the day. Put him back out on the beat and he’d
die of a heart attack if he had to chase a 99-year-old granny.

‘George?’

‘Yes, Sarge?’ The great neckless head lifted from the rounded shoulders, the great gut wobbled above the tree-trunk thighs.

‘Nobody in or out of these rooms.’ Ransom nodded vaguely at the door he had closed and the one beside it.

‘Detective Menton is in there.’

I’m surprised you noticed, Ransom wanted to say. He could see that the
News of the World
in the pudgy hands was open at
the racing page, which meant that the Sunday papers were already in. The
Mirror
lay on the floor beside George’s chair; Ransom craned to read the front-page headline. ‘Stand-off at Berlin Wall.’ A grey
photo of tanks facing each other, watched by helmeted troops. Fucking Krautland, he thought, always fucking trouble.

‘Tell Detective Menton to meet me in the yard,’ he said. ‘And nobody goes in or out of those rooms.’ He could have knocked
on Menton’s door himself but he wanted the satisfaction of having George lift his fat arse off the plastic chair. Even a plastic
chair sometimes needed a break.

In the reception area the uniformed duty sergeant was also busy with the Sunday papers; he nodded to Ransom over the rim of
his cup of tea. Endless cups of tea, Ransom thought: it was what kept you going through the endless nights of boredom, lies
and then more lies. In the end, lies became your way of life; sometimes he lied to Hilda about his shifts, anything to avoid
the litany of whingeing in the house in Hayes.

He stood on the steps at the back entrance to the station and listened to the night, to the absence of whingeing. Behind him,
the station lights blazed but the building seemed oddly silent, like a ghost ship becalmed in a sea of darkness. Beyond the
high walls of the yard, even the great city seemed subdued, as though catching its breath after the capers of another breathless
Saturday night. Cars and vans crowded together against the walls of the yard, resting, until the beast of the city stirred
again and summoned them to the jungle.

Ransom savoured the night, the silence, the faint hum of the city; it was the life he had lived on the edge, in the dark skies
over wartime Germany. Now he had Hayes and Hilda – and a lying little fucker who didn’t know when he was well off. A fucking
jeweller’s shop at home and a degree to his name. All of it up the
Swanee if the idiot persisted with his story. Up the Swanee for a very long time if the poor bastard in the hospital gave
up the ghost.

He heard Menton’s footfall on the stone steps. Tall, wiry fellow, ginger crewcut. Ransom knew by the smile on Menton’s freckled
face that the other Paddy, the young fellow, had given it up. He wondered if Menton had given the fellow a few slaps; he was
known to use his fists in the interview room although Ransom always made sure he himself was absent when any blows were struck.

‘The young fellow?’ he asked.

Menton nodded. ‘He just started crying. I never laid a finger on him, just looked menacing and lowered my voice a little,’
he grinned, ‘and he starts bawling and calling for his mummy and says he didn’t mean to do it, it was an accident, you know,
the usual shite.’ Menton yawned, stretched his arms wide. ‘I could do with a good shag now, always makes me feel like a new
man. Would you mind if I took off? I’ve got a nice little shop girl waiting for me down in Putney.’

Menton always had a nice little somebody waiting for him somewhere. Sometimes Ransom wondered what it would be like to have
a firm young body beside you in bed in place of Hilda’s flowing uncorseted rump.

‘It’s only half three,’ he said, looking at his watch, ‘and anyway we’ve still got the paperwork.’

‘Fucking paperwork.’ Menton laughed. ‘We’ll drown in fucking paper.’

The loud voice from the doorway behind made them both turn. They looked at each other. You couldn’t mistake that voice anywhere:
loud, confident, laden with centuries of privilege, clipped and strangulated to the point where you wondered if the speaker
was English at all.

‘Evening, Mr Fitch-Bellingham. We didn’t realize you’d come to visit us.’

‘Evening, gentlemen.’ He turned to shout goodbye and thanks to the duty sergeant, then nodded again at Menton and Ransom.
‘Not huddling over a new gunpowder plot, I hope?’ Fitch-Bellingham laughed at his own sally, an infectious laugh that invited
you to share his amusement.

‘You’ll be the first to know, sir,’ Ransom said, ‘if we stumble across any conspirators.’ Or Russian sailors or Polish seamen,
Ransom thought, jumping ship for the delights of decadent England. Fitch-Bellingham never missed a locked-up Eastern European:
under standing orders the spooks had to be notified even before names were written into the daybook. And Fitch-Bellingham
would cruise in at the wheel of his black Jaguar, ready as always to determine whether some washed-up wretch from behind the
Iron Curtain might be of some use to Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Most times the frightened prisoners were charged and sent
for trial in the normal way or admitted to the asylum process; the unlucky ones were returned to their communist ships or
embassies – more than once, Ransom had heard some poor bugger crying and beating his fists against the side of the van ferrying
him back to his waiting masters.

‘Busy time for your people, I’m sure, sir.’ Menton’s voice oozed respect: You’d never guess, Ransom thought, that he could
have the entire canteen in stitches with his mimicry of the plummy tones of Rupert Fitch-Bellingham. ‘I mean,’ Menton went
on, ‘with all this trouble about the Berlin Wall right now.’

‘Indeed, the situation is fraught, gentlemen.’ You never knew where you were with Fitch-Bellingham; everyone, from cleaning
lady to Chief Constable, was addressed with equal gravity in the same rich tones. ‘But, like yourselves and the rest of the
constabulary, my colleagues and I are ever alert.’

He might be taking the piss, Ransom thought, but you could never be sure with Fitch-Bellingham; at six feet four, stick thin,
impeccably turned out in pinstripes and club tie, he could be taken for some eccentric huntin’-shootin’-fishin’ type from
the shires but legendary tales abounded of his wartime exploits in the Balkans where the goat-shagging natives didn’t much
care if they knifed a lost Tommy or a stray Nazi. Not one to be trifled with, Ransom told himself; if Rupert told you the
situation in Berlin, or anywhere else, was
fraught
, whatever the fuck that might mean, then you’d best believe him.

‘Well, mustn’t loiter, gentlemen,’ Fitch-Bellingham flashed the two officers a smile, ‘the call of duty and all that, so I’ll
bid you goodnight.’ He was jangling the car keys – Ransom could see the old Jaguar now, tucked in between a pair of vans –
as he made his way down the steps.