Simon Tolkien Inspector Trave Trilogy: Orders From Berlin, The Inheritance, The King of Diamonds. Simon Tolkien
work,’ he said, smiling benignly at his assistant. ‘We’ll let the medicine man stew in his juices tonight and see what we can find out about him tomorrow. Can I give you a lift home?’
‘No thanks. I’d like the walk. I don’t live too far from here,’ said Trave.
‘All right, suit yourself.’
Trave watched from the doorstep as the inspector got into his car and drove away, then waited until the Wolseley had turned the corner at the end of the street into Albert Bridge Road before he went back inside and knocked on the door of the ground-floor flat.
Quaid might be focused on the dead man’s son-in-law, but Trave was curious to know more about the victim and the mysterious visitor who’d left the note with the old lady downstairs – the note that had made Albert Morrison so agitated when he got back from the park. A fireside chat with Mrs Graves wasn’t on the list of Quaid’s instructions, but Trave didn’t feel he needed the inspector’s permission to ask her a few questions. The time to make a report would be after he’d found something out, not before.
As he’d hoped, Mrs Graves was still awake. The only change was that she had exchanged her black widow’s weeds for a floral dressing gown and curlers in her hair. Mourning was clearly not a night-time occupation. And instead of tea, she offered the young policeman something a little stronger from a bottle that she stood on a chair to get down from a high cupboard in her kitchen.
‘I think we need a little pick-me-up after all that’s happened,’ she said. ‘There’s not been a murder in this house before – at least not in my time.’
‘Well, I’d like to thank you for your kindness to Ava. I don’t think she’d have been able to answer the inspector’s questions if you hadn’t helped her out to begin with,’ said Trave.
‘It was the least I could do. She’s not had a very happy life, the poor girl, and now this …’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, we shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, should we, but her father wasn’t an easy man, you know. More often than not he looked daggers drawn if you so much as wished him good morning, and he didn’t like anyone except Ava going into his flat. Apart from her husband, of course – the doctor. He was always round here with his bag of tricks, ministering to Albert. Much good all that medicine did him, God rest his soul,’ said Mrs Graves, crossing herself before pouring Trave and herself two more generous measures from the half-empty whisky bottle on the table.
‘So he didn’t have any other visitors?’
‘No, like I said, he liked to keep himself to himself.’
‘But there was someone today, wasn’t there?’ asked Trave. ‘The man who left the note that you took up to Albert after he got back from the park. Ava told us about it.’
‘Oh, him. Yes, he’s been here before a few times, but not for a while now. Not until today.’
‘What did he look like?’
‘I don’t know … middle-aged, in his early fifties, maybe, with fair-coloured hair going bald at the top – a bit of grey in it, if I remember rightly. Not thin, not fat, average looking, I suppose. No glasses. He’d got yellow fingers like people do when they smoke all the time, and his suit was crumpled up like he’d slept in it – that I do remember. I doubt he’s married or got anyone taking care of him, looking like that.’
‘Anything else?’
‘Nice-sounding voice. I might remember his name if you give me a minute. He didn’t tell me it this time, but we had a chat once when he was here before and he wasn’t in such a hurry. Briars, maybe … no, something else that hurts – on plants.’ Mrs Graves scratched her head, searching for the word, and then abruptly found it. ‘Thorn – that’s it,’ she said, snapping her fingers. ‘I remember because it wasn’t the right name for him. He wasn’t prickly or up on his high horse like Ava’s husband. She’d have done a lot better marrying this bloke if she was going to go for someone older, if you ask me—’
‘You said he was in a hurry today,’ interrupted Trave, trying to get the widow back on track.
‘Yes, a real hurry. Couldn’t wait for Albert to get back, and so I got him a piece of scrap paper and he scribbled something on it, leaning over on the ledge in the hall where we leave the letters, so I couldn’t see what he was writing even if I’d wanted to, which I didn’t, of course. It was none of my business. And then when he’d finished, he folded it up and made me promise to give it to Albert personally when he got back, which I did just as soon as he came in. I hope I did the right thing,’ she said anxiously, looking up at Trave for reassurance. ‘I hope that note didn’t have anything to do with what happened – you know, afterwards.’
‘I’m sure it didn’t,’ said Trave, injecting a note of certainty into his voice that he was far from feeling. ‘We just need to get the whole picture, that’s all. You understand.’
Trave sensed that he’d got everything from Mrs Graves that was worth getting and stood up to leave. But the widow wouldn’t hear of it, keeping him prisoner for half an hour longer while she plied him with more whisky and memories of her late lamented husband, who’d died of something unspecified at the time of the General Strike. And in retrospect, Trave didn’t know how he would have got out of her flat at all if it hadn’t been for the air raid siren that came to his rescue on the stroke of eight o’clock, sending Mrs Graves scurrying to the basement with the other surviving tenants of Gloucester Mansions.
This time it was no false alarm, as less than ten minutes later, just as he was approaching Albert Bridge, Trave began to hear the sound of distant explosions. There was no one in sight, and he felt for a moment as if he were looking at a surrealist painting of an inhuman world – the pale metal girders holding up the bridge on either side appeared in the moonlight like the carcass of some monstrous prehistoric ship, while up in the sky above Battersea Park, a second silver barrage balloon had been winched up to join its mate, so that now they floated over the trees like gigantic headless creatures, inhabitants of another planet.
Further up the river towards Lambeth, a red-white glow began to suffuse the eastern skyline, and Trave felt a stab of pity for the poor people who were being bombed, defenceless against the rain of incendiaries and high explosives pouring down on them from up above. Try as he might, Trave could see no sense in this indiscriminate bombing of families in their homes. He wondered where it would end or if it ever would.
A memory came unbidden into his mind of an old man in Oxford before the war who used to stand by the Martyrs’ Memorial in St Giles, shouting at passers-by to prepare for the end of the world. Trave sighed as he remembered how he and his wife, Vanessa, had laughed at the crazy old fool back then, not understanding that he’d been quite right in his predictions. They’d been living in a fool’s paradise, with no idea of how little time they had left.
Trave shivered and turned his collar up against the cold as he stepped off the bridge and began to walk home along the deserted embankment, while behind him the bombs continued to fall.
Trave woke up in the grey light of the early dawn. Not that he could see the rising sun from the window of his dingy single-room basement flat on the wrong end of the New King’s Road. The view was limited to the twisted trunk and lower branches of a leafless beech tree and the brick wall of a neighbouring boarded-up house whose owners had fled the capital in the first year of the war and never come back.
He put some water to heat on the small gas ring in the corner and raised the window sash, reaching for the remains of yesterday’s pint of milk, which he had left outside on the ledge the night before. It was frozen half-solid in the bottle, and the rush of cold air into the room was as effective as a cold shower to bring him fully awake. Quickly, he pulled his greatcoat from off the hook on the back of the