Free Then We Take Berlin by John Lawton Page A

fell, roaring up through the sound of breaking glass, was “Scaaaaarper!”
    Then the bang as his body hit the floor below, and the cascade of shattered glass and splintered timber as the atrium collapsed on top of him.
    §16
    Wilderness found a pair of wire cutters under the wad of money. At Gospel Oak Station he snipped the lock off a bike and cycled back in the direction of Stepney. He got off and walked for a while close to Highbury Corner. Most of one side of the street was in ruins. Air raid wardens, firemen, and Heavy Rescue swarmed across the rubble. No one paid the slightest bit of notice to him. Nor did they when he abandoned the bike by the London Hospital, where ambulances swept in and out every few seconds like bees at the hive.
    §17
    He lay awake, watching the night pale into day through the skylight. Around dawn it started to rain.
    Abner was dead. He was certain Abner was dead. The old man would not have his identification card on him, but it would not take the police long to work out who he was.
    It took till breakfast.
    He sat at the kitchen table—a steel Morrison shelter to which Abner had bolted a wooden top—with a cup of tea.
    Merle was asleep. He’d told her nothing. She had come in long after he had got home, another night on the game, and he’d told her nothing.
    The copper at the door was not a local. He knew all of them by sight. This one was in civvies. A rain-spotted, belted macintosh and a trilby. The copper who stood behind him, buttoned to the chin, helmet clutched to his chest, was a manor face. One he knew from the streets without ever knowing his name.
    “This is the home of Abner Riley?”
    They knew damn well it was. As surely as they knew he was dead.
    Wilderness strived for the appearance of innocence, to sound and look closer to thirteen than seventeen.
    “Grandad ain’t up yet.”
    The detective was torn between the certainty of duty, to investigate a crime, and the civility of duty, to report a death, and it seemed to Wilderness that the ambiguities of this were beyond the man. He wanted to explain and he wanted to accuse. His cheek twitched and he could not quite hold the tough-guy pose of looking him in the eye. And when he stepped in uninvited, he removed his hat.
    “Anyone else at home, son?”
    Wilderness had not heard Merle stir.
    “What’s the matter?” Wilderness asked.
    “Your grandad’s met with a . . .”
    He was searching for a euphemism or perhaps just a small lie.
    “An accident.”
    Wilderness reached for an equivalent fib.
    “You mean the air raid? You mean he’s dead?”
    The detective looked at the bloke in uniform.
    The bloke in uniform took the hint.
    “’Fraid he is dead, but it wasn’t the raid. He died pulling a job.”
    At last they had got to the point. It could only be a matter of a minute or so before they asked him where he had been last night.
    “Would you mind telling me where you were round about ten o’clock last night, son?”
    From behind him Wilderness heard Merle say, “He was home with me.”
    She was propped in the doorway to her bedroom, a dressing gown pulled loosely round her, one hand holding it closed over her breasts, the other pressing a cigarette to her lips.
    “Mrs. Riley?” asked the detective.
    The uniform shook his head at this. Merle drew on her cigarette and didn’t bother to answer.
    “You’re alibiing the boy?”
    “Nah . . . I’d only be doing that if a crime had been committed wouldn’t I? You said an accident. What accident?”
    “There has been a crime. Abner Riley died . . . accidentally . . . in the act of committing a burglary.”
    “You don’t say? My Abner was a tom? Lord love a duck.”
    The coppers looked at one another again. They knew.
    “You’re saying the boy was with you all night?”
    “Yep. Once a raid starts up. I just stay put. Ain’t been down a shelter since 1941. Who wants to die with strangers in a stinkin’ hole in the ground. Stay put, sit it out. That’s our way.