Free Black Out by John Lawton Page A

after the case we’re looking for. I suppose it must have been May last year.’
    Troy had finished his pile and watched as Flint picked over May. He was painfully slow, as though to look and talk at the same time were beyond him.
    ‘It surprised all of us, I can tell you. Mind, I wasn’t sorry to see him go. I worked with him for eight years. Well, you saw what he was like yourself that time they sent you over when you was still wet behind the ears.’
    ‘Thanks,’ said Troy.
    ‘Aunt Fanny we called him. A fusspot. Not even a good fusspot. Couldn’t find a truncheon in his trousers without a torch – well, you know how they talk in a locker room.’
    ‘But meticulous?’
    ‘Oh yes. That all right.’
    Flint had resorted to licking finger and thumb to get a better grip, and was slowly working his way down towards the end of May.
    ‘Anything Mr Malnick left would be in good order?’
    ‘Oh yes.’
    Troy waited, trying to show patience with a man clearly not in the best of health, trying not to rush the obvious. After all, it was not so far away.
    ‘Odd,’ said Flint, ‘it’s not in your bit … ’
    ‘And it’s not in yours.’
    ‘Stripe me.’
    ‘I’m not surprised, but I am curious. What kind of power, what kind of access does it take to make all trace of a man disappear?’
    Flint sucked in his breath, pretending appraisal of a situation that was beyond his experience.
    ‘You don’t,’ Troy ventured, ‘by any chance know what airfield Mr Malnick is serving on?’
    As it happens I do. He sent us a card this Christmas just gone. Said he couldn’t tell us where he was, but to let us know he was engaged on work of national importance.’
    ‘Aren’t we all.’
    ‘But it had a postmark. Bradwell in Essex. An’ I know there’s an RAF outfit there, ’cos my sister’s boy ‘Enry is on it. Mostly Poles and Canadians he reckons. A few English to … liaise … I think he calls it.’

§ 16
    It took Troy most of the following morning to persuade the motor pool to fill up his Bullnose Morris with enough petrol to get him out to Bradwell-on-Sea and back. In the garage at the Yard, a man in greasy overalls had looked over his chit as though he thought Troy had printed it himself.
    Troy was in his office stuffing a briefcase for the trip when the phone rang
    ‘Ah. Found you,’ said Anna. ‘I have a definite match on blood group. That disgusting handkerchief you left is clotted with type O. Kolankiewicz is still being unspeakable, but says to tell you the bones in the bag could be part of the same body as the arm – that is there are no left arm bones in the bag, and the right arm is the same size, although many other smaller bones are also missing. Should stand up in court.’
    ‘What news on the Tower beach corpse?’
    ‘Worse. Everything. Every single damn thing is missing. The only option left was the body itself, so I enquired about the possibility of exhumation. Forget it. The cemetery took a direct hit six weeks ago.’
    ‘So much for a fine and private place.’
    ‘Sod Marvell,’ she said, ‘more like Hieronymus Bosch. A charnel house in the mud. Sorry.’
    ‘Where is Kolankiewicz, by the way?’
    ‘Scrubbing up for a dissection. Cambridgeshire constabulary have a tricky one for him. He spent part of the morning with that arm of yours and kept muttering about trousers.’
    ‘Trousers?’
    ‘That’s what it sounded like to me.’
    Troy rang off, hoping that when Kolankiewicz finally surfaced from his Polish misery it would all yield something constructive. Troy rooted around in his desk drawer to see if he still had toothpaste and a razor for a possible overnight. He looked up. Silently Onions had entered the room. He was clutching the chit. He sat in the upright chair on the far side of Troy’s desk and scratched at his cheek with the hand that held the chit.
    ‘I take it you can’t handle this by phone?’ he said.
    ‘You’ve met Malnick. Any answers I can get out of him will