Free Black Out by John Lawton Page B

mean nothing if I can’t see his face when he speaks.’
    ‘Do we call our fellow officers liars?’
    ‘No. But I do call this one stupid and devious. And that’s a bad combination.’
    Onions took a fountain pen from his breast pocket and scribbled his signature across the chit. Troy closed his briefcase, and hoped he could make a getaway. The fringes of London could jam solid with troop convoys these days and a journey could take twice as long as it used to before the war.
    ‘Hendon?’ Onions asked simply, and Troy knew he had no quick escape.
    ‘Everything’s gone. Not a paper-clip left in place.’
    ‘Ah … so you smell conspiracy?’
    ‘Smell it? Stan, I can touch it, it’s tangible, solid, inescapable. If Malnick is part of it, which I very much doubt by the way, he’ll be as slippery as an eel. As it is he’ll play up his injured innocence and think I’m directly accusing him.’
    ‘Which you’re not?’
    The door burst open. A breathless Wildeve rushed in and began to gabble before he had even noticed the presence of Onions.
    ‘Do you know how many Germans and Austrians and other assorted enemies there are in this country?’
    ‘About seventy-five thousand,’ Troy replied.
    ‘Oh. You do know.’
    Onions stood up. ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said.
    Troy could have sworn that Wildeve blushed as Onions looked directly at him. He recalled that in his early days Onions’s gorgon gaze had been utterly mysterious, as likely to be mere curiosity as silent reprimand.
    ‘My brother was interned,’ Troy continued. ‘I looked into it. What have you found?’
    ‘Well, they only fingerprinted those they interned in 1940, that is largely people in categories A and B, and that’s less than a third of the total. Even then they reckon there were well over five hundred they never even caught up with. They said they couldn’tmount a search themselves, but I’ve got a uniform on it, so it’s being done.’
    ‘How long?’
    ‘Days. Perhaps a week. At least. Nothing in CRO. Whoever he was he had no form.’
    Onions thrust the chit at Troy and left without another word. ‘Have I upset him?’ said Wildeve.
    ‘No – I’ve just confronted him with a situation he hates. I think we can count Hitler and the Luftwaffe out of the conspiracy,’ Troy said, ‘but everybody else in.’
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I mean,’ Troy said, ‘that the plot thickens. Unfortunately a lot now depends on Malnick, which is why I’m not giving him any warning. If I phone him he can get off the line and cook up a story. I’m playing it down for Stan, but I wouldn’t trust Malnick to see old ladies across the road.’
    ‘You don’t surely think a policeman would destroy files?’ Wildeve almost whispered the sentence, as though it were a heresy best unuttered.
    ‘Somebody did.’

§ 17
    Troy took the Bullnose Morris through the battered fringes of East London once more, a snaking crawl around pot-holes and debris out via the boroughs on either side of the Lea Valley where entire streets stood roofless and windowless, houses quilted in cardboard and tarpaulin, shops that had gone from being more open than usual – one of the war’s more short-lived jokes – to being simply, perhaps permanently shut. He found it hard to believe a second time in the political daydream of homes fit for heroes – the heroes, as he saw it, had by and large been the civilian population, sixty-odd thousand of whom had died, and, heroism being a finite resource, many had fled from the Blitz never to return. He wondered what inducement other than the familiarity and illusorysafety in one’s own origins would lure people back, found it impossible to imagine East London recovering. Beyond this where London met Essex were places like Hornchurch, swamped by the RAF and the USAF, whose aerodromes were scattered up the east coast, shattering the nights of the sleepy dormitory towns of the thirties and the rural outposts of Langham and Bentwaters and