Читать книгу SS-GB - Len Deighton - Страница 15

Long ago Seven Dials had been a district noted for vice, crime and violence. Now it was no more than a shabby backwater of London’s theatreland. Douglas Archer got to know this region, and its inhabitants, during his time as a uniformed police Inspector, but he little thought that one day he would live here.

When Archer’s suburban house – situated between two prongs of the German panzer thrust at London – had been demolished, Mrs Sheenan had offered him and his child bed and board. Her husband, a peacetime policeman, was an army reservist. Captured at Calais the previous year he was now in a POW camp near Bremen, with no promised date of release.

The table was laid for breakfast when Douglas Archer got back to Monmouth Street and the little house over the oil-shop. Mrs Sheenan’s son, Bob, and young Douggie were being dressed in front of a blazing fire, in a room garlanded with damp laundry. Douglas recognized the striped towel that cloaked his son. It was one of the few items he’d managed to salvage from the wreckage of his house in Cheam. It brought back happy memories that he would have preferred to forget.

‘Hello, Dad! Did you work all night? Is it a murder?’

‘It’s a murder in an antique shop, isn’t it, Mr Archer?’

‘That’s right.’

‘There, told you so, Douggie,’ said young Sheenan. ‘It said so in the newspapers.’

‘Hold still,’ said Mrs Sheenan as she finished buttoning her son’s cardigan. Douglas helped her dress young Douggie. That finished, she reached for a pan on the hob. ‘You like them soft-boiled, don’t you, Mr Archer?’ She kept their relationship at that formal stage.

‘I’ve had my eggs this week, Mrs Sheenan,’ said Douglas. ‘Two of them fried on Sunday morning –remember?’

The woman scooped the boiled eggs with a bent spoon and put them into the egg cups. ‘My neighbour got these from her relatives in the country. She let me have six because I gave her your old grey sweater to unravel for the wool. All the eggs should be yours really.’

Douglas suspected that this was just a way of letting him have an unfair share of her own rations but he started to eat the egg. There was a plateful of bread on the table too, with a small cube of margarine, the printed wrapper of which declared it to be a token of friendship from German workers. What about a gesture of friendship from German farmers, said the wags who preferred butter.

‘Suppose there was a murder in a French aeroplane flying over Germany, and the murderer was Italian and the man murdered was…’ Bob thought for a moment ‘…Brazilian.’

‘Don’t speak with your mouth full,’ said his mother. On the radio the announcer played a Strauss waltz, requested by a German soldier stationed in Cardiff. Mrs Sheenan switched the music down.

‘Or Chinese!’ said Bob.

‘Don’t pester the Superintendent. You can see he’s trying to eat his breakfast in peace.’

‘That would be for the lawyers to decide,’ he told Bob. ‘I’m only a policeman. I just have to find out who did it.’

‘Mrs Sheenan is going to take us to the Science Museum on Saturday,’ said Douggie.

‘That’s very nice of her,’ said Douglas. ‘Be a good boy and do as she tells you.’

‘He always does,’ said the woman. ‘They both do; they’re both good boys.’ She looked at Douglas. ‘You look tired,’ she said.

‘I’m just getting my second wind.’

‘You’re not going back there again, without a rest?’

‘It’s a murder inquiry,’ said Douglas. ‘I must.’

‘Told you so, told you so, told you so!’ shouted Bob. ‘It’s a murder! Told you so!’

‘Quiet, boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘I have a car here,’ said Douglas. ‘I’ll pass the school – in about half an hour – will that be all right?’

‘A car. Have you been promoted?’

‘I have a new boss,’ said Douglas. ‘He says he likes his men to have the best of everything. His own car has a wireless in it. He can send messages straight to Scotland Yard while he’s driving along.’

‘Listen to that!’ said Bob. He pretended to use the phone. ‘Calling Scotland Yard. This is Bob Sheenan calling Scotland Yard. Like that, Superintendent? Does it work like that?’

‘It’s morse code,’ explained Douglas. ‘The wireless operator has to be able to use a morse key but he can receive speech messages.’

‘What will they think of next?’ said Mrs Sheenan.

‘Can we see your car?’ said Bob. ‘Is it a Flying Standard?’

‘The police have all sorts of cars, don’t they, Dad?’

‘All sorts.’

‘Can we go to the window and look at it?’

‘Finish your bread and then you can.’

With whoops of joy the two children went into the front room and raised the window to look down into the street at the car.

‘The bath water is still warm,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘Only the boys have used it.’ She looked away, embarrassed. Like so many people, she found the social degradation of the new sort of poverty more difficult to bear than its deprivations.

‘That would make a new man of me,’ said Douglas, although in fact the new changing rooms at the Yard had baths, and hot water in abundance.

‘There’s a bolt on the scullery door,’ she said. ‘Are you sure you won’t get into trouble taking us to the school?’

‘It will be all right.’

‘The regulations about the misuse of fuel are horrifying. That manager in the coal office in Neal Street was sentenced to death. I read that in the Evening News last night.’

‘It will be all right,’ said Douglas.

She smiled contentedly. ‘It’s more than a year since I was in a motor-car. My Uncle Tom’s funeral. That was before the war – seems like a hundred years ago, doesn’t it?’

Mrs Sheenan came and sat near the fire, and looked at it as it burned. ‘The wood is almost finished,’ she said, ‘but the oil-shop man will lend me a few more logs until the new ration period starts next week.’

Her voice made Douglas start, for the food, the hot tea and the warmth of the fire had caused him to close his eyes and nod off.

‘There’s something I have to bother you with, Mr Archer,’ she said.

Douglas reached into his pocket.

‘Not money,’ she said. ‘I can manage on what you give me, and the supplementary ration card you get makes a wonderful difference.’ She put out a hand and mechanically felt the heat of the teapot under its knitted cosy. ‘The two boys have an extra hour’s music lesson on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It’s only a shilling a week and they seem to like it.’

Douglas knew that she’d originally started to say something different but he didn’t press her. Instead he closed his eyes again.

‘More tea?’

‘No thanks.’

‘It’s the German ersatz. They say it’s made for them to have with lemon. It’s not very nice with milk is it?’

She disappeared behind the hanging gardens of damp garments, touching each of them to see how they were drying. She turned some of the garments round. ‘The woman down the street saw an ambulance train going through Clapham Junction last Monday. Carriages crowded with wounded soldiers – dirty looking and with torn uniforms – and two red cross coaches on the back, the sort they have for stretcher cases.’ She put the pegs in her mouth while she rehung a child’s pyjama top. ‘Is there still fighting?’

‘I’d be careful whom you tell that to, Mrs Sheenan.’

‘She wouldn’t make up stories – she’s a sensible woman.’

‘I know,’ said Douglas.

‘I wouldn’t tell strangers, Mr Archer – but I always feel I can say anything to you.’

‘In the towns it’s just bombs and murdering German soldiers. In the country districts there are bigger groups, who ambush German motorized patrols. But I doubt if they will survive the winter.’

‘Because of the cold?’

‘You can’t light fires, because of the smoke. The leaves come off the trees, and so there’s no concealment, no cover. And in winter the spotting planes can see a man’s tracks better on the ground – and if it snows…’ Douglas raised his hands.

‘Those poor boys,’ said Mrs Sheenan. ‘They say it’s terrible in the unoccupied zone now, with the winter not even started. Shortages of everything.’ She hovered over Douglas and he knew she had something to tell him. Like any good policeman he let her take her time about it.

‘This music master who does the lessons – he’s very young, wounded in the war and everything, so I wouldn’t like to complain about him,’ she paused, ‘but he was asking the boys a lot of questions, and I knew you wouldn’t like it.’

Douglas was suddenly wide awake. ‘Questions? What sort of questions?’

‘Yesterday afternoon at the music lesson. They have a proper gramophone and loudspeakers, and everything to play the music – it’s music appreciation really – and he has someone to work it, that’s why it costs the extra shilling.’

Douglas nodded. ‘What’s his name?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Archer. Your Doug told me afterwards that the teacher was asking about you – what time you got home and so on. I didn’t want to question Douggie too much about it. You know how sensitive he is, and what with losing his mother…sometimes I could cry for the little love.’ She smiled suddenly and shook her head. ‘I’m probably being a silly old woman. I should never have worried you about it.’

‘You did right,’ said Douglas. ‘Questions, you say?’

‘Oh, nothing like that – rest your mind. He’s not that sort of man at all. I can spot those sort of men a mile off.’

‘What then?’

‘I think he wanted to know if you liked the Germans.’ She stood up and straightened her hair, looking in the mirror. ‘I don’t want to get either of them into trouble. And I know you wouldn’t either. But if something happened to you or your Douggie, how would I be able to live with myself if I’d not told you?’

‘You’re a sensible woman, Mrs Sheenan. I wish I had a few more police officers as sensible as you are. Now tell me more about these two teachers.’

‘Only one’s a teacher, the other just helps with the music. They’re from the war – officers I should think, both wounded; one has lost his arm.’

‘Which arm?’

‘The right one. And he used to play the piano before the war. Isn’t it a terrible thing, and he can’t be more than twenty-five, if that.’

‘I’ll have that bath now, Mrs Sheenan. You get the boys ready and I’ll take you to the school in about fifteen minutes’ time.’

She got the children’s raincoats from the cupboard. One of them was threadbare. ‘Bob’s raincoat was stolen from the cloakroom last week. He’s back to wearing this old one again. I’ve told the boys to take their coats into the classroom in future. There are some terrible people about, Mr Archer, but there, you must know that better than any of us.’

‘This fellow had a false arm, you say?’

‘No, his arm is missing, poor boy.’