Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Very nearly lost my seat,’ said Brown with a politician’s self-absorption.

  ‘I saw him change,’ Walter said. ‘Something quite drastic. It was like the road to Damascus. It was as though his own success couldn’t coexist with his old ideas.’

  Troy knew from trying to have rational conversations with Rod that the politically committed cannot grasp the notion that people simply and easily change their minds. It remained, however, that what the man was offering him was what he most needed, an educated guess at the motivations of Commander Cockerell.

  ‘About the time of the Festival of Britain?’ he asked.

  The two men looked at each other again. Without the smiles, puzzled this time.

  ‘Now you mention it,’ Walter said, ‘it was. Peculiar that.’

  ‘The Damascus road of modern furniture,’ said Troy, paraphrasing Janet Cockerell.

  ‘No, no.’ Walter mused, ignoring his beer. ‘It was more than that. I know what you mean. Shop full of Scandinavian tat at high prices. It was more than finding his niche in the business, more than making a bob or two for the first time in his life. It was as though someone had picked him up and shook him.’

  ‘That’s fancy,’ said Ted. ‘Have you been at the Babycham? If you ask me, it’s bloody simple. It’s the British story, isn’t it? Great Britain This Is Your Life—give a man a few quid more and he starts looking after self-interest. Give a man a leg up in life and he bites the hand that feeds him. It’s what dogs us as a party and a country—we breed Tories. You’ll see. We get back in next year or the year after, we improve the lot of the workers—do what we’re committed to do—and the next election after that the buggers’ll vote us out because they’re making a bit too much money to trust it to Labour. That’s what happened to Cockerell. He made a bob or two. And from then on he was determined to hang onto it.’

  ‘Write that down,’ Brown said. ‘Gaitskell can use it next May Day.’

  They all laughed at this. Troy managed a gentle smile, hoping he looked wry rather than humourless.

  ‘I know his wife quite well,’ Walter said. ‘In fact she still pays her subs. Doesn’t come to meetings or dos, but she’s a member. She said, a few years ago now, must have been ’52 or ’53, when he became Treasurer of the local Tories, she said he talks such utter rubbish, she said, I can’t believe he believes it. And then she said, “I don’t know what got into him. He’s like a schoolboy, smirking to himself, sitting there with his finger up his bum.”

  Troy could imagine Janet Cockerell saying that. He could imagine the hell that was surely the home life of Mr and Mrs Cockerell, narrated by a tedious, self-obsessed bore, punctuated by the balloon-pricking, contrivedly vulgar wit of his wife. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she voted Labour. God, how that must have annoyed him.

  §46

  ‘Dead?’ she said.

  ‘Heart.’

  ‘So it’s not connected? You don’t suspect . . . ?’

  She searched for a word or phrase. Her eyes looking down at the lawn, flicking up at the blank cartridge paper on the easel, and back to Troy.

  ‘. . . Foul play. My God, I’m getting to use all the jargon, aren’t I?’

  She rolled ‘foul play’ around on her lips once more as though toying with the phrase.

  Janet Cockerell had, he felt, been pretty straight with him. This was no time to allow another person’s honesty to let him stumble into truth. The truth was of no use to her, the truth could do her no good.

  ‘No,’ he lied. ‘I don’t.’

  §47

  The interview room at Belper Police Station was designed to let paint intimidate. If the malefactor did not instantly feel the pangs of guilt on entering a room almost entirely denied natural light by the accumulated dirt on the windows, the brick walls, eggshelled over in dirty brown and dirtier cream, with a dividing border at shoulder height, would no doubt soon reduce him to gibbering confession along the lines of, ‘It’s a fair cop, guvnor. You got me bang to rights.’ So reminiscent were they of the soothing shades of a good Victorian prison. It was at least sixty miles to Strangeways, but a short hop on the Brolac paint chart ‘Snazzy Colours for Old Lags’.

  Troy watched Godbehere riffle through a stack of papers, and waited.

  Once, years ago, an old lag had accepted arrest by Troy with the words ‘It’s a fair cop,’ and Troy could only ask, ‘Are you taking the mickey?’ There were moments when he loved the job.

  Godbehere pushed a blank statement form across the table to him.

  ‘You don’t need me to put it into copperese, now do you, sir?’

  Troy spoke fluent copperese and hated it. It went with black boots and silly helmets. He wrote an account of his finding the body of George Jessel in less than a hundred and fifty words, signed it and pushed it back.

  ‘What have you got?’ he asked.

  ‘Three sets of prints. Quite clear. I’ll run them by CRO and send you whatever emerges. I’ll call you when the coast is clear.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘I couldn’t do much else. Market day, you see. People everywhere. I talked to the obvious. The bloke outside the Kedleston selling newspapers. Always there, observant chap, but the only stranger he’s seen is you. He knows all the travelling salesmen by name or by sight and they’ve all been regulars. Between you and me, I think he makes a bob or two fixing them up with tarts from time to time. It’d pay him to keep his eyes peeled. And I talked to the woman who runs the drapery right opposite the alley. Nothing. Nothing worth her remembering.’

  ‘It needs a house to house, along the alley at least, and flyers. Posters up King Street. You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘I know. And I can’t do it. If the boss knows I did what I did today he’ll have my guts for banjo strings.’

  Godbehere toyed with his ball-point pen, not quite looking Troy in the eye.

  ‘You could make it official. Come in over his head, but we both know damn well what’s going to be in the medical report, don’t we, sir? Or you could take Mr Warriss into your confidence and tell him what you’ve got on the end of your handkerchief. But you’re not going to do that, are you, sir?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘You think he’ll cock it up?’

  ‘Maybe, but the problem is that he’s already made up his mind. That’s a bad start to any investigation. If I tell him what it is and it doesn’t fit he’ll just bury it in one of the vast vacancies of his brain.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

  ‘Gun oil. Lubricant for an automatic.’

  Godbehere sighed and muttered, ‘Oh shit. And you still want the house-to-house?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And the flyers?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. I understand, but if you want me do any more, you’re going to have to talk to Inspector Warriss. And I think I should warn you that right now he’s telling everyone in the station that we’ve got a rogue copper from the Yard trespassing on our turf—a right twat who can’t tell murder from a heart attack.’

  ‘Well,’ said Troy. ‘It looks as though I shall have to go on being a “right twat”, doesn’t it?’

  §48

  Warriss heard him out in silence. Troy asked for the house-to-house, and for flyers to be posted. Warriss nodded, and when Troy had finished said simply, ‘Fine. When are you leaving?’

  §49

  He left on the next train. Half an hour sitting on a bench in front of the Swiss-style waiting room on the up platform, watching Oliver Hardy tend a flowerbed, bent over his charges, as far as his bulk would allow bending, clutching a trowel and tossing the weeds behind him onto the platform. He spoke not a word to Troy—Troy concluded he spoke to no one, but he thought it a great pleasure to watch a man delight quietly in his work—and ten minutes before the train was due, Hardy disappeared up the slope and came back down on his electro-trolley at the head of another caravan of burbling pigeons.

  It was mid-afternoon. The trai
n gathered speed slowly, out of the cutting and onto the flood plain of the Derwent, into a half-mile tunnel and out into the flatlands that in a mile or two were recognisable as the English Midlands. Khrushchev’s words, as they often did, came back to him, more for their forcefulness than their poetry. There was little or no poetry in ‘Bugger England’, but ‘Bugger England’ it was that came back to him, and if this was, if this had been, his experience of Middle England, then bugger Middle England too.

  §50

  ‘Where ya bin?’

  He could feel the weight of melancholy in each short syllable. He could not acknowledge it. He did not want to pick it up—to pick it up might be to make it his own, and he had no wish to do that.

  ‘In the North of England.’

  ‘Another murder, I guess?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  ‘Y’know—I never had you figured for the kind of guy who said “sort of”.’

  ‘It’s vague. Possibly three murders.’

  ‘Three?’

  ‘One without a body.’

  ‘OK. I’m followin’.’

  ‘One without a face. Or a name.’

  ‘Still with yas.’

  ‘And one without a means.’

  ‘Now you lost me.’

  He wondered how he could explain. Drew a deep breath, and she cut him off.

  ‘No—don’t explain. Just tell me when you’re comin’ home.’

  ‘I really don’t know. It’s going to keep me busy.’

  ‘Should I come down to London?’

  ‘Up.’

  ‘Uh?’

  ‘One always comes up to London and down to the country.’

  ‘Jesus, Troy! You’re beginning to sound like your sisters!’

  He was. It was just the kind of nonsense they would utter.

  ‘Are they giving you a hard time?’

  ‘Not exactly. They say things like, “It’s your house now, Larissa, you’re the mistress of Mimram.” Like we were re-enacting some plot by the fuckin’ Brontë sisters. I’m the mistress of Hardcock Hall. And—they don’t mean it.’

  Troy knew damn well they didn’t.

  ‘They just use crap like that to wind me up. I should care who’s fuckin’ mistress of fuckin’ Mimram. You know what’s wrong? I got nothin’ in common with ’em. ’Cept two languages. Has it ever seemed to you that those women are noddle-heads?’

  ‘Of course. They are.’

  ‘I mean. Here I am trying to educate myself, reading your old man’s books and that, and they giggle and say things like, “Oh dear, Larissa’s turning into a bluestocking.” Like they never read a book in their goddam lives. Now what the fuck’s a goddam bluestocking? I mean. I been wearing your trousers all week. I don’t even own a pair of blue stockings!’

  Tosca came to London, sad, unpredictable and unchanging. The job swallowed him whole; Troy had little time for her, but then she had so little time for him. Silent, nose buried in a book. Apologising for her silence. Then angry. Once he had explained the bluestocking remark, it rankled. Anger he could handle. Soak it up like a sponge. Unlike the sadness, it did not become his. He could see it but he did not share it.

  Each night she crept into his bed, said, ‘Don’t touch’—and he didn’t.

  §51

  Kolankiewicz could explode. You would be having, you thought, a perfectly reasonable conversation with the Polish Beast when suddenly—poof, yaroo, wallop—he was off into one of the rages that Troy ascribed to the occupational hazard of being Polish. There were half a dozen questions Troy would have loved to put to Kolankiewicz, but the risk was too great. Better by far to stick to the job in hand and ask him the nuclear questions later, when he was free to duck and cover.

  He phoned down to Forensics. Kolankiewicz spent much of his time dashing between the new lab at the Yard and the old one at Hendon. It was possible he was in the building. A voice he did not know answered—one of a dozen young men that manned Kolankiewicz’s department, much grown in size and importance in the last ten years.

  ‘Is Mr Kolankiewicz about?’ Troy asked.

  ‘He’s just scrubbing up after a job, sir. He’ll be free in a few minutes. Shall I get him to call you?’

  ‘No. I’ll come to him.’

  He found Kolankiewicz in his windowless, cheerless office in the basement, with a thermos full of milky tea, a row of jam doughnuts and his copy of the News Chronicle.

  ‘Long time no smartyarse,’ he said.

  It was. They had not met since their evening with Khrushchev at the Bricklayer’s Arms.

  ‘You want doughnut?’ he said through a mouth gushing red jam.

  ‘No thanks. I just thought you might like to take a look at this.’

  He put his Irish linen handkerchief on the open newspaper.

  ‘What you want, I should examine your bogies? Troy, you getting to be bigger fucking pig than me.’

  ‘Impossible,’ said Troy. ‘You are the most disgusting man alive.’

  Kolankiewicz beamed at the compliment, genuinely flattered to hear the common wisdom of the entire Metropolitan Police Force and much of the constabularies of the home counties distilled into a single sentence.

  ‘What I want,’ said Troy, ‘is your opinion on the brown stain at the corner.’

  ‘Ah—brown stain! Troy, Troy, Troy. Brown stain—two of the most beautiful words in the English language. Why is it that a nation that has produced Shakespeare and Blake has no sonnet to the brown stain, no song, of experience, no song of innocence, that encompasses the mystery of the brown stain? We are old friends, brown stain and I.’

  He picked up the handkerchief and sniffed loudly at the corner.

  ‘Almost no odour,’ he said. ‘You had this a day or two?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No matter, I can reactivate it. A dash of this, a soupçon of that and dear little brown stain will yield up its filth for all to sniff.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Tomorrow.’

  Kolankiewicz put the linen to his nose again and made revolting noises, worse than any schoolboy with a runny nose and bad adenoids.

  ‘And you want it just between the two of us. Right, smartyarse?’

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘I known you what now, twenty years? Look at your own habits, Troy. Everybody got habits. Onions picks his nose, Wildeve forever scratch arse—you close doors quietly, like you hope no one can hear you, whenever you expect secrecy. I see you close door when you come into room and I know we are in business for ourselves again and the Yard go flying fuck.’

  Of course, he was right. The Yard did indeed go flying fuck.

  §52

  Troy went back to his own office and phoned one Angus Pakenham, his accountant of many years, a notorious one-legged RAF hero dry-drunk, and the husband of his recent mistress, Anna.

  ‘Whaddyawant?’ he barked at Troy.

  ‘It’s business, Angus.’

  ‘I should bloody well hope so. Or did you think I lived on thin air?’

  ‘Is there any chance we could meet up later? Perhaps a bit of a chat after work, at the end of the day?’

  ‘Don’t see why not. Meet me by the pump at six. And if you’re late, y’bugger, I’ll hobble off without you.’

  The pump was their very occasional but habitual meeting place It stood, tall, black, elegant and, since the demise of the horse-drawn hansom cab, redundant, an ornament at the junction of Bedford Row and Jockey’s Fields in Bloomsbury. Angus and his partners had the top two floors of a mews in Jockey’s Fields, overlooking Gray’s Inn. Angus had lost a leg leaping from the walls of Colditz Castle whilst trying to escape. He had spent the rest of the war as a POW, given a tin leg by the Germans, which they confiscated after every subsequent escape attempt. He had attempted to escape seventeen times. On his release the Roehampton Hospital had equipped him with a state-of the-art rubber and plastic leg and he had hated it and gone back to the hand-made tin leg the Germans had given him. He spent much of his lif
e in pain—the missing leg, he said, hurt like hell—and much of his time escaping pain with a near-lethal mixture of pills and booze. He and Troy met by the pump because he could not stand to be waited on or watched as he negotiated the three flights of steps that led from his office to the street. He hobbled down them at his own painful pace, cursing all the way. By the time he got to the pump he was usually red-faced but relieved, and depending on the vicissitudes of the leg and his naturally bloody disposition, he was either the best company in the world or the worst.

  Troy sat waiting for Angus. He was whistling as he came round the corner from Jockey’s Fields—red-faced but whistling—a halo of scant ginger curls peeking out from under his bowler, his briefcase under one arm, the artificial leg in its pinstripe swinging out at an unnatural angle but at a cracking pace.

  ‘Right, y’bugger. Lead on. What’s it to be? The “Lot’s Wife” or the “Whore of Babylon”?’

  Troy had difficulty remembering what public house was what. Angus had privately renamed most of the pubs within hobbling distance of his office. They had perfectly ordinary names, like the Gryphon or the Three Tuns, but he had rechristened them to suit himself, and, the landlord of the ‘Two Dogs at It’ withstanding (Angus claimed to have found two of the creatures copulating on the pavement one day right outside the pub in question), no one seemed much to mind. It also had the added advantage that if his wife overheard him planning to meet a crony, she had little idea of where he was really headed.

  ‘How about the “Frankenstein’s Codpiece”?’ said Troy without the faintest idea which one it was Angus had so dubbed.

  ‘Right you are,’ Angus replied and struck off north up Jockey’s Fields, and Troy knew that they were heading for the Seven Bells in Theobald’s Road.

  Angus cut a swathe through the evening drinkers with cries of ‘Mind the cripple!’ Troy had known him wallop people with his walking stick on the days when the pain necessitated its presence, and when feeling particularly witty, he would elbow the drinking public aside with, ‘Unclean, unclean, leper approaching.’ He threw himself down in a chair and began to rub vigorously at the point on his thigh where stump and tin leg met.