by Lawton, John
‘Just a bit more. Won’t hurt, honest.’
He knew he was being called out. The schoolyard cry of ‘cowardy custard’. He sucked on the wound, salt and sand mingled with the taste of blood, and she squirmed gently and threw back her arms and stretched. Now all he could taste was blood. He let go of her and was wondering what he was supposed to do next. She sat up, put her fingertips to his lips and read his mind, to the very syllable.
‘The woman’s dilemma throughout history. Do you swallow it, or spit it out?’
She kissed the back of her hand, pinched his lips together and he swallowed on the reflex.
She drew back, a satisfying smile on her face.
‘There. Told you it wouldn’t hurt.’
§68
‘I’ve something to show you.’
She peeled off the dress. Scarlet above the waist, black where the water had drenched it. Troy was delighted to find that this was one of the occasions when she had seen fit to wear underwear. She padded barefoot across the room, leaving a faint trail of blood on the carpet.
She opened a door in the vast wardrobe. There, side by side on the rail, were two rubber suits. Exactly as she had said. His, complete with frogman flippers, and hers. Madeleine unhooked hers, and held it up to show to him. Two large holes in the chest showed where her breasts would protrude when she wore it. Troy kept his eyes up, and tried not look at the unsubtle alterations that had been carried out on the lower half of the costume. It struck him as being a mould for woman—with enough plaster of Paris you could make a plaster woman. Your own Venus de Milo for the garden. Look nice next to the pond with the goldfish. And it struck him as shudderingly repulsive.
‘I could slip mine on,’ Madeleine said. ‘You wouldn’t have to wear Ronnie’s. Wouldn’t fit you, anyway. But I could wear mine.’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said.
‘Be a devil.’
‘I couldn’t,’ he said again, thrashing around for an excuse. Any excuse. ‘You’ve had far too much to drink. It would be taking advantage of you.’
She giggled. The giggle became a laugh. The laugh became the raucous mockery he had asked for.
‘You don’t mean to say you’ve never made love to a woman who’s pissed before?’
Troy never had. Lately he hadn’t made love to any woman. Pissed or sober. She danced up his cheekbone with her lips, setded on his ear lobe and nipped it lightly with her teeth.
‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘Really I can’t.’
She whispered in his ear. The heat of her breath tingled through half the veins in his body, coursing down to the loins to stir the bits he would rather leave unstirred.
‘Has anyone ever told you you’re a bit of a spoilsport?’
Most of the women in his life had told him that.
Cowardy custard.
§69
He woke up alone and chaste in one of the many spare bedrooms in Madeleine Kerr’s mansion. He had slept badly, waking often, dreaming deeply. It was something about her eyes. He felt awful. Again, the sound of running water. It followed him all the way down to the ground floor and into the kitchen as he searched for breakfast. Breakfast was not a meal of any importance in the Kerr household, at least not to the woman—the image of Cockerell alias Kerr shovelling kedgeree was permanently imprinted on Troy’s brain—and all he could find was a packet of Ryvita and a jar of ‘instant’ coffee. Instant coffee, as well as being a perfect example of an oxymoron and a good bet for revised editions of Fowler’s English Usage, was a novelty of the new world, the post-war world, instantly accepted like the ball-point pen and the plastic mackintosh—and it tasted instantly awful. It floated down to the bottom of the cup, as light as dust, a powdery scent already wafting off it, and when dissolved in boiling water it yielded up a strong and artificial aroma. It tasted like the coffee creme in a box of sickly chocolates, the merest approximation of what coffee tasted like, achieved by blending caramel and scouring powder. It brought pictures to the mind’s eye. Troy could see the ribbon on the chocolate box, the guide to the contents of each brown blob, to find a centre by its shape, cherry cup and nut cluster and the one nobody wanted—coffee creme. It was faintly gelatinous and clung to the cup and to the teeth with a viscous smear. He drank half a cup with a Ryvita and a dab of orange marmalade, and poured the rest of it down the sink. As he turned off the tap, he was suddenly conscious of the silence. The sound of water roaring through pipes had stopped. She must be out of the shower.
‘Are you ready?’
Troy turned at the sound of her voice. Madeleine stood in the doorway, dressed and made up, taking a last look at her artistry in the mirror of her compact. She clicked it shut and looked him up and down. Shirt tails out and no shoes or socks. Far from ready.
‘I tend to save lines like, “You look like shit in the mornings” for more intimate relationships. But you do look like shit in the morning, don’t you? Get your skates on, Troy, we’ve got a train to catch.’
He did up his shoelaces in the cab on the way to the station. She had wrongfooted him, almost literally, and he was wondering at this new organisation woman she had presented him with, wondering at the hurry they were in and wondering why she seemed completely free of the hangover she so richly deserved. If he drank the best part of two bottles of claret, he paid for it for days.
The cab pulled in under the glass awning of Brighton station. He paid and they stood before the huge wooden destination board, checking the London trains.
‘We’ve missed the Belle,’ Madeleine said. ‘If you’d been ready we could have had kippers and coffee and be halfway to London by now. Still, doesn’t matter much, as long as we go First.’
First—Onions would have a fit if Troy bought First-Class railway tickets on Scotland Yard expenses. But First it was. The look on her face told him she was used to no less and would accept no less. Cockerell had spoilt her—but then so richly, so inventively had she spoilt and satiated him.
Troy did not much care for First-Class travel. You met nobody. While there were times when he would quite like to meet nobody, most of the time copper’s nosiness prevailed. The British public as the great human reference work. You never knew who was going to start talking to you. Particularly in the years just after the war when petrol was still rationed, hardly anyone owned a car and some vestige of wartime bonhomie prevailed. He recalled a trip to Manchester, out of Euston, sitting opposite a potbellied man with an RAF moustache who had explained at length the precise length of his artificial intestine, and just how much of his guts he had left in a German field hospital when the Wellington he had been co-piloting had been shot down over the flat plains of Prussia. And on the return journey a seven-year-old boy, being taken to London for the day by his father, whose vision of the capital seemed to be made up entirely from precociously lurid reading. He was dying to see Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, could hardly wait for 221B Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes. Troy tried to make his day. ‘I’m a detective,’ he said. And the child thought he was having his leg pulled.
‘Troy?’
He blinked. He’d been miles away.
‘You were daydreaming? Didn’t you hear me? I said I could murder a cup of coffee.’
He looked at her through furred vision. She was neat, beautiful in her tight, two-piece outfit—red again, she adored red, a statement of her role as the scarlet woman?—with a sleeveless, high-necked silk blouse in white. She slipped off the jacket, laid it on the seat next to her and took out her compact from her handbag. Her arms were slender and tanned and watchable. He watched with a childish fascination as she again, and quite unnecessarily, looked at her own reflection in the mirror, pursed her lips, touched an eyebrow, but did nothing to change her appearance.
‘Well?’ she said across the top of the compact, green eyes flashing at him.
‘Where are we?’
‘Just coming up to Three Bridges.’
‘Surely there’ll be a waiter round in a minute?’
He d
id not much feel like moving.
‘Or not,’ she said. ‘Troy, be a darling and get me a coffee. I’m gasping.
She flipped the compact shut again, blew him a mock kiss from shiny red lips, and slipped it into the pocket of her red jacket.
He walked a couple of jolting coaches to the dining car. The attendant said he’d be round in ten minutes. Troy grovelled and persuaded the man to let him carry a tray and two cups back with him. The train stopped as the man poured, and Troy saw the sign for Three Bridges outside the window. He picked up the tray and with all the precision of bad timing the train started up again and quickly gathered speed. He cursed Madeleine Kerr the rattling length of two carriages, and as he had his hand on the door of the third the train hit the brakes and threw him onto his back in the corridor and the coffee flooded all over his crumpled black suit.
He’d never been on a train before when someone pulled the emergency cord, but he had no doubts that that was what had happened. There was hubbub behind him, alarmed voices and a child crying, and silence in front of him. He stepped into the last carriage, turned in at the door of Madeleine’s compartment. Her head lolled towards the window, bobbing on her left shoulder, as the train gently recoiled and uncoiled like an overtightened spring. He had seen broken necks before and had no doubt that she was dead. He put his fingers to the side of her neck. There was no pulse. Her eyes were closed, her hands were in her lap, and her handbag was gone. He was succumbing to the stillness of the moment, the lateral force of shock, the absurd trick of nature that had left her looking beautiful in death, when the train jolted sharply and the door at his side swung open. Now he knew.
He leapt to the track and landed badly. All his weight on his left ankle and the leg slid from under him in a searing burst of pain. He dragged himself upright and caught sight of a figure running down the track, back towards the station. Troy took a step and felt his left leg drag him back down. The man disappeared behind a concrete shed. Troy took another step and another, trying as best he could to run. The man darted out from behind the shed. Troy had only a fleeting vision of a blur in blue but knew as the sinking feeling hit his stomach that the dark blob at the end of an outstretched arm really was a gun being levelled at him. The gun flashed and blew him green and blew him red and blew him black—into a dreamless hell.
§70
How often had he lain like this? Waking up, roaring earthward from a timeless, wordless hell, trying to recognise the hospital from its paintwork, knowing he had been walloped again and waiting for the rush of consciousness that brought it all back to him and told him who, when and everything but where. A nurse told him that. A pretty young woman in a staff nurse’s uniform, and almost before the words were out of her lips he recognised the distinctive belt buckle and the unique configuration of starched linen that passed for a cap.
‘You’re in the Charing Cross, Mr Troy.’
‘So I see.’
‘Do you remember me?’
Troy looked as closely as his horizontal position and swimming vision would permit.
‘I was a first-year nurse at the Middlesex in ’51 when you caught Edward Langdon-Davies.’
The rush of memory—the past more vivid than the present. Troy had caught Langdon-Davies that winter. Cuffed, nicked, sentenced, hanged. And Langdon-Davies had caught him across the shoulder with a poker and broken his collarbone. Jack had bundled him into a squad car and taken him to the nearest casualty department, the Middlesex. This young woman had watched as a doctor jerked his bones back into place with a sickening jolt of pain, and then she had tied his arm in a sling and told him to salute Caesar for a month.
‘Getting to be a habit with you,’ she said, smiling, not knowing how near the truth she came.
‘How long have I been here?’ he asked from the depths of the habit.
‘Just overnight. You came to at the Mid-Sussex. The X-rays were fine, so they let your brother hire an ambulance to bring you back to London. You came to a few times, but I don’t suppose you remember a thing about that, do you?’
She took his pulse and temperature and bustled out. Troy felt the right side of his head. A bandage, bulging over a large swab. No pain, and once he had sat up no double vision or nausea. Perhaps he had got away with murder yet again. The phrase rolled around in his mind. Langdon-Davies had not got away with murder. Troy had not thought he should hang. Langdon-Davies, like Cockerell, like Angus Pakenham, and so many people into whose lives he had blundered lately, had been an irrevocable casualty of war. A born soldier, an officer to his nicotined fingertips. In the post-war he had been lost. No trade or profession worth mentioning, except killing and deceiving. He was, Troy knew, half mad. A series of failed business ventures, in none of which had commando skills been much use, most of which had turned out to be the local equivalents of the Ground-Nut scheme, or a latterday version of chicken-farming—either was ripe in the national argot as a symbol of failure and folly—had sent him into confidence trickery (fraud and forgery, the ignoble art of the bum cheque); trading on rank (Major), and accent (RP), and at the end of the last such trick he had killed his wife. As he had told it to Troy, they had argued badly, she screaming at him, all the names under all the suns in all the galaxies it seemed, him trying to be as calm as possible, the code telling him one did not abuse the ‘fairer’ sex. He had turned his back on her thinking the row over, and she had hit him from behind, and in reflex, as he would have it till the day they took him out and hanged him, he had jabbed her in the throat with his elbow, without even looking, and on the turn he had forced her head back with his other hand and snapped her neck. All, he said, in the twinkling of an eye, a textbook despatch of assailant-from-behind, as learnt, if not upon the playing fields of Eton, then upon the square tarmac of Aldershot.
Murder never fails to attract attention. But the run Langdon-Davies had made, eluding the police for weeks, living by theft and burglary, so like the Invisible Man that doors were bolted and windows barred the length of Britain for fear of a ‘murderer’, had reached the level of a national obsession, all but displacing Dick Barton in the imagination of the people. He became the man the papers loved to hate, a murderer on the run, sighted as far afield as Dundee and Barnstaple, and at that on the same day. ‘Murderer’, a species, in the realm of myth and popular journalism, rather than a demented individual. Troy had not thought he should hang. He even, it had to be said, liked the man. But the law, not seeing his madness for what it was, had no other penalty. He hanged. Hanged for the crime of never being able to forget what he had learned in war. He had talked, oh how he had talked, a confession so long it was little short of a novel. What story would Arnold Cockerell tell if Troy could but get the dead to speak? But then Cockerell had spoken, the drear tale of the carpet salesman. It had told him next to nothing. It was the mere facet of a life. Turn it this way, that way, another facet, another tale, another meaning would become apparent.
‘I want the lot,’ said Jack simply.
Later in the day, fourish, fivish, his watch was missing and he could not be certain, Jack stood before him, grim and pale. He threw a police 10 C 8 photograph of Madeleine Kerr onto the bedspread.
‘I want the lot, and if I get the impression that you’re holding anything back, so help me, Freddie, I’ll sink you.’
He turned around the upright chair, visitors for the use of, and sat stiffly upon it, arms folded, his hat perched on the edge of the bed like a small species of slothful animal. It was unlike Jack to wear a hat. It was symbolic, the assumption of power in the garb of those old know-nothings in bowler hats and black boots who had been the ‘Yard’ when they had first joined before the war—a breed of dullards, inhibited and motivated by the constant humiliations of class—to which Onions had proved a savage exception.
‘Where shall I begin?’
‘Assume I know her name—Madeleine Kerr—and assume I recognised the photos dotted round her house as Cockerell. Take it from there.’
Troy told him. E
verything from Angus’s phone call to his leaping onto the track in the middle of Sussex into the path of a bullet and the blur in blue.
Jack heard him in near silence. He took no notes, prided himself on his memory and asked few questions.
‘What do you have?’ Troy asked.
Jack stood up and stretched, strolled a few paces around the room, rested the palms of his hands on the windowsill, looked out at the dwindling afternoon sunlight.
‘He snapped her neck like a twig. No sign of a struggle. She died instantly. We found her handbag in the woods. Turned out, scattered. Impossible to tell what he was looking for, or what might be missing. Her driving licence and a couple of letters told us who she was. Just as well. You were in no fit state to ask.’
Troy wondered about the look Jack shot at him. Reproach?
‘Her house had been turned over.’
‘Ransacked?’
‘No. A pro. Not a thing out of place. But it had been done just the same. You know the feeling when that’s been done. You’ve seen it yourself. And I still don’t know what he was looking for.’
Nor did Troy. Jack sat on the cold radiator. Troy twisted his head to be able to see his face, felt the lump beneath the bandage as his head touched the frame of the bed. What must he look like?
‘What were you doing?’
‘Eh?’
‘Why were you taking her to London? She had a return ticket in her coat pocket. That and a powder compact. Why were the two of you on that train?’
‘I don’t really know.’
Jack pushed himself off the radiator, took a few steps into the room and Troy heard the deep breath that presaged rage. He was being so awfully dim. Jack, lackadaisical Jack, darting around a room like a cat on a hot tin roof, unable to stay still for more than a minute. It was his way of keeping control. He was seethingly angry with Troy and Troy had been too slow to realise it. He prised himself higher in the sheets and pillows, as near as he could an attempt to face Jack and diffuse him.
