Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘You still look absolutely bloody awful,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks, Jack.

  The night porter at the Ritz knew Troy by sight, and took evident pride in his own sense of discretion. He glanced once at Troy’s shoes, and gave him Clark’s room number.

  Troy heard Clark’s voice answer through the locked door.

  ‘If you’re Chief Inspector Troy, what was my nickname in Berlin in 1948?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what it is now—it’s Fat-rogue-asking-for-a-demotion-and-a-posting-back-to-bloody-Birmingham!’

  ‘Right first time,’ Clark said and slid back the chain on the door.

  Troy threw himself into a chair and felt his muscles uncoil for the first time in hours and the breath seep out of him in a trailing sigh.

  Clark was in his shirt-sleeves and braces. Last night’s papers strewn across the floor, a pocket chess set and two empty pale ale bottles laid out on a coffee table beneath a single lamp. He was playing against himself. Troy would never understand minds like Clark’s if he lived to be a hundred, and he felt as though he’d be lucky to make forty-two.

  ‘Foxx?’ he said.

  ‘Next door. I’ve got the key to the connecting door.’

  ‘Are you in the picture?’

  ‘Pretty much. Our American friend?’

  ‘Safe and fairly sound. Jack’s driving her to Hertfordshire now.’

  Troy mustered the last of his energy and peeled off Jack’s mac and his jacket.

  ‘Call room service. We want a typewriter, a stack of foolscap and a half a dozen sheets of carbon paper. How long will it take to type out your version of Cockerell’s cypher?’

  ‘Half an hour or so. I was clerk of store stores for a while back in Berlin. I learnt to touch type,’ said Clark, and then added a telling, ‘among other things.’

  He picked up the phone, and placed the order.

  ‘And a pair of trousers,’ he said looking at Troy.

  Troy whispered a ‘what?’ at him, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Well, if they can find us a typewriter at two o’clock in the morning, a pair of trousers should be no problem. What size?’

  ‘Twenty-nine by thirty-one leg. Do you think they could throw in a pair of socks too?’

  ‘And a triple helping of roast beef sandwiches,’ Clark concluded, and hung up.

  ‘Ten minutes or so, sir.’

  ‘Fine. Three copies. I have to go next door.’

  §103

  Foxx was not sleeping. She was sitting up in bed, wearing a fashionable shortie nightdress. He heaved his leg to the edge of the bed.

  ‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’

  ‘I know. People keep telling me.’

  ‘Did you find her?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’d better take those trousers off.’

  He could not do it. He could unbutton his own flies, but he could not bend as far as his ankles, and with the weight of dried blood the trousers would not bend either. Foxx pulled off his shoes, tugged at the trousers, and he sat on the edge of her bed in sodden socks and shirt-tails staring down at a leg black with gore, and a flap of loose flesh gaping on the thigh.

  ‘Bloody ’eck,’ she said. ‘That needs stitching.’

  ‘It will have to do. I can’t go to a hospital.’

  Foxx went to the bathroom and came back with all the towels and a flannel soaked in hot water. She bathed the wound and worked down the leg, wringing out the flannel in the basin four or five times and mopping him dry with the towels. The towels were filthy now, and there was still a mess of blood on him, but the flesh was visible again, and the wound clean.

  ‘How did it happen?’

  ‘Someone took a shot at me.’

  ‘The same someone who killed Stella?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Troy!’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you get him?’

  ‘I don’t know. It isn’t over yet.’

  Foxx rummaged around in her handbag and came up with a pack of needles and a reel of synthetic thread.

  ‘This won’t be totally sterile, but at least it won’t fester. Brace yourself.’

  Troy saw the needle go in and re-emerge between his torn leg and her bobbing head.

  ‘It doesn’t hurt. Why doesn’t it hurt?’

  ‘I don’t know why, Troy. Perhaps because you love me truly, and true love can know no pain. But—I haven’t believed that since I was twelve. So, God knows. It should hurt. You deserve it.’

  She moved slowly. It seemed to Troy that she knew little of medicine, but enough of dressmaking, and sewed him with a perfect seamstress’s hemstitch. Her head moved up and down with her hands, the tips of her hair brushing his leg. The charge ran through him, up his spine to raise the hairs on his head, the delicious tightening of the scalp—but the flesh was willing and the spirit weak as a guttering candle.

  ‘What now?’ she said. ‘What is to become of me?’

  ‘How much money do you have?’

  ‘Thirty-eight thousand six hundred and forty-five pounds in cash. And seven hundred in sovereigns. I’ve no idea what they’re worth. And two boxes to go. We haven’t looked in Amsterdam or Monte Carlo. But it’s still a lot more than Stella said it would be.’

  ‘Take it.’

  ‘I already have. Did you think I was daft? I opened an account in Zurich in my own name.’

  ‘Take it. Go to Brighton. They won’t follow. You’re free. The house is in her name, and it’s yours now. Get yourself a solicitor and apply for probate on your sister’s estate. Once it’s through you can do anything you want.’

  ‘Anything?’

  ‘Anything. You have the money.’

  ‘Is that what it comes down to? Money?’

  ‘Tell me. Have you ever read the Count of Monte Cristo?’

  ‘Years ago. ‘When I was a nipper.’

  ‘Do you remember the Abbé Faria? The old man who tunnels through the Château d’If to find Dantès? He’s the most knowledgeable, the most educated man Dantès ever meets. He attempts to pass on his wisdom to Dantès, but in the end the only legacy that matters is the fortune, the boundless fortune walled up in a cave on a Mediterranean island. Wisdom was as nothing compared to money. I used to think my father was Faria and Dantès rolled into one. He bought us all freedom, bought his entire family choice in the tide of history, but I’m still not sure whether it was his genius or his money.’

  She bent low to snap the thread between her teeth, and said, ‘And what about you?’

  ‘I appear to have . . . obligations.’

  ‘Obligations you didn’t know you had?’

  ‘Sort of.’

  She raised her head, pulled the broken thread from her teeth and wafted the word at him like a last-blown kiss.

  ‘Liar.’

  §104

  It was almost dawn by the time Troy reached home, the sun breaking the skyline off to his right, occasionally visible in the rear view mirror as he steered the Bentley round the last snaking lanes between the main road and Mimram, following the course of the river.

  Jack was right. He had his work cut out driving with the muscles of his right leg torn. It hurt like hell every time he put his foot down on the accelerator. Once out of central London, and into fewer stops and gear changes, he abandoned the clutch, used his left foot on the brake and accelerator and changed gear on the sound of the engine.

  Jack stood leaning in the porch, wrapped up against the early morning cold in Rod’s dirty-white riding mac, a double-barrelled shotgun dangling at his hip, one finger through the trigger-guard. He looked for all the world like Jesse James.

  ‘I found it in the umbrella stand. It’s just for show. I couldn’t find my shells.’

  ‘I shouldn’t think it’s been fired in years,’ said Troy, thinking of the gun Jack had made him leave in Narrow Street. ‘Have you had any sleep?’

  ‘No. I popped a couple of bennies about an hour ag
o. When I crash, heaven will fall with me, but that won’t be for several hours yet. I’ll . . . er . . . ride shotgun while you sleep if you like.’

  He swung the gun round by his finger and it slipped effortlessly into place in the crook of his arm, almost as though he’d practised the move. No, thought Troy, it wasn’t Jesse James. It was John Wayne playing the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.

  Troy was yawning. It was too good an offer to refuse.

  ‘We’ll have to clear the decks. It’s Sunday. There’ll be an absolute horde arriving for lunch unless we stop them. Call Rod and the women, tell them “no go”. The cook’ll be here about ten, and there’s a chap comes in to mow the grass sometime before noon. And so on, and so forth. Just tell anyone who shows up to come back tomorrow.’

  Jack woke him at eleven. Sat on the bog seat once more, while Troy watched the bathwater turn bloody brown yet again, and examined the neat line of black hemstitch that closed the fleshy flap in his thigh. He could see the speed in Jack’s eyes, his pupils enlarged to bottomless black wells.

  ‘I talked to them all over breakfast,’ Jack said. ‘Except Sasha. I got Hugh instead. He said they weren’t planning on coming anyway, and seemed to take it as an impertinence that I should be calling. There was a silent “fuck off” between every sentence, so I fucked off.’

  Troy wondered if Sasha knew yet. Or was she breaking the news that she was leaving Hugh for a lover already dead? He had found it hard to believe that Sasha would ever leave Hugh—it was too easy to cheat on him, and go on cheating on him—but Johnny’s death had left him with a superstitious respect for Johnny’s belief in her.

  He looked in on Tosca. Sleeping soundly. He pulled back the sheet. Her face was a mess, but her body was unmarked. Then he and Jack took their coffee upright on the porch, Jack still absurdly toting the shotgun, his eyes so wide Troy knew he was popping pills like jelly beans, and watched the Indian Summer toss down a last, sunny, breezy afternoon. Troy felt clean for the first time in days. The starch in his shirtfront was an inexplicable source of pleasure. Clean, but lame. The same umbrella stand that had yielded a shotgun now delivered up a walking stick, unused since his father’s death more than ten years ago.

  It was turned four o’clock when next Troy pushed open the door to Tosca’s bedroom. She was up, bathed and dressed. She was wearing his clothes again. The grey gardening trousers, the worn Tattersall shirt. She was just finishing her make-up. It seemed to Troy that they had carved an arc in time, an arc that had become a circle. Tosca was bruised and bloody as when he found her in Amsterdam. She put down the jar of flesh-tint, turned to look at him, the bruised eyelid like a stuck venetian blind, and as she did, pulled a glove over her right hand to hide her battered knuckles, and the circle was complete. Before he could speak he heard Jack bounding up the stairs to the half-landing.

  ‘There’s a car at the end of the drive, in the lay-by on the other side of the road.’

  They stood on the porch again. Jack handed the binoculars to Troy. Troy saw Charlie get out of his car, saw Cobb in the passenger seat, saw Charlie saying something to Cobb and setting off up the drive.

  ‘He’s coming.’

  Jack looked at Troy. Not so stoned he didn’t know what was coming next.

  ‘I have to do this alone.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Just me and Charlie.’

  ‘You don’t owe him that, you know.’

  ‘No, I owe it to you. Whatever happens now, it’s best you don’t know.’

  ‘I’ll be at the the Blue Boar in the village.’

  Jack stopped his car halfway down the drive, wound down the window. He and Charlie exchanged half a dozen words and Charlie walked on. He looked pale, tired, but still inescapably handsome. A lock of blond hair waving in the breeze, hands sunk deep in the trouser pockets of an olive-coloured summer suit. A mannequin elegance Troy could not aspire to this side of rebirth or plastic surgery.

  ‘Another fine mess, eh Freddie?’ he said standing in the drive, observing a sense of threshold.

  ‘It must be fourish. You’re just in time for tea.’

  ‘Good-oh.’

  Troy limped down the long corridor into the kitchen. Lit the gas under the kettle for another round of the English tea ceremony, and found he could not reach the shelf with the tea caddy—his leg would not stretch. Charlie handed it down, shoved his hands back into his pockets and mooched up and down the kitchen floor, head down, leather soles tapping softly on the tiles, like a schoolboy in search of a stone to kick.

  ‘Where did they nab you?’ said Troy. ‘Cambridge? Along with Burgess and Maclean?’

  Charlie ceased his shuffling, looked up through a wayward curl. Then his hand swept it from his eyes.

  ‘If you like. It’s not strictly true, but Cambridge is a good enough symbol. Maclean and a few others came over in that sort of way—but if you know for a fact they nabbed Burgess, you know more than I do. To this day I’m not certain that Guy’s one of us.’

  ‘So you’re the infamous Third Man?’

  ‘Good God no. I’m not even the fourth or fifth man. Philby’s the third man. He’d be most put out if he thought I was laying claim to the title.’

  Troy was setting tea cups on the tray. The rattle of crockery felt like thunder in the head. He hoped he did nothing by way of hesitation that might give away his reaction. It was only a year or so since Philby had broadcast his innocence at a press conference, only a year since Macmillan had exonerated him in the House. Charlie would not be telling him this if he thought there was any way he would blab. One way or another, Charlie meant to shut him up. And Troy had no idea how far he would go.

  The kettle blew, Charlie leant his backside against the dresser, Troy filled the pot.

  ‘You carry,’ he said, reaching for his walking stick. ‘I haven’t two hands, I’m afraid.’

  Troy limped across the lawn to where a small wicker table and two chairs were set out in the fleeting sunshine, and Charlie followed with the tea tray. The same wind that had whipped the overnight rain from the grass now blew clouds slowly across the western sky—large clouds, lenticular clouds, tabby clouds, rippled like plump brindle cats rolling lazily head over heels in heaven.

  Charlie set down the tray. Troy sat down on a wicker chair, and propped his stick against the arm. Something hard dug into his backside. He stuck his left hand behind his back, moved it, winced sharply, pressed his hand to his hip and stretched his back muscles.

  ‘Sorry about the leg, Freddie,’ Charlie said. ‘Does it hurt much?’

  ‘No. But it will. I still get gyp off the wound to the kidney and that’s more than ten years ago.’

  Charlie had come through the war, and every subsequent skirmish not deemed worthy of the title, unscathed. He sat opposite Troy, tucked back the knee of his perfect trousers, crossed his perfect legs, and touched together the tips of perfect fingers. He spoke calmly, an affection in his voice that was bound to provoke.

  ‘Freddie, we have to find a way out of this, you do see that? Don’t you?’

  ‘No. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I’ve listened to you all my life. All my life I’ve been the brave to your chief. Now, you’re going to shut up and listen to me.’

  ‘Freddie—’

  ‘Shut up! We’re into endgame, Charlie. Can’t you see that? This is no time to be spinning me blarney. I’m going to tell you what’s what and you’re going to listen.’

  ‘What, like the last page in an Agatha Christie? Poirot Sums Up.’

  It seemed so sweetly pleasant, not the sneer which it surely was.

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘Fine. But if you’re going to go all the way back to Cambridge we’ll be here for a week.’

  ‘I don’t give a blue fuck about Cambridge. 17 April. That’s where it starts, when those two poor buggers from the Branch wrapped their car round a tree on the Portsmouth Road.’

  ‘I’m all ears.’

  His fingers stayed paused in their goth
ic position, the fingertip church, deceptively serene, while the pale blue eyes locked tightly onto Troy’s.

  ‘When the Branch roped me in, they did the last thing you had expected and certainly the last thing you wanted. If there was one copper in London you wanted nowhere near Portsmouth, it was me. Not because of the proximity of me and Khrushchev—as my brother so rightly put it, guarding Khrushchev was a red herring—you wanted me nowhere near Arnold Cockerell. Bit of bad luck really that I was ever roped in. But your luck got worse. You tried to talk me out of it, and we ran into Johnny Fermanagh. Johnny always costs me a good night’s sleep, blasts me into sleeplessness. So I caught the late train to Portsmouth, and tough luck again, I found myself sharing a breakfast table with Cockerell, an hour or two before you sent him out to his death under the naive illusion that he was spying on the Russian ship. Am I right so far, Charlie?’

  ‘Of course. So far, so good.’

  ‘Then a few days later the balloon went up and Detective Inspector Bonser dashed round to the King Henry and covered the trail. That puzzled me. Bonser is not an impulsive man. I don’t think he’s got the imagination to work up initiative. Now, I haven’t had the time to pull Cobb’s service record, but what’s the betting that if I do I’ll find that Cobb was in the Special Branch in Liverpool before he got the Yard posting? And that in Liverpool he worked with a sergeant named Bonser? When Bonser heard about the frogman spy, he called his old friend Norman Cobb—if he did, there’ll be a record of the call in the duty log—and without you to turn to Cobb panicked and told Bonser to bury the evidence. So, Bonser ripped out the page from the register at the King Henry, a page that also had my name on it. Then, Cobb caught up with you. You told him he’d been a fool, that above all else you wanted the body identified as Cockerell. Because if it isn’t Cockerell, where’s the scandal?

  ‘Now, unless I’m mistaken you were out of the country in June and July—I know, Gus Fforde said you’d passed through Vienna on your way somewhere, and I tried ringing you myself, just to tell you I’d married and to introduce you to Tosca—but Cobb wasn’t, was he? Cobb was at the Yard handling this fiasco on his own. So, the body finally washed up in July, Bonser called Cobb again, and received new, contrary orders—forget covering up, it’s got to be Cockerell, Cobb said, at any price. God knows what Bonser told Cobb, but if you’d been around I doubt you would have paid the price of his next move. When no one in Portsmouth could identify the body as Cockerell, Bonser consulted the torn page, talked to Quigley and then he called me. Bonser’s a good copper, follows orders to the letter. He got me down to Portsmouth, asked me to look at the body, asked me to meet the grieving widow. And once again the worst thing that could happen to you happened—I investigate the death of Arnold Cockerell. More than that, I investigate the life of Arnold Cockerell.