Second Violin

by John Lawton

  ‘Is . . . a . . . bella.’

  Head up, eyes smiling. Mischief.

  ‘Is that three or four syllables?’

  ‘Four, I think, but you can call me Izzy.’

  He knew she was lying, but he couldn’t care less. Izzy it was. And Izzy Who really didn’t matter.

  ‘When are you going back to England?’

  ‘As soon as Lindfors and your father are through. And you?’

  ‘We’re going on to Siena. I was wondering . . . when I get back . . . it would be nice to see you again.’

  Izzy buried her face in the pillow. A muffled voice said, ‘You’re making plans. It’s been nice. But for God’s sake don’t make plans.’

  § 75

  Troy decided that he could probably, given the choice, spend every warm evening the calendar had to offer for the rest of his life sitting in the Campo in Siena, with a glass of rich, red Vino Nobile di Montepulciano in one hand – but, then, what choices was he not given? Given the head start in life of being the son of a wealthy man – none of whose children needed employment for its own sake, he had chosen to be a copper and live in the middle of London. In his other hand was Il Giorno, with which he struggled and failed. At least pictures, names and titles required no translation. The man on page two was captioned ‘Count Ciano’, husband of Edda Mussolini, son-in-law of Il Duce and Italian Foreign Minister. He was also the man Troy had seen emerging from his father’s room in Monte Carlo. The man he’d seen setting out for the golf course the morning after.

  His father was gazing at the palazzo tower on the southern side of the Campo, outlined in burnished gold against a sky so vividly blue Troy could not think of an appropriate shade to describe it. It was a reverie of sorts, the sort all the Troy men were prone to. It seemed a shame to break it, but he would do it all the same.

  He put down the paper and tapped on Ciano’s picture.

  ‘You could have told me,’ he said.

  Alex only glanced at the photograph before resuming his gaze into the night sky, his Campari and soda untouched on the table.

  ‘Knowledge of this kind can be a burden. I merely chose not to burden you.’

  ‘I know anyway.’

  ‘You spied on me?’

  ‘He came out of your room about two in the morning. I didn’t recognise him. And I saw him setting out the next morning, looking like an extra in Laurel and Hardy Go Golfing. I didn’t recognise him then either.’

  ‘Let us hope you were not alone in your ignorant condition, my boy Golf was meant to be his . . . what is the word . . .?’

  ‘Cover?’

  ‘Cover? Quite. I was thinking of something a little more elaborate . . . the red herring . . . he is golf crazy and golf boring after all. Anyone who saw him in Monte might readily have concluded he was there for the golf. There is a British ex-pats’ golf course just above the city on the French side, just as there is in Rome.’

  ‘Why not meet him here?’

  ‘Then everybody would have recognised him.’

  ‘And the real purpose? The real reason you and Lindfors met with him in secret?’

  Alex looked at his son at the mention of Lindfors’ name, but let it pass. A brief sigh, the merest hint of exasperation and Troy knew the old man was going to tell him.

  ‘To talk. I saw no harm in talking one last time. The lack of talk is how we got into this mess after all. There is still a possibility Italy will stay out of the war. Ciano is not pro-war. Who knows, he may have some influence? He may persuade Mussolini to let Hitler go it alone. I can even see advantages for Hitler in going it alone.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘They would benefit from Italian neutrality . . . they would have a trading partner whose ships we would not sink, whose airfields we would not bomb. And as a bonus . . . he would not be called upon to bail out the Italians when they cock up their war – as they surely will.’

  ‘But will Ciano persuade Mussolini not to invade his neighbours . . . to stay out of Greece and the Balkans? Invading Albania was a pretty poor precedent for peace . . . and hardly evidence for them cocking up their war.’

  ‘That is where our talks broke down. But, I still say it was worth the attempt.’

  ‘Hardly a pleasant experience – talking to a fascist, I mean.’

  ‘“Jaw jaw is better than war war” as Winston is apt to say. But he is scarcely the exemplar of his own wisdom – he will not talk to Labour . . . they are little short of Bolsheviks . . . he will not talk to Russia . . . they are Bolsheviks . . . he will not talk to rebels in his own party if they do not agree with him almost word for word . . . and for whatever reason he would not talk to Ciano. He sent Lindfors. Whether he sent Lindfors because he knew I would be there, I did not ask. I have known Ciano since the Twenties. I’ve no idea whether Winston and Ciano have even met and I have not had the occasion to ask. He is not speaking to me and may not again.’

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since my editorial on Russia . . . but let us not ruin a beautiful sunset with talk of Mr Churchill. We will be hearing quite enough from him, however indirectly, in the months and years to come.’

  ‘Do you really think this war will last years?’

  Alex was gazing at the darkening sky again. He looked at his son, shot him an ancient mariner’s fixing glance and said, ‘Tomorrow will be beautiful. Why don’t we stroll down to the botanical gardens before luncheon, and then perhaps a visit to the Duomo in the afternoon? I believe there is a Donatello of one saint or another.’

  Whichever saint Donatello had carved for the cathedral in Siena, Troy never got to see. In the morning at breakfast Alex showed him a telegramme:

  FREUD DEAD. FUNERAL TUESDAY. GOLDERS GREEN.

  ‘Would you mind terribly if we missed Amalfi? I would like to be there. It is a chapter in my life. So many chapters lack a sense of an ending. I would like to be there when this one ends.’

  Troy did not argue.

  §

  Under moonlight,

  infectious moonlight,

  a madman dances.

  Smeared in excrement,

  naked as nativity,

  Lord Carsington dances.

  An Interlude

  §

  March 1940 . . .

  London, the Phoney War or thereabouts

  While the British Expeditionary Force was still on the Continent, the blast of war seemed scarcely to touch England. The bureaucracy did. It was a time of organisation and regulation, a time of the amassing of paperwork – usually referred to as ‘bum fodder’ – a time of mass evacuation, of recruitment, of innovation and wild suggestion. Everyone had ideas to help with the war effort, from the shoolboy designing giant tank-carrying submarines on his school jotter, to the man who wrote to The Times suggesting that the way to be seen in the blackout was to carry a white Pekinese dog. Some suggestions were not so daft – growing one’s own vegetables for instance.

  Tite Street might be fashionable. It was once, fifty years earlier, home to Oscar Wilde and might therefore be notorious as well as fashionable. At the end of Tite Street is a small green Chelsea square, Tedworth Gardens. Shrubs, flowerbeds, a patch of grass, the odd tree, lots of railings, the unfortunate residue of visits by errant dogs . . . that sort of thing. One breezy afternoon late in the spring of 1940, a big man – not a fat man or a stout man or a portly man, at this stage merely a big man – was ripping up shrubs and breaking turf in Tedworth Gardens. His employer, home on leave and still in uniform, had come to the square in search of him, somewhat exasperated with his gentleman’s gentleman. But, as he had long learnt, you get nowhere with this particular gentleman’s gentleman by showing exasperation. So he asked simply, ‘Busy, are you?’

  ‘Wossit look like?’

  ‘It looks to me as though you are a one-man pagan horde vandalising the flowerbeds and lawn of a rather pretty London square.’

  ‘Bugger off, then.’

  ‘No, honestly, what are you doing?’

 
; ‘I’m teaching me Aunt Fanny how to knit balaclavas for fuzziwuzzis. Wossit look like I’m doing, yer berk? I’m getting a patch ready for me spuds. ’Cos tomorrow a bloke from Fullers’ brewery is bringing me a load of horse’s doins. Always pays to get yer spuds in before Good Friday. That’s what my old dad used to say anyway. And as I means to grow King Edwards, the sooner they’re underground the better. I got some nice second earlies too, Edzell Blue, as nice a tater as you’ve ever got yer choppers into.’

  ‘Oh, I see,’ said his employer not seeing, and wishing there was someone around to press trousers and iron shirts and generally get him back into civvies for a weekend as a free man.

  The big man reached into the back pocket of his trousers, and thrust a Ministry of Food pamphlet into the man’s hand.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘“Dig for Victory with Potato Pete”.’

  ‘That’s the little fellow, green hat, hobnail boots looks a bit like a spud with legs.’

  ‘Yes, I can see that.’

  ‘There’s another bloke, he’s based on a carrot he is. He’s a laugh too. I don’t know how they think ’em up.’

  ‘Yes. It’s alright. I get the picture. I meant . . . will you be long?’

  ‘Why are you askin’ me? Try askin’ old Adolf. I shall be diggin’ for victory for the duration of hossitilities. I won’t be the only one neither. There’s Lady Diana from Tite Street and an old codger, Admiral Wotsisface, from Radnor Walk, and me. Yours Truly. We’s’ll have a patch each and a hut between us. Come back in a fortnight you won’t recognise the place.’

  ‘Ah . . . quite . . . yes . . . I see . . . but . . . could you see your way clear to doing the odd bit of valeting before peace breaks out? At the moment I would appear to be a gentleman without a gentleman.’

  ‘Course, old cock. Is it yer socks again? Just stick ’em on the pile. I’ll be doin’ a spot of darning once the nights start drawing in.’

  ‘Nights drawing in? It’s only March. You won’t be planting potatoes until November?’

  ‘No cock, by November I’ll be feeding the peelings to the pig.’

  ‘Pig? What pig?’

  ‘That pig.’

  He wasn’t sure how he could have missed the pig, but once pointed out to him it was undeniable that a large white pig had fixed him with its beady eye from its chosen spot under a rose bush.

  ‘You can’t be serious. This is . . . this is . . . Chelsea.’

  ‘Just watch me, old cock.’

  The gentleman departed, doubtless to darn his own socks. We will not see him again. The gentleman’s gentleman remained, back bent over his spade, digging, as he put it, for victory. Of him we shall hear more, but not for three or four years.

  II

  Little Vienna

  § 76

  Late Spring or Perhaps Early Summer 1940

  Onions, Troy had learnt, was not one to count his chickens. An arrest would often as not result in a ‘Well done, lad’ – or worse, if no confession was forthcoming, a ‘D’ye think you can make it stick in court?’ It was, Troy concluded, a modesty he would do well to share. He knew when he nicked Jack Seaton for the murder of his brother-in-law in the January of 1940 that he could make it stick, confession or not, and any tendency to smugness would always be wiped out with the judge’s wearing of the black cap – which was no kind of cap, more like a black silk handkerchief – and the majesty of the law reduced to the ritual mechanics of death. Hence, after a morning court appearance one day early in June, the verdict ‘guilty’, the ritual so enacted, Troy, finding himself with no appetite for lunch, was in his office when Onions appeared in his doorway.

  ‘I heard,’ he said.

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘’Nother feather in your cap.’

  ‘Another one for Tom Pierrepoint to breathe whisky fumes over before he ties the noose. Another body in quicklime.’

  Onions looked at him quizically took the seat by the bleached and blackened bars of the gas fire – turned off by written instruction since the end of April and not on again until October, regardless of the English weather – took out his Woodbines and lit up a cigarette.

  ‘I wouldn’t have thought you’d be much bothered by that. He had it coming after all.’

  ‘I don’t think I am much bothered. I became part of the business of death the day you brought me to the Yard. But I’d be less than human if I didn’t feel a sting at sending another man to his grave.’

  Onions ignored the obvious and said, ‘Business of Death? I reckon you read too many novels.’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Have you got your teeth into another case?’

  ‘No,’ Troy said. ‘I hesitate to say this, but once I sling Seaton’s file back in the cabinet there’s not a lot on my desk.’

  ‘Good,’ said Onions. ‘Good, good.’

  He drew deeply on his cigarette and slowly exhaled a plume of smoke.

  ‘How do you fancy a spell with the Branch?’

  Troy didn’t, but this was hardly the moment to say so. Special Branch were, in Troy’s opinion, legalised thugs – door-kickers, head-crackers all – and to be in the Branch required no police skill other than a blind obedience to orders, which in the case of the Branch came not from Onions or the Metropolitan Police Commissioner but from MI5.

  ‘I doubt I’ve any talents they’d want,’ Troy said more in hope than expectation.

  ‘Oh, but you do. Local knowledge.’

  ‘They want me to police Hampstead?’

  ‘Stepney.’

  ‘Stepney?’

  ‘The order’s gone out. We’re rounding up all the Category C aliens. C means mostly harmless buggers with the misfortune not to have their mitts on a British passport. Germans, Austrians, some Eyties . . . lots of ’em in the East End . . . lots of ’em Jewish, I shouldn’t wonder. The view from on high is that rounding up the Bs last month was a bit of a pig’s ear and it’s thought best if we put men in charge who’ve been there, been around a bit, worn out a bit of shoe leather . . . rather than a paddy wagon full of Branch blokes bussed in for the raid.’

  ‘In other words, you want me to go back to Stepney and nick innocent people whom I got to know as a beat bobby?’

  One more drag and exhale, then the fag was stubbed out in the otherwise pristine ashtray sitting on the tiles in the hearth.

  ‘I knew you’d get the picture. You’ll be working to Ernest Steerforth. D’ye know him?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘He’ll be the Chief Inspector in charge. You’ll be working with another local. Inspector Stilton. Walter Stilton. D’ye know him?’

  ‘Of course. He’s an old pal of George Bonham’s. Lives just around the corner from George. I know him . . . but I’ve not had much to do with him.’

  ‘He’s one of the best. Take it from me. You and Walter report to Steerforth tonight. Six o’clock, back at your old nick.’

  § 77

  Out on the coast, in the seaside village of Burnham-on-Crouch, much the same conversation was taking place.

  Squadron Leader Orlando Thesiger had the task of interrogating any refugees from occupied Europe who landed on the North Sea coast anywhere between Southend and Harwich. The short description of his job was ‘Spycatcher’. In this he was assisted by both Military Intelligence in the shape of a lanky laconic guards officer, Captain Charlie Leigh-Hunt, and by Special Branch in the shape of a rotund, robust trencherman, Inspector Walter Stilton.

  Walter Stilton prided himself on his German. It was the one positive thing he had salvaged from the Great War, an event otherwise viewed by him, as by so many of its veterans, as a fiasco. As a married man with children, Stilton would have been low on the list for conscription, but as a patriot he had answered Lord Kitchener’s call to arms and volunteered for the London Rifle Brigade, the 5th Battalion, commonly known as the Queen’s Westminster Rifles. In 1915 Lord Kitchener had needed him. It had seemed almost personal. In 1916 he was thrust into battle in the b
loodiest baptism of all – the Somme. He had been lucky. He was one of the few who lived. A few scrapes and scratches, a minor flesh wound to the upper left arm that had missed both bone and artery and he was captured. Captured to sit out the rest of the war in Cottbus POW camp in Prussia – a Kriegsgefangenenlager fifty miles beyond Berlin, about as far from the Western front as he could be without actually being on the Eastern front. Cottbus had thrived. He had not felt harshly treated. He had enough to eat and joined an active Amateur Dramatic Society, playing Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest. He had read more than at any other time in his life. But acting and reading alone could not fill the hours – so he had sat down with his guards, decent enough blokes, he thought, like himself that bit older than the average soldier, and learnt German from them. By the time of his repatriation at Christmas 1918, he was fluent. He had returned to his old job as a policeman, fathered more children, moved up the ranks at the Yard, transferred to the Special Branch – and found all but no use for his German. Until about six months ago, when the Branch had assigned him to be the hands and feet of Squadron Leader Thesiger in MI5. It seemed to be the perfect job. The arrest powers of a London bobby allied to a command of the German language. Who better to trail after spies? And who knew how many spies there were going to be in the wake of the fall of France? It had been low key so far, almost inactive at times, but it was all in the preparation, Stilton thought, in being ready for the moment when the moment might come. And it was the perfect job.

  Stilton wondered about the perks of the job. Might they in fact be just liberties? Thesiger hardly ever seemed to wear full uniform. When they had all set out for Burnham in the winter to set up the unit he had favoured green corduroy trousers, black wellingtons and his RAF blouse. Today, flaming June, was clearly the morning after the night before. Thesiger had been up to town, got back late and had worked through the morning in evening dress, bow tie hanging loose, studs popped. The concessions to uniform were, Stilton concluded, the scuffed RAF-issue shoes and the pale blue braces. The peaked cap sat in his in-tray – but Stilton had never seen him wear that.