Black Out (Frederick Troy 1)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Neville Pym?’

  ‘It says N. A. G. Pym? D’ye know him?’

  ‘I was at school with him.’

  ‘My, my, my. That old school tie’ll be the death of you.’

  ‘I’ll talk to Pym.’

  ‘Are you going to tell me why?’

  ‘Just a hunch. I have a feeling that this might be their turf rather than ours.’

  ‘Bodies on the streets of London is always our turf,’ said Onions.

  From the corner of his eye Troy could see imminent flapping in Wildeve. He was on edge, trying and failing to interrupt.

  ‘Spit it out, Jack. Whatever it is.’

  ‘Well . . . it’s just . . . well, you did say the woman you had followed was called Brack. Diana Brack you said. Diana OrmondBrack?’

  ‘Could be.’

  ‘Well . . . I rather think I know her. Or at least I used to. She’s old Fermanagh’s daughter.’

  ‘Am I supposed to guess what that means?’ said Onions, turning Wildeve to beetroot. ‘Old MacDonald would mean more.’

  ‘Jack means the Marquess of Fermanagh,’ said Troy. ‘He’s one of the powers behind the throne. One of those Conservative Party king-makers. It’s said he helped keep Churchill in the wilderness for ten years.’

  ‘She was a friend of my brother’s at one time,’ said Wildeve, blushing a little more at the euphemism for lover.

  ‘Well, well,’ said Onions, getting up from his chair, stubbing his last Woodbine out at the mantelpiece. ‘It’s a small world. And as this appears to be the only lead you two have got, I suppose I’d better leave you to it. I wouldn’t want to be treading too close behind you with the Pyms and the Fermanaghs in this Lobster Quadrille. You never know, I might wear me brown boots with me blue suit, and that would never do.’

  As the door closed behind Onions, and Wildeve resumed an approximately normal colour, he asked quietly of Troy, ‘Do you suppose that was sarcasm?’

  ‘Probably,’ Troy replied.

  Wildeve got up. ‘I suppose I’d better get back to B3.’

  ‘No, Jack. Just tell your uniform what he needs to know. Let him draw the blank.’

  ‘You seem very confident.’

  Troy shrugged. ‘Is it likely that Diana Brack will remember you?’

  ‘Only by name. I was fourteen or fifteen the last time we met.’

  ‘Get over to Tite Street as soon as you can. Watch, follow, and then come back and tell me. Who she meets, where she goes. It’s too early to steam in and ask her anything.’

  Wildeve reached across his desk and gathered up a loose collection of papers and dumped the lot in Troy’s in-tray. As he looked out at the Thames Troy heard the door close softly behind him.

  There was more than sarcasm, more than counter-snobbery to Onions’s remark. The conspiracy that Troy had told Onions was all but tangible required a conspirator or two of enormous power. But peers of the realm didn’t have people bumped off just to cover up the indiscretions of a wayward daughter, did they? Surely Stan wasn’t thinking in that direction?

  Troy called MI5 in St James’s Street and asked for Squadron Leader Pym. It took a while for the switchboard to put him through. He heard the line crackle repeatedly and was beginning to think they were cranking up some sort of security apparatus when a loud click heralded the connection.

  ‘Squadron Leader Pym,’ a voice said loudly and brusquely.

  ‘Good morning. It’s Frederick Troy here.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘Troy?’

  ‘Frederick Troy.’

  There was a deafening silence, then Pym spoke again almost sotto voce. ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I think I need to talk to you . . . ’

  The usual waffle about wanting information, the usual flattery about only ‘you’ can help, the usual lie about it being ‘just routine police business’ was cut short. Even more softly than he had spoken before, Pym said, ‘Not here, not now.’

  ‘Sorry,’ Troy said. ‘Have I called at a particularly bad time for you?’

  ‘How innocent,’ Pym replied. ‘Of course you have. Any time would be a bad time.’ He paused again. ‘Come to my flat this evening at seven. I’m at Albany. E6.’

  And the line went dead. E6 was not a postal address in the East End. It was the apartment number. Albany was, as Onions would have said, the ‘swankiest’ address a single man about town could have. A beautiful, exclusive apartment building on the north side of Piccadilly. It was an address that would have suited such as Lord Peter Wimsey or Albert Campion, although, if Troy’s teenage reading served him right, it was Raffles who had lived there – and Raffles wasn’t on the same side as Troy. As a bachelor apartment, with its uniformed porters and its famous ropewalk, Albany was without equal in the whole of London. Pym had done well for himself. From an office at MI5 HQ Pym could walk home in a matter of minutes. If Pym had grown into a man about town then he could be about town minutes after leaving work at the flip of a collar stud.

  25

  A day on paperwork wore away much of Troy’s patience. When the top-hatted porter at Albany stopped him, he produced his warrant card and declined to give his name, state his business or be announced. Pym had seemed so reluctant that he didn’t want to give him any opportunity to put him off any further.

  When Pym answered the door on the second floor he was wearing a deep burgundy smoking jacket, and he was smoking. He was smoking a Passing Cloud. A ridiculous cigarette that was oval rather than round, and looked as though it had been recently sat on. Troy thought it was smoked only by fools who wanted to attract attention to themselves.

  ‘You’re early,’ he said, and looked somewhere over Troy’s head, so pointedly that Troy himself thought there might be someone behind him and turned to look.

  ‘You’ve come alone?’ asked Pym.

  ‘Of course,’ said Troy.

  As Troy stepped past him into the hallway Pym looked both ways outside the door before he closed it. He led Troy into a huge mock-Palladian drawing room, the height of the ceilings alone would have been intimidating but Pym had added to the effect with an expensive array of Regency furniture. Troy found too much red and gold oppressive, the trappings of a circus – he found the furniture uncomfortable. Pym stopped at a sideboard and poured a small glass of sherry for Troy. Troy perched himself on the edge of a glittering circus chair, Pym leaned against the marble fireplace and plucked his glass off the mantelpiece. He had gone grey above the ears since Troy had last seen him, and had acquired the soft, loose look of face that characterised a man who took little exercise and took most of his pleasures in restaurants. Pym was running rapidly to seed and looked as though he meant to enjoy every moment and ounce of it. Somewhere in his attic was a portrait that was forever young.

  ‘I see no reason why we can’t be civilised about this,’ he said.

  He looked down at Troy, softly arrogant, the merest quaver in the rich ruby port of his voice, resuming its natural lush, suggestive tone that reminded Troy of his schooldays, rather than the false RAF bark with which he had greeted him earlier or the equally false stage whisper with which he had ended. Troy had no idea what he was talking about.

  ‘You’re not the first to phone up out of the blue and come crawling round here.’

  Troy still had no idea what Pym meant, but thought ‘crawling’ a bit beyond the pale.

  ‘I’m only doing my job,’ he said.

  ‘And what precisely do you consider your job to be? I suppose you’re going to say pestering me is a public service?’

  ‘Well, I hadn’t really thought of it in that way. I can’t tell you it’s routine because it isn’t. It’s a pretty serious police matter as these things go.’

  Troy watched the blood drain from Pym’s face exactly as it had done from Driberg’s at the mention of the same word.

  ‘You’ve told the police? You fool, you complete and utter bloody fool.’

  Pym set down his glass again. Troy saw that he was now
almost white and thought he might faint.

  ‘Pym, I don’t know what stupid game you’re playing with me, or what misapprehension you’re labouring under, but you are, are you not, the MI5 liaison officer with the Yard? If you’re not say so now and I’ll bugger off and you can stuff your damned sherry. Just tell me who I have to call.’

  ‘You’re a policeman?’

  Troy wondered. Had he really not told that girl on Ml5’s switchboard that he was calling from Scotland Yard? If he hadn’t what on earth had Pym thought he was after? And then it dawned on him. The Driberg reaction was for precisely the same reason. The homosexual’s habitual fear of the Vice Squad. At school, Pym, some four years older than Troy, had been a bully. But then that was the job of every older boy – to bully the younger. As bullies went Pym was hardly the worst. He had no taste for the brutality, the beatings that prefects had the power to inflict on small boys. His tongue was feared – he had a remarkable capacity to inflict abuse and humiliation but that was about it. Troy’s closest friend Charlie had been Pym’s boy, not his fag – for a while Troy himself had held that unenviable post – but his lover. Troy had thought nothing of it, and being Pym’s lover had afforded Charlie some measure of the protection that a thirteen-year-old boy who looked like a blond, Nordic princess needed in a system that was, at least for the duration of school life, predominantly queer. Charlie had long since grown out of it. The availability of women in the outside world had given him a choice and he’d made it. Pym too had made his choice, and as Troy looked at him puffing furiously at his Passing Cloud, struggling to regain his composure, propped against the fireplace like a character in a play by No√´l Coward, he realised that the choice had been to stay as he was.

  ‘Neville,’ said Troy, venturing the Christian name tentatively, ‘I’m with the Murder Squad. I hold no brief for the Vice Squad.’

  Pym glugged back his sherry, poured himself a large brandy and sat back in the chair opposite Troy.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe how many of them still come around. People you thought you’d never see again after they opened the gates on that fucking school and turned us loose. You know I rather think our parents sent us to the wrong school. It seems to have turned out a lot of chaps who appear to be habitually down on their luck, and most of them seem eager to describe themselves to me as “old friends” – I’d no idea I’d so many friends. I’ve been touched for a loan – usually accepted with an ungracious “just to tide me over” – half a dozen times in the last couple of years.’

  ‘If you’ve been blackmailed you should report it.’

  ‘In my position?’

  Troy shrugged.

  ‘I think you’d better tell me why you’ve come.’

  ‘I have a murder on my hands. I believe the victim to be German. I’m ninety-nine per cent certain he’s not a refugee. In fact I’m pretty damn certain he arrived on these shores rather recently’.

  ‘So?’

  ‘If he was a spy, if you have lost a spy, I will need to know.’

  ‘A body you say. Dumped on your doorstep or what?’

  ‘Shot, dismembered, burnt.’

  ‘Troy, we don’t shoot spies, we turn them. And if we can’t turn them or we have no use for them we put them on trial and then we hang them. I can tell you now the answer is no. And before you ask, the chances of the Germans having spies in London, at least spies even the Yard can spot as German, without us knowing about it are virtually nil.’

  That was the answer Troy had anticipated. He watched Pym inhale the aroma hovering in the brim of his balloon glass and thought of the wording of his next question. The issue he had so far declined to discuss with Onions or Wildeve.

  ‘There is another possibility,’ he began. ‘I need to know if your people have brought anyone out of Germany or the occupied countries who has subsequently gone missing.’

  Pym sipped at his brandy and thought for a moment.

  ‘That’s a very tall order.’

  ‘No taller than the last.’

  ‘Spies come over. They get caught. Everyone knows that. The Germans have been known to send poor Dutch bastards across in rowing boats armed with nothing more than a dictionary full of pinpricks for their codes. And the poor sods do it because their families are hostage. Those men are dead the minute they set off. The Germans would be better off putting a bullet through their heads. What you’re asking is very different. You’re asking what our people are up to over there. I’ve no authorisation to answer that. Even for Scotland Yard.’

  ‘But,’ said Troy, ‘you’ll ask.’

  Pym got up, a huffy dignity, a piqued sense of self-importance showing in his expression, and went into the other room. The phone jangled as phones do when someone is dialling on a badly wired extension. Troy tried the sherry. He had always thought the stuff tasted awful. This specimen did nothing to change his mind. He looked around for a plant pot in which to dispose of it. In most homes in England he would have found a handy aspidistra perched on its high table, but Pym had no plants. Every table and niche was occupied with some sort of statuary, an arresting array of nude males. Over by the door where Pym had just gone was a largish plaster copy of the Michelangelo David. It was rumoured that when Queen Mary had visited the British Museum the staff had had a fig leaf made to cover the offending cock on their own cast of the statue. Pym did not care for such modesty. The cock bloomed for all to see. Any ‘old friend’ who did turn up to touch Pym for a fiver would know at a glance he was on to a good thing. Did the man invite blackmail? After all, there were plenty of other places he and Troy could have met if the prospect of turning up at MI5 was more than Pym could contemplate. It crossed Troy’s mind that Pym might just enjoy the risk.

  Pym returned in less than five minutes, and took up his old pose by the fireplace.

  ‘I’ve had a word in the appropriate quarter,’ he said. ‘The answer’s no. We’ve brought out no one we can’t account for. And that constitutes no admission on our part that we have brought anyone out, you will understand.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Troy. After all, even in the height of his momentary panic, Pym had had enough sense not to admit he was still queer. It had been understood unspoken. ‘I’m almost sorry to have troubled you.’

  He rose to go and began to button his overcoat. Pym took a huge stone table lighter off the mantelpiece and lit another of his awful cigarettes. The ‘almost’ in ‘almost sorry’ had bounced off Pym, now safely esconced in his own conceit once more.

  ‘There is one last thing,’ said Troy just before he reached the door, aiming for the suggestion that what was high in his list of priorities was perhaps a mere afterthought – a cheap ploy of detective stories that he had learnt from the daddy of all cheap detectives, Porfiry Porfirovich in Crime and Punishment. Pym blew smoke down his nostrils. Troy had often thought that however impressive the trick it must feel deeply unpleasant.

  ‘We’re not the only army in these islands, are we?’

  ‘What do you mean?’ Pym looked surprised.

  ‘I mean, it’s just as likely that the Americans would have brought out a useful foreign national.’

  Pym said nothing, waiting for Troy to ask and offering no invitation.

  ‘I’ll also need an answer to the same question from them.’

  ‘I’ll see what I can do.’

  ‘I’ll need to know pretty quickly.’

  ‘As I said. I’ll see what I can do. I can’t speak for the Americans. All I can do is ask. I’ll call you tomorrow’.

  26

  Better than his word, Pym called Troy at half past nine the following morning. The rain ran down the window in sheets; Troy was sitting with his back to the torrent, listening to a bleary, yawning Wildeve give his account of Diana Brack’s movements the night before, when the telephone rang.

  ‘Troy, listen,’ said Pym imperiously. ‘The Americans will see you. God knows why, but they will.’

  ‘You have a way of making it sound as though they’re above
the law,’ said Troy.

  ‘What you don’t grasp, Troy, is that they run things now. And it’s not a point I’m about to argue with you. Do you want this meeting or not?’

  ‘Of course. When?’

  ‘I’m afraid it’s eleven o’clock this morning or not at all. They have an office in St James’s Square, at Norfolk House. You see a chap called Zelig – Colonel Zelig.’

  ‘Who is he? Your opposite number?’

  ‘I’ve no idea. Quite simply he’s the man who’ll answer your questions. Isn’t that enough?’

  ‘Of course. I appreciate your help, Neville.’

  The use of his Christian name seemed to be an affront that stung Pym.

  ‘You’ve used up any favours I owed you, Troy. Remember that.’

  He rang off before Troy could say a word. The precise point of the outburst was lost on Troy. He looked up at Wildeve, trying to dry his hair on a pullover, while his coat steamed on a radiator and his shoes made puddles in the waste-paper bin.

  ‘I’m seeing some American this morning.’

  ‘Where does that connect with my end of things?’ asked Wildeve.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘Ah . . . where was I?’

  ‘You and Lady Diana had just sat through Major Barbara.’

  ‘Right.’ Wildeve sat down opposite Troy and pushed a lock of damp brown hair from his eyes. ‘She walked home. Could’ve strangled her. All that money and she doesn’t take a cab, she decides to walk all the way from Shaftesbury Avenue to Chelsea. Do you know how long it takes to walk from—’

  ‘Skip it, Jack. Doesn’t it strike you as odd that a woman of her class does all this alone?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘She has a drink at the Cri, she goes to the theatre, she meets no one. You’ve no sense that someone she expected stood her up?’

  ‘Freddie, you’ve seen Lady Di. You’d have to be blind to stand up Diana Brack!’

  ‘Yet she tackles the social round of her class without an escort.’

  ‘A lack of eligibles perhaps. They’re all in the Toff’s Rifles or the Mummersetshire Yeomanry. I tell you, in her time most of the eligible chinless in the country have paid court to Diana – my brothers to name but two – and a fair smattering of lounge lizards and silver screeners. There was a lot of talk about her and Jack Buchanan for a while. Al Bowlly was reportedly mad with frustration because he couldn’t get within a mile of her.’