A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  Troy did. A booming voice yelled, “Bugger off!”

  Troy inched the door open, put his head in the line of fire. Angus was leaning back in his chair, feet up on the desk, staring into space.

  “Frederick Troy,” said Troy. “Your noon appointment.”

  Angus swung one leg off the desk, grabbed the other with both hands, grunted, and lowered it to the floor. The leg clanked faintly as he did so. It clanked faintly as he limped across the floor, hand extended to shake Troy’s.

  “If you just let it drop it hurts like merry hell. You ever lost a limb? Thought not. You wouldn’t believe how much the damn thing hurts. Imagine wiggling toes you haven’t got. Imagine the ache in a bunion you haven’t set eyes on since the Krauts invaded Russia. There are moments when you wish you had it back so you can rub it or scratch it and you start to think you should be searching for it somewhere, that the whole point of the war was to enable Hitler to capture your bunion and it begins to seem like some poem Lewis Carroll never got around to writing. “The Hunting of the Bunion.” Call out the cavalry, line up the Lancers. The Nazis have got me bunion!”

  He paused momentarily, let go of Troy’s hand, perhaps aware for the first time that Troy wasn’t getting a word in.

  “Sergeant Troy, right?”

  “I’m an inspector now. I was a sergeant when I first met Anna.”

  “And you have need of an accountant?”

  “’Fraid so,” Troy lied.

  The head pulled back, tilted slightly, sunlight in the ginger curls, a twinkle in the pale blue eyes looking down at Troy.

  “You’re lying,” said Angus.

  Troy wondered if he’d flinched or blanched at such a plainly true statement.

  “What would a jobbing copper want with an accountant? The old girl put you up to this, didn’t she?”

  Troy said nothing.

  Angus wheeled around on what Troy took to be the tin leg and railed at the ceiling.

  “Why in God’s name does she do this? Does she think I’m helpless? Does she think I’m broke?”

  “Yes,” said Troy simply.

  One more spin on his axis and Angus was facing Troy again. Troy drew first.

  “It’s not that she thinks you’re broke. It’s that she doesn’t know what her prospects are under the National Health Service.”

  “Remind me, when does that start?”

  Was he the only man in England who didn’t know?

  “It started last week.”

  “And the old girl’s having second thoughts?”

  “Well,” Troy fudged. “Not exactly . . .”

  “Bollocks! She’s all in favour of it. She didn’t have to join.”

  “But she has, and after three years in private practice she thinks her income, and hence your joint income, might go down rather than up.”

  “And you’re the best she could come up with? A copper on salary. Good God, Mr. Troy, are you on even a thousand a year?”

  “As a copper, of course I’m not. But on the side, as it were . . .”

  Troy paused, hoping Angus might fill in the gaps.

  No such luck. He scratched his ginger halo, but said nothing.

  “On the side . . . I’m filthy rich,” Troy concluded reluctantly.

  It was a Beano moment when the lightbulb appeared above Angus’s head.

  “Filthy rich?”

  “Filthy, grubby, downright dirty. You couldn’t scrub us poor.”

  “You’re one of those Troys? She never mentioned that. Bloody hell!”

  Another spin on his metal pivot and Angus lurched into the corner behind his desk.

  “Let us adjourn to more convivial surroundings and count your ackers, Mr. Troy. It is past noon and the pubs are open.”

  Anna had warned Troy that this might happen but he couldn’t think of a damn thing to do about it short of outright refusal.

  Angus bent from the waist and came up with what appeared to be a length of cloth wrapped around something. Looking more closely Troy saw that it was a couple feet of gents’ pinstripe trouser leg, so favoured by the professions, complete with turnup, encasing a tin leg, complete with sock and shoe. Someone had gone to the trouble of shining the shoe. Someone had gone to the trouble of pinning the Distinguished Flying Cross to the fabric just below the knee. Angus handed it to Troy.

  “My spare. Just hang on to it till we get to the bottom of the stairs. I’ll need two hands, but I’ll be in Scotland afore ye.”

  Troy doubted this.

  Once outside his office door, Angus took hold of the banister rails, braced himself between them, stuck his tin leg out horizontally, kicked off with his good leg, and glided down to the next landing. Troy watched him vanish from sight at the next corner, heard the swoosh-bang-ouch as he landed at the next floor, and the floor below, and the floor below that.

  It was a turn to marvel at. Helter-skelter for a grown-up—if that term could ever be sensibly applied to Angus. Troy stood for a moment wondering that anyone like Anna would ever have married anyone like Angus.

  “Well,” a voice boomed up from below, “what in God’s name is keeping you?”

  They headed west into Holborn, Troy feeling like a fussy, precise little midget next to Angus’s loose, lumbering six foot and more.

  They turned right into Lamb’s Conduit Street, a narrow lane leading in the direction of Brunswick Square.

  “We’ll start at the Leper’s Loincloth,” Angus said.

  Troy thought he knew most London pub names. They were much of a muchness—the George, the Royal Oak, the Anchor, the So and So’s Arms, the Duke of Kent, the Admiral Nelson—and doubtless they all meant something to the inquiring mind, and on this matter Troy’s did not inquire, but he’d never heard of a Leper’s Loincloth. In fact the only pub he knew in Lamb’s Conduit Street was the Lamb. Indeed, they were standing right outside it.

  “I’ve changed the names,” said Angus, tapping the side of his nose. “That way, if the old girl hears me planning a night out she’ll not know where to start looking for me. You’d better learn a few if we make a habit of this. We’ll have a couple here and then push on to the Nell Gwynn’s Tits.”

  Troy felt the seeping, damp unease of despair like rain in a leaking shoe.

  It was a sight to turn heads. A lanky lunatic comes into a pub carrying a spare leg. A lanky lunatic comes into a pub carrying a spare leg to which the king has awarded the DFC and which the leg wears with seeming pride. Troy concluded the lunchtime regulars in the Lamb had seen Angus before. No one batted an eyelid. Even when Angus stood the leg on the bar, all the barman said was, “Yer usual, Mr. Pakenham?” and pulled two doubles of Dalwhinnie from the optics.

  “And you, sir?” the barman turned and looked at Troy.

  Troy opened his mouth to speak, pointing as he did so to the nearest glass of malt the man had just set down, but the man shook his head gently before Troy could utter a word.

  Angus had downed his in a single gulp and wrapped his fist around the second.

  “I’ll just take Ernest to a table for his nip, Tommy. Give Inspector Troy whatever he fancies.”

  So saying, Angus took both leg and tot to a corner table.

  “Ernest?” Troy said.

  “Most men,” said the barman, “have names for their todgers. Leastways they do when they’re boys. The squadron leader has continued this quaint affectation and has named his leg Ernest.”

  “And Ernest likes single malt?”

  “Oddly enough, sir, Ernest seems to like whatever the squadron leader likes at any particular moment. Now, what can I get you?”

  Troy asked for half a pint of ginger beer shandy and followed Angus. Angus was nursing the second tot with an affection he had not demonstrated to the first. Ernest stood bolt upright, a chair to himself, predictably mute on the matter of his purloined nip. Angus looked once at Troy’s and said, “Jesus wept. Is this why we fought a war? So grown men can drink ginger beer?”

  Two blokes who had been c
hatting at the next table guffawed at this.

  “S’right. You tell ’im,” said a little bloke in a battered bowler hat. “Ginger beer. Wot a liberty, eh?”

  Far from seeing the funny side of it, far from welcoming the famous Cockney bonhomie, Angus took hump.

  “I wasn’t aware that my remark was addressed to you.”

  It was a rejection guaranteed to fluster, if not humble, the recipient.

  “Sorry, guv. I was only saying—”

  “What were you only saying? That my friend has no right to the beverage of his choice?”

  “Nah. ’Course not. I was sayin’, why did we fight the war?”

  Against all the odds the little bloke in the battered bowler had got the bit between his teeth and managed to find his wagging finger before Angus got back at him.

  “I mean. I get up this mornin’. Wot does my missis stick in front of me? Cornflakes. I sez to ’er I sez where’s me bacon an’ negg? I want me bacon an’ negg. You can’t send a man off to do a day’s work on flakes o’ bleedin’ cardboard. You know wot she sez? She sez kids come first. An’ when every bleedin’ fing’s rationed growin’ kids gets first divvies. An’ she rattles off a wot’s wot o’ grub. Lard—one ounce. I ask yer, one ounce. An’ I’m partial to a bit o’ bread and lard I am. And bread, half a pound a day. Half a pound I sez, that’s not even three slices wiv or wivout the bleedin’ lard. And then she ’ammers on about sugar an’ butter an’ milk and when she’s finally shut ’er clangin’ man’ole I sez to ’er I sez ‘war’s been over best part o’ three soddin’ years an’ fings is worse than wot they ever was.’ We didn’t have no bread rationin’ during the war. We got more’n a bobsworth of meat. So I sez wot you just said, ‘why did we fight the war?’ So I could eat cornflakes, go to work ’ungry and stand in the bleedin’ bus queue in the pourin’ rain waitin’ for a bus that arrives stuffed to the gills if it does arrive. It’s all down to yer Labour government, I sez. Reds and Commies the lot of ’em. An’ I tells ’er. ’Itler was right about ’em. And I sez maybe we’d all have been better off under ’Itler”

  This was a startling and rarely uttered sentiment. However many idiots might think it, it was a stubbornly stupid man who said it in a London pub in front of anyone, let alone a six foot, half-crazed hero of the Battle of Britain.

  “Tell me,” Angus said with a deceptive calm. “What did you do in the war?”

  “Reserved occupation,” Bowler Hat replied, declining to elaborate.

  Angus rose slowly from his seat, grasped Ernest firmly in both hands, and plonked him down on the table between the two Cockneys, the DFC pretty well at Bowler Hat’s eye level.

  “Well, you ignorant sack of faeces, while you were serving with the Polished Arse Battalion of the Kings Own Skiving Pen-Pushers, Ernest and I flew Hurricanes and, whilst I am inclined to be tolerant of the odd moron who whiles away his time in a pub spouting utter tosh, Ernest is not. And he is not because the war cost him dearly and he knows precisely why we fought it. We fought for this England. And we fought it so good men like Mr. Troy and myself did not have to sit here and listen to gobshites like you while we drink our hard-earned ginger beer. I think Ernest deserves an apology from you, little fatty—indeed he’s going to stand here till he gets it.”

  “Yer what?” was all this elicited from Bowler Hat.

  Angus let go of Ernest and as Troy lunged to catch the tin man, Angus grabbed Bowler Hat by the throat and lifted him bodily off the ground.

  Bowler Hat choked out, “Leggo! I’ll have the law on you.”

  Thus prompting Troy to remember that he was the law.

  “Angus, for God’s sake put him down.”

  “No can do, old man. He apologizes to Ernest or he dangles here till my arms drop off as surely as me leg did.”

  Bowler Hat’s mate displayed wisdom over courage and scarpered. It was left to the barman to tackle Angus, armed with a handy cliché he doubtless kept behind the bar for just such occasions.

  “Leave it out, Squadron Leader. He’s not worth it! He’s not worth it!”

  Angus hung on. Bowler Hat’s face turned to beetroot and he lost the power of speech.

  “Angus,” Troy said softly. “If you kill him it will be murder, and my job is nicking people for murder. How will I ever explain to Anna that meeting you for a quiet drink ended up with me slapping the cuffs on you?”

  Angus shook himself like a wet dog and dropped Bowler Hat back into his chair.

  “Quite right, old man. Shouldn’t embarrass the missis. Woman’s a saint after all.”

  While Bowler Hat wheezed and tried to breathe again, Troy bunged the barman a ten-bob note, whispered an apology, and steered Angus and Ernest out of the door.

  “Angus, it’s been a pleasure but I really must be getting back to work.”

  “Nonsense, the night is still young.”

  “Actually, Angus, it’s barely the afternoon.”

  “Good-o. We’ll find another watering hole. Pay, pack, and follow.”

  The next watering hole was in Bloomsbury, nominally the Three Tuns, but as Angus had forewarned, known to him as the Nell Gwynn’s Tits. Seeking an antidote to the experience of the Leper’s Loincloth Troy joined Angus in his tipple, telling himself it would be just the one. Angus made it two, both doubles. They stayed there until it closed. When it closed, Angus tapped the side of his nose and said he knew a private drinking club on the far side of the Tottenham Court Road, in which they repeated the recipe, and when, at about half past four, feeling much the worse for abandoning ginger beer for scotch, Troy said, “I really must be going now,” Angus said, “Rubbish, we haven’t done Soho yet.”

  “I have to work this evening.”

  “Felons to apprehend, eh?”

  “No, just a nark to meet for dinner. And I’d prefer to be sober when I do.”

  “Dinner at the taxpayer’s expense, eh?”

  “No, the Yard doesn’t run to that. I’ve no doubts I shall be picking up the bill myself. Now if you’ll excuse . . .”

  Angus clicked into pro mode.

  “Bring me the receipt.”

  “What?”

  “Dinner with nark. A professional expense and hence tax deductible.”

  And Troy thought that perhaps he might need an accountant after all.

  §86

  Troy stood in the bogs down the corridor from his office, forcing water down his throat from a far-from-clean cup, wishing that somewhere in Scotland Yard there was a place where he could get a decent cup of coffee, and swearing to the invisible gods on a pile of invisible Bibles that he would never let Angus do this to him again.

  When he got back to his outer office, where Jack Wildeve usually sat, a light was flashing on the base of Jack’s phone and in his own office the phone was ringing loudly. In the bogs he’d mistaken this for a ringing in his head. Whoever it was had been hanging on for an age.

  Troy snatched up the receiver.

  “Freddie? Where the bloody hell have you been? I’ve been calling for the best part of half an hour.”

  “Sorry, Jack, the day sort of ran away with me.”

  Saying this, Troy realized he had no real idea of what time it was or how long he’d let Angus carouse and torment. He checked his watch, then he checked his watch against the clock on the wall. It was six o’clock. Angus had boozed away an entire afternoon and taken a bite out of the evening.

  “Can you get over to Camden right away? I’ve a body on my hands.”

  The magic words. The bolt of lightning up the spine. Troy reached for a pencil.

  “Where?”

  “On the Underground. Northern line, southbound platform on the Charing Cross branch. I’ve closed the platform and all I’ve got are half a dozen uniformed plods to hold back a mob of very angry commuters. As soon as you can, Freddie; as soon as you can.”

  “Have you closed the northbound platform?”

  “Not yet. I’ll do it if it’s absolutely necessary but I’d rather not. I
’d have a riot of bowler hats and brollies on my hands.”

  Good, thought Troy, good. After all, he could hardly drive through the streets pissed. And with any luck he’d be an approximation of sober by the time he got to Camden Town.

  “Twenty minutes,” he said to Jack.

  “Make it fifteen,” Jack said.

  §87

  Troy shook himself a dozen times. He’d boarded a tube train at Charing Cross, fallen asleep at Strand, woken up as the train pulled out of Warren Street, and only stopped panicking when he realized it had been Warren Street and that he still had two stops to go: Mornington Crescent, then Camden Town. And he knew he was at Camden Town from the size of the crowd and noise it was making. It was so unlike Londoners to talk to one another and this lot were babbling, looking pointlessly at their watches and speculating on how they might eventually get home to Streatham or Tooting or wherever, wishing they’d bought that house in Finchley or Neasden when they’d had the chance in ’46 or ’47 or whenever.

  “Of course,” he heard as he flashed his warrant card, barged his way through to the southbound line. “When you nationalize everything and build nothing, what can you expect? No bloody houses and no bloody trains.”

  A uniformed copper stood in the tunnel linking the platforms. He saluted Troy.

  “Mr. Wildeve’s just ’round the corner to your right, sir.”

  Jack was fifty yards or so down the platform, pacing up and down with his head low, searching. He looked up as he heard Troy approach.

  “It’s a waste of time,” he said. “Anything you might grace with the name of clue has been under a thousand beetle-crushing shoes since this poor bugger copped it.”

  So saying, he whipped an old macintosh off the corpse. That, too, looked as though it had been trampled underfoot.