by John Lawton
‘I did as you asked,’ Milligan said. ‘Mrs Devanney came clean. Young Niall got his marching orders from his dad. She tried to get between them and the old man thumped both of them for her trouble. She wept buckets this morning. She has a bit of difficulty accepting that her son’s queer, but she’s a realist – she isn’t denying what her senses told her. Accepting that he’s dead . . . that’s another matter. She can’t quite take that in. But – and it’s a huge but – she wants to know for sure. In fact, she wants to see the body.’
‘Oh, God. Did you tell her the state it was in?’
‘I did. And she wept yet more buckets. But she’s a tough old stick. Insists she has to see for herself. I agreed to drive her to the station tomorrow. She should be at Euston around quarter past two. If you don’t mind me suggesting, I think you should have a WPC there with you. I don’t know what her reaction will be when she sees the corpse.’
‘Point taken. If it was a simple matter like a corpse I would still be concerned, but this is like a pack of human joints. I don’t see how her seeing them can do any good.’
‘Ask yourself this, Freddie, would your mum know you from an arm or a buttock? Can a mother somehow see the body she wiped and washed for ten years in the grown man or even the remains of the grown man?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Troy. ‘I honestly don’t know.’
§ 95
As Troy was leaving his office, Mary McDiarmuid parked out front with the engine running, Eddie called him back with the single word ‘Stepney.’
Troy picked up the phone, glancing at his watch as he did so. Five to two. ‘Ray, this has got to be quick.’
‘It is. Mazzer just reported in. He lost Mott. Nearly forty-eight hours of traipsing after him and he lost him.’
‘Where?’
‘On the Underground. Mott led him a dance and lost him in the change at Bank station around ten o’clock this morning. Mazzer went back to Mott’s digs in Vallance Road, gave it a couple of hours and reported in.’
‘Where is Mazzer now?’
‘At home in Stratford. He’d been up two nights in a row.’
‘Fine. Let’s leave him there for the time being.’
‘And Mott?’
‘Mott is creating his own fate.’
‘Eh?’
Troy rang off and dashed for the car.
He had been wondering how he’d know Mrs Devanney. Godbehere’s description of a ‘woman hammered by life and husband’ didn’t seem much to go on. But being late helped. The crowd was off the train and most of it had vanished into buses, tubes and taxis. She stood out on the concourse looking exactly as Godbehere had said, ‘hammered’. Paddy had called her old – ‘a tough old stick’. She was, in all probability, no older than Troy himself, but she looked sixty. Grey hair, a short dumpy body, varicose of leg, her best floral print summer frock, the sort that, in its leafy browns, always struck Troy as looking more like wallpaper than cloth, the fawn macintosh that the English never quite had the confidence to abandon even in summer draped across one arm, an over-large black handbag on the other, flat sensible shoes and the merest touch of make-up – no eye-shadow or mascara, but foundation and lipstick, applied with the skill of someone who hardly ever wore make-up but whose sense of occasion would not let a day like this pass off as the quotidian. How did one dress to identify a dead son? Like churchgoing on a summer Sunday?
‘Mrs Devanney, I’m Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard. This is WPC McDiarmuid.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ she said, flat and low and in control.
Troy sincerely hoped she would stay that way. ‘It’s a short drive to the Yard,’ Troy said. ‘I was wondering, would you care to have lunch first?’
‘I’d just like . . . I’d just like . . . to see my son.’
They drove to the Yard in silence. Mrs Devanney looked out of the window with the same curious eye Rork had shown – the mark of the first-timer – but none of Rork’s gung-ho enthusiasms. If she wondered what was what she never asked.
Kolankiewicz had limited facilities for the cold storage of body parts, and Troy had suggested that there was both clarity and consideration in taking the parts out of their bags and arranging them into the semblance of a man.
‘What,’ Kolankiewicz had asked, ‘is a man without head, hands or cock? It’ll still look like something out of Baron Frankenstein’s workshop.’
‘But we’ll do it all the same,’ Troy had replied.
He was pleased to see, as the shelf rolled out from the cold-store, that Kolankiewicz had draped a clean white sheet across the body. It bought them a few seconds of time. If she was having second thoughts, there was one last chance to say no.
‘No. I have to look. D’ye see?’
There was pleading in her eyes. The deference the poor often felt in the face of authority, not knowing what power they had over her and little presumption to say the choices were hers and hers alone.
‘Of course,’ said Troy, and Kolankiewicz pulled the sheet back to the waist, exposing the jagged black line at the neck where the head had been severed, the cuts in the arms, and the stubs at the wrists where the hands should have been.
Mrs Devanney stared, paling but unflinching, looking at the body not at them as she spoke.
‘Could I . . . could I see the . . . the rest please?’
Kolankiewicz rolled the sheet back past the feet.
Mrs Devanney shuffed sideways. ‘Would it be possible to turn over the leg? The left one. Just on to the side.’
Kolankiewicz turned the two pieces of the left leg. It had been severed above the knee, and the skin had been peeled away by the concrete mix from which he had rescued it.
‘You see them little scars, down the left side of his calf? And that one on the kneecap? Fell off his bike when he was eight. That bump on the shin is where the bone knitted. The leg never did recover proper. It was as strong as the right, but try as he might he could never build up the muscle to match it. It always looked that bit the smaller. I told him I couldn’t see it, and if his own mum couldn’t see it no one else would. But I was lying. Trying to make him happy. He never believed me.’
She turned her attention to the left hip. A vivid white scar. ‘Jumped the back fence as soon as his leg was healed, just to show he could. Snagged himself on a nail. Bled like billy-o. Took five stitches.’
Now she looked up at Troy for the first time since Kolankiewicz had rolled back the sheet.
‘Mrs Devanney, are you sure?’
‘His dad said he was accident prone. But truth to tell he was just fearless. I never saw him frightened of anything or anyone. He just didn’t seem to see risks, and he never complained when he took a tumble. It was all in a day’s work for Niall. He was hardly ever without an Elastoplast or a scab. His dad said he wasn’t long for this world. Turned out he was right, didn’t it?’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Am I sure? You don’t have children, do you, Mr Troy?’
None of them had children, but to answer was just a distraction.
‘If you had, you’d know.’
Kolankiewicz pushed back the shelf.
It was time for Eddie’s special brew. In Troy’s outer office Mrs Devanney stood and stared at Eddie’s coffee-making contraption. Eddie made tea. Troy went to his desk and took out the photograph, a grainy ten-by-eight blow-up made from the snapshot Mrs Devanney had given to the police when she’d reported her son missing. A smiling eighteen-year-old with thick black hair and good teeth. He was trying to associate the face with the body parts – a mental exercise to reassure himself that probably wouldn’t work. When he looked up, Mary McDiarmuid was standing in front of him with Mrs Devanney. For a moment all he could hear was the habitual bubbling of Eddie’s coffee machine, the hissing of the kettle and the sound of what seemed to be one long sigh emanating from Mrs Devanney.
‘Boss?’ Mary had Troy’s attention now. ‘Mrs Devanney brought you a photograph.’
Mrs Devanney held
out another snapshot to Troy. He turned over the one he had been holding, hoping she had not seen it and took the one she proffered. It was a hand-coloured print from the 1940s. Handcolouring had had its day and gone the way of polyfoto. It brought a touch of cinema, and had never looked less than synthetic. There was Niall Devanney, aged eight, a scruffy cherub with curly hair and startling blue eyes, grinning at the camera. Technicolor tints allowed for, a child of remarkable beauty, if remarkable recklessness.
Troy looked back to the boy’s mother. She had her son’s eyes; he had had hers. Blue beyond blue, the kind of blue to which only Technicolor did justice, and with a faint Oriental upward slant. It seemed she was about to speak, a flickering in the lower lip. But the tears welled in her almond eyes, and in a swift, sudden turn she flung herself on Mary McDiarmuid and wept into her shoulder.
§ 96
It seemed like an age before Mary McDiarmuid was back from Euston station.
‘The train was late. I could hardly leave her. I took her to a caféin the Hampstead Road. Actually got her to eat something. An Eccles cake and a cup of tea.’
‘Good,’ said Troy, without taking his eyes off the spread of photographs on his desk. Here a torso, there a thigh.
‘She said a lot more. I’m not sure how much of it is of any use. I could’ve taken notes, but it didn’t seem . . .’
‘It wasn’t. You did the right thing. She told you her life story, right?’
‘Right. Do they always do that?’
Troy looked up. ‘Not always, but I’ve known a lot that do. At this point they want the story to mean something.’
‘She was desperate for it to seem to real. To me at least. If she said, “Do you see?” once, she said it a thousand times. She asked me how it had all come to this. I thought better of telling her the truth. I didn’t mention the precise circumstances of Niall’s death – the buggery an a’ that – I just stated what I thought was obvious. He’d fallen in with the wrong crowd. Christ, what an understatement that was. I did start to wonder, is this what it’s like being on the Murder Squad? The problem isn’t the dead, it’s the living.’
‘It gets worse. Can you handle it?’
‘I think so.’
‘Good. Because things are going to get a lot worse before the night is over.’
‘Eh?’
Troy waved the ‘eh?’ aside, much as he’d done with Godbehere. ‘I want to put the file in order. Put it together in terms of the grotesque. Start with feet, work up to the head shots we have of those two boys, and remove anything that’s superfluous. File all the written work separately.’
‘OK. Can I ask why?’
‘It’s time.’
‘Time?’
‘Time to tackle Ted Spoon.’
‘What makes you think he’ll even see you? He’s not the sort to let coppers past the door without prior notice. Give him any notice and he’ll have his brief there, telling him not to answer a damn thing.’
Troy folded open that day’s copy of The Times, and held it out. ‘Read it aloud, Mary.’
‘“President Eisenhower’s visit culminates this evening in a Second World War reunion dinner, given in his honour by Sir Rodyon Troy, the shadow home secretary and a wartime colleague of the President, at his Hertfordshire home Mimram House. Field Marshals Montgomery and Alexander will be among a guest list thought to total more than fifty. Also present will be Marshal of the RAF Lord Tedder, President Eisenhower’s deputy in 1944, Harold Macmillan the Prime Minister, a former political adviser at Allied HQ, Mala Caan VC, and Lord Steele, who, in 1944, led Resistance activity behind enemy lines in Normandy . . .”’
‘Enough. You can stop there.’
‘No, boss. I can’t. It goes on to mention the high level of security at Mimram this evening. US Secret Service, Special Branch and the Hertfordshire Constabulary.’
§ 97
The Hertfordshire Constabulary had closed off the lane leading to Mimram. At the sight of Troy’s Bentley two constables simply hauled the barrier aside and saluted as he passed.
At the gates of Mimram there was a copmotley. Two plain-clothes detectives, the village bobby Constable Frank Trubshawe, two American agents and a man Troy knew and did not much like – Chief Inspector Derek Hurst of the Special Branch. It was all too apparent who was who. The Americans still sported the over-short wartime crew-cut. And in contrast to their British counterparts, they were neat in black suits that looked as though they had been cleaned and pressed. Hurst and his men had Branch written all over them, that shabby, threadbare look of suits with shiny elbows that Troy thought so typical of the brute force and no-imagination brigade.
They all looked at one another. Clearly they had not anticipated another vehicle. Troy stepped out of the car. Trubshawe looked vaguely quizzical, approached Troy and said, ‘Evenin’, sir. We weren’t really expecting you.’ And Troy was almost certain he heard Hurst mutter, ‘Oh, shit.’
‘I’m sure you weren’t, Mr Trubshawe, but if you gentlemen would be so kind as to make way. . .’
One of the Americans pushed past Trubshawe. ‘Just a minute. Are you on the guest list? We have sixty-four guests on the list, and you’re the sixty-fifth person.’
Troy held out his warrant card at arm’s length. The American moved closer, mouthing the words on the card with his lips. As he reached the last syllable of ‘Superintendent’, Troy whipped the card away, turned to Hurst and said, ‘Tell him, Mr Hurst.’
‘Mr Troy is head of the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard,’ said Hurst.
‘So – what are you telling me? That you have a case here? Tonight?’
‘Indeed I do. Now, if you’d just—’
‘Bullshit! The gates are closed. Nobody else gets through. Go back to Scotland Yard and tell ’em Mañana. Or you’ll have a diplomatic incident on your hands.’
‘You have ten seconds,’ said Troy. ‘After that I’ll leave and in forty minutes I’ll be back with forty coppers and you’ll be charged with obstructing the course of justice. Now, that will be a diplomatic incident.’
‘You can come back with Ali Baba and the forty fuckin’ thieves, it ain’t gonna—’
Trubshawe was tugging at the American’s sleeve. He finally got his attention and whispered to him.
‘Whaddya mean, his house? I thought it belonged to that big guy with the odd socks.’
Trubshawe whispered again.
‘Jesus! Why wasn’t I told? I do not believe this. I do not fucking believe this. Does nobody tell me anything?’
The American looked at his colleague and said, ‘OK. OK. Larry, get the radio. Tell Marco two more are comin’ up. Chief Superintendent Troy and. . .?’
‘WPC McDiarmuid.’
The walkie-talkie crackled. Larry turned his back on them, and the two Special Branch officers pushed open the gates.
‘I hope,’ the American said to Troy, ‘that you think this is worth it. Because if you fuck up up there your balls and my ass will be on the same line.’
‘Trust me,’ said Troy.
As they headed up the drive, Mary McDiarmuid said, ‘Boss, tell me. Are you really going to pull Spoon in front of the President and the Prime Minister?’
‘Only if he makes me.’
§ 98
It seemed to Troy that he did not recognise his own home. That he had stepped into the set of a black and white film bearing a tantalising resemblance to L’Année Dernière à Marienbad. People moved slowly about the blue room in evening dress, a tidal surge of shiny lapels and bow-ties. An awkward elegance, set to the soundtrack of a baritone murmur.
Mostly they were men. That made sense: most of Ike’s wartime colleagues had been men. The wives were passed over for an evening, and among the few women Troy thought he knew was a woman he thought might have been a secretary to Churchill during the war – not that he could see Churchill anywhere – and Mala Caan, who had survived interrogation at the hands of the Gestapo and was one of the few ever female recipients of the VC. She wa
s talking to Spoon, but then, if the CIA and The Times were to be believed, they had in common the dangerous past of having worked behind enemy lines in France. Troy was looking for Rod, when Rod found him, grabbed him by one arm and whisked him into a hushed huddle.
‘What exactly do you think you’re playing at? You said you wouldn’t be here. Dammit, Freddie, you’re not even dressed.’
‘That’s because I’m working.’
‘What?’
‘I made you a promise that when I knew what Spoon was up to you’d know. I know now, and I can tell you. It’s just that you won’t want to know.’
‘You can’t arrest him here, for God’s sake.’
‘I’ve no intention of arresting him, but he is going to talk to me. He’s going to look at the evidence.’
They both glanced back into the throng.
‘Sod it, he’s talking to Ike and Mac now. Freddie, I appeal to you – wait. We’ll be going into dinner any minute – wait until after.’
Rod was pinching now, his thumb and fingers sinking into Troy’s arm. Troy took his hand and unpeeled the fingers one by one.
‘Rod. Get it through your head. This isn’t some financial irregularity. This isn’t a bit of clandestine pederasty, although I’d bet money Spoon has engaged in both. This is multiple murder. Young men butchered like mutton and dumped on the streets of London.’
‘Good God! And you think Spoon did that?’
‘No, but he knows the men who did. The same men you and Maurice White argued should be left alone.’
Troy left Rod speechless, and headed for Mala Caan, Harold Macmillan, Lord Spoon and the President of the United States.
Ike was saying, ‘And . . . my successor, whoever he is, may well not be able to avoid another war. Laos is containable. I doubt Vietnam is. It’s not for me to commit troops to Vietnam, but others may not have that choice.’
Macmillan nodded. If Troy was feeling generous he might well have assumed that the air of doing so ‘sagely’ was not contrived, the bloodhound eyes, almost always tinged with sadness, staring off at nothing, past Ike, past everyone else in the room. ‘You don’t say?’ was his less than memorable response.
