by John Lawton
He could see 1944 so clearly. That bitter winter’s day out on the bombsite when he had recruited the kids of Stepney Green into an ad hoc and, as Bonham had insisted, highly immoral posse – a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, an array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs, outsize jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding-basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps – eight willing heroes, who saw themselves as Tex Ritter or Gene Autry, galloping to his rescue. All they asked was to be bribed and he had bribed them. He’d never forgotten Shrimp, who had bargained with him over possession of the cartridge case, or Tub, who had found the body in the first place . . . or Carrots, who had juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, and he could remember names like Spud and Plonk and Plug, but until today, if he rolled his mental projector down that row of children, half of the faces would have eluded memory. Now he could see them all – for the first time in fifteen years he could see the two boys who’d stood sixth and seventh, next to the carrot-headed boy with the cocoa tin, a bit bigger than the others, two smirking, nudging twins, who’d seemed throughout to be sharing a private joke, slapping each other, and always on the verge of giggling themselves silly. Robertson had seemed the hard one – withholding information until the last minute, talking to Troy only in private and demanding an outrageous half-crown for what he had to say. The twins had seemed for all the world to be no more than a couple of scallywags who’d seized any excuse for a day off school. Neither of them had even spoken to Troy.
But in his mind’s eye – which he knew to be an unreliable organ – Troy could not make the transition from the Ryans of 1944 to the Ryans of 1959, from boys to men, any more than when he’d seen the Ryans at the Empress he had been able to imagine them as kids, from scallywags to murderous thugs, from living to dead.
The dead were never less than grotesque to Troy. It never failed to take him by surprise how immediately the human body lost all resemblance to a living thing once the life had been extinguished. No dead shape ever looked to him like anything that could have lived. The colourless wet corpse that had been Diana Brack, the dead weight, the useless lump of flesh that had been Norman Cobb. As they bled out, both the Ryan brothers had looked like giant crabs, an inhuman contortion, hunched over and twisted, like something you’d find on a beach in an adventure novel, like something you’d tap cautiously with the tip of your boot to see if it still moved . . . like something in The Coral Island. But this wasn’t The Coral Island. This wasn’t games with Jack and Ralph. This was . . .
Sergeant Kinney had run up to Troy, panting for breath.
‘Bloody hell,’ was all he could say, and bloody hell it was. Two spreading puddles of blood that joined into a creeping crimson tide, seeping out across the stones and vanishing into the cracks. Bloody hell.
As Kinney’s gasps subsided, Troy became aware of the sound of the river lapping against the stone wall, the creaking arm of a wooden hoist jutting out over the Thames. Then silence. A crystal moment in the light of dawn. The two crabbed bodies in their Savile Row suits, beached upon the cobbles, rockpooled in their own gore.
‘He asked for it,’ Troy had said simply.
‘Been asking for it for fuckin’ years,’ said Kinney, with no grasp of what Troy had really meant. And Troy had realised that no one would. Whatever it was, murder or mercy, he would get away with it.
Only Mary McDiarmuid had guessed the truth. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice.
Troy sank back into the passenger seat of his Bentley. Closed his eyes. They had plenty of time. A slow drive to Westminster and he would have something to say to Stan. Something economic and plausible.
‘Back to the Yard,’ he had said to Mary McDiarmuid. ‘And let’s try sticking to the speed limit, shall we?’
‘Are you OK?’ Mary McDiarmuid had said.
‘OK?’
‘How do you feel, Troy?’
‘Feel?’
He was not happy. Happy was not the word. He might be content. Content might be the word. He felt . . . no, it felt . . . it felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.
Stan would not have understood . . .
The cricket perched upon his shoulder. An image as unbidden as the others. A voice saying softly over and over again, ‘Not like this. You can’t leave us like this. Not like this.’ Troy flicked it off with a fingernail and thumb.
He slept a couple of hours between seven and nine. When he awoke the voice had gone silent. He never heard from it again.
§ 115
Kolankiewicz offered Troy the ‘courtesy’ of a look at his report before it went to the inquiry. Troy read it over. It was brief and to the point. The Ryans had died of gunshot wounds: Patrick of two shots to the chest, although the first had been fatal, in that it had pierced the heart, Lorcan from a single shot to the head. Kolankiewicz recorded that he had retrieved all three bullets from the brick wall of the warehouse, and that they were too damaged for identification – but since no one was contesting that Chief Superintendent Troy had shot both the Ryans, this was scarcely a problem. He also reported on the buckshot he had removed from Troy’s leg, the buckshot the London Hospital had removed from Robertson’s, and the buckshot found in the dockyard wall. There was, he wrote, no trace of any bullet fired by Lorcan Ryan, but without doubt the gun had been fired that night and there were powder residuals on Ryan’s hands.
It was a neat sleight-of-hand, thought Troy. Kolankiewicz had avoided any mention of the bore of the bullets in question, and had dismissed as an unspoken norm the fact that three bullets had passed clean through the victims at such a velocity as to destroy themselves in the wall. Six guns had been collected from the armourer, and six returned. Troy had little doubt that the one that had killed the Ryans now lay gathering dust in some drawer in Kolankiewicz’s office.
The same day Sir Orrin Mitchell, chief constable of Shropshire, made the journey to London to head the inquiry.
What, Troy thought, this inquiry needed, if truth were its concern, was a man with a mind like a corkscrew. Sir Orrin asked sensible questions, questions without edge or subtlety or deviousness. And Troy answered. He was not wholly sure at first, but by his second interview he was convinced they meant to turn no stones and wanted merely the simplest confirmation of his story.
Troy met Robertson in a corridor at the Yard. The boy walked with a stick. It was as though he and Troy had traded places.
‘I’ll be OK. It was just a flesh wound. They reckon I’ll be back on the job in a few weeks.’
‘Does it hurt?’ Troy asked.
‘Not much. I reckon answering questions’ll hurt more.’
‘Just tell the truth,’ Troy lied.
And when Sir Orrin Mitchell whitewashed Troy to the nation’s press, he spoke of ‘a long-serving officer’ and ‘the line of duty’ – and of a medal for the boy.
§ 116
They had Jack in the London Hospital in Whitechapel. In the same private ward Troy had been in when Diana Brack had shot him in 1944. He’d been there when the first doodlebugs had fallen. Just to see the room again triggered the memory. The window blowing in, a hundred thousand glass snowflakes showering down across the bed.
Jack was going to recover quickly. He would not go through what Troy had gone through. The first time Troy went to see him he was sitting up in bed eating heartily, surrounded by books and newspapers. The second time he was flirting with a pretty young nurse and had managed to persuade her to part with her home telephone number. The third time he told Troy he would be discharged the following day – all things permitting.
And then he said, ‘When did you decide to kill them?’
It occurred to Troy to say nothing, but Jack deserved an answer.
‘Dogshit,’ Troy whispered, ‘coppers, dogshit, coppers.’
‘As long ago as that, eh? And when did you decide Mott Kettle was expendable?’
Now Troy said nothing.
§ 117
Troy got home from the hospit
al to find Kitty installed in his house. Her shoes had been kicked off by the door, her handbag dumped in the middle of the floor, an empty glass stood next to an open bottle of vodka on a side table, and the Erroll Garner record she’d bought him pounded out its concert to no one. He looked up the stairs. A low light on in his bedroom. He went back to the sitting room and turned off the gramophone.
‘I was listening to that!’
He’d thought very little about Kitty since her last phone call, and when he had thought about her it had been to wonder if he’d ever see her again. Not in the literal sense of see, but whether they would ever pick up the haphazard relationship where they’d left it. He tried to remember the last time they’d slept together. Had it been the day he’d come clean with her in the Café Royal – sent her storming out and storming back? Was it as long ago as that? Had she spent the last few weeks exclusively with Danny Ryan? Or was Angus still a minor player in her game? Had the trip to Scotland been a mere coincidence? Or . . . why ask? The permutations of possible players in Kitty’s game could be little short of infinite.
He went upstairs. She was reading by the light of the bedside lamp.
‘What?’ he asked, with curiosity born of habit.
She held up a slender paperback, Death Likes It Hot by one Edgar Box. A pseudonym if ever he saw one. How did writers make up these things?
‘Much more me than anything else you’ve got. Can’t be arsed with all those gloomy Russians – all those -ikovs and -bogovs.’
It was just as well death liked it hot. It was a stinker of a night. Kitty had the windows wide open, and lay with a single sheet tucked under her arms.
Troy sat on the edge of the bed, wondering what she wanted, wondering more what he wanted. He kicked off his shoes, threw his socks into a corner and bought himself time to think with five minutes in the bathroom, but thinking did not come easily. He looked at himself in the mirror, toothbrush sticking out of the corner of his mouth, a dribble of minty toothpaste rolling down his chin, and thought of nothing. He was tired. The strain of the last few days was finally catching up with him. Deceit could be so wearing.
Kitty had put down the book, splayed across the bed.
She peeled back the sheet, first one breast and then the other. A daring gesture in a woman half her age. A daring glint in the green eyes, daring him. She wanted to fuck him. He, he concluded via a process of inertia, wanted to fuck her. Inevitably, then, they would fuck. He wanted the fuck, he wanted the sweat of sex on a muggy night, he wanted to see her pluck her damp hair from his eyes, to feel the release of flooding semen spattering the two of them and sticking them together with unholy glue.
Kitty peeled the sheet back to her thighs and kicked it away. Troy shed his clothes in silence and plunged into the oblivion that was Kitty Stilton.
Many men needed a post-coital cigarette – Troy needed food. He got up and slipped on his trousers.
‘Where are you going?’
‘Feeling a bit peckish. Going down to the kitchen.’
‘Why put your pants on?’ Kitty flung off the sheet. ‘I can’t sleep. Do you have anything like aspirin?’
‘If I do it’ll be in the kitchen. I’ll bring it up.’
Troy found no aspirin and called up. Then he heard the bump of Kitty’s feet on the floor, and the sound of her padding downstairs barefoot. ‘Bound to be some in my handbag.’
‘It’s where you left it – in the middle of the floor.’
Troy sliced bread and put together a Cheddar and piccalilli sandwich, the mustard yellow goo almost luminous in the low light.
‘Kitty?’
He had heard no feet ascending, no expletives as she turfed out the contents of her bag.
‘Kitty?’
‘Troy – you’d better come in here.’
Troy stepped into the living room. He could just make out Kitty, stock still by the fireplace, naked and bedraggled.
‘Troy . . .’
Danny Ryan stepped out of the darkness of the opposite wall, into a narrow shaft of light from the kitchen. He was clutching an old Second World War German Luger and pointing it at Kitty. Kitty had neither raised her hands nor attempted to cover herself.
‘Troy . . .’ she said again, faint as a whisper.
Troy stepped between Kitty and Danny.
Danny was shaking, the barrel of the gun waving like barley in a summer breeze, his finger unsteady on the trigger. He was in one of his neat black suits – it looked as though he’d slept in it, but the man himself didn’t look as though he’d slept in days. There was a grey stubble on his chin, and a red-eyed tint of madness.
‘You shouldn’t oughta done it, Troy.’
‘Put the gun down and go home, Danny.’
‘They was kids. Not much more than kids. You slaughtered them like they was pigs.’
‘They were pigs.’
Behind him Kitty said, ‘For Christ’s sake, Troy.’
Ryan was close to screaming: ‘They was kids! Fucked-up kids with no mum and no dad! I gotta do this. You gotta pay.’
‘For the last time, Danny, give me the gun and piss off home before it’s too late.’
‘Troy – please . . . For Christ’s sake, he’s going to shoot you!’
‘No, he’s not.’
‘I gotta do this. It’s family. Family. There’s got to be blood.’
Danny held the gun at arm’s length, as steady as he could, and aimed it straight at Troy’s head. He stepped forward, far too close, far too squeamish, closed his eyes as his finger tightened on the trigger – and Troy snatched the gun from his hand. He flipped out the magazine, threw it one way, threw the gun the other, and decked Danny with a left hook to the jaw. For a big man and an ex-boxer he went down with remarkable ease, crashing to his knees in front of the chaise longue.
Troy turned to check on Kitty. She was quiet, goose-pimply, the merest shiver flickering across her torso, gazing past Troy to look at Danny, the green eyes as wide as saucers. Troy knelt down in front of Danny. ‘Danny. They were pigs. Neither of them were worth your life or mine. Do you hear me? Pigs.’
‘My kid brothers,’ Danny said softly.
‘Pigs, Danny. Pigs. I’ve saved you from spending the rest of your life looking out for those two, explaining them, apologising for them, covering up for them and in the end disowning them. If family and blood really mean anything to you, then hold them in your head as they were just before you joined the army in 1940 or when you got out in ’46 – and forget everything since.’
Danny took his eyes off the carpet and looked up at Troy. ‘Like they was toddlers, like they was eight yearsold?’
The image of a cherubic child, eight years old, reckless beauty, a hand-tinted photograph flashed into Troy’s mind. ‘Exactly,’ he lied.
‘But . . . brothers . . . brothers . . . blood.’
‘Brothers . . . blood . . . bollocks. You want blood, have some.’ Danny was bleeding from the lip where Troy had hit him. Troy reached out, smudged the lip with his thumb and held it up to him. ‘You want blood, you got blood. But it’s all you’re getting.’
He wiped the blood off on Danny’s lapel and Danny wept.
Troy had never seen a man weep like this before, but it had been a year of weeping. So many had crouched on the floor in his sitting room in just this position and wept – invariably for themselves. Masha, Foxx, and now Danny. Even Kitty had wept once, had wiped a tear from her eye when first mentioning her mother’s death. But she had not wept since and she wasn’t weeping now. She was still staring at Danny, but with what Troy took to be pity rather than her usual scorn. They’d been lovers. All summer long they had been lovers, and she stared and did not move. No arms to hold him, not even a healing hand to touch his and let him know he was not alone in the world. She stared and she stared, and did not move until Troy picked up the phone.
‘Troy no! You can’t! For God’s sake, don’t turn him in. He’s harmless, can’t you see that?’
Troy said, ‘Co
uld I have a cab to the corner of Goodwin’s Court and St Martin’s Lane? About five minutes? Fine. Where to?’
He turned to Kitty, ‘Where does he live?’
‘Narrow Street. He lives in Narrow Street.’
Troy rattled off the address and put the phone down. ‘Help me get him up.’
Kitty and Troy each took an arm. Danny felt like the world’s largest rag doll, a Looby Loo of grief and inertia. He seemed not even to notice when Troy dragged one arm across his shoulder and hefted him out into the street. Danny’s legs kicked in. He walked with Troy almost tucked under one armpit steering him towards the end of the alley. At the first corner, where Goodwin’s Court dog-legged round the steps of the last house, Danny swung round to look back at Kitty standing on Troy’s doorstep, naked, blank and baffled in the golden light of a streetlamp. Troy saw his lips trying to form words, the slight pout and wide spread of a hard consonant that would not come. Then Troy swung him back and out into the street.
It was less than a minute before a cab pulled up at the kerb.
‘What?’ said Danny.
‘You’re going home.’
‘Home?’
‘Home.’
‘But I tried to kill you.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
Troy tipped him into the back seat, sprawled across the leather with his strings cut. The cabman looked at Danny, looked at Troy – naked from the waist up, barefoot – and leaned across to the window.
‘Not pissed is ’e, guv’ner?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘See he gets into the house safely. OK?’
Troy found a fiver in his trousers pocket and pressed it into the man’s hand.
‘Say no more,’ said the cabbie.
And Troy sincerely hoped that no one would.
