Blue Rondo (aka Flesh Wounds)

by Lawton, John

  ‘You didn’t think I could do this, did you?’ Sasha whispered to Troy.

  ‘It’s not a matter of think,’ he whispered back. ‘I didn’t know you could do it. Is there a knack, some secret you’d care to share with me, or are you going to make it into another of your little conspiracies?’

  ‘No,’ she said, at a normal volume, head swivelling just to be certain they could all hear. ‘No knack. Just the orthodox technique, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Churchill? And I do not conspire. I imagine.’

  ‘And what,’ Churchill asked, walking into the trap Troy had sidestepped, ‘do you imagine?’

  ‘I imagine,’ she said, sighting up another, ‘that all these wretched clays. . .’ another bit the dust mid-sentence ‘. . . that all these wretched clays are my wretched husband. And as a result . . . one never misses.’

  Troy heard the Big Man chuckle, saw Churchill raise his eyes to heaven much as he did when Kolankiewicz swore.

  ‘And,’ Troy whispered, ‘what do you think your wretched husband was doing while you were rogering Jack last night?’

  ‘Don’t know. Don’t bloody well care! Pull!’ Sasha blasted off again, then beckoned Troy in closer.

  ‘Young Jack was deevy. Simply deevy. Why didn’t you tip me the wink before? Keeping him all to yourself.’

  Troy said nothing.

  Over the next week Churchill took Troy from inners to bullseyes with half a dozen different handguns. The Walther, the Browning, the Mauser. His own progress astounded him. He began to wonder if he might learn to sing as well – another art at which he had long considered he had no talent whatsoever. The sewing-machine, the sewing-machine.

  And his sister Sasha took him to the point where he was hitting forty-nine clays out of fifty. She struck him as a surprisingly good tutor. It put him in mind of a day long ago, lost in his adolescence. The first occasion on which black tie had meant just that. Standing in front of a mirror swearing at a recalcitrant bow-tie. It was pointless asking his dad. His dad would not give a damn about such things. Ties were part of the rules, and whilst the old man knew perfectly well how to tie a bow, he saw no reason whatsoever to initiate his son into rules when rules were made for other people, not for his son and certainly not for him. In the absence of big brother Rod, it had fallen to the sisters to intervene. He was twelve and still shorter than them. They took it in turns to stand behind him and guide his hands in theirs, weaving around his throat like the wings of birds, cool and light. For years they had thought him so young as to be hardly worth notice; they had dressed and undressed in front of him without a shred of selfconsciousness. This was the first time they had ‘dressed’ him. He recalled with neither guilt nor embarrassment, just the sharp backward stab of memory so vivid as to be tangible, the involuntary erection he had had as Sasha – or was it Masha? – had pressed her hips into him to reach the closer.

  Early in the new year Churchill said, ‘I must get back to town. Can I suggest you come with me? I’ve a couple of customers to see, but once work’s out of the way there’s one last gun I’d like you to try.’

  Just when Troy thought he’d tried them all. But, then, the first time he’d met Churchill he’d interrupted him in the act of stripping down a Bren gun. And they hadn’t tried that.

  ‘It’s not your Bren, is it? I’ve really no need of a working knowledge of a Bren gun.’

  ‘No. It’s not. It’s the kind of weapon I couldn’t bring here. In fact it’s the kind of weapon I wouldn’t let out of the house. If I thought you needed lessons on a Bren I’d’ve stuck it in the dickey and brought it down. No, you come up to London. It’s something you need to try.’

  7

  January 1945

  ‘Again’ had paid off. An afternoon’s practice with a sawn-off shotgun had paid off. Down in the cellar that ran from his shop out under the arches of Orange Street Churchill pronounced himself well pleased with Troy’s marksmanship.

  ‘You may not be Buffalo Bill but, if I say so myself, I’m a good teacher and you’ve proved a good pupil. I’d enter you for Bisley if I knew the war would be over by next year, and I thought for a moment you’d do it.’

  The end of the cellar was now a mess of straw and sawdust – Troy’s cardboard assailants lay in shreds. He laid the shotgun back on the workbench between the Colt .45 and the Smith & Wesson Magnum. His sense of distaste did not pass readily.

  ‘You’re being very kind about all this, Bob, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the time you’ve put in. But I don’t think I’ll ever have an affinity for guns. I’m a firm believer in an unarmed police force . . . and for the life of me I cannot conceive of the circumstances in which I’d have to use a weapon like this.’

  ‘Nor can I. I’m a believer in an unarmed force myself. I’d hate to see London become New York or Chicago. But that’s hardly the point, is it? The point is, as you so inadvertently and appropriately put it, “the life of you”. If we’re dealing only in known quantities, as it were, I’d’ve brought you up to scratch on the standard-issue handguns and left it at that. You’d be au fait with the Webley and not much else. The point is what a villain comes at you with, and what he can do to you if you don’t react properly. It’s not what you do when you fire this at one of the buggers. It’s what they do to you. And if Kolankiewicz’s thesis of the moral decay we can expect in post-war life is to be believed, God knows what that will be.’

  ‘I’ll try to bear that in mind,’ said Troy, forgetting already.

  2

  Blue Rondo

  8

  London, early summer 1959

  Onions stuck his head round the office door.

  ‘Champagne in my office. Ten minutes. OK?’

  Troy sat behind his desk still scribbling notes to himself.

  Wildeve was staring out of the window, watching the first hint of summer dance on the Thames in a sparkle of white light. ‘It’ll be Asti Spumante,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Was last time.’

  ‘Don’t knock it,’ Troy said. ‘He tries. And if he can’t celebrate a thief-taking as rich as this one then things have come to a pretty pass. Serious Crime have been after Alf Marx for about as long as I can remember. If I were Stan I’d pop the cork on a few bubbles myself.’

  Ten minutes later they found their way to Onions’ outer office, crowded with coppers. John Brocklehurst, Chief Superintendent of the Serious Crime Squad, was on the receiving end of handshakes and backslaps. Madge, Onions’s secretary, was spilling fake champagne over the carpet and getting very little in the glasses. Wildeve relieved her of the task and popped corks with the ease born of years of practice. Onions’s inner door opened a fraction. Troy saw a large blue eye peer out at him, and a hand beckoned.

  Inside, Onions was struggling with his uniform. ‘I can’t do these bloody buttons up.’

  ‘Then don’t.’

  ‘Can’t host a do like this wi’out a uniform. Don’t be daft.’

  Onions, like Troy, hated uniforms. After thirty-five years in plain clothes the assumption of office as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had the occasional wearing of a uniform as one of its many drawbacks. In the unlikely event of the job ever being offered to Troy he’d decided to say no.

  ‘Must have put on a few pounds since last time. Do I look fat?’

  Troy had no idea how to answer this. Instead he gripped Onions’s tunic with both hands and forced the blue serge over the silver buttons. Onions exhaled. The fabric stretched across his belly tight as a snare drum.

  ‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Grand. Are they all out there?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Troy.

  ‘And John?’

  ‘A bit red in the face. You know Brock, doesn’t take centre stage easily.’

  “Appen if he did he’d be wearing this fancy get-up, not me. Right. How do I look?’

  ‘Fine,’ Troy lied. ‘Fine.’

  He watched Onions step into the throng, half listened as the top copper in the land congratulated his force on the arres
t and conviction of East London’s ‘Mr Big’, King Alf – Alfred Joseph Marx – stopped listening as Onions praised the jury system, the Twelve Good Men who’d just voted to bang up Alf Marx for fifteen years. Troy rambled into mental arithmetic: Alf Marx would be sixty-seven when he got out, sixty-two if he kept his nose clean, though he was unlikely to do that, and would emerge some time in 1974, a spent force. The world would have moved on, changed around him, while time stood still in whatever maximum-security nick housed him.

  Troy, standing between Wildeve and Swift Eddie Clark, felt Wildeve nudge him. Saw Onions’s eyes upon him. When the blue gaze left them, Wildeve whispered, ‘You were daydreaming.’

  Troy whispered back, ‘I was just thinking. Nature abhors a vacuum.’

  ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

  ‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’

  Champagne soon ran out. Whisky appeared as if from nowhere. Detectives drank whisky – neat, or drowned in half a tumbler of water, it seemed to be the professional drug. Madge went home. Swift Eddie parked himself in a corner with a triple and farted. Troy and Wildeve found themselves the unwelcome recipients of Onions’s pissed bonhomie; the buttons popped on his tunic, one arm around Brock’s shoulders, telling him what he had told Troy an hour before. ‘If you’d played your cards right, it could have been you in this damn monkey suit.’

  Brock answered quietly, ‘But I didn’t want it, Stan. I always say it pays to know your place. My dad was a pork butcher in Nottingham. One step at a time he said. So I make detective chief superintendent. A pretty big step, mind. Who knows where my lads’ll end up?’

  Onions ignored the common sense of what Brock had said and heard only the deference. ‘My old man was a bloody millwright in Rochdale! You sayin’ I shouldn’t have taken the job?’

  ‘I was saying nothing of the sort, Stan. I was saying I shouldn’t have taken it, and I didn’t. I didn’t even get the chance.’

  Onions pondered this. Poured himself another Scotch and failed to see that one statement or the other had to be a lie. Troy knew the truth: men like Brock were never made commissioner. Class alone might not account for it – character had a lot to do with it. And Brock, though ambitious, was not pushy, and, above all, was not the diplomat that Stan was. He’d just demonstrated the limit of his diplomacy in avoiding telling Stan that he should have said no to the job. Men like Stan did not get made Met Commissioner either, but he had. All too often the job went to the Troys and the Wildeves of the world. Men whose birth and education marked them for leadership in a country hidebound by class. Stan was a changeling – brash and Lancashire, magnificent and magisterial, pushy and proud, sly, dissembling, deceitful and manipulative. Everything Troy and Wildeve were, but with a clogs-and-cap accent and a ruthless short-back-and-sides. Jack looked like a naval officer, a minor film star in the mould of Michael Wilding or Stewart Granger. Troy looked like a demonic faun from a Diaghilev ballet. Stan looked like a trade-union leader, more Fred Kite than Ernie Bevin – an excellent candidate for one of the most devious jobs imaginable, but the wrong class to make it work for him. Brock could see the difference, Troy could, and doubtless Wildeve too, but through the bottom of his glass Stan was darkly, if momentarily, blind to it.

  Half an hour later they poured him into a squad car and packed him off to Acton and the tender mercies of his daughter Valerie. Troy watched Swift Eddie and Jack Wildeve, both dwellers south-of-the-river, make their way towards Westminster Bridge. He found himself alone with Brocklehurst.

  ‘One for the road?’ Brock asked.

  Troy had had one token glass of champagne and avoided the whisky. The merest hint of a hangover could put him on the wagon for weeks. ‘I, er . . .’

  ‘For me,’ Brock said. ‘Just for me. You and me, Freddie. There’s no other buggers here. Besides, I want a drink with a man of me own rank.’

  Troy could not say no now. Brock had pulled the old pals’ act on him mercilessly. It meant there were things he had to say. He was probably going to cry into his glass and say things he would never dream of uttering to other ranks.

  They picked up Brock’s Wolseley from the motor pool, and drove almost to Troy’s house, to the Chandos, a small pub on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and William IV Street. If Brock and booze got the better of him, Troy could roll home from here. And it was far enough from the Yard to bank on not meeting other coppers.

  Brock bought himself a beer and a shot, smiled at Troy’s request for ginger-beer shandy, pulled out his fags with nicotined fingers and lit what was probably his fiftieth Senior Service of the day. It seemed to Troy that Brock always walked in a fug of fags, that they coloured his hands, his teeth and quite possibly his personality. There was, he had thought these last few years, something in Brock that had dried up and shrivelled.

  ‘How old are you, Freddie?’

  Silly question, but Troy was the youngest chief super at the Yard and accustomed to accounting for his age. ‘I’ll be forty-four in the summer.’

  ‘I’m fifty-two,’ Brock said. ‘You start to feel it when you get to my age.’

  Silently Troy thought this a preposterous remark.

  ‘I’ve begun to realise. There’s not much time left.’

  Troy said nothing, hoping not to have to tease a single word or phrase out of the man. Brock stared into his pint letting time, of which he now seemed to have so little, tick by.

  ‘So I made me mind up . . .’

  He was looking at Troy, almost as though he was willing him to finish the sentence for him. Troy didn’t.

  ‘I’m putting me papers in. Going. Retiring. Out to grass. Finito.’

  ‘Is that what you want?’ Even to Troy it sounded pathetic.

  ‘I’ve had enough, Freddie. I’ve had enough. Enough is enough. And … I always wanted to get out while I was ahead of the game, winning. There’ll be no bigger win than today. I’ll put in me papers. Pick up me pension and me gold watch. Be out by the end of next month. Sell the house in Islington. Travel a bit. Who knows? Might even meet the right woman. Get married again. You never know.’

  Brock, like Onions, was a widower. Jack had never married, a practised womaniser. Troy had married one summer, three years ago. By the autumn she had left him. He had not seen her for months now. He had to bend to see Brock’s point of view. Men there were for whom home was not home without an aproned body bustling around a kitchen telling you whatever time you came in that you were late and your dinner was on the table. Men there were who could not sleep without a stout body denting the mattress next to them. Coppers’ wives were an odd breed, as odd as the men themselves. Troy had never wanted one. It was probably all that men like Stan and Brock craved. Afterwards, dust gone to dust, their lives were hollow spaces vainly filled by an inflated notion of ‘the job’. And if Brock was through with that. . .

  He was not responding. Brock was nudging. ‘And you, Fred? How long do you think you’ll give it?’

  For a second Troy had no idea what he meant. ‘Give it? You mean when will I retire? I’m forty-three – I thought I just said that. I’ve never even thought about retirement.’

  ‘Next year there’s got to be an election. Mebbe this year – there’s still time. Labour are a dead cert to win, a shoe-in, and you’ll find yourself running the Murder Squad with your own brother as Home Secretary. Do you really want that? Do you think the brass’ll find that acceptable?’

  Troy had scarcely given the matter a deal of thought. His elder brother Rod had been an MP since the Labour landslide of 1945 – the khaki vote. He had served as a junior minister at the Air Ministry towards the fag end of the government and held on to his seat in what now seemed like interminable years of opposition. The Conservative Party had won the last two elections, survived the enforced retirement of Churchill, the madness of Eden, and now seemed to be riding out the stop-go chaos of an old romantic named Macmillan. The prospect of Rod becoming Home Secretary had been dangled before him for three years. It was ab
ove and beneath contemplation. Not worth the time it took to work up a worry.

  ‘I’m sure if the brass find it impossible they’ll let me know.’

  ‘They can hardly be expected to tolerate a direct line from a chief super to the Home Secretary, now, can they? It’s like a short-circuit.’

  ‘“They”, as you put it, is Stan. Stan has known Rod since before the war. I hardly think he’ll feel undue access is being granted to me or undue political pressure put on him with me as the conduit.’

  ‘You’re playing the innocent, Freddie. You know as well as me it’s a pig’s ear of a situation. A right pickle.’

  ‘Then I’ll tackle the pickle when I come to it.’

  Brock grinned, sniggered, and then laughed out loud. Troy was pleased. He could not have tolerated the conversation proceeding pofaced in this direction much longer. Yet to call time on a man who’d just celebrated his greatest triumph, just announced his abdication, seemed inexcusable. He was stuck with Brock until Brock called time and rolled home.

  ‘How are your spuds this year?’ he tacked away unsubtly.

  They had this in common – all three of them, Brock, Troy and Stan: they passed their free time gardening. Troy in the ancient kitchen garden of his country house in Hertfordshire; Stan on an allotment in Acton; and Brock on a strip of reclaimed bombsite in Islington. He was forever digging out broken brick.

  ‘Oh, not a bad year at all. Lovely crop of King Edwards on the way. As tall as an elephant’s eye. And you?’

  ‘A touch of wireworm last year,’ said Troy. ‘If I beat it this year I’ll be delighted. Plants look healthy enough.’

  ‘Not a problem you get on a mix of brick and subsoil, but you know what to do, don’t you?’