by Lawton, John
‘You made it just in time. Another two minutes and I’d’ve barred the door and called it a day.’
Pieces of eight, thought Troy. ‘Good of you to stay up,’ he said.
Quigley thrust open the door to a vast barn of a room and pointed across the wildly sloping floor to the comfort and welcome of a half-tester bed, already turned down, inviting Troy to a sleep he fervently hoped would be dreamless. He dropped his case and sloughed off his coat, hoping Quigley was not in the mood for chat.
‘Early breakfast, you said?’
‘Seven-thirty, if that’s not too . . .’
‘Fine, fine, Mr Troy. One o’ my girls’ll be serving. Mary, my youngest. You’ll remember her. We’re pretty full tonight. Lots o’ them reporter chappies down from Fleet Street to snap those Russkis tomorrow. Not that any o’ them’ll be up with the lark. I’ve one other early call. Salesman chappie from up north somewhere. So it’ll be no trouble.’
Quigley paused. The obvious had occurred to him.
‘I don’t suppose that’s got anything to do with your own visit, Mr Troy? Russkis an’ all?’
Troy smiled and said nothing. Whatever answer he gave would only be to invite Quigley to natter, and he desperately wanted his bed. Quigley took the hint. Troy heard the floorboards creak all the way back down the corridor. The wind rose suddenly and he felt the room shake and the old oak flex under the strain like a mast in a storm.
Pieces of eight, he thought, and fell gratefully into the half-tester.
In the morning he woke early and stared at the light slanting in through the curtains. It could not be later than six-thirty; he could hardly have slept more than five hours. He closed his eyes again and the dream flooded back in on him, the searing images of Diana Brack: stalking him across a wasteland, gun in hand; curled sleeping in the crook of his arm; stretching, yawning, naked at the foot of his bed. His eyes snapped open. He threw back the sheets, bumped onto the drunken floor, and cursed Johnny Fermanagh once more.
In the dining room a flustered Mary Quigley met him. A dozen tables stood piled with chairs and in the midst of them one had been set for breakfast. A small man in a blue blazer sat with his back to them, his right elbow working vigorously.
‘You won’t mind sharing, will you?’ Mary asked. ‘Only I’m way behind this morning and as there’s just the two of you, it does save setting two tables and running between them like a scalded cat. I’ll be doing enough of that when those randy buggers from Fleet Street stir their stumps. Bottom pinchers the damn lot of ’em.’
Put like that, Troy could hardly say no. Of course he didn’t want to share. Breakfast was the most private meal of the day. Selfish beyond reproach. His father had always risen early to be sure of taking it alone. His mother had always breakfasted in her bedroom. And the children ate with the cook, under strict instruction that they could not talk to their father until after his third cup of coffee and his second newspaper. He couldn’t remember when he last shared breakfast with anyone.
The man in the blazer paused in his porridge to offer a hand to Troy.
‘Cockerell,’ he said. ‘Arnold Cockerell.’
Troy shook the hand, which instantly resumed its porridge-shovelling, and sat down.
‘Troy,’ he said. ‘Frederick Troy.’
‘Gentleman of the press?’ Cockerell queried, through his last mouthful of oats.
Troy had no ready lie. He heard, felt, the clank of cup and saucer, felt the splash of two sugars and the rattle of the spoon as Cockerell stirred his tea in the silence of Troy’s own making. The last thing he’d ever thought he’d need was an alibi. What was he doing in Portsmouth at seven o’clock of a Wednesday morning?
‘No, no,’ he muttered. ‘Just a bit of a break really.’
Pathetic, especially for a man whose profession necessitated practised skill with lies, but Cockerell seemed satisfied with the answer.
‘All right for some,’ he said, and Troy knew he was off the hook, knew what was coming next. With any luck all he’d have to do would be to nod occasionally through the clichés.
‘I’m in sales myself,’ Cockerell began. ‘Just another working day for me, another early start. Still, it’s the early bird catches the worm.’
Mary appeared at the table, balancing a large wooden tray bearing porridge and a pot of coffee for Troy and, almost beyond belief, a plate of kedgeree for Cockerell. The man’s digestion, Troy thought, must be Edwardian. Who in hell could stomach porridge and kedgeree? For all he knew the man had started with a plate of devilled kidneys and worked his way down the menu.
‘Dad says to give you coffee not tea. On account of how you never drunk the tea last tune you was ’ere,’ said Mary. She plonked the pot in front of Troy and was gone. Troy poured himself a cup and, as the aroma of a good dark roast wafted up, said a silent thank-you that Quigley knew how to make decent coffee. Cockerell had started on his plate of kedgeree. Troy hoped it might shut him up.
‘During the war,’ Cockerell sallied forth with a beginning Troy had long ago come to dread as a preface to whatever rubbish might follow. ‘During the war . . .’
The phrase rattled around in Troy’s brain. It stood for a certain type of man, a particular, though hardly peculiar, breed of Englishman. ‘During the war’—a phrase of constant anticipation, heralding hours of harmless fun, yard upon yard of interminable reminiscence about the way things were.
‘During the war’—Troy looked across the top of his cup at the bearer of this piece of traditional English nonsense, wondering if he were true to type or if, by some God-given miracle, he might just be a variation that he hadn’t encountered in the eleven long years of constant nostalgia since the war in question had ended.
Cockerell was off on some train of his own about the ‘Yanks’ and ‘over here’ and how they always drank coffee and not tea and how he’d never understood how anyone could start the day without a good cup of the leaf. Troy was not listening. He heard Cockerell’s words through gauze and cotton wool, but he saw the man quite clearly for what he was. Ever since the war, the English had rehashed it endlessly. Many of those who survived the bombs and bullets had been destroyed by blue blazers with badges. They could be found across the length and breadth of the nation. Propping up bars in RAF clubs and the British Legion. Yarn spinners and bluffers whose greatest hour had been square-bashing in Inversquaddie or nipple-greasing at RAF Cummerbund, whose lives ever after would be in sozzled thrall to this one moment. Men who had foundered on the rock of a pointless nostalgia for the good old days, which, if viewed objectively, had to be counted amongst mankind’s darkest hours. Troy found them to be hopeless bores.
Cockerell’s badge had no inscription, but from the coils of rope twisted around what might be an anchor, Troy deduced that he had whiled away the apocalypse in the Royal Navy. Clerk in charge of stores, perhaps? Mess waiter? He looked at the weaselly face opposite him. A narrow skull, a pointy jaw and a pencil-thin moustache. A familiar enough face. A face to be seen in a thousand pubs anywhere in the British Isles. One to be avoided like the plague. Troy put him down as a former petty officer, shore-based, whisky drinker, Senior Service smoker, and probably wearer of suede shoes. He was almost tempted to risk a dropped table napkin to confirm the latter point when it dawned on him that Cockerell was looking at him in a manner that indicated he was waiting for Troy to speak. If he’d asked a question, Troy hadn’t heard him.
‘Tell me,’ Troy fudged. ‘What exactly is it that you sell?’
The man beamed. Troy had just pulled the cracker for him. He paused in his kedgeree, wiped a fleck of boiled egg yolk from his bottom lip, rested an elbow on the table, and shone with pride and self-esteem.
‘Modern furniture,’ he said, so softly as to be almost reverential. ‘Tomorrow’s look. The settee of Mrs 1960 in your lounge today.’
Good grief Troy thought. What hath God wrought?
‘We’re a stuffy old country,’ Cockerell was saying. ‘We do so like to cling to the pa
st. Do you know most families in England today have never bought a three-piece suite? Never! We all live with the junk our parents hand down. Most homes you go into are still using furniture bought in 1925 at a tanner a week on the knock. We’re living in the past. Europe’s leaving us standing. I mean, is this what we won the war for?’
Troy had no idea why we had won the war. At the time it had seemed to him a marvellous stroke of good fortune. All the same, he was damn certain it wasn’t won simply to facilitate the purveying of second-rate tat in the dubious name of modernity. He knew what Cockerell meant by ‘modern’—coffee tables on black tapered legs, sticking out at odd angles, and hideous carpets with patterns looking like Jackson Pollock’s rejects. But then, he had never bought an item of furniture in his life. His mother had furnished his house, entirely with odds and sods from her own. He was, he supposed, part of what Cockerell was getting at. What he called antique, Cockerell called second-hand. It cut both ways. During his brother Rod’s last campaign, the General Election of 1955, one old trout in Hertfordshire had buttonholed Troy and informed him of her intention of voting Liberal. She could not vote for Rod—such a nice man, but a Socialist—and she could no longer vote for the Conservative. Why? Troy had asked. He invited us in for tea, the trout had replied, and do you know he had shop-bought furniture! In her book, one closed to such as Cockerell Troy suspected, the only way to acquire furniture was to inherit it.
‘Do you know what England is?’ Cockerell blathered on. ‘The land of the forgotten parlour, the last bastion of the antimacassar.’
Silently, wishing him no encouragement, Troy concurred entirely with Cockerell’s opinion. It summed England up very well.
‘My old dad kept the key to the front parlour on his watch chain. He’d open it once a week for my mother to do the cleaning, and the rest of the week it was locked to keep us kids out. Fifty-one weeks a year this rigmarole went on. We used the blasted room on Boxing Day, and then we shut it up again, with its immaculate suite, scarcely dented by a human backside, its antimacassars and its sea-shell ashtrays, until next Christmas. By the time I inherited, the furniture was hopelessly out of date. About as fashionable as spats, and looking as new as it did the day the horse and cart delivered it in 1908. I’d’ve given it to a museum if I thought they’d have taken it. As it was I took it outside and I put a match to it. Good riddance, say I. We have to keep up with the times, don’t you agree?’
Troy did not agree. He was not at all sure what this much-used phrase meant. Cockerell gobbled more kedgeree—a surprising appetite for a man so thin—and did not seem to expect an answer.
‘I’ve three shops,’ he went on. ‘In the North and Midlands. One in Derby, one in Alfreton and my HQ in Belper.’
The precision of ‘North and Midlands’ struck Troy as oddly mechanical, somehow devoid of humanity. A place in which no one could really live. The stilted language of a contestant in the regional finals of a ballroom dancing competition. Troy knew Derby. He had spent the best part of a week there hunting down a poisoner in 1951. The other two were merely names, although for some reason Belper sounded vaguely familiar to him.
‘I import and export. The Contemporary look. Mainly Scandinavia, you know. That’s where the best of the new comes from nowadays. But I buy anywhere and I sell everywhere. All over Europe.’
Cockerell finished the last of his kedgeree, pressing his fork down on the last few grains of boiled rice. As if by magic, Mary appeared with the toast. One small silver rack for Troy, and one small silver rack for Cockerell. The difference was that Troy’s toast was a uniform golden brown, while Cockerell’s was white on one side and black on the other. Troy would be damned before he’d trade so much as a slice with this living monument to British boredom. Cockerell scarcely seemed to notice. He scraped away sturdily with his knife at a rock hard slab of refrigerated butter and prattled on. Had Troy considered the attractions of wall-to-wall carpeting? The phrase meant nothing to Troy. Cockerell explained and even drew the swirls and curves of his own favourite design on the back of an envelope for him.
‘There,’ he said proudly. ‘Skaters. It’s all the rage. At least it will be. I’ve thirty rolls in the Belper shop.’
‘Tell me,’ Troy asked, finishing his toast and knowing he could duck out of any consequences. ‘What brings you to Portsmouth? Wall-to-wall ward room? Scandinavian-design barnacles?’
Cockerell was more than momentarily flummoxed. Troy had said so little, perhaps, that any question, however sarcastic, might stun him to silence. But it seemed more than that. He reddened a little, looked down at his toast and marmalade, and then, shrugging, looked back at Troy, a faint smile on his thin lips, a lost look in his pale blue eyes.
‘Oh, you know, bit of this, bit of that . . .’
It was a lie. As limp as Troy’s own. But if a voluble bore finally resorted to a lie that dribbled down into silence, Troy would at least be grateful for the silence. What matter if the man was away from home, having, as English euphemism so tartly put it, his bit on the side?
True to Troy’s definition of type, he pulled the glass ashtray towards him, pushed away his plate and took a packet of Senior Service from his pocket. The man positively reeked Rotary Club. Troy wondered once more about the suede shoes.
§7
Troy was late. He had dawdled. He checked his watch. It was a quarter to ten. A clear, crisp spring morning. The kind of April Troy thought presaged a good summer. The guard at Her Majesty’s Dockyard Portsmouth—a place known throughout what remained of the Empire as Pompey—looked at Troy’s warrant card and scanned a list of names.
‘You’re not the last,’ he said. ‘Not quite. I’ve yet to see hide nor hair of Inspector Cobb.’ He turned, arm outstretched. ‘Second hut on your left.’
Troy followed where he pointed. He thrust open the door of a wooden hut, and found himself facing a loose squad of five bleary policemen. Four of them sat at a table, one of them slumped forwards on his arms quite obviously fast asleep. Troy thought he recognised some of them. A young man, no more than twenty-five, got to his feet.
‘Chief Inspector. I’m Huw Beynon. Detective Sergeant with the Branch,’ he said.
Troy knew the face. He’d seen him in the corridors at the Yard. Too young to be a sergeant, far too young to be with those bastards at the Branch. Beynon introduced him to Sergeants Beck and Molloy, also of the Branch, and one of them saw fit to nudge Detective Sergeant Milligan, drafted in for the occasion from J Division, into something resembling wakefulness in the presence of a Detective Chief Inspector. He looked up at Troy, muttered a greeting. A greyish fuzz coated his chin. He hadn’t shaved. If Troy knew Cobb, the man was in for a good dressing down. It wasn’t his responsibility, and Troy felt vaguely pleased to be free from it.
The fifth man hogged the stove. A short, fat, miserable-looking man, and a poor-looking specimen for a copper. Oblivious to all around him, he buried himself in the pages of a large, hardbacked book. Troy approached, tipped the book forward to see the title. Lolita—of which he had never heard—by one Vladimir Nabokov—of whom he’d never heard either. The man adjusted his glasses and his focus, and stared for a moment at Troy.
‘Lance Bombardier Clark?’ Troy said.
‘It’s Detective Constable Clark now, sir. And I don’t suppose you’re an Inspector any more, are you, sir?’
‘Chief Inspector. Are you with the Branch?’
‘Lord no, sir. Warwickshire Constabulary. I got roped in for me languages. I’ve Russian as well as German. Truth to tell, all the time I spent in Berlin I’d have to have been deaf not to come away fluent in Russian.’
Troy had not set eyes on Clark since Christmas Day of 1948 in a snow-bound Berlin, to which the late Josef Stalin had laid siege. Clark, Lance Bombardier, Artillery, had been assigned by the British Army as his translator. Which reminded him that he had last seen Tosca only minutes after the last time he saw Clark. Troy pulled up a chair close to Clark. The policemen had been up since four
or five in the morning. They were all drowsy and bedraggled. A private conversation was unlikely to offend.
‘How did they get you?’ he asked simply.
‘Quite straightforward, sir,’ Clark replied. ‘I’d done fifteen years by 1952. I’d made Warrant Officer Class II. I knew I wasn’t what you’d call officer material. Personally, I don’t think I was even Warrant Officer Class I material. It was time to ask for me civvy suit. About that time the force started recruiting in a big way. There’d been that big purge of bent coppers, you’ll recall. They sent a couple of blokes to the base I was on to blow their own trumpet. They told me I was just what the force needed. Languages an’ all. The new breed of educated copper. Brains instead of boots. Fine, I thought. I volunteered. I spent the next three years pounding a beat back in bloody Birmingham. The only foreign language I got to use was if we got villains in from Wolverhampton. About a year ago I got out of uniform. Things’ve looked up a bit since then. This came out of the blue. A right treat. Couldn’t believe me luck.’
‘Nor I.’
Troy dearly wanted to ask Clark about Larissa Tosca. But there was a risk. What had Clark thought she was? That last night in Berlin, he had watched her back into the mess at RAF Gatow, dusting the snowflakes from her WAC’s uniform and almost collide with Clark, on his way out. Did he ever learn that the uniform was utter deception? A relic of the war that she was no more entitled to wear than Troy himself? Did he ever realise which side she was on?
‘When did you leave Berlin?’ he ventured.
‘Oh, I was there till the end. I saw it all. Mind you, nothing was the same after 1949. Once the Soviets eased up on us it was dull as ditchwater. Life without a few little fiddles wasn’t worth living. They all said it. The army, the spivs, the spies. It was yesterday’s rice pudding.’
Much as Troy wanted news, the ambiguities of ignorance appealed. Supposing Clark knew everything? He had surely seen her sit down with Troy that night? Supposing she had been exposed or purged in one of those countless show trials rigged up by Beria under Stalin’s regime? Did he want to know, and if he wanted to know, did he want to know the worst?