by Lawton, John
It was seven o’clock in the morning. A fine summer morning. The sun coursed down the Pentonville Road, over the rooftops of Islington and Clerkenwell to pick out the magnificence of St Pancras’ Midland Hotel in all its grime and glory. London was waking up. Two million kettles sang on hobs. He threw his case in the back of a cab. After coffee and a bath he was quite looking forward to walking to the Yard.
The old Ascot Patent Gas Water Heater perched on its iron bracket above the bath worked well enough if you knew the knack. Begin in the bathroom. A small trickle will emerge from the nozzle. Turn knob fully counterclockwise. Run downstairs, wallop pipe next to sink with heel of shoe, held firmly in left hand. Run upstairs, turn knob half-clockwise, press button to ignite. Go to airing cupboard on landing, wallop pipe at back of cupboard with shoe, held firmly in left hand. Return to bathroom, trickle will now be a lukewarm, modest flow. Disrobe. Lukewarm, modest flow has now become hot, generous flow. Get in bath. Flow cuts out at four inches of hot water in obedience to World War II guidelines.
Troy had no idea why his Ascot had never got over the war. So much of England had not, after all, and it might well be a simple matter of the machine’s sympathies, but after this rigmarole nothing would induce him to answer the telephone. It rang as he settled into the bath, and it rang again five minutes later. He stood his mug of coffee and his slice of toast and marmalade on the soap rack and lay back in the suds. A gentle kick with his foot on the up pipe and the Ascot would yield a second harvest to create something resembling a decent bathful. It just required a little patience. Whoever it was on the phone could go to hell.
He sipped at his first good cup of coffee in weeks, and was strongly reminded of Larissa Tosca, of her utter immodesty which led her to hold court in the bath, of him perched awkwardly on the loo while she sank into foam like a Hollywood starlet in a musical comedy. Bath nights had never been the same since.
The walk to the Yard was pleasant beyond all his anticipation. There were days when he loved London; there were days when it sparkled through the grime, and one could be seduced by the lie that fog and winter were not its natural condition.
He scarcely recognised his office. It was neat and clean and orderly. Someone had emptied the waste paper bin. Someone had cleared that pile of files off the floor and filed them. Someone had unjammed the window to let the breeze in off the river along with the odd toot of the traffic. Someone had taken down years’ old notices from the board. Someone had wound the clock. Someone had replaced the broken chair with one of those swivel things that glamorous secretaries sit on while they hoik up their skirts and take dictation. And the desks. Jack’s desk was almost bare. His own was stacked with papers, but a small, far from glamorous, stout little body was sitting in his chair calmly working his way through them, sorting the urgent from the routine, occasionally annotating, he presumed for his, Troy’s, future benefit. It made no sense. Had they fired him in absentia and replaced him with a real policeman? Was he one of the three bears? Was this the fat version of Goldilocks?
‘Good morning, sir,’ said the stout little body.
Clark. It was Clark. He’d quite forgotten about Clark.
‘I bet you could use a cup of coffee, couldn’t you, sir?’
Before Troy could say that he’d just had a cup and that nothing short of desperation would induce him to drink Scotland Yard coffee, his eye was caught by a contraption on the corner cupboard, next to the gas fire. It seemed to consist of a Bunsen burner, several glass flasks, a yard or two of glass and rubber tubing and a large, round condenser from which a deep brown liquid appeared to be dripping into a beaker.
‘Do you like it, sir? I designed it myself.’
‘Like it? I don’t even know what it is.’
‘It’s a coffee machine, sir.’
Troy looked at the bubbling glass maze. Piranesi could not have bettered the design. He inhaled deeply. It was coffee, and it smelt rather good. Better than the stuff he made himself.
‘Where did you get the apparatus?’ he asked as Clark poured him a cup.
‘From Forensics, sir.’
‘You mean Kolankiewicz parted with half a ton of his clobber to let you make coffee?’
‘Not exactly, sir. I requisitioned it with a chitty.’
‘A chitty?’
‘Yes, sir. I find that if you catch Mr Wildeve when he’s trying to leave, particularly if you already know from his diary that he’s got a date for the evening, he’ll sign almost anything without reading it.’
This was bad news. This was pretty much how Troy got Onions to sign chitties. It was all a matter of knowing when Stan had arranged to play bowls or dig his allotment. It did not bode well. How many scoundrels could fit into a single office?
‘You’re not back to your old fiddles, are you, Eddie?’
‘Well, sir. I paid for the coffee. Besides, if you lived in the Police House you’d make your office as comfortable as you could. A home from home, if you like.’
‘Is that where they put you?’
‘Just till I can find a place of my own, sir. I’ll be a few quid a week better off when I get my first sergeant’s pay packet. I might be able to afford a small flat somewhere, you never know.’
Troy was not sure whether this was a tip of the hat from Clark acknowledging his promotion or another episode in the great British whinge. Promotion meant about thirty shillings a week to Clark, Troy estimated, still leaving him short of five hundred pounds per annum. It might be enough to set him up in a place of his own. It might not. It wasn’t a great sum. Troy himself earned the maximum allowed to a Metropolitan Chief Inspector, less than a travelling salesman, and well short of the social yardstick of one thousand pounds per annum—the enviable ‘thousand a year man’—but then he had never lived off his salary and had never had to. Clark had a point. A single man would not be anyone’s priority in London’s struggle to house its people in the battered buildings the Blitz had left standing.
‘Is there anything I should know about?’ he said, pointing at the pile of paperwork.
‘Half a dozen things you should read. Nothing that can’t wait. Though this might amuse you.’
He handed Troy a copy of the Police Gazette, folded open at the promotions and transfers page.
‘J Division has a new DDI, sir.’
Troy read the short piece announcing ‘the appointment of Detective Sergeant Patrick Milligan as Divisional Detective Inspector, J Division, based at Leman St., London E1, following the death of DDI Horace Jago’. Leman Street had been Troy’s first station twenty years ago.
‘That’s quite a promotion,’ he said. ‘Who would ever have thought he had it in him?’
‘I don’t think Mr Cobb brought out the best in Paddy, sir.’
‘My recollection is that he was asleep half the time, and the other half he was scheming ways to get even with Cobb.’
‘Weren’t we all, sir? Oh, by the way, your brother’s been trying to reach you all morning.’
‘Urgent?’
‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’
Troy called his brother. Next to the phone was a copy of The Times, folded open at its daily crossword. It was nine-thirty in the morning and Clark had already finished it.
‘What’s up?’
‘I’ve a treat for you,’ Rod said. ‘Can you meet me in forty minutes?’
‘I’ve got a fortnight’s leave due to me. I’ll be at Mimram tomorrow morning. Couldn’t it wait till then?’
‘No. It’s special.’
‘Rod—’
‘Just meet me. Won’t take long.’
‘At your office?’
‘No. At the Post. Lawrence is making an announcement.’
In 1945 Rod had called the family together. He could not, he said, take responsibility for the family businesses and be an MP. Whatever the rules said, he could not and would not do it. Did they, he mooted, wish to get out of the business of Fleet Street and sell the lot? No, was the chorus answer. It would be sel
ling everything the old man had put together. To Troy’s surprise his brother-in-law Lawrence, still in uniform himself, stepped into the breach and offered to run the Sunday Post. He had no experience of such work; he had been a barrister when he married Masha, had spent a frustrating war wearing the red flashes of a staff officer, had never in fact seen combat or set foot on foreign soil. He was, he said privately to Troy, itching for a challenge. And he had risen to it. The Post was now the most contentious Sunday paper in the country, and Lawrence the most litigious, cantankerous, campaigning editor. All in all a man pretty much like their father. Rod might be right, it might be worth hearing. It might be another of those occasions like the time when Lawrence accused Attlee of selling out his principles after he had imposed charges on the National Health Service to pay for Britain’s part in the Korean War. Or the time when he had personally signed an editorial calling for Churchill’s resignation on grounds of senility. Subscriptions all over Britain had been cancelled. Ex-colonial colonels and mad majors had written in in droves and patriots bunged half-bricks though his windows. Lawrence had his moments.
§22
The lobby of the Sunday Post was full of grumbling hacks complaining yet again of the absurd vanity of Lawrence calling a press conference. The other newspapers might have sent their trainees and their hasbeens, but they would not ignore Lawrence, and the chance of another row. There was at least an inch or two of column space in reporting the antics of the competition. They cliqued unto themselves, talking shop, but then so did the other faction present.
London was a city of exiles. Here and there, statistical probability implied, there might just be the odd refugee from the fall of the Second Empire. Some nonagenarian brought across the Channel in childhood. The Empress Eugénie herself had lived on in Chislehurst on the southern edge of London into the 1920s. But Russians fleeing their revolution, London had had aplenty in its time and, it seemed, every living London Russian exile Troy had ever met or even heard of, including several he had thought long dead, was there. They were not a pleasant bunch. The last scions of displaced and dying lines, the final bearers of ancient and occasionally bogus titles, the last believers unwilling to recognise the course history had taken, not-so-old men who still thought the storming of the Winter Palace might be undone, that Ekaterinburg might not have happened after all. As a rule, he avoided them.
The USSR was the fine line of the century. Its most heated topic, from the old guard of diehard monarchists to the fellow-travellers of the thirties. Though both were thin on the ground these days, there was still a peculiar species of egghead who could bore for Britain on the subject of the Soviet Union at the drop of a hat. It was the most attacked, the most defended, and the most mythic country on earth, that about which we knew least and talked most. People turned out for Russia.
‘If this lot are meant to be indicative of the tone or content of this hullaballoo,’ Troy said, ‘I’m leaving now. It’s beginning to look like a freak show. I take it Lawrence has dug up some new scandal on the USSR? And the gathering of the clans is meant to celebrate the cocking up of another Five Year Plan or something equally silly?’
‘Bear with me,’ said his brother. ‘There’s more to it than a handful of old fools and clapped-out hacks.’
At the back of the room Troy caught sight of one of the few people he would still listen to on the matter of the Soviet Union. Seated on a foldaway chair, Homburg far back on his head, eyes closed as though snatching a nap mid-morning, was his Uncle Nikolai, Troy’s father’s younger brother. The last of the Troitsky brothers, and the only one to accompany Troy’s father to England. He looked old to Troy, though he could not say with any certainty how old he was.
The old man’s consistent opposition to all Russian regimes, from Nicholas II to Lenin and Stalin, to Khrushchev and Bulganin, had enabled him to keep intact his wartime role as British Intelligence’s man on ships and planes and bombs and rockets, right into the peace, and right past his retirement, despite his obvious Anarchist leanings. He received a ‘clearance’ that was in all probability denied to Troy, a serving copper, and to Rod, a former Government minister and, if the Tories blew the election in 1960, most certainly the next Foreign Secretary. Nikolai had given up his chair in Applied Physics at Imperial College, but hung onto his office and a fellowship, hung onto his advisory role. Nobody knew more about ships and planes and bombs and rockets; his mind was an attic cluttered with the dust of these horrors. A mind that was much like his father’s—Troy’s grandfather’s—tending to dust off the attic at unexpected moments and wheel out something arcane, to interrupt a conversation with a diversionary tack—the wooden horse of physics, the abandoned rag doll of pre-Soviet history. His grandfather would suddenly burst with nostalgia and reminiscence, bringing meals and conversations to a juddering halt. Even Troy’s father, Alexei Rodyonovich, that garrulous piss artist, could be silenced by unanswerable interjections from the elder generation, a Slavic rumble from deep in the enveloping beard and tunic. Nikolai was more focused, arcane it might be, or amusing, or important, or deadly accurate. He had the unsparing knack of putting lives to rights in a sentence or two without even recourse to ‘you know what your trouble is?’ Troy added it silently to many things the old man threw at them, and he was pretty sure Rod did the same.
Troy felt Rod nudge him. Lawrence had appeared in front of the lectern and was waving for silence with a piece of paper, Chamberlain-style.
‘For many weeks now, we have all of us been hearing rumours, emanating from the Soviet Union, concerning a secret speech made at the Twentieth Party Congress by Nikita Khrushchev. Details of this speech have been speculated upon since February, and I think I speak for Fleet Street when I say that it is now widely believed that Khrushchev used this secret session to denounce Stalin. I can tell you now that this is true.’
Somewhere in the ranks of the cognoscenti a raspberry was blown, and a second voice said simply ‘Big deal’. This was hardly news.
‘I can tell you,’ Lawrence went on, ‘because I have obtained a copy of the speech.’
No one sneered. The press ranks exploded with cries of ‘How?’, ‘Where from?’
Lawrence carried on regardless. He had their attention now. They’d all been upstaged and they knew it.
‘From, shall I say, sources overseas.’
Lawrence had a simple code. Russia itself would be ‘unnamed sources’, a contrived British leak would be ‘friendly sources’, and the US was always ‘sources overseas’. So, Lawrence had a nark in the State Department? This should not surprise the hacks. What was surprising was that this should be Khrushchev’s way of leaking the truth. Who did he have in the State Department? It was a neat trick—it had in-built deniability. Khrushchev could leak it and deny it at the same time. Lawrence’s sense of theatrical timing gave the hacks a minute or two of hubbub before he closed in for the kill.
‘The full text will be published in the Post this Sunday. All 26,000 words of it. In the meantime I can tell you something of the atrocities denounced by Khrushchev. There are some truly shocking revelations. I think we have known for some long time now that history is unlikely to offer a larger rollcall of the dead. Khrushchev does not deal in figures. Indeed I doubt that we or he will ever know the full carnage of the Yezhovshchina, but he deals in methods and principles—the methods of Stalin’s madness and the principles of his paranoia.’
Lawrence rattled on. Troy looked at Rod. His face said, ‘I told you so,’ and his lips formed the words seconds after Troy had read them in his eyes.
‘Told me what?’
‘It’s a hoot. It’s a coup.’
‘No it’s not.’
‘How so? It means Khrushchev was serious about peaceful coexistence. Or are you going to insult me in your habitual fashion and tell me that “he’s just another politician”?’
‘Worse, Rod. He’s an actor.’
‘Eh?’
‘I saw a wee bit more of the man than you did, and take it
from me, he’s Grimaldi and Alec Guinness rolled into one.’
Lawrence was almost through with his press-tease, saying nothing and something at the same time, and he ended by quoting Khrushchev’s own words.
“Comrades, we must abolish the cult of the individual decisively, once and for all.”And if you want any more, you’ll have to buy the Post. Thank you, gentlemen.’
Lawrence stepped down to half-hearted applause, beaming with pleasure. He had pulled off a coup, stuck one to the rest of Fleet Street en masse and he knew it. Every editor on the street would have killed for that speech. Most of them would run it in full just as Lawrence was doing, revelling in the showmanship, knowing full well that not one reader in fifty would get halfway through it. Troy made a mental note to buy the News of the World instead. Comrade K could not compete with tits and bums and wayward vicars, the rightful, the traditional subjects of the English Sunday papers, as British as the fish and chips they would be wrapping by next Tuesday.
From behind them Troy heard a sigh that seemed to bear the weight of history on its breath, an infinite weariness, the like of which Troy had not heard since the days of his grandfather. It could only be Nikolai. They both turned at the same time. Rod and Troy looked at their uncle, his head resting on the wall, the brow of his Homburg pointing skyward, his eyes looking up to the heaven in which he surely did not believe.
‘Nikolai,’ Rod said, softly, with caution. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I am fine, my boy,’ he said without looking at either of them. ‘It is you and yours I fear for, not myself. Stalin is dead—long live Stalin.’
‘Eh?’ said Rod for the both of them. It struck Troy as the most logical response he could make.
‘Do you know why Khrushchev will not enumerate the Soviet Book of the Dead? Do you know why he will not add up the millions upon millions? Do you know what this man did in the first years after the war?’