Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘I know, sir. He can’t say for certain. And his daughter won’t look. The squeamish type, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Next of kin?’

  ‘There’s a wife sir, but . . . well . . . she’s upset right now. She may give us an ID in the future, but she can’t or won’t confirm at the moment. If you could come down, sir, it might result in a quick clear up of the case. As it is, things are a bit awkward. Mrs Cockerell’s still here and I might be able to persuade her to take another look, but it is . . . well . . . it’s awkward, d’you see?’

  ‘OK,’ said Troy. ‘I’ll be there after lunch.’

  He put the bacon back onto the flame, tipped the eggs into the gleam of butter in the bottom of the saucepan, listened to Tosca banging about as she finished dressing, listened to her start a new song—‘I’m just a gal who cain’t say no!’—and wondered why Rod hadn’t bothered to tell him about Cockerell. Only weeks ago it seemed he had been obsessed with screwing an admission out of Eden. But the answer was almost obvious. He had come home with a wife, and at that a Russian wife. Rod, the happily married man, who could conceive of no man being happy out of marriage and no man unhappy within it, had had his cup filled to the brim, and as it ran over he had forgotten that anything else mattered. Troy had thought Rod would never stop laughing at Tosca’s Mae West line. She could not have cracked the ice more perfectly. He had clasped her to his chest, or as far up it as she came at five foot two inches in high heels, and laughed till he cried. It was typical of Rod’s passions that they eclipsed each other like the moon going round the sun. Sooner or later he would have told him.

  §36

  Awkward was not the word Troy would have chosen. Most of Cockerell’s face had gone. And with it the whole of his right hand, his left down to the knuckles, all of the right foot and two toes off the left. The top of his head had been sliced off and the back of it crushed like a peppercorn. He’d been in the water more than three months. His rubber suit had protected his torso but the fish had lunched on anything that was exposed. The one eye hanging loose and half eaten from the remains of its socket was enough to make the strongest stomach heave.

  He looked at the naked mess that might once have been the pathetic little bore from the carpet saleroom, stretched out on a green rubber sheet. The exposed flesh was streaked and stained; the flesh uncovered by the peeling away of the wetsuit was as pale as flour, bloated like a white slug on a cabbage leaf.

  He turned to the sergeant Bonser had sent in with him.

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said. ‘His own mother couldn’t identify him.’

  The man was indifferent or callous or just young. He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘There’s always the teeth, I suppose. And prints off the three toes.’

  For some reason this irritated Troy.

  ‘Look at his jaws. Do you see any teeth? Isn’t it obvious the man wore false teeth?’

  The sergeant crouched and peeped into the black, lipless hole.

  ‘Oh, I see what you mean. Where are they now?’

  ‘I don’t know. Perhaps you should dredge the Solent?’

  The sarcasm of this went over the man’s head. He probably would dredge the Solent for a set of false teeth.

  ‘And whilst you can get prints off toes, when does anyone bother to record toeprints?’

  The man shrugged again. He was easy with death. Death didn’t bother him. It bothered Troy. He couldn’t wait to get out of the room.

  The door to Bonser’s office was open. He was resting his backside on the front edge of his desk, leaning low over the hunched, juddering figure of a woman.

  ‘Surely you can?’ he was saying. Then, ‘After sixteen years of marriage?’

  His tone of voice was somewhere between the incredulous and the hectoring. It did not, to Troy’s ears, sound pleasant, particularly in the light of his assumption that the sobbing woman must be Cockerell’s wife.

  Troy tapped gently on the glass.

  Bonser prised himself off the desk and came over to the door.

  ‘Any luck?’ he said.

  Troy had no wish to speak in front of Mrs Cockerell. He shook his head.

  ‘What, nothing? Surely you—’

  It was the same ‘surely’ he had used a moment before on the grieving widow. Troy refused to respond to it, cut him off before the verb by walking past him and placing a hand on Mrs Cockerell’s shoulder.

  ‘Mrs Cockerell?’

  She unwrapped a little, looked up at him, her face contorted into a mask of ugliness by tears. A frump of a woman well into middle age. Overdressed for the weather in a heavy tweed coat; overdressed for the occasion in one of those stupid hats that women wear to be formal. But, then, what was more formal than a dead husband?

  ‘Frederick Troy. I’m a chief inspector at Scotland Yard. I met your husband briefly last April. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

  Her eyes flashed with panic. She swivelled in the chair, looking sharply at Bonser, then at Troy again.

  ‘It’s not him, you know. You haven’t told them it’s him, have you?’

  Troy looked at Bonser. More than a bit of a slob, a big bloke, with a boxer’s nose, standing in the open doorway in his striped braces, his tie at half-mast, his hands thrust into his trousers, Biro sticking out of the breast pocket of his bri-nylon shirt, as though he’d seen far too many episodes of Dragnet. She was alarmed, almost demented by the thought. How long had Bonser had her in here putting on the screws?

  ‘No. I haven’t. I couldn’t in all honesty say that I recognised the body as your husband.’

  ‘It’s not. You do see that, don’t you? It’s not him. It can’t be.’

  Bonser took his hands out of his pockets.

  ‘Oh come on now—’

  Troy cut him off, raised his voice just a fraction louder than was necessary and stared him down. It was known as pulling rank.

  ‘Have you had lunch yet, Mrs Cockerell?’

  She shook her head. A lock of grey hair fell free from the ridiculous hat.

  ‘It’s nearly three. You must be famished.’

  Troy held out a hand to her. She took it and stood up. A little taller than Troy, slim and fiftyish. He could see her clearly for the first time. Her face powder creased by rivulets of tears. Her bright red lipstick smudged. She did not, thank God, seem to wear mascara or she’d look like a coal chute, thought Troy.

  He sat her in the front of the Bentley. Ducked back into the station. Bonser was unhappy but short of protest.

  ‘I’ll talk to her,’ said Troy. ‘You’ll get nowhere if you lean on her.’

  Bonser shruggged, began to gather up the scattering of paperwork on his desk, his mind already moving on.

  ‘Maybe you’re right. But it’ll drag on now, won’t it?’

  ‘What will you do?’

  ‘What can I do? Follow the book. Put him on ice.’

  He tossed a file into the open cabinet and slammed it shut.

  ‘Coroner opens an inquest and adjourns it indefinitely. You know the routine. In the meantime I’ve got an unidentified body and an open case. Makes a mess of the figures.’

  This was universal copper-speak, an appeal through rank to Troy’s sympathies.

  ‘There are worse things,’ said Troy. Then he added, ‘The post mortem. You’ll send a copy of the report up to the Yard?’

  ‘If you like,’ Bonser said, as though it were a matter on which he was wholly indifferent.

  Troy swung the car into the yard of the King Henry. It was out of hours, and he was relying on the goodwill of Quigley. The door was propped open, Quigley was behind the bar drying glasses, a towel demonstratively laid across the pumps.

  ‘Mr Quigley?’ Troy began. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a late lunch?’

  ‘I’m sure I can manage something,’ Quigley said.

  ‘And a drop of brandy?’

  Quigley looked at the dial-faced clock over the bar. He knew exactly what time it was. The clock s
imply provided reassurance, and passing drama. There was a barely audible, hammy intake of breath.

  ‘It’s not for me,’ Troy said. ‘I’ve Mrs Cockerell with me.’

  ‘Say no more. On the house. That way the law can’t touch us, now can it?’

  They sat alone at a table in the centre of the room. Quigley took one look at Mrs Cockerell and set a very large brandy in front of her. Troy coaxed. Persuaded her to take off her coat, to sip at the brandy. Her tears had stopped. The grief had lapsed into silence. She did not speak to Troy until Quigley returned with two plates of roast beef and boiled spuds in pools of gravy. She unpinned the silly hat, set it down on the spare chair, shook her hair out of her face, straightened her posture and assumed the forced look of bearing up in adversity.

  ‘It’s not him, you know,’ she said bluntly.

  Tact not truth, thought Troy.

  ‘I’m sure you know best.’

  ‘That Inspector wanted me to say it was.’

  ‘No—I think he was just doing his job. Just asking you to be sure.’

  She took a mouse’s bite at a potato, chewed half-heartedly, decided she liked it and began to take bigger forkfuls.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘It was more than that. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

  She spoke calmly. It did not seem to him to be the reaction of hysteria. Besides, Troy had to admit to himself that this squared with what he had seen. It seemed wrong, however, to agree with her and let her go away with the idea that Bonser had been heavy with her. Peace, if attainable, lay in denial. The truth came a poor second.

  ‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘were there no distinguishing marks which might have been unique to your husband?’

  ‘He had a scar on the back of his right hand. And a mole on the side of his neck. But there was no right hand, was there? There wasn’t much of a neck. I told that Inspector all that. He still seemed to think I should know.’

  Troy decided to let it drop. She ate slowly but steadily, seemed quite capable of getting through it all. Mary Quigley brought over two bowls of plum duff and synthetically yellow custard. Troy preferred his Technicolor on the screen rather than the plate. He declined and took the chance to seek out Quigley.

  ‘Mr Quigley, when you were on the force, did you know Bill Bonser?’

  Quigley uncorked the brandy bottle and poured two shorts for himself and Troy, far, far smaller than the one he had given to Mrs Cockerell. He pushed Troy’s across the bar to him. Cleared a space to take the elbow upon which the process of confidentiality demanded he now lean.

  ‘Came from Liverpool the year I retired. He was a sergeant in them days. If you ask me he shoulda stayed a sergeant.’

  ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘Well, what qualities would you pride yourself on, Mr Troy? Intuition, imagination—flair, would you call it?’

  ‘If you like,’ said Troy.

  ‘Billy Bonser ain’t that sort. He’s what I’d call a born sergeant.’

  Quigley paused to knock back his brandy. Troy still couldn’t see what he was driving at.

  ‘But you’re not saying he’s bent?’

  ‘Bent? Billy Bonser? He’s so straight you could use ’im for a truncheon. Straight, bent—that’s not the matter. Matter is—what separates the goat from the sheep? Nouse, Mr Troy. Bonser don’t have nouse. Bonser has—well—loyalty, obedience. The stuff you’d want in a good sergeant. ’E don’t ’ave the imagination to be bent. You give Billy Bonser an order and ’e’li follow it over a cliff. ’E was in ’ere the day I reported Cockerell missing. That was two days after you was last ’ere. Comes in. Asks to check the register.’

  Quigley reached under the bar and pulled out the register. He flipped it open and ran his finger down the torn seam between pages.

  ‘Looks at the page with Cockerell’s name on it, yours too as it ’appens, and blow me he rips it right out and tells me ’e was never ’ere. Then yesterday he comes in and asks me to identify the body. Typical Bonser. Orders to lose Cockerell, one day, orders to see to it ’e’s identified the next, and he follows both to the letter. Bent—not on your life. Straight as a die. Born sergeant.’

  Troy considered that as Quigley had spent twenty years as a sergeant there was an odd mixture of generosity, objectivity and sheer perversity in the view, but it did prompt a question.

  ‘Whose orders would he be following? Why would anyone down here want Cockerell lost?’

  ‘Nah. Not down ’ere, Mr Troy. It’d be one of his mates in Special Branch. Before he got this posting Bonser was a sergeant in the Branch up in Liverpool. Mind you, it was too late. I’d already had a reporter in ’ere. And he’d seen it first.’

  ‘Reporter? Did you ask which paper?’

  ‘He said he was from the Sunday Post. Local stringer. If you ask me, ’e’d heard it from a nark down at the nick. So ’appens he moved quicker than Bonser.’

  ‘Did you tell Bonser this?’

  ‘No. Why upset him?’

  This put a piece of the puzzle into place, the Sunday Post being owned by the Troy family, edited by his brother-in-law, Lawrence. Anything of use to Rod, Lawrence would undoubtedly pass on—which was how Rod had been able to harangue the Government long before it was common knowledge that there was a spy. It also spelt out to Troy that Rod had known all along that the Portsmouth spy was Commander Cockerell. He had never named him. He could imagine the delight Rod had taken in forcing Eden to name him, the off-the-record hints by which Rod would have let Eden know that he knew. Except that now—now it seemed that the Portsmouth spy might not be Commander Cockerell?

  Troy offered Mrs Cockerell a lift to London. She declined, saying her train changed at Reading and she’d be fine if he would just drop her at the railway station.

  ‘It’s not him,’ she said again, with her hand on the car door, paused to get out into the station forecourt. ‘Really, it isn’t.’

  It was a habit. A bad one, and more often than not meant as a brush-off. Troy gave her his card. His rank, the Whitehall 1212 number, the most famous telephone number in Britain.

  ‘If there’s anything I can do—’ he said meaninglessly, knowing he would never hear from her again.

  And for a month he did not.

  §37

  He had retreated to his father’s study—his study, as he habitually failed to think of it. The summer rain pelted the windows, setting the glass rattling in its frame. He stuck Art Tatum on the gramophone, picked Graham Greene’s The Quiet American off the shelf and decided to while away a wet Saturday afternoon and quite possibly a wet weekend in solitary pleasures. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the sisters’ prattle. Rod was up in his office with a deskful of papers, as he was every Saturday; Nikolai was sleeping off lunch in the conservatory; Cid was in the kitchen discussing the evening’s menu with the cook. He had no idea where Tosca was and for two chapters of Graham Greene he did not wonder.

  To enter his thoughts seemed like word magic—as though he could summon her up simply by thinking of her, she opened the door softly and came in. The creature he summoned was dressed bizarrely. All the clothes were his, rescued from the box he put aside for gardening and pigging. His old grey cotton trousers, rolled up many times at the ankle, and a Tattersall shirt, shot at the collar and cuffs. She was bored. He was getting used to that. She was so easily bored. She was in all probability drawn by the music, the rippling, sentimental piano of Tatum, the oh-so-mellow saxophone of Ben Webster, the Chekhovian thud of the string bass. He had no sense of intrusion. Indeed, he wished she would show more initiative and pick up a book and put on a record without waiting for him to make the decision. He had weaned her off Huck Finn, convinced her that there were other writers besides Mark Twain. But he was rapidly coming to conclude that he could not please her—in any sense of the word.

  ‘Y’ OK, baby?’

  She sat on the edge of the chair opposite, not relaxing into it. More like his daughter than his wife. Irritable, irritating and curious.


  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Y’ don’t mind me just . . . sittin’ here?’

  ‘Not at all. You’re my wife.’

  ‘Buys a lot of favours, huh?’

  He did not answer.

  ‘Sorry. That was bitchy. I been hangin’ out with your sisters too much.’

  The rain shook the french windows to fill up the silence. It let him put off what he knew he must say and would rather not, such display being alien to his nature.

  ‘That’s OK. I didn’t mean I owned you. I meant what’s mine is yours. As corny as that.’

  She smiled and unsmiled, all in a split second.

  There was no way out. He’d better say it. Knew he had to say it. He put down the book. His own inadequacies rushing in to meet him black as storm clouds.

  ‘I meant, I loved you.’

  ‘That so?’

  A whisper, not half-hearted, not uncertain, no sense of doubt. But it seemed to him that it did not register with her; so much did not, after all, and this was her only response, and it seemed the words she used did not mean what they said.

  The telephone rang. It was far nearer her than him. She was looking intently at him, smiling shyly, stuck for words. She let it ring, until Troy said: ‘Pick it up. It’s probably for Rod. Usually is.’

  ‘Hello,’ she said quietly, and he saw the blood drain from her face, saw her eyes lock onto his with an expression little short of terror.

  ‘Yeah, yeah [pause]. Yeah, he’s here. Sure.’

  Then she put her hand across the mouthpiece and screamed her whisper at Troy.

  ‘Aaaaaagh!’

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Aaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh!!! It’s Ike!’

  ‘Ike who?’

  ‘Eisenhower, dummy!!! The goddam President! Jesus Christ. Take the damn thing off me!’

  Troy ran around the desk.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘He just called to ask if I’m happy. Jesus Christ, Troy! What do you think he wants? He wants Rod!’