by Lawton, John
Troy snatched the phone from her. She hopped around the room screaming quietly, dancing from one foot to the other as though walking on hot coals.
He ran upstairs. Rod took it all very calmly. Yawned, picked up the phone and said, ‘Ike,’ as though he had seen him only yesterday.
Afterwards, he sat in the study and watched Tosca rant and rave, still tearing around the room on fire.
‘Jesus, baby. Suppose he recognised my voice?’
‘It was twelve years ago.’
‘Dammit, Troy. I saw the old guy every day for weeks, months even! I mean, he used to flirt with me!’
‘He didn’t have a clue. You’re dead, remember?’
She returned to her place, perched on the edge of the chair, toes drumming nervously on the floor.
‘You’re right. I’m dead. I find it hard to remember sometimes. I mean, here am I trying to work out who the hell I am, eyeless in Gaza, clueless in Hertfordshire, lost in the desert of the English home counties, marooned between the Co-op and Dorothy Perkins, caught between the devil and the woman in the deep-blue dress who just popped in from the Women’s Institute, adrift on a sea of good manners and guilt about masturbation, wondering whether property is really theft or does my fawn handbag really not go with my twin-set, driven crazy by not knowing which’ll desTroy us first, the H-bomb or the wrong fork at the dinner table, forgetting all the time that I’m dead. Well—fucky wucky woo!!!’
For several minutes all he could hear was rain and the gathering rumble of thunder.
He leaned back, the chair on two legs, and flipped the switch to start the record again. Tatum glided into ‘Gone With the Wind’—the prewar song from which Margaret Mitchell had taken her book title, which in turn had become a film, which in turn had became another, utterly unrelated tune—and competed with the rain on the window pane. There was scarcely a mood to recapture, but he loved and hated the fragility of silence under rain. Almost erotic. The temptation to shatter it was too strong. He’d tried once and failed dismally.
He reached for his book. Then she leapt from her chair, knocked the book from his hand, threw her arms around his neck and wept onto his chest.
The record spun on its final groove. One of Mr Sod’s favourite laws was that the autochanger never cut out when you wanted it to. She prised her head off his chest, sniffed noisily, looked at him nose to nose.
‘Y’ remember what Twain said?’
He shook his head.
‘Rumours of my demise are greatly something or other.’
‘Exaggerated?’
‘That’s the word.’
Then she kissed him, drew up her legs, wedged her stockinged feet between his thighs and buried herself in his neck. She smelt of perfume, nothing he could name, of soap flakes, and of Tosca.
§38
Rod took the bellows to the last of the fire. A man of no real practical skills, he was devoted to the two or three things he did well. He was excellent at pancakes, though rarely called on to prove it since his children hit adolescence, mixed a mean Martini, and would always undertake the lighting of fires with repeated cries of, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t touch it!’ And on cold summer evenings such as this could be found bent over the embers, arse uppards, blowing a spark into flame. The fire once lit, he would be reluctant to waste so much as a therm of heat and light, and was often to be found crouched over a fire with parliamentary papers, or the novels he rationed to himself, past midnight, past sociability, yawning and nodding off. In the days when he had been a minister, Troy had saved him from a scorching when a Government white paper slipped from his lap into the grate and set fire to his trousers.
Dinner had dissolved, the family dispersed to their rooms. Troy walked the length of the table snuffing out the candles with his fingers. He had first taken the precaution of closing the door. He sat by the fire, hoping for a fireside chat—a phrase not much heard since the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rod achieved ignition, sighed and sat back in the chair opposite.
‘Staying up, are you?’ he said.
Which was by way of a hint. It meant ‘sod off’ in Rodspeak, but Troy was not to be sodded.
‘Aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on?’
‘Meaning?’
‘The President of the United States is usually to be found on the golf course on a Saturday morning, not making clandestine calls to minor British politicians on their home numbers.’
‘Minor! Clandestine!’
‘I didn’t even know you knew him.’
‘I was in and out of Overlord HQ dozens of times in the run-up to D-Day. I can’t say I was on first-name terms with a five-star general, but I knew him. I saw him again a couple of times in ’54, and I led the Labour group to Washington this June while you were off gallivanting with your newfound wife.’
‘And you just happened to give him this number?’
Rod put aside the sheaf of papers he had sat clutching. It indicated that Troy had at last won his attention.
‘Off the record. Right?’
‘I’m not a Fleet Street hack, Rod.’
‘It’s part of the job, his and mine, to meet the Opposition leaders, you’ll agree. Nothing odd about that, so don’t pretend. The fact that we knew one another in the war helps. After all, he didn’t know Gaitskell. He told me in June that he was worried about Egypt—the Baghdad pact and all that—said it would be useful from time to time to know what Her Majesty’s Opposition felt without the formalities and frills. And no, I didn’t give him this number. He had it already. Asked if I minded him calling me here, but said he knew for a fact that the line wasn’t bugged. Which is more than can be said for my office. He said we could talk without anyone else knowing—not his people, and not mine. What prompted him to ring today was that television address to the nation Eden gave the other night. Ike, it seems, had the London embassy stick the phone next to the set so it could be relayed direct to him in the White House. The upshot is that he thinks Eden is not getting the message. He says Dulles is being as clear as can be that the Americans will not back us over Egypt—“we will not shoot our way through the canal” and all that guff—bit subtle for Eden, really—and we cannot expect them to. But he thinks Eden is just blind and deaf on the matter.’
‘So what’s new? Ike must have known Eden during the war. I doubt his character has improved.’
‘Quite. That is part of the problem. I doubt whether Ike has ever had a deal of confidence in him. However, there is something new.’
Rod paused, seemed almost to sigh with regret.
‘We’re going to invade.’
Troy thought silence the better part of discretion. Just keep him talking.
‘The Tories have signed a secret pact with France and Israel. Israel strikes at Egypt across Sinai, towards the canal. Then the British and the French steam in as peacemakers, and on the way nab the canal for themselves. It was all in writing, it seems, but Eden has burnt his copy of the agreement, and sent a Foreign Office chap to France to get the French copy. But he couldn’t get the Israeli copy. Eden’s lied to the House and if we drag him back for a special session he means to go on lying.’
‘How does Ike know this?’
‘The CIA got a look at Israel’s copy.’
‘Why is he telling you this?’
‘He just wants me to know.’
‘I don’t believe that. Nor do you. I don’t see how you can use this. When did anyone last stand up in the house of clowns and call the Prime Minister of the day a liar? If you do, every journalist in Britain will ask you for your source. What are you going to tell them? That Ike calls you at home? Because no one will believe you. That you have a hotline to the CIA? That’ll do you more harm than good. You’ll have your own left wing shooting at you with everything they’ve got.’
Rod leant forward. No one could possibly hear them, but still he lowered his voice.
‘He says that he’ll pull the rug from under the pound if Eden goes through with it. I
t’ll drop like stone against the dollar. In the autumn we’re due to pay interest on the post-war loans the Americans gave us. We’ll probably have to default. The Exchequer will be passing the hat round and we’ll be borrowing from anyone with a five-bob postal order to lend. From imperial power to international beggars in less than ten years. At which point Ike has us by the balls—and one of Ike’s maxims is that when you have a man by the balls his heart and mind soon follow.’
‘Jesus Christ,’ said Troy. ‘That’s Machiavellian. But I still don’t see why he’s gone to the trouble of telling you.’
‘Special relationship?’
‘Come off it.’
‘He wants us to be ready.’
‘Ready for what?’
‘Government.’
‘Government? There’s no bloody election due till 1960!’
‘Eden will go. Ike has decided. When he goes there’s a good chance he’ll bring the Tories down around his head like Samson. We’ll be back in government by January.’
‘So Ike is acting like a bookie’s runner. Giving you a hot tip?’
‘All in the interests of continuity.’
‘Rubbish.’
‘It’s called diplomacy.’
‘Sez you,’ said Troy. ‘I could think of half a dozen other words for it.’
It was Troy’s turn to lean in close over the sputtering fire, to usher in the tones of a spurious confidentiality. Secrets where there could be none. Home truths where there could only be alien lies.
‘Tell me, don’t you find it in the least bit disturbing to be on the receiving end of CIA operations? Aren’t you just a wee bit apprehensive about an American president deciding to swap governments in Britain? Because if they can do it to the Conservatives, they can do it to you.’
‘Strange times, Freddie, make strange bedfellows.’
‘If I went to bed with the CIA I’d count my bollocks in the morning.’
§39
The Quiet American was not where he had left it. With only a couple of chapters to go, he was quite looking forward to finishing it in bed.
He tapped on Tosca’s door and went in. The windows were wide open to let in the night air and the last reluctant drops of rain with it. Her trousers, knickers and socks trailed across the floor from the door, exactly as she had stepped out of them. The room was turning into a marginally neater version of the pit she had had in Orange Street all those years ago. She was sitting up in bed. The Tattersall shirt had become a nightdress. She was reading his book. He decided to say nothing. He’d start another.
‘I’m sorry about this afternoon.’
‘That’s all right. You must have been scared.’
‘Shitless would be the word.’
She paused, put her thumb between the pages and clutched the book to her bosom. Drew her knees up to support her chin.
‘It makes me wonder. Y’know. Could be anybody. Anytime. I mean—we’ll never know. We can never be certain, can we?’
She was looking at him. A look he could not fathom. She had wrapped herself around him, slept off the fear of the day in the sleep of a frightened child. She had never done that before. She had clammed up over dinner, let Rod and the sisters make all the running, occasionally reached under the table cloth and held him by the hand or grabbed him by the balls. She had done that dozens of times. He did not know what she wanted of him now.
‘No,’ he said. ‘We can’t.’
§40
It had been a sodden summer. Wind and rain, with the odd day of outstanding sunshine to pepper the calendar and remind the English that they didn’t have summers like they used to—before the war. One glimmer of ‘sunshine’ remained—earlier in the season England had thrashed the Australian touring cricket team in the test and reminded them that Len Hutton had retired, but that perhaps his spirit played on.
The desk copper at the Yard had the reliability of a good barometer. He would talk about the weather or he would talk about cricket. In either case, he had the same solution.
‘It’s the bomb,’ he told Troy one morning at the end of August. ‘Stands to reason.’
Troy loved ‘stands to reason’—it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous, to a statement that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.
‘Definitely the bomb,’ the copper said, as Troy walked in from Whitehall.
Troy waited. Cricket or the weather?
‘We never had weather like this before you had all them atoms in the air! It’s the atoms. We got too many of ’em just whizzing around in the atmosphere.’
Play or pass? Play, he thought. Absurdist’s gambit.
‘It rains in Japan all the time.’
‘Yeah, but there’s always the trade winds. We’re on the same trade winds as Japan, you see. The wind blows all their atoms from Hiroshima and Nagawotsit over to England.’
This required little thought. Troy could see mate in a couple of moves.
‘Of course,’ he said, Knight to Queen’s Bishop 4, ‘Japan never was any good at cricket.’
‘Stands to reason,’ said the copper, and went into a manoeuvre known to Troy as the cracker-barrel loop, the homespun philosopher’s ploy of repeat, sigh and wonder at the majesty of God and Nature. Troy quit. They bred a particularly hardy species of idiot—the English.
Up in his office the phone was ringing. And not a sign of Clark or Wildeve.
He did not recognise the woman asking for Chief Inspector Troy.
‘It’s Janet Cockerell,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ he said neutrally.
‘You said to call you if—’
She could not complete the sentence, but it didn’t matter. The ‘if’ had been universal. Bread cast upon the waters. Anything and nothing with a preference that it should be nothing. But she had called.
‘I’ve heard from that Inspector Bonser again.’
So had Troy. A post-mortem report lay unread in his in-tray. If he’d had a reason for asking Bonser to send it, he’d quite forgotten what it was.
‘He wants me to go back to Portsmouth. And I was wondering. Well. Do I have to go?’
‘No, Mrs Cockerell, you don’t.’
‘He can’t make me?’
‘No, he can’t.’
Troy was not surprised to learn that Bonser had asked. How else was he ever going to get the body identified? If anything, it was odd he’d left the matter as long as he had.
‘But,’ Troy went on, ‘I’m sure you’ll appreciate how little Mr Bonser has to go on.’
‘You’re not saying I should do it?’
‘No. I’m not.’
‘It’s not him. I can’t say it is if it isn’t.’
Troy had heard all this.
‘It’s the way he asks. I feel I’m being bullied.’
He was not wholly sure why he was prolonging this conversation, or where it was leading.
‘Mrs Cockerell. Why are you so certain your husband is not the body we saw?’
‘He’s still alive. I know it.’
‘I’ve been investigating suspicious deaths for twenty years, Mrs Cockerell. Most people who begin as missing persons show up as corpses. There’s not a man in ten thousand can effectively engineer his own disappearance. The old ploy of leaving your clothes on the beach doesn’t work. If he’s still missing after nearly five months the chances are—’
‘My husband didn’t leave his clothes on a beach! He left them at the King Henry Hotel,’ she protested.
‘Quite. Doesn’t that tell you anything?’
‘No.’
‘Well. It tells me that your husband has not staged a disappearing trick. Clothes are one thing. Your husband left his wallet, his case and his car, his toothbrush, his razor. If he’s roving England, he’s roving it without so much as a farthing to his name.’
‘Doesn’t that tell you anything?’ she threw his question back at him.
‘Suc
h as?’
‘That perhaps it all comes down to money. That maybe he’s got a nest egg stashed away somewhere?’
‘You may be right. But—’
‘It’s money, Mr Troy. It all comes down to money. If you could just come and look.’
‘What?’
‘If you could come up here. To Derbyshire. And look.’
‘I’m on the Murder Squad. I can’t look into missing persons or missing money.’
‘But you don’t think he’s missing. You think he’s dead!’
She had rounded on him in a quick twist of logic. Afterwards he often had cause to wonder why he had agreed to make the trip to Derbyshire, to involve himself in this bloody, cloying mess. Even as he jotted down her address, the name of the town—Belper—seemed oddly familiar, as though he’d heard it recently in some other context. She was right: he did believe, if only from a combination of experience and instinct, that Cockerell was dead. She was right too, in that, for all that he could not offer Bonser the legal certainty he needed, he too thought the corpse was Cockerell. The weakness in it all was that if the corpse was Cockerell, it was not his problem—let the spooks handle that one—but if it wasn’t, what logical consequence followed from his assertion that the man was dead? Dead where? Dead when? And by whose hand? No—it was not her logic that gripped him; it was his own. That and the dead cat curiosity of wanting to stick his nose into the Cockerell affair, simply because he was intrigued that his own brother should have concerned himself so much with the political capital to be made out of it. Rod was playing an odd game. Of late Troy had been surprised at the lengths to which he would go and the methods he would use, the people with whom he was prepared to deal. Strange bedfellows, as he had called them. He remembered the long spoon at Downing Street. And he remembered Rod’s stinging suggestion that perhaps Troy and ‘all the piods in Special Branch’ had been only decoys in the episode of Commander Cockerell. He doubted the use Rod was making of all that he knew and he doubted the source of all that he knew—but worse, far worse, he hated the thought that he himself might have been used, hated the idea that he’d been in a sideshow when all the time he thought he’d been present at the main attraction.