Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  He looked at the neat, small stack of paperwork on his desk, so controlled and so ordered since the arrival of Clark. The opposite of his life.

  ‘I’ll be there sometime tomorrow,’ he said to her.

  He rang off and pulled the post-mortem report from his in-tray. All good cases begin with a good body. And whoever he was down there on the slab in Portsmouth, he was the ripest corpse in a long time. Foul, fish-eaten, putrid and stinking. The pathologist’s report made a disgustingly enjoyable read—up, that is, to the heading ‘Contents of Digestive Tract, Stomach, Duodenum, Colon & Examination of Rectum’. At which juncture disgust overwhelmed even the most perverse of policely pleasures, and Troy dropped the report in his out-tray. He did not have a pending-tray. Perhaps Clark was working on that? Perhaps one day soon he would walk in and find his life casually dumped in that centre tray?

  §41

  When it came down to it he could not face the drive. The thought of the hours spent crawling up the A5 and then up the A6, across Northamptonshire and Leicestershire and halfway up Derbyshire, filled him with boredom. You could spend hours stuck in traffic before even leaving Greater London, and the road north could move at a snail’s pace. Britain, it had to be said, was choking on its traffic. What Britain needed was Autobahns. They were the one positive thing the late Adolf Hitler was remembered for. Visitors would return from the newly reconstituted Germany and whinge about the backwardness of Britain when it came to roads. Every so often you could meet a buffoon in a bar for whom the mark of a civilised country was that it let him cruise at 105 mph along a concrete superhighway. But, then, that was the post-war syndrome. Troy was getting used to the fashionable rediscovery of the Continent—or Europe as people were tending to call it these days—the costly summer holiday abroad from which the well-to-do British would return boasting that they’d found somewhere in France that served English beer or a nice cup of tea—or, increasingly, on the opposite tack, that they’d discovered things that ‘simply hadn’t caught on in Britain yet’, and never would while we remained ‘insular’. Troy remembered his first sight of a garlic press, a bottle of Chianti and red Tuscan pottery. And that little blue book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David, stuffed full of ‘calamári’—whatever that was—and ‘courgette’, better known in its bloated form on the allotments of England as a ‘prize marrer’—that had a lot to answer for. Either way, either response, was part of the great British talent for self-flagellation.

  He reached into his desk drawer for a copy of the railway timetable and began to search for a suitable train. The old Midland line out of St Pancras. He liked trains, and Britain had an extensive network of lines that seemed to connect pretty well everything with pretty well everything else. Unlike Mussolini’s trains, they rarely ran on time, but they did get you into the nooks and crannies of the country, whether the nook was Midsomer Norton in deepest Somerset or the cranny Monsal Dale in the heights of Derbyshire. The railways were like the underground, as he had described it to Khrushchev—ramshackle but they worked.

  Belper? Why did he know that name? Belper. He found it on the network map. It was about ten miles north of Derby, a one-horse town, wedged between a tributary of the Trent and the tail end of the Pennines. And it did indeed have a railway station.

  §42

  The engine was a shabby specimen, still bearing the insignia of the old London, Midland & Scottish Railway, long since nationalised as part of British Railways. Troy had been a train-spotter as a boy—so many lines passed through Hertfordshire on their way north—but had outgrown the delights of childhood by the time this type had appeared. All the same, he knew it for what it was under the grime and neglect of the new order. It was, he recalled, a Jubilee class 4–6–0, named for the year of the old King’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. Not as grand as the Coronation and Princess Pacifics, not as powerful, but sleek, neat, and usually red like the story-book engine—not dirty black as it was now.

  The rhythm of steam, the mechanical inhalation and exhalation of the iron beast, was always soporific. He fell asleep, appropriately enough, somewhere in Bedfordshire. When he awoke it was dark and the train was chugging through the flatlands of the Trent Valley. He could not remember passing Leicester or Loughborough. He peered out of the window into a clear sky lit by a near-perfect half-moon. A station passed swiftly by—Long Something or other. He leant against the worn cushioning of an LMS Third Class railway compartment and fell back into sleep again.

  Someone was nudging him. He opened his eyes. It was dim in the carriage, dark outside and the train had stopped. The someone was a railway guard.

  ‘Belper you said, guvner? Look sharpish or you’ll find yourself in Manchester.’

  Troy leapt from the train, still half in the land of nod, and found himself in the land of he-knew-not-what. Far Twittering or Oyster Perch? The train pulled out, deep rhythmic sighs, and disappeared slowly into the stone cutting to the north. As the chug-hiss and the smell of smoke and steam faded, other sounds and scents took their place, opening up like flowers in trick photography. A delicate waft of night-scented stock, the fainter scent of late-flowering cabbage roses, the strong aromatics of nicotiana. He found himself facing a well-ordered flowerbed. In large white stones in the centre of the display, offset by an outline of scarlet geraniums, the letters B-E-L-P-E-R were picked out as though freshly whitewashed. High on a stone wall, a gas lamp perched upon its iron stem and hissed gently into the scented air. From its two arms hung baskets of trailing nasturtium and lobelia. The sound of the engine finally died in the distance, and from beneath it emerged a throaty musical burble, a multitude of deep cooing voices, dipping in and out of the silence. The silence. That was what was so startling. Somewhere in the distance an open window let out the indecipherable but unmistakable sound of a wireless tuned to the Home Service, but apart from that and the odd burbling noises, Troy could hear nothing, not a car, not a voice, nothing. A scented silence.

  He looked around. He was standing next to a peeling red railway building, somewhat in the style of a Swiss chalet. The door to his right bore an enamel plaque saying ‘Ladies Only’. Off to his left a man in porter’s uniform was loading wicker crates full of racing pigeons onto a cart. The pigeons cooed at him, and there was a swift flutter of feathers as he lifted each basket in turn. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Oliver Hardy. The same rotund face, the same layered jowls jammed between chin and collar, the same clipped, old-fashioned moustache—the same colossal girth.

  ‘Excuse me,’ said Troy, ‘I don’t suppose there’s a station hotel?’

  Troy half-expected him to straighten up, fiddle with his tie or cuddle his hat to his chest and fluster a little in best Georgian modesty, rocking his head from side to side and pursing his lips. He said nothing, simply carried on loading his burbling baggage onto the cart. Troy regretted the implied negative in his question. Sod the English and their ungrammatical manners. All he meant was, ‘Where’s the nearest hotel?’

  Without looking at Troy, Hardy pointed up the narrow track towards the town.

  ‘Up there?’ Troy asked. He was aware such men existed. People who scarcely dealt in language.

  ‘Top o’ the slope. Across the square. Kedleston,’ said Hardy, in a surprisingly high, soft voice, barely raised above a whisper, still not looking at Troy. He plonked the last basket high on the load, walked to the front of the cart, and pressed a button. An electric motor kicked in with a whirr about as loud as a sewing machine, and the loaded cart wobbled off up the slope with Hardy perched at its head. Troy followed the railway caravan in search of the caravanserai, bemused by his silence, dreamily letting the sound of pigeons and the scent of stock wash over him in the warm night air. A Pennine Arabian Night.

  It could not last. The Kedleston was a hole. A hole that had last seen a paintbrush or a new roll of paper sometime in the reign of Edward VII. His room was tiny and the bed the width of a coffin. Its springs, long since exhausted, protested to him most of the night and when
they did not the man in the room next door, from which Troy seemed to be divided by two sheets of wallpaper glued back to back, broke wind frequently as though in sympathy with the tortured bedsprings.

  He awoke, aching and tired, to find himself facing the only item of twentieth-century furniture in the room. Designed and built to be makeshift, the rational extension of the wartime motto ‘make-do-and-mend’, Utility furniture had proved surprisingly durable, and God knows, there might even have been people who found the plain plywood tallboy, an identical item to which could be found in homes the length and breadth of the land, attractive. It was alchemy in wood, necessity transmuted into virtue.

  He washed and dressed to the sound of thumping water pipes and the deafening roar of emptying lavatory pans. The hot ran cold, and as he waited for the trickle of water to gain temperature, the sound of feet descending the stairs banged past his door and rattled the ornamental vase of plastic flowers on top of the tallboy.

  He was the last down. The small dining room was full. Men with moustaches. Men in brown suits, who all seemed to know each other, and to be deeply submerged in greasy eggs, greasy bacon, greasy, milky tea and knowing shop talk. A smell of stale tobacco and hair oil glided gently across the worst that breakfast could exhale. One or two of the brown suits said, ‘Mornin’,’ to Troy, and the one nearest to him asked him what he sold. Listening to their proud, jargon-ridden banter, Troy soon realised he was sharing a table with pioneers at the cutting edge of the brush and bathroom-fittings trades.

  He emerged into the street. An Indian Summer’s day. The bright light of belated sunshine, racing to make up for the cold of August. He looked around him. A bustling main street, banks and drapers and building societies and butchers, drenched in a sudden rush of smoke and steam as a northbound express roared through the cutting in the heart of the town. He looked up past the painted shop fronts to the stone upper storeys and the town shot back a century or more to the plainer solidity of the original Victorian; and above them all rose green hills, wrapping the town on three sides. It was not the landscape he had seen from the train, just before he had last nodded off. This was not the flood plain of the Midlands, this was a stone-built, sturdy northern town, climbing the sides of a Pennine valley. The landscape, if his matriculation all those years ago in School Certificate Geography served him well, of cotton and coal.

  The waitress who had served him a disgusting breakfast of congealed something with cold something, which had to recommend it only that fact that there was lots of it, had drawn him a rough plan of the town. He turned it this way and that, trying to find north, and set off up the main street towards the eastern hill, looking for the Heage Road, for the address Mrs Cockerell had given him. He had not seen quite so much stone since he last killed a dull afternoon in Westminster Abbey. The town seemed to be carved from it. The odd outburst of brick seemed like an afterthought, a failed gesture in the direction of modernity. The town, like so much of Britain, did not strike him as well-to-do. The age of austerity had gone, but its defining attribute lingered on like a persistent cobweb. An air of the poor, stopping short of poverty.

  So many of the houses were shabby, the paintwork peeling and the woodwork rotting, the people Orwellian, seeming to Troy like characters from The Road to Wigan Pier. Ascending the steep hill out of the town centre he passed what was obviously a doss house. A gaunt man stood outside wearing the remains of an army greatcoat, the flashes of a regiment still visible, the buttons dull and unpolished ten years or more, the hands clutching the lapels, one above the other as though cold in the warm light of morning, and the lips moving softly. As he passed him, Troy heard the syllables clearly ‘che, che, che . . .’—a stammer leading nowhere. He would never get past the first syllable of whatever it was, and the worn, post-war, post-what figures emerging, shuffling and farting, from the blistered maroon door of the doss house did not wait for him to finish. They shuffled on, up or down the hill. Sad and silent. Post-war, post-what? Troy often wondered what private tragedy brought men to this. Britain after the war, any war, the First had been no different, seemed to litter itself with its unhealing casualties. But it was hard to believe that the public tragedy could account for all this. Beneath, beyond, the tangible fact of war were the multitudes of intangible facts of God-knows-what. As a child Troy had thought that there must be some special place from which such men came, almost like the factory of a mad scientist where rags were arranged into the form of man, the island of Dr Moreau where the half-men were half made. So often would he meet them in the dusty lanes of Hertfordshire, so often would a talking bundle of rags ring the bell at the kitchen door of his parents’ house to be given leftovers. The reason Jimmy Wheeler’s rice pudding joke was not funny was not that it had been told too often. It was not funny because it was true.

  From the crest of the hill he could look back on the town. Over to his right, looking north, was a vast, blackened, brick chimney. So, it was a mill town after all. And, doubtless, if he’d been up and about earlier he would have passed streams of women pouring out of stone cottages in stone streets, walking in for an eight o’clock shift. Instead, at nine-thirty going on ten he was checking the names on the gates of large houses in a street of a different kind. Heage Road was, clearly, the posh end of town, the houses bigger, better maintained, further apart, lacking uniformity, suffering the gables and crestellations of passing architecture. He found Jasmine Dene, a large, between-wars Tudorish bungalow in black and white, set well back from the road, behind double gates, each gate post topped by a large square, wooden basket of hanging flowers. He opened one of the gates, parting Jasmine from its Dene. The garden was immaculate. Perfect to the artificial—rollered turf in stripes like the grain in wood, a razored edge, with borders of precisely aligned bedding plants, verging on the regimented, verging on the unattractive in the precision of their symmetry. The author of this British line and square was bending over the blades of an upturned lawnmower. A man of seventy or so, in black trousers, black waistcoat and a collarless, patterned cotton shirt. He looked up at Troy through enormous grey eyebrows. It was Uncle Todger come to life.

  ‘Art lookin’ fert missis?’ he said.

  Troy had no idea what he’d said. ‘Yes’ seemed like a good answer to try, then if the man whipped out a subscription to the Reader’s Digest or a pledge to Jehovah’s Witnesses he could try sign language.

  ‘Yes,’ Troy said.

  ‘Tha’d best ring t’bell then, anntya?’

  It didn’t seem like a question, but Troy heard the upward inflection that implied it might be. He resorted to a ‘jolly good’, always handy in time of doubt. The man bent over his jammed lawnmower once more and Troy stepped between two half-barrels, in the ubiquitous black and white, chockful of primulas, and yanked on an iron bell-pull.

  Grief is a deceiver. This was not the woman he had seen in Portsmouth. This woman was a well-preserved fifty. Tall, slender and elegant, and whilst he could not honestly say she was good-looking, she kept herself; carried herself and dressed herself in a way that made it seem inconceivable that she was the same person.

  ‘Mr Troy, you’re bright and early. Do come in.’

  She smiled and threw the door wide, and when she smiled her eyes lit up. She was wearing a boiler suit of many zips in mid-blue, the same colour as her eyes, doubtless dyed from its wartime dirty grey, belted tightly around her narrow waist, and the blue was smudged and smeared with a hundred different hues. And in her left hand she clutched two paintbrushes, one with a dab of Chinese White and the other with a shade Troy recalled from childhood as Burnt Umber, fixed in his memory with an unanswered question as to why a box of watercolours had no paint called Raw Umber. She pulled a Liberty scarf from her head, shook her hair, part brown and part grey and well-cut, free from its bond.

  ‘You’ve stayed in the town somewhere? God, I bet you could kill for a decent cup of coffee. Let me rinse the brushes and I’ll get a pot going.’

  A long corridor led to the back o
f the house. Mrs Cockerell strode off down it, leaving Troy to follow at his own pace. She had disappeared like the white rabbit, through a doorway to the right. Troy paused by the first door, knowing she was somewhere at the back of the house. Double doors opened into a front-facing sitting room. Nosiness drew him to the threshold; discretion kept him hovering on it. There, in the piercing eastern light, breaking incongruously through the leaded windows of the original mock-Tudor, were the artefacts and icons of the new, the substance of the gospel according to Cockerell. Ashtrays on stilts. A portrait of a stern Chinese woman, whose skin was green. The skater-pattern carpet, the coffee table with its laminated, clear plastic top and its inlay of plastic sea-shells—the factory version of Mother Nature’s bug-in-amber—the non-matching wallpapers, whereby two walls faced each other in pale stripes and two in dark swirls and spirals. And the curtains—curtains in Mediterranean, sun-bleached tints, depicting an assortment of ubiquitous Chianti bottles, the symbol of all we were not—a sun-loving, easy-going, mañana people. It was not a room in which he could have felt comfortable. The studio-style, studded PVC leatherette furniture, so delicate on its black tapered legs and brass-shoed feet, seemed fragile compared to the robust representatives of the new technology—the double-doored television set, the huge, multi-functional radiogram, with an array of creamy, off-white push-buttons rictus-grinning like false teeth in a tumbler. You could not be comfortable. The furniture might break beneath your weight, then the machines might eat you.

  ‘Arnold gave you his lecture, then?’

  She had appeared quietly at his side. He was about to apologise, but suddenly it seemed unnecessary. She leant on the door jamb and peered in.

  ‘You know. The Contemporary Look. All this tat.’