Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

Troy smiled.

  ‘Yes. He did.’

  ‘Bet he bored you silly with it, didn’t he? He’d have done the whole house out this way if I’d let him. Come and look. I kept one room, just for me. Arnie’s allowed in on condition he changes nothing.’

  Right at the back of the house was a large room opening out to the garden through french windows. It was an afternoon room, facing south and west, but even in the morning light it was obvious what she meant. Not a scrap of Contemporary had made it past the door. Walls papered in a pattern of English wildflowers, muted yellows and washed-out blues; a polished parquet floor; a few old, worn Persian rugs, a deep, sturdy Edwardian three-piece suite, reupholstered in pale colours; large Colefax and Fowler flowers on a cornfield chintz. A solid wall of tatty, broken-spined, well-read books. And twenty to thirty watercolours scattered across the other walls. It was traditional, it was comfortable, and it had more of an individual mark on it than the other room would have if lived in for fifty years.

  She had gone again, away to the whistling of a kettle. Troy was drawn to the paintings. Mostly, he assumed, they were her own. The peaks and valleys of Derbyshire, the watercolours of the Early British style. Unfashionable now, but she worked through that, pushing, it seemed to him after he had looked at half a dozen, through the representation of landscape to an unsentimental abstraction. He had gazed a minute or more at one such abstract until the signature told him otherwise: ‘Janet Cockerell. Combe Martin, Devon. 1948.’ What he had taken as abstract was a seascape dazzling in the silver light of North Devon, the beaten-metal sea, the red-rippled, iron rocks of the coastline. He blinked and looked again. It was abstract once more.

  He was staring, envious of her taste, at the few paintings that were not her own work—a portrait by Gwen John, a pseudo-religious scene, quite possibly a gospel story, in the unmistakable, irresistible heavy hand of Stanley Spencer—when she returned.

  ‘Shall we have coffee in the garden? After all that rain I think we might be in for an Indian Summer.’

  He followed her out through the french windows. The same division of property seemed to apply to the garden. This was not the immaculate military layout of the front; this was a wilder place altogether. Herbs and flowers competed with vegetables in the same bed—a straggling thyme bush, the crisp, blackened flowers of marjoram, dozens of onions, their tops folded over to ripen in maturity, a ragged, unpruned late-flowering red rose, petals bright as blood, a rambling, fruit-laden quince, a thousand wallflowers turning woody, and being left to seed themselves.

  An easel stood facing the south-west, across the smoking chimneys of the town, down across slate roofs, over the Orwellian maze of stone streets. The merest outline of an image appeared. She had clearly been at work a matter of half an hour or so before Troy’s visit distracted her. She set down her tray on a wicker table—a cheap and cheerful Suzy Cooper pattern of crockery, and a large pot of steaming hot coffee. Troy took the chair furthest from the house, and found himself perched almost on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the overgrown remains of a quarry. Instinctively he pulled his chair a foot nearer the house.

  She said nothing until he had a cup of aromatic, strong, black coffee in his hands.

  ‘I know I’m playing with your sense of paradox, Chief Inspector, but my husband is not dead.’

  ‘Not dead.’

  ‘Not dead. Running.’

  ‘Running?’

  ‘Hiding.’

  ‘From what?’

  She set down her cup. They had in a few, short strokes arrived at the heart of the matter it seemed.

  ‘I think my husband was living beyond his means. I think we’ve lived high on the hog for far too long, and I think whatever he’d been doing to finance our style of living was about to break, his chickens were coming home to roost. And he ran.’

  ‘The things he left behind him in Portsmouth?’

  ‘All planned. Designed to make us think he was dead.’

  ‘The body?’

  ‘Coincidence. A remarkable coincidence.’

  ‘And the conviction the Government have that your husband was working for them?’

  She shrugged, much as he would have done himself.

  ‘I don’t think the right hand knows what the left hand’s doing.’

  Troy could agree with that. In fact, it was the best summing up he’d heard of the governmental mess that had seeped out around the clumsy attempts to conceal whatever had been going on—worthy of a leader writer.

  ‘Why would Her Majesty’s Government use a man like my husband? He wasn’t the best frogman in SOE, even in his prime. And that was more than ten years ago. He was a stringy, seedy, out of condition fifty-two-year-old, far too fond of cork tips and whisky. He was thirty-five when the war began. If he hadn’t been in the Navy anyway he would never have been called up, not at his age. The idea that they’d get him out of retirement to do another job is preposterous.’

  ‘What do you think he was doing in Portsmouth?’

  ‘Preparing his own disappearance. Scattering a few red herrings. It just so happened it was the spies, his old pals, who picked them up and not the ordinary bobbies whom I’d yet to inform of his disappearance. I didn’t report him missing until ten days after you met him. Right now he’s abroad somewhere, puzzled to read that he was a spy, cockahoop that it lets him off the hook and scuppers his creditors.’

  ‘Have they approached you?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Doesn’t that blow a hole in your case that it was a problem with money?’

  ‘No. I’ve the evidence of my eyes. It may be they don’t know they’ve been had. It could take a long time to surface. What I know is that we lived very high on the hog these last few years. And I know we can’t afford it.’

  ‘How long do you think this has been going on?’

  ‘Five or six years. Since the Festival of Britain.’

  She laughed at her own exactitude, looked down into her coffee cup, smiling wryly.

  ‘He came back from that telling me, “I’ve seen the future and it works—works in any size and colour you want.” He always told me business was booming. Once Labour was out he used to bang on about economic growth. We had a businessman’s government, he said. He’d hold forth on that on the golf course, in the Conservative Club and when he was slumming in the British Legion. It took over from, “What I did in the war.” I was pleased not to have to listen to his war any more, but I thought it was twaddle. And five years later we have three shops—I used to scream if he used the word “emporium”—a warehouse stuffed with all the tat he seems to think people want—and he’s a better authority on that than I am—a Rover and a Jag in the garage, and he could afford to abandon an MG in Portsmouth. Our current account is absurdly healthy and our deposit is stuffed. None of it adds up. He couldn’t have come by it legally.’

  Troy thought it odd that debt or fraud should force him to disappear, when his bank accounts were lined. Equally he thought it odd that she should be telling him all this.

  ‘Supposing you’re right and he is alive. Supposing I find him. You would, in effect, have shopped him.’

  ‘He ditched me. I don’t care.’

  ‘And the business?’

  ‘I haven’t touched it. I’m a director. All I’ve done is sign cheques for the managers and leave them to it. If I’m right and Arnold’s alive and you find him, then I’ll sell the business over his head, pay off the people he’s swindled and to hell with him. If you’re right and he’s dead, then I’ll get probate. Either way I don’t care. I don’t need the money. My father left me a trust. God knows Arnold didn’t need to fiddle anything. We had quite enough as it was. But he had his honour. He held it as a principle that we shouldn’t spend my money. A man’s not a man who’s supported by his wife. That sort of thing. Men and their wretched honour. Just another of their lies. Something they thought up for their own convenience. I never had a lot of time for Arnold’s honour.’

  Troy remembered
a line Conrad put into the mouth of his old sailor Marlow: ‘He made so much of the dishonour, when it was the guilt alone that mattered.’ Of course, she was right. But Troy doubted the worth of mentioning a book quite so male as Lord Jim.

  ‘Tell me,’ he tacked. ‘Who came to you?’

  ‘I don’t quite follow you, Mr Troy.’

  ‘You reported your husband missing . . . in the conventional way.’

  ‘Yes. The local inspector came up. Harold Warriss. I suppose you could say he’s a friend of the family. I’ve—we’ve known him for years. He was blandly reassuring. Told me Arnold would turn up soon enough.’

  ‘And when he didn’t? When the papers became chock-a-block with spy stories?’

  ‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I didn’t associate those stories with my husband.’

  ‘And nor, it seems, did Warriss?’

  ‘Well, if he did, it didn’t prompt him to pay me a second visit.’

  ‘And when the PM named your husband?’

  ‘Oh, the Prime Minister has old-fashioned manners,’ her voice rippled with the sarcasm. ‘When he finally decided to make a statement naming my husband, which he must have been planning for weeks, he sent a chap to see me.

  ‘I heard nothing at all until about a week before Arnold was named. It had, honestly, never crossed my mind that he might be the anonymous Portsmouth spy. Then one day, without warning, a chap from the Foreign Office turned up. Daniel Keeffe, about your age I suppose. Good-looking young chap. Very shy, very nervous, stammering an apology on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. Arnold would be named in a Commons statement the next week, and it had all been a dreadful mistake.’

  ‘He actually said that?’

  ‘No. His exact words as I recall were, “It’s all been the most dreadful misunderstanding. I’m so dreadfully sorry. I’d no idea that he meant to do it.”

  ‘“I” not “we”?’

  ‘Yes. He seemed to take it very personally. He was very upset. I’m sure I should have asked him more questions, but I didn’t. I didn’t believe Arnold had been the Portsmouth spy. I still don’t. As far as I was concerned he was still missing. It’s very convenient for the Government to say it’s Arnold. Ties up a loose end, doesn’t it? But it isn’t Arnold.’

  ‘And the press?’

  ‘Oh, they hung around at the gates for a few days. The old pals’ act finally worked for Arnold. Warriss put a man in uniform outside the house until they cleared off. Then nothing. Other fish to fry, I suppose. What’s a dead frogman compared to Nasser?’

  ‘You know,’ said Troy, after a while, ‘most men don’t disappear over money. It’s usually women.’

  She laughed, a short, bitter snort.

  ‘Give over, Mr Troy. You saw my husband. Do you think he has the makings of anyone’s fancy man?’

  It called for, and Troy deployed, a standard line from Teach Yourself Detection.

  ‘It takes all sorts,’ he said, squirming at the phrase.

  ‘Believe me, Mr Troy, my husband wasn’t interested in women, or sex. At least not in—’

  She stopped herself. Passed over the moment by pouring another cup of coffee for him. But it was impossible to let the remark go.

  ‘At least,’ he said, ‘not in ordinary sex?’

  There was a pause so long he thought she would not answer, but then she drew breath and picked up his gaze.

  ‘No. Not in ordinary sex. He was over-fond of his frogman’s suit. He wanted us to do it while he wore the damn thing. I never would.’

  ‘And you don’t think he might have found someone who would?’

  ‘No. It’s the kind of thing he could get from whores in all the cities he visited from Manchester to Stockholm. God knows he spent enough time travelling to know half the whores in Europe. That would not surprise me. But the idea of another woman actually offering him such nonsense as part of a sexual relationship—no. I can’t find that believable. My husband could not sustain such a relationship. It wasn’t in him to do it. When I told him I wouldn’t let him into the bed in his rubber suit, he took to undressing in the bathroom. I haven’t seen him naked in ten years. I don’t think he could show his body to a woman. I saw more of the man on the slab in Portsmouth than I ever did of my husband . . .’

  She paused for breath. Troy hoped she would pick up; he did not want to prompt her in any direction with any word of his own.

  ‘That, that Inspector Bonser. Do you know, he actually asked me if I could identify . . . I mean . . . he actually thought I could recognise my husband by his . . . thing.’

  She paused again. He said nothing.

  ‘Of course, I couldn’t. But he would ask. It was what he was going on about when you walked in. He really would not believe that a woman could not know that.’

  She slammed down the cup onto its saucer. Anger, worked up in an instant, to save her from her tears. She leant back, her face tilted to the sky while the moment passed and the prospect of tears with it. When she turned her eyes back to Troy, she was almost calm, and she was harder and sterner. Suddenly he existed for her. She was aware of her listener as well as her own narrative.

  ‘You know, I’m not at all sure I should be telling you all this.’

  ‘I’m a detective, Mrs Cockerell. I need clues.’

  ‘Yes—the detective detects. But what I detect is the inward sneer of the man. You are sneering at all of this, aren’t you, Mr Troy?’

  Damn the woman. He had not thought she would be so acute. Sneering? Of course he was sneering.

  ‘Don’t reproach yourself too much, Mr Troy. There’s probably a lot to sneer at. I imagine a house called Jasmine Dene is enough to make your home counties sensibility heave. My husband wanted to merge our names and rename the house, but that yielded “Jarno” or “Arnoja”. I suggested “Dunswimmin” might be appropriate for an ex-frogman, at which point he gave up and we left it with the name it had when we bought it. Not a great sense of humour, my husband.’

  Troy felt he had tacked into the wind. It had been short of explosive, but it had still been an outburst. He picked up the line and gently pulled her in.

  ‘Was he a frogman when you met him?’

  ‘Yes. I met him in the spring of 1940. The last weeks of the Phoney War. We married that summer. Everybody did, after all. Summer of the Battle of Britain and the quickie marriage. He spent most of the war teaching men fifteen years younger than himself how to be frogmen. That hurt. He came home irritable as hell. “Boys doing a man’s job,” as he put it. Then as the war hotted up he went into active service. I think Special Operations must have got short of qualified swimmers, possibly desperate to have taken Arnold off the back burner—perhaps all those boys he trained were dead by then?—and from the summer of 1943 he was tapping the side of his nose, using phrases like “hush-hush” and banging on about work of “national importance”, about which he couldn’t possibly tell me anything. He never realised I didn’t want to know. I think he would have loved it if I’d wormed a secret out of him.’

  ‘But afterwards—surely he told you then what he’d done?’

  ‘Yes. Of course. I suppose he was right. It was “hush-hush”. He was surveying French beaches looking for the D-Day site. He did some genuinely dangerous work, I’ll give him that. He once swam into Brest to set magnetic mines on German ships, that sort of thing. But he wasn’t anything special, he was just inordinately proud of it. I don’t know what the magic ingredient was, but those five years of hell and want seem to have imbued us all with a preposterous national pride.’

  She paused. Looked at Troy quizzically. Weighing up his reaction.

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Troy. I’m not unpatriotic. It’s . . . well . . . it’s just “men”, isn’t it? I suppose you’re of an age. You did your bit in the war, I wasn’t trying to offend—’

  Troy cut her short.

  ‘I wasn’t in the services, Mrs Cockerell.’

  She raised an eyebrow at this. There could be few men of Troy’s age without a w
ar record of some sort. It was his generation’s war.

  ‘I was a WREN,’ she added bluntly.

  He said nothing.

  ‘At Bletchley Park. Cryptography. That sort of thing.’

  Troy was quietly amazed. Her casual ‘that sort of thing’ had been the best-kept secret of the war. Odd things had come to light in the years since, but it was still true to say that it was also one of the best-kept secrets of the peace.

  ‘My father died in ’43. Left us this house. Arnold got an early demob. We were installed here before the results of the ’45 election were out. He went onto the reserve list, but I think if they’d given him a choice he would have stayed. He wasn’t a conscript after all, he was a regular, even though his time would have been up in ’44 anyway if there hadn’t been a war. But he got his orders soon after VE Day. All they’d looked at was his age. He was forty-one. I suppose it was generous in its way. Discharge the married men first, the middle-aged, those with dependent families. Of course, we didn’t have children. We’d spent most of the war apart. And by then it was too late.

  ‘We stood in King Street at the end of July and cheered when Labour got in. Everybody did. The next morning I found Arnold cleaning his frogman’s kit. He put it in the garage, in a steel trunk. Once or twice a year, he’d take it out. Clean it. And put it back. The only swimming he did after that was on our holidays. We used to go to Woolacombe. My choice—the North Devon light is quite incredible, I’ve been painting it for years—but the sea was warm and blue if you wanted to swim. We went every year in the forties, but I never saw him do anything more than swim a few yards like any holiday maker, then he’d laze around on the beach, and then he’d prop up the bars, boring people with his war.

  ‘The last few years I’ve been on my own. Arnold’s been on his foreign jaunts—buying, selling, roister-doistering. God knows.’

  In the midst of all this had been a telling statement. Troy wondered if he could make her pick it up again.

  ‘You say he kept his frogman’s kit in the garage?’

  ‘Yes—in a trunk. If I’d let him he’d probably have hung it on the wall like a trophy.’