Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re with the Branch?’

  ‘No. As a matter of fact I run the Murder Squad.’

  Warriss was not impressed.

  ‘Is that so? Who’s been murdered, then?’

  ‘Cockerell.’

  ‘News to me. Last I heard the Russkis had got him. We do get the news up here, y’know. We’re not all brown ale and whippets.’

  ‘I was asked to look into the disappearance and possible death of Commander Cockerell.’

  ‘I see,’ Warriss mused. ‘And you don’t think your first port of call might have been the local nick?’

  ‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

  The same glint appeared in Warriss’s eyes—the same smug satisfaction in his own powers of deduction.

  ‘It was her, wasn’t it? The wife. She dragged you up here, didn’t she. The bitch, she never trusted me. I’m handling Arnold Cockerell’s disappearance, not the bloody Yard!’

  He tapped his own chest with a stubby index finger. His voice rose. He was shouting, now. Not the faintest shred of pretence of respect for rank.

  ‘It’s my case, Mr Troy! The matter was reported to my nick, to me personally. I’m in charge of the investigation. Dammit, I’ve known Cockerell ten years or more. He was a friend! You want to carry on an investigation on my patch, you go through me!’

  A convenient express roared through the cutting, southbound, and shrouded them in smoke and steam. As the air cleared Troy tried the only ploy left to him. He looked Warriss clearly in the eyes and put on his best no-nonsense voice.

  ‘However. There is now a second case. Murder is my business. George Jessel’s murder will be my business.’

  Warriss laughed. Troy was expecting another tirade, and the man laughed.

  ‘Murder? George Jessel? We’ll see about that.’

  He pointed off towards the door of the building behind Troy. The Police Surgeon was emerging, his bag half-open, the rubber tail of a stethoscope dangling from it. He held out his hand to Troy. Troy shook it. It was the first semblance of good manners he’d seen so far.

  ‘Jewel,’ the man said. ‘Joe Jewel. County Police Surgeon.’

  Before Troy could say a word Warriss cut in sharply.

  ‘Whatever you’re thinking, don’t say it. There’s not a joke about Jewel and Warriss we haven’t heard. So just save your breath.’

  One would think, thought Troy, that to have the same name as the most famous pair of music hall comedians in the land might be some incentive to behave less like a clown. However, he knew the thought would be wasted if uttered.

  ‘Well,’ Warriss said to Jewel. ‘Am I right?’

  ‘Oh aye. His heart. Finally gave out.’

  ‘You’ll sign then?’

  ‘Oh aye. Open and shut.’

  Warriss seemed almost to grin at Troy. A silent, smirky ‘I told you so.’

  ‘I don’t want to interrupt the smooth working of an efficient team,’ Troy said, ‘but when a man is found dead in suspicious circumstances, it isn’t open and shut.’

  Warriss seemed not have switched on his patent sarcasm detector and let his other half answer.

  ‘Oh, believe me, Mr Troy. It is. Y’see. Being a Police Surgeon in this neck o’ the woods isn’t full time. There isn’t the call. We don’t get the bodies. I’m a GP most of the time. So happens George was a patient of mine. He’d chainsmoked for forty-five years, he swigged scotch like it was Tizer, he’d got a heart about as strong as a bathroom sponge and arteries as hard as treacle toffee. Believe me, Mr Troy, this is natural causes. He died of a massive, and entirely expected, heart attack. And I’ve no qualms about signing his death certificate.’

  Warriss found his twopenn’orth.

  ‘The only thing suspicious is the fact that you’re here. And you’ve already said you weren’t investigating Jessel, so that’s that.’

  ‘I want a post mortem and I want the matter reported to the coroner,’ said Troy, softly and emphatically. ‘If you do not go through the motions now and of your own volition, I will call the Met Commissioner and your Chief Constable and I will report the pair of you for obstructing an investigation.’

  Jewel looked at Warriss. Warriss looked at Jewel. A practised double-take.

  ‘You London shites are all the same,’ Warriss snarled. ‘You think you can come up here and—’

  ‘Just do it!’

  Warriss eased his elbow off the wall. For a second Troy thought he was going to hit him. Then a uniformed constable came dashing down the alley.

  ‘Langley Mill on the phone, boss. Urgent.’

  Warriss worked his arm vigorously. He was not going to hit his superior officer. He had lounged so long in his posture of arrogance that the nerve in his elbow had gone to sleep. But his face was red and his voice was hoarse. If only the wit could be found he would surely have flung a bon mot or a clever insult at Troy.

  ‘Cunt,’ he said, trying his best. ‘You’ll get your PM, but if you’re still on my patch tomorrow you report into the nick, and that goes for every day you stay. Sir!’

  He stomped off down the alley. Jewel shrugged a little. Closed the clasp on his bag.

  ‘It’ll be in the post, laddie. But you’re wrong. You’ll see.’

  He followed Warriss. The cleaning woman in the flowered overall appeared at the threshold of number 23, shaking her yellow duster. Troy approached her.

  ‘Excuse me?’

  ‘Why, what yer done?’

  ‘I’d just like to ask you a few questions.’

  ‘Ask away, me duck.’

  It seemed to Troy that the gap between the local argot and received pronunciation was considerable, but he would endeavour.

  ‘Do you clean the whole building—all the offices?’

  ‘Ah do.’

  ‘Mr Jessel’s office?’

  ‘Oh aye. Very partickler is Mr Jessel. Every morning, quart to nine.’

  ‘I see,’ said Troy. ‘And you didn’t see anyone come in between then and ten o’clock?’

  ‘No. Only Mr Jessel. He came in about quarter past. Then ah took me tea-break, like. ’Ad a bit o’ snap. Ah were back in afe an ’our. Ah saw thee come in. Then young Brenda not five minutes later.’

  ‘And you cleaned Mr Jessel’s office.’

  ‘Ah just said ah did. Cleaned and polished every mornin’, same time.’

  Troy shot up the stairs, praying silently that Detective Sergeant Godbehere had more brains than his boss.

  He found him, sitting on the chair he had sat on himself the day before, reading the Daily Mirror. He was tall, slim, and when he looked up at Troy’s entrance seemed to have a mercifully intelligent look about him. He had had the decency to drape a sheet across the late George Jessel.

  ‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to help me,’ said Troy.

  Godbehere folded his newspaper.

  ‘Why is it, sir, that at the sound of those words the hairs on the back of my neck stand up?’

  ‘Copper’s instinct.’

  ‘I’m supposed to wait till the meat wagon gets here. And when Brenda’s recovered I take her statement, and when you’ve got your bollocking from the boss, I take yours. And that’s all I’m supposed to do. You do know that, don’t you, sir?’

  ‘Indeed. I’ve already been bollocked, and I think common courtesy will allow Brenda another half hour in which to grieve. In the meantime I want you to dust the place for prints.’

  Godbehere stood up and reached for his bag of tricks.

  ‘You’ll get me shot.’

  ‘I’ll carry the can.’

  ‘You’d better,’ Godbehere said without inflection. ‘Now, where do you want me to start?’

  ‘Desktop. It was wiped clean at about nine this morning.’

  ‘Handy,’ said Godbehere, and he pushed the chair away to make room in the tiny space available to him.

  ‘Just a minute,’ Troy stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Did you pull up the chair to sit down?’
/>   ‘No. It was here, by the desk. I just parked me backside.’

  Troy saw in the mind’s eye that fastidious gesture. The precise aligning of the chair with the wall. The flapping handkerchief. It was a gesture born entirely of habit. Surely Jessel, a fussy man Troy concluded, did this with every visitor? Set the chair out and put the chair back. He looked at the patch of claret-coloured carpet by the wall. Four deep ruts had been impressed in the fabric by the habitual presence of the chair legs.

  ‘I’ll tell you now,’ said Troy. ‘Whatever Jessel died of, he did not die alone. Someone was here. Someone sat exactly where you were sitting when I walked in just now. Dust the lot, doorknob, chairback everything.’

  ‘You’ll get me shot,’ Godbehere said again, unpacking his case, and seeming indifferent to the prospect even as he stated it.

  Troy knelt down and looked across the leather top of the desk at eye level. Something obtruded, a speck or a blob, just off-centre to the right. He took out his pocket handkerchief. Put a corner of the Irish linen to the blob and watched as a tiny brown stain spread a thirty-second of an inch up the material. He stood and put the cloth to his nose. Oil. Definitely oil. And if those two weeks walking around with that ridiculous Browning stuck up his armpit had been at all useful, they had taught him the smell of gun oil.

  He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it in his inside pocket where it nestled against the papers he had pinched from Jessel’s desk. Godbehere dusted the edge of the desk with white powder and offered an instant opinion.

  ‘There’s something here. No doubt about it. D’ye reckon that cleaning lady was thorough?’

  ‘You saw her. Looked to me as though she cleaned Pandaemonium for Lucifer on a regular basis. No brimstone left unturned.’

  Troy looked down at the powdery smudges. This, like money, was not one of his strong points. He was about as capable of reading the signs as he was of deciphering the hidden meanings in wallpaper. Godbehere seemed to realise this only too well.

  ‘I’ll get on better on my own, sir. Why don’t you do whatever it is you have to do and come down the nick to give me your statement a bit later. I’m there till six today and I’m on again at eight-thirty tomorrow. The nick’s out on the Matlock Road. Ask anybody.’

  Troy left to do whatever he had to do. It was just that he had no idea what the whatever he had to do should be.

  He stood at the end of Railway Cuttings, pondering the dilemma. Either he placed a great deal of confidence in Godbehere, or he steamed in uninvited, set up his own investigation, knowing full well that the connection to Cockerell, and Cockerell’s connection to what Stan would inevitably call ‘spookery’, was enough to make Onions hesitate in backing him. And if he did, Troy would then find himself stepping on the toes of every local plod for miles around and making himself the most unpopular copper in England.

  Someone was honking a car horn at him. He looked at a pale Daimler or Jaguar parked a little way up the street. All he could see in the windscreen was a reflection of the street outside, crowded with shoppers. Then the driver’s door opened and a stout, owlish figure beckoned to him.

  ‘Get in,’ he yelled.

  It was George Brown. The penny dropped. The Somewhere-up-North for which Brown sat in the Commons was Belper. This was his constituency. Good God, he should have realised.

  He pulled open the passenger door and got in. Brown eased the large car into traffic and headed slowly down the street.

  ‘I don’t have to ask you what you’re doing here, do I?’ he said.

  ‘Is it that obvious?’

  ‘Only two things have put Belper on the map since the industrial revolution. Me, and Arnold bloody Cockerell!’

  ‘You knew him?’

  ‘You couldn’t miss him. Local nob. Rotary Club. Chamber of Commerce. Treasurer of the Tory Party for a couple of years. Always giving me gyp at public meetings. But I can’t honestly say I knew him. Mind you, if it’s local knowledge you want, I’m meeting two of my chaps for a drink at the Legion in five minutes. You might as well join us.

  Brown swung the car left at the next junction.

  ‘Did anyone raise the matter of Cockerell’s disappearance with you? As a constituency matter, I mean?’

  ‘His wife did. But of course, by then it was what you’d call a Commons undercurrent. Your brother was masterminding it. I had a word. He said ‘leave it to me’, and I was glad to. I was supposed to have blotted my copybook where the Russians are concerned, as I’m sure you gathered from Brother Khrushchev. It was better all round for Rod to handle it. I told Cockerell’s wife what I could. Wasn’t a lot.’

  Brown paused.

  ‘I have to ask you this. Your brother didn’t ask you to come up here, did he?’

  ‘No. And I think I can say that he’d have told you first.’

  ‘I’ve big feet,’ Brown said. ‘Easy to tread on.’

  He swung the car left again and brought it to a halt in front of a sturdy, squat example of twenties architecture. The Royal British Legion. Watering hole of old, and not so old, soldiers.

  Troy could not recall that he had ever been inside a British Legion. He had, after all, no entitlement. He had not only not done his bit, he would have lied, cheated and run away to Ireland to avoid doing his bit. It had never come to that—Onions had kept him out of the forces as an essential worker. He did not think that Brown had been in the forces either. It was an odd feeling; it set them apart from their generation. At most Brown was two or three years younger than Troy, one of the rising stars of the Party, if the fogies of fifty or so—Gaitskell, Rod—ever gave them space to spread their wings. The next election was four years away and closing with every crisis. Gaitskell looked set to win it hands down. It would be a very long time before the generation of George Brown and Harold Wilson found room at the top.

  ‘You’re not a member, are you?’ Brown was saying as he locked the car door.

  Troy shook his head.

  ‘Then Walter had better sign us in. I’m not either, you see.’

  Troy wondered if this admission had undertones. Did a British man, let alone a British politician, of their age automatically feel the divide of fought/not fought? Was it for ever going to be held up as the central action, the defining experience of their generation? Worse, when they got in there, to the Legion, what did people—men, it was always men—talk about? Could a bunch of forty-year-olds rehash ‘what I did in the war’ till the day they died? Would they be doing this in the 1980s, the 1990s, into the next century?

  Brown introduced Troy to Walter and Ted—two men separated by a couple of stones in weight, a couple of years in age—roughly the same age as Brown and Troy—and a small round table bearing a crumpled copy of the Manchester Guardian and two half-finished half pints of bitter. They shook hands and said hello, and revealed a wider gap. The stout one, Walter, was clearly a Lancastrian, and the skinny one, Ted, just as clearly a Yorkshireman. Quite a melting pot, the British Legion, thought Troy.

  ‘What’ll you have?’ the thin man said.

  Brown asked for a half of the local brew—a Mansfield ale—and Troy followed on the Driberg principle that the first crack in the ice was usually to be achieved by drinking what the working man drank.

  Troy looked around. It was a dull place. Inevitably, it was a dull place. But no duller than any London club he’d ever been in. Faintly hideous with varnished woodwork, it was neither more nor less pleasant than the Garrick with all its varnished portraits dulled with age—and no one had asked if he was wearing a tie. The new Queen had pride of place with a wall to herself, a public photograph in red robes. The war had its small memorials in the decorative plates hanging askew on the wall, to the local regiment—the Sherwood Foresters—and to the 1st Polish Parachute regiment. The illusion that the war had been England’s war was a thin one, and only idiots ever believed it was. England had been too full of Czechs and Poles—and Yanks—for it to have been otherwise. In the background he could see a row of f
ull-sized billiard tables, and the bar-room gossip was punctuated by the constant click of the balls. The gossip. He strained to hear, strained to make sense of a difficult local accent, and found, much to his amazement, that old soldiers talked about the weather and football and rugby league and what they’d seen on the ‘telly’ last night. No one mentioned the war.

  He felt Brown’s elbow nudge him, and turned to see him lighting up his pipe. The look on the stout one’s face told him he’d just asked a question that Troy had not heard.

  ‘I was just saying. Would you be Rod Troy’s brother?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘He’s been up a few times and given us a talk. Came up for George in ’50 and ’51.’

  There was a slight pause, possibly for Troy to fill, but he did not so the stout one added, ‘Decent bloke,’ by way of a coda.

  At his best, Rod was a passionate believer in and campaigner for Love and Justice and Democracy. A man who hated lies. Troy could admire that, even if it was usually he who flicked up all three for him. At his worst, Rod was ‘a decent bloke’. Troy hated the decent bloke.

  The thin one returned, balancing a tray of drinks and the first rush of shag cloud billowed forth from Brown.

  ‘The Chief Inspector’s here about Arnold Cockerell,’ he said through the smoke.

  The two men looked at each other. Troy thought they both smiled. He was dreading the existence of another local double act and hoped to God they’d something sensible to say.

  Walter spoke first. ‘So it’s not him down at Portsmouth? Must say I never thought much of the idea of Arnold as Bulldog Drummond.’

  Troy put the obvious question. ‘You knew him, then?’

  ‘Moved here about the same time I did. I met him when I got out of the Army at the end of ’45. Of course, he was with us then.’

  ‘With us?’ said Troy.

  ‘Party member,’ Ted put in across the top of his glass.

  ‘We saw a lot of him,’ Walter continued. ‘He was very active on George’s behalf.’

  Troy looked at Brown, smacking loudly at the end of his pipe.

  ‘By 1950 I was Satan, of course.’

  ‘No,’ said Ted. ‘He was still with you in ’50—he left us between then and the ’51 election.’