Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  He threw his head back, rolled his eyes, and waved his hands in the air in mock horror.

  ‘Ach! Ach! This is disgusting. Christ almighty, what kind of a man eats fish and eggs and rice mixed up altogether for his breakfast?’

  Troy seized Kolankiewicz by the straps of his apron and bodily lifted him to eye level, suspended him over the corpse, all but nose to nose, speaking softly, scarcely more than a whisper in the wake of Kolankiewicz’s racket.

  ‘A certain kind of Englishman, that’s who. It’s a delicacy of the Raj. It’s called kedgeree. And I saw Cockerell demolish a plateful for breakfast and then start on the toast and marmalade.’

  Kolankiewicz smiled sheepishly, as much as he could, suspended by his braces, feet dangling, he shrugged—palms upwards in surrender to the logic on offer.

  ‘Kedgeree, schmedgeree . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Then it’s him,’ Kolankiewicz said quietly.

  Troy put him down. Heard the click as his heels hit the floor.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it’s him.’

  He turned round to jack.

  ‘It’s him,’ he said softly.

  Jack sat very still, the colour only just returning to his cheeks.

  ‘Can we go now?’ he asked.

  §58

  Kolankiewicz seemed not to bear the grudge. Out in the car park, dignity and hat restored, he stuffed his News Chronicle into his pocket and assumed a job-well-done affability. It was a moment Troy had been waiting for, and if he blew up at him now it would have little immediate consequence.

  ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you,’ Troy said. ‘You know, about that night in Stepney with Khrushchev.’

  ‘No, no,’ Kolankiewicz said quickly. ‘There is no need. I quite understand your motives. Indeed, I did at the time. It requires no explanation. Since neither you nor I have the courage or the morality that would enable us to put a bullet through the man’s head, a little education was perhaps the best thing you could have done for him, for you, for the world. I just hope you had a long spoon.’

  He grinned wickedly at Troy over the last phrase.

  ‘No,’ said Troy, treading carefully. ‘That isn’t really what I meant. I wanted to ask what you and he talked about.’

  ‘Poland, of course! He told me he could envisage a day when the Russian soldier need not stand one inch beyond the Russian frontier, that he could foresee a time when Poland would be free to call its own elections, elect its own government. And he could see this because he had no doubts that they would elect a Communist government. It was the inevitability of history’s purpose.’

  ‘Aha. And what did you say?’

  ‘Oh—I called the bastard a liar to his face.’

  In his mind’s eye Troy saw Khrushchev rising red-faced from his seat at exactly the moment Eric the landlord had appeared with his handbell to cry, ‘Aven’t you lot got homes to go to?’ It seemed to him now that both he and Kolankiewicz had been saved by the bell. The surprise was how quickly Khrushchev had recovered from what must undoubtedly be the worst abuse anyone had heaped upon him since the death of Stalin. Between Stepney and Claridge’s he had slipped smoothly from the surly to the affable to the downright chatty.

  ‘Shall we go?’

  It was Jack, pulling Troy back from reverie.

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  Troy turned back to Kolankiewicz.

  ‘Do you need a lift up to London?’

  ‘No,’ he replied, tugging at the brim of his Homburg. ‘For favours like this to buggers like you, I demand the bribe of a First-Class railway ticket, with which the fat bloke in your office has furnished me. While you boys struggle down the crowded roads, I shall eat a British Railways high tea, with sticky cakes and a little help from my hip flask, and finish the crossword puzzle in this morning’s paper. In which there is no small measure of justice. So long, flatfoots.’

  ‘Charming,’ Wildeve said.

  §59

  Wildeve drove. Pleased as punch to be behind the wheel of the Bentley. He was a far better driver than Troy. Troy sat well back in the passenger seat, half-mesmerised by the rhythmic flashing of the sunlight through the trees, working it all out. They had reached Petersfield before he felt he had the pieces of the puzzle in place. Even then, they made no picture he could recognise.

  ‘If that is Cockerell—’ he began.

  ‘What? What the hell do you mean “if’? You’ve just told Kolankiewicz it’s definitely Cockerell!’

  ‘Of course it’s Cockerell, but—’

  Troy got no further. Wildeve swung the car off the road, still doing over fifty, and brought it screeching to a stop on the forecourt of a roadside café.

  ‘I! But! Dammit, Freddie, why are you even thinking about this? It is Cockerell. That’s all there is to it and for God’s sake let that be an end to it.’

  ‘But—’ Troy struggled pathetically.

  Wildeve snatched the keys from the ignition, slammed the car door behind him and strode off across the forecourt into the café. Troy had little choice but to follow. To sit and wait in the car was so like the action of a sulking adolescent that he would have followed Jack through the gates of hell.

  He found him at a Formica-topped, greasy table inside the wooden hut, two cups of murky-looking tea in front of him. The whole place reeked of cigarettes and bacon and egg. Burly lorry drivers in blue overalls and bobble hats turned to look at two toffs in dark suits, silk ties and polished shoes. As Troy sat down, self-consciously, accepting the silent invitation, Jack pushed the caked bottles of ketchup and brown sauce away from the centre, clearing the ground for what Troy knew damn well was bound to be confrontation.

  ‘Spit it out, Jack,’ he said, and sipped at the mess of tea.

  ‘I don’t understand you. I just don’t understand you. Isn’t it obvious what’s going on?’

  ‘Of course it is. It’s a spook affair through and through. We knew that from the start.’

  ‘Good. At least we see eye to eye on that. But it’s because it’s a spook affair that we get out now. All Cockerell’s wife asked was to know one way or the other that that corpse was him. The Government had already said it was, but no one could blame her for clinging to one last shred of hope that her wandering hubby might still be alive somewhere.’

  ‘There’s more to it than that.’

  ‘There’s an infinite amount more to it than that! But it’s none of our business.’

  ‘Jack, aren’t you the slightest bit curious? Someone sapped him and dumped him in the water. If he hadn’t got caught up in a ship’s propeller we’d have known it was him the day he was washed up. But it was a mess. Given that it was a mess, why were the local plod so anxious that it should be Cockerell? First they rip a page out of the register at the Henry, as though they want to conceal Cockerell, then they practically bully the poor woman into saying it’s her husband when she cannot say for sure that it is. Doesn’t that strike you as a mite odd?’

  ‘You don’t get it do you, Freddie? Let me spell it out for you. What did Onions say to us in 1944? He told us that he’d roast our balls over a slow fire if he ever caught us meddling in a spook affair again!’

  Troy sipped at his tea. Jack’s anger had not subsided enough to let him so much as touch his cup.

  ‘To be precise, Jack, what Stan actually said was that if anything like that ever came up again he wanted to know at the outset. He didn’t say we couldn’t do our job.’

  ‘And you’re going to tell him, are you?’

  Of course Troy wasn’t going to tell Onions. Wildeve had him cornered now. Lying would be pointless.

  ‘Not yet anyway.’

  ‘Not yet, or when it suits you?’

  ‘Much the same thing really.’

  ‘So you’re going after this on your own, knowing bloody well that the next step has got to be investigating some damn KGB spook or other, without telling Stan.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought what the next move was, but if you put
it like that—’

  ‘There’s no other way to put it. The man is dead. Washed up in his frogman’s clobber not two miles from the very berth in which even Her Majesty’s Government has admitted he was spying on the Russian ship. Who else do you think you’re going to investigate? How far do you think you’ll get?’

  Troy shrugged. Wildeve was thinking so much quicker than he was himself. But then Wildeve was burdened by only half the knowledge Troy had.

  ‘I’ll tell you what the next move is. We drop it. You report back to the widow, give her the bad news, express your condolences and get back to honest murders. Ifyou don’t—’

  Troy opened his mouth, about to speak. Wildeve’s hand shot up, flatly and squarely in his face, like the point-duty copper halting the mighty roar of London’s traffic.

  ‘Shut up! If you don’t do this, if I hear that you are pursuing the matter of the death of Commander Cockerell, in whatever direction, from whatever source, so help me, Freddie, I’ll shop you. I’ll shop you and I’ll tell Stan everything. Do you understand me?’

  Troy understood very well.

  They drove back to London in silence. He could not, after all, think in what direction he could or should pursue the matter, nor, for the life of him, could he think from what source such a fresh impulse or initiative might come. It really didn’t matter that Jack had taken such a hard line. In identifying Cockerell he had hit the buffers. The only Cockerell that could matter was the one who wasn’t washed up on the Hampshire coast, the errant husband whom Troy had thought of as romping somewhere with a mistress, the errant husband whom his wife had thought was fleeing his creditors, and since the man on the slab was Commander Cockerell, none of the others existed. For the first time in days he could not hear the fox and the cat. Their song was silent and their feet were stilled.

  §60

  When he got home it was early evening. The September nights not autumnal, but no longer summer either in that you could not take their duration for granted. Tosca was sitting in the living room in her Chanel two-piece, the same suit she had been wearing when he found her in Amsterdam. Her going away suit, as he had come to think of it.

  She blew a bubble of gum, and burst it neatly with her front teeth.

  ‘Good,’ she said. ‘You’re just in time to take me out to dinner.’

  He had made no plans, had not even been sure whether he would find her in—of late she had wandered around the town very much on her own and at whim. Troy concluded she was revisiting old haunts, old memories, rediscovering London.

  ‘OK,’ he agreed. ‘What’s it to be? Posh or Soho?’

  ‘Soho.’

  ‘Gennaro’s, the Hussar, or do you want music?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  They settled on Wheeler’s in Old Compton Street. Troy had never much liked the place, or its emphasis on English cooking, but she professed never to have eaten there, nor ever to have eaten oysters, for which Wheeler’s was famous. He doubted that the notorious, mythical effect of oysters could do much to lift his mood.

  He watched her pulling faces and wondering whether the salt texture of oysters was an acquired taste or the emperor’s new clothes, and he told her of his trip to Portsmouth. How he hated giving up on a case.

  ‘Murder ain’t what it used to be,’ said Tosca.

  ‘You’ll have to explain that.’

  ‘It was in one of your books I been reading—Shooting an Elephant by that Orwell guy. An essay called “Decline of the English Murder”. How before the war—there we go, that phrase again—before the goddam war murders were like a family affair. But these days you get killing for kicks, and what that adds up to is the job of the cop is getting harder. Blamed the Americans, as I recall.’

  The idea put Troy in mind of Neville Heath, a multiple killer of the first year of peace, who had ‘played’ murder as though it were a game between himself and the police.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Troy. ‘Not about the Americans, but about the way things have changed. Time was if you found a shallow grave and a woman’s body, you looked for a fugitive husband or lover. Now, I don’t know where to look. And I haven’t a clue who I’m looking for. As you so succinctly put it, “Murder ain’t what it used to be.” ’

  Emerging from Wheeler’s Troy instinctively turned right, towards the Charing Cross Road.

  ‘No,’ said Tosca. ‘The long way.’

  So they set off westward, further into Soho.

  A buzz was coming from the 2i’s coffee bar as they passed. A basic but raucous amplified guitar and drum kit bash to a horde of kids in sloppy Joe sweaters, amongst whom Troy recognised his nephew Alex.

  Tosca paused, Troy did not.

  ‘Isn’t this the racket you’ve been playing?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s the boiled-milk version.’

  She ran to catch up with him. They turned down Wardour Street towards Shaftesbury Avenue. She was looking around, scrutinising everything and everyone they passed. They crossed the avenue by the bombed-out shell of Queen’s Theatre—bombed, Troy recalled, during a performance of Rebecca—and a sudden spurt of traffic stranded them on the concrete island in the middle, a stonesthrow from Piccadilly Circus. The thought that had been visibly nagging at her all evening surfaced.

  ‘I don’t recognise this country.’

  ‘I do. It’s the one we used to have. After the war ended we took the ticket back to the pawn shop and redeemed it. Dusty, musty and moth-eaten, but essentially intact.’

  ‘What—like England was a jalopy up on blocks an’ all you had to do was put the wheels back on, fill ’er up, grease a few nipples and hit the starter?’

  ‘Pretty much. That’s how my mother’s car spent the war. It’s pretty much how the institutions of the nation spent it too.’

  ‘Y’know, I never saw England till ’42. It dazzled me for a while, London under siege had such a feel to it, like we had something huge in common, something that united us, but it didn’t take too long to work out that this wasn’t the way it had always been. There was this WAC Lieutenant from Arlington I used to work with, classy a broad as you could ever hope to meet—Second Lieutenant Zadora Pulaski, daughter of a Republican Senator, who’d thought it was a good idea to finish his little girl’s education with a spell in England. She was here from ’35 to ’37, and she used to say to me, “Hon, you’d never believe this place. You think they’re uptight now, shoulda seen ’em before the war. A cat could not look at a king.” Used to enunciate that last line like she was sucking a chili.

  ‘I concluded that the black out was the best symbol for England at war. Under cover of darkness all the old rules and restraints were quietly ignored. Like meeting a plum-voice woman on a train who shares her lunchbox with you, or picking up some guy in the street who’s not afraid to fuck you. And then the lights went back on. Shock, horror! Everybody dusts off their manners and hikes up their pants. So, what is England now? A place where they’d see you starve before they shared a goddam crumb with you, and where the men are too scared of women to admit they might even like them, let alone want to fuck ’em.’

  The irony of this last remark was not something that registered with her. Troy almost winced at the jab of it, but Tosca rattled on as though it had no resonance at all.

  ‘And it comes down to this, to a single question, what did the war change?’

  ‘I have a friend, an ex-RAF flyer, who takes the line that it changed nothing. Absolutely nothing. Not a damn thing.’

  ‘He’s right.’

  ‘Wrecking our cities, destroying our balance of payments, knocking our foreign exchange to pieces, cleaning out our gold reserves, sinking the Empire, and putting us permanently in hock to the almighty dollar don’t count, eh?’

  ‘Not in this equation they don’t. Look at Germany, for God’s sake. They lost the goddam war. By 1947 they were exporting Volkswagens. You know what Germany has that you guys don’t? The Marshall Plan? They’re born engineers? All they had to do was swe
ep away the rubble and start again? All those phoney-baloney arguments you get in the English papers? Nuts. It’s far simpler. Nobody mentions the war.’

  ‘With good reason,’ Troy said to a deaf ear.

  ‘The Brits? Fuckit Troy. They never shut up about the war. They relive it every minute of the goddam day. I mean, is there a movie house in London that isn’t showing some goddam war movie?’

  She had a point. The war had unimaginable importance to the English. ‘Their Finest Hour’ was also their ball and chain. Something in them yearned still for the simple truths of glory. Only a few years ago, there had been national rejoicing on an absurd scale when HMS Amethyst had run the gauntlet of Chinese guns and broken out of the Yangtse blockade, with the loss of the ship’s cat to enenw fire. The moggie had been awarded a ‘VC for Cats’ and buried with military honours. Troy had never been quite sure whether this was touching or bonkers.

  ‘I used to like London. I liked the unofficial freedoms of war. But times change, the world moves on. England hasn’t. It’s moved backwards, and it’s done that by enshrining the war. It’s become a touchstone. They remember all that was bad about it and go on celebrating it. And the good stuff, the way the barriers came down, the way you class-conscious bastards pulled together . . . all that’s forgotten. You used to know you were all in the same boat, now you don’t even think you’re on the same river. It’s a miserable, damp little tea-swilling nation. And I don’t like it any more. England—stinking of old tobacco, wet gabardine and men who never dry clean those awful suits, and have hairy nostrils. Never put your head in an Englishman’s lap. You’ll gag on a miasma of stale piss and rancid nostalgia.

  ‘There’s one thing that’s wrong with England and wrong in a big, big way. Apart from the fact that they never stop talking about it, it’s as if the war never happened!’

  There was a long pause. For the first time Troy became aware of the precariousness of their position, the traffic shooting by on either side at its busiest as the theatres emptied all around them. Marooned on a traffic island a hundred yards from the heart of an empire we no longer wanted.