Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘And how does that make you feel?’

  ‘Like an American. Don’t laugh, but after all I been through I kinda get the feeling I might just be an American after all.’

  ‘Do you know what that makes me?’

  ‘Nope.’

  ‘A GI bride. Great title for a film. I Was a Male GI Bride.’

  ‘You were a GI bride? Dammit Troy, if they did but know it this whole fuckin’ island was a GI bride!’

  Across Shaftesbury Avenue, down the short end of Wardour Street and into Coventry Street.

  As they crossed Leicester Square, Tosca caught sight of the huge illuminated billboard outside the Odeon. Troy had been hoping she wouldn’t. Kenneth More, Muriel Pavlow and Anton Diffring in Reach For the Sky. The tale of Douglas Bader, a flying ace with even fewer legs than Angus Pakenham.

  ‘Oh Jesus, Troy. Will you look at that. Isn’t that just what I’ve been saying. Another goddam war movie. I mean . . . I mean, that’s where I saw Gone With the Wind. Five times in 1943.’

  The brown eyes looked into his.

  ‘And twice more in ’44.’

  It occurred to Troy to say that Gone With the Wind was just another goddam war movie, but her sadness at the sight of yet another bunch of stalwart Brits pitched against the sinister menace of Mr Diffring, a one-man repertory of jackbooted, steely jawed Fascists, was so obviously real. She pressed her forehead to his chest and he realised that she was sobbing gently, that she wept for Rhett and Scarlett and for herself too.

  He bent his head to whisper in her ear.

  ‘Da da daa daaa. Da da daa daaa.’

  Her head came up, eyes smiling through the tears.

  Troy slipped his arms into position, still humming the tune and plied her unwilling feet to motion.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘It’s a waltz. You know. One, two, three, one two, three. Da da daa daaa.’

  ‘But it’s silly. We can’t—’

  ‘Yes we can. We’re already doing it.’

  He waltzed her down the square towards Irving Street, da da dadaaing in her ear till she giggled, and the tears stopped and her smile burnt him to the heart. She danced—they danced—more smoothly than he could ever have imagined. He danced so rarely. A married woman as a lover, of late, had meant that courtship was a hole-and-corner affair. He and Anna had never danced, had scarcely allowed themselves to be seen in public. The sound of Tara’s theme swelled and he saw over Tosca’s shoulder a bunch of drunks taking up the song, surprisingly in tune, and they waltzed to an improvised brewery choir, and her giggle became hysterics and she could dance no more for laughing.

  They stopped. She reached her arms around his neck and hugged him and froze in motion as a round of applause broke the night air. Troy looked around, a little embarrassed to find they had an appreciative audience, a dozen Londoners for whom Gone With the Wind was also worth a dozen war films, the real memory of the way we were more precious by far than the celluloid one.

  He took her hand and they ran for the Charing Cross Road, down the alley between the theatres and home.

  She tumbled into his bed. For the first time they had not gone to their separate beds, only to have her crawl into his at some ungodly hour on terms of truce. Troy put out the light and reached for her. Already she had turned her back on him. He put out a hand to her backside. It was the arse of yore. She had regained all the weight she had lost in Moscow. It was the same round arse his fingertips and palms knew. In what ganglion of his body was this remembered? What neurone stored the imprint of an arse? It surely had little to do with that remote and unreliable organ the brain?

  He pressed on, fingers sliding to the crack of her buttocks and further, his erection pushing against her, and down deeper, between her legs. And he began to think that she would not stop him. Then her hand took his, placed it back on his own thigh. The same hand reached for his cock and pumped him gently and quickly into a wet rush in the small of her back.

  He heard the intake of breath that presaged speech. Trapped in the puddle between pleasure and the certain knowledge that in her way she had seen him off yet again, he craved the sweetness and nothingness of sweet nothings. Whatever she said next, please God let it be the inconsequentiality of meaningless affection.

  ‘Y’know,’ she said, and turned to bury her head in his chest, voice muffled by his body. ‘I don’t want to live in this town any more. Would you mind much if I went back to Mimram? Made another go of it?’

  §61

  Tosca lay face down in the sheets with her head in his ribcage, and one hand flat across his belly. Troy could not tell if she had fallen asleep at this odd angle or if she was holding it as a neutral position. The demilitarised zone, the 38th Parallel of the bed.

  The phone rang. More accurately it clattered and buzzed gently, as he had long ago removed the bells to stop it sounding like a fire engine tearing through his bedroom.

  A muffled voice rose from beneath him.

  ‘Don’t answer it.’

  He reached for the receiver. Tosca stuck a finger in his belly button and pressed.

  ‘Don’t answer it.’

  ‘I have to. This time of night, it has to be work.’

  ‘It’s turned midnight. I’m comfortable. I’m almost happy. One foot on the yeller brick road. Let Jack go diddle.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  He picked up the phone. Button A clattered in his ear.

  ‘You took yer time, y’ bugger!’

  ‘Angus?’

  ‘No, it’s the Archbishop of fucking Canterbury calling to tell you masturbation is a sin so knock it off and get out of bed.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  ‘Pissed as a fart.’

  An echoing hoot of steam filled up the background. A mournful metal beast somewhere over the shoulder.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘St Pancras. Just got back from Derbyshire. Bloody train took four hours. Good job there was a bar full of miniatures. I drank British Railways dry. They had to restock at Kettering just for me. I’m coming straight over to you.’

  He had forgotten Angus. He had put him so completely out of mind.

  ‘No, no, Angus. There’s no need. I was wrong. Cockerell really is dead. He really was spying on that ship.’

  ‘No you’re not.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You’re not wrong. I’ll be over as soon as I can get a cab.’

  He rang off.

  Tosca rolled over. Bumped him with her backside, and bumped him again and again till he had to get out or fall out.

  ‘I won’t be long.’

  ‘Don’t matter now.’

  ‘I’ll get rid of him, and come back to bed.’

  ‘Don’t matter, so don’t bother.’

  He pulled on his dressing gown and went down to the kitchen and the kettle. He’d have to pour a few cups of coffee down Angus, thank him, tell him he’d had a wasted journey and pack him off home to Anna.

  Ten minutes later he thought he heard a voice in the alley. Some idiot singing.

  ‘Hey, hey, Uncle Fud.’

  Or some such.

  ‘Hey, hey, Uncle Fud.’

  The voice stopped at his door and bellowed, ‘Troy!’

  Troy opened the door. Angus stood in the alley, looking as though he had been driven through a hedge in a wheelbarrow, stained from collar to crotch, tie askew, half his fly-buttons undone, and swaying gently, like a poplar in a summer wind.

  ‘Hey, hey, Uncle Fud. It’s a treat to beat your meat in the Mississippi mud.’

  ‘Come inside and shut up.’

  Angus fell into an armchair, his fingers still clutching the handle of his briefcase. His mouth fell open and his eyes closed. It was tempting. Troy could leave him there till morning. Instead, he nudged him and stuck a cup of black coffee in his hands.

  ‘Are you trying to sober me up? Spoilsport.’

  ‘Yes. And then you should go home to your wife.’

  ‘Not till you’ve heard what I ha
ve to say.’

  Angus stood up, flung off his jacket, rubbed his face with his hands and made blubbery noises, and then knocked back scalding coffee in a single gulp.

  ‘If I sit down I’ll be in the land of Nod in seconds. Got to keep moving. Got to keep moving.’

  He put too much weight on the tin leg and Troy saw him wince sharply. He paused by the piano, rested his backside on the lid.

  ‘The gist of it is, you were right. He’s a crook. There’s a most gigantic fiddle going on.’

  ‘I told you, Angus. He’s dead.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter a damn. You sent me up there because you smelt a rat. And I’ll tell you now the bugger’s the size of a small dog. A Jack Russell or possibly one of those snappy, ugly little creatures Her Majesty so obviously adores.’

  Troy sat down, hoping Angus might follow suit, but he lurched about the room, tin leg flailing, bumping into the furniture, stretching and trying to drag himself one step nearer coherence and sobriety. He put his hands to his face again, gave a huge, muffled cry of ‘Worraworraworra’ and got stuck into the accountant’s tale.

  ‘Cockerell was a crook. Jessel was in it with him. They were pushing around an awful lot of money. I’ve been over the books for the last seven years. I’ve read all his tax returns. I’ve been to all those dreadful shops. I’ve talked to his bank manager. And I had, as you shall hear, a bloody good go at his building society. Troy, there was a small fortune being pushed through the books. Those shops can’t turn over so much as fifteen per cent of what he’s declaring. As for his foreign trade, he’d need a staff of a half a dozen or more just to handle the number of deals, the buying here, the selling there, he claims to have done. The truth is, he’s using his business and his accounts to launder money.’

  ‘Launder?’

  ‘Wash. Money comes in dirty, that is illegal, goes out the other end clean, that is legit.’

  ‘Why has no one caught him?’

  ‘Ah, that’s the beauty of it. How do most fiddlers get caught? They live too high, declare too little, conceal too much and our old pals at the Inland Revenue get them. Most fraudsters fall foul of the income tax chappies long before the Fraud Squad would ever spot them. Cockerell paid tax on everything that ever passed through the business. His books are a work of colossal fiction, but his tax returns are scrupulously honest. After all, what do the Inland Revenue look for? They look for people declaring too little from their work or their business, they haven’t the time to bother with people who might be declaring too much. Why should they? They profit by Cockerell’s honest payments on his dishonest earnings. Can’t last. Take my word for it. Organised crime in the States has raised money laundering to an art—remember how the Feds nabbed Capone, not for murder or bootlegging but for tax evasion. Sooner or later the Inland Revenue is going to face the same problems as the IRS. But in the mean time your Commander Cockerell has hit upon a simple fiddle and it works.’

  ‘It sounds crude to me, almost stupid.’

  ‘Crude it may be, but it’s beautiful. It’s not foolproof, but it’s ingenious. You get a bent auditor to keep Companies House happy, and you pay the full whack on all your fiddles. It’s simple, Freddie, but it’s not stupid. He could have got away with it for years to come. But—but—he was getting careless. Did the old girl show you his car?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How much do you think a car like that costs? Now, I know you drive a Bentley, y’bugger, but don’t think small of the Jag. Go on, how much?’

  ‘Six or seven hundred?’

  ‘More like a thousand. And he owned a Rover as well. And he paid cash. The best part of two years’ salary for an average bloke. In cash.’

  ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Went down to the garage in Derby where he bought ’em. Unlike a lot of people, the proprietor was only too willing to chat about Commander Cockerell. One of his best customers. New cars every year. Top of the range. Walnut and leather interiors, built-in wireless, the works. And the last two years he paid cash. Now—that I would call stupid. He’d been neat, and honest with all his fake figures to the point where no one looked twice. God knows, maybe he wanted the bravura high of blowing cash. But it was stupid, because if I hadn’t known that I might have just given the bugger the benefit of the doubt; I might just have assumed that trade on this scale could be carried by one hardworking bod and a couple of shop assistants. But I say now that it is my professional, if pissed, opinion that most of Cockerell’s foreign deals are phoney, that much of what he pays out in England has nothing to do with the business, with goods delivered or services rendered, and they’re kickbacks of some sort, and that if he brought cash into England from abroad to blow on posh cars, he was probably also doing it on a bigger scale and that too disappeared down various routes. Moreover, I’d say there have to be other bank accounts abroad that we and the Inland Revenue don’t know about. I don’t know the why of this fiddle but I do know the what. It’s amateurish, and it’s simple, but it works—and it’s big. It starts in 1951, when he sets up his Swedish enterprise; it grows slowly over ’52 and ’53 and by ’54 he’s turning over a small fortune. Anyone looking at the figures with a sceptical eye who also knew his circumstances would have wondered why he didn’t live better than he did. The wife said they lived, as she put it, “high on the hog”—with what he was earning I’d bath in Glenfiddich. I’d have me socks handmade in Jermyn Street. I’d have me tin leg gold plated. Sometime in 1951 something happened to turn this bugger’s life around. He was doing fair to middling. No better than that. Somebody brought him an irresistible deal. And the money has spun around and around ever since.’

  Angus was throwing too much at Troy too fast. He tried for a handle with which to grasp it.

  ‘How can people cart money around like that? It’s smuggling isn’t it? Currency smuggling?’

  ‘Wrong way, old boy. The state the pound’s in, our lot are concerned about money leaving the country. Export sterling and they’ll do you. And they spend so much of their time looking for people trying to smuggle sterling out, that I don’t think it would occur to them, given our exchange problems, that anyone would try and smuggle it in. Of course he could have got bad luck, they could have opened him up looking for a few fag lighters or a bottle of scent and found him with ten grand in cash, but the gods smiled on him. I’d call it a reasonable risk.’

  ‘The banks—why wasn’t his bank manager suspicious?’

  ‘Why do you think he banked in Great Malvern? So the bloke had no idea of the true scale of the business in Derbyshire. A local man would have put two and two together. Besides which he’s a dim fucker. I know, I spent an hour on the phone to him.’

  Angus sat down, the leg had stood all it could, but the eyes were bright, and there was an edge born of mathematical delight in his voice. He took a wadge of papers from his briefcase and waved them at Troy.

  ‘Bank statements. Building society papers. A mortgage. The building bricks of life as we know it. The carbon, the amine, the deoxyribonucleic acid of our social being.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘In your notes you said the father-in-law bought the house for the Cockerells. Why the mortgage? I rang the dimwit in Great Malvern and he confirmed, once I’d convinced him of my authority to act, that one of the standing orders on Cockerell’s bank statements was a monthly mortgage repayment. But—it was only taken out in 1952—the house, you will recall, was inherited in ’43—and it was paid off in December last year. As far as I can tell, with all the loot Cockerell had floating around, the only purpose it could serve was the tax break. Mr Fiddle doing things by the book yet again. So, I rang the Ancient Order of Derbyshire Foresters and before they stonewalled me I did manage to get out of some poor woman in the chain of command that the mortgage was not on that bungalow in Belper. Freddie, the bugger had a second home somewhere. Some sort of bolt hole, I should think.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I just told you. I don’t know. Some officious git, q
uite possibly the Ancient Forester himself, came on the line and told me to mind my own business. But if you ask me a bolt hole is the prime requirement of a vanishing trick.’

  ‘He’s dead, Angus.’

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘Yes. I held a second post mortem and in the end I identified him myself.’

  ‘Then who’s in the bolt hole?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’

  §62

  He rolled Angus into a cab and tiptoed quietly upstairs. Tosca was curled up in the middle of his bed. He had half expected to find that she had sloped off to her own. He slid in beside her, listened to the regularity of her breathing. He kissed a shoulder blade and the rhythm stayed the same. He wrapped an arm around her and put his fingers to her left nipple. She took the hand away, held it to her lips and kissed it, and dropped it back on his side of the bed.

  §63

  In the morning Troy rode the underground to King’s Cross with her. He could not recall that they had ever ridden the underground together. A flash of memory brought her voice to him from the war, telling him she would rather die in the open air than shelter underground, ‘It stinks, y’know that, it really stinks.’

  ‘Don’t see me off. I can’t stand waving and kissing. I seen Brief Encounter too many times.’

  So they stood the among the shacks and sheds that made a shanty town of the station forecourt, in front of the left luggage office.

  ‘You’ll be home at the weekend?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Rod and your sisters?’

  ‘They take the place for granted. Rod needs it, to be honest, for his work. But it’s my house, I can tell them all to go to hell.’

  ‘There’s no need. I’ll handle it. I just never had family before. It was always just my mom and me.’

  Troy was shocked. He had never given a moment’s thought to the possibility that she too might have family.