by Lawton, John
‘Where is your mother?’
‘I wish I knew. She’s still young, y’ know. Maybe sixty-three or sixty-four.’
He watched the tears form in the corner of each eye and a torrent begin to cross her cheeks.
‘She must think I’m dead. I mean. They’ll have told her I’m dead, won’t they?’
‘I’m afraid so. I reported you dead to the US Army myself.’
He paused. It seemed inevitable, impossible not to utter.
‘I thought you were dead.’
And once uttered it seemed like an accusation.
An engine howled long and deep in the glass canopy inside—an iron beast in pain. She kissed his cheek and ran. It seemed to Troy that there might be no end to running.
§64
The Ancient Forester was ancient indeed. A wavering voice. An immovable man.
‘You say you’re a detective from Scotland Yard. How am I to know you’re a detective from Scotland Yard?’
‘Because I say so’ was unlikely to convince. Nor, Troy thought, was a line about obstructing an officer in the course of his duty.
‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he said. ‘You call me back. You do know Scotland Yard’s telephone number, don’t you?’
‘But,’ said the Ancient, ‘I would then have to pay for the call.’
‘I’ll send you a postal order,’ said Troy.
It usually worked. He waited five minutes and five minutes became quarter of an hour. He had begun to think he had found the one person in Britain who did not know the number Whitehall 1212, and his hand was outstretched to pick up the telephone and dial the old fool again, when it rang.
‘Is that Chief Inspector Foy of Scotland Yard?’
‘Troy. The name is Troy.’
‘Oh, I was just speaking with a Chief Inspector Foy.’
‘That was me.’
Silence. Troy mentally calculated how long it might take him to get up to Chesterfield and rattle the address out of him.
‘Cockerell, you say?’
‘Yes.’
‘We do appear to have had dealings with Mr Cockerell.’
‘Yes.’
‘But no longer.’
‘What you had was a mortgage, taken out by him in the September of 1952, or thereabouts, which was paid off in December of 1955.’
Troy heard the sound of the Ancient shuffling papers. The laboured breathing of a man in the onset of emphysema.
‘I believe that is correct.’
‘What I need to know is where the property on which Cockerell had the mortgage is.’
Again, the slow, almost interminable shuffling of papers. Inhalation and exhalation that seemed to be wrung out of him by a mangle. The two short, disparate syllables.
‘Bri–ton.’
Bri–ton? Bri–ton? Good God, the old fool was saying Brighton. Troy’s heart leapt. The thrill of the chase, the heady pursuit of the agile criminal, the painstaking diligence of a good detective.
‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but where in Brighton.’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Where in Brighton?!?’
Troy bit his bottom lip. The desire to interrupt was unlikely to be productive. He held his breath and waited.
‘Number 2 . . .
‘Yeeees.’
‘Number 2, Chatsworth Place, Cavendish Hill, Bri–ton.’
The mute voice in the head cheered and sang. For safety’s sake Troy read the address back to him, with the Ancient saying ‘yes’ at every pause. At the last pause Troy had a ‘goodbye-thank-you-don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you’ on his lips when the old man pulled out the rabbit from the hat.
‘Property of Mrs M. Kerr.’
‘What?’
‘It says here . . . Kerr. M. (Mrs).’
‘You mean Cockerell didn’t own the house?’
Another endless pause as the Ancient gathered elusive breath.
‘Apparently not.’
‘But he paid the mortgage?’
‘Regularly. And to completion.’
‘Isn’t that a bit queer?’
‘A little unusual, perhaps. But as long as the deeds are placed with us, as indeed they were—we still have them—all is proper.’
Very little about the case of Commander Cockerell was proper. It was a word Troy would never apply to anything Cockerell did.
‘Who is Kerr. M. (Mrs)?’
‘I could not tell you. Without, that is, examining the deeds themselves. I merely read you the reference as our records show it. Now, about that postal order . . .’
§65
Troy had never worked in Brighton. His vision of the place was coloured more by Graham Greene and Richard Attenborough than it was by experience. The train down was crowded with holiday makers. He stood in the corridor all the way—the rattle of the bogies over the rails became monotonous, every jolt at the fishplates in the track assumed the words ‘Kolley Kibb-er Kolley Kibb-er’ in his mind as though the train were talking to him. They were not words he much wished to hear. He began to regret that the occasional aversion to the motor car led him to presume relief and pleasure in travelling by train.
Cavendish Hill took some finding. Largely because he had the map upside down. Only when he realised that the English Channel could riot really be on the north did he turn around in Kemptown and head off to where Brighton blends smoothly into Hove.
The Hill rose steeply from the seafront about a quarter of a mile west of the West Pier. And a quarter of a mile or so up the hill, Chatsworth Place ran off from it, parallel to the coast. He had, he realised, been expecting a mews or some such. The address implied tucked away—which it was—it also implied that it would be less grand than Cavendish Hill—which it wasn’t. It was a narrower house, but taller by far, and as he approached number 2, he could see clearly that it had been combined with number 3—there were no houses on the other side of the street—into a sprawling, double-fronted house with a commanding view across the town to the sea. Commander Cockerell had done very well for himself—if indeed it was for himself.
He stretched out a hand to the doorbell when he saw that the front door was an inch or so ajar. Suspicion fought a scrummage with plain nosiness—they called it a draw and he pushed on the door and entered. It was almost silent; the rumble of water running down the pipes echoed around the house, but little else other than the creak of his own footsteps broke the silence. Suspicion pulled ahead on points.
He turned right, and found himself in a dazzlingly modern kitchen that had the mark of Cockerell all over it. No more the clutter of little wooden tables, of higgledy-piggledy shelves askew on old iron brackets, of tin mesh larders to keep away the summer flies. This was seamless, as seamless as Brighton joining Hove, seamless in ivory-coloured plastic, dotted here and there with little splashes of blue and red. It looked to Troy like a dilute version of Mediterranean pottery. Best of all the gas stove and the fridge slotted in almost as though the places had been built around them. Where was the gap down which to lose a wooden spoon or half your dinner? This was Cockerell’s world, the world of Mrs 1960, and Miss World’s Fair. Who could guess, but that were he to open one of the many fitted cupboards—yes, ‘fitted’, that was the word—a double bed or a folding bath might unfurl before his eyes. At the very least it would be a fully functioning rotisserie, complete with skewered chicken, rotating as it opened to the beholder.
He set foot on the stairs. The first creak was enough to freeze him to the spot, but when the house offered no response he pressed quickly on and into the drawing room on the first floor. He knew as soon as he saw the room that someone else was involved. He had puzzled over the matter ever since Angus had told him that Cockerell had a second house. It could hardly be just to live alone in, away from a bad marriage. Logically, it would be a love nest. A little somewhere he could meet a mistress. But it was hard to imagine the man with a mistress, and this was not a little somewhere, it was a big somewhere, and here in this wide, airy room, with the sea laid o
ut before floor-to-ceiling windows like a private panorama, was the evidence of the other woman. This room was Cockerell-ish, but his absurd proselytisation of the new was compromised, subtly leavened by someone else’s taste. The heavy glass table on turned wrought-iron legs might well be him, but the close-packed wall of two hundred years of seascapes, in every medium from charcoal, through gouache and watercolour to heavily discoloured and darkened oils, was not. This must be the woman’s work. As his first home had shown, Cockerell’s taste ran to nothing better than Trechikoff’s Green Woman. This living wall was breathtakingly beautiful, startlingly original—Troy would never have dreamt that one could pack paintings together so closely and not lose all they represented—and in it he saw the meaning of the mistress. Jasmine Dene was a war zone, divided into his and hers with a line through it like Korea or Jerusalem. Two minds, two sets of values met in this room and worked together. Yes—Cockerell definitely had a mistress.
He moved quietly up a floor. Bedrooms. Front and back, and all, it seemed, unused. Enough space to have four or five house guests at the weekend. The staircase narrowed; he was climbing to the top floor, there could only be attics above it. At the bend it narrowed further, as it carried on high under the eaves, and formed a small landing with a pair of slender double doors facing him. They offered the same invitation to nosiness as the front door had done. An inch ajar, asking to be pushed. He pushed. He was back in the land of Cockerell, a feminised Cockerell, where everything was spanking new but deeply luxurious. The spareness of the Scandinavian look pushed through spareness to emerge the other side in a Hollywood style of smothering comfort.
He could hear nothing. The sound of running water had stopped. Two doors led off the bedroom, presumably to a bathroom and a dressing room, and the front wall of the room was made up of huge sliding glass doors, which opened onto a narrow terrace. He tiptoed pointlessly across a shag-pile carpet—pit boots would have made no noise on it—to the open door to the terrace. A gentle evening breeze had caught the curtain and was wafting it to and fro. He looked at the view. The beginnings of evening redness in the west gleaming like rubies in the sea. He looked at the bed. A happy man could lie abed and watch the sun rise or set in the Channel. A happier man could make love with a sea breeze caressing his nether regions. Then he noticed the photographs. Half a dozen in a column next to the door frame. Good bloody grief. Cockerell had surely developed these himself, perhaps he even had a darkroom in the cellar? No self-respecting chemist would fail to call the Vice Squad if he found these in the back of a Brownie 127.
A woman, back to the camera, was bending low, legs straight, face hidden from view—so that the length of the 10 C 8 print was made up of an inverted V of her legs with a full, well-lit view of her sexual parts. The one below showed the same woman—at least he assumed it was the same woman—leaning, back, crab-style, over a Bentwood chair, the face hidden again, but the view now as explicit from the front—a tiny spotlight trained on her seam to light up her halo of blondish pubic hair with an unnatural gleam. He fully meant to look at the rest. Out of sheer nerves he glanced furtively over his shoulder before doing so, like a man caught ogling Health & Efficiency in a newsagent’s.
A woman of twenty-five or so stood in the bathroom door in a haze of steam and talc. All she wore was a towel, and that was wrapped around her head. At the best of times Troy did not much rate guns as fashion accessories, but when the gun was pointed at your chest it did at least offset nudity rather well by making it somewhat less than fascinating. Slowly he put his hands up and strained for a smile.
‘You’ve been reading too much Raymond Chandler,’ he said.
‘Eh?’
‘When in doubt . . . ?’
‘Get on with it!’
‘When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.’
‘If you think I’m a man,’ she said, ‘you need glasses. Now—who are you?’
‘I’m a policeman.’
‘Aha?’
‘I can prove it.’
Gently he lowered his left hand to his jacket front.
‘I have a warrant card. I’m going to take it out very slowly.’
He held it up, lodged between his index and biggest fingers like a cigarette.
‘Chuck it over here.’
He threw the card at her feet. It landed soundlessly on the carpet, and one of his own calling cards, with his rank and his Goodwin’s Court address, spilled out from the fold. She knelt, kept the gun aimed at his chest, and quickly picked them up. Then she put the gun on the sideboard, tossed the warrant card back at him, whipped the towel off her head to wrap herself in, and as a last gesture tucked his calling card into the top of the towel, a sophisticated parody of a whore tucking a ten-bob note into her cleavage.
‘Is this where you tell me it wasn’t loaded anyway?’ he said.
She flung herself in an armchair and reached for a cigarette box on the side table.
‘Oh it’s loaded all right. Look, there’s a bottle of brandy in the bedside cabinet. Why don’t you pour us both a drink. I’m sure we need it.’
She lit up her cigarette, a ridiculous king-size with a filter tip and a couple of gold bands, with a huge, clumsy, green stone table lighter. He did as he was told, wondering what next.
‘What kept you?’ she asked so bluntly the question threw him.
‘I . . . er . . . I don’t quite follow.’
He edged back towards her, feeling his feet sink almost to the ankle in the bedside carpet, handed her a glass and sat, daringly it seemed to him, on the edge of the bed.
‘He’s been dead the best part of five months. You took your time.’
‘I’ve only just been able to confirm that Commander Cockerell is dead.’
‘Oh? Really? I knew he was dead forty-eight hours after he failed to show up.’
‘I suppose I’ve been rather in the dark.’
‘What is it you want to know?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What do you know?’
‘Me? I know everything. Isn’t that why you came?’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’
§66
Troy waited while she dressed. She—Kerr M. (Mrs). He had no idea who she was beyond the near-statistical tag of a building society record. Mary? Marilyn? And was there a Mr Kerr? He could guess who that might be. He sipped at the brandy. A good vintage, he was certain, but they all tasted a bit like soap to him.
The woman emerged in a simple dress for evening. Simple and brazen, the scarlet version of the little black dress in searing red. Sleeveless, cut very low at the back, and just preserving modesty at the front. Her hair was piled high on her head and she was twiddling with the fingertips of both hands to put an earring in place. It was a gesture to put him immediately in mind of Tosca with her squeamishness about body piercing, standing bolting her jewellery into place, of tiny gems or milky pearls on silver threads.
‘I don’t know your name,’ he said.
‘I can’t say I recall your asking. But it’s Madeleine, Madeleine Kerr.’
Her hands moved to the other ear, the same fine gesture with the same delicate engineering, to hang a gold leaf from the lobe.
‘You’re a Fred? Don’t meet many Freds. Mind if I call you Troy?’
‘Most people do.’
‘Oh, and Arnold, Commander Cockerell. He’s Ronald Kerr down here. Ronnie to you and me.’
Troy looked a little puzzled. He felt the name should make sense to him. The look on her face told him it ought to be self-explanatory.
‘You don’t get it, do you?’
‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘Ronald is an anagram of Arnold. And Kerr is from Cock—Kerr—Ell. Geddit?’
It was so easy, he almost blushed at his own stupidity.
‘And before you ask, whatever Ronnie was he wasn’t a bigamist. The Mr and Mrs is all pretend. And a bloody sight more fun for being so. Now shall we go?’
‘Where?’ he asked lamely.
‘To dinner. Ifyou’re going to play the copper and ask me a thousand questions, the least you can do is buy me dinner. After all, I’ve eaten alone for the last five months.’
‘There is one thing before we go out,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘The gun.’
‘Yes.’
‘I think you’d better give it to me.’
‘Ronnie gave it to me. For protection, he said.’
‘You won’t need it with me. And I can’t let you walk around with a gun in your handbag.’
‘How do you know it’s in my handbag?’
‘Trust me. I’m a detective.’
She opened the bag, took out the gun and gave it to him. Then she tossed the bag onto the bed as though its only purpose had been to conceal and carry the gun.
Troy felt its weight. Feathers had more substance. It was a tiny, golden .22 automatic. What Chandler would have called a lady’s gun. Pretty much like the one Tosca had had, the one he had dumped in the Irish Sea.
She led the way downstairs, out into Chatsworth Place and down Cavendish Hill. As they rounded the first corner she slipped her arm into his.
‘We’ll go to the Wellesley Hotel. There’s a rooftop restaurant with a smashing view. It was called La Manche when it opened, but everybody called it The Munch, which sounded a bit common, so they changed it to the Clair de Lune. Much better name. Specially on a night like this.’
She looked up at the rapidly darkening, utterly cloudless sky.
‘Plenty of Lune and pretty Clair wouldn’t you say?’
He gave the shining sixpenny moon a passing glance and looked at her. A fraction taller than him, even in flat heels. She had looked beautiful before she had made up her face. Now, the beauty was layered in some imprecise way, as though she had assumed a gloss of sophistication. It worked, largely, but he remained somehow unconvinced. There was an inescapable element of the girl dressed as the woman, of the girl-in-the-woman, and it had begun the minute she had lit up her first cigarette, and she had pursued it through make-up and clinched it through clothes. The arm through his seemed like instant friendship. He had known the woman less than forty minutes. He had seen her naked, he had seen her posing for the camera—she surely was the woman in the photographs?—in positions he had never seen any woman assume, and now she strolled along arm in arm just as though they were old friends. Or new lovers. He detached his arm from hers. She was prattling on about the beauty of a full moon and seemed not to notice that he had done it. When she had finished, she simply closed the gap between them and slipped her arm in his once more.