by Lawton, John
‘I meant,’ he began lamely, ‘that she didn’t tell me why. Simply that there were things she would only tell me once we’d got to London.’
‘Such as?’
‘Cockerell—what he was up to.’
‘You mean you had a night alone with her and you couldn’t get it out of her?’
‘Yes.’
‘Freddie. Did you sleep with that woman?’
It seemed like a challenge to his nature, one the severest moments of mistrust in all the years they had known one another.
‘No, Jack, I didn’t.’
‘A whole night to ask her questions and you end up with her leading you around by the—’
‘Jack! I didn’t fuck her!’
Jack grabbed the chair, pulled it closer to Troy, and leant in.
‘Do you have even the faintest idea what you’ve done? This is no time to be telling me lies!’
‘I’m not lying. And what I did was investigate a murder.’
‘Freddie, until you went to Brighton, there was no murder.’
‘Yes there was. Cockerell was murdered. Jessel was murdered.’
‘I’ve seen the medical report on your desk. Jessel died of heart failure.’
‘Heart failure aggravated by having a gun waved in his face!’
Jack sat back, almost reeled at the shock.
‘What?’
‘I found gun oil on his desk. A drop no bigger than a pin head, but unmistakably gun oil. Some bugger thought it a good idea to put the fear of God up Jessel by waving a gun in his face.’
‘Why is none of this in writing?’
‘Jack—for Christ’s sake . . .’
‘I repeat. Do you know what you’ve done?’
Troy did not answer.
‘You’ve left me bugger all to go on. You’ve ripped the lid off a can of worms.’
‘Bonser. We talk to Bonser. Somebody told him to go round to the King Henry that day. We talk to Bonser.’
‘We?’
Troy said nothing. He knew what was coming.
‘We. Freddie, there is no “we”. You’re off the case.’
‘You told Onions?’
‘Did you think I was bluffing?’
‘What’s the deal?’
‘You’re on sick leave. You stay away from the Yard. When the medics pass you as fit, your return is discretionary. If I think you’re going to stick your nose into this, I can and will prolong your sick leave.’
‘Jack,’ he said softly. ‘That’s the most colossal fiddle.’
‘Quite. But it might just keep you alive. It might just keep you away from the spooks. Onions wants you nowhere near the bastards.’
This was bad news. What idea did Jack have about the next move?
‘Jack, you surely don’t mean that you’re going to tackle the spooks? That’s the last thing we can do.’
Jack picked up his hat from the bed. If the gesture was meant to end the meeting it was wasted. Troy sat bolt upright.
‘Jack! You’re not listening to me!’
Indeed, Jack was heading for the door.
‘You can’t approach them. Don’t you see?’
Jack had the door open, one half of his body already hidden by it.
‘They’ll kill it stone dead!’
Troy realised he was shouting with all the power left in his lungs. The force made his chest ache and his head momentarily was reeling. Jack closed the door and leant against it, his palms flat against the boards.
‘They’ll take it out of our hands. Then they’ll do nothing.’
‘Let’s hear it,’ Jack said.
‘Has it occurred to you that we don’t know which . . .’ Troy fumbled for the word and failed . . . ‘which . . . side killed Cockerell?’
‘I don’t follow.’
‘I mean that I don’t know who Cockerell was working for. He wasn’t official. We can’t investigate this and expect any help from Five and Six. Now the PM has owned up they’ll want it all buried as soon as possible. If that means leaving the murder of an innocent woman uninvestigated, then that’s what they’ll do.’
Jack knew he was right. Troy could see it in his eyes. He was yet again buggering Jack about with irrefutable and utterly unpalatable logic.
‘So I’m stuck with a case that has no leads?’
‘Work around it. Follow the scent, pretend for the time being that spooks aren’t involved. Just as though it were an ordinary murder. See how close you can get. We can only go to Five and Six when we’ve the making of a case. If at all.’
‘Ordinary murder? Do you know that no one on that train can positively identify the man who broke Madeleine Kerr’s neck? I’ve enough details to describe a small army, but so contradictory that you could never resolve it into an individual. Tall, short fat, thin. The only clear description I have is of you. Half a dozen people are perfectly willing to go into court and identify you as the man who broke Madeleine Kerr’s neck, but nobody can pick out the real killer. Nobody saw him pass through the station. Nobody at Brighton can single out anyone in particular as boarding that train. And you want me to work “around it”?’
‘Yes. And keep her name and mine out of the papers.’
‘Well,’ Jack said, ‘it’s nice to know I can do one thing right.’
He heard the echo of the door slamming for what seemed like an age afterwards, the trail of Jack’s anger lingering in the air, glancing off the walls. But Jack was not the worst. The worst was yet to come.
§71
The next day, the day of his discharge. He had stuffed his pyjamas into his briefcase and was struggling with the sleeves of his jacket. Dizziness caught him, he fell back against the side of the bed, one arm in, one arm out, the jacket stranded halfway down his back. A hand reached out to help him. He looked up. Anna Pakenham, dour, unsmiling, standing over him, her hands guiding his arms through the momentary maze of his sleeves.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘Trust me. I’m a mistress.’
She was insistent. She would drive him home. He protested weakly that it was less than a quarter of a mile, but feeling his head spin knew he would probably end up face down in the gutter in the Strand if left to his own devices.
In his sitting room she unwound the bandages and checked the wound.
‘Neat,’ she said. ‘There’ll be a scar, but the flap of skin’s retaking. You won’t have a bald stripe. It looks for all the world as though the bullet bounced off your thick head. I don’t suppose you need me to tell you how lucky you’ve been.’
‘Story of my life.’
‘Luck can run out, Troy. Have you ever met a boxer who’s gone punchy? Mickey McGuire’s a patient of mine. British and Empire Light Heavyweight Champion before the war, at least for two bouts until he lost it. He’s been bashed to buggery in his time—and now he’d be hard pressed to tell you what time it is or what day it is.’
‘I get the message.’
‘No you don’t. You can hear me but it doesn’t mean a damn thing to you. Now, to more important matters than whether you live or die. I want to know—have you dragged Angus into anything that will hurt him?’
‘No,’ he said, ‘Angus is out of it.’
Anna clicked her doctor’s bag closed, kissed him on the cheek, called him a bastard and opened the front door. He was halfway to the kitchen, intending to put the kettle on, when he heard her voice, and then his brother’s voice in answer. They were standing on the doorstep mulling him over. He put the kettle on anyway. He doubted he could get through one of Rod’s lectures without something to do with his hands.
When he returned, Rod had thrown his jacket on the sofa, and was standing red-faced, tugging his tie to half-mast and groping for the collar stud. Troy stuck the tray in front of him.
‘Not to beat about the bush, Freddie—’
He grunted at the constriction of his throat, sighed as the stud popped free.
‘Not to beat about the thingumajig—what are you up to?’
He breathed deeply, looking Troy in the eye.
‘Well?’
‘I’m doing my job, Rod. That’s all there is to it.’
‘You’re lying!’
Troy swung at him, his clenched fist floating uselessly off Rod’s arm as he sidestepped the blow, his own weight plummeting him towards the floor, sending the tea tray flying. Rod grabbed him round the torso and dropped him onto the sofa in an easy movement. He was a head taller than Troy and a couple of stones heavier, he took his weight effortlessly and then let him go.
‘Don’t be bloody stupid! You think I don’t know when you’re lying? You’ve been a world class liar since we were boys!’
Troy had winded himself. Rod leant low over him. For a fraction of a second Troy thought he meant to hit him, and as Rod bent over him, legs wide, head low, he got ready to kick him in the balls and have done. But Rod reached behind him to his jacket, half-buried under Troy. He pulled something from the pocket and stood up.
‘Just doing your job, eh?’ he said, and flung a small shiny object into Troy’s lap. It was Madeleine Kerr’s gun.
‘Just doing your job? Freddie, you’re bloody lucky Jack didn’t find this. Bloody lucky the local plods going through your pockets found your warrant card first and stopped searching. I found this when the quacks summoned me to that Sussex hospital. Why are you carrying a gun? Why are you lying to me?’
‘I refer the honourable member to my previous answer.’
Even as he said it, it sounded cheap and adolescent. Cocking a snook at big brother.
Rod straightened up, began to pick up the fragments of the tea set. He could not sustain anger long, even when it might well be in his own defence. The edge went out of his voice, a saddened, concerned, irritatingly humane baritone took over.
‘I’ll tell you what I think. I think you’re chasing this one out of guilt. That load of twaddle about the old man. You’re chasing spooks because somewhere inside you, you actually believe the old man was a spook, and this is your way of expiating the guilt.’
‘Guilt?’ Troy said, compounding anger with a sneer. ‘I don’t know guilt.’
‘How can you expect me to believe that you investigating Arnold Cockerell is just a coincidence?’
‘Jack told you?’
‘Of course.’
‘Did he also tell you I was the last person to see Cockerell alive?’
Rod stood with the teapot in one hand and its spout in the other.
‘No. Were you?’
‘Yes. Bad luck really. I just happened to be in the right hotel on the wrong night.’
‘The last I heard, Cockerell’s wife had been unable to identify the body.’
‘She won’t have to. I’ve done it.’
‘It’s him?’
‘Yes.’
Rod threw the pieces back onto the tray, and flopped into an armchair.
‘So. That’s it.’
‘It? You mean final? Of course it isn’t final. What do you think, that you’ve finally nailed Eden’s balls to the floor? You knew it was Cockerell long before the Government owned up! But this isn’t the last nail. Rod, you knew, but Eden didn’t. None of the buggers knew. Cockerell was a loner. Eden probably found out after you did. Your theory of the great conspiracy, as is so often the case, comes down to the great cock-up.’
‘I don’t deny that I knew Cockerell’s name right from the start . . .’
‘Even on that day we got pissed at the Commons?’
‘Yes. Even then. But I still don’t see how you can say Eden didn’t know.’
‘The war cry of discredited leaders throughout the ages. “Nobody told me.” I don’t know what happened, but I know that SIS were surprised by this. And I think Eden was horrified.’
Rod sat back. Stared at a space somewhere over Troy’s head, then lowered his eyes to meet Troy’s gaze.
‘Doesn’t excuse them, though. Does it?’
‘No. Their job to know after all. But it does put the ball squarely in my court.’
‘How so?’
‘It’s murder. Three murders to be precise. I don’t know who killed Cockerell, but it’s conceivable it was the same person who killed George Jessel and Madeleine Kerr. It’s not final because it’s still happening, because it’s murder—and murder is my business.’
‘Shit,’ Rod said softly. ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
‘Cockerell was a crook. Of what kind, I don’t know. But he was working a fiddle worth thousands through his business. He wasn’t your sophisticated spy, he was a common or garden crook.’
‘But he was also spying? Why else was he down there? I don’t follow.’
And Troy did not much mean to lead. There were things he would tell Rod and things he would do his best to avoid telling him. It was all a matter of phrasing. It was time to change tack or be caught out.
‘Tell me. What is a spy?’ he said.
‘Bit bloody philosophical, isn’t it?’
‘Indulge me. What is a spy in his . . . nature?’
Rod thought about this. Locking his fingers together, stretching out his arms and listening to every joint in his hands crack.
‘I know it’s a cliché, but they’re whores aren’t they? At heart your spy is a whore.’
‘And what is the nature of a whore? The prerogative, if you like.’
‘Oh, I get it. You mean that old saw about the chap at the Tory Party conference, Baldwin or somebody very like Baldwin, who described the press as exercising power without responsibility, which “has been the prerogative of the whore throughout history, arf arf”. Then Devonshire turns to Macmillan and says, “Damn, there goes the tarts’ vote!” ’
‘That’s the one. The whore has power without responsibility. The spy has responsibility without power.’
‘Now you have lost me.’
“What is the spy’s stock in trade? What is the commodity at the heart of his trade?’
‘Information.’
‘Knowledge.’
‘If you like.’
‘Portable property Dickens would have called it. Knowledge he can carry, trade or deliver, but on which he cannot act.’
‘Meaning?’
‘Knowledge is not power. Bacon was only half right. Knowledge is only power if you can act upon it.’
‘And if you can’t?’
‘If you can’t, then knowledge is a dead weight. The fate of the spy is to know in impotence.’
‘The burden of knowledge, eh?’
‘Something like that.’
‘And how do you come to know this?’
An honest answer might have been to say ‘because I married one’, but Tosca was a red herring to the argument. It was not her nature he was driving at, but Rod’s and his own.
‘A few weeks ago you called me a spy.’
Rod opened his mouth. Troy knew that his unspeakable decency would lead him to apologise for any truth. He raised a hand to shut him up.
‘Of course I was a spy. I can hardly pretend otherwise. But what are you?’
‘You’re going to tell me. I can’t stop you. And I’m beginning to wish you hadn’t smashed the teapot.’
‘A spy is someone in possession of information to which he has no right and is powerless to use. You got a lucky tip over Cockerell, but you couldn’t come out and name him.’
‘He wasn’t exactly my priority. The point wasn’t Cockerell or who killed Cockerell. It was the breach of faith by the Government.’
‘Quite. You went after the Tories over Cockerell without Cockerell being the issue. You scored a victory, but the storm you whipped up won’t die down. It’s murder. It always was.’
‘It won’t die down because you’re raking it up.’
Troy ignored this.
‘The same tactic applies to Suez. You know what the buggers are planning, thanks to the CIA. But you can’t come clean and say it. The information strangles you. Knowledge without power. You can’t stop Eden without revealing your source.
I’ll go further—you won’t stop Eden. You won’t stop him, because you want to see him fuck up and then your party can step in as the saviours.’
Rod sighed deeply. There would be no angry outburst. This was its cue and it wasn’t even waiting in the wings.
‘Freddie. Believe me, I’d give anything to stop this war happening. But I can’t. Not me, not heaven, not hell. All I can do is harass the bastards from the sidelines, see to it that my own party comes through it untainted and in a position to pick up the pieces.’
Troy pushed himself to the edge of the sofa. Rod was leaning forward, elbows on knees, fingertips to chin. He met his brother almost nose to nose.
‘But, doesn’t it hurt to know?’ he whispered.
‘Not the word I’d have put to it yesterday or even five minutes ago, but yes, that’s exactly what it does.’
Troy got up. Walked a giddy walk to the kitchen. Rooted out the spare pot. God knows, Rod had earned his cuppa. He heard him sighing repeatedly over the gentle hiss of the kettle. He knew he had hit him hard, more brutal than any physical blow he could have landed on him. He stuck a second tray in front of Rod and poured for the two of them. The soft, oriental waft of Earl Grey floating to the nostrils, the airy illusion that they were good, solid Englishmen, at teatime peace with history.
Rod smiled, said, ‘Let’s see if we can avoid smashing this one, shall we?’
They sipped in silence. Troy could read Rod like a book. The pattern of guilt inscribing itself deep in the soft yielding tissue of his good nature. He stared at the ceiling, sighed from time to time and seemed to be working his way to some kind of conclusion.
‘You know, I can’t even tell Gaitskell. I mean, that is, I haven’t told Gaitskell. In fact, you’re the only person I have told. It’s like holding the grenade in your fist. I can taste the metal pin in my mouth. Teeth clamped, fist tight.’
He stumbled to a halt. Troy sensed revelation slouching.
‘You remember Ike called me?’
‘I doubt I shall ever forget.’ Rod did not ask Troy what he meant by this.
‘I told you he’d heard Eden’s address to the nation. It wasn’t quite what prompted the call. Truth is, he’d heard Hugh’s reply as well. He called not because he thinks Eden’s war barmy—goes without saying—but because he fears Hugh and the Labour Party may well back him. Ike calls me up from the nineteenth hole almost every damn Saturday. “Only phone in America that ain’t bugged!”—and he doesn’t laugh when he says it. Last weekend he was all but shouting at me. He’s really worried that the country will fall in behind Eden.’