Old Flames (Frederick Troy 2)

by Lawton, John

  ‘He has a point,’ said Troy.

  Rod looked sharply at him but declined the bait. The struggle simply to get out what he had to say was taking all his strength.

  ‘Last month the Prime Minister of Malta paid us a visit. Hugh and I had a private meeting with him. He told us that the Royal Navy was amassing an armada off Malta. And that there could be only one reason for this. And blow me, Hugh said, “I don’t believe you”! What the hell does he think is going on out there? A regatta? I can’t tell him. I don’t know how to tell him.’

  Rod slipped into staccato. Each phrase dragged up as though it were poetry, costing him the price of his soul at utterance. The pauses getting longer and more maddening with every attempt he made at precision.

  ‘We’re embarking on a national madness—The last fling of Empire—It’ll damn us for a generation—We’ll be international pariahs—It’ll create the biggest run on the pound in years—Sterling will go through the floor—Our gold reserves will be wiped out—And I can’t find a way to tell him—’

  Troy thought the last pause would be infinite. He could hear Rod breathing, he could hear cabs honking in St Martin’s Lane, he could hear a London pigeon burbling on his windowsill. He could hear the blood pulse in the cut on the side of his head.

  Suddenly Rod rounded on the argument in a move swifter than a cracker-barrel loop.

  ‘You know, I can’t stop what’s going to happen—but you can stop investigating Cockerell.’

  ‘No I can’t.’

  ‘It’s Jack’s case now.’

  ‘You’ve known me all your life. Do you really think that’s going to stop me?’

  ‘Let it go, Freddie. We’re both in over our heads. That’s what you’ve been to considerable pains to tell me.’

  ‘I know, but don’t you wonder where it’s leading? Guilt or no guilt. Father or no father. Doesn’t the spook chase make you wonder into what corners it will take us?’

  Rod mulled this one over.

  ‘Corners. Corners? Not the word I would have chosen. Depths, perhaps.’

  He sipped at his tea and mulled a new word.

  ‘Yes—depths. I don’t much care about the corners. Where would rooms, cardboard boxes and Pythagoras be without them? Depths. It’s the depths that bother me.’

  He drained his cup. Set it back on its saucer with a penetrating plonk. He looked at his watch.

  ‘I must dash. I should be in the House.’

  Troy was puzzled. The House did not sit in September.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Didn’t I tell you? We recalled Parliament while you were in the land of Nod. You know, the great experiment—democracy and all that?’

  That was a family phrase, the et cetera of ‘all that’—their father’s pattern of speech. It had been his pleasure and duty to educate his children by anecdote and aphorism, usually whilst doing something else, writing or eating, so that one always had the impression that such knowledge as he imparted was being imparted with extreme lassitude, the asides of a relaxed, occupied mind. Troy, as the youngest and sickliest, so often at home, so often just ‘around’, was the most frequent recipient of ‘all that’.

  ‘History, my little Englander, can be divided into two categories. The actions of history are either a bad thing or a necessary thing. Take the Revolution, our Revolution. A necessary thing. Take the present state of Mother Russia—the jury of history is still out. It will become a necessary thing or it will become a bad thing. There is no such thing as a good thing. Take the American Revolution. A necessary thing. Take their President—Mr Hoover—a bad thing. Take their present state. A necessary thing? Democracy and all that? Perhaps, but not a good thing.’

  A few years later a schoolmaster and a journalist had got together and written a very funny spoof history of England, a terrific schoolboy howler in which there were good kings and bad kings and good things and bad things. They had called the book 1066 and All That. Troy had often wondered if they had, at some point, met the old man in garrulous mood, and simply got it wrong.

  There was no easy dismissal of Rod’s ‘democracy and all that’—the phrase carried too much baggage and most of it was doubt.

  §72

  He had lied to Rod. Thinking about the encounter afterwards, they were lies of imprecision rather than complete untruth. It all depended on how Rod took his line about the common crook and the sophisticated spy. Troy had loaded all meaning he could onto the nouns, knowing these would lead Rod away from where meaning really lay, in the adjectives. He knew in his bones that Cockerell was a spy—he just wasn’t a ‘sophisticated’ spy. Perhaps he was even an uncommon crook. The more he learnt of the man, the more uncommon he seemed to be beneath the common façade. But Troy had surely and deliberately sent Rod away thinking that he had said Cockerell was not a spy. The less Rod knew the better.

  The less Tosca knew the better. He could not face the explanations, could not face her with his head wrapped up in its skimpy turban.

  He called her.

  ‘It’s Saturday tomorrow. Y’ comin’ home?’

  It was as well she said—he had had no idea what day it was.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I’ll have to work this weekend.’

  ‘The next then?’

  ‘Yes,’ he lied. ‘How . . . how are you . . . managing?’

  He heard the word crash down like breaking crockery.

  ‘Not bad. Wish you were here. Bet that surprises you, don’t it? One of the women turned out to be a mensch.’

  ‘Which one?’

  ‘Lucinda.’

  He was not surprised.

  ‘And the Fat Guy says you’re not to forget the pig is due to something or other.’

  ‘Farrow.’

  ‘Farrow?’

  ‘The pig is pregnant.’

  They lapsed into silence.

  Then she said, ‘Is that all we got to say to each other? The pig is pregnant? The goddam pig is pregnant!’

  He had never felt much like a married man. Now he did not feel like one at all. She had been gone a week, more or less? He wasn’t really sure. Dreamless hell was timeless hell. He began to wonder why he had any clarity of thought, what motive force enabled him to make sentences and utter speech. Dreamless hell was wordless hell. Mimram and Tosca seemed like images from another lifetime. He caught sight of himself in the mirror. Took off the bandage and threw it in the bin. He looked worse than she had the day he found her in Amsterdam.

  Jack phoned. His voice flat and emotionless. A courtesy call.

  ‘I’ve seen Bonser. He says he acted on his own initiative. Tore the pages out of Quigley’s book because he thought it was expected of him. Admits he was wrong. Even handed over the pages.’

  ‘He’s lying,’ said Troy.

  Jack exploded.

  ‘Of course he’s fucking lying! You think I don’t know he’s lying!?!’

  ‘Jack, I was only—’

  But Jack had hung up on him.

  He sat most of the evening playing, and playing again, Debussy’s Estampes. They fitted the night and fitted the mood. Limp and liquid. It was raining once more. The earth boomed and shook with thunder like the rage of Zeus, the rain tore down in sheets and lightning ripped the sky with a sound like tearing canvas. When he got fed up with Debussy he switched to Bach, those infuriating ‘pieces to be played in another room’, the Goldberg Variations. There was only one word for the Goldberg Variations. Flash. He loved the change of gear from first to top, especially that between the first and second variations. And he felt he coped well with the fast bits. It was the slow bits that did for him. Clunking through like a man with ten thumbs when, really, he needed three hands. The problem lay in the staccato nature of the work. Sharp—yes, staccato—but fluid at the same time. Tap, tap bonk just wouldn’t do.

  But the tap tap tapping was coming not from the keyboard. As a peal of thunder rolled away into a complaining grumble he stopped and heard, once again, the distinct tap of a hand at his
door. He took the small golden automatic off the top of the piano and flipped back the slide, heard the metallic thunk as the bullet entered the breach. He seriously doubted whether a gun so small could fire through an inch and a half of two-hundred-year-old oak, but as he reached for the handle with his right hand, his left held the gun against the door at chest height. He prised the door open. Through the two-inch gap he could see a bedraggled figure standing in the alley just below the bottom step. The rain was falling so hard it was bouncing back off the flagstones to give the impression that here was some unfortunate northern Aphrodite, rising from the foam, shrouded in the mist—and shivering to death. As a crack of lightning shredded the sky above him he could see her clearly. It was Madeleine Kerr, in a sodden T-shirt and sodden blue jeans.

  ‘You must be freezing,’ he said and threw the door wide.

  She stepped across the threshold, wiping the water from her face, and he ran to the bathroom for a towel.

  She stood dripping on the mat. He kicked the door to and handed her the towel.

  ‘Do you know who I am?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said.

  ‘You don’t seem surprised.’

  ‘I’ve been around twins all my life. It doesn’t surprise me to know that one person can precisely resemble another. Besides, they never do, precisely.’

  This woman had the same blonde hair, the same pale green eyes, but she was, in some way he could scarcely pin down, better-looking than her twin, a remarkably beautiful woman. Perhaps the wet waif was a powerfully deceptive image. The difference he saw, he realised, was in the absence of a sense of decadence. The too-knowing look.

  She rubbed at her hair in a desultory way.

  ‘Madeleine told you about me?’

  ‘She never mentioned you.’

  He knelt by the fire, turned on the gas and put a match to it. It popped into life. Pink and human and friendly.

  ‘Sit here and get yourself dry. I’ll make tea.’

  His hands shook as he reached down the tea caddy, rattled the tin kettle against the tap as he filled it. But that was, he had always thought, the purpose of the English Tea Ceremony. It bought time for nervous hands and hollow minds.

  When the tea was ready and his hands were steady, he carried the tray into the sitting room. The woman was crouched on the hearth-rug, wrapping herself in the huge bath towel and pulling off her clothes. Her jeans and T-shirt steamed on the back of a chair. She reached under the towel, eased her weight off her backside and dropped her knickers onto the chair. An awkward motion—for any woman faced with a total stranger. But she just smiled sweetly at him, without a trace of coyness. He set down the tray and sat on the edge of the fireside chair. She moved closer to the fire, sitting on her haunches, pulled the towel off herself in a momentary flash of hands and breasts and held it in front of her as a curtain, while she dried her face on its top edge. The towel rolled about her once more, she pulled the slide from the knot at the back of her head and eighteen inches of wet, blonde hair cascaded down her back.

  ‘I’m her sister,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Shirley. Shirley Foxx. With two exxes.’

  ‘Troy,’ he said. ‘With one of each letter.’

  She smiled. Reached for the tea cup.

  ‘Madeleine’s real name was Stella. She made up the Madeleine Kerr name. Two of her favourite actresses rolled into one. Madeleine Carroll and Deborah Kerr. She loved Deborah Kerr.’

  She paused, sipped at the tea.

  ‘I suppose it must have made it a bit awkward for the police, trying to trace someone and not knowing her proper name. But they found me. I went down to identify her.’

  He could hear the northern vowels in her voice. That was the trace of accent, he realised, that he had heard in Madeleine Kerr’s voice. Derbyshire. God, how the woman had lied to him.

  She reached for her handbag. Dug around inside it and produced a small, ivory-coloured compact. The same one he had seen Madeleine Kerr use on the train from Brighton.

  ‘When it was all over, that young copper from Scotland Yard, the good-looking one . . .’

  ‘Inspector Wildeve,’ Troy said.

  ‘Yes, him. He said I could take away Stella’s effects—I think that’s what he called them—her effects, and this was with them.’

  She flipped open the compact. Looked into the mirror at herself and then up at Troy.

  ‘When we were kids. Eleven or twelve. At the end of the war. We were each given one of these by an aunt. Rationing made them so precious. Even though our Mam said we were nowhere near old enough to be putting powder on our faces, and Dad hit the roof at the thought of his girls wearing make-up. So we kept them for years. Unused. They became our secret place. Because—you see—if you . . .’

  She pressed the side of the compact and the mirror shot forward on a spring. She turned the compact around for him to see. In the space behind the mirror was his card, the one Madeleine Kerr had taken. And beneath that, Sellotaped to the stainless steel, was a small flat key.

  ‘It was our hiding place. We kept our secrets there. It was a place we put things for ourselves and for each other. That’s how I knew. She put your card there for me to find. She put the key there for me to give to you.’

  Troy pulled the key free from its sticky tape. An elaborate K was on one side, an equally elaborate M on the other, in something like a Kelmscott typeface, and under the K was a stamped number so small one would need a magnifying glass to read it. Jack had said the killer had taken her handbag, tipped it out in the woods and abandoned it. The compact he had seen Madeleine slip into her jacket pocket. It must have been there when the local plod searched the body. The killer could not have found it.

  ‘Did you,’ he said, ‘did you show this to the Inspector, Mr Wildeve?’

  She shook her head. Not the faintest shred of guilt or doubt.

  ‘For your eyes only,’ she said.

  It seemed to Troy that she was placing an awful lot of trust in him on the basis of a single gesture. But, then, he was the youngest child of four, stranded at the far side of a large family like a poorly used preposition at the end of a sentence. He had no experience of the shared intimacies, the common ground of siblings. He doubted that Rod did either; they were middle-aged men now, striving for the semblance of trust they had not shared as children, teetering constantly on the edge of each other’s misgivings and Troy’s evasions—but his sisters in the privacy of their twindom had a common language, a private language that was gobbledegook to anyone else, a mutual trust, a great contra mundum—it should never have surprised him that they conspired at the manipulation of gullible husbands to conceal each other’s adultery—perhaps the trust this young woman had in him was only the transference of the trust she had placed in her sister. Troy had better be careful. He knew he had led Madeleine Kerr to her death, knew full well that whoever killed her had only found her because he had led him there. It was one of the most stupid things he had ever done. He could not tell Jack, although Jack would doubtless work it out for himself, and he must certainly never let this woman realise how misplaced her trust in him was.

  ‘Do you know what the key’s for?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. It’s a safety deposit box key for a bank in Hanover Square.’

  ‘What, like the District or the National Provincial?’

  ‘Not quite—a private bank called Mullins Kelleher.’

  She seemed impressed by the readiness with which he recited this.

  ‘I suppose it’s your job to know things like that?’

  ‘No, just so happens I bank with them too.’

  ‘I know it’s important, but I don’t know why.’

  Troy did. It was without doubt the reason Madeleine had insisted on the trip to London before she talked any further to him. Whatever was in that box was, in some unknown way, vitally important as a precondition to whatever she had meant to tell him. He put it on the mantelpiece with all the force of casualness he could mu
ster. The tiny rattle of metal on wood cut through his nonchalance like a whisper in St Paul’s.

  ‘Are you hungry?’ he said. ‘I’m a fair cook.’

  ‘And I’m a fair eater.’

  He went back to the kitchen. But the cupboard was bare. There was a large tin of Heinz beans on the shelf, the hard, stale end of a white loaf in the bread bin and a jar of sticky peanut butter in the fridge—Tosca’s legacy. Ransacking the drawers he also found a Mars Bar of indeterminate age. He had not shopped in days, he had not eaten in days, merely grazed until he was down to the bachelor’s bottom line, the last tin of beans on the shelf.

  It was nursery food, served in the best possible light. Beans on toast with peanut butter, best china and family silver, with an accompaniment of every proprietary pickle known to man: Pan Yan, piccalilli, Major Grey’s and Branston, crowned by the pièce de résistance, his sister’s home-made green tomato chutney—followed by half a Mars Bar each and a choice of Lapsang or Darjeeling.

  ‘Don’t laugh,’ he said.

  And if he hadn’t said that she probably would not have—good manners more powerful than her sense of the absurd. And when she had stopped, she ate heartily and said, ‘I haven’t shared a Mars Bar since sweet rationing ended.’

  ‘You must have got used to sharing.’

  ‘Twins, you mean? Of course, we shared everything. Until . . .’

  The sentence petered out. But it was obvious. The missing word was Cockerell.

  ‘When did they meet?’

  She took the cue. Pushed away her plate, screwed the Mars wrapper into a ball, shook her hair, inched a little nearer the fire and stared into it.

  ‘Hard to say. I can’t much remember a time when Arnold wasn’t a town busybody. He seems to have been the big fish in the little pond from the time he got there, and I suppose that’s ten years or more. My parents bought their three-piece suite from him. On the HP, Utility-made. That’d be 1947 or 1948. Stella and I were there when he delivered it. We’d be thirteen or fourteen I suppose. Even Arnold Cockerell wouldn’t flirt with a fourteen-year-old. Not in front of our Dad, he wouldn’t.’