by Lawton, John
‘A hard man?’
‘That would be putting it mildly. An Ulsterman. Presbyterian. None of the faith left, just the rigours. We were bright girls. We both of us got scholarships to the grammar school. If Dad had had his way we’d have left at fifteen and got jobs, brought in a wage and paid our way till some man took us off his hands. But Mam was different. Derbyshire through and through—old-fashioned Labour. Education was everything; the only way out was up. So we took eight O-Levels apiece, and passed them all. After that we went to commercial college in Nottingham—shorthand, typing, French and German. That’s as far as the vision went.’
She looked from the fire to Troy. Seeking the reaction in his face.
‘Not much, was it? How to be one notch better off than your own parents is a lot like knowing your station in life. It means you don’t think you can do anything you want or be anyone you want, you can just . . . well . . . do a little bit better.’
Foxx put a hand to the back of her neck, twisted her head slightly and angled the last of the wet hair towards the fire. She reached for her handbag, pulled out a brush and began to brush her hair in long, measured strokes.
‘Then he died. Knocked off his perch by a heart attack at forty-two. We’d not long left college. The summer of 1951. Sweet seventeen. Stella was working for Cockerell, I was at the Co-op office.’
The look on Troy’s face must have told her something.
‘That’s not what she told you, is it? None of this is what she told you.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s not. In fact it’s quite a way from what she told me.’
‘Daddy was a country vet in Devon? Or was it a parson in Shropshire?’
‘GP in Berkshire, I think.’
‘That’s a new one. I’ve not heard that one before. Stella was quite a liar you know.’
‘So I’m discovering.’
‘I rather admire it. If the fiction is better than the life you’re leading . . .’
‘Please, go on.’
‘Dad died. That knocked Mam for six. He was a complete bastard, but it seems that he was her life and without him it wasn’t worth living. She became an instant invalid. Took to her bed. Then in the autunm of the next year Stella announced she was off. She told me the truth, that Cockerell was prepared to set her up in her own place—a love nest the News of the World would call it—she told everyone else she’d got another secretarial job in London. I wasn’t surprised. She’d been letting Cockerell have his way almost from the first day. They used to do it on the carpet samples with the lights out after work. Or, if he was feeling bold, in the back room during the lunch hour.’
‘Good God,’ said Troy almost involuntarily. ‘Did his wife know?’
‘I doubt it. But, then I’ve never met Mrs Cockerell. I know her by sight. It’d be hard not to in a town that size. But I’ve never spoken to her, and Stella said she never went near the shop. If Mrs Cockerell suspected anything she could have buttonholed me in the street at least once a week for the last four years. Never did. Never a word or a look. I told Stella she was a fool, but she didn’t listen. I told her she was dropping me in it, an invalid mother to look after and only one wage coming in. She wept and wailed and said she was sorry, but I don’t think she really gave a damn. By October she’d moved to Brighton. I threw over the Co-Op and went to the mill. There was more money to be made on a loom than taking dictation, and we needed it by then.’
‘Did you see her in Brighton?’
‘No. We always met in London.’
‘Did you know what she was up to?’
‘Up to? No, I didn’t know what she was up to. But that’s a leading question, isn’t it? And in answering a leading question I’m admitting I thought she was up to something, aren’t I?’
She’d rounded on him as swift as a Queen’s Counsel nailing his evidence in the box.
‘Yes, you are rather.’
‘Let me ask you a leading question.’
‘Fire away.’
She took him eye to eye.
‘Did my sister make a play for you?’
‘What makes you think she’d do that?’
‘Well. I know my sister. And you’re her . . .’ She hesitated, tangled a finger in a long strand of hair, ‘. . . her type. I don’t think I can put it any better.’
‘Type?’
‘Well . . . you do sound a bit like Robert Donat. You know the bloke in The Thirty-Nine Steps. The one who spends the night handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. And you’re a dead ringer for James Mason. You know—Odd Man Out, The Wicked Lady. And she was completely nuts about him.’
‘Odd,’ said Troy. ‘Odd for her to have a type and then to choose so completely against it. If you ask me, Cockerell was much more the Edward Everett Horton type.’
Foxx smiled, laughed softly, but would not follow the tangent he had marked for her.
‘But she did make a play for you, didn’t she?’
‘Yes. She did.’
‘And?’
‘And nothing.’
‘Really? You didn’t fancy my sister?’
‘Of course I fancied your sister. But she was drunk—plastered, in fact.’
‘And you were on duty?’
‘Glad you appreciate it.’
‘But you’re off duty now?’
He said nothing.
‘And I am, believe me, completely sober.’
He said nothing.
Foxx wound both hands in her hair. Toyed with idea of a beehive. She seemed to have either no sense of certainty—the hair, in the course of half an hour, had been up, down, over the left shoulder, over the right, and at one point gripped between her nose and her top lip like a fake moustache—she played with it constantly—or she lacked self-consciousness in a way Troy could only envy.
She dropped her hair, she dropped her towel and locked her hands around the back of his neck. It seemed like a long time since he had last been kissed, let alone so passionately as this. She drew back, placed a finger at the corner of his mouth, traced out the line of his lips with the edge of her nail.
‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said. ‘I could fuck you silly.’
§73
Dawn was the time of day he hated most. It had none of the slippin’ slidin’, heartwarming glow of dusk—the horizontal sigh. It glared and it seared and it exposed. As the usage of centuries had it so rightly, it broke. Among the wreckage he found himself lying next to a young, blonde woman of extraordinary beauty. Her forehead was level with his chest. She stirred as he slid from between the sheets, rolled over and did not wake, shedding the covers as she turned to show the curve of her spine, the rising roundness of her backside as the last of the sheet clung to her. He crept downstairs to the kitchen, the tiles cold beneath his feet, the smell of the storm still poised in the air. He found half a bottle of flat Tizer in the fridge, and stood with his back to the door, swigging from it.
He was, in all probability, beguiled—he was most certainly bothered and bewildered—God knows, he might even be bewitched. But he knew beyond a whisper of a doubt that before the day was out he would be . . . wild again.
He sank to the floor, still clinging to the Tizer bottle. However cold the tiles beneath his feet, colder still beneath the buttocks and balls. He drained the bottle, watched it roll away to the dark place beneath the sink, and then he stretched out on his side, full length across the floor.
Grab the thought now. Or lose it.
He was forty-one years old.
He had just let himself be seduced by a woman half his age.
It felt wild.
Wilder still.
Awop
bop
alubop
alop
bam
boom.
And wild again.
§74
In the morning, Troy drove her to the station—St Pancras once more. Up the ramp to stop the Bentley by the red brick arch that led under the gothic hotel into the soot-blackened glass engine shed.
‘Whatever I find out, I’ll share with you.’
Her muscles tensed, the merest pressure on the car door, and then relaxed. She looked back at him again.
‘You’re married, aren’t you?’
‘What makes you think that?’
‘Most men are married. Either to a woman or to the job.’
‘Which am I?’
‘Both,’ she said.
§75
Dickie Muffins was the quietest of the four. At once the most and the least imaginative of the schooldays quartet of Charlie, Gus, Troy and Dickie. A born bookworm, with none of the daring of Gus or Charlie, and none of the intense, obsessive introspection of Troy. He had always followed the line of least resistance. To university at eighteen, a year at Harvard, and to the family business at twenty-two.
The family business was one of London’s oldest private banks, with but a single branch, so small you might easily miss it altogether or mistake it for a private house, in Hanover Square, a stonesthrow from Regent Street.
He did not, Troy knew, give a damn about the bank. Joining had simply fulfilled his obligations to family—the line of least resistance—and allowed him endless free hours to pursue his first love—military history—in which field over the last ten years he had produced a definitive account of the Iberian Campaign and a well-reviewed life of Marshal Ney—uninterrupted save for the rare visit from one of his all too well-heeled customers. It said something for the scam Cockerell was working if he could afford an account at Mullins Kelleher for his mistress, without which Madeleine could not have had the use of the deposit box.
Troy did not see enough of Dickie, but that was entirely his own fault.
‘Freddie. What a surprise. What brings you here?’
Dickie rose from a pile of books, his hand extended.
‘It’s business, Dickie.’
‘Bugger—do I have to play the bank manager? What’s up? Your sisters squandered the family fortune?’
Troy took the police 10 C 8 of Madeleine Kerr from his briefcase and laid it on top of the open book on Dickie’s desk.
‘Oh shit,’ said Dickie. ‘Oh shit. She’s dead, isn’t she? I saw a lot like that when I was in the ARP during the war. Not a mark on them, but dead as door nails from the blast.’
Troy laid the flat Mullins Kelleher key on top of the photograph.
Dickie stared at the juxtaposition for a moment or two, then reached behind him and laid a four-day-old Evening Standard next to it.
‘MURDER ON THE BRIGHTON LINE.’
‘It’s her, isn’t it, Freddie? She was the unnamed woman found dead on the Brighton train. And you’re the unnamed policeman injured in pursuit of the murderer, aren’t you?’
‘’Fraid so. Dickie, I need to know what’s in that safety deposit box. I take it the box is in Madeleine’s name?’
‘Indeed it is. Mrs Madeleine Kerr. Never did come across Mr Kerr. I take it you don’t have a warrant?’
‘Not at this stage.’
‘Or any stage?’
Troy shrugged. ‘I do have the consent of Madeleine’s next of kin.’
‘In writing?’
Troy shook his head.
‘There is the matter of probate. Probate takes a damn sight longer than four days.’
‘She’s dead, Dickie, and I do have the key.’
‘Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.’
‘Old pals’ act?’
Dickie bustled out from behind the desk and its small mountain of books, pulling on his black jacket, trying to look like a banker.
‘I’ll need to get the second key, come on.’
Troy followed him down two floors to the vaults, through a thick steel outer door and a mesh inner door to a room of a thousand tiny doors.
Halfway up the wall Dickie inserted his key and beckoned to Troy. They both turned their keys at the same time and the tiny door swung sideways to reveal the handle of a long, narrow steel drawer.
Troy flipped the lid. Inside was a single envelope addressed simply ‘Shirley’.
He tore it open. A single sheet of foolscap. A single sheet of utter gobbledegook. A numerical soup. And Sellotaped to the bottom were five small keys much like the one he had just used to open the box.
‘Anything wrong, Freddie?’ Dickie said.
Troy folded the paper.
‘I’m going to have to take it away.’
Dickie slid the drawer back in and closed the door.
‘My God, you ask a lot.’
‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Did Madeleine have much money in her account?’
‘Now, you’re asking too much. I can’t possibly tell you that.’
‘How far does the writ of the old pals’ act run?’
‘Not that far. You’ll get me shot. Speaking of old pals. Seen anything of Charlie lately?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No, I haven’t.’
Troy had tried ringing Charlie not long after his return from Vienna. It was news then. News he felt he should share with his oldest friend. It wasn’t news now and he didn’t feel like sharing it with anyone. Winding up the staircase, Dickie asked all the ‘what’s new?’ questions and Troy muttered inconsequentially about things being ‘much the same’.
He was letting Dickie down, and he knew it.
§76
Troy parked the car by St James’s Park underground and went into the station to use a call box. He dialled his own number at the Yard. If he got Jack, then he would just press button B, get his pennies back and try later. It was Clark who answered.
‘Are you alone?’
‘Yes, sir. Mr Wildeve’s in court today; the Old Bailey.’
‘Do you know anything about codes?’
‘You mean coded messages, that sort of thing?’
‘Yes.’
‘Trained in it, sir. Army Intelligence cryptography course at Camberley in 1947. And odd refreshers while I was in Germany.’
And, thought Troy, twenty years of doing the crossword in The Times.
‘OK. I’m coming in.’
Ten minutes later he put the document he had taken from Mullins Kelleher in front of Clark.
Clark looked at it for less than a minute, and said, ‘Piece of cake. Simple substitution. Number for letter. All you need to know is how far down the alphabet they start. Nobody’s dim enough to go A–1, B–2—at least no one over the age of twelve. All I need is a little time without interruptions.’
He cocked his head in the direction of Wildeve’s desk.
‘If you catch my drift.’
‘Quite,’ said Troy.
Then it struck him that Clark meant more by the remark.
‘Why don’t you go home and read a book, sir?’
Clark pulled open the top drawer of his, that is Troy’s, desk.
‘Borrow anything you like.’
Not a bad idea, thought Troy, took Lolita off the top of the pile and shoved it in the pocket of his jacket. He made a quick telephone call to Nikolai, said goodbye to Clark and drove over to Knightsbridge. The only way Jack would ever find out he had been in Scotland Yard was if one of the blokes in uniform on the door mentioned it. That was pretty unlikely, he thought, as none of them would know that he was meant to be off sick.
Nikolai was outside Imperial College, waiting for him. Thin and grey, and looking smaller than ever—hatless and coatless in the summer sun. The flaps of a capacious double-breasted jacket waving unbuttoned as if to emphasise the slightness of his build. Without the winter weight of his astrakhan coat, he seemed to Troy to be stripped of all bulk, to be well on the way to becoming a wizened old man.
‘You haff unerring copper’s instinct, my boy. My stomach rumbles and tells me I will not get through to lunchtime, then you ring and invite me to early lunch. Leave your preposterous motor c
ar here, and let us walk the length of Exhibition Road while giving thanks to the memory of Prince Albert.’
He slipped on a pair of ancient sunglasses, their lenses as dull and unreflective as blackboards, and walked off southerly down the road. Troy found himself wondering about his gait. Was this an old man’s shuffle? Prince Albert’s achievement got very little of the old man’s attention. He asked for family gossip and, when it seemed that Troy had none, loaded him up with his own.
‘What’s got into your sister?’ he asked.
‘Which one?’
‘Sasha.’
‘Dunno. I can’t remember when I last saw her.’
‘She is up and down, up and down. Moody is an inadequate word to describe her. She swings from elation to misery.’
This, to Troy, about summed her up at any time, and he could not see what Nikolai was getting at.
‘God knows. She’s forty-six. Do you suppose . . . ?’
‘Ach. Don’t ask me. I’m a physicist. I know nothing of biology.’
They crossed the Cromwell Road, by the Victoria & Albert Museum. Nikolai pointed to the tiny traffic island, with its thick bottle-glass floor—a skylight to the dark, miserable tunnel that lay below.
‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when you were a little boy? How we would come down the tunnel from the Underground station and climb the steps to emerge over there? You used to think it was a kind of magic to pop up out of nowhere into the middle of the traffic.’
It was one of those drifts of memory that were so characteristic of his grandfather and were getting more typical of Nikolai with age. Troy now realised where they were heading. To the Polish caff at the end of the road. It was handy. Nikolai spoke passable Polish and, a couple of hundred yards from his office, it provided a substitute for the Russian he could not hear, and a choice of dozens of sickly-sweet sticky cakes. Troy had eaten with him there many times, although he cared little for Polish food, and doubted whether the countless Polish exiles who frequented the place cared much for an old man who spoke their language with a marked Russian accent.