by Lawton, John
She slept and he let her sleep.
When she awoke it was dark. He was sitting on a chair in the corner of her room. He saw her stir, watched her rub her hair and blink at him. For a moment it seemed that she did not recognise him, the hands left her hair and clapped onto her open mouth as she muffled a scream.
‘Jeeezus. Jeezus. I remember! I remember! It’s him!’
Troy crossed the room, pulled her hands away from her mouth, and held them.
‘Just tell me.’
‘November. Three years ago. 1953. I was on a live drop to Lisbon. Regular run. I’d been doing it since the spring. Same guy, same method, same exchange. He’d show up clutching a two-day-old copy of The Times, with the eyes of the Es filled in, and I’d hand him a parcel. They never told me what it was, but I knew it was money. I’d done half a dozen in a row. Then in November a different guy shows, clutching the paper marked up in the right way. So I gave him the money. Didn’t take fifteen seconds—we neither of us asked any questions—and he didn’t try to flirt with me. But it was Charlie. Only time it ever happened. In December the regular guy was back and I never saw Charlie again. The regular guy showed up every other time. Lisbon, Paris, Zurich. Regular as clockwork, till they pulled me off it.’
Troy went downstairs and came back clutching his briefcase. He tipped it out on the bed and held up a photograph of Cockerell he’d cut from a newspaper.
‘Is this him?’
‘Sure. That’s the guy. Ronnie Kerr. But how did you—?’
‘His real name’s Arnold Cockerell.’
‘The frogman? The guy you’ve been investigating? I don’t get it.’
‘You should. It’s simple. You were the service end of a grubby little operation.’
‘I was?’
‘Where did you think the money went? What did you think it was for?’
‘I didn’t think. You lose the habit. You just do it and hope to get by. Y’know. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Nobody knows. I mean, nobody else. Nobody that could tell. Charlie won’t tell, will he? I mean he can’t. If he blows the whistle on me he blows it on himself. It’s a Mexican stand-off. So we’re safe. Nobody really knows. I mean, who else has ever seen me?’
Troy could not tell her pleading from her desire to reassure him, and hence herself. He picked up the police 10 C 8 of the dead Madeleine Kerr.
‘Did you know her?’
‘Nah. Never met her.’
‘She was Ronnie Kerr’s wife. Or at least she pretended to be. Twenty-two years old. Thought it was all a lark. She was murdered. Less than two weeks ago. You remember the case I was on in Derbyshire? That was Ronnie Kerr’s accountant. That leaves you—you’re the last person in England who knows Charlie was running a racket for the Russians. Everyone else has been killed.’
‘Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.’
The phone had rung persistently over his words. He picked it up, meaning to hang up and silence it.
‘Mr Troy?’ The operator’s voice.
‘Yes.’
‘Reverse charge call from Leicester. A Mr Clark. Will you accept the charge?’
Tosca was right. No one but Charlie had ever seen her in her old guise. No one except Clark.
‘It’s me, sir.’
‘Eddie. Where are you?’
‘I’m on Leicester station, sir. I’ve forty minutes between connections. I’m waiting for the slow train from Nottingham, but I thought I’d better tell you as soon as I could. I’m on my way back from Derbyshire. I’ve cracked the code.’
‘The code?’
‘Madeleine Kerr’s last letter, sir. I was getting nowhere with it. Couldn’t get past the first sentence. Then it dawned on me. She hadn’t written it. Cockerell wrote it. So. I had to look for the key.’
‘Key?’ Troy said feeling like an ill-informed parrot.
‘Yes, sir. Codes like this need a text. An acrostic grid that both writer and reader know to use. At its neatest you have two code pads, one-time pads they’re called, five letters in a block, and you tear off the page every time you use it, so it’s never the same code twice. At its most complex you have a machine with lots of rotating cogs that makes Babbage’s engine look as simple as an alarm clock, and a few thousand assorted boffins and WRENS in wooden huts in Bletchley Park to work the damn thing. I didn’t think Commander Cockerell quite that sophisticated, so I knew I was looking for a printed text. The letter opens in the old alphabet code—Dear Sis. That’s a pun in my opinion sir. SIS. Get it?’
‘Just tell me, Eddie.’
‘Then it says 49AA. However I worked the code I always ended up with gibberish from those four letters. I thought I must be working it wrong. But then it was obvious, there was a new code for everything that followed and this was the key, they weren’t actually in code themselves. What we in the police force call a clue, sir. I began to realise that Madeleine Kerr had written only the first two lines, something to steer her sister to the real code that Cockerell was using. And it had to be something Cockerell had access to every day. So I took his shop keys out of your desk and went up there yesterday afternoon. I missed it. It was out in the open and I missed it. I spent all last night and half this morning turning out his desk drawers. Then I saw it, sticking out of one of those pigeon holes above his desk. The Automobile Association Handbook for 1949. At the back of the book they give you the distances between the major towns of the country. A simple A–Z graph on two axes. The perfect reusable code. Unless you know what it’s based on, you’d never crack it! So A is for Aberdeen, and the first use of the letter A is the distance between Aberdeen and Aberystwyth—which is 427 miles, therefore the code is 427. The second use would be based on the distance between Aberdeen and Barnstaple, which is 573 miles, hence 573. And as there are fifty-seven possible codes for the letter A, you can write a page or more before you have to repeat any one code. Occasionally you’ll get overlaps—for example the distance from London to Brighton is the same as from London to Cambridge so you could in theory have 53 standing for both B and C, but as London is at the bottom of every column you’d be on at least your thirtieth use of the letter by then, so . . . And the tricky bit is there’s no major British city beginning with the letter J, so the second I, which is Ipswich, becomes J. You’ll never guess how he managed Z.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Eddie. Just tell me!’
‘Ashby de la Zouche. Not bad, eh?’
Clark clearly was not getting the message. Troy turned around in search of Tosca, but she had gone downstairs.
‘You cracked it. Well done. Now just tell me what it says.’
But he knew what it would say. Knew it at its worst.
‘Cockerell was a double agent, sir. I doubt he had the brains to work out exactly what that meant, but the people running him did. They were using him as a courier to channel information out of Britain and money in. They bounced him all over Europe—Paris, Milan, Lisbon. You name it. He was recruited by a man called Charles Leigh-Hunt in the summer of 1951 on a trip to London, ostensibly to visit the Festival of Britain. Says Leigh-Hunt’s MI6, and that he’d known him in the war, but I have no real confidence in Mr Cockerell on matters like that. Could be a fake name, could be a line they spun him. But there’s no doubt about who was his immediate control—would you believe our old friend Inspector Cobb?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘I would.’
‘Then there’s a list of seven names of agents Cockerell claimed to have on his payroll. Earl, John—Smith, Alan—Harwood, Antony—’
‘Don’t recite the lot. Just give me what’s important. The big fish, not the sprats.’
Clark paused, as though Troy had set him a dilemma.
‘Well, sir. There’s only one other big fish as you put it. The courier the Russians sent. He records every meeting, every date, every place, but then he says she always used a different name, so he doesn’t bother to record them, as they’ll all be phoney.’
Clark paused again. Troy could hear his own heart beat
.
‘But he does describe her.’
Again silence. Troy not wanting to break into it, for fear of what must follow.
‘I will say, sir, it sounds familiar.’
‘Does it?’
‘About five foot tall, close-cropped hair, although the colour varies from blonde to ginger, built like Jane Russell, bit of a looker, and what Cockerell calls an “irritating American accent”. But, sir, and here’s the clincher, “always clutching a copy of Huckleberry Finn”. Now, sir, who does that sound like to you?’
He wanted so much to be able to see her. He wanted to look into her eyes. He wanted to fling her “we’re safe” back in her face in all its overconfident stupidity. Why had she chosen now to wander off? Now—when the lies she had constructed were about to come crashing down like crazy paving.
‘Eddie, do you still live in the Police House?’
‘I do, sir.’
‘Don’t go back there. Watch your back all the way home. Check into a hotel. Go to the Ritz, give them my name. There’ll be a room for you. She’ll meet you there.’
‘I don’t quite follow, sir.’
But he didn’t ask who Troy meant by ‘she’.
‘There’s been another murder. Someone Cobb mistook for me.’
‘Bloody hell.’
Troy went downstairs to the sitting room. Tosca was sitting in one armchair. Foxx in the other. Like hell’s bookends. Foxx was the new Foxx—the Dior suit, the good shoes—the matching pink luggage in a heap between the two chairs. Tosca was the old Tosca, wishing looks could kill.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘looks like we caught you suckertush, doesn’t it?’
She crossed her legs, let her foot swing, a metronome of her own impatience. Foxx looked at him. Baffled and not far short of angry.
‘You gonna explain, or what?’ said Tosca.
Troy seized her by the hand, dragged her into the kitchen and kicked the door shut. He didn’t see the fist that came flying at him, and a direct hit to the jaw knocked him off-balance. He deflected the second blow, and the third went wild, colliding with a saucepan. She bruised her knuckles and yelled in pain.
Troy slipped in and slammed her back against the wall.
‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘You complete fuckin’ bastard. You couldn’t wait for me could you? You couldn’t fuckin’ wait! I mean was that a lot to ask? Just to wait for me!’
He took her by the jaw, tilted her head and levelled her eyes on his. Her feet still kicked, but the hands stopped flailing.
‘Shut up. Shut up and listen to me. Whatever’s running through your mind, whatever it is you think I’ve done to you there’s something more important.’
Tosca managed an ‘Oh yeah?’ through pursed lips.
‘They killed a man last night.’
‘They?’
‘Them. The people you were dealing with.’
‘Oh God.’
‘Right here. On the doorstep.’
Her eyes widened. He felt her body slacken and knew the fight had gone out of her.
‘They thought he was me.’
‘Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh God save us.’
He let go. She slithered to the floor, wrapped her arms about herself and he saw tears forming in her eyes.
He squatted down to her level.
‘Who was he? This guy they thought was you?’
‘An old friend. You might have heard me mention him. Johnny Fermanagh.’
‘And this guy looked like you?’
‘A bit. Well, a lot.’
She leant her head against his thigh and groaned.
‘Whatdafuckaweegonnadooo?’
He stretched out a hand to her head and ruffled her hair, picked out the cobwebs she had gathered slithering down the wall.
‘Exactly what I tell you.’
‘I’m all ears.’
‘You take Shirley. You check into the Ritz. You take three rooms.’
‘Who’s the third one for?’
‘My sergeant. He’ll get in touch with you in a couple of hours.’
‘How will I know him?’
‘He’s an old friend—Edwin Clark.’
Her head shot up so fast he thought she’d crick her neck, and her eyes were the size of saucers.
‘Edwin? Edwin? You mean fat little Eddie Clark from Berlin? Sweet little Swifty who did that nice line in women’s underwear and black-market coffee? The guy who got me my black strapless Schiaparelli?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he’s your sergeant?’
‘Yes.’
‘Jeezus! Jeezus, Troy. Why didn’t you tell me about Clark? He knows me, he knows me! You could have told me, you could have fuckin’ told me!’
‘It doesn’t matter. It would only have alarmed you. Besides, he’s one of us now.’
‘Us? Us? Troy, I don’t even know the word!’
‘Leave a message at the desk telling him which room you’re in. Lie low and do nothing till you hear from me. Now—get your shoes and coat. You haven’t time to pack.’
He opened the kitchen door, and she ran for the stairs. Foxx was standing by the fire, with her back to him. She turned and slapped another large brown envelope against his chest.
‘When I said you were married, you told me you didn’t live together any more.’
‘We didn’t, or I didn’t think we did,’ Troy said, not wholly sure what the truth was.
‘But here she is, and here am I.’
‘And you’ll be together a little longer.’
‘Are we in trouble?’
‘Yes.’
‘I was prepared for that. I don’t think I was prepared for a wife.’
§99
Troy put the two women in a cab, and went back to the house. He took the little golden gun from his coat pocket, pushed off the safety and racked a bullet into the chamber. He put the gun on the table next to the telephone. The tools of the trade. One or other had to get him out of this.
Time was he and Charlie would discuss every aspect of their lives. Once, the best part of twenty years ago, Charlie had rung him and said ‘I’m engaged. Talk me out of it.’ Troy had. And he had never even learnt the unfortunate woman’s name. But to call him, and square off, to call him and draw a line in the sand, to call him and be willing to go as far as blackmail—that he had never done, and he had no idea how to set about it. With any luck Charlie would call him. ‘We’re in a mess Freddie, let’s get out of it.’ Time was, Charlie could talk his way out of anything.
Half an hour had passed, and he had not reached for the phone. It rang first. He picked it up. If it was Charlie, so be it.
‘Troy? It’s me—Foxx. I’m at the Ritz. Something happened. We took the taxi to King’s Cross. Larissa gave the driver new instructions after we’d set off. Not the Ritz. She said it was dumb to go straight to the Ritz. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m a pro.” She said she’d been followed before. She knew how to shake off a trail. We changed taxis at King’s Cross. I flagged it down. She was behind me, paying the first taxi. She dropped her handbag, and when I turned round she’d vanished. The bag was still there, lying on the ground, but she’d gone, Troy. She’d just gone. I waited for more than ten minutes, but she’d vanished into thin air! Vanished, Troy. Just . . . vanished!’
§100
It had been years since he had last been in Edwardes Square. He had always thought it beautiful, in its sylvan way, but he had never found any reason to go there and enough of a reason not to. One thing had changed. There was now no Special Branch plod outside number 52. There was now no need for him to lurk in the shadows. He parked the Bentley outside Mrs Edge’s door and yanked on the bell pull.
‘You’re late,’ she said as she saw him framed in the doorway.
Troy looked at his watch. It was a quarter to eleven.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea of the time.’
‘I meant late in the lifetime of your favour, Mr Troy. Not the hour. However, I’ve been expecting
you these ten years. Do come in.’
She pushed the door to and drew a heavy curtain across it, locking out the night.
‘Almost autumn, you know. Mists and mellow fruitfulness, to say nothing of cold draughts and rising damp.’
He followed her down the hall and into an overheated sitting room at the back of the house.
‘I retire at Christmas. If you had not come soon, you would never have been able to collect what you’re owed.’
‘I wasn’t thinking in those terms.’
‘Don’t be coy. It doesn’t suit you.’
She sat down in a high armchair next to a hissing gas fire. Troy had the vaguest memory of a yappy lapdog, but a fat tabby cat occupied pride of place on the hearthrug, opened one eye as Troy approached, and did not stir from its place in the artificial sun. A game of patience was set out before her on a low, green baize card table, the latest novel of Kingsley Amis spread open on the footstool. Time had not been kind to Muriel Edge. The lines around her myopic eyes had sunk into Audenesque canyons. The high chair was clearly intended to cater to the onset of arthritis and an inability to bend without pain. The disease had locked her fingers like claws, bent and angular, the knuckles swollen to the size of conkers. The very shape bespoke pain to Troy.
‘I should have gone in the spring, at sixty. But when Dick White went off to run the other show, the new chap asked me to stay on. See the section through the handover, as it were. I was only too glad, retirement will bore me into an early grave. God knows, I can hardly while away the time writing a memoir, now can I?’
She waved Troy into the chair opposite with a crooked hand.
‘Now, tell me what you want. I do hope it’s something within my reach. I do so dislike to leave a debt unsettled.’
Troy had told her the truth. He had no sense of calling in a favour. But he would never have called on her had he not been able to bank on her sense that he had done her job for her all those years ago—tracking Jimmy Wayne where she could not, bringing him to book when her powers had reached their limit. He saw it as a connection, not a debt, but if that was how she saw it, it was but a small difference. He wanted a favour. Whether it was owed or not was of no matter if she granted it.