Friends and Traitors

by John Lawton

  “No—it’s not. It’s telling them we play by the rules. It’s a neutral condition. If an officer is under suspicion, it’s right that he has no cases until he’s cleared.”

  “No cases? I’ve just got back to three weeks of fucking paperwork!”

  “Leave it. It’s why you hired Eddie Clark, isn’t it?”

  Troy looked out of the window. Anything not to have to look at Stan. What he said next needed the most careful phrasing he could manage.

  He turned back.

  “It is also something else. Something that might not be obvious.”

  “Fine. I’ve not had me breakfast yet. Give me an egg to suck.”

  “Stan, please. It’s a tactic on the part of MI5. Suppose I were whatever it is they might suspect me to be … a secret agent … a spy … to suspend me is to tip me off … and that might give me cause to contact my handlers. They want me to break protocol … they want me to run … just like Donald Maclean.”

  “Then you’ve nothing to be afraid of, have you? First off, you’re not a bloody spy, and second, if they keep tabs on you the way they did on Maclean you’ll be in Moscow by Thursday lunchtime!”

  The faintest flicker of a smile on the grim Lancashire face. Troy wished he’d opened their conversation with that small vote of confidence, but he hadn’t.

  §89

  Westcott was coming down the corridor as Troy stood in the doorway of Eddie’s office. He’d not set eyes on him for about three years. On a day-to-day level, Troy happily followed Stan’s advice and had as little to do with the Branch as possible. At “plod” level, he despised them. Mindless thugs in black boots and macintoshes. An insult to the name of copper. But not Jim Westcott. Westcott was pure mind, with a fearsome reputation. A fearsome reputation and an unprepossessing appearance. He seemed to Troy to follow the Stanley Onions school of fashion, which was no fashion at all. He didn’t wear a suit, it simply hung on him as it would on a scarecrow.

  But he was smiling, and he was offering Troy a hand to shake.

  “Mr. Troy. I think we should talk, don’t you?”

  At least he hadn’t used any euphemism along the lines of “a bit of a chat.”

  “I’m sure you do, Mr. Westcott. Equally, I’m sure you’ll understand when I say, ‘not in this building.’”

  “I think I do, Mr. Troy, I think I do.”

  “Then what say we meet on neutral territory?”

  “You have somewhere in mind?”

  “I do. Meet me at the corner of Garrick Street and St. Martin’s Lane, just below Seven Dials … at—”

  Troy looked at his watch.

  “Shall we say four o’clock?”

  “Four will be fine.”

  Yes, thought Troy, “unprepossessing” was the word.

  He called Rod, from his office.

  A simple request.

  “And I suppose I’m not supposed to ask why?” said Rod.

  “No,” said Troy. “You’re not.”

  §90

  Westcott was at the corner on time. Troy watched him walk up St. Martin’s Lane from the Trafalgar Square end. Smaller than he had first seemed. Very grey, and just a little shabby, his moustache permanently stained with nicotine. Troy would put him at sixty or so, but was pretty certain he was younger. His generation had not worn well. A childhood in the over-romanticised Edwardian Age, an adolescence spent wondering if the Great War would last long enough to kill him, and then thrust out into the twenties, into the General Strike and the Depression—the Age of Disappointment—and the thirties, what Auden had called “that dirty, double-dealing decade”—one not designed to leave a man with any memories of heroism, camaraderie, or death. A dullness, a flatness, a slow-grinding hardship without redemption.

  Troy felt that parity of rank—Westcott was also a Chief Superintendent, albeit in and out of retirement as MI5 had recourse to his talents—would prevent Westcott from any pulling rank, and that he would probably be inclined to treat Troy as an equal whilst doing his job with all his much-vaunted tenacity. He would not keep Troy waiting, there’d be no cheap tricks designed to upstage or wrong-foot Troy. He’d play fair.

  Troy wouldn’t.

  “You live around here, don’t you, Mr. Troy?”

  “Yep. But my house would hardly be neutral territory. We’ll just walk along to the Garrick. It’s just over there.”

  “You’re a member?”

  Westcott could hardly keep the incredulity out of his voice.

  “No. Coppers are not clubbable, you will agree. My father was, and just before the war he offered to put my brother and myself up for membership. Rod accepted, went on the waiting list and got in quite quickly. A few places freed up by wartime casualties, I would imagine. We’re his guests. He’ll show us to a quiet corner and then bugger off.”

  “Am I dressed alright?”

  “Yes. They’re not complete and utter snobs except where women are concerned. They even keep spare jackets and ties at the door so they never have to turn anyone away. That said, I don’t recommend turning up in shorts and sandals.”

  Rod was just inside, hovering by the porters’ desk.

  Troy could sense the nervousness in him. He doubted Westcott could. Rod pulled out the vox humana on his politician’s keyboard, pressed the flesh, resorted to flattery.

  “Mr. Westcott. Not often I get to meet a living legend.”

  Westcott ducked into the mask of modesty that was probably one of his most useful tools as an interrogator.

  “Nor I, Sir Rod. I was too old for the last war, and too young for the first, but I have read almost every book about the Battle of Britain and I think you’re more likely to be the legend.”

  “Too kind,” Rod replied with just a flicker of embarrassment. “Let me show you around.”

  “Of course,” Westcott seemed to ramble on as they climbed the overly grand, over-elaborate staircase, “I was a serving copper during the war, but off duty I was on duty, as it were—Home Guard in Queen’s Park.”

  Troy had hated the Home Guard, the ARP, the part-timers and all those officious old men drummed into service. Not so much chocolate soldiers as hot-milk-and-Horlicks soldiers.

  “We all did our bit,” said Rod, in a mode Troy thought of as his political auto-pilot. “Except Freddie, of course. Couldn’t drag him away from Murder.”

  The baffled look on Westcott’s face broadened into a brown-toothed smile as something in his brain heard the capital M on Murder.

  Troy said nothing.

  Rod had set the tone nicely for phase one, but the sooner he buggered off the better. Phase two—Troy wanted Westcott to be overwhelmed by their surroundings, he wanted Westcott awed and intimidated. A little Sir Rod, a dash of RAF hero, a pinch of Shadow Home Secretary had helped—but their uses were limited. Let the Garrick do its work, let it wrong-foot an old copper in a Burton’s off-the-peg suit, on less than a grand a year, whose breath smelt of fags, whose clothes whiffed of stale sweat, whose ill-fitting shoes pinched his bunions, let him feel the cultural clout of Establishment England … feel the slings and arrows of Troy’s dirty-tricks campaign. Besides, there was nothing in what he or Westcott had to say that he would care to have said in front of Rod. Rod would no doubt be full of questions the next time they met, if he could wait that long, but Troy was adept at fending Rod off. Now—he needed to get Westcott alone.

  A quick tour, not quick enough for Troy, but no doubt furthering the slow process of intimidating Westcott, and Rod took them back downstairs and showed them to a cranny known to members as “Under the Stairs”—a curtained-off area of the main, ground floor lobby, beneath the main staircase—leather armchairs, and it being December, a coal fire. It was often full after lunch, but at four thirty on a winter’s afternoon, empty.

  “I’ve ordered tea. The man’ll be along in a minute or two. All on my slate. I’ll leave you to it.”

  Westcott pulled out his Player’s Navy Cut, the packet with the sailor on the front, a man bearing a str
iking resemblance to the late Tsar. He lit up, and when tea arrived flicked ash into the saucer, even though the Garrick provided ashtrays galore—the habit of a lifetime, thought Troy. And he began to see that impressed as he was by his surroundings, Jim Westcott was not going to let class intimidate him.

  “Do you remember the first time you met Burgess?”

  “Of course. Dinner, at my father’s house in Hertfordshire. Round about 1935, I think. The Prime Minster was there.”

  “Mr. Baldwin?”

  “No, the present Prime Minister, Mr. Macmillan.”

  Westcott dragged on his cigarette without a flicker. Name dropped, name sunk, thought Troy.

  “And the last time?”

  “Vienna, obviously. Or we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about him.”

  “No. I meant the last time before … as it were … the old days, before his defection.”

  “That would have been May 25, 1951. Around three in the afternoon. A Friday, I believe.”

  “How can you be so precise?”

  “It was the day he skipped the country. I have a different tailor for suits and a different tailor for uniforms. Mine needed stitching. Guy was there.”

  “At Gieves?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why didn’t you report this at the time?”

  “At what time? It was weeks before the government admitted he and Maclean had done a bunk. When the story broke in the papers I was up to my neck in a couple of very gruesome murders in Cardiff, and had no time to follow the story. It would be the end of that summer, perhaps autumn, before I pieced it together and realised I’d seen him on his last day. Then there was an election in October—I usually take a bit of leave to help my brother. By the time that was over, we had a new government and Burgess and Maclean were old news.”

  “You didn’t consult your notes?”

  “I don’t take notes when visiting my tailor, and neither do you.”

  “Did you talk?”

  “Briefly. Guy seemed to be planning a holiday. Scotland, the North. The only odd thing about it was he hated being out of London. Hated the suburbs, hated the Home Counties. If he ever went north of the Trent in his life I’d be amazed. The idea of him in Scotland was unimaginable. As far as Guy was concerned, the world ended at the Circle Line and Camden Town was a foreign country.”

  “So you knew he was lying to you?”

  “No. I knew he was just rattling on. It was … Guy nonsense. I don’t remember what I thought. Perhaps a smokescreen to disguise a queer liaison—but he’d never bothered with any pretence in the past. He just did what he did all too blatantly. We chatted, we parted.”

  “You realise, you might have been the last person to see Burgess?”

  “No. That was probably one of your blokes. It seems pretty clear you were following Maclean and managed to lose him. Perhaps you lost Burgess too? Or were you not following him?”

  Westcott lit up a new fag from the stub of the old. Troy thought the stench appalling, but said nothing. This was a London gentleman’s club—it was tobacco-coloured.

  “Did you like him?”

  “Hard to say. He had … has a grotesque charm. I don’t dislike him. I don’t share his tastes, except for music.”

  “Do you know why he approached you?”

  “Opportunism. Coincidence.”

  “We’re policemen, Mr. Troy. We think coincidence is a dirty word.”

  Troy said nothing.

  “But … as you say … also opportunism. You were there. He was there. And you shared a taste in music?”

  “Méret Voytek?”

  “I was coming to her, yes.”

  “Ten and more years ago, Miss Voytek and I had the same piano tutor, Viktor Rosen. I investigated Viktor’s death in 1948.”

  “Was she a suspect?”

  “No, no one was a suspect. It was suicide. I established that almost at once.”

  “And when she defected?”

  Time to lie.

  “When she defected I was as surprised as anyone else.”

  “You’d no idea?”

  “I didn’t need an idea. I investigate murder and this was suicide. My involvement lapsed once that was clear. The question ought to be, did your people have any idea?”

  “So—you were surprised to hear from her in Vienna?”

  “Yes, pleasantly so.”

  “And when Burgess appeared?”

  “It didn’t take a genius to work out that they might have met in Moscow, two exiles in need of company, a common love of music. And from Burgess’s point of view, a common language. Miss Voytek has toured repeatedly behind the Iron Curtain for years—she is one of the most acclaimed cellists on earth, and a pretty good pianist as well. And as Austria’s neutrality is guaranteed by all concerned, she is hardly likely to be snatched by our people or the Americans off the streets of Vienna. I gather she has played there quite a few times since 1955. That the Russians let her is no surprise. The real surprise was that they let Burgess get that far. To the point where he could de-defect.”

  “Unless, of course, they had other reasons for letting him out of his box?”

  Westcott didn’t use metaphor. His vocabulary was largely literal. This use of imagery, however slight, was telling. Burgess in his box.

  Westcott looked at his watch.

  “I think we might call it a day—for now. Thank you, Mr. Troy.”

  Westcott had asked no questions about the shooting of Bill Blaine—but he wouldn’t, would he? He had a copy of the police report from Vienna. Troy had nothing to add to that, and Troy knew full well he wasn’t suspected of pulling the trigger, he was simply suspected. The incident was not the object of Westcott’s enquiry … Troy was. Troy and Burgess … as though ever to have known the man was a culpable act. Troy thought of all the irritable, irritating warnings Rod had grumbled at him about Burgess over the years, yet he could not bring himself to regret his friendship with Burgess. He wouldn’t even try.

  As they left the Garrick, parting with a handshake like two shy friends who’d never got onto Christian-name terms, Westcott set off back in the direction of St. Martin’s Lane, and Troy set off in the opposite direction to the corner of New Row.

  He felt behind him the quickening shadow, the silent boot, the invisible, flapping gaberdine mac of Special Branch.

  §91

  Someone was following Frederick Troy.

  §92

  Someone was following Frederick Troy.

  Of course Jim Westcott would have him followed. It would be madness not to have him followed.

  Troy led his followers—two of them, clumsy, obvious, flat-footed buggers, he thought—across Covent Garden’s rotting vegetable remnants, slippery as ice, an excellent place to lose them if he so chose, onto Long Acre, across Seven Dials and Great Newport Street, into the Charing Cross Road. It wasn’t quite a full circle from the Garrick, but close enough for him to be sure they really were following him, and close enough for them to work out that he knew they were following him—but he didn’t think they’d do that. They stuck to orders to the letter, they did not think for themselves. Robby the Robot would give more thought to the job in hand than they would.

  Not knowing how long he’d be at a loose end, or how long he’d have to keep this up, he dropped into Dobell’s Jazz Record shop at 77 Charing Cross Road, just south of Cambridge Circus. He was an occasional rather than a regular, but was known to spend large amounts of money when he did visit, and so was on first-name terms with the proprietor. His indifference to the occasional aura of pot trailed by other customers like clouds of glory helped him to fit in. Douglas Dobell thought of Troy as a customer first and a policeman, if at all, second.

  “It’s been a while, Freddie. How’re things in Murder?”

  “Bloody as ever, but I’m on leave for a few days … so what’s new on vinyl?”

  “It’s been a good year. I’d say one of the best. Stereo is really taking off.”

  “It’s a
gimmick, Doug. It’ll never catch on.”

  “It’s more an illusion than a gimmick, and take it from me, it’s here to stay.”

  “I shall be listening on my old electric gramophone, come what may, so …”

  “They call them record players now, Freddie. Electric? I’m amazed you don’t still have one with a wind-up handle.”

  “Do you want to make a sale or not?”

  “Are you buying for you or the missus?”

  “Both, I suppose.”

  “There’s a new Billie Holiday. Great title. Lady in Satin. Miss Foxx’ll love it. Stan Getz has teamed up with Oscar Peterson. A great jam session.”

  “I’ve always thought ‘jam session’ musician-speak for arsing about.”

  “No, trust me. It’s great. A wonderful ten-minute medley in the middle based around “Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered.” Then there’s Duke Ellington’s Indigos, Ella’s recorded The Irving Berlin Songbook, and Miles has a film score out … Asc … Asc …”

  “Ascenseur pour l’échafaud. I’ve seen the film. Jeanne Moreau and I forget who else. Stick one on in a booth, would you?”

  “Which one?”

  “Any. I won’t be listening.”

  Troy reached up and twisted the light bulb, and the booth dropped into semi-darkness. Troy could just make out the two coppers on the other side of the road. The Charing Cross Road was so well lit, it would have paid them to retreat into a shop doorway, any one of the dozens of second-hand bookshops that lined the street.

  Doug changed records, played him a track off each LP he’d mentioned. It was well past five now and Troy wondered at what point the Branch would call it a day. The taller of the two coppers had been glancing at his watch every couple of minutes, and on the dot of five thirty they both set off down the road in the direction of the tube station. Predictable as clockwork.

  Troy emerged from the booth.

  “Which is it to be?” Dobell asked.

  “I’ll take the lot. And while I’m in spending mood, is there anything new from Coltrane?”