The Mammoth Book of Best British Crime 9

by Maxim Jakubowski

  “I’m not a young thing any more,” she said. “It need not be a marriage of passion. There’s much to be said for companionship.”

  George was not well acquainted with passion. There’d been the odd dusky prostitute out in Libya, a one-night fling with a NAAFI woman in Aldershot … but little else. He had not given up on passion because he did not consider that he had yet begun with it.

  They were married as soon as the banns had been read, and he walked out of church under a tunnel of swords in his blue dress uniform, the Madame Bovary of Upton Bassett, down a path that led to twin beds, Ovaltine and hairnets worn overnight. He had not given up on passion, but it was beginning to look as though passion had given up on him.

  **

  Six weeks later, desperation led him to act irrationally. Against all better judgement he asked once more to be transferred to Intelligence and was gobsmacked to find himself summoned to an interview at the War Office in London. London … Whitehall … the hub of the universe.

  Simply stepping out of a cab so close to the Cenotaph – England’s memorial to her dead, at least her own, white dead, of countless Imperial ventures – gave him a thrill. It was all he could do not to salute.

  Down all the corridors and in the right door to face a Lt Colonel, then he saluted. But, he could not fail to notice, he was saluting not some secret agent in civilian dress, not Bulldog Drummond or James Bond, but another Ordnance officer just like himself.

  “You’ve been hiding your light under a bushel, haven’t you?” Lt Colonel Breen said when they’d zipped through the introductions.

  “I have?”

  Breen flourished a sheet of smudgy-carbonned typed paper.

  “Your old CO in Tripoli tells me you did a first-class job running the mess. And I think you’re just the chap we need here.”

  Silence being the better part of discretion and discretion being the better part of an old cliché, George said nothing and let Breen amble to his point.

  “A good man is hard to find.”

  Well – he knew that, he just wasn’t wholly certain he’d ever qualified as a “good man”. It went with “first-class mind” (said of eggheads) or “very able” (said of politicians) and was the vocabulary of a world he moved in without ever touching.

  “And we need a good man right here.”

  Oh Christ – they weren’t making him mess officer? Not again!

  “Er … actually sir, I was under the impression that I was being interviewed for a post in Intelligence.”

  “Eh? What?”

  “I have fluent Russian sir, and I …”

  “Well, you won’t be needing it here … ha … ha … ha!”

  “Mess Officer?”

  Breen seemed momentarily baffled.

  “Mess Officer? Mess Officer? Oh, I get it. Yes, I suppose you will be in a way, it’s just that the mess you’ll be supplying will be the entire British Army ‘East of Suez’. And you’ll get your third pip. Congratulations, Captain.”

  Intelligence was not mentioned again except as an abstract quality that went along with “good man” and “first-class mind”.

  * * *

  Sylvia would not hear of living in Hendon or Finchley. The army had houses in north London, but she would not even look. So they moved to West Byfleet in Surrey, on to an hermetically sealed army estate of identical houses, and as far as George could see, identical wives, attending identical coffee mornings.

  “Even the bloody furniture’s identical!”

  “It’s what one knows,” she said. “And it’s a fair and decent world without envy. After all the thing about the forces is that everyone knows what everyone else earns. Goes with the rank, you can look it up in an almanac if you want. It takes the bitterness out of life.”

  George thought of all those endless pink gins he and Ollerenshaw had knocked back out in Libya, and how what had made them palatable was the bitters.

  George hung up his uniform, went into plain clothes, War Office Staff Captain (Ord) General Stores, let his hair grow a little longer and became a commuter – the 7.57 a.m. to Waterloo, and the 5.27 p.m. back again. It was far from Russia.

  Many of his colleagues played poker on the train, many more did crosswords and a few read. George read; he got through most of Dostoevsky in the original, the books disguised with the dust jacket from a Harold Robbins or an Irwin Shaw, and when he wasn’t reading stared out of the window at the suburbs of South London – Streatham, Tooting, Wimbledon – and posh “villages” of Surrey – Surbiton, Esher, Weybridge – and imagined them all blown to buggery.

  The only break in the routine was getting rat-arsed at the office party a few days before Christmas 1962, falling asleep on the train and being woken by a cleaner to find himself in a railway siding in Guildford at dawn the next morning.

  It didn’t feel foolish – it felt raffish, almost daring, a touch of Errol Flynn debauchery, but as 1963 dawned England was becoming a much more raffish and daring place – and Errol Flynn would soon come to seem like the role model for an entire nation.

  * * *

  It was all down to one person really – a nineteen-year-old named Christine Keeler. Miss Keeler had had an affair with George’s boss, the top man, the Minister of War, the Rt Hon. John (Umpteenth Baron) Profumo (of Italy) MP (Stratford-on-Avon, Con.), OBE. Miss Keeler had simultaneously had an affair with Yevgeni Ivanov, an “attaché of the Soviet Embassy” (newspeak for spy) – and the ensuing scandal had rocked Britain, come close to toppling the government, led to a trumped-up prosecution (for pimping) of a society doctor, his subsequent suicide and the resignation of the aforementioned John Profumo.

  At the War Office, there were two notable reactions. Alarm that the class divide had been dropped long enough to allow a toff like Profumo to take up with a girl of neither breeding nor education, whose parents lived in a converted wooden railway carriage, that a great party (Conservative) could be brought down by a woman of easy virtue (Keeler) – and paranoia that the Russians could get that close.

  For a while Christine Keeler was regarded as the most dangerous woman in England. George adored her. If he thought he’d get away with it he’d have pinned her picture to his office wall.

  It was possible that his lust for a pin-up girl he had never met was what led him into folly.

  * * *

  The dust had scarcely settled on the Profumo Affair. Lord Denning had published his report entitled unambiguously “Lord Denning’s Report” and found himself an unwitting bestseller when it sold 4,000 copies in the first hour and the queues outside Her Majesty’s Stationery Office in Kingsway stretched around the block and into Drury Lane, and the country had a new Prime Minister in the cadaverous shape of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, who had resigned an earldom for the chance to live at No. 10.

  George coveted a copy of the Denning Report but it was understood to be very bad form for a serving officer, let alone one at the Ministry that had been if not at the heart of the scandal then most certainly close to the liver and kidneys, to be seen in the queue.

  His friend Ted – Captain Edward Ffyffe-Robertson RAOC – got him a copy and George refrained from asking how. It was better than any novel – a marvellous tale of pot-smoking West Indians, masked men, naked orgies, beautiful, available women and high society. He read it and reread it and, since he and Sylvia had now taken not only separate beds but also separate rooms, slept with it under his pillow.

  About six months later Ted was propping up the wall in George’s office, having nothing better to do than jingle the coins in his pocket or play pocket billiards whilst making the smallest of small talk.

  Elsie the tea lady parked her trolley by the open door.

  “You’re early,” Ted said.

  “Ain’t even started on teas yet. They got me ’anding out the post while old Albert’s orf sick. What a diabolical bleedin’ liberty. Ain’t they never ’eard of demarcation? Lucky I don’t have the union on ’em.”

  Then she slung a single large b
rown envelope on to George’s desk.

  “I see you got yer promotion then, Mr ’Orsefiddle. All right for some.”

  She pushed her trolley on. George looked at the envelope.

  “Lt Colonel H. G. Horsfield.”

  “It’s got to be a mistake, surely?”

  Ted peered over.

  “It is, old man. Hugh Horsfield. Half-colonel in Artillery. He’s on the fourth floor. Daft old Elsie’s given you his post.”

  “There’s another Horsfield?”

  “Yep. Been here about six weeks. Surprised you haven’t met him. He’s certainly made his presence felt.”

  With hindsight George ought to have asked what Ted’s last remark meant.

  Instead, later the same day, he went in search of Lt Col. Horsfield, out of nothing more than curiosity and a sense of fellow-feeling.

  He tapped on the open door. A big bloke with salt-and-pepper hair and a spiky little moustache looked up from his desk.

  George beamed at him.

  “Lt Col. H. G. Horsfield? I’m Captain H. G. Horsfield.”

  His alter ego got up and walked across to the door and with a single utterance of “Fascinating” swung it to in George’s face.

  Later, Ted said. “I did try to warn you, old man. He’s got a fierce reputation.”

  “As what?”

  “He’s the sort of bloke who gets described as not suffering fools gladly.”

  “Are you saying I’m a fool?”

  “Oh, the things only your best friend will tell. Like using the right brand of bath soap. No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that to a high flyer like Hugh Horsfield, blokes like us who keep our boys in pots and pans and socks and blankets are merely the also-rans of the British Army. He deals with the big stuff. He’s artillery after all.”

  “Big stuff? What big stuff?”

  “Well, we’re none of us supposed to say, are we. But here’s a hint. Think back to August 1945 and those mushroom-shaped clouds over Japan.”

  “Oh. I see. Bloody hell!”

  “Bloody hell indeed.”

  “Anything else?”

  “I do hear that he’s more than a bit of a ladies’ man. In the first month alone he’s supposed to have shagged half the women on the fourth floor. And you know that blonde in the typing pool we all nicknamed the Jayne Mansfield of Muswell Hill?”

  “Not her too? I thought she didn’t look at anything below a full colonel?”

  “Well, if the grapevine has it aright she dropped her knickers to half-mast for this half-colonel.”

  What a bastard.

  George hated his namesake.

  George envied his namesake.

  * * *

  It was someone’s birthday. Some bloke on the floor below, whom he didn’t know particularly well but Ted did. A whole crowd of them, serving soldiers in civvies, literally and metaphorically letting their hair down, followed up cake and coffee in the office with a mob-handed invasion of a nightclub in Greek Street, Soho. Soho – a ten-minute walk from the War Office, the nearest thing London had to a red-light district, occupying a maze of narrow little streets east of the elegant Regent Street, south of the increasingly vulgar Oxford Street, north of the bright lights of Shaftesbury Avenue and west of the bookshops of the Charing Cross Road. It was home to the Marquee music club, the Flamingo, also a music club, the private boozing club known as the Colony Room, the scurrilous magazine Private Eye, the Gay Hussar restaurant, the Coach and Horses pub (and too many other pubs ever to mention), a host of odd little shops where a nod and a wink might get you into the back room for purchase of a faintly pornographic film, a plethora of strip clubs and the occasional and more-than-occasional prostitute.

  He’d be late home. So what? They’d all be late home.

  They moved rapidly on to Frith Street and street by street and club by club worked their way across towards Wardour Street. The intention, George was sure, was to end up in a strip joint. He hoped to slip away before they reached The Silver Tit or The Golden Arse and the embarrassing farce of watching a woman wearing only a G-string and pasties jiggle all that would jiggle in front of a bunch of pissed and paunchy middle-aged men who confused titillation with satisfaction.

  He’d been aware of Lt Col. Horsfield’s presence from the first – the upper-class bray of a bar-room bore could cut through any amount of noise. He knew H. G.’s type. Minor public school, too idle for university, but snapped up by Sandhurst because he cut a decent figure on the parade ground. Indeed, he rather thought the only reason the Army had picked him for Eaton Hall was that he too looked the officer type at a handsome five foot eleven inches.

  As they reached Dean Street George stepped off the pavement meaning to head south and catch a bus to Waterloo, but Ted had him by one arm.

  “Not so fast, old son. The night is yet young.”

  “If it’s all the same to you, Ted, I’d just as soon go home. I can’t abide strippers, and H. G. is really beginning to get on my tits if not on theirs.”

  “Nonsense, you’re one of us. And we won’t be going to a titty bar for at least an hour. Come and have a drink with your mates and ignore H. G. He’ll be off as soon as the first prozzie flashes a bit of cleavage at him.”

  “He doesn’t?”

  “He does. Sooner or later everybody does. Haven’t you?”

  “Well … yes … out in Benghazi … before I was married … but not …”

  “It’s OK, old son. Not compulsory. I’ll just be having a couple of jars myself then I’ll be home to Mill Hill and the missis.”

  It was a miserable half-hour. He retreated to a booth on his own, nursing a pink gin he didn’t much want. He’d no idea how long she’d been sitting there. He just looked up from pink reflections and there she was. Petite, dark, twenty-ish and looking uncannily like the dangerous woman of his dreams; the almost pencil-thin eyebrows, the swept-back chestnut hair, the almond eyes, the pout of slightly prominent front teeth and the cheekbones from heaven or Hollywood.

  “Buy a girl a drink?”

  This was what hostesses did. Plonked themselves down, got you to buy them a drink and then ordered house “champagne” at a price that dwarfed the national debt. George wasn’t falling for that.

  “Have mine,” he said, pushing the pink gin across the table. “I haven’t touched it.”

  “Thanks, love.”

  He realized at once that she wasn’t a hostess. No hostess would have taken the drink.

  “You’re not working here, are you?”

  “Nah. But …”

  “But what?”

  “But I am … working.”

  The penny dropped, clunking down inside him, rattling around in the rusty pinball machine of the soul.

  “And you think I …”

  “You look as though you could do with something. I could … make you happy … just for a while I could make you happy.”

  George heard a voice very like his own say, “How much?”

  “Not up front, love. That’s just vulgar.”

  “I haven’t got a lot of cash on me.”

  “’S OK. I take cheques.”

  * * *

  She had a room three flights up in Bridle Lane. Clothed she was gorgeous, naked she was irresistible. If George died on the train home he would die happy.

  She had one hand on his balls and was kissing him in one ear – he was priapic as Punch. He was on the edge, seconds away from entry, sheathed in a frenchie, when the door burst open, his head turned sharply and a flash bulb went off in his eyes.

  When the stars cleared he found himself facing a big bloke in a dark suit, clutching a Polaroid camera and smiling smugly at him.

  “Get dressed, Mr Horsfield. Meet me in the Stork Café in Berwick Street. You’re not there in fifteen minutes this goes to your wife.”

  The square cardboard plate shot from the base of the camera and took form before his eyes.

  He
fell back on the pillow and groaned. He’d know a Russian accent anywhere. He’d been set up – trussed up like a turkey.

  “Oh … shit.”

  “Sorry, love. But, y’know. It’s a job. Gotta make a livin’ somehow.”

  George’s wits were gathering slowly cohering into a fuzzy knot of meaning.

  “You mean they pay you to … frame blokes like me?”

  “’Fraid so. Prozzyin’ ain’t what it used to be.”

  The knot pulled tight.

  “You take money for this?”

  “O’ course. I’m no Commie. It’s a job. I get paid. Up front.”

  He had a memory somewhere of her telling him that was vulgar, but he sidestepped it.

  “Paid to get you out of yer trousers, into bed, do what I do till Boris gets here.”

  “What you do?”

  “You know, love … the other.”

  “You mean sex?”

  “If it gets that far. He was a bit early tonight.”

  A light shone in George’s mind. The knot slackened off and the life began to crawl back into his startled groin.

  “You’ve been paid to … fuck me?”

  “Language, love. But yeah.”

  “Would you mind awfully if we … er … finished the job?”

  She thought for a moment.

  “Why not? Least I can do. Besides, I like you. And old Boris is hardly going to bugger off after fifteen minutes. He needs you. He’ll wait till dawn if he has to.”

  * * *

  Walking to Berwick Street, along the Whore’s Paradise of Meard Street, apprehension mingled with bliss. It was like that moment in Tobruk when Johnny Arab had stuck a pipe of super-strength hashish in front of him and he had looked askance at it but inhaled all the same. The headiness never quite offset and overwhelmed the sheer oddness of the situation.

  In the caff a few late night “beatniks” (scruffbags, Sylvia would have called them) spun out cups of frothy coffee as long as they could and put the world to rights – while Boris, if that really was his name, sat alone at a table next to the lavatory door.

  George was at least half an hour late. Boris glanced at his watch but said nothing about it. Silently he slid the finished Polaroid – congealed as George thought of it – across the table, his finger never quite letting go of it.