by Lawton, John
‘They’ve got you by the balls, son, can’t you see that?’
‘No. I bloody can’t. What I can see is that a copper’s been shot in the face on a London street.’
Walsh looked around the room, checking to see if heads had turned at Troy’s outburst. He leaned closer. His voice dropped and the tone of shared confidence became one of rank and authority.
‘Listen to me, Sergeant. I’ve been on the force thirty-two years. Nobody blows my men away like chaff if there’s a single damn thing I can do to stop it. But I’m a police officer, just like you, and I learned the day I joined that taking orders is what keeps us on the straight and narrow. If we can’t take orders, if we don’t respect our superiors then we’re just like that lot -’ He gestured out towards the street with the wet end of his pipe. ‘We’re scum and we’re rabble.’
He sat back red-faced and angry. His pipe had gone out and he laboriously went through the sucking and puffing of relighting it. ‘I’ve had my orders. You’ve had yours. That’s all there is to it.’
‘My orders are to continue,’ said Troy quietly and pointedly.
‘Then I wish you well of it. From what I hear, following orders hasn’t been your strong suit of late.’
‘I want to see Miller’s file on Wayne.’
‘Sorry. I can’t help you.’
Walsh sank most of his pint. Troy’s Guinness sat untouched. He hadn’t wanted the drink in the first place, had not in fact touched alcohol since his night with Tosca, but not to have a glass in front of him would have been so openly hostile.
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘You told my Super that Miller was following Wayne.’
‘I said no such thing.’
‘I need to see that file. The only reason we didn’t insist on it last night is because we thought you were investigating too.’
‘I do not have the file.’ Walsh paused for the effect. ‘If such a file ever existed.’
‘Miller was following Wayne. He kept notes. We all do – those notes will be a matter of record. There must be a file.’
Troy hammered out his logic to be faced with the same curt denial.
‘As I said, I can’t help you.’
‘If you’re not investigating and you do not hand over that file, it could be construed as withholding evidence. If you make me I’ll request it through formal channels. I don’t care what gentleman’s arrangement you’ve reached over my head . . . if you make me I’ll get it the formal way . . . I’ll have Onions do it.’
Troy half-expected Walsh to explode – he could hardly be accustomed to being threatened by his juniors. Instead he made one last generous suck on his pipe and knocked it out in the ashtray. He took a silver smoker’s penknife from his waistcoat pocket and went into the ritual of scraping and tapping – looking across at Troy every few seconds as he did so.
‘Tell me, Sergeant. Do you know what vetting is?’ he asked, raising a bushy eyebrow in feigned innocence.
‘Roughly.’
‘Well – more precisely than roughly – yours only just measured up to scratch the last time it was done. I know. I conducted it myself back in that fifth-column panic in 1940. Lot of nonsense, and we all know it, but if you go on digging around in this way, you may come up against that catch-all line “a matter of national importance” – could be anything from the price of eggs to secret weapons – and you may give our lords and masters cause to examine that vetting and consider . . . shall we say . . . its marginality?’
‘You’re talking about my family.’
‘Amongst other things. That uncle of yours at Imperial is a bit of a barm cake – ranting at Speakers’ Corner – I ask you – the man’s a clown. And your brother – in and out of internment. All adds up y’see. And it all adds up to the sudden necessity of keeping your nose clean.’
‘My brother’s collecting his DFC from the King next month,’ said Troy.
‘Doesn’t make you a hero. You know what I mean, lad.’
‘So I mustn’t ask for non-existent files?’
‘I think we understand each other at last. Sorry not to have been more help, Sergeant.’
As quickly as he had appeared, Walsh had picked up his bowler and was gone. For ten or twenty seconds Troy sat in bitter disbelief, until the penny dropped. He ran out of the Princess Louise and looked down the street. Walsh was walking solidly, back bent, one hand to his hat in the stiff evening breeze, in the direction of Holborn viaduct. Troy ran after him and caught him by the sleeve and shouted, ‘You can’t give me the file because you don’t have it. And you don’t have it because Miller didn’t report to you!’
Walsh shook free of Troy’s hand and looked down at him. Six foot and heavy-set it seemed that he could crush Troy underfoot like a beetle.
‘Split hairs, Mr Troy, split hairs.’
Troy walked hurriedly alongside Walsh until he stopped again.
‘If Miller didn’t report to you, who did he report to?’
Walsh sighed deeply, as though bothered by a persistently stupid child.
‘You’re a good copper, Troy. I’ve admired your work. We all have. There’s not many have come so far so quick. But you’ve got to learn to take orders. If we can’t take orders then the rule of law means bugger all, and if you can’t grasp that then you’re not one of us. I’ll bid you goodnight, Troy. If you follow me again, I’ll slap the cuffs on you and clip you to a railing.’
He walked off, still at his steady policeman’s pace, clumping westward. The wind flapped and tugged at Troy’s coat as he watched Walsh disappear into the evening’s rush for the Underground. He stood immobile, thinking – until a man bumped into him, jabbing him in the back with his gas-mask case and told him to mind himself. In that mind a dotted line had become firm, solid, continuous – almost tangible. Edge.
44
Troy and Wildeve met for lunch in St James’s Park. Troy, having no appetite, brought nothing. Wildeve brought the sandwiches his landlady had made up for him. Nothing could be less appetising than national loaf, the merest smear of butter and a spread of four-year-old raspberry jam. Wildeve would have given an arm or a leg for a piece of veal and ham pie or a slice of lean roast beef on white bread. Instead he had given his food coupons to his landlady and bitterly regretted it.
‘I can’t eat this muck. I really can’t,’ he said to Troy. ‘I don’t suppose you . . .?’
Troy got up from the bench, took the sandwiches and walked towards the pond. ‘Let’s see if the ducks will eat them,’ he said.
Wildeve sat and shivered. ‘And then perhaps we could eat the ducks. Though I don’t suppose we could get an orange for love or money. Do you know there are kids nowadays who’ve never seen a banana ‘or an egg you didn’t have to shake out of a packet like cheap custard powder?’
‘Stop whining, Jack. We’re in a Royal park. Those ducks are the King’s property. You’re talking treason.’
Troy broke the stodgy bread into pieces and dropped it into the quacking mass of ducks that had gathered around him.
‘It’s cold as hell, Freddie. Why do we have to meet here?’
Troy hurled a piece of greyish bread towards the middle of the water and sent half a dozen ducks scurrying towards it. Wildeve sat with his back to The Mall and Troy turned to face him looking quickly down the path in each direction. From this position he could see anyone within a hundred or so feet in any direction.
‘I don’t want ears pressed to partitions or keyholes in the office. I don’t want anyone to know what you’re up to.’
‘Me?’ said Wildeve.
‘Don’t worry, Jack. It’s orders.’
‘Whose orders?’
‘Mine, Constable.’
‘And Onions?’
‘No. In fact Onions doesn’t know and I don’t want him to know. If you end up in the shit you were just following orders, the buck stops with me.’
‘Oh.’
‘I want you to put Muriel Edge, head of MI5 section F4, under surveilla
nce.’
Wildeve muttered ‘shit’, stuck his hands deep into his pockets, strolled to the path and sent a stone hurtling down it with the toe of his shoe.
‘Shit,’ he said again, more loudly than the first time, ‘shit, shit, shit.’
The ingénu pretence was over. No longer the whining schoolboy, he turned his shining morning face to meet Troy’s gaze, bright of eye and cynical.
‘I want her followed from her office in St James’s Street, I want her home watched, I want to know when and how I can talk to her without any of her people knowing. There’ll be a Special Branch man somewhere around most of the time I should think.’
‘Shit!’ Wildeve said again.
‘It’s possible that as a section head she has a permanent shadow. All I need is a gap in her life when I can be certain she isn’t being watched.’ Wildeve looked across to Horse Guards Parade, towards Whitehall, as though imaginatively weighing up the magnitude of his task.
‘Freddie, I don’t suppose you could tell me why?’
‘I don’t see why not. I met with Walsh from Special Branch last night. He’s been told to drop Miller’s murder. His orders come direct from MI5. Now, he tells me . . . and I believe him . . . that he doesn’t have Miller’s papers on Wayne.’
‘He must have. Miller was his man.’
‘If he had been Walsh would be locked on to this case like an alligator. He’s that sort of man, believe me. At first I thought I was getting the same runaround that I got from Zelig – but Walsh is the cleverest operator I’ve ever met. He pointed me in the right direction, he warned me to watch my back, and all anyone overhearing him would have heard was a Chief Inspector dressing down a sergeant. His hands are tied, but he made damn sure we kept after Miller’s killer. Miller was not his, Miller reported directly to Edge. If a file exists, Edge has it.’
‘But surely it’s Edge who’s told Walsh to lay off?’
‘I don’t think so. I think that came from higher up.’
‘Such as?’
Troy fell silent as a bowler-hatted civil servant approached the water and opened up his gas-mask case. He pulled out a few crusts, tossed them at the ducks and walked slowly on.
‘Such as?’ Wildeve repeated.
‘I don’t know – but someone who can tell both Walsh and Edge when to jump. Her immediate boss is the divisional director Roger Hollis. He’ll answer directly to Sir David Petrie. Whoever made them jump they jumped – they backed off the case. You and I are the only people looking into Miller’s death.’
‘Then why haven’t we been keelhauled too?’
‘Simply because we don’t take orders from MI5. Only Onions and the Met commissioner can tell me to stop an investigation. The route MI5 have to the commissioner is through the Home Secretary, and I really don’t think they want to have to explain to Herbert Morrison why the streets of his city are getting littered with corpses. Pym and the Americans can stonewall us by not answering questions or invoking national security – but unless they go to the Home Secretary and convince him to tell the commissioner then there’s bugger all they can do to make us quit.’
‘Short of adding us to the pile of English dead, you mean?’
‘Oh no. They won’t do that. Not for a while anyway. Miller’s death upset the applecart . . . I don’t know how . . . but I doubt they’ll risk another.’
I thought Petrie was an ex-copper,’ said Wildeve. ‘I can’t imagine how he could just sweep the death of another policeman under the carpet.’
‘An awful lot of them are ex-coppers. I’m not sure past loyalties matter a damn. Besides Edge was never on the Force, neither was Hollis. This business may not even have reached Petrie. The chain of command could stop well short of him.’
‘I see. Just as it does with Onions?’
‘It’s not that I don’t want Stan to know – honestly, Jack, at the moment Stan doesn’t want to know. He wants results. If I get them, he’ll put his blind eye to the telescope. I can’t follow her myself. She knows me. Any thick plod they’ve assigned to her will have been told to look out for me. You have to do it.’
Troy scattered the crumbs from Wildeve’s sandwiches, and tossed the paper bag on to the water.
‘Any idea where Mrs Edge lives?’ asked Wildeve.
‘Fifty-two Edwardes Square.’
‘And I don’t suppose I’m allowed to ask how you know this?’
‘Quite right, you’re not. And I need to know quickly.’
Three days later Troy knew.
45
Edwardes Square is in west London, just south of Holland Park. A quiet, leafy expanse of late Georgian elegance. Quiet because it lies tucked away from the Cromwell Road and Kensington High Street, and has houses on only three sides. Leafy since the square itself is a large private park cordoned off for the benefit of residents only by high iron railings. Before the war the scene in front of Troy would have been lit by the dull glow of ancient gas-lamps, still perched awry on their fluted stems. It was a Hollywood idea of London. Capes, top-hats and hansoms – the detective furnished courtesy of Mr Chesterton and the Club of Queer Trades.
The plain-clothes copper on the door was getting restless. He kept glancing at his watch. Each time he waited less and was now looking in less than a minute. From the dark side of the square, where the high wall that ran along the backs of the houses in the High Street threw him into deep shadow, Troy could see the man and thought he knew the type well enough. Beery and fortyish – passed over for promotion and hobbling lazily towards a pension at the earliest date, war permitting, and his place next to the fire. If Wildeve was right, any second now he’d slope off to the pub at the south-east corner of the square and be gone a good half-hour. The copper pinched out the end of his cigarette, placed the stub carefully in a tin and slipped the tin back into his overcoat pocket. A gesture at once both neat and petty, but it was a common enough sight nowadays to see a man roll a fresh cigarette from the stubs of a dozen old ones. He turned up his collar, gave a desultory glance into the square and was gone.
The gate into the park stood open. The light would be good for another twenty minutes. Troy could just make out Mrs Edge, kneeling in front of a large well-kept flowerbed – shielded from the street by a thick hedge of variegated privet. Something cracked beneath his feet. He felt sure she must look up, but she carried on rooting out and pulling at something unwelcome in her flowerbed. A small Pekinese dog perked up at the sound, walked warily towards him and then turned and ran back with a single soprano yap as though announcing Troy’s presence. Edge stood clutching something brown and shrivelled. Without turning she said, ‘My fuchsias – they never seem to survive the English winter.’
She crumbled them to dust between her hands. Peeling off her gardening gloves she turned to Troy.
‘What kept you?’ she said simply.
Troy sat on the nearest bench and watched as she undid her headscarf and tucked it into the pocket of her fawn suit. She looked less the county lady without it.
‘A little matter of certainty,’ Troy replied. ‘And the man on your door.’
Edge sat down next to Troy – delicately perched and ramrod straight. ‘Yes. He is a nuisance, isn’t he. So tiresome, but I tell myself it’s all for my own good.’
She reached inside her jacket and brought out a thick wad of paper folded many times.
‘Rather messy I’m afraid, but I think our friend would have noticed if I’d tried to walk the dog clutching a cardboard file.’
It was too late to read. Troy merely felt the weight of the paper and slipped it into his inside pocket.
‘Of course Sergeant Miller only records facts. Facts and observations. He doesn’t – didn’t – speculate, but then I don’t suppose he was trained to theorise. You people aren’t, are you?’
Troy wondered if an insult phrased in the semblance of a question really required an answer. ‘How much did you tell Miller?’ he asked.
‘Enough for him to know what to look for I hope.�
��
‘Not enough to prevent him getting killed?’
The soft mockery vanished as she turned her hard, rich blue eyes on him. The lines around her mouth drew in sharply. She looked to Troy like a vicious bird of prey.
‘You knew Wayne was a killer, didn’t you?’ Troy persisted.
‘I suspected it. But then I suspect a lot of things. The whole point in having Sergeant Miller was to find out what was true and what was not.’
‘He killed a man as long ago as April last year.’
‘At which point I did not know of his existence. No, Mr Troy, I didn’t know he was a murderer. I asked for a Special Branch officer only in November last year. You’ll see. Sergeant Miller’s notes go back no further than the last week of November. I’d received too many reports of this mysterious American involving himself with the London Communists. They may well be stupid enough to take him at face value – I’m not. I could see him as a plant at once. It was simply a matter of finding out exactly what he was up to and tracing him back to . . .’ she fumbled for the right word, ’ . . . to . . . source.’
‘Source?’
‘To his masters. To the men who authorised American penetration.’
Troy could feel her anger rising. She could hardly shout at him without attracting the attention they both wanted to avoid, but her shoulders shook gently with the suppression of rage, and he felt her looks would turn him to stone if they only could.
‘Mr Troy, I’m a section head. Do you know what that means?’ It too required no answer.
‘I’ve worked all my adult life for my country. I love my country. I’d die rather than see it go Bolshevik. But that does not mean I will surrender any part of it to an alien power simply because that power assures me that we’re fighting the same battle. I don’t expect you to understand, you’re only a policeman – but Wayne is OSS. That pernicious organisation has a foothold here. One granted to it by sheer necessity of the common cause – the special relationship.’