by Lawton, John
‘Who does?’
‘Brack.’
‘Freddie, what on earth are you on about?’
Troy fell back on the sofa.
‘Wayne is back,’ he said.
‘Wayne did this?’
‘Why do you doubt it?’
‘It . . . it . . . doesn’t seem credible. Why would he take the risk? Look, I’ve got to call a doctor. For one thing that cut on your head is bleeding rather badly.’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Get Kolankiewicz. I can’t afford to be laid up by some stickler of a quack now. We have to get back out there. He’s here, he’s here!!!’
The expression on Wildeve’s face, the silent exchange of looks between Wildeve and Ruby told Troy that he was yelling, that to them he was a bleeding, battered, hysterical fool. He breathed deeply in an effort to slow the pace of heart and mind. Ruby came over to him and fussed silently. Pulling the blanket up to his chin, propping a cushion under his head so that he could see Wildeve without straining, wiping a rivulet of blood from his eyes. Wildeve leaned over once, pulled a face of mild disgust and turned his back on him. Moments passed to the tune of a thumping blood-vessel. The room swam a little, then steadied itself like a ship righting itself from listing. Troy heard Wildeve on the phone telling Kolankiewicz he knew what time it was but and but again.
‘He’s on his way. Are you settled now?’
Troy nodded.
‘Then tell me about it. Slowly.’
‘Onions gets to hear nothing of this.
‘Agreed. I’ll cover for you until you’re on your feet.’
‘OK. OK. Wayne was hiding out in the Savoy. He’s probably back there now.’
‘Well I’ll be blowed,’ said Wildeve. ‘Spitting distance the whole bloody time!’ He paused, then added with the merest hint of incredulity, ‘How do you know?’
And Troy realised for the first time that he could not tell Wildeve how he had come by this information. Worse, he could not think of a fitting lie.
59
Ruby slept stretched full length in front of the fire. Wildeve sipped tea and kept out of the way. Kolankiewicz raged.
‘What did I tell you? What did I tell you!’
He shone his Ever Ready penlight into Troy’s eyes, and plucked at his eyelids. Troy winced at the pain and at the breath of the man. Who in their right mind ate garlic liver-sausage for breakfast? Where on earth did he get the stuff off the ration? It could hardly be on it.
‘How many finger I hold up?’
Dozens danced like Mickey Mouse’s demonic broomsticks dashing to the well and back. Troy hesitated.
‘Tell the truth for once,’ said Kolankiewicz.
‘Two,’ guessed Troy.
‘Jesus Christ. All five, you lying bastard! How do you expect me to help you. Trust me I’m a doctor. Trust me or I kick you in the balls right now!’
‘Too many to count.’
‘Ach . . . ach . . . smartyarse. Listen, Troy. You got pressure on the optic nerve from the blood-vessels at the back of the eye. Not serious. All you need is rest and darkness. The swelling in your head goes down and the pressure on the nerve with it. But if you arse about you play with trouble. You got me?’
‘What sort of trouble?’
‘Trouble trouble. You are at risk.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean you could go blind.’
Kolankiewicz rummaged around in his bag and came up with a curved stainless-steel needle.
‘You need stitches in your head and on your chest. Two or three in each case. I got no anaesthetic and I hope it hurts. It might convince you to stop getting bashed about. Otherwise I predict a good chance you will join my regular client list.’
It hurt. Troy yelled. Wildeve excused himself to the kitchen. Ruby awoke with a start and followed him. Kolankiewicz tied the last knot and dived into his Gladstone bag once more. Troy watched the needle spurt as Kolankiewicz held the hypodermic up to the light.
‘You sod,’ he said, ‘you had anaesthetic all along.’
‘Not anaesthetic,’ Kolankiewicz said, ‘sedative.’
He whacked the needle into Troy’s arm before he could protest.
‘You got about five minutes to get yourself upstairs to bed. I give you enough to put down a brewer’s dray horse. If you show your face at the Yard within a week Onions hears everything. You understand me? Good. Now, if you excuse me the dead are waiting.’
He slammed out. Troy felt the first giddy, sub-orgasmic rush of the drug and called for Wildeve. Wildeve hooked an arm around his shoulders and lugged him up the stairs. The staircase spun, Troy’s legs abandoned him and a delicious narcotic elation flooded swiftly through his veins. The world was a painless, pleasant place. From outside the crystal bowl of his euphoria Wildeve’s pleading reached him.
‘Freddie, what the hell do I tell Onions? Where are you for the next week?’
Troy thought fast with what little power of thought remained.
‘Norfolk,’ he muttered. ’Suffolk. Lots . . . lots of air bases. Gone to . . . catch . . . catch . . .’
He resisted the pool of warm, pink light that invited him in and struggled with a final thought. There was something terribly important he had to tell to Jack. Terribly important. If only . . .
‘Savoy,’ he slurred out. ‘Check apartment. Wayne. Brack. Check apartment.’
He sank back on to the pillows. Ruby elbowed Wildeve aside and from nowhere produced a pair of striped winceyette pyjamas. The last thing Troy saw was her pulling off his trousers and trying to thread his legs into the pyjamas.
60
He woke from dreams of flight. He had been a kite high over Hampstead Heath tethered to Wildeve, who pulled on the wire and swirled him above the clouds. The view of London was tremendous. Night fell with exaggerated speed, the rolling night of trick photography. London lit up like Regent Street at Christmas. And not a bomber to be seen. He sat up in bed wondering how he could have such a vision of the city, somewhat in awe of the power of imagination until he remembered watching a night of the Blitz from atop Primrose Hill years ago. Incendiaries roaring up like gas jets off a stove. Suddenly it all looked remarkably like the view from Primrose Hill. Hardly quotidian but less the feat of untramelled imagination. He swung his legs off the bed. He ached dully but felt nothing he could honestly call pain. He pulled up his pyjama jacket. Two inches below the right nipple blood had caked around three black stitches. Connecting him but unconnected to him it seemed. He ran his fingers through his hair and felt the ridge of blood above his right ear. He stood. Less giddy than lightweight. His feet floated where his brain halfheartedly said they should go.
From the top of the stairs he saw Ruby with her back to him. She was ushering a man gently out into the street with a hand in the small of his back. The door closed, she leaned against it and tucked a ten-shilling note into the top of her stocking. Then she felt Troy’s eyes upon her.
‘Don’t get moral. I’ve a living to earn. And if I did it in all the old familiar places there’d have been no one here to look after you.’
Troy said nothing. He sat on a step about halfway down. She smiled.
‘I could cut you in of course. But that would be living off immoral earnings.’
She held out a hand to Troy. He stood and padded softly down the stairs, dishevelled in his pyjamas.
‘What time is it?’
‘Just after eight. It’s Sunday morning. You’ve had a nice sleep since Friday. That nice Mr Klankiwitch phoned last night to see how you were. I told him you were sleeping like a baby.’
Troy made a mental note to ask Kolankiewicz what he had put in the Mickey Finn he called a sedative. Ruby pulled the curtains open. Troy could not remember when he had last seen the light of day; it seemed like another lifetime. Morning sun slanted into the yard from the east. For once it looked like spring. Temptingly like spring.
He bathed, he dressed, he went out. As he pulled the door behind him he caught sight of Ruby looki
ng at him across the top of a magazine. He had no idea how long she intended to stay, but could not wrap his mind around the problem of letting a prostitute ply her trade out of his parlour. He smiled, imagining Onions’s reaction. He realised that he was still under the Mickey, or he would never have seen the funny side of it. He set off westward. If he could make it as far as Green Park then he might make up his mind where, if anywhere, he was going.
At Piccadilly he stood and looked back in the direction he had come. Across Leicester Square the sun shone gloriously in a sky that was bluer than blue and virtually cloudless, the like of which he could not remember having seen before. He was wrapped in his black overcoat, readily accepting that his mass of bruises was in some way to be equated with childhood illness and a voice in his head had told him maternally that he should not go out without his coat. At the foot of Eros’s pedestal two young women sat in shirtsleeves, daring all for spring sun, and shared a single cigarette.
He walked on into Piccadilly, watching his shadow dance before him. In the brightness of such light the city contrasted sharply with the weather. London thawed. London budded. London ached. Like muscle stretched and strained for too long it yearned to relax. The sense of action, the sense of an ending being almost tangible, Troy found himself wondering if the city would not expire with the first breath of spring like some old man who had spent his energy enduring the depth of winter and had none left for the simple pleasure of living. What the sun revealed was a city of peeling, blistered paint, of broken, boarded-up windows, of shattered walls and open roofs, of four long years of make do and mend. It was a city scorched and scarred, patched and tattered in the light of spring.
At Half Moon Street he crossed the road into Green Park. A squad of United States military police, white-helmeted, whitegaitered, stood to attention. From somewhere in the park he had heard the sound of ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’. As he came closer to the band, as yet unseen, they took up the tune of ‘Little Brown Jug’ and the soldiers swung into action, drilling to the upbeat of Glenn Miller’s arrangement, swinging their rifles from shoulder to ground and through cartwheels on to the other shoulder. The precise ballet of military training.
Troy sat on a bench, marvelling at the beauty of it, cynically curious as to what use it would all be on a French beach in a few weeks’ time. More cynically he had bet Onions ten shillings that the second front would open in Normandy. Onions had taken him up, a firm believer in the Pas de Calais. No one, not even the few Belgians Troy knew, was betting on the coast of Belgium. Dunkirk was all very well in such use as ‘the spirit of ’, but who in their right mind would risk it all a second time?
The soldiers switched to formation-marching to the tune of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. A crowd of more than a hundred had gathered, and a huge cheer went up as the Americans mapped out their military squares and sang a massed chorus of ‘Pardon me boy’.
All around him the park eased into leaf-hawthorn in its deepest green, the paler green of oaks and chestnuts. And, lagging behind, with hardly a bud to show for themselves, the elm and the ash-ash, always the last to burst into leaf in May and the last to grudgingly give them up, often hanging on until early December. Across the park the mingled scents of spring floated towards Troy. Mayflower, of that he was certain. Lilac? Wasn’t it too early, too optimistic to be thinking of lilac? They separated out like streams of water. Yes, it was lilac, it was lilac. And mingled again, the softness of the lilac overlaid by the sharpness of mayflower, never far from cat’s piss at the best of times.
A couple strolled by arm in arm. A young chattering woman on the arm of an American first lieutenant. Her scent, caught on the breeze, added itself to the trail of blossom and suddenly Troy knew where he was going. He ran out into Piccadilly, stopped sharply on the pavement, feeling his head spin and his feet tread air, and hailed a cab.
‘Tite Street,’ he said.
At Tite Street he told the driver to drive on. They passed Detective Constable Gutteridge at the corner, slyly smoking on duty. In Tedworth Gardens Troy stopped the cabbie and paid him off. He had surrendered to an irrational hunch, as was so often necessary, and had been right. There, in the middle of the allotment, stooping over a hoe and gently shoving at the weeds was Diana Brack—tattily in mufti; jodhpurs, wellingtons and a moth-eaten Fair-Isle pullover, her hair pulled back into a single pony-tail by a rubber band.
Troy entered the square through a break in the fencing, tucked his hands in his pockets and approached. A few feet away from her the big man in Heavy Rescue uniform was on his knees in front of a large tin bath washing the pig. The pig looked up at Troy, smiled, winked and grunted with pleasure as the bristles of the brush scrubbed her to ecstasy.
‘Wotcha cock,’ said the man.
Brack had her back to Troy and turned to see whom the big man was addressing. She straightened her spine and looked him up and down.
‘What happened to you? You look as though you got hit by a steamroller?’
‘Something like that,’ said Troy.
‘Give me a few minutes,’ she said, and disappeared into a Nissen hut at the edge of her plot.
Troy watched the man scrub the pig, wondering if the pig had really winked at him and silently promising himself he would kill Kolankiewicz for giving him a drug that made pigs wink.
‘That’s a nice shiner you got yourself,’ the man said.
Troy rubbed gently at the eye with his hand.
‘The other day,’ he said, ‘when I came through here in the dark. How did you know I was a policeman?’
‘Stands to reason, old cock. You was chasing the Major. And I had him tagged for a wrong ‘un months back. Besides, I spent a fair bit o’ my time ’anging around the likes of you. Gets so I can spot ’em. I did a lot of work before the war for a detective like – amateur, mind, a gentleman – in fact I’d be doin’ it now but that he took ‘imself orf to the army and one of those ‘ush-’ush jobs. Still, he’ll be back. And we shall like as not have new trails to follow, new murders to solve and new villains to bring to book.’
The man prodded the pig, who scrambled out of the bath and shook herself like a dog. She brushed past Troy, pausing a moment to rub herself against his trouser leg and ambled off to the other end of the allotment, nose to the ground. The big man drained the water and hung the bath on the side of the Nissen hut.
‘Take a look at this,’ he said, leading Troy along the narrow path between his allotment and Brack’s. ‘Know what that is?’
‘Cauliflower,’ said Troy.
‘Broccoli,’ said the man with infinite pride in the esoterica of his own knowledge. ‘White-heading winter broccoli.’
‘A cauliflower by any other name,’ said Troy.
‘Might smell as sweet, but wouldn’t be ’alf as big. I put this in last May. This May, let’s say another ten days, and I’ll have the fullest, ripest head of broccoli you’ve ever mistook for a cauli. She’ll weigh seventeen pounds I reckon. I gets to eat the head and the pig gets to eat the leaves. What could be fairer?’
Troy looked at the bare, weedy patch that was Brack’s.
‘Not exactly green-fingered, wouldn’t you say?’
‘She tries, old cock, she tries. The Major he done the winter diggin’ for ’er. All that frost broke up the ground nicely. And when she clears away the weeds she’ll find all those leeks she put in in February, nestling under there like little green needles in their ’aystack. There’ll be some garlic too. Dunno why she grows that-foreign muck if you ask me -but she did insist.’
‘Why do you say the Major’s a wrong ‘un?’ Troy asked.
But before the man could answer Brack emerged from the Nissen hut, dressed in black skirt and jacket once more, her hair combed and brushed, pulling on her gloves.
‘Are you are a gardening man, Mr Troy?’ she asked in best formal mode.
‘I was when younger,’ he replied. ‘But I have a house in Goodwins Court now—there’s no garden attached.’
‘I see,
’ she said, still playing the game for the benefit of the big man. She walked off along the path, slowly, toward the north end of the square, in the direction the pig had taken. The big man was not deceived by distance, physical or metaphorical. He picked up a hoe and returned to weeding his allotment.
‘One reason I’d say he’s a wrong ‘un,’ he said to Troy, ‘is his paying court to her ladyship. She can’t half pick ’em. The odder the better. Don’t let her lead you too far, cock. She’ll run you ragged.’
Troy caught up with Brack as she left the square at the far side.
‘We cannot go to my house,’ she said at last. ‘You have a man watching it.’ She paused. ‘Of course, you could order him to leave.’
She stopped and turned to face Troy, awaiting his answer.
‘No. I couldn’t. I’m not even supposed to be in London.’
‘Then I suppose I must come to you.’
‘Yes,’ he said.
‘That is what you want. You do want me to come to you, don’t you?’
‘I suppose it is,’ he said.
‘Then I shall.’
They walked on, around the perimeter of the square anticlockwise, towards the corner of Tite Street.
‘What happened? I mean, what happened to your face?’
‘I was attacked. Two nights ago. A man.’
‘A man?’
‘The man.’
‘No – you are mistaken. I told you he’s gone.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘Because if he were here he would have found me. Even with your man at my door, he would have found a way.’
They paused at the corner. Another yard and Troy would be visible to Gutteridge.
‘Tonight,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Troy.
‘As soon as it is dark.’
61
It was close to sunset. He had drifted all day. Aimlessly. He guessed that he had gone out of the house at nine or nine thirty. He had met Brack an hour or so later, and for the time elapsed since then he could hardly account. By four in the afternoon he had drifted into the Russian tea rooms in Davies Street, a little to the north of Berkeley Square. He had not been there in a while, since before Christmas at least. The tea rooms had been opened the previous spring by a couple of Russian women, serving tea straight from the samovar. Troy did not go for the tea – Samovar tea always tasted stewed to him, though the cakes were passable – he went for the sound, the sibilant susurrus of voices speaking Russian. Of voices speaking Russian and making none of the demands on his belonging that his family made. Here he could listen without obligation. Here he could hear Russian without his sisters’ moral blackmail – or the contempt with which Kolankiewicz occasionally flung the odd phrase at him. More and more he came to realise the ethnic mix that was North America as Canadians and Americans turned up in uniform ordering their tea and chatting to the women behind the counter in fluent, if accented, Russian. Perhaps his origins did not show after all – two young soldiers sat opposite and chatted in Russian as though not expecting him to understand and discussed how backward they thought the English were. They found the lack of refrigeration a puzzle and the quality of the beer objectionable. Imagine liquid wool, one of them said, and you have English beer. What made Milwaukee famous would do the Brits a power of good.