A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  The bloke steering customers to their seats seemed vaguely familiar to Troy, and clearly Troy was more than vaguely familiar to him, as he had greeted him by name. As ever, Troy thought, it was his father they remembered. He was merely an adjunct.

  He felt as out of touch as his father. The place was doubtless stuffed with talent, and he didn’t think he recognized anyone. He could be content looking at the menu. Menus at a time when almost everything required one to produce a coupon or to queue, at a time when bread was an unappetizing shade of grey, when lard was rationed to two ounces a week, cheese to one and a half ounces, butter to seven, and the water from boiled carrots passed off as soup . . . were like works of fascinating fiction. A list of ingredients constituted a good read. The menu in a place like the Ivy was worth a Balzac or a Dickens or two. A prewar menu was a journey into a foreign country: Filet d’agneau aux fines herbes Poulardine rôtie à la broche, zabaglione—“I nearly wept when they got to the soufflé.”

  For no reason he could think of, not that he was drooling, Troy felt like the convict in the opening chapters of Great Expectations—Abel Magwitch—so hungry the food scarcely touched the sides on the way down. And then it dawned on him why he had thought of this. On one level he had recognized a film star—Valerie Hobson, who had played Estella in the recent film of Great Expectations, was sitting at the next table.

  Jordan swept by her table with a blown kiss and a, “hello, Valerie,” to plonk himself down opposite Troy.

  “Have you ordered?”

  “No.”

  “I could eat a horse,” Jordan said, picking up his menu, “but I’ll settle for bangers and mash.”

  While Jordan’s head was down in the menu, Troy said softly, “Do you really think we can discuss this in public?”

  “Discuss what? Old Wally didn’t tell me a thing. Just said you were investigating the killing on the Northern Line and needed to meet me . . . or someone very like me.”

  “And you came without knowing why?”

  “Oh, no, Inspector, I came knowing exactly why. I would imagine you think your father’s famous—and you’d be right—or that your brother’s famous—he will be one day I’m sure—but that you aren’t. Believe me, Troy, in my profession ‘The Tart in the Tub’ case is legend. You took on the OSS, the Branch, and MI5 . . . you are known, Troy, you are known. Of course, I wouldn’t turn down the chance to meet you. Odd thing is we’ve never met before.”

  Troy did not know how to take this. The killing of Diana Brack had been four years ago. He doubted he would be allowed to forget it. It had cost him half a kidney, all his heart, delayed his promotion, and made him a bête noire with the Special Branch and certain members of military intelligence. It was why he’d asked for someone unknown to him and trustworthy. But Jordan was smiling. He might be frank, blunt even, but he was smiling.

  “Shall we order?”

  “Bangers and mash will be fine,” said Troy.

  “And listen for a moment, would you.”

  Jordan waved a hand in the air, drawing an arc in the space between them. Troy listened; Troy looked around.

  “Now, can you honestly tell me you can hear anyone else’s conversation? Can you hear anything except for the odd ‘darling’ above the hubbub? And we have to allow them that—they’re actors.”

  Over bangers and mash—“I nearly wept when they got to the onion gravy”—Troy told Jordan everything he had found . . . Wally’s suspicions, the Russian gun, the Russian inscription.

  Jordan ate, listened, made indeterminate movements of the head that Troy could interperet as neither nodding nor shaking, and eventually said, with a mouthful of sausage, “I put two and two together. Wally asking me to meet you, the front pages of the London papers . . . Wally can be very discreet when he wants but it was obvious what was at the heart of his request. And the name of André Skolnik rang a few bells. I knew you’d be asking about him even if I didn’t know what you’d be asking. There’s a file on him. I read it before I left the office this morning. He was vetted, very quickly, after Dunkirk. So many people were, it’s almost meaningless—there’s a file on you from that time, as I’m sure you know—we were looking for a Nazi fifth column, which, mercifully, didn’t exist. There are no entries between then and early 1946, when someone thought it worthwhile, in view of our changed relationship with Poland—stuck behind what we weren’t yet calling the Iron Curtain—to look once again at Polish nationals who’d been granted British citizenship. Skolnik has been British since 1937. I vetted some of the Poles myself at that time. Not Skolnik, but I can assure you he was vetted again, very quietly. The second look yielded nothing. Ever since the hot war turned chilly, it’s been my job to know who the Russians have got working for them over here, and I can tell you now, André Skolnik was not one of them. I could name you several who are, from trade union leaders to members of the House of Lords, but Skolnik wasn’t working for the Russians.”

  “You’re absolutely certain of that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know who vetted Skolnik?”

  “Of course, and I can’t tell you.”

  “But somebody talked to him, somebody trailed him, somebody interviewed friends and known associates?”

  “‘Known associates’—very Scotland Yard. Troy, I can’t discuss our methods, either. Read what you like into me saying it was done ‘very quietly.’ Ask yourself . . . in 1940, did any of us talk to you?”

  Troy said nothing.

  “Quite,” said Jordan.

  Troy leaned in a little closer across the table. He might just annoy Jordan and if he did he wanted be sure what he said was smothered in “darlings.”

  “Consider that your people might have made a mistake. It hardly seems a high priority, checking out Poles who’d been here twenty-odd years. Supposing someone in your department preferred wielding a rubber stamp to wearing out his shoe leather and just stamped Skolnik’s file in the interests of a quiet life?”

  “Spoken like a copper. And I won’t deny we have lazy buggers, drunken buggers, and that there are one or two who think I’m a flash bugger, but take it from me, Troy, it was done properly, and in the absence of any other evidence—”

  “The gun.”

  “Coincidence. You said yourself, Swiss-made. Probably just looks Russian.”

  “The inscription?”

  “Most Poles speak some Russian. Wally does, after all.”

  “So . . . more coincidence?”

  “I’m afraid so. I think you’re doing what the taxpayer pays you to do, Troy. You’re looking for a murderer, not an assassin. Someone who knew him. Some jealous girlfriend, some bloke who’d got fed up waiting for money to be repaid . . .”

  Troy knew in his bones this was not the case but said nothing. Instead, he said, “Is there a way I can reach you without going through Wally?”

  Jordan handed Troy his card, called for the bill, and said, “By all means, keep in touch . . . this has been . . . shall we say . . . simpatico.”

  Troy had not got what he wanted. He had a dead spook on his hands and, given the brick wall any copper hits sooner or later in trying to investigate a dead spook, he wanted MI5 to pick up the case and let him move on to something he could solve.

  He wondered how much thought, how much self-conscious flash buggery had gone into the choice of a word like “simpatico.” But Jordan was right. He liked the man; he’d been charmed by the good looks, the easy manner, and the gentle blue eyes. It had been frustrating, but it had been simpatico.

  §106

  Routine took over. Routine is not the reason anyone chooses to become a Scotland Yard detective.

  Jack had ordered Constables Thomson and Gutterridge to approach travellers at Hampstead and Camden Town Underground stations with a photograph of Skolnik. Troy would have liked posters but as they had found no photograph of the living Skolnik the mugshot was of the corpse and Jack had argued that this was grotesque, unproductive, and would frighten children. This yiel
ded nothing. The next day Troy released the photograph to the papers. This yielded sightings of Skolnik at Tooting Bec, Maida Vale, and South Acton, in the latter case the day after he had died.

  Troy took the paperwork as part of a bargain with Jack. He searched both flat and studio, and at the end of the searching day wished he could say, “I told you so,” to anyone other than himself. He had found no paperwork of any kind in the flat, save newspaper (Skolnik had been a Daily Mail reader with occasional weekend forays into the Reynold’s News) and bog roll (the shiny sort that doesn’t do much), and in the studio had found seven shoe boxes full of bills—paid bills, for gas, electricity, water rates, and milk going back to 1927, all in chronological order. Skolnik did not appear to have a bank account, but, then, so few people did. So few people had need of one. Most people in Britain received cash in a small brown envelope on a Friday afternoon. It was known as wages. The salaried were few and far between. He did not find a photograph of anyone, he did not find a postcard, a letter, a memo, a jotting, a used bus ticket, a railway timetable . . . although he did find several sketchbooks in which rough versions of Skolnik’s paintings were even rougher in pencil or charcoal. But from this he learned two things, that Skolnik was methodical, obsessive even, and most certainly had something to hide—the disposal of the personal was too thorough to be innocent. Everybody’s life left detritus. The life that didn’t was a contrivance and hence it was suspect.

  Jack got to work the pubs and caffs on and off Charlotte Street.

  “Skolnik was well-known. No denying it. Twenty-odd years on the same turf and there’s scarcely anyone who wasn’t on nodding terms with him. The Newman Arms pub in Rathbone Street, right opposite his studio, saw a fair bit of him at lunchtimes. There are blokes in there who say he still owes them money, but there was no one I found with any particular resentment of that, or any particular insight into the man.

  “In Gennaro’s caff, one chap described him to me as ‘a bank clerk disguised as a bohemian,’ which was pretty much echoed in the George and Dragon in Cleveland Street, where he was ‘a man who would sell his soul to have a dark, deep secret, but alas no one was buying.’

  “In the Marquis of Granby he was ‘someone who’d show you a good time if he happened to find one stuck to the sole of his shoe.’

  “I’ve picked up enough aphorisms on Skolnik to publish a small book. Me asking about him seems simply to have given every wag in Fitztrovia the chance to sharpen his wit on the dead. Some of it has more depth, for example, ‘a master of sophistry, half-truth, and fractions thereof.’

  “Against this there are plenty of blokes—you don’t get a lot of women in these places, it’s not like it was during the war—plenty of blokes who’d agree with Mrs. Narayan, that he could be generous when flush. That bit about whipping everyone into Bertorelli’s for example. I talked to the waiters there. They say often as not when that happened, Skolnik would have no real idea who he’d brought in his wake, and frequently treated people he’d never met before who just happened to be in the pub he’d gone to for the round-up. And he never queried the bill. A waitress told me he rolled up one day with what she thought was a tramp in tow, who managed to set fire to the tablecloth. Turned out it was Augustus John. They stuck the cost of the tablecloth on the bill. Skolnik didn’t query that one, either. Didn’t bat an eyelid, she said.

  “But the matter of women remains. No one ever mentioned a girlfriend, a mistress . . . and that brass in the tweed oufit who’s always in the Wheatsheaf, the one they call Sister Ann, said ‘he’s one o’ the lucky ones, ain’t ’e? one o’ them wot ain’t bovvered’ . . . well, it’s been my experience in twenty-eight short years on this planet that everyone’s ‘bovvered’ . . . so I had to ask someone, ‘was André Skolnik queer?’

  “And in the Fitzroy on the corner of Windmill Street and Charlotte Street I bumped into your old pal Quentin Crisp. Who better to ask?”

  Jack read his notes out in a passable imitation of Crisp’s languid baritone.

  “Was Mr. Skolnik queer? Well, we none of us have it thrust upon us, and we none of us achieve it. Try as you might. Some of us are born queer. It’s the hand life deals you in the great poker game of sex, and in that great poker game of sex, André didn’t even bother to turn over the cards he’d been dealt. No, André and sex didn’t go together in the same sentence. André and money, well there you might have something. I used to call him the Cadgepenny Count. He sounded more than a little like Dracula ought to sound and he was always cadging money. I introduced him to the art schools as a model in the hope that a regular income might reduce his importuning, but what do I have of André now he’s gone? A Polish voice echoing in my ears and it’s saying, ‘Five bob and I will gladly repay you Friday.’ I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating . . . Poland isn’t a country, it’s a state of mind.”

  Troy was smiling. A Crispism never failed to produce that effect. To Jack he said, “The Cadgepenny Count. Let’s see that one doesn’t get into the papers shall we?”

  §107

  Troy hoped the ballyhoo of what his brother had mercilessly dubbed the “Threadbare Olympics” would pass him by. It did. As Rod joined the king and half the government at Wembley for the opening ceremony at the end of July, the job wrought one of its grisly miracles in the shape of a body on the railway tracks just south of Vauxhall station, and for ten days he and Jack pieced the case together until they found out which Surrey commuter—Wicked of Weybridge or Evil of Esher—had thought so little of a fellow traveller as to shove him out of the carriage door. While the names of Fanny Blankers-Koen or Emile Zatopec filtered through to them, they were spared the spectacle. By the 11th of August they had a prisoner in the cells, booked and charged, the case of André Skolnik on the back burner, and a fine, sunny day on which to take a cheerless lunch in the park: grey bread—the national loaf, as an idiot in the government had labeled it in an attempt to evoke pride where only guilt would suffice—and Spam. Troy was not entirely certain what was in Spam, but if he had to eat tinned meat he would probably have killed for a slice or two of good Argentine corned beef.

  “Sorry, old man. Gonna have to scratch. There’s this new WPC down on—”

  “Jack, we have an hour for lunch. What can you possibly do in a hour?”

  “Freddie, when it comes to women you have no imagination.”

  So Troy ate alone.

  The choice of parks was limited. He could eat in the Victoria Embankment gardens, practically next door and stretching along the river all the way to the Savoy, but carrying the risk of meeting other coppers just when one wanted a half an hour without them; or there was a delightful little spot, a sort of tarmac park, on top of the Temple Underground station, but farther than he wanted to walk; or there was St James’ Park—out the back, a short walk along Whitehall, cut through Downing Street, and over Horse Guards . . . St James’ Park with its echoes of Lord Rochester’s verse—he could never sit there for long without hearing Rochester whisper in his ear—and the lesser risk of coppers and sandwiches, leavened by civil servants and sandwiches, politicians and sandwiches, or even spooks and sandwiches.

  The spook standing in front of him wasn’t carrying sandwiches. Troy thought better of offering him any of his when he opened his jacket long enough for Troy to see the Tokarev TT-33 automatic in its shoulder holster.

  “And just in case you have any doubts, Inspector Troy . . .”

  The spook tilted his head to the right—“Jan”—he tilted his head to the left—“and Jiri.”

  They were thirty feet away, right at the water’s edge, but they turned to make eye contact with Troy as their names were called.

  He was not a handsome creature. He was about 5’9”, fortyish, balding, squarely built, big in the chest and shoulders, and had old scars on his top lip and his chin as though he’d been in a knife fight twenty or so years ago.

  “How can I help you?” Troy asked, not rising from the bench he had chosen, setting his sandwic
hes carefully to one side and wondering about the accent.

  “I would like to ask you questions about André Skolnik. You answer my questions and there will be no trouble. You go your way I go mine, you finish your lunch if you like.”

  He wasn’t Russian. Troy would have spotted that at once. After years of listening to Kolankiewicz he didn’t think he was Polish, either. What kind of a name was Jan? Universally Eastern European? A name you could take anywhere? Jiri? Jiri sounded Czech or Hungarian.

  “Ask away,” said Troy.

  “Who killed André Skolnik?”

  “I don’t know. If I did he’d be in custody.”

  “Maybe. Maybe not. Maybe you been told not to get too close?”

  “Now who would tell me that?”

  “Don’t play clever dick with me, Mr. Troy. Were you told to drop this by MI5?”

  “No, I wasn’t. In fact I haven’t dropped it. It’s an active case. It’s just that it’s a case going nowhere for lack of new evidence. Unless, of course, you’re the new evidence.”

  “I do not understand.”

  “I mean . . . Skolnik worked for you, and I assume you work for Russia—”

  “Of course. You think I come all this way just to eat fucking Spam?”

  “Well, you may congratulate yourself. Whatever it was Skolnik did for you, our boys hadn’t noticed. In fact they’re quite convinced Skolnik was bumped off by a jealous lover or someone he’d quarrelled with over money.”

  “Bumped off?”

  “Killed.”

  “You believe that?”

  “I was getting ready to believe it until you boys showed up. I’m now quite conviced Skolnik was killed by secret agents. Our secret agents, or your, as it were, no-longer-quite-so-secret agents.”

  Troy gestured beyond the man, in the direction of Jan and Jiri—two look-alike blonds, younger and taller than their spokesman. Jan and Jiri watched the paths, every so often they watched each other, and every so often they looked into the distance, focused somewhere behind Troy.