A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  The gesture was more provocative than he’d ever intended or imagined. His interrogator stooped slightly to lean over Troy, lowered his voice to a snarl.

  “These men can break your legs with their bare hands. These men will bite off your balls if I tell them.”

  Troy did not doubt it.

  “I’m telling you the truth. I don’t know who killed Skolnik. And if I did, I’d tell you. It might be a feather in my cap if I did. If I find the jealous lover or the aggrieved creditor, I’ll be a hero. But if it’s you, or worse, if it’s our lot, then I’d just be pissing in the wind.”

  The man smiled. The phrase resonated with him.

  “Peessing in the wind. Yes. Well put, Mr. Troy. You very funny man. This very funny man, boys! Peessing in the wind. Yes. You would be peessing all over yourself.”

  He looked over his shoulder, translated what Troy had said for his henchmen. A language Troy did not recognize. They laughed. All three laughing so vigorously a woman passing by with a poodle on a lead could not help but smile broadly at what she took to be the warmth of their bonhomie.

  His chuckles subsiding but a big smile still bending his scars upwards, he said, “You know what, funny man? I think maybe you do tell me truth. Peessing in the wind. Exactly so. So, we go now. Just never forget.”

  Before Troy could ask what it was he should never forget, he was treated to another glimpse of the Tokarev in its leather shoulder holster. When he looked away from it, Jan and Jiri had gone, and their leader was buttoning his jacket and, still chuckling to himself, walking away in the direction of the Buckingham Palace as though he had not just engineered a diplomatic incident.

  Troy, finding he had no appetite, threw his lunch to the ducks and went back to the Yard.

  §108

  He said nothing to Jack. He said nothing to Onions. For a while he thought better of saying anything to Jordan. He went to bed with the piano wedged behind the front door. About two in the morning, thinking this was childish, he got up and moved it, but after a night’s thinking decided he should call Jordan.

  The card Jordan had given him that day at the Ivy had a home number in Chelsea on the front and, scribbled on the back, what Troy took to be the number of the switchboard at MI5’s headquarters in Curzon Street.

  He wondered how they’d answer. It had been different during the war. They tended to wear uniforms and be less clandestine. They were military intelligence in a nation that had been mobilized for war. He’d heard rumours about MI6 having a shingle hanging out front that read something like “Frank’s Carpentry & Joinery: No Job Too Small.” Did they answer the phone with that particular fiction? Was he now about to find himself talking to the receptionist at “Joe’s Plumbers” and asking for a plumber with the unlikely name of Major Younghusband? But all he got was the anonymity of “Good Morning.” And, “I’ll see if I can find him, dearie.”

  Eventually, a man picked up and said, “Smith here.”

  “Good morning. Inspector Troy, Scotland Yard. I was hoping to speak to Major Younghusband.”

  “You’ve just missed him. Dashed in and dashed straight out again.”

  “Would you ask him to call me?”

  “Wilco. What’s your number?”

  “Whitehall 1212,” said Troy, hoping that the exasperation he felt at having to repeat a number that was broadcast in the course of the six o’clock news on the Home Service most nights did not show in his tone.

  It did.

  “Silly me,” said Smith.

  It took five days for Jordan to return his call. On the following Monday he called shortly before ten, which left Troy thinking that he was top of a list that Jordan tackled after he’d tackled the important stuff.

  “We need to talk,” Troy said.

  “When a chap uses those precise words I tend to add a silent ‘not over the phone.’”

  “You may be right.”

  “Then you’d better come over now. You know where we are?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then I’ll tell old Doris to let you in.”

  Troy parked opposite Leconfield House and found that Leconfield House was all MI5 had on their shingle and that Doris matched the voice he had heard on the telephone. He had heard that fag dangling from her bottom lip as surely as he’d heard the dropped aitches and stopped consonants of Bethnal Green and Stepney.

  “Sign the book, dearie. Third floor. Lift’s bust. Mind ’ow you go.”

  Jordan greeted him with a handshake. Smith excused himself almost at once and left them alone.

  Jordan babbled.

  “I know I was late getting back to you, Troy, but you wouldn’t believe how hectic the last couple of weeks have been. The Olympics have been a security nightmare. Would you believe one of the Czech gymnasts chose last Wednesday to tell us she wasn’t going home? Bunged in a formal request for asylum. And of course, we none of us expected this, so we had no contingency plan. Which, of course, meant we . . . meaning I . . . had to keep her hidden in a crappy hotel in Finsbury Park until it was all over, just in case they made any retaliatory moves against her. Russia didn’t take part but most of the satellite states did, and the Soviets took the opportunity to send over the most dodgy-looking bunch of sport and cultural attachés imaginable. We’ve been awash in foreign agents. For a while I thought every thug from Petrograd to Prague had been turned loose in London.”

  “I know,” Troy said calmly, hoping some of it would rub off on Jordan. “I had a visit from three of them.”

  “Oh, hell . . . oh, bloody hell . . . shall we . . . sit down?”

  Jordan slipped his jacket off onto the chair back and loosened his tie.

  “Oh, hell. This is going to be a stinker isn’t it? You’re going to tell me they came asking about Skolnik, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you’d better tell me everything.”

  Troy told him.

  Jordan said, “In the park? In broad bloody daylight? The cheek of it, the sheer bloody cheek of it.”

  Troy tried to soften what he had to say by using a plural he did not think to be true, and said, “It makes a nonsense of the conclusion we drew about Skolnik. It confirms the worst.”

  “Indeed, it does. Care to take a shot at their nationality?”

  “I think they were Czech. Jiri sounds more Czech than anything else.”

  “Makes sense,” said Jordan. “The Communist takeover in February gave the Russians a whole new set of pawns to play with, and with the added advantage that most of them would be unknown to us. We can have a crack at identifying these blokes but it’s almost academic. The Czechs went home yesterday. If they hadn’t, I’d still be at the Gladstone Arms, Finsbury Park, with a very bored gymnast. I can get files sent up. Won’t be quick. Any chance you could come back in the morning?”

  In the morning, Smith had a stack of cardboard files spread out across Jordan’s desk. He had none of Jordan’s flamboyance—he was dowdy rather than dandy, but he was calm and methodical.

  “Don’t expect too much, Inspector. I imagine you’re used to mug shots. All in order, right profile, left profile, front. We have nothing so useful. Most of these—and in the case of the Czechs we only have about twenty files—are taken with hidden cameras or at a distance. They can be fuzzy.”

  But he, the brick shithouse of a man with the facial scars, was the third photograph Smith turned over. In a winter coat, collar turned up, half in profile, but nothing would hide the scars on the top lip.

  “Milos Danko,” Smith said with a touch of pride. “Snapped in Paris in March. Rumour has it he was on the other side during the war—SS Einsatzgruppen. The Russians thought too highly of his talents as a killer to waste him on a firing squad. Let me check him against the embassy’s list.”

  Jordan leaned over and looked at Danko.

  “Looks like a thug, doesn’t he?”

  “Quite,” said Smith, running his finger down a column of typed names, “But the Czechs have him down as a
cultural attaché. I must say he looks about as cultured as next-door’s dog. He came in with a bunch of cultural attachés and sporting coaches on July twenty-seventh. That’s two days before the official opening. And if you two will hang on a minute . . . well, I count two Jiris and three Jans in the Czech contingent. Not a lot of help. I suppose we could check the athletes themselves, but that will take time.”

  Troy had flicked through all the files and photographs. “I wouldn’t bother, they’re neither of them here.”

  He looked from Smith to Jordan as he spoke, wondering if both might answer. “I’m the innocent in all this, so tell me, is everyone working for a foreign embassy a spy?”

  “Dunno,” said Jordan. “But it pays to act on that assumption.”

  “And does that mean you have them under surveillance?”

  “No. We don’t have the manpower, and if we dogged their men in an obvious fashion they’d simply do the same to ours. We follow the buggers when we know they’re up to something specific. Anything else just wears out shoe leather. And before you ask, no, no one was following Danko. We simply don’t have the resources. If I’d known Danko had a specific mission to nobble you . . . take it as read, I’d’ve been on to him. He’d not have got out of St James’ Park.”

  “But for you to know what Danko was up to, you’d have needed to know what Skolnik was up to, wouldn’t you?”

  Jordan said nothing, much as Troy would have done confronted by the same question.

  “And, of course, we still don’t know what Skolnik was up to, do we?”

  Jordan told Troy that he would have to “kick this one upstairs,” and that, like everything else, it would take time.

  “But you’re not at risk. Honestly, Troy. They went home on Sunday. I think it was a one-off attempt to find out what happened to their man. Opportunistic might be the word.”

  “Time, you say?”

  “Couple of days. A week at the most.”

  “Good,” said Troy, “because I have to tell my superintendent something very soon.”

  §109

  The best part of a week passed. When Jordan phoned again he said, “Could you come over after work this evening? Say about half past six.”

  He was waiting in the foyer of Leconfield House when Troy arrived, leaning against Doris’s desk. Doris had gone, a plastic cover over her typewriter, a brimming ashtray, and a half-finished cup of tea.

  “Sign yourself in, Troy, and we’ll go downstairs.”

  “Downstairs?” Troy asked, thinking dungeons and torture chambers, but following where Jordan led.

  “We have a club. Strictly staff only . . .”

  “I just signed in as Inspector Troy, Scotland Yard.”

  “That’s okay, they’ll just think you’re a plod from Special Branch. As I was saying, we have a club—not sure who’s idea it was but the point is to stop blokes like me from drifting into a pub at this time of night with a colleague, propping up a bar, and talking shop in public. When we were at St James’s it happened all the time. Not that I think any secrets were betrayed to any eavesdropping Nazis after the third or fourth double, but you never know.”

  They’d reached the bottom of the staircase. Jordan yanked open the heavy door to let out a torrent of voices and reveal a wood-panelled pastiche of a London club—a shabby Garrick, an economy Athenaeum. A job lot of anonymous portraits on the wall—a few examples of Sir Alfred Munnings at his most horsey. The odd framed photograph of a man with a dead beast by his side, be it lion, tiger, or rhino—and the odd framed photograph of a rowing team from one university or the other. MI5 had gone to a lot of trouble to make its staff feel “at home”—if anyone other than a public school-educated, Oxbridge Guards officer could ever feel at home in a London club, let alone one set aside exclusively for the use of spies. It said, Troy thought, a lot about the recruiting practices of this “other place.” There were no horny-handed sons of toil in here, there were no women, there was no Doris—it was chockablock with men, men like Jordan and men like Troy. It was a slice of the Britain his brother had set out, if not to destroy, then to change—and it seemed to Troy as Jordan said “What can I get you? We do a rather palatable house claret,” . . . that Rod, on his quest for equality, was, to reuse a phrase that still rang in his ears, “peessing in the wind.” He wondered why Jordan was showing him this place within the other place.

  “We’re not going to pursue the Skolnik affair. We simply don’t have enough to go on. I just wanted to be able to tell you face to face.”

  “You could have told me that over the phone.”

  “I wanted to be able to look at you as I told you. I know what you’re thinking; you made it pretty obvious the last time we were here.”

  “I’m listening,” Troy said.

  “Don’t make me spell it out, Troy.”

  “When someone says they know what you’re thinking, they set themselves up for that.”

  Jordan sighed—a sadness in his tone, a wordless appeal to Troy that seemed to want to be trusted.

  “You think we did it.”

  “Jordan, I don’t know who did it. It was why I came to you in the first place.

  “I can’t deny we screwed up. We didn’t know what Skolnik was up to, and it’s because we didn’t that we’d have no motive to kill him. And if we had killed him do you think we’d have left the body on the London Underground for commuters to trip over? We could have made Skolnik vanish.”

  “Why were the Czechs here?”

  “I don’t know. They could have been here just to throw a spanner in the works. Someone comes over in early July—maybe even the same three someones on fake passports. Skolnik gets hit. Then a legit Czech contingent arrives for the games and someone, possibly the same three someones, decides to muddy the waters by putting pressure on you. They sow confusion and they also find out how little we know.”

  “When three blokes armed with Tokarevs decide to ask me questions I tend to think answering politely might be a good idea.”

  “I wasn’t accusing you, Troy. I’d’ve done the same. From what I’ve learnt of Danko in the last few days he’s capable of shooting you and just walking away. He’s a pro.”

  “Which is how Skolnik died. A pro job?”

  Another of Jordan’s sad sighs.

  “All the same. You think it was us, don’t you? Troy, please trust us on this. We don’t know what Skolnik was up to. We didn’t kill Skolnik. We don’t know who killed Skolnik.”

  “Trust us?”

  “Okay. I can understand that. You’re a natural cynic where an organization like ours is the issue. Trust me.”

  Troy echoed Jordan’s sigh.

  “When a spy says trust me, my copper’s hackles rise.”

  “Troy—that’s unfair, bloody unfair. And considering the company we’re in, bloody tactless.”

  Troy looked around at the oblivious men in suits lost in the hubbub of their own importance.

  “Oh, Jordan, really. I don’t think they heard me above the ‘darlings,’ do you?”

  Standing up to leave, Troy slipped his card across the table. Scotland Yard on one side, his address in Goodwin’s Court on the reverse.

  “Keep in touch. We might find occasion to be simpatico again. You never know.”

  §110

  It was a Woodbine moment. And they were late for it. Troy was used to them. In seven years, Jack had not got used to them, and dreaded finding Onions as he was now, hunched over an unlit gas fire in Troy’s office, puffing on a fag.

  Occasionally, Troy had wondered why Onions gravitated towards the fireplace regardless of season or weather. He thought it might be a northern, working class childhood at the turn of the century—a Lawrentian scene, a large family huddled round the embers of two smoldering chimney sweeps who had perished on the job—you can never get enough of enough, so you get it while you can. “Never enough of enough,” . . . it sounded like a campaign slogan for a political party far more honest than any England had to show. I
t was a slogan for the postwar era . . . and “get it while you can” . . . well, wasn’t that the message of every spiv?

  “Summat to tell me?” he said simply.

  “Yes,” said Troy.

  Onions caught sight of Jack heading for the door.

  “Park yer arse, lad. We’ll all hear this and then there’ll be no misunderstanding.”

  Jack froze midstep, then slipped quietly onto a chair on the periphery of Onions’s vision. Troy sat down directly opposite Onions, and whilst careful to be vague about the dates the three Czechs had nabbed him in the park and the length of time that elapsed before he had decided to tell Onions anything, gave him a largely truthful account of what had happened since they last talked.

  “And the spooks reckon they’ve gone back?”

  “They’re pretty well certain of it.”

  “And they reckon these blokes did the killing on the Northern Line?”

  “No. They’re more open-minded than that. And even if they were certain it was the Russians who ordered this hit they’d still be uncertain it was the same men who actually did the job. They have Danko recorded as entering England on July twenty-seventh, in time for the opening of the Olympics. Too late to have killed Skolnik. And, of course, whatever reasons the Russians might have for wanting Skolnik out of the way, our side had even better ones. They’re not going to pick this one up.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “Jordan was quite clear, Stan. They’re not picking up.”

  “You think MI5 might have done it?”

  “I don’t know. I do know it’s a professional job. One side or the other killed Skolnik.”

  Onions lit a new ciggy from the end of his last, the third or fourth time he had done this while Troy talked. It was a handy ritual, like donning the black cap. It bought time and tension for all concerned. And when he spoke it was judgement and it was final.

  “Then I say we drop it. If Five can’t be arsed, why should we? It’s spook business. It’s not as though this Skolnik was a real person, is it? He was a bum and a scrounger and a spook. An adopted Englishman, someone we’d welcomed in when Eastern Europe went up in flames and how does he repay us? Works for the fuckin’ Russkis. Well, fuckim. I’m not wasting any more manpower on it. Case closed.”