A Lily of the Field

by John Lawton

  “What? Did you think Intelligence was somehow an arbitrary name for the service?”

  “I’m rather tired right now . . .”

  “We need to talk and there are things I can’t say on the phone.”

  Troy shrugged this off, “I’m sure the Ritz has learnt to keep its secrets.”

  By which he meant he was damn sure any spooks on the Ritz switchboard were British spooks.

  “Jordan, I’ll be home this evening. Come ’round after six.”

  Jordan was silent for a moment. Troy listened to him breathe, thought it a sad sound, and silently berated himself for imagining too much, then Jordan said, “It’s thanks to me you can go home this evening, you mad bugger. It’s all clean, although if I were you I’d consider redecorating that room. And if your neighbours mention a gas leak, just nod and look as though you know what they’re talking about. We had to explain our presence and get them out of the way somehow. Four body bags and a wheelbarrow take some disguising.”

  He hung up.

  §152

  Troy checked out at five—he’d have fun getting Angus to rack up a night at the Ritz as a legitimate expense—and was home in less than fifteen minutes.

  It was clean, Jordan was right about that. He’d never seen the place so free from dust. But they’d thrown out the Kelim rug that his mother had given him when he moved in, the back wall was stained and streaked where Jordan’s cleaners had scrubbed the wallpaper bald, and the room smelled—mostly chemical bleach, a bit lavatorial with a hint of town gas—Jordan must have turned the gas stove on unlit to back up his invention—but a distinct, at least distinct to Troy, underscent of blood. And fainter still, almost beyond the nose’s imagining . . . a hint of cordite.

  He was glad he’d moved the Constables. Adhering to the sea, just below the cello case on Skolnik’s masterpiece was a piece of brain the cleaners had missed. A wee speck of Jan or Jiri. Troy tore the corner off a page of newsprint and wiped him away. They’d missed nothing else. Even the corkscrew had been stripped of Danko’s sticky mortal remains and placed neatly on the draining board. Troy didn’t much feel like touching it again, but self-knowledge told him he’d change his mind the next time he wanted to open a bottle. The moment came sooner than he had thought.

  On the dot of six, Jordan was knocking on his door.

  “I said too much over the phone . . . and there were things I simply could not say.”

  He paused.

  Troy sensed a difficult subject. Resisted the temptation to fill the silence and say, “spit it out.”

  Jordan almost whispered, as though he feared being overheard in an empty house.

  “Did you have to kill them all?”

  Troy said nothing.

  “Well, did you?”

  “Jordan, let me ask you this. What were you going to do with four live rogue Soviet agents? Four live rogue Soviet agents in all probability denied by both the Russians and the Czechs? Put them on trial and listen to protestations of innocence, put up with tit for tat measures? Try and swap them for one of ours, even after the Russians disown them? Because you know as well as I they will disown them. Jordan, four live Czechs were nothing but an embarrassment for you. Better, by far, that they simply vanish.”

  “It was you or them, right?”

  “Of course, it was me or them.”

  Troy lowered his voice, took out the anger he didn’t much feel in the first place. Whispered the near-whisper Jordan had used.

  “Besides, it’s not as if they were real, is it?”

  Now Jordan said nothing.

  The concept—one that had struck root, grown, curled, and convoluted in Troy’s mind like bindweed since the day Onions had first uttered it—could hardly be new to Jordan, but it seemed it was. Troy could hear that same sad silence once more. Jordan looked stunned at the remark, and then passed over it without comment. An almost visible stiffening of the lip.

  “I think you may be right about ‘rogue’ agents. We’ve been able to follow their trail. They came in from Dunkirk on fake Belgian passports. They probably had no contact with the Russians from the moment they assumed new identities. They certainly had no contact with anyone at the embassy here or in Paris or in Brussels. Danko’s always been a maverick. I’m pretty certain he set out to solve this one on his own. If he did, there’s a very good chance the Russians have no idea who he intended to see while he was here. Which means there’s a very good chance they don’t know a damn thing about you.”

  “And if your hunch is wrong?”

  “Then they’ll come looking for you, won’t they?”

  Jordan accepted a glass of wine. It was how men of their class and upbringing coped with deprivation. They uncorked a piece of history, hoping austerity would spend itself before history did. Saying it would be just the one, he was looking oddly at Troy over it. Troy did not ask. He knew the look. He’d seen it a thousand times in the job—it was saying, “I thought I knew you”—a presumption given the brevity of their acquaintance—and adding, “But I didn’t.” It was something akin to shock in Jordan. In its odd way—odd since it was Troy with whom or at whom he was shocked—in its odd way it was pleasing, it made Troy faintly hopeful that there was more to human insignificance than the hill of beans. He liked Jordan. Jordan was not “one of us.” Onions was, Jack wasn’t, Rod most certainly wasn’t. Onions would not blanch at what Troy had done. He might arrest him for it, but he would not blanch, flinch, or doubt. Rod would weep, Anna would weep in torrents. Kolankiewicz would debate life’s fatal necessities with him. Méret Voytek would understand. Méret Voytek was “one of us” as surely as Troy himself. And suddenly Troy knew what it was Kolankiewicz would debate with him. He had half an idea why Voytek was as she was. He had no idea why he was.

  Jordan left without any word that this had been simpatico. They might never be simpatico again. Troy took down the Skolnik and rehung the Constables. The Skolnik he consigned to the cupboard under the stairs. It was too awful, and too revealing to anyone who could put two and two together and realize it was the square root of sixteen. He could give it back, but thought better of it. One day he might own a lawnmower and have to buy a shed to house the lawnmower, and one day in the unimagined future, the sunny uplands of the 1950s and beyond, he might have to patch the roof on that shed.

  About half an hour later the telephone rang. Kolankiewicz.

  “I can’t be sure but I think my office might have been burgled. A day or two back. I cannot be certain. If so, a neat job, and the file on Skolnik is missing.”

  “I know,” Troy said. “I found it. Nothing to worry about.”

  “Found it? How?”

  “As I was saying . . . it’s nothing to worry about.”

  §153

  Troy sat at his desk in Scotland Yard and opened Voytek’s letter. It was direct and to the point—it did not mention Skolnik—it ought to do the trick, and whilst MI5 might be permanently baffled as to who sent it, they’d be bound to act upon it.

  He fed two sheets and a carbon into the roller of his typewriter, thinking that while he was at it he’d scrub up her grammar and make the author of this anonymous denunciation sound less like a foreigner. Before his fingers had touched qwerty he realized that he did not want this done on his typewriter, he wanted it done on a typewriter no one would ever think to check. He was not above suspicion but he knew a man who was.

  He phoned Rod’s office. It was five-thirty in the afternoon. Rod ought to be on the floor of the House.

  “He is,” said Megan the secretary. “It’s the armed forces funding debate. Rod’s the principal speaker for the government. He told me not to wait. Said it would take until at least six o’clock and then there’d be the vote. I was just packing up when you called.”

  Perfect.

  Troy strolled out onto the embankment, ducked down the tunnel to the Palace of Westminster, accepted an unquestioning salute from the duty copper, and dashed up the stairs to Rod’s office.

  Mega
n was the epitome of neatness—the sort of woman who remembered to empty the ashtray and put the plastic cover on the typewriter before she went home in the evening. Troy tore it off and typed out the two copies he needed.

  When he’d finished he read it through, concluded it did not sound like the work of someone ratting themselves out, and folded the original to put it back in the envelope.

  He realized the envelope was not empty. He shook it and a small piece of yellow cardboard fell out onto the desk. A pawn ticket, the number bold and black, the edges of the card worn and woolly—an address in the unfashionable World’s End stretch of the King’s Road, down by the Fulham gas works.

  Had she meant to give this to him, or was it merely in the envelope when she reused it? No matter, she wasn’t coming back for it, whatever it was.

  Rod breezed in, brimful of bonhomie. Whatever it was he’d been saying on the floor of the House, it had gone down well. Troy tore the “confession” from the roller and folded it before Rod could sneak a look.

  “Don’t they have typewriters at Scotland Yard?” Rod asked without a hint of resentment and scarcely any of real curiosity.

  “Bust,” Troy said simply.

  “Well, be my guest.”

  Rod dropped into an armchair. Put his feet up on the edge of the desk.

  “I am knackered. I have fought the good fight and I am royally and righteously knackered. There’s nothing like giving the Tories a metaphorical arse kicking to cure insomnia. I could sleep the sleep of the brave, I could sleep for a week.”

  “Do you have a couple of envelopes you could spare?” Troy said.

  “With or without House of Commons crest?”

  Troy was tempted. It was all but irresistible, but resist he did.

  “I think plain will do,” he said, and watched a good gag vanish in the face of common sense and caution.

  “Do you fancy getting pissed tonight?” Rod said. “I think it’s time we showed the Age of Austerity some decidely unaustere excess, don’t you? Time to open the good stuff.”

  “Your place or mine?”

  “Mine, I think.”

  “Okay. I’ve letters to post and a call to make at World’s End, but I could be there not long after eight.”

  “You could drop the letters in the out tray. I’m sure the government can spare the price of a stamp or two.”

  Troy posted them on the other side of the road. The first envelope read simply “MI5.” He’d thought hard about to whom the second should be sent. It would be a scoop for the Post, edited by his brother-in-law, Lawrence, but there was just a chance Lawrence would recognize the type . . . and above all he wanted it to go to a newspaper so hostile to the government that there’d be no easy deals done to delay or suppress printing. He wanted it in black and white and all over the hoardings before anyone at MI5 could even think about a D-Notice. Voytek’s bunking off in Vienna depended on the story breaking before MI5 could find her. It had to be a Beaverbrook paper—he could almost imagine the relish, the schoolboy glee with which the Beaver would receive this, so he scribbled Daily Express, Fleet Street, on the envelope in his most schoolboy scrawl and dropped it in the box. Rod would never know the service he had rendered. If they lived to be eighty, then he might tell him . . . sometime around . . . 1995 . . . just in time to coincide with the invention of the no-stick frying pan and the telephone answering machine. Rod could hit him with one and record his confession with the other.

  §154

  Were it not that Rod’s mood was too good for Troy to want to ruin it, it occurred to him that a way to smash through the irritating smugness of his good-feeling might be to show him, in his professional capacity as a member of his majesty’s government, the interior of a London pawnshop. It was one way to read the economic health of the nation. After all, he thought, one might readily understand the circumstances that might lead a man to pawn his best winter overcoat (display three: two black, one blue) or the wife’s fox fur stole (display five: all a bit the worse for wear) or the sailor to pawn his concertina (display nine), but what in the economic downturn that seemed to be the permanent condition of the nation could be quite so bad as to compel a man to pawn his winter underwear (display: eleven pairs of long johns, condition variable)—and at that, to do so and not to have acquired the wherewithal to redeem them by November?

  Gazing at the motley, Troy saw high on the shelf above the door to the back room a dusty viola without strings and he knew at last why she had given him the ticket and what it was for.

  An unshaven grump in a grubby shirt and grubbier waistcoat took the ticket from him, peered at it, and said, “Good job I’m not a betting man. I ’ad ’er down as a no-show. Didn’t think I’d see ’er again. But . . . I suppose I ’aven’t cos you’re here instead, ain’t you? I told her last week there weren’t no call for ’em any more. But I took it all the same. Do you know, she wanted fifty quid for it? Fifty quid! Would you Adam an’ Eve it? But I told ’er straight, there ain’t no call for ’em and she could count herself lucky I was offerin’ a tenner for it.”

  “A tenner?” said Troy, incredulous.

  “Well, I know it’s an old un but the case is new. Gotta be worth summink init?”

  Troy put down two five-pound notes and counted out the interest in silver.

  “I’ll take it now,” he said.

  “In the back. Such a big bugger I couldn’t leave it lyin’ around the shop.”

  In the back, surrounded by a cornucopia of filth, Troy opened the case and took one of the tools of his trade from his inside pocket—a small Ever Ready torch in the shape of a fountain pen. He shone the narrow beam though an ƒ-hole onto the label:

  “Wossat?”

  “The maker’s label. Mattio Goffriler made cellos in the eighteenth century, in Italy.”

  “Worth summink, is it?”

  And while tact and courtesy were clearly options, they were on a hiding to nothing when up against the sheer pleasure in annoyance that the truth would cause. Troy did not feel like sparing the feelings or the wallet of a grumpy old man who gave out coppers for long johns and who had given Voytek ten pounds for the most precious object in her life.

  “Well,” he said, “the last time a Mattio Goffriler cello came up at Sotheby’s it fetched almost five thousand pounds.”

  §155

  It fitted fairly well into the back of Troy’s Bullnose Morris but he knew it would fit less well into his parlour. He would be forever tripping over it. And whilst part of him yearned to have a cellist to play alongside—but that Voytek was now a fugitive and had always been in a different musical league, he would have loved her company—no part of him yearned to learn the instrument himself.

  Still, he had been invited to spend the evening at his brother’s house—and that had possibilities. Risks, too, but principally possibilities.

  His sister-in-law answered the door.

  “Er . . . Freddie, what’s that?”

  “A cello.”

  “You weren’t planning on abandoning it here, were you?”

  “As a matter of fact, I was.”

  “Oh, God, not more sodding junk. This house is full of junk; these islands are full of junk. You’d think if there were one thing the Luftwaffe could have done for us, it was to blow away all the sodding junk!”

  “Are you going to let me in?”

  “I suppose so. Stick it in the study, perhaps no one will notice it among all that tat of your dad’s that I am not allowed to throw away.”

  Downstairs, he took the cello out of its case and propped it up against the bookshelves. He’d have to buy a proper stand or the neck would warp, but for now it looked pretty good.

  Rod came in—full postparliamentary rigging, wind in his sails, three sheets to the wind, no shoes, odd socks, red braces, tie at half-mast, a gin-and-it in hand, and not his first of the evening.

  “Wossat you got there?”

  Troy stated the obvious.

  “Good one, is it?”


  “Not bad,” said Troy. “I’ll take it out to Mother’s when I get the chance. It can go in the study there.”

  “Mmm . . . where d’ya get it?”

  Troy said nothing. Wondered if a half-truth might suffice along the lines of, “I found it in a pawnshop.”

  Rod played the violin—not that you would have known it from the idle way he plucked at a string of the cello. Then he was peering down at it, trying to see through the ƒ-holes.

  “I say, there’s a label in here.”

  If Rod could read the label, read the words “Mattio Goffriler,” there’d be no way Troy could ever pretend he’d picked it up cheap in a junk shop. There’d be questions.

  “You don’t say?” said Troy, sounding to his own ears like Bertie Wooster, midfib, but trying to sound a better liar than Bertie Wooster ever made.

  But the booze already had Rod in thrall. He straightened up with no apparent further interest in the cello.

  “Got a decanter breathing nicely,” he said. “An 1870 Cos d’Estournel.”

  This really was the good stuff. Troy doubted he’d open two bottles at that vintage but if he did, Troy would let him get stewed and try not to join him—God knows that was easy enough once Rod hit drink-and-natter mode. It seemed to him now that he had spent a summer steeped in booze, since the day Angus first took him on a pub crawl. His hand forever wrapped around a corkscrew . . .

  “Fine,” he said “I’ll be up in a jiffy. Just one or two things to do down here.”

  Rod bumbled off.

  Troy took a small package from his inside pocket, unwrapped the Fabergé gun with its sole remaining ruby, wiped it clean with his handkerchief, and laid it on his father’s desk next to the three-piece cigar kit. It wasn’t a perfect match but it was close. With any luck, Rod would never notice and if he did, Troy was prepared to swear blind it had been there all along, that he’d played with it as a boy . . . or something. And if Rod ever looked inside the cello again, well . . . he’d eat his hat . . . or something.