by John Lawton
Troy got up from the stool, an ache in his back telling him God never meant man to sit on one in the first place. Alice slipped ahead of him to the door and held it open for him. Watched as he leaned on his stick in the doorway. He could see her expression melt.
He stood in the garden waiting for whatever it was that was taking its time to surface in her.
‘I’m not completely hard, you know. I did hear you got caught in that explosion what killed that copper what sent Alf down.’
‘His name was John Brocklehurst.’
‘I know what it’s like.’
Troy did not ask what ‘it’ was.
‘It was nothin’ to do with us. You do know that, don’t you? There’s not one of Alf’s boys would have done a thing like that.’
Troy said nothing.
‘Could you like, you know . . . send my . . . you know . . . condolences to his wife?’
‘John was a widower, Alice. He had no wife. Just two sons who’ll never see their father again. On the other hand . . . with any luck you’ll see Alf once a month for the next twelve to fifteen years and then you’ll get him back. Older, wiser and knowing how to sew mailbags. That is, if he doesn’t divorce you for the adultery you’ve just put your name to.’
‘He knows I didn’t do that. Besides, I’d divorce the bastard myself if I had grounds.’
Troy looked at the sky. A clear blue summer’s day. Heard again the song of the blackbird. Bach had given way to Delius, a whisper of Brigg Fair. A melody designed to induce soporific happiness, evoking the haze of a summer’s morning, the sound of a skylark, and a hint of anticipation. As English a sound as music and the BBC Third Programme had to offer. A perfect moment to put the boot in.
‘Try desertion,’ he said, heading for the gate.
‘Is it desertion?’
‘Well . . . he’s not here, is he?’
‘Hardly his fault, is it? That’ll get me laughed out of court.’
She was almost shouting now as Troy opened the gate.
‘Then it’s mental cruelty, Alice. Run it by your brief. Tell him how it pushed you to the brink being married to a professional thief, how his life of deception and the revelations at his trial were more than you could bear. Tell him how you nearly lost your mind.’
Nothing in her expression told him she was aware of either the irony or the satire in what he’d said. His last sight of her was her sucking on another fag and mulling the idea over. He’d probably just wrecked what remained of Alf Marx’s marriage. It was worth a smile.
§ 68
Troy arranged to meet his brother-in-law, Lawrence, the same evening. Lawrence had suggested Troy come to his borrowed rooms at Albany rather than to Fleet Street. Troy had not asked whether Anna would be there. Lawrence had both tact and bravura. Ordinarily one could rely on the former, but Lawrence was not leading an ordinary life. At fifty-something, he was a first-time adulterer. He might just want to brazen it out.
Troy passed Anna in the ropewalk. Another of her flowery summer dresses, not one he’d seen before – some sort of purple daisy pattern – and a shawl for the onset of evening.
‘I’ve been given half a crown and told to go to the pictures. I gather you two have things to discuss that chaps can only discuss en chap as ’twere?’
‘How have you been?’
‘Nothing doing, Troy. If I say I’m sad you’ll gloat. If I say I’m happy you’ll find some scornful one-liner. Let’s talk about the only thing that matters. How are you? You’re looking pretty good, by the bye.’
‘Is that a professional opinion?’
‘Strictly doctor to patient.’
‘My eyesight’s improved no end. I’m not even sure I need the stick any more.’
He tapped one leg gently with the walking stick, in much the way Angus would tap his tin leg to show it rattled.
‘Then if you don’t need it, don’t use it. Has it occurred to you how much of what you’re going through might be simply psychological?’
‘No,’ he replied honestly.
‘The stick is a prop, Troy. And I mean that in the melodramatic sense. Throw it away.’
Anna walked on. He had not taken three steps when she called to him. ‘Troy, it wasn’t you sent Angus haring off to Scotland, was it?’
Lawrence flung the door open, looking every inch a Troy. Braces dangling, tie at half-mast, a bottle of wine in one hand. ‘You’re early. You didn’t, er . . . did you?’
‘We had a bit of a chat, yes.’
‘And now we have our bit of a chat, eh? It’s work, isn’t it? I assumed it was work when you telephoned.’
Lawrence flung himself down in an overstuffed armchair, and yanked the cork out of the bottle. Troy looked around. He’d not been inside Albany in years. It was still intimidating. Everything on the grand, too grand, scale. Everything ordered, in its place. He couldn’t believe it suited Lawrence. Not quite the Spartan quarters of the army officer who was its regular occupant, but simplicity and system in a setting of gilded, bachelor indulgence. What Lawrence was used to was a ramshackle house in Highgate, strewn with books and papers and kids’ toys.
‘What’s up?’
‘Nothing. I used to know the chap lived in the flat below.’
‘I don’t think they call them flats, Freddie. They’re gentlemen’s sets or some such nonsense.’
‘Killed himself about ten years ago.’
‘We’ve both us had a bellyful of suicide lately, so why don’t we change the subject? In fact, let’s get to the subject.’
Troy sat down opposite Lawrence and accepted a large glass of claret. ‘Those chaps who run the Empress. I promised you a story.’
‘So you did.’
‘We’ve talked to them about two murders in the last few weeks. Pulled them for the most recent. Let them go today under habeas corpus.’
‘Pity. I’m damn sure they did it.’
‘You know about them?’
‘Don’t be naïve, Freddie. After our little chat outside the Empress I opened a file on the Ryans. I’ve picked up every bit of chit-chat there is on the street, I’ve greased the palms of more oily narks than I could count. I’ll admit it’s a piss-poor thin file at the moment, but the truth is obvious – the Ryans run the East End nowadays, don’t they? Or are Scotland Yard the last people to discover this?’
‘I rather think that may be true. We’ve been pissing in the dark.’
‘But on the other hand. . .I’ve had nothing about them being pulled. I mean nothing definite. I had assumed they were the two hauled in for the Felucci business, but no one has confirmed that. Your people resorted to the “unnamed suspects” line, as I recall.’
‘Nor will anyone confirm it. Their brief’s running circles round Stan, claiming intimidation or harassment or whatever. We won’t be charging them and we won’t be naming them.’
‘So what’s my “scoop” . . . if I may use such an inadequate term?’
‘I want you to leak your file to every other newspaper in London. I want you to use Fleet Street’s old-boy network and get what the Ryans are up to in every paper in the land. Every paper except yours.’
Lawrence took this remarkably well. Drained his glass, filled it again, stared at his socks, then stared at Troy.
‘Why would I want to do that? We’re streets ahead of the competition on the Ryan story. You can’t just ask me to give it away.’
‘If you let the competition make the running, suggestion, innuendo, gossip, everything but the names, they can whip up a storm. Then when the time comes I will name them and you’ll be the one to break the story.’
‘You’ll name them? But you can’t say when?’
‘No, I can’t.’
‘Supposing they sue?’
‘We’ll have to be prepared for that. But if I catch them first . . .’
‘Catch them? I thought you were still off sick?’
‘I was coming to that.’
§ 69
It was a pleasur
e to watch it unfold.
Troy sat, two mornings later, in the sunshine of Goodwin’s Court with all that day’s papers in front of him.
The News Chronicle, the Daily Mail, the Daily Sketch, the Daily Herald, The Times and the Manchester Guardian all played a variation on a theme. How London was rife with rumours to the effect that two young thugs had taken over the East End, had taken possession of an unnamed London club, and had evaded the best efforts of Scotland Yard to catch or prosecute them. They steered clear of the libel law by offering only nebulous hints as to who these men might be. It wasn’t headlining stuff, it was gossip and hence back-page gossip-column material, but it would be a blind man who missed it.
At lunchtime Onions phoned. ‘Have you seen the papers?’
‘Just the Guardian,’ Troy lied.
‘It’s in most of ’em. Not the Express, or the Post but most of ’em. I know, I had Swift Eddie read the lot.’
That might have told Stan something. The Troys owned the Post. It was the weekday version of the much larger Sunday Post that Lawrence edited.
‘D’ye reckon the lad leaked it?’
The lad was Jack. Occasionally Troy wondered what age Jack would have to reach before he’d be anything else to Stan. ‘No, I don’t. Jack would have named them, wouldn’t he? Considering the rage he was in, he wasn’t going to be coy about it. If he’d told the press he’d have named them. And the press would have printed it, wouldn’t they?’
Onions thought about this. Onions did not come from an era in which the criminal looked to his libel lawyer. ‘I suppose you’re right. Doesn’t make it any easier, though. We’ve had that shit of a brief on the phone half the morning. Talked about a smear campaign, and how those two Irish gobshites would be in touch with their MP and all that malarkey.’
‘Ignore him.’
‘I can’t ignore him. It’s way past that stage. I tell you, it’s come to a pretty pass when villains can get their brief to ring up the Yard and boast about their political clout.’
§ 70
The following day the Daily Express, the London Evening News, the Evening Standard, the Star and the Daily Telegraph joined the fray.
It was Saturday afternoon when Lawrence called Troy.
‘There has been a development. I am invited to dinner by Rod at Church Row this evening.’
‘In what way is that a development?’
‘I am invited to meet Maurice White. And I am invited to meet Ted Steele – Lord Spoon, as you and Rod are wont to call him. The last time I saw Lord Spoon was in the Empress, deep in conversation with the Ryan twins.’
‘You went in? I thought I told you not to?’
‘Grow up, Freddie. Now, do you feel like gate crashing your brother’s dinner party?’
‘If I do that neither Rod nor Spoon will say what it is they have to say. But I’ll be there all the same. And I’ll be listening.’
‘Listening? Where?’
§ 71
As a child Troy had learnt by the age of five that he could ride from the cellar to the kitchen to the dining room inside the dumb waiter, hauled through the entrails of the house by his elder brother. It was not a favour he could ever repay. Rod was always too big to haul anywhere. By the age of eight he had discovered that being packed off to bed while the grown-ups entertained – Rod at fifteen now counting as a grown-up – had its compensations. When the ladies retired the cook usually took to her chair and slept for half an hour in front of the range. A boy well placed with his body scrunched into the dumb waiter could hear all that the gentlemen had to say over the cigars and brandy. In this fashion Troy had been made privy to the thoughts of Lloyd George in 1926, and some ten years and countless eavesdroppings later, to the thoughts of Joachim von Ribbentrop, the new Reich ambassador to St James’s – or, as his father had called him, ‘that fucking Nazi’.
It was a matter of chance. When the terms of his father’s will dictated that the Church Row house in Hampstead be given to Rod, no one had argued. It was big enough for them all. What did it matter whose name was on the deeds? By then Troy had his terraced cottage in Goodwin’s Court, Masha and Lawrence had their house in Highgate, and Sasha’s money had bought Hugh what Hugh thought suited his position in society, a house in Lord North Street, so handy for the House of Lords. All the same, Troy had never quite got round to surrendering the keys his father had given him on his sixteenth birthday in 1931.Since Rod had taken up residence he had always rung the bell, and tried not to take his hospitality for granted – something Rod did all the time with Troy’s house in Mimram.
On the Saturday evening, Troy used the key for the first time in fifteen years and let himself in quietly. There would be no cook to outwit, just Rod’s wife Cid.
He approached the dining-room door. There was a crack in one of the upper panels, just about level with the eyes of an eight-year-old.
He peeked in. They were on pudding. And the only woman present was Cid. Troy doubted they would have had whatever conversation Lawrence had been summoned for with Cid in the room. She had ways of discouraging men from talking shop. When she left – ‘retired’ was scarcely the word to use in this day and age – they’d get to whatever it was. Troy went down to the kitchen and gently slid up the hatch on the dumb-waiter.
As he turned round he found himself face to face with his sister-in law, mouth open ready to scream. He clapped a hand over her mouth and waited as she clocked who he was.
‘You lunatic, Freddie. You nearly scared me half to death. What are you doing down here in the dark? Come to think of it, what are you doing here at all?’
‘I came,’ he whispered, ‘for the cigars and brandy.’
‘Oh. You mean the conspiracy? I might have known.’
‘Is it a conspiracy?’
‘What else would you call it? No wives invited and dinner-table conversation that would bore the bum off a rhino. Of course it’s a conspiracy. Rod is up to something. I don’t know what and I don’t want to know what. But you do, don’t you?’
‘’Fraid so.’
‘Well, I’m not staying up for it. Whatever it is, please don’t let Rod make a bigger fool of himself than is necessary. I’m off to bed.’
Troy was far too big to sit inside the dumb-waiter any more. He pulled up a chair and stuck his head into the shaft. He could hear perfectly – all that was required was to overcome the sensation that he was on the guillotine waiting for the chop. Rod had only to choose this moment to send a cold terrine back down . . . He wondered how the ice would be broken and by whom.
He even heard the scratch of a match as one of them lit up a cigar. Probably Maurice White, he thought. And it was Maurice who spoke first.
‘It’s very good of you to agree to meet us at short notice, Lawrence.’
‘I’d be a poor excuse for a hack if I couldn’t smell a story, Maurice.’
‘It’s not so much a story,’ Rod said. ‘It’s a . . .’
Troy knew his brother would never get to the end of that sentence. He always fluffed his lines when he was feeling guilty about something.
Maurice bailed him out. ‘I’m not sure it’s a story either. I’d prefer to think of it as a party matter. After all, we’re all members of the Labour Party. Aren’t we?’
Nobody said yes to the obvious.
‘And it’s less about creating a story than correcting one.’
‘Really? I can hardly begin to guess what you mean, Maurice.’
Rod found his voice again. ‘It’s a long story . . .’
‘Which one? The one we’re correcting or the one I’m creating?’
Rod doggedly ignored this.
‘We, that is the Party, mean to come into office with a committed programme of urban renewal. That’s hardly surprising. It’s been in every manifesto since the war and it’ll be in the next one.’
‘Why does that not sound like success?’
Rod ignored this too. It was the kind of remark that usually had him saying things like ‘I�
�ll knock your block off.’
‘A few weeks ago Maurice approached me with a project for redeveloping a site in the East End.’
‘You mean a bombsite?’
‘No,’ Maurice chipped in. ‘We mean the redevelopment of slums.’
‘Knocking houses down? When London has its biggest housing shortage since 1940?’
‘Knocking ’em down, Lawrence, and rebuilding ’em.’
‘I see . . . and where is this site?’
‘Watney Market. My manor. I was born there.’
‘And you want the next government, the next Labour government, to rubber-stamp this?’
Rod again: ‘It’ll be more than that. It’ll be a sort of partnership.’
‘A partnership? Between a Labour government and venture capital?’
Troy could almost feel Rod gagging on his Calvados.
‘Doesn’t sound exactly socialist to me, Rod.’
‘It’s not incompatible either. Think of it as a Public–Private Partnership.’
‘I’ll try, but it sounds to me like an acronym in the making, and a recipe for a scam.’
Ted Spoon spoke for the first time. ‘It’s detail, Lawrence, merely detail. We wish to be the contractors for this project. There’s no reason why we cannot build decent homes for working people. We are self-made men who simply want to put something back into the community. As a Fleet Street editor you are familiar with the work and lives of both Maurice and myself, if only for the purposes of writing our obituaries at some distant date.’
‘I wrote yours myself last summer, Ted. We try to plan ahead.’
Whether he meant to or not, Lawrence had broken the tension. Ted Spoon laughed out loud and Maurice and Rod joined in. As the laughter died down, Troy heard the clink of the brandy bottle doing the rounds. Rod’s sense of relief was almost palpable.
Someone complimented Rod on the brandy, sotto voce. Someone coughed loudly, and Spoon picked up where he’d left off, but with a lighter tone in his voice. ‘We’re both working-class boys made good, Lawrence. We’ve given away millions. Simple charity. Almost effortless. Sign a cheque and salve your conscience. It’s almost too easy. This . . . this is a project that takes us back to our roots. It’s a real chance to do something for a whole community.’