Short, nasty and brutish.

Troy stared.

‘Go on,’ said Churchill.

Still Troy stared.

‘Go on. Pick it up.’

Troy hefted the gun in his left hand. Sawn off at the barrels and stock, it had become less a shotgun than an outsize handgun. He felt the weight, thought the alterations did nothing for its balance and less for its looks. ‘I hope this didn’t start life as one of your hand-mades,’ he said.

‘Far from it. I helped myself to it after a trial a few years back. The court wanted it destroyed, naturally, but I pleaded its . . . educational value.’

Churchill smiled at Troy over this last phrase. Down the tunnel Hitler and Göring watched with fixed gazes. Tempting him.

‘My education, I suppose?’ Troy said.

‘As it happens, yes.’

‘You know,’ Troy went on, ‘it’s appalling a policeman should ever have his hands on such a weapon.’ He tucked the stubby stock into one hip and fired. The first shot cut Adolf in two, the second set fat Hermann spinning. Straw and sawdust everywhere.

Churchill sighed. ‘What have I told you, Frederick?’

Troy recited: ‘Every shot counts. Speed isn’t everything.’

‘And?’

‘And a wounded man can still kill you.’

‘Quite,’ said Churchill. ‘If old Göring had been anything more than a cut-out from Picture Post and a sack full of straw you’d be dead now. Shall we do it again with a little more accuracy and a little less haste?’

‘Again.’ It seemed to be Churchill’s motto, and it seemed to Troy that he was no further on than the day Churchill had walked back into his life three weeks ago.

 

§ 1

DECEMBER 1944

In the summer of 1944 Lady Diana Brack had shot Detective Sergeant Troy in the gut. He had lost part of one kidney, and had been lucky not to lose a length of small intestine. He had been off work for six months. Six months that to him seemed far more than enough and which he ascribed as much to his superintendent’s desire to punish him as to the rigours of passing the medical. Every time he reported for duty, Onions sent him home. Not long before Christmas he had finally got back into his old office, behind his old desk, and attempted to slip on the old skin he had sloughed off in June.

A week later he was back in hospital, rushed to the Charing Cross with internal bleeding as a result of a massive haemorrhage, the first he had known of which had been pissing blood. Sergeant Wildeve had picked him off the bog floor, flies gaping, cock out, slewed in a crimson slick of blood and piss.

His family came to drive him mad.

His mother sat at his bedside and distracted him from the prospect of death by reading aloud to him, much as she had done when he was young. He had been a sickly child. Now that he was a sickly grown-up, he was happy to have her read; he wished only that she had chosen something more cheery than Rimbaud’s Un Saison en Enfer.

He could understand why. French was her first language. Like many Russian toffs, Russian, to her, had been a language for talking to servants, and, unlike her husband, she had never found it in herself to embrace the irregularities of English with the passion one could only ever muster for something so perverse. French it had been, French it was – but Rimbaud. Mother, please.

‘J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité.’

Oh, bloody hell, he thought. Waiting for God? Was that what he was doing? But help was at hand. His sister Masha had appeared at his mother’s shoulder: ‘There’s two chaps waiting to see Freddie, Maman. As he’s only allowed two visitors at a time . . .’

His mother stuck a bookmark in the pages of the battered Rimbaud and told him they would continue tomorrow.

‘Anyone I know?’ Troy asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said his sister, and as she walked out Kolankiewicz had walked in, followed closely by a face that made Troy think for a moment. Churchill, Bob Churchill. Good Lord. He didn’t think he’d seen Bob since his father’s funeral.

Lady Troy offered a cheek for Churchill to peck. Troy couldn’t help feeling she would have preferred a handshake, but that would have meant surrendering the grip on one or other of her walking-sticks. For eighteen months or so now they had kept her mostly upright and moving against the tortuous twists and stabs of arthritis. All Kolankiewicz got was a mumbled, ‘Good evening.’ She had never liked Kolankiewicz, but then so few people did – so few could or would get past the foul exterior and the fractured English. Besides, Poles and Russians . . . they had history. Taras Bulba was not a novel or a name ever to be mentioned around Kolankiewicz.

Churchill had gained weight – a family trait, perhaps. He was almost as rotund as his distant cousin Winston, and when the mood took him the same mischievous Churchillian glint could be seen in his eyes.

No one spoke as Troy’s mother walked to the door, sticks clacking arrhythmically across the linoleum floor. When she had gone Churchill said softly, ‘Your mother was fine the last time I saw her. Has all this come upon her since your father’s death?’

Troy’s father had died late in 1943. He had watched his mother slip into sudden ill-health, her limbs seizing up as the most important limb of all had been cut from her. A physical parody of her mental state. It was not Troy waiting for God, it occurred to him, nor was it a poem read for his benefit – it was his mother, and there were times he thought God could not arrive soon enough for her liking.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s little to be done. She seems almost to relish the affliction. It’s her punishment for letting the old man slip.’

‘You been reading that bugger Freud again?’ Kolankiewicz said.

‘Let’s change the subject, shall we? I’m sure I don’t owe this honour to your desire to argue the toss about Freud or Bob’s concern for my mother’s health.’

Churchill and Kolankiewicz looked at each other, and Troy knew he had hit the mark. It was indeed an honour – a visit from the greatest gun expert on Earth and from London’s finest forensic pathologist. If the two of them had got together to visit him in his sick bed they must be up to something – the static between them flashed out ‘conspiracy’ to Troy.

‘Bob has an idea,’ Kolankiewicz began.

‘Well, more of a suggestion, really, and it was your idea, really, Ladislaw . . .’

Ladislaw? No one called the Polish Beast by his Christian name.

‘Stop there, both of you. I’m too tired and too pissed off to listen to you play Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Could one of you just spit it out?’

Kolankiewicz deferred. Churchill took the chair Troy’s mother had been in, and Kolankiewicz perched on the edge of the bed.

‘It’s like this, Frederick. After you were shot, Ladislaw and I met up . . . When was it now?’

‘Doesn’t matter when,’ said Troy.

‘I suppose not. Anyway, he told me you couldn’t hit a barn door at twenty paces and the only reason Diana Brack hadn’t killed you instead . . .’ Churchill paused, reddened even, as the inevitability of what he had to say next struck him.

‘Instead of me killing her,’ Troy prompted.

‘Quite. As you say. The only reason was . . . well . . . pure luck. Wasn’t it?’

Churchill looked at Kolankiewicz. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Troy met them head on. ‘Yes. A lucky shot,’ he agreed.

Lucky? The bullet that had killed Diana Brack ricocheted through his dreams and would do so for the rest of his life.

‘So . . . what’s your point, gentlemen?’

‘Well . . .’ Churchill fudged.

Kolankiewicz had had enough of fudge.

‘Well is as well does. Next fucker who comes at you with gun is going to kill you, you stupid bugger.’

Churchill manoeuvred around the F-word by pulling out a large linen handkerchief and honking loudly, as though a good hooter blast could erase the sound of air turning blue.

‘Fuck it, Troy, you know as well as I do if the Brack bitch had got off a second shot you’d be six feet under pushing up buttercups!’

‘Daisies,’ Troy said softly.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s “pushing up daisies” not “pushing up buttercups”, you Polish pig – and, yes, you’re quite right. She damn near killed me. I’ve had six months to work that out. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

Churchill got between them. ‘When will you be discharged?’

‘For Christmas,’ Troy replied. ‘They’ve assured me of that.’

‘And how fit will you be?’

Troy threw back the bedclothes, hoisted his nightshirt and pointed to the four-inch scar on his abdomen.

‘I see,’ Churchill said. ‘You’ll take a while to heal. So, we’ll take it gently at first, shall we?’

‘Take what gently?’

Kolankiewicz answered, the steam spent, and a near-avuncular tone in his voice: ‘My boy, Bob is offering to teach you to shoot. It’s a good idea. It could save your life.’

‘I get weapons training at the Yard.’

‘Perfunctory stuff, take my word for it,’ said Churchill. ‘Enough so coppers don’t dislocate their shoulders with recoil, enough so they can fire the odd bullet in roughly the right direction. A few weeks with me and you’ll be shooting like Wyatt Earp.’

It was a good idea. Troy knew it. But he had a built-in aversion to guns. He’d only had one with him that night because Larissa Tosca had nagged him not to go unarmed. He had lived through that night. Tosca had not – although the absence of a body had always left him with more than enough room for doubt. On the nights when Brack did not rattle round in his head, Tosca did. On a really bad night they met. Yes – he’d master that aversion: learning how to shoot would be good. It might even occupy his mind, an organ desperately in need of occupation, any occupation, that might evict the dead women squatting there.

 

§ 2

It must have been two or three days later. He was waiting on the consultant’s round, waiting on his petty god and the news of his own imminent escape. His mother sat once more at his bedside, his sister, as ever, out in the corridor preferring a tacky novel to their mother’s grapplings with poetry, although Masha’s influence must have prevailed to some extent. When the old woman had flourished a volume of Hardy’s verse, Troy’s spirits had floated on visions of Wessex life and rumpy-pumpy in haystacks, only to crash to earth when she began to read ‘The Voice’ from Hardy’s poetry of the last years before the Great War. Her accent was atrocious.

‘“Woman much missed how you coll to me, Sayink zat you are not as you were. . .”’

And he realised she was about to embark on a cycle of dead woman songs – Hardy’s own Frauentotenlieder.

‘“. . . Zuss I; faltering fowadd, leafes around me follink, Wint oosink sin srough ze zorn from nowidd, And ze woman collink.” ’

Jesus Christ. Dead women collink? What had possessed her to pick that? Innocence? Not grasping what the man was banging on about. It’s about death, dammit! Hardy’s murky obsession with dead women. Far, far too close to Troy’s own.

Saved by the bell once more. The consultant breezed in like a man late for a dead cert at the bookie’s, glanced at his chart and said, ‘You can go, Sergeant Troy. Healing up nicely, wouldn’t you say?’ And did not wait for an answer.

‘I shall let you dress,’ said Lady Troy. ‘Masha and I will be outside.’

From the other side of the bed Troy heard the impatient sigh of the Big Man folding his News Chronicle. ‘Struth, old cock, I thought she’d never stop. I don’t know who this Hardy bloke is . . . but wot a miserable git! D’ye reckon everyone he knew popped their clogs?’

‘Who cares? Help me out of here before I pop mine.’

Troy swung his legs to the floor, felt the first rush of dizziness and paused, staring down to where white knees peeped from under his nightshirt, pale as jellyfish.

‘Awright, cock?’

The Big Man loomed over him, big and round and blue in his Heavy Rescue uniform, blocking half the light from the window, like a tethered anti-aircraft balloon floating in his flight path. Troy felt the rush of an old, familiar feeling breaking in his mind. He wondered out loud: ‘You know, this has been bloody awful. I was the kind of child who got everything going, mumps, measles, scarlet fever . . .’

‘Wot kid didn’t, matey?’ said the Big Man without sympathy. ‘Bet you didn’t get rickets, though, nor pneumatic fever – not toff’s diseases, are they?’

Every so often the Big Man would do this to him, remind him, whether he liked it or not, of their respective places in the layers of the big onion that was English society. Troy spent a split second wondering what pneumatic fever might be, then gave up. ‘Can I finish?’

‘Be my guest.’

‘I was a sickly child – but nothing prepared me for this, I mean for the last six months. For all this . . . recuperation . . . all this fucking hospitalisation . . .’

‘Mind yer French, young Fred, there might be ladies about.’

‘. . . and if I thought . . . I mean if I thought I’d have to go through this again . . . ever . . . I mean . . . spend this much time in hospital . . .’

He had no ending to the sentence, but the Big Man did: ‘If you want to avoid all this malarkey in the future, then you best do what that Klankiwitch bloke and Bob Churchill are telling you.’

‘You know about that?’

‘O’ course. Mr Churchill and me, we go back a long way. Till when you was a nipper, I should think. He’s done a fair bit of the old owsyerfather for the guv’ner, has Mr Churchill.’

Troy had given up trying to find out who the ‘guv’ner’ was. He was clearly the Big Man’s employer, and once in a while the Big Man would refer to himself as a ‘gentleman’s gentleman’, but declined to solve the mystery. Troy had known him intermittently since the end of last winter, when he had come across him tending a pig on an allotment carved for wartime necessities out of the former elegance of Tedworth Gardens in Chelsea. The last time Troy had discharged himself from hospital, in June, it had been the Big Man who had bundled him up like a baby and rushed him to hospital and, when it came down to it, saved his life. Troy had never been really grateful to him. It had all got in the way of an indulgent self-pity that had left him wanting to die.

‘So you think I’m going to get myself killed as well, do you?’

‘You can bet your best baggy underpants on it, old cock.’

The Big Man held underpants in one hand, trousers in the other. As Troy snatched them from him he remembered a phrase of Dorothy Parker’s that came close to the approximation of gratitude: ‘You might as well live.’

‘Might as well live? Wossat mean, cock?’

‘Nothing,’ said Troy. ‘It doesn’t matter. You’ve won this one.’

 

§ 3

The Big Man wrapped him in a blanket – a parcel awaiting collection once again – and put him into the back seat of Troy’s father’s 1937 V12 Lagonda. The last time Troy had seen the car it had been up on blocks. Now it purred softly at the pavement, like a big cat lazing away a savannah afternoon. ‘Where did you get the tyres?’ he asked.

The Big Man tapped the side of his nose. One of those infuriating ask-no-questions-be-told-no-lies gestures he seemed to delight in using.

‘The petrol?’ Troy persisted.

‘Your family pooled their coupons to give you a smooth ride home. An invalid carriage fit for a king.’

‘How about an invalid carriage fit for an invalid?’ said Troy remembering how he had got the car up to 110 m.p.h. on the Great North Road one day in 1938.

‘Trust me,’ said the Big Man.

Troy found himself in the back, next to Masha, his mother the best part of six feet away next to the Big Man, who sat behind the steering-wheel.

Masha smiled almost sweetly at him. It was one of her great cons to be unpredictable and unreadable. Troy thought there might be a Just So story somewhere in which a deadly creature habitually smiles at its prey. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Let’s hear it.’

‘Let’s hear what?’

‘Whatever it is that you’re bursting to tell me. Whatever snatch of gossip is eating your soul at the moment.’

‘I don’t gossip.’

‘Fine. Have it your way. Bitch a little instead. You can bitch for Britain, after all.’

Masha mused, lips gently parted, one hand idly conducting some invisible orchestra. ‘Well . . . Mummy’s raised the most enormous crop of leeks for the winter.’

‘Is that the best you can do?’

‘And with no keepers and no shoot the pheasants have bred like rabbits, so we have a positive plague. Cocks duelling at it all over the place. And, of course, more pheasants means more food for foxes so we have an army of little red—’

‘Masha, for Christ’s sake.’

‘OK. OK.’ (Pause) ‘Speaking of cocks . . .’

‘Yeeees?’

‘My co-natal sibling would appear to be the object of a penetrating physiological enquiry.’

The woman was talking bollocks. Then he realised: code. A code to exclude their mother, who might have nodded off or might be listening. Co-natal sibling? Her twin, Sasha. Penetrating physiological enquiry? Fucking. Sasha had a new lover.

‘Really,’ Troy said at last. ‘Who’s she shagging now?’

‘Freddie!’

But his mother had not turned. Her ears had not pricked up at the prick. Troy concluded she had nodded off, ramrod straight, more upright asleep than she would ever manage waking. And the Big Man was in a happy world of his own, foot on the floor – flouting wartime wisdom – tearing along at over ninety, a tuneless tune humming on his lips. The outrage on Masha’s part Troy knew to be bluffery – the fond illusion the twins cherished that, whilst flinging caution to the winds themselves, they could somehow protect him from the very people they were. There were times their catalogue of conquests bored him, times, as now, with little else to echo in the idling mind, when it was better than nothing.

‘Anyone I know?’ he asked.

‘Nice young chap. RAF, actually. Based at Duxford. Shot up in a Hurricane. Not too bad, but too bad to fly, so he’s one of those chaps with lots of rings on his cuffs who pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest.’

Troy revised his metaphor slightly – they had flung caution to the hurricanes, well, at least to a former Hurricane pilot. ‘You know,’ he said tentatively, ‘there’s something awfully familiar about that description. Didn’t you have a thing with a chap out at Duxford last September?’

‘Sort of.’

‘How sort of?’

‘Sort of yes.’

‘Sort of yes with a chap who got shot up in a Hurricane and now pushes little models around a map with a sort of snooker rest?’

‘If you put it like that, yes.’

‘How else could I put it? What you’re saying is that you passed this Wotsisname—’

‘Giles Carver-Little, actually.’

‘Whatever. This English toff with too many names gets passed from one sister to the other like a brown-paper parcel.’

‘A brown-paper parcel? No. Not at all. More like some delicacy from Fortnum’s in a little white box all done up with a pinky silk ribbon and a gold-edged card saying, “ To my darling sister, all my love Masha”.’

Good God, it was rich. He had often wondered if there was anything of which these two were not capable.

‘I mean, if you found out about something jolly good wouldn’t you tip off a mate about it?’

‘Don’t make it sound like a tip for the Derby. What you’re telling me is that the two of you are willing to share lovers.’

‘Not literally, not any more. We haven’t done threesomes for a while. But yes. I mean. Bloody hell, why not?’

‘Don’t you think it’s all a bit melodramatic? Everyone having everyone else?’

‘Not in the least. I simply let my sister in on a good thing. As for having everyone else . . . isn’t that just that Darwin chap – evolution,

survival of the fittest and all that?’

‘Herbert Spencer,’ said Troy.

Masha mused.

‘No. Can’t say I’ve had him. Don’t think I’ve ever had a Herbert, in fact. But you can’t really expect me to remember the lot now, can you? Friend of yours, is he?’

‘I meant,’ Troy persisted, with wasted logic, ‘that the survival of the fittest was said by Spencer not Darwin, and I cannot for one moment see how you can pass off what you get up to as the ascent of the species.’

‘Selective wotsit? Natural thingies?’ Masha ventured.

‘Shared shagging,’ Troy said.

‘Quite,’ said his sister. ‘I mean. Wouldn’t you?’

Troy said nothing. Yet again the woman had gone beyond the bounds of what he knew.

They rode awhile in silence. Troy had no wish to feed whatever bizarrely amoral trend of thought might be lurking deeper in the pit that was his sister’s psyche. They had crossed into Hertfordshire ten minutes ago. Home, after all, was not far away. It just seemed that way and had for a while – but as the car passed through the gateposts of Mimram (the gates having gone to make Spitfires in 1940), rounded the curving, crisply brown winter beeches at the head of the drive and the house sprang into view, Troy lost mental sight and sound of his sister. His childhood home. The rotting pile his father had bought in 1910 and had never quite finished restoring. An English country seat crossed with a Russian dacha. It was like a Mexican blanket, thought Troy, ragged at one corner where the artist had left loose threads and thus allowed his soul’s escape from his art. His father had escaped into death, and Troy’s own words to the Big Man came back to him in all their crassness – if he could get him alone he’d tell him so. ‘You might as well live’ seemed so inadequate in the face of all that Mimram now dragged out of him.

He turned to Masha, said, ‘Home.’ And thought that perhaps his inflexion had not been as intended for she said, ‘Where did you think we were going?’

 

§ 4

Christmas came to drive him mad. Christmas at the family home seemed tailor-made to drive him mad. It was their second without his father – Troy was certain his mother counted ‘dead Christmases’ – one of many without brother Rod, a pilot on Tempest fighters, stationed in France, or the brothers-in-law Hugh and Lawrence, both doing their bit for King and Country. It was, Troy thought, a return to the infantile: too many women to remind him that he was the baby of the family at twenty-nine and would for ever be so. Yet it was lavish in a way few English families could extend to in the winter of 1944, for his mother raised not only leeks but potatoes in her greenhouse, fresh as June for Christmas Day, turkeys in a pen on the south lawn and Brussels sprouts on a vast raised bed in her vegetable garden. She had propped up her failing limbs and dug for victory since the first blast of war in 1939. Nonetheless he had had all the gin and charades he could take by Boxing Day, so his mother suggested to him that it might be a good idea if he invited some of his ‘chums’ round for a day or two. He leapt at the chance, rang Jack Wildeve and rang Kolankiewicz.

Kolankiewicz said, ‘And your lessons, my boy?’

‘My lessons?’

‘You are bored already. Give Bob Churchill a call and get down to business.’

To his surprise Churchill readily agreed, said that he had not been to Mimram since he had personally delivered a hand-made shotgun to Troy’s father in 1928.

Churchill was last to arrive, rolling up the drive at the wheel of a ’34 Buick, a huge two-seater, complete with dickey seat propped open and covered in tarpaulin. He was in tweed, all set for a pre-war country weekend. The Big Man slid out from the passenger seat, still in his LCC Heavy Rescue outfit, and muttered ‘Wotcher.’ He unroped the snow-spattered tarp from the dickey and unloaded a pile of darkly polished, dovetail-jointed, brass-plated, mahogany carrying cases. He set them on the drive, a neat and presumably lethal pile at their feet.

‘Don’t expect me to hump the lot on me tod,’ he said.

‘You came prepared, then?’ Troy stated the obvious.

‘Oh yes,’ said Churchill. ‘We’ll tackle the lot. Smith and Wesson, Colt, Winchester, Mauser, Walther, Schmeisser – get you familiar with them all.’

The Big Man picked up two cases and stomped off into the house. Churchill fished his dinner togs from the dickey seat, crumpled on their hanger. Handed them to Troy. A black tent of a jacket and capacious trousers.

‘You came over-prepared, then?’

‘I did?’

‘We haven’t dressed for dinner since before the war. But don’t let me put you off. My mother will be delighted.’

‘Y’know, the last time I was here your father was in . . . what shall I call it? One of his moods. Not only would he not dress for dinner he wouldn’t dress at all. Spent two days in his dressing-gown . . . wouldn’t shave, often as not wouldn’t speak.’

‘He could be like that. I’ve seen dinner pass with him sitting like Banquo’s ghost at the end of the table.’

‘And at other times—’

‘You wished you knew how to make him shut up?’

‘Exactly,’ said Churchill.

‘I can promise you a more customary evening,’ said Troy. ‘We are none of us enough like the old man to put you through that again.’

He spoke too soon.

 

§ 5

Troy’s mother had gone to bed after the main course, leaving Troy, Kolankiewicz, Wildeve and one sister to finish the meal alone. She had been charmed by Churchill’s dressing for dinner, something Jack and Troy chose not to do and something Kolankiewicz never would, but perhaps the presence of two such trenchermen as Kolankiewicz and Churchill had proved too much for the old lady. Troy had seen few men with the appetite of Bob Churchill. But he, at least, was virtually teetotal. Kolankiewicz could drink a pub dry. The Big Man had declined to join them on the grounds that ‘an evenin’ of toff chat would like as not bore the britches off me and, worse, lead to me missing me favourite programme on the wireless’. A pity: Troy had wanted to see the look on his face when he realised there was a Sasha as well as a Masha. As identical twins went, they were identical. Troy had never had any trouble telling them apart, but he’d known his own brother get them mixed up; he’d known both of them to exploit the fact for all it was worth, and, as yet, time and chance had not wrought enough differences in their characters that one could drive a playing card between them. They were, as Troy was wont to think and utter, one dreadful woman with two bodies. He decided to reward the Big Man for his churlishness by letting him find out the hard way. Masha had gone home on Boxing Day: let him ‘discover’ sister Sasha for himself. All the same the Big Man had been right about toff chat. Even Wildeve was stifling yawns as Kolankiewicz unburdened himself of one of the many theses he seemed to store up in a mental sack. Troy thought that conversations a bit like this, though surely less intense, must be taking place all over the country – ‘when the war is over’ had all but displaced ‘before the war’ as an opening gambit.

‘It won’t be the same,’ Churchill was saying. ‘It can’t be the same.’

‘You’re speaking professionally?’ Troy asked.

‘Indeed I am. But it’s your profession as much as mine.’

‘What are you expecting? A sudden surge in the possession of guns?’

‘Goes almost without saying. Call it the debris of war. Any war. The flotsam and jetsam. Whatever shade of government we have, whatever system we set up for the demobilisation of a million men-at-arms, we’ll never get back so much as a fraction of the handguns we’ve issued.’

‘Souvenirs,’ Wildeve offered. ‘All my uncles kept an old Webley in the desk drawer throughout the twenties. We boys thought it was great fun. Never saw one fired, though.’

‘Lower your sights a little,’ said Churchill. ‘What happens to a handgun in the possession of your uncles is a world away from what happens to it in the hands of a man for whom it has become simultaneously his first taste of freedom and power.’

‘Eh?’

‘Bob is saying,’ Troy said, ‘that we can expect a crime wave as soon as our boys get home.’

‘Really?’

It wasn’t that Jack was thick, thought Troy, more that he was distracted. He had had the feeling for several minutes now that Sasha had been playing footsie with him under the table – the slope of her torso, the sense that she was stretching out, the seductive grin on her too, too pretty face – and as Jack’s innocent ‘ehs’ and ‘reallies’ mounted he had been certain that the damn woman had winked at him.

‘Jack, we’ve turned a million men loose on the continent. Some may come back and settle for being bank clerks or hewing coal again but as many won’t. The Labour Party may talk of a quiet revolution after the war. What they don’t see is that it’s happened already. It wasn’t necessary to politicise the working classes, it was necessary merely to turn them loose. And when they get back they may well just take what they want. Legally or not. They won’t wait on a change of government, and they won’t tuck their old Webleys or their “souvenir” Lugers in a desk drawer to amuse the kiddies with.’

‘But,’ said Wildeve, ‘it didn’t happen that way after the last war, now, did it?’

‘That was a very different war,’ said Churchill. ‘Men came back hammered into the ground. It may not be for a man of my age to say this, and I certainly wouldn’t say it in the presence of a serving soldier, but this generation, this English generation, has got off lightly. It could have been so much worse.’

Kolankiewicz, having kicked off this discussion, had said nothing for several minutes. His interjection cut through brusquely: ‘You English. You English. The island mentality. The compromise with history. You do not know the half of it.’

‘Meaning?’ said Troy.

‘Where were you when the war ended?’

‘What’s that got to do with it?’

‘Humour me. I am a cranky old Pole.’

‘I was three,’ said Troy, with a hint of exasperation, ‘and Jack wasn’t even born.’

‘I was thirty-two, pretty well where I am now, doing pretty much what I’m doing now,’ said Churchill.

‘And I,’ said Kolankiewicz, ‘was a twenty-year-old conscript in what remained of the Polish regiments of the Imperial Russian Army. Forced to fight a war to defend a country we hated against a country we hated almost as much. Poland has always been in the middle. So much in the middle that for hundreds of years at a time you find it erased from the atlas and all but erased from history. The war you date as ending in 1918 ended a year earlier for the whole of Poland and Russia. And in its place began another which has never ended. When the Germans put Lenin in that sealed train to the Finland Station, they had sent us a time-bomb. By 1920 I was a prisoner of the Whites. Suspected of being a Red, wanting merely to be a Pole. Stuck on a train of cattle wagons on the new border with Poland and shipped east. You may say I had not run fast enough. Quite so. A lesson hard learnt. Ever since I have not ceased to run. I have lived in the same house in the same backwater avenue in Hampstead Garden Suburb for sixteen years now – and still I run. Every day and every night I run. What do you English know of running?’

It was a blunt, almost brutal little speech. A rain of bricks and rubble clunking down around them, bouncing the cutlery and shattering the china. In a few swift sentences Kolankiewicz had demolished the edifice of argument, pulled racial rank on them all and upped the ante. There was a pause as he helped himself to more port. This time, Troy was certain, Sasha had winked at Wildeve.

‘What you are both focusing on,’ Kolankiewicz went on, ‘are the social and criminal consequences of demobilisation. I cannot fault you on this, Bob. You are, in all probability, right. What I saw in Poland and Russia after the last war were the effects of total war on the civil population. On those who did not or could not fight, and on those who were too young to fight.’

‘Total War?’ said Troy.

‘The phrase has been in use for a while you will find.’

‘It’s your use of it that bothers me. It’s used to describe . . . how shall I put it . . . a mobilisation of resources . . . you’re talking about it as a culture . . . as a substitute for culture.’

‘If it is all you know of life, if it has shaped the values by which you live, then it is your culture. Substitute or not. I met it face to face. I said I was not swift enough to run in 1917. It would have been convenient to find myself on the German boundaries, to be part of the newly mooted Poland. Mea culpa, I found myself in the hell that was the embryonic Soviet Union. And, as I was saying, I found myself with a one-way ticket to Siberia. It was January. Not the kindest of months. The train ground to a halt in a mountain of snow just this side of the Urals. I never did find out where – Mumsk or Bumsk, it scarcely matters. Among my many travelling companions was another ragamuffin such as I was myself. But he was older than me, older than any of us young men being herded east. I knew him. I’d known him as a sergeant on the eastern front, under the name of Ivan Volkonsky – the name he was doubtless born with, but I also knew his nom de guerre. Since 1917 he had been Leonid Rodnik, a general in Trotsky’s Red Army. He knew me too. His secret became a bond, as it were. The idiots guarding us would have had a prize, if only they had realised just who they had. How they caught him Rodnik never said. But, as the train sat the best part of a month in the deadly cold of a Russian winter, I got to know him rather better. I got to know his life story and he mine – what little there was of it. Indeed, I owe much of my command of Russian to his tutelage.

‘Each wagon would be allowed out once a day to piss, to shit and to gather wood. We stripped the forest of kindling while the Whites watched, and fed the pot-bellied stove inside our wagon. And when we ran short Rodnik opened up his shirt and revealed what had kept him warm those weeks, a lining of several million roubles in Tsarist currency. We fed that into the stove too – I was warmed by the heat of burning money. Rodnik started to laugh. Infectious. The whole wagon joined in, hysterical with laughter at the thought of burning that which most of them would have killed for but a few years earlier.

‘We starved and we fell ill, and each day the guards would take the most infirm among us and despatch them to the next world with a bullet to the back of the head. It was obvious, even disregarding the fate that awaited us on the other side of the mountain, that if the train did not get through the next tunnel soon we would all die in the same fashion. The rough justice of the judge with the rifle. You may recall the long passages in War and Peace when the French march their prisoners westward shooting the wounded as they go. It was not unlike. One of those moments when you seek no parallel in literature. I have never seen myself as Bezukhov. Indeed, I have never been able to read the book since. No matter.

‘As dead wood grew scarcer the guards escorted us further and further from the train. Every so often someone would make a break for it and get a bullet in the back. We were lucky. I escaped without a scratch. Rodnik took a bullet in the arm. But we ran. In half an hour they gave up the search. Why waste a bullet? Winter would kill us anyway.

‘On the third day we stumbled into a dream . . . no . . . a fairy tale . . . a setting from the Gebrüder Grimm. It was dark – an hour or so after dusk. We came upon a clearing in the forest. Tiny huts built of branches, a campfire burning, a stew of some forest creature bubbling, an array of utensils beaten out of tin, a hard circle of earth, clean and worn as though someone had lived there a while – but of that someone there was not a sign. So . . . we raised the pot and we ate. We had neither of us shown any ability to live off the land. We had starved for those three days, and for weeks before that we had lived on rations of nothing but oats and kasha. It was a matter of minutes before I saw them. They had been watching us all along. Then they came out of the trees, those hideous, blackened bodies . . . and not one of them four feet tall. A dozen children living wild in the forest. Rodnik put down his tin plate and stood to speak to them. The first child stuck a spear in his chest, another aimed at me and missed. A third crawled along the ground and sank its teeth into Rodnik’s leg. We ran again. Or I ran and Rodnik hobbled, dragging the demented child along by its teeth. I leapt a ditch. Rodnik could not. The weight of the child held him down. He screamed at me, “Run,” and I ran. I looked back and saw children swarming over him like flies upon a carcass. I spent a night in the forest. I circled. Determined to rescue Rodnik, if I could. Not knowing the folly of such a thought. The next day I entered the same clearing. The children were gone, the campfire burnt still. But there was no sign of Rodnik. I approached the pot, prepared once more to rob Lilliput to keep Brobdingnag alive. I picked up the beaten tin ladle, stuck it into the stew and raised a mouthful to my lips, all the time looking around for the children. And from the corner of my eye I saw a pile of long bones, and another pile of the clothes Rodnik had been wearing. And I knew what was in the pot. I knew what it was I held to my lips. I had almost eaten the delicacy known as long pig. Those children had killed, skinned and jointed Rodnik, put him in the pot and eaten him. I ran. It seems to me now that I ran all the way to England. All the way to Hampstead Garden Suburb. When I die you can shovel a spadeful of North London into my coffin, much as Chopin’s friends shovelled a bit of Poland in with him. Whatever . . . I ran, and they did not catch me.

‘Who knows where those children had come from? How far they in their turn had run to escape the war? Who knows how long they had lived like that, without parents, without teachers? Who knows how long they went on like that? The little cannibals of the Russian forest. Orphans of the total war. Stripped of all morality. Stripped of anything you or I might recognise as civilised values. That is total war. And I will warn you now that there is a whole generation growing up in England stripped of conventional morality. Cannibals? Perhaps that is unlikely . . . but a generation that survives by taking what it wants?’

Not so long ago it seemed – had it been last February or March in the depths of winter? – Troy had faced a bunch of urban urchins in Stepney in London’s East End. He recalled the mixture of innocence and greed that had flickered across eight small faces as he bribed them all to help him search a Blitz bombsite for the remains of a corpse. His old mentor Sgt Bonham had been outraged. Not simply the bribing of kids, that alone was bad enough, but the knowledge of what they might find. Troy had had no doubts. He was not corrupting youth. Youth had been corrupted long before he got there. Those boys had had the best part of five years of war. They were ten years old or thereabouts and their memories of life before the war must have been scant. They’d known little else but rationing and deprivation – wanting was their world. But, try as he might, Troy could not see the comparison Kolankiewicz was making between the savagery he depicted and the children he had met. It was still an innocence of a sort. Take away the simple fact of death – a body to whose fate the kids had been indifferent not, it would seem, out of callousness or war’s familiarity but out of a paucity of imagination – take away that body and it wasn’t Kolankiewicz’s primitive nightmare in a Russian forest it was . . . it was . . . The Coral Island . . . it was adventures with Jack and Ralph. Wasn’t it?

He looked round for his Jack. But Wildeve had slipped out silently. So had Sasha. Ah well, he thought, there were worse things in the world than your best friend fucking your sister. Weren’t there?

 

§ 6

The next morning the Big Man made a makeshift shooting range in the orchard out of straw bales and cardboard. He painted up a rough series of concentric circles. A target so big perhaps he thought even Troy could not miss it. But Troy did.

Churchill tried him out first on the police-issue Webley. Troy knew – he’d been told – he couldn’t hit the side of a barn door. Not with a weapon as clumsy and imprecise as this he couldn’t. He stuck out his arm, fired off three rounds and missed the target every time. He paused and could have sworn he heard the Big Man sucking air through his teeth.

‘Ignore him,’ said Churchill. ‘The only opinion that counts is mine. It’s about body and posture, Frederick. Don’t hold the gun as though you’re offering it up for sacrifice. Pull back your arm and tuck yourself in a bit tighter.’

‘But then I can’t use the sight.’

‘Sights on a handgun are a waste of time. The best you can do is aim your whole body in the right direction. So, swing round, full on to the target, pull back . . .’

Troy fired a fourth round that nicked the edge of the Big Man’s target. He hoped he was smiling, not smirking, but getting it right, or marginally right, for the first time was enormously satisfying.

‘Fire the next,’ Churchill said, ‘and if you hit it again make the adjustment to hit closer with the one after.’

‘Adjustment? What adjustment?’

Churchill swayed gently, rolls of fat surely quivering beneath his winter tweeds, feet planted firmly in the crisp snow. He looked like a woolly Buddha performing some ritual exercise. ‘Flow,’ he was saying. ‘I can’t think of any other way to put it. The whole body flows with it. You don’t steer . . . you just flow. It’s like riding a bike.’

This at least made sense to Troy. That was the great thing about a childhood spent on a bike. You thought, it did. Symbiosis between boy and machine. All he had to do was to think of the gun, any gun, as a Rover bike with a Hercules three-speed.

The fifth clipped the edge again. He thought, ‘in a bit’, and placed the final shot in the second inner ring. And all, he thought, without seeming to have to do anything. His bike had gone round corners without him having to steer it.

‘Not bad, not bad at all,’ Churchill said.

‘Always knew you could do it,’ the Big Man lied.

‘Reload. Fire off another six, and then we’ll try an automatic.’

Two misses four inners.

Troy would always have a ‘thing’ about the American army-issue Colt .45 automatic. It was the gun that had put him in hospital. He said nothing to Churchill, picked it up and loaded.

Something must have been obvious, perhaps the hesitation, perhaps the sense that Troy had weighed up the gun in his hand as an outward manifestation that he was also weighing up the idea.

‘Anything wrong?’ said Churchill.

Troy clapped a hand to his side. Roughly where the bullet had caught him.

‘Oh, I see.’

‘I really ought to get over it,’ Troy said.

‘Indeed. It’s hardly more than a superstition if you think about it.’

‘Quite.’

‘One Colt is much the same as another.’

‘I know.’

‘Except, of course, that this isn’t a Colt.’

‘Eh?’

‘Well, it’s the Colt patent, all right, but Colt didn’t make it.’

‘Eh?’

‘Well, wartime demand got so heavy they . . . they . . . franchised the manufacture. I’m sure that’s the word, “franchise”. If you look at the grip you’ll find the name of the manufacturer.’

Troy took his thumb off the grip and opened his palm. ‘Good Lord . . . Singer. Don’t they make . . .’

‘Sewing-machines? Indeed they do. Now, sing along with me: the sewing-machine, the sewing-machine . . . it’s a girl’s best friend!’

And he burst into song. A clear, accomplished baritone. Troy did not sing, but at every repetition of ‘sewing-machine’ he squeezed off a round.

The Big Man had begun his retreat from the matter once it was obvious that Troy was not going to make a complete fool of himself, and had felt, after less than an hour out in the cold, the pressing need of his elevenses: a Thermos flask of hot tea, a ham sandwich and that morning’s pitifully thin copy of the Daily Mail. Once Churchill began to sing, his interest perked up again and his bass joined Churchill’s baritone – a fat man’s chorus: ‘the sewing-machine, the sewing-machine.’

Two misses, four inners. Troy changed magazines and reversed the proportions. The gun behaved differently. It felt to Troy as though it could run away with him, get so easily beyond his control. The escaped bicycle. But he could not deny it was a more accurate gun and easier to handle once that initial runaway feeling had been mastered. With his third magazine he got all six on the target. Low-scoring shots in Bisley terms, but in Churchill terms they were ‘at least going in the right direction’. They worked at it until lunchtime, alternating between the Webley and the Colt – and the inevitable fatties’ chorus – ending with twelve shots apiece from the Smith & Wesson and the Schmeisser.

The Smith & Wesson took him by surprise. Long and slender, unusually heavy, with a surprisingly small bore – but it blew the target to smithereens and kicked back at him like an angry pig. In complete contradiction to his usual body-hugging technique, Churchill had him hold it at arm’s length. With each shot his arm bucked as though it had been jerked upward by an invisible spring.

‘What on earth is this? It feels like a hand-held cannon.’

‘Pretty much what it is,’ said Churchill. ‘The manufacturers describe it as a big man’s gun. But that’s advertising for you. It’s what they call a Magnum. They’ve been around for a few years now. J. Edgar Hoover supposedly had the first, and I believe General Patton carries one with a pearl handle. But that’s Patton for you. Essentially – a .357 bullet backed up by a whopping great cartridge. If you look at the chamber you’ll see it’s out of all proportion to the barrel. That accounts for most of the extra weight. A small bullet propelled at high speed by a big charge. You could shoot through a brick wall with it.’

Troy stared down at the monstrosity in his hand. ‘Why,’ he asked, ‘would anyone want to?’

‘Call it stopping power. Hit someone with a round from a Magnum, they won’t get up again.’

Troy put the gun gently back on the wooden case. He rather thought it had just displaced the Colt in his disaffections.

At lunch Kolankiewicz ate behind a copy of the News Chronicle. The Big Man still pondered his Daily Mail.

‘Is he any better?’ Troy heard Kolankiewicz ask.

‘That barn door’s getting a bit closer,’ the Big Man replied.

After lunch Churchill said, ‘I’ve asked him to rig up a clay shoot on one of your meadows. Have you ever used a shotgun before?’

‘My dad let me – no, made me have a go with that one you made for him. Can’t say I thought much about it at the age of thirteen. I certainly didn’t go back for a second crack at it.’

‘It’s just the thing for teaching you to sight aim.’

It may well be true, thought Troy, after twenty or more cartridges had burst uselessly against the clouds, but by the time you’ve sighted up a clay pigeon it’s somewhere else in the sky.

‘I’m sorry, Bob,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back to handguns. I’m clearly hopeless at this.’

Before Churchill could answer a dishearteningly cheery voice could be heard saying, ‘Half a mo’, you chaps. I want a go.’

Troy turned to see his sister Sasha crunching down the path in her wellies, wrapped up against the cold in her habitual black Russian-doll outfit, furry earflaps flapping, toting, breech broken across her arm, their father’s 1928 handmade Churchill shotgun. Something Troy had thought twice about using in front of its creator.

‘Not chaps only, is it?’ she said in pure defiance, meaning that if it was they could just get stuffed. She had come out to play and would play regardless of what they thought. ‘I’ll show you how it’s done, li’l bro. Rightie-ho, Fatty, let ’em rip.’

‘’Ere,’ said the Big Man. ‘Oos she calling fat? I never been called fat before. Robust maybe, but fat? Never!’

Troy looked at Churchill. Churchill looked at the Big Man, the Big Man looked at Troy. Troy silently weighed up the precision of Sasha’s epithet, decided she was right, and nodded to him. This was not the moment to explain the sisters to him. Clay after clay exploded into shards as Sasha, quite literally, showed him how it was done. Churchill, recognising a natural when he saw one, silently deferred.

‘You don’t follow, brer. You let it come to you. See?’

Another clay soared above them. The gun seemed to dangle at the end of Sasha’s arms about waist height. Then, without any sign of haste, she raised the gun to her cheek, looked down the barrel and blew the clay to smithereens. You don’t follow, you let it come to you. You don’t steer, you simply flow. Was it, he thought, all going to be quite so arcane? The initiation into a Zen mystery?

‘You didn’t think I could do this, did you?’ Sasha whispered to Troy.

‘It’s not a matter of think,’ he whispered back. ‘I didn’t know you could do it. Is there a knack, some secret you’d care to share with me, or are you going to make it into another of your little conspiracies?’

‘No,’ she said, at a normal volume, head swivelling just to be certain they could all hear. ‘No knack. Just the orthodox technique, wouldn’t you agree, Mr Churchill? And I do not conspire. I imagine.’

‘And what,’ Churchill asked, walking into the trap Troy had sidestepped, ‘do you imagine?’

‘I imagine,’ she said, sighting up another, ‘that all these wretched clays . . .’ another bit the dust mid-sentence ‘. . . that all these wretched clays are my wretched husband. And as a result . . . one never misses.’

Troy heard the Big Man chuckle, saw Churchill raise his eyes to heaven much as he did when Kolankiewicz swore.

‘And,’ Troy whispered, ‘what do you think your wretched husband was doing while you were rogering Jack last night?’

‘Don’t know. Don’t bloody well care! Pull!’ Sasha blasted off again, then beckoned Troy in closer.

‘Young Jack was deevy. Simply deevy. Why didn’t you tip me the wink before? Keeping him all to yourself.’

Troy said nothing.

Over the next week Churchill took Troy from inners to bullseyes with half a dozen different handguns. The Walther, the Browning, the Mauser. His own progress astounded him. He began to wonder if he might learn to sing as well – another art at which he had long considered he had no talent whatsoever. The sewing-machine, the sewing-machine.

And his sister Sasha took him to the point where he was hitting forty-nine clays out of fifty. She struck him as a surprisingly good tutor. It put him in mind of a day long ago, lost in his adolescence. The first occasion on which black tie had meant just that. Standing in front of a mirror swearing at a recalcitrant bow-tie. It was pointless asking his dad. His dad would not give a damn about such things. Ties were part of the rules, and whilst the old man knew perfectly well how to tie a bow, he saw no reason whatsoever to initiate his son into rules when rules were made for other people, not for his son and certainly not for him. In the absence of big brother Rod, it had fallen to the sisters to intervene. He was twelve and still shorter than them. They took it in turns to stand behind him and guide his hands in theirs, weaving around his throat like the wings of birds, cool and light. For years they had thought him so young as to be hardly worth notice; they had dressed and undressed in front of him without a shred of self-consciousness. This was the first time they had ‘dressed’ him. He recalled with neither guilt nor embarrassment, just the sharp backward stab of memory so vivid as to be tangible, the involuntary erection he had had as Sasha – or was it Masha? – had pressed her hips into him to reach the closer.

Early in the new year Churchill said, ‘I must get back to town. Can I suggest you come with me? I’ve a couple of customers to see, but once work’s out of the way there’s one last gun I’d like you to try.’

Just when Troy thought he’d tried them all. But, then, the first time he’d met Churchill he’d interrupted him in the act of stripping down a Bren gun. And they hadn’t tried that.

‘It’s not your Bren, is it? I’ve really no need of a working knowledge of a Bren gun.’

‘No. It’s not. It’s the kind of weapon I couldn’t bring here. In fact it’s the kind of weapon I wouldn’t let out of the house. If I thought you needed lessons on a Bren I’d’ve stuck it in the dickey and brought it down. No, you come up to London. It’s something you need to try.’

§ 7

JANUARY 1945

‘Again’ had paid off. An afternoon’s practice with a sawn-off shotgun had paid off. Down in the cellar that ran from his shop out under the arches of Orange Street Churchill pronounced himself well pleased with Troy’s marksmanship.

‘You may not be Buffalo Bill but, if I say so myself, I’m a good teacher and you’ve proved a good pupil. I’d enter you for Bisley if I knew the war would be over by next year, and I thought for a moment you’d do it.’

The end of the cellar was now a mess of straw and sawdust – Troy’s cardboard assailants lay in shreds. He laid the shotgun back on the workbench between the Colt .45 and the Smith & Wesson Magnum. His sense of distaste did not pass readily.

‘You’re being very kind about all this, Bob, and I couldn’t be more grateful for the time you’ve put in. But I don’t think I’ll ever have an affinity for guns. I’m a firm believer in an unarmed police force . . . and for the life of me I cannot conceive of the circumstances in which I’d have to use a weapon like this.’

‘Nor can I. I’m a believer in an unarmed force myself. I’d hate to see London become New York or Chicago. But that’s hardly the point, is it? The point is, as you so inadvertently and appropriately put it, “the life of you”. If we’re dealing only in known quantities, as it were, I’d’ve brought you up to scratch on the standard-issue handguns and left it at that. You’d be au fait with the Webley and not much else. The point is what a villain comes at you with, and what he can do to you if you don’t react properly. It’s not what you do when you fire this at one of the buggers. It’s what they do to you. And if Kolankiewicz’s thesis of the moral decay we can expect in post-war life is to be believed, God knows what that will be.’

‘I’ll try to bear that in mind,’ said Troy, forgetting already.