§ 8

LONDON,
EARLY SUMMER 1959

Onions stuck his head round the office door.

‘Champagne in my office. Ten minutes. OK?’

Troy sat behind his desk still scribbling notes to himself.

Wildeve was staring out of the window, watching the first hint of summer dance on the Thames in a sparkle of white light. ‘It’ll be Asti Spumante,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Was last time.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ Troy said. ‘He tries. And if he can’t celebrate a thief-taking as rich as this one then things have come to a pretty pass. Serious Crime have been after Alf Marx for about as long as I can remember. If I were Stan I’d pop the cork on a few bubbles myself.’

Ten minutes later they found their way to Onions’ outer office, crowded with coppers. John Brocklehurst, Chief Superintendent of the Serious Crime Squad, was on the receiving end of handshakes and backslaps. Madge, Onions’s secretary, was spilling fake champagne over the carpet and getting very little in the glasses. Wildeve relieved her of the task and popped corks with the ease born of years of practice. Onions’s inner door opened a fraction. Troy saw a large blue eye peer out at him, and a hand beckoned.

Inside, Onions was struggling with his uniform. ‘I can’t do these bloody buttons up.’

‘Then don’t.’

‘Can’t host a do like this wi’out a uniform. Don’t be daft.’

Onions, like Troy, hated uniforms. After thirty-five years in plain clothes the assumption of office as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had the occasional wearing of a uniform as one of its many drawbacks. In the unlikely event of the job ever being offered to Troy he’d decided to say no.

‘Must have put on a few pounds since last time. Do I look fat?’

Troy had no idea how to answer this. Instead he gripped Onions’s tunic with both hands and forced the blue serge over the silver buttons.

Onions exhaled. The fabric stretched across his belly tight as a snare drum.

‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Grand. Are they all out there?’

‘I think so,’ said Troy.

‘And John?’

‘A bit red in the face. You know Brock, doesn’t take centre stage easily.’

‘’Appen if he did he’d be wearing this fancy get-up, not me. Right. How do I look?’

‘Fine,’ Troy lied. ‘Fine.’

He watched Onions step into the throng, half listened as the top copper in the land congratulated his force on the arrest and conviction of East London’s ‘Mr Big’, King Alf – Alfred Joseph Marx – stopped listening as Onions praised the jury system, the Twelve Good Men who’d just voted to bang up Alf Marx for fifteen years. Troy rambled into mental arithmetic: Alf Marx would be sixty-seven when he got out, sixty-two if he kept his nose clean, though he was unlikely to do that, and would emerge some time in 1974, a spent force. The world would have moved on, changed around him, while time stood still in whatever maximum-security nick housed him.

Troy, standing between Wildeve and Swift Eddie Clark, felt Wildeve nudge him. Saw Onions’s eyes upon him. When the blue gaze left them, Wildeve whispered, ‘You were daydreaming.’

Troy whispered back, ‘I was just thinking. Nature abhors a vacuum.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’

Champagne soon ran out. Whisky appeared as if from nowhere. Detectives drank whisky – neat, or drowned in half a tumbler of water, it seemed to be the professional drug. Madge went home. Swift Eddie parked himself in a corner with a triple and farted. Troy and Wildeve found themselves the unwelcome recipients of Onions’s pissed bonhomie; the buttons popped on his tunic, one arm around Brock’s shoulders, telling him what he had told Troy an hour before. ‘If you’d played your cards right, it could have been you in this damn monkey suit.’

Brock answered quietly, ‘But I didn’t want it, Stan. I always say it pays to know your place. My dad was a pork butcher in Nottingham.

One step at a time he said. So I make detective chief superintendent. A pretty big step, mind. Who knows where my lads’ll end up?’

Onions ignored the common sense of what Brock had said and heard only the deference. ‘My old man was a bloody millwright in Rochdale! You sayin’ I shouldn’t have taken the job?’

‘I was saying nothing of the sort, Stan. I was saying I shouldn’t have taken it, and I didn’t. I didn’t even get the chance.’

Onions pondered this. Poured himself another Scotch and failed to see that one statement or the other had to be a lie. Troy knew the truth: men like Brock were never made commissioner. Class alone might not account for it – character had a lot to do with it. And Brock, though ambitious, was not pushy, and, above all, was not the diplomat that Stan was. He’d just demonstrated the limit of his diplomacy in avoiding telling Stan that he should have said no to the job. Men like Stan did not get made Met Commissioner either, but he had. All too often the job went to the Troys and the Wildeves of the world. Men whose birth and education marked them for leadership in a country hidebound by class. Stan was a changeling – brash and Lancashire, magnificent and magisterial, pushy and proud, sly, dissembling, deceitful and manipulative. Everything Troy and Wildeve were, but with a clogs-and-cap accent and a ruthless short-back-and-sides. Jack looked like a naval officer, a minor film star in the mould of Michael Wilding or Stewart Granger. Troy looked like a demonic faun from a Diaghilev ballet. Stan looked like a trade-union leader, more Fred Kite than Ernie Bevin – an excellent candidate for one of the most devious jobs imaginable, but the wrong class to make it work for him. Brock could see the difference, Troy could, and doubtless Wildeve too, but through the bottom of his glass Stan was darkly, if momentarily, blind to it.

Half an hour later they poured him into a squad car and packed him off to Acton and the tender mercies of his daughter Valerie. Troy watched Swift Eddie and Jack Wildeve, both dwellers south-of-the river, make their way towards Westminster Bridge. He found himself alone with Brocklehurst.

‘One for the road?’ Brock asked.

Troy had had one token glass of champagne and avoided the whisky. The merest hint of a hangover could put him on the wagon for weeks. ‘I, er. . .’

‘For me,’ Brock said. ‘Just for me. You and me, Freddie. There’s no other buggers here. Besides, I want a drink with a man of me own rank.’

Troy could not say no now. Brock had pulled the old pals’ act on him mercilessly. It meant there were things he had to say. He was probably going to cry into his glass and say things he would never dream of uttering to other ranks.

They picked up Brock’s Wolseley from the motor pool, and drove almost to Troy’s house, to the Chandos, a small pub on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and William IV Street. If Brock and booze got the better of him, Troy could roll home from here. And it was far enough from the Yard to bank on not meeting other coppers.

Brock bought himself a beer and a shot, smiled at Troy’s request for ginger-beer shandy, pulled out his fags with nicotined fingers and lit what was probably his fiftieth Senior Service of the day. It seemed to Troy that Brock always walked in a fug of fags, that they coloured his hands, his teeth and quite possibly his personality. There was, he had thought these last few years, something in Brock that had dried up and shrivelled.

‘How old are you, Freddie?’

Silly question, but Troy was the youngest chief super at the Yard and accustomed to accounting for his age. ‘I’ll be forty-four in the summer.’

‘I’m fifty-two,’ Brock said. ‘You start to feel it when you get to my age.’

Silently Troy thought this a preposterous remark.

‘I’ve begun to realise. There’s not much time left.’

Troy said nothing, hoping not to have to tease a single word or phrase out of the man. Brock stared into his pint letting time, of which he now seemed to have so little, tick by.

‘So I made me mind up. . .’

He was looking at Troy, almost as though he was willing him to finish the sentence for him. Troy didn’t.

‘I’m putting me papers in. Going. Retiring. Out to grass. Finito.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Even to Troy it sounded pathetic.

‘I’ve had enough, Freddie. I’ve had enough. Enough is enough. And . . . I always wanted to get out while I was ahead of the game, winning. There’ll be no bigger win than today. I’ll put in me papers. Pick up me pension and me gold watch. Be out by the end of next month. Sell the house in Islington. Travel a bit. Who knows? Might even meet the right woman. Get married again. You never know.’

Brock, like Onions, was a widower. Jack had never married, a practised womaniser. Troy had married one summer, three years ago. By the autumn she had left him. He had not seen her for months now. He had to bend to see Brock’s point of view. Men there were for whom home was not home without an aproned body bustling around a kitchen telling you whatever time you came in that you were late and your dinner was on the table. Men there were who could not sleep without a stout body denting the mattress next to them. Coppers’ wives were an odd breed, as odd as the men themselves. Troy had never wanted one. It was probably all that men like Stan and Brock craved. Afterwards, dust gone to dust, their lives were hollow spaces vainly filled by an inflated notion of ‘the job’. And if Brock was through with that . . .

He was not responding. Brock was nudging. ‘And you, Fred? How long do you think you’ll give it?’

For a second Troy had no idea what he meant. ‘Give it? You mean when will I retire? I’m forty-three – I thought I just said that. I’ve never even thought about retirement.’

‘Next year there’s got to be an election. Mebbe this year – there’s still time. Labour are a dead cert to win, a shoe-in, and you’ll find yourself running the Murder Squad with your own brother as Home Secretary. Do you really want that? Do you think the brass’ll find that acceptable?’

Troy had scarcely given the matter a deal of thought. His elder brother Rod had been an MP since the Labour landslide of 1945 – the khaki vote. He had served as a junior minister at the Air Ministry towards the fag end of the government and held on to his seat in what now seemed like interminable years of opposition. The Conservative Party had won the last two elections, survived the enforced retirement of Churchill, the madness of Eden, and now seemed to be riding out the stop-go chaos of an old romantic named Macmillan. The prospect of Rod becoming Home Secretary had been dangled before him for three years. It was above and beneath contemplation. Not worth the time it took to work up a worry.

‘I’m sure if the brass find it impossible they’ll let me know.’

‘They can hardly be expected to tolerate a direct line from a chief super to the Home Secretary, now, can they? It’s like a short-circuit.’

‘“They”, as you put it, is Stan. Stan has known Rod since before the war. I hardly think he’ll feel undue access is being granted to me or undue political pressure put on him with me as the conduit.’

‘You’re playing the innocent, Freddie. You know as well as me it’s a pig’s ear of a situation. A right pickle.’

‘Then I’ll tackle the pickle when I come to it.’

Brock grinned, sniggered, and then laughed out loud. Troy was pleased. He could not have tolerated the conversation proceeding pofaced in this direction much longer. Yet to call time on a man who’d just celebrated his greatest triumph, just announced his abdication, seemed inexcusable. He was stuck with Brock until Brock called time and rolled home.

‘How are your spuds this year?’ he tacked away unsubtly.

They had this in common – all three of them, Brock, Troy and Stan: they passed their free time gardening. Troy in the ancient kitchen garden of his country house in Hertfordshire; Stan on an allotment in Acton; and Brock on a strip of reclaimed bombsite in Islington. He was forever digging out broken brick.

‘Oh, not a bad year at all. Lovely crop of King Edwards on the way. As tall as an elephant’s eye. And you?’

‘A touch of wireworm last year,’ said Troy. ‘If I beat it this year I’ll be delighted. Plants look healthy enough.’

‘Not a problem you get on a mix of brick and subsoil, but you know what to do, don’t you?’

Troy didn’t.

‘You let it grass over this winter and turf-strip it next spring. You’ll catch most of the little buggers that way. Let ’em die off in your compost heap.’

By chucking-out time – not that anyone chucked out London bobbies – they had happily compared beetroot, leeks and carrots, and discussed the virtues of Troy’s prize pig. Brock lamented the confines of Islington. Perhaps when he’d had his jaunt, found Miss Right – who knows? – he’d find somewhere you could park a pig.

Troy was sober. Brock was pissed, but no amount of Troy’s cajoling would persuade him he was not fit to drive. Troy gave up the ghost of the argument. After all, there was no law against driving drunk, as long as you drove within the law. Once you broke the law, crossed the speed limit, bumped another car, shot a zebra crossing, then the police could nick you, and your drunkenness, or otherwise, would without doubt be a factor in the beak’s sentence, but it was not unlawful per se.

‘Knock it off, old son. I’ve driven wi’ a damn sight more’n this inside o’ me. Islington’s three miles up the road. What can go wrong in three miles?’

Troy shrugged. All coppers drank and drove. They all felt the job bought them immunity. He and Brock stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the street, heard the bolts shot on the pub doors. Brock swayed slightly. Troy steadied him and steered him towards the car.

As Brock fiddled with his keys in the door, Troy said, ‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. Stirling bloody Moss, that’s me.’

‘I meant about putting in your papers.’

‘Already done it, old son.’ Brock tapped the side of his nose. ‘Slipped ’em on old Madge’s desk after she went home. Stan’ll get ’em Monday morning and that’ll be that. You’ll be in Monday, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘Then ah’ll see yer then.’ Brock moved swiftly for a drunk: he clasped Troy in a bear hug, crushed him to the ribs and let him go. ‘Night, old son.’

Troy walked off. Stopped, turned, watched Brock climb into the driver’s seat, waved pointlessly, and walked on towards home. The blast of the bomb lifted him off his feet. He hit the pavement ten yards away. The world turned green, then black. He sank into black as into the arms of a lover. It was all so familiar. Smothering, comforting, known.

 

§ 9

When Troy awoke his lover was sitting at his bedside, reading. He couldn’t see the book’s title. It and its jacket were a blur. So was her face, but if he couldn’t recognise Foxx by the shape of her legs after three years . . . He watched her turn two pages before she looked up and saw that he had woken.

Anxiety written on her face. She turned in the chair. Eyes searching for a doctor. A nurse.

‘It’s all right,’ Troy said softly. ‘I can see, I can hear and I think I can think.’

She laid the book face down on the bed and took his right hand in both of hers, the meniscant bubble of tears forming in the corners of her eyes. ‘Do you know what happened?’

‘Car bomb,’ he said, just as quietly. ‘Somebody killed John Brocklehurst. I got in the way.’

The bubble burst. Tears coursing down her cheeks. Mascara staining.

‘He is dead, isn’t he?’

Foxx nodded. ‘Could have been you,’ she said at long last, her voice buried deep in her chest.

A white-coated doctor appeared behind her, whispered to her. She let go of Troy’s hand. Walked away with half a dozen glances over her shoulder.

The doctor talked and touched at the same time. Flicked on a narrow-beam torch and plucked at Troy’s eyelids with her thumb as she spoke. Troy vanished in a tunnel of blinding white light.

‘So, Mr Troy, you can hear and you can see. You know, that was quite a blow you took to the head. Tell me, do you know where you are?’

Troy didn’t.

‘Charing Cross Hospital,’ the doctor said, perching on the edge of Troy’s bed.

Again? That figured. He and Brock had been only yards from it when the car went up.

‘In fact, you almost made it here unassisted. The blast rolled you right to the doorway. All we had to do was carry you in on a stretcher.’

‘Carried in,’ Troy said. ‘But I’ll walk out?’

‘Well, you broke nothing, and that’s a minor miracle in itself. A few grazes and a lump the size of a tennis ball on your head. But that’s what concerns me.’

She held up a hand. ‘How many fingers?’

‘It’s all right,’ Troy said. ‘I’m not going to pretend. I’m seeing two of everything, perhaps three.’

‘Then we’ll be keeping you in for a while. Absolutely standard with head injuries – but I doubt it’ll be long. No bloodclots on the brain, no hairline fractures. Your pulse and blood pressure are quite normal. Now, you must be feeling tired. Comas are like that. You sleep an age and wake up exhausted.’

‘Coma,’ said Troy, rolling the word around as though trying to divine a hidden meaning. ‘How long?’

‘Two and a half days. It’s Monday morning.’

She told Troy that she would send Foxx back to him. Troy closed his eyes. She was right. He was knackered. He thought he would spare himself the pain of the overhead light. Why couldn’t they put him in a dark room? He had no idea or intention to sleep, but he did. Red flames lapped around him. His ears rang with a cacophony of bells. His eyes flashed open. An act of will. The only sure-fire way to stop a dream. To wake. The figure at his bedside was not Foxx. It was a man. Troy willed resolution. Wildeve – Jack Wildeve.

‘Good,’ Jack said. ‘I was just about to give up and let you sleep.’

‘I was asleep?’

‘Yes. You’ve slept about an hour, I should think. I sneaked in between that rather delicious doctor you’ve got and your Miss Foxx. She’s getting a cup of tea. Strictly one at a time today.’

An hour? Good God – it had felt like a second anatomised. Time’s merest measurable fragment.

‘Is there anything you can tell me?’

‘I doubt it. Brock . . . got into his car . . . tried to stop him . . . couldn’t.’

‘Why?’

‘He was drunk. Didn’t give a damn. I walked off. The car blew up. It . . . sounded like it went up with the ignition . . . can’t be sure.’

‘Sounds about right to me,’ Jack said. ‘Forensic say it was done with a length of cable running from the distributor under the car to a spark plug dangling in the neck of the tank. Very crude, but effective. As soon as Brock turned the key the petrol vapour would have exploded. The tank, the feed line and the engine would have followed in an almost instant reaction.’

Not instant enough. Troy could hear in the mind’s ear the struggle of the starter motor, then the bangs of the explosion, three at least before he had fallen to Earth.

‘I knew he was dead. As soon as I heard . . . no . . . felt the bang.’

For a second or two as he looked at Jack, Jack swam into clear focus and Troy could read his face plainly.

‘Tell me,’ he said. ‘Tell me the truth.’

Jack would not now meet his gaze, but to Troy he had already dissolved into Jacks. One of them drew a sharp breath and said, ‘Brock wasn’t killed outright. He suffered almost ninety per cent burns. Damn Terylene suit went up like a roman candle, melted on him. Melted him. There was nothing left of his face but his eyes. But they got him out alive. Tried to treat his burns. Pumped him full of morphine to numb the pain. He had the constitution of an ox. Kept regaining consciousness. Kept asking after you. All the pain he was in and he kept asking for you. He died last night. About three in the morning. It really couldn’t come soon enough. There never was a chance he could live with that sort of damage.’

Troy’s mind clicked on, clicked back. His brother. The end of the war. A celebration party at their father’s old house in Hampstead for Rod’s first election win. His old RAF mates turning up. Two faceless men. The angles and arches of noses and eyebrows dissolved into blobs and curves. The shiny skin of plastic surgery. The gung-ho optimism of one, the scarcely containable rage of the other. Brock would have been like that. Angry. Cursing God and Man and Fate.

 

§ 10

The next time Troy awoke it was with the sense that time had slipped. There was a big man, no, a fat man – this man was definitely fat – seated next to the bed leafing through the pages of the Daily Mail. He was wearing an LCC Heavy Rescue blouse, he was bald and he was humming ‘April in Paris’ softly to himself. Troy strained to read the front page of the paper and found he could not decipher the headline, let alone the date. But he saw the leather elbow patches and cuffs on the Fat Man’s outfit, like the piped edging of a leather suitcase, the visible tears of wear, of fifteen years’ digging spuds and shovelling pig muck, and time regained its keel. It wasn’t 1944 at all . . . It was whenever it was . . . ages later.

‘Been here long?’ he said.

‘Seems like an age, cock, but . . . looking at me watch . . .’ He deftly yanked a pocket watch from a breast pocket and flipped the case. ‘. . . I’d say about an hour and a bit. I’m supposed to phone young Jack when you come round again, and he’s supposed to call your guv’ner. That Onions bloke.’

‘And Foxx?’

‘Foxx?’

‘My . . . er. . .’

‘You mean yer totty?’

Troy was quite sure he didn’t. ‘I mean Miss Foxx, Shirley Foxx.’

‘Sent her back to your place to get some kip. She’s taken this badly, if you ask me. Needed to get her ’ead down. After all, I bang on the door she can be here in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.’

The Fat Man passed the paper to Troy and went to the payphone in the corridor. Troy let the paper slip. Print was a maelstrom to him. It spun and it eddied and it went down a big plughole.

‘He’ll be right over,’ the Fat Man reported back.

‘Fine,’ Troy said, without feeling. ‘While he’s here would you mind going round to the house and asking Foxx if she’d come over? I’m sure she was here a while ago, but . . .’

‘But what, old cock?’

‘But I can’t remember when.’

‘She’s been here every day.’

‘And today is?’

‘Wednesday.’

He’d slept another thirty-six hours or more. He felt as though sleep were a runaway train. Give in to it for so much as a second and you woke to find the world had rolled on without you . . . station after station . . . oh Mr Porter. . .

‘Brock’s funeral?’

‘Friday, but don’t bank on being there.’

Onions looked grim. As though all the sleep Troy had had was stolen from him. He had five o’clock shadow – but for all Troy knew it was five o’clock – his blue striped suit was crumpled and the bags under his eyes were as big as pheasants’ eggs. He looked less like the Commissioner of the Met than the hard-working, both-ends-burning copper he’d been until promotion fell on him, like reward and punishment in a single hammer-blow.

‘I’d’ve been over sooner . . .’ he began.

‘Forget it,’ Troy said. ‘I’ve not been in a state to receive you. I would not have known you were here. Do we have any leads?’

Onions sighed. ‘We’ve nowt. But that’s not why I’m here.’

‘You pulled Alf Marx’s mob, though?’

‘We pulled everyone who’s ever met him, but we’ve got nowt all the same. London is shtum, or London knows nowt. And, like I said, that’s not why I’m here.’

‘You pulled Bernie Champion?’

Champion was King Alf’s long standing number two – the right arm, the heir apparent.

‘Aye, and I sucked on half a dozen eggs while I did it. Of course I pulled the bugger. He turned up with so many briefs we had to set out more chairs. And, needless to say, he’s got an alibi you could wallop with a Tiger tank. Arrogant gobshite. Blowin’ up a copper on the streets of London and defying us to do a damn thing about it. He’s just taking the piss, isn’t he?’

‘He’d hardly have done the job personally, would he?’

‘No. But, like I keep tryin’ to tell you, that’s not why I’m here.’

Onions looked around. Pulled a packet of Woodbines from his jacket pocket. ‘D’ye reckon they let you smoke in here?’

Troy smelt a rat, saw it, touched it. ‘No. I’m sure they don’t. Why not just spit it out, Stan?’

Onions looked wistfully at his fags, shoved them back and bit on the bullet. ‘Freddie. Have you thought about retiring?’

It was pretty close to the last thing Troy had expected. At the same time it was vaguely familiar as though he could hear another, unidentifiable voice asking the same question. ‘Stan . . . I’m forty . . .’

But he couldn’t remember quite how old he was. Onions looked away as Troy fumbled for the numbers, but looked back with that old steely glint in his blue eyes. ‘You’ve taken another bad blow to the head. That’s at least the third while I’ve known you. The first sent you blind.’

That had been in the summer of ’44. And it hadn’t been the first.

He’d been kicked in the head by a horse at the Battle of Cable Street before he and Onions ever met.

‘I recovered, Stan.’

‘Then you got shot in the head three years back.’

That had been 1956. He rather thought it might have been summer too. He’d ended up in this very same hospital.

‘I recovered from that too.’

‘And there must be half a dozen times you’ve had that lunatic Pole patch you up just so it doesn’t get on to your file. Things I’m not supposed to know about.’

Troy said nothing.

‘But what the quacks are telling me now is about the cumulative effects of all those blows. You can’t see straight, can you?’

‘No. But I will.’

‘It might be weeks, months, even.’

‘Stan, are you firing me?’

Onions seemed almost to flinch as though Troy had struck him. ‘O’ course I’m not bloody firing you! I’m just trying to get you to see sense. It’d be retirement. Full pension. Mebbe even a gong. I wouldn’t dream of firing you!’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘Because if you want me to retire that’s what you’ll have to do.’

Onions gave in to the need, pulled out his Woodbines once more and lit up. ‘I’m only trying to show you where your own self-interest lies,’ he said, through the first cloud of smoke. ‘How long do you think you can go on taking punishment like this?’

Troy had not thought of it as punishment. The mereness of metaphor was wide of the mark.

‘I appreciate that, Stan. I’m just not going to do it.’ Over Onions’s shoulder he caught sight of a young woman talking to a nurse. Her face was out of focus – what wasn’t out of focus? – but it had to be Foxx.

Onions followed his gaze, got out of the chair and said, ‘I’ll be back. Oh, and you’re forty-three by the way.’

As Onions passed Foxx, Troy saw them exchange words he could not hear. He saw Onions’s eyes glancing back at him as he whispered.

She approached him. He reached out a hand trying to draw her into focus, trying to resolve the shimmering mirage of Foxxes into one coherent woman, and for a second or two he saw her as she was, slender, blonde, wistful, challenging – a blue-jean vision for his blurring eyes.

‘I’ve been every day,’ she said. ‘They seem to want you to sleep. To, like, sleep it off.’ She sat on the edge of the bed. Kissed him. Smiled. He was sure she smiled.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘I’m going to pull through.’

‘I know. I’ve been every day. I’ve talked to the doctors.’

‘And?’

‘And I want you to quit.’

‘Eh?’

‘I’d like you to retire from the force.’

She said it so slowly, but still he couldn’t quite get the meaning of her words, could not quite take them at face value. There had to be another layer. ‘What?’

‘I’ve had enough. I can’t bear any more. Since I met you you’ve been shot, stabbed and blown up. That’s an awful lot for three years. I want you to stop now because it’s time to stop, because it’s time to quit before the job kills you. I didn’t come to London, I didn’t take up with you just to watch you die. So, I want you to stop now.’

This was pretty much the last thing Troy had expected. But now the other voice was clear and distinct. Before Foxx had asked him this, before Stan had asked it, it had been Brock putting the same question to him that night in the Chandos, minutes before the explosion. Troy found himself uttering the same answer: ‘But I’m only forty-three.’

This was pathetic. Stupid even to his ears, the second it was out of his mouth. He was forty-three. Foxx was twenty-five, or was it twenty-six? He wanted something more out of the job before he reached the same frame of mind Brock had been on that last night. She wanted the life she had ahead of her – the miracle was she wanted it with him.

‘What did Stan say to you on his way out?’

She ignored this. ‘I don’t expect you to say yes just like that. Think on it. Sleep on it. I’ll come back in the morning.’

‘I can’t say yes.’

‘Don’t say anything. Just do what I ask. Sleep on it.’

So he did.

When he awoke on what he took to be the Thursday morning, Foxx was already at his bedside.

‘I can’t do it,’ he said, as though nothing but the one question had rattled around in him all night.

She kissed him, said, ‘You have to do it.’

‘Why?’

‘Because if you don’t I’m leaving you.’

As she walked away Troy said, ‘What did Stan say to you?’

She ignored this.

On the Friday she came later. He was awake and had eaten breakfast. Two doctors had already done their rounds. One had told him he had ‘bounced rather nicely’. The other had said, ‘You still can’t see straight, can you?’

Foxx said, ‘Have you thought about what I said?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And the answer’s still no.’

‘Then I’m definitely leaving you.’

And she did.

 

§ 11

On the Monday he was discharged and given over to the care of his physician. He’d known Anna Pakenham for years. They’d met, he thought, in 1940 or ’41. She’d been the longest serving of Kolankiewicz’s assistants out at the Hendon Laboratory. She’d put up with his abuse, his bad manners and his foul English in exchange for the wealth of knowledge he possessed. She had finished her MD after the war, served a couple of years in the fledgling NHS and soon found she was better suited to Harley Street, where she had practised these last five or six years. It had been a negotiation getting her to be his doctor. He needed her for the same reasons he needed Kolankiewicz – for the certain knowledge that Stan and the Yard would never learn one iota of what went on between them.

‘It’s a bit, you know, iffy,’ she had said, ‘taking a lover as a patient, BMA rules and all that. Medical ethics. Hippocratic stuff, gross moral thingie.’

He had said, ‘You sound just like my sisters . . .’

‘God forbid.’

‘Never the right word if there’s a thingie to be found. However, the word you want is turpitude. Gross moral turpitude. And if anyone in your practice gives a toss about it I’ll be amazed. You can’t tell me Paddy Fitz plays by the rules?’

‘Troy, I doubt very much whether my senior partner knows there are such things as rules. Or if he does he’ll have the same cavalier attitude you do, that rules were made for idiots.’

She had taken him on all the same. And when their affair had ended some three years ago she had not turned round and said, ‘Get yourself another doctor.’

On the Monday morning she arrived at the Charing Cross as he was dressing, stuck her head through the screens. ‘Oh, good. You’re awake. You’ve been asleep every time I’ve called in. Still, you’ll be needing a lot of sleep.’

‘Is that a professional opinion?’

‘Yes. I’m signing you off sick.’

Troy beckoned her into the privacy of the screens. ‘How long?’

‘As long as it takes.’

‘Has Onions been on to you?’

‘Yes. He wanted me to talk to you about retiring.’

‘And?’

‘I said I wouldn’t waste my breath, that I’d sign you off sick for as long as you were sick, and after that you were his problem not mine.’

‘Thanks,’ Troy said.

‘No need, Troy. All I did was tell the truth. If I could get you to quit I would. But I can’t, can I? Now, shall we go?’

She had kept one hand behind her back as they had talked. Now she brought it forward, clutching a rubber-tipped National Health walking stick. It seemed to Troy to be one symbol too many – it scrawled ‘cripple’ across his conscious mind. She read his mind. ‘Look at it this way, Troy. It’s too near for an ambulance. The cabbies would think we were pulling their leg asking to go two hundred yards. So it’s shanks’s pony and your little wooden friend. Look at it this way, you’re leaving under your own steam. Not the way you came in, after all.’

For a moment Troy could hear that triple bang inside his head. For a moment he could feel the inertia of going head over heels into goodnight. Blown in could so easily have been blown out.

Anna lifted his left hand, placed the crook of the stick in it, held out her own left arm for his right.

‘Lean on me.’

But he never would.

As they came down the narrow end of Goodwin’s Court he saw a pile of what he thought might be suitcases outside his own door. Closer, they appeared to be the first odd components in a matching five-piece set of pink lady’s luggage, the set Foxx had equipped herself with the summer they met, for a weekend in Paris and beyond.

‘I think this is where I leave you,’ Anna said.

‘To be left by two women simultaneously. Is this a record?’

‘I don’t know, Troy, but it’s hardly a laughing matter.’

As Anna turned and walked off, Foxx appeared in the doorway with the largest of her cases.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I was sort of hoping to be done and dusted by the time you got back.’

‘You’re serious, then?’

‘What on earth would make you think I wasn’t?’

She ducked back inside, like an animal darting back into her cave. Except the cave was his cave. For a moment he could see nothing as his eyes adjusted to the light, he could just hear the sound of her banging about more loudly and more quickly than he thought necessary for the simple job of packing.

‘You’ll have to send some stuff on, if that’s not too much trouble.’

She wasn’t even looking at him. She was bent over the last of her cases, vainly trying to crush whatever square peg it was into the almost round hole. T-shirt, American blue jeans and ponytail. A sight, he thought, for sore eyes. And the only part of him that didn’t feel sore was his eyes. They felt lunar, lagunar – moony and watery at the same time, as most images swam gently in front of him. Not enough to make him vomit, but enough to give the less than fond illusion that what he saw was somehow not real.

‘I can’t manage the LPs. Too many and too heavy.’

‘You don’t have to manage anything.’

Now she looked up at him, sweeping the errant ponytail from one eye. ‘Eh?’

‘You don’t have to go.’

‘Going to make me stay then, are you? You know, Troy, that might involve actually saying something along the lines of “Please stay” or “I’d like you to stay” or, if you were feeling really bold you might say, “Please don’t leave me.” ’

Troy said nothing.

‘Go on, Troy. Ask me, just ask me to stay. But you bloody well won’t, will you?’

Troy said nothing.

‘I thought as much. You shit, Troy, you complete and utter shit.’

Foxx barged past him and slammed the last case down on the pile just as a cabman came up the yard to say, ‘You ready now, Miss?’

Troy said to her back, ‘Where will you be?’

She had the two smaller cases, one in each hand, as the cabman picked up the bigger three and set off back down the yard. One more flick of her head and the ponytail took its desired place as a mane bouncing halfway down her back.

‘There’s a flat over the Kingly Street shop. A storeroom or two at the moment, but I’ll soon get it tidied up. Well . . . as the agent said to the sword-swallower, “Don’t call us, we’ll call you.” ’

He watched her all the way to the kink in the alley, watched her till she passed out of sight. It seemed terribly familiar, but he couldn’t pin down who he had watched walk out of his life in quite this way. He went inside, closed the door, resorted to the English panacea – put the kettle on – and, while he waited for it to boil, leafed through a pile of thirty or forty long-playing records she had left. Some were their joint taste – the Elgar and the Delius, the Debussy and the Fauré. Some was his taste thrust at her – Little Richard. Some was her taste thrust at him – Elvis Presley. And some was a taste she had that he’d never acquire in a thousand years: American crooners of the Ratpack variety. It seemed to him that he held in his hands the modern, the fifties equivalent, of lovers’ keepsakes. If they’d been a couple of generations older, he would be finding wild flowers they had pressed into the endpapers of a book of poetry on some idyllic ramble through the English countryside in the years before the Great War – lovers from a novel by D.H. Lawrence. Instead they had music, pressed pieces of plastic, and none the shabbier for that.

 

§ 12

His brother phoned. ‘Not good news, I’m afraid.’

‘Just spit it out, Rod.’

Troy heard him sigh. To Troy it was second nature telling people that someone they knew/loved/hated was dead. Went with the job, and he had long ago ceased to use the ‘spare your feelings’ line. Now he merely wondered who.

‘Hugh died last night.’

Hugh – their brother-in-law, husband of sister Sasha, Viscount Darbishire, umpteenth of that line. Troy had known him twenty-five years and never found it in him to like the man.

‘I didn’t know he was . . .’ The penny dropped. ‘Good Lord, what am I saying? How did he do it?’

‘I wasn’t aware his intention was that obvious, but he hanged himself in the garage. Surprised me, I can tell you.’

‘Did it with the old school tie?’

‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake, the man isn’t even cold yet.’

‘How’s Sasha taking it.’

‘Sanguine, I’d say. Surprisingly sanguine.’

Half an hour later he was able to put the same question to his sister Masha.

‘Barking. Absolutely fucking barking. I look at her and wonder if she’ll ever come down from it. I look at her and think, Good bloody grief this woman is my twin! If Rod thinks she’s “sanguine” – bloody silly word if you ask me – it’s because he sees what he wants to see or he catches her in her quiet moments. Truth is she’s cock-a-hoop. She’s been let out of a loveless marriage. No messy divorce. No shyster lawyers.’

‘Was she contemplating divorce?’

‘Don’t be naïve, Freddie. She was contemplating shooting the bastard. She has every day for years, as we both know.’

‘And in a few days’ time we will all attend his funeral, speak well of the dead and mourn him as a missed husband and father.’

‘Won’t we just? If I were you I’d turn off your irony button.’

Troy was right: it was a matter of days. The coroner opened the case and closed it minutes later with a discreet misadventure verdict. It was so hard in England to commit suicide as a form of statement. The general public must have at least been mildly baffled at the number of accidents while cleaning a shotgun, and quite what legitimate purpose might be served by anyone putting a rope around his neck, the other end around the main roof truss, then swinging out into nowhere must have been utterly perplexing. There had to be easier ways to reach the cobwebs, after all. And, less than cynical, Troy concluded there had to be easier ways to meet your Maker.

The funeral took place forty-eight hours later.

Hugh, Umpteenth Viscount Darbishire, was one of a breed that had become much commoner since the war – the impoverished toff. The country pile had long since become just that, a pile of bricks in a field. The family fortune had been squandered by his father, the late Umpteenth-Viscount-but-one, and Hugh had preserved as much of the style of the English aristocracy as he could, on very little of the substance. The money was all Sasha’s. After the war Hugh had played on the old school tie, with which he had not thought to hang himself, and become ‘something in the City’, as well as, of late, picking up his measly stipend for attending the Lords and voting on things about which he knew bugger all and, worse, occasionally speaking on things about which he knew bugger all. He had never made money, so the funeral took place at Mimram, in the small cemetery attached to the village church of St Job, patron saint of one or two of the worst things in life, in the Troy family plot. Living off his wife even in death.

The Fat Man picked up Troy in the Bentley and drove him out to Mimram. It was rare to see him togged out like a gentleman’s gentleman, but there was no denying he fitted the part. Black, stripes and a cavernous bowler. But there it stopped. There was no holding the passenger door open, no standing upright as though on parade. He simply told Troy to ‘shift yer ’arris’ and get in. It was a pleasant drive through the burgeoning English countryside in summer, and a pleasant hour spent on the joys of the Gloucester Old Spot. How Lord Emsworth could even keep Whites baffled Troy – as, indeed, he thought it must baffle all Mr Wodehouse’s readers. The thought sent him off at a tangent of fantasy. Would he one day turn into Lord Emsworth? He already kept pigs and felt as though his life was a plague of sisters. What else did Fate have in store for him? The forgetfulness of the classic English duffer?

‘We’re there.’

‘Eh?’

‘We’re there. You was off in one of your little dazes again.’

‘Was I?’

‘I wouldn’t worry none. It’s not the blow to yer ’ead. You’ve always done it. I reckon that’s where you get some of yer best ideas. Just daydreamin’an’ such. Now. Can you manage?’

‘Not crippled yet.’

‘Good. Cos I ain’t comin’ in with yer. Can’t abide churchianity. I’ll just sit out ’ere with me Pig and Pigeon Gazette. You just wobble yer way back when it’s all over. There’ll be a bit of a do I ’xpect?’

‘Oh, yes, there’ll be a do all right. In fact, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the funeral baked meats did not supply the wedding feast.’

‘Eh?’

‘Hamlet. On the haste with which his mother remarried.’

‘The mad tart’s thinkin’ of marryin’ again?’

‘Not quite. But she won’t be in mourning for long. If I were a betting man I’d be putting money on hours not weeks.’

Troy was last to arrive and picked his way down the gravel path to find two blokes leaning on spades in the shadow of a yew, having a swift smoke before filling in the grave. Fifty yards further on the black-clothed backs of most of his relations were visible. The brother, the sisters, the endless nieces and nephews, the short, rotund figure of his Uncle Nikolai, the taller, effortlessly elegant figure of his brother-in law, Lawrence. The unfamiliar figure of the vicar – Troy had not met the vicar, any of Mimram’s vicars, in years. This chap could be the new incumbent or an old stager for all he knew.

He’d missed something, clearly, but the vicar was still droning on, and he found a place in front of Rod and behind Sasha’s younger son, Arkady. Looking around the boy, since it was impossible to look over him, Troy saw his sisters side by side, holding hands as one might expect of sisters, twins especially, at a time like this – but what, he thought, was the large American-style carpet bag at Sasha’s feet? A small handbag, slung across one arm, stuffed full of hankies, weeping for the use of, might have seemed appropriate. But then Sasha wasn’t weeping. She was looking around rather blankly. She stared straight at him for a couple of seconds. No expression of grief, or joy or madness. And then it hit him. When had Sasha ever done what might be deemed appropriate?

Sasha stepped forward, stopping the vicar mid-mumble with a raised hand like a copper on point duty. ‘It’s time,’ she said, ‘to whizz past the platitudes of received wisdom and –’

From behind him Troy heard his brother’s muttered, ‘Oh, bloody hell.’

‘– lay to rest the man I knew, rather the man we all wish he was.’

She opened the carpet bag and took out what appeared to be a pipe. ‘Cultures there are,’ she went on, ‘that hold dear the belief that the departed, dear or not, have use in the next world for goods and chattels that have been of use to them in this. Indeed, if I am to believe my little brother, there are sects in India which prescribe that the widow should immolate herself upon the same pyre as the burning remains of her late husband. Suffice to say I shall not be entertaining you in quite that fashion. So, Hugh, dearest, puff on your pipe, be it in heaven or hell.’

Sasha lobbed the pipe into the grave, where it thudded off the coffin with a hollow bang. Troy watched what little blood remained in the vicar’s cheeks drain to leave a tuberculoid hue.

Sasha took out an old cloth cap in a tweedy sort of pattern. ‘Saturdays would not be Saturdays without you in your cloth cap.’

It, too, flopped down into the pit. As did a copy of last year’s Wisden, a couple of golf balls, several novels of the Bulldog Drummond variety, a couple of old 78s by the comic singer Frank Crumit – a man who had found it in him to sing the joys of the prune and the errant ways of a golf ball – Hugh’s old school tie (Troy had been wondering when it would put in an appearance), a copy of Horse and Hound, a pewter tankard bearing Hugh’s initials, a badger-hair shaving brush . . . It was, all in all, thought Troy, a representative, if far from complete, itinerary of what Sasha hated about Hugh.

At last she pulled forth the final item. A Second World War issue Webley revolver. The unison communal intake of breath was like a pantomime breeze rattling the leaves.

‘With this gun my husband single-handedly held off the entire German army at Dunkirk. To listen to him tell his war stories, as one so often had to, was to realise what British pluck and British bullshit were all about. That dear Hughdie was stationed in Camberley at the time of Dunkirk never caused the slightest hiccup in the telling of the tale.’

Sasha approached the grave as though intending to lob this last item into hell with Hugh. Instead she took aim at the coffin, and blew a hole in the lid. And as though not content with this, she then leapt down into the grave, legs spread for balance, took the gun in both hands and began to empty it into the late Hugh. By the third shot the vicar and most of the mourners had fled. Troy found himself at the graveside with only Masha to turn to.

‘Rot in hell! Bastard, bastard, bastard!’

And with the sixth shot, the final cry of ‘bastard’, the gun was empty and so, it seemed, was Sasha. All passion spent.

There was silence. The birds had scattered. The cemetery seemed suddenly empty. Troy looked around. Rod had retreated to a safe distance, the two gravediggers peered round the yew tree, wide-eyed and gob-smacked.

‘Don’t just stand there. Give me a hand out, you two.’

Troy and Masha each extended an arm and pulled Sasha out. She tossed the gun over her shoulder, one last thump down in the grave, and beckoned to the gravediggers. ‘Come on, you dozy buggers. I’m not going to bury the bastard myself, am I?’

Then she turned to Troy. ‘Shall we go home now?’ And smiled.

She slipped an arm through her sister’s and wandered up the path more as though coming from a picnic than from an act of madness. Troy followed, reached into his pocket as he passed the gravediggers and bunged them each ten quid. ‘Two things,’ he whispered. ‘Not a word to anyone, and that gun stays where it is.’

‘Done,’ said the diggers, with all the deference of greed, and Troy followed on, to find the Fat Man perched on the wall, exactly as he had said, reading his copy of the Pig and Pigeon Gazette, oblivious to all that had happened. That which might wake the dead, of which there were plenty at hand, had not penetrated his self-absorption.

‘Is the do now?’ he said.

 

§ 13

It was about an hour and a half later. Sasha was mingling among the grazing mourners as though nothing at all had happened. Rod was pouring wine on troubled waters, and Troy was looking sceptically at what he held to be a bunch of lunatics, and wondering if, perhaps, he had not been found under a gooseberry bush, when Rod’s daughter Nattie came to tell him there was a policeman at the door.

‘One of mine?’

‘No – old Trubshawe from the village.’

‘And he’s asking for me?’

‘He’s asking for the guv’ner, whoever that might be.’

‘Fine. Show him into my study. Then find Sasha, get her upstairs and keep her there.’

Troy gathered up Rod and brother-in-law Lawrence. ‘I want the two of you there. But say nothing unless I give you the nod. This is copper stuff and I suggest you let me handle it.’

Neither argued. When Constable Trubshawe was shown into Troy’s study, the three of them had arranged themselves like actors blocking out the set in a third-rate West End drawing-room drama, the fireplace, the desk, the french windows. Troy thought they all looked like suspects in Cluedo. All they needed was the lead piping or the dagger. Trubshawe clutched his helmet, that monstrous, absurd symbol of his authority, in one hand and shook Troy’s hand with the other. Troy had known Frank Trubshawe most of his life. He’d come to the village as a constable – indeed, he was still a constable – when Troy was in his teens. All the same it was not a time to use his Christian name.

‘Good of you to call so soon, Mr Trubshawe. You know Rod, of course, and my brother-in-law, Lawrence Stafford.’

‘Mr Rod, Mr Stafford,’ Trubshawe said, with the hint of deference he could never quite lose after twenty-seven years as a village bobby. He sat on the edge of a chair, the helmet at his feet, his notebook out and flipped open.

‘I gather there was a funeral this mornin’, a member of your family, I’m told, sir.’

‘We buried my sister’s husband. Viscount Darbishire,’ said Troy.

‘I have had reports of the discharge of a firearm.’

‘Really? From whom?’

‘The vicar, sir. Canon Chasuble. Very distressed, he was.’

‘Anyone else?’

‘Oddly enough, no, sir. The gravediggers say they heard nothing, and I’ve not yet had occasion to talk to any of the mourners.’

‘They’re all here.’

‘I’m sure they are, sir.’

The remark seemed almost dismissive, a conclusion foregone.

‘However the Reverend Mr Chasuble can hardly be dismissed lightly, so if you’d care to tell me what happened . . .’

Trubshawe’s appearance was misleading, fat, fiftyish, red-faced, bald, but nobody’s fool.

‘My sister did fire a gun, yes. She was hysterical with grief. But I cannot see that any law was broken.’

‘Discharge of a firearm in a public place, sir. You know the Act as well as I do. Indeed, I should think you could quote me the relevant sub-paragraph.’

‘A public place?’

‘The cemetery.’

‘The cemetery is not public, it’s private – it is the fiefdom of the Lord of the Manor and merely loaned to the Church.’

Trubshawe mused on this, but seemed undeterred. ‘And who might the Lord of the Manor be, if you don’t mind my askin?’

‘Well,’ said Troy, ‘It was my father . . . so I suppose it is now one of us – Rod, as the eldest son, or me, as the owner of Mimram. It’s not a conversation we’ve ever had.’

‘Indeed, sir. And I am informed at least one shot was aimed at the coffin.’

Troy said nothing.

‘Which might be termed “mutilation of a cadaver”, which, as I’m sure you know, sir, is illegal under the 1716 Act and again under the revisions of 1868.’

‘We’ll never know,’ said Troy.

‘How do you reckon that, sir?’

‘Well, the body is now under several feet of earth. We cannot simply dig it up and look. That would require an exhumation order from either a judge or a coroner, and I do find myself wondering if, without any further corroborating evidence, we should pursue the matter to that extent.’

‘Further corroborating evidence?’

‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘Unless you care to talk to my entire family, who are, almost needless to say, in mourning . . . you know, grief, shock . . . all that sort of thing.’

Trubshawe flipped his notebook shut without a word written. Looked from Troy to Rod and from Rod to Lawerence. Nobody spoke. A nod from Troy, and Lawrence, with his insatiable hack’s curiosity, would be in like lightning, but Troy didn’t nod.

‘I’ll thank you for your time, gentlemen,’ Trubshawe said at last. ‘And I’ll be off.’

Troy walked with Trubshawe to the front door. He put his helmet back on, tucked the strap into a cleft between his many chins, clutched the handlebars of his bike, and said, ‘How much did you slip the gravediggers, sir, if you don’t mind my askin’?’

‘Tenner each,’ said Troy.

‘Hmmm,’ said Trubshawe musing again. ‘That seems to be about the going rate. Certainly did the trick.’

‘Doesn’t pay to be stingy at a time like this.’

‘Indeed, sir. Might I also ask where the gun is now?’

‘In the grave with my late brother-in-law.’

‘Then we’ll say no more about it. Dare I say, sir, you’ve got away with it?’

Troy said nothing.

‘But sometimes, sir, don’t you wonder just how much you can get away with, and that one day maybe you won’t? It’s one thing, a bunch of toffs getting the best of an old-timer like me who’s never made it past constable, but you play in a bigger league, don’t you, sir?’

Trubshawe wasn’t smiling exactly, but, equally, he seemed to be speaking without resentment, as though the point so made was of purely philosophical interest.

‘Did you never fancy life at the Yard, Mr Trubshawe?’

‘No, sir. I like a world where black is black and white is white. The – what would ye call ’em? – the ambergooities of your world wouldn’t sit toowellwithme.’

With that he scooted up his bike, flung one leg over the saddle and rattled off down the drive.

Troy found he rather envied Trubshawe. He’d been a copper almost as long, and well remembered the days before the ambergooities of the job had made themselves obvious to him . . . when the world had been black and white or he could at least pretend that it was.

 

§ 14

It was only a few days later. Troy had spent the afternoon sitting in the yard at the front of his London house, pretending to read the daily papers, occasionally watching print dance like clumsy hippopotafairies across the page.

The papers seemed to have next to nothing to say for themselves. He had read all he could stand of the exploits of Lord Steele and his headline-hogging wife Sylvia – she of the gold-plated Daimler, a woman who seemed to have no other purpose in life than to spend her husband’s fortune. Ted Steele was, as he reminded the press on every occasion, a self-made man. Conspicuous consumption was his wife’s prerogative. Earned, not inherited. And when he’d said his piece he stood next to his wife, as the photographers flashed away, and let her prattle on. He struck Troy as a faintly comic figure, rich, vulgar and foolish, looking, at fifty-something just a bit too old for the thirty-year old woman on his arm.

Troy supposed that they might be a symbol of the age. That was the sort of phrase his brother used, and whilst Troy hadn’t the first idea what they symbolised, he felt pretty certain Rod would. He could imagine the conversation now. ‘What, brer, is the symbolic value of a peer of the realm and his tarty wife dressing to the nines and visiting a coal pit in Derbyshire or opening a town bypass in evening dress and a tiara and pronouncing, as they are wont, on matters of which they know bugger all?’ And Rod would look serious, rev up his argument and embark on his thesis of the self-made man. Perhaps that was all it was – the self-made man was post-war man, or at least what post-war man aspired to, a chancer who saw his chance and took it. We would all be rich if we could. Meanwhile Rod, the man of 1945, of socialism, idealism and the Welfare State, would try to convince the British of such matters as ‘the common good’ and fought a losing battle. The British subscribed to the Welfare State whilst sincerely hoping to be rich, and saw no contradiction. Even Ted Steele was a member of the Labour Party. Indeed, for a couple of years he’d been a Labour MP. Troy wondered if he’d actually voted Labour before his elevation. To be a paid-up Labour Party member, whilst privately voting Conservative, now that really would be symbolic of the age. That needed no explaining.

And when the newspapers slipped from his lap he had watched summer bloom in the southern sky. Even the most blurred vision could not have missed the great swirling billows of cloud blowing offstage eastward to make way for the June blue heaven.

Come evening, he had propped open the front door, stuck Thelonious Monk on the gramophone and treated those Londoners who used Goodwin’s Court as a cut-through to the joys of ‘Smoke Gets In Your Eyes’ and ‘Hackensack’.

At dusk a figure appeared in his doorway: Anna in one of her many summer dresses – this one red with the black silhouettes of flowers. ‘Why are you sitting here?’

‘Would you believe “It’s where I live” as an answer?’

‘I might. If it weren’t for the fact that you have a perfectly decent house out in the sticks. There’s no need to sit here being miz.’

‘I am not sitting. I am, as you will observe, lying. And I’m not miserable. I am. . .’

Content was not the word. He was not content. Happy was not the word. He was not happy. He was Monkish, but he saw no point in telling her that, and let the sentence hang.

‘Must be this awful music, then. I don’t know what you see in it. It’s all so sodding . . . well . . . miserable. Plonk plink plonk. I’m sure you’d be much happier in the country – especially now the weather’s improved a bit – where you wouldn’t be on your own, where you wouldn’t be fending for yourself, where there are maids and a cook, and the Fat Bloke looking after your pig.’

‘Is he?’ Troy asked.

‘Yes. I gather you rather blew him out when he offered to look after you here.’

Had he? Troy had a half-way decent recollection of this and he rather thought the conversation had gone ‘You need anything, cock?’, ‘No.’

‘I know for a fact he’s looking after your pig. I had that chap he works for on the phone asking if I’d seen him lately. What’s the point in having a gentleman’s gentleman who buggers off half the time, was pretty much the gist.’

‘I didn’t know you knew him.’

‘Patient,’ Anna said simply, and Troy knew there was no point in even asking her for a name. She’d invoked her confidentiality clause much as one would slap down the Get-Out-Of-Jail-Free card when playing Monopoly.

‘Let’s go to Mimram,’ she said.

‘I’ve only just got back. It was chaos, sheer bloody chaos.’

‘You mean the funeral?’

Troy had told her nothing of what happened. ‘Sasha . . . well, Sasha was Sasha.’

‘I think I’ll leave that as cryptic as it is. Whatever she’s done this time I’d rather not know. However, the house will surely be empty now. Let’s go to Mimram.’

It was not pleading, but it was little short of pleading. He had no way of knowing whether this was what she thought best for him or merely what she wanted for herself. But the obvious monosyllabic question was at hand: ‘Us?’

‘The two of us.’

‘My brother will be there.’

‘Rod never gets there much before midnight on Friday. He spends most of Saturday with constituents. I think we’d see him for Sunday lunch and that would be that. If we get there on Thursday—’

‘That’s tomorrow.’

‘We could have a sort of long weekend.’

‘Indeed we could. It would be like—’

‘Old times?’

‘Sort of,’ she said. ‘Sort of.’

Troy let Anna drive. He did not like driving at the best of times. At the worst – and this was surely one of the worst – he was death on wheels. They rolled down the drive of Mimram House late on the afternoon of the following day. He had nodded off and slept from the fringe of the city almost to his own gates (replaced in 1955, and doubtless made from melted-down Spitfires) and woken to Anna chattering something about how much she looked forward to the light nights of summer. The raucous heaven’s choir that was birdsong, the dusky leathern flap of gliding bat, the midnight goosepimpling whoop of owl, the six a.m. barking yawn of dog fox, the basso profundo snuffle of pig at breakfast. Fine, thought Troy, if that’s what she really wants . . .

The house was empty. Clean, well-stocked but empty.

Anna knocked up spag bol for two, Troy rooted around in the cellar for a bottle of Chaˆteau Quelque Chose and they sat at the kitchen table with less than little to say to one another.

‘I was always happy here,’ she said at last, cradling a glass of claret in one hand and swirling it gently around.

‘Happy?’ he said.

‘You say that as though you don’t know the meaning of the word.’

‘I’m sorry. That wasn’t what I meant. I suppose I was saying that I didn’t realise how happy you’d been.’

‘But I was.’

‘All the same. No regrets?’

‘Oh, no,’ she said. ‘No regrets. I mean. After all. You’re married now. Aren’t you?’

It was typical of Anna to see the status of his relationships rather than their substance. She’d known him and Foxx as an item ever since they had itemised. She’d dined with them at home, eaten out with them, been to the theatre with them and, a matter of days ago, had been reluctant witness to the item’s demise. All of this, any of this, might have bothered her. None of it did. Instead it was the wife, the absent wife, the relic of a marriage that had lasted weeks that bothered her.

‘I’ve never felt less married. I don’t even know where she is.’

Troy had never been able to explain Tosca to Anna. They’d never met and it was conceivable that he’d never mentioned her name until that day in 1956 when he had had no choice. Even then he’d botched it. How to explain, without sounding like an utter clot, that he had involved himself with an American WAC sergeant in the last year of the war, that he had doubtfully presumed her dead only to have her reappear for the ‘other side’ five years later to bail him out of a jam in Berlin, and that he had returned the favour in ’56 – and that a vital part of that reciprocation had been a sham marriage and a real British passport. How to explain that, alive or dead, she rattled around in his dreams to that day? Better not even to try. Better to retaliate in kind.

‘You were married when we met.’

‘You know very well what kind of a marriage mine is. On or off, depending on whether Angus wanders or hangs about for a while.’

‘You could try taking away his tin leg.’

‘And have him crawl away from me? Good God, no. I’d far rather he walked.’

‘Is he on walkabout now?’

She sipped and nodded. ‘Day after you got blown up. I woke up to a call from the Charing Cross telling me you were in a coma, and a note from Angus sellotaped to his spare leg saying, “The pipes are calling.” ’

Angus was wont to sing when pissed, and to sing ‘Danny Boy’ when maudlin pissed.

‘So. That’s it, then,’ said Troy. ‘He’s gone.’

There was brief, sharp silence, then . . .

‘He’ll be back,’ they chimed together.

And Anna giggled and sprayed claret across the table.

 

§ 15

It was implicit. Understood. Received. They would go to the same room and to the same bed. That much he knew he could not escape. Troy had taken over his father’s room years ago and left the bedroom of his childhood pretty much as it was. An unconscious if obvious shrine to he knew not what. Part of what had made his relationship work with Anna was the sheer frisson of immorality – the leaping loins of adultery; the far greater part of it was that they, for want of a less neologistic euphemism, ‘clicked’. He did not magnify her inhibitions or she his, and there was, he thought, little better one could ask of any relationship.

He rooted around for five minutes in his father’s study – also long since his but hardly ever referred to as anything but ‘Dad’s study’ – for a novel to read when the insomnia hit him, found an old Penguin Margery Allingham, and went upstairs.

Anna emerged from his bathroom, peeled off her dress in a single crossing and lifting of her arms, and stood before him naked. Such lack of self-consciousness never ceased to impress him but, then, they had both grown up in a world that was so self-conscious. Even its temporary surrender was a sweet taste of victory. Anna was thirty-nine. Still beautiful, still seductive, but even as the word passed through his mind he could see its futility.

She crossed the floor. Only a fraction shorter than he, she put her arms around his neck and her lips to his.

‘Come on. Clothes off,’ she said.

Then she noticed the book, felt it digging into her as Troy clutched it. She took it from him, glanced at the title. ‘More Work for the Undertaker. Sounds like a busman’s holiday to me, reading about coppers and corpses. Or should I take the fact that you brought it up with you as a statement of intention?’

‘No,’ he lied, put the book on the bedside table and began to unbutton his shirt.

Anna flung open the window; he felt the night waft across his back as he discarded the shirt.

‘Too hot not to, don’t you think?’ she said.

He pulled his trousers over his ankles and kicked them on to the floor, sitting, now naked, on the edge of the bed. He felt the springs creak as she climbed on to the other side, her arms encircling him again, her nipples bouncing off his back, his cock rising involuntarily – but when did it ever do so voluntarily? He sat still, so rigid it was impossible not to notice.

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Not dizzy or anything?’

‘No more than usual.’

‘Then it’s . . . me?’

‘More likely to be me, I should think.’

‘Eh?’

‘Not sure I can.’

She grabbed him by the cock. ‘What do you mean “not sure if I can”? Troy, it’s up, the damn thing is up!’

‘The flesh is willing, it’s the spirit that’s weak.’

‘What the bloody hell is that supposed to mean? I thought a standing prick had no conscience?’

‘Conscience has no part of it. It’s. . .me. . .menow. . .meas. . .’

‘As what?’

The telephone rang. They both stared at it.

‘I have to,’ he said.

She turned her back on him, yanked down the sheets and pulled them up to her chin.

‘Freddie? It’s me, George.’

George Bonham. Retired Station Sergeant Bonham. Troy’s oldest friend in London. The man in charge of his first nick in Stepney all those years ago.

‘Jus’ to let you know. Walter Stilton’s widow, Edna, died today.’

Troy was taking this in. It wasn’t registering much. He was more conscious of the grief in George’s voice than he was of any response of his own. He’d known all the Stiltons when he was younger. He’d even been involved in the investigations into old Walter’s murder during the war, but he hadn’t seen Edna Stilton in . . .

‘Can’t talk no more. Gotta go. This has been a blow, Freddie, it really has.’

And the phone went dead.

Anna was staring at him now. Troy watched the anger in her melt. She flung back the sheets, said, ‘You might as well get in,’ and then wrapped him in cool linen and warm flesh.

‘Who was that?’

‘George Bonham. Someone I almost knew just died.’

‘It’s your night for being elliptical, isn’t it. What am I supposed to understand by the word “almost”?’

Troy lay back on the pillow and wished Anna would ask him a question he could answer in words of one syllable and crystal clarity. ‘There are times in life when you meet people who don’t want to know you and scarcely acknowledge you. I dated – at least, I think that’s the word–her daughter.’

‘I doubt that’s the word. Unless it was before 1935.’

‘Almost—’

‘That word again.’

‘It was 1940. And round two was in ’41.’

‘1941? That’s when you and I met.’

Was it? Was it really that long ago?

‘And I don’t think Edna Stilton thought I was right for her daughter.’

‘Ah . . . Old Stinker’s daughter.’

‘You knew her?’

‘No. Never met her. But I almost knew her father.’

‘Almost?’

‘It was my first year in Forensic Pathology. I worked on Stilton’s corpse after the old boy was killed, if you recall.’

So she had.

‘Let’s change the subject, shall we?’

‘So . . . wunderkind . . . what do we do now?’

‘Lie here like brother and sister?’

‘You forget, Troy. I know your sisters.’

 

§ 16

Troy passed a pleasant Friday. Doing nothing. Anna fluttered around him in another brightly coloured summer dress like some exotic insect. She was, it would seem, as she had said, happy. Happy was the word. In all the time they had been lovers his capacity to make her happy was something to which he had given not a split second’s thought. Now, sex notwithstanding, he seemed to have achieved something almost effortlessly. But when he thought about it, the lack of effort meant it was not his achievement at all. It was hers.

She vanished into the village on his sister’s bicycle and returned to find him sleeping on the west-facing verandah in the afternoon sun.

‘The fishmonger was open. I know it’s Friday, and it’s corny, but would you be OK with cod and chips?’

‘Fine,’ said Troy.

‘Good. Then perhaps you’d find us a suitable wine.’

‘Tizer,’ said Troy. ‘Or Vimto at a pinch. That’s what you’d find in a chip shop.’

‘No, Troy. Nip down to the cellar and dig out a bottle of Pouilly Fumé – I’ve always had a taste for that Couve de Murville you bought a couple of years ago.’

Another meal in the kitchen. Another bottle of Pooh Foom. Another conversation that skirted meaning to remain inconsequential. Happy was still the word.

Around ten p.m. Anna took herself, and Troy’s copy of the Allingham novel, to bed. No winks, no smiles, not a hint of innuendo. Troy knew he wouldn’t sleep for hours yet so he took himself and a second bottle of Pouilly Fumé back to the verandah. He stretched out, stared into the darkness until he could see as far as the willows down by the river, listened intently until he could hear the rustling of hedgehogs in the hedgerows. He was still staring when Rod found him around midnight.

The first he knew was Rod peering down at him only inches from his face. ‘Are you all right? You look awful.’

‘Thanks for nothing. It’s just the insomnia. Leaves me drained but I still can’t sleep at will, as it were.’

‘Freddie, seriously, have you thought about—’

‘Don’t say it. Just don’t say it. Right now the world and his wife all want me to retire or resign. Don’t waste your breath.’

‘Actually, Freddie, I was going to say, have you thought about taking a holiday? You know, Greece or Italy.’

Rod stood over him, a bit déshabillé, sweaty from the day’s heat, collar popped, tie at half-mast. Troy softened. ‘Let’s change the subject. Park your backside and tell me something of the world outside. Lately I feel like one of those pre-war wives locked in the house all day by the working husband, reliant on him for all contact with the world.’

Rod picked up Troy’s glass, filled it to the brim and sat on a battered wicker chair. ‘Right now my wife has gone straight to bed. Pissed off with me that I got stuck in a meeting until nearly ten o’clock.’

‘Fine. Bore me rigid. I’m all ears. Who was in the meeting?’

‘Gaitskell, Brown, Wilson and me.’

‘The shadow-cabinet cabal?’

‘If you like. We had some rather disturbing news to discuss.’

‘White Fish Authority run out of chips? Ministry of Works not working?’

‘No election next month.’

‘Was there supposed to be one?’

‘Our narks in the government were putting money on July. Looks more likely to be the autumn now.’

‘You have narks in the government?’

‘Just a figure of speech. We know what they want us to know, would be a better way of putting it. But I know one thing they don’t know I know.’

‘You just lost me.’

‘October would be a good month for the PM to go to the country. Ike is coming over for a visit. Reflected glory, basking for the use of. Macmillan would be a fool not to call an election after that.’

‘Ike’s coming?’

‘Told me so himself. Macmillan’s been nagging him about it for ages. I know he’s going to say yes, because he telephoned me and asked if there was any chance of getting some of his wartime pals together. Probably towards the end of the summer, August or September. He’ll make a state visit. Be seen on the news with Mac at this do or that. Meet the Queen, and all that. In fact, you’re finding out about it before the PM, but I’d have to have told you sooner or later. He’s coming here for a weekend – we’ll have the reunion bash here.’

‘I see.’

‘Do you, Freddie? Extra security. American Secret Service chaps. Special Branch. I know how fond you are of Special Branch.’

‘Be my guest. They can hardly exclude me from my own home, can they?’

Troy could see Rod far better than Rod could see him, and the expression on Rod’s face told him that he’d just said the opposite of what Rod was thinking: Rod was praying Troy would stay away.

‘Don’t worry, brer. I won’t fuck it up for you. You make Ike feel at home. See if he can’t win the election for you.’

‘God knows, we’ve got to win this one. Bloody country’s going to hell in a handcart.’

‘Really? I thought we’d never had it so good?’

‘Not funny, Freddie.’

‘No . . . wasn’t kidding. Just look at things without the blinkers of ideology for a moment. Wages are up, pretty nigh full employment, consumer hardware available by the wagonload on tick . . .’

‘Freddie, as you well know, that is the problem – on “tick”. We are a nation living on the slate. We have become the something-for-nothing live-now-pay-later society. Do you know, I was watching one of those wretched game shows the other night—’

‘Take Your Pick.’

‘As a matter of fact it was.’

‘And they gave away a car.’

‘Yes. They gave away a car. Can’t you see how emblematic that is of greed, of things coveted and not earned?’

‘As I recall, Rod, the car was a Mini – you drive one yourself – and it was won by a factory-floor worker from Leicester who made the clips that keep vacuum-cleaner bags from spewing dust everywhere. I would imagine he does it nine hours a day, biff, bash, bosh every few seconds, eats soggy sandwiches out of a plastic hamper for lunch, and bikes home in the pouring Leicester rain to eat food that’s come out of a tin and—’

‘What is your point?’

‘My point is that while you’re driving your Mini, which you think is your right, you are also sneering at the consumer society and the fat, lazy prole who somehow betrays your socialist ideal of the honest working man. The fat prole, who is also the same man as the honest working man, makes all those consumers durables – Mini cars included – the free availability of which causes you so much intellectual grief. Fuckit, Rod, they make the goods, they’ve a right to own them. What’s good for the goose. Workers with cars and washing-machines does not automatically bespeak a society in degeneration, any more than Sylvia Steele and her gold-plated Daimler. And if you go into an election with that approach they’ll vote you out for the third time in a row. What I sometimes feel you never learn is that “Jam Tomorrow” gets a bit frustrating. And I rather think Macmillan’s motto is “Jam Today”. What else was that tuppence off the price of a pint about in the last budget? You call it pandering to the electorate. Mac calls it “Jam Today”.’

Troy thought Rod might explode. Instead he picked up the bottle, topped up his glass, said, ‘Drink me,’ and burst into a fit of unparliamentary giggles. ‘You know, you should come out with Gaitskell some night. You’ve got pretty much the same sense of humour. He’d be laughing himself silly if he were here now.’

‘Any time,’ said Troy.

Rod quaffed half the glass in a single gulp. He said nothing. They listened to the sounds of midnight, the distant chimes of the clock on the tower of St Job’s.

‘Have you heard any whispers?’ Troy said at last.

‘Whispers? Whispers of what?’

‘Sasha’s little escapade.’

‘Oh. No . . . not a peep. I rather think Lawrence has pulled a few strings to keep that under wraps. But, then, that’s why you made sure he was there when old Trubshawe came round, wasn’t it?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Y’know. It was necessary. I can’t deny that . . . but doesn’t it make you wonder what class and a bit of power can do? Doesn’t it make you wonder just what we can get away with?’

‘That’s what Trubshawe said.’

‘And, when you come to think of it, Hugh got away with murder.’

A few years back in a fit of rage Hugh had admitted to beating one of Sasha’s lovers to death. It was, Troy had argued, nothing they could ever prove, and hence nothing they should ever talk about. Rod had not raised the matter even at the time of Hugh’s suicide. Now they had buried Hugh, and the problem with him. Troy rather hoped they’d never have to mention it again. It was not that the Troys had a skeleton in the cupboard: they had their own private boneyard.

Rod had closed his eyes. He wasn’t asleep. Troy could hear the waking rhythm of his breathing. A cricket settled on his shoulder, drawn by the light from the room behind him. Troy wondered. Suppose his brother was made of wood? What twists of conscience was the cricket whispering into Rod’s wooden head?

No cricket landed on his shoulder.

 

§ 17

On the Saturday morning, as he lay in bed next to a sleeping Anna, Troy heard the pop-shuffle-grunt of an old BSA motorbike-sidecar combination approaching. He slid his arm from under her, hoping to slip out without her noticing. They had got through two nights without sex, a whole day without recrimination. All the same, he wasn’t about to risk the consequences of a morning quickie. He picked up his clothes from the floor and tiptoed to a bathroom on the other side of the house. Half an hour later, dressed and shaved, he sought out the Fat Man down by the pig pens.

Every so often the familiarity of the scene struck Troy as unchanging, timeless in the way visitors to the National Trust expect things to be timeless. The Fat Man would wear, as ever, his Second World War Heavy Rescue blue blouse, almost unchanging except that it got tattier with every year that passed. His Thermos and his ham sandwich would sit on the bench ready for whenever the need for elevenses hit him, which bore no relation to what the clock actually said, and the Fat Man would be found musing on some nonsense he’d found in the daily paper and occasionally reading snippets out loud to the pig. But the Fat Man was full of surprises. Today . . . Troy had had no idea the Fat Man could juggle.

As he came down the path to the edge of the orchard, the Fat Man was deftly juggling turnips, three or four at a time. Cissie the pig was sitting about fifteen feet away, her eyes spinning to keep track of the turnips, and every so often the Fat Man would bounce a turnip off his head – just like a footballer – straight at her. The pig would snatch it from the air, crunch it once and swallow it almost whole. She had the agility of a Jack Russell or, as Troy had observed when she was a piglet, a mountain goat, climbing everywhere – Troy often thought they should have named her Hillary or Tenzing. But Cissie it had been, Cissie the Gloucester Old Spot, a breed commonly known as the Orchard Pig.

The Fat Man put another handful of turnips into the air and the pig’s neck began to twist and turn as its beady eyes followed breakfast as it spun through space.

‘I didn’t know you could do that,’ Troy said.

‘I can spin plates an’ all. And what I can do with a top hat, two pigeons and a rabbit you wouldn’t believe.’

He launched all four turnips at the pig. Snap, snap, snap, snap, and they were gone.

‘How do you think she does that?’

‘Dunno, old cock. The hand may be quicker than the eye. It certainly ain’t quicker than the pig. If I was younger I’d work up a turn and go on the halls with her.’

‘If there were any music halls left,’ Troy added.

‘O’ course, cock. Goes without sayin’. Now, what gets you up bright and late on this sunny morn?’

‘Angst,’ said Troy.

‘Ants?’

‘People . . . are getting at me.’

The Fat Man sat down on the bench next to Troy, opened his Thermos, handed Troy a cup of sickly-sweet instant coffee, and tucked into his sandwich. The pig’s eyes followed the to and fro between them, hopefully. Troy hated instant coffee, but he’d never risk saying no to it, and much preferred the days when the Fat Man brought tea.

‘You just tell me who, and I’ll go round with an Austin 7 startin’ ’andle and sort ’em out.’

‘You’re kidding?’

The Fat Man spat crumbs over Troy. ‘Course I’m kidding. It’s that Stanley, isn’t it? And it’s that young woman o’ yours, and it’s that other young woman o’ yours – your doctor? And I reckon it’s your brother too.’

‘That’s about the gist of it. Not my brother, oddly enough, but everybody else you just named wants me to call it a day.’

‘Resign, you mean?’

‘Retire.’

‘But . . . you’re just a boy.’

It was well meant – although Troy found it hard to take that way – and he supposed that to the Fat Man, whose age was impossible to guess, bald for years and fat almost as long, he was not much more than a boy.

‘It’s OK. I’m not going to do it. If I give in now I’ll spend the rest of my life wondering about what might have been . . . I’ll become a fat, sodden whinger, full of regret and self-pity like . . .’

Like who? For fuck’s sake, like who?

The pig gave up waiting for more turnips and rolled on her back squirming at an itch she could not scratch. Troy knew just how she felt.

‘. . . Like . . . like Dyadya Vanya.’

‘Daddy who?’

‘Not daddy – Dyadya. It means “uncle”. It’s Russian for “uncle”.’

‘I didn’t know you’d got an uncle Vanya. I’ve met your uncle Nikolai, but I don’t remember a Vanya.’

‘No. I haven’t got an uncle Vanya.’

‘Then why tell me you have?’

‘He’s a character in a play by Chekhov.’

‘Who’s Chekhov?’

‘Doesn’t matter. All I meant was that I’d become like Vanya – a miserable, suicidal sod incapable of blowing out his own brains or anyone else’s for that matter.’

‘You want to blow somebody’s brains out?’

‘No, of course not. That’s not what I meant.’

‘It seems to me, young Fred, that about three-quarters of what you’re saying isn’t what you mean. But this much I will say. You do what you think’s best, cock. Maybe there’ll come a time to throw in the towel. Who knows? t it’s for you to say. And, if you want my

But wopenn’orth, when that time comes you’ll know. Believe me, old son, you’ll know. In the meantime you get back into the thick of it and kick bum!’

‘Bum?’

‘Arse.’

‘Ah, you mean . . . as they say in America, “kick ass”?’

‘Oh, no, cock. Never hurt an animal.’

 

§ 18

‘Really, Troy?’

‘Yes, really.’

‘But we don’t have to. I don’t have to. I can call Fitz and get a locum. I could take off the next fortnight, the next month if I have to. We could stay here. Dammit, Troy, I’m happy here.’

He hoped she would not cry. It would not be out of character, but it would be impossible to contrive. Anna could not and did not cry on cue.

‘You can stay. It’s only me. I have to go back. Not to be in London now . . . not to be in London now is to risk being edged off the map.’

‘Troy, it could be weeks before you can work again. And that’s not some old flame talking, that’s your doctor.’

‘I can’t be out of the loop. Not now. A copper just got blown to smithereens on the streets of London –’

‘I know! It was nearly you or has the fact escaped you?’

‘– so I have to be there. Don’t you get it?’

‘No, Troy. I don’t get any of it. In fact, I think it’s madness.’

All the same she drove him back. Parked the Bentley in Bedfordbury, handed him the keys, would not cross his threshold, declined his offer of a cup of tea and left with an immeasurable sadness in her eyes.

 

§ 19

Troy phoned Scotland Yard.

‘Jack?’

‘Ah . . . Freddie, you read my mind. Did you know I was about to pick up the phone and call you?’

‘You were?’

‘You surely didn’t think I was going to leave you out of things . . . just because. . .?’

‘No,’ Troy lied, ‘of course not. What’s happened? Something’s happened. I can hear it in your voice.’

‘Bernie Champion.’

Bernie had been Alf Marx’s right-hand man for years. The investigation that had sent Alf down had found nothing provable against Bernie. Bernie was at large: the heir apparent come into his own.

‘Dead?’

‘No, just missing. His wife walked into Leman Street nick this morning and said he hadn’t been home for three nights.’

‘Then he’s probably dead.’

‘I think they had more tact than to tell her that, but from now on I’ll be looking at every body that turns up to see if it’s Bernie.’

‘Jack?’

‘Yeeeees?’

‘Bodies. Bodies turning up. Don’t leave me out of that either.’

‘As if . . .’ Wildeve lied.

 

§ 20

The days of his recuperation – and it always seemed to him far longer than it was – took on an immediate routine, such was the nature of recuperation. Yet each day Troy awoke not with the sense of a pattern established or a life well ordered, but with the distinct, the unnerving sensation that each day was the first, the first of what he did not ask – but it was a greenness and an absence of familiarity and accomplishment that disturbed him not a little.

Blows to the head notwithstanding, Troy prided himself on having a good memory. It was part of the job. And this woman standing on his London doorstep had introduced herself with ‘I’m Kate Cormack. I bet you don’t remember me,’ – and he didn’t.

About his age, maybe a bit younger, say, thirty-eight or thirty-nine, red hair, expensively cut, a Dior suit in charcoal black, an American accent quite unlike his wife’s – none of the brashness of New York, more a touch of the South, perhaps Carolina or Virginia – and an impossible sadness in the eyes that, once noticed, distracted him from the beauty of a good-looking middle-aged woman. She looked much as Anna had done the last time he’d seen her. Sad without anger. The sadness of defeat.

‘When you knew me I was Kitty Stilton,’ she said.

Good God, so she was. And she wasn’t thirty-eight, she was nearer fifty.

Troy swung back the door. Kitty/Kate stepped over the threshold. Dropped a large flat package on the hallstand. Stood with her back to him, letting her eyes readjust to the half-light of the room. She looked around, the sadness in her eyes welling as restraint of tears in the corners. The hydraulic surge of times remembered. Then she looked at Troy. He was damn certain they were remembering the same times, thinking the same things at that moment, lumbering themselves with the same burden of imagery.

‘It’s been a long time,’ Kitty/Kate said.

Troy said nothing.

‘Almost eighteen years,’ she added, then, ‘Are you ever going to say anything or shall I just bugger off now?’

‘Seventeen years, ten months, three weeks and I sort of lose count of the days,’ Troy heard himself say.

She wrapped herself round him, tears falling wet and warm on to his face. ‘And there was I thinking you hadn’t an ounce of sentimentality in you.’

Slowly, he set the walking-stick against the wall and put first one arm, then the other round her shoulders.

‘My mum died,’ she murmured, into his shoulder.

‘I heard,’ he said, wondering how he could have missed the significance of George Bonham’s phone call, failed to anticipate that the death of Edna Stilton might well bring her daughter home, and marvelling that at some point his unconscious had tracked back to the precise date they had last stood together in this room: June 1941. Sentimentality had less to do with it than the scrambled eggs that were his brains today.

‘How old was she?’

Kitty prised her head up, pulled out a handkerchief and dabbed at her cheeks. ‘Sixty-nine. Not old enough.’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘Of course what?’

‘Your mother and George Bonham were at school together. They’d be about the same age, wouldn’t they?’

‘Yes. They were. I haven’t thought of George in years. Old Bigfoot. Kept us all in line. All us kids.’ She screwed her handkerchief into a ball, looking down at it, then up at Troy then down again.

‘I expect he’ll be at the funeral?’

‘I expect so. Be unlike our Vera to forget him. My little sister, in charge again. But that sort of brings me to the point, doesn’t it?’

Troy sat down, hoping Kitty would follow and take some of the tension out of this impromptu reunion. Lowered himself gently into an armchair, felt his head rattle like peas in a tin. Kitty tucked her skirt deftly, sat on the edge of the sofa, mannequin-poised, and crossed her legs. ‘It’s the day after tomorrow,’ she went on, ‘and I really don’t want to go alone.’

‘Alone? Your whole family will be there, your husband—’

‘No,’ said Kitty. ‘Cal won’t be coming. Quite simple reasons, really, but the upshot is I wonder if you’d escort me.’

She glanced knowingly at the stick, still propped against the wall where Troy had left it.

‘I mean, you are on the mend, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. Good. I know about your accident. Vera sent me all the press clippings. You were lucky. But you will, won’t you? You will do this for me?’

He could hardly say no.

‘I can’t stay. They want me in Stepney. Shall we say two o’clock? I’ll get us a cab at Claridge’s and pick you up.’

‘You’re staying at Claridge’s?’

‘I couldn’t stay at Stepney. It would be too . . . well, you know.’

‘I was just thinking . . .’ said Troy.

‘I know. Claridge’s – where Cal stayed during the war. It was where . . . well, you know. It was where Cal Junior was conceived.’

‘Ah.’

‘You didn’t really think it was yours?’

‘I never knew.’

‘And you never asked. No, Troy, young Cal is seventeen, the dead spit of his namesake and getting ready for West Point. I’ve two other children. Walter—’

‘After your father.’

‘I had to do it. He hates the name and he’s insisted on being Walt since he was six. But I couldn’t let my dad’s name die. And there’s Allison. And she’s named after no one.’

Kitty/Kate was smiling for the first time. She took an obvious pleasure in speaking of her children that seemed less than obvious when she spoke of her husband. That infinite sadness in the eyes of women like Kate and Anna was, he realised, probably put there by men like him. Men like him and men like United States Senator Calvin M. Cormack.

‘Really, I have to go now. The parcel’s for you. A couple of things you’ll find in every American home.’

She kissed him, did not wait for him to open the door, and left. Troy watched as she passed out of sight at the kink in the alley. He picked up the package. Given the shape it could be only one thing. A long-playing record. He tore off the wrapper. Two long-playing records.

Concert by the Sea, Erroll Garner.

Time Out, the Dave Brubeck Quartet.

He’d heard records by both pianists. The last time he’d heard Brubeck he rather thought it had been an octet. These were treats. The Kitty he used to know would have dismissed music like this as ‘strictly for wankers’.

He stuck the Garner on his gramophone. It was time to buy a new one. Everyone he knew was banging on about ‘stereo’. Old friends invited him round to listen to their ‘stereo’, invariably a recording of a steam train passing to demonstrate how the Doppler effect could be achieved with two speakers. It did nothing for music and nothing for Troy. Life, he protested, was mono. He had been perfectly happy with shellac at 78 r.p.m.

Garner played witty games with his audience. He buggered about so much with the opening of each song that they were kept guessing. So much so that a cheer went up when they finally spotted what he was playing. ‘I’ll Remember April’ – one of Troy’s favourite songs – opened with a slam-dunking left hand: Troy could almost swear Garner was doing nothing more musical than bringing down a clenched fist on the keyboard. But . . . it was intriguing. He played it over and over again for the rest of the day, and then opened the lid on his piano to see if he could do it. He could. Not all that well, but he could. And for a day and a half he was blissfully happy, blissfully unaware of his injuries, and blissfully unaware that his career was over.

 

§ 21

He had always known he was a klutz, long before his wife had taught him the word. As a child if it could be dropped or broken he would drop or break it, and ball games struck him as a mystery. Golf in particular had baffled him until he realised that there was no ball in golf, and that the arm gestures were part of an arcane ritual of divine appeasement, probably dating back to the building of Stonehenge.

Equally problematic were shoelaces and ties. Of late, say the last twenty-five years, he had coped fairly well, with his father’s oft-repeated dictum never far from his mind: ‘What does it matter, my boy?’

Today he had managed shoes but how to tie his black funeral tie was escaping him. Odd: he’d managed it without a second thought for Hugh’s funeral, but today he couldn’t do it for love or money. Right over left, left over right, the little rabbit goes down the little hole . . . were all right in their way, but then his father’s efforts to teach came back to him: his father being right-handed and Troy left, it had been like trying to learn the woman’s role in a tango and dance backwards, at the end of which footloose farce his father would say, ‘What does it matter, my boy? Do not wear the tie, go barefoot if it pleases you,’ et cetera.

He finally achieved something so bulky that his tie looked less like a tie than a small turban lodged at his throat. He glanced in the mirror. Good God, he looked like the Duke of Windsor, a man in the fierce grip of a fashion frenzy so absurd as to be anything but unobtrusive. He was not wearing a tie, he was making a statement. If only he knew what it was trying to say to him.

‘Come on, Troy. I’ve a cab out in the lane with the meter running.’ Kitty stuck her head in through the open door. ‘I thought you’d be ready by now.’

‘Can’t do the sodding tie.’

‘You can and probably will be late for your own funeral, Troy, but let’s not keep my mum waiting, eh?’

Kitty whipped it off him and, in a flurry of hand movements, retied it and pulled the knot up to his collar. A small, sensible knot, with nothing to say for itself. ‘If you had sons you’d know how to tie a tie backwards. Taught both of mine, after all.’

‘Where were you when my dad needed you to dance backwards?’

‘Are you feeling all right?’

‘You should never dance a tango with an Eskimo.’

‘I couldn’t agree more, but why tell me now?’

‘Never mind. It’s just the sort of meaningless connection that the mind makes when it has nothing better to do.’

Troy found himself face to face with Kitty, looking slightly up at her as she spoke. She paused briefly, a sad sort of smile passing briefly between them, then she kissed him once, drew back, kissed him again and said, ‘Let’s go.’

They crossed the City in silence. Passing the Bank of England Troy said, ‘I didn’t ask you where.’

‘St George’s-in-the-East. Next to my dad. You weren’t at that one, were you?’

‘No, I wasn’t. If you recall, I got stabbed a couple of days after Walter was killed. I was sort of . . . laid up.’

‘Ah,’ she said, and looked out of the window away from him as though not remembering.

Then she said, ‘It was awful in so many ways. Dead Dad – as if that wasn’t bad enough, but the church was in ruins. Got hit in one of the last raids of the Blitz only a few weeks before Dad was killed. It would have been the May, May 1941. They just swept aside the rubble and carried on. I can still remember the crunch of dust and mortar under my shoes.’

Troy hadn’t been to St George’s since before the war. It was a Hawksmoor, but a Hawksmoor driven to the hilt. So many towers and turrets, urns and domes. It seemed to Troy that the architect had seen this first not in his sketches but in a dream, some opium-induced fantasy of Xanadu proportions. Buildings were the stuff of dreams, after all. Worse, the stuff of nightmares. It surprised him how often he dreamt of buildings and rooms and walls.

Inside the walls, the parishioners of St George-in-the-East had erected a tin hut. It looked for all the world like a chunk of a wartime RAF base plucked up by Dorothy’s tornado from a field in Kent and plonked down in London, into a frame by Nicholas Hawksmoor. It was utilitarian in the extreme. Tin and asbestos walls, stacker canvas chairs and a plug-in Hammond organ. Inside, all that was visible of the glory that had been was the dazzling mosaic gold of the Christ Crucified on the end wall onto which the hut had been built. A funeral service in a glorified Nissen hut? It seemed to Troy to be another symbol of the age in which they lived.

Troy had decided it would be no bad thing if this funeral failed to resemble the last one he had been to. Not that he expected any of the Stiltons to behave like Sasha. It would be just as well if it were different in every respect. He looked at the sky over the East End. It was ominously, pleasingly dark. They might be in for a summer cloudburst. That would be different – it would change the tone nicely.

Compared to the funeral of the late Hugh, this was on the grand scale. The Stiltons had turned out in force. Troy would have been happiest at the back, beyond the obvious questions surely being asked of ‘Who’s he?’ but Kitty rightly would have none of it. She was the eldest child, she had to sit at the front with her three sisters, her one surviving brother and all their many spouses. But that didn’t stop her whispering and pointing out every single member of her family to him.

Aunt Dolly and her inseparable friend Mrs Wisby. Troy had the dimmest recollection of meeting Aunt Dolly before the war. Brother in-law Maurice White, probably London’s best-known self-made millionaire, formerly Maurice Micklewhite, who at some point had managed to lose the first syllable of his name as neatly as Troy’s own father had lost the last of his. Troy made no effort to log the list of cousinry, and diverted himself as Kitty whispered a lengthy chronicle of Kathleens and Michaels and Alberts and Marys by wondering if cousinry might not be cousintude or cositude or some such. His dad would know. It was just the sort of trivia his dad stored up in spades.

‘Have you heard a word I’ve said?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he lied.

‘And, of course, old Mr Bell’s on the organ. You remember him? He was our lodger during the war. He still is Vera’s lodger.’

Vera was Kitty’s youngest sister. Scarcely out of her teens when the old man had been killed, she had taken control of the house and, with it, the lives of most of her siblings. She had a facial resemblance to her mother, but she had grown to her father’s bulk – a big woman, never far from an apron or a rolling-pin.

Troy drifted off. He was, he knew full well, just window dressing. An accessory Kitty could wear on one arm. It didn’t mean he had to pay attention or say anything, and with a bit of luck he might get through the whole caboodle without having to utter a word. He stood when Kitty stood, mouthed tunelessly when she sang, sat when she sat, whipped out his clean hanky when she sniffled, and the next thing he knew he was outside standing in the drizzle for the burial.

It was, by Troy family standards, all rather restrained, rather polite and rather ordered. The tearful daughters threw single roses into the grave, the son and sons-in-law stood steely and tearless, and no one flourished a revolver. In minutes, it seemed, he found himself walking slowly back from the churchyard towards the Highway in the company of George Bonham. It seemed odd having Bonham slow down for him: for years now it had been the other way round, Bonham slowed by bulk rather than age, the heavy-footed pace of a man the best part of six foot seven and, in former days, wearing his silly policeman’s helmet, nearer seven foot. He had dwarfed Troy from the day they’d met in 1936. And from that day forth Troy had dodged around Bonham like a mosquito, inflicting on him ideas and actions that either appalled or baffled him without, in either case, denting his loyalty. Troy was his protégé – that much he understood.

‘I wasn’t sure you’d be here.’

‘Kitty asked me. But to be honest, until she did it had never occurred to me to come.’

‘Stirs up old memories a funeral, don’t it? And I suppose you’ve got a few.’

‘Since you put it like that. I was the copper called out to old Walter’s murder. I saw the body before it was even cold, sprawled on the cobbles with a bullet hole in the head. I’ve never felt much like facing Mrs Stilton since. I certainly never felt like answering any questions.’

‘Aah,’ said Bonham. ‘I meant memories of you and Kitty. Sort of.’

Troy knew George’s ‘sort of ’. It was uttered as a way of toning down whatever he had just said with a hint of uncertainty. It didn’t work. ‘She’s married, George. Let’s leave the past where it belongs, shall we?’

A path ran at right angles to the one they were on into another quarter of the churchyard. A small man in a cloth cap was hurrying down it towards them.

‘It’s old Arthur,’ Bonham said. ‘You remember Arthur Foulds? Lost his missus the same week I lost mine in the Blitz.’

Arthur turned into their path and scuttled right up to them. ‘Vandals!’ he shouted. ‘Teds and yobs and bloomin’ tearaways!’

Now that Troy could see him clearly he knew him. He’d been a resident of Stepney when Troy was a fresh-faced beat bobby. Another retired docker, characteristically built like a brick shithouse. A powerhouse of muscle packed into a five-foot-four frame that had turned slowly to fat in fifteen years of retirement.

‘Just the blokes I need. A couple o’ coppers.’

‘We’re here for a funeral, Arthur. ’Sides, I’m retired and Mr Troy’s not on duty.’

‘But you’ll at least come and look?’

‘Look at what?’

‘The missus’s grave. My Janet’s restin’-place. It’s been vandalised!’

‘Arthur, there’s not a lot—’

Troy interrupted: ‘Let’s look shall we?’

Bonham glared down at him. ‘By rights it’s the sort of thing you report to the nick and let them take care of it.’

‘Won’t hurt to look. Besides, we’re way ahead of the Stiltons. They’re still standing around gabbing. Bound to be a pecking order for the cars back to Jubilee Street. Let’s buy ourselves a little time.’

Bonham accepted silently. They followed old Arthur to his wife’s grave. It was a mess: every plant, and he seemed particularly fond of polyanthi, had been ripped up and left to die. The earth looked less like the carefully tended plot Troy knew it must have been and more like an allotment. The fresh marks of footprints were beginning to fill with water as the drizzle turned to rain.

‘It’s criminal,’ Arthur stated the obvious. ‘And something’s got to be done,’ he stated the unlikely.

‘A lot of it about, is there?’ Troy asked.

‘First time,’ said Arthur. ‘Been tendin’ ’er grave for nigh on twenty years . . . and nothing like this has ever happened before. I come here two, maybe three times a week. And nothin’ like this has ever happened before. They’ve no respect. That’s what’s wrong with young people today. Got no respect.’

He was crying now. Bonham responded: ‘You leave it with us, Arthur. We’ll report it to the nick and something’ll be done. Trust me.’

A huge, avuncular arm embraced the shoulders of the older man.

‘What’s the country comin’ to? What’s the bleedin’ country comin’ to?’

Neither of them answered.

 

§ 22

The house in Jubilee Street had been in Edna Stilton’s family since it was built in 1887. Edna and all her children had been born there. It was big, plenty big enough to accommodate the funeral party – a barn of a kitchen, a dining room, a sitting room and – reserved, if not designed, for such occasions – a parlour. It was not a concept Troy readily grasped. A room that was virtually mothballed from one event, tragedy or celebration, to the next. His house at Mimram would dwarf Jubilee Street, but there was not a room he and his brother and sisters did not use.

It seemed inevitable to him that the parlour would look as it did. Rather like a mausoleum, a living, if that was the word, museum to the recent past. Was there another house in England still with antimacassars on the chairbacks? Could you still buy macassar to necessitate the antimacassar? Surely we’d all gone Brylcreem round about 1940?

The sepia portrait of the monarch hanging on the parlour wall was not of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, nor was it of her father George VI: it was of her grandfather, the ‘old king’, George V. Troy was prepared to bet that half the homes in England that had such patriotism as to want a portrait of the monarch still had one that matched this. It was fitting. The King had dominated pre-war England. Troy’s own sisters had been presented to Queen Mary as débutantes in the twenties – the Queen had survived the encounter – and the royal couple seemed the bridge between the world we lived in now, whatever it was coming to, and the world before the war, before the Great War, which we had lost. They had survived, solidly. A smaller world – fewer peacock plumes and fewer eagles – built around the brick notion of family. The result, as Troy’s father had wryly observed, was that there was now nothing quite so middle class as royalty. That much we owed to King George and Queen Mary.

On the mantelpiece were silver-framed wedding photos. One of them had to be of Walter and Edna his bride, circa 1910, but he would not have known the man. The slim young copper in uniform walking out under the arch of truncheons, raised military-style, bore scant resemblance to the well-fed trencherman he had known. But he knew Edna at once. That same look in her eye. The heart of gold, the will of iron. Young she might be, but she was still the same woman who had seen off his courtship of Kitty with ‘Stick to your own kind.’ Troy had found no way to impress or even please Mrs Stilton.

‘She didn’t change much.’ Kitty, sneaking up behind him, a glass of white wine in each hand. ‘I insisted,’ she said. ‘Can’t get through a funeral on tea and brown ale. Rose thinks it’s extravagant and inappropriate. What did you have at your brother-in-law’s wake?

‘Champagne,’ said Troy. ‘But, then, we’re rich and we were glad to see him go.’

Kitty sniggered. ‘Don’t make me laugh. That would be inappropriate. Come and talk to Tel. He may be in his thirties but he’s still as awkward as a teenager. Whatever the funereal equivalent is of the spare prick at the wedding he’s it.’

Kitty introduced Troy to her little brother and vanished. Troy found himself listening to a somewhat bitter, neurotic life story – how the deaths of two elder brothers in the last war had freed him from the call-up, and how there had been nothing he had wanted but to join the navy. Even peacetime conscription had passed him by and declined his services when he volunteered.

‘What,’ Troy asked, when he could get a word in, ‘did you do?’

‘’Prenticeship. Butcher’s. Quite enjoyed it as it happened.’

‘But?’ It seemed the obvious and simplest nudge of a question.

‘But Mo made a pile and—’

‘Mo?’

‘Maurice. Reenie’s husband. You must remember Maurice?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Yes, of course I know Maurice.’

Maurice White had formed his business partnership in 1946 –White, Bianco, Weiss. A clumsy name but, if nothing else, it at least caught a fair sample of the racial mix of the East End. Bianco had gone solo by 1950, and Maurice had taken control of the company, whittling down Weiss’s role. Mr Weiss was not much heard from. The masthead conveyed the importance of who did what in no uncertain terms, Maurice’s name being twice the size of the other two put together. WBW had redeveloped bombsites in South Wales and Plymouth, had built towering office blocks in central London and erected prefabricated factories in Derby and Birmingham. Most appropriately for a former pilot, Maurice had bought up some of the old RAF bases in Lincolnshire and Nottinghamshire, then sat on them until he got planning permission for housing estates. WBW had made a reputation in a very short time as one of the faces of modern Britain. A modern Britain for whom the past was less than sacred. They even had the wrecking ball as part of the company logo. These days, you could drive almost anywhere in Britain and see a sign on a site somewhere that had WBW painted up in large red letters and the slogan ‘Building a Better Britain’. There were plenty of people who admired Maurice as a man of enterprise, and as many more who mistrusted him as a chancer. Troy was never quite sure what the word ‘magnate’ meant, but perhaps it meant Maurice.

Tel was still talking: ‘Mo made his pile. And suddenly it wasn’t on for me to work in a butcher’s down Whitechapel. I had to have an office job, din’ I? I had to go and work for Mo.’

‘And you don’t like office work?’

‘Not so much that as . . . well, it’s Mo. Mo’d like to own the world. To own the world and then sell it on at a profit. That’s Mo for you. The man who sold the world.’

Tel had uttered this almost sotto voce, and glanced around just to be certain that his brother-in-law was not within earshot. He almost was. As Tel finished his litany, Troy’s eyes met Maurice’s and Maurice quickly crossed the room to clasp his hand. A big man, six foot, well groomed, wearing a black bespoke suit that looked to Troy to be almost as expensive as his own, and certainly better kept.

‘Freddie, long time no see. Not been boring you, has he?’

It had been a long time – Troy couldn’t quite remember when or where. Maurice clapped an arm around Tel’s shoulders, more proprietorial than avuncular. He exuded a bonhomie in which Troy could not quite believe. The smile was too quick, the capped teeth too perfect.

‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘Quite the opposite.’

‘Good, good. Because I mean to steal you away from him.’

Without another word to Tel, the embracing, the captivating arm moved from Tel to Troy and steered him gently to a corner. With the arrival of riches Maurice had changed his tailor but not his accent.

‘I was ’opin’ to ’ave a word. In fact, you’re just the chap I wanted to see.’

‘Ask away,’ said Troy.

‘I’d sooner show you.’

‘Show me what?’

 

§ 23

Troy had tried telling Maurice that they couldn’t simply duck out of a funeral. Kitty would give him hell. And all Maurice would say was that he’d have him back in good time. They crossed the Commercial Road in Maurice’s chauffeur-driven Rover 90 – ‘I could run to a Rolls, but that would be just flaunting it, wouldn’t it?’ – and over into the rough-hewn streets of Shadwell. ‘You worked out where we are yet, Freddie?’

‘Watney Street.’

‘Yep. I grew up here.’

‘And I walked it as a beat bobby.’

‘Let’s walk it again for a couple of yards.’

The chauffeur stopped the car, and Troy stepped out into the closing moments of Watney Market. On a good day, and most were, this was one of London’s most thriving street markets. It was said that in the 1920s you could have run from Commercial Road to the Highway on the heads of the packed punters. Today was their half-day – stalls wheeled away, a mountain of paper and rotting vegetables being swept up.

Maurice turned off the market into Cridlan Street – a narrower, residential street. Troy looked around. It was a timeshift, a backward glance. Many of the houses had broken windows, patched up with cardboard; there were gaping, rotten holes in the doors big enough to let rats in; paint was peeling off every wooden surface; there was rubbish piled up on the pavements; and in the street itself kids as tatty as gypsies played football with a bundle of rags tied up with string upon a sea of broken glass. It was probably the 1930s when Troy had last stood there. It still looked like the 1930s. Time had stood still. Spawned another generation of street kids, but stood still.

‘Mind the dogshit, Freddie.’

Too late. He’d stood in it and was scraping his heel against the kerb when a dashing child all but knocked him of his feet. Maurice grabbed him, yelled at the kid and steadied Troy. Twenty yards on, the child stopped, turned around, held up two fingers and said, ‘Fuck off, ponces.’

Maurice turned another corner, Troy following into Wetmore Street. More kids, more rubbish, more filth.

‘Maurice, is there a point to this trip down Memory Slum?’

Maurice stopped. ‘Why did Labour lose the last election, and the one before?’

‘I’m not going to answer that because you’re going to tell me anyway.’

‘Houses.’

‘Fine. You’ll get no argument from me. The Tories promised to build houses and Macmillan delivered a quarter of a million a year. That was our failing – my brother never stops beating his breast about it. The obvious thing. A nation that had lost hundreds of thousands of houses –’

‘One in three was damaged in the war. One in three.’

‘– and the party of the people couldn’t deliver homes for the people. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

They ambled down the street, round another corner – one more and they’d come full circle – into Holden Street, dodging broken bottles and dogshit in a bizarre game of hopscotch. Maurice stopped at a gap in the terrace, the houses to either side shored up with beams, the rendered column of the fireplaces and flues standing out like the backbone in a fossil.

‘That was my nan’s. Bombed out 1940.Still bombed out in ’59. Now, why is that, Freddie?’

‘I don’t know, Maurice, but Khrushchev said much the same thing on his visit three years ago. “Why do you have bombsites? In Russia we rebuild.” Now, why not cut the history lesson and tell me what’s on your mind?’

‘I want to rebuild. Too much of the East End still looks like this, though I doubt there’s much worse than this that’s still lived in. I don’t want to patch it up, fill in the gaps –’

A door opened. A shoeless young woman with her hair in curlers ran out screaming. A shirtless man, braces dangling, chased after her. ‘Cheese? I go out and do a hard day’s graft and all I fuckin’ come home to is fuckin’bread an’fuckin’cheese! You dozy tart, you dozy fuckin’ tart!’

‘– I want to knock it all down and rebuild. I want to get in the wreckin’ ball, the dynamite and the diggers and start all over again –’

Over Maurice’s head Troy could see up to the first floor of the houses behind him. In one window a pretty young woman stood smoking a cigarette, staring back at Troy. She whipped open her blouse, flashed her tits and beckoned to him with the hand that waved the fag. Troy returned his gaze to Maurice, uninterruptible in his spiel.

‘– not houses like this, with outdoor khazi and no bathrooms. I want to put up tower blocks, flats for working families, with all the mod cons. I want something that stretches as close to heaven as we can get. Fifteen, twenty storeys. Something London can be proud of.’

‘You mean, level it?’

‘Absolutely.’

‘Finish what Hitler couldn’t?’

‘Hitler would have been doing this place a favour if he had. I’m going to do a damn sight more than just level it, Freddie. I’m going to level it, raise it and reach for the sky.

‘Well, I’d have no professional objection. As the districts of London go, this one probably has the highest proportion of criminals of any. It’s often been a subject for discussion when the Yard meets with the divisions. All the same I still don’t see why you’re telling me.’

‘I need political support. I need to talk to your brother.’

‘My brother?’

‘Labour can’t lose again. There’s bound to be an election soon. Rod’ll be Home Secretary any day now . . . Need I say more?’

‘No. But you’ll need to ask him yourself. Indeed, I can’t think why you haven’t. I’ve just remembered the last time you and I met. It wasn’t at the Stiltons’, it was at Rod’s demob party. You flew with his squadron in ’44. You know what the RAF means to Rod. Call him at the Commons. I can’t believe he won’t take the call.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Really. And you’ll have to do it because I’m not going to do it for you.’

‘We’ve not met since the last reunion in 1954.’

‘Trust me, Maurice. He’ll take the call. Besides, whilst I doubt you’re a paid-up member of the Party, I’ll bet that your millions have made the odd contribution to Party funds.’

‘There has been a few quid. When I thought I could help out.’

‘Very coy, Maurice. Can we go now?’

They turned back into Watney Street, emerging at the junction where the market met Cable Street, where the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway crossed high on its way to Essex, and the East London branch of the Metropolitan Line crossed deep on its way under the Thames down Brunel’s tunnel to Rotherhithe. They stood outside the Eel and Mash shop. Maurice waved for the car, all but besieged by kids at the top of the street, and as Troy got in he said, ‘Maurice – why?’

‘Why? Because it’s my street. It’s my neck o’ the woods. As they say Stateside it’s my “briarpatch”. It’s what made me. Even the effort of getting away from it made me. It’s time to give something back. We all have to give something back.’

Maurice sat back in the seat. It seemed to Troy that he was smiling contentedly. He gazed back at the grubby faces of rowdy kids pressed to the windows without concern.

‘Give something back?’ said Troy. ‘And make something while you’re at it?’

Maurice wasn’t smiling now: he was grinning.

‘Goes without saying, Freddie. That’s the way of the world.’

 

§ 24

Troy felt they’d been lucky. Kitty was ready to leave, but hardly champing at the bit. She was chatting happily to another old face from Troy’s East End days – a broken-nosed, pugilistic face, but a handsome one – the boxing promoter Danny Ryan. As Maurice came in he threw a mock punch at Danny’s shoulder, saying, ‘Just taken Freddie back to the old street, Dan.’

Ryan smiled without any more to it than good manners. ‘Whatever you say, Mo. Blow it up, paint it sky-blue pink. All the same to me.’

Maurice moved on. Kitty looked from Troy to Ryan and back again. ‘So, you two know each other?’

‘I knew Danny when I was a beat copper.’

Ryan said nothing.

Kitty said, ‘Danny and I go back a long way. We were kids together.’

Ryan cleared his throat and spoke: ‘I think we were a bit more to each other than that, Kit.’

She touched his arm gently. ‘Of course we were.’ And turned to Troy whilst still touching Ryan.

‘But that was before you and I were . . . you know . . .’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

In the cab heading back West, Troy said, ‘Been your day for old flames, hasn’t it?’

‘I don’t know about that. There was only you and Danny. And Danny wasn’t there as an old boyfriend. He was there because he’d been very good to my mum since my dad died. Not that my mum would ever have asked, but if it were left to Danny she’d never have wanted for anything.’

She caught Troy smiling. ‘What’s so funny, Troy?’

‘The use of the conditional “were”. It’s very American. Twenty years ago you’d’ve said “woz”.’

‘Leave it aht, young Fred,’ said Kitty in pure glottal-stopped Cockney, and her hand took his and gave it a squeeze.

 

§ 25

‘Do you have anything to drink? I mean hard booze. I don’t think I could face another glass of wine, let alone another cup of tea.’

‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘Not much choice, but say what you’d like and we’ll see.’

‘Vodka.’

‘No problem.’

‘Not much choice’ was a lie posing as modesty. Between the squat brick columns that supported the kitchen sink Troy kept his ‘cellar’. Every trip home to Mimram would garner another half-dozen bottles of wine from the genuine cellar that his father had left equally to Troy and brother Rod in 1943, and which, sixteen years on, they seemed scarcely to have dented. For the benefit, mostly, of guests he also kept vodka – Polish as well as Russian to keep Kolankiewicz happy – and whisky, a couple of single malts, which had pretty much the same happiness quotient for Wildeve. And pale ale for those rare occasions when the Fat Man knocked on his door. He picked up the Russian. It wasn’t as strong as the Polish. Something lurking in the memories of his youth left him scared – oh-so-slightly – of a Kitty pissed.

‘I’ll be staying a while. I don’t know how long.’

‘I understand, things to sort out.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘Not a damn thing to sort out. Probate won’t take long. Mum’s will was perfectly straightforward. I’m the executor, me and her sister Dolly. There are small bequests to no more than a dozen people, a bigger one to Tel – always worried about Tel, Tel being the youngest – and the house goes to Vera.’

‘Pretty unequal, then?’

‘Unequal but fair. Vera’s run that house since my dad died. She’s never lived anywhere else. Mum would never have put her in the position of having to sell up and move just so she could divvy a share of it to Rose and Reenie. They’re doing all right. Or, rather, their husbands are. Tom’s got his civil-service pension. They’ll be “comfy” – a very Tom word, “comfy”. And, you’ll have gathered, Maurice has made a fortune since the war.’

‘Impossible not to. If you flick through the pages of the Sunday newspapers, there’s often as not a bit of gossip about Sylvia Steele’s latest abomination for charity in the home pages, something in the financial pages about Maurice, usually a company takeover or a building going up, and another bit about Danny Ryan in the sports. If you’d invited Lady Steele to the funeral you’d have scored a hat-trick. And you? What’s your legacy?’

‘I asked for nothing. Vera wants me to take Mum’s old sewing-machine. A girl’s best friend, as she insists. But that’s a sentimental thing. I might even do it. But I asked for nothing. What would I want with a few quid from the estate? Cal is richer than he ever was, almost as rich as Maurice, which is surprising when you come to think of it. No one in that family has done any work – real work, I mean, not politics – since before the Civil War.’

Troy steered her back to the subject. ‘But all the same, you’re staying.’

Kitty drained her glass and stuck it out for more. ‘There’s something I haven’t told you.’

Troy was quite sure there were thousands of things she hadn’t told him.

‘Cal’s running for president. The primaries start in about six months. He’s already fundraising. Running in a race that’s hardly started yet, and won’t be over till next November. Once I get back, I get back to . . . not chaos exactly, but I know my feet won’t touch the ground till about January 1961.’

Her own words seemed to give her pause for thought and pause for booze. She was getting steadily pissed, but it was a day to get pissed. He was beginning to accommodate the idea of a Kitty pissed. He almost felt he could join her at the bottom of the bottle.

‘Good God, when you say it it sounds like something out of science fiction, doesn’t it? Who ever thought we’d live to see a date like 1961? Imagine writing that on a cheque. You’d look twice at your own handwriting. So . . .I’m just putting a little distance between me and the big race. It’ll be the last chance I get for more than a year if he wins the nomination. If he wins the White House, make that eight years. Tell me, Troy, when you took up with me all those years ago did you ever imagine in your wildest dream that I’d be America’s First Lady?’

Of course he hadn’t. Neither had she. She’d been a chatty, cheeky police sergeant, making her own small piece of history as the first woman ever to run a London nick. He was a rather raw detective sergeant, outranked by Kitty in every sense but the literal. It had all changed with her sudden marriage to Cormack. She had been Britain’s first GI bride, some three years and more before the term had been minted.

‘Have you told the family?’

‘No. They wouldn’t understand. America’s just Hollywood and GI Joes to them. They probably think the presidency’s hereditary. Right now they take the mickey out of my accent. They think that’s really funny. As though I could or should have gone on being the Cockney sparrow. Once I’d explained about Cal’s ambitions they’d be inordinately pleased and boasting to the neighbours about how well Kitty’s done in America, without the first grasp of what America is. Honestly, Troy, I could do without that. I think I need time to think.’

‘Do you know what America is?’

‘As ever, straight to the heart of the matter in a single sentence. You are your father’s son. And the answer is, I’m not sure what America is, but I know I spend a damn sight more time thinking about that than my husband does.’

‘And?’

‘And more booze if you want my thesis.’

Troy topped up her glass, decided to join her and topped up his own. The Kitty Stilton he had known would never have uttered a word like ‘thesis’.

‘America is . . .’ Then she stopped. Swigged vodka and held out her glass again. Troy would never keep up with her at this pace. ‘America is I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver, the World Series and . . . and . . . nothing – that’s what America is. A culture – a popular culture masquerading as a nation state. So there.’

Pissed or sober this woman was definitely not Kitty Stilton. This wasn’t like a chat with Kitty: this was like an argument with his dad, who had unlegged many a donkey on many a subject. In turn this realisation only made his bafflement, the inevitable questions, the more pathetic.

‘I’ve seen I Love Lucy, but what’s Leave It To Beaver and what’s the World Series?’

‘Kids’ programme. Every kid in America watches it, I should think. World Series is baseball – all the major national sides and maybe even one or two from Canada.’

‘Sort of like the FA Cup?’

‘Bigger, more obsessive – you even get women reciting ballgame statistics to you. Fanatic followers. High drama. On a scale you’d never get here. But . . . I Love Lucy, Leave It To Beaver and the World Series are the three things that bind America together and they’re all on television. That’s the level at which America exists – television. I couldn’t argue that it exists as a single nation on any other level – and, of course, America doesn’t know this. War’s different, of course. I got to America six months before they entered the war. It . . . rallied them . . . It fostered the illusion that they might be one nation, but they’re not. Fostered the illusion that they’re the world’s great melting-pot, but they’re not. Did you know Cal was part German? Fluent in it since childhood. As I’ve heard him tell people more times than I’d ever care to count, “German is handed down with the family Bible.” My boys speak passable German. My husband is both typical and atypical. Typically any American who can trace his family to the old country – any old country – does so and never ceases to remind you that they are Irish, Moravian, Lithuanian . . . whatever. But . . . Cal is a hybrid, and that’s rarer than you might imagine. The tribes, there is no better word for them, the white tribes, practise endogamy by and large . . .’

Troy had to think what endogamy was but the context helped. He wondered when in the hurly-burly of raising children she had found the time to educate herself, but she had.

‘. . . and hence we have the strange phenomenon of the ethnic vote. The separate nations that really make up America when the illusions are blown away. Tell me, Troy, can you imagine your brother worrying about the Jewish vote or the Irish vote? Can you imagine the Jews or the Irish voting as a block with one mind? Can you imagine any English politician even thinking in those terms? That’s what Cal will spend the next year doing – wooing, conning, cajoling. Kissing babies, wearing a yarmulka, sporting a shamrock, lying through his teeth. God knows, if the Negroes could vote he’d be wooing them too. And I’ll be there with him. At his side, the loyal wife, mother of his sons. And Troy, my glass is empty.’

Troy had lost count of the number of refills he had given Kitty by the time she persuaded him to lift the lid on the piano. They’d boozed away an evening into a night. She had a remarkable capacity to stay lucid while pissed, but he felt pretty certain she was approaching her limit.

‘Did you ever see The Best Years of Our Lives? You know, Myrna Loy and Fredric March.’

‘Yes.’

‘That scene where Hoagy Carmichael plays “Lazy River”, so soft and slow, his hands hardly moving. Made it look effortless.’

‘Hoagy Carmichael made everything look effortless. “Lazy River”, “Lazy Bones” – he wrote them both.’

‘Play it for me. Soft and slow.’

Troy played the song, as close as he could remember to the version Carmichael had played in the film. Kitty drooped, wilted like a flower, and laid her head on his shoulder.

‘Do you think there is a lazy river – somewhere – anywhere?’

‘Depends,’ Troy said. ‘On what you want from it. I have pretty much what I want out at Mimram – pig in its pen, vegetables green and growing in the kitchen garden, all the Art Tatum records money can buy. There’s even a river Mimram at the bottom of the garden. If I fished I’d hang out a sign that said “Gone fishin’“ whenever I felt like it.’

‘But you’re still a copper.’

‘Call it balance. I’ve never thought of quitting – though I’m pretty certain Stan has come close to firing me more than a few times – and lately everyone else seems to want me to quit but . . . there’s that ole rockin’ chair waiting just to get me . . . but there’s something in the job I need. Never known what.’

‘Well . . . you never needed the money, did you?’

‘And, these days, neither do you, Mrs President.’

‘I don’t want to be First Lady, Troy. I want my lazy river. If I ever find it I’ll become lazy bones . . . sleep in the noonday sun . . . never make another dime . . . and hang out that sign for real – “gone fishin’“.’

Troy changed songs. He could scarcely sing a note, but Louis Armstrong had a highly imitable voice. Troy threw in a few scat noises as deep as he could go and bababoomed his way through it. Kitty wept. When she had stopped, blown a good honk into her hanky, she said, ‘You know, I can’t stand the thought of another day as a political accessory. That’s all a politician’s wife is, about as important as a bloody handbag or a matching set of shoes and gloves. I make him look better than he is on his own – I make him . . . electable. God knows, there’s never been a bachelor in the White House. But I really don’t want that any more. Any of it. I don’t give a toss. I just don’t want it. I don’t want to have to do it or be it.’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want you to take me to bed.’

Kitty Stilton just took; Kate Cormack asked.

 

§ 26

Kitty had none of the self-consciousness of the middle-aged woman, but then, she’d had none of the self-consciousness of the young woman twenty years ago. Modesty was always, by definition, false modesty, of which she had none. No ‘Don’t look at my stretchmarks’ or ‘Don’t look at my spare tyre.’ She had neither: she’d looked after herself. At almost forty-nine she was tall, lean and firm with a better tan than she’d ever have had to show if she’d spent her life in England. At almost forty-four Troy was skinny and pale, a book of scars on which she passed no comment. This was a gentler Kitty. The need was obvious, the haste absent. It was a slower, more gentle lovemaking than he’d ever known with her. And she was setting the pace. He would not have initiated the sexual rage of their younger days, but he would not have objected either. A little rage might have convinced him of his own capacity. He liked slow and easy. He’d rather liked rage too.

Afterwards. Kitty sprawled and musing. Stringing her sentences together slow and breathy. ‘You remember the film?’

‘Which film?’

‘The Best Years of Our Lives. The one you were . . .’

‘Right.’

‘The scene where Fredric March finally gets back to his apartment in whatever one-horse town it is . . .’

‘Of course, they never do tell you exactly where. There’s that marvellous shot from the bomb-aimer’s window as the plane comes in low over Kansas or Iowa or wherever, lasts for ages, and you see the midwest, flat and almost endless, rolling away beneath the plane. I think it’s meant to give you a sense of it being Anytown, USA.’

‘Have you finished? Because I hadn’t. Myrna Loy is in the kitchen. March comes in the front door and shushes the kids, but Myrna Loy . . . I guess she kind of hears the silence. But she doesn’t turn around straight away. There’s a tangible moment of anticipation. You almost hear her breathing. Then . . . well, then . . . you know. That’s not unlike Cal’s return home. I mean, I didn’t think he was dead or anything. In fact, I knew damn well he wasn’t. But it was scary. In 1943 he’d got himself transferred out of Intelligence to a front-line regiment. He could have spent the whole damn war at a desk in Washington, but he wouldn’t do it. Said it would make him sick to see other guys fighting the war while he polished a chair with his trousers. Said he’d had enough of spooks and spookery, scuttlebutt and lies. So he did the honest and stupid thing –he put his life on the line.’

‘So did Rod. Had a desk job working with Ike at Overlord HQ. Once the D-Day plans were fixed he asked to fly again.’

‘Did they let him?’

‘Yes. Led squadrons of Tempests over France. Made Wing Commander.’

‘Cal was a full colonel by 1945. That February the Americans – I should say we, the Americans – landed on Iwo Jima. That was the only time I really thought he might have bought it. About a thousand dead GIs for every square mile. He was there, as much in the thick of it as a full colonel could be. But in the end it was promotion saved him. By the end of the war he was a one-star general.’

‘That’s like what? A brigadier?’

‘Yep. And he was one of the youngest. And he came home in 1946, and it really was like that Myrna Loy moment. Just to touch him. Knowing he was safe wasn’t enough. I had to touch him. Young Walt was born nine months later to the day. Then in ’47 he puts in his papers and says he’s running for the Senate. His grandfather’s old seat. And I said, “I thought you’d had enough of scuttlebutt and lies” . . . but he couldn’t see the comparison. He won the seat easily enough. Catch Cormack’s grandson and a war hero to boot. How could he lose? Even had enough of the adman in him to open the campaign in uniform, with all those medal ribbons across his chest. Soon switched to a suit. That’s Cal. Wasn’t a soldier any more so he couldn’t pretend he was. I said yes to a soldier. For all but the first five years I’ve been married to a politician. Even that was tolerable. But now I’m married to a candidate. And if all goes well for him, the candidate. It’s like being married to a suit.’

They’d just made love. Twice. She had mused away the afterglow talking of her husband. It was as well not to mind. Later, as Kolankiewicz had warned him, Troy’s insomnia returned. She slept, he blazed as though floodlit in the darkness. He tried an American version of counting sheep, working out the names of all those presidents who had been bachelors, not trusting Kitty’s knowledge of history any more than he’d trust her knowledge of quantum physics. Sleep through ephemera. Jefferson had been a widower – one of his daughters had been First Lady . . . which said nothing of the Second Lady, the black mistress, or of their children, born into slavery . . . and Buchanan, had he been a bachelor? Who remembered the first thing about Buchanan? He was about as important as Neville Chamberlain for much the same reasons. Woodrow Wilson had been a widower too, but remarried . . . Perhaps the only contender was Grover Cleveland, who had married during one of his disparate terms of office . . . but which one? However, this altered nothing. Underlying Kitty’s assertion was the inescapable truth that there’d never been a divorced president. In a land that stamped ‘In God We Trust’ on its coins, biblical rectitude was never far away and could be invoked by the most godless of critics. The infidelities of Ike and the curious marriage that had been Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt’s notwithstanding, Kitty could unseat Cal at the first hurdle. He wouldn’t win a primary, let alone the nomination, without a loyal wife by his side.

 

§ 27

He was the worst gumshoe Troy had ever seen. ‘Encountered’ might have been a better word. Troy had not seen him, not face to face and not clearly, but he knew he was being followed. Reflections in shop fronts, a stout man who feigned interest in window displays, turning too quickly on his heel, far too careful to look in Troy’s direction. Troy had spotted him yesterday, which probably meant the man had been tailing him for three or four days – Troy being far from alert, but his tail almost as bad.

He decided to pick the moment and the place. They were at Seven Dials now. Troy dawdled: it would be too easy to lose him now, and he didn’t want that. He led off down Mercer Street, turned left into Shelton Street and left again up Neal Street. One more left turn and the gumshoe would surely get the message. Troy turned right into Short’s Gardens, right again into Endell Street and into the first greasy caff he came to. Three in the afternoon was the right moment, the place was empty – and hence the place was the right place. He ordered two cups of tea and took a table in the middle of the room, facing the window. Gumshoe pretended great interest in the menu tacked to the A board on the pavement. Troy summoned the waitress, slipped her half a crown and asked her to invite the man inside.

He couldn’t hear a word, but the shape of the gumshoe’s lips said, ‘What?’ The waitress pointed back to Troy. For the first time Troy and Gumshoe looked directly at one another. Troy beckoned. Gumshoe looked from him to the waitress and back again. Pushed his trilby hat up his forehead, sighed and stepped into the caff.

‘I ordered for both of us,’ said Troy.

Gumshoe looked at the traditional mess of scum that was a London cuppa. ‘I’m kind of a coffee man, but what the heck?’

An unmistakable New York accent. He stuck his hat on the table and sat down. A man of roughly Troy’s age. Much the worse for wear – stout, balding and red-nosed. Pugilistic, but pleasant. A blue-eyed smile, like the ones Troy so rarely saw on Onions these days.

‘What gave me away?’ He sipped at the tea. Pulled a face and reached for the silver-topped sugar pourer.

‘The hat doesn’t help. Weather’s too warm for a hat. Hats are hardly fashionable in England any more.’

Gumshoe swept the offending object on to a spare chair. ‘Jeez, and I thought I blended in like I was part of the wallpaper. Back home I’d wear a straw skimmer this time of year. Half the men in Manhattan still do.’

‘And your feet.’

‘Not much I can do about them.’

‘You have copper’s feet.’

‘So I should. Nineteen years in the NYPD. I guess we should introduce ourselves. Joey Rork.’ He held out his hand for Troy to shake. ‘I’m a private dick now.’

‘I’m Frederick Troy. And I’m very much a public dick. I’m Chief Superintendent of the Murder Squad at Scotland Yard. But you knew that, didn’t you?’

‘Not at first. I found out yesterday you were a cop. And I’d no idea you were quite such a ranking cop.’

‘Really?’ Troy said. ‘Then why have you been trailing me?’

Rork looked around. Caught the waitress’s eye. ‘Say, can a man still get lunch at three in the afternoon?’

‘No, love. But I could do you egg an’ chips and some bread an’ butter.’

‘Sounds fine.’ He turned to Troy. ‘And you?’

Troy shook his head. The thought of egg and chips made him queasy.

When the waitress had gone Rork slurped at his tea. Troy did not prompt him.

‘In two words,’ Rork said, stringing the moment out. ‘In two words . . . Mrs Cormack.’

‘Calvin Cormack hired you to follow Katherine?’

‘No,’ said Rork. ‘I sincerely hope the Senator doesn’t know. The committee of Democrats to Elect Calvin Cormack hired me. It’s quite a mouthful – they usually just call themselves the Deeks.’

‘The Deeks?’ Troy said, scarcely keeping the tone of incredulity out of his voice.

The waitress slapped a plate in front of Rork, a good half-loaf of skimpily buttered bread. Rork swallowed the first slice in the great maw of his mouth without seeming to chew.

‘Sure. Senator Cormack is a contender.’

‘“He coulda been somebody, Charlie,” ’ Troy said.

Rork almost choked on his second slice. ‘Don’t tell me, don’t tell me . . . Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, right? Him and Karl Malden.’

‘Rod Steiger.’

‘Steiger? Right. Anyways, it’s for real. There is a . . . shall I say a substantial slice of the Democrat Party that prefers the Senator to Hubert Humphrey, to Jack Kennedy, and God knows anyone’s better than Lyndon Johnson. A Texan in the White House. Can you imagine that?’

‘Perhaps next year is the Republicans’ year. Perhaps Mr Nixon is also a contender.’

‘The Veep? Huh? You want to waste thirty minutes one day, sit down and list for yourself the names of all the Vice-Presidents of the United States. It’s a list of losers.’

‘Harry S Truman?’

‘So . . . there’s always gonna be exceptions.’

‘Teddy Roosevelt?’

‘Jeez. I’m beginning to be sorry I spoke. Let me kill this line of conversation once and for all. Veeps get to be pres if the Pres gets blown away. No one is going to assassinate Ike. I like Ike. You like Ike. Everybody likes Ike. There is no way Richard M. Nixon is ever gonna be President.’

‘And Cal is?’

‘Cal? Sounds like you know him?’

‘Knew him.’

‘When?’

‘During the war.’

‘But he was in the Pacific. Enough medals to build a bridge.’

‘And before that, before you lot were in the war, he was in England. How did you think he met Katherine?’

‘I didn’t know, I guess. Nobody told me.’

And Troy guessed that it was a slow-witted gumshoe who hadn’t been able to work this out for himself.

The waitress served Rork his egg an’ chips. He stared at it, knife in one hand, slice of bread in the other.

‘Now you put the chips on the bread and make a sandwich.’

‘You do? Great.’

‘Preferably with this.’ Troy held up a gummy-necked bottle of tomato ketchup.

‘Catsup? Great.’ Rork beamed across the top of his red-running chip butty. A man who had come late in life to one of the great delights of gluttony. Troy refrained from teaching him how to stir the yolk of his egg with a chip, as it looked affected when done by anyone past puberty.

‘Sho . . . you and the Shenator’s wife go back a waysh.’

‘Yes.’

‘Wish kind of bringsh me to the point.’

‘You’ve been sent to prevent any scandal that might endanger Cal’s chance of getting the nomination.’

‘You’re way ahead of me.’

You bet.

‘However, you ain’t the problem. In fact, if you and the Senator’s wife are playing hide the salami, then I admire your discretion.’

Troy had to think about this, but when he did work out what ‘hide the salami’ meant he could only wince inwardly at such a disgusting turn of phrase. ‘I’m not the problem?’

‘Nope.’

‘Then who is?’

Rork pulled last Sunday’s Observer from his pocket, folded open to the showbiz page. He tapped a large box advertisement with his forefinger. ‘Dis palooka.’

It was an ad for the London Hippodrome, a theatre in the Charing Cross Road, only yards from Troy’s house and only half a mile or so from where they were sitting. For the next month its stage would be filled and, doubtless, its stalls packed by the presence of one Vince Christy, a smoke-voiced American crooner who owed a lot to Frank Sinatra but had been sharp enough to learn a thing or two from Johnnie Ray. He wasn’t as big as Sinatra, and never would be, but he’d outlasted Ray, survived the Elvis revolution, and had a reputation as a singer nowhere near as newsworthy as his role as one of Sinatra’s Ratpack.

‘Tell me,’ Troy said.

Rork was well into his trough. Face stuffed full of what he undoubtedly called French fries. ‘You know much about Vince?’

‘No. I know he’s in the Ratpack. And I don’t think he’s married to June Christy.’

‘He ain’t. And he can’t sing half as well as her. Fact – his name ain’t even Christy, it’s Cristofero da Vinci.’

‘Any relation?’

‘To Leonardo? Nah. When he was a teenager in Hoboken he was a house painter – painted my mom’s apartment on West 47th once – so bad she wouldn’t pay him. So I figure not. But he’s Italian. That’s what matters. Italian, connected and proud of it.’

‘Proud enough to change his name?’

‘That’s showbiz. That’s America. Take me, for example. Rork, R-O R-K. A hundred and more years ago the name was O’Rourke. I don’t know what happened to all those missing letters. America just does that. Your ancestor gets off a boat, finds himself facing an Immigration and Natz guy who can’t spell pretzel, and the next thing you know Suleiman Yuriakamsohn from Lodz is Jack Solomon from Brooklyn. Believe me, that happened to my sister’s father-in-law. Word for word. Then, maybe a generation later, a little fame beckons and a guy whose old man got through with his name in one piece feels he has to sound like he’s an Anglo. You know who Angelo Siciliano is? Course you don’t. ’Cos everybody knows him as Charles Atlas. It’s just showbiz. It don’t mean nothin’. Changing his name don’t make Vince less than Italian, don’t make him less than Sicilian. If you catch my drift.’

Troy caught it. And said nothing. His father had changed the family name too. Troy was more ‘Anglo’ than Troitsky. Troy had no feelings about it one way or the other.

‘So,’ Rork was saying, ‘Vince is connected. Not a made man you unnerstand but . . . connected. There are people who say he owes a few career breaks to those connections. You remember that war film from a few years back, Hell Is a Crowded Place? Vince gets pulled from the quicksand by William Holden?’

‘The one set on a Pacific island? Christy, Holden and that tall chap – wooden actor, can’t remember his name.’

‘Ronald Reagan, used to be a sports commentator, “Dutch” Reagan. Shoulda stuck to it. Anyways, Ole Vince beat off some serious competition for that part. Actors who could act the pants off him – Dana Andrews wanted it, I heard, but Vince got it and he didn’t have to sing a note. So, you see, Vince has influence, so when he and Mrs Cormack became, like, an unofficial item . . .’

Rork did not finish the sentence. Plied his elbow to finishing his chips instead.

‘When?’ said Troy.

‘’Bout two years ago. The Senator’s wife took to spending a lot of time on the West Coast. After all, the kids are in private schools, her husband is up to his keyster in paperwork . . . A woman gets lonely.’

Bored more like, Troy thought. Bored would be much more like Kitty. She’d changed less than he had imagined in all those years away. Cal was still a cuckold.

‘So she took up with Vince?’

‘Vince fell for her hook, line and sinker. Nobody’s sure how long it lasted, and everybody got lucky. The only paper to run with it was a Los Angeles scandal sheet, a kind of Who Boffs Who, a one-man gossip operation. The Party sent round some heavies and gently persuaded the guys to drop it. Week or so later some of Vince’s compadres went to see him and broke both his arms. Guy runs a laundry now.’

‘So you’re not here because Katherine’s actually having an affair. You’re here to stop her taking up with an old flame.’

‘Something like that. Once we got word that they’d be in England at the same time, it seemed like something should be watched. So I’m watching. And instead I find you.’

‘But I’m discreet?’

‘Believe me, if my hat hadn’t just gone out of fashion I’d take it off to you.’

‘So, what’s your problem?’

‘Vince knows she’s here. This tour of his is a very last-minute thing. He’s come to London for Katherine Cormack. I think he thinks no one will be watching, or maybe that no one will care. Think about it, who gives a plug nickel about the reputation of Senator Cormack over here? Who’s even heard of him? I figure the average Londoner has heard of Ike and Adlai and that’s about it. You and I could stand on any street corner in this town with photos of Nixon or Kennedy and most people wouldn’t know ’em from Charlie Chaplin.’

‘If Katherine and Christy get back together, and if our press picks up on it, and all it would take would be one Slickey of a gossip columnist, you realise they can’t be leant on?’

‘I was kind of hoping to get to them before that stage. I was kind of hoping that you might slip me the goods ahead of the press finding out.’

‘Mr Rork, whatever makes you think I’d do that?’

‘The old quid pro quo. You let me know if Vince comes sniffing, I don’t tell no one about you and Mrs Cormack.’

‘That sounds ominously like blackmail.’

‘Nah . . . it’s like you guys always say, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ said Troy.

Rork had finished his plateful. Sat clutching his last slice of bread.

‘Usually,’ Troy told him, ‘one wipes the plate with it.’

‘One does?’

‘De rigueur,’ said Troy.

‘Jeez. And there was I thinking of all that lovely gloop going to waste and it would be the height of bad manners to mop it all up.’

‘Only amongst the middle classes. The rest of us don’t give a damn.’

Rork polished the china, sat back and grinned. ‘So, Topcop, whaddya say?’

Troy thought about it, watched the contentment of repletion spread like a roseate glow across the man’s face, watched him pop the first button on his flies, heard him belch politely into his clenched fist. This man was too stupid to get involved with, but he could see no merit for himself or Kitty in being the focus of a scandal. ‘You know where I live. I think you’d better tell me where you’re staying.’

‘Cheap hotel in Gower Street, the Cromarty. My expense account don’t run to Claridge’s.’

‘Well, I hope it runs to egg and chips and two teas,’ said Troy. He got uptoleave.

Rork twisted his bulk in his chair to say to Troy’s retreating back, ‘You gonna keep in touch or what?’ but Troy had gone.