Troy dug last Sunday’s Observer out of the rubbish and found the advertisement for Christy’s concerts. He wasn’t due to open for another week – unless he was completely winging it that meant he was here now, resting and rehearsing. He folded it open and dropped it on the coffee-table hoping it would look casual. It didn’t. He twisted it this way and that and gave up. She’d spot it or she wouldn’t. She’d comment or she wouldn’t. He wasn’t going to raise the name of Vince Christy with Kitty. He owed Cal nothing – Rork and the Democrats absolutely nothing. If she wanted to fuck Cal out of the presidency Troy would not care – but it came to him as he sat and tune-pootled at the piano, weaving ‘My Old Flame’ into ‘The Man I Love’ and wondering somewhat slightly at the nature of his own unconscious, that Kitty didn’t care either, that she had stated her wishes the first night she had tumbled him into bed. Cal wanted the White House; she didn’t. He began to wonder if she had set this up to stop him. He did not doubt that Gumshoe was right. A sex scandal would sink Cal, even at second hand. Middle America would have no regard, no sympathy for his own innocence and probity: Cal would be damned by his wife’s actions. A sexual liaison between the putative First Lady and a Mafioso crooner would rock America. God help their delicate sensibilities if they ever found out the truth about Senator Kennedy. When Troy had known Jack before the war he would, as the cliché had it, fuck anything with a pulse.
Troy was still at the piano when Kitty got in. He’d given his unconscious free rein and had moved to ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’, by way of ‘Why Don’t You Do Right?’ and ‘Sentimental Journey’. It was almost dark. Kitty kicked off her shoes, stood behind him, hands upon his shoulders, slipping to his chest, her face buried in his hair, a hug so fierce he broke rhythm and stopped.
‘Don’t stop. Play one more, just one more.’
Troy began a slowed down, bass-heavy version of ‘Makin’ Whoo pee’, the pace of his playing running counter to the nature of the song. Such slow, languid whoopee.
‘Makin’ whoopee. Such a good idea.’ Kitty took him by the hand and led him up the stairs. Undressed him then herself, pushed him back on the bed.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘that I once had the pleasure of makin’ whoopee in Macon, Georgia?’
‘That’s an awful joke,’ he replied.
‘True, though.’
It was too late in the day for his eyes to keep focus. The Kitty who rose and fell and thrashed on top of him was a woman-blur. He wished he could see her face. The touch, the scratch, the sweat rolling off her and on to him. But he wished he could see her face. He came into her, a wet rush that soaked his belly, and Kitty landed on his chest, breasts flattening on him, his face smothered by her hair. One last whisper of ‘whoopee’ in his ear before she fell fast asleep.
He felt the pleasure of her rage.
And suddenly he had, in his mind’s eye, a clear image of Gumshoe, at one end of the alley and then the other, looking at his watch, noting the time Kitty arrived, noting the time she came and waiting for her to leave, and he hated it. It seemed like violation.
The eyes-wide, head-thumping inner glare of insomnia woke him just before dawn. More than half-light seeping in through his bedroom window. Now he could see. Like a Battle of Britain pilot on carrot juice. Kitty had thrown off the covers in the summer heat. He could see the curve of her hip, the soft round mound of her arse. Tempting. Close enough to touch. She would surely wake? But when the telephone rang at the bedside she did not even stir. Jack. It had to be Wildeve.
‘I hope this is one of your sleepless nights, Freddie.’
‘I’m alert. In fact I’m full of lert.’
‘Can you see all right?’
‘Yes. It usually begins the day well and starts to wear out after lunch. Now’s a very good time.’
‘Good. Get dressed. I’ll pick you up in ten minutes. There’s a body I want you to see.’
Then minutes later Troy stood in St Martin’s Lane, waiting, unwashed and unshaven, almost certain he could still smell Kitty’s perfume lingering on him. The street was empty of traffic. Jack roared up from Trafalgar Square in his big black Wolseley.
‘Are you sure you’re up for this?’
‘Do I look that bad?’ Troy asked.
Jack sniffed the air. ‘You smell better than you look. And my infallible totty-indexing system tells me that isn’t Miss Foxx’s perfume. Why women always seem to want you when you’re only firing on two cylinders has always baffled me.’
‘Vulnerability,’ Troy said. ‘Now, where are we going?’
‘Hertfordshire. Pretty well to Harpenden. They’re building a new – what d’ye call ’em? – out there.’
‘Autobahn?’
‘Nope.’
‘Freeway?’
‘Nope.’
‘Motorway – that’s it. Motorway. The new London to Birmingham road.’
‘Motorway it is. There’s a bit of elevated highway – flyover, I believe is the jargon – just outside Harpenden.’
Arc lights made the earth-moving equipment seem like monsters from childhood nightmares. A local bobby led Wildeve and Troy between metal-toothed giants, around concrete columns, through a roofless pagan cathedral to the heart of the new technology: a scraped-clear circle of compacted clay by a wooden hut. By the time they got there Troy felt as though he’d arrived at a place of primitive sacrifice. Instead of Isaac and Abraham, they had a site foreman in a hard hat, a police sergeant in uniform, and a small figure kneeling next to a dark mass of tarpaulin, shirtsleeves rolled up, Homburg pushed back on his head. Kolankiewicz.
He turned as they approached. ‘You should be in bed,’ he said bluntly to Troy. ‘This bugger drag you out at crack of dawn just to look at a stiff?’
‘I’m happy to do it. I’m at my best in the mornings.’
‘I known you twenty-five years. You’re always crap in the mornings.’
‘Well, there’s nothing like a bang on the head to change the habit of a lifetime. Now, can we get on?’
Kolankiewicz stood up, hands caked in mud and cement and human gore. ‘It’s not a pretty one.’
‘Show me.’
Kolankiewicz whipped back the tarpaulin. It was Bosch-like – so many bodies were – large bits of flesh and bone set in concrete, hacked out and hacked up. Kolankiewicz had made an attempt to reassemble the body. Looking past the distortions created by the lumps of concrete, Troy could discern the outline of a human form. This was the body of a tall man, age indeterminable to Troy, who had had the misfortune to be decapitated and hacked limb from limb. There appeared to be no sign of the head.
‘How long?’
‘Impossible to say with any accuracy, but allowing for the good weather we’ve had recently and the state of decomposition, say thirty-two hours. Maybe forty-eight.’
Troy turned to the site foreman. ‘What can you tell us?’
The man tilted his hard hat up a little. Looked down at the corpse, drew breath and looked straight back at Troy. It was as though he found bodies on a daily basis. ‘We clad the supports with wooden shuttering. You can’t fill ’em all at once or it takes too long to set and you get cracks. Takes four days to fill a support as big as this. Yesterday morning we poured concrete. But the boards split and we had to redo it tonight. When we knocked out the last day’s work we found this.’
‘In the top layer?’
‘Right. Top layer.’
‘That means the body was dumped yesterday?’
‘Had to be or it would have been further down and we’d never have spotted it. Site was empty last night.’
‘A night-watchman perhaps?’
‘Keeps the insurers happy. Most night-watchmen nod off before midnight. I’ve even known buggers get hired as watchmen who were deaf as bleedin’ doorposts.’
Troy and Kolankiewicz knelt down. Wildeve conspicuously kept his distance.
‘OK. Follow the bouncing ball. First no head.’
‘I had noticed.’
‘No hands.’
‘They don’t want him identified.’
‘They don’t call you smarty arse for nothing. But what I want you to see are the cuts and breaks. Look at the femur. The incision, if you can call it that, begins about half-way between the greater trochanter and the lateral epicondyle. It then careers raggedly-jaggedly to emerge an inch and a half lower on the inner side.’
‘So?’
‘Whoever did this knew nothing about anatomy.’
‘Do they ever?’
‘Some murderers, as well you know, have a precision that matches mine and a cunning that matches yours. This bloke is an amateur. He killed and then disposed of the body with whatever was handy. In this case I rather think some kind of mechanical saw.’
‘A chainsaw?’
‘If that is indeed the term, yes, a chainsaw.’
‘Good God. I hope he was dead when they did this to him.’
‘He was. Now . . .’ Kolankiewicz picked up his geologist’s hammer and chipped away at the cement casing on what Troy took to be a section of the humerus.
‘See. Same again. A quick, ragged cut at the deltoid tubercle. A neat butcher would joint the corpse – literally, by incisions at the joints. Anything else is messy, blood and bone fragments everywhere. If you ever find out where they did this, there’ll be more evidence than they could ever wash out or sweep up.’
‘Well, there are certain advantages to the chainsaw if you don’t mind mess. It’s quick. But it’s not for the squeamish.’
On cue they both turned to look at Wildeve. He was listening, and looking and not getting too close. He hadn’t spoken in a while.
‘Are you all right?’ said Troy.
‘Fine,’ Wildeve lied. ‘Just thinking.’
They turned back to the corpse. Kolankiewicz took up his hammer again and picked up a blob of cement about the size of a cricket ball. It cracked open like a walnut. He hacked away at the interior, picked up tweezers and teased the skin of a small, fleshy object away from the sides.
‘Greaseproof paper in my bag. Quick.’
Troy held out a strip and Kolankiewicz gently placed a severed penis on it.
‘Amazing,’ said Troy.
‘How so?’
‘It puts us into a different league. You chop off a bloke’s head and hands, and there is motive and purpose. Without them we stand next to no chance of identifying the body. Chopping this off serves no purpose. It’s . . . gratuitous.’
‘Barbaric would be my word.’
They stood again.
Wildeve moved closer. ‘What’s up?’
Troy acted on instinct. Put his hand over the penis. Spoke on instinct. ‘What were you thinking, Jack?’
‘That it might be Bernie Champion.’
‘It’s not.’
‘How can you be sure?’
‘How long’s Bernie been missing? Ten days? A fortnight?’
‘He need not necessarily have been dead all that time – if you’re going by the rate of decomposition.’
‘That’s a factor, but it’s not the clincher. Bernie Champion was Jewish. None of King Alf ’s lieutenants were goy. House rule. Look at the cock.’
Troy held out the offended object on its strip of greaseproof paper. Mangled manhood. A two-inch squib, severed intact from the body – intact to the tip of its puckered akroposthion.
Wildeve went white. Looked at the fading moon and pinched the bridge of his nose. It was thirty seconds before he spoke. ‘Sorry. I was being dumb. I don’t suppose there’s such a thing as an uncircumcised Jew, is there?’
‘Not in Alf Marx’s gang, and not in Bernie Champion’s generation. I got invited to a couple of Brith Milahs in my time in Stepney. They’re loaded with symbolism. A boy is not quite a Jew until it’s done. I rather think the first test for joining Alf ’s mob was to drop your trousers.’
‘Makes my blood run cold,’ said Jack.
In the presence of a body that had been totally dismembered, limb from limb, limb from torso, head from neck, cock from balls, this struck Troy as unnecessarily squeamish. But, then, Jack was famous for puking at the scene of crime. It was a minor blessing he hadn’t yet. But the day was young.
‘Oh,’ Kolankiewicz said, with an air of remembering something he had forgotten to mention, ‘there is one more thing you should know now.’
‘And?’ said Troy.
‘I examined the backside before you got here. The rectum is full of semen.’
Wildeve leaned over and vomited.
Troy could not resist. It spelled temptation, it spelled stupid, and he did it just the same. He had to see for himself. Part of him, the larger part of him, was relieved when the box office at the Hippodrome told him they were sold out for the next two weeks: Vince Christy’s music did nothing for him. He would kill an hour or so in the pub, then wait by the stage door in an alley off Cranbourn Street, itself but a stone’s throw from Leicester Square.
What surprised him was the age span of Christy’s fans. He found himself at the back of a throng of thirty or forty women who were anything from fifteen to fifty. Not that that seemed a large number – Tommy Steele and the new teen heart-throb Cliff Richard had been mobbed at personal appearances, and forty-odd didn’t make a mob – but they screamed in what Troy could only think of as a sexual frenzy, the way women had at Sinatra in the late 1940s. If this ever became the norm, if Elvis ever got out of the army and played England . . .
He turned over a dustbin and stood on it to get a better view. Christy must be just inside the stage door, or they were screaming at no one. He saw a stout man with thinning hair crushed among the women. He turned, as though feeling Troy’s eyes upon him. It was Gumshoe. Gumshoe without his hat. Troy would hate to be Gumshoe right now, he thought. One step too far and they’d trample him. Troy got a good look at Christy as he ducked out of the stage door and into a white Rolls-Royce – the famously wavy hair, the famously orange suntan, a beaming, pearly smile as he threw signed photographs into the air and used the scrum he’d created to dive into the car with a leggy blonde in tow, her face hidden by dark glasses and a headscarf. Troy would like to be her even less – they’d rip her to pieces if they could. As the Rolls pulled away, a dozen of the younger women pursued it, banging on the doors and windows. At the end of the alley it turned left into Leicester Square, half the crowd was gone, and suddenly Troy could hear the murmur that remained. A sad, tearful sound of joy half glimpsed, of pleasure half denied. A girl of seventeen or so was kissing Christy’s photograph, and saying, ‘My lovely,’ to herself, over and over again. Some of the women were slumped on the ground where they’d dived to grab a photograph. It looked like the closing scene of Hamlet, after all the betrayal, after all the slaughter. He’d no wish to cast himself as Fortinbras. Too late the hero. It was . . . repellent.
Troy walked out into the square. A cab was parked a few yards down, towards the Empire, its back door open. The cabman waved at him. Troy ignored him. He cut through the alleys to St Martin’s Lane and emerged by the Salisbury, opposite Goodwin’s Court. The same cab was parked there, back door open. The cabman waved again. ‘Sorry to trouble you, guv’ner. The fare wants a word.’
Troy looked into the darkness of the cab.
A small woman, dressed in black.
‘Freddie?’
His sister Masha.
‘Oh, Freddie.’
‘What’s the matter?’
He held out a hand. Masha took it and pulled herself to her feet, stepped out of the cab and wrapped herself round him. He didn’t think she’d done this since they were children.
‘You’d better come in for a bit,’ he said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on . . . or something.’
A polite cough from the cabman.
‘How much?’ said Troy.
‘Twenty-seven an’ six, guv’ner.’
‘What?’
‘We was stood up by the ’Ippodrome an age with the meter running.’
Troy fished in his pocket, found a pound note and a ten-bob note. The cabman trousered the lot, said, ‘You’re a toff , sir.’ And drove off.
Troy found himself supporting a sobbing Masha. Like it or not, the night was going to cast him, deus ex machina, as the late-arriving hero.
‘What is it?’
‘The bastard.’
‘Which bastard? There’ve been so many in your life.’
‘Vince.’
‘What?’
‘We went to the Dorchester. Wouldn’t even see us. Sasha just said “Well, fuckim, then.” But I couldn’t do that. I had to see for myself.’
‘I didn’t know you—’
‘His last tour, nineteen forty-nine. The winter he played the Palladium. Sasha and I . . . well, you know. We had him. Had him all winter. A lovely, juicy, Italian-American sandwich. Lots of lovely garlic and basil and mozzarella and Cole Porter all wrapped up in me and my sister. Now he won’t even speak to me.’
‘As you said. A bastard.’
‘Did you get a look at his bit of totty?’
‘Yes. Blonde. Tall – well, taller than you. That’s about all I could tell you.’
‘So that’s it. Blondes are in. And dusky beauties pushing fifty are on the scrap-heap. Bastard.’
‘Come inside. I’ll put the kettle on.’
‘Do stop saying that, Freddie. It’s so bloody English.’
He made a pot of tea that neither of them drank. It sat on its little tray with its china teacups, just to remind them they were almost-English.
He sat opposite Masha while she dried her eyes and told him a tale of unequalled heartbreak.
‘Lawrence has left me.’
‘What?’
‘He’s gone off to live at Albany. Some old crony from his army days has lent him a flat. He’s having an affair.’
The words ‘pot’ and ‘kettle’ competed for space in Troy’s mind.
‘He’s having an affair with Anna Pakenham.’
‘I see.’
‘Do you, Freddie?’
‘You’re not blaming me?’
‘No, I’m not. You introduced them, but it’s hardly your fault if my husband decides to go off and fuck her, is it? There’s only one person to blame for that.’
‘Does Lawrence know about . . . ?’
‘About all my affairs? Yes. I’ve never rubbed his nose in it, but I’ve never made a secret of it either. I shouldn’t think for one second he knows the half of it, but to know even a fraction would be enough. And do you know what really hurts?’
Troy could not even begin to guess.
‘She’s younger than me. Isn’t she?’
‘I suppose she is.’
‘Suppose bollocks you know damn well the woman isn’t even forty!’
‘I think she’s thirty-nine.’
‘And I’m forty-nine!’
Masha dabbed at her eyes with her hanky, fought back a sob. ‘That’s why it was so important to me to see Vince, to – to have him again. I was thirty-nine that winter he and I and Sasha – but now I’m forty-nine, I’ll be fifty next spring. At thirty-nine I was perfectly acceptable. Now I’m an old bag!’
‘You’ve kept your looks. You don’t look anywhere near fifty.’
She didn’t, but it struck Troy as a minor miracle. This was a woman who had danced naked on the rim of hell for thirty-five years.
‘That’s very sweet of you, Freddie. But the fact of the matter is I’ve been turned down for younger women twice in one week. My life is in pieces. My children don’t want to know me. I can’t even begin to think how I’ll tell them if Lawrence opts for divorce. Dammit, Freddie, I’m fifty years old and there’s no one in my life. No one. A loyal, decent man has left me for one of your cast-offs – it is over between you and her, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Troy lied. When was it ever over?
‘And a shit of a man I shouldn’t let near me with a bargepole, who I only want because I want to be wanted, treats me like a rag he’s wiped his thingie on and thrown away. Jesus Christ! I keep asking myself, what have I done with my life? What have I done to deserve this? To have it all come down to this. What have I done?’
She sobbed now without restraint, slid off the chair to her knees and puddled on the floor. Troy gently lifted her up, and sat her on his lap, much as she used to do with him when he was nine or ten and she was fifteen and he’d grazed or cut or bruised himself.
It was like watching a ship approach on the horizon. Troy could see. And seeing it so clearly did not offer any way out. It had that same sense of inevitability. Heading for them inexorably and, however indistinct, never less than obvious. Masha slumped on him, wept into his chest. A woman several times larger than life now seeming smaller than she was, curling up like a child, her feet not touching the floor. Then her head lifted and Troy saw the wind hit the sails, felt the rigging stretch taut, and saw her face approach his, a close and blinding blur. She kissed him, he kissed her back – foundered on the barren skerry of her want.
Masha fumbled. Clumsy as a teenager. His shirt tore, buttons pinging off like bullets; her knickers snagged on her heels and she ripped them off with one hand without bothering to look. She fell back on the floor, he banged an elbow and pulled back, wincing. Masha locked both hands behind his neck and drew him down.
‘Please,’ she said. ‘I have to have someone right now. Please.’
She wriggled and scrambled until she had her skirt round her waist, his trousers pushed below his arse, his cock in her hand ready and far too willing.
He found he had literary expectations of incest. An arsenal of clunky metaphors mostly to do with looking-glasses and cameras, all telling him what he was supposed to feel in the midst of the outrageous. But it didn’t feel outrageous. It felt like the culmination of a long seduction his sisters had begun on him before he was ten. They’d dressed and undressed in front of him, bathed in front of him, fucked all his friends, bored him with the details of every love affair they’d ever had. All, from the vantage-point of being flattened on her breasts and joined humping at the groin, seeming like a mixture of flirtation and proxy-sex. He wasn’t outraged at himself or her, simply because it felt as though they’d done this all their childhood days. And what was childhood but a journey without maps? What was the adult life but the piecing together of the jigsaw of childhood into a map, into the illusion of coherence? It felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.
Part of his mind was asking when the searing light of common sense might return. As it usually did, one split second after the betrayal that was orgasm and ejaculation? But it didn’t. Once he had recovered an ounce of energy he took her by the hand and pulled her to her feet. She cast off the rest of her clothes, with not a hint of coyness, stepped out of her high heels, stood naked in the light of a forty-watt reading lamp while he kicked off his. Then they went upstairs and fucked again.
The cricket sat upon his shoulder. He flicked it off with a finger.
It was still dark. Not quite dawn. Masha was standing, pulling her hair out of her eyes with one hand, vaguely looking for something with only moonlight to search by. ‘My clothes?’
‘Downstairs. Where we left them.’
She was not hiding. At least, not from him. Not yet. She stood, five foot two in bare feet, stark naked, half in shadow and half out, looking back at him and said, ‘Downstairs?’
‘Downstairs. On the floor.’
‘On the floor?’
‘We did it on the floor. We came upstairs when you said your back ached.’
‘Did we?’
She went down to gather up her clothes. Any minute now he expected to hear the door slam. With that, reality would surely return. But she came back upstairs, laid her clothes across the chair and got back into bed. Side by side, looking straight ahead not at him.
‘I really hate having to wear yesterday’s knickers. It makes staying over anywhere such a drag. At least I’ve spared myself that. They’re ripped to shreds. Sasha always carries an extra pair in her handbag, but I’ve never really known if that’s her idea of forward planning or an advert.’
‘Let’s not mention Sasha,’ he said.
‘She wouldn’t understand.’
‘I doubt many people would.’
‘No – I mean she wouldn’t understand being left out.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
There was a pause as Masha lay on her back and arranged her hands, the heels of each upon a breast, fingers pointing heavenward, tips touching like the buttresses in a church roof, thinking. ‘You know, Freddie, I don’t think we should ever tell anyone. Not anyone. Not ever.’ Then she said, ‘Would you just hold me? That’s all. Just hold me.’
He wrapped an arm round her. Ah, well, he thought, there were worse things in life than fucking your sister. Weren’t there?
Troy lay awake watching the dawn light bounce off the wall of the building opposite his window. Masha was sleeping now, her breathing regular as a metronome. He caught the phone at its first ring.
Jack. Again.
‘There’s been another. Much closer to home. Adam and Eve Court.’
‘Where?’
‘It’s an alley behind a pub in Wells Street. Leads from Eastcastle Street to Oxford Street. Shall I pick you up?’
‘No. I’ll walk over. I’ll be there in about a quarter of an hour.’
It was so familiar. And a shock to think he had not been abroad in the city at this time of day in ages. It was London bleached out, its day only just begun. Winos around Soho Square, growling at him incomprehensibly, a crazed monologuist, poised flamingo-like on one leg in Great Chapel Street, pointing a finger at Troy and calling him a ‘sinner’, to no denial from Troy, prostitutes in Berwick Street smiling at him, a beat copper in Poland Street who recognised him and saluted, and then the crush of police cars and detectives in Oxford Street at the narrow entrance to the unlikely named Adam and Eve Court. Once he saw it he knew it. He’d just never known it had such a momentous name.
They let him pass with murmured good-mornings, yawning and sighing. For a second Troy wondered if he smelt of sex, then realised these men had probably been up all night and reeked of beer and fags themselves. Jack’s car was parked face on at the top of the alley, headlights on dip to light up the court better than the day could manage at that hour. Jack was nowhere to be seen.
Kolankiewicz said, ‘For once I cannot blame him. This one is messy.’
He lifted a rubber sheet. Rearranged by someone with a passing knowledge of human anatomy, these bloody joints of meat might pass as a facsimile of something that had once been a living, breathing human being. This one had not been dead as long as the other: it was wet with blood and guts. The smell of it smothered beer and fags. Smothered sex. Smothered everything except the stench of vomit when Wildeve returned. ‘Sorry, chaps. I’ll be fine now. Have you got anywhere?’
Troy said nothing, Kolankiewicz said, ‘It looks much the same. Male. About twenty. Big. Put Humpty back together and I’d say about five eleven or six foot. Big in the chest and arms, plenty of muscle, not much under fifteen stones. And just like the last, no clothes, no head, no hands . . . and no cock that we’ve found. And taken apart with a mechanical saw.’
Kolankiewicz draped the rubber sheet over the remains.
‘Semen?’ Troy asked, talking to Kolankiewicz but watching Wildeve.
‘Yes.’
‘And where was the body?’
‘In dustbins, with the night’s rubbish from the pub. Binmen found it about an hour ago,’ said Jack.
‘Then it is different from the last. They tried to conceal the last.’
Kolankiewicz said, ‘Is it not concealment of a sort?’
Troy said. ‘No. I think we were meant to find this one.’
And Jack said, ‘I agree. They’re making no effort to hide it. In fact, they’re taking the piss. They’re holding up two fingers to us, and yelling, “Catch us if you can.” ’
They left Kolankiewicz to it. Driving back towards the Tottenham Court Road, Troy said, ‘Taking the piss? Isn’t that what you said about Brock getting blown up?’
‘Don’t remember,’ Jack replied.
When Troy got home Masha had gone.
Troy was pootling – he could term it no better – through a version of Erroll Garner’s version of ‘I’ll Remember April’. The left hand still baffled, slam-dunking down so solidly he couldn’t believe it wasn’t a clenched fist. The telephone rang.
‘Hiya, Topcop.’
‘How did you get this number, Mr Rork?’ Rork said, ‘I knew you had me down for some kind of dummy . . .’
Correct.
‘. . . but I’m not such a shmuck I can’t work an angle and get hold of an unlisted number.’
‘The embassy?’
‘Ask me no questions Topcop . . .’
Still a shmuck.
‘. . . and I’ll tell you—’
‘Cut the crap, as you Americans are so fond of saying, and tell me what you want.’
‘What I want is to take you out to lunch and do you a favour.’
‘You mean you want to pick my brains?’
‘Jeez . . . Did a bear eat your nuts in the night? Ease up, Mr Troy.’
‘OK. Where are you?’
‘I’m in the pub opposite the end of your alley. I figured we could go back to the diner and have egg ’n’ chips again.’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I’ve a better idea. A much better idea.’
Out in St Martin’s Lane Troy managed to beckon to Rork and flag down a cab with a single gesture.
‘Where to, guv?’
‘Do you know a good eel-and-mash?’
‘Watney Market, guv. Pete Wallis’s Eel Pie.’
‘No,’ said Troy, for reasons he could not fathom. ‘Not Watney Market. What’s the name of the one in Whitechapel? The Mile End Road.’
‘If there’s one there’s ’alf a dozen.’
‘Frank . . . Frank. . .?’
‘Frank Tritten’s. You mean ole Tritt-Trott’s.’
‘Why so?’ asked Rork, settling back in the cab.
‘A culinary delight.’
‘Such as?’
‘Let me surprise you. The journey should take about twenty minutes. You can tell me what’s on your mind.’
‘Nah. Let’s have a working lunch. I prefer to do business over lunch.’
‘Have you been busy? I know you went to see Christy. I saw you there.’
‘And I saw you, Mr Troy. But it’s who else I saw that figures. All in good time. I shall – what’s the word? – relish the adventure. We goin’ east right? I’ve never seen the East End. During the war I used to listen to Ed Murrow. All those planes, all those bombs. All those plucky Cockneys. Got to admire those guys.’
‘That,’ said Troy, ‘was a long time ago.’
Rork gazed out of the window. Every so often he’d point to the obvious and ask, ‘St Paul’s, right?’, ‘Tower of London, right?’, or variations on that theme.
The cab pulled up in front of Frank Tritten’s Fish and Mash in the Mile End Road, halfway between Whitechapel and Stepney Green Underground stations. Troy paid off the driver. Rork stared at the sign over the window.
‘Is this, like, the native cuisine?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘That’s exactly what it is.’
They took seats. A wooden booth – a table as solid as a butcher’s slab, a gleam of moisture across its swirling veins – a steamy smell of fish in the air. Rork sloughed off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves with the look of a practised trencherman before he’d even glanced at the menu.
‘Anything that’s de rigger?’
‘Well, I don’t think one should look at the ladies while they eat,’ said Troy.
They had arrived as a group of four old ladies were finishing their eels. It looked to Troy to be a weekly outing, a ritual they had probably begun as young women at the turn of the century. They were dressed as only old women could be, in the fanciful hats and long skirts of the Edwardian era. Perched on the edge of modernity, for ever lost in a sunnier, bleached-out age buried under two world wars. Gumshoe could not resist and turned to look just as the old ladies, one after another, whipped out their false teeth, spat them into their handkerchiefs and sucked, toothless and gummy, on bones of eel, cheeks collapsing like tents in a blizzard.
‘I guess not, but I meant more what’s de rigger on the menu. What’s unmissable. Now – what would you recommend?’
‘The eels,’ said Troy. ‘I can definitely recommend the jellied eels.’
‘You been to this neck o’ the woods before?’
‘My first beat as a uniformed copper, 1936.’
‘Mine was South Bronx. Same year.’
‘Or a plate of whelks. . .’
‘Y’know I’m kinda peckish. Great word that – peckish. Sounds like something Charles Dickens made up.’
‘You’re thinking of Pecksniff. In Nicholas Nickleby or Martin Chuzzlewit.’
‘Could be . . . whatever . . . but it sounds just like what it means. Peckish. I’m peckish, so maybe I’ll have both.’ He turned to the waitress – ordered ‘like big helpings’ with three rounds of bread and butter. ‘An’ you?’ he said to Troy.
‘Oh, I’m still recuperating. You know. Invalid food. Just a bowl of vegetable soup and a cup of tea.’
Troy was going to enjoy this. He’d never met anyone not born to it who could get through a bowl of jellied eels or a plate of whelks. Most non-Londoners were put off simply by the appearance. Most wouldn’t even taste them. He’d been hoodwinked into trying them his first day in Stepney by his old mentor Sergeant Bonham. A sergeant and two old coppers giggling into their tea while an upper-crust rookie choked on one of the most disgusting textures ever to foul his palate. Salt and rubber. Never again.
‘Like you said, Topcop, I been busy.’ Rork pulled a small folder of photographs from his jacket pocket.
‘Which implies that Mrs Cormack has been busy.’
‘Yep. But not as predicted. See for yourself.’
He fanned out the photographs across the marble. Troy took out his new reading-glasses, an inevitable and he hoped less than permanent consequence of his injuries, fought off self-consciousness and sifted through the pile. Some simply showed Kitty shopping in either Bond Street or somewhere very like it. Running through her husband’s millions. None showed her with Vince Christy. One had Kitty and Troy emerging from Goodwin’s Court into Bedfordbury, at which point Gumshoe seemed to have given up on them, for the majority showed her with one man. Getting out of a cab, emerging from the Quo Vadis, entering the Gay Hussar, on the steps of Claridge’s, flagging a cab outside the Embassy club, embracing in the street, a stolen kiss by London lamplight . . .
‘You see my point?’
‘Impossible not to.’
‘You know this palooka?’
‘Yes.’
‘And?’
The waitress bought Troy the time he craved. Slapped a fishy feast in front of Rork and one small bowl of synthetic-looking vegetable soup in front of Troy. Rork delayed the inevitable. Swallowed a slice of bread almost whole, belched delicately into his fist and, as he reached for his fork, said, ‘So?’
Troy hesitated. Waiting for the first quiver of revulsion on Gumshoe’s face. Gumshoe bit down, Gumshoe munched and Gumshoe smiled.
‘Not bad. Not bad at all. Tell me, Topcop, you ever eat gefilte fish? Me, I’ll eat anything. Gefilte fish, chop suey, shish kebab. Anything. Only thing I can’t abide is pretzels – cardboard with salt on. My ex-wife says I have a stomach like a basement boiler. But, like I was saying, you try gefilte fish and food holds no terrors for you. Sits on the belly like lead shot. This, now, this is good. Do they have places like this in Soho? I could eat like this every day.’
Gumshoe one – Troy nil, thought Troy.
‘You know what it needs?’ Rork was saying, whirling around in search of a waitress. ‘Just a dash of horseradish. Not the white, the red. The red horseradish would suit to perfection.’
Troy accepted defeat politely. ‘If you want gefilte fish, try Bloom’s about a hundred yards down the street. Now, you were saying?’
‘Oh, yeah . . . mmmm . . . man, this is. . .’
If Rork had had false teeth he, too, would have been spitting them into his hanky the better to suck on the bones.
‘Just get on with it. I can survive without a running commentary.’
‘Sure. Whatever. This guy. This guy she sees all the time. That is, when she ain’t seeing you. You know him?’
‘Yes. I know him.’
‘Un-huh?’
‘Daniel Ryan. About Kate’s age. They grew up together. Not half a mile from where we’re sitting now.’
‘Like, old flames?’
‘Yes.’
‘Like you?’
‘No. Not like me.’
‘Suit yourself. What can you tell me about him?’
Troy wondered if this was perspicacity or chance phrasing – that Rork had not simply asked, ‘What do you know about him?’
‘He’s no “palooka”, as you put it. He’s one of our most successful boxing promoters. Perhaps not a national figure, but certainly a London face.’
‘Boxing?’
‘Been in it since before the war. Ambitious, honest. Would love to stage the world heavyweight fight here. Unless I’m mistaken he was in America earlier this year to talk to Floyd Paterson’s people about a possible bout.’
‘With whom?’
‘I don’t follow the sport, Mr Rork.’
‘Boxing? Boxing? Ambitious?’
‘Yes.’
‘Honest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Y’know, I don’t think there’s such a thing as an honest fight promoter. In the fight game everybody’s for sale and everybody’s bought.’
‘Not Danny Ryan.’
‘You saying it don’t happen here? That fighters don’t get bought? That fighters don’t throw fights they could win? The punchy bums like Primo Carnera don’t get to the top by fights staged for easy wins? I know boxing, Mr Troy. I seen Marciano defend his title. I seen Jake LaMotta fight more times’n I can count. I’m a New Yorker. LaMotta’s a New Yorker. New York is Fight-town. I polished a seat with my ass at Madison Square Garden a hundred times. Take it from me, it’s a bent business. You say it don’t happen here? I say nuts.’
‘No – I’m not saying that at all. That sort of thing happens. Of course it does. I’m simply saying that Danny Ryan is known as one of the straightest people in the business.’
‘Is that saying much? The best of a very bad bunch?’
‘Maybe not.’
‘Is he married?’
‘Widower, I believe.’
‘Anything else could fuel a scandal?’
‘I think you’ll find the scandal is all on Kate’s side.’
Rork pushed his bowl aside and started on the whelks. Whatever pleasure he derived from them was masked by the look of professional concern. ‘No, no, it’s not. Your word won’t be enough. I can’t go back to the Deeks and say the Senator’s wife is boffing a boxing promoter. The first word they’ll utter will be “Mafia”. Boxing is dirty, that’s all they know and all they’ll see. If this breaks and the press get it it would be as bad as an affair with a professional hit man or a Nazi on the run. Bad news, Topcop, very bad news.’
‘You know your country. I don’t. In fact I haven’t been there for thirty years. But if you’re right, I don’t see what you can do about it.’
‘Do? Do? We have to tell her, that’s what. We have to warn her off this guy.’
‘We?’
‘OK. You got me there. I mean you.’
‘And what do you want me to tell Kate?’
‘Just to stay away from—’
‘And how do I know this, Mr Rork? How do I know Kate is screwing Danny Ryan? Because you told me? Because you produced your sordid little snapshots? If I do that, your cover’s blown. Kate knows she’s being followed. What do you think she’ll do? Mutter “mea culpa” and give him up? Or is it possible she’ll call up the Deeks and fire a broadside into their intrusion into her privacy?’
Rork munched on his whelks for a moment. Jammed another slice of bread into his mouth. ‘I guesh not. I guesh maybe I hadn’t thought that part through.’
‘Damn right you hadn’t. There’s no way I can tell her. You’d just better pray that she stays lucky and that you’re the only one who catches Kate and Danny Ryan in the same frame. No one will be watching Danny Ryan. The press are all over Vince Christy. Look at it this way. You already got lucky.’
Rork pulled a second envelope of photographs out of his pocket. ‘Maybe you’re right. Cos Vince has been a very busy boy.’
He fanned out the photos. Christy and his rented Rolls-Royce at the stage door, the screaming fans, the lucky few who got picked.
Troy had to admit that whatever magnetism the man had worked like a charm. He sifted through a bevy of English beauties. All conforming to a type – Vince clearly had a thing about slim, tall blondes. A film of moisture stuck the last photograph to the one above. Troy prised them apart. Vince and a girl entering the Dorchester. Another leggy blonde girl. But the girl was a woman. And the woman was Foxx.
Troy was in more than half a mind to call on George Bonham. It was a short walk to Cressy Houses and he hadn’t seen the old man since he didn’t know when. But then ‘he didn’t know when’ was so easily pinpointed. George had nurtured him as a fledgling copper and never failed to show up at whichever hospital he’d been in at whichever crisis in his life as wunderkind of the Yard. Of course, Troy had seen George only weeks ago – he just wasn’t wholly sure he remembered it. And then he remembered, instant and total recall, meeting the man at Edna Stilton’s funeral, the conversation he had had with him, down to the last word – and even more he wondered at the tidal nature of his memory. He put Gumshoe in a taxi. Rork rolled down the window and said,
‘Mañana.’ He’d accepted Troy’s word. Troy wasn’t going to tell Kate Cormack a damn thing.
‘Mr Troy, sir?’
Troy turned round. A young man in his early twenties stood facing him. A bony five foot nine, a mouthful of gleaming, smiling teeth and the uniform of a Hendon police cadet. All boots and buttons.
‘You don’t remember me, do you, sir?’
How Troy hated to hear those words. One more reminder of the number of things, of faces, of people he didn’t remember. But the youth’s implied opposite was right: there was something terribly familiar about him.
‘Robertson, sir. You knew me as Shrimp. But me real name’s Samuel.’
Troy’s memory produced, rabbit-from-hat, an image of a boy of eight or nine years, small for his age, standing between Anna and the Polish Beast at his bedside in the London Hospital. The summer of 1944 revisited. Just a couple of days after D-Day. Him post-op from the bullet Diana Brack had put into him, the boy gruesome and shameless in his curiosity – ‘The Tart in the Tub Case’, as the press had so cruelly dubbed it – and the boy’s urgency, ‘It was the posh bird shot you, wasn’t it?’ and his own monosyllabic reply. And how grateful he’d been that the boy had not asked who had shot the posh bird, who had killed Diana Brack.
‘You’ve . . . you’ve joined us?’
‘Pass out next month, sir.’
The sweet flush of pride passing over the young man’s face.
‘You’re what now, Mr Robertson?’
‘Call me Shrimp, sir, everyone still does.’
‘Twenty-five?’
‘Twenty-three, sir. I was just a nipper when I searched that bombsite for you. I was nearly nine. All the other kids was bigger’n me, even them wot was younger’n me. I applied to join the force when I was eighteen. But I was too little. I’ve wanted to be a copper ever since that day you hired all us scallywags to search for you. It was me found the cartridge case, if you remember. Cost you an extra ’alf a dollar that did. But, like I said, at eighteen I was too little, so the call-up got me instead. National Service, two years of square-bashin’ an’ bullshit – ’scuse my French. But I grew two and a half inches in the army. Must have stretched me a bit, too, I reckon. And I couldn’t settle well into Civvy Street again, couldn’t see meself cuttin ’air like me old man, or drivin’ a bus like me uncle Ernie, so I gave it a couple of years and reapplied. They took me. It’s all down to you, Mr Troy, I’d never’ve thought of becoming a copper if it wasn’t for you . . . and then when I saw you comin’ out of the caff I just had to say . . . like . . . well . . . thank you.’
It was a stunning little speech. The weight of responsibility fell on Troy like cold porridge on to linoleum. ‘Actually, Shrimp, I’m on my way to see Sergeant Bonham – he’s retired now. You remember Mr Bonham, I’m sure.’
‘O’ course, sir. Old Bigfoot, we used to call him. If I had a tanner for every clip round the ear’ole I got from Mr Bonham . . .’
‘I wonder if you’d care to come along and risk another clip round the ear’ole?’
‘Don’t mind if I do, sir.’
The Shrimp fell into step with Troy as they crossed the Mile End Road and headed for Stepney Green. Troy saw him glance at the walking-stick, but he asked no questions. Why would he? thought Troy. It had made the papers: it would be the talk of Hendon College. How often do chief superintendents of the Yard get blown away on the streets of London?
Bonham answered the door in his floral pinafore – a six foot seven friendly giant armed only with a sink plunger.
‘It’s the tea leaves,’ he said. ‘They block up the sink. I’d tip ’em down the karzey but they stain the porcelain and bleach’ll never shift it. Ethel used to moan at me for doin’ that.’
Ethel had been dead for the best part of twenty years and still Bonham spoke of her as though she’d nagged him about it only yesterday.
‘And ’oo’s the newboots, then?’
‘Good afternoon, George,’ Troy said.
‘Arternoon, Freddie.’
Bonham swung back the door and ushered them into the cramped living room of the flat. Neither Troy nor the Shrimp had answered his question and he regarded the boy quizzically. ‘I never forget a face, you know.’
‘I’m sure you don’t, Mr Bonham.’
‘Give us a clue.’
‘When did you last get your hair cut?’
Bonham snapped the fingers of his left hand. ‘Robertson. Young Robertson. Wilf Robertson’s boy. I ’ad me barnet done only last week. Yerdad neversaid.’
‘There are some things me dad wouldn’t boast about, Mr Bonham. Me bein’ a copper bein’ one of them. He thinks no one will ever tell him anything again. And what’s a barber’s life without gossip?’
Bonham thought this truism the funniest thing he’d ever heard and disappeared into the kitchen, chuckling to himself. Troy heard the soft pop of the gas ring go on. Warming up for the English tea ceremony. Robertson looked around the room. Ten by eight, if that. A cupboard by the standards of Troy’s home life. Troy followed his gaze. The glass display case that had once held Ethel Bonham’s plaster dogs and china trinkets was now stuffed full of dog-eared whodunits, the hideous wood-cased chiming clock that had been George’s retirement gift from the Met, the framed photographs of the Bonhams’ long-since-grown-up children.
‘George raised three kids here,’ Troy said softly.
‘I know, sir. I grew up in a flat just like it. Me an’ three sisters. You wouldn’t believe the freedom of bein’ in digs in Mill Hill. All the space in the wardrobe, me own room, and better still me own bed.’
It was another world to Troy, and he could see that Robertson knew it as he said it. ‘Have you thought about your first posting?’ he asked.
‘I’ve thought about it, sir,’ the Shrimp replied, with precision.
Bonham bustled in with a tray of cups and saucers, muttered, ‘sugar,’ to himself and bustled out again.
‘It’s a tricky one,’ the Shrimp added.
‘Wot is?’ said Bonham as he returned. ‘Sit down, sit down, the pair o’ye. No point in cluttering the place up.’
He sat on the edge of the armchair next to the unlit gas fire, noticed his pinny and yanked it over his head. ‘You might have told me.’
‘I thought it suited you,’ Troy said. ‘Mr Robertson and I were just discussing his first posting.’
‘Wot’s so tricky about that? There’ll be a job for you here. Paddy Milligan’s still the divisional detective inspector. Mr Milligan’s a pal of me an’ Mr Troy. A word from either of us and you’ll be in. In where you belong. On your own manor.’
Robertson accepted the proffered tea and sat with it perched precariously on one knee. He looked at Troy and then addressed himself to Bonham. Bonham slurped tea and failed to see the expression on the boy’s face. ‘It’s that that’s tricky, Mr Bonham.’
Bonham didn’t get it.
‘I know Stepney Green. I know it too well, Mr Bonham.’
Bonham set down his cup and saucer. ‘But where else would you go?’
‘I’m thinking about that right now.’
‘Where else would you go? You’re a Stepney lad, a Cockney sparrer. Where else would you go?’
‘It’s . . .’ The boy looked directly at Troy.
Troy took refuge behind a sip of tea. He’d had too many conversations like this with Bonham when he was younger.
‘It’s a matter of loyalties, Mr Bonham.’
‘Loyalties?’
‘Loyalties.’
‘Good,’ said Bonham. ‘A man should have loyalties. To his own borough. To the force. To his fellow officers . . .’
‘To his childhood mates.’
‘Them too.’
‘That’s the problem, Mr Bonham. Not all my childhood mates are on the same side.’
‘Eh?’
‘Mr Robertson is saying,’ Troy intervened, ‘that some of his childhood friends are criminals.’
Bonham looked flustered, as though on the edge of anger so rarely expressed. ‘But we don’t have loyalty to villains!’
‘Don’t we, George?’ Troy asked.
‘Freddie. I expect that in that arsy-versy toff world you come from the old school tie might stretch a long way. But round ’ere the old school is Redman’s Road Infants. I went there, young Shrimp went there. And we don’t ’ave no old school tie. The first loyalty is to the force. If your old pal’s a villain you owe him bugger all. Cos if he’s villain he ain’t a pal no more.’
Bonham was thumping the arm of the chair with each word, bringing up a cloud of dust with every blow. He was right. It was another world. When Troy thought of his old pal Charlie and the things old Charlie had done for which he would never be caught or tried or sentenced . . . Men like Charlie belonged in jail. And Troy had been one of those who had declined to send him there. Just a little he envied the simplicity of George’s moral scheme, the absence of ambergooities – the ease of absolutes. He could not share them. Neither, it seemed, could the Shrimp.
Troy and the Shrimp parted company at the corner of Jubilee Street and Adelina Grove.
‘You’ll be all right, Mr Troy?’
‘Of course. I’ll either hop on the Underground at Whitechapel—’
‘Hop, Mr Troy?’
‘Stumble, Mr Robertson, and if I do I shall give up the effort and flag a cab. And you?’
The Shrimp pointed off down Jubilee Street. ‘South, sir. My eldest sister’s place in Watney Street.’
‘I patrolled that as a beat copper when I was your age,’ said Troy. ‘I think I can say it was the toughest street I ever had to walk.’
‘You should see it now, sir. Tough doesn’t begin to describe it.’
‘And your sister?’
‘Got her name down for a council flat. She’ll be relieved to get out. She skivvies, Jim skives, and the little ’uns grow up in a house and a street that should have been bulldozed years ago.’
‘And you?’
‘Me, sir?’
‘Think about George Bonham’s offer. If you do decide to come back to Stepney we’d both of us put in a word with the DDI.’
Troy gave Robertson his card, the one with his home number and no rank – Frederick Troy, Goodwin’s Court, wc1. Robertson thanked him, shook his hand more vigorously than Troy thought necessary, and set off down Jubilee Street with not a hint of copper’s plod in his step. As he passed the Stiltons’ house Kitty’s sister Vera appeared in the doorway shaking her dusters – her pinafore matched Bonham’s to the petal. She spoke to the Shrimp, turned and looked straight at Troy without recognising him. It was the first victory for memory Troy had scored that day. Others’ failings cheered him to the point of unrepentant schadenfreude.
‘You’ve no right to ask me that. No right at all.’
Troy sighed so audibly that Foxx was sure to have heard it at her end of the phone. ‘I’d no idea you were going to be quite so hostile.’
‘Troy, I am not hostile. You made your bed. Lie in it. And lying in it means not asking me questions about any man I might be seeing now.’
‘Might? You are seeing Vince Christy. That is a fact!’
‘I never thought you’d stoop to spying on me.’
‘I’m not.’
‘Then who is?’ She yelled the last line at him as a blast of searing rhetoric. It required no answer in her mind.
He had one all the same. ‘A private detective from New York.’
‘What?’
‘A former NYPD officer.’
‘What?’
‘An ex-New York cop.’
‘What the bloody hell does an ex-New York cop want with me?’
Troy could almost hear the clunk as the penny dropped. He dropped his voice to a tone he thought placatory. ‘He’s bent. I’ve been trying to tell you that for the last five minutes.’
There was a long silence.
‘Supposing this ex-cop is wrong.’
‘I don’t so suppose.’
‘Then humour me, you bastard. Try to see it my way!’
‘And . . .’
‘And it’s very handy for you, isn’t it? Gives you the perfect excuse to warn me off Vince. You and I break up and suddenly out of nowhere an ex-cop appears to give you the perfect reason to nag me about—’
‘I’m not nagging you. I’m warning you.’
‘Oh, Troy, fuck off.’
‘He’s not just bent, he’s ma—’
All he heard was the dial tone rattling in his ear.
Foxx was making her own bed as surely as he had made his. He was not about to let her lie in it.
Less than a minute passed before the telephone rang. She was going to hear him out. But it was Jack.
‘Just thought you’d like to know. We found the cock from the Adam and Eve body.’
‘Where?’
‘In a plain brown envelope, addressed to me at the Yard.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘You know you reminded me what I’d said about taking the piss?’
‘Yes – but I was wrong. It was Onions.’
‘No matter. It’s exactly what they’re doing. Taking the piss. Puts me in mind of that letter Neville Heath wrote to the Yard in ’47.’
‘Forty-six.’
‘Whatever. He wrote to old Bill Barratt with a pack of lies. But it was saying the same thing. “You can’t catch me.” Then he went right out and butchered another woman. “You can’t catch me.”’
‘But we did. And justice was done. And he hanged.’
‘So he did.’
When the phone rang three days later, in the middle of the morning, it was Paddy Milligan, divisional detective inspector at Stepney. Troy and Milligan had been friends for two or three years only, and he was the kind of man Troy felt it would be easy to lose touch with. ‘A bit of a loner’ was the way Paddy was often described, and despite the fact that it might easily have applied to Troy himself, he thought it an obstacle to the job Milligan did.
‘It’s been a while.’ Troy stated the obvious.
‘Been back home. Liverpool.’
Milligan paused. Troy heard him breathe in as though embarking on a topic his instincts told him to avoid.
‘It’s my dad. He’s got the cancer in his lungs. Truth is, Freddie, I don’t think the old man’ll last long.’
Troy and Milligan were about the same age. How old would the man’s father be?
Milligan read his mind.
‘He’s sixty-nine. No great age.’
‘Cigarettes?’ Troy asked.
‘Mustard gas,’ said Milligan, and Troy felt utterly stupid that he had not seen at once that in giving him his father’s age he had fixed the old man as a Great War veteran.
‘It’s taken up a fair bit of my time, I can tell you. I’m all he’s got. I’ve used up all me holiday time, and a fair whack of compassionate. However, that’s not why I’m calling. There’s a young chap name of Robertson just coming through Hendon College, wants to work out of my nick. George says the two of you know him.’
‘Well, George has known him all his life. I wouldn’t be amazed if he’d been there with the midwife. I think we can both endorse the boy. He has good local knowledge, and he’s not just rushed into being a copper because of some childhood notion of glamour. We turned him down a few years back. He’s done his National Service and he still wants to be a copper. I call him a boy, he must be twenty-three or four. He’s had time to find his way first. I think that’s admirable.’
‘Suits me,’ said Milligan. ‘I’ll stamp his papers and get him down here. An extra bloke would be good right now.’
‘You mean you’ll still have to go back to Liverpool?’
Another breathy pause. Milligan was not a man easy with his own emotions. ‘Were you there when your old man died, Freddie?’
‘I was, as a matter of fact. He had me and my brother read aloud to him in the last few days. I was there when he spoke his last words.’
‘Then I’ll say no more. I have to be there. If the job came first, if he died while I was down south, I’d never forgive meself.’
For ages now Troy had resisted running Foxx to earth. But if she wouldn’t talk to him on the telephone, what choice did he have? He’d walked across Soho, almost to Regent Street, across the bottom of Berwick Market, along Broadwick Street and zigzagged the west Soho maze into Kingly Street. ‘Street’ was an overstatement. It was a long alley. One car wide. Running parallel to Regent Street on one side and Carnaby Street on the other. Unlike its neighbours, it was dark and sunless, dwarfed by the backs of the department stores in Regent Street. It was rag trade without the rags, the tailors preferring the lighter shop fronts of Carnaby Street. When Foxx had come into a small fortune three years ago, Troy had been mildly surprised at her practicality. There had been no spree. She had bought a long lease on the shop, and set up her own business importing and selling the clothes and accessories she liked. In this one crowded shop in Kingly Street you could buy ‘Americana’, and he was not at all sure whether that was a real word or one he’d made up, that was obtainable nowhere else in London – blue jeans Foxx insisted were called Levis, leather jackets like Marlon Brando wore in The Wild One, sunglasses like the ones James Dean wore in he forgot what film. It was, he readily conceded, a good idea. Perhaps a little ahead of its time, but a good idea. What he’d never been sure of was the street. It seemed the wrong street. Nonetheless, her business had prospered, and they had lived together as a couple of wholly independent means. Her money was her money. And apart from her fights to the United States two or three times a year to stock up the shop, they had not been apart until now.
There was a neon sign, a blue flicker in the shop window, ‘Grapes and Wrath’ (Troy had always liked the wit of this: most would have settled for the corniness of ‘Stars and Stripes’), and in the room above the dim orange glow of a reading lamp behind the curtain. Next to the trade bell for the shop was a new bell marked simply ‘Flat’. He pressed it several times, but there was not a sound from above nor the slightest movement of the curtain. He stood for ten minutes, telling himself every time he looked at his watch that he would go in thirty seconds, but stood an hour or more. Then he walked to the top of the street, as far as the London Palladium, then he walked back to the bottom, as far as Beak Street. When he had done this a couple of times he noticed a beat bobby watching him and realised that he, too, would regard this as slightly suspicious behaviour in anyone he did not know. But the bobby did know him, saluted, asked after his health and moved on. It was nearly midnight. He was tired. He stepped out into Regent Street, fagged a cab and went home.
When Troy got in he found a large man asleep on the sitting-room sofa. The arm had been let down at either end and still the man hung off it. Head over one end and feet over the other. Feet, in all accuracy, was foot. One foot stuck out from under a blanket, at the other end a ginger head snored whisky snores, and in the middle of the carpet stood the other foot, attached to a tin leg. Also attached to the tin leg was a note:
Strange woman in your bed.
Yrs
Angus
James
Montrose
Tobemory
Pakenham.
PS you appear to be out of Scotch.
What, thought Troy, was the mad bugger doing here? It seemed logical that Angus might not want to go home to his wife, Anna, but why here? Why me?
Not putting the light on he groped his way upstairs and from bathroom to bedroom. As he slipped into bed Kitty woke and wrapped an arm around him. ‘You saw the guy on the couch?’
‘I could hardly miss him. He’s six foot four. Did you have to let him in?’
‘He seemed lonely. Said he was a friend.’
‘He is. After a fashion. Couldn’t you have packed him off to your room at Claridge’s?’
‘Like I said, he seemed lonely.’
Troy weighed this one up. Angus never looked lonely. Angus always looked like what he was: a crackpot. War hero, decorated war hero, survivor of Colditz et cetera – but a crackpot. No, if loneliness was an issue it was far more likely to be hers than his, and loneliness was not what Troy would have called it.
‘You didn’t?’
‘I might have.’
‘Jesus Christ, Kitty!’
‘What harm does it do? You weren’t here. You didn’t have to watch.’
‘In my bed?’
‘’S OK. I changed the sheets.’
‘But. . .’
‘But what?’
‘He’s only got one leg.’
‘That’s OK too. He can still get the one leg over.’
‘What would you do if you met a man with no legs?’
‘Inventiveness would come to my rescue. Where there’s a will and all that malarkey.’
‘I don’t bloody believe this!’
‘Troy, could we go to sleep now? You’re making my brain ache.’
In the morning Troy woke to find Kitty had slipped out. The banging and rattling coming from the kitchen could not be her, accompanied as it was by an off-key baritone rendition of ‘Danny Boy’.
Troy dressed quickly and went downstairs to see what the madman was up to. He was rambling and scrambling. Philosophy and eggs with brown-bread toast. Troy accepted breakfast and ate while Angus fluffed up more eggs for himself.
‘Glad you were in. I’ve been meaning to come round for a –’
‘You mean,’ said Troy, ‘that you’re glad I was out.’
‘– bit of a chat. And don’t go bearing grudges. Do I pout and go sullen when I catch you in bed with the wife?’
‘You have never caught me in bed with Anna. And the last time you even suspected I might be you threatened to take off your tin leg and thrash me with it.’
‘Ah . . . I was younger then.’ Angus dropped two slices of bread into the toaster.
‘It was only a couple of years ago.’
Angus stirred his eggs with a wooden spoon. ‘It’s the last couple of weeks that concern me now. I have had, for want of a better word, a revelation.’
Angus found a neat pause in cooking and leaned over the table like a preacher with a lectern.
Oh God, thought Troy.
‘You will agree, old son, that we are middle-aged?’
Troy said nothing.
‘And that middle age itself requires a survival strategy?’
‘Eh?’
‘The necessity is a plain one – to reinvent the self. To change from the man I am to the man I would be.’
‘And what would you be?
The toaster pinged. Angus turned, caught the two slices deftly in mid-air, slapped them on to a plate, scooped up his scramble and, in what seemed to Troy to be a bit of flashy kitchen choreography, pivoted on his good leg, and sat down opposite Troy with his breakfast steaming up his nose. Only the clunk as his tin leg collided with the table spoilt the effect.
Angus winced. ‘You won’t believe how much that hurts.’
‘You were saying . . .’
‘Indeed I was . . . I’ve given it a lot of thought. One must see to the heart of the age in which one lives. Changing oneself is merely—’
‘Angus. You cannot change yourself.’
‘No?’
‘You can change. But you can’t change yourself. You can’t will it.’
‘I do hope you’re wrong there. I was going to say that changing oneself is just the prelude to changing society. And to do that you must know where your society is, where its heart is.’
‘OK. So what do you mean to do?’
‘Simple, really. Weighed it up. Looked at it from all angles. Pros, cons, you know the score. As I see it, either I join a skiffle band or I stand for Parliament. Since I can’t – as you may have gathered – keep a tune for more than about five seconds and as I do not own a tea chest or a washboard . . .’
‘You want to be an MP!’
‘Quite. Which is why I needed to see you. I was wondering if you might have a bit of a chat with your brother. No point in beating about the bush, is there? Could be an election any minute. Rod could be Home Secretary any day now. Got to get meself a safe seat.’
‘Angus, are you even a member of the Labour Party?’
‘Details, Troy, mere details.’
‘I think you’ll find Rod will not agree. And the answer’s no. You want Rod to pull strings for you, call him yourself.’
When would people stop using Troy as an earpiece to get to his brother?
‘Have you considered standing as an independent?’
‘Buggers never stand a chance. Party system runs the whole shebang.’
‘That rather depends on where you stand. Why do you think Rod stood for Hertfordshire? Because he was local. Local connections can still count for a lot. An English public-school accent notwithstanding, weren’t you brought up in Scotland?’
‘As a matter of fact, I’m from the Western Isles. My old dad cut quite a figure there before the war. I take your point. There’d be a bit of kudos in standing where I’d be known as old Hector’s son, but it’s an urban constituency I want. The belly of the beast.’
There was no way Angus was ever going to get the belly of the beast. There was no way Troy would ever mention this loony request to Rod. He got up to push the plunger on the cafetie`re. The action seemed to break the spell of Angus’s obsession, and he changed the subject. ‘About the wife.’
‘What about your wife?’
‘This new bloke of hers.’
Troy feigned innocence. ‘Anna has a new bloke?’
‘Good God, Troy, do the two of you never talk?’
‘About men? Hardly at all.’
‘Well, I thought she might have mentioned this one. It’s your brother-in-law, that git Lawrence Stafford from the Sunday Post.’
So – he knew after all.
An hour or so later the two of them stood on the doorstep. Troy had been edging him towards the door ever since breakfast. Angus took one step into the yard, and said, ‘Just a jify. I owe you this.’ He rolled up his trouser leg. The sun glinted on the tin as he flipped open a door in the leg to reveal a full bottle of Scotch, held in place by an ingenious system of straps and flanges. He unhooked it and handed it to Troy.
‘Got the old boy in Colditz village to make me the cubby hole when I lost the leg in ’42. Used to hide trowels and hammers in there during the war, goons never found ’em, and for a whole month I had the camp wireless tucked away in there, with the leg acting as an aerial. It’s probably one of life’s rarer experiences to feel the buttocks vibrate to the rhythm of the BBC Home Service. Nowadays I have better uses for it. This is the business. None of your blended muck. A good single malt from Skye. Talisker. Goes down like nectar. Try to save some for me.’
He legged off, swinging his tin prosthesis like a cricket bat. Out, side, forward, down, clank. At the end of the alley Troy caught sight of a figure beating a hasty retreat. It looked to him remarkably like Gumshoe.
It was three days before he heard from Gumshoe again.
‘I was wondering if I could buy you lunch.’
‘OK,’ said Troy.
‘But this time I get to pick the joint.’
‘That’s OK too. Where did you have in mind?’
‘You heard of a street called Strand?’
‘Mr Rork, there are Malay bandits in the eastern jungle, there are Bushmen in the Kalahari, there are pygmies in the darkest reaches of the Belgian Congo who’ve heard of the Strand.’
‘Oh – so it’s kind of like Fifth Avenue?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Okey-doh. Meet me at a joint called Simpson’s. I hear it’s the best burger bar in town.’
The maître d’ greeted Troy by name. Troy hardly ever ate at Simpson’s, but it had been a haunt of his father’s – and it was the memory of the old man they were greeting rather than the living son. Troy did not have to ask for Gumshoe. He had bagged a corner booth to the right of the great fireplace. He was facing the room, waving at Troy, and wearing that little-short-of-salivating look that Troy had known overtake aged members of the aristocracy to the detriment of heart, liver and life. Many a toff , Troy thought, would doubtless choose not to die unless he could take it with him – although it was the doctrine of the Anglican faith that you could take it with you– but if he had to die at all he would prefer to die in Simpson’s, fork in hand, ready to meet his Maker on a gastronomic high.
‘Swell, huh?’
‘You could say that,’ Troy replied. ‘Or if you had a talent for half-way decent prose you could say it was a Temple to Food. At least, I think that’s what P. G. Wodehouse called it.’
‘Wodehouse?’
‘The writer.’
‘Oh, yeah . . . H. G. Wodehouse, like War of the Worlds?’
‘That was Wells.’
‘Right. Orson Welles. Y’ know, I was in New York when he did it on the radio. All those Martians landing in New Jersey. Scared the bejasus out of the whole city. Now – to business. What would you recommend?’
‘Well, you won’t get whelks or eels.’
‘Everything in its place,’ said Gumshoe. ‘And I was thinking of something more in the beef line.’
‘In the beef line? OK. Flag down the carver and see if he has any beef Wellington.’
‘Why’s it called that?’
‘After the Duke, I would imagine. Can’t say I’ve ever given it much thought.’
‘Right. Duke Ellington. Very American. He’s from Washington, y’ know. Saw him play Carnegie Hall, Christmas of ’47. Johnny Hodges did this great sax medley – “Junior Hop” . . .’
Troy raised a hand and fagged the carver.
‘. . . “Jeep’s Blues”. . .’
The carver, so fagged, wheeled his carnivore’s cart to their table.
‘. . . “The Mood to Be Wooed”. . .’
Troy stopped the flow of reminiscence –
‘. . . nobody is as mellow as Hodges, not even Ben Webster . . .’
– and pointed out the beef (W)Ellington.
Gumshoe looked from the beef to the waiter and back again. Troy thought he might be in danger of drooling. Perhaps suggesting one thing was a mistake. Why not let him order the whole smoking carvery?
‘What’s the white stuff on the outside?’
‘Pastry, sir.’
‘So it’s like . . . cow pie?’
The waiter looked to Troy in something close to despair.
‘Only Desperate Dan eats cow pie.’
‘Who’s he?’
‘A cowboy of sorts – shaves with a blow-lamp, lives off cow pie, always leaves the horns on the side of the plate. Bad manners not to, after all. He’s very popular with children over here.’
‘So it is American? Great. Beef Ellington it is. And for my guest?’
Troy ordered a few slices of rare roast. Wondered how much more of Gumshoe’s chit-chat he could take.
But Gumshoe headed him off at the pass. Slapped down another packet of snapshots. ‘Now, tell me, Topcop. Do you still say Daniel Ryan is kosher?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Take a look.’
Troy slid the first few photographs on to the tablecloth. Angus – leaving Troy’s house in Goodwin’s Court.
‘She’s seen him since, you know,’ Gumshoe said, with more man-to man than Troy found tolerable.
Angus leaving Claridge’s.
‘I mean, what does she see in a gimp?’
Troy said nothing.
‘And he looks kinda crazy, doncha think?’
‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘And I thought we were talking about Ryan?’
He fanned out the rest of the pack. Daniel Ryan in what looked like a London nightclub. Some with a bunch of men he did not know. One with Kitty. And one with a very familiar face – that self-publicising arrogant shit Lord Steele, husband of the ubiquitous Sylvia – formerly Ted Steele, MP for Nottingham, now a Labour apparatchik in the Lords, one of the first of the new-fangled life peers. It was a minor miracle Gumshoe had not known who he was – or did the man read no English newspapers? Ted was something of a joke to brother Rod. On his elevation he had put to the College of Arms the idea that he would take the title ‘Lord Sheffield Steele.’ This they had duly forwarded to the appropriate Lords committee. ‘But, Ted, it’s advertising. You can’t use a title to advertise a product! Besides you’re not even a Sheffield MP.’ Someone on the committee had recounted the conversation to Rod who had helpfully suggested the title of ‘Lord Fork and Spoon’ – it was marginally shorter, they made ’em in Sheffield and it was steel. In the end Ted had copped out and just turned his own surname into a title. To Troy and Rod he would always be ‘Lord Spoon’.
‘Your point?’
‘The company he keeps.’
Troy tapped the photo. ‘Ted Spoon . . . sorry, I mean Steele. Ted Steele. Member of the Lords. Filthy rich, and a total twat, but that’s hardly a crime.’
‘Look at the first one of Mr Ryan.’
Troy looked again, and failed to recognise anyone in the convivial gathering but Ryan himself.
‘You know these guys?’
‘No.’
‘They’re Citizen Ryan’s kid brothers.’
‘They may well be. As I recall, Danny comes from a large family. I’ve never made it my business to keep au fait with the family tree.’
Gumshoe’s lip curled like Elvis’s – part smile, part sneer.
‘You say he ain’t bent. OK. I might just buy that. But these two – his kid brothers – either they’re bent or I didn’t spend seventeen years in the NYPD, I don’t have flat feet, I don’t have haemorrhoids . . . Take it from me, Topcop, these guys are crooks.’
‘What kind of crooks?’
‘How in hell should I know? That’s up to you guys. Or has the East End become a no-go area for the London bobby?’
It was a stinging comment. This flatfoot buffoon had turned the tables on him. If the Ryan brothers were bent somebody ought to know. Somebody should be au fait. But it was hardly Troy’s domain – these men might be petty criminals. The Metropolitan Police Force had its divisions for that sort of thing.
‘You know this place?’
‘No.’
‘They call it the Empress Club.’
‘I still don’t know it.’
‘One of those side streets off Bond Street. Now, correct me if I’m wrong but that’s what you’d call a classy neighbourhood, right?’
‘It’s what you’d call Mayfair.’
‘These two palookas own it.’
‘And?’
‘And? And that’s a hell of a lot of moolah, that’s what.’
‘I doubt Danny’s hard up. Perhaps he bankrolled his brothers.’
‘I thought of that too. But if he’s that philanthropic how come these guys had day jobs in a garage underneath railway arches in Shadwell until the spring? I asked around. They were monkeys in greasy overalls until a matter of months ago. They still put in appearances at their garage from time to time. And how come they take hundreds home in cash from their club every night and help themselves from the till like it was their personal piggy-bank? Troy, take it from me, something stinks. Somebody is folding the greenbacks away. Money is changing hands like it was juggling class. These two are rotten. I can feel it in my piss. And if they are, the odds are big brother Danny is too. And even if he ain’t it’s too close to Mrs Cormack for my comfort.’
Troy looked again. The brothers looked to be twins. They also looked to be the best part of twenty years younger than Danny. Two big brash young men in shiny suits and an excess of Brylcreem. He didn’t know them. They could be any pair of on-the-make young tearaways of the post-war world. It seemed like only yesterday, although it was probably five years, that the city was awash in young men armed with cut-throat razors, dressed in the outlandish red and purple suits, the bungy-soled brothel creepers of the New Edwardian look. They’d been known as Teddy Boys, or Teds. It was Troy’s night for Teds. Perhaps this was what they’d evolved into. These vaguely menacing, cocksure young faces.
‘Now, we come back to the same question. Are you gonna tell her or am I?’
‘Is Kate a regular at the Empress?’ He fanned quickly through the rest of the shots. ‘You would appear to have only three, no, four shots of her out of about thirty.’
‘Troy, just answer the fucking question.’
‘It is in both our interests to see that Mrs Cormack does not become embroiled in a scandal.’
‘Was that a “yes”?’
‘That was an “I want to see for myself ”.’
‘You mean you’re gonna go down the Empress and spy on these guys in person and hope that the Senator’s wife doesn’t spot you in the crowd?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Jesus Christ.’
‘OK, smartarse. How did you do it?’
‘Me – I’m not quite as conspicuous as you, for starters.’
‘Of course not,’ Troy lied.
‘For twosers, Mrs Cormack wouldn’t know me from Adam.’
‘Can’t argue there.’
‘And threesies, I got this from a buddy in the CIA.’ Rork took a tiny camera out of his pocket.
‘High-res film, no need for a flash. You can snap a guy and he’d never know.’
‘You know,’ said Troy. ‘I thought the trick was to have it concealed in your bow-tie.’
‘I ain’t wearin’ a bow-tie.’
‘Quite.’
‘Are you pullin’ my pretzel?’
Oh, God, thought Troy. Oh, God. Rork was about as inconspicuous as an elephant and, worse, he was an elephant who went around pointing a camera at people thinking no one would notice. That was the chilling thing about Gumshoe. You thought him a fool, then he surprised you, trounced you almost, and then he said something so dumb you thought him a fool all over again.
It took Troy a couple of days to find the nark he wanted. Most of the narks he’d had in his younger days knew the East End and little else. After his move to the Yard they had tended to be Soho-centred. What he needed now was someone a little more geographically and socially mobile. Someone who might occasionally venture into Mayfair.
Shortly after the end of the war he had inherited a nark. Chief Inspector Walsh, the only officer in the Special Branch who would even give Troy the time of day, had offered him an oddity known as Fish Wally. The Branch had little further use for him, but it seemed a shame not to deploy his ears and eyes. By a coincidence Fish Wally had been recruited to the hidden profession by none other than Kitty’s father, the late Chief Inspector Stilton. However, the relationship Troy and Wally had formed was based on cash not sentiment. Over the years Troy had reached the conclusion that Wally did his cash business with quite a few people. In the last ten years Wally had been transformed from a walking ragbag in a tatty greatcoat and three-day stubble to a man who could only be described as dapper. An Aquascutum blue cashmere overcoat – it would have to be a blistering summer day before Wally would venture out without it; today was a blistering day and still he wore it – an array of Harvie and Hudson, both white and striped, shirts, shoes handmade to a last of his foot at Lobb’s – and gloves, gloves that hid his frostbitten lobster-claw hands. The gloves were always white and always put Troy in mind of a Disney character. Mickey Mouse and Goofy always wore white gloves. Like Mickey Mouse and Goofy, Wally never took them off. Wally ate wearing his gloves just as he was about to now. In the same greasy caff in which Troy had confronted Gumshoe for the first time. Wally turned a few heads among the working men in overalls sitting down to steak and kidney pie and chips, but he had a dignity as starched as his shirts. ‘How discerning of you, Troy. I have ever been partial to the plain fare served in this establishment by Mother Riley.’
Mother Riley was standing over them, a bosom as big as Texas, clutching her order pad. She uttered what Troy wouldn’t: ‘I never understand a bleedin’ word ’e says. Usual, is it, Wol? The kidney puddin’? And for you, Chief Superintendent?’
More heads turned. Two young men got up and left without ordering.
‘Egg and chips, no bread and butter.’
Troy paused before asking Wally anything, knowing full well that Mother Riley’s next move would be to yell the order down the dumb waiter at deafening volume.
When she’d finished, it was Wally who spoke. ‘What is it you want that you think we can discuss in public?’
‘The Empress Club. What is it and why have I never heard of it?’
‘You probably knew it before the war. It began life as the El Hassan in the twenties – then it was something else I do not recall. Whatever it was it was called it until about 1945, when it became The Swingtime, and that’s what it stayed until about two months ago.’
‘Why the change?’
‘Change of ownership.’
‘The Ryan twins?’
‘So I gather, but of them I know next to nothing. The club was owned by someone you may well know – Bobby Collington.’
‘The bandleader?’
‘The same. The King of English Swing, as he called himself.’
Troy had never been to The Swingtime, but he’d heard Collington’s records. They always struck him as a milk-pudding version of the real thing – the real thing being probably the old Tommy Dorsey band – and definitely not to his taste, at least not to his taste while Duke Ellington was still around. He said as much to Wally while Mother Riley slapped the meal in front of them.
Wally gazed down at his steaming plate silently for several seconds, his knife and fork untouched. ‘You know,’ he said, looking up at last, ‘how certain things habitually remind you of the rituals of childhood?’
Troy nodded.
‘With every meal served by another hand, and this does not happen when I cook for myself, but these days I so rarely do . . . with every meal I hear my father’s voice saying grace, urging his sons and daughters to a gratitude they scarcely felt or understood. The Germans shot my father. Most of my brothers and sisters too. My Catholicism lapsed into atheism overnight. Yet still my mind recites the ritual words of thanks, and does so in his voice. I have the gratitude now, I have lost the god. How curiously we are constructed. Do you ever think of your father, Troy?’
‘Every day,’ said Troy tersely. ‘Where were we?’
‘You were telling me you had no taste for old Bobby Collington’s music. You will like the new sound of his club even less. Bobby is, I believe, a partner of the Ryans, whether he likes it or not, and the club purveys the latest jazz, which I believe is called Trad and is the height of fashion.’
Trad, Troy thought, was rubbish. The New Orleans sound of King Oliver and Kid Ory turned into a hammy seaside pastiche – all boaters and stripy waistcoats – that scarce deserved the name of music.
‘What do you mean “whether he likes it or not”?’
‘You would not be asking me about the Empress if you did not have your suspicions. Do you really think they bought their stake in the club? I think Bobby got strong-armed. These days he hangs around looking nervous and wishing he had retired to a bungalow in Frinton-on-Sea.
Or so I am told. I have not, you will appreciate, been to see.’
‘Could you find out more?’
‘I can always find out more. I could even talk to old Bobby, but as to what he will say . . .’ Wally let the sentence run down, forked in a good helping of kidney and mash, the godless satisfaction of gratitude lighting up his eyes.
‘Do you mean to look for yourself?’ he asked.
‘I was thinking of going tonight.’
‘It’s members only, but I should think a discreetly placed bribe would do the trick.’
Troy arrived after ten thirty, thinking this would be in the interval between sets, to find they hadn’t even started. The trick was played and a tenner did it. A six-foot, sixteen-stone plug-ugly bouncer, who cheated on his employers and saw Troy for what he was at first glance. He wondered how long it would take before the word suffused the whole club. ‘Old Bill’s in tonight.’
‘Anywhere?’ said the talking suit by the velvet ropes.
‘Side booth, quiet and shady.’
It was an old-fashioned look – not tarted up but not shabby either. The clean, yet elaborate lines of art deco. The red and sandy colours the original designers of the El Hassan had meant to suggest Morocco or Egypt. As though the accretions of the last twenty-odd years had been peeled away. As though new management had taken over the club, ripped out half a ton of plasterboard and found a pre-war nightclub intact beneath. Troy had the vaguest memory of the place. He rather thought he’d been there some time in the 1930s when it had been known as The New Yorker or The Manhattan or something equally silly, long after it had been the El Hassan. He’d been there in ’36 or ’37 at the height of the Depression – and as that word flashed through his mind the real name of the club sprang fully fledged to memory. It had been sillier still – The Roaring Twenties, after the Bogart and Cagney film. He had not been twice. They had still played twenties music, the frenetic, tasteless pretence of the carefree . . . so out of place in an age that had cares by the million. It was a sound raucously echoing in an empty hall long after the party had ended. Perhaps 1959 was exactly the moment to reopen the club in its original form. In a mere quarter of a century we had gone from never having it to never having it so good. There might be many in Britain who had not noticed they had never had it so good, but the Prime Minister had assured us it was so. It seemed to Troy to be touch and go. (Or was it stop and go?) Make the most of it while it lasts. Given the fickle, almost neo-embryonic nature of English culture at the moment it was perfectly possible that in six months a job lot of labourers would be ushered in with a hundred sheets of pegboard to whack up and this glimpse of a lost era would be lost once more.
From his side booth he had a good view of the centre tables and the better-lit booths nearer the band. He was looking around when the lights dimmed and the band took to the stage. A crooner’s voice said, ‘One, two, three, four’, the stage lights went up and a nine piece band in blazers striped like deckchairs struck up an ear-bendingly awful version of ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’. They followed this with a sousaphone-led rendition of ‘Bye Bye Blackbird’ that the crooner crooned through a tin megaphone. Troy wondered how long the set would last. Could he get through it without euthanasia? Yet . . . yet . . . the audience clapped enthusiastically after every number – some even whistled and yelled. What, thought Troy, as people seemed to say to him so often nowadays, is the country coming to? Many numbers on, they ended the set with the ritual slaughter of ‘Lazy River’. In so short a time he had come to think of it as Kitty’s song – it was more than slaughter, it was murder.
When the house lights went up again, he caught sight of Kitty, clapping politely at the death of her song. And when she stopped clapping, she leaned over to Danny Ryan and whispered something in his ear. She was not looking his way. There was only one light at his table, illuminating the cocktails menu at head height. Troy reached for his hanky and twisted the hot bulb in its socket. If Kitty looked now, it was unlikely she’d see anything but an outline.
As he looked around he saw another canoodling couple two booths further back from Kitty. Foxx, head on the shoulder of Vince Christy. A waitress stood before him and blocked his view.
‘Nothing, thank you.’
‘You gotta order summink. ’Ouse rules. Two quid minimum.’
‘Water, then.’
‘Water don’t cost two quid, water don’t cost tuppence.’
‘Bring me a glass of water and I’ll pay two quid for it. Just move.’
In the time it took to get rid of her, the empty booth behind Foxx and Christy had received two occupants. Troy began to wonder if there was a surprise the evening would not spring on him. Ted Steele, Lord Spoon as Troy knew him, and quite possibly the last face Troy expected to see in a Trad Jazz club. Tom Driberg, a maverick back-bencher from the Labour Party, and old friend of Troy’s since the war, an even older friend of his father’s and someone the very mention of whose name could provoke Rod to rage or laughter. Troy had the merest sliver of sympathy for Rod’s point of view – if you wanted your party elected to power, an unrepentant, indiscreet queer on the benches didn’t help much. Troy had had no idea Spoon and Driberg were friends. Acquaintances inevitably – Spoon sat on the Labour front bench in the Lords – but friends? Unlikely. An odd couple, even physically. Tom Driberg had never been particularly handsome, even as a young man, and in middle age seemed to have developed a striking resemblance to a sleepy dog, but somehow managed to look effortlessly upper crust (although what upper crust or elegant with effort might look like Troy had never been able to work out). Lord Steele was in good shape, far from seedy at fifty or so, tall, good-looking in that greying sort of way, and ever so faintly continental in appearance, in much the same way Troy’s brother Rod was – and almost always to be found, as he was now, puffing at a Gitane. It was only the second or third time Troy had seen the man in the flesh, rather than in one of his customary husband-as-accessory poses in the newspapers. Troy wondered about the transparent vulgarity of the man, the way he lent himself to his wife’s headlining antics, and he wondered, too, about the Sheffield Steele story. Was it apocryphal? He didn’t know the man, yet he’d taken the piss out of him for years – he’d been a joke to Troy and Rod – but that was them, when they wanted to take the piss they did it. And they were forever making up nicknames for politicians. Troy had dubbed Harold Wilson ‘Mittiavelli’, Rod had christened Nye Bevan ‘Humpty’. Steele had been ‘Spoon’ for about a year now. Might there be more to Steele than Spoon?
In the interval the club was filling up for the second set. It must be getting on for midnight and still they came. The Empress Club, he realised, was that fashionable sort of place one went to with the defining phrase ‘We’re going on somewhere’ – the place you went to after the theatre or the restaurant, only to roll home around dawn. Almost on the stroke of midnight two figures appeared and stood in front of the velvet ropes, surveying the floor below them with a look Troy could only describe as proprietorial. The Ryan twins. And what Rork, who was, thankfully, nowhere to be seen, had failed to capture in his snapshots was the sheer swagger of the men, or rather more than swagger – even the Teddy Boys had had swagger, and this was so much more. This was, in the vocabulary of the unimaginative, ‘presence’. Troy preferred the local argot ‘clout’ – these men had clout. He played a mental game he often played. He looked into the looming hulks of these men for the trace of the two little boys they must once have been, and it seemed to him they had been born fully-fledged into this cocky brutality. As they stepped on to the floor, a man in his sixties, whom Troy recognised as Bobby Collington, appeared, spoke a few words, received a patronising mock slap to his face and vanished again. Fish Wally’s description had been precise: Collington had the look of a man who dearly wished he was anywhere but where he was. But Troy would not have called it nervous – he would have called it fear. Then the Ryans moved from table to booth, booth to table, glad-handing like royalty and beaming with pleasure. It seemed to Troy that they moved through the throng like the prow of a ship slicing through water – the whole room rippled to the wave they made. He knew now why they had changed the name of the club: it was their mistress and their empire.
At Spoon’s booth they sat down and talked, just as the waitress reappeared with Troy’s glass of London tap and a bill for two quid. Troy paid her, turned over the bill and scribbled on it.
‘I want you to give this to that gentleman over there.’
‘What gentleman?’ she sneered.
‘The one looking like a sad bloodhound, talking to the Ryans.’
‘Boss don’t like bein’ disturbed by punters.’
Troy had three quid in change from his ‘cocktail’. He pressed it into her hand and said, ‘Take a chance. After all, how bad is their bark?’
She pulled a face at this but took the cash and the note all the same. Troy watched as Driberg read the note and looked around. Troy risked waving from the shadows, saw Tom mouth, ‘Excuse me,’ and get up.
‘Last place I expected to find London’s greatest aficionado of Art Tatum. Hardly your cup of tea, Troy.’
‘I could say much the same to you. But my excuse has to be better than yours. I’m working.’
‘Ah – police business. I see. Our hosts?’
‘Who else?’
‘Rough types, Freddie. That’s all. Rough types who’ve done rather well for themselves.’
Troy shook his head, leaned in a little closer to Driberg. ‘No, Tom. Wide boys running a racket. Walk away from it.’
‘Really? What sort of a racket?’
‘I’m not sure and if I were I wouldn’t tell you, but take my word for it – if those two aren’t already the subject of a Scotland Yard investigation, they soon will be. Walk away from it.’
‘Bit melodramatic, don’t you think?’
‘Tom. Just take a hint. And count yourself lucky you’re getting it. I won’t be doing any favours for Spoon.’
The changes were subtle – the pause, the barely audible intake of breath and the faintly quizzical tone Driberg had used so far was replaced by something more gleefully earnest. ‘How neatly ends meet. I was wondering if there was a favour you might do for me.’
‘I think you’ll find I just did.’
‘I meant one I was about to raise before you beckoned.’
Oh, God.
‘OK. Let’s hear it. But if it’s anything to do with your peculiar way of spending your evenings . . .’
‘Sex has no part of it. It’s the new sex.’
‘The new sex?’
‘Politics.’
Oh, God.
‘Then you’d better share a cab with me. I’m not having this conversation here.’
‘But I’ll miss the band.’
‘Do you really care?’ said Troy.
They left the booth. Troy took a last look at the sexual motley. Kitty laughing at something Danny Ryan had said, running a finger tantalisingly down his broken boxer’s nose, not even remotely aware of Troy’s presence, the other hand sliding up and down Danny’s arm between the elbow and the shoulder. Affectionate. Possessive. Foxx smouldering – that overworked Hollywood-movie-mag Ava Gardner/ Julie London word – as she looked across Christy and straight at Troy. It was for the best. If any of them had to spot him it was better by far it be Foxx rather than Kitty.
Out in the street. Twelve thirty at night and still as hot as noon.
Another piece of the rondo fell into place. A last, unpredictable piece. As Troy and Driberg were leaving, Anna and Masha’s husband, Lawrence, were coming in.
‘Oops,’ said Lawrence, with a grin on his lips. ‘Bloody awful timing. How’ve you been, Freddie?’
That was what men of Lawrence’s class did when they thought they’d been caught out. Grinned like schoolboys, and rebutted all unspoken accusations with a guiltless heartiness. Anna just looked away and Troy heard her semi-silent, half-whispered, ‘Oh, fuck.’
He took Lawrence by the arm and left Driberg to find a cab.
‘Pure coincidence, Freddie, honestly,’ Lawrence went on.
Troy stopped him. ‘Shut up. I couldn’t give a damn. Just don’t take Anna in there. Take her somewhere else. I don’t care. I’ve no axe to grind. Just not in there.’
Troy and Lawrence had known each other for twenty years. Troy had a better relationship with Lawrence then he had with his own brother. Lawrence was looking intently at him, trying to read him. ‘Freddie. Do I detect a tone of professional interest?’
‘Yes.’
‘Getting ready to raid them?’
‘Lawrence, for Christ’s sake . . . I’m not in the fucking Vice Squad.’
‘Then what’s going on? If there’s a story here, I expect to be the first to know.’
‘I can’t tell you. But when I can you will be the first to know. Your paper can have an exclusive. But not now. Just find a better dive. There must be nightclubs more fashionable than this.’
‘This place is supposed to be the next most fashionable club in town.
Up and coming. Just thought I’d take a look. Apart from that I don’t know the first thing about it.’
‘You won’t like the music. And you’ll like the management even less.’
‘Ah. Is that a clue?’
Driberg tapped Troy on the shoulder. ‘We’re off.’
Troy looked at Lawrence waiting for his clues. Looked at Anna – wholly lacking the bravura self-confidence that was Kitty, or the sangfroid that Foxx had mustered. Anna was red in the face, embarrassed as hell. He’d just ruined her evening and he knew it.
‘I’ll call you,’ he said, speaking to Lawrence, looking at Anna. ‘I’ll call you.’
As the cab wound its way through the maze of narrow streets towards Regent Street, and back into Soho, Driberg stated his case, looking out of the window more than he looked at Troy, in a pretence of diffidence. ‘Bound to be an election soon,’ he said.
‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘People keep telling me that.’
‘And I was wondering . . .’
‘There’s something you want me to ask my brother?’
‘Quite. You took the words out of my mouth.’
‘After all he’s going to be Home Secretary any day now.’
‘Quite.’ Driberg seemed oblivious to Troy’s sarcasm.
‘And you were wondering . . .’
‘Quite. I was wondering. I mean to say . . . well, let me put it this way. I can’t be a back-bencher for ever, now, can I?’
That, thought Troy, was perfectly possible.
‘So, I was wondering. Does Gaitskell have a job in mind for me?’
Troy bit his tongue.
‘It would be insufferable to be overlooked again. Do you think perhaps Rod could sort of . . . you know . . . sound him out on my behalf?’
Of all the favours Troy’s friends and acquaintances had sought to solicit from him on the matter of his brother’s impending rise to power, this had to be the daftest. But it was the only one Troy felt even remotely inclined to grant. ‘I may be able to help you, Tom, I may not. But shall we finish the night’s business first?’
‘Be my guest. What’s on your policeman’s mind?’
‘I would not have thought you and Spoon likely friends,’ said Troy.
‘Ah, well, buggers can’t be choosers.’
‘But he’s married!’
‘So am I. And Spoon’s on his second wife by the bye. First divorced him when he came clean about his tilt. Gentlemen’s agreement. Private detective, an obliging whore, a daytrip to Brighton – all very kosher. You’d never have known he was queer from the divorce proceedings. New wife is equally a gent’s bargain. He told her up front. She fig-leafs him, and in return Ted indulges her vulgar displays of ostentatious wealth. You know, personally, I think Ted is inwardly wincing whenever Sylvia poses for one of those endless photos we get plastered across the papers. And I think the gold-miner’s helmet and the white boiler-suit for the trip to Brinsley colliery were something approaching the limits of good taste. The silver pickaxe with rhinestones in the handle might have been a tad too vulgar, you never know. But . . . he bought her the gold-plated Daimler. It never was gold-plated of course, ’cept for the handles. The first lot really were gold plate, but when they got nicked Ted replaced them with something that looked gold and simply kept up the story of a gold-plated Daimler. Come to think of it, that’s almost a Hollywood film title. Wasn’t there one a few years back called The Gold-Plated Cadillac?’
‘You’re saying he’s queer?’
‘I just did. Do try to keep up, Troy. Queer as a four-pound note and with a penchant for rough trade. In fact, a complete pushover for any strapping young chap with a northern accent. Nothing seems to get Ted going a like a bit of the ‘ee-bah-gums’. But then . . . the finer things in life are so easy to recognise. Once the veil has been lifted, that is.’
Driberg turned from looking out of the window to looking at Troy as he uttered this last sentence. As a rule Driberg’s queer propensities caused Troy no problem. Moral, legal or otherwise. He had long subscribed to the English dictum that, whatever the law said, the queer’s responsibility was the same as anyone else’s. Not to do it in the street and frighten the horses. But he felt the merest shudder of revulsion as Driberg hinted that he didn’t know what he was missing. He changed the subject. ‘You’re in luck, Tom.’
‘I am?’
‘Rod and I are having a drink with Gaitskell tomorrow night.’
Troy had been home less than an hour, and was lying down listening to his Brubeck LP again. It made up for the torture his ears had suffered at the Empress Club. He loved the insistence of ‘Blue Rondo A La Turk’, a driving piano riff – that was the word, wasn’t it, ‘riff ’? Some piece of old Constantinople that had reached California by way of Vienna – and the only contribution from the drums seemed to be brushed cymbals. ‘Take Five’ on the other hand seemed to reverse the pattern, the piano providing rhythm, Joe Morello on drums all but supplying the melody. It was close to hypnotic.
The door burst open. Foxx slammed it behind her. ‘What in the name of heaven gives you the right to spy on me?’
Troy didn’t move. He said softly, ‘It was bad luck you being there. I was spying, but not on you.’
‘Liar!’
‘You should keep better company.’
‘Bastard!’
Something went flying from the shelves by the door as she lashed out at the first things to hand. The light was dim, but he could see her well enough. She was less angry than she made out – tears of rage were tears still, and breaking something, anything, was enough to slow her down.
‘I don’t mean Christy. I mean the Ryan twins.’
‘Who?’
‘The owners of that club you were in.’
Foxx knelt down next to the sofa and thumped him on the chest, but with no force behind it.
‘You sod, Troy, you total utter fucking sod.’
A blow for every other word. He felt nothing, as though the paws of a cat had walked across his chest. Then she drooped, her hair trailing across him, her tears soaking through his shirt. Troy ran his fingers through her hair. She didn’t stop him. She sobbed for what seemed to Troy like an age, then said, ‘Are you telling me the truth?’
‘When have I ever lied to you?’
She raised her head off his chest, now she could laugh and cry at the same time. ‘How long have you got? Lie to me, of course you lie to me. You always do.’
‘Not now. There’s something odd about the Ryans and that club. If your new lover wants to show you a good time, steer him in some other direction.’
‘You’re not going to tell me I should leave him and come back to you?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We’ll take that as read. Where is he, by the way? Stuck in a taxi in St Martin’s?’
‘Back at the Dorchester.’
‘Are you going there?’
‘Don’t know.’
‘It’s late.’
‘I know.’
‘You could stay here.’
‘Maybe.’
‘It’s one of those warm summer nights you always loved. In fact, it’s a heatwave. Can’t remember when it last rained. We could sleep with the window open. We could put Delius on the gramophone. One of those nice scratchy seventy-eights you like. None of that stereo nonsense. “Summer Night On The River”. Old Tommy Beecham. You used to be dotty over that. Then we could listen to London shut down.’
‘I s’pose we could. I quite like the stuff you’ve got on now.’
‘It’s Brubeck . . . and I have fresh oranges and eggs. We could have breakfast in bed.’
‘P’raps.’
Foxx flopped on to his chest again, and let out the mother of all sighs. They did not move.
‘Of course,’ she said, into his ribcage, ‘it wouldn’t mean I’m coming back to you. It would be just for now – just because it’s too late to go home.’
‘Of course,’ Troy lied. They did not move.
Later. Hours later. Foxx sleeping, Troy waking, he found a new form of counting sheep springing unbidden to his thoughts. The idling mind pieced together his own ‘Blue Rondo’. Cue Dave Brubeck on piano, with one cymbal from Joe Morello. Right now, he thought, current mistress Kitty, also known as Kate, was in bed with her old lover the broken-nosed boxing promoter Danny Ryan. Or, if the night had changed course, she was in bed with Anna’s husband Angus, the lunatic, one-legged accountant. Cue Gene Wright on bass. Ex-girlfriend Anna was in bed with his brother-in-law, Lawrence, editor of the Sunday Post. The smoky crooner Vince Christy, current lover of the woman sleeping at Troy’s side, Shirley known as Foxx, former lover of the current mistress, Kitty, also known as Kate, now sleeping with the broken-nosed boxing promoter or the lunatic, one-legged accountant, was cold turkey at the Dorchester or had mustered new groupies. Cue Paul Desmond, alto sax. And he hadn’t a clue where or with whom his sister Masha, wife of the errant Lawrence, editor of the Sunday Post, former lover of the smoky crooner at the Dorchester, was. But he was trying not to think of Masha. And Masha was surely trying not to think of him. After all, he hadn’t heard from her since . . . Cue Morello on drums.
A casual passer-by who chances this evening to be gazing in through the window of Kettner’s, the fashionable London restaurant in Romilly Street, or the less casual passer-by, weaving his way to his table and taking in the crack as he did so, might possibly notice three very different specimens of the genus Englishman, all similarly attired in the garb of their class, two old Harrovians and a Wykehamist, somewhat the worse for the copotation of alcohol. The first, a short, slightly stout man in his fifties, whose hair rises up in curly wisps – a long, almost pointed nose much beloved of caricaturists. This is the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, the Right Honourable Hugh Gaitskell MP, a man said to be one of England’s great wits. Given that the next general election cannot be much more than a couple of months away, he is de facto, the PrimeMinister-in-Waiting. The second, a tall, sort of foreign-looking bloke, also in his fifties, thick, dark hair turning rapidly to salt and pepper, who is, should the passer-by be quite so nosy, found to be wearing odd socks – a lifelong bad habit of which his wife of twenty-five years has been quite unable to cure him. This is the Right Honourable Sir Rodyon Troy Bt, MP, DSO (and bar) DFC, the Shadow Home Secretary and a man said by his younger brother to ‘exude a terrible decency’. The third and last, a short, dark, demonic-looking elf of a man, aged about forty, with eyes like polished jet, a walking-stick propped against the side of his chair, his socks matching. This is Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy, ‘of the Yard’, as he is wont to remind us – a man without a Rt Hon or a medal to his name, a man described by his elder brother as ‘the most devious little shit in history’.
And they are all giggling like schoolboys who have found the cherry brandy.
‘He’s got to be joking,’ Gaitskell is saying, and not for the first time.
‘Does Driberg joke?’ Rod asks.
‘Most of the time,’ Troy replied. ‘But not this time.’
‘What the bloody hell does he expect me to do? Put one of England’s most notorious buggers in the cabinet?’
‘Wouldn’t be the first,’ Troy says, and the other two giggle like idiots, each silently drawing up a list of highly placed pederasts who have been of great service to their country by day and up dark alleys by night.
‘It’s rich,’ says Gaitskell. ‘Rich.’
‘You’ve got to admire his nerve,’ Rod says.
‘Or,’ Troy adds, ‘his lack of self-knowledge.’
‘Oh,’ says Gaitskell. ‘I think Tom knows himself very well. After all, what’s the first criterion of self-knowledge – of knowing what you are? It’s got to be knowing what you like.’
‘And so fewofusdo,’saysTroy.
For reasons Troy cannot perceive, this sends his brother off into a spluttering fit that showers the table in a champagne rain.
‘Did you hear the one about Tom at Buckingham Palace?’ Gaitskell says. ‘No,’ Rod says, and Gaitskell and Troy look at him astounded. ‘You should get out more, brer,’ Troy says, and it is Gaitskell’s turn to shower them in champagne. ‘Shall you tell him, Hugh, or shall I?’ Gaitskell waves him on, speechless with mirth. ‘I’m not sure exactly when this was, but Tom had dined with George VI at the Palace, so I suppose it wouldn’t be long after the war. On the way out he spots a guard on duty outside his box, busbied, upright, rifle, the lot – and the old urge seizes him. Knowing they are not permitted to move or speak while on duty Tom goes down on his hands and knees, unzips the chap’s flies and blows him. Right there, in the open air at the gates of Buck House.’
‘I say again, you’ve got to admire his nerve.’ Rod pauses to refill his glass and let the heaving chests of his potential audience subside. Then he says, ‘Did you hear about Tom and Nye Bevan?’ Gaitskell and Troy look at him astounded. Later – nearer midnight – the Troy brothers have poured the Leader of the Opposition into a cab and pointed him north towards home. They are in Troy’s house, trying with little success to make coffee. Neither of them can get the match to the flame for shaking with laughter. Rod sputters, the match blows out for the third or fourth time and Troy turns off the gas and says, ‘Forget it.’
‘Forget it? Forget it? Can’t go home like this. She’ll fucking slaughter me. Gotta sober up.’
‘Forget it. Let’s give Driberg the good news instead.’ Rod is all but rolling on the floor. Troy fears he might explode, but reaches for the phone anyway.
‘Tom? Tom?’
‘Troy? You make me sound like the piper’s son. Do you know what time it is?’
‘Haven’t the fogging fuckiest. Just got in from a drink with Gaitskell. He’s offering you a job next time round.’
Rod screeches. Troy shushes him.
‘What was that? Somebody with you?’
Just my brother. Listen, listen . . .’
‘I am.’
‘The job, the job.’
‘ Yeeees?’
‘Arse. . .’
‘Eh?’
‘Arsh. . .’
‘Arsh?’
‘Arshbishop of Canterbury.’
Rod howls. Troy cannot but join in. There is silence from the other end of the line. Then . . . ‘You pair of shits. You pair of drunken shits.’
And Driberg hangs up.
Troy puts down the phone. His brother is crying tears of joy. The phone rings. Troy reaches for it and says, ‘Tom, Tom, Your Grace.’
And the voice says, ‘No, it’s me, Jack. There’s been another body found. Whole this time. Can you get down to Limehouse?’
The jolt of sobriety ripped through him just as though he’d walked into a door. And normal service was resumed.
Jack sent a car for Troy. An unmarked souped-up Wolseley 6/90 with a uniformed WPC at the wheel.
‘Where are we going?’ Troy asked.
‘Regent’s Canal Dock, sir.’
A Glaswegian accent. Troy looked at the face. Ringlets of red hair bursting out beneath her peaked cap. Just a little, she reminded him of the Kitty of twenty years ago. He didn’t know the woman. ‘You’re new?’ he asked.
‘Mary McDiarmuid, sir.’
‘You’re Wildeve’s driver?’
‘As a matter of fact, sir, I’m your driver. I was assigned to you the day Mr Brocklehurst died. I guess you never got round to reading the paperwork.’
Without doubt she meant the day Brock was blown up, not the day he died. Troy could see no point in setting her right. ‘Quite,’ he said.
He climbed into the back. The first lurch forward almost made him puke, brought home to him how pissed he was. He took refuge in sleep. Woke as the Wolseley swung off the Commercial Road into the dockyard.
It was a moonlit night. Barges bobbing on the basin. Another Wolseley, undisguised, ‘Police’ blazoned across the doors, lights glaring out across the water. Shrimp Robertson guarding it like a sentry. Two uniformed coppers dodging across the tops of the barges.
Troy knew he couldn’t do that. Even on a good day without a skinful of booze he couldn’t do that. He felt a hand on his shoulder. ‘Freddie? The body’s over here.’
Troy turned to face Jack.
‘Good bloody grief. You look awful.’
‘I’ll be fine,’ Troy lied.
‘No, I should never have called you out.’
‘Whole, you said?’
‘Eh?’
‘The body. You said it was intact.’
‘More or less. Not like the others at all.’
‘Let me see.’
‘Do you really want to see?’
‘Yep.’
Wildeve led him round to the front of the car. The body lay under a blanket between the lights and the water. Wildeve nodded, and one of the coppers whipped the blanket away. A fat, sodden corpse, bloated with gas after a few days in the water, the pale and pasty face of death. Troy turned away and vomited.
After a few seconds, when the heaving had stopped and all he could taste was bile, he felt Jack’s hand on his shoulder again. ‘Sorry, Freddie. I shouldn’t have—’
‘It’s OK.’
‘It’s usually me who pukes, after all.’
‘It’s OK. It’s the booze.’
‘The booze?’
‘Champagne with Rod.’
‘Ah.’
‘And.’
‘And?’
‘I know the man.’
‘You do?’
‘Rork. Joey Rork. Known him a couple of weeks.’
There was a pause Jack seemed reluctant to fill. Troy took his arm and levered himself up off the wing of the car. ‘Let’s look again.’
Rork had died from a single shot to the head – eyes open, looking at his killer. Only when Troy reached the hands did he realise what Rork had suffered. Where his knuckles had been there was a glutinous mess of flesh and bone. But he was past puking now. He was halfway to sobriety.
‘Drill,’ he heard Mary McDiarmuid say.
‘Really?’ Jack’s voice, with a hint of astonishment.
Troy stood up, wished he’d remembered to bring his walking stick.
‘They drilled out his knuckles with one of those electric drill thingies.’
‘Jesus Christ! Why?’
Mary McDiarmuid looked at Troy as though telling him they were dealing with an innocent – but Jack could be like that, seeing the worst man could inflict on man as a matter of duty day after day and yet still baffled by it.
‘Well,’ said Troy, ‘it’s a pretty surefire way to get someone to tell you what you want to know.’
Jack looked down at the body, then back at Troy. ‘Was he the sort of chap to tell them?’
‘I don’t think he had anything to tell them,’ said Troy. ‘And if he’d talked they’d have shot him after one knuckle or two. Most men would crack after one knuckle. They wouldn’t have bothered with all ten.’
This was the moment at which Jack usually puked. He didn’t. He put out an arm and caught Troy as he wobbled.
‘You’d better get me to a nick and take my statement,’ Troy said, soft as a whisper.
‘Statement, my arse. I’m taking you for a cup of strong coffee.’
George Bonham might not have been the last man in England to sleep in a nightshirt – but he was the last whom Troy knew. He answered the door without a flicker of surprise, even though Jack’s hammering had clearly roused him from his slumbers.
‘Coffee, George. Black and sweet,’ Jack said.
‘You look awful,’ Bonham said, looking at Troy.
‘I know. People are kind enough to keep telling me.’
‘White as a wossname . . . sheet.’
Wildeve and Mary McDiarmuid lowered Troy on to the sofa. Robertson stood in the corner, clutching his helmet, looking stranded. Jack waved him down into a corner chair.
‘Where’s your inspector?’ Troy asked.
‘Beg pardon, sir?’
‘Where’s Inspector Milligan? We’re on his patch. I would have thought . . .’
He followed the Shrimp’s gaze to Wildeve.
‘Paddy’s had his problems,’ Jack said. ‘He’s in Liverpool on a compassionate. His dad. He’s dying.’
‘Dying?’
‘Lung cancer.’
‘Of course. He told me. I’m almost certain he told me.’ Troy sighed. ‘But . . . but . . . he should be here. We can’t do this without him.’
‘He’ll be back. And George is right. You do look bloody awful. This can wait. It can wait till morning. Let’s get you home as soon as we’ve got something warm inside you.’
‘There are things you should know.’
‘Wait for the coffee, Freddie. You haven’t enough breath to blow out a candle.’
Bonham stuck a mug of sickly sweet instant coffee into Troy’s hands, wrapping his fingers around it as though he thought it would slip from his grip.
Troy sipped and tried to pretend he thought it pleasant or beneficial. ‘Joey Rork,’ he said. ‘Or did I tell you that? Whatever. Joey Rork. A private eye from the States. Ex-NYPD. And I rather think he was out of his depth.’
Jack prompted: ‘In what way?’
‘I had dinner with him about three days ago. He’d been following Danny Ryan. Been doing that for a while. At dinner he produced a stack of photographs – he did that every time we met, but this time it was obvious he was getting very close to Danny. No long lenses. He was in the same room.’
‘Danny Ryan?’ Jack cut in. ‘Is this something to do with boxing?’
‘I doubt that. In fact I think Danny Ryan might be incidental. Rork wasn’t wild about my assurances that Danny was straight, but it was Ryan’s brothers that got his copper’s hackles up. He was absolutely convinced they were up to something.’
‘Who are these brothers? I’ve never heard of them.’
‘Neither had I – I kept telling Rork. I used to know Ryan before the war, and I’ve followed his career in the papers just like anyone else – and I’ve seen him in person perhaps a couple of times since, but as for any brothers, they were news to me. I don’t know them.’
There was a cough of polite attention-seeking from the other side of the room. Jack, George, Mary McDiarmuid and Troy all turned to look at the Shrimp – reddening slightly and wary of the position he was in.
‘Spit it out, Mr Robertson,’Jack said.
‘You do know them, Mr Troy.’
‘I do?’
‘They was with me and Tub Flanagan and all them other kids that day you paid us all to search the bombsite where Alma Terrace used to be.’
‘That was—’
‘Nineteen forty-four, sir.’
‘I was about to say it was ages ago. Of course I don’t know them. I can’t even remember what they looked like.’
‘But they remembered you, Mr Troy. You was their hero. Right up to the end of the war that gang they used to have with old Tub was known as Troy’s Marauders. I was in it meself. I oughta know.’
Jesus Christ.
‘I was a hero meself for a while, ’cos I found the cellar where the body was. But I was too small to hold me own against the twins, but they—’
‘Enough! I don’t want to hear this.’
Bonham muttered a sotto voce ‘I told you so’, and vanished into the kitchen.
Troy leaned back, stared at the ceiling and said, ‘Shit, shit, shit.’
Jack spoke softly: ‘Freddie, it’s time you went home.’
‘No, I should make a statement.’
‘You should be in bed.’
‘What’s the point? I’ll be wide awake in four hours, buzzing like a sodding bee.’
‘Bed,’ said Mary McDiarmuid, with more authority than Jack had mustered, and Troy let himself be hoicked up by one arm and steered to the door. ‘George,’ he said, turning back to Jack.
‘Later,’ Jack said. ‘Later.’
Mary McDiarmuid drove like Fangio. He was back on his own doorstep in less than twenty minutes.
‘Do you want me to come in, sir?’
‘No. I’ll be fine. Now, tell me, are you permanently assigned to me?’
‘In so far as you’re expected back, yes, sir. In the meantime I’m floating a bit too freely. I get whatever comes up.’
‘That can be remedied. But when we’re alone it’s Troy. Forget the rank. Save it for when Onions is about.’
He was fiddling with the door key and failing. She took it off him, turned the lock, shoved the door open and stuck the key back in his hand with a ‘Whatever you say, boss.’
Inside, he kicked off his shoes, sloughed his jacket on to the floor. He hadn’t the strength to pick it up. It could wait till morning. It could all wait till morning. He couldn’t remember when he’d felt so tired. He hauled himself up the stairs to the bathroom, scrubbed away the taste of champagne and vomit with his toothbrush, spat peppermint toothpaste at the basin – and as he did so caught a trace of something else on the air. Lately he’d known his nose to play tricks, not as many as his eyes, but he had found himself smelling the most unlikely things – rubber, salt and vinegar, cardamom. Now it was a scent. Something familiar but unplaceable. The upper frequencies of Dior? With the toothbrush still sticking out of the side of his mouth, he pushed open his bedroom door, and saw the round bump of Kitty’s backside in his bed. He could not fault her timing. At once appropriate and awful.
His prediction was wrong. He did not wake at six, simply because he had not slept. Kitty had not stirred. He had lain motionless for most of what was left of the night, while his mind and memory had roared.
He had liked Gumshoe. He had not realised this until he had been confronted with his corpse. He had found that while part of his mind examined the wounds with a detached, professional eye, another part had looked at Rork’s beetlecrusher shoes and found something inexorably sad in the sight of those huge flat feet; that same part had wondered what had become of his hat.
Gumshoe gave way to the Shrimp. The Shrimp was proving to be a ragbag of surprises and secrets. Troy’s Marauders? Good fucking grief. If it weren’t so bizarre it would be funny. And George, that hushed ‘I told you so’. Had he been waiting the best part of twenty years to say that? Troy found he could remember George’s exact words on that bitterly cold day in the February of 1944, the restrained outrage that Troy had bribed a bunch of schoolkids to look for a dismembered body.
‘It’s a scandal, Freddie, a scandal. They’re kids. They should be in school. If the mums find out . . .’
And Troy had brushed George off. It was so easy. George had been at the back of the queue when God gave out smarts – the nicest man on earth, not the brightest. And then he’d said, ‘You know, Freddie, there are times I think there’s nothing like a spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’
With hindsight, that near-perfect science, Troy thought it the most acute sentence George had ever uttered. Was that what twenty years at the Yard had done to him? Put iron in his soul? Wasn’t that what Trubshawe had hinted at after Sasha’s outburst at the funeral? The ‘ambergooities’ of the Yard put iron in the soul.
He could see that posse of urban cowboys in his insomniac’s mind’s eye. He could see Tub Flanagan – fat boy with Elastoplast across his glasses. He could see the Shrimp, small for his age, wiry and street-smart. If Troy had been taking bets rather than whacking out tanners and half-crowns that day he’d have put money on the Shrimp to grow up to be a villain. It seemed so much more likely than that he would become smitten with the idea of becoming a copper. He could see a boy whose name he never knew juggling a smoking cocoa tin he’d turned into a winter handwarmer. But, try as he might he couldn’t see a pair of twins. To listen to Bonham it had been the corruption of youth, the spike of iron. It all seemed so long ago . . . Besides, it had been ‘adventures with Jack and Ralph’. Hadn’t it?
He must have nodded off. The clock on his bedside table read ten a.m. and Kitty was gone. He flung back the bedclothes and a small piece of paper fell to the floor. He picked it up and reached for his glasses.
Fat lot of use you were. Why didn’t you wake me when you got in? K
Bugger, bugger, bugger.
He felt dehydrated. More the alcohol than the midnight murder. He stumbled downstairs, sank a pint of cold water, picked up the phone and rang Claridge’s. Mrs Cormack had not yet returned. He left a message asking her to call him back and ran a bath. He was dragged from it minutes later by the phone ringing.
‘Freddie,’ said Jack, ‘if you’re up and about I’m sending a car for you.’
‘A car?’
‘Time to take your statement. You are up to this, aren’t you? I mean, I could always come to you.’
‘I’m fine. Just . . .’
‘Just what?’
‘Just not right now.’
‘Not right now? Freddie, last night you were wilting like last week’s daffs and deadly keen to get it all down on paper.’
‘I need time.’
‘We don’t have time. What we have is a body.’
‘Just a few hours.’
‘What’s up? Tell me what’s changed.’
‘Nothing.’
‘Freddie – I don’t know why but you’re lying to me. Whatever it is, get it fixed and be at the Yard by six. How long do you think I can hold Stan at bay? For Christ’s sake!’
‘Jack, I’m sorry. I’m not holding out on you.’
‘Freddie, that’s exactly what you’re doing and if a witness did it to you you’d chuck him in the cells till—’
‘I’ll be there. I’ll be there at six.’
‘In the meantime I want a few basic facts. I’m not losing a day.’
‘His name was Joey Rork.’
‘You told me that last night!’
‘He was a private eye, ex-NYPD –’
‘That too!’
‘– and he had a room at the Cromarty in Gower Street.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere. How long had he been at the Cromarty?’
‘Weeks. I couldn’t honestly say how long.’
‘Why was he here? How do you come to know him? He surely didn’t fly over from New York just to follow Danny Ryan?’
‘Jack, that’s the bit I’d rather tell you at six.’
‘You’re asking an awful lot, you know.’
‘I know, I know. Honestly.’
Jack hung up. Troy felt a little as though his junior had just read the Riot Act to him. The phone rang again.
‘Bastard.’
‘You were sleeping so peacefully.’
‘Smarmy bastard. Where were you anyway?’
‘Limehouse.’
‘At that time of night?’
‘I’m a copper. You were one yourself, once upon a time.’
‘OK, OK. Don’t rub it in. So, Sherlock, did the pleasure of some poor bugger’s cold flesh lure you away from the infinitely greater pleasures of my warm flesh?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘I thought you were still off sick.’
‘Wildeve and I have an arrangement. Kitty, we have to talk.’
‘That’s got to be one of my husband’s favourite phrases. It usually means he has to talk and I have to listen.’
‘Can you come over now?’
‘No.’
‘Can I come to you?’
‘No.’
‘Kitty, this is important. I have to see you.’
‘That’s how I felt last night. Fat lot of good it did me. No, Troy, my sisters and I are lunching here, then going shopping up West – good God, “up West”. I shouldn’t think I’ve used that phrase in twenty years. Just goes to show you can take the woman out of Stepney and blah-deblah-de-blah.’
‘When, then?’
‘Tea. You can buy me tea to make up for last night. Tea at the Café Royal. Be there at four.’
Kitty rang off. Troy was left thinking that he was cutting Jack’s deadline very close and that the Stepney had long since been taken out of Kate Cormack. About a fortnight after Kate Cormack had been taken out of Stepney, he rather thought.
At noon he rang Kolankiewicz. ‘What killed that bloke we fished out of the canal basin last night?’
‘Nine mill. Judging from the powder residue, not point-blank range but not more than ten or twelve feet either. Nothing fancy. The most common ammunition there is nowadays. And nothing powerful. The bullet came out of the poor bastard’s brain intact. If you get lucky and find the gun I can do a match.’
‘Who would be stupid enough to keep the gun?’
‘And . . . besides the obvious signs of torture, which I assume you flatfoots noted, there was bruising to the back of the head.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as someone sapped him. And disarmed him.’
‘What makes you say disarmed?’
‘Shoulder holster. Left armpit. But no gun.’
Damn. They’d allowed the hysteria of the moment, the grotesque fact of a brutal death and the pointless complication of his own physical weakness to distract them. Jack or Troy or someone should have searched the body last night. Worse, Gumshoe had traipsed around London for weeks with a gun up one armpit and it had not even occurred to Troy that he was doing so.
‘Anything else?’
‘I’d say the man was American from his clothes and his dentistry . . .’
‘He was.’
Kolankiewicz let this pass without comment. ‘Not a snappy dresser, his shoulder holster was tailor-made but his clothes were all off the peg. Off the peg but clean. I’d say he’d had the suit dry-cleaned in the last week or so. Hence I think the oil stains on the trousers, around the calves and knees, might be evidence.’
‘Might? What sort of oil?’
‘The sort you’d put in your car.’
‘Can we match that?’
‘To what? You could bring me samples from every garage in England and it would match ninety-nine per cent of them. All it tells us is that he was in a garage, but even that could be significant.’
‘A tailor-made holster, you say. Tailor-made for what?’
Kolankiewicz paused. Not his customary mode. ‘It could be one of several models. However, I have in my possession a gun that I believe fits it perfectly.’
‘Well?’
‘Smith & Wesson.’
‘Smith & Wesson what?’
‘.357 Magnum.’
‘Where on earth did you get one of those?’
Kolankiewicz strung out his sentences, the pause between each one longer than the pause before, the pitch of his voice rising slightly with every fractional utterance. ‘A fact-finding visit to Washington a couple of years ago. A day or two spent with our colleagues at the FBI. A careless moment. A souvenir. Of sorts.’
‘You mean you nicked it?’
‘I think this is where I whistle something from The Wizard of Oz and try to look if not innocent then disingenuous. You, however, would be far better advised to weigh up what I said a few sentences back.’
‘Eh?’
‘They disarmed him, Troy. Someone is walking around London with a gun that will shoot holes in solid concrete.’
‘A hand-held cannon,’ Troy whispered.
‘What?’
‘At the end of the war you and Bob Churchill came out to Mimram. Bob trained me up on handguns – he had a Smith & Wesson then. That’s what it felt like – a hand-held cannon.’
Troy was late getting to the Café Royal. Kitty was waiting, sipping at her Earl Grey, nibbling a slice of Battenberg, surrounded by the results of a day out with her sisters – ‘packages from Liberty’s, packages from Harrods, headscarf for the sister, knickers for the wife . . . Close your eyes, my darling, as the gentlemen pass by . . .’
Her mood was good, the therapy of shopping – she smiled at Troy, stood up to give him a smackeroo on the lips and beckoned to a waiter. By the time he could sit down Troy felt smothered: Kitty’s kisses, a sea of tissue paper unwrapped around him, and a busy young man setting tea and cake before him. There was nowhere to rest an elbow, no obvious way through the smallness of small-talk.
Kitty rattled on about her sisters, the generosity of her mood persisting without bitchiness to the point where, if he had been able to concentrate, he might have concluded that she was once again a Londoner, if only for a day, was once again the ‘sparrer’ from Jubilee Street, now the weight of being Mrs Cormack was off her, if only for a day – but he could stand it no longer.
‘We have to talk,’ he said, halfway through an account of Reenie trying on something meant for a woman half her age and size.
‘There you go again. That phrase. OK. Don’t listen to me. Just spit it out. Be brutal. See if I care.’
She did care. As he told her, care etched itself into every line in her face. By the end she was a simmering volcano, on whose rim he perched with precarious toehold. ‘And you didn’t tell me? My husband sets a private eye on me and you don’t bloody tell me?’
‘Not Cal. The Deeks.’
‘Do you think that matters? Weeks you say, weeks with this jerk following me around, spying on me, and you don’t tell me. You shit, you complete and utter shit!’
‘You may be right. And if he hadn’t been found murdered last night I might not be telling you now. But he has been murdered, and I cannot not tell you, and you have to make a statement.’
‘What?’
‘Rork came here to follow you and Vince Christy. When you seemed to have nothing to do with—’
‘Seemed! I did have nothing to do with the slimy bastard. He called me up at Claridge’s and I blew him out of the water!’
‘Then you have to say so. You see, Rork was following Danny Ryan, not just you.’
‘And the Yard think Danny did this?’
‘I don’t know what they think, but you have to tell them what you know. We both do. I have to make a statement to Jack Wildeve at six today.’
‘I don’t know anything. I never saw or heard of this Rork fellow. All I know is my husband and my lover – if I can grace you with that term – conspired to treat me like a ten-dollar hooker in a crappy gumshoe novel. Troy, if you think I’m talking to anyone except the head of that committee of fools who want Cal for president, then think again. I’m making no statements. Not now. Not ever. And as for you . . . fuck you, Troy!’
Kitty had shattered the politesse of afternoon tea. The four o’clock susurrus had ceased. Every head in the room had turned. She stood up sharply – her cup overturned – grabbed her packages and left.
Troy watched Kitty storm out with no expectation that she’d turn back or glance at him. She did rage like no other woman he’d ever met. His sisters specialised in scorn. Foxx would hardly ever expend more energy than it took to hint at an infinite sadness nudging towards regret. Anna? Anna he couldn’t quite pin down, but his wife did rolling sarcasm, her eyes glancing momentarily upwards to the indifferent heavens as if to say, ‘God spare me from this jerk.’ It had taken him more than a moment to realise it but the woman staring at him from across the room was his wife. If he’d wanted to follow Kitty, he neither could nor would now.
He crossed the floor. ‘Hello,’ he said simply.
Tosca looked in the direction Kitty had gone as though expecting to see scorchmarks on the carpet. ‘Jeezus! Do you know who that was?’
‘Of course. I’m not in the habit of dining with total strangers.’
‘Sorry, that was dumb. What I really meant was, how long have you and Senator Cormack’s wife been . . . y’ know . . .?’
‘May I join you?’
‘Don’t fuck me around with your English manners, Troy, just sit down and answer the fucking question.’
Troy pulled out a chair, sat down and faced his wife across a dining-table for the first time since the previous December. He’d heard not a peep from her since. ‘How do you know Kitty and I are . . . “y’ know”?’
‘Kitty?’
‘An old name. Long before she was Kate.’
‘So the two of you been having y’ know for a long time?’
‘I haven’t seen her since the war.’
‘But when you did see her?’
‘Yes. We were y’ knowing.’
‘Before or after me?’
‘Before. Two or three years before. Now, don’t tell me you’ve just breezed into London for an uncharacteristic display of jealousy?’
‘Fuck off, Troy. I don’t know why I came. But I can tell you this. Kate Cormack is pretty well the last person I expected to find you having y’ know with. Did I ever tell you I knew her husband?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I think I can safely say that’s one of the many things you never bothered to tell me.’
‘We were both stationed in Zurich in ’41. Just before we got into the war.’
‘Odd,’ said Troy. ‘That’s when I met him. 1941.Just before you lot decided to join us. We must have just missed one another.’
‘Story of my life, Troy. Like I just missed you this afternoon.’
‘You’ve been to the house?’
‘Yep. Screwed my courage to the thingummy and knocked on the door.’
‘I was only out getting a paper. You could have waited.’
Stupid remark. One of Tosca’s characteristics was that she didn’t wait. She was time and tide in a five-foot package.
‘How long are you here?’
‘No. I’m not answering that.’
‘Could we meet again?’
‘We’re meeting now.’
‘I meant . . . alone.’
‘Sure. I’m at Claridge’s. Come round this evening – say, seven?’
That was cutting it fine.
‘OK.’
‘Good–’cos we have to talk.’
‘There we go,’ he said. ‘That phrase again.’
‘What phrase?’
Troy was early getting to the Yard. He called in at his own office. It had been weeks. Swift Eddie Clark was at his desk, his home-made coffee machine burbling away behind him as strong Blue Mountain made its way from a boiling jar to a flask, by way of a Bunsen burner and several feet of glass piping. It was, possibly, the finest cup of coffee to be had in the whole of London. When Eddie said, ‘He’s in with someone,’ Troy accepted a cup and sat down to wait.
‘Who’s the extra desk for?’ he asked.
‘The Scottish bird, sir. Seems hell-bent on making herself at home. Rang Admin and ordered the desk herself. If she looks like she’s permanent maybe she won’t get posted back to the drivers’ pool. She’s got shorthand and typing too, sir. Always useful.’
On cue Mary McDiarmuid appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr Wildeve’ll be just a couple of minutes. Shall I run you home after?’
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’
‘That’s nae problem. Me an’ Edwin’ve got lots to be getting on with.’
She smiled at Clark. Clark managed a flicker back. He hated being called Edwin.
‘What have we got?’ Troy asked.
‘The Ryans seem to have watertight alibis. Four blokes all willing to swear they were in an all-night pontoon game. Mr Wildeve collared them this morning. They sent for their brief. They were out by lunchtime.’
‘The drills?’
‘If there was one in that garage of theirs there was a hundred. Mr Kolankiewicz is testing them . . . but . . .’
Mary McDiarmuid did not need to finish the sentence. They both knew how futile it all was. A drill in a garage was scarcely more optimistic than the needle in the haystack.
Troy waited. Eddie and Mary McDiarmuid rustled papers and talked to each other sotto voce. Troy felt as if he was in a dentist’s waiting room rather than his own office. Rarely had he felt more out of it.
A few minutes later, Troy heard Jack’s office door open and footsteps coming down the corridor. Kitty stood in the doorway, Jack behind her.
‘It’s very good of you to come in, Mrs Cormack.’ Jack, mouthing the platitudes of the job.
‘It was no trouble,’ answered Senator Cormack’s wife, and as she turned to gaze stonily at Troy, Mrs Cormack was all he could see – Kitty was suddenly invisible. The woman he knew entirely absorbed by the woman he didn’t.
Jack turned to Troy, his look almost as stony, and said, ‘Ready when you are.’
Troy could not face typing out a statement. Kitty and Tosca between them had contrived to exhaust him. Trapped between love and death, all he wanted to do was lie down.
‘Mary?’
‘Yep?’
‘Would you mind taking my statement?’
She picked up a notepad and followed the two of them into Jack’s office. Jack glanced at Mary McDiarmuid, saw the pad and pen and nodded. He sat back in his chair, looking as weary as Troy felt. Troy doubted he had had any sleep at all.
‘Right, Freddie, tell me the lot. Tell me everything.’
Troy told him. And when he had finished Jack said, ‘And you thought none of this worth a mention. It didn’t raise your professional hackles?’
It was an unusual experience being carpeted by his junior, but Troy’s inner voice was whispering, ‘You had it coming, Freddie. You brought this on yourself.’
‘No.’
Jack made a cut-throat gesture to Mary McDiarmuid and she stopped writing. ‘You and I break the rules. I get you out and about to look at some of the ripest murders we’ve had in a long time and you don’t see it as a give-and-take process?’
‘Jack, what did I have to give?’
‘That an American was loose on the streets of London with a gun the size of a Sherman tank, for starters!’
‘I didn’t know about the gun, honestly. And for the life of me I can’t see any link between Rork and the murders you’re investigating. In fact, I thought what you thought when you phoned me up last night . . . that this was just another . . . that you’d summoned me out to look at another boy . . . I didn’t think Rork was in that deep. If I’d reported to you I have no idea what it was I should have been saying.’
Troy took Jack’s pause as assent. When he finally spoke it was to move the subject on if not a mile then round a corner. ‘And Mr Robertson surprised us all.’
‘Quite.’
‘Then I think it’s time we had a word with Mr Robertson.’
Troy found refuge in the ‘we’. However angry Jack was about the mess with which Troy had presented him, he was still talking as though they were a team.
‘Off the record?’ Troy asked.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘He’s a kid, Jack. He’s been in the job a matter of days. He’s fresh out of Hendon. It would be grotesquely unfair to put anything on his record at this stage that we aren’t totally sure of.’
‘OK. Where, then? And it has to be soon. Whatever it is that’s buzzing in young Robertson’s head I want to hear it.’
‘How about my house tomorrow morning?’
‘How about your house in an hour and a half?’
Troy did not argue. Jack would not have understood.
While Mary McDiarmuid fetched a car, Troy drifted along to Onions’s office. His secretary, Madge, had gone home. Both inner and outer doors were open. Onions was at his desk, slaving at paperwork under a reading lamp, rapidly scanning pages and scribbling his initials. As Troy came in he looked up once, the green shade casting a dragon-skin across his face. ‘I’ve heard,’ he said simply. ‘You’re in the shit again. Don’t even think of askin’ me to let you back early. Just bugger off.’
‘But—’
‘Bugger off!’
The cast was slow to assemble. Mary McDiarmuid insisted on driving Troy home and stayed to eat dinner with him. He could find no way to tell her to go. He desperately wanted to phone Tosca. He couldn’t do that with Mary there. He could go upstairs and phone on the bedroom extension, but he’d still be conscious of Mary. Instead he cooked for her: a vaguely Italian chicken and mushroom in white wine sauce that caused her to raise an eyebrow. ‘If you’re this good a cook, boss, I’m surprised you’re still single.’
‘I’m married,’ he said bluntly. ‘Don’t ask.’
Eddie turned up alone. Troy was uncertain whether his being there at all was his own idea or Jack’s, but Jack arrived ten minutes later and seemed not in the slightest surprised to find Eddie sipping tea on a straight-back chair in the corner, as ever trying to look like part of the furniture. And lastly, came Shrimp Robertson and George Bonham.
It had turned into an evening of warm summer drizzle, moisture simply hanging rather than falling to coat everything in soft focus. The droplets glistened on the Shrimp’s uniform, clinging to the blue-black tunic, shining like diamond on his silver buttons. He took off his helmet and clutched it, not in the way coppers do, who have long since given up wondering what to do with it, but clutching it with pride. The Shrimp wore his whole uniform with pride, even down to the boots, so shiny you could see your face in them – but that was often true of former National Servicemen. If little else they knew how to shine shoes. Troy could not remember that pride. He had fought his father to be allowed to become a copper in the first place, and the old man had quickly resigned himself to it as a comic novelty. But Troy doubted he had ever felt the pride Robertson felt. He had hated being in uniform, and going ‘plain’ had come as a relief. Whatever happened now, he hoped it did not take the shine off the boy’s pride in the job.
‘I ’ope you don’t mind, Mr Wildeve, sir, but Mr Bonham and me we go back a long way. In fact I’ve known Mr Bonham all me life. Mr Bonham can speak for me.’
‘You’re not on trial, Mr Robertson, but George is welcome all the same. This isn’t about anything you’ve done . . . It’s about . . . local knowledge. You’re the one with the local knowledge and before you it was George.’
It was, Troy thought, a surprisingly tactful speech. All the same, George and the Shrimp sat on the edges of their chairs, looking completely unsure of the situation. Jack stood, Mary McDiarmuid sat on a stool by the fireplace, and Troy found himself with the chaise-longue to himself. All in all the room felt too full, too many people crammed in, as though the inevitability would be some sort of rupture.
‘The Ryans?’ Jack began simply. ‘Tell us all about the Ryans.’
Shrimp looked at George; George looked at Jack. ‘If you want the lot, the kit an’ caboodle, you’d better let me start,’ he said.
‘Fine.’
‘I knew their father, old Mickey Ryan. I say old, he was younger’n me. But that’s the way he was. He came back from the war in 1918 old – just worn out, old and half bonkers. He’d two kids, both born just before the war, Danny and Mickey junior. But Mickey junior and the wife got took in that bad ’flu epidemic in ’17. Mickey came back to Blighty to find Danny being looked after by his grandparents. He took Danny home with him, went back to his job at Billingsgate. Hated it, as far as I could see. Hated life. Sometime in the twenties he remarried. There were four kids. Martin in about ’24, Alice in about’29, she died before she was one, and then the twins in ’35, Patrick and Lorcan. The followin’ year his second wife dies, and the same year, that summer of 1936, Mickey takes a trip out to Walton-on-the-Naze, takes off all his clothes and walks out into the North Sea. No one ever saw hide nor hair of ’im again. That leaves just Danny. He’d be in his early twenties by then, I s’pose, and he takes the twins. Danny’s a bloke with a heart of gold, and he’s the nearest thing those twins ever got to a dad. But he volunteers in 1940. And Martin, their other brother, dies on the beach at Normandy. So when the war’s over Danny comes back to find a pair of scallywags who’ve been passed from one aunt to another for the best part of six years.’
‘That’s where I come in,’ said the Shrimp. ‘I known the Ryans all me life. Born in the same hospital, grew up in the same streets. They’re only eleven months older than me. It’s just like Mr Bonham says, we were all little sods – war on, half the dads away fightin’ . . . bound to happen. Often as not we just skived off school and gave all the lip we could to the grown-ups. We’d skived off school the day Mr Troy met us in ’44. But we could be worse than that. We nicked things. What kid didn’t? My dad thrashed me for that. We smashed things. What kid didn’t? My dad thrashed me for that too. But Paddy and Lorc went further than any of us. They could be cruel. I mean vicious. They thought it was hilarious to bait some poor dog, catch and skin it. I saw ’em carve up a Jack Russell once. Belonged to some poor old woman down Jubilee Street. Only thing she had in the world, but they caught the little blighter and they butchered him. It made us all just a bit wary of ’em. You couldn’t predict what they’d do next. Mind – they weren’t stupid. One or two of my old mates would do things so daft they were askin’ to get caught. And they did time in Borstal for it. Not the Ryans. They knew not to get nicked, and they knew how to put the blame on somebody else. I say me dad thrashed me a few times – sometimes it was for things they’d done. That sort of drove a wedge between us. By the time I left school I wasn’t havin’ much to do with ’em. When it came time for National Service I was prayin’ not to get sent to the same camp as them. But I did. I went through basic with them. And you know what? They kept their noses clean. They was model soldiers up front, “Yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir.” And behind the scenes they was nickin’ everythin’ that wasn’t nailed down. They peddled NAAFI stuff all over West Germany.’
Troy looked at Eddie to see if this struck a chord. Clark had run a nice little business in NAAFI coffee beans in Berlin just after the war. Eddie looked blank, not a flicker of identification. Jack stood with his back to the fireplace, saying not a word. George picked up the thread.
‘After the war Danny went into boxing. He’d been Light-Heavyweight champion in the army. You know the rest. Pretty soon he was managing anyone who was anyone. He tried to get the twins to take an interest, thought it might just sort of level ’em off. But they didn’t want to know.’
‘And when they finished in the army,’ the Shrimp picked up, ‘Danny sets ’em up in that garage under the railway arches in Shadwell and tells ’em that’s it. They make a go of it, or they don’t, but they needn’t bother comin’ runnin’ to ’im for ’andouts cos there weren’t going to be any. Last two or three years that’s wot they done. They run a garage, they traded cars and it looked like they was keepin’ their noses clean all over again. But they weren’t. Least, I reckon they weren’t.’
‘How can you be sure?’ Jack speaking was like a ripple running through the air. He oozed scepticism.
‘I know the Ryans, sir. But I s’pose what you mean is what do I know that they actually did? First whiff I got of it was earlier this year. I was still out at Hendon. There’s a chippie in the Mile End Road called Foster’s. It’s common knowledge that half the businesses in the Mile End Road paid protection to Alf Marx’s mob. Everybody knows it but nobody squeals. Then, February I think it was, when old Alf was still on remand, pre-trial like, my sister tells me this story of two young blokes that try to muscle in. They went round Foster’s and told old Joe he should pay them from now on. So, as you’d expect, Joe Foster gives ’em grief, tells ’em how he pays money to Alf Marx to keep toerags like them away from his shop. You know what they did? Joe had this old ginger tom, been there for years it had. They picked the poor bugger up and flung ’im in the deep-fat fryer. That’s when Joe caved in and that’s when I knew it was the Ryans. Cos that’s just the sort of stunt they’d have pulled when I was a kid. But there’s more. You remember last March some poor sod was found out in Eppin’ Forest nailed to a tree like Jesus on the cross?’
Troy and Jack looked at each other. They’d never solved that one.
‘They did that too. I know cos I saw ’em do that to a Labrador when I was about twelve. Foster’s chippie, that bloke in the forest . . . that’s when I think the Ryans started their takeover. Cos while Alf Marx ran things nobody would have dared.’
‘Let me get this straight,’ Jack said. ‘You’re saying these Ryans, who are what, twenty-four or twenty-five, have taken over Alf Marx’s rackets?’
The Shrimp stopped, looked at Jack and then at Troy, aware for the first time of the import of what he had said. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose I am saying that.’
‘And you’ve been how long at Stepney?’
‘Just a couple of weeks, sir. But that’s not the point. Point is, I know the Ryans. I know what they’re capable of.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell us until now?’
The Shrimp stopped again, he and Troy looking straight at each other.
‘Would any of us have believed Mr Robertson?’ Troy said. ‘I’d’ve asked him where his hard evidence was. I might even have been dismissive of his childhood assessment of the Ryans. And there is, as we know, the matter of loyalties and loyalties compromised. It would have been easy for Mr Robertson not to come back to Stepney. He could have gone to any nick in the country. He need not have set foot on his own patch. But since he did, and since he knows what he knows . . . why should a young copper risk his career for what was no more than gossip?’
‘Was?’ said Jack. ‘You mean it isn’t now? Freddie, there’s enough sleight-of-hand in your last statement to baffle Houdini. It’s local knowledge, it’s gossip, it’s not to be repeated and then it is? And if it’s true, why haven’t we spotted them? We’re the good guys. Not only that we’re meant to have an efficient, if ad hoc, system for gathering information. How can two Irish yobbos knock an entire Jewish gang off the map and we don’t know about it until now?’
‘Jack, who in any nick is responsible for keeping an ear to the streets?’
Troy turned to the Shrimp. ‘Remind me, Mr Robertson, who’s your detective sergeant?’
‘Mazzer, sir. Al Mazzer.’
‘What’s that?’ said Jack. ‘Italian?’
‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I rather think it’s Jewish.’
‘That’s right, sir. I reckon Mr Mazzer is Jewish.’
‘Jewish,’ George chipped in, ‘and bent.’
The Shrimp was quick to protest, ‘I never said that, Mr Bonham.’
‘He’s gotta be, hasn’t he? Stuff like this going down and the DS doesn’t bloody know? When I ran that nick we’d’ve known. We’d have had all the tittle-tattle off the street and we’d have known what was bollocks and what wasn’t. We’d’ve known. If this Mazzer’s not bent . . .’
Jack said, ‘You know him, George?’
‘I’ve seen him about. Flash bastard. Brought in from Leytonstone two or three years back.’
‘And?’
‘And what?’
‘Do you know for a fact that he’s bent?’
‘No – but I’ll lay you a penny to a quid.’
Robertson looked at Troy desperate for a way in.
Troy said, ‘Let’s hear from Mr Robertson. He works with Mazzer after all.’
‘Well?’ said Jack.
‘Mr Bonham’s right, sir. Al Mazzer is a bit flash. And the talk in the nick is . . . well, y’ know.’
Troy thought Jack would explode. A slow ascent, but a steady one. He’d known Jack too long ever to be surprised by him completely. But knowing just when Jack would decide to go by the book and when he would leap in where only fools and Troys would ordinarily tread was impossible. He’d known Jack bend and break the law to back him up, and he’d known him rat him out to Onions when time and circumstance dictated.
‘That’s it? That’s all the two of you have to point the finger at a fellow officer? He’s a bit flash? He’s a bit bloody flash? Well, it’s not good enough. I can’t go to the commissioner with what amounts to no more than the gut feelings of a wet-behind-the-ears recruit and, forgive this, George, a man who’s been retired for five years. He’ll blast me off the bloody mountain. Now, there is something amiss in the borough of Stepney. That much is obvious. But you cannot expect me to take what the two of you are saying seriously when it amounts to no more than gossip. And I’ll say now that I’m appalled by all three of you. Where, where for Christ’s sake, is your judgement? Freddie – you’ve been ill. Can’t blame you for that, but has it rotted your brain? I cannot waste time listening to your crackpot theories. We do not go around pointing the finger at our fellow officers without the slightest shred of evidence. And if we took heed of every daft rumour we heard, you and I would both have been drummed out of the force years ago. What we have is a system, a system that the three of you now seem to be trying to circumvent. There ought to be a sign on the desk of every divisional detective inspector saying, “The buck stops here.” If there’s anyone to blame it’s got to be the man in charge. Now, when is Inspector Milligan due back?’
‘Tomorrow,’ said the Shrimp.
Jack’s voice soared. Eddie and Mary McDiarmuid looked blank and baffled. The Shrimp had turned white; Bonham was red with embarrassment or restrained rage.
‘Tomorrow I shall fry Milligan’s ears in chip fat. If the Ryans have muscled in on the Marxes, he’s the one who should have known, and he’d better have a bloody good explanation! I’ve got bodies piling up like the St Valentine’s Day massacre and I want answers! In the meantime, I want nothing of what was said here leaked. If so much as a word of this gets out I shall come down on the lot of you like a ton of bricks!’
Jack left without another word.
Troy took advantage of the chaise-longue, and quietly stretched out: Jack had worn him out. He’d seen dozens of Jack’s rages over the years, but this one had the unique quality, if that was the word, of coming when he, not Troy, was running the show.
A few moments passed in silence. Then Bonham got up with a quiet ‘I’ll be off then,’ and opened the front door.
The Shrimp looked blasted, muttered his ‘goodnight,’ and they left together.
Mary McDiarmuid moved to a position from which she could look clearly at Troy and said, ‘I’m the new girl here. Would you mind telling me what all that was about?’
Troy sighed at the effort, but the words were ready and able. ‘Jack feels cornered.’
‘Cornered?’
‘I’ve presented him with a fait accompli and he doesn’t like it. But he’ll come round, maybe not tomorrow or the day after, but he’ll come round.’
It was Eddie’s turn to express bewilderment.
‘What fait accompli?’
Troy thought about this. Clark was the most trustworthy man he had ever known. Not that he was honest, straight as a die et cetera –far from it. But he was bent in all the ways Troy himself was bent. For much of the time so was Jack, but when he wasn’t he wasn’t.
‘Who do you think blew up Brock? Who do you think put me in hospital? Who do you think snatched Bernie Champion? We’ve been looking at Brock’s murder from the wrong angle from the start. We assumed it was vengeance. That Brock had been blown up as tit-for-tat for sending Alf Marx down. Nothing of the sort. The Ryans hit Brock just to show Alf ’s gang they could. To scare the living daylights out of them. And they took Bernie to get control of the territory. What we just heard from George and young Robertson is the first thing I’ve heard in weeks that explains what happened to me.’
‘And Joey Rork?’
‘Rork just blundered into it. He followed the Ryans thinking he would learn something about Danny. They killed him. Rork wasn’t a complete fool either. He spotted them for what they were. Two tearaways on the up. He didn’t think they were just ringing cars. He thought they were making serious money.’
‘They’re not much more than kids. How could they just take over? Us not knowing about it till now is one thing, but how?’
‘How many of Alf ’s mob went down with him?’
‘Six or seven?’ said Eddie.
‘Eight,’ said Troy. ‘The gang was left in tatters.’
Eddie thought about this. When Eddie thought about things, Troy knew, he was, often as not, faking to give the appearance of due consideration to what had been on the tip of his tongue anyway. ‘Do you remember, sir, what you said at Mr Brocklehurst’s party when Alf Marx went down?’
‘No.’
‘I was standing next to you, sir, you were talking to Mr Wildeve but I heard you all the same. You said, “Nature abhors a vacuum.” ’
‘I did?’
‘Yes, sir. Let’s hope Mr Wildeve remembers too.’
Troy reached for the telephone and called Claridge’s. Only when Reception answered did he realise he didn’t know what name to ask for. ‘Miss Tosca?’ But there was no Miss Tosca staying there. ‘Mrs Troy?’ It seemed so unlikely. Mrs Troy it was, but she had checked out half an hour ago.
He lay back on the chaise-longue, the phone sitting on his chest like an obelisk. It might ring. He’d wait. He might by force of will be able to conjure her up like a will-o’-the-wisp.
About ten minutes later he heard the door open. He hadn’t bothered to lock it after he’d finally ushered Eddie out with ‘It’s ten o’clock. Bugger off home.’ All the same, the strength of his will was a surprise.
He saw a pair of spiky heels step into the arc lit by the reading lamp behind his head, tilted a little and saw the hem of a rain-spattered trenchcoat. The trenchcoat pooled around her ankles, he looked all the way up and saw . . . Kitty, a vision of a creamy-white summer dress, so translucent he could see through it . . . a collage of light and shade, curve and hollow. She flicked the hem at him, brushing it gently across his face. ‘If you say you haven’t got the energy, you ’re dogmeat.’
She plucked the phone off his chest, and lay down in its place, nose to his nose, lips to his lips . . . lips to his ear.
‘Phoning someone, were you?’
‘Claridge’s,’ he said simply, marvelling how neatly the truth became a lie.
In the middle of the night the phone rang.
Not Jack?
Not another dismembered body?
Surely?
It was Tosca. At the sound of her croaky hello, Troy turned to see if Kitty had woken. She hadn’t.
‘Where are you?’
‘Heathrow. My plane leaves in less than an hour.’
‘Leaves for where?’
‘Not gonna tell you that. We don’t have the time. I just wanted you to know you blew it.’
Troy and Milligan met in the Chandos about half an hour before closing time. It was the first time Troy had been into the pub since the night Brock had been killed. The blast had forced the place to smarten up a bit. It had lost its front windows and, in replacing them, much of the pre-war feel of the place had gone – peeled off with the wallpaper, thrown out with the chairs and tables. No bad thing, thought Troy – it had given it a look of its own time, brought a bit of old London into the 1950s. Kicking and screaming might well be the cliché – if that could in any measure qualify the effect of a bomb. It had been Brock who kicked and screamed as his skin turned to cinder on his flesh.
‘I’m sorry to drag you out, Freddie, but there are things I need to tell you.’
Troy noted that Milligan wasn’t saying ‘talk about’, he was saying ‘tell’. He looked awful. Another man’s dying had put years on him. At best Paddy was the sort of bloke who looked in need of a shave or half asleep, but those were the illusions of appearance not the man. But now the bags under his eyes, the lines scored in each cheek were real. His dad was killing him. ‘I can’t go on. I’ve got to put in me papers. This thing with my old man is tearing me apart. I can’t be in two places at once. So I’ve decided. I’m puttin’ in me papers.’
It was eerie. Paddy was using exactly the same words Brock had used, in the same pub, at the same time of night. If it weren’t for the refit, it might even have been the same table – they were sitting in the same spot.
‘You don’t have to do that, you know.’
Milligan was weeping silently, two small rivulets coursing down his cheeks. Troy reached out a hand, but before he could touch him the man had whipped out his handkerchief and honked. A rough seizure of self-control that didn’t quite work.
‘There’s compassionate leave,’ Troy said softly.
‘How much do you think I’ve had in the last four months? I’ve exceeded any reasonable limit they might have. My nick’s going to hell in a handcart. Jack said as much this afternoon.’
‘You’ve seen Jack?’
‘Came over to Stepney. I’m not sure I’d ever say Jack was a mate, but we’ve been through a couple of scrapes together – you know, you were there yourself – but today I felt like one of the dogs. He was – he was on the edge of rage all the bloody time. I could feel it. He didn’t let rip. But he let me know in no uncertain terms what he thought of me.’
Troy said, ‘It’s not Jack’s decision, fortunately. It’s Onions’s. And Jack’s been like that a lot lately. We’ve all seen it. He’s too many unsolved murders on his hands. At least five at the moment – if you count Bernie Champion.’
Troy had thought a bit of professional interest might make Milligan perk up at this, but he ignored it.
‘He closed the door to my office and asked me straight out, did I think Al Mazzer was bent?’
There was no way out now. No amount of sympathy could grant leeway to spare his feelings. ‘Is he?’ Troy said simply.
Milligan reddened, visibly. Tightened his fist round the double whisky he had not yet touched. ‘I’ll tell you what I told Jack. No. Absolutely fuckin’ not! Do you think I’d accept a bent copper in my nick? Do you think that because a bloke’s a bit flash, dresses well, he’s automatically on the take? No, Freddie, no!’
Paddy’s glass shattered in his hand. A jet of blood and Scotch shot out across the table. Troy looked up. The whole room was staring at them now. Troy stared back until the heads turned away and the bar-room buzz began again. He passed a clean handkerchief to Paddy, watched as he staunched the cuts to his hand, wiped at his cheeks, red with rage, wet with grief.
‘We had to ask,’ Troy whispered.
Milligan whispered back, ‘I know, I know. Somebody tipped you off, nobody’s sayin’ who . . .’ Again tears welled in his eyes, he bent his head and his voice rumbled in his throat. ‘I’m sorry, Freddie. I really am. I’d better go.’
Troy placed a hand on his arm and gently held him. ‘There’s still something to be done.’
Milligan raised his head, a mask of pain and misery. ‘What?’
‘I can talk to Onions. Onions can talk to the chief constable in Lancashire, the ACC in Liverpool. We can get you a transfer.’
‘There’s nothing. I asked. If I asked once I asked a dozen times.’
‘Manchester, then? Warrington? Preston?’
Milligan drew deep breaths, calmed himself before answering. ‘Truth to tell, I didn’t look that far afield. All I could see was being there. Me being there, in the ’Pool. With me dad in the ’Pool.’
‘But you could,’ Troy proceeded slowly, ‘handle things from Warrington or Manchester or . . .’
‘I suppose so. It’s just that all I could think of was . . .’
‘Then let me handle it. I’ll talk to Onions. I’ll get you the transfer.’
‘Can you really do that, Freddie?’
‘Of course,’ Troy lied. ‘But there’s one other thing I need to know.’
‘Right.’
‘The Ryan twins. Did Jack ask you about them?’
‘Yep. And I told him. We’ve had those two marked since they got out of the army. They’re villains right enough, but small-time. They live in Watney Street – half of Watney Street is crooked. I reckon they ring cars and fence a bit of stuff. They’ve got a garage under the arches in Shadwell. I’ve raided them a couple of times. Never been able to catch ’em. But it’s only a matter of time.’
‘So, they’re not the East End’s new Mr Big?’
‘Freddie, it’s good of you to try and cheer me up, and funny as that is I really don’t feel like laughin’ right now.’
Onions was not in a good mood. ‘Why is Milligan pestering you? Doesn’t he know you’re off sick?’
‘He’s not pestering me. We had a couple of drinks in the pub and it all came out,’ Troy lied. ‘Stan, trust me. Do this for me.’
‘Hasn’t he had any leave?’
‘I believe he’s had lots of leave, but the fact remains he needs more.’
‘OK, OK. If I agree to this, though God knows why I should, then there are consequences and there are questions.’
‘Of course.’
‘Who’s number two at Stepney and is he capable of running a nick until we get someone in or promote some lucky sod?’
‘He’s called Al Mazzer, and the answer’s no. He can’t be allowed to run a nick and he shouldn’t be promoted.’
‘You know the bloke?’
‘Never met him.’
‘Then whatever it is you’re not tellin’ me I think you’d better tell now.’
Troy told him. Jack would just have to live with it. He could almost see Onions’s fuse catch light.
‘What? What? On the word of a constable who’s still wet behind the ears?’
‘Yes.’
‘Freddie, I do not take lightly to my coppers being called crooked. I want hard evidence before I act on stuff like that.’
‘I believe Robertson.’
‘Freddie, you’ve never met the man. I’m not pointing the finger at a copper on the word of a green recruit.’
‘Then you and Jack think as one. You are in the majority. But all I’m asking is that you do nothing. I’m not saying haul him in, kick him out. I’m saying leave him exactly where he is.’
Silence.
‘You can do that, Stan. Can’t you?’
‘I can. But that still leaves us without a DDI for Stepney.’
‘An outsider. Someone who’s never worked in London before.’
‘Who?’
‘Let me sleep on it.’
In ’56 Troy had investigated a case in the north of England. A furniture salesman from a one-horse town in the middle of Derbyshire had vanished, and the wife had appealed to Troy. Unfortunately Troy had found not a live if straying husband but a dead frogman, and he’d found him underneath a Russian battleship in Portsmouth harbour. The ramifications of this had rumbled on for weeks. It had been a diplomatic incident. Out of it came two visits to Belper, Derbyshire. One had resulted in his relationship with Foxx, the other in a debt of gratitude to a young policeman, who had defied his bosses to help Troy. Troy had kept in touch with Detective Sergeant Ray Godbehere. Sooner or later, he knew, there would be a way to repay the debt.
‘It’s been a while, Mr Troy,’ Godbehere said. ‘I almost thought you’d forgotten me.’
‘No, a few months, surely.’
‘No, sir, it’s more than a year since you last rang.’
‘And have there been changes?’
‘What? In this nick?’
‘Yes.’
‘Mr Warriss is due to retire next year. I don’t believe he intends to recommend me for the promotion in his stead, if that’s what you mean.’
‘Your accent. Are you a local man?’
‘Not exactly. I’m from Sheffield.’
‘Any particular prejudice against London?’
‘Lead me to it.’
‘Fine. Leave it with me and I’ll get back to you later today.’
‘Mr Troy, not so fast. You can’t just dangle this in front of me without a clue as to what it is.’
‘You’re the new divisional detective inspector of Stepney. I’ll get your file plonked in front of the commissioner later today, and when he rubber-stamps it I’ll call you back.’
‘And I’m supposed to concentrate on me job in the meantime? Bloody hell.’
‘No, Mr Godbehere, you’re supposed to pack.’
Forty-eight hours passed.
Onions called with a terse ‘You’d better be right about this bloke.’
Jack called with a terser ‘Cunt.’
Troy could not face another meeting in the Chandos. It had, in so short a time, achieved too symbolic a value. He would always associate it with the physical dissolution of Brock, and the spiritual dissolution of Milligan. When Godbehere called he suggested instead the pub nearest his own house – the theatreland watering hole, the Salisbury in St Martin’s Lane, a plush, mirrored, gilded boozer in the high Victorian style.
He watched Godbehere at the bar, wondering if at thirty he’d had that same young, determined look about him. He knew he had, he just found it so hard to remember. It was like an age of innocence, and that, too, was in the nature of an illusion. He’d never been innocent, as Kolankiewicz reminded him once or twice a year when the vodka had washed away the last vestiges of the old man’s caution.
Godbehere slapped down a ginger beer in front of Troy and a large vodka for himself.
‘Are you settled in?’
‘I’ve digs across the river in Southwark. I never think it pays to live on the manor. I’ve a room in a house practically on top of Borough Tube station.’
‘Underground,’ Troy said. ‘Only tourists call it the Tube.’
‘I think there are one or two at Leman Street nick who think I might be a tourist.’
‘Have they made you welcome?’
‘The air of resentment is so thick you could stuff it in your pipe and smoke it. But that’d be true of any nick you could post me to. It won’t last. I’m in charge and they know it. Mr Wildeve came round in person on the first day. I felt anointed. If he doesn’t want me there he’s not letting on.’
‘I don’t think Jack knows what he wants.’
‘Can I be frank, sir?’
‘Of course, and drop the “sir”.’
‘Then,’ Godbehere went on, ‘I don’t think that matters. You’re calling the shots. It’s what you think that matters. And you do know what you think or I wouldn’t be sitting here. I’d be stuck in Derbyshire still wondering if I’d make it past sergeant.’
‘Quite.’
‘You got me down to the Smoke for a purpose. I’m curious to know what.’
‘What has Jack told you?’
‘He was blunt. Very blunt. Told me he thinks my predecessor fucked up in spades. Filled me in on the problem with the Ryans. Made it clear I’d got my work cut out, and told me to have no hesitation, “none whatsoever,” I think he said, in calling in the Yard when I saw fit.’
‘And your detective sergeant?’
‘Mr Mazzer? He told me to watch Mr Mazzer. Wouldn’t go any further than that. Warned me he’d been passed over for promotion and there was bound to be friction.’
‘It’s more than that,’ said Troy. ‘Mazzer’s bent. Jack is being exceptionally cautious in not warning you of that. That, after all, is why you’re here. Report to Jack what you see fit, but report everything to me. I don’t want Mazzer watched, I want him cut out. I want him marginalised until I know what he’s up to. And I want him to know as little as possible of your investigation into the Ryans. Tomorrow you’ll get a call from a chap called George Bonham. He was station sergeant at Leman Street for years. Meet him at his flat. Tell no one what you’re doing. He’ll put you in touch with every East End nark he knows. You’re to build up a dossier. I want to know everyone who works for the Ryans, every job that can reasonably be put down to them, all their assets, every piece of property they own, every bank account they have, everyone who’s ever so much as taken a tanner from them.’
‘You think Mr Mazzer’s taken the odd tanner?’
‘I’d like to say I know it in my bones. But I can’t. It’s a hunch. Not a guess or a longshot. A hunch. And I’ve gambled a lot persuading the commissioner to act on my hunch. Have you raised the issue of the Ryans with Mazzer?’
‘Oh, aye, I raised it all right.’
‘And?’
‘He told me they were “fly” – that was his word “fly”, “fly and harmless”.’
Bruno is tied to a dining chair with gaffer tape. His wife Glenda is also taped to a chair. The difference is that they’ve taped across her mouth too. Bruno can see the flare of her nostrils above the strip of black plastic and the wide-eyed stare of panic in her eyes. She is grunting.
Ryan presses the barrel of his revolver into Bruno’s forehead. ‘I’m gonna ask you one more time, Bruno—’
‘Fuck you!’
Ryan pulls back the gun and cracks him above the ear with it. ‘Naughty, naughty. Now. Here me out, old son. I’m gonna ask you one more time. You tell me where my money is or your missus gets it.’
‘You wouldn’t d—’
Ryan swings round neatly, levels the gun and shoots Glenda Felucci in the face. Bone and brains splatter out across the wallpaper, a fountain of blood a foot high spurts from the back of her head, the chair goes over backwards and Bruno finds himself looking up the skirt of his dead wife. A grotesque and trivial indecency.
Ryan puts the gun back on Bruno’s forehead, but all Bruno can say is ‘Waa, waa, waa, waa.’
‘Oh, fuckin’ ‘ell. Oh, fuckin’ ’ell. Bruno! Bruno!’
Ryan slaps him, but all Bruno can say is, ‘Waa, waa, waa, waa.’
‘Oh, fuckin’ ’ell. Just tape the bugger up, will you?’
‘Shouldn’t we kill him too?’
‘If we kill ’em both, you plonker, we’ll never get our money back, now, will we? Just tape up that clanging manhole. I can’t bear to listen to ’im.’
It’s forty minutes before the police arrive. The first man in throws up at the sight of Glenda Felucci. The second pulls down her skirt and tears the strip of gaffertape off Bruno’s mouth.
Bruno whispers, ‘Ryan.’
For several hours it is all he says.