Scotland Yard was a complex structure. A complex structure rendered complicated by the legacy of recently retired Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Stanley Onions, KCMG, OBE. Onions had been Troy’s champion. Against the odds, and scarcely without wavering, but Troy’s champion all the same.
In 1944 Troy had blotted his copybook – been caught in possession of an illegal weapon, still working on a case Onions had told him to drop, and damn near killed in what Onions had called ‘a shoot-out at the OK corral.’ He had delayed Troy’s promotion by the best part of a year. In 1956 he had accepted an undated letter of resignation from Troy and simply sat on it. It covered Onions for things Troy had done that he had thought it better not to know about. All he heard were rumours and Troy doubted very much whether Onions ever believed Troy was connected with the disappearance of Inspector Cobb – but if Stan had really had an inkling Troy had killed Cobb, nothing on earth would have saved his skin. But rumour persisted without ever seeming to gel. And Onions’ reaction to uncongealed rumour had been to promote Troy. As the cliché had it, he put his money where his mouth was. He promoted and he promoted and he promoted. By the summer of 1961 Troy had risen to Commander of Criminal Investigation, in all but name Scotland Yard’s chief detective. Under him were all the arms of the CID responsible for investigation of crime. And there they came unstuck.
‘What are you up to in Soho?’ Stan had asked one day late in 1961.
‘I need coppers. I can’t afford to waste them on the trivial.’
‘Trivial?’
‘Crimes without victims.’
‘Oh aye?’
‘Do you know how many men we waste chasing whores around Soho?’
‘According to Superintendent Wiggins, not enough.’
‘Ah. He’s been to see you?’
‘Did you expect him to take it lying down? You’ve stripped his squad by three-quarters.’
‘I’ve a crime wave on my hands. Burglaries are up twenty per cent on last year and there’s an organised gang wreaking havoc in sub-post offices all across the south of England. I need every man I can get. The whores aren’t walking the streets any more, and nobody whistles, “Psst, wanna buy a dirty postcard?” It’s all indoors now. Things have changed. The Wolfenden Report changed everything. I’m not going to waste coppers policing what consenting adults do behind closed doors.’
‘Jesus Christ! You’re not serious?’
‘Anyone who wants a French model on the third floor in Meard Street can just walk up. I don’t care.’
‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake – the job of the Vice Squad is to stamp out vice!’
‘Fine. Are we going to nick schoolboys for wanking? The notion you can stampout vice is fatuous; you cannot police the unpoliceable. I’ve left Wiggins enough men to cope with the pimps and the wide boys and with the girls if they get so bold as to solicit on the street. Beyond that I propose better uses for the lazy buggers he calls his Vice Squad. They can try detecting real crime for a change, instead of sitting on their backsides in the coffee bars leafing through tit-and-bum magazines and taking backhanders off ponces!’
Onions had taken the squad away from him. Troy was glad. Vice was a pain in the arse.
It was a simple matter of reorganisation. Onions ran the Met. Under him was a deputy commissioner; under him a bevy of assistant commissioners, each responsible for a section of the Met: A, the uniformed coppers; B, transport; D, a hotchpotch of recruiting, training and communication, and C, crime. C section was what the average man in the street thought of as Scotland Yard. The Criminal Investigation Department. Traditionally C had three branches: the Metropolitan Police Laboratory under its Director, Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, MD, MSc, ARCSc, DI C, FRIC, MBE, amad Pole of remarkably, foully fractured English; Special Branch under Deputy Commander Graham Tattershall MM, CBE; and everything else, all the way from fingerprints, via robbery and murder, to liaison with the metropolitan divisions, under Commander Frederick Troy, a man without title and likely to remain that way. Neither the Branch nor the labs answered to Troy, but directly to C section’s Assistant Commissioner, Albert Scudamore. To Scudamore’s direct responsibilities Onions had added Vice, under its own deputy commander. This division of labour had stayed in place when Onions and Scudamore had retired in the autumn of 1962. Troy did not want Vice back and did not ask for it.
In the long-awaited spring of 1963, the Commissioner was Sir Wilfrid Coyn, KCMG, the Assistant Commisioner for C, Daniel Quint – and between the two the vacant post of Deputy Commissioner. Coyn was a rustic, recently Chief Constable of Wiltshire and regarded by all and sundry as a stop-gap, a chair-filler aged sixty-three, warming the seat until the powers that be made up their minds who should really run the Yard. Rank deceived no one. Quint had been brought in at the same time as Coyn – a tough big-city copper, fresh out of Birmingham – to offer the toughness which Coyn, for all his administrative expertise, might be held to lack. No one much valued the role or rank of the various assistant commissioners of A, B or D. Anyone could direct traffic or order spare parts for wirelesses. When Coyn retired in eighteen months, the race was between Troy and Quint.
It did not make for a happy Yard. It did not make for happy coppers.
Troy missed Onions dearly. He had come to loathe meetings with Quint, to tolerate those with Coyn and if at all possible to avoid meetings with both of them at once. He had his own team, officers who were ‘his’ as he had been Onions’. Superintendent Jack Wildeve, who ran the Murder Squad in C9, as Troy had done in his day. And Troy’s two assistants: Det. Sgt Edwin Clark, a man who had refused promotion on the grounds that it might take him from behind his desk and might just force him to take a little exercise; a man who spoke five languages; a man who could finish The Times crossword in twenty minutes; a man from whom Scotland Yard had no secrets – Swift Eddie was the perfect rogue, the perfect spy, Troy’s eyes and ears – sooner or later every memo in the Yard passed by his gaze. And Det. Sgt Mary McDiarmuid, pretty much the opposite of Clark, a cynical, straightforward Scotswoman who spoke only one language, but spoke it to perfection – pragmatism.
On the Tuesday after Easter at Uphill Troy emerged from a meeting with Quint and Coyn feeling bloody.
‘Your doctor’s been calling you,’ said Mary McDiarmuid.
Clark had never called Troy anything but ‘sir’. Off duty, behind closed doors, it made no difference, Clark invariably called him ‘sir’. Mary McDiarmuid was scrupulous about rank in front of Troy’s superiors, but in their absence frequently called him nothing – and when off duty did what Anna did and called him ‘Troy’. It was Anna trying to reach him now. What could the woman want that she didn’t want at six thirty yesterday evening when he had dropped her off at the conjugal hell in Bassington Street, Marylebone, that was her marital home with Angus, and inevitably dubbed by him ‘Unbearable Bassington Street’?
‘She didn’t say. Just wanted you to call her.’
‘At the surgery?’
‘Yep.’
Troy called.
‘Are you through for the day?’ Anna asked.
‘Just about. Why?’
‘You couldn’t pop in, could you? I’d like you to come in.’
‘What?’
‘Just for a check-up.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’
‘What about your cough?’
‘What cough?’
‘You were coughing half the night on Sunday. You were coughing all through the evening we spent in Notting Hill.
‘No . . . I wasn’t.
‘Honestly, Troy, you were. Look, just come in. A routine check-up. Let me take a professional look at you.’
‘Routine?’
‘Of course. It’s probably nothing, but we should make sure. Just a few tests.’
Afterwards, looking back, he could not see what had possessed him to believe her. So often as a young detective he had invited people to the Yard on a matter that was ‘just routine’ and held onto them all the way to the dock in the Old Bailey. Only Anna, he kept telling himself, would ever have got him to do it.