Travis still stood with his back to them, one hand pressed to his forehead, the elbow crooked, as though fighting to contain what cerebrally could no longer be contained. He said nothing. Troy counted the stripes on his shirt.
‘What now?’ he said at last, without turning. ‘What do the two of you have in mind?’
Troy looked at Woodbridge to find Woodbridge looking at him.
‘Let’s have some light on the subject, shall we?’
Woodbridge got up, flicked the light switch by the door. A chandelier bearing two dozen electric candles flashed on, and he parked his backside on a radiator beneath the window. Travis lowered his hand, sat facing Troy once more, the comfort of darkness stripped from him, every line in his face visible, the blankness in his eyes, and the bags beneath them. He put his palms flat on the polished surface of the table as though steadying his whole body with the slightest pressure.
‘You resign,’ said Troy.
It seemed to him that Travis nodded.
‘You stand down at the next election. You do not accept a peerage. You leave public life.’
Again the merest nod of the head.
‘Coyn retires at Christmas.’
He nodded again, eyes down, not looking at Troy, staring at the spread of his own fingers on the table top.
‘Quint is fired.’
‘All of us?’ said Travis simply.
Troy heard the words come to him from some distant schoolbook history. Words he could not have said he knew.
‘“You have sat too long for any good you might have been doing. In the name of God go.”’
This remark seemed to galvanise Travis. The fingers closed, the hands locked, his eyes met Troy’s.
‘How very convenient for you, Commander Troy. Everyone out of the way. Leaving you a clear field. A quick bit of Shakespearian blank verse, and you sweepus all away and run Scotland Yard yourself.’
Troy was sure he heard it. Ricocheting between earth and sky. Sure he saw it. Him, the boy Troy, running up the aisle of that long-forgotten theatre in Le Touquet. His father’s voice ringing in his ears. A sound like breaking string. He heard it snap, over his head somewhere, deep within him somewhere. Something snapped. Something snapped in Mr Charlie. Something snapped in Troy. Then he could hear Woodbridge speaking from the edge of the room.
‘You’re an ignorant bugger, Nick. It isn’t blank verse and it isn’t Shakespeare. It’s Cromwell dismissing the Long Parliament.’
And then all he could hear was the sound like breaking string. ‘A distant sound, as though coming from the sky, like the breaking of a string.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘We all go. I’ll resign too. We all go.’
A quarter of an hour later, ash white with burnt-out rage, Travis showed them to the door.
‘One last thing,’ Troy said in the open doorway, buttoning up his coat. ‘How did you get Percy Blood to shoot Fitz?’
Travis didn’t even think about it, as though he had expected the question all along, an ironic smile twisting his thin lips.
‘If I’d wanted Fitz killed, do you seriously think I’d’ve sent a lunatic to do it?’
‘How were you going to do it?’
‘Do you know, I never worked that out. As you said, I had my arrangement with Fitz. I took one thing at a time. And then . . . then I didn’t have to. The problem had sorted itself.’
The door closed. Troy and Woodbridge found themselves alone in the stillness of a wet, deserted street. They walked to the end of Church Row and stood on the corner.
‘Thank you,’ said Troy. It seemed to him that it needed to be said.
‘Had to be done,’ said Woodbridge. ‘It had to be done for Fitz and for Clover. I won’t deny I gave it some thought after you’d gone. And I don’t much care for blackmail. But you were right. We do it for Fitz and for Clover. They neither of them deserved what was done to them. She didn’t deserve to be dead at seventeen. Fitz never deserved to be publicly pilloried in that way. He didn’t deserve to be hounded and he didn’t deserve to be in their line of fire. As you said to me not so long ago – aim too low and you never know who you might hit.’
‘All the same, I’m grateful to you. I’d’ve hated signing Charlie’s death warrant.’
‘But you’d’ve done it?’
Troy shrugged.
‘Answer me one question, Troy. Why aren’t you bringing down the government? First Profumo and Keeler, then me and the Ffitch sisters. After a year like this it will only take one more scandal to finish us. You arrest Travis and we’re finished.’
‘You’re finished whatever I do. Macmillan’s already said he’ll go. You and Fitz have done for Macmillan as surely as if you’d put a gun to his head. You lot aren’t going to have a party conference this week; it’s a beauty contest. Perhaps Rab Butler will lead you into the next election. He’s never struck me as a winner. Or, since one can now resign a peerage, perhaps some Tory in the Lords will decide to throw in his cap. Who knows, you might end up led by a fool like Hailsham, and that’s a losing ticket if ever I saw one. No – I’m not using this to bring down a government because I don’t have to and I don’t think it’s my job to. The next election is Labour’s for the asking. Besides, Travis is a bigger fool than even you think. We’ve evidence of his infidelities, but I’ve nothing that would stand up in court and convict him of murder. If he thinks he’s getting away with murder, then let him. Just so long as he goes.’
‘Do you know how that piece of Cromwell you quoted him ends?’
‘No. I shot my bolt in quoting as much as I did.’
‘It ends, “You shall now give place to better men.” Do you really think the other lot will be better men?’
‘Family loyalties apart, probably not. But at least give them a chance to fuck up in their own way. Harold Wilson is about as dry as a cream cracker and scarcely more witty. I doubt he’s the imagination to compete with you or Travis – I should think he has few thoughts below the collar stud let alone below the waist. George Brown is genial enough but a complete liability with two drinks inside him. I doubt very much whether the party has ever forgiven him for telling Khrushchev where he got off. I think it’s asking too much that politicians should not be bent, but at least let’s have some new kinks and curves.’
‘And I alas shall not be here to see them. I’m going to live in France. Turn the summer place into a permanent home. I was packing when you called. And you? Will you really resign?’
‘Yes. I meant it. We . . . I mean our generation . . . has made a hash of it. Let’s see if the new lot can do any better.’
‘The new generation? Wilson and Brown? New Britain?’
Troy’s memory told him he had heard such incredulity recently, expressed in pretty much the same terms. Only then it had been Troy himself uttering them. Woodbridge was laughing. In the same way, in the same words Troy had laughed at Rod months ago. This was the dawn of the ‘New Britain’, and they neither of them believed in the validity of the ‘new’ any more than Rebecca West had done . . . New Woman, New Britain – but where were the New Men? There were only old men. At best, old men in new trousers. Now, there was a phrase. ‘New Britain, New Trousers.’ It had all the catchiness of a good political slogan. Let Rod put that to his ‘punters’.
‘I don’t think I meant Wilson and Brown. I meant . . .’
He was not sure how this sentence ended, but since names came in handy couples . . .
‘I meant Lennon and McCartney. And for that matter Tara and Caro Ffitch.’
‘I’ll be leaving in the morning. If you fancy a week in the Cevennes next spring, give me a call.’
Woodbridge crossed the empty street, heading for the alley that cut across to Hampstead High Street. He stopped and called back to Troy. ‘And you? Where will you go?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Troy. ‘I really don’t.’
It occurred to him that he could still call Woodbridge back while he was still within earshot, and tell him the truth, that his career had been destroyed by a trap, not of the Russians’ making, but of his own side’s. A trap they had been too stupid or too cowardly to stop. But if Woodbridge felt that another scandal and his own guilt would bind him, how would he not be bound by the force of his own anger?