He found the newspaper headlines gave him no pleasure. ‘Scotland Yard Rocked By Resignations.’ But it worked like clockwork. After a lacklustre speech to his party conference, Travis had not put in his bid for the leadership, and when the resignations hit – first Quint (men in jobs like his never get fired, they merely accept that they have resigned, like it or not) – then Coyn’s request for early retirement, and finally Troy – no one could be in any way surprised that the Home Secretary thought fit to follow. He tendered his resignation to the new Prime Minster, Sir Alec Douglas-(lately Lord)Home, and was accepted. Half the newspapers in the land implied or openly said that he must be to blame. The bolder even suggested another scandal, to round off the year of scandals, that was being buried in this rapid tumble of the Titans.
Kolankiewicz, Quint and Troy all left the Yard on the same day. The press paid no heed to Kolankiewicz – they had never heard of him. Troy, when pressed by the Sunday Post, merely pointed to the state of his health. Quint seethed in silence. The front, since it mattered, was maintained to the point of the Commissioner holding a leaving party for the three of them. Troy thought that he had never attended a drearier, more joyless gathering of human beings. After Coyn’s brief speech he could have sworn he heard the sound of one hand clapping.
The man clearly thought he should make a toast. He looked from Quint to Troy and back to Troy again, and Troy saved him from the ‘umms’ and ‘ers’ by raising his glass and giving the detectives of Scotland Yard an unambiguous toast.
‘Mary McDiarmuid,’ he said, and the room echoed his cry. It was, he thought, the one toast that would not have them thumping each other between the filing cabinets.
He went to the bogs and relieved himself of two glasses of lukewarm, flat beer. He did not hear a sound behind him. The first he knew was an excruciating blow to the kidneys that sucked the air out of his lungs and left him pissing down his trouser leg. Halfway to the floor, an elbow wedged in the trough, he saw the foot aiming at his face and braced himself for the blow. Then foot and man went flying and Jack reached out to help him to his feet. He looked down at Quint stretched full length on the lavatory floor. Jack had knocked him out cold.
‘Am I going to spend the rest of my life getting you out of scrapes, Freddie?’
It was not the rest of Jack’s life that concerned Troy, it was the rest of his own. If this was the limit of Quint’s idea of vengeance then he would not waste one second of it worrying about him.
Out in the corridor a posse of the short and stout waited for them. Kolankiewicz in his ancient homburg, a copy of the Daily Herald sticking out of his macintosh pocket, and Clark, identical in girth, stature and macintosh, but favouring Private Eye and a trilby. Kolankiewicz dangled what looked very much like a hatbox at the end of one arm.
‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us wash the dust of thirty years from our throats.’
He led the way, out of the south entrance and round the corner to St Stephen’s Tavern, watering hole of the odd copper and the even odder MP, being, as it was, almost directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. They pushed in past a noisy horde of backbenchers. Troy even recognised a few of them, part of the new intake of 1959, one or two of them disciples of Rod’s. Most of them could bore for Britain. He picked up fragments as Jack and Eddie went to the bar and bought for the four of them.
‘We’ve got the bastards on the run this time,’ a red-faced Yorkshireman was saying. ‘Travis is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back.’
And from another corner of the room, ‘Twelve years in power. Twelve miserable bloody years! Do you know there are kids out campaigning in my constituency who can’t remember any other government?’
And Troy turned off to it. They could say nothing he wanted to hear. Nothing he had not heard before. Nothing he had not himself said to Woodbridge amonthorsoago in the wet streets of Hampstead. Nineteen-sixty-three would end as it had begun, with futile speculation along the lines of imminent election. Rod was right: build your wall. While the glue that held us together dissolved – if there was now a generation that could not remember life before the Tories, there was most assuredly one and a half which could not remember the war – build your wall high.
‘What will you do?’ Jack said to Kolankiewicz.
‘I have my allotment. I have raised most of my own veg since the war. The contrast between slicing into a carrot grown on your own plot and slicing into the skull of some poor bugger you’ve never met in life cannot be overstated. I might go so far as to say that it has kept me sane these many years.’
There were, thought Troy, many who might disagree. If this was Kolankiewicz the sane version, he never wanted to see the nutter who lurked within.
‘And’, he went on, ‘my particular delight in my small front garden has been the cultivation of the flag iris, on which I now propose to write a book.’
Jack looked gobsmacked. Looked at Troy.
‘Don’t ask,’ said Troy.
‘Ask what?’
‘Don’t ask me what I’m going to do. Because I don’t know.’
A hour or more later they had toasted freedom, cursed the Yard, voiced regret, pledged eternal friendship, reminisced at random and were ready to leave. Troy asked the question that had nagged at him most of the evening.
‘What’s in the hatbox?’
Kolankiewicz opened it up and removed what appeared to be a leather football, a casey, painted black, with a short length of fuse sticking out of the seam, and the word ‘Bomb’ neatly stencilled on the side.
‘Is November 5th,’ he said. ‘Gunpowder, treason and to hell with those fuckers over the road.’
Jack roared with laughter. Troy knew Kolankiewicz better and while he saw the joke he was more puzzled than amused. The more so when Kolankiewicz carried the ‘bomb’ head high past a mob of cheering, half-pissed backbenchers. Troy would not have thought they were capable of taking themselves and their dubious trade lightly enough to find this funny.
Outside the pub, they reached the parting of ways. Jack, the only one of them in any way sentimental, hugged a startled Kolankiewicz, hugged a less startled Troy and was about to hug Clark when Clark said, ‘But I’ll be seeing you at work tomorrow, sir.’
‘So you will,’ said Jack, ‘so you will.’
Jack and Eddie went south, Troy and Kolankiewicz north.
‘Look over your shoulder,’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘Are they looking back at us?’
No,’ said Troy. ‘They’re going over Westminster Bridge. Jack’s a bit unsteady on his feet. Eddie’s holding him up.’
‘Good.’
Kolankiewicz crossed the street, just north of Big Ben. Troy followed. A beat bobby, big as a barn door, passed them on the pavement. Troy was not sure whether he recognised either of them or not. But he looked at Kolankiewicz’s ‘bomb’, laughed out loud and walked on chuckling, hands clasped behind his back, plodding into Lambeth in best copper fashion. The great English cliché, the laughing policeman. Troy could still hear the sound of his laughter as Kolankiewicz put a match to the fuse and lobbed the ‘bomb’ over the railings and into New Palace Yard.
‘We got three minutes,’ he said.
‘Three minutes for what?’
Troy hurried after him. They had just rounded the corner into Horse Guards Parade when Kolankiewicz stopped, took out his pocket watch and began to count off the seconds on his fingers. On the count of three a dull whumphff was just audible behind them.
‘Not bad,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Out by only three seconds.’
He walked on. Troy stood rooted to the spot, all but openmouthed. Then he tore after Kolankiewicz.
‘You don’t mean that bomb was real?’
‘Very small, but, yes, very real. Call it a parting gesture.’
They went their separate ways at the Strand Underground station, where Kolankiewicz could catch the Northern Line home to Hampstead Garden Suburb.
‘A book on flag irises?’ said Troy.
‘Why not?’ said Kolankiewicz.
Troy walked home. Across the Strand, past the Charing Cross Hospital, up Bedfordbury, retracing at a slow walk the exact route he had taken the night he had run down the street with the dying Clover in his arms. In the back way, down the courtyard to his front door, and into the rest of his life.