Troy phoned Anna. He waited almost a whole day after Foxx turned him down and then he called Anna. He could not remember when he had last called her.
‘I’ve been trying to reach you for two days,’ she said.
He thought she sounded tearful, an immense sadness in her voice.
‘I’ve been out a lot,’ he said lamely. ‘Just walking around.’
‘Could you come over right away?’
‘What’s up?’
‘Angus is dead. They’ve found his body. It appears he jumped in the river and drowned himself about a month back. Now the body’s washed up on the Essex coast by Jacob’s Reach. The police came to see me two days ago.’
Tumbling through his mind, the kaleidoscopic explosion of paper as he had torn Angus’s manuscript free from his chest, the manuscript he had faithfully promised Angus he would deliver safely to Anna, the last words he had spoken, ‘I knew it would get me in the end.’ Had he jumped before or after Troy had been pushed? Then the indelible words Charlie had uttered to him – Jacob’s Reach, the muddy promontory on the Essex coast where the body of Norman Cobb had finally broken surface. Anna’s voice cut into his reverie.
‘Oh God, Troy. I can’t take any more. Just get over here pronto, will you?’
He listened to the buzz of the dialling tone, put down the phone and, wondering how long he’d be gone, packed a toothbrush and a clean shirt. Then he collected the Bentley, parked in Bedfordbury almost exactly where it had stood the night Percy Blood had riddled it with bullets, and drove to Unbearable Bassington Street.
‘They asked me to identify him,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to see my husband dead. I didn’t want the memory of him looking like a half-decayed corpse. I spend my working life with the dead and dying. I wanted to remember Angus alive. I wanted him vital, I wanted him to be the man I married. I called you. You could have gone instead. But I had to go. And I couldn’t swear that it was him. He was unrecognisable. The water, the fish, God knows. The eyes were gone. Troy! He had no eyes! A one-legged man with Angus’s wallet in his coat pocket. And I wished they hadn’t made me look. So I asked for the leg. And there it was, that old tin leg with all the repairs he’d had made to it over twenty years. And on the back of the calf a maker’s stamp. I’ll remember it till the day I die: ‘A. Futscher, Colditz, fecit. MCMXLII .’ So it was him, I said. Him or some other one-legged RAF ace with a tin leg made by the same little man in the same little German town. God, Troy, where were you when I needed you?’
Angus was buried the following day. Troy had spent the night in Anna’s guest room, heard her cry till dawn and watched her emerge in black, decline his offer of breakfast, hiding her grief beneath a layer or more of make-up.
A damp November day, ten thousand leaves waiting to be swept up, soggy underfoot, clinging to the soles of the shoes. No one came. Angus had few friends, no siblings, and his parents were long dead. Troy stood with Anna on his arm while a priest, two gravediggers and an old lady who seemed to be a professional mourner watched Angus’s vast coffin lowered into the grave. He found thoughts so idle, so pointless he could never utter them – had they buried his tin leg in the coffin with him?
They walked back to his car as the thud of earth hitting the coffin lid boomed out. He did not know how Anna felt, but he could not bear to hear this sound.
They stopped under a leafless chestnut tree. She slipped her arm from his.
‘Well?’ he said.
‘Well?’ she said. ‘Well? You bastard, you complete and utter fucking bastard.’
Her arms flailed and the blows of small clenched fists caught him on the chest, the cheeks, the ears. She laid into Troy just as Peggy Blood and Valerie Clover had done.
Troy held her fast, her arms with his, stilled the rain of blows and her head sank onto his chest and her tears rolled forth in flood.
‘Oh Troy, just hold me, will you?’
Minutes passed. He could not have guessed how many. The furious pounding of her heart slowed, the tectonic heaving of her breast calmed. At last she spoke again, her voiced muffled by the tear-wet wool of his winter overcoat. ‘Oh Troy, just fuck off, will you?’