About Ten Days Later
Someone was following Frederick Troy.
He was pretty certain the Branch had given up tailing him, and in keeping with their habitual, lazy practices they knocked off sharpish at five thirty every day—that was in all probability how they had lost Burgess and Maclean. The new man, caught in reflections from shop windows, was much more persistent. Troy had yet to see his face clearly. All he knew for certain was he was a big bugger in a black macintosh. No hats to disguise him, no change of outfit from one day to the next. Troy had always thought such tactics crude—after all, who could disguise posture or gait, which were giveaways as much as any item of clothing—and so it seemed did his follower. He relied on distance and concealment rather than disguises. A man in a black coat? How obvious was that? London in winter was a sea of black overcoats and gaberdine macintoshes. A flotsam of trilbies punctuated by the odd bowler. All the same, Troy had spotted him two days ago.
Emerging from the Gay Hussar at lunchtime, Troy had gazed idly around and seen no sign of him. But by the time he passed the window of Foyles booksellers, less than two hundred yards away, there he was, a sudden flash in the plate glass.
Early that Friday evening, Troy emerged from the London Library in St. James’s Square. It was time to call it a day and go home. Or—time to turn the tables. The logical route home was along Pall Mall, through London “Clubland,” to the top of Trafalgar Square, by the National Gallery. It was time to test logic. If he gave his tail the idea that he was trying to lose him, then the man might more readily accept that he had been lost. At the end of Pall Mall, Troy turned up the Haymarket, and into the “mighty roar of London’s traffic,” as the BBC put it nightly, at Piccadilly Circus. There, quite certain his tail had followed, he vanished into Swan & Edgar.
Emerging into Regent Street he joined the throng around the base of Eros and waited. Eros was about as cosmopolitan as the cosmopolis got, the tawdry hub of empire: tourists wandered, took photographs in the half-light that would look awful when printed up, gazed in awe at the illuminated advertisements that silently mocked the architecture; drug addicts shivered, twitched, and begged—Troy saw one off with a ten-bob note and “You’re blocking my view”; prostitutes, tired of pacing Piccadilly in high heels and tight skirts in search of a fare, kicked off their shoes and sat on the pedestal beneath the demigod of their trade.
“You up fo’ it?” said one, a beautiful black girl with crimson lips and green eye shadow.
“Do I look as though I’m up for it?”
“Dunno. I can’t see what ya little chap’s tinking from heayah.”
“Well, my big chap is saying off-duty copper to you.”
“Off duty? So ya might be up fo’ it, den?”
He waited a full twenty minutes—so long that the prospect of drugs or sex or both might begin to seem tempting—before his man emerged, a look of frustration on his face. He was younger than Troy, perhaps thirty at most, tall, lean, and quite handsome. He glanced at his watch, stared into the crowd without seeing Troy, turned up his collar and headed off past Eros and into Coventry Street. Troy could almost swear he had silently mouthed the word “bugger.”
His destination was obvious. The Northern Line tube station at Leicester Square. If he’d gone down to the Underground at Piccadilly Circus, he would have taken the Bakerloo or Piccadilly lines. A tourist might be a slave to the tube map and its carpet of coloured thread, a Londoner wanting the Northern Line would simply walk the four hundred yards to the next tube station rather than change lines at track level.
The trick now was to get ahead of him. Troy cut across to Lisle Street and ran like hell for the Charing Cross Road, hoping the crowds of shoppers in Leicester Square would slow his man down.
At the tube station he waved his warrant card at the barrier and ran down the escalator to track level. The question now was “north or south?” and logic was no help. It was a simple gamble. To stand where the lobby divided travellers north or south was to be spotted. He had to be on one platform or another, huddled among the tired and the impatient Friday-night Londoners.
He chose northbound. If he was wrong, so what? It was odds on he would be followed tomorrow or the day after that or Monday, and equally odds on he could lose him again.
A train came and went while he waited, and he began to feel exposed, but in minutes the platform filled with passengers again. Among them, his man, eyes glued to a copy of the News Chronicle. He’d given up. Accepted that he had lost Troy. He didn’t look around, simply glanced at the destination board and went back to his paper.
The next train was for Edgware. When it pulled in, his follower slipped through the sliding doors into the nearest car without a backwards glance. Troy followed one car behind. At every stop he stepped onto the platform. Tottenham Court Road, Goodge Street, and Warren Street he deemed unlikely, far easier, even quicker, to walk; the probabilities opened up at Euston, with the possibility of a change to the main line—Mornington Crescent, Camden Town, Chalk Farm … Bel-size Park.
At Hampstead, the man got out, stuffed the newspaper into his pocket, and joined the burgeoning, slow-moving queue for the creaking, ancient lifts that hauled you up from the deepest station in London to street level. There were three. Troy had only ever known two to be working at any one time. Surfacing at Hampstead could be an ordeal. Troy took the emergency staircase. Unless his heart gave out, there was a chance that he could get to the surface first.
By the time his man appeared, Troy was standing on the far side of Heath Street in the darkened doorway of a closed shop, his blood roaring in his ears—he felt he must be breathing as loudly as a charging rhino. He watched the man head south, towards Church Row. He could almost believe the man was about to call on his brother, but he walked on, walked on and turned right into Perrin’s Walk, and suddenly all this began to make sense to Troy.
There was only one thing to do.
He stood outside the house in Perrin’s Walk and rang the bell.
He heard footsteps on the stairs. A voice yelling, “Get that, will you.”
Then the door opened, a familiar face appeared, a familiar jaw dropped, a familiar eye popped, and Eddie said, “Oh, bloody Norah.”
“I’ll take that as an invitation, shall I, Eddie?”
Eddie was speechless.
Eddie closed the door behind Troy without another word. Troy went upstairs to the first-floor sitting room. His follower had shrugged off his macintosh and stood in shirtsleeves with his back to him, pouring vodka on the rocks for two. He turned.
“Eddie, get us a third glass, would you?”
Then he stuck out his hand.
“Joe Holderness. I’ve heard a lot about you, Chief Superintendent Troy.”
Troy shook the hand.
“And I you, Flight Sergeant Holderness. Or do I call you Mr. Wilderness?”
“Nah. The women call me that. You can call me Joe.”