The best part of a week passed. When Jordan phoned again he said, “Could you come over after work this evening? Say about half past six.”
He was waiting in the foyer of Leconfield House when Troy arrived, leaning against Doris’s desk. Doris had gone, a plastic cover over her typewriter, a brimming ashtray, and a half-finished cup of tea.
“Sign yourself in, Troy, and we’ll go downstairs.”
“Downstairs?” Troy asked, thinking dungeons and torture chambers, but following where Jordan led.
“We have a club. Strictly staff only . . .”
“I just signed in as Inspector Troy, Scotland Yard.”
“That’s okay, they’ll just think you’re a plod from Special Branch. As I was saying, we have a club—not sure who’s idea it was but the point is to stop blokes like me from drifting into a pub at this time of night with a colleague, propping up a bar, and talking shop in public. When we were at St James’s it happened all the time. Not that I think any secrets were betrayed to any eavesdropping Nazis after the third or fourth double, but you never know.”
They’d reached the bottom of the staircase. Jordan yanked open the heavy door to let out a torrent of voices and reveal a wood-panelled pastiche of a London club—a shabby Garrick, an economy Athenaeum. A job lot of anonymous portraits on the wall—a few examples of Sir Alfred Munnings at his most horsey. The odd framed photograph of a man with a dead beast by his side, be it lion, tiger, or rhino—and the odd framed photograph of a rowing team from one university or the other. MI5 had gone to a lot of trouble to make its staff feel “at home”—if anyone other than a public school-educated, Oxbridge Guards officer could ever feel at home in a London club, let alone one set aside exclusively for the use of spies. It said, Troy thought, a lot about the recruiting practices of this “other place.” There were no horny-handed sons of toil in here, there were no women, there was no Doris—it was chockablock with men, men like Jordan and men like Troy. It was a slice of the Britain his brother had set out, if not to destroy, then to change—and it seemed to Troy as Jordan said “What can I get you? We do a rather palatable house claret,” . . . that Rod, on his quest for equality, was, to reuse a phrase that still rang in his ears, “peessing in the wind.” He wondered why Jordan was showing him this place within the other place.
“We’re not going to pursue the Skolnik affair. We simply don’t have enough to go on. I just wanted to be able to tell you face to face.”
“You could have told me that over the phone.”
“I wanted to be able to look at you as I told you. I know what you’re thinking; you made it pretty obvious the last time we were here.”
“I’m listening,” Troy said.
“Don’t make me spell it out, Troy.”
“When someone says they know what you’re thinking, they set themselves up for that.”
Jordan sighed—a sadness in his tone, a wordless appeal to Troy that seemed to want to be trusted.
“You think we did it.”
“Jordan, I don’t know who did it. It was why I came to you in the first place.
“I can’t deny we screwed up. We didn’t know what Skolnik was up to, and it’s because we didn’t that we’d have no motive to kill him. And if we had killed him do you think we’d have left the body on the London Underground for commuters to trip over? We could have made Skolnik vanish.”
“Why were the Czechs here?”
“I don’t know. They could have been here just to throw a spanner in the works. Someone comes over in early July—maybe even the same three someones on fake passports. Skolnik gets hit. Then a legit Czech contingent arrives for the games and someone, possibly the same three someones, decides to muddy the waters by putting pressure on you. They sow confusion and they also find out how little we know.”
“When three blokes armed with Tokarevs decide to ask me questions I tend to think answering politely might be a good idea.”
“I wasn’t accusing you, Troy. I’d’ve done the same. From what I’ve learnt of Danko in the last few days he’s capable of shooting you and just walking away. He’s a pro.”
“Which is how Skolnik died. A pro job?”
Another of Jordan’s sad sighs.
“All the same. You think it was us, don’t you? Troy, please trust us on this. We don’t know what Skolnik was up to. We didn’t kill Skolnik. We don’t know who killed Skolnik.”
“Trust us?”
“Okay. I can understand that. You’re a natural cynic where an organization like ours is the issue. Trust me.”
Troy echoed Jordan’s sigh.
“When a spy says trust me, my copper’s hackles rise.”
“Troy—that’s unfair, bloody unfair. And considering the company we’re in, bloody tactless.”
Troy looked around at the oblivious men in suits lost in the hubbub of their own importance.
“Oh, Jordan, really. I don’t think they heard me above the ‘darlings,’ do you?”
Standing up to leave, Troy slipped his card across the table. Scotland Yard on one side, his address in Goodwin’s Court on the reverse.
“Keep in touch. We might find occasion to be simpatico again. You never know.”