Troy had never liked driving. He would far rather somebody else did it. An initial surge of terror as Anna behaved like Malcolm Campbell going for another world record soon subsided and as she settled into a ninety-mile-per-hour cruise up the Great North Road to Cambridge, he nodded off.
When he woke, the car had stopped and he found himself in the driveway of a Victorian rectory.
“Where are we?”
“Grantchester.”
“Stands the church clock at ten to three?”
“It’s just past noon.”
“Forget it.”
Cousin Jimmy came out to meet them. A bear of a man in capacious corduroy trousers and a tattersall shirt. A man from much the same mould as Angus. Perhaps this was why Anna had married Angus. He seemed familiar.
The bear’s paw extended.
“Jimmy Coburn. No relation.”
“Frederick Troy. No relation to whom?”
“Forget it. Now, you chaps have half an hour to scrub up. Then it’s a glass or two of Pouilly-Fumé on the verandah followed by a spot of lunch.”
Much to Troy’s surprise, Jimmy had put Anna and himself into one room—one room with a four-poster so capacious it would accommodate a troop of boy scouts.
“He’s never married,” Anna said. “It wouldn’t occur to him to think. He doesn’t mean anything by it. He just hasn’t thought. Besides, you heard him—we’re both ‘chaps.’ We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
“Fine,” said Troy, wondering what the best of it might be.
After lunch, Jimmy said, “What’s it to be? A bash at croquet or out to the shooting range?”
Anna and Troy looked at one another.
“Actually, Jimmy,” she said. “Troy’s come to you with a bit of a conundrum.”
“Bingo,” said Jimmy.
Troy said, “Do you by any chance read music?”
Jimmy smiled, almost giggled, “I think I can safely say that the only man on Earth more likely to be able to annoy you with a turn on the violin is Jack Benny. I love my violin, I love music. I’m just bloody awful at it.”
He led the two of them into what he called his music room—a baby grand piano, a drum kit, a cabinet-sized wind-up gramophone, one of the new-fangled electric radiograms, a mountain of discs, and his violin.
“Now what’s it be? “My Old Man Said Follow the Van” or a quick burst of Paganini?”
Troy handed him the annotated score of the Debussy Cello Sonata.
“Ah. Know it well, old man. Now, what’s puzzling you?”
Troy sat at the piano, explained as clearly as he could about the extra notes, the flattened notes, the sharpened notes, the unwritten arpeggios . . . and as he played the piano part, Jimmy deftly picked up the cello’s role on his violin. No mean feat, Troy thought, for a man who professed little talent.
It was gone four by the time they had worked through to the end, with Jimmy studying, playing, and jotting down every alteration. At the end he had a page of letters, that, to Troy, meant nothing.
Jimmy scratched his head. Troy did not find this promising.
“Any joy?”
“Need to put my thinking cap on, old man. Let’s get out of here for half an hour. I say again—croquet or the shooting range?”
“I feel I could shoot something,” Troy said.
A couple of hundred yards from the house was an old barn. Inside, Jimmy had lined the rear wall with sandbags and set up targets.
“Took this up during the war. I find it sharpens the mind. And I think the spook stuff out at Bletchley left me a frustrated soldier. Never got into uniform. Never fired a shot at Jerry.”
“Me, neither,” said Troy. “In fact, I couldn’t hit the barn door until I took lessons after the war.”
“Really? Well, let’s see how good you are.”
He handed Troy a BSA .38 and hefted one himself. A bit big, a bit clumsy.
Then he banged off six rounds into his target.
Two outers, three inners, and a bull’s-eye.
It was Troy’s turn.
Two inners, four bull’s-eyes.
“Bloody hell!” said Jimmy. “Took lessons you say. Mind if I ask who from?”
“Bob Churchill. He seemed to think I wouldn’t live long if he didn’t teach me how to shoot.”
“Could you teach me? I don’t mean the whole damn thing. Just improve my shot.”
“We could give it half an hour,” Troy replied. “While you put your thinking cap on.”
Troy knew Jimmy was doing two things at once, and that he had reached some conclusion when he lowered the gun with a round still in the chamber and said, “Half a mo’.”
He stared at the target, but Troy knew he was seeing notes on staves not concentric circles.
Then he said, “Back to the joanna, old man.”