‘Billy Grogan had better come back with that letter or you’ll be brown bread,’ said Nolan.
They were alone together in the office. Grogan had taken Cooper with him to Pimlico. Jago could imagine the scene, a bloodbath of jam. He’d brought more trouble to Christine and Veronica but it hadn’t been deliberate, just the first hiding place that came to his mind. And all too soon Grogan would return in a fury. Nolan seemed to sense his fear.
‘If you’ve been wasting our time, it’ll be the poof down in the cells who gets it. Billy will kick his balls to beetroots in front of you. He won’t even begin to question you again until he’s had his fun. Big mistake to lie to the guvnor.’
‘I haven’t.’
But he had. He had a clear recall of the soot-stained lavatory bowl in the burnt-out flat. Of the impossibly white flakes of paper floating down into it as he tore the report and letter into pieces. He’d used a charred segment of a picture frame to stir the bits into a dark, glutinous mass. Now he’d told Grogan the lie to buy time, that most precious commodity they’d said in his SOE training. Time for something to happen, for someone to turn up. Jago had made a little time, but for what?
The sudden sound of the air raid siren made him start.
‘Here we go again,’ said Nolan. ‘Come on, petal.’
Nolan lifted Jago out of his chair with a huge hand under the armpit.
‘Where are we going? To the cells?’
A locked cell would be the end of hope.
‘It’d make sense you’d think, the cells being underground. But technically, unless you’ve been charged, I can’t lock you up in one during an air raid.’
He led Jago out of the office into the corridor. The sound of a distant explosion confirmed it wasn’t a false alarm, that London was being hit again.
‘Rocket attack,’ said Jago.
‘Sodding Jerry, why doesn’t he lay down and die.’
Jago repeated his question. ‘Where are we going?’
‘The Military Police let us use the shelter of their TA hall opposite.’
The dark street was empty and silent, a rocket attack being different in that respect from the bombers of the Blitz, when wave after wave of aircraft had been the background growl to an hysteria of sirens, ack-ack and fire engine bells. A rocket attack was silence, punctured by sudden and noisy devastation, before an eerie quietness returned and all waited for the next one.
Nolan, in the process of hustling Jago across the street, leapt when the second rocket struck much closer than the first.
‘Jesus!’ he yelled.
Jago saw the van, a dark shape without its headlights, rushing down the road towards them. The driver trying to outrun the raid and preventing them from crossing the road.
‘Come on, you bugger.’
Nolan plainly didn’t like rocket attacks. As he fidgeted in agitation, Jago, without warning, barged the detective onto the bonnet of the passing van. The force of the collision threw them both up and back onto the pavement behind. Nolan had taken the brunt of it and, through the larger man’s body, Jago had felt the echo of the blow. Slammed down on the unforgiving paving stones, only Jago was moving. He heard the van’s brakes screech and Nolan’s soft moans, as if he were having a very private nightmare. Jago felt the grip of panic as he realised he couldn’t breathe, but with that realisation, he suddenly heaved and air rushed back into his lungs. With huge protesting gasps, he pulled himself up. His trousers were gone at the knees, an elbow and wrist on one arm throbbed, and his ribs felt like a busted parrot cage. Leaving the still gently groaning Nolan, Jago staggered off, as another rocket hit London.
Bare chested, Jago sat in the back of the Riley, as Austen finished fastening a very tight bandage. ‘I don’t think any of them are broken. Badly bruised, though,’ he said.
Jago felt bruised was an understatement. His ankle throbbed from the kicking. His cheeks felt swollen. He felt he needed a proper check-up and then bed. Instead he had to stay on his feet and carry on.
Austen helped Jago on with his shirt before rummaging in the first aid box for some disinfectant to rub on Jago’s bloody knees. Jago winced.
‘That stuff’s supposed to be for victims of air attacks,’ said Lavender.
She drove them carefully through the blackout and rocket attack towards Dolphin Square. Since they’d picked Jago up, he’d been aware she was not in the best of moods. And while he had little to do with the personal aspects of women, he wondered if it were her time of the month. School, not marriage, had acquainted him with this phenomenon; when he’d walked the corridors, trying not to decipher the various codes the girls used. That so many girls had an Aunt Flo, who visited them regularly, had confused him for ages. Of course, given the prevalence of horsey girls at his mother’s school, it had been no surprise that back in the saddle was the most commonly used term, and occasionally the fairy tale version, riding the cotton pony. Strangely, in his lonely way, Jago had envied them that fraternity of the curse, before he discovered he also was a member of a cursed fraternity. Whether Lavender was suffering from her monthly affliction or not, her temper was certainly foul, he thought.
‘Is Commander Godwin alright?’ Austen asked, as he dabbed disinfectant onto Jago’s knees.
‘That stuff stinks,’ Lavender complained from the front.
Jago ignored her. ‘No.’
A sudden series of angry blasts on the car horn filled the car. Jago looked out – he couldn’t see the cause of them.
‘Well he’s only got himself to blame. Carrying on like a bloody Frenchman, in the middle of an operation, what was he thinking of?’
Austen spoke quietly in Jago’s ear. ‘She’s been like this since she come back from seeing the Don.’
Jago wondered if it were another biological imperative that had caused Lavender’s mood, not hers but the spymaster’s? Veronica had told him that all men were delusional where women were concerned and could, if the wind were coming in the right direction, confuse do you want a cup of tea? for let’s have sex. Had the Don tried it on, was that it, he wondered? If the Don had been sordid, it would explain Lavender’s anger. Beside him, Austen, rashly in Jago’s opinion, questioned his sister’s attitude to Nicky’s situation.
‘I don’t think Nicky was done for looking for fun. Not in a lavatory, not him. He was framed.’
Austen’s words seemed like petrol on the fire of Lavender’s temper. ‘Do me a favour! Listen, framing him’s only possible because everyone knows he’s that way inclined. Roll on the revolution, I say.’
Even Jago had to question that. ‘What’s the revolution got to do with this?’
‘Because after we get a Marxist–Leninist government of the proletariat, there won’t be any deviants.’
Jago’s sudden anger seemed to exacerbate the pain from his bruises. ‘You’re going to put us up against a wall and shoot us, are you?’
‘Won’t be necessary,’ she said, taking a corner too fast. ‘Sexual perversity is a symptom of capitalist society. When we cure society, we cure everything else, everyone. Austen will have a normal life with a wife and kids, not a half-life doing what he does.’
Jago wanted to tell her that what she’d said was horrible, but Austen spoke first. ‘I can’t help it.’
Lavender swung her eyes from the road ahead to turn to her brother. ‘Of course you can!’ Then her eyes swung back as she muttered, ‘Dad would be so ashamed.’
Around them in the dark the raid continued. Explosions, muted by distance, that nonetheless brought tragedy and the end of things for all time to the people caught in the blast.
They reached Dolphin Square in a silence that Jago broke. ‘There are two air raid shelters; Mrs Cambridge will be in the one that doesn’t allow pets.’
‘I’ll get her.’
Lavender went and Austen turned to Jago, embarrassed he’d witnessed the family scene. ‘I’ll make up with her later.’ The two of them approached Hood House. On the roof, the dark sculpture of the twisted aerials was in silhouette.
Mrs Cambridge arrived, brisk and businesslike, as if burglary was a nightly experience for her. Jago had briefed her on the phone before he’d been picked up and she knew what was required.
‘Up these stairs,’ she said, as they entered Hood House. ‘I should warn you, Major Knight keeps a brown bear in his rooms. Normally it’s harmless, a pet, if you like that sort of thing.’ Mrs Cambridge plainly didn’t. ‘But one doesn’t know how territorial the beast is going to be, whether it will cut up rough at the scent of intruders. We must be prepared for it to be vicious on its home turf.’
‘Great,’ Lavender muttered.
Jago too considered the prospect of an unsympathetic bear bitterly. They had the air raid that had removed Knight from his apartment into a shelter but, in his absence, they still faced his Cerberus.
Jago picked the lock and, as officer commanding, did his duty and entered first. A deep rumble welcomed him and told Jago this was a conscientious bear, one not asleep on duty. A dark shape loomed towards him. The shadow grew in height and the rumble sharpened into a growl of outrage.
‘Stop that! Bad bear!’ said Mrs Cambridge. The animal froze at her words. ‘Naughty girl. Stop showing off, Bessie. Go to your bed.’
The silhouette before Jago shrank like a concertina and slunk back into the shadows.
‘That’s how he talks to the creature,’ she said. ‘Like a nanny.’
The bear’s den was under a long mahogany dining table, which the intruders skirted cautiously. Lavender made her way to a transmitter on a desk, the surface of which also bore an aquarium of fish.
‘It may take a while,’ she said. ‘This isn’t a regular call time and if the receiver was in occupied Europe there’d be no chance of a link-up. The piano would be packed away and hidden. But Switzerland? Who knows, maybe the pianist keeps it out and on. We may get lucky.’
‘We have to try,’ said Jago. ‘We have to tell Foxley the identity of the Three Graces.’
‘You’re sure you’ve identified the right person?’ Mrs Cambridge asked.
Jago thought back to his schooldays and the Game of Graces, and that very specific rule regarding the make-up of a team. ‘Yes,’ he said.
‘Right,’ said Lavender. ‘I’m about to start tapping out love’s old sweet song. When I do, every home security detector van will pick me up and start homing in on us here.’
‘Will they bother? Won’t they think it’s Major Knight?’ her brother asked.
She snapped at him, still angry at something. ‘Don’t be stupid. Signals have to be logged in advance. Something out of the blue will upset the bloodhounds. Now clear off and do something useful.’
The taps began, and sounded extraordinarily loud in the claustrophobic flat, with its fug of animal smells. Time passed, and no acknowledgement came from Switzerland. They stood unspeaking, trying to block out the stink and waiting.
‘Can we have a window open?’ Lavender asked, bent over her task.
Her brother opened one but the blackout curtain in front of it prevented any meaningful invasion of fresh air. However, the gap allowed in the sound of bells ringing frantically on an emergency vehicle.
‘Coppers or an ambulance?’ asked Austen.
No one could tell, but the sound grew more insistent as it came closer, and, as if connected, the intensity of the rocket attack increased.
‘I’m not getting through,’ Lavender muttered. ‘Come on, come on, pick up!’
The ringing outside got louder.
‘I thought so, they’re coming here,’ said Austen.
‘Right,’ said Jago. ‘We need to give Lavender as much time as possible. We need to divert them. Austen, we need the police to see us on the roof so they think that’s where we’re sending from. If they storm up there we can try to hold them back for as long as possible.’
‘Right, skipper.’ Jago noted he had been promoted in Austen’s head, but the man was still speaking. ‘Even after we’re arrested it might take them a time to twig the roof isn’t the site of the transmission.’
‘It could still be an ambulance,’ Mrs Cambridge ventured. But they all knew it wasn’t.
Jago and Austen reached the roof via a small flight of stairs. Every step was agony for Jago. Around them was the weird and wonderful copse of aerials, frozen as in the middle of a frenzied dance to music by Stravinsky, fingers up in ecstasy. Jago and Austen acted out the pantomime of popping up and down by the aerials, trying to give the impression of subterfuge. The show was timed to the arrival of the detector van and police car.
‘Up there, on the roof!’ came a voice that Jago thought might be Detective Cooper’s.
‘I knew that rogue signal was him,’ Grogan could be heard saying.
There had been no way of locking the door to the roof and nothing to block it with but their own bodies. The two of them braced themselves against it, waiting for the assault.
‘We need to buy time,’ Jago said.
‘She’ll get through. She’s a good girl.’
Why Lavender’s moral standing might make it inevitable for her message to be received, Jago wasn’t sure.
Distracted as Jago was by pain and nausea, he was unprepared for the crash when it came. The door smacked him on the nose he’d left too close to its surface. His eyes streamed, and he cursed as they pushed it back the few inches they’d surrendered. Jago’s ribs screamed at him, and his knees asked not to be thrust against the door, but they were ignored.
‘Open this fucking door!’ came Grogan’s voice from the other side.
A series of thrusts were choreographed from the other side, each gaining some territory, before relinquishing it again as the defenders dug in. But numbers told and the door was forced back, inch by inch, until Jago and Austen gave in to the inexorable pressure and jumped back. There was a moment of silent movie comedy as the policemen ended up in a pile by the open door.
More slapstick followed, as a Keystone Cops-style chase happened across the flat roof of Hood House, Jago dragging his body through one last torment. He knew that, below, Lavender was desperately tapping her Morse. He intended to buy her as much time as possible. It wasn’t long; he went down onto the tarmac, rugby-tackled by a brute of a policeman. He almost fainted with the pain as the last of his resistance went. Someone hauled him up. He was dragged to Billy Grogan. Austen was frogmarched over. Grogan ignored them.
‘Well?’ he called across the roof.
‘Can’t find the transmitter,’ a voice called back from the gloom.
‘Keep looking. It’s up here somewhere.’
He turned to Jago. ‘You bastard. You’ve finished Nolan’s service. A wife and three kids and he might never walk again.’
Might never put the boot in again, Jago thought, but he said, ‘These things happen in a war.’
Jago didn’t mean the official one. Grogan nodded and understood. ‘Well it’s all one. Casualties on both sides. Talking of which,’ he spoke with a false concern that awakened in Jago the beginning of fear, ‘we reckon your chum’s dad smuggled in a weapon. Well, your average British rozzer won’t search an earl. A Smith and Wesson revolver, one bullet up the spout. Gentleman’s way out. The honourable thing to do – Commander Godwin took it.’
Grogan’s words were the worst that Jago thought he would ever hear.
‘Nicky?’ It was worse than all the punches and kicks. It hurt more than the van he’d collided with. He hadn’t known pain until this moment.
‘Dead. Brains all up the wall. Duty sergeant at the nick not well pleased.’
Shock was a world of ice where Jago wanted to stay, numb and protected from the heat of grief. The homosexual pursuit of love wasn’t a romance of ships that passed in the night, he thought. It was the Silent Service, two submarines seeking each other blindly, in a minefield. Jago became aware of a uniformed constable in front of him, like something emerging from a fog. The man had crossed front teeth. He was grinning at him. Nicky’s death had pleased this man, had given him pleasure. From the ice and before the pain, Jago discovered there was another stage he had to travel: rage.
Grogan was speaking again. ‘The commander had been sitting on that gun all the time you were slagging him off. What did you call him? A shit-stabber?’
Jago flew at Grogan, his sudden fury taking a policeman holding his arm by surprise, but Grogan had been expecting it. He’d been goading Jago and, as Jago reached him, he hit him hard in the face. Jago fell backwards to land with a sudden intensity on his bottom.
The police laughed at his pratfall, but another figure detached himself from a captor and careened into Grogan. Austen had been brought up in the school of hard knocks. Grogan’s fist found nothing this time, as it swiped around the empty air where Austen’s head had been a moment before. Austen bobbed down, hoisted up the shouting Grogan and set off at a run, carrying him like a giant child. None of the policemen later said they made out what Austen yelled, but Jago, who knew the context, did. As Austen jumped to his death off the roof of Hood House, taking the screaming Grogan with him, he shouted, ‘Boy, First Class.’
Jago rushed to the parapet. Below, on the crazy paving path, were two very still bodies. Behind them, on the roof, the access door opened again and Lavender came through it.
‘I’ve done it. Message sent and received. Foxley has acknowledged.’
The triumph faded from her face, to be replaced by a flicker of confusion. ‘Where’s my brother?’