§24

Diana Brack tumbled through his dreams, dragged out of her hiding place in some cupboard in Troy’s mind by her brother, yet again. He awoke to find himself with the beginnings of a foul mood, and to the Sunday papers on the mat.

It was a rash promise. Only to himself, but one he could not keep. Well before noon Troy had begun to wish he had nabbed the paper boy and bought a News of the World off him. The Sunday Post lay upon the wicker table on the verandah, a fat unreadable wadge. He read the first paragraph of Comrade K’s message to mankind and yawned into his morning coffee. Guilt and salvation when what he needed was tit and titillation. Perhaps he would get out his bicycle and ride into the village for a copy of the News. On the other hand perhaps he’d just sit and yawn.

He was still yawning on his second cup of coffee when his sister Masha appeared out of nowhere. He had not heard a car on the drive. Rod had scratched his weekend, driven up for morning surgery on the Saturday and gone straight back to a meeting in London. Troy had been looking forward to being alone, except for the Fat Man. It was his motorbike he had been listening out for. How had he missed a car, and what was the damn woman doing here today?

‘You bastard!’

Troy blinked at her, not much interested in what it was he might now be supposed to have done. She threw her hat at him.

‘What have you been saying to Nikolai?’

‘Me?’

‘The pair of you! You unconscionable bastards! I had him on the phone Friday and yesterday in one of his tizzes. What have you and Rod been saying to him?’

Troy gathered his dressing gown around him. This was no way to spend his first Sunday morning off in six weeks. He picked up the Sunday Post, threw it towards her. She caught it with a little gasp, but didn’t look at it.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘You read it. I can’t be bothered. And when you have, you go and talk to him about the fate of the little people. Of necessity and choice, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of apparatchiks and kings, and why the sea is boiling hot and whether pigs have wings. See if you can’t irritate him far more than I can.’

He left her clutching the paper and went back to the kitchen to make more coffee. On the kitchen table was a note from the Fat Man. Thick pencil on lined paper.

‘Pig in Pudding Club. Your ole pal, . . .’ Then a long scrawl which Troy took to be his signature. All he could make of it was that it was indeed very long.

Damn. He’d missed him. He must have come and gone before Troy was even up. ‘Pig in Pudding Club.’ Troy tried to work out the date. The gestation period of a pig is 117 days. That made it . . . September the . . . well, near enough the end of September. He’d have to remember that. It would be a shame to be in Aberdeen or Aberanywhere at that moment.

On his way back out he heard the telephone ring in his father’s study. Then he heard Masha’s voice answer. She was cooing unctuously. She could only be talking to her husband. Then the penny dropped. A husband. Not hers.

‘Of course, darling. Of course. Well, I think Masha wants to take a walk through the woods this afternoon. I thought perhaps we’d make up some sandwiches and . . . what? No, he won’t come. He’ll stay at home with his blasted pig. I’ll call you about five, shall I? Bye, Hughdey darling.’

Troy waited till she had finished and then crossed the room to the verandah. He did not care that she must know he had heard; he did not care what lies she told.

Masha reappeared next to him as he sat down and reclaimed her hat.

‘Don’t ask,’ she said.

‘I wasn’t.’

‘And don’t judge.’

Which he certainly wasn’t.

He heard Masha banging around in the house for another ten minutes or so, then he heard the scrunch of gravel as her car disappeared down the drive. He was just starting to wonder about the problem she had left him with if Hugh phoned back asking for Sasha, when the phone rang. If it were Hugh, he’d no idea what to tell the poor cuckolded sod.

It was Rod.

‘Well, did you see it?’

‘I could hardly miss it. It weighs as much as a side of bacon. Whatever happened to paper rationing?’

‘No, not Khrushchev. Bugger Khrushchev. Page seven, bottom left. Got ’em! All I want now is the name!’

Troy rang off and turned to page seven. Any subject but Khrushchev would do, but all the same he had no idea what Rod was on about. Then he saw it. A small piece buried between a bit of Khrushchev and an advert for Horlicks.

‘Sources close to Downing Street have revealed that Her Majesty’s Government will make a Commons statement early next week on the matter of the Frogman Spy, following several questions tabled over recent weeks by Sir Rod Troy (Lab.—Herts. South), the Shadow Foreign Secretary. It is believed that the Prime Minister will admit the error, and offer an unreserved and full apology to the Soviet leader and to the captain of the Ordzhonikidze. It is understood that while the purpose of sending out a naval frogman was to test new experimental underwater equipment, the exercise was open to the wrong interpretation and is to be regretted.’

Fine, thought Troy and turned to Uncle Todger’s gardening strip at the back of the paper.

‘Aye up,’ said a bubble coming from the lips of a caricature northern bloke on his allotment behind the mill, waistcoat, muffler, cloth cap on head, string around the knees of his tatty trousers. ‘Did you know that now is the right time to make a second sowing of Cos lettuce so you can have lettuce right through the autumn? I thought not.’

This was more like it. In the absence of tit and titillation, Uncle Todger was infinitely preferable to Khrushchev or the Frogman Spy. Rod could keep the spooks and spookery. This was the real world of rhizomes and tubers, of scab and blackleg, of pricking out and earthing up, and putting horsemuck on rosebushes. Not that Troy was entirely sure what a rhizome was. All the same, he took Uncle Todger at his word, and as soon as he had bathed and dressed went down to the kitchen garden, took up the rake and hoe and made a fresh sowing of lettuce.

It was late afternoon before the telephone rang again. He was mentally striving for the last frame of Uncle Todger’s strip—of every strip, on every Sunday—the scene of pastoral reconciliation in which he sits upon a barrel and puffs gently on his pipe, while Nature blooms abundant all around him, fed and watered by his own hand . . . all that’s made to a green thought in a green shade. It was almost five, a sunny, moderately warm June afternoon, the height of the English summer, peaceful Sunday, blessed Sunday . . . bloody Sunday. He was not succeeding; the tooth and claw crouched waiting beneath the green and pleasant, and he was beginning to think that perhaps he and Uncle Todger were not cut from the same cloth. Where was Uncle Todger in the fury and the breaking thunder when it came to rage against the heavens? What price this Nuncle on the blasted heath? And—he was half expecting Masha to show up any minute and reinforce her sister’s alibi. He picked up the phone, wanting it not to be Hugh in his cuckold’s horns, and heard Jack’s voice.

‘I’m in the office.’

‘On a Sunday?’

‘Just clearing up a bit. Look, there’s an airmail letter turned up for you. It’s done the rounds a bit. It’s dated last Tuesday. It was addressed to “Sergeant Troy”, except that the “y”s been smudged. It’s ended up in your tray. Probably late yesterday. Shall I open it?’

‘Yes.’

‘It says “Hotel de l’Europe, Amsterdam. Till Thursday next week. Lois Teale.” You don’t know anyone called Lois Teale, do you?’

‘No,’ Troy lied. ‘I don’t.’

§25

Amsterdam is a city of concentric circles, of concentric canals. Prinsengracht, Keizersgracht, Herengracht and, as near to the middle as dammit, the Singel.

Troy had last been in Amsterdam as a child late in the 1920s. One of his mother’s musical grand tours. A little night music in Vienna, on to Hannover to hear Walter Gieseking—in the days before his dubious, disgraceful association with the Nazis—play the entire Debussy Preludes, with Estampes thrown in for an encore, and ending in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam and the full blast of Mahler’s Second. He had no recollection of the Mahler, it had merged with a dozen other performances over the years, but to this day he had only to close his eyes and imagine the sound of the third Estampe, ‘Jardins sous la pluie’, to see Gieseking’s huge frame and bald head bent over the keyboard, his giant’s hands somehow producing the most delicate music he had heard in his young life. And when he saw Gieseking he saw not Hannover, but Amsterdam.

The war and occupation seemed to have left Amsterdam physically unscathed. A seventeenth-century mercantile city left intact by the blitzkrieg that destroyed Antwerp and Rotterdam, Coventry and Plymouth. It had none of the ambitious design of Hausmann’s Paris, a city reshaped to the military column—he could not imagine the Dutch marching in columns. Nor was it the mess with occasional concession to scheme that London was—a city in which no grand scheme had ever run more than a few streets without merging once more into the chaos that was natural to it.

Tall, narrow houses, no two alike it would seem, squeezed each other for room on the canal banks—odd shapes, uneven heights, gables sharp as steeples, some tilting at precarious angles—the city seemed to Troy to loom over him, to wrap itself around him, to contain him and thrust him at its heart. Accordingly, he found himself on the innermost circle, the bull’s-eye, as it were, at a sharp curve in the Singel at about five in the afternoon, on the day following the cryptic airmail letter. He presumed a degree of secrecy and so did not telephone ahead. He presumed also that Lois Teale would be expecting him. He looked up at the outside of the Hotel de L’Europe, seven storeys of red brick, edged in white and topped by a Hollywood-scale sign, rising to a host of dormer points, St Pancras in miniature, hesitant, wondering what he might find. June light danced on the water of the Singel. It had been a blazing, blistering summer’s day, one of those days when the canals turned to glass and lit the city from below, creating a mixture of spotlight and shadow, a dappled city, revealing as much as it hid.

He could leave now. He could turn right around, get on one of those creaking old trams and go back to the Central Station, the way he had come. He could pretend that he had never received the airmail letter. He could learn the lesson of youth, admit he had grown up a bit, and not get involved again.

A flower-seller was pitching his wares from a wooden cart, only a few feet away. An eye-catching display of summer’s reds and yellows and blues, against the flaking Balmoral green of the old wagon. There had been one much like it on almost every corner. The flower-seller eyed Troy expectantly.

‘Why not buy her some flowers?’ the flower-seller asked in English. Two assumptions in a single expression, so put as to make Troy instantly self-conscious. Was he really so transparent? Did the look on his face say ‘woman’? Worse, did it say it in English? He had no idea what to buy. To buy tulips seemed nothing less than corny.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Roses. A dozen white roses.’

As English a choice as he could make, a dozen York roses. Since, he was, it seemed, so recognisably English.

He crossed the iron bridge to the other bank, a few feet nearer the heart, walked into the lobby of the hotel and asked for Miss Teale. Did he mean Mrs Teale? There was a Mrs Teale in 601. Yes, he was sure he did. An American lady? They would have to ring up. No visitor could be admitted unannounced. Mrs Teale had been quite insistent on the point.

He tapped lightly on the door of 601. It opened at once, an inch or two of light showing, a face in shadow thrust to the crack, a brown eye peeking at him.

‘That you, baby?’

‘Yes.’

‘I—er—I need a minute. And we’re right out of the hard stuff. Could you go round the block to a liquor store and get me a quart of Jack Daniel’s?’

The door shut on him before he could argue a syllable.

Back across the iron bridge, he asked directions of the flower-seller and two side streets away found a liquor store which had very expensive, imported bottles of Wild Turkey. It would have to do.

He gave her a full quarter of an hour and tapped on her door again. Her voice answered faintly from inside.

‘It’s open. You can come in.’

She stood between two double beds, facing him, back to the window, curtains half drawn to whittle down the daylight to a single shaft aimed at him, framed in the doorway, lit as by a natural spotlight. The room resolved into vision for him, and he saw that daylight was not the only thing aimed at him. The thing in her hand was a small automatic, a .25 Beretta or some such, the classic woman’s gun, tailor-made for the handbag.

She was dressed in a neat Chanel deep-blue two-piece, oh-so-high heels, a nervous, flickering grin on her face, that failed to make the evolution to a smile, her blonde hair bobbed, her fathomless, fleckless brown eyes staring at him.

‘Long time no see,’ she said, lowering the gun.

‘Yes. It’s been a while.’

‘You can close the door now.’

He kicked it to with his foot. She put the safety on and dropped the gun on the bed behind her.

‘Had to be sure. You see that, don’t you?’

Troy was not at all sure what he saw. He felt encumbered, bourbon in one hand, flowers in the other, and neither seeming much to matter any more. He put them gently down on a chair and moved slowly round her in an arc towards the heavy brocade curtain. She turned as he moved. He grabbed the curtain with one hand, her arm with the other and pulled. The shaft of light became a flood and he drew her to him, cupped her face with one hand and rubbed his thumb across her cheek. He knew now why she had stalled him, why the curtains had been drawn. The cheek was thick with make-up. She squirmed and yelled but before she had pulled free he had seen the bruises, purple ringed in yellow. He caught the hand that came at him spread to slap. Two of the fingernails had been half torn off, the pulpy flesh beneath bright pink and swollen.

‘What the hell is going on?’

She lurched across the room and picked up the first thing to hand. A dozen white roses hurtled at him, followed by the bourbon. He caught the flowers in his right hand and the bourbon neatly in his left.

She flung herself at him, hands flailing. She caught him a couple of stingers round the ear. A clenched fist to the diaphragm almost winded him. He found himself encumbered once more; the flowers and the bourbon had simply changed hands. He drew her to him, smothered her anger in a clumsy half-embrace, like hugging someone in too many overcoats and outsize mittens.

She kicked his shins, but he simply tightened his grip until she stopped moving altogether. It seemed to him that minutes passed, before she moved again. He had no idea how long. He could hear the sounds of traffic in the street, the occasional hoot of a barge on the canal, and when they were silent all he could hear was the thumping of her heart.

‘Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy, Troy,’ she said into his chest.

‘Tosca,’ he said, looking down at the top of her head. ‘Or do I call you Mrs Teale?’

She wriggled, tilted her head up at him. One clear brown eye peeping out, a teardrop poised in the corner. Her voice rough and throaty, as New York as lox and cream cheese.

‘Tosca, schmoshca. What’s in a name?’

§26

It had been a wet night in the winter of 1944. The last bombs of the ‘Little Blitz’. His second meeting with M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC. The first counted for little. He remembered feeling sodden and miserable, on the verge of giving up, when he had caught sight of her, making her way from Ike’s Overlord HQ in St James’s Square to her billet in Orange Street. Not that he knew it was Orange Street, or he would not have tried to follow her, would not have wasted time, would not have had her turn on him, first accusing then challenging him.

The challenge was sex—she assumed, she had told him, that he was following her because he fancied his chances. He had no way now of knowing whether this was true or not, and perhaps it didn’t matter. He had tumbled willingly if clumsily into her bed less than half an hour later, and so embarked on a perilous course that had damn near cost him his life, and if the Yard had ever found out about his liaison with a witness, his job too.

He had been seduced, in every conceivable sense of that word, by this pocket Venus, this pizza-toting, bourbon-guzzling, much-hyphenated Italian-American, a Manhattan moll born and brought up on Spring Street, wise-cracking, foul-mouthed, Bowery-brash and brassy—and utterly, completely, totally false.

At the height of summer, almost exactly this time twelve years ago—8 or 9 June, he thought—she had vanished, leaving her Orange Street billet swamped in her own blood, and he had reported her dead. Jack had been with him, but when push came to shove, Jack was the most reliable person he knew, the best of lieutenants, and he knew to ask no questions.

Then in the winter of 1948 M/Sgt Larissa Tosca WAC, Italian-­American, had surfaced once again in a Berlin locked in Stalin’s iron fist—just when he needed a guardian angel—mysteriously transformed into the Russian-American Major Larissa Dimitrovna Toskevich KGB, NKVD? P&O? . . . or whatever initials the Cheka had had at that time. He could not keep track, and if there was one thing that characterised secret police all over the world it was that they were alphabetically mobile, changing initials at whim, it seemed.

Tosca had helped him trap Jimmy Wayne, alias John Baumgarner, the most elusive criminal Troy had ever set his sights on. Christmas Day 1948, and from that day to yesterday, the Sunday Jack had read Lois Teale’s airmail letter out loud to him, he had heard not a whisper of her—Tosca, Toskevich, Teale—what, indeed, was in a name?

§27

Troy woke late in the morning, nearer eleven than ten. The heap in the bed opposite did not move. Larissa/Lois Tosca-Toskevich-Teale was sleeping soundly. Late the previous night she had pointed him to his own bed and said she was exhausted.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’

‘Mind,’ he had said. ‘What’s to mind?’

‘Separate beds. Separate beds is to mind. But—’

‘It’s all right, I understand.’

‘Do you, Troy? Do you?’

He had tried to persuade her out for the evening and failed. She had not wanted to leave the room, had not left it in a week.

‘How do you manage?’ he had asked.

‘Room service. I live off the delivery menu. I been all the way through the damn thing once already. I’m back to cold roast chicken again. I’ve eaten more pickled herring than Moby Dick. I could kill for pepperoni and mozzarella pizza or spaghetti vongole or even just a warm bagel.’

So they sat on the floor, backs against the matching beds, tore apart a whole roast chicken, which he downed with Perrier and she with slugs of bourbon. There were a thousand questions he wanted to ask, but he doubted he’d get answers to a single one, so instead he let her ask a thousand questions and did his best to answer them all. Until they came full circle, once more through another menu.

‘You were famous for a while, d’y’know that?’

‘Even in the Soviet Union?’

‘The Man Who Shot Jimmy Wayne. Quite a reputation.’

‘It sounds like a good title for a cowboy film. But I didn’t.’

‘You didn’t shoot him?’

‘No. Why would I shoot him?’

‘I heard you went up against him at Heathrow armed with a handgun. And he pulled a gun on you, and you winged him.’

‘Not the way it happened. High Noon at Heathrow isn’t exactly the English way, is it?’

‘Glad to hear it. And that’s an awful title for a movie.’

‘I did have a gun. A necessary precaution. But I also had six armed constables surrounding the plane he was on. And I didn’t have to shoot him for the simple reason he wasn’t armed.’

‘How d’he die? I know he never made it to the gallows.’

‘Suicide.’

‘Well, KGB gossip got that right. Hang himself with his suspenders?’

‘Cyanide capsule in one of his teeth. A legacy of his time in Berlin, I should think. As soon as the Old Bailey handed down the sentence, he was put in a paddy wagon to be taken back to Brixton prison. He was handcuffed, but there should still have been someone in the van with him. Lazy sods rode up front so they could smoke and natter. He was dead when they opened the door at Brixton. If the trial hadn’t been in camera there would have been one hell of a row, but—hang on a minute, it was in camera, how did you know he was dead?’

‘We leaked it. Did you think I helped you catch him for old times’ sake? The British tried him in camera, fairly predictable after all. To try a CIA killer in public would put the last nail in the coffin of the special relationship. But we had our sources and we leaked it. Every newspaper in the western world knew Wayne was on trial and for what. Some of the French papers ran it for a day or two till the fist came down. Too late by then. We’d sown the seed of doubt. Probably more valuable as rumour than if Fleet Street had printed it in full. You were lucky not to get the Order of Lenin.’

He got out of bed and tugged at the curtains. Another cloudless June morning. The bourbon bottle lay on its side, half-empty. The roses lay on the dressing table, sad and wilting where she had left them, petals fallen like giant snowflakes onto the lavender-coloured carpet. He didn’t think he’d bother buying her flowers again. And if she could drink like that he didn’t think he’d buy her bourbon again either. He pulled the sheet gently off her. Still she did not wake. He looked at her. She was thin, almost wasted by comparison with her old self. A stone or so underweight. It looked to him as though she’d been eating badly and too little and as though she had not seen the sun in a long time. He had vivid, tactile memories of the curve of her backside—it was one of the great backsides—which now seemed flattened, and the muscles of her calves seemed slack, and her back was a mass of bruises as bad as the ones she buried under pancake on her face. He’d seen such marks a hundred times in the course of the job—a good kicking to the kidneys.

He washed, shaved and dressed and came back to find that she had not moved. Only now her eyes were open.

‘Get up.’

‘Nuuuhh?’

‘Get up. We’re going out.’

‘Out?’

‘You can’t stay in this room for ever.’

‘Wanna bet?’

Tosca dragged herself to the bathroom naked, and emerged fully clothed, with another thick layer of make-up to her face, pulling a glove over the torn fingers of her right hand. She did not seem to bother with the left.

‘What d’ya have in mind?’

‘Lunch. We’ll go to lunch. And we’ll talk.’

All Troy wanted was a clean, well-lighted place. A view of the canal would be nice. Any canal, it didn’t matter which. But all the way out, on every corner Tosca was looking over her shoulder, checking in the reflections of shop windows in an atrocious parody of fugitive caution.

‘Stop it,’ Troy said.

‘Stop what?’

‘All this cloak and dagger nonsense. If the person you think is following us is any good you won’t spot him, and if he isn’t, I’d’ve spotted him pretty quick myself.’

They had stopped by some law of serendipity outside a small café on the Prinsengracht. Troy decide to look no further and all but dragged her inside. To appease her they took a window table. Troy could see to the next bend in the canal one way, Tosca the other. She waved away the menu and ordered ‘coffee, black, lots of it’.

‘Who do you think is following you?’ he asked.

Tosca said nothing, did not return his gaze and made tramlines on the tablecloth with her fork.

Troy wondered how to break the silence. Her right hand let go of the fork and disappeared below the table. Glove or no glove he assumed she was acting upon an instinct to hide it, but the hand came up again clutching her handbag.

‘I got a letter for you.’

‘A letter? For me?’

‘Well, a note really.’

‘From whom?’

He had a momentary, illusory vision of long-lost cousins he’d never met and never heard of somehow encountering Tosca in the lost domain of family history that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. She fished into her handbag and brought out a tiny piece of paper folded over many times.

‘Burgess.’

‘Guy Burgess?’

‘Yeah. I got to know him pretty well, he gets bored easy, never really learnt Russian. He used to take me out drinking just to have a conversation in English.’

‘And you and Guy Burgess talked about me?’

‘Well, no, not exactly. I guess your name came up at some point. I mean most of the time he wanted to talk about England, he loved the fact that I’d lived there. That I’d not been there for a good five years before he split didn’t seem to matter, just to know the same bars and restaurants was enough. We ran through the names of everyone we knew there till he found a name we had in common. I never thought it would be you. He said if I was ever in England I should give you this.’

‘When did he say this?’

‘Christmas before last.’

Troy held out his hand for the note, but she unfolded it and began to read.

‘Hold on. I can’t . . . it says something like please send one dozen jars . . . jeezus it looks like . . . pappum papperum. Jeez, I dunno. Anyway that’s the stuff he wants you to send him. I guess it’s the English equivalent of a Hershey bar. You miss ’em like hell, then the first one you get you damn near barf and wonder what you ever saw in them.’

Troy snatched the scrap of paper from her. It read ‘Patum Pepperium’, in Burgess’s upright, loopless hand, his letters stiff and straight like lead soldiers in their box—the opposite of the man himself. Patum Pepperium, an anchovy paste which called itself ‘the Gentleman’s Relish’, much as Heinz boasted of its fifty-seven varieties. Burgess gave an address at the Moskva Hotel and sent his best wishes. Troy screwed up the note and dropped it in the ashtray.

‘No,’ he said, ‘Guy can go fuck himself for his Patum Pepperium.’

‘If Burgess could fuck himself, he’d be the happiest man alive. As things are, he’s one of the unhappiest.’

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘If you ever defect, defect to Paris or Monte Carlo—not Moscow, anywhere but Moscow.’

‘I hadn’t planned on it. Reminds me of a scrawl I once saw at Liverpool Street station. Where the sign says, “Harwich for the Continent”, some wag had written, “And Paris for the Rest of Us” underneath.’

She smiled. Without nervousness, without forcing it. A natural reflex action. The first in the many hours they had been together.

‘He’s right, whoever he is. Burgess is holed up in his hotel, pissed half the time, watched all the time. It’s no life.’

She paused to turn the tramlines she had scored on the white tablecloth into a chequerboard.

‘Tell me,’ she said, looking up. ‘Do you remember when you were interrogating Diana Brack?’

He could scarcely believe she had raised the name, but the look in her eyes showed no anger, no sensibility that he too might feel anger, or remorse, or pain. He nodded.

‘She said talking to the old British Socialists was like spending an evening with the guys who planned the bus routes or mapped out the sewers or something like that. Well, I’ve seen the Soviet Union from the top since then, and believe me, the damn woman was right. You could take a job lot of council clerks and town planners and dump them down in Moscow or Omsk or Tomsk—and they’d feel at home in ten minutes and Russia would feel at home with them. It’s the bourgeois country, Troy. They’ve enshrined the practices of Middle England, even as they reject the values. They have a form for that, a Ministry of Circumlocution, a Department of Bumf. Jeezus, it’s a miracle they achieve anything! Russia has become the natural home of the little guy with the rubber stamp. For every heroic, bleeding Stakhanovite you hear about, there’s a dozen Mr Efficiencies running a world the borough surveyor from Fogtown and Bogshire would find recognisable. Praise the Lord and pass the Turkey.’

‘How did you stick it?’

‘You sneering? Troy, you wouldn’t be sneering, now would you?’

‘It’s an honest question. I’ve never been there—but it is the most fantasised, the most imagined country since Lilliput.’

She shrugged her shoulders, stirred the tablecloth chequers into messy, concentric circles with her fork. And suddenly he realised that he had unleashed the flood. He had no idea what he’d said to achieve this, perhaps it was not of his doing at all, perhaps he had Burgess to thank for breaking her silence? But she was talking.

‘I guess I wasn’t there a lot. The whole point in having someone like me who can pass for an American is to send ’em abroad. Mostly I played Western Europe. I spent a lot of time in Berlin, but I got pulled from there not long after you snatched Wayne. It was too public a place. Every other guy was a spy. There was a risk of me getting too well known. And when I was home I was well treated. Until ’53, that is.’

‘’53? What happened in ’53?’

‘Stalin died. I thought you might have heard.’

‘I don’t quite see what you mean.’

‘When the top man goes there’s little guys all down the line who get reshuffled. It’s like a house of cards or a row of dominoes. One tumbles, they all go. Although the death that mattered was Beria’s. Once he was gone there was a purge of his people.’

‘You mean you were one of Beria’s people?’

‘Not directly. Not in any real sense. I mean I never even met the guy. But reason is not the way these things operate. Somewhere up the line a guy I had worked for was held to be too much the Beria man, so he was out. So then they look down the line, I was his as he’d been Beria’s. So while I wasn’t out, I was downgraded, reassigned to safer stuff and my promotion was stopped. I’m still a Major. I been a Major for seven years. Since 1953 all I’ve been is a low-level courier in cities that are considered relatively safe like Paris or Brussels or Zurich, places that have never been carved up into zones, places where the concierge leans in a window smoking cheap cigarettes for the hell of it instead of noting everyone who passes for one goddam secret service or the other. I did that for three years, just shuffling packages around, live drops and duboks. Then this March they pulled me off it. I began to wonder if some defunct apparatchik in some prison somewhere hadn’t fingered me to cut a deal for themselves. Or maybe Khrushchev’s denunciation finally did it for me. Old Joe is knocked off his pedestal and the domino ripple finally reached me, the last apparatchik in the stack. God knows, I don’t. I wasn’t just off the job, I was under arrest.’

‘In the Lubyanka?’

‘God, no. I don’t think I was important enough for that, I wasn’t even in Dzerzhinsky Square. I was in one of those cheap hotels the KGB have. If they have one they have twenty. Lock you in a room, beat the shit out of you, and no one will hear because the place is empty or else everyone else in every other room is getting the shit beaten out of them at the same time.

‘You know what? They didn’t even ask me questions. That’s how unimportant I was. There was nothing they wanted to know. They just did it for the hell of it. They did it because it was their job, and they didn’t feel they were doing it properly any other way.’

She held up the gloved hand and turned it slowly. Made a fist and dropped it back to the tabletop.

‘As torturers go they weren’t very inventive. At the end of April they decided to move me. God knows why. One hotel to another, but it meant crossing Moscow two days before May Day. Most of the time you could play baseball in the street in Moscow; there’s almost no such thing as traffic or traffic jams. But Mischa and Little Yuri have been guarding me for a month. Yuri’s OK but Mischa is a slob. Beats up on me because he likes it. The only reason he didn’t fuck me too was because I told him he’d better kill me afterwards, ’cos if he didn’t I’d never stop till I got him. So he hit me some more, pawed every part he could reach, but he didn’t try and fuck me. Who knows, I could beat the rap and be back at work in a few weeks. It’s been known to happen . . . I mean, pigs fly, Al Smith was a Republican. He wasn’t going to take that risk. But crossing Moscow we meet a military convoy getting into position for May Day, and the traffic stops. Yuri’s driving, I’m in the back with Mischa. Cocky bastard didn’t even bother to cuff me—after all, where can I run to? And he decides a good way to pass the time in a traffic jam would be for me to suck him off. Gets his roscoe out and hard and says, “How about it?” Dumb cluck. I snapped his dick back with my right hand, snatched his gun with my left, then hit him in the throat as hard as I could. Yuri reaches into his jacket and tries to turn in the seat. I put the gun on him and said, “Yuri, do you really want to die just because this schmuck wanted his dick sucked?” He tosses his gun over the seat and says, “On your way.” Mischa is unconscious or he fainted, I don’t know, so Yuri throws in a “Good luck.” I get out of the car and I walk away. Took me six weeks to get here. It was a month before I dared to leave Russia. I figured they’d look for me at every port or crossing for a week or two and then assume I’d got through and switch their resources. I wasn’t that important any more. Then I came across Finland and down through Norway and Denmark. Nice and slow. But now comes the problem. I ask myself what I’d do if I had to track me. I wouldn’t waste manpower and time on the land crossings, there’s too damn many of them. I’d watch the one place I have to end up. I’d watch England, I’d watch the ports. If I really wanted Larissa Tosca back I’d have guys watching every ferry that docked at Dover or Folkestone or wherever. This is where I come unstuck. I’ve no plan to get myself across the water. I live by my wits, I live by plans and deceptions and I can’t get around this one. The fuckers’re gonna nab me the minute I set foot in England. And if I stay on the Continent, it’s only a matter of time. The disguise that suited the KGB so well is the same one that makes me stick out like Paul Robeson at a Klan meeting. They’re gonna get me. I know it.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Troy said. ‘I’ll think of something.’

She simpered, smiled, almost contrived to blush, dipped her face and gazed up at him through fluttering eyelids.

‘Gee, big boy—I was hoping you’d say that.’

He would have, he realised, to get used to being sent up.

§28

Back at the hotel, Tosca kicked off her shoes, took apart her vanity case, ripped up the false bottom and tipped out a dozen assorted passports into a heap on the carpet. They sat as they had most of the previous night, inches apart on the floor, like children playing.

‘Now. Who am I? Take your pick. Lois Teale has had her day. Time to be somebody else.’

Troy picked one up off the pile.

‘Greta Olaffssonn. Born 3 August 1912, Duluth, Minnesota.’

‘Nah. I been Greta too many times.’

‘Are they all fake? How did you get them?’

‘Fake? Of course they’re not fake. Most are got through the old trick. You find out the name of some poor kid who died very young, never applied for a passport, and you get one in her name with your face on it. Works every time. Greta never made it to her second birthday.’

Tosca picked up another and looked at the name.

‘Clarissa Calhoun Breckenridge. Well, I never been her, but with a name like that is she from the Deep South or is she from the Deep South? I’d never manage the accent. And I don’t know how to cook chitlins.’

She tossed it back on the pile. Troy picked it up.

‘Born Hoboken, New Jersey, 22 August 1913,’ he said.

‘Well. Whaddya know? I could do Hoboken. It’s Sinatra’s hometown. It’s only a spit and a ferry ride away from Manhattan. I’ll have to remember that. Ole Clarissa could come in handy.’

Troy picked up another.

‘Nora Schwartz. Born Chicago, 10 June 1911.’

‘Nah. Don’t like the name. If I’d been born Nora Schwartz I’d’ve changed it. Betty Boop, Minnie Mouse, anything but Nora Schwartz.’

‘Larissa Dimitrovna Tosca. Born New York, 5 April 1911. This is yours. And it’s still valid. This must be a fake. It’s only four years old.’

‘No. It’s real. And Tosca’s my real name too. It was all immigration could make of my old man’s name. My last passport ran out in ’52. I just took it to the American Embassy in Lisbon and got a new one.’

‘But the Americans think you’re dead. You died in a bloodbath in Orange Street in 1944.’

‘Yeah. But apart from the guys I worked with at the time, why should anyone know that? Just ’cos you filled in a few forms at Scotland Yard and posted ’em off to Grosvenor Square? Troy, the world is not that efficient. Who matches births to deaths? It’s the same as getting a ringer. You show up with the right face and the right papers, who gives a damn?’

Then, the penny dropped. He should have seen at once. Such a simple solution. The right face, the right papers, who gives a damn?

‘Look. I think I’ve found the solution.’

‘Aha?’

‘You have to become British. We get you a British passport.’

‘How do we do that?’

‘You have to marry me.’

‘Not the cutest proposal I ever received, I can tell you.’

‘You have to marry me, because marriage confers citizenship. And once you’re a citizen you can apply for your own passport. You enter Britain as Mrs Frederick Troy, British subject. Tosca no more, Greta no more. We’ll marry in Vienna. We’ll have to wait a few days, quite possibly more than a week, while the embassy issues a passport to you. Then we go into England through the back door.’

‘Back door?’

‘Ireland.’

‘Why Ireland?’

‘Because there’s no immigration control between the republic and the mainland. And we fog the trail by stopping over at the Isle of Man. Ships from there are not counted as international. We dock at Liverpool at a domestic berth. No customs, no passports, and hence no reason for any of your spooks to be watching.’

‘It’ll work?’

‘If we can get into Vienna without being spotted, yes.’

‘And then what, a plane to where? Dublin?’

‘Yes.’

Tosca stared at the carpet, then she looked him in the eye.

‘Mrs Frederick Troy.’ She enunciated the words very slowly.

They lapsed into silence. He filled it.

‘It’s just a convenience.’

She stared at him.

‘It doesn’t mean anything.’

‘Liar,’ she said.

She scooped up the passports and clutched them to her chest.

‘It’s OK. I’m game. But I don’t see how we can work this scam from this side of the Channel.’

‘I have a friend,’ he said.

‘Aha?’

‘At our embassy in Vienna. Are you known in Vienna?’

‘Nah. I never played Vienna. Too many goddam spooks.’

She fanned the passports out like a hand of cards and spread them on the carpet.

‘Who am I?’ she said.

‘You’d better be yourself. That’s a risk we have to take. The entry stamps on your passport would be useful, and the marriage and hence the citizenship will only be valid if you’re Larissa Tosca. I can’t marry you as Minnie Mouse or Betty Boop. There’d be no point. You have to enter Austria and marry as yourself.’

‘I understand. But what I meant was, “Who Am I?” Capital W, capital A, capital I.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘Nor me. That’s why I’m asking, Troy. Who Am I?’

§29

Gus Fforde was a rogue. A rogue, a wag and an old friend. He and Troy and Charlie had been schoolboys together. Charlie was the leader, Troy and Dickie Mullins very much the NCOs, and Gus the inspired, reckless subaltern. Fforde it was who had taught Troy how to disable a car by shoving a potato up the exhaust, how to blow out the down-pipe on a lavatory cistern with gun-cotton so that the next poor sod to flush the bog got a free shower, and how to catapult stink bombs in chapel. Of these, Troy had found only the first to be of any lasting value.

Fforde was also First Secretary at Her Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in Vienna, capital of the newly reconstituted Austria—its democratic government only weeks old, the Russian and American troops that had been there since 1945 having departed a matter of months ago.

‘A passport, you say?’

‘Yes, Gus. For my wife.’

‘She’s not English then?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Okey doh. And when did you get married?’

‘Tomorrow. You can be a witness if you like.’

‘Freddie, there wouldn’t be anything . . . how shall I say? . . . untoward about this, would there?’

‘Untoward, no. Downright dodgy, yes. In need of discreet assistance from an old friend, yes.’

‘Quite,’ said Fforde. ‘What are old friends for?’

Fforde did his bit. Witnessed a civil wedding, pronounced Tosca, even with her haggard look and pancake make-up, to be ‘a stunner’, discreetly intervened when the clerk raised the vexatious matter of ‘residency’, popped the champagne and served the Sachertorte in the lobby of the Sacher Hotel, and rushed through a British passport, asking no questions and stepping lightly over embassy staff who remarked that it was all a little irregular.

‘Speaking of the irregular,’ he said. ‘Seen anything of Charlie lately?’

Troy thought about it.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Wish I had. But I don’t think I’ve set eyes on him since April.’

‘I have,’ Fforde went on. ‘He was through here only a week or two back. All nods and winks, nothing definite. Wouldn’t tell me a damn thing. Do you think he’s still at it? After all these years, I mean.’

What are old friends for? Fforde had been immeasurably good to Troy. God knows, this whole thing could rebound on him, and a lesser friend would have told Troy to go home and sort it out there. But Troy’s debt to Gus could not include such truths. It seemed odd that in his position he did not know, but if he didn’t Troy could not be the one to tell him. Of course Charlie was still at ‘it’. And ‘it’ was something Troy would not go into. He shrugged it off and mourned the days when they had all told each other everything. What were old friends for?

§30

It was a smooth crossing. Over the Irish Sea. Aboard the Maid of Erin, out of Dublin, bound for Liverpool via Douglas I.O.M. Within sight of the Isle of Man, not far off the uninhabited southern island, the Calf of Man, they stood at the rail watching the gulls circle, and the herring boats bobbing in the distance.

‘Give me the gun,’ Troy said.

‘What? I mean why?’

‘Just give it to me.’

Tosca looked around, checked no one could see, took the gun out of her handbag and slipped it to him palm to palm. It was so small he could conceal it almost completely in his hand. He looked around, exactly as she had done, and dropped the gun over the side into the grey surf.

‘We don’t need guns,’ he said.

‘We don’t?—No—I guess not.’

‘Now,’ he said. ‘Let’s agree on a story.’

§31

He stopped the Bentley in the curve of beech trees, resplendent in their bottle green, the late June sun glinting off their leaves as from a thousand tiny mirrors. The house was just visible beyond the curve, a quarter of a mile or so in the distance.

Tosca said, ‘Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley.’

He looked at her, surprised and pleased that she knew an English novel, that she knew anything that wasn’t Huck Finn—she was always reading Huck Finn—but she wasn’t smiling.

‘Is this poetry or premonition?’ Troy asked.

She flapped a dismissive hand at him.

‘Oh, don’t mind me. It’s just—well—it’s just that that’s what it looks like to me. Y’know, Hollywood England, green shires on a back lot.’

So, she had not read the book after all, she was merely remembering the Hitchcock film—Olivier, darkly romantic, and George Sanders playing yet another supercad.

‘I wouldn’t mind,’ he said. ‘But Joan Fontaine so mangled those opening lines.’

‘She tried, baby. We all do. Now, do I get to meet Mrs Danvers?’

‘If you’re going to take the mick—’

She leant her head on his shoulder and elbowed him until he put an arm around her. He slipped his foot slowly off the clutch and let the car crawl gently up the drive in first, steering as little as it needed with the fingertips of one hand upon the wheel. For a moment or two it was plausible, the seductive lie that this was the opening page of a lasting romance. Every bone in his body wanted it to be true, and every cell in his brain told him it wasn’t.

‘Of course you can meet Mrs Danvers,’ he said. ‘But you mustn’t let her play with the matches.’

Mimram to him was a series of shapes and spaces, colours and sequences arranged in transparent time—a glass onion. The house of childhood, still visible through adulthood, nestled at its core, laid out in the order in which he had discovered it.

Tosca pulled a face at the stuffed black bear standing in the hallway.

‘Jeez, but he looks moth-eaten. I mean, does he have to stand there, like the first thing you see when you come in the door?’

True, he was ugly as sin, had lost one eye, one ear and seemed daily to lose more and more of his stuffing, but to Troy he was Boris the Bear. He had stood on the same spot since 1919, and Troy saw no reason why he might not be found on the same spot in 1969. One of Troy’s earliest memories was of Boris wearing a tin hat and waving a Union Jack on the first Armistice Day. He had worn a red poppy every November ever since; someone, not always Troy, remembered to pin one on him. He was part of the structured maintenance of childhood, as, indeed, was so much of the paraphernalia of the living house. In the main drawing room, the blue room, a battered Congolese carving of a Pygmy mounted upon an ebony elephant, the human figure far, far larger than the animal, had stood in the fireplace longer than he could remember. Sasha had nicknamed it Minnie, as a child. Once Troy had moved Minnie from the left-hand side of the fire to the right, only to see Sasha, on her next visit, move the figure back, without comment, or, Troy thought, consciousness. He would have difficulty explaining things like this to Tosca. The sheer solidity that the old man had placed around them, the spun, set spidersilk of airy nothings—his genius, as Nikolai had put it, for wrenching choice out of necessity. Tosca had lived her life out of a suitcase—three countries, a dozen passports and countless cities. Her cry of ‘Who am I?’ was not one he had ever asked of himself. He had doubts by the score; he knew Rod did too, and if they ever rose to any level resembling self-knowledge it was possible the sisters would too. He knew who he was; he was a Troy. And the best protection he could give her was to make her one too. If she would but accept.

‘Pick a room,’ he said to her, as he dumped their bags on the first-floor landing.

‘Whaddya mean, “Pick a room”?’

‘You did say you would like your own room.’

‘I know—you gotta give me some time. I mean I—’

‘No, no, I wasn’t arguing with you. I’m saying pick any room that isn’t occupied. Make it your own.’

‘Any room?’

‘Any that isn’t occupied.’

‘Well, how many are there?’

‘I’ve never counted, but I should think between fifteen and twenty.’

‘How do I know which are occupied?’

‘Slippers at the foot of the bed, dressing gowns on the back of the door, and the ones that aren’t will probably smell a bit mothbally.’

She wandered from room to room, every step and word echoing around the empty house. She took a liking to Masha and Lawrence’s room, bathed in the rosy western light of late afternoon, tinting the off-white walls Masha favoured with a wash of pink, and for a moment he wondered whether he might not have to persuade his sister to swap, but on the south side of the house she plumped firmly for a small dark room with faded wallpaper and a view of the river and the willows.

‘It’s kinda my size. You know what I mean? Well, you ever lived in a Moscow apartment, you would.’

‘Yes. I know. It was my room when I was a boy.’

‘You grew up in this? This was where you read Winnie the Pooh, sat up nights with Kennedy’s Shorter Latin Primer, and jerked off to dreams of Carole Lombard?’

‘Sort of. But I had a preference for Barbara Stanwyck.’

‘And now?’

‘I took my father’s room at the end of the war. It’s next door. Look, why don’t you bathe and change. It’s been a hellish journey. I’ll rustle up some tea, and then we can look over the rest of the place.’

He had not contrived the situation, but once it had arisen he could not deny the familiarity. Tosca up to her tits in a bathful of bubbles, teacup in hand, blathering away at him; him sitting on the bog seat, partly listening partly daydreaming, his mind drifting between present and past. This was how things had been. This simple juxtaposition with a naked, garrulous woman had set like gelatine in the mind as one of his ‘fondest’ memories. And he dearly wished he had a better word than ‘fond’ for it. It had ended in blood, hers and his, and half his left kidney blown away.

Tosca stretched out a leg to soap and he saw the unmistakable marks of cigarette burns—the scars would be permanent—and the arm that held the soap still bore bruises that had faded to medicinal yellow. Again he wondered, how hard had they hit her for the marks to last the best part of two months? He could not ask again until she was ready to tell. God only knew whether he had the tact to discern such a moment.

Dressed, powdered, perfumed and, he thought, quite possibly pleased, she followed him from room to room, each still in the soft, powdery, floral colours in which his parents had found it in the summer of 1910, five years before his own birth. Each colour had been maintained, restored. The blue room, the largest drawing room on the south-west corner of the house—Tosca paused over the scratches on the window, where Sasha had carved her and Hugh’s initials in the glass with the diamond of her engagement ring—Alexandra Troy and Hugh Darbishire—AT & HD, entwined above a heart and the date ‘30th Jany 1933’.

‘Time and chance do that to you,’ said Tosca, tracing out the letters with her fingertips. ‘Make you look like a romantic fool, before you can so much as blink.’

‘Eh?’

“January 30th 1933”—the day Hitler became Chancellor of Germany.’

He waited to see if she would elaborate. She didn’t. But he thought he knew what she meant—the lives of little people measured against the mark of history. What mattered at the time seen with the devastating benefit of hindsight. Sasha had meant to etch the date of her engagement into glass for ever, and inadvertently achieved a different commemoration, of an event that would eclipse any other that day.

Troy threw open the doors to the smaller red room, with its bay window where a Christmas tree stood every year. And the rest of the year, his mother had often sat in the bay sewing or lace-making or working at any one of a dozen quick-fingered hobbies that ruined her eyes by the time she was seventy. To the pink room—not so much pink as washed-out sainfoin magenta; to the yellow room—primrose and cowslip, ‘Patent Yellow’ to the discerning eye; through the deep Prussian of the dining room, through the layers of the onion to his father’s study, its colour a dark, obscure nothing, a faded something.

At some point his father had lined the room with bookshelves, and when they had been filled, he had stuffed books into cupboards and when they too had filled, he had left books in piles on the floor, where they stood to this day. And in front of the books he had piled anything that caught his fancy. Three long-case clocks of differing height—­remarkably, Troy now thought, like the Amsterdam skyline—which no one had ever managed to synchronise. A complete orrery—complete but for the undiscovered ninth planet—in brass, which no one had wound and set in motion in years. A harmonium whose leather lungs had long since perished. A player piano on which the hands of Gustav Mahler, Igor Stravinsky and George Gershwin could be brought to life from a punch-paper roll. A large, hand-painted, flaking, plaster of Paris globe on an iron pedestal, depicting the world in pastel colours as it had appeared in the days of empire and eagles. Extinct countries like Austria-Hungary, Imperial Russia, and no hint of neogeographic entities such as Yugoslavia. The existence of Poland was a mystery to the boy Troy, a country which came and went like the little man in the weather house, now you see it now you don’t, and which, since his father’s death, in its most recent incarnation, had leapt bodily some five hundred miles to the west. The old man had used the globe and his stamp album to teach Troy geography and history. His stamp album ran from a plethora of penny reds and the young head of Queen Victoria to the inflated millions on the denominations of the Weimar Republic, to the tasteful browns of Hitler’s portrait, via vanished confederations of British East Africa, and the oddly colourful stamps of South Sea islands, where the head of George V could be found offset by palm trees and giant tortoises. Troy wondered, did the king have a tortoise at home with him, grazing the lawns at Buckingham Palace? And the naming of places puzzled him. Who was Gilbert? And were he and Ellice married? And did they have children after whom other islands might be named? The spelling of Yugoslavia, with its interchangeable J or Y, had taken him an age to learn.

‘I’m almost sorry to waste your time,’ his father had told him. ‘I doubt it will be there long. You cannot invent a country. If you can invent yourself you’re doing quite well enough.’

Tosca’s gaze came to rest on the wall between the windows, just above the desk.

‘I ain’t seen one of those in years.’

He could not make out what she was looking at, but then she reached up and took his father’s gun off the two wooden pegs that supported it on the wall. It was a large, heavy, semi-automatic pistol.

‘It was my father’s,’ he said.

‘Yeah—my old man had one just like it. You know what it is?’

Troy shook his head. He had an aversion to guns at the best of times.

‘It’s German. It’s a Mauser 1896 Conehammer. A semi, a machine pistol—kinda like a hand-held machine gun.’

This meant nothing to Troy. It might as well have been a Howitzer.

‘My Dad had one in the Civil War. Shot his way across Siberia with the damn thing—least that’s the way he told it.’

‘Maybe that’s its purpose in life. It lends itself to legend. My father claimed to have shot his way onto the last train out of Russia in 1905.’

‘Don’t you believe him?’

Troy shrugged. He had never known how much to believe of anything his father told him. If his life turned out to be one colossal work of fiction, Troy would not be surprised. And, unlike his brother, he would not be offended.

‘A train, perhaps. The last train, I doubt. Shot his way through, I doubt that too. Talked his way would be more in character. He may well have waved the gun around a bit while he talked. Just for show.’

Tosca flipped out the magazine, checked it was empty and pushed it back into place in front of the trigger-guard.

‘It’s a cavalry pistol,’ she said with all the enthusiasm of a train-spotter. ‘It’s got a side-mounted hammer. You’re supposed to have it in a saddle holster. Then when you have to draw it, you roll it over your thigh, which cocks the hammer, so the gun comes up ready, like this.’

So saying, Tosca stood on one leg, raised her right thigh and cocked and levelled the gun at him in a single action. He found himself looking down the barrel of a gun yet again.

Then there was silence, then there was stillness. Neither of them knowing what to do next, both of them rendered uneasy by the presence of a weapon, Tosca perched on one leg like a dwarf flamingo. A burst of pheasant’s rattle from the garden broke the silence. She lowered the gun and her leg, blushing a little and clearly feeling as silly on her end of the gun as he did on his. He took the gun from her awkwardly and put it back on its wooden pegs, in the mind’s eye seeing some burly Russian soldier teaching a little girl how to fire a lethal weapon, and wondering at the nature of paternal wisdom.

‘Best place for it,’ said Troy.

‘Sure,’ she said softly.

In the green room—sage panels lined in deeper green—stood the Bechstein his parents had shipped from Vienna in 1911. He had spent hundreds of hours at this learning from his mother.

Tosca ran a finger over the lid and came up with a crown of fluff.

‘You don’t play any more?’

‘Of course I play. I just haven’t played this particular piano for a while.’

He opened it and played a quick scale.

‘Still in tune,’ he said. ‘Any requests?’

‘One of the old guys. Cole Porter or Gershwin? I always loved Gershwin.’

‘Yip Harburg?’

‘You mean like “Over the Rainbow”?’

‘No, I mean like . . .’

He played the opening five chords that spelt out ‘April in Paris’. She smiled and he began again. He gave it his best shot, and when he saw that she was still smiling, propped against the piano, her chin upon her hands, her eyes closing, he risked all and let his hands tinkle forth Monk’s interpretation, every angular note adding, as he thought of it, to the romantic pull of the song, giving all and taking nothing. She let him get all the way through before she opened her eyes. He had half dreaded the protest of a purist.

‘Gee—but that’s beautiful. Even the bum notes work.’

‘I think you might have stumbled on a definition of Jazz. Bum notes that work.’

‘What’s new?’

‘What’s new?’

‘I mean new new. Really new. Like hot off the press. You get so starved for new in Russia. Old we got plenty of. It’s new we don’t get. The hottest thing when I left Moscow was Judy Garland singing to Clark Gable’s picture. “You made me love you, didn’t wanna do it, didn’t wanna do it.” Now how old is that.’

‘I don’t know. Donkey’s years, I should think.’

‘That figures. We got plenty of donkeys too.’

Every so often Rod would make a trip to America, fulfilling his duty to party and country, taking, as he saw it, his life in his hands, and flying in one of the huge new airliners: Comet, Constellation, Caravelle, that sort of thing, they all seemed to begin with C to Troy. The hero of the Battle of Britain firmly maintained that the aeroplane was not meant to be bigger than a six-seater and that the bigger they were the more likely they were to crash. All the same he did it, and never forgot the souvenirs for his family, button-fly blue jeans for the teenagers, records for Troy. Among the last batch Troy had found on top of the gramophone in the study was a record for which new seemed almost inadequate as an adjective.

‘OK,’ he said, and began to play.

A little more than two minutes later he had finished, delighted that he had kept to the tempo—it was a fast and difficult tune—and breathless from singing, which was not his forte, but without which the song seemed less than complete.

She stood before him, mouth open, eyes wide. Horror or fascination, he could not tell.

‘Is that it?’

‘Well, yes.’

‘I don’t get it.’

‘What don’t you get?’

‘Well—who is this Daisy woman?’

‘Dunno.’

‘Why does she drive him nuts?’

‘Not nuts, crazy.’

‘And who is Sue and what does she know how to do?’

‘I’d be guessing.’

‘And the words. I couldn’t understand half of them. Awobbly dobblynobbly—what the heck is that?’

‘Know what you mean. Took me a while. Look, why don’t we take it a phrase at a time?’

‘Sure,’ she shrugged. ‘Why not?’

‘Awop,’ he said tentatively.

‘Awop,’ she echoed, and there was the beginning of a look in her eye that made him suspicious.

‘Awopbop.’

‘Awopbop.’

‘Awopbopalubop.’

‘Awopbopa—what?’

‘Lubop. It’s lubop.’

‘How do you spell that?’

‘God knows, but it’s pronounced Awopbopalubop.’

‘OK—Awopbopalubop.’

‘Awopbopalubopalopbamboom.’

‘Awopbopalubopalopbamboom.’

She slammed the flat of her hand onto the piano.

‘Awopbopalubopalopbamboom! Goddammit, Troy, you know what that is? It’s straight out of some goddam Mississippi juke joint. Goddammit, Troy, it’s nigger music!’

‘Quite,’ he said. ‘I believe they call it Rock’n’Roll.’

A polite cough was heard behind her. Troy looked up, Tosca turned on one ankle, her elbows on the piano, one leg slightly raised, her toes tucked in behind the knee, looking as though she’d just finished a smoky rendition of ‘Cry Me a River’. Rod stood in the doorway, and behind him Nikolai, and just behind him Sasha and Masha, and behind them Hugh and Lawrence, and behind them . . .

Tosca eased herself off the piano.

‘Well,’ she said, and in her heavy Muscovy accent, ‘Это что ли пис­толет у тея в карнмане, или ты просто рад меня видеть?’

§32

They pleaded the wear and tear of a long journey, left Rod and the sisters at the table to see in midnight, drinking and squawking round the debris of the meal. Lawrence and Masha seemed on good terms. Hugh and Sasha, Troy concluded, were in the midst of another row and had diplomatically reached a truce for the evening. Nice of them—he had known occasions when they would not, but their rows never lasted long, and pretty soon Hugh would revert to his self-deluding, obliviating view of his wife’s virtues. Rod would get drunk, have a hangover and regret it. Sasha and Masha would get drunk and appear magically unscathed in the morning, immune to the ravages of booze, or the criticism of husbands. Nikolai had excused himself before the coffee. Cid climbed the stairs with them, pecked them each on the cheek, smiled and said nothing. More than most, Troy thought, she would appreciate the dilemma of joining a tribe.

When she had gone their awkwardness remained.

‘Well,’ he said. ‘What do you make of it all?’

‘Tutti frutti,’ said Tosca.

And they went to their separate rooms.

Hours later, it seemed, he was awoken by the door of his room opening. Someone climbed into the bed, next to him, inches away, not touching.

‘Y’awake?’

‘Stupidest question in the world. Supposing I said “no”?’

‘But you are.’

He half turned to face her, and her hand pushed him back.

‘No, don’t move. Just stay still. We’ll go to sleep now.’

‘Before you do I have a question.’

‘Okey dokey.’

‘You rehearsed that bit of Mae West, didn’t you?’

‘Sure. Be yourself, you keep telling me. Takes practice. I been somebody else for years, I been several somebodies else—being me takes a lot of practice. Besides, it did no harm. He didn’t have a gun in his pocket and he was pleased to see me.’

When he finally decided that she was asleep, he squirmed around as carefully as he could and stretched out a hand. Before he could reach anything a sleepy, hoarse, bedroom whisper said, ‘Don’t touch.’

§33

In the morning she was still there. It was familiar and unfamiliar. He had not woken up next to Tosca in years. Not that he would or could forget it. Christmas Day 1948. But the unfamiliar troubled him. For the moment he could not quite put his finger on it.

It was early still. He lay and mused for a while, watched the sun dance behind the curtain, flapping gently in the open window, and listened to the birdsong. Then it dawned on him. He had last woken up in this bed next to someone in April. Or was it March? The week the sisters had forced him into getting a television. He had not seen his mistress in . . . weeks . . . months? He’d get hell for this. He could hardly put it off much longer.

The telephone rang. He reached over and picked it up before it rang twice, but Tosca had not stirred.

‘Hello, Troy?’ said Anna’s voice.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about you.’

§34

Troy and Anna always met at the Café Royal, in the Quadrant of Regent Street. It was pretty well midway between his office at Scotland Yard and her surgery in Harley Street, and her husband, who scavenged half the watering holes in London, had never, to their knowledge, been sighted in the Café Royal.

‘I’ve pushed my afternoon appointments on a bit,’ said Anna. ‘We’ll be OK till about half past two.’

Anna had begun as a pathologist, assisting Kolankiewicz. With the commencement of the National Health Service she had moved into general practice—struck a bargain with the striped trousers and fancy waistcoats of Harley Street and helped a bunch of incomprehending old men into the post-war world and a practice that combined treating those who could pay with treating those who no longer had to. Troy missed her skill at making sense and peace out of Kolankiewicz, but admired the idealism.

‘I thought we should meet,’ she said.

‘It’s been a while,’ he agreed.

‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you.’

‘Me too. I’ve been meaning to talk to you. A bit of news, I suppose.’

‘Rightie ho—shall I go first?’

‘If you like,’ he said, sensing an imminent bollocking.

‘Angus is back.’

Angus was her husband. A preposterous drunk, a daring drunk, as decorated as Rod for the same reasons. A do-or-die RAF flyer who had done and had not died. But then he had not put the war behind him with the scarless aplomb that Rod had achieved. His benders were notorious. It had occurred to Troy that the real reason he was not seen at the Café Royal was that they wouldn’t let him in.

‘I didn’t know he’d been anywhere.’

‘It was a metaphor, Troy. I mean that he’s back with me. I mean that I’ve taken him back.’

Angus had never actually left the marital home. He had simply moved all that mattered about him to the planet Angus—and not for the first time.

‘You mean he’s sober?’

‘I think I do.’

‘What’s he saying?’

‘He says he wants to make a go of it.’

‘And that if he does he’ll stay sober?’

‘Sort of.’

‘Sort of?’

‘You know Angus.’

‘I know that you can’t believe a word he says where booze is concerned.’

‘I know.’

She paused in a sadness that Troy could not fathom. Anger was so often more her modus operandi.

‘The thing is, you see, I want to believe him.’

‘Yeees . . .’

‘The thing is, I want to make a go of it.’

‘I see.’

‘I’m thirty-eight. We could still start a family. It’s not too late.’

‘Quite.’

‘It’s not as if we were passionate about one another.’

The ‘we’, he realised, referred to himself.

‘You and I never worked up much in the way of passion, did we?’

‘I suppose not,’ he agreed.

‘I mean—we came together sort of in the spaces in between.’

Indeed they had. It was a tune played only on the black notes of the keyboard. They had known one another since the second year of the war. It had been late 1949 before they had tumbled into bed, and perhaps for both their sakes they should have done it sooner, but the possibility had been inherent from the start—only her loneliness and his fecklessness had ever led them across the line he knew existed. He rather thought she knew it too.

‘If you like,’ he said.

‘I want to make this work, Troy, really I do. And for God’s sake stop saying “if you like”.’

She was crying quietly. Her handkerchief came out to dab at her eyes.

‘If you’d seen him when I married him . . .’

They hit silence. This was not a line he would pick up, not a sentence he ever wanted to hear the end of. Troy waited while she found composure. It was unlike her to show quite so much feeling. What they had in common, he had long thought, was the tearless cynicism of people who made their living in death.

‘It’s all right,’ he said at last. ‘I understand.’

‘Could you try to be a bit less understanding?’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind. Why don’t you tell me your news.’

‘My news?’

‘Yes. You said there was something you wanted to tell me.’

‘Well,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure how to tell you this.’

‘Just spit it out. It can hardly be as deadly as what I’ve just told you, now can it?’

She smiled through the glaze of tears.

‘I got married the other week,’ he said simply.

The smile vanished. Slate clean.

‘Troy—you shit. You complete and utter fucking shit!’

§35

One Friday morning at Goodwin’s Court, late in July, Troy was cooking breakfast for the two of them. He had heard Tosca get out of the bath, her feet slap on the floorboards above, and begun to fry the bacon and heat a saucepan for the scrambled eggs. She had been an age in the bath. The scent of bath salts had drifted down the stairs, the sound of her rhythmical, rather flat and raspy singing had come with it, floating into the kitchen: ‘Gonna wash that man right outta my hair.’ He hoped it meant nothing. ‘And send him on his way.’ He was sure it meant nothing. He flicked on the wireless in time for the news. A best Home Service voice crackled forth.

‘It was announced in Alexandria last night that Egypt is to nationalise the Suez Canal. Colonel Nasser has declared his intention to reject the terms of the 1888 agreement whereby Britain and France retain control of the canal until 1968. This is believed to be a response to last week’s withdrawal by Her Majesty’s Government of financial aid for the Aswan Dam project . . .’

The telephone was ringing. It had to be Rod. It was a Rod moment.

‘Mr Troy? Bill Bonser. Detective Inspector, Portsmouth CID.’

Troy moved the bacon off the hob.

‘How can I help you, Inspector?’

‘I was wondering if you could find a few hours to come down to Portsmouth. We’ve found the body.’

‘The body?’

‘Well . . . I say the body. I’m not one hundred per cent sure it’s him.’

‘Who?’

‘Him, sir. The Portsmouth spy.’

‘I hope I’m not being dense, Inspector, but what exactly has this got to do with me? It doesn’t sound like a typical case for the Murder Squad.’

‘No—it’s not. But it would seem you were the last person to see him alive.’

‘To see who?’

‘The spy, sir.’

The merest hint of exasperation was beginning to creep into his tolerance of rank.

‘I still don’t get it. When am I supposed to have seen him?’

‘Oh . . . How shall I put this without seeming rude. Have you by any chance been out of the country for a while? Away from the papers?’

‘As it happens I have. Most of June.’

‘Ah . . . then you won’t have heard. HMG named the spy about four weeks ago. Cockerell. Lieutenant Commander Arnold Cockerell, RN, retired.’

The name meant nothing to Troy. Then a mnemonic flash. Suede shoes. Suede shoes. The weaselly bloke, with the Ronald Colman moustache, the navy blazer and the suede shoes.

‘As I said, sir, we’ve a body. Fished out of the sea, over Chichester way on the far side of Selsey Bill yesterday morning. But we’re having a little difficulty getting a positive ID.’

‘Sorry, Inspector. I was being slow, but I’m with you now, and I can tell you that I wasn’t the last person to see him alive. Ex-Sergeant Quigley saw him after me, and he’s right on your doorstep.’

‘I know, sir. He can’t say for certain. And his daughter won’t look. The squeamish type, I’m afraid.’

‘Next of kin?’

‘There’s a wife sir, but . . . well . . . she’s upset right now. She may give us an ID in the future, but she can’t or won’t confirm at the moment. If you could come down, sir, it might result in a quick clear-up of the case. As it is, things are a bit awkward. Mrs Cockerell’s still here and I might be able to persuade her to take another look, but it is . . . well . . . it’s awkward, d’you see?’

‘OK,’ said Troy. ‘I’ll be there after lunch.’

He put the bacon back onto the flame, tipped the eggs into the gleam of butter in the bottom of the saucepan, listened to Tosca banging about as she finished dressing, listened to her start a new song—‘I’m just a gal who cain’t say no!’—and wondered why Rod hadn’t bothered to tell him about Cockerell. Only weeks ago it seemed he had been obsessed with screwing an admission out of Eden. But the answer was almost obvious. He had come home with a wife, and at that a Russian wife. Rod, the happily married man, who could conceive of no man being happy out of marriage and no man unhappy within it, had had his cup filled to the brim, and as it ran over he had forgotten that anything else mattered. Troy had thought Rod would never stop laughing at Tosca’s Mae West line. She could not have cracked the ice more perfectly. He had clasped her to his chest, or as far up it as she came at five foot two inches in high heels, and laughed till he cried. It was typical of Rod’s passions that they eclipsed each other like the moon going round the sun. Sooner or later he would have told him.

§36

Awkward was not the word Troy would have chosen. Most of Cockerell’s face had gone. And with it the whole of his right hand, his left down to the knuckles, all of the right foot and two toes off the left. The top of his head had been sliced off and the back of it crushed like a peppercorn. He’d been in the water more than three months. His rubber suit had protected his torso but the fish had lunched on anything that was exposed. The one eye hanging loose and half eaten from the remains of its socket was enough to make the strongest stomach heave.

He looked at the naked mess that might once have been the pathetic little bore from the carpet saleroom, stretched out on a green rubber sheet. The exposed flesh was streaked and stained; the flesh uncovered by the peeling away of the wetsuit was as pale as flour, bloated like a white slug on a cabbage leaf.

He turned to the sergeant Bonser had sent in with him.

‘You’ve got to be joking,’ he said. ‘His own mother couldn’t identify him.’

The man was indifferent or callous or just young. He shrugged his shoulders.

‘There’s always the teeth, I suppose. And prints off the three toes.’

For some reason this irritated Troy.

‘Look at his jaws. Do you see any teeth? Isn’t it obvious the man wore false teeth?’

The sergeant crouched and peeped into the black, lipless hole.

‘Oh, I see what you mean. Where are they now?’

‘I don’t know. Perhaps you should dredge the Solent?’

The sarcasm of this went over the man’s head. He probably would dredge the Solent for a set of false teeth.

‘And whilst you can get prints off toes, when does anyone bother to record toeprints?’

The man shrugged again. He was easy with death. Death didn’t bother him. It bothered Troy. He couldn’t wait to get out of the room.

The door to Bonser’s office was open. He was resting his backside on the front edge of his desk, leaning low over the hunched, juddering figure of a woman.

‘Surely you can?’ he was saying. Then, ‘After sixteen years of marriage?’

His tone of voice was somewhere between the incredulous and the hectoring. It did not, to Troy’s ears, sound pleasant, particularly in the light of his assumption that the sobbing woman must be Cockerell’s wife.

Troy tapped gently on the glass.

Bonser prised himself off the desk and came over to the door.

‘Any luck?’ he said.

Troy had no wish to speak in front of Mrs Cockerell. He shook his head.

‘What, nothing? Surely you—’

It was the same ‘surely’ he had used a moment before on the grieving widow. Troy refused to respond to it, cut him off before the verb by walking past him and placing a hand on Mrs Cockerell’s shoulder.

‘Mrs Cockerell?’

She unwrapped a little, looked up at him, her face contorted into a mask of ugliness by tears. A frump of a woman well into middle age. Overdressed for the weather in a heavy tweed coat; overdressed for the occasion in one of those stupid hats that women wear to be formal. But, then, what was more formal than a dead husband?

‘Frederick Troy. I’m a chief inspector at Scotland Yard. I met your husband briefly last April. I can’t tell you how sorry I am.’

Her eyes flashed with panic. She swivelled in the chair, looking sharply at Bonser, then at Troy again.

‘It’s not him, you know. You haven’t told them it’s him, have you?’

Troy looked at Bonser. More than a bit of a slob, a big bloke, with a boxer’s nose, standing in the open doorway in his striped braces, his tie at half-mast, his hands thrust into his trousers, Biro sticking out of the breast pocket of his bri-nylon shirt, as though he’d seen far too many episodes of Dragnet. She was alarmed, almost demented by the thought. How long had Bonser had her in here putting on the screws?

‘No. I haven’t. I couldn’t in all honesty say that I recognised the body as your husband.’

‘It’s not. You do see that, don’t you? It’s not him. It can’t be.’

Bonser took his hands out of his pockets.

‘Oh come on now—’

Troy cut him off, raised his voice just a fraction louder than was necessary and stared him down. It was known as pulling rank.

‘Have you had lunch yet, Mrs Cockerell?’

She shook her head. A lock of grey hair fell free from the ridiculous hat.

‘It’s nearly three. You must be famished.’

Troy held out a hand to her. She took it and stood up. A little taller than Troy, slim and fiftyish. He could see her clearly for the first time. Her face powder creased by rivulets of tears. Her bright red lipstick smudged. She did not, thank God, seem to wear mascara or she’d look like a coal chute, thought Troy.

He sat her in the front of the Bentley. Ducked back into the station. Bonser was unhappy but short of protest.

‘I’ll talk to her,’ said Troy. ‘You’ll get nowhere if you lean on her.’

Bonser shrugged, began to gather up the scattering of paperwork on his desk, his mind already moving on.

‘Maybe you’re right. But it’ll drag on now, won’t it?’

‘What will you do?’

‘What can I do? Follow the book. Put him on ice.’

He tossed a file into the open cabinet and slammed it shut.

‘Coroner opens an inquest and adjourns it indefinitely. You know the routine. In the meantime I’ve got an unidentified body and an open case. Makes a mess of the figures.’

This was universal copper-speak, an appeal through rank to Troy’s sympathies.

‘There are worse things,’ said Troy. Then he added, ‘The post mortem. You’ll send a copy of the report up to the Yard?’

‘If you like,’ Bonser said, as though it were a matter on which he was wholly indifferent.

Troy swung the car into the yard of the King Henry. It was out of hours, and he was relying on the goodwill of Quigley. The door was propped open, Quigley was behind the bar drying glasses, a towel demonstratively laid across the pumps.

‘Mr Quigley?’ Troy began. ‘I don’t suppose there’s any chance of a late lunch?’

‘I’m sure I can manage something,’ Quigley said.

‘And a drop of brandy?’

Quigley looked at the dial-faced clock over the bar. He knew exactly what time it was. The clock simply provided reassurance, and passing drama. There was a barely audible, hammy intake of breath.

‘It’s not for me,’ Troy said. ‘I’ve Mrs Cockerell with me.’

‘Say no more. On the house. That way the law can’t touch us, now can it?’

They sat alone at a table in the centre of the room. Quigley took one look at Mrs Cockerell and set a very large brandy in front of her. Troy coaxed. Persuaded her to take off her coat, to sip at the brandy. Her tears had stopped. The grief had lapsed into silence. She did not speak to Troy until Quigley returned with two plates of roast beef and boiled spuds in pools of gravy. She unpinned the silly hat, set it down on the spare chair, shook her hair out of her face, straightened her posture and assumed the forced look of bearing up in adversity.

‘It’s not him, you know,’ she said bluntly.

Tact not truth, thought Troy.

‘I’m sure you know best.’

‘That Inspector wanted me to say it was.’

‘No—I think he was just doing his job. Just asking you to be sure.’

She took a mouse’s bite at a potato, chewed half-heartedly, decided she liked it and began to take bigger forkfuls.

‘No,’ she said. ‘It was more than that. He wouldn’t take no for an answer.’

She spoke calmly. It did not seem to him to be the reaction of hysteria. Besides, Troy had to admit to himself that this squared with what he had seen. It seemed wrong, however, to agree with her and let her go away with the idea that Bonser had been heavy with her. Peace, if attainable, lay in denial. The truth came a poor second.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘were there no distinguishing marks which might have been unique to your husband?’

‘He had a scar on the back of his right hand. And a mole on the side of his neck. But there was no right hand, was there? There wasn’t much of a neck. I told that Inspector all that. He still seemed to think I should know.’

Troy decided to let it drop. She ate slowly but steadily, seemed quite capable of getting through it all. Mary Quigley brought over two bowls of plum duff and synthetically yellow custard. Troy preferred his Technicolor on the screen rather than the plate. He declined and took the chance to seek out Quigley.

‘Mr Quigley, when you were on the force, did you know Bill Bonser?’

Quigley uncorked the brandy bottle and poured two shorts for himself and Troy, far, far smaller than the one he had given to Mrs Cockerell. He pushed Troy’s across the bar to him. Cleared a space to take the elbow upon which the process of confidentiality demanded he now lean.

‘Came from Liverpool the year I retired. He was a sergeant in them days. If you ask me he shoulda stayed a sergeant.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Well, what qualities would you pride yourself on, Mr Troy? Intuition, imagination—flair, would you call it?’

‘If you like,’ said Troy.

‘Billy Bonser ain’t that sort. He’s what I’d call a born sergeant.’

Quigley paused to knock back his brandy. Troy still couldn’t see what he was driving at.

‘But you’re not saying he’s bent?’

‘Bent? Billy Bonser? He’s so straight you could use ’im for a truncheon. Straight, bent—that’s not the matter. Matter is—what separates the goat from the sheep? Nouse, Mr Troy. Bonser don’t have nouse. Bonser has—well—loyalty, obedience. The stuff you’d want in a good sergeant. ’E don’t ’ave the imagination to be bent. You give Billy Bonser an order and ’e’ll follow it over a cliff. ’E was in ’ere the day I reported Cockerell missing. That was two days after you was last ’ere. Comes in. Asks to check the register.’

Quigley reached under the bar and pulled out the register. He flipped it open and ran his finger down the torn seam between pages.

‘Looks at the page with Cockerell’s name on it, yours too as it ’appens, and blow me he rips it right out and tells me ’e was never ’ere. Then yesterday he comes in and asks me to identify the body. Typical Bonser. Orders to lose Cockerell, one day, orders to see to it ’e’s identified the next, and he follows both to the letter. Bent—not on your life. Straight as a die. Born sergeant.’

Troy considered that as Quigley had spent twenty years as a sergeant there was an odd mixture of generosity, objectivity and sheer perversity in the view, but it did prompt a question.

‘Whose orders would he be following? Why would anyone down here want Cockerell lost?’

‘Nah. Not down ’ere, Mr Troy. It’d be one of his mates in Special Branch. Before he got this posting Bonser was a sergeant in the Branch up in Liverpool. Mind you, it was too late. I’d already had a reporter in ’ere. And he’d seen it first.’

‘Reporter? Did you ask which paper?’

‘He said he was from the Sunday Post. Local stringer. If you ask me, ’e’d heard it from a nark down at the nick. So ’appens he moved quicker than Bonser.’

‘Did you tell Bonser this?’

‘No. Why upset him?’

This put a piece of the puzzle into place, the Sunday Post being owned by the Troy family, edited by his brother-in-law, Lawrence. Anything of use to Rod, Lawrence would undoubtedly pass on—which was how Rod had been able to harangue the Government long before it was common knowledge that there was a spy. It also spelt out to Troy that Rod had known all along that the Portsmouth spy was Commander Cockerell. He had never named him. He could imagine the delight Rod had taken in forcing Eden to name him, the off-the-record hints by which Rod would have let Eden know that he knew. Except that now—now it seemed that the Portsmouth spy might not be Commander Cockerell?

Troy offered Mrs Cockerell a lift to London. She declined, saying her train changed at Reading and she’d be fine if he would just drop her at the railway station.

‘It’s not him,’ she said again, with her hand on the car door, paused to get out into the station forecourt. ‘Really, it isn’t.’

It was a habit. A bad one, and more often than not meant as a brush-off. Troy gave her his card. His rank, the Whitehall 1212 number, the most famous telephone number in Britain.

‘If there’s anything I can do—’ he said meaninglessly, knowing he would never hear from her again.

And for a month he did not.

§37

He had retreated to his father’s study—his study, as he habitually failed to think of it. The summer rain pelted the windows, setting the glass rattling in its frame. He stuck Art Tatum on the gramophone, picked Graham Greene’s The Quiet American off the shelf and decided to while away a wet Saturday afternoon and quite possibly a wet weekend in solitary pleasures. Somewhere in the distance he could hear the sisters’ prattle. Rod was up in his office with a deskful of papers, as he was every Saturday; Nikolai was sleeping off lunch in the conservatory; Cid was in the kitchen discussing the evening’s menu with the cook. He had no idea where Tosca was and for two chapters of Graham Greene he did not wonder.

To enter his thoughts seemed like word magic—as though he could summon her up simply by thinking of her, she opened the door softly and came in. The creature he summoned was dressed bizarrely. All the clothes were his, rescued from the box he put aside for gardening and pigging. His old grey cotton trousers, rolled up many times at the ankle, and a Tattersall shirt, shot at the collar and cuffs. She was bored. He was getting used to that. She was so easily bored. She was in all probability drawn by the music, the rippling, sentimental piano of Tatum, the oh-so-mellow saxophone of Ben Webster, the Chekhovian thud of the string bass. He had no sense of intrusion. Indeed, he wished she would show more initiative and pick up a book and put on a record without waiting for him to make the decision. He had weaned her off Huck Finn, convinced her that there were other writers besides Mark Twain. But he was rapidly coming to conclude that he could not please her—in any sense of the word.

‘Y’ OK, baby?’

She sat on the edge of the chair opposite, not relaxing into it. More like his daughter than his wife. Irritable, irritating and curious.

‘I’m fine.’

‘Y’ don’t mind me just . . . sittin’ here?’

‘Not at all. You’re my wife.’

‘Buys a lot of favours, huh?’

He did not answer.

‘Sorry. That was bitchy. I been hangin’ out with your sisters too much.’

The rain shook the french windows to fill up the silence. It let him put off what he knew he must say and would rather not, such display being alien to his nature.

‘That’s OK. I didn’t mean I owned you. I meant what’s mine is yours. As corny as that.’

She smiled and unsmiled, all in a split second.

There was no way out. He’d better say it. Knew he had to say it. He put down the book. His own inadequacies rushing in to meet him black as storm clouds.

‘I meant, I loved you.’

‘That so?’

A whisper, not half-hearted, not uncertain, no sense of doubt. But it seemed to him that it did not register with her; so much did not, after all, and this was her only response, and it seemed the words she used did not mean what they said.

The telephone rang. It was far nearer her than him. She was looking intently at him, smiling shyly, stuck for words. She let it ring, until Troy said: ‘Pick it up. It’s probably for Rod. Usually is.’

‘Hello,’ she said quietly, and he saw the blood drain from her face, saw her eyes lock onto his with an expression little short of terror.

‘Yeah, yeah. [Pause.] Yeah, he’s here. Sure.’

Then she put her hand across the mouthpiece and screamed her whisper at Troy.

‘Aaaaaagh!’

‘What’s the matter?’

‘Aaaaaaaaaagggghhhhhhh!!! It’s Ike!’

‘Ike who?’

‘Eisenhower, dummy!!! The goddam President! Jesus Christ. Take the damn thing off me!’

Troy ran around the desk.

‘What does he want?’

‘He just called to ask if I’m happy. Jesus Christ, Troy! What do you think he wants? He wants Rod!’

Troy snatched the phone from her. She hopped around the room screaming quietly, dancing from one foot to the other as though walking on hot coals.

He ran upstairs. Rod took it all very calmly. Yawned, picked up the phone and said, ‘Ike,’ as though he had seen him only yesterday.

Afterwards, he sat in the study and watched Tosca rant and rave, still tearing around the room on fire.

‘Jesus, baby. Suppose he recognised my voice?’

‘It was twelve years ago.’

‘Dammit, Troy. I saw the old guy every day for weeks, months even! I mean, he used to flirt with me!’

‘He didn’t have a clue. You’re dead, remember?’

She returned to her place, perched on the edge of the chair, toes drumming nervously on the floor.

‘You’re right. I’m dead. I find it hard to remember sometimes. I mean, here am I trying to work out who the hell I am, eyeless in Gaza, clueless in Hertfordshire, lost in the desert of the English home counties, marooned between the Co-op and Dorothy Perkins, caught between the devil and the woman in the deep-blue dress who just popped in from the Women’s Institute, adrift on a sea of good manners and guilt about masturbation, wondering whether property is really theft or does my fawn handbag really not go with my twin-set, driven crazy by not knowing which’ll destroy us first, the H-bomb or the wrong fork at the dinner table, forgetting all the time that I’m dead. Well—fucky wucky woo!!!’

For several minutes all he could hear was rain and the gathering rumble of thunder.

He leaned back, the chair on two legs, and flipped the switch to start the record again. Tatum glided into ‘Gone With the Wind’—the pre-war song from which Margaret Mitchell had taken her book title, which in turn had become a film, which in turn had became another, utterly unrelated tune—and competed with the rain on the window pane. There was scarcely a mood to recapture, but he loved and hated the fragility of silence under rain. Almost erotic. The temptation to shatter it was too strong. He’d tried once and failed dismally.

He reached for his book. Then she leapt from her chair, knocked the book from his hand, threw her arms around his neck and wept onto his chest.

The record spun on its final groove. One of Mr Sod’s favourite laws was that the autochanger never cut out when you wanted it to. She prised her head off his chest, sniffed noisily, looked at him nose to nose.

‘Y’ remember what Twain said?’

He shook his head.

‘Rumours of my demise are greatly something or other.’

‘Exaggerated?’

‘That’s the word.’

Then she kissed him, drew up her legs, wedged her stockinged feet between his thighs and buried herself in his neck. She smelt of perfume, nothing he could name, of soap flakes, and of Tosca.

§38

Rod took the bellows to the last of the fire. A man of no real practical skills, he was devoted to the two or three things he did well. He was excellent at pancakes, though rarely called on to prove it since his children had hit adolescence, mixed a mean martini, and would always undertake the lighting of fires with repeated cries of, ‘Don’t touch it, don’t touch it!’ And on cold summer evenings such as this could be found bent over the embers, arse uppards, blowing a spark into flame. The fire once lit, he would be reluctant to waste so much as a therm of heat and light, and was often to be found crouched over a fire with parliamentary papers, or the novels he rationed to himself, past midnight, past sociability, yawning and nodding off. In the days when he had been a minister, Troy had saved him from a scorching when a Government white paper slipped from his lap into the grate and set fire to his trousers.

Dinner had dissolved, the family dispersed to their rooms. Troy walked the length of the table snuffing out the candles with his fingers. He had first taken the precaution of closing the door. He sat by the fire, hoping for a fireside chat—a phrase not much heard since the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Rod achieved ignition, sighed and sat back in the chair opposite.

‘Staying up, are you?’ he said.

Which was by way of a hint. It meant ‘sod off’ in Rodspeak, but Troy was not to be sodded.

‘Aren’t you going to tell me what’s going on?’

‘Meaning?’

‘The President of the United States is usually to be found on the golf course on a Saturday morning, not making clandestine calls to minor British politicians on their home numbers.’

‘Minor! Clandestine!’

‘I didn’t even know you knew him.’

‘I was in and out of Overlord HQ dozens of times in the run-up to D-Day. I can’t say I was on first-name terms with a five-star general, but I knew him. I saw him again a couple of times in ’54, and I led the Labour group to Washington this June while you were off gallivanting with your newfound wife.’

‘And you just happened to give him this number?’

Rod put aside the sheaf of papers he had sat clutching. It indicated that Troy had at last won his attention.

‘Off the record. Right?’

‘I’m not a Fleet Street hack, Rod.’

‘It’s part of the job, his and mine, to meet the Opposition leaders, you’ll agree. Nothing odd about that, so don’t pretend. The fact that we knew one another in the war helps. After all, he didn’t know Gaitskell. He told me in June that he was worried about Egypt—the Baghdad pact and all that—said it would be useful from time to time to know what Her Majesty’s Opposition felt without the formalities and frills. And no, I didn’t give him this number. He had it already. Asked if I minded him calling me here, but said he knew for a fact that the line wasn’t bugged. Which is more than can be said for my office. He said we could talk without anyone else knowing—not his people, and not mine. What prompted him to ring today was that television address to the nation Eden gave the other night. Ike, it seems, had the London embassy stick the phone next to the set so it could be relayed direct to him in the White House. The upshot is that he thinks Eden is not getting the message. He says Dulles is being as clear as can be that the Americans will not back us over Egypt—“we will not shoot our way through the canal” and all that guff; bit subtle for Eden, really—and we cannot expect them to. But he thinks Eden is just blind and deaf on the matter.’

‘So what’s new? Ike must have known Eden during the war. I doubt his character has improved.’

‘Quite. That is part of the problem. I doubt whether Ike has ever had a deal of confidence in him. However, there is something new.’

Rod paused, seemed almost to sigh with regret.

‘We’re going to invade.’

Troy thought silence the better part of discretion. Just keep him talking.

‘The Tories have signed a secret pact with France and Israel. Israel strikes at Egypt across Sinai, towards the canal. Then the British and the French steam in as peacemakers, and on the way nab the canal for themselves. It was all in writing, it seems, but Eden has burnt his copy of the agreement, and sent a Foreign Office chap to France to get the French copy. But he couldn’t get the Israeli copy. Eden’s lied to the House and if we drag him back for a special session he means to go on lying.’

‘How does Ike know this?’

‘The CIA got a look at Israel’s copy.’

‘Why is he telling you this?’

‘He just wants me to know.’

‘I don’t believe that. Nor do you. I don’t see how you can use this. When did anyone last stand up in the house of clowns and call the Prime Minister of the day a liar? If you do, every journalist in Britain will ask you for your source. What are you going to tell them? That Ike calls you at home? Because no one will believe you. That you have a hotline to the CIA? That’ll do you more harm than good. You’ll have your own left wing shooting at you with everything they’ve got.’

Rod leant forward. No one could possibly hear them, but still he lowered his voice.

‘He says that he’ll pull the rug from under the pound if Eden goes through with it. It’ll drop like stone against the dollar. In the autumn we’re due to pay interest on the post-war loans the Americans gave us. We’ll probably have to default. The Exchequer will be passing the hat round and we’ll be borrowing from anyone with a five-bob postal order to lend. From imperial power to international beggars in less than ten years. At which point Ike has us by the balls—and one of Ike’s maxims is that when you have a man by the balls his heart and mind soon follow.’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Troy. ‘That’s Machiavellian. But I still don’t see why he’s gone to the trouble of telling you.’

‘Special relationship?’

‘Come off it.’

‘He wants us to be ready.’

‘Ready for what?’

‘Government.’

‘Government? There’s no bloody election due till 1960!’

‘Eden will go. Ike has decided. When he goes there’s a good chance he’ll bring the Tories down around his head like Samson. We’ll be back in government by January.’

‘So Ike is acting like a bookie’s runner. Giving you a hot tip?’

‘All in the interests of continuity.’

‘Rubbish.’

‘It’s called diplomacy.’

‘Sez you,’ said Troy. ‘I could think of half a dozen other words for it.’

It was Troy’s turn to lean in close over the sputtering fire, to usher in the tones of a spurious confidentiality. Secrets where there could be none. Home truths where there could only be alien lies.

‘Tell me, don’t you find it in the least bit disturbing to be on the receiving end of CIA operations? Aren’t you just a wee bit apprehensive about an American president deciding to swap governments in Britain? Because if they can do it to the Conservatives, they can do it to you.’

‘Strange times, Freddie, make strange bedfellows.’

‘If I went to bed with the CIA I’d count my bollocks in the morning.’

§39

The Quiet American was not where he had left it. With only a couple of chapters to go, he was quite looking forward to finishing it in bed.

He tapped on Tosca’s door and went in. The windows were wide open to let in the night air and the last reluctant drops of rain with it. Her trousers, knickers and socks trailed across the floor from the door, exactly as she had stepped out of them. The room was turning into a marginally neater version of the pit she had had in Orange Street all those years ago. She was sitting up in bed. The Tattersall shirt had become a nightdress. She was reading his book. He decided to say nothing. He’d start another.

‘I’m sorry about this afternoon.’

‘That’s all right. You must have been scared.’

‘Shitless would be the word.’

She paused, put her thumb between the pages and clutched the book to her bosom. Drew her knees up to support her chin.

‘It makes me wonder. Y’know. Could be anybody. Anytime. I mean—we’ll never know. We can never be certain, can we?’

She was looking at him. A look he could not fathom. She had wrapped herself around him, slept off the fear of the day in the sleep of a frightened child. She had never done that before. She had clammed up over dinner, let Rod and the sisters make all the running, occasionally reached under the table cloth and held him by the hand or grabbed him by the balls. She had done that dozens of times. He did not know what she wanted of him now.

‘No,’ he said. ‘We can’t.’

§40

It had been a sodden summer. Wind and rain, with the odd day of outstanding sunshine to pepper the calendar and remind the English that they didn’t have summers like they used to—before the war. One glimmer of ‘sunshine’ remained—earlier in the season England had thrashed the Australian touring cricket team in the test and reminded them that Len Hutton had retired, but that perhaps his spirit played on.

The desk copper at the Yard had the reliability of a good barometer. He would talk about the weather or he would talk about cricket. In either case, he had the same solution.

‘It’s the bomb,’ he told Troy one morning at the end of August. ‘Stands to reason.’

Troy loved ‘stands to reason’—it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous, to a statement that would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.

‘Definitely the bomb,’ the copper said, as Troy walked in from Whitehall.

Troy waited. Cricket or the weather?

‘We never had weather like this before you had all them atoms in the air! It’s the atoms. We got too many of ’em just whizzing around in the atmosphere.’

Play or pass? Play, he thought. Absurdist’s gambit.

‘It rains in Japan all the time.’

‘Yeah, but there’s always the trade winds. We’re on the same trade winds as Japan, you see. The wind blows all their atoms from Hiroshima and Nagawotsit over to England.’

This required little thought. Troy could see mate in a couple of moves.

‘Of course,’ he said, Knight to Queen’s Bishop 4, ‘Japan never was any good at cricket.’

‘Stands to reason,’ said the copper, and went into a manoeuvre known to Troy as the cracker-barrel loop, the homespun philosopher’s ploy of repeat, sigh and wonder at the majesty of God and Nature. Troy quit. They bred a particularly hardy species of idiot—the English.

Up in his office the phone was ringing. And not a sign of Clark or Wildeve.

He did not recognise the woman asking for Chief Inspector Troy.

‘It’s Janet Cockerell,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said neutrally.

‘You said to call you if—’

She could not complete the sentence, but it didn’t matter. The ‘if’ had been universal. Bread cast upon the waters. Anything and nothing with a preference that it should be nothing. But she had called.

‘I’ve heard from that Inspector Bonser again.’

So had Troy. A post-mortem report lay unread in his in-tray. If he’d had a reason for asking Bonser to send it, he’d quite forgotten what it was.

‘He wants me to go back to Portsmouth. And I was wondering. Well. Do I have to go?’

‘No, Mrs Cockerell, you don’t.’

‘He can’t make me?’

‘No, he can’t.’

Troy was not surprised to learn that Bonser had asked. How else was he ever going to get the body identified? If anything, it was odd he’d left the matter as long as he had.

‘But,’ Troy went on, ‘I’m sure you’ll appreciate how little Mr Bonser has to go on.’

‘You’re not saying I should do it?’

‘No. I’m not.’

‘It’s not him. I can’t say it is if it isn’t.’

Troy had heard all this.

‘It’s the way he asks. I feel I’m being bullied.’

He was not wholly sure why he was prolonging this conversation, or where it was leading.

‘Mrs Cockerell. Why are you so certain your husband is not the body we saw?’

‘He’s still alive. I know it.’

‘I’ve been investigating suspicious deaths for twenty years, Mrs Cockerell. Most people who begin as missing persons show up as corpses. There’s not a man in ten thousand can effectively engineer his own disappearance. The old ploy of leaving your clothes on the beach doesn’t work. If he’s still missing after nearly five months the chances are—’

‘My husband didn’t leave his clothes on a beach! He left them at the King Henry Hotel,’ she protested.

‘Quite. Doesn’t that tell you anything?’

‘No.’

‘Well. It tells me that your husband has not staged a disappearing trick. Clothes are one thing. Your husband left his wallet, his case and his car, his toothbrush, his razor. If he’s roving England, he’s roving it without so much as a farthing to his name.’

‘Doesn’t that tell you anything?’ she threw his question back at him.

‘Such as?’

‘That perhaps it all comes down to money. That maybe he’s got a nest egg stashed away somewhere?’

‘You may be right. But—’

‘It’s money, Mr Troy. It all comes down to money. If you could just come and look.’

‘What?’

‘If you could come up here. To Derbyshire. And look.’

‘I’m on the Murder Squad. I can’t look into missing persons or missing money.’

‘But you don’t think he’s missing. You think he’s dead!’

She had rounded on him in a quick twist of logic. Afterwards he often had cause to wonder why he had agreed to make the trip to Derbyshire, to involve himself in this bloody, cloying mess. Even as he jotted down her address, the name of the town—Belper—seemed oddly familiar, as though he’d heard it recently in some other context. She was right: he did believe, if only from a combination of experience and instinct, that Cockerell was dead. She was right too, in that, for all that he could not offer Bonser the legal certainty he needed, he too thought the corpse was Cockerell. The weakness in it all was that if the corpse was Cockerell, it was not his problem—let the spooks handle that one—but if it wasn’t, what logical consequence followed from his assertion that the man was dead? Dead where? Dead when? And by whose hand? No—it was not her logic that gripped him; it was his own. That and the dead cat curiosity of wanting to stick his nose into the Cockerell affair, simply because he was intrigued that his own brother should have concerned himself so much with the political capital to be made out of it. Rod was playing an odd game. Of late Troy had been surprised at the lengths to which he would go and the methods he would use, the people with whom he was prepared to deal. Strange bedfellows, as he had called them. He remembered the long spoon at Downing Street. And he remembered Rod’s stinging suggestion that perhaps Troy and ‘all the piods in Special Branch’ had been only decoys in the episode of Commander Cockerell. He doubted the use Rod was making of all that he knew and he doubted the source of all that he knew—but worse, far worse, he hated the thought that he himself might have been used, hated the idea that he’d been in a sideshow when all the time he thought he’d been present at the main attraction.

He looked at the neat, small stack of paperwork on his desk, so controlled and so ordered since the arrival of Clark. The opposite of his life.

‘I’ll be there sometime tomorrow,’ he said to her.

He rang off and pulled the post-mortem report from his in-tray. All good cases begin with a good body. And whoever he was down there on the slab in Portsmouth, he was the ripest corpse in a long time. Foul, fish-eaten, putrid and stinking. The pathologist’s report made a disgustingly enjoyable read—up, that is, to the heading ‘Contents of Digestive Tract, Stomach, Duodenum, Colon & Examination of Rectum’. At which juncture disgust overwhelmed even the most perverse of policely pleasures, and Troy dropped the report in his out-tray. He did not have a pending-tray. Perhaps Clark was working on that? Perhaps one day soon he would walk in and find his life casually dumped in that centre tray?

§41

When it came down to it he could not face the drive. The thought of the hours spent crawling up the A5 and then up the A6, across Northamptonshire and Leicestershire and halfway up Derbyshire, filled him with boredom. You could spend hours stuck in traffic before even leaving Greater London, and the road north could move at a snail’s pace. Britain, it had to be said, was choking on its traffic. What Britain needed was Autobahns. They were the one positive thing the late Adolf Hitler was remembered for. Visitors would return from the newly reconstituted Germany and whinge about the backwardness of Britain when it came to roads. Every so often you could meet a buffoon in a bar for whom the mark of a civilised country was that it let him cruise at 105 mph along a concrete superhighway. But, then, that was the post-war syndrome. Troy was getting used to the fashionable rediscovery of the Continent—or Europe as people were tending to call it these days—the costly summer holiday abroad from which the well-to-do British would return boasting that they’d found somewhere in France that served English beer or a nice cup of tea—or, increasingly, on the opposite tack, that they’d discovered things that ‘simply hadn’t caught on in Britain yet’, and never would while we remained ‘insular’. Troy remembered his first sight of a garlic press, a bottle of Chianti and red Tuscan pottery. And that little blue book of Mediterranean Food by Elizabeth David, stuffed full of ‘calamári’—whatever that was—and ‘courgette’, better known in its bloated form on the allotments of England as a ‘prize marrer’—that had a lot to answer for. Either way, either response, was part of the great British talent for self-flagellation.

He reached into his desk drawer for a copy of the railway timetable and began to search for a suitable train. The old Midland line out of St Pancras. He liked trains, and Britain had an extensive network of lines that seemed to connect pretty well everything with pretty well everything else. Unlike Mussolini’s trains, they rarely ran on time, but they did get you into the nooks and crannies of the country, whether the nook was Midsomer Norton in deepest Somerset or the cranny Monsal Dale in the heights of Derbyshire. The railways were like the underground, as he had described it to Khrushchev—ramshackle but they worked.

Belper? Why did he know that name? Belper. He found it on the network map. It was about ten miles north of Derby, a one-horse town, wedged between a tributary of the Trent and the tail end of the Pennines. And it did indeed have a railway station.

§42

The engine was a shabby specimen, still bearing the insignia of the old London, Midland & Scottish Railway, long since nationalised as part of British Railways. Troy had been a train-spotter as a boy—so many lines passed through Hertfordshire on their way north—but had outgrown the delights of childhood by the time this type had appeared. All the same, he knew it for what it was under the grime and neglect of the new order. It was, he recalled, a Jubilee class 4–6–0, named for the year of the old King’s Silver Jubilee in 1935. Not as grand as the Coronation and Princess Pacifics, not as powerful, but sleek, neat, and usually red like the story-book engine—not dirty black as it was now.

The rhythm of steam, the mechanical inhalation and exhalation of the iron beast, was always soporific. He fell asleep, appropriately enough, somewhere in Bedfordshire. When he awoke it was dark and the train was chugging through the flatlands of the Trent Valley. He could not remember passing Leicester or Loughborough. He peered out of the window into a clear sky lit by a near-perfect half-moon. A station passed swiftly by—Long Something or other. He leant against the worn cushioning of an LMS Third Class railway compartment and fell back into sleep again.

Someone was nudging him. He opened his eyes. It was dim in the carriage, dark outside and the train had stopped. The someone was a railway guard.

‘Belper you said, guvnor? Look sharpish or you’ll find yourself in Manchester.’

Troy leapt from the train, still half in the land of nod, and found himself in the land of he-knew-not-what. Far Twittering or Oyster Perch? The train pulled out, deep rhythmic sighs, and disappeared slowly into the stone cutting to the north. As the chug-hiss and the smell of smoke and steam faded, other sounds and scents took their place, opening up like flowers in trick photography. A delicate waft of night-scented stock, the fainter scent of late-flowering cabbage roses, the strong aromatics of nicotiana. He found himself facing a well-ordered flowerbed. In large white stones in the centre of the display, offset by an outline of scarlet geraniums, the letters B-E-L-P-E-R were picked out as though freshly whitewashed. High on a stone wall, a gas lamp perched upon its iron stem and hissed gently into the scented air. From its two arms hung baskets of trailing nasturtium and lobelia. The sound of the engine finally died in the distance, and from beneath it emerged a throaty musical burble, a multitude of deep cooing voices, dipping in and out of the silence. The silence. That was what was so startling. Somewhere in the distance an open window let out the indecipherable but unmistakable sound of a wireless tuned to the Home Service, but apart from that and the odd burbling noises, Troy could hear nothing, not a car, not a voice, nothing. A scented silence.

He looked around. He was standing next to a peeling red railway building, somewhat in the style of a Swiss chalet. The door to his right bore an enamel plaque saying ‘Ladies Only’. Off to his left a man in porter’s uniform was loading wicker crates full of racing pigeons onto a cart. The pigeons cooed at him, and there was a swift flutter of feathers as he lifted each basket in turn. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Oliver Hardy. The same rotund face, the same layered jowls jammed between chin and collar, the same clipped, old-fashioned moustache—the same colossal girth.

‘Excuse me,’ said Troy, ‘I don’t suppose there’s a station hotel?’

Troy half-expected him to straighten up, fiddle with his tie or cuddle his hat to his chest and fluster a little in best Georgian modesty, rocking his head from side to side and pursing his lips. He said nothing, simply carried on loading his burbling baggage onto the cart. Troy regretted the implied negative in his question. Sod the English and their ungrammatical manners. All he meant was, ‘Where’s the nearest hotel?’

Without looking at Troy, Hardy pointed up the narrow track towards the town.

‘Up there?’ Troy asked. He was aware such men existed. People who scarcely dealt in language.

‘Top o’ the slope. Across the square. Kedleston,’ said Hardy, in a surprisingly high, soft voice, barely raised above a whisper, still not looking at Troy. He plonked the last basket high on the load, walked to the front of the cart, and pressed a button. An electric motor kicked in with a whirr about as loud as a sewing machine, and the loaded cart wobbled off up the slope with Hardy perched at its head. Troy followed the railway caravan in search of the caravanserai, bemused by his silence, dreamily letting the sound of pigeons and the scent of stock wash over him in the warm night air. A Pennine Arabian Night.

It could not last. The Kedleston was a hole. A hole that had last seen a paintbrush or a new roll of paper sometime in the reign of Edward VII. His room was tiny and the bed the width of a coffin. Its springs, long since exhausted, protested to him most of the night and when they did not the man in the room next door, from which Troy seemed to be divided by two sheets of wallpaper glued back to back, broke wind frequently as though in sympathy with the tortured bedsprings.

He awoke, aching and tired, to find himself facing the only item of twentieth-century furniture in the room. Designed and built to be makeshift, the rational extension of the wartime motto ‘make-do-and-mend’, Utility furniture had proved surprisingly durable, and God knows, there might even have been people who found the plain plywood tallboy, an identical item to which could be found in homes the length and breadth of the land, attractive. It was alchemy in wood, necessity transmuted into virtue.

He washed and dressed to the sound of thumping water pipes and the deafening roar of emptying lavatory pans. The hot ran cold, and as he waited for the trickle of water to gain temperature, the sound of feet descending the stairs banged past his door and rattled the ornamental vase of plastic flowers on top of the tallboy.

He was the last down. The small dining room was full. Men with moustaches. Men in brown suits, who all seemed to know each other, and to be deeply submerged in greasy eggs, greasy bacon, greasy, milky tea and knowing shop talk. A smell of stale tobacco and hair oil glided gently across the worst that breakfast could exhale. One or two of the brown suits said, ‘Mornin’’ to Troy, and the one nearest to him asked him what he sold. Listening to their proud, jargon-ridden banter, Troy soon realised he was sharing a table with pioneers at the cutting edge of the brush and bathroom-fittings trades.

He emerged into the street. An Indian Summer’s day. The bright light of belated sunshine, racing to make up for the cold of August. He looked around him. A bustling main street, banks and drapers and building societies and butchers, drenched in a sudden rush of smoke and steam as a northbound express roared through the cutting in the heart of the town. He looked up past the painted shop fronts to the stone upper storeys and the town shot back a century or more to the plainer solidity of the original Victorian; and above them all rose green hills, wrapping the town on three sides. It was not the landscape he had seen from the train, just before he had last nodded off. This was not the flood plain of the Midlands, this was a stone-built, sturdy northern town, climbing the sides of a Pennine valley. The landscape, if his matriculation all those years ago in School Certificate Geography served him well, of cotton and coal.

The waitress who had served him a disgusting breakfast of congealed something with cold something, which had to recommend it only that fact that there was lots of it, had drawn him a rough plan of the town. He turned it this way and that, trying to find north, and set off up the main street towards the eastern hill, looking for the Heage Road, for the address Mrs Cockerell had given him. He had not seen quite so much stone since he last killed a dull afternoon in Westminster Abbey. The town seemed to be carved from it. The odd outburst of brick seemed like an afterthought, a failed gesture in the direction of modernity. The town, like so much of Britain, did not strike him as well-to-do. The age of austerity had gone, but its defining attribute lingered on like a persistent cobweb. An air of the poor, stopping short of poverty.

So many of the houses were shabby, the paintwork peeling and the woodwork rotting, the people Orwellian, seeming to Troy like characters from The Road to Wigan Pier. Ascending the steep hill out of the town centre he passed what was obviously a doss house. A gaunt man stood outside wearing the remains of an army greatcoat, the flashes of a regiment still visible, the buttons dull and unpolished ten years or more, the hands clutching the lapels, one above the other as though cold in the warm light of morning, and the lips moving softly. As he passed him, Troy heard the syllables clearly: ‘che, che, che . . .’—a stammer leading nowhere. He would never get past the first syllable of whatever it was, and the worn, post-war, post-what figures emerging, shuffling and farting, from the blistered maroon door of the doss house did not wait for him to finish. They shuffled on, up or down the hill. Sad and silent. Post-war, post-what? Troy often wondered what private tragedy brought men to this. Britain after the war, any war, the First had been no different, seemed to litter itself with its unhealing casualties. But it was hard to believe that the public tragedy could account for all this. Beneath, beyond, the tangible fact of war were the multitudes of intangible facts of God-knows-what. As a child Troy had thought that there must be some special place from which such men came, almost like the factory of a mad scientist where rags were arranged into the form of man, the island of Dr Moreau where the half-men were half made. So often would he meet them in the dusty lanes of Hertfordshire, so often would a talking bundle of rags ring the bell at the kitchen door of his parents’ house to be given leftovers. The reason Jimmy Wheeler’s rice pudding joke was not funny was not that it had been told too often. It was not funny because it was true.

From the crest of the hill he could look back on the town. Over to his right, looking north, was a vast, blackened, brick chimney. So, it was a mill town after all. And, doubtless, if he’d been up and about earlier he would have passed streams of women pouring out of stone cottages in stone streets, walking in for an eight o’clock shift. Instead, at nine-thirty going on ten he was checking the names on the gates of large houses in a street of a different kind. Heage Road was, clearly, the posh end of town, the houses bigger, better maintained, further apart, lacking uniformity, suffering the gables and crestellations of passing architecture. He found Jasmine Dene, a large, between-wars Tudorish bungalow in black and white, set well back from the road, behind double gates, each gate post topped by a large square, wooden basket of hanging flowers. He opened one of the gates, parting Jasmine from its Dene. The garden was immaculate. Perfect to the ­artificial—rollered turf in stripes like the grain in wood, a razored edge, with borders of precisely aligned bedding plants, verging on the regimented, verging on the unattractive in the precision of their symmetry. The author of this British line and square was bending over the blades of an upturned lawnmower. A man of seventy or so, in black trousers, black waistcoat and a collarless, patterned cotton shirt. He looked up at Troy through enormous grey eyebrows. It was Uncle Todger come to life.

‘Art lookin’ fert missis?’ he said.

Troy had no idea what he’d said. ‘Yes’ seemed like a good answer to try, then if the man whipped out a subscription to the Reader’s Digest or a pledge to Jehovah’s Witnesses he could try sign language.

‘Yes,’ Troy said.

‘Tha’d best ring t’bell then, anntya?’

It didn’t seem like a question, but Troy heard the upward inflection that implied it might be. He resorted to a ‘jolly good’, always handy in time of doubt. The man bent over his jammed lawnmower once more and Troy stepped between two half-barrels, in the ubiquitous black and white, chockful of primulas, and yanked on an iron bell-pull.

Grief is a deceiver. This was not the woman he had seen in Portsmouth. This woman was a well-preserved fifty. Tall, slender and elegant, and whilst he could not honestly say she was good-looking, she kept herself; carried herself and dressed herself in a way that made it seem inconceivable that she was the same person.

‘Mr Troy, you’re bright and early. Do come in.’

She smiled and threw the door wide, and when she smiled her eyes lit up. She was wearing a boiler suit of many zips in mid-blue, the same colour as her eyes, doubtless dyed from its wartime dirty grey, belted tightly around her narrow waist, and the blue was smudged and smeared with a hundred different hues. And in her left hand she clutched two paintbrushes, one with a dab of Chinese White and the other with a shade Troy recalled from childhood as Burnt Umber, fixed in his memory with an unanswered question as to why a box of watercolours had no paint called Raw Umber. She pulled a Liberty scarf from her head, shook her hair, part brown and part grey and well-cut, free from its bond.

‘You’ve stayed in the town somewhere? God, I bet you could kill for a decent cup of coffee. Let me rinse the brushes and I’ll get a pot going.’

A long corridor led to the back of the house. Mrs Cockerell strode off down it, leaving Troy to follow at his own pace. She had disappeared like the White Rabbit, through a doorway to the right. Troy paused by the first door, knowing she was somewhere at the back of the house. Double doors opened into a front-facing sitting room. Nosiness drew him to the threshold; discretion kept him hovering on it. There, in the piercing eastern light, breaking incongruously through the leaded windows of the original mock-Tudor, were the artefacts and icons of the new, the substance of the gospel according to Cockerell. Ashtrays on stilts. A portrait of a stern Chinese woman, whose skin was green. The skater-pattern carpet, the coffee table with its laminated, clear plastic top and its inlay of plastic sea-shells—the factory version of Mother Nature’s bug-in-amber—the non-matching wallpapers, whereby two walls faced each other in pale stripes and two in dark swirls and spirals. And the curtains—curtains in Mediterranean, sun-bleached tints, depicting an assortment of ubiquitous Chianti bottles, the symbol of all we were not—a sun-loving, easy-going, mañana people. It was not a room in which he could have felt comfortable. The studio-style, studded PVC leatherette furniture, so delicate on its black tapered legs and brass-shoed feet, seemed fragile compared to the robust representatives of the new technology—the double-doored television set, the huge, multi-functional radiogram, with an array of creamy, off-white push-buttons rictus-grinning like false teeth in a tumbler. You could not be comfortable. The furniture might break beneath your weight, then the machines might eat you.

‘Arnold gave you his lecture, then?’

She had appeared quietly at his side. He was about to apologise, but suddenly it seemed unnecessary. She leant on the door jamb and peered in.

‘You know. The Contemporary Look. All this tat.’

Troy smiled.

‘Yes. He did.’

‘Bet he bored you silly with it, didn’t he? He’d have done the whole house out this way if I’d let him. Come and look. I kept one room, just for me. Arnie’s allowed in on condition he changes nothing.’

Right at the back of the house was a large room opening out to the garden through french windows. It was an afternoon room, facing south and west, but even in the morning light it was obvious what she meant. Not a scrap of Contemporary had made it past the door. Walls papered in a pattern of English wildflowers, muted yellows and washed-out blues; a polished parquet floor; a few old, worn Persian rugs, a deep, sturdy Edwardian three-piece suite, reupholstered in pale colours; large Colefax and Fowler flowers on a cornfield chintz. A solid wall of tatty, broken-spined, well-read books. And twenty to thirty watercolours scattered across the other walls. It was traditional, it was comfortable, and it had more of an individual mark on it than the other room would have if lived in for fifty years.

She had gone again, away to the whistling of a kettle. Troy was drawn to the paintings. Mostly, he assumed, they were her own. The peaks and valleys of Derbyshire, the watercolours of the Early British style. Unfashionable now, but she worked through that, pushing, it seemed to him after he had looked at half a dozen, through the representation of landscape to an unsentimental abstraction. He had gazed a minute or more at one such abstract until the signature told him otherwise: ‘Janet Cockerell. Combe Martin, Devon. 1948.’ What he had taken as abstract was a seascape dazzling in the silver light of North Devon, the beaten-metal sea, the red-rippled, iron rocks of the coastline. He blinked and looked again. It was abstract once more.

He was staring, envious of her taste, at the few paintings that were not her own work—a portrait by Gwen John, a pseudo-religious scene, quite possibly a gospel story, in the unmistakable, irresistible heavy hand of Stanley Spencer—when she returned.

‘Shall we have coffee in the garden? After all that rain I think we might be in for an Indian Summer.’

He followed her out through the french windows. The same division of property seemed to apply to the garden. This was not the immaculate military layout of the front; this was a wilder place altogether. Herbs and flowers competed with vegetables in the same bed—a straggling thyme bush, the crisp, blackened flowers of marjoram, dozens of onions, their tops folded over to ripen in maturity, a ragged, unpruned late-flowering red rose, petals bright as blood, a rambling, fruit-laden quince, a thousand wallflowers turning woody, and being left to seed themselves.

An easel stood facing the south-west, across the smoking chimneys of the town, down across slate roofs, over the Orwellian maze of stone streets. The merest outline of an image appeared. She had clearly been at work a matter of half an hour or so before Troy’s visit distracted her. She set down her tray on a wicker table—a cheap and cheerful Suzy Cooper pattern of crockery, and a large pot of steaming hot coffee. Troy took the chair furthest from the house, and found himself perched almost on the edge of a cliff, looking down into the overgrown remains of a quarry. Instinctively he pulled his chair a foot nearer the house.

She said nothing until he had a cup of aromatic, strong, black coffee in his hands.

‘I know I’m playing with your sense of paradox, Chief Inspector, but my husband is not dead.’

‘Not dead.’

‘Not dead. Running.’

‘Running?’

‘Hiding.’

‘From what?’

She set down her cup. They had in a few, short strokes arrived at the heart of the matter, it seemed.

‘I think my husband was living beyond his means. I think we’ve lived high on the hog for far too long, and I think whatever he’d been doing to finance our style of living was about to break, his chickens were coming home to roost. And he ran.’

‘The things he left behind him in Portsmouth?’

‘All planned. Designed to make us think he was dead.’

‘The body?’

‘Coincidence. A remarkable coincidence.’

‘And the conviction the Government have that your husband was working for them?’

She shrugged, much as he would have done himself.

‘I don’t think the right hand knows what the left hand’s doing.’

Troy could agree with that. In fact, it was the best summing up he’d heard of the governmental mess that had seeped out around the clumsy attempts to conceal whatever had been going on—worthy of a leader writer.

‘Why would Her Majesty’s Government use a man like my husband? He wasn’t the best frogman in SOE, even in his prime. And that was more than ten years ago. He was a stringy, seedy, out of condition fifty-two-year-old, far too fond of cork tips and whisky. He was thirty-five when the war began. If he hadn’t been in the Navy anyway he would never have been called up, not at his age. The idea that they’d get him out of retirement to do another job is preposterous.’

‘What do you think he was doing in Portsmouth?’

‘Preparing his own disappearance. Scattering a few red herrings. It just so happened it was the spies, his old pals, who picked them up and not the ordinary bobbies whom I’d yet to inform of his disappearance. I didn’t report him missing until ten days after you met him. Right now he’s abroad somewhere, puzzled to read that he was a spy, cockahoop that it lets him off the hook and scuppers his creditors.’

‘Have they approached you?’

‘No.’

‘Doesn’t that blow a hole in your case that it was a problem with money?’

‘No. I’ve the evidence of my eyes. It may be they don’t know they’ve been had. It could take a long time to surface. What I know is that we lived very high on the hog these last few years. And I know we can’t afford it.’

‘How long do you think this has been going on?’

‘Five or six years. Since the Festival of Britain.’

She laughed at her own exactitude, looked down into her coffee cup, smiling wryly.

‘He came back from that telling me, “I’ve seen the future and it works—works in any size and colour you want.” He always told me business was booming. Once Labour was out he used to bang on about economic growth. We had a businessman’s government, he said. He’d hold forth on that on the golf course, in the Conservative Club and when he was slumming in the British Legion. It took over from, “What I did in the war.” I was pleased not to have to listen to his war any more, but I thought it was twaddle. And five years later we have three shops—I used to scream if he used the word “emporium”—a warehouse stuffed with all the tat he seems to think people want—and he’s a better authority on that than I am—a Rover and a Jag in the garage, and he could afford to abandon an MG in Portsmouth. Our current account is absurdly healthy and our deposit is stuffed. None of it adds up. He couldn’t have come by it legally.’

Troy thought it odd that debt or fraud should force him to disappear, when his bank accounts were lined. Equally he thought it odd that she should be telling him all this.

‘Supposing you’re right and he is alive. Supposing I find him. You would, in effect, have shopped him.’

‘He ditched me. I don’t care.’

‘And the business?’

‘I haven’t touched it. I’m a director. All I’ve done is sign cheques for the managers and leave them to it. If I’m right and Arnold’s alive and you find him, then I’ll sell the business over his head, pay off the people he’s swindled and to hell with him. If you’re right and he’s dead, then I’ll get probate. Either way I don’t care. I don’t need the money. My father left me a trust. God knows Arnold didn’t need to fiddle anything. We had quite enough as it was. But he had his honour. He held it as a principle that we shouldn’t spend my money. A man’s not a man who’s supported by his wife. That sort of thing. Men and their wretched honour. Just another of their lies. Something they thought up for their own convenience. I never had a lot of time for Arnold’s honour.’

Troy remembered a line Conrad put into the mouth of his old sailor Marlow: ‘He made so much of the dishonour, when it was the guilt alone that mattered.’ Of course, she was right. But Troy doubted the worth of mentioning a book quite so male as Lord Jim.

‘Tell me,’ he tacked. ‘Who came to you?’

‘I don’t quite follow you, Mr Troy.’

‘You reported your husband missing . . . in the conventional way.’

‘Yes. The local inspector came up. Harold Warriss. I suppose you could say he’s a friend of the family. I’ve—we’ve known him for years. He was blandly reassuring. Told me Arnold would turn up soon enough.’

‘And when he didn’t? When the papers became chock-a-block with spy stories?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. I didn’t associate those stories with my husband.’

‘And nor, it seems, did Warriss?’

‘Well, if he did, it didn’t prompt him to pay me a second visit.’

‘And when the PM named your husband?’

‘Oh, the Prime Minister has old-fashioned manners.’ Her voice rippled with the sarcasm. ‘When he finally decided to make a statement naming my husband, which he must have been planning for weeks, he sent a chap to see me.

‘I heard nothing at all until about a week before Arnold was named. It had, honestly, never crossed my mind that he might be the anonymous Portsmouth spy. Then one day, without warning, a chap from the Foreign Office turned up. Daniel Keeffe, about your age I suppose. Good-looking young chap. Very shy, very nervous, stammering an apology on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government. Arnold would be named in a Commons statement the next week, and it had all been a dreadful mistake.’

‘He actually said that?’

‘No. His exact words as I recall were, “It’s all been the most dreadful misunderstanding. I’m so dreadfully sorry. I’d no idea that he meant to do it.”’

‘“I” not “we”?’

‘Yes. He seemed to take it very personally. He was very upset. I’m sure I should have asked him more questions, but I didn’t. I didn’t believe Arnold had been the Portsmouth spy. I still don’t. As far as I was concerned he was still missing. It’s very convenient for the Government to say it’s Arnold. Ties up a loose end, doesn’t it? But it isn’t Arnold.’

‘And the press?’

‘Oh, they hung around at the gates for a few days. The old pals’ act finally worked for Arnold. Warriss put a man in uniform outside the house until they cleared off. Then nothing. Other fish to fry, I suppose. What’s a dead frogman compared to Nasser?’

‘You know,’ said Troy, after a while, ‘most men don’t disappear over money. It’s usually women.’

She laughed, a short, bitter snort.

‘Give over, Mr Troy. You saw my husband. Do you think he has the makings of anyone’s fancy man?’

It called for, and Troy deployed, a standard line from Teach Yourself Detection.

‘It takes all sorts,’ he said, squirming at the phrase.

‘Believe me, Mr Troy, my husband wasn’t interested in women, or sex. At least not in—’

She stopped herself. Passed over the moment by pouring another cup of coffee for him. But it was impossible to let the remark go.

‘At least,’ he said, ‘not in ordinary sex?’

There was a pause so long he thought she would not answer, but then she drew breath and picked up his gaze.

‘No. Not in ordinary sex. He was overfond of his frogman’s suit. He wanted us to do it while he wore the damn thing. I never would.’

‘And you don’t think he might have found someone who would?’

‘No. It’s the kind of thing he could get from whores in all the cities he visited from Manchester to Stockholm. God knows he spent enough time travelling to know half the whores in Europe. That would not surprise me. But the idea of another woman actually offering him such nonsense as part of a sexual relationship—no. I can’t find that believable. My husband could not sustain such a relationship. It wasn’t in him to do it. When I told him I wouldn’t let him into the bed in his rubber suit, he took to undressing in the bathroom. I haven’t seen him naked in ten years. I don’t think he could show his body to a woman. I saw more of the man on the slab in Portsmouth than I ever did of my husband . . .’

She paused for breath. Troy hoped she would pick up; he did not want to prompt her in any direction with any word of his own.

‘That, that Inspector Bonser. Do you know, he actually asked me if I could identify . . . I mean . . . he actually thought I could recognise my husband by his . . . thing.’

She paused again. He said nothing.

‘Of course, I couldn’t. But he would ask. It was what he was going on about when you walked in. He really would not believe that a woman could not know that.’

She slammed down the cup onto its saucer. Anger, worked up in an instant, to save her from her tears. She leant back, her face tilted to the sky while the moment passed and the prospect of tears with it. When she turned her eyes back to Troy, she was almost calm, and she was harder and sterner. Suddenly he existed for her. She was aware of her listener as well as her own narrative.

‘You know, I’m not at all sure I should be telling you all this.’

‘I’m a detective, Mrs Cockerell. I need clues.’

‘Yes—the detective detects. But what I detect is the inward sneer of the man. You are sneering at all of this, aren’t you, Mr Troy?’

Damn the woman. He had not thought she would be so acute. Sneering? Of course he was sneering.

‘Don’t reproach yourself too much, Mr Troy. There’s probably a lot to sneer at. I imagine a house called Jasmine Dene is enough to make your home counties sensibility heave. My husband wanted to merge our names and rename the house, but that yielded “Jarno” or “Arnoja”. I suggested “Dunswimmin” might be appropriate for an ex-frogman, at which point he gave up and we left it with the name it had when we bought it. Not a great sense of humour, my husband.’

Troy felt he had tacked into the wind. It had been short of explosive, but it had still been an outburst. He picked up the line and gently pulled her in.

‘Was he a frogman when you met him?’

‘Yes. I met him in the spring of 1940. The last weeks of the Phoney War. We married that summer. Everybody did, after all. Summer of the Battle of Britain and the quickie marriage. He spent most of the war teaching men fifteen years younger than himself how to be frogmen. That hurt. He came home irritable as hell. “Boys doing a man’s job,” as he put it. Then as the war hotted up he went into active service. I think Special Operations must have got short of qualified swimmers, possibly desperate to have taken Arnold off the back burner—perhaps all those boys he trained were dead by then?—and from the summer of 1943 he was tapping the side of his nose, using phrases like “hush-hush” and banging on about work of “national importance”, about which he couldn’t possibly tell me anything. He never realised I didn’t want to know. I think he would have loved it if I’d wormed a secret out of him.’

‘But afterwards—surely he told you then what he’d done?’

‘Yes. Of course. I suppose he was right. It was “hush-hush”. He was surveying French beaches looking for the D-Day site. He did some genuinely dangerous work, I’ll give him that. He once swam into Brest to set magnetic mines on German ships, that sort of thing. But he wasn’t anything special, he was just inordinately proud of it. I don’t know what the magic ingredient was, but those five years of hell and want seem to have imbued us all with a preposterous national pride.’

She paused. Looked at Troy quizzically. Weighing up his reaction.

‘I’m sorry, Mr Troy. I’m not unpatriotic. It’s . . . well . . . it’s just “men”, isn’t it? I suppose you’re of an age. You did your bit in the war, I wasn’t trying to offend—’

Troy cut her short.

‘I wasn’t in the services, Mrs Cockerell.’

She raised an eyebrow at this. There could be few men of Troy’s age without a war record of some sort. It was his generation’s war.

‘I was a WREN,’ she added bluntly.

He said nothing.

‘At Bletchley Park. Cryptography. That sort of thing.’

Troy was quietly amazed. Her casual ‘that sort of thing’ had been the best-kept secret of the war. Odd things had come to light in the years since, but it was still true to say that it was also one of the best-kept secrets of the peace.

‘My father died in ’43. Left us this house. Arnold got an early demob. We were installed here before the results of the ’45 election were out. He went onto the reserve list, but I think if they’d given him a choice he would have stayed. He wasn’t a conscript after all, he was a regular, even though his time would have been up in ’44 anyway if there hadn’t been a war. But he got his orders soon after VE Day. All they’d looked at was his age. He was forty-one. I suppose it was generous in its way. Discharge the married men first, the middle-aged, those with dependent families. Of course, we didn’t have children. We’d spent most of the war apart. And by then it was too late.

‘We stood in King Street at the end of July and cheered when Labour got in. Everybody did. The next morning I found Arnold cleaning his frogman’s kit. He put it in the garage, in a steel trunk. Once or twice a year, he’d take it out. Clean it. And put it back. The only swimming he did after that was on our holidays. We used to go to Woolacombe. My choice—the North Devon light is quite incredible, I’ve been painting it for years—but the sea was warm and blue if you wanted to swim. We went every year in the forties, but I never saw him do anything more than swim a few yards like any holiday maker, then he’d laze around on the beach, and then he’d prop up the bars, boring people with his war.

‘The last few years I’ve been on my own. Arnold’s been on his foreign jaunts—buying, selling, roister-doistering. God knows.’

In the midst of all this had been a telling statement. Troy wondered if he could make her pick it up again.

‘You say he kept his frogman’s kit in the garage?’

‘Yes—in a trunk. If I’d let him he’d probably have hung it on the wall like a trophy.’

‘Is it there now?’

He had clearly uttered the unexpected. She stared at him for a moment unblinkingly.

‘You know—I haven’t looked.’

She led the way back across the lawn, through the side gate to a double garage—about the most colossal status symbol a suburban house could display; to own one car was posh enough, two, or three as they appeared to have, was a rare display of the ostentation of wealth.

Mrs Cockerell prised open a warped wooden door to reveal a shiny black Rover 90—the poor man’s Rolls-Royce as it was so often called. At the far end of the garage was a thick steel chest. She lifted the lid. It was empty.

‘Doesn’t mean anything, you know.’

Troy said nothing.

‘If he’s planned it all as carefully as I think, then this is just one more red herring.’

‘Didn’t the police ask to look at it? Or the chap from the FO?’

‘I didn’t think to mention it.’

She strode quickly out of the dimness of the garage and back into sunlight. Troy found himself facing the upturned backside of the gardener, bent over the lawnmower once more.

She folded her arms, thumbs pressing deeply into her flesh, and composed her face against the anger she so clearly felt.

‘I know what you’re thinking. But believe me, Arnold was clever. He planned ahead. This is just another twist he thought up. And besides, it doesn’t square up. None of it does. Do you know what the papers said? They said he’d been testing experimental equipment for the Navy. In a pig’s eye, he had. And if he was, why would he need his own kit? And that line doesn’t match what young Keeffe told me. If it was all a “misunderstanding”, where did he get hold of this so-called experimental kit? In an Army and Navy surplus store? Mr Troy, you can surely see what a cock-up this is? They can’t even get their stories straight. Arnold just provided them with a convenient scapegoat. I shouldn’t think he gives a damn. Wherever he is, he’ll be flattered to think he was of use to the Navy one last time. Ironic, isn’t it?’

The man with the lawnmower moved off slowly across the lawn, creating the even stripes, the green herringbone, filling the air with the smell of freshly cut grass. It seemed to Troy that the pattern in the grass was the only one Mrs Cockerell was willing to see for herself.

‘For a second, Mrs Cockerell, indulge me and pretend that your husband might be dead. Then ask yourself why you so much want him to be alive in the teeth of the evidence.’

‘I may take it this question does not allow of matters of the heart or even the mereness of sentiment, Mr Troy?’

‘You may.’

‘Then I think that perhaps we understand one another after all. I want him alive, I want him alive, and I believe him to be alive, because if he’s dead, then he’s got away with everything.’

It was a showstopper. A number to ring down the curtain and bring the audience to its feet. He followed her back into the bungalow. She went to the back room, her room, flipped down the lid of a writing desk and picked up a set of keys.

‘Take these. The main shop is closed for the moment. The manager wanted his summer holiday. So I let him take it. Look at anything you like. I have no secrets; they’re all Arnold’s. Somewhere in there is the key to how he did it. A colossal fiddle, I’m sure. Who knows, if you find out how he did it we may discover a trail of money, a paperchase. And at the end of it, there he will be.’

‘I’m not wonderfully experienced at fraud cases, Mrs Cockerell.’

‘But you’ll do your best.’

It grew slowly, a heaving, dragging curse, uttered from deep in the bowels of the planet, spreading its damnation until at the pitch of madness a sound like a tortured banshee wailed in through the open french windows and chilled him to the marrow. He moved to the edge, looked out across the garden, soaked in its incongruous southern sun, and heard the unmistakable, but almost forgotten tones of an air-raid siren.

She had followed him, peering around him, shoulder to shoulder in the door frame.

‘What’s the matter?’

He was speechless.

‘Oh, the siren! I wouldn’t let that bother you. They use it at the mill to announce the change of shift.’

She turned her wrist and looked at her watch, showing him the face.

‘See, it’s noon. On the dot. You’ll hear it again at four. It’s mounted on top of Woolworth’s. I suppose it ensures that everybody knows when the Moloch wants them.’

The arrogance of it. He could scarcely believe it. The modern equivalent of the knocker-up, and to achieve it they perpetuated the most frightening, the most evocative sound in England. Dragged the past into the present, and momentarily dragged him back to 1944. To dark cold nights, the frozen wastes of East London. Darkness, death, the wail of the siren. Darkness, death, the ripe smell of cordite. He could almost taste it.

‘Mr Troy. Are you all right? You’ve turned very pale.’

He was not all right. He felt breathless and sick to the pit of his stomach.

‘I haven’t heard that sound . . . in a long time.’

‘We’re used to it.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’m sure.’

She held out the keys. He took them.

‘You’ll be in touch?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said.

§43

Commander Cockerell’s main emporium, his ‘HQ’, stood at the top of the market place. A large blue-and-white sign said simply COCKERELL in letters eighteen inches high, spanning the shop front, and that of the one next door. It said nothing else—from a distance he could be the butcher, the baker or the man who sold pea-green boats. At some point in the recent past the two shops had been knocked into one to create a barn-like room in which the angular Scandinavian sofas could be displayed in clusters of three, like broken squares, with a coffee table at each centre and sci-fi-looking, technology-defying lamps, no more than thin strips of steel or coiled springs bearing light bulbs, perched at the corners. It was termed, he had read somewhere, a ‘conversation pit’, a social device designed to bring one’s kneecaps into close contact with other, perhaps lonelier, kneecaps; a dexterity-stimulating device, designed to teach you the rapid juggling of cups of instant, powdery coffee, glasses of warm white wine and little trays full of nuts and things; a sense-numbing device, as you watched warm blobs of oil rise and fall in the tapered cylinders of illuminated liquid table lamps. All in all, it brought out the snob in Troy.

Troy looked around for anything resembling an office. There was none on the ground floor. A steep, curving staircase led up to the first floor, and curved around again to climb to the second. In the space between the two was a wood and glass cubby hole, its walls formed by a simple partition from the main room, its ceiling by the angle of the ascending staircase. A single bulb, in a frosted glass shade, hung precariously from the ceiling on a twisted, cloth-covered cable, through which flecks of black and red baked rubber showed. Troy flicked the brass nipple on the wall switch, half expecting sparks and flames to spurt from the wires. Forty watts dimly illuminated the room. A cramped, poky little hole, whose height fell away to nothing as the stairs met the floor, but into it Cockerell had stacked everything he needed. The only remotely new item was a telephone. The filing cabinets, the desk, the rows of dusty pigeon holes, looked as though they had frozen in grime and time some fifty odd years ago. A small sliding panel, no more than six inches across, was set in the wooden wall at waist height, as though at some date long since receipts and tallies had been passed through by an army of shop assistants to the lonely clerk in his corner booth. The swivel chair burst with horsehair and the roller on the roll-top desk was jammed at three-quarters open and no force on earth would budge it. There was still a discernible pattern to the faded wallpaper that lined the sloping ceiling and one of the walls. Troy knew from childhood forays into the upper floors of Mimram that it was Victorian, the greens and the yellows were unmistakable, and it had probably adorned the walls of Cockerell’s office for more than seventy years. He found it hard to believe that Cockerell did any real work here. Found it hard to believe that the John the Baptist of the New Look could live or work contentedly among such obvious relics of the hated past.

A pipe rack had been crudely nailed to the wall above the desk. Three pipes, blackened and stained but long unused, hung at odd angles. Just inside the door an umbrella stand held a collection of walking sticks, a dozen or more—one with a brass duck’s head, one with knobs on, looking vaguely Celtic, and a shooting stick with a perished leather and canvas seat. He flipped through a couple of the pigeon holes—a catalogue of spare parts for paraffin stoves, dated September 1922, a dozen back issues of Health and Efficiency all dating from the 1940s, an old AA handbook (where to stay in the remotest shires and a few spidery road maps of Britain)—a couple of copies of Fur and Feather Monthly and he would have enough for a dentist’s waiting room—and the first sign of recent occupation, Parade, February 1956—a risqué magazine, with none of the wholesome illusion of H&E, full of tits and backsides. All of which told him nothing. He turned his attention to the row of dusty books on top of the desk. Whitaker’s Almanack 1951, the Lith–Zyx volume of Webster’s Universal English Dictionary and dozens of well-read, broken-spined, paperback books. Mostly the work of the late Peter Cheyney, a master of racial and social snobbery, creator of superior, ruthless, womanising Englishmen and wise-talking, slang-obsessed, rod-packing, punchy Americans. The villains were, inevitably, spawned by the lesser races—Jews, Negroes, anyone from Eastern Europe. Troy had read one or two Cheyneys in his early teens, and found them distasteful. Cockerell’s recent reading was more interesting. The new bloke, already beginning to cause a bit of a fuss—Ian Fleming. Cockerell had Casino Royale, Moonraker and Live and Let Die, all featuring Fleming’s hero James Bond, Commander James Bond, RN. Troy caught the connection. Any fantasist might read, and some would enjoy, the pre-war world of Peter Cheyney in which the Englishman was still God, pushing through crowds of gibbering foreigners, waving Her Britannic Majesty’s passport and shouting ‘Imshe’ but, perhaps, the man had a closer identification with Bond. The naval commander, the secret agent, socially superb, sexually confident, emotionally damaged—­vulnerable enough to permit even a weasel like Cockerell the passing glimmer of identity. Besides, Fleming himself was supposed to be the real thing, an old Etonian, a close friend of the Prime Minister, part of our shady secret services during the war and quite possibly after, a silken charmer with women, nattily attached to one end of a long cigarette holder, but if Rod’s parliamentary gossip was to be believed, a loser too since, as Rod would have it, while Fleming smoothed and smarmed his way around the heights of society, Hugh Gaitskell coolly, and in utter secrecy, was having an affair with his wife.

The left-hand pillar of the desk appeared to be one large cupboard. It was locked with two locks, one far newer and stouter than the other. Troy quickly went through the bundle of keys Mrs Cockerell had given him, and after a couple of tries found the pair that opened the cupboard. It was a model of neatness compared to the room which housed it. Neat stacks of thin cardboard folders: bank statements held together by bulldog clips, with each quarter dated; the stubs of his chequebooks; a paying-in book for the Hereford and Worcester Joint Commercial Bank, Great Malvern branch; a sheaf of annual statements from the Ancient Order of Derbyshire Foresters Savings Society, with whom Cockerell had a small mortgage, and a sheaf of quarterly statements from a bank in Stockholm, presumably where Cockerell acquired most of the ‘Contemporary’ furniture that filled up the floor below. Troy was, he knew, next to useless with this sort of thing. It was one of the reasons he had leapt at the chance to transfer Clark; neither he nor Jack had a scrap of patience where figures were concerned.

Seeking anything to put off the moment when he would have to examine the books of the business, Troy rummaged among the pigeon holes, not knowing what he was looking for or could expect to find. A covering letter from a travel agent, a pocket diary full of dates and assignations, a small black book marked ‘Read This for Clues’? The best he found was a torn postcard. An English seaside resort, one of those long, pleasureless piers stretching out into the cold offshore waters of the Channel or the North Sea, Southend or Skegness or some such. The address side was intact—Mr A. Cockerell, and the shop address—but little remained of the greeting and the postmark was smudged. He puzzled a while over the remnants of the message—a woman’s hand he was sure—but could do little with ‘ing’, ‘ou’ or ‘eine’. ‘Eine’ at least was interesting. Few English words ended that way.

At last he could put it off no longer. He drew up the splitting horse- hair chair, blew five months’ dust off the desk and turned to the less than riveting papers accounting for the proper running of a small business. Why, he wondered, long enough to gaze down the length of the main street and up at the looming Pennines, why had Napoleon dubbed the English ‘a nation of shopkeepers’? He took a last look at his watch. He had wasted time, it was gone two. He must keep track of the time. If that damn siren was due to wail again at four he wanted to be ready for it. The last thing he wanted was for it to catch him unawares.

Cockerell was right to boast. His business was doing very nicely, far more nicely than one might suppose given that he was in unfashionable Middle England, far from the fashionable Heart of England. His wife was right to be suspicious. He was turning over a very tidy sum indeed. But beyond that Troy could not tell; the requisite skills were not his. He began to wish that Cockerell might be dead, that someone had killed him; it would at least bring him back within his own domain. You know where you are with a murder. It had taken him an hour or more to reach even this basic conclusion. He glanced at his watch. It was 3.58. Any minute now. He looked down the street once more. A steady bustle of afternoon shoppers, housewives with bulging shopping bags, the to and fro of delivery vans. He began to see why Cockerell had sited his office where he had. It was great spot for an idle mind to be idle in. Hours could be whiled away. The siren took up its wail. Troy sat it out. Stared at the hills above the town and waited.

It was a while before he perceived the sound beneath the siren. Loud and tedious now, rather than disturbing, but it masked almost completely the vigorous pounding at the shop door. By the time he had worked out that that was what it was, the man at the door had had time to pass through exasperation to anger.

‘And who the ’eck might you be?’ he said as Troy opened the shop door to him.

It was another of the weaselly men. He stood below the step, in a tatty tweed jacket and grey cavalry twill trousers bearing a multitude of unseemly stains, a cigarette stub burning between the longest fmgers of his right hand. This specimen was more robust than Cockerell, taller and fleshier, but with the same scrawny look to him, the same fondness for the pencil-line moustache. But seediness had taken a different toll on this one; he was not simply scrawny, he was scrawny with a potbelly, scrawny with deeply nicotined teeth, scrawny with badly chewed fingernails. He was about five feet nine or ten. Troy estimated his age as fifty-five or so, and not wearing it well.

There was a visible frisson as Troy showed him his warrant card and returned the greeting word for word.

‘I saw the light on,’ he said. ‘I thought it was Janet—Mrs Cockerell.’

‘I’m sure you did, but you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Oh, I’m George Jessel. I’ve come about the books.’

‘You’re Cockerell’s book-keeper?’

‘Oh no. Arnold kept his own books.’

‘His accountant?’

‘No—he did that too. I’m the auditor.’

He fumbled inside his jacket and produced a dog-eared business card: ‘George G. Jessel—Chartered Accountant, 23 Railway Cuttings, Belper.’

‘I do the audit twice a year. It’s overdue.’

The cigarette, burning down to his stained, coffee-coloured fingertips, was suddenly applied to the tip of a fresh one and discarded. A rapid bout of deep inhalation was followed by a rapid fit of coughing. He heaved and hoiked, and spat globules of phlegm onto the pavement, bent double with the effort of putting the torch to his own lungs.

He almost smiled as he straightened up.

‘Long overdue as a matter of fact. Would it be all right if I picked up the last six months’ figures now?’

Time for silence. Spin it out, thought Troy. Let him fill the vacuum. So he stared and said nothing.

‘I did ask Janet—I mean Mrs Cockerell—but she said she couldn’t be bothered. But it’s got to be done, hasn’t it?’

Troy said nothing. Jessel drew deeply on his cigarette.

‘It’s women,’ he prattled. ‘You know what they’re like.’

‘No, I don’t. And the answer’s no. You can’t take anything now. If I decide you can have the books, I’ll let you know. In the meantime they’re part of my investigation. Now, can you be reached at this address?’

He held up the dog-eared card.

‘Oh aye, nine till five-thirty, weekdays.’

‘Then I’ll be in touch.’

He stood some moments on the doorstep after Troy had closed the door on him. As he walked off down the street, he looked back several times and before he had gone fifty yards lit another cigarette from the stub of the old and coughed his lungs up again.

Troy watched him from the upstairs window. It was not long past four. If he zipped through the rest of the papers, Troy thought, he might just catch Mr Jessel in his office at closing time. He was not at all sure Mr Jessel would enjoy the meeting. The prospect of a live human subject to investigate rather than a set of figures galvanised Troy. Nothing quite so focuses the mind as knowing you might be able to hang some other bugger in the morning.

In an hour or so he had read all he wanted to. The rat, if such creature it be, that Janet Cockerell could smell, was smelt by him. It didn’t add up—except, of course, that the metaphor was ill chosen, for add up was precisely what it did. The smell was beyond, beneath and all around the unlikely fact of such addition and precision.

Without doubt he was going to have to spend another night in this one-horse town, sampling the delights of the Kedleston. He looked at the row of books again, and, preferring what he knew to what he didn’t, stuffed Casino Royale, the one Fleming he had read, into his coat pocket. It would pass a dull night in a small town.

Railway Cuttings was almost opposite the railway station, an alley of soot-blackened Victorian cottages running along the edge of the deep cutting that carried the tracks through the middle of the town. At best it was eight feet wide, and one side of it was made up of the thick granite restraining wall that topped off the cutting. The tracks were visible over the low wall, gleaming off to meet at infinity, polished like stainless steel with constant use.

Number 23 was some sort of lapsed warehouse. He could just make out the faded, cusped lettering of an old sign for a Seed Merchant and Nursery, high on the wall facing the tracks, but down at eye level were two small rectangular plates—new and painted, ‘Belper Urban District Council Refuse Disposal’; old and brass, ‘George G. Jessel, Chartered Accountant. 2nd Flr’.

The staircase had no carpet. Bits of old linoleum tacked onto the worn treads. Flakes of ancient off-white distemper floating down from the ceiling. The hand rail worn into deep curves by the passing of many hands. At the top were two doors. One half-open, marked ‘G. Jessel’. The other, closed, marked ‘Private’. Behind the first was a small, square office, packed with filing cabinets, with a small desk at the centre, overburdened with a huge manual typewriter sitting under its nightly plastic dust cover, its shift arm sticking out like a splint. He turned to the other door, heard the sound of papers rustling, and tapped gently. The door opened. Jessel’s head appeared in the space. Dark brown cow eyes peering out at him.

‘You found it, then?’

‘Yes. I found it.’

Jessel backed away, ushered him into a room scarcely bigger than Cockerell’s office. Tiny, triangular, but a complete contrast. It was a model of neatness. Everything shipshape and orderly. Not a speck of dust to be seen or a paperclip out of place. Although Jessel had a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, and had developed the knack of talking without dislodging it, the ashtray was wiped clean, as though he tipped it out and dusted it after every couple of fags. It startled Troy, but he could see the logic behind it. He had expected a reflection of the physical man, a man who, it seemed, kept a record of most recent meals on his shirtfront and lapels, stained from collar-stud to fly-buttons. Of course, the room reflected the mind of the man, the ordered categories of the accountant mind.

Jessel pulled an upright chair away from its place against the wall and set it in front of the desk for Troy. He sat on the other side, across the narrow strip of shiny oak and worn red leather—a small silver fob watch, a row of freshly sharpened pencils, a cut glass inkwell, and two marble-finish Waterman fountain pens laid out like toy soldiers in battle formation.

Jessel opened his mouth to speak and the roar of a train in the cutting made him think better of it. The room shook, the pens and pencils danced a jig across the desktop, a whiff of steam-laden smoke rolled in through the open window and Jessel picked up the fob watch and tapped the face.

‘The five-fifteen out of Derby. St Pancras to Sheffield. Same time every day. Three minutes later on Saturdays, and never on a Sunday.’

‘You’ve seen Mrs Cockerell, you say, and she—’

‘No,’ Jessel cut in. ‘Not seen. On the phone. I’ve talked her on the phone.’

‘And she won’t let you see the books?’

Jessel detached the cigarette from his lower lip, the lip puckered and gave up its spittle adhesion reluctantly. How often, Troy thought, did the man skin himself doing that? Jessel picked a fleck of tobacco from his mouth—the hard stuff, no filter tips—drew on the fag, managed not to cough and flicked the ash into the otherwise pristine ashtray.

‘Right. I don’t blame her. She says Arnold will tackle it when he gets back and it should all just wait. I suppose it’s important to her to believe he will come back. But the figures are piling up, even without all the foreign trade, and besides, it’s not legal, is it?’

‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘It’s a matter of the law that brings me here.’

From the look in his eyes Troy knew that Jessel was instantly regretting having introduced the notion of law.

‘Arnold’s death.’

‘Arnold’s disappearance.’

‘He’s not dead then?’

‘Mrs Cockerell is unwilling to confirm that the body is his.’

Another deep drag on the weed, a cloudy breathing out of noxious, high-strength tobacco smoke.

‘If he’s not dead, what’s the problem?’

‘Money,’ said Troy simply.

‘Money?’

‘Lots of money.’

Jessel sucked his cigarette down to the knuckle, lit up another from the stub and bought himself as much time as he could.

‘Nothing illegal about money,’ he fluffed, and Troy knew he was on the defensive, knew down to his copper’s toes that Janet Cockerell was right. And if she was, he would leave this man no stone under which to hide.

‘How long have you been covering up for him?’

Jessel coughed, retched and looked to die. Troy sat impassively, watching the sweat beads form high up at the hairline and head slowly south across the reddening face to be mopped up by the frayed shirt collar. It was theatrical. Dragged out as long as he could muster phlegm, heaving till his ribs ached—and it wasn’t going to work.

When he raised his head above the desktop, Troy was staring at him.

‘Is . . . is . . . herrummmphhickerrwyerch . . . is that what she told you?’

‘Is that what you’re doing?’

‘You don’t want to believe everything Janet Cockerell tells you. They didn’t exactly get on like a house on fire, you know. She’s had it in for Arnold for years.’

‘There’s an awful lot of money passing through Cockerell Ltd. A small fortune for three small shops in the Pennines.’

‘It’s all legitimate. You’re forgetting the foreign trade.’

‘Goods that never enter England, but show up via his bank account in Stockholm?’

‘Exactly. But you make it sound sinister. It’s not. It’s all above board. Declared and taxed. Perfectly legal. Men like Arnold Cockerell—the backbone of Britain. Expanding into Europe. Pioneers.’

He was beginning to sound like one of those dreadful Party Political Broadcasts that television had made into a form of boredom unique to the medium. It was a hangover from the war, when Churchill and Roosevelt felt obliged to chat to their people over the airwaves. In peacetime it was an anachronistic bore. A prominent politician would address the nation, pompous and pretentious, and reading the stuff very badly from cards. Worse still the next night, the other side would talk you silly with their right of reply. Export—that was one of their favourite ways to bore for Britain.

Troy had too little to go on. Jessel could refute him step by step. But, where was the man’s sense of outrage? Troy had called him a crook to his face, and now he sat there reasonably defending himself and Cockerell, when, Troy felt, an honest man would have shown him the door and told him to come back with a warrant.

‘There don’t appear to be copies of Cockerell’s tax returns among the papers at the shop,’ he said.

Jessel’s cigarette had gone out. In the effort to be reasonable in the face of Troy’s accusations he had forgotten to smoke. He rummaged in his pocket for matches.

Troy gambled.

‘You have them, don’t you?’

Jessel had just got a light to the nud end. His hand shook furiously. Cigarette and flame refused utterly to meet. The match burnt down to his fingers. He winced and struck another.

‘I’d like to see them.’

This, above all, was the point at which outraged citizenry told him to come back when he’d got a warrant. Even if they did not know what it meant—and a chartered accountant surely did?—they’d all seen it at the pictures. Coppers sent packing by the right phrases in the right tones, as though they were unsolicited carpet sellers. Just short of a second singeing, Jessel managed to light up. Neither the gesture nor the tobacco brought him any relief. He was trembling and sweating worse than ever.

‘I . . . er . . . can’t put my hands on them right now. My . . . er, my secretary . . . goes home at five.’

This was fine by Troy. He was happy to sweat Jessel overnight. He could hardly be so stupid as to destroy papers that were already a matter of record. And if he was, it was tantamount to a confession.

‘Very well,’ he smiled at Jessel. ‘I’ll see you first thing in the morning.’

From the look on Jessel’s face Troy might just as well have suggested an appointment in Samara. But, he roused himself. Enough energy for the semblance of normality. He bustled past Troy, opened the door for him, put the chair back against the wall, where it came from, and, in a gesture Troy found curiously fastidious, whipped out his handkerchief and quickly dusted the seat, waving at it with an airy motion, the linen barely glancing off the oilcloth.

‘Fine,’ he said, the cigarette flapping from his lower lip once more. ‘Tomorrow it is.’

§44

He made his way back up the hill in the cool of the evening, his briefcase bulging with the collected papers of Cockerell Ltd. Janet Cockerell was still in the garden, the painting pretty well finished, a few more dabs and shades added to the motley of her boiler suit. But the working day was done. She was sipping white wine and staring off into the redness of the evening sky. She fetched a second glass and the bottle. A well-chilled hock, flowery and not too sweet.

‘Why didn’t you mention George Jessel to me?’

‘I can’t think of everything.’

‘No more than I can believe everything.’

She was far too smart not to know when she’d been called a liar.

‘I suppose the real reason is that I don’t want to have to think about him at all. I’d rather not give a man like Jessel head room. He’s a toad. I don’t like him and I don’t much like Arnold when the two of them are together. He’s the most unsavoury of Arnold’s cronies.’

‘Cronies? Why cronies? Why not just say friends?’

‘I haven’t looked it up in the dictionary, but I would hardly be surprised to find that the definition of “crony” was “disreputable friend”.’

The next time Rod referred to Driberg or Fermanagh as being ‘one of your cronies’, he would have to remember to feel insulted.

‘Or,’ she went on, ‘were you thinking of a more conspiratorial meaning?’

‘I think perhaps I was.’

‘Then I’m sorry to have kept him from you. But now you’ve met him I think you’ll see my point. If Arnold was up to something, George Jessel is the sort of chap would lie through his teeth for him, and think it nothing more than matey loyalty, wouldn’t he?’

‘Yes, I rather think he would.’

‘Are you planning to see him again?’

‘Oh, yes. He can marinade overnight and I’ll roast him tomorrow.’

Back in the joyless Kedleston, he spread Cockerell’s records out across the bed and found he had no heart for such joyless reading. He skimmed the headlines in the Manchester Guardian. Read another lengthy piece on the burgeoning crisis in Suez, and fell asleep without even opening the Ian Fleming.

§45

He breakfasted among the brown suits. Something hot, something tasteless, washed down with something lukewarm. He gave Jessel the best part of half an hour to gather himself, a safe margin to let the anxiety build in him, stuffed all Cockerell’s papers back into his briefcase, and on the dot of ten climbed the staircase to his office. In the first room, the typewriter stood unused under its plastic cover. He had expected to find some young woman filing papers or her nails.

The door to Jessel’s office was ajar. He pushed gently at it without knocking. Jessel was sprawled in his chair, head back, eyes open, dead.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ Troy said.

He put his fingertips to the side of Jessel’s neck. Warm, but definitely dead. He stood by the corpse, slowly turning his head to take in as much as he could. He had just as much time as it took till the next person, whoever that might be, arrived.

He heard a rustle from the outer office, across the landing.

Shit, shit, shit.

A young woman was lifting the cover from the typewriter. As she raised her face to him, he could see the side of her cheek was badly swollen.

‘Are you Mr Jessel’s secretary?’

She mmmed at him and nodded vigorously.

‘Call the police,’ he said. ‘The local station, not 999.’

She froze. Stared anxiously at him.

‘You have the number?’

She nodded again, fumbled at the telephone pad and dialled. He could hear the ringing tone. She pointed to her cheek. The police station answered.

‘Awo,’ she said. ‘Poweese?’

There was a pause. Troy could hear the plod on the other end saying, ‘What?’

‘Poweese. Ish Bwenda Bwock. Geosh Jeshll’s Shecetwy.’

She held the phone out to Troy.

‘They can’t unnershtann me. Bin to dennish.’

He took it from her.

‘This is Chief Inspector Troy of Scotland Yard. Get over to 23 Railway Cuttings at once. I’ve just found George Jessel dead.’

There was a whumphf as Brenda Brock fell into her chair. Troy slammed the phone down, took her head and pressed it down between her knees. At least, thank God, she wasn’t screaming. In less than a minute she raised her head, pale and tearful, looked him in the eyes and said, ‘No kiddin’?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘No kidding.’

He left her. Went back into Jessel’s office. The top drawer on Jessel’s side of the desk was open a couple of inches. A sheaf of papers peeped out invitingly at him. He pulled them out. A couple of dozen pages stapled together in two lots—Cockerell’s tax returns for the last five years. So, he meant to show them to him after all. He stuffed them into his inside pocket, and looked around. There was no sign of violence. Jessel was slumped, as though he had suddenly snapped at the shoulders and the knees like a puppet whose strings had been cut. There were five nud ends in the ashtray. Having seen the way the man chainsmoked, that was probably representative of the first half-hour of the working day. He was kicking himself hard. The arrogance of ‘letting him marinade overnight’ came home to him. He’d had his chance and he’d lost it. The cheap detective’s ploy of waiting half an hour before showing up, just to string him out. He’d had a second chance and he’d lost it. All in all he’d made an utter balls-up of the business, and any minute now he’d have to face the local plod and pretend he was playing by the book. It would not be pleasant.

He heard footsteps on the stairs, took a last look around the room and darted back into the outer office.

Brenda Brock was staring down into the cutting, crying silently, her mascara dribbling across her swollen, hamster cheeks.

A burly man, overdressed for the weather in a mackintosh and trilby, appeared in the doorway.

‘Warriss, Station Inspector,’ he said bluntly, staring hard at Troy. ‘Now—who the bloody hell are you?’

Troy recited name and rank and produced his warrant card.

‘Don’t be going anywhere,’ Warriss said. ‘I’ll be wanting to talk to you, sir.’

The inflection on the ‘sir’ safely expressed a mixture of anger and contempt. A younger man, in his late twenties, appeared on the landing.

‘Detective Sergeant Godbehere,’ said Warriss. ‘My scene-of-crime man. We’ve the big boys with us today, Raymond. Chief Inspector Troy of the Yard, would you believe?’

He turned to Troy, utterly unintimidated by rank.

‘In there, is he?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

Warriss and Godbehere left him with Brenda. Five minutes later, Warriss came back alone.

‘You’ve touched nothing?’ he asked.

‘Of course not,’ Troy lied.

‘And the lass?’

‘She hasn’t been in there.’

Another clumping on the stairs produced another large man in mackintosh and trilby. This one clutched a doctor’s bag. Obviously the County Police Surgeon.

He nodded in Troy’s direction, and greeted Warriss with a simple ‘Harold.’

‘In there, is he? Grim reaper finally got ’im? Silly bugger.’

He lumbered off across the landing.

Troy heard him say, ‘Well now, Ray me lad, what have we got here? Oh dearie, dearie me.’

Troy’s eyes were on the door, following the doctor, in his mind’s eye following the routine he would now go through. Warriss’s voice cut through, pulled him sharply back.

‘A word with you, Mr Troy. Outside, if you wouldn’t mind.’

He led off down the stairs. Troy looked at Brenda Brock. Beautiful green eyes looked pleadingly back at him, but whatever the plea, he could not meet it. He followed Warriss. At the turn in the stairs he passed an elderly woman in a flowered bri-nylon overall, dusting the landing windowsill.

Outside Warriss waited, an elbow propped on the embankment wall—a presumptive posture of might and right. Troy was about to be bollocked by a man ten years his elder, a rank his junior, and he hadn’t a leg to stand on.

‘Tell me,’ Warriss began, ‘does the word protocol mean anything to you, or are all you young buggers down in London ignorant clever dicks?’

‘I’m sorry—’

‘You’d bloody well better be. How long have you been on my patch?’

‘Only since yesterday morning.’

‘And what interest does the Yard have in George Jessel that it did not see fit to share with the local force?’

‘Nothing. Jessel was not the object of my investigation.’

A light of sheer pleasure came into Warriss’s bloodshot eyes. The glint of revelation.

‘My God. My God! You’re here for Arnold Cockerell, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re with the Branch?’

‘No. As a matter of fact I run the Murder Squad.’

Warriss was not impressed.

‘Is that so? Who’s been murdered, then?’

‘Cockerell.’

‘News to me. Last I heard the Russkis had got him. We do get the news up here, y’know. We’re not all brown ale and whippets.’

‘I was asked to look into the disappearance and possible death of Commander Cockerell.’

‘I see,’ Warriss mused. ‘And you don’t think your first port of call might have been the local nick?’

‘I’ve said I’m sorry.’

The same glint appeared in Warriss’s eyes—the same smug satisfaction in his own powers of deduction.

‘It was her, wasn’t it? The wife. She dragged you up here, didn’t she. The bitch, she never trusted me. I’m handling Arnold Cockerell’s disappearance, not the bloody Yard!’

He tapped his own chest with a stubby index finger. His voice rose. He was shouting, now. Not the faintest shred of pretence of respect for rank.

‘It’s my case, Mr Troy! The matter was reported to my nick, to me personally. I’m in charge of the investigation. Dammit, I’ve known Cockerell ten years or more. He was a friend! You want to carry on an investigation on my patch, you go through me!’

A convenient express roared through the cutting, southbound, and shrouded them in smoke and steam. As the air cleared Troy tried the only ploy left to him. He looked Warriss clearly in the eyes and put on his best no-nonsense voice.

‘However. There is now a second case. Murder is my business. George Jessel’s murder will be my business.’

Warriss laughed. Troy was expecting another tirade, and the man laughed.

‘Murder? George Jessel? We’ll see about that.’

He pointed off towards the door of the building behind Troy. The Police Surgeon was emerging, his bag half-open, the rubber tail of a stethoscope dangling from it. He held out his hand to Troy. Troy shook it. It was the first semblance of good manners he’d seen so far.

‘Jewel,’ the man said. ‘Joe Jewel. County Police Surgeon.’

Before Troy could say a word Warriss cut in sharply.

‘Whatever you’re thinking, don’t say it. There’s not a joke about Jewel and Warriss we haven’t heard. So just save your breath.’

One would think, thought Troy, that to have the same name as the most famous pair of music hall comedians in the land might be some incentive to behave less like a clown. However, he knew the thought would be wasted if uttered.

‘Well,’ Warriss said to Jewel. ‘Am I right?’

‘Oh aye. His heart. Finally gave out.’

‘You’ll sign then?’

‘Oh aye. Open and shut.’

Warriss seemed almost to grin at Troy. A silent, smirky ‘I told you so.’

‘I don’t want to interrupt the smooth working of an efficient team,’ Troy said, ‘but when a man is found dead in suspicious circumstances, it isn’t open and shut.’

Warriss seemed not to have switched on his patent sarcasm detector and let his other half answer.

‘Oh, believe me, Mr Troy. It is. Y’see. Being a Police Surgeon in this neck o’ the woods isn’t full time. There isn’t the call. We don’t get the bodies. I’m a GP most of the time. So happens George was a patient of mine. He’d chainsmoked for forty-five years, he swigged scotch like it was Tizer, he’d got a heart about as strong as a bathroom sponge and arteries as hard as treacle toffee. Believe me, Mr Troy, this is natural causes. He died of a massive, and entirely expected, heart attack. And I’ve no qualms about signing his death certificate.’

Warriss found his twopenn’orth.

‘The only thing suspicious is the fact that you’re here. And you’ve already said you weren’t investigating Jessel, so that’s that.’

‘I want a post mortem and I want the matter reported to the coroner,’ said Troy, softly and emphatically. ‘If you do not go through the motions now and of your own volition, I will call the Met Commissioner and your Chief Constable and I will report the pair of you for obstructing an investigation.’

Jewel looked at Warriss. Warriss looked at Jewel. A practised double-take.

‘You London shites are all the same,’ Warriss snarled. ‘You think you can come up here and—’

‘Just do it!’

Warriss eased his elbow off the wall. For a second Troy thought he was going to hit him. Then a uniformed constable came dashing down the alley.

‘Langley Mill on the phone, boss. Urgent.’

Warriss worked his arm vigorously. He was not going to hit his superior officer. He had lounged so long in his posture of arrogance that the nerve in his elbow had gone to sleep. But his face was red and his voice was hoarse. If only the wit could be found he would surely have flung a bon mot or a clever insult at Troy.

‘Cunt,’ he said, trying his best. ‘You’ll get your PM, but if you’re still on my patch tomorrow you report into the nick, and that goes for every day you stay. Sir!’

He stomped off down the alley. Jewel shrugged a little. Closed the clasp on his bag.

‘It’ll be in the post, laddie. But you’re wrong. You’ll see.’

He followed Warriss. The cleaning woman in the flowered overall appeared at the threshold of number 23, shaking her yellow duster. Troy approached her.

‘Excuse me?’

‘Why, what yer done?’

‘I’d just like to ask you a few questions.’

‘Ask away, me duck.’

It seemed to Troy that the gap between the local argot and received pronunciation was considerable, but he would endeavour.

‘Do you clean the whole building—all the offices?’

‘Ah do.’

‘Mr Jessel’s office?’

‘Oh aye. Very partickler is Mr Jessel. Every morning, quart to nine.’

‘I see,’ said Troy. ‘And you didn’t see anyone come in between then and ten o’clock?’

‘No. Only Mr Jessel. He came in about quarter past. Then ah took me tea-break, like. ’Ad a bit o’ snap. Ah were back in afe an ’our. Ah saw thee come in. Then young Brenda not five minutes later.’

‘And you cleaned Mr Jessel’s office.’

‘Ah just said ah did. Cleaned and polished every mornin’, same time.’

Troy shot up the stairs, praying silently that Detective Sergeant Godbehere had more brains than his boss.

He found him, sitting on the chair he had sat on himself the day before, reading the Daily Mirror. He was tall, slim, and when he looked up at Troy’s entrance seemed to have a mercifully intelligent look about him. He had had the decency to drape a sheet across the late George Jessel.

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to help me,’ said Troy.

Godbehere folded his newspaper.

‘Why is it, sir, that at the sound of those words the hairs on the back of my neck stand up?’

‘Copper’s instinct.’

‘I’m supposed to wait till the meat wagon gets here. And when Brenda’s recovered I take her statement, and when you’ve got your bollocking from the boss, I take yours. And that’s all I’m supposed to do. You do know that, don’t you, sir?’

‘Indeed. I’ve already been bollocked, and I think common courtesy will allow Brenda another half-hour in which to grieve. In the meantime I want you to dust the place for prints.’

Godbehere stood up and reached for his bag of tricks.

‘You’ll get me shot.’

‘I’ll carry the can.’

‘You’d better,’ Godbehere said without inflection. ‘Now, where do you want me to start?’

‘Desktop. It was wiped clean at about nine this morning.’

‘Handy,’ said Godbehere, and he pushed the chair away to make room in the tiny space available to him.

‘Just a minute,’ Troy stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Did you pull up the chair to sit down?’

‘No. It was here, by the desk. I just parked me backside.’

Troy saw in the mind’s eye that fastidious gesture. The precise aligning of the chair with the wall. The flapping handkerchief. It was a gesture born entirely of habit. Surely Jessel, a fussy man, Troy concluded, did this with every visitor? Set the chair out and put the chair back. He looked at the patch of claret-coloured carpet by the wall. Four deep ruts had been impressed in the fabric by the habitual presence of the chair legs.

‘I’ll tell you now,’ said Troy. ‘Whatever Jessel died of, he did not die alone. Someone was here. Someone sat exactly where you were sitting when I walked in just now. Dust the lot, doorknob, chairback everything.’

‘You’ll get me shot,’ Godbehere said again, unpacking his case, and seeming indifferent to the prospect even as he stated it.

Troy knelt down and looked across the leather top of the desk at eye level. Something obtruded, a speck or a blob, just off-centre to the right. He took out his pocket handkerchief. Put a corner of the Irish linen to the blob and watched as a tiny brown stain spread a thirty-second of an inch up the material. He stood and put the cloth to his nose. Oil. Definitely oil. And if those two weeks walking around with that ridiculous Browning stuck up his armpit had been at all useful, they had taught him the smell of gun oil.

He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it in his inside pocket, where it nestled against the papers he had pinched from Jessel’s desk. Godbehere dusted the edge of the desk with white powder and offered an instant opinion.

‘There’s something here. No doubt about it. D’ye reckon that cleaning lady was thorough?’

‘You saw her. Looked to me as though she cleaned Pandaemonium for Lucifer on a regular basis. No brimstone left unturned.’

Troy looked down at the powdery smudges. This, like money, was not one of his strong points. He was about as capable of reading the signs as he was of deciphering the hidden meanings in wallpaper. Godbehere seemed to realise this only too well.

‘I’ll get on better on my own, sir. Why don’t you do whatever it is you have to do and come down the nick to give me your statement a bit later. I’m there till six today and I’m on again at eight-thirty tomorrow. The nick’s out on the Matlock Road. Ask anybody.’

Troy left to do whatever he had to do. It was just that he had no idea what the whatever he had to do should be.

He stood at the end of Railway Cuttings, pondering the dilemma. Either he placed a great deal of confidence in Godbehere, or he steamed in uninvited, set up his own investigation, knowing full well that the connection to Cockerell, and Cockerell’s connection to what Stan would inevitably call ‘spookery’, was enough to make Onions hesitate in backing him. And if he did, Troy would then find himself stepping on the toes of every local plod for miles around and making himself the most unpopular copper in England.

Someone was honking a car horn at him. He looked at a pale Daimler or Jaguar parked a little way up the street. All he could see in the windscreen was a reflection of the street outside, crowded with shoppers. Then the driver’s door opened and a stout, owlish figure beckoned to him.

‘Get in,’ he yelled.

It was George Brown. The penny dropped. The Somewhere-up-North for which Brown sat in the Commons was Belper. This was his constituency. Good God, he should have realised.

He pulled open the passenger door and got in. Brown eased the large car into traffic and headed slowly down the street.

‘I don’t have to ask you what you’re doing here, do I?’ he said.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Only two things have put Belper on the map since the industrial revolution. Me, and Arnold bloody Cockerell!’

‘You knew him?’

‘You couldn’t miss him. Local nob. Rotary Club. Chamber of Commerce. Treasurer of the Tory Party for a couple of years. Always giving me gyp at public meetings. But I can’t honestly say I knew him. Mind you, if it’s local knowledge you want, I’m meeting two of my chaps for a drink at the Legion in five minutes. You might as well join us.’

Brown swung the car left at the next junction.

‘Did anyone raise the matter of Cockerell’s disappearance with you? As a constituency matter, I mean?’

‘His wife did. But of course, by then it was what you’d call a Commons undercurrent. Your brother was masterminding it. I had a word. He said ‘leave it to me’, and I was glad to. I was supposed to have blotted my copybook where the Russians are concerned, as I’m sure you gathered from Brother Khrushchev. It was better all round for Rod to handle it. I told Cockerell’s wife what I could. Wasn’t a lot.’

Brown paused.

‘I have to ask you this. Your brother didn’t ask you to come up here, did he?’

‘No. And I think I can say that he’d have told you first.’

‘I’ve big feet,’ Brown said. ‘Easy to tread on.’

He swung the car left again and brought it to a halt in front of a sturdy, squat example of twenties architecture. The Royal British Legion. Watering hole of old, and not so old, soldiers.

Troy could not recall that he had ever been inside a British Legion. He had, after all, no entitlement. He had not only not done his bit, he would have lied, cheated and run away to Ireland to avoid doing his bit. It had never come to that—Onions had kept him out of the forces as an essential worker. He did not think that Brown had been in the forces either. It was an odd feeling; it set them apart from their generation. At most Brown was two or three years younger than Troy, one of the rising stars of the party, if the fogies of fifty or so—Gaitskell, Rod—ever gave them space to spread their wings. The next election was four years away and closing with every crisis. Gaitskell looked set to win it hands down. It would be a very long time before the generation of George Brown and Harold Wilson found room at the top.

‘You’re not a member, are you?’ Brown was saying as he locked the car door.

Troy shook his head.

‘Then Walter had better sign us in. I’m not either, you see.’

Troy wondered if this admission had undertones. Did a British man, let alone a British politician, of their age automatically feel the divide of fought/not fought? Was it for ever going to be held up as the central action, the defining experience of their generation? Worse, when they got in there, to the Legion, what did people—men, it was always men—talk about? Could a bunch of forty-year-olds rehash ‘what I did in the war’ till the day they died? Would they be doing this in the 1980s, the 1990s, into the next century?

Brown introduced Troy to Walter and Ted—two men separated by a couple of stones in weight, a couple of years in age—roughly the same age as Brown and Troy—and a small round table bearing a crumpled copy of the Manchester Guardian and two half-finished half pints of bitter. They shook hands and said hello, and revealed a wider gap. The stout one, Walter, was clearly a Lancastrian, and the skinny one, Ted, just as clearly a Yorkshireman. Quite a melting pot, the British Legion, thought Troy.

‘What’ll you have?’ the thin man said.

Brown asked for a half of the local brew—a Mansfield ale—and Troy followed on the Driberg principle that the first crack in the ice was usually to be achieved by drinking what the working man drank.

Troy looked around. It was a dull place. Inevitably, it was a dull place. But no duller than any London club he’d ever been in. Faintly hideous with varnished woodwork, it was neither more nor less pleasant than the Garrick with all its varnished portraits dulled with age—and no one had asked if he was wearing a tie. The new Queen had pride of place with a wall to herself, a public photograph in red robes. The war had its small memorials in the decorative plates hanging askew on the wall, to the local regiment—the Sherwood Foresters—and to the 1st Polish Parachute regiment. The illusion that the war had been England’s war was a thin one, and only idiots ever believed it was. England had been too full of Czechs and Poles—and Yanks—for it to have been otherwise. In the background he could see a row of full-sized billiard tables, and the bar-room gossip was punctuated by the constant click of the balls. The gossip. He strained to hear, strained to make sense of a difficult local accent, and found, much to his amazement, that old soldiers talked about the weather and football and rugby league and what they’d seen on the ‘telly’ last night. No one mentioned the war.

He felt Brown’s elbow nudge him, and turned to see him lighting up his pipe. The look on the stout one’s face told him he’d just asked a question that Troy had not heard.

‘I was just saying. Would you be Rod Troy’s brother?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘He’s been up a few times and given us a talk. Came up for George in ’50 and ’51.’

There was a slight pause, possibly for Troy to fill, but he did not so the stout one added, ‘Decent bloke,’ by way of a coda.

At his best, Rod was a passionate believer in and campaigner for Love and Justice and Democracy. A man who hated lies. Troy could admire that, even if it was usually he who flicked up all three for him. At his worst, Rod was ‘a decent bloke’. Troy hated the decent bloke.

The thin one returned, balancing a tray of drinks and the first rush of shag cloud billowed forth from Brown.

‘The Chief Inspector’s here about Arnold Cockerell,’ he said through the smoke.

The two men looked at each other. Troy thought they both smiled. He was dreading the existence of another local double act and hoped to God they’d something sensible to say.

Walter spoke first. ‘So it’s not him down at Portsmouth? Must say I never thought much of the idea of Arnold as Bulldog Drummond.’

Troy put the obvious question. ‘You knew him, then?’

‘Moved here about the same time I did. I met him when I got out of the Army at the end of ’45. Of course, he was with us then.’

‘With us?’ said Troy.

‘Party member,’ Ted put in across the top of his glass.

‘We saw a lot of him,’ Walter continued. ‘He was very active on George’s behalf.’

Troy looked at Brown, smacking loudly at the end of his pipe.

‘By 1950 I was Satan, of course.’

‘No,’ said Ted. ‘He was still with you in ’50—he left us between then and the ’51 election.’

‘Very nearly lost my seat,’ said Brown with a politician’s self-absorption.

‘I saw him change,’ Walter said. ‘Something quite drastic. It was like the road to Damascus. It was as though his own success couldn’t coexist with his old ideas.’

Troy knew from trying to have rational conversations with Rod that the politically committed cannot grasp the notion that people simply and easily change their minds. It remained, however, that what the man was offering him was what he most needed, an educated guess at the motivations of Commander Cockerell.

‘About the time of the Festival of Britain?’ he asked.

The two men looked at each other again. Without the smiles, puzzled this time.

‘Now you mention it,’ Walter said, ‘it was. Peculiar that.’

‘The Damascus road of modern furniture,’ said Troy, paraphrasing Janet Cockerell.

‘No, no.’ Walter mused, ignoring his beer. ‘It was more than that. I know what you mean. Shop full of Scandinavian tat at high prices. It was more than finding his niche in the business, more than making a bob or two for the first time in his life. It was as though someone had picked him up and shook him.’

‘That’s fancy,’ said Ted. ‘Have you been at the Babycham? If you ask me, it’s bloody simple. It’s the British story, isn’t it? Great Britain This Is Your Life—give a man a few quid more and he starts looking after self-interest. Give a man a leg up in life and he bites the hand that feeds him. It’s what dogs us as a party and a country—we breed Tories. You’ll see. We get back in next year or the year after, we improve the lot of the workers—do what we’re committed to do—and the next election after that the buggers’ll vote us out because they’re making a bit too much money to trust it to Labour. That’s what happened to Cockerell. He made a bob or two. And from then on he was determined to hang onto it.’

‘Write that down,’ Brown said. ‘Gaitskell can use it next May Day.’

They all laughed at this. Troy managed a gentle smile, hoping he looked wry rather than humourless.

‘I know his wife quite well,’ Walter said. ‘In fact she still pays her subs. Doesn’t come to meetings or dos, but she’s a member. She said, a few years ago now, must have been ’52 or ’53, when he became Treasurer of the local Tories, she said he talks such utter rubbish, she said, I can’t believe he believes it. And then she said, “I don’t know what got into him. He’s like a schoolboy, smirking to himself, sitting there with his finger up his bum.”’

Troy could imagine Janet Cockerell saying that. He could imagine the hell that was surely the home life of Mr and Mrs Cockerell, narrated by a tedious, self-obsessed bore, punctuated by the balloon-pricking, contrivedly vulgar wit of his wife. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she voted Labour. God, how that must have annoyed him.

§46

‘Dead?’ she said.

‘Heart.’

‘So it’s not connected? You don’t suspect . . . ?’

She searched for a word or phrase. Her eyes looking down at the lawn, flicking up at the blank cartridge paper on the easel, and back to Troy.

‘. . . Foul play. My God, I’m getting to use all the jargon, aren’t I?’

She rolled ‘foul play’ around on her lips once more as though toying with the phrase.

Janet Cockerell had, he felt, been pretty straight with him. This was no time to allow another person’s honesty to let him stumble into truth. The truth was of no use to her, the truth could do her no good.

‘No,’ he lied. ‘I don’t.’

§47

The interview room at Belper Police Station was designed to let paint intimidate. If the malefactor did not instantly feel the pangs of guilt on entering a room almost entirely denied natural light by the accumulated dirt on the windows, the brick walls, eggshelled over in dirty brown and dirtier cream, with a dividing border at shoulder height, would no doubt soon reduce him to gibbering confession along the lines of, ‘It’s a fair cop, guvnor. You got me bang to rights.’ So reminiscent were they of the soothing shades of a good Victorian prison. It was at least sixty miles to Strangeways, but a short hop on the Brolac paint chart ‘Snazzy Colours for Old Lags’.

Troy watched Godbehere riffle through a stack of papers, and waited.

Once, years ago, an old lag had accepted arrest by Troy with the words ‘It’s a fair cop,’ and Troy could only ask, ‘Are you taking the mickey?’ There were moments when he loved the job.

Godbehere pushed a blank statement form across the table to him.

‘You don’t need me to put it into copperese, now do you, sir?’

Troy spoke fluent copperese and hated it. It went with black boots and silly helmets. He wrote an account of his finding the body of George Jessel in less than a hundred and fifty words, signed it and pushed it back.

‘What have you got?’ he asked.

‘Three sets of prints. Quite clear. I’ll run them by CRO and send you whatever emerges. I’ll call you when the coast is clear.’

‘And?’

‘I couldn’t do much else. Market day, you see. People everywhere. I talked to the obvious. The bloke outside the Kedleston selling newspapers. Always there, observant chap, but the only stranger he’s seen is you. He knows all the travelling salesmen by name or by sight and they’ve all been regulars. Between you and me, I think he makes a bob or two fixing them up with tarts from time to time. It’d pay him to keep his eyes peeled. And I talked to the woman who runs the drapery right opposite the alley. Nothing. Nothing worth her remembering.’

‘It needs a house-to-house, along the alley at least, and flyers. Posters up King Street. You know that, don’t you?’

‘I know. And I can’t do it. If the boss knows I did what I did today he’ll have my guts for banjo strings.’

Godbehere toyed with his ball-point pen, not quite looking Troy in the eye.

‘You could make it official. Come in over his head, but we both know damn well what’s going to be in the medical report, don’t we, sir? Or you could take Mr Warriss into your confidence and tell him what you’ve got on the end of your handkerchief. But you’re not going to do that, are you, sir?’

‘No, I’m not.’

‘You think he’ll cock it up?’

‘Maybe, but the problem is that he’s already made up his mind. That’s a bad start to any investigation. If I tell him what it is and it doesn’t fit he’ll just bury it in one of the vast vacancies of his brain.’

‘Are you going to tell me what it is?’

‘Gun oil. Lubricant for an automatic.’

Godbehere sighed and muttered, ‘Oh shit. And you still want the house-to-house?’

‘Yes.’

‘And the flyers?’

‘Yes.’

‘OK. I understand, but if you want me do any more, you’re going to have to talk to Inspector Warriss. And I think I should warn you that right now he’s telling everyone in the station that we’ve got a rogue copper from the Yard trespassing on our turf—a right twat who can’t tell murder from a heart attack.’

‘Well,’ said Troy. ‘It looks as though I shall have to go on being a “right twat”, doesn’t it?’

§48

Warriss heard him out in silence. Troy asked for the house-to-house, and for flyers to be posted. Warriss nodded, and when Troy had finished said simply, ‘Fine. When are you leaving?’

§49

He left on the next train. Half an hour sitting on a bench in front of the Swiss-style waiting room on the up platform, watching Oliver Hardy tend a flowerbed, bent over his charges, as far as his bulk would allow bending, clutching a trowel and tossing the weeds behind him onto the platform. He spoke not a word to Troy—Troy concluded he spoke to no one, but he thought it a great pleasure to watch a man delight quietly in his work—and ten minutes before the train was due, Hardy disappeared up the slope and came back down on his electro-trolley at the head of another caravan of burbling pigeons.

It was mid-afternoon. The train gathered speed slowly, out of the cutting and onto the flood plain of the Derwent, into a half-mile tunnel and out into the flatlands that in a mile or two were recognisable as the English Midlands. Khrushchev’s words, as they often did, came back to him, more for their forcefulness than their poetry. There was little or no poetry in ‘Bugger England’, but ‘Bugger England’ it was that came back to him, and if this was, if this had been, his experience of Middle England, then bugger Middle England too.

§50

‘Where ya bin?’

He could feel the weight of melancholy in each short syllable. He could not acknowledge it. He did not want to pick it up—to pick it up might be to make it his own, and he had no wish to do that.

‘In the North of England.’

‘Another murder, I guess?’

‘Sort of.”’

‘Y’know—I never had you figured for the kind of guy who said “sort of”.’

‘It’s vague. Possibly three murders.’

‘Three?’

‘One without a body.’

‘OK. I’m followin’.’

‘One without a face. Or a name.’

‘Still with yas.’

‘And one without a means.’

‘Now you lost me.’

He wondered how he could explain. Drew a deep breath, and she cut him off.

‘No—don’t explain. Just tell me when you’re comin’ home.’

‘I really don’t know. It’s going to keep me busy.’

‘Should I come down to London?’

‘Up.’

‘Uh?’

‘One always comes up to London and down to the country.’

‘Jesus, Troy! You’re beginning to sound like your sisters!’

He was. It was just the kind of nonsense they would utter.

‘Are they giving you a hard time?’

‘Not exactly. They say things like, “It’s your house now, Larissa, you’re the mistress of Mimram.” Like we were re-enacting some plot by the fuckin’ Brontë sisters. I’m the mistress of Hardcock Hall. And—they don’t mean it.’

Troy knew damn well they didn’t.

‘They just use crap like that to wind me up. I should care who’s fuckin’ mistress of fuckin’ Mimram. You know what’s wrong? I got nothin’ in common with ’em. ’Cept two languages. Has it ever seemed to you that those women are noddle-heads?’

‘Of course. They are.’

‘I mean. Here I am trying to educate myself, reading your old man’s books and that, and they giggle and say things like, “Oh dear, Larissa’s turning into a bluestocking.” Like they never read a book in their goddam lives. Now what the fuck’s a goddam bluestocking? I mean, I been wearing your trousers all week. I don’t even own a pair of blue stockings!’

Tosca came to London, sad, unpredictable and unchanging. The job swallowed him whole; Troy had little time for her, but then she had so little time for him. Silent, nose buried in a book. Apologising for her silence. Then angry. Once he had explained the bluestocking remark, it rankled. Anger he could handle. Soak it up like a sponge. Unlike the sadness, it did not become his. He could see it but he did not share it.

Each night she crept into his bed, said, ‘Don’t touch’—and he didn’t.

§51

Kolankiewicz could explode. You would be having, you thought, a perfectly reasonable conversation with the Polish Beast when suddenly—poof, yaroo, wallop—he was off into one of the rages that Troy ascribed to the occupational hazard of being Polish. There were half a dozen questions Troy would have loved to put to Kolankiewicz, but the risk was too great. Better by far to stick to the job in hand and ask him the nuclear questions later, when he was free to duck and cover.

He phoned down to Forensics. Kolankiewicz spent much of his time dashing between the new lab at the Yard and the old one at Hendon. It was possible he was in the building. A voice he did not know answered—one of a dozen young men that manned Kolankiewicz’s department, much grown in size and importance in the last ten years.

‘Is Mr Kolankiewicz about?’ Troy asked.

‘He’s just scrubbing up after a job, sir. He’ll be free in a few minutes. Shall I get him to call you?’

‘No. I’ll come to him.’

He found Kolankiewicz in his windowless, cheerless office in the basement, with a thermos full of milky tea, a row of jam doughnuts and his copy of the News Chronicle.

‘Long time no smartyarse,’ he said.

It was. They had not met since their evening with Khrushchev at the Bricklayer’s Arms.

‘You want doughnut?’ he said through a mouth gushing red jam.

‘No thanks. I just thought you might like to take a look at this.’

He put his Irish linen handkerchief on the open newspaper.

‘What you want, I should examine your bogies? Troy, you getting to be bigger fucking pig than me.’

‘Impossible,’ said Troy. ‘You are the most disgusting man alive.’

Kolankiewicz beamed at the compliment, genuinely flattered to hear the common wisdom of the entire Metropolitan Police Force and much of the constabularies of the home counties distilled into a single sentence.

‘What I want,’ said Troy, ‘is your opinion on the brown stain at the corner.’

‘Ah—brown stain! Troy, Troy, Troy. Brown stain—two of the most beautiful words in the English language. Why is it that a nation that has produced Shakespeare and Blake has no sonnet to the brown stain, no song of experience, no song of innocence, that encompasses the mystery of the brown stain? We are old friends, brown stain and I.’

He picked up the handkerchief and sniffed loudly at the corner.

‘Almost no odour,’ he said. ‘You had this a day or two?’

‘Yes.’

‘No matter, I can reactivate it. A dash of this, a soupçon of that and dear little brown stain will yield up its filth for all to sniff.’

‘When?’

‘Tomorrow.’

Kolankiewicz put the linen to his nose again and made revolting noises, worse than any schoolboy with a runny nose and bad adenoids.

‘And you want it just between the two of us. Right, smartyarse?’

‘How did you know?’

‘I known you what now, twenty years? Look at your own habits, Troy. Everybody got habits. Onions picks his nose, Wildeve forever scratch arse—you close doors quietly, like you hope no one can hear you, whenever you expect secrecy. I see you close door when you come into room and I know we are in business for ourselves again and the Yard go flying fuck.’

Of course, he was right. The Yard did indeed go flying fuck.

§52

Troy went back to his own office and phoned one Angus Pakenham, his accountant of many years, a notorious one-legged RAF hero dry-drunk, and the husband of his recent mistress, Anna.

‘Whaddyawant?’ he barked at Troy.

‘It’s business, Angus.’

‘I should bloody well hope so. Or did you think I lived on thin air?’

‘Is there any chance we could meet up later? Perhaps a bit of a chat after work, at the end of the day?’

‘Don’t see why not. Meet me by the pump at six. And if you’re late, y’bugger, I’ll hobble off without you.’

The pump was their very occasional but habitual meeting place It stood, tall, black, elegant and, since the demise of the horse-drawn hansom cab, redundant, an ornament at the junction of Bedford Row and Jockey’s Fields in Bloomsbury. Angus and his partners had the top two floors of a mews in Jockey’s Fields, overlooking Gray’s Inn. Angus had lost a leg leaping from the walls of Colditz Castle whilst trying to escape. He had spent the rest of the war as a POW, given a tin leg by the Germans, which they confiscated after every subsequent escape attempt. He had attempted to escape seventeen times. On his release the Roehampton Hospital had equipped him with a state-of the-art rubber and plastic leg and he had hated it and gone back to the hand-made tin leg the Germans had given him. He spent much of his life in pain—the missing leg, he said, hurt like hell—and much of his time escaping pain with a near-lethal mixture of pills and booze. He and Troy met by the pump because he could not stand to be waited on or watched as he negotiated the three flights of steps that led from his office to the street. He hobbled down them at his own painful pace, cursing all the way. By the time he got to the pump he was usually red-faced but relieved, and depending on the vicissitudes of the leg and his naturally bloody disposition, he was either the best company in the world or the worst.

Troy sat waiting for Angus. He was whistling as he came round the corner from Jockey’s Fields—red-faced but whistling—a halo of scant ginger curls peeking out from under his bowler, his briefcase under one arm, the artificial leg in its pinstripe swinging out at an unnatural angle but at a cracking pace.

‘Right, y’bugger. Lead on. What’s it to be? The “Lot’s Wife” or the “Whore of Babylon”?’

Troy had difficulty remembering what public house was what. Angus had privately renamed most of the pubs within hobbling distance of his office. They had perfectly ordinary names, like the Gryphon or the Three Tuns, but he had rechristened them to suit himself, and, the landlord of the ‘Two Dogs at It’ withstanding (Angus claimed to have found two of the creatures copulating on the pavement one day right outside the pub in question), no one seemed much to mind. It also had the added advantage that if his wife overheard him planning to meet a crony, she had little idea of where he was really headed.

‘How about the “Frankenstein’s Codpiece”?’ said Troy without the faintest idea which one it was Angus had so dubbed.

‘Right you are,’ Angus replied and struck off north up Jockey’s Fields, and Troy knew that they were heading for the Seven Bells in Theobald’s Road.

Angus cut a swathe through the evening drinkers with cries of ‘Mind the cripple!’ Troy had known him wallop people with his walking stick on the days when the pain necessitated its presence, and when feeling particularly witty, he would elbow the drinking public aside with, ‘Unclean, unclean, leper approaching.’ He threw himself down in a chair and began to rub vigorously at the point on his thigh where stump and tin leg met.

‘It’s just about this time of day, when you’ve had the damn thing strapped on for nine or ten hours, that you get the most Godalmighty itch.’

He oohed and aahed at the relief, and then his eyes noticed the bulging briefcase Troy had placed on the chair between them.

‘That’s it, eh? The substance of your “bit of a chat”? Well, just looking at the outside I can tell you it’s more than a bit and it’ll cost you. However . . .’

He paused for a last deeply raking scratch at his stump, and let out a sigh of profound satisfaction.

‘Ah me . . . However . . . before we get stuck in, there is one thing I’ve been meaning to ask you. Have you been fucking my wife?’

‘No,’ Troy lied.

‘Good. I’m glad you have the decency to lie. ’Cos if you’d tried to brazen it out and tell me it meant nothing, I’d’ve taken off me tin leg and beaten the living shite out of you with it. In fact, for future reference, let me state it plainly. If I catch you sniffing around the old girl again, that’s exactly what I’ll do—in the street, and I don’t care if it bends me leg and frightens the horses. Capiche?’

Troy nodded.

‘Good. That’s that out of the way. Now get the drinks in and tell me what you’re after.’

‘I thought you weren’t drinking.’

‘Look, Troy. Do you want me to thrash you silly or do you want to mind your own damn business and tell me exactly what’s on your mind? A large malt. No water. No ice. Filthy American habit.’

Troy hoped it was not Angus’s intention to get pissed. He needed him sober—God knows, he was the most difficult man alive sober, but he was unbearable drunk—and he wanted Anna’s optimism to bear fruit. He knew that it was only Angus’s month-long benders—when his business went to pot and he was about as priapic as a caterpillar—that had brought the two of them together, to cross the shaky line that had joined and separated them as lovers-not-lovers since they were in their twenties. Besides, right now he couldn’t handle Anna back again. He cheated. Set a small malt in front of Angus and half an inch of ginger ale in the bottom of a glass for himself in the hope Angus would think he was on scotch too.

Angus held his glass up to the light. Before Troy could stop him he was yelling across the room to the landlord.

‘Herbert! You mingy old bugger! You call this a double? You want your eyes tested!’

Herbert strolled over, a short fat bloke with hair like autumn corn stubble and the puffy face of an ex-boxer.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said . . .’ Angus hauled himself to his feet, towering over the landlord at more than six foot two. ‘I said, you’re a mingy bugger. And you need to get your optics fixed. On the wall or in your face.’

A stubby finger struck him on the sternum and Troy watched as the little bloke firmly pushed him back into his seat.

‘Mingy? Now you listen to me, ’ero. Mr bleedin’ medals, Mr I-flew-a-bleedin’-’Urricane, Mr Battle of bloody Britain. We take a lot of shit from you. Every landlord between ’ere and the river takes a lot of shit from you. And we put up with it. You did your bit, you earned yer gongs, we all admire yer, Gawd knows some of the dafter ones even like yer. You’re our bit of ’istory. Colditz on legs, and one of ’em tin. You’re the only customer we got with a genuine ’ollow leg. But mingy? Short measure? Don’t push yer luck, Angus. I was Hoxton and Shoreditch Under 21 Middleweight Champion. I went five rounds with Mickey McGuire when I was a lad. I’ll wallop yer into rice pudding!’

Angus had not flinched. His expression had not changed.

‘Nicely spoken, Herbert. Would you care to join the Chief Inspector and myself in a libation?’

‘Very kind of you, Angus, but I never ’as shared a tipple with the Old Bill and I doesn’t mean to start now.’

He nodded gently in Troy’s direction.

‘No offence meant.’

‘None taken,’ said Troy, knowing it was what pub manners—that arcane men’s code—demanded of him.

It seemed wise to open the briefcase and let paper be a professional temptation. Troy would never understand it, but accountants could feel as strongly about their work as he did about his.

Angus sipped at his scotch and said, ‘What’s the beef, old boy?’

Troy gave him the potted version of the case of Commander Cockerell, moving as quickly as he could to the prospect of financial irregularities and the hypothesis of the wife.

‘Well,’ Angus said after a while. ‘Who doesn’t live beyond their means? The story of our times, eh? I know you’re rolling in the stuff, but I’m stony most of the time.’

‘But they weren’t, at least not on paper they weren’t.’

‘Business doing well?’

‘Too well.’

‘Figures don’t add up?’

‘They do but . . . I’m suspicious. Look at it this way. If you were working a fiddle, who would you need on your side?’

‘Book-keeper.’

‘Cockerell looked after the books personally.’

‘Accountant.’

‘That too.’

‘He’d still have to be damn clever with figures to get it past the auditor. Mind you, plenty of buggers are or we’d have no need of a Fraud Squad.’

‘Which brings me to the case of George Jessel.’

‘Who he?’

‘Cockerell’s auditor—crony—and a recent occupant of the mortuary. He died at a very convenient moment.’

‘Murder?’

‘I can’t prove it, but I think so.’

‘You think this bloke collaborated with the first bloke to do what? Cover up losses, fiddles, hide debts? What?’

‘I don’t know, that’s why I need you. There’s something not quite kosher about all of this. I just don’t know what.’

Angus riffled the fat sheaf of papers. ‘As I was saying, this will cost you.’

‘Fine. Bill me.’

‘And I’ll need a letter of authorisation from you.’

‘I have one ready.’

Troy reached into his inside pocket and handed Angus an envelope and the keys to Cockerell’s shop.

‘It’s all there. A copy of the notes I took at the time. Bank statements, tax returns, the lot. And if you have to go up there, the wife’s address, the auditor’s address. Shop keys. Call the wife, she’s bright and she’s determined to nail her husband for something. And if you can, keep out of the way of the plod, and if you can’t there’s a young sergeant name of Godbehere who seems trustworthy. The local Inspector isn’t, but then he was a crony of Cockerell’s too.’

There was, Troy knew, quite a mind behind the bluster. Often in that rapid, expanding and seemingly interminable time between D-Day and the German surrender, Anna had described the RAF charmer who had swept her off her feet and into a do-it-now-we-may-be-dead-tomorrow marriage. He had been a looker, which he wasn’t now, but above all she seemed to have been snared by his way with words and ideas. What she had called his ‘egghead blarney’. It was increasingly rare to see the combative mask slip from Angus’s booze-reddened, pissed-out features, but something he had just said had engaged with the inner man, the mind, long enough for him to forget the outer man, the anger.

‘Crops up a lot doesn’t it, “cronies”? Has it occurred to you that it almost constitutes a principle of social action? A doctrine—“cronyism”? A frilly functioning set of bon mots. By their cronies shall ye know them, cronies in high places, one for all and all for crony, a crony in need is crony indeed. Bears a bit of thinking, y’know.’

He held up his glass and nodded at the bar.

‘Be the death of this country, you know. Cronyism, clubbable Britain, the nods, the winks, the special handshakes, the blackballing. I used to think the war changed something. In fact I used to think it changed every­thing. I even thought six years of Socialism had changed something. But they didn’t. We’re still the same old place we were before the war.’

Herbert set another glass of whisky in front of Angus, without a word. A full double this time. Angus drank half of it and picked up his theme.

‘And we’ll rot on it. What was it Feste or some other clown says in Shakespeare—“Thou art like the medlar, rotten before ’tis ripe.” That’s Britain—we’ll rot on the bone, long before we’re dead or democratic. Cronyism has a lot to answer for. I decided in the end the war changed just one thing.’

‘What was that?’

‘It chopped off me fuckin’ leg.’

Troy said nothing. If not at the root of the matter, they were certainly at the stump.

‘And now there’s only one thing to do. Get pissed and wait for the end of the fuckin’ world. Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Bikini Atoll, and bloody Windscale. Pass the single malt, and don’t let the kiddies drink the milk. The green, green grass of England is no longer green, it glistens in its thousand hues like a Strontium rainbow. We gather in the purple rain, lambs to the atomic slaughter. The centre never held. Things that fell apart have been badly stuck back together by a jealous child armed with a tube of polystyrene glue. What rough beast slouches two-headed and triple-bollocked, broad of bicep and limp of dick, towards the smouldering remains of Bethlehem to be illegally aborted?’

He surfaced a fraction, poking a feeler out for a reaction.

‘I don’t suppose you fancy a piss-up do you, Freddie? A pub crawl. Give a few landlords a bit more shit. I’ve a slate with every pub from here to the Embankment, as old Herbert so rightly says. Once more round the Great British Raree Show? There’s a bloke in the Tit and Biscuit who takes out his glass eye and drops it in his pint—or yours if you’re not careful. And this chap in the Pig and Bedpost has a steel plate in his head. Got shot up in a Spit—knew ’im in 1940 as a matter of fact—and the quacks stuck this steel plate in his bonce. So he’s fitted a magnet to one of those snowstorm jobbies—y’ know, one of those glass balls that you shake up and snowflakes fall on a wooden hut in Switzerland or some such place. Won’t take it off—even wears it under his hat. Every time the bugger so much as nods his head you get a blizzard up the Alps. And there’s a bloke in the Lucifer’s Arms who can fart the national anthem—’

‘And there’s a bloke in this pub who’s been known to whip off his tin leg and wield it like the jawbone of an ass. Angus, I haven’t got the time!’

More than that, Troy had no wish to be drawn into Angus’s world. It seemed to him hellish beyond measure to be made to share that awful malvision. A night out with Angus would be like treading lightly across a swamp in the vain illusion that you would not be sucked in. Lately he had come to think that survival in middle age demanded not simply the growing up that all men put off in prolonged adolescence, but also the avoidance of ways of seeing, ways of being, of miscalculated actions even, that—and he had no better phrase for it—sucked you in. Angus on the rocks was to be politely avoided, Johnny Fermanagh on the rocks needed the armour-plated heart.

‘And nor have you,’ he added.

Angus flicked a corner of the paper pile with his thumbnail, rippling it like a dealer shuffling a deck of cards.

‘Tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I’ll get stuck in tomorrow.’

He paused. Stared into the distance.

‘Or the day after.’

Then he hoisted his glass aloft, yelled, ‘Herbert, old boy.’ And Troy left him to it.

§53

Special Branch was a hotbed of mangled Secret Service gossip. If the Secret State were an organism, MI5 and 6 were the two cerebella, the Branch was its arms and legs. Armwork—twisting and breaking—and legwork—kicking and breaking—were its function within Britain. Troy could ask the Branch for nothing. The time of day would be too much. They had nothing but contempt for him. He doubted whether his short spell under Inspector Cobb’s wing had done anything to improve his standing with them. He asked Jack to put his ear to the ground.

‘They’ll talk to you,’ he said. ‘Just find out what you can about Daniel Keeffe. Something in Six. Don’t know what.’

There were two D. Keeffes in the directory. Keeffe, D. J. P., in Drayton Gardens SW10, and Keeffe, D. S., in Notting Hill W2. Troy took them in alphabetical order. Keeffe, D. J. P. rang and rang without picking up. He dialled Keeffe, D. S. It picked up on the fifth ring and a woman’s voice said ‘Yes’, bluntly and quietly as though he had woken her from sleep.

‘Mrs Keeffe?’

‘Who wants to know?’

‘My name’s Troy. I’m a detective chief inspector with Scotland Yard—’

She hung up. He had almost certainly found the right Keeffe. Ten minutes later Jack came into his office, helped himself to a cup from Clark’s machine and pulled up a chair and confirmed the suspicion.

‘There is gossip,’ he said, ‘about this chap Keeffe. I sat with a few of the heavies in the canteen at lunchtime. It would appear that a particularly nasty piece of Special work called Gorman, ugly bugger, ex-Military Police, a sergeant, was boasting a few weeks ago that he’d roasted Keeffe in his own flat. Given him the third degree and turned the place over. My source quoted Gorman as saying, “We turned over this nasty little kike.”’

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Troy. ‘Looking for what?’

‘Not looking for anything. Just, as the saying goes, roasting.’

‘Punishment?’

‘I can’t think what else to call it. When Five and Six send the Branch in to sort out their own it can only be threat or punishment. I doubt they learn anything directly. They have their own chaps for that, after all. I think they sent Gorman just to make a mess, and God knows they can make a mess, can’t they? Gorman took two constables and really turned him over. According to the chap who was telling me, Keeffe had a collection of porcelain, Meissen, Limoges, that sort of thing. They smashed the lot. And as there was no mention of an arrest or even the prospect of one, I conclude that this was the Branch operating in their purest form—bullying for the sake of it.’

‘I think I just talked to his wife. She hung up once I’d given her my rank.’

‘I don’t blame her. Now, are you going to tell me who he is?’

‘I think he’s the man who sent Commander Cockerell out to spy on the Ordzhonikidze. He’s certainly the man the FO sent to explain it all to Cockerell’s wife once the Government decided to come clean.’

Jack looked blankly at him for a moment or two.

‘Clean? Not the word I would have chosen.’

‘Quite.’

Jack resumed the blank stare. Troy began to wonder if he had left half his lunch smeared across his chin.

‘You’re not going after Five and Six again, are you?’

‘Again?’

‘You know bloody well what I mean.’

‘No. I’m not. I just want to know.’

‘Know what?’

‘What happened to Cockerell.’

‘You mean, who killed him?’

‘I just want to be sure it doesn’t fall within our brief.’

‘And if it doesn’t, we’ll leave well alone?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Freddie?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘You know, somehow I don’t believe you.’

Troy worked his way through the paperwork on his desk and cleared the afternoon. By three he was walking from Notting Hill Gate Underground station towards Kensington Gardens. He turned left into Linden Gardens, a looping cul-de-sac, a mixture of mansion flats and double-fronted family homes. He stood on the pavement opposite number 202, wondering what opening tactic would stop him getting an earful of the resentment that the Branch deserved. The door of the house opened, and a short woman emerged, wrapped in a belted mackintosh, headscarf and dark glasses. It was a warmish late-summer day. The inappropriate clothes looked to Troy like a crude form of disguise. Audrey Hepburn or Diana Dors trying to shop unrecognised in Regent Street, but making quite sure everyone would say, ‘There’s a film star in disguise.’ She walked off in the direction of the Bayswater Road and stopped by a parked Morris Minor.

‘Mrs Keeffe!’ Troy called out to her, and she stopped fiddling with her keys, turned and pulled her glasses down to the tip of her nose, peering at him over the top.

‘It was you who called me?’

‘Yes. Mrs Keeffe—I’m not Special Branch.’

‘And I’m not Mrs Keeffe.’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘I’m Deborah Keeffe. Daniel was my brother.’

‘Was?’

She took the glasses off entirely, folded them and put them in her coat pocket. Her eyes were red and the lids were swollen. She looked as though she had not slept for two or three days.

‘No,’ she said. ‘You can’t be Branch or you’d know. My brother took an overdose five days ago. He’s dead, Mr—I’m sorry I’ve forgotten your name.’

‘Troy.’

‘I thought I’d seen you before. Or I’d’ve walked on when you called my name. I’ve seen you at the House. You’re Rod Troy’s brother, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m the Assistant House Librarian, Science and Engineering. I don’t suppose you’d’ve noticed me. The members don’t, so why should the visitors? I suppose you went through the telephone directory looking for Keeffes, didn’t you? I don’t know what your interest is in Daniel, but he lived in Drayton Gardens. As I said, if you were Branch you’d know that.’

‘I’m with the Murder Squad, Miss Keeffe.’

‘Who’s been murdered?’

Increasingly Troy had no answer to this simple question. He gave the answer he was accustomed to give, even though it ran against the grain of what he now believed.

‘Commander Cockerell.’

‘Well, well, well, the chickens come home to roost at last.’

She pulled her dark glasses out again and slipped them on.

‘The last few days I’ve been over to Drayton Gardens. Clearing up, clearing out, you know. I was on my way there just now, but I suppose that’s the last place we can talk. Why don’t we forget the car and take the underground. I’ve always found it a rather private place outside the rush hour. I doubt anyone will hear what we have to say.’

They walked back the way he had come from Notting Hill Gate and boarded a Circle line, on the clockwise run, the long way round to Chelsea, north through Bayswater, east via Baker Street.

Miss Keeffe said nothing until they were seated. She pocketed the sunglasses once more, pulled off her headscarf. Black curly hair fell free, and she brushed it clear of her face. Troy put her at about thirty. Short and Jewish, broad at the cheekbones, her eyes as dark as his, her skin pale, almost white by contrast, except where sleeplessness and grief had left it red and raw. It was a familiar face. England had received many immigrants in the first forty years of the century. She was, he guessed, Latvian or Lithuanian, a descendant of refugees from countries that no longer existed. Someone not unlike him. She knew this, too.

‘You’re Russians, aren’t you, you and your brother? Sir Alex Troy’s boys.’

‘From Tula,’ he said, as he always did.

‘My mother was from Vilnius. Her parents brought her over in 1899. Russian speakers, Jews, outsiders twice over. Trying to beat the pogrom. They got on a ship bound for Ellis Island. It put in at Tilbury. They disembarked, looked around for the Statue of Liberty, decided it was lost in the fog, registered, and lived here for the best part of a week under the illusion it was New York. My father was from Cork. He had no illusions. He had no adherence to the faith either. An odd marriage, but it worked. Half-Catholic, half-Jewish, guaranteed for neurosis, wouldn’t you say?’

Troy saw the gap.

‘Was your brother neurotic?’

‘Yes. And that’s why he killed himself. In the end. A more stable man might have ridden out the embarrassment, a more secure man might have seen it as less than life-threatening. Only a fool would ever have dismissed it as trivial. He didn’t have to kill himself. It was always in him to do so, however.’

‘I take it your brother had run Cockerell during the war?’

‘Yes. He was in the Navy. Made commander. One notch higher than Cockerell. Ever since then there’s been the usual rubbish about the reserve list and a job in the Foreign Office, and his rank became a sort of courtesy, concealing whatever rank he really held.’

‘And he was blamed for what Cockerell did?’

‘Blamed, interrogated, punished and humiliated. They posted him to Reykjavik at the end of June. Can you imagine the humiliation? Good war record. Bright young thing of the department, leading light in Soviet watching, spoke the language since childhood, still under forty—and they post him to a non-place, to a non-job. All he’d do for the rest of his tour would be to count fishing boats and spy on the amount of cod and halibut they landed. It was worse than sacking him. I always disliked Daniel’s commitment to his job. In wartime it seemed fine. In peace it didn’t. Don’t ask me why. Maybe in war everything was bending to the common cause. The fabric of the old British prejudices stretching out of shape, holes appearing like fishnet stockings, holes through which men like Daniel passed. Outsiders became insiders. He thought it was permanent. Bloody fool. He lied to himself and he lied to me. He wanted to be accepted.

‘The night before he left he came round to see me, already half cut. He finished off a bottle of gin in my sitting room and blubbered on about his job. I urged him to quit. He couldn’t do that, he told me. Once they had you, you were theirs for ever. It would all blow over. He’d done nothing. Sooner or later they’d see that. Then he told me. Told me how Cockerell came to see him after more than ten years. Daniel had been in charge of him, his “case officer” or whatever the spooks call it, during the war. He’d retired him, because he was so obviously past it. Cockerell told him he wanted one last job before he finally hung up his flippers. Told Daniel he could tackle the Ordzhonikidze, described some crazy scheme he’d thought up for examining the hull of the ship. Why would we want to do that? Daniel asked him. And Cockerell rambled on about Russian secrets, and how it was a golden opportunity. Daniel said no. Told him he couldn’t possibly get authorisation for such a harebrained scheme. But he felt sorry for the old fool. He took him for a drink at his club. But even that was showing off. Boasting that he had a club to take him to.

‘And then the bubble burst. The rumours about Cockerell started. The papers got hold of it. Entry records were checked. They all had to produce their diaries, and there it was, just as the PM was trying to deny everything, Daniel’s diary showed an appointment with Cockerell. The log on the door showed Lieutenant Commander Cockerell admitted to see Commander Keeffe in March. Too many spooks saw Daniel with Cockerell in his club, drinking like old comrades. And nobody believed a word of Daniel’s version. That he put Cockerell on a train back to darkest Derbyshire with a couple of stiff drinks inside him and told him to forget about Khrushchev and enjoy his retirement.

‘He spent two days with someone he called the “Soft Man”—he looked five years older by the time he emerged. Then the Branch called. Smashed everything that mattered to him. And the final humiliation. Three weeks before Daniel shipped out for Reykjavik the PM decided to own up and Daniel was sent up to Derbyshire to debrief the widow. And I think debrief is Newspeak for “shut her up”. I don’t know what he said to her. He hardly spoke except when he was drunk. Mind you, that was every day by then. He sailed for Reykjavik drunk, he phoned me up drunk. And he died drunk, swimming in gin and barbiturates.

‘I was at work when they told me. I have an office just off the reading room. Chap called Woodbridge, Tim Woodbridge, called in. Parliamentary Secretary at the Foreign Office, MP for Upshire or Downshire. No one I knew. Most of my work is with the Opposition. Government doesn’t much need the briefs we can prepare, they have the civil service at their beck and call. So, Woodbridge introduced himself, told me he had some bad news for me, started his how-sorry-we-all-are waffle. I cut him short and told him if Daniel was dead he should just spit it out. Had to be Daniel. My parents are long gone, and we were neither of us married. There was just me and him. And besides, it was in his nature to do the silly thing. Anyway, Woodbridge let me have a little cry, and when it looked as though I’d put on the stiff upper lip he came to the real purpose of his visit. Anything among Daniel’s possessions relating to the job must be returned to the spooks, and I’m still bound by the Official Secrets Act. I must tell no one anything, and if I cooperate my prospects at the House are assured. Meaning if I don’t, they’ll finish me. All said in the nicest possible way, you understand, and not a word of reference to what he really meant—just “recent events in which your brother may have been involved”. Didn’t mention spies or frogmen or Khrushchev. And all the time the bastard called me “my dear”. I can take all the time I want off work, all they ask is for assurances of my discretion. I felt like he was pretending all the time. Pretending I was one of them, pretending I wasn’t a woman, pretending I mattered in some way, pretending I was part of “the club”, pretending I played by the same rules, for God’s sake pretending I wasn’t Jewish!’

‘Then why are you telling me this?’

‘Because I’m not part of the club. Because faith, age and gender exclude me from it. Because I won’t play by their rules. I like my job. I’ve worked hard to get there. Scholarship to Girton when I was seventeen, a Master’s from the LSE by the time I was twenty-one. Commons Librarian at twenty-six. But they can’t bribe me with it. They can’t use it to hit me over the head. I don’t know what I’d’ve done. I’ve almost cleaned out Daniel’s flat and I haven’t found a damn thing that would point a finger at anyone. But I know what I know. And if you hadn’t come along I’d’ve found someone. Some bloody Ivanhoe would come along and rescue Rebecca. I hope to God he would. I’d’ve told somebody. God knows, I might even have told your brother, I’ve written the odd brief for him. At least he knows my name.’

‘Don’t.’

‘Eh?’

‘Don’t tell him anything.’

She shrugged. ‘If you like. I’m not sure what appealing within Westminster will achieve anyway.’

She paused. Troy could almost hear the action of memory.

‘Tell me, do you remember that piece in The Economist last year, at the time the House debated Burgess and Maclean?’

‘What piece?’

‘I think the chap’s name was Fairlie. He said something like the “Establishment closing ranks” to protect them? Does that ring a bell?’

It didn’t. Troy had dim memories of poor old Harold Philby denying all the innuendo in the press conference at his flat, facing the likes of Alan Whicker, and doing his best to defend himself against the power of rumour.

‘Vaguely.’

‘It stirred up a debate in itself. One of those cultural rows that happen from time to time as a country and a culture redefines itself. That’s what we’re doing now. Redefining ourself. Doing it rather badly, as a matter of fact. And just because we don’t have a Fourth of July, or salute the flag, and we have no notion of un-British in the sense of un-American, and no one stands up in the cinema for the national anthem any more, it doesn’t mean we don’t have a sense of identity, a sense of ourself. Fairlie put his finger on it. The idea of an Establishment—an inner layer of Britain that always looks after its own. Not a class or a hierarchy, and much harder to define than that. Layer’s about the best I can do. It’s about belonging. I don’t belong. My brother did not belong, and he died of wanting to belong. He could not live with the accusation of betrayal. But he never grasped that without belonging there can be no betrayal. Do you see what I mean?’

Troy saw very clearly what she meant. For a moment it was like debating with his father. It was his kind of argument. It was his kind of structure. But she had got the important point the wrong way round.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘But the point of Burgess and Maclean is that belonging makes betrayal impossible. If you belong you cannot betray. Establishment, however you define it, is not country, is not patria. Betray and the country will disown you or prosecute you. This Establishment, this layer as you call it, never will. It is in that scheme of things perfectly possible to betray, to belong and not to accept that you have betrayed. It’s perfectly possible that Burgess has kept up his subscription to whatever gentleman’s club he was in on the off chance of his ever needing it again.’

He thought of Patum Pepperium, the Gentleman’s Relish, and of the gentleman in Moscow, outrageous to the last, still thinking of himself as belonging to everything he had sold up the Swanee, still wanting betrayal with relish, holding a press conference to justify his betrayal still wearing his Old Etonian tie.

‘Which,’ Miss Keeffe replied, ‘ought to be a paradox. But it isn’t, is it?’

She put her hands up, the fingertips touching, the palms apart, the ribs and buttresses of a symbolic, make-believe cathedral.

‘The Establishment closes ranks to protect and in so doing contains, that is includes and excludes. Even if you’re living in Moscow on a KGB pension, you’re still included. But God help the buggers caught in the gate when the ranks slam shut.’

She brought her palms together, the soft clap of flesh on flesh.

‘Splat. That’s what happened to Daniel Keeffe. Splat.’

It seemed to Troy that they understood one another perfectly. Rarely had he had a conversation with someone who so closely shared his own prejudices. But to what end?

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

She looked surprised. Looked back at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

‘Want? Why should I want anything from you? You came to me, Mr Troy. You do what you have to do. I haven’t solved your murder for you. Nor have I added to the rollcall of the dead. My brother was a victim, as I’m sure you will agree, the perfect scapegoat, but he wasn’t murdered and it will do no good for me to pretend that he died by any other than his own hand.’

Looking back on the whole sorry mess he always stuck at this moment, came back to it time and again, that this was the one person who had been lucid through the pain and anger, that this was the one person in the entire affair who had wanted nothing of him.

‘Then let me put it another way. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to finish clearing out Drayton Gardens. Then I’m going to go back to work. If, as a result of what I’ve told you, Woodbridge or any one of the Gentlemen accuse me, I shall not deny it. Nor shall I resign. They’ll have to fire me. I’ve jumped through the English hoops all my life, so did my brother, we made ourselves in the required image, but they can’t make me a liar, Mr Troy.’

But, of course, this was where they differed. He had long since, since childhood, since the coming of language, accepted the inevitability of lying. It was almost a way of life.

Troy looked out at the station sign, the line through a circle that marked every stop on the London Underground. He’d noticed nothing since Miss Keeffe had begun to speak, they could have been anywhere for all he knew, from Notting Hill to Charing Cross, but now she had so obviously finished. They were pulling out of Moorgate. One more stop and they’d be at Liverpool Street. He said goodbye and got out at the next stop. Found himself in front of the platform bar he and Khrushchev had propped up. Now it was shuttered and barred, or he’d have bought half a pint and thought a while. Instead, he looked down the tunnel, breathed deeply, searching to see if he too could smell despair, wondering what despair should smell like and why it should have a smell at all. He could not—only bacon frying.