§74

In the morning, Troy drove her to the station—St Pancras once more. Up the ramp to stop the Bentley by the red brick arch that led under the gothic hotel into the soot-blackened glass engine shed.

With her hand on the door, one foot on the ground and an irate cabbie honking behind them, Foxx turned to him and said, ‘You’ll tell me. Won’t you? You won’t just let it slip, you’ll tell me?’

‘Whatever I find out, I’ll share with you.’

Her muscles tensed, the merest pressure on the car door, and then relaxed. She looked back at him again.

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Most men are married. Either to a woman or to the job.’

‘Which am I?’

‘Both,’ she said.

§75

Dickie Muffins was the quietest of the four. At once the most and the least imaginative of the schooldays quartet of Charlie, Gus, Troy and Dickie. A born bookworm, with none of the daring of Gus or Charlie, and none of the intense, obsessive introspection of Troy. He had always followed the line of least resistance. To university at eighteen, a year at Harvard, and to the family business at twenty-two.

The family business was one of London’s oldest private banks, with but a single branch, so small you might easily miss it altogether or mistake it for a private house, in Hanover Square, a stonesthrow from Regent Street.

He did not, Troy knew, give a damn about the bank. Joining had simply fulfilled his obligations to family—the line of least resistance—and allowed him endless free hours to pursue his first love—military history—in which field over the last ten years he had produced a definitive account of the Iberian Campaign and a well-reviewed life of Marshal Ney—­uninterrupted save for the rare visit from one of his all too well-heeled customers. It said something for the scam Cockerell was working if he could afford an account at Mullins Kelleher for his mistress, without which Madeleine could not have had the use of the deposit box.

Troy did not see enough of Dickie, but that was entirely his own fault.

‘Freddie. What a surprise. What brings you here?’

Dickie rose from a pile of books, his hand extended.

‘It’s business, Dickie.’

‘Bugger—do I have to play the bank manager? What’s up? Your sisters squandered the family fortune?’

Troy took the police 10 C 8 of Madeleine Kerr from his briefcase and laid it on top of the open book on Dickie’s desk.

‘Oh shit,’ said Dickie. ‘Oh shit. She’s dead, isn’t she? I saw a lot like that when I was in the ARP during the war. Not a mark on them, but dead as door nails from the blast.’

Troy laid the flat Mullins Kelleher key on top of the photograph.

Dickie stared at the juxtaposition for a moment or two, then reached behind him and laid a four-day-old Evening Standard next to it.

‘Murder on the Brighton Line.’

‘It’s her, isn’t it, Freddie? She was the unnamed woman found dead on the Brighton train. And you’re the unnamed policeman injured in pursuit of the murderer, aren’t you?’

‘’Fraid so. Dickie, I need to know what’s in that safety deposit box. I take it the box is in Madeleine’s name?’

‘Indeed it is. Mrs Madeleine Kerr. Never did come across Mr Kerr. I take it you don’t have a warrant?’

‘Not at this stage.’

‘Or any stage?’

Troy shrugged. ‘I do have the consent of Madeleine’s next of kin.’

‘In writing?’

Troy shook his head.

‘There is the matter of probate. Probate takes a damn sight longer than four days.’

‘She’s dead, Dickie, and I do have the key.’

‘Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.’

‘Old pals’ act?’

Dickie bustled out from behind the desk and its small mountain of books, pulling on his black jacket, trying to look like a banker.

‘I’ll need to get the second key, come on.’

Troy followed him down two floors to the vaults, through a thick steel outer door and a mesh inner door to a room of a thousand tiny doors.

Halfway up the wall Dickie inserted his key and beckoned to Troy. They turned their keys at the same time and the tiny door swung sideways to reveal the handle of a long, narrow steel drawer.

Troy flipped the lid. Inside was a single envelope addressed simply ‘Shirley’.

He tore it open. A single sheet of foolscap. A single sheet of utter gobbledegook. A numerical soup. And Sellotaped to the bottom were five small keys much like the one he had just used to open the box.

‘Anything wrong, Freddie?’ Dickie said.

Troy folded the paper.

‘I’m going to have to take it away.’

Dickie slid the drawer back in and closed the door.

‘My God, you ask a lot.’

‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Did Madeleine have much money in her account?’

‘Now, you’re asking too much. I can’t possibly tell you that.’

‘How far does the writ of the old pals’ act run?’

‘Not that far. You’ll get me shot. Speaking of old pals. Seen anything of Charlie lately?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No, I haven’t.’

Troy had tried ringing Charlie not long after his return from Vienna. It was news then. News he felt he should share with his oldest friend. It wasn’t news now and he didn’t feel like sharing it with anyone. Winding up the staircase, Dickie asked all the ‘what’s new?’ questions and Troy muttered inconsequentially about things being ‘much the same’.

He was letting Dickie down, and he knew it.

§76

Troy parked the car by St James’s Park Underground and went into the station to use a call box. He dialled his own number at the Yard. If he got Jack, then he would just press button B, get his pennies back and try later. It was Clark who answered.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes, sir. Mr Wildeve’s in court today; the Old Bailey.’

‘Do you know anything about codes?’

‘You mean coded messages, that sort of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Trained in it, sir. Army Intelligence cryptography course at Camberley in 1947. And odd refreshers while I was in Germany.’

And, thought Troy, twenty years of doing the crossword in The Times.

‘OK. I’m coming in.’

Ten minutes later he put the document he had taken from Mullins Kelleher in front of Clark.

Clark looked at it for less than a minute, and said, ‘Piece of cake. Simple substitution. Number for letter. All you need to know is how far down the alphabet they start. Nobody’s dim enough to go A–1, B–2—at least no one over the age of twelve. All I need is a little time without interruptions.’

He cocked his head in the direction of Wildeve’s desk.

‘If you catch my drift.’

‘Quite,’ said Troy.

Then it struck him that Clark meant more by the remark.

‘Why don’t you go home and read a book, sir.’

Clark pulled open the top drawer of his, that is Troy’s, desk.

‘Borrow anything you like.’

Not a bad idea, thought Troy, took Lolita off the top of the pile and shoved it in the pocket of his jacket. He made a quick telephone call to Nikolai, said goodbye to Clark and drove over to Knightsbridge. The only way Jack would ever find out he had been in Scotland Yard was if one of the blokes in uniform on the door mentioned it. That was pretty unlikely, he thought, as none of them would know that he was meant to be off sick.

Nikolai was outside Imperial College, waiting for him. Thin and grey, and looking smaller than ever—hatless and coatless in the summer sun. The flaps of a capacious double-breasted jacket waving unbuttoned as if to emphasise the slightness of his build. Without the winter weight of his astrakhan coat, he seemed to Troy to be stripped of all bulk, to be well on the way to becoming a wizened old man.

‘You haff unerring copper’s instinct, my boy. My stomach rumbles and tells me I will not get through to lunchtime, then you ring and invite me to early lunch. Leave your preposterous motor car here, and let us walk the length of Exhibition Road while giving thanks to the memory of Prince Albert.’

He slipped on a pair of ancient sunglasses, their lenses as dull and unreflective as blackboards, and walked off southerly down the road. Troy found himself wondering about his gait. Was this an old man’s shuffle? Prince Albert’s achievement got very little of the old man’s attention. He asked for family gossip and, when it seemed that Troy had none, loaded him up with his own.

‘What’s got into your sister?’ he asked.

‘Which one?’

‘Sasha.’

‘Dunno. I can’t remember when I last saw her.’

‘She is up and down, up and down. Moody is an inadequate word to describe her. She swings from elation to misery.’

This, to Troy, about summed her up at any time, and he could not see what Nikolai was getting at.

‘God knows. She’s forty-six. Do you suppose . . . ?’

‘Ach. Don’t ask me. I’m a physicist. I know nothing of biology.’

They crossed the Cromwell Road, by the Victoria & Albert Museum. Nikolai pointed to the tiny traffic island, with its thick bottle-glass floor— a skylight to the dark, miserable tunnel that lay below.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when you were a little boy? How we would come down the tunnel from the underground station and climb the steps to emerge over there? You used to think it was a kind of magic to pop up out of nowhere into the middle of the traffic.’

It was one of those drifts of memory that were so characteristic of his grandfather and were getting more typical of Nikolai with age. Troy now realised where they were heading. To the Polish caff at the end of the road. It was handy. Nikolai spoke passable Polish and, a couple of hundred yards from his office, it provided a substitute for the Russian he could not hear, and a choice of dozens of sickly-sweet sticky cakes. Troy had eaten with him there many times, although he cared little for Polish food, and doubted whether the countless Polish exiles who frequented the place cared much for an old man who spoke their language with a marked Russian accent.

They slurped their way through a bloody borscht, then Nikolai aired his cracked Polish and ordered pierogi. Dumplings. With salmon and sour cream. Fried dumplings—Пирожки. Pirozhki—the code word Khrushchev’s man at the embassy had given him.

‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Why would anyone want to spy on the Ordzhonikidze?’

‘Who, if I might ask, is anyone?’

‘The British. And I use the word loosely.’

Nikolai bit into his pierogi, chomped and shrugged.

‘No reason I can think of.’

‘Could you be a bit more forthcoming? Or do I have to wait till you’ve eaten your way through the menu?’

‘The British—or if I may be so bold as to call them “we”—we have no reason to spy on the Ordzhonikidze because we know all there is worth knowing about it, and have done since 1953. It is a Sverdlov-class cruiser. The Sverdlov itself sailed from the Baltic to Odessa in that year. It anchored at Spithead as the Soviet gesture for the Coronation. We surveyed it again from Malta, and again last year when it paid a visit to Portsmouth. There is nothing we don’t know. The Ordzhonikidze is identical. A typical ship of her class. There are at least a dozen like her. I could show you a deck plan if you so wished.’

‘Did you know Khrushchev offered to sell her to the Royal Navy while we were in Greenwich?’

‘A joke, perhaps?’

‘Of course it was a joke, but his jokes were never just surface. He meant what he said about it being almost obsolete. And if it is, why would anyone spy on her?’

‘I don’t know. Khrushchev allowed a British naval officer to travel all the way from Baltisk with them—if I am to believe MI5 gossip, the Russians even boasted that they got him drunk on Khrushchev’s birthday and let him roam at will. On the weekend they were here they even threw the ship open to tourists. They have no secrets. We know they have no secrets. They know we know they have no secrets.’

‘But Cockerell did spy on the ship.’

‘So I’m told. You are certain it was Cockerell, by the way?’

‘I identified the body myself.’

Nikolai shrugged again.

‘Did they show you his kit?’

‘His kit?’

‘His frogman’s gear. It was, I am reliably informed, ten years out of date. The sort of thing that had not been issued to a naval frogman since the war. Very far from being the new equipment he was supposed to be testing. None of the modern gadgetry.’

‘Such as?’

‘Closed-circuit oxygen systems.’

‘Meaning?’

‘It’s like the condenser on a steam engine. It leaves no trail of bubbles. A frogman is virtually undetectable. No one would be able to see him.’

‘Somebody did. Or we wouldn’t be having this conversation. No, they didn’t show me anything. But it fits, doesn’t it? The man himself is ten years too old for the job. Ten years out of condition. And stupid enough to attempt an underwater swim on a full stomach. It’s all wrong. It’s an Alice-in-Wonderland kind of espionage, isn’t it? A Looking-Glass War.’

‘Indeed it is. Are you on for cheesecake?’

Troy wondered at the old man’s skinniness. He had never known a time when he did not eat enough for two. Perhaps that was the paradox of wasting away. Nikolai was much his father’s junior, but even so he must be seventy-five or six. How long would he go on playing war games? Grateful though Troy was that he played them for the moment.

‘Doesn’t it look to you like a rogue operation? A bunch of amateurs, not the spooks?’

‘Yes it does, but the newspapers and my sources tell me otherwise. It is held to be official. And besides, Her Majesty’s Government has owned up to it.’

‘That’s the oddest thing. Why did they do it? Why not just deny it? Until the body was washed up, it was just another Russian rant. Even with the body, it was deniable.’

‘There I disagree. Enough people in Fleet Street knew about it. They knew Cockerell was missing. It was easy to draw the right and wrong conclusion. Besides, if the body were not Cockerell, where is Cockerell?’

‘Fleet Street could have been smothered with a D notice.’

‘Yes, but then there is the matter of your brother. Rod almost single-handedly forced an admission out of the Government. In fact, Sir Norman Spofford—you know who I mean . . . ?’

‘No.’

‘We’re sitting in his constituency right now. I see him from time to time. He’s one of those backbench Tories, utterly opposed to Eden—Spofford told me that Rod had almost certainly been wholly responsible for getting Eden to spill the beans. And Rod is not subject to D notices. There was virtually no way to shut him up. To own up may well have been the best chance of getting him to shut up. To let rumour run, and denial merely feeds rumour, was probably the worst solution. Someone up there took a decision to end the matter by admission, and by admission to contain it—damage limitation as Newspeak has it. Personally I think that was the biggest lie of all. But it was plausible. Whereas the notion that Cockerell might have acted alone was not. Am I to take it that you have confirmation of this from someone, that Commander Cockerell was indeed a rogue?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy.

‘Fine. Someone you can trust? No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know. We are in this too deep already. It is almost a family affair. Rod has been stirring mightily. It does, by the way, prompt me to say that if it gets out that you were the last man to see Cockerell alive, then someone might put two and two together, your part in the matter and Rod’s, and make five.’

Nikolai worked his way through a hefty slice of cheesecake. Troy sipped Russian tea, thinking as he did every time he succumbed to tradition that he much preferred it with milk, and that whatever their other ­failings —and they were legion—the English were still the only tribe that knew how to make a good cup of tea.

‘What,’ Nikolai asked, puffing out a fine dust of icing sugar from his beard, plucking words out of the air that Troy had thought he had uttered and discarded, ‘do you mean by “a Russian rant”?’

Troy thought about it. ‘Do it!’

‘I think,’ he began slowly, ‘I think Khrushchev wanted something to happen. I think the incident came gift-wrapped and it must be pissing him off no end that it’s not turned out to be a clear propaganda victory.’

Nikolai beckoned to the waitress, and ordered another helping of cheesecake.

‘Suddenly you are the master of understatement. It is, in the language of football, an own goal. Or to put it another way, the Prime Minister has shot himself in the foot so many times that the cook at Number 10 uses his shoes to strain the vegetables.’

Out in the street, retracing their steps. Nikolai put on the sunglasses again, squinted up at the sky, decided he did not need them and dropped them into the breast pocket of his jacket. He set off. Yes. The walk was definitely sliding slowly into a shuffle. Once more he rummaged among Troy’s words.

‘You say you haff not seen Sasha in a while?’

Troy did not answer. In the keen ear of the mind he heard the surface break over a rising ‘you know what your trouble is?’ The old man walked on slightly ahead of him, throwing the words over his shoulder.

‘Yet she is at Mimram most weekends. Is she not?’

He paused. Troy declined the bait.

‘Ergo you haff not been to Mimram. Ergo you haff not seen your wife.’

Troy quickly drew level. He was damned if he’d talk to his back.

‘If you’re about to utter a catechism of cliché along the lines of “marry in haste, repent at leisure”, or “mixed marriages never work”, then don’t. I don’t want to hear it.’

Nikolai looked up at him, the beginning of a twinkle in his eye.

‘Far from it, my boy. The regret was all mine. The first time I saw her I wished I were thirty years younger.’

§77

He lay on the bed and opened Lolita. He read the first sentence: ‘Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins,’ and by the second do-re-mi recitation of Lo-lee-ta knew he was defeated. He took the copy of Casino Royale off the bedside table—the one he had pinched from Cockerell’s office —and decided to read it again. He was less disturbed this time by its author’s lush, almost surreal prose than he was intrigued by the mind of its erstwhile reader, the late Commander Cockerell. Was this how he saw himself? Smooth, charming and vulnerable in a brutal, mannish sort of way? Troy looked at the cover. More than a little lurid, with an artist’s impression of James Bond in black and white at the bottom. Cockerell, with his weaselly face, pencil-line moustache and air of self-regarding weediness, looked nothing like this ideal. If anything it resembled the actor Eric Portman, a rather old-fashioned English face, strong in the nose and jaw—much more like Rod than like Cockerell. Cockerell was much more a poor man’s—if not an outright beggar’s—Ronald Colman. And that was the generous view. The painfully truthful view invoked the name of Edward Everett Horton, in all his spindly bumbling, once more. God save us all from self-awareness, thought Troy.

He had to admit it was still a good read, and he made a mental note to pick up a few more Flemings the next time he was in the Charing Cross Road. The plot, the outcome of this one, made him think of the Marlowe line: ‘. . . but that was in another country and besides, the wench is dead.’ Dead wenches were terribly useful to plots in novels, particularly if, like Fleming, you wanted to keep your hero unencumbered and tortured in the soul. God knows, Fleming gave Bond enough torture of the body as it was—Troy winced as he read the scene in which Bond is thrashed across the bollocks with a rattan carpet-beater. What kind of a mind thought these things up? What kind of a man did Arnold Cockerell think he was, in his own mind? Did that drab, duplicitous little life long to see itself tortured, grieving at the grave of a dead bitch for the rest of his days, whilst carelessly fucking all the others? Troy had, he realised too late, just formulated the plot of the cheap novelette of his own life for the last ten years or more. And it hurt like hell. God save us from self-awareness.

The phone rang and saved him from a reflection that was utterly futile.

‘Hello, Troy? You there?’

Troy heard the familiar if rare tones of Tom Driberg. Driberg had not called him at home in years. The precedent did not augur well.

‘Yes, Tom. I’m off sick, as a matter of fact.’

It was a losing tactic. Appealing to Driberg’s sense of tactful consideration for the poorly was as likely to put him off as it was a charging rhino, for the same pachydermous reasons.

‘I don’t suppose you could come over?’ Driberg went on as though Troy had not said what he had. ‘Bit of a pickle.’

Driberg was a master of understatement. In all likelihood, a bit of a pickle meant police involvement somewhere.

‘Who is it this time?’

‘It’s not what you think.’

‘Is it you?’ Troy asked with visions of outraged bobbies in public lavatories, enforcing the unenforceable.

‘Honestly, Troy. It’s something else entirely. Take my word. Buggery has no part of it.’

‘Delighted to hear it. I suppose you’ll tell me it can’t wait, all the same.’

‘Well . . .’ Driberg stalled.

‘Don’t worry, Tom. I’ll be round in an hour or so. I could do with the air.’

He rang off. Driberg could lie for Britain. Troy knew in his bones that he had fallen foul of the law and was, as before, appealing to Troy’s rank in the force to cover up some queer indiscretion. If not his own, then some crony’s. Rod would have a fit. Just before the last election Driberg had asked Troy whether he could put in a word with Rod—in the eventuality of Labour winning he thought it was high time he got a ministerial post. No, had been Troy’s answer. He knew damn well what Rod thought of Driberg. Almost without pause Driberg had shifted the conversation round to one of his escapades—the time he had blown a guardsman on duty at Buckingham Palace, after dinner with George VI and Queen Elizabeth. A couple of beers later he once again tried to coax Troy into ‘having a bit of chat with your brother’. There was, it seemed, no natural division in the man’s mind to prevent him rolling the distastefully disparate into a single conversation. Not that Driberg lacked all discretion. Or else he would have been nicked long ago.

The flat Driberg had was not the same one he had had during the war. Troy was relieved at that. His mildly superstitious sense bristled at the memory of finding Neville Pym there all those years ago, with all the consequences that followed. Perhaps he was wrong after all. Perhaps Driberg just wanted to natter. The Driberg who opened the door to him certainly seemed to be relaxed. He had a glass in his hand, and as he led Troy to the narrow window terrace, no more than a shelf above the street, he snatched a bottle of malt off the coffee table. Troy glanced down at the table. Driberg was an inveterate reader of poetry. A slender volume of Philip Larkin lay face down—The Less Deceived—its pages splayed in lieu of a bookmark. The flat was tiny, serving Driberg as nothing more than a London base, but the walls were lined with bookshelves. The man read more than anyone else he knew, short of his Uncle Nikolai. Troy remembered Ian Fleming, with whom he had passed a long afternoon, and for a fleeting second felt the pointless pinprick of cultural guilt.

Out on the terrace there was just enough room for two upright chairs, but the impulse was right. It was an evening to take in the passing of day and watch London wend its way home and then work its way out into the street again. Summer in the city. Well worth it as a spectator sport; beat the goggle-box any night. A pleasing variation on Troy’s verandah habit.

Driberg sloshed three fingers of whisky into a glass and handed it to Troy. It might just turn out to be a pleasant evening after all. When he didn’t have a bee in his bonnet, Driberg could be the best of company. Pushed, even Rod would admit that Tom was a wag.

‘I’ve been in Russia,’ he said.

‘I know,’ said Troy.

‘I got my interview with Khrushchev.’

‘I noticed,’ said Troy. ‘Congratulations.’

‘Hang on, there’s more.’

Driberg paused. Swirled his scotch, and then, almost against the grain of character, weighed up his words.

‘When it was over—or at least when I thought it was over—this other chap was summoned, and I found myself interviewed. Tables turned. If you see what I mean?’

Troy didn’t.

‘What other chap?’

‘Serov. Victor Serov.’

Troy began to see all too clearly.

‘Ivan Serov?’

‘Dunno. Could be, I suppose. Victor. Ivan. That sort of name.’

‘The head of the KGB?’

‘That’s the feller.’

Suddenly Troy could see for miles and very little of what followed caused him to raise a single hair of an eyebrow. It might just be a pleasant evening, but Troy could feel it begin to slip away from him. Serov, after all, was a nasty piece of work. He had been shown the diplomatic door in March or April, when Khrushchev had been stupid enough to send him on ahead, and he was surely the man who, Nikolai had predicted, would not live to collect his pension.

‘Khrushchev sends for this chap,’ Driberg went on. ‘The interpreter stays put, and the next thing I know he’s asking me to spy for them.’

This was not sufficient to break the stride of the conversation. The only thing that disturbed Troy was that only Driberg would ever dream of having a conversation like this on a balcony. Down in the street the citizens of London, Her Majesty’s subjects, in whose name all this cloak and dagger nonsense was conducted, shuffled around between home and job, stopping-off points on the way to the grave. It reminded Troy of Eliot’s office workers teeming across London Bridge—he had not known death had ‘undone so many’. Oblivious to the culture of deceit in which they swam like fish in water, dreaming dreams of better days—or as his wife had so bluntly put it ‘still harping on about the goddam war’. One day, thought Troy, they might even come to look back fondly on the bizarre equilibrium of the cold war—if it ever ended.

‘And what did you say?’

‘I was a bit flummoxed. You can imagine.’

‘Of course.’

‘I found myself thinking what their next move might be after I said no—the Lubyanka? A salt mine? The Dissident Ladies’ Touring Orchestra of East Siberia? But then, when it came down to it I was more interested in what happened if I said yes. I mean, it’s not as if I know any secrets. Five years in opposition—Gaitskell doesn’t tell me a bloody thing. If he were PM I doubt he’d give me the time of day. So I said, “What exactly is it that you want me to do?” I was expecting Serov to answer. The interpreter was looking at him as he spoke, but it was Khrushchev who chipped in. “We want you,” he said, “to spy on the Labourites.” For a second or two I didn’t know what he meant. Then I realised he meant the party. Us. The Labour Party! I tell you, Troy, you could have knocked me down with a feather.’

Troy sipped at his whisky. Déjà vu.

‘That night at the Commons,’ he said, ‘when George Brown got right up Khrushchev’s nose. He got it into his head that Labour was some sort of anti-Soviet group. George makes a strong impression at the best of times, and this was one of the worst, as I’m sure you’ll recall. Khrushchev thinks George is really representative of the party. And he thinks he might be some sort of disaffected Trotskyite. Which is about as far from the truth as you could get. That, plus Rod giving him that list of missing East European dissidents and what-have-you stuck in his mind. In fact, I’d say it irritated the hell out of him. I told him what the party was, but it was all to a deaf ear. He’s asking you to spy on the Labour Party because he seriously thinks it’s a threat. Possibly the only man in Europe who does, but . . . What did you do, tell him Gaitskell would soon have his finger on the button?’

‘Not exactly,’ Driberg paused. Let Troy sip a little more of the malt. ‘I told him I’d do it.’

Nice, thought Troy. Get yourself out of that one, Tom. But, of course, the whole point in Troy’s being there was that Driberg expected something of him. Surely, even in his wildest imaginings, he did not think Troy could get him out of this?

‘Tell me, Tom. Did Nikita Sergeyevich offer you a tot of vodka by any chance?’

‘Well, yes. Several, as a matter of fact.’

‘Fine. Now, let me get this straight. After a few too many, one over the eight, your hollow leg brimming with the spirit, you tell the leader of the Soviet Union and his head of KGB that you’ll spy on the Labour Party for them?’

Driberg drew in his breath, let it out slowly, as though what followed needs must be precision.

‘Sort of,’ he muttered.

‘Sort of?’

‘Well. Obviously I won’t but . . .’ The sentence vanished into the vagueness from which it came. A hand waved out into nowhere indicating a vast whatever.

‘Let me put it this way, Tom. What on earth do you expect me to do?’

‘Well.’ Driberg perked up, almost smiled. ‘You know the bugger. You’ve spent more time with Khrushchev than anyone else in England. You must be the envy of half the spooks in MI5. Can you trust him? is what I want to know.’

‘I’d hate to have to trust him,’ said Troy hoping the remark was not too obscure for what appeared to be a bad day for Driberg’s intelligence. And at the back of his mind dreading the day he would ever have to place his trust in a man like Nikita Khrushchev.

‘But if push comes to shove?’

‘Tom, he’s a politician!’

‘Bad as that, eh?’

‘Yes. And if you take my advice you’ll tell the spooks before one of their moles tells them first.’

‘Yeees,’ said Driberg slowly, musing. ‘I was going to have a natter with them a bit later on in the week. It was just . . . the money, you see.’

‘Eh?’

‘The money. They weren’t expecting me to do it for nothing. Gave me five hundred pounds up front. Told me they had a network. Absolutely untraceable. They could pay money to me in Britain, and it would never be traced back to Russia. I’ve spent a few bob of it already. You know, souvenirs. That sort of thing.’

Troy did not believe a word of this. The idea of Driberg blowing hundreds of pounds on concentric wooden Russian dolls and odd boxes to keep fags in was pretty well preposterous. This was simply Driberg’s way of stating that he was broke. It was in Driberg’s nature always to feel broke, regardless of circumstances—and his circumstances were that he was out of the House, after stepping down at the 1955 election, and probably feeling very broke and very sorry for himself—but Troy knew damn well that literary London was awash with rumours that he had recently taken a large advance—one never heard rumours of small advances—from a publisher, the Viennese émigré George Weidenfeld, to write a biography of Burgess. He was just about the last person Troy would have trusted to write such a book, and he doubted whether George would get his money’s worth, but he rather thought that this had bankrolled the trip to Russia. All Driberg was saying was that if at all possible he’d like to have his cake and eat it—to tell MI5 and somehow hang onto the loot.

‘If they’ve got a network, why did they take the risk of giving you cash?’

‘Network temporarily out of commission, Serov said. Asked if I minded cash, much the same way one asks a chap if he minds a cheque when one knows damn well the bloody thing’ll bounce. I wasn’t crazy about carrying that much boodle through customs, but then they hardly look for currency coming in. Much more concerned about it going out. And they’d be back to business as usual in a few weeks, Serov reckoned. I didn’t ask what he meant.’

Troy knew exactly what he meant. Angus had used precisely the same argument to him when Troy had queried the money-laundering operation in which Cockerell was so patently involved. Driberg was an unlikely source for the confirmation Troy had sought, but here it was. The piece of the puzzle that made it all make sense. This was what the man had been up to with all those phoney figures and floating thousands. It was logical. Soon enough, they’d replace him. A new courier would be found, and any minute now some of the world’s worst carpet-patterns would be magically transformed into a healthy row of noughts in Driberg’s bank account.

‘I think you’ve no choice about this, Tom. Tell the spooks. Give them the money and let them take care of it. At the very least you’ll get an anecdote for your memoirs out of it.’

‘Oh really,’ said Driberg rather too keenly. ‘Do you think anyone will want to read them?’

§78

A dozen times in the weeks since he had been summoned to Portsmouth to look at the bloated mess that once had been Arnold Cockerell, it had crossed Troy’s mind to call Charlie. Each time he had put it off. He had never, on any Scotland Yard case, asked a favour of Charlie. It would break the silent agreement they had made many years ago, at the end of the war, when the fiction of Charlie the Diplomat had first been launched; it would make of his work the last thing either wished it to be, an issue between them that ran the constant risk that it might divide them.

It was almost dusk when he got back from Driberg’s, a little the worse for the whisky, clutching The Less Deceived, which Driberg had thrust on him. He reached for the phone, not at all sure what he would say if Charlie answered.

There was haste, a tearing urgency even in the word ‘hello’.

‘It’s Freddie.’

‘Freddie,’ Charlie slipped into charm mode, effortlessly. ‘Long time no see, but sad to say it may yet be longer. I have a cab at the door.’

‘I just wanted to—’

‘And a plane waiting. Sorry. Blame Colonel Nasser. I’m flying to Akrotiri tonight. If it can wait I’ll call you the minute I’m back. Honestly. Must dash!’

Troy said a snatched goodbye and hung up. He remembered what Charlie had read at Cambridge in the early thirties—Arabic. All British diplomats were Arabists. That, too, was part of the fiction. It somehow lifted them onto a plane of academic respectability. To read German or Russian might mean you really wanted to be a spy, to read Economics or Philosophy might mean you were too bright to be a spy, and as everyone who was too thick to read anything else read History, Arabic did nicely, tinged, as it was, with a little learning and a little empire, smacking of T.E. Lawrence and St John Philby. He could not believe for one second that Charlie had ever thought he’d be called upon to use it, but what other purpose could there be in sending him to Cyprus? Cyprus, after all, did not matter. Everyone who was anyone knew that sooner or later the British would give Cyprus to the Cypriots. Egypt—Egypt was another matter.

§79

Clark called on Troy the next morning. It was gone nine. Troy was being lazy. Still in his dressing gown. Still sipping coffee and flicking through the morning paper. He had read a page of Nabokov and felt better about it, and a page of Larkin and felt even better about that. He opened the door to see Clark standing in the eastern light, staring up at the warmth of sun edging in over Bedfordbury, much as Troy’s pigs would do at any opportunity. He turned to Troy and smiled.

‘Cracked it, sir,’ he said simply.

Troy swung back the door and Clark bustled in. He took a sheaf of papers from his jacket pocket and quickly unfolded them at the dining table. Troy sat down, pushed a cup and the cafetiêre towards Clark. Clark ignored it. He was brimful of enthusiasm, the customary demeanour of misery, his habitual disguise—all good coppers needed one, Troy thought—temporarily suspended.

‘I can’t stop long. It was a piece of cake. The only thing that threw me was the knock-on. Every repetition would move on two, but every pattern of five, she’d move on three. I think she must have been a darts player. Still, it was vowels more often than not.’

‘She?’ Troy queried. He had not been at all certain whether it was the work of Cockerell or of Madeleine.

‘It was written by a woman, sir. You’ll see. An amateur too, but a good one. Someone who took a real delight in deception. The satisfaction of a good red herring.’

It took Troy back a little to realise how much Clark had been able to deduce of the character of Madeleine Kerr from a simple cryptogram. She had been a delightful liar, he thought. She had paid a terrible price for her lies. Was this the reason?

‘Skip the technical stuff, you’re talking to a man who’s never finished a crossword in his life.’

‘Right you are, sir.’

Clark sat down opposite Troy, breathed deeply and began to read.

‘Dear Sis—does that make sense to you, sir?’

‘Yes—just read the lot, Eddie.’

Dear Sis, if you are reading this then the chances are that daft bugger Ronnie’s gone and got us both killed. And there’s nothing I can say here that’ll hurt you more than I have already so I’ll tell you the lot and let you make your own mind up.

I know you thought I was a prat for going off with him. And I know you thought Brighton was nothing much. But it got me out of Derbyshire, didn’t it? It got me out of an office and a life of shorthand typing. It got me out of the prospect of marrying some dozy bugger off the mill floor, who might just make foreman if he worked his balls off for the rest of his life. It got me out of a semi on a fucking council estate. Sorry. I said I wouldn’t hurt you any more. Didn’t mean that.Well, my love, it wasn’t Brighton. There was more to that, just as there was to Ronnie. You could never see that side of him, could you? I told you he’d whisked me off my feet and you should have believed me. I knew the risk and I took it—and I don’t mean the risk of another woman’s husband. Sis—I’ve seen Paris. I’ve seen Amsterdam, I’ve seen West Berlin. I’ve played Chemin de Fer in Monte, I’ve skied in Zermatt, I’ve browned me tits on the beach at St Tropez, I’ve been pissed as a fart in Biarritz—and I’ve watched Ronnie run circles round MI5 and the Russians.

Now, I don’ t want you to be alarmed at this. There’ s a lot of loose ends to be picked up. If you want to do it, it’ll set you up for life. If you don’t, put this lot on the fire and walk away from it.

Ronnie and me smuggled money. The Russians gave it to us in cities all over Europe and Ronnie pushed it through the business. Where it went after that I don’t know. Ronnie never told me and I didn’t ask. We were careful. None of the people Ronnie dealt with ever saw me. I saw them, but they didn’t see me. But like I said, if you’re reading this we slipped up somewhere, didn’t we? There’s money in five banks. At the Banque du Commerce Coloniale in Paris, and the National Bank of South Africa in Zurich, at Gebrüder Hesse also in Zurich, at the Merchant Orient in Amsterdam and at the Monégasque Premiere in Monte Carlo. Somewhere in the region of forty or fifty thousand quid, I think. It’s all legit—Ronnie’s cut. He swindled nobody. We deserved every last penny of it.

There’s also a list of everyone I ever saw or everyone Ronnie ever told me about in the game. This is dangerous stuff, but it might protect you if you know. On the other hand, it might just get you killed. But—like I said—you can walk away from it if you want.

See you in heaven, my lovely.

Clark paused breathily. When he picked up again his voice had dropped almost to a whisper.

‘It’s signed “Stella”, and then there’s a list of numbers matching the keys you gave me to the banks.’

Troy felt the weight of silence. Clark’s professional satisfaction had not blinded him to the inherent sadness in the letter. A dead woman who referred to the conspiracies of complex, devious organisations as a game. A romantic fool who’d paid with her life for what amounted to no more than a series of dirty weekends with a man twice her age in the fashionable watering holes of Europe—a deadly holiday in a class not her own—a deadly ‘game’ of which she could scarcely have grasped the purpose. Troy was stunned. He was not surprised. Since the day Angus had told him Cockerell was running a racket, what else could it have been? What else, after what Driberg had told him, could it be? How it must have appealed to the vanity of the man, to be so deliciously out of his depth in the gaming rooms of Monte Carlo, with a woman as beautiful as Madeleine Kerr on his arm. To be seen with her, simply to be seen with her—and all the time kidding themselves it was their secret, the fond illusion that they saw without being seen. What did she mean by ‘Ronnie ran circles’ round the spooks? What did she mean? When it came down to brass tacks the war had done for Arnold Cockerell as surely as it had done for those it killed quickly and those it killed slowly in the years that followed. He had died of not recovering, of not wanting to recover from that brief taste of adventure, that exhilarating rush of adrenaline. But Troy doubted that he had run circles around anyone—the spooks had him. They loved romantic fools. They were better than cannon fodder.

‘Sir?’

Clark was looking quizzically at him, beckoning him back to the moment.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said again.

‘Of course. How did you manage to get away?’ Troy asked.

‘Mr Wildeve’s in Hammersmith, sir. Body under the floorboards. Terrible niff. The neighbours called the Yard.’

‘And Stan?’

‘Mr Onions? Funny you should ask, sir. Nobody’s seen him since Saturday.’

‘Not funny at all,’ said Troy.

He went back to the kitchen and returned with the Post. He folded the paper open at page five—Overseas News.

‘Read this,’ he told Clark.

‘What this? “British Soldier Murdered in Cyprus”?’

Clark’s eyes flashed down the page; he read the whole piece in a matter of seconds.

‘I don’t get it, sir. Who is Flight Sergeant Kenneth Clover?’

‘He was Onions’ son-in-law. “Our Valerie’s” husband.’

‘I see. Poor bugger. Tortured to death and dumped in a ditch with a placard round his neck. Nasty way to go.’

‘Not the first. Not the last. There’ve been a dozen or more this year. Eoka mean to have us out. Flight Sergeant Clover was the poor sod in the middle.’

‘Did you know ’im, sir?’

‘Yes. I knew him. I knew Valerie too. Onions will be in Salford with his daughter.’

‘Why has he told no one?’

‘He’ll have told anyone who matters, the Commissioner, his ­secretary—he might even have told me if I’d been around—but he’d never let the reason be commonly known. This will make Stan mad as hell. Rage is one of the few ways he knows to register feeling. He’d be embarrassed to think his family and its troubles were being talked about.’

‘Troubles don’t come much bigger than this,’ Clark said softly.

‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘But he’ll handle it alone. I was a sergeant when his wife died. I’ve seen him this way before.’

Clark got up. Looked without loss at his cold cup of coffee.

‘I’d best be off. I think Mr Wildeve may be in Hammersmith a while. I’ll be able to call you a bit more often. I must say, sir. I thought I’d left my days of discretion behind me in Berlin. I’ve told more lies since I came to work for you than I have since I flogged black-market stockings.’

Troy showed Clark to the door and stepped into the sunlight of the yard. Warm sun on his face, cold flagstones under his bare feet.

‘I trust it’s not an imposition?’

Clark blinked up at the sun, one hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes.

‘Lord no, sir. I was born to play Leporello. And what’s life without a bit on the side?’

Troy watched him amble off towards St Martin’s Lane. He understood exactly what Clark meant. It summed up the fat, little rogue he had met in Berlin in the bleak years very well—but it was also the philosophy that had got Cockerell and Kerr killed. He wondered if he should tell him about Tosca. He never had. Simply let it be known that he had married quietly. On the Continent. An old flame. Clark had said a swift ‘congratulations’, and that was that. But he knew. In his bones Troy knew he knew.

Back in the house Troy could hear the telephone ring. He kicked the door to behind him, picked up the receiver. All his instincts told him it would be Onions. It was.

‘You’ll have heard by now,’ he said without preamble.

‘Yes, Stan. It was in the morning paper. Terrible news. I’m so sorry.’

He heard Onions sigh deeply, heard the laboured effort of self-restraint. The pause skirted infinity.

‘D’ye think you could come up? She’s askin’ for you.’

‘When?’

‘Funeral’s the day after tomorrow. I don’t suppose you could get here today?’

‘I don’t think I could,’ Troy answered, thinking on his toes. ‘But tomorrow’s fine. I could be there in good time tomorrow.’

He jotted down the address Onions gave him—a back street in the red brick wilderness of Salford’s Lower Broughton. He was deeply sorry for Stan. The relationship with Ken had been nothing special, in fact it had often seemed to Troy that the two men had nothing in common but the link that was Valerie, but Valerie was emotional enough for the three of them, and to be left alone to handle her at a time like this . . . all that duty demanded of Onions would not be enough.

He had from time to time wondered how much Stan knew. That Troy and Valerie had been an item in the last, tense summer before the war, he surely knew. It had been no secret, and they had both been single. It was the reason he sent for Troy now—another emotional buffer-zone to place between himself and the whirlwind that Valerie could whip up. Troy prayed to God that Onions did not know that they had also briefly been an item once more in the spring of 1951, while Ken was in Korea. He doubted that Onions would sanction adultery, but more than that his attitude towards young Jackie Clover, his only grandchild, was protective in the extreme. Onions refrained from open judgement on Troy’s morals—once, a few years ago, he had asked if he ever thought he would marry—Troy had uttered a decisive, if erroneous no—and any speculation on the sex life of a single, well-heeled man approaching forty had been left unspoken.

He shaved, dressed, felt through his hair to the ridge of torn skin and dried blood left on his scalp by the bullet, and rummaged around in the small drawer set beneath the mirror on the hallstand. House keys, car keys and at the bottom, gathering dust onto its thin film of protective grease, a pair of gun-metal grey lock-picks. He took out his handkerchief, wiped them clean, slipped them into the pocket of his jacket, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He felt at the scabrous ridge once more. It had ceased to hurt days ago, but he knew damn well that even if Wildeve had not imposed idleness upon him the medics would have, and if Kolankiewicz knew that he was about to cheat medicine once more—‘fuck with the head’, as he would undoubtedly put it—he would call him smartyarse, call him crazy and explode with Polish anger.

He collected the Bentley. Drove down to Brighton. Picked the lock on the door of Madeleine Kerr’s house. Stole four of her best outfits. Shoes to match. A suitcase to hold them. And was back in London by four in the afternoon. By six o’clock the next morning he was in the Bentley once more, driving north up a deserted Marylebone Lane, out of the Smoke, out of Cobbett’s Wen, out in the direction of Watford and the Black Country and the Potteries and Manchester and the far-flung North. What the South, in all its imperial snobbery, still called the Provinces. England, Troy had learnt long ago, had few greater insults than to call you provincial. It implied you still wore woad.

§80

Clearly they were savages. It was a little after noon. He had just found St Clement Street, Lower Broughton, and was parked outside number 25. Before he had even pulled the key from the ignition a grubby face had pressed itself up against the window on the driver’s side—nostrils flattened against the glass. Another head popped in at the open window on the passenger side.

‘What kind of car is this Mister is it a Cadillac or a Packard or a Ferrari it’s a big un in’t it I’ve gorra dinky of a Caddy an a Packard an a Ferrari.’

The sentence had no pauses. An acute grammarian could not have driven in a comma with a sledgehammer.

Troy looked at the child—nine or ten at the most—full of curiosity, devoid of all knowledge.

‘It’s a Bentley,’ Troy told him, trying very hard not to feel foolish.

‘Bentley?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it posh is it?’

‘lf you like.’

‘D’thee mek dinkies of it?’

Troy waved the other child off the glass and opened the door. Over the top of the car the voluble child was just visible, craning upwards, marginally short of climbing on the bodywork. A third savage had appeared from nowhere and was undertaking a personal test of the springs in the left-hand wing mirror with the flat of his hand. Behind him the vast bulk of Onions had appeared in the open doorway of number 25. A blonde, beautiful, sad-eyed girl of ten or so peeped round him at hip level.

‘Probably,’ Troy said to the boy.

Onions roared.

‘Clear off. The lot of you!’

It had no effect. In the canteen at Scotland Yard grown men would leap to their feet and spill their pudding at such a sound from Onions. Indeed he had once seen Onions simply yell Constable Agnew’s name only to see Agnew shoot bolt upright, recite his national service rank and number and click his heels together on the ‘Sir!’, deluded by the force of Onions’ delivery into believing for a moment that he was back in the Army. They all looked at him, the newcomer even paused momentarily in his technical test of the mirror, but they also ignored him.

‘I’ll mind your car for a tanner,’ said the first child.

‘OK,’ said Troy.

The boy held out a hand.

‘C.O.D.,’ Troy said.

‘Yer what?’

‘Cash on delivery. If the car’s still here when I get back you get your sixpence.’

The boy shrugged his acceptance of the terms. Onions reached behind the house door, groping for his jacket. Jackie Clover stood on the step, the thin boundary between home and street, quite possibly the only one in the terrace that had not been freshly donkey-stoned, and scrutinised Troy. It was a disturbing gaze. Trying so hard to look as deep into Troy as she could. Surely she had no memory of him. It had been so long ago and she so small. She would not speak to him. Did not speak to Onions as he ruffled her hair and told her to tell her mother that they’d ‘gone down the Grosvenor’. As they passed the Bentley Onions clipped the boy at the wing mirror round the ear without even looking at him.

§81

Onions ordered bread and cheese. A pint of mild each. Muttered that he had eaten nowt but his own cooking for three days. The barman slapped a doorstep of a slice in front of each of them. Silently Onions spooned a sticky brown pickle onto his plate, bent his back and shoulders into it and ate ravenously. It reminded Troy of the scene in Great Expectations when Magwitch, played by Finlay Currie, gorges himself out on the marshes with the food Pip has stolen for him. Was Valerie really that bad a cook? He’d never eaten a meal prepared by her; they’d always eaten out. He occasionally thought that this had been essential to the relationship. Even more than wanting to be fucked, Valerie wanted to be wined and dined. Life with Kenneth could not have been a box of delights. Even less so when he had returned home and whisked her from a backstreet in Shepherd’s Bush to a backstreet in Salford.

Troy could stand the sound of stolid munching against the faint hum of lunchtime chatter no more.

‘Had Kenneth been long in Cyprus?’ he asked.

Onions unhunched from the food and looked across the table at him. There was relief in the stony eyes, their bright blue flattened to slate with grief and tiredness. He was glad Troy had broken the ice.

‘Nobbut a fortnight. Went out there about the middle of the month. Bugger all notice. His entire squadron just told to pack and get on board a transport. Weren’t even told where they were bound. Our Valerie found out where he was when she got a postcard. That was Friday. Telegramme came Saturday. Could be worse. Could have arrived before the damn card, I suppose.’

Troy could not eat. Would not have touched the beer in any case. He knew Onions well enough to know the explosion could not be far off.

‘I mean. I ask yer. What in God’s name was he doing there? What were British tommies doing in Cyprus?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I wouldn’t be askin’ if I didn’t, would I?’ Onions snapped.

Troy knew that he could only let loose the wrath of Onions; he could not control or diminish it. He could only leach it and watch it flow down. It seemed to be what he should do.

‘Cyprus has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘The nationalists have been bumping off the odd swaddie every so often, just like the Jews did in Israel under the mandate a few years back. That’s just coincidence.’

‘Ken died for a coincidence?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t there for any reason that matters to Cyprus, Cyprus is a floating island, the great Mediterranean aircraft carrier. A handy spot to launch the invasion of Egypt.’

‘Jesus. Jesus,’ Onions whispered.

Had he really not worked it out for himself? It was hardly more than six weeks since Nasser had seized the canal. Wasn’t it obvious? Couldn’t every sentient being in Britain see that we were heading into war?

‘It’s like . . . it’s like Ken’s death doesn’t count.’

‘Not to Eden it doesn’t.’

‘Eden?’ Onions looked baffled by the word.

‘He means to have Nasser. To humiliate him on the world stage.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Yes. Rod swears the man is certifiable.’

There was a pause. Troy felt the mood swing again. The softness of shock and incomprehension rising towards anger once more.

‘He’s the Prime Minister!’

‘Yes.’

‘I voted for the bastard.’

Troy should not have been shocked by this. The phenomenon of the working-class Tory was as English as morris dancing and the Last Night of the Proms. It was simply that he and Onions never talked politics, at least not domestic politics. He was, true to class, slightly in awe of it all, the party hardly mattered, he was unduly respectful of Rod whenever he came to the Yard. Yet the truth was clear. Stan had not voted for Eden, he had voted for Churchill through Eden, who in the eyes of men like Stan was no more or less than Churchill’s shadow. That Churchill had to be booted from office almost gaga by his own party would be a mystery to Stan. Not worth the time it took to find it credible. Troy had seen this for himself. Waiting for Khrushchev at Number 10 he had bumped into Winston in a corridor, somewhat the worse for drink and by far the worse for age. Troy had no vanity that he would remember him. They had met a dozen times at his father’s dinner table, but that had been during the wilderness years, the best part of twenty years ago, but he did expect that a man in full possession of his faculties might just remember where the bog was in a house he had occupied for the best part of ten years. He had shown him to the right door, and mimed zipping up his flies when the old man emerged agape with his shirt tail flapping like an elephant’s ear.

‘What the bloody hell are we doing in Cyprus? What in God’s name have we got to do with the Gyppos? It’s like the bloody Boer War all over again. What is this? The last bash at the wogs? I thought all that malarkey went out when I was a boy; I thought we’d just fought a war for a better world?’

Onions was shouting now. It was by far the longest political statement Troy had ever heard him make, wallowing in confusion and half-articulate sentiment though it was.

‘No wonder the niggers are picking us off like flies. We’ve no business there. Let the niggers have bloody Cyprus, let ’em have the fucking desert!’

Out of the corner of his eye Troy could see the occasional turn of the head. Almost involuntary on the part of the odd lunchtime drinker. Not wanting to look. The entire street knew who Onions was. They must all know of his loss.

‘What am I to tell our Valerie? That her husband was burned to a crisp with a bloody blow-lamp, had his teeth ripped out with pliers, just because we want one last go at the niggers before the Empire finally slips through our fingers? Is that it? Is that what I have to tell her?’

Silently the barman appeared at their table and set a large brandy next to Onions’ elbow. Neither he nor Troy had touched their pints. Troy swapped his plate of bread and wedge for Onions’ empty one. Stan downed the brandy in one, and started on his second plateful. He glanced up at Troy once or twice. There were tears in the corners of his eyes.

‘Are you not hungry?’ he said at last.

‘I had something on the way. Stopped off just south of here at Dunham Park.’

Onions responded to the tactical shift. Accepted the burden of small talk.

‘Know the place. Out Altrincham way. American base during the war, wasn’t it?’

‘From the look of it you’d think they left yesterday. Jerry cans all over the place, concrete bunkers, burnt-out jeeps. Mind you, a couple of centuries before that it was the delight of the landscape painters.’

‘Sounds like a better reason for going.’

The silence fell like fine dust through sunlight. Onions ate. Fragments of pub talk began to filter through to Troy in meaningless snatches. He felt suddenly vacant in the teeth of Onions’ unanswerable, so justifiable rage, and on the momentary tabula rasa of his mind the pieces of conversation scored an image so bizarre he turned around in his seat to see who was talking.

‘Busby’s Babes’, the man was saying. It was the only decipherable phrase, and Troy saw in the mind’s eye floating kaleidoscopes of pretty pre-war women dancing to formation camera-work and Irving Berlin tunes. Black-and-white glimpses of Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler. ‘Remember My Forgotten Man’. The many death had left undone. Appropriate to the point of absurdity. Then the man holding forth jabbed the table top with his middle finger, drew a line in the sheen of beer-spill and said, ‘Bobby Charlton’s the man. He’ll get us to the top this season,’ and the image popped like a bubble blown from a pipe, as the reality pricked through. Football. He should have known. They were talking about football.

He turned back to Stan. He had all but demolished the second plateful.

‘How is she?’ Troy asked.

Stan did not look up.

‘You’ll see soon enough.’

‘Taking it badly?’ It was a lame remark. Stan looked up. Tears dried.

‘Hysterical. You know Valerie. Any excuse.’

§82

They turned the corner from Great Clewes Street back into St Clement’s. Troy’s car stood out like a Sherman tank. The only car in the street. The donkey-stoned steps shone like false teeth—all except the Clovers’, where Jackie sat exactly where Troy and Onions had left her. The boy with the model-car obsession was sitting on the bumper of the Bentley, a Beano in one hand, a slice of bread and dripping in the other. His lips moving softly as he read, oblivious to all around him. At the end house a young woman in a wrap-around overall and a headscarf stood in the doorway taking the sun and smoking a roll-up. Wisps of auburn hair peeped out from under the scarf. It was a stunningly beautiful face. Troy stared a moment too long and she puckered up, blew him a kiss and winked at him. It was the sort of thing Tosca would do, he thought.

‘Where’s your Mam?’ Onions said to the girl.

‘She said to tell you she’s gone for a lie down, Grandad.’

Jackie paused, screwed up her face to look straight up at Onions.

‘Will she be tekkin’ me ter Lewises?’ she asked.

‘I shouldn’t think so.’

‘But she promised.’

‘When was this?’

‘Last week.’

‘That was before . . . before . . .’

The child waited. Troy had little expectation that Onions would get to the end of the sentence.

‘If Val’s asleep,’ he said, ‘I’ve time to kill. No point in waking her. I’ll take Jackie into Manchester, if you like.’

Jackie stood up, went through elaborate gestures of dusting herself off and smoothing down her skirt.

‘Can I sit up front?’

Before Troy could grant her wish a small voice behind him said, ‘Can I have me tanner now?’

§83

She let Troy buy her a pair of white ankle socks and an Alice band. They seemed to be all she wanted. The decision took most of the afternoon and necessitated a full, floor-by-floor tour of Manchester’s largest department store, its cornucopia. For more than fifteen years there’d been next to nothing to buy. The modesty of her choice was entirely in keeping with the modesty of the times.

On the way home she peered out of the window less intently than she had done on the way into the city. As they crossed the Irwell Bridge she asked Troy who he was.

Onions served tea with bread and jam on the oilcloth-covered table in the back room. Valerie made no appearance. Onions took up a tray and brought it down an hour later untouched.

‘Bugger,’ he said under his breath.

Troy lied when asked if he would stay the night. Told Onions he had booked a room at the Midland. He could see little point in exhausting the pair of them with boredom if tomorrow he had to face Valerie, and do whatever it was that Onions felt himself ill-equipped to do.

§84

It ought to be raining, he thought. Pissing it down in knives and forks like it did that dismal November when they buried his father. Tearing across the sky in sheets as it had done at Debussy’s funeral—a snippet he only knew because his mother had remarked on the weather and the similarity. He had never known that she had known the man. All those years practising the piano at her behest, and such was the woman’s nature that she had never before bothered to tell him that she had known Debussy in her youth, that he had taught her the instrument when she was eight years old, that she had journeyed to France on a wet day in 1918 to see him buried in a godgiven storm, to the rival thunder of the German bombardment. A fact as buried as the corpse until the funeral of her husband prompted the randomness of memory in her, exactly as it was now doing in Troy. Perhaps funerals were Chinese boxes, always another within.

Streaming, dazzling sunshine seemed irreverent to the dead. Detrimental to the living. It showed the black of mourning in all its shabbiness. Every streak and speck and fleck turned the garb of mourning into a motley.

He had sat up front in the old black Rolls-Royce. Valerie sat between her father and daughter, crying silently throughout behind the veil. She had risen at noon that day, acknowledged Troy with the single use of his christian name, accepted a peck on the cheek from her daughter and said nothing to Onions’ desultory attempt at chatter. She retreated to the bathroom with a cup of tea and emerged forty minutes later in her widow’s weeds. They sat a long half-hour on the upright chairs in the front room, in the smell of lavender furniture polish and the stale air of disuse. When the hearse arrived bearing the body of Flight Sergeant Clover, Onions whispered, ‘Are you ready?’ and she had nodded.

Troy stood at the graveside with the detachment of a camera—‘kodak-distant’, as Philip Larkin so succinctly had it. Neighbours paid their respects and brought Valerie to the pitch of muttering. Onions stood holding Jackie’s hand, and as the last of the mourners left, Valerie put out a hand to summon Troy. He gave her his arm to lean on. Jackie rode up front on the return journey, where she had wanted to be all along. Troy took her place.

There would be no funeral baked meats. No guests. No wake. Onions made plain tea once more. As he rattled around in the scullery, Troy heard a dull thumping through the ceiling from the room above. He slipped quietly up the stairs and found Valerie sitting on her bedroom floor with the contents of the fireside cupboard scattered around her. She tugged at the perished rubber of a World War II gas mask, watching it come apart in her hands.

‘Will you look at this junk,’ she said. ‘He’d never let me throw a damn thing away.’

She threw the gas mask at the wall.

‘Fuck ’im,’ she said.

There were no tears now.

‘Fuck ’im.’

Troy sat on the floor. A small folding-bellows camera, missing the eyepiece, lay on top of a photo album, where it had fallen from the cupboard. He took it off, set it gently down, and turned a page. There was Jackie in her mother’s arms in 1946 in front of the house in Shepherd’s Bush. Six weeks old. Then the same set-up, the same place and pose, except that a proud father, in uniform, now held his daughter.

‘But you’d surely want to keep some things?’ he said.

‘Right now I could torch the lot. Starting with the bloody house.’

She slammed the album shut.

‘I don’t want to see it. He dragged me away from that to live in this hole. Did you know he asked for this posting? When he got back from Korea he took us away from everything I had, everything I knew. I was seven when Dad went to the Yard. I hardly remembered Lancashire. I was a west London girl down to my toes. I never wanted to move. Fuck ’im.’

‘I didn’t know.’

‘He wanted to get me as far away from you as he could.’

‘I didn’t know he knew about me.’

‘He didn’t. He just knew there was somebody. My “fancy man”, as he called him.’

Troy had no idea what he should or could say to this.

‘Don’t flatter yourself, Troy,’ she said. ‘You weren’t the only one. And if you didn’t know that then I’m surprised you call yourself a detective.’

It was almost a joke. A quick, grim smile flashed across her lips. Then the tears started to well in her eyes. She bowed her head and he could just hear her say, ‘Jesus Christ, Troy. What am I going to do now?’

She stretched out her arms, draped them around his neck and sobbed into his shoulder.

‘Fuck ’im,’ she said between gasps. ‘Fuck ’im. I hope he rots in hell.’

She sobbed an age away. Troy saw the light shift into late afternoon through the back window, looking out onto the privies and across the alley to the houses at the back. She had not moved in a while. All he could feel was the slow, rhythmical rise and fall of her chest against him. He put out a hand to her hair. It seemed the right thing to do. It seemed that he had to do something. She stirred. Her face came up to his. Close in the dimness. She was only thirty-seven. Still very good-looking. Almost as blonde as her daughter, her father’s piercing blue eyes set in a broad, pale face. She kissed him on the cheek. Pulled back. Looked at him expressionless. Kissed him on the lips and began to prise them apart with her tongue.

She could feel the lack of response in him. Lips like tentflaps.

‘For Christ’s sake, Troy.’

‘I’m married,’ he said simply.

‘Hah? Married?’

‘Yes,’ he said, and it felt more like a lie than all the lies he’d told lately.

‘I was married. What bloody difference did it make then? Troy, I don’t want you to tell me I’m the love of your life. I’m not so green as I’m cabbage-looking, but I know what’s going to happen. Dad will ride to the rescue like a knight in shining armour. We’ll lose the house. And good riddance. It’s an RAF house, Married Quarters, NCOs for the use of—but Dad’ll take me back to bloody Acton. I don’t want Acton, Troy. I don’t want to be a little girl in my father’s house again. Fuck Acton, fuck my Dad. I just need a break, a chance, a chance to stand on me own two feet. Me and Jackie. Just put a roof over my head till I can do that. Acton’ll kill me. He’ll get me back and he’ll never let me go. I’ll be at 22 Veryneat Villas for the rest of my life. An eternity at Tablecloth Terrace. Do this for me, Troy. You don’t have to say you love me. Just help me. I couldn’t stand Acton. Help me, Troy.’

Troy said nothing.

§85

Onions had lit a poor excuse for a fire in the iron range of the back room. He sat in front of it smoking a Woodbine.

‘I was beginning to wonder,’ he said.

‘She’ll live.’

‘In what state, though? There’ve been times when she was younger she’d work herself into such a tizzy I thought she’d go mad.’

‘She’s a grown-up now, Stan. She’ll pull through quicker than you think. And I wouldn’t expect her to wear her widow’s weeds for long.’

‘Eh?’

‘She won’t mourn for Ken any longer than she has to. In fact, I rather think somewhat less than protocol would demand. She’s quite determined to get shot of the house, and Salford, and get back to London. She won’t be erecting any shrine to Ken in this street or in her heart.’

‘She’ll be all right for money, though?’

‘Of course. Ken was a regular. There’ll be a full RAF pension. And he’ll count as killed in action. Maybe a bit more money, and a medal. I called my brother last night. He’s still the darling of the Marshals, for those two years he served as Air Minister under Attlee. He says Valerie will want for nothing. He’ll see to that. There’ll be money to put Jackie through school if you want it, and money to relocate back to London.’

‘Relocate?’ Onions said, querying the neologism.

‘If I were you I’d dust off her old room in Acton and have the two of them back till she finds her feet.’

‘Is that what she’s asking for?’

Troy shrugged, letting the gesture say whatever Stan wanted it to.

‘I’ll have to stay here a while.’

‘Of course. What do you want me to do?’

‘You’ll have to take charge at the Yard. I can’t do without you any longer. The boy was right.’ The boy was Wildeve. Thirty-six and he’d never be anything else to Onions. ‘He came to me and insisted I lay you off. But you’re more or less OK now, aren’t you?’

It seemed to have slipped his mind that there were other, better reasons for Jack’s request.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ll put in for a week’s compassionate leave. But I’ll not do it till Monday. That’ll buy you a few days to get a medical, get your life in order. You’ll have to do some of my work, just for a bit. And you’ll run the squad in your own right from now on—Tom won’t be back. I heard on Friday. Doctors have given him a month. Friday was my day for bad news. Just get yourself back to the Yard and take over. You’ll be confirmed as a superintendent as soon as Tom’s papers are through. I’ll handle things up here.’

Onions slipped into silence. An infinite sadness. The beginning of a tear once more starting to form in the corner of each eye. He puffed one last time on his Woodbine and threw the nud end into the range. Rarely had Troy seen such a sense of defeat so manifest in Stan. For twenty years Stan had stood like a rock in his life. Rocks did not bleed, stones did not weep.

All in all Troy could not believe his luck.

§86

Jackie was sitting on the doorstep again. At some point she must have slipped upstairs to see her mother. She had the disintegrating gas mask on her face, and had taken the precaution of wearing her Alice band on the outside. Its garish plastic colours and glass gems contrasted comically with the greys and browns of rubber and canvas. It seemed to Troy to sum up something about the country rather well, the fruitless way his generation had passed their legacy on to the next. She turned and looked through the cracked plexiglass at Troy. The car-boy was standing on the pavement.

‘Go on. I’ll give you sixpence fer it.’

Jackie turned back to him.

‘Awright,’ she said through the mask, sounding like an asthmatic frog.

Her hand came up and delicately removed the Alice band, and then tore off the mask.

‘Tanner it is,’ she concluded.

She put the small silver coin in the pocket of her dress, tucking it in below her handkerchief.

Troy was staring. She felt this. Looked up and said, ‘I got a bob for me Dad’s old camera.’

Troy said goodbye and walked round to the driver’s side of his car. The boy circled the car, wings out, undercarriage running hard, the faint burblings of a propeller coming from inside the mask. He had got his history mightily wrong.

Troy wound down the window to let out the heat of the day. The boy touched down next to him.

‘Why did you waste your money on that thing?’ Troy asked him.

‘Whatdeyer mean waste? It’s good this is!’

‘Good for what?’

‘In case Jerries come again.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Troy. ‘That was years ago.’

‘Could still ’appen,’ the boy protested. ‘Me Dad says it’ll be Gyppos next.’

‘Maybe. But they’re not Germans, are they?’

‘Me Dad says they’re all foreigners.’

The irrefutable logic of xenophobia, in one so young. The infallible oracle that was ‘me Dad’. Troy put the key in the ignition and decided to end the conversation. The boy felt otherwise.

‘Me Dad says Gyppos killed Jackie’s dad.’

Troy looked at the house. The door was closed. She had gone.

‘That’s not true,’ he said softly to the boy. ‘It was Cypriots. Not Egyptians. The Egyptians haven’t killed anyone.’

‘Me Dad says they chopped him up inch at a time, just like Japs did in the war!’ said the boy with evident relish.

Troy smiled falsely and turned the key.

§87

It was a glorious drive. Over the Pennines with the western sun behind him. Through Whalley Bridge and down into the old spa town of Buxton. He stopped in the last of day at Monsal Head. He had never driven the route before and had long wanted to see the railway viaduct that had so offended Ruskin. The most beautiful valley in England, desecrated with a huge bridge and a high embankment simply that ‘every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’.

Troy stared at the bridge. High and narrow over the Wye. As elegant as a row of flamingos’ legs. Ruskin was wrong. A hundred years on it looked as though God had put in an extra half-day’s overtime on the first Sunday to see that this sat well with Mother Nature.

He had no wish to drive or to arrive in darkness. It seemed too compromising. He checked into the Peacock Inn at Rowsley. Dined late, breakfasted early, and by seven-thirty the next morning was approaching Commander Cockerell’s hometown from the north, along the crooked miles of the A6, snagged between the Derwent and the old Midland Railway line that snaked and burrowed its alpine way from Derby to Manchester.

He stopped by the cotton mill and asked for the Wirksworth Road. A man exercising a dog pointed up the hill with his walking stick. Across the river, off the Ashbourne road. North, poetically, by north-west.

He parked in front of number 44 and took the pink suitcase he had had since Brighton from the boot. There was no doorbell. He banged loudly with the horizontal knocker on the letter box.

She was not dressed. She stood in the doorway, in a terry-cloth dressing gown, her hair pinned into a bun high on her head.

She peered round Troy. Looked at the Bentley.

‘Are you going to leave that there? It’s wider than the house.’

‘Why, do you think the neighbours will talk?’

‘They’d better!’ said Foxx.

§88

Troy watched as she dressed, hands flitting between a large mug of instant coffee and items of clothing. For a brief moment she stood naked, as she pulled on her knickers, then disappeared beneath American fly-button faded blue jeans, that he knew from his nephews were all the rage and hard as hell to get hold of, and a white T-shirt. As she flexed her arms in the air to ease the shirt down over her breasts, one hand hovered at the back of her head and pulled out the pin that held her hair. She shook it loose, sending it cascading halfway down her back. She opened the back door to a row of steep concrete steps leading down to a perilously perched garden, stood in the doorway’s morning light and brushed out her hair.

‘I suppose,’ she said lackadaisically, ‘that you’re used to women with dressing rooms and dressing tables. Very working class to dress in the kitchen. But the reason everything takes place in the kitchen is that more often than not it’s the only heated room in the house. Besides, I live alone.’

She looked down the garden, down to the valley, giving her hair a last dozen strokes. Troy said nothing. Of course she was right, but then he’d relished every moment of it. When he was small his sisters, women devoid of self-consciousness and self-knowledge, had dressed and made up in front of him. It was curious, nostalgic even, hardly sexual but hardly devoid of sexuality.

‘What’s the suitcase for?’

It seemed as though she had only just noticed it, but he had walked in carrying it and she was not looking at it now—she had chosen her own moment.

‘We’re taking a trip.

‘To the moon on gossamer wings?’

She closed the door on the view, lodged her hairbrush next to the stopped clock on the mantelpiece.

‘No. To Paris. Possibly Monte Carlo.’

She sat on the arm of a battered Utility chair that stood in the corner between the door and the fireplace, and pulled on a pair of baseball boots, back bent, fingers moving almost quicker than the eye could see as she laced them up to the ankle. She stood up with a little bounce, up onto her toes like a boxer moving around the ring in the seconds before the gloves touched.

‘I’m not dressed right for Monte Carlo,’

‘What do you think is in the suitcase?’

‘At a guess I’d say half a dozen of Stella’s frocks. But they’re not really me. Look, we don’t have to leave right now, do we?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not right now.’

‘Then let’s go out for a while. A walk. You are up to a walk, aren’t you?’

She stepped lightly across the room to reach him. She stood eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder with him, put out her hands and pulled down his head. A gesture as gentle as Kolankiewicz’s was bullying, but to the same purpose. She ran her fingers along the scar.

‘It’s healing well. If you’re sure you’re up to it, I’ll show you around. There’s a few things to be said before we pluck up sticks and disappear.’

All down the steep hill that led back into the town they walked thirty yards behind a group of chattering young women.

‘Eight o’clock start at the mill,’ Foxx said. ‘I should be with them at this time on any other day.’

‘Are you on compassionate leave?’

‘What? Don’t be daft. It’s a cotton mill, not the Royal Navy. I asked for every day’s holiday due to me when that copper came up from Scotland Yard and told me Stella was dead. They gave me a fortnight like I’d asked them to chop off a leg. I’ve had more than a week now. And I still don’t want to go back.’

She steered Troy off the road only a few feet before the Derwent Bridge and headed out along a riverside lane, high above the rushing white water.

‘How long did you say you’d worked there?’

‘I started there when I was eighteen. Later than most. I could have gone at fifteen or sixteen, I suppose. Wobbling around on heels, and me bra padded out, pretending I was Jane Russell, trying to look like a grown-up. I didn’t. My mother always thought we were cut out for something better. Long after our Dad was dead she was still trying to better us. I did the same secretarial course as Stella. Typing and shorthand might be “better”, but it didn’t pay as well—and to tell the truth I was heartily fed up with being anybody’s secretary. My boss was no better than Cockerell—worse, he thought he could stick his hand up your skirt and not set you up in a love nest. I went onto the mill floor. It was the obvious, the easy thing to do. Half the town works there, after all. And the half that doesn’t is down the pit or on the railways. It took me less than a day to learn the job and within a week I could do it in my sleep. Or at least do it while I daydreamed. At the time I thought a job which used none of your mind was marginally better than one which used about a tenth—I thought of it as a kind of freedom. And it was good money compared to typing, brought in enough to run the house for me and Mam. Then Stella started sending money. I could have sent it back—I knew it was Cockerell’s money—but I didn’t. And I could have quit the mill, but I didn’t. Mam thought Stella was doing another secretarial job in London. I suppose I was part of the cover. If I’d stopped working she’d have asked where the money was coming from. That we lived a damn sight better than we could on a mill girl’s wages seemed to escape her notice. She wasn’t all there towards the end anyway. But Mam died at Christmas. And I grew to hate the mill long ago. There comes a point when daydreams turn sour if you don’t do something about them.’

The pace she had set up was almost winding Troy. They climbed steeply up the side of the valley away from the river, and onto a rough, ancient track that ran southward along the ridge of the Pennines.

‘D’you know what makes a place like that tick?’

She pointed back at the mill chimney, the largest object on the skyline.

‘Paypackets? Promotion? No—it’s a running undercurrent of sexual innuendo. The men don’t say “hello” on a Monday morning, they say, “Didst gerrowt?”

‘What?’

‘Didst gerrowt? Did you get any? Meaning sex.’

‘I see,’ he said, unable to visualise the exchange in his mind.

‘But then, nobody lays a hand on you.’

‘All mouth and no trousers?’ he queried.

‘Yes. And you don’t know how grateful a girl can be for that sometimes. I’m immune to the smutty remark. But then I was immune to the charms of Arnold Cockerell. If Stella had been too she might be alive now.’

Foxx hopped nimbly over a wooden gate. Troy followed gingerly, and found himself facing a colossal stone wall in the middle of nowhere—or, to be precise, since a herd of Scottish longhorns mooed lazily at them as they approached, in the middle of a field of grazing cattle.

Troy stared up at the wall. It was the best part of twenty-five feet high, solidly built of local granite, and pitted with small holes, out of a few of which sprouted ambitious sycamore saplings. It was a rifle range, clearly dated 1860 by an iron plate just below the parapet. A relic of the last time Troy’s two nations had fought each other in earnest, in the Crimea. The futile, bloody stalemate of the 1850s. Several ancestors and kinsmen had died at Sevastopol. This wall halfway up the Pennines was the result, as the British Army sought to improve itself, realising at last that a good shire militia was worth a dozen charges by the Light Brigade. It was odd to think that old history should penetrate as far as it did. The date and the obvious purpose of the structure instantly brought to mind his grandfather’s anecdotes of the brothers and cousins the old man had lost in battle. Whatever symbolic value the wall had for Foxx, she could hardly guess at its significance to Troy.

Foxx set foot upon the wall, working her toe into a hole probably made generations ago by a musket ball. She braced her arms against the almost vertical slope of the wall and climbed three or four feet off the ground.

‘You don’t have to stand and watch, you know,’ she said, looking down at him under an arm. ‘You’ll put me off. How’s your head?’

‘Still aches a bit,’ he said.

‘I meant for heights. There’s a ladder round the back. I’ll meet you at the top.’

‘You’re going to climb all the way?’

‘I wasn’t intending to fly. I’ve been doing this since I was ten. As long as you don’t distract me I’ll be fine.’

Troy scrambled round to the beech grove at the back of the range and found a rusting iron ladder. It groaned under his weight, and he concluded he was the first person to set foot on it in many years. A few feet from the top, one rung snapped clean in two and sent his pulse racing, but he hauled himself onto the flat top, to find a view across the valley that stretched for miles.

A hand appeared on the parapet, followed by a foot, and in a moment Foxx had pulled herself over the edge. She lay a few seconds at his feet, breathing heavily, then she stood, dusted herself down and said a simple, ‘Well?’

‘Was that worth it?’

‘Oh yes,’ she gasped. ‘Every time.’

She walked to the very end, gazed out across the valley, where the mill chimney still dominated everything in sight, breathed deeply and came back to him.

‘You’ve news,’ she said. ‘You’ve news, or you wouldn’t be here with your posh car and a packed case.’

Troy pulled the translated letter from his pocket.

‘This was in your sister’s safety deposit box. It was in code, but it was a simple code, and it’s addressed to you.’

She sat on the edge, her legs dangling over the twenty-five-foot drop, silently reading the letter. He saw her fold it once more. She paused, and was perfectly still for the best part of a minute, then she patted the stone next to her, indicating that he should sit. He did not look down.

She handed the letter back to him, pale and tense, but without a trace of tears.

‘I think I knew all that. Not the money. And not the Russians. But I knew the rest. She was living pretty high on the hog.’

‘Do you believe her?’

‘Yes. And so do you. Or else you wouldn’t have come here. I think it’s time you told me why you came.’

‘I want you to come to Paris and open the safety deposit box for me. Perhaps another after that if we don’t find what we want. London was the old pals’ act. I know the bank’s director. It wouldn’t work anywhere else. But if you cut your hair, change your make-up—”

‘And put on one of those posh frocks you brought.’

‘I brought suits. Two-piece jobs. Very discreet. If you do this you’ll pass for your sister. In theory all you need to open a box is the key. Possession is everything. In practice no one’s that green. They’ll know their clients. This way we do what has to be done without arousing any suspicion.’

‘Aha.’

‘You’ll do it?’

‘We’re not after the money?’

‘It’s incidental. I need to know what else there is. It’s the only way we’ll catch her killer.’

‘She says the other stuff is dangerous.’

‘She’s right.’

‘Then the money’s not incidental. I don’t see how forty thousand quid can be incidental to anyone. If there’s a risk there’s got to be some reward.’

‘You’ll do it?’

Again she did not answer. She stood up, turned to face the town, across the river.

‘Look over there. Tell me what you see.’

He regarded the question with some suspicion, but took her hand as she pulled him to his feet, and looked out over the valley. What was he meant to be looking for? It might well be an entirely innocent question. There was, he saw for the first time, more than one mill chimney—perhaps the town had sprung up on cotton and stopped, frozen in time fifty years later—a host of church towers and spires—and street upon street of houses climbing the sides of a small valley at right angles to the Derwent Valley, in which, school geography told him, there was almost certainly a tributary stream. The houses looked to him like a precise illustration of a Grimm tale. The lonely giant climbing his mountain with a sackful of custom-made houses for his model village finds too late that there is a hole in his sack, and the houses tumble in their own order, which is no order, down the hillside. And there he leaves them, clinging scattered to the contours.

Nothing encroached on the river but the mill; the town stopped two hundred yards short in a well-defined flood plain. Up the hill towards them crept fields of every shape, the irregular rhomboids and trapezoids of the English quilt, dotted with sheep and oaks, ragged ribbons of hawthorn hedging, tangles of dog-rose gone to hip, the dried-blood red of ripening blackberries. Just below them an orderly row of hornbeam cut a line down to a cart track, and the track in turn led to a couple of farmhouses, carved in stone and seemingly half-buried in the landscape. It was a good time for hardwoods. Just past their peak, in the full glory of deep greens, that in a week or two would surely begin to brown with the onset of autumn.

He was, he realised, being forced to reappraise the place. The Orwellian sense he had had of narrow, cobbled streets and shabby northern houses gave way to this wider view. The town was like many northern towns, industry all but in a field. But it was unlike anything he had seen in Yorkshire. The town was smaller, neater, the countryside so much lusher, so verdant in its greens. It was, he admitted only to himself, a better-looking slice of the sad shires than his own home county.

‘It’s nice,’ he said blandly.

‘Nice?’

‘All right—beautiful.’

‘Fine. Then you can have it. You can keep it. You can stuff it. I don’t want it!’

‘What do you want?’

‘I want,’ she said slowly and carefully, enunciating like an elocution teacher, letting the words burst like bubbles on her lips, ‘you to take me away from all this.’

Her arm swept out across the valley, pointing to everything and nothing. Suddenly a pompous phrase from a penny dreadful seemed real and portentous and dangerous.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘I mean it, Troy. We go home. Pack. I post the latchkey back to the council. We get in that absurd car of yours and we never come back.’

‘OK,’ he said again.

‘Great.’

She grinned, widely, beautifully, turned on her heel and dropped to the ground. Instinctively Troy leaned out to grab her and almost fell over the edge. Instead he saw her drop into a crouch, roll over like a parachutist, and bounce up again onto her feet. The fall should have broken both legs—it seemed to Troy impossible. But there she was off down the track at a run. She turned, jogged backwards for a few steps and yelled up at him.

‘I’ll need an hour to pack. Don’t get lost!’

§89

Foxx got more than her hour. Troy found a footpath leading back into the town, and trudged his way back up the stone streets to the opposite side of the valley, in search of Jasmine Dene.

Mrs Cockerell answered the door with a paintbrush between her teeth. She took it out.

‘I always knew if I saw you again it would be bad news.’

She led off, back into the house, towards the rear, without another word. Troy followed. It had not occurred to him that he was the bearer of good or bad news. He had presumed that by now she simply wanted to know, one way or the other.

He thought she might be leading the way into the garden. Through the open french windows he could see an easel, set up for the southeast, and a large off-white card with a half-finished, almost abstract image upon it. But she turned into the kitchen, and he heard the pop of a gas ring going on. Tea and sympathy. But what sympathy he could bring he did not know. She stood with her back to the cooker. Paintbrush in one hand, battery-powered hob lighter in the other, hands crossed over her bosom. The housewife Nefertiti.

‘It’s him, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure?’

‘Yes.’

She put down the lighter. Wiped magenta paint off the brush onto her Joseph-coated apron and stuck the brush in a jam jar.

‘Don’t worry, Mr Troy. I’m not about to cry.’

He was pleased. He’d had enough of tears. And then she burst like a summer tempest.

§90

Troy chose a small hotel on the Left Bank, between the Boulevard St Germain and the Place de l’Odéon. The opposite tactic of his ventures to Amsterdam and Vienna. Concealment in the byways of a city. A hotel with none of the prominence—or elegance—of the Europe or the Sacher. If anyone wanted to find him, it would be like looking for a needle in a haystack. The room was tiny, but Foxx had no mark by which to measure it, and accepted everything without comment. She asked for money to shop. Essential to the deception, as they both knew, that she should look and sound like her sister. A haircut, some new clothes perhaps?

Troy was surprised at the sense of ritual Foxx brought to the task. She returned from the hairdresser’s clutching another pink suitcase and a large green shopping bag, her hair wrapped in a headscarf, her figure hidden beneath the blunt lines of a sexless pea jacket and her customary T-shirt and blue jeans.

She unbuttoned the jacket and let it slip from her shoulders to the floor. Pulled the scarf off and shook her hair free. Eighteen inches of wild blonde mane had changed to a neat cut, about chin length, framing the face anew. Long, her hair had tended to flow backwards, away from the face; short, it fell forward, the razored tips almost curling under at the cheeks, hiding the face and with it half her expression.

She took one of her sister’s suits from the wardrobe, stripped the wrapping off new underwear and lay them on the bed side by side, one by one, like paper cut-outs, dressing dolly—the bra, the knickers, the suspender belt and stockings—the double-breasted jacket, the matching burgundy skirt.

‘Do you know what this is?’ she asked Troy.

‘No. I just picked the nearest in the wardrobe.’

‘It’s a Dior. What they called the H line unless I’m very much mistaken. The rage of Paris a couple of years ago. Costs a packet. If it hadn’t been so random I’d almost have said you had taste.’

She peeled off the T-shirt, popped the steel buttons on her jeans, almost like shelling peas, and stepped out of them; put her thumbs into the elastic of her knickers, shoved them to the ankles and kicked them off. She stood naked, looking not at Troy, but at her own image in the looking-glass.

They were sisters. They were twins, but even now Troy could tell the one from the other. The tight muscularity of Foxx mentally juxtaposed with the naked Madeleine who had stepped from her bathroom to point a gun at him—which gun now sat among the fluff and old bus tickets in his jacket pocket. The Madeleine in his memory was paying the price of the high life, at twenty-two already slackening under the onslaught of food and fags and booze. Foxx rippled with muscle. Troy figured her biceps to be bigger than his own. Her legs were certainly longer—the thigh muscle standing out in a single ridge, the muscles of the calf overlapping in taut tendons as she perched on her toes to turn her backside to the glass. The small breasts swung to face him, pectorals firmed, pink nipples tilting upwards in best cliché of worst racy novel.

‘Goodbye Shirley Foxx,’ she said as she pulled on the pants. ‘Call me Maddy, call me mad.’

Troy sprawled on the bed and watched the ensemble assembled. The bra clipped by that disjointing, impossible gesture with arms contorted behind the back, the stockings rolled up each thigh to the tune of infinity, hand over hand over hand, the skirt hooked up and zipped up, the reverse striptease of a total metamorphosis. Last of all a pair of new shoes emerged from a box, expensive shoes, good shoes, in red leather. She stepped into them, tugged at the cuffs of her jacket, stranded partway up the forearm.

‘This suit’s made to be worn with gloves, you know that, don’t you?’

‘Never crossed my mind,’ he said, still horizontal on the bed.

‘Good job it crossed mine, then. Or I’d look a right twaddle.’

She opened the new suitcase, removed another, smaller, pink case from inside, and from that took out a pair of elbow-length white gloves, as though they were the prize waiting at the end of a game of pass the parcel.

‘C’est tout,’ she said.

‘Non,’ he replied. ‘Ce n’est pas tout.’

He took a black jewellery case from his coat pocket and flipped the lid. A single strand of pearls lay on a bed of velvet. She turned. He fastened the clasp at the back of her neck and spun her around to face him.

‘There,’ he said. ‘Now it’s complete.’

‘They’re hers?’

‘I found them on her dressing table,’ he said.

Foxx stared into the looking-glass again. And from the looking-glass to Troy.

‘Are they real?’

‘Probably.’

She fingered the strand of pearls, the traditional neckwear of the upper-crust Englishwoman. Part of the uniform.

‘God. The things she did. Who would ever think she’d want to be a fake Englishwoman? Did you believe her?’

‘Mostly. There was something that didn’t quite ring true, but mostly I believed in this girl from a good home in the shires. I didn’t quite believe in the sophisticate. It looked like a layer of lacquer. Perhaps the fake Englishwoman was what Cockerell wanted?’

‘No. It was Stella. This was Stella’s game. Arnold put up the money, and did what he did, but this part of it was Stella. It’s got her written all over it.’

Foxx turned back to the looking-glass, scanning her own image.

‘I’m not me any more, am I? I’m her.’

‘Surfaces,’ said Troy. ‘Not even skin deep.’

‘I wonder. I really do. Will I ever find me again?’

‘There’s one way to find out.’

‘Aha.’

‘You could take it all off again.’

‘All?’

‘Everything. Bit by bit.’

‘Sort of a striptease?’

‘If you like. But at the end of it there you’ll be.’

He watched the process reverse itself. The static charge as her skirt slid over her hip to run the length of her stockinged legs and pool at her feet. The Dégas angle of the body, the balletic tilt, one leg absurdly longer than the other, as she unhooked stocking from suspender, locked the muscle in her thigh and peeled off the nylon. And the stretching of the torso, the stretching out and up of the ribcage, the flattening of her breasts as her arms went over her head once more and she flung off the bra, poised with her fingertips out to the ceiling, balanced on her tiptoes. She stood naked again. Troy didn’t care if she never wore clothes again. Just to look at her burnt. Simply to touch drove him wild. She leant over him, wearing only the pearls. He thought he’d go mad. It had been years since he felt uncontrollable lust. He was accustomed to reasonable lust, lust that allowed itself to be negotiated, the polite sex of the middle-aged, the wants that wait.

He put out a hand to one small breast, slid the other between her legs. She put her hand over his, held it poised on her mound, his palm cupped to it.

‘Steady on,’ she said. ‘We’ve got all night.’

He could not but disagree. He had no sense of all. No sense of for ever. He’d known heaven like a tent . . . how did the line go? . . . ‘to wrap its shining yards and disappear’.

In the morning when he awoke she was sleeping soundly, one leg across his. He moved it gently, and noticed for the first time the last irrefutable difference between Foxx and her sister—a small tattoo on the inside of the left ankle. A bird of some sort, a bird ascending with something in its mouth. A dove? It had to be a dove. A dove holding an olive branch. He had sucked the seashell from Madeleine’s left foot. He liked to think he would have noticed a tattoo. When she was dressed, the next time she was dressed as her sister, the fake Englishwoman, as she herself had put it, he would think of the tattoo—so utterly un-English, un-­middle-class—hidden beneath nylon stockings and good shoes.

§91

The Banque du Commerce Coloniale was all but indistinguishable from a private house, tall and narrow as a London terrace. Indeed, it stood in a street of largely private houses, into which the fashion houses were just beginning to intrude—the Avenue Montaigne, cleaving from the Champs Elysées at forty-five degrees, aiming straight for the river at the Pont de l’Alma. Like Mullins Kelleher, only a small brass plaque told you it was a bank. And if you weren’t looking, you’d miss it.

From his seat on a bench, on the tiny triangle of muddied grass in the Place de l’Alma, Troy had a clear view to the bank, and an equally clear view of the Crazy Horse in the Avenue George V. He wondered about the proximity of the two. Did this say something, anything, about Cockerell? Drawing out money from his bank, only to blow it at the conveniently close capital of tit and titillation? He could not concentrate on pretending to read the newspaper that was meant to be his disguise. Paris was a city of mnemonics—the republican habit of remembering every odd and sod in place names nudged the memory constantly. The English scarcely did this. Where in London was the Avenue Churchill or the Rue Ernie Bevin? Or, for that matter, George V Street? He was captivated by a world of small symbols and fleeting coincidences. Place de l’Alma: the French equivalent of a street he had walked in his beat days in the East End, and the name of yet another Crimean battle at which ancient Troys had perished; and Montaigne, Montaigne, what was it Montaigne had called lies? . . . the wretched vice? No . . . the accursed vice. Lying, Madeleine Kerr’s accursed vice. He played pointlessly with the ‘kerr cur’ rhyme, and missed her exit. Before he knew it Foxx was at the bank door, shaking hands with someone and then standing, blinking into the sun, while the man hailed a taxi for her.

Troy caught a taxi as it came down the Avenue George V, pointed at the back of Foxx’s cab as it crossed the bridge and said, ‘Suivez.’

The driver rolled his eyes upwards—boredom and exasperation as though all the English ever wanted was that you should waste time following another taxi. As they swung left on the opposite bank, onto the Quai d’Orsay, Troy could see Foxx’s blonde head through the cab’s rear window. His own driver was muttering and cursing, but they had her clearly in sight, and he turned his attention to what mattered. Was anyone else following? He looked behind him every few seconds, he peered into every car that drew level with them and watched the cab in front with one hand on Madeleine Kerr’s little golden gun as they paused at traffic lights all the way along the Boulevard St Germain.

He was pretty sure they were not being followed. The cab turned off the Boulevard into the Rue de l’Odéon, with two cabs behind them, then off the Rue de l’Odéon and into Rue Racine, and then there were none. His cab and hers were the only cabs in the street. Foxx turned right, and Troy knew she would stop outside the hotel. He stopped his cab at the corner and walked the last fifty yards.

Five minutes hanging around in the lobby and no one else had entered. He went up to their room. It was empty. The smallest of the pink cases lay on the bed unopened. Her shoes lay on the carpet where she had kicked them off. He pushed at the bathroom door, stepped inside. Only the rush of air told him the blow was coming. He ducked and a Perrier bottle wielded like an Indian club smashed on the wall above his head.

‘I thought you’d be here,’ Foxx said, standing over him. ‘You said you’d be here. I didn’t know what had happened to you.’

Troy got to his feet. Knocked the shards of glass from his hair.

‘I was watching you,’ he said. ‘If I’d told you, you’d have been looking out for me, whether you resisted the impulse or not, you’d’ve had one eye cocked for me.’

‘Someone’s following us?’

‘No. I don’t think anyone is. But this was the only way to be sure.’

‘Who’d be following us?’

He took a towel, mopped the mineral water from his head and face as they moved back to the bedroom. It was not a subject he wanted to pursue.

‘How did it go?’

He sat on the bed next to the pink case, shrugged off his jacket and rubbed at his hair with the towel.

‘Fine. Just the one awkward moment. I addressed the manager in French; he replied, and told me my accent had improved, then he switched to English, and we stayed in English till we got out to the street. Me with “how now brown cow” running through my mind and trying to sound home counties. I think he and Stella had a routine—a bit flirty I should think—but I couldn’t work it out, I could only fit in with what he did. But I don’t think he suspected a thing.’

‘And the box?’ said Troy.

Foxx flipped the catches on the case. Huge bundles of white five-pound notes, a brown envelope and several strips of gold coins in plastic covers.

‘I took everything. I don’t know how much there is in paper money, but each of those strips holds fifty sovereigns and there’s six of them.’

Troy tore open the envelope. Five sheets of paper. Five double-spaced typed sheets of the five-block numerical code he had found in the London bank. He was not good with numbers. Hated numbers. It would take him all day to decode this using the instructions Clark had given him.

He looked at Foxx. Standing, arms folded, in her stockinged feet, the tight, red burgundy skirt, the crisp cotton blouse and the token string of pearls. She shook her newfound fringe from her eyes. Pale, green, looking back at him, trusting him and waiting on him. He had a day’s work cut out for him, and all he wanted to do was fuck her. He held the heart of the mystery in his hands, gold and revelation, locked away in cellophane and cypher, and all he could think of was her on her back with her legs locked around his waist.

‘You’re soaked,’ she said, in a matter of fact tone of voice. ‘Your shirt’s wet through. Here, let me.’

She pulled at the knot in his tie and began to pop the buttons on his shirt—a maternal, sexless gesture he could not take as maternal or ­sexless —and he knew he was lost. She was the heart of the mystery, locked away in cotton and nylon. Down there was the dove. All he had to do was strip off the wrapper.

§92

It was past noon before they surfaced. While Foxx bathed he set out the five sheets of foolscap on the small table in the window. By the time she emerged from the bathroom he had decoded the first sentence and ground to a halt on the second. It was going to take a lot longer than he had thought.

‘What can I do?’

‘Nothing. Why don’t you see the sights. I’ll meet you for dinner.’

‘Where should I go?’

‘There are plenty of places within walking distance. The Jardin du Luxembourg is only a quarter of a mile or so from here, and the river’s even less the other way. Why don’t you see the jardin, walk over to the Île de la Cité, do Notre Dame, and then if the sun’s still out, sit in the little park at the opposite end of the island. It’s a beautiful spot. Read a newspaper and watch the Seine barges go by. I’ll meet you at Lapérouse about eight o’clock.’

“Where’s that?’

Troy sketched the flattened U of the Seine on the back of the room service menu, drew in the elongated blobs for the two islands and marked the Quai des Grands Augustins with an X.

‘There,’ he said. ‘See you at eight.’

But by eight he was no wiser. He had tried every variation on the crib Clark gave him, all twenty-six possible starting points. To no avail.

He found her in a dark corner of Lapérouse, buried in its deep black and gold, her burgundy suit blending into the near-subterranean setting like natural camouflage. A corner table, lit by a single sputtering candle. She held a half-empty glass of champagne in her hands, and was leaning back against the panelled wall with her eyes closed. They flickered open momentarily as he sat down.

‘I’m dreaming,’ she said. ‘I’ve died and gone to heaven. I went up the Eiffel Tower. It was magical. You wouldn’t believe the day I’ve had.’

He would and he did. He’d known Paris magic. His mother had taken him to Paris half a dozen times in the 1920s. They had heard recitals by Ravel and Stravinsky. They had eaten in this very restaurant. She had reminisced about her own Paris magic, her first visit when she was seven­teen, when she had been introduced to Maupassant and Zola, and seen the Eiffel Tower half-built, and had considered it ‘vulgar’.

‘It seems a shame to go back so soon.’

Foxx opened her eyes fully, smiled at him.

‘You’re not,’ said Troy.

‘I’m not?’

‘I can’t crack the code. There’s something wrong somewhere. I have to go back and set my sergeant to work on it. I’m due back at the Yard anyway, and I doubt I can stall them a day longer. You have to go on. I need to know what’s in the next box. It might be different. It might be easier.’

‘Go on where?’

‘Another city. Monte Carlo, Zurich, Amsterdam. Take your pick.’

She held out her hand.

‘Pencil,’ she said simply, and Troy took one from his inside pocket.

She tore thin strips off the wine list, scribbled down the three cities, and arranged them like a game of three card monte. A quick shuffle and she asked him to ‘pick a card’.

He had difficulty in believing her lack of volition, but picked.

‘Zurich,’ he said. ‘It’s Zurich.’

§93

Onions had a civilian secretary he referred to behind her back as ‘the gorgon’. Her real name was Madge.

‘You’re late,’ said Madge, standing in front of his desk, a huge sheaf of papers pressed to her bosom. ‘I was told to expect you this morning. I called you four times.’

‘Doctor,’ Troy lied. ‘Had to see my doctor.’

He had stayed with Foxx, wrapped up in Foxx till dawn, and travelled back in the wan light of early morning. He felt dreadful.

‘But you’re fine now?’ Madge said without concern.

‘Yes,’ he said.

The sheaf of papers hit his desk with a thud.

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Mr Wildeve’s in Hammersmith. Mr Clark’s trailing along behind him. The boss is in Manchester and Mr Henrey’s dead. So somebody round here had better do a bit of work. Read and initial, except where it says sign, and you sign pp. Mr Onions.’

She strode to the open door. Troy stopped her with a hand on her arm.

‘When?’ he said.

‘When what?’

The woman had the sensitivity of a reptile.

‘When did Tom die?’

‘Last night. I wasn’t ringing you to check on your health.’

It was not that Madge had no regard for Tom. She had no regard for anyone but Onions.

‘What word from Manchester?’

‘The boss’ll be there till Thursday, he reckons.’

‘I have to talk to him.’

‘He says not to call. I don’t know what you’ve done, Troy. But you seem to be a major bone of contention with “our Val”. If I were you, I’d do as he says and let sleeping dogs lie for a while.’

He let her go. He felt a moment’s pointless guilt. The fleeting surrender of intelligence to coincidence. An old colleague had breathed his last while he was in the arms, between the thighs, of a woman half his age. And then it passed. He and Tom had not been the best of friends, and he was a lousy copper.

Troy wondered if he could get through the next three days without a major case he could not delegate dropping onto his desk. His share of Onions’ work was routine; he found himself initialling orders for paper clips and truncheons. He found his mind wandering. Could he work Clark’s coffee machine? Could he conjure a cup from this Heath Robinson affair? And as he stared at the Thames, cup in hand, he found he could conjure the image of Foxx like a genie from a lamp.

In the morning Clark returned from a house-to-house search. Troy gave him the new papers. He looked at them like a master plumber confronted with a blocked lavatory and sucked air through his teeth.

‘I’ll need time,’ he said.

In the afternoon Jack returned from Hammersmith. Troy sat while he brought him up to date on bodies rotting under floorboards in the terraces of Bedford Park, a case that at any other time would have had him gripped. And at the end of it, he could see guilt in Jack’s eyes, much as it was so often writ in Rod’s.

‘You’re fine now, aren’t you, Freddie?’Jack said. ‘I mean, that was a narrow scrape.’

Jack had had him suspended, shoved him into hole and corner.

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘I’m fine.’

On Thursday morning Madge graced his office with her steely presence to tell him Onions would be a day late.

On the Friday there was no sign of Stan. And no sign of Clark either.

‘I have to phone him,’ Troy told Madge.

‘Tough tittie,’ she said. ‘Val’s had one of her fits with the poker. Smashed the china, smashed the mirrors, smashed the phone too. Boss calls me from a box now. You’ll just have to wait.’

But he could not wait. He was out of his depth and he knew it. He had to tell someone. Stan was the best person. Stan was the logical, the legal conduit between the Yard and the intelligence services. He had unearthed a crime beyond the scope of his powers. Worse, he had no idea who the criminal was. He had worked out, and he was pretty certain Clark had too, that either side could have killed Cockerell, Jessel and Kerr.

And so, he made the call he had put off for weeks, and in the larger context had put off for twenty years.

‘Charlie, I need to talk. It’s business.’

‘Yours or mine?’ said Charlie.

‘Both,’ said Troy.

Charlie paused so long Troy had begun to think they had been cut off.

‘Fine,’ Charlie said at last, with no music in his voice. ‘I’m up to my neck today, and come to that tomorrow morning too. But we could meet tomorrow afternoon. How about tea at the Café Royal? Fourish?’

They had crossed a line, one he had never wanted to cross. One he was sure Charlie had never wanted to cross either.

§94

Troy sat in Goodwin’s Court in the encroaching dusk of Friday evening. He had left messages everywhere for Clark to call him—at the Police House and in every pub within walking distance of the Yard. He sat by the telephone in the darkness and silence, willing it to ring. And when it did his spell went awry—he had summoned Madge from her circle in hell.

‘The boss is back in Acton. He says he’ll be in in an hour.’

‘I’ll be there,’ Troy said.

He put the phone down, and it rang again at once. He almost ignored it. They did it of their own accord half the time.

‘Freddie?’ said Johnny Fermanagh’s voice. ‘We have to talk. I must see you.’

‘You’ve picked a lousy time,’ said Troy.

‘Please. S’important.’

Troy heard the sound of laughter in the background, the umistakable roar of pub jollity.

‘Johnny, where are you?’

‘Colony Room. Dean Street.’

‘What happened to “on the wagon” and “the love of a good woman”?’

‘Nothing happened. I stuck to it. I’m sober as a judge.’

‘Then what are you doing in a place whose sole function is to allow Soho layabouts to get pissed at any time of the day or night, with no restriction from the licencing laws?’

‘Freddie, I’m sober! It’s just that after twenty years a drunk you’ve nowhere else to go. All you know are the old places. You try killing a wet Friday afternoon in Soho!’

‘I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m on Britvic, and bloody awful it is too! Here, Muriel, you tell him. I’m sober, aren’t I?’

Troy heard a remote voice saying, ‘More’s the pity.’

‘We have to talk. You put your finger on it. Woman. The love of a good woman.’

Troy looked at his watch. He knew he’d only wear holes in the lino waiting for Onions. Why not give Fermanagh a crack? It had the attraction of true banality compared to his present problem.

‘All right. Back room of the Salisbury in fifteen minutes.’

He would head him off at the door. That way they could talk in the street, neither in the pub nor in his house. It would make it so much easier to stop when he’d heard enough.

It had come on to rain. A steady drizzle, putting a haze around the street lamps, and a come-hither glow onto the pub windows. Troy turned up the collar of his overcoat and stood in the doorway of the Salisbury. A couple of minutes later, he saw Johnny coming down St Martin’s Court from the Charing Cross Road, in the uniform of their class—the black cashmere overcoat, the brown trilby and the red scarf, wrapped up against the drizzle, but smiling. He seemed genuinely happy to see Troy.

‘Are we not going in?’ he asked simply.

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Not if you’re telling me the truth. It will be no hardship to stand on the pavement for ten minutes. It will test your willpower and your liver.’

‘I’ve not had a drop since June, Freddie. Not since the last time we met.’

Troy was not wholly sure he believed him, but looking at him closely, peeking under the brim of the hat, his skin was tighter and healthier and for the first time in years his eyes were not bloodshot. They were his sister’s eyes, a deep, beautiful bottle green.

‘Then say your piece.’

This flummoxed him. He scraped a foot across the paving and could not look Troy in the eye.

‘Johnny, just spit it out.’

‘You know I said there was a problem with my . . . er . . . my good woman’s marriage.’

‘I thought that was the problem, that she was married?’

‘Quite. I’m not putting things too well, am I? Well, it’s simple really. She’s willing to leave him for me.’

‘So, she’s told him?’

‘No. But she’s going to. This weekend.’

Troy wondered if Johnny was really as gullible as he sounded.

‘How often have you heard that in a film or read it in a novel, Johnny?’

‘No—Freddie, I know what you mean, but it’s real this time. This time it’s for real.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because . . . because . . . because she has courage.’

Troy groaned aloud at the innocence of it all.

‘Johnny, Johnny, Johnny. For God’s sake.’

‘Because . . . she’s your sister!’

‘Which sister?’ Troy said involuntarily, and as soon as the words were out he knew how stupid a question it was. Which sister? It could only be Sasha. She had been having an affair with somebody for months. He’d seen Masha set up her alibi for adultery time after time. He’d seen the friction between Sasha and Hugh all but strike sparks at the family dinner when he had introduced them all to Tosca. Of course it was Sasha.

He knew then that there was no dismissing Johnny. He would have to give the poor sod all the attention he could muster.

‘You picked a lousy time,’ he said.

‘I know. You told me.’

Troy fished into his coat pocket for his keys.

‘I have to go to the Yard. Take my keys and let yourself in. I’ll be back in an hour and a half or so. We can talk then.’

They rounded the corner into St Martin’s Lane. Out of the shelter of the alley, the rain whipped up.

‘You’ll get soaked,’ said Johnny. ‘Take these.’

He took off his hat and placed it on Troy’s head. He undid his scarf and wrapped it loosely around Troy’s neck. A curious gesture, almost touching, almost fraternal.

Troy looked back at Johnny. The eyes apart, they were the same physical type. Small dark men with masses of black hair, flopping down onto the forehead. He had never really noticed before.

§95

He cooled his heels for an hour or more. Madge went home. Jack yawned his goodnight and went in search of the next single woman. There was no sign of Onions. There was no sign of Clark.

He set off back home in the drizzle and the unaccustomed hat. Irritated by the wasted time, trying as best he could to find the right mental gear in which to handle Johnny and the impending divorce and scandal that Sasha was about to unleash upon the family.

There was no light in the court. The street lamps of St Martin’s Lane did not penetrate beyond the first three yards, and for some reason the lamp at the other end was out. He fumbled down the alley blind as he had done a thousand times, and on his own doorstep tripped over something solid. It pitched him forward, onto his hands with his knees across the obstacle. His palms braced his weight, face down on the paving stones, and came up wet. But rain did not smell like this, rain did not smell of anything, and nothing on earth had the unmistakable scent of blood. A mad phrase of Kolankiewicz’s flashed through his mind: ‘sweet shit, sweet shit’, that was how the beast had precisely caught the smell of spilt, congealing blood. And Troy was covered in it.

A light went on two floors up in the building at the back of him, reflected off the windows of his house and bathed the alley in a dim glow. The body at his feet was a man. A man wrapped like him in a blood-sodden black overcoat. Troy lifted the head.

‘F . . . F . . . F . . .’ burbled from the lips.

He laid Johnny’s head in his lap. Tore at the buttons of his overcoat and laid it over the man like blanket.

‘Fr . . . Fr . . . Fr . . .’ Johnny said.

Troy wiped the blood from his face. Cleaned his lips and eyelids with a fingertip. And the lips opened once more.

Troy leant nearer, strained to hear, shifted his grip and found one hand sinking into the back of the crushed skull, a smattering of grey matter seeping between his fingers.

‘Freddie,’ Johnny said clearly.

His eyes opened once. As wide as they could go. Then closed. Troy heard the deep exhalation, felt the chest fall, and the life ooze out of him.

Troy sat an age. Time he could not measure. The light above him went out, and sometime later came on again. Into its pool a figure came. Troy looked and could not focus. Looked and could not speak. He heard someone call his name, then the same voice said, ‘Oh my God,’ then he heard the shrill blast of a police whistle.

‘Freddie, Freddie,’ said the voice close to him. ‘Let go now. You can let go now. He’s dead.’

A second figure joined them, running down the courtyard. They resolved into focus, leaning over him, prying his fingers from the body. One was Diana Brack, the other was Ruby the Whore. Ruby, Ruby, he’d not seen Ruby in years. She married a punter and went to live in Leamington.

‘Ruby?’ he said weakly.

‘Oh bugger,’ said the first voice. ‘He’s out of his fucking head. Get an ambulance. Call the Yard. Give them my name. Wildeve, Inspector Wildeve. Tell them I want Kolankiewicz a.s.a.p.’

And Troy saw Ruby run, skirts flying out behind, her, boots clattering.

By the time the short, fat, ugly one appeared they had prised his keys from the corpse’s fingers and laid Troy out on the chaise longue in the sitting room. He was shivering uncontrollably, so they had stripped the eiderdown from his bed and draped it over him.

‘Oh no,’ the short, fat, ugly one was saying. ‘Not again. How many times I tell you, smartyarse?’

‘Just take a look,’ said the young one. ‘There’s blood everywhere. I’ve no idea how much of it is his.’

Ugly probed his skull with short, hard fingers. Then unbuttoned his shirt and wiped away the blood with a towel.

‘There’s not a mark on him. It’s all off the other bugger!’

‘Then he’s in shock.’

‘Of course he’s in shock. Wouldn’t you be in fuckin’ shock? No, you’d have tossed your lunch all over the evidence. Out of the way. Get out of the way!’

Ugly produced a hypodermic syringe, the fluid spurting from the needle. Troy’s hand shot out and grabbed him by the wrist.

‘No,’ he said.

‘No? Fine, Troy. Who am I?’

Troy thought about it. A short, fat, ugly man. He knew a short, fat, ugly man. He’d got his own short, fat, ugly man. Had one for years.

‘Kolankiewicz. You’re Kolankiewicz.’

The pair looked at each other like a double act of music hall comedians.

‘And who am I?’ said the young one.

Troy dragged up a word from the pit of consciousness.

‘Jack?’ he said.

‘Maybe he’s OK after all?’

‘Bollocks,’ said the ugly one. ‘Troy, listen to me. What year is it?’

‘1944.’

‘That does it.’

The ugly one pulled his wrist free and aimed for a vein in Troy’s arm.

‘No,’ said the young one. ‘Half the dose. I’ll need to talk to him in the morning.’

Troy never heard the ugly one answer. Pink washed him into scarlet and scarlet into burgundy and burgundy into black, black night.

§96

Johnny’s blood turned the bathwater brown. Troy pulled the plug and watched it vanish into its spiral, hit the pipe at the end of the bath with his foot and waited while the geyser delivered its meagre four inches of clean.

Jack appeared with a large mug of black coffee, and sat on the bog seat while Troy drank it. It was the old scene—the court of the ablutions, only Jack was him and he was a bubbleless, death-scented, flat-chested substitute for Tosca.

‘You know,’Jack said, ‘I knew Johnny Fermanagh for the best part of thirty years. Since school, in fact. As older boys went, a decent chap even at the age of twelve. As an adult he was the most useless pillock alive, but he was also the most harmless. No one could have any reason to kill him. I conclude therefore that he was not the intended victim. You were. It was you they meant to kill.’

‘Out in the lane,’ Troy began, hardly louder than a whisper. ‘Insisted on giving me his hat and scarf. Watched him walk off down the alley. Turned up his collar against the rain. Anyone watching who’d been a bit slow would have thought I was him and he was me. Even I thought he was me.’

‘I’ve asked myself. Who would want to kill you? And the answer I come up with is . . . the same people who wanted to kill you last time. So, tell me what lead enabled you to pick up the case?’

‘The sister. The one you found in Derbyshire. She found the key to a safety deposit box. Madeleine Kerr left a will, of sorts, blowing the whistle on what she and Cockerell were up to.’

Every time Troy looked over at Jack he nodded as if to say ‘go on’. And in ten minutes he had the whole story in half-sentences and breathless mumbles.

‘How much does Clark know?’ he said at last.

‘Everything. Well, almost everything. Don’t get on the high horse. He’s simply played the role you used to. What’s a conspiracy without a conspirator?’

‘Have you told Stan?’

‘I’ve tried. I tried all week. He’s not there to tell. But perhaps it’s all for the best. You know what he’s like where the spooks are concerned. He’ll get formal, he’ll get flustered and he’ll get angry. Then God help us all. He won’t handle it well. I’m going in through the back door.’

‘Aha,’ Jack nodded. ‘That friend of yours, Charlie?’

‘Yes.’

‘When?’

‘Today. Late afternoon. About four. Unless I can get to him earlier.’

‘I’ll be home all evening. Call me. Whatever the outcome, call me. I think it’s time we stopped fighting each other and fought the enemy.’

‘Whoever he is,’ said Troy.

‘Quite,’ said Jack. ‘And I’ve no more idea than you have.’

Troy lay back, the nape of his neck on the roll of the bath’s rim, and closed his eyes. The water was almost stone cold, he was scarcely covered by a watery scum of blood and soap and the ghostly trace of Tosca’s bath salts, but he didn’t much care if he never moved again.

‘The tearaway toffs,’ he said softly.

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what the Yard used to call us, before we garnered enough rank for them to pretend to more respect—the tearaway toffs.’

‘Good Lord, so they did. I haven’t heard that phrase in years. The tearaway toffs ride again, eh?’

§97

There was no reason to feel this way. No logical reason, that is. But when Troy saw Charlie sitting in the Café Royal at the same table at which he and Anna had ceremoniously dumped each other, his fingers tingled and his thumbs pricked.

‘You look bloody awful,’ said Charlie. ‘Any particular reason?’

‘Dozens, hundreds,’ said Troy.

Charlie had clearly been there a while. He’d finished a plate of sandwiches and marked up the late runners for Sandown Park in the morning paper. He flagged a waiter and ordered the same again.

‘Unless,’ he said, ‘you feel like something stronger. We could always adjourn to one of the watering-holes.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I’d only feel worse.’

‘Then perhaps you’d better tell Uncle Charlie all about it, and I’ll kiss it better.’

‘Cockerell. It’s all about Cockerell.’

There was only one thing Troy wanted to hear from Charlie. He stumbled into his preposterous tale, and within a couple of sentences Charlie said it.

‘Dammit, Freddie. What are old friends for? Why didn’t you come to me sooner?’

They both knew why.

Charlie reached into his jacket pocket, and finding he had no paper, opened the back of his chequebook and began to scribble. He filled the back of one cheque—those ludicrous, giant pages, the size of pre-war banknotes that Mullins Kelleher favoured—and began on another. Troy wondered if he’d end up filling the book, tearing off the stubs in summary of this mess of mayhem. And then it would make sense. He would only have to read the stubs to see meaning. Deposit—one mystery. Withdraw—one life.

As Troy told him a cloud appeared in the telling. It hovered at every stage. It clung to every question Charlie asked. He suddenly felt that he had dreamt last night, that it had not happened. Washed and dressed, the smell of blood smothered in talcum powder, he felt suddenly stripped of its certainty, as though he had set foot upon a dream. He could feel Johnny’s weight in his arms, he could see the mask he had made of his face as he wiped the blood from his eyes and lips, a blood-red nigger-minstrel mask. But he could not hear him, and he could not smell him, and the weight floated from him and the vision dissolved, and he began to think he had dreamt it and because he had dreamt it he could not talk about it. He could not tell Charlie.

‘Where is it now?’ Charlie said.

‘Where’s what?’

‘This document you say you found in Paris.’

‘Oh . . . my sergeant has it. He knows a bit about cryptography.’

‘And where’s he? At the Yard?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know where he is. He seems to have vanished.’

They had reached the point at which chronology dictated that he recount the previous night. He tried to see it all again. The moment when Johnny had placed the hat upon his head and they had symbolically exchanged identities. The sound of his last uttered word—Troy’s own name. It was a dream. He had floated in pink somewhere. It never happened. And he knew he could not tell it.

And then he saw her. Picking her way between the tables and the afternoon shoppers of Regent Street, taking the tea they all held to be earned, heading for him, waving fussily, coming up behind Charlie. He rose from his chair. Charlie looked around to see who had joined them, and seeing a woman, rose too.

‘This is unexpected,’ Troy said.

‘Aw . . . I came up with your sisters. They wanted to hit town and blow some money. It was nice for a while but goddammit, all those women can talk about is shopping and fucking, fucking and shopping.’

Then she noticed Charlie. And Troy saw the tiny spark that passed between them.

‘Charlie. My wife—Larissa Troy,’ said Troy. ‘Larissa. Charles Leigh-Hunt.’

Charlie beamed his famous smile at her, took her hand.

‘At last,’ she said. ‘I heard a lot about you.’

‘Nothing good, I hope?’

Troy watched. Even Tosca basked in the attention of a man like Charlie. He was not sure what it was, but he knew he didn’t have it. This animal magic that could corrupt the common sense of women. Height helped, the elegance it gave, and the beautiful blue eyes spoke as loudly as his perfect smile, but these were only parts of the puzzle, and the sum was greater than the parts. She waved a hand, mock dismissively, almost seemed to blush at one of the corniest lines in the book.

‘Naw—just lotsa stuff about all the things you and the gang used to get up to.’

‘The gang?’

‘Oh . . . you know . . . Huey, Dewey and Louie.’

Charlie looked quizzically at Troy.

‘Gus and Dickie,’ he said.

‘Baby. I gotta run. Or they’ll come looking for me. You be home soon. Nice meetin’ ya, Charlie.’

She pecked him on the cheek, waved cutely at Charlie and dashed for the door. A ten-second whirlwind.

They sat down.

‘Well,’ said Charlie.

‘You were abroad,’ said Troy.

‘Was I?’

‘I tried phoning you.’

‘I suppose congratulations are in order.’

‘If you like.’

‘You know. I never really thought that we’d either of us marry. Funny really. No rhyme or reason to it. I just never thought we would.’

‘Nor I.’

The pause that followed was one of the most awkward Troy could ever recall. Until Charlie said, ‘Now—where were we?’

§98

Troy ran. All the way home. Out of the Café Royal, into the Quadrant and hell for leather towards Piccadilly Circus. He tripped crossing Leicester Square, tore the knee out of one trouser leg, pushed away the kindly hands that helped him to his feet and ran for the Charing Cross Road, St Martin’s Court, across the Lane and breathless to his own door. He could still feel the imprint of Charlie’s bear hug, the palms clapped to his shoulder blades, like demonic stigmata.

Tosca was home. The pipes banged and creaked with the telltale noises of a bath running. Troy threw off his jacket and ran upstairs. She was half undressed, down to her blouse and suspenders, padding around her bedroom in her stockinged feet, humming softly to herself

She draped her arms around his neck. The best of moods, smiling, jokey. The wise-cracking, wise-ass, all-American broad she could be when the mood took her. He slipped his arms about her waist out of nothing more than habit. A reflex in no way connected to what he was thinking.

‘That was quick. Just as well. We’re goin’ out. On the town. It’s time to rock’n’roll!’

She kissed him. A real smackerooney—a parody of a kiss—pulled herself back, arched her neck, put her weight on his arms and beamed at him. He felt the provocative stroking of one stockinged heel on the back of his calf. It was the peak of irony, that the best should surface in her at the worst moment.

‘Well? Cat gotcha tongue?’

‘Sit down,’ Troy said.

‘What?’

He pushed her to the edge of the bed and made her sit.

‘Where have you seen Charlie before?’

‘What?’

‘Where have you seen Charlie before?’

‘I never seen him before. You introduced us not half an hour ago.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No. I’ve known Charlie since we were boys. He tried, and he put on a damn good show, but he could not hide it. He recognised you. He knew you.’

‘Baby, I never—’

He took her face in his hands, his fingers splayed across each cheek, and looked right into her eyes. It was better than shouting at her.

‘Think!’ he said. ‘Think! Where have you seen him before?’

Tears started in the corner of each eye.

‘He knew me?’

‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know him. I mean I thought I’d just met your oldest friend.’

‘He is my oldest friend. But he’s a spook.’

‘You said, but high up—like diplomatic. I was a nobody. I had no reason to think he’d be anyone I’d ever dealt with.’

‘Nor I. But I can read Charlie like a book sometimes. He’s met you, and in the only guise that matters.’

‘On the job?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t think maybe in the war? I mean it’s a goddam miracle I never bumped into your brother in the war. I met so many Brits.’

‘If it had been in the war, don’t you think he would have said?’

She sagged with the weight of his logic. He felt that if he let go of her now she would simply fall into a heap on the bed.

‘Yeah. Of course. I’m clutching at straws. I know the type. He’s not the klutz with women that you are. He’s a fuckin’ smoothie. A lounge lizard if ever I saw one. If there’d been any intro he could have used he’d have flirted with me till his balls fell off. Damn, damn, damn!’

The tears flowed under his hands, and behind him he heard the sound of the bath running over, of water splashing onto wood. He let go of her and went to the bathroom to turn off the tap. When he returned she had buried her face in the pillow. He picked her up and wrapped her in his arms. She sobbed into his shoulder. He heard her strangled voice say, ‘There’s never going to be a way out, is there? There’s never going to be an end to running.’

She slept and he let her sleep.

When she awoke it was dark. He was sitting on a chair in the corner of her room. He saw her stir, watched her rub her hair and blink at him. For a moment it seemed that she did not recognise him, then the hands left her hair and clapped onto her open mouth as she muffled a scream.

‘Jeeezus. Jeezus. I remember! I remember! It’s him!’

Troy crossed the room, pulled her hands away from her mouth, and held them.

‘Just tell me.’

‘November. Three years ago. 1953. I was on a live drop to Lisbon. Regular run. I’d been doing it since the spring. Same guy, same method, same exchange. He’d show up clutching a two-day-old copy of The Times, with the eyes of the Es filled in, and I’d hand him a parcel. They never told me what it was, but I knew it was money. I’d done half a dozen in a row. Then in November a different guy shows, clutching the paper marked up in the right way. So I gave him the money. Didn’t take fifteen seconds—we neither of us asked any questions—and he didn’t try to flirt with me. But it was Charlie. Only time it ever happened. In December the regular guy was back and I never saw Charlie again. The regular guy showed up every other time. Lisbon, Paris, Zurich. Regular as clockwork, till they pulled me off it.’

Troy went downstairs and came back clutching his briefcase. He tipped it out on the bed and held up a photograph of Cockerell he’d cut from a newspaper.

‘Is this him?’

‘Sure. That’s the guy. Ronnie Kerr. But how did you—?’

‘His real name’s Arnold Cockerell.’

‘The frogman? The guy you’ve been investigating? I don’t get it.’

‘You should. It’s simple. You were the service end of a grubby little operation.’

‘I was?’

‘Where did you think the money went? What did you think it was for?’

‘I didn’t think. You lose the habit. You just do it and hope to get by. Y’know. Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. Nobody knows. I mean, nobody else. Nobody that could tell. Charlie won’t tell, will he? I mean he can’t. If he blows the whistle on me he blows it on himself. It’s a Mexican stand-off. So we’re safe. Nobody really knows. I mean, who else has ever seen me?’

Troy could not tell her pleading from her desire to reassure him, and hence herself. He picked up the police 10 C 8 of the dead Madeleine Kerr.

‘Did you know her?’

‘Nah. Never met her.’

‘She was Ronnie Kerr’s wife. Or at least she pretended to be. Twenty-two years old. Thought it was all a lark. She was murdered. Less than two weeks ago. You remember the case I was on in Derbyshire? That was Ronnie Kerr’s accountant. That leaves you—you’re the last person in England who knows Charlie was running a racket for the Russians. Everyone else has been killed.’

‘Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.’

The phone had rung persistently over his words. He picked it up, meaning to hang up and silence it.

‘Mr Troy?’ The operator’s voice.

‘Yes.’

‘Reverse charge call from Leicester. A Mr Clark. Will you accept the charge?’

Tosca was right. No one but Charlie had ever seen her in her old guise. No one except Clark.

‘It’s me, sir.’

‘Eddie. Where are you?’

‘I’m on Leicester station, sir. I’ve forty minutes between connections. I’m waiting for the slow train from Nottingham, but I thought I’d better tell you as soon as I could. I’m on my way back from Derbyshire. I’ve cracked the code.’

‘The code?’

‘Madeleine Kerr’s last letter, sir. I was getting nowhere with it. Couldn’t get past the first sentence. Then it dawned on me. She hadn’t written it. Cockerell wrote it. So. I had to look for the key.’

‘Key?’ Troy said, feeling like an ill-informed parrot.

‘Yes, sir. Codes like this need a text. An acrostic grid that both writer and reader know to use. At its neatest you have two code pads, one-time pads they’re called, five letters in a block, and you tear off the page every time you use it, so it’s never the same code twice. At its most complex you have a machine with lots of rotating cogs that makes Babbage’s engine look as simple as an alarm clock, and a few thousand assorted boffins and WRENS in wooden huts in Bletchley Park to work the damn thing. I didn’t think Commander Cockerell quite that sophisticated, so I knew I was looking for a printed text. The letter opens in the old alphabet code—Dear Sis. That’s a pun in my opinion, sir. SIS. Get it?’

‘Just tell me, Eddie.’

‘Then it says 49AA. However I worked the code I always ended up with gibberish from those four letters. I thought I must be working it wrong. But then it was obvious, there was a new code for everything that followed and this was the key, they weren’t actually in code themselves. What we in the police force call a clue, sir. I began to realise that Madeleine Kerr had written only the first two lines, something to steer her sister to the real code that Cockerell was using. And it had to be something Cockerell had access to every day. So I took his shop keys out of your desk and went up there yesterday afternoon. I missed it. It was out in the open and I missed it. I spent all last night and half this morning turning out his desk drawers. Then I saw it, sticking out of one of those pigeon holes above his desk. The Automobile Association Handbook for 1949. At the back of the book they give you the distances between the major towns of the country. A simple A–Z graph on two axes. The perfect reusable code. Unless you know what it’s based on, you’d never crack it! So A is for Aberdeen, and the first use of the letter A is the distance between Aberdeen and Aberystwyth—which is 427 miles, therefore the code is 427. The second use would be based on the distance between Aberdeen and Barnstaple, which is 573 miles, hence 573. And as there are fifty-seven possible codes for the letter A, you can write a page or more before you have to repeat any one code. Occasionally you’ll get overlaps—for example the distance from London to Brighton is the same as from London to Cambridge so you could in theory have 53 standing for both B and C, but as London is at the bottom of every column you’d be on at least your thirtieth use of the letter by then, so . . . And the tricky bit is there’s no major British city beginning with the letter J, so the second I, which is Ipswich, becomes J. You’ll never guess how he managed Z.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Eddie. Just tell me!’

‘Ashby de la Zouche. Not bad, eh?’

Clark clearly was not getting the message. Troy turned around in search of Tosca, but she had gone downstairs.

‘You cracked it. Well done. Now just tell me what it says.’

But he knew what it would say. Knew it at its worst.

‘Cockerell was a double agent, sir. I doubt he had the brains to work out exactly what that meant, but the people running him did. They were using him as a courier to channel information out of Britain and money in. They bounced him all over Europe—Paris, Milan, Lisbon. You name it. He was recruited by a man called Charles Leigh-Hunt in the summer of 1951 on a trip to London, ostensibly to visit the Festival of Britain. Says Leigh-Hunt’s MI6, and that he’d known him in the war, but I have no real confidence in Mr Cockerell on matters like that. Could be a fake name, could be a line they spun him. But there’s no doubt about who was his immediate control—would you believe our old friend Inspector Cobb?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘I would.’

‘Then there’s a list of seven names of agents Cockerell claimed to have on his payroll. Earl, John—Smith, Alan—Harwood, Antony—’

‘Don’t recite the lot. Just give me what’s important. The big fish, not the sprats.’

Clark paused, as though Troy had set him a dilemma.

‘Well, sir. There’s only one other big fish as you put it. The courier the Russians sent. He records every meeting, every date, every place, but then he says she always used a different name, so he doesn’t bother to record them, as they’ll all be phoney.’

Clark paused again. Troy could hear his own heart beat.

‘But he does describe her.’

Again silence. Troy not wanting to break into it, for fear of what must follow.

‘I will say, sir, it sounds familiar.’

‘Does it?’

‘About five foot tall, close-cropped hair, although the colour varies from blonde to ginger, built like Jane Russell, bit of a looker, and what Cockerell calls an “irritating American accent”. But, sir, and here’s the clincher, “always clutching a copy of Huckleberry Finn”. Now, sir, who does that sound like to you?’

He wanted so much to be able to see her. He wanted to look into her eyes. He wanted to fling her “we’re safe” back in her face in all its overconfident stupidity. Why had she chosen now to wander off? Now—when the lies she had constructed were about to come crashing down like crazy paving.

‘Eddie, do you still live in the Police House?’

‘I do, sir.’

‘Don’t go back there. Watch your back all the way home. Check into a hotel. Go to the Ritz, give them my name. There’ll be a room for you. She’ll meet you there.’

‘I don’t quite follow, sir.’

But he didn’t ask who Troy meant by ‘she’.

‘There’s been another murder. Someone Cobb mistook for me.’

‘Bloody hell.’

Troy went downstairs to the sitting room. Tosca was sitting in one armchair. Foxx in the other. Like hell’s bookends. Foxx was the new Foxx—the Dior suit, the good shoes—the matching pink luggage in a heap between the two chairs. Tosca was the old Tosca, wishing looks could kill.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘looks like we caught you, suckertush, doesn’t it?’

She crossed her legs, let her foot swing, a metronome of her own impatience. Foxx looked at him. Baffled and not far short of angry.

‘You gonna explain, or what?’ said Tosca.

Troy seized her by the hand, dragged her into the kitchen and kicked the door shut. He didn’t see the fist that came flying at him, and a direct hit to the jaw knocked him off-balance. He deflected the second blow, and the third went wild, colliding with a saucepan. She bruised her knuckles and yelled in pain.

Troy slipped in and slammed her back against the wall.

‘You bastard,’ she hissed. ‘You complete fuckin’ bastard. You couldn’t wait for me, could you? You couldn’t fuckin’ wait! I mean was that a lot to ask? Just to wait for me!’

He took her by the jaw, tilted her head and levelled her eyes on his. Her feet still kicked, but the hands stopped flailing.

‘Shut up. Shut up and listen to me. Whatever’s running through your mind, whatever it is you think I’ve done to you there’s something more important.’

Tosca managed an ‘Oh yeah?’ through pursed lips.

‘They killed a man last night.’

‘They?’

‘Them. The people you were dealing with.’

‘Oh God.’

‘Right here. On the doorstep.’

Her eyes widened. He felt her body slacken and knew the fight had gone out of her.

‘They thought he was me.’

‘Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh God save us.’

He let go. She slithered to the floor, wrapped her arms about herself and he saw tears forming in her eyes.

He squatted down to her level.

‘Who was he? This guy they thought was you?’

‘An old friend. You might have heard me mention him. Johnny Fermanagh.’

‘And this guy looked like you?’

‘A bit. Well, a lot.’

She leant her head against his thigh and groaned.

‘Whatdafuckaweegonnadooo?’

He stretched out a hand to her head and ruffled her hair, picked out the cobwebs she had gathered slithering down the wall.

‘Exactly what I tell you.’

‘I’m all ears.’

‘You take Shirley. You check into the Ritz. You take three rooms.’

‘Who’s the third one for?’

‘My sergeant. He’ll get in touch with you in a couple of hours.’

‘How will I know him?’

‘He’s an old friend—Edwin Clark.’

Her head shot up so fast he thought she’d crick her neck, and her eyes were the size of saucers.

‘Edwin? Edwin? You mean fat little Eddie Clark from Berlin? Sweet little Swifty who did that nice line in women’s underwear and black-market coffee? The guy who got me my black strapless Schiaparelli?’

‘Yes.’

‘And he’s your sergeant?’

‘Yes.’

‘Jeezus! Jeezus, Troy. Why didn’t you tell me about Clark? He knows me, he knows me! You could have told me, you could have fuckin’ told me!’

‘It doesn’t matter. It would only have alarmed you. Besides, he’s one of us now.’

‘Us? Us? Troy, I don’t even know the word!’

‘Leave a message at the desk telling him which room you’re in. Lie low and do nothing till you hear from me. Now—get your shoes and coat. You haven’t time to pack.’

He opened the kitchen door, and she ran for the stairs. Foxx was standing by the fire, with her back to him. She turned and slapped another large brown envelope against his chest.

‘When I said you were married, you told me you didn’t live together any more.’

‘We didn’t, or I didn’t think we did,’ Troy said, not wholly sure what the truth was.

‘But here she is, and here am I.’

‘And you’ll be together a little longer.’

‘Are we in trouble?’

‘Yes.’

‘I was prepared for that. I don’t think I was prepared for a wife.’

§99

Troy put the two women in a cab, and went back to the house. He took the little golden gun from his coat pocket, pushed off the safety and racked a bullet into the chamber. He put the gun on the table next to the telephone. The tools of the trade. One or the other had to get him out of this.

Time was he and Charlie would discuss every aspect of their lives. Once, the best part of twenty years ago, Charlie had rung him and said, ‘I’m engaged. Talk me out of it.’ Troy had. And he had never even learnt the unfortunate woman’s name. But to call him and square off, to call him and draw a line in the sand, to call him and be willing to go as far as blackmail—that he had never done, and he had no idea how to set about it. With any luck Charlie would call him. ‘We’re in a mess, Freddie, let’s get out of it.’ Time was, Charlie could talk his way out of anything.

Half an hour had passed, and he had not reached for the phone. It rang first. He picked it up. If it was Charlie, so be it.

‘Troy? It’s me—Foxx. I’m at the Ritz. Something happened. We took the taxi to King’s Cross. Larissa gave the driver new instructions after we’d set off. Not the Ritz. She said it was dumb to go straight to the Ritz. “Trust me,” she said. “I’m a pro.” She said she’d been followed before. She knew how to shake off a trail. We changed taxis at King’s Cross. I flagged it down. She was behind me, paying the first taxi. She dropped her handbag, and when I turned round she’d vanished. The bag was still there, lying on the ground, but she’d gone, Troy. She’d just gone. I waited for more than ten minutes, but she’d vanished into thin air! Vanished, Troy. Just . . . vanished!’

§100

It had been years since he had last been in Edwardes Square. He had always thought it beautiful, in its sylvan way, but he had never found any reason to go there and enough of a reason not to. One thing had changed. There was now no Special Branch plod outside number 52. There was now no need for him to lurk in the shadows. He parked the Bentley outside Mrs Edge’s door and yanked on the bell pull.

‘You’re late,’ she said as she saw him framed in the doorway.

Troy looked at his watch. It was a quarter to eleven.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’d no idea of the time.’

‘I meant late in the lifetime of your favour, Mr Troy. Not the hour. However, I’ve been expecting you these ten years. Do come in.’

She pushed the door to and drew a heavy curtain across it, locking out the night.

‘Almost autumn, you know. Mists and mellow fruitfulness, to say nothing of cold draughts and rising damp.’

He followed her down the hall and into an overheated sitting room at the back of the house.

‘I retire at Christmas. If you had not come soon, you would never have been able to collect what you’re owed.’

‘I wasn’t thinking in those terms.’

‘Don’t be coy. It doesn’t suit you.’

She sat down in a high armchair next to a hissing gas fire. Troy had the vaguest memory of a yappy lapdog, but a fat tabby cat occupied pride of place on the hearthrug, opened one eye as Troy approached, and did not stir from its place in the artificial sun. A game of patience was set out before her on a low, green baize card table, the latest novel of Kingsley Amis spread open on the footstool. Time had not been kind to Muriel Edge. The lines around her myopic eyes had sunk into Audenesque canyons. The high chair was clearly intended to cater to the onset of arthritis and an inability to bend without pain. The disease had locked her fingers like claws, bent and angular, the knuckles swollen to the size of conkers. The very shape bespoke pain to Troy.

‘I should have gone in the spring, at sixty. But when Dick White went off to run the other show, the new chap asked me to stay on. See the section through the handover, as it were. I was only too glad, retirement will bore me into an early grave. God knows, I can hardly while away the time writing a memoir, now can I?’

She waved Troy into the chair opposite with a crooked hand.

‘Now, tell me what you want. I do hope it’s something within my reach. I do so dislike to leave a debt unsettled.’

Troy had told her the truth. He had no sense of calling in a favour. But he would never have called on her had he not been able to bank on her sense that he had done her job for her all those years ago—tracking Jimmy Wayne where she could not, bringing him to book when her powers had reached their limit. He saw it as a connection, not a debt, but if that was how she saw it, it was but a small difference. He wanted a favour. Whether it was owed or not was of no matter if she granted it.

On a small oak table in the alcove of the chimney breast sat two telephones, at arm’s length from her chair. A black one and a white one—the white had no dial. The standard equipment of a senior officer of MI5. Muriel Edge was a section head. The white phone would lead directly to MI5’s own switchboard. She would have only to lift it to find a duty officer waiting to address her by name. The favour Troy had to ask would be almost effortless for her.

‘Do you know Norman Cobb?’

‘Yes. I know Inspector Cobb. He did one or two jobs for me. But not lately. He is . . . ah . . . too heavy-handed. I can’t have that. There are better officers in the Branch, though God knows, subtlety is not their middle name.’

‘Sometime today he will have requested use of a safe house. I need to know where it is.’

‘Is that all?’

‘Yes.’

She shrugged as though he had accepted a shilling for a quid and reached for the white phone.

‘Yes. I need to speak to Norman Cobb of Special Branch. He’s in a safe house of ours. I don’t know which one. No, don’t put me through, just call me on the other line when you know.’

She turned back to Troy.

‘He’ll be a few minutes. Why don’t you pour us both a drink. You’re as white as a sheet, you know. I think we could both use a brandy.’

Troy followed where the bent finger pointed, to the sideboard and its array of spirit bottles. He returned, set the glass next to her deck of cards, and sipped at his own. It still tasted like soap, but she was right—it was just what he needed.

‘I’ve been following your career. From time to time, that is. You do have your ups and downs, don’t you?’

It should not have puzzled Troy—though it did—but she had not yet asked why he wanted Cobb in his MI5 safe house. And, it seemed, she would not.

‘You were the talk of the town a while back.’

‘Was I?’

‘Oh yes. I felt proud to have known you. When you told Ted Wintrincham you wouldn’t spy on Bulganin, but you would spy on Khrushchev.’

She was chuckling softly now—not at him, but, it would seem, with him.

‘You heard that? I wasn’t aware it was common knowledge.’

‘It’s not. It’s what you call uncommon knowledge. Ted’s quite a wag. Told the story with all the pauses, mimicked that overblown public-school accent of yours and then laughed fit to bust. He told anyone who’d listen. Thought it was the funniest thing he’d ever heard.’

‘I’m afraid I didn’t manage to see the joke,’ said Troy.

‘Nor should you. That’s when they got you. You should never have agreed to any part of their plan. You should have got to your feet and told them to do their own dirty work. You should have walked out of the door with not so much as a glance over your shoulder for fear of the salt pillar. It was madness. It was vanity in its crudest form. You were flattered they wanted you. You were flattered by the chance to meet Khrushchev. You fell for hobnobbing, for rubbing shoulders with the great and the monstrous—but that’s when they got you. You’ve been theirs ever since. And once they get you, you’re theirs for ever. You, you of all people, ought to have known better. I find it hard to believe that you didn’t know this. Once they get you, you’re theirs for ever!’

Her voice had risen in a steady crescendo to this final reiteration. ‘Once they get you, you’re theirs for ever’—these were the last words of Daniel Keeffe.

‘I’m taking steps to be un-got,’ he said.

‘Oh? You are? Inspector Cobb, I take it?’

The black phone rang. She picked it up, said ‘yes’, and put it back almost at once.

‘Narrow Street,’ she said, ‘Cobb is at number 11a Narrow Street, in Limehouse.’

§101

Narrow Sreet was the dream of a perfervid imagination. A fragment of Dickens, a figment of Edgar Wallace or Arthur Machen. The sort of mist-shrouded Limehouse riverside alley where dead dogs would be found floating in green puddles, where the younger sons of peers, silk-hatted and black-caped, would stagger stoned from the opium dens of London’s Chinatown, where Dorian Gray would walk the night for ever young, for ever evil, where scarlet whores in scarlet dresses would flounce their skirts beneath the gaslamps and solicit with a cry of ‘Allo, ducks’, where every other man was a cutpurse who would slit your ‘froat from ear to ear’ and dump your body in the Thames to float downriver.

Troy had walked Narrow Sreet as a beat bobby. He rather liked the place.

It was almost one in the morning. He stood with Jack in the drizzling rain, looking up at number 11a from the opposite side of the street. He had got Jack out of bed, and he had picked Troy up at the Yard in his plain black police Wolseley 4/44, so much more discreet than a Bentley. He had called Leman Street police station and asked for the Divisional Detective Inspector of J Division, and caught him only minutes before he signed off for the night.

‘Paddy—it’s Troy. Do you still want a chance to even the score with Norman Cobb?’

‘Lead me to him,’ Milligan had said.

‘He’s on your patch. Narrow Street.’

‘Bingo,’ said Milligan.

And he had called George Bonham.

‘George, can you still get into your uniform?’

‘O’ course,’ Bonham had said. ‘What’s up?’

Troy could see Bonham now, lumbering down the street from Limehouse Cut. His boots clattering on the cobblestones, splashing through the puddles, his shadow thrown before him, immense in the moonlight, his pointy hat towering above them, the best part of seven feet off the ground.

Milligan stepped out of the shadows under 11a, and crossed the street, soft shoes treading soundlessly.

‘He’s here all right. There’s a squad car under a tarpaulin down the alley next to the house. They’ve blacked it out pretty well, but there’s definitely lights on the first and second floors.’

‘You know George Bonham, don’t you, Paddy?’

‘Of course. We were at Leman Street together for a while, weren’t we, Mr Bonham?’

Troy turned his attention on Bonham. He was the one who would most need the explanation and be least capable of grasping it.

‘George, we’re all of us off duty. Do you see what I mean?’

‘I’m not,’ said Bonham. ‘I’m retired.’

‘Same difference,’ Troy said.

Bonham looked puzzled, scratched one ear beneath the pointy hat.

‘We’re all coppers, though?’

‘Yes—we’re all coppers, but this is not a police operation. We’re . . .’

Troy racked his brains for a euphemism that would explain and not alarm.

‘We’re freelance tonight.’

‘Oh, I gettcha. Sort of a posse like?’

The idea had not occurred to Troy, but that was exactly what they were, and the word suited very well.

‘Yes. A posse. We’re a posse.’

‘And who are we chasin’?’

‘Norman Cobb.’

‘What, that bastard from the Branch?’

No one, it seemed, had a good word for Inspector Cobb.

‘All you have to do is get them to open the door. That’s why we need a uniform. Cobb will have a constable with him at the very least. He’ll be the one to open up. Make an enquiry. Ask him about the car. Don’t be fobbed off with a flash of warrant card. Take out your notebook, ask him for the registration number and the log book. I’ll go in the back. And I’ll create the disturbance we need to let Jack and Paddy steam in. You just sit on that constable.’

‘Freddie—what’s in there?’

‘It’s an MI5 safe house, George.’

‘I see,’ he said, but plainly didn’t. ‘MI5—aren’t they our blokes then?’

‘Usually,’ said Troy. ‘But . . .’

‘But,’ Milligan cut in, ‘when they use a safe house on your patch and don’t have the courtesy to tell the local nick they’re doing it, they’re not playing by the rules, are they? So there’s no reason we should either.’

‘We rescuing someone, George. If we do it right no one will say a thing about it afterwards. It will be as though it never happened. Your pension’s safe, and who knows, the rest of us might live to collect ours.’

‘Say no more,’ Bonham said. And Troy hoped he meant it.

Troy and Jack slipped between Cobb’s car and the corrugated steel fence that ran down to the river.

‘Are you sure you’re up to this?’ Jack asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I could go, you know.’

Troy pointed to the top-floor window at the back, where the building jutted out over the river.

‘It’s tiny,’ he said. ‘I’m the smallest. It’s best if I do it. Give me ten minutes to get in, then set George to rattle the door. Keep out of sight. Give them a clear view of him. If they think he’s a passing beat bobby being dutifully nosy, so much the better. When I’ve found her, I’ll kick up a racket. If needs be enough of a disturbance to make a forced entry perfectly legal . . .’

‘I think we should stop using that word. George might need the reassurance. As far as I’m concerned it’s irrelevant. Cobb’s got it coming.’

‘Whatever . . . just come in fighting.’

Jack cupped his hands to make a foothold and eased Troy over the fence.

‘Tearaway toffs!’ he whispered in the same tone in which one told actors to ‘break a leg’.

‘Jesus Christ,’ said Troy, and dropped clumsily down the other side.

The rain made everything slippery. Troy grabbed hold of the soil stack and began to wonder if ten minutes would be enough. The stack, an eight-inch diameter iron pipe, was old, stout, and solidly bolted to the wall. At the first floor it swung through forty-five degrees and crossed from the side of the building to the back, sticking out precariously over the mudflats of the Thames. Troy felt like a human fly clinging to the pipe as it rounded the corner, but it took his weight, realigned to the vertical and seemed to lead privy by privy to the top of the building, and the open window on the top floor—the only one that was not barred or bricked up. At the third floor he lost his footing and found himself spinning into space, seventy feet above the river, the rain spitting in his face, clinging to an overflow pipe and staring at the looming cranes of Canada Wharf.

The odd thing was the trembling of the knee. He eased himself quietly through the top-floor window into a long-abandoned lavat­ory, and slid down onto the bog seat. Ancient distemper flaked at every touch and covered his clothes with its fine, pale ash. But the knee, the same knee he had scabbed dashing across Leicester Square, the leg that lost its grip on the pipe, jerked with a life of its own. He held it down with both hands and willed it to respond. Any minute now Bonham would thump his giant’s fist against the door and set the house to rattle to its roots.

The top floor was abandoned. Rain and moonlight poured in through missing slates in the roof. Troy took the gun from his pocket and went down to the fourth. The floor was empty. Down to the third. Gently turning the doorhandles one by one. And in the second room he found her, just as Bonham began to pound the door.

Tosca lay on a bare mattress by the far wall. She was not bound or gagged; she was out cold. Troy knelt down, placed the gun on the seat of a bentwood chair, and turned her face to him. She had taken a beating. Her face was a blue patchwork of bruises, her right eye was closed by swelling not by sleep, and one of her front teeth was chipped. But the knuckles of her right hand were skinned and bloody. She had put up one hell of a fight.

He put his mouth to her ear and spoke as loudly as he dared.

‘Tosca. Tosca.’

She stirred, groaned, mumbled and beneath the mumble he heard too late the tread of feet upon the boards behind him. He turned sharply. All he could see were legs, then an arm swung down at him—his own gun, held by the barrel, the butt aimed at his face. He rolled backwards, kicked out with both legs and connected loudly with Cobb’s shins. Cobb went down. Troy flung himself on top of him and got both his hands around the hand that held the gun. He found himself looking straight into Cobb’s face. A bloody bruise beneath one eye bore witness to the struggle he had had taking Tosca. But Troy was scarcely bigger than she. Almost smiling at the task, Cobb simply rolled Troy off him and reversed their positions. Troy still clung to his gun hand. Cobb twisted the wrist. The barrel still pointed off to nowhere, but slowly he was turning it on Troy.

Troy put his thumbs over Cobb’s trigger finger and squeezed. The shot rang out and a shower of plaster cascaded down on both of them. Cobb reared up, his left hand thumping Troy in the face, but off-balance and without the strength or skill of his right. Then Troy heard feet on the stairs and a truncheon thwacked Cobb across the shoulders, and he felt his weight roll off him, and the rush of air returning to his lungs, and saw Milligan whacking Cobb into a corner.

Jack helped him to his feet. Milligan had knocked Cobb senseless, and now scooped Tosca in his arms as though she weighed no more than a leaf and vanished through the door.

‘You OK?’ Jack said.

‘Yes. He damn near had me, but I’m OK.’

The knee that trembled suddenly refused to bear his weight. Jack caught him, and the bullet Cobb was aiming shot between them, drawing a bloody line on the outside of Troy’s right thigh. Cobb was sprawled full length on the other side of the room, blinking as though unable to focus, clutching the little golden gun at arm’s length. In two strides Jack was across the room. One foot crunched Cobb’s wrist, and the other delivered a cracking kick to the jaw. Cobb’s head shot sideways and his grip on the gun relaxed. This time he really was out. Troy lurched across the room, all his weight on his left leg, but Jack caught him in both arms.

‘Leave him, Freddie! He’s not worth it. Leave him!’

And he bundled him out of the door and down the stairs.

Of course Cobb was not worth it. But it was not Cobb Troy had gone after. It was the gun.

Out in the street Bonham held a young constable, no more than twenty-five or six, pinned to the pavement with a size fourteen boot across his throat and a truncheon aimed at his balls.

Troy stopped on the threshold, clinging to Jack’s arm, blood coursing down his leg and filling up his shoe.

‘You,’ he said. ‘Warrant card!’

The man fumbled in his pocket. Troy looked at the card. He was a regular Special Branch constable. Troy had no way of knowing whether he was a stooge of Cobb’s or someone who honestly thought he was doing his duty.

‘Do you know who I am?’

The man nodded.

‘Then take some advice. If you want a career as a copper, forget this ever happened. Go back to the Yard and ask to be transferred out of the Branch. And keep well away from Cobb until you get it. If you don’t, I wouldn’t give tuppence for your chances. Do you understand?’

He nodded again. Bonham showed no inclination to lift his foot. Jack tugged at his sleeve and gestured upwards with the flat of his hand. Bonham let go, and the young constable sucked in air with a painful wheeze.

Milligan had lain Tosca on the back seat of the car. She had not come round. Now, he lifted Troy into the front seat as Jack started the engine.

‘Hospital,’ Milligan said to no one in particular.

Troy put a hand on Jack’s arm to stop him, and reached down to the floor of the car, acutely conscious that the wetness he could feel beneath his fingers was as likely to be blood as rain. His fingers grasped the hard, round object he sought.

Troy handed the potato to Bonham. He took it in his huge paw and regarded it quizzically. Then it dawned on him. A disarming smile of uncertainty, swept by good manners into a display of gratitude.

‘Ta, very much. It’ll bake nicely with a couple o’ parsnips and the Sunday joint.’

‘No, George. It’s not a present. I want you to shove it up the exhaust pipe of Cobb’s car. If he’s any notion of following when he comes round, it’ll buy us a few hours till he gets his hands on another.’

Bonham looked at the potato, once more an object of mystery where he thought he had perceived a simple household vegetable.

‘Up the exhaust? Wherever do you learn such things?’

‘At an English school, George. It was either that or learn how to blow smoke rings.’

Troy thanked Milligan, Jack put the car in gear and roared off towards the Highway and Cable Street.

‘Hospital,’ he said, echoing Milligan.

‘No,’ said, Troy. ‘The Ritz.’

‘The Ritz? What the bloody hell’s at the Ritz?’

‘Clark and the sister.’

Jack nodded towards the back seat and the horizontal Tosca.

‘What about sleeping beauty?’

‘Take her to Mimram. I’ll join you as soon as I can.’

‘Can you drive like that?’

The gash didn’t hurt. There was a lot of blood, but the wound was a nick in the flesh; it was too shallow to have hit an artery and most certainly had not hit a bone. Sooner or later the blood would stop.

‘Yes,’ Troy said optimistically.

‘We could be at the London Hospital in less than two minutes.’

‘A hospital—with a gunshot wound. Jack, they’d have to call the police.’

‘We are the police.’

‘I’d hate to have to defend tonight’s actions with those four words.’

§102

‘You can’t go in there looking like that.’

Jack was right. His jacket was peppered with flaky green paint, he looked like a Martian with a bad case of dandruff. The knee was out of one trouser leg, the other slashed at the thigh and crisp with the browning mat of his own blood. His shoe squelched when he walked.

‘Why don’t you take my mac.’

Jack was a six-footer. The mac covered a multitude of sins and reached almost to Troy’s ankles.

Jack’s hand swept the hair from his eyes.

‘You still look absolutely bloody awful,’ he said.

‘Thanks, Jack.’

The night porter at the Ritz knew Troy by sight, and took evident pride in his own sense of discretion. He glanced once at Troy’s shoes, and gave him Clark’s room number.

Troy heard Clark’s voice answer through the locked door.

‘If you’re Chief Inspector Troy, what was my nickname in Berlin in 1948?’

‘I’ll tell you what it is now—it’s Fat-rogue-asking-for-a­-demotion-and-a-posting-back-to-bloody-Birmingham!’

‘Right first time,’ Clark said and slid back the chain on the door.

Troy threw himself into a chair and felt his muscles uncoil for the first time in hours and the breath seep out of him in a trailing sigh.

Clark was in his shirt-sleeves and braces. Last night’s papers strewn across the floor, a pocket chess set and two empty pale ale bottles laid out on a coffee table beneath a single lamp. He was playing against himself. Troy would never understand minds like Clark’s if he lived to be a hundred, and he felt as though he’d be lucky to make forty-two.

‘Foxx?’ he said.

‘Next door. I’ve got the key to the connecting door.’

‘Are you in the picture?’

‘Pretty much. Our American friend?’

‘Safe and fairly sound. Jack’s driving her to Hertfordshire now.’

Troy mustered the last of his energy and peeled off Jack’s mac and his jacket.

‘Call room service. We want a typewriter, a stack of foolscap and a half a dozen sheets of carbon paper. How long will it take to type out your version of Cockerell’s cypher?’

‘Half an hour or so. I was clerk of stores for a while back in Berlin. I learnt to touch type,’ said Clark, and then added a telling, ‘among other things.’

He picked up the phone, and placed the order.

‘And a pair of trousers,’ he said looking at Troy.

Troy whispered a ‘what?’ at him, and he put his hand over the mouthpiece.

‘Well, if they can find us a typewriter at two o’clock in the morning, a pair of trousers should be no problem. What size?’

‘Twenty-nine by thirty-one leg. Do you think they could throw in a pair of socks too?’

‘And a triple helping of roast beef sandwiches,’ Clark concluded, and hung up.

‘Ten minutes or so, sir.’

‘Fine. Three copies. I have to go next door.’

§103

Foxx was not sleeping. She was sitting up in bed, wearing a fashionable shortie nightdress. He heaved his leg to the edge of the bed.

‘You look like something the cat dragged in.’

‘I know. People keep telling me.’

‘Did you find her?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’d better take those trousers off.’

He could not do it. He could unbutton his own flies, but he could not bend as far as his ankles, and with the weight of dried blood the trousers would not bend either. Foxx pulled off his shoes, tugged at the trousers, and he sat on the edge of her bed in sodden socks and shirt tails staring down at a leg black with gore, and a flap of loose flesh gaping on the thigh.

‘Bloody ’eck,’ she said. ‘That needs stitching.’

‘It will have to do. I can’t go to a hospital.’

Foxx went to the bathroom and came back with all the towels and a flannel soaked in hot water. She bathed the wound and worked down the leg, wringing out the flannel in the basin four or five times and mopping him dry with the towels. The towels were filthy now, and there was still a mess of blood on him, but the flesh was visible again, and the wound clean.

‘How did it happen?’

‘Someone took a shot at me.’

‘The same someone who killed Stella?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Troy!’

‘Yes.’

‘Did you get him?’

‘I don’t know. It isn’t over yet.’

Foxx rummaged around in her handbag and came up with a pack of needles and a reel of synthetic thread.

‘This won’t be totally sterile, but at least it won’t fester. Brace yourself.’

Troy saw the needle go in and re-emerge between his torn leg and her bobbing head.

‘It doesn’t hurt. Why doesn’t it hurt?’

‘I don’t know why, Troy. Perhaps because you love me truly, and true love can know no pain. But—I haven’t believed that since I was twelve. So, God knows. It should hurt. You deserve it.’

She moved slowly. It seemed to Troy that she knew little of medicine, but enough of dressmaking, and sewed him with a perfect seamstress’s hemstitch. Her head moved up and down with her hands, the tips of her hair brushing his leg. The charge ran through him, up his spine to raise the hairs on his head, the delicious tightening of the scalp—but the flesh was willing and the spirit weak as a guttering candle.

‘What now?’ she said. ‘What is to become of me?’

‘How much money do you have?’

‘Thirty-eight thousand six hundred and forty-five pounds in cash. And seven hundred in sovereigns. I’ve no idea what they’re worth. And two boxes to go. We haven’t looked in Amsterdam or Monte Carlo. But it’s still a lot more than Stella said it would be.’

‘Take it.’

‘I already have. Did you think I was daft? I opened an account in Zurich in my own name.’

‘Take it. Go to Brighton. They won’t follow. You’re free. The house is in her name, and it’s yours now. Get yourself a solicitor and apply for probate on your sister’s estate. Once it’s through you can do anything you want.’

‘Anything?’

‘Anything. You have the money.’

‘Is that what it comes down to? Money?’

‘Tell me. Have you ever read The Count of Monte Cristo?’

‘Years ago. ‘When I was a nipper.’

‘Do you remember the Abbé Faria? The old man who tunnels through the Château d’If to find Dantès? He’s the most knowledgeable, the most educated man Dantès ever meets. He attempts to pass on his wisdom to Dantès, but in the end the only legacy that matters is the fortune, the boundless fortune walled up in a cave on a Mediterranean island. Wisdom was as nothing compared to money. I used to think my father was Faria and Dantès rolled into one. He bought us all freedom, bought his entire family choice in the tide of history, but I’m still not sure whether it was his genius or his money.’

She bent low to snap the thread between her teeth, and said, ‘And what about you?’

‘I appear to have . . . obligations.’

‘Obligations you didn’t know you had?’

‘Sort of.’

She raised her head, pulled the broken thread from her teeth and wafted the word at him like a last-blown kiss.

‘Liar.’

§104

It was almost dawn by the time Troy reached home, the sun breaking the skyline off to his right, occasionally visible in the rear view mirror as he steered the Bentley round the last snaking lanes between the main road and Mimram, following the course of the river.

Jack was right. He had his work cut out driving with the muscles of his right leg torn. It hurt like hell every time he put his foot down on the accelerator. Once out of central London, and into fewer stops and gear changes, he abandoned the clutch, used his left foot on the brake and accelerator and changed gear on the sound of the engine.

Jack stood leaning in the porch, wrapped up against the early morning cold in Rod’s dirty-white riding mac, a double-barrelled shotgun dangling at his hip, one finger through the trigger-guard. He looked for all the world like Jesse James.

‘I found it in the umbrella stand. It’s just for show. I couldn’t find my shells.’

‘I shouldn’t think it’s been fired in years,’ said Troy, thinking of the gun Jack had made him leave in Narrow Street. ‘Have you had any sleep?’

‘No. I popped a couple of bennies about an hour ago. When I crash, heaven will fall with me, but that won’t be for several hours yet. I’ll . . . er . . . ride shotgun while you sleep if you like.’

He swung the gun round by his finger and it slipped effortlessly into place in the crook of his arm, almost as though he’d practised the move. No, thought Troy, it wasn’t Jesse James. It was John Wayne playing the Ringo Kid in Stagecoach.

Troy was yawning. It was too good an offer to refuse.

‘We’ll have to clear the decks. It’s Sunday. There’ll be an absolute horde arriving for lunch unless we stop them. Call Rod and the women, tell them “no go”. The cook’ll be here about ten, and there’s a chap comes in to mow the grass sometime before noon. And so on, and so forth. Just tell anyone who shows up to come back tomorrow.’

Jack woke him at eleven. Sat on the bog seat once more, while Troy watched the bathwater turn bloody brown yet again, and examined the neat line of black hemstitch that closed the fleshy flap in his thigh. He could see the speed in Jack’s eyes, his pupils enlarged to bottomless black wells.

‘I talked to them all over breakfast,’ Jack said. ‘Except Sasha. I got Hugh instead. He said they weren’t planning on coming anyway, and seemed to take it as an impertinence that I should be calling. There was a silent “fuck off” between every sentence, so I fucked off.’

Troy wondered if Sasha knew yet. Or was she breaking the news that she was leaving Hugh for a lover already dead? He had found it hard to believe that Sasha would ever leave Hugh—it was too easy to cheat on him, and go on cheating on him—but Johnny’s death had left him with a superstitious respect for Johnny’s belief in her.

He looked in on Tosca. Sleeping soundly. He pulled back the sheet. Her face was a mess, but her body was unmarked. Then he and Jack took their coffee upright on the porch, Jack still absurdly toting the shotgun, his eyes so wide Troy knew he was popping pills like jelly beans, and watched the Indian Summer toss down a last, sunny, breezy afternoon. Troy felt clean for the first time in days. The starch in his shirtfront was an inexplicable source of pleasure. Clean, but lame. The same umbrella stand that had yielded a shotgun now delivered up a walking stick, unused since his father’s death more than ten years ago.

It was turned four o’clock when next Troy pushed open the door to Tosca’s bedroom. She was up, bathed and dressed. She was wearing his clothes again. The grey gardening trousers, the worn Tattersall shirt. She was just finishing her make-up. It seemed to Troy that they had carved an arc in time, an arc that had become a circle. Tosca was bruised and bloody, as when he’d found her in Amsterdam. She put down the jar of flesh-tint, turned to look at him, the bruised eyelid like a stuck venetian blind, and as she did, pulled a glove over her right hand to hide her battered knuckles, and the circle was complete. Before he could speak he heard Jack bounding up the stairs to the half-landing.

‘There’s a car at the end of the drive, in the lay-by on the other side of the road.’

They stood on the porch again. Jack handed the binoculars to Troy. Troy saw Charlie get out of his car, saw Cobb in the passenger seat, saw Charlie saying something to Cobb and setting off up the drive.

‘He’s coming.’

Jack looked at Troy. Not so stoned he didn’t know what was coming next.

‘I have to do this alone.’

‘I know.’

‘Just me and Charlie.’

‘You don’t owe him that, you know.’

‘No, I owe it to you. Whatever happens now, it’s best you don’t know.’

‘I’ll be at the Blue Boar in the village.’

Jack stopped his car halfway down the drive, wound down the window. He and Charlie exchanged half a dozen words and Charlie walked on. He looked pale, tired, but still inescapably handsome. A lock of blond hair waving in the breeze, hands sunk deep in the trouser pockets of an olive-coloured summer suit. A mannequin elegance Troy could not aspire to this side of rebirth or plastic surgery.

‘Another fine mess, eh, Freddie?’ he said, standing in the drive, observing a sense of threshold.

‘It must be fourish. You’re just in time for tea.’

‘Good-oh.’

Troy limped down the long corridor into the kitchen. Lit the gas under the kettle for another round of the English tea ceremony, and found he could not reach the shelf with the tea caddy—his leg would not stretch. Charlie handed it down, shoved his hands back into his pockets and mooched up and down the kitchen floor, head down, leather soles tapping softly on the tiles, like a schoolboy in search of a stone to kick.

‘Where did they nab you?’ said Troy. ‘Cambridge? Along with Burgess and Maclean?’

Charlie ceased his shuffling, looked up through a wayward curl. Then his hand swept it from his eyes.

‘If you like. It’s not strictly true, but Cambridge is a good enough symbol. Maclean and a few others came over in that sort of way—but if you know for a fact they nabbed Burgess, you know more than I do. To this day I’m not certain that Guy’s one of us.’

‘So you’re the infamous Third Man?’

‘Good God no. I’m not even the fourth or fifth man. Philby’s the third man. He’d be most put out if he thought I was laying claim to the title.’

Troy was setting tea cups on the tray. The rattle of crockery felt like thunder in the head. He hoped he did nothing by way of hesitation that might give away his reaction. It was only a year or so since Philby had broadcast his innocence at a press conference, only a year since Macmillan had exonerated him in the House. Charlie would not be telling him this if he thought there was any way he would blab. One way or another, Charlie meant to shut him up. And Troy had no idea how far he would go.

The kettle blew, Charlie leant his backside against the dresser, Troy filled the pot.

‘You carry,’ he said, reaching for his walking stick. ‘I haven’t two hands, I’m afraid.’

Troy limped across the lawn to where a small wicker table and two chairs were set out in the fleeting sunshine, and Charlie followed with the tea tray. The same wind that had whipped the overnight rain from the grass now blew clouds slowly across the western sky—large clouds, lenticular clouds, tabby clouds, rippled like plump brindle cats rolling lazily head over heels in heaven.

Charlie set down the tray. Troy sat down on a wicker chair, and propped his stick against the arm. Something hard dug into his backside. He stuck his left hand behind his back, moved it, winced sharply, pressed his hand to his hip and stretched his back muscles.

‘Sorry about the leg, Freddie,’ Charlie said. ‘Does it hurt much?’

‘No. But it will. I still get gyp off the wound to the kidney and that’s more than ten years ago.’

Charlie had come through the war, and every subsequent skirmish not deemed worthy of the title, unscathed. He sat opposite Troy, tucked back the knee of his perfect trousers, crossed his perfect legs, and touched together the tips of perfect fingers. He spoke calmly, an affection in his voice that was bound to provoke.

‘Freddie, we have to find a way out of this, you do see that? Don’t you?’

‘No. I see nothing. I hear nothing. I’ve listened to you all my life. All my life I’ve been the brave to your chief. Now, you’re going to shut up and listen to me.’

‘Freddie—’

‘Shut up! We’re into endgame, Charlie. Can’t you see that? This is no time to be spinning me blarney. I’m going to tell you what’s what and you’re going to listen.’

‘What, like the last page in an Agatha Christie? Poirot Sums Up.’

It seemed so sweetly pleasant, not the sneer which it surely was.

‘If you like.’

‘Fine. But if you’re going to go all the way back to Cambridge we’ll be here for a week.’

‘I don’t give a blue fuck about Cambridge. 17 April. That’s where it starts, when those two poor buggers from the Branch wrapped their car round a tree on the Portsmouth Road.’

‘I’m all ears.’

His fingers stayed paused in their gothic position, the fingertip church, deceptively serene, while the pale blue eyes locked tightly onto Troy’s.

‘When the Branch roped me in, they did the last thing you had expected and certainly the last thing you wanted. If there was one copper in London you wanted nowhere near Portsmouth, it was me. Not because of the proximity of me and Khrushchev—as my brother so rightly put it, guarding Khrushchev was a red herring—you wanted me nowhere near Arnold Cockerell. Bit of bad luck really that I was ever roped in. But your luck got worse. You tried to talk me out of it, and we ran into Johnny Fermanagh. Johnny always costs me a good night’s sleep, blasts me into sleeplessness. So I caught the late train to Portsmouth, and tough luck again, I found myself sharing a breakfast table with Cockerell, an hour or two before you sent him out to his death under the naive illusion that he was spying on the Russian ship. Am I right so far, Charlie?’

‘Of course. So far, so good.’

‘Then a few days later the balloon went up and Detective Inspector Bonser dashed round to the King Henry and covered the trail. That puzzled me. Bonser is not an impulsive man. I don’t think he’s got the imagination to work up initiative. Now, I haven’t had the time to pull Cobb’s service record, but what’s the betting that if I do I’ll find that Cobb was in the Special Branch in Liverpool before he got the Yard posting? And that in Liverpool he worked with a sergeant named Bonser? When Bonser heard about the frogman spy, he called his old friend Norman Cobb—if he did, there’ll be a record of the call in the duty log—and without you to turn to Cobb panicked and told Bonser to bury the evidence. So, Bonser ripped out the page from the register at the King Henry, a page that also had my name on it. Then, Cobb caught up with you. You told him he’d been a fool, that above all else you wanted the body identified as Cockerell. Because if it isn’t Cockerell, where’s the scandal?

‘Now, unless I’m mistaken you were out of the country in June and July—I know, Gus Fforde said you’d passed through Vienna on your way somewhere, and I tried ringing you myself, just to tell you I’d married and to introduce you to Tosca—but Cobb wasn’t, was he? Cobb was at the Yard handling this fiasco on his own. So, the body finally washed up in July, Bonser called Cobb again, and received new, contrary orders—forget covering up, it’s got to be Cockerell, Cobb said, at any price. God knows what Bonser told Cobb, but if you’d been around I doubt you would have paid the price of his next move. When no one in Portsmouth could identify the body as Cockerell, Bonser consulted the torn page, talked to Quigley and then he called me. Bonser’s a good copper, follows orders to the letter. He got me down to Portsmouth, asked me to look at the body, asked me to meet the grieving widow. And once again the worst thing that could happen to you happened—I investigate the death of Arnold Cockerell. More than that, I investigate the life of Arnold Cockerell.

‘It took me till yesterday to work out that it was Cobb following me around. Stupid of me, damn near got me killed. It wouldn’t have been hard for him to keep track of my movements at the Yard, he’d only have to put his ear to the ground to know I was going down to Derbyshire to see Cockerell’s wife. I found Jessel, and before I could get anything out of him Cobb killed him. I don’t think he meant to, but he overdid the bully boy routine and scared the poor bugger to death. I’ve got fingerprints from Jessel’s desk. One of the prints will surely match Cobb’s.

‘Then . . . then I fucked up. Cobb had no idea Madeleine Kerr existed. No idea that Cockerell had a mistress. I led him straight to her, and he killed her. No accident this time. He snapped her neck, pulled the cord, jumped from the train, and if he’d been a better shot he’d have killed me too.

‘I found myself on enforced sick leave and in the detective’s doghouse. But that meant I wasn’t at the Yard, and with Onions’ wrath hanging over me it meant that I was a damn sight more secretive about what I was doing. Cobb lost me. He didn’t pick up the next lead, he didn’t follow me to Paris because he didn’t know I’d gone. In fact none of you knew a damn thing about it till yesterday, when my wife blundered into the Café Royal and blew both our covers.

‘But we were all on borrowed time. If you’d been around when I first brought her home with me, it would all have come apart in our hands weeks ago.

‘So, I found Arnold Cockerell’s insurance policy—the document Cobb suspected he’d left behind, and for which he killed Madeleine Kerr. And now I not only know what happened—I know why.’

Charlie’s reactions had been minimal. A slight twitch in the muscles of the cheek—a little like the King’s nervous tic during the abdication speech—a tilt of the head forward so his lips touched the tips of his extended fingers.

‘I’m still listening,’ he said, scarcely more than a whisper across his fingertips.

‘Now we will go back a while, not as far as the thirties, and not to Cambridge, but to, let’s say, 1951, to London. You and Cobb are setting up a new network for the Russians. I presume you knew both Cobb and Cockerell from the war?’

Charlie straightened up, smiled, almost happy to be able to make a contribution.

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘They were SOE. Very much our operational arm in those days. I knew Cobb fairly well. He’d no politics to speak of, but he always needed money, and I knew he’d do almost anything to get it. They don’t make the best agents, but then you’ve always some degree of power over them, because they’re so damn greedy. A greedy man is a weak man. I met Cockerell a couple of times at best, but I didn’t know him. Norman was the one who knew Cockerell.’

‘And when the Russians told you they needed a money-laundering service and a courier, Cobb suggested Cockerell?’

‘Of course, I’d forgotten all about the chap. He hardly stuck in the memory, did he? Cobb knew he was in business, and it seemed like just the cover we needed.’

‘1951,’ Troy went on. ‘Cockerell told his wife he was going to visit the Festival of Britain. At the same time Cobb arranged a meeting for the three of you. And I’ve wondered, what lie did you tell him, Charlie, what yarn did you spin him?’

‘None at all. Told him the truth. It was a Russian operation. Not my fault if he couldn’t grasp the reality. And he did go to the Festival. We met him in the Dome of Discovery, as a matter of fact.’

‘You recruited Cockerell to bring in and distribute money to your network. You created a plausible cover, you told him to set up a foreign business, to inflate it to heaven, and he brought in Jessel to keep everything looking kosher. Jessel worked out the trick of paying tax on the money, effectively legitimised it—but nobody told Jessel the truth. Jessel just thought it was a fiddle. And if there’s one thing the age of austerity did for us, it made us a nation of fiddlers. Sid James is our national archetype. Jessel saw very little wrong with this. God knows, until I showed up he probably thought of himself as honest. It was just one more piece of spivvery—the economic modus operandi of the ration book society.

‘Strangest of all—you told Cockerell to turn respectable. He improved his cover, left the Labour Party, joined the Tories and the Rotary Club—he became a pillar of the local Establishment, the middle man of Middle England, and all the time you were pushing thousands of pounds through his Contemporary tat business to a network of Soviet agents working to overthrow everything Cockerell now appeared to stand for. A nice sense of irony, I’ll give you that.

‘For the best part of five years it ran like clockwork. Then something got into Cockerell. I’ve had a high old time trying to figure out what, but at some point he came to you and said he wanted a real mission, he wanted one more crack in the field, didn’t he, Charlie?’

‘It was almost insane,’ Charlie said. ‘He came to me and said he had to swim again. It was something he had to do for himself. He said, “I must have a mission”—you’re quite right, his exact words—he suggested some crack at Bulganin and Khrushchev, not me. I said “Arnold, we’re on their side.” And he didn’t seem to grasp it. It was as though a button had been pressed in his brain and he was back in the war. Swimming into Brest, a recce out to the beaches of Normandy, or whatever. I couldn’t get through to him what we were doing. He seemed to have grasped so little of it. He seemed to think that in some way it was all circular, that in doing this for me he was party to some double- or triple-agent scheme whereby it would all turn out to be for Britain in the end. And you’re wrong about his cover—I never told him to go Establishment. He did all that off his own bat. Worse still, I think he genuinely believed it all. He was the man he pretended to be. Pretty much the fate of all of us when you come to think about it. You invent yourself.

‘As you will imagine, by March he was a liability. I told the Russians about his crackpot scheme and asked what to do with him, and they said, “Fine, send him out to the Ordzhonikidze.” Could’ve knocked me down with a feather. I was staggered. But I did it. I didn’t know they were going to kill the poor sod.’

‘But they didn’t tell you why they wanted him sent out, did they?’

‘Not till I’d done it, no.’

‘It was a black joke. One of Khrushchev’s finest. Cockerell was sent out to spy, by the Russians on the Russians, and they in turn used him to create a scandal that rocked the British Government. It really spits in your eye, doesn’t it? You thought you’d finally got Cockerell off your hands and they toss him back at you like a sprat. Can’t you see the contempt they had for you in pulling a stunt like that?

‘But, it didn’t go smoothly. On the Monday night I heard Khrushchev say, “Do it.” I’d no idea what he meant. I didn’t know who he was talking to, but sure enough the next morning the Captain of the Ordzhonikidze complained to the Foreign Office about a frogman spy. That Monday night, while Khrushchev and I were out pub-crawling, they dumped the late Commander Cockerell overboard. That was “Do it”—“dump the body now!” But in the morning there’s no body. It had vanished, when it should have been floating belly up in Portsmouth Harbour like a dead mackerel. God, Krushchev must have been furious. He’d been saving Cockerell to create a diplomatic crisis when he felt like having one, and he felt really bloody after the row with the Labour Party, so he told the Russian captain to “do it”—but nobody allowed for the currents and Cockerell’s body got washed along the coast for five miles and as many months, and it became a scandal without proof. Only my brother raising hell in the Commons and Eden’s stupidity ever allowed Khrushchev so much as a whiff of victory. He got his scandal, but all too late and too little for his purposes. What he wanted was all hell to break loose while he was still here. Two birds with one stone—the public embarrassment of the Government and the disposal of a useless former agent. Khrushchev probably thought Cockerell was more useful dead than he’d ever been alive.

‘When the body finally washed up, it’d been chewed beyond recognition by fish and propellers and God knows what. It was still important that it should be Cockerell, but by the time I gave you the positive identification you wanted, the proof of the pudding as it were, none of it really mattered much. Yesterday’s rice pudding. Eden had opted for damage limitation, owned up to something he didn’t do, and it was all old hat. And besides, the perfect scapegoat had been found. Both sides needed a victim, both sides needed someone else to blame, and once he’d been nailed the matter could be safely buried by everyone concerned. Scandal, retribution, sacrifice and finally justice. Tell me, how did you manage to pin it on Daniel Keeffe?’

‘Oh, that was easy. I told Cockerell to report to his wartime controller. Keeffe. I knew Keeffe would dismiss his plan as rubbish, but by then it would be too late. His visit would be a matter of record. It didn’t matter what Keeffe said, no one in Five and Six would believe him.’

‘So Keeffe died for your sins. The perfect scapegoat.’

‘If you like.’

‘And now your chickens come home to roost.’

‘I don’t quite follow you.’

‘When you pulled Cockerell off the money run, the Russians had no further use for their courier—Tosca. They pulled her from their end of the operation, knocked her about, and she fled for her life—to find me, and eventually, inevitably, she would find you. Doesn’t it strike you as a mite ironic, that you set in train the sequence of events that would undo you when you sent Cockerell to his death?’

‘Irony’s wasted on me, Freddie. I’m not open to it. Underline it, put it in red. Do what you will. It won’t affect me. I’m a believer.’

‘And I’m not. And first and foremost I don’t believe you.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but now we’ve had the what and the why and the irony, if you’ve reached the end of your little speech perhaps we can get down to brass tacks and do business. Ten out of ten for detection, but Tosca, after all, is why we’re here. There’s got to be a way out for both of us. We can still horse trade, but we can’t leave things as they are.’

‘No.’

‘What do you mean—“no”?’

‘No. No deals. Not while you’re still lying to me.’

‘Freddie, I’m not lying.’

‘You said you’d no idea the Russians would kill Cockerell. Maybe you’re trying to spare me, I don’t know, but Cockerell was dead when the Russians got him. Cobb killed him.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Because you told him to. Because Cockerell knew too much for you ever to let the Russians take him alive. They told you to send him out to them, but they didn’t say dead or alive, so Cobb sapped the poor fool across the back of the head, and dumped him in the water in full frogman’s gear for the Russians to find. They sent a couple of frogmen out from one of the escort ships as they steamed up the Solent. Whatever they were expecting, Cobb gave them a body—and he only just made it back to Portsmouth in time. He was sweating like a pig and he was frazzled. I was there. I saw him. He was on edge, and I put it down to his temperament. He was someone who got high on power, but it was more than that—he’d just killed a man, and the adrenaline was still ripping through his veins like a shot of heroin.’

‘Speculation, Freddie. That’s all.’

‘No—fact. If Cockerell was alive until the Tuesday when the Russian captain put in his complaint, there’d have been no evidence of his last meal in Portsmouth still in his stomach—he died within an hour of finishing his blasted kedgeree. For all I know the Russians stuck him in the fridge for six days, but he was dead when they got him. And he was dead because you couldn’t take the risk of him telling them the truth about your network. I’ve read Cockerell’s insurance policy, Charlie. His last will and testament. He only wrote it because he didn’t trust you. He knew it couldn’t stop him being killed; it could only make life hell for you and Cobb afterwards. He names seven agents on your payroll. Some bloke in GCHQ, an old don at Cambridge to spot likely undergraduates, a couple of minor civil servants at the War Office, whom you appear to be blackmailing, two MPs and a dotty lord. Now, how many have you told the Russians you’ve got? Twelve? Twenty? Because you’re pushing more money through Cockerell’s books than you could ever spend on that threadbare list of would-be traitors. And where does the rest of the money go?’

Troy paused, but Charlie volunteered nothing.

‘Do you remember when you last borrowed money from me? I do. It was the summer of 1951. You paid me back the same year—in cash, and you never asked for money again. You and Cobb are skimming like a pair of cheap croupiers. You pocket the money that the Russians think is going to your list of phoney agents.’

‘It wasn’t my idea, Freddie. Give me some credit. I believe in what I’m doing. It was Cobb. And I didn’t tell Cobb to kill Cockerell. He acted on his own.’

‘I don’t believe you. “They’re so damn greedy. A greedy man is a weak man.”’

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what you said ten minutes ago. You were describing Cobb, but I think it sums you up rather well too. You’ve always been profligate, Charlie. That’s the next thing to being greedy.’

‘Freddie. I did not kill Cockerell. Cobb killed him off his own bat. Just like he killed Jessel and Madeleine Kerr.’

‘Was it his idea to kill Johnny Fermanagh and snatch Tosca too?’

‘What?’

‘Was it his idea to beat Johnny Fermanagh to death and snatch Tosca?’

It seemed to Troy that this must be the make or break question. There they were, each on the edge of their seats, shouting in each other’s faces. But, it should somehow make a difference to the inevitable end of their friendship if Charlie would answer ‘yes’.

The question seemed to halt Charlie in his anger. He looked baffled and his mouth opened soundlessly. Troy never got an answer. Cobb lumbered round the corner from the front of the house, as Troy always knew he would, aiming for them in huge strides, an errant sunbeam breaking the clouds to pick him out like limelight, big feet thudding down like shire hooves, all that grim determination screwed up into an ugly scowl.

Charlie got to his feet.

‘No, Norman. No!’

But Cobb was not listening.

‘I’ve had enough of this bloody farce.’

Cobb reached into his jacket with his right hand, to grasp the Browning sleeping snugly in its leather holster in the armpit of his generously tailored suit. A double-breasted suit may flatter the bigger man, may smooth out the bulge of a concealed weapon, but it adds precious fractions of a second to the action Cobb attempted. Before his hand could clear his lapel once more Troy had shot him five times through the heart.

He had not been wholly sure he could do it.

The Mauser had nestled under the cushion of his chair most of the afternoon, and he had slipped it into his waistband as he sat down. He had taken it off its wooden pegs that morning, felt its weight and wondered. There was ammunition, years old but sound, in the bottom drawer of the old man’s desk. Troy had loaded the gun and found it heavier, longer than any gun he had ever wielded. Worse, his father had been right-handed, and Troy was left-handed, and whilst this mattered not a damn with ninety-nine guns in a hundred, the Mauser, as his wife had so vividly demonstrated, was designed as a cavalry weapon to be cocked by a roll on the thigh as the arm came upwards from a saddle holster. Hence there were models with the hammer on the left, for right-handed people, and, rarely, models with the hammer on the right for left-handed people. He could not draw the gun in any conventional way. He had settled on sticking it in his waistband, in the small of his back with the butt facing to the left. With a little practise he could draw the gun left-handed, cock it almost on the hip as he pulled it up and under and shoot with it held sideways, hammer uppermost, sights to the right—and he found he could do it quickly. But, he had wondered, how quickly would he have to do it?

Every rook in every tree squawked skyward. Cobb fell like an oak struck by lightning—he did not crumple or cry out, but keeled over backwards, with a crash that shook the ground. His hand flew clear of his jacket, the arm extended at right angles to his torso, still clutching the Browning.

Troy had not anticipated the effects of recoil. He had squeezed the trigger and half the magazine had discharged, and the force of it had knocked him off his feet and onto his knees. He put his weight on his right hand. Cobb was still. Stretched out cruciform. He looked to Charlie and found that he, too, was on his knees only a yard away, his face buried in his hands, and a sodden whisper of ‘Jesus, Jesus’ seeking through the mask he had made for himself.

Troy levelled the gun on him, saw an eye open and peep between the fingers like a child pretending to be invisible.

Cobb rattled as his last breath escaped his throat. Troy kept his eyes on Charlie, whipped the gun sideways, shot Cobb once through the forehead, and put the gun back on Charlie.

‘Look at me, Charlie,’ Troy said.

Charlie took his hands from his face, still whispering ‘Jesus, Jesus’ to himself like a fragment of half-remembered prayer, the magic word to undo all he had seen. His cheeks were glazed with tears.

‘Look at me, Charlie.’

Charlie looked up at Troy, then glanced at Cobb as though confirming the worst, then looked back at Troy, still propped up on his right arm, still aiming the gun at him.

‘In case you’re wondering,’ Troy said breathily, ‘it’s an 1896 Mauser Conehammer semi-automatic machine pistol. It holds ten. I rather think I just put six into the late Cobb. Whatever you’re carrying, take it out and throw it on the lawn.’

‘Carrying?’ Charlie’s voice was shrilly incredulous. ‘You mean you think I have a gun? Why on earth would I have a gun?’

‘Of course—you had Cobb. You don’t need a gun. But I’m not going to take that risk. Stand up and take off your jacket.’

Charlie did as he was told. Got shakily to his feet. Held the jacket out and shook it.

‘Please believe me, Freddie. I didn’t know Cobb was going to do that. Really I didn’t. I told him to stay in the car. The last thing I said to him was, “Stay in the car.”’

‘Turn around, drop the jacket, roll up your trouser legs.’

When Charlie stood with his back to him, calves bared like a ludicrous freemason, looking wry-necked over one shoulder, Troy eased himself off the grass and back into the chair, let the gun hang loosely at his side, and waved Charlie down into his chair with his free hand. The move cost him dearly, knocked the breath from his lungs, and he and Charlie faced each other in a crackling, electric silence until Troy found the energy to speak once more.

‘Charlie, this is the deal. And it’s the only one you’re getting. I’ve put everything I’ve just told you on paper, and it’s on its way to lawyers in three different cities, in three different countries, together with copies of Cockerell’s last letter. You’d be well advised to keep me alive, Charlie. If I die they have instructions to send everything to MI5. But you’re safe—your shabby little network is safe—as long as I never hear from you again. If I, or my wife, or any member of my family is ever troubled by either side—it doesn’t matter which—I’ll shop you to both. I want to be left alone. And if I’m not, then we’ll find out the hard way just how convincing the proof is.’

‘The British are gullible, Freddie. Look what mugs Philby made of them. And do you really think you can get anything to the Russians without me knowing?’

‘I’ve already done it.’

‘Eh?’

‘Check the duty log from the watch on the Russian Embassy. You’ll find a man answering my description dropped a letter in their box about 4 a.m. this morning.’

‘You’re being naive. The KGB will—’

‘Пирожки,’ said Troy, softly pouting over the first syllable.

‘What?’

‘Пирожки.’

For the first time Troy felt that he had really got through to Charlie—with a single word in a language he did not speak.

‘Oh God. Oh my God. Khrushchev gave you an embassy code, didn’t he?’

‘There has to be an end to running. I dropped him a line. Told him where she was, that she will say nothing of what little she knows to anyone and how grateful we would both be to be left in peace. You could say I gave you a head start. But you’d better pray the First Secretary grants my wish. If he sends the dogs, we’ve both had it.’

‘You’re mad, Freddie. He might do just that.’

‘And then again he might not. And if he doesn’t, the status quo pertains. You and me with a common cause once more—contra mundum as you used to say when we were kids.’

The silence fell on them again. Troy thought he had said it all. He’d had most of the day to rehearse it, but he’d never been able to work out how it should end. There were no famous last words on the tip of his tongue.

‘I’ll miss you, Charlie.’

Charlie’s eyes flashed. The finality of what Troy had said seemed to sting him.

‘That’s it, eh? Just like that?’

‘We’ve nothing more to say to one another.’

‘You’ve said an awful lot, Freddie, but you haven’t asked me why.’

‘I’m not interested in why. I never much cared for ideologies.’

‘It’s got bugger all to do with ideologies. Isn’t it obvious why?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Hasn’t it been obvious since we were kids at school? Didn’t you swear oaths to kill every last one of the bastards every time they beat us black and blue? Didn’t you ask a dozen times a day what all that hidebound ritual had to do with you and me? Didn’t it send you screaming into the world hating God and King and Country? And every last damn thing they stood for? Don’t you still look around and ask what all this has to do with you or me? Don’t you still ask yourself how you can ever belong to all this?’

Charlie’s arm swept out inclusively—the house, the garden, the pig pens, the willows and the river, so English in their deepgreenness and their mild eccentricity, so Russian in the human choices they represented and the extremes they struggled silently and secretly to reconcile and if not reconcile contain. The irony of this was lost on Charlie—they were simply symbols close to hand—but hardly on Troy, and Troy knew that he did belong to this, as much as it to him, and knew that he could not explain this to Charlie.

‘We don’t belong, you and I, Freddie. We never did. It was you and me contra mundum for so long.’

His voice dropped to a whisper, the darkness of the confessional.

‘And if you don’t belong, you can’t betray.’

It seemed to Troy like the distillation of all that Deborah Keeffe had said to him—her intelligent, heartfelt argument boiled down to a ruthless conclusion, to a licence to kill.

‘We all said things like that. It didn’t mean a thing,’ he said, knowing full well that it did.

‘Oh no—I meant it. I meant I was out to get them. I was fit to kill.’

‘And who did we kill in the end, Charlie? A weaselly, clapped-out ex-frogman, a pissed-out chartered accountant, a gullible, innocent girl—’

‘And Cobb, Freddie. We killed Cobb.’

‘That doesn’t change anything, Charlie. Cobb’s not my responsibility.’

Charlie looked at Cobb’s body. The chest drenched in grume. The forehead pierced by a clean, bloodless black hole. He looked back at Troy. Whatever it was he was about to say, Troy had heard enough.

‘You can go now, Charlie. We’ve said all we’re ever going to say.’

Charlie stared at Troy, but did not move.

‘I mean it, Charlie. Go now.’

Charlie got to his feet. His lips parted. No words came out. He turned on his heel and began to stride briskly away.

‘Charlie,’ Troy called after him. ‘You’re forgetting Cobb.’

Charlie stopped.

‘What? You can’t seriously expect me to drag his carcass after me?’

‘Yes I can. Think of yourself as Hamlet with Polonius. Lug the guts behind the arras.’

Charlie came back a few paces, drew level with Cobb’s body.

‘What the hell do you expect me to do with him?’

‘I don’t know, Charlie. I don’t care. But you’ll think of something. You always do.’

Charlie seized Cobb by the collar of his jacket and tugged. The body moved a couple of feet, the heels of his shoes scoring parallel furrows in the turf. The look on Charlie’s face was expectant, as though Troy must inevitably see the impossibility of his disposing of Cobb’s corpse, but Troy just stared back at him and said nothing. He watched Charlie all the way to the gate. It took fifteen minutes of tugging, resting and sweating to get there—Troy watching all the time. And when Charlie’s car had roared off he sat and watched a green and yellow dragonfly dance in eccentric circles across the lawn, watched the first tinge of dusk reddle the sky, heard the tuneless rattle of a wren singing—sat until he felt the chill of evening raise his skin, sat until the last swallow had caught the last fly on the wing, and the first bats had glided into the weft of evening.

He was still clutching the gun, his fingers wrapped around the butt as if it had grown out of his arm. He reached for his stick. The leg hurt more than ever. He leant on the stick and limped into the house.

In the semi-darkness he could make out Tosca sitting halfway up the stairs, pale of face, knees under her chin, arms clasped to her shins, the white-gloved hand wrapped around the other, staring at him.

He flipped the magazine from the Mauser and emptied the clip.

‘You can live with that?’ she said softly as the bullets fell into his hand like peas shelled from the pod.

‘We’re not going to talk about it.’

‘Jeezus, Troy. That was murder.’

‘We’re not going to talk about it . . . because if we do then we’ll have to ask how many lives you’ve been responsible for in your time.’

‘Troy, I told you a thousand times. I was just a spy. I dealt in information. I never killed anybody!’

‘Do you really believe that?’

She stamped her feet all the way upstairs. He heard the door of her bedroom close.

Troy hobbled into the kitchen. The light was on. The kettle sang on the gas ring. The Fat Man sat at the kitchen table eating a roast beef sandwich.

‘How long have you been here?’ said Troy.

‘Long enough,’ said the Fat Man. ‘Like I said, yer Old Spot’s due to farrow tomorrow, so I thought I’d best look in on ’er today.’

Troy sat down opposite him. Put the gun on the table.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Of course. The pig. I’d forgotten about the pig.’

‘Anything I can do to help, old cock?’

‘Can you get rid of this?’ Troy said with his hand still on the Mauser.

‘I should think so.’

‘Permanently?’

‘Consider it done, old cock.’

Troy slid the gun across the table, like a pint of beer sent skidding along a bar, and the Fat Man slipped it into his belt and pulled his ragged pullover down over it.

‘Now,’ he said, ‘do you fancy a cup o’ rosy lea?’

§105

For three days they ate their meals in silence—a precise illustration of cartoons by Osbert Lancaster, they sat at opposite ends of the dining table in an atmosphere that would straighten a corkscrew. Between meals they found occupation at far corners of house or garden and at bedtime retired, Maxim and Mrs de Winter, to their separate rooms.

On the evening of the fourth day Troy motored up to London and spent a night at Goodwin’s Court. The next morning he went into the Yard, still in pain, still leaning heavily on a walking stick. Onions sat by the gas fire in his office waiting, puffing gently on a Woodbine. It was a familiar scene. Troy had arrived at his office dozens of times over the years to find Onions there, in just that pose—hunched over gas fire and ashtray regardless of the time of year, regardless of whether the fire was lit or not.

He drew deeply on the stub of his cigarette and looked up as Troy sat down opposite him.

‘I been hearing rumours,’ Onions said.

‘Of course,’ said Troy simply.

‘Rumours the like of which I’ve never heard about a copper at the Yard and never did expect to hear.’

‘I know.’

‘It’s got to be taken care of. I’ve got to take care of it. You do see that, don’t you, Freddie?’

Troy slipped a long white envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Onions. Onions turned it over in his hand. It was unsealed and was addressed to ‘Ass’t Commissioner Onions’ in Troy’s over-elaborate, near-cyrillic hand. Onions stuffed it in his jacket pocket unread.

‘How long do you think you’ve got? How long do you think you’ve got before they come for her? One side or the other.’

‘It’s taken care of. I’ve taken care of it.’

Пирожки.

Onions lit a fresh cigarette from the dying glow of the first.

‘I never thought it would end like this,’ he said.

Troy drove home, pushing the Bentley for all it was worth along the Great North Road. Rounding the bend that took him clear of the beech trees at the top of the drive he could see the house in the first light of autumn. The sun was low on the skyline, cutting sharply through the trees, dappling the house with shadows of hawthorn’s stripped boles. He wound down the window—the air had that unmistakable autumnal smell, the sharp, clean smell of ploughed earth displacing the dusty tang of harvest. The Indian Summer was over. In a single night the seasons had changed, and October had been claimed. The porch door was ajar and filling up with golden leaves rustling gently in the breeze. The house was empty.

He called out as though hearing his own voice in a dream, as though returning to a house he had seen only in a dream, lived in only in some other life—but no one answered.

Up in Tosca’s room a note was propped against the mirror—a stiff foolscap sheet of crested Mimram House paper.

§106

Troy was left with the problem of how to close four cases. The death of Arnold Cockerell could be left exactly as it had been in April. The death of George Jessel exactly as it had been in September. The deaths of Madeleine Kerr and Johnny Fermanagh needed some conclusion—for the record if for nothing else the Yard had to state a reason for looking no further. Then a circular memorandum appeared on his desk informing him of the disappearance of Cobb on MoD business. Wintrincham drew no conclusions in public. If he knew what Onions knew, he kept it to himself. It was obvious what Charlie had told the Branch. God alone knew what they had told Cobb’s family—if he had one. It had not occurred to Troy to ask before. Troy then issued a description of a man, that fitted Norman Cobb precisely, as wanted in connection with the murders of Kerr and Fermanagh, and placed it in front of Jack. Jack accepted it without a murmur and quietly let the cases drop.

§107

Autumn brought the world to the brink of madness. A surge of bellicosity that looked like the willed fulfilment of some collective death wish. Russian tanks rolled around Poland as Poland offered the promise of a political spring in autumn—Khrushchev flew into Warsaw and flew home again with the promise nipped in the bud. Kolankiewicz phoned Troy and said flatly, without the faintest trace of humour or histrionics, ‘I told you so. You have supped with the devil.’

November brought the meeting of the stones. The world went wild again. Over the brink of madness and into the abyss. Britain and France invaded Egypt. Russia invaded Hungary. Bulganin casually threatened to blast London and Paris.

Stones met.

Troy read the papers every day, saw the newsreels in the Eros Cinema at Piccadilly Circus—British paratroopers floating down over Suez like great white jellyfish; an armada of French and British ships steaming south—his natural cynicism taking no pleasure in being proved right. The victorious allies of the last war spanned the world, bestrode it like squabbling colossi.

Stones met.

He stood awkwardly in Onions’ sitting room, clutching a brown ale, with a bewildered, angry Onions, a silent, resentful Valerie-in-her-moated-grange, while Jackie sat at the table drawing endless concentric circles in fifty different colours on a large sheet of paper, and watched the nine-inch television set the new generations had imposed on ­Onions—watched Gaitskell address the nation, a rousing, faultlessly moral speech, damning Her Majesty’s Government for their ‘criminal folly’, and across his face was written the pain of a man who knew himself deceived. The Prime Minister must resign, he said, it was the only way to ‘save the honour of our country’, and in that ringing phrase he felt the hand of Rod. It took him back to Janet Cockerell, and the matter of her husband’s honour. She had had no time for honour, so male a notion. It was guilt that mattered.

Stones met.

He stood with the raggle-taggle British dissidents in Trafalgar Square. Duffle-coated optimists flying in the face of their country at its most banal, as it burst with British patriotism, ‘their finest hour’ rendered down to ‘an ignoble loneliness’. Heard Nye Bevan, the finest political orator in the land, argue for ‘law not war’. Rod should have been there. On the platform, side by side. It was a Rod moment, but he was nowhere to be seen.

Stones met.

Ike tore up the ‘special relationship’. Lit a bonfire in the White House. New wars consumed by old flames. The British forces ground to a halt in the sands of Egypt, no ‘right wheel at Ismailia’, no ‘next stop Cairo’, no hope, no glory—starved of economic fuel and political will. Vanity, folly and fire. New war. Old flames.

And Troy went in search of Angus. He found him in the third pub he tried—the ‘Two Dogs at It’. The landlord had dug out a framed photograph of Churchill and a pair of Union Jacks on little wooden sticks, stuck Winston over the bar and crossed the flags above him. Troy entered at an opportune moment—Angus was yelling, ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean? Battle of Britain part two? What do you silly sods think the last ten years have been? The commercial break? And where did you get ’em? The national dressing-up box?’

It came rapidly, instantly to blows. Troy dragged Angus out still hurling insults at simple-minded men who saw themselves as simple patriots and were baffled to simple violence by his abuse of them. He felled three of them before Troy could even bundle him to the door. ‘Dulce et decorum est,’ he was yelling. ‘Pro bunch of arselickers mori!’

Troy watched the anger in them subside as quickly as it had flared up, the sad shake of heads—‘and him a war hero too’. The two of them fell out onto the pavement, Angus’s tin leg skidded from under him in the gutter, his briefcase flew through the door and landed at his feet—his bowler hat followed, Troy reached up and caught it neatly at full stretch, heading for the boundary and a probable six.

‘Right, y’buggers.’ Angus got to his feet, but he wasn’t facing the ‘Two Dogs at It’, he was looking to the muted orange glow leaking out into the November night from the ‘Lucifer’s Arms’ on the other side of the street.

‘Right, y’buggers,’ he said again, and pursed his lips—a burbling raspberry sound—and it dawned on Troy that this was the noise small boys made when playing aeroplanes. Angus’s arms levelled at the horizontal.

‘Chocks away,’ he said. ‘Takkatakkatakkatakkatakkatakkatakka.’ And shot through the doors of the ‘Lucifer’s Arms’ and into another dogfight.

Troy waited. Stared at the dented crown of the bowler. Looked at his watch. Five minutes passed with no sign of anything more than the usual pub hubbub. He pushed open a door. A man at the bar was farting out the rhythm of the national anthem, ‘God Save the Queen’ played without melody upon the human sphincter, and no one paid a blind bit of notice. Angus was seated at one of the small, round pedestal tables, two enormous scotches before him, his face buried in his hands. All Troy could see of him was the balding pate and the ginger halo spiralling out into the ether. He sat down next to him. Angus took his face from his hands and looked up at Troy—a flurry of burst veins; a relief map of Arizona, criss-crossed with dry river beds; a rough sketch of the moon pitted with open pores the size of craters; Passchendaele the day after.

‘You can tell a man what boozes by the company he chooses,’ he said.

Troy knew the doggerel. His father used to recite it. God knows where he learnt it . . . ‘And the pig got up and slowly walked away.’

Angus knocked back his scotch. Troy almost beat him to it. Their glasses returned empty to the table top at the same moment.

‘Quite,’ said Angus. ‘Same again?’

Stones met.

When Troy was eight or nine yet another seemingly interminable childhood illness had floored him, his head swam, his eyes refused to focus. He could not read. As ever he recuperated, bound in blankets, on long summer evenings on the south verandah. His father came home each day and read aloud to him from The Golden Bough. An old Aztec ritual had Troy chilled to the bone. He could never forget the sickening horror he had felt on first hearing the tale of the meeting of the stones—so phrased that the life that was crushed to pulp as the stones met did not even figure in the title. He was reminded once more of Nikolai’s lament for the ­apparatchiks—the little people he had called them, only to have Rod and Troy dismiss him with a sneer. But—the world between the stones was the world of little people—who could be crushed without care if they spoke a language that sounded like an accident with a Scrabble box, or were so unfortunate to have skins of dusky hue. The world between the stones was full of gooks and niggers.

From Cyprus arrived a plain card in a plain envelope, saying simply, ‘Forgive me.’ Troy never replied. The stones met. He felt again the sickness of horror. The stones met. He had supped with the devil.

§108

Christmas rose up at speed. The sisters descended upon him, complaining and hooting about the petrol rationing—the sense of deprivation was undeniably nostalgic, so British, so very British—and whipped the local tradesman up in a flurry of pheasant and venison and turkey and decked the house in holly. On Christmas Eve all the Troys gathered at Mimram, as they had done for thirty or more years. He stood on the porch with Rod, coatless and shivering as Rod, last to arrive, knocked the first flakes of snow from his hat and said softly, ‘I’ve lost the Foreign job. Gaitskell’s batted me sideways into Home. I suppose I’m paying the price of being right.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I rather think it’s just the price of knowing.’

Rod tilted his head gently towards the house and the burr and hum of the women revving into Christmas.

‘I could do without all this right now. But I suppose I have to get through it.’

‘We,’ said Troy. ‘We have to get through it.’

Troy ducked questions on the whereabouts of Tosca. Pretended it was all jolly, skived off charades and lost twice a day to his uncle at chess. On Boxing Day a deceptive calm lay across the house and the white landscape. The elder children usurped the servants’ hall to watch the television without which they could, it seemed, no longer live. The younger gathered around the Christmas tree in the red room, assembling the vast train set Nikolai had given to Masha’s boys. In the drawing room Nikolai disappeared behind a newspaper many days old. Only when Troy, playing host, asked him if he wanted another glass of something did he realise the old man had nodded off. Hugh drank glass after glass of something scotch and rapidly got roaring drunk. The row that had been simmering for so long between him and his wife boiled over amidst the tinsel and the sherry. They stood either side of the fireplace shouting at each other, until Hugh raised an arm at Sasha and Rod broke a truce of many months and blocked Hugh’s arm with his own and told him he’d had too much to drink and should sit down.

Hugh looked across Rod at his wife.

‘I’ll swing for you, you selfish bitch,’ he screamed in best B-feature cliché.

‘Hugh, you haven’t got the nerve. You’re all mouth and no trousers!’ Sasha yelled back.

‘Oh haven’t I?’ he replied, struggling against Rod’s restraining arms. ‘I’ll do for you just like I did for your fancy man!’

Rod let go sharply and thrust Hugh backwards into an armchair. Sasha had a hand across her mouth and seemed to Troy to be screaming silently.

‘What?’ Rod said softly. ‘What did you say?’

‘I said,’ Hugh hissed, ‘that I’ll do for her like I did for that snivelling ponce Johnny Fermanagh.’

Rod looked at Troy. Desperation in his eyes.

‘I didn’t hear what he said,’ Troy said. ‘He’s drunk, and he’s rambling. I didn’t hear him. And nor did any of you.’

He looked around the room, making sure they all acknowledged what he had said. Then he went upstairs to Tosca’s room. Lay on the bed and wept silently for Johnny Fermanagh. It seemed to him now that his life would be for ever tangled up in Bracks, that neither Johnny nor his sister would ever be out of his mind or out of his dreams. He had lost Tosca, he had lost Charlie and he had lost Johnny with too little realisation that the man meant anything to him. So he wept for himself. Never in his life had he felt this alone. He slept. He did not know how long. When he awoke he switched on the light on the dressing table. There, propped against the mirror, was the note Tosca had left. He had never moved it. It stood where she had placed it weeks before.

On the vast white emptiness of foolscap her words read simply, ‘We cannot live like this.’