8

London, early summer 1959

Onions stuck his head round the office door.

‘Champagne in my office. Ten minutes. OK?’

Troy sat behind his desk still scribbling notes to himself.

Wildeve was staring out of the window, watching the first hint of summer dance on the Thames in a sparkle of white light. ‘It’ll be Asti Spumante,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Was last time.’

‘Don’t knock it,’ Troy said. ‘He tries. And if he can’t celebrate a thief-taking as rich as this one then things have come to a pretty pass. Serious Crime have been after Alf Marx for about as long as I can remember. If I were Stan I’d pop the cork on a few bubbles myself.’

Ten minutes later they found their way to Onions’ outer office, crowded with coppers. John Brocklehurst, Chief Superintendent of the Serious Crime Squad, was on the receiving end of handshakes and backslaps. Madge, Onions’s secretary, was spilling fake champagne over the carpet and getting very little in the glasses. Wildeve relieved her of the task and popped corks with the ease born of years of practice. Onions’s inner door opened a fraction. Troy saw a large blue eye peer out at him, and a hand beckoned.

Inside, Onions was struggling with his uniform. ‘I can’t do these bloody buttons up.’

‘Then don’t.’

‘Can’t host a do like this wi’out a uniform. Don’t be daft.’

Onions, like Troy, hated uniforms. After thirty-five years in plain clothes the assumption of office as the Metropolitan Police Commissioner had the occasional wearing of a uniform as one of its many drawbacks. In the unlikely event of the job ever being offered to Troy he’d decided to say no.

‘Must have put on a few pounds since last time. Do I look fat?’

Troy had no idea how to answer this. Instead he gripped Onions’s tunic with both hands and forced the blue serge over the silver buttons. Onions exhaled. The fabric stretched across his belly tight as a snare drum.

‘Grand,’ he said. ‘Grand. Are they all out there?’

‘I think so,’ said Troy.

‘And John?’

‘A bit red in the face. You know Brock, doesn’t take centre stage easily.’

“Appen if he did he’d be wearing this fancy get-up, not me. Right. How do I look?’

‘Fine,’ Troy lied. ‘Fine.’

He watched Onions step into the throng, half listened as the top copper in the land congratulated his force on the arrest and conviction of East London’s ‘Mr Big’, King Alf – Alfred Joseph Marx – stopped listening as Onions praised the jury system, the Twelve Good Men who’d just voted to bang up Alf Marx for fifteen years. Troy rambled into mental arithmetic: Alf Marx would be sixty-seven when he got out, sixty-two if he kept his nose clean, though he was unlikely to do that, and would emerge some time in 1974, a spent force. The world would have moved on, changed around him, while time stood still in whatever maximum-security nick housed him.

Troy, standing between Wildeve and Swift Eddie Clark, felt Wildeve nudge him. Saw Onions’s eyes upon him. When the blue gaze left them, Wildeve whispered, ‘You were daydreaming.’

Troy whispered back, ‘I was just thinking. Nature abhors a vacuum.’

‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘The king is dead. Long live the king.’

Champagne soon ran out. Whisky appeared as if from nowhere. Detectives drank whisky – neat, or drowned in half a tumbler of water, it seemed to be the professional drug. Madge went home. Swift Eddie parked himself in a corner with a triple and farted. Troy and Wildeve found themselves the unwelcome recipients of Onions’s pissed bonhomie; the buttons popped on his tunic, one arm around Brock’s shoulders, telling him what he had told Troy an hour before. ‘If you’d played your cards right, it could have been you in this damn monkey suit.’

Brock answered quietly, ‘But I didn’t want it, Stan. I always say it pays to know your place. My dad was a pork butcher in Nottingham. One step at a time he said. So I make detective chief superintendent. A pretty big step, mind. Who knows where my lads’ll end up?’

Onions ignored the common sense of what Brock had said and heard only the deference. ‘My old man was a bloody millwright in Rochdale! You sayin’ I shouldn’t have taken the job?’

‘I was saying nothing of the sort, Stan. I was saying I shouldn’t have taken it, and I didn’t. I didn’t even get the chance.’

Onions pondered this. Poured himself another Scotch and failed to see that one statement or the other had to be a lie. Troy knew the truth: men like Brock were never made commissioner. Class alone might not account for it – character had a lot to do with it. And Brock, though ambitious, was not pushy, and, above all, was not the diplomat that Stan was. He’d just demonstrated the limit of his diplomacy in avoiding telling Stan that he should have said no to the job. Men like Stan did not get made Met Commissioner either, but he had. All too often the job went to the Troys and the Wildeves of the world. Men whose birth and education marked them for leadership in a country hidebound by class. Stan was a changeling – brash and Lancashire, magnificent and magisterial, pushy and proud, sly, dissembling, deceitful and manipulative. Everything Troy and Wildeve were, but with a clogs-and-cap accent and a ruthless short-back-and-sides. Jack looked like a naval officer, a minor film star in the mould of Michael Wilding or Stewart Granger. Troy looked like a demonic faun from a Diaghilev ballet. Stan looked like a trade-union leader, more Fred Kite than Ernie Bevin – an excellent candidate for one of the most devious jobs imaginable, but the wrong class to make it work for him. Brock could see the difference, Troy could, and doubtless Wildeve too, but through the bottom of his glass Stan was darkly, if momentarily, blind to it.

Half an hour later they poured him into a squad car and packed him off to Acton and the tender mercies of his daughter Valerie. Troy watched Swift Eddie and Jack Wildeve, both dwellers south-of-the-river, make their way towards Westminster Bridge. He found himself alone with Brocklehurst.

‘One for the road?’ Brock asked.

Troy had had one token glass of champagne and avoided the whisky. The merest hint of a hangover could put him on the wagon for weeks. ‘I, er . . .’

‘For me,’ Brock said. ‘Just for me. You and me, Freddie. There’s no other buggers here. Besides, I want a drink with a man of me own rank.’

Troy could not say no now. Brock had pulled the old pals’ act on him mercilessly. It meant there were things he had to say. He was probably going to cry into his glass and say things he would never dream of uttering to other ranks.

They picked up Brock’s Wolseley from the motor pool, and drove almost to Troy’s house, to the Chandos, a small pub on the corner of St Martin’s Lane and William IV Street. If Brock and booze got the better of him, Troy could roll home from here. And it was far enough from the Yard to bank on not meeting other coppers.

Brock bought himself a beer and a shot, smiled at Troy’s request for ginger-beer shandy, pulled out his fags with nicotined fingers and lit what was probably his fiftieth Senior Service of the day. It seemed to Troy that Brock always walked in a fug of fags, that they coloured his hands, his teeth and quite possibly his personality. There was, he had thought these last few years, something in Brock that had dried up and shrivelled.

‘How old are you, Freddie?’

Silly question, but Troy was the youngest chief super at the Yard and accustomed to accounting for his age. ‘I’ll be forty-four in the summer.’

‘I’m fifty-two,’ Brock said. ‘You start to feel it when you get to my age.’

Silently Troy thought this a preposterous remark.

‘I’ve begun to realise. There’s not much time left.’

Troy said nothing, hoping not to have to tease a single word or phrase out of the man. Brock stared into his pint letting time, of which he now seemed to have so little, tick by.

‘So I made me mind up . . .’

He was looking at Troy, almost as though he was willing him to finish the sentence for him. Troy didn’t.

‘I’m putting me papers in. Going. Retiring. Out to grass. Finito.’

‘Is that what you want?’ Even to Troy it sounded pathetic.

‘I’ve had enough, Freddie. I’ve had enough. Enough is enough. And … I always wanted to get out while I was ahead of the game, winning. There’ll be no bigger win than today. I’ll put in me papers. Pick up me pension and me gold watch. Be out by the end of next month. Sell the house in Islington. Travel a bit. Who knows? Might even meet the right woman. Get married again. You never know.’

Brock, like Onions, was a widower. Jack had never married, a practised womaniser. Troy had married one summer, three years ago. By the autumn she had left him. He had not seen her for months now. He had to bend to see Brock’s point of view. Men there were for whom home was not home without an aproned body bustling around a kitchen telling you whatever time you came in that you were late and your dinner was on the table. Men there were who could not sleep without a stout body denting the mattress next to them. Coppers’ wives were an odd breed, as odd as the men themselves. Troy had never wanted one. It was probably all that men like Stan and Brock craved. Afterwards, dust gone to dust, their lives were hollow spaces vainly filled by an inflated notion of ‘the job’. And if Brock was through with that. . .

He was not responding. Brock was nudging. ‘And you, Fred? How long do you think you’ll give it?’

For a second Troy had no idea what he meant. ‘Give it? You mean when will I retire? I’m forty-three – I thought I just said that. I’ve never even thought about retirement.’

‘Next year there’s got to be an election. Mebbe this year – there’s still time. Labour are a dead cert to win, a shoe-in, and you’ll find yourself running the Murder Squad with your own brother as Home Secretary. Do you really want that? Do you think the brass’ll find that acceptable?’

Troy had scarcely given the matter a deal of thought. His elder brother Rod had been an MP since the Labour landslide of 1945 – the khaki vote. He had served as a junior minister at the Air Ministry towards the fag end of the government and held on to his seat in what now seemed like interminable years of opposition. The Conservative Party had won the last two elections, survived the enforced retirement of Churchill, the madness of Eden, and now seemed to be riding out the stop-go chaos of an old romantic named Macmillan. The prospect of Rod becoming Home Secretary had been dangled before him for three years. It was above and beneath contemplation. Not worth the time it took to work up a worry.

‘I’m sure if the brass find it impossible they’ll let me know.’

‘They can hardly be expected to tolerate a direct line from a chief super to the Home Secretary, now, can they? It’s like a short-circuit.’

‘“They”, as you put it, is Stan. Stan has known Rod since before the war. I hardly think he’ll feel undue access is being granted to me or undue political pressure put on him with me as the conduit.’

‘You’re playing the innocent, Freddie. You know as well as me it’s a pig’s ear of a situation. A right pickle.’

‘Then I’ll tackle the pickle when I come to it.’

Brock grinned, sniggered, and then laughed out loud. Troy was pleased. He could not have tolerated the conversation proceeding pofaced in this direction much longer. Yet to call time on a man who’d just celebrated his greatest triumph, just announced his abdication, seemed inexcusable. He was stuck with Brock until Brock called time and rolled home.

‘How are your spuds this year?’ he tacked away unsubtly.

They had this in common – all three of them, Brock, Troy and Stan: they passed their free time gardening. Troy in the ancient kitchen garden of his country house in Hertfordshire; Stan on an allotment in Acton; and Brock on a strip of reclaimed bombsite in Islington. He was forever digging out broken brick.

‘Oh, not a bad year at all. Lovely crop of King Edwards on the way. As tall as an elephant’s eye. And you?’

‘A touch of wireworm last year,’ said Troy. ‘If I beat it this year I’ll be delighted. Plants look healthy enough.’

‘Not a problem you get on a mix of brick and subsoil, but you know what to do, don’t you?’

Troy didn’t.

‘You let it grass over this winter and turf-strip it next spring. You’ll catch most of the little buggers that way. Let ‘em die off in your compost heap.’

By chucking-out time – not that anyone chucked out London bobbies – they had happily compared beetroot, leeks and carrots, and discussed the virtues of Troy’s prize pig. Brock lamented the confines of Islington. Perhaps when he’d had his jaunt, found Miss Right – who knows? – he’d find somewhere you could park a pig.

Troy was sober. Brock was pissed, but no amount of Troy’s cajoling would persuade him he was not fit to drive. Troy gave up the ghost of the argument. After all, there was no law against driving drunk, as long as you drove within the law. Once you broke the law, crossed the speed limit, bumped another car, shot a zebra crossing, then the police could nick you, and your drunkenness, or otherwise, would without doubt be a factor in the beak’s sentence, but it was not unlawful per se.

‘Knock it off, old son. I’ve driven wi’ a damn sight more’n this inside o’ me. Islington’s three miles up the road. What can go wrong in three miles?’

Troy shrugged. All coppers drank and drove. They all felt the job bought them immunity. He and Brock stood on the pavement on the opposite side of the street, heard the bolts shot on the pub doors. Brock swayed slightly. Troy steadied him and steered him towards the car.

As Brock fiddled with his keys in the door, Troy said, ‘You’re quite sure?’

‘Sure I’m sure. Stirling bloody Moss, that’s me.’

‘I meant about putting in your papers.’

‘Already done it, old son.’ Brock tapped the side of his nose. ‘Slipped ‘em on old Madge’s desk after she went home. Stan’ll get ‘em Monday morning and that’ll be that. You’ll be in Monday, won’t you?’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

‘Then ah’ll see yer then.’ Brock moved swiftly for a drunk: he clasped Troy in a bear hug, crushed him to the ribs and let him go. ‘Night, old son.’

Troy walked off. Stopped, turned, watched Brock climb into the driver’s seat, waved pointlessly, and walked on towards home. The blast of the bomb lifted him off his feet. He hit the pavement ten yards away. The world turned green, then black. He sank into black as into the arms of a lover. It was all so familiar. Smothering, comforting, known.