Mary McDiarmuid drove Jack and Troy to the house in Watney Street.
‘I thought Ray had already been here? And it’s the last place they’ll come back to,’ Jack said.
‘See what?’
‘See . . . them.’
‘See them?’
‘See them … as they are . . .’
‘I don’t quite follow you here, Freddie.’
‘What we’ve seen so far is … on the level of a myth. We’re chasing mythical beasts. They exist in the words of those they’ve encountered, they exist as their victims narrate them . . . We haven’t really met them.’
‘You know, they told me when I joined that you could wank for England when the thesis took you. We do not need to “meet” them, as you put it, we do not need to know them – we merely have to nick them before they kill anyone else. And I met them for three sodding days at the Yard. Take it from me. They’re real enough.’
They stood in a living room less than ten feet square. A cliché of working-class life before the Second World War. A worn but sturdy three-piece suite in black and green leatherette – so big it made any movement across the room into an obstacle course. A beige-tile fireplace with a scorched white gas-fire in its hearth and two glazed spaniel dogs on its mantel. A brush, a poker and a shovel disguised by the figure of a brass knight-in-armour. Three plaster ducks flying up the wall. And not a speck of dust to be seen. It was a house to turn out of and turn into. A house rendered spotless by the daily cleaning woman. It was almost clinical.
‘No dirt,’ Troy said. ‘No vice. Where there’s dirt there’s vice. Everyone has some vice.’
‘I don’t believe it,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t believe they live here.’
But they did. In the first bedroom there was a built-in wardrobe full of bespoke suits and hand-made shoes. The second was different only in that a paperback copy of Peyton Place lay splayed upon the bedside table atop a copy of Parade, a risqué magazine that printed photographs of women without blouses or bras.
‘There’s your vice, Freddie. Ordinary as it comes. The most ordinary sin in the universe.’
Troy pulled open a drawer in the tallboy. Cotton underpants that had been ironed. Socks in neat little balls – socks that had been darned.
‘Savile Row suits. Lobb shoes . . . and darned socks.’
‘I don’t get it,’ Jack said. ‘I don’t get it. They pull jobs, they terrorise the East End, they rub shoulders with toffs and politicians. They dress from Savile Row. And . . . they kill people. And at the end of the day they come back here. To this. Why?’
‘The womb?’ said Troy. ‘Wouldn’t you relish someone who darned your socks? My brother’s wife darns his socks. We could buy an empire of socks, but still he wants the reassurance of a woman’s touch with the darning-needle. It’s a womb. You go out in your tailor-mades and you come back to darned socks.’
‘Spare me the Freudian stuff, Freddie. If it’s their womb then it’s one they’re prepared to put under the wrecking ball if the price is right.’
‘Just an idea,’ said Troy. ‘I’ve been trying to see them as the two boys Robertson tells me I once met. I don’t seem to be able to manage it.’
‘I don’t have to. I encountered them as they are. What they might have been means nothing. Now, are we through?’
‘Not quite.’
Mary McDiarmuid drove them to the Ryan twins’ garage under the arches of the London, Tilbury and Southend Railway in Cable Street.
‘More nostalgia?’
‘Eh?’
‘Don’t you recognise it, Freddie? It’s the same arch we were in in ‘44 – the one Sidney Edelmann had as a bomb-shelter.’
So it was.
Troy looked around. The huge steel H-beams reinforcing the roof, the three-quarter-inch armour-plating Edelmann had pinched from the docks to guarantee the safety of his small branch of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Edelmann had died the same night Troy had killed Diana Brack. It was a coincidence that the Ryans should be running their business out of this particular arch – they could have been in any one of thirty or more – but Troy was in a mood to respond to coincidence.
He could hear Edelmann in his mind’s ear – ‘As I live and breathe it’s Mr Troy. Lads, lads, it’s my old friend Constable Troy’ – almost see Edelmann, hamming it up like a cross between Quasimodo and a Shakespearean clown. He’d not been here in years. He and Jack had been ‘granted an interview’ with Edelmann not long before his death -and a few weeks before that he’d encountered the Ryans for the first time. He could see Edelmann, he could hear Edelmann, he could smell Diana Brack – the drenching scent of Je Reviens. Reach out a hand and he could touch her. But he couldn’t see the Ryans. Couldn’t see the little boys the Ryans had once been.
‘Well?’ said Jack.
‘Nothing,’ said Troy.
Nothing and everything.