It was a night without sleep, a night without women. Just as well. His leg hurt like hell. And he would have hated to have to explain to any of them. It was a night spent musing, musing on images that he would scarcely have said troubled him, but which, nonetheless, he was incapable of dismissing readily from his mind.
He could see 1944 so clearly. That bitter winter’s day out on the bombsite when he had recruited the kids of Stepney Green into an ad hoc and, as Bonham had insisted, highly immoral posse – a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, an array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs, outsize jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding-basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps – eight willing heroes, who saw themselves as Tex Ritter or Gene Autry, galloping to his rescue. All they asked was to be bribed and he had bribed them. He’d never forgotten Shrimp, who had bargained with him over possession of the cartridge case, or Tub, who had found the body in the first place … or Carrots, who had juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, and he could remember names like Spud and Plonk and Plug, but until today, if he rolled his mental projector down that row of children, half of the faces would have eluded memory. Now he could see them all – for the first time in fifteen years he could see the two boys who’d stood sixth and seventh, next to the carrot-headed boy with the cocoa tin, a bit bigger than the others, two smirking, nudging twins, who’d seemed throughout to be sharing a private joke, slapping each other, and always on the verge of giggling themselves silly. Robertson had seemed the hard one – withholding information until the last minute, talking to Troy only in private and demanding an outrageous half-crown for what he had to say. The twins had seemed for all the world to be no more than a couple of scallywags who’d seized any excuse for a day off school. Neither of them had even spoken to Troy.
But in his mind’s eye – which he knew to be an unreliable organ – Troy could not make the transition from the Ryans of 1944 to the Ryans of 1959, from boys to men, any more than when he’d seen the Ryans at the Empress he had been able to imagine them as kids, from scallywags to murderous thugs, from living to dead.
The dead were never less than grotesque to Troy. It never failed to take him by surprise how immediately the human body lost all resemblance to a living thing once the life had been extinguished. No dead shape ever looked to him like anything that could have lived. The colourless wet corpse that had been Diana Brack, the dead weight, the useless lump of flesh that had been Norman Cobb. As they bled out, both the Ryan brothers had looked like giant crabs, an inhuman contortion, hunched over and twisted, like something you’d find on a beach in an adventure novel, like something you’d tap cautiously with the tip of your boot to see if it still moved . . . like something in The Coral Island. But this wasn’t The Coral Island. This wasn’t games with Jack and Ralph. This was. . .
Sergeant Kinney had run up to Troy, panting for breath.
‘Bloody hell,’ was all he could say, and bloody hell it was. Two spreading puddles of blood that joined into a creeping crimson tide, seeping out across the stones and vanishing into the cracks. Bloody hell.
As Kinney’s gasps subsided, Troy became aware of the sound of the river lapping against the stone wall, the creaking arm of a wooden hoist jutting out over the Thames. Then silence. A crystal moment in the light of dawn. The two crabbed bodies in their Savile Row suits, beached upon the cobbles, rockpooled in their own gore.
‘He asked for it,’ Troy had said simply.
‘Been asking for it for fuckin’ years,’ said Kinney, with no grasp of what Troy had really meant. And Troy had realised that no one would. Whatever it was, murder or mercy, he would get away with it.
Only Mary McDiarmuid had guessed the truth. He could see it in her eyes, hear it in her voice.
Troy sank back into the passenger seat of his Bentley. Closed his eyes. They had plenty of time. A slow drive to Westminster and he would have something to say to Stan. Something economic and plausible.
‘Back to the Yard,’ he had said to Mary McDiarmuid. ‘And let’s try sticking to the speed limit, shall we?’
‘Are you OK?’ Mary McDiarmuid had said.
‘OK?’
‘How do you feel, Troy?’
‘Feel?’
He was not happy. Happy was not the word. He might be content. Content might be the word. He felt . . . no, it felt … it felt natural. It felt like . . . like what? Like vengeance.
Stan would not have understood . . .
The cricket perched upon his shoulder. An image as unbidden as the others. A voice saying softly over and over again, ‘Not like this. You can’t leave us like this. Not like this.’ Troy flicked it off with a fingernail and thumb.
He slept a couple of hours between seven and nine. When he awoke the voice had gone silent. He never heard from it again.