Troy was early getting to the Yard. He called in at his own office. It had been weeks. Swift Eddie Clark was at his desk, his home-made coffee machine burbling away behind him as strong Blue Mountain made its way from a boiling jar to a flask, by way of a Bunsen burner and several feet of glass piping. It was, possibly, the finest cup of coffee to be had in the whole of London. When Eddie said, ‘He’s in with someone,’ Troy accepted a cup and sat down to wait.
‘Who’s the extra desk for?’ he asked.
‘The Scottish bird, sir. Seems hell-bent on making herself at home. Rang Admin and ordered the desk herself. If she looks like she’s permanent maybe she won’t get posted back to the drivers’ pool. She’s got shorthand and typing too, sir. Always useful.’
On cue Mary McDiarmuid appeared in the doorway. ‘Mr Wildeve’ll be just a couple of minutes. Shall I run you home after?’
‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’
‘That’s nae problem. Me an’ Edwin’ve got lots to be getting on with.’
She smiled at Clark. Clark managed a flicker back. He hated being called Edwin.
‘What have we got?’ Troy asked.
‘The Ryans seem to have watertight alibis. Four blokes all willing to swear they were in an all-night pontoon game. Mr Wildeve collared them this morning. They sent for their brief. They were out by lunchtime.’
‘The drills?’
‘If there was one in that garage of theirs there was a hundred. Mr Kolankiewicz is testing them . . . but . . . ’
Mary McDiarmuid did not need to finish the sentence. They both knew how futile it all was. A drill in a garage was scarcely more optimistic than the needle in the haystack.
Troy waited. Eddie and Mary McDiarmuid rustled papers and talked to each other sotto voce. Troy felt as if he was in a dentist’s waiting room rather than his own office. Rarely had he felt more out of it.
A few minutes later, Troy heard Jack’s office door open and footsteps coming down the corridor. Kitty stood in the doorway, Jack behind her.
‘It’s very good of you to come in, Mrs Cormack.’ Jack, mouthing the platitudes of the job.
‘It was no trouble,’ answered Senator Cormack’s wife, and as she turned to gaze stonily at Troy, Mrs Cormack was all he could see – Kitty was suddenly invisible. The woman he knew entirely absorbed by the woman he didn’t.
Jack turned to Troy, his look almost as stony, and said, ‘Ready when you are.’
Troy could not face typing out a statement. Kitty and Tosca between them had contrived to exhaust him. Trapped between love and death, all he wanted to do was lie down.
‘Mary?’
‘Yep?’
‘Would you mind taking my statement?’
She picked up a notepad and followed the two of them into Jack’s office. Jack glanced at Mary McDiarmuid, saw the pad and pen and nodded. He sat back in his chair, looking as weary as Troy felt. Troy doubted he had had any sleep at all.
‘Right, Freddie, tell me the lot. Tell me everything.’
Troy told him. And when he had finished Jack said, ‘And you thought none of this worth a mention. It didn’t raise your professional hackles?’
It was an unusual experience being carpeted by his junior, but Troy’s inner voice was whispering, ‘You had it coming, Freddie. You brought this on yourself.’
‘No.’
Jack made a cut-throat gesture to Mary McDiarmuid and she stopped writing. ‘You and I break the rules. I get you out and about to look at some of the ripest murders we’ve had in a long time and you don’t see it as a give-and-take process?’
‘Jack, what did I have to give?’
‘That an American was loose on the streets of London with a gun the size of a Sherman tank, for starters!’
‘I didn’t know about the gun, honestly. And for the life of me I can’t see any link between Rork and the murders you’re investigating. In fact, I thought what you thought when you phoned me up last night. . . that this was just another . . . that you’d summoned me out to look at another boy … I didn’t think Rork was in that deep. If I’d reported to you I have no idea what it was I should have been saying.’
Troy took Jack’s pause as assent. When he finally spoke it was to move the subject on if not a mile then round a corner. ‘And Mr Robertson surprised us all.’
‘Quite.’
‘Then I think it’s time we had a word with Mr Robertson.’
Troy found refuge in the ‘we’. However angry Jack was about the mess with which Troy had presented him, he was still talking as though they were a team.
‘Off the record?’ Troy asked.
‘Why would I do that?’
‘He’s a kid, Jack. He’s been in the job a matter of days. He’s fresh out of Hendon. It would be grotesquely unfair to put anything on his record at this stage that we aren’t totally sure of.’
‘OK. Where, then? And it has to be soon. Whatever it is that’s buzzing in young Robertson’s head I want to hear it.’
‘How about my house tomorrow morning?’
‘How about your house in an hour and a half?’
Troy did not argue. Jack would not have understood.
While Mary McDiarmuid fetched a car, Troy drifted along to Onions’s office. His secretary, Madge, had gone home. Both inner and outer doors were open. Onions was at his desk, slaving at paperwork under a reading lamp, rapidly scanning pages and scribbling his initials. As Troy came in he looked up once, the green shade casting a dragon-skin across his face. ‘I’ve heard,’ he said simply. ‘You’re in the shit again. Don’t even think of askin’ me to let you back early. Just bugger off.’
‘But—’
‘Bugger off!’