Troy’s Bentley pulled up in a leafy avenue in Hampstead Garden Suburb. Once he had told Mary McDiarmuid to wait and the sound of the engine had rattled down to nothing he stood and listened. This wasn’t London, this was someplace else. The sound of a blackbird, a child in the distance laughing, the gentle mathematics of a Bach well-tempered prelude drifting through an open window. This wasn’t London.
He checked the address he’d copied down from her statement. Alice Marx had bought herself a corner house on Palmerston Grove – the unquaintly named Rutherford Court. Don’t mix science and politics, as Troy’s father had once told him. An L-shaped house, with the front door set squarely in the long stroke of the L, a new-looking fence separating the short stroke for privacy – privacy in a street where your neighbours were not cheek-by-jowl, where lace curtains did not twitch, and housewives did not stand in the doorways giving out the gossip. This wasn’t London. This wasn’t Hampstead, this wasn’t a garden and it wasn’t a suburb. This was what Ally Marx had chosen to escape London. Troy had often wondered why Kolankiewicz had chosen to live here. He’d never explained, but it had something to do with the man’s sense of security. His end to running. The same might apply to Ally Marx.
Troy yanked on the bell-pull.
‘My God. My God. Where did you spring from? It must be – what? Ten years?’
Alice Marx was probably about the same age as Troy. She hadn’t worn well. A good dye job dealt with the grey hair, but nothing would erase the sharp creases round her mouth where she’d spent a lifetime doing just what she was doing now, pulling on a cigarette, pursing her lips and letting the smoke roll down her nose. She was a good shape, Mrs Marx, a slender figure in silk blouse and cotton slacks, but her face could only be described as the ruin of a former beauty. She didn’t seem to give a damn.
‘More like fifteen, Ally.’
‘Sergeant Troy, Sergeant Troy, George Bonham’s little boy.’
Troy could hear the rhyme, a taunting schoolboy metre. He was pretty certain she couldn’t.
‘It’s Chief Superintendent now, Ally.’
‘I always knew you’d make good. Alf always said you’d run the soddin’ Yard one day.’
‘You going to invite me in?’
‘Of course. I don’t need to ask why you’ve come, do I?’
She turned on her heel. Left him to close the door. He followed her into a big sitting room. A model of neatness, not a cushion out of place, the magazines fanned out across a heavy glass coffee-table, a paperback copy of Peyton Place splayed on the arm of a plush, apricot-coloured armchair, and an ashtray on stilts with a whiz button to make unsightly fag ash vanish in a flash.
Alice turned to face him. ‘You wanna talk, right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then take off your jacket and roll up your shirt.’
‘Eh?’
‘You wanna talk to me, you do as I say. I’m not talking to you ‘cept off the record. So I wanna know up front that you’re not making any records. Roll up yer shirt.’
‘Alice. I don’t think we have that kind of technology.’
‘Shirt or walk, Troy. Your choice.’
Troy removed his jacket, feeling as though he were in front of the school matron, and hocked his shirt up above his nipples.
‘Oy-vey!’ she said, softly parodie. ‘Troy, you’ve taken a battering in your time.’
Troy said nothing. Turned his back to her so that she could see that he did not have whatever device she thought he might.
‘OK. So you’re clean. Come in the kitchen and I’ll make us some coffee.’
She set the kettle to boil. Scooped an inch of ground coffee into the bottom of a cafetière and chattered about her decorators and her builders and the trouble she’d had getting the house as she wanted it. ‘It’s not being able to work with your own. That’s what it is. I got a lovely bathroom now. The doin’s . . . but half the tradesmen in North London are idiots. And can you get a Jewish plumber? Can you my fanny. There’s no such soddin’ thing as a Jewish plumber.’
Troy had a momentary vision of marble tops and gold taps. Perhaps a lavatory seat in a seahorse pattern. A pale green bath. The innate snobbery of his upbringing sitting calmly with the radicalism of his family’s politics, thinking nothing of his inward sneer at the lack of taste so manifested.
At last she stuck a cup and saucer in front of him on what he knew was termed a ‘breakfast bar’. She pulled up a stool. He perched opposite her, thinking this was the most uncomfortable posture to eat any meal and that if it was designed for breakfast he’d far rather take it standing up as his father had done, pacing round his study, bowl of salty porridge in hand, belting out ideas to the boy Troy faster than Troy could catch them.
‘Ginger nut?’ she said.
‘Love one,’ said Troy.
She rolled the packet towards him. As he bit into one she said, ‘Dunk if you want. Alf always did. I could never get him to stop. Couldn’t get him to drink the real stuff either, but you’re used to it, aren’t you? Can’t see you drinking Maxwell House.’
It was the first time Alf’s name had come up. He wondered where the mention of her husband would lead her, but all she said was ‘When you’re ready.’
There could only be one question. ‘Why?’
‘Why?’
A slow stirring of her coffee, her eyes not meeting his. Then the upward tilt of the head, eyes locking on to his like radar.
‘Millie,’ she said simply.
‘Millie?’
‘I’ve known Millie Champion all my life. She was Millie Levine when we was kids. A couple of years younger’n me. A skinny scrap of a girl with legs like beanpoles, and two trails of snot hangin’ off her nose like icicles. We nicknamed her Raggety. I imagine there are still blokes in Bethnal Green who think her name’s Raggety. Millie’s the little sister I never had. Bernie? A pain in the arse. I never thought she should marry a putz like Bernie. But what could I say? I’d married Alf. I hadn’t a stiletto heel to stand on. But, like I said, we grew up together. We stuck together. She cried on my shoulder when Bernie disappeared.’
Troy wondered if there might be mention of Alice crying on Millie’s shoulder when Alf got banged up for fifteen years. There wasn’t. She paused to sip coffee and picked up her thread with no mention of Alf.
‘So. When those Irish sacks of shit went to her and said she’d never see Bernie alive again if I didn’t come up with an alibi for them she didn’t have to plead with me. I said yes straight away. I don’t see what else I coulda done.’
‘Bernie’s dead. You know that, don’t you?’
‘You found the body?’
‘Not yet.’
‘And maybe you never will. But you’re right. Of course Bernie’s dead. But what kind of a friend would I be if I kept telling her that? I just said I’d do it. I alibied the bastards.’
‘When?’
‘Two days before they went out to Bruno Felucci’s. They knew what the odds were. Chances were they’d end up shooting somebody. I just never thought it would be Glenda. In fact, I’d no idea what I was covering them for until I read it in the papers.’
‘A blanket alibi for that night?’
‘If you like.’
‘Did they get in touch with you personally?’
‘Worse than that. I met with them up West in a hotel. Just to get our stories straight and to come up with enough to withstand cross-examination if it ever came to that.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as we all stripped off. I had to be able to point to a mole or a scar or whatever it was. I told ‘em up front. Any funny business and I’d scratch their eyes out. But there weren’t no funny business. That was what was so odd. It was business. That and nothing more. And do you know what sticks in the mind? No offence, you being a goy and all, but the ugliest sight in the world has got to be an uncircumcised prick. And I had to get a gander at two of’em. Never seen one before. And there I was lookin’ at a matchin’ set. Like two choppers in babies’ bonnets. And I went round their place, so I could clock the colour of the wallpaper and which side the light was on and all that nonsense. Then it was all down to time and chance. If they pulled off whatever it was I’d not hear from them. I was to read the papers, and if I saw anything I could expect a phone call and I was to get hold of my brief. We was thorough. We must a’been. Or you lot wouldn’t have let ‘em walk, would you?’
‘We’ll get them.’
‘You’d better.’
‘You wouldn’t consider withdrawing your evidence?’
‘Fuck off, Troy. I’ve told you. I’ve Millie to think of. While she’s got the hope . . . besides, it was more than just me, wasn’t it?’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘A feeling. Well . . . more than a feeling. I got told to go to the Yard and make a statement. So I got me brief and I did it. But if I was all they had to get their lyin’ arses off the hook you’d have had me back at the Yard half a dozen times with my brief interrupting you every two seconds, now, wouldn’t you? No, Troy. I reckon you had a piss-poor case. You’ve come to me cos you want confirmation of what you already know. The Ryans blew away Glenda Felucci – you just can’t prove it.’
‘I will. Sooner or later.’
‘Don’t waste your time, Troy. Do London a favour. Take that scum off the streets. Blow them away, if you have to.’
Troy got up from the stool, an ache in his back telling him God never meant man to sit on one in the first place. Alice slipped ahead of him to the door and held it open for him. Watched as he leaned on his stick in the doorway. He could see her expression melt.
He stood in the garden waiting for whatever it was that was taking its time to surface in her.
‘I’m not completely hard, you know. I did hear you got caught in that explosion what killed that copper what sent Alf down.’
‘His name was John Brocklehurst.’
‘I know what it’s like.’
Troy did not ask what ‘it’ was.
‘It was nothin’ to do with us. You do know that, don’t you? There’s not one of Alf’s boys would have done a thing like that.’
Troy said nothing.
‘Could you like, you know . . . send my . . . you know . . . condolences to his wife?’
‘John was a widower, Alice. He had no wife. Just two sons who’ll never see their father again. On the other hand . . . with any luck you’ll see Alf once a month for the next twelve to fifteen years and then you’ll get him back. Older, wiser and knowing how to sew mailbags. That is, if he doesn’t divorce you for the adultery you’ve just put your name to.’
‘He knows I didn’t do that. Besides, I’d divorce the bastard myself if I had grounds.’
Troy looked at the sky. A clear blue summer’s day. Heard again the song of the blackbird. Bach had given way to Delius, a whisper of Brigg Fair. A melody designed to induce soporific happiness, evoking the haze of a summer’s morning, the sound of a skylark, and a hint of anticipation. As English a sound as music and the BBC Third Programme had to offer. A perfect moment to put the boot in.
‘Try desertion,’ he said, heading for the gate.
‘Well . . . he’s not here, is he?’
‘Hardly his fault, is it? That’ll get me laughed out of court.’
She was almost shouting now as Troy opened the gate.
‘Then it’s mental cruelty, Alice. Run it by your brief. Tell him how it pushed you to the brink being married to a professional thief, how his life of deception and the revelations at his trial were more than you could bear. Tell him how you nearly lost your mind.’
Nothing in her expression told him she was aware of either the irony or the satire in what he’d said. His last sight of her was her sucking on another fag and mulling the idea over. He’d probably just wrecked what remained of Alf Marx’s marriage. It was worth a smile.