Old Flames (16 page)

The telephone rang. He picked it up and heard his brother-in-law Hugh asking if he could speak to his wife.

‘Sasha?’ Troy said, puzzled, and before he could say a word more the phone was snatched from his hand.

‘Hughdey,’ Masha crooned. Only Sasha ever called Hugh Hughdey. ‘Darling. [Pause.]Yes, darling. [Pause.] I’ll be back after lunch I should think.’

There was a longer pause. Troy could hear the Bakelite crackle, the baritone rasp of Hugh’s voice, without being able to make out a word of what he was saying.

‘Oh,’ Masha resumed. ‘Nothing special. Lucinda came down too, so it was dinner
en famille
.’

She paused again.

‘Yes. After lunch.’

She blew him a smacking kiss and hung up.

Troy stared in near-disbelief.

‘Does Sasha provide the same service for you?’ he said.

‘Don’t ask.’

‘Do you think he’ll fall for that?’

‘Well—he always has in the past.’

‘Hugh isn’t a complete fool, you know.’

‘Wanna bet?’ said Masha.

Onions rang forty minutes later.

‘Pack a suitcase. You’re booked on the night sleeper to Aberdeen.’

‘A juicy one?’ Troy asked.

‘Arsenic. Four bodies. Same MO, and the locals are stumped.’

This appealed. He had not had a good body in a while. He had not investigated a poisoning for about five years, and now the prospect of four at once.

‘What about the squad?’

He heard Onions sigh deeply. The squad was under strength. When Troy had told Khrushchev’s apparatchik that he ran the Murder Squad, he had clipped the truth. He was its acting head in the
absence of Superintendent Tom Henrey. But Tom had been absent since Christmas.

‘I doubt Tom’ll be back,’ Onions said at last. ‘It’s cancer of the pancreas. But until he tells me one way or the other, to relieve him of the job permanently seems
like piling it on—like I was hurrying him into the grave.’

‘Of course,’ Troy said. ‘I’m not asking to be promoted, but I think we have to get someone else in lower down the ladder, as soon as we can.’

‘I’d be hard pressed to give you another inspector.’

‘A sergeant will do.’

‘Anyone in mind?’

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Clark, Edwin Clark. Warwickshire Constabulary, currently with Birmingham CID.’

Onions thought for a second.

‘OK. You’re on. I’ll get Sergeant Clark transferred.’

‘Constable Clark.’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s a constable now. He’ll be a sergeant once he’s on the squad.’

‘God, you ask a lot. Is he up to it?’

‘Of course he’s up to it. In fact, he may be just what we need. A solid anchor man, someone who’s good with paperwork.’

‘It’d be nice to set foot in your office and be able to see young Wildeve. Lately the pile of paper’s been bigger than him.’

Troy knew he would have no difficulty justifying Clark’s presence. A fortnight with him left alone to pervade the office with his unrufflable calm and his methodical, military efficiency
and Onions would soon appreciate him—and the contrast in temperament between such a cool customer and two men as volatile as Troy and Wildeve.

Aberdeen took longer than he or Onions had guessed. When Troy stepped from the overnight sleeper into the dusty morning light under the arches of King’s Cross railway
station in early June, he had been gone the best part of six weeks. London had roared into summer.

He was feeling that curious mixture of the contentment of success and the niggling doubt of a loose end. The murders had indeed been arsenic, but the mistake that had thrown the Aberdonians was
in presuming a common
modus operandi.
Troy had seen at once that this was not the case. The four doses of the poison had been administered in wildly differing quantities, and the emergence
of a fifth body two days after Troy had arrived only added to the spread of evidence. They were not looking for a murderer, he had told them, but for several murderers. His task had been to
redirect the team, to rake over the evidence accumulated in the best part of a year, to interview all over again those potential suspects who had not fitted the previous assumptions about the
case.

It had been a long haul, days without break, often starting at break of day. Occasionally he would pick up a newspaper and scan it quickly. Egypt still simmered, Cyprus still bled and the
Government made no admissions about the Portsmouth spy. The press made endless speculation, particularly those papers owned by the Troys, and Troy knew that some of that speculation was being fed
to them by Rod. The mysterious spy had gone missing, or he was not really working for the Secret Service at all but had been hired by the rightwing Empire mob / the left-wing anti-Soviet Trots /
the White Russian exiles / the Zionists, or he had been kidnapped and was now in Russia, or he had died on the job and was now at the bottom of the Solent—perm any two of three, delete as
appropriate. He had no time to follow the story in depth, but then, he thought, the only depth the story had was that in which this mysterious frogman spy might be buried.

He had gained a confession to two of the murders from the victims’ own family doctor; the local inspector had managed the same with the brother of the second victim; the team as a whole
had built a case against a third man for the fourth murder that Troy was certain would convict him in court—but the fifth case he could not solve, and he returned to London trailing behind
him the thread of his first failure in several years, much inclined to write it down to imitation, the copycat syndrome as he believed the Americans were now calling it. There was a lesson to be
learnt in keeping some things out of the papers. It was, he concluded, a loose thread that was unlikely to be tugged in the near future. At the earliest he would be yanked back to Scotland at the
end of the summer to give evidence in court.

It was seven o’clock in the morning. A fine summer morning. The sun coursed down the Pentonville Road, over the rooftops of Islington and Clerkenwell to pick out the magnificence of St
Pancras’ Midland Hotel in all its grime and glory. London was waking up. Two million kettles sang on hobs. He threw his case in the back of a cab. After coffee and a bath he was quite looking
forward to walking to the Yard.

The old Ascot Patent Gas Water Heater perched on its iron bracket above the bath worked well enough if you knew the knack. Begin in the bathroom. A small trickle will emerge from the nozzle.
Turn knob fully counterclockwise. Run downstairs, wallop pipe next to sink with heel of shoe, held firmly in left hand. Run upstairs, turn knob half-clockwise, press button to ignite. Go to airing
cupboard on landing, wallop pipe at back of cupboard with shoe, held firmly in left hand. Return to bathroom, trickle will now be a lukewarm, modest flow. Disrobe. Lukewarm, modest flow has now
become hot, generous flow. Get in bath. Flow cuts out at four inches of hot water in obedience to World War II guidelines.

Troy had no idea why his Ascot had never got over the war. So much of England had not, after all, and it might well be a simple matter of the machine’s sympathies, but after this rigmarole
nothing would induce him to answer the telephone. It rang as he settled into the bath, and it rang again five minutes later. He stood his mug of coffee and his slice of toast and marmalade on the
soap rack and lay back in the suds. A gentle kick with his foot on the up pipe and the Ascot would yield a second harvest to create something resembling a decent bathful. It just required a little
patience. Whoever it was on the phone could go to hell.

He sipped at his first good cup of coffee in weeks, and was strongly reminded of Larissa Tosca, of her utter immodesty which led her to hold court in the bath, of him perched awkwardly on the
loo while she sank into foam like a Hollywood starlet in a musical comedy. Bath nights had never been the same since.

The walk to the Yard was pleasant beyond all his anticipation. There were days when he loved London; there were days when it sparkled through the grime, and one could be seduced by the lie that
fog and winter were not its natural condition.

He scarcely recognised his office. It was neat and clean and orderly. Someone had emptied the waste paper bin. Someone had cleared that pile of files off the floor and filed them. Someone had
unjammed the window to let the breeze in off the river along with the odd toot of the traffic. Someone had taken down years’ old notices from the board. Someone had wound the clock. Someone
had replaced the broken chair with one of those swivel things that glamorous secretaries sit on while they hoik up their skirts and take dictation. And the desks. Jack’s desk was almost bare.
His own was stacked with papers, but a small, far from glamorous, stout little body was sitting in his chair calmly working his way through them, sorting the urgent from the routine, occasionally
annotating, he presumed for his, Troy’s, future benefit. It made no sense. Had they fired him
in absentia
and replaced him with a real policeman? Was he one of the three bears? Was
this the fat version of Goldilocks?

‘Good morning, sir,’ said the stout little body.

Clark. It was Clark. He’d quite forgotten about Clark.

‘I bet you could use a cup of coffee, couldn’t you, sir?’

Before Troy could say that he’d just had a cup and that nothing short of desperation would induce him to drink Scotland Yard coffee, his eye was caught by a contraption on the corner
cupboard, next to the gas fire. It seemed to consist of a Bunsen burner, several glass flasks, a yard or two of glass and rubber tubing and a large, round condenser from which a deep brown liquid
appeared to be dripping into a beaker.

‘Do you like it, sir? I designed it myself.’

‘Like it? I don’t even know what it is.’

‘It’s a coffee machine, sir.’

Troy looked at the bubbling glass maze. Piranesi could not have bettered the design. He inhaled deeply. It was coffee, and it smelt rather good. Better than the stuff he made himself.

‘Where did you get the apparatus?’ he asked as Clark poured him a cup.

‘From Forensics, sir.’

‘You mean Kolankiewicz parted with half a ton of his clobber to let you make coffee?’

‘Not exactly, sir. I requisitioned it with a chitty.’

‘A chitty?’

‘Yes, sir. I find that if you catch Mr Wildeve when he’s trying to leave, particularly if you already know from his diary that he’s got a date for the evening, he’ll sign
almost anything without reading it.’

This was bad news. This was pretty much how Troy got Onions to sign chitties. It was all a matter of knowing when Stan had arranged to play bowls or dig his allotment. It did not bode well. How
many scoundrels could fit into a single office?

‘You’re not back to your old fiddles, are you, Eddie?’

‘Well, sir. I paid for the coffee. Besides, if you lived in the Police House you’d make your office as comfortable as you could. A home from home, if you like.’

‘Is that where they put you?’

‘Just till I can find a place of my own, sir. I’ll be a few quid a week better off when I get my first sergeant’s pay packet. I might be able to afford a small flat somewhere,
you never know.’

Troy was not sure whether this was a tip of the hat from Clark acknowledging his promotion or another episode in the great British whinge. Promotion meant about thirty shillings a week to Clark,
Troy estimated, still leaving him short of five hundred pounds per annum. It might be enough to set him up in a place of his own. It might not. It wasn’t a great sum. Troy himself earned the
maximum allowed to a Metropolitan Chief Inspector, less than a travelling salesman, and well short of the social yardstick of one thousand pounds per annum—the enviable ‘thousand a year
man’—but then he had never lived off his salary and had never had to. Clark had a point. A single man would not be anyone’s priority in London’s struggle to house its people
in the battered buildings the Blitz had left standing.

‘Is there anything I should know about?’ he said, pointing at the pile of paperwork.

‘Half a dozen things you should read. Nothing that can’t wait. Though this might amuse you.’

He handed Troy a copy of the
Police Gazette,
folded open at the promotions and transfers page.

‘J Division has a new DDI, sir.’

Troy read the short piece announcing ‘the appointment of Detective Sergeant Patrick Milligan as Divisional Detective Inspector, J Division, based at Leman St., London E1, following the
death of DDI Horace Jago’. Leman Street had been Troy’s first station twenty years ago.

‘That’s quite a promotion,’ he said. ‘Who would ever have thought he had it in him?’

‘I don’t think Mr Cobb brought out the best in Paddy, sir.’

‘My recollection is that he was asleep half the time, and the other half he was scheming ways to get even with Cobb.’

‘Weren’t we all, sir? Oh, by the way, your brother’s been trying to reach you all morning.’

‘Urgent?’

‘I wouldn’t know, sir.’

Troy called his brother. Next to the phone was a copy of
The Times,
folded open at its daily crossword. It was nine-thirty in the morning and Clark had already finished it.

‘What’s up?’

‘I’ve a treat for you,’ Rod said. ‘Can you meet me in forty minutes?’

‘I’ve got a fortnight’s leave due to me. I’ll be at Mimram tomorrow morning. Couldn’t it wait till then?’

‘No. It’s special.’

‘Rod—’

‘Just meet me. Won’t take long.’

‘At your office?’

‘No. At the
Post.
Lawrence is making an announcement.’

In 1945 Rod had called the family together. He could not, he said, take responsibility for the family businesses and be an MP. Whatever the rules said, he could not and would not do it. Did
they, he mooted, wish to get out of the business of Fleet Street and sell the lot? No, was the chorus answer. It would be selling everything the old man had put together. To Troy’s surprise
his brother-in-law Lawrence, still in uniform himself, stepped into the breach and offered to run the
Sunday Post.
He had no experience of such work; he had been a barrister when he married
Masha, had spent a frustrating war wearing the red flashes of a staff officer, had never in fact seen combat or set foot on foreign soil. He was, he said privately to Troy, itching for a challenge.
And he had risen to it. The
Post
was now the most contentious Sunday paper in the country, and Lawrence the most litigious, cantankerous, campaigning editor. All in all a man pretty much
like their father. Rod might be right, it might be worth hearing. It might be another of those occasions like the time when Lawrence accused Attlee of selling out his principles after he had
imposed charges on the National Health Service to pay for Britain’s part in the Korean War. Or the time when he had personally signed an editorial calling for Churchill’s resignation on
grounds of senility. Subscriptions all over Britain had been cancelled. Ex-colonial colonels and mad majors had written in in droves and patriots bunged half-bricks though his windows. Lawrence had
his moments.