Old Flames (26 page)

‘No,’ he said. ‘We can’t.’

It had been a sodden summer. Wind and rain, with the odd day of outstanding sunshine to pepper the calendar and remind the English that they didn’t have summers like they
used to—before the war. One glimmer of ‘sunshine’ remained—earlier in the season England had thrashed the Australian touring cricket team in the test and reminded them that
Len Hutton had retired, but that perhaps his spirit played on.

The desk copper at the Yard had the reliability of a good barometer. He would talk about the weather or he would talk about cricket. In either case, he had the same solution.

‘It’s the bomb,’ he told Troy one morning at the end of August. ‘Stands to reason.’

Troy loved ‘stands to reason’—it was, when used by a certain kind of idiot, specially bred by the English, the signal, the preface, to the preposterous, to a statement that
would, beyond a shadow of a doubt, be quite devoid of reason.

‘Definitely the bomb,’ the copper said, as Troy walked in from Whitehall.

Troy waited. Cricket or the weather?

‘We never had weather like this before you had all them atoms in the air! It’s the atoms. We got too many of ’em just whizzing around in the atmosphere.’

Play or pass? Play, he thought. Absurdist’s gambit.

‘It rains in Japan all the time.’

‘Yeah, but there’s always the trade winds. We’re on the same trade winds as Japan, you see. The wind blows all their atoms from Hiroshima and Nagawotsit over to
England.’

This required little thought. Troy could see mate in a couple of moves.

‘Of course,’ he said, Knight to Queen’s Bishop 4, ‘Japan never was any good at cricket.’

‘Stands to reason,’ said the copper, and went into a manoeuvre known to Troy as the cracker-barrel loop, the homespun philosopher’s ploy of repeat, sigh and wonder at the
majesty of God and Nature. Troy quit. They bred a particularly hardy species of idiot—the English.

Up in his office the phone was ringing. And not a sign of Clark or Wildeve.

He did not recognise the woman asking for Chief Inspector Troy.

‘It’s Janet Cockerell,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he said neutrally.

‘You said to call you if—’

She could not complete the sentence, but it didn’t matter. The ‘if’ had been universal. Bread cast upon the waters. Anything and nothing with a preference that it should be
nothing. But she had called.

‘I’ve heard from that Inspector Bonser again.’

So had Troy. A post-mortem report lay unread in his in-tray. If he’d had a reason for asking Bonser to send it, he’d quite forgotten what it was.

‘He wants me to go back to Portsmouth. And I was wondering. Well. Do I have to go?’

‘No, Mrs Cockerell, you don’t.’

‘He can’t make me?’

‘No, he can’t.’

Troy was not surprised to learn that Bonser had asked. How else was he ever going to get the body identified? If anything, it was odd he’d left the matter as long as he had.

‘But,’ Troy went on, ‘I’m sure you’ll appreciate how little Mr Bonser has to go on.’

‘You’re not saying I should do it?’

‘No. I’m not.’

‘It’s not him. I can’t say it is if it isn’t.’

Troy had heard all this.

‘It’s the way he asks. I feel I’m being bullied.’

He was not wholly sure why he was prolonging this conversation, or where it was leading.

‘Mrs Cockerell. Why are you so certain your husband is not the body we saw?’

‘He’s still alive. I know it.’

‘I’ve been investigating suspicious deaths for twenty years, Mrs Cockerell. Most people who begin as missing persons show up as corpses. There’s not a man in ten thousand can
effectively engineer his own disappearance. The old ploy of leaving your clothes on the beach doesn’t work. If he’s still missing after nearly five months the chances
are—’

‘My husband didn’t leave his clothes on a beach! He left them at the King Henry Hotel,’ she protested.

‘Quite. Doesn’t that tell you anything?’

‘No.’

‘Well. It tells me that your husband has not staged a disappearing trick. Clothes are one thing. Your husband left his wallet, his case and his car, his toothbrush, his razor. If
he’s roving England, he’s roving it without so much as a farthing to his name.’

‘Doesn’t that tell
you
anything?’ she threw his question back at him.

‘Such as?’

‘That perhaps it all comes down to money. That maybe he’s got a nest egg stashed away somewhere?’

‘You may be right. But—’

‘It’s money, Mr Troy. It all comes down to money. If you could just come and look.’

‘What?’

‘If you could come up here. To Derbyshire. And look.’

‘I’m on the Murder Squad. I can’t look into missing persons or missing money.’

‘But you don’t think he’s missing. You think he’s dead!’

She had rounded on him in a quick twist of logic. Afterwards he often had cause to wonder why he had agreed to make the trip to Derbyshire, to involve himself in this bloody, cloying mess. Even
as he jotted down her address, the name of the town—Belper—seemed oddly familiar, as though he’d heard it recently in some other context. She was right: he did believe, if only
from a combination of experience and instinct, that Cockerell was dead. She was right too, in that, for all that he could not offer Bonser the legal certainty he needed, he too thought the corpse
was Cockerell. The weakness in it all was that if the corpse was Cockerell, it was not his problem—let the spooks handle that one—but if it wasn’t, what logical consequence
followed from his assertion that the man was dead? Dead where? Dead when? And by whose hand? No—it was not her logic that gripped him; it was his own. That and the dead cat curiosity of
wanting to stick his nose into the Cockerell affair, simply because he was intrigued that his own brother should have concerned himself so much with the political capital to be made out of it. Rod
was playing an odd game. Of late Troy had been surprised at the lengths to which he would go and the methods he would use, the people with whom he was prepared to deal. Strange bedfellows, as he
had called them. He remembered the long spoon at Downing Street. And he remembered Rod’s stinging suggestion that perhaps Troy and ‘all the piods in Special Branch’ had been only
decoys in the episode of Commander Cockerell. He doubted the use Rod was making of all that he knew and he doubted the source of all that he knew—but worse, far worse, he hated the thought
that he himself might have been used, hated the idea that he’d been in a sideshow when all the time he thought he’d been present at the main attraction.

He looked at the neat, small stack of paperwork on his desk, so controlled and so ordered since the arrival of Clark. The opposite of his life.

‘I’ll be there sometime tomorrow,’ he said to her.

He rang off and pulled the post-mortem report from his in-tray. All good cases begin with a good body. And whoever he was down there on the slab in Portsmouth, he was the ripest corpse in a long
time. Foul, fish-eaten, putrid and stinking. The pathologist’s report made a disgustingly enjoyable read—up, that is, to the heading ‘Contents of Digestive Tract, Stomach,
Duodenum, Colon & Examination of Rectum’. At which juncture disgust overwhelmed even the most perverse of policely pleasures, and Troy dropped the report in his out-tray. He did not have
a pending-tray. Perhaps Clark was working on that? Perhaps one day soon he would walk in and find his life casually dumped in that centre tray?

When it came down to it he could not face the drive. The thought of the hours spent crawling up the A5 and then up the A6, across Northamptonshire and Leicestershire and
halfway up Derbyshire, filled him with boredom. You could spend hours stuck in traffic before even leaving Greater London, and the road north could move at a snail’s pace. Britain, it had to
be said, was choking on its traffic. What Britain needed was Autobahns. They were the one positive thing the late Adolf Hitler was remembered for. Visitors would return from the newly reconstituted
Germany and whinge about the backwardness of Britain when it came to roads. Every so often you could meet a buffoon in a bar for whom the mark of a civilised country was that it let him cruise at
105 mph along a concrete superhighway. But, then, that was the post-war syndrome. Troy was getting used to the fashionable rediscovery of the Continent—or Europe as people were tending to
call it these days—the costly summer holiday abroad from which the well-to-do British would return boasting that they’d found somewhere in France that served English beer or a nice cup
of tea—or, increasingly, on the opposite tack, that they’d discovered things that ‘simply hadn’t caught on in Britain yet’, and never would while we remained
‘insular’. Troy remembered his first sight of a garlic press, a bottle of Chianti and red Tuscan pottery. And that little blue book of
Mediterranean Food
by Elizabeth David,
stuffed full of ‘calamári’—whatever that was—and ‘courgette’, better known in its bloated form on the allotments of England as a ‘prize
marrer’—that had a lot to answer for. Either way, either response, was part of the great British talent for self-flagellation.

He reached into his desk drawer for a copy of the railway timetable and began to search for a suitable train. The old Midland line out of St Pancras. He liked trains, and Britain had an
extensive network of lines that seemed to connect pretty well everything with pretty well everything else. Unlike Mussolini’s trains, they rarely ran on time, but they did get you into the
nooks and crannies of the country, whether the nook was Midsomer Norton in deepest Somerset or the cranny Monsal Dale in the heights of Derbyshire. The railways were like the underground, as he had
described it to Khrushchev—ramshackle but they worked.

Belper? Why did he know that name? Belper. He found it on the network map. It was about ten miles north of Derby, a one-horse town, wedged between a tributary of the Trent and the tail end of
the Pennines. And it did indeed have a railway station.

The engine was a shabby specimen, still bearing the insignia of the old London, Midland & Scottish Railway, long since nationalised as part of British Railways. Troy had
been a train-spotter as a boy—so many lines passed through Hertfordshire on their way north—but had outgrown the delights of childhood by the time this type had appeared. All the same,
he knew it for what it was under the grime and neglect of the new order. It was, he recalled, a Jubilee class 4–6–0, named for the year of the old King’s Silver Jubilee in 1935.
Not as grand as the Coronation and Princess Pacifics, not as powerful, but sleek, neat, and usually red like the story-book engine—not dirty black as it was now.

The rhythm of steam, the mechanical inhalation and exhalation of the iron beast, was always soporific. He fell asleep, appropriately enough, somewhere in Bedfordshire. When he awoke it was dark
and the train was chugging through the flatlands of the Trent Valley. He could not remember passing Leicester or Loughborough. He peered out of the window into a clear sky lit by a near-perfect
half-moon. A station passed swiftly by—Long Something or other. He leant against the worn cushioning of an LMS Third Class railway compartment and fell back into sleep again.

Someone was nudging him. He opened his eyes. It was dim in the carriage, dark outside and the train had stopped. The someone was a railway guard.

‘Belper you said, guvner? Look sharpish or you’ll find yourself in Manchester.’

Troy leapt from the train, still half in the land of nod, and found himself in the land of he-knew-not-what. Far Twittering or Oyster Perch? The train pulled out, deep rhythmic sighs, and
disappeared slowly into the stone cutting to the north. As the chug-hiss and the smell of smoke and steam faded, other sounds and scents took their place, opening up like flowers in trick
photography. A delicate waft of night-scented stock, the fainter scent of late-flowering cabbage roses, the strong aromatics of nicotiana. He found himself facing a well-ordered flowerbed. In large
white stones in the centre of the display, offset by an outline of scarlet geraniums, the letters B-E-L-P-E-R were picked out as though freshly whitewashed. High on a stone wall, a gas lamp perched
upon its iron stem and hissed gently into the scented air. From its two arms hung baskets of trailing nasturtium and lobelia. The sound of the engine finally died in the distance, and from beneath
it emerged a throaty musical burble, a multitude of deep cooing voices, dipping in and out of the silence. The silence. That was what was so startling. Somewhere in the distance an open window let
out the indecipherable but unmistakable sound of a wireless tuned to the Home Service, but apart from that and the odd burbling noises, Troy could hear nothing, not a car, not a voice, nothing. A
scented silence.

He looked around. He was standing next to a peeling red railway building, somewhat in the style of a Swiss chalet. The door to his right bore an enamel plaque saying ‘Ladies Only’.
Off to his left a man in porter’s uniform was loading wicker crates full of racing pigeons onto a cart. The pigeons cooed at him, and there was a swift flutter of feathers as he lifted each
basket in turn. He bore a remarkable resemblance to Oliver Hardy. The same rotund face, the same layered jowls jammed between chin and collar, the same clipped, old-fashioned moustache—the
same colossal girth.

‘Excuse me,’ said Troy, ‘I don’t suppose there’s a station hotel?’

Troy half-expected him to straighten up, fiddle with his tie or cuddle his hat to his chest and fluster a little in best Georgian modesty, rocking his head from side to side and pursing his
lips. He said nothing, simply carried on loading his burbling baggage onto the cart. Troy regretted the implied negative in his question. Sod the English and their ungrammatical manners. All he
meant was, ‘Where’s the nearest hotel?’

Without looking at Troy, Hardy pointed up the narrow track towards the town.

‘Up there?’ Troy asked. He was aware such men existed. People who scarcely dealt in language.

‘Top o’ the slope. Across the square. Kedleston,’ said Hardy, in a surprisingly high, soft voice, barely raised above a whisper, still not looking at Troy. He plonked the last
basket high on the load, walked to the front of the cart, and pressed a button. An electric motor kicked in with a whirr about as loud as a sewing machine, and the loaded cart wobbled off up the
slope with Hardy perched at its head. Troy followed the railway caravan in search of the caravanserai, bemused by his silence, dreamily letting the sound of pigeons and the scent of stock wash over
him in the warm night air. A Pennine Arabian Night.