Old Flames (47 page)

She dropped her hair, she dropped her towel and locked her hands around the back of his neck. It seemed like a long time since he had last been kissed, let alone so passionately as this. She
drew back, placed a finger at the corner of his mouth, traced out the line of his lips with the edge of her nail.

‘Let’s go upstairs,’ she said. ‘I could fuck you silly.’

Dawn was the time of day he hated most. It had none of the slippin’ slidin’, heartwarming glow of dusk—the horizontal sigh. It glared and it seared and it
exposed. As the usage of centuries had it so rightly, it broke. Among the wreckage he found himself lying next to a young, blonde woman of extraordinary beauty. Her forehead was level with his
chest. She stirred as he slid from between the sheets, rolled over and did not wake, shedding the covers as she turned to show the curve of her spine, the rising roundness of her backside as the
last of the sheet clung to her. He crept downstairs to the kitchen, the tiles cold beneath his feet, the smell of the storm still poised in the air. He found half a bottle of flat Tizer in the
fridge, and stood with his back to the door, swigging from it.

He was, in all probability, beguiled—he was most certainly bothered and bewildered—God knows, he might even be bewitched. But he knew beyond a whisper of a doubt that before the day
was out he would be … wild again.

He sank to the floor, still clinging to the Tizer bottle. However cold the tiles beneath his feet, colder still beneath the buttocks and balls. He drained the bottle, watched it roll away to the
dark place beneath the sink, and then he stretched out on his side, full length across the floor.

Grab the thought now. Or lose it.

He was forty-one years old.

He had just let himself be seduced by a woman half his age.

It felt wild.

Wilder still.

And wild again.

In the morning, Troy drove her to the station—St Pancras once more. Up the ramp to stop the Bentley by the red brick arch that led under the gothic hotel into the
soot-blackened glass engine shed.

With her hand on the door, one foot on the ground and an irate cabbie honking behind them, Foxx turned to him and said, ‘You’ll tell me. Won’t you? You won’t just let it
slip, you’ll tell me?’

‘Whatever I find out, I’ll share with you.’

Her muscles tensed, the merest pressure on the car door, and then relaxed. She looked back at him again.

‘You’re married, aren’t you?’

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Most men are married. Either to a woman or to the job.’

‘Which am I?’

‘Both,’ she said.

Dickie Muffins was the quietest of the four. At once the most and the least imaginative of the schooldays quartet of Charlie, Gus, Troy and Dickie. A born bookworm, with none
of the daring of Gus or Charlie, and none of the intense, obsessive introspection of Troy. He had always followed the line of least resistance. To university at eighteen, a year at Harvard, and to
the family business at twenty-two.

The family business was one of London’s oldest private banks, with but a single branch, so small you might easily miss it altogether or mistake it for a private house, in Hanover Square, a
stonesthrow from Regent Street.

He did not, Troy knew, give a damn about the bank. Joining had simply fulfilled his obligations to family—the line of least resistance—and allowed him endless free hours to pursue
his first love—military history—in which field over the last ten years he had produced a definitive account of the Iberian Campaign and a well-reviewed life of Marshal
Ney—uninterrupted save for the rare visit from one of his all too well-heeled customers. It said something for the scam Cockerell was working if he could afford an account at Mullins Kelleher
for his mistress, without which Madeleine could not have had the use of the deposit box.

Troy did not see enough of Dickie, but that was entirely his own fault.

‘Freddie. What a surprise. What brings you here?’

Dickie rose from a pile of books, his hand extended.

‘It’s business, Dickie.’

‘Bugger—do I have to play the bank manager? What’s up? Your sisters squandered the family fortune?’

Troy took the police 10 C 8 of Madeleine Kerr from his briefcase and laid it on top of the open book on Dickie’s desk.

‘Oh shit,’ said Dickie. ‘Oh shit. She’s dead, isn’t she? I saw a lot like that when I was in the ARP during the war. Not a mark on them, but dead as door nails from
the blast.’

Troy laid the flat Mullins Kelleher key on top of the photograph.

Dickie stared at the juxtaposition for a moment or two, then reached behind him and laid a four-day-old
Evening Standard
next to it.

‘M
URDER ON THE
B
RIGHTON
L
INE
.’

‘It’s her, isn’t it, Freddie? She was the unnamed woman found dead on the Brighton train. And you’re the unnamed policeman injured in pursuit of the murderer,
aren’t you?’

‘’Fraid so. Dickie, I need to know what’s in that safety deposit box. I take it the box is in Madeleine’s name?’

‘Indeed it is. Mrs Madeleine Kerr. Never did come across Mr Kerr. I take it you don’t have a warrant?’

‘Not at this stage.’

‘Or any stage?’

Troy shrugged. ‘I do have the consent of Madeleine’s next of kin.’

‘In writing?’

Troy shook his head.

‘There is the matter of probate. Probate takes a damn sight longer than four days.’

‘She’s dead, Dickie, and I do have the key.’

‘Bugger. Bugger. Bugger.’

‘Old pals’ act?’

Dickie bustled out from behind the desk and its small mountain of books, pulling on his black jacket, trying to look like a banker.

‘I’ll need to get the second key, come on.’

Troy followed him down two floors to the vaults, through a thick steel outer door and a mesh inner door to a room of a thousand tiny doors.

Halfway up the wall Dickie inserted his key and beckoned to Troy. They both turned their keys at the same time and the tiny door swung sideways to reveal the handle of a long, narrow steel
drawer.

Troy flipped the lid. Inside was a single envelope addressed simply ‘Shirley’.

He tore it open. A single sheet of foolscap. A single sheet of utter gobbledegook. A numerical soup. And Sellotaped to the bottom were five small keys much like the one he had just used to open
the box.

‘Anything wrong, Freddie?’ Dickie said.

Troy folded the paper.

‘I’m going to have to take it away.’

Dickie slid the drawer back in and closed the door.

‘My God, you ask a lot.’

‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Did Madeleine have much money in her account?’

‘Now, you’re asking too much. I can’t possibly tell you that.’

‘How far does the writ of the old pals’ act run?’

‘Not that far. You’ll get me shot. Speaking of old pals. Seen anything of Charlie lately?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘No, I haven’t.’

Troy had tried ringing Charlie not long after his return from Vienna. It was news then. News he felt he should share with his oldest friend. It wasn’t news now and he didn’t feel
like sharing it with anyone. Winding up the staircase, Dickie asked all the ‘what’s new?’ questions and Troy muttered inconsequentially about things being ‘much the
same’.

He was letting Dickie down, and he knew it.

Troy parked the car by St James’s Park underground and went into the station to use a call box. He dialled his own number at the Yard. If he got Jack, then he would just
press button B, get his pennies back and try later. It was Clark who answered.

‘Are you alone?’

‘Yes, sir. Mr Wildeve’s in court today; the Old Bailey.’

‘Do you know anything about codes?’

‘You mean coded messages, that sort of thing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Trained in it, sir. Army Intelligence cryptography course at Camberley in 1947. And odd refreshers while I was in Germany.’

And, thought Troy, twenty years of doing the crossword in
The Times.

‘OK. I’m coming in.’

Ten minutes later he put the document he had taken from Mullins Kelleher in front of Clark.

Clark looked at it for less than a minute, and said, ‘Piece of cake. Simple substitution. Number for letter. All you need to know is how far down the alphabet they start. Nobody’s
dim enough to go A–1, B–2—at least no one over the age of twelve. All I need is a little time without interruptions.’

He cocked his head in the direction of Wildeve’s desk.

‘If you catch my drift.’

‘Quite,’ said Troy.

Then it struck him that Clark meant more by the remark.

‘Why don’t you go home and read a book, sir?’

Clark pulled open the top drawer of his, that is Troy’s, desk.

‘Borrow anything you like.’

Not a bad idea, thought Troy, took
Lolita
off the top of the pile and shoved it in the pocket of his jacket. He made a quick telephone call to Nikolai, said goodbye to Clark and drove
over to Knightsbridge. The only way Jack would ever find out he had been in Scotland Yard was if one of the blokes in uniform on the door mentioned it. That was pretty unlikely, he thought, as none
of them would know that he was meant to be off sick.

Nikolai was outside Imperial College, waiting for him. Thin and grey, and looking smaller than ever—hatless and coatless in the summer sun. The flaps of a capacious double-breasted jacket
waving unbuttoned as if to emphasise the slightness of his build. Without the winter weight of his astrakhan coat, he seemed to Troy to be stripped of all bulk, to be well on the way to becoming a
wizened old man.

‘You haff unerring copper’s instinct, my boy. My stomach rumbles and tells me I will not get through to lunchtime, then you ring and invite me to early lunch. Leave your preposterous
motor car here, and let us walk the length of Exhibition Road while giving thanks to the memory of Prince Albert.’

He slipped on a pair of ancient sunglasses, their lenses as dull and unreflective as blackboards, and walked off southerly down the road. Troy found himself wondering about his gait. Was this an
old man’s shuffle? Prince Albert’s achievement got very little of the old man’s attention. He asked for family gossip and, when it seemed that Troy had none, loaded him up with
his own.

‘What’s got into your sister?’ he asked.

‘Which one?’

‘Sasha.’

‘Dunno. I can’t remember when I last saw her.’

‘She is up and down, up and down. Moody is an inadequate word to describe her. She swings from elation to misery.’

This, to Troy, about summed her up at any time, and he could not see what Nikolai was getting at.

‘God knows. She’s forty-six. Do you suppose … ?’

‘Ach. Don’t ask me. I’m a physicist. I know nothing of biology.’

They crossed the Cromwell Road, by the Victoria & Albert Museum. Nikolai pointed to the tiny traffic island, with its thick bottle-glass floor—a skylight to the dark, miserable tunnel
that lay below.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, ‘when you were a little boy? How we would come down the tunnel from the Underground station and climb the steps to emerge over there? You used to
think it was a kind of magic to pop up out of nowhere into the middle of the traffic.’

It was one of those drifts of memory that were so characteristic of his grandfather and were getting more typical of Nikolai with age. Troy now realised where they were heading. To the Polish
caff at the end of the road. It was handy. Nikolai spoke passable Polish and, a couple of hundred yards from his office, it provided a substitute for the Russian he could not hear, and a choice of
dozens of sickly-sweet sticky cakes. Troy had eaten with him there many times, although he cared little for Polish food, and doubted whether the countless Polish exiles who frequented the place
cared much for an old man who spoke their language with a marked Russian accent.

They slurped their way through a bloody borscht, then Nikolai aired his cracked Polish and ordered Pierogi. Dumplings. With salmon and sour cream. Fried
dumplings—
Пирожки
. Pirozhki—the code word Khrushchev’s man at the embassy had given him.

‘Tell me,’ Troy said. ‘Why would anyone want to spy on the
Ordzhonikidze?’

‘Who, if I might ask, is anyone?’

‘The British. And I use the word loosely.’

Nikolai bit into his pierogi, chomped and shrugged.

‘No reason I can think of.’

‘Could you be a bit more forthcoming? Or do I have to wait till you’ve eaten your way through the menu?’

‘The British—or if I may be so bold as to call them “we”—we have no reason to spy on the
Ordzhonikidze
because we know all there is worth knowing about it,
and have done since 1953. It is a
Sverdlov
class cruiser. The
Sverdlov
itself sailed from the Baltic to Odessa in that year. It anchored at Spithead as the Soviet gesture for the
Coronation. We surveyed it again from Malta, and again last year when it paid a visit to Portsmouth. There is nothing we don’t know. The
Ordzhonikidze
is identical. A typical ship of
her class. There are at least a dozen like her. I could show you a deck plan if you so wished.’

‘Did you know Khrushchev offered to sell her to the Royal Navy while we were in Greenwich?’

‘A joke, perhaps?’

‘Of course it was a joke, but his jokes were never just surface. He meant what he said about it being almost obsolete. And if it is, why would anyone spy on her?’

‘I don’t know. Khrushchev allowed a British naval officer to travel all the way from Baltisk with them—if I am to believe MI5 gossip, the Russians even boasted that they got
him drunk on Khrushchev’s birthday and let him roam at will. On the weekend they were here they even threw the ship open to tourists. They have no secrets. We know they have no secrets. They
know we know they have no secrets.’