Old Flames (36 page)

He thought of Patum Pepperium, the Gentleman’s Relish, and of the gentleman in Moscow, outrageous to the last, still thinking of himself as belonging to everything he had sold up the
Swannee, still wanting betrayal with relish, holding a press conference to justify his betrayal still wearing his Old Etonian tie.

‘Which,’ Miss Keeffe replied, ‘ought to be a paradox. But it isn’t, is it?’

She put her hands up, the fingertips touching, the palms apart, the ribs and buttresses of a symbolic, make-believe cathedral.

‘The Establishment closes ranks to protect and in so doing contains, that is includes and excludes. Even if you’re living in Moscow on a KGB pension, you’re still included. But
God help the buggers caught in the gate when the ranks slam shut.’

She brought her palms together, the soft clap of flesh on flesh.

‘Splat. That’s what happened to Daniel Keeffe. Splat.’

It seemed to Troy that they understood one another perfectly. Rarely had he had a conversation with someone who so closely shared his own prejudices. But to what end?

‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

She looked surprised. Looked back at him with a puzzled expression on her face.

‘Want? Why should I want anything from you? You came to me. Mr Troy. You do what you have to do. I haven’t solved your murder for you. Nor have I added to the rollcall of the dead. My
brother was a victim, as I’m sure you will agree, the perfect scapegoat, but he wasn’t murdered and it will do no good for me to pretend that he died by any other than his own
hand.’

Looking back on the whole sorry mess he always stuck at this moment, came back to it time and again, that this was the one person who had been lucid through the pain and anger, that
this was the one person in the entire affair who had wanted nothing of him.

‘Then let me put it another way. What are you going to do?’

‘I’m going to finish clearing out Drayton Gardens. Then I’m going to go back to work. If, as a result of what I’ve told you, Woodbridge or any one of the Gentlemen accuse
me, I shall not deny it. Nor shall I resign. They’ll have to fire me. I’ve jumped through the English hoops all my life, so did my brother, we made ourselves in the required image, but
they can’t make me a liar, Mr Troy.’

But, of course, this was where they differed. He had long since, since childhood, since the coming of language, accepted the inevitability of lying. It was almost a way of life.

Troy looked out at the station sign, the line through a circle that marked every stop on the London Underground. He’d noticed nothing since Miss Keeffe had begun to speak, they could have
been anywhere for all he knew, from Notting Hill to Charing Cross, but now she had so obviously finished. They were pulling out of Moorgate. One more stop and they’d be at Liverpool Street.
He said goodbye and got out at the next stop. Found himself in front of the platform bar he and Khrushchev had propped up. Now it was shuttered and barred, or he’d have bought half a pint and
thought a while. Instead, he looked down the tunnel, breathed deeply, searching to see if he too could smell despair, wondering what despair should smell like and why it should have a smell at all.
He could not—only bacon frying.

Warriss delighted in the call.

‘Myocardial infarction. Or would you like that in words of one syllable, sir?’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Just stick a copy of the report in the post. And tell me if there are any details I should know now.’

‘No marks of any kind. No bruises, no cuts. Nothing. Your questions and your flyers were a waste of my time—yielded Sweet Fanny Adams. There is no evidence to suggest that Jessel
died of anything other than a heart attack brought on by years of booze and figs and a history of angina. Dr Jewel is prepared to sign the certificate as “natural causes”. Unless, of
course, you know different?’

It was a taunt. The man was laughing at him. Troy hung up on him. Ten minutes later the telephone rang again.

‘Mr Troy? Ray Godbehere here.’

‘I’ve just had your Inspector kicking sand in my face.’

‘I know, sir. That’s why it’s safe for me to call you. He’s gone off to lunch laughing like a hyena.’

‘I’m still the biggest twat in Belper, am I?’

‘I wouldn’t say that, sir. I’ve checked the three sets of prints I got off the desktop. One is the Inspector’s. I know that ’cos we file all our own to cut down on
the cock-ups. Clumsy of him to mess up a scene of crime, but then he doesn’t think it is a scene of crime, does he, sir? The second set is left hand only. A prominent scar running the width
of the index finger. You don’t have a scar on your left index finger by any chance do you, sir?’

Damn. He must have leant on the desk at some point, though he had no recollection of doing so.

‘Yes. I’m sorry to say that’s me. And the third?’

‘Also left hand only. Fingertips at various points and full palm right on the edge. As though someone had put most of his body weight on the left hand. No match anywhere. I didn’t
print Brenda or the cleaning lady—it’s a man’s hand, a big man’s. I printed the late Mr Jessel. No matches. And nothing in CRO. At one point your print overlaps one of the
unknown’s, so it looks as though you were right. Between the cleaner and yourself, someone was in there.’

‘Leaning on his left hand to wave a gun in George Jessel’s face with his right. He racked back the slide, leant over and spilt a drop of oil on Jessel’s side of the
desk.’

‘And Jessel died on him. Is that what you’re saying, sir?’

‘I think so. I think someone was trying to scare him and got lucky.’

‘Lucky?’

‘I doubt they would or could have shot him and walked away. The heart attack was very convenient.’

‘Do you have anyone in mind?’

‘Have you got a print for Cockerell?’

‘No, sir. And I don’t know how to get one. According to the papers he was washed up without hands.’

‘Try the door of his car.’

‘You mean go up there and ask Mrs Cockerell?’

‘Yes. You can do that, can’t you?’

‘Yes, I can. But let me put it this way, sir. I did the last few days’ legwork. I put out the flyers for the Inspector. I did the knocking on doors. No one saw anyone. That’s
the truth, but I’ll tell you now the one person anyone hereabouts would remember seeing is Arnold Cockerell. He’s the one man who couldn’t walk into the town unnoticed, kill his
accountant and get on the next bus to Shottle.’

Troy presumed the closing phrase was some local metaphor for the vanishing trick. Of course he had a point. It just didn’t fit the pattern Troy was seeing. More and more he was coming
round to Janet Cockerell’s point of view. The man had vanished. And the delight in vanishing was to surface from time to time.

‘I’m sorry. You’re probably right. Let’s leave Mrs Cockerell alone for the time being. How much does Warriss know?’

‘No more than he did the last time the two of you met.’

‘Thank you. I’m grateful.’

‘Mind, if he does find out—’

‘I know—I’ll get you shot.’

‘More than that, sir, you’d best find me another job.’

Troy took the hint. God knows, Godbehere seemed brighter than half the dozy buggers he’d worked with at the Yard. Perhaps too bright. Of course, Troy didn’t think Cockerell had
pointed a gun at George Jessel and scared the living daylights out of him, but it would have been so very neat if he had, and whilst he didn’t really think this, the part of his mind that
tacked intuitively, sailing close to the deceptive winds of imagination, would not quite surrender the notion that he
might
have done so.

He needed the solidity of fact. He needed Kolankiewicz and Kolankiewicz was a day late with his promise. He pulled the post-mortem report on Cockerell off his desk and went to
beard the Polish Beast in his lair.

‘I bin busy. The dead keep crazy hours.’

He got up and closed the door behind Troy.

‘You’re forgetting your privacy,’ he said to no reaction. ‘But I have what you wanted.’

He pulled open the top drawer of his desk and put the remains of Troy’s handkerchief in front of him.

‘You cut up one of my best Irish linen handkerchiefs!’

‘I cut off one corner. Don’t be so damn fussy! Do you want to know or don’t you? I got plenty of other coppers I can play with.’

‘OK. Let’s hear it.’

‘It is, as I’m sure you surmised, gun oil. Or, in so far as any substance is qualified adjectivally by use, oil which is gun oil if you use it to oil a gun.’

This was Kolankiewicz in fully professional mode. The command of language that evaded him in the fractured colloquial was put to a precise scientific use that obfuscated beautifully.

‘Can I have that in English?’

‘It is what I would use on an automatic, if I had one. It is what many men do use, but it also has other uses. I used the same oil to loosen up the lawnmower last weekend. But unless you
are about to tell me you’re investigating a man run over by a lawnmower in Hampstead Garden Suburb—in which case I plead provocation and say I have always hated the man next door and
killed the bastard in a fit of horticultural madness—let us presume a gun. Low viscosity oil, high graphite content. Won’t stick. Does not attract dirt, won’t jam the slide, but
it’s fluid. It will run and you would need to oil the gun more regularly than you would with an oil of higher viscosity. You will get drips, you’ll mess up your suit. Sooner or
later.’

‘And?’

‘And what?’

‘And speculate.’

‘No common villain, no wide boy, would know such a detail. They’d put three-in-one on a gun just as they would on a bicycle, if they knew enough to oil it or clean it in the first
place. A man who looks after his weapon in this way knows guns. An ex-serviceman—’

‘We’re a nation of ex-servicemen.’

‘Most of whom never saw an automatic pistol in their life. There’s a world of difference between the mechanics of a bolt-action Lee Enfield rifle and a Colt or a Browning hand gun. I
mean an officer, or a professional, someone who takes no chances on a gun jamming at the wrong moment.’

‘All this from a drop of oil?’

‘You’ve never come to me with a grain of sand. I wait for the day you do.’

‘You’ll ruin your suit. Sooner or later.’ Troy remembered the shirt he had never got clean after Portsmouth. Ruined by a few drops of oil. A heart-shaped stain. It was moment
of odd recognition, seeing the point at which he had come in.

‘Can you get down to Portsmouth in the morning?’

‘Probably. Why?’

‘The locals have a body on ice. Arnold Cockerell.’

‘The spy?’

‘Yes. Get him on the slab again. I want a second opinion.’

‘You want me to upset a colleague? Tread on the toes of a fellow sawbones?’

‘You know the local man?’

‘Of course not. But does that make him any the less a colleague?’

Troy put the post-mortem report in front of Kolankiewicz.

‘You read it. I need more than this.’

Kolankiewicz pushed it back at him. ‘Have you read it?’

Troy pushed it back at Kolankiewicz. ‘Of course I’ve read it.’

He had found it in his out-tray. That meant he’d read it. Of course he’d read it. But he had not read it all, and it did not occur to him that he hadn’t. He had, after all,
such a vivid picture of the corpse in his mind’s eye.

Kolankiewicz was looking oddly at him. Was that concern he saw in the piggy eyes?

‘You know me, Troy. The avuncular is not my
modus operandi.
But, I ask you, do you really want to stick your proboscis into Five and Six? Once more with the cats and foxes? How many
hospitals I fished you out of? How many stitches I put in you these twenty years? You my best customer. I should keep a slab ready for you.’

It was the voice of Jiminy Cricket chirping in his ear. And it made not a damn of difference. The fox and the cat already sang to him. He danced down the cobbled alley with their song of
seduction ringing in his head. Hi diddle di dee.

‘I’m already in it,’ he said flatly.

‘Then I reserve my right to be Polish smartyarse and say, “I told you so” at some future date.’

‘Fine,’ said Troy. ‘You’ve been saying that as long as I’ve known you. You’ll no doubt have it chipped on my headstone. I’ll see you at the mortuary
mid-afternoon.’

The weather was odd. The drenched August now promised almost an Indian Summer. The desk-bound idiot on the south door of the Yard had his theory, but Troy did not listen. He
took off his jacket, wiped down the windscreen of the Bentley, saw the sun and the fleeting clouds reflected in it and decided it could not be a more beautiful day to drive down to the coast. The
sky was Wedgwood, the clouds danced across it like blown candy floss and the sun was a checkercab yellow. He would tune the car wireless to the Third Programme and enjoy a couple of hours’
freedom and sanity before he faced Kolankiewicz and a corpse, belligerence and death, for the umpteenth time in his career. He was trying to find the wavelength when Wildeve appeared through the
gateway from the Embankment, jacket across his shoulder, sleeves rolled up, yawning widely.

‘You off somewhere?’

‘Portsmouth. A post mortem.’

‘Cockerell? Keeffe?’

‘Cockerell.’

‘Mind if I tag along?’

‘I thought you were in court all this week.’

‘Our Mr Bayliss just changed his plea to Guilty.’

He grinned like a schoolboy in the sheer pleasure of victory.

‘OK. Get in.’

Troy drove the Bentley out onto the Embankment and across West-minster Bridge, just as Big Ben struck the chimes of noon. Jack settled back in the passenger seat and closed his eyes.

‘Are you going to tell me what you’re up to?’ he said.

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I’m not.’

‘Fine. I’m knackered. Wake me up when we get there.’

Troy put the wireless on low, found the opening moments of a lunchtime concert. A Haydn symphony. He’d have fun guessing which.

Kolankiewicz pointed at Wildeve.

‘Why you bring him?’

Troy thought about it.