Old Flames (41 page)

A woman, back to the camera, was bending low, legs straight, face hidden from view—so that the length of the 10 C 8 print was made up of an inverted V of her legs with a full, well-lit
view of her sexual parts. The one below showed the same woman—at least he assumed it was the same woman—leaning, back, crab-style, over a Bentwood chair, the face hidden again, but the
view now as explicit from the front—a tiny spotlight trained on her seam to light up her halo of blondish pubic hair with an unnatural gleam. He fully meant to look at the rest. Out of sheer
nerves he glanced furtively over his shoulder before doing so, like a man caught ogling
Health & Efficiency
in a newsagent’s.

A woman of twenty-five or so stood in the bathroom door in a haze of steam and talc. All she wore was a towel, and that was wrapped around her head. At the best of times Troy did not much rate
guns as fashion accessories, but when the gun was pointed at your chest it did at least offset nudity rather well by making it somewhat less than fascinating. Slowly he put his hands up and
strained for a smile.

‘You’ve been reading too much Raymond Chandler,’ he said.

‘Eh?’

‘When in doubt … ?’

‘Get on with it!’

‘When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.’

‘If you think I’m a man,’ she said, ‘you need glasses. Now—who are you?’

‘I’m a policeman.’

‘Aha?’

‘I can prove it.’

Gently he lowered his left hand to his jacket front.

‘I have a warrant card. I’m going to take it out very slowly.’

He held it up, lodged between his index and biggest fingers like a cigarette.

‘Chuck it over here.’

He threw the card at her feet. It landed soundlessly on the carpet, and one of his own calling cards, with his rank and his Goodwin’s Court address, spilled out from the fold. She knelt,
kept the gun aimed at his chest, and quickly picked them up. Then she put the gun on the sideboard, tossed the warrant card back at him, whipped the towel off her head to wrap herself in, and as a
last gesture tucked his calling card into the top of the towel, a sophisticated parody of a whore tucking a ten-bob note into her cleavage.

‘Is this where you tell me it wasn’t loaded anyway?’ he said.

She flung herself in an armchair and reached for a cigarette box on the side table.

‘Oh it’s loaded all right. Look, there’s a bottle of brandy in the bedside cabinet. Why don’t you pour us both a drink. I’m sure we need it.’

She lit up her cigarette, a ridiculous king-size with a filter tip and a couple of gold bands, with a huge, clumsy, green stone table lighter. He did as he was told, wondering what next.

‘What kept you?’ she asked so bluntly the question threw him.

‘I … er … I don’t quite follow.’

He edged back towards her, feeling his feet sink almost to the ankle in the bedside carpet, handed her a glass and sat, daringly it seemed to him, on the edge of the bed.

‘He’s been dead the best part of five months. You took your time.’

‘I’ve only just been able to confirm that Commander Cockerell is dead.’

‘Oh? Really? I knew he was dead forty-eight hours after he failed to show up.’

‘I suppose I’ve been rather in the dark.’

‘What is it you want to know?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What do you know?’

‘Me? I know everything. Isn’t that why you came?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I suppose it is.’

Troy waited while she dressed. She—Kerr M. (Mrs). He had no idea who she was beyond the near-statistical tag of a building society record. Mary? Marilyn? And was there a
Mr Kerr? He could guess who that might be. He sipped at the brandy. A good vintage, he was certain, but they all tasted a bit like soap to him.

The woman emerged in a simple dress for evening. Simple and brazen, the scarlet version of the little black dress in searing red. Sleeveless, cut very low at the back, and just preserving
modesty at the front. Her hair was piled high on her head and she was twiddling with the fingertips of both hands to put an earring in place. It was a gesture to put him immediately in mind of
Tosca with her squeamishness about body piercing, standing bolting her jewellery into place, of tiny gems or milky pearls on silver threads.

‘I don’t know your name,’ he said.

‘I can’t say I recall your asking. But it’s Madeleine, Madeleine Kerr.’

Her hands moved to the other ear, the same fine gesture with the same delicate engineering, to
hang a gold leaf from the lobe.

‘You’re a Fred? Don’t meet many Freds. Mind if I call you Troy?’

‘Most people do.’

‘Oh, and Arnold, Commander Cockerell. He’s Ronald Kerr down here. Ronnie to you and me.’

Troy looked a little puzzled. He felt the name should make sense to him. The look on her face told him it ought to be self-explanatory.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’

‘No, I’m afraid I don’t.’

‘Ronald is an anagram of Arnold. And Kerr is from Cock—
Kerr
—Ell. Geddit?’

It was so easy, he almost blushed at his own stupidity.

‘And before you ask, whatever Ronnie was he wasn’t a bigamist. The Mr and Mrs is all pretend. And a bloody sight more fun for being so. Now shall we go?’

‘Where?’ he asked lamely.

‘To dinner. Ifyou’re going to play the copper and ask me a thousand questions, the least you can do is buy me dinner. After all, I’ve eaten alone for the last five
months.’

‘There is one thing before we go out,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

‘The gun.’

‘Yes.’

‘I think you’d better give it to me.’

‘Ronnie gave it to me. For protection, he said.’

‘You won’t need it with me. And I can’t let you walk around with a gun in your handbag.’

‘How do you know it’s in my handbag?’

‘Trust me. I’m a detective.’

She opened the bag, took out the gun and gave it to him. Then she tossed the bag onto the bed as though its only purpose had been to conceal and carry the gun.

Troy felt its weight. Feathers had more substance. It was a tiny, golden .22 automatic. What Chandler would have called a lady’s gun. Pretty much like the one Tosca had had, the one he had
dumped in the Irish Sea.

She led the way downstairs, out into Chatsworth Place and down Cavendish Hill. As they rounded the first corner she slipped her arm into his.

‘We’ll go to the Wellesley Hotel. There’s a rooftop restaurant with a smashing view. It was called La Manche when it opened, but everybody called it The Munch, which sounded a
bit common, so they changed it to the Clair de Lune. Much better name. Specially on a night like this.’

She looked up at the rapidly darkening, utterly cloudless sky.

‘Plenty of Lune and pretty Clair wouldn’t you say?’

He gave the shining sixpenny moon a passing glance and looked at her. A fraction taller than him, even in flat heels. She had looked beautiful before she had made up her face. Now, the beauty
was layered in some imprecise way, as though she had assumed a gloss of sophistication. It worked, largely, but he remained somehow unconvinced. There was an inescapable element of the girl dressed
as the woman, of the girl-
in
-the-woman, and it had begun the minute she had lit up her first cigarette, and she had pursued it through make-up and clinched it through clothes. The arm
through his seemed like instant friendship. He had known the woman less than forty minutes. He had seen her naked, he had seen her posing for the camera—she surely was the woman in the
photographs?—in positions he had never seen any woman assume, and now she strolled along arm in arm just as though they were old friends. Or new lovers. He detached his arm from hers. She was
prattling on about the beauty of a full moon and seemed not to notice that he had done it. When she had finished, she simply closed the gap between them and slipped her arm in his once more.

The maître d’ at the Wellesley greeted her like a lost sister. Madamed her to death. Showed the two of them to a table on the terrace. When the sound of his leather soles on the
floorboards had died away, there was only the murmur of the room inside and the deeper, rhythmical murmur of the sea below them.

‘I do hope,’ Madeleine said, ‘that you’re not a meat and two veg followed by spotted dick man.’

‘I’ve never been a spotted dick man in my life.’

‘Good—then I’ll order for us.’

She raised an arm. A waiter hurried over to her.

‘We’ll have the
lotte,
new potatoes,
mangetout,
green salad, followed by the
crème caramel,
and I think the ’47 Château Lattre de
Tassigny.’

‘Nothing to start, Madame Kerr?’

‘No, just bring the claret straight away.’

Troy admired her panache. He was paying, but she was calling the shots and meant to prove it to him.

‘Red wine with fish?’ he asked.

‘Do you really believe all that tosh? Don’t you think it’s all part and parcel of the dreadful English snobbery, the curse of class? Surely freedom means having what you want
when you want it?’

It was a startling little speech. He had seen his father glug best claret from a tea cup, seen him drink Pouilly-Fuissé with roast beef, seen him eat cheese with jam, seen him eat
Christmas dinner still in his dressing gown. Of course she was right. The old man had spent much of Troy’s childhood proving the same point. ‘How do you think the English came to
control half the planet, my boy? You know. The red bits on the map that the buggers are so inordinately proud of? With an army? Until 1915 they had never had conscription, nor had they maintained a
large standing army, nor do they to this day. With their navy? Well, it helps to rule the waves, but it does very little to keep order in the hills of northern India or in the deepest jungles of
Burma and Malaya. No—Britannia rules with her civil service. It is an empire of bureaucrats, of assistant district commissioners, of pen pushers and rule-writers. And thus are the rulers
ruled, for they end by making as many rules for themselves as they ever did for the rest of us. Hence, your Englishman, hidebound, class-bound, who, given the freedom to have what he wants, will
merely ask what the rules permit him to have.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I do.’

The wine waiter appeared with two bottles of claret, and whipped out his corkscrew.

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘We only ordered—’

Madeleine’s hand waved him down.

‘He knows me. He knows what I usually have, don’t you, Jean-Paul?’

She smiled at the waiter. He smiled back politely, uncorked the second bottle and left them to it. She
poured. Knocked back almost half her glass in a single mouthful and looked at Troy.

‘Well,’ she said.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘What do you want to know?’

‘Well—it’s perfectly simple. What was Cockerell up to, and for whom?’

She set down her glass, just for emphasis.

‘No. Not now. Not tonight. It’s not a simple question, as well you know. Tomorrow we’ll go up to London. You give me an hour or so to myself, then we can meet up and I’ll
answer all your questions. There’s just one or two things I need to do first. Ask me anything else. Anything at all.’

Troy was flummoxed. He had felt sure that this entire rigmarole was leading somewhere. Now, he couldn’t think of a question innocent enough.

‘How did you meet him? Here, in Brighton?’

‘No. Brighton had nothing to do with it—at least not then.’

She took a huge gulp of red wine and denied him the prompt.

OK. Think of another.

‘You’re not from here?’

He winced inwardly. It was a line from a bad chat-up routine.

‘No. I’m from Deeplydullshire. My father, God rot ’im, is a village GP in Berkshire. I’d done my degree at Bristol—my father would have preferred it if I’d
done a commercial diploma in shorthand and typing, joined the civil service and hooked a diplomat for a husband. But I didn’t, I kicked the dust of Berkshire off my heels and settled in
London. That’s where I met Ronnie.’

She had finished her first glass—he had not even touched his—and reached for the bottle.

‘I met him at the Embassy.’

Alarm bells rang in Troy’s head.

‘Embassy? Which embassy? The Russian embassy?’

‘No—silly—the Embassy Club in Bond Street. It was four years ago. The week the King died. I’d been stood up. A chinless wonder from the Grenadier Guards—Billy or
Bobby something—he was squiffy when he called round for me. Swigged whisky from his hip flask all the way there in the cab, disappeared into the loo ten minutes after we got there and I never
saw him again. I was stuck at our table, no cigarettes, no money. Then this dapper little chap came up and asked me to dance. It was Ronnie. He moved so beautifully, such confidence, so light on
his little feet. Nice looking too. I’ve always liked older men. I was twenty-five, he’d be about fifty. Just the right gap, wouldn’t you say?’

Troy had no opinion. But, then, the question didn’t seem to require an answer. He may have broken his wrist crank-starting the woman but she was rolling smoothly now.

‘We sat out the next dance. He bought me a martini and I was desperate for a ciggy by then, and he took out two from his cigarette case, put them in his mouth, just like Humphrey Bogart.
Lit up both and passed one to me. I thought that was so good mannered. So romantic.’

Troy was getting puzzled. Not only did he not believe this woman was pushing thirty, he did not see how one gesture could be commended as good mannered and romantic at the same time. Romantic,
he thought, usually wasn’t much bothered by any notion of manners. And the voice. Something was not quite right. It had a languid beauty to it, but something seemed to lurk beneath
it—the hint of a lost accent?

‘The next dance was slow and gentle, and I felt his hand slide down to my bottom. So I did what a good girl should. I pulled it back up twice and let him have his little victory the third
time. And he said—looked me right in the eyes—he had such lovely pale blue eyes—and said, “You’re not wearing any knickers, are you?” Of course—I
wasn’t.