Old Flames (43 page)

He woke up alone and chaste in one of the many spare bedrooms in Madeleine Kerr’s mansion. He had slept badly, waking often, dreaming deeply. It was something about her
eyes. He felt awful. Again, the sound of running water. It followed him all the way down to the ground floor and into the kitchen as he searched for breakfast. Breakfast was not a meal of any
importance in the Kerr household, at least not to the woman—the image of Cockerell alias Kerr shovelling kedgeree was permanently imprinted on Troy’s brain—and all he could find
was a packet of Ryvita and a jar of ‘instant’ coffee. Instant coffee, as well as being a perfect example of an oxymoron and a good bet for revised editions of Fowler’s
English
Usage,
was a novelty of the new world, the post-war world, instantly accepted like the ball-point pen and the plastic mackintosh—and it tasted instantly awful. It floated down to the
bottom of the cup, as light as dust, a powdery scent already wafting off it, and when dissolved in boiling water it yielded up a strong and artificial aroma. It tasted like the coffee creme in a
box of sickly chocolates, the merest approximation of what coffee tasted like, achieved by blending caramel and scouring powder. It brought pictures to the mind’s eye. Troy could see the
ribbon on the chocolate box, the guide to the contents of each brown blob, to find a centre by its shape, cherry cup and nut cluster and the one nobody wanted—coffee creme. It was faintly
gelatinous and clung to the cup and to the teeth with a viscous smear. He drank half a cup with a Ryvita and a dab of orange marmalade, and poured the rest of it down the sink. As he turned off the
tap, he was suddenly conscious of the silence. The sound of water roaring through pipes had stopped. She must be out of the shower.

‘Are you ready?’

Troy turned at the sound of her voice. Madeleine stood in the doorway, dressed and made up, taking a last look at her artistry in the mirror of her compact. She clicked it shut and looked him up
and down. Shirt tails out and no shoes or socks. Far from ready.

‘I tend to save lines like, “You look like shit in the mornings” for more intimate relationships. But you do look like shit in the morning, don’t you? Get your skates on,
Troy, we’ve got a train to catch.’

He did up his shoelaces in the cab on the way to the station. She had wrongfooted him, almost literally, and he was wondering at this new organisation woman she had presented him with, wondering
at the hurry they were in and wondering why she seemed completely free of the hangover she so richly deserved. If he drank the best part of two bottles of claret, he paid for it for days.

The cab pulled in under the glass awning of Brighton station. He paid and they stood before the huge wooden destination board, checking the London trains.

‘We’ve missed the Belle,’ Madeleine said. ‘If you’d been ready we could have had kippers and coffee and be halfway to London by now. Still, doesn’t matter
much, as long as we go First.’

First—Onions would have a fit if Troy bought First-Class railway tickets on Scotland Yard expenses. But First it was. The look on her face told him she was used to no less and would accept
no less. Cockerell had spoilt her—but then so richly, so inventively had she spoilt and satiated him.

Troy did not much care for First-Class travel. You met nobody. While there were times when he would quite like to meet nobody, most of the time copper’s nosiness prevailed. The British
public as the great human reference work. You never knew who was going to start talking to you. Particularly in the years just after the war when petrol was still rationed, hardly anyone owned a
car and some vestige of wartime
bonhomie
prevailed. He recalled a trip to Manchester, out of Euston, sitting opposite a potbellied man with an RAF moustache who had explained at length the
precise length of his artificial intestine, and just how much of his guts he had left in a German field hospital when the Wellington he had been co-piloting had been shot down over the flat plains
of Prussia. And on the return journey a seven-year-old boy, being taken to London for the day by his father, whose vision of the capital seemed to be made up entirely from precociously lurid
reading. He was dying to see Whitechapel and Jack the Ripper, could hardly wait for 221B Baker Street and Sherlock Holmes. Troy tried to make his day. ‘I’m a detective,’ he said.
And the child thought he was having his leg pulled.

‘Troy?’

He blinked. He’d been miles away.

‘You were daydreaming? Didn’t you hear me? I said I could murder a cup of coffee.’

He looked at her through furred vision. She was neat, beautiful in her tight, two-piece outfit—red again, she adored red, a statement of her role as the scarlet woman?—with a
sleeveless, high-necked silk blouse in white. She slipped off the jacket, laid it on the seat next to her and took out her compact from her handbag. Her arms were slender and tanned and watchable.
He watched with a childish fascination as she again, and quite unnecessarily, looked at her own reflection in the mirror, pursed her lips, touched an eyebrow, but did nothing to change her
appearance.

‘Well?’ she said across the top of the compact, green eyes flashing at him.

‘Where are we?’

‘Just coming up to Three Bridges.’

‘Surely there’ll be a waiter round in a minute?’

He did not much feel like moving.

‘Or not,’ she said. ‘Troy, be a darling and get me a coffee. I’m gasping.

She flipped the compact shut again, blew him a mock kiss from shiny red lips, and slipped it
into the pocket of her red jacket.

He walked a couple of jolting coaches to the dining car. The attendant said he’d be round in ten minutes. Troy grovelled and persuaded the man to let him carry a tray and two cups back
with him. The train stopped as the man poured, and Troy saw the sign for Three Bridges outside the window. He picked up the tray and with all the precision of bad timing the train started up again
and quickly gathered speed. He cursed Madeleine Kerr the rattling length of two carriages, and as he had his hand on the door of the third the train hit the brakes and threw him onto his back in
the corridor and the coffee flooded all over his crumpled black suit.

He’d never been on a train before when someone pulled the emergency cord, but he had no doubts that that was what had happened. There was hubbub behind him, alarmed voices and a child
crying, and silence in front of him. He stepped into the last carriage, turned in at the door of Madeleine’s compartment. Her head lolled towards the window, bobbing on her left shoulder, as
the train gently recoiled and uncoiled like an overtightened spring. He had seen broken necks before and had no doubt that she was dead. He put his fingers to the side of her neck. There was no
pulse. Her eyes were closed, her hands were in her lap, and her handbag was gone. He was succumbing to the stillness of the moment, the lateral force of shock, the absurd trick of nature that had
left her looking beautiful in death, when the train jolted sharply and the door at his side swung open. Now he knew.

He leapt to the track and landed badly. All his weight on his left ankle and the leg slid from under him in a searing burst of pain. He dragged himself upright and caught sight of a figure
running down the track, back towards the station. Troy took a step and felt his left leg drag him back down. The man disappeared behind a concrete shed. Troy took another step and another, trying
as best he could to run. The man darted out from behind the shed. Troy had only a fleeting vision of a blur in blue but knew as the sinking feeling hit his stomach that the dark blob at the end of
an outstretched arm really was a gun being levelled at him. The gun flashed and blew him green and blew him red and blew him black—into a dreamless hell.

How often had he lain like this? Waking up, roaring earthward from a timeless, wordless hell, trying to recognise the hospital from its paintwork, knowing he had been walloped
again and waiting for the rush of consciousness that brought it all back to him and told him who, when and everything but where. A nurse told him that. A pretty young woman in a staff nurse’s
uniform, and almost before the words were out of her lips he recognised the distinctive belt buckle and the unique configuration of starched linen that passed for a cap.

‘You’re in the Charing Cross, Mr Troy.’

‘So I see.’

‘Do you remember me?’

Troy looked as closely as his horizontal position and swimming vision would permit.

‘I was a first-year nurse at the Middlesex in ’51 when you caught Edward Langdon-Davies.’

The rush of memory—the past more vivid than the present. Troy had caught Langdon-Davies that winter. Cuffed, nicked, sentenced, hanged. And Langdon-Davies had caught him across the
shoulder with a poker and broken his collarbone. Jack had bundled him into a squad car and taken him to the nearest casualty department, the Middlesex. This young woman had watched as a doctor
jerked his bones back into place with a sickening jolt of pain, and then she had tied his arm in a sling and told him to salute Caesar for a month.

‘Getting to be a habit with you,’ she said, smiling, not knowing how near the truth she came.

‘How long have I been here?’ he asked from the depths of the habit.

‘Just overnight. You came to at the Mid-Sussex. The X-rays were fine, so they let your brother hire an ambulance to bring you back to London. You came to a few times, but I don’t
suppose you remember a thing about that, do you?’

She took his pulse and temperature and bustled out. Troy felt the right side of his head. A bandage, bulging over a large swab. No pain, and once he had sat up no double vision or nausea.
Perhaps he had got away with murder yet again. The phrase rolled around in his mind. Langdon-Davies had not got away with murder. Troy had not thought he should hang. Langdon-Davies, like
Cockerell, like Angus Pakenham, and so many people into whose lives he had blundered lately, had been an irrevocable casualty of war. A born soldier, an officer to his nicotined fingertips. In the
post-war he had been lost. No trade or profession worth mentioning, except killing and deceiving. He was, Troy knew, half mad. A series of failed business ventures, in none of which had commando
skills been much use, most of which had turned out to be the local equivalents of the Ground-Nut scheme, or a latterday version of chicken-farming—either was ripe in the national argot as a
symbol of failure and folly—had sent him into confidence trickery (fraud and forgery, the ignoble art of the bum cheque); trading on rank (Major), and accent (RP), and at the end of the last
such trick he had killed his wife. As he had told it to Troy, they had argued badly, she screaming at him, all the names under all the suns in all the galaxies it seemed, him trying to be as calm
as possible, the code telling him one did not abuse the ‘fairer’ sex. He had turned his back on her thinking the row over, and she had hit him from behind, and in reflex, as he would
have it till the day they took him out and hanged him, he had jabbed her in the throat with his elbow, without even looking, and on the turn he had forced her head back with his other hand and
snapped her neck. All, he said, in the twinkling of an eye, a textbook despatch of assailant-from-behind, as learnt, if not upon the playing fields of Eton, then upon the square tarmac of
Aldershot.

Murder never fails to attract attention. But the run Langdon-Davies had made, eluding the police for weeks, living by theft and burglary, so like the Invisible Man that doors were bolted and
windows barred the length of Britain for fear of a ‘murderer’, had reached the level of a national obsession, all but displacing Dick Barton in the imagination of the people. He became
the man the papers loved to hate, a murderer on the run, sighted as far afield as Dundee and Barnstaple, and at that on the same day. ‘Murderer’, a species, in the realm of myth and
popular journalism, rather than a demented individual. Troy had not thought he should hang. He even, it had to be said, liked the man. But the law, not seeing his madness for what it was, had no
other penalty. He hanged. Hanged for the crime of never being able to forget what he had learned in war. He had talked, oh how he had talked, a confession so long it was little short of a novel.
What story would Arnold Cockerell tell if Troy could but get the dead to speak? But then Cockerell had spoken, the drear tale of the carpet salesman. It had told him next to nothing. It was the
mere facet of a life. Turn it this way, that way, another facet, another tale, another meaning would become apparent.

‘I want the lot,’ said Jack simply.

Later in the day, fourish, fivish, his watch was missing and he could not be certain, Jack stood before him, grim and pale. He threw a police 10 C 8 photograph of Madeleine Kerr onto the
bedspread.

‘I want the lot, and if I get the impression that you’re holding anything back, so help me, Freddie, I’ll sink you.’

He turned around the upright chair, visitors for the use of, and sat stiffly upon it, arms folded, his hat perched on the edge of the bed like a small species of slothful animal. It was unlike
Jack to wear a hat. It was symbolic, the assumption of power in the garb of those old know-nothings in bowler hats and black boots who had been the ‘Yard’ when they had first joined
before the war—a breed of dullards, inhibited and motivated by the constant humiliations of class—to which Onions had proved a savage exception.

‘Where shall I begin?’

‘Assume I know her name—Madeleine Kerr—and assume I recognised the photos dotted round her house as Cockerell. Take it from there.’

Troy told him. Everything from Angus’s phone call to his leaping onto the track in the middle of Sussex into the path of a bullet and the blur in blue.

Jack heard him in near silence. He took no notes, prided himself on his memory and asked few questions.

‘What do you have?’ Troy asked.

Jack stood up and stretched, strolled a few paces around the room, rested the palms of his hands on the windowsill, looked out at the dwindling afternoon sunlight.

‘He snapped her neck like a twig. No sign of a struggle. She died instantly. We found her handbag in the woods. Turned out, scattered. Impossible to tell what he was looking for, or what
might be missing. Her driving licence and a couple of letters told us who she was. Just as well. You were in no fit state to ask.’