Old Flames (50 page)

‘Sir?’

Clark was looking quizzically at him, beckoning him back to the moment.

‘I can’t stay long,’ he said again.

‘Of course. How did you manage to get away?’ Troy asked.

‘Mr Wildeve’s in Hammersmith, sir. Body under the floorboards. Terrible niff. The neighbours called the Yard.’

‘And Stan?’

‘Mr Onions? Funny you should ask, sir. Nobody’s seen him since Saturday.’

‘Not funny at all,’ said Troy.

He went back to the kitchen and returned with the
Post.
He folded the paper open at page five—Overseas News.

‘Read this,’ he told Clark.

‘What this? “British Soldier Murdered in Cyprus”?’

Clark’s eyes flashed down the page; he read the whole piece in a matter of seconds.

‘I don’t get it, sir. Who is Flight Sergeant Kenneth Clover?’

‘He was Onions’ son-in-law. “Our Valerie’s” husband.’

‘I see. Poor bugger. Tortured to death and dumped in a ditch with a placard round his neck. Nasty way to go.’

‘Not the first. Not the last. There’ve been a dozen or more this year. E
OKA
mean to have us out. Flight Sergeant Clover was the poor sod in the middle.’

‘Did you know ’im, sir?’

‘Yes. I knew him. I knew Valerie too. Onions will be in Salford with his daughter.’

‘Why has he told no one?’

‘He’ll have told anyone who matters, the Commissioner, his secretary—he might even have told me if I’d been around—but he’d never let the reason be commonly
known. This will make Stan mad as hell. Rage is one of the few ways he knows to register feeling. He’d be embarrassed to think his family and its troubles were being talked about.’

‘Troubles don’t come much bigger than this,’ Clark said softly.

‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘But he’ll handle it alone. I was a sergeant when his wife died. I’ve seen him this way before.’

Clark got up. Looked without loss at his cold cup of coffee.

‘I’d best be off. I think Mr Wildeve may be in Hammersmith a while. I’ll be able to call you a bit more often. I must say, sir. I thought I’d left my days of discretion
behind me in Berlin. I’ve told more lies since I came to work for you than I have since I flogged black market stockings.’

Troy showed Clark to the door and stepped into the sunlight of the yard. Warm sun on his face, cold flagstones under his bare feet.

‘I trust it’s not an imposition?’

Clark blinked up at the sun, one hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes.

‘Lord no, sir. I was born to play Leporello. And what’s life without a bit on the side?’

Troy watched him amble off towards St Martin’s Lane. He understood exactly what Clark meant. It summed up the fat, little rogue he had met in Berlin in the bleak years very well—but
it was also the philosophy that had got Cockerell and Kerr killed. He wondered if he should tell him about Tosca. He never had. Simply let it be known that he had married quietly. On the Continent.
An old flame. Clark had said a swift ‘congratulations’, and that was that. But he knew. In his bones Troy knew he knew.

Back in the house Troy could hear the telephone ring. He kicked the door to behind him, picked up the receiver. All his instincts told him it would be Onions. It was.

‘You’ll have heard by now,’ he said without preamble.

‘Yes, Stan. It was in the morning paper. Terrible news. I’m so sorry.’

He heard Onions sigh deeply, heard the laboured effort of self-restraint. The pause skirted infinity.

‘D’ye think you could come up? She’s askin’ for you.’

‘When?’

‘Funeral’s the day after tomorrow. I don’t suppose you could get here today?’

‘I don’t think I could,’ Troy answered, thinking on his toes. ‘But tomorrow’s fine. I could be there in good time tomorrow.’

He jotted down the address Onions gave him—a back street in the red brick wilderness of Salford’s Lower Broughton. He was deeply sorry for Stan. The relationship with Ken had been
nothing special, in fact it had often seemed to Troy that the two men had nothing in common but the link that was Valerie, but Valerie was emotional enough for the three of them, and to be left
alone to handle her at a time like this … all that duty demanded of Onions would not be enough.

He had from time to time wondered how much Stan knew. That Troy and Valerie had been an item in the last, tense summer before the war, he surely knew. It had been no secret, and they had both
been single. It was the reason he sent for Troy now—another emotional buffer-zone to place between himself and the whirlwind that Valerie could whip up. Troy prayed to God that Onions did not
know that they had also briefly been an item once more in the spring of 1951, while Ken was in Korea. He doubted that Onions would sanction adultery, but more than that his attitude towards young
Jackie Clover, his only grandchild, was protective in the extreme. Onions refrained from open judgement on Troy’s morals—once, a few years ago, he had asked if he ever thought he would
marry—Troy had uttered a decisive, if erroneous no—and any speculation on the sex life of a single, well-heeled man approaching forty had been left unspoken.

He shaved, dressed, felt through his hair to the ridge of torn skin and dried blood left on his scalp by the bullet, and rummaged around in the small drawer set beneath the mirror on the
hallstand. House keys, car keys and at the bottom, gathering dust onto its thin film of protective grease, a pair of gun-metal grey lock-picks. He took out his handkerchief, wiped them clean,
slipped them into the pocket of his jacket, and caught sight of himself in the mirror. He felt at the scabrous ridge once more. It had ceased to hurt days ago, but he knew damn well that even if
Wildeve had not imposed idleness upon him the medics would have, and if Kolankiewicz knew that he was about to cheat medicine once more—‘fuck with the head,’ as he would
undoubtedly put it—he would call him smartyarse, call him crazy and explode with Polish anger.

He collected the Bentley. Drove down to Brighton. Picked the lock on the door of Madeleine Kerr’s house. Stole four of her best outfits. Shoes to match. A suitcase to hold them. And was
back in London by four in the afternoon. By six o’clock the next morning he was in the Bentley once more, driving north up a deserted Marylebone Lane, out of the Smoke, out of Cobbett’s
Wen, out in the direction of Watford and the Black Country and the Potteries and Manchester and the far-flung North. What the South, in all its imperial snobbery, still called the Provinces.
England, Troy had learnt long ago, had few greater insults than to call you provincial. It implied you still wore woad.

Clearly they were savages. It was a little after noon. He had just found St Clement Street, Lower Broughton, and was parked outside number 25. Before he had even pulled the key
from the ignition a grubby face had pressed itself up against the window on the driver’s side—nostrils flattened against the glass. Another head popped in at the open window on the
passenger side.

‘What kind of car is this Mister is it a Cadillac or a Packard or a Ferrari it’s a big un in’t it I’ve gorra dinky of a Caddy an a Packard an a Ferrari.’

The sentence had no pauses. An acute grammarian could not have driven in a comma with a sledgehammer.

Troy looked at the child—nine or ten at the most—full of curiosity, devoid of all knowledge.

‘It’s a Bentley,’ Troy told him, trying very hard not to feel foolish.

‘Bentley?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is it posh is it?’

‘If you like.’

‘D’thee mek dinkies of it?’

Troy waved the other child off the glass and opened the door. Over the top of the car the voluble child was just visible, craning upward, marginally short of climbing on the bodywork. A third
savage had appeared from nowhere and was undertaking a personal test of the springs in the left-hand wing mirror with the flat of his hand. Behind him the vast bulk of Onions had appeared in the
open doorway of number 25. A blonde, beautiful, sad-eyed girl of ten or so peeped round him at hip level.

‘Probably,’ Troy said to the boy.

Onions roared.

‘Clear off. The lot of you!’

It had no effect. In the canteen at Scotland Yard grown men would leap to their feet and spill their pudding at such a sound from Onions. Indeed he had once seen Onions simply yell Constable
Agnew’s name only to see Agnew shoot bolt upright, recite his national service rank and number and click his heels together on the ‘Sir!’, deluded by the force of Onions’
delivery into believing for a moment that he was back in the Army. They all looked at him, the newcomer even paused momentarily in his technical test of the mirror, but they also ignored him.

‘I’ll mind your car for a tanner,’ said the first child.

‘OK,’ said Troy.

The boy held out a hand.

‘C. O. D.,’ Troy said.

‘Yer what?’

‘Cash on delivery. If the car’s still here when I get back you get your sixpence.’

The boy shrugged his acceptance of the terms. Onions reached behind the house door, groping for his jacket. Jackie Clover stood on the step, the thin boundary between home and street, quite
possibly the only one in the terrace that had not been freshly donkey-stoned, and scrutinised Troy. It was a disturbing gaze. Trying so hard to look as deep into Troy as she could. Surely she had
no memory of him. It had been so long ago and she so small. She would not speak to him. Did not speak to Onions as he ruffled her hair and told her to tell her mother that they’d ‘gone
down the Grosvenor’. As they passed the Bentley Onions clipped the boy at the wing mirror round the ear without even looking at him.

Onions ordered bread and cheese. A pint of mild each. Muttered that he had eaten nowt but his own cooking for three days. The barman slapped a doorstep of a slice in front of
each of them. Silently Onions spooned a sticky brown pickle onto his plate, bent his back and shoulders into it and ate ravenously. It reminded Troy of the scene in
Great Expectations
when
Magwitch, played by Finlay Currie, gorges himself out on the marshes with the food Pip has stolen for him. Was Valerie really that bad a cook? He’d never eaten a meal prepared by her;
they’d always eaten out. He occasionally thought that this had been essential to the relationship. Even more than wanting to be fucked, Valerie wanted to be wined and dined. Life with Kenneth
could not have been a box of delights. Even less so when he had returned home and whisked her from a backstreet in Shepherd’s Bush to a backstreet in Salford.

Troy could stand the sound of stolid munching against the faint hum of lunchtime chatter no more.

‘Had Kenneth been long in Cyprus?’ he asked.

Onions unhunched from the food and looked across the table at him. There was relief in the stony eyes, their bright blue flattened to slate with grief and tiredness. He was glad Troy had broken
the ice.

‘Nobbut a fortnight. Went out there about the middle of the month. Bugger all notice. His entire squadron just told to pack and get on board a transport. Weren’t even told where they
were bound. Our Valerie found out where he was when she got a postcard. That was Friday. Telegramme came Saturday. Could be worse. Could have arrived before the damn card, I suppose.’

Troy could not eat. Would not have touched the beer in any case. He knew Onions well enough to know the explosion could not be far off.

‘I mean. I ask yer. What in God’s name was he doing there? What were British tommies doing in Cyprus?’

‘Do you really want to know?’

‘I wouldn’t be askin’ if I didn’t, would I?’ Onions snapped.

Troy knew that he could only let loose the wrath of Onions; he could not control or diminish it. He could only leach it and watch it flow down. It seemed to be what he should do.

‘Cyprus has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘The nationalists have been bumping off the odd swaddie every so often, just like the Jews did in Israel under the mandate a few
years back. That’s just coincidence.’

‘Ken died for a coincidence?’

‘Yes. He wasn’t there for any reason that matters to Cyprus, Cyprus is a floating island, the great Mediterranean aircraft carrier. A handy spot to launch the invasion of
Egypt.’

‘Jesus. Jesus,’ Onions whispered.

Had he really not worked it out for himself? It was hardly more than six weeks since Nasser had seized the canal. Wasn’t it obvious? Couldn’t every sentient being in Britain see that
we were heading into war?

‘It’s like … it’s like Ken’s death doesn’t count.’

‘Not to Eden it doesn’t.’

‘Eden?’ Onions looked baffled by the word.

‘He means to have Nasser. To humiliate him on the world stage.’

‘He’s mad.’

‘Yes. Rod swears the man is certifiable.’

There was a pause. Troy felt the mood swing again. The softness of shock and incomprehension rising toward anger once more.

‘He’s the Prime Minister!’

‘Yes.’

‘I voted for the bastard.’

Troy should not have been shocked by this. The phenomenon of the working-class Tory was as English as morris dancing and the Last Night of the Proms. It was simply that he and Onions never
talked politics, at least not domestic politics. He was, true to class, slightly in awe of it all, the party hardly mattered, he was unduly respectful of Rod whenever he came to the Yard. Yet the
truth was clear. Stan had not voted for Eden, he had voted for Churchill through Eden, who in the eyes of men like Stan was no more or less than Churchill’s shadow. That Churchill had to be
booted from office almost gaga by his own party would be a mystery to Stan. Not worth the time it took to find it credible. Troy had seen this for himself. Waiting for Khrushchev at Number 10 he
had bumped into Winston in a corridor, somewhat the worse for drink and by far the worse for age. Troy had no vanity that he would remember him. They had met a dozen times at his father’s
dinner table, but that had been during the wilderness years, the best part of twenty years ago, but he did expect that a man in full possession of his faculties might just remember where the bog
was in a house he had occupied for the best part of ten years. He had shown him to the right door, and mimed zipping up his flies when the old man emerged agape with his shirt tail flapping like an
elephant’s ear.