Old Flames (6 page)

The fifth man hogged the stove. A short, fat, miserable-looking man, and a poor-looking specimen for a copper. Oblivious to all around him, he buried himself in the pages of a large, hardbacked
book. Troy approached, tipped the book forward to see the title.
Lolita
—of which he had never heard—by one Vladimir Nabokov—of whom he’d never heard either. The man
adjusted his glasses and his focus, and stared for a moment at Troy.

‘Lance Bombardier Clark?’ Troy said.

‘It’s Detective Constable Clark now, sir. And I don’t suppose you’re an Inspector any more, are you, sir?’

‘Chief Inspector. Are you with the Branch?’

‘Lord no, sir. Warwickshire Constabulary. I got roped in for me languages. I’ve Russian as well as German. Truth to tell, all the time I spent in Berlin I’d have to have been
deaf not to come away fluent in Russian.’

Troy had not set eyes on Clark since Christmas Day of 1948 in a snow-bound Berlin, to which the late Josef Stalin had laid siege. Clark, Lance Bombardier, Artillery, had been assigned by the
British Army as his translator. Which reminded him that he had last seen Tosca only minutes after the last time he saw Clark. Troy pulled up a chair close to Clark. The policemen had been up since
four or five in the morning. They were all drowsy and bedraggled. A private conversation was unlikely to offend.

‘How did they get you?’ he asked simply.

‘Quite straightforward, sir,’ Clark replied. ‘I’d done fifteen years by 1952. I’d made Warrant Officer Class II. I knew I wasn’t what you’d call officer
material. Personally, I don’t think I was even Warrant Officer Class I material. It was time to ask for me civvy suit. About that time the force started recruiting in a big way. There’d
been that big purge of bent coppers, you’ll recall. They sent a couple of blokes to the base I was on to blow their own trumpet. They told me I was just what the force needed. Languages
an’ all. The new breed of educated copper. Brains instead of boots. Fine, I thought. I volunteered. I spent the next three years pounding a beat back in bloody Birmingham. The only foreign
language I got to use was if we got villains in from Wolverhampton. About a year ago I got out of uniform. Things’ve looked up a bit since then. This came out of the blue. A right treat.
Couldn’t believe me luck.’

‘Nor I.’

Troy dearly wanted to ask Clark about Larissa Tosca. But there was a risk. What had Clark thought she was? That last night in Berlin, he had watched her back into the mess at RAF Gatow, dusting
the snowflakes from her WAC’s uniform and almost collide with Clark, on his way out. Did he ever learn that the uniform was utter deception? A relic of the war that she was no more entitled
to wear than Troy himself? Did he ever realise which side she was on?

‘When did you leave Berlin?’ he ventured.

‘Oh, I was there till the end. I saw it all. Mind you, nothing was the same after 1949. Once the Soviets eased up on us it was dull as ditchwater. Life without a few little fiddles
wasn’t worth living. They all said it. The army, the spivs, the spies. It was yesterday’s rice pudding.’

Much as Troy wanted news, the ambiguities of ignorance appealed. Supposing Clark knew everything? He had surely seen her sit down with Troy that night? Supposing she had been exposed or purged
in one of those countless show trials rigged up by Beria under Stalin’s regime? Did he want to know, and if he wanted to know, did he want to know the worst?

Clark was looking across Troy’s shoulder. He turned. Beynon appeared above him.

‘Excuse us, sir. We was wondering like. It’s past ten and not a sign of Mr Cobb. He dropped us here more than an hour ago. You don’t suppose there’s anything we should be
doing? We was wondering. You being the senior man an’ all.’

Troy was about to point out his raw recruit’s status on the operation when the door banged open and Cobb bustled in, red-faced and sweating. He slapped his case onto the trestle table,
jerking Milligan once more to life. He looked around him, gasping and out of breath, taking in the room in a sweeping glance. As Troy had expected, that glance came to rest on Milligan.

‘You,’ he barked. ‘Shave and haircut the minute you’re off duty!’

He turned his gaze on Troy.

‘Good of you to join us, Mr Troy!’

‘You didn’t get my message?’ Troy said softly.

‘Yes—I got your message. But if you don’t mind, for the future, once a plan’s been agreed I’d be obliged if you’d stick to it.’

Troy slowly turned his left wrist around. Looked at his watch and looked at Cobb, making his point silently. Cobb ignored the hint. Whatever it was that had made him late, it had severely taxed
his physique. The man was streaming sweat, as though he had just won first prize in the sack race.

‘Right,’ he began. ‘Rosters!’

Cobb tore off his blue mackintosh and scattered the schedule for the next ten days across the table. Troy glanced down it. It was chock-a-block. Not a day out of the next ten seemed to have as
much as a tea-break built in to it. Bulganin and Khrushchev were about to be bounced the length and breadth of the British Isles by all known means of transport, and to be wined and dined by every
dignitary London could unearth, in a punishing round of sociability that would strain a man half their age. For the evening of the twenty-third they were to be the guests of the Labour Party at the
House of Commons. Suddenly Troy spotted trouble, but if the Branch and Her Majesty’s Government couldn’t see it, it was, he thought, scarcely his job to point it out to them.

‘First off. For those of you who’ve already spent good money at Moss Bros, there’ll be no evening dress. Our guests appear not to have brought theirs, so we’re all, to
avoid embarrassment, to wear plain dark suits for the evening dos.’

Cobb looked briefly but pointedly at Troy. The follow-up to yesterday’s wisecrack.

‘Now—there’s a few rules and regulations. A few dos and don’ts. Cock up and you’ll have me to answer to. We all know why we’re here, and we all know what the
front is. Each of you will log on and off shift with me. I want to know when you pick up the nobs and when you drop ’em, and when you drop ’em I want a full verbal report. I’ll be
the one to decide what needs to be in writing. You won’t have time to take notes and even if you have, I don’t want anyone caught by the Russians jotting things down. For the purposes
of clear communications, Khrushchev is codenamed Red Pig, Bulganin is Black Bear. Nobody uses their real names over the phone. Got it?’

He looked at them all in turn. For no reason Troy could see, he let his gaze rest on Clark.

‘Got it?’ he said again.

Troy heard Clark gulp and manage a faint ‘yessir’.

‘Right. Next on the agenda. Guarding Red Pig and Black Bear.’

He paused. Troy assumed he was straining for the pause to look meaningful.

‘Not your job. Repeat. Not your job. My boys will be everywhere and highly visible.’

‘What? Trench coats and bowler hats?’ said a voice from the back. Troy saw Cobb’s eyes home in. He turned to see Milligan receiving the gorgon stare.

‘Shuttit, laddie. Just shuttit.’

Cobb broke the stare. Looked at the roster in front of him.

‘As it happens,’ he said, reddening slightly, ‘it
will
be trench coats and bowler hats.’

Troy knew he was grinning. Unless God spared him quickly, a grin would become a snigger and a snigger a laugh and he would have Cobb down on him like an irate schoolmaster, armed with a piece of
chalk. The thought of all those flatfoots swarming all over Claridge’s Hotel dressed up like pantomime policemen was too funny to resist.

Cobb’s finger shot out, aiming towards Troy.

‘You! Stop bloody grinning!’

Troy looked back and realised that Cobb was pointing at Clark. The fat little man was smirking with repressed laughter.

‘They’ll do the real work, and they’ll be recognisable. To everyone. But in the event of a real hoo-ha, there’s a routine to go through. First. The only time you do not
accompany Red Pig and Black Bear is when other security is provided, e.g., royal palaces, Downing Street. In all other places you stick to them like glue. No matter where. Nobody is exempt. If you
have to sit in on a cosy chat with the Archbishop of Canterbury, you do it. Second, you always go through doors ahead of them. Third, if any nutcase has a go at them, you get them out of the room
and you let my boys handle the assailant. You do not tackle anyone unless you’ve no choice.’

Beynon’s hand shot up like an eager schoolboy.

‘Excuse me, sir. But have there been any actual threats?’

‘Threats?’ Cobb sneered. ‘Threats? Every bunch of cranks in Britain from the Empire Loyalists to the Last-of-the-Mosleyites has threatened ’em. They’re all nutters
and it doesn’t mean a damn. If we believed every crank who thought Khrushchev was the anti-Christ there’d not be a copper left on point duty from here to John O’Groats. All the
same, we play safe. Understood? And remember, the Russians wanted the KGB guarding their own blokes. We had quite a row convincing them we weren’t going to have armed Russian bully-boys
swanning around London. So—bear this in mind. If we fuck up, we’ll never hear the last of it.’

Again he swept the room with a practised penetrating stare. Practised, no doubt, in front of a bathroom mirror from an early age. Cobb was, Troy decided, a brute of a man, but not the ugly brute
he had first supposed. The man’s waffle gave him time to look and appraise. The stare was disturbing, more than Cobb ever meant it to be. He meant merely to command, and he did it rather
well. But his eyes seemed asymmetrical. It was the cock-eyed, strabismic stare of a one-eyed man. But Cobb had two eyes. Then the penny dropped. It was the eyebrows. The left eyebrow drew all the
attention to the left eye. It was white in the middle. A one-inch strip of premature white hair, as startling to observe as Diaghilev’s two-tone coiffure or the hennaed halo of Quentin Crisp.
Troy remembered Cobb’s reputation at the Yard as a ladykiller. He was beginning to see why he had it. There was a slob side to him, that could appeal to the tidy instinct in a woman—a
man for whom the right woman could roll pairs of socks into balls ever after—but there was also a raffish, brutal handsomeness to the man. To Troy it bespoke the surly Special Branch bastard.
But, it was conceivable that to some young WPCs he was Mr Rochester of the Yard. Brown curls fell across his forehead, his mouth was wide, his jaw strong despite the extra chin—and he dressed
surprisingly well. The mackintosh was a Burberry; the neat, double-breasted, figure-flattering blue suit must have cost a packet. Troy was all but indifferent to clothes. He had his suits made in
Savile Row out of nothing more than habit. He dressed well only because money let him and tradition paved the way. Taste did not come into it. And a suit as sharp as Cobb’s he did not
own.

‘And lastly—’

Lastly? Troy must have missed something.

‘Lastly. These.’

Cobb opened his case and tipped out six police-issue Browning automatics in their shoulder holsters. It was an odd moment. Troy had not seen a gun in a while. It had been well over a year since
he had last had to request issue of one. They sat uneasily with his notion of ‘copper’.

‘Sign here. You get two extra clips of nine mill. And you account for every shell spent.’

Troy watched as Beynon, Beck and Molloy slipped into their shoulder holsters like practised gunmen. He fumbled at his. Clark fumbled. Milligan fumbled. It slowly dawned on Troy that the shoulder
holster could not be used left-handed. It went under the left armpit or nowhere. Clark managed to sling it around his neck, with the butt of the gun dangling across his sternum. Mulligan was all
but making a cat’s cradle of it.

Cobb looked at them, making no attempt to disguise his contempt.

‘Jesus Christ. Amateurs. Rank bloody amateurs. Beynon, you show ’em!’

He stormed out. Beynon gave Troy a look that said ‘sorry’.

‘It goes like this you see, sir.’

He whipped off his own holster and slowly put it back on for the benefit of all three, exaggerating each gesture—the patient Scoutmaster teaching the dimwits a useful knot or two.

‘Left arm first. Down, around the back. Right arm through the elastic side, straight out and pull in. See?’

They saw. Mulligan got the hang of it. Troy and Clark looked like the last of the clowns.

‘S’cuse the thought, sir’, said Milligan, ‘but if I ever get Mr Cobb behind the bikesheds …’

‘After me in the queue,’ said Troy. ‘If I knew how this thing worked, I’d shoot him myself.’

He put the gun into the holster and put his jacket back on. It felt awkward and it felt silly. It stuck in his armpit like a cucumber. He’d have to live with it. God help Nikita Khrushchev
if he ever had to draw it.

Guns boomed in the dockyard. Over and over again. Troy did not need to count. There would be thirteen blasts, as tradition demanded, followed by a Soviet reply of twenty-one. It meant the
Russian ships were docking—or World War III had begun. Troy put his overcoat back on and joined the others in the yard.

‘You’re in luck,’ Cobb yelled at them over the sound of the guns. ‘You get a personal introduction. We stand in line and the Foreign Office bloke will introduce you in turn as personal bodyguards. Whatever they say to you, for pete’s sake look as
though you don’t understand and don’t answer until the FO have translated for you. As far as the Russians are concerned you’re ordinary coppers—just how ordinary I shudder
to think. Right, follow me.’

Cobb led off under the worn brick arch to the berth set aside for the Russian ships. The sun shone, but as they cleared the arch a salt wind came up off the sea to remind Troy that it was still
only the middle of April and the weather could turn any minute. The quay was crowded: a horde of pressmen, the gentlemen of Fleet Street, standing around in groups smoking and joking; a horde of
Foreign Office bigwigs and littlewigs, the gentlemen of Pall Mall, standing around not smoking and not joking. And, as Cobb had said, the unmistakable presence of Special Branch in its Sunday best,
belted trench coats, bowler hats and big feet. There could scarcely be a phone tapped or a skull cracked the length of Britain this morning, there was no one to do it. They were all here looking
like they were auditioning for the role of Chinese policeman in a seaside production of
Aladdin.
Troy did a quick head count of his own party, realised they were seven, and tried not to
think of Snow White.