Old Flames (2 page)

‘Don’t make me, Yuri. You been good to me. Don’t make me shoot you.’

He held his gun up by the barrel and passed it back to her. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Before the slob comes round.’

She reached for the door and the last thing she thought she heard was Yuri softly saying, ‘Good luck. By God you’re going to need it.’

She had always been careful where Dorry was concerned. Dorry was her secret. Dorry was her escape route. She’d never been seen with Dorry. She’d never visited her
except when she was certain she was not followed. She considered herself an expert at shaking off tails. Wasn’t so hard. You took one cab, paid him to cross the city, got out round the
corner, ran like hell and picked up one going the other way.

Dorry cried when she saw her on the doorstep.

‘I thought for sure you were dead,’ she said through her tears. ‘It’s been weeks. They stripped your apartment down to the floorboards and then they took up the
floorboards.’

There was nothing for them to find. All that mattered was here. The passports, the travel permits, two thousand US dollars and an array of dreadful wigs.

Dorry got out the suitcase. The Major pulled out the false bottom and sifted its contents for anything incriminating. She’d need the passports. If she made it out of Russia she’d be
half a dozen different people before she found safety. There was the letter from Guy Burgess. Why on earth had she kept it? It could get them both killed. Better now to burn it. But she
didn’t. She folded it over one more time and dropped it in with the passports.

Dorry had the stove door open and was feeding in oddments as the Major passed them to her.

‘That too,’ she said, pointing to Huck Finn.

‘Nah. Not Huck.’

‘It’s a dead giveaway. It’s your trademark. Besides, a book that thick, we’ll get twenty minutes of heat off it.’

She pulled on the mousey wig, wrapped herself into the peasant overcoat. It felt like it had been run up from a mixture of horse blanket and candle wax. Then she passed the chic black number to
Dorry.

‘Oh no,’ said Dorry, running a fmger down the lapel. ‘It’s beautiful. It’s worth a year’s wages.’

‘And it’s a “dead giveaway”. It’d never fit you. You’re five feet nine, and I just about make five nothin’—burn it!’

‘Where will you go?’

‘West. Where else can I go?’

‘Will you write to me?’

‘Sure. If I can. I mean. When it’s safe.’

‘Send me something.’

‘Like what? Scent? Lingerie? That sort of thing?’

‘No. Send me an Elvis Presley record.’

‘Elvis Presley? Who the hell is Elvis Presley?’

A blurred face swam at the end of a tunnel. Croaked like a frog.

‘Is that it?’ said Troy.

‘Is that what?’ said his sister.

‘It, dammit, it. I mean the danm thing cost seventy guineas—is that as good as it gets?’

The man in overalls, crouching behind the set, twiddling with a screwdriver, looked over the top.

‘It’s in its infancy, you know. You can’t expect it to look like the Gaumont, now can yer?’

The face swam fishily, rippling like a mustachioed and unwelcome mirage. Troy recognised him. Gilbert Harding. A figure made by the new medium, a tele-pundit, a man with an opinion on
everything, and quite probably the most famous ex-copper in the land.

‘I thought we invented television years ago,’ Troy went on irritably. ‘I thought we led the world in this sort of thing. I thought it was like radar. The stuff of boffins.
Barnes Wallis, Logie Baird and all those chaps.’

‘It’s your own fault,’ said Masha. ‘If you’d got one for the Coronation like everyone else, it’d be fine by now.’

‘You’re not saying it takes three years of fiddling and twiddling to get it right?’

‘Well,’ she said, ‘Sort of.’

‘Then I don’t want it. Take it back.’

Gilbert Harding stopped wobbling. Troy could hear him clearly for the first time.

‘Am I right in thinking you’re in the pottery industry?’

Applause. A voice off-screen said an utterly unnecessary ‘yes’.

‘Am I right in thinking you’re a saggar-maker’s bottom knocker?’

More applause. A third voice broke in, and the camera cut to a big, curly-headed man with a tough, if pleasing, boxer-like face, smiling genially at an embarrassed nonentity who had at some
point thought it would be fun to waste thirty minutes letting four people in evening dress guess his occupation. It struck Troy as being bizarre in the extreme.

The telephone rang and saved Troy from throwing out the chap in overalls or physically assaulting his sister. Life with the goggle-box, he concluded, was not going to be easy.

‘The Branch want to see you,’ Onions said.

‘I don’t work for the Branch.’

‘For Christ’s sake, Freddie, knock it off.’

‘Stan, I don’t have to work for those—’

‘Two of their blokes were killed today,’ Onions said bluntly.

Troy weighed this up momentarily. Carrot or stick? ‘You mean murdered?’

‘No. Car crash on theA3.’

‘Then I don’t see what it’s got to do with us.’

‘It leaves them short. They say they need you.’

‘Why?’

‘Not over the phone, Freddie.’

Troy sighed. He hated this pretence of hush-hush, as though anyone other than Special Branch would be tapping a phone line in England. All the same, if they’d asked for him by name he was
intrigued.

‘Just see them,’ Onions said. ‘You don’t have to commit yourself to anything. Just hear them out.’

It was an hour’s drive to Scotland Yard down the Great North Road. Troy was due three more days holiday, but the drive into London had the added draw that it would free him from the
attentions of his sisters, who had talked him into buying the goggle-box and would doubtless waste a whole evening talking him through their favourite programmes. If this guessing game were
anything to go by, the damn contraption could be stuck in the servants’ hall the minute the sisters left and he need never be bothered with it again. By the time they next suffered a
misdirected bout of maternal concern for him, some other fad would have taken its place.

Troy’s Bullnose Morris had expired in 1952 at the age of seventeen. He did not want another. He had liked the car. He had even appreciated the mockery it had elicited in
its tattier latter years, but he did not want another. For the first time since the death of his father in 1943 he had blown a portion of his inheritance on an incontrovertible indulgence—a
five-litre, six-cylinder Bentley Continental Saloon with Mulliner’s sports bodywork. Long, stylish and fiercely raked at the blunt end, it was a car in a thousand and, as all who knew him had
pointed out, utterly un-Troy. The pleasure it gave him to deny familiarity beggared description.

He had the door open and was flinging his old leather briefcase onto the passenger seat when the other sister appeared. Sasha was drifting aimlessly in the spring twilight, clutching a handful
of bluebells, humming tunelessly to herself as she approached the drive from the pig pens Troy had built at the bottom of the kitchen garden. She seemed to be in a very different mood from her
twin. They read each other as though by telepathy but there appeared to be no rule in twindom that said they should think or feel alike at any one moment. When they did, of course, it was hell for
those around them—two bodies with but a single personality, thought and purpose. Sasha was in meditative whimsy, Troy thought.

‘Off so soon?’ she said.

‘The Yard,’ muttered Troy, hoping this would suffice to kill the conversation.

‘That Old Spot’s turned out to be beauty. Are you going to have her put to the tup this month?’

‘I think you only call them tups if they’re sheep.’

Sasha thought about this as though it were some great revelation, startling to contemplate and worth hours of harmless fun. Troy sat in the driver’s seat and reached for the door, but she
put her hand across the top of the frame and emerged from reverie.

‘Oh well … are you going to get her fucked by a daddy pig then?’

‘Goodnight, Sasha.’

She let go of the door.

‘Goodnight, Freddie.’

Troy slipped the car into first and let it purr slowly down the drive, the crunch of gravel under-wheel louder than the engine. In his rearview mirror he could just make out Sasha sitting on the
steps of the house gazing idly at the moon. He rounded the row of beech trees at the head of the drive and could see her no more. The way ahead was clear, he eased out of the gates and set the
Bentley racing south towards the London road.

Onions was waiting in Troy’s office, perched on the edge of the desk, back to the door, staring out at the moonlit Thames. He was often to be found this way. As
Superintendent in charge of the Murder Squad he had developed the habit of office-hopping. Never, in Troy’s recollection, had Onions once summoned him to his own office. He would drop in,
unexpected, uninvited and on occasion unwelcome, at any time of the day and expect to be briefed, or else Troy would arrive to find him hunched over the gas fire pulling on a Woodbine, or as now,
watching the river flow. Almost idly, it seemed—but it never was. Onions learned every secret in his squad by rooting around with his nose to the ground. He was adept at reading documents
upside down as he talked to you across the desk, and Troy had long ago learnt to leave nothing much lying around unless he felt happy with Onions reading it. Becoming Assistant Commissioner had not
changed his habits. Meetings were always held in someone else’s office, information was still gleaned in this haphazard fashion. Troy returned the compliment. On days when he knew Onions was
out he would go through his desk, as surely as Onions did his. The result: they had no secrets, except for the secret that they had no secrets.

Onions was bristling. A glimmer of something unknown played about him.

‘Good,’ he said simply as Troy walked in. ‘Good, good.’

Troy took the mood for excitement. Something as yet unspoken was giving him a great sense of anticipation, quite possibly great pleasure. He slipped off the desk. Troy heard the thick, black
beetle-crusher boots clump on the floorboards. Onions slid his palms across the stubble that passed for a haircut, as though neatening that which did not exist to be neatened in the first place,
and smiled. Troy slung his briefcase onto a chair and stuck his hands in his coat pockets, the merest hint of petulance and defiance in his posture.

‘Are you going to tell me what this is about, Stan? Or do I have to guess?’

‘Ted Wintrincham’s waiting for us in his office right now. Why don’t you give it half a mo’ and let him tell you.’

Troy had no idea what to make of this.

‘Why?’

‘’Cos I think it might amuse you.’

‘Aha.’

‘Oh yes, laddie. In fact, if it strikes you as being half as funny as it strikes me, you’ll be a basket case in ten minutes.’

‘Stan, Special Branch are about as funny as Jimmy Wheeler’s rice pudding joke.’

‘Tell me later. When you’ve heard Wintrincham.’

He smiled in a roguish way that was almost out of character. It seemed from the barely suppressed grin that Onions himself might corpse at any moment. He led off along the corridor. As they
mounted the stairs to Wintrincham’s office, Troy fished.

“Who died in the car crash?’

‘Herbert Boyle, and his sergeant. Young chap name of Briggs. Did you know ’em?’

‘I didn’t know Briggs. I knew Boyle. It was hard not to.’

‘Aye. You could never say he didn’t speak his mind.’

‘You could never say he wasn’t the most unconscionable bastard ever to walk the earth,’ said Troy.

‘Jesus Christ, Freddie, the man’s not been dead three hours.’

They arrived at Wintrincham’s door. Onions thrust it open without knocking. Ted Wintrincham was a Deputy-Commander, and head of Special Branch. Much Troy’s superior, but it would
never occur to Asst. Commissioner Onions to treat him any differently than he treated any other junior officer. One china shop was much like another to the bull. Wintrincham was seated behind his
desk. He rose to shake hands with Troy and make the introductions.

‘Good of you to come so promptly, Chief Inspector Troy. You know Inspector Cobb, don’t you?’

Troy looked at the big man lurching unsteadily to his feet to take his hand as he extended it. He knew Norman Cobb by sight. He was well over six foot, a good sixteen stone, and rather hard to
miss. Troy had seen him around the corridors of Scotland Yard for years without ever exchanging a word. He was Troy’s idea of a surly bastard. Well suited to the Branch.

‘I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure,’ said Troy.

Cobb gave him a bone-crunching grip and a brief glimpse of gleaming front teeth in an attempt at a smile. Troy threw his overcoat on the back of a chair and sat down next to Onions, facing
Wintrincham. Cobb, Troy rapidly concluded, was cold or just plain huffy, sitting there in his natty blue gabardine mackintosh, buttoned to the neck—like a child sent by his mother to a party
he’d determined to hate from the start. Wintrincham was a different kettle. He was the only Special Branch officer Troy liked, the only one with whom he’d pass the time of day without
the sensation that he’d just had his pocket picked. He often wondered how the man had risen to the top of his disreputable job. He was a pleasant, friendly countryman. The best part of half a
century in London had done little to clip his Hampshire burr, and he still spoke like a rustic and suffered the nickname ‘Farmer’ throughout the Metropolitan Police Force.

‘Ye’ll have heard about Inspector Boyle and Sergeant Briggs, I take it?’

Troy nodded.

‘I hate losing men at the best of times, but this is a bad time. There’s a state visit this week—I’m sure that’s no secret.’

Troy was looking at Onions. Onions looked back. Troy could almost swear he winked. Good God, how could the man sit on information like this and not burst? Suddenly he could see exactly what was
animating Onions, could see exactly why he’d played on the element of surprise, could see exactly what was coming.