Old Flames (30 page)

It was a while before he perceived the sound beneath the siren. Loud and tedious now, rather than disturbing, but it masked almost completely the vigorous pounding at the shop door. By the time
he had worked out that that was what it was, the man at the door had had time to pass through exasperation to anger.

‘And who the ’eck might you be?’ he said as Troy opened the shop door to him.

It was another of the weaselly men. He stood below the step, in a tatty tweed jacket and grey cavalry twill trousers bearing a multitude of unseemly stains, a cigarette stub burning between the
longest fmgers of his right hand. This specimen was more robust than Cockerell, taller and fleshier, but with the same scrawny look to him, the same fondness for the pencil-line moustache. But
seediness had taken a different toll on this one; he was not simply scrawny, he was scrawny with a potbelly, scrawny with deeply nicotined teeth, scrawny with badly chewed fingernails. He was about
five feet nine or ten. Troy estimated his age as fifty-five or so, and not wearing it well.

There was a visible frisson as Troy showed him his warrant card and returned the greeting word for word.

‘I saw the light on,’ he said. ‘I thought it was Janet—Mrs Cockerell.’

‘I’m sure you did, but you haven’t answered my question.’

‘Oh, I’m George Jessel. I’ve come about the books.’

‘You’re Cockerell’s book-keeper?’

‘Oh no. Arnold kept his own books.’

‘His accountant?’

‘No—he did that too. I’m the auditor.’

He fumbled inside his jacket and produced a dog-eared business card: ‘George G. Jessel—Chartered Accountant, 23 Railway Cuttings, Belper.’

‘I do the audit twice a year. It’s overdue.’

The cigarette, burning down to his stained, coffee-coloured fingertips, was suddenly applied to the tip of a fresh one and discarded. A rapid bout of deep inhalation was followed by a rapid fit
of coughing. He heaved and hoiked, and spat globules of phlegm onto the pavement, bent double with the effort of putting the torch to his own lungs.

He almost smiled as he straightened up.

‘Long overdue as a matter of fact. Would it be all right if I picked up the last six months’ figures now?’

Time for silence. Spin it out, thought Troy. Let him fill the vacuum. So he stared and said nothing.

‘I did ask Janet—I mean Mrs Cockerell—but she said she couldn’t be bothered. But it’s got to be done, hasn’t it?’

Troy said nothing. Jessel drew deeply on his cigarette.

‘It’s women,’ he prattled. ‘You know what they’re like.’

‘No, I don’t. And the answer’s no. You can’t take anything now. If I decide you can have the books, I’ll let you know. In the meantime they’re part of my
investigation. Now, can you be reached at this address?’

He held up the dog-eared card.

‘Oh aye, nine till five-thirty, weekdays.’

‘Then I’ll be in touch.’

He stood some moments on the doorstep after Troy had closed the door on him. As he walked off down the street, he looked back several times and before he had gone fifty yards lit another
cigarette from the stub of the old and coughed his lungs up again.

Troy watched him from the upstairs window. It was not long past four. If he zipped through the rest of the papers, Troy thought, he might just catch Mr Jessel in his office at closing time. He
was not at all sure Mr Jessel would enjoy the meeting. The prospect of a live human subject to investigate rather than a set of figures galvanised Troy. Nothing quite so focuses the mind as knowing
you might be able to hang some other bugger in the morning.

In an hour or so he had read all he wanted to. The rat, if such creature it be, that Janet Cockerell could smell, was smelt by him. It didn’t add up—except, of course, that the
metaphor was ill chosen, for add up was precisely what it did. The smell was beyond, beneath and all around the unlikely fact of such addition and precision.

Without doubt he was going to have to spend another night in this one-horse town, sampling the delights of the Kedleston. He looked at the row of books again, and, preferring what he knew to
what he didn’t, stuffed
Casino Royale,
the one Fleming he had read, into his coat pocket. It would pass a dull night in a small town.

Railway Cuttings was almost opposite the railway station, an alley of soot-blackened Victorian cottages running along the edge of the deep cutting that carried the tracks through the middle of
the town. At best it was eight feet wide, and one side of it was made up of the thick granite restraining wall that topped off the cutting. The tracks were visible over the low wall, gleaming off
to meet at infinity, polished like stainless steel with constant use.

Number 23 was some sort of lapsed warehouse. He could just make out the faded, cusped lettering of an old sign for a Seed Merchant and Nursery, high on the wall facing the tracks, but down at
eye level were two small rectangular plates—new and painted, ‘Belper Urban District Council Refuse Disposal’; old and brass, ‘George G. Jessel, Chartered Accountant. 2nd
Flr’.

The staircase had no carpet. Bits of old linoleum tacked onto the worn treads. Flakes of ancient off-white distemper floating down from the ceiling. The hand rail worn into deep curves by the
passing of many hands. At the top were two doors. One half-open, marked ‘G. Jessel’. The other, closed, marked ‘Private’. Behind the first was a small, square office, packed
with filing cabinets, with a small desk at the centre, overburdened with a huge manual typewriter sitting under its nightly plastic dust cover, its shift arm sticking out like a splint. He turned
to the other door, heard the sound of papers rustling, and tapped gently. The door opened. Jessel’s head appeared in the space. Dark brown cow eyes peering out at him.

‘You found it, then?’

‘Yes. I found it.’

Jessel backed away, ushered him into a room scarcely bigger than Cockerell’s office. Tiny, triangular, but a complete contrast. It was a model of neatness. Everything shipshape and
orderly. Not a speck of dust to be seen or a paperclip out of place. Although Jessel had a cigarette glued to his bottom lip, and had developed the knack of talking without dislodging it, the
ashtray was wiped clean, as though he tipped it out and dusted it after every couple of fags. It startled Troy, but he could see the logic behind it. He had expected a reflection of the physical
man, a man who, it seemed, kept a record of most recent meals on his shirtfront and lapels, stained from collar-stud to fly-buttons. Of course, the room reflected the mind of the man, the ordered
categories of the accountant mind.

Jessel pulled an upright chair away from its place against the wall and set it in front of the desk for Troy. He sat on the other side, across the narrow strip of shiny oak and worn red
leather—a small silver fob watch, a row of freshly sharpened pencils, a cut glass inkwell, and two marble-finish Waterman fountain pens laid out like toy soldiers in battle formation.

Jessel opened his mouth to speak and the roar of a train in the cutting made him think better of it. The room shook, the pens and pencils danced a jig across the desktop, a whiff of steam-laden
smoke rolled in through the open window and Jessel picked up the fob watch and tapped the face.

‘The five-fifteen out of Derby. St Pancras to Sheffield. Same time every day. Three minutes later on Saturdays, and never on a Sunday.’

‘You’ve seen Mrs Cockerell, you say, and she—’

‘No,’ Jessel cut in. ‘Not seen. On the phone. I’ve talked her on the phone.’

‘And she won’t let you see the books?’

Jessel detached the cigarette from his lower lip, the lip puckered and gave up its spittle adhesion reluctantly. How often, Troy thought, did the man skin himself doing that? Jessel picked a
fleck of tobacco from his mouth—the hard stuff, no filter tips—drew on the fag, managed not to cough and flicked the ash into the otherwise pristine ashtray.

‘Right. I don’t blame her. She says Arnold will tackle it when he gets back and it should all just wait. I suppose it’s important to her to believe he will come back. But the
figures are piling up, even without all the foreign trade, and besides, it’s not legal is it?’

‘Quite,’ said Troy. ‘It’s a matter of the law that brings me here.’

From the look in his eyes Troy knew that Jessel was instantly regretting having introduced the notion of law.

‘Arnold’s death.’

‘Arnold’s disappearance.’

‘He’s not dead then?’

‘Mrs Cockerell is unwilling to confirm that the body is his.’

Another deep drag on the weed, a cloudy breathing out of noxious, high-strength tobacco smoke.

‘If he’s not dead, what’s the problem?’

‘Money,’ said Troy simply.

‘Money?’

‘Lots of money.’

Jessel sucked his cigarette down to the knuckle, lit up another from the stub and bought himself as much time as he could.

‘Nothing illegal about money,’ he fluffed, and Troy knew he was on the defensive, knew down to his copper’s toes that Janet Cockerell was right. And if she was, he would leave
this man no stone under which to hide.

‘How long have you been covering up for him?’

Jessel coughed, retched and looked to die. Troy sat impassively, watching the sweat beads form high up at the hairline and head slowly south across the reddening face to be mopped up by the
frayed shirt collar. It was theatrical. Dragged out as long as he could muster phlegm, heaving till his ribs ached—and it wasn’t going to work.

When he raised his head above the desktop, Troy was staring at him.

‘Is … is … herrummmphhickerrwyerch … is that what she told you?’

‘Is that what you’re doing?’

‘You don’t want to believe everything Janet Cockerell tells you. They didn’t exactly get on like a house on fire, you know. She’s had it in for Arnold for
years.’

‘There’s an awful lot of money passing through Cockerell Ltd. A small fortune for three small shops in the Pennines.’

‘It’s all legitimate. You’re forgetting the foreign trade.’

‘Goods that never enter England, but show up via his bank account in Stockholm?’

‘Exactly. But you make it sound sinister. It’s not. It’s all above board. Declared and taxed. Perfectly legal. Men like Arnold Cockerell—the backbone of Britain.
Expanding into Europe. Pioneers.’

He was beginning to sound like one of those dreadful Party Political Broadcasts that television had made into a form of boredom unique to the medium. It was a hangover from the war, when
Churchill and Roosevelt felt obliged to chat to their people over the airwaves. In peacetime it was an’ anachronistic bore. A prominent politician would address the nation, pompous and
pretentious, and reading the stuff very badly from cards. Worse still the next night, the other side would talk you silly with their right of reply. Export—that was one of their favourite
ways to bore for Britain.

Troy had too little to go on. Jessel could refute him step by step. But, where was the man’s sense of outrage? Troy had called him a crook to his face, and now he sat there reasonably
defending himself and Cockerell, when, Troy felt, an honest man would have shown him the door and told him to come back with a warrant.

‘There don’t appear to be copies of Cockerell’s tax returns among the papers at the shop,’ he said.

Jessel’s cigarette had gone out. In the effort to be reasonable in the face of Troy’s accusations he had forgotten to smoke. He rummaged in his pocket for matches.

Troy gambled.

‘You have them, don’t you?’

Jessel had just got a light to the nud end. His hand shook furiously. Cigarette and flame refused utterly to meet. The match burnt down to his fingers. He winced and struck another.

‘I’d like to see them.’

This, above all, was the point at which outraged citizenry told him to come back when he’d got a warrant. Even if they did not know what it meant—and a chartered accountant surely
did?—they’d all seen it at the pictures. Coppers sent packing by the right phrases in the right tones, as though they were unsolicited carpet sellers. Just short of a second singeing,
Jessel managed to light up. Neither the gesture nor the tobacco brought him any relief. He was trembling and sweating worse than ever.

‘I … er … can’t put my hands on them right now. My … er my secretary … goes home at five.’

This was fine by Troy. He was happy to sweat Jessel overnight. He could hardly be so stupid as to destroy papers that were already a matter of record. And if he were, it was tantamount to a
confession.

‘Very well,’ he smiled at Jessel. ‘I’ll see you first thing in the morning.’

From the look on Jessel’s face Troy might just as well have suggested an
appointment in Samara. But, he roused himself. Enough energy for the semblance of normality. He bustled past Troy, opened the door for him, put the chair back against the wall, where it came from,
and, in a gesture Troy found curiously fastidious, whipped out his handkerchief and quickly dusted the seat, waving at it with an airy motion, the linen barely glancing off the oilcloth.

‘Fine,’ he said, the cigarette flapping from his lower lip once more. ‘Tomorrow it is.’

He made his way back up the hill in the cool of the evening, his briefcase bulging with the collected papers of Cockerell Ltd. Janet Cockerell was still in the garden, the
painting pretty well finished, a few more dabs and shades added to the motley of her boiler suit. But the working day was done. She was sipping white wine and staring off into the redness of the
evening sky. She fetched a second glass and the bottle. A well-chilled hock, flowery and not too sweet.

‘Why didn’t you mention George Jessel to me?’

‘I can’t think of everything.’

‘No more than I can believe everything.’

She was far too smart not to know when she’d been called a liar.

‘I suppose the real reason is that I don’t want to have to think about him at all. I’d rather not give a man like Jessel head room. He’s a toad. I don’t like him
and I don’t much like Arnold when the two of them are together. He’s the most unsavoury of Arnold’s cronies.’