Old Flames (32 page)

‘I’m afraid you’re going to have to help me,’ said Troy.

Godbehere folded his newspaper.

‘Why is it, sir, that at the sound of those words the hairs on the back of my neck stand up?’

‘Copper’s instinct.’

‘I’m supposed to wait till the meat wagon gets here. And when Brenda’s recovered I take her statement, and when you’ve got your bollocking from the boss, I take yours.
And that’s all I’m supposed to do. You do know that, don’t you, sir?’

‘Indeed. I’ve already been bollocked, and I think common courtesy will allow Brenda another half hour in which to grieve. In the meantime I want you to dust the place for
prints.’

Godbehere stood up and reached for his bag of tricks.

‘You’ll get me shot.’

‘I’ll carry the can.’

‘You’d better,’ Godbehere said without inflection. ‘Now, where do you want me to start?’

‘Desktop. It was wiped clean at about nine this morning.’

‘Handy,’ said Godbehere, and he pushed the chair away to make room in the tiny space available to him.

‘Just a minute,’ Troy stopped him with a hand on his arm. ‘Did you pull up the chair to sit down?’

‘No. It was here, by the desk. I just parked me backside.’

Troy saw in the mind’s eye that fastidious gesture. The precise aligning of the chair with the wall. The flapping handkerchief. It was a gesture born entirely of habit. Surely Jessel, a
fussy man Troy concluded, did this with every visitor? Set the chair out and put the chair back. He looked at the patch of claret-coloured carpet by the wall. Four deep ruts had been impressed in
the fabric by the habitual presence of the chair legs.

‘I’ll tell you now,’ said Troy. ‘Whatever Jessel died of, he did not die alone. Someone was here. Someone sat exactly where you were sitting when I walked in just now.
Dust the lot, doorknob, chairback everything.’

‘You’ll get me shot,’ Godbehere said again, unpacking his case, and seeming indifferent to the prospect even as he stated it.

Troy knelt down and looked across the leather top of the desk at eye level. Something obtruded, a speck or a blob, just off-centre to the right. He took out his pocket handkerchief. Put a corner
of the Irish linen to the blob and watched as a tiny brown stain spread a thirty-second of an inch up the material. He stood and put the cloth to his nose. Oil. Definitely oil. And if those two
weeks walking around with that ridiculous Browning stuck up his armpit had been at all useful, they had taught him the smell of gun oil.

He folded the handkerchief carefully and put it in his inside pocket where it nestled against the papers he had pinched from Jessel’s desk. Godbehere dusted the edge of the desk with white
powder and offered an instant opinion.

‘There’s something here. No doubt about it. D’ye reckon that cleaning lady was thorough?’

‘You saw her. Looked to me as though she cleaned Pandaemonium for Lucifer on a regular basis. No brimstone left unturned.’

Troy looked down at the powdery smudges. This, like money, was not one of his strong points. He was about as capable of reading the signs as he was of deciphering the hidden meanings in
wallpaper. Godbehere seemed to realise this only too well.

‘I’ll get on better on my own, sir. Why don’t you do whatever it is you have to do and come down the nick to give me your statement a bit later. I’m there till six today
and I’m on again at eight-thirty tomorrow. The nick’s out on the Matlock Road. Ask anybody.’

Troy left to do whatever he had to do. It was just that he had no idea what the whatever he had to do should be.

He stood at the end of Railway Cuttings, pondering the dilemma. Either he placed a great deal of confidence in Godbehere, or he steamed in uninvited, set up his own investigation, knowing full
well that the connection to Cockerell, and Cockerell’s connection to what Stan would inevitably call ‘spookery’, was enough to make Onions hesitate in backing him. And if he did,
Troy would then find himself stepping on the toes of every local plod for miles around and making himself the most unpopular copper in England.

Someone was honking a car horn at him. He looked at a pale Daimler or Jaguar parked a little way up the street. All he could see in the windscreen was a reflection of the street outside, crowded
with shoppers. Then the driver’s door opened and a stout, owlish figure beckoned to him.

‘Get in,’ he yelled.

It was George Brown. The penny dropped. The Somewhere-up-North for which Brown sat in the Commons was Belper. This was his constituency. Good God, he should have realised.

He pulled open the passenger door and got in. Brown eased the large car into traffic and headed slowly down the street.

‘I don’t have to ask you what you’re doing here, do I?’ he said.

‘Is it that obvious?’

‘Only two things have put Belper on the map since the industrial revolution. Me, and Arnold bloody Cockerell!’

‘You knew him?’

‘You couldn’t miss him. Local nob. Rotary Club. Chamber of Commerce. Treasurer of the Tory Party for a couple of years. Always giving me gyp at public meetings. But I can’t
honestly say I knew him. Mind you, if it’s local knowledge you want, I’m meeting two of my chaps for a drink at the Legion in five minutes. You might as well join us.

Brown swung the car left at the next junction.

‘Did anyone raise the matter of Cockerell’s disappearance with you? As a constituency matter, I mean?’

‘His wife did. But of course, by then it was what you’d call a Commons undercurrent. Your brother was masterminding it. I had a word. He said ‘leave it to me’, and I was
glad to. I was supposed to have blotted my copybook where the Russians are concerned, as I’m sure you gathered from Brother Khrushchev. It was better all round for Rod to handle it. I told
Cockerell’s wife what I could. Wasn’t a lot.’

Brown paused.

‘I have to ask you this. Your brother didn’t ask you to come up here, did he?’

‘No. And I think I can say that he’d have told you first.’

‘I’ve big feet,’ Brown said. ‘Easy to tread on.’

He swung the car left again and brought it to a halt in front of a sturdy, squat example of twenties architecture. The Royal British Legion. Watering hole of old, and not so old, soldiers.

Troy could not recall that he had ever been inside a British Legion. He had, after all, no entitlement. He had not only not done his bit, he would have lied, cheated and run away to Ireland to
avoid doing his bit. It had never come to that—Onions had kept him out of the forces as an essential worker. He did not think that Brown had been in the forces either. It was an odd feeling;
it set them apart from their generation. At most Brown was two or three years younger than Troy, one of the rising stars of the Party, if the fogies of fifty or so—Gaitskell, Rod—ever
gave them space to spread their wings. The next election was four years away and closing with every crisis. Gaitskell looked set to win it hands down. It would be a very long time before the
generation of George Brown and Harold Wilson found room at the top.

‘You’re not a member, are you?’ Brown was saying as he locked the car door.

Troy shook his head.

‘Then Walter had better sign us in. I’m not either, you see.’

Troy wondered if this admission had undertones. Did a British man, let alone a British politician, of their age automatically feel the divide of fought/not fought? Was it for ever going to be
held up as the central action, the defining experience of their generation? Worse, when they got in there, to the Legion, what did people—men, it was always men—talk about? Could a
bunch of forty-year-olds rehash ‘what I did in the war’ till the day they died? Would they be doing this in the 1980s, the 1990s, into the next century?

Brown introduced Troy to Walter and Ted—two men separated by a couple of stones in weight, a couple of years in age—roughly the same age as Brown and Troy—and a small round
table bearing a crumpled copy of the
Manchester Guardian
and two half-finished half pints of bitter. They shook hands and said hello, and revealed a wider gap. The stout one, Walter, was
clearly a Lancastrian, and the skinny one, Ted, just as clearly a Yorkshireman. Quite a melting pot, the British Legion, thought Troy.

‘What’ll you have?’ the thin man said.

Brown asked for a half of the local brew—a Mansfield ale—and Troy followed on the Driberg principle that the first crack in the ice was usually to be achieved by drinking what the
working man drank.

Troy looked around. It was a dull place. Inevitably, it was a dull place. But no duller than any London club he’d ever been in. Faintly hideous with varnished woodwork, it was neither more
nor less pleasant than the Garrick with all its varnished portraits dulled with age—and no one had asked if he was wearing a tie. The new Queen had pride of place with a wall to herself, a
public photograph in red robes. The war had its small memorials in the decorative plates hanging askew on the wall, to the local regiment—the Sherwood Foresters—and to the 1st Polish
Parachute regiment. The illusion that the war had been England’s war was a thin one, and only idiots ever believed it was. England had been too full of Czechs and Poles—and
Yanks—for it to have been otherwise. In the background he could see a row of full-sized billiard tables, and the bar-room gossip was punctuated by the constant click of the balls. The gossip.
He strained to hear, strained to make sense of a difficult local accent, and found, much to his amazement, that old soldiers talked about the weather and football and rugby league and what
they’d seen on the ‘telly’ last night. No one mentioned the war.

He felt Brown’s elbow nudge him, and turned to see him lighting up his pipe. The look on the stout one’s face told him he’d just asked a question that Troy had not heard.

‘I was just saying. Would you be Rod Troy’s brother?’

‘Yes, I am.’

‘He’s been up a few times and given us a talk. Came up for George in ’50 and ’51.’

There was a slight pause, possibly for Troy to fill, but he did not so the stout one added, ‘Decent bloke,’ by way of a coda.

At his best, Rod was a passionate believer in and campaigner for Love and Justice and Democracy. A man who hated lies. Troy could admire that, even if it was usually he who flicked up all three
for him. At his worst, Rod was ‘a decent bloke’. Troy hated the decent bloke.

The thin one returned, balancing a tray of drinks and the first rush of shag cloud billowed forth from Brown.

‘The Chief Inspector’s here about Arnold Cockerell,’ he said through the smoke.

The two men looked at each other. Troy thought they both smiled. He was dreading the existence of another local double act and hoped to God they’d something sensible to say.

Walter spoke first. ‘So it’s not him down at Portsmouth? Must say I never thought much of the idea of Arnold as Bulldog Drummond.’

Troy put the obvious question. ‘You knew him, then?’

‘Moved here about the same time I did. I met him when I got out of the Army at the end of ’45. Of course, he was with us then.’

‘With us?’ said Troy.

‘Party member,’ Ted put in across the top of his glass.

‘We saw a lot of him,’ Walter continued. ‘He was very active on George’s behalf.’

Troy looked at Brown, smacking loudly at the end of his pipe.

‘By 1950 I was Satan, of course.’

‘No,’ said Ted. ‘He was still with you in ’50
—
he left us between then and the ’51 election.’

‘Very nearly lost my seat,’ said Brown with a politician’s self-absorption.

‘I saw him change,’ Walter said. ‘Something quite drastic. It was like the road to Damascus. It was as though his own success couldn’t coexist with his old
ideas.’

Troy knew from trying to have rational conversations with Rod that the politically committed cannot grasp the notion that people simply and easily change their minds. It remained, however, that
what the man was offering him was what he most needed, an educated guess at the motivations of Commander Cockerell.

‘About the time of the Festival of Britain?’ he asked.

The two men looked at each other again. Without the smiles, puzzled this time.

‘Now you mention it,’ Walter said, ‘it was. Peculiar that.’

‘The Damascus road of modern furniture,’ said Troy, paraphrasing Janet Cockerell.

‘No, no.’ Walter mused, ignoring his beer. ‘It was more than that. I know what you mean. Shop full of Scandinavian tat at high prices. It was more than finding his niche in the
business, more than making a bob or two for the first time in his life. It was as though someone had picked him up and shook him.’

‘That’s fancy,’ said Ted. ‘Have you been at the Babycham? If you ask me, it’s bloody simple. It’s the British story, isn’t it? Great Britain This Is
Your Life—give a man a few quid more and he starts looking after self-interest. Give a man a leg up in life and he bites the hand that feeds him. It’s what dogs us as a party and a
country—we breed Tories. You’ll see. We get back in next year or the year after, we improve the lot of the workers—do what we’re committed to do—and the next election
after that the buggers’ll vote us out because they’re making a bit too much money to trust it to Labour. That’s what happened to Cockerell. He made a bob or two. And from then on
he was determined to hang onto it.’

‘Write that down,’ Brown said. ‘Gaitskell can use it next May Day.’

They all laughed at this. Troy managed a gentle smile, hoping he looked wry rather than humourless.

‘I know his wife quite well,’ Walter said. ‘In fact she still pays her subs. Doesn’t come to meetings or dos, but she’s a member. She said, a few years ago now,
must have been ’52 or ’53, when he became Treasurer of the local Tories, she said he talks such utter rubbish, she said, I can’t believe he believes it. And then she said,
“I don’t know what got into him. He’s like a schoolboy, smirking to himself, sitting there with his finger up his bum.”

Troy could imagine Janet Cockerell saying that. He could imagine the hell that was surely the home life of Mr and Mrs Cockerell, narrated by a tedious, self-obsessed bore, punctuated by the
balloon-pricking, contrivedly vulgar wit of his wife. And if that wasn’t bad enough, she voted Labour. God, how that must have annoyed him.