Blue Rondo

John Lawton

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9781611855876
• eBook ISBN:
  9781611859881
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Written by 'a sublimely elegant historical novelist as addictive as crack' ( Daily Telegraph ), t he Inspector Troy series is perfect for fans of Le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst. 1959. An old flame has returned to Troy's life: Kitty Stilton, now wife of an American presidential hopeful, has come back to London, and with her, an unwelcome guest. Private eye Joey Rork has been hired to make sure Kitty's amorous liaisons don't ruin her husband's political career. But before Rork can dig any dirt, he meets a gruesome end... But he isn't the only one, and with the body-count mounting is it possible that the blood trail leads back to Troy's police force and into his own forgotten past?

Contents

Prologue

Boys’ Game

§ 1

§ 2

§ 3

§ 4

§ 5

§ 6

§ 7

Blue Rondo

§ 8

§ 9

§ 10

§ 11

§ 12

§ 13

§ 14

§ 15

§ 16

§ 17

§ 18

§ 19

§ 20

§ 21

§ 22

§ 23

§ 24

§ 25

§ 26

§ 27

§ 28

§ 29

§ 30

§ 31

§ 32

§ 33

§ 34

§ 35

§ 36

§ 37

§ 38

§ 39

§ 40

§ 41

§ 42

§ 43

§ 44

§ 45

§ 46

§ 47

§ 48

§ 49

§ 50

§ 51

§ 52

§ 53

§ 54

§ 55

§ 56

§ 57

§ 58

§ 59

§ 60

§ 61

The Life of You

§ 62

§ 63

§ 64

§ 65

§ 66

§ 67

§ 68

§ 69

§ 70

§ 71

§ 72

§ 73

§ 74

§ 75

§ 76

§ 77

§ 78

§ 79

§ 80

§ 81

§ 82

§ 83

§ 84

§ 85

§ 86

§ 87

§ 88

§ 89

§ 90

§ 91

§ 92

§ 93

§ 94

§ 95

§ 96

§ 97

§ 98

§ 99

§ 100

§ 101

§ 102

§ 103

§ 104

§ 105

§ 106

§ 107

§ 108

§ 109

§ 110

§ 111

§ 112

§ 113

§ 114

§ 115

§ 116

§ 117

§ 118

§ 119

§ 120

§ 121

§ 122

§ 123

§ 124

Prologue

A grim prospect greeted Troy and Bonham. Eight small boys ranged across the pavement, all looking expectantly towards Bonham. No one spoke, the expectant looks seemed fixed somewhere between joy and tears. Sgt Bonham held power over the greatest, the most mysterious event in their short lives. Troy looked down at a motley of gabardine mackintoshes, outsized jackets tied up with string, brown boots, pudding basin haircuts, bruised and scabrous kneecaps. Such an amazing array of ill-fitting hand-me-downs that only the peach-fresh faces challenged the image of them as eight assorted dwarves. Out on the end of the line, a grubby redhead, doubtless called Carrots, juggled a smouldering cocoa tin from hand to hand, an improvised portable furnace. Troy wished he had one of his own.

Troy glanced at the boys, wondering how much they heard and how much they understood. Eight cherubic faces, and sixteen hard, ruthless eyes looked back at him. Preserving innocence seemed a fruitless ideal.

‘How would you like to make some money?’ he said.

‘How much?’ said the biggest.

‘A shilling,’ said Troy.

‘Half a crown,’ said the boy.

‘You don’t know what it’s for yet!’

‘It’ll still cost you half a dollar,’ the boy replied.

‘OK, OK,’ said Troy, ‘half a crown to the boy who finds the rest.’

‘Freddie, for God’s sake,’ Bonham cut in. ‘You can’t!’

He gripped Troy by the shoulder and swung him round into a huddled attempt at privacy.

‘Are you off yer chump?’

‘George, can you think of any other way?’

‘For Christ’s sake they’re kids. They should be in school!’

‘Well they clearly have no intention of going. And they don’t exactly look like Freddie Bartholomew do they?’

‘Jesus Christ,’ Bonham said again.

‘Don’t worry,’ said Troy.

‘On your own head be it.’

Troy turned back to the boys, ranged in front of him in a wide semicircle.

‘I want you to look for . . .’ he hesitated, uncertain what to call a corpse. ‘For anything to do with what Tub found. OK?’

They nodded as one.

‘And if you find it don’t touch it. You come straight back and tell Mr Bonham, and nobody, I mean nobody, goes near it till he’s seen what you’ve found. Understood?’

‘You know, Freddie,’ Bonham said softly, ‘There are times when I think there’s nothing like a long spell at the Yard for putting iron in the soul.’

1

Boys’ Game

Short, nasty and brutish.

Troy stared.

‘Go on,’ said Churchill.

Still Troy stared.

‘Go on. Pick it up.’

Troy hefted the gun in his left hand. Sawn off at the barrels and stock, it had become less a shotgun than an outsize handgun. He felt the weight, thought the alterations did nothing for its balance and less for its looks. ‘I hope this didn’t start life as one of your hand-mades,’ he said.

‘Far from it. I helped myself to it after a trial a few years back. The court wanted it destroyed, naturally, but I pleaded its . . . educational value.’

Churchill smiled at Troy over this last phrase. Down the tunnel Hitler and Göring watched with fixed gazes. Tempting him.

‘My education, I suppose?’ Troy said.

‘As it happens, yes.’

‘You know,’ Troy went on, ‘it’s appalling a policeman should ever have his hands on such a weapon.’ He tucked the stubby stock into one hip and fired. The first shot cut Adolf in two, the second set fat Hermann spinning. Straw and sawdust everywhere.

Churchill sighed. ‘What have I told you, Frederick?’

Troy recited: ‘Every shot counts. Speed isn’t everything.’

‘And?’

‘And a wounded man can still kill you.’

‘Quite,’ said Churchill. ‘If old Göring had been anything more than a cut-out from Picture Post and a sack full of straw you’d be dead now. Shall we do it again with a little more accuracy and a little less haste?’

‘Again.’ It seemed to be Churchill’s motto, and it seemed to Troy that he was no further on than the day Churchill had walked back into his life three weeks ago.

§ 1

DECEMBER 1944

In the summer of 1944 Lady Diana Brack had shot Detective Sergeant Troy in the gut. He had lost part of one kidney, and had been lucky not to lose a length of small intestine. He had been off work for six months. Six months that to him seemed far more than enough and which he ascribed as much to his superintendent’s desire to punish him as to the rigours of passing the medical. Every time he reported for duty, Onions sent him home. Not long before Christmas he had finally got back into his old office, behind his old desk, and attempted to slip on the old skin he had sloughed off in June.

A week later he was back in hospital, rushed to the Charing Cross with internal bleeding as a result of a massive haemorrhage, the first he had known of which had been pissing blood. Sergeant Wildeve had picked him off the bog floor, flies gaping, cock out, slewed in a crimson slick of blood and piss.

His family came to drive him mad.

His mother sat at his bedside and distracted him from the prospect of death by reading aloud to him, much as she had done when he was young. He had been a sickly child. Now that he was a sickly grown-up, he was happy to have her read; he wished only that she had chosen something more cheery than Rimbaud’s Un Saison en Enfer.

He could understand why. French was her first language. Like many Russian toffs, Russian, to her, had been a language for talking to servants, and, unlike her husband, she had never found it in herself to embrace the irregularities of English with the passion one could only ever muster for something so perverse. French it had been, French it was – but Rimbaud. Mother, please.

‘J’attends Dieu avec gourmandise. Je suis de race inférieure de toute éternité.’

Oh, bloody hell, he thought. Waiting for God? Was that what he was doing? But help was at hand. His sister Masha had appeared at his mother’s shoulder: ‘There’s two chaps waiting to see Freddie, Maman. As he’s only allowed two visitors at a time . . .’

His mother stuck a bookmark in the pages of the battered Rimbaud and told him they would continue tomorrow.

‘Anyone I know?’ Troy asked.

‘You’ll see,’ said his sister, and as she walked out Kolankiewicz had walked in, followed closely by a face that made Troy think for a moment. Churchill, Bob Churchill. Good Lord. He didn’t think he’d seen Bob since his father’s funeral.

Lady Troy offered a cheek for Churchill to peck. Troy couldn’t help feeling she would have preferred a handshake, but that would have meant surrendering the grip on one or other of her walking-sticks. For eighteen months or so now they had kept her mostly upright and moving against the tortuous twists and stabs of arthritis. All Kolankiewicz got was a mumbled, ‘Good evening.’ She had never liked Kolankiewicz, but then so few people did – so few could or would get past the foul exterior and the fractured English. Besides, Poles and Russians . . . they had history. Taras Bulba was not a novel or a name ever to be mentioned around Kolankiewicz.

Churchill had gained weight – a family trait, perhaps. He was almost as rotund as his distant cousin Winston, and when the mood took him the same mischievous Churchillian glint could be seen in his eyes.

No one spoke as Troy’s mother walked to the door, sticks clacking arrhythmically across the linoleum floor. When she had gone Churchill said softly, ‘Your mother was fine the last time I saw her. Has all this come upon her since your father’s death?’

Troy’s father had died late in 1943. He had watched his mother slip into sudden ill-health, her limbs seizing up as the most important limb of all had been cut from her. A physical parody of her mental state. It was not Troy waiting for God, it occurred to him, nor was it a poem read for his benefit – it was his mother, and there were times he thought God could not arrive soon enough for her liking.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘And there’s little to be done. She seems almost to relish the affliction. It’s her punishment for letting the old man slip.’

‘You been reading that bugger Freud again?’ Kolankiewicz said.

‘Let’s change the subject, shall we? I’m sure I don’t owe this honour to your desire to argue the toss about Freud or Bob’s concern for my mother’s health.’

Churchill and Kolankiewicz looked at each other, and Troy knew he had hit the mark. It was indeed an honour – a visit from the greatest gun expert on Earth and from London’s finest forensic pathologist. If the two of them had got together to visit him in his sick bed they must be up to something – the static between them flashed out ‘conspiracy’ to Troy.

‘Bob has an idea,’ Kolankiewicz began.

‘Well, more of a suggestion, really, and it was your idea, really, Ladislaw . . .’

Ladislaw? No one called the Polish Beast by his Christian name.

‘Stop there, both of you. I’m too tired and too pissed off to listen to you play Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Could one of you just spit it out?’

Kolankiewicz deferred. Churchill took the chair Troy’s mother had been in, and Kolankiewicz perched on the edge of the bed.

‘It’s like this, Frederick. After you were shot, Ladislaw and I met up . . . When was it now?’

‘Doesn’t matter when,’ said Troy.

‘I suppose not. Anyway, he told me you couldn’t hit a barn door at twenty paces and the only reason Diana Brack hadn’t killed you instead . . .’ Churchill paused, reddened even, as the inevitability of what he had to say next struck him.

‘Instead of me killing her,’ Troy prompted.

‘Quite. As you say. The only reason was . . . well . . . pure luck. Wasn’t it?’

Churchill looked at Kolankiewicz. Kolankiewicz looked at Troy. Troy met them head on. ‘Yes. A lucky shot,’ he agreed.

Lucky? The bullet that had killed Diana Brack ricocheted through his dreams and would do so for the rest of his life.

‘So . . . what’s your point, gentlemen?’

‘Well . . .’ Churchill fudged.

Kolankiewicz had had enough of fudge.

‘Well is as well does. Next fucker who comes at you with gun is going to kill you, you stupid bugger.’

Churchill manoeuvred around the F-word by pulling out a large linen handkerchief and honking loudly, as though a good hooter blast could erase the sound of air turning blue.

‘Fuck it, Troy, you know as well as I do if the Brack bitch had got off a second shot you’d be six feet under pushing up buttercups!’

‘Daisies,’ Troy said softly.

‘Eh?’

‘It’s “pushing up daisies” not “pushing up buttercups”, you Polish pig – and, yes, you’re quite right. She damn near killed me. I’ve had six months to work that out. Now tell me something I don’t know.’

Churchill got between them. ‘When will you be discharged?’

‘For Christmas,’ Troy replied. ‘They’ve assured me of that.’

‘And how fit will you be?’

Troy threw back the bedclothes, hoisted his nightshirt and pointed to the four-inch scar on his abdomen.

‘I see,’ Churchill said. ‘You’ll take a while to heal. So, we’ll take it gently at first, shall we?’

‘Take what gently?’

Kolankiewicz answered, the steam spent, and a near-avuncular tone in his voice: ‘My boy, Bob is offering to teach you to shoot. It’s a good idea. It could save your life.’

‘I get weapons training at...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author biography
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication page
• Contents
• Historical Note
• Acknowledgements