Old Flames

John Lawton

• Publisher: Grove Press UK
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781611855906
• eBook ISBN: 9781611859911
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Written by 'a sublimely elegant historical novelist as addictive as crack'- Daily Telegraph

The Inspector Troy series is perfect for fans of Le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.

London, 1956.

Khrushchev and Bulganin, leaders of the Soviet Union, are in Britain on an official visit. Chief Inspector Troy is assigned to be Khrushchev's bodyguard and to spy on him. Soon after, a Royal Navy diver is found dead and mutilated beyond recognition in Portsmouth Harbour. What was he doing under the hull of Khrushchev's ship, and who sent him there?

Meanwhile, cold-blooded killings have started to follow Troy wherever he goes. Is it possible that the executioner is a fellow policeman, or, worse still, an old friend?

§1

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.

§2

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.

§3

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.

‘...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• April 1956
• Prologue
• §1
• §2
• §3
• §4
• §5
• §6
• §7
• §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
• §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
• Historical Note