‘If she had,’ said Wells, ‘would we any of us remember it?’
Polly the housemaid appeared in the doorway with a dinner gong. She looked at Troy, listened to the burgeoning argument, and froze, her big eyes wide, her hand poised.
‘Just hit it,’ Troy mouthed at her. And two of the Western World’s greatest thinkers were gonged off.
He found himself seated between his sisters, Masha to his left, Sasha to his right. He hoped their affairs were going well. If they, in the absence of husbands who’d enlisted at the first blast of war’s trumpet, were manless, they could be peevish beyond measure and would take it out on him. In their eyes he was still eight years old. They guarded him alternately viciously and preciously, as though his supposed virginity might somehow balance the spent currency of their own. Worse, sooner or later, since they knew no guilt, they would want to boast to him. He never wanted to listen. The last time, Sasha had described her unstoppable adulteries as her part of the war effort. Her mission to make English manhood happy. Those about to die got the chance to salute her.
‘Got a girlfriend these days?’ she said without preamble.
Troy said nothing.
Masha leaned over him.
‘Didn’t I tell you? He ditched that little WPC he was with, didn’t you Freddie?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Just as well,’ said Sasha. ‘Not your type. Honestly.’
‘What is my type?’ and he regretted instantly having spoken.
‘Dunno. Just not wotsername.’
‘You know,’ said Masha, ‘I’ve forgotten her name too. Milly or Molly or something?’
At the other end of the table, where Troy dearly wished he had been seated, Rod, their father and Wells had moved on from Russia to the only topic of the moment. The war. Rod had been holding forth for some minutes on the subject of a second front. Wells, having endured as much of his own silence as he could manage in the course of a single meal, said, ‘Surely that’s why he’s here? Hess was sent to avert that possibility. To offer some sort of alliance and so pre-empt a second front.’
They both looked at Alex, as though this were his cue.
‘A second front?’
‘Second to North Africa, I meant,’ said Rod.
‘I know what you meant. But it seemed to me only the other day that we were fighting on half a dozen fronts at the same time, even if we do not call them fronts.’
‘Were we, I mean are we?’ Rod looked nonplussed.
‘North Africa… we have barely left Greece…’ Alex went on.
‘And we have barely begun in Crete,’ Wells added.
‘The skies above us, and the waves below us, at least above us here and below those of our people stuck in the mid-Atlantic with German U-boats on the prowl.’
‘That’s five, four and a half really-I don’t think you can have Greece and Crete in their entirety,’ said Rod unhelpfully. ‘There’s not a British soldier in Greece, other than the POWs, and not a German one on Crete.’
‘Not yet,’ said Alex, ‘not yet.’
‘So what’s the other?’ Rod said.
‘Iraq,’ Troy said from the far end of the table.
‘Quite right.’ A nod of acknowledgement from his father. ‘Iraq it was. Five and a half fronts-if you like. However, I cannot but think of it in terms of the last war. Eastern Front and Western Front. Sooner or later the pattern will reassert itself. And as to Hess being here: I don’t know why he’s here. I’d dearly love to be able to ask him.’
‘Perhaps Churchill will let you,’ said Wells.
Alex tilted his bowl, scooping at the last of a thin clear soup which Troy had found so tasteless as to be unidentifiable.
‘Winston and I are no longer as close as we were. I cannot remember precisely when we last spoke, but it must have been in 1939 or thereabouts.’
‘It was just after your editorial on the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Dad,’ Rod said.
Troy would not have bothered. They all knew when it had been. The row had been volcanic.
He felt hot breath upon his ear. Polly, clutching a bowl of steaming cabbage, was whispering to him.
‘It’s that Onions bloke from the Yard, young Fred. He wants you on the blower.’
Troy ducked out, feeling his mother’s eyes upon him. Back in the study, the phone lay off the hook on his father’s desk. He picked it up and heard Superintendent Stanley Onions’ Lancashire growl.
‘Are you free?’
It didn’t matter if he wasn’t.
‘Body for you. A Mrs O’Grady, lla Hoxton Street, phoned in. Lodger tripped and fell down a flight of stairs. Dead as a doornail. Better check it out. You never know.’
‘You never know’ just about summed up the working lives of two detectives on the Murder Squad.
Troy made his excuses in the dining room. Saw his mother rise and throw down her napkin, coming round the table to him.
‘My dear, we have only just started the main course. Does Scotland Yard want you to starve?’
Her words all at odds with her gestures, she kissed him on both cheeks, escorted him to the door and made no effort beyond the formality of words to detain him.
‘Is he still trying to write the same article?’ Troy asked as he slipped into his coat.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And he will tie us all in knots until he has done so. At the moment the idea is that he and Wells will write it together. I’ll be amazed if it survives the evening. They’ll be at each other’s throats before the dessert if Rod doesn’t stop stirring.’
‘He doesn’t mean to. In fact he doesn’t know he’s doing it. He just drops bricks.’
‘Your faith in innocence would be touching were it not for your odd choice of profession.’
It was odd. And she’d never let him forget it.
§ 21
Cal dashed into Lippschitz Bros., slapped down two pounds ten shillings and grabbed the package the old men had for him.
‘Don’t you want to wait for a fitting?’ they yelled after him.
‘Don’t have the time!’
It was a mistake. He stood in front of the mirror in his room at Claridge’s and cursed the name of Lippschitz. The waist bagged, the jacket hung on him like something made for Cab Calloway to sport on Lenox Avenue, and the trouser cuffs let daylight onto his socks. He looked like a clown. Damn, damn, damn. And there wasn’t a spare second to do a thing about it. He ran for a cab.
He was wondering why Stilton had suggested a pub and not Scotland Yard or the American Embassy, wondering how he’d know Stilton if he saw him.
It was too easy. He pushed open the saloon door of the Green Man in the Strand. A man leant against the bar, chatting happily to the barman in an accent Cal could not place, one hand in his trouser pocket, one elbow on the bar, looking for all the world as though he could hold the posture all night if need be.
‘Not so much as a whizz or a bang for five days. ‘Appen it’s over,’ he was saying.
‘More like Adolf s saving it all up for a big one. I’ve heard say the next’ll be the biggest we’ve seen.’
‘Jack, you are a miserable sod, you always look on the black side. Try being an optimist. Like I said, ‘appen it’s over.’
Jack gave this a second’s thought, then slapped his hand on the bar. ‘Touch wood,’ he said, then he looked at Cal, as though waiting for his order. Stilton’s eyes followed and found Cal.
He was a big man, as tall as Cal himself, but sixty or more pounds the heavier, and every inch the London bobby. A nondescript, voluminous brown mackintosh, a trilby hat perched on the bar next to his pint, shiny boots-polished until they gleamed like ebony-and a plump, reddish, fiftyish face, framing bright brown eyes and a big, bushy, wild moustache-the only un-neat thing about the man. Peeping from beneath the mackintosh were the folds of a dark, striped suit-better by far than the work of the fifty-shilling tailor Reininger had sent him to-knife-edge creases in the trousers, cuffs neatly resting upon the tops of his boots, not hovering at half-mast around the ankles like Cal’s.