‘What?’
‘Next to the tall bloke in the awful suit. See, looks like it was cobbled together by Flanagan and Allen in a Crazy Gang sketch at the Palladium. They were there when I came in. The chap sounded American to me.’
He’d know Kitty anywhere, from any angle. She slipped her arm through the man’s. Gave him a kiss on the ear. Troy wondered if she knew he was there. If Charlie had told her who he was meeting. But the Salisbury was twenty yards from Troy’s front door. Who else would Charlie be meeting? Kitty inched closer. The light between their bodies vanished as she melded her affection into him, fitting the curve of her waist around the man’s hip. Troy stared, willing the American to turn around. He did. It was the same man he’d seen Kitty’s father with last night. Time to change the subject.
‘You’ve been out of London. You must have. Or you’d have been nagging me to come out for a drink before this.’
‘Indeed I have, o’man. But I can’t say where or why for reasons of national security.’
This was nonsense, or the prelude to a gag. Charlie was the most indiscreet man alive. He couldn’t keep a secret to save his life.
‘Come off it,’ Troy said simply.
‘Let’s just say a quick trip to the land of bagpipes and haggis, a quicker trip back to a large unnamed fortress not a million miles from here in which Richard III murdered his nephews, all because of a chap who’s name begins with H and ends with ESS, but who is known to us in the trade as Mr Briggs.’
Troy tried not to laugh. If he did Charlie would get the giggles and collapse in a heap of helpless laughter. This was typical of the man. The unutterable blurted out in a flippant sentence. Matters of national security. Of course he should not have told Troy that Hess was in the Tower of London, but Troy could not think of the force on earth that could stop him. Short of a firing squad.
‘Chatty, was he?’
‘Doesn’t breathe between paragraphs. Talk? The bugger never shuts up. Alas, he doesn’t say anything that matters. I’ve just witnessed four days of the party line. I think he came here genuinely believing that Hamilton would introduce him to the King and a bunch of senior Tories, and then they’d all get together, dump Churchill and do a deal with Hitler. He even asked for a copy of Three Men In A Boat-if that’s his vision of England, then Mr B. is a chronic fantasist who seems to believe in some sort of ancient Tory heartland that’s only waiting for the moment to make peace.’
‘Well,’ said Troy. ‘He’s right about that. That’s why we locked them up.’
‘Quite-but I rather think his invitation to join forces against the Soviet horde might have found itself outweighed by the opening of the flat or the start of the hunting season. “Mad” does not begin to convey Rudolf Hess. Barking, barking, barking. No matter what question the blokes from the FO put to him, he found some trite bit of Nazi spiel that covered the issue neatly. I tell you, Freddie, it reminded me of nothing quite so much as getting stuck on the doorstep with a very persistent Jehovah’s Witness.’
‘You should introduce him to my father. They’d be well matched.’
‘We’d probably get a damn sight further with your old man putting the questions than we have with these types from the Foreign Office. However, I think hell will freeze over before the boss lets your father within a mile of Mr Briggs.’
‘Who is the boss?’
‘Reggie Ruthven-Greene. Do you know him?’
Troy shook his head. Charlie flagged down the clearer again and ordered another whisky and soda, pointed at Troy’s untouched Guinness. Troy shook his head, lifted the glass to his lips and put it back without taking a sip.
Charlie said, ‘This had better be my last. I have to meet Reggie about five minutes ago. Look, I won’t be far out of London once old Briggs is fixed up, and I can be back any time there’s a break. You’re single again, aren’t you…?’
‘Single?’ said Troy, as though the word meant nothing to him.
‘You know what I mean… spare… without a woman! Why don’t we get together one night next week? Do the town. Check out operations on the totty front.’
He belted back his whisky in a single gulp and was on his feet before Troy could answer. But Troy never would answer. He’d just say ‘Of course’, and when Charlie phoned up divert him from the plan or plead the job’. Charlie always wanted to check out the totty front, but he always ended up ‘doing the town’ without Troy.
The American and Charlie collided in the doorway. An ‘Excuse me’ deferred to an ‘After you, old chap’, they hesitated for ten seconds and then the American slipped out and Charlie waved his cheerio and followed. The coincidence of them leaving at the same time left Troy staring at Kitty Stilton’s back. She turned, stuck her hands in her coat pockets and sauntered across the floor towards him.
‘Fred,’ she said by way of greeting.
‘Sergeant Stilton,’ said Troy with all the neutral inflection he could muster.
‘Your mate coming back, is ‘e?’
‘No. Yours?’
Kitty pulled back the chair Charlie had sat in.
‘Ain’t you gonna buy a girl a drink, then?’-Troy buttonholed the clearer. Asked for a gin and lime.
‘I’m not a bleedin’ waiter, y’know.’
Kitty opened her coat, let him see the uniform beneath and thrust out her chest.
‘For the boys in blue?’ said Troy, and the man muttered a grudging ‘Awright’.
Thirty seconds later he slammed a glass down in front of Kitty, spilling half its contents and stuck out his hand for the cash.
Kitty sipped at her drink.
‘S’made with cordial,’ she said. ‘Don’t taste the same.’
‘I expect they can’t get fresh limes any more.’
Troy tipped his Guinness into the aspidistra pot.
‘Could you do me a favour?’
‘Course.’
‘I bumped into your father last night. He’s still treating me like a pariah…’
‘A wot?’
‘An outcast. He talks to me with thinly disguised hatred. I wonder if you might put him straight. Tell him the truth.’
‘What truth would that be?’
‘That you dumped me, not I you. He seems to have got it into his head that I trifled with your affections.’
Kitty sniggered through her gin and lime, and succumbed to a fit of giggling and choking.
‘And while we’re on the subject of loose ends, you still have a key to my house.’
‘Ain’t got it on me though, ‘ave I? Besides, you still got all my records.’
‘Come and get them. I’ve no wish to deprive you of them.’
‘Right now?’
Troy paused-this had the makings of a Kitty trap.
‘Isn’t your friend coming back?’
‘Nah-he’s got to meet my dad. They got work to do. He’ll be gone all night.’
No-she could not mean what he thought she meant. They were past that. She had dumped him. She’d made that perfectly clear.
§ 33
Troy opened the cupboard under the gramophone and removed a stack of records-all the things Kitty liked and he didn’t. Dance bands with inanely exotic names-Orpheans, Melodians, Waldorfians-or inanely stupid-Syncopating Syd and his Tyrolean Accordianist Ensemble, Ali McDonald’s Ocarina Wizards. He’d tried and failed to get her to listen to Duke Ellington or to Art Tatum. Ellington had ‘got something’, but she’d never put him on the turntable of her own choosing, and Tatum was ‘just a racket’ and ‘ruined a good tune’.
A record slipped from the top as he reached the table. Kitty caught it or it would surely have shattered on the floor.
She held it in both hands and looked at the label, fingers brushing across the grooves, tracing out the words on the label.
‘It’s Riptide,’ she said. ‘Al Bowlly and Lew Stone.’
She hesitated, staring down at the record in the dim light.
‘Lovely Al Bowlly,’ she said. ‘Poor, lovely Al.’