Old Flames (40 page)

‘How can people cart money around like that? It’s smuggling isn’t it? Currency smuggling?’

‘Wrong way, old boy. The state the pound’s in, our lot are concerned about money leaving the country. Export sterling and they’ll do you. And they spend so much of their time
looking for people trying to smuggle sterling out, that I don’t think it would occur to them, given our exchange problems, that anyone would try and smuggle it in. Of course he could have got
bad luck, they could have opened him up looking for a few fag lighters or a bottle of scent and found him with ten grand in cash, but the gods smiled on him. I’d call it a reasonable
risk.’

‘The banks—why wasn’t his bank manager suspicious?’

‘Why do you think he banked in Great Malvern? So the bloke had no idea of the true scale of the business in Derbyshire. A local man would have put two and two together. Besides which
he’s a dim fucker. I know, I spent an hour on the phone to him.’

Angus sat down, the leg had stood all it could, but the eyes were bright, and there was an edge born of mathematical delight in his voice. He took a wadge of papers from his briefcase and waved
them at Troy.

‘Bank statements. Building society papers. A mortgage. The building bricks of life as we know it. The carbon, the amine, the deoxyribonucleic acid of our social being.’

‘Yes.’

‘In your notes you said the father-in-law bought the house for the Cockerells. Why the mortgage? I rang the dimwit in Great Malvern and he confirmed, once I’d convinced him of my
authority to act, that one of the standing orders on Cockerell’s bank statements was a monthly mortgage repayment. But—it was only taken out in 1952—the house, you will recall,
was inherited in ’43—and it was paid off in December last year. As far as I can tell, with all the loot Cockerell had floating around, the only purpose it could serve was the tax break.
Mr Fiddle doing things by the book yet again. So, I rang the Ancient Order of Derbyshire Foresters and before they stonewalled me I did manage to get out of some poor woman in the chain of command
that the mortgage was not on that bungalow in Belper. Freddie, the bugger had a second home somewhere. Some sort of bolt hole, I should think.’

‘Where?’

‘I just told you. I don’t know. Some officious git, quite possibly the Ancient Forester himself, came on the line and told me to mind my own business. But if you ask me a bolt hole
is the prime requirement of a vanishing trick.’

‘He’s dead, Angus.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes. I held a second post mortem and in the end I identified him myself.’

‘Then who’s in the bolt hole?’

‘I wish I knew.’

He rolled Angus into a cab and tiptoed quietly upstairs. Tosca was curled up in the middle of his bed. He had half expected to find that she had sloped off to her own. He slid
in beside her, listened to the regularity of her breathing. He kissed a shoulder blade and the rhythm stayed the same. He wrapped an arm around her and put his fingers to her left nipple. She took
the hand away, held it to her lips and kissed it, and dropped it back on his side of the bed.

In the morning Troy rode the underground to King’s Cross with her. He could not recall that they had ever ridden the underground together. A flash of memory brought her
voice to him from the war, telling him she would rather die in the open air than shelter underground, ‘It stinks, y’know that, it really stinks.’

‘Don’t see me off. I can’t stand waving and kissing. I seen
Brief Encounter
too many times.’

So they stood the among the shacks and sheds that made a shanty town of the station forecourt, in front of the left luggage office.

‘You’ll be home at the weekend?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Rod and your sisters?’

‘They take the place for granted. Rod needs it, to be honest, for his work. But it’s my house, I can tell them all to go to hell.’

‘There’s no need. I’ll handle it. I just never had family before. It was always just my mom and me.’

Troy was shocked. He had never given a moment’s thought to the possibility that she too might have family.

‘Where is your mother?’

‘I wish I knew. She’s still young, y’ know. Maybe sixty-three or sixty-four.’

He watched the tears form in the corner of each eye and a torrent begin to cross her cheeks.

‘She must think I’m dead. I mean. They’ll have told her I’m dead, won’t they?’

‘I’m afraid so. I reported you dead to the US Army myself.’

He paused. It seemed inevitable, impossible not to utter.

‘I
thought you were dead.’

And once uttered it seemed like an accusation.

An engine howled long and deep in the glass canopy inside—an iron beast in pain. She kissed his cheek and ran. It seemed to Troy that there might be no end to running.

The Ancient Forester was ancient indeed. A wavering voice. An immovable man.

‘You say you’re a detective from Scotland Yard. How am I to know you’re a detective from Scotland Yard?’

‘Because I say so’ was unlikely to convince. Nor, Troy thought, was a line about obstructing an officer in the course of his duty.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ he said. ‘You call me back. You do know Scotland Yard’s telephone number, don’t you?’

‘But,’ said the Ancient, ‘I would then have to pay for the call.’

‘I’ll send you a postal order,’ said Troy.

It usually worked. He waited five minutes and five minutes became quarter of an hour. He had begun to think he had found the one person in Britain who did not know the number Whitehall 1212, and
his hand was outstretched to pick up the telephone and dial the old fool again, when it rang.

‘Is that Chief Inspector Foy of Scotland Yard?’

‘Troy. The name is Troy.’

‘Oh, I was just speaking with a Chief Inspector Foy.’

‘That was me.’

Silence. Troy mentally calculated how long it might take him to get up to Chesterfield and rattle the address out of him.

‘Cockerell, you say?’

‘Yes.’

‘We do appear to have had dealings with Mr Cockerell.’

‘Yes.’

‘But no longer.’

‘What you had was a mortgage, taken out by him in the September of 1952, or thereabouts, which was paid off in December of 1955.’

Troy heard the sound of the Ancient shuffling papers. The laboured breathing of a man in the onset of emphysema.

‘I believe that is correct.’

‘What I need to know is where the property on which Cockerell had the mortgage is.’

Again, the slow, almost interminable shuffling of papers. Inhalation and exhalation that seemed to be wrung out of him by a mangle. The two short, disparate syllables.

‘Bri–ton.’

Bri–ton? Bri–ton? Good God, the old fool was saying Brighton. Troy’s heart leapt. The thrill of the chase, the heady pursuit of the agile criminal, the painstaking diligence of
a good detective.

‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but where in Brighton.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Where in Brighton?!?’

Troy bit his bottom lip. The desire to interrupt was unlikely to be productive. He held his breath and waited.

‘Number 2 …

‘Yeeees.’

‘Number 2, Chatsworth Place, Cavendish Hill, Bri–ton.’

The mute voice in the head cheered and sang. For safety’s sake Troy read the address back to him, with the Ancient saying ‘yes’ at every pause. At the last pause Troy had a
‘goodbye-thank-you-don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you’ on his lips when the old man pulled out the rabbit from the hat.

‘Property of Mrs M. Kerr.’

‘What?’

‘It says here … Kerr. M. (Mrs).’

‘You mean Cockerell didn’t own the house?’

Another endless pause as the Ancient gathered elusive breath.

‘Apparently not.’

‘But he paid the mortgage?’

‘Regularly. And to completion.’

‘Isn’t that a bit queer?’

‘A little unusual, perhaps. But as long as the deeds are placed with us, as indeed they were—we still have them—all is proper.’

Very little about the case of Commander Cockerell was proper. It was a word Troy would never apply to anything Cockerell did.

‘Who is Kerr. M. (Mrs)?’

‘I could not tell you. Without, that is, examining the deeds themselves. I merely read you the reference as our records show it. Now, about that postal order …’

Troy had never worked in Brighton. His vision of the place was coloured more by Graham Greene and Richard Attenborough than it was by experience. The train down was crowded
with holiday makers. He stood in the corridor all the way—the rattle of the bogies over the rails became monotonous, every jolt at the fishplates in the track assumed the words ‘Kolley
Kibb-er Kolley Kibb-er’ in his mind as though the train were talking to him. They were not words he much wished to hear. He began to regret that the occasional aversion to the motor car led
him to presume relief and pleasure in travelling by train.

Cavendish Hill took some finding. Largely because he had the map upside down. Only when he realised that the English Channel could riot really be on the north did he turn around in Kemptown and
head off to where Brighton blends smoothly into Hove.

The Hill rose steeply from the seafront about a quarter of a mile west of the West Pier. And a quarter of a mile or so up the hill, Chatsworth Place ran off from it, parallel to the coast. He
had, he realised, been expecting a mews or some such. The address implied tucked away—which it was—it also implied that it would be less grand than Cavendish Hill—which it
wasn’t. It was a narrower house, but taller by far, and as he approached number 2, he could see clearly that it had been combined with number 3—there were no houses on the other side of
the street—into a sprawling, double-fronted house with a commanding view across the town to the sea. Commander Cockerell had done very well for himself—if indeed it was for himself.

He stretched out a hand to the doorbell when he saw that the front door was an inch or so ajar. Suspicion fought a scrummage with plain nosiness—they called it a draw and he pushed on the
door and entered. It was almost silent; the rumble of water running down the pipes echoed around the house, but little else other than the creak of his own footsteps broke the silence. Suspicion
pulled ahead on points.

He turned right, and found himself in a dazzlingly modern kitchen that had the mark of Cockerell all over it. No more the clutter of little wooden tables, of higgledy-piggledy shelves askew on
old iron brackets, of tin mesh larders to keep away the summer flies. This was seamless, as seamless as Brighton joining Hove, seamless in ivory-coloured plastic, dotted here and there with little
splashes of blue and red. It looked to Troy like a dilute version of Mediterranean pottery. Best of all the gas stove and the fridge slotted in almost as though the places had been built around
them. Where was the gap down which to lose a wooden spoon or half your dinner? This was Cockerell’s world, the world of Mrs 1960, and Miss World’s Fair. Who could guess, but that were
he to open one of the many fitted cupboards—yes, ‘fitted’, that was the word—a double bed or a folding bath might unfurl before his eyes. At the very least it would be a
fully functioning rotisserie, complete with skewered chicken, rotating as it opened to the beholder.

He set foot on the stairs. The first creak was enough to freeze him to the spot, but when the house offered no response he pressed quickly on and into the drawing room on the first floor. He
knew as soon as he saw the room that someone else was involved. He had puzzled over the matter ever since Angus had told him that Cockerell had a second house. It could hardly be just to live alone
in, away from a bad marriage. Logically, it would be a love nest. A little somewhere he could meet a mistress. But it was hard to imagine the man with a mistress, and this was not a little
somewhere, it was a big somewhere, and here in this wide, airy room, with the sea laid out before floor-to-ceiling windows like a private panorama, was the evidence of the other woman. This room
was Cockerell-ish, but his absurd proselytisation of the new was compromised, subtly leavened by someone else’s taste. The heavy glass table on turned wrought-iron legs might well be him, but
the close-packed wall of two hundred years of seascapes, in every medium from charcoal, through gouache and watercolour to heavily discoloured and darkened oils, was not. This must be the
woman’s work. As his first home had shown, Cockerell’s taste ran to nothing better than Trechikoff’s
Green Woman.
This living wall was breathtakingly beautiful,
startlingly original—Troy would never have dreamt that one could pack paintings together so closely and not lose all they represented—and in it he saw the meaning of the mistress.
Jasmine Dene was a war zone, divided into his and hers with a line through it like Korea or Jerusalem. Two minds, two sets of values met in this room and worked together. Yes—Cockerell
definitely had a mistress.

He moved quietly up a floor. Bedrooms. Front and back, and all, it seemed, unused. Enough space to have four or five house guests at the weekend. The staircase narrowed; he was climbing to the
top floor, there could only be attics above it. At the bend it narrowed further, as it carried on high under the eaves, and formed a small landing with a pair of slender double doors facing him.
They offered the same invitation to nosiness as the front door had done. An inch ajar, asking to be pushed. He pushed. He was back in the land of Cockerell, a feminised Cockerell, where everything
was spanking new but deeply luxurious. The spareness of the Scandinavian look pushed through spareness to emerge the other side in a Hollywood style of smothering comfort.

He could hear nothing. The sound of running water had stopped. Two doors led off the bedroom, presumably to a bathroom and a dressing room, and the front wall of the room was made up of huge
sliding glass doors, which opened onto a narrow terrace. He tiptoed pointlessly across a shag-pile carpet—pit boots would have made no noise on it—to the open door to the terrace. A
gentle evening breeze had caught the curtain and was wafting it to and fro. He looked at the view. The beginnings of evening redness in the west gleaming like rubies in the sea. He looked at the
bed. A happy man could lie abed and watch the sun rise or set in the Channel. A happier man could make love with a sea breeze caressing his nether regions. Then he noticed the photographs. Half a
dozen in a column next to the door frame. Good bloody grief. Cockerell had surely developed these himself, perhaps he even had a darkroom in the cellar? No self-respecting chemist would fail to
call the Vice Squad if he found these in the back of a Brownie 127.