Old Flames (52 page)

‘I’ll have to stay here a while.’

‘Of course. What do you want me to do?’

‘You’ll have to take charge at the Yard. I can’t do without you any longer. The boy was right.’ The boy was Wildeve. Thirty-six and he’d never be anything else to
Onions. ‘He came to me and insisted I lay you off. But you’re more or less OK now, aren’t you?’

It seemed to have slipped his mind that there were other, better reasons for Jack’s request.

‘I’m fine.’

‘I’ll put in for a week’s compassionate leave. But I’ll not do it till Monday. That’ll buy you a few days to get a medical, get your life in order. You’ll
have to do some of my work, just for a bit. And you’ll run the squad in your own right from now on—Tom won’t be back. I heard on Friday. Doctors have given him a month. Friday was
my day for bad news. Just get yourself back to the Yard and take over. You’ll be confirmed as a superintendent as soon as Tom’s papers are through. I’ll handle things up
here.’

Onions slipped into silence. An infinite sadness. The beginning of a tear once more starting to form in the corner of each eye. He puffed one last time on his Woodbine and threw the nud end into
the range. Rarely had Troy seen such a sense of defeat so manifest in Stan. For twenty years Stan had stood like a rock in his life. Rocks did not bleed stones did not weep.

All in all Troy could not believe his luck.

Jackie was sitting on the doorstep again. At some point she must have slipped upstairs to see her mother. She had the disintegrating gas mask on her face, and had taken the
precaution of wearing her Alice band on the outside. Its garish plastic colours and glass gems contrasted comically with the greys and browns of rubber and canvas. It seemed to Troy to sum up
something about the country rather well, the fruitless way his generation had passed their legacy on to the next. She turned and looked through the cracked plexiglass at Troy. The car-boy was
standing on the pavement.

‘Go on. I’ll give you sixpence fer it.’

Jackie turned back to him.

‘Awright,’ she said through the mask, sounding like an asthmatic frog.

Her hand came up and delicately removed the Alice band, and then tore off the mask.

‘Tanner it is,’ she concluded.

She put the small silver coin in the pocket of her dress, tucking it in below her handkerchief.

Troy was staring. She felt this. Looked up and said, ‘I got a bob for me Dad’s old camera.’

Troy said goodbye and walked round to the driver’s side of his car. The boy circled the car, wings out, undercarriage running hard, the faint burblings of a propeller coming from inside
the mask. He had got his history mightily wrong.

Troy wound down the window to let out the heat of the day. The boy touched down next to him.

‘Why did you waste your money on that thing?’ Troy asked him.

‘Whatdeyer mean waste? It’s good this is!’

‘Good for what?’

‘In case Jerries come again.’

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Troy. ‘That was years ago.’

‘Could still ’appen,’ the boy protested. ‘Me Dad says it’ll be Gyppos next.’

‘Maybe. But they’re not Germans, are they?’

‘Me Dad says they’re all foreigners.’

The irrefutable logic of xenophobia, in one so young. The infallible oracle that was ‘me Dad’. Troy put the key in the ignition and decided to end the conversation. The boy felt
otherwise.

‘Me Dad says Gyppos killed Jackie’s dad.’

Troy looked at the house. The door was closed. She had gone.

‘That’s not true,’ he said softly to the boy. ‘It was Cypriots. Not Egyptians. The Egyptians haven’t killed anyone.’

‘Me Dad says they chopped him up inch at a time, just like Japs did in the war!’ said the boy with evident relish.

Troy smiled falsely and turned the key.

It was a glorious drive. Over the Pennines with the western sun behind him. Through Whalley Bridge and down into the old spa town of Buxton. He stopped in the last of day at
Monsal Head. He had never driven the route before and had long wanted to see the railway viaduct that had so offended Ruskin. The most beautiful valley in England, desecrated with a huge bridge and
a high embankment simply that ‘every fool in Buxton can be at Bakewell in half an hour, and every fool in Bakewell at Buxton’.

Troy stared at the bridge. High and narrow over the Wye. As elegant as a row of flamingos’ legs. Ruskin was wrong. A hundred years on it looked as though God had put in an extra
half-day’s overtime on the first Sunday to see that this sat well with Mother Nature.

He had no wish to drive or to arrive in darkness. It seemed too compromising. He checked into the Peacock Inn at Rowsley. Dined late, breakfasted early, and by seven-thirty the next morning was
approaching Commander Cockerell’s hometown from the north, along the crooked miles of the A6, snagged between the Derwent and the old Midland Railway line that snaked and burrowed its alpine
way from Derby to Manchester.

He stopped by the cotton mill and asked for the Wirksworth Road. A man exercising a dog pointed up the hill with his walking stick. Across the river, off the Ashbourne road. North, poetically,
by north-west.

He parked in front of number 44 and took the pink suitcase he had had since Brighton from the boot. There was no doorbell. He banged loudly with the horizontal knocker on the letter box.

She was not dressed. She stood in the doorway, in a terry-cloth dressing gown, her hair pinned into a bun high on her head.

She peered round Troy. Looked at the Bentley.

‘Are you going to leave that there? It’s wider than the house.’

‘Why, do you think the neighbours will talk?’

‘They’d better!’ said Foxx.

Troy watched as she dressed, hands flitting between a large mug of instant coffee and items of clothing. For a brief moment she stood naked, as she pulled on her knickers, then
disappeared beneath American fly-button faded blue jeans, that he knew from his nephews were all the rage and hard as hell to get hold of, and a white T-shirt. As she flexed her arms in the air to
ease the shirt down over her breasts, one hand hovered at the back of her head and pulled out the pin that held her hair. She shook it loose, sending it cascading halfway down her back. She opened
the back door to a row of steep concrete steps leading down to a perilously perched garden, stood in the doorway’s morning light and brushed out her hair.

‘I suppose,’ she said lackadaisically, ‘that you’re used to women with dressing rooms and dressing tables. Very working class to dress in the kitchen. But the reason
everything takes place in the kitchen is that more often than not it’s the only heated room in the house. Besides, I live alone.’

She looked down the garden, down to the valley, giving her a hair a last dozen strokes. Troy said nothing. Of course she was right, but then he’d relished every moment of it. When he was
small his sisters, women devoid of self-consciousness and self-knowledge, had dressed and made up in front of him. It was curious, nostalgic even, hardly sexual but hardly devoid of sexuality.

‘What’s the suitcase for?’

It seemed as though she had only just noticed it, but he had walked in carrying it and she was not looking at it now—she had chosen her own moment.

‘We’re taking a trip.

‘To the moon on gossamer wings?’

She closed the door on the view, lodged her hairbrush next to the stopped clock on the mantelpiece.

‘No. To Paris. Possibly Monte Carlo.’

She sat on the arm of a battered Utility chair that stood in the corner between the door and the fireplace, and pulled on a pair of baseball boots, back bent, fingers moving almost quicker than
the eye could see as she laced them up to the ankle. She stood up with a little bounce, up onto her toes like a boxer moving around the ring in the seconds before the gloves touched.

‘I’m not dressed right for Monte Carlo,’

‘What do you think is in the suitcase?’

‘At a guess I’d say half a dozen of Stella’s frocks. But they’re not really me. Look, we don’t have to leave right now, do we?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not right now.’

‘Then let’s go out for a while. A walk. You are up to a walk, aren’t you?’

She stepped lightly across the room to reach him. She stood eye to eye, shoulder to shoulder
with him, put out her hands and pulled down his head. A gesture as gentle as Kolankiewicz’s was bullying, but to the same purpose. She ran her fingers along the scar.

‘It’s healing well. If you’re sure you’re up to it, I’ll show you around. There’s a few things to be said before we pluck up sticks and disappear.’

All down the steep hill that led back into the town they walked thirty yards behind a group of chattering young women.

‘Eight o’clock start at the mill,’ Foxx said. ‘I should be with them at this time on any other day.’

‘Are you on compassionate leave?’

‘What? Don’t be daft. It’s a cotton mill not the Royal Navy. I asked for every day’s holiday due to me when that copper came up from Scotland Yard and told me Stella was
dead. They gave me a fortnight like I’d asked them to chop off a leg. I’ve had more than a week now. And I still don’t want to go back.’

She steered Troy off the road only a few feet before the Derwent Bridge and headed out along a riverside lane, high above the rushing white water.

‘How long did you say you’d worked there?’

‘I started there when I was eighteen. Later than most. I could have gone at fifteen or sixteen, I suppose. Wobbling around on heels, and me bra padded out, pretending I was Jane Russell,
trying to look like a grown-up. I didn’t. My mother always thought we were cut out for something better. Long after our Dad was dead she was still trying to better us. I did the same
secretarial course as Stella. Typing and shorthand might be “better”, but it didn’t pay as well—and to tell the truth I was heartily fed up with being anybody’s
secretary. My boss was no better than Cockerell—worse, he thought he could stick his hand up your skirt and
not
set you up in a love nest. I went onto the mill floor. It was the
obvious, the easy thing to do. Half the town works there, after all. And the half that doesn’t is down the pit or on the railways. It took me less than a day to learn the job and within a
week I could do it in my sleep. Or at least do it while I daydreamed. At the time I thought a job which used none of your mind was marginally better than one which used about a tenth—I
thought of it as a kind of freedom. And it was good money compared to typing, brought in enough to run the house for me and Mam. Then Stella started sending money. I could have sent it back—I
knew it was Cockerell’s money—but I didn’t. And I could have quit the mill, but I didn’t. Mam thought Stella was doing another secretarial job in London. I suppose I was
part of the cover. If I’d stopped working she’d have asked where the money was coming from. That we lived a damn sight better than we could on a mill girl’s wages seemed to escape
her notice. She wasn’t all there towards the end anyway. But Mam died at Christmas. And I grew to hate the mill long ago. There comes a point when daydreams turn sour if you don’t do
something about them.’

The pace she had set up was almost winding Troy. They climbed steeply up the side of the valley away from the river, and onto a rough, ancient track that ran southward
along the ridge of the Pennines.

‘D’you know what makes a place like that tick?’

She pointed back at the mill chimney, the largest object on the skyline.

‘Paypackets? Promotion? No—it’s a running undercurrent of sexual innuendo. The men don’t say “hello” on a Monday morning, they say, “Didst
gerrowt?”

‘What?’

‘Didst gerrowt? Did you get any? Meaning sex.’

‘I see,’ he said, unable to visualise the exchange in his mind.

‘But then, nobody lays a hand on you.’

‘All mouth and no trousers?’ he queried.

‘Yes. And you don’t know how grateful a girl can be for that sometimes. I’m immune to the smutty remark. But then I was immune to the charms of Arnold Cockerell. If Stella had
been too she might be alive now.’

Foxx hopped nimbly over a wooden gate. Troy followed gingerly, and found himself facing a colossal stone wall in the middle of nowhere—or, to be precise, since a herd of Scottish longhorns
mooed lazily at them as they approached, in the middle of a field of grazing cattle.

Troy stared up at the wall. It was the best part of twenty-five feet high, solidly built of local granite, and pitted with small holes, out of a few of which sprouted ambitious sycamore
saplings. It was a rifle range, clearly dated 1860 by an iron plate just below the parapet. A relic of the last time Troy’s two nations had fought each other in earnest, in the Crimea. The
futile, bloody stalemate of the 1850s. Several ancestors and kinsmen had died at Sevastopol. This wall halfway up the Pennines was the result, as the British Army sought to improve itself,
realising at last that a good shire militia was worth a dozen charges by the Light Brigade. It was odd to think that old history should penetrate as far as it did. The date and the obvious purpose
of the structure instantly brought to mind his grandfather’s anecdotes of the brothers and cousins the old man had lost in battle. Whatever symbolic value the wall had for Foxx, she could
hardly guess at its significance to Troy.

Foxx set foot upon the wall, working her toe into a hole probably made generations ago by a musket ball. She braced her arms against the almost vertical slope of the wall and climbed three or
four feet off the ground.

‘You don’t have to stand and watch, you know,’ she said, looking down at him under an arm. ‘You’ll put me off. How’s your head?’

‘Still aches a bit,’ he said.

‘I meant for heights. There’s a ladder round the back. I’ll meet you at the top.’

‘You’re going to climb all the way?’

‘I wasn’t intending to fly. I’ve been doing this since I was ten. As long as you don’t distract me I’ll be fine.’

Troy scrambled round to the beech grove at the back of the range and found a rusting iron ladder. It groaned under his weight, and he concluded he was the first person to set foot on it in many
years. A few feet from the top, one rung snapped clean in two and sent his pulse racing, but he hauled himself onto the flat top, to find a view across the valley that stretched for miles.