Old Flames by John Lawton Read Free Book Online

more than twenty-five, got to his feet.
    ‘Chief Inspector. I’m Huw Beynon. Detective Sergeant with the Branch,’ he said.
    Troy knew the face. He’d seen him in the corridors at the Yard. Too young to be a sergeant, far too young to be with those bastards at the Branch. Beynon introduced him to Sergeants Beck
and Molloy, also of the Branch, and one of them saw fit to nudge Detective Sergeant Milligan, drafted in for the occasion from J Division, into something resembling wakefulness in the presence of a
Detective Chief Inspector. He looked up at Troy, muttered a greeting. A greyish fuzz coated his chin. He hadn’t shaved. If Troy knew Cobb, the man was in for a good dressing down. It
wasn’t his responsibility, and Troy felt vaguely pleased to be free from it.
    The fifth man hogged the stove. A short, fat, miserable-looking man, and a poor-looking specimen for a copper. Oblivious to all around him, he buried himself in the pages of a large, hardbacked
book. Troy approached, tipped the book forward to see the title. Lolita —of which he had never heard—by one Vladimir Nabokov—of whom he’d never heard either. The man
adjusted his glasses and his focus, and stared for a moment at Troy.
    ‘Lance Bombardier Clark?’ Troy said.
    ‘It’s Detective Constable Clark now, sir. And I don’t suppose you’re an Inspector any more, are you, sir?’
    ‘Chief Inspector. Are you with the Branch?’
    ‘Lord no, sir. Warwickshire Constabulary. I got roped in for me languages. I’ve Russian as well as German. Truth to tell, all the time I spent in Berlin I’d have to have been
deaf not to come away fluent in Russian.’
    Troy had not set eyes on Clark since Christmas Day of 1948 in a snow-bound Berlin, to which the late Josef Stalin had laid siege. Clark, Lance Bombardier, Artillery, had been assigned by the
British Army as his translator. Which reminded him that he had last seen Tosca only minutes after the last time he saw Clark. Troy pulled up a chair close to Clark. The policemen had been up since
four or five in the morning. They were all drowsy and bedraggled. A private conversation was unlikely to offend.
    ‘How did they get you?’ he asked simply.
    ‘Quite straightforward, sir,’ Clark replied. ‘I’d done fifteen years by 1952. I’d made Warrant Officer Class II. I knew I wasn’t what you’d call officer
material. Personally, I don’t think I was even Warrant Officer Class I material. It was time to ask for me civvy suit. About that time the force started recruiting in a big way. There’d
been that big purge of bent coppers, you’ll recall. They sent a couple of blokes to the base I was on to blow their own trumpet. They told me I was just what the force needed. Languages
an’ all. The new breed of educated copper. Brains instead of boots. Fine, I thought. I volunteered. I spent the next three years pounding a beat back in bloody Birmingham. The only foreign
language I got to use was if we got villains in from Wolverhampton. About a year ago I got out of uniform. Things’ve looked up a bit since then. This came out of the blue. A right treat.
Couldn’t believe me luck.’
    ‘Nor I.’
    Troy dearly wanted to ask Clark about Larissa Tosca. But there was a risk. What had Clark thought she was? That last night in Berlin, he had watched her back into the mess at RAF Gatow, dusting
the snowflakes from her WAC’s uniform and almost collide with Clark, on his way out. Did he ever learn that the uniform was utter deception? A relic of the war that she was no more entitled
to wear than Troy himself? Did he ever realise which side she was on?
    ‘When did you leave Berlin?’ he ventured.
    ‘Oh, I was there till the end. I saw it all. Mind you, nothing was the same after 1949. Once the Soviets eased up on us it was dull as ditchwater. Life without a few little fiddles
wasn’t worth living. They all said it. The army, the spivs, the spies. It was yesterday’s rice pudding.’
    Much as Troy