Smoke and Embers E-Book

John Lawton

• Herausgeber: Grove Press UK
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 518

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

1950. Chief Inspector Troy learns that his sergeant has been conducting an affair with the known mistress of infamous London racketeer Otto Ohnherz. Troy is immediately intrigued by the mysterious origins of Ohnherz's second-in-command, Jay Fabian, who is a major contributor to all three British political parties and claims to have survived the concentration camps, yet lacks any identification beyond his word. Why would a refugee be trying to buy influence? So begins a novel of swapped identities in the aftermath of World War II and the Holocaust, each chapter adding a new layer of intrigue. With a twisting plotline, crackling dialogue and the return of beloved characters, Smoke and Embers is an exciting new addition to John Lawton's masterful canon of Cold War thrillers.

Leseprobe

SMOKE AND EMBERS

Also by John Lawton

1963

Black Out

Old Flames

A Little White Death

Bluffing Mr. Churchill

Flesh Wounds

Second Violin

A Lily of the Field

Sweet Sunday

Then We Take Berlin

The Unfortunate Englishman

Friends and Traitors

Hammer to Fall

Moscow Exile

First published in the United Kingdom in 2025 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

First published in the United States of America in 2025 by Atlantic Monthly Press, an imprint of Grove Atlantic

Copyright © John Lawton, 2025

The moral right of John Lawton to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of the book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be used in any manner in the learning, training or development of generative artificial intelligence technologies (including but not limited to machine learning models and large language models (LLMs)), whether by data scraping, data mining or use in any way to create or form a part of data sets or in any other way.

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A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN 978 1 80471 090 6

E-book ISBN 978 1 80471 091 3

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for

Sue Freathy

Disguise is the face we wear. There is no such thing as natural anymore. Everything is a disguise. The point is . . . is the disguise to restrict or pursue freedom? Larvatus prodeo.

Jerzy Kosinski, 1989

One must always avoid being a nobody.

Primo Levi, The Truce, 1963

Prologue

Do you often have the dream? Or should I ask, do you ever have the dream? The one in which you are you, you as you are now, but the house is not the one you live in, the room is not the one you live in, but the one before and the one before that and the one before that and so on, until the infinity of infancy is reached and the room becomes the world, the only one you have ever known—a regression scarcely short of the womb.

If there is a guardian angel of our dreams then that angel knows that Fabian had that dream, von Niegutt too—not at the same time, of course, but it was the same dream. Two men, much the same age, half a continent and a few years apart, dreaming of the same room. Time after time.

Troy

1

Brompton, London

February 23, 1950

Brompton Cemetery was full of dead toffs. Just now Troy was standing next to a live one—John Ernest Stanhope Fitzclarence Ormond-Brack, umpteenth Marquess of Fermanagh, eligible bachelor, man-abouttown, and total piss artist. They stood, as they had done this day every year since 1946, at the grave of Johnny’s elder sister, Lady Diana Brack. It was her birthday. Neither man was sure how old she would be turning until they read the dates on the stone. Forty. And they would forget again by the next time. Neither man had brought flowers.

A few years ago they had reached an unspoken agreement not to mention the fact that Troy had killed Diana. At about the same time, they had reached a spoken agreement to the effect that the previous umpteenth Marquess, Johnny’s father, had been, in the words of the incumbent, “an utter fucking gobshite.”

They stood a few moments in silence.

Johnny Fermanagh, like nature, abhorred a vacuum and usually filled a silence.

“Got time for a quick one, Freddie?”

“It’s nine o’clock in the morning.”

“Call it a nightcap then, almost my bedtime.”

“A copper’s working day, Johnny. I’m picking Jack Wildeve up at his flat in less than ten minutes.”

“Might one ask . . . a body?”

“A body on the beach, to be precise.”

“Really? The body on the beach? Sounds like a book by one of those popular lady crime writers. Marjorie or Gladys somebody-or-other.”

“I have to go. The beach in question is St Leonard’s.”

“St Leonard’s? In February? Sooner you than me.”

Troy hoped that one day Johnny might forget about Diana’s birthday and leave him to the silence he wanted. To the expiation and contemplation he deemed necessary. He thought of Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol: “Yet each man kills the thing he loves . . . the brave man does it with a sword, the coward with a kiss.” Or was it the other way around? No matter. He’d killed Diana with a gun, not a sword, a gun he’d bought off a spiv in Soho. He wasn’t brave, nor was he a coward—but he had most certainly killed the thing he loved.

“How about this evening?” Johnny drew Troy back from reverie.

“What about this evening?”

“There’s a huge election-night do at Claridge’s, and at the Savoy, and I reckon at half the hotels in Mayfair.”

“Think where I should be tonight, Johnny. Just for a moment, think.”

So often, Johnny didn’t.

“Of course. Your brother . . . I wasn’t . . . Does he . . . does he reckon he’ll lose?”

“I don’t know. I’ve done my damndest to avoid him during the whole campaign.”

2

Jack’s flat was in Redcliffe Square—once-elegant houses of six storeys, fronted by marble porticos, built as homes for the larger upper-middleclass Victorian family and its attendant servants. As with most of London there seemed to be a coating of dust on every building, on every step and every windowsill, waiting like the rest of England for a real or metaphorical wind that would blow away the ashes of World War II. Redcliffe Square had escaped lightly, with broken windows, not ruined houses. In East London, Troy’s old beat when he was a uniformed copper, whole streets, whole squares still lay as uncleared rubble, sprouting forests of buddleia and willow herb.

No doubt some of these dusty façades still concealed families, whether large or small, although few if any had servants. Most were in the process of being turned into flats. Jack had recently acquired what was known as a lateral conversion, that is, the entire first floor of one house and the entire first floor of the adjoining house. It was on the northwest side of the building, where a corner, for no other reason than architect’s whim, became a delicious curve, and behind the curve Jack had a sitting room scarcely smaller than a tennis court.

Troy rang on the bell. A minute or less later a hand appeared over one of the balconies and a key-bearing sock floated down to the pavement.

It was perhaps an unexpected consequence of the curve in the conversion that the windows at each extremity faced each other. Troy stood in the sitting room and, looking idly around, found himself staring at Jack in what was clearly his bedroom window. Jack was almost ready, almost dressed but for a dangling tie and the absence of a jacket. She wasn’t. She was stark naked, accepting kisses to her throat. As Jack’s head bent, lips to nipple, she looked out of the window. Troy turned away, not quite quickly enough, as the woman fled. Jack simply tied his tie with not a glance in Troy’s direction. He must not have seen Troy, and if he had, what did it matter? Jack was shameless, he’d never apologise nor expect an apology for any aspect of his love life—he had shagged his way through the world war with a particular fondness for the WRNS. Troy had bumbled into situations like this half a dozen times. But this was the first time he’d recognised one of Jack’s lovers.

3

Jack had never trusted Troy’s car, nor Troy behind the wheel of his car, so Jack drove his own Scotland Yard Wolseley 4/44.

“How long have you had that car?”

“I forget,” Troy lied.

It was a Bullnose Morris, a car almost designed to end up as a jalopy, which Troy had bought new over fifteen years ago.

“I mean,” Jack went on, “it’s not as if . . .”

Money, money, money.

When Troy lapsed into silence, unwilling to complete an obvious sentence for Jack, Jack bided his time. They’d reached the Elephant & Castle before Jack chose another obvious subject.

“This is a test, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“Freddie, I’m up for inspector. And, if I may say so, an overdue promotion . . .”

“No, you may not. You’ve been a detective sergeant for five years, give or take. So was I. In fact, more, as Onions withheld my promotion for a year.”

“All the same, this is minor stuff. It doesn’t take two of us.”

“If you think murder is ever minor—”

“We don’t know yet that it is murder. Until then, does it really need a chief inspector and a sergeant?”

“How often have we gone out as a team?”

“Er . . .”

“‘More often than not’ would be the answer you’re looking for.”

“OK. OK. But if it’s not a test, you’re still monitoring, and Onions is bound to ask you, isn’t he?”

Indeed he was. Indeed he had, and Troy had endorsed Jack repeatedly. It had crossed Troy’s mind that Jack might be punished for Troy’s sins. The less-than-flattering sobriquet “tearaway toff” had been coined in the locker rooms of Scotland Yard to describe Troy ten years ago, then it had been applied to both of them and now, on the eve of his promotion, seemed to be sticking to Jack like chewing gum on the sole of his shoe.

Their sins were of a very different nature—Troy’s the more serious, a track record of disobedience and, if Onions only knew, some actual law-breaking, but a quiet life at home with the Metaphysical poets, a glass of claret, and the BBC’s Third Programme. Jack . . . Jack was what another century might have termed a roister-doisterer. Troy was not even sure he could spell “roister-doisterer” and would hate to have to say it after a third glass of claret, but if it summed up a man who often came into the Yard hungover, whose free nights were spent in the clubs of Soho and Mayfair and whose track record with women, be it a Lyons Nippy or a debutante, might be the envy of Errol Flynn, then that was Jack Wildeve.

What was bothering Troy was Jack’s current woman. How long had he been sleeping with Bryce Betancourt?

4

Troy fell asleep before they reached Sidcup. He was blessed in that whatever he was dreaming about vanished the moment Jack nudged him to say, “We’re just passing Battle. We’ll be there in a few minutes.”

He glanced at his watch.

“Good grief, it’s almost one. How long was I out?”

“Best part of three hours. I don’t know what you were up to last night, but not a word about what I was up to, because you haven’t a leg to stand on. Besides, you snore.”

Inspector Musker was waiting. He didn’t strike Troy as a patient man.

Looked at his watch and said, “I should be at me lunch! The county pathologist left an hour ago.”

Jack glanced at Troy. It was rare for rank to be so blatantly ignored.

“Don’t let us keep you,” Troy said.

With the added stare it was just enough.

“Hmph. You’ll need me to bring you up to speed.”

“Then you’d better lead the way.”

In a cold, brightly lit back room, a body lay on a slab. A tall, overweight, naked man. Aged fifty to fifty-five. Grey hair in his sideburns, white hair on his chest, a double chin and the sagging waistline of middle-aged spread.

As yet, there had been no exploratory surgery. The cuts were the injuries of assault.

Musker said his piece. The facts and speculations he had clearly been itching to utter all morning. The regional copper’s resentment of Scotland Yard informed every syllable of his local report.

“Harry was our resident villain. Full name Harold Edward Edmondson. Traded as ‘Gerald Gee—Bookmaker.’ G. Gee, if you get it.”

“Of course,” said Troy, looking at Harry’s throat rather than at Musker.

“He had a finger in a lot of pies. A chain of bookies all along the south coast as his legit enterprises and then the dodgy deals that weren’t. Nothing we could ever nick him for. In fact, he could pass for respectable, but . . . but he was connected.”

“Connected?” Jack said.

“London. London gangs. The big boys. He mixed with some of the new tearaways in the East End, and there were rumours he worked with the West London mob—Otto Ohnherz and the like.”

Did Jack flinch at the name? Troy wasn’t looking at Jack, he was looking at Harry’s hands, at nicotined fingers, pumice-scrubbed and neatly clipped clean nails.

“If you want my opinion—”

A phrase Troy rather thought Musker probably had recourse to several times a day, uttered in the face of every indication to the contrary.

“—This was a hit.”

Now Troy looked up.

“A hit?”

Had the idiot been watching too much Hollywood Noir?

“Gang killing. Plain as the nose on your face. He crossed one of the London mobs. They sent a hitman down from the Smoke.”

The Smoke? Really?

“Took old Harry out to the beach after dark, then took him out.”

“Where on the beach?”

“About two hundred yards west of here. Not far off the prom.”

“Can you show us?”

In front of the police station Musker pointed to the spot.

“Mind—tide’s been in and out twice. There’s nothing left to see.”

“But we’ll look all the same,” Troy said.

“Suit yourself. Waste o’ time, to my way of thinking.”

Why was it that “to my way of thinking” was so often spoken by men who did not seem much bothered by thought?

“Why don’t you have your lunch, Mr Musker. We’ve already inconvenienced you. We can meet back here in an hour.”

When Musker was out of earshot Jack said, “I know he’s a first-class arse, Freddie, but he’s right. We’ll see nothing on the beach.”

“We’re not going to the beach. We’re going back inside. I want another look at old Harry. You keep watch and see Musker doesn’t interrupt me.”

5

Half an hour later Jack and Troy sat in the saloon bar of the Nag’s Head.

Two rounds of egg and cress and two halves of mild.

“Well?” said Jack.

“I think Inspector Muskrat—”

“Musker.”

“Whatever . . . He would dearly love to solve this one without us and wishes we’d just bugger off. But the chief constable told him to call the Yard so . . .”

“And his theory?”

“Poppycock.”

“Isn’t it just.”

“So tell me why.”

“Another test, Freddie? OK. The victim, Harry Edmondson, this G. Gee, was nothing but a small-town bookie. Musker talks of a chain of bookmakers all along the south coast. It’s really just three, one here, one in Bexhill and one in Eastbourne. If you want to know how I know, just turn around: there’s a flyer for ‘G. Gee Turf Accountants’—ridiculous bloody phrase—tacked up on the wall. While you took another look at the body, I had a chat with the desk sergeant. Wouldn’t quite say it but he thinks Musker keeps his brains in his boots. Gee was a boaster, inflated his reputation with hints of London connections—nods and winks and all that nonsense—and only Musker is dumb enough to believe it. I’d say the nearest Gee had ever been to a mob was probably joining the Rotary Club or the East Sussex Freemasons Lodge. It somehow enhances Musker’s status if the criminals he deals with have underworld reputations. High time he grew up. There’s no London end to this. It’s a local killing. Now, your turn. Read me the corpse.”

“Multiple knife wounds. Most of them shallow. Someone slashing rather than stabbing. None of them would have been remotely fatal but for a lucky hit on the carotid artery. Gee probably bled out on the beach while his killer looked on in amazement. I’d say someone he knew. No mob hit. They would have killed him with the first stroke of the blade—to the body, not the face and throat—or more likely they would have just shot him. They’d never have left the body on the beach. We’d probably never have found a body. I’d say Gee was lured—and I use that word with some precision—onto the beach, and if his killer intended to kill him at all—and I cannot state that that was the case—they probably hoped the tide would carry the body out to sea. As amateur as King Cnut.”

“Hmm. Why do you say ‘lured’ is a precise term?”

“Because the killer was—”

“A woman.”

“So glad we see eye to eye on this.”

Troy glanced at his watch. Stood up.

“Now if you’ll excuse me, I can be on the next train to Victoria and be back at the Yard before six. Musker’s all yours and you’re welcome to him.”

“Seriously?”

“Jack, you’ve been telling me to get off your back all day. Consider it a free and unencumbered back. It’s your case now, and yours alone. Find G. Gee’s spurned mistress and wrap it up. If you can leave Inspector Musker with stale egg and limp cress on his face, call it a bonus.”

6

Not long after he returned to Scotland Yard, Troy called Inspector Kenneth Burdock in Criminal Records. He’d been at Hendon with Ken, refrained from using the nickname Dandelion, and respected Ken for recognising early on that he was a paper-and-numbers copper, not a pointy-hat-and-truncheon copper. Ken’s memory was prodigious, his love of taxonomy awe-inspiring among the few who knew what taxonomy meant.

“Do you have anything on Bryce Betancourt?”

“You’d learn more by reading the News of the World.”

Just after the war Bryce Betancourt had been living openly with one of West London’s “Mr Bigs” (there were so many). In 1949 she had sued the News of the World over allegations of prostitution, won, dropped a similar case against the Daily Mail and magnanimously given her settlement to Dr Barnardo’s children’s homes. The press had poked around trying to find more about her and hit a brick wall—she was Swiss, she was French . . . she was a Jewish refugee from Austria . . . no doubt all fictions of her own devising—and within a few weeks she was yesterday’s news wrapping tonight’s fish and chips. Since then she had successfully dodged the spotlight. Troy himself had not had a single thought about Bryce or her notoriety until she had flitted across the window of Jack’s apartment that morning. It was puzzling that he had recognised her immediately. More puzzling that he had recognised her stark naked.

“But,” Troy said, “you’ll have a file on Otto Ohnherz, and she might be mentioned in that?”

“Give me a few hours, Freddie. It’s a busy day. Half my blokes want to leave early to vote. Why they can’t vote first thing in the morning . . .”

Troy looked at his watch. It was almost seven. He hadn’t voted. He’d gone straight to the cemetery. The polls would close at ten. He was registered at his mother’s house in Hertfordshire, where his brother Rod was the sitting Labour MP. Rod would kill him if he didn’t vote.

7

It had been a sodden evening. Troy had got soaked dashing from his car to the polling station in the snug bar of the Blue Boar in Mimram, and soaked again getting from the car to the front door of his mother’s house.

It was ten exactly according to the long-case clock that stood in the hall, five to ten according to the long-case clock that stood in Troy’s study and “What fucking time do you call this?” according to Rod, who sat by a flickering, dying fire, listening or not to the news on the Home Service, gulping at a half-full brandy balloon.

“Tell me you got to the pub in time!”

“I did, and if you retain your seat by just one vote, that one vote will be mine.”

Men there were who might say thank you and apologise now. Rod was just such a man, but no apology came forth. Troy sloughed off his overcoat and poked at the fire.

Rod turned off the radio.

“I hate pundits. Harding, Muggeridge—fuckemall. Do I really need anyone to tell me we’re going to get our arses kicked? Where is Nancy Spain when you want her?”

“Right now, if I don’t get some dry wood on the fire we’re going to get our arses frozen.”

Rod set his brandy aside.

“I’ve got to get back to Stevenage. The ballot boxes will start arriving in half an hour. I spent most of the day in Stepney. Only came home so Cid could change.”

“Stepney?”

“As ever Freddie, out of touch with anything but guts and gore. Stepney, the soon-to-be constituency of your old sparring partner Billy Jacks.”

“I wouldn’t call him that.”

Given a choice Troy would not call Billy Jacks anything. Given a choice Troy would avoid Billy like a dose of the clap. Billy’s errant wife, Judy, had deflowered him on the kitchen table when he was nineteen. Best stick to politics—a subject of no controversy whatsoever.

“When did Billy forsake the beliefs of a lifetime?”

“As with so many, the war changed Billy. Went into internment a raving Tory—”

“To put it mildly.”

“As I was saying, went in a raving Tory. Came out a convinced socialist.”

“Congratulations.”

“Earned and accepted.”

Rod eased himself from the depths of his armchair, stood, looking slightly wobbly, and shook himself like a wet dog.

“Are you sure you’re fit to drive?”

“Cid’s driving. Wifely duty on such occasions, after all. And if you think I’m pissed, you’re wrong. That won’t be true for several hours yet.”

“How long?”

“Quick, I’m told. We’re not in any race to declare, but they reckon about two o’ clock.”

“Fine, I’ll wait up.”

“You don’t have to do that, Freddie.”

“I said. I’ll wait up.”

What was a couple of hours? In 1945 they’d waited weeks. Rod had still been in uniform. Instant demob if he won, back to the RAF if he didn’t.

Troy stoked the fire, watched the cherry logs spit sparks, thought of Judy Jacks, dismissed the thought, thought of Diana Brack, could not dismiss the thought, and reached for the inch and a half of brandy Rod had left in his glass.

8

“And here in Eigg, Muck, Rum and Ardnamurchan (North),” said the radio, “a Liberal gain as Murdo McDonald loses to Sir Grahame Ramsay-Muir, with the Conservatives trailing third, the two independents losing their . . .”

Troy was only half asleep, still half listening. He didn’t hear Rod come into the room and was startled by a sudden hiss and roar from the fireplace. Rod was leaning, one hand on the mantelpiece, watching his red rosette burn.

“Don’t tell me you lost?”

Rod said nothing for the best part of a minute, let the radio burble on.

“No. In fact . . . I increased my majority. Twelve thousand. Enough to make it officially a safe seat.”

Inactivity had left Troy feeling cold. He prised himself out of the chair and stood at the opposite end of the fireplace, feeling the faint warmth of a burning symbol, more light than heat.

“Good news, then.”

“Oh yes.”

“And you heard about Stepney?”

“No. Tell me.”

“Billy Jacks won by a landslide. Majority of thirty thousand. Tory lost his deposit.”

Rod smiled, just when Troy was thinking he’d forgotten how to.

“Well, Billy deserves it.”

“Honestly?”

“I see you finished my brandy. Pour us each another. If you’re going to argue, I need arsy-li’l-bro fuel.”

Seated either side of the fire, Troy still shivering, Rod stripped down to shirtsleeves, his Old Harrovian tie at half-mast, shoes off, odd socks on display.

Rod said, “I don’t care what history there is between you and Billy. All to do with your time as a beat bobby, I suppose.”

“To say nothing of a stint rounding up enemy aliens in 1940.”

“Quite. Billy as an alien. He’s more the Englishman than either of us, and as such he’s got his finger on the pulse of the nation. Something I fear the Labour party as a whole managed to lose in a very short time. I can defend ‘austerity’ if you like, but now is not the time—”

“It’s joyless.”

“Yes. It is joyless. But that isn’t my point. England will accept joyless if the rewards are evident—and they haven’t been. For every bloke on the Clapham omnibus who sings the praises of the National Health Service, there’s a housewife in Hackney who’ll list you all things she can’t buy to keep her family warm and fed. I spoke for Billy half a dozen times during the campaign and I saw more of the East End than I’ve done since you walked the beat before the war. It’s . . . it’s as though the war ended yesterday. The bomb sites are still there, just grassed over, there are houses without roofs or windows, standpipes in the street, loos that are little more than sheds . . .”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“And that’s the pattern everywhere from Stepney to Glasgow. As a government we failed at the most fundamental level—in people’s homes. If the Tories are voted in—and I might add that I think we’ll scrape to victory—the first thing Churchill should do is announce a building programme . . . I dunno . . . a hundred thousand . . . a quarter of a million new homes a year.”

“Instead Labour will say what?”

“I think an old idea is about to be revived. We will probably announce that we’re throwing the country a party, an end to joylessness—a festival of some kind next year. Shades of Prince Albert, 1851, the Great Exhibition and the Crystal Palace.”

“Papering over the cracks.”

“You may very well think that, and for once we would be of the same mind, but I’d be in a minority in the cabinet. I’d like the cabinet to listen to Billy, but it’ll be an age before they open their ears to him. I flatter myself mine have been open, and I’ve had both ears bent by him of late. What really hurt was something he said about ten days ago, not from the platform—he’s learnt some tact—but to me, in private. He said Otto Ohnherz’s rackets in Notting Hill and Bayswater have housed more people than Stepney Council have put into their houses. I doubt that’s true, but it stings all the same. A Labour government achieving less than a wartime spiv and racketeer ought to be unthinkable.”

Troy pondered his next remark, tossed another log on the fire.

“That name does keep coming up,” he said.

“Ohnherz? Why so?”

“I asked for his file today.”

“Really? What do you think you have on him?”

“Until I see the file, I don’t know. Let’s just say he is . . . of interest.”

Rod straightened up, a look of something akin to shock on his face.

“You do realise he’s a major donor to the party?”

“No. And it would never have occurred to me. But now you mention it, what does occur to me is to ask why the Labour Party takes money from an obvious crook. As you put it not thirty seconds ago, a spiv and racketeer.”

“Obvious but unconvicted, and if memory serves, he’s never even been charged with anything.”

“He hasn’t, but only because no one will testify against him. He’s still running rackets. And in all probability the rackets themselves are not illegal, just the methods he uses. You know that, I know that and so does Fleet Street.”

Rod sighed and sank again.

“I was against accepting so much as a farthing, but the party took the view that to turn him down would be tantamount to an accusation. Trial in the court of gossip. And . . . I’ve a sneaking suspicion he gave money to the Tories and the Liberals as well. The ultimate in arse-covering. Pay off everybody. Back every horse in the race.”

“Have you met him? Is hobnobbing one of the perks of his donation?”

“Anyone expecting that would be disappointed with me as a nob to be hobbed. A junior at the Air Ministry? Not worth five bob to hob that nob. And no, I’ve never met him. He sends one of his blokes to meetings . . . I was at one in ’48 or ’49 . . . ducked out early and let Harold Wilson do the glad-handing. He seems to have taken to the bloke—Jim or Joe somebody. A Jewish name. Don’t ask me to think clearly quite so early in the morning.”

Troy shrugged. Blue fuse lit, time to stand back.

“I’m not expecting to find anything.”

“So why are you asking? Suddenly he’s moved up from housing rackets to murder?”

“It’s . . . hmm . . . personal.”

9

Troy rose early and was back at Scotland Yard by eight thirty.

An angry Jack was waiting for him in the outer office. He snatched a piece of paper off his desk.

“You have one message. The Dandelion phoned: ‘Tell Troy I have nothing on Bryce Betancourt and I’ll get back to him about Ohnherz.’ Freddie, what the hell are you playing at?”

Jack was a six-footer. Towered over Troy. Troy was hard to intimidate and simply met his gaze.

“Jack, do you want this promotion or not? Because if you do, I need to know everything Onions or the commissioner can find out if they decide to dig around.”

“Dig around in my private life?”

“Yes.”

“As you know, I’m not one to bandy around words like ‘hypocrite,’ Freddie, but right now that is the only word that comes to mind.”

“Meaning?”

“Diana Brack. You had an affair with a suspect. And you have the fucking cheek to check up on my girlfriend.”

“Your girlfriend is the mistress of a man considered to be a criminal.”

“And Diana Brack was a criminal.”

“Which I did not know. And when Onions found out he delayed my promotion for a year while he considered sacking me. And I don’t know what bothered him the most—the utter cock-up that got her killed or my stupidity in being involved with her at all. Jack, I do not want to see anything like that happen to you. You’ve earned the promotion. Don’t fuck it up.”

Jack was not to be placated. On the other hand he wasn’t going to retaliate. He stuffed his briefcase with a wad of papers from his desk and headed for the door.

“I have to get back to St Leonard’s. May I take it you’re not coming?”

Troy said nothing.

Went into his own office and called Burdock.

“There’s a file on Otto Ohnherz—well, there would be, wouldn’t there?” Burdock said.

“I hear a ‘but,’ Ken.”

“But I don’t have it. The Branch keep it.”

“Why?”

“No idea. You could ask them, but you know as well as I do that no one in Special Branch would give you the time of day.”

Burdock was stating a self-evident truth. It had been that way since the war. Troy had made enemies.

“You’ve got friends in MI5,” he continued. “Whatever the Branch have, they have. You could get the file. Old pals act and all that.”

Troy could have done without Burdock’s last sentence, a scarcely disguised reference to class, but he was right.

Troy called Leconfield House and asked to speak to Jordan Young-husband. Troy had not known Jordan long, about two years, but long enough for the “old pals act” to kick in.

“I don’t even need to look,” Jordan said. “I know for a fact we have a file on Ohnherz.”

“You’ll understand,” Troy said, “if I am curious to know why MI5 has a file on a man who is probably no more than a common criminal.”

“As you say, probably. And perhaps Otto Ohnherz is an uncommon criminal. But—this isn’t anything I’ll talk about on the phone.”

“Your place or mine?”

“Yours, I think. Do you have a bottle or two of your dad’s 1929 claret under the sink?”

“Of course.”

“And are you still getting off-the-ration veg from your mother’s garden?”

“It’s February, Jordan.”

“Ah.”

“I have eggs. And some salted bacon the Fat Bloke barrelled last autumn.”

“Soooo—if you can work your usual magic of turning a packet of spaghetti into something resembling wallpaper paste, we might have makings of a meal?”

“See you at eight.”

10

An hour later Chief Superintendent Onions, head of the Murder Squad, appeared in Troy’s office. Sat by the gas fire, trousers hitched up to half-mast above the tops of his boots. Pulled out fags and matches. Lit up a Woodbine. Coughed. Once, the last Christmas of the war, Troy had given Onions a silver smoker’s kit from Asprey’s, a tiny box to hold matches, with a compartment to tap ash into in the absence of any other vessel. He’d seen Onions use it twice before reverting to his usual box of Swan Vestas and dropping fag ash on the lino. He might as well have bought him a striped tie or a straw boater.

“Anything I should know about?” Onions asked.

“Probably not.”

“Do you know owt I don’t know?”

“Lots.”

Onions drew deeply on his cigarette, exhaled a noxious cloud through his nostrils.

“Otto Ohnherz, for example.”

Good bloody grief. Did everyone know?

“Just an enquiry,” Troy said.

“About a murder?”

“No.”

“Then why are you enquiring?”

“Personal.”

“Personal? What does that mean?”

“Just a private matter, Stan.”

“Then you’ll be enquiring on your own time.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so.”

Fine. That was Troy’s evening settled and sorted.

“And,” Onions went on, “the lad’s promotion will be through at the end of the week. Let’s have a bit of a do for ’im. I reckon the lad’s earned it. If he can only keep it in his pants, he might even make chief inspector one day.”

The lad. Jack was twenty-nine. For years Troy had been “the lad.” He was 99 per cent sure he was still “the lad” if his name came up in conversation between Stan and other senior coppers.

11

Troy’s house in Goodwin’s Court might once have been a shop. He didn’t know, nor did anyone else in the courtyard, but its bow-fronted window of spun glass, bulging with age and seemingly defying gravity, looked as though it might once have been a showcase for the latest fashions of the eighteenth century, all puff and powder. His mother had bought the house for him when he graduated from Hendon in 1935, almost fifteen years ago. It had been empty for “a while,” and judging by the amount of pigeon shit he had swept out ahead of the fitters and decorators, that “‘while” stretched back to the general strike of 1926 and perhaps beyond that to the antediluvian world of the teens and tens—a world of which he had no memory. The youngest of four—afterthought or accident, he would never ask—and the only one English-born, his mother always referred to him as her “little Englander,” seeming anxious that he should adapt from the polyglot household she and his father ran at Mimram to England and the English, a journey she would never make herself. It might have helped if she’d spoken to him in English, but like many a Russian aristo-in-exile she preferred French. When he was a child she had made bedtime efforts to read to him in English, but her accent had been so atrocious he had wanted to put his fingers in his ears—“five” was always a county in Scotland and “sausage” utterly defeated her, “zozwatch” being about as close as she could get. The Englishman she might have wanted Troy to become Rod had half become—he was, after all, an eccentric, the abiding characteristic of a well-bred English gent, and had he not found his métier in being a member of parliament, he might have run an antiquarian bookshop or explored Antarctica. Becoming a Scotland Yard detective probably ruined her ambitions for Troy by being beyond her ken (there were only two types of copper, the Tsarist Okhrana agent and the Hertfordshire fat British bobby-on-a-bike) but she would never say so. Instead her admiration was saved for a type of Englishman epitomised by Jordan Younghusband—abundant without being ubiquitous. They had met the previous year, and he had charmed her to melting point, switching effortlessly between English and French, making her laugh . . . sending an eighty-year-old woman almost girlishly giggly. Troy had never thought she’d had a sense of humour.

“And what is your occypattzion, Mister Yunkzbun?”

Jordan could not answer that question honestly.

“Oh, you know, Lady Troy, this and that.”

“Zees unt zat. What kindt of zees unt zat?”

“Oh, I’ve flown all around the world in a plane, I’ve started revolutions in Spain, even charted the North Pole . . . once upon a time . . .”

His mother wouldn’t recognise a song lyric from Don Giovanni, let alone Ira Gershwin, but she knew a tease when she heard one—she laughed out loud and handed her empty teacup to Troy without taking her eyes off Jordan.

Thing was, Troy thought to himself, Jordan probably had done all of those things . . . once upon a time.

Waiting for him now, Troy wondered at the redundancy of his question about Bryce. Onions might just have nullified it with his “keeps it in his pants.” If Jordan brought information that led to her name, Troy would listen, and whether he asked a question depended entirely on what Jordan said and how much of Troy’s dad’s claret he had necked.

12

“You’ve improved.”

“You mean, it didn’t taste like glue?”

“Be fair, Freddie. I said consistency of glue . . . nothing to do with the taste.”

“So happens it is just a cookery trick. You cool the pan before you drop the pasta back in and add the egg yolk, that way you don’t—”

“Get scrambled egg? Quite. Of course, if we’re going to be sticklers, the bacon should be pancetta—”

“Instead you get a fat man’s best fatback.”

“How is the old boy?”

“Getting older. Not slowing down. Wants me to keep my own pigs.”

“You gonna do it?”

“Hmm . . . later perhaps. After I get one more promotion under my belt. And it might require my mother to shuffle off her mortal coil.”

“Heaven forfend.”

“She’s a snob, Jordan. You just haven’t figured her out yet. If I kept pigs at Mimram, I’d be reducing her family to the peasantry.”

“My dad farms sheep.”

“Never tell her. And when you say he farms sheep, what you really mean is he has a bloke on his estate on the Scottish border who farms sheep for him while he swans about in tweed and wellies saying, ‘Jolly good, chaps. Keep up the good work.’”

“And you think your mother’s a snob?”

“I have the antidote to all this guff breathing gently on the draining board.”

“Eh?”

“You did say two bottles.”

“I was being greedy.”

“Nessun problema.”

13

When Troy came back from the kitchen clutching a Château Ducru-Beaucaillou ’29, Jordan had a brown cardboard file set next to his plate.

Questions, questions, questions.

First Troy topped him up. Decided to let him speak first. If this turned out to be a can of worms, he’d rather be the man uncorking the claret than the one reaching for the can opener.

A tissue-thin label was glued to the file cover—wartime economy paper—reading “Otto Ohnherz,” the n slightly dropped by a clapped-out typewriter.

Jordan flipped it open. Just one page. Badly typed. Every n dropped.

“Don’t have much. As far as I can tell the file was opened in October ’39, for no other reason than that Otto was technically an enemy alien. German, after all.”

“Never applied for citizenship?”

“So many didn’t. Your brother, to name but one.”

“For which mistake Rod was interned for several months on the Isle of Man . . . And Otto wasn’t?”

“I think age might have helped. He was already well over sixty . . . not much of a threat . . . and he was still, just about, respectable. He had one of the best escape clauses a man could have—a Ministry of Supply contract to manufacture RAF uniforms. I’d say Rod might have worn one, but I happen to know his tailor. If Otto was running rackets back in ’39, most of us didn’t know, and he also had friends, friends who would pull for him all the strings your father declined to pull for Rod. He spent the early years of the war at the BBC in a sort of psychological warfare unit, broadcasting propaganda. George Orwell was there, George Weidenfeld too, and William Empson.”

“I don’t remember any broadcasts by Otto Ohnherz.”

“You wouldn’t have heard them. Not for home consumption. He wrote scripts, in German, and apparently wasn’t much good at it, so they let the arrangement lapse. He was gone by ’41, and I am inclined to think that’s when he got into the black market.”

“A grudge?”

“If you like. A man spurned is a man . . .”

“Quite.”

“Pretty soon he was the mirror image of Goering.”

“Eh?”

“Butter before guns. He had a nickname, the Butterman. Half the housewives in London probably bought his off-the-record off-theration butter. However, our interest in him had lapsed by then. MI5 isn’t bothered by spivs, and the ministry needed all the uniforms his factory could turn out. Ohnherz wasn’t a threat to national security. Hence just the one page.”

Troy had taken in the page in a single glance. Not a mention of Bryce Betancourt, and as far as he could see no longer any reason to mention her. He could just let it drop—after all, Jordan hadn’t asked why Troy wanted to see the file, and might never ask.

Jordan set another brown folder on the table.

JAY FABIAN

It was a name Troy knew without being able to attach any specific memory to it.

“This chap, however, is of interest.”

“Name is vaguely familiar. Who is he?”

“In the parlance of the New York mafia he would be the consigliere. He’s Otto’s right-hand man—”

Ah—the Jim or Joe that Rod had misremembered.

“And he is a person of interest not because of what he does for Otto, but for what he does that we don’t know.”

“Eh?”

“He is, or rather claims to be, a survivor of Auschwitz. To be precise, a survivor who was still there when the Russians arrived. Believe it if you will.”

“Not something someone would make up.”

“Perhaps, perhaps not, but it’s enough to ring alarm bells. We’re ninety-nine per cent certain that’s when the Russians recruited Méret Voytek.”

An involuntary twitch of the head, and Troy found himself focussed on one of the leafy-green Constables hanging on the sitting room wall. For a while, two years ago, a pastiche of the Botticelli Venus had hung there. He’d scraped dried brain from one corner. The last mortal remains of a Czech assassin who’d come for Méret Voytek, if only he had known who she was. Troy had helped Voytek escape to Paris. If Jordan had only known, and right now Troy thanked God he hadn’t.

Jordan’s eyes had followed his. He wondered: Did Jordan feel a frisson every time he set foot in this room—and he’d eaten with Troy on half a dozen occasions in the last two years—did he see walls splattered with blood and brains? If so . . . it didn’t show. Troy thought he could still smell the smell every so often—not blood, not brains, but the Jeyes Fluid Jordan’s team of “cleaners” had used to scrub away death.

“So,” he said. “Anyone who fits that bill is suspect?”

“Pretty much.”

“And you think Fabian is a Soviet agent?”

“Dunno.”

“And what in his work for Otto Ohnherz is there that might be worth a spy’s time?”

“That’s wide of the mark. No, it’s everything else he’s up to.”

“Such as?”

“He’s a mingler. Ohnherz is semi-reclusive these days. Stroke in ’49. Knocked him out of the loop. Fabian does almost everything for the business and goes well beyond anything Ohnherz would have done. He’s a very different character. A charmer, whereas Ohnherz was always a bit of a curmudgeon. Fabian has a London social presence. Your brother’s met him.”

“‘Met him’ being different from ‘knows him’? Rod’s mentioned him just once. Couldn’t even get his name right.”

“‘Know’ is such a versatile word. However, there are rumours about Fabian and your sister. And in her case we’d need to define ‘know’ in its fullest and possibly most biblical sense.”

“I don’t need to ask which sister. The only surprising thing is that Sasha hasn’t boasted about him.”

“Quite. And there are also rumours about Fabian and the infamous Miss Betancourt, Otto being indisposed—‘indisposed’ as in ‘probably can’t get it up.’”

At last. After spag carb and the best part of two bottles of red . . . at last. The name.

Troy did not pursue.

“What you seem to be saying is that Fabian is, if this is the right word, infiltrating.”

“Yes.”

“Last night my brother told me Ohnherz is a donor to the Labour Party. In fact it’s this Fabian chap, isn’t it? If that’s infiltration, I imagine he’s in for the long haul. He’s working his way into Labour while Labour are wondering how long they’ll have in office. You seem to keep track of Fabian, so I can assume you know he knows Harold Wilson—Wilson’s in the cabinet today . . . President of the Board of Trade . . . sounds far more important than it really is—”

“It has the word ‘president’ in it, after all. Must be so confusing for a foreigner.”

“But in a year’s time he could be on the back benches and in opposition.”

“Well, agents like that aren’t called sleepers for nothing. And that’s the idea that has us worried. How sleepy a game might the Russians be prepared to play? You say Wilson might be yesterday’s man in a year or so. He’s only thirty-three. It’s where he might be in ten or twenty years that matters. Fabian could prick his finger on a spinning wheel and still wake up in time.”

“Rod thinks he’s given money to the Liberals and the Tories too, backing every horse in the race, as he put it.”

“That’s true as well. Can’t see the point in giving so much as a farthing to the Liberals, though. Labour will scrape home this time. Tiny majority. There’ll be another election in a couple of years and the Liberals will get wiped out. They might hold on to Orkney and Shetland, who knows? The last bastions of the Asquith family. Meanwhile Fabian will have friends in government, right or left, whatever the shade.”

“Let’s go back to the beginning. If Russia has a Soviet agent in place, how did they get him here?”

“I don’t know. Let me begin with the name. Jay Fabian is just one of the variations. There is also Jay Heller, Sam Heller and Sam Fabian. Our man is supposed to have used all four aliases in his time here but has apparently settled on Jay Fabian. I’m inclined to think none of them are real. We have no records of any of those names that we can be certain of. However, let’s just call him Fabian for simplicity’s sake. Fabian shows up in London in 1946. At that time Ohnherz’s main racket was working the refugees. Finding jobs, skimming off their wages and so on. We think this is how he met Fabian. Problem is, there’s no record of Fabian entering the country under the refugee quota. He was never issued an identity card and seems to have had no paper existence until Ohnherz used the refugee organisations and the Jewish lobby to get him papered—concentration camp survivor, trauma, amnesia and what have you—to take the pressure off him. And people—the little men with the rubber stamps, the state—do back off. No one wants to be called a Nazi. Fabian becomes legitimate with the start of the National Health Service . . . gets an NHS number and a National Insurance number . . . date of birth, dubious . . . place of birth, Berlin, also dubious. And ‘Auschwitz survivor’ becomes almost a war cry, a deterrent to any further probing.

“It’s at this point that Ohnherz ups his game by starting his housing racket. The profits from the black market get ploughed into property in West London. He buys a house, then several houses, then a whole street in Notting Hill. Out go the white working-class tenants, in come all the Jamaicans and Trinidadians . . . paying through the nose because no legit landlord will take them in. I say ‘legit,’ but there’s nothing illegit about anything Ohnherz is doing—and I should stop saying ‘Ohnherz’ because it’s clearly Fabian who’s the brains behind this.

“We tried tracing Fabian by all the names he’s used—or more accurately, since he sticks to ‘Jay Fabian,’ all the names we’ve had reason to think might have been his. The name Sam has been thrown up from somewhere. And Heller. Sam Heller, Sam Fabian . . . nothing, not a damn thing. If he was in Auschwitz under any of those names, there’s no way we’d ever find out. That nation of meticulous record-keepers was also a nation of mass record destroyers once they knew it was all over. They wiped Treblinka off the map, after all.

“We found what might be a Jay Heller in that there was a James Heller who seems to vanish off the face of the earth in the 1920s—and a Jacob Heller who joins the Ordnance Corps in 1940 and in 1945 transfers to UNRRA. At least that’s the front. He was most certainly MI6. He gets his demob in 1946. Back to England from Germany on military transport, but between Dover and the demob centre in Camberley he too vanishes. Technically he’s a deserter. Never even collects his gratuity or his badly cut suit. And if Jay Fabian really is Jacob Heller, he’s applied for none of the benefits to which Jacob Heller is entitled. At best it’s a tenuous connection. I cannot see Jay Fabian as an agent of Six, and if Six thought Fabian was really Heller, well . . . they’ve had four years to pick him up and reclaim him. As it is, I reckon they’ve taken a look and dismissed the idea that he is their missing man.”

“They’re not saying one way or the other?”

“Do they ever? Jay Fabian doesn’t have a passport. In fact, he still doesn’t have a national identity card—although to be honest I couldn’t find mine if a beat bobby asked me to produce it. His only legit ID is his National Insurance card and equivalent NHS card, but he pays his taxes on time, and he banks with Coutts. Simultaneously he does and does not exist.”

“While waving a Coutts cheque the size of a tablecloth? Very discreet. Perhaps Herr Fabian is Schrödinger’s cat. But—he’s what, an illegal immigrant? You could just deport him back to Germany.”

“Why on earth would we want to do that? The whole point is to watch him. To find out how much he knows and to whom he tells it. Besides, any move by us and he’ll have lawyers onto us crying ‘Nazi,’ and the next thing you know he’ll have British citizenship.”

“Somebody must be running him. If he’s a spy he’ll have some sort of embassy contact.”

“None that we’ve found. Either he really is a sleeper, who’ll report nothing until there’s something worth reporting . . . or he isn’t a spy at all.”

Troy had been glancing through the file, ten times longer than the one on Ohnherz. He closed it. Dropped it back on the table.

“Jordan, this isn’t anything I should bother with. Call me when Fabian kills someone.”

“Au contraire, Freddie. Why don’t you call me when someone kills him?”

14

The next day Onions gave Jack the good news.

Troy hoped it would wipe the slate, but Jack seemed to be accepting with surly grace the promotion which he had long held to be his due.

Two days later in Sidcup Jack arrested Rebecca Brand, aged twenty-seven, half Harry Edmondson’s age.

Time after time Harry told me, “I’ll tell ’er this weekend.” He din’t love ’er no more. He said he loved me. “You’re the only one, Becky, the only one.” And then I found out I wasn’t. I know ’cos his missis came round to my flat and laughed in my face. “You’re not the first, dearie. And you won’t be the last. And you sure as hell ain’t the only one.” Called me a daft trollop.

And then Harry suggested another of his moonlight walks along the beach. We did that a lot. The old trout never went near the sea, said it smelled. And then I asked him. “What other woman?” he says. And I say, “Don’t lie to me, Harry.” And he slaps my face. Hard like. So I slashes him. Only meant to stripe him the once. Just a kitchen knife. Same one I use for spuds an’ carrots. But summink went wrong.

“At this point I found myself wishing she’d never mentioned the knife in her handbag. A crime of passion suddenly turned into premeditation. But . . . never thought she’d killed him with a nail file or anything else you’d ever expect to find in a lady’s handbag. I thought the tears would never stop. Two cups of tea and a river of mascara later she told me where she’d ditched the knife. In a waste bin outside the pub where you and I had lunch. She went in for a large G & T to ‘steady me nerves.’ I got helpful Mr Musker to send a uniform round. It was still in the bin under the fag packets and used condoms. I have Rebecca Brand bang to rights, and I wish I hadn’t. Fukkit, Freddie—she could hang for this.”

Troy said nothing.

It was far from unusual for a successful arrest to feel like a Pyrrhic victory once the gallows loomed up, and it had taken the shine off Jack’s promotion. There’d be no “bit of a do,” no celebration, no bunched coppers at the bar of the Red Lion.

Jack’s mood lightened a little over the next few days, and neither of them felt it necessary to mention Bryce Betancourt or Rebecca Brand.

15

September 1950

In September 1950,Otto Ohnherz died. He was seventy-three and had been in poor health for some time. There were no close relatives. In fact, no relatives at all.

Predictably the News of the World went to town, Ohnherz’s death knocking good-time girls and randy vicars off the front page for a day:

KING OF THE UNDERWORLD DEAD!

THE NAPOLEON OF NOTTING HILL!

AUSCHWITZ SURVIVOR!

THE MAN THEY COULDN’T CATCH!

It is a given of journalism that the dead do not sue. Wisely, having lost to her once already, the News of the World did not mention Bryce Betancourt.

“Auschwitz survivor” was untrue—lazy reporting, a confusion of identities that Troy considered had probably been encouraged by both Otto Ohnherz and Jay Fabian—but the News of the World didn’t bother with obituaries, only headlines. Rackets made a headline. Auschwitz made a headline.

The Post did run obituaries, one might even say it specialised in obituaries, and they got it more or less right.

Otto, only son of Isaac and Hannah Ohnherz, born Charlottenburg, Berlin, 1877, had lived in London since the 1880s, when his parents had fled Germany in anticipation of the next pogrom . . . and blahdey blahdey blah.

Jordan had told him it was Fabian who’d been in Auschwitz. And if memory served, Jordan had ended his sentence with “believe it if you will.”

Believe it if you will . . . Auschwitz?

Sam

16

Oświęcim, Poland

January 1945

As the Red Army drew ever closer, the Germans marched all who could walk westward out of Auschwitz, across Poland. Samuel Fabian could not walk. This probably saved his life.

Fabian lay in a bunk in the infirmary. A strange institution in a camp designed for death. Fabian had never grasped the point of the SS treating illness when a bullet would suffice . . . but he was ill with he knew not what and stuck there in the pretence of recovery. Then the pretence stopped. Shots, single shots, rang out from the far end of the room and drew nearer with each squeezing of the trigger. As Fabian tried in vain to raise his head, a pair of dirty jackboots came into view, the ragged hem of a field-grey SS greatcoat and a hand in a tight black leather glove held out a Luger towards him.

Fabian felt nothing, heard nothing. The hammer had fallen on nothing.

The SS guard did not pull the trigger twice, let his hand fall to his side and spoke.

“It seems you get to live. Good luck with that.”

Fabian slipped back into his sporadic coma.

He never saw the face of the man who had either spared his life or merely been too lazy to reload.

17

When he awoke it was light, and he found he could move the muscles in his neck. He lifted his head to look out upon a shining sea of frozen shit and piss. He had no idea how long he had slept since the SS departed. Boots approached, stepping carefully round the slicks of shit. No greatcoat, no gun—the white quilted trousers of a winter combat suit.

“Polski? Russki? Deutsch?” a woman’s voice asked.

Fabian was not at all certain he could speak, but did.

“Deutsch,” he said, then “Jude.”

Lest there be any misunderstanding.

“My German not good,” she said.

He switched languages. “My Russian’s fine. Talk to me in Russian. Just talk to me. No one has in weeks.”

She perched her padded backside on the edge of his bunk.

Short, pretty, dark-haired and faintly oriental. A few acne scars on her left cheek, almond eyes and long lashes.