Second Violin Read online

  SECOND VIOLIN

  John Lawton is the director of over forty television programmes, author of a dozen screenplays, several children’s books and seven Inspector Troy novels. Lawton’s work has earned him comparisons to John le Carré and Alan Furst. Lawton lives in a remote hilltop village in Derbyshire.

  THE INSPECTOR TROY NOVELS

  Black Out

  Old Flames

  A Little White Death

  Riptide

  Blue Rondo

  Second Violin

  A Lily of the Field

  First published in 2007 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, England

  This ebook edition published in 2012 by Grove Press UK, an imprint of Grove/Atlantic Inc.

  Copyright ©John Lawton, 2007

  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.

  Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

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

  ISBN 978 1 61185 987 4

  Printed in Great Britain

  Grove Press, UK

  Ormond House

  26–27 Boswell Street

  London

  WC1N 3JZ

  www.groveatlantic.com

  For Ion Trewin

  Britain became bomb-conscious: trenches were dug; many Londoners went to earth in the country; hardly had the trenches become water-logged and the earths abandoned than it was all to do again. After that many new fashions came in; windows were crisscrossed with tape; gas masks were carried about and left in cinemas and on blackberry bushes, bags of sand lay on pavements, rotted, sprouted, and burst asunder; through Cimmerian blackness torches were flashed, annoying drivers; women went into trousers, civilians into fire, ambulance and wardens’ stations, older men into the Home Guard; young men and women were put into the forces and factories, enemy aliens (hostile and friendly) into camps, British Fascists and others into gaol, policemen into tin hats. Cars crashed all night into street refuges, pedestrians, and each other; the warning banshee wailed by night and day; people left their beds and sat in shelters . . . where a cheerful, if at times malicious, envious and quarrelsome social life throve . . . Conversation was for some months on catastrophic lines; key-words were siren (by the less well instructed pronounced sireen), all clear, bomb, under the table, a fine mess in blank street, a nice shelter in dash street, and blitz . . . [later] conversation tended to turn on . . . food: what was permitted, what was to be had, what was not permitted and where this was to be had and at what cost, what was not to be had at all and how so-and-so had had it . . . food talk often beat bomb talk. So, later, did clothes coupons talk (those who said sireen said cyoopons). Standards of smartness depreciated, to the relief of those who found them tedious or inaccessible. Bare legs became a feminine summer fashion; men, more sartorially conservative, clung to such socks as they had. Evening dress was seldom seen. Life was less decorative and less social; but human gregariousness found, as always, its outlets. For many, indeed, it became more communal than before; uniformed men and women were assembled for military or civil defence, and, in the intervals of their duties, played, ate and drank together; it was a life which tended to resolve class distinctions; taxi-drivers, dustmen, window-cleaners . . . shop assistants, hairdressers, and young ladies and gentlemen from expensive schools and universities, met and played and worked on level terms, addressing each other by nicknames. English social life is . . . moving a few steps nearer that democracy for which we say we are fighting and have never yet had . . . and whether these will be retraced or continued when the solvent furnace of war dies down . . . we cannot yet know.

  Rose Macaulay, Life Among the English, 1942

  Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky;

  It was Hitler over Europe, saying: ‘They must die’;

  We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind.

  Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin,

  Saw a door opened and a cat let in:

  But they weren’t German Jews, my dear, but they weren’t German Jews.

  W.H. AUDEN from REFUGEE BLUES 1939

  ‘Do you think this war will rid us of cellophane?

  I speak feelingly, having just tried to get at

  the interior of a box of cigars.

  A world without cellophane or petrol – as in my youth!

  What a dream of bliss’

  H.M. HARWOOD, from a letter to SAM BEHRMAN

  19 SEPTEMBER 1939

  ‘If ever there was a time when one should wear life like a loose garment, this is it’

  U.S. GENERAL RAYMOND LEE,

  The London Observer Diaries

  15 SEPTEMBER 1940

  Contents

  I

  §1

  §2

  §3

  §4

  §5

  §6

  §7

  §8

  §9

  §10

  §11

  §12

  §13

  §14

  §15

  §16

  §17

  §18

  §19

  §20

  §21

  §22

  §23

  §24

  §25

  §26

  §27

  §28

  §29

  §30

  §31

  §32

  §33

  §34

  §35

  §36

  §37

  §38

  §39

  §40

  §41

  §42

  §43

  §44

  §45

  §46

  §47

  §48

  §49

  §50

  §51

  §52

  §53

  §54

  §55

  §56

  §57

  §58

  §59

  §60

  §61

  §62

  §63

  §64

  §65

  §66

  §67

  §68

  §69

  §70

  §71

  §72

  §73

  §74

  §75

  An Interlude

  II

  §76

  §77

  §78

  §79

  §80

  §81

  §82

  §83

  §84

  §85

  §86

  §87

  §88

  §89

  §90

  §91

  §92

  §93

  §94

  §95

  §96

  §97

  §98

  §99

  §100

  §101

  §102

  §103

  §104

  §105

  §106

  §107

  §108

  §109

  §110

  §111

  §112

  §113

  §114 />
  §115

  §116

  §117

  §118

  §119

  §120

  §121

  §122

  §123

  §124

  §125

  §126

  §127

  §128

  §129

  §130

  §131

  §132

  §133

  §134

  §135

  §136

  §137

  §138

  §139

  §140

  §141

  §142

  §143

  §144

  §145

  §146

  §147

  §148

  §149

  §150

  §151

  §152

  §153

  §154

  §155

  §156

  §157

  §158

  §159

  §160

  §161

  §162

  §163

  §164

  §165

  §166

  §167

  §168

  §169

  §170

  §171

  §172

  §173

  §174

  §175

  §176

  §177

  §178

  §179

  §180

  §181

  §182

  §183

  §184

  §185

  §186

  §187

  §188

  §189

  §190

  §191

  §192

  §193

  I

  Red Vienna

  At 451 °F paper burns.

  At 900 °F glass melts.

  At 536 °F flesh will burst into flames.

  At –40 °F Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet.

  §

  Under moonlight

  a madman dances.

  § 1

  12 March 1938

  Hampstead, London

  Yellow.

  It was going to be a yellow day.

  The nameless bird trilling in the tree outside his window told him that. He had learnt too little of the taxonomy of English flora and fauna to be at all certain what the bird was. A Golden Grebe? A Mustard Bustard? He took its song as both criticism and compliment – ‘cheek, cheek, cheek’.

  Fine, he thought, if there’s one thing I have in spades it’s cheek. Do I need a bird to tell me that?

  He watched its head bobbing, heard again the rapid chirp – now more ‘tseek’ than ‘cheek’, and was wondering if he had a yellow tie somewhere for this yellow day and whether it might sit remotely well with his suit, when Polly the housemaid came in.

  ‘My dear, tell me . . . what is this bird in the tree here?’

  ‘Boss . . . there’s bigger fish to fry than some tom tit–’

  He cut her short.

  ‘There, do you see? In the cherry tree. The one with the yellow breast.’

  ‘Boss . . . I’m a Londoner. Born, bred and never been further than Southend. Sparrers is me limit. Just call it a yeller wotsit and listen to me.’

  He turned. It was typical of her to be so casual in her dealings with him, untypical of her to find anything so urgent. It was as though she’d seized him by his lapels.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘’Itler’s invaded Austria. It was on the wireless you know. The missis sent me to tell you.’

  The missis was his wife. Time there was, and not that long ago, when he would have learnt of such things not by his wife sending in the maid, but by a phone call from his Fleet Street office at whatever time of day or night, deskside or bedside. On his seventy-fifth birthday he had told his editors, ‘History can now wait for me.’ Usually history waited until he had his first cup of coffee in his hand.

  ‘Do you want me to turn the set on in here, Boss?’

  ‘Yes, my dear. Please do that.’

  It was indeed a yellow day. What other colour has cowardice ever had? It was all too, too predictable. Hitler had signalled his punches like a feinting boxer. He had had his editorial ready for a month now, ever since Hitler and Schuschnigg had met at Berchtesgaden in the middle of February for Schuschnigg’s ritual humiliation – ‘I am the greatest German that ever lived!’ . . . so much for Goethe, so much for Schiller, for Luther and Charlemagne, for Beethoven and Bach. He’d listen to the next bulletin on the wireless, and if nothing forced a change upon him, and he doubted that it would, he’d take the editorial out of his desk drawer and have a cab take it to Fleet Street for the evening edition. All it needed was his signature . . . a rapid flourish of the pen and, in the near-cyrillic of his handwriting, the words ‘Alexei Troy’.

  § 2

  14 March

  Vienna

  The Führer took his triumphant time getting to Vienna. There was his hometown of Linz to be visited, embraced, captured on the road to Vienna. The town from which, as he put it himself, Providence had called him. He drove through streets gaily decked out with the National Socialist flag – red and black can be so striking in its simplicity – past cheering citizens, gaily decked out in green jackets and lederhosen.

  In the second car SD Standartenführer Wolfgang Stahl, a fellow Austrian, wondered where they got it all from. As though some wily rag-and-bone man had been round the week before with a job lot of old coats and leather britches. It seemed to him to be parody, to be bad taste, to be Austria’s joke at its own expense. All this, all of it, would be at Austria’s expense. It was simply that Austria didn’t know it.

  It was past lunchtime on the following day before the entourage rolled into Vienna. Hitler was in a foul mood. The motorcade had broken down. Not just the one vehicle but dozens had ground to a halt with mechanical failure. It looked half-arsed. And the trick to invading without a shot fired, to taking a country that was all too willing to capitulate, was to look wholly-arsed, as though you could have taken them by force if you so desired. The Wehrmacht was untested in the field. Any failure now sent out the wrong signal to the fair-weather friends of Austria and Czechoslovakia. The world was watching. That nincompoop Chamberlain was watching. Entering Vienna, they crossed a bridge that had been mined. Schellenberg had inspected the device personally, taken a gamble with their lives, thought better of telling this to Hitler, and mentioned it to Stahl only as a problem solved. It was just as well. The bad mood did not lift. Hitler accepted the adulation of the crowds in the Heldenplatz, scowled through the reception at the Hofburg Palace and flew on to Munich the next morning. Country captured, country visited, Secret Police installed. Next.

  Stahl stayed. The SS was already rounding up suspects, tormenting Jews and murdering discreetly as a preamble to murdering indiscreetly. Neither was his job. Himmler and Schellenberg had flown in ahead of the convoy at first light. Heydrich, flash as ever, had flown in in his own private plane, meditating on his plans for Austria’s first concentration camp. They had gilded thugs aplenty, thugs in oak leaves, thugs in lightning, thugs in black and silver. Stahl was just an ornament. He’d been invited to Vienna, his native city, merely as part of the Führer’s sense of triumphalism. He’d been presented to the Viennese as a prodigal son, someone not quite called by Providence, which only had room for one, but touched by it. The hand of fate that had grabbed Adolf Hitler, had brushed the sleeve of Wolfgang Stahl. Others stayed on simply because the pickings were too rich – not simply what could be stolen, but what could be bought. The department stores of Vienna were so much better stocked than those in Berlin. Stahl had in his pocket a handwritten note from Hermann Göring – ‘Could you get me a dozen winter woollen underpants from Gerngross’s, waist 130 cm?’

  Stahl stayed because Vienna fixed him, fixed him and transfixed him as surely as if it had struck out, stabbed him and pinned him to the wall. He could not help Vien
na in her suffering, and at the same time he could not resist watching as she suffered.

  § 3

  14 March

  Berlin

  TELEGRAMME : TROYTOWNLON

  TO : TROYTOWNBER

  ATT: ROD TROY

  MY BOY, DO YOU NOT THINK IT TIME YOU CAME HOME?

  THIS IS, DARE I SAY, A JACKBOOT TOO FAR.

  DO NOT WAIT FOR WAR. COME BACK NOW.

  COME BACK TO YOUR WIFE AND YOUR FAMILY.

  YOUR LOVING FATHER,

  ALEX TROY.

  Rod showed the telegramme to Hugh Greene in Kranzler’s restaurant at lunchtime.

  ‘I can’t say I’m always getting them. But it’s not the first and it won’t be the last. Thing is . . . the old man never wanted me to come out in the first place.’

  In 1933, when the Nazis had taken power, Rod had been just short of his twenty-fifth birthday and had been three years a parliamentary correspondent on his father’s Sunday Post. He begged his father for the Berlin posting. In the September the old man had finally agreed and Rod had presented himself to the Press Office of the National Socialist Workers’ Party and the British Embassy as the new Berlin Correspondent for the Troy Press. The Germans had looked askance at his authentication, but said nothing. The embassy had said in one of those subtle walls-have-ears tones, ‘You’re taking one hell of a risk, old boy.’

  Greene echoed the line now, ‘Your father has a point. You don’t have the protection I have.’

  Greene had come to Berlin, via Munich, for the Daily Telegraph the February after Rod. He was younger than Rod by nearly three years, and taller by more than three inches. They had been ‘absolute beginners’ together, often sharing what they knew. Rod revelled in the languid mischief that Greene seemed to exude, the nascent wickedness of the man. It reminded him more than somewhat of his younger brother. Much as he was loth to admit it, there were times when he missed his brother. Even more he missed his wife. She had joined him a few weeks after the posting and, like the colonial wife in Nigeria or Sierra Leone, she had returned home for the birth of their first child in 1936, and was home now expecting the second.

  ‘If I have to weigh that one up every time Hitler pushes the country to the brink, I might as well go home and become the gardening columnist reporting on outbreaks of honey fungus and the private life of the roving vole.’

  ‘Questing vole, surely?’ said Greene. ‘“Something something through the plashy fens goes the questing vole”.’