Old Flames Read Online Free PDF

cab as it shot away down St Martin’s Lane.
    Troy and Charlie stood facing each other on the pavement, neither making a move to go back inside.
    ‘Friend of yours?’
    ‘Johnny, thirteenth Lord Enniskerry, tenth Viscount Lissadell, ninth Marquess of Fermanagh, and well-known piss artist,’ Troy recited.
    Charlie looked at his shoes, then back at Troy.
    ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Diana Brack’s brother.’
    He paused. Glanced back down the street after the cab.
    ‘I wouldn’t have said he’d make a natural friend.’
    ‘Killing his sister isn’t part of the equation. If the truth be known, I’d say Johnny was devoted to Diana. But in killing her I destroyed his father. And if there really is
something the ninth Marquess and I have in common, it’s a hatred of the eighth Marquess. I’m sorry, Charlie, but this puts a damper on the evening. If you’ll forgive me I’m
just going to stagger home to bed. I have to be up with the birds anyway.’
    ‘You’ll be OK?’
    ‘Of course. I’ve put Johnny to bed pissed out of his brain dozens of times. I’ve listened to his drivel about his sister and his father more times than I could ever count.
Always leaves its mark, but nothing I can’t handle.’
    Charlie hugged Troy. A quick embrace, with enough backslap to pass for rugged and manly. It was the sort of thing Troy hated, but it was Charlie through and through and he had long since learnt
not to flinch from Charlie’s promiscuous, public emotions. Troy had, he rarely thought, loved only four people in his life: his father, long dead; Diana Brack, also long dead, shot by Troy
himself in the last year of the war; one Larissa Tosca, long since vanished; and Charles Leigh-Hunt. It would be foolish in the extreme to lose what little he had left.
    He crossed St Martin’s Lane, cursed Johnny Fermanagh for his lack of timing, and went home. Within ten minutes he knew that Johnny had ruined a good night’s sleep and with it the
prospect of an early night. Troy would not sleep. Sleep brought only the prospect of the same repetitive nightmare; the same which played itself out in his head a thousand times, in a thousand
variations, but with only one ending.
    He had been recently in Portsmouth—three days spent on a murder investigation in February. A pimp strung up from a lamppost by his tie, and the killer had hung onto his feet till the poor
sod had strangled. Troy had stayed at a pleasant enough hotel only walking distance from the naval dockyard—the King Henry, run by a retired dockyard policeman. It was only a quarter to ten.
If he threw a few things into an overnight bag and got a cab to Waterloo, he could be there by midnight or perhaps twelve-thirty at the outside. It would distract him from the headful of nonsense
that Johnny Fermanagh had given him, and with any luck he might be ready for sleep when he arrived. Better still, he’d be able to lie in till seven or thereabouts. He called ahead.
    ‘You’re in luck, Mr Troy,’ said ex-Sergeant Quigley. ‘We got just the one room left. I’ll be up till one meself. Always stock the bar before I goes to bed. Just
bang good and hard on the door.’
    Out in the street Troy flagged a cab. As he sat back in the seat, and the cabbie waited a moment for traffic to pass, the door of the Salisbury swung open and Charlie came out. He yawned,
stretched, buttoned his coat, swung his scarf around his neck and disappeared down Cecil Court. Troy watched him go, wondering at the distance that time had placed between them, wondering how well
you could know any man whose entire life was bound up with lies, and thinking that Charlie knew Troy, now, infinitely better than Troy knew him or could know him. It pained him. As boys they had
had no secrets, even to the details of Charlie’s vigorous queer love life; as young men they had had few secrets, even to the details of Charlie’s gargantuan consumption of women. Now
he told Troy little. And for once it dawned on him