Robert Ryan - Signal Red

She climbed out of the car, slamming the door with hinge- threatening violence, and clattered off towards the cash and carry in high heels.

Tony pulled out the handwritten shopping list and the wad of cash Bruce had given him. He guessed it was best if he didn't mention that Mary Manson had drawn up the items to be bought. Fifteen or sixteen men staying for a week in a farmhouse were going to need food and essential supplies. He locked the Husky and scanned the list as he went. Twenty- four tins of luncheon meat, four packets of Oxo, four bottles of Bovril, Campbell's soups, various flavours, corned beef, Shippam's paste, ketchup – lots of ketchup – Fairy washing- up liquid – he could imagine the fuss over who would do the bloody dishes – Maxwell House coffee, catering size, Kellogg's cornflakes, Weetabix, Ready Brek, Typhoo tea, lots of sugar, crackers (Ritz and Jacobs both specified), baked beans, tinned peas and potatoes, jam, sardines, Lifebuoy soap. The list went on, covering, it seemed, everything except booze, which Bobby Welch, the club owner, was taking care of. It looked as if Bruce was planning to feed and clean an army. Well, in a way, that was what it was. An army of villains.

Who would have thought that robbery, with or without violence, would be fuelled by two dozen cans of Spam?

He finished reading and looked back at the squat little van. It was the first time he had found a use for the Husky – none of his customers had expressed any interest in such a humdrum machine, and he was thinking of offloading it – but already he wondered if it was going to be big enough for the supplies.

Tony reached the entrance where Janie was leaning on a shopping trolley. The cash and carry was like a vast cathedral of consumerism. Instead of pews, there were rows of goods on pallets, piled high, most of them Brobdingnagian- sized 'extra-value' packets or smaller items in multiples of a dozen or a gross. You could shop for surviving a nuclear strike here, Tony thought. Maybe people did just that. Those bloody Civil Defence ads on TV would make anyone panic.

Janie snapped her fingers. 'Let me see that, will you?'

'Do you speak to all your staff like that?'

'Just the handsome, insolent ones.'

He passed it over. She glanced down it as she wheeled the trolley, stopping in the first section. Then she gave a little whoop of satisfaction. She had noticed an omission. When she spoke, the Janie of the Soho bars, voice rasped by cigarette smoke, had returned.

'And what are you going to do? Wipe your arses with the Sporting Life? Here, give us a hand.' She reached up to pull down one of the twelve-packs of Bronco lavatory paper. 'You'll need a lot of this, all the shit you blokes talk.'

'Hold on,' Tony said, remembering something.

'What is it now?' Janie had reverted to the posh bitch.

'Gloves.' He held out a pair.

'Gloves? Oh, lord. Why on earth?'

'Bruce's orders.'

'Did he say they had to be brown gloves? Did he supply any black ones?'

He was losing patience now. 'Janie, it's not fuckin' Hardy Amies. It's a cash and carry. I don't know what it is with you and Bruce and Mary and, frankly, I don't care. Just put the fucking things on.'

She smiled. 'My, you really are quite attractive when you flush like that. Do you go that colour when you fuck?'

He put his hands up. 'Married. Baby on the way. Wife has carving knife and knows how to use it. What's more, I might be stupid, but I'm not stupid enough to get between you and Bruce. Clear?'

'You flatter yourself, mister.' Then she smiled. 'Is your wife all belly and big blue-veined tits?' She squeaked in a pantomime imitation of a woman's voice. "'Oh Tony, don't spunk on the baby's head. Let's wait till the christening'.'

'Put the gloves on, Janie.'

With a display of huffing, puffing and tutting, she thrust her hands into the oversized gloves. They loaded a couple of packs of the toilet paper into the trolley. Then she consulted the list again.

'No salt? Tony, be a dear and get that drum of Saxo over there. And you could do with some fruit. A nice tinned fruit salad. Del Monte, perhaps.' She was being sarcastic now, he could tell, ridiculing them. 'And condensed milk. Carnation. Bruce has a sweet tooth, you know. And candles. In case the power goes. Who in blazes wrote this?' Tony kept mum, allowing himself a tiny shrug. 'I'm going to have to go through this carefully. You push, darling, I'll follow. Then maybe we can have a little celebration later, when we're done? Just the two of us.'

'No.' Tony had no desire for any part of his body to be used;is an instrument of revenge against Bruce. 'Isn't going to happen.'

Janie scowled and muttered something obscene. Tony grabbed the handle of the trolley. It was going to be a long, long day.

Commander George Hatherill fell asleep soon after they settled into their seats on the train to Paddington, and seemed determined to snooze all the way to London. Billy Naughton was left to gaze out of the window at an astonishingly verdant landscape. The cold winter had given way to a wet spring and now a damp summer. 1963: The Year of Crappy Weather. Farmers and holidaymakers grumbled, but fields and hedgerows seemed to glow a deep, happy green.

Billy tried to digest all that had gone on while he had been in Cornwall. Hatherill had refused to answer questions about how he obtained the Oxo tin, whether Billy had been personally targeted, or if it was a general sweep. He simply said that the 'old way of doing things' was going to come to an end. He didn't want young coppers like Billy caught up in it.

The TM had admitted that his own record was not without blemishes. Apparently, he had been wrong about the Free French in London: he had reported that they had interrogated one of their own men, suspected of being a spy, who subsequently hanged himself. He now believed that the French had had a torture chamber in St James's and had behaved like Nazis. 'But it was war. And they were our allies. What good would the scandal have done? I wanted to believe them, so I didn't follow my instincts. I have regretted that ever since. They murdered some of their own. I am sure of it now.'

He also lamented some of his persecutions of the queers. 'You don't appreciate how angry Burgess and Maclean made us. Those, those… buggers. So we overstepped the mark sometimes, I think. Putting out agents provocateurs, fishing for homos. Not a decent use of police resources, in retrospect. They can't all be Commie spies, can they? The queers, I mean.'

But misjudgements in his own life, he went on, like the

Duke Street torture chamber, meant he always gave coppers such as Trellick a second chance. Never a third, mind. But a good second.

Then he had settled down and fallen asleep, apparently content. Cornwall hadn't given him his Last Big Case, but it had given him the quiet satisfaction of solving a mystery and perhaps that of saving a young policeman's career, too.

Billy had assumed he would be severed from Duke, and said so, but Hatherill had said no. He had to confront temptation and deal with it. Running away was no answer. And Len's turn would come, the day when he had his hand in the wrong till.

Billy took himself off to the dining car for breakfast, treating himself to ham, egg and chips. He felt strangely calm, quietly elated almost. It was as if he, as well as the Cornish PC, had been given a fresh start. From now on, he would be a good copper. From now on, he would do the right thing.

As arranged, Tony dropped off the supplies with Jimmy White, who was acting as quartermaster, storing all the gear they needed in lock-ups across London. They would be taken up, along with some of the team, by lorry once the purchase of the farm was complete. Afterwards, Tony had given Janie a lift to Waterloo, where she would catch a train home, and he carried on north, glad to see the back of her.