A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  He didn’t know.

  ‘Fitz?’

  ‘Today’s been particularly bad. The trial started today.’

  In the pit of self-obsession he’d missed the matter entirely. Anna handed him the prescription.

  ‘They’re called Mandrax. They’re strong, Troy. Promise me this. You’ll never take more than two at once, and never, never with alcohol.’

  Sleep became bliss. Physical heaven. It took him a while to get going again in the morning, but sleepwashed over him like waves, a giant, sensuous hand gently pressing him down into the bedding.

  § 51

  The cab dropped him twenty yards from the side entrance of the Old Bailey’s Court No. 1, near the corner of Newgate Street. He had not anticipated the crowd. At best the Public Gallery held twenty-five people. Here were eighty or ninety at least. On the corner, trying to keepan eye on both entrances, were a bevy of press photographers, shooting randomly. Anybody might be somebody. One came running, and Troy found himself blinded by the flash as the bulb popped in his face. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, and before he had opened them felt the heavy hand upon his shoulder.

  ‘Move along there!’

  The hand shoved him forward. He opened his eyes to see exactly what he had expected to see. A large constable hell-bent on doing his duty. Troy’s eyes were level with the topbutton of his tunic. The man stared down at him a second, hand raised to push him along and then it saluted him sharply.

  ‘Sorry, sir. Didn’t recognise you there.’

  ‘That’s OK. I’m off duty. I was just hoping to see a bit of the trial.’

  ‘What? From the gallery? You’ll be lucky. I’d be risking a riot if I shoved you in ahead of the queue, sir. It’s day two. Some of this lot have been camping out since the night before last. The pecking order’s all worked out. You just come with me, sir.’

  He chaperoned Troy to the front entrance. They caught up with the happy hack who had snapped Troy.

  ‘Oi you! I’ll have that last plate or you’ll feel my boot up yer backside!’

  To Troy’s amazement the man did not argue, just muttered ‘shit’ and tore the strip of film from the back of the camera. Troy had not, he realised, been out with the boys in blue in a very long time.

  ‘Now, sir. Up the steps, into the court. City benches on your right, just behind counsel. Privileged seats, just tell ’em all to move up and flash your warrant card.’

  There were hundreds of people outside the court. Troy felt almost abandoned as the man left him and resumed his duties. He felt acutely conscious of his stature – was everyone in the world bigger than he? – and his frailty. He had not found himself in the midst of a crowd since . . . since he did not know when.

  The interior was hardly less busy, a mêlée of journalists, lawyers and policemen. All in motion like the scattering of the reds on a snooker table. The courtroom, by contrast, was quietly sepulchral. He soon realised that the copper had done him a favour. The view from the privileged planks of the City Lands Committee benches was a good one. He found himself sharing the back row with a dozen women in daft hats. They were, it struck him, dressed for church – a little too florid, a little too much powder, a discreet smidgeon of lipstick. He had forgotten the space a good trial occupied in the social calendar, somewhere between the Church of England and a West End play. He had not attended as a spectator since his first year on the force, when it had been part of his education to know the workings of the law at this level. For most of the last thirty years he had faced these benches from the opposite side, from the witness box, occasionally glancing at women such as these and wondering at their fascination with crime.

  The woman in lilac next to him smiled and inched along the bench to make room for him without a murmur. Perhaps he looked like an invalid; perhaps his very pallor said ‘poorly’? The woman on the other side of her, so obviously her mother, looked all of eighty, head bent over her knitting, humming softly to herself, the skin of her hands liver-spotted, her cheeks chalk-white beneath the dusting of powder.

  Fitz, on the other hand, put up in the dock, looked the picture of health – out on bail, spared the sunlessness of prison, the perils of perpetually boiled meals. His head turned, moments before the court rose for the judge, and for a second he looked straight into Troy’s eyes. Troy could read nothing. Not reproach, not guilt – then Fitz smiled. And the smile was the mereness of recognition.

  Troy found he had encountered all the major players at one time or another. He had given evidence before Sir Ranulph Mirkeyn on half a dozen occasions. He was not one of his favourites, a former member of the Plymouth Brethren, a man and a mind deeply rooted in the Old Testament. He had answered the questions of Prosecuting Counsel Henry Furbelow twice, as he recalled, and he had met Defending Counsel David Cocket at Uphill. The choice of Cocket worried him. Charged with anything more than drunk and disorderly, Troy would opt for the best lawyer money could buy, not a friend – well, not necessarily a friend – and certainly not a friend who conceded, at Troy’s estimate, twenty years’ experience to the prosecution, and who had yet to take silk. He had liked Cocket, he was sharp, he was witty, but could he hold his own against a warhorse as experienced as Henry Furbelow QC?

  The first goal was an own goal.

  Furbelow rose.

  ‘My Lord, the prosecution wishes to withdraw the charge of procurement.’

  Good bloody grief. Mirkeyn would eat him alive for this. It could mean only one thing. They had taken a chance the day before on drumming up evidence they had failed to find. They were conceding defeat now – a day too late for the good temper of any judge.

  To Troy’s amazement Mirkeyn simply accepted this. The court hissed with whispers. Mirkeyn called for silence and when the whispers had stopped Cocket was smiling and Furbelow not. The first victory – however large or small. It bothered Troy, bothered him professionally. A prosecution as sloppy as this had just appeared to be meant sloppy police work. If it had fallen to him to refer a charge for prosecution he would never have let it get this far without the proof. Nobody came out of such chaos looking good. Troy knew exactly what had happened – somewhere along the line they had lost a witness.

  § 52

  It was gone four o’clock. Everyone was flagging. The day had been a non-event, a bogging-down in procedure, aptly summed up by the stage whisper of the old tricoteuse, who turned to her daughter and said: ‘Have the tarts been on yet, dear? Have I missed the tarts?’

  Half the court, it seemed, had heard her. Cocket turned round, involuntarily perhaps, tried not to grin. Fitz looked over from his seat in the vast emptiness of the dock and smiled again. The same smile he had smiled at Troy. It wasn’t recognition, Troy now realised. It was not an outward motion at all. It was something in Fitz. Some absolute resolution not to be unnerved by it all. As though the man had induced a state of calm, by power of will alone or, more likely, by surrender of will. A beatific, a Buddhist serenity, Troy could not but see it as a dangerous condition. He who isn’t fearful in the dock does not know the power of an English court. He who isn’t at least cautious in any seat in the Old Bailey, from counsel to public gallery, does not know the law of contempt, the absolute power of a judge to imprison without trial.

  Mirkeyn’s demonstration of his power was brief. He hammered his gavel and adjourned until the following morning.

  When Troy had made his way slowly out from the City benches – letting the women in hats stream out ahead of him – he found a tall, dark, handsome young man waiting for him. His nephew, Alex.

  ‘You’re just about the last person I expected to see.’

  ‘Call it a hobby,’ said Troy. ‘It may well be all that’s left of my job. However, you’re not the last person I was expecting. In fact I would like a word with you.’

  ‘I have to file, Freddie. I should be running hell for leather for Fleet Street right now.’

  ‘Then get me a cab. We can share a cab as far as the Post.’

>   ‘Quicker if I walk at this time of day, but I’ll happily find you a cab.’

  Troy stood on the pavement, while Alex waved his arm at indifferent cabbies and elbowed the competition aside.

  ‘I merely wanted to ask you why they’ve dropped the procurement charge.’

  But Alex had bagged a cab and bundled Troy into it.

  ‘Freddie, why don’t you call me? I’ll be happy to give you all the dope some other time.’

  Alex banged the door shut. The passing thought ‘they grow up so quickly’ passed through Troy’s mind, but he consigned it to the ragbag of poor thinking almost at once. He’d been brushed off and that was all there was to it.

  He was about to tell the cabbie they should go, when the door opened again. He assumed it was Alex, thinking better of his haste. But it was an old, familiar face. That of Percy Blood, Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. An ugly, old-school copper. The old school that favoured black boots and grubby brown mackintoshes. They went nicely with the greasy strands of hide-the-bald-spot hair combed in furrows left to right across his dome, and nicely too with the bitten, nicotined fingernails. He was fifty-five or thereabouts. Long since passed over, he would see out his days as a chief inspector, and this had lent to his naturally unpleasant disposition an edge of bitter resentment. He was a plodder. If he were in Troy’s section Troy would have put him out to an early pension.

  ‘Mr Blood. Can I offer you a lift to the Yard?’

  ‘No thank you, sir. I’ve a squad car waiting.’

  ‘Then how can I helpyou?’

  ‘I saw you. In the court.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I was wondering. If your interest in the case was professional like. The Yard said nowt to me.’

  ‘I’m on sick leave, Mr Blood. As I’m sure you know. I’m simply passing the time. Call it academic interest.’

  He looked blankly back at Troy as though the phrase meant nothing to him.

  ‘So – you’re not . . . you’re not . . . like . . .’

  ‘No. I’m not. But since you’re here I do have a question.’

  Again the blank look as though they spun words from a different yarn in Manchester and twenty years in London had not taught him the lingo.

  ‘When did you transfer from Special Branch to the Vice Squad?’

  Blood pretended to think about this, pretended to come up with nothing.

  ‘A while back,’ he said, and closed the door.

  Stupid, thought Troy, it was a simple question, and the answer simply found if he just called Records. He’d been brushed off again, but it didn’t much matter.

  § 53

  The following day, Troy sat waiting to see who would be called next. Tara? Caro? But it was a name he’d never heard. The cry went down the court for one ‘Moira Twelvetrees.’

  It was a face he’d never seen – but a face he’d seen a thousand times. The pathetic ‘want-a-good-time-dearie?’ face of a London streetwalker.

  He remembered vividly the burning embarrassment the first time a Soho whore had put the question to him. Want a good time, dearie? He had had two reactions: firstly that she probably wouldn’t know a good time if it fell on her, and secondly that it marked him. He was only twenty-seven, but one of the rites de passages of middle age had to be the moment when a Soho whore first takes you for a fare.

  The whore was young, pretty but utterly lacking style. She had no idea how to dress or to apply make-up or, more likely, had an idea which was wholly parodic and therefore wholly wrong. Would Fitz, Troy thought to himself, have left anyone so untutored? The Ffitches were sophisticates; Clover, her way with eye make-up notwithstanding, even Clover had style. This woman had none.

  He listened as Furbelow drew from her the story of Fitz accosting her near Paddington station and taking her back to Dreyfus Mews for, as Furbelow so emphatically intoned, ‘sexual intercourse’, a phrase with which the woman had some little difficulty, calling it as she did ‘sectional intercourse’. Troy yearned for the legitimacies of plain English, the unambiguity of fuck and swive. At the end of their sectional intercourse Fitz, the court was asked to believe, had offered to find her more clients and let her use his bedroom, in return for half the take. She had agreed and fucked a dozen or more of Fitz’s contacts over a period of weeks earlier in the year. Prostitution, pimping, cut and dried.

  Cocket rose for the cross. He ignored the singular coitus between Fitz and Moira Twelvetrees and chose instead to ask her for detail upon detail. A wealth of small questions.

  Troy could see her lips move silently as Cocket put his questions. It seemed to him that she had been tutored after all – but not by Fitz – and before Cocket could even finish the question she was mutely rehearsing her answer, drawing not upon memory but on the rote-learning someone had dunned into her. The front door was yellow, there was a big Chinese vase on the left as you went in. On the right or on the left? Oh, the left, definitely the left. Fitz’s bedroom was on the first floor at the back, the lavatory was – shock upon shock – black, to match the washbasin. From this the jury was left in no doubt that she knew Fitz’s house very well; the details were, for want of a less loaded word, intimate.

  And then Cocket jumped in at the deep end.

  ‘You are saying, are you not, Miss Twelvetrees, that you had sex with a variety of men over a period of twelve weeks from December last year until March of this year in the Dreyfus Mews house of the defendant?’

  ‘Er . . . yeah.’

  ‘And you know these men only as Bill or Nicky or David?’

  ‘They didn’t tell me surnames. None of ’em.’

  ‘And you didn’t recognize any of them?’

  ‘Recognise?’

  ‘We heard in the prosecution’s opening address that the defendant was acquainted with the rich and famous. I was merely wondering if any of his rich and famous friends might have been among those clients you claim to have serviced.’

  ‘My Lord . . .’ Furbelow rose, did not finish his sentence.

  ‘Mr Cocket,’ said Mirkeyn, and Cocket in the face of two halfsentences graciously withdrew the question. Had Troy believed for a moment that the lovely Moira had serviced the toffs of London town he might well have listened out for the velvet swish as the establishment ranks closed over her.

  ‘Did you ever practise the sexual act in the missionary position?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘On your back. Did you lie on your back with a man on top of you?’ ‘Well . . . o’ course . . .’ ‘How often?’ ‘You what?’ ‘Did you assume this position for every client?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? Why not?’

  ‘Well some of ’em . . .’ and her voice dropped to a crimson whisper, ‘some of ’em wanted to play doggies.’

  From the colour of her face Troy felt that the woman knew no other phrase for the act and wished she did.

  ‘So,’ said Cocket, ‘some of your clients played doggy?’

  Go on, thought Troy, be the perfect English judge and ask her what she means. But Mirkeyn did not.

  ‘Did most of them play doggy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So . . . I can safely say most of them had you on your back?’

  ‘S’pose so.’

  ‘Tell me, Miss Twelvetrees, have you ever feigned an orgasm?’

  ‘Come again?’

  Furbelow rose.

  ‘My Lord, is this relevant?’

  Mirkeyn passed the question.

  ‘Well, Mr Cocket, is it?’

  ‘Yes, my Lord, I believe it is.’

  ‘Continue, Mr Cocket. Continue with care.’

  ‘Miss Twelvetrees?’

  She muttered, redder than ever.

  ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that?’

  ‘Do you mean, like, come? Like faking coming?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then . . . yes.’

  ‘Yes, some of the time? Or yes, all of the time?’

  ‘Yes all of the time.’


  So much for British manhood, and with Mirkeyn glaring at the gallery, none dared gaspand none dared giggle.

  ‘And while you were ah . . .’ (hammy pause from barrister) ‘. . . faking it . . . what did you do?’

  ‘I make like . . . noises.’

  ‘You make noises? What sort of noises?’

  ‘Sort of . . . ooh ooh ooh.’

  ‘Ooh ooh ooh?’

  ‘Yeah. And after a while I just sort of stare at the ceiling.’

  The shift in tone and gear was startling to hear in Cocket.

  ‘Miss Twelvetrees, what colour is the ceiling in Dr Fitzpatrick’s bedroom?’

  It was, Troy realised, very far from being the titillating waste of time he had taken it for – it was a superb stringing out of a witness to an unwitting conclusion.

  ‘I . . . I . . . dunno.’

  ‘Come, come, Miss Twelvetrees. You went to Dreyfus Mews countless times – and you have told us many details of the interior. You had a dozen regular clients, most of them on your back, with whom you faked orgasm and stared at the ceiling. What colour was the ceiling?’

  ‘White,’ she blurted out.

  Cocket reached for an envelope and removed a 10 × 8 colour photograph, which the usher passed to Moira.

  ‘I took this myself, on the day the defendant was charged. It is the ceiling of the defendant’s bedroom. What colour would you say it was?’

  ‘It’s blue,’ she said.

  ‘Blue,’ said Cocket. ‘Blue and what?’

  ‘Blue with little silver stars. An’ little silver moons.’

  It put Troy in mind of Yeats’s Wandering Aengus – ‘little silver apples of the moon’. Chief Inspector Blood had been betrayed by his copper’s nose – too close to the ground. He had been looking in the gutter when he should have been staring at the stars.

  ‘My Lord, I submit this photograph as defence exhibit A. It is witnessed on the back by my clerk of chambers. I ask that it be so marked. Now, Miss Twelvetrees, have you ever been inside the defendant’s house?’