A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Caroline Alexandra Sarah Ffitch.’

  And her date of birth.

  ‘September 3rd 1939.’

  It was, as an English comedian of the old school had put it at the opening of so many lugubrious monologues, ‘the day war broke out . . . ’ Caro Ffitch, younger than her sister by fifteen months, was the perfect war baby.

  Troy did not think Furbelow would be long about this. He would get her to confirm her sister’s evidence and then Caro would face hell from Cocket, as he exploited the weaker sister as he could not the stronger.

  Furbelow skipped the family life of Caro, lingered a moment on the gap in their ages that had kept her at home for a year after Tara had escaped, and how Caro had wanted nothing more than to forsake her home and her father to join her sister in the city. Then he moved quickly to her life at Dreyfus Mews.

  ‘Are you acquainted with a man known to your sister as the Professor?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Caro softly.

  ‘Am I right in saying that this man regularly gave you money?’

  Cocket rose and objected.

  ‘M’lud. My learned friend is leading the witness.’

  ‘Sustained,’ said Mirkeyn.

  ‘Miss Ffitch. Did the Professor ever give you money?’

  ‘Yes, from time to time.’

  ‘Did you do anything for this money?’

  ‘Did I do anything? I don’t understand.’

  ‘Well . . . did you provide a service of any kind?’

  Troy distinctly heard the old tricoteuse say, ‘Just like What’s My Line, dear,’ to her daughter.

  ‘No,’ Caro replied. ‘I didn’t.’

  Furbelow was momentarily nonplussed by her answer. It was not in the script. He ruffled the papers in front of him, adjusted his glasses and came back to the issue.

  ‘Miss Ffitch are you familiar with the phrase sexual services?’

  ‘Yes. I think so.’

  ‘Then let me ask you again. Did you provide any services to the Professor, services of a sexual nature?’

  ‘Do you mean did I sleep with him?’

  ‘Yes, but more than that, did you sleep with him for money?’

  ‘No.’

  Furbelow rummaged among his papers again.

  ‘Miss Ffitch, I have here the statement you made to the police at Scotland Yard in June.’

  Furbelow held it out to the usher who passed it to Caro.

  ‘That is your signature at the bottom is it not?’

  ‘Yes . . . but . . .’

  ‘There are no buts. It either is or it isn’t!’

  ‘But . . .’

  Furbelow was well into his best bullying manner now.

  ‘Is it or isn’t it?’

  Troy could see that Caro was on the verge of tears. She could not answer Furbelow. He should have waited her out, but his own impatience got the better of him.

  ‘In this statement you wrote, quite clearly, that the Professor gave you money after sex.’

  Caro fumbled with the sheet of paper, opened her handbag, took an age to take out her handkerchief and blow her nose. When she looked up again tears were rolling silently down her cheeks.

  ‘The Professor did give us money. But not for sex. And not that often.’

  ‘How often?’

  ‘It was irregular. Sometimes he’d just open his wallet and say, “Treat yourself.”’

  ‘Was one way of treating yourself to pay money to the defendant?’

  ‘No. Why would I do that?’

  ‘Might you not have done it because he asked you?’

  ‘No, that’s not true. Fitz never asked me for money.’

  ‘Miss Ffitch. Would you look again at the statement you have in your hand and tell me, is that your signature?’

  ‘Yes,’ Caro said.

  ‘Yet you have just refuted two of the strongest statements to which you signed. Can you explain that?’

  Troy thought Furbelow was tacking badly here. If he’d been the prosecuting counsel he’d have passed the matter up to the bench several minutes ago.

  Caro looked at the statement, looked around the court as though she was utterly lost. Then she looked at the statement again, her lips opening soundlessly, as though she were making a desperate effort to comprehend what she had written, as though the words were swimming like tadpoles in front of her eyes.

  ‘I . . . I . . . didn’t read it.’

  The roar from the gallery and the press box felt to Troy like the coming of a hurricane – loud and airy at the same time, belief and disbelief in a single breath.

  Mirkeyn pounded his gavel, and at last did what a good judge should have done by now – he addressed himself directly to the witness.

  ‘Miss Ffitch, are you saying you did not write this statement?’

  ‘I didn’t write it and I didn’t read it. I mean . . .’

  Caro held up the piece of paper.

  ‘It’s typed,’ she said sadly. ‘I can’t type.’

  The gallery exploded into laughter. Mirkeyn banged away once more. All the same, it took a couple of minutes to subside and another minute for him to spell out his power and his willingness to clear the court if needs be. It was more than sad; it was pathetic. She could not type. It was a fundamental skill of many women of Caro’s class and age, learnt if only as a means to a husband, and here she was waving a piece of paper and bleating pathetically that she could not type. A woman with no other known skills, save sex.

  ‘Miss Ffitch,’ he resumed, ‘it is an accepted practice in every police station in the land that a police officer types statements for witnesses based directly on what the witness has said to them. It is for the witness then to read the statement and to ask for emendations accordingly. Once signed your signature is taken as assent that what precedes it is true. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes . . . but I didn’t read it.’

  ‘Why did you not read it?’

  ‘I was . . . I was . . . I was too upset.’

  She thrust her hanky to her nose. Her tears now came in floods. Troy wondered how far they’d get with her. All the same, he would not put it past Mirkeyn to remind her of the meaning of perjury, or to threaten her with contempt, when all a good judge needed to do was to adjourn for half an hour.

  ‘Why were you upset?’

  It seemed to Troy as though he was now witnessing a private conversation. Mirkeyn looked only at Caro, Caro looked only at him. A ludicrous public intimacy. He was, Troy thought, not a man at ease with women’s tears, and she was weeping buckets.

  ‘I’d . . . I’d been there all day . . . not just that day . . . lots of days . . . all on my own . . . all on my own . . . just being asked questions . . . over and over again. I’ve lost count. I must have been called to Scotland Yard a dozen times.’

  Troy looked across at the press box. Every Biro jiggled. They’d have a field day with this. The Yard would not come well out of it. Blood was an idiot.

  ‘Nonetheless . . . the police would not have typed up what you had not said.’

  Careful, Caro. Mirkeyn is inviting you to call the police liars. If you do he will find some excuse to send you down for contempt or, worse, perjury. One must never call a policeman a liar. Even though many of us are.

  She wiped a hand over each cheek and the streams of her tears, her sobs still audible in every corner of the courtroom.

  ‘I’m sure they typed what I said, my Lord. It was I who did not know what I was saying. I was confused. I was very mixed up, I don’t know what I said . . . may very well have said everything they say I said . . . but it was not what I meant to say . . . I was . . . hysterical.’

  The word seemed to clunk down like a brick in front of Mirkeyn. Caro could not have chosen a better word. It was part and parcel of the vocabulary of men like Mirkeyn. Women were hysterical. It was why they were intellectually unreliable. This seemed to tip the scales. Mirkeyn drew back and turned to Furbelow. He would not threaten to imprison Caro. She’d been damn lucky. A man less con
temptuous of women might not have been so susceptible to their ‘hysteria’.

  ‘Proceed, Mr Furbelow.’

  Furbelow was startled. Proceed? Proceed where? He no longer had a witness.

  After lunch Cocket, wisely, had only one question for Caro. The same one Troy had put to Clover the night before.

  ‘Are you now or have you ever been . . .?’

  To which she gave a clear and unhysterical ‘no.’

  § 59

  It was a mess. A farce of a case. It made Troy angry. It offended his professional sensibilities. At the end of the day’s session Troy looked around for Blood, but he wasn’t there. He had been dismissed. It was unlikely his workload would let him indulge his curiosity hanging around the court. Cocket could recall him in the light of Caro’s evidence, but this would be to call the police liars, and no one was going to do that. More would be lost than gained.

  Troy decided to visit the Yard on his way home. He would see if he could get five minutes with the Commissioner – and whilst he too would not call the police liars, he could at least air his professional opinion.

  He made his way up the stairs, wheezing a little, and came to rest on a landing between floors – only to find Sir Wilfrid Coyn descending the same staircase.

  ‘Freddie. Just paying us a visit? How are you?’

  ‘Fine,’ Troy said, still wheezing.

  ‘Popping in to CID ?’

  ‘No. I was looking for you, actually.’

  ‘Me? Look, I’ve a car waiting. I have to go home and change. Dinner at the Mansion House. Why don’t you walk down with me and tell me what’s on your mind?’

  Troy followed him down to the car park, talking to his back all the way.

  ‘I’ve been passing the time at the Old Bailey.’

  ‘Oh? Something juicy, I hope.’

  ‘Court number 1.’

  Coyn looked quickly over his shoulder at Troy.

  ‘The case is falling apart. It’s a shambles. We should never have brought the prosecution. Too much of the evidence is being shown up as flimsy.’

  They reached the car park. A driver held the car door open for Coyn.

  ‘When this is all over we’re going to look like fools. This case will not enhance the reputation of the Yard in any way. We’ll end up looking like a bunch of monkeys.’

  Coyn stopped with his hands resting on the top of the door. ‘You don’t think it’s for the defence to move for a dismissal?’

  ‘It’s not quite at that stage.’

  ‘Then what stage is it at?’

  ‘The stage when it’s becoming obvious to everyone that we should not have brought the prosecution in the first place.’

  ‘Freddie,’ said Coyn, ‘your job’s getting well again. I need you fit. The Yard needs you fit. Why not just let us get on with our job in the meantime, eh?’

  He patted Troy gently on the upper arm, climbed in the car and drove away. It was as close as men like Coyn came to saying fuck off.

  § 60

  He felt worn out by the time he got home. He had lingered too long. It was past dusk. He had walked too many streets, sat on too many park benches and stared too long at nothing in particular. He sloughed off his coat, kicked off his shoes, draped his tie over the doorknob. The house was quiet. There was no sign of Clover but for the faint scraping sound of the gramophone stylus orbiting the final loop of a record. He pulled the arm back and turned off the power. Then he heard her voice. She was in the bathroom on the half-landing at the back. Still in the bathroom? He looked at his watch. He’d been gone the best part of twelve hours. She was hogging the bathroom, again.

  He stomped up the stairs, fist clenched ready to hammer on the door. He stopped his hand, laid his palm flat on the wooden panel. Clover was singing to herself again – and not one of her Beatles’ songs – her voice filling the bathroom, echoing off tiles, seeping out onto the staircase with wafts of steam, following him up the stairs to his bedroom. He had not thought that she possessed such a voice, a clear, wonderfully controlled contralto. He had not thought she knew any song that was not bang up to date. This was old. The last century at least. He knew it well – it was an Irish folk song called ‘She Moved Through The Fair’.

  My young love said to me

  Your Mother won’t mind

  And your father won’t slight me

  For our lack of kind

  And he stepped away from me

  And this did he say

  It will not be long love, till our wedding day.

  He lay down on his bedroom floor, used his jacket for a pillow, closed his eyes and listened to the song push its way through the floorboards.

  He stepped away from me

  And moved through the fair

  And fondly I watched him move here and move there

  And he went his way homeward

  With one star awake

  As the last swan of evening moved over the lake.

  The people were saying

  No two were e’er wed

  But one had a sorrow

  That never was said.

  He went away from me with his boots and his gear

  And that was the last that I saw of my dear.

  It was a sinister tale. He knew of two or three variants on the theme in English, which probably meant there were at least two or three dozen known to the likes of Cecil Sharpe or Percy Grainger and those fanatical turn-of-the-century collectors of folk music. It was a demon lover song. The lover seduces. Too late the seduced discovers that her lover is a cloven-hoofed demon, or simply dead to begin with. The last verse was a killer. Beautiful, stark and deadly.

  I dreamed it last night

  That my dead love came in

  So softly he came, that his feet made no din

  He laid his hand on me

  And this he did say

  It will not be long love, till our wedding day.

  The words stopped. Clover continued the melody in scat. And as the words ceased the tune grew, the volume swelling, to the point where he opened his eyes almost certain of what he would see, her backlit in the doorway, wrapped in a scarlet bath towel, hair pinned up, stripped of make-up.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Yes. Just a bit tired I think.’

  ‘Wot you doin’ on the floor, then? You might as well stretch out on yer bed.’

  He could not think of a lie. Occasionally this happened to him.

  ‘I was listening to your song. This end of the room’s right over the bathroom. I could hear you quite clearly. It was beautiful. You have a good voice. Where did you learn that song?’

  ‘My mum taught it to me when I was little.’

  ‘I didn’t know Val sang.’

  ‘If you ask me, there’s a lot you and my mum didn’t bother to find out about each other.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about your mum.’

  ‘Fine by me. Look, you ain’t ’alf lookin’ peeky. Is there anything I can get you? Cup o’ char? Is there anything you want?’

  She stepped closer, the towel swept the floorboards and brushed against his shirt. She wafted it across his face. Playfully, he thought.

  ‘Well? Wotcher want?’

  Was that a smile or a grin? She wafted the edge of the towel across his face once more. Talc. Nothing he could name. Something floral. He grabbed the end. Clover held the towel with both hands clutched at her sternum. Troy pulled the towel gently taut and she let go. The towel floated down, scarlet folds on the boards. Clover caught one corner before it could land – a broad red ribbon leading from him to her. Him in shirt and socks and trousers, her naked as she had been amid the ruins of Uphill Park.

  ‘You gettin’ up or am I gettin’ down?’

  ‘I haven’t the energy to get up.’

  ‘Troy, there’d better not be a two-letter word missing from that sentence.’

  Her strength surprised him. His lack of substance surprised him. She took his hands in hers, pulled him to his feet and fell neatly back on the bed
, head straight to the pillow, with Troy on top of her. She popped every button on his shirt, slid her hands down his chest, pulled at his zipper and, when both hands were wrapped around his risen cock, whispered in his ear.

  ‘Take your socks off.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’ve never made love to a bloke still wearin’ his socks and I don’t intend to start now.’

  Troy could not tear them off quickly enough. Nor his trousers, nor his underpants, nor his flapping shirt. He found himself standing over her, cockstiff and crazy, gazing at her, dappled with patches of talcum powder – the small breasts, the stiff nipples, the tiny waist, a vertical slit of a belly button. She reached across and took his left hand, placed it between her legs. He slipped in a finger. She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him down and kissed him. Lips, nose, eyelids. Slowly he became aware that she was steering him. His lips drifting southward, across her throat, over one breast, in and out of the belly button – her hands gripping his head, her fingernails nipping his scalp, talcum powder dusting his lips. Yet he could not find the scent of her. The talc was freesia, the soap peach, but she was so fresh from the bath, so well scrubbed, he could not smell Clover. He had reached her thighs, with her fingers still locked in his hair. He took his left hand away and put his lips to her cunt.

  He’d no idea what to do. He’d never done this before. No woman he’d ever been with had ever suggested it. He’d never dared to ask.

  § 61

  He awoke to find himself flat on his back, Clover half draped across him, the scentless air now scented with the alkaline smell of sex – part cunt, part semen, faintly acrid, impossible to mistake. Why did it always remind him of mangoes?