by John Lawton
Troy waited till his eyes left the page and his fingers refolded it. He half expected Stan to return the letter, but he didn’t. He put it, almost delicately, back into its envelope and slipped it into his pocket with his glasses. It occurred to Troy that few letters so private in intent were ever quite so public as suicide notes. It was evidence.
‘If there’s anything . . .’
Stan read his mind. Cut him short.
‘There isn’t. Just asks me to forgive her and to explain to her mother. Explain what, I ask you?’
‘Then it can be between you and her. No need for Jack to read it.’
‘Jack?’
‘Jack Wildeve. He’ll be here any minute.’
‘You don’t believe it was suicide?’
‘I don’t know what I believe.’
Stan stared right through him for almost a minute, then thrust the chair back with an ear-splitting scrape.
‘Her mother. I must see her mother.’
‘Stan!’ Troy called to his back. But he was up and lurching down the ward. At the doors he ran into Jack. Troy saw Jack put a hand out to Stan’s shoulder, heard softly spoken condolences and saw Stan blunder on, speechless in his rage and confusion.
Jack looked as bad as Troy. ‘Been up all night,’ he said simply. ‘Got your message around four o’clock. Saw no reason why we should both lose a night’s sleep. You don’t suppose there’s any chance of a cuppa, do you?’
‘They don’t do room service. You can drink mine when they bring it.’
Jack rubbed at his eyes with his fists and said, ‘Fire away.’
And when Troy had finished – how he spent the evening with Fitz, how he found Clover in a coma, where the damn pills came from – Jack said exactly what Stan had said.
‘You don’t think it’s suicide, do you?’
‘Inside pocket of my jacket,’ Troy said. ‘Just behind you.’
Jack read Clover’s letter.
A nurse appeared with Troy’s morning tea. Jack slurped at it greedily, sat with the letter in one hand, the teacup in the other and Troy used the distraction to wonder what he really did think.
‘Ordinarily,’ Jack said, ‘I’d say it was pretty conclusive. You’re certain it’s her handwriting?’
‘I’ve never seen her handwriting. You’ll have to check with Stan.’
If Stan chose to show Jack his own note from Clover, so be it, but it seemed beyond the pale to Troy to mention it now.
‘I’m sure it’s genuine. It’s her turn of phrase. And it’s clearly the half-formed hand of a teenager. But since you ask, the note notwithstanding, I can’t think of any reason why she should kill herself.’
‘Cheerful, was she?’
‘Cheerful enough. A damn sight more cheerful than me most of the time.’
‘And Fitz?’
‘Oh, he was fine, cocky – stupidly so.’
Troy had just enough warning of what was coming. Jack had slipped the question in as neatly as he would have done himself.
‘Fitz shot himself last night. About an hour and a half after he said goodnight to you at Leoni’s. Put the barrel of his revolver to his ear and blew his brains out.’
§ 72
Jack took Troy’s keys. A new doctor took his blood pressure and listened to his heart, but then discharged him. He was home by ten o’clock. The front door propped open, morning light streaking down the yard, projecting his shadow towards the inhumanly huge feet of a waiting, uniformed constable.
The man saluted and said, ‘Scene of Crime still inside, sir.’
It was as near to barring Troy’s way as the man would dare. Troy stuck his head around the door, just in time to hear the pop of a flash bulb. A police photographer was shooting the chair and the coffee table from all angles. A fingerprint man was dusting doorknobs and tut-tutting to himself. Jack sat on an upright chair between the hallstand and the grandfather clock, jotting notes into his little black book.
‘Ah, Freddie. Just in time. Prints are asking if you’ve had many visitors lately?’
‘None at all,’ said Troy. ‘Stan was the last and that was the day he brought Jackie round.’
Was that a glimmer of guilt he saw in Jack’s eyes? No one had been to see him. Not a damn soul. Not Swift Eddie, not Crazy Kolankiewicz, not Jack, not anybody.
Jack folded his notebook. ‘If you’re fit enough to talk we should find somewhere quiet and let this lot do their job.’
‘The Salisbury,’ Troy suggested. ‘Won’t be open for another hour. We can bang on the door till Spike opens and have the place to ourselves.’
Spike yelled, ‘Bugger off ’ through the closed door, and, ‘Go home, you drunken bastards.’
Jack rattled the door and said, ‘Open up! Police!’
What was traditional was also effective. The door inched back. Spike’s head appeared. ‘Good Lord. Mr Troy, and Mr Wildeve too. It’s not often we get the pleasure of both of you at once. In fact, it can mean only one thing. Another dead ’un?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Over the road. In the Court.’
Spike ushered them in. ‘What, right on your own doorstep?’
‘Closer,’ said Troy.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Spike said softly. He stepped behind the bar and shoved two glasses under the optics. ‘On the ’ouse,’ he said, and left them to it.
The two glasses sat either side of a tiny round table. The smell of the brandy almost brought Troy to retching. Neither of them wanted it.
Jack could not sit. He seemed to Troy to be at that stage of exhaustion where to settle would be to sleep. He pulled back a chair, slung his coat over it, and paced the room, rubbing at his forehead, occasionally screwing his fists into his eyes. His notebook stayed buttoned up in his pocket. Troy rolled up his coat for a pillow and stretched full length on a mock-leather bench beneath the window. He could feel the rumble of the traffic in St Martin’s Lane, he could see the fancy plasterwork of the ceiling if he looked straight up, and if he twisted his neck he could hold a conversation with Jack’s knees.
They were wooden figures in a Swiss weather house – at opposite poles of activity.
‘Let’s go over the basics one more time,’ Jack began. ‘Jackie was Clover Browne?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Stan knew this, or he just suspected it?’
‘He knew.’
‘And Clover Browne was the third woman in the Fitz business?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how many people knew this?’
‘Every hack in London I should think. No one ran with it because of the libel laws, and because Vice apparently couldn’t find her and hence could not call her as a witness. I doubt any newspaper wanted to be the first to name her. Stan’s instincts were right. If he could just keep Jackie from blundering into the press she was probably safe, and the good name of Onions safe with it.’
‘It was Percy Blood’s investigation, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Blood never identified Clover as Jackie? Hence the procurement charge was dropped?’
‘Without Clover the charge was nonsense. It was a waste of time charging Fitz with something so weak, but then so was so much else of what was produced as evidence. I went to the Old Bailey most days. It was a botched case. I told Coyn as much. I don’t think the press know. Rod’s son Alex has been making all the running in the papers, and he’s never let slip to me that he knew who Clover was. And if he knew he’d have asked. He’d have come to me with a stream of questions.’
‘Do you think Fitz knew?’
‘Knew what?’
‘Knew that he was entertaining the granddaughter of a senior policeman.’
‘I’ve no idea. It would not have bothered him if he did. He collected celebrity and pseudo-celebrity. I mean, it even seemed to amuse him to know me. I cannot work out whether he enjoyed risk or whether he simply had no concept of it. As far as Fitz was concerned, risk was probably stealing or forging or killing – I don’t th
ink he recognised a notion of social risk. Rules were for idiots. Rules were not for him. Rules were made to be broken. But then, Fitz’s graspof reality struck me as being as flimsy as the case against him. I could not get him to see that the judge meant to see him go down. He might have got off at appeal, but I really think this morning would have seen Fitz sent down for a couple of years. He’d have done a few months before the appeal, and you know what a meal the hard boys would make of a man like Fitz. Couldn’t get that throughtohim.’
‘You don’t think he might have thought it through after the two of you parted, and thought the worst of it?’
‘It’s possible. Of course it’s possible. I might have tipped him over the edge. But I know this – he would never have chosen a gun as his ticket to the next world. Anything but a gun. He hated guns. Went right through the war as an officer without even touching one. And why would any doctor have need of a gun to kill himself? Why would a man as fastidious as Fitz leave a mess? He could have opened his doctor’s Gladstone bag, swallowed a handful of Nembutal and gone happily to Valhalla.’
‘So we agree.’
‘Do we?’
‘There is no evidence, at least none I’ve found at this very early stage, to suggest that Fitz was anything but alone at the time of his death. He’d given Pritch-Kemp a key and he’s spent the past few nights with Fitz. Company, I suppose. Stopped him thinking. Pritch-Kemp let himself in some time after midnight, as he seems to have done every night this week, and found Fitz dead. An army-issue Webley still in his hand.’
‘But?’
‘It was murder. I know in my bones Fitz was murdered.’
‘And Clover?’
‘How much faith do we put in coincidence?’
‘It’s a pretty cool customer who pumps a young woman full of drugs in Soho and then nips off to Paddington to shoot someone.’
‘But . . . as you said in the hospital, you have doubts. No reason to want to kill herself.’
This was a familiar moment, one they used to reach so often in cases. Jack was appealing to Troy to support his instinct. The vagaries of rank, the vicissitudes of ill-health meant nothing. Jack was saying, ‘Let’s be a team.’ And Troy could not respond. He could not tell Jack that he knew in his bones that Jackie Clover was murdered. He knew nothing in his bones. His body talked to him of raging silence.
Jack put his coat back on. Looked at his watch. Troy swung his feet to the ground and found he had but one thought and that idle.
‘Two murders,’ Troy said. ‘And I just happen to be the last person to see both victims alive. Now that is a coincidence.’
‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you really want me to. But the last people to see Fitz alive were half a dozen ill-assorted hacks from Fleet Street. I doubt Fitz got past his own front door without running the gauntlet. But then, that’s why young Jackie was with you, wasn’t it? No hacks on your step.’
‘Quite – and as far as the hospital and the hacks are concerned she’s still Clover Browne. You’ll have to talk to Coyn. I can’t nobble the coroner, but he can.’
‘You really think you can keep it a secret?’
‘I’d hate to face Stan if we can’t.’
Jack strode to the door, pulling on the handle as he said his last words to Troy.
‘I’ll try and keepin touch. There’ll be a stink of course. Coyn will lose his bottle. But we owe Stan a bit of discretion, I think.’
If this was Jack’s way of saying he’d hold the press at arm’s length, then Stan would not be the only one thankful for a bit of discretion.
§ 73
Jack sent a detective sergeant to take a full statement from Troy. Troy dictated with all the precision and brevity of a thirty-year copper and the man asked few questions. At the end he gathered up his foolscap sheets and printed forms and said, ‘Dreadful business.’ And it sounded to Troy like some form of condolence.
The Commissioner, Sir Wilfrid Coyn, telephoned not long afterwards. It was, he said, ‘a dreadful business’.
Troy had no respect for Coyn. Indeed, he had come to regard ‘respect’ as a notion thought up by old men to keep order among the young. It had little or nothing to do with any idea that those so demanding of respect might also have to be deserving of it, that the condition might involve some consideration of worth, either in the disciplines of character or in the soundness of action. It was as meaningless as its oft-invoked adjective ‘respectable’. If their positions had been reversed and Coyn were Onions and Onions Coyn, Stan would have called in person, would have assured himself face to face that a matter involving two suspicious deaths, a recently retired policeman of highest rank, and the serving Chief of CID , was wholly above board and wholly without detriment to the force. He’d have raised hell.
The inquest on Clover opened and adjourned. What little Jack had asked of Coyn he appeared to have done. There was not a mention of her real name.
There remained the funeral.
Since Clover had died in the presence of two nurses and a doctor and since a post-mortem had revealed the cause of death in the residue of twenty-eight sleeping pills in her stomach, the coroner saw fit to release the body for burial.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Onions said. ‘Ten o’clock. Acton Cemetery.’
It was a call Troy had dreaded.
‘Stan, I really don’t think I should—’
‘Be there!’ was all Stan said before he hung up.
Troy rode the Central line out to North Acton. It stopped only yards from the cemetery. He could walk from there. It was a morning for the dead, a dampmorning, a miasma of autumnal dew.
It was a scene too familiar. He’d been to two other Onions family funerals: Stan’s wife Marjorie, dead from cancer in the first weeks of the war, and his son-in-law Kenneth in ’56, tortured and murdered by EOKA on Cyprus. He had vivid, etched-in, scorched memories of Valerie Clover, née Onions, clinging for life in the fact of death to her father’s arm and weeping copiously – but, as ever, bitterly rather than sadly. Life cheated Val, swindled her at every turn.
There were few mourners. Stan had left his family behind in Rochdale when he moved to the Yard in the 1920s. He was one of the few working-class coppers ever to be Met commissioner – the rank and the title sat uneasily on him, and he’d been given both so close to retirement that the job had proved a disappointment. He could make so little of it in the three years he held it. And it made no friends. A Met commissioner with a Lancashire accent, black boots, belt and braces, was never going to be acceptable in society. He had been a working copper. And when the work had been pulled from under him at retirement he had taken to his allotment in Acton, where the other gardeners would joke about ‘Sir Stan’, until he told them all to ‘bugger off ’. Troy stood at the back. The other half-dozen people between him and the upright, pale Onions, the bent, the wilted, weeping Valerie, he took to be neighbours. The dutiful and the decent.
All the same he knew he would not get off lightly.
As they moved off, he wondered if he could just calmly walk back to the Underground without saying anything, but Stan seized him by one elbow and muttered, ‘Second car,’ to him, and he found himself sharing an old Rolls-Royce with three housewives from Starch Green – who told him they’d been in the Townswomen’s Guild with ‘Marje’, ‘Did you know Marje?’ – for the ride back to the little house in Tablecloth Terrace and a wake cast in hell.
The small front room was full. Another dozen mourners, mostly women of Stan’s age, had appeared from somewhere, and they muttered and munched on crustless sandwiches of tinned salmon and cucumber sliced so thin it was shaved. The Townswomen’s Guild must have done the catering, Troy concluded. Stan would never waste the crusts off a loaf of bread. And he’d never known Valerie cook a meal.
Troy watched Stan playing host, commanding the ritual, endlessly thanking all these old women for turning out. Valerie stuck close to him, but stood unaided. Pale, frail, bleached by grief, but at – he guessed – forty-four or five
, still good-looking. Her daughter’s blowaway blonde hair, the Onions family piercing blue eyes. She had survived the battle with the bottle in a way Charlie would not.
He explained a dozen times that he had worked with Stan up to his retirement and heard a dozen times how interesting that was. Then one of the matrons saw the reality beneath the small talk and told him he needed fattening up. As if to ram home the point, she put a whole plate of sandwiches in his hand, added a couple of cold, crisp sausages, and seemed all set to stand smiling while she personally restored him to good health.
Val crossed the room, seized the plate, slammed it down onto the table and shoved him ahead of her into the back room. ‘I want to hear it from you,’ she said.
She sat down and waited for him to do the same. They sat a couple of feet apart on straight-back chairs like strangers encountering one another in a dentist’s waiting room.
Troy told her. Coming home and finding Jackie. The mad dash to the hospital. The moment the young doctor had come into his cubicle to tell him Jackie had died. It was very matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion. He had long ago learnt not to loose emotion on Val. She would consume all he had and want yet more.
He finished. It seemed stupidly simple in the telling. Val sat silently, her breathing deepand loud, the respectful hubbub of the wake drifting in from the other room.
‘There’s still one thing,’ Val said.
‘What’s that?’ said Troy, with no idea what she’d say next.
‘Did you fuck her, Troy?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Did you fuck my daughter?’
And when Troy said nothing to this too she said it all the louder.
‘Did-You-Fuck-My-Daughter?’
Onions appeared in the doorway, took one look at the two of them and closed the door quietly behind him.
‘Do you want everyone to hear you? Keep your voice down, woman!’
He might as well not have spoken. Valerie got to her feet and began to beat Troy about the head with both hands, clenched into fists, raining blows down on him. He rose instinctively, put his hands to his face – the only defence.
