by John Lawton
‘Tell me you didn’t fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’
Onions seemed to freeze. Unless he stepped in she would soon hammer Troy to the floor – he’d no strength to stopher. Over and over, louder and louder. ‘Tell me you didn’t fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’
Then it stopped. Onions had put his arms around her and pinned hers to her side.
‘For Christ’s sake, Freddie, just tell her what she wants to hear!’
Suddenly Valerie was calm. She stopped struggling. Took Troy’s silence for answer. ‘He can’t. Don’t you see? He can’t.’
‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake, man!’
He let her go. She took Troy’s face in her hands, wiped a streak of blood away from the corner of his mouth with the tipof one thumb. Looked into his eyes, exactly as Troy recalled himself doing with Anna a few months ago.
‘He can’t say he didn’t, because he did. Didn’t you, Freddie?’
All he could see was her. Blue eyes, the same shade as her father’s, the same shade as Jackie’s. And all he could hear was Stan.
‘You stupid, stupid bugger. You must be mad. Completely bloody mad. You must have been mad. Mad, mad, mad. Whatever were you thinking of ?’
Troy could no more answer Stan’s question than he could Valerie’s.
§ 74
When he got home he felt dreadful. A nausea akin to seasickness. He looked in the mirror. As a rule he was white as a sheet. He’d got used to that. He thought of it as the colour of the disease – TB was white. Now he was reddish, purple where he was coming up in bruises from Valerie’s fists. It was a good job she had beaten him. If she had not, Onions surely would have and he would be a damn sight the worse for it.
He made tea and stretched out on the chaise longue, hoping the world would go away. Sipped tea, tasted blood. With his second cup he felt the need of music. He hadn’t played a record in ages. There was one already sitting at the bottom of the pit in the gramophone. He pulled it off the spindle and looked at the label. It was the record Foxx had given him; the one Clover seemed to play at any opportunity; the one she had played every day of that long weekend at Uphill. ‘Please, Please Me’ by the Beatles. She must have been playing it on the last night of her short life, while he was out with Fitz. And it had sat there ever since.
He read through the song titles, his brain making idle connections and refusing in its present condition to see them as idle. It seemed to him in his madness that they represented coded chapters in the messy saga in which he was now embroiled. He had seen her standing there – and of course she was just seventeen – he had gone to Anna, who had asked him to please, please her, then bound him in chains, caused his misery, and packed him off to the place, then the weeks of secrets, then his brief taste of honey and the final PS I Love You . . . Where was the song about the complete fucking idiot he’d been?
He slipped the record back into its sleeve and stuck it in the rack. It had punctuated the spring and summer. He could not yet conceive of the circumstances which would induce him to listen to it again.
§ 75
He found that he could remember the wording of Clover’s suicide note. He sat one day, doing nothing, trying to think nothing, and found the words projected in his skull like a silent cinema show from the days of childhood. He could see the words, terse as a caption card, filling in the action one never got to see, substituting for the dialogue one never got to hear.
Just to be certain, he sat at his desk and wrote them down. His fancy, quasi-Russian hand, all flow and loop, replacing her stickman letters, scarcely joined up at all.
I’m sorry to do this to you, and I know it’s a mess. But it pays to know when it’s all pointless. You been great – really you have – but this was always there, always with me, and it was never going to go away. Was it?
Why was it pointless? What was it that was always there and never going to go away? She wrote this as though she thought he knew. Did suicides ever calmly jot anything down beforehand? Didn’t death by pills mean that what was written was written as the narcolepsy hit? Why should Clover’s words mean a damn thing? Written, as they probably were, through a haze of pills that whacked you sideways, shoved your brains into your loins and then puffed you off to never-never land with a stupid grin of satisfaction on your face?
Clover had her ups and downs. The woman he’d encountered at Uphill was surly, secretive and rude. The child Onions had delivered into his inadequate care was peevish, distraught and rude. He’d seen both personae evaporate in hours. Surly Clover had given way to the self-assured tart who’d strolled across Uphill Park with him wearing only a fur coat and wellies. Peevish Jackie had turned herself around almost as soon as her grandfather had left to become a city girl, professing a greater wisdom of the streets than he pretended to himself. And buried beneath both was a romantic who was touched by Jules et Jim and bowled over by his sparse account of Mayerling.
He did not know the woman. Had not known the woman. He had no idea of what she was capable – except change.
If there was one person of whom he knew less than he knew of Clover Browne, it was Frederick Alexeyevitch Troy.
He sat in Embankment Gardens, stranded out of season in the nearest bit of municipal green to his house, on a grey autumnal afternoon, feeling tormented by the sound of seagulls flocking on the Thames, depressed by the optimism of a man who still put out deckchairs at this time of year – and summed up his life.
Not long turned forty-eight, separated but not divorced – unless Fitz was wrong and she had divorced him in absentia in some foreign part.
A small man, used to be a looker as Clover herself had put it. Thin as the dying Chatterton in somebody-or-other’s famous painting in the Tate, though gaining weight; his bathroom scales told him he was eight stone four now.
Jobless – he never would get back to the Yard. By the time he could muster a clean bill of health, a full year would have passed and a new order come into being. His career was over; he had better accept that. More fuck-ups to his record than he dare count – it seemed to him he was surrounded by the dead. A small mountain of bodies to his name – Diana Brack, Norman Cobb, now Clover Browne. He had killed her with neglect as surely as he had killed the other two with bullets.
No appetite to speak of. No appetite, either, for books or music – he did not read, he did not play, he did not listen.
All in all, it was a good recipe for suicide. Chatterton had topped himself at seventeen. Just like Clover. Except that the recipe simply didn’t fit. It was him, not her, who had recognised the pointlessness of it all. Of course, it paid to know when it was all pointless. But that was him talking. His words, written by her, framed by her. But meant for him. What possible reason could she have for dying? He knew what her grandfather would say – given the chance, Troy knew he would most certainly say it any day now – she had ‘so much to live for, her whole life ahead of her’. He would wait and say nothing and nod his agreement when Stan did say it. But he knew – he had nothing to live for, his life was behind him. Good bloody grief, had the woman breathed in his despair between his sheets, as he had breathed in the tubercular bacillus on some crowded Moscow streetcar? Had this been his protection – to infect her with his own misery?
The bloke who collected money for deckchairs had finally seen the light – or seen the lack of it; the sun had not so much as peeped all day – and was gathering up the chairs with a tuneless clacking of wood on wood. A bold, a tame, seagull stood near Troy’s feet, ripping the frankfurter from the mustard heart of a day-old hot dog. If he was quick he could leap on the wretched bird and throttle the life out of it before it could utter one more of it’s ear-splitting squawks, wrap his hands around its rotten feathery neck and squeeze until the bugger choked.
§ 76
That night the Demon sat upon his bedpost. Not one he knew. He knew the Demon of Despair – its eyes were green and it never stopped talking. He knew the Demon of Madness – its eyes were
red as though lit from within by tiny flames struck over and over again from flint and tinder.
This Demon said nothing and its eyes were silvered like a looking-glass. In them he saw his own reflection.
‘Which are you?’ said Troy.
‘Guilt,’ said the Demon.
‘Don’t believe we’ve met,’ said Troy.
‘Have now,’ said the Demon.
§ 77
‘What is this?’ said Troy. ‘A delegation?’
He had opened the front door to find Jack, Clark and Mary McDiarmuid in the courtyard.
‘Yep,’ said Jack.
‘You’d better come in, then, and don’t sit in a row or you’ll look like three wise monkeys.’
Jack threw off his coat and said, ‘How are you? Are you on the mend?’
It was not idle pleasantry, Troy knew.
‘You didn’t come here to ask about my health.’
‘It matters all the same.’
Jack plonked himself next to Swift Eddie on the sofa. Mary McDiarmuid took a dining chair and Troy stood with his back to the gas fire facing them.
‘We want you to come back to the Yard. In fact, it’s absolutely vital you come back. I’ve had a week on the deaths of Paddy Fitz and young Clover. I’ve made bugger all progress. I’ve had to fight for forensic resources. I’ve been swamped by that multiple shooting in Silvertown. By last night I was beginning to think I was being deliberately overworked, diverted, what you will – but then Quint stepped in. Asked for a report, waited while I typed it up, read it and told me it was open and shut, told me I’d had a whole week and turned up nothing – this despite the fact that I’d been handling three other cases for most of the week – pronounced them suicide and told me to wrap it.’
He paused to consult the other two with a silent exchange of glances.
‘You have to come back. If you don’t, Quint will kill the case.’
‘I thought you said he already had?’
Mary McDiarmuid spoke from her place at the table. ‘It’s protocol.’
‘Protocol?’
‘Procedure, then.’
This was not a word Troy cared for. The procedural was deadly boring.
‘Quint is only overruling Jack because he can.’
‘I think that goes with being Assistant Commissioner,’ said Troy.
‘No, that’s what I meant about protocol. Quint does what he does only in your name. He’s running CID while you’re on sick leave. All you have to do is come back, take a look at the file and decide to reopen it. Perfectly proper procedure.’
‘And all Quint has to do is overrule me.’
‘And when did that last happen? When did the head of C section last upset the apple cart by telling the chief detective to drop a case?’
She was right. No assistant commissioner would so interfere in a CID investigation at so early a stage. If Troy came back, if he reopened the investigation into the deaths of Clover Browne and Patrick Fitzpatrick, Quint would just bite on the bullet. Later rather than sooner he had every right to ask what result had been achieved, but Troy would have at the least a clear fortnight before that same protocol permitted him to ask much more than a supervisory question, a catch-all put-me-in-the-picture.
‘I couldn’t investigate and run CID . I’d be dead on my feet within the week.’
‘You don’t have to. Eddie and I can run it. Or did you think you did it all by yourself anyway? He’s had your signature off pat for years. You’re damn lucky he’s not picking up your pay cheque.’
This was typical Mary McDiarmuid. Blunt as stone on steel. Clark did not react, not so much as a flicker in the face of incontrovertible truth.
‘It’s not as easy as you might think. Any doctor can sign me off. But only a police surgeon can sign me back on. I haven’t a clue whether I could get Anna to pass me fit, but it wouldn’t matter if she did, the Yard will only accept a clean bill of health with one of its own as signatory. We’ll never get a police surgeon to sign.’
‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Jack. ‘Only thing is he’s late. He was meant to meet us on the doorstep ten minutes ago.’
There was a timely rap at the door. Before Troy could move, Jack had shot from his seat and yanked open the door. ‘You’re late!’ he said to whoever was there.
Then Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, MD, MSc, ARCSc, DIC, FRIC, MBE, Head of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, pushed him to one side, saying as he did so, ‘You want truncheon up arse, copper, you going right way to get it!’
He stuck his homburg on the hatstand, dropped his doctor’s bag on the floor and gave a Troy a quick once over.
‘You white as snow,’ he pronounced in his fractured mode.
Troy got the picture.
‘Jack – do you seriously expect this stunt to work?’
‘What you mean, stunt? I’m qualified police surgeon – have been since 1934. Qualified enough to know you look like shit and should be in bed with hot-water bottle and back numbers of the Beano.’
‘Do you see what I mean?’ Troy said to Jack.
‘Knock it off, the pair of you. This will work. Kolankiewicz is, as he rightly says, a police surgeon. All he has to do is sign one piece of paper.’
‘And his patients have one thing in common. They’re all dead by the time they get to see him! He hasn’t practised on the living in thirty years.’
Kolankiewicz came up close, only inches away, took his wrist and felt for a pulse. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Stick out your tongue.’
Troy shook himself free. ‘Stop it. Stop it the lot of you! This isn’t going to work.’
Jack moved in, closer, if that were physically possible, than Kolankiewicz himself. ‘Freddie. It doesn’t have to be real. All we need is the pretence. Once the paperwork’s done, who’s going to ask any questions?’
‘If it’s only a pretence then we’ll skip the examination. And if he opens his bag I’ll throw him out! I’m still alive – being treated by him makes me feel as though I’ve got one foot in the grave.’
Kolankiewicz looked hurt. Not an expression Troy had ever seen disrupt his countenance before.
‘How many times I treat you in the past, smartyarse? How many times you call on me when you in some mess where you don’t want the Yard or your regular physician knowing? Troy, I bound up head kickings and knife wounds. For Chrissake I even dug bullets out of you. And what about that time in ’55 I treated you for the clap when the last person on earth you wanted finding out was Anna?’
Mary McDiarmuid coughed politely. ‘Ladies present,’ she said.
All heads turned to her. Silence ensued. Jack retreated to the sofa. Kolankiewicz and Troy stood eye to eye. There was not a hair on Kolankiewicz’s head but for those which sprouted awry in the tiny forests of his ears and nostrils, and the caterpillars which passed for eyebrows. With every year that passed it seemed to Troy that Kolankiewicz got shorter, fatter and uglier, and he invariably smelled of liverwurst. Troy had known him since 1936 or thereabouts. He was quite possibly, defectors to the Soviet Union withstanding, his oldest friend. Bloody of mind and foul of mouth as he was, he deserved better than this.
‘I’m sorry. You’re right. Of course you’re right. And I’ve been more grateful than I could say on each occasion. The difference is not in you. It is in me. This isn’t a kicking or a stabbing. This time I’m ill. This time I haven’t bounced. This time, as you so rightly say, I look like shit. This time you can’t put Humpty together again with a brown paper bandage and a few Polish curses. I’m sorry. That’s all I meant.’
‘You want my professional advice?’ Kolankiewicz said softly.
Troy nodded.
‘You too ill. Tell the coppers go flying fuck.’
‘I can’t. They need me.’
‘Then I sign piece of paper and we say no more about it. All I ask of you is to take care. Remember how weak you are. And if you crack this one do me a favour, Troy, do yourself a favour, and sign off sick again.’
H
e held out his hand. Jack gave him the medical form and turned his back so Kolankiewicz could scrawl his near-illegible signature across it.
‘I put it through system,’ Kolankiewicz said, folding the form into three. ‘In a month or so maybe it reach Coyn’s desk. Maybe not.’
‘Tomorrow?’ Jack said hopefully.
‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Tomorrow.’
‘Good. I’ve got a squad car waiting. I really must get back to Silvertown.’
Troy wondered, watching Jack, Clark and Mary McDiarmuid file out, just what he had let himself in for. Only a few years ago, it seemed, it was him keeping squad cars waiting, engine running, ready for a dash to some insalubrious nook of the city. Now he was a pen pusher who couldn’t even push his own pen – dammit he even had someone to write his name for him.
Kolankiewicz made no move to leave.
‘Staying, are you?’ Troy asked.
‘You got whisky?’
‘I’m sure there’s a dropin the cupboard somewhere. God knows how old. I haven’t drunk Scotch in I don’t know when.’
‘Be a mensh. Pour a belt for your old pal.’
The cupboard meant under the kitchen sink, where Troy found a twelve-year-old single malt – at least it had been twelve years old when he had put it there in 1952 or ’53. He splashed an inch or so into a glass and handed it to Kolankiewicz.
‘Not bad,’ he said, sipping at it. ‘Not bad at all.’
‘Just as well,’ said Troy. ‘I’ve no vodka.’
‘Vodka is for show. Vodka is for being Polish. I drink vodka when I have something to prove.’
‘You mean you haven’t got something to prove?’
Kolankiewicz shrugged. ‘No. Nothing to prove. No Polish points. Just things on my mind.’
The presaging sigh reminded Troy of his Uncle Nikolai, a man given to setting the world – and Troy with it – to rights. It was not the modus operandi of the Polish Beast.
