A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Just answer me, Percy. Humour me.’

  ‘Did I threaten the Ffitch woman? Is that what you’re asking?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then that’s my answer. Yes. I threatened her. I told her I’d put the council onto her, onto the way she cared for her kid. And there was nothing illegal about that. I did no more than you’d have done in the same situation. I had a witness I knew in me bones was lying to me. Call it copper’s instinct, sir. Find me a copper who says he doesn’t believe in copper’s instinct and I’ll show you a poor copper. Tell me you don’t believe in such a thing as copper’s instinct and I’ll call you a liar. All I did was use what I had to get her to tell me the truth.’

  ‘She says you hit her.’

  ‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? Did she show you any bruises? Did she show anyone any bruises?’

  Troy knew that one of the talents Blood would have learnt in ten years in Special Branch was how not to leave marks when he hit a suspect.

  ‘I’d have done it too,’ Blood said. ‘And the courts would’ve backed me. A single woman, with a bastard child, seeing the kid when it suits her, keeping the company of nig-nogs and reefer addicts, and earning her keep by parading her fanny. If I’d shopped her, the kid would have been taken into care and the magistrate would have backed it with a court order. I threatened her with nothing I couldn’t follow through. It wasn’t idle, it wasn’t malicious and it wasn’t illegal. It was horsetrading. She had something I wanted and I had something on her. We came to an arrangement. And if that strikes you as odd or bent, then, sir, I don’t think we’ve been serving in the same force these last twenty years.’

  Blood was red with the tinge of anger. He bought himself a moment of time. Got up from his chair. Put the lid on the box and set it down on a side table. It seemed to Troy that he had symbolically cleared the space between them.

  ‘You interviewed her more than a dozen times. Bit excessive, isn’t it?’

  Blood stood gripping the back of the chair – his hands locked onto it like big, boiled crabs – broad palms and stubby red fingers.

  ‘Seventeen times to be precise. And the answer’s no. I did what my duty required of me. If I’d had to have her in twenty times I’d have done it.’

  ‘Why do you think she changed her mind in court?’

  ‘Did she, sir? I wasn’t in court. I was a witness myself, if you recall.’

  ‘She retracted her statement.’

  ‘And her sister didn’t. If you ask me the two of them had been rowing before the case came up. I think they fell out among themselves. According to the papers I read, the woman was hysterical, and when the prosecuting brief asked her why she’d signed a false statement she couldn’t tell him. I doubt the jury would have been taken in by it.’

  ‘We’ll never know,’ said Troy.

  ‘No sir, we’ll never know.’

  Blood crossed the room. He’d seized the upper hand, the minute he’d stood up, and now he was showing Troy the door.

  ‘It was good of you to call, sir.’

  He opened the door to the hall. Troy rolled with it and let himself be steered to the front door.

  ‘I wasn’t aware you were back at the Yard, sir.’

  ‘And I’, said Troy, ‘was not aware that you weren’t.’

  ‘Sick leave, sir. Happens to the best of us one time or another.’

  Blood took on the colours of the rainbow as he stood for a moment behind the stained-glass door, with the noon sun shining through the sailing ship. Then he twisted the doorknob, and white light washed in. There could be but one sentence left in him before he ushered Troy across the threshold.

  ‘It was good of you to call, sir. But I don’t answer to you, and if you call again I’d be grateful of a bit of notice. I’ll have a repfrom the Police Association, and you’ll have an officer from A10 with you, won’t you, sir?’

  One small thing was still nagging at Troy. At the best of times it was hard to believe in coincidence, even though this so obviously was one. He asked all the same.

  ‘You saw the medical officer on the 19th? Is that right?’

  ‘I don’t recall.’

  ‘You should. It was the day Fitzpatrick died.’

  Blood roared. ‘Peggy!!!’

  And the mouse-woman scurried to his side.

  ‘Mr Troy would like a word. He’s a question he wants to ask you. He’d like to know where I was on the night of the 19th. Tell ’im, Peggy.’

  ‘Percy was here with me. We had our tea and we listened to the wireless. There was a concert on the Light. Dance band. We went to bed about half past ten,’ she said.

  Blood slammed the door on him. It was all very pat and precise. But then, Blood was a career copper and precision was his business. He had not even asked what day of the week the 19th was – nor had his wife – and Troy was not at all sure that this meant anything. He could hammer on the door and ask Percy Blood what dance band had been playing, but he would know – Joe Loss, Ted Heath – he’d know.

  § 89

  ‘The Commissioner’s been in again,’ said Clark.

  ‘No problem,’ Troy replied.

  ‘And Mr Wiggins.’

  Troy had had so little to do with Superintendent Wiggins. He ran Vice. A shady bunch of nogoodniks for whom Troy was very happy to have no responsibility. Wiggins was no problem either. He’d have stuck in his two penn’orth sooner or later. Offended by Troy’s disregard of procedural courtesies. Troy would smooth ruffled feathers and give it to him straight. The occasion arose sooner than he had expected.

  Troy was sipping at a cup of nut-brown, stewed and scummy Scotland Yard tea in the canteen. It was late in the afternoon, and he felt fairly safe from attention. Then he saw the dark blur above him and looked up to see Dudley Wiggins, a man in the fierce grip of five o’clock shadow.

  ‘Mind if join you, sir?’

  Troy showed an open hand and beckoned him. Wiggins sat down and plonked his cup and saucer on the yellow-spotted Formica tabletop. Half an inch of tea slopped over into the saucer. Troy looked at his face – a man ten years older than he, grey and lined and worn out by the job – and realised why moustaches such as Wiggins sported were called tea-strainers.

  Wiggins poured back the spillage and slurped. ‘I hear you’ve had a chat with Percy Blood.’

  If Wiggins knew it was now pretty certain most of the Yard knew. It had taken a mere five hours to be common knowledge. Troy saw no reason to lie to the man. He could like it or he could lumpit.

  ‘I have,’ said Troy. ‘I know I should have told you first, but I acted quickly and I wanted to be certain Percy got no hint of my arrival. There wasn’t a lot of time for the protocol.’

  And that was as near an apology as the man was going to get.

  ‘Oh, I don’t mind about that. Blood’s not one of mine.’

  ‘But he’s on your squad?’

  ‘I got stuck wi’ Percy Blood. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I never asked for him. I got stuck with him. The AC just called me one day last May and told me I’d got Blood as DCI. What I thought didn’t matter Sweet Fanny Adams. I didn’t want the bugger on my squad. I didn’t want a career Special Branch copper trained in all the dirty tricks running my lads in Soho.’

  Troy could believe this. Wiggins didn’t want a member of the political police working in the Vice Squad and being privy to the countless little fiddles that Wiggins’s men ran from day to day.

  ‘I’m an old-school copper. I don’t hold wi’ people like Percy Blood.’

  This was fatuous, conceited, arrogant to the point of banality. Wiggins had probably served the best part of forty years, Troy had served twenty-seven and Blood had served at least thirty-five. They were all old-school coppers. That was the thing about the old school. Sooner or later everybody turned out to have been there. You just didn’t know it at the time. And simply to have been to the old school didn’t mean you’d sat at the same form as Dudley Wiggins while he carved ‘I love
Ethel Bloggs’ in the desktop – and it sure as hell didn’t mean you shared the same values. Wiggins’s old school was one that nodded to all his fiddles, one that turned Soho into his private fiefdom. Of course he didn’t want Percy Blood muscling in.

  ‘He was never part of the team, y’know.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.

  ‘I mean he didn’t account to me or to Mr Tattershall. He accounted direct to Mr Quint.’

  It occurred to Troy that Wiggins’s first reaction must have been to think that Blood had been brought in to spy on him.

  ‘And another thing – it cut us out of the juiciest case this side of Kitty O’Shea!’

  Ah – so his vanity was singed?

  ‘You think you could have made a case against Fitzpatrick, do you?’

  ‘Made it? Made it? I’d’ve put the twisted bugger away for life!’

  And it seemed to Troy that Fitz was a mirror to the nation, in which none could recognise their own image, save as dogs do, barking at their own reflection in a rock pool.

  § 90

  That evening as he walked down Goodwin’s Court, he heard boots clattering after him, and turned to see Onions. He’d been sitting in the Salisbury, waiting. It was the way people Troy knew found to find him. Onions was pretty close to being the last person Troy expected to be waiting for him.

  ‘I was waiting.’

  ‘I know,’ said Troy, paused with the key in the lock not knowing what came next. There’d been rows between them – they’d known each other the best part of thirty years – but nothing like the last. Troy had left Tablecloth Terrace concluding that Onions would not speak to him again.

  ‘Are we going in?’ Onions asked, and Troy pushed the door open.

  Troy tried letting routine carry them. He put the kettle on. Onions sat on the sofa and did not take off his mac. So far a typical Stan and Troy meeting, except that Stan usually had a bit more colour to his cheeks, and rarely, hardly looked his age. Grey before he was forty, and built like a docker, he had scarcely seemed to Troy to change. He was nearing seventy now. Perhaps Jackie’s death had been the one thing that could let time catch up with him? Perhaps Jackie’s death would be his death?

  ‘I hear you got something,’ he said.

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘I hear you’ve been to see Percy Blood.’

  Troy did not need to ask how he knew, although he was surprised at the speed with which he had been told. Blood would have complained to his cronies in Special Branch, and someone in the Branch would have been an old Onions protégé and would have called him at home. He thought of putting a small ad in The Times. ‘Commander Troy has been to see Percy Blood.’

  ‘What have you got on him?’

  ‘Not much. He’s crossed the line. Bullied the statements out of the Ffitch girls. He’s passing it off as routine – “We all do it, don’t we?” – but it wasn’t. I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got to go on. And it doesn’t connect with Jackie at all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Doesn’t connect?’

  ‘I meant . . . well he didn’t interview her, did he?’

  ‘Of course he didn’t. I told him not to.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I told that bugger Blood. I may be retired, but if he drags our Jackie into this I’ll see his career on the rocks.’

  ‘Blood knew?’

  ‘O’ course he bloody knew! I got word he was asking, so I met him in the Dog and Truss in Maiden Lane, and I told him. He left her alone or I’d sink him! I didn’t give the best years of my life to the Met to have my own grandchildren pestered by buggers like Percy Blood. The job owes me one favour. That’s it. I told him she knew nowt about owt – she’s wayward and she’s silly, but she’s not bent – and if I heard one more time that he was asking questions about her, I’d have ’im.’

  That Clover Browne was Jackie Clover was the best-kept secret of the whole affair. The Ffitch sisters did not know – Fitz might have known – the press did not know; Rebecca West did not know; the prosecution had dropped the charge of procurement because they did not know, because they could not find Clover Browne, and they could not find her because her real name was so well concealed. But Blood knew. Blood knew? How did Blood know? Troy knew only because Stan had told him. All the efforts of young bloods like Alex Troy had failed to find her, but Percy Blood knew?

  Suddenly Blood had moved from the periphery to the centre, simply because he knew. Troy was no further on, had not a scrap of new evidence – but Blood knew. It didn’t fit. Quite simply, it didn’t fit.

  He had not been listening to Stan. He tuned back in and tried to pickup thethread.

  ‘She had so much to live for, her whole life ahead of her,’ Stan was saying.

  Troy said nothing, and nodded his agreement.

  § 91

  He knew what he ought to do. He had been wrong to put it off in the first place. He needed a quiet spot, somewhere in the Yard where no one would think of looking for him, somewhere where he could go over all the evidence Jack had dumped on his desk.

  He went down to Forensics. Through the glass wall he could see Kolankiewicz eviscerating some poor sod. His office would be empty. Perfect. Most policemen were far more squeamish than Troy and tended to avoid Forensics, and few would beard the Polish Beast in his lair.

  He cleared a space on Kolankiewicz’s desk and dipped into the cardboard box. There wasn’t much. The empty pill jar with his own name on the label, the Webley .38 revolver that had killed Paddy Fitz, four bullets and a spent cartridge. The folder contained Jack’s hastily written report, a Forensics report from one of Kolankiewicz’s assistants, photographs of his own sitting room, and photographs of Fitz’s. The latter were messy. The bullet had taken off a large part of Fitz’s skull. There were also statements from some of the hacks outside Fitz’s house, from Pritch-Kempon the finding of Fitz’s body and from himself on the finding of Clover’s. It was not promising material. He was searching for something new. He was deeply uncertain of finding it.

  He read it all, and felt blank. ‘Rusty,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’m rusty. I’ve just been out of things a bit too long.’

  He read it all again – and the first sore thumb reared up.

  A dozen hacks, his own nephew included, had signed statements to say that they had been on Fitz’s doorstepall night, as they had been for many weeks, and had seen no one come or go except Pritch-Kemp.

  Then why had no one heard the shot?

  He phoned Alex.

  Alex said, ‘Did you see Tara?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘It’s confidential, Alex. And it’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling about your statement.’

  ‘Statement?’

  ‘The one you made to Jack Wildeve’s murder team on the morning of the twentieth.’

  Alex sighed audibly. This, clearly, interested him not one jot. Troy knew he would be looking at his watch, wondering how quickly he could get rid of his uncle.

  ‘You say you were there all night.’

  ‘Yes. We were. We ended up pissing into milk bottles.’

  ‘But you don’t report hearing the shot.’

  ‘I didn’t hear it.’

  ‘Why not? A Webley is not a sophisticated weapon. In the dead of night, it would sound like a cannon going off.’

  ‘Fitz lived at the back of the house, Freddie. Largely to get away from us, I should think.’ ‘You’d still have heard it if you’d been there all night.’ ‘Of course we were there all night. It was routine. So routine I thought it was a waste of time. Fitz would get home. Give us a smiley “Goodnight, gentlemen.” Then Pritch-Kemp would show up about midnight. And then there’d be nothing until the beat bobby moved us on about—’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It was routine, Freddie. We were moved on between eleven and about half past twelve every night. We just walked round the block, came in the other end of the mews. We were still there all night – it took less than fiv
e minutes!’

  ‘You don’t think that’s long enough for a murder?’ ‘The last time you called me it was an “unexplained death”!’ ‘Things have moved on. What time did the beat bobby move you on?’ ‘I don’t know. I told you it was routine. No one gave it any thought.’ ‘Try.’ ‘I dunno – eleven, eleven fifteen. I doubt it was much later than that. I suppose Pritch-Kemp came in about an hour later. Sometimes he came in before we were moved on, sometimes after. That night it was after.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Troy hung up and checked Pritch-Kemp’s statement.

  The press were outside as usual. Joky, a bit loud for the time of night. I asked them to keep down the noise.

  Troy flicked forward a page.

  Fitz was half in, half out of the armchair. I went to the bog and puked. It was several minutes before I could go back in – and I certainly could not have spoken, so I wasn’t yelling ‘Help! Help!’ or anything. When I did go back it was so quiet. Then this scraping cut through. I couldn’t place it

  And it started to fill up the room. I got very agitated. Irrational, but I did. It turned out to be the turntable on Fitz’s hi-fi. The needle was stuck in the final groove. Just repeating it endlessly – scrape, scrape, scrape.

  So Fitz had died to the sound of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. It did not strike Troy as music to commit suicide to. But what was? There was a radio show that could beat the hell out of Desert Island Discs. He would never have chosen the Jupiter – it was not other-worldly, it was so much of this world. It had . . . it had . . . pomp. It seemed to him that there was no other word for it. Heavy on the combined force of brass and strings – at least it was on the one recording he knew, the one Von Karajan had made in Italy during the war. It had oomph. He supposed that a man unfamiliar with the report of a gunshot might have presumed that a louder passage might drown it out. It wouldn’t, but if suicides’ minds worked so rationally, why not the 1812? – which Troy recalled seeing in Fitz’s collection of long-playing records, and which at full volume would drown out the Blitz.