A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  He called Paddington Green police station and asked for the station sergeant.

  ‘Did you instruct the foot patrol in Dreyfus Mews to move on the press?’

  ‘I did, sir. I thought we should show the force. Not a lot we could do, and I don’t have the men to leave anyone outside the door day and night, but the blokes on the beat were told to make our presence felt from time to time. We run the streets of London, not the gentlemen of the press.’

  Troy understood the logic. Men like this thought like soldiers. It was their turf, their territory. He doubted very much whether it had occurred to the man to give Fitz a bit of peace. He had done it because he believed in the thin blue line.

  ‘Was this common knowledge?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, sir. It certainly wasn’t a secret.’

  Anyone who cared to watch Dreyfus Mews, and, God knows, there were enough dark corners from which to watch, would have no difficulty working out the copper’s routine. Ninety minutes was hardly a long time. Two or three nights of observation and they’d know. On the other hand, a Chief Inspector of Vice could simply find an excuse to visit Paddington Green and sneak a look at the duty roster and the accompanying standing orders. No one would question his presence; no one would much remember seeing him.

  ‘Has Chief Inspector Blood been in lately, do you know?’

  The man thought for a minute and then proved Troy right.

  ‘Not so’s I can recall, sir.’

  The second thing to strike him was in a photograph of his living room. The chair in which he had found Clover, slumped and dying, stood between the gas fire and the coffee table. On the coffee table the Mandrax jar lay on its side, the cap and the little swab of cotton wool next to it. But beneath the table, a foot or so nearer the other armchair than Clover’s, was a white blob. He had no recollection of seeing this – and whatever it was it received no mention in Jack’s report or the findings of the forensic officer.

  He called the Scene of Crime man, a sergeant named Hopkins.

  ‘It was cotton wool, sir.’

  ‘And what did you do with it.’

  ‘I stuffed it back in the jar when I cleared up, sir.’

  Troy had taken a pill from that jar every day for a fortnight. The piece of cotton wool had been a devil to remove the first time – he’d got his little finger stuck in the neck of the jar trying. And each night he had stuffed it back thinking that it surely served some purpose. But there had been just the one piece, of this he was certain.

  He opened the jar. Two pieces. The two together far larger than the one he remembered. He checked the Forensics report. The jar had still had one pill left in when it reached the lab. Cameron, Kolankiewicz’s assistant, had analysed it and confirmed it as Mandrax. He had not analysed the cotton wool. This was far from sloppy work, but it wasn’t top notch either. He had made assumptions. Hopkins had made assumptions. They were not necessarily facts.

  He read the fingerprint report. The only prints on the jar belonged to Clover and to himself.

  The door to the office opened quietly. Troy looked up to find Kolankiewicz looking back at him.

  ‘Refuge?’ said Kolankiewicz.

  ‘Sort of. I began needing a place to hide. Now I rather think I need you.’

  Kolankiewicz crossed to the corner of the room and plugged in the kettle.

  ‘You want doughnut with your tea?’

  ‘Is it that time of day?’

  ‘Be dark soon. Of course it’s that time of day.’

  ‘I didn’t realise. I’ve been in here since lunchtime. Yes, I’ll take a doughnut.’

  Kolankiewicz inched him aside, tugged open a drawer in his desk and took out a box from a Viennese patisserie in Golder’s Green, a beautifully square box, pea-green lettering on white cardboard, held shut with golden thread.

  ‘I like the Viennese. You plonk them down anywhere on earth they do three civilised things. They found a university, they form a string quartet and they open a patisserie. You will appreciate I use the word doughnut lightly.’

  Indeed he did. Such was the array of cream and pastry that it brought back the appetite of a man who had presumed it had left him for ever.

  Over a custard slice Troy said, ‘Can you analyse these?’ And held up the two pieces of cotton wool.

  ‘Piece of cake,’ said Kolankiewicz.

  ‘And why would your man Cameron not have analysed them?’

  ‘Cameron is a good man, Troy. He was rushed by Jack. Jack was rushed by Quint. That said, if the cotton wool was in the jar . . .?’

  Kolankiewicz did not finish the sentence.

  ‘There’ve been too many ready conclusions drawn in this case,’ said Troy. ‘Jack’s man put it in the jar, assuming it had come from there. Your man didn’t ask any questions. And none of my people thought to check whether there was a beat bobby around.’

  ‘I repeat. He’s a good man. What you are saying is that he didn’t ask the right questions.’

  Kolankiewicz shoved the box of cakes towards him, a ‘help-yourself ’ gesture. Troy went back to reading the reports.

  It took a while. He must have read it half a dozen times and not seen what it meant.

  Cameron: one shot fired. Four unused .38 cartridges in the chamber. Manufacturer’s standard load. No modifications. Gun in all prob. untraceable.

  To this Jack had added a scrawl saying, ‘No other firearms in house – no bullets – no box.’

  ‘If you were hell-bent on suicide, would you load five chambers in a revolver or would you presume to kill yourself with the first shot?’

  Kolankiewicz peered over his shoulder at the report. ‘Eh?’ ‘All he needed was one bullet. Why would he put in more?’ ‘Suicides aren’t usually that rational.’ Troy ignored this. ‘If you loaded a gun without really thinking you’d fill six chambers. If you were hell-bent on suicide and a part of your mind was still rational, and, after all, suicide requires a certain practicality – I’ve known them to pay all their bills first, empty the ashtrays and flush the lavatory – then you’d load one. But a trained man setting out to use a gun leaves one chamber empty to avoid accidents. Standard procedure. You do it on auto. A thug with a gun fills all six and doesn’t care if he blows his foot off drawing the damn thing. A trained man always leaves the hammer on an empty chamber.’

  ‘Any old soldier would know that. Any officer. And Fitz did his bit. You told me so yourself.’ ‘No, not soldiers. Coppers. It’s a copper’s thing. Soldiers are blasé – wear a gun all the time and it becomes as routine as tying your shoelaces. And Fitz wasn’t in the infantry, he was in the Army Medical Corps – he refused weapons training. Even defied them to court-martial him. He wouldn’t know the ropes. The only gun Fitz ever had was made of wood.’

  But the only prints on the Webley were Fitz’s. He went back to the report.

  Pritch-Kemp: Fitz’s head, what was left of it, was lolling over the left arm of the chair. His right hand was over the right arm, still holding the gun. I’ve never known why this happens. It’s the stuff of a twopenny mystery. Why does the dead hand grip so? Why doesn’t the weight just pull the gun out of the hand? I got my breath back and phoned Scotland Yard. I told them I had found Dr Fitzpatrick dead. Then I sat and waited. I couldn’t leave the room, I couldn’t leave him – but I couldn’t look at him either. I sat still. I didn’ ttouch anything, except the arm of the hi-fi. The scraping would have driven me mad. I suppose it took less than ten minutes for the police to arrive. I knew they’d got here when I heard the hubbub in the street.

  Few people ever so speculated in police statements. It looked to Troy as though Jack had simply decided to let him rip and tell it in his own words. It contrasted sharply with his own matterof-fact account.

  Wildeve: The deceased was still holding a .38 Webley in his right hand when I arrived S-O-C. There were severe powder burns to the right side of the head approx. one inch above and one inch in front of right ear.

  This figured. The gun pressed to the s
kull. The instinctive turning of the head away from the barrel. No matter whether you were aiming the gun yourself or someone else was.

  Wildeve: I took the gun from his hand. On opening the chamber I found one spent round under the hammer and four live bullets.

  Bullets. Bullets. Bullets. Then it hit him. He almost dropped the file. ‘Bullets!’ he said. ‘We just did bullets,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘There’s no fingerprint report on the bullets! Only on the gun.’ Kolankiewicz tore the file from his fingers. ‘Shit, shit, shit and lots more shit!’ ‘You going to tell me he’s a good man one more time?’ But Kolankiewicz wasn’t listening. He had a jeweller’s glass in one eye and was holding one of the bullets under his desk lamp. ‘There’s a partial on this one. Pass me another – and pick it up by the lead end.’ One by one, Troy handed him the remaining live bullets, and then the spent shell on the end of a ballpoint pen. Kolankiewicz pulled out his eyepiece.

  ‘I need to dust them and photograph them. The sides are badly smudged. The percussion ends all have partials, and I think they are all thumbprints.’

  ‘Figures,’ said Troy. ‘You palm the bullets and shove them into the chamber with your thumb.’

  ‘I make no promises, Troy. But I say this. If I photograph all five I may be able to reconstruct a single print with a little cut and paste.’

  ‘When?’ said Troy.

  ‘Tomorrow morning. First thing.’

  § 92

  Kolankiewicz had one wall of his office lined in cork. He had cleared it of pins and paper and by the time Troy and Mary McDiarmuid arrived the next morning he had it covered in 10 × 8 blow-ups of thumbprints. They looked on this scale like contour maps of some mountainous country – central Italy or Transylvania or Idaho. The middle of thumb – spiralling whorls vanishing into obdiplostemonous vortices – the outer edges of thumb – formidable Apennine ridges running north to south and east to west. Across half of them he had drawn blue lines with a setsquare, and from the copies now littering the floor he had cut and pasted to assemble in the centre of the board a composite thumbprint, as neat as the face of Frankenstein’s monster, but complete. Next to it he had pinned a thumbprint marked up in red crayon as ‘Fitzpatrick’.

  Even with them blown up to the size of dinner plates, he was peering from one to the other through a magnifying glass.

  ‘Well?’ said Troy.

  Kolankiewicz did not turn. He roved across his masterpiece, reached out blindly with one hand and adjusted the anglepoise lamp to give more light. ‘Even if I have to say so myself, this is bloody good,’ he said. ‘The print is not Fitzpatrick’s.’

  Even Troy could see that.

  ‘You never thought it was, did you?’ Kolankiewicz said.

  He put his glass down and faced them.

  ‘There is, as we surmised, just the one digit, but in five different sections. They overlap considerably, and I think we got lucky. Your man did not set out a row of bullets on a desktop and pick them up one by one. He did what you said you would do. Palmed the lot and fed them in. This is what smudged prints on the sides of the cartridge – we have only blurs – but it also caused much twisting of the right hand, and consequently brought the thumb down at a different angle and area of surface each time. Essentially five different actions rather than the same action repeated five times. Hence the variations in pressure, density of latent image and area of print.’

  ‘Hence our picture.’

  ‘Indeed. Behold. Am I not magnificent? Am I not the Leonardo of the Yard?’

  ‘Did he work in Kodak and cow-gum, then?’ said Mary McDiarmuid.

  Kolankiewicz smiled. Sarcasm he could handle. What he hated was ‘the great English po-face’, as he called it. And Mary McDiarmuid had none of it.

  ‘Believe me, Scottish person, if Leonardo had known about Kodak and cow-gum he would have used them. Now, see for yourself.’

  He handed Troy the magnifying glass. Troy agreed silently that the print was pretty well complete, but beyond that he had no idea what to make of it.

  ‘Can you’, he asked, ‘get enough points of similarity to take into court?’

  ‘Similarity with what? You given me nothing to match it with!’

  ‘Sorry, I was getting ahead of myself. Mary, would you call Chief Inspector Blood and ask him to come in this afternoon? Say about two o’clock?’

  Mary McDiarmuid seized Troy by the arm, dragged him into the corridor and banged the door behind them.

  ‘Are you out of your mind? I thought you thought Blood was a link, a connection. At worst guilty of bullying the witnesses. Are you saying now that you think he killed Paddy Fitz?’

  ‘Yes. In fact I’m almost certain he did.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He knew too much.’

  Mary McDiarmuid tilted her head, screwed up one eye and squinted at him.

  ‘Cliché, Troy.’

  ‘Nonetheless it’s true.’

  ‘Percy Blood knew too much? You expect me to drag a serving member of the force off the street on the strength of that? Can you imagine the row? As things are I have a table to myself in the canteen. None of the other women want to sit with me ’cos you’re giving one of our own a hard time. Now you want to accuse him of murder?’

  ‘Not accuse. I just want to ask him a few questions. And to ask for a set of his prints.’

  ‘They may well be on record.’

  ‘They may, but they’ll be with the Branch and the minute we ask for them someone will accidentally put a match to them. Get the bugger in, Mary.’

  She was still looking awry at him. ‘You don’t think it’s time to call in A10?’

  ‘It’s murder, Mary, not a protection racket squeezing a few quid out of the clubs and restaurants.’

  ‘Your office at two?’

  ‘No, an interview room at two. Let’s see how Percy likes being on the receiving end.’

  § 93

  Troy was standing on one of the many half-landings on the south staircase, in front of one of Norman Shaw’s vast windows, watching the river flow. He saw Coyn reflected in the glass – the dark mass of his uniform, dotted with the brightness of buttons and his insignia of rank – as he came up the staircase towards him. This was one more reason why he’d never be Commissioner – he did not much want a title, but he certainly did not want to wear the uniform again. He could never be a chocolate-creme soldier. He could never be that neat in blue and silver. Sir Wilfrid Coyn never had a hair out of place. He was the sort of man whose moustache could be measured with a micrometer, whose fingertips were little arcs of perfection, buffed nicotine-clean with lemon juice and pumice stone, the sort of man whose wife regularly trimmed the hairs in his nose and ears. They stood side by side. The briefest exchange of looks and then Coyn too stared at the river.

  ‘Do you not think you’re a bit close to this one, Freddie?’

  The best lies are always couched in the vocabulary of the lied to.

  ‘It’s because I’m close to it that I can handle it. It’s not just any crime. It’s a matter of Met pride. Onions will be unrelenting if we don’t handle this properly.’

  ‘Mr Quint considered it wrapped, I believe.’

  ‘No disrespect to Mr Quint, but I’ve spent my entire career in murder. I deemed this worth a second look.’

  ‘Should you be out in the field so soon? Couldn’t one of your chaps handle it?’

  ‘After five months away I need a practical case to work on. This was simply the top of the pile.’

  He could believe this if he liked.

  ‘But you won’t overdo it, will you?’

  Troy said nothing. What was it Jack had said? Eyes as big as saucers? Every cell in his body was overdoing it.

  § 94

  Troy met with Blood alone in a stark, windowless room at the Yard. Three chairs, a table and an ashtray. He lumbered in. The old school of men like Wiggins and Blood had its uniform. A heavy brown macintosh, a grey chalk-stripe suit that had seen better days, a row of biros peepin
g out from the breast pocket, a trilby, police-issue black boots that did not quite meet the turn-ups of his trousers, and five o’clock shadow at any o’clock of the day. On formal occasions he probably wore a bowler and looked like a plainclothes copper from a Giles cartoon in the Daily Express.

  ‘Do I need to ask what this is about? Or have the Ffitch sisters been complaining about me again?’

  ‘Take a seat, Percy.’

  Blood sat opposite Troy, placed his hat on one corner of the table, and made no move to take off his mac. Symbolic of his belief that he’d not be here long.

  ‘It’s not about the Ffitch sisters. It’s about Patrick Fitzpatrick.’

  ‘Matter of record, sir. All in my notes. I had a case.’

  ‘I’ve read your notes. You don’t record striking Caroline Ffitch.’

  ‘I thought this wasn’t about the Ffitches, sir.’

  ‘And you don’t record your search for Clover Browne.’

  ‘Suspicions, sir. Hunches. We don’t record ’em all or our files would be as thick as the London phone directory. All I had on Clover Browne was a hunch and a whisper.’

  He was lying, and Troy knew it, but to chase him down this path would be a waste of time.

  ‘Tell me where you were on the 19th.’

  ‘At ’ome with the wife.’

  ‘Except when you saw the chief police surgeon here?’

  ‘That was in the morning. I went home for me dinner. We listened to the afternoon play on the wireless. I had a nap. Peggy washed up. I worked on one of me ships and when our tea was ready Peggy called me into the dining room.’

  ‘What did you have for tea?’

  ‘Potted meat, slice or two of haslet. Nothing grand.’

  Indeed it wasn’t – the offal-based fare of a working-class English family. But since it wasn’t, why would one remember? It seemed to Troy that Percy had put some effort and planning into what he would and would not choose to remember.