A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  He went into the bathroom, tipped all his pills down the bog and pulled the chain.

  § 124

  Troy asked himself why. He wanted the neatness of an answer. The last piece banged into the puzzle. The last square peg hammered into its round hole. Why did Percy Blood kill Paddy Fitz?

  Blood was mad to begin with. Almost the only person who did not know this was Percy himself. When the chief police surgeon called him in on 19 September he had put Blood on sick leave. This was a body blow, the second such in a matter of months. First leaving the bosom of the Branch, then ordered to rest. Perhaps Quint had promised him a transfer back to the Branch when it was all over. Now, that was unlikely to happen soon enough. He was on sick leave. Worse he had been told to see a psychiatrist. Blood would bridle at this. The idea of psychiatry meant next to nothing to him. All he would know was the army use of the term as ‘trick-cyclist’, and only malingerers ever saw the ‘trick-cyclist’. His life was effectively in ruins. He was either mad or he was a malingerer and he did not care to be called either. Someone had to be to blame. It could not be Peggy Blood. Troy would bet a penny to a pound that she’d called the chief surgeon only in confidence, in fear of another beating. Blood looked at the coincidence of dates. The last day of the Fitz trial – his biggest case and it had not gone well – was the first day of his ‘madness’. There were too many things about this case he did not understand. Why had the Yard stopped him bringing in the girl Clover? Why had that bastard Troy suddenly turned up at the Old Bailey? It was obvious who was to blame. If he’d never got mixed up with that disgusting ponce Patrick Fitzpatrick he wouldn’t be in this mess now. Worse, it looked to Percy as though Fitz might get off. Justice and vengeance met in Percy’s mind. He shot Paddy Fitz for Percy Blood and blind drunk justice.

  § 125

  He found the newspaper headlines gave him no pleasure. ‘Scotland Yard Rocked By Resignations.’ But it worked like clockwork. After a lacklustre speech to his party conference, Travis had not put in his bid for the leadership, and when the resignations hit – first Quint (men in jobs like his never get fired, they merely accept that they have resigned, like it or not) – then Coyn’s request for early retirement, and finally Troy – no one could be in any way surprised that the Home Secretary thought fit to follow. He tendered his resignation to the new Prime Minster, Sir Alec Douglas-(lately Lord)Home, and was accepted. Half the newspapers in the land implied or openly said that he must be to blame. The bolder even suggested another scandal, to round off the year of scandals, that was being buried in this rapid tumble of the Titans.

  Kolankiewicz, Quint and Troy all left the Yard on the same day. The press paid no heed to Kolankiewicz – they had never heard of him. Troy, when pressed by the Sunday Post, merely pointed to the state of his health. Quint seethed in silence. The front, since it mattered, was maintained to the point of the Commissioner holding a leaving party for the three of them. Troy thought that he had never attended a drearier, more joyless gathering of human beings. After Coyn’s brief speech he could have sworn he heard the sound of one hand clapping.

  The man clearly thought he should make a toast. He looked from Quint to Troy and back to Troy again, and Troy saved him from the ‘umms’ and ‘ers’ by raising his glass and giving the detectives of Scotland Yard an unambiguous toast.

  ‘Mary McDiarmuid,’ he said, and the room echoed his cry. It was, he thought, the one toast that would not have them thumping each other between the filing cabinets.

  He went to the bogs and relieved himself of two glasses of lukewarm, flat beer. He did not hear a sound behind him. The first he knew was an excruciating blow to the kidneys that sucked the air out of his lungs and left him pissing down his trouser leg. Halfway to the floor, an elbow wedged in the trough, he saw the foot aiming at his face and braced himself for the blow. Then foot and man went flying and Jack reached out to help him to his feet. He looked down at Quint stretched full length on the lavatory floor. Jack had knocked him out cold.

  ‘Am I going to spend the rest of my life getting you out of scrapes, Freddie?’

  It was not the rest of Jack’s life that concerned Troy, it was the rest of his own. If this was the limit of Quint’s idea of vengeance then he would not waste one second of it worrying about him.

  Out in the corridor a posse of the short and stout waited for them. Kolankiewicz in his ancient homburg, a copy of the Daily Herald sticking out of his macintosh pocket, and Clark, identical in girth, stature and macintosh, but favouring Private Eye and a trilby. Kolankiewicz dangled what looked very much like a hatbox at the end of one arm.

  ‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us wash the dust of thirty years from our throats.’

  He led the way, out of the south entrance and round the corner to St Stephen’s Tavern, watering hole of the odd copper and the even odder MP, being, as it was, almost directly opposite the Houses of Parliament. They pushed in past a noisy horde of backbenchers. Troy even recognised a few of them, part of the new intake of 1959, one or two of them disciples of Rod’s. Most of them could bore for Britain. He picked up fragments as Jack and Eddie went to the bar and bought for the four of them.

  ‘We’ve got the bastards on the run this time,’ a red-faced Yorkshireman was saying. ‘Travis is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back.’

  And from another corner of the room, ‘Twelve years in power. Twelve miserable bloody years! Do you know there are kids out campaigning in my constituency who can’t remember any other government?’

  And Troy turned off to it. They could say nothing he wanted to hear. Nothing he had not heard before. Nothing he had not himself said to Woodbridge amonthorsoago in the wet streets of Hampstead. Nineteen-sixty-three would end as it had begun, with futile speculation along the lines of imminent election. Rod was right: build your wall. While the glue that held us together dissolved – if there was now a generation that could not remember life before the Tories, there was most assuredly one and a half which could not remember the war – build your wall high.

  ‘What will you do?’ Jack said to Kolankiewicz.

  ‘I have my allotment. I have raised most of my own veg since the war. The contrast between slicing into a carrot grown on your own plot and slicing into the skull of some poor bugger you’ve never met in life cannot be overstated. I might go so far as to say that it has kept me sane these many years.’

  There were, thought Troy, many who might disagree. If this was Kolankiewicz the sane version, he never wanted to see the nutter who lurked within.

  ‘And’, he went on, ‘my particular delight in my small front garden has been the cultivation of the flag iris, on which I now propose to write a book.’

  Jack looked gobsmacked. Looked at Troy.

  ‘Don’t ask,’ said Troy.

  ‘Ask what?’

  ‘Don’t ask me what I’m going to do. Because I don’t know.’

  A hour or more later they had toasted freedom, cursed the Yard, voiced regret, pledged eternal friendship, reminisced at random and were ready to leave. Troy asked the question that had nagged at him most of the evening.

  ‘What’s in the hatbox?’

  Kolankiewicz opened it up and removed what appeared to be a leather football, a casey, painted black, with a short length of fuse sticking out of the seam, and the word ‘Bomb’ neatly stencilled on the side.

  ‘Is November 5th,’ he said. ‘Gunpowder, treason and to hell with those fuckers over the road.’

  Jack roared with laughter. Troy knew Kolankiewicz better and while he saw the joke he was more puzzled than amused. The more so when Kolankiewicz carried the ‘bomb’ head high past a mob of cheering, half-pissed backbenchers. Troy would not have thought they were capable of taking themselves and their dubious trade lightly enough to find this funny.

  Outside the pub, they reached the parting of ways. Jack, the only one of them in any way sentimental, hugged a startled Kolankiewicz, hugged a less startled Troy and was about to hug Clark when Clark said, ‘But I�
��ll be seeing you at work tomorrow, sir.’

  ‘So you will,’ said Jack, ‘so you will.’

  Jack and Eddie went south, Troy and Kolankiewicz north.

  ‘Look over your shoulder,’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘Are they looking back at us?’

  No,’ said Troy. ‘They’re going over Westminster Bridge. Jack’s a bit unsteady on his feet. Eddie’s holding him up.’

  ‘Good.’

  Kolankiewicz crossed the street, just north of Big Ben. Troy followed. A beat bobby, big as a barn door, passed them on the pavement. Troy was not sure whether he recognised either of them or not. But he looked at Kolankiewicz’s ‘bomb’, laughed out loud and walked on chuckling, hands clasped behind his back, plodding into Lambeth in best copper fashion. The great English cliché, the laughing policeman. Troy could still hear the sound of his laughter as Kolankiewicz put a match to the fuse and lobbed the ‘bomb’ over the railings and into New Palace Yard.

  ‘We got three minutes,’ he said.

  ‘Three minutes for what?’

  Troy hurried after him. They had just rounded the corner into Horse Guards Parade when Kolankiewicz stopped, took out his pocket watch and began to count off the seconds on his fingers. On the count of three a dull whumphff was just audible behind them.

  ‘Not bad,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Out by only three seconds.’

  He walked on. Troy stood rooted to the spot, all but openmouthed. Then he tore after Kolankiewicz.

  ‘You don’t mean that bomb was real?’

  ‘Very small, but, yes, very real. Call it a parting gesture.’

  They went their separate ways at the Strand Underground station, where Kolankiewicz could catch the Northern Line home to Hampstead Garden Suburb.

  ‘A book on flag irises?’ said Troy.

  ‘Why not?’ said Kolankiewicz.

  Troy walked home. Across the Strand, past the Charing Cross Hospital, up Bedfordbury, retracing at a slow walk the exact route he had taken the night he had run down the street with the dying Clover in his arms. In the back way, down the courtyard to his front door, and into the rest of his life.

  § 126

  The rest of his life was proving to be a bit of a bore. The first morning he had plucked the Morning Herald off the doormat, made coffee and toast and gone back to bed. One item amused him – a group of confused MPs reported how they had emerged from St Stephen’s Tavern to find themselves suddenly showered with scraps of old leather and smothered in the smell of what could only be described as the world’s biggest banger, that firework so favoured by aggressive pre-adolescent boys. The report did not mention that these guardians of liberty were probably pissed out of their skulls at the time. If they weren’t, why hadn’t they given Kolankiewicz’s description to the Yard? The Yard. How odd it seemed to use the words and not have them mean himself.

  Kolankiewicz phoned. ‘Damn,’ he said. ‘Missed the bastards!’

  He passed the rest of the day without quite seeming to do anything. And by the third day he was restless. The pleasures of toast and coffee in bed while the rest of London slogged to work on buses and tube trains were beginning to seem distinctly limited. He had choices. So many choices. He could go home, home, that is to Mimram, where Sasha would be waiting to adopt him. He’d get to see his pig. He was already envious of Kolankiewicz having his book to write. Perhaps he could write a handbook of pig husbandry? But he’d be stuck with his sister. Or he could go out.

  He went to one of the music shops in the Charing Cross Road and bought the sheet music of the Well-Tempered Clavier Book One. He liked it less than the Goldbergs or the French Suites, but he had never in his life attempted to play it. It was ‘new’. And the ‘new’ soon palled.

  Within ten days – ten days in which he had banged his way badly through bits of Bach – he knew what the restlessness was telling him. Not that he had planned badly. He had not planned at all. He knew that. What it told him was to get out of England, to ignore home, homes, any of his homes, and just go. What it told him was the opposite of what it had told him when they had finally let him out of The Glebe. The last thing he had wanted was women. Now he wanted women. Or, to be precise, woman.

  He seemed to recall a vague invitation to visit a shop in Carnaby Street. So he went in search of Foxx.

  He crossed Soho Square, cut through Great Chapel Street, along Great Marlborough Street and came into Carnaby Street via the top end, next to Liberty’s store. The shop was not where she had told him it would be. That shop was boarded up. He walked further down the street, towards the Beak Street end, to where a pile of old lath and plaster was piled on the pavement, to where a shiny, new, white Lambretta motor scooter was parked. The windows of this shop were whitewashed to let in daylight and keep out prying eyes, but there was a light on and the door was not locked. He pushed it open, and stepped into what had once been the front room of a small Georgian house, and for years since had probably been a tailor’s premises. The room had been gutted, stripped of most of its plasterwork, its cornices and its wooden fittings. Dust lay everywhere, pieces of wallpaper many layers thick lay across the floor stiff as hardboard. The dividing wall to the back room had been removed and a sheet of heavy transparent plastic cordoned it off.

  A hand, then an arm, emerged through a gap in the plastic, followed by a torso. Foxx appeared like a large blonde butterfly from its chrysalis. Vintage Foxx, the Foxx he had first tumbled for – T-shirt, blue jeans and frayed baseball boots. Plaster in her hair, the powdery residue of ancient paints dusting her cheeks.

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She kissed him, hugged him, before he could answer.

  ‘How did you find it? I got outbid for the last shop at the last minute. Had to move halfway down the street. I’m weeks behind with the reopening.’

  ‘I’m sure London can do without its blue jeans for a week or two.’

  ‘Oh, this won’t be just blue jeans and sneakers. I’m designing now. And I’m importing direct from Italy. I’ll have a range of new clothes. A little revolution – my personal mission to get the Englishwoman out of potato sacks and her man out of Charlie Chaplin pants. All I need is a name. You couldn’t come up with a good name for the shop, could you? I’ve been racking my brains.’

  A piece of paper detached itself from high up on the wall to fall on Troy’s head. He plucked it off, looked at the layers, the generations, overlapping like the pages in a book.

  ‘You’ve taken on quite a task,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing I can’t handle. It’s great fun.’

  She twirled to the centre of the room, arms outstretched, eyes bright with pleasure.

  ‘You won’t believe the dirt that was here. I don’t think anything had been done to this place since some time in the last century. Dickens was a boy when this place last got a spring clean.’

  He was still holding the paper. He’d counted eleven different layers in it. The last wasn’t even Victorian, he thought. It was probably put up in the reign of George III .

  ‘England was like that,’ he said. ‘There always seemed to be corners that gathered dust. Some cranny where things you thought you’d never see again lingered generations after they’d gone from everyplace else. I was forever finding time compressed into the corners of Mimram when I was a boy.’

  ‘Well you won’t find it here in a fortnight’s time. I’m clearing the whole lot out.’

  ‘Off with the old and on with new? I rather think that’s becoming the philosophy of our times.’

  ‘I don’t know what we’ve been witnessing lately – the death throes of the old or the birth pangs of the new, but I know this. In a couple of years’ time it won’t matter a damn. England is going to go boom!’

  She reinforced her words with her hands, arms swinging upward to simulate the explosion, cheeks blowing out as she ‘boomed’.

  ‘I know,’ said Troy. ‘People keep telling me that.’

  ‘By 1965 or ’66 you won’t recognise the place. It’ll be a . .
. a . . .’

  ‘A new world?’ Troy ventured.

  ‘Yes. That’s exactly what it’ll be. A new world.’

  ‘Then there’s the name for your shop.’

  ‘What? “New World”?’

  ‘I was thinking more of “Terra Nova”.’

  ‘That would be a bit beyond the grasp of most of my customers.’

  ‘Everyone’s heard of Captain Scott.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter as long as they can pronounce it.’

  ‘How about just “Nova”?’

  ‘Sounds fine. For your customers, I mean. Personally I have heard “new” to the point of tedium this year. It’s part of the vocabulary of advertising. Advertising has only three adjectives: more, real and new. I have grown suspicious of the new.’

  ‘Get used to it, Troy. It’s here to stay.’

  ‘On the contrary, it’s here only until the next “new” comes along.’

  ‘The king is dead,’ she said. ‘Long live the king.’

  He threw down the piece of paper. It had set him musing now, musing out loud. But she was used to that.

  ‘When I was five or six – and I suppose that would make it about 1920 – my father took me for tea at the old Midland Hotel, you know, the one that stands in front of St Pancras Station. Most people think it is St Pancras I’m sure, but it’s newer than the station and designed by a different bloke. George Gilbert Scott, the most lavish of the Victorian gothics. I suppose the old man had taken me there many times as a toddler, but this is the only occasion I was old enough to remember, and it was the last. The war had been over just a couple of years. Looking back I think the nation was desperately trying to create a sense of light and air and carefreeness. And what they did was to look at the preceding age – the Victorian – and see that it had lingered those dozen or so years after the old Queen’s death, associate it with bloody mess that followed almost as cause and effect, and decide to whitewash it. Almost literally. The Midland Hotel was a staggeringly beautiful creation, a myriad of hardwood grains, marble from Ireland streaked with lime-green swirls, stencil-work that ran for miles, iron fine as filigree and murals fifteen feet high. It was, for want of a better word, a masterpiece. And in 1920 they painted it all over. They were putting on the coat of white in the corridors as we took tea. And white became dull nothing, and dull nothing became brown. And we have lived with the shades of brown ever since. Seeking out light and air, carving out our clean lines, we brushed away colours we had ceased to perceive.’