A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  Naked.

  He stared.

  Her flesh came up in goose pimples.

  Stiff little nipples.

  Blonde bush like whore frost.

  ‘You was wonderin’ weren’t you?’

  ‘Was I?’

  ‘“Is she a real blonde?”’

  ‘Never crossed my mind.’

  ‘Well – I am. Not like the twins, they’re not blondes. Out of a bleedin’ bottle.’

  ‘They’re not twins either.’

  ‘Come again?’

  ‘I’ve been around twins all my life. I grew up with twin sisters. I’d say there’s the best part of a year between Tara and Caro.’

  ‘Lyin’ tarts. Now – me coat pockets. Hand me the shoes and the mask.’

  Troy rooted in the pockets of the fur coat, and found a pair of high heels and an operetta mask. The mask covered her cheeks and her nose, framed the mouth, buried the eyes in emphatic darkness, gave wings to her ears.

  ‘Right. Gotta dash or the old sod’ll be wonderin’ where I got to. Tap tap at the bleedin’ window – “’Eathcliff it’s me” – silly old sod.’

  ‘Lucky Tommy,’ he said.

  ‘Tommy?’ she said, and the inflexion baffled him, question or statement? ‘I should cocoa. Right, give us a kiss for luck.’ This embarrassed him more than her nakedness. The thought that he had to move; even the mere stoop and turn of the head the gesture required held up a mirror to his foolish face. He felt he must be the colour of beetroot. He pecked her on the cheek as dutifully as he could.

  ‘Nah. Not like that.’

  She slipped her arms around his neck, slapped her lips on his, pressed her hips into his groin and snogged him – an overlong, overly wet juvenile kiss in best back-row-of-the-cinema tradition. He came up instantly. The worst, the hardest of unbidden erections. It was impossible she would not notice. She pulled back, one hand reached down and squeezed his cock.

  ‘Now, now,’ she said. ‘Plenty of time for that later.’

  Troy felt as though he had been scalded. He felt as he thought those fat, seedy, middle-aged men must feel in Soho strip joints, he felt as Charlie must have felt with his last whore, ashamedly grubby, foolish to the point of stupidity, feeling the chasm that yawned between intelligence and cupidity. He ran all the way back. With any luck he’d never see that woman again.

  § 27

  Anna was in his bed. Her back to him, the lights out. Asleep, he hoped. By the time he had slipped silently between the sheets she had turned. Her hand slid across his chest, brushed one nipple and came to rest on the flat of his belly. Had she felt his heartbeat, the unwilling suspension of his breathing? The hand slid on, wrapped around his cock. It came instantly to life. She rose up without a word, slid onto it, braced her hands upon his shoulders and began to prise herself on him, off him, on him.

  She was smiling sweetly. To herself, not at him. Her eyes were closed. He put a hand out to her breasts. She slapped it back, her eyes flashed once and closed again. Then, unbidden as all his responses, the image of Clover Browne darted into his mind and he came.

  Anna stopped. Waited while the gush spent itself inside her. Her eyes opened. He thought she’d be annoyed, but she was smiling still. She leant forward, nipples touching his chest, hands buried in the pillow either side of his head, one finger tracing the outline of his ear.

  ‘Good Lord. What’s got into you?’

  The nature of guilt eluded him. At the best or worst of times he felt so little of it that its occasional descent to his unwilling shoulders took him by surprise. He had fucked Anna twice, come twice, whilst thinking of other women. The unfamiliar pattern of guilt flickered across his mind – a magic lantern light thrown upon a crumpled scrim, the shifting shadow of the demon faint as Nosferatu – and disturbed his sleep. He did not know what to make of it. When he awoke it had gone, gone as though it had never been.

  § 28

  Scotland Yard was a complex structure. A complex structure rendered complicated by the legacy of recently retired Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police Sir Stanley Onions, KCMG, OBE. Onions had been Troy’s champion. Against the odds, and scarcely without wavering, but Troy’s champion all the same.

  In 1944 Troy had blotted his copybook – been caught in possession of an illegal weapon, still working on a case Onions had told him to drop, and damn near killed in what Onions had called ‘a shoot-out at the OK corral.’ He had delayed Troy’s promotion by the best part of a year. In 1956 he had accepted an undated letter of resignation from Troy and simply sat on it. It covered Onions for things Troy had done that he had thought it better not to know about. All he heard were rumours and Troy doubted very much whether Onions ever believed Troy was connected with the disappearance of Inspector Cobb – but if Stan had really had an inkling Troy had killed Cobb, nothing on earth would have saved his skin. But rumour persisted without ever seeming to gel. And Onions’ reaction to uncongealed rumour had been to promote Troy. As the cliché had it, he put his money where his mouth was. He promoted and he promoted and he promoted. By the summer of 1961 Troy had risen to Commander of Criminal Investigation, in all but name Scotland Yard’s chief detective. Under him were all the arms of the CID responsible for investigation of crime. And there they came unstuck.

  ‘What are you up to in Soho?’ Stan had asked one day late in 1961.

  ‘I need coppers. I can’t afford to waste them on the trivial.’

  ‘Trivial?’

  ‘Crimes without victims.’

  ‘Oh aye?’

  ‘Do you know how many men we waste chasing whores around Soho?’

  ‘According to Superintendent Wiggins, not enough.’

  ‘Ah. He’s been to see you?’

  ‘Did you expect him to take it lying down? You’ve stripped his squad by three-quarters.’

  ‘I’ve a crime wave on my hands. Burglaries are up twenty per cent on last year and there’s an organised gang wreaking havoc in sub-post offices all across the south of England. I need every man I can get. The whores aren’t walking the streets any more, and nobody whistles, “Psst, wanna buy a dirty postcard?” It’s all indoors now. Things have changed. The Wolfenden Report changed everything. I’m not going to waste coppers policing what consenting adults do behind closed doors.’

  ‘Jesus Christ! You’re not serious?’

  ‘Anyone who wants a French model on the third floor in Meard Street can just walk up. I don’t care.’

  ‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake – the job of the Vice Squad is to stamp out vice!’

  ‘Fine. Are we going to nick schoolboys for wanking? The notion you can stampout vice is fatuous; you cannot police the unpoliceable. I’ve left Wiggins enough men to cope with the pimps and the wide boys and with the girls if they get so bold as to solicit on the street. Beyond that I propose better uses for the lazy buggers he calls his Vice Squad. They can try detecting real crime for a change, instead of sitting on their backsides in the coffee bars leafing through tit-and-bum magazines and taking backhanders off ponces!’

  Onions had taken the squad away from him. Troy was glad. Vice was a pain in the arse.

  It was a simple matter of reorganisation. Onions ran the Met. Under him was a deputy commissioner; under him a bevy of assistant commissioners, each responsible for a section of the Met: A, the uniformed coppers; B, transport; D, a hotchpotch of recruiting, training and communication, and C, crime. C section was what the average man in the street thought of as Scotland Yard. The Criminal Investigation Department. Traditionally C had three branches: the Metropolitan Police Laboratory under its Director, Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, MD, MSc, ARCSc, DI C, FRIC, MBE, amad Pole of remarkably, foully fractured English; Special Branch under Deputy Commander Graham Tattershall MM, CBE; and everything else, all the way from fingerprints, via robbery and murder, to liaison with the metropolitan divisions, under Commander Frederick Troy, a man without title and likely to remain that way. Neither the Branch nor the labs answered to Troy, but directly to C sec
tion’s Assistant Commissioner, Albert Scudamore. To Scudamore’s direct responsibilities Onions had added Vice, under its own deputy commander. This division of labour had stayed in place when Onions and Scudamore had retired in the autumn of 1962. Troy did not want Vice back and did not ask for it.

  In the long-awaited spring of 1963, the Commissioner was Sir Wilfrid Coyn, KCMG, the Assistant Commisioner for C, Daniel Quint – and between the two the vacant post of Deputy Commissioner. Coyn was a rustic, recently Chief Constable of Wiltshire and regarded by all and sundry as a stop-gap, a chair-filler aged sixty-three, warming the seat until the powers that be made up their minds who should really run the Yard. Rank deceived no one. Quint had been brought in at the same time as Coyn – a tough big-city copper, fresh out of Birmingham – to offer the toughness which Coyn, for all his administrative expertise, might be held to lack. No one much valued the role or rank of the various assistant commissioners of A, B or D. Anyone could direct traffic or order spare parts for wirelesses. When Coyn retired in eighteen months, the race was between Troy and Quint.

  It did not make for a happy Yard. It did not make for happy coppers.

  Troy missed Onions dearly. He had come to loathe meetings with Quint, to tolerate those with Coyn and if at all possible to avoid meetings with both of them at once. He had his own team, officers who were ‘his’ as he had been Onions’. Superintendent Jack Wildeve, who ran the Murder Squad in C9, as Troy had done in his day. And Troy’s two assistants: Det. Sgt Edwin Clark, a man who had refused promotion on the grounds that it might take him from behind his desk and might just force him to take a little exercise; a man who spoke five languages; a man who could finish The Times crossword in twenty minutes; a man from whom Scotland Yard had no secrets – Swift Eddie was the perfect rogue, the perfect spy, Troy’s eyes and ears – sooner or later every memo in the Yard passed by his gaze. And Det. Sgt Mary McDiarmuid, pretty much the opposite of Clark, a cynical, straightforward Scotswoman who spoke only one language, but spoke it to perfection – pragmatism.

  On the Tuesday after Easter at Uphill Troy emerged from a meeting with Quint and Coyn feeling bloody.

  ‘Your doctor’s been calling you,’ said Mary McDiarmuid.

  Clark had never called Troy anything but ‘sir’. Off duty, behind closed doors, it made no difference, Clark invariably called him ‘sir’. Mary McDiarmuid was scrupulous about rank in front of Troy’s superiors, but in their absence frequently called him nothing – and when off duty did what Anna did and called him ‘Troy’. It was Anna trying to reach him now. What could the woman want that she didn’t want at six thirty yesterday evening when he had dropped her off at the conjugal hell in Bassington Street, Marylebone, that was her marital home with Angus, and inevitably dubbed by him ‘Unbearable Bassington Street’?

  ‘She didn’t say. Just wanted you to call her.’

  ‘At the surgery?’

  ‘Yep.’

  Troy called.

  ‘Are you through for the day?’ Anna asked.

  ‘Just about. Why?’

  ‘You couldn’t pop in, could you? I’d like you to come in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just for a check-up.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with me.’

  ‘What about your cough?’

  ‘What cough?’

  ‘You were coughing half the night on Sunday. You were coughing all through the evening we spent in Notting Hill.

  ‘No . . . I wasn’t.

  ‘Honestly, Troy, you were. Look, just come in. A routine check-up. Let me take a professional look at you.’

  ‘Routine?’

  ‘Of course. It’s probably nothing, but we should make sure. Just a few tests.’

  Afterwards, looking back, he could not see what had possessed him to believe her. So often as a young detective he had invited people to the Yard on a matter that was ‘just routine’ and held onto them all the way to the dock in the Old Bailey. Only Anna, he kept telling himself, would ever have got him to do it.

  § 29

  Troy found himself confusing the categories. Something he presumed Anna did not do. A necessary, simple trick of the mind – and, he flattered himself, she did not fuck all her patients. All the same, he wondered. What was she discovering about his body in the course of these few minutes with the cold end of her stethoscope and the tap tap tapping of her fingertips across his ribs that she had not learnt in the best part of fourteen hours in the sack together?

  ‘Don’t put your shirt back on. I’d quite like a second opinion.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fitz. I’d just like Fitz to take a look at you.’

  They were partners. All the same, she’d never asked Fitz to examine him before. In the odd narratives of her working life she’d not once mentioned asking Fitz to look at one of her patients. Anna simply did not do this.

  Fitz came in, in his full Harley Street private practice outfit. Black jacket, striped trousers, fancy waistcoat. His fingers were cool, and unnaturally long. A fine manicure had left his almond-shaped fingernails with just a hint of an edge. Their touch brought Troy up in goose pimples. He could not find that simple trick of the mind that would enable him to separate the doctor – the good doctor, Fitz was clearly that – from the sensualist, the extraordinary sensualist, he knew him to be. They did not feel like a man’s hands, and he found himself wondering – what sexual use, what precise sexual use – he could guess the general area – did such long fingernails have on the male of the species? And it had to be sexual, didn’t it? It wasn’t just affectation or decoration, was it? The little fingernail of his left hand was longer than all the others, like a tiny barb, pressing its moonsliver mark onto his skin.

  Fitz listened to Troy’s inner grumblings at half a dozen points on his chest and back with a stethoscope, put him through the same routine of deepbreathing that Anna had, and finally said, ‘We’ll need an X-ray. You don’t mind an X-ray, do you, Freddie? Clear things up once and for all.’

  ‘I have a job to do, Fitz. I really must get back to the Yard.’

  ‘We can do it right here. We’re state of the art. Can’t develop, of course, but if you call back in a couple of days . . . honestly, Freddie, it won’t take long.’

  Troy gave in. Afterwards, finally allowed to dress, he could feel her eyes on him.

  ‘I suppose you got me down to Uphill just so he could look me over,’ Troy joked, and from the averting of her eyes, the faint reddening of her cheeks, knew it was not a joke, that the two of them had set him up.

  § 30

  Two days later Troy was returning to London from an overnight stay at his Hertfordshire home. He had turned the Bentley off Shaftesbury Avenue, down Monmouth Street and was rounding Seven Dials into the lower reach of Monmouth Street, the short stretch before it blends seamlessly into Upper St Martin’s Lane. He felt dizzy, his vision blurred almost to blindness, and only the sheer familiarity of the manoeuvre enabled him to pull out of the circle and leave Seven Dials for Monmouth Street. Then he knew he could not see at all, and his fingers tingled and his breath failed and his hands left the wheel. He awoke with blood streaming from a cut on his forehead to find the car half buried in a shopfront. His windscreen scattered in his lap like diamonds. Leathery incunabula strewn across the bonnet like dead bats. He had demolished the premises of a second-hand bookseller.

  In the Charing Cross hospital they X-rayed his skull, pronounced him sound, stuck an Elastoplast on his forehead and sent for his physician.

  She did not say, ‘I told you so.’

  She said, ‘There’s no time to lose. We have the X-rays of your chest. I’d like you to see a specialist tomorrow.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Troy asked.

  ‘You weigh eight stone, you black out and crash your car. That’s what’s wrong.’

  ‘I meant – what is the nature and name of my ailment?’

  ‘Just see the specialist will you, Troy. Do it for me. My surgery, ten o’clock tomorrow mor
ning.’

  § 31

  A good-looking young woman. Taciturn, dark – thick black hair piled high on her head in an out-of-the-way-for-work, no-nonsense fashion. She asked him his full name, as though she did not have such information from Anna, and wrote down what he told her on a form of many dashes and lines. She listened to his heart and chest through a stethoscope. Then she showed him the examination table, told him to stripoff and pulled the screen around him.

  It was thorough handwork – they flew over him, fluttering like birdwings, kneading him like catspaws, pinching at him like the mandibles of insects. Compared to hers, Anna and Fitz’s once-over seemed almost perfunctory. Her hands read his body like braille.

  ‘That was quite a war you had, Mr Troy.’

  She touched the raised seam of the scar on his right thigh. One that had never seen a physician. The shallow tear of a .22 bullet. Hand-stitched from a sewing kit in a hotel bedroom. Ragged like a torn hem. Detective Inspector Cobb’s parting shot in 1956.

  ‘I wasn’t in the war.’

  She raised an eyebrow at this. She knew bullet wounds when she saw them. The tiny ridge above the hairline, left by a Browning 9mm. Detective Inspector Cobb, again. The Webley .38 scar on his right arm. A captain of His Majesty’s Household Cavalry, 1940. The punctured slash in his side where they had dug a Colt .45 slug from his left kidney and cut out half the kidney with it. Diana Brack, 1944.

  ‘I mean I wasn’t in the forces. I’m a policeman. Have been for nearly thirty years.’

  The hands moved to his side, pressing into him, above the appendix he had lost at seventeen, the one on top of the other.

  ‘So you’re quite high up then?’ she said, and he could not be at all certain how idle a question it was.

  ‘Inspector?’ she mused. ‘Chief Inspector?’