A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But that was only on the one occasion, when you had sex with the defendant, was it not?’

  She was looking about her, her eyes seeking help.

  ‘That’s not true. It was lotsa times. Lotsa times!’

  And try as he might Cocket could not get her to admit that she had made up every other aspect of her story. But it would be an odd jury indeed who could not see the truth in her for all that she kept on lying. It would be an odd juror who thought a blue and star-spangled ceiling less memorable than a Chinese vase. Moira looked cornered, she looked like a liar and the fact that she went on lying only served to convince Troy that someone had put the fear of God in her.

  Cocket sat down. Troy wondered how much the lost admission mattered. If she had told the truth . . . it would amount to a Prosecution cock-up, and the defence could ask for a dismissal. He might not get it, but he could ask.

  Mirkeyn looked at his watch, slipped it back into his waistcoat pocket, and adjourned.

  An old woman was waiting for Troy as he slipped from the row. She was staring intently at him – huge, heavy-lidded, dark eyes, almost as dark as his own.

  ‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

  He did not, but he had noticed her. She sat each day in the press box, scribbling furiously, deftly shuffling two pairs of spectacles as she looked from her notebook to the witness box and back again. She must be about seventy, he thought, and she spoke the received pronunciation of a lost Edwardian age – almost, not quite, a female Mr Macmillan in her tones – a squeaky voice, wet on the ‘s’s. If she had known him, it might well have been in his childhood. He found too often these days that he had a poor memory for all those grown-up faces that had graced his father’s dining table. It was hard to think that the old man’s heyday had been more than thirty years ago, but it had. How much could she have changed in thirty years?

  ‘You’re Frederick, the youngest, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I used to write for your father.’

  So many had.

  ‘I’m Rebecca West.’

  Troy stuck out his hand. Dame Rebecca held it lightly and performed the almost touchless old lady’s handshake. The coldness of her fingertips upon his palm.

  ‘I’m so sorry. Of course. I’m afraid I didn’t recognise you at first.’

  ‘Nor do you now. Have I changed so much?’

  Indeed she had. She had been one of ‘the beauties’, one of those ageless, beautiful women that had seemed so abundant, so unattainable in the days of his long adolescence. Ageless – she had probably been in her mid-thirties then, younger by far than his parents, older by far than him. He had the embarrassing memory of a schoolboy crush, that overly polite term for unuttered, unutterable lust.

  ‘Do you have time for a drink and a chat?’ she asked, and a schoolboy dream came true, thirty-five years too late, but impossible to refuse nonetheless. ‘We’ll find a caff somewhere shall we?’

  ‘Caff ’ was not a word he would expect to hear on the lips of a woman of her generation, but she was smiling as she said it and he recalled that she could be one of the most unpredictable – hence, one of the prickliest – of people when she wanted. She was relishing the word.

  He found just such an establishment in Carter Lane. No other word would do. Soho it was not. No Gaggia machine, no ‘froffee coffee’, just tea, dark brown, pungent, milky, scummy tea served in half-pint cups at refectory tables of scrubbed, cracked and fag-end-burnt Formica. Nor were there the denizens of Soho – no would-be Bohemians in sloppy-joe sweaters, clutching copies of the New Statesman and boring on the subject of Dave Brubeck or John Coltrane – no flash bastards in tight trousers, winkle-picker shoes and greasy quiffs. It was a working man’s caff – pie an’ mash at lunchtime, packed in twelve to a table – or it would be if any of them had looked as though they had jobs. Most of them didn’t; most of them looked down and out, eking out three penn’orth of tea and a Woodbine as long as they could.

  ‘There’s so much I would want to ask you,’ she had said as they crossed Ludgate Hill. The tense had baffled him – she had made it conditionally and temporally impossible. And to prove it she said nothing more until he set her cup of tea in front of her, and one ringed finger had picked up a teaspoon to stir.

  ‘But I won’t,’ she said as though there had been no interval between one sentence and the next.

  He filled in the blank, half a dozen connections forming themselves simultaneously in his mind. She had been very attached to his father – possibly too attached; Troy had seen a few blazing rows between them – but she had vanished from his, Troy’s, life when he had joined the police and spent less and less time at Mimram. And after his father’s death she had not, he was certain, been asked back to Mimram. But who had? His mother’s regime had been so different from that of his father. ‘Les Anglais’ bored her, as she symbolically made clear in most conversations. She spoke Russian or French to her children. Their father, almost invariably English. Rebecca had written lengthy pieces in the press at the time of the first rumours about Charlie, six or seven years ago – her endless, seemingly endless, speculations upon the meaning of treason, as though it needed meaning. She had busied herself in the lives of Burgess and Maclean, and before that such as William Joyce. If, now Charlie’s cover was blown, she was expecting a few snippets from Troy, she could whistle for them. She was the most vociferous of anti-Communists, as was Troy’s Uncle Nikolai. She was also rumoured to be writing a novel about the Russian revolutions, one of which his father had participated in, the other two – there were another two, weren’t there? – had never ceased to be the subject of his commentary. And . . . and there was the hidden link of Diana Brack, H. G. Wells’s mistress in the thirties – as Rebecca had been in the teens and twenties of the century – and Troy’s in the forties. ‘How much did the old woman know?’ he wondered – and wondered without wanting resolution. Whatever she said next, let it not be a question about Diana Brack.

  ‘You know Fitzpatrick, don’t you?’ she said.

  ‘Yes. How do you know that I know?’

  ‘He looks your way from time to time. When he bothers to look at anything, that is. I don’t suppose you can see what he does from where you’re sitting, but he’s blasé beyond belief. One would think he was not listening at all. He passes the time drawing caricatures, wicked, pornographic caricatures of the court. He’s sketched Mirkeyn in the nude three times already. And he somehow manages to draw Furbelow with three buttocks and make it seem anatomically accurate. But . . . when he looks at you and when you look back it is clear – you know one another.’

  ‘A friend of a friend,’ Troy said for simplicity’s sake.

  ‘And so your interest is not professional?’

  ‘I’m off duty. In fact I’m off sick. But any Scotland Yard case brought to trial is inevitably a professional interest.’

  ‘Do you think he’s guilty?’

  ‘I’ve hardly heard the evidence yet.’

  ‘Try to think a bit less like a policeman.’

  These had been Fitz’s own words to him not so long ago. In another lifetime.

  ‘I doubt it,’ he conceded. ‘Didn’t need the money. He loves risk, but I cannot see the fun in the risk of poncing. Sex is fun, money is fun. Put them together and suddenly they’re not. That’s about as fundamental as the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides in a right-angled triangle.’

  ‘Aha. Do you think he’s a spy?’

  ‘A spy!’

  ‘There has been much privileged speculation on the point.’

  Privileged meant one thing – what those slander-immune buggers in the Commons said.

  ‘What sort of speculation?’

  ‘Oh, you know how they do things in the House. Your brother’s one of them, after all. “So-and-so may not be a Communist,” you say, thereby implying that equally well he may be.’

  ‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I doubt that too. A dupe perhaps,
a spy . . . highly unlikely. I’ve never thought Fitz capable of keeping a secret. Primary qualification for the job I should think. If those clots in the Commons think he’s a spook, they’re mistaking the bond between Fitz and Tereshkov. It wasn’t politics; it was sex.’

  ‘How quickly we arrive at the heart of the matter,’ Rebecca said.

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Sex.’

  ‘Sex?’

  ‘Power.’

  It felt like moves in an invisible chess game, and she’d just put him in check in half a dozen swift manoeuvres.

  ‘Power?’

  ‘The power men have over women.’

  ‘Old as history,’ said Troy, quickly switching rook for king, knowing this added nothing to the point she was making, but then he had no idea quite what point she was making.

  ‘We’re on the verge of a new age, you know. I keep hearing that.’

  ‘So do I,’ said Troy, ‘I’ve been listening out for England going “boom”. Not sure I’ve heard it yet.’

  ‘I doubt you will. Have things changed at all since I was young? I was one of the New Women – it’s a label that’s made me highly sceptical of the use of “new” ever since. I see nothing new in Fitzpatrick’s relationship with these girls.’

  ‘The oldest profession?’ said Troy.

  ‘No. I didn’t mean prostitution at all. In fact I thought we’d just agreed he wasn’t guilty of that. But he’s betrayed those girls as surely as if he’d put them on the streets. He has made them commodities. He’s packaged them. Whatever it was in them that was “new”, that was of this “new” age, he has put into the same old packet.’

  Troy remembered his first reactions, the first time he had seen the Ffitches. His own unspoken phrase had lodged in his mind. They had looked, as he thought it, like ‘sex in a packet’. As instant as coffee. But she could hardly mean anything so . . . so . . . so slight as appearance. They looked – surely? – the way they wanted to. What woman ever dressed for a man? Except to attract one – but then perhaps that was what Dame Rebecca meant. The commodity must appeal to the purchaser.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘Fitz is not on trial for that.’

  ‘Is he on trial at all? It is England on trial. The old one trying this nebulous new one – or the new one trying the old. I cannot work out which. The court we sit in isn’t the only court in operation and may well not be the one that matters in the long run. There is so much more to this than meets the eye and so much much more to it than the sexual mores and dubious income of Paddy Fitz.’

  ‘He’s not a villain, you know.’

  ‘Oh? So he’s a good man is he?’

  ‘Hardly that either. He and Woodbridge are two of a kind. Now, I don’t know Woodbridge at all well, but they are both men presumptuous enough to think they are above, not the law, but perhaps the rules that govern us.’

  ‘Laws nonetheless,’ she said.

  ‘If you like,’ said Troy, using his father’s phrase and seeing her smile warm at the familiarity of it. ‘But that doesn’t make them criminals. And the common cry of them both is, “I’ve done nothing illegal,” by which they mean nothing wrong, as though the only rights and wrongs were the rights and wrongs of law.’

  She was nodding her assent now. He was, he felt, talking her language.

  ‘What separates them is merely class and power.’

  This, in English terms, was pretty much the same as saying that what separated them was infinity itself, but she let it pass.

  ‘They aren’t villains . . .’ he went on.

  And racked his brains for what they were.

  ‘They are sybarites. And if there is an abiding characteristic to the sybarite, a sybarite’s code if you like, it is that what’s good for him is good for the rest of us. Denying him his pleasure does him no good, if us no harm. Granting it does him good and his good is our good. Thereby we all benefit. The only sin is denial.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right. In fact you’re probably right about both of them – Fitzpatrick and Woodbridge – both of them every other inch the gentleman . . .’

  She smiled as she said it. It was very funny, and so true. Both of them gentlemen for the odd inches only, and rogues for all the evens.

  ‘But,’ she picked up, ‘but, it isn’t the fate of the men that concerns me. It’s the women. Have you been round the back yet and seen what happens when the witnesses leave? The Ffitch girls have been booed, hissed and yesterday I saw a lone lunatic pelt them with rotten fruit as though they were in the pillory. Indeed, they are – in the pillory of national opinion. Tarts, as that old dear so rightly put it yesterday. Our national tarts. And do you know, they don’t deserve it?’

  Troy wondered about the nature of her sympathies. She was quite possibly one of the most infamous unmarried mothers of the century. Sexually liberated in the last days of whalebone and bloomers, just before the First World War. The mistress of H. G. Wells at twenty-one, the mother of his child at twenty-two. He had in his youth wondered if, sexual liberation notwithstanding, she considered herself abused by Wells – she certainly saw the Ffitch sisters as abused by men. And he recalled now that his father, that most expansive, eclectic of hosts, a man who delighted in the absurd juxtapositions of people, had never invited H. G. Wells and Rebecca West at the same time. Come to think of it, he had never invited her to his Hampstead house, the house in Church Row he had bought from Wells, the one Rod now occupied. But, then, it was not absurd, perhaps merely embarrassing, as though for Wells and West to meet would offend, not the other guests, but Wells and West themselves; as though a public secret could still not be paraded in public. For Wells and West to meet might be the fusion of matter and anti-matter, followed by social annihilation at molecular level. God knows why his father had done this. Perhaps he had felt the sense of injustice in her. Plenty of others had been happy enough to entertain the two together.

  ‘Do you think they’ve given up the search for the third girl?’ Dame Rebecca asked.

  Whatever he said now might well be to give a hostage to fortune. She was, after all, a working hack – and for all he knew at work on a book too. Better by far to tell her nothing, to throw the question back at her as disingenuously as possible.

  ‘Were they looking?’

  He hoped he sounded innocent.

  ‘Oh Lord, yes. Of course they were looking. The police and the press. If the police don’t know she’s called Clover Browne then they should ask the gentlemen of Fleet Street. But no one’s found her. With any luck they’ll never find her. Browne with an “e” is merely Smith into Smythe. I’m sure you remember what Groucho Marx had to say about that. Browne can hardly be her real name, now can it? In fact I hear rumours of some influence in the family.’

  ‘Sir Somebody Something,’ Troy muttered.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘That’s what Woodbridge called him. Sir Somebody Something.’

  ‘Well, if we knew who Sir Somebody Something was we’d know who Clover Browne was. Tell me, who do you think this old buffer is? Some retired general from the shires?’

  Troy thought of Catesby, just for the exemplar, and could not conceive that he, or anyone remotely like him, could possibly be related to Clover.

  ‘Dunno,’ he said lackadaisically. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

  It did not concern him. Really it didn’t.

  § 54

  ‘I call Tara Ffitch,’ Furbelow declaimed.

  Troy had last seen Tara at Uphill, naked under the thrusting buttocks of Tim Woodbridge. She made her way to the witness box, the whisper of anticipation circling the room and dying away in a slow diminuendo as she did so. The star had just descended the golden staircase, the house lights were down and the spot upon her.

  She had chosen a deliberately muted look, hair up, no hat and a black two-piece. The flat shoes looked to Troy to be against her nature, but then she was, he thought, trying hard to make herself acceptable in the eyes of little men, and in heels she must have touched six foot or mor
e – a metaphor too far. She gazed around the courtroom – unashamed – a stern look at Furbelow, the making of a smile for Cocket and was that an eyebrow raised at Troy himself or merely his own wishful thinking? She did not look at the dock.

  Furbelow set out to establish Tara’s sexual history. Cocket objected at once and Mirkeyn overruled him. It was what the crowd had bayed for. The tale of a good girl from a good home in the shires who had kicked over the traces in the wake of the unfortunate early death of her mother and embarked on a life of promiscuity. It would have been unremarkable in the extreme if narrated by a man. It wasn’t Troy’s life, but it was the life of many men he knew. It was Charlie’s and it bore a more than passing resemblance to the life of Troy’s old colleague Superintendent Wildeve, a handsome young copper when they had met during the war, courting every Wren in sight, and now a handsome copper untrapped by marriage in early middle-age and still as promiscuous as ever. And no one thought the worse of him for it.

  It seemed to Troy that, laboured though it was, Furbelow was trying to establish the link between promiscuity and prostitution. He was taking his time. Cocket raised no further objections, sat quietly and seemed to Troy to take no notes while the entire press box scribbled furiously. All the same, they had adjourned for lunch and reconvened before Furbelow found his target, and along the way he’d made damn sure that every newspaper in the land had got its headlines for the following morning.

  By early afternoon Furbelow had coaxed this narrative – breathless in its courtroom hush to the extent that Tara’s exasperation could be heard in exhalation by all – almost to the present day, to the cohabitation of Tara and Caro and Fitz at Dreyfus Mews.

  ‘What was the basis of your presence at the Dreyfus Mews house?’

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

  ‘Were you lovers?’

  ‘No. We were friends.’

  ‘You and your younger sister and Dr Fitzpatrick shared a common abode merely as friends?’

  ‘Yes.’