A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  In the centre of the room stood a wing chair in dull green upholstery, the left side wing stained with what Troy knew to be the dried remains of Fitz’s blood and brains. Beyond it the worn Persian carpet was blackened by a hundred spots of blood. To the right of the chair, a partner’s desk, littered with the paraphernalia of living. A silver letter knife, a green-shaded glass reading lamp, a large piece of white quartz which he presumed Fitz thought to be decorative, a couple of medical journals for the current month, a walrus tooth scrimshanked with the image of Lillie Langtry and inscribed ‘New Bedford 1904’, a cut-glass inkwell without any ink, a dozen or more ballpoint pens stuffed into a blue-and-white striped coffee mug, a two-week-old copy of the Observer folded open at Len Deighton’s cookstrip – all bearing the telltale dust of finger-printing powder.

  And a book – the last book Fitz had ever read? Troy picked it up. A red, leather-bound copy of the complete works of the Earl of Rochester. It was pure Fitz. Quite the filthiest poet ever to make it into the literary canon. The book fell open, a folded sheet of paper marking the place. Troy found himself reading ‘Against Constancy’ . . .

  But we, whose hearts do justly swell,

  With no vain-glorious pride,

  Who know how we in love excel,

  Long often to be tried.

  Then bring my bath and strew my bed,

  As each kind night returns,

  I’ll change a mistress till I’m dead,

  And fate change me for worms.

  It had been an unkind night that changed Fitz for worms. But the conceit summed him up neatly: he thought he excelled in love; he cultivated it; he became its connoisseur; it was what the rest of society called perversion.

  Troy unfolded the sheet of paper Fitz had used as a bookmark and saw the familiar House of Commons portcullis crest, like the back of a threepenny bit. Another uninformative note from the office of the Leader of the Opposition, this time dating from mid-June. It meant nothing to Troy. It might mean nothing to anyone. Fitz hobnobbed that was a matter of record. He pocketed it all the same. Jack was thorough. This might well turn out to be the only new item Troy would find.

  He scanned the bookshelves. One whole wall was books and records, from floor to ceiling. There were the works of ‘Walter’, nine hefty volumes sitting just above the gramophone. But it wasn’t a gramophone – at least it bore little resemblance to the one Troy had. This was state of the art: a wooden box with lots of knobs to amplify the sound, labelled ‘Leak’; what he believed was called a transcription turntable – all weights and counterweights and infinitesimal adjustments, which even then seemed to require a shilling balanced on the counterweight to ensure maximum performance – and two speakers, spread the width of the room, as big as dustbins. This was called stereophonic sound. Bores were wont to demonstrate it to the unwitting guest with a record of steam engines whizzing past, revealing, as they shot from one speaker to the other, the Doppler effect. Troy had not ‘gone stereo’. Most of the artists he liked had died before the invention of stereo, and, once heard, the pleasures of the Doppler effect quickly palled, but sooner or later he’d have to.

  Fitz had liked Mozart. The Jupiter symphony still sat on the turntable, the Clarinet and Horn concertos lay without covers on the floor in front of the bookcase. But . . . his pièce de résistance was a full-scale copy of Donatello’s David, standing in the corner where the bookshelves joined the wall. No more than five feet tall, it was quite the sexiest statue Troy had ever seen – the coy tilt of the head, the outrageous, pagan hat, the slim young body, the girlish waist, the delicate little prick. Only when you followed the sword down past the prick to the severed head of Goliath at his feet did any biblical notion creep into it.

  Troy went upstairs. To Fitz’s bedroom. There was the much vaunted ceiling. He had not quite been able to envisage it as Cocket had conveyed it, as he had solicited it from Moira the prostitute. Blue with stars and moons did not do it justice. It was Florentine in its richness of blue, dotted with myriad stars and moons like a Renaissance room, as though it should look down not on the casual coupling of Paddy Fitz and Moira Twelvetrees but on Donatello or Cellini – and God only knew what they had got up to. Fitz’s clothes were still in the wardrobe and the tallboy. A fastidious man. The socks paired and rolled into balls, the shoes in neat rows, polished to a shine, the ties on the back of the wardrobe door and an array of his Harley Street waistcoats all neat on their little hangers. The fastidious man was not helpful to the detective. The detective thrived on sloppiness and litter.

  He moved onto the next room. Smaller, emptier for far longer. This must have been Clover’s, though there was not a thing in it to indicate that she had ever been there. The bed was stripped; the cupboard was bare.

  He moved upto the topfloor. The Ffitch sisters’ room, bright and beautiful in pale yellow, with skylights let into the roof and large windows opening out onto a small iron balcony high above the garden. He sat on the bed – what he believed was termed a ‘king size’ – and he knew that all he was achieving was the confirmation of what he already knew: he was not adding to the sum of his knowledge. He had not lost his powers of observation. The front door had not been jemmied, the desk drawers had not been forced and there were no obvious clear spots in the gathering dust to indicate any theft. He had not thought there would be. There had never been any question in his mind of another motive, of Fitz’s killing being incidental to some other crime. Whoever killed him had killed him because of . . . because of what? Because of everything else, because of the scandal of Paddy Fitz and the upsetting of the great English applecart that had ensued. He had seen for himself. The chair in which a man sat, if the wisdom of his superiors was to be believed, to blow out his own brains. It was the old, old method. He had done this so many times – skimmed some poor sod’s bookshelves, opened his mail, rifled his bathroom cabinet – and it got him nowhere.

  This room was too bare to offer clues. It too had been all but stripped of the presence of its former occupants. All but – one dress hung in the wardrobe. The little black number Tara had worn that first night at Uphill. It prompted one thought in Troy, a thought which would not go away. Jack’s file had contained a statement from Pritch-Kemp, who had kept Fitz company in the last days of his life and who had been unfortunate enough to find the body, but he could recall nothing from the Ffitch sisters.

  He went back downstairs to Fitz’s desk and picked up the telephone. It still worked, although it could hardly be long before the GPO cut Fitz off. Dead men pay no bills – wasn’t there a novel of that title? He called the Yard.

  ‘Eddie. There was no report or transcript of any interview with the Ffitch sisters. Could you ask Jack—’

  ‘He’s standing right here, sir.’

  ‘Put him on.’

  ‘You’re lucky you caught me,’ he heard Jack say.

  ‘Jack, did you interview the Ffitch girls?’

  ‘No. They moved out of Fitz’s weeks ago. I might well have got around to it. But they’d been putting such obvious distance between each other ever since Fitz’s arrest that they could scarcely be my priority. After all, neither one of them could have nipped to the corner shopwithout some hack spotting them, let alone back to Dreyfus Mews. They’re about as far from being suspects as the Home Secretary!’

  Troy could not but agree with this last remark, but his feel for the matter was the opposite. The Ffitches were the axis. They might well, indeed almost certainly did, know nothing of the murder of Paddy Fitz, but they had been pivotal to all that had happened. Without them no scandal; without them, no court case; without them, Troy knew, no reason for anyone to want Fitz dead. He wanted to talk to them. Whatever Jack thought, he wanted to talk to them.

  ‘Do you have an address for them?’

  ‘Half a mo’. Right. 19 Melmoth Terrace W2.’

  ‘Thanks, could I have Eddie back?’

  Clark came on the line.

  ‘Eddie. It occurs to me. When exactly did Percy B
lood get transferred from Special Branch to Vice?’

  ‘Dunno, sir. Do you want me to find out?’

  ‘Yes. Has there been anything I should know about?’

  ‘The Commissioner popped in, sir.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He seemed a little surprised to find that you’d gone out.’

  ‘Did he ask why? Did he ask what I was working on?’

  ‘No, sir. But he will.’

  Troy did not doubt it.

  § 81

  Melmoth Terrace was deserted. Parked cars, a prowling cat, the distant sound of the Light Programme. Ten thousand more fag ends ground into the cobblestones outside No. 19 by a dozen more hacks who had hung around for weeks. He knocked but knew before he did that the birds had flown. The house was empty. No one answered and when he stuck his ear to the letterbox all he could hear was the rattle and hum of a badly balanced refrigerator. Across the street he saw curtains twitch. Then a window opened, the sound of the music on the Light surged and a woman’s voice yelled, ‘Bugger off ! Haven’t you lazy bastards got proper jobs to go to?’ The window slammed shut. He thought better of asking her any questions, whoever she was.

  Back at the Yard, Clark said he wasn’t surprised. After all, they no longer had any obligation to inform the police of their whereabouts.

  Someone knew. Someone had to know.

  Troy called Alex.

  ‘Freddie . . .’ A breeze in his voice to take the wind out of Troy’s sails. ‘I was just in the middle of—’

  ‘Don’t brush me off, Alex. Stopwhat you’re doing and find time.’

  ‘What do you want?’ said Alex, the urgency to be free still audible in his tone.

  ‘The Ffitches have vanished.’

  ‘Can’t say I’m surprised.’

  ‘Where are they, Alex?’

  ‘How the hell should I know?’

  ‘Alex, I’ve two unexplained deaths on my hands. Don’t piss me about. Those women were bought and sold like cocoa futures. A quote in this paper, an interview in that, but nobody ran with their story, nobody had their version in full. They knew what it was worth and stored it up for their own future. You made all the running breaking the case. You precipitated everything that followed. You’ve bought their story, haven’t you?’

  ‘Freddie, I—’

  ‘You know where they are!’

  ‘Freddie, you can’t ask me to reveal a source. It simply isn’t done.’

  ‘The Ffitches aren’t a source, Alex. Any way you look at it they’re not your source. That journalistic hog won’t wash.’

  ‘What are they, then?’

  ‘They’re material witnesses. And you’re obstructing an investigation.’

  Alex’s voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. ‘Freddie. I can’t talk about this matter on this line.’

  ‘Then get to one you can use. And if you don’t call me in five minutes, I’ll call your editor.’

  Troy waited five minutes, then ten, then quarter of an hour. When Alex rang, Troy could hear the roar of traffic in the background.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Far side of Blackfriars Bridge. Had to get a cab across the river. I don’t trust any of the call boxes in Fleet Street. You never know who’s hooked up to what.’

  ‘A wise precaution, I’m sure.’

  ‘Freddie, I don’t care to be bullied.’

  ‘Then tell me where they are and I’ll stop.’

  There was a pause. He knew Alex was weighing the risk of challenging him one more time.

  ‘OK. OK. Tara’s at . . . have you got a pen?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It’s a long one. She’s at Brick Kiln Cottage, May’s Lane, Dedham, near Colchester, in Essex.’

  Troy could hardly believe it – the circularity of it. He had thought he had seen the last of Dedham.

  ‘Phone number?’

  ‘Isn’t one.’

  ‘And Caro? Are they together?’

  ‘I don’t know where Caro is. Honestly, I don’t. Tara won’t tell me. Says I deal with her or nobody.’

  Troy found this perfectly plausible. That was just the way Tara would play it.

  ‘When are you running with their story?’

  ‘As soon as she gets back and spills the beans. She wanted a break from it all. Said it was wearing her sister out. I told her she could have a week. That was three days ago.’

  It was perfectly clear to Troy that Alex had his doubts as to Tara ever reappearing to spill the beans.

  ‘Thank you, Alex.’

  ‘Freddie. Just one thing. Please don’t fuck this up for me.’

  Troy would try not to, but he did not care how much the Sunday Post had paid for the Ffitch version or whether they got to run with it or not.

  § 82

  In the middle of the afternoon he set off for Dedham, the first long drive he had attempted in many months. He was surprised how good it felt.

  Two hours later he stopped outside a pub on the edge of the village, an old thatched pub called The Lamb. He did not recall that he had ever seen it before, but it was a landmark on his map and according to his map he should turn left to get to The Glebe and right to find May’s Lane.

  It could scarcely be more than an hour to dusk – the sun sat reddening on the skyline. He found May’s Lane, less than a mile away. A long, unmade track lined with unleaving elm and oak, a small forest of wild horseradish lining the banks of the deepdrainage ditches to either side. Half a mile on, a mudspattered white Mini Cooper was pulled up in front of a skewwhiff redbrick cottage, one of those ancient houses built before the discovery of the right angle, a crumbling anachronism in powder red and green-mossed tile.

  He parked the car. No one came out to see, but then a Bentley hardly made any noise, purred rather than roared for all its power. He rounded the corner to the back of the house. A mousey-haired woman in blue jeans and a grubby crêpe-de-chine blouse was snipping away at the straggling limbs of a climbing tree.

  She turned at the sound of his shoes on the twigs and pebbles of the big back yard. It was Tara. Tara without a hint of surprise.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know anything about figs, do you, Troy?’

  ‘Not much. I’m a bit of a gardener, but I run more to spuds and leeks than to figs.’

  ‘It’s a Brown Turkey.’

  ‘You’re asking the wrong person.’

  ‘I know. That’s the trouble with the dead. You can always think of one more damn thing you want to ask them.’

  ‘I hardly recognised you,’ he said lamely.

  ‘I couldn’t wait for the blonde to grow out. Takes for ever. This is near enough my natural colour. I say “near” – can you imagine going into Boots and asking for hair colour in a shade of “mouse”? They don’t do it. Now, shall we go in and have a drink? And you can tell me what brings you all this way, as if I couldn’t guess.’

  The kitchen floor made him seasick just looking at it. Old yellow-white bricks undulated across a large, dusty farmhouse kitchen, worn shallow in the tracks of several hundred years of shuffling feet. Cobwebs clung to every beam and spiders scuttled in the corners of the windows. A single brass tap on the end of a lead pipe stuck out of the wall above a dirty porcelain sink; a bright-blue bottled gas cylinder under the draining board fed a two-ring cooker. It was basic; it was primitive; it was the raw, unscrubbed reality Fitz had copied in his hi-tech farmhouse kitchen at Uphill, but it was the way it was not because it been planned or designed but because it had been neglected. Neglect, he thought, was the missing principle in Darwinism.

  ‘It was my mother’s,’ Tara said as though reading his mind. ‘Been in the family for years. She left it to us, to me and Caro. Wanted us to have something the old man couldn’t touch. I’ve never really had need of it till now . . .’

  She opened the door of the larder. It was painted that very familiar shade of washed-out, flat green that had been so prevalent when Troy was a boy. There were times when it seemed that what the Victorians
had not painted black they had painted this pale pea-green.

  He heard the clunk of a gin bottle on the tabletop.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

  Or was it years?

  She handed him a gin and tonic. ‘Don’t ask for ice,’ she said. ‘There’s no fridge, because there’s no electricity. I can barely manage the cooker.’

  The wastebin overflowed with empty baked-bean tins. This was Tara’s idea of cooking. The only beans she’d spilled.

  ‘You know,’ Tara said. ‘I was surprised, really very surprised at you taking Clover in.’

  Not half as surprised as Troy was at the question.

  ‘How did you know?’

  ‘Clover called me from your house a couple of times. Never said why. Why did you do it?’

  ‘She . . . she just turned up.’

  ‘What? Knocked on your door and said, “Take me in”?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘OK. Fine. You’re not going to tell me. But – I wonder – was that where she died?’

  ‘Who told you she was dead? You’d have to have read the coroner’s reports to know that.’

  ‘Young Alex. You may have killed the story. But he knows an awful lot. You going to answer me?’

  ‘She died in the Charing Cross Hospital. But yes . . . she overdosed in my sitting room.’

  ‘And that’s why you’re here?’

  ‘I can’t believe in the coincidence of two suicides, those two suicides.’

  ‘Right under your own nose, eh?’

  ‘I’d just left Fitz at Leoni’s.’

  ‘I’d only seen him from the witness box, you know. Been weeks since we met face to face.’