A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  ‘That changed when he got me alone. He stopped asking me the same questions over and over again. Of course he’d always come back to them. But there was something else eating away at him. He had a real bee in his bonnet. He got angrier and angrier. I couldn’t understand it. It was as though I’d done something to him personally, offended him personally. It was like nothing quite so much as talking to my own father. I came home one day, I’d been shopping, I’d bought one of those flared ya-ya underskirts that made your skirt stick out like you were Sandra Dee. He went apoplectic. Before I could even try it on he’d torn it out of my hands and stuffed it on the fire. He stood there, ramming the poker into it, boiling with rage. Like it was a personal insult. Blood was like that. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he kept saying. “Do you know what you’ve done?” I said nothing. What could I say? At first I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Then it got clearer. He was talking about Vivienne. Or to be precise, he was talking about sex with black men. Nig-nogs as he called them. “You’ve tainted some very important people,” he said. I still didn’t know what he meant. Tainted? A white woman sharing her body with black men and white men. Decent people, tainted by me. Through me. “What do you think that disgusting little twat of yours is?” he said. “A melting pot? I’ll tell you what it is, a cesspit chock-full of nig-nog come. You taint decent men. You spread your filth across decent men. Important men.” Well, I knew now, didn’t I? I was a cesspit.’

  ‘Who do you think he meant by important men?’

  ‘Woodbridge, I suppose. I don’t suppose for one moment he meant Tony. And I don’t suppose he even knew about old Tommy. I was very fond of Tommy. He was the one man we never shared. Tara thought he was fun, but nothing more. I used to give Tommy one from time to time. Kept him happy. Now – I do sound like a whore don’t I?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Then it got really weird. I think Blood lost sight of me. Almost literally. It was as though he couldn’t see me. It was though he saw some kind of composite whore made up of me and Tara and Clover.’

  ‘He asked about Clover?’

  ‘Oh boy, did he ask about Clover. You’d think his life depended on it. I didn’t know where she was. There was nothing I could tell him. But it seems as though I was responsible for her. I’d taught her how to fuck black men. I’ve no idea whether she did or not. Absolutely no idea. And I shouldn’t think she needed lessons. But I was responsible. I’d spread my filth, to her and to whoever she was fucking. Then he said it again. I’d tainted very important, very decent men. Only this time I’d done it through Clover. I’d no idea I’d so much power. I didn’t understand any of this. He was just ranting. Bonkers, Troy. Truly bonkers.’

  It paid to see the world through other men’s eyes from time to time, he knew. To Percy Blood the Ffitch sisters and Clover must seem like uncontrollable forces, bending and breaking the lines of race and class precisely where they should hold firm. Blood had not mingled the ethos of the two squads he had served; he had merely brought the solidity of one to meet the insubstantiality of the other – the political certainties of Special Branch met the sexual uncertainties of Vice. In women such as these, to a man such as Blood, race, class, politics and sex mixed. Those which should be kept apart flowed into one another, dissolved in the wetness of women. No wonder he was apoplectic.

  ‘That was when he started on Vivienne. My piccaninny as he called her. He asked me to imagine how my life would look to a magistrate trying to determine her well-being. I was a slut. I was the most notorious whore in the country. I had no husband; I had one man after another – didn’t seem to occur to him that I might have two at once – I had nig-nogs; Vivienne’s father was a nig-nog who paid nothing for her keep. Worse, he was a jazz musician. I don’t know how he knew that. And I knew what jazz musicians were, didn’t I? Drug addicts. All of them. He painted a bleak picture. Said he could have her put into care just like that. He snapped his fingers. I remember that. Horrible big hands and flat, ugly fingernails. Right in front of my eyes. He wanted me to brand myself a whore and Fitz a pimp. I still wouldn’t do it.

  ‘I met Tara afterwards, when he’d finished with her. She dragged me into a pub. Everybody gawping at us. She stared them down. Told me Blood had said the same thing to her. That he’d take Vivienne away from me. Said she’d made a statement and signed it. Then she said I had to do the same. I said I wouldn’t. She squeezed my hand and told me I was being stupid. Then she was bullying me too, telling me I was always the baby sister – “b’ister” she used to call me – that she was the one with the brains. “Trust me,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”

  ‘Blood got me in the next day. He must have known I still wasn’t going to make a statement. He had one typed out. Set it on the table as soon as I walked in the door, before I could sit down. I just shook my head. He slipped behind me, and he hit me so hard I thought I’d throw up. I didn’t, though.’

  ‘Where?’ said Troy. ‘Where did he hit you?’

  Caro twisted her torso, pointed to her back above the hip. A kidney punch.

  ‘I tried saying no. All I could do was whisper. He hit me again. Other side this time. I signed. I didn’t read a word of it, but I signed. Tara was waiting when he was through with me. I had a smudgy carbon of what I’d signed clenched in my fist. I couldn’t read it. I asked her what I’d signed. When she told me, I wept. It seemed like we’d damned Fitz. I never wanted to do that. Fitz had been good to me. I loved Fitz.’

  ‘And you determined to tell the truth at the trial?’

  ‘Troy, please don’t ask me about the trial. I don’t want to talk about the trial. I really don’t.’

  He could press for more – he’d get more, but at a price. He did not think her distress a price worth paying. He asked Caro the same question he had asked her sister.

  ‘Do you know of anyone who would want Fitz dead?’

  ‘I loved Fitz,’ she said again. ‘Until all this blew up I rather thought everyone else did too.’

  Passing the sitting-room door, Troy saw the child playing on the carpet, a noisy game with a wooden hammer, board and blocks. It looked to him to be a game of square pegs in round holes. Philly sat restringing an old guitar.

  ‘Well, piano man – she OK?’

  ‘I think so,’ said Troy. ‘And you? Is your band still together?’

  ‘Yeah, we giggin’ Friday and Saturday. Still one step ahead of the man.’

  Troy took out one of his calling cards, the personal ones with the Goodwin’s Court address and his home telephone number.

  ‘You might call me if the Home Office try to deport you. My brother will be Home Secretary in a few months’ time.’

  Philly pulled a face. Mock astonishment. ‘You got to be the best-connected piano player I ever had.’

  ‘That’s me,’ said Troy.

  He had no idea what he might say to Rod if push came to shove. He could try telling him that to break up a working band would be to put half its members on the dole – God knows, it might work.

  § 87

  Blood,Perceval Albert. Chief Inspector

  (9/9/58)

  b.3/8/07Manchester

  Educated StThomas’s School, Manchester.

  No Matric. Left 27/6/21

  Apprentice butcher 1921–6

  Butcher in family business 1926–7

  Enrolled Special Constable 1926

  Applied Lancs. Constabulary 23/10/26.

  Failed literacy

  Volunteered British Palestine Police 1927

  2 Commendations from Insp-General for bravery

  Requested transfer to Royal Navy June 1941 – refused

  Requested transfer to Royal Air Force Aug. 1941 – refused

  Requested transfer to Army Sept. 1941 – accepted

  Enrolled Military Police,Camberley 5/11/41

  Served Hamburg and Berlin 1945–6

  Transferred Metropolitan Police 1/8/46 with rank of Sgt. CID from 14/10/48

 
; Flying Squad 14/10/48

  Promoted Inspector 1/2/51

  Special Branch 1/6/53

  Promoted Chief Inspector 1/9/58

  Clark’s summary of the career of Percy Blood was a bald set of dates and ranks, but it told a story. Blood had rescued himself from the boredom of working for his father by volunteering as a Special, an unpaid, part-time constable – and the date was a giveaway. He had come forward on the side of law and order at the age of nineteen, during the General Strike. The first taste of power had been unforgettable. He had tried to join the regular police force, but he could not spell, or his lips moved when he read and they’d turned him down. Troy could guess what happened next. He’d studied hard, overcome his disability and made it into one of the colonial forces – Palestine. And he had served with distinction. Palestine had become a battleground, even before the Second World War – first the Arabs and then the Jewish guerrillas, Stern and Irgun. Troy had no doubt that he’d earned his commendations. And then the war had broken out in Europe. Good God, how Blood had wanted to be in it – he’d volunteered for every arm of our fighting forces until one accepted him. It was probably only his age that had barred him from the navy and the RAF – he was thirty-four; it would be a long time before men of that age were called up– and when he got into the army it must have disappointed him deeply that all they wanted of him was more police work. He’d have seen no combat as a Redcap stuck in Camberley and then in the occupied cities of Germany. He’d drawn the short straw with his war. Not a good war – that line which every Englishman yearned to be able to utter – not a bad one, but a dull one, busting petrol thieves, sobering the habitual drunks, and stamping his feet at Courts Martial. Then he got lucky. The Met – the London Metropolitan Police Force – accepted him. He went from a life on the periphery to the heart of the matter, straight in at Scotland Yard. His promotion had been slow, and it was now almost certainly stuck. He’d never make superintendent. And there the record stuck. It was not up to date. There was no mention of his transfer from the Branch to Vice. There was also no mention of last year’s investigation into allegations of brutality in his handling of Ban-the-Bombers at one of those interminable Trafalgar Square demonstrations. He’d been cleared. But, as Troy recalled, it had been touch and go. Troy tended to pay scant attention to the operations of the political police – they did not answer to him – but if the last word had been Troy’s he might not have been quite so inclined to give Blood the benefit of the doubt. All in all, the record bore out the Blood he had thought he knew. This was the making of a disappointed man, a bitterly disappointed man.

  He turned to page two – medical history. Percy Blood had never taken a day off sick since the day he joined the Met seventeen years ago. Until now.

  § 88

  Seventy-one Marsh Lane was an Edwardian villa. Red and white tiles in diamond formation led up a short path from a rickety, rotten garden gate, past a ragged blue hydrangea to a maroon front door with a leaded stained-glass window depicting a square-rigger in full sail set in its upper half. It was the sort of door to make John Betjeman lyrical or tearful or both. It was the sort of house, the sort of street, to cheer the heart of a nostalgic man. Hardly a parked car, not a twitter from a trannie, only the roosting H-shaped television aerials on the chimney stacks told you it was the seventh decade of the century rather than the first. That and the hideous 1950s fill-in where half the terrace had succumbed to a bomb in 1940. The fifties had put up flats between terraced houses with no regard for architectural style in much the same way Troy’s brother put on socks. Nothing ever matched. It had been an era in which nothing matched. Troy would always think of it as the odd-socks age.

  He banged the brass knocker across the topof the letterbox.

  A small rodent of a woman opened the door. A woman in her mid-fifties, he thought. The spiralling remnants of a home perm. Not a trace of make-up. A nylon housecoat in pink and pale blue, its sleeves stopping far short of the sleeves of the woollen dress she wore beneath it. She looked to Troy to be the kind of houseproud woman who might well spend all her time in such a housecoat, never far from a duster. There was a yellow duster in her hand as she spoke to him.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good morning, Mrs Blood. Is your husband at home?’

  She scrutinised him, put one hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun slanting across his shoulder. ‘It’s Mr Troy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes. Is the Chief Inspector at home?’

  ‘He’s not expecting you.’

  ‘I was passing.’

  She let the obvious lie go by, pulled the door wide to admit him, quickly shook her duster in the open air and pushed the door to.

  ‘He’s in there. I’ll tell him you’re here.’

  She crossed the hall and opened the door opposite. Troy could see Blood beyond her, sitting on the far side of a green-baize table, head bent over something, hands poised on a puzzle or a kit of some sort.

  ‘Percy,’ she said.

  Blood did not seem to hear her.

  ‘Percy!’ she said the louder, and Blood looked up, looked from her, with annoyance in his eyes, to Troy, with evident surprise.

  He stood up, put down the model ship he’d been working on, still clutching an odd-shaped piece of the kit in his other hand.

  ‘Mr Troy.’

  ‘Mr Blood.’

  Blood looked at his wife.

  ‘All right, Peggy. It’s all right, you can leave us now.’

  He dismissed her as readily as any servant. As Troy approached the table, Blood pointed at the chair opposite him, but glared at his wife, hovering in the doorway.

  ‘Later, Peggy, later,’ he said.

  Still she did not move, then Blood waved his hand. Troy heard the soft click of the door behind him.

  Blood put down the sheet of extruded plastic he had been holding.

  ‘I won’t shake hands, sir. The glue, d’ye see?’

  He picked up a rag, poured a drop of thinner onto it and began to rub at his hands, working the solvent down the side of his fingernails, looking at his hands, not at Troy.

  The room seemed to Troy to be a shrine to the navy, a personal museum of ships and sailing. Everywhere he looked there were models of ships in balsa and plastic, or passepartout-mounted prints of ships. Tall ships, steamships, ships in bottles. Even the lamp by which Blood worked was a familiar, unlovesome object from the 1930s – a lamp in the shape of a galleon, a Maltese cross upon the foresail, an English leopard on the mizzen, looking as though they’d been cut from dried skin. The room was so very thirties, so very suburbia. No sign of television; a large wireless, still tuneable to lost stations such as Droitwich and Hilversum, topped by a large goldfish bowl, home to a pair of orbiting goldfish; the disused fireplace, neatly, absurdly ornamented by a fan of folded paper; a brass holder for tongs, poker and brush; the rising sun patterned rug, its beams radiating outward from the hearth; the ashtrays precarious on the chair arms; the hand-embroidered antimacassars creaseless upon the backs. It was lost in time – perhaps many English homes now were. Would someone come upon his home in ten or twenty years’ time and think it all so quaintly dated?

  Troy looked at the box lid in front of him. This was the quick version of model-making. Warships by numbers, available in every Woolworth’s the length and breadth of the land. Aimed at children, but then he’d once whiled away a wet Saturday himself making a model of a Spitfire. This specimen was huge.

  ‘May I?’ said Troy, and turned the lid towards him.

  ‘The Hood,’ said Blood simply.

  Troy doubted there was anyone in his generation – and Blood’s – who would not have recognised the silhouette of this ship. HMS Hood. Launched when Troy had been five or six years old. At 42,000 tons the largest battleship afloat. The pride of the Royal Navy for twenty-one years, until its successor – the next shipto be the largest shipafloat, the Bismarck – had sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic in less than two minutes. Troy knew the death toll – t
hey all did – 1,400. He knew the survivors – they all did – three out of 1,400.

  Blood put down the rag. The smell of polystyrene thinner pervaded the air. Ever after Troy would associate that smell with Blood.

  ‘My brother was on the Hood. Chief Petty Officer. Thirty-five years old. Married. Three kids.’

  Blood paused. He was looking straight at Troy without, it seemed, seeing him.

  ‘Not one . . .’ Troy said.

  ‘No,’ Blood said. ‘Not one of the survivors.’

  Troy saw the pattern beneath the curriculum vitae. May 1941. Blood had volunteered so keenly, so persistently, in the wake of his brother’s death. That was why his first choice had been the navy. That was why his hobby was model ships, if something so obviously total, so obviously obsessive, could be as simple as a hobby. He had probably bought the house for the pattern on its front door.

  Blood threw down the rag, sniffed at his fingers and, satisfied with the smell, straightened the ragged sleeves of his cardigan. Perhaps, too, there would come a time in Troy’s life when the unexpected visitor would come across him in such a cosseting garment, darned at the elbows, frayed at the cuffs, taking his private comfort from a public world?

  ‘Tell me, Mr Troy. What brings you my way?’

  Hit him hard, Troy thought.

  ‘It’s really very simple. Did you tell Caroline Ffitch you’d have her child taken away?’

  ‘I explored that possibility.’

  Troy was gobsmacked. The precision of the man’s evasion. A perfect sentence in the art of understatement. It was almost the last thing he’d expected of him. Round one to Blood, and Blood had the second punch in before Troy could draw breath.

  ‘’Scuse me asking, sir, but exactly what case are you investigating?’