A Little White Death

by John Lawton

  Rod bustled in. ‘Not late, am I?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy.

  ‘Good, good. Has he been out?’

  ‘No,’ said Troy.

  ‘Tell me, you have met him?’

  ‘Of course. One of the disadvantages of rank is having to attend meetings and sit on damn committees. I’ve known every Home Sec since Churchill’s last government.’

  ‘Good, good,’ said Rod, and it dawned on Troy that Rod was not much looking forward to this meeting. He’d put Rod in a bit of an awkward spot. But he didn’t care.

  A Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, a species of minister so low down on the life chain that they were acronymed to PUSS and probably lived under the gas stove too, emerged from Travis’s office.

  ‘The Home Secretary will see you now.’

  He flung the door wide to admit them. Travis was emerging from behind his desk. He was a big man, as tall as Rod and about the same age, Troy thought, late fifties. Not as good-looking. Conk too big, Troy had always thought. The sort of bloke who favoured a striped shirt with red braces, so that when he took off his jacket as he had done for this meeting, or the one before, he could look like a hardworking, hard-drinking, truth-chasing national newspaper editor rather than just a clapped-out lawyer with a parliamentary sinecure. There were times when Troy was not sure whom he loathed the more, spooks or pols.

  ‘Rod,’ Travis said heartily. ‘Good to see you without a dispatch box in-between.’

  ‘Nick,’ said Rod. ‘I believe you know my brother, Freddie.’

  ‘Of course, of course, Commander Troy. Scotland Yard’s finest.’

  Rod smiled at this, happy to pretend to anything that took out the tension. Troy didn’t, but then Troy silently agreed with it anyway.

  A quick handshake. Travis looked at Troy’s bandaged hands without comment, sat at his desk, back to the window, and picked up Troy’s letter. Rod and Troy sat and waited while he flicked through it. Then he said exactly what Coyn had said.

  ‘Excellent piece of detection. First class, absolutely first class.’

  ‘First class’ never impressed Troy as a compliment. It was too Oxonian. It was part of the vocabulary of excuseology, whereby an upper-class fool who had pissed away three years at university drinking yards of ale and rowing boats was saved from the justice of his innate stupidity by having ‘a first-class mind’. Half the prats on the front benches of both parties had ‘first-class minds’. It meant nothing.

  ‘Without your diligence and persistence it would appear that Chief Inspector Blood would have got away with murder.’

  Odd, thought Troy. Blood had got away with murder. Justice was hardly served by his suicide.

  ‘Assistant Commissioner Quint was clearly wrong, and thanks to you the murder of Fitzpatrick was solved. I am also inclined to agree with you that Sir Wilfrid Coyn is wrong. At least wrong in terms of the blanket solution he seems to believe in. I’m satisfied from the report you’ve given me, and the forensic reports you enclosed, that Blood killed Fitzpatrick and Detective Sergeant McDiarmuid, and I can see nothing that points to him having killed young Jackie Clover. But . . .’

  Troy was waiting for the but. There had to be one. There always was.

  ‘You can’t have it both ways, Commander. If Blood did not kill Miss Clover and the evidence you offer is the difference in modus operandi, and that evidence in turn invokes the apparent lack of violence in her death, then it simply begs the next question. If Blood could not force pills down a young girl’s throat without leaving marks – and you’re insistent on the medical report’s finding that there were none – surely no one else could? I agree with you. There is no evidence to support Sir Wilfrid’s belief that Blood committed all three murders, but there’s none to show that anyone else killed Miss Clover either. I’ve thought about this. Perhaps, for once, first impressions are the most plausible? The most obvious cause seems to me to be the real one. She died by her own hand. Consider her circumstances: you were out; she was bored and lonely; she’d been under all the pressure of a court case happening around her with no power to influence it; she’d experienced the wrath of her grandfather, and been entrusted to the care of a man more than twice her age with whom she could have little in common. She stole your sleeping pills. She swallowed a handful, dashed off a couple of suicide notes and then she was . . .’

  Neither Troy nor Travis cared to finish that sentence.

  Rod said, ‘Dead,’ looking from one to the other, wondering at their silence in the face of the word.

  ‘I can endorse your view. I can write to the Commissioner and tell him I consider it unwise to attribute the death of Jackie Clover to Blood – but what would it achieve? A different coroner’s verdict? A lightening of Blood’s load from three murders to two? But I can’t go back to him and tell him to let you carry on investigating it as murder. After all . . .’

  Travis glanced quickly at the last two pages of Troy’s letter and put the whole document down on his desk.

  ‘After all, you haven’t even got a suspect in the picture, have you?’

  Troy felt Rod’s foot tap against his, telling him to say nothing.

  ‘I’m sorry, Commander, I really am.’

  Troy got up. Rod seemed a little surprised to find it was all over so soon. But it suited Troy and it suited Travis.

  He showed them out.

  ‘Forgive me, but I’m due at the conference at noon tomorrow and I’ve at least three boxes of government papers to get through before then.’

  It seemed to Troy that he was rubbing it in, just a little. Reminding Rod that it had been years and years since he had last got his hands on a government red box.

  Traipsing down the interminable Whitehall corridor, Troy suddenly felt weak, and stopped to rest a while on a wooden bench. Rod sat next to him.

  ‘Well?’ he said.

  ‘I was wrong,’ said Troy.

  Troy wondered if Rod might be relieved to hear this. He was not.

  ‘Wrong? Wrong? After all you’ve said to me? You mean you’re telling me you think Travis is right?’

  Troy had not and would not say that.

  ‘I meant . . . there was no conspiracy . . . no MI5 hit. I was wrong.’

  ‘No conspiracy? God, you’re amazing. You know, Freddie, you almost had me believing it that day in St James’s Park.’

  Almost? No, Rod had been only too willing to believe him. Had believed him before he even spoke. But if he was now backtracking, then that was fine by Troy. The less he knew the better. If it meant undoing what was true, retreating into what was safe, then the less he knew the better. Troy had a case to pursue. A criminal to catch, not, it would seem, the criminal he had thought, but the hunt was far from over.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he lied. ‘I was wrong.’

  Rod could not stay seated. When he was angry he stamped or he paced or, as now, just moved. He stood across the corridor, his back to Troy, one hand pressed to his skull as though preventing its imminent explosion.

  ‘Freddie, I cannot begin to tell you how angry this makes me. All your life, you’ve had a devious, oblique, perhaps even an interesting mind, a terrier tenacity I have grown to admire, a relentlessness I find unforgiving and frequently pointless, and for the last twenty years you’ve seen conspiracies around every corner. Where is it all leading?’

  He turned to face Troy.

  ‘When is it all going to end?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Are you going you go on making a fool of yourself ?’

  Troy said nothing.

  ‘Are you going to make fools of us all?’

  ‘No. I’m not. It’s over. There was no conspiracy. I was wrong. Who knows, perhaps I went back to work too soon? Perhaps I need arest.’

  ‘You’re lying to me. You’ve been a liar all your life. You think I don’t know when you’re lying!’

  It’s for your own good, thought Troy. What I know you’d rather not.

  § 118

 
Troy phoned Kolankiewicz. And when he had talked to him he knew how Clover Browne came to be murdered.

  ‘That compound analysis you did for me . . .?’

  ‘The piece of cotton wool?’

  ‘Yes. What would happen if one were to take a large quantity of it?’

  ‘In what form?’

  ‘Pills. Pills corresponding in their make-up to the residue you found. Like the bit you found.’

  ‘Such a pill would be a large-dose vitamin pill. You would take one at a time. Sort of thing you might do if you have the flu.’

  ‘Supposing you took twenty-eight or thirty.’

  ‘Well . . . Vitamin A cannot be processed in excess. It ends up stored in the liver and as such becomes toxic. But a single overdose would hardly have a dramatic effect – you’d do yourself damage only if you took too much every day for weeks. We know very little about the effects of Vitamin E or Vitamin K, of which there was a trace in the et ceteras – but Vitamin C, by far the largest factor in the residue, the body will not store. It uses what it wants and pisses out the rest.’

  ‘So what ill-effects would you feel after such a dose.’

  ‘You’d buzz all night. I doubt you’d get a deal of sleep and your piss would turn an alarming shade of green.’

  ‘And that’s all?’

  ‘That’s all.’

  § 119

  It had occurred to Troy not to tell Jack, not to involve him, to let him escape into ignorance. It seemed like a violation. Jack was not his brother. Jack was his partner. Thrust together by necessity. Twenty-two years could not count for nothing. So he told him. Told him how Clover Browne came to die. Sitting at Goodwin’s Court, he laid the case out as clearly as he could. Even so he faltered, he lost his thread and took the best part of half an hour to get through it. Jack had said nothing. Then he put the same questions Troy would have put if he’d been Jack.

  ‘You’re certain?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So what’s the crime?’

  ‘Suicide pact.’

  ‘I’ve never encountered one. Is it murder?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to find out.’

  On cue, Clark let himself in the front door, one arm wrapped around law books, stuffed with bookmarks. He dumped them on the dining table. Turned to Troy.

  ‘It’s better than you’d think.’

  ‘Better?’

  ‘Clearer. It seems the powers that be have given the matter more attention than I thought, and at that a damn sight more recently.’

  ‘You have the floor, Eddie.’

  Clark was in his element. Jack stretched, locked his hands behind his head and tried not to yawn.

  ‘Prior to 1957 it would have been clear as mud. To enter into a suicide pact and simply to survive, whether by accident or design, ought to have been murder as the law stood at the time. However, we had a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sitting between ’49 and ’53 just to muddy the waters . . .’

  Jack and Troy exchanged looks. They’d both given evidence to the Commission. As far as Troy was concerned it might as well have happened in another lifetime. Clark flipped open a volume.

  ‘. . . “There are cases in which the survivor alleges that he and the deceased had agreed to die together, but it is doubtful whether there was a genuine agreement or a genuine attempt or intention to commit suicide on his part. Such cases are considered on their merits . . .” and what that amounts to is the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, which naturally falls to the Home Secretary. He decided who hanged and who didn’t depending on whether or not he believed the story. The Commission goes on . . . “It may be less easy for the Home Secretary to satisfy himself that the parties have agreed to die, especially if the survivor does not appear to have made a very determined attempt on his own life.” The Commission then recommended a change in the law to the effect that if the other party in a suicide pact takes their own life, the survivor is guilty only of aiding and abetting a suicide; but if the pact was tit for tat – you do me as I do you – then it’s murder.’

  ‘Sounds a bit bloody mechanical to me.’ said Jack. ‘Means not motives. Eddie, have we got this bastard or not?’

  ‘Bear with me, sir.’

  He opened a second fat book and ran a finger down the margin.

  ‘The 1957 Homicide Act did not implement the recommendation. Instead it made participation in such a pact manslaughter, and dropped the active/passive distinction. “A suicide pact is defined as a common agreement between two or more persons having for its object the death of all of them, whether or not each is to take his own life . . . but nothing done by a person who enters into a suicide pact shall be treated as done by him in pursuance of the pact unless it is done while he has the settled intention of dying in pursuance of the pact.”’

  ‘God give me strength. Eddie, have we got the bugger or not?’

  Troy intervened.

  ‘Yes. We have. It’s murder. Murder. Plain and simple. The act ironed out the ambiguities. It’s murder. Premeditated murder. Just imagine it. They’d been lovers. Forced apart by the Tereshkov rumpus and by Stan dumping Jackie on me. He came to see her. He knew how susceptible she was to romantic rubbish. She even thought Jules et Jim was romantic. He spun her a line, conned her into thinking a joint suicide was the only escape for both of them. He sat there while she swallowed Mandrax by the handful and fed himself plain white pills. When it was all over for Clover he packed up and left. But he missed the cotton wool out of the top of his jar of pills. Kolankiewicz analysed the residue as nothing stronger than vitamins. You can’t enter into a suicide pact and expect to kill yourself with a jar of vitamin pills.’

  ‘At last. At last. Now, can we prove it?’

  That was the one question Troy would not have asked.

  § 120

  ‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ Rod said. ‘Twice in two days.

  Have you spent so much time in this house since the old man died?’

  ‘Time to kill.’

  Rod took his coat and hung it up. The house was wonderfully warm. There was music playing softly. Pablo Casals, the Bach solo cello suites – designed, Rod had once told him, to make you stoic. Troy was stoic. What he needed was to be brave. Rod was in evening work mode, sleeves rolled up, tie at half-mast and the least sexy pair of tartan slippers Troy had ever seen.

  ‘Time to kill. I do hope that’s a metaphor,’ Rod said, and before Troy could say anything added, ‘I’m sorry, Freddie. That was absolutely tasteless.’

  Always the decency, that all-pervading, all-English decency that Troy could never muster with a thousand pounds of torque. Less than twelve hours ago Rod had been spitting fury. Now, as always, it was as though it had never happened. When would the man learn to hate properly?

  Troy said a quick ‘never mind’ and let Rod bustle him into a fireside chair in front of the roaring heat of a smokeless fire. Most Londoners had boarded up their fireplaces years ago when the city went smokeless in an effort to stop the killer smogs that had swamped the city in the early fifties. Rod had not given up. He had discovered a man-made fuel that looked like black sponge cake and stuck by his one practical skill in life – lighting the fire. Rod in front of a cheery fire, obligatory red tie dangling, was the man in his element – relaxed, self-contained, affable. From where he sat Troy could see right through the window, across Church Row to Travis’s front door.

  Troy was wrong. It was not a work evening. There were no parliamentary papers scattered on the carpet. Just a book. Face down on the threadbare Bakhtiar – The Last Days of Socrates.

  ‘Would you like a drink? Scotch perhaps?’

  Troy said yes. He’d just broken his dry spell at a house around the corner, and with Mandies, speed and two glasses of Margaux swimming in his blood, what did a drop of malt matter? Alcohol did not seem to get him pissed; it combined with the drugs into a sensation he could not name. Not drunk. Not drugged. High, in a lucid, crystalline way. He felt focused, very focused.
>
  ‘Miserable stuff for a quiet evening in,’ he said, pointing at the book.

  Rod handed him a large malt. They sat opposite each other and sniffed the peaty smell of malt whisky.

  ‘I read it again once in a while. Usually after a brush with death.’

  ‘You’ve had a brush with death?’

  ‘I meant you. You have. Or did you think it was just a bout of flu? It was the book the old man asked me to read aloud to him whilehewas dying.’

  Alexei Troy’s last illness had been sudden and brief. Fine one day, dying the next and dead within the week. It had been the middle of the Second World War. Troy had been at the Yard, Rod on an RAF base in mid-Essex. They each got a week’s leave. The old man had taken to his bed and, in death as in life, he had talked and talked and talked. There was, Troy thought, structure to his reminiscence. He did not ramble. Even if Troy could not see the connections, he could not think of it as rambling – a visit to Paris in 1909 to hear the famous Russian bass Fyodor Chaliapin sing, and two months later standing on the coast of France to watch Louis Blériot take wing for England. A meeting with H.H. Asquith in 1915, a blazing row with Beaverbrook in 1920, an audience – was that the word he had used? – with Hitler in 1930. And when his voice began to fail, what he wanted of his sons was that they should read aloud to him. He asked Troy to read him the Last Poems of W.B. Yeats. If, as it turned out, he had had Rod read Plato to him, then it made sense. Troy had read him the regrets, the miserable haunting might-havebeens of life – Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad? – and Rod had read him the optimism, the bravura stoicism, of Socrates under sentence of death, the philosopher’s sense of impending freedom in death. Troy had no idea which notion had gone with him to the grave. All he remembered was the old man’s last words to him as he had read him High Talk for the umpteenth time: ‘Barnacle goose? What the fuck’s a barnacle goose? I’ve never even seen a bloody barnacle goose.’ And he had died before Troy could answer. As famous last words went, it almost ranked with ‘Bugger Bognor.’