A Little White Death (13 page)

It was a week before they spoke again. Anna called him at the Yard, on the eve of the long weekend.

‘You have got the weekend off, haven’t you? You see, Tommy Athelnay’s invited us all down to Uphill for the holiday. You know, one of those pre-war long weekends. Turn up for
tea on Saturday, set off home same time Monday, back in London before bedtime.’

‘Us?’ Troy said simply. ‘All?’

‘Well you and me, and the Ffitch girls, and a couple of Fitz’s friends. Chap called Tony, someone he calls Marty, and a girl called Clover. I know her – she’s part of
that odd harem Fitz has at the mews house. Funny little thing. Never met Tony or Marty, or at least I don’t think I have. Tommy doesn’t go a lot on surnames – but it’ll be
about a dozen in all I should think.’

Troy said nothing, so she prattled on to coax him.

‘I say Tommy’s asked us, but we’d stay with Fitz of course. He rents the south lodge off Tommy. Tommy’s lived in the north lodge ever since Uphill Park got bombed in the
war.’

‘You think the prospect of prolonged exposure to Tommy would put me off, do you?’

‘I never know with you, Troy. The slightest thing can put you off. Tommy can be a bit of a bore, but you’re one of the most awkward buggers I know.’

‘And what about Fitz?’

‘What about Fitz? You’re not saying you’ve anything against Fitz?’

Troy knew Anna. He could imagine her clearly now, spluttering with incredulity. He chose his words carefully.

‘He pricks me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I think I mean he flirts with me. It’s a kind of flirtation. He flirts with the law.’

‘Can’t say as I’ve noticed.’

‘You wouldn’t.’

‘I mean, you’re not saying you think Fitz is a wrong ’un are you? He’s a rogue, but hardly a wrong ’un.’

‘No. I’m saying that he thinks he is. In his own mind he thinks he’s outside the law. The flirtation is in wanting also to be above the law.’

‘Now you have lost me.’

‘Why are most criminals caught?’

‘In my limited experience because they leave their fingerprints all over the shop. The average criminal seems not to be able to afford the price of a pair of gloves. Perhaps that’s
what drives them to crime in the first place? And they don’t reckon with Kolankiewicz and his bag of forensic tricks. And then, they don’t much reckon with you I suppose. The relentless
plod who never stops. You know “neither rain, nor snow, nor something something shall stop. . .”, and all that.’

‘I think you’ll find it’s the New York Post Office who never stop. No. Most criminals are caught because they want to be caught. Greater by far than the profit motive is the
wish to be able to fling the defiant act in the face of authority.’

‘And you think that’s what Fitz is doing to you?’

‘Yes.’

‘But he’s not a criminal.’

‘No. He’s not.’

‘Then I still don’t get it.’

‘You think inviting me to sit in a cellar that reeks of pot-smoking, where men roll up reefers in the lavatory, isn’t flirtation, the flirtation I’ve just described?’

‘Did it reek of pot? I can’t say I noticed. I mean you expect the odd whiff. It wouldn’t be jazz and it wouldn’t be jazz in Notting Hill if there weren’t a dash of
that sort of thing. I mean. Negroes do that sort of thing, don’t they? One sort of expects it of them, doesn’t one?’

‘I don’t.’

‘Yes – but you’re a policeman . . . oh bugger. This is rather where we came in, isn’t it?’

‘Quite. And I think by now you ought to be able to see that he associates with such people because it gives him sin by association, vicarious pleasure without the guilt, and then, to crown
it all he wants me to see it. He wants me, relentless plod as you put it, to see how untouchable he is in the middle of all this vicarious pleasure, this second-hand guilt. The eyes of Nero and the
hands of Pontius Pilate. That’s Paddy Fitz.’

‘He doesn’t mean any harm, you know.’ There was a bottomless sadness in her voice.

‘Convince me,’ said Troy.

Troy let Anna drive. She was thrilled to be behind the wheel of a seventeen-foot Bentley, and she was a better driver than Troy. Most people were.

He did not go often to Sussex. For all its proximity to London, it was not a part of England he knew well. He thought, as Anna drove him south, that it undulated in that classic way of rolling
English countryside. He’d seen it in all those pre-war films, he’d seen it from time to time from train windows on his way to Brighton. He had never been sure of the etymology of the
word ‘Downs’. Clearly, they were ‘Ups’, two chains of hills that wended their way from somewhere in the middle of southern England – Troy had no idea where –
eastward to the coast. The North Downs sort of fizzled out in Canterbury, and the South Downs leapt to their death near Beachy Head, and between the two lay a curved plain that took up much of East
Sussex and Kent. To cross them was a delight, revelation after revelation, a peeling away of horizon from horizon.

In its day, Uphill Park had been famous. It had been built by Inigo Jones for some ancestor of Tommy Athelnay’s, with later additions by various hands and, later still, gardens by Humphry
Repton. It had peaked about 1860, gone slowly downhill, in every sense but the nominal and literal, throughout the previous century, and had been in very poor condition, though still inhabited,
when a stray doodlebug chugged out sixty-odd miles short of its target and finally saw it off in the summer of 1944. Queen Elizabeth may never have ‘slept here’, but Queen Anne had, and
so had Mr Gladstone, William IV, Gilbert White and Admiral Nelson – to say nothing of Lady Hamilton.

All that remained were the walls, and the north and south lodges. But the lodges were on the grand scale and occupied one of the best vantage points in the county, a sharply rising, flat-topped
hill that had long, long ago been an island in the tidal inrush of the channel until centuries of silt had embedded it firmly in the surrounding mainland, above which it now rose as sharply as a
sandcastle. The lodges had been built as follies by the mid-Victorian umpteenth Viscount Athelnay. From the road, and from the surrounding countryside, they appeared to be the craggy ruins of
mediaeval castles, utterly at odds with the big house in Jones’s English wet-weather-adapted Palladian style. From the park side, they were houses, far from ordinary houses, bent into
colossal horseshoe shapes for the benefit of the illusion, but houses all the same. In between the two lodges lay the ruins of Uphill itself, the neglected Repton gardens, and enough grassy space
– lawn it was not – to accommodate a couple of cricket pitches and several tennis courts should anyone desire them. What had been desired was a croquet pitch. All a croquet pitch
required was a level surface, a lawnmower, a roller and the banging of a few hoops into the ground. As Anna pulled the Bentley up the hill and around the south lodge, Tommy Athelnay was lining up a
shot, his great, overstuffed frame bent at the knees, the mallet swinging smoothly between his legs to whack the wooden ball effortlessly through the hoop.

He was playing the Ffitch sisters, and partnered by a third young woman, whom he brought over to the car as Troy and Anna stretched their legs.

‘Jolly good,’ he said in his over-hearty tone. ‘Jolly good, you’re the first. Just in time. We can all have one more bash and then set up tea on the terrace. Now have you
met Clover? You haven’t met Clover have you? Mind you, the sky’s pretty clear. Perhaps we could play another hour and go in for tea, get a nice log fire roaring and . . . er, have you
met Clover? Or did I ask you that already? Anyway it’s a fine afternoon why don’t we . . . er . . .’

Troy wished Anna would say something, do something other than smile, or Tommy might prattle for ever. The girl took the initiative.

‘Clover Browne,’ she said, and stuck out her right hand at Troy. ‘Browne with an “e”.’

Troy shook. He didn’t know how Tommy did it and he was not at all sure he wanted to know, but this girl was younger and better looking even than the Ffitch girls. She was not their leggy
five foot ten, but her hair was long and blonde, natural blonde, and her eyes a piercing shade of blue. It was a face to turn heads. The accent did not match. Her ‘with’ was a
‘wiv’. The Ffitch girls spoke the received pronunciation of a southern girls’ public school. They were Roedean or Cheltenham or Bedales. Clover was undisguised cockney –
Parson’s Green Elementary or Shepherd’s Bush High – and no ‘e’ on the end of her Brown would ever disguise it. It was Brown as in ‘knees up’. If
she’d added the ‘e’ herself, thought Troy, she’d wasted her time.

‘I’d love to play,’ said Anna. ‘Just what I need after two hours behind the wheel. I’m a bit rusty, though.’

‘No matter, no matter,’ said Tommy, hugging her with one huge arm, while the other dangled his mallet. ‘It’s like riding a bike. You can have the pleasure of falling off
all over again. And you, Troy?’

Troy was miles away. Staring at Clover Browne. Tommy had said his name again before he realised he had been staring, and realised the more that the child had not looked away, but had steadily
returned his gaze, frowning all the while. Child. Yes, he thought, child. She could hardly be more than eighteen or nineteen.

‘No thanks, Tommy. Not for me. I’ll get the bags in.’

‘Fine, fine,’ said Tommy, and Troy surmised that little would ever displease or unsettle such an amiable buffoon.

‘’Ere, you ’ave mine,’ Clover said and thrust her mallet at Anna. ‘I’ve ’ad enough for now.’

Clover walked ahead of Troy up the steps of wide flagstones, their cracks dotted with flowering thyme and creeping mint, past the remains of Repton’s terraced garden, to the back door of
the lodge, propped open with a weathered stone head at the centre of the horseshoe. She gave him a good view of her backside, so neat in its navy-blue slacks, the sort of slacks that slipped a loop
under the foot and stretched themselves to the leg and the backside with every stride. She turned on the top step, watching him, lumbered with all the bags he wished Anna had not brought and his
own solitary overnight case. She looked neat standing there. He could think of no other word to describe her – neat in her stretch slacks, neat in the sleeveless white cotton blouse, buttoned
high at the throat, leaving her arms bare and tanned. Neat with no wind to ruffle her hair, now nestling lightly over one eye to give her a modern version of the peekaboo. Neat in her stylish way
– stylish, he thought, like Veronica Lake. The archetypal short, blonde beauty of the 1940s. But she was staring at him far more intently than he at her.

‘Why are you staring at me?’ he asked.

‘I was just thinking – bet you was a looker when you was young.’

Thanks, thought Troy. And the girl turned on her heel and vanished into the house.

‘I know what you’re thinking,’ said a voice behind him.

Troy looked over his shoulder. Paddy Fitz stood in a bed of miniature roses, in grubby corduroy trousers and a smudged RAF blue shirt, shorn of its collar, pulling off a pair of gardening
gloves.

‘You were thinking, “I bet she’s under age.”’

‘Not quite,’ said Troy. ‘But almost certainly under voting age.’

‘How tactfully you put it, Freddie. But try to think a bit less like a policeman. She’s seventeen. I may have a certain reputation, but not with minors. If she were under age,
believe me, she would not be here.’

Fitz threw his gloves on the ground, reached out and took two of Anna’s bags from Troy.

‘Let’s have a drink, shall we? I’ve been pulling up fucking weeds all afternoon.’

Troy followed Fitz into the house – dark and cool, wooden panelling, heavy furniture and the smell of beeswax polish. Repton’s ‘red book’ stood in the hall, propped open
on a lectern. Uphill Park, for all Fitz’s efforts, might never look that way again. On into a thoroughly modern kitchen, all stainless steel and yards of that new stuff that had so completely
displaced oilcloth and had a name like ‘Formica’ – and gadgets, gadgets galore, that sliced and chopped and mixed. Troy cooked when the mood took him. He wasn’t bad at it,
but he’d never win prizes for it. He was simply not the slave to the laziness of living alone, or the dependence on women, that most men of his age were. But this was the kitchen of a man who
took his cooking seriously, and equipped it with a vast
batterie de cuisine
– an arsenal. A full set of imported French enamelled iron cooking pots hung from hooks embedded in the
beams. A murderous-looking row of Sabatier knives clung to a magnetic strip on the wall as though merely waiting the appearance of the knife thrower and the girl in the tasselled swimsuit. And the
dusty harvest of last year’s crops dangled from the rafters, great swathes of tarragon and rosemary, and strings of onions, shallots and garlic. The centrepiece was a vast deal table, which
bore every conceivable stain and scar of its years of use: the black spots of fag ends carelessly stubbed out, the red rings of wine glasses, the faded brown of coffee cups, the washed-out greens
of pounded herbs and the serratic scars of endless slicings and choppings across this maid of all work.

The air was rich and warm with the smell of yeast. Troy had to hand it to Fitz. He didn’t know another man in the whole of England who would pass a lazy Saturday afternoon baking his own
bread.

‘Dump your stuff anywhere,’ said Fitz, and Troy did.

Fitz opened a cupboard and reached down a couple of glasses.

‘You know, I’m really very glad you decided to come. Anna needs the break. And I’m not all sure she’d have come without you.’

Troy was not all sure what he meant by this. He’d half formed the opinion that he was her escort in a very broad sense of the meaning – convenience, in that he played man to her
woman on the social stage; protection, in that while he did this none of Fitz’s male friends were likely to regard her as a bit of spare and leap on her. If there was another meaning,
he’d rather hear it from Anna than Fitz.

Troy said nothing, and yawned.

‘Tiring drive?’ Fitz asked.

‘Didn’t drive. Let Anna do it all,’ Troy replied through another yawn. ‘I just haven’t been sleeping too well lately.’