A Little White Death (26 page)

‘A what?’

‘A permissive society.’

‘What’s that? What the hell is a “permissive society”?’

‘I rather think I just made it up. But it does describe pretty well the society we are becoming, but if we are “permissive” – can you hear the inverted commas, Freddie?
– then are we not forced to ask “whose permission?” I never needed anyone’s permission. I did what I did because it was what I wanted to do. Not because it outraged the
bourgeoisie. Fuck ’em, I say.’

It was the most complicated statement he had ever heard the wretched woman make. She who lacked all self-awareness, a born anarchist, who did first and thought about doing, if at all, much much
later, had come up with something that passed for analysis. A statement of her ‘position’. ‘She didn’t need ’em.’ And Troy did not need Sasha.

‘Sasha. Could you just fuck off ?’

She stood up, little legs ramrod straight, the lips a letterbox line. Picked up her drink and her newspaper and stared at him.

‘You know, Freddie. When you were young you were very pretty. A complete shit but a very pretty boy. One forgave you everything. Now you’re an emaciated wreck, you’re going to
have to be a lot more careful about playing the complete shit!’

She slammed the door on the way out. He knew now. He’d have to go to London or they’d all drive him totally mad.

Salvation was at hand. Two days later he woke late after another bad night and heard the sound of someone playing his piano. Badly. A deepand truly awful voice drifted up from
below.

‘You look sweet, talk abaht a treat, you look dapper from yer napper to yer feet . . .’

Troy swung his feet to the floor and reached for his dressinggown.

‘Dressed in style, wiv yer brand new tile, yer farver’s old green tie on, buuuuuuut ah wunt give yer tuppence for yer old watch chain, old iron, old iron!’

Descending the stairs, something told him this was not an unannounced visit from Lennon and McCartney.

‘Any old iron, any old iron, any any any old iron . . .’

The Fat Man sat at the piano, a brace of dead pheasants on the piano lid. He was in black jacket and stripes, a bowler hat the size of one of the lesser planets plonked down next to the
pheasants. His gentleman’s gentleman outfit. Troy had never seen him in it before.

‘I was in this neck o’ the woods,’ he said. ‘The guv’nor fancied a fresh bird, what with the glorious twelfth just passed. So I got on me bike and bagged a couple
o’ yours. You wasn’t up. So I was just passing the time at the old joanna. They don’t write ’em like that any more do they?’

No, thank God.

‘You’re going up to town?’

‘All the way to the ’Dilly, old cock.’

‘Any chance of a lift?’

‘’Allo, ’allo,’ said the Fat Man. ‘’Ere we go again.’

Once he had settled into Goodwin’s Court it seemed a good idea to call Anna. So he did. She drove over at once, clutching her doctor’s bag, wearing a flowery cotton
dress, poppy-like flowers on a black background, flat shoes without stockings. It was still summer. Her arms were bare and tanned. She had lost weight. Probably the same half stone he had gained.
She looked the better for it – he remembered vividly the slim young woman he had met in the 1940s. But there was a mask across her face, a flat unemotionality in her voice, that he had put
there.

‘I really should have come and seen you as soon as you were discharged.’

He said nothing. She seemed hesitant, confused.

‘Of course . . . that would have meant me coming out to Mimram . . .’

Of course, he had not asked her to Mimram.

‘But here we are,’ he said and so evaded whatever it was she might have meant, as such phrases are intended to.

Anna took his pulse, his blood pressure, listened intently at his chest and insisted he got down the bathroom scales so she could weigh him. He had indeed gained half a stone, nine pounds
exactly.

‘You’ve been very lucky,’ she said. ‘You’re mending well. You’re still giving yourself the jabs?’

Intramuscular injections, self-administered to the backside with the aid of a mirror. To say nothing of a large handful of pills each day.

‘Yes. I was wondering how long?’

‘Oh, weeks yet.’

‘If I’m recovering well, how soon can I—’

‘Work? Oh God, Troy. Don’t press me on this please. Months, honestly months.’

She stuffed the stethoscope back in her bag, smoothed down the front of her skirt, and looked grimly at him. She had not smiled once.

‘Now, is there anything else?’

‘I’m still not sleeping. I feel as though I’ve heard every dawn chorus for ages.’

‘Well, I can easily do something about that.’

She sat down, took a prescription pad from her bag, scribbled quickly and then tore up the topsheet.

‘What’s up?’

‘Oh, nothing. Damn near killed you with the wrong dose, that’s all. I’ve been so distracted lately.’

‘Distracted?’

‘You know. Angus.’

‘You’ve heard from Angus?’

‘Don’t be daft, Troy. Of course I haven’t heard from Angus. I doubt whether I or you will ever hear from Angus again. It’s been nine months. He’s never vanished for
that long before. And Fitz. You know.’

He didn’t know.

‘Fitz?’

‘Today’s been particularly bad. The trial started today.’

In the pit of self-obsession he’d missed the matter entirely. Anna handed him the prescription.

‘They’re called Mandrax. They’re strong, Troy. Promise me this. You’ll never take more than two at once, and never, never with alcohol.’

Sleep became bliss. Physical heaven. It took him a while to get going again in the morning, but sleepwashed over him like waves, a giant, sensuous hand gently pressing him down into the
bedding.

The cab dropped him twenty yards from the side entrance of the Old Bailey’s Court No. 1, near the corner of Newgate Street. He had not anticipated the crowd. At best the
Public Gallery held twenty-five people. Here were eighty or ninety at least. On the corner, trying to keepan eye on both entrances, were a bevy of press photographers, shooting randomly. Anybody
might be somebody. One came running, and Troy found himself blinded by the flash as the bulb popped in his face. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, and before he had opened them
felt the heavy hand upon his shoulder.

‘Move along there!’

The hand shoved him forward. He opened his eyes to see exactly what he had expected to see. A large constable hell-bent on doing his duty. Troy’s eyes were level with the topbutton of his
tunic. The man stared down at him a second, hand raised to push him along and then it saluted him sharply.

‘Sorry, sir. Didn’t recognise you there.’

‘That’s OK. I’m off duty. I was just hoping to see a bit of the trial.’

‘What? From the gallery? You’ll be lucky. I’d be risking a riot if I shoved you in ahead of the queue, sir. It’s day two. Some of this lot have been camping out since the
night before last. The pecking order’s all worked out. You just come with me, sir.’

He chaperoned Troy to the front entrance. They caught up with the happy hack who had snapped Troy.

‘Oi you! I’ll have that last plate or you’ll feel my boot up yer backside!’

To Troy’s amazement the man did not argue, just muttered ‘shit’ and tore the strip of film from the back of the camera. Troy had not, he realised, been out with the boys in
blue in a very long time.

‘Now, sir. Up the steps, into the court. City benches on your right, just behind counsel. Privileged seats, just tell ’em all to move up and flash your warrant card.’

There were hundreds of people outside the court. Troy felt almost abandoned as the man left him and resumed his duties. He felt acutely conscious of his stature – was everyone in the world
bigger than he? – and his frailty. He had not found himself in the midst of a crowd since . . . since he did not know when.

The interior was hardly less busy, a mêlée of journalists, lawyers and policemen. All in motion like the scattering of the reds on a snooker table. The courtroom, by contrast, was
quietly sepulchral. He soon realised that the copper had done him a favour. The view from the privileged planks of the City Lands Committee benches was a good one. He found himself sharing the back
row with a dozen women in daft hats. They were, it struck him, dressed for church – a little too florid, a little too much powder, a discreet smidgeon of lipstick. He had forgotten the space
a good trial occupied in the social calendar, somewhere between the Church of England and a West End play. He had not attended as a spectator since his first year on the force, when it had been
part of his education to know the workings of the law at this level. For most of the last thirty years he had faced these benches from the opposite side, from the witness box, occasionally glancing
at women such as these and wondering at their fascination with crime.

The woman in lilac next to him smiled and inched along the bench to make room for him without a murmur. Perhaps he looked like an invalid; perhaps his very pallor said ‘poorly’? The
woman on the other side of her, so obviously her mother, looked all of eighty, head bent over her knitting, humming softly to herself, the skin of her hands liver-spotted, her cheeks chalk-white
beneath the dusting of powder.

Fitz, on the other hand, put up in the dock, looked the picture of health – out on bail, spared the sunlessness of prison, the perils of perpetually boiled meals. His head turned, moments
before the court rose for the judge, and for a second he looked straight into Troy’s eyes. Troy could read nothing. Not reproach, not guilt – then Fitz smiled. And the smile was the
mereness of recognition.

Troy found he had encountered all the major players at one time or another. He had given evidence before Sir Ranulph Mirkeyn on half a dozen occasions. He was not one of his favourites, a former
member of the Plymouth Brethren, a man and a mind deeply rooted in the Old Testament. He had answered the questions of Prosecuting Counsel Henry Furbelow twice, as he recalled, and he had met
Defending Counsel David Cocket at Uphill. The choice of Cocket worried him. Charged with anything more than drunk and disorderly, Troy would opt for the best lawyer money could buy, not a friend
– well, not necessarily a friend – and certainly not a friend who conceded, at Troy’s estimate, twenty years’ experience to the prosecution, and who had yet to take silk. He
had liked Cocket, he was sharp, he was witty, but could he hold his own against a warhorse as experienced as Henry Furbelow QC?

The first goal was an own goal.

Furbelow rose.

‘My Lord, the prosecution wishes to withdraw the charge of procurement.’

Good bloody grief. Mirkeyn would eat him alive for this. It could mean only one thing. They had taken a chance the day before on drumming up evidence they had failed to find. They were conceding
defeat now – a day too late for the good temper of any judge.

To Troy’s amazement Mirkeyn simply accepted this. The court hissed with whispers. Mirkeyn called for silence and when the whispers had stopped Cocket was smiling and Furbelow not. The
first victory – however large or small. It bothered Troy, bothered him professionally. A prosecution as sloppy as this had just appeared to be meant sloppy police work. If it had fallen to
him to refer a charge for prosecution he would never have let it get this far without the proof. Nobody came out of such chaos looking good. Troy knew exactly what had happened – somewhere
along the line they had lost a witness.

It was gone four o’clock. Everyone was flagging. The day had been a non-event, a bogging-down in procedure, aptly summed up by the stage whisper of the old
tricoteuse
, who turned to her daughter and said: ‘Have the tarts been on yet, dear? Have I missed the tarts?’

Half the court, it seemed, had heard her. Cocket turned round, involuntarily perhaps, tried not to grin. Fitz looked over from his seat in the vast emptiness of the dock and smiled again. The
same smile he had smiled at Troy. It wasn’t recognition, Troy now realised. It was not an outward motion at all. It was something in Fitz. Some absolute resolution not to be unnerved by it
all. As though the man had induced a state of calm, by power of will alone or, more likely, by surrender of will. A beatific, a Buddhist serenity, Troy could not but see it as a dangerous
condition. He who isn’t fearful in the dock does not know the power of an English court. He who isn’t at least cautious in any seat in the Old Bailey, from counsel to public gallery,
does not know the law of contempt, the absolute power of a judge to imprison without trial.

Mirkeyn’s demonstration of his power was brief. He hammered his gavel and adjourned until the following morning.

When Troy had made his way slowly out from the City benches – letting the women in hats stream out ahead of him – he found a tall, dark, handsome young man waiting for him. His
nephew, Alex.

‘You’re just about the last person I expected to see.’

‘Call it a hobby,’ said Troy. ‘It may well be all that’s left of my job. However, you’re not the last person I was expecting. In fact I would like a word with
you.’

‘I have to file, Freddie. I should be running hell for leather for Fleet Street right now.’

‘Then get me a cab. We can share a cab as far as the
Post
.’

‘Quicker if I walk at this time of day, but I’ll happily find you a cab.’

Troy stood on the pavement, while Alex waved his arm at indifferent cabbies and elbowed the competition aside.

‘I merely wanted to ask you why they’ve dropped the procurement charge.’

But Alex had bagged a cab and bundled Troy into it.

‘Freddie, why don’t you call me? I’ll be happy to give you all the dope some other time.’

Alex banged the door shut. The passing thought ‘they grow up so quickly’ passed through Troy’s mind, but he consigned it to the ragbag of poor thinking almost at once.
He’d been brushed off and that was all there was to it.