A Little White Death (28 page)

‘You know Fitzpatrick, don’t you?’ she said.

‘Yes. How do you know that I know?’

‘He looks your way from time to time. When he bothers to look at anything, that is. I don’t suppose you can see what he does from where you’re sitting, but he’s
blasé beyond belief. One would think he was not listening at all. He passes the time drawing caricatures, wicked, pornographic caricatures of the court. He’s sketched Mirkeyn in the
nude three times already. And he somehow manages to draw Furbelow with three buttocks and make it seem anatomically accurate. But . . . when he looks at you and when you look back it is clear
– you know one another.’

‘A friend of a friend,’ Troy said for simplicity’s sake.

‘And so your interest is not professional?’

‘I’m off duty. In fact I’m off sick. But any Scotland Yard case brought to trial is inevitably a professional interest.’

‘Do you think he’s guilty?’

‘I’ve hardly heard the evidence yet.’

‘Try to think a bit less like a policeman.’

These had been Fitz’s own words to him not so long ago. In another lifetime.

‘I doubt it,’ he conceded. ‘Didn’t need the money. He loves risk, but I cannot see the fun in the risk of poncing. Sex is fun, money is fun. Put them together and
suddenly they’re not. That’s about as fundamental as the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides in a right-angled triangle.’

‘Aha. Do you think he’s a spy?’

‘A spy!’

‘There has been much privileged speculation on the point.’

Privileged meant one thing – what those slander-immune buggers in the Commons said.

‘What sort of speculation?’

‘Oh, you know how they do things in the House. Your brother’s one of them, after all. “So-and-so may not be a Communist,” you say, thereby implying that equally well he
may be.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘I doubt that too. A dupe perhaps, a spy . . . highly unlikely. I’ve never thought Fitz capable of keeping a secret. Primary qualification for the job I
should think. If those clots in the Commons think he’s a spook, they’re mistaking the bond between Fitz and Tereshkov. It wasn’t politics; it was sex.’

‘How quickly we arrive at the heart of the matter,’ Rebecca said.

‘Sex?’

‘Sex.’

‘Sex?’

‘Power.’

It felt like moves in an invisible chess game, and she’d just put him in check in half a dozen swift manoeuvres.

‘Power?’

‘The power men have over women.’

‘Old as history,’ said Troy, quickly switching rook for king, knowing this added nothing to the point she was making, but then he had no idea quite what point she was making.

‘We’re on the verge of a new age, you know. I keep hearing that.’

‘So do I,’ said Troy, ‘I’ve been listening out for England going “boom”. Not sure I’ve heard it yet.’

‘I doubt you will. Have things changed at all since I was young? I was one of the New Women – it’s a label that’s made me highly sceptical of the use of “new”
ever since. I see nothing new in Fitzpatrick’s relationship with these girls.’

‘The oldest profession?’ said Troy.

‘No. I didn’t mean prostitution at all. In fact I thought we’d just agreed he wasn’t guilty of that. But he’s betrayed those girls as surely as if he’d put
them on the streets. He has made them commodities. He’s packaged them. Whatever it was in them that was “new”, that was of this “new” age, he has put into the same old
packet.’

Troy remembered his first reactions, the first time he had seen the Ffitches. His own unspoken phrase had lodged in his mind. They had looked, as he thought it, like ‘sex in a
packet’. As instant as coffee. But she could hardly mean anything so . . . so . . . so slight as appearance. They looked – surely? – the way they wanted to. What woman ever
dressed for a man? Except to attract one – but then perhaps that was what Dame Rebecca meant. The commodity must appeal to the purchaser.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘Fitz is not on trial for that.’

‘Is he on trial at all? It is England on trial. The old one trying this nebulous new one – or the new one trying the old. I cannot work out which. The court we sit in isn’t the
only court in operation and may well not be the one that matters in the long run. There is so much more to this than meets the eye and so much much more to it than the sexual mores and dubious
income of Paddy Fitz.’

‘He’s not a villain, you know.’

‘Oh? So he’s a good man is he?’

‘Hardly that either. He and Woodbridge are two of a kind. Now, I don’t know Woodbridge at all well, but they are both men presumptuous enough to think they are above, not the law,
but perhaps the rules that govern us.’

‘Laws nonetheless,’ she said.

‘If you like,’ said Troy, using his father’s phrase and seeing her smile warm at the familiarity of it. ‘But that doesn’t make them criminals. And the common cry of
them both is, “I’ve done nothing illegal,” by which they mean nothing wrong, as though the only rights and wrongs were the rights and wrongs of law.’

She was nodding her assent now. He was, he felt, talking her language.

‘What separates them is merely class and power.’

This, in English terms, was pretty much the same as saying that what separated them was infinity itself, but she let it pass.

‘They aren’t villains . . .’ he went on.

And racked his brains for what they were.

‘They are sybarites. And if there is an abiding characteristic to the sybarite, a sybarite’s code if you like, it is that what’s good for him is good for the rest of us.
Denying him his pleasure does him no good, if us no harm. Granting it does him good and his good is our good. Thereby we all benefit. The only sin is denial.’

‘I’m sure you’re right. In fact you’re probably right about both of them – Fitzpatrick and Woodbridge – both of them every
other
inch the gentleman . .
.’

She smiled as she said it. It was very funny, and so true. Both of them gentlemen for the odd inches only, and rogues for all the evens.

‘But,’ she picked up, ‘but, it isn’t the fate of the men that concerns me. It’s the women. Have you been round the back yet and seen what happens when the witnesses
leave? The Ffitch girls have been booed, hissed and yesterday I saw a lone lunatic pelt them with rotten fruit as though they were in the pillory. Indeed, they are – in the pillory of
national opinion. Tarts, as that old dear so rightly put it yesterday. Our national tarts. And do you know, they don’t deserve it?’

Troy wondered about the nature of her sympathies. She was quite possibly one of the most infamous unmarried mothers of the century. Sexually liberated in the last days of whalebone and bloomers,
just before the First World War. The mistress of H. G. Wells at twenty-one, the mother of his child at twenty-two. He had in his youth wondered if, sexual liberation notwithstanding, she considered
herself abused by Wells – she certainly saw the Ffitch sisters as abused by men. And he recalled now that his father, that most expansive, eclectic of hosts, a man who delighted in the absurd
juxtapositions of people, had never invited H. G. Wells and Rebecca West at the same time. Come to think of it, he had never invited her to his Hampstead house, the house in Church Row he had
bought from Wells, the one Rod now occupied. But, then, it was not absurd, perhaps merely embarrassing, as though for Wells and West to meet would offend, not the other guests, but Wells and West
themselves; as though a public secret could still not be paraded in public. For Wells and West to meet might be the fusion of matter and anti-matter, followed by social annihilation at molecular
level. God knows why his father had done this. Perhaps he had felt the sense of injustice in her. Plenty of others had been happy enough to entertain the two together.

‘Do you think they’ve given up the search for the third girl?’ Dame Rebecca asked.

Whatever he said now might well be to give a hostage to fortune. She was, after all, a working hack – and for all he knew at work on a book too. Better by far to tell her nothing, to throw
the question back at her as disingenuously as possible.

‘Were they looking?’

He hoped he sounded innocent.

‘Oh Lord, yes. Of course they were looking. The police and the press. If the police don’t know she’s called Clover Browne then they should ask the gentlemen of Fleet Street.
But no one’s found her. With any luck they’ll never find her. Browne with an “e” is merely Smith into Smythe. I’m sure you remember what Groucho Marx had to say about
that. Browne can hardly be her real name, now can it? In fact I hear rumours of some influence in the family.’

‘Sir Somebody Something,’ Troy muttered.

‘Eh?’

‘That’s what Woodbridge called him. Sir Somebody Something.’

‘Well, if we knew who Sir Somebody Something was we’d know who Clover Browne was. Tell me, who do you think this old buffer is? Some retired general from the shires?’

Troy thought of Catesby, just for the exemplar, and could not conceive that he, or anyone remotely like him, could possibly be related to Clover.

‘Dunno,’ he said lackadaisically. ‘Haven’t a clue.’

It did not concern him. Really it didn’t.

‘I call Tara Ffitch,’ Furbelow declaimed.

Troy had last seen Tara at Uphill, naked under the thrusting buttocks of Tim Woodbridge. She made her way to the witness box, the whisper of anticipation circling the room and dying away in a
slow diminuendo as she did so. The star had just descended the golden staircase, the house lights were down and the spot upon her.

She had chosen a deliberately muted look, hair up, no hat and a black two-piece. The flat shoes looked to Troy to be against her nature, but then she was, he thought, trying hard to make herself
acceptable in the eyes of little men, and in heels she must have touched six foot or more – a metaphor too far. She gazed around the courtroom – unashamed – a stern look at
Furbelow, the making of a smile for Cocket and was that an eyebrow raised at Troy himself or merely his own wishful thinking? She did not look at the dock.

Furbelow set out to establish Tara’s sexual history. Cocket objected at once and Mirkeyn overruled him. It was what the crowd had bayed for. The tale of a good girl from a good home in the
shires who had kicked over the traces in the wake of the unfortunate early death of her mother and embarked on a life of promiscuity. It would have been unremarkable in the extreme if narrated by a
man. It wasn’t Troy’s life, but it was the life of many men he knew. It was Charlie’s and it bore a more than passing resemblance to the life of Troy’s old colleague
Superintendent Wildeve, a handsome young copper when they had met during the war, courting every Wren in sight, and now a handsome copper untrapped by marriage in early middle-age and still as
promiscuous as ever. And no one thought the worse of him for it.

It seemed to Troy that, laboured though it was, Furbelow was trying to establish the link between promiscuity and prostitution. He was taking his time. Cocket raised no further objections, sat
quietly and seemed to Troy to take no notes while the entire press box scribbled furiously. All the same, they had adjourned for lunch and reconvened before Furbelow found his target, and along the
way he’d made damn sure that every newspaper in the land had got its headlines for the following morning.

By early afternoon Furbelow had coaxed this narrative – breathless in its courtroom hush to the extent that Tara’s exasperation could be heard in exhalation by all – almost to
the present day, to the cohabitation of Tara and Caro and Fitz at Dreyfus Mews.

‘What was the basis of your presence at the Dreyfus Mews house?’

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’

‘Were you lovers?’

‘No. We were friends.’

‘You and your younger sister and Dr Fitzpatrick shared a common abode merely as friends?’

‘Yes.’

‘Who owned the property?’

‘As far as I know Fitz . . . Dr Fitzpatrick owned the house.’

‘And you and your sister were his guests?’

‘Yes.’

‘How long did you live at Dreyfus Mews?’

‘Almost four years.’

‘As guests? Wouldn’t the word lodger be more apt than guest?’

‘If you like.’

‘And as lodgers did you pay rent?’

‘Not as such, no.’

Troy could hear the changes in the tone and pace of Tara’s answers. She had narrated her tearaway teens and twenties with a sense of boredom with her own life. She looked for all the world
like a reluctant celebrity cornered by Eamonn Andrews for
This Is Your Life
, going through the motions for the sake of family and friends, listening patiently as significance she did not
share was attached to incidents she had long since dismissed. Now she was, he thought, cautious. An invisible boundary had been crossed. For the first time since taking the stand she had looked
directly at Fitz. Troy knew the look. He was a poor copper if he didn’t. It said two things. It said, ‘Sorry’ and it said, ‘Lies’. Whatever she said from now on he
knew to take with a pinch of salt.

‘If not as such,’ Furbelow said, ‘then as what?’

‘We – that is my sister and I – gave him money on an occasional basis.’

‘And what were these occasions?’

‘Usually occasions when we had money.’

‘And when did you have money? You have, I need hardly remind you, already stated that you have had no paid work since 1960.’

‘We had money when we were given money.’

‘And who gave you money?’

‘Men,’ said Tara. ‘Men gave us money.’

Mirkeyn silenced the courtroom buzz with his gavel and glared at the gallery.

‘Why would men give you money?’

Tara kept her eyes on Furbelow, as though burning a hole in the man’s face.

‘Men gave us money, because they wanted to.’

‘Men gave you money out of the goodness of their hearts?’

‘Not exactly. Men gave us money because we pleased them.’

‘Pleased them sexually?’

‘Yes.’

‘And where did this sexual pleasing take place?’

‘There was no one place. Lots of places.’