A Little White Death (29 page)

‘But since you lived at Dreyfus Mews can the court not safely conclude that you pleased men at that address?’

‘Yes. We had men at home.’

‘Men who then paid you for your services?’

‘Yes.’

‘One man in particular?’

‘Yes.’

‘And who might this one man be?’

‘The Professor.’

‘And you and your sister had sex with the Professor at Dreyfus Mews for money?’

Cocket rose to speak for the first time in what seemed like hours.

‘Objection.’

‘Your grounds, Mr Cocket, your grounds,’ Mirkeyn replied.

‘M’lud. It is perfectly obvious to the court that both the witness and my learned friend know the name of the Professor, in which case he should be named. And if I am wrong, and they
do not know the name of the man so referred to, then the evidence amounts to no more than hearsay and as such I would suggest is inadmissible.’

This caused Mirkeyn no great deal of thought.

‘From the first reporting of this case, and I mean by that many weeks before it was brought before me in this court, the names of individuals have been dragged through the mud in what I
can only call a frenzy of innuendo. I will not further that process. There will be no mud-slinging in my court. Overruled. Pray proceed, Mr Furbelow.’

Troy found this astounding. Mirkeyn was admitting evidence concerning a material witness whom the prosecution were being allowed to keep anonymous.

‘Now, Miss Ffitch. The Professor paid you for sex, did he not?’

‘Yes.’

‘How often? Every time you had sex?’

‘Yes. More or less.’

‘And how much.’

‘It varied. Sometimes he’d leave fifty, sometimes a hundred.’

The court gasped. Troy saw two men in the jury turn to each other and exchange whispers. He did not need to hear them. There could be only one line: ‘They must be a bloody good screw to be
worth a hundred quid!’

‘And how much of this money did you subsequently give to the defendant?’

‘That varied too.’

‘Well – would you say half ?’

‘No – less than that.’

‘A third then?’

‘Perhaps. Yes, about a third.’

‘Miss Ffitch. How long did you and your sister continue this relationship whereby the Professor gave you money for sexual intercourse at Dreyfus Mews and you in turn paid a significant
proportion of that money to the defendant in lieu of rent?’

‘About three years.’

Well, it may have taken all day but Furbelow had done it. He’d laid before the court clear evidence that Fitz had lived off the immoral earnings of Tara and Caro. It was just that Troy did
not believe a word of it. And all this without a single mention of the name ‘Woodbridge’.

It was almost four o’clock. Mirkeyn wound up for the day.

Troy sat and let the rush go by. Which of them would accost him today? There was no sign of Blood, Alex dashed past him and shot him a ‘Not now’ look, and he found himself watching
Dame Rebecca slowly approach. She stopped, smiled at him, turned to smile at someone out of sight on his right, whispered ‘later’ and walked on. He could feel the presence, almost the
shadow cast over him, and twisted in his seat to see at whom she had smiled. It was Onions. Sir Stanley Onions, former Commissioner of the Met, his old boss, mentor and what-have-you. He should be
on his allotment in Acton digging up spuds, or sitting on an upturned orange box smoking a Woodbine – any of the pleasures of retirement. What was he doing here?

‘We should have a bit of a chat,’ he said.

Troy hated Onions’s bits of chat. They weren’t bitty and they weren’t chatty.

It was a walking-stick day for Stan. There were days when he needed his walking stick and there were days when he didn’t. There were days when he carried one, and days when he didn’t
– and the two categories did not necessarily coincide. He led off north towards Smithfield at a cracking pace, Troy bursting his frail lungs to keep up with him, the stick crashing down like
a bolt from heaven, fit to crack paving stones.

He led Troy to a caff. Much the same as the one he had shared with Rebecca West, but catering to the market porters, and at four in the afternoon all but empty and anxious to close.

Onions ordered two teas.

‘We shut in fifteen minutes,’ said the bloke in the greasy apron.

‘Bring ’em over,’ Onions said, sounding every inch the copper he used to be. Why, thought Troy, can I never sound like a copper?

Onions hooked his stick across the back of the chair and sat down.

‘I’ve been wanting a word,’ he said.

‘Oh,’ said Troy. ‘How did you know I’d be at the Bailey?’

‘I didn’t. I’d’ve been round to see you straight after. I came to get a look at the bugger for meself.’

‘Oh, I see. Professional curiosity.’

‘Professional poppycock. It’s our Jackie I want to see you about.’

‘Our Jackie’ – the habitual Lancastrian possessive – ‘Our Jackie’ was his granddaughter, only child of Onions’s only child.

‘Jackie?’ asked Troy with a breathless innocence he would come to see as plain stupid.

‘The lass’s gone off the rails. More’n a year now. Always a bit wayward, but this is too far by half. You know ’er. You know what she’s like.’

Troy didn’t. He could not remember when he’d last seen little Jackie.

‘I might’ve known she’d be the one to fall in with a fast set.’

Troy had not heard the word ‘fast’ used in quite that way for more than thirty years. It was a bit Noël Coward. And he’d no idea what Stan was on about.

‘Fast?’ he echoed.

‘Parties. Wild parties. Reefer smokers. You know.’

‘I see,’ said Troy, not seeing.

‘That’s why I had to see the bugger for meself. See what kind of a man he is.’

‘You mean Fitz? I don’t follow. What has Fitz to do with Jackie?’

‘Everything. He’s the Svengali in the whole bloody mess!’

‘And Jackie’s Trilby?’

‘No. Our Jackie’s “Clover”. Leastways that’s what she calls herself. Clover Browne.’

Troy’s heart sank. It was a dreadful thought, Sir Somebody Something . . . Sir Stanley Onions? He had never thought of Onions as Sir Anybody Anything. He was Stan. The title went with the
job. You became Commissioner of the Met and they bunged you a knighthood. No one had ever turned it down; Troy did not even know if one could turn it down. And if he became Commissioner – all
sins, if not forgiven, then safely buried – he would be Sir Frederick Troy. It didn’t bear thinking about. Not for a moment had it occurred to him that Stan was Sir Somebody Something
and that Jackie Clover – good God, the name alone should have told him – was Clover Browne.

‘You mean Jackie is the third woman the press have been looking for? She’s one of Fitz’s—’

He thought he might have said ‘harem’ or ‘set’ next, but ‘set’, as Stan had demonstrated, was a noun that went only with ‘fast’, and he never got
the chance.

‘One of his tarts?’ Onions bellowed. ‘Of course she wasn’t one of his tarts! She’s a virgin! For Christ’s sake she’s only sixteen!’

‘Seventeen,’ Troy blurted out.

‘Eh?’ said Stan. ‘What makes you say that?’

Mental arithmetic was not Troy’s strong point. Right now he felt as though his life depended on it. He tried to see the figures in his mind and the only figure he could see was
Jackie’s, stepping out of her knickers in the ruins of Uphill House, and the memory of that unabashed teenage kiss. A mental image for which, for all he knew, Onions might well thrash him in
the street. He thrashed around with the subtraction and came up as if by magic with the words ‘1946. She was born in 1946, wasn’t she?’

‘Aye, she was.’

The glare of suspicion Troy had seen in his eyes began to fade.

‘Surprised you remember. But it was September. She’s not seventeen till this month.’

Damn Fitz. Damn Fitz and his lies. If what the girl had told Troy was true, that she’d been knocking around with Fitz since the previous summer, then she had been under age. The question
was, who had been knocking her?

‘I’ve had a word with her mother.’

Jackie’s mother was Valerie – ‘our Valerie’ as Stan would call her. Valerie Clover, née Onions, was, Troy thought, an hysteric. But then that was pretty much what
her father thought too. One of Stan’s jobs in recent years had simply been to try to keep her sober. Years ago – in the last summer before the Second World War, when they were both
single – Val and Troy had been an item. What he hoped Stan never knew was that they had been an item once more in the early fifties, when Valerie’s husband Ken had been away at the
Korean War. When Ken had been killed in the skirmish over Cyprus in 1956 Stan had brought Val back from Manchester to live in London. Troy had avoided her ever since. All the same, they managed to
end up in the same room once a year or so. He had come to dread such meetings, to dread even the mention of her name. Few people gave him more hell than our Valerie.

‘How is Val?’ he asked, dutifully going through the motions.

‘Dryin’ out. She’ll be out and about in a couple of weeks. Like I said, I’ve had a word with her. We’ve decided. Something’s got to be done about
Jackie.’

Troy could not agree more.

‘She’s got to be . . .’

Stan searched for the right words and came up with the ambiguous ‘. . . taken off the streets. Right now, I’d put her in a nunnery if they’d take ’er.’

The phrase ‘never darken my door again’ came unbidden to Troy’s mind.

‘But I can’t. So we’ve got to stick her somewhere.’

‘Quite,’ said Troy, for the sake of saying something.

‘We’ve agreed. We want you to have her.’

‘What?’

‘You’re on sick leave, aren’t you?’

‘Yes, but—’

‘You could take her in. Just for a few days. Till the trial’s over. Till the press lose interest. After all, it’s the last place the bastards’ll ever look for
her.’

Troy dearly wanted to say no. He found the word would not form on his lips. It was a preposterous suggestion. It was a bag with too many cats in.

‘Stan . . . I . . . I . . .’

‘It’ll not be for long. Just let the dust settle. It’s open and shut. Jury’ll not be out ten minutes. The bugger goes down, and two days later he’s
yesterday’s news and they wrap fish ’n’ chips with his headlines.’

‘Stan, it’s not that simple. It’s not going to be that simple—’

But Stan’s graspof the trial and mistrial of Patrick Fitzpatrick was nothing next to his absolute conviction that Troy should have Jackie Clover at Goodwin’s Court.

‘Whatever!’ Stan dismissed any argument. ‘It’s good of you, Freddie. I’ll bring the minx round tonight. ’Bout half past seven.’

Stan got to his feet, unhooked his walking stick from the back of the chair. Troy still hadn’t said ‘yes’ and if he did he doubted Stan would hear. He had railroaded Troy, but
then he’d always had that talent, and if at any point in their long relationship Troy had ever kidded himself it was rank not talent, he knew now. He watched the table shake as the beast
rose, watched Onions’s tea sloparound in his saucer, watched the bull hobble off to some other china shop, whispered goodbye and wondered how he had ever got himself into such a pickle.

Troy opened the door. Stan stood in the courtyard towering over his granddaughter, one hand holding her suitcase, the other in the small of her back, shoving her forward like a
recalcitrant truant. Jackie looked like the schoolgirl she should have been. Stan had ‘cleaned up her act’. Clover had become Jackie. Little Jackie, with her mop of blonde hair in a ponytail, held in place with a plain brown rubber band. A grey skirt, a blue jacket, a
white blouse and what could only be described as ‘sensible’ shoes. She looked as though she could willingly murder Stan. The girl wore not a scrap of make-up: her fingernails were
unpainted; her eyes stripped of the strong black lines she usually favoured. Troy could imagine the scene which had preceded this.

‘Get that muck off yer face, girl! You’re going nowhere looking like that!’

Jackie would have said ‘no’. Knowing Stan, he would simply have belted her one, taken her to the kitchen sink and scrubbed the make-up from her face. God knows how he’d got rid
of the nail varnish. A blow lamp?

‘Come in,’ said Troy, trying to sound pleased to see them.

Stan prodded the girl into the house, set down the suitcase. Jackie stood sullenly regarding Troy, both hands gripping the shoulder strap of a white PVC handbag. Troy hoped she’d keep up
the dumb act. He dreaded whatever it was she might have to say.

‘You remember your Uncle Freddie, don’t you?’ Stan prompted.

‘Of course,’ the lying tart said. ‘You took me into Manchester the day before me dad’s funeral. Bought me an Alice band and a pair of socks.’

Troy could not have said he’d remembered this till she said it, but yes, he had driven a silent child of ten into the city to get her out of her mother’s way. The smile on
Jackie’s face had become a smirk. Jackie said the words but it was Clover who looked at him now and silently took the piss. She’d known him from the first at Uphill, and she knew now
that the last thing Troy wanted was any mention that they had ever met at Uphill, and she was playing this for all its silent worth.

Troy stuck out his hand for her to shake, but she stepped forward past the hand and kissed his cheek.

‘I’ve missed you, Uncle Freddie,’ she hissed into his ear, and since he could do very little about her, Troy determined to get Onions out of the house as soon as possible.

But Onions showed no inclination to stay. He didn’t take his coat off and he didn’t suggest putting the kettle on. ‘I’ll be off then,’ was all he said, as though
he’d done his bit by delivering the human parcel.

‘Fine,’ said Troy, since in a situation where nothing was even tolerable, let alone fine, this was the nearest to it, that Stan should leave before the small scene in a small room
blew up in their faces.

‘I’ll phone. Don’t worry, I’ll phone. And as soon as this mess is cleared up I’ll come for her. But I’ll phone.’

‘Fine,’ said Troy.

‘There is one thing,’ Stan said, looking at Jackie. ‘Open your handbag.’