A Little White Death (32 page)

He made his way up the stairs, wheezing a little, and came to rest on a landing between floors – only to find Sir Wilfrid Coyn descending the same staircase.

‘Freddie. Just paying us a visit? How are you?’

‘Fine,’ Troy said, still wheezing.

‘Popping in to CID ?’

‘No. I was looking for you, actually.’

‘Me? Look, I’ve a car waiting. I have to go home and change. Dinner at the Mansion House. Why don’t you walk down with me and tell me what’s on your mind?’

Troy followed him down to the car park, talking to his back all the way.

‘I’ve been passing the time at the Old Bailey.’

‘Oh? Something juicy, I hope.’

‘Court number 1.’

Coyn looked quickly over his shoulder at Troy.

‘The case is falling apart. It’s a shambles. We should never have brought the prosecution. Too much of the evidence is being shown up as flimsy.’

They reached the car park. A driver held the car door open for Coyn.

‘When this is all over we’re going to look like fools. This case will not enhance the reputation of the Yard in any way. We’ll end up looking like a bunch of
monkeys.’

Coyn stopped with his hands resting on the top of the door. ‘You don’t think it’s for the defence to move for a dismissal?’

‘It’s not quite at that stage.’

‘Then what stage is it at?’

‘The stage when it’s becoming obvious to everyone that we should not have brought the prosecution in the first place.’

‘Freddie,’ said Coyn, ‘your job’s getting well again. I need you fit. The Yard needs you fit. Why not just let us get on with our job in the meantime, eh?’

He patted Troy gently on the upper arm, climbed in the car and drove away. It was as close as men like Coyn came to saying fuck off.

He felt worn out by the time he got home. He had lingered too long. It was past dusk. He had walked too many streets, sat on too many park benches and stared too long at
nothing in particular. He sloughed off his coat, kicked off his shoes, draped his tie over the doorknob. The house was quiet. There was no sign of Clover but for the faint scraping sound of the
gramophone stylus orbiting the final loop of a record. He pulled the arm back and turned off the power. Then he heard her voice. She was in the bathroom on the half-landing at the back. Still in
the bathroom? He looked at his watch. He’d been gone the best part of twelve hours. She was hogging the bathroom, again.

He stomped up the stairs, fist clenched ready to hammer on the door. He stopped his hand, laid his palm flat on the wooden panel. Clover was singing to herself again – and not one of her
Beatles’ songs – her voice filling the bathroom, echoing off tiles, seeping out onto the staircase with wafts of steam, following him up the stairs to his bedroom. He had not thought
that she possessed such a voice, a clear, wonderfully controlled contralto. He had not thought she knew any song that was not bang up to date. This was old. The last century at least. He knew it
well – it was an Irish folk song called ‘She Moved Through The Fair’.

He lay down on his bedroom floor, used his jacket for a pillow, closed his eyes and listened to the song push its way through the floorboards.

It was a sinister tale. He knew of two or three variants on the theme in English, which probably meant there were at least two or three dozen known to the likes of Cecil Sharpe or Percy Grainger
and those fanatical turn-of-the-century collectors of folk music. It was a demon lover song. The lover seduces. Too late the seduced discovers that her lover is a cloven-hoofed demon, or simply
dead to begin with. The last verse was a killer. Beautiful, stark and deadly.

The words stopped. Clover continued the melody in scat. And as the words ceased the tune grew, the volume swelling, to the point where he opened his eyes almost certain of what
he would see, her backlit in the doorway, wrapped in a scarlet bath towel, hair pinned up, stripped of make-up.

‘You OK?’

‘Yes. Just a bit tired I think.’

‘Wot you doin’ on the floor, then? You might as well stretch out on yer bed.’

He could not think of a lie. Occasionally this happened to him.

‘I was listening to your song. This end of the room’s right over the bathroom. I could hear you quite clearly. It was beautiful. You have a good voice. Where did you learn that
song?’

‘My mum taught it to me when I was little.’

‘I didn’t know Val sang.’

‘If you ask me, there’s a lot you and my mum didn’t bother to find out about each other.’

‘Let’s not talk about your mum.’

‘Fine by me. Look, you ain’t ’alf lookin’ peeky. Is there anything I can get you? Cup o’ char? Is there anything you want?’

She stepped closer, the towel swept the floorboards and brushed against his shirt. She wafted it across his face. Playfully, he thought.

‘Well? Wotcher want?’

Was that a smile or a grin? She wafted the edge of the towel across his face once more. Talc. Nothing he could name. Something floral. He grabbed the end. Clover held the towel with both hands
clutched at her sternum. Troy pulled the towel gently taut and she let go. The towel floated down, scarlet folds on the boards. Clover caught one corner before it could land – a broad red
ribbon leading from him to her. Him in shirt and socks and trousers, her naked as she had been amid the ruins of Uphill Park.

‘You gettin’ up or am I gettin’ down?’

‘I haven’t the energy to get up.’

‘Troy, there’d better not be a two-letter word missing from that sentence.’

Her strength surprised him. His lack of substance surprised him. She took his hands in hers, pulled him to his feet and fell neatly back on the bed, head straight to the pillow, with Troy on top
of her. She popped every button on his shirt, slid her hands down his chest, pulled at his zipper and, when both hands were wrapped around his risen cock, whispered in his ear.

‘Take your socks off.’

‘What?’

‘I’ve never made love to a bloke still wearin’ his socks and I don’t intend to start now.’

Troy could not tear them off quickly enough. Nor his trousers, nor his underpants, nor his flapping shirt. He found himself standing over her, cockstiff and crazy, gazing at her, dappled with
patches of talcum powder – the small breasts, the stiff nipples, the tiny waist, a vertical slit of a belly button. She reached across and took his left hand, placed it between her legs. He
slipped in a finger. She put her hand behind his neck, pulled him down and kissed him. Lips, nose, eyelids. Slowly he became aware that she was steering him. His lips drifting southward, across her
throat, over one breast, in and out of the belly button – her hands gripping his head, her fingernails nipping his scalp, talcum powder dusting his lips. Yet he could not find the scent of
her. The talc was freesia, the soap peach, but she was so fresh from the bath, so well scrubbed, he could not smell Clover. He had reached her thighs, with her fingers still locked in his hair. He
took his left hand away and put his lips to her cunt.

He’d no idea what to do. He’d never done this before. No woman he’d ever been with had ever suggested it. He’d never dared to ask.

He awoke to find himself flat on his back, Clover half draped across him, the scentless air now scented with the alkaline smell of sex – part cunt, part semen, faintly
acrid, impossible to mistake. Why did it always remind him of mangoes?

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Must have nodded off.’

‘Nodded off. You was snoring.’

‘Sorry – shouldn’t sleepon my back. Never do as a rule.’

‘Don’t matter. You want to fuck some more?’

‘I couldn’t . . . I’m drained.’

‘No you’re not.’

One hand stroked his cock from tip to balls. He was up already. She had coaxed him to an erection even as he slept. The damn thing had its own life even as his seemed to have slipped from
him.

‘I couldn’t . . .’

‘Right you are. It’ll ’ave to be girls on top.’

She slid one leg over him, all her weight on her knees, her hands flat on the mattress either side of his head. Less did he enter her than she enveloped him. With his cock inside her, her back
arched, her hands flitted lightly over his face, fingertips tracing the line of his cheekbones and lips. Then they came to rest at the back of her neck. She pulled the rubber band off, shook her
hair free and smothered him in it. For a while he thought it bliss. Flat on his back, getting fucked silly.

The next day was Saturday. He spent it in bed, reading, recovering from the exertions of the day and the more demanding exertions of the night. He spent it in bed avoiding
Clover.

It was gone six in the evening before she put her head round his door. She came in and sat on the end of the bed.

‘It’s Saturday night,’ she said.

‘I know.’

‘Let’s go out.’

‘Go out?’

‘It’s Saturday night. People go out of a Saturday night. I been indoors since grandad dumped me on your doorstep.’

‘Where would you like to go?’

‘Dunno. You say.’

‘Ronnie Scott’s?’

‘Not my scene.’

‘The Flamingo?’

She pursed her lips, held one hand level at waist height and twisted it like an aileron – neither up nor down, neither yes nor no.

‘How about the Marquee?’ she said.

‘That’s not my scene,’ said Troy.

‘So we’re stuck in. Sittin’ in front of the fire like Darby an’ bleedin’ Joan!’

Darby and Joan. What she really meant was Stan and Valerie.

‘A film,’ he said. ‘Let’s go to the pictures.’

‘The flicks? Is that the best you can do?’

‘It’s dark, it’s anonymous.’

‘What’s on?’

‘
Lawrence of Arabia
.’

‘Not the bloody war again!’

‘No – a quite different war.’

‘Don’t matter. Seen it anyway. Can I pick?’

Troy tossed a copy of yesterday’s
Evening Standard
at her.

Five minutes later she had found nothing she liked and let it slip from her fingers, let her lipcurl into the petulant beginning of the Elvis-sneer.

Troy took up the paper.

‘
Jules et Jim
’s on at the Academy,’ he said hopefully.

‘What, that place with all the foreign films?’

‘Yes.’

‘Subtitles?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’d have to wear me specs.’

‘Who’s going to see?’

Dressed in Troy’s macintosh, buttoned to the chin, collar up, her hair wrapped in a headscarf, he felt Onions himself might not have known her. The spectacles came out as soon as the
houselights dimmed. Vanity preserved. He feared her restlessness, her insatiable, lazy boredom, but she sat silently – so silently he soon recognised it for what it was. Rapture.

Emerging into the street once more, close by Oxford Circus, she stopped. Grabbed him by the sleeve.

‘You seen it before?’

‘Yes. Must have been about a year ago now, perhaps a little longer. When it was new.’

‘It’s . . . it’s fuckin’ fabulous!’

‘I know.’

He walked on in the hope she’d bend if not break her trance and follow. He didn’t want to stand in the bustle of Oxford Street all night. It was one of the most depressing places on
earth.

‘I mean that’s it, isn’t it? That’s got to be it, hasn’t it?’

He’d no idea what she was talking about. But then all he had to do was let her walk and talk.

‘To die for each other. I mean. There is no greater love.’

Inadvertently hitting upon a jazz standard as her qualifier, she had also hit upon a colossal fallacy.

‘For each other?’

‘Yes. To die for each other. To know it’s all pointless, to get in that car, to drive off that bridge and die together, for each other.’

‘You mean like a suicide pact?’

‘Yeah.’

This was startling. Had they seen the same film?

‘She murdered him.’

‘What?’

‘She could not have him. So she murdered him.’

‘She loved him!’

‘She did, throughout the film, exactly what she wanted. She was the most selfish of heroines, and when Jim comes to his senses and recognises this she kills them both. It was
murder.’

‘But she was so beautiful. Wotsername was so . . .’

‘Jeanne Moreau.’

‘So beautiful. I don’t mean to look at . . .’

Why not? thought Troy, he’d fallen for Moreau at first celluloid sight.

‘But in herself.’

‘You’re wrong.’

‘Damn you, Troy. You just won’t see it the way it was. To die for each other. To die for.’

She lapsed into silence. He wondered what she was dredging up.

‘Romeo and Juliet,’ she said at last. ‘There was to die for. They died because they couldn’t be together.’

‘Indeed they did, but it wasn’t suicide. It was the great cock-up.’

He had to think quickly. Romeo and Juliet. Who killed who? Which one had the knife, which one had the poison? Who licked poison off whose lips? Who ever watched Shakespeare for his plots?

‘One of them commits suicide – or maybe both of them – but not together, and then only because one of them thinks the other’s dead, when they’re not, and thinking
they’re dead commits suicide, and then the one that wasn’t dead but looked to be wakes up and seeing the other one really dead commits suicide too.’