A Little White Death (37 page)

Jack put his coat back on. Looked at his watch. Troy swung his feet to the ground and found he had but one thought and that idle.

‘Two murders,’ Troy said. ‘And I just happen to be the last person to see both victims alive. Now that is a coincidence.’

‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you really want me to. But the last people to see Fitz alive were half a dozen ill-assorted hacks from Fleet Street. I doubt Fitz got past his own front
door without running the gauntlet. But then, that’s why young Jackie was with you, wasn’t it? No hacks on your step.’

‘Quite – and as far as the hospital and the hacks are concerned she’s still Clover Browne. You’ll have to talk to Coyn. I can’t nobble the coroner, but he
can.’

‘You really think you can keep it a secret?’

‘I’d hate to face Stan if we can’t.’

Jack strode to the door, pulling on the handle as he said his last words to Troy.

‘I’ll try and keepin touch. There’ll be a stink of course. Coyn will lose his bottle. But we owe Stan a bit of discretion, I think.’

If this was Jack’s way of saying he’d hold the press at arm’s length, then Stan would not be the only one thankful for a bit of discretion.

Jack sent a detective sergeant to take a full statement from Troy. Troy dictated with all the precision and brevity of a thirty-year copper and the man asked few questions. At
the end he gathered up his foolscap sheets and printed forms and said, ‘Dreadful business.’ And it sounded to Troy like some form of condolence.

The Commissioner, Sir Wilfrid Coyn, telephoned not long afterwards. It was, he said, ‘a dreadful business’.

Troy had no respect for Coyn. Indeed, he had come to regard ‘respect’ as a notion thought up by old men to keep order among the young. It had little or nothing to do with any idea
that those so demanding of respect might also have to be deserving of it, that the condition might involve some consideration of worth, either in the disciplines of character or in the soundness of
action. It was as meaningless as its oft-invoked adjective ‘respectable’. If their positions had been reversed and Coyn were Onions and Onions Coyn, Stan would have called in person,
would have assured himself face to face that a matter involving two suspicious deaths, a recently retired policeman of highest rank, and the serving Chief of CID , was wholly above board and wholly
without detriment to the force. He’d have raised hell.

The inquest on Clover opened and adjourned. What little Jack had asked of Coyn he appeared to have done. There was not a mention of her real name.

There remained the funeral.

Since Clover had died in the presence of two nurses and a doctor and since a post-mortem had revealed the cause of death in the residue of twenty-eight sleeping pills in her stomach, the coroner
saw fit to release the body for burial.

‘Tomorrow morning,’ Onions said. ‘Ten o’clock. Acton Cemetery.’

It was a call Troy had dreaded.

‘Stan, I really don’t think I should—’

‘Be there!’ was all Stan said before he hung up.

Troy rode the Central line out to North Acton. It stopped only yards from the cemetery. He could walk from there. It was a morning for the dead, a dampmorning, a miasma of autumnal dew.

It was a scene too familiar. He’d been to two other Onions family funerals: Stan’s wife Marjorie, dead from cancer in the first weeks of the war, and his son-in-law Kenneth in ’56,
tortured and murdered by EOKA on Cyprus. He had vivid, etched-in, scorched memories of Valerie Clover, née Onions, clinging for life in the fact of death to her father’s arm and
weeping copiously – but, as ever, bitterly rather than sadly. Life cheated Val, swindled her at every turn.

There were few mourners. Stan had left his family behind in Rochdale when he moved to the Yard in the 1920s. He was one of the few working-class coppers ever to be Met commissioner – the
rank and the title sat uneasily on him, and he’d been given both so close to retirement that the job had proved a disappointment. He could make so little of it in the three years he held it.
And it made no friends. A Met commissioner with a Lancashire accent, black boots, belt and braces, was never going to be acceptable in society. He had been a working copper. And when the work had
been pulled from under him at retirement he had taken to his allotment in Acton, where the other gardeners would joke about ‘Sir Stan’, until he told them all to ‘bugger off
’. Troy stood at the back. The other half-dozen people between him and the upright, pale Onions, the bent, the wilted, weeping Valerie, he took to be neighbours. The dutiful and the
decent.

All the same he knew he would not get off lightly.

As they moved off, he wondered if he could just calmly walk back to the Underground without saying anything, but Stan seized him by one elbow and muttered, ‘Second car,’ to him, and
he found himself sharing an old Rolls-Royce with three housewives from Starch Green – who told him they’d been in the Townswomen’s Guild with ‘Marje’, ‘Did you
know Marje?’ – for the ride back to the little house in Tablecloth Terrace and a wake cast in hell.

The small front room was full. Another dozen mourners, mostly women of Stan’s age, had appeared from somewhere, and they muttered and munched on crustless sandwiches of tinned salmon and
cucumber sliced so thin it was shaved. The Townswomen’s Guild must have done the catering, Troy concluded. Stan would never waste the crusts off a loaf of bread. And he’d never known
Valerie cook a meal.

Troy watched Stan playing host, commanding the ritual, endlessly thanking all these old women for turning out. Valerie stuck close to him, but stood unaided. Pale, frail, bleached by grief, but
at – he guessed – forty-four or five, still good-looking. Her daughter’s blowaway blonde hair, the Onions family piercing blue eyes. She had survived the battle with the bottle in
a way Charlie would not.

He explained a dozen times that he had worked with Stan up to his retirement and heard a dozen times how interesting that was. Then one of the matrons saw the reality beneath the small talk and
told him he needed fattening up. As if to ram home the point, she put a whole plate of sandwiches in his hand, added a couple of cold, crisp sausages, and seemed all set to stand smiling while she
personally restored him to good health.

Val crossed the room, seized the plate, slammed it down onto the table and shoved him ahead of her into the back room. ‘I want to hear it from you,’ she said.

She sat down and waited for him to do the same. They sat a couple of feet apart on straight-back chairs like strangers encountering one another in a dentist’s waiting room.

Troy told her. Coming home and finding Jackie. The mad dash to the hospital. The moment the young doctor had come into his cubicle to tell him Jackie had died. It was very matter-of-fact, devoid
of emotion. He had long ago learnt not to loose emotion on Val. She would consume all he had and want yet more.

He finished. It seemed stupidly simple in the telling. Val sat silently, her breathing deepand loud, the respectful hubbub of the wake drifting in from the other room.

‘There’s still one thing,’ Val said.

‘What’s that?’ said Troy, with no idea what she’d say next.

‘Did you fuck her, Troy?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Did you fuck my daughter?’

And when Troy said nothing to this too she said it all the louder.

‘Did-You-Fuck-My-Daughter?’

Onions appeared in the doorway, took one look at the two of them and closed the door quietly behind him.

‘Do you want everyone to hear you? Keep your voice down, woman!’

He might as well not have spoken. Valerie got to her feet and began to beat Troy about the head with both hands, clenched into fists, raining blows down on him. He rose instinctively, put his
hands to his face – the only defence.

‘Tell me you didn’t fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’

Onions seemed to freeze. Unless he stepped in she would soon hammer Troy to the floor – he’d no strength to stopher. Over and over, louder and louder. ‘Tell me you didn’t
fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’

Then it stopped. Onions had put his arms around her and pinned hers to her side.

‘For Christ’s sake, Freddie, just tell her what she wants to hear!’

Suddenly Valerie was calm. She stopped struggling. Took Troy’s silence for answer. ‘He can’t. Don’t you see? He can’t.’

‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake, man!’

He let her go. She took Troy’s face in her hands, wiped a streak of blood away from the corner of his mouth with the tipof one thumb. Looked into his eyes, exactly as Troy recalled himself
doing with Anna a few months ago.

‘He can’t say he didn’t, because he did. Didn’t you, Freddie?’

All he could see was her. Blue eyes, the same shade as her father’s, the same shade as Jackie’s. And all he could hear was Stan.

‘You stupid, stupid bugger. You must be mad. Completely bloody mad. You must have been mad. Mad, mad, mad. Whatever were you thinking of ?’

Troy could no more answer Stan’s question than he could Valerie’s.

When he got home he felt dreadful. A nausea akin to seasickness. He looked in the mirror. As a rule he was white as a sheet. He’d got used to that. He thought of it as
the colour of the disease – TB was white. Now he was reddish, purple where he was coming up in bruises from Valerie’s fists. It was a good job she had beaten him. If she had not, Onions
surely would have and he would be a damn sight the worse for it.

He made tea and stretched out on the chaise longue, hoping the world would go away. Sipped tea, tasted blood. With his second cup he felt the need of music. He hadn’t played a record in
ages. There was one already sitting at the bottom of the pit in the gramophone. He pulled it off the spindle and looked at the label. It was the record Foxx had given him; the one Clover seemed to
play at any opportunity; the one she had played every day of that long weekend at Uphill. ‘Please, Please Me’ by the Beatles. She must have been playing it on the last night of her
short life, while he was out with Fitz. And it had sat there ever since.

He read through the song titles, his brain making idle connections and refusing in its present condition to see them as idle. It seemed to him in his madness that they represented coded chapters
in the messy saga in which he was now embroiled. He had seen
her standing there
– and of course she was
just seventeen
– he had gone to
Anna
, who had asked him to
please, please her
, then bound him in
chains
, caused his
misery
, and packed him off to the
place
, then the weeks of
secrets
, then his brief
taste of honey
and the final
PS I Love You
. . . Where was the song about the complete fucking idiot he’d been?

He slipped the record back into its sleeve and stuck it in the rack. It had punctuated the spring and summer. He could not yet conceive of the circumstances which would induce him to listen to
it again.

He found that he could remember the wording of Clover’s suicide note. He sat one day, doing nothing, trying to think nothing, and found the words projected in his skull
like a silent cinema show from the days of childhood. He could see the words, terse as a caption card, filling in the action one never got to see, substituting for the dialogue one never got to
hear.

Just to be certain, he sat at his desk and wrote them down. His fancy, quasi-Russian hand, all flow and loop, replacing her stickman letters, scarcely joined up at all.

Why was it pointless? What was it that was always there and never going to go away? She wrote this as though she thought he knew. Did suicides ever calmly jot anything down beforehand?
Didn’t death by pills mean that what was written was written as the narcolepsy hit? Why should Clover’s words mean a damn thing? Written, as they probably were, through a haze of pills
that whacked you sideways, shoved your brains into your loins and then puffed you off to never-never land with a stupid grin of satisfaction on your face?

Clover had her ups and downs. The woman he’d encountered at Uphill was surly, secretive and rude. The child Onions had delivered into his inadequate care was peevish, distraught and rude.
He’d seen both personae evaporate in hours. Surly Clover had given way to the self-assured tart who’d strolled across Uphill Park with him wearing only a fur coat and wellies. Peevish
Jackie had turned herself around almost as soon as her grandfather had left to become a city girl, professing a greater wisdom of the streets than he pretended to himself. And buried beneath both
was a romantic who was touched by
Jules et Jim
and bowled over by his sparse account of Mayerling.

He did not know the woman. Had not known the woman. He had no idea of what she was capable – except change.

If there was one person of whom he knew less than he knew of Clover Browne, it was Frederick Alexeyevitch Troy.

He sat in Embankment Gardens, stranded out of season in the nearest bit of municipal green to his house, on a grey autumnal afternoon, feeling tormented by the sound of seagulls flocking on the
Thames, depressed by the optimism of a man who still put out deckchairs at this time of year – and summed up his life.

Not long turned forty-eight, separated but not divorced – unless Fitz was wrong and she had divorced him
in absentia
in some foreign part.

A small man, used to be a looker as Clover herself had put it. Thin as the dying Chatterton in somebody-or-other’s famous painting in the Tate, though gaining weight; his bathroom scales
told him he was eight stone four now.

Jobless – he never would get back to the Yard. By the time he could muster a clean bill of health, a full year would have passed and a new order come into being. His career was over; he
had better accept that. More fuck-ups to his record than he dare count – it seemed to him he was surrounded by the dead. A small mountain of bodies to his name – Diana Brack, Norman
Cobb, now Clover Browne. He had killed her with neglect as surely as he had killed the other two with bullets.