A Little White Death (38 page)

No appetite to speak of. No appetite, either, for books or music – he did not read, he did not play, he did not listen.

All in all, it was a good recipe for suicide. Chatterton had topped himself at seventeen. Just like Clover. Except that the recipe simply didn’t fit. It was him, not her, who had
recognised the pointlessness of it all. Of course, it paid to know when it was all pointless. But that was him talking. His words, written by her, framed by her. But meant for him. What possible
reason could she have for dying? He knew what her grandfather would say – given the chance, Troy knew he would most certainly say it any day now – she had ‘so much to live for,
her whole life ahead of her’. He would wait and say nothing and nod his agreement when Stan did say it. But he knew – he had nothing to live for, his life was behind him. Good bloody
grief, had the woman breathed in his despair between his sheets, as he had breathed in the tubercular bacillus on some crowded Moscow streetcar? Had this been his protection – to infect her
with his own misery?

The bloke who collected money for deckchairs had finally seen the light – or seen the lack of it; the sun had not so much as peeped all day – and was gathering up the chairs with a
tuneless clacking of wood on wood. A bold, a tame, seagull stood near Troy’s feet, ripping the frankfurter from the mustard heart of a day-old hot dog. If he was quick he could leap on the
wretched bird and throttle the life out of it before it could utter one more of it’s ear-splitting squawks, wrap his hands around its rotten feathery neck and squeeze until the bugger
choked.

That night the Demon sat upon his bedpost. Not one he knew. He knew the Demon of Despair – its eyes were green and it never stopped talking. He knew the Demon of Madness
– its eyes were red as though lit from within by tiny flames struck over and over again from flint and tinder.

This Demon said nothing and its eyes were silvered like a looking-glass. In them he saw his own reflection.

‘Which are you?’ said Troy.

‘Guilt,’ said the Demon.

‘Don’t believe we’ve met,’ said Troy.

‘Have now,’ said the Demon.

‘What is this?’ said Troy. ‘A delegation?’

He had opened the front door to find Jack, Clark and Mary McDiarmuid in the courtyard.

‘Yep,’ said Jack.

‘You’d better come in, then, and don’t sit in a row or you’ll look like three wise monkeys.’

Jack threw off his coat and said, ‘How are you? Are you on the mend?’

It was not idle pleasantry, Troy knew.

‘You didn’t come here to ask about my health.’

‘It matters all the same.’

Jack plonked himself next to Swift Eddie on the sofa. Mary McDiarmuid took a dining chair and Troy stood with his back to the gas fire facing them.

‘We want you to come back to the Yard. In fact, it’s absolutely vital you come back. I’ve had a week on the deaths of Paddy Fitz and young Clover. I’ve made bugger all
progress. I’ve had to fight for forensic resources. I’ve been swamped by that multiple shooting in Silvertown. By last night I was beginning to think I was being deliberately
overworked, diverted, what you will – but then Quint stepped in. Asked for a report, waited while I typed it up, read it and told me it was open and shut, told me I’d had a whole week
and turned up nothing – this despite the fact that I’d been handling three other cases for most of the week – pronounced them suicide and told me to wrap it.’

He paused to consult the other two with a silent exchange of glances.

‘You have to come back. If you don’t, Quint will kill the case.’

‘I thought you said he already had?’

Mary McDiarmuid spoke from her place at the table. ‘It’s protocol.’

‘Protocol?’

‘Procedure, then.’

This was not a word Troy cared for. The procedural was deadly boring.

‘Quint is only overruling Jack because he can.’

‘I think that goes with being Assistant Commissioner,’ said Troy.

‘No, that’s what I meant about protocol. Quint does what he does only in your name. He’s running CID while you’re on sick leave. All you have to do is come back, take a
look at the file and decide to reopen it. Perfectly proper procedure.’

‘And all Quint has to do is overrule me.’

‘And when did that last happen? When did the head of C section last upset the apple cart by telling the chief detective to drop a case?’

She was right. No assistant commissioner would so interfere in a CID investigation at so early a stage. If Troy came back, if he reopened the investigation into the deaths of Clover Browne and
Patrick Fitzpatrick, Quint would just bite on the bullet. Later rather than sooner he had every right to ask what result had been achieved, but Troy would have at the least a clear fortnight before
that same protocol permitted him to ask much more than a supervisory question, a catch-all put-me-in-the-picture.

‘I couldn’t investigate and run CID . I’d be dead on my feet within the week.’

‘You don’t have to. Eddie and I can run it. Or did you think you did it all by yourself anyway? He’s had your signature off pat for years. You’re damn lucky he’s
not picking up your pay cheque.’

This was typical Mary McDiarmuid. Blunt as stone on steel. Clark did not react, not so much as a flicker in the face of incontrovertible truth.

‘It’s not as easy as you might think. Any doctor can sign me off. But only a police surgeon can sign me back on. I haven’t a clue whether I could get Anna to pass me fit, but
it wouldn’t matter if she did, the Yard will only accept a clean bill of health with one of its own as signatory. We’ll never get a police surgeon to sign.’

‘I’ve thought of that,’ said Jack. ‘Only thing is he’s late. He was meant to meet us on the doorstep ten minutes ago.’

There was a timely rap at the door. Before Troy could move, Jack had shot from his seat and yanked open the door. ‘You’re late!’ he said to whoever was there.

Then Ladislaw Kolankiewicz, MD, MSc, ARCSc, DIC, FRIC, MBE, Head of the Metropolitan Police Laboratory, pushed him to one side, saying as he did so, ‘You want truncheon up arse, copper,
you going right way to get it!’

He stuck his homburg on the hatstand, dropped his doctor’s bag on the floor and gave a Troy a quick once over.

‘You white as snow,’ he pronounced in his fractured mode.

Troy got the picture.

‘Jack – do you seriously expect this stunt to work?’

‘What you mean, stunt? I’m qualified police surgeon – have been since 1934. Qualified enough to know you look like shit and should be in bed with hot-water bottle and back
numbers of the
Beano
.’

‘Do you see what I mean?’ Troy said to Jack.

‘Knock it off, the pair of you. This will work. Kolankiewicz is, as he rightly says, a police surgeon. All he has to do is sign one piece of paper.’

‘And his patients have one thing in common. They’re all dead by the time they get to see him! He hasn’t practised on the living in thirty years.’

Kolankiewicz came up close, only inches away, took his wrist and felt for a pulse. ‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘Stick out your tongue.’

Troy shook himself free. ‘Stop it. Stop it the lot of you! This isn’t going to work.’

Jack moved in, closer, if that were physically possible, than Kolankiewicz himself. ‘Freddie. It doesn’t have to be real. All we need is the pretence. Once the paperwork’s
done, who’s going to ask any questions?’

‘If it’s only a pretence then we’ll skip the examination. And if he opens his bag I’ll throw him out! I’m still alive – being treated by him makes me feel as
though I’ve got one foot in the grave.’

Kolankiewicz looked hurt. Not an expression Troy had ever seen disrupt his countenance before.

‘How many times I treat you in the past, smartyarse? How many times you call on me when you in some mess where you don’t want the Yard or your regular physician knowing? Troy, I
bound up head kickings and knife wounds. For Chrissake I even dug bullets out of you. And what about that time in ’55 I treated you for the clap when the last person on earth you wanted
finding out was Anna?’

Mary McDiarmuid coughed politely. ‘Ladies present,’ she said.

All heads turned to her. Silence ensued. Jack retreated to the sofa. Kolankiewicz and Troy stood eye to eye. There was not a hair on Kolankiewicz’s head but for those which sprouted awry
in the tiny forests of his ears and nostrils, and the caterpillars which passed for eyebrows. With every year that passed it seemed to Troy that Kolankiewicz got shorter, fatter and uglier, and he
invariably smelled of liverwurst. Troy had known him since 1936 or thereabouts. He was quite possibly, defectors to the Soviet Union withstanding, his oldest friend. Bloody of mind and foul of
mouth as he was, he deserved better than this.

‘I’m sorry. You’re right. Of course you’re right. And I’ve been more grateful than I could say on each occasion. The difference is not in you. It is in me. This
isn’t a kicking or a stabbing. This time I’m ill. This time I haven’t bounced. This time, as you so rightly say, I look like shit. This time you can’t put Humpty together
again with a brown paper bandage and a few Polish curses. I’m sorry. That’s all I meant.’

‘You want my professional advice?’ Kolankiewicz said softly.

Troy nodded.

‘You too ill. Tell the coppers go flying fuck.’

‘I can’t. They need me.’

‘Then I sign piece of paper and we say no more about it. All I ask of you is to take care. Remember how weak you are. And if you crack this one do me a favour, Troy, do yourself a favour,
and sign off sick again.’

He held out his hand. Jack gave him the medical form and turned his back so Kolankiewicz could scrawl his near-illegible signature across it.

‘I put it through system,’ Kolankiewicz said, folding the form into three. ‘In a month or so maybe it reach Coyn’s desk. Maybe not.’

‘Tomorrow?’ Jack said hopefully.

‘Yes,’ Troy replied. ‘Tomorrow.’

‘Good. I’ve got a squad car waiting. I really must get back to Silvertown.’

Troy wondered, watching Jack, Clark and Mary McDiarmuid file out, just what he had let himself in for. Only a few years ago, it seemed, it was him keeping squad cars waiting, engine running,
ready for a dash to some insalubrious nook of the city. Now he was a pen pusher who couldn’t even push his own pen – dammit he even had someone to write his name for him.

Kolankiewicz made no move to leave.

‘Staying, are you?’ Troy asked.

‘You got whisky?’

‘I’m sure there’s a dropin the cupboard somewhere. God knows how old. I haven’t drunk Scotch in I don’t know when.’

‘Be a mensh. Pour a belt for your old pal.’

The cupboard meant under the kitchen sink, where Troy found a twelve-year-old single malt – at least it had been twelve years old when he had put it there in 1952 or ’53. He splashed
an inch or so into a glass and handed it to Kolankiewicz.

‘Not bad,’ he said, sipping at it. ‘Not bad at all.’

‘Just as well,’ said Troy. ‘I’ve no vodka.’

‘Vodka is for show. Vodka is for being Polish. I drink vodka when I have something to prove.’

‘You mean you haven’t got something to prove?’

Kolankiewicz shrugged. ‘No. Nothing to prove. No Polish points. Just things on my mind.’

The presaging sigh reminded Troy of his Uncle Nikolai, a man given to setting the world – and Troy with it – to rights. It was not the
modus operandi
of the Polish Beast.

‘How many corpses you reckon I cut up in my time? How many sternums I hacked through? How many skulls I unscrewed like the top on the pickle jar? How many yards of gut I unravelled like
sausage time at the pork butcher’s?’

‘I’ve no idea. I couldn’t begin to guess.’

‘Nor could I. That’s my point.’

‘I thought you didn’t have a point?’

‘Indulge me. I’m an old man.’

The next question seemed obligatory. Bad manners not to ask.

‘How old are you?’

‘I’m sixty-four. I go a year early.’

Troy had often thought the only way the Yard would get rid of Kolankiewicz would be to take him out feet first.

‘Why?’ he said.

‘I’m tired. I’m tired of death. I’m tired of blood. I’m tired of bowels. I’m tired of bones.’

Unexpected as it was, it made sense.

‘And I’m tired of the Yard. Tired of Coyn and Quint.’

‘When exactly?’

‘Fifth of November. Maybe I plant a bomb before I leave.’

He sipped at his whisky. Did not smile at his own joke. Troy stared at his eyebrows. The longest, at his estimate, was getting on for two and a half inches. It waved as his head moved and it was
white as snow. Moving wispily across the vast expanse of forehead, itself but a lower slope of the vaster expanse of hairless cranium, it reminded Troy of boyhood nights trying to tune a crystal
wireless with a cat’s whisker.

‘And you?’ Kolankiewicz said at last. ‘What of you?’

Troy said nothing.

‘How many corpses you seen in your time?’

‘Dunno.’

‘How many you killed in your time? No! Don’t answer that. You would only lie. I know you thirty years nearly. You were only boy when we met. You and truth are passing acquaintances
at best.’

‘What’s your point?’

‘That we have lived with death too long. We have been living death. Time to stop. Time to quit. When I go you should follow.’

‘I’m only forty-eight. I’m fifteen years younger than you.’

‘No, my boy. You born old. You older than me. You always have been. You one of those buggers born too many times. Earth-weary from the first day. Take my tip. Time to go now. Use the
fifteen years you have on me. Become a mensh while you still can. Leave death behind.’

Troy did not for one moment accept this. He found the touch of pseudo-mysticism out of character for Kolankiewicz.

‘And another thing . . .’

That was more like it. That was the real Kolankiewicz. There always was another damn thing with Kolankiewicz.

‘And another thing . . .’ He waved the medical certificate at Troy. ‘This is a work of fiction. The biggest lie of all. As you would do well to remember. You fuck with death
one more time you could fall apart like Pinnochio with a bad dose of woodworm!’