A Little White Death (45 page)

Blood put down the rag. The smell of polystyrene thinner pervaded the air. Ever after Troy would associate that smell with Blood.

‘My brother was on the
Hood
. Chief Petty Officer. Thirty-five years old. Married. Three kids.’

Blood paused. He was looking straight at Troy without, it seemed, seeing him.

‘Not one . . .’ Troy said.

‘No,’ Blood said. ‘Not one of the survivors.’

Troy saw the pattern beneath the curriculum vitae. May 1941. Blood had volunteered so keenly, so persistently, in the wake of his brother’s death. That was why his first choice had been
the navy. That was why his hobby was model ships, if something so obviously total, so obviously obsessive, could be as simple as a hobby. He had probably bought the house for the pattern on its
front door.

Blood threw down the rag, sniffed at his fingers and, satisfied with the smell, straightened the ragged sleeves of his cardigan. Perhaps, too, there would come a time in Troy’s life when
the unexpected visitor would come across him in such a cosseting garment, darned at the elbows, frayed at the cuffs, taking his private comfort from a public world?

‘Tell me, Mr Troy. What brings you my way?’

Hit him hard, Troy thought.

‘It’s really very simple. Did you tell Caroline Ffitch you’d have her child taken away?’

‘I explored that possibility.’

Troy was gobsmacked. The precision of the man’s evasion. A perfect sentence in the art of understatement. It was almost the last thing he’d expected of him. Round one to Blood, and
Blood had the second punch in before Troy could draw breath.

‘’Scuse me asking, sir, but exactly what case are you investigating?’

‘Just answer me, Percy. Humour me.’

‘Did I threaten the Ffitch woman? Is that what you’re asking?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then that’s my answer. Yes. I threatened her. I told her I’d put the council onto her, onto the way she cared for her kid. And there was nothing illegal about that. I did no
more than you’d have done in the same situation. I had a witness I knew in me bones was lying to me. Call it copper’s instinct, sir. Find me a copper who says he doesn’t believe
in copper’s instinct and I’ll show you a poor copper. Tell me you don’t believe in such a thing as copper’s instinct and I’ll call you a liar. All I did was use what I
had to get her to tell me the truth.’

‘She says you hit her.’

‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? Did she show you any bruises? Did she show anyone any bruises?’

Troy knew that one of the talents Blood would have learnt in ten years in Special Branch was how not to leave marks when he hit a suspect.

‘I’d have done it too,’ Blood said. ‘And the courts would’ve backed me. A single woman, with a bastard child, seeing the kid when it suits her, keeping the company
of nig-nogs and reefer addicts, and earning her keep by parading her fanny. If I’d shopped her, the kid would have been taken into care and the magistrate would have backed it with a court
order. I threatened her with nothing I couldn’t follow through. It wasn’t idle, it wasn’t malicious and it wasn’t illegal. It was horsetrading. She had something I wanted
and I had something on her. We came to an arrangement. And if that strikes you as odd or bent, then, sir, I don’t think we’ve been serving in the same force these last twenty
years.’

Blood was red with the tinge of anger. He bought himself a moment of time. Got up from his chair. Put the lid on the box and set it down on a side table. It seemed to Troy that he had
symbolically cleared the space between them.

‘You interviewed her more than a dozen times. Bit excessive, isn’t it?’

Blood stood gripping the back of the chair – his hands locked onto it like big, boiled crabs – broad palms and stubby red fingers.

‘Seventeen times to be precise. And the answer’s no. I did what my duty required of me. If I’d had to have her in twenty times I’d have done it.’

‘Why do you think she changed her mind in court?’

‘Did she, sir? I wasn’t in court. I was a witness myself, if you recall.’

‘She retracted her statement.’

‘And her sister didn’t. If you ask me the two of them had been rowing before the case came up. I think they fell out among themselves. According to the papers I read, the woman was
hysterical, and when the prosecuting brief asked her why she’d signed a false statement she couldn’t tell him. I doubt the jury would have been taken in by it.’

‘We’ll never know,’ said Troy.

‘No sir, we’ll never know.’

Blood crossed the room. He’d seized the upper hand, the minute he’d stood up, and now he was showing Troy the door.

‘It was good of you to call, sir.’

He opened the door to the hall. Troy rolled with it and let himself be steered to the front door.

‘I wasn’t aware you were back at the Yard, sir.’

‘And I’, said Troy, ‘was not aware that you weren’t.’

‘Sick leave, sir. Happens to the best of us one time or another.’

Blood took on the colours of the rainbow as he stood for a moment behind the stained-glass door, with the noon sun shining through the sailing ship. Then he twisted the doorknob, and white light
washed in. There could be but one sentence left in him before he ushered Troy across the threshold.

‘It was good of you to call, sir. But I don’t answer to you, and if you call again I’d be grateful of a bit of notice. I’ll have a repfrom the Police Association, and
you’ll have an officer from A10 with you, won’t you, sir?’

One small thing was still nagging at Troy. At the best of times it was hard to believe in coincidence, even though this so obviously was one. He asked all the same.

‘You saw the medical officer on the 19th? Is that right?’

‘I don’t recall.’

‘You should. It was the day Fitzpatrick died.’

Blood roared. ‘Peggy!!!’

And the mouse-woman scurried to his side.

‘Mr Troy would like a word. He’s a question he wants to ask you. He’d like to know where I was on the night of the 19th. Tell ’im, Peggy.’

‘Percy was here with me. We had our tea and we listened to the wireless. There was a concert on the Light. Dance band. We went to bed about half past ten,’ she said.

Blood slammed the door on him. It was all very pat and precise. But then, Blood was a career copper and precision was his business. He had not even asked what day of the week the 19th was
– nor had his wife – and Troy was not at all sure that this meant anything. He could hammer on the door and ask Percy Blood what dance band had been playing, but he would know –
Joe Loss, Ted Heath – he’d know.

‘The Commissioner’s been in again,’ said Clark.

‘No problem,’ Troy replied.

‘And Mr Wiggins.’

Troy had had so little to do with Superintendent Wiggins. He ran Vice. A shady bunch of nogoodniks for whom Troy was very happy to have no responsibility. Wiggins was no problem either.
He’d have stuck in his two penn’orth sooner or later. Offended by Troy’s disregard of procedural courtesies. Troy would smooth ruffled feathers and give it to him straight. The
occasion arose sooner than he had expected.

Troy was sipping at a cup of nut-brown, stewed and scummy Scotland Yard tea in the canteen. It was late in the afternoon, and he felt fairly safe from attention. Then he saw the dark blur above
him and looked up to see Dudley Wiggins, a man in the fierce grip of five o’clock shadow.

‘Mind if join you, sir?’

Troy showed an open hand and beckoned him. Wiggins sat down and plonked his cup and saucer on the yellow-spotted Formica tabletop. Half an inch of tea slopped over into the saucer. Troy looked
at his face – a man ten years older than he, grey and lined and worn out by the job – and realised why moustaches such as Wiggins sported were called tea-strainers.

Wiggins poured back the spillage and slurped. ‘I hear you’ve had a chat with Percy Blood.’

If Wiggins knew it was now pretty certain most of the Yard knew. It had taken a mere five hours to be common knowledge. Troy saw no reason to lie to the man. He could like it or he could
lumpit.

‘I have,’ said Troy. ‘I know I should have told you first, but I acted quickly and I wanted to be certain Percy got no hint of my arrival. There wasn’t a lot of time for
the protocol.’

And that was as near an apology as the man was going to get.

‘Oh, I don’t mind about that. Blood’s not one of mine.’

‘But he’s on your squad?’

‘I got stuck wi’ Percy Blood. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I never asked for him. I got stuck with him. The AC just called me one day last May and told me
I’d got Blood as DCI. What I thought didn’t matter Sweet Fanny Adams. I didn’t want the bugger on my squad. I didn’t want a career Special Branch copper trained in all the
dirty tricks running my lads in Soho.’

Troy could believe this. Wiggins didn’t want a member of the political police working in the Vice Squad and being privy to the countless little fiddles that Wiggins’s men ran from
day to day.

‘I’m an old-school copper. I don’t hold wi’ people like Percy Blood.’

This was fatuous, conceited, arrogant to the point of banality. Wiggins had probably served the best part of forty years, Troy had served twenty-seven and Blood had served at least thirty-five.
They were all old-school coppers. That was the thing about the old school. Sooner or later everybody turned out to have been there. You just didn’t know it at the time. And simply to have
been to the old school didn’t mean you’d sat at the same form as Dudley Wiggins while he carved ‘I love Ethel Bloggs’ in the desktop – and it sure as hell didn’t
mean you shared the same values. Wiggins’s old school was one that nodded to all his fiddles, one that turned Soho into his private fiefdom. Of course he didn’t want Percy Blood
muscling in.

‘He was never part of the team, y’know.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.

‘I mean he didn’t account to me or to Mr Tattershall. He accounted direct to Mr Quint.’

It occurred to Troy that Wiggins’s first reaction must have been to think that Blood had been brought in to spy on him.

‘And another thing – it cut us out of the juiciest case this side of Kitty O’Shea!’

Ah – so his vanity was singed?

‘You think you could have made a case against Fitzpatrick, do you?’

‘Made it? Made it? I’d’ve put the twisted bugger away for life!’

And it seemed to Troy that Fitz was a mirror to the nation, in which none could recognise their own image, save as dogs do, barking at their own reflection in a rock pool.

That evening as he walked down Goodwin’s Court, he heard boots clattering after him, and turned to see Onions. He’d been sitting in the Salisbury, waiting. It was
the way people Troy knew found to find him. Onions was pretty close to being the last person Troy expected to be waiting for him.

‘I was waiting.’

‘I know,’ said Troy, paused with the key in the lock not knowing what came next. There’d been rows between them – they’d known each other the best part of thirty
years – but nothing like the last. Troy had left Tablecloth Terrace concluding that Onions would not speak to him again.

‘Are we going in?’ Onions asked, and Troy pushed the door open.

Troy tried letting routine carry them. He put the kettle on. Onions sat on the sofa and did not take off his mac. So far a typical Stan and Troy meeting, except that Stan usually had a bit more
colour to his cheeks, and rarely, hardly looked his age. Grey before he was forty, and built like a docker, he had scarcely seemed to Troy to change. He was nearing seventy now. Perhaps
Jackie’s death had been the one thing that could let time catch up with him? Perhaps Jackie’s death would be his death?

‘I hear you got something,’ he said.

Troy said nothing.

‘I hear you’ve been to see Percy Blood.’

Troy did not need to ask how he knew, although he was surprised at the speed with which he had been told. Blood would have complained to his cronies in Special Branch, and someone in the Branch
would have been an old Onions protégé and would have called him at home. He thought of putting a small ad in
The Times
. ‘Commander Troy has been to see Percy
Blood.’

‘What have you got on him?’

‘Not much. He’s crossed the line. Bullied the statements out of the Ffitch girls. He’s passing it off as routine – “We all do it, don’t we?” – but
it wasn’t. I’m afraid it’s all I’ve got to go on. And it doesn’t connect with Jackie at all. I’m sorry.’

‘Doesn’t connect?’

‘I meant . . . well he didn’t interview her, did he?’

‘Of course he didn’t. I told him not to.’

‘What?’

‘I told that bugger Blood. I may be retired, but if he drags our Jackie into this I’ll see his career on the rocks.’

‘Blood knew?’

‘O’ course he bloody knew! I got word he was asking, so I met him in the Dog and Truss in Maiden Lane, and I told him. He left her alone or I’d sink him! I didn’t give
the best years of my life to the Met to have my own grandchildren pestered by buggers like Percy Blood. The job owes me one favour. That’s it. I told him she knew nowt about owt –
she’s wayward and she’s silly, but she’s not bent – and if I heard one more time that he was asking questions about her, I’d have ’im.’

That Clover Browne was Jackie Clover was the best-kept secret of the whole affair. The Ffitch sisters did not know – Fitz might have known – the press did not know; Rebecca West did
not know; the prosecution had dropped the charge of procurement because they did not know, because they could not find Clover Browne, and they could not find her because her real name was so well
concealed. But Blood knew. Blood knew? How did Blood know? Troy knew only because Stan had told him. All the efforts of young bloods like Alex Troy had failed to find her, but Percy Blood knew?

Suddenly Blood had moved from the periphery to the centre, simply because he knew. Troy was no further on, had not a scrap of new evidence – but Blood knew. It didn’t fit. Quite
simply, it didn’t fit.

He had not been listening to Stan. He tuned back in and tried to pickup thethread.