A Little White Death (46 page)

‘She had so much to live for, her whole life ahead of her,’ Stan was saying.

Troy said nothing, and nodded his agreement.

He knew what he ought to do. He had been wrong to put it off in the first place. He needed a quiet spot, somewhere in the Yard where no one would think of looking for him,
somewhere where he could go over all the evidence Jack had dumped on his desk.

He went down to Forensics. Through the glass wall he could see Kolankiewicz eviscerating some poor sod. His office would be empty. Perfect. Most policemen were far more squeamish than Troy and
tended to avoid Forensics, and few would beard the Polish Beast in his lair.

He cleared a space on Kolankiewicz’s desk and dipped into the cardboard box. There wasn’t much. The empty pill jar with his own name on the label, the Webley .38 revolver that had
killed Paddy Fitz, four bullets and a spent cartridge. The folder contained Jack’s hastily written report, a Forensics report from one of Kolankiewicz’s assistants, photographs of his
own sitting room, and photographs of Fitz’s. The latter were messy. The bullet had taken off a large part of Fitz’s skull. There were also statements from some of the hacks outside
Fitz’s house, from Pritch-Kempon the finding of Fitz’s body and from himself on the finding of Clover’s. It was not promising material. He was searching for something new. He was
deeply uncertain of finding it.

He read it all, and felt blank. ‘Rusty,’ he thought to himself, ‘I’m rusty. I’ve just been out of things a bit too long.’

He read it all again – and the first sore thumb reared up.

A dozen hacks, his own nephew included, had signed statements to say that they had been on Fitz’s doorstepall night, as they had been for many weeks, and had seen no one come or go except
Pritch-Kemp.

Then why had no one heard the shot?

He phoned Alex.

Alex said, ‘Did you see Tara?’

‘Yes.’

‘Well?’

‘It’s confidential, Alex. And it’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling about your statement.’

‘Statement?’

‘The one you made to Jack Wildeve’s murder team on the morning of the twentieth.’

Alex sighed audibly. This, clearly, interested him not one jot. Troy knew he would be looking at his watch, wondering how quickly he could get rid of his uncle.

‘You say you were there all night.’

‘Yes. We were. We ended up pissing into milk bottles.’

‘But you don’t report hearing the shot.’

‘I
didn’t
hear it.’

‘Why not? A Webley is not a sophisticated weapon. In the dead of night, it would sound like a cannon going off.’

‘Fitz lived at the back of the house, Freddie. Largely to get away from us, I should think.’ ‘You’d still have heard it if you’d been there all night.’
‘Of course we were there all night. It was routine. So routine I thought it was a waste of time. Fitz would get home. Give us a smiley “Goodnight, gentlemen.” Then Pritch-Kemp
would show up about midnight. And then there’d be nothing until the beat bobby moved us on about—’

‘What?’

‘It was routine, Freddie. We were moved on between eleven and about half past twelve every night. We just walked round the block, came in the other end of the mews. We were still there all
night – it took less than five minutes!’

‘You don’t think that’s long enough for a murder?’ ‘The last time you called me it was an “unexplained death”!’ ‘Things have moved on. What
time did the beat bobby move you on?’ ‘I don’t know. I told you it was routine. No one gave it any thought.’ ‘Try.’ ‘I dunno – eleven, eleven
fifteen. I doubt it was much later than that. I suppose Pritch-Kemp came in about an hour later. Sometimes he came in before we were moved on, sometimes after. That night it was after.’

‘You’re sure?’ ‘Yes, I’m sure.’ Troy hung up and checked Pritch-Kemp’s statement.

Troy flicked forward a page.

So Fitz had died to the sound of Mozart’s Jupiter symphony. It did not strike Troy as music to commit suicide to. But what was? There was a radio show that could beat the hell out of
Desert Island Discs
. He would never have chosen the Jupiter – it was not other-worldly, it was so much of this world. It had . . . it had . . . pomp. It seemed to him that there was no
other word for it. Heavy on the combined force of brass and strings – at least it was on the one recording he knew, the one Von Karajan had made in Italy during the war. It had oomph. He
supposed that a man unfamiliar with the report of a gunshot might have presumed that a louder passage might drown it out. It wouldn’t, but if suicides’ minds worked so rationally, why
not the 1812? – which Troy recalled seeing in Fitz’s collection of long-playing records, and which at full volume would drown out the Blitz.

He called Paddington Green police station and asked for the station sergeant.

‘Did you instruct the foot patrol in Dreyfus Mews to move on the press?’

‘I did, sir. I thought we should show the force. Not a lot we could do, and I don’t have the men to leave anyone outside the door day and night, but the blokes on the beat were told
to make our presence felt from time to time. We run the streets of London, not the gentlemen of the press.’

Troy understood the logic. Men like this thought like soldiers. It was their turf, their territory. He doubted very much whether it had occurred to the man to give Fitz a bit of peace. He had
done it because he believed in the thin blue line.

‘Was this common knowledge?’

‘I’ve no idea, sir. It certainly wasn’t a secret.’

Anyone who cared to watch Dreyfus Mews, and, God knows, there were enough dark corners from which to watch, would have no difficulty working out the copper’s routine. Ninety minutes was
hardly a long time. Two or three nights of observation and they’d know. On the other hand, a Chief Inspector of Vice could simply find an excuse to visit Paddington Green and sneak a look at
the duty roster and the accompanying standing orders. No one would question his presence; no one would much remember seeing him.

‘Has Chief Inspector Blood been in lately, do you know?’

The man thought for a minute and then proved Troy right.

‘Not so’s I can recall, sir.’

The second thing to strike him was in a photograph of his living room. The chair in which he had found Clover, slumped and dying, stood between the gas fire and the coffee table. On the coffee
table the Mandrax jar lay on its side, the cap and the little swab of cotton wool next to it. But beneath the table, a foot or so nearer the other armchair than Clover’s, was a white blob. He
had no recollection of seeing this – and whatever it was it received no mention in Jack’s report or the findings of the forensic officer.

He called the Scene of Crime man, a sergeant named Hopkins.

‘It was cotton wool, sir.’

‘And what did you do with it.’

‘I stuffed it back in the jar when I cleared up, sir.’

Troy had taken a pill from that jar every day for a fortnight. The piece of cotton wool had been a devil to remove the first time – he’d got his little finger stuck in the neck of
the jar trying. And each night he had stuffed it back thinking that it surely served some purpose. But there had been just the one piece, of this he was certain.

He opened the jar. Two pieces. The two together far larger than the one he remembered. He checked the Forensics report. The jar had still had one pill left in when it reached the lab. Cameron,
Kolankiewicz’s assistant, had analysed it and confirmed it as Mandrax. He had not analysed the cotton wool. This was far from sloppy work, but it wasn’t top notch either. He had made
assumptions. Hopkins had made assumptions. They were not necessarily facts.

He read the fingerprint report. The only prints on the jar belonged to Clover and to himself.

The door to the office opened quietly. Troy looked up to find Kolankiewicz looking back at him.

‘Refuge?’ said Kolankiewicz.

‘Sort of. I began needing a place to hide. Now I rather think I need you.’

Kolankiewicz crossed to the corner of the room and plugged in the kettle.

‘You want doughnut with your tea?’

‘Is it that time of day?’

‘Be dark soon. Of course it’s that time of day.’

‘I didn’t realise. I’ve been in here since lunchtime. Yes, I’ll take a doughnut.’

Kolankiewicz inched him aside, tugged open a drawer in his desk and took out a box from a Viennese patisserie in Golder’s Green, a beautifully square box, pea-green lettering on white
cardboard, held shut with golden thread.

‘I like the Viennese. You plonk them down anywhere on earth they do three civilised things. They found a university, they form a string quartet and they open a patisserie. You will
appreciate I use the word doughnut lightly.’

Indeed he did. Such was the array of cream and pastry that it brought back the appetite of a man who had presumed it had left him for ever.

Over a custard slice Troy said, ‘Can you analyse these?’ And held up the two pieces of cotton wool.

‘Piece of cake,’ said Kolankiewicz.

‘And why would your man Cameron not have analysed them?’

‘Cameron is a good man, Troy. He was rushed by Jack. Jack was rushed by Quint. That said, if the cotton wool was in the jar . . .?’

Kolankiewicz did not finish the sentence.

‘There’ve been too many ready conclusions drawn in this case,’ said Troy. ‘Jack’s man put it in the jar, assuming it had come from there. Your man didn’t ask
any questions. And none of my people thought to check whether there was a beat bobby around.’

‘I repeat. He’s a good man. What you are saying is that he didn’t ask the right questions.’

Kolankiewicz shoved the box of cakes towards him, a ‘help-yourself ’ gesture. Troy went back to reading the reports.

It took a while. He must have read it half a dozen times and not seen what it meant.

To this Jack had added a scrawl saying, ‘No other firearms in house – no bullets – no box.’

‘If you were hell-bent on suicide, would you load five chambers in a revolver or would you presume to kill yourself with the first shot?’

Kolankiewicz peered over his shoulder at the report. ‘Eh?’ ‘All he needed was one bullet. Why would he put in more?’ ‘Suicides aren’t usually that
rational.’ Troy ignored this. ‘If you loaded a gun without really thinking you’d fill six chambers. If you were hell-bent on suicide and a part of your mind was still rational,
and, after all, suicide requires a certain practicality – I’ve known them to pay all their bills first, empty the ashtrays and flush the lavatory – then you’d load one. But
a trained man setting out to use a gun leaves one chamber empty to avoid accidents. Standard procedure. You do it on auto. A thug with a gun fills all six and doesn’t care if he blows his
foot off drawing the damn thing. A trained man always leaves the hammer on an empty chamber.’

‘Any old soldier would know that. Any officer. And Fitz did his bit. You told me so yourself.’ ‘No, not soldiers. Coppers. It’s a copper’s thing. Soldiers are
blasé – wear a gun all the time and it becomes as routine as tying your shoelaces. And Fitz wasn’t in the infantry, he was in the Army Medical Corps – he refused weapons
training. Even defied them to court-martial him. He wouldn’t know the ropes. The only gun Fitz ever had was made of wood.’

But the only prints on the Webley were Fitz’s. He went back to the report.

Few people ever so speculated in police statements. It looked to Troy as though Jack had simply decided to let him rip and tell it in his own words. It contrasted sharply with his own
matterof-fact account.

This figured. The gun pressed to the skull. The instinctive turning of the head away from the barrel. No matter whether you were aiming the gun yourself or someone else was.

Bullets. Bullets. Bullets. Then it hit him. He almost dropped the file. ‘Bullets!’ he said. ‘We just did bullets,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘There’s no fingerprint
report on the bullets! Only on the gun.’ Kolankiewicz tore the file from his fingers. ‘Shit, shit, shit and lots more shit!’ ‘You going to tell me he’s a good man one
more time?’ But Kolankiewicz wasn’t listening. He had a jeweller’s glass in one eye and was holding one of the bullets under his desk lamp. ‘There’s a partial on this
one. Pass me another – and pick it up by the lead end.’ One by one, Troy handed him the remaining live bullets, and then the spent shell on the end of a ballpoint pen. Kolankiewicz
pulled out his eyepiece.