A Little White Death (48 page)

‘Would it surprise you to learn that I have a print off the gun that killed Fitzpatrick that does not match his fingerprints?’

‘Nothing about this case would surprise me, and nothing wouldn’t surprise me. My involvement in it ended when I stepped down from the witness box. I’ve not been privy to the
details of your investigation, sir.’

‘I have reason to believe that this fingerprint is the fingerprint of the man who murdered Fitzpatrick.’

‘I’m sure you have.’

And Troy was equally sure that Blood’s slow-but-sly brain was now reviewing his last denial, telling himself once more that he
had
wiped down the gun first, that he
had
worn
gloves, and wondering whether he should not have invented the finding of a gun. A gun he had somehow neglected to confiscate and forgotten to mention in his notes. A plausible explanation of how
his fingerprints came to be on the gun. God knows, Troy had given him ample opportunity to dig that grave if he was not happy with this one – no lie the man could come up with would explain
why his prints might be on the bullets inside the gun.

‘I’d like to request that you allow us to take your fingerprints.’

Mary stuck a voluminous handbag on the table and took out an ink pad and fingerprint form.

‘Here?’ said Blood. ‘Now?’

‘Why not?’ said Troy.

‘I don’t have to.’

Troy was not certain whether this was question or statement. Blood showed none of the nervousness of obvious guilt, but he was close to outrage, his copper’s pride severely insulted.

‘No, you don’t, but it would helpus enormously if you would.’

‘You mean like eliminate me from further enquiry?’

‘No. That’s not what I meant.’

‘Well,’ Percy said through gritted teeth. ‘I decline to give ’em. I’m not a villain you’ve dragged in from Watney Street, I’m a serving copper. I
deserve to be treated a bit better than that. You want my prints – you want
me
, Mr Troy! – then you’ll have to charge me. But I don’t think you’re ready for
that, are you, sir? So I’ll say this to you. Charge me or I walk.’

It seemed to Troy that he should at least pretend to give this some thought.

‘You may leave whenever you choose.’

‘Then I choose now,’ said Blood in a rasping, angry whisper. He pushed his chair across the tiles with a scrape fit to crack tooth enamel, yanked open the door and left. They heard
his boots ringing on the stone steps all the way to the next floor.

Mary McDiarmuid opened her handbag once more, took out a dust puffer and, holding Blood’s tea mug by the rim, blew powder over it.

‘Oh dear Percy, where were you when God gave out the brains? He must be part sealion to swallow so many red herrings. I’m amazed you didn’t ask him his collar size.’

‘At least there was poetry in his answers. Potted meat and haslet,’ said Troy, shaking his head gently. ‘I ask you . . . potted meat and haslet.’

‘Eh?’

‘Never mind.’

She puffed again. A cloud of white powder settled on the body of the mug. She pursed her lips, blew off the surplus and looked closely. ‘Two clear thumbs and a partial,’ she said.
‘Nae problem.’

Late in the afternoon Kolankiewicz came in dressed ready for the street. He was clutching a large brown envelope. He took out two 10 × 8s, pinned them to the back of the
door and slapped the flat of his hand across them.

‘They’re identical,’ he said. ‘I have all sixteen points. Enough to hang this Blood.’

‘I’m not out to hang him,’ Troy said.

‘What you have set out to do is of no matter. This case is now cast in iron. Blood would be a fool to plead anything but guilty. You may not want to hang him. Equally he may well hang. The
choice is not yours.’

Troy looked at him, in his homburg and macintosh, already pulling his gloves out of his pocket, anxious to leave.

‘Why so ratty? What’s the hurry?’

‘Cribbage night at the Brickie’s Arms. Or had you forgotten?’

Troy had forgotten. Twice a week a group of old men sat in the Bricklayer’s Arms on Stepney Green and played cribbage. Among them Kolankiewicz and Troy’s old station sergeant from
his first posting at Leman Street nick – George Bonham. Like Onions, George was now nearing seventy. A giant of a man unbent by age, thirty years ago he had taught Troy all he knew about the
law and police work, ‘coppering’, as he called it. Troy had long ago outstripped his teacher. He had not seen George in how long?

‘I haven’t seen George in ages,’ he said aloud. ‘Not since . . .’

‘Not since you caught the plague,’ said Kolankiewicz bluntly. ‘Be a mensh and dropin some time. He always asks after you.’

‘Be a mensh’ was getting to be Kolankiewicz’s catchphrase. But he was right. When all this was over he would ‘dropin’.

Kolankiewicz left. Troy found himself staring at the prints. It was unmistakable. A small scar in the shape of a crescent moon slicing across the ridges on each one.

He could feel Mary McDiarmuid sneaking up next to him. ‘What now?’ she said, arms folded across her bosom, that steely look in her eye.

‘I’m going to arrest Chief Inspector Blood.’

She kicked the door to with the toe of her shoe. The rest of her body did not seem to move. Her arms remained symbolically folded, some Berlin Wall Troy had to cross to get what he wanted.

‘Bad idea,’ she said.

‘Bad idea?’

‘He’s still one of us. Bad idea. Bad form.’

‘He’s not one of us any longer.’

‘He’s a copper, Troy. I can’t say I think we owe him. In fact I can’t bring myself to say I think we owe Percy Blood a damn thing – but we owe something to the
force. Troy, don’t go tearing down to Camberwell in a squad car to bring Blood back in cuffs. In his mad way Percy was right when he said he deserved better than that, if only because we all
deserve better than that.’

‘What do you suggest?’

‘Go and see him. Off the record. Absolutely off the record. Tell him what you know and give him twenty-four hours to turn himself in. If he does that we can always say we didn’t get
Kolankiewicz’s report till tomorrow. We can sit on it for the good of the force. When Blood turns himself in we charge him and let the record state that he came in voluntarily.’

Troy looked at his watch. It was almost five thirty.

‘Eighteen hours,’ he said. ‘If he doesn’t turn himself in by noon tomorrow I’ll go down there with the cavalry.’

‘You’re doing the right thing. Believe me, you’re doing the right thing.’

Peggy Blood came to the door. It opened only a matter of inches and she said soft as a whisper, ‘He doesn’t want to see you.’

It had been a long time since he’d put his foot in a door. It was something he thought best left to uniformed coppers in black boots. A big bugger could break the toes of a man in ordinary
shoes.

Mrs Blood retreated at the intrusive foot and Troy pushed past her. The first blow caught him just behind the ear, the second on the back of the neck – so hard he found himself ducking and
wrapping his arms around his head. Then they fell on him like hailstones.

‘Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you done enough?’

She caught him a stinger on the right cheek. A tiny fist with the whole weight of her back and shoulder behind it.

‘Go away. Just go away and let us alone!’

Then a voice like thunder said, ‘Leave go, woman!’

She stopped. Troy took down his hands and saw Blood standing in the doorway of the sitting room. Frayed cardigan and carpet slippers. Peggy and Blood stood stock still, staring at one another
for a moment as though Troy were invisible. Then she fled, running between them in the direction of the kitchen. Blood turned around without another word and disappeared through the doorway.

Troy could hear a pulse beating loudly in his head. His own breath in audible rasps. He straightened up, gulped air and followed Blood.

He was at the green-baize table once more. Lit by the galleon lamp. The muted mumble of the six o’clock news on the wireless. The fish circling frantically. A single-bar electric fire
glowing dully on the sunburst hearthrug. Another model in his great crab hands. A ship to be fitted into a bottle, its hull slender as an eel, its tiny, fragile masts folded down to be threaded
through the neck of the bottle.

Troy sat opposite Blood, hoping he did not sound as pathetic as he felt. Blood tinkered, took up a wire hook and made invisible readjustments to the lie of the masts.

‘Percy.’

Blood did not look up. Not the faintest acknowledgement that Troy was in the room.

‘Percy. Things have moved on.’

Blood did not look up.

‘I’ve no more questions. I’ve all the evidence I need. Your prints match.’

Blood slotted the stern of the sailing shipinto the neck of the bottle.

‘This visit is off the record.’

The ship slid to the belly of the bottle and keeled over.

‘If I arrest you now you’ll do the full stretch for murder.’

Troy thought it unlikely in the extreme that Blood would hang. He might not be as mad as jokes and gossip would have him, but somewhere, somewhere in the legal process of blind drunk justice,
something would mitigate.

Blood took a longer wire hook and righted the vessel.

‘If you come to the Yard and give yourself up, I will add to my report the fact that you co-operated and I’ll see the judge knows this.’

The masts flicked upright, filling the bottle – as delicate and beautiful as the spread of a butterfly’s wings. As instant as the blossom of frame-stopfilming.

‘You have until noon tomorrow. You have eighteen hours to come to your senses. After that I’ll issue a warrant for your arrest. Do you understand me, Percy?’

Blood set the bottle on its blocks. In profile Troy saw the ship for what it was – the
Cutty Sark
. He left without Blood having looked at him. Once he had called off his wife it was
as though Troy had not existed for him.

He was exhausted. It was still early in the evening, but he was spent. He sat at his desk, still in his overcoat, hands sunk in his pockets. He tried to count the days since he
had come back to work. Four? Five? Or was it six? Perhaps his body was caving in only because it could? Blood would turn himself in tomorrow and the case would be wrapped as soon as he had made his
statement. The huge ‘but’ lurking at the end of this sliced into his tiredness. He felt his eyes must be shining like beacons in the paleness of his wasted body. He felt his mind
wrenching itself free of the weight of flesh. Blood had killed Fitz – but he had not killed Clover. He might have been party to it, but he had not committed the act. And what was the act? How
did anyone compel a woman to write suicide notes, how did he force-feed her sleeping pills without leaving a mark?

‘Come on.’

Mary McDiarmuid was standing in the doorway.

‘You look dead beat. I’ll drive you home. And then Eddie here will cook us a meal. When did you last have a decent meal, Troy?’

He could not recall and he could not argue. He quite fancied potted meat. Blood had stirred a childhood memory of it as nursery food – like toast and dripping, and jam roly-poly.
He’d not had that in years either. Fat chance. Clark was into the gourmet stuff. He’d probably get ratatouille or moules marinières, followed by Calvados pomme tarte.

It seemed to please Mary enormously to be at the wheel of a seventeen-foot 1952 Bentley Continental. Troy got in the back and closed his eyes. Clark took the passenger seat and directed Mary to
Bedfordbury and the back entrance to Goodwin’s Court. It took a matter of minutes. All the same, Troy nodded off, and Clark shook him to wake him. He saw Mary turn her head and smile with
pleasure. If she enjoyed it this much he must let her drive more often. The two of them pushed their doors open; Clark bent down to gather up his shopping.

Troy never saw the man who shot him. He stood in the black shadow of the alley and fired his revolver at point-blank range. He was a lousy shot. Five bullets, and only the last hit Troy, grazing
the back of his left hand with a crimson tear.

The first four killed Mary McDiarmuid.

Troy found himself on the ground, one leg bent under him, his shoulder against the car door, the bleeding hand shielding his eyes in a stupidly instinctive reaction. What you cannot see cannot
hurt you. He lowered the hand. Heard the sound of the hammer falling on empty chambers, heard the slow, seemingly methodical, unhurried steps as his would-be-assassin walked back down the alley,
into the courtyard, out into St Martin’s Lane.

Clark appeared from the other side of the car. Troy could not find Mary McDiarmuid’s pulse. His hand was bleeding all over hers. Her wrist seemed to him as thin and slippery as an eel. Her
chest leaked blood like a squeezed sponge. Clark put his fingers to her neck and shook his head.

‘She’s dead, sir.’

He took off his macintosh and draped it over Mary McDiarmuid.

‘Stay with her,’ Troy said. ‘I’m going in to call the Yard.’

‘Careful, he might—’

‘No,’ Troy said. ‘He’s gone. He’s said his piece. He won’t be back.’

Troy called the Yard. And then he called an ambulance. He bound up the wound on his hand as best he could. It bled copiously, but he found he could still move his fingers without great pain,
found he could still grip the butt of the old World War Two-issue Webley .38 he disinterred from beneath the loose floorboard by the hatstand.

When he got back to Bedfordbury a patrol car had already arrived, the back end blocking the way from New Row, headlights full on, the beam flooding the street. Mary McDiarmuid still lay in the
open door of the Bentley, head back, legs bent, the shoe twisted from one foot, Clark’s macintosh preserving decency.

A uniformed sergeant was holding one edge. Peering at her face. ‘Jesus Christ,’ he said softly.

‘I need your car,’ said Troy as he walked past.

‘My man’ll drive you,’ said the sergeant to Troy’s retreating back. But Troy simply told the driver to leave the keys and get out. There was a sharp stab of pain as he
put the car in gear. Then he headed south for Waterloo Bridge and Camberwell, wondering who would get there first.