A Little White Death (50 page)

‘Does it hurt, baby?’

‘Not as much as you’d think,’ he heard himself say, watching the two of them from some inside/outside stance, part and not part of his own dream.

‘I know what you need,’ she said. ‘And I got what you want.’

And she had performed a slow striptease, something she had never done in life, shedding her army uniform, piece by piece. The olive-green blouse – kicking off her shoes – the
non-regulation skirt – unhooking the silk stockings from the suspenders – the joint-defying backward/upward swing of both hands to unclip the bra, the slow slide of a shoulder strap
down her right arm as she stood in profile, head back, tits out. Turning frontward, white knickers her only garment – vanished, yanked down in a single movement. Then she pulled back the
bedclothes, and he found himself looking down the length of his own body, a thinness exaggerated into bone geometry by the power of dream, a pitiful wreck of a body.

‘Anything I should know about? Any new piggies?’

He raised his left hand. Feebly. Like Lazarus. Trailing a bandage that stretched down to the floor, out of the door and down the stairs to the room below, weaving in and out and around the
furniture, Ariadne’s thread.

She lay across him, her toes touching his toes. He felt her nipples brush his chest, tits landing on him, a hand playing with the lock of hair across his forehead. He closed his eyes, felt
himself come up, stiff as a pikestaff. Opened his eyes. Tosca had become Clover. Brown eyes turned metallic blue. He screamed. Woke up and screamed the more.

Morning.

The little yellow pill.

The hypodermic jab to the backside.

The dog with eyes as big as millwheels.

Later in the day Kolankiewicz called.

‘Coyn sent for me this morning.’

‘And?’

‘He stuck your medical certificate under my nose. “So? What’s up?” I said. He said, “It’s a standard Scotland Yard medical form type 006/C.”
“So?” I said. “Read the signature,” he said. “Ladislaw Kolankiewicz,” I said. “You think I so dumb I don’t know my own name?” “And you
see nothing wrong in this?” he said. So I said, “Quite right.” Took out a Biro and added MD after my name. He was still staring at it when I walked out.’

‘You’re shoving your retirement up his bum, aren’t you?’

‘I should care. However, that is not my reason for calling. I have the chemical analysis of your bits of fluff. The smaller bears the dust of your sleeping pills. The larger is, I presume,
the one you’re interested in. I got lucky – there was a fairly large fragment of pill embedded in it. You ready? In descending order – Ascorbic Acid, Potassium, Sodium, Calcium,
Magnesium, Manganese, Zinc, Carotene, Thiamine, Riboflavin, Niacin, Pyridoxine, Tocopherol, Cobalamine and minor quantities of stuff we will sum up with an et cetera. Now smartyarse – you
tell me what that lot adds up to.’

It made no sense.

‘Ascorbic Acid. In what proportion?’

‘Granted even distribution over a pill I calculate at five-eighths of an inch diameter . . . I’d say about eight times the RDA .’

‘It’s a vitamin pill. Nothing more than a proprietary vitamin pill. Vitamin C, Vitamin A, the Vitamin B complex, Vitamin E, and a sprinkling of minerals on a chalk base. A shilling a
packet at any branch of Boots.’

‘Congratulations. You win a major prize.’ ‘I don’t get it.’ ‘Nor I. Do you keep such stuff in the house?’ ‘No . . . no, I don’t.’
‘Well, we know how it got into death’s jar. How did it get onto your carpet?’ ‘Just what I was thinking,’ said Troy.

Night again.

The fat white pill.

Flipped like a coin.

Mx – heads.

Single scored line – tails.

Do not dream.

Do not dare to dream.

The best part of a week had passed in tiredness and enforced idleness. He sat in front of the gas fire and reread the copy of Graham Greene’s
Our Man in Havana
that Woodbridge had given him months ago, the funny-sad tale of Wormold the vacuum cleaner salesman out of his depth, playing with the spooks.

It crossed his mind to ignore the phone when it rang. It was too late in the day for it to be Clark, who was, likely as not, going to be the only person to call him with anything that mattered.
He didn’t. ‘You never know’ passed quickly through his mind.

‘Troy,’ said a voice he knew well but had not heard in a while – Tom Driberg, an old friend since the war, and the utterly maverick MP for Maldon in Essex. ‘I hear
you’ve been in the wars?’

‘You heard right. An absolute stinker. I’ve had TB.’

‘Are you mending? Fit for human consumption?’

Troy wondered if this were a bad joke or just Freud speaking.

‘I’m OK. I was back at work until a few days ago,’ he lied.

‘Fancy a night out?’

Troy thought about it. When a man like Driberg uttered these words it was a fool who did not for a moment entertain some of the bizarre possibilities they might imply.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘The Establishment in Greek Street. The satire boys – a drink or two – perhaps a dash of music . . .’

Troy knew the Establishment Club. It was part of the satire boom – damn, that word again – and it had its origins in an irreverent production at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival called
Beyond the Fringe
. When the show had transferred to a West End theatre, Rod had dragged Troy to see it, to see sacred cows eviscerated. Not a sacred stone of England left unturned, dug up
and flung at the Establishment – hence the club’s name.

Rod had laughed fit to die as a slim, dark, impossibly tall young man named Peter Cook had impersonated the Prime Minister, alone on a bare stage, wrapped in a plaid blanket, tucked into an
armchair, a Scottish old age pensioner answering the letters of other old age pensioners. It was daring and it was funny – though probably not as funny as Rod thought it was – and it
had never been done before. A line had been crossed: the hitherto time-honoured entitlement to respect-regardless-of-worth ditched. It was impossible to imagine Winston having the piss taken out of
him in this way, and the only way to take the piss out of Eden was to have it surgically removed. Rod concluded, wrongly, that Troy had missed the joke.

‘You don’t get it, do you?’ he said as they walked home.

‘No, Rod. It’s you who doesn’t get it. I’m all in favour of it. Take the piss out of the bastards at every turn. But in a couple of years’ time it’ll be you.
If you haven’t worked out that they’ll be just as hard on you, that in a year or two it’ll be you or Hugh or Mittiavelli being sent up, then you really don’t get
it.’

Rod looked just a little hurt. Troy knew what he was thinking, and was not uttering for fear Troy would turn more savage than Peter Cook – ‘But we’re the good guys!’

Believe it if you will, thought Troy.

The Establishment was Cook’s club. Stark and black and clinically chic, in amongst the nochic tit-and-bum bars of Greek Street. Right now, as Troy and Driberg took their seats, a short
stout chap was up on the stage at the end of the room doing his impression of Wilson. Very dull. Very Yorkshire. Very Wilson. Troy doubted whether he could ever get Rod to witness such a sight with
him. He still wouldn’t get it. For all he took the mickey out of Wilson behind his back, for all that he had nicknamed him Mittiavelli, some unerring instinct for party loyalty would surely
take over if he saw someone doing the same thing on the stage.

Troy was hoping for music. Satire – or was it just language? – required more concentration than he seemed to be able to muster. He had heard that Cook’s partner led a
three-piece jazz group and sometimes played in the club. But as successive comics took to the stage, he rather thought that this was not one of their nights.

‘Do Dudley Moore’s trio still play here?’ he asked.

‘So I’m told,’ said Driberg. ‘Not tonight, though. He’s on Broadway in the American version of the
Fringe
. All the
Fringe
boys are on
Broadway.’

The short stout bloke reappeared and was joined by a tall thin bloke. They stood with their backs to the audience and appeared to have their hands at their flies. They had gagged their way
through half a dozen lines before Troy twigged that they were playing the roles of Woodbridge and Tereshkov, comparing notes on Tara and Caro Ffitch like a couple of old rakes meeting side by side
in a urinal and discussing the kinky merits of their sexual partners while pissing. Only they weren’t. This wasn’t, ‘You get a better blow job with Tara’, or ‘Caro is
a spanker.’ It was the quality of the secrets they revealed; it was what their women knew about the inner workings of the Foreign Office or our nuclear deterrent that these two were swapping
like dirty details.

A man at the next table – late fifties, Troy thought, thick grey hair, bushy beard turning white – laughed so loudly the actors paused to let him rip before the punch line.

‘Of course,’ said the short stout one. ‘If you really want the hard stuff . . .’

‘The hard stuff ?’

‘You know, the
hard
stuff.’

‘Oh, I see, the
hard
stuff. You mean our negotiations for Common Market entry?’

‘. . . Then you want Miss Whiplash in Wardour Street.’

They turned sideways to the audience, mimed shaking their pricks and zipping up. This brought the house down, and brought them to an interval.

Troy said, ‘Tom, why did you get me here?’

As if cued, Driberg got to his feet. ‘See a man about a dog,’ he said, and walked off to the gents’.

Thanks, Tom.

Suddenly Troy felt a hand on his shoulder. He looked up and the chap at the next table, who had been laughing so loudly, was standing over him.

‘Troy,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Have we . . . er . . .’

And he looked beneath the beard, beneath the dyed hair and, finding the man, realised it was Tereshkov.

He spoke in Russian, softly and quickly. ‘There are things you don’t know about the case. And if you don’t know them you will blunder in the dark for ever. Know this, Troy. It
was a honeytrap. It was me they were after, not Woodbridge, and they snared the wrong bird. The man you want is Wallace Curran.’

And with that he strolled off towards the stairs and was halfway up it before Troy could even rise from his seat. Troy collided with a man carrying a cello down the staircase. A panel opened up
in the soundbox – a squeaky Punch and Judy voice began to intone ‘You’ve never had it so good, so good, so good’ – and the Prime Minister’s head shot out,
propelled by a length of pantographic trellis, and jammed Troy and cello into the narrow staircase. By the time he had struggled past the contraption and its inventor, Tereshkov had vanished. He
rushed out into Greek Street, but there was no sign of him. Troy did not even know which way he had turned. The chase was pointless.

‘So good, so good, so good,’ squawked the voice on the stairs.

‘Shit, shit, shit,’ said Troy.

‘Trouble?’

He turned around. Driberg had come up silently behind him.

Tom had set him up, for the best of reasons, but still set him up. He was in on the conspiracy, if that were not becoming too hackneyed a term. He, an elected Member of Parliament, had thought
little or nothing of arranging a clandestine meeting between a Russian spy and Scotland Yard’s chief detective. The press would have a field day, if they but knew. The least he could have
done was dropped a hint. He owed Troy the price of the deceit. There was nothing to lose by asking.

‘What’s a honeytrap?’

‘Pussy,’ said Tom. ‘Twat, cunt – quim, if you’re feeling poetic. I believe Chaucer has a variant on the word as queynte –
Miller’s Tale
, I
shouldn’t wonder. Something so sweet it’s irresistible. God knows why they should apply such a term to women but they do – and your guess at the truth of it would be better
informed than mine, I should think.’

Tom was married. Married, Troy knew, these ten years or more. He doubted very much that the union had ever been consummated, and he had no idea why Driberg had felt the need of a fig leaf for
his unflaggingly queer propensity – he who could sing hymns to the joys of blowing a nice bit of rough trade. He found it hard to believe that it was just a political ploy, a crowd and
constituency pleaser. That Troy’s own marriage, seven years old, seven years neglected, went also unconsummated he did not impart to anyone. Driberg could guess if he liked, but he
wasn’t guessing. He was simply disdaining heterosexual practices with a flip, all-encompassing remark. The look on his face told Troy that.

‘Common practice, is it?’ Troy asked.

‘Virtually standard among the spooks,’ Driberg opined. ‘They seem to think most men are fools for cunt.’

He shrugged off an issue less than distasteful, of simply no interest to him. ‘And I suppose they’re right. By and large,’ he concluded.

Troy had fallen asleep, he remembered, not long after taking off from Moscow. He had awoken over eastern Austria to the realisation that he’d been had. He had laughed out loud. The man
sitting next to him had looked at him as though he thought he was crazy. And if he’d known the word honeytrap he would have laughed the louder. He had spent a pleasured night, a delicious
night, with Valentina Vassilievna – call me Vivi – Asimova and it had only then, half an hour away from landing in Zurich, occurred to him that if Charlie’s room was bugged
– which it surely was – then it was more than likely his was too and if he knew it, then she knew it the better. If she slept with him, and she had, she had done so in the full
knowledge that their every sigh and intimate whisper was being recorded. She had slept with him simply because she had been told to. Her inept act of following him had been just that, an act. She
had thrown herself in his way to gain his attention and his sympathy – one copper to another in a world of spies. Her appearing at his bedroom door had not been a secret plea for
understanding, but an open seduction by the Russian rule book. He’d been had, by the book, down to the last delicious, dirty moan, the last whispered ‘otchi tchernye’. He could
not believe they’d learnt a thing – he was beyond blackmail and what secrets did he know? – but he’d been, as Tom put it, a fool for cunt, and if that was a honeytrap, then
he understood the concept very well.