A Little White Death (56 page)

‘Fucking hell. What happened to you? You look like something the cat dragged in!’

Troy told him.

Rod heard him out and then said, ‘Why have you come to me, Freddie?’

‘I can’t let it drop now. Coyn is an ass. I have to bypass him. I have to talk to the Home Secretary.’

‘So?’

‘I want you to arrange a meeting with Nick Travis.’

‘You’ll have to be quick. Their Party Conference starts this week. With Mac out the way it’ll be a free-for-all.’

‘That’s why I’m asking you.’

Rod thought about this.

‘Of course you could just go and knock on his door.’

‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.

‘He lives on the other side of the Row. The house due opposite.’

‘Good Lord. How long’s he been there?’

‘About a year. He’s not in now. There’s no lights on, and his wife seems to spend as little time there as possible. I get the impression they fight like cat and dog.’

‘Do you see much of him?’

‘What? You mean do I nip over and ask to borrow a cup of sugar? He’s a Tory, for crying out loud.’

‘I just thought. You work in the same place. Travel the same route . . .’

‘We don’t share a cab, if that’s what you mean. He has a Home Office chauffeured car and I take the bloody Northern line. You can’t socialise with the fuckers, Freddie,
really you can’t. Cid tried. Popped over to introduce herself to Jane Travis the day after they moved in. Won’t make that mistake again. If there’s one thing Tory wives hate more
than Labour wives, its Labour wives with titles. I bet she spat feathers when Cid said “call me Lucinda” after the first utterance of “Lady Troy” – must have choked
the bitch to have to utter those two words.’

‘Is she a bitch?’

‘One of the worst. I think the marriage only holds together because he wants a crack at the leadership. Well – now’s his chance.’

Troy pulled Rod back to the point.

‘No – I can’t just walk across and ring on his bell, this is official.’

‘If it’s official, why have you come to me?’

‘You’re the Shadow Home Secretary.’

‘No – I’m your brother. In coming to me you want a favour. You’re pulling a string. So it isn’t official.’

‘Yes it is. If I go through channels, as I’ve every right to do, it’ll take days maybe even a couple of weeks to get to Travis. I need to talk to him tomorrow. The favour you
do me is that you create the access – a hotline if you like. Once we get there, it’s official.’

‘You’ll have to give me something in writing.’

Troy held up his hands again.

‘I can’t type.’

‘I can. You’re looking at the fastest two-fingered typist in Westminster.’

‘You mean you’ll do it? You’ll make the call?’

‘Yes. I’ll call him first thing in the morning. And I’ll drop off whatever we bash out tonight. But I’ll warn you now. If you’re going to bang on about the spooks
and this Curran chap, forget it. The shutters will come down like closing time at the fishmonger’s. Travis won’t even consider seeing you.’

‘Curran is my suspect. More than that, he did it. He had Clover killed. He had me sapped on the head and dumped in the Thames.’

‘Take my advice. If you mention M15 to Travis you’ll get nothing but silence.’

‘OK,’ said Troy reluctantly. ‘If that’s the way it has to be.’

They moved upstairs to a box room Rod laughingly called his study. He had a prewar manual Corona typewriter set up on a tiny writing desk, a beautiful machine, bright with chipped green paint
and gold lettering, the sort that still dealt in guineas rather than pounds. It had belonged to their father. He had personally typed up an account of Lawrence’s entry into Damascus on it
more than forty years ago. There was probably sand in the works to this day. In amongst the parliamentary bumf there was just enough room for Rod and Troy.

Troy thought, spoke, Rod typed; Troy thought, spoke, Rod argued.

‘Keep it simple, Freddie. Travis is going to give this about five minutes flat. Just stick to the facts. Stop speculating.’

Troy dictated again. Rod was right. He was the fastest two-fingered typist in the West. All the same, they had taken an age to get through three pages, and they weren’t done yet.

Rod’s wife, Cid, brought in beef sandwiches and beer. She kissed Troy on the forehead. Told him he’d used up eight of his nine lives.

Troy realised he had scarcely eaten in more than three days. He wolfed the sandwiches and left Rod the beer. When they had finished it ran to five typed pages, and struck Troy as oversimplified,
but Rod pronounced himself pleased with it.

‘It gets to the point. And above all you won’t trigger his alarm bells. When you’re writing to a politician that’s the first thing to remember. Political man is wired
like Fort Knox, designed to go off at the slightest sign of trouble. Now—’

He looked at his watch.

‘You’re staying the night.’

‘No I’m not.’

‘Yes you are. You look like shit. And as my wife so rightly says, you’ve only the one life left. Time you took better care of it. Sleep in in the morning. I’ll call home as
soon as I get any word from Travis.’

Troy stopped arguing. Clean sheets could be such a joy.

The phone went around ten fifteen the next morning. Cid woke Troy and told him Rod wanted him.

‘He’ll see us. Straight after lunch. Two thirty.’

Troy pondered the ‘us’, but accepted it. That was the price he paid for dragging Rod into this.

He rose slowly, accepting everything Cid set in front of him. Fresh, strong coffee. Porridge. He could not remember when he’d last had porridge. He never made it for himself. The washingup
afterwards always seemed like too much trouble. He walked around the kitchen. What was it L.P. Hartley had written? “Only a cad eats his porridge sitting down”? Looked at the shelves of
cookery books. Cid had the same one Clover had used; Troy had never thought of Cid as ever having lived in a bedsit. Said hello to the family tom who hissed and lashed out at him and retreated
under the stove. Then he got stuck into bacon and eggs and fried bread. All in all, it was bliss.

At ten to three, he sat in the Home Secretary’s outer office listening to two typists rattle away. Every so often the shift arms would be pushed at the same moment and the banality of
synchronicity would ring forth. Somewhere in the civil service hereafter, the great typing pool in the sky, a shorthand angel got her wings. When he got bored with this, he thought, he’d try
seeing faces in the wallpaper. But there was no wallpaper, only an off-white paint, sort of eggy-creamy. Why did these bastards always keep you waiting? Why was Rod late?

Rod bustled in. ‘Not late, am I?’

‘No,’ said Troy.

‘Good, good. Has he been out?’

‘No,’ said Troy.

‘Tell me, you have met him?’

‘Of course. One of the disadvantages of rank is having to attend meetings and sit on damn committees. I’ve known every Home Sec since Churchill’s last government.’

‘Good, good,’ said Rod, and it dawned on Troy that Rod was not much looking forward to this meeting. He’d put Rod in a bit of an awkward spot. But he didn’t care.

A Parliamentary Under Secretary of State, a species of minister so low down on the life chain that they were acronymed to PUSS and probably lived under the gas stove too, emerged from
Travis’s office.

‘The Home Secretary will see you now.’

He flung the door wide to admit them. Travis was emerging from behind his desk. He was a big man, as tall as Rod and about the same age, Troy thought, late fifties. Not as good-looking. Conk too
big, Troy had always thought. The sort of bloke who favoured a striped shirt with red braces, so that when he took off his jacket as he had done for this meeting, or the one before, he could look
like a hardworking, hard-drinking, truth-chasing national newspaper editor rather than just a clapped-out lawyer with a parliamentary sinecure. There were times when Troy was not sure whom he
loathed the more, spooks or pols.

‘Rod,’ Travis said heartily. ‘Good to see you without a dispatch box in-between.’

‘Nick,’ said Rod. ‘I believe you know my brother, Freddie.’

‘Of course, of course, Commander Troy. Scotland Yard’s finest.’

Rod smiled at this, happy to pretend to anything that took out the tension. Troy didn’t, but then Troy silently agreed with it anyway.

A quick handshake. Travis looked at Troy’s bandaged hands without comment, sat at his desk, back to the window, and picked up Troy’s letter. Rod and Troy sat and waited while he
flicked through it. Then he said exactly what Coyn had said.

‘Excellent piece of detection. First class, absolutely first class.’

‘First class’ never impressed Troy as a compliment. It was too Oxonian. It was part of the vocabulary of excuseology, whereby an upper-class fool who had pissed away three years at
university drinking yards of ale and rowing boats was saved from the justice of his innate stupidity by having ‘a first-class mind’. Half the prats on the front benches of both parties
had ‘first-class minds’. It meant nothing.

‘Without your diligence and persistence it would appear that Chief Inspector Blood would have got away with murder.’

Odd, thought Troy. Blood had got away with murder. Justice was hardly served by his suicide.

‘Assistant Commissioner Quint was clearly wrong, and thanks to you the murder of Fitzpatrick was solved. I am also inclined to agree with you that Sir Wilfrid Coyn is wrong. At least wrong
in terms of the blanket solution he seems to believe in. I’m satisfied from the report you’ve given me, and the forensic reports you enclosed, that Blood killed Fitzpatrick and
Detective Sergeant McDiarmuid, and I can see nothing that points to him having killed young Jackie Clover. But . . .’

Troy was waiting for the but. There had to be one. There always was.

‘You can’t have it both ways, Commander. If Blood did not kill Miss Clover and the evidence you offer is the difference in
modus operandi
, and that evidence in turn invokes
the apparent lack of violence in her death, then it simply begs the next question. If Blood could not force pills down a young girl’s throat without leaving marks – and you’re
insistent on the medical report’s finding that there were none – surely no one else could? I agree with you. There is no evidence to support Sir Wilfrid’s belief that Blood
committed all three murders, but there’s none to show that anyone else killed Miss Clover either. I’ve thought about this. Perhaps, for once, first impressions are the most plausible?
The most obvious cause seems to me to be the real one. She died by her own hand. Consider her circumstances: you were out; she was bored and lonely; she’d been under all the pressure of a
court case happening around her with no power to influence it; she’d experienced the wrath of her grandfather, and been entrusted to the care of a man more than twice her age with whom she
could have little in common. She stole your sleeping pills. She swallowed a handful, dashed off a couple of suicide notes and then she was . . .’

Neither Troy nor Travis cared to finish that sentence.

Rod said, ‘Dead,’ looking from one to the other, wondering at their silence in the face of the word.

‘I can endorse your view. I can write to the Commissioner and tell him I consider it unwise to attribute the death of Jackie Clover to Blood – but what would it achieve? A different
coroner’s verdict? A lightening of Blood’s load from three murders to two? But I can’t go back to him and tell him to let you carry on investigating it as murder. After all . .
.’

Travis glanced quickly at the last two pages of Troy’s letter and put the whole document down on his desk.

‘After all, you haven’t even got a suspect in the picture, have you?’

Troy felt Rod’s foot tap against his, telling him to say nothing.

‘I’m sorry, Commander, I really am.’

Troy got up. Rod seemed a little surprised to find it was all over so soon. But it suited Troy and it suited Travis.

He showed them out.

‘Forgive me, but I’m due at the conference at noon tomorrow and I’ve at least three boxes of government papers to get through before then.’

It seemed to Troy that he was rubbing it in, just a little. Reminding Rod that it had been years and years since he had last got his hands on a government red box.

Traipsing down the interminable Whitehall corridor, Troy suddenly felt weak, and stopped to rest a while on a wooden bench. Rod sat next to him.

‘Well?’ he said.

‘I was wrong,’ said Troy.

Troy wondered if Rod might be relieved to hear this. He was not.

‘Wrong? Wrong? After all you’ve said to me? You mean you’re telling me you think Travis is right?’

Troy had not and would not say that.

‘I meant . . . there was no conspiracy . . . no MI5 hit. I was wrong.’

‘No conspiracy? God, you’re amazing. You know, Freddie, you almost had me believing it that day in St James’s Park.’

Almost? No, Rod had been only too willing to believe him. Had believed him before he even spoke. But if he was now backtracking, then that was fine by Troy. The less he knew the better. If it
meant undoing what was true, retreating into what was safe, then the less he knew the better. Troy had a case to pursue. A criminal to catch, not, it would seem, the criminal he had thought, but
the hunt was far from over.

‘I’m sorry,’ he lied. ‘I was wrong.’

Rod could not stay seated. When he was angry he stamped or he paced or, as now, just moved. He stood across the corridor, his back to Troy, one hand pressed to his skull as though preventing its
imminent explosion.

‘Freddie, I cannot begin to tell you how angry this makes me. All your life, you’ve had a devious, oblique, perhaps even an interesting mind, a terrier tenacity I have grown to
admire, a relentlessness I find unforgiving and frequently pointless, and for the last twenty years you’ve seen conspiracies around every corner. Where is it all leading?’

He turned to face Troy.

‘When is it all going to end?’

Troy said nothing.

‘Are you going you go on making a fool of yourself ?’