A Little White Death (60 page)

‘Do you know how that piece of Cromwell you quoted him ends?’

‘No. I shot my bolt in quoting as much as I did.’

‘It ends, “You shall now give place to better men.” Do you really think the other lot will be better men?’

‘Family loyalties apart, probably not. But at least give them a chance to fuck up in their own way. Harold Wilson is about as dry as a cream cracker and scarcely more witty. I doubt
he’s the imagination to compete with you or Travis – I should think he has few thoughts below the collar stud let alone below the waist. George Brown is genial enough but a complete
liability with two drinks inside him. I doubt very much whether the party has ever forgiven him for telling Khrushchev where he got off. I think it’s asking too much that politicians should
not be bent, but at least let’s have some new kinks and curves.’

‘And I alas shall not be here to see them. I’m going to live in France. Turn the summer place into a permanent home. I was packing when you called. And you? Will you really
resign?’

‘Yes. I meant it. We . . . I mean our generation . . . has made a hash of it. Let’s see if the new lot can do any better.’

‘The new generation? Wilson and Brown? New Britain?’

Troy’s memory told him he had heard such incredulity recently, expressed in pretty much the same terms. Only then it had been Troy himself uttering them. Woodbridge was laughing. In the
same way, in the same words Troy had laughed at Rod months ago. This was the dawn of the ‘New Britain’, and they neither of them believed in the validity of the ‘new’ any
more than Rebecca West had done . . . New Woman, New Britain – but where were the New Men? There were only old men. At best, old men in new trousers. Now, there was a phrase. ‘New
Britain, New Trousers.’ It had all the catchiness of a good political slogan. Let Rod put that to his ‘punters’.

‘I don’t think I meant Wilson and Brown. I meant . . .’

He was not sure how this sentence ended, but since names came in handy couples . . .

‘I meant Lennon and McCartney. And for that matter Tara and Caro Ffitch.’

‘I’ll be leaving in the morning. If you fancy a week in the Cevennes next spring, give me a call.’

Woodbridge crossed the empty street, heading for the alley that cut across to Hampstead High Street. He stopped and called back to Troy. ‘And you? Where will you go?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Troy. ‘I really don’t.’

It occurred to him that he could still call Woodbridge back while he was still within earshot, and tell him the truth, that his career had been destroyed by a trap, not of the Russians’
making, but of his own side’s. A trap they had been too stupid or too cowardly to stop. But if Woodbridge felt that another scandal and his own guilt would bind him, how would he not be bound
by the force of his own anger?

Troy had that feeling. The Demon would come tonight. Squat on his bedpost. Green. Guilty.

He slept with the old Webley loaded and tucked between the sheets. Sure enough, the Demon appeared, silvered eyes flashing back his own image.

‘Well now,’ said the Demon. ‘You have been busy.’

Troy blew its green brains out and went back to sleep.

In the morning he could recall the strangest dream. More vivid than any he could remember before it. Then he saw the Webley on the bedside table. He flipped the chamber open and counted only
four bullets where he usually kept five. He saw the hole in the plaster of his bedroom wall, the size of a side-plate.

He went into the bathroom, tipped all his pills down the bog and pulled the chain.

Troy asked himself why. He wanted the neatness of an answer. The last piece banged into the puzzle. The last square peg hammered into its round hole. Why did Percy Blood kill
Paddy Fitz?

Blood was mad to begin with. Almost the only person who did not know this was Percy himself. When the chief police surgeon called him in on 19 September he had put Blood on sick leave. This was
a body blow, the second such in a matter of months. First leaving the bosom of the Branch, then ordered to rest. Perhaps Quint had promised him a transfer back to the Branch when it was all over.
Now, that was unlikely to happen soon enough. He was on sick leave. Worse he had been told to see a psychiatrist. Blood would bridle at this. The idea of psychiatry meant next to nothing to him.
All he would know was the army use of the term as ‘trick-cyclist’, and only malingerers ever saw the ‘trick-cyclist’. His life was effectively in ruins. He was either mad or
he was a malingerer and he did not care to be called either. Someone had to be to blame. It could not be Peggy Blood. Troy would bet a penny to a pound that she’d called the chief surgeon
only in confidence, in fear of another beating. Blood looked at the coincidence of dates. The last day of the Fitz trial – his biggest case and it had not gone well – was the first day
of his ‘madness’. There were too many things about this case he did not understand. Why had the Yard stopped him bringing in the girl Clover? Why had that bastard Troy suddenly turned
up at the Old Bailey? It was obvious who was to blame. If he’d never got mixed up with that disgusting ponce Patrick Fitzpatrick he wouldn’t be in this mess now. Worse, it looked to
Percy as though Fitz might get off. Justice and vengeance met in Percy’s mind. He shot Paddy Fitz for Percy Blood and blind drunk justice.

He found the newspaper headlines gave him no pleasure. ‘Scotland Yard Rocked By Resignations.’ But it worked like clockwork. After a lacklustre speech to his party
conference, Travis had not put in his bid for the leadership, and when the resignations hit – first Quint (men in jobs like his never get fired, they merely accept that they have resigned,
like it or not) – then Coyn’s request for early retirement, and finally Troy – no one could be in any way surprised that the Home Secretary thought fit to follow. He tendered his
resignation to the new Prime Minster, Sir Alec Douglas-(lately Lord)Home, and was accepted. Half the newspapers in the land implied or openly said that he must be to blame. The bolder even
suggested another scandal, to round off the year of scandals, that was being buried in this rapid tumble of the Titans.

Kolankiewicz, Quint and Troy all left the Yard on the same day. The press paid no heed to Kolankiewicz – they had never heard of him. Troy, when pressed by the
Sunday Post
, merely
pointed to the state of his health. Quint seethed in silence. The front, since it mattered, was maintained to the point of the Commissioner holding a leaving party for the three of them. Troy
thought that he had never attended a drearier, more joyless gathering of human beings. After Coyn’s brief speech he could have sworn he heard the sound of one hand clapping.

The man clearly thought he should make a toast. He looked from Quint to Troy and back to Troy again, and Troy saved him from the ‘umms’ and ‘ers’ by raising his glass and
giving the detectives of Scotland Yard an unambiguous toast.

‘Mary McDiarmuid,’ he said, and the room echoed his cry. It was, he thought, the one toast that would not have them thumping each other between the filing cabinets.

He went to the bogs and relieved himself of two glasses of lukewarm, flat beer. He did not hear a sound behind him. The first he knew was an excruciating blow to the kidneys that sucked the air
out of his lungs and left him pissing down his trouser leg. Halfway to the floor, an elbow wedged in the trough, he saw the foot aiming at his face and braced himself for the blow. Then foot and
man went flying and Jack reached out to help him to his feet. He looked down at Quint stretched full length on the lavatory floor. Jack had knocked him out cold.

‘Am I going to spend the rest of my life getting you out of scrapes, Freddie?’

It was not the rest of Jack’s life that concerned Troy, it was the rest of his own. If this was the limit of Quint’s idea of vengeance then he would not waste one second of it
worrying about him.

Out in the corridor a posse of the short and stout waited for them. Kolankiewicz in his ancient homburg, a copy of the
Daily Herald
sticking out of his macintosh pocket, and Clark,
identical in girth, stature and macintosh, but favouring
Private Eye
and a trilby. Kolankiewicz dangled what looked very much like a hatbox at the end of one arm.

‘Come,’ he said, ‘let us wash the dust of thirty years from our throats.’

He led the way, out of the south entrance and round the corner to St Stephen’s Tavern, watering hole of the odd copper and the even odder MP, being, as it was, almost directly opposite the
Houses of Parliament. They pushed in past a noisy horde of backbenchers. Troy even recognised a few of them, part of the new intake of 1959, one or two of them disciples of Rod’s. Most of
them could bore for Britain. He picked up fragments as Jack and Eddie went to the bar and bought for the four of them.

‘We’ve got the bastards on the run this time,’ a red-faced Yorkshireman was saying. ‘Travis is the straw that’ll break the camel’s back.’

And from another corner of the room, ‘Twelve years in power. Twelve miserable bloody years! Do you know there are kids out campaigning in my constituency who can’t remember any other
government?’

And Troy turned off to it. They could say nothing he wanted to hear. Nothing he had not heard before. Nothing he had not himself said to Woodbridge amonthorsoago in the wet streets of Hampstead.
Nineteen-sixty-three would end as it had begun, with futile speculation along the lines of imminent election. Rod was right: build your wall. While the glue that held us together dissolved –
if there was now a generation that could not remember life before the Tories, there was most assuredly one and a half which could not remember the war – build your wall high.

‘What will you do?’ Jack said to Kolankiewicz.

‘I have my allotment. I have raised most of my own veg since the war. The contrast between slicing into a carrot grown on your own plot and slicing into the skull of some poor bugger
you’ve never met in life cannot be overstated. I might go so far as to say that it has kept me sane these many years.’

There were, thought Troy, many who might disagree. If this was Kolankiewicz the sane version, he never wanted to see the nutter who lurked within.

‘And’, he went on, ‘my particular delight in my small front garden has been the cultivation of the flag iris, on which I now propose to write a book.’

Jack looked gobsmacked. Looked at Troy.

‘Don’t ask,’ said Troy.

‘Ask what?’

‘Don’t ask me what I’m going to do. Because I don’t know.’

A hour or more later they had toasted freedom, cursed the Yard, voiced regret, pledged eternal friendship, reminisced at random and were ready to leave. Troy asked the question that had nagged
at him most of the evening.

‘What’s in the hatbox?’

Kolankiewicz opened it up and removed what appeared to be a leather football, a casey, painted black, with a short length of fuse sticking out of the seam, and the word ‘Bomb’ neatly
stencilled on the side.

‘Is November 5th,’ he said. ‘Gunpowder, treason and to hell with those fuckers over the road.’

Jack roared with laughter. Troy knew Kolankiewicz better and while he saw the joke he was more puzzled than amused. The more so when Kolankiewicz carried the ‘bomb’ head high past a
mob of cheering, half-pissed backbenchers. Troy would not have thought they were capable of taking themselves and their dubious trade lightly enough to find this funny.

Outside the pub, they reached the parting of ways. Jack, the only one of them in any way sentimental, hugged a startled Kolankiewicz, hugged a less startled Troy and was about to hug Clark when
Clark said, ‘But I’ll be seeing you at work tomorrow, sir.’

‘So you will,’ said Jack, ‘so you will.’

Jack and Eddie went south, Troy and Kolankiewicz north.

‘Look over your shoulder,’ Kolankiewicz said. ‘Are they looking back at us?’

No,’ said Troy. ‘They’re going over Westminster Bridge. Jack’s a bit unsteady on his feet. Eddie’s holding him up.’

‘Good.’

Kolankiewicz crossed the street, just north of Big Ben. Troy followed. A beat bobby, big as a barn door, passed them on the pavement. Troy was not sure whether he recognised either of them or
not. But he looked at Kolankiewicz’s ‘bomb’, laughed out loud and walked on chuckling, hands clasped behind his back, plodding into Lambeth in best copper fashion. The great
English cliché, the laughing policeman. Troy could still hear the sound of his laughter as Kolankiewicz put a match to the fuse and lobbed the ‘bomb’ over the railings and into
New Palace Yard.

‘We got three minutes,’ he said.

‘Three minutes for what?’

Troy hurried after him. They had just rounded the corner into Horse Guards Parade when Kolankiewicz stopped, took out his pocket watch and began to count off the seconds on his fingers. On the
count of three a dull whumphff was just audible behind them.

‘Not bad,’ said Kolankiewicz. ‘Out by only three seconds.’

He walked on. Troy stood rooted to the spot, all but openmouthed. Then he tore after Kolankiewicz.

‘You don’t mean that bomb was real?’

‘Very small, but, yes, very real. Call it a parting gesture.’

They went their separate ways at the Strand Underground station, where Kolankiewicz could catch the Northern Line home to Hampstead Garden Suburb.

‘A book on flag irises?’ said Troy.

‘Why not?’ said Kolankiewicz.

Troy walked home. Across the Strand, past the Charing Cross Hospital, up Bedfordbury, retracing at a slow walk the exact route he had taken the night he had run down the street with the dying
Clover in his arms. In the back way, down the courtyard to his front door, and into the rest of his life.

The rest of his life was proving to be a bit of a bore. The first morning he had plucked the
Morning Herald
off the doormat, made coffee and toast and gone back to bed.
One item amused him – a group of confused MPs reported how they had emerged from St Stephen’s Tavern to find themselves suddenly showered with scraps of old leather and smothered in the
smell of what could only be described as the world’s biggest banger, that firework so favoured by aggressive pre-adolescent boys. The report did not mention that these guardians of liberty
were probably pissed out of their skulls at the time. If they weren’t, why hadn’t they given Kolankiewicz’s description to the Yard? The Yard. How odd it seemed to use the words
and not have them mean himself.