A Little White Death (16 page)

Tommy saw them.

‘You don’t fancy a go do you, Freddie? I’ve a spare gun. Woodbridge brought his own.’

Troy looked at Fitz.

‘Go ahead,’ Fitz said. ‘I’ll go back to the lodge and get on with lunch. Come up in about half an hour.’

He left them to it.

Anna made the introductions, adding, ‘You have something in common. You’re both patients of mine.’

Troy would not have been surprised to find that that was all they had in common. If there had been a mental list of ‘people I least expected/wanted to meet here/there/in any
circumstances’, Wood-bridge would have been high on it.

He smiled a good, white-teeth smile and shook Troy’s hand. ‘I’ve crossed swords with your brother a few times in the House,’ he said, aiming at non-partisan
affability.

Such vanity, thought Troy. Rod always wiped the floor with the arrogant bugger.

Anna had never shot clays before. She missed four in a row. Troy put down his gun and proceeded to teach her.

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘Lean into it. There’s almost no recoil, so don’t anticipate it. Put your weight on your leading foot.’

Anna shifted her balance, steadied the gun and called. A clay soared up from the left. She followed it, fired and missed.

‘What did I do wrong?’

‘Don’t follow. Pick your window, wait for the clay to enter it.’

‘What? Let it come to me?’

‘Sort of. If you pick your window, you’ll find you don’t swing the barrel wildly. In fact you’ll find you only need to put the gun to your shoulder to aim.’

The obvious example was at hand.

‘Just watch Woodbridge for a minute.’

Woodbridge never missed. Every time he yelled ‘pull’ two clays took to the air and he blew both to smithereens without even seeming to aim. He’d be chatting amiably to Tommy,
weight on his left hip, gun at waist level, and would still be talking as he casually shifted to the right foot, put the gun to his shoulder and fired both barrels seamlessly. It was like watching
Fred Astaire in one of his old films, whacking away at golf balls in the middle of a dance routine, a rhythm so perfect he never missed, an aim so true he must have been the envy of half the
golfers on earth.

Troy talked Anna through it. It struck him as pitifully simple. He had been the world’s worst shot, and had paid for it with the loss of half a kidney to an assassin’s bullet twenty
years ago. Only a lucky shot had saved his life. Recovering – long, still summer days of immobility and pain, the distant hum of traffic, the puttering sound the V1 flying bombs and deadly,
ear-splitting explosion of the V2 – he had determined that he would never again rely on luck where guns were concerned, and a few lessons had long since taught him how to hit the
bull’s-eye. As a copper he still disliked guns, and rarely felt the professional need of one, but he took a refresher course every year just the same.

Woodbridge was beginning to irritate him. After a couple of dozen more clays Anna had got the hang of it, and was hitting two in three. Woodbridge had not missed once. Woodbridge had pissed him
off no end. Somehow Anna seemed to know this.

‘He’s rather flash, isn’t he?’

‘Just a bit,’ said Troy. ‘But he’s using a far better gun than you.’

‘Why do I have the feeling you’re being kind to me? Why do I have the feeling the quality of his gun matters less than his skill or my lack of it?’

‘Well fuck ’im,’ muttered Troy, and picked up his gun.

Anna stepped back. Woodbridge was still blathering with Tommy.

‘Load three,’ said Troy.

A silence followed.

‘Eh?’ said Tommy.

‘Three,’ said Troy.

He had Woodbridge’s attention now.

‘There’s only two barrels, Troy.’ Anna whispered the obvious.

‘Just stand over there and load up. When I throw you my gun, you throw me yours.’

Tommy synchronised the two traps and nodded to Troy.

‘Pull!’

He took out the first two effortlessly, threw the gun to Anna, caught hers, shouldered it and caught the third clay far and low and heading for the treetops. He knew from the way it spun that he
had only nicked the rim with the shot, but it broke, it shattered and it counted.

‘Bugger me!’ said Tommy Athelnay.

‘Good Lord!’ said Anna.

‘Well done,’ said Woodbridge. ‘Fine shooting, but I’ll wager twenty quid you can’t do it again.’

Troy looked at him. He’d half expected him to try to top whatever he had done with a meretricious display of his own. He was smiling – smiling, but quite serious.

‘Twenty quid?’ said Troy a little peevishly.

‘If you hit all three.’

‘No,’ said Troy.

‘No?’ said Woodbridge.

‘A hundred,’ said Troy.

‘Bugger me,’ said Tommy Athelnay again.

Woodbridge looked to Tommy, who shrugged a ‘don’t ask me’, then he looked at Troy, grinned broadly and said, ‘You’re on.’

Troy and Anna swapped guns like jugglers trading Indian clubs in mid-air, but the third clay had flown wild and low. By the time Troy had it in his sights it was below the treetops and the
barrel of his shotgun was nearing the horizontal. He took his finger from the trigger and lowered the gun, heard the distant crack as the clay hit the trees.

Woodbridge was behind him, standing where he could follow the clay from Troy’s point of view.

‘You know,’ he said, and Troy turned to him, ‘you could’ve hit that.’

‘It was too low,’ said Troy.

‘No, honestly you could have hit it. You’re really very good.’

‘Too low,’ said Troy. ‘Well into the woods. Could be people there for all we know. Aim too low and you never know who you might hit.’

He put a hand to his eyes, stared off into the woods for a moment. Nothing moved.

‘I owe you a hundred.’

‘Cheque’ll do,’ Woodbridge said in a ‘don’t mention it old chap’ tone of voice and before Troy could say anything Tommy Athelnay chipped in with, ‘I
don’t know about you lot, but I’m starving. Why don’t we all toddle off and see what Fitz has rustled up?’

Woodbridge broke his Purdey, stuck it in the crook of one arm and held out the other to Anna.

‘Mrs Pakenham?’ he said, investing two words with several buckets of practised charm, and she took his arm and they strolled off towards the south lodge. After a dozen paces she
turned to stick her tongue out at Troy.

‘You know,’ Tommy said, as he and Troy pulled the covers across the traps, ‘he’s not at all bad when you get to know him.’

‘
When
,’ said Troy emphasising his disbelief with an inflection lost on Tommy.

‘Terribly sad man. Terribly sad. Never got over his wife’s death.’

This was common knowledge. Sarah Woodbridge had died in a car crash along with their six-year-old daughter four years before. Woodbridge had been driving – the family’s annual
holiday in Italy. A twisting road south of Naples, a reckless lorry driver and the car had plunged off the road and down the hillside. Somehow Woodbridge had walked away from it. Much of the time
it seemed as though he wished he hadn’t. His grief had been public. The heart of the nation – an organ in which Troy found it hard to believe – had gone out to him. He had been
the rising star of the Conservative Party, a man with, as the curriculum vitae demanded, a ‘good war’ behind him – he had roared across Europe to Lüneberg Heath in command of
a tank battalion and picked up more medals, even, than Rod Troy – a safe Commons seat since the election of 1950; a wife heralded as an asset, the brightest, prettiest young wife of the
man-in-the-making. Woodbridge was a future prime minister many said, certainly a future foreign secretary. He had been number two at the Foreign Office. But he had resigned at once. And no
blandishments of Macmillan would make him reconsider. Last summer Macmillan had sacked half his cabinet in an effort to revive the standing of a flagging government and, if rumour were to be
believed, had offered Woodbridge the post of Foreign Secretary. Woodbridge had declined, and at this juncture it might have seemed that it was all over for him – one can be a rising star for
only so long before there comes a point at which one has either risen or one has not. And the role of bright young thing is best played by the young and, if at all possible in politics, the bright.
It was all but impossible nearing fifty – and Woodbridge, Troy knew, was much the same age he was himself.

Then at Christmas he had suddenly relented. He had taken his old job back, Minister of State at the Foreign Office, number two to Lord Home – a man Troy thought not long for this politic
world once Mac had sharpened his next case of knives – and since Alec Home sat in the Lords, Woodbridge was to all intents and purposes the Foreign Secretary for the Commons. It was a shrewd
move. It gained him all the press attention, all the House attention he needed to renew his chances, but kept him out of the firing line. Anyone calling for heads to roll was unlikely to name him
as the man who must go. The safe job was ‘Number Two’ – and it was in this capacity that he had turned up on Charlie in Beirut. Troy wondered in what capacity had he turned up on
Tommy Athelnay and Paddy Fitz?

Right now this ‘terribly sad man’ was reducing Anna to hysterics. Troy and Tommy Athelnay walked to the lodge some thirty yards behind Woodbrige and Anna. Troy could not hear a word
of what he was saying to her, all he could hear were her giggles. And then the gesture. The affectionate arm slipped from his to wrap itself around his waist, as his came around her shoulder. Last
night Troy had humped her sore and not seen such affection from her. Only the rawness of her own need.

He could not deny that Woodbridge was a charmer. He and Charlie were two of a kind – were it not for Charlie’s decline into booze they’d even look alike
– but by the end of the evening Troy had concluded that Woodbridge and Charlie deserved each other. Even a good-natured rogue could be a little wearing. He was glad when Woodbridge slipped an
arm around the helplessly squiffy Tommy and ushered him home in an ostentatious chorus of ‘goodnight ladies’. Glad to be able to call an end to the round of bonhomie and fall into bed.
Preferably alone. There had been tense moments, moments when he could have sworn Woodbridge bit his tongue and did not say what he had it in mind to say – perhaps even moments when he might
have unsaid what he had said. No matter, not a single one of the man’s asinine sentences had stuck in Troy’s memory. All in all, he concluded, it must have put a bit of a damper on the
evening to find himself at Fitz’s table with someone quite so closely associated with the Opposition as Troy. He watched the waving torch as the two of them picked their way across Uphill
Park at midnight, and said goodnight to whoever remained. There was no sign of the women – Anna had gone up an hour before and he’d no idea what had become of the others. There was only
Fitz, still at the dining table, a little the worse for drink, humming softly to himself. Troy left him to it.

He had drunk too much. A scraping dryness at the back of his throat kept him awake an hour or more. He slipped on his shirt and trousers – to bump into Anna in his dressing-gown seemed too
much the invitation – and set off for the kitchen. Again he passed the Ffitch girls’ bedroom door in the west wing. It was closed. But the same sighs and whispers of sexual intercourse
crept through every crack in the panelling. It froze him mid-stride, foot hardly daring to press down upon a potentially groaning floorboard. He hesitated too long. The door opened, he had the
merest glimpse of a man’s plunging buttocks and the uplifted legs of a woman, her ankles crossed behind his back, and Caro Ffitch emerged, bare-arsed, a sheet clutched to her front, and
dashed across the landing to the bathroom. She put a finger to her lips – a silent hush – but Troy wasn’t saying anything. Was she hushing his thoughts?

Then she whispered, ‘Can’t watch tonight. Tim thinks that’s a bit too kinky,’ pecked him on the cheek and vanished into the loo.

It embarrassed him to think that she thought he was queuing at her bedroom door. Embarrassed him to think that she’d noticed him the night before. He’d rather hoped she hadn’t.
He should never have stood so much as a split second with Paddy Fitz watching their antics. It was too kinky for him too.

He found Fitz where he had left him, in the dining room, centre-table amid the debris, the thin man’s Henry VIII , finishing the last of the wine – two and seven-eighths sheets to
the wind.

‘Going to get pissed. Care to join me?’

Wrong tense, Fitz.

He wandered the length of the table and gathered the bottles in a half-moon around him, sampling and mixing almost regardless of grape or vintage. It seemed to Troy that it was a sorry
drunkenness he was aiming at – a sorry-for-himself piss-up.

‘Woodbridge isn’t playing the game,’ he said miserably, seemingly à propos of nothing, as though he and Troy were picking up the threads of a ragged conversation.

‘What’, said Troy seizing the moment, ‘is the game?’

‘Peekaboo.’

‘Peekaboo?’

‘I peek and nobody says boo. Tell me, Freddie, are you familiar with the work of the Victorian pornographer known to posterity as “Walter”?’

Troy doubted he was familiar with the work of any pornographer. Was D. H. Lawrence a pornographer? Was Henry Miller?

‘No.’

‘Among other things – well to be honest among many things, the man wrote at inordinate length – he once asked of his readers, “Who among you, offered the chance to watch
two people fuck, would not look?” The answer, as I’m sure you grasped, was implicit in the question. Who indeed would not look at a fucking couple given half a chance?’

Troy said nothing.

‘It is . . . my pleasure, my pleasure above all others to watch people fuck. Twos or threes. I have no puritan principle about the sanctity of the couple. I have other pleasures, of
course. Booze, my garden, music, booze and more booze. On occasion I too will fuck . . . but to watch . . . to watch is my particular delight.’

Fitz lingered over the ‘ck’ of fuck, the ‘ic’ of particular and slurred down to silence at the end of his sentence. Troy thought he might have ground to a drunken halt.
Wistfully lost in contemplation of his perversion.