A Little White Death (27 page)

He was about to tell the cabbie they should go, when the door opened again. He assumed it was Alex, thinking better of his haste. But it was an old, familiar face. That of Percy Blood, Chief
Inspector at Scotland Yard. An ugly, old-school copper. The old school that favoured black boots and grubby brown mackintoshes. They went nicely with the greasy strands of hide-the-bald-spot hair
combed in furrows left to right across his dome, and nicely too with the bitten, nicotined fingernails. He was fifty-five or thereabouts. Long since passed over, he would see out his days as a
chief inspector, and this had lent to his naturally unpleasant disposition an edge of bitter resentment. He was a plodder. If he were in Troy’s section Troy would have put him out to an early
pension.

‘Mr Blood. Can I offer you a lift to the Yard?’

‘No thank you, sir. I’ve a squad car waiting.’

‘Then how can I helpyou?’

‘I saw you. In the court.’

‘Yes?’

‘I was wondering. If your interest in the case was professional like. The Yard said nowt to me.’

‘I’m on sick leave, Mr Blood. As I’m sure you know. I’m simply passing the time. Call it academic interest.’

He looked blankly back at Troy as though the phrase meant nothing to him.

‘So – you’re not . . . you’re not . . . like . . .’

‘No. I’m not. But since you’re here I do have a question.’

Again the blank look as though they spun words from a different yarn in Manchester and twenty years in London had not taught him the lingo.

‘When did you transfer from Special Branch to the Vice Squad?’

Blood pretended to think about this, pretended to come up with nothing.

‘A while back,’ he said, and closed the door.

Stupid, thought Troy, it was a simple question, and the answer simply found if he just called Records. He’d been brushed off again, but it didn’t much matter.

The following day, Troy sat waiting to see who would be called next. Tara? Caro? But it was a name he’d never heard. The cry went down the court for one ‘Moira
Twelvetrees.’

It was a face he’d never seen – but a face he’d seen a thousand times. The pathetic ‘want-a-good-time-dearie?’ face of a London streetwalker.

He remembered vividly the burning embarrassment the first time a Soho whore had put the question to him. Want a good time, dearie? He had had two reactions: firstly that she probably
wouldn’t know a good time if it fell on her, and secondly that it marked him. He was only twenty-seven, but one of the
rites de passages
of middle age had to be the moment when a Soho
whore first takes you for a fare.

The whore was young, pretty but utterly lacking style. She had no idea how to dress or to apply make-up or, more likely, had an idea which was wholly parodic and therefore wholly wrong. Would
Fitz, Troy thought to himself, have left anyone so untutored? The Ffitches were sophisticates; Clover, her way with eye make-up notwithstanding, even Clover had style. This woman had none.

He listened as Furbelow drew from her the story of Fitz accosting her near Paddington station and taking her back to Dreyfus Mews for, as Furbelow so emphatically intoned, ‘sexual
intercourse’, a phrase with which the woman had some little difficulty, calling it as she did ‘sectional intercourse’. Troy yearned for the legitimacies of plain English, the
unambiguity of fuck and swive. At the end of their sectional intercourse Fitz, the court was asked to believe, had offered to find her more clients and let her use his bedroom, in return for half
the take. She had agreed and fucked a dozen or more of Fitz’s contacts over a period of weeks earlier in the year. Prostitution, pimping, cut and dried.

Cocket rose for the cross. He ignored the singular coitus between Fitz and Moira Twelvetrees and chose instead to ask her for detail upon detail. A wealth of small questions.

Troy could see her lips move silently as Cocket put his questions. It seemed to him that she had been tutored after all – but not by Fitz – and before Cocket could even finish the
question she was mutely rehearsing her answer, drawing not upon memory but on the rote-learning someone had dunned into her. The front door was yellow, there was a big Chinese vase on the left as
you went in. On the right or on the left? Oh, the left, definitely the left. Fitz’s bedroom was on the first floor at the back, the lavatory was – shock upon shock – black, to
match the washbasin. From this the jury was left in no doubt that she knew Fitz’s house very well; the details were, for want of a less loaded word, intimate.

And then Cocket jumped in at the deep end.

‘You are saying, are you not, Miss Twelvetrees, that you had sex with a variety of men over a period of twelve weeks from December last year until March of this year in the Dreyfus Mews
house of the defendant?’

‘Er . . . yeah.’

‘And you know these men only as Bill or Nicky or David?’

‘They didn’t tell me surnames. None of ’em.’

‘And you didn’t recognize any of them?’

‘Recognise?’

‘We heard in the prosecution’s opening address that the defendant was acquainted with the rich and famous. I was merely wondering if any of his rich and famous friends might have
been among those clients you claim to have serviced.’

‘My Lord . . .’ Furbelow rose, did not finish his sentence.

‘Mr Cocket,’ said Mirkeyn, and Cocket in the face of two halfsentences graciously withdrew the question. Had Troy believed for a moment that the lovely Moira had serviced the toffs
of London town he might well have listened out for the velvet swish as the establishment ranks closed over her.

‘Did you ever practise the sexual act in the missionary position?’

‘The what?’

‘On your back. Did you lie on your back with a man on top of you?’ ‘Well . . . o’ course . . .’ ‘How often?’ ‘You what?’ ‘Did you
assume this position for every client?’

‘No.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘Well some of ’em . . .’ and her voice dropped to a crimson whisper, ‘some of ’em wanted to play doggies.’

From the colour of her face Troy felt that the woman knew no other phrase for the act and wished she did.

‘So,’ said Cocket, ‘some of your clients played doggy?’

Go on, thought Troy, be the perfect English judge and ask her what she means. But Mirkeyn did not.

‘Did most of them play doggy?’

‘No.’

‘So . . . I can safely say most of them had you on your back?’

‘S’pose so.’

‘Tell me, Miss Twelvetrees, have you ever feigned an orgasm?’

‘Come again?’

Furbelow rose.

‘My Lord, is this relevant?’

Mirkeyn passed the question.

‘Well, Mr Cocket, is it?’

‘Yes, my Lord, I believe it is.’

‘Continue, Mr Cocket. Continue with care.’

‘Miss Twelvetrees?’

She muttered, redder than ever.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t quite catch that?’

‘Do you mean, like, come? Like faking coming?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then . . . yes.’

‘Yes, some of the time? Or yes, all of the time?’

‘Yes all of the time.’

So much for British manhood, and with Mirkeyn glaring at the gallery, none dared gaspand none dared giggle.

‘And while you were ah . . .’ (hammy pause from barrister) ‘. . . faking it . . . what did you do?’

‘I make like . . . noises.’

‘You make noises? What sort of noises?’

‘Sort of . . . ooh ooh ooh.’

‘Ooh ooh ooh?’

‘Yeah. And after a while I just sort of stare at the ceiling.’

The shift in tone and gear was startling to hear in Cocket.

‘Miss Twelvetrees, what colour is the ceiling in Dr Fitzpatrick’s bedroom?’

It was, Troy realised, very far from being the titillating waste of time he had taken it for – it was a superb stringing out of a witness to an unwitting conclusion.

‘I . . . I . . . dunno.’

‘Come, come, Miss Twelvetrees. You went to Dreyfus Mews countless times – and you have told us many details of the interior. You had a dozen regular clients, most of them on your
back, with whom you faked orgasm and stared at the ceiling. What colour was the ceiling?’

‘White,’ she blurted out.

Cocket reached for an envelope and removed a 10 × 8 colour photograph, which the usher passed to Moira.

‘I took this myself, on the day the defendant was charged. It is the ceiling of the defendant’s bedroom. What colour would you say it was?’

‘It’s blue,’ she said.

‘Blue,’ said Cocket. ‘Blue and what?’

‘Blue with little silver stars. An’ little silver moons.’

It put Troy in mind of Yeats’s Wandering Aengus – ‘little silver apples of the moon’. Chief Inspector Blood had been betrayed by his copper’s nose – too close
to the ground. He had been looking in the gutter when he should have been staring at the stars.

‘My Lord, I submit this photograph as defence exhibit A. It is witnessed on the back by my clerk of chambers. I ask that it be so marked. Now, Miss Twelvetrees, have you ever been inside
the defendant’s house?’

‘Yes.’

‘But that was only on the one occasion, when you had sex with the defendant, was it not?’

She was looking about her, her eyes seeking help.

‘That’s not true. It was lotsa times. Lotsa times!’

And try as he might Cocket could not get her to admit that she had made up every other aspect of her story. But it would be an odd jury indeed who could not see the truth in her for all that she
kept on lying. It would be an odd juror who thought a blue and star-spangled ceiling less memorable than a Chinese vase. Moira looked cornered, she looked like a liar and the fact that she went on
lying only served to convince Troy that someone had put the fear of God in her.

Cocket sat down. Troy wondered how much the lost admission mattered. If she had told the truth . . . it would amount to a Prosecution cock-up, and the defence could ask for a dismissal. He might
not get it, but he could ask.

Mirkeyn looked at his watch, slipped it back into his waistcoat pocket, and adjourned.

An old woman was waiting for Troy as he slipped from the row. She was staring intently at him – huge, heavy-lidded, dark eyes, almost as dark as his own.

‘You don’t remember me, do you?’

He did not, but he had noticed her. She sat each day in the press box, scribbling furiously, deftly shuffling two pairs of spectacles as she looked from her notebook to the witness box and back
again. She must be about seventy, he thought, and she spoke the received pronunciation of a lost Edwardian age – almost, not quite, a female Mr Macmillan in her tones – a squeaky voice,
wet on the ‘s’s. If she had known him, it might well have been in his childhood. He found too often these days that he had a poor memory for all those grown-up faces that had graced his
father’s dining table. It was hard to think that the old man’s heyday had been more than thirty years ago, but it had. How much could she have changed in thirty years?

‘You’re Frederick, the youngest, aren’t you?’ she said. ‘I used to write for your father.’

So many had.

‘I’m Rebecca West.’

Troy stuck out his hand. Dame Rebecca held it lightly and performed the almost touchless old lady’s handshake. The coldness of her fingertips upon his palm.

‘I’m so sorry. Of course. I’m afraid I didn’t recognise you at first.’

‘Nor do you now. Have I changed so much?’

Indeed she had. She had been one of ‘the beauties’, one of those ageless, beautiful women that had seemed so abundant, so unattainable in the days of his long adolescence. Ageless
– she had probably been in her mid-thirties then, younger by far than his parents, older by far than him. He had the embarrassing memory of a schoolboy crush, that overly polite term for
unuttered, unutterable lust.

‘Do you have time for a drink and a chat?’ she asked, and a schoolboy dream came true, thirty-five years too late, but impossible to refuse nonetheless. ‘We’ll find a
caff somewhere shall we?’

‘Caff ’ was not a word he would expect to hear on the lips of a woman of her generation, but she was smiling as she said it and he recalled that she could be one of the most
unpredictable – hence, one of the prickliest – of people when she wanted. She was relishing the word.

He found just such an establishment in Carter Lane. No other word would do. Soho it was not. No Gaggia machine, no ‘froffee coffee’, just tea, dark brown, pungent, milky, scummy tea
served in half-pint cups at refectory tables of scrubbed, cracked and fag-end-burnt Formica. Nor were there the denizens of Soho – no would-be Bohemians in sloppy-joe sweaters, clutching
copies of the
New Statesman
and boring on the subject of Dave Brubeck or John Coltrane – no flash bastards in tight trousers, winkle-picker shoes and greasy quiffs. It was a working
man’s caff – pie an’ mash at lunchtime, packed in twelve to a table – or it would be if any of them had looked as though they had jobs. Most of them didn’t; most of
them looked down and out, eking out three penn’orth of tea and a Woodbine as long as they could.

‘There’s so much I would want to ask you,’ she had said as they crossed Ludgate Hill. The tense had baffled him – she had made it conditionally and temporally impossible.
And to prove it she said nothing more until he set her cup of tea in front of her, and one ringed finger had picked up a teaspoon to stir.

‘But I won’t,’ she said as though there had been no interval between one sentence and the next.

He filled in the blank, half a dozen connections forming themselves simultaneously in his mind. She had been very attached to his father – possibly too attached; Troy had seen a few
blazing rows between them – but she had vanished from his, Troy’s, life when he had joined the police and spent less and less time at Mimram. And after his father’s death she had
not, he was certain, been asked back to Mimram. But who had? His mother’s regime had been so different from that of his father. ‘Les Anglais’ bored her, as she symbolically made
clear in most conversations. She spoke Russian or French to her children. Their father, almost invariably English. Rebecca had written lengthy pieces in the press at the time of the first rumours
about Charlie, six or seven years ago – her endless, seemingly endless, speculations upon the meaning of treason, as though it needed meaning. She had busied herself in the lives of Burgess
and Maclean, and before that such as William Joyce. If, now Charlie’s cover was blown, she was expecting a few snippets from Troy, she could whistle for them. She was the most vociferous of
anti-Communists, as was Troy’s Uncle Nikolai. She was also rumoured to be writing a novel about the Russian revolutions, one of which his father had participated in, the other two –
there were another two, weren’t there? – had never ceased to be the subject of his commentary. And . . . and there was the hidden link of Diana Brack, H. G. Wells’s mistress in
the thirties – as Rebecca had been in the teens and twenties of the century – and Troy’s in the forties. ‘How much did the old woman know?’ he wondered – and
wondered without wanting resolution. Whatever she said next, let it not be a question about Diana Brack.