A Little White Death (34 page)

‘Jokingly?’ Cocket queried.

‘Just a tone of voice. A way of getting his point across. He said it often enough to make me think it rankled with him from time to time.’

‘To your knowledge, did Dr Fitzpatrick ever ask either of the sisters for a share of any money you gave them?’

Furbelow rose. ‘This is calling for hearsay, m’lud.’

‘Sustained.’

‘I have only one more question,’ Cocket continued. ‘Did either of the sisters ever ask you for money in exchange for sex?’

‘No,’ said Pritch-Kemp.

Cocket sat down.

It had been neatly contained, a thorough refutation of the basis of the prosecution case. Pritch-Kemp was a loose cannon who had not sent grapeshot flying off in every direction. At least not
yet. As Furbelow rose again Troy was sure he saw in Pritch-Kemp’s eye the glint of combat.

‘Professor Pritch-Kemp,’ Furbelow began with relish – if the man was to be named, then he would at least have the pleasure of rolling the name around on his lips. ‘Are
you in the habit of giving money to women you sleep with?’

‘Habit? I’ll do it if the mood takes me. Don’t you ever give your women a little something?’

This brought the public gallery to hysterics. Furbelow blushed, Troy could have sworn he blushed. The judge blew out his cheeks and gave Pritch-Kempwhat for.

‘Mr Pritch-Kemp. May I remind you that there is such a thing as contempt of court.’

‘Indeed you may, m’lud. For I have no contempt of this court. I am merely amazed at the ignorance of m’learned counsel. One would think he had never been with a whore, for he
certainly seems not to know the protocol.’

There was an audible communal gasp. Pritch-Kemp had just given a hostage to fortune. In spite of all he’d said for the defence, caught on the cross he’d as good as called the
Ffitches whores. Freud moved in mysterious ways.

‘I warn you, Mr Pritch-Kemp, choose your next remark carefully. Mr Furbelow, I take it you wish to continue?’

Furbelow would have to be a complete idiot not to want to press on now.

‘Thank you, m’lud. Am I to understand, Professor Pritch-Kemp, that you regularly go with prostitutes?’

‘Not regularly, no, but enough to know the ropes.’

‘Oh?’ Furbelow played to the gallery and Troy thought him a fool. ‘And what are “the ropes”?’ he sneered.

‘It’s perfectly simple,’ said Pritch-Kemp. ‘And half the men in London will tell you so. With a whore one agrees terms upfront and nine times out of ten one pays up
front. One agrees conditions up front—’

‘M’lud,’ Furbelow chirped, ‘the witness is giving me a lecture!’

Laughter from the gallery. More laughter as Cocket intervened.

‘M’lud, am I to take it my learned friend is objecting to his own question? The witness was merely answering the question as put to him.’

It pained Sir Ranulph Mirkeyn deeply but he said, almost
sotto voce
, ‘Continue, Mr Pritch-Kemp.’

‘Thank you, m’lud. One agrees the price with a tart, and one agrees the conditions.’

‘Conditions?’ said Mirkeyn almost involuntarily.

‘You know,’ said Pritch-Kemp. ‘All her clothes off or just the necessary. Whether it’s half an hour or all night; whether it’s the full works or a hand
shandy.’

‘A hand shandy!?’ Mirkeyn exclaimed with more vowels than Edith Evans could have inserted into three words. And then he had to hammer with his gavel for nearly two minutes to achieve
enough quiet for the trial to continue.

‘And’, Pritch-Kemp went on to the dismay of the prosecution, ‘there’s a world of difference between agreeing a few quid upfront, and I do mean a few quid, and deciding
that your lover would look nice in a new hat or a new frock the next time you see her and leaving her fifty quid to treat herself. I defy the married men of England to say they do not treat their
wives. I defy the unmarried men of England to say they do not so treat their lovers.’

Furbelow looked pole-axed. He had foreseen an easy victory over the defence’s star witness, and even after a colossally dropped brick, the man had just wiped the floor with him. He ducked
out with a wimpish ‘no further questions’, only to find Cocket asking to return to his witness. Clearly, it was crossing the old sod’s mind to refuse but, Troy knew, that would be
merely another hostage to fortune, an unexploded shell for the appeal. ‘After all,’ Mirkeyn was probably thinking, ‘the harm’s done.’

‘Very well, Mr Cocket.’ And then the irresistible dig. ‘If you cannot prepare your case well enough to ask your questions at the right time and in the right order.’

Cocket did not mind the sarcasm. He knew there was yet more damage he could do.

‘Professor Pritch-Kemp, could you define prostitution for the court?’

Furbelow rose. Before he could speak, Cocket headed him off at the pass.

‘M’lud, Professor Pritch-Kempholds the Garrat Chair in English at King’s College. Might the court accept that the meaning of words is his profession and hence his testimony be
accepted as that of an expert witness?’

If I could read minds, Troy thought, then the words ‘Jesus wept’ just passed through Mirkeyn’s. The judge put one hand over his eyes, quickly withdrew it and uttered a
‘yes’, scarcely concealing his rage.

‘Professor, when is sexual intercourse prostitution?’

‘When there is no element in the relationship between the man and the woman except a desire on the part of the woman to make money – when it is separated from any attachment and is
indeed just the sale of her body – and no other desire on the man’s part but self-gratification.’

‘No further questions,’ said Cocket.

Troy wondered what this precision had achieved. He had seen the jury’s faces. This had not been well received. They were not the kind of people to flirt with the new morality or to find
the moral and intellectual flirtatiousness of a man like Pritch-Kemp amusing. It had given the gallery a good laugh; it had made a fool of Furbelow, but it had angered the judge, and this final
definition had left him wondering what it said about Fitz. It said plenty about Pritch-Kemp, but if this was the defence’s last word in the way of evidence, then it left an emphatic feeling
of heartlessness – and he was not at all sure that it had not misfired. In trumpeting that Pritch-Kemp bought flesh, that he knew when he was with a whore and when he wasn’t,
hadn’t the defence put too subtle an argument to the jury? Pritch-Kempwent with whores,
ergo
all women he went with were whores, regardless of his ability to define the terms? It may
have worked wonders when the defendant was three hundred pages of paper and the whores fictional. Troy doubted whether it had helped a living, breathing man. They had been, he thought, too clever
by half. If he’d been defending, he would have put one last question – ‘Do you consider your relationship with the Misses Ffitch to have been prostitution?’ – and
he’d have told Kemp to keep his answer down to a simple ‘no’. He knew what the jury were asking themselves: ‘Was she or wasn’t she?’, when the defence’s
job was to leave them with no subtlety and in no doubt.

Cocket called no other witnesses. All that remained were the final addresses to the jury and the judge’s summing up. Mirkeyn adjourned for an early lunch and told them all to reconvene at
one. It seemed to Troy that this might be it. The court could get through what it had to in what remained of the day. Then, he thought, the jury would probably be banged up in a hotel for the
night.

He had no appetite for lunch. He had a cup of tea in a caff in Blackfriars Lane and phoned home. The line was engaged.

As he walked back to the Old Bailey he caught sight of a large red-headed man ahead of him. A man walking with the laboured geometrical swing of a tin leg, kicking out into open space with all
the weight of a vast body resting on the other hip. Up, swing, clank, bonk. He’d know that walk anywhere. Angus Pakenham, Anna’s wandering Aengus-husband. The red giant rounded the
corner. Troy, as much as breath allowed, ran to catch up, but when he turned into Pilgrim Street there was no sign of the pilgrim. Perhaps it hadn’t been Angus? Perhaps he had better not
report it as a sighting?

Judges, in Troy’s experience of them, and it was no doubt a peculiarity of the English system, could raise hell if counsel attempted to mislead the jury, but were not
above doing it themselves. Mirkeyn was a master of the art.

He had the problem of contradictory evidence to convey to the jury – so contradictory in Troy’s opinion that Cocket would have been justified in moving for a dismissal. Pointless:
Mirkeyn would not have granted it, but it might just have lodged the possibility in the jury’s mind.

‘I come now to the evidence of Miss Moira Twelvetrees. She was precise in her evidence as to the facts of her prostitution and the money given by her to the defendant. The counsel for the
defence rests his challenge to her sworn testimony on one thing and one thing only – that the witness could not remember the colour of a ceiling. I ask you to consider whether it is
reasonable to expect the witness, so clear upon the salient facts, to remember quite so much of the lesser detail as counsel would wish her . . .

Now, I shall consider the evidence of Miss Caroline Ffitch – a self-confessed hysteric – and I would emphasise that the statement she made to the police, in which she stated quite
clearly that she had accepted money for sex and had passed on that money to the defendant, was made entirely without coercion. I would ask you to consider which is the more likely, that her
behaviour to this court was hysteria, or her statement freely given at Scotland Yard . . .

And the evidence of Professor Pritch-Kemp. I would remind you that it was the word of a man who admits to regular carnal relationships with prostitutes . . .’

Troy watched the jury as Mirkeyn droned on. They’d never struck him as social radicals disguised by cheap hairdos and hideous suits. They were what they appeared to be. Middle England. The
drearies. Twelve narrow minds and true. And their expressions told him they did not incline towards notions of Fitz’s innocence even after all they had heard in support of the notion. What
mattered was what they were hearing now – highly coloured, decidedly prejudicial, and highly selective in its emphases . . . Moira’s evidence was ‘her sworn testimony’,
Caro’s only her ‘behaviour’. If Pritch-Kemp was not to be believed because he
went
with whores, they were, in the turn of a phrase, being asked to believe Moira, who
was
a whore.

He wondered what chance Fitz stood.

Again, Troy sat out the rush to leave. By the time he decided it was time to move, he had the benches to himself. A constable approached.

‘Mr Troy, sir. I’ve a letter for you.’

‘A letter? From whom?’

‘From the prisoner, sir.’

Troy took the folded piece of paper from him. Less a letter than a note. A note in best Fitz doctor scrawl. ‘I’m downstairs. If you can spare a minute I’d like a word before
you leave. Fitz.’

The constable was still waiting.

‘He wants to see me,’ said Troy.

‘Follow me, sir.’

He led Troy downstairs, away from the world of panelled walls and into the world of painted bricks and iron bars. He stopped by an open cell door.

‘In here, sir.’

Fitz was sitting on a bentwood chair, legs crossed, smoking calmly, but then he’d looked calm from start to finish.

‘What are you doing here?’ said Troy. ‘I thought you were on bail?’

‘Don’t blow your stack, Troy. It’s not what you think. I gather there’s an unusually strong gathering of the gentlemen of Fleet Street and the morally outraged waiting
outside. The police were kind enough to offer me a cell until the mob disperses. The Old Bailey would not appear to run to a green room. You never know, with any luck they might even make us a pot
of tea.’

The constable returned with a chair for Troy.

‘Just tell me when you’re ready to leave, sir.’

Troy sat down, still wondering what was going on.

‘I hope I’m not causing you any problems, being seen with a perv, I mean,’ Fitz said.

‘Not at all,’ said Troy. ‘He probably thinks it’s police business. I’ve come to take down your confession.’

Fitz almost choked laughing with a cigarette between his lips.

‘Not quite, Troy, not quite. I was wondering. Would you be free for dinner tonight? Marty’s been round almost every night during the trial – I can’t stand the nights
– but he has to go down to Kent tonight. His father’s none too well. I thought we might go to Leoni’s. You never know, if I do decide to confess, you can take down my statement on
the back of the menu.’

‘Of course,’ said Troy. ‘About what time?’

‘Early. Shall we say seven thirty?’

Troy walked home. Clover was upside down on the floor, her legs on the chaise longue, her feet in the air, as though she had dropped clumsily from heaven and was waiting for
mortal man to right her again. She was reading a magazine, held over her head and lit by the reflected glow of the gas fire.

‘How can you see to read in this light?’

‘That’s wot Grandad would say.’

Which ended that conversation. It was marginally less insulting than ‘That’s what my Mum would say.’

She had not one magazine but half a dozen, ranging from the solidity of
Woman’s Realm
to the teen zeens of
Marilyn
and
Romeo
. He wondered how careful she was when she
went out. He wondered who she had phoned. He did not ask. He went up to his bedroom and lay down for an hour with the Home Service news on low, listened to the chimes of Big Ben, and mustered
enough energy to cope with a Fitz evening.

Even as a copper on the beat, Troy had been in the habit of reading the blue LCC ‘lived here’ plaques on the buildings of London, as a way into other, imagined
lives. He’d often gazed a moment or two at the one on the outside of Leoni’s restaurant – it read ‘Karl Marx lived here’ – not considering the doctrine that had
overturned the old regime, the old country, simply trying to imagine the life of an academic in late-Victorian London, grinding away at words, living with his wife and daughters in chilly, foggy
London, in a flat above this restaurant, unheated save for miserably smoking coal fires. In this flat
A Doll’s House
had been given its first English ‘performance’ for
friends and family . . . One of Marx’s daughters had played Nora . . . Bernard Shaw had directed. He stopped daydreaming, looked at his watch. Time to go in.