A Little White Death (39 page)

When Kolankiewicz had gone, the question rankled. How many had he killed? More than any other copper in the land, that much he knew, and that statistic did not include Inspector Cobb. It was an
unenviable reputation. Diana Brack in 1944, who had tried to kill him with a .45, whom he had shot with a .22; Chief Petty Officer May in 1952, who had tried to strangle him, whose neck Troy had
broken in the ensuing struggle; and the Ryan brothers, Patrick and Lorcan, in 1959. If he was not infamous before that case, he had been ever since.

The East End gang leaders, always too clever to leave a witness, or too clever to kill in person, had finally gone mad and shot one of their own men in a packed pub in the Mile End Road. The
Yard had responded with a full-blown, old-fashioned manhunt. Doors were barred the length and breadth of East London; men who would have suffered torture before they peached had shopped them from
every corner of the underworld. And the Ryans had been cornered, cornered in a warehouse on the Isle of Dogs.

Troy had led four armed officers to arrest them. A sergeant and two constables took the back entrance, Troy and one constable the front. The Ryans had come out guns blazing like the heroes of a
bad Western. Troy’s constable went down in the first volley of shots. But Troy had shot Patrick Ryan dead, and as the man fell his twin had dropped his revolver, cradled Patrick’s head
and wailed like Hecuba. Troy looked at his constable. The wound was to his leg. The fall had knocked him out. He reached down to drag the man clear. Then Lorcan Ryan spoke.

‘You can’t leave us like this,’ he said.

He was not screaming. He sounded calm. Almost rational.

‘You can’t leave us like this. Not like this.’

Troy glanced once more at his constable. The man was still out. He let him fall, the gun level with his left thigh, pointing at the ground, finger in the trigger guard, thumb on the hammer.

‘Pick it up.’

For a moment he thought Ryan had not heard him. Then he gently laid his brother’s head on the cobblestones and lurched for the gun.

Troy blew his brains out.

Seconds later the sergeant had run up to Troy.

‘Bloody hell,’ was all he could say, and bloody hell it was. A creeping crimson tide seeping out across the stones and vanishing in the cracks.

‘He asked for it,’ Troy had said simply.

‘Been asking for it for fuckin’ years,’ said the sergeant with no graspof what Troy had really meant. And Troy realised that no one would. Whatever it was, murder or mercy, he
would get away with it.

Perhaps Kolankiewicz was right. He was tired of blood. Tired of death. Lorcan Ryan had been a death too far. But what had the old man meant by them ‘living death’?

Troy phoned Anna.

‘I need to see you.’

‘And I you. In fact I should really see you about once a week. But . . . you know . . . Fitz dying . . . you know.’

He had not called her. It had not occurred to him to call her. Anna and Fitz had been partners – the closest of friends – for more than fifteen years. Some plainclothes copper on
Jack Wildeve’s squad would have called on her, Troy now thought, to give her the bad news, ask her the bad questions and leave her with the bad things in life. Troy had not tried to imagine
her grief.

‘I’m going back to work.’

‘What?’

‘I’m going into the Yard in the morning.’

‘Troy, you’re mad! You have to be crazy to want to do that.’

She came round to his house. Late in the afternoon. Saddened and concerned. Mistress and physician. Pain had left her pale and quiet, scored the lines about her eyes that bit the deeper.

‘I can’t sign you off. You know I can’t.’

‘You don’t have to. Kolankiewicz has already done it.’

‘Then you’re both crazy. You’re acting just like you did when I met the pair of you twenty years ago. You’re the most unholy alliance I can think of. You’ve no
respect for your own body and he’s no respect for anything. The world isn’t your oyster, it’s your cadaver!’

Ah, so this was living death?

‘I can’t make it alone.’

Anna looked at him, utterly baffled by his last remark. Her black eyes looking into his black eyes in total disbelief.

‘I need something to get me through the day. Or I’ll be worn out by lunchtime.’

‘I can’t,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I can’t.’

‘A pill. Something. Anything.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You got me into this. Now get me out of it.’

She said nothing. The muscles in her neck seemed to stiffen with resolution. She knew he was blackmailing her.

‘Clover’s dead. Jack’s been taken off the case. If I don’t investigate, no one will.’

He saw tears start up and roll down her cheek.

‘When?’

‘Same night as Fitz.’

She sat down, put her face in her cupped hands and wept. If the Murder Squad had not told her it was murder, she surely knew now. Troy waited until she looked up. He knelt down and took her
hands in his. ‘Helpme,’ he said.

She tore her hands away. Fresh tears spilled out across her reddened face. But these were tears of rage. For a moment he thought she would hit him.

‘Damn you, Troy. You complete fucking shit. You’ve never asked me for anything in your entire life. Don’t say “help me” as if you’re the fucking victim, the
weak one. You’ve never been the weak one. You’ve never been the victim. Never. You always get what you want. You always take what you want. Don’t start whining at me now! It
doesn’t ring true. What do you want? Benzedrine? Dexedrine? A nice little upper to go with your nightly downer?’

‘Yes,’ he said, his voice a whisper in the wake of her anger, ‘that’s exactly what I want.’

Anna took out her pad and scribbled out a prescription for a hundred Dexedrine tablets.

‘I meant what I said, Troy. It’s one of the laws of thermodynamics: you cannot get something out of nothing. You know, the myth of perpetual motion and all that. Taking amphetamine
doesn’t make you superman. All the energy you’ll feel comes out of your system. Sooner or later you’ll crash. It’s nature’s way of telling you “no free
lunch”.’

‘I’ll be careful.’

She tore the sheet from the pad and pressed it into his hand. She got up, turned her back on him, took out her compact and dabbed at her face.

‘Why didn’t you tell me about Clover sooner? Did you think I couldn’t take one more death after Fitz?’

She glanced at him over her shoulder.

‘Clover was Onions’ granddaughter. I’ve told nobody.’

She turned around, swept a lock of hair from her eyes.

‘You know, I don’t think I can cry three times in five minutes, even for you.’

Troy wiped the last flecks of shaving soap from his face and looked deeply into the mirror. He had, as ever, made a hash of it, bristles uncut and soap in the ears, but this
did not concern him. Did he look consumptive? Would he pass muster? Or would they walk around him as one best left to his fate? He was embarking on the most preposterous bluff of his life. He did
not know what he expected to see, but the worst of what he saw was the stark contrast between the whiteness of his skin and the blackness of his hair and eyes.

He pulled at the mirror to reveal the tiny medicine cupboard buried in the wall behind it. Aspirin; Elastoplast; a ribbed brown bottle of kaolin and morphine mixture that he was pretty certain
had been there since before the war, now separated into strata of mud and cement; penicillin left over, and no doubt festering, from the dose of the clap Kolankiewicz had been so indiscreet as to
mention. And there were the two bottles of pills side by side. The remaining bottle of Mandrax Clover had not swallowed, and the bottle of Dexedrine he’d got from the all-night
chemist’s in Piccadilly last night. ‘Drink me,’ they said. ‘Eat me,’ they said, regardless of form – one to make you bigger and one to make you small. He
unscrewed the cap on the amphetamines and tipped a little yellow pill into his hand.

Walking to work, he knew which one it was. It was the one that made Alice bigger, definitely bigger. The sleeping pill had shrunk him, shrunk the world, nest-wrapped him and Clover to the point
where reality had pleasantly blurred. This, the ‘upper’, as Anna had put it, stretched him, he was taller – well, he felt taller. He filled the space around him, his stride
lengthened, his feet left the ground – he grew to fill the world. The world was the world as he thought it. It existed because he thought it.
Cogito, ergo est
. And it was just as
pleasant a place as the nest had been.

His office felt like the
Marie Celeste
. The outer room was empty, the door to the inner wide open. Clark’s Heath Robinson coffee machine bubbled away to itself,
pumping best Blue Mountain through a maze of glass tubing. He hung up his coat and looked at the contents of his in-tray: the documents in the case – the case of Patrick Fitzpatrick and
Clover Browne. There was pitifully little physical evidence. A buff file in the tray and a cardboard box dumped on his desk. He looked around, tried to remember the last time he had set foot in
this room. It had been some time in April. It was now September. The clock ticked away, in synch with the coffee machine. It was typical of Clark to remember the little things. Keeping the clock
wound, making fresh coffee, forging his signature on God knew what. Troy was staring out of the window at the Thames. It was filthy. There was talk that the fish were dying or dead. It didn’t
seem all that long ago that a Labour MP had demonstrated some point or other – the fordability of the Thames? – by trying to walk across the riverbed. Troy wondered how long he’d
live. The Thames was not the bright silver ribbon he remembered; it was dirty brown. His thoughts moved laterally. The Thames, he reasoned, was probably much the same. It was he that had changed,
the nature and quality of his perception, not the object perceived.

‘Good morning, sir.’

It was Clark. Looking at Troy looking out at the river. Two steaming mugs in one hand, a bundle of Scotland Yard standard memos in the other.

‘You’re bright and early.’

‘Bright and lost,’ Troy muttered.

‘Eh?’

‘Nothing, Eddie. Is this the lot?’

‘Believe so, sir.’

Mary McDiarmuid put her head round the door.

‘Brass alert. Everybody duck!’

Troy dropped the box on the floor and turned over the buff file to the plain side. Clark retreated to his desk just in time to look busy and unconcerned as Assistant Commissioner Quint walked
in.

‘Freddie! I heard you were back.’

Quint was about the same age as Troy, a little taller, a little broader, a lot rougher at the edges. He was smiling his way through a bluffer’s front. He had heard Troy was back because
someone had spotted him entering the building and earned a few points by phoning him. He could hardly be pleased to see him or pleased to find out only when it was too late.

‘I seem to have made a remarkable recovery,’ Troy said flatly, not caring whether this convinced Quint or not.

‘Certainly is remarkable. From TB to a clean bill of health in four months.’

‘More like six,’ Troy lied.

Quint stuck his hands in the pockets of his expensive, grey, single-breasted suit and strolled over to the window. Troy slid the box under his desk with one foot, while pretending to go through
the routine memos Clark had dumped on his desk.

‘I had an aunt had TB. It was more than a year before she was up and about.’

‘Before the war, was it?’ Troy asked.

‘Oh aye, before the war—’

‘Things have improved since then,’ Troy said. ‘Wonders of modern science and all that.’

‘All the same. You’re not rushing things are you, Freddie?’

‘No. I’m not rushing things.’

Quint strayed closer to the desk. One hand crept out of his pocket and he flicked the edge of the file with a thumbnail in feigned idleness.

‘I dare you,’ thought Troy, ‘I just dare you to turn it over.’

Quint riffled the edge like a dealer shuffling cards. ‘You working on anything special?’

Troy dropped half the memos on top of the file. Quint removed his hand.

‘No. Just getting my knees under the table. A mountain of routine stuff to catch up on.’

‘You’ll be at the regular meeting tomorrow, then.’

‘Of course,’ said Troy.

Troy, Quint and Coyn met twice a week as a matter of course. Whether Troy attended would depend entirely on how far he got with the case.

‘Fine,’ said Quint. ‘Fine. See you then.’ And left.

Clark and Mary McDiarmuid stood in the doorway.

‘He knows,’ said Mary McDiarmuid.

‘Of course he knows,’ said Troy. ‘The question is, what’s he going to do about it?’

He sat down, pulled his chair up to the desk, picked up the box and turned over the file. Glanced up at the door. They were still standing there. He waved them away and opened the case file.
Stepping back into an old routine, putting on old slippers – and they didn’t fit.

He found he could learn so little from material so matter-of-fact. He read it all and felt scarcely the wiser. The only item that made his copper’s instinct rise like the fur on a
cat’s back was the inclusion in the box of two letters from the office of the Leader of the Opposition, Harold Wilson, written to Fitz, standard acknowledgements of correspondence received
with no hint of what Fitz had been writing to him about, and one of them so old – October of 1962 – as to be irrelevant. A note in Jack’s handwriting was attached with a
paperclip: ‘Found top LH drawer Fitzpatrick desk.’ And nothing in the file pertaining to Clover raised so much as a whisker – the mundane, the obvious – the police 10
× 8s of his own sitting room, and the lab report on the Mandrax pills.

He knew he was rusty. He knew he had to go over it all again with more care. He didn’t. This was stage two of any investigation. What he craved was stage one. A good body. And since that
was not possible, he took the next best thing. A visit to the scene of the crime. He collected the keys to Fitz’s house from Clark and caught a cab to Dreyfus Mews. He could have asked for a
car and driver, but that would simply have given one more nark to Quint.