A Little White Death (41 page)

Two hours later he stopped outside a pub on the edge of the village, an old thatched pub called The Lamb. He did not recall that he had ever seen it before, but it was a landmark on his map and
according to his map he should turn left to get to The Glebe and right to find May’s Lane.

It could scarcely be more than an hour to dusk – the sun sat reddening on the skyline. He found May’s Lane, less than a mile away. A long, unmade track lined with unleaving elm and
oak, a small forest of wild horseradish lining the banks of the deepdrainage ditches to either side. Half a mile on, a mudspattered white Mini Cooper was pulled up in front of a skewwhiff redbrick
cottage, one of those ancient houses built before the discovery of the right angle, a crumbling anachronism in powder red and green-mossed tile.

He parked the car. No one came out to see, but then a Bentley hardly made any noise, purred rather than roared for all its power. He rounded the corner to the back of the house. A mousey-haired
woman in blue jeans and a grubby crêpe-de-chine blouse was snipping away at the straggling limbs of a climbing tree.

She turned at the sound of his shoes on the twigs and pebbles of the big back yard. It was Tara. Tara without a hint of surprise.

‘I don’t suppose you know anything about figs, do you, Troy?’

‘Not much. I’m a bit of a gardener, but I run more to spuds and leeks than to figs.’

‘It’s a Brown Turkey.’

‘You’re asking the wrong person.’

‘I know. That’s the trouble with the dead. You can always think of one more damn thing you want to ask them.’

‘I hardly recognised you,’ he said lamely.

‘I couldn’t wait for the blonde to grow out. Takes for ever. This is near enough my natural colour. I say “near” – can you imagine going into Boots and asking for
hair colour in a shade of “mouse”? They don’t do it. Now, shall we go in and have a drink? And you can tell me what brings you all this way, as if I couldn’t
guess.’

The kitchen floor made him seasick just looking at it. Old yellow-white bricks undulated across a large, dusty farmhouse kitchen, worn shallow in the tracks of several hundred years of shuffling
feet. Cobwebs clung to every beam and spiders scuttled in the corners of the windows. A single brass tap on the end of a lead pipe stuck out of the wall above a dirty porcelain sink; a bright-blue
bottled gas cylinder under the draining board fed a two-ring cooker. It was basic; it was primitive; it was the raw, unscrubbed reality Fitz had copied in his hi-tech farmhouse kitchen at Uphill,
but it was the way it was not because it been planned or designed but because it had been neglected. Neglect, he thought, was the missing principle in Darwinism.

‘It was my mother’s,’ Tara said as though reading his mind. ‘Been in the family for years. She left it to us, to me and Caro. Wanted us to have something the old man
couldn’t touch. I’ve never really had need of it till now . . .’

She opened the door of the larder. It was painted that very familiar shade of washed-out, flat green that had been so prevalent when Troy was a boy. There were times when it seemed that what the
Victorians had not painted black they had painted this pale pea-green.

He heard the clunk of a gin bottle on the tabletop.

‘You OK?’

‘Sorry, I was miles away.’

Or was it years?

She handed him a gin and tonic. ‘Don’t ask for ice,’ she said. ‘There’s no fridge, because there’s no electricity. I can barely manage the cooker.’

The wastebin overflowed with empty baked-bean tins. This was Tara’s idea of cooking. The only beans she’d spilled.

‘You know,’ Tara said. ‘I was surprised, really very surprised at you taking Clover in.’

Not half as surprised as Troy was at the question.

‘How did you know?’

‘Clover called me from your house a couple of times. Never said why. Why did you do it?’

‘She . . . she just turned up.’

‘What? Knocked on your door and said, “Take me in”?’

‘More or less.’

‘OK. Fine. You’re not going to tell me. But – I wonder – was that where she died?’

‘Who told you she was dead? You’d have to have read the coroner’s reports to know that.’

‘Young Alex. You may have killed the story. But he knows an awful lot. You going to answer me?’

‘She died in the Charing Cross Hospital. But yes . . . she overdosed in my sitting room.’

‘And that’s why you’re here?’

‘I can’t believe in the coincidence of two suicides, those two suicides.’

‘Right under your own nose, eh?’

‘I’d just left Fitz at Leoni’s.’

‘I’d only seen him from the witness box, you know. Been weeks since we met face to face.’

‘I know, but I can’t think where else to start.’

‘You could try asking me why I lied in court.’

‘Well . . . it did make me wonder.’

‘That copper from the Yard. Blood. He interviewed most of Fitz’s friends. He had me and Caro in there at least a dozen times. After the second time he split us up. Very clever.
He’d get nothing out of her with me there, and he’d get nothing out of me but the truth. I never gave Fitz so much as a farthing. I think Caro has better manners. She bought a pair of
oven gloves and occasionally came home with a packet of coffee beans; but I’m a pig. I was happy to live off Fitz and most of the time Fitz was happy to let me. All this stuff about
Pritch-Kemp giving us money which we then passed to Fitz is just that – stuff and nonsense, as my mother would have said. I gave the Yard Pritch-Kemp. They were idiots. I wouldn’t name
him, but it was obvious who I meant. They thought I’d handed them a loaded gun, but I’d given them a time bomb. They were idiots to think Pritch was the kind of man who’d hide
from it. They thought he’d bury his head in the sand like Tim. I knew damn well he’d stand up for the defence. But I seemed to be the only person who did.

‘I think it must have been the last time but two, or thereabouts, that we’d been to the Yard. I met up with Caro on the Embankment. She was in floods of tears. Blood had played his
trump card. He’d found out about the baby.’

‘What baby?’

‘Caro’s daughter. She’s two now. Vivienne Elizabeth. Caro’s had a nanny for her for the last year. We lead the life of working women in reverse – Caro sees the
child midweek, the nanny has her weekends. Fitz never needed to have a baby and wet nappies around the place, and life goes on as . . . as normal. Shocking word isn’t it,
“normal”? Our dear father doesn’t even know. But Blood found out. Told Caro if she didn’t co-operate he’d have the child put in care. She was quite resolute. Got guts,
my little sister. She told Blood to go to hell. I’m more of a realist. I knew he could do just what he threatened. The next time he got us in I changed my story. Caro never would, but I
couldn’t let her do that to herself. I nagged her and I nagged her until eventually she signed a statement. I suppose it was naive of me to think she’d stick to it in court, once she
had to face poor old Fitz across a courtroom. I’ve been wondering ever since what it must have looked like. I knew what she’d done, but by the time she could tell me she was all over
the place. I thought she’d go mad. I still don’t know what Blood said to her before she signed. She won’t tell me. But if he wants to exact his vengeance, he’s got to find
her first.’

‘So have I,’ Troy said simply.

Tara said nothing. Troy decided to tack off and come back to the point at a better moment.

‘When did you and Fitz meet?’

She swigged gin. Seemed to muse on the question.

‘Can you remember?’ he prompted.

‘Oh yes, I can remember all right. I met him late in the summer of 1959. A Saturday. One of those Indian summer days when they stick tables outside the London cafés and try to
pretend it’s Rome or Paris or anywhere but London. It was in Endell Street, near Covent Garden. I was with Caro. Fitz was sipping his cappuccino at another table. Saturday is a mufti day for
men like Fitz. Wore his linen suit and this preposterous hat – a Stetson I think you’d call it. Anyway, it was his affectation at that time. Did the trick. Made people notice him. As he
was leaving he came over and said, “I’m having a party at my house tonight. It would be so nice if you could come.” Then he picked up the menu, jotted down the mews address and a
phone number and went. We’d neither of us spoken. Then we debated whether or not we’d go to a party given by a man we’d never met before and it sort of resolved itself down into
I-will-if-you-will-sowill-I. So we did. Two days later we moved in. We were there four years. He only moved us out when the police came. Said it would be better for all of us. Said it was strictly
pro tem. He was much quicker with Clover. Stuck her in a bedsit as soon as young Alex started his campaign in the Post. He wasn’t taking any chances with her.’

‘How did they meet? Fitz and Clover, I mean.’

‘Same way. Almost to the letter. Another summer. Last year’s. Another café. Old Compton Street this time. Except she was working as a waitress. He even used the same line.
Told her we were having a party. Which we were not. But we were by the time she arrived. Fitz drummed up a drunken quorum between four in the afternoon and eight in the evening. He was a bit more
hesitant about moving her in than he was with us. I think she dropped a few hints. She’d seen how we lived. She knew Caro and I only needed the one room between us, so I think in the end he
just gave in to her.’

‘What did he see in her? She wasn’t your age. She was scarcely more than a child.’

‘She was fifteen, Troy. We both know that. I can see no need to hide it now they’re both dead.’

She paused, thought through something and picked up her thread very decisively.

‘He made people. Or rather remade them. It was a sort of hobby of his, remaking people.’

Hobby? More like a colossal vanity, Troy thought. He had never understood it – the Pygmalion syndrome. His father had a touch of it, but surely a man was entitled to some share in the
making of his own sons? And if Alex Troy made Frederick Troy with an excess of zeal, it was in part due to the vicissitudes of Troy’s health, in that he was around, always around, and in part
due to the age his father had reached – sixtyish and bored by his own success. His father’s old rival Lord Beaverbrook had indulged this vanity in spades, remaking mistresses and
protégés. Rod’s brief rebellion against his father had been to go and work for Beaverbrook’s
Daily Express
for a year. Lord B had seen not only the potential in
Rod, but the potential rage to which he could provoke Old Troy. It did no one any good. Rod had the makings of a good journalist, but he did not have the makings of a good Tory – simply
rearranging the letters was not enough – and there the relationship foundered. It showed in Rod to this day. If he read a book he liked he would go back to the shop buy three or four copies
and give them to friends or family – it was remaking reduced to its most basic components of knowledge and influence. Take it or leave it. It worked or it didn’t. Troy still had
somewhere a copy of
Lucky Jim
by Kingsley Amis, received one day nine or ten years ago when Rod had rushed in, dishing out copies saying it was funniest thing he had read since Evelyn Waugh
stopped being funny. It wasn’t. Troy’s bookmark stuck where he had placed it after twentyodd yawnsome pages. Somewhere in his house now was Clover’s cookery book –
‘New girls begin here’ – the testament of Fitz’s Pygmalion game with the child.

‘There were others?’ he said.

‘Two at least that I know of. Frances. No surname that I ever heard. I’ve no idea what became of her. Simply vanished about a year before I met Fitz. But I’ve seen the
photographs. The before and after shots, as it were. The before have her looking more waifish than Clover ever did. The afters have her looking like a duchess. The end result of the Fitz method.
And then there was Tanya Hennessey. I knew Tanya. She didn’t vanish. She lived the dream so well she fulfilled it and in its fulfilment there wasn’t a deal of room for Fitz. She married
one of Tommy’s nephews in the spring of 1960. In fact, she married the heir. So I suppose, now that Tommy’s gone to the great nightclub in the sky, she’s Lady Athelnay. Everything
Fitz could have wanted for her. And he isn’t here to see it, and if he was I doubt she’d give him houseroom. If you ask me he did a better job on Clover. Didn’t run against the
grain. Found her an unsophisticated little tart and left her a sophisticated little tart. No elocution lessons, no class pretension, simply told her what she needed to know. Much the better way.
You see, once he’d remade himself he thought it was easy to remake others. He was soft for me and Caro, but we didn’t much need what he had to offer. We learnt from Fitz, without doubt,
but we were not recast in his image. Tanya did need him, Clover did. They were his Elizas; they were his Gigis.’

Troy was not entirely sure he believed her disavowal. It was probably what Frances, wherever she was, and Tanya, Lady Athelnay, said – if they spoke of Fitz at all. He knew there was truth
in Rebecca West’s damning assessment – Fitz had packaged the Ffitches.

‘Tell me, Troy, did Clover show off her cooking?’

‘Yes. Was that the obvious thing?’

‘Oh yes, her
pièce de résistance
. Did not wait to be asked. Fitz lesson No. 1. I do hope you enjoyed it. I can’t cook for toffee.’

Troy looked at his watch, remembered the pile of empty bean tins spilling out of the wastebin. ‘I can,’ he said.

She showed him the larder. It was bare enough for the age of rationing. The sight of few and sorry vegetables put him in mind of the austerity of war and the long, stark years that followed. A
meal out of this would be a small miracle. Three eggs, two potatoes, a rare red pepper wrinkling with age, an onion green with mould at the outer skin . . . but in his war he had produced little
miracles on a regular basis, helped by the fact that his mother had used her huge Hertfordshire garden to produce vegetables and eggs aplenty. It called for a Spanish omelette. He had seemed to
make them quite a lot during the war.

Tara’s contribution was to light three candles on the kitchen table, candles undignified by candelabra, stuck into enamel Wee Willie Winkie candleholders. Troy thought for a moment how
romantic and how absurd this was, and then remembered that there was no electricity and that she was coping with necessity, not setting a mood.