A Little White Death (42 page)

They ate in near silence. For the moment she seemed to have nothing to say. The most he got out of her was a ‘not bad’. Then à propos of nothing she said, ‘What was
Clover’s real name? Did she ever tell you?’

‘I thought it was Clover,’ he said, telling truth as lies.

‘Nobody’s christened Clover. At least nobody born to a couple of cockneys at the end of the war. Surely she was a Pauline or a Susan?’

‘Never said.’

‘I bet Fitz knew.’

Tara stacked the plates in the sink and left them, reached for the gin bottle again, poured two huge measures and flavoured them lightly with a splash of tonic.

‘Shall we sit outside?’ she said. ‘I think there’s about fifteen minutes of a rather spectacular sunset left.’

She stuck two kitchen chairs in the yard, and they sat looking westward either side of the door. The last slice of sun was glowing burnt orange and sinking beneath the horizon.

‘It is beautiful, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Makes me think I don’t get out of London often enough.’

‘I do,’ said Troy. ‘I have to get out of the fray. I have to get out of the fray, because I have to be in it. You could stay out of it. You don’t have to go
back.’

He was not looking at her as he spoke, he was looking at the sun, but he was sure her non-word amounted to ‘hrrummph’, and turned to find her looking hard at him.

‘You took a shine to me at Uphill? Am I right?’

‘A shine?’

‘Coyness doesn’t suit you, Troy.’

‘OK. A shine it is.’

‘Glad we can agree. But . . . Troy . . . do not mistake me. Do not think me one of the good girls. I’m not. Forget the whore with the heart of gold. T’ain’t me. I am in
what I am in for what is in it for me.’

‘Aha?’

‘Now – I know a little bit about you. Fitz seemed to think you were the best thing at a piano since Russ Conway, and Anna used to talk about this eccentric copper who bred pigs and
won prizes for his leeks. I rather think she loved your rural idyll, and you were a bastard not to let her see more of it than you did. You can tell me it’s bliss to be out of the fray
– you can tell me till the cows come home and God knows there’s enough of the four-footed fuckers around here. But . . . big big but . . . I am a child of the fray. Going back? Of
course I’m going back. Did you think I meant to stay here for ever? I can’t fulfil your rural idyll for you, Troy. I’m going back. More than that, I’m taking the money.
I’ve already sold Fitz. I want my thirty pieces of silver. My father cut me off in 1955. I’ve torn away ever since, since I was seventeen. There’ve always been other
“daddies”. Although right now there’s really a shortage of daddies, at least of daddies I’d ever want. So I’m taking the money. I’d never have done it if Fitz
had lived – but he didn’t, so nothing I can say will hurt him.’

‘You’ll be notorious.’

‘I’m already notorious.’

‘How much are they offering?’

‘Thousands. Believe me, thousands. I’ll give Fleet Street what they want, every last damn scrap of it. And if it isn’t enough I’ll make it up. But I’ll nail Chief
Inspector Blood. And I don’t care if he sues. I’ll tell Britain what the bastard did and I’ll take the consequences.’

‘When?’ said Troy.

‘Any day now. As soon as I can screw up the courage.’

‘Can you give me more time?’

‘You? I don’t understand.’

‘I can nail Blood. But Blood’s a dim bugger. It’s possible he set out to convict Fitz at any price. There’s a kind of policeman in every force whose idea of good
coppering is to convict at any price. And they don’t think they’re dishonest. They think they’re making up for all the loopholes in the law. He might have thought this up on his
own. But I’d be very surprised. And I cannot nail him and whoever pulls his strings in a couple of days.’

‘How long?’

‘A fortnight. Give me a fortnight.’

Tara sipped gin and thought. Tapped against the leg of his chair with the toe of her plimsoll.

‘OK. A fortnight it is. But you must be the one to talk to Alex. I don’t want to do it. In fact, I don’t want to see the little shit until you’re through.’

‘Is he a little shit?’

Tara thought about this too.

‘I don’t have your family loyalties. Perhaps it’s fairer to say he’s ambitious and he knows he’s pulled off a real coup this time, and that has consequences upon
his character. He’s just not like you or your brother.’

‘You’ve met my brother?’

‘Tommy took me to lunch at the Lords a few times. Your brother was there once. I think it was just about passable for a socialist to be seen dining with a cross-bencher. Your
brother’s a sweet man. Your nephew isn’t. It’s about as simple as that.’

‘I don’t think Rod remembers meeting you.’

‘He wouldn’t, would he? I wore National Health specs, put my hair up and tried to look like a secretary. Tommy did that a lot, you know. Primmed and primped me and took me out to
meet the respectable and the boring. I think it gave him enormous pleasure. “This is Miss Jones, doing a little research for me.” It was his idea of sailing close to the wind, but as
most of the people he introduced me to would have been none the wiser if he’d told them my real name and left me looking, as he used to put it, “like a scarlet beauty”, I
don’t think there was really any risk at all. That was just silly old Tommy. Fitz, now Fitz did take risks. But then Tommy was an insider, wasn’t he? He could flirt harmlessly because
he belonged. Fitz was an outsider. He wanted to belong and to destroy in equal measure. So he took real risks. He used to fuck in St James’s Park, in the bushes – who hasn’t after
all? – but as close as he could get to people passing by, as close as he could get to public sex without it being public. Flirting with the outrageous, wanting to outrage, which of course he
never quite did. The man who wanted to belong always in some sort of bizarre equilibrium with the man who wanted to destroy. Poor Fitz, he finally did outrage the public, and what a price he
paid.

‘Tommy untarting me was his rather tame version of the same flirtation. He introduced me to your brother as Miss Brown, I think. Rod asked if I was any relation to George Brown. Tommy
stepped on my foot to stop me laughing out loud and then your brother tried to talk Tommy into supporting a Labour vote in the Lords. Rod was sweetness itself, but I doubt I figured much in his
thoughts. Some men never look twice at another woman. They still exist, much to my surprise, and he’s one of them. But there you and your brother differ – don’t you,
Troy?’

Troy said nothing. The sun winked out.

‘Am I shocking you, Troy?’

‘No,’ he said. And she wasn’t.

‘But all this, all this sort of thing isn’t you is it? Isn’t your thing.’

‘No. It’s not me.’ He found he could not utter the phrase ‘my thing’ without mentally adding inverted commas. ‘Not “my thing”.’

‘Are you staying the night?’

‘Dunno. What time is it?’

‘Dunno. But it’s dark. Do you really want to drive back in the pitch dark?’

In the morning he found there was nothing in the cupboard but bread, butter, a splash of milk and half a packet of maggoty old flour – and there was no water in the tap.
Hot or cold. Then he saw the shiny new galvanised steel bucket below the kitchen sink and realised that drawning water from a well probably went with cooking on bottled gas and pissing in an earth
closet.

He went into the yard and prised up the wooden lid of the well. He’d done nothing like this since before the war. A gardener’s cottage on his father’s estate. An old boy who
refused all the new-fangled gadgetry that his father would have installed in 1930 – water in taps, a bog that flushed, electricity. The old boy had lived all his life thirty-odd miles from
London and never been there. In his retirement he had raised the lushest garden Troy had ever seen, so rich, so colour-crammed, Fitz would have been chlorophyll green with envy – head-high
delphiniums in palest blue, tiny tulips in darkest black, and the mottled, browning greens of foul, fug-making homegrown tobacco, strung out in late summer to dry – and he knew the proper
names of none of his blooms, no more than he knew the real names of half the creatures of the garden. One word had lodged in Troy’s mind for ever: the old boy had called snails
‘hodmandods’, a word peculiar to the dialects of eastern England. ‘Hodmandod,’ thought Troy, as he saw one of the creatures slide up the inner wall of the well.

Perhaps Tara was right. Perhaps he laboured under an habitual fancy of being a rustic. Even as he thought the mundane thought he heard the crash of conkers in their spiky shells hitting the
ground, looked up to see crows conspiratorially perched on the barn ridge, and a fighter formation of Canada geese, gently flapping southward, watched a black-stained, mildewed sycamore leaf float
slowly down, and smelt the unmistakable cheesy, rotten smell of
Phallus impudicus
– the stinkhorn toadstool. Autumn in all her fruitfulness, and yet again a new season spelt out to him
how much of the year had gone, how much of it he had passed in the dream.

He rested the full bucket on the lip of the well. It was definitely autumn, the last pretence of summer dropped, too cold to be out before eight in the morning in his shirtsleeves. Half a mile
in the distance he could see the slate gables of a big house, and he realised he was staring at the back of The Glebe, that the meadow that rolled down into the valley from Tara Ffitch’s yard
was the same one he had looked into for the best part of twenty weeks from The Glebe. If he found the time, he’d look in on Catesby before he drove to London.

He followed the scent of stinkhorn. Only a fool would eat the stinking prick, but if it was close by, so might be the highly edible
Boletus edulis
or the more common
Agaricus
campestris
, and a day without much in the way of breakfast might suddenly have the best of beginnings.

Half an hour later he woke Tara. She was buried in a rough mountain of sheets and blankets. One arm, one foot and a few strands of mousy hair showed where she was.

‘Good God, Troy. I don’t do mornings. Never have. What time is it?’

‘About half past eight.’

‘Troy, just fuck off will you!’

‘I need to talk to you. Besides I’ve made breakfast.’

‘Out of what? Fresh air and toadstools?’

‘More or less.’

She sat at the kitchen table wearing the eiderdown, held in place by a firm grip from her armpits. The look on her face said ‘so surprise me’. He did. She took one bite and
gasped.

‘Good grief. It’s bloody marvellous! Whatever is it?’

‘Toast.’

‘I can see that.’

‘With creamed
cèpes
, a touch of parsley I found in what remains of your garden, and a dash of garlic I found growing wild. The rest I improvised from the contents of your
larder.’

He did not tell her that he had picked the maggots from the flour. She wolfed the slice, the eiderdown slipped, a nipple escaped and she did not care to retrieve it.

‘Any more?’

‘Toast takes a while over a gas ring, but yes, there’s more.’

He stuck a slice of bread on the end of the toasting fork and lit the gas ring. He dangled the bread, a visible temptation.

‘You were saying last night that Blood gave the worst of his interrogation to Caro.’

‘Bastard. He’d have never have got the better of her with me there.’

‘I’ll need to talk to Caro.’

‘Nothing doing, Troy.’

He lit a flame under the mushroom sauce, hoping the aroma would waft her way.

‘I have to know everything. If I thought you’d seen it all, believe me, I wouldn’t ask to see her. Where is she, by the way?’

Tara said nothing.

Troy said nothing. Turned the toast, stirred the sauce.

‘If I were to tell you . . .’

Troy was not about to finish this or any other sentence for her.

‘It would be off the record, wouldn’t it?’

‘I’m investigating a murder. Nothing’s off the record. If, along the way, I have to investigate Percy Blood because he’s conducted his investigation with scant regard for
the rules, then I will. But nothing’s off the record.’

‘We lied. Both of us in our statements. Me in court. That’s perjury, isn’t it?’

‘Yes. But I wouldn’t worry about it. If Blood did what you say he did, no one is going to charge you with perjury. No one is going to take Caro’s baby. Trust me, I’m a
very important policeman. All I want to do is get Caro’s version. That means notes. If as a result of that Blood is reprimanded, or God knows perhaps charged, I’ll need it in
writing.’

‘Wit hthe two of us as witnesses?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then the answer’s no. Caro’s been a witness once too often. We can’t put her through that again. Now, are you going to give me seconds or are we going play temptation
all morning?’

‘I do have one last question.’

‘Fire away,’ she said.

‘Do you know of anyone who might want Fitz dead?’

‘No one and everyone,’ she replied. ‘No one who knew him, and almost everyone who didn’t.’

After breakfast Tara yawned, kissed him on the cheek and went back to bed. He was in the lane starting the Bentley when she stuck her head out of her bedroom window.

‘Troy,’ she yelled, ‘I meant what I said. You have to talk to Alex. I don’t want to hear a peep out of him for two weeks. Capiche?’

At the turn-off for the London road, just before the pub, he braked and paused, and only when someone honked behind him was the decision made for him, and he drove on, down the
hill and into the driveway of The Glebe.

Nurse appeared at the sound of his tyres on the gravel, almost as though she had been listening out for him.

‘Well, Frederick, we didn’t expect to see you so soon. How long is it now?’

‘About six weeks, I suppose. I was hoping to see some of the others.’

‘Our Geoffrey left when you did.’

‘No,’ said Troy. ‘He left weeks before me. It was Alfie left when I did. The day before, in fact. I suppose I was wondering about the General.’

‘We lost the General.’