A Little White Death (57 page)

Troy said nothing.

‘Are you going to make fools of us all?’

‘No. I’m not. It’s over. There was no conspiracy. I was wrong. Who knows, perhaps I went back to work too soon? Perhaps I need arest.’

‘You’re lying to me. You’ve been a liar all your life. You think I don’t know when you’re lying!’

It’s for your own good, thought Troy. What I know you’d rather not.

Troy phoned Kolankiewicz. And when he had talked to him he knew how Clover Browne came to be murdered.

‘That compound analysis you did for me . . .?’

‘The piece of cotton wool?’

‘Yes. What would happen if one were to take a large quantity of it?’

‘In what form?’

‘Pills. Pills corresponding in their make-up to the residue you found. Like the bit you found.’

‘Such a pill would be a large-dose vitamin pill. You would take one at a time. Sort of thing you might do if you have the flu.’

‘Supposing you took twenty-eight or thirty.’

‘Well . . . Vitamin A cannot be processed in excess. It ends up stored in the liver and as such becomes toxic. But a single overdose would hardly have a dramatic effect – you’d
do yourself damage only if you took too much every day for weeks. We know very little about the effects of Vitamin E or Vitamin K, of which there was a trace in the et ceteras – but Vitamin
C, by far the largest factor in the residue, the body will not store. It uses what it wants and pisses out the rest.’

‘So what ill-effects would you feel after such a dose.’

‘You’d buzz all night. I doubt you’d get a deal of sleep and your piss would turn an alarming shade of green.’

‘And that’s all?’

‘That’s all.’

It had occurred to Troy not to tell Jack, not to involve him, to let him escape into ignorance. It seemed like a violation. Jack was not his brother. Jack was his partner.
Thrust together by necessity. Twenty-two years could not count for nothing. So he told him. Told him how Clover Browne came to die. Sitting at Goodwin’s Court, he laid the case out as clearly
as he could. Even so he faltered, he lost his thread and took the best part of half an hour to get through it. Jack had said nothing. Then he put the same questions Troy would have put if
he’d been Jack.

‘You’re certain?’

‘Yes.’

‘So what’s the crime?’

‘Suicide pact.’

‘I’ve never encountered one. Is it murder?’

‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to find out.’

On cue, Clark let himself in the front door, one arm wrapped around law books, stuffed with bookmarks. He dumped them on the dining table. Turned to Troy.

‘It’s better than you’d think.’

‘Better?’

‘Clearer. It seems the powers that be have given the matter more attention than I thought, and at that a damn sight more recently.’

‘You have the floor, Eddie.’

Clark was in his element. Jack stretched, locked his hands behind his head and tried not to yawn.

‘Prior to 1957 it would have been clear as mud. To enter into a suicide pact and simply to survive, whether by accident or design, ought to have been murder as the law stood at the time.
However, we had a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sitting between ’49 and ’53 just to muddy the waters . . .’

Jack and Troy exchanged looks. They’d both given evidence to the Commission. As far as Troy was concerned it might as well have happened in another lifetime. Clark flipped open a
volume.

‘. . . “There are cases in which the survivor alleges that he and the deceased had agreed to die together, but it is doubtful whether there was a genuine agreement or a genuine
attempt or intention to commit suicide on his part. Such cases are considered on their merits . . .” and what that amounts to is the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, which naturally falls
to the Home Secretary. He decided who hanged and who didn’t depending on whether or not he believed the story. The Commission goes on . . . “It may be less easy for the Home Secretary
to satisfy himself that the parties have agreed to die, especially if the survivor does not appear to have made a very determined attempt on his own life.” The Commission then recommended a
change in the law to the effect that if the other party in a suicide pact takes their own life, the survivor is guilty only of aiding and abetting a suicide; but if the pact was tit for tat –
you do me as I do you – then it’s murder.’

‘Sounds a bit bloody mechanical to me.’ said Jack. ‘Means not motives. Eddie, have we got this bastard or not?’

‘Bear with me, sir.’

He opened a second fat book and ran a finger down the margin.

‘The 1957 Homicide Act did not implement the recommendation. Instead it made participation in such a pact manslaughter, and dropped the active/passive distinction. “A suicide pact is
defined as a common agreement between two or more persons having for its object the death of all of them, whether or not each is to take his own life . . . but nothing done by a person who enters
into a suicide pact shall be treated as done by him in pursuance of the pact unless it is done while he has the settled intention of dying in pursuance of the pact.”’

‘God give me strength. Eddie, have we got the bugger or not?’

Troy intervened.

‘Yes. We have. It’s murder. Murder. Plain and simple. The act ironed out the ambiguities. It’s murder. Premeditated murder. Just imagine it. They’d been lovers. Forced
apart by the Tereshkov rumpus and by Stan dumping Jackie on me. He came to see her. He knew how susceptible she was to romantic rubbish. She even thought
Jules et Jim
was romantic. He spun
her a line, conned her into thinking a joint suicide was the only escape for both of them. He sat there while she swallowed Mandrax by the handful and fed himself plain white pills. When it was all
over for Clover he packed up and left. But he missed the cotton wool out of the top of his jar of pills. Kolankiewicz analysed the residue as nothing stronger than vitamins. You can’t enter
into a suicide pact and expect to kill yourself with a jar of vitamin pills.’

‘At last. At last. Now, can we prove it?’

That was the one question Troy would not have asked.

‘To what do I owe this pleasure?’ Rod said. ‘Twice in two days.

Have you spent so much time in this house since the old man died?’

‘Time to kill.’

Rod took his coat and hung it up. The house was wonderfully warm. There was music playing softly. Pablo Casals, the Bach solo cello suites – designed, Rod had once told him, to make you
stoic. Troy was stoic. What he needed was to be brave. Rod was in evening work mode, sleeves rolled up, tie at half-mast and the least sexy pair of tartan slippers Troy had ever seen.

‘Time to kill. I do hope that’s a metaphor,’ Rod said, and before Troy could say anything added, ‘I’m sorry, Freddie. That was absolutely tasteless.’

Always the decency, that all-pervading, all-English decency that Troy could never muster with a thousand pounds of torque. Less than twelve hours ago Rod had been spitting fury. Now, as always,
it was as though it had never happened. When would the man learn to hate properly?

Troy said a quick ‘never mind’ and let Rod bustle him into a fireside chair in front of the roaring heat of a smokeless fire. Most Londoners had boarded up their fireplaces years ago
when the city went smokeless in an effort to stop the killer smogs that had swamped the city in the early fifties. Rod had not given up. He had discovered a man-made fuel that looked like black
sponge cake and stuck by his one practical skill in life – lighting the fire. Rod in front of a cheery fire, obligatory red tie dangling, was the man in his element – relaxed,
self-contained, affable. From where he sat Troy could see right through the window, across Church Row to Travis’s front door.

Troy was wrong. It was not a work evening. There were no parliamentary papers scattered on the carpet. Just a book. Face down on the threadbare Bakhtiar –
The Last Days of
Socrates
.

‘Would you like a drink? Scotch perhaps?’

Troy said yes. He’d just broken his dry spell at a house around the corner, and with Mandies, speed and two glasses of Margaux swimming in his blood, what did a drop of malt matter?
Alcohol did not seem to get him pissed; it combined with the drugs into a sensation he could not name. Not drunk. Not drugged. High, in a lucid, crystalline way. He felt focused, very focused.

‘Miserable stuff for a quiet evening in,’ he said, pointing at the book.

Rod handed him a large malt. They sat opposite each other and sniffed the peaty smell of malt whisky.

‘I read it again once in a while. Usually after a brush with death.’

‘You’ve had a brush with death?’

‘I meant you. You have. Or did you think it was just a bout of flu? It was the book the old man asked me to read aloud to him whilehewas dying.’

Alexei Troy’s last illness had been sudden and brief. Fine one day, dying the next and dead within the week. It had been the middle of the Second World War. Troy had been at the Yard, Rod
on an RAF base in mid-Essex. They each got a week’s leave. The old man had taken to his bed and, in death as in life, he had talked and talked and talked. There was, Troy thought, structure
to his reminiscence. He did not ramble. Even if Troy could not see the connections, he could not think of it as rambling – a visit to Paris in 1909 to hear the famous Russian bass Fyodor
Chaliapin sing, and two months later standing on the coast of France to watch Louis Blériot take wing for England. A meeting with H.H. Asquith in 1915, a blazing row with Beaverbrook in
1920, an audience – was that the word he had used? – with Hitler in 1930. And when his voice began to fail, what he wanted of his sons was that they should read aloud to him. He asked Troy to read him the
Last Poems
of W.B. Yeats.
If, as it turned out, he had had Rod read Plato to him, then it made sense. Troy had read him the regrets, the miserable haunting might-havebeens of life –
Why Should Not Old Men Be
Mad?
– and Rod had read him the optimism, the bravura stoicism, of Socrates under sentence of death, the philosopher’s sense of impending freedom in death. Troy had no idea which
notion had gone with him to the grave. All he remembered was the old man’s last words to him as he had read him
High Talk
for the umpteenth time: ‘Barnacle goose? What the
fuck’s a barnacle goose? I’ve never even seen a bloody barnacle goose.’ And he had died before Troy could answer. As famous last words went, it almost ranked with ‘Bugger
Bognor.’

It prompted Troy to think of the last mystery. The riddle he had asked Charlie to solve. He had never heard from Charlie again, and he doubted now that he ever would.

Travis’s house was dark. Not a light to be seen.

They said nothing for a while. Troy was thinking nothing more than that synthetic coal didn’t crackle or split or smell of anything. Then Rod spoke.

‘It’s like that time we sat in the cellar and toasted the old man in Veuve Clicquot.’

‘January,’ said Troy. ‘This year.’

‘Seems like longer.’

‘Seems like a bloody lifetime to me.’

‘Been a long year. Britain feels to me like someone just ripped out its giblets. And after all that’s happened I still never thought I’d see Macmillan go. But he’s
gone.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Oh, it matters all right.’

‘Doesn’t get you an election, though, does it?’

‘No. There’ll be no election this year. The Tories will run to the limit now. A week from now we’ll have Travis, or Butler, or Hailsham.’

‘I’ve never known you not place a bet on something like that.’

‘If Mac had called it quits before May this year I’d’ve backed Woodbridge. However, I’ll stick twenty-five nicker on Travis.’

‘Win or place?’

Rod laughed.

‘No such thing as coming second in politics. It’s called losing.’

A Humber pulled up on the other side of the street. A figure in a black overcoat got out. A few words with a flunkie on the pavement, the flunkie got back in, the car drove off, the policeman on
the door saluted and Travis went inside.

Troy put down his glass and stood up.

‘Don’t back Travis,’ he said. ‘You’ll lose.’

Troy went for his coat. Rod followed with
that
look on his face.

‘What do you mean? Freddie, what are you up to?’

Troy opened the door, stepped into the street and turned up his collar against the rain.

‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake—’

But Troy no longer heard him. He heard his shoes on the wet tarmac, then that too drowned out to the narco-rhythm in his head, the roaring in his veins he had felt so often at times like
this.

The duty copper watched him cross the street, a puzzled look on his face. He let Troy get right up to him and then he saluted. Troy knew the man, an old-timer with twenty-five years of service
under his belt.

‘Take a tea break, Reg,’ Troy said.

‘I’m not really supposed to . . .’

‘Mr Travis will be quite safe with me. Come back in an hour.’

Reg sloped off, inasmuch as a uniformed constable can slope. If he could he would have put his hands in pockets, but he couldn’t.

Troy let him reach the end of the street and then he yanked on the bell pull.

Travis answered. Just like Rod, shirtsleeves and half-mast tie, but without the rotten taste in slippers. He had a bottle of wine in one hand, the corkscrew sticking out of the top, the cork
waiting to be pulled. He did not in the least seem surprised.

‘Was it something I said?’ he said.

‘Of course,’ Troy replied.

‘Then you’d better come in. We don’t want Big Brother watching, now do we?’

He led the way into the front room, the dining room as this version of a Church Row house was laid out, set the bottle down unopened and pulled the curtains to. Troy caught a glimpse of Rod, lit
up in his own front window, staring out at them. Then he was gone and it was just Troy and Travis alone on opposite sides of a vast table, in the light and shade of a single lamp.

‘I’m not going to help you, Commander Troy. Whatever’s on your mind, just spit it out.’