The cab dropped him twenty yards from the side entrance of the Old Bailey’s Court No. 1, near the corner of Newgate Street. He had not anticipated the crowd. At best the Public Gallery held twenty-five people. Here were eighty or ninety at least. On the corner, trying to keepan eye on both entrances, were a bevy of press photographers, shooting randomly. Anybody might be somebody. One came running, and Troy found himself blinded by the flash as the bulb popped in his face. He pinched the bridge of his nose and closed his eyes, and before he had opened them felt the heavy hand upon his shoulder.
‘Move along there!’
The hand shoved him forward. He opened his eyes to see exactly what he had expected to see. A large constable hell-bent on doing his duty. Troy’s eyes were level with the topbutton of his tunic. The man stared down at him a second, hand raised to push him along and then it saluted him sharply.
‘Sorry, sir. Didn’t recognise you there.’
‘That’s OK. I’m off duty. I was just hoping to see a bit of the trial.’
‘What? From the gallery? You’ll be lucky. I’d be risking a riot if I shoved you in ahead of the queue, sir. It’s day two. Some of this lot have been camping out since the night before last. The pecking order’s all worked out. You just come with me, sir.’
He chaperoned Troy to the front entrance. They caught up with the happy hack who had snapped Troy.
‘Oi you! I’ll have that last plate or you’ll feel my boot up yer backside!’
To Troy’s amazement the man did not argue, just muttered ‘shit’ and tore the strip of film from the back of the camera. Troy had not, he realised, been out with the boys in blue in a very long time.
‘Now, sir. Up the steps, into the court. City benches on your right, just behind counsel. Privileged seats, just tell ’em all to move up and flash your warrant card.’
There were hundreds of people outside the court. Troy felt almost abandoned as the man left him and resumed his duties. He felt acutely conscious of his stature – was everyone in the world bigger than he? – and his frailty. He had not found himself in the midst of a crowd since . . . since he did not know when.
The interior was hardly less busy, a mêlée of journalists, lawyers and policemen. All in motion like the scattering of the reds on a snooker table. The courtroom, by contrast, was quietly sepulchral. He soon realised that the copper had done him a favour. The view from the privileged planks of the City Lands Committee benches was a good one. He found himself sharing the back row with a dozen women in daft hats. They were, it struck him, dressed for church – a little too florid, a little too much powder, a discreet smidgeon of lipstick. He had forgotten the space a good trial occupied in the social calendar, somewhere between the Church of England and a West End play. He had not attended as a spectator since his first year on the force, when it had been part of his education to know the workings of the law at this level. For most of the last thirty years he had faced these benches from the opposite side, from the witness box, occasionally glancing at women such as these and wondering at their fascination with crime.
The woman in lilac next to him smiled and inched along the bench to make room for him without a murmur. Perhaps he looked like an invalid; perhaps his very pallor said ‘poorly’? The woman on the other side of her, so obviously her mother, looked all of eighty, head bent over her knitting, humming softly to herself, the skin of her hands liver-spotted, her cheeks chalk-white beneath the dusting of powder.
Fitz, on the other hand, put up in the dock, looked the picture of health – out on bail, spared the sunlessness of prison, the perils of perpetually boiled meals. His head turned, moments before the court rose for the judge, and for a second he looked straight into Troy’s eyes. Troy could read nothing. Not reproach, not guilt – then Fitz smiled. And the smile was the mereness of recognition.
Troy found he had encountered all the major players at one time or another. He had given evidence before Sir Ranulph Mirkeyn on half a dozen occasions. He was not one of his favourites, a former member of the Plymouth Brethren, a man and a mind deeply rooted in the Old Testament. He had answered the questions of Prosecuting Counsel Henry Furbelow twice, as he recalled, and he had met Defending Counsel David Cocket at Uphill. The choice of Cocket worried him. Charged with anything more than drunk and disorderly, Troy would opt for the best lawyer money could buy, not a friend – well, not necessarily a friend – and certainly not a friend who conceded, at Troy’s estimate, twenty years’ experience to the prosecution, and who had yet to take silk. He had liked Cocket, he was sharp, he was witty, but could he hold his own against a warhorse as experienced as Henry Furbelow QC?
The first goal was an own goal.
Furbelow rose.
‘My Lord, the prosecution wishes to withdraw the charge of procurement.’
Good bloody grief. Mirkeyn would eat him alive for this. It could mean only one thing. They had taken a chance the day before on drumming up evidence they had failed to find. They were conceding defeat now – a day too late for the good temper of any judge.
To Troy’s amazement Mirkeyn simply accepted this. The court hissed with whispers. Mirkeyn called for silence and when the whispers had stopped Cocket was smiling and Furbelow not. The first victory – however large or small. It bothered Troy, bothered him professionally. A prosecution as sloppy as this had just appeared to be meant sloppy police work. If it had fallen to him to refer a charge for prosecution he would never have let it get this far without the proof. Nobody came out of such chaos looking good. Troy knew exactly what had happened – somewhere along the line they had lost a witness.