It was gone four o’clock. Everyone was flagging. The day had been a non-event, a bogging-down in procedure, aptly summed up by the stage whisper of the old tricoteuse, who turned to her daughter and said: ‘Have the tarts been on yet, dear? Have I missed the tarts?’
Half the court, it seemed, had heard her. Cocket turned round, involuntarily perhaps, tried not to grin. Fitz looked over from his seat in the vast emptiness of the dock and smiled again. The same smile he had smiled at Troy. It wasn’t recognition, Troy now realised. It was not an outward motion at all. It was something in Fitz. Some absolute resolution not to be unnerved by it all. As though the man had induced a state of calm, by power of will alone or, more likely, by surrender of will. A beatific, a Buddhist serenity, Troy could not but see it as a dangerous condition. He who isn’t fearful in the dock does not know the power of an English court. He who isn’t at least cautious in any seat in the Old Bailey, from counsel to public gallery, does not know the law of contempt, the absolute power of a judge to imprison without trial.
Mirkeyn’s demonstration of his power was brief. He hammered his gavel and adjourned until the following morning.
When Troy had made his way slowly out from the City benches – letting the women in hats stream out ahead of him – he found a tall, dark, handsome young man waiting for him. His nephew, Alex.
‘You’re just about the last person I expected to see.’
‘Call it a hobby,’ said Troy. ‘It may well be all that’s left of my job. However, you’re not the last person I was expecting. In fact I would like a word with you.’
‘I have to file, Freddie. I should be running hell for leather for Fleet Street right now.’
‘Then get me a cab. We can share a cab as far as the Post.’
‘Quicker if I walk at this time of day, but I’ll happily find you a cab.’
Troy stood on the pavement, while Alex waved his arm at indifferent cabbies and elbowed the competition aside.
‘I merely wanted to ask you why they’ve dropped the procurement charge.’
But Alex had bagged a cab and bundled Troy into it.
‘Freddie, why don’t you call me? I’ll be happy to give you all the dope some other time.’
Alex banged the door shut. The passing thought ‘they grow up so quickly’ passed through Troy’s mind, but he consigned it to the ragbag of poor thinking almost at once. He’d been brushed off and that was all there was to it.
He was about to tell the cabbie they should go, when the door opened again. He assumed it was Alex, thinking better of his haste. But it was an old, familiar face. That of Percy Blood, Chief Inspector at Scotland Yard. An ugly, old-school copper. The old school that favoured black boots and grubby brown mackintoshes. They went nicely with the greasy strands of hide-the-bald-spot hair combed in furrows left to right across his dome, and nicely too with the bitten, nicotined fingernails. He was fifty-five or thereabouts. Long since passed over, he would see out his days as a chief inspector, and this had lent to his naturally unpleasant disposition an edge of bitter resentment. He was a plodder. If he were in Troy’s section Troy would have put him out to an early pension.
‘Mr Blood. Can I offer you a lift to the Yard?’
‘No thank you, sir. I’ve a squad car waiting.’
‘Then how can I helpyou?’
‘I saw you. In the court.’
‘Yes?’
‘I was wondering. If your interest in the case was professional like. The Yard said nowt to me.’
‘I’m on sick leave, Mr Blood. As I’m sure you know. I’m simply passing the time. Call it academic interest.’
He looked blankly back at Troy as though the phrase meant nothing to him.
‘So – you’re not . . . you’re not . . . like . . .’
‘No. I’m not. But since you’re here I do have a question.’
Again the blank look as though they spun words from a different yarn in Manchester and twenty years in London had not taught him the lingo.
‘When did you transfer from Special Branch to the Vice Squad?’
Blood pretended to think about this, pretended to come up with nothing.
‘A while back,’ he said, and closed the door.
Stupid, thought Troy, it was a simple question, and the answer simply found if he just called Records. He’d been brushed off again, but it didn’t much matter.