‘I call Tara Ffitch,’ Furbelow declaimed.
Troy had last seen Tara at Uphill, naked under the thrusting buttocks of Tim Woodbridge. She made her way to the witness box, the whisper of anticipation circling the room and dying away in a slow diminuendo as she did so. The star had just descended the golden staircase, the house lights were down and the spot upon her.
She had chosen a deliberately muted look, hair up, no hat and a black two-piece. The flat shoes looked to Troy to be against her nature, but then she was, he thought, trying hard to make herself acceptable in the eyes of little men, and in heels she must have touched six foot or more – a metaphor too far. She gazed around the courtroom – unashamed – a stern look at Furbelow, the making of a smile for Cocket and was that an eyebrow raised at Troy himself or merely his own wishful thinking? She did not look at the dock.
Furbelow set out to establish Tara’s sexual history. Cocket objected at once and Mirkeyn overruled him. It was what the crowd had bayed for. The tale of a good girl from a good home in the shires who had kicked over the traces in the wake of the unfortunate early death of her mother and embarked on a life of promiscuity. It would have been unremarkable in the extreme if narrated by a man. It wasn’t Troy’s life, but it was the life of many men he knew. It was Charlie’s and it bore a more than passing resemblance to the life of Troy’s old colleague Superintendent Wildeve, a handsome young copper when they had met during the war, courting every Wren in sight, and now a handsome copper untrapped by marriage in early middle-age and still as promiscuous as ever. And no one thought the worse of him for it.
It seemed to Troy that, laboured though it was, Furbelow was trying to establish the link between promiscuity and prostitution. He was taking his time. Cocket raised no further objections, sat quietly and seemed to Troy to take no notes while the entire press box scribbled furiously. All the same, they had adjourned for lunch and reconvened before Furbelow found his target, and along the way he’d made damn sure that every newspaper in the land had got its headlines for the following morning.
By early afternoon Furbelow had coaxed this narrative – breathless in its courtroom hush to the extent that Tara’s exasperation could be heard in exhalation by all – almost to the present day, to the cohabitation of Tara and Caro and Fitz at Dreyfus Mews.
‘What was the basis of your presence at the Dreyfus Mews house?’
‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand.’
‘Were you lovers?’
‘No. We were friends.’
‘You and your younger sister and Dr Fitzpatrick shared a common abode merely as friends?’
‘Yes.’
‘Who owned the property?’
‘As far as I know Fitz . . . Dr Fitzpatrick owned the house.’
‘And you and your sister were his guests?’
‘Yes.’
‘How long did you live at Dreyfus Mews?’
‘Almost four years.’
‘As guests? Wouldn’t the word lodger be more apt than guest?’
‘If you like.’
‘And as lodgers did you pay rent?’
‘Not as such, no.’
Troy could hear the changes in the tone and pace of Tara’s answers. She had narrated her tearaway teens and twenties with a sense of boredom with her own life. She looked for all the world like a reluctant celebrity cornered by Eamonn Andrews for This Is Your Life, going through the motions for the sake of family and friends, listening patiently as significance she did not share was attached to incidents she had long since dismissed. Now she was, he thought, cautious. An invisible boundary had been crossed. For the first time since taking the stand she had looked directly at Fitz. Troy knew the look. He was a poor copper if he didn’t. It said two things. It said, ‘Sorry’ and it said, ‘Lies’. Whatever she said from now on he knew to take with a pinch of salt.
‘If not as such,’ Furbelow said, ‘then as what?’
‘We – that is my sister and I – gave him money on an occasional basis.’
‘And what were these occasions?’
‘Usually occasions when we had money.’
‘And when did you have money? You have, I need hardly remind you, already stated that you have had no paid work since 1960.’
‘We had money when we were given money.’
‘And who gave you money?’
‘Men,’ said Tara. ‘Men gave us money.’
Mirkeyn silenced the courtroom buzz with his gavel and glared at the gallery.
‘Why would men give you money?’
Tara kept her eyes on Furbelow, as though burning a hole in the man’s face.
‘Men gave us money, because they wanted to.’
‘Men gave you money out of the goodness of their hearts?’
‘Not exactly. Men gave us money because we pleased them.’
‘Pleased them sexually?’
‘Yes.’
‘And where did this sexual pleasing take place?’
‘There was no one place. Lots of places.’
‘But since you lived at Dreyfus Mews can the court not safely conclude that you pleased men at that address?’
‘Yes. We had men at home.’
‘Men who then paid you for your services?’
‘Yes.’
‘One man in particular?’
‘Yes.’
‘And who might this one man be?’
‘The Professor.’
‘And you and your sister had sex with the Professor at Dreyfus Mews for money?’
Cocket rose to speak for the first time in what seemed like hours.
‘Objection.’
‘Your grounds, Mr Cocket, your grounds,’ Mirkeyn replied.
‘M’lud. It is perfectly obvious to the court that both the witness and my learned friend know the name of the Professor, in which case he should be named. And if I am wrong, and they do not know the name of the man so referred to, then the evidence amounts to no more than hearsay and as such I would suggest is inadmissible.’
This caused Mirkeyn no great deal of thought.
‘From the first reporting of this case, and I mean by that many weeks before it was brought before me in this court, the names of individuals have been dragged through the mud in what I can only call a frenzy of innuendo. I will not further that process. There will be no mud-slinging in my court. Overruled. Pray proceed, Mr Furbelow.’
Troy found this astounding. Mirkeyn was admitting evidence concerning a material witness whom the prosecution were being allowed to keep anonymous.
‘Now, Miss Ffitch. The Professor paid you for sex, did he not?’
‘Yes.’
‘How often? Every time you had sex?’
‘Yes. More or less.’
‘And how much.’
‘It varied. Sometimes he’d leave fifty, sometimes a hundred.’
The court gasped. Troy saw two men in the jury turn to each other and exchange whispers. He did not need to hear them. There could be only one line: ‘They must be a bloody good screw to be worth a hundred quid!’
‘And how much of this money did you subsequently give to the defendant?’
‘That varied too.’
‘Well – would you say half ?’
‘No – less than that.’
‘A third then?’
‘Perhaps. Yes, about a third.’
‘Miss Ffitch. How long did you and your sister continue this relationship whereby the Professor gave you money for sexual intercourse at Dreyfus Mews and you in turn paid a significant proportion of that money to the defendant in lieu of rent?’
‘About three years.’
Well, it may have taken all day but Furbelow had done it. He’d laid before the court clear evidence that Fitz had lived off the immoral earnings of Tara and Caro. It was just that Troy did not believe a word of it. And all this without a single mention of the name ‘Woodbridge’.
It was almost four o’clock. Mirkeyn wound up for the day.
Troy sat and let the rush go by. Which of them would accost him today? There was no sign of Blood, Alex dashed past him and shot him a ‘Not now’ look, and he found himself watching Dame Rebecca slowly approach. She stopped, smiled at him, turned to smile at someone out of sight on his right, whispered ‘later’ and walked on. He could feel the presence, almost the shadow cast over him, and twisted in his seat to see at whom she had smiled. It was Onions. Sir Stanley Onions, former Commissioner of the Met, his old boss, mentor and what-have-you. He should be on his allotment in Acton digging up spuds, or sitting on an upturned orange box smoking a Woodbine – any of the pleasures of retirement. What was he doing here?
‘We should have a bit of a chat,’ he said.
Troy hated Onions’s bits of chat. They weren’t bitty and they weren’t chatty.
It was a walking-stick day for Stan. There were days when he needed his walking stick and there were days when he didn’t. There were days when he carried one, and days when he didn’t – and the two categories did not necessarily coincide. He led off north towards Smithfield at a cracking pace, Troy bursting his frail lungs to keep up with him, the stick crashing down like a bolt from heaven, fit to crack paving stones.
He led Troy to a caff. Much the same as the one he had shared with Rebecca West, but catering to the market porters, and at four in the afternoon all but empty and anxious to close.
Onions ordered two teas.
‘We shut in fifteen minutes,’ said the bloke in the greasy apron.
‘Bring ’em over,’ Onions said, sounding every inch the copper he used to be. Why, thought Troy, can I never sound like a copper?
Onions hooked his stick across the back of the chair and sat down.
‘I’ve been wanting a word,’ he said.
‘Oh,’ said Troy. ‘How did you know I’d be at the Bailey?’
‘I didn’t. I’d’ve been round to see you straight after. I came to get a look at the bugger for meself.’
‘Oh, I see. Professional curiosity.’
‘Professional poppycock. It’s our Jackie I want to see you about.’
‘Our Jackie’ – the habitual Lancastrian possessive – ‘Our Jackie’ was his granddaughter, only child of Onions’s only child.
‘Jackie?’ asked Troy with a breathless innocence he would come to see as plain stupid.
‘The lass’s gone off the rails. More’n a year now. Always a bit wayward, but this is too far by half. You know ’er. You know what she’s like.’
Troy didn’t. He could not remember when he’d last seen little Jackie.
‘I might’ve known she’d be the one to fall in with a fast set.’
Troy had not heard the word ‘fast’ used in quite that way for more than thirty years. It was a bit Noël Coward. And he’d no idea what Stan was on about.
‘Fast?’ he echoed.
‘Parties. Wild parties. Reefer smokers. You know.’
‘I see,’ said Troy, not seeing.
‘That’s why I had to see the bugger for meself. See what kind of a man he is.’
‘You mean Fitz? I don’t follow. What has Fitz to do with Jackie?’
‘Everything. He’s the Svengali in the whole bloody mess!’
‘And Jackie’s Trilby?’
‘No. Our Jackie’s “Clover”. Leastways that’s what she calls herself. Clover Browne.’
Troy’s heart sank. It was a dreadful thought, Sir Somebody Something . . . Sir Stanley Onions? He had never thought of Onions as Sir Anybody Anything. He was Stan. The title went with the job. You became Commissioner of the Met and they bunged you a knighthood. No one had ever turned it down; Troy did not even know if one could turn it down. And if he became Commissioner – all sins, if not forgiven, then safely buried – he would be Sir Frederick Troy. It didn’t bear thinking about. Not for a moment had it occurred to him that Stan was Sir Somebody Something and that Jackie Clover – good God, the name alone should have told him – was Clover Browne.
‘You mean Jackie is the third woman the press have been looking for? She’s one of Fitz’s—’
He thought he might have said ‘harem’ or ‘set’ next, but ‘set’, as Stan had demonstrated, was a noun that went only with ‘fast’, and he never got the chance.
‘One of his tarts?’ Onions bellowed. ‘Of course she wasn’t one of his tarts! She’s a virgin! For Christ’s sake she’s only sixteen!’
‘Seventeen,’ Troy blurted out.
‘Eh?’ said Stan. ‘What makes you say that?’
Mental arithmetic was not Troy’s strong point. Right now he felt as though his life depended on it. He tried to see the figures in his mind and the only figure he could see was Jackie’s, stepping out of her knickers in the ruins of Uphill House, and the memory of that unabashed teenage kiss. A mental image for which, for all he knew, Onions might well thrash him in the street. He thrashed around with the subtraction and came up as if by magic with the words ‘1946. She was born in 1946, wasn’t she?’
‘Aye, she was.’
The glare of suspicion Troy had seen in his eyes began to fade.
‘Surprised you remember. But it was September. She’s not seventeen till this month.’
Damn Fitz. Damn Fitz and his lies. If what the girl had told Troy was true, that she’d been knocking around with Fitz since the previous summer, then she had been under age. The question was, who had been knocking her?
‘I’ve had a word with her mother.’
Jackie’s mother was Valerie – ‘our Valerie’ as Stan would call her. Valerie Clover, née Onions, was, Troy thought, an hysteric. But then that was pretty much what her father thought too. One of Stan’s jobs in recent years had simply been to try to keep her sober. Years ago – in the last summer before the Second World War, when they were both single – Val and Troy had been an item. What he hoped Stan never knew was that they had been an item once more in the early fifties, when Valerie’s husband Ken had been away at the Korean War. When Ken had been killed in the skirmish over Cyprus in 1956 Stan had brought Val back from Manchester to live in London. Troy had avoided her ever since. All the same, they managed to end up in the same room once a year or so. He had come to dread such meetings, to dread even the mention of her name. Few people gave him more hell than our Valerie.
‘How is Val?’ he asked, dutifully going through the motions.
‘Dryin’ out. She’ll be out and about in a couple of weeks. Like I said, I’ve had a word with her. We’ve decided. Something’s got to be done about Jackie.’
Troy could not agree more.
‘She’s got to be . . .’
Stan searched for the right words and came up with the ambiguous ‘. . . taken off the streets. Right now, I’d put her in a nunnery if they’d take ’er.’
The phrase ‘never darken my door again’ came unbidden to Troy’s mind.
‘But I can’t. So we’ve got to stick her somewhere.’
‘Quite,’ said Troy, for the sake of saying something.
‘We’ve agreed. We want you to have her.’
‘What?’
‘You’re on sick leave, aren’t you?’
‘Yes, but—’
‘You could take her in. Just for a few days. Till the trial’s over. Till the press lose interest. After all, it’s the last place the bastards’ll ever look for her.’
Troy dearly wanted to say no. He found the word would not form on his lips. It was a preposterous suggestion. It was a bag with too many cats in.
‘Stan . . . I . . . I . . .’
‘It’ll not be for long. Just let the dust settle. It’s open and shut. Jury’ll not be out ten minutes. The bugger goes down, and two days later he’s yesterday’s news and they wrap fish ’n’ chips with his headlines.’
‘Stan, it’s not that simple. It’s not going to be that simple—’
But Stan’s graspof the trial and mistrial of Patrick Fitzpatrick was nothing next to his absolute conviction that Troy should have Jackie Clover at Goodwin’s Court.
‘Whatever!’ Stan dismissed any argument. ‘It’s good of you, Freddie. I’ll bring the minx round tonight. ’Bout half past seven.’
Stan got to his feet, unhooked his walking stick from the back of the chair. Troy still hadn’t said ‘yes’ and if he did he doubted Stan would hear. He had railroaded Troy, but then he’d always had that talent, and if at any point in their long relationship Troy had ever kidded himself it was rank not talent, he knew now. He watched the table shake as the beast rose, watched Onions’s tea sloparound in his saucer, watched the bull hobble off to some other china shop, whispered goodbye and wondered how he had ever got himself into such a pickle.