Jack took Troy’s keys. A new doctor took his blood pressure and listened to his heart, but then discharged him. He was home by ten o’clock. The front door propped open, morning light streaking down the yard, projecting his shadow towards the inhumanly huge feet of a waiting, uniformed constable.
The man saluted and said, ‘Scene of Crime still inside, sir.’
It was as near to barring Troy’s way as the man would dare. Troy stuck his head around the door, just in time to hear the pop of a flash bulb. A police photographer was shooting the chair and the coffee table from all angles. A fingerprint man was dusting doorknobs and tut-tutting to himself. Jack sat on an upright chair between the hallstand and the grandfather clock, jotting notes into his little black book.
‘Ah, Freddie. Just in time. Prints are asking if you’ve had many visitors lately?’
‘None at all,’ said Troy. ‘Stan was the last and that was the day he brought Jackie round.’
Was that a glimmer of guilt he saw in Jack’s eyes? No one had been to see him. Not a damn soul. Not Swift Eddie, not Crazy Kolankiewicz, not Jack, not anybody.
Jack folded his notebook. ‘If you’re fit enough to talk we should find somewhere quiet and let this lot do their job.’
‘The Salisbury,’ Troy suggested. ‘Won’t be open for another hour. We can bang on the door till Spike opens and have the place to ourselves.’
Spike yelled, ‘Bugger off ’ through the closed door, and, ‘Go home, you drunken bastards.’
Jack rattled the door and said, ‘Open up! Police!’
What was traditional was also effective. The door inched back. Spike’s head appeared. ‘Good Lord. Mr Troy, and Mr Wildeve too. It’s not often we get the pleasure of both of you at once. In fact, it can mean only one thing. Another dead ’un?’
‘Yes,’ said Troy. ‘Over the road. In the Court.’
Spike ushered them in. ‘What, right on your own doorstep?’
‘Closer,’ said Troy.
‘Jesus Christ,’ Spike said softly. He stepped behind the bar and shoved two glasses under the optics. ‘On the ’ouse,’ he said, and left them to it.
The two glasses sat either side of a tiny round table. The smell of the brandy almost brought Troy to retching. Neither of them wanted it.
Jack could not sit. He seemed to Troy to be at that stage of exhaustion where to settle would be to sleep. He pulled back a chair, slung his coat over it, and paced the room, rubbing at his forehead, occasionally screwing his fists into his eyes. His notebook stayed buttoned up in his pocket. Troy rolled up his coat for a pillow and stretched full length on a mock-leather bench beneath the window. He could feel the rumble of the traffic in St Martin’s Lane, he could see the fancy plasterwork of the ceiling if he looked straight up, and if he twisted his neck he could hold a conversation with Jack’s knees.
They were wooden figures in a Swiss weather house – at opposite poles of activity.
‘Let’s go over the basics one more time,’ Jack began. ‘Jackie was Clover Browne?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Stan knew this, or he just suspected it?’
‘He knew.’
‘And Clover Browne was the third woman in the Fitz business?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how many people knew this?’
‘Every hack in London I should think. No one ran with it because of the libel laws, and because Vice apparently couldn’t find her and hence could not call her as a witness. I doubt any newspaper wanted to be the first to name her. Stan’s instincts were right. If he could just keep Jackie from blundering into the press she was probably safe, and the good name of Onions safe with it.’
‘It was Percy Blood’s investigation, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And Blood never identified Clover as Jackie? Hence the procurement charge was dropped?’
‘Without Clover the charge was nonsense. It was a waste of time charging Fitz with something so weak, but then so was so much else of what was produced as evidence. I went to the Old Bailey most days. It was a botched case. I told Coyn as much. I don’t think the press know. Rod’s son Alex has been making all the running in the papers, and he’s never let slip to me that he knew who Clover was. And if he knew he’d have asked. He’d have come to me with a stream of questions.’
‘Do you think Fitz knew?’
‘Knew what?’
‘Knew that he was entertaining the granddaughter of a senior policeman.’
‘I’ve no idea. It would not have bothered him if he did. He collected celebrity and pseudo-celebrity. I mean, it even seemed to amuse him to know me. I cannot work out whether he enjoyed risk or whether he simply had no concept of it. As far as Fitz was concerned, risk was probably stealing or forging or killing – I don’t think he recognised a notion of social risk. Rules were for idiots. Rules were not for him. Rules were made to be broken. But then, Fitz’s graspof reality struck me as being as flimsy as the case against him. I could not get him to see that the judge meant to see him go down. He might have got off at appeal, but I really think this morning would have seen Fitz sent down for a couple of years. He’d have done a few months before the appeal, and you know what a meal the hard boys would make of a man like Fitz. Couldn’t get that throughtohim.’
‘You don’t think he might have thought it through after the two of you parted, and thought the worst of it?’
‘It’s possible. Of course it’s possible. I might have tipped him over the edge. But I know this – he would never have chosen a gun as his ticket to the next world. Anything but a gun. He hated guns. Went right through the war as an officer without even touching one. And why would any doctor have need of a gun to kill himself? Why would a man as fastidious as Fitz leave a mess? He could have opened his doctor’s Gladstone bag, swallowed a handful of Nembutal and gone happily to Valhalla.’
‘So we agree.’
‘Do we?’
‘There is no evidence, at least none I’ve found at this very early stage, to suggest that Fitz was anything but alone at the time of his death. He’d given Pritch-Kemp a key and he’s spent the past few nights with Fitz. Company, I suppose. Stopped him thinking. Pritch-Kemp let himself in some time after midnight, as he seems to have done every night this week, and found Fitz dead. An army-issue Webley still in his hand.’
‘But?’
‘It was murder. I know in my bones Fitz was murdered.’
‘And Clover?’
‘How much faith do we put in coincidence?’
‘It’s a pretty cool customer who pumps a young woman full of drugs in Soho and then nips off to Paddington to shoot someone.’
‘But . . . as you said in the hospital, you have doubts. No reason to want to kill herself.’
This was a familiar moment, one they used to reach so often in cases. Jack was appealing to Troy to support his instinct. The vagaries of rank, the vicissitudes of ill-health meant nothing. Jack was saying, ‘Let’s be a team.’ And Troy could not respond. He could not tell Jack that he knew in his bones that Jackie Clover was murdered. He knew nothing in his bones. His body talked to him of raging silence.
Jack put his coat back on. Looked at his watch. Troy swung his feet to the ground and found he had but one thought and that idle.
‘Two murders,’ Troy said. ‘And I just happen to be the last person to see both victims alive. Now that is a coincidence.’
‘Well, I’ll arrest you if you really want me to. But the last people to see Fitz alive were half a dozen ill-assorted hacks from Fleet Street. I doubt Fitz got past his own front door without running the gauntlet. But then, that’s why young Jackie was with you, wasn’t it? No hacks on your step.’
‘Quite – and as far as the hospital and the hacks are concerned she’s still Clover Browne. You’ll have to talk to Coyn. I can’t nobble the coroner, but he can.’
‘You really think you can keep it a secret?’
‘I’d hate to face Stan if we can’t.’
Jack strode to the door, pulling on the handle as he said his last words to Troy.
‘I’ll try and keepin touch. There’ll be a stink of course. Coyn will lose his bottle. But we owe Stan a bit of discretion, I think.’
If this was Jack’s way of saying he’d hold the press at arm’s length, then Stan would not be the only one thankful for a bit of discretion.