Jack sent a detective sergeant to take a full statement from Troy. Troy dictated with all the precision and brevity of a thirty-year copper and the man asked few questions. At the end he gathered up his foolscap sheets and printed forms and said, ‘Dreadful business.’ And it sounded to Troy like some form of condolence.
The Commissioner, Sir Wilfrid Coyn, telephoned not long afterwards. It was, he said, ‘a dreadful business’.
Troy had no respect for Coyn. Indeed, he had come to regard ‘respect’ as a notion thought up by old men to keep order among the young. It had little or nothing to do with any idea that those so demanding of respect might also have to be deserving of it, that the condition might involve some consideration of worth, either in the disciplines of character or in the soundness of action. It was as meaningless as its oft-invoked adjective ‘respectable’. If their positions had been reversed and Coyn were Onions and Onions Coyn, Stan would have called in person, would have assured himself face to face that a matter involving two suspicious deaths, a recently retired policeman of highest rank, and the serving Chief of CID , was wholly above board and wholly without detriment to the force. He’d have raised hell.
The inquest on Clover opened and adjourned. What little Jack had asked of Coyn he appeared to have done. There was not a mention of her real name.
There remained the funeral.
Since Clover had died in the presence of two nurses and a doctor and since a post-mortem had revealed the cause of death in the residue of twenty-eight sleeping pills in her stomach, the coroner saw fit to release the body for burial.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Onions said. ‘Ten o’clock. Acton Cemetery.’
It was a call Troy had dreaded.
‘Stan, I really don’t think I should—’
‘Be there!’ was all Stan said before he hung up.
Troy rode the Central line out to North Acton. It stopped only yards from the cemetery. He could walk from there. It was a morning for the dead, a dampmorning, a miasma of autumnal dew.
It was a scene too familiar. He’d been to two other Onions family funerals: Stan’s wife Marjorie, dead from cancer in the first weeks of the war, and his son-in-law Kenneth in ’56, tortured and murdered by EOKA on Cyprus. He had vivid, etched-in, scorched memories of Valerie Clover, née Onions, clinging for life in the fact of death to her father’s arm and weeping copiously – but, as ever, bitterly rather than sadly. Life cheated Val, swindled her at every turn.
There were few mourners. Stan had left his family behind in Rochdale when he moved to the Yard in the 1920s. He was one of the few working-class coppers ever to be Met commissioner – the rank and the title sat uneasily on him, and he’d been given both so close to retirement that the job had proved a disappointment. He could make so little of it in the three years he held it. And it made no friends. A Met commissioner with a Lancashire accent, black boots, belt and braces, was never going to be acceptable in society. He had been a working copper. And when the work had been pulled from under him at retirement he had taken to his allotment in Acton, where the other gardeners would joke about ‘Sir Stan’, until he told them all to ‘bugger off ’. Troy stood at the back. The other half-dozen people between him and the upright, pale Onions, the bent, the wilted, weeping Valerie, he took to be neighbours. The dutiful and the decent.
All the same he knew he would not get off lightly.
As they moved off, he wondered if he could just calmly walk back to the Underground without saying anything, but Stan seized him by one elbow and muttered, ‘Second car,’ to him, and he found himself sharing an old Rolls-Royce with three housewives from Starch Green – who told him they’d been in the Townswomen’s Guild with ‘Marje’, ‘Did you know Marje?’ – for the ride back to the little house in Tablecloth Terrace and a wake cast in hell.
The small front room was full. Another dozen mourners, mostly women of Stan’s age, had appeared from somewhere, and they muttered and munched on crustless sandwiches of tinned salmon and cucumber sliced so thin it was shaved. The Townswomen’s Guild must have done the catering, Troy concluded. Stan would never waste the crusts off a loaf of bread. And he’d never known Valerie cook a meal.
Troy watched Stan playing host, commanding the ritual, endlessly thanking all these old women for turning out. Valerie stuck close to him, but stood unaided. Pale, frail, bleached by grief, but at – he guessed – forty-four or five, still good-looking. Her daughter’s blowaway blonde hair, the Onions family piercing blue eyes. She had survived the battle with the bottle in a way Charlie would not.
He explained a dozen times that he had worked with Stan up to his retirement and heard a dozen times how interesting that was. Then one of the matrons saw the reality beneath the small talk and told him he needed fattening up. As if to ram home the point, she put a whole plate of sandwiches in his hand, added a couple of cold, crisp sausages, and seemed all set to stand smiling while she personally restored him to good health.
Val crossed the room, seized the plate, slammed it down onto the table and shoved him ahead of her into the back room. ‘I want to hear it from you,’ she said.
She sat down and waited for him to do the same. They sat a couple of feet apart on straight-back chairs like strangers encountering one another in a dentist’s waiting room.
Troy told her. Coming home and finding Jackie. The mad dash to the hospital. The moment the young doctor had come into his cubicle to tell him Jackie had died. It was very matter-of-fact, devoid of emotion. He had long ago learnt not to loose emotion on Val. She would consume all he had and want yet more.
He finished. It seemed stupidly simple in the telling. Val sat silently, her breathing deepand loud, the respectful hubbub of the wake drifting in from the other room.
‘There’s still one thing,’ Val said.
‘What’s that?’ said Troy, with no idea what she’d say next.
‘Did you fuck her, Troy?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Did you fuck my daughter?’
And when Troy said nothing to this too she said it all the louder.
‘Did-You-Fuck-My-Daughter?’
Onions appeared in the doorway, took one look at the two of them and closed the door quietly behind him.
‘Do you want everyone to hear you? Keep your voice down, woman!’
He might as well not have spoken. Valerie got to her feet and began to beat Troy about the head with both hands, clenched into fists, raining blows down on him. He rose instinctively, put his hands to his face – the only defence.
‘Tell me you didn’t fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’
Onions seemed to freeze. Unless he stepped in she would soon hammer Troy to the floor – he’d no strength to stopher. Over and over, louder and louder. ‘Tell me you didn’t fuck her! Tell me you didn’t fuck her!’
Then it stopped. Onions had put his arms around her and pinned hers to her side.
‘For Christ’s sake, Freddie, just tell her what she wants to hear!’
Suddenly Valerie was calm. She stopped struggling. Took Troy’s silence for answer. ‘He can’t. Don’t you see? He can’t.’
‘Freddie, for Christ’s sake, man!’
He let her go. She took Troy’s face in her hands, wiped a streak of blood away from the corner of his mouth with the tipof one thumb. Looked into his eyes, exactly as Troy recalled himself doing with Anna a few months ago.
‘He can’t say he didn’t, because he did. Didn’t you, Freddie?’
All he could see was her. Blue eyes, the same shade as her father’s, the same shade as Jackie’s. And all he could hear was Stan.
‘You stupid, stupid bugger. You must be mad. Completely bloody mad. You must have been mad. Mad, mad, mad. Whatever were you thinking of ?’
Troy could no more answer Stan’s question than he could Valerie’s.