Troy caught a cab to Notting Hill. He thought better of parking a Bentley anywhere in the vicinity of St Simon Square. It was the heart of what had lately become known as Rachman country, after the infamous slum landlord who had died the previous year. St Simon Square looked typical of the poorly maintained London houses that had formed the backbone of his property empire. Tall, once-elegant, terraced houses, surrounding a square, once green with grass and shrubs, now grey with cinders and cordoned off by chainlink fencing. Paint peeled from high windows, rubbish piled up in porticoed doorways. Ironically, two or three houses on either side of the square were boarded up – ironically, as those houses that were not would undoubtedly be bursting at the seams with human life. Rachman had had a simple policy, and he had not been its only practitioner. Buy cheap – and the Church of England in the fifties had been only too willing to sell – mortgage to the hilt, boot out the existing tenants and then fill up with West Indian immigrants – Jamaicans, Barbadians and Trinidadians – and charge them the earth whilst pointing out that the rest of London did not ‘take coloured’. And, of course, this was true. Troy could recall seeing signs in the windows of London lodging houses, when he was a beat bobby before the war, that read, ‘No Coloured, No Irish, No Dogs.’ It was a policy of playing upon the prejudices of the English in order to make it pay. By the late fifties there had been race riots on the streets of West London.
Some time this winter, the door of No. 44 had had a fresh coat of paint. Deep, glossy green. Troy knocked. Heard feet bounding upstairs.
The door swung sharply back. A black face peered out at Troy.
‘Man, when you told us you were the heat you weren’t joking, were you?’
It was Philly the sax player from the Cool in the Shade Club.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I told you the truth.’ Troy had never felt the need to apologise for his profession.
‘An’ now I s’pose you tellin’ me you lookin’ for Caro?’
‘Is she at home?’
Philly said nothing and kept his hand firmly gripped on the edge of the door.
‘I’m not investigating Caro. I’m investigating the death of Paddy Fitz.’
‘She still upset about that.’
Aren’t we all? thought Troy. Philly pulled the door wide and admitted Troy.
‘Right to the back, and down the stairs. She’s in the kitchen.’
Troy descended a rickety, uncarpeted staircase to the basement.
Caro was standing by the gas stove, hair up in a headscarf, no make-up, blue jeans and a dark, billowing, chequered blue shirt many sizes too big. She was stirring a pan with one hand, holding and gently rocking a coffee-coloured infant with the other.
‘Troy,’ she said with the merest hint of surprise. ‘Phil. Take Vivienne will you. I’m sure Troy just wants a quiet word.’
Philly reached over and hefted the two-year-old into his arms.
‘No,’ said the child.
‘Yes,’ said Philly, and he disappeared back up the stairs.
Caro turned off the gas, swept an errant lock of blonde hair back under the headscarf and sat down at the kitchen table. ‘He’s very good with children,’ she said. ‘Loves them.’
It occurred to Troy that nature was somewhat awry if fathers did not, but it seemed as though she had read his mind.
‘Vivienne isn’t Philly’s. She’s Cliff ’s. Cliff ’s all right in his way. But he’s never got any money.’
She seemed disinclined to push the line she had opened. Troy pulled out a chair and sat opposite her.
‘Tara told you I’d be coming?’
‘Yes. I don’t mind. Really I don’t. But I suppose I did think Fitz might have shot himself until . . .’
‘Until I told Tara otherwise?’
She nodded.
‘I need to know what happened between you and Chief Inspector Blood.’
‘I know.’
‘I’ve heard what happened with Tara. I need to know what happened when you were alone with him.’
‘We weren’t alone at first. He split us up as a way of getting at me. He was never easy on me, never pleasant, but after Tara was gone he became horrible. She has a way of deflecting other people’s anger away from me and onto herself. She’s done it since we were children. I was lost without her. Blood sensed this. He’d asked us about men we slept with and Fitz. He wanted us to say we were tarts and we paid Fitz as our pimp. We wouldn’t.
‘That changed when he got me alone. He stopped asking me the same questions over and over again. Of course he’d always come back to them. But there was something else eating away at him. He had a real bee in his bonnet. He got angrier and angrier. I couldn’t understand it. It was as though I’d done something to him personally, offended him personally. It was like nothing quite so much as talking to my own father. I came home one day, I’d been shopping, I’d bought one of those flared ya-ya underskirts that made your skirt stick out like you were Sandra Dee. He went apoplectic. Before I could even try it on he’d torn it out of my hands and stuffed it on the fire. He stood there, ramming the poker into it, boiling with rage. Like it was a personal insult. Blood was like that. “Do you know what you’ve done?” he kept saying. “Do you know what you’ve done?” I said nothing. What could I say? At first I didn’t even know what he was talking about. Then it got clearer. He was talking about Vivienne. Or to be precise, he was talking about sex with black men. Nig-nogs as he called them. “You’ve tainted some very important people,” he said. I still didn’t know what he meant. Tainted? A white woman sharing her body with black men and white men. Decent people, tainted by me. Through me. “What do you think that disgusting little twat of yours is?” he said. “A melting pot? I’ll tell you what it is, a cesspit chock-full of nig-nog come. You taint decent men. You spread your filth across decent men. Important men.” Well, I knew now, didn’t I? I was a cesspit.’
‘Who do you think he meant by important men?’
‘Woodbridge, I suppose. I don’t suppose for one moment he meant Tony. And I don’t suppose he even knew about old Tommy. I was very fond of Tommy. He was the one man we never shared. Tara thought he was fun, but nothing more. I used to give Tommy one from time to time. Kept him happy. Now – I do sound like a whore don’t I?’
Troy said nothing.
‘Then it got really weird. I think Blood lost sight of me. Almost literally. It was as though he couldn’t see me. It was though he saw some kind of composite whore made up of me and Tara and Clover.’
‘He asked about Clover?’
‘Oh boy, did he ask about Clover. You’d think his life depended on it. I didn’t know where she was. There was nothing I could tell him. But it seems as though I was responsible for her. I’d taught her how to fuck black men. I’ve no idea whether she did or not. Absolutely no idea. And I shouldn’t think she needed lessons. But I was responsible. I’d spread my filth, to her and to whoever she was fucking. Then he said it again. I’d tainted very important, very decent men. Only this time I’d done it through Clover. I’d no idea I’d so much power. I didn’t understand any of this. He was just ranting. Bonkers, Troy. Truly bonkers.’
It paid to see the world through other men’s eyes from time to time, he knew. To Percy Blood the Ffitch sisters and Clover must seem like uncontrollable forces, bending and breaking the lines of race and class precisely where they should hold firm. Blood had not mingled the ethos of the two squads he had served; he had merely brought the solidity of one to meet the insubstantiality of the other – the political certainties of Special Branch met the sexual uncertainties of Vice. In women such as these, to a man such as Blood, race, class, politics and sex mixed. Those which should be kept apart flowed into one another, dissolved in the wetness of women. No wonder he was apoplectic.
‘That was when he started on Vivienne. My piccaninny as he called her. He asked me to imagine how my life would look to a magistrate trying to determine her well-being. I was a slut. I was the most notorious whore in the country. I had no husband; I had one man after another – didn’t seem to occur to him that I might have two at once – I had nig-nogs; Vivienne’s father was a nig-nog who paid nothing for her keep. Worse, he was a jazz musician. I don’t know how he knew that. And I knew what jazz musicians were, didn’t I? Drug addicts. All of them. He painted a bleak picture. Said he could have her put into care just like that. He snapped his fingers. I remember that. Horrible big hands and flat, ugly fingernails. Right in front of my eyes. He wanted me to brand myself a whore and Fitz a pimp. I still wouldn’t do it.
‘I met Tara afterwards, when he’d finished with her. She dragged me into a pub. Everybody gawping at us. She stared them down. Told me Blood had said the same thing to her. That he’d take Vivienne away from me. Said she’d made a statement and signed it. Then she said I had to do the same. I said I wouldn’t. She squeezed my hand and told me I was being stupid. Then she was bullying me too, telling me I was always the baby sister – “b’ister” she used to call me – that she was the one with the brains. “Trust me,” she said. “I know what I’m doing.”
‘Blood got me in the next day. He must have known I still wasn’t going to make a statement. He had one typed out. Set it on the table as soon as I walked in the door, before I could sit down. I just shook my head. He slipped behind me, and he hit me so hard I thought I’d throw up. I didn’t, though.’
‘Where?’ said Troy. ‘Where did he hit you?’
Caro twisted her torso, pointed to her back above the hip. A kidney punch.
‘I tried saying no. All I could do was whisper. He hit me again. Other side this time. I signed. I didn’t read a word of it, but I signed. Tara was waiting when he was through with me. I had a smudgy carbon of what I’d signed clenched in my fist. I couldn’t read it. I asked her what I’d signed. When she told me, I wept. It seemed like we’d damned Fitz. I never wanted to do that. Fitz had been good to me. I loved Fitz.’
‘And you determined to tell the truth at the trial?’
‘Troy, please don’t ask me about the trial. I don’t want to talk about the trial. I really don’t.’
He could press for more – he’d get more, but at a price. He did not think her distress a price worth paying. He asked Caro the same question he had asked her sister.
‘Do you know of anyone who would want Fitz dead?’
‘I loved Fitz,’ she said again. ‘Until all this blew up I rather thought everyone else did too.’
Passing the sitting-room door, Troy saw the child playing on the carpet, a noisy game with a wooden hammer, board and blocks. It looked to him to be a game of square pegs in round holes. Philly sat restringing an old guitar.
‘Well, piano man – she OK?’
‘I think so,’ said Troy. ‘And you? Is your band still together?’
‘Yeah, we giggin’ Friday and Saturday. Still one step ahead of the man.’
Troy took out one of his calling cards, the personal ones with the Goodwin’s Court address and his home telephone number.
‘You might call me if the Home Office try to deport you. My brother will be Home Secretary in a few months’ time.’
Philly pulled a face. Mock astonishment. ‘You got to be the best-connected piano player I ever had.’
‘That’s me,’ said Troy.
He had no idea what he might say to Rod if push came to shove. He could try telling him that to break up a working band would be to put half its members on the dole – God knows, it might work.