Seventy-one Marsh Lane was an Edwardian villa. Red and white tiles in diamond formation led up a short path from a rickety, rotten garden gate, past a ragged blue hydrangea to a maroon front door with a leaded stained-glass window depicting a square-rigger in full sail set in its upper half. It was the sort of door to make John Betjeman lyrical or tearful or both. It was the sort of house, the sort of street, to cheer the heart of a nostalgic man. Hardly a parked car, not a twitter from a trannie, only the roosting H-shaped television aerials on the chimney stacks told you it was the seventh decade of the century rather than the first. That and the hideous 1950s fill-in where half the terrace had succumbed to a bomb in 1940. The fifties had put up flats between terraced houses with no regard for architectural style in much the same way Troy’s brother put on socks. Nothing ever matched. It had been an era in which nothing matched. Troy would always think of it as the odd-socks age.
He banged the brass knocker across the topof the letterbox.
A small rodent of a woman opened the door. A woman in her mid-fifties, he thought. The spiralling remnants of a home perm. Not a trace of make-up. A nylon housecoat in pink and pale blue, its sleeves stopping far short of the sleeves of the woollen dress she wore beneath it. She looked to Troy to be the kind of houseproud woman who might well spend all her time in such a housecoat, never far from a duster. There was a yellow duster in her hand as she spoke to him.
‘Yes.’
‘Good morning, Mrs Blood. Is your husband at home?’
She scrutinised him, put one hand to her eyes to shield them from the sun slanting across his shoulder. ‘It’s Mr Troy, isn’t it?’
‘Yes. Is the Chief Inspector at home?’
‘He’s not expecting you.’
‘I was passing.’
She let the obvious lie go by, pulled the door wide to admit him, quickly shook her duster in the open air and pushed the door to.
‘He’s in there. I’ll tell him you’re here.’
She crossed the hall and opened the door opposite. Troy could see Blood beyond her, sitting on the far side of a green-baize table, head bent over something, hands poised on a puzzle or a kit of some sort.
‘Percy,’ she said.
Blood did not seem to hear her.
‘Percy!’ she said the louder, and Blood looked up, looked from her, with annoyance in his eyes, to Troy, with evident surprise.
He stood up, put down the model ship he’d been working on, still clutching an odd-shaped piece of the kit in his other hand.
‘Mr Troy.’
‘Mr Blood.’
Blood looked at his wife.
‘All right, Peggy. It’s all right, you can leave us now.’
He dismissed her as readily as any servant. As Troy approached the table, Blood pointed at the chair opposite him, but glared at his wife, hovering in the doorway.
‘Later, Peggy, later,’ he said.
Still she did not move, then Blood waved his hand. Troy heard the soft click of the door behind him.
Blood put down the sheet of extruded plastic he had been holding.
‘I won’t shake hands, sir. The glue, d’ye see?’
He picked up a rag, poured a drop of thinner onto it and began to rub at his hands, working the solvent down the side of his fingernails, looking at his hands, not at Troy.
The room seemed to Troy to be a shrine to the navy, a personal museum of ships and sailing. Everywhere he looked there were models of ships in balsa and plastic, or passepartout-mounted prints of ships. Tall ships, steamships, ships in bottles. Even the lamp by which Blood worked was a familiar, unlovesome object from the 1930s – a lamp in the shape of a galleon, a Maltese cross upon the foresail, an English leopard on the mizzen, looking as though they’d been cut from dried skin. The room was so very thirties, so very suburbia. No sign of television; a large wireless, still tuneable to lost stations such as Droitwich and Hilversum, topped by a large goldfish bowl, home to a pair of orbiting goldfish; the disused fireplace, neatly, absurdly ornamented by a fan of folded paper; a brass holder for tongs, poker and brush; the rising sun patterned rug, its beams radiating outward from the hearth; the ashtrays precarious on the chair arms; the hand-embroidered antimacassars creaseless upon the backs. It was lost in time – perhaps many English homes now were. Would someone come upon his home in ten or twenty years’ time and think it all so quaintly dated?
Troy looked at the box lid in front of him. This was the quick version of model-making. Warships by numbers, available in every Woolworth’s the length and breadth of the land. Aimed at children, but then he’d once whiled away a wet Saturday himself making a model of a Spitfire. This specimen was huge.
‘May I?’ said Troy, and turned the lid towards him.
‘The Hood,’ said Blood simply.
Troy doubted there was anyone in his generation – and Blood’s – who would not have recognised the silhouette of this ship. HMS Hood. Launched when Troy had been five or six years old. At 42,000 tons the largest battleship afloat. The pride of the Royal Navy for twenty-one years, until its successor – the next shipto be the largest shipafloat, the Bismarck – had sent it to the bottom of the Atlantic in less than two minutes. Troy knew the death toll – they all did – 1,400. He knew the survivors – they all did – three out of 1,400.
Blood put down the rag. The smell of polystyrene thinner pervaded the air. Ever after Troy would associate that smell with Blood.
‘My brother was on the Hood. Chief Petty Officer. Thirty-five years old. Married. Three kids.’
Blood paused. He was looking straight at Troy without, it seemed, seeing him.
‘Not one . . .’ Troy said.
‘No,’ Blood said. ‘Not one of the survivors.’
Troy saw the pattern beneath the curriculum vitae. May 1941. Blood had volunteered so keenly, so persistently, in the wake of his brother’s death. That was why his first choice had been the navy. That was why his hobby was model ships, if something so obviously total, so obviously obsessive, could be as simple as a hobby. He had probably bought the house for the pattern on its front door.
Blood threw down the rag, sniffed at his fingers and, satisfied with the smell, straightened the ragged sleeves of his cardigan. Perhaps, too, there would come a time in Troy’s life when the unexpected visitor would come across him in such a cosseting garment, darned at the elbows, frayed at the cuffs, taking his private comfort from a public world?
‘Tell me, Mr Troy. What brings you my way?’
Hit him hard, Troy thought.
‘It’s really very simple. Did you tell Caroline Ffitch you’d have her child taken away?’
‘I explored that possibility.’
Troy was gobsmacked. The precision of the man’s evasion. A perfect sentence in the art of understatement. It was almost the last thing he’d expected of him. Round one to Blood, and Blood had the second punch in before Troy could draw breath.
‘’Scuse me asking, sir, but exactly what case are you investigating?’
‘Just answer me, Percy. Humour me.’
‘Did I threaten the Ffitch woman? Is that what you’re asking?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then that’s my answer. Yes. I threatened her. I told her I’d put the council onto her, onto the way she cared for her kid. And there was nothing illegal about that. I did no more than you’d have done in the same situation. I had a witness I knew in me bones was lying to me. Call it copper’s instinct, sir. Find me a copper who says he doesn’t believe in copper’s instinct and I’ll show you a poor copper. Tell me you don’t believe in such a thing as copper’s instinct and I’ll call you a liar. All I did was use what I had to get her to tell me the truth.’
‘She says you hit her.’
‘Well, she would, wouldn’t she? Did she show you any bruises? Did she show anyone any bruises?’
Troy knew that one of the talents Blood would have learnt in ten years in Special Branch was how not to leave marks when he hit a suspect.
‘I’d have done it too,’ Blood said. ‘And the courts would’ve backed me. A single woman, with a bastard child, seeing the kid when it suits her, keeping the company of nig-nogs and reefer addicts, and earning her keep by parading her fanny. If I’d shopped her, the kid would have been taken into care and the magistrate would have backed it with a court order. I threatened her with nothing I couldn’t follow through. It wasn’t idle, it wasn’t malicious and it wasn’t illegal. It was horsetrading. She had something I wanted and I had something on her. We came to an arrangement. And if that strikes you as odd or bent, then, sir, I don’t think we’ve been serving in the same force these last twenty years.’
Blood was red with the tinge of anger. He bought himself a moment of time. Got up from his chair. Put the lid on the box and set it down on a side table. It seemed to Troy that he had symbolically cleared the space between them.
‘You interviewed her more than a dozen times. Bit excessive, isn’t it?’
Blood stood gripping the back of the chair – his hands locked onto it like big, boiled crabs – broad palms and stubby red fingers.
‘Seventeen times to be precise. And the answer’s no. I did what my duty required of me. If I’d had to have her in twenty times I’d have done it.’
‘Why do you think she changed her mind in court?’
‘Did she, sir? I wasn’t in court. I was a witness myself, if you recall.’
‘She retracted her statement.’
‘And her sister didn’t. If you ask me the two of them had been rowing before the case came up. I think they fell out among themselves. According to the papers I read, the woman was hysterical, and when the prosecuting brief asked her why she’d signed a false statement she couldn’t tell him. I doubt the jury would have been taken in by it.’
‘We’ll never know,’ said Troy.
‘No sir, we’ll never know.’
Blood crossed the room. He’d seized the upper hand, the minute he’d stood up, and now he was showing Troy the door.
‘It was good of you to call, sir.’
He opened the door to the hall. Troy rolled with it and let himself be steered to the front door.
‘I wasn’t aware you were back at the Yard, sir.’
‘And I’, said Troy, ‘was not aware that you weren’t.’
‘Sick leave, sir. Happens to the best of us one time or another.’
Blood took on the colours of the rainbow as he stood for a moment behind the stained-glass door, with the noon sun shining through the sailing ship. Then he twisted the doorknob, and white light washed in. There could be but one sentence left in him before he ushered Troy across the threshold.
‘It was good of you to call, sir. But I don’t answer to you, and if you call again I’d be grateful of a bit of notice. I’ll have a repfrom the Police Association, and you’ll have an officer from A10 with you, won’t you, sir?’
One small thing was still nagging at Troy. At the best of times it was hard to believe in coincidence, even though this so obviously was one. He asked all the same.
‘You saw the medical officer on the 19th? Is that right?’
‘I don’t recall.’
‘You should. It was the day Fitzpatrick died.’
Blood roared. ‘Peggy!!!’
And the mouse-woman scurried to his side.
‘Mr Troy would like a word. He’s a question he wants to ask you. He’d like to know where I was on the night of the 19th. Tell ’im, Peggy.’
‘Percy was here with me. We had our tea and we listened to the wireless. There was a concert on the Light. Dance band. We went to bed about half past ten,’ she said.
Blood slammed the door on him. It was all very pat and precise. But then, Blood was a career copper and precision was his business. He had not even asked what day of the week the 19th was – nor had his wife – and Troy was not at all sure that this meant anything. He could hammer on the door and ask Percy Blood what dance band had been playing, but he would know – Joe Loss, Ted Heath – he’d know.