‘The Commissioner’s been in again,’ said Clark.
‘No problem,’ Troy replied.
‘And Mr Wiggins.’
Troy had had so little to do with Superintendent Wiggins. He ran Vice. A shady bunch of nogoodniks for whom Troy was very happy to have no responsibility. Wiggins was no problem either. He’d have stuck in his two penn’orth sooner or later. Offended by Troy’s disregard of procedural courtesies. Troy would smooth ruffled feathers and give it to him straight. The occasion arose sooner than he had expected.
Troy was sipping at a cup of nut-brown, stewed and scummy Scotland Yard tea in the canteen. It was late in the afternoon, and he felt fairly safe from attention. Then he saw the dark blur above him and looked up to see Dudley Wiggins, a man in the fierce grip of five o’clock shadow.
‘Mind if join you, sir?’
Troy showed an open hand and beckoned him. Wiggins sat down and plonked his cup and saucer on the yellow-spotted Formica tabletop. Half an inch of tea slopped over into the saucer. Troy looked at his face – a man ten years older than he, grey and lined and worn out by the job – and realised why moustaches such as Wiggins sported were called tea-strainers.
Wiggins poured back the spillage and slurped. ‘I hear you’ve had a chat with Percy Blood.’
If Wiggins knew it was now pretty certain most of the Yard knew. It had taken a mere five hours to be common knowledge. Troy saw no reason to lie to the man. He could like it or he could lumpit.
‘I have,’ said Troy. ‘I know I should have told you first, but I acted quickly and I wanted to be certain Percy got no hint of my arrival. There wasn’t a lot of time for the protocol.’
And that was as near an apology as the man was going to get.
‘Oh, I don’t mind about that. Blood’s not one of mine.’
‘But he’s on your squad?’
‘I got stuck wi’ Percy Blood. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I never asked for him. I got stuck with him. The AC just called me one day last May and told me I’d got Blood as DCI. What I thought didn’t matter Sweet Fanny Adams. I didn’t want the bugger on my squad. I didn’t want a career Special Branch copper trained in all the dirty tricks running my lads in Soho.’
Troy could believe this. Wiggins didn’t want a member of the political police working in the Vice Squad and being privy to the countless little fiddles that Wiggins’s men ran from day to day.
‘I’m an old-school copper. I don’t hold wi’ people like Percy Blood.’
This was fatuous, conceited, arrogant to the point of banality. Wiggins had probably served the best part of forty years, Troy had served twenty-seven and Blood had served at least thirty-five. They were all old-school coppers. That was the thing about the old school. Sooner or later everybody turned out to have been there. You just didn’t know it at the time. And simply to have been to the old school didn’t mean you’d sat at the same form as Dudley Wiggins while he carved ‘I love Ethel Bloggs’ in the desktop – and it sure as hell didn’t mean you shared the same values. Wiggins’s old school was one that nodded to all his fiddles, one that turned Soho into his private fiefdom. Of course he didn’t want Percy Blood muscling in.
‘He was never part of the team, y’know.’
‘I don’t follow,’ said Troy.
‘I mean he didn’t account to me or to Mr Tattershall. He accounted direct to Mr Quint.’
It occurred to Troy that Wiggins’s first reaction must have been to think that Blood had been brought in to spy on him.
‘And another thing – it cut us out of the juiciest case this side of Kitty O’Shea!’
Ah – so his vanity was singed?
‘You think you could have made a case against Fitzpatrick, do you?’
‘Made it? Made it? I’d’ve put the twisted bugger away for life!’
And it seemed to Troy that Fitz was a mirror to the nation, in which none could recognise their own image, save as dogs do, barking at their own reflection in a rock pool.