Peggy Blood came to the door. It opened only a matter of inches and she said soft as a whisper, ‘He doesn’t want to see you.’
It had been a long time since he’d put his foot in a door. It was something he thought best left to uniformed coppers in black boots. A big bugger could break the toes of a man in ordinary shoes.
Mrs Blood retreated at the intrusive foot and Troy pushed past her. The first blow caught him just behind the ear, the second on the back of the neck – so hard he found himself ducking and wrapping his arms around his head. Then they fell on him like hailstones.
‘Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you done enough? Haven’t you done enough?’
She caught him a stinger on the right cheek. A tiny fist with the whole weight of her back and shoulder behind it.
‘Go away. Just go away and let us alone!’
Then a voice like thunder said, ‘Leave go, woman!’
She stopped. Troy took down his hands and saw Blood standing in the doorway of the sitting room. Frayed cardigan and carpet slippers. Peggy and Blood stood stock still, staring at one another for a moment as though Troy were invisible. Then she fled, running between them in the direction of the kitchen. Blood turned around without another word and disappeared through the doorway.
Troy could hear a pulse beating loudly in his head. His own breath in audible rasps. He straightened up, gulped air and followed Blood.
He was at the green-baize table once more. Lit by the galleon lamp. The muted mumble of the six o’clock news on the wireless. The fish circling frantically. A single-bar electric fire glowing dully on the sunburst hearthrug. Another model in his great crab hands. A ship to be fitted into a bottle, its hull slender as an eel, its tiny, fragile masts folded down to be threaded through the neck of the bottle.
Troy sat opposite Blood, hoping he did not sound as pathetic as he felt. Blood tinkered, took up a wire hook and made invisible readjustments to the lie of the masts.
‘Percy.’
Blood did not look up. Not the faintest acknowledgement that Troy was in the room.
‘Percy. Things have moved on.’
Blood did not look up.
‘I’ve no more questions. I’ve all the evidence I need. Your prints match.’
Blood slotted the stern of the sailing shipinto the neck of the bottle.
‘This visit is off the record.’
The ship slid to the belly of the bottle and keeled over.
‘If I arrest you now you’ll do the full stretch for murder.’
Troy thought it unlikely in the extreme that Blood would hang. He might not be as mad as jokes and gossip would have him, but somewhere, somewhere in the legal process of blind drunk justice, something would mitigate.
Blood took a longer wire hook and righted the vessel.
‘If you come to the Yard and give yourself up, I will add to my report the fact that you co-operated and I’ll see the judge knows this.’
The masts flicked upright, filling the bottle – as delicate and beautiful as the spread of a butterfly’s wings. As instant as the blossom of frame-stopfilming.
‘You have until noon tomorrow. You have eighteen hours to come to your senses. After that I’ll issue a warrant for your arrest. Do you understand me, Percy?’
Blood set the bottle on its blocks. In profile Troy saw the ship for what it was – the Cutty Sark. He left without Blood having looked at him. Once he had called off his wife it was as though Troy had not existed for him.