It had occurred to Troy not to tell Jack, not to involve him, to let him escape into ignorance. It seemed like a violation. Jack was not his brother. Jack was his partner. Thrust together by necessity. Twenty-two years could not count for nothing. So he told him. Told him how Clover Browne came to die. Sitting at Goodwin’s Court, he laid the case out as clearly as he could. Even so he faltered, he lost his thread and took the best part of half an hour to get through it. Jack had said nothing. Then he put the same questions Troy would have put if he’d been Jack.
‘You’re certain?’
‘Yes.’
‘So what’s the crime?’
‘Suicide pact.’
‘I’ve never encountered one. Is it murder?’
‘I don’t know. I’m waiting to find out.’
On cue, Clark let himself in the front door, one arm wrapped around law books, stuffed with bookmarks. He dumped them on the dining table. Turned to Troy.
‘It’s better than you’d think.’
‘Better?’
‘Clearer. It seems the powers that be have given the matter more attention than I thought, and at that a damn sight more recently.’
‘You have the floor, Eddie.’
Clark was in his element. Jack stretched, locked his hands behind his head and tried not to yawn.
‘Prior to 1957 it would have been clear as mud. To enter into a suicide pact and simply to survive, whether by accident or design, ought to have been murder as the law stood at the time. However, we had a Royal Commission on Capital Punishment sitting between ’49 and ’53 just to muddy the waters . . .’
Jack and Troy exchanged looks. They’d both given evidence to the Commission. As far as Troy was concerned it might as well have happened in another lifetime. Clark flipped open a volume.
‘. . . “There are cases in which the survivor alleges that he and the deceased had agreed to die together, but it is doubtful whether there was a genuine agreement or a genuine attempt or intention to commit suicide on his part. Such cases are considered on their merits . . .” and what that amounts to is the exercise of the Royal Prerogative, which naturally falls to the Home Secretary. He decided who hanged and who didn’t depending on whether or not he believed the story. The Commission goes on . . . “It may be less easy for the Home Secretary to satisfy himself that the parties have agreed to die, especially if the survivor does not appear to have made a very determined attempt on his own life.” The Commission then recommended a change in the law to the effect that if the other party in a suicide pact takes their own life, the survivor is guilty only of aiding and abetting a suicide; but if the pact was tit for tat – you do me as I do you – then it’s murder.’
‘Sounds a bit bloody mechanical to me.’ said Jack. ‘Means not motives. Eddie, have we got this bastard or not?’
‘Bear with me, sir.’
He opened a second fat book and ran a finger down the margin.
‘The 1957 Homicide Act did not implement the recommendation. Instead it made participation in such a pact manslaughter, and dropped the active/passive distinction. “A suicide pact is defined as a common agreement between two or more persons having for its object the death of all of them, whether or not each is to take his own life . . . but nothing done by a person who enters into a suicide pact shall be treated as done by him in pursuance of the pact unless it is done while he has the settled intention of dying in pursuance of the pact.”’
‘God give me strength. Eddie, have we got the bugger or not?’
Troy intervened.
‘Yes. We have. It’s murder. Murder. Plain and simple. The act ironed out the ambiguities. It’s murder. Premeditated murder. Just imagine it. They’d been lovers. Forced apart by the Tereshkov rumpus and by Stan dumping Jackie on me. He came to see her. He knew how susceptible she was to romantic rubbish. She even thought Jules et Jim was romantic. He spun her a line, conned her into thinking a joint suicide was the only escape for both of them. He sat there while she swallowed Mandrax by the handful and fed himself plain white pills. When it was all over for Clover he packed up and left. But he missed the cotton wool out of the top of his jar of pills. Kolankiewicz analysed the residue as nothing stronger than vitamins. You can’t enter into a suicide pact and expect to kill yourself with a jar of vitamin pills.’
‘At last. At last. Now, can we prove it?’
That was the one question Troy would not have asked.