The driver jumped out of the cab and wrenched the passenger door open.
‘Come on, son, let’s have you out in the fresh air. There’s a drain over there. You can be sick down that.’
Peter obeyed without a word, his face contorted with discomfort. Once he was on the pavement and away from his precious cab, the driver heaved a sigh of relief. The boy walked gingerly to the drain and then did something quite surprising. He raised himself up from the semi-crouching pose and began to run. Down the street he fled without a glance back towards the deserted chauffeur.
‘Oi!’ shouted the taxi driver, but the boy was now too far away to hear him. He scratched his head. ‘What the bleedin’ hell was that all about? Little blighter,’ he muttered to himself. He’d had many a punter try to scarper without paying the fare but not after they’d only been driven less than half a mile. Still, he thought, philosophically, he wasn’t sick in my cab. I can be thankful for that.
By the time the cabbie drove off again in the search for regular fare-paying passengers, Peter was many streets away, lurking in a shop doorway, catching his breath. For comfort he rubbed the coins in his pocket that Johnny had given him to pay for the taxi ride. He would certainly use them to pay for a ride, but the journey would take him to another destination other than home. He murmured the address to himself – the one he had observed on the pad by the telephone in Johnny’s office – just to make sure he remembered it. He had forced it into his memory like a religious mantra. He knew it was important. He knew it was connected with the Raymond Carter case. He knew that it was to this address that Johnny was now making his way. He knew that he had to go there too.
He learned very quickly that no cab driver was going to stop to pick up a schoolboy in short trousers no matter how desperately he tried to flag one down. He had no idea where Chiswick Reach was so he couldn’t go by tube or bus. He really had to get a cab. Then he had the spark of an idea. If he found a hotel where cabs dropped passengers off, he could try and hire one there. He could show the driver his shiny coins to prove that he had the wherewithal to pay his fare. Surely, if he did that no self-respecting cabbie would deny him his ride? With this plan in mind, he made his way to Tottenham Court Road and on to Store Street. It was here he discovered what looked from a distance like a small, smart hotel. On approaching it, he saw that it was indeed small but the rather shabby entrance declared that it wasn’t particularly smart. Nevertheless, it was here that Peter thought that he would try his luck. After a five-minute wait, a cab drew up and two large giggling ladies emerged carrying shopping bags. Their faces were flushed and shiny with paint. They paid their fare and jostled merrily into the hotel. In an instant, Peter was up at the driver’s window. He tapped gently and the grizzled cabbie wound it down.
‘Can you take me to Chiswick Reach?’ asked Peter, in his most grown-up manner.
‘Why, d’you fancy a swim?’ The cabbie chortled at his own joke.
‘I … er … I want to get home for tea.’
The cabbie frowned. ‘Well, you’re a long way from home and I reckon it’s a little past your teatime.’
Peter nodded vigorously. ‘It is. I need to get home before my mother worries too much.’ He held up the coins. ‘I can pay.’
‘Can you now?’ The cabbie squinted at the coins. ‘Well, then I reckon I can take you. Hop in lad. Chiswick Reach it is.’
Peter settled back in the cab as it lurched forward into the darkness, a bevy of flitting butterflies played in his stomach. He felt a strange mixture of worried concern and suppressed excitement. He knew that he was disobeying Johnny’s instructions, which didn’t please him, but he thrilled in anticipation of doing his own detective work. He permitted himself a grim little smile. Peter Blake was on the case.
THIRTY-THREE
* * *
‘Now then Dad, how about a little drink, eh?’
‘Oh, yes, please.’ At the mention of a drink Raymond Carter instinctively ran his sandpaper tongue along his cracked lips. He was still bewildered and confused as to why this disembodied voice speaking to him from the blackness referred to him as ‘Dad’, but his thirst overrode such concerns for the moment. His mind conjured up an image of a large gushing fountain of cool clear water. Its gurgling spray sparkling like diamonds caught by the rays of sunlight. He saw himself lying beneath it, the water showering on him like liquid needles. He could almost taste the ice-cold freshness as the liquid trickled down his parched throat.
Suddenly he found the neck of a bottle rammed aggressively against his teeth and gums. The vision vanished in an instant and he cried out in shock as some of the liquid spilled down his chin.
‘Come on, Dad, drink up.’
Eagerly, he sucked hard on the neck of the bottle and the contents gushed into his mouth. He spluttered and cried out in disgust. It burnt his throat and caused his eyes to moisten. It was gin. It wasn’t cool, thirst-quenching water. It was warm gin.
‘Thought you’d like a cocktail,’ said the voice, retracting the bottle and casting it aside. Carter heard it clatter and thud as it fell to the floor somewhere out there in the darkness.
‘Now, Dad, I think it’s time for the finale, don’t you? This entertaining cabaret has gone on too long, hasn’t it? It’s time for the last act and then we can bring down the curtain once and for all.’
That voice. That voice, he knew it. If only his brain would allow him to remember it. But Carter’s brain wouldn’t. It had ceased to function normally. He now could barely remember his own name, let alone that of a purring disembodied voice. And why ‘Dad’? He wasn’t anyone’s father … was he?
The torch clicked on again, but instead of Charlie Dokes’s shiny features springing out from the dark as on previous occasions, it was a real man’s face. Long, young and with an aquiline nose on which was perched a large pair of tortoiseshell spectacles. The features were stoical, but for a brief moment they relaxed into a smile.
Recognition came to Carter. It was … It was Al. This face before him. Yes, it was Al Warren. What on earth is Al doing here? Here … in the darkness. With me. Then the thought struck him, struck him so hard that he thought his heart would burst as it pounded within his breast. A kind of truth exposed itself to Carter rather like a self-assembling jigsaw. It was Al who was doing all this to him. It was Al who had tied him up and kept him prisoner. It was Al who had clubbed him. It was Al … He pushed harder at the thoughts. Yes … it was Al then who … who had killed her. Killed the girl. What was her name? But yes, he had killed her. An image of her dead body splayed on the bed, the red-lipped mouth agape in that silent scream, flashed into his ravaged mind, and he emitted a gagging cry of pain.
‘You … killed her,’ he croaked.
‘Evie?’ said Al evenly. ‘Yes, I suppose I did.’
Evie, that was her name mused Carter. Yes, Evie. Evelyn. And Al had killed her.
‘Why?’
‘All part of the plan, Poppa. All part of the grand design. It’s still not clear to you yet, is it? You see, I’m your little Freddie all growed up.’
‘Freddie?’ Carter shook his head in bewilderment.
‘You should remember the name if not the face. I can understand why you don’t recognize me. After all I was only a few weeks old when you left. Just a bawling, mewling scrap of humanity. But you do remember when you left me, don’t you? And my mother.’
‘Sally.’ From nowhere it came. The name that had not crossed his lips in a lifetime. And it came to him along with the dread memories from out of the past. He forced his mind to find a clearing in the fog, to focus on what the voice was saying and its implications. As he did so, a frightening possibility occurred to him. ‘Sally was your mother?’ For a brief moment her face floated before him and then faded into the gloom.
‘And you … my father,’ said Al Warren, simply.
Tears welled up in Carter’s eyes and his body shuddered with emotion but he had no idea why. Blind unfathomed feelings engulfed him like it does with
a young child whose senses are only roughly formed with logic playing no part in pain or pleasure.
‘I was the last inconvenient straw,’ the strangely illuminated face was saying. ‘You had grown tired of my mother and then when she was careless enough to fall pregnant with me, you wanted out. A kid and a wife was too much baggage for Raymond Carter, eh? They got in the way of your career and your womanizing.’ The voice now had a sharp, angry edge to it and the eyes flashed fiercely in the harsh torchlight. ‘I suppose you had the decency to wait until I was born before you did the dirty. Perhaps you were hoping she’d have a miscarriage. Heaven knows you knocked her about enough. But sadly for you there was no miscarriage. Your wife – my mother – had a healthy and a very smart cookie. Me. So you upped sticks and left. You deserted us. You simply cut us out of your life. Left my mother to fend for herself.’ Warren’s voice cracked and he paused to inhale and bring his emotions under control. After a moment, he continued, his voice stronger, his anger greater.
‘And my mother who, God help her, loved you couldn’t bear it. Despite all you’d done to her, she still loved you. You left her with no alternative. So she killed herself.’
‘Sally,’ said Carter hoarsely, as the frail fragment of memory returned to him. He remembered now. It was so long ago. Another life. It seemed as though it had all happened to another person. Another Raymond Carter. Not him.
‘Sally,’ repeated the face tenderly. ‘My mother.’
‘Freddie.’
‘Yes, baby Freddie. That’s me. Orphan Freddie. Because you refused to have anything to do with me, I was auctioned off to an American couple who smuggled me into the States. It was there I grew up and it was there I became Al Warren. When I eventually found out that I’d been adopted, I was determined to find my real parents. To discover the truth. And I did. I didn’t have to dig too deep. And when I knew the truth, I was determined that you would pay. You were responsible for my mother’s death and you would pay. And so I came after you.’
‘Are you going to kill me?’
Suddenly Al Warren laughed and the torchlight left his face for a few moments.
‘Kill you? Oh, that would be too easy. Too quick, old boy. I’ve waited a long time for this. I’m not going to end things with a sudden moment of frenzied passion. I’ve had too many of those over the years. They’re not all they’re cracked up to be. No, this has got to be a slow process. I’m a scriptwriter, remember and I’ve scripted this scenario down to the last comma and full stop. I took you from being a third-rate music-hall act to being a national star. We did it. Me and Charlie Dokes. My scripts made you famous. You never knew it, but you were my dummy. I was playing you and what a great pleasure it gave me. It was all done for a purpose, you see. To build you up so that I could knock you down. The greater the height: the greater the fall.’
Carter screwed up his face with concentration. ‘You planned all that … just to kill me.’
‘Just to have my revenge, Daddy dear. And it is true what they say: revenge is sweet. Very tasty indeed.’
‘Please … it was all a long time ago. It … was a mistake. I didn’t know your mother would take her own life. She was always a little … melodramatic.’
‘Like me, I guess. This is all a bit melodramatic, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t do it. I beg you. Don’t kill me.’
‘I’m not going to kill you. I wouldn’t soil my hands.’ Warren paused for effect and then grinned. ‘I’m just going to damage you.’
The torch went out and there the sound of movement in the darkness and then suddenly a bright yellow light flooded the area. In bewildered fascination, Carter stared upwards and saw the naked light bulb dangling above him, its filament glowing fiercely.
Warren towered over him, grinning. In his right hand he held something that was bright and shiny. Carter focused on it. It was a knife.
THIRTY-FOUR
* * *
The address I had been given was in a sense another piece of evidence that fitted in nicely with my theory concerning the identity of the murderer. A houseboat on the river at Chiswick. A houseboat on the river. I was reminded of the final sketch in the Palladium show which had been set on a houseboat, the sketch in which Raymond Carter was regularly drenched with water, to the great amusement of the audience. There was an element of indignity for the star in that scenario and it had struck me at the time that the writer of the sketch must have a cruel sense of humour to subject Carter to being deluged on stage every night. The writer of the sketch was, of course, Al Warren.
From the very start of this investigation, I had been of the strong opinion that Carter’s tormentor had to be someone concerned with the Okey Dokes radio show. There was the warning message on the script and the culprit obviously was in possession of so much inside information. It could easily have been the announcer Percy Goodall finally exacting his revenge for Carter’s adulterous fling with his wife; or Edward Simmons the producer of the show and obviously far from being a fan of the ventriloquist; or Larry Milligan, his long suffering agent, who had struck me as a very cold fish indeed. But the key to the case was motive and theirs, if they really had one, did not seem strong enough, certainly not strong enough to lead them from intense dislike to actual murder.
My digging into Carter’s past had brought its rewards. The conversation I’d had with Greta Fielding and Cyril Sarony had filled in many pieces of this difficult jigsaw. Thanks to Greta I now knew what happened to Carter’s son whom she had abandoned twenty-five years ago. I was seeing the picture which was forming before my eyes with greater clarity and I was convinced that Greta was correct in thinking that maybe the boy had been adopted by an American couple. Mr and Mrs Yankee would have whipped him off to the States and brought him up there. This scenario not only focused the beam of suspicion on one particular fellow in my chosen crew of suspects, but it also allowed me to construct an all important, albeit makeshift, motive. The old Hawke brain with its dubious convolutions suggested to me that it was possible, probable even, that the twenty-five year old Al Warren with the trans-Atlantic accent was my man. And yet it didn’t make sense. Warren had been Carter’s saviour. It was Warren’s scripts and advice that were the bedrock of the ventriloquist’s success. And there seemed real affection between the two men. Why would Warren do that if he hated Carter? As I mulled these thoughts over in my mind during the taxi ride to Chiswick, I came to realize that perhaps I hadn’t yet got to the bottom of the case. There were still some important pieces missing. I hoped that my trip to Warren’s houseboat would bring further clarification, but I was aware that it would not necessarily bring closure.
The bloodstain I’d found in Evelyn Munro’s flat suggested to me that Carter had been attacked by her murderer and captured by him or dumped somewhere. The river was always a reliable repository for a dead body. I shivered at this thought. I didn’t want to think of my client as a corpse. I hoped that he was still alive. Somewhere.
If Warren was the murderer, then he knew the whereabouts of Raymond Carter. Whether the ventriloquist was alive or dead was a question I could not answer and one I didn’t really want to think about.
I paid off the taxi and walked down on to the towpath that ran along by the side of the river. It was dark now and there was only a faintly perceptible shift in the depth of blackness between the sky and the land. A faint moon, enveloped in cloud, provided some illumination. Gradually, as my eyes became acclimatized to the starless night, I could just about make out the vague contours of the horizon across the river. I was able to determine the vague shape of the gantry of a crane, like a skeletal finger pointing up to the heavens.
On my side of the river, I could see a flotilla – if that’s the word – of houseboats moored along this stretch of the Thames. I was looking for one called Mermaid III. Slowly I made my way from houseboat to houseboat, flashing my torch surreptitiously along the side looking for a name plate, looking, no doubt, like a rather arrogant burglar. I came across The Golden Hind,
Water Repos, Ratty’s Bolthole and other watery nomenclatures. But there was no Mermaid III. Not even Mermaids I and II.
I was about to give up hope as I approached the final vessel in the line when the narrow beam of my torch caught out the faded lettering on the side. There it was: Mermaid III. It had to be the last one of course. It was shrouded in darkness, but in these days of the blackout that meant nothing. It certainly did not prove that there was ‘no one home’.
Clutching the revolver in my coat pocket, I crossed the little gangplank and boarded Mermaid III. I moved down the side of the vessel and crouched by one of the long narrow windows and listened. At first I thought there was no sound at all, but I was mistaken. It had been masked by the sharp breeze rippling some tarpaulin on deck and the lapping of the water, but, as I strained my ears until I could feel the wax shift. I felt certain I could catch the faint strains of music, jolly jazz-type music. It may have been the radio or the gramophone but it was certainly coming from inside the houseboat. So, someone was in residence and surely that someone was Al Warren.
I was about to raise myself up into a standing position when I felt something cold and hard prod into the back of my neck.
‘I knew sooner or later someone would come prowling round here,’ said a voice, ‘and I reckon I’d have put money on it being you, Mr Hawke.’
I didn’t move. I was fairly sure that the cold metal object pressed hard against my medulla oblongata, one of my favourite organs, was a gun.
‘Good evening, Mr Warren.’
‘Not for you, I fear. However, let us continue this conversation in the warm. Stand up slowly and we’ll go inside. As they say on the movies, “No funny business now or I’ll blow your head off”.’
I thought it better to remain silent. A response might be regarded as funny business.
Warren prodded me forward along the deck and towards the cabin door.
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