No Hearts, No Roses

by Colin Murray

  Yeah, I thought, Alfred Hitchcock was always getting off the Queen Mary and stopping at Les’s gaff in Pimlico for a cup of tea and a custard cream. Probably on his way to see his old mum in Whipps Cross Road or wherever she lived these days.

  ‘Anyway, she surprised me,’ he said. ‘She was really upset when she came to me and told me that her brother had disappeared. I didn’t think she was that emotional.’

  ‘What about the brother?’ I said. ‘Know anything?’

  ‘Never even knew she had any family until yesterday.’

  Something occurred to me. ‘What’s her real name?’ I asked.

  ‘Funnily enough, I think it’s Beverley Beaumont. I don’t think she changed it.’

  ‘Is there a husband around?’

  ‘There doesn’t seem to be anyone close. Course, she’s been around the block a bit. I mean, she must be close to twenty-five now. Could have been a husband at some time.’ He looked thoughtful. ‘Come to think of it, I should send a note down to publicity. See if we’re missing a trick here. We could float a romance for her . . .’

  He picked up a propelling pencil and jotted something down on a pad. He’d just finished writing when the telephone rang. He picked up the receiver, listened for a second, then put his hand over the mouthpiece. ‘I’ve got to take this, Tony. Welsh distributor has got me by the Max Walls. Tell Daphne to give you what you need from petty cash. No questions asked.’ He actually winked as he nodded at the door to dismiss me.

  Daphne was drinking tea and smoking another cigarette when I stepped into reception again. The last of the messengers was just leaving, a bulky envelope under his arm, and there was relative calm. I knew from experience that it wouldn’t last so I grabbed the moment.

  In spite of what Les had said, she made me sign for the two five-pound notes she handed over. (‘It’s a lot of money, Tony. I don’t care what his nibs says.’)

  Tricky financial negotiation out of the way, she relaxed and poured me a cup of tea.

  ‘So,’ she said as I took a slurp, ‘found him yet?’

  ‘Got an address,’ I said, ‘but he’s flown the coop already.’ The tea was stewed.

  ‘Not surprised,’ she said. ‘If he’s the little tart’s brother, I’m a Chinaman.’ She looked around warily. ‘She likes ’em young.’ Her eyes narrowed a little. ‘And she likes ’em confused an’ all. If you know what I mean . . .’

  I wasn’t sure that I did, but I nodded sagely and drank some more of the disgusting tea. I was thinking about the phrasing of a question that might produce some clarification when the switchboard started buzzing like a demented bluebottle and another elderly messenger, breathless from the two flights of stairs, coughed and spluttered his way in.

  Daphne raised her eyebrows in resigned exasperation, shook her head and mouthed, ‘Here we go again,’ and turned her attention to the switchboard.

  I nodded at her, put my unfinished cup of tea back on the tray behind her and left.

  Les and Daphne had been divorced for nine years now, and I’d often wondered why they continued to work together. I could see it from his point of view. She had always done his accounts, so she knew where the bodies were buried. I’ve always assumed that he rather took the view that it was, as the saying goes, better to have her on the inside pissing out, than on the outside pissing in. So he retained his bookkeeper and his secrets. It’s possible that he liked having her around as a reminder, a sort of conscience, but that’s getting into deep water and I’m not competent to swim there. What she gets out of it, I don’t know. Though, on reflection, she does slyly undercut his authority just by being there. Maybe that’s enough. And it’s always possible that she enjoys the job.

  I pondered the mystery of Daphne and Les Jackson as I wandered down Wardour Street. It was warm, and I started to sweat a bit in my wool suit.

  The cabbie muttered under his breath throughout the journey and smoked Player’s Weights constantly. I couldn’t hear what he said and so wasn’t sure that his comments were directed at me, but I decided to act as though they were and tip accordingly.

  He had a lugubrious, leathery face with moist brown eyes and permanent five o’clock shadow, and he looked as hurt as if I’d just sworn in front of his sainted mother when I handed him the exact fare. He stared at the coins in his hand before saying something very choice under his breath and driving off in a cloud of black exhaust.

  I watched him go and then looked at my surroundings. It was a busy street and, if it had suffered during the war, all the damage had long since been tidied up. But there were no interruptions to the terraces, no grassy bomb-sites preparing to blossom in the London spring, so I guessed the road had escaped any direct hits.

  The house I was outside was a big one. It was a bit rundown, and the woodwork was in need of a lick of paint, but the steps leading up to the front door and the downstairs windows all looked clean, and the small front yard was tidy enough.

  The woman who opened the door could have stepped out of an Ealing Studios film. She probably wasn’t any older than me, and she was still attractive in a worn, world-weary way. A long war and a hard life had obviously taken their toll, but she had a lean, trim figure and slim legs. She was wearing a white apron over a brown skirt and a short-sleeved green blouse, and she had covered the curlers in her hair with a flimsy scarf.

  I said I was Jonathan Harrison’s uncle and asked if he was there. She said nothing and didn’t look as if she believed me. I added that his sister was worried about him.

  ‘He owes me money,’ she said and folded her arms across her ample bosom, a what-do-you-think-of-that expression on her face. I didn’t think much of it.

  ‘I’m sure we can sort something out.’

  She looked as unimpressed with that as I’d been with her attempt to extort money.

  ‘Can I see his room?’ I said. ‘He may have left some indication of where he’s gone . . . The sooner I can find him, the sooner we can resolve any financial problems . . .’

  We stood there in silence while she weighed up the pros and cons of being obdurate. I wasn’t sure if I was prepared to force the issue. Her hands were big and red, and she had powerful forearms. She’d probably manage to slam the door before I could get a shoulder against it. Then inspiration struck, and I handed her one of my fancy cards. She looked at it sceptically for a few seconds and then it worked its magic. It was obviously rather more impressive than me because she opened the door a little wider and allowed me in. Perhaps she didn’t notice the E10 address.

  She took me up to the top floor and pointed at a door on the left. It wasn’t locked.

  She was standing outside, her impressive arms resolutely folded, when I came out.

  ‘Do you have a telephone?’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s one on the corner.’

  ‘Well, perhaps you’d be kind enough to go along there and call the police,’ I said. ‘Tell them there’s been a suspicious death.’

  ‘Suspicious death?’ she said.

  I nodded. That was one way of putting it.

  SIX

  Garrotting someone isn’t easy. It takes strength, technique and a ruthlessness most of us, thank God, lack. The victim fights back, desperately, and if he’s stronger and better trained than the would-be murderer that can be a problem.

  Richard Ellis, however, hadn’t been particularly strong, and I rather doubted that he’d been trained in anything more lethal than pillow fighting in the school dorm. In any case, his murderer hadn’t really given him a chance. He’d used a cruelly thin length of wire with sturdy wooden handles lashed to each end, rather like the implement a grocer uses to cut pieces from a slab of Cheddar, and had probably taken Richard completely by surprise.

  Cheese, though, might crumble a bit and sweat, but it doesn’t bleed.

  Poor Richard hadn’t been garrotted so much as almost decapitated. The wire had severed just about everything through to the spine, and the wire was still embedded in the purplish, tor
n and ragged flesh. The two wooden handles were dangling off each of his shoulders, bobbing slightly in a gentle draft, like fishing floats on a placid stream.

  And, unlike a mature Cheddar, Richard had bled – a lot.

  The room smelt like a slaughterhouse. The armchair Richard was slumped in and the carpet round about were sodden and dark with blood. Some had sprayed up one wall, presumably when one of his arteries was cut.

  I managed to dissuade Mrs Elvin – Rosemary (we’d introduced ourselves properly on the way up the stairs) – from entering the room to see for herself, and she agreed that it was probably best if I stayed outside the room, to stop anyone else going in, while she telephoned the police. We then sat in the kitchen, drinking tea, while we waited for them.

  While she’d been gone, I’d taken the opportunity to look around. But all I could do was look, as I didn’t want to tread in blood or touch anything. So I stood just inside the door, handkerchief clutched to my face against the thick, cloying smell. I learnt very little, except that Jonathan Harrison wasn’t there – and Richard Ellis had told me that the night before.

  It was the kind of place far too many working men fell into after the pubs chucked out: a gloomy, depressing room with heavy brown curtains drawn across the one window. It was somewhere you slept. You didn’t live there. There were two unmade beds along opposite walls, two battered armchairs, one occupied by Richard Ellis’s body, a table and two wooden chairs. Apart from a small pile of books on the table, two white shirts, a striped tie and a jacket lying on one of the beds and a pair of brown shoes next to it, that was about it. The tie and the jacket looked like the ones Richard had been wearing in the club. Since he wasn’t wearing any shoes, I guessed that they were his too.

  It had been quite a while since I’d been this close to anyone who had died a violent death, and I noticed that the hand holding the handkerchief was trembling. I closed my eyes and imagined the wire biting into flesh.

  Only, I didn’t have to imagine it. I could remember it very clearly.

  The victim then had been a boy too: a boy in a uniform.

  The idea had been that it would be quick and silent: a loop of wire around the neck would stop him crying out. And it had. But it hadn’t stopped him emptying his bowels or dropping his rifle on cobble stones or hammering and scuffing his boots on the ground and against the shins of the man behind him as he sawed through his throat. Nor had it stopped the heavy, rasping breaths and grunts of the assailant’s exertions. Not silent at all. And not very quick either.

  When I’d heard the front door bang, I’d opened my eyes and realized that Mrs Elvin had come back. I’d left the room and quietly shut the door behind me. The offer of tea had been very welcome. I had even sugared it liberally. I recognized that I was in mild shock.

  New Scotland Yard isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. If you squinted out of the window in the office where Rosemary and I waited, you could just see the sun streak the slug-coloured Thames with some oily colour. But, apart from a brief glimpse as we’d driven over Westminster Bridge in the comfortable old police car, I hadn’t seen the tower of Big Ben or the Houses of Parliament.

  And the office itself looked as if it hadn’t changed much in the sixty-odd years since it opened. The brown walls couldn’t have been painted more than once since then, and the window hadn’t been caressed by a shammy in a while. The wooden chairs reminded me of those I’d sat in at Sunday School when I was a kid. In those days, of course, my feet had dangled a long way from the floor. Now, they were firmly planted on the drab lino. The dark-brown seats of the chairs had all been worn to a dirty yellow by the countless bums that had rubbed across them. I wondered if any famous felons had ever sat on mine.

  We were given more tea, sugary Nice biscuits and left to ourselves for an hour, which gave me a chance to discover everything Rosemary knew Jonathan.

  She turned out to be nowhere near as hardbitten as I’d thought. She was rather sweet and more vulnerable than she appeared. Her big, work-hardened hands worried away at each other constantly, and she kept seeking my reassurance that she’d be allowed back into her home and continually asking me what her other tenant would do when he came home from work. I couldn’t offer much, apart from bland platitudes about how sure I was that it would all be all right. Which I wasn’t, not least because I was going to have a hard time explaining my own involvement.

  Still, in between the pointless reassurance, I managed to keep her talking about Jonathan and Richard. But the big hands kept rubbing and scratching at each other, occasionally making forays upwards to pat at her hair. In fact, she couldn’t tell me very much about the boys. They hadn’t actually rented the place themselves, it seems. An older man had done that. He’d paid two weeks’ rent in advance and a small deposit. He’d given his name as Jenkins and an address in Cambridge. He’d been ‘ever so well spoken’, a big man, conservatively dressed in black jacket and striped trousers and had worn a bowler hat. (A fleeting memory of Ghislaine when I’d first met her crossed my mind. Where, she’d asked, was my ‘chapeau melon’?) Rosemary had seen him again on the first day that ‘the gentlemen’ had been with her, but not since. And she hadn’t seen or heard anything suspicious the previous night. But she had been in the snug bar at the Red Lion with her friend Florrie and had drunk three port and lemons and so had slept ‘soundly’.

  Well after three, a painfully thin inspector came in briefly to apologize for keeping us waiting. He said his name was Rose. He was wearing a blue bow-tie, the colour of speedwell. It matched his eyes and stood out from his sombre suit.

  Ten minutes later Rosemary was summoned by a much chubbier man. I tried to imagine a police interview conducted by Laurel and Hardy, but my heart wasn’t in it and, instead, I carefully considered what to tell them. I decided that it would be very risky to lie or mislead them. Les wouldn’t be happy about my dragging Beverley Beaumont and the studio into it, but I didn’t think I had any option. This was a murder, and if I wasn’t already a suspect, I would be just as soon as they suspected me of telling fibs. The Imperial Club wouldn’t be happy with me either, but I thought I could probably live with that. Anyway, the police would have made the connection sooner or later.

  It seemed that I’d only been ruminating for a few minutes when I was called in.

  I followed the portly detective sergeant – he’d introduced himself as Radcliffe – along a gloomy corridor to Inspector Rose’s office. I was offered another worn, wooden seat and then the inspector asked why I’d chosen that day to seek out my nephew. I launched into a long explanation. And I told the truth.

  There was just one thing I didn’t volunteer. I felt no guilt about not saying anything because I didn’t regard it as relevant. I said nothing about my knowledge of the use of the garrotte, learnt during the war. It would only have raised unfounded suspicions.

  Consequently, the interview was all very sombre and rather dull. If Inspector Rose or Sergeant Radcliffe thought I’d murdered Richard Ellis they gave no indication of it. They seemed tired and bored rather than hostile. Radcliffe perked up and grinned at the mention of Beverley Beaumont but, apart from that and a few frowns when the Imperial Club came into things, neither of them betrayed any feelings at all. After twenty minutes of uninspired questions, I was asked to write out a statement. It was eighteen years since I’d written a school essay, and I was so out of practice that it took me another half hour. Inspector Rose read it, suggested a couple of changes and then I was free to go.

  It had just gone five and Victoria Embankment was full of people hurrying to the Underground or rushing to catch buses. They were all very drab in their dark wool clothes, and a thin, low, very English sun glinted off the water and glanced off the grey concrete blocks and plate glass of the Royal Festival Hall on the opposite bank. The only flashes of colour came from the red buses. The river gave off a slightly unpleasant odour, a bit like an old, damp dog, and I turned away from it as soon as I could.

  I knew that I was depressed a
nd still mildly shocked from the discovery of the body, but London seemed unusually dull, ugly and unpleasantly noisy.

  I marched up Whitehall, across Trafalgar Square and along Charing Cross Road, trying to dispel the dark mood that was threatening. As I approached Old Compton Street, it occurred to me that it would be a kindness to tell Roger the barman in the Imperial to expect a visit from the Old Bill. But, first, I thought I’d better tell Les Jackson the good news that I was off the case and the rozzers were on it. He’d probably sack me on the spot. I might just catch him, if he was still in the office and hadn’t left early to go off somewhere to bang his new secretary, so I turned smartly left towards Wardour Street.

  Daphne was still at her desk, still smoking and, judging by the colour and consistency of it, still drinking the same cup of tea.

  ‘There’s someone with him,’ she said.

  I shoved a pile of cheap, brown envelopes from one end of the mud-coloured sofa and slumped down into it.

  ‘You look a bit rough,’ she said. ‘Want a cuppa?’

  ‘No thanks, Daff,’ I said, ‘I’ve got tea coming out me ears. Any more and I could rent myself out as an urn.’

  ‘Just so long as I don’t have to fiddle with the spigot,’ she said and turned back to the big Burroughs adding machine on her desk.

  There was something oddly comforting about the banality of Daphne pecking away at her accounts, puffing on her fortieth fag of the day, swilling her eleventh cup of tea while the faint sounds of office life murmured all around us.

  Most people – the secretaries and clerks – had already left, so there was no pounding of typewriters, no tinkling of bells as carriages returned, but the film industry isn’t quite as nine to five as a bank, and Hoxton’s offices include an editing suite where films are often worked on well into the early hours, so there was still a certain amount of coming and going. I wasn’t sure that there was much point in the press office writing and sending out releases, with the newspaper strike still going on, but the Manchester Guardian was publishing and there were probably some underemployed journalists around with time on their hands and a thirst, literal and metaphorical, that needed to be slaked. So I suppose there was still work to be done.