For the next ninety minutes I joined Tiger Blake in yet another of his ‘rip-roaring adventures’. This time he was in search of The Lost City. Tiger had been a childhood hero of mine. I first encountered him as a comic strip in my boys’ paper and then he emerged as a film star. There had been at least a dozen Tiger Blake movies and I’d seen them all. They had taken me from puberty, through my teenage years and here I was at twenty-six still following Tiger’s exploits. The series was now rather old hat. Budgets had been cut, the sets were wobblier and it seemed to be on its last legs. The star, Gordon Moore, who had been in his mid-thirties when he’d played the part for the first time in Tiger Blake and the Devil’s Doorway, was now approaching fifty and, I’m afraid, he looked it. His hair was obviously thinning and his once slender, muscular shape was running to fat. To make matters worse, his leading lady was significantly younger and resembled his daughter rather than his love interest. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie. It wasn’t very good but it had a strange nostalgic appeal to me and for a short time I was transported back to my worry-free early teens when I wanted to be Tiger Blake, the man who, with one bound, was always able to break free from every tight corner in which he found himself. Paunchy, balding and slower in the action scenes than he had been, Tiger was still my man.
I left before the newsreel. I can’t bear to watch scenes of the war. In that respect I was a coward, I suppose, but I knew it would only increase my sense of frustration and despair.
It was dusk and a thick fog had settled down on London. Pulling up my collar and tipping my hat forward, I headed for Benny’s Café on Dean Street. As I walked, I glimpsed dimly-lighted shop windows through the shifting grey curtain of fog, while pedestrians, unidentifiable dark shapes, slid silently by. It was a good night to be anonymous.
Soon the bright window of Benny’s Café beckoned like a beacon.
‘So it’s Sherlock Holmes.’ Benny gave me a wave as I entered. ‘How’s business?’
‘What business?’
‘That bad, eh?’
I nodded and took a seat by the window. It was approaching seven o’clock, closing time, and I was his only customer.
‘Today’s special is Brown Windsor Soup, and Shepherd’s Pie.’
I shrugged. ‘That’ll be fine,’ I said, lighting up a Craven A. Food only interested me when I was happy, otherwise I saw it merely as a fuel to keep the body going. I dug into my pocket and dragged out some change. I was running low on funds. In my current financial circumstances that trip to the flicks had been an extravagance. Not only would horns have to be pulled in, but hooves and tail, too.
Benny was not the best of cooks – the soup tasted of gravy browning, which it probably was, and no self-respecting shepherd would have touched the pie, not even with his crook – but Benny was a friendly soul and I felt at ease in the place.
As I chewed on the strange brown stringy material that lay beneath the crusted layer of potatoes, I glanced up and saw a face staring in at me through the condensation-bleared window. It was a young face, a pale mask that bore a haunted look. A boy, somewhere around ten or eleven years old. The wide eyes stared at my plate enviously.
I smiled back at him. The face froze for a moment in fear at being seen and then vanished from sight. I went to the door and looked out. He had gone. I could hear the boy’s running footsteps disappearing into the distance as tendrils of fog enveloped me.
three
After I’d finished what I could of Benny’s repast, he cleared the plates away, raising an eyebrow at my leavings. ‘You’ll never build your strength up if you let good food go to waste,’ he said. I bit my tongue – which was somewhat more tasty than the pie – and nodded. Locking the door and switching the Open sign around to Closed, Benny came and sat beside me and offered me a cigarette.
‘You look as though you’ve just had an appointment with Mr Hitler himself,’ he observed, blowing smoke over his shoulders. ‘Such a face.’
I grinned. ‘Nothing so exciting.’ I was used to Benny mother-henning me and I didn’t mind. In fact, it was quite touching.
‘Tell me, Johnny, what would bring a smile to that so unhappy mush of yours? What do you need? Mind you,’ he added, waving his arms in mock horror, ‘if it’s cash, you’ve come to the wrong fellow. Shepherd’s pie and Brown Windsor soup don’t make a man rich. If it did, Buckingham Palace I would live.’
I shook my head. ‘No, it’s not cash.’
‘So … what? What do you need?’
I took a deep drag on the weedy little cigarette and let the smoke escape slowly until it almost masked my face. ‘A purpose,’ I said.
* * *
I left Benny’s about half an hour later and wandered around the fog-enshrouded West End for best part of an hour until inevitably my feet led me to The Velvet Cage, my second home. It was a jazz club run by a somewhat dodgy Greek character called George Cazmartis. I’d done a job for him when I first started up as a private detective. Someone was regularly dipping his fingers into the till and I’d been able to ram it shut while the hand was still there. Not exactly a pivotal moment in the history of crime detection, but it had impressed Georgie so much that he had given me life membership to the club. I could get in free anytime I liked. And I liked. It was on a par with the cinema: a dark, smoky place where one could be anonymous.
I nodded to Charlie the doorman and passed through the swing doors. Immediately I could feel the heat of the club waft towards me as though it was desperate to escape the stifling, hazy atmosphere within. It was an atmosphere I loved: the jazzy, boozy world where one could slip into veiled anonymity and soak up the pleasure.
I was just in time to catch Tommy Parker’s first set with a new singer, Beulah White, who sang like Billie Holliday’s sister but looked like her mother. She warbled ‘I loves you Porgy’ with such sweet power that I found my eye moistening. The honeyed voice with the gravelly undertone soothed and elated and like all good singers, touched the soul. After she’d finished, I dug deep into my fading resources and bought her a drink and we fell into talking about songs and how to sell them. She believed that clichés in the lyric weren’t necessarily a hindrance as long as the melody was strong enough to compensate. ‘A good tune gives added depth to the words. ‘You listen to what I do with ‘Love for Sale’ in the second set,’ she grinned, her white teeth illuminating her careworn face. I raised my glass in toast to this as she excused herself to ‘powder her nose’. Judging by her raddled features and dreamy eyes, I reckoned this was a euphemism for some other activity in which powder and her nose would feature.
‘Johnny. Good to see you.’
Without turning, I knew the voice. It belonged to a little fat man in a double-breasted dinner suit which was two sizes too small for him and the possessor of a nose so hooked he could have gone fishing with it. It was the owner, Georgie the Greek. I turned and gave him an insincere smile.
Casting his beady eye on my empty glass, he beckoned to the barman. ‘Jimmy, give Mr Hawke a Scotch on the house. A double.’ He grinned his benevolent grin, his lips almost stretching round to touch his nose. Patting me on the back once more, he evaporated into the crowd to practise his benevolent mine-host act elsewhere. As I lifted my refreshed glass and inhaled the whisky fumes, I wondered why, despite his generosity to me, I didn’t like the man. What the hell, I liked his whisky, especially when it was free.
Beulah’s singing was more erratic and less assured in the second set. She certainly lost her way through ‘Love for Sale’, although I could see what she had been aiming for. It was clear that she was at her best before she powdered her nose.
I stayed on at the club until just after eleven, buying myself another double Scotch. My pockets now had lost their chink. As the crowd began to thin out, I decided to add to the process and make my way home.
The fog had cleared considerably, just leaving behind phantom wisps of grey that floated like ectoplasm on the stiff November air. Junior ghosts on their way home. The streets
were empty and, as I walked along, I was accompanied by the clip clop of my own footsteps. I began to feel a little guilty now at leaving the office unattended for most of the day. It would be just my luck if I’d missed some rich client, or better still some exciting case, with a missing diamond and beautiful blonde – the sort that Tiger Blake gets. At the thought of my hero Tiger Blake, I grinned an inane, inebriated grin.
I was about two streets away from Priors Court when, as I passed a darkened shop doorway, I heard a noise emanating from the blackness. It was the sound of crying. Gentle, stifled sobs in the shadows. Breathing in the cold night air to help clear my head, I investigated.
As I moved nearer to the doorway, the sobbing stopped abruptly and there was a frantic scrabbling sound like some animal in distress. In the gloom I could make out the shape of a young boy cowering in the corner, his knees bent up to his chest and his face turned into the corner, hidden from view as though he was desperately trying to make himself invisible.
‘Hello,’ I said softly.
As soon as I spoke, the youth gave a cry of alarm, scrambled to his feet and rushed forward in an attempt to push by me. I side-stepped so that he ran straight into my arms. He gave a shriek of terror and kicked me on the shin. I winced but hung on.
‘Let me go. Let me go,’ he yelled, as he wriggled furiously in a desperate attempt to escape my grasp.
‘Whoa,’ I said quietly, but holding him firmly. ‘Just stop your struggling, sonny. You’re not going anywhere.’
He kicked me again and although it was quite painful – painful enough to make me mouth a silent swear word – I held on to the boy.
‘Look,’ I said, ‘you might as well give in. I am bigger and stronger than you and I’m not going to let go.’
Slowly the boy relaxed his efforts and slumped like a puppet with its strings cut. ‘Don’t hurt me, mister,’ he said softly. ‘I’m doing no harm.’
I led him from the shadow of the doorway towards the light of a street lamp. He was dressed in short trousers and a dark belted raincoat. His hair was ruffled and his features tearstained and grimy. I’d seen him before. This was the spectre at the feast – the haunted face that had stared at me through the steamy window of Benny’s Café.
‘What are you doing out at this time of night on your own?’
The boy averted my gaze and said nothing.
‘Where do you live?’
‘I … I haven’t got a home. I don’t live nowhere.’
‘What about your parents?’
‘I got no parents. They’re dead. Both of them … dead.’
Now he started to cry and without embarrassment he clung to me and sobbed. I didn’t know what to think. Parents or no parents he had come from somewhere. It was clear from his appearance that he had not been living rough for long.
‘I’m Johnny. What’s your name?’
‘Peter.’
‘Peter what?’
‘Just Peter.’ He wasn’t going to be caught out like that.
‘Well, Peter, my lad, you can’t sleep in that doorway all night, that’s for sure. You’ll catch your death in this weather. You’d better come home with me.’
To my surprise the lad offered no resistance to this suggestion. I reckoned that he was too weary to object. I took his hand in mine and we walked down the empty street looking for all the world like father and son returning home from some event – a party or a trip to the cinema. I thought it best not to pressure him with questions about his home and family. I needed to let him learn to trust me a little first. It was clear that for whatever reason he’d done a bunk. Maybe his parents were really dead and he had scaled the walls of the orphanage to explore the big wide world, or he’d been farmed out to some strict spinster in the country and he’d skedaddled back to town but was now too afraid to face his parents. I’d find out in due course. After all, I was a detective.
For a brief moment I remembered my own longings to leave the orphanage. How sometimes I’d get up in the middle of the night, clamber on to a chair and stare out of the window. When the moon was bright I could see the trees and fields beyond the confines of Brookfield House. That was the real world – the world of mums and dads and houses and hugs and kisses, birthday presents and laughter. I never did anything about ‘escaping’. It was just a dream – but when I talked about it, my brother Paul, who was a realist, told me not to be so stupid. He knew that I wouldn’t find what I longed for. There was a completely different life agenda for orphans.
‘When was the last time you had something to eat?’ I asked, as we approached Hawke Towers.
The boy shook his head. ‘Dunno. I had some choc’late this morning.’
I grinned. ‘Well, let’s see what I can rustle up.’
Not much is what I could rustle up. The Hawke larder is on a par with Old Mother Hubbard’s. However I did possess a rather rusty tin of Spam and some baked beans – not exactly cordon bleu but as I prepared this midnight feast the boy’s eyes lit up with excitement. He sat on the sofa, still wearing his grubby raincoat and watched with fascination as I prepared the food – lighting the gas ring to warm the beans and unkennelling the spam.
The food was wolfed down in minutes.
‘You enjoyed that, eh?’
He nodded shyly. ‘Thank you, mister. Can I go now?’
‘Go where?’
The boy pursed his lips. He had no answer.
‘Another doorway somewhere, eh? I have a better idea – you kip down here on my sofa tonight. It’s a bit lumpy but it’s a damned sight more comfortable than stone flags. How about that? No strings attached.’
The worried eyes looked uncertain but the temptation of somewhere warm to curl up overcame his misgivings.
I grabbed the eiderdown from my bed and flung it at him with a smile. ‘OK, Pete, you make yourself comfortable and get a good night’s sleep. And remember, no snoring.’
For a moment that weary tear-stained face lost its frown and the ghost of a smile touched his lips.
Within minutes he was curled up in a tight ball on the sofa, almost lost under the eiderdown, and purring gently as he sank into deep and, I hoped, untroubled sleep.
four
The boy slept soundly for two or three hours and then a disturbing dream brought him savagely awake. He had been running down a long, featureless corridor, but no matter how hard he tried he could not shake off the dark, hooded figure that was chasing him. Indeed, the figure was gaining on him. Then Peter tripped and fell and the figure loomed over him, its darkness seeping outwards ready to envelop the boy.
Gasping for air, Peter sat up, his chest heaving silently as he tried to contain his panic. For a moment he didn’t know where he was. The shadows in the room were alien to him and then he remembered. The strange man with the black eye patch and the warm food. As he shifted his position, he felt the dampness between his legs. He had wet himself again. He bit his lip in shame and sorrow. He had thought that in leaving his mother, he would never do that again. Now he would smell of wee and everyone would know he was ‘a fucking bedwetter’. He sniffed back a tear. He would not cry. All that baby behaviour was behind him now that he was a grown up, alone in the world.
Gradually his eyes became accustomed to the gloom and he was able to make out the features of the room. To his dismay he saw that the man with eye patch was slumped in the chair by the fireplace. He was fast asleep, his head lolling back and his mouth wide open. Every now and then a gentle guttural snore escaped from the gaping aperture. The man had been nice to him, but he knew that sooner or later he would try to take him back to his mother and he didn’t want that. He had to escape.
Carefully, so as to make no noise, he pulled back the eiderdown and collected his shoes from under the sofa. He tied the laces in a simple bow – the only way he knew how – and stood up. He spied his raincoat hanging on the back of a chair by the window. Like a character in a film shot in slow motion, he crossed the room and retrieved it. He had no idea where his carrier b
ag was but there were only a couple of shirts and a couple of pairs of underpants in it anyway. He would have to leave it. He couldn’t risk waking the eye patch man.
Then he spotted the man’s jacket lying on the table. Peter felt in the inside pocket and pulled out a wallet. It contained two one-pound notes only, some stamps and a few receipts. Taking one of the pound notes and slipping it into his trouser pocket, he returned the wallet. He didn’t like the idea of stealing, especially stealing from a man who had helped him, but in the short time Peter had been on the streets he had learned that he had to be practical rather than sentimental. And anyway, he hadn’t taken both pound notes – he had left one.
Slipping the latch up noiselessly, the boy let himself out of the room.
The sky was still black as Peter emerged once more into the cold November night. He could grab a few more hours’ sleep in a doorway somewhere before it was light. Then he’d go in search of a place for breakfast with his newly acquired wealth.
five
When I awoke, the miserable grey light of dawn was already forcing its miserable way through the miserable crack in the curtain and illuminating my miserable dump of a room. My tired, drink-befogged brain had rested while I slept but was still only functioning in first gear as I regained consciousness and it took me some time to recollect the circumstances leading up to me kipping down in the armchair instead of the lovely lumpy bed in the alcove. Ah, yes, I told myself, as I rubbed my prickly chin and blinked my good eye: the boy. I sat up, yawned and gazed over to the settee, expecting to see Wee Willie Winkie cradled in the arms of Morpheus. But of Wee Willie Winkie there was no sign. The eiderdown was on the floor and the settee was vacant. The lad had done a bunk. What a fool I’d been not to lock him in. He was a fugitive after all. I pictured that small, gaunt face with the haunted eyes. He was running away from something or someone and was terrified that I’d take him back. So terrified that he’d wet my settee and then gone back to a life of cold doorways and scrabbling for food.
Forests of the Night Page 2