“But of course,” he said instead. He put his stovepipe hat down on top of his snow-white locks, gave the lady his arm and escorted her to her car.
– . –
Greenaway stood at the foot of the stairs, behind the unlocked door that the last careless punter had not bothered to close properly behind him. Conduit Mews, read the address on Swaffer’s notepaper. A narrow, cobbled thoroughfare between Paddington Station and Hyde Park, the ideal set-up for a prostitute and her maid – discreetly tucked away from the main thoroughfare and the fleapit hotels, public houses, illicit gaming rooms and bookies’ joints that studded the warren of backstreets. The workshop beside the entrance, like most of its neighbours, had been a mechanic’s garage that was now boarded up, the proprietor no doubt conscripted, the landlord not too choosey about whom he rented out the upstairs space to, under the circumstances.
Not that Greenaway would have expected the frontwoman of this operation to have presented herself in any manner other than such that suggested she really was some kind of down-on-her-luck dowager whose circumstances had reduced her to take rooms a little further away from Belgravia than she would have wished. And no doubt the property was being well maintained, whatever was going on in there. She was meticulous about making the right impression, whoever it was she was trying to cast her glamour over. Always had been. Despite their shared areas of interest, Greenaway wondered how much even Swaffer actually knew about her.
At the top of the stairs, a red bulb hung under a fringed shade. Greenaway could hear the muffled sound of voices and a jazz piano tinkling away. But what stopped him in his tracks was a scent that came wafting down to greet his nostrils, a perfume that brought back, in one synaptic rush, an entire world. A world of smog and dirt and deprivation, of clamorous hunger and noise. The smell of Greenaway’s childhood: the smell of violets.
He took a deep breath, shook his head, and walked up the stairs.
8
WHY DON’T YOU DO RIGHT?
Wednesday, 11 February 1942
At the top of the stairs was a beaded curtain made from jet, hung to tinkle out a warning to those seated on the other side of it that fresh company had arrived. But in the pink glow of her table lamp, the Duchess waited alone. The voices and the jazz Greenaway had heard were all emanating from the radiogram beside her.
“Saw me coming in your crystal ball, did you?” he said, his eyes travelling around the room, taking in the gold-and red-striped wallpaper, the red velvet love seat, the walnut casing on the radiogram and the mahogany table behind which the Duchess sat, items that looked like they’d been salvaged from her previous employer on Dover Street. It was all very ostentatious for a one-woman set-up and obviously designed to convey a different class of service. Though the feeling Greenaway got was that he was standing in a gypsy caravan. The smoke left by the last visitor still hung in heavy trails on the air.
Finally, his gaze came to rest on the woman herself. She wasn’t wearing a headscarf festooned with gold coins, as he had more than half expected. Instead, she looked serene, regal even, with her hair swept up into a roll at the front, copper-coloured ringlets snaking around her shoulders, a cameo brooch on a velvet ribbon around her neck, pearl teardrops hanging from each earlobe. One hand holding a bone china teacup halfway to her lips, the newspaper spread out on the table in front of her.
The Duchess arched one eyebrow. “Business is slack,” she said, tapping an immaculately manicured and painted fingernail on top of Swaffer’s headline. “As well you know. Your firm seems to have frightened everyone off the streets tonight.”
“My firm?” said Greenaway. “I thought there was a mad killer out there.”
The flicker of a smile played across Duch’s lips as she studied him.
“Lil!” she shouted. “Get yer knickers on. We got the law here.”
At her bedroom sink, flannel and carbolic between her thighs, Lil yelled out: “Oh, bleedin’ ’ell, not again!”
But when, hastily wrapped in her silk gown and slippers, she opened the bedroom door, the sight beyond surprised her. From the superior cut of his dark overcoat and the bashed-about look of his face, Lil would have assumed that the man standing in their parlour, twirling his trilby around in his right hand, was one of the lot her Tom was always on about, the racetrack hoodlums who hung about down Archer Street. As he nodded his head in greeting, she was sure that was where she had seen him before, at the bar of the Entre Nous.
“Lil,” said her maid, “this is Detective Chief Inspector Greenaway. He’s an old acquaintance of mine and a friend of Mr Swaffer’s. The man who put the great Sammy Lehmann behind bars, no less. Ain’t you, Ted?”
Lil frowned as her eyes flickered between Duch and the big detective.
“Well, what you after me for?” she asked him. “I ain’t done no bank jobs lately.”
“I think he wants to ask you about what you heard in the hairdresser’s, love,” said Duch. “That airman what attacked your pal Lorna. See, Ted’s the head of the Murder Squad these days,” Duch rolled her eyes. “He’s out to catch a real villain.”
“Oh,” said Lil, sitting down. Greenaway did likewise, flicking open his notebook.
“All right,” she turned towards him in a cloud of perfume that made his head swim. “Where d’you want me to start?”
– . –
Daphne Maitland stood in the first-floor sitting room of her Gloucester Place townhouse, arms clasped in front of her in a manner of penitence, eyes staring into the fire. Swaffer, sitting in a Regency armchair of a similar vintage to his surrounds, inhaled the contents of his brandy glass and waited for her to begin.
“One of the women you mentioned in your piece,” she began. “One of the victims …” She drew in a breath and shuddered.
“Was known to you,” Swaffer ended the sentence for her. “Miss Evelyn Bourne, I imagine. The lonely chemist from Newcastle.”
His hostess turned her head sharply. “But how …” she began.
Swaffer put his glass down, opened his palms outwards. “It’s not so hard to divine, my dear. Despite your concern for good works, I can’t imagine how you would have come across the other unfortunate lady of the night. But Miss Bourne wasn’t like that, was she? She was a socialist, an intellectual, so I was told. I expect you met her at a Party meeting,” he picked up his glass again, eyes never leaving hers. This time it was Daphne who felt a curious intensity, as if the journalist was riffling through the contents of her mind. “Or some similar gathering.”
Her eyes dropped back down to the carpet.
“Actually, I met her by complete coincidence,” she said. “In the summer of 1940, in a tiny little village in Leicestershire called Appleby Magna. I was posted there by the Women’s Land Army. Evelyn was a travelling saleswoman for a pharmaceutical firm; she had this hopeless old banger that conked out on the way to Burton-on-Trent one night. She got stranded at the village pub, where I was hiding from the ruddy-faced farmer who wanted me to do a little bit more than just milk his cows.”
She reached for the cigarette case she had left on the mantelpiece.
“I could see she was as lost as I was,” Daphne continued. “Sitting there in the corner, alone with her lemonade, trying to disappear into the furnishings.” She lifted a jade table lighter to ignite her smoke.
“We got talking,” she continued. “Well, I got talking. Evelyn seemed so terribly shy; she could barely say boo to a goose. But after a bit of prodding, I discovered we had a few things in common. As you say,” her eyes briefly met Swaffer’s again, “it was mainly politics. I told her I had joined the WLA because of Lady Denman and how I hoped I was going to be able to join her staff at Balcome Place – I was such an admirer of everything she did for the suffrage, you know.”
“Indeed I do,” Swaffer nodded gravely. “Lady Denman and I once attempted a raid on Parliament. Our plan was to float a suffragette over the House in a hot-air balloon, whereupon she would shower down leaflets about the plight of the
ladies on hunger strike. Would have made a terrific front cover. Except that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and she floated off down to Tilbury Docks instead.” He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “I digress.”
For the first time, a tremor of a smile played on Daphne’s lips.
– . –
“Gordon,” said Lil, staring hard at the tablecloth as she summoned back the conversation at the salon. “Mol said the fella’s name was Gordon. And his pal was called Felix.” She looked back up at Greenaway, the pupils of her eyes so dark and dilated her irises looked totally black.
Greenaway felt a familiar tingle in his blood as she said it, as if he was back on the racetrack and a tip was coming good.
“Funny name, Felix,” Lil went on. “Posh boys, I s’pose – they said they was training to be officers in the RAF, had some little white slips in their hats to prove it.” Her frown deepened and her stare intensified. “They only take them sort to be officers, don’t they? They don’t take no commoners – nor Romans, neither.”
The Duchess put her hand down softly on Lil’s arm. “Well remembered, love,” she said, patting her, “you never told us their names before.”
“I only just remembered them,” Lil turned her gaze on her companion. “You was late that morning, Duch, where d’you get to anyway? You never said …”
“Never mind that now,” Duch’s mothering fingers gave a sharp little squeeze before she let go. Greenaway noticed the smile tighten at the corners of her mouth. “Is there anything else you need to tell the Inspector you never thought of before?”
“No,” Lil winced, pulling her arm away. “Oh,” her features transformed, as quickly as the sun coming out behind clouds, the warmth of her smile resting on Greenaway. “One thing I’d like to know. If you’re a friend of Mr Swaffer’s, then you probably know my Tom – Tom Power, or Frank I should say – he was the crime reporter on the Evening Sentinel and he was always after Sammy Lehmann, too. I wondered if you’d heard from him at all, since he got the draft?”
Greenaway’s mind shimmied like a tic-tac man calling the odds. Tom Power, that nosy little bastard? Had he been seeing this undoubtedly beautiful but at the same time fatally fallen woman while he was out chasing gangsters and then waxing moralistic in the linen drapers? What would Mrs Power think?
Mirroring this imagined countenance, the face of the Duchess flashed white.
“Course he don’t, Lil,” she said before he could reply. “And even if he does, he ain’t got time for gossip now. He’s got a killer to catch, ain’t he?” She got to her feet. “I’ll see you out, Ted, if there’s nothing more we can help you with?”
Greenaway got to his feet. “No,” he said, offering Lil his hand. “Except to say you’ve been very helpful, Miss, very helpful indeed. If you hear any more talk about this Gordon, then you’ll be sure and let me know, won’t you?”
Her hand was as light as chiffon in his big paw. There was something about her that went beyond how she looked and what she did for a living that turned all this into some grim kind of joke. Greenaway could see how easy it would have been for Tom Power to fall for Lil. Wondered what the Duchess was most afraid of – losing her to a murderer or to a hack.
“And if you see the bastard,” he added, “run.”
– . –
Daphne had almost come to the end of her tale. Swaffer had learned how it was membership of the CP that had brought the two women together – shared nights of intellectual discourse, rallying and sweating over pamphlets in the top room of a pub in Burton-on-Trent, owned by a sympathetic former miner. Of how Evelyn had shed her shyness amid their endeavours, while Daphne had found the purpose in life she had been seeking, the pair of them becoming so inseparable at one point that Daphne had even brought Evelyn back to London with her when she was given leave. And then, as summer had shaded into autumn, how the bloom had started to come off the red rose of their friendship.
“It was when I started to get friendly with some of the others in the group that it all started to change,” Daphne recalled. “It was fine when I was the new girl and she was showing me off to everyone. But when others started taking an interest in me, well …” She rubbed her arms as if she was out in the cold, not standing in front of the fire.
“It started with a few snide comments here and there. I tried to ignore them, pass them off as my being too sensitive, mishearing what Evelyn had really said. But then, when she was driving me back to the farm one night, it turned into a full-scale row. She virtually accused me of being a prostitute because I had spent too long talking to this one other person. Then I realised what it was. She didn’t want me to talk to anyone else, have anyone else but her. I had thought it was she who was the shy one, when I met her that first time in The Black Horse, but in fact it was my own awkwardness she picked up on. And I think she read it as something else …”
She looked back at Swaffer, searching for the right words.
“She was in love with you,” he said.
Daphne nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think she was. But she was so intense about it, so suffocating, it was frightening and I knew I couldn’t go on seeing her. I’m not very good at that sort of conflict, I’m afraid, Mr Swaffer. So I rang Balcome Place and asked to be relieved of my duties. As you know, we’re volunteers in the WLA, there’s nothing to make us stay where we’ve been posted. I didn’t tell Evelyn, I just went. And I never heard from her again until the night—” her eyes dropped back down to the fire in the grate, “she was murdered.”
“What happened that night, Miss Maitland?” Swaffer asked.
Daphne lit another cigarette.
“She called me,” she said, blowing smoke across the room, her eyes following the trail of it, into the distance. “At about half-past six in the evening. I don’t remember having given her my number, but as I told you, she did stay here with me once and I suppose she was just cunning enough to have taken it down and stored it away. She said it was her birthday and that she was coming up to see me. Just as if we had never said a bad word to each other, just as if she was an old friend I would have been delighted to receive at such short notice. Well, I couldn’t believe my ears. And I’m afraid I told her what I thought of her. I’ll spare you the details, but suffice to say, there was this long silence and then she hung up the telephone. But that wasn’t the end of it. I had a horrible feeling it wouldn’t be.
“I told my housekeeper that if anyone should come calling later that evening she must tell them I was not in London and send them away. Sure enough, four hours later, there was Evelyn, standing on the doorstep.”
Daphne’s hand shook as she put the cigarette out, reached for her glass of brandy. “But, Mr Swaffer, if I had only known what was out there waiting for her, I would never have turned her away. I was so scared of her, but what was she, really? A lonely, frustrated woman, that’s all. She didn’t deserve to die like that. No one does. And that’s why I wanted to see you. Because I know what you believe.”
“My poor, dear girl,” said Swaffer, rising to his feet to put his arms around her. “What a terrible burden you have carried.”
Daphne could contain her tears no longer. “Please tell me,” she said, “please tell me she’s all right … Wherever she is now …”
– . –
Black pins in the map over Greenaway’s desk marked the location of the two murder sites. Red pins mapped the killer’s hunting grounds around Piccadilly and Soho. As he pushed in another one at the address of Lil’s friend Lorna, Greenaway’s eyes travelled in a circuit around his quarry’s trails. A list in his hand of barracks and civilian buildings requisitioned for the duration of the conflict. Between Regent’s Park and Marble Arch. Round in a sweep, clockwise. Green pins for the army, blue pins for the RAF. Round in a sweep anti-clockwise. Back to Regent’s Park. Abbey Lodge: a mansion block taken by the RAF on St James Place, a crescent off Prince Albert Road that was mere strolling distance from the air-raid shelter on Montagu Plac
e.
Greenaway checked his wristwatch. It was 1.15am.
– . –
Swaffer got back into the car outside on Gloucester Place.
“The Savoy,” he told the driver, taking his fob watch out of his waistcoat pocket and speculating on how inebriated his intended dining companion, a young Labour firebrand, would have become over the course of the last hour.
Pissed to the point of impropriety, he gauged, as his eyes rested on the timepiece. It was 1.15am.
– . –
The click of the latch on the door of the flat opposite woke Mari Lambouri from her slumbers. Mari was not a good sleeper, her predicament made worse not just by the air raids, but the infrequent hours kept by the woman who lived across the hall from her, in Flat 4, 9–10 Gosfield Street. A woman that, good Catholic as she was, Mari would never dream of describing as any kind of lady.
Twice in the last two weeks Mari had been driven from her bed by screams of bloody murder emanating from Phyllis Lord’s place. Twice she had been made to witness the purple bruises, freshly bloomed, across her neighbour’s stomach and chest, the ripped clothes and smashed furniture. And twice the stupid woman had refused point blank to call the very police she had been yelling for only moments earlier.
So it was strange, on this night, that a mere click had been enough to rouse her. As her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Mari heard the sound of footsteps, a man walking away from Phyllis’s flat and quietly opening and closing the front door. Whistling softly to himself a tune Mari vaguely recognised from an old Fred and Ginger film, she thought, although it was rendered flat and off-key.
The clock by her bedside read a quarter-past one.
9
DON’T FENCE ME IN
Thursday, 12 February 1942
“We’ve a man here who does answer to your description,” the Corporal told Greenaway. The orderly in charge of RAF A Squadron, Abbey Lodge, looked just the way he’d sounded over the telephone: a black-haired Yorkshireman with a face the size and shape of a shovel and the demeanour of one who would use such an implement to dig graves.
Without the Moon Page 6