Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  “You don’t think much of your corporal, do you, Cummins?” he asked. “He’s an old man, ain’t he? Don’t see too much. That’s how come it was so easy for you to pull the wool over, on your little trips up and down that fire escape. Thing is, he don’t think all that much of you, neither. Which is how come he let me take a rummage through your billet Thursday morning, while you was on parade. And look what I found in your bin.”

  He took out the pair of boot soles that Forensics had examined, placed them over the top of the brand new pair attached to Cummins’s boots.

  “Look at that,” he said to Sheeney.

  “A perfect fit,” the Detective Sergeant agreed.

  “And what does that prove, exactly?” Cummins patted around his top pocket again. This time, Greenaway didn’t come to his aid.

  “That you wanted to get rid of these in a hurry, probably because you read in the newspaper that we had found a footprint in that air-raid shelter in Montagu Place. I think you also realised that all that dust and rubble that had got into the tread might be traceable to all that dust and rubble you walked over while you was in there. But what I don’t think you did take into account was that it got into your gas mask and all—” Greenaway began to slowly count his fingers, “one, two, three, four … five whole days before you reckon you lost it at a party.” He raised his eyebrows. “Anything you want to add?” he asked Cummins.

  A shrug was all he was offered in return.

  “We’ll take these, then,” said Greenaway, bagging up the boots.

  “And you take these,” Sheeney handed across a pair of prison-issue shoes that the Governor had provided before the interview.

  Greenaway put back the cigarette case and the watch, cleared away the photographs.

  “As a result of enquiries I have made,” he told the prisoner, “you will be brought up at Bow Street Police Court on Monday morning and charged with murder.”

  Cummins looked mildly puzzled. “How many did you say again?” he asked.

  “Four,” said Greenaway, getting to his feet. “I don’t somehow take you for a religious man, Cummins. But make the most of your day of rest, won’t you?”

  Cummins had nothing else to say.

  – . –

  “Listen,” said Duch, “I’ve been doing a lot of thinking since Thursday night myself. All this just ain’t fair on you, Lil. You don’t need this life no more.”

  “But,” Lil said and then hiccupped, “what else am I s’posed to do with meself? Tom ain’t coming back for me, I can see that now. And I don’t know no other way.”

  “I told you right at the start of our acquaintance,” said Duch, “when we got enough money, you take your cut and set yourself up in business. Get yourself that little dress shop you was after. I’ve had a good look at our bank balance and, well—” she smiled hopefully, “there’s enough in there now. You want to get out and give it a go?”

  Lil’s mouth fell open. She didn’t know what to say.

  “Here,” Duch handed her a clean hanky. “Think about it, love. Only don’t take too long about it.”

  Lil nodded solemnly. Then a smile crossed her face like a flash of sunlight.

  “Ask the tea leaves for me, will you, Duch?”

  Duchess stood up, shaking her head affectionately, turned on the radiogram and struck a match to boil the kettle.

  “Here is the news,” the announcer’s voice crackled into the room, “for six o’clock on Saturday, the fourteenth of February …”

  “I’ll miss your tea, you know,” said Lil. “No one makes a cuppa like you do, Duch.”

  “You want to watch me sometime,” said Duch, blowing out the match. “You might learn something.”

  “All right,” Lil got to her feet. “Show me how you do it.”

  Neither of them listened much to the announcer as he intoned grave tidings about the imminent fall of Singapore. It wasn’t until they had settled down with their cups in front of them that he finally managed to catch their attention.

  “… London and Scotland Yard announced today they have charged a man with the murders of four women which took place in the capital over the past week.”

  The two women stared at each other.

  “Your old boyfriend,” Lil spoke first. “That copper – he’s got the bastard.”

  “… the suspect has been remanded in custody at Brixton Prison to face magistrates on Monday morning …” the announcer went on.

  “So he has,” said Duch, putting her cup back down in its saucer. “I knew he would.”

  Lil looked down at her own cup. “Did you see it in the leaves?” she asked.

  “No.” Duch’s gaze went right through her companion, as for a moment she was drawn back to a different room in a different time, the air thick with the smell of blood and spilt perfume, an ominous dark lump on the bed in front of her. “I saw it when he solved his first murder, love,” she said. “My Ted don’t ever give up.”

  “Well,” said Lil brightly, “this changes fings, don’t it? I could be back on the bash tomorrow …”

  “Don’t you dare!” Duch’s complexion turned white.

  “Your face!” Lil said, breaking into a wild peal of laughter, relief tinged with hysteria. “Don’t worry Duch, I’m only pullin’ your leg. I’ve made up me mind now. I won’t let you down. Still,” her smile evaporated. “Thank God that’s over, eh? Thank God they got him behind bars, where he belongs.”

  But the Duchess continued to stare into the middle distance, like an oracle ready to impart a vision. “It ain’t over, Lil,” she said, her voice sounding strangely emotionless. “That’s just it, love. It ain’t ever gonna be over. There’s another one coming up, coming up right behind him …”

  PART TWO

  PEG O’ MY HEART

  16

  AIN’T MISBEHAVIN’

  Saturday, 14 February 1942

  Over the rooftops, along the wide stretch of the Thames, rolling inky-black without the moon, across the scaffolding that encased the building works of the new Waterloo Bridge, down to the Port of London and north again to the other side of the city, in Bethnal Green, another woman waited.

  Frances Feld tried not to keep looking up at the clock as she stood at the stove, stirring the pot. Seven chairs around her kitchen table, but only two places set for supper. Her husband was working lates this week, worked all the hours God sent. Her children had been evacuated, were all living on a farm, safe in the Welsh countryside – all except for one.

  Her eldest, Bobby, couldn’t take to the outdoor life. Kept running away and finding new routes back to the bomb-cratered mess of the East End, hitching rides with lorry drivers and sleeping in hedges. Did it so many times that her husband waved his hands in despair and told her: “Let him stay. He’s in God’s hands.”

  It was an argument she should have tried harder to win, she always thought at moments like this, remembered lines that revolved around her head like a stuck groove in a record. When she heard a tapping at the front door, her heart jolted.

  “Bobby?” she said, as she turned off the gas ring, wiped her hands and headed up the hallway. Even though her head told her that the missing member of her household would simply have let himself in.

  The face on the other side of the door was not one she had been expecting to see. It was framed dramatically in a red head-scarf, swept up and twisted in the manner of a turban. Beneath that, eyebrows plucked into crescents, arched over a pair of heavily made-up eyes, a countenance powdered and rouged in the imitation of youth and stardom, with red lips twitching up into an insouciant smile beside a painted-on beauty spot. A full-length rabbit fur coat swirled down to a pair of stockinged ankles set atop plum-coloured high-heeled shoes, a thin sliver of gold snaking around the left one.

  “Mother of God,” said Frances, her hand involuntarily flying to the cross around her neck. “Margaret.”

  “It’s Peggy, these days, if you don’t mind,” replied her sister, her smile deepening. “Aren�
�t you going to invite me in, dear?”

  – . –

  Not far around the terrace corner, beyond the craters that had been made of similar streets, on the lower reaches of Brick Lane, the cause of Frances’s anxiety stood leaning on a broom in the corner of Soapy Larry Spielman’s barbershop. Bobby Feld should have been home an hour ago. The blackout had gone down with the last dregs of the light at a quarter-past five, the sign on the door turned around to read: Closed. But still the big, black-framed, square-faced clock that hung above Bobby’s head clicked away, unheeded by either himself, the man taking up the chair space, Soapy, who attended to him, or the figures who sat by the table near the window playing Klobbiotsch.

  Bobby loved it in Soapy’s. It was warm and smelt of good things: soap and leather, spices and musk – not like home, which reeked of cabbages and laundry on the boil. Here, the radio was always on, tuned to a station that played the best sounds. Negro Americans singing in a secret language Bobby longed to decipher, big-band swing laced with bittersweet traces of his father’s favourite old records, of the singing in the synagogue that he infrequently attended, being a boy split between two worlds.

  He loved watching Soapy practise his art to these soundtracks, the whole ritual of the hot towels and tongs, the foaming up of the soap with shaving brushes, the beautiful, pearl-handled razor the barber wielded with such delicate skill, the cologne and the Brilliantine that shined his customers up until they fairly sparkled.

  But even that was not the main attraction. The main attraction were the customers – men who were free to stroll in and have their grooming attended to in the middle of the day, when Bobby’s old man would either have been at work for six hours already, or round about now, when he would just be setting off. Men who could while away a whole afternoon just talking – and how. They had their own secret language, too.

  The man in the chair was Moishe Abraham, known hereabouts as Bluebell. Not because he had the delicacy of spring’s first bloom – far from it: Bluebell was a broad, thickset man with the neck of a bull and hair the colour of a raven’s wing, a mass of curls close-cropped and glinting with pomade. He dressed in suits that went against all the fabric regulations – double-breasted, chalk-striped, with two-inch turn-ups at the bottom of the generously cut trousers. It was the shirts he customarily wore, in vivid shades of sapphire, augmented with silk ties and handkerchiefs, which were the source of Moishe’s moniker. Bluebell smoked even as Soapy worked and when he went to retrieve a cigar from between the folds of pristine white towelling, gold rings caught the light.

  The two men sitting by the window had their own names, too. The tall, thin man with the pencil moustache who was dealing the cards might be Raymond Parnell to his mother, but at Soapy’s they called him Maestro. Sat across from him was the Bear – a logical name, considering Bobby would judge him to be about the size of one. He had a hard face set about with scars, wore modest suits of brown or black flannel and hardly spoke a word. He didn’t have to – one glance from those amber slits of eyes that glittered beneath his protuberant forehead and bristling dark brows would be enough to silence a room. Those ursine eyes flicked upwards every so often, towards the door, over at Bluebell and back again. When his left arm moved forwards and his jacket slid open, Bobby caught a glimpse of the holster strapped under his armpit. Caught it and quickly looked away.

  It was a gun that had first brought Bobby to Soapy’s attention. A pistol he and Barney Newbiggin found in the bombsite on Swedenborg Gardens, back in the summer. Barney claimed it was a Luger, dropped by a German pilot. But he wouldn’t give Bobby a good enough look to see for sure, had made off with it on his long whippet’s legs too fast for Bobby to follow. Barney had made it as far as here before Bobby caught up with him, found him showing his bounty off to a gaggle of younger kids just outside Soapy’s. The fight that ensued was loud enough to attract the barber’s attention.

  Soapy knew more about guns than Barney, that much was soon evident. It wasn’t a Luger, it was a Colt .45, dropped by a Yank, most likely. It was, however, half loaded and could have blown their stupid heads off. As Soapy admonished them, twisting a lughole in each hand for emphasis, Bobby had stared at the gold ring in the barber’s left ear, the tendrils of colour he could see escaping down his arms from where his shirtsleeves were rolled up. Bobby was fascinated – he had always been taught that such things were the marks of Cain. The sharp widow’s peak, badger-striped grey hair and lines on Soapy’s forehead all indicated that he was older even than Bobby’s father, but he didn’t much act like it.

  After that day, Bobby kept coming back to stare into the barbershop, until Soapy took pity and let him in. He didn’t give the gun back, but he did consider that maybe there were a few things Bobby could do for him that would “keep him out of bother” instead.

  As far as his mother was concerned, Bobby was learning a trade on the weekends and evenings he spent at Soapy’s. And so he was. He was learning the sorts of things Frances was most afraid of him ever finding out.

  “Boychick,” said Bluebell, clicking his fingers in Bobby’s direction. “You want to hear a story? I ever tell you about how Sammy’s luck ran out?”

  – . –

  Despite the pitch darkness of the evening, Frances cast an anxious glance up and down the street before she stood back and allowed entry. Once the door was closed, she ushered her visitor straight into the sitting room.

  “Well, now,” she said, “so you’ve found me. What is it that you want from me, Margaret?”

  For a long minute, her sister didn’t answer. Instead, her hazel eyes scanned appraisingly the modest room, taking in all the familiar hallmarks of Frances’s endeavours – the neatly swept hearth, the afghan she would have knitted and the rug she would have woven, the cross on the wall and the pictures of her favourite saints, St Joseph and St Jude, the devotion to the latter no doubt inspired in no small part by herself. The things that weren’t so familiar to her. That strangely shaped seven-branched candlestick in the middle of the mantelpiece: something to do with the husband, Margaret surmised.

  The sisters had originally come over from Donegal to train as nurses. Frances, who had a deft brain and the ability to concentrate, had done well, steadily climbing the ladder of midwifery and then marrying a doctor. Fate had a different path mapped out for Margaret.

  Margaret fixed a smile to her red lips. “Can I not drop by and see how my nieces and nephews are doing from time to time? Here, I’ve bought them some presents.”

  From under the folds of her voluminous coat, she retrieved a parcel she had tucked beneath her arm. “It’s nothing much, just a few dollies for the girls and comics for the boys – you know, the sort of things they enjoy at that age. Plus, a little something for yourselves.” She winked. “It’s all legit, I promise.”

  Frances eyed the brown-papered lump as if it were an unexploded bomb and made no motion to take it. “You’re doing all right for yourself these days, then?” she said.

  – . –

  Sammy Lehmann was the subject of a lot of the stories spun in Soapy’s. Bobby had never met him, on account of the fact his liberty had been curtailed back in the summer of 1940. Sammy had been “sent down” by his nemesis from the Flying Squad, a man referred to as “that bastard Greenaway”. But it was clear that up until then Sammy had been the leader of these men.

  Bluebell puffed on his cigar, exhaled with satisfaction, and settled down to the telling. “There was a tickle he’d been perfecting since the blackout come in,” he rolled his eyes to the ceiling, “which, might I say, was God’s gift to the graft. No more lights blazing all night long, everything nicely tucked away behind the curtains. All a man like Sammy had to do in them days was wait ’til the coast was clear, go through the locks and have a shufti through all the tomfoolery he could unload. ’Course, these jewellers got wise after a while, started using a safe at night. But they weren’t safe for long, not with Sammy around. He’d just wait for them to open up of a morning and
have it away there and then.”

  Anticipating his customer’s movements, Soapy withdrew his razor from Bluebell’s cheek as the narrator’s laugh cracked through the shop like a Tommy gun.

  “What Sammy worked out was this,” Bluebell went on. “You need two drags, two drivers, one block and tackle. One motor comes up the pavement, right up the front door, so no one in the shop can get out. The other one comes straight up the window, does out the glass with a sledgehammer, Sammy on the running board leans in for the grab and boom! You’re off. Meanwhile, the other car pulls out into the road and blocks it off before the bogeys can get the scream on.

  “Couple of jobs like this go off like clockwork. Sammy finesses it still further – he’s a craftsman, ain’t he? Instead of getting out of the motor, he finds one with a sunroof, so’s he can pop up through that and have the windows and the trays all out in one fell swoop. So simple, it’s beautiful. One of the boys even done him some special plates, for the benefit of that bastard Greenaway – MUG 999 they read.”

  Bluebell took another puff, savouring the chuckles this last detail provoked, even from those who had heard it many times before.

  “Greenaway’s as riled as a hornet at a picnic, but there’s nishte he can do about it. Every time he pulls Sammy in and puts him on parade, no one’s ever seen his handsome boat before – a man should be so lucky.

  “But then, boychick, then the odds turn against him. He’s been casing this joint in Conduit Street. Has a lovely little sports Alvis picked up from outside the Bath Club and a Bentley to bring up the rear, all beautifully ringed and repainted.” Bluebell sighed and shook his head, regretful, allowed Soapy to douse his newly shorn countenance with cologne and then continued.

  “The drag comes up Bond Street like planned, turns the corner and boom! Headfirst into a flatfoot. They swerve away from him, get up to the window, Sammy stands up with the sledgehammer – and the drag stalls dead. By now, the bogey’s blown his whistle and there’s a whole stampede of honest citizenry swarming towards them.