Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Sammy makes for the Bentley but the bogey’s already there. He throws his truncheon through the windshield; it rains down with glass and what do you know – that car stalls and all. Sammy does the only thing he can do – he legs it. All the way over Bond Street and down Bruton Street he goes, half of London on his tail. First doorway he finds, he’s in and up the stairs, don’t stop ’til he’s on the roof. He takes a quick shufti and sees a hundred faces staring up at him from the street, all shouting: ‘There he is, officer!’”

  Leaning forwards in his seat, Bluebell went through the motions of his story like he was performing it on stage.

  “Still Sammy don’t give up,” he said, drawing his arms wide. “He springs onto the next roof, nonchalant as you like, disappears down their stairs and out the back – only to find Lily Law waiting there in the doorway. Thinking on his feet, he points behind him and says: ‘Quick, officer! He’s in here!’”

  Bear slapped his knee, shaking his head with silent mirth.

  “Trouble was,” Bluebell went on, “the half of London what had already seen him go up, calls back like bleedin’ panto: ‘Oh no he isn’t! That’s him!’ And that was poor Sammy, bang to rights. The end of a beautiful caper.”

  Bluebell gave Bobby a rueful smile, then examined himself in the mirror Soapy proffered, nodded his satisfaction and stood up. This was Bobby’s cue to remove the apron and rub down the pinstriped shoulders with a clothes brush.

  “Two years in the Moor he got,” Bluebell went on. “You know what he’s doing in there?”

  Bobby shook his head.

  “He’s the prison barber!” Bluebell exploded into laughter again, clapping Bobby round the shoulders. “As he was taught by Soapy hisself. So you watch out, my son. You never know where all this could lead you.”

  – . –

  Margaret shrugged, put the parcel down on the nearest chair. “As you can see,” she said, stroking the sleeve of her coat.

  Then her expression changed, the sardonic mask slipped and a look of pleading came into her eyes, softening her features, reminding Frances for just one second of the girl her sister had been, tickling trout in the burn under Muckish mountain, mud on her face and tangles in her hair.

  “Francie,” Margaret said, “I know it’s asking a lot, but could I not just say hello to them?”

  Frances stiffened, the shutters clanging down on her memories. “There’s no point,” she said, wondering if for once, Bobby’s absence counted as a blessing. “They’re not here. They’re on a farm in Wales, out of harm’s way. Do you think I would let my children stay here, with the bombs raining down on them every single night?”

  It was clear from Margaret’s face that the finer details of motherhood and responsibility had not once crossed her mind.

  Aware that at any moment, the one component of this white lie that could cause its undoing could present himself and expose her falsehood, Frances moved in for the kill. “Now, we made a deal long ago and it was for everyone’s sake that we did. If there’s nothing more I can help you with, then you’d best be on your way.”

  She was only a thin, slight willow of a woman, but at that moment Frances stood as hard and unbending as steel. Margaret knew that it was better not to argue. Frances held the winning cards in this hand of the game and maybe she always would.

  On the doorstep, Frances pushed the parcel back into Margaret’s arms. “And you can take this with you,” she said, shutting the door before there was a chance to say another word.

  – . –

  Bobby held tightly to the coin Bluebell had given him as he was leaving, clasped it in the centre of his fist as he ran all the way home. Half a crown! It was imperative that he kept this safe from the disapproving eyes of his parents.

  He didn’t get back soon enough to glimpse the departing figure in the fur coat. But when he reached his front doorstep, he found a parcel sitting there, wrapped in brown paper and tied up with string. Lifting it up curiously, Bobby breathed in the scent of violets.

  17

  JEEPERS CREEPERS

  Monday, 16 February 1942

  “What kind of a man is he?”

  Daphne Maitland looked down from the public gallery in Bow Street Magistrates’ Court at the figure in the dock, this stranger who had snuffed out Evelyn’s life as easily as another might swat a fly. His appearance came as a shock to her – here was neither the drooling demon of her imagination, nor an echo of the top-hatted wraith from Victorian Whitechapel that the papers had conjured. Instead, an ordinary, almost pleasant-looking young man with his wavy, golden hair, standing to attention in his RAF uniform while the magistrate read out the charges. It was only when he began to smile at the list of outrages he stood accused of that the question flew from her mouth.

  Madame Arcana gripped her handbag tightly as she leant forward for a better look. “The Knight of Swords,” she replied in a whisper, dark eyes glued to the same insouciant countenance, the smirk that danced beneath his pencil moustache.

  Daphne’s other neighbour gave a mirthless grunt. “He don’t exactly look the part, do he?” The Duchess put her hand over Daphne’s and gave it a squeeze. Daphne did her best to return a smile. They had been so kind to her, Miss Moyes and her circle, just as Mr Swaffer had predicted. It had given her the courage to come here, knowing that her new friends would be with her; there was no one from her own circle she could possibly have asked. Though, she was surprised just how familiar her new friends had been with the processes of a court – when to arrive, where to go and what to do – not to mention the number of other women they knew who had all turned up with the same purpose in mind: of seeing a Ripper, if not in chains, then held captive at least.

  “But I s’pose he knows what he’s doing,” Duchess nodded down towards Greenaway as the detective was called to take the stand.

  – . –

  Placing his hand on the Bible, Greenaway swore his oath, eyes travelling around the courtroom. Aside from the officials, police officers and journalists present, Cummins’s audience consisted of women. Up in the gallery, the amassed ladies of the parish were doing their best to make their grievances palpable, staring down all the curses known to them with their glittering eyes. Behind the dock where Cummins stood sat two others whose lives had been ruined by the man: his wife, Marjorie, and her sister, Freda Stevens – though the rigid pose of the former and the scowling visage of the latter did not radiate hatred like the others – with them, it was more like fear.

  Greenaway had visited these two women the previous day in the flat they shared in Barnes. He’d been hoping to discover something more about the airman’s motivations, work out how he had successfully kept his murderous impulses under wraps for so long. He had certainly hidden his domestic situation well, in an unremarkable street between the common and the river that even the Luftwaffe seemed to have overlooked.

  Marjorie Cummins was a good-looking woman, as attested by the photo found in her husband’s wallet. The thick, almost black hair which clouded around her shoulders in that image was now hoisted up into a bun, but her arresting, pale-blue eyes needed no making up, despite the puffy redness of the skin around them. She dressed demurely, in a tweed suit that did not disguise the elegance of her long legs and slim ankles.

  Cummins had got himself a trophy wife all right, and then had been content to leave her on the shelf, along with all the other items in the overstuffed front room that seemed to chime with his conceited view of himself: the claret leather armchair on which Marjorie bade Greenaway sit; the oil painting of aircraft ascending over cornfields that hung inside a rococo frame worth more than its contents; the abundance of brass knick-knacks and the grandfather clock in the corner that Greenaway wouldn’t have minded running past Stolen Property.

  But no doubt it was Marjorie who had paid for all these things. She worked as an assistant to a theatre producer, earning a decent wage, though she still had need to take a lodger, in the stout, plain form of her sister, who sat on the so
fa, smoking and sizing up Greenaway with eyes that displayed all of the guile her sibling lacked. Looks and sense must have been doled out straight down the middle of that family, he thought.

  Marjorie went through the motions of making him some tea, though most of it was in the saucer by the time her trembling hand had passed it across. Then she shrank back onto her end of the sofa as if trying to disappear into the fabric, wringing her hands while she hesitatingly sketched out a life of marital bliss with her heroic other half. That she refused to believe the charges was only natural – what woman would want to admit she had been married to such a man? But it was the reason she clung to that rang false – that her beloved would never do anything that could jeopardise his chances of qualifying as a pilot. That was why, she insisted, Gordon had refused to come home during the previous week – he wanted to be sure to be back in his billet each evening at a decent hour, to be well rested for the next day’s training.

  Throughout the interview, Freda leaned over to pat Marjorie’s shoulder each time her voice started to break, reminding her that she didn’t have to answer if she didn’t want to, while at the same time, flashing Greenaway knowing glances. When it became clear there was nothing else he could learn from Marjorie, it was Freda who stood up to show Greenaway out, taking her cigarette with her and pointedly closing the door on the tragedy behind them.

  In the hallway, she spoke. “As my sister told you, we’ve not seen Gordon since Sunday,” she said, keeping her voice low. “And that was his first visit home since he got his new billet.”

  “Which was Monday, the second of February,” Greenaway said, making a note of it. The date the Corporal had said Cummins arrived at Abbey Lodge.

  “That’s right.” Freda curled her upper lip. Though she shared the same well-modulated tones as Marjorie, Greenaway could imagine her language soon turning earthier. “I’m afraid I do count the days, Chief Inspector. He came for lunch so he could cadge some more money out of her. I didn’t catch the full performance; I only came in at about five o’clock myself, by which time I was hoping he’d be gone. They were standing where we are now and she had her hand in her purse, as usual.”

  “You’re not fond of your brother-in-law, I take it?” Greenaway enquired.

  Freda exhaled smoke. “I don’t know how I came by such a word, but our Gordon is what you would probably call a ponce,” she said. “He’s taken every penny Marjorie earns and has given her absolutely nothing in return.”

  Her eyes travelled from Greenaway’s to rest on a framed poster of one of her sister’s employer’s productions. One that depicted the silhouette of a man in a top hat and a stylised drawing of flickering flame emitting zig-zagged yellow rays. The words GAS LIGHT fell in a diagonal line between the two images, trailing a red drop-shadow.

  “You would have thought,” she said, “that with all her education, she might have seen through a rank poseur like him. But no,” she stubbed her cigarette out with some force in a brass ashtray on the telephone table. “As you can see by her line of work, Marjorie is a cursed romantic. Gordon swept her off her feet at an air display on Empire Day in 1936, badgered her to marry him for seven months and took off again the moment the ring was on her finger. No, I never did like him much.”

  “All the same, this must have come as a shock to you?” Greenaway asked.

  Freda looked away from the poster and down at the floor. “Of course it did, Chief Inspector. However much I detested Gordon and the effect he had on my sister, I never thought him capable of such …” She looked back up at him. “Well, if it is true, what you say.”

  “Believe me,” Greenaway told her, “I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t. I’ll be honest with you, Miss Stevens. I’ve never worked a case like this before. I mean, I’ve done my time in the navy and on the Flying Squad, I thought I’d seen every kind of crook there was to know. But not like him. It keeps me up at night trying to work out what kind of a man he really is.”

  Freda lit another cigarette. “One who is different things to different people, I suppose,” she offered. “Not so very far from an actor, when you think about it.”

  “And did you ever see him acting violently towards your sister?” Greenaway asked.

  Freda went silent, weighing up her response, or perhaps, the reflection it would have on the woman silently weeping in the next room. “No,” she eventually said, looking away.

  – . –

  Freda didn’t look at Greenaway as he detailed to the magistrate how he had charged Cummins at Brixton and submitted his formal application that the prisoner be remanded without bail. To the end of his careful testimony, she kept her eyes on the magistrate, who peered above his half-moon spectacles at the man in the dock.

  “How do you plead?” he asked the accused.

  Cummins smiled back at him. “Not guilty.”

  – . –

  Before Greenaway was halfway across the lobby, he felt a hand on his arm.

  “You sure you got the right man, Ted?” the Duchess demanded. “Only that little ponce up there didn’t look like much to me. We want to know if it’s safe for us to go out at night. That’s really him, is it?”

  Greenaway looked at her, and the women grouped around her, all batting their painted lashes at him. Amongst them was a face that didn’t belong, though it only took him a second to place the connection. Lady Daphne Maitland was the woman Swaffer had brought in to see him, a friend of Evelyn Bourne, who had been able to identify the green propelling pencil found in Cummins’s bin as the type the lonely chemist habitually carried around with her.

  “It’s him. You got my word on it,” he said, his eyes lingering on Lady Daphne.

  “Strange company you’re keeping, ma’am,” he added, just as the Assistant Commissioner passed close enough to hear the exchange.

  “DCI Greenaway,” he said. “A word.”

  – . –

  “Got a bollocking for that,” Greenaway explained to Swaffer later in the bar of the Entre Nous. “Apparently, reassuring your snout, or should I say snouts, outside a magistrates’ court that we had the right man in custody could be construed by the gentlemen of the press as giving my permission to go out soliciting.”

  Swaffer raised a hand to his heart in mock horror. “Perish the thought!” he said.

  “Yeah, and perish the thought of getting any credit for taking a madman off the streets,” Greenaway lifted his glass, noting the lack of liquid inside with surprise.

  “Allow me,” Swaffer caught the barman’s eye.

  Greenaway’s countenance radiated ill-humour. Swaffer had previous experience of the DCI in his cups and decided the judicious imparting of information might raise his spirits more effectively than the fresh glass of stout being placed on the beer mat in front of him.

  “I’ve done some more digging,” he said, handing the barman some coins. “Shall we retire to my table?” Greenaway shrugged, but followed Swaffer to his usual lugubrious corner and watched him pull out his notebook, extracting several sheets to scribble on as he talked, to translate his shorthand into names and numbers.

  “Miss Stevens’ summation of events to you seems accurate,” Swaffer said. “When Cummins was first married he was stationed with the Marine Aircraft Experimental Establishment at Felixtowe in Suffolk. The unit moved to Scotland in 1936 and he was with them for a further three years, during which time he earned himself the nickname ‘the Count’—” Swaffer’s eyebrows rose as he peered over the top of his pad, “owing to the decadent lifestyle he maintained, with the help of the local ladies. In the October of 1939, he transferred as a rigger to 600 Squadron at Helensburgh, Dumbartonshire, where not only did his carnal escapades continue apace, but his rendering of those exploits to the other cadets earned him a promotion – at Helensburgh, they called him ‘the Duke’.”

  Greenaway swallowed half a pint in one gulp. “Go on,” he said, wiping his mouth.

  “It seems our illustrious braggart began to believe his own press,” Swaffer conti
nued. “By the time he was posted to Colerne near Bath in 1941, he was referring to himself as the Honourable Gordon Cummins. I spoke to a friend of his there, Flight Lieutenant Alfred Peters,” Swaffer scribbled the name and a telephone number down, “who is the PR man for the RAF in Wiltshire. He believed Cummins to be the son of a peer. He was always flush, drank only the most expensive Canadian rye whisky and was forever boasting of the swathe he was cutting through the ladies of Bath.”

  “What, literally?” Greenaway’s eyes narrowed.

  “Sorry, unfortunate turn of phrase.” Swaffer hastily returned to his notes. “But here’s where we get the measure of his audacity. Cummins was billeted off-barracks in Colerne and made himself at home with the farmer, a man appropriately named Fields, who seems to have a very accommodating wife. The Honourable Cummins became a bit of a celebrity at the local pub, thanks in part to his generosity, and also because he took to riding down there on one of the farmer’s horses. To the manor born, indeed – he even had Lieutenant Peters’s wife doing his laundry for him. His mastery of illusion only really started to crumble when he was transferred to Predannack in November 1941.”

  “Yeah?” Swaffer detected a glint of interest return to Greenaway’s eyes. “In what way?”

  “Cummins’s charms didn’t wash quite so well down in Cornwall,” Swaffer reported. “The men at this posting apparently found his ceaseless boasting a bore, so he tried to find other ways to appeal to them. He became good friends with the landlady of the Blue Peter club in Falmouth, who gave him a part-time job behind the bar and access to her flat above it. It all went sour when she caught him serving free drinks to the rest of his squadron. After she gave him the boot, she realised a lot of her jewellery had gone missing. She called the police and Cummins was investigated, but unfortunately they couldn’t prove anything. From there, Cummins requested a transfer to train as a pilot, he passed the selection and was transferred to Regent’s Park, as you know.”