Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  The touch of earthly years.

  No motion has she now, no force

  She neither hears nor sees

  Rolled round in earth’s diurnal course

  With rocks, and stones, and trees.

  Frances looked up from the page and wiped her eyes as she heard the front door go and the sounds of talk and laughter proceeding up the hallway. The kitchen door opened and Harry came in with Bobby right behind him, rubbing his hands and asking: “Is that supper ready, my dear? It smells a treat, doesn’t it, Bobby?”

  She closed the book and stood up, forcing a smile to greet this unexpected sight of familial solidarity.

  “Not half,” Bobby agreed, his blue eyes catching hers and a tentative smile forming there. “I’m starving, Mum,” he added.

  “Well, we’d better get you fed then,” Frances said, smiling back at him.

  She scooped the book off the table, put it back up on the shelf where she had put the package her sister left on Saint Valentine’s Day. Now she knew exactly what words to use in parting when she took Margaret’s body home.

  24

  KILLIN’ JIVE

  Friday, 20 February 1942

  He feigned outrage at first, the way his sort always did.

  “What murder enquiry?” Parnell asked as Greenaway walked him to his car. “What you talking about? You must have run out of ideas, picking on me.”

  Scores of children playing amongst the debris at the end of the market day stopped their games and stared at the pair of them, round eyes in mucky faces reflecting a mixture of curiosity and awe. The one little sentinel Greenaway had singled out to keep an eye on the motor for him was still at his post, standing guard like a good soldier. Greenaway ruffled his curly head and slipped him a shilling.

  “Well done, son,” he said. “Come and see me when you’re out of short trousers, I’ll make a good copper of you yet.”

  “Wow!” The boy eyed his bounty with delight. Parnell gave him a venomous stare.

  “That’s all bogeys are about, you know, bribing off decent folk,” he hissed. “You want to watch yourself, sonny Jim.”

  “Up yours!” the child replied, sticking two fingers up and running away, laughing.

  Greenaway afforded himself a chuckle. “He’s got your number, Parnell. Now shut up and get in the car.”

  The Maestro spent the journey brooding in silence. He had never had a face-to-face with Greenaway on his own before, but he had been forewarned that there was no dealing with the DCI. If he seemed to be being reasonable, it was because he was working an angle on you and getting you to help him discover exactly what he wasn’t sure of – making you knit your own noose, as Bluebell would put it. Parnell wasn’t sure that was what was happening here – so far Greenaway had been much less than friendly. All he knew was that he’d had nothing to do with any murder. Not that the fact was any comfort where he was being taken.

  Greenaway, meanwhile, was whistling “The Camptown Races”, getting the feeling he was on to a winner all the way back to Tottenham Court Road, past the Duty Sergeant to the door of the cell in which he deposited his witness to collect his thoughts while he cleared up a few other pertinent matters.

  “You’ve still not told me what this is all about,” Parnell protested as the door was closed on him.

  Greenaway smiled back through the hatch. “An old friend of yours,” he said. “Private Joseph Muldoon of the Cameron Highlanders. He threw a woman off of Waterloo Bridge Tuesday night and ran off with her handbag to a certain little boarding house in Leatherhead. That’s my murder enquiry and that’s what you’re going to be assisting me with. So, make yourself comfortable while you cast your mind back a year or so and remember everything you can think of about lorries full of cigarettes, the landlady of Mole Cottage and the Canadian toerag in question. I’ll see you later.”

  He closed the hatch on Parnell’s yelps of protest.

  – . –

  Since he’d been out of the office, a courier had brought over a couple of documents Greenaway needed to read. First, Cherrill’s forensic report on the handbag. With his usual meticulous attention to detail, the fingerprint man had established a match for two thumbprints found on the tortoiseshell clasp and the ration book made out to Peggy Richards with the dabs that had been taken upon Muldoon’s arrival at Bow Street. It was exactly what Greenaway needed.

  These would form the basis of the physical evidence against the Private, along with Alf Simmons’s report of the encounter on the bridge and the testimony of the landlord and cellarman from the Hero of Waterloo – Muldoon’s movements tracked by witnesses from the time he left the pub with Peggy/Margaret to the moments just after he threw her to her death. The strands of the rope were starting to weave themselves together. But there was still contingency work to do, starting with the second document. Greenaway found something interesting on that one, too.

  He picked up the phone to the Chief Commander. Once he had brought Peter Beverley up to speed with Muldoon’s performance in the morgue and Cherrill’s report on the fingerprints, Greenaway had a theory to expound to his old boss.

  “Some old unfinished business of ours ties into this,” he said. “The landlady at the boarding house where Muldoon was picked up told me that the first time he stayed with her was in March last year. He was introduced to her by a mate of his who’s another one of her loyal customers – one Raymond Parnell.”

  “Not the same one that we know?” said Beverley.

  “I doubt they made two like him,” said Greenaway. “Now, you might recall a couple of NAAFI cigarette lorries got hijacked in the vicinity of Leatherhead around the time, one on the first and one on the eighth of March. I’ve brought Parnell in for questioning this afternoon, made sure I pinched him in plain sight of the rest of his firm, at Soapy Spielman’s barbers. See, I’ve got a hunch there’s more to Muldoon being on Waterloo Bridge than meets the eye.”

  “Go on,” said Beverley.

  “My snout who found the body,” said Greenaway, “also tipped me off there’s a night watchman on the site hosting little parties in his hut of an evening. Said he’d seen some faces from back East dropping in on him, namely Moishe Abraham and his pet Bear, associates of our dear friend Parnell. Which signals to me, it ain’t some simple game of Klobbiotsch going on in there. So, I got a list of all the night watchmen employed by Peter Lind Construction sent to me,” Greenaway consulted the document, “and the name Morris Spence comes up on there.”

  “The plot thickens,” said Beverley. “Morrie the Tipster, I take it?”

  “If it ain’t too much of a coincidence that this Morrie’s been working on the site for as long as that Morrie got out of his last stretch at the Ville, then we are talking the very same gentleman I once nicked with a portable press, rigging the Tote for the Lehmann firm at Sandown,” Greenaway confirmed. “Exactly the sort of press that could very easily be adapted to manufacture the same kind of bootleg petrol coupons I found in quantity in Muldoon’s kitbag. I must say, there was something familiar about them.”

  “How very interesting,” said Beverley.

  “That’s what I hoped you’d say, sir. See, I’ve been having these horrible premonitions that if Muldoon gets some clever barrister, he might try the M’Naghten defence, on account of his war record in France. He might come across as a bit of a hero, being only one of seven men to come back from his squad alive; destroying twenty-one Jerry tanks in the process and so on. But if we can prove he’s spent most of his leave ever since at work for the Lehmann firm, he ain’t going to look quite so sweet, is he?”

  Greenaway could hear the Chief Commander’s teeth chomping against the side of his pipe. “I rather like your thinking, Ted,” Beverley told him. “What you proposing?”

  “Well,” said Greenaway, “when I picked Parnell up, I told him and the rest of his firm that this was Murder Squad business. They’ve probably all read about Cummins in the linens, but I’m not so sure they’ll have been so interested in the
Waterloo Bridge woman, or have half a clue how it could connect back to them – yet. I’m aiming to keep the Maestro sweating overnight, let him out bright and early and see how quickly things move when news gets back to the rest of his clan. In the meantime, I was hoping you might be able to spare an officer or two to keep an eye on the huts along the north entrance to the Waterloo Bridge site between now and then?”

  “I see,” said Beverley. “What’s the hurry, if you have Parnell locked up already?”

  “His firm get itchy fast,” said Greenaway. “I don’t want to leave nothing to chance. The press don’t have Muldoon’s name yet, but I intend to charge him this evening and you know how leaky even the walls of Bow Street can be. If Moishe Abraham gets wind of any of this, he’ll be straight over there to sort out any outstanding business he might have with Morrie the Tipster, believe me.”

  “All right,” said Beverley. “I’ll see what I can muster. And I’ll expect to hear back from you in due course.”

  “Thank you, sir,” said Greenaway. He resumed the whistling of his favourite sporting ditty while he made his next telephone call to Charing Cross station.

  – . –

  Parnell sat down on the bunk, looked down at his long, manicured hands to make sure they weren’t shaking, then took the pack from where he had concealed it in his sock and began to shuffle. Feeling the cards flying through his fingers had a calming effect on the Maestro, putting him back in control of a system of logical thinking that would stop the narrow walls from bearing down on him and his mind from straying into panic.

  Parnell had been keeping his mind agile this way for almost as long as his call-up to the RAF had been served on him – currently three years and counting. The morning those papers had landed on his mother’s doormat was the same day he had left his hometown of Preston for good, putting the full width of the Ridings between them before he stopped in Bridlington.

  There, Parnell had tried his luck fulfilling his dearest ambition, playing drums in a show band at the Spa Pavilion. He had displayed enough of an aptitude for hitting things with some sort of rhythm to earn himself a place in his school orchestra and was therefore competent enough to pass the audition. What he hadn’t realised was quite how desperate his fellow Long Shore Swingers had become for someone to fill their vacant stool before they ended up hiring him.

  Parnell’s education in the music business over that first summer season was one long, slow and bitter realisation that he was never really going to be up to the task of playing big-band swing. No matter how hard he practised, he could never get to the stage he had always dreamed of – to lose himself within the rhythm and merge with the music he loved. It was a bitter pill to swallow.

  Luckily, he found a sympathetic friend in the kindly old duffer who did the magic turn in the same summer show. In Parnell, this ageing Maestro saw a glimpse of his younger self and, following a few commiserating after-show drinks one night, set about schooling him in the arts of illusion, card sharpery and mesmerism, techniques that, to his delight, Parnell found much easier to master. Once his benefactor was convinced a new Maestro had been born, he offered some sage advice.

  “You want to get yourself down to London, my dear. Don’t waste your life like I have in these provincial dives. There are many more opportunities for a clever boy like yourself in the Smoke than you’ll ever find on the end of a pier.”

  He supplied his protégé with the phone numbers of his remaining contacts before he waved him off on the train down south and, by the summer of 1939, Parnell had joined a variety troupe making their way around London and the Home Counties. For two weeks that June, they were booked at the Victoria Hall in Leatherhead – which was how he had first made the acquaintance of Edith Cavendish-Field.

  A sudden barrage of shouting broke Parnell’s concentration. A drunk-and-disorderly was being manhandled into the cell next door, letting his captors know his frank opinion of their parentage and choice of careers. Parnell rolled a finger around the neck of his shirt. Edith and Joe. It had all started off as a joke to him. But it hadn’t turned out very funny.

  – . –

  As Margaret McArthur’s body had been found on Charing Cross turf, it was with one of their senior detectives that Greenaway made his return visit to Bow Street. DI William Bright was exactly the sort of dedicated connoisseur of villains who would be useful on a trickster like Muldoon. Ten years younger than Greenaway, he had been spared the call-up thanks to an injury sustained while pursuing a suspect over a warehouse roof and falling through the ceiling, which had left him minus three toes on his left foot. Bright’s limp only served to enhance a formidable presence, built like a blacksmith with a thatch of hair the colour of barley and unnervingly pale-blue eyes.

  Greenaway outlined his angle on Muldoon to DI Bright as they waited for him to be brought up from the cells to the interview room. “Let me take the lead,” he said, “but if anything occurs to you, adjust your tie and I’ll let you make your presence felt. In the meantime, you’ve got a good pair of eyes on you, see if you can’t sus him out.”

  Their prisoner was back to playing his insolent act, with a constable on either side needed to manoeuvre him up from the cells and deposit him in the chair opposite the two detectives. Greenaway began with the formalities.

  “My name is Detective Chief Inspector Edward Greenaway and this is Detective Inspector William Bright. I am conducting investigations relative to the murder of the woman now known to have been Margaret Theresa McArthur on Waterloo Bridge on the night of Tuesday, the seventeenth of February.” He paused to stare hard at his suspect. “I did tell you I’d be back, Muldoon. Couldn’t you be bothered to even have a shave? We do allow it here, you know.”

  Slumped in his chair, Muldoon stared back with all the hostility he could muster. “Can I have a cigarette?” he asked.

  Greenaway gave his jacket pocket a cursory pat. “Oh dear,” he said, “I’ve run out.”

  “Here,” Bright picked up his cue, offered his own case across. “Have one of mine.”

  Muldoon accepted the smoke and a light, exhaling his first drag in Greenaway’s direction. Greenaway took Cherrill’s report out of his murder bag.

  “Your fingerprints are all over that handbag you tried to flog in Leatherhead,” he told his suspect. “Margaret McArthur’s handbag. That’s irrefutable evidence, Muldoon.”

  “It don’t mean I killed her,” Muldoon said, his dark eyes shifting between the two detectives and finally settling on Bright.

  “Then explain what happened between the hours of eleven o’clock and midnight on the evening of Tuesday, the seventeenth of February,” said Greenaway. “We know you were in the Hero of Waterloo pub on the Strand until closing time, and we know you left with the deceased. We have witnesses to all of that. We have a further witness who places you on the northeast side of Waterloo Bridge at midnight. All you need to do is fill in the missing details of how you ended up with Miss McArthur’s handbag in a pub in Leatherhead and how she ended up lying dead underneath the exact spot on the bridge where our witness found you.” He spread his hands out. “It’s simple, really.”

  “Look,” Muldoon kept his eyes locked on Bright, “I’ll level with you guys. I paid that dame three dollars, up front, for a service she offered me. I even found us a nice, out-of-the-way spot to do it in, instead of the doorway she tried to drag me into. But when it came down to it, she wouldn’t put out. I asked for my money back, but she wouldn’t give that up either, instead she started yelling the place down like she was drunk or mad or something. You know what those Irish broads can get like.” Muldoon pointed an index finger towards his temple and spun it around in a circle. Bright smiled encouragement back at him. “They’re crazy, yeah? I had to get my money back so I pushed her around a little bit – but who wouldn’t, in those circumstances? I got the bag off her and then I took off. And that’s all there is to it.”

  “Really, Muldoon,” said Greenaway. “I’ve left you here all afternoon and th
at’s the best you can come up with? You were seen, remember? That man who helped you down off the bridge? He heard you both arguing, but by the time he got to where you were, there was no sign of the woman. He thought there was something a bit strange about that, so he hung about ’til daybreak, when he found her dead body.”

  Muldoon shrugged, kept his eyes on Bright. “How should I know what she did with herself after I took off?” he said. “She was mad as hell, mad enough to throw herself off the bridge for all I know. Or maybe she was so drunk she tripped over her own feet – I mean, Christ, she was only a whore. What do you care if she did herself in?”

  Bright put his hand up to loosen the knot of his tie. “Tricky creatures, ain’t they, women?” he said. “Do you mind telling me, at what point during your transaction did you realise that this one wasn’t going to play the game?”

  “Soon as the folding was in her purse,” Muldoon said. “I shoulda known better.”

  “What happened then?” Bright looked puzzled. “Did she try to run off or did she just start shouting at you?”

  Muldoon’s brow furrowed. “She tried to run off,” he said, “so I caught hold of her arm.” He nodded, satisfied with his explanation. “And that was when she started screaming.”

  “Right,” Bright said, scratching his head. “So then at what point, between you giving her the money and her trying to run off, did her right stocking come off and tie itself around her neck? Or did that happen when she tripped over her own feet?”

  Muldoon’s expression soured. “I don’t get it,” he said.

  “The stocking,” repeated Greenaway. “How did it get around her neck, Muldoon? Some sort of a magic trick, perhaps?”

  Muldoon’s cheek began to twitch the way Greenaway had come to expect when he’d run out of smart things to say. “How should I know?” the Private said. “You’re just trying to pin something on me I had nothing to do with.”

  Greenaway shook his head. “None of you can ever think of an original line to say, can you?” He leant across the table. “I know you couldn’t bring yourself to take a very good look in the end, but all those injuries you witnessed today at the morgue, they weren’t just caused by her fall from the bridge, as well you know and as the autopsy makes clear. In addition to the ligature marks caused by your little homage to Cummins, she was punched on the lower jaw and had fractured her spine struggling with an assailant prior to smashing her head in on the scaffold on the way down. Or are you trying to tell us she managed to do all that to herself, too? You’re a useless liar, Muldoon, on top of the rest of your failings.”