“What the hell is it?” asked Jury. “What’s wrong?”
“It’s these two, this Bea Slocum and Gabriel Merchant.”
“Something’s happened to them?” Jury was alert.
“No, nothing’s happened. It’s where he lives, sir. In East London.”
Jury frowned. “So? A hell of a lot of people live in East London.”
“Not on Catchcoach Street, they don’t.”
It sounded vaguely familiar, obviously not vague at all to Wiggins. “Catchcoach Street?” Jury turned it over, smiled, laughed. “My Lord, Wiggins, you’re not talking about—”
Looking as if the atmospheric ozone had just burst another hole, Wiggins nodded. His voice was ominous. “Crippses, sir. White Ellie. Ash. And those—kiddies . . . ” An involuntary shudder ran through him. He opened his eyes, then looked imploring. “I’m still feeling really chesty, sir. I was thinking of maybe going home early, having a quiet lie-down.”
Jury was already shrugging into his jacket. “No lie-down, Sergeant. Two men. You know how it is; Racer says we’ve got to follow proper procedure.” Jury beamed at him. “Just bring your black biscuits.”
ELEVEN
All things change, all is transitory, and you never dip your hand in the same river twice. Or piss in the same birdbath.
Unless you were a Cripps.
In the front garden—a mere dusty patch of earth—of the house in Catchcoach Street, a boy of perhaps four years was taking aim at a white plastic birdbath that was planted amidst the earthly delights of plastic ducks and a hateful-looking troll.
Birds were visibly absent, having drunk once too often already, Jury thought as he and Sergeant Wiggins stood on the pavement watching, fascinated.
A window flew up; a slab of pale face above an obese body appeared, yelling, “Petey! Stop that infernal pissin’ and come get yer tea!” SLAM down went the window, rattling the panes, shaking the baby buggy sitting on the step by the door. Without bothering to collect his short trousers, Petey hightailed it through the door, leaving it ajar.
“I expect we don’t need to knock,” said Jury, peering in the carriage at the baby in its faded bunting. It was like turning back time for Jury, seeing that buggy. The first time he’d seen it was nearly ten years ago, when he and Wiggins had come to Catchcoach Street to dig up information about a suspect in a grisly murder case. They’d been more successful in digging the baby out from under the wash. The carriage was still doing double time as a laundry cart; Jury moved a towel and some flannels away from the baby’s face and checked to make sure the tyke was breathing. Yes.
Wiggins shook himself loose of his own personal Cripps nightmare and mumbled, “Good Lord.” Then he, too, peeped into the carriage. “Surely, that can’t be the same baby, sir, as last time?”
“Probably there’s always a baby of one sort or another.” Jury gave the dented rattle a bit of a shake. The baby gurgled and drooled, its fingers clutching a flannel, either uncaring or unmindful of the dark fate that lay in wait for it, if not today, then tomorrow or the day after.
They entered what might dubiously be termed a “front parlor,” where Wiggins just missed stepping in a bowlful of water with wires running into it, sitting on the floor. From the kitchen came a terrible din, sounds of kettles and jangling crockery, curses and giggles, White Ellie’s voice distinguishable above the others from sheer volume. Then Ellie appeared, wreathed in smiles.
“Well, if it ain’t the Two Rons back again! Wait’ll I tell Ash—” She lifted her eyes ceilingward, adding, “Never mind. Come on in and wet yerselves!” Without waiting for them to answer, she dashed—waddled, rather—back through the kitchen door.
Wiggins, for once, wasn’t backing away from her offer of refreshment, for his attention was taken up by the bowl of water. “What’s this lot, then? Look, those are live wires, sir. That’s dangerous. Burn the house down with that.” Wiggins kept shaking his head.
“Probably,” said Jury, glancing at the colored images jerking around on the telly. Some kind of cartoon show—
“You’re in the way, mate,” said a female voice from the other side of the room. The figure there was slouched, nearly buried in a dozen cushions scattered about the sofa. The red hair blazed as if the head itself were charged with electrical wires, like the dish on the floor.
Jury smiled. “Beatrice Slocum, isn’t it? I’m from Scotland Yard CID.”
Bea Slocum tried to appear bored, her interest aroused only by the cartoon characters. She clapped her hand over her mouth, giggling. It was a little like talking to Carole-anne Palutski.
“I’m Richard Jury; this is Sergeant Wiggins, Scotland—”
“Well, that there’s Ren and Stimpy, so move, will you?” Her hair was a wondrous bluish-blackish-reddish color that one sometimes sees in adverts, and certainly looked dyed, the color of eggplant. She had a pretty face, spoiled by rainbow shadings of eye shadow—there must have been half a dozen colors vying. The face was soft and petulant, the mouth downturned slightly, signal that the soft petulance might, in ten years’ time, harden into cynicism. She was dressed in a kind of ugly green flak jacket and sawed-off jeans. Her feet were stuffed into heavy, short boots. She was holding a remote in her hand and she raised the volume, and, apparently lured by the sounds of their favorite cartoon show, several Cripps kiddies burst from the kitchen into the living room, nearly bowling Wiggins over, then scattered like shot to distribute themselves across the floor, where they immediately started poking and pinching one another.
Said Jury above the TV noise, “If Ren and Stumpy—”
“Stimpy, sir,” Wiggins corrected him. “It’s all the rage.”
With Wiggins, too, apparently, given the way he was so intently staring at the screen. “Don’t sit on the floor, Sergeant.”
Ren (or Stimpy) looked like a pull of taffy with teeth. The other looked like something Picasso had tossed out. Their time appeared to be taken up in bloodthirsty yowlings or finding ways to destroy whatever they came in contact with, with all the elaborate machinations that cartoon characters are given to, screaming, shouting, pinwheeling about the premises. No one was paying any attention to Scotland Yard, not even its own detective sergeant.
Naturally, Ren and Stimpy were an inspiration to the Cripps kiddies. For when Ren (or Stimpy) strangled Stimpy (or Ren), the older boy with the spiky hair made to do just the same thing to his little sister, shaking her like a rag doll until Jury clamped hands on him and pulled him off. If there was one rule the Cripps lads hewed to, it was never to pick on someone your own size, age, or sex; that way, you weren’t so likely to get hurt. That the children hadn’t changed over the last ten was, of course, the illusion created by more Cripps kiddies coming along to replace the ones who had got larger. If that taller lad over there was Friendly, he had grown a lot, but still had the sly and foxy look he had already honed to perfection when he was seven or eight. Yes, it must be Friendly, thought Jury, judging from the way his hand crept toward his crotch. Or perhaps such a movement was locked into the Crippses’ genes. Just look at his father.
“Hey, mister, give us ten p. Go on, mister!” One of the smaller girls was yanking on his sleeve with a hand that bore witness to a tea of mash and catsup. Her boldness encouraged demanding howls from the others.
“Shut yer trap, Alice!” Here was the voice, if not of authority, at least of White Ellie. She came stomping back into the room with two cracked mugs of tea. These she held out to Jury and Wiggins. “Wet yerselves.”
Jury’s thanks were lost in the uproar created by Alice and Petey and the baby in the pram they’d managed to set wailing outside on the pavement. As for Sergeant Wiggins, well, it was the first time Jury had ever seen him look at a cup of tea with disrespect.
“ ’Ere now!” Wildly, she looked round the room. “Wherever’s little Robespierre? Did ya go and leave ’im out again?” White Ellie went to the door and out to the pavement to rescue the baby. “Petey, you been pissin’ in that birdbath?
”
“No ma’am, no ma’am, no ma’am,” Petey answered in a singsong.
“Takes after his da, Petey do. Disgustin’, I keep tellin’ ’im, and he’ll wind up like ’im, too, screamin’ in the streets. Just last week the Liar was rantin’ and ravin’ that Ash give ’er one in Mervin’s lockup garage, but I says, ‘Ha.’ Wishful thinking, if you ask me. Well, you never did meet our Amy”—here she dragged a six-year-old out of the crowd and planted her before Jury. “Just a baby she was last time you was ’ere.” She managed to make it sound as if Jury and Wiggins were annual visitors. “And this here’s Alice.”
Alice, a year or two younger than her sister, said hello by raising her cotton skirt so that the policemen could see she wasn’t wearing knickers. Her grin was impoverished by several missing teeth.
White Ellie slapped the hand away and yanked the skirt down. Then she marched to the television and slapped it off, as if it too were up to salacious doings. “We got comp’ny!”
All the while, Bea’s persimmon head had been bobbing here and there, first to one side, then to another, trying to regain her view of the telly. Defeated, she fell back against the faded cretonne of the sofa. Jury wasn’t sure exiling Ren and Stimpy was such a hot idea, anyway. At least the cartoon had increased the attention span of the kids. Now, of course, they all had to amuse themselves again, and were bobbing around in a circle singing
Piddlin’ Pete, Piddlin’ Pete,
Piddles all over the toilet seat
which they thought rich with humor, or all of them did except for Petey himself, who stood bawling in the middle of the goblin ring.
White Ellie’s injunction to “SHUT YER TRAP” warranted nothing. Sotto voce for no reason Jury could understand, she went on, “Thought you was the Social, come about Ashley. Up there—” she looked at the ceiling—“with ’er around the corner, the both a them, last week. Disgustin’. Bangin’ ’er in me own ’ouse . . . ” White Ellie could never quite believe that New Scotland Yard wasn’t yet another arm of that police surveillance set up to expose the doings of her husband, Ash Cripps. “Well, I says, ‘Ashley, you’re bloody lucky it was the Liar spreadin’ that story about Mervin’s lockup, nobody believes what she says, anyways, know what I mean?’ ”
No, Jury didn’t, but he took the opportunity to say: “It’s not Ash we’ve come to see, Ellie. Actually, it’s Beatrice, here.”
Beatrice was stirring the kiddie stew by poking at the dancing ring with the broom handle. She looked up, surprised.
Piddlin’ Pete, Piddlin’ Pete,
Piddles all over his own two feet!
More wails from Petey, trapped in the center.
“Clear out and give the superintendent a seat!” shouted Ellie. “You, Aurora, clear them knickers and tights off that chair there.” Whichever one Aurora was, she paid no attention, nor did the others, being much too busy with their game.
Jury did for himself, sweeping a few rags from the cushion beside Bea Slocum. “You were at the Tate with your friend Gabe. Where is he, then? It was Gabe I expected to see here.”
White Ellie put in, “Kips on our sofa there, Gabe does. Lost his flat, so Ash told him he could stay ’ere till he got on his feet. And Bea, she’s only stopped by fer tea. Bea’s got a job over in Bethnal Green. Bea works.” Unused to the notion of gainful employment, Ellie breathed real life into the word.
Jury said, “I thought you might’ve remembered something about the dead woman. Frances Hamilton was her name.”
“Gabe might’ve done. Thing is, we separated for a while so’s he could go to the Swagger exhibit and I could look at the J.M.W.’s—”
“The what?” asked Wiggins. He had apparently given up on the wire-laced dish of water for now and had his notebook out.
Bea fiddled a scrap of red polish off a nail. “Turner, you know.” She apparently took Jury’s and Wiggins’s astonished looks to mean they didn’t know who Turner was, and added, “J.M.W. Turner. He’s a painter.” She said this quite matter-of-factly, her information aimed at the knuckleheads who’d never heard of Turner. “Anyways, Gabe likes the Tate; we go there a lot. Gabe’s a painter.”
White Ellie hooted. “That one? Only thing he ever painted was Ash.”
“Oh, give it a rest, Elephant. That was just a joke.”
“Nearly landed Ash in the nick, that did. Some joke. See—” Ellie turned her full attention to Jury, spreading her great girth over the clean laundry—“drunk as two lords they got, Ash and Gabe, and Gabe, he’s got out his pots of paint—”
“My paint, Elephant. Mine. Last I had, too. Gabe nicked it from my flat in Bethnal Green.”
Ellie went on, “So Gabe, he makes a few dibs and dabs on Ashley. Then they think, well, what’s the point of being only a little bit blue, so Ash strips right down until he’s stark, and Gabe paints him blue, blue all over except for patches so’s the skin could breathe, and then bets him ten quid he wouldn’t run down to the corner that way. So I’m in here, givin’ Robespierre ’is bottle, and what do I see when I look up. This blue thing goes streakin’ by the window and pretty soon one of the kids comes runnin’ and tells me his da just run by, and he was turned all blue—”
Now the counterpoint to this tale was offered by the kiddies, who changed their chant to
Ash is blue, Ash is stark,
Ash is always outta work.
“ ’Ere now!” cried White Ellie. “That’s yer da ya be makin’ fun of, so show more respect!”
Da is blue, Da is stark,
Da is always outta work.
As if there’d been no interruption, Ellie went on, “And don’t think the Liar wasn’t ringin’ up the Old Bill practically before I could even catch me breath and get out there. So round come the cops and the Liar’s out there directin’ traffic and Gabe just laughin’ fit to kill—”
Said Bea, as she cadged a cigarette from Jury’s pack, “Ah, go on, Elephant. Give it a rest.”
Jury turned his attention to Bea. “Is it possible Gabe saw Mrs. Hamilton—the dead woman—when he was going round the Swagger Portrait exhibit? And you were in the Clore Gallery?”
Exhaling a bale of smoke, she said, “He might’ve done. He’ll be here in a minute. You can ask him yourself.”
“Were you looking at the Turners, then?”
“Oh, well,” she said, as if either the question were idiotic or any answer would be, “you seen one Turner, you seen them all, right? How many ways can you do light? is what I say.” She was looking at Jury to see how he’d react.
Jury’s reaction was even greater astonishment. Beatrice Slocum wasn’t the girl he’d thought she was. Or the one she wanted you to think she was.
There was a brief scuffle out in the street, and Bea leaned over the back of the sofa to pull a grubby lace curtain aside.
The participants in this fracas were an elderly man with no chin; a woman in a waxed coat who’d probably looked middle-aged all of her life; a tall, youngish man whom Jury recognized as Beatrice’s young man, Gabe; and Ashley Cripps. Jury certainly would have known Ash anywhere. Some sort of argument was in progress—shouting from the chinless man, waving of arms from Ash, a cane brought into play by the woman, which put her at considerably more than middle age.
Bea was turned round, looking over the back of the sofa. “Oh, bloody hell. It’s the Liar again. She’s out there with Fuckin’ Freddie—”
Ellie threw up the window. “Get outta the street, Ashley. Get yerself in ’ere!”
With obvious irritation at this interruption of his dispute, he told Ellie to go fuck herself, he was busy, thank you very much, and returned to shoving his fist at the nose of the chinless man.
Disgusted, White Ellie waddled over to the front door and furiously across the pavement. Now there were five of them, and Jury decided he had better intervene, or at least go out and collect Gabe, if his investigation was to end this year. He walked out into the street.
To what must have been White Ellie’s question, the
chinless man was responding:
“Well, he f-f-f-f-fuckin’ pissed hisself in me primulas, dihn’t he? F-f-f-f-f-f—”
“Ah, shud-dup!” shouted Ash. “I never done no such thing.”
“Seen ’im with me own eyes!” whined the woman Jury presumed was the Liar.
The tall young man was himself sticking up for Ash, claiming the Liar was exactly that and hadn’t seen any such thing. Jury asked him if he was Gabriel Merchant.
“Yeah, tha’s right, guv, but piss off for right now, okay?” It was apparently the password, offered in a friendly manner.
The collective voices had reached a pitch feverish enough to attract the attention of passersby, who were stopping with their dogs on leads and their shopping carts to watch.
“—and then he f-f-f-f-fuckin’ pulls down ’is zipper an’—”
“I never! Elephant, tell ’er! I couldn’t do, could I?”
The woman started whipping the air with her cane. “You did do, I seen you, I seen you—”
“Liar! Liar! Liar!” yelled White Ellie. “He couldn’t, could he? I sewed it up, dihn’t I?”
Ashley thought this was enormously funny, the two neighbors being caught out, as he thrust his pelvis forward. “Go on, then, go on, yank ’er open, Liar.”
The woman gave a little gasp, either over the proximity of Ash Cripps’s zipper or over being discovered in the act of living up to her sobriquet. The fly of his trousers was quite firmly stitched over. She turned, face flushed nearly to the color of the garnet at her throat, and stumped away. The chinless man (Fuckin’ Freddie, apparently) stuttered out a few indecipherable words and made off after her.
Both Ash and Gabe laughed until they wept, arms round one another’s shoulders.
“I hate to break this up,” said Jury.
“Hey, well, I’ll be pissed if it ain’t Scotland Yard come round again.” Enthusiastically, Ashley shook Jury’s hand, pumping it up and down. “Hey, Gabe, this here’s the police. Remember I told you about that case we was helpin’ out with?” Cheerfully, Ash turned to Jury. “So what’s it this time?”
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