Angels Dining at the Ritz

by John Gardner

  ‘Most likely, Chief. Thought you should know.’

  ‘Thank you, Dennis. Now, Suzie…’

  Suzie didn’t stay to hear the question. She gave a little sob, couldn’t stop shaking, and did a kind of quick dance step, twisting her body to the left, hopping behind Tommy and Dennis Free, then running down the stairs, out of the front door: out to the sunshine and Brian and Doc, standing by the cars.

  ‘Suzie…’ Tommy called again from the landing.

  Outside, Brian followed her, two steps, and called out, ‘You want to sit in the car, Skip?’

  She doesn’t reply, just shakes her head rather wildly, like a wet dog, surprised to find she’s crying. In her head pictures of the dead revolve, full of blood: her father mangled in sliced metal, a dozen other horrors, the little man decapitated in Soho to the three bodies behind her now in Knights Cottage, their faces scrubbed away with the 12-bore shot, and the child taken in his sleep.

  ‘Heart, what is it?’ Tommy comes up quietly behind her, his hand first on her shoulder, then the fingers straying to her cheek, touching the tears. ‘What is it?’ understanding what was going on and wanting her to put it into words, clean out her mind, scour the final emotional release, the bottled-up terrors from all the dead she had encountered over the years. She feels wrung out, desolated, reaches up, placing a hand on his shoulder, eyes brimming. ‘Tommy. Sorry. How do you deal with it?’ Meaning the final full stop of sudden death. ‘How do you feel about death, Tom?’

  His face slid into a sad half smile. ‘Oh, I’m agin’ it, heart. Definitely agin’ it.’ His face reforming into a grin.

  She blinked — bravely through the tears, she thought — starting to come down from the feeling of shock. Typical of Tommy, making light of the most terrible aspect of life and the horror of it all ending so suddenly.

  ‘Get in the car, heart.’ Patting her shoulder. ‘We’ll go back to the Falcon and you can get yourself together.’ He called Brian, then made his excuses: ‘Got to have a word with Molly.’

  ‘Want to sit in the back, Skip?’ Brian asked and she didn’t even acknowledge him, still drowned in a mixture of emotions, just climbed in and slumped into the back seat where, presently, Tommy joined her and they purred back to the inn.

  ‘Molly’s following. I’ve organized some food with our soignée landlady, the fair Madame Staleways.’

  The description was so inappropriate that, in spite of herself, Suzie smiled weakly. Then she asked if she’d have time to unpack.

  ‘Don’t unpack, heart. We’re not staying tonight. Back to the Smoke, then up here again sometime tomorrow or Wednesday.’

  ‘But we’ve only just got here.’

  ‘I know. Comes with the job, old love. Got to sneak around Lincoln’s Inn and talk to old Willoughby Sands, him of the paunch, big arse, full of smart legal chatter.’

  ‘Tommy.’ Chiding him, more out of habit than anything else.

  ‘Either go to his chambers or see him at home: Hampstead. You’d like it there, heart. Very swish, dontcherknow.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘We haven’t got enough on the Ascolis and I don’t want to leave it to Billy Mulligan. I’ve not done me job: bad planning, old love. Me, the one who usually has everything tied up. This time I didn’t. Ropey do, heart. Thought we’d have a file on the Ascolis, because they settled here, in Britain, at the turn of the century: ice cream makers, did cakes and other titbits. Made their fortunes by 1910.’ He gave a little laugh, reached over and squeezed her hand. ‘All well and good but we’ve got no real detail. You see what happened in Knights Cottage as a bit of revenge, sudden, like Tait suggested? Vagrants? Tramps? Travelling people?’

  As they pulled into the Falcon so the Flying Fortresses were returning to the base up the road, landing on the main runway and taxiing round to the hardstandings, the frying pans. The engines roared, then dropped down as they stalled out for their three-point landings, then grumbled again as they taxied, spluttering to a halt. They could be heard all over the village, the sounds funnelling through the old streets.

  ‘Ascolis killed by vagrants, my impression,’ Tait had said.

  Suzie put her brain back in gear, then said she really didn’t see some vagrant creeping back to do for the people who had, possibly, refused them some kind of assistance, a tip or food. Tommy nodded. ‘Me neither, and I don’t see Max being high-handed to beggars. No marks on the wall either.’

  ‘Marks?’

  ‘Vagrants, beggars, gypos, didicoi, milestone inspectors: they all do it, signal soft touches and hard cases with a chalk mark. Special signs. Should learn them, heart.’

  Aloud, Suzie said, ‘Oh?’ then wondered why DCI Tait had suggested vagrants in the first place. ‘No evidence to support it: not as yet,’ she said, then went to her room — a single next to Tommy’s huge double at the front of the building, overlooking the square. She washed, changed and went down with her small case stuffed with overnight things and her schoolgirl toilet bag.

  Molly had arrived and sat waiting near the dining-room door. Tommy came down a couple of minutes later.

  ‘Well, GPO were fast enough, good,’ he announced. ‘Set up a telephone in my room, new number, account to the Yard, no SNAFUs. Not yet.’

  The dining room was almost empty.

  They sat at a window table and were waited on by Beryl Staleways — a thin soup, dry lamb cutlets, over-cooked potatoes and carrots — an unappetizing Sunday dinner on a warm August Monday evening which ended with rhubarb and a lumpy custard. ‘I thought the London British restaurants were bad,’ Tommy said, raising his eyebrows and glancing across the room at Beryl, lumpy as the custard and with BO redolent of rodent — en masse.

  During the meal Tommy had talked almost non-stop, giving his instructions to Molly. ‘Curry-comb the place,’ he said. ‘Then Hoover it, and after that you collect every scrap of paper and begin to sort through it. Go to the back of drawers, riffle through books, don’t be shy about diaries and personal letters.’ He continued in that vein until the rhubarb arrived.

  Molly said the lamb was spectacularly bad.

  ‘Old ewe,’ Tommy agreed.

  ‘My grandma,’ Molly told them, ‘was a bit of a Mrs Malaprop. She thought E-W-E was pronounced eewee. Used to call me her eewee lamb.’

  Suzie laughed, but Tommy smiled weakly and said he’d had an aunt who once said they’d backed a winner at Newmarket that had made them ‘Rich beyond the dreams of ambergris’, capping Molly’s story to the extent that Suzie didn’t really believe him. Sometimes Tommy liked to be king of the castle as far as wit was concerned. It was one of his least pleasant sides.

  The balance of the team arrived, chattering and looking satisfied with themselves. ‘You going to warn them?’ Tommy asked of Molly.

  ‘Let them find out the hard way.’ Molly laughed. ‘Chief, the Press’re around, outside.’

  They came out, Tommy and Molly walking ahead, Suzie just behind, a little to the left, ‘The bodyguard position,’ Molly had once told her, and the Press came out from under the flagstones: two reporters and a blocky looking man with a camera.

  ‘Chief Super, what’s the latest?’ they were asking, clamouring.

  Tommy waved them away, and the guy with the camera began taking pictures: click, click, click.

  ‘I want them working nine, ten hours tomorrow; want this part tied up. If you’ve any spare time get ’em all chatting up the locals — gossip, rumours, the usual…’

  ‘Don’t worry, Chief.’ Molly, grave and unsmiling. Click…click…click.

  ‘…start harassing their doctor in King’s Lynn, name of Locust. Peter Locust. Locals call him Plague for obvious reasons.’

  Tommy was still talking to her as they folded themselves into the back of the car. ‘I’ll leave a message for you in the morning, or trace you and give you a list of where we expect to be — over at Sir Willoughby Sands’s to start with, either in his chambers or his house, depending on the arrangements WDS Cox has made for u
s. Don’t know where after that, but we’ll keep in touch. Be good, Molly, and keep the team under the lash.’ Grin, raised hand, ‘Right, Brian, let’s go.’

  As the Wolseley turned on to the main road that ran along the perimeter of the air base, so they were met by what looked like a factory turning out at closing time, bicycles by the dozen and a couple or three jeeps sweeping out of the main gate: GIs on bikes, sergeants, T-sergeants, M-sergeants, WOs, officers in various states of dress — No 1 uniforms, olive-green shirtsleeve order, even officers in their pink and greens — and on all sorts and conditions of bikes, men’s bikes with the crossbar, women’s bikes without a crossbar, some of the shorter men riding kid’s bikes; there were bikes with baskets across the handlebars and bikes with saddlebags: Ralph Taylor in the Square must be doing a roaring trade. Everyone smiled and some shouted to one another. Many smoked cigarettes; some had cigars in their mouths. They were the Yanks, the guys who had come to show little old England how a war should be fought: arrogant with a mix of wanting to please and a need to have a good time.

  The bicycles were heading towards the village and its pubs, while Tommy noted the jeeps went fast along the road towards the relative sophistication of King’s Lynn. These were young men, some of them risking their lives in the skies of northern Europe. These were men far away from home and the social disciplines of family. Many would drink more than was good for them; some would pick up local girls and try to do what they’d never think of trying on with their serious girls back home. All too soon they would discover that the British country girls tended to say yes — footloose no doubt in the absence of their boyfriends, now wedded to HM Forces.

  Looking at the massed squadrons of cyclists in uniform, Tommy felt the stirring of an idea. ‘Heart?’ he said in the Eton drawl. Suzie found the Eton drawl to be the facet of Tommy that she liked least. His ‘language’ she could put up with, and the occasional farting in bed — ‘The old Scotch warming pan,’ as he’d say — but the Eton drawl always indicated something sneaky was about to surface: it was his twitch, his tic, his almost deliberate signal of a new idea, good or bad.

  ‘Heart?’

  ‘Yes, Tommy.’

  ‘Don’t you think we should cast an eye on Max, Jenny and the Yanks? See if they had dealings. Never can tell with the Yanks, heart, eh?’

  ‘Absolutely, Tommy.’

  She put it on the back burner of her mind. Left it simmering on a low light so that it would be well done after they returned from quizzing Sir Willoughby Sands and anyone else who might add to their knowledge of the Ascoli family.

  *

  Some forty miles inland from Long Taddmarten, off the road between Haddenham and Huntingdon, up a tree-lined drive and surrounded by a high brick wall topped with broken glass set into cement, lay Saxon Hall. That afternoon it had been visiting hours at Saxon Hall Hospital, known locally as the lunatic asylum or, incorrectly, the Spike, which was usually slang for workhouse.

  Among police officers and members of the legal profession Saxon Hall was spoken of with some reverence as ‘The Hall’ because within its stern walls were two large wings set aside for the Criminally Insane: very tight and secure with several separate wards for males and females and never the twain shall meet. This was where Golly Goldfinch — Two-Faced Golly — was being kept at His Majesty’s pleasure. And that afternoon, Golly Goldfinch, of Ward C1, had a visitor: a tall, plump lady with hair long and brushing her shoulders, black as nightshade, thick pebble spectacles and a limp.

  ‘Who you then?’ Golly asked quietly. There were four ‘patients’, as they were euphemistically called, in Ward C1, which had only one way in and out: a triple-locked steel inner door and an outer door that was made of solid oak with reinforced panels and a speaking tube to contact anyone inside. The windows set high along one side were big, arched, covered in wire mesh and protected on both sides by bars. Facing this wall were the four cubicles — solid, thick metal walls and a steel door with standard Judas squint. The doors were locked each night from eight until seven the next morning except in an emergency.

  Golly was the only one with a visitor this afternoon. Since he had been at The Hall his only visitors had been police officers who came to talk him into admitting to more killings than they knew about, hoping to be able to cross out some that were still on the books. He also saw the psychiatrist once a week, taken to his office by the large Mr Bolt — Christopher Bolt the Chief Nurse/Warder, big with a small, rather silly moustache — and his oppo, Mr Sidney Snow, tall, thin and dogmatic. Golly had the same line for them, never tired of it — ‘You going to bolt me in then, Mr Bolt?’ and ‘Going to snow today, is it, Mr Snow?’ — this last becoming tedious in the middle of August. Golly didn’t imagine that they’d get fed up with these questions, thought they were the soul of wit, but the two men could’ve thumped him if they got the chance.

  ‘You’ve forgotten what I look like, Golly?’ The woman brushed hair back from her face and smiled, giving him a slow wink behind the thick specs. They sat facing each other at a small table in the main association area of the ward, near Golly’s cubicle, or his cell as he thought of it: bed, metal cupboard, bolted to the wall, and the writing desk that folded flat.

  ‘I never seen you before.’ In a bit of a sulk.

  ‘Oh, come on now, Golly. Course you seen me before, your Auntie Harriet. Your mum’s younger sister…’ She had a broad country accent, Berkshire, Hampshire maybe.

  ‘Mum never had a younger sister.’

  The psychiatrist had said he might not recognize her and she had agreed it had been a while since he’d seen her — ‘Only I thought that, as how Golly has no other family — ’cept that no-good sister of his — it’s my duty to come and see him.’ All potential visitors had to be interviewed by one of the doctors before they were allowed to see the prisoner, as well as being vetted by the institution’s executive staff, who were fairly slapdash.

  ‘Golly, of course she did. You remember me really, Golly. Course you do,’ this last almost whispered. Then she dropped her voice even more, barely a breath in what seemed to be a different voice entirely: ‘Kill with the wire, Golly. You remember that.’

  Mr Bolt and Mr Snow were playing some card game, quietly, over by the door. Mr Chris Williams and Mr Billy Green were talking to the other patients, sitting and chatting away quietly, down the far end, by the door to the Ablutions: more steel, unlocked only when a patient needed to be in Ablutions, accompanied by a warder…nurse.

  Golly looked up sharply now and peered at his aunt, leaned forward a little in his chair and saw her eyes and the smile.

  ‘Shit,’ he said, awestruck. ‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Ah! Yes. I know who —’

  ‘Course you do, Goll,’ said Lavender, who had got the long black wig from a mate who worked for a theatrical costumier and could get things like wigs and padding, which she was using now to put on weight; she’d also borrowed the terrible old suit she wore and the dykey shoes, mannish brogues, polished like a conker. ‘I’m your Auntie Harriet, though I’m not surprised you didn’t recognize me because I haven’t seen you since before the war: 1938, was it?’

  Lavender was a whore, and being a relative of Golly’s had used him as a minder in the two rooms she worked out of off Rupert Street in London’s West End, spit and a stride from Piccadilly where the whores, now in 1942, were coming into their own: the Piccadilly Commandos.

  ‘Yeah, about then,’ Golly grinned and gave his familiar ‘huh’ of a laugh. ‘1938 or ’39, I forget.’

  ‘Thirty-eight,’ said Lavender firmly. Golly would move out on his own if she wasn’t careful — liked making up his own stories — and the laugh, she knew, often got out of hand: drew attention to himself. The last thing either of them needed was attention.

  Quietly she asked Golly what the screws behind her were doing.

  ‘Minding their own business,’ he told her, ‘and they’re nurses, not screws.’

  ‘I know what they are. Officially those men are calle
d Nurse/Warders,’ Lavender said with feeling. The ones she could see, at the other end of the ward, were not interested in what she and Golly were talking about. Why should they be? Nobody could possibly escape from Saxon Hall, could they? ‘I know exactly what they are,’ she continued. ‘And the real problem is…’ long pause, then speaking without moving her mouth, like a ventriloquist ‘…getting you out of here.’

  ‘Can’t be done,’ Golly trying to do the same trick — Ant ge un.

  ‘Oh, yes it can.’ She smiled and he could sense the old Lavender under the smile. ‘I’ve a fool proof plan. Piece of cake.’

  ‘Piece of cake,’ he repeated not moving his lips — Eas o’ ake. Then, ‘The judge said I was at His Majesty’s pleasure and the brief said that meant for ever and ever. Amen. Told me that. And Mr Bolt he said it was for always. He said it was for ever and a day. Those were Mr Bolt’s words.’ Golly looked up and his eyes opened wide just at the moment Lavender sensed someone behind her.

  ‘Mr Bolt said what was for ever and a day?’ Christopher Bolt, standing just behind her, large as life and twice as natural. ‘Talking about me, Golly?’

  Golly swallowed and looked away, couldn’t look Mr Bolt the Chief Nurse in the eye, six foot one with bulging muscles because he spent time with the dumb-bells and weights. ‘Nothing, Mr Bolt.’

  ‘Wocher mean, nothing, Golly?’

  Lavender, as nice Auntie Harriet, adjusted her glasses, looked straight at Bolt and told him the poor boy was bewailing his fate. ‘He knows they’re never going to let him out of here, Mr Bolt. Never in a hundred years.’

  ‘No, miss. No, they’re not going to let him out, not even if the Angel Gabriel blows his trumpet tomorrow forenoon. They’ll not even let him out then.’ Bolt nodded and walked down the ward to the other men at the far end while Mr Snow let himself out of the main door and went for his break, cup of tea, a wad and a Wills Woodbine fag. The only brand available that week.

  Nobody near them now.

  Low, under her breath, Lavender in her deep disguise and right in the character she had created for herself whispered, ‘Listen, Golly, listen really well. This is what we have to do, and your side is easy…’