Murder Under A Green Sea

by Phillip Hunter

  “How can they make them non-citizens?” Flora was saying. “What’s gonna happen to ’em?”

  “That’s a very good question,” Max said quietly. “Anyway, that’s why I got cut last night, because we’re all going to hell in a handbasket.”

  Flora gave that some thought while she smoked. “My sister’s a machinist at a tie makers down Brick Lane, and her boss is a Jewish fella. Mr Rothman. Me dad invited him over for tea once, and he brought my mum flowers. Flowers, and he didn’t even know her. Can’t imagine Hitler and that lot bringing flowers.”

  “I couldn’t have put it better myself.”

  “It’s a pity someone don’t shoot him.”

  “People like him are twisted,” Max said. “The straighter you shoot, the more you miss.”

  “Bleedin’ uniforms,” Flora said, glancing at Max with a slightly nervous smile.

  “Yes,” Max said, smiling back.

  He mashed his cigarette on his empty plate and waved away the smoke. Flora spat on the palm of her hand and doused the cigarette tip there. She dropped the stub into her pinafore pocket.

  “By the way,” Max said, “has Martha mentioned the dinner this evening?”

  “She told me on the way out.”

  “Will you be able to work?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. Thanks very much.”

  “You don’t mind? I mean, you weren’t going to see Eric or anything?”

  Flora shrugged. “Nah,” she said. “Eric’s busy tonight. I saw him yesterday and he told me he was sorry he couldn’t see me tomorrow as he had to go meet his pals. Then he tells me if I come by the shop Monday, he’d give me a bleedin’ pig’s heart.”

  By this, Max assumed that Flora wasn’t keen on Eric’s pals. And she wasn’t fussed about pigs’ hearts either.

  “May I ask who’s coming tonight, sir?”

  “Um, I forget.”

  “Will Mr Lindsey be coming?”

  “Lindsey? He’ll probably turn up. He can smell free booze from Wimbledon. Why?”

  Flora blushed. “Well, sir, last time he was a bit, um, a bit forward, sir.”

  “Was he? Well, if he’s ever forward again, you have my permission to knock his bloody head off.”

  Flora blushed more and decided that was a good time to tackle the frying pan, eggs and all. “Yes, sir,” she said over her shoulder, a wide smile lighting up her glowing face.

  That was another thing Max liked about Flora, her smile. You can tell a lot about a person by the way they smile, or don’t. With Flora, it was a wide smile that made her eyes sparkle. It was open, honest.

  There was a knock at the door, and Flora, who was still desperately trying to remove all evidence that the frying pan had ever been within a hundred miles of an egg, dropped the offending item into the sink with such urgency that it threw out half the water. She scuttered off to answer the door.

  That’ll be Martha, no doubt, Max thought. Probably forgotten her money or something. God, I hope she hasn’t brought her mother back.

  Chapter Three

  There was the clinking of teaspoons on cups, and a low hum of voices, although Martha couldn’t see many people talking. She glanced around the small café, letting her eyes wander from one table to the next. The people were mostly young or middle-aged, in couples or small groups. The men seemed mostly solemn, and the women mostly quiet. It looked like a painting by Degas or Manet, everyone waiting for the artist to tell them he’d finished now and they were free to move.

  There was one young couple that caught Martha’s attention. They weren’t quite as well dressed as many here – the woman in a cotton blouse and tweed skirt, the man in a plain dark grey suit – and they weren’t solemn at all. They chatted excitedly about something, the woman gesticulating with her hands whenever she spoke, the man ready to smile or agree, his eyes wide.

  This couple made Martha sigh for reasons she couldn’t explain and, perhaps, wouldn’t want to.

  Martha’s mother, Mrs Webster, looked up from her diary, saw Martha’s expression and frowned tightly. “Have some tea, dear,” she said. “It’ll get cold.”

  Mrs Webster was a firm sort of woman, tall and erect, with an unwavering gaze that gave to many people the impression of a sergeant major in the British army. Even seated, she gave that impression, which is hard to do. She wore a French-made woollen skirt and jacket, which was tightly buttoned with a diamond leaf brooch on the right shoulder. On her feet were low leather shoes and on her head was a solid, practical hat firmly pinned to her firm hair.

  “There’s something wrong,” Martha said.

  Her mother sipped her tea and put the cup down precisely on the saucer, as if she were demonstrating for her daughter, and everyone else in the place, the right way to drink tea. “Hmm?” she said.

  “With Max. There’s something wrong. I think he’s lost something, and I don’t know what it is, and I feel I should know.”

  “What are you talking about, dear? Lost what? Are you speaking materially? Has he lost a sock?”

  “No,” said Martha, knowing she’d made a terrible mistake.

  Her mother knew precisely what Martha had meant. And Martha knew that she knew, which meant that Martha was about to receive a lecture of some sort. “Ah,” she said. “Then you mean it in a metaphysical way. Things are far too metaphysical these days, if you ask me. Everybody wants to examine the Universe and their place in it. Why they can’t all accept things and get on with it is beyond me. Your husband would be better off looking for his sock, in my opinion.”

  Martha felt her face redden. “Mother,” she said, “please. It has nothing to do with metaphysics, as you call it. He’s sad, and I don’t know why, and I can’t reach him.”

  Mrs Webster considered this for a moment. She wasn’t insensitive, after all. “Max needs a career,” she said finally. “Men need to work and do their duty. That’s how they fill those voids. I’m sure Max just has a void that needs filling. He needs to do his duty.”

  “He fought for his country. How much more duty should he do?”

  “His duty to you, Martha. To his wife.”

  “Anyway, he has a career.”

  “Writing isn’t a career. It’s a hobby. I mean, if he sold any of his books or wrote something important, it would be different.”

  “He does sell books. His last one on the Peninsular War has sold almost a thousand copies. And the Telegraph called it masterful.”

  “But he doesn’t sell lots of books. He’s not famous.”

  “So you’d prefer that he wrote romance novels or something.”

  “Yes,” Mrs Webster said, firmly. “If they sold.”

  “It’s something to do with what’s going on in Europe. Hitler and Mussolini and all that sort. It’s as if he thinks he should be out there fighting them.” Martha sighed and said, “Oh, I don’t know.”

  She was quiet for a moment. It had been a mistake to speak to her mother – it usually was – but there was nobody else she could talk to. She drank some of her tea, which was getting cold. She deliberately put the cup down on the tablecloth to annoy her mother.

  She found herself looking again at the young couple over by the window. The man was now explaining something to the woman, using his hands to shape the explanation in the air. The woman watched his hands move, but her gaze kept returning to his eyes, then her eyes would become soft and Martha’s, mirroring the woman’s, would soften too, and something inside would hurt.

  Martha moved her view to the window and the world beyond, cabs and buses, people strolling along in the bright crisp spring air, shadows opposite like blocks of angles, all bright or black in the sunshine even though there was a chill to the wind, an ice on the air that Martha imagined came from the Russian steppes. It was a feint, only pretending to be spring out there while the winter lingered out of sight.

  He
r mother said something, and brought Martha back to the heaviness of reality. “What did you say?”

  “I said, he only married you for your money.”

  Oh. So her mother was still on that subject, was she? “He married me because he loved me. And I loved him.”

  “Loved?”

  “Love. Loves. Please don’t twist my meaning. Besides, what’s wrong with marrying for money? You did.”

  “That’s different. Women are permitted to marry money. What else do we have? You young people think that we’ve won something because we have the vote, but that was just a sort of conjurer’s trick. They gave us the vote and while we all watched it and were in awe, we missed the other part of the trick, the part in which everything else stays the same. After all, we have a vote, but for whom do we get to vote? Men.”

  Mercifully, the waitress appeared and placed three plates on the table. Martha had gone for the baked sea bass with Béarnaise sauce. Mrs Webster was on another of her dieting fads. This one had something to do with mushrooms. Consequently, she was having mushrooms with everything and couldn’t understand why she wasn’t losing weight. In fact, she’d put on three pounds in two weeks, which only determined her to eat more mushrooms. Now, she was having a cheese and mushroom omelette with a side of mushroom pâté on toast.

  “Trust me,” she was saying, stuffing a mushroom into her mouth, “women have to marry money. But if a man marries money, that’s a sign of greed and laziness.”

  “Max doesn’t care about money.”

  “Everybody cares about money.”

  “He doesn’t. Really he doesn’t. Sometimes I think he despises it.”

  “Well, there you are then. He must have Bolshevik sympathies.”

  Martha wasn’t listening. She speared the sea bass with her fork, but she had no appetite now. She was quiet for a moment, regarding the dead fish. Then she looked up at her mother and said, “Sometimes I think he despises me for having it. Or coming from it.”

  Mrs Webster sighed heavily. “Then he’s an idiot or he’s a Bolshevik, and I don’t know which is worse. Either way, you should never have married him.”

  Martha was about to tell her mother that marrying Max was the best thing she’d ever done, but she never got the chance.

  Everyone’s attention was caught by a commotion at the entrance. The maître d’ stood with a woman before him, barring her entry to the café on grounds of lacking a reservation. He kept raking through his long dark hair, trying to push it back on to his skull in a proxy, no doubt, for pushing the woman out of the café.

  The woman was young and slim and seemed to have limbs that were too long. She wore a shapeless brown coat and a misshapen hat that wasn’t doing much good at all. “Stuff your bleedin’ reservation,” the woman said.

  “Please, miss,” the maître d’ was saying, flattening his hair. “You must have a reservation.”

  “Isn’t that your girl?” Mrs Webster said, peering through the pince-nez she held in front of her face.

  “Flora?” Martha said. “Oh, Flora.”

  Flora, seeing her mistress, pushed past the maître d’ and rushed forward. Her face was red with effort and emotion. “Ma’am,” she said as she reached the table. “Oh, it’s awful. Ma’am, sir, coppers, I mean, police, he’s… oh…”

  “What’s wrong with you, girl?” Mrs Webster said.

  Flora, apparently noticing Mrs Webster for the first time, burst into tears. “Max… I mean, Mr Max, I mean, your – bugger – I mean, ma’am, sir –”

  “Calm down, Flora,” Martha said, putting a hand on the girl’s arm. “Sit down.”

  Flora pulled out a seat and sat down, Martha’s hand still on her arm.

  The maître d’ was upon them now, trying simultaneously to maintain his dignity, avoid the embarrassment of a scene and keep his hair in order. He was failing at all three.

  “What’s wrong?” Mrs Webster asked him firmly. “Can’t you see this young girl is overwrought?”

  “She doesn’t have a reservation,” the maître d’ said weakly before withdrawing to hide somewhere, taking his hair with him.

  Most people in the café watched the small group, although some were determinedly not watching, feeling it was all too emotional and vulgar, especially at lunchtime.

  “Flora,” Martha said, “please calm down and tell us what’s happened.”

  Flora breathed deeply for a few seconds. Then she looked up at her mistress and said, “It’s Mr Dalton, ma’am. He’s been arrested.”

  “I knew it,” Mrs Webster said.

  “Flora,” Martha said, glaring at her mother. “Arrested for what?”

  “Murder.”

  Chapter Four

  The room was about fifteen-foot square with walls that were a colour previously unknown to humanity, waxed in a coating of nicotine and dust, and paled by sunlight. There were two desks at right angles to each other, one opposite the door and the other, on the right as you entered, facing the window, which provided a nice view of a brick wall.

  The desk opposite the door was cluttered with papers, files, a telephone, a folded map, ashtrays, books, photographs and a dozen other incidental items. At the front of the desk was a wood-mounted brass nameplate announcing that the occupant of the desk was a Detective Sergeant Pierce.

  The other desk belonged to Detective Inspector Longford. His desk had as many items, but in a neater order, the blotter parallel to the edge of the desk, the telephone to the right and various files stacked to the left. In a silver frame, behind the telephone, was a photograph of a woman with two young children, taken on the promenade of a beach town, all three of them smiling broadly. An ashtray, a packet of pipe tobacco and a box of matches were at the corner of the blotter, and a rack of pipes stood by itself to one side. This desk, Max thought, was orderly and unimaginative.

  Max had been waiting in the office, by himself, for half an hour. When, finally, the door opened and two men entered, Max felt like he knew them both well. Old Longford, reliable and dull, and his dishevelled sidekick, Pierce.

  Longford was tall, about the same height as Max, but a little heavier around his torso. He was in his mid-fifties, which made that photograph on his desk a decade or so old. He had a prominent, straight nose, short brown hair and gentle eyes, grey or light blue.

  The other man, Pierce, was shorter by four inches, and heavier by four stone. He looked like he’d been carved from the trunk of an ancient oak. Max thought he’d have made a pretty good prop for the British Lions. In fact, judging by his face, he’d been just that since birth, cauliflower ears and scar tissue around his eyes, and a nose that must’ve been broken a dozen times. But, for all that, his eyes were young and his face was unlined, so Max put him below thirty.

  Both men took positions behind their desks, with Longford packing a pipe and lighting it while Pierce took a notebook from a drawer and a pen from his inside jacket pocket.

  Longford was the first to speak. He sucked on his pipe, blew the smoke out and said, “I’m sorry to have to bother you with this, Mr Dalton.”

  He didn’t sound sorry, but Max was determined to appear unruffled. “No bother,” he said, as casually as he could. “Perhaps you could tell me what all this is about. The detective said it concerned a death.”

  “A murder, sir,” Pierce said. “Not a death.”

  Max turned to the sergeant, who hadn’t taken his eyes from his notebook, and was busy scribbling away. “That’s right. I promise you, Inspector,” Max said, turning back to Longford, “I haven’t murdered anyone for at least two weeks.”

  Longford smiled thinly.

  “May I ask where you were last night, sir?”

  “Last night? I was in a pub, The Lion, on the Strand. Why?”

  “And before that?”

  “My paper. The News Chronicle.”

  “Oh, yes. I unders
tand you’re a journalist, sir. Is that right?”

  “On occasion. I’m freelance, but I used to work at the Chronicle and a friend of mine lets me use his desk when he’s not there. So I popped in to check my mail, and to have a word with Features. I fancied an idea about the Berlin Olympics. Should be an interesting contest.”

  “Features?”

  “Yes. Man called Barney Watson. Features editor.”

  The sergeant made a note of this. The inspector blew smoke out, forming a cloud that hung under the ceiling like fog. Max watched the smoke, remembering years earlier. His eyes became soft and sad.

  “Sir?” the inspector said.

  Max blinked.

  “Um, afterwards, I wandered along to The Lion.”

  “And what time was that?”

  “Seven, half past, something like that. Look, can you tell me what this is about? The detective only said that someone was dead and I might be a witness. If I’d seen anything, don’t you think I’d have told you?”

  Inspector Longford glanced over at his sergeant. There was something in that look that Max didn’t like. It said: ‘He doesn’t understand what we do.’

  “As we mentioned, sir,” the inspector said, returning his gaze to Max, “it’s about a murder, and you might be a witness without realising it, you see? Now, you were at the pub for how long?”

  Longford sucked down some more smoke and blew it out, making the cloud even thicker. The smoke, in this confined room, was making Max feel ill. He wanted to open a window, breathe in fresh air. He felt trapped, somehow. “Few hours. Until last orders, a bit past there.”

  “And can anyone verify that, sir?”

  “Is it important?”

  The inspector answered that by smiling vaguely. He did lots of things vaguely, except when it came to being vague, which he did precisely and with the apparent purpose of unsettling Max.