‘Hungry?’ Mirabelle enquired.
‘You bet,’ Vesta nodded. They decided to pick up fish and chips.
‘You mind eating with your fingers?’ Vesta asked.
Mirabelle shook her head.
‘Ha! You ain’t such a lady after all!’ Vesta teased. ‘Come on, I know a place.’
She cut up town, arm in arm with Mirabelle. Most of the shops had closed for the night though by contrast the pubs were busy with customers pouring out onto the narrow cobbled streets.
‘It’s just up here,’ Vesta promised.
The queue was already snaking towards them. Several women turned as Vesta passed. Mirabelle heard one whisper look at that darkie!’ and her friend, all bobby pins and red glossy lipstick, peered over the top of her sunglasses. Vesta didn’t turn a hair, just joined the end of the queue as sly eyes took in the colour of her skin and there was giggling up ahead. Between the barely subdued look at her’s Mirabelle heard the girls discussing the relative merits of two dances on that evening – one at the Palais and one at the Regal. Then from beyond the queue an older woman in a wide gingham skirt touched Vesta surreptitiously, looked at her palm and wiped her hand, running off towards the pub to be reunited with her friends.
‘Well, really!’ Mirabelle snorted but Vesta hardly blinked. She had become accustomed to it.
The queue moved on, though when they finally made it inside, the man serving behind the counter ignored Vesta completely.
‘For two, is it?’ he asked Mirabelle.
‘Fish and chips for me,’ Mirabelle said gently, ‘and what would you like, Vesta? Do tell the gentleman.’
Later, as they walked towards the flat at the Lawns, the last salty remnants licked from their fingers, Mirabelle asked, ‘Doesn’t it make you angry when people stare at you like that? If people in shops don’t serve you?’
Vesta shrugged. ‘That’s just the way it is, isn’t it? If you’re different. Mostly I don’t take it. I say “Excuse me” very loudly and make them sell me what I want. When I was a kid my mother used to stamp her feet and cough, but I don’t – I just shout my order. I’m in there once a week or so – they never know what to say. And the girls in the queue – well, it’s everywhere, but it’s still rude.’
Mirabelle nodded. ‘It is,’ she said quietly. ‘And it’s wrong, Vesta. Really wrong.’
‘Can’t do much about it, though, can you? You’d spend your whole life in and out of barneys. Fighting all the way. I just insist on manners when I can, that’s all. The rest is their choice.’
Mirabelle hesitated. ‘Are your parents in London?’
‘Yeah, my daddy works on the docks. At Limehouse. It ain’t swanky but it’s home.’
‘Do you see them much?’
Vesta frowned. ‘I went to secretarial college. Did some temping up in London. After that I got the job at Halley’s. I’ll see them at Christmas.’
Mirabelle turned off the main road towards the apartment deep in thought. Poor kid, she must be scared out of her wits. She needs to learn to stand up for herself, she thought, and right then she decided to help Vesta as much as she could.
20
Blowback: the unintended consequences of covert operations
They had to wait for a while. As the sun set through the Georgian windows of Mirabelle’s drawing room, the two women sat watching the view. Neither of them said anything, though periodically Vesta sighed. Once it was dark, Mirabelle fetched some clothes from her wardrobe and they got changed.
Dressed in black and with low heels they sat side by side on the lower deck of the bus all the way through town and beyond. The pier was lit up, the focus of the evening’s frantic activity with crowds thronging, the men jockeying for position, the women red-lipped and exuberant. The suburbs by contrast were dull, the streetlights sparse along the dark streets. Gradually the bus emptied until they were almost the last on board. When they alighted towards Rottingdean they were deep on the east side of the city – the first possible location for the kidnap scene – near one of the workshops Vesta had identified. Outside the town centre the streets were deserted. Still close to the shore the sound of the waves was clearly audible. The women disappeared from the main road and made their way uphill towards the first garage.
‘You’ve done this before, right?’ Vesta checked.
Mirabelle made a face.
‘In the war. You did this in the war. All the time.’
Mirabelle shook her head. ‘I worked in an office during the war, Vesta. This is my first outing in the field.’
‘No,’ Vesta replied, ‘you were a spy or something. You had to be.’
‘I’ve never been in operations. I dealt with spies and informants later in my career but mostly I worked in the office. I was a researcher. And a coordinator. I managed information and passed it on.’
Vesta looked crestfallen. ‘But you know what you’re doing,’ she ventured.
‘Well, I’ve read the manuals,’ Mirabelle replied. ‘Actually I wrote one or two of the manuals.’
‘Shit,’ said Vesta.
‘Look, we just need to check out each of these businesses and see if the area rings a bell or we can find any suitable outbuildings. We might find Sandor. I hope so. If there were more of us we’d cut the whole city into a grid and search everywhere, but it’s only you and me, so we’re doing it this way. Finding someone is only a matter of time. We have some time. That’s good. We just have to try. And keep trying. And later we’ll be intelligence gathering at Second Avenue and we’ll have a good chance there, I reckon, of finding out where they’ve got him if we haven’t hit on it by chance.’
‘Shit,’ groaned Vesta.
Mirabelle ignored her. She clicked on her torch, checked the map and pointed in the right direction.
The first garage was in what was now a field. The building had miraculously survived what had clearly been a prolonged aerial bombing during the war and the area around it had been cleared but not redeveloped. The land probably wasn’t worth enough to build on and instead the small warehouse stood alone in a sea of parked cars, some intact and others stripped for parts. Rotting tyres and disconnected axles littered the dark ground like waves creeping up a beach. There was no building near enough to be able to hear hammering on metal over a phone and the place was empty. This established, they gave up quickly and walked to the north, heading for the second address.
This looked more promising but half an hour scouting the district within acoustic range provided no buildings of the size and construction Vesta remembered. At the third location there was an alleyway of lock-ups, which they checked carefully, knocking on walls and climbing up to peer into the small square windows set at the top of the peeling painted doors. Sandor wasn’t there. They brushed themselves down and headed westwards, towards two more possibilities. Neither was fruitful. It was well after midnight, even after two, perhaps, by the time they made it back across town to Hove, the smell of the sea suddenly coming towards them on the incoming tide as they walked down the hill towards Second Avenue. Mirabelle’s hands were shaking but she hid them behind her back. This was the lion’s den and Vesta was reticent enough as it was.
‘This way.’ Mirabelle led Vesta to the rear of number 22 where, warmed up by the succession of commercial premises, they easily scaled the low garden wall and tiptoed across the lawn, hearts pounding. The lights in the sleeping house were out and the dark building lay silent.
‘The doctor and Lisabetta probably sleep on the first floor,’ Mirabelle whispered, ‘and the staff will be right up at the top, I expect.’
‘Or maybe in the basement,’ Vesta pointed.
There was a window with closed curtains, which opened straight onto the lawn. That made sense if there was a live-in cook. In any case, both the basement and pantry windows were barred and the kitchen door had a stout lock, but the sitting room to the rear had sash windows and when Vesta clambered up she found one of the sashes had not been locked. She rolled up the window sil
ently and pulled Mirabelle into the house behind her. Inside they scanned the dark room and then, so nervous they could hear blood rushing in their ears, they opened the door, which led to the hall. The click of the catch seemed to echo up the stairs and Mirabelle felt her heart in her mouth but there was nothing else for it – they had to get on with the job.
She peered round the doorpost and waited for a second. Nothing stirred. The hallway remained absolutely silent. The house smelled of stale cigar smoke and abandoned port glasses, as if, somewhere, dinner had not been cleared away. Mirabelle sneaked across the rug on tiptoes, followed by Vesta, and then she gestured towards the doctor’s study. The door was locked but the key was in place. Getting used to the tension now Mirabelle turned it and eased the door open. Inside the women made for the doctor’s desk – a heavy mahogany Victorian piece with four drawers down both sides and a green leather top. Sharing the torch they took one side each – Vesta started from the bottom, Mirabelle from the top. Vesta turned the key in the lock and pulled the drawer open. She immediately gave an excited squeak as Mirabelle abandoned her side – stethoscope, torch, prescription pad and some wooden spatulas.
‘Jesus!’ Vesta whispered.
The drawer was deep, very heavy, and half-packed with gold coins. Mirabelle selected one and examined it in the torchlight. It was a sovereign. There must have been over a hundred coins in the drawer – easily worth a couple of thousand pounds. Mirabelle slipped the coin into her pocket with Vesta staring on wide-eyed.
‘You can’t do that!’
‘It’s evidence – we might need it,’ she whispered. ‘Come on. These won’t tell us where Sandor is being kept. We need to find some keys or a lease or something.’
Grudgingly Vesta pushed the heavy drawer back into place and they turned their attention to the job in hand. There was nothing else of particular interest in the desk and they moved onto the chiffonier that clearly held some of the doctor’s medical equipment. Vesta peered at a speculum quizzically while Mirabelle disappeared into a small walk-in cupboard that appeared to be full of bandages and splints. None of this was any help. She tried to think where, if she were Crichton, she might keep a key or even, come to think of it, an address book, if not in the desk. Cautiously she pulled back from the cupboard, wondering about a hiding place in easy reach of the desk, along the bookshelves. Just as she was pushing the cupboard door closed, she happened to cast her eyes downwards. On the bottom shelf she spotted a strange padded bandage. Trusting her instinct she picked it up.
‘Oh, my goodness!’ she whispered as she realised what it was. She held it away from her body.
‘Is that ...’ Vesta started, but her eyes widened and she stopped speaking as Mirabelle fitted the foam padding to her own stomach in the quivering torchlight, giving her the outline of a heavily pregnant woman.
‘Do you think ...’ Vesta put two and two together.
‘Romana Laszlo,’ Mirabelle confirmed. ‘She wasn’t having a baby at all.’
‘They made it all up? But why?’
‘For a thousand pounds, maybe? It’s a lot of money ...’ Mirabelle whispered.
‘There’s more than that in the drawer,’ Vesta hissed back. ‘Never mind whatever they’re up to at the racecourse.’
And then they heard the sound.
Upstairs a door creaked and the muffled click of slipperclad footsteps pattered across the hallway on the first floor.
‘Go!’ Mirabelle whispered.
Vesta moved like a cat over to the window. She unlocked the catch and pulled it open in one movement, slipping over the windowsill and down into a flowerbed at the front of the house. Then she took off towards the nearest cover, behind a privet hedge across the road. Mirabelle stuffed the prosthetic belly back into the cupboard. She panicked. If she got caught hauling herself over the windowsill they’d have her just like they had Sandor. The footsteps were now approaching fast down the stairs. There was no time. Just as the study door flew open she drew back into the cupboard. Her breathing, she realised, sounded incredibly loud. She tried to slow it as she crouched in the cramped space, peering through the keyhole.
Accustomed to the dark she saw Lisabetta run straight to the open window and look out over Second Avenue. Lisabetta drew a gun from the pocket of her dressing gown. She raised the weapon smoothly and fired without hesitation. The muffled sound of the silenced barrel made less noise than a book toppling from a bedside table. Hardly able to breathe Mirabelle watched as Lisabetta swore quietly. Good, she hadn’t found her target. The woman hovered a moment in the bay, clearly contemplating facing the chilly spring night in a thin nightgown and a pair of slippers with a gun. It wasn’t feasible. Instead she snapped on the light and closed the doctor’s curtains to inspect in private what the intruders had been doing.
The drawer of the desk was slightly open and she fell to examining that. Now with proper light Mirabelle could see, as Lisabetta emptied the coins, that there were several different kinds. Two-pound coins, five-pound coins, guineas and half-sovereigns as well as the standard sovereign she had in her pocket. Lisabetta sat in the doctor’s leather chair and poked the nozzle of her gun into the stash, making – as Mirabelle and Vesta had done earlier – a calculation as to how much was in there. With the additional currencies it was worth even more. Lisabetta raised an eyebrow. It was clearly in excess of what she thought he was creaming off. ‘That greedy son of a bitch,’ she muttered.
Lisabetta began to look around, wondering what else the doctor had been up to. She pulled open the other drawers of the desk. Then she sat back letting the chair swing at an angle. What was in easy reach from here? With her beautifully manicured fingers she picked out a black notebook on the shelf closest to the desk. It was at just the right height for Crichton to bring easily back and forth and was filed between medical books that no one else would find the least bit interesting. She opened it and flicked through pages of handwritten notes. Her eyes were ablaze with anger.
‘Middlemass!’ she hissed.
The name was familiar. Mirabelle thought a moment. Ah yes, that was the name of a man who had been murdered in London a couple of months ago in Kensington Park Gardens. She had read about it in The Times. The murder had been shelved by the police due to a complete lack of evidence. She had thought it was an interesting case – Middlemass had apparently been a forgettable man. On the evening of his death he had given a woman a light with his gold Dunhill on the corner of the street. It was the last time anyone had seen him. The police had said that locals with whom the victim had done business found him difficult to describe as there was simply nothing distinctive about him. This notebook obviously contained details of Lisabetta’s operation – other clients, perhaps. Maybe even murders. What occurred to Mirabelle at the same time as it occurred to Lisabetta on the other side of the cupboard door was that Crichton could only be keeping the information for two reasons. It was either to inform on Lisabetta and curry favour with the authorities or it could be used to blackmail her.
Lisabetta began to search through the book once more, calling out names in German under her breath until she stopped on a recent page where he had made a few notes in pale blue ink. Here she almost spat with rage as she read the sentence out loud, her accent stronger than Mirabelle had heard before: Lisabetta shows sociopathic tendencies – a complete inability to feel emotion. I wonder if she is psychopathic? For a moment the woman seemed stunned and then, suddenly, it hit her. She was utterly incensed. This was treason!
It was interesting, Mirabelle thought, that the doctor had misjudged her. Lisabetta appeared to have plenty of emotions. Perhaps he had meant empathy. She certainly lacked that.
Furious, Lisabetta snapped off the light and crossed to the window. She flicked the curtains aside to check the street but there was no one there. Then she turned and dialled a number on the telephone. There was a long pause as the phone rang out. It took a while before anyone answered. Her voice, when she spoke, was cold as ice, replying to the sleepy and
no doubt grumpy mumbling of whomever she had woken.
‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she dismissed the complaint. ‘That’s by the by. I want you to go round to Cadogan Gardens, Bert. I want you to pick up my things. Pack it all. Send it to Brighton. No, no. Not my name.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘Send it with the usual name to the usual place. You know what to do.’
Mirabelle heard Bert Jennings’ voice as a distant echo. He was arguing with her.
‘Don’t be ridiculous! I can’t be French! I will have married a Frenchman, I’m sure.’ He was objecting. ‘But you have your cut. It’s on the way and it’s guaranteed, isn’t it? I have something to deal with here. But I won’t be long. It’s all winding up very nicely. I will be in touch soon. Send my things. The first train, remember. The early one.’
The phone clicked. Lisabetta crossed the room.
Mirabelle could just make out her dark figure crouching in front of the fireplace. She dropped Dr Crichton’s notebook onto the grate and lit it. The dry paper cover set alight easily and she stood back to watch it burn, turning over the ashes to make sure that not one single word of the journal remained. Then she stooped to light a cigarette on the flames, the warm light playing on her skin. Her face looked almost diabolical.
‘Sociopathic,’ she muttered under her breath, trying the word out for size.
As the flames died she poked them with a brass fork to make sure nothing remained. Then she closed the window and crossed the room to Crichton’s locked medicine cabinet. She picked out a small bottle of chloroform and a patch of gauze. Mirabelle prayed Lisabetta wasn’t going to come into the bandage cupboard but the woman merely checked her face in the mirror, blew herself a sinister kiss and disappeared back out of the door.
Brighton Belle Page 14