by Janet Roger
There were four River Police standing inside, bulked out in foul-weather gear, peering past a spray-pitted windshield that shook to the pounding of the motors. Air so thick with pipe smoke you could cut it in strips. They held the launch sixty feet off the river margin, worked fast along a string of barges, heading to where the river veered south beyond Rotherhithe. I was braced against a bulkhead when the nearest of the four noticed there was company. He cupped hands an inch from my ear and bellowed over the generator-pitch of the diesels. “McAlester?”
I shook my head. “Couldn’t make it.”
His boat was eating the distance downriver and didn’t allow for conversation. He nodded and turned his gaze back to the wharves and warehouses passing fast along the north shore—New Crane, Saint Hilda, Prospect Wharf—painted on soot-gray sides of warehouses in high white letters. On that morning, under that sky, through a bow spray dancing rainbows off the water, they would never look better. But they weren’t where he was headed. Across the fret of flood tide, a half-mile ahead a lighter was swinging at a buoy four hundred feet off a derelict quay. The launch careened to pass around a tugboat, leveled out and made a shallow diagonal for the buoy.
Free Trade Wharf was a blitzed stretch of north shore at the top of Limehouse Reach, where the river broadened in a wide double-loop around West India Dock and the Isle of Dogs. Standing off the wharf was a hundred-yard long disused quay built out into the river on a lattice of heavy lumber. The quay was connected to the wharf by a high walkway over a mud beach, disappearing by the minute under the tide. The launch lost headway to come shore-side of the lighter, stiffened against the breeze and wheeled hard over. It aimed its bow at a concrete slipway at the upstream edge of the mud beach, and when it did that two of the River Police ducked out of the wheelhouse and went aft with a canvas stretcher. I followed and joined them in a ragged chorus line, eyeing the dip and rise while the boat corkscrewed in on the swell. Then on a downswing, as if we’d been rehearsing all week, we stepped over the boat’s rail and down onto the slipway and the launch started backing out hard.
From the beach, the quay was a giant’s forest of wood supports planted in the river, its decking sixty feet above low water, out of sight. Between the forest and the wharf, the wind sawed through a somber canyon bridged by the walkway, blocked out of the low sun even at midday and slapped by an inbound tide. A sewer outfall spilled from high in the river wall, and in the gravel washout at the foot of the fall a body lay face down in the shadows. When the launch moved up to the slip the body had been twenty feet from the waterline. It was less than half that now. In a race across the beach, it looked evens whether to put your money on the stretcher party or on the tide.
The dead man was meshed in a cat’s cradle of steel hawser anchored in the river bed, like a soldier caught in the wire, so swollen that the topcoat he wore might have been bought for somebody else. Forty-eight hours in the water, maybe more, had bloated his features almost past recognizing. The dragging tides had left his limbs dislocated and awry. One of the police squatted down to prize open a loop of hawser making a noose around the corpse’s neck, did the same to release an arm and heaved the body over to look at what he had. An eel twisted out of a raw-edged gash in the corpse’s chest and fell snapping in the gravel. Four inches below the gash a second hollow pit had a rib threaded through it. The officer scuffed the eel farther off with his hand and said flatly, “We’ll lose him if we don’t move him.” And to me, “He’s the one you want?”
They had the stretcher unrolled in the water alongside. Together they tried easing the body from the tangle of cable, saw there wasn’t time and dragged it out of its topcoat and jacket instead, left the clothes caught in the wire and heaved the corpse on the stretcher. Thirties. Brush moustache. Well-dressed. A little taller than average. Identifiable, just, from the photograph in my pocket. Forget the fair hair plastered across his emptied eyes or the bow tie skewed like a vaudeville drunk. It was Michael Garfield, stretched in the mud at the river’s edge, the debris of a city washed up around him, two ragged gunshot wounds aimed at his heart. I nodded. He was the one.
The launch was edging back into the slipway. The officers hoisted their stretcher and splashed toward it over a strip of disappearing beach. I let them go, went down on one knee in the freezing tidewater and sifted through the stinking mud in Garfield’s coat pockets while they billowed on the rising river. The concrete ramp was awash. The police launch stood off again, rolling on the fret with Garfield’s body laid across the deck, its stretcher party looking nervous. I got up, waved the boat to get out of there fast, and started wading, clear of the coiling metal and along the submerged beach, to where the sewer made an ugly flowering that the tide was dragging upstream.
At the side of the outfall, fluorescent with weed, a rise of iron staples climbed sixty feet sheer up the river wall, past the open mouth of the sewer to the edge of the disused wharf. I stopped there to look back and get a breath, knee-deep in the clawing flood at the foot of the ladder. Garfield’s coats were lost already beneath the water, the launch a speck moving westward, laying down a glittering curve like a meteor tail. A satin blue sash of sky was turning the whole river to ultramarine. Nose clamped, eyes watering against the corrosive stench of the sewer, I lifted a foot to the first staple above water and started the climb up and out of the shadows.
Take away the angles of heavy timber that shored up its streets and it felt as if all of Wapping could keel over and slide into the Thames. Overhead, a mesh of high, iron walkways linked its gutted warehouses. At street level, delivery trucks picked routes through a snowfield where tarpaulins flapped and made pigeons nervous. I tramped tire tracks across last night’s snowfall, back along a mile-long reach of river the police launch had covered like an express train. In half an hour I was standing at the head of an ancient river stair, in sight of the police boat station. My ride was tied up at the jetty, its stretcher cargo offloaded and its engines silent, snoozing after its morning gallop. I scraped mud off my shoes at the curb, squeezed river out of the bottom of my coat and walked into the Town of Ramsgate shaking with cold.
The Ramsgate had once been the haunt of a fishing fleet that brought its catch upriver from the coast, its saloon a long, low-lit tunnel set at a right angle to the water. No customers at that hour, only a sulfur blonde behind the bar overworking a tight sweater, pouting in the mirror at back of the counter and painting a wide mouth china red so you wouldn’t lose her in a crowd. The saloon had a window bay overlooking the river, a table in the center of the bay, and a coke stove next to the table floating waves of heat across the window glass. The closing door got the blonde’s attention back from the mirror. I called for a whisky and hot water and went to sit where I could be six inches from the stove.
When the whisky arrived, I put it down whole and wrapped my hands around the jug of hot water till my fingers unhooked. Then took out the wallet that had been in Garfield’s jacket pocket, blotted the river out of it with my coat sleeve and prized it open while the liquor percolated. The wallet was organized in the professor’s way with all things: his identity card and reading room tickets, a message off a pad, a restaurant bill too faint to read, and banknotes separated out. I spread the contents on the table, clasped my hands back around the jug and considered my haul.
The note was folded to show a Guildhall crest, and below the crest the words Telephone Message all but leached out. I pulled it closer, picked at a corner and peeled it apart. The Guildhall operator had written the message in fat, squat capitals, marked it for the attention of Professor Garfield at four-forty p.m. and dated it December twenty-something, too blurred to make out. The message said the professor’s caller wanted to meet him at nine that evening, at a place I couldn’t read either. But I didn’t need to. Because according to the landlord of the Raglan, Michael Garfield had arrived there Christmas Eve sometime before nine, to wait for somebody who didn’t show; a disappointment that left the profess
or at a loose end until Terry Reilly stepped over to start a conversation, entranced him with brand new possibilities and led him into the night.
Dillys Valentine meanwhile had been staying late at her office when Jarrett walked in the door, expecting Reilly to join him when his trick was through. Turned midnight, when Reilly didn’t show, Jarrett left. And an hour later Miss Dillys had a visitor she never saw before. Was it Garfield who’d arrived looking for Jarrett? I couldn’t say, and of the people who should know, three of them—first Jarrett, then Dillys Valentine, now Garfield himself—were dead inside the next twelve hours.
I shuffled the contents back in the wallet, dropped it in my coat pocket and left the telephone message on the table. It was my one bright spot. You draw a blank sometimes and you know the questions you’re asking are wrong. At other times all it says is you were talking to the wrong people. Asked who the professor went to meet at the Raglan that night, Henry Beaufort told me he had no idea, and likely was telling the truth. Now, I had a three-word answer in front of me, courtesy of the switchboard at Guildhall. On the message drying out on the table, next to the line marking it for Professor Garfield’s attention, the operator had added in the same fat capitals, From Councilor Drake.
TWENTY
The housemaid seemed surprised I was back so soon, took my coat and hat and said the councilor was expecting me. This time we went through a door at right of the hall, across a drawing room into a library with sporting prints in the bays between the bookcases. It had two windows overlooking the gardens, Venetian glass in a chandelier, a club chair in front of an elegant fireplace and green plush drapes. The kind of room where you’re meant to sit at night in a cravat and a quilted robe reading Kipling by firelight until the Madeira runs out. The maid announced me and waited for instructions, and when she didn’t get any, left the room and closed the door without a sound. The councilor was standing on a Persian rug with his back to the fire, short and round in a dark suit and high buttoned vest, drawing on a fat cigar. He cupped a hand to stir the smoke haze he took with him everywhere and motioned at the far side of his library. “You’ve met already.”
Allynson was turned away from us both at a liquor cabinet disguised in the bookcases, prizing the glass stopper out of a decanter. I said yes, we’d met already and no to the decanter the lawyer was waving at me. He shrugged, chimed liquor and soda in two crystal glasses and brought one over to Drake. When nobody spoke, he flashed the strained schoolboy grin again. “Newman. What news?” But what’s news depends on what counts and who’s listening. The lawyer put the glass to his lips like communion.
“Mr. Allynson, it’s more than forty-eight hours since your tenant was murdered. Less than that since the councilor told me he didn’t know, or know anything of Raymond Jarrett, let alone the fruit store and blackmail racket he was running from the address you rented him.” Drake took the cigar off his bottom lip, rolled it in his fingers and weighed it absently. “You could ask what was there to notice? What does that kind of racket ever take more than a small-time entrepreneur and a select clientele that doesn’t advertise its tastes? The answer is, it takes plenty more than Jarrett had. Meaning his small and very private retreat in the City was being bankrolled by somebody with connections.” Nobody interrupted. Soda bubbled in the councilor’s glass. I turned to him, not to let the conversation get too abstract. “Which is where the problem lies, because not long after I started wondering who could be bankrolling him, I happened across Jarrett’s police file. How doesn’t matter. What matters is there’s a bank check in his file dated Christmas Eve. The problem with that, Councilor, is the check is drawn on your account. You wrote it out to Raymond Jarrett yourself and signed it. He just didn’t get chance to cash it before he was killed.”
Drake blinked and coughed politely around the cigar clamped in his mouth.
“I thought about how that could be. I even toyed with the idea you could be bankrolling Jarrett yourself. After all, it’s something you could lose in pocket change. Except in the end it’s not only about the money. The refined part isn’t the hideaway or the black-market film, or the boys with moods and haircuts. It’s about owning the cops and the muscle that guarantees business stays untroubled, either by the law or by the lawless. And somehow, Councilor, that didn’t sound like you.”
Coals flamed in the hearth. Drake waited expressionless and laid blue smoke on the room, thick as truck exhaust. Allynson was all bright-eyed attention. I asked, “Have you ever had a religious experience? I used to think they were strictly for shepherdesses short on company. Not anymore. Because yesterday I had one of my own, in a temperance residence at a solid address on the Strand. It’s Boys’ Town, a house of uplift where well-dressed, older men come and go and a slim-hipped priest is faking the register and racing his conscience to oblivion. Last evening when I checked it out, one of the boys introduced himself, and as we passed the time of day an idea came to me that we’d met someplace before. I just couldn’t place where. But then I had a revelation. As a matter of fact, I had two.”
Outside in the garden a robin took a dive off the top of a frosted plum tree, landed on a windowsill and started hopping around in the snow. So picture perfect that if he could sing as well as dance, they’d put him under contract at Paramount. “My second revelation was realizing I never had met the boy, only his picture in among a hundred others in Jarrett’s bedroom. He was just a face in a crowd and I missed the connection, until out of the blue the priest mentioned who owns Paddy’s. And that was my first revelation, Councilor. Because it turns out the owner is you.”
Drake’s chins were flushing from the brandy and the heat off the fire. The lawyer choked softly on his drink and dabbed at his mouth with his show-handkerchief. The robin had his head to one side looking in the window at the line of hunting prints. There were straight-backed women riding side-saddle to hounds that didn’t interest him at all. But one look at the huntsmen in pink had him bouncing up and down, pressed up against the glass with a wild, happy eye. He was making me wonder if I had everything as wrong as he did. “So tell me nothing is the way it looks, Councilor, because when the City’s finest put all that together they’ll have questions for both of us. You being my client, there’ll be some I can’t answer and that will go hard for me. But you could help me feel better about it when they’re lighting a fire under my heels.”
The handkerchief folded back in Allynson’s pocket. He put up a tight smile. “Really, Newman, Councilor Drake owns a great many properties in the City. We cannot possibly be aware of every…”
Drake brought his gaze around. His lawyer dried. “Your observations are apposite, Newman. For ourselves, we shall not rest on legal niceties. City Police may depend upon our fullest co-operation.” He sucked on the cigar and set on his heels, as if that ought to be enough to put us all in square with the boys in blue. Allynson swirled his glass and emptied it, looking thirsty for the next.
I said, “Councilor, understand this. You’re elbowing your way to the top of a police investigation. Not because your tenant traded on your lack of curiosity. Not even because, like it or not, you’ve been playing host to prostitution and blackmail. This is about fitting you for a murder. Maybe for more than one. Because the question that doesn’t go away is who Jarrett made so nervous it got him killed?”
The fire went on shifting. Allynson kept the tight smile. Silence settled over the room like fine ashes. Then the library door opened wide and Mrs. Willard breezed in. She trailed a rustle that started in the drawing room the other side of the door, skirted around the company and pulled up alongside the bookcase that wasn’t a bookcase. By way of explanation and without breaking stride, she swept a hand at the doorway she’d walked in and said, “Mr. Newman, allow me to present my always fragrant husband. Which scent are we wearing today, Joseph, Anemone of the People?” Mrs. Willard poured a stiff jolt of her own and livened it with a small splash of soda while her husband followed into the room, took
in the crowd and let the door close behind him. She brought her drink over and stood right in front of me, close enough to count my eyelashes. “How lovely to meet again. Can we expect regular visits from now on?”
“I doubt it very much, Mrs. Willard.”
It was a good time of the day for her. Her cheeks had lost the alcohol flush of the night before, her hair was brushed out, her makeup fixed in morning light and she hadn’t overdone the jewelry. The rustle was a satin house robe that fitted down to her hips and trailed along the carpet. In daylight, her eyes matched the dark silver stripe in the robe. She said, “Such a shame,” sighed and gave me a small, wistful smile, then went over to her father, kissed him on the forehead and took the club chair in front of the fire.
If his wife’s behavior bothered him, Willard didn’t let it show. He arrived in the room at a loose-sprung saunter, sleek in a soft lounge suit, loud necktie, two-tone shoes and a cologne sharp enough to scratch diamonds. Added to that, he was good-looking and more or less in shape, a little slack around the middle and the chin but not so much it was fraying his confidence. It might have been practice, but Willard looked more relaxed ignoring his wife in private than dancing with her in public. He slipped a cigarette case from inside his suit jacket, fitted the gold band of a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and talked to me around it. Close up, something about him nagged at me. “They tell me a tenant of ours was shot. Is that what this is about?” The talk styled the same way as the clothes.
“Your tenant was shot and killed, Mr. Willard. This is about something else.” He spun the wheel of a gaudy lighter, put the lighter up to the cigarette and flipped it shut with a knuckle weighted with two gold dice set in a jet stone so big the room felt crowded. The knuckle motioned me to carry on. “On Christmas Eve, Councilor Drake met the City archaeologist at a diner in Smithfield. I came to ask the councilor what his conversation was about.”