by Janet Roger
She took a pull from her brandy and let it work under her scalp, put Henry a seat against the oil heater and another alongside it for herself and counted back. “That was three days before Christmas. The snow had stopped and Michael telephoned to say he wanted to take some photographs. There was cloud when he got here but too high to be a problem. We did our usual thing and flew circuits over his blitz sites in the City. Michael was happy as Larry, climbing around the cabin and photographing through the window.” She made hopeless eyes at Henry across the top of her mug. “I had to practically yell at him to behave. I mean, the other chap was absolutely green about the gills the whole time.”
She drained off the brandy and rinsed it around her teeth. Henry Beaufort blinked. I turned around from her pictures. “There was somebody else in the plane?”
She swallowed and nodded back at me. “A City bigwig Michael brought along. He telephoned me yesterday as it happens. I forget his name.” And then, triumphant, “Duck!”
I said, “His name’s Drake. Councilor Drake. Did he always go along with the professor for the ride?”
“Never. And he was so awfully ill I can’t imagine seeing him ever again. I mean, he was calling to ask if I still had the film we took.” She looked up at me, askance.
I went along with it. “And did you?”
“Of course not. Michael never used the plane’s camera. He had his own Fairchild. Ex-RAF. Easily as good as mine.” She got up from her seat by the stove and unzipped from the flying suit, took out a handful of grips from a flap, clamped them in her teeth and hooked a wad of orange hair behind her ear. “After we landed, it took an hour in here drinking my brandy to get your councilor back on his feet, so completely wretched he obviously hadn’t a clue what was going on. When he called yesterday, he actually asked to speak to his pilot, Mister Fulton. Well who the hell did he think I was, the bloody stewardess?”
Drake. So airsick he didn’t notice Garfield was taking pictures with his own camera. Or that when his pilot stood down for drinks, she turned out to be Rita Hayworth with her mouth set in a permanent whistle. Perhaps. But even if the councilor had to be carried in from the airplane, you marveled how his next hour with her could be so hard to remember.
Ground fog settled over the airfield, spread a blanket across the flat acres taking the Oxford road back to the city and muffled the sound of the Morgan’s tires. It made the low exhaust sound nervous. I put my knees back under my chin, wrapped my coat around my ankles, slid down the seat until I was staring up at the canvas top and set my hat over my eyes. Then said, “Tell me about Edgar Levin.”
Henry was arched over the wheel, straining at a lazy semaphore of oncoming lights. “Tell you what about him?”
“He had a war. Tell me about his war.”
And so he told it, in a halting monotone, whispered inside the shake and jar of the Morgan.
According to Henry, Levin had been a Medical Corps reservist in 1939 and got called up early. He wasn’t ecstatic about it but he didn’t see it as avoidable either; not in the way his boss and his fiancée did. Guy Beaufort didn’t want to lose his brightest mind, and had favors he could call in. Levin’s fiancée knew it and didn’t see why he wouldn’t stay out of the fight. Then one early spring day in 1940 their arguing was cut short. The British started out on a six-week disaster that was the Norway campaign, Levin had shipped with it to Narvik and didn’t come back.
Henry owned he’d liked Levin from the minute his father brought him to the firm. But it was in the months after Narvik, while they waited for news and scanned the gazettes together, that he’d gotten to know Sybil Drake. By then, Norway read like the military equivalent of Laurel and Hardy putting up a deckchair, destined for calamity from the outset. Sybil Drake had started out tearful, then turned angry at the sheer waste of it, went on pushing officials two long years for information they didn’t have and finally decided she had better keep her chin up, understand that Edgar Levin died doing what he thought was necessary and put the whole sorry affair behind her. It was around that time she was first introduced to Willard.
Henry slowed the Morgan for traffic building on the edge of town, sank against the seatback and dropped his hands to the wheel rim in his lap. “You could see why Willard would be interested. The Drakes were old money and well-connected in the City. But Sybil? And her father? As a prospective husband and son-in-law, Willard was spectacularly unsuitable, yet they both seemed not to notice.”
I glanced across at Henry bent over the wheel, saw he was in earnest and let that pass. Like anything you could name in 1942, suitability had been on ration, and by next summer Sybil Drake was married. The same summer, as it happened, that Edgar Levin’s name came up on a wounded list for the first time since he went missing, put there by the director of a Kriegsmarine sanatorium outside the port of Trondheim. The Navy doctor could have signed Levin fit for a stalag long before, even as an amputation case. But he liked his Jewish patient’s chances better in the sanatorium, pulled his name from the POW files, and kept him permanently on a recovery ward. It wasn’t until summer of ’43, when he’d gotten notice of a Red Cross exchange of wounded, that the doctor put Levin’s record back in the file, added him to the discharge list and told him he was going home.
When the exchange went ahead that fall, Henry had been stunned seeing his friend as good as return from the dead. Likewise, Beaufort senior, who couldn’t believe his luck at getting back his best talent. But he also had qualms. How Levin would take to the fact of the new Mrs. Willard there was no telling. But after three long months of matrimony, Mrs. Willard’s distaste for her husband was already undisguised, and how she might take to getting Edgar Levin back was aggravating Beaufort’s ulcers. By the close of 1943, the City was looking ahead to the end of the war, the Corporation had two hundred and fifty acres of flattened, high-grade real estate waiting on reconstruction and Guy Beaufort was its chief adviser on a master plan that took the breath away. Having his star architect seen around town with the planning chairman’s lately married daughter was not what his doctor ordered. Henry noticed his father was upping the milk in his nightcaps.
The Morgan crawled past Euston in a swirling snow that blotted out the rail station arch, then got in line to re-cross Gray’s Inn Road. Henry was craned permanently over the steering wheel, using the flat of his hand to wipe off the screen. He hadn’t spoken since his Levin story ended. “I’ve been thinking. Michael’s office at Guildhall.” He faltered, as if he’d forgotten how to swallow. “I’d like to go there. I’ve got a key.”
The car rolled past a phone booth and halted again. I stretched to find if I had any sensation below the waist, felt under my armpit for the lever, sprung the door and got out. Sleet drizzled in fingers down the back of my collar. I put my head back in under the canvas top. “On a night like this nobody will stop you. Wait there for me.” I slammed shut the car door and stepped across the gutter to the empty booth.
TWENTY-THREE
Kathryn Swinford was working late in the glass office. She reached in a drawer and said offhand, “Take one of these. They’re yours.”
She emptied the contents of a manila folder on the blotter in front of her. I put the cigarette I was lighting back in its pack and sank in the chair opposite. “Mine?”
Her nose wrinkled. “If you really want me to, I’ll explain. But give it a moment, I know you’ll remember.”
The lump on my neck felt ready to crack open and hatch a chick. I put a hand to it, shut my eyes and breathed the coffin smell of Sun Street Passage. On the blotter was a crumpled pack of Passing Clouds, cocktail-hour pink.
“Where else are you hurt?” Her gaze settled on the dressing taped around the ball of my thumb, then watched me shrug the question off. “You really don’t trust me, do you? You ought to you know.” She didn’t wait for an answer, took an envelope from a wire tray and tossed it in front of me on the desk. “Garfield’s postmortem. The
reason you telephoned. But we’ll come to that. There’s something we need to talk about first.” Her fingernails tapped the edge of the desk. “When I left you my working notes, they said the only prints identified at Miss Valentine’s murder were her own. So they were. But this afternoon I had what I expect you’d call a hunch and did some identifying of my own.”
I pulled my hand off the throbbing behind my ear and thought, why not? Everybody has hunches. Night or day I get a hundred of my own and one in a hundred that gets close to being a long shot. Probably it was as good an average as the next genius, and no reason to suppose Dr. Swinford was having a better than average day. I gave her the grin through my teeth. The one that charms at the same time it breaks down defenses. “Doctor, any other prints likely belong to City Police at the scene. They tramp all over out of pure enthusiasm. Leave it to the boys in the lab. They can tell the difference.”
She gaped at me wide-eyed in disbelief. Not all of it was theater. “That was cheap of you, Detective. I have prints I take to be yours on the wax candles from the church crib; that can be checked. But in any case, they match with others taken from this packet of Passing Clouds. Miss Valentine lit one of them before she was killed. The rest of the packet was found tucked in the cuff of her sweater.” She took a pencil from her lab coat pocket. “For goodness sake, credit me with some sense. And give me due for not passing this on, at least not yet. I was there when you were brought these. Remember?” The end of the pencil turned the cigarette pack around. “But they weren’t for you, were they? They were a Christmas present for Miss Valentine. After you left the Great Eastern it was her you went to see. An hour later an anonymous caller reported her body at a location scarcely a quarter of a mile from here, less still from the hotel.”
She looked past me to the darkened laboratory outside her office window, then leaned in, voice lowered to a hiss. “Look, there was blood on her coat and skirt, and on the ground around her body that wasn’t her own. As of now, so help me, my report says it was probably her killer’s. But there’s no evidence, none whatever, that she fought him off. So tell me the blood isn’t yours or tell me what happened.” She prodded the crumpled cigarette pack in my direction. “Because these say Dillys Valentine was alive when you arrived and dead when you left. Which is not ideal, Detective, now is it?”
Her chair scuffed hard back and she walked to my side of the desk, reached for my wrist and spread my palm. Her thumb pressed hard into the wad of gauze and tape until my eyelids floated. She said flatly, “There’s glass still in the wound.” Pipes cracked. Low-watt lighting hummed and flickered. No other sound in the room. The doctor went back around her desk and took the faint, sharp mortuary smell of ether with her, stood with her hands deep in her pockets and waited for answers with a look I wasn’t meant to like. I looked at my wristwatch. It was past seven o’clock. I picked up the envelope with Garfield’s postmortem inside and said, “All right, but first I need a drink.”
She nodded, went over to the stand by her office door, swapped her white coat for her outdoor and collected her hat and umbrella. “Not any more than I do.”
The Viaduct was a quarter mile east of the bridge that carried Holborn in three iron spans high across Farringdon Road. It was a saloon bar left over from a Victorian gin mill, set on a corner opposite the Central Criminal Court. Any Saturday night it had cadet nurses from Bart’s spilling from its doors, off-duty, loud and fried. On a Saturday night between Christmas and New Year all that was added was a sea of colored streamers, tinsel and balloons.
The saloon took up the quarter circle of the street corner, with three sets of double doors at intervals around its frontage, all three opening into the single barroom. I had one of the swing doors pushed open while the doctor shook out her umbrella and surveyed the crush. She sucked in a breath, dipped a shoulder and shoved for the bar through the press of bodies. I stepped in behind and trailed in her wake.
A counter ran along one wall, tall gilt mirrors along the other, with paintings in fake marble frames in the spaces between. I leaned in close to the barman’s ear to call two drinks and steered the doctor to the only right-angle in the room. She turned there, put her back to the corner and peeled off her gloves. I kept my back to the party. It got us the one place in the Viaduct where we could talk without a loudhailer and gave me a mirror view of all three entrance doors.
Kathryn Swinford was wearing the same cream coat as Christmas morning, with its button cuffs and a high collar turned up around her ears. Tonight she wore it differently and I liked her better this way: tired and a little frayed around the edges in a felt hat with a slouch brim, swallowing warm whisky in a place she didn’t want to be. I watched the liquor hit the pit of her stomach and sink with all hands, saw her nose wrinkle again and the line of her jaw relax. She took another sharp breath and frowned.
I said, “You’re taking a big risk, Doctor.”
She rolled the glass between her palms and summoned up her bright tone. It cost some effort. “By leaving you Jarrett’s file to read? Don’t tell me you disapprove.”
“That depends why you’re taking the risk.”
Her eyes slid around to where they could watch the buzz and the high jinks going on over my shoulder. She talked past me, near enough to scent the liquor on her breath. “Well, I can’t sit on my hands and do nothing. Blanche Beaufort has spent the past two months in a sanatorium, not nearly well enough to be told how idiotically her son is behaving. Much less that Littomy talks to the newspapers as if the boy’s a fugitive from justice. It’s cynical and dangerous of him. And Garfield’s postmortem isn’t going to help things one jot.” I said nothing and watched the color fade from her cheeks. She shrugged an eyebrow. “You see, you were right. I do have ideas about fairness. I’ve told Guy about you, and that you’re not jumping to conclusions the way Littomy is. That being so, I thought you ought to have whatever help I can give you. Are you jumping to conclusions?”
“You’d be the first to know. Tell me about Garfield.”
It wasn’t good. Her postmortem showed two gunshots fired from a .38. What was almost certainly the first one had smashed through the professor’s upper left arm and ribcage before the bullet lodged in his right shoulder socket. It was damage enough to kill him anyway, but the killer hadn’t left that to chance. A second gunshot had punched a hole in Garfield’s chest and exited his left shoulder into the night. There was no water in his lungs. He’d been dead when he hit the river, and not less than forty-eight hours before he was found. His wristwatch said more like sixty; the water had stopped it minutes before eleven and the doctor judged that to be eleven at night on Christmas Eve, not later. She drank and winced and shook her head. “In short, Garfield couldn’t have killed Jarrett. He was already dead six hours before. And there’s more.”
The wall mirror behind her caught a new arrival. The farthest street door pushed inward on the crowd, and when it opened wide enough, a nurse in uniform slipped through it brushing wet snow off her cape. The nurse stopped there and turned to someone who followed in through the door, masked by the slant of the hat she wore. Then she started for the bar with her company in tow. I lost sight of them both and pulled my gaze off the mirror. “It was the same .38 that killed Jarrett?”
The doctor was unbuttoning her coat, slacking a silk square knotted under her chin. “It seems likely. I’ll have something more definite tomorrow. But that’s not what I meant. It’s that the second bloodstain on the coat in Michael Garfield’s closet, the one Henry tried to throw out—”
“Is Garfield’s.”
She nodded distantly, drained the whisky and looked past me again at the crowd. “The same blood group. Meaning if Littomy really wants to, he could bring Henry in on suspicion of a double murder. In which case, I’ve become an accessory to a complete mess.” Her voice had the same note as her first telephone call two days before, as if she saw a calamity coming and didn’t know how to duck. But even c
alamity comes in degrees. The whisky bottle that ground the life out of Dillys Valentine had prints on it that hadn’t been identified yet. The day somebody thought of checking them against Blanche’s boy, Littomy would have a candidate not just for two, but for all three of his murders.
I pointed at her empty glass, and when she shook her head, said, “When Henry didn’t find his boyfriend home on Christmas Eve, he stayed the night in the family apartment on Ludgate Hill. Next morning, he went back to Cross Key Square. Still no professor, or any sign of a break-in, but overnight the house had been turned over and a bloodstained coat left in a travel grip at the back of a closet. So says Henry, and if you’ve got reasons to believe him that’s dandy. But Littomy hasn’t any reasons and your postmortem will tell him Garfield was already floating on the tide. How else would he see it but as a double murder? You’re an accessory to regular police work Doctor, let it go at that.” I looked for my two hats in the mirror. For Nurse Greer with her wayward dark waves pinned in a starch-white cap, and for her companion in the slantwise fashion number who’d let herself into the nurse’s house, broke out the kitchen fire, turned on the radio and left a message to meet at the Viaduct tonight.
“Well thank you for your interest and concern!”
My head jerked around. Kathryn Swinford’s lips drawn so hard across her teeth they could barely form words. “Newman, what on earth is the matter with you? I simply want to know how to stop this getting completely out of hand. Who would you have me turn to?” She had a fighter’s reflex for a fast combination: the feint with the unreasonable and then a fast cross with the unanswerable, before you got a chance to step inside.
I twisted the glass from her grasp, set mine in her hand and snarled at her when she demurred. “Take it and listen. The boy might be telling the truth. It’s hard for me to tell. But if you want him out of this jam, start asking smarter questions about Dillys Valentine. The night Jarrett died she ran into somebody who was out looking for him. Nobody she ever saw before. Not Garfield because he was already with the fishes, but if it was Garfield’s killer, maybe Jarrett’s too, he knew she could identify him. Which is motive for her murder. But there’s better.”