Then he caught sight of George properly. ‘You —!’ he cried, and he called George a word that I will not repeat here, for it was shocking and not at all nice. ‘What do you think you’re doing? Coming over here and attacking our—’
He put out a hand towards me and then froze as he took in my face. I had frozen too. I wanted to back away, to simply stop existing on this street in front of this horrid person. But George drew himself up and crossed his arms elegantly.
‘My good sir,’ he said, ‘do you know to whom you are speaking? I am the Prince of Bengal and these are my friends, the Princess of Kowloon and the Duke of Massachusetts. We are waiting for my father, the Maharajah, to come out of this bookshop so he can take us to the Ritz for tea. Do you intend to prevent us from going about our business?’
The man quailed. George certainly knows how to behave like a prince, and not just because his father really is a knight. I tried to look like royalty and pretend that my knees were not knocking together.
‘Well?’ said George sharply.
The man glared at the three of us. ‘London,’ he said bitterly, half to himself. ‘It’s not like it was in the good old days.’
Suddenly I knew exactly what Daisy would say. ‘No, it isn’t,’ I said, taking off my glasses. ‘It’s better.’
‘Didn’t we do well?’ asked George, once the old man had stormed away. ‘Hazel, you were brilliant!’
‘You really were!’ agreed Alexander, beaming at me so warmly that I had to duck my head.
‘George was too!’ I said, to distract myself. ‘Oh, hurry – let’s go and find Annie’s accommodation before Bridget catches up with us!’
4
But Soho, when we turned right onto Old Compton Street, turned out to be rather different to the cheerful, if dusty, Charing Cross Road, where tradesmen’s vans clattered and housewives hurried by, carrying parcels done up with string. This road was damp and cobbled, and slipped under our feet unsteadily. Houses rose up around us, narrow and dingy, with pinched people peering out of them as they hung limp clothing out to dry.
Poky little shops clustered together, neon signs hanging above them with words that would light up in the evening, but in the day looked simply empty and sad. Some of the signs were quite rude, and some of the people walking about in the streets looked rude too. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with my eyes, so I kept them cast down at my feet, at the peelings and slops and rinds and worse that clotted the spaces between the cobbles.
This place reminded me very much of Wan Chai in Hong Kong, but an older, odder version, without the glitter and excitement of Hong Kong streets. Alexander and George tucked their arms through mine and we walked three abreast – and, although I knew that they were pretending to be worldly, they were just as embarrassed and awkward as I was.
The boarding house was just off Greek Street, a tall, thin building with cracked windows. There was a woman standing outside it, brushing away at the pavement and looking tired and cross. ‘What d’you want?’ she asked us roughly. ‘You’re not press, are you? You look too young to be press, but I wouldn’t know these days. They just keep on getting younger and younger, seems to me.’
‘No, no, we’re not press,’ said George quickly. ‘We’re – well, this is Mr Joy. Annie’s brother.’
We had planned this out with Daisy beforehand, after consulting the newspapers. There had been no pictures of the Joys, but we knew that Annie had a brother, and so we thought our best hope was for Alexander to pretend to be him.
Alexander stared hopefully at the woman, trying to look as sad as possible. She widened her eyes, and then leaned forward to peer into Alexander’s face. ‘You don’t look much like her,’ she said. ‘Annie was a little thing and you’re a beanpole.’
‘People always said that about us,’ said Alexander, in a most extraordinary accent that was half Essex and half RP, with a small American twang still threading through his words. ‘They thought we couldn’t be brother and sister. We used to joke about it. Poor Annie!’
I passed him my handkerchief, as I saw he was about to wipe his eyes on his sleeve. Somehow he had managed to conjure up real tears. George and I glanced at each other in amazement, and then quickly looked away again.
‘Mum sent me – she couldn’t manage it,’ Alexander went on. ‘If I could just have a quick look in her room, with my friends – there are some keepsakes that Mum and Dad want.’
Tears came into his eyes once again. I could see that the woman was touched, and I had a burst of sudden, horrid guilt. Where was Annie’s real brother? Was Alexander hurting him, acting this part? But there was no way of stopping this play now that we had begun.
‘Well,’ the woman said, ‘you oughtn’t, but – if you promise to be in and out in five minutes … And don’t touch anything else, all right? It’s top left.’
‘Oh, thank you awfully!’ cried Alexander, his American accent slipping through in his excitement. ‘Come on, er, chums, let’s go!’
Through the peeling doorway we rushed and into a dingy hall. There were no electrics here, only a small, unlit oil lamp, a broken chair and dark, narrow stairs leading away upwards. Fearing every moment that Bridget might appear behind us, we went clattering up the stairs, which creaked and complained underneath our hurrying feet. We wound upwards through the house, past closed doors with people snoring behind them, past the sound of dancing feet and voices rehearsing lines, past all the odd debris of a boarding house: a single shoe with a hole in its sole, a pair of camiknickers hanging off a newel post (embarrassing – we all looked away), an apple core rotting quietly in a corner of the stairs.
At last we came to the top floor, dizzyingly high and with a peculiar smell to it like dead flowers or stale breath, and there was the door to Annie’s room. George pushed it open and we all stepped inside.
In front of us was a narrow bed, and a wardrobe and chest of drawers of thin wood. It looked very lived-in: shoes were shoved into a corner, there was a ewer and basin half full of mucky water, and several stockings were drying on the radiator.
‘All right, Pinkertons and Detective Society member!’ said George. ‘We must search this room – and quickly. I shall take the floor. Hazel, you look at anything below the level of the windowsill and, Alexander, you look at everything above it. Understood?’
We all nodded at each other, and (although it was odd to be ordered around by a detective who was not Daisy, and odder still to see how the Pinkertons managed their investigations) I was glad to have a purpose.
What would we find? Had Annie done herself mischief, or had she instead been hurt by someone else, someone she had agreed to meet on the night she died? If so, who was it? Who had hurt her? Were there clues in this room that would lead us to the end of her life, and Rose’s?
5
I went first to the bed. I could tell it was Annie’s – I could see pale, fine hairs and smears of make-up on the pillow, and when I lifted it up I found a rather limp pair of pyjamas smelling of Annie’s perfume. The linen had not been changed for ages, but the bed was made quite carefully. If Annie had lain down last night, she had tidied up before she left the room. That gave me a shiver – the person who had tucked in these sheets had been alive just a few days before, and now she was not.
I quickly put back the bedcovers and turned to the chest of drawers. I pulled open the top drawer, and inside, beneath a layer of underthings, something rattled. I brushed a pair of stockings aside and found myself staring at a pile of books. Each was the size of my hand, in cheap imitation leather with a year embossed on the front in peeling gilt. I saw 1936, 1932, 1927 … the older the date, the more worn the book appeared. I opened 1936 and saw what I had suspected: that it was a diary, with a week laid out on every page. Every inch was filled with Annie’s looping script, smudged where her hand had rubbed across the page as she wrote.
February 10th: First day of a new show at the Criterion! Dishy lead. Must find out how he takes his tea. Had a lovely idea on the Undergro
und about a shot silk dress. Remember: buy liver.
It was exactly as vague and wandering as one of Annie’s conversations. I flicked through the pages, but, where May 1936 should be, there was a great gouge out of the book. Ten pages were missing – the whole of the month. The last entry was at the end of April:
April 25th: went to see Happy Families at the Lyric this evening. The eau de Nil bathrobe in the final scene was divine. The play made me feel like a child again – it’s funny how easy it is to remember everything from when I was sixteen, when now I can hardly remember a person I met last week. I’m sure she won’t remember me, but I mean to find out … Ripped my stocking getting out of the station on the way home, heard someone mentioning Mussolini and thought they were talking about mussels. Perhaps I’ll have mussels for tea tomorrow.
I put 1936’s diary down and dug through the drawer again, piling books in my arms and laying them out on the floor in a row. George and Alexander both stopped what they were doing to watch.
‘Golly!’ said Alexander. ‘What have you found?’
‘Diaries,’ I said, pulling out the last two books. ‘The pages for the latest entries are missing – she must have taken them with her, the last time she left this room! But everything else is here.’
‘If the police didn’t take what’s left of that diary, they really must think it was a suicide,’ said George, frowning. ‘Otherwise they’d be hunting through it now. I suppose all we can do is read everything else she’s written, in case it gives us a clue. If she saw something, she’d have noted it down there. And she must have seen something, or heard something – you’re sure you don’t remember anything particular?’
‘She was behaving oddly the last time we saw her, but she didn’t say anything then. And before that … I don’t know!’ I said, feeling rather hopeless. ‘She said so many things, it was hard to pay attention.’
‘Exactly the sort of person likely to become the second victim in a case like this,’ said George knowledgeably. ‘The type who doesn’t know what they know, and is liable to babble it out to the wrong person.’
‘That’s the great thing about talking,’ said Alexander. ‘The more you do it, the less people actually listen to you.’
That was true, I thought. Annie chattered so much that my brain had refused to take in much of what she said.
I had been ordering the diaries by date as Alexander spoke, and now I sat back and stared at the line of them. There was one for each year, beginning in 1918 and ending in 1936. The 1918 book was on very thin paper, and when I opened it the frontispiece read ANNIE’S DIRY, AGE 7, 139 SEVEW STRET, SOWTHND, ESSIX.
‘You’ve missed one,’ said George, pointing.
‘I haven’t!’ I protested – then realized he was quite correct: 1926 was next to 1928 – 1927 was missing. Puzzled, I went digging through the drawer again, and then through the rest of the clothes. George stuck his head underneath the wardrobe, and Alexander lifted up the mattress of the bed – but the diary could not be found.
I looked around the room again and peered into the wardrobe. I had another moment of knowing exactly what Daisy would say.
‘The diary is missing,’ I said. ‘But look what else is here. Her good coat and hat, her nicest handbag. The red coat she was seen with – that’s her everyday one.’
‘So?’ asked George.
‘So she didn’t dress up,’ I said. ‘Annie was dramatic – she loved clothes. Why would she wear her ordinary clothes if she planned to throw herself off a bridge? She’d want to look as nice as possible. But if she was only going to meet someone, she’d wear her usual things.’
‘Hazel, you’re right!’ said Alexander, grinning. ‘That’s clever of you. I didn’t see a telephone downstairs, so she must have arranged the meeting on the day she died. And that makes it likely that it was someone she saw at the Rue – otherwise how would they have contacted her?’
‘We can’t say that yet!’ George told him. ‘But I admit it does make sense. Can we find any more clues here, before we move on?’
But there was nothing – just bits of cotton wool clotted with make-up in the waste-paper bin, smeary fingermarks on the ewer and basin, fair hairs wrapped round a pair of curling tongs.
‘Come on,’ said Alexander excitedly. ‘We’ve found everything we can in here. Annie left here on the night of her death. Where did she go next?’
6
‘She was seen on Charing Cross Road, and again near Westminster Bridge,’ said George as we hurried away from the boarding house. I had slipped Annie’s 1936 diary into my pocket as we left. It burned a guilty hole in my thoughts. The police hadn’t thought it important, and so really it was not stealing … but still it felt wrong.
‘So, down this road and then here …’
George led us through narrow London streets, ducking and dodging round carts and taking unexpected right and left turns. He belonged here, I saw – this city was part of him, the way Hong Kong is part of me. We hurried down an echoing little street with buildings leaning close overhead – and there in front of us again was the open stretch of Charing Cross Road and Leicester Square, horses and cars jostling and hawkers and newsmen shouting. The Rue was just away behind us.
‘So, she would have turned right here,’ said George. ‘This is where she bumped into the first witness. Now, if she kept walking towards the river … Come on, this way. There’s really nowhere else to go—’
And we followed him all the way down the road until, in a shocking instant, it opened out into the wide glory of Trafalgar Square. Soho was forgotten behind us. Here was nothing but air and light. Pigeons whirled and settled, the British flag snapped to my left and right over St Martin-in-the-Fields church and the National Gallery, and in front of me the fountains splashed and glittered in the sun as it pushed its way at last through puffy little spring clouds. Above everything, high above the hats and coats of the people hurrying through the square, Nelson soared on his column. He was guarded down on the earth by four magnificent lions, their mouths a little open as if to warn the people in the red London buses crawling by not to go near.
I sighed, because it was all so beautiful, and clean, and bright.
‘Isn’t the British Empire awful?’ said George. ‘This whole place was built on slave labour, you know.’
‘George!’ said Alexander, elbowing him.
‘I’m not being rude, I’m being truthful,’ said George, drawing his eyebrows together crossly. ‘Lots of beautiful things have awful histories.’
‘All right, let’s not fight,’ said Alexander. ‘Come on. So Annie walks down the road and arrives here. Where would she go next? Down on the Embankment, beside the river?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘I don’t think she would go that way. It was almost midnight, and it was foggy. If I was trying to get to Westminster Bridge, I’d go the most brightly lit way.’
‘But, Hazel—’ Alexander began.
‘No, I think Hazel’s right,’ said George, stopping him with a hand on his arm. ‘We’d go that way, Alex. But imagine being Annie. The witnesses said she was nervous – bumping into them, asking for a cigarette to steady herself. So, she walks under lamps – let’s see, that would be down Whitehall, all the way to the Houses of Parliament. Then she turns left, onto the bridge. Come on!’
Off we went again, crossing Trafalgar Square and moving down the long, wide road beyond it, the buildings on each side of us becoming larger and more white, until I really could feel the full force of the British Empire bearing down upon me.
Then Big Ben rose up in front of us like a cathedral, its gold stone glowing. The round yellow faces with their heavy black hands glowered down at us, and I imagined being Annie, coming here at night, the cold fog swirling around her coat, the light from the lamps just firefly specks in the darkness. I shuddered.
‘This is where the second witness saw her,’ said George. ‘Just here, it must have been. She asks for a cigarette, then she walks away … and is never seen alive ag
ain.’
7
We stepped onto the long stone span of Westminster Bridge, following Annie’s invisible path. In the dark, in the mist, it would have felt lost and lonely, but today we could see the grey buildings of London stretching far away on either side of us, under the cloudy grey and blue sky. I looked at the dome of St Paul’s, like something from a fairy tale, at the spires and rickety buildings of the East End. Beyond that, I knew, was Tower Bridge, and then the Thames Estuary, where Annie’s body had been found.
Then I tilted my head downwards. Below me was the Thames, muscular brown water churning away against the pillars of the bridge. It looked terribly far. I shuddered and stepped backwards, almost knocking into a man in a suit who was striding down the pavement. He shouted at me and hurried on.
George was leaning against the nearest wrought-iron lamp post, one of the many that were measured out across the bridge, staring out into space.
‘It looks like it ought to be safe here,’ he said thoughtfully, without turning to me. ‘All these lamps, lit every night. All these people crossing the bridge every hour. Omnibuses and carts and taxis and cars. But that’s not true, not when you think about it. A city’s the loneliest place, really. People might see you, but no one will notice you unless you do something like, well, bump into them. Imagine Annie standing here after dark.’
‘She was wearing that red coat!’ said Alexander. ‘She’d glow under the lamp.’
‘She might,’ said George. ‘But only if she was beneath it. And, Hazel, you said it was foggy that night, didn’t you?’
‘Yes!’ I said. ‘When we left the Rue, it wasn’t dark yet, but the fog was already coming in. In the end, it was a proper pea-souper.’
‘Exactly,’ said George. ‘Thick yellow fog curling around everyone. Imagine Annie walking through it. Even in the brightest coat, she’d only be properly visible if you were very close to her, like both those witnesses were. She arrives on the bridge, she’s standing near here, and then …’
Death in the Spotlight Page 17