The Bee's Kiss (8 page)

Both pleased and disturbed by his encounter, Joe worked his way back towards Piccadilly Circus. A gathering rumble in the night air reminded him how late – or was it how early? – was the hour. The country carts were lumbering down Piccadilly, jogging along on their way to Smithfield, Covent Garden and Billingsgate. When the market bells rang at five o’clock a new London day would begin. He crossed the street, dodging a flower-laden cart heady with the scent of wallflowers and bright with tulips, and picked up a cruising taxi-cab for home. His mind was racing, trying to order the many things he would have to do in a few hours’ time. He peered blearily through the cab window at the now milky sky as they turned on to the Embankment and he wondered if they would get to Chelsea before daybreak. Perhaps he should ask the cabby to loiter on Westminster Bridge so that he could enjoy the moment when the sun rose up from the grey waters of the Thames and brought back life to the capital; the brief moment before the houses and factories started puthering out their wreathing layers of yellow-grey smoke. Nocturne in black and grey perhaps? Variations in black and gold?

A river police launch shot the bridge like a swimming rat, its three-man crew alert and looking out into the oily depths of the river, the sinister grappling iron projecting from the stern announcing their grim purpose. Joe shivered. The sun would rise too late to bring warmth to some poor, cold, hopeless bugger. He was faintly embarrassed that he’d been about to linger, fancifully trying to decide whether the misty grey scene would have been more effectively rendered by Monet or Whistler. Some other day, he decided. And he wasn’t quite in tune with Wordsworth this morning either.

He yawned. Another thing he must do was put through a call to Records before the meeting. He wanted to ask them to look out a file for him. The name on the file would be Sergeant W. Armitage. He wondered whether Sir Nevil’s question mark was the same as his own.

‘Sir! I’ve been detailed to lend a hand this morning. Constable Sweetman. Attached to Vine Street.’

The eager young policeman in his impeccable uniform was, Joe judged, in his probationary year.

‘Good morning, Sweetman. You have your instructions from Inspector Cottingham?’

‘Yessir. He’ll be here in a moment. I think we’re both early, sir.’

‘You’re aware that I may require you to demonstrate your particular skill?’

‘That’s what I understand, sir.’ He grinned and added, ‘Won’t be the first time.’

‘Good. Then we just have to wait until my assistant, Sergeant Armitage, gets here.’ Joe checked his watch. He was five minutes early.

‘I think they’re just arriving, sir.’

Cottingham strode up looking disconcertingly dapper. Starched collar and bowler hat, spats and smart black cashmere overcoat, he’d dressed for a working day in the West End. Bill Armitage, on the other hand, to Joe’s satisfaction looked more blurred around the edges than he did himself, though the sergeant had obviously taken pains to make himself presentable. His light tweed suit topped off with a sample of the nob’s version of the proletarian flat cap favoured by the royal princes was giving out signals complex enough to hold the attention for a good five minutes. Joe thought his choice was perfectly in tune with the bright spring day and with the task in hand.

They greeted each other with slightly twisted smiles and wry pleasantries, agreeing to get on with the job at once. The four men set out to retrace Armitage’s tour of inspection the night before, circling the building until they reached the façade on the eastern side. They all looked up, eyes following the ledge below the mansard roof and focusing on the one window which had been boarded up. For a moment there was silence as they examined the challenging climb.

‘Fire escape as far as the third floor,’ said Joe, ‘but then it gets a bit tricky. It’s a fingers and toes job up the next floor and then there’s the ledge overhang to negotiate before he can inch his way along to the broken window. Not pleasant but it has to be done. Heaven knows what clues, what evidence he might have left behind. Well, you know . . . button, thread of fabric . . . identity card?’

‘Found a pair of false teeth at the scene once!’ said Cottingham jovially. ‘Clamped around a beef and horseradish sandwich, they were.’

Armitage handed his cap to young Sweetman and began to take off his jacket. His usual swagger was absent, Joe noticed, as he said, ‘Leave this to me, sir.’ He clenched and unclenched his large hands and the knuckles were white with tension as he scanned the façade.

‘Stand down, Sergeant,’ said Cottingham. ‘No need for that! Constable Sweetman is here for a purpose. Not just a pretty face – the lad has hidden talents, I’m told. Rock climber at weekends! You may divest yourself of your helmet and tunic before commencing, Roy, if you wish.’

The constable grinned and cast an assessing eye over the climb. ‘It’ll be a doddle, sir. Shall I start now? Is anyone going to time this?’

Cottingham took out a stop watch and moved off with his officer to the foot of the iron ladder of the fire escape. When they were out of earshot Joe said quietly, ‘Very bold of you in the circumstances, I think, Sergeant, to volunteer for a climb like that?’

He paused, waiting for a response. Armitage looked truculently at his feet.

‘The leg, Bill? Anything you want to tell me about the leg?’

Armitage’s face stiffened with resentment. ‘Following me down the street last night, was it, sir?’

Joe was unapologetic. ‘Yes. Couldn’t help noticing you were favouring your left leg . . . when you thought no one was looking. War wound, I take it?’

‘It comes and goes, sir.’

‘For example it comes when you think you are unobserved and goes when you’re up for a medical?’ Joe enquired with an interested smile.

Armitage’s eyes glinted and his chin came up in defiance. ‘All right, so you can get me sacked for disability . . .’

‘And deception.’ Joe was not prepared to let this go. ‘I remember every recruit has to make a statement about his physical condition as well as prove it in the medical examination. And the three months’ training is no cakewalk. I’m surprised that you managed to pull the wool over so many eyes for so long, Armitage.’

‘So am I,’ he admitted. ‘And I can tell you it was bloody painful! But there were some good fellers who knew when to look the other way. Five years ago, the force was desperate for a certain calibre of recruit and in all other ways I fitted the bill. I’ve had no complaints. My record is a good one, you’ll find when you’ve time to check it. Perhaps you already have, sir?’

Joe was silent for a moment, wondering exactly what he had uncovered and what action he should take.

‘There’s a telephone in reception. One call should do it, Captain.’ The voice was icy and resigned.

The use of his old army rank was the only appeal the man would allow himself, though it was potent in itself, Joe recognized. He was too proud to allude to the many favours he’d done Joe over the months they’d fought together; it was bad form for survivors of the war to mention their experiences even to those who’d shared them. For men of his generation, four years of life – if you could call it that – were edited out of conversation. But not out of memory. Joe remembered the cups of weak tea proffered with a smile and an encouraging quip, the last drops of the sergeant’s rum ration swirling muddily in the bottom of his dixie. ‘Sippers? Naw! Go, on – finish it! You’re the barmy bugger who’s going over the wire. I’ll keep the next ration safe. Be here when you get back, sir.’

And the life-saving shot of raw spirit was, indeed, there waiting for him but much more. Still fifty yards short of the trench and a grey dawn breaking, he’d been spotted. Rifle bullets cracked around him as he wriggled on elbows and belly, following the intermittent shelter of a tuck in the land. A bullet through his shoulder, exhausted and drained of any will to go on, Captain Sandilands had slumped on to his face on the earth waiting for death.

‘Fucking sniper!’ Bill’s voice growled suddenly in his ear. ‘Overdone it this time, though! We got a flash of him when he started having a go. Lads have got him in their sights. Listen! That’ll make him keep his bloody head down – if it’s still on his shoulders! I think we could break for it now. You okay?’ And strong hands had hauled and pushed and rolled him the rest of the way back to shelter.

‘Perhaps I’m one of those fellers who know when to look the other way? It’s a skill I learned from a past master of the art in India,’ said Joe.

They watched in companionable silence as the constable swarmed fearlessly up the fire escape. ‘Tell me, Bill, did you ever stop counting those minutes?’ Joe asked quietly.

Armitage responded at once to the allusion. Perhaps it had been in his mind also. ‘Funny thing that. The counting had become so engrained I missed it when it all came to a stop. It kept me going. We all had to find our own ways of getting through.’

Joe was remembering the iron gleam in the sergeant’s eye as he fired a captured enemy machine gun at a row of German infantry emerging from their trench only yards away. They’d been sitting ducks for the raking gun. When, finally, the pitiless racket stopped and no more figures came on towards them through the smoke Joe had touched Armitage’s shoulder briefly with a stiff, ‘Well done, Sarge!’ He’d realized with a shock that Armitage had been counting throughout. ‘Twenty-five!’ he’d said with satisfaction. ‘Every bugger I get, I reckon as another minute off this bloody war. So that’s near half an hour saved, Captain!’

Joe had known many men go through the war without ever firing their rifle. Some, no more than boys, he’d seen close their eyes before firing. Some had loosed off everything they had at the horizon. But not Armitage. He had placed every shot deliberately and counted every hit.

Joe’s thoughts were interrupted by a triumphant crowing from Constable Sweetman who took time off from his climb to point to his left and stick a thumb in the air, indicating he’d spotted something of interest. He finished his climb, mimed jemmying and then smashing the window, and began the descent. This was done more slowly, with an eye open for evidence. When he reached a piece of roof invisible to those standing below he moved sideways from his course and, pausing, took a white handkerchief from his pocket. Using this, he carefully picked up an object and examined it uncertainly. Coming to a decision, he adjusted the handkerchief and took the thing firmly between his teeth before continuing his descent.

‘Good Lord, Sweetman!’ said Cottingham, impressed, handing back his helmet. ‘It only took you four and a half minutes to get up there. Well done! What athletic ability! Nothing like it since Douglas Fairbanks swarmed up the rigging in
The Black Pirate
.’

With a flourish, Sweetman removed the object he’d retrieved from between his clenched teeth and gingerly held it out. ‘’Cept this should be a dagger, sir, or a cutlass, maybe! Murder weapon! Would this be the murder weapon, sir? It’d rolled under a lead flashing. Hard to spot! But at least the rain’s not got at it. Look here, sir. And here. Them’s hairs . . . red ’uns. And that there’s not tomato ketchup neither.’

They all looked with curiosity at the fireside poker.

‘No, indeed,’ said Cottingham. ‘And, again, well spotted!’ He took a brown paper evidence envelope from his murder bag and wrapped it loosely around the poker. ‘I’ll get this straight down to the lab, sir. It may have prints on it.’

The meeting broke up in great good humour with much self-congratulation and with a renewed appetite for the next stage of the case. Sweetman made his way back to Vine Street to impress and entertain his mates with an account of his exploits while Cottingham hailed a taxi for Scotland Yard where he intended to spend the day, as he put it, ‘working on the forensics’.

Joe was left facing an Armitage still apparently ill at ease and subdued by the uncovering of his deception. ‘Shouldn’t think they’ll find much more than the chambermaid’s dabs on that,’ he said finally with a dismissive shrug. ‘Let’s not be forgetting our friend was wearing gloves. Hardly likely to have said, “’Ere, hang on a minute, madam, whilst I divest myself of these gloves prior to seizing this ’ere poker and bashing you about the ’ead with it,” now is he?’

‘Doesn’t sound reasonable to me either,’ said Joe. ‘And I expect we’re in for a disappointment. Oh, and, Sergeant, I’m afraid you must prepare yourself for a further setback.’ He sighed and smiled a rueful smile. ‘I reported by telephone to the boss this morning and . . .’ He hesitated, wondering how to go on. ‘And for reasons I can’t readily understand – yet – I am directed once more – and very firmly directed, I have to say – to make use of the services of Constable Westhorpe.’

‘No!’ Armitage was gratifyingly thunderstruck.

‘’Fraid so. She is to accompany us this afternoon to Surrey to investigate Dame Beatrice’s home and family. There may well be female insights she can offer us, I’m told. But the first of our problems will be locating the wretched girl. I telephoned her home to make suitable arrangements at nine this morning only to be told by her father that Mathilda had already left the house in her uniform, reporting for duty in Hyde Park.’ He waved an arm vaguely to the west. ‘So she’s out there somewhere in six hundred acres of woodland, lake and garden.’

Armitage’s expression hardened but he commented lightly enough, ‘And they do a good job, these women, I understand . . . fishing little boys out of the Serpentine, protecting laundry maids taking a short cut between the wilder parts of Bayswater and the Knightsbridge hotels, reuniting straying toddlers with their nannies.’

‘The weaker members of the park-going community must be comforted by their presence,’ said Joe firmly.

‘Yers, and I’ve heard as how they’ve protected many an unworldly politician from the terrifying advances of ladies of a certain profession,’ drawled Armitage with undisguised sarcasm. ‘Did you hear, sir, about the Assistant Commissioner last December . . .’ He looked about him. ‘Must have been somewhere round here . . . Caught in flagrante with a Miss Thelma de Lava. I know the two lads who made the arrest. Takes courage to pick up the boss! Stout chaps!’