Without the Moon (5 page)

Swaffer tore a page out of the back of his notebook and handed it across. “She was very concerned, you see, because at the moment she is working for the most strikingly blonde woman you have ever seen. They heard about this airman from a friend of theirs in the hairdresser's this morning, a lady who'd had a bit of a close shave with him last night. She was in the process of having her hair dyed brown.”

Greenaway looked down at the given name and address and felt the hairs prickle up on his arms. He folded the paper carefully and swapped it for the envelope that was in his inside pocket.

“This friend of theirs was lucky. This,” he handed his exchange across, “is Spilsbury's report on Mrs Bettencourt.”

It disappeared into Swaffer's topcoat so swiftly it might never have even been there. “What more does no one else know yet?” the journalist asked.

“The man's left-handed,” said Greenaway. “That's the main reason why I know it's him who done both of them. Fred Cherrill's working on dabs, but so far, he don't seem to be a known resident of any of his files. The airman thing fits with the information I got and the rest—” Greenaway looked up at the clock above the bar, “you'll have to deduce for yourself.”

The detective got to his feet. “Do a good job, won't you, Swaff? For the sake of all the ladies of the parish. You know you're the only one they ever read.”

7
I'LL BE AROUND

Tuesday, 10 February 1942

“And I told you – I ain't going with no bleedin' soldier!”

Twelve hours after leaving Gladys's salon with her freshly dyed locks waved and pinned securely under her favourite red pillbox hat, Lorna had found her voice again. It rang out shrill and hard in the ears of the Scots Guardsman who, approving of her new look, was flashing a wad of money at her, outside the New Eros cinema in Piccadilly Circus.

“What's wrong wi' ye, hen?” he said, alcohol-suffused blood rising. “Ye not ready ter help the fightin' man, eh? They's battleships comin' up the Channel, but ye's too good ter do yer bit, are ye?”

Lorna looked past him to the shadows under the awning of the tobacconist's next to the cinema. Molly stepped out into view.

“Ye's just wait,” the Scotsman went on. “Ye'll ha' a fine auld time once the Russians get here. Oh aye …”

The cosh she had borrowed slipped down Molly's coat sleeve into her right palm.

Lorna felt a presence on her left-hand side, heard the hum of a familiar tune, the clack of shoes coming to a halt beside her. The Guardsman must have noticed, too, because he swung his head in the same direction.

A woman stood there, statuesque in a long black coat and matching felt hat, a cigarette in a long holder held poised in her right arm, smoke curving to wreath her face. She pointed in Lorna's direction.

“You tell him,” she said, “you're thoroughly British and you'll stand no more of his nonsense.”

She took a drag on her cigarette, regarding the Guardsman through narrowed eyes. In the glare of her basilisk stare, he appeared momentarily lost for words. He looked from the woman to Lorna and then turned on his heel, stalking off down Piccadilly, muttering darkly to himself. The woman winked at Lorna. She resumed her humming as she continued on her way.

Molly's hand touched Lorna's arm. “The
Lady
,” she said.

The Lady afforded herself a smile. She was aware of how her fellow women of the street regarded her and how this was down to the way she projected herself, the attitude she kept at all times – she'd had a little training once, for the stage, and it had served her well. If only those two girls had known that the name on her ID card was Phyllis Rosemarie Lord.

There was nothing showing at the vast Deco picture house she had just passed that Phyllis was eager to see.
Next of Kin
,
One of Our Aircraft is Missing
– all those propaganda films left her cold. The figures that danced in her head belonged to the era that preceded the war, top hats and tails twirling under the Klieg lights to swooping strings orchestrated by Irving Berlin. That was where Phyllis had always pictured herself, dancing in the arms of Fred Astaire.

She took another long drag on her cigarette as her mind returned to more mundane concerns: the percentage of the night's earnings she would need to put by for her daughter's schooling at St Gabriel's in Southend-on-Sea, for clothing, food and other provisions, the rent on her small flat in Gosfield Street. Phyllis had been something of a businesswoman once, when she had run the Beach Bazaar, her husband Fred's fancy goods shop on the seafront. She had more nous for it, being an avid reader of
Vogue
and
The Queen
, and had always cut a stylish figure who knew exactly what cut-price copies of the goods displayed in those magazines would lure her customers into parting with their LSD.

But Fred had been stuck in his ways. Fred had his friends whom he always did business with, in the shop, and at their afterhours card games. Up to his neck in hock to them, Fred had popped his clogs from a massive heart attack by the time their little Jeanie was ten. The only way to keep herself afloat after that was for Phyllis to sell the shop and everything in it, enrol Jeanie in the best school she could afford on the proceeds and turn to the streets of London for a way of making money that she found less distasteful than scrubbing floors.

The one image she could not abide was that of herself on her knees in a pinafore, reflected in another woman's eyes.

Phyllis passed a couple of constables as she crossed into Shaftesbury Avenue. There were a lot of them about tonight and their presence brought briefly to her mind the headlines on the
Daily Herald
:

SEX MANIAC LOOSE IN LONDON!
NO WOMAN SAFE FROM LEFT-HANDED
KILLER, SAY SCOTLAND YARD
EXCLUSIVE REPORT BY HANNEN SWAFFER

Under her tailored coat and her freshly pressed skirt, her silk blouse and lambswool jumper, Phyllis bore the scars of the trade she had taken up. The Lady had come to Lorna's aid tonight precisely because she shared her views regarding servicemen. Those types always felt that there was something owed to them. Those types could rarely get aroused without becoming violent. After the last pounding she had taken from that Canadian, she wanted nothing more to do with them either.

It was funny, though, how they had all deferred to the sound of an upper-class voice, the Guardsman and those girls. Yes, she mused, as she stopped in a doorway, a safe distance from the bogeys, to light another cigarette. When it came down to it, all her life had been some kind of act or other. It was the only way she knew how to get through it, pretending it was all a dream.

“Pardon me,” came a voice beside her in the dark. A voice that purred like a well-oiled Bentley. “But I can't help admiring your style. What say you join me for a drink?”

Phyllis turned her head slowly, parrying her torch towards a face with high cheekbones and light-coloured eyes, goldishblond hair and a clipped moustache. She swept the beam down to take in the rest of him. He was tall and athletic-looking, he was the right age, but he wasn't wearing a uniform.

“Well,” she said, offering him her arm. “I don't mind if I do.”

– . –

Inside the Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, three hundred pairs of eyes rested on Swaffer. Not because of the headlines he had produced earlier in the day, nor because he was about to bring them news from the Other Side. Tonight, the pews of the austerely magnificent home of the Ethical Society were packed with people eager to hear him hold forth on another of his great passions: politics.

His age might have prevented him from the frontline reporting he had produced in the last war, and the coalition government had called an uneasy truce on party politicking for his beloved Labour Party, but Swaffer had not been idle on the Home Front. He had been the first national journalist to report from the East End when the Blitz began. He had seen the fire and carnage and had listened to the stories of the people who preferred to take refuge in the tube stations or under their own staircases than risk their lives in the flimsy shelters that the government provided. Then he had taken their concerns to his old friend Herbert Morrison, the Home Secretary, via a march from Bethnal Green to Whitehall. His efforts had brought about another coalition: of ministers, Trades Unionists and Communists, who continued to harangue MPs about the building of deep shelters and the bringing of relief to London's beleaguered communities. Tonight's meeting was both a progress report and a rallying of troops to keep the pressure on.

As Swaffer spoke, he became aware of one pair of eyes in particular, staring at him with a peculiar intensity. Throughout his address and that of the next speaker, through the question-and-answer session that followed, they continued to stare – but the mouth said nothing.

After the last cups of tea had been drunk, the cups washed up and the banners packed away, after the last hands had been shaken and the people dispersed, the owner of that pair of eyes lingered by the door like a shade. As Swaffer approached, she placed a hand on his arm and whispered a greeting.

“Mr Swaffer,” she said, “my name is Daphne Maitland. We have never been introduced, but I have attended many of your rallies as a member of the CP and I am a great admirer of
all
your works.”

Her appearance was that of an aesthete: tall and thin, encased in a dark grey suit and felt hat. The emphasis she placed on the last sentence sent a tingle up the arm where her hand still rested, to Swaffer's brain, which began to replay the conversation he had had with Greenaway the previous afternoon.

“I wondered,” she continued, “if I may speak to you about a matter of great concern to me. I'm afraid it is to do with that article you wrote in today's paper.”

“Of course, my dear,” Swaffer said, indicating that they should sit down.

She shook her head. “No, not here, not in public.” When she looked back up at him, tears were brimming in her eyes, but she kept her voice level. “Would you do me the favour of accompanying me home? I won't take much of your time, I promise, and I'll have my driver take you anywhere you wish to go afterwards.”

Swaffer did not laugh at the idea of an avowed Communist ordering her driver to chauffeur him home. Nor did he look at his watch and inform her of the prior engagement he had at the Savoy, to which he really should have been heading.

“But of course,” he said instead. He put his stovepipe hat down on top of his snow-white locks, gave the lady his arm and escorted her to her car.

– . –

Greenaway stood at the foot of the stairs, behind the unlocked door that the last careless punter had not bothered to close properly behind him.
Conduit Mews
, read the address on Swaffer's notepaper. A narrow, cobbled thoroughfare between Paddington Station and Hyde Park, the ideal set-up for a prostitute and her maid – discreetly tucked away from the main thoroughfare and the fleapit hotels, public houses, illicit gaming rooms and bookies' joints that studded the warren of backstreets. The workshop beside the entrance, like most of its neighbours, had been a mechanic's garage that was now boarded up, the proprietor no doubt conscripted, the landlord not too choosey about whom he rented out the upstairs space to, under the circumstances.

Not that Greenaway would have expected the frontwoman of this operation to have presented herself in any manner other than such that suggested she really was some kind of down-on-her-luck dowager whose circumstances had reduced her to take rooms a little further away from Belgravia than she would have wished. And no doubt the property was being well maintained, whatever was going on in there. She was meticulous about making the right impression, whoever it was she was trying to cast her glamour over. Always had been. Despite their shared areas of interest, Greenaway wondered how much even Swaffer actually knew about her.

At the top of the stairs, a red bulb hung under a fringed shade. Greenaway could hear the muffled sound of voices and a jazz piano tinkling away. But what stopped him in his tracks was a scent that came wafting down to greet his nostrils, a perfume that brought back, in one synaptic rush, an entire world. A world of smog and dirt and deprivation, of clamorous hunger and noise. The smell of Greenaway's childhood: the smell of violets.

He took a deep breath, shook his head, and walked up the stairs.

8
WHY DON'T YOU DO RIGHT?

Wednesday, 11 February 1942

At the top of the stairs was a beaded curtain made from jet, hung to tinkle out a warning to those seated on the other side of it that fresh company had arrived. But in the pink glow of her table lamp, the Duchess waited alone. The voices and the jazz Greenaway had heard were all emanating from the radiogram beside her.

“Saw me coming in your crystal ball, did you?” he said, his eyes travelling around the room, taking in the gold-and red-striped wallpaper, the red velvet love seat, the walnut casing on the radiogram and the mahogany table behind which the Duchess sat, items that looked like they'd been salvaged from her previous employer on Dover Street. It was all very ostentatious for a one-woman set-up and obviously designed to convey a different class of service. Though the feeling Greenaway got was that he was standing in a gypsy caravan. The smoke left by the last visitor still hung in heavy trails on the air.

Finally, his gaze came to rest on the woman herself. She wasn't wearing a headscarf festooned with gold coins, as he had more than half expected. Instead, she looked serene, regal even, with her hair swept up into a roll at the front, copper-coloured ringlets snaking around her shoulders, a cameo brooch on a velvet ribbon around her neck, pearl teardrops hanging from each earlobe. One hand holding a bone china teacup halfway to her lips, the newspaper spread out on the table in front of her.

The Duchess arched one eyebrow. “Business is slack,” she said, tapping an immaculately manicured and painted fingernail on top of Swaffer's headline. “As well you know. Your firm seems to have frightened everyone off the streets tonight.”

“My firm?” said Greenaway. “I thought there was a mad killer out there.”

The flicker of a smile played across Duch's lips as she studied him.

“Lil!” she shouted. “Get yer knickers on. We got the law here.”

At her bedroom sink, flannel and carbolic between her thighs, Lil yelled out: “Oh, bleedin' 'ell, not again!”

But when, hastily wrapped in her silk gown and slippers, she opened the bedroom door, the sight beyond surprised her. From the superior cut of his dark overcoat and the bashed-about look of his face, Lil would have assumed that the man standing in their parlour, twirling his trilby around in his right hand, was one of the lot her Tom was always on about, the racetrack hoodlums who hung about down Archer Street. As he nodded his head in greeting, she was sure that was where she had seen him before, at the bar of the
Entre Nous
.

“Lil,” said her maid, “this is Detective Chief Inspector Greenaway. He's an old acquaintance of mine and a friend of Mr Swaffer's. The man who put the great Sammy Lehmann behind bars, no less. Ain't you, Ted?”

Lil frowned as her eyes flickered between Duch and the big detective.

“Well, what you after me for?” she asked him. “I ain't done no bank jobs lately.”

“I think he wants to ask you about what you heard in the hairdresser's, love,” said Duch. “That airman what attacked your pal Lorna. See, Ted's the head of the Murder Squad these days,” Duch rolled her eyes. “He's out to catch a real villain.”

“Oh,” said Lil, sitting down. Greenaway did likewise, flicking open his notebook.

“All right,” she turned towards him in a cloud of perfume that made his head swim. “Where d'you want me to start?”

– . –

Daphne Maitland stood in the first-floor sitting room of her Gloucester Place townhouse, arms clasped in front of her in a manner of penitence, eyes staring into the fire. Swaffer, sitting in a Regency armchair of a similar vintage to his surrounds, inhaled the contents of his brandy glass and waited for her to begin.

“One of the women you mentioned in your piece,” she began. “One of the victims …” She drew in a breath and shuddered.

“Was known to you,” Swaffer ended the sentence for her. “Miss Evelyn Bourne, I imagine. The lonely chemist from Newcastle.”

His hostess turned her head sharply. “But how …” she began.

Swaffer put his glass down, opened his palms outwards. “It's not so hard to divine, my dear. Despite your concern for good works, I can't imagine how you would have come across the other unfortunate lady of the night. But Miss Bourne wasn't like that, was she? She was a socialist, an intellectual, so I was told. I expect you met her at a Party meeting,” he picked up his glass again, eyes never leaving hers. This time it was Daphne who felt a curious intensity, as if the journalist was riffling through the contents of her mind. “Or some similar gathering.”

Her eyes dropped back down to the carpet.

“Actually, I met her by complete coincidence,” she said. “In the summer of 1940, in a tiny little village in Leicestershire called Appleby Magna. I was posted there by the Women's Land Army. Evelyn was a travelling saleswoman for a pharmaceutical firm; she had this hopeless old banger that conked out on the way to Burton-on-Trent one night. She got stranded at the village pub, where I was hiding from the ruddy-faced farmer who wanted me to do a little bit more than just milk his cows.”

She reached for the cigarette case she had left on the mantelpiece.

“I could see she was as lost as I was,” Daphne continued. “Sitting there in the corner, alone with her lemonade, trying to disappear into the furnishings.” She lifted a jade table lighter to ignite her smoke.

“We got talking,” she continued. “Well, I got talking. Evelyn seemed so terribly shy; she could barely say boo to a goose. But after a bit of prodding, I discovered we had a few things in common. As you say,” her eyes briefly met Swaffer's again, “it was mainly politics. I told her I had joined the WLA because of Lady Denman and how I hoped I was going to be able to join her staff at Balcome Place – I was such an admirer of everything she did for the suffrage, you know.”

“Indeed I do,” Swaffer nodded gravely. “Lady Denman and I once attempted a raid on Parliament. Our plan was to float a suffragette over the House in a hot-air balloon, whereupon she would shower down leaflets about the plight of the ladies on hunger strike. Would have made a terrific front cover. Except that the wind was blowing in the wrong direction and she floated off down to Tilbury Docks instead.” He shook his head. “Sorry,” he said, “I digress.”

For the first time, a tremor of a smile played on Daphne's lips.

– . –

“Gordon,” said Lil, staring hard at the tablecloth as she summoned back the conversation at the salon. “Mol said the fella's name was Gordon. And his pal was called Felix.” She looked back up at Greenaway, the pupils of her eyes so dark and dilated her irises looked totally black.

Greenaway felt a familiar tingle in his blood as she said it, as if he was back on the racetrack and a tip was coming good.

“Funny name, Felix,” Lil went on. “Posh boys, I s'pose – they said they was training to be officers in the RAF, had some little white slips in their hats to prove it.” Her frown deepened and her stare intensified. “They only take them sort to be officers, don't they? They don't take no commoners – nor Romans, neither.”

The Duchess put her hand down softly on Lil's arm. “Well remembered, love,” she said, patting her, “you never told us their names before.”

“I only just remembered them,” Lil turned her gaze on her companion. “You was late that morning, Duch, where d'you get to anyway? You never said …”

“Never mind that now,” Duch's mothering fingers gave a sharp little squeeze before she let go. Greenaway noticed the smile tighten at the corners of her mouth. “Is there anything else you need to tell the Inspector you never thought of before?”

“No,” Lil winced, pulling her arm away. “Oh,” her features transformed, as quickly as the sun coming out behind clouds, the warmth of her smile resting on Greenaway. “One thing I'd like to know. If you're a friend of Mr Swaffer's, then you probably know my Tom – Tom Power, or Frank I should say – he was the crime reporter on the
Evening Sentinel
and he was always after Sammy Lehmann, too. I wondered if you'd heard from him at all, since he got the draft?”

Greenaway's mind shimmied like a tic-tac man calling the odds. Tom Power, that nosy little bastard? Had he been seeing this undoubtedly beautiful but at the same time fatally fallen woman while he was out chasing gangsters and then waxing moralistic in the linen drapers? What would Mrs Power think?

Mirroring this imagined countenance, the face of the Duchess flashed white.

“Course he don't, Lil,” she said before he could reply. “And even if he does, he ain't got time for gossip now. He's got a killer to catch, ain't he?” She got to her feet. “I'll see you out, Ted, if there's nothing more we can help you with?”

Greenaway got to his feet. “No,” he said, offering Lil his hand. “Except to say you've been very helpful, Miss, very helpful indeed. If you hear any more talk about this Gordon, then you'll be sure and let me know, won't you?”

Her hand was as light as chiffon in his big paw. There was something about her that went beyond how she looked and what she did for a living that turned all this into some grim kind of joke. Greenaway could see how easy it would have been for Tom Power to fall for Lil. Wondered what the Duchess was most afraid of – losing her to a murderer or to a hack.

“And if you see the bastard,” he added, “run.”

– . –

Daphne had almost come to the end of her tale. Swaffer had learned how it was membership of the CP that had brought the two women together – shared nights of intellectual discourse, rallying and sweating over pamphlets in the top room of a pub in Burton-on-Trent, owned by a sympathetic former miner. Of how Evelyn had shed her shyness amid their endeavours, while Daphne had found the purpose in life she had been seeking, the pair of them becoming so inseparable at one point that Daphne had even brought Evelyn back to London with her when she was given leave. And then, as summer had shaded into autumn, how the bloom had started to come off the red rose of their friendship.

“It was when I started to get friendly with some of the others in the group that it all started to change,” Daphne recalled. “It was fine when I was the new girl and she was showing me off to everyone. But when others started taking an interest in me, well …” She rubbed her arms as if she was out in the cold, not standing in front of the fire.

“It started with a few snide comments here and there. I tried to ignore them, pass them off as my being too sensitive, mishearing what Evelyn had really said. But then, when she was driving me back to the farm one night, it turned into a full-scale row. She virtually accused me of being a prostitute because I had spent too long talking to this one other person. Then I realised what it was. She didn't want me to talk to anyone else, have anyone else but her. I had thought it was she who was the shy one, when I met her that first time in The Black Horse, but in fact it was my own awkwardness she picked up on. And I think she read it as something else …”

She looked back at Swaffer, searching for the right words.

“She was in love with you,” he said.

Daphne nodded. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I think she was. But she was so intense about it, so suffocating, it was frightening and I knew I couldn't go on seeing her. I'm not very good at that sort of conflict, I'm afraid, Mr Swaffer. So I rang Balcome Place and asked to be relieved of my duties. As you know, we're volunteers in the WLA, there's nothing to make us stay where we've been posted. I didn't tell Evelyn, I just went. And I never heard from her again until the night—” her eyes dropped back down to the fire in the grate, “she was murdered.”

“What happened that night, Miss Maitland?” Swaffer asked.

Daphne lit another cigarette.

“She called me,” she said, blowing smoke across the room, her eyes following the trail of it, into the distance. “At about half-past six in the evening. I don't remember having given her my number, but as I told you, she did stay here with me once and I suppose she was just cunning enough to have taken it down and stored it away. She said it was her birthday and that she was coming up to see me. Just as if we had never said a bad word to each other, just as if she was an old friend I would have been delighted to receive at such short notice. Well, I couldn't believe my ears. And I'm afraid I told her what I thought of her. I'll spare you the details, but suffice to say, there was this long silence and then she hung up the telephone. But that wasn't the end of it. I had a horrible feeling it wouldn't be.

“I told my housekeeper that if anyone should come calling later that evening she must tell them I was not in London and send them away. Sure enough, four hours later, there was Evelyn, standing on the doorstep.”

Daphne's hand shook as she put the cigarette out, reached for her glass of brandy. “But, Mr Swaffer, if I had only known what was out there waiting for her, I would never have turned her away. I was so scared of her, but what was she, really? A lonely, frustrated woman, that's all. She didn't deserve to die like that. No one does. And that's why I wanted to see you. Because I know what you believe.”

“My poor, dear girl,” said Swaffer, rising to his feet to put his arms around her. “What a terrible burden you have carried.”

Daphne could contain her tears no longer. “Please tell me,” she said, “please tell me she's all right … Wherever she is now …”

– . –

Black pins in the map over Greenaway's desk marked the location of the two murder sites. Red pins mapped the killer's hunting grounds around Piccadilly and Soho. As he pushed in another one at the address of Lil's friend Lorna, Greenaway's eyes travelled in a circuit around his quarry's trails. A list in his hand of barracks and civilian buildings requisitioned for the duration of the conflict. Between Regent's Park and Marble Arch. Round in a sweep, clockwise. Green pins for the army, blue pins for the RAF. Round in a sweep anti-clockwise. Back to Regent's Park. Abbey Lodge: a mansion block taken by the RAF on St James Place, a crescent off Prince Albert Road that was mere strolling distance from the air-raid shelter on Montagu Place.