Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  “He’s an airman, ain’t he? RAF?”

  Greenaway picked up the remains of his pencil. “That’s what she says, is it?”

  “Yeah, reckons she could pick him out of any line-up,” the voice went on. “She can even draw you a picture of him if you want. She’s quite clever that way.”

  “All right,” said Greenaway. “Send her down to Tottenham Court Road and I’ll make sure I see her right away. What name she go by?”

  “Ah, well, see … there’s a bit of a problem with that.”

  “Oh, really?” Greenaway put the jagged half into his desk sharpener, began to turn the handle.

  “Well, she’s a bit shy, ain’t she?” the voice wheedled on. “She don’t want to come down the West End, not after what happened. She don’t feel safe, like what you said yourself in the paper yesterday. She asked if you could meet her somewhere local, where I can introduce you to her proper.”

  “How local?” Greenaway’s hand turned faster. “Your manor, I take it?”

  “That’s right, Inspector, the Effra Arms. You know it, dontcha?”

  “Brixton,” said Greenaway. “Ain’t you heard of petrol rationing, son?”

  “But that don’t apply to you gentlemen of the Yard, surely?” the voice feigned wonder. “And anyway, I thought you wanted this maniac behind bars, pronto?”

  Greenaway picked the pencil back out and examined the sharpened lead, thinking. He had been about to go back to Abbey Lodge, bring Cummins in to parade in front of Ivy. But, if he were to try to overturn the evidence of the Corporal’s passbook, it would strengthen his case to have another good witness he could use, regardless of what Cherrill might come up with. It was seven now, but the Corporal had promised to detain his suspects until he called and surely this wouldn’t take that long?

  “All right,” he said, “I’ll be half an hour.” He put the pencil back into his pocket. “Tell her to start drawing.”

  – . –

  Duchess saw Lil’s last client out and waited at the top of the stairs, making sure this one closed the door behind him. Then she went back to her empty parlour. Business was as dire tonight as it had been the evening before.

  “It’s like the Marie Celeste in here,” she called out. “Want a cuppa char while we’re waiting?”

  Lil opened her bedroom door, wrapped in her robe without bothering to wash up after herself, her mascara smudged on her cheeks and her hair a tangled mess. She picked up an ashtray from the table, but instead of taking a seat there, she plonked herself down on the loveseat, swivelling sideways to stretch her bare feet onto the upholstery.

  Duch tried not to look askance as Lil placed the ashtray on her belly and produced her cigarettes and lighter from the pocket of her robe. Instead, she busied herself filling the kettle and spooning tea leaves into the pot. Even so, she couldn’t help cringing as she heard the click of the flame igniting and imagined a shower of embers falling.

  “Well how many have I done today?” Lil finally asked. “Four or five? Ain’t that enough to keep us ticking over?”

  Duch kept her eyes on the crockery. “’Course it is, love,” she said. “It’s bitter out, and it’s crawling with bogeys. That’s what’ll be keeping the regulars away.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe it ain’t just Tom, eh?” Lil clicked the lid of her lighter open and shut. “Maybe they’ve all gone right off me.”

  “Oh, don’t say that, love,” Duch was forced to look over at her now, to try to keep the recrimination from her eyes. Lil was staring at her mutinously.

  “Don’t keep dwelling on it,” Duch urged. “You don’t know what he’s doing out there, do you? You know how clever he is with the undercover work. He probably got chosen to go on some secret mission and he ain’t allowed to write to no one.”

  “So you keep saying,” Lil snapped the lid of her lighter shut and screwed out her cigarette. “You think I’m a baby, don’t you? Well, what do you know? You and your bleedin’ cards and your bleedin’ tea leaves, you can stuff the lot of it. You don’t know nuffink about real life, that’s for sure.”

  She stood up, smacked the ashtray back down on the table and stomped back to her room, slamming the door behind her.

  – . –

  Greenaway parked around the corner from the Effra Arms, on a residential street. The car pool at the station had been virtually empty and the Austin he had taken was not his usual marque, so he took the precaution of disabling the starting motor before he walked around the corner to the redbrick Victorian tavern on Kellett Road.

  He found his contact with his arm around a young blonde in the otherwise empty snug. She was clutching a pink gin; with a similar fervour he was patting her shoulder, the pair of them putting on a fair performance of the concerned boyfriend comforting his moll. His snout’s head shot up as Greenaway came through the door.

  “This is him, Doris, love,” he said, getting to his feet.

  Greenaway walked over to their table, scanning the frosted glass behind it that separated them from the saloon, noting the hatch was up behind the bar. The landlord here was an old face from the track who had run with the Elephant Boys in his youth, before coming into the rights to this property via another type of gaming endeavour. No doubt he would be somewhere within listening distance.

  “A pleasure, I’m sure,” Doris raised her head demurely and offered him the hand that had been clutching her gin. It was cold and damp.

  Greenaway ignored the snout’s outstretched paw and sat down opposite the girl. She was done up in the approximation of a starlet, but her bleached hair and red lips could not disguise her spotty cheeks. These, coupled with the long teeth revealed by her nervous smile, had him wondering if she couldn’t be more like a relative than a close friend of his informant. Still, the fact that she was blonde gave her credence.

  “This is him.” From the black handbag that sat on her knee Doris withdrew a crumpled betting slip, on which was sketched the face of a man with wide-spaced eyes and a pencil moustache, wearing a forage cap with a slip in the side of it. Greenaway had to admit the drawing did display a certain degree of skill. Better still, it adequately portrayed what Ivy had seen and what Lil had reported to him.

  “You say you ran into him last night?” Greenaway looked back up at Doris. She nodded, her grey-brown eyes wide.

  “On Piccadilly,” she whispered.

  “He come up to you, did he?” asked Greenaway. “What did he say?”

  Her fearful gaze stole over to her boyfriend.

  “That he liked blondes,” she said. He nodded his approval.

  “Piccadilly your usual beat, is it?” Greenaway asked. She looked back at him, startled.

  “It’s all right,” her companion reassured, patting her knee. “He ain’t gonna do you for it, Doris love. You’re helping him, remember?”

  “Well, yes,” Doris said. “You got to go where business is good, ain’t you?”

  “So why d’you turn him down then?” Greenaway asked.

  “Well,” Doris shifted in her seat, playing with the clasp on her handbag. “I’d got to talking to some other girls, earlier on. They told me to be careful if anyone in an RAF uniform came up to me, on account of me being blonde. That’s what this sex maniac wants, they said, blondes. And … well … I’m quite new to the bash, to be honest. When this fella comes up to me I got scared and went home.”

  “She done the right thing, didn’t she?” the snout returned his protective arm to her shoulder. “She could be dead by now if she didn’t, eh?”

  “Yeah,” Greenaway’s sleepy eyes became hard as he stared at his informant. “Money ain’t everything, is it, son?” He was wondering whether some other woman might not have taken Doris’s place. All day long he had been expecting another summons to a murder site.

  “What did he sound like, Doris, when he spoke to you?” he asked.

  “Well,” she said, “he was posh, weren’t he?”

  “I have to say, you got a good likeness from a few moment
s’ conversation.” Greenaway studied her drawing again and held it back up to her. “You’d know this face again as soon as you saw it, would you?”

  “’Course,” said Doris.

  “That’s good,” said Greenaway, “’cos I’ll need you for a lineup. There’s no need to be worried, once I have this man in custody, he won’t be going nowhere except the court and then the gallows. You got my word on that. And as your friend here knows,” he nodded across the table, “I am a man of my word.”

  He smiled, patting his jacket pocket.

  “Oh,” said Doris, looking perplexed, “all right. When will that be, then?”

  “Now,” said Greenaway, getting to his feet. “If you don’t mind?”

  “Now?” Doris repeated. She turned to her boyfriend. “But you didn’t say nuffink …”

  He withdrew his arm from her shoulder rapidly. “Go on, Doris,” he said. “You heard the man, he said you’ll be all right. Go on and do your duty – for all the other girls on the bash.”

  “But,” Doris got to her feet, clutching her handbag, “I …”

  The snout’s eyes narrowed just for a second, long enough for his meaning to be conferred to both people present. Greenaway picked up Doris’s rabbit fur coat from the back of her chair and helped her into it.

  As he steered her towards the door, he clocked the landlord hovering behind the hatch on the other side of the bar. His informant made no move from his seat.

  Out on the street, Doris dragged her heels. “But mister,” she started to whine, “Johnny didn’t say nuffink about me coming with you now. I got places to go …”

  “It won’t take long,” Greenaway’s grip on her tightened and his own pace increased so that he was pushing her along beside him round the corner. “I’ll make sure you get a lift home if that’s what you’re worried about …”

  He stopped short of where he had parked the Austin.

  The car was gone.

  – . –

  Duchess looked up, startled. Lil stood in her doorway now perfectly made-up, her hair teased into a roll and clipped under a black pillbox hat, blonde curls in a cloud around her shoulders. She wore her best beaver lamb coat and high-heeled black suede shoes and had a small, snakeskin clutch under her left arm.

  “If they won’t come to me …” she began.

  “Aw c’mon, love.” Duchess got to her feet. “It ain’t that bad, surely? I don’t want you out there this weather and with a bleedin’ maniac about. Be sensible.”

  Lil waved a hand dismissively. “I am being sensible,” she said. “I ain’t got no work and we ain’t got enough money. I’ve always been able to pull in a good crowd after a few minutes’ stroll, you know that. All’s I have to do is go down the train station, I won’t be more than ten minutes.”

  Duchess walked tentatively towards her. Lil’s voice had regained its usual matter-of-factness, all the insolence of their last exchange vanished along with the slutty appearance. Something else had changed, but you had to get close enough to see it. Her pupils were like pinpricks.

  “Lil,” Duchess said, mentally recapping all the men who had been up the stairs today, stopping on the face of a jazz drummer who played for the house band at the Entre Nous. “You ain’t been back on the bennies, have you?”

  “So what if I have?” Lil’s top lip curled, the challenge back in a flash.

  “’Cos you won’t stop, will you? And it ain’t safe, you know that …”

  “Awww,” Lil took Duchess’s chin in her right hand as if she was talking to a child. “It ain’t safe? Not without your big, friendly detective, is it, Duch? You know, you really got me wondering about him.” Her fingers tightened, nails starting to dig into flesh. “Old friends, are you? Well why don’t you give him a call,” her hand dropped and she made for the front door with a rapid, darting movement, “and leave me to look after myself.”

  She clattered down the stairs and yanked the front door open, leaving her parting shot hanging ominously on the air. “Like I always used to!”

  – . –

  In the time it had taken to get back to the Effra Arms, Greenaway’s snout had vanished. The landlord was standing behind the bar, polishing his just-washed glass.

  “Need the blower, Inspector Greenaway?” were his greeting words.

  – . –

  Sleet was falling thick and fast in the cobbled mews, but Lil’s need to escape the confines of the flat, fuelled by the drags on the inhaler the drummer had left her, was stronger than that. She had got to a point she had been to many times before in her short life. Her fuse had ignited. The soporific mental state that suffused most of her days had lifted like a veil before her eyes and she could suddenly see, all too clearly, that she had been kidding herself again.

  Lil’s beauty had marked her out, at an early age, from any wishes she might have had for a normal life. From the age of twelve, when the other kids on her road were still playing in the streets with dirty knees and broken nails, men had sidled up to her, asking her out for drinks, offering her pretty trinkets and baubles that she knew she was too young to take. She always knocked them back, for Mum had always warned her: “Never take money from a man.”

  It was a rubric she had abided by until the age of fourteen, when she had been indentured into service in a big house by the river in Chiswick, to two old dears and their deaf old brother. On her first day she had set out with purpose, starching sheets and scrubbing floors, washing down steps and making the meals the way her mother had shown her. The old girls had loved her, said she was a “treasure”.

  Pleased with herself, Lil had left for the evening to meet with a friend on Hammersmith Broadway, intending on a little promenade. A trio of young men in a sports car pulled up beside them. Lil had never met the sort of man who owned a sports car before, so she let herself be led into a public house for the first time and passed through a portal into another existence. Upon her first taste of gin, it had come to Lil with the force of revelation that only her looks stood between this tantalising taste of glamour and the lifetime of drudgery to which she had been assigned. She awoke in a hotel room in Paddington with a five-pound note on the pillow beside her, and neither the bereft old dears nor her poor mother had ever seen Lil again.

  Along the way, there had been plenty of people who had promised her better – a career in modelling, the movies, and lately with the Duchess, the idea that once they had made enough capital they could set up their own legitimate business along the lines of Lil’s latest fantasy, a dress shop in Mayfair. With Duch, whom she regarded as a kind of benevolent auntie better schooled in the ways of society than she had ever been, she had lasted longer than she had with any man.

  Then Tom had come along, and Lil had dreamed of a different outcome. Of her very own house by the river, a loving husband and children who would never have to make the decisions she had, thanks to the money he earned.

  All – she could see now – part of the delusion that had kept her the way she was: youthful, beautiful, eager to please, through all the years and the thousands of men there had been since that first sip of gin. And if Tom had let her down, Duch was no better; all she wanted was Lil flat on her back, earning money for a future that would never come. At that moment, Lil’s Benzedrined mind pulsed with white-hot rage.

  “If you’re out there, you bastard,” she said aloud, crossing through the mews and on to Praed Street, “come and get me. Go on, I bleedin’ dare you!”

  11

  IN THE MOOD

  Thursday, 12 February 1942

  Madeline Harcourt looked at the clock hanging over the bar of the Universelle Brasserie in Piccadilly Circus. The second hand ticked past slowly, as if the fug of cigarette smoke that rose above the chatter and noise was obfuscating its purpose. It was eight and Madeline was early, couldn’t bear to arrive late, a part of her nature which she could never seem to overcome, even though it left her frequently feeling like she did at present – nervous and uncomfortable.

  She
sat at a table close to the horseshoe-shaped cocktail bar from where she had as clear a view of the door as was possible. The place was packed with men in uniform – Canadians and Americans, most of them – picking up women as easily as children picking daisies. The British officer she awaited had yet to show.

  Madeline had never been very lucky in love. At the age of thirty she was separated from her husband, the chief act of defiance in her life. She had met her Second Lieutenant in this very spot three months earlier and they had gone out for meals, drinks and the odd show ever since, according to the erratic schedule of his duties. What had impressed Madeline most about him were his manners. She had conveniently filed away, right to the back of her mind, the insight that it was precisely such refined traits that had led her into a loveless match with her estranged theatre director five years previously. As her eyes travelled around the tables, she had no idea that another had been studying her while she sat there alone.

  “Are you waiting for somebody?”

  Madeline looked round with a start. There was an airman standing behind her, tall and slender in his blue dress uniform, a wave of unruly hair, the colour of turning leaves, falling into his wide-spaced eyes.

  “I’m sorry?” she said, having to make sure it was her he was addressing.

  “I asked if you were waiting for someone?” His smile crinkled the corners of his eyes. His voice purred like a well-oiled Bentley.

  “Yes,” Madeline’s voice came out in a gulp. “I have an … appointment.”

  Half of her hoped this would deter him. Her date could be here any minute and she didn’t want any complications. Another half felt otherwise.

  “Well,” he said, “would you care for a drink while you wait?”

  Madeline stared at him for a second. Should she? It was obvious what he was after. His type always were – they threw their money about with the reckless abandon that made them so irresistible to most of the women who clustered in the brasserie. But then, she had sat here for nearly fifteen minutes now with little in her own budget to cover the cost of another drink and no sign of the Second Lieutenant.