“Yes, please,” she heard herself say. Even as he turned to fetch them, she admonished herself. Her date had told her he would arrive between eight and nine; she had only herself to blame for all this waiting, making herself a sitting target at the bar …
“Here’s to you.” A tumbler of Scotch was placed down in front of her before she had come to the end of her thoughts. He sat down opposite, raising his own glass in salute, before downing the contents of it in one gulp.
As Madeline began her first, tentative sip, the airman rolled his empty glass around in his hands, impatience rising off him in waves. She found herself staring into those strange, broad-set eyes, which, despite their pale hue drifting somewhere between blue and grey, burned with intensity.
“Why don’t we go somewhere a little quieter,” he said, “and have some dinner?”
“I told you,” Madeline attempted to stand her ground, “I have an appointment.”
He brushed his hand through the front of his hair, a boyish gesture, backed up by another of his crinkly smiles. “Oh, I’m sure we have plenty of time,” he said. “In any case, I have to be back to my unit by ten-thirty.”
It was as if somebody had taken a magnet and run it across Madeline’s brain, erasing clean away all the thoughts about the Second Lieutenant and their possible future together that had previously been occupying her, so that all that remained was this handsome chap in front of her, willing her to agree. She nodded, put down her glass.
“Splendid!” He got to his feet. “I’ll just get my coat.”
– . –
He stayed inside his greatcoat, his gas mask slung over his shoulder, as they sat in another cocktail lounge, in the Trocadero, drinking more whisky. It was this seeming indifference to his surroundings, coupled with the fact that he had made no attempt at asking for a menu since they’d arrived, that made Madeline aware of how reckless she had just been.
“Where do you live?” he asked, fixing her with his mesmerist’s eyes.
“Wembley,” said Madeline, instantly regretting having said so.
“That’s a long way out,” he leaned across the table, smile not seeming so boyish any more, reminding her instead of something more animal. “Isn’t there anywhere round here we can go?”
“No,” said Madeline. I ought to get out of here, said a little voice in her head, barely more than a hum. But somehow she couldn’t seem to rouse herself.
“Are you a naughty girl?” He raised one eyebrow, his leer widening, his eyes now curiously dull. Madeline noticed how pointed his teeth were.
“No, I am not,” she said, cheeks reddening. “There’s nothing like that about me.”
He gave a gruff chuckle, went into his pocket and pulled out the most enormous roll of money Madeline had ever seen.
“I’m not broke, you know,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
He started to count out the bills in front of her, one by one, like a dealer laying out his cards across the table. Madeline counted to thirty before the hum in her head became a scream and she got to her feet.
“Well, thank you for the drinks,” she said, pulling on her coat. “But I really must be going. You seem to have got entirely the wrong idea about me.”
Equally as quickly, he gathered his wad back into his pocket, stood up beside her.
“Let me walk you back to your appointment,” he said.
– . –
Madeline wanted to run as soon as they were back outside, but he placed a hand on her arm, steered her across the road.
“I’ll take you to the Jermyn Street entrance, all right?” he said.
Madeline didn’t answer. They crossed Piccadilly along the west side of the Haymarket, turned right towards Jermyn Street. Despite the foul weather, all around her she could hear music, laughter, people enjoying themselves just out of sight, hidden by the walls and the curtains of the blackout. Voices as disembodied as she felt herself at that moment, walking into the sleeting darkness with a stranger.
“Do you know, I knocked a girl out once?” He said it so pleasantly it took a second for his words to sink in.
“W-why would you do that?” she asked.
“Oh, her old man interfered,” he went on cheerfully. “So I kicked him in the privates and then I knocked her out.”
He had steered her down the wrong side of the road, Madeline realised. They were walking away from the Universelle, into St Alban’s Street. She had a flash of her Second Lieutenant, waiting there for her, looking up at the clock the way she had … what? An hour previously?
“We’re going the wrong way,” she said, stopping.
“I just wanted to kiss you goodnight,” he said, pulling her into a doorway. “Now come here …”
He took his gas mask off his shoulder and set it down on the floor, taking Madeline into his arms. Before she could think any more she was kissing him back, tasting the whisky on his tongue, feeling his arms moving up and down her body, around her waist and then under her skirt.
“No,” she smacked his hands away, “I don’t do things like that!”
He pushed her further back into the doorway, a low chuckle on his lips. His hands moved back up her torso, circling around her throat and then tightening there. Madeline tried to push him away, tried to beat him with her fists. But the harder she struggled, the tighter his embrace became, a ring of steel around her neck, closing in and in, his breathing heavy, her arms becoming heavier still, her heels scuffling on the concrete below her, a horrible gurgling sound coming out of her throat.
“You won’t …” the airman whispered, his eyes huge now, saucer-like, and completely void of emotion. “You won’t, you won’t, you won’t …”
Out of the corner of her eye, Madeline saw a flash, like the beam of a lighthouse, sweeping across her vision as everything slowed down and her legs buckled beneath her.
“You won’t, you won’t, you won’t …”
The flash came again, and with it a man’s voice, the sound of running feet.
“Oi! What’s going on in there?”
Suddenly the pressure was gone. Madeline’s head lolled back on the pavement as the dark shadow of a man flitted across St Alban’s Street and was gone.
– . –
In the cells at Tottenham Court Road station, Doris began to cry. It was nearly half-past ten now, and there was still no sign of the big detective coming back for her. Her mother was going to have her guts for garters. How had she got herself into this mess?
That was something that Greenaway intended to find out, just as soon as he had discovered what had become of his car. It had taken the best part of an hour and a half to get from the Effra Arms to Brixton nick and then back to the West End, where he had deposited his charge with the duty sergeant. He had spent the following thirty minutes burning up his private line talking to all the jokers in South London about the need for the missing Austin to be returned to Scotland Yard in haste and without a scratch.
Finally, one of them had told him what he needed to hear and now it was time to turn his attention to Doris. As he lifted the hatch on the cell door to peer in on her, he could see that her solitary confinement, listening to all the drunks of Soho ringing and singing out from the cells next door, had achieved the desired effect.
He opened the door and came straight to the point. “Tell me, Doris – I ain’t had an entirely wasted evening, have I?”
Her face twisted with the effort of holding back more tears.
“I didn’t really meet no airman in Piccadilly Circus,” she confessed. “I heard some girls talking about him in the York Minster on Dean Street while I was waiting to meet Johnny for a drink last night. I had the paper, see, and Johnny saw your name in the Herald. He said he knew you personal like, and that there might be some kind of reward for that sort of information. Only, he reckoned it would go a lot better if I pretended I had actually seen this airman face to face.”
“And this?” Greenaway dangled the portrait in front of her no
se.
Doris took a loud gulp, scrubbed around her eyes with her hanky. “It’s what they said he looked like,” she said, “them girls. They was describing him to some friends of theirs and I started sketching while I was listening, on the back of some paper that was left on the table. I ain’t really on the bash, see. I’m a student at St Martin’s. But when Johnny saw what I’d done he thought it was perfect, that we were bound to get some reward money if you clocked it.”
Greenaway rubbed his forehead. “So, you got brains enough to get into art school,” he said, “but not to stop running about with a toerag like him?”
Her eyes filled with fresh tears. “That’s just what me mum said,” she blubbered. “What’s going to happen to me now? Am I going to go to jail?”
Greenaway stood up. “I’m tempted,” he said. “But I reckon it’ll seem like punishment enough next time you pick up a paper and read about some girl getting murdered while you and your boyfriend send me off on a wild goose chase. I could have had my suspect in custody by now. Instead, he could be anywhere. Think on that while you spend the night safely tucked up in here.”
He ran upstairs to his office. It was now three and a half hours beyond the time that the Corporal had suggested Greenaway could meet him back at Abbey Lodge for a little chat with Cummins. Knowing it was hopeless, the detective lifted the phone, asked the operator to put him through to the billet anyway.
“Oh, it’s you, Inspector Greenaway,” the Corporal answered on the second ring. “I was expecting your colleague from the Service Police. He must have got through to you fast enough, it’s not five minutes since he called here.”
Greenaway rubbed his temples. “Say that again,” he said.
“Seems you were on the right track after all,” the Corporal went on. “The number on that gas mask they found is the same as the one that was issued to Cummins. Soon as I had it, I sent an orderly up to his room. Seems he’s disobeyed orders. He’s not there. It’s a shame you didn’t pop by earlier, like I suggested …”
12
GOODBYE PICCADILLY, FAREWELL LEICESTER SQUARE
Thursday, 12 February 1942
Kate Molloy had read Swaffer’s piece in the paper. She had heard what all the girls were talking about in Gladys’s salon, Berlemont’s pub and at the Entre Nous. That Jack the Ripper was raised from the dead and had taken the form of an airman.
The man that stood staring at her, outside Oddendino’s in Piccadilly, was wearing an RAF greatcoat. He regarded her without speaking as he smoked his cigarette. The smile that played thinly around his lips didn’t meet his widely spaced pale eyes, which seemed to look straight through her.
Kate had spent five years on the streets and liked to think she had developed a sixth sense for dangerous men. She knew she was looking at one now. But Kate had other problems pressing. Money worries. The sort that took the form of a man who wore padded shoulders and turn-ups in his suits and never went away.
As if reading her mind, the airman took two steps towards her, holding up the glowing end of his cigarette to view her face more clearly. Kate instinctively patted her hair. Another thing she’d been told. He went for blondes.
“Will you go with me?” He sounded posh. Like Jack the Airman was supposed to.
“It’ll cost you two quid,” said Kate, blood quickening.
“OK.” Without blinking, he went into his pocket and handed the notes across. “Where do you live?”
Kate wasn’t going to tell him that. She rented a room for business purposes, a room on which she was two weeks behind, owing to the crocodile in the pinstripe suit who would be round with his rent book tomorrow. For the moment, Kate was just one degree more frightened of him than she was of the man in front of her. The feel of money in her hands would do that to her.
“I got a place in Marble Arch,” she said.
“I’ll get us a cab,” he replied.
– . –
“Madeline Harcourt’s her name. Constable Skinner brought her in, just after nine,” DS Tom Sheeney told Greenaway down the phone from West End Central station, Savile Row. “Found her staggering around the Haymarket with a young night porter who could barely keep her upright. First, he thought they was drunks. But it was the porter what broke up the fight between her and the airman, round the back of St James market, and picked up the gas mask the miscreant dropped. I had PC Skinner go back to the scene and retrieve her handbag while I took her statement.”
“And where is Mrs Harcourt now?” asked Greenaway.
“St Mary’s, Paddington,” said Sheeney. “She was in obvious need of medical attention, but she insisted on giving her statement first. Brave woman.”
“Yeah,” said Greenaway, “and what did you tell them at Abbey Lodge?”
“That the owner of the gas mask RAF regimental number 525987 was wanted in connection with the assault of a woman in the West End.” Sheeney looked down at his notes. “And that when he returns to his billet I want him detained.”
“Right,” Greenaway’s voice sounded distant. “Thanks. That’s very useful, Detective Sergeant.”
“Why?” Sheeney asked. “You want him for something, too?”
But the line had gone dead.
– . –
Inside the cab, Kate tried to make small-talk. Her most pressing concern came spilling out instead. “I’d really like to make five quid tonight,” she told the airman.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “Look what I’ve got.”
He went into his pocket and pulled out a roll. Winking, he extracted two more one-pound notes and handed them over. Before she could stuff them into her handbag, he had got down onto the floor of the cab and began pushing up her skirt.
“No!” Kate saw the cabbie adjust his rear-view mirror, his eyes meeting hers for an instant as the airman buried his face between her thighs, rough stubble against tender skin, a worming, penetrating tongue and the feel of teeth behind it. “You mustn’t!” she said, pushing his head away. “Not here.”
Without saying a word, he pulled out from underneath and returned to the seat beside her. The cabbie kept his eyes on the road as he negotiated the roundabout and headed west down Hyde Park Lane.
“Then why don’t we get out here and have some fun in the park?” Kate’s companion suggested.
“Don’t be silly.” Kate’s skin was beginning to crawl, knowing what went on in there, knowing that only a desperate woman would ever punt for business in that dark tangle of bushes and trees. “We’ll be there any minute.”
The cabbie looked at her once more in the rear-view mirror as he steered off the main road and into the little cobbled mews. He saw a woman afraid, biting her lip, but she didn’t return his gaze until he was driving away and she was staring after his receding tail lights, the tall figure beside her taking her arm and steering her away.
– . –
Madeline Harcourt’s eyes flickered open drowsily, the world around her morphine-blurred. There was a man sitting by the side of her bed, a big man in a black overcoat leaning towards her. As he swam into focus she discerned, to her relief, that he looked more like a pugilist than a priest.
“Mrs Harcourt, I’m sorry to disturb you,” Greenaway, ignoring the frowning matron casting the evil eye from behind his shoulder, held out his warrant card. “I know you’ve already given your statement to my colleague at Savile Row, but I need to ask you one thing. It’s very important.”
Madeline found it impossible to read whatever it was he was showing her. The letters kept running down and off the side of the card. He put it back in his pocket and brought out something else.
“Is this the man what did this to you?”
The picture shocked her surroundings back into clear focus — the hospital bed, the dressings around her neck and head, the drip inserted in the vein on the back of her right hand. It was only a sketch, but those grey, flat eyes stared out of the piece of paper just as though she was back in their infernal gaze, back in that dark doorway on St Al
ban’s Street. Her head jerked back and she gave a strangled little gasp, her hands involuntarily rising to her throat.
“It’s all right,” Matron darted between Greenaway and her patient, taking hold of Madeline’s hands before she could manage to dislodge anything. “It’s all right,” she soothed, “you’re quite safe now.”
She turned her head and glared at Greenaway. “I trust that will be all, Inspector?”
“Thank you, Mrs Harcourt,” he said, rising to his feet.
He stood outside the hospital, gulping in lungfuls of dank night air. Sleet enveloped him as he crossed Praed Street, his feet taking him around the corner before he even knew what he was really doing, stopping short at the corner of Conduit Mews.
He looked up at the room above the garage. The blackout was down. He caught a waft of scented violets and he closed his eyes, trying to shut out the memories of a little girl with copper hair who put on a headscarf and read fortunes in the tea leaves for everyone on the street, palming coppers instead of silver, back in the bad old days.
The hands on his wristwatch moved to eleven o’clock as he stood there, fighting the urge to press on the doorbell and ask her to look into her teacup and tell him why she had reappeared again now, in this time of madness, at the centre of his investigation. Then the visions sparked in front of his lids: of Madeleine Harcourt’s terrified stare, of Ivy sat on her single bed with a room of blood behind her, of Evelyn Bourne stretched out on the cold concrete floor of an air-raid shelter and an elderly pathologist, dying in his eyes. Coming back to himself, he turned abruptly on his heel.
– . –
Kate lit the gas fire and turned the knob on her meter. The bare bulb above her head flickered, casting sickly yellow light across a single bed, a cabinet beside it and one moth-eaten armchair, then went out.
Kate swore under her breath. She looked back up at her client, standing in the middle of the room, a shadow only visible in the vague glow of the fire.
Without the Moon Page 9
