Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Got a shilling for the meter, love?” she asked.

  “No,” he said, pale eyes boring through the gloom.

  “Give me just one sec, will you?”

  Her heart hammering, Kate stepped into the kitchenette and stashed the folding he had given her into a tin she kept beneath the sink. She took a saucepan from her one-ring stove and crumpled some newspaper into it, lighting it with a match.

  “What are you doing?” he asked impatiently as she brought her improvised lamp back into the room with her. He had already peeled most of his clothes off.

  “I just wanted a bit more light,” said Kate, slowly unbuttoning the front of her jacket.

  He watched, transfixed, as she peeled off the layers, his breathing became more distinct, more animal, until she was down to her lace-up boots and necklace.

  The paper in the saucepan flared, crackled and extinguished.

  “Stop there,” he said. “Lie on the floor.”

  Kate scowled. “I don’t do kinks, mister. It’s the bed or nothing.”

  “As you like,” he said. He smelt like an animal too, waves of him coming up at her; a smell of raw meat and dank earth suffused, making her think of foxes and the terrifying noises they made while coupling, banshee sounds she had heard as a child, back in the wilds of Ireland. His mask over her face now, grey eyes, pointed chin and goldie-blond hair completing the vulpine transformation. His hands on her; kneading and pulling, her skin crawling beneath his touch.

  “D’you want to get on top, love?” she asked, hopeful of finishing him off quickly.

  As he raised himself, Kate reached into the drawer of her bedside cabinet for a French letter. She was just tearing the packet open when he slammed himself into her, both knees to her stomach, the force of it sending her vision red and bringing a scream to her throat that was abruptly cut off as his hands flew to her necklace, twisting it into a noose around her neck. Panic, survival and the instincts of five years on the streets kicked in as Kate’s fists connected with his wrists and she squirmed and bucked beneath him. The pressure on her windpipe grew stronger as he shifted his weight forwards, concentrating all his strength on snuffing her out.

  Kate’s head started to swim from lack of oxygen but there was something animal in her, too. As he tilted, she brought her booted foot up into his stomach, kicking with such force that he crashed headfirst off the top of her, landing on the floor with a startled yelp. Kate jumped to her feet, leapt from the bed over his sprawled form and made for the door.

  “Murder! Police!” Kate screamed through the red-raw pain. She felt his fingertips brush her ankle as she pulled the door open, running straight across the hall to her neighbour opposite, a barmaid named Kitty O’Toole with whom she’d always been on friendly terms, hammering on the door. “Let me in! Let me in!”

  Kitty, just in from her shift at the Duke of York, opened up in an instant.

  “There’s a man trying to kill me!”

  She took in Kate’s wild eyes and naked body and pulled her inside. Across the hall, her neighbour’s flat was in darkness, but by the faint glow of the fire, she could make out the form of a tall man standing there. Another door opened along the hallway, an old woman stuck her head out, took one look and shut the door again, giving Kitty just enough illumination to see that the man in Kate’s room had no clothes on.

  “Could you give me a light, please?” he said.

  “Call the police!” Kate’s voice behind her was a harsh whisper. Kitty leant across her and picked up the vase from her occasional table, the first weapon that came to hand.

  “Miss,” the man repeated meekly, “could you please give me a light?”

  There was a box of matches on the same table. Kitty used her spare hand to throw them towards him. They landed in the middle of the hall. As he bent down to retrieve them, she gripped the vase tighter, raising it up to smash it down on his head if he made a move towards them.

  Instead he merely lit his smoke and turned back to Kate’s room.

  “Have you seen my boots?” he called out.

  Kate crouched behind Kitty, beginning to hyperventilate. But neither of them could seem to tear their eyes away from the airman as he stumbled around the room opposite, picking up his clothes and putting them back on. He started to hum to himself, a discordant rendering of an old Fred and Ginger song.

  He stepped back into the hallway. Kitty gave him her most venomous barmaid’s stare, the vase raised high above her head. Kate’s fingers dug into her shoulders.

  “You’re him,” Kate hissed. “You’re Jack.”

  He went into his pocket, pulled out a roll of money. Slowly, he counted out eight pound notes and threw them at her feet.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I think I’ve had rather too much to drink tonight.”

  Then he turned and walked away, picking up the refrain of his tune as he wove unsteadily down the corridor. Kitty and Kate waited for the door to slam behind him before they collapsed into each other’s arms.

  – . –

  Claudette Coles stood under a shop awning across the road from Paddington Station. As she took down a lungful of smoke, she wondered for a brief instant what it was she thought she was doing here.

  At seven o’clock that evening she had waved her husband, Herbert, off on his Circle Line train to Sloane Square and his job as a night manager at the Royal Court Hotel. Returning to the flat they shared in 187 Sussex Gardens, she had cleared the soup dishes from the dining table, letting water wash over them and her hands in the sink as she scrubbed methodically away, willing the mindless task to erase just as easily the banal platitudes she had shared with her old man over the consumption of their meagre meal, the routine they followed night after night after night.

  The next time she had looked at a clock, it was the one in her bedroom, which told her an hour had passed. She sat down at her dressing table, stared at her face in the mirror, the cracks and lines that had appeared there over her seven long years of marriage. She began to plaster over the top of them, to powder and paint. Claudette had always looked more like a schoolmarm than a Windmill girl, but there was a certain sort of man, her husband included, that relished that sort of severity.

  However, under the crouching gloom of the blackout, in the unrelenting sleet, there didn’t seem to be any sorts of men except bogeys tramping the streets tonight. Claudette had walked a circular route, down to Hyde Park and along beside it to Marble Arch, where she had treated herself to a cup of tea in Lyons, hoping to find company there. When this proved futile she had come back up the Edgware Road to Praed Street, speculating that it might be possible to accost some late night travellers. She stopped for a cigarette first, holding the light from her match up to her wristwatch. It was now half-past eleven.

  “Rotten night, ain’t it?” a voice beside her startled Claudette. She turned to see a woman whose blonde hair framed the most beautiful, flawless face. A scent of violets, along with something altogether more human, drifted up to her nostrils. “How long you been out here, love?” she asked.

  “Couple of hours, thereabouts,” said Claudette, clocking the expensive coat her new companion was wrapped in. Despite the fact she had announced herself as a fellow professional, the woman looked more like a film star.

  “Me and all,” said Lil. “Thought I’d give the station a whirl, but the bleedin’ porter wanted one on the house, the cheeky bastard.”

  “Ah,” said Claudette, thinking even that would be better than nothing at all.

  Lil, on the other hand, had exhausted her rage. She had found herself drifting back towards the scene of her youthful initiation to the game, the Norfolk Square Hotel. There she found a party of businessmen stranded for the night by the bad weather. The trouble she had taken with her appearance, coupled with the tip she palmed the barman, allowed her to pass from the saloon and up to one of the rooms they had taken, where she had found the oblivion she sought in sex.

  “There ain’t many trains running tonigh
t, see,” she went on to explain what she had learned during the course of her evening’s endeavours. “The storms brought a load of trees down all along the line past Reading. I think I’m gonna call it a night. Maybe you should do the same.”

  “Maybe,” said Claudette, still thinking about the porter. “But it’s still so early. I don’t like to go home empty-handed, you know.”

  “I do know,” said Lil, giving a sympathetic smile. “Well, all right, love, ta ta.” She started to walk back towards the mews, calling over her shoulder: “And good luck!”

  Claudette watched her disappear around the corner, her heart sinking with every clack of Lil’s receding footsteps as the brief glimmer of interesting conversation passed like a setting sun.

  As she watched, a figure stepped out of the gloom. A man, in a military greatcoat and forage cap, tall and lean, shoulders hunched against the sleet. Claudette dropped the dregs of her cigarette and hastily found another, striking a match as he came close.

  The flare lit up a face with high cheekbones and light-coloured eyes, goldish-blond hair and a clipped moustache. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth, wreathing him in smoke and when he spoke he sounded almost apologetic.

  “Will you take me home with you?” he asked. “I have two pounds.”

  He looked much better to Claudette than the porter she had been imagining and she liked the intelligent, educated sound of his voice.

  “It’s just around the corner, dear,” she said.

  – . –

  Greenaway looked down at his wristwatch, the hands inching towards one o’clock. Above the snores of the three men in the bedrooms behind him, he could just discern other noises drifting up from beneath his post by the kitchen window in Abbey Lodge. The sound of footfalls on the metal fire escape that ran along the other side of the wall, and a song being whistled off-key. While Greenaway tried to place the tune, he watched fingers slide underneath the sill that had been left ajar by half an inch, presumably to allow such access upon the return of the one man who was still missing from his billet. From the opposite side of the sink unit, the Corporal likewise observed first-hand the trick his charge had employed to evade that evening’s curfew. They had been waiting long enough by now for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark.

  The fingers flattened themselves out into an upturned palm, curled around the woodwork and heaved it up. Another hand came to join it, this one carrying a gas mask, which was tossed across the top of the sink and landed with a thud on the linoleum floor. From out of the darkness rose up a tousled head and with it, thick, entwined aromas of alcohol, tobacco and sex.

  Neither Greenaway nor the Corporal moved as their quarry slid under the window, unfurling long legs out across the sink in careful, practised moves. He sat there for a moment, rubbing his eyes, then turned to close the window and lower himself onto the floor. Bending down, he fumbled for the gas mask, swaying slightly like a drunkard. Then his fingers located it, grasped it and brought it back up to his chest.

  “There may be trouble ahead …” he whispered tunelessly.

  “You got that right,” said Greenaway, snapping on the light and staring into a pair of wide-spaced eyes, a face that could perhaps have been considered handsome, if it wasn’t for those cold grey lamps. “Gordon Frederick Cummins, you’re fucking nicked, my son.”

  13

  AFTER YOU’VE GONE

  Friday, 13 February 1942

  When Mari Lambouri opened her door on Friday morning, the brown paper package was still sitting there on her neighbour’s doorstep. This time Mari didn’t just carry on her way. She knew that Phyllis’s young daughter, Jeannie, always came up from Southend on Friday afternoons to spend the weekend with her mother. It wasn’t the fault of the girl – a solemn, studious looking fifteen-year-old – that Phyllis behaved the way she did. And by now it was abundantly clear to Mari that something very unusual – and perhaps very wrong – had occurred in the flat across the way from her. She had heard not a peep from the residence since the whistling man had departed in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

  She had read the papers, too.

  Taking her purse from her handbag, Mari went along the hall to see the landlord about making a telephone call.

  – . –

  West End Central was having the first crack at Cummins. It was protocol – DS Sheeney had called it in first, found the gas mask that positively identified the man – but it was also something of a relief for Greenaway. If he hadn’t had the Corporal standing beside him when he made the arrest, Greenaway wasn’t sure what he might have found himself doing. One look at that supercilious countenance and a tattoo had started up in his brain, the urge to redecorate the room in Cummins’s blood surging with it, willing him to take his own justice into his own fists and to Hell with the rules he had sworn to abide by. Getting his suspect directly into custody at Savile Row had been safer for both of them. But the cold nerve of the trainee pilot lingered, prickling at the back of Greenaway’s mind like blips from a half-remembered nightmare, snapshots of the carnage the killer had left in his wake mingling with other suppressed memories, of dark cold lumps in dark cold beds, back in the bad old days.

  Cummins had shown no outwards concern at being confronted shinning his way into his billet, neither did he seem particularly perturbed to learn that he was wanted for the assault on Madeline Harcourt. He treated the whole situation like a prank that had backfired, offering the gas mask he’d thrown through the window as his evidence that it couldn’t have been him that was up to anything naughty in St James market.

  But then, neither he, the Corporal nor Sheeney knew what Greenaway was after him for. The DCI was content to let it stay that way, for now. He had deposited his quarry at West End Central at two in the morning and gone home for the first six hours of justified sleep he had managed since the case began.

  Greenaway got to his desk freshly shaved and shined by ten o’clock. A pile of messages awaited him, amongst them one from Cherrill: Results back from Forensics: dust in the boot soles from RAF bin a match for Montagu Place. Also a brown Austin Cambridge turned up at the Yard this morning.

  Then there was a copy of the log of the duty sergeant who had booked Cummins in last night. In the pockets of his RAF uniform he had found a wad of notes – fifty-six pounds in total, serial numbers all duly noted – a silver cigarette case, a woman’s wristwatch with a strip of Elastoplast on the back of the face, some love letters and a revealing family snapshot: proud squiresman Cummins had a wife living in Barnes.

  The label in the inside pocket of the smart suit Greenaway had extracted from his locker was from a tailors in that district. The shirt hanging underneath that suit had minute dark brown splashes on the cuffs. The smell of a woman’s perfume still faintly lingered on it. All these items were now at the lab in Hendon.

  He reached across to call Cherrill just as the phone began to ring.

  Greenaway’s sense of relief drained away as he listened to his summons. He hadn’t got the bastard in time after all.

  – . –

  Numbers 9–11 Gosfield Street belonged to a block of flats only a few minutes around the corner from the station on Tottenham Court Road. A dark flock of constables guarded the entrance, blowing and stamping the cold away. Cherrill’s car was already parked outside. At the door of the ground floor flat numbered 4, the divisional surgeon exited, looking like a man with a bad hangover.

  “What we got here?” Greenaway asked.

  “A woman, late thirties,” the surgeon replied. “Name of Phyllis Lord. She’s been strangled and then …” he shook his head, “… worse. Been dead about two days, I reckon, which ties in with what the witness called it in said. Her neighbour across the way, a Mrs Lambouri, says there’s been a package left on her doormat since Wednesday morning. Mrs Lord’s daughter apparently comes down to see her every Friday and Mrs Lambouri had read the papers, put two and two together. Didn’t want to risk the girl walking in on anything. Thank Christ
for nosy neighbours.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I’ve put everything back the way I found it.”

  Inside, Cherrill was setting up his lamps.

  Phyllis Lord’s front room was as still and cold as a mausoleum and held barely as much furniture – just a single bed pushed lengthwise against the wall with a black eiderdown thrown over it, an occasional table, a small square of carpet and a couple of wooden chairs. On the mantelpiece across the empty fireplace stood a glass candlestick and a tumbler half full of beer. There was a pile of clothing at the foot of the bed, discarded in obvious haste.

  “Ted,” said Cherrill.

  “Fred,” said Greenaway.

  Greenaway put down his murder bag and pulled on his gloves. Cherrill picked up his magnifying glass and went straight to the mantelpiece. Greenaway felt bile rising in his throat as he walked the other way, towards the ominous lump hidden beneath the eiderdown. Too late …

  The once handsome face of the Lady was now a livid mottling of brown and purple, pink froth around her nose and mouth, caused by her own silk stocking that had been pulled taut and tied around her throat. The rest of her was covered by two blankets and a sheet. Slowly, carefully, Greenaway folded them back.

  It was even worse than Evelyn Bettencourt.

  Phyllis had been attacked with an armoury of different weapons. By the side of her belly lay a breadknife, its saw-edge blade crusted with blood, pointed inwards and down. A black-handled table knife, smeared with gore, lay across the top of her left thigh. On the bedsheet to her right, a yellow-handled table knife and a vegetable peeler pointed dark brown blades across to the rest of the contents of her kitchen drawers. But even the butchery inflicted upon her by all these implements had not been enough. On the sheet between her open legs, a poker with its handle broken off. Protruding from inside her, a bloodied candle.

  A scent lingered in the still air, the fragrance faint, but familiar enough to snap Greenaway’s synapses back to the suit in Cummins’s locker.

  He turned his head to where Cherrill was examining the empty candlestick with his magnifying glass.