Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  “There’s latents on here, Ted,” the fingerprint man said, “off the right hand. Which means,” Cherrill mimed the actions of the attacker, “he used his left hand to take the candle out.”

  “I got him, Fred,” said Greenaway. “He’s in the cells at West End Central. I just didn’t get him soon enough.”

  “Get him to sign something,” said Cherrill, “see which hand he uses.”

  Greenaway lifted the blanket back to cover the scene already indelibly etched on each iris. “Spilsbury’s on his way,” he said. “I want him to talk me through exactly how this happened before I brace the bastard.”

  – . –

  Herbert Coles stopped outside his flat at 187 Sussex Gardens. There was something wrong. The morning’s milk delivery was still standing on the doorstep. Nervously, he looked up and down the street, a lump forming in his throat.

  Herbert had spent the seven years since he had first encountered his wife on Oxford Street in a perpetual state of fear that she would one day leave him. He knew what she was and at first he had thought he could save her from that life. But perhaps that day had finally come.

  He fumbled for his keys in his trouser pocket.

  Twenty years older than Claudette, Herbert had been a man of comfortable means, having sold his hotel business for enough of a profit to see him through the rest of his days – or so he had thought. It had been enough to get his proposal of marriage accepted, two months after their first professional assignation in her old flat on the Edgware Road. Claudette had moved into his house on Bathurst Place and assumed the role of housewife, happily at first, but with steadily declining interest over the next three years.

  It was as if Claudette sent out radio signals on a frequency Herbert could tune into, wherever he happened to be. When she started taking a little longer over the shopping of a morning, he knew it had started again. Afraid to confront his wandering wife, Herbert tried diversion tactics: he invested some of his capital to buy a café on one of the little back-streets between Paddington and the Edgware Road and gave Claudette the job as co-manager. It was a disaster. The back-street was a customer cul-de-sac and in four months, Herbert had yet to recoup a fraction of his investment selling cups of tea and bread-and-scrapes to the elderly, while Claudette let the wide boys from every mechanics’ shop, bookies and pool hall in the district run up a fortune on the slate. It was almost as if she was siding with them against him. Almost as if, the darkest voices in his head would insist, she was getting some other sort of payment for her bacon and eggs.

  Herbert sold the café and relocated them to Eastbourne, where he spent hard on entertainments to keep Claudette out of the arms of other men. The change of scene worked while the summer and his funds lasted. When war was declared that September, a depleted Herbert packed his wife off to her mother’s in Harrogate, while he returned to London and took a job as staff manager in Oddendino’s, sending her an allowance each month, his comfy nest egg by now all but wiped out.

  It wasn’t long, however, before he bumped into his wife on Oxford Street again. Worse than the shock of this was the news she had found her own accommodation – right across the street from him in Sussex Gardens. Almost as if she was taunting him, almost as if she was rubbing his nose in it. Herbert pleaded with her to stay out of harm’s way – meaning both Hitler’s bombs and the attentions of those leering, pinstriped goons who had made his venture at the café such an unmitigated failure. Claudette laughed in his face. Herbert had never been man enough for her, she said. And if he wasn’t up to the job, then what was she to do but find others who were?

  Despite all his wife’s cruelty and caprice, Herbert did not want to lose her. He pleaded and cried and demeaned himself before her until she gave up her flat and moved back in with him – on the condition that what she did with herself while he was at work was none of his affair. In order to turn a blind eye to her nocturnal activities, he found another job, as the night manager at the Royal Court in Sloane Square, far enough away from her stamping grounds that he didn’t run the risk of stumbling across her hawking for business outside the establishment’s front doors. He left every evening at seven and returned the next morning at eleven, to sleep until six, then have dinner with Claudette. That arid hour was all he had left of her, but to him, it was better than the alternative.

  Herbert picked up the pint of milk, still icy cold, mind spinning back to the night before. Supper had felt even more strained than usual. All the way through his attempts to make conversation, she had stared straight through him, her mind far away, in a landscape he could not comprehend. Still, she had come to see him off on the tube, and from that he had taken crumbs of consolation, enough to see him through his shift.

  He pushed the front door open, almost tripping over the morning paper that lay on the doormat.

  “Claudette?” he called, kneeling to pick up the Daily Herald.

  His own voice, high-pitched and strained, echoed back at him. Normally Claudette kept the wireless on while she was in the house.

  “Claudette?”

  Everything felt too still, too empty. He walked down the hallway, turning the doorknob into the lounge. The blackout was still down from the night before. He put a hand to the light switch, but the illumination of the electric bulb did not extend to any clues to his wife’s whereabouts. Everything was as meticulously tidy as it always was, not a hair out of place. Claudette was as obsessive about keeping the house clean as she was about rolling her own body in filth, he had always thought.

  Herbert walked through the still life into the kitchen, putting the milk down on the counter top. He unfurled the paper and the headlines hit him.

  WEST END KILLER STILL AT LARGE!

  SCOTLAND YARD URGE ALL WOMEN TO STAY

  INSIDE AT NIGHT

  Herbert turned on his heel, as if some unseen entity had a dagger pressed to the base of his spine, propelling him back down the hallway to the bedroom. He flung himself at the door, but it was no use. It was locked.

  The dagger pressing harder, a dagger made of ice, Herbert began to pound on the door with his fists.

  “Claudette!” His voice getting higher, shriller. “Claudette!”

  Then, as if the dagger had penetrated, his blood began to chill and his panic subsided into an intuitive horror of the situation. He had tuned back into his wife’s frequency and already knew what lay beyond the locked door.

  He stepped backwards, turned the hall light off.

  Sure enough, a band of glowing yellow at the bottom of the bedroom door told him Claudette was still at home.

  Herbert walked backwards some more, into the front room. With shaking hands, he lifted the receiver of his telephone.

  – . –

  “Depending on whether she is breathing in or out when the murderer tightens his grip, it takes fifteen to thirty seconds to strangle a woman,” Sir Bernard Spilsbury told Greenaway. “In this case,” the pathologist dropped his gaze back down to the stricken visage of Phyllis Lord, “I would estimate she died in fifteen seconds. She was trying to scream when he pulled the stocking around her neck. Everything else came after.”

  “So let me get this straight,” Greenaway’s head was thumping so loudly he had to strain to keep his thoughts in order. “That,” he pointed to the silken noose, “was for him. And this,” his finger arced to the post-mortem butchery, “was for us.”

  Spilsbury raised his eyebrows. “I’m not a psychologist,” he said. “But there’s something in what you say. Are you thinking the same as I am?”

  With a loud backfire from its exhaust pipe, a motorbike pulled up outside. Both men watched the dispatch rider enter the building, Spilsbury’s question answered before Greenaway had even opened the message that was handed to him.

  “Not another one?” the pathologist said.

  “Yeah,” said Greenaway. “Another one. At Sussex Gardens, Paddington.” His stomach dropped as he read it. Sussex Gardens – so close to where he had been last night that it was
entirely possible he could have missed Cummins on the street by only seconds.

  “You coming?” he looked back up at Spilsbury.

  Too late …

  14

  THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU

  Friday, 13 February 1942

  Herbert Coles sat alone in his living room while the horde of policemen that had arrived within the past hour went about their business just down the corridor. The first of them to arrive, a constable from Paddington, hadn’t been able to get through the outside window to the bedroom and in the end had seen no other way but to kick out the hinges of the locked door, warning – or advising, as he had put it – Herbert not to follow him in there. He had left Claudette’s husband to pace the floor, tortuous thoughts ripping through his mind like the wood splintering from the doorframe.

  That first constable had been very young. When he had finally come back, his face now pallid, he’d asked to use the telephone. Herbert heard him request Scotland Yard CID and the divisional surgeon to report to the flat immediately. He closed his eyes, seeing the newsprint headlines on the discarded paper in the kitchen next door. Pain like he had never known before flooded every cell of his body, every ending of his nerves. The nightmares that had tormented him through his whole married life were as nothing compared to the reality of Claudette leaving him this way: going from their marital bed to a place she could never come back from.

  Tears began to leak out of the corners of Herbert’s eyes. He put one hand up to brush them away, while the other fell between the cushion and the back of the sofa. His fingers touched something soft.

  It was one of Claudette’s handkerchiefs, a piece of purple satin with red edging and an embossed red rose in the centre of the square she had folded and ironed it into. Herbert lifted it to his face, breathed in the scent of her perfume.

  – . –

  Jeannie Lord stopped at the top of the steps from Tottenham Court Road tube station. So far, it had not been a good day. Her train from Southend had been delayed by half an hour and then came to a halt on the tracks for another twenty minutes between Leigh-on-Sea and Benfleet. The carriage had been freezing, the view bleak – an eerie expanse of creeks and marshland, fringed by the black rolls of barbed wire that marked the edge of the Thames. Storm clouds chased across the grey sky, the estuary gazed sullenly back. Jeannie had put her head in her schoolbook, tried to concentrate on the words, even though she just wanted to scream: “Get a move on!”

  She could never wait to leave the gloomy, gothic penury of her boarding school on a Friday afternoon and set out for London. Mother would always have a treat for them waiting: a trip to the cinema, a walk in Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, window-shopping in the department stores that fringed those places, just occasionally a trip through the doors for a new handkerchief or gloves, a spray of perfume from the immaculately turned-out lady on the counter.

  Best of all, though, would be dinner in Kettners. Jeannie loved Soho: the crowded bustle of it all, the street markets and spivs on Berwick Street, so many different types of people speaking all kinds of languages and wearing strange types of clothes. The food they had there she was sure you could get nowhere else, least of all Southend.

  She wished she could just stay with Mother for the rest of the week and go to school in London, but Mother was adamant. It was too dangerous – and anyway, she had to pass her exams so that she would have a good job when she left school.

  Jeannie had decided she would become a spy. She loved the way the Frenchwomen in Soho looked and spoke. If she could emulate them perfectly, she told herself, then she could become a secret agent, go to France and bring down a German general or two. Jeannie was always being teased at school for being a Plain Jane. None of her contemporaries would ever have guessed the reason why she always came top of the class in French, Greek and Latin. Which, of course, made her perfect spy material.

  Such thoughts, along with analysis of all the people in the train carriage and then later, the tube, kept her occupied until she walked out on to Tottenham Court Road.

  All the rubble and broken glass that had greeted her the week before had been cleared away from the half of the street where shops still stood and went about their business. Across the road, though, only a few fragments of blasted wall, standing out like blackened, broken teeth, remained from what had once been a row of houses. Jeannie’s eyes alighted on a piece of rose-patterned wallpaper, still incongruously stuck to what must have been the inside of somebody’s bedroom, and a horrible sense of foreboding descended. She hurried away, around the corner, towards Gosfield Street.

  – . –

  Like a macabre pas de deux, Greenaway arrived at the door of the ground floor flat in Paddington just as the divisional surgeon was leaving.

  “Brace yourself.” He nodded as they passed. “It’s him again.”

  Greenaway turned to watch him go. Spilsbury hobbled across the forecourt towards him, waving him on with one of his walking sticks when he saw he was being observed. Cherrill, who had driven them there, carried both his own and the pathologist’s bags from his car. Greenaway’s mind flitted back for an instant to the last war and the things that he had seen there, the wraiths of the walking wounded. He shook his head and went through the door of 187 Sussex Gardens. A young constable greeted him, pointed him right down the corridor, lowering his voice as he told him: “She’s in the bedroom down there. The husband’s in the sitting room, I’ve told him to stay put.” The PC put his hand over his stomach as he spoke, an involuntary indication of what Greenaway could expect to find.

  – . –

  The bad feeling increased when Jeannie saw two policemen standing outside the front door of Mother’s block. What could they be doing there?

  Hesitantly, she walked towards them, hoping they would part and let her pass. But instead they both moved in together, blocking the entrance, staring at her intently.

  “Excuse me, Miss,” one of them said. The older-looking of the pair, so old, in fact, he looked like he could have retired once before and then been sent back to work. “Would you mind telling me your name and business here?”

  “Wh-Why?” Jeannie heard the tremble in her voice. “What’s wrong?”

  “I’m afraid there’s been an incident, Miss,” the old policeman said. “We’re not letting anyone through here at the moment unless we know who they are.”

  Jeannie felt her stomach drop thirteen floors but she determined that she would show no fear. This was just a test, that was all.

  “Miss Jean Louise Lord,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “I’m here to see my mother, Mrs Phyllis Lord. She lives in Flat number 4.”

  The old policeman’s eyes suddenly looked sad. “If you wouldn’t mind just waiting here for a moment, Miss,” he said. Then he turned to his companion. “Go and get the old dear,” he said.

  – . –

  Like the other murder sites through which Greenaway had passed in the space of the last week, a stillness had settled in Claudette Coles’s bedroom, as if an icy breath had frozen the scene. The feeling of déjà vu intensified as he crossed the threshold, the door leaning off its hinges at a woozy angle, and walked towards the lump on the right side of the bed. Another dark lump on another dark bed …

  Greenaway pulled back the covers and saw white skin and fair hair, dilated pupils staring straight through him into infinity, mouth open in a silent scream. A black stocking made the ligature, the killer’s finishing flourish to tie it up in a bow just under the left side of her chin.

  Greenaway could feel his jaw tense as he heard the others enter the room behind him, the pounding beginning in his temples again. He made himself go on looking, take it all in, record exactly what he saw in his notebook with methodical detail.

  A gash in her right cheek, made by clawing fingernails, wept congealed blood. Beneath her ruined face, her left breast had been cleaved away by a circular knife wound, four inches long. There was another half-inch knife wound on the right side of her nipple, as
if the killer had tried to slice it off. Perpendicular to that, a deep slash six inches long carved her abdomen in two from her navel downwards, drawing the eyes down to the blood-encrusted ribbons he had made of her genitals, over which he had folded her left hand.

  “You’ve got a madman on parade here,” Greenaway heard Spilsbury say.

  The pathologist had made the same mental leap as the women of the street. He had been nine in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper; old enough to have those unsolved atrocities seared into his brain, the materials that would form the purpose of his life. As a young man, he had made his name on the case then considered the most gruesome of the twentieth century: that of John Hawley Harvey Crippen, who dismembered his wife in his Camden Town basement and tried to dissolve her existence with quicklime. A five-and-a-half inch by seven-inch piece of skin yielding an operation scar that Spilsbury proved to have belonged to the vanished Cora Crippen gave Scotland Yard the evidence to send the bad doctor to the gallows.

  During the thirty-one years since, Spilsbury had never ceased learning the stories of the dead and speaking deeds of darkness into the light of a courtroom day. But his lifetime’s service had taken its toll. Less than two years ago, he had suffered a stroke, standing at his dissection table, mid-autopsy. It hadn’t been severe enough to put him out of action, but it was the reason he now made his daily commute with the aid of two walking sticks. On top of that, he’d lost his doctor son Thomas in the Blitz, been bombed out of his home, his wife had gone back to her family in the country and he’d been left to barrack down with two elderly, unmarried sisters in Hampstead. His current caseload could not have been heavier, but still, he wouldn’t give up the work.

  Greenaway nodded, wondering how much longer the pathologist would still have the strength to go on with it.

  – . –

  Jeannie recognised the old lady who lived across the way from Mother. The Spanish Widow, as Mother called her, she always dressed in black, with a knitted shawl and a large crucifix around her neck. Jeannie had always been rather afraid of her stern appearance. But today the old lady approached her with an expression of grief in her dark brown eyes, and reached out to put a bony hand on her shoulder.