Then her head caught the side of a scaffolding pole and the woman who once was Margaret McArthur, once was Peggy Richards, knew and felt no more.
19
CRUISING DOWN THE RIVER
Wednesday, 18 February 1942
Greenaway’s feet crunched over shingle, dirty with Thames mud, towards the tangle of limbs and fur that lay beneath Waterloo Bridge. The man at his side was a GPO cableman who was sure he had witnessed a murder the night before.
“Just gone midnight, I heard it,” Alf Simmons told the DCI. “I’d been over the supplies’ shop, the other end of the bridge, to get some more batteries for me torch and I was just about halfway back across. Sounded like a couple having a right old ding-dong. It all goes quiet and then she let out this bloodcurdling scream – God’s truth, it made me hair stand on end.”
Alf had covered these few, previously electrified strands of hair with a flat cap. Leading Greenaway down the steps beneath the scaffolding that surrounded each flank of the vast Peter Lind construction site, he continued, “Only, by the time I got to the place I could hear it all coming from,” he nodded up at the first arch on the northeast face of the bridge, “there weren’t no sign of her. There was just this man standing there. A soldier – he had a sort of tartan cap and the word CANADA on the front of his jacket.” Alf scratched under the rim of his cap. “Tell yer the truth, I ain’t sure what regiment that is.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said Greenaway, “just tell me what you do know.”
Closer to the stricken body, he could make out a peculiar detail: one of her legs was encased in a black stocking, the other one was bare. A familiar thrumming tattoo started up at the back of his brain, the feeling he was walking back into a nightmare that he thought he’d just woken from.
“‘What you doing here?’ I asks him,” Alf went on. “‘Oh, I’m all right, don’t worry about me,’ he says, ‘I’ve just lost me friends somewhere.’ Too right you have, I think, you just pushed her over the side. So I have a bit of a recce, flash the torch about and that, but there’s nothing on the bridge itself. Beyond that, you can’t see far enough with the blackout. By now he’s weaving about a bit, either pissed as a parrot or making out he is; I can’t leave him on the bridge like that. So I bring him down the steps, trying to keep an eye on him and still have a shufti as we get closer to the shore. Only, once we hit dry land he’s out of the traps like a rabbit. I couldn’t have kept up with him in the dark.”
“No point you trying,” said Greenaway. “Go on, Alf, what happened next.”
“Well, after he’d gone, I had another look for her. Crawled along a gantry up there,” Alf pointed upwards at the scaffolding, “as far as I dare go. That’s where I found her headscarf, flapping round the end of the trestle. Must have hit it on the way down. I knew there weren’t no more I could do then, so I waited until first light when I could actually see her – right underneath where I found him. And that’s when I got on the blower to you, Mr Greenaway.”
By now they had reached her. She was face down on the foreshore, her arms flung up over her head, which lay in the direction of the bridge. The tide had risen to the point where it was lapping against the side of her head, the long, chestnut-coloured hair that had spilt out of her turban floating like seaweed, the blood that had congealed around the wound on the back of her skull now diluting and colouring the grey waters pink. Her stockinged right leg, crossed over the top of the left one, still had a plum-coloured shoe attached to the foot, the other shoe was nowhere in sight.
“You done right, Alf,” said Greenaway, wondering how long the tide would take to claim her, “but this ain’t an ideal situation. I should really have some pictures of her here, but if we leave her any longer it’ll mess up the forensics. Can you get some kind of stretcher to help move her back upstairs? I’ll give you a hand with it, soon as I’ve made some notes.”
“Right you are, guv,” Alf turned and crunched his way back to the bridge.
Kneeling beside her, Greenaway sketched the position of the body, filling in details with words. Only when he had finished that did he lean across to move her sodden hair away from her neck, to where his gut was telling him he would find the other stocking without even knowing why, except for the fact that he had seen women killed this way too many times of late.
He took his hand away, sat back on his heels, returning his notebook to his murder bag. His fingers brushed on the as yet unopened bottle of Scotch he had put in there to replace the one he’d given Ivy Poole just over a week ago, a week that felt more like a year. Greenaway bit back the urge. He hadn’t even had a proper breakfast yet.
Instead, he looked up at the archway above his head made of cool, grey Portland stone, the rows of supporting beams beneath the bridge that, despite their modernist intentions, suggested the vaulted ceiling of a medieval cathedral. What a thing it was to build a bridge in the middle of a war, he thought. He got to his feet, stepping backwards to scan the scaffold. Clumps of fur from the woman’s shredded coat flapped off the corners of poles, a trail of the trajectory of her descent.
There was a sound of boots on gravel behind him: Alf and two more pallbearers in blue boiler suits, with a six-by-four piece of planking to receive this fallen angel.
– . –
“What was they doing up here in the first place?” Greenaway asked, gripping the tin mug of tea Alf had brewed up for him to keep his thoughts away from the contents of his murder bag. “You get much of that going on here, do you?”
“What, brasses?” said Alf. “Pubs round the Strand are full of ’em, but we don’t usually get no bother from them up here. Nah—” he lowered his voice, not watching the Divisional Surgeon or the PCs now congregated around the corpse, “which ain’t to say you don’t find other sorts of people hanging about the place what shouldn’t be.”
“D’you want to step outside a minute?” Greenaway said, catching his drift. “Ain’t too pleasant watching the doctor at work, is it? Take me back to the spot where you heard the argument, Alf, I’d like to take a better look at that.”
Alf retraced the route. Up on the bridge, the wind was strong, the air full of the booming of ships moving up and down the river. In the daylight, London looked as shattered as the woman’s corpse, great gaps of rubble surrounding St Paul’s Cathedral in every direction, everything the colour of rust. Once they got to the spot where Alf had found the Canadian it was plain to see how easy it would have been to push the woman over – the parapet stood at barely three feet six. Greenaway put his bag down, began to examine the stonework.
“So tell me,” he said, “about these other sorts of people?”
“Well,” said Alf, “there’s one of the night watchmen you might mistake for a fence. I seen people going in and out of his hut of an evening who ain’t got no business up here. Sometimes it’s soldiers. Other times,” kneeling close to Greenaway, he whispered, “faces from back East.”
Greenaway turned his eyes away from the scuff marks he had found on the parapet to look at Alf. “Anyone specific?” he asked.
Alf looked at the ground. Greenaway sighed, put his hand in his jacket pocket and withdrew his wallet. A pound note passed between his hand and Alf’s before the cableman found his voice again.
“Bluebell,” he said. “Bear. There must be a game going on in there, at the least.”
“The Lehmann firm,” said Greenaway. “It’ll be more than just cards, Alf.”
Alf nodded, his Adam’s apple bobbing up and down as he swallowed. He’d said enough, Greenaway judged, putting a hand down on the other man’s shoulder as he stood back up. “And,” he said in a voice loud enough for any passer-by to hear, “let’s see that gantry where you found her scarf from up here.”
“Right,” said Alf, rising to lean over the parapet. “Straight down there. See it?”
“You were right,” said Greenaway. “Looks like that is what killed her.” The two men stood in silence for a moment, eyes on the smashed trestle, bef
ore the detective spoke again. “When’s the bridge supposed to be opening to the public?” he asked.
“Fortnight’s time,” said Alf. “They want to let two lanes of traffic through by then.”
“Well,” said Greenaway, “you’ve still got some work to do, ain’t you? I won’t hold you up no longer. Thanks, Alf.”
“Thank you, Mr Greenaway.” The cableman gave a little bow and edged himself away. Greenaway knelt back down to his examination of the low wall in front of him. The scratches in the stone told him there had been a fight here, that the woman had been pushed and not fallen.
“’Scuse me, sir,” a uniformed copper appeared in Alf’s place. “Surgeon told me to let you know they’re ready to take her to the morgue.”
– . –
Under the harsh lights the woman’s body was a stark collision of blue, black, purple and white. Her kneecaps were shattered, both thighs fractured and the right side of her chest was smashed in, puncturing the lung and crushing her liver and right kidney. But there were other marks of violence that spoke of the desperate prelude to her fall: a blue, oval bruise underneath her jaw and a ring of spot bruises around her nose and mouth, ligature marks on her neck from where her assailant had tried to strangle her. A fracture in her lower back, where the rib met the spine, attested to the ferocity of the fight she had put up on the bridge.
“It wasn’t caused by her hitting the scaffold,” Spilsbury explained. “This would have been her struggling to release herself from where he had her pinned down.”
“He was sitting on top of her.” It was easy for Greenaway to picture. “Knees on her chest, straddling her, as he tried to strangle her.” It gave him the cold chills to think about it. Cummins might be safely under lock and key in Brixton but here was yet another Allied serviceman, apparently carrying on his work for him. “Seen a bit too much of this kind of thing lately, ain’t we?” he thought aloud.
“How did you come by this one?” the pathologist asked.
“I got a snout works on Waterloo Bridge who was the first one to find her. It ain’t the usual sort of tip I get from him, but he’s got a guilty conscience. He reckons he could have saved her if he got there sooner and he thinks he let the murderer get away.”
Spilsbury raised his eyebrows. “He saw the assailant?” he said.
Greenaway nodded. “A drunk Canadian soldier, he says. D’you reckon it’s catching?”
Spilsbury stared down at the corpse. “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy,” he said. “But what we can safely establish is that, despite all these injuries, she was alive when she fell. It was probably the blow to the head that killed her, but the injuries sustained on the impact of landing would have done that, too. I would rule out self-precipitation or accident and there’s no possibility that she drowned. Another thing you’ll find interesting, given the circumstances,” he looked back up at Greenaway. “There are no signs of sexual intercourse.”
Greenaway’s mind flashed back to Kate Molloy, putting a hand up to the bruise marks around her neck, to Madeline Harcourt in her hospital bed. Sex, or seduction, had only been Cummins’s premise with them. Once he had them where he thought he was safe, he had tried to kill them immediately – it was the act of strangulation that actually aroused him. If Cummins’s twisted mind was anything to go by, this killer had assumed he was secure enough where he was not to even make the pretence of a straightforward transaction with a working girl. Which meant he was every bit as dangerous as the man Greenaway had just put away.
“Right,” he said, “I’ll call a press conference. Try and find out who she was.”
– . –
“Why do they call you Maestro?” Bobby Feld asked the man in the pinstriped suit who sat at the table by the window in Soapy’s. Bobby had been watching him out of the corner of his eye for the past hour, shuffling, cutting and dealing out a pack of cards, muttering to himself in a voice too soft to catch.
Raymond Parnell looked up slowly, as if the ritual he was performing with the cards was indeed some kind of spell that Bobby was breaking. Oval brown eyes with long lashes blinked twice, transporting him back to the reality of the barbershop in late afternoon and the boy leaning on his broom, an earnest expression on his face.
“Is it something to do with magic?” Bobby persisted.
Parnell smiled, scooped the deck up off the table and in one deft flick of his wrist, fanned it out in a semicircle.
“Pick a card,” he said. “Any card. Take a good look at it, but don’t show it me.”
The Maestro looked so much like one of the hoodlums in a Cagney film it was always a surprise to hear his Northern accent. A flicker of a smile spread across Bobby’s face as he snatched up a card.
“Right,” said Parnell. “Now remember what it was and give it back – only be careful I don’t see it, or it won’t work.”
Bobby held his palm over the Jack of Spades as he handed it over.
“Good lad,” said Parnell, slipping it back between the other cards. “Now,” he said, scooping them back up into the deck and handing them over. “You give that a good shuffle now. Be as crafty as you like.”
Bobby turned away from him, partly to appear as if he was indeed being crafty, but mainly to hide the fact he was no expert when it came to handling a pack of cards. When he had slowly cut and separated it five times, he judged he had messed up the order of the cards well enough to hand them back.
“Right,” said Parnell, turning the pack face side up and fanning them back out across the table. “Now then,” his brow furrowed in concentration as he hovered his right hand over them. Fingers lingered for a moment, above the Two of Clubs. “No,” Parnell shook his head, “that’s not it.” His hand wafted on in a circular motion, pausing over the Eight of Hearts. “No,” he said again, “not that one neither. Am I getting warm, though?”
“No,” said Bobby, his smile now spreading right the way across his face.
“Oh dear,” said Parnell. “Think I’ll have to use some magic words to help me, then. Abracadabra!” He swooped the hand from left to right, “Alacazam!” He brought it down on the Jack of Spades, flicking it up for Bobby’s approval. “Am I right?”
“Yes!” said Bobby, his face a picture. “How d’you do that?”
“What’s the sudden interest?” Parnell asked.
Bobby’s mouth went into a straight line and he swivelled his eyes about the shop to make sure Soapy was otherwise occupied. Then he rummaged in the pocket of his shorts and brought out a piece of paper that he slowly unfolded and handed across.
“Learn the art of magic,” Parnell read aloud. “Everything you need to amaze and astound your friends!” The advert showed a top hat, a cane, a pack of cards and a handkerchief. “For only 3/6.” He looked up at Bobby. “Where d’you get this from, one of your comics?”
Bobby nodded. The Maestro was right again – the advert was from one of the comics inside the brown paper parcel he had found on his doorstep last Saturday night – which was a mystery in itself. When he’d brought it in to show his mother, she had gone very pale and sat down at the kitchen table with her hand on her forehead, the way she looked when she had one of her headaches. Yet the moment he suggested opening it, she jumped straight back to her feet and started shouting. Snatching the parcel out of his hands, she told him that since it wasn’t addressed to him he had no business taking it, it must have been left at their house by mistake and she would see that it was handed in to the Post Office in the morning for redelivery.
Once she’d put it up on her highest shelf, another strange mood had overtaken her. Instead of tearing another strip off him for staying out late like she normally did, she dished him up a huge portion of stew and started asking him how he was enjoying his job. Bobby answered as best as he could, sticking only to what Soapy had taught him about keeping the place clean and tidy. He didn’t ask her how she could get the parcel redelivered when it had no address written on it. He didn�
��t give her any cheek at all. He ate up all his food like a good boy and asked if he could be excused to go up to his room and read. She dismissed him with an air of relief.
Keeping vigil from his darkened room, Bobby peered down the side of the blackout curtain into the back yard where he observed his mother taking the parcel down to the dustbin. He waited until she had been in her own bed for an hour before he crept downstairs to retrieve it.
Back in his room he’d opened it slowly, by torchlight, under the cover of his bedclothes.
There were enough presents inside it for everybody in the house, if everybody had been there. Alongside some more babyish fare was a copy of Ace Comics, its cover illustrated with the same spade symbol as the card he’d just picked from the Maestro’s deck, surrounded by drawings of cowboys, pirates and soldiers. There were also three rag dolls and a bottle of French brandy. But as hard as Bobby examined these items, and the paper that had covered them, he couldn’t find anything to say who had sent them, which deepened his dilemma still further.
If his mother would rather have thrown the parcel out unopened than let him have it, he couldn’t go back and tell her it was she who had made the mistake, that it must have been meant for them after all. Should he tell his father, or would that only get him into trouble for taking it out of the dustbin? Who was the mystery benefactor and why had their gift made his mother so angry? Bobby fell asleep with unanswered questions revolving round in his head, illicit bounty under his mattress.
First thing Monday morning he put it all inside his school satchel and transported it to the nearest bombsite, hiding everything amid the rubble except for his comic, which he had since read from cover to cover, and the brandy. He had a feeling that bottle could come in useful and now he knew that instinct was right.
“I can afford it,” he told the Maestro. “I been saving up my tips for months. Only, it’s got to be delivered, ain’t it?”
Without the Moon Page 16
