Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  Muldoon slapped himself hard on the giveaway cheek. For a moment he maintained eye contact with Greenaway, putting everything he had left into that wild-eyed stare.

  “Anything more to add?” Greenaway kept his own face neutral as he stared back, looked deep into those black-hole eyes until he could see gravestones appearing there.

  “No? Well, then, as a result of enquiries I have made you will be brought up at Bow Street Police Court on Monday morning and charged with murder.” Greenaway stood up. “Do yourself a favour, son. Have a shave before then.”

  25

  HAUNTED NIGHTS

  Friday, 20 February 1942

  “My dear, may I present another newcomer to our circle tonight?”

  Miss Moyes had brought her best grey moiré gown out of mothballs, augmented it with black lace and a solid silver cross at her throat. The parlour of the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Association had been dusted from top to bottom, best silver and Wedgwood laid out and all rations put to the service of the largest gathering the Duchess had ever witnessed at Lansdowne Road.

  All to honour a singularly unremarkable guest, as far as Duch could see.

  Mrs Helen Duncan was a stout, plain-looking woman with a flat black bob, dressed in a floor-length black gown and Paisley shawl. She could barely dislodge her cigarette from between her stumpy fingers before they shook hands. Her husband Henry, a similarly barrel-shaped man, had narrow, watery eyes and an equally moist handshake that did not inspire any further conviction in Duch that she was in the presence of elevated beings. However, their fame within Spiritualist circles had quadrupled the attendance of the regular Friday night meetings. Duch could count the heads of almost everybody she had ever met through the Association, alongside a fair smattering of strangers, like the tall, redheaded gentleman Miss Moyes was beckoning her to meet.

  “This is Mr Ross Spooner,” her hostess informed her. “He’s a journalist from Two Worlds magazine.”

  “A pleasure to meet you,” he said. Like the Duncans, he spoke with a Scottish accent, but whereas Duch had struggled with their dialect, Spooner’s voice had a rippling cadence she found immediately engaging.

  “A journalist?” said Duch. “How interesting. Have you been writing for this magazine for long?”

  “Tell you the truth, it’s the first time I’ve been trusted with a story,” he said, a slight colour rising in his cheeks, which, along with his unruly shock of hair and the wire-rimmed spectacles that did not sit quite straight across the bridge of his nose, gave him the look of a naughty schoolboy. “I hope I won’t make a hash of it.”

  “And it’s Mrs Duncan you’ll be writing about?” enquired Duch.

  “Aye, that’s right,” said Spooner. “She’s quite a fearsome reputation with the ectoplasm, hasn’t she?”

  Duch raised her eyebrows. “I don’t doubt she’s full of it,” she said. “Do you know of her from Scotland, then? I’m afraid to say I’m not so familiar with her talents myself. I’m only really what you could call a dabbler, you see.”

  “Oh aye, yes, well,” Spooner’s face got redder still. “Mrs Duncan’s from Callander, she’s a Highland lassie, whereas I’m from Aberdeen. We’ve no’ actually met before, but I have been taking a keen interest in her career for a wee while now.”

  “Well, I’m sure your story will turn out fine,” Duchess tried to sound more encouraging than she felt. “It’s a shame Mr Swaffer isn’t here,” she added, sweeping the room for any sign of his snowy-white head. Strange that everyone else had turned out for Mrs Duncan except for him, she realised, although this guest spot had been a somewhat impromptu affair, arranged only in the last couple of days, so perhaps the news had just not got through to Fleet Street’s finest. “He would have been able to give you some tips on getting a scoop, no doubt.”

  “Mr Swaffer?” Spooner spilt drops of his sherry down the front of his waistcoat without noticing. “Hannen Swaffer, you mean? The Hannen Swaffer?”

  “That’s right,” said Duch. Her eyes stopped on the figure of Daphne Maitland, who was bending awkwardly over a vintage supporter of Miss Moyes who sat in a bath chair, holding up an ear trumpet for her to talk into. Daphne was trying hard, as she always did, thought Duch – despite her attempts to dress as dowdily as possible, in the plain grey or brown suits her Communist principles dictated, those suits still came from Derry & Toms and she still looked like a fashion plate from Vogue. A quality which, Duch suspected, would not be lost on young Spooner.

  “Though we have got another of his protégées with us. That lady there,” she pointed, “Daphne Maitland her name is. She does the in-house magazine for Miss Moyes. Puts the whole thing together and then prints it in the basement here. Would you like to meet her?”

  The green-brown eyes behind Spooner’s spectacles widened with interest as he followed the line of the Duchess’s finger.

  “Oh aye,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I mean, yes, please.”

  – . –

  Hannen Swaffer was not happy. For a start, he was on the other side of the river, where he never felt entirely safe. The squat, redbrick pub to which he had been despatched to meet with the group who addressed themselves as the Campaign Against Capital Punishment in the letters sent to the Herald offices, was clearly a hive of villains. The landlord, Swaffer recalled, was once a member of the infamous Elephant Boys racetrack gang, with whom Greenaway had frequent skirmishes in the past decade. The proximity of the Effra Arms to Brixton Prison was no coincidence either.

  Inside the snug bar sat the deputation. Miss Olive Bracewell had been known to Swaffer since April 1935, when she had begun her campaign outside Wandsworth Prison, where the murderer Leonard Brigstock was due to be hanged. There, dressed and made-up like a film star, she had put on as much of a show as her wealth could command, hiring a choir to sing “Abide With Me” and men with sandwich boards protesting that “A murderer is no different from a madman” to march about distributing leaflets urging the abolition of capital punishment. Her arrest for obstruction in the glare of the flash-bulbs of the press was taken as a personal challenge. She had taken up her cry at every major murder trial that was likely to afford her maximum press coverage ever since. In turn, Swaffer had done his own share of digging on her.

  Miss Bracewell was the industrious only daughter of a coal porter and a washerwoman from Birmingham, who had amassed a fortune in her youth by inventing the first brushless shaving cream, enabling her escape from the Midlands and relocation to a gothic pile in Hampstead. There she mixed with the kind of people who, if they found her eccentric, were not unsympathetic to her cause. Indeed, she had even been encouraged by one or two of them in an ill-fated attempt at standing as an abolitionist Labour MP in the doldrums of the Thirties. But the longer her activities went on, the more she seemed to gain a grudging kind of acknowledgement, the result, Swaffer thought, due more to her sheer tenacity than to the actual public mood.

  It was therefore no surprise that she began to bombard him with letters about Gordon Cummins the moment the ink was fresh on the paper that proclaimed his murder charge. What was new was this title she was now giving herself, as if she had finally become an organisation, rather than a one-woman campaign. This was not the impression Swaffer garnered from those gathered around her: a bunch of meaty-armed Brixton housewives with headscarves over their curlers – and cleavers in their overalls, no doubt – a greasy-haired young man wearing an expensive camel coat with padded shoulders and a bleached blonde in a rabbit fur. It was only the threat implied in her latest missive and his editor’s reaction to it that had brought him to meet her.

  “Miss Bracewell,” Swaffer took a deep breath and doffed his stovepipe hat.

  “About time.” Even in matronly middle-age, she still retained a certain glamour, thanks to a highly skilled paint job, diamonds that flashed in her earlobes, a pillbox hat with an ostrich feather bobbing on its crown and a fox-fur collar to her coat. The only thing she had never managed to iron out was
the accent of her youth, still ending each word she pronounced with an upward whine. “We’ve been sat here twenty minutes waiting for yow.”

  Swaffer gave her his most charming smile and took the chair opposite that had pointedly not been offered to him. “Well,” he said, “there is a war on.”

  Miss Bracewell pointed a pudgy finger, encased in black-lace gloves, accusingly. “Yow’d better take note of what I have to say this time, Mr Swaffer,” she said. “This time it’s not just the abhorrence of the death sentence we will be protesting against. It’s the evidence that has come to my attention that yower friend, Chief Inspector Greenaway, did not act properly during the course of his investigations.”

  Now she was getting to it. Pulling his notepad from his frock coat, Swaffer flicked it open and then reached for his pen. He sat, poised and cross-legged in an exaggeratedly theatrical pose.

  “Go on then, my dear,” he encouraged. “I’m all ears.”

  Miss Bracewell sat back, turned her head towards the tarty blonde in the rabbit fur. “Go on, Doris,” she ordered imperiously. “Yow tell him.”

  – . –

  “Is this how it normally goes?” Spooner hissed in Duch’s ear.

  The room had been arranged so that the rows of seats faced towards the specially constructed cabinet in which Mrs Duncan sat in an armchair, curtains draped on either side of her. The sitters blinked in the gloom of a single red bulb, from a lamp behind them. Mrs Duncan, her eyes shut, slumped backwards, arms lolling over the arms of the chair, head lowered on her chest. Groans rose up from her throat, getting louder as the air gradually became infused with a briny, bodily aroma.

  “No,” Duch admitted, wrinkling her nose. “I can’t say I’ve ever seen it done quite this way before. Leastways, not here.”

  A white cloud began to manifest itself around the dark form of the medium, first floating around her head while it grew more substantial, then spilling down to the floor in front of her in a cascade. The room was filled with sharp intakes of breath, murmurings of astonishment. Then, billowing, tremulous, the cloud began to rise up in front of the sitters and take on a human form, filling out into the shape of a man – but with a black hole where the face should be.

  “What a pleasure it is to see so many of you gathered here.” The voice that floated forth from this apparition also seemed to tremble between two worlds, those of male and female. The being hovered for a moment in the centre of the front row, then moved closer towards where Daphne, Duch and Spooner were seated.

  “And some have travelled far to be here, seeking answers to their woes.”

  A ghostly arm reached out in the half-light, a hand touched Spooner’s knee.

  – . –

  “Well,” said Doris, “what happened was, I had some information that I thought could help the police catch the Blackout Ripper. Only I didn’t know what to do about it.”

  “Go to your nearest police station, I should have thought,” said Swaffer.

  One of the Brixton housewives thumped a fist down on the table. “That ain’t the way fings is done round here,” she informed him. “We don’t just go running to the bogeys with our business. We sort it aht between ourselves first.”

  The youth in the camel coat put a comforting arm around Doris’s shoulder. “It was a delicate situation,” he explained in a more reasonable tone. “Doris come to me to ask what she should do. She wants to tell the bogeys what she knows, ’cos she’s scared for her life of this Ripper. But on the other hand, she don’t want to end up getting pinched herself for how she come to know what she knows, if you see what I mean.”

  “She was afraid of being judged on her profession and not being taken seriously?” Swaffer divined.

  “Yeah,” said the youth, “somefink like that. Any road up, I tell Doris that we all know Chief Inspector Greenaway round here, and if there’s anyone who she can trust to tell this information to, then it’s him, right?”

  Doris’s bottom lip trembled. “That’s right,” she echoed, looking down at her gin.

  “And what was this information, my dear?” Swaffer asked her gently. She looked back up at him, her eyes moist and hesitant between the caked-on layers of mascara.

  “Some friends of mine,” she said, “had a run-in with this airman on Piccadilly. One of them took him back with her but it didn’t go quite right. He paid her up front but then he couldn’t do nuffink.” Though she had gone through this part over and over again, Doris still found her memory of the overheard conversation in the York Minster pub disintegrating as she attempted to put it into words. “So she tried to chivvy him along and then he …”

  She stopped, looked up at Swaffer helplessly, the words dying on her tongue. Her companion came swiftly to her aid.

  “He started to strangle her,” he said, leaning forward in a confidential, man-to-man gesture, “and that’s when he spent his load.” He winked at Swaffer. “That’s the bit what gets to her, see. She don’t like talking about it.”

  “And when did this happen?” Swaffer asked him.

  “It was Monday the ninth,” the youth replied smoothly. “Ain’t that right, love?”

  “That’s right,” said Doris, rolling her frightened eyes back up at Swaffer. “Though I didn’t actually see my friends until the Wednesday.”

  “And they asked you to tell the police for them?” Swaffer could not easily discern where this was going, only that the girl’s story had many similarities to the one the Duchess’s friend Lil had told him on Tuesday the tenth, after she had heard it from the mouth of the woman who was attacked. The date tallied, if not the precise details.

  “No, it weren’t that exactly,” said Doris. “They asked me to draw a picture of him for them and then go to the police, so they could use it to warn all the other girls.”

  “She’s very good at drawing, see,” the youth put in helpfully.

  “So I had a couple of goes at it, got it to how they said he looked,” said Doris. “Then I come and see Johnny and he arranged this meeting with me and Inspector Greenaway.”

  “And then what happened?” Swaffer enquired.

  “Police brutality, that’s what happened!” Miss Bracewell reared back up. “Instead of passing on this piece of very useful information in confidence, Inspector Greenaway marched this poor girl back to his station and made her spend the night in the cells, while he went out and arrested Cummins on the strength of her drawing!”

  Swaffer ignored her. “In what way was Inspector Greenaway brutal to you, dear?” he asked Doris.

  The witness shrank into her seat. “He took my picture,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper, “and used it to get Cummins. But I never saw Cummins, did I?”

  “Which tends to rather cast doubt on the veracity of his arrest, wouldn’t you think?” Miss Bracewell parried. “How can we be sure he even got the right man, and not just the first person he saw wearing a moustache and an RAF forage cap?”

  “That is a somewhat perilous accusation to make, Miss Bracewell,” said Swaffer. “Especially to someone who knows a lot more about the facts than you do.” He turned back to Doris. “And where is it you really work, my dear?” he pressed on. “Gladys’s Hairdressing Salon of Piccadilly, is it? Or the York Minster, somewhere like that?”

  “What d’you mean by that?” the youth’s face curdled into a hostile sneer even as Doris’s open-mouthed stare gave her game away.

  “Miss Bracewell,” said Swaffer, closing his notebook and putting it away. “Where did you first learn of this injustice? These people came to you, did they?”

  “They certainly did,” she replied, puffing herself out. “They knew I could be relied upon. I told them yow wouldn’t have it, that yow’d only stick up for him, I know yow’re all in it together. But this time, so are we.”

  “Hence this new name you’re trading under,” Swaffer concluded. “And did you, by any chance, pay these people for their information?” He looked firmly at the greasy youth as he said this, received
a smirk in reply. Miss Bracewell ignored the question.

  “Know this, Mr Swaffer,” she said. “I’ve filed a petition to the Home Secretary and the moment we leave here, we will be starting a vigil outside Brixton Prison that’ll last for as long as Gordon Cummins remains incarcerated.”

  “Oh dear,” said Swaffer, getting to his feet.

  The Campaign Against Capital Punishment rose as one, two of the Brixton housewives reaching for the banner proclaiming Cummins’s innocence that had, until now, been concealed behind their united front.

  “Stick this up yer front page,” one of them challenged him as they unfurled it.

  “He hasn’t got the guts,” said Miss Bracewell. “He likes to call himself a socialist, but just listen to him! He’s a lackey of the state like they all are!”

  “Madam,” Swaffer drew himself up to his full height, “I will have you know the Home Secretary is a very dear friend of mine and I have no doubt he will treat your petition in exactly the same way as I will treat this story. By showing it the door!” With that, he turned on his heel and made his exit. Thankfully, he had asked his driver to wait for him.

  “Take me to Archer Street,” Swaffer said. “As fast as is humanly possible.”

  26

  RIPTIDE

  Saturday, 21 February 1942

  As the night drew on and the pubs emptied, all the cells around Parnell filled up, four-or five-men deep by the sound of it, although he had obviously been singled out for the solitary treatment. The clamour cut through his attempts to keep distracting himself with the cards. As the witching hour struck, spectres came back to haunt him, images of faces swirling around the confines of his tiny, locked room.