Without the Moon

by Cathi Unsworth

  Edith Cavendish-Field. Joseph Muldoon. Ken ‘Snakehips’ Johnson.

  It was the latter of these three that had inadvertently brought the other two together. Parnell’s mind travelled back to the beginning of the previous year, down Old Compton Street to a green-painted door with a Judas hole. A winking of an eyeball and through that portal, down a set of stairs into a crowded, smoke-filled basement, where the greatest performer he had ever seen in his life was on stage in full flight.

  Ken Johnson, from British Guiana, taught to move by Buddy Bradley who had coached Fred Astaire. All six-foot-four-inches of him, all lithe and beautiful: black suit, white shirt, black skin, white carnation in his lapel. Tails flying from his hips and honey dripping from his lips.

  Another voice beside him as the first set ended, cutting through the applause, bringing Parnell’s mind back from the faraway flights he’d been riding on.

  “… somethin’ else, ain’t he? Buddy, thought I’d seen the best of them, you know, Calloway and Henderson, but this guy steals the lick on all of those cats. How the heck does he move like that?” The speaker looked like a Mediterranean pirate with his hooked nose, thick lips, olive skin and black curls snaking out of the tartan cap that perched sideways on his head.

  “You look like you know a thing or two about jazz,” he went on, his eyes glittering as they travelled up and down Parnell’s pinstriped suit, taking in the wide shoulders and lapels, the generous turn-ups on his trousers and the pointed, shiny shoes beneath. “And a lot of other things, I’ll bet.” He took his cap off, ran long fingers through his hair. A waft of his cologne, all pirate’s rum and spices, reached Parnell’s nose.

  “Joe Muldoon,” he said and stuck his hand out. “’S’cuse the uniform. Ain’t really my regular style, you dig?”

  Parnell finally remembered how to say his own name, laughed and returned the handshake. “So, you’re not over here on your holidays, then?” Cringing inwardly as he said it, the sort of thing his granddad would have come out with. Muldoon didn’t seem to mind, responded with an equally corny line.

  “Yeah, some vacation this turned out to be. Still, there’s fun to be had if you know where to look for it, right? Hey, you want a cigarette?” Offering him a packet of Lucky Strike, then lighting him up with a brand new Zippo, he added: “There’s plenty more where that came from …”

  The thought of cigarettes snapped Parnell out of his reverie. He patted his pockets in what he knew was a futile gesture: he may have kept his cards safe from the Duty Sergeant but that was all. He got up from the bunk, stretched himself, walked up and down the cell a few times to try to shake off the craving. In the cells beyond, someone started singing ‘Danny Boy’ in a voice that had not been made for such delicate work. A couple of other barroom crooners joined in, raising the feel of the place to that of an alleyway full of stray hounds. Parnell sat back down on his bunk, reshuffled his deck of cards.

  Edith’s face replaced Muldoon’s in his mind, the backdrop shifting from the New Harlem bottle party in January 1941 to the dining room of Mole Cottage in the summer of 1939, the night still warm although the moon was high in the blue velvet sky beyond the diamond-hatched windows. Edith was putting his post-theatre dinner down on the table in front of him, a thick slice of game pie, mashed potatoes, carrots and green beans, all covered in a simmering lake of gravy.

  “You’re early tonight,” she noted, lingering by the table as he tucked in. She knew she was a good cook and she liked to see a man enjoy her work.

  “The others went off carousing,” he told her, “but I couldn’t wait no longer for this.”

  “Good.” Edith’s smile lit up her handsome face. “Would you like a beer to go with that?” she offered. “Or a glass of wine, perhaps? I keep a few good bottles to share with those who appreciate the finer things.”

  Parnell had known she had her eye on him, had deliberately left the others to it that evening precisely to see what would happen when he was alone with her.

  “You do the magic act, don’t you?” she asked, when she had cleared away his empty plate and settled down on the chair opposite, pouring them both another glass from the already half-empty decanter.

  “That’s right,” Parnell dabbed his face with the crisp, white napkin before he took another sip, savouring the richness of both the drink and his surrounds.

  “Is it all an act?” she asked, rolling the stem of her goblet around in her fingers and studying him carefully.

  “How d’you mean?” Parnell noting the growing intensity in her gaze, wanted to carefully gauge where this was leading.

  She smiled, shrugged. “I wonder if you’ll think I’m being silly,” she said, “but I’ve always wanted to know. Is everything you do in your act just a trick that anyone can learn, given the time, or do you have to have some sort of … I don’t quite know how to put it … a gift for it?”

  “You mean,” Parnell read the signals of her hesitation, “a gift like how the Spiritualists mean it? Sort of a sixth sense?”

  He saw colour rise in her cheeks. “I knew you’d think I was being silly,” she said, looking away from him and raising her glass to her lips.

  “Not at all,” said Parnell. “It’s a question a lot of people ask. But did you know that magicians are forbidden to reveal their secrets?”

  Edith raised her perfectly plucked eyebrows. “Is that so?” she said, smile returning.

  “Aye,” said Parnell, “it is. You’ll have me drummed out of the Magic Circle if you press me on the subject. What I can tell you is that what I do up on stage is like an art form that needs constant working on, it’s got nowt to do with the supernatural. But what drew me towards wanting to learn this art form in the first place,” he lowered his tone to a whisper, “was experiences I’ve had in life that have seemed to suggest I do have some sort of a gift for the other.”

  Edith’s pupils widened. This was what she wanted to hear. “Is that so?” she said. “What kind of experiences do you mean?”

  Parnell focused the full beam of his saucer-shaped brown eyes on her and lifted her right hand up off the table. Pressing it gently, he told her: “Seeing people who aren’t really there. Like the man I can see standing behind you now, wearing his colonel’s uniform.”

  Edith jerked her hand away. “My husband!” she cried, turning to scour the empty room behind her as if she expected him to have crept up on them. “Oh, my!” she turned back to Parnell, covering her mouth with her hand. “Is he really there?”

  Parnell looked into the empty space behind her, summoning all the details he had memorised from the photograph in her study and the conversations he’d had in the pub down the road, where Edith and her intrigues were a major topic of conversation. “He’s about six-foot-two, with dark, wavy hair and blue eyes. Very powerfully built, could have been a heavyweight boxer, but when he smiles you can see what kind of a man he really is, there’s laughter lines all over his face. That sound like him to you?”

  “Oh, I say,” said Edith. “Oh, it does.”

  “See, I don’t pick when this kind of thing happens to me,” Parnell returned his gaze to Edith’s. “It’s more like they choose me. He’s been waiting for a long time to have this conversation. Three years now, in’t it, since he passed away?”

  Edith nodded, her fingers still trembling by her lips.

  “Well, your husband wants me to let you know that you don’t have to go on worrying for him any more. It were sudden, like, how he left, and he knows it were a shock for you, but he’s found himself in a much better place now and he’ll be waiting there for you when your time comes.”

  Edith’s smile drooped a little at this information. Parnell gave a chuckle, nodding and winking at the space above her head. “Right you are, sir,” he said, looking back at Edith. “He’s just said he knows that happy day is still going to be some while off yet, love. He wants you to get on and enjoy your life as best you can until then, and not to spend any more of your time in mourning.”

>   “Does he really?” Edith’s smile returned. This was more than she had dared hope.

  “Aye,” Parnell said, his smile on equally full wattage. “You have his blessing.”

  “Mr Parnell,” tears sparkled in Edith’s eyes as she reached for his hand across the table. “How can I ever thank you?”

  – . –

  Free board and lodgings, best steak, the odd bottle from the Colonel’s cellar and his collection of cigars were amongst the tokens of Edith’s gratitude Parnell received for that night and the subsequent “readings” he was to give her each time business took him back to Leatherhead, though the magic act tailed off after he made the acquaintance of Sammy Lehmann and Bluebell at the Entre Nous in the winter of that year. In exchange for them sorting out his problem with the RAF, he put his skills to other uses for them. The work that they sent him out to do still often involved out-of-town driving at antisocial hours, making Mole Cottage a convenient bolthole. He had some business cards made up to present himself as a travelling salesman and told Edith that, valued private clients like herself aside, he could make better money this way while the war was on, further enhancing the illusion by slipping her the odd item of contraband on his visits.

  For Parnell genuinely liked Edith. He enjoyed her company and the ongoing saga of her liaisons at the Running Horse that she would confide in him over another bottle of the Colonel’s wine, or a couple of Gin-and-Its, when the rest of the household was asleep. So when Muldoon tipped him the wink about the consignments of cigarettes due for his army base and the roads along which they’d be travelling before they could get there, it seemed the ideal set-up.

  The cards now in disarray across the grubby, grey blanket that covered his bunk, Parnell slumped against the wall. It felt as clammy as he was, and once more he felt the need to loosen his tie and undo another button on his shirt, forcing down the memories he knew he would have to find some way of confronting when Greenaway came knocking at the door, the question he would have to answer himself before that moment came, in order to be ready for it.

  Despite everything that went down in Leatherhead, could he really help Greenaway send Joe to the gallows?

  – . –

  “I was hoping you’d be here, dear boy,” Swaffer’s eyes alighted on Greenaway at the bar of the Entre Nous. “Might I have a word?”

  “Swaff,” Greenaway turned from his companion, an equally robust plainclothes detective with thick, fair hair, and greeted the journalist with more enthusiasm than Swaffer had seen since all this Murder Squad business first began. “Can I introduce DI Bill Bright from Charing Cross? We’re just drinking to our chances of getting another sinner bang to rights.”

  “Delighted,” said Swaffer, taking Bright’s massive paw in his long, nicotine-stained fingers. “Am I to surmise you have the culprit from Waterloo Bridge?”

  “On the nose as ever, Swaff,” said Greenaway, exuding bonhomie and something more, a sparkle of excitement in his eyes that had been missing for a long time. Swaffer swallowed, hoping his own news wouldn’t do too much to quash it.

  “Charged the bastard this evening, the arraignment’s first thing Monday morning, if you want to put that in your social diary.” Greenaway waggled his eyebrows and then leaned back on the counter to survey the room with a satisfied air.

  Swaffer followed his gaze to a familiar-looking group clustered around the table nearest to the stage. There he discerned the menacing bulk of Moishe ‘Bluebell’ Abraham and his accomplice the Bear, in contrasting sapphire-glinting pinstripes and business brown worsted, their brilliantined heads locked together over the glass ashtray at the centre of their table as they telegraphed malevolence back in Greenaway’s direction with every flick of ash and muttered curse. Sitting with them, but slightly apart, was a woman whose raven-black hair was sculpted upwards into gravity-defying rolls, dressed in a blue satin gown straight out of a Parisian couturier’s and a mink stole. She was leaning back in her chair, blowing smoke rings to the ceiling in an exaggerated show of boredom, her long false eyelashes batting slowly and insolently as her manicured fingers played around the stem of a champagne glass. She took occasional glances towards her two companions then exhaled again. As lean and angular as her husband was heavy and rotund, this was Ava, Bluebell’s wife.

  At once Swaffer realised why his old friend appeared so chipper. “Ah,” he said. “This has something to do with the Lehmann firm.”

  “It might,” said Greenaway. “But they don’t know what yet. All they know is I’ve got one of theirs spending a sweaty night down the cells in connection with a murder they currently know nishte of. I’m just wondering how long it’ll take those two to puzzle it out, ’cos I’m laying two to one on that they ain’t gonna get there before morning.” He smiled, winked and turned back round to face Swaffer. “Anyway, you wanted to tell me something.”

  “It would be better said in private.” Swaffer looked apologetically towards Bright.

  “I see,” said Greenaway, “protecting your sources at all times, eh, Swaff?”

  Bright looked down, checked his wristwatch. “About time I pushed off anyway,” he said. “Nice to meet you, Mr Swaffer, and Ted, good luck, I’ll see you Monday.”

  – . –

  “What did you make of Mrs Duncan then, Daph?”

  The Duchess and Daphne stood at the sink in Miss Moyes’s kitchen. There was a mountain of the night’s crockery and cutlery to be breached, but Duch had volunteered on the basis that clearing it up was the best way to circulate the room and hear what everybody had made of the extraordinary night’s entertainment.

  Ross Spooner had needed the assistance of several more glasses of sherry to come to terms with being on the receiving end of the first manifestation of the evening. It had been one of Mrs Duncan’s spirit guides, a little girl called Peggy, who assured him that the spirits knew he had chosen the right path and sung him an encouraging verse of ‘Loch Lomond’ before melting back into the ether.

  Others had been delighted by what Mrs Duncan had brought for them. Old Mr Worth, the man in the bath chair, had a visitation from his aunt, who’d recently died from bowel trouble. Mr Hillyard, the caretaker, had his brother come through, speaking in a Yorkshire accent, to tell him he didn’t think much of the medium, she was too fat – which proved beyond all doubt that it was him. A lady whose son was missing in action, received a soldier killed in an explosion in Singapore, telling her that he would always remain by her side, for which she wept in gratitude.

  Once the human spirits had exhausted themselves, animals had come through. Duch had learned that the parrot who’d appeared to screech: “Pretty Polly!” at them was another of Mrs Duncan’s regular spirit guides, who went by the name of Bronco. This evening, he had been joined by a cat and a rabbit – actually rather shapeless, white oblongs, Duch had thought – before the show came to a dramatic climax with Mrs Duncan lurching out of her cabinet, flailing her arms and crashing down next to her husband. After being revived by him, with the help of a lit cigarette, the lights went back up and the Duncans themselves melted away into the night, leaving a lot of excited chatter in their wake.

  Daphne, who was on wiping duty, picked up a glass. “Well, you know I’m not an expert in these matters,” she said. “When I was first introduced to her, I’m afraid I found her somewhat menacing – and her husband. I was surprised Miss Moyes had asked such people to come here. Of course, I had no idea that such an extraordinary reputation preceded her.”

  “And does it?” Duch held another glass up to the light. “That’s news to me and all.”

  “Apparently so,” said Daphne. “Miss Moyes told me that Mrs Duncan rarely comes to London any more, though she caused rather a stir here in the Thirties – made herself some powerful enemies as well as friends, apparently.”

  “Oh yeah?” said Duch. “Like who?”

  “There’s a fellow from the National Laboratory of Psychical Research, if you know what that is?” said Daphne. “Harry Price. He�
��s one of them. Keeps trying to expose her as a fraud, even though she’s been examined God knows how many times by experts before she gives her exhibitions. So she’s set up a new circle at a church in Portsmouth, where she’s apparently doing tremendously well.”

  “Portsmouth?” The glasses were flying through Duch’s fingers now, her interest in their condition waning in direct proportion to her attention to Daphne’s story. “What would you want to go there for?”

  “Our biggest naval base,” said Daphne, “in the middle of a war? Of course she’s going to get an audience there – think about it. All those families whose nearest and dearest are in daily peril from the sea …” She raised her eyebrows.

  “’Course,” said Duch. “So,” she shot Daphne an appraising look, “you think her doubters might have a point, then?”

  “Miss Moyes is adamant in her support for Mrs Duncan and I don’t want to be disloyal. You know how much it means to me, working here.” Daphne lowered her voice to a whisper. “But just between you and me, after tonight’s showing I rather think they might.”

  Duch chuckled, shook her head. “I hope you didn’t say anything of the sort to poor Mr Spooner. Would have broken his heart. I must make sure I get hold of a copy of this magazine he works for, ’cos I can’t wait to read his report on meeting little Peggy on the bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond.”

  Daphne snorted with laughter. “Oh God!” she said. “I thought he was going to jump through the roof when that thing touched him! Honestly, though, what on earth do you think it actually was?”

  “I wouldn’t like to say,” said Duch, recalling the odour that had permeated the parlour during the séance. “But I don’t think I’d have wanted it touching me either.”

  “No,” said Daphne, her expression turning sterner. “And I’m not altogether sure what you were up to with that man either, but I could swear you were encouraging Mr Spooner to be more than a little friendly towards me.”