Duch batted her lashes. “What, me?” she said. “Whatever gave you that idea?”
27
SING, SING, SING
Saturday, 21 February 1942
Long after the drunks had exhausted their repertoire and loud snores became the soundtrack of the cells, the man in solitary could not find oblivion. Parnell could only lie on his bunk, scenes flickering behind his closed eyelids of the nights he’d spent with Joe.
Upstairs in his office, Greenaway had given up on the idea of sleep, too. Swaffer’s news about Olive Bracewell had sent him back through his files on Cummins to double-check there was not a hair out of place. By the time he was satisfied that he could hang the killer four times over with his evidence it was too late to go home. Greenaway had never had much trouble catching a nap at his desk, but now, each time he shut his eyes, he was back in the old nightmare that had resurfaced from his childhood on the night he caught Cummins. Back in that dark cold room, with the dark cold lump on the bed in front of him. Only now there was a new twist to it. As always, he moved towards the bed against his will, as if he was a puppet that someone else was manipulating. He felt his hands close on the dirty grey blanket, tried to turn his head away as he lifted it up but found he could not move his neck. His eyes were locked in close-up, and in full-colour, to the entire oeuvre of Cummins’s crimes as the woman on the bed changed from Evelyn Bourne to Evelyn Bettencourt, to Phyllis Law, to Claudette Coles and finally to Margaret McArthur, who, lying on the hospital trolley in the morgue, opened her eyes, but they were not her eyes they were green eyes, and said in a familiar voice: “You took your bleedin’ time, Ted. How many more of us do there have to be, eh?”
He gave up after thirty minutes, went out to catch the morning’s papers being delivered to the newsstands and brought a sheaf of them back to the canteen for inspection.
Though Swaff had immediately seen through the story he was being peddled in the Effra Arms, his editor was keen on Bracewell as an eccentric character and so likely to send him back to Brixton to report on her protest, as well as follow up on the progress of her petition. Leafing through the rest of the linens, Greenaway could catch no further scent of her works yet. But there was still plenty of time for more mischief-making; Cummins didn’t come to trial for another month.
Five chicory coffees and one plate of watery eggs and toast later, Greenaway made his way down to the cells. His mind rested briefly on Doris, and how he had hoped her night behind bars would have put her off having anything more to do with the lowlife she was flirting with. But she was clearly up to her neck in it now. The only thing he couldn’t adequately explain to Swaff about the whole set-up was Madeline Harcourt’s reaction to Doris’s drawing – how the seemingly witless art student had managed to forge such a potent likeness of Cummins from her eavesdropping.
Swaff would have to consult with the spirits on that one.
– . –
Parnell, his memory having returned to a bedroom in Mole Cottage, could almost smell rum and spices when the hatch on his door clanged open and a voice announced: “Rise and shine!”
Greenaway was at least reassured that his interviewee had had an even worse night of it than he had as he observed the shaky, sallow figure that tottered off his bunk, gathering up his pack of cards and the tie that he’d flung to the corner of the room.
“What time is it?” asked Parnell.
“Half-past seven,” Greenaway replied. “I hope that’s given you long enough to collect your thoughts.”
“Half-past seven?” Parnell repeated. “But you’ve not even charged us yet!”
“It might not come to that, Parnell,” Greenaway said, tapping the side of his nose. “Depends on how much I like what I hear.”
“You got any smokes?” asked Parnell.
– . –
In the interview room, Greenaway lit two cigarettes. “Start at the beginning, Parnell,” he instructed, passing one over. “How did you first meet Private Joseph Muldoon?”
Parnell inhaled, the nicotine racing through him, returning his mind to a more even keel. If this was an official grilling, he realised, then Greenaway was supposed to have another officer present.
“What’s in it for me to tell you owt?” he asked. “I mean, I know you could beat the shit out of me if I don’t talk, and that you’d probably enjoy it. But then again,” he raised his eyebrows, “so might I. You never know, do you?”
Greenaway returned his smile and cracked his knuckles. “I’ll tell you what you enjoy, Parnell, and that’s your liberty. You want to go on enjoying it, don’t you? Only, thanks to that nice Mrs Cavendish-Field, I now have the evidence to link you and Muldoon to a couple of NAAFI cigarette hijackings that took place near Leatherhead in March 1941. You want me to overlook these new leads,” Greenaway spread his hands, the gesture of a reasonable broker, “then I would have thought that was good enough reason to co-operate. But,” the fingers moved back together, forming a steeple as the detective shifted forwards, “if you need another, it’s quite simple. Muldoon’s a nasty bastard and I want him to swing. As such, I’m prepared to overlook more minor misdemeanours in my quest to take him to the gallows. As you can see,” the palms opened once more, “there’s no one else listening.”
Parnell weighed up the value of these words in the greater scheme of his life and the question he had been struggling with all night. He had never thought himself capable of grassing. But after what had gone down in Leatherhead, there was a part of him that wanted to assist Greenaway in his not unreasonable aim. After all – and this was what he kept coming back to – it could so easily have been Edith’s neck on the receiving end of those murderous hands of Joe’s. And whose fault would that have been?
“On the level?” he said. “If I tell you all I know about Muldoon then I walk away from here like we never met?”
“You make it sound so romantic, Parnell,” said Greenaway. “But that’s about the gist of it, yeah. So if we’ve got the niceties out of the way …?”
“OK,” Parnell looked down, imagined a spread of cards fanning out before him, the Jack of Diamonds face up. “I was at the New Harlem bottle party, back in January last year, to see Snakehips Johnson. Soldier-boy sparked up a conversation with us. It were about the music, like, but he was sussing us out at the same time. Comparing British swing to what they’ve got in North America; Snakehips and Hutch with Fletcher Henderson and Cab Calloway. Dropping hints that he come from a land of plenty and had access to the spoils. He wasn’t green to the graft, if I got his drift.”
“He was touting for business, then?” said Greenaway.
Parnell nodded. “Yeah. And Joe weren’t interested in any smalltime pilfering. He needed help with what he had in mind.”
“The cigarette lorries,” said Greenaway.
Parnell shrugged. Talking about Muldoon was one thing, the business he did for the firm another matter. Even if no one else was listening.
Greenaway divined his hesitation. “So you set up a meet in Leatherhead. And how exactly did Mrs Cavendish-Field fit into this rosy picture?”
“Good old Edith.” Parnell smiled, picturing the Queen of Hearts, face up on the pack. “I’ve known her for years.”
“Is that so?” said Greenaway. “Convince a cynical old man how that unlikely statement might prove to be true.”
“Like this,” said Parnell. He closed his fist over his cigarette, raised his right arm and opened it again. His palm was empty. Then leaned forward, put his left hand behind Greenaway’s ear and appeared to produce the still-smoking fag from behind it. “Magic,” he said, snapping his fingers.
For a second, Greenaway was back in his nightmare, flashing back to the bubbles of blood around Claudette Coles’s mouth, and he slapped his neck in reflex. Parnell read it as a nervous reaction.
“I were in this variety act, see,” he said, a grin extending across his face. “Played her local fleapit the summer before the war. Edith were one of the few landladies who’d tak
e in theatricals. She didn’t mind doing the late meals and, in fact, she loved it – looked on it as her chance to get in on all the gossip.”
“Found you amusing, did she?” said Greenaway, grimacing, annoyed at his own momentary loss of control.
“When she found out I did the magic turn, she did, aye.” Parnell winked. “Took it to mean I was some sort of medium – she were not long widowed back then, see. Wanted me to tell her what her old Colonel was up to on the Other Side. And, not being one to disappoint, I made up some old spiel about him being happy and wanting her to enjoy the life she had left. You know, the sort of thing them Spiritualists go in for.” Parnell smirked. “And it seemed to do the trick.”
“Very considerate of you,” said Greenaway. “So, you gained her trust with your sleight of hand and then what? Some kind of long game? You and Muldoon was out to fleece her on top of the other job you were pulling?”
To Greenaway’s relief, the smile fell from Parnell’s face. “No,” the Maestro said. “Not at all. I was just having a bit of fun with the pair of them, at his expense, mainly. I never expected her to fall for him.”
“What, respectable Mrs Cavendish-Field and a lowlife like Muldoon?” Happier still, Greenaway feigned surprise at his own conclusions being confirmed. “How did that happen?”
“Don’t seem likely, does it?” Parnell admitted. “But you want to try and understand Edith, you start with her natural habitat. There’s this pub near her house called the Running Horse. Ha! Phoney Pony, more like. That’s where all the proper gentry mix it up with those with an eye for the main chance. And Edith acts like a honeypot. Every fake general and dodgy vicar in Surrey come buzzing around her, vying for her hand, ’cos they think the Colonel left her a fortune. She wouldn’t be renting her house out if he did, like, but she knows how to deal with them sort. Had a pack of the buggers on a string, paying for her social life and getting nowt in return but a nudge and a wink.” Parnell sighed. “It were only with Joe that she didn’t have a clue.”
“Seeing as you’re such a keen student of psychology,” Greenaway offered his cigarette case a second time, “how d’you work out he done it?”
Parnell gladly accepted another smoke. Despite his surroundings – and his listener – he found a curious relief in being able to recount the tale. “I set him a task, didn’t I?” he explained. “Joe was due to meet us in Leatherhead one Friday lunchtime. I sent him to the Phoney Pony, knowing that Edith would already have a date lined up with one of her drooling admirers, but she always turned up early to see if there was owt better going on. Gave him half an hour to see how far he’d get.” Parnell raised his eyebrows. “Thought I’d see him outside, head first in the water trough. But, I totally underestimated him.”
“Why, what did he do to her?” Greenaway asked.
“Well, according to him …” Parnell leaned in closer. “He’s got there first, so while he waits for Edith to show, he practises his chat-up lines on the barmaid. She tells him all the pub folklore, including the nice little detail that it were once the centre of an Elizabethan smuggling ring. Then Edith appears. Joe starts off making a fuss of her dog. He’s in his uniform, so straight off she can see he’s just a lowly private, but she can hardly refuse to talk to him. And with what he’s just learned from the barmaid, he seems quite clever, like he’s really interested in the local surroundings. He does a bit of forelock tugging about discovering his roots – he’s in a Highland regiment after all, and Edith knows all about grouse shooting in the Cairngorms. So she goes on talking to him, trying to work him out. By the time I get there, she’s so intrigued she’s virtually horizontal. Meanwhile, the rest of her would-be suitors can only look on aghast while this strip of a lad swans off with all their pension plans. I got to hand it to him. He were better than Laurence Olivier that day.”
Greenaway’s mind shifted again, back to Freda Stevens in her sister’s hallway, talking about Cummins: “Not so very far from an actor, when you think about it.”
“Muldoon ever tell you about his time in France?” he asked.
Parnell frowned. “Not that I recall. Why, did he see some action out there?”
“A bit,” said Greenaway. “He was at Dunkirk. Him and forty-four others of his outfit held the line at La Bassée canal for five hours until the tank regiment got through. By which time, there was only seven of them left.”
Parnell’s stare intensified as Greenaway relayed this information, his head shaking from side to side, as if something that had up until then been a mystery to him was finally being explained. He ran a finger around his collar, loosening the careful knot he had put in his tie between the cells and the interview room.
“That’ll account for it, then,” he finally said. “Bloody hell.”
“Mrs Cavendish-Field told me you’d had a falling out,” Greenaway pressed on. “What was it about?”
The shaky, sickly expression Greenaway had noted in the cells stole back over Parnell’s face. Greenaway opened his cigarette case on the desk between them.
“Have as many as you like,” he said.
Parnell nodded. “A week after that,” he said, “we’re back in the Phoney Pony, making out like any door-to-door salesman and off-duty soldier would do of a Friday night.” His mind spun backwards, to an oak-panelled snug, thick with smoke and the plummy chatter of Surrey voices exchanging the price of hay. Louder still was the sound of Muldoon wheedling at him, drawing unwanted attention their way.
“Only, Joe was getting a bit excitable,” he recalled, “on account of the fact that Edith had let slip to him what I did when I first met her. He was like a little kid, demanding a demonstration of me magical powers. So, to shut him up, I promised to show him a few card tricks back in me room.” An image of Bobby’s eager face snapped into Parnell’s mind as he spoke. With an effort, he pushed it away. “But it weren’t card tricks he were after, was it? No, he had this bee in his bonnet about mesmerism. Reckoned his mind was so strong that no one had ever been able to put him under.”
“What?” Greenaway thought of the sister’s letter, the “unfortunate incident” in Muldoon’s youth. “Does he make a habit of trying to get hypnotised?” he wondered aloud. Or could he have been psychoanalysed before?
“Dunno,” Parnell conceded. “But he were taking it all so serious. I told him what I did was just an act I learnt off some old fella in Brid, but he were having none of it. He bet me five quid I couldn’t hypnotise him. So …”
Parnell was back in Mole Cottage, Muldoon sitting down on his bed, his stubble blue on his chin, his pirate’s aftershave permeating every humid molecule of air in the room. An occasional table strewn with glasses of whisky, an overflowing ashtray and the Ace of Spades face up on the deck between them.
“I get out me pocket watch, dangle it in front of him and tell him to sit still and follow the motion with his eyes.”
He heard once more the sonorous ticking of the grandfather clock in the hall outside, Muldoon’s breathing getting louder and deeper.
“I tell him he’s going under. Either he’s more pissed than I thought or he’s having me on, ’cos I can see his eyelids start to flutter. I tell him he’s out and under my control and what d’you bet? He slumps like a sack of potatoes. I prod him a few times, check he’s not having me on, but no, I’ve really put him under – and in no time at all. Never mind his superior mind control, soldier boy’s totally susceptible. So, I start to think, how I can use this to my advantage? I tell him that when I click my fingers he’s going to come round, go straight to his room and get to sleep.”
“What happened?” Greenaway watched as Parnell lit another cigarette with shaking hands. The Maestro looked past his inquisitor and into the shadows beyond.
“I click my fingers,” he mimicked the action. “And he rises up off the bed like King-fucking-Kong. I start laughing, tell him his act’s definitely better than mine and he can stop doing it now. But his face don’t change, he’s all dead-eyed and breathing heavy. Then h
e says something really weird. He says: ‘Just be good now, laddie, just be good,’ puts his hands around me neck and lifts me up with a strength that don’t seem human.”
Greenaway saw Margaret McArthur’s body lying in the morgue, an abstract in black and blue. “Sounds like what he did to the woman on Waterloo Bridge,” he said. “How did you get out of it?”
“Well,” said Parnell, pulling his tie loose, “this is it, I didn’t. He’s choking the life out of me and I’m starting to black out, when I hear all this commotion, the dog barking, someone knocking at the door – only it sounds like it’s coming down a tunnel, from far away …”
Parnell had seen his life in that moment unfurl before his eyes: the terraced house in Preston under a skyline of belching chimneys and frowning moors. His father in the pub, laughing and singing. His mother in the parlour, a rod in one hand and a rosary in the other. Lessons at the day school she inveigled him into after Dad left, the punishments for not paying attention, playing the drums his only release. Going on the lam to Brid, the frustration of the show band, the consolation to be found at the old Maestro’s knee. Meeting Bluebell in the Entre Nous, a flash of familiarity in his smile, Parnell seeing the old man reflected in his face. Soapy in his barbershop, seeing something else, another kind of recognition there. Snakehips Johnson up on the stage, singing “It’s Only Make Believe” through the smoke of a crowded ballroom, the whole of the moon in his dazzling smile …
Had Parnell not been in Leatherhead that night he would have been at the Café de Paris on the eighth of March 1941, when the German bomb fell and killed his hero. Afterwards, he’d heard tell, they found Snakehips without a mark on him, his white carnation still perfect in his buttonhole.
“He must have let go of me then, dropped me on the bed,” Parnell resumed his tale. “’Cos next thing I know, I’m lying face down on the pillows and Edith’s dog’s licking me face. I’m not quite fully there, but I can hear Joe telling Edith that I’m a bit the worse for wear with the drink and he’s putting me to bed. Next thing I know, he’s left and closed the door and I’m lying there in the dark like I’m coming out of a bad dream. I get up and start retching something chronic. When I look in the mirror, there’s bright red marks all round me neck.”
Without the Moon Page 24
