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· Contents ·
Cover
Title
Dedication
I. Night at the Angel Steps
II. Morning in York
III. Afternoon in Islington
IV. Rackmoor Fog
V. Limehouse Blues
VI. The Old Red Rag
VII. Simon Says
Copyright
To my brother, Bill
· I ·
Night at the Angel Steps
1
SHE came out of the fog, her face painted half-white, half-black, walking down Grape Lane. It was early January and the sea-roke drove in from the east, turning the cobbled street into a smoky tunnel that curved down to the water. The bay was open to the full force of gales, and the scythelike curve of Grape Lane acted as a conduit for the winds from the sea. Far off the fog siren known as the Whitby Bull gave its four mournful blasts.
The wind billowed her black cape, which settled again round her ankles in an eddying wave. She wore a white satin shirt and white satin trousers stuffed into high-heeled black boots. The click of the heels on the wet stones was the only sound except for the dry gah-gah of the gulls. One strutted on a ledge above her, pecking at the windows. To avoid the wind she clung to the fronts of the tiny houses. She looked up alleyways that seemed to end in cul-de-sacs, but from which steps like hidden springs curled down to other passages. The narrow street came right up to the cottage doors and black iron bootscrapers. She stopped for a moment beneath the dim streetlamp when someone passed her on the other side of the lane. But in this fog, no one was recognizable. She could see the pub at the end of the lane by the breakwater, its windows glowing mistily like opals in the dark.
When she came to the iron gates of the Angel steps, she stopped. The wide stair was on her left and connected Grape Lane and Scroop Street above with Our Lady of the Veil, the church at the top of the village. She unlatched the gates and walked up, a long walk to a small landing where a bench served as a resting place. Someone was sitting there.
The woman in black and white took a step back and down, startled. She opened her mouth to speak. The figure had risen, two arms coming out suddenly as if jerked by strings — out, up and down. Struck again and again, the woman finally fell like a puppet and was kept from rolling down the steps only because the other one grabbed at her cape. Her body lay collapsed, sprawling, head down the steps. The other person turned and stepped over her, almost casually, and walked down the Angel steps back to Grape Lane, keeping close to the wall so as not to step in the blood.
It was Twelfth Night.
2
“Certain kinds of people have always got away with murder!” Adrian Rees slammed his glass on the bar. He had been extolling the virtues of Russian literature and Raskolnikov.
No one in the Old Fox Deceiv’d was especially interested.
Adrian tapped his empty glass with his finger. “Another, Kitty me love.”
“Don’t ‘Kitty-me-love’ me, and you’ll not be gettin’ another until I see your money.” Kitty Meechem wiped the counter where he’d banged the mug, sending his neighbor’s beer over the sides of his glass like sea spray. “Drunk as a lord.”
“Drunk is it? Ah, Kitty me gurhl . . . ” His tone was wheedling as he reached out a hand towards Kitty’s light brown locks, a hand she slapped away. “You’d not even stand one of your own countrymen?”
“Har! And yer no more Irish than me ginger cat.”
The cat in question was curled up on a scrap of rug before the blazing hearth. It was always there, like a plaster ornament. Adrian wondered when it was ever up and around enough to get the cuts and scratches it sported. “Looks lazy enough to be Irish,” said Adrian.
“Would you listen to the man? Him who spends his days dabbin’ and daubin’ and paintin’ women without a stitch on.” That comment earned a few sniggers up and down the line at the bar. “That cat does more an honest day’s work than many I know.”
Adrian leaned across the counter and stage-whispered: “Kitty, I’ll tell all Rackmoor you posed for me in the nude!”
Titters to the left, giggles to the right from Billy Sims and Corky Fishpool. Imperturbable and rocklike, Kitty merely kept swabbing down the bar. “I’ll have none a yer darty paintings and none a yer darty mouth. But” — she knifed the foam from a couple of glasses of dark beer — “only yer darty money. Or will I be seein’ any this night a tall a tall?”
Adrian looked hopefully from Billy to Corky, both of whom immediately struck up fresh conversations with those beside them. No buyers. Not for his paintings, either, which was why he had no money.
“You should be worrying about the state of your souls, not your purses!”
Corky Fishpool looked at him and picked his teeth. Adrian returned to the tale of Raskolnikov: “He came back to the conniving old woman again and again to pawn his few belongings . . . tight she was.” (And here he leveled a glance at Kitty Meechem, who ignored him.) “Then one day he crept up the stairs . . . ” Adrian’s fingers walked slowly towards Billy Sims’s glass, which was quickly pulled out of reach. “And when he got inside and her back was turned—VROOM! He let her have it.” He noticed he had drawn a few more listeners, coming up to stand behind him. But no one offered to buy. Not even Homer could get a drink out of this lot.
“What’d t’fool do that fer, it’s daft, fer a bit a money as ‘e got.” This came from Corky’s cousin, Ben Fishpool, a humorless, literal man, a beefy fisherman with a face like a slab off the cliffside, and a dragon tattooed on his forearm. He kept his own pewter mug hanging above the bar. He drank by holding it finger in handle, thumb on rim, as if making sure no one would wrest it away.
“Because he wanted to understand the nature of guilt, something you swillers of ale would not appreciate.” Adrian reached for a pickled egg in a bowl and Kitty slapped his hand away.
“Summat daft, ‘e be,” mumbled Ben, not satisfied with that explanation.
“Guilt, redemption, sin! That’s what it’s all about.” Adrian twirled round and addressed the room at large. The air was almost fruity with the pungent smoke of many tobaccos. Smoke hung suspended over the tables as if the sea-fret had crept in, penetrated the walls, slid under the door and across the sills. Adrian thought it should have been a grand place to talk about guilt and sin; the expressions of those still hanging on till closing time seemed fairly to dote on life’s being a trial. Any burst of laughter was soon quelled, as if the offender had caught himself having a giggle in a graveyard.
“Raskolnikov wanted to show that certain kinds of people could do murder and not suffer for it.” No one seemed to be listening.
“And don’t you go wheedlin’ money out a Bertie,” said Kitty, as if she hadn’t heard a word about sin, guilt nor Raskolnikov. “I seen you do that only this last week. Shameful, it is.” She flicked the bar-towel in his direction. “A grown man gettin’ beer money from a wee bairn, a pore, pore, motherless lad.”
Adrian hooted. “Bertie? A ‘pore, pore motherless lad’? Christ, he charges more interest than the banks. I think Arnold keeps the books.” Even behind those thick glasses, the kid had eyes like rivets. He’d have a confession out of Raskolnikov inside of two minutes.
“And you needn’t go sayin’ nasty things about Arnold, neither. I’ve seen Arnold walk down wee paths along these cliffs, no wider’n a wee snake. While you can’t even wal
k a straight line up to the High.”
“Ha ha ha,” said Adrian, unable to outtalk Kitty, as usual, or think of a witty reply. His eye fell on Percy Blythe’s glass of bitter. Percy Blythe’s sharp little eyes screwed up and he put his two hands quickly over the glass. Then he went back to his reading.
“Philistines! You none of you understand sin and guilt!” “That and fifty pence’ll buy you a pint,” said Kitty. “TIME, GENTLEMEN, PLEASE!”
• • •
The door slapped shut behind him and Adrian buckled up the oilskin over his blue guernsey and pulled his knitted cap down over his ears. January in Rackmoor was hell.
The Old Fox Deceiv’d was so near the water that waves once washed its outer walls. At one time, high waves had swept the bow of a ship straight through it. Finally, a seawall had been erected. The front of the pub faced the little cove where tiny boats slapped about in the water. From the north toward Whitby came the mournful dirge of the Whitby Bull.
Four narrow streets converged here: Lead Street, the High, Grape Lane and Winkle Alley. The High was the only one of them wide enough for a car, if any intrepid driver felt like daring the incredible angle of descent from the top of the village. It was on the High that Adrian lived, near the other end where the street dog-legged before continuing its gravity-defying ascent. He decided to walk along Grape Lane, though; it was not quite so steep and there were fewer booby traps of broken cobbles. Behind him as he walked he could still hear the regulars in the Fox hanging on until the quarter-hour closing. Philistines.
He heard her before he saw her.
Just as he was passing the Angel steps, he heard the tiny hammer-taps of the high heels. She came out of the fog on the other side of Grape Lane, walking towards the Angel steps and the sea. The wind whipped her black cape round her white trousers. Adrian thought he was proof against any odd sight in Rackmoor, yet he shrank back a bit against the cold stone of a cottage. For the barest moment she stopped in the arc of one of the few lamps and he took her in.
When Adrian wanted to remember something—the scattered pattern of colored leaves; the lay of the moonlight; the fold of velvet across an arm—he didn’t have to look twice. The shutter of his eye snapped it, fixed it in his memory, filed it for future reference. He had always thought that he would make one hell of a police witness.
In those few seconds beneath the lamp she was painted in his memory: the black cape, white satin shirt and pants, black boots, black cap on her head. But it was the face that was memorable. As if a line had been drawn absolutely evenly down the bridge of her nose, the left side was painted white, the right side black. And a small, black mask completed the weird, checkerboard look.
She walked on quickly toward the Angel steps and the sea, the high heels drumming back into the fog. He stood staring into nothing for a few seconds.
Then he remembered it was Twelfth Night.
3
“Shall I be Mother?”
Bertie Makepiece held the stoneware teapot aloft. It was very late to be up making tea, but with no school tomorrow, Bertie felt he could indulge himself; he’d been peckish ever since their evening meal. He was wearing an apron much too large so he had secured it with the tie running round his chest and under his arms. Now he stood with teapot poised over cup and waited patiently for Arnold’s answer.
None was forthcoming from the occupant of the other chair. One might have felt, though, looking into Arnold’s earnest eyes, that his failure to respond was not because he was a dog, but because, No, he really didn’t want to be Mother.
Arnold was a Staffordshire terrier the color of a Yorkshire pudding or a fine, dry sherry. The unnervingly steady look of his dark eyes might have made one think he was not a dog at all, but someone doing an impersonation, zipped up in a dog suit. He was a quiet dog; seldom did he bark. It was as if he had decided one couldn’t make it through life on mouth alone. The other village dogs followed him, but respectfully, at a distance. Arnold was a dog’s dog. Whenever he snuffled along walks and through alleyways, he always gave the impression of being onto something big.
“Did you hear something, Arnold?”
Arnold had nearly finished the milk in his bowl — laced with a bit of tea — and sat up, ears pricked.
Bertie slid off his chair and padded over to the window. Their cottage on Scroop Street was wedged between two others: one belonged to some summer people and the other to old Mrs. Fishpool who put out scraps for Arnold which he took up the alley and buried in the dustbin.
The Makepiece cottage was near the Angel steps. The hardier parishoners trudged up them every Sunday to Our Lady. Looking out and down, Bertie could see nothing through the fog except the ghostly outlines of peaked roofs and chimney pots below.
There was a tapping above him on the window of his bedroom. Bertie jumped. A herring gull, maybe, or a fulmar: ag-ag-aror, it seemed to be chuckling, as if it had a joke on the village. They were always doing that, waking him in the morning sometimes, coming like visitors to knock at the door. Gulls and terns — bloody old birds acted like they owned the place.
Arnold was standing behind him, waiting to go out. “Well, hop it, then, Arnold.” Bertie opened the door and Arnold slipped through like a shadow. Bertie called after him, “Mind you’re back soon.”
The dog stopped and looked back at Bertie; probably, he understood. Bertie stood there awhile, looking out at the moving mist. What he had heard had sounded like a scream. The birds were always screaming.
One scream sounded pretty much like another in Rackmoor.
4
It was the Wakeman who found her.
Billy Sims had continued his evening revels with Corky Fishpool long after the closing of the Fox, visiting first one crony, then another in Lead Street and Winkle Alley. It was a night of celebration, after all.
Now, with his tricornered hat and fawn tunic on backwards, he decided to gain his own small cottage in Psalter’s Lane, beside Our Lady, by walking up the Angel steps, although he knew they were unlit and unsafe in the winter darkness. With his horn tucked under his arm, he weaved upwards.
His foot struck something. Something unyielding and yet soft, not stone. He had no torch, but he did have matches. He struck one.
The match spurted up and he saw the upside-down and blood-covered face, the limbs going off in impossible directions, making the black-and-white figure look like a huge doll.
Billy Sims nearly took a dive down the steps. When he remembered that it was Twelfth Night, and that this was but some mummer who had strayed from a party, it only served to turn the nightmare real.
5
Detective Inspector Ian Harkins of the Pitlochary C.I.D. was furious. The first really meaty case to come his way and the Chief Constable wanted to throw it to somebody from C.I. in London. Over my dead body, thought Harkins, grinning a little at his own gallows humor. Harkins had the face to go with it, sunken-eyed and skeletal.
His knuckles whitened on the telephone. “I see no reason for calling London. I’m not even there yet and you’re talking about Scotland Yard. Kindly give me a chance.” There was a certain acidity in his kindly.
Superintendent Bates reluctantly allowed him twenty-four hours. It sounded like the kind of case that might turn up complications; Leeds would not be happy.
Harkins finished dressing. For Ian Harkins, this was not a matter of dragging on unmatched socks and unpressed suit. He did it in front of a cheval mirror. He had a tailor in Jermyn Street and a rich aunt in Belgravia who doted on him, although she questioned his strange predilection for the frozen North and talked about his work as if it were a sometime hobby which had suddenly become addictive.
It wasn’t a hobby; Harkins was an excellent policeman. His mind was shrewd, incisive, uncluttered by sentiment.
Harkins adjusted the belt on a camel’s-hair coat, specially lined against the Yorkshire winter, and drew on gloves of a leather so fine they nearly melted on his hands. It was true he was an excellent policeman, but
he was damned if he’d go about looking like one.
But a C.I.D. man is not supposed to waste time in dalliance over his clothes. To make up for it he hopped into his Lotus Elan, drove it up to ninety, and almost hoped some idiot patrolman would try to stop him on the fifteen miles of icy road to Rackmoor and the coast.
• • •
“Been bashed about pretty smartly, hasn’t she?”
Detective Constable Derek Smithies grimaced. The description seemed much more appropriate to a rugby game than a bloody murder.
Ian Harkins got up from where he had been kneeling and adjusted the coat round his shoulders. His emaciated face made him look ten years older than he was. To make up for the skeletal look—cheekbones as prominent as small wings—he wore a long, full mustache. He had removed his beautiful, butter-leather gloves to examine the body. He drew them on again like a surgeon.
From the station in Pitlochary, a town five times the size of Rackmoor, but still with only a small police force, Inspector Harkins had called in half-a-dozen men, including a local doctor and the constable scratching down notes behind him. The Scene of Crimes man had already been and gone. A fingerprint expert was yet to come, a man who had the reputation for being able to lift stuff off the wings of flies. The pathologist got up, grunted, wiped his hands.
“Well?” said Harkins, shoving a thin, hand-rolled Cuban cigar back in his mouth.
The doctor shrugged. “I don’t know. It looks like somebody took a pitchfork to her.”
Harkins looked at him. “A rather unwieldy weapon, man. Try again.”
The doctor matched Harkins’s own ascerbic tone. “Vampire bats.”
“Funny.”
“Ice pick, awl, God knows. She looks like a sieve. But the ice pick’s out because it looks like whatever it was had more than one prong. I can tell better when I have the body back at the morgue.”
The Old Fox Deceived Page 1
