by Colin Murray
Peter Baxter stood up, cleared his throat, murmured something about getting on stage and shuffled off to the door.
‘He might still turn up,’ Miss Summers said very quietly.
Peter stopped, cleared his throat again. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah. Well, he’s got about three quarters of an hour.’ He stood awkwardly in the doorway for a few seconds and then stomped off. After a few minutes we heard the band launch into ‘The Sheik of Araby’.
‘Do you think he will?’ I said. ‘Turn up, that is.’
Miss Summers looked up at me. ‘He always has,’ she said, ‘in the past.’
‘Does he often go missing?’ I said.
‘Not often, no.’ There was an edge to her voice. ‘No more than two or three times a week.’
I was relieved that the edge wasn’t directed at me. For some reason, I didn’t want her mad at me.
Jerry stood up. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a warm beer waiting on the bar, and it’s probably getting cold.’
Miss Summers smiled at him. ‘Thanks again for the offer,’ she said, ‘but I’m just not comfortable singing with anyone else at the piano.’
‘That’s copacetic,’ Jerry said and strolled out, carefully shutting the door behind him.
I was still wondering what he meant when Miss Summers spoke again.
‘And thank you for looking for Lee, Mr Gérard. I really must apologize for inconveniencing you.’
‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’m just sorry I didn’t find him . . . And it’s Tony.’
She looked down at her lap where her pale hands rested. ‘Well, thank you, Tony,’ she said.
The faint American accent I’d detected the night before had evaporated completely. She now sounded like a regular London girl.
‘Where did you meet him? Lee, I mean,’ I said.
‘Here,’ she said, ‘during the war. March 1944. I was sweet sixteen and he was on leave, playing the piano in a pub in Camden for his mates. Don’t ask me how a bunch of Yankee soldiers found their way to Camden because I don’t even know what I was doing there. Betty, one of the girls from the factory, probably suggested it.’ She sighed. ‘It was probably Betty who persuaded me to sing as well. Which was why Lee told me how much he liked my voice. I thought it was just a line and he was just another glib, charming, handsome, feckless American, but, after the war, he came back and whisked me away. I was a GI bride.’ She paused and smiled wanly. ‘He wasn’t ill then, of course. That came later, when we started playing the jazz clubs in Kansas City and Chicago . . .’
I tried to find a few words of reassurance, but I didn’t have any. All I could offer her was an awkward silence.
The distant, raucous sound of Peter Baxter and the boys struggling with ‘I Got Rhythm’ drifted along the corridor. She had the grace not to wince, but she raised her eyebrows and smiled sadly at me. ‘It’s just as well Lee isn’t here,’ she said. ‘He loves Gershwin. He’s been working on arrangements of “Someone To Watch Over Me” and “They Can’t Take That Away From Me” for us. He thinks they’ll suit my voice.’
‘He’s right,’ I said. ‘Not that I’m an expert or anything.’ After a long pause I asked the question that had been on my mind for a while. ‘Has he ever been gone for this long before?’
She leaned forward and reached for the glass of warm gin that was still on the desk. She sipped it. ‘Only once,’ she said. ‘Six months ago, in New Orleans. The stuff had been cut with something very bad. He nearly died.’
‘Perhaps,’ I said, ‘it’s time to contact the police . . .’
She sipped some more gin. I found myself wondering how long she’d been drinking.
‘Or I could try some hospitals . . .’
She looked up. ‘I’d rather the police weren’t involved,’ she said. ‘A junkie jazz musician? He’d be deported, and me with him. It might make it difficult to get back into the country.’
I nodded. ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘You must have family here.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t have any family, except Lee. I just don’t want to burn any boats. Or is it bridges?’
‘It depends on whether you want to stop the enemy advancing or your own lot retreating,’ I said.
Peter Baxter’s office had a small, grubby window which looked out on to a narrow alleyway. A few patches of dull, yellow light spilled out from the upstairs windows and glinted on half a dozen bashed and dented bins and piles of boxes overflowing with rubbish from the Acropolis. Something large moved sinuously in the shadows. I hoped it was one of Soho’s cats.
The raw, gutsy sound of Peter Baxter and the boys belting out ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ drifted along the corridor.
Jeannie Summers stared dreamily at the dirty, smeared panes. She obviously hadn’t heard what I’d said. I started to suspect that she’d had more than the one gin.
I watched her for a moment or two. She was one of those women who really have no idea just how attractive they are.
And even if she was a bit older and more worn than she looked on stage, she was very attractive. Her pale, bare shoulders added a touch of vulnerability to the sadness in her eyes, and I found myself wanting to hold her. But I didn’t. I’m not impulsive, I’m not God’s gift to womankind and it was her husband who should take her in his arms, not me.
Anyway, there was a certain froideur in her gaze when it settled on me that told me she knew what I was thinking and that such intimacy would not be welcome. I suddenly realized that I was wrong. She did know how attractive she was.
I coloured slightly. At first, because I was a bit miffed that she thought that I was as obvious and predictable as every other man she’d ever been alone with, and then because I realized that she was right.
I consoled myself with the thought that at least I wasn’t as crass or as crude as Ricky Mountjoy and never had been. Not that that would have meant anything to Jeannie Summers.
Something about young Ricky had been nagging at me for a while, and I suddenly realized what it was. A lad (however likely) from a Leyton family on one of the bottom rungs of criminal activity wouldn’t just have strolled out of Pentonville or Wandsworth and started up a nice little business in the West End. Even Leyton’s most important villains (a category that certainly included the Mountjoys) wouldn’t make it into the robbers’ version of Burke’s Peerage. This was lucrative stuff. And it was dangerous. It was turf that was fought over. Maybe his dad or one of his uncles had moved into the big time and was employing him. But it was far more likely that he’d made some interesting friends on the inside. Either way, there were grown-ups behind him.
It also crossed my mind that Les Jackson wasn’t going to be too happy to hear that one of the actors he was grooming for success had been slumming it in the Frighted Horse, in the company of some seedy purveyors of little bags of powdered happiness. And it occurred to me that he might blame me. After all, I was supposed to be looking after the little toerag.
A door banged somewhere above us, abrupt and startling, and then there were heavy footsteps on the stairs that led from the kitchen of the Acropolis down to the alley. We both tensed slightly and stared at the window.
Miss Summers nervously glugged down enough mother’s ruin and tonic water to slake the thirst of a Welsh front row.
It’d be one of the Greek kitchen staff with a bucket of potato peelings and fish heads to add to the cats’ cornucopia.
I attempted a reassuring smile. But my heart wasn’t in it. I wasn’t feeling very reassuring because I counted three pairs of feet clanging on the iron stairs and I doubted that the Acropolis boasted more than one kitchen boy to wash up and dump the rubbish. On the other hand, maybe it was just the management using the back exit, or the council investigating complaints about the sanitary arrangements.
I guess that the bash on the head had me looking for people creeping up behind me.
If that was the case then I definitely had something to thank young Billy Watson for because these
guys shuffled around for a moment or two at the bottom of the steps, muttering, and then opened the back door to Pete’s Place. They strode steadily along the corridor, past the office and then stopped and knocked on the next door, which was, I realized, Jeannie Summers’ dressing room.
She looked at me with wide eyes, and I held my hand up to indicate that she should stay put and moved to the door.
I listened for a moment, but all I heard was some more muttering and another knock. I remembered all that stuff I learned in the army about never volunteering for anything, always keeping your head down and how discretion is very much the better part of value, then I gave a little mental shrug and, as I’d done so often before, ignored any good advice I’d been offered and slipped out to see what was going on.
A quick glance confirmed what I already knew. There were three men standing outside the dressing-room door. Well, two, who I didn’t recognize, were standing there, and one, who I had seen before, was propped up against the wall next to it and looked as if he was about to slide down it.
The two who I didn’t know were hard-looking guys about my age in nice suits, clean white shirts, neat blue ties and were recently shaved. The other one had close on two days’ worth of stubble, had clearly slept in his crumpled suit and wasn’t wearing a tie.
At least my record on finding missing persons was looking a lot more impressive. Two found in one day wasn’t bad, especially as I hadn’t lifted a finger to find Philip Graham and had only sustained one bump on the head to locate Lee the piano player, who now did begin to slide gently down the wall.
At this rate, I could expect Daff’s long-lost daughter to bring me my early morning cuppa along with the Daily Herald on Monday.
Always assuming the two tough-looking gents were a lot friendlier than they looked and I survived until Monday.
SIX
‘He all right?’ I said, waving a hand in Lee’s direction.
Both of the tough guys turned to face me. They were silent for a few seconds, and Peter Baxter’s strident trumpet filled the little corridor with a shrill, and not altogether successful, attempt to reach something very high as the climax to ‘St James Infirmary’. The man nearest to me allowed a slightly pained and puzzled expression to soften his battered face. His nose had been broken a couple of times, and there was scar tissue around his eyes, suggesting mixed fortunes in a long career in the ring.
When Peter finished and applause broke out like sporadic gunfire, the man flashed me an amiable smile and jerked a thumb at the almost recumbent piano player. ‘He yours?’ he said.
‘Sort of,’ I said, with a dismissive shrug. ‘Is he all right?’
He ran his tongue around his lips. ‘About as all right as a beaten-up junk fiend coming off a bender can be,’ he said.
‘Beaten up?’ I said.
‘Yeah, someone’s given him a bit of a seeing to. Quite professional. Left the face alone. Lots of body shots. He’ll probably find it a bit painful to pee for a few days.’ He paused to rub his damaged nose. ‘Anyway, we’ve delivered him. He’s all yours.’ He nodded at the other guy and they both moved towards me.
‘You didn’t happen to find him upstairs in a pub?’ I said.
‘Maybe,’ he said.
‘The Frighted Horse?’ I said.
They stopped.
‘What makes you ask that?’ The second man spoke for the first time, and there was an edge of suspicion, and a touch of Yorkshire, in his voice.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘I was over there looking for him an hour or so back.’
The first man looked at his companion and the amiable smile became a very wide grin. ‘You didn’t,’ he said, ‘by any chance meet up with a couple of young lads, did you?’ he said.
‘Might have done,’ I said cautiously, taking a step back.
‘Because I heard that someone did some very nice things to the Mountjoy boy,’ he said, ‘and, if that was you, I’d like to shake your hand.’
To prove it, he held out one of his large, misshapen paws. The thick, blunt fingers looked as if they’d all been broken once or twice, and none of the knuckles appeared to be where they should be. What could I do? I took the hand and we shook.
‘Malcolm Booth,’ he said.
‘Tony Gérard,’ I said. ‘What’s your interest in Lee here?’
‘None at all,’ he said. ‘But our employer has some businesses around here, and we were looking out for them when we came across him in the course of our duty, as it were. He gave the club’s address, and we thought it would be a neighbourly act to bring him back.’
‘That’s good of you,’ I said. ‘Very. I appreciate it. And I know his wife will.’
Malcolm raised his eyebrows. ‘Think nothing of it. And if you see young Mountjoy, or one of the other little oiks he hangs out with, tell him Malc would like a word.’
‘I’ll do that,’ I said, ‘but, to tell you the truth, I was hoping not to run into him again.’
‘Oh, you will,’ he said. ‘Believe you me, you will.’ And he patted me gently on the shoulder, jerked his head at the other man and the two of them left the same way they’d arrived.
I listened to them clang up the iron staircase, heard the heavy door of the Acropolis’s kitchen bang shut, wondered which particular villain they worked for, and which of his ‘businesses’ they had been ‘looking out for’, and then I reached down to help haul Lee to his feet. He towered over me by perhaps six or seven inches, but he must have weighed a stone and a half less. He was painfully skinny. I gripped his upper arm. It felt like a pipe cleaner.
He winced as he stood up, then he staggered slightly and doubled over, clutching his stomach. For a few seconds I thought he was going to vomit all over me, but I was worrying unnecessarily. He was responding to some heavy bruising rather than an urge to retch.
He straightened up and leaned against the wall again. ‘Thanks,’ he said so quietly that I almost missed it as the door behind me squeaked open and then closed with a little tut of exasperation and Jeannie Summers slipped into the corridor.
The band started an uncharacteristically subdued version of ‘Lover Man’. I couldn’t decide whether this counted as an ironic coincidence or not. The mellow sound of Peter Baxter’s trumpet echoed hauntingly in the drab, brown, damp and smelly corridor. I stood quietly and listened for a moment or two as Miss Summers reached up and stroked her husband’s clammy forehead, then I helped her manoeuvre him into their dressing room.
He slumped into a battered but comfortable-looking old armchair, his long legs thrust out in front of him, taking up most of the available space. She knelt beside him and gently rubbed the back of his hand.
The room was dark and cramped. It was painted the same drab brown as the corridor and Peter Baxter’s office, and its one small window was covered by a dusty-looking dark-red curtain. An old upright piano occupied all of one wall, and the stool was covered in music. There was a table with Miss Summers’ shiny black handbag sitting on it and some make-up – a lipstick, a compact – scattered about. An old, smudged mirror with an unhealthy, brown-spotted complexion leaned back from it, resting precariously against the wall. Miss Summers’ street clothes were neatly folded on the only other chair in the room, her sensible flat-heeled shoes tucked carefully underneath it.
She looked up at me and forced a sad, little smile. ‘Tell Mr Baxter to give us twenty minutes,’ she said. ‘We’ll be ready to go on then. Or maybe half an hour.’
I must have looked unsure. I certainly felt it.
‘Really,’ she said, nodding her head decisively. ‘He’ll be fine.’
‘That’s . . . good,’ I said. ‘I’ll go and tell Peter.’ I paused at the door and turned back to face her, but she was busy wiping a handkerchief across his face, just as my mother had done to me when I’d been a nipper with a dirty mug. The difference was that Lee wasn’t complaining about it and trying to pull away. The harsh smell of cheap eau de cologne irritated the lining of my nostrils, and I sneezed noisily. She tu
rned her head towards me, and I sneezed again. ‘I’d be interested to know what happened to him,’ I said, choking down a third sneeze and rubbing my hand across my nose. ‘When he’s up to talking about it. Who gave him the lumps and so on.’
She nodded, doused the already grubby handkerchief with more perfume and scrubbed at Lee’s forehead. I quietly left her to it.
I closed the door behind me and stood in that dimly lit corridor, trying to ignore the smell of old cabbage water, listening to the band storming towards the end of ‘Mississippi Mud’. I didn’t know if they started together, but they were making a pretty good fist of finishing together. Applause crackled around the hall like there was a serious skirmishing action going on in there. Then I heard Peter make an announcement that I didn’t catch. As he and the others, sweat-drenched and beaming, then bounced down off the stage, I assumed he had declared a drinks and pee break.
When he saw me, his expression changed to one of grim anxiety and he strode down the corridor, trumpet in hand.
‘He’s back,’ I said quickly, ‘and she seems to think they can go on in twenty minutes or so.’
He looked at me for a moment or two. ‘You don’t seem so sure,’ he said.
I shrugged. ‘He’s not looking too well,’ I said. ‘But Miss Summers seemed certain.’
The other band members were mopping brows, smiling and talking quietly together. It must have been a good set.
‘Hey, Peter,’ Danny the tubby bass man shouted out, ‘is it all right if we go and sink a pint or two? I’ve got a thirst on me like a dehydrated camel.’ I assumed that he meant he was very dry indeed. Danny knew something about camels. He’d been in North Africa during the war.
‘Sure,’ said Peter. ‘Tell whoever’s on at the bar that the first one’s on me.’
‘Cheers, Peter,’ Danny said. He waved his hand at the dressing-room door behind Peter and lowered his voice. ‘What’s the score?’ he said, conspiratorially. ‘We on again after the break, or what?’
