Moon Over Soho rol-2

by Ben Aaronovitch

  She invited me in and I asked her name.

  “Martha,” she said and she must have seen me wince because she chuckled. “Yes, I know. I’m in the kitchen,” she said and led the way. It was a big kitchen with an oak table that was European but an array of large pots, ladles, and plastic washing-up bowls full of cassava and stockfish that was pure West African.

  I declined tea and biscuits and we sat down at the far corner of the table.

  “Mum’s at the hospital,” said Martha. “I’m just cleaning up.” She didn’t need to explain to me. Enough of my mum’s London family had died over the years for me to know the drill. Once word got out that Michael Adjayi was dead, the relatives would start coming around and God help Martha if the house wasn’t immaculate when they got there.

  “Was he the eldest son?” I asked.

  “Only son,” said Martha bitterly. “I’ve got two other sisters. They don’t live here anymore.”

  I nodded to show I understood. Favored son, the girls work but the boy carries the name. “How long had he been playing jazz?”

  “Mickey? Since forever,” said Martha.

  “Did you think he was good?”

  “He was brilliant,” she said.

  I asked if her parents minded that he was going to be a musician but she said that Mickey had it covered. “He had a place at Queen Mary’s reading law,” she said. “He figured that would give him at least four years to become famous.”

  And once he was famous Mother and Father wouldn’t care — as long as he was rich as well. Martha obviously thought it was a workable plan. I asked about his love life and apparently that wasn’t a problem either — at least not as much of a problem as it might have been.

  “White girl?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. “But Cherie was really nice and a bit posh so, you know, that softened the blow for Mum and Dad.”

  Martha didn’t know the girlfriend’s details but she promised to ask her parents when they got back. She couldn’t think of anybody who had it in for Mickey, or anything suspicious at all. “He just went out one afternoon,” she said. “And came back dead.”

  ON MY way back from Cheam I got a call from Ms. Ghosh at the Musicians Union. She wanted to tell me about the new wave of Anglo-Indian jazz that was coming out of Mumbai these days. I let her go on — it was better than the radio.

  “Anyway,” she said eventually. “There was one case. A member called Henry Bellrush, died suddenly just after a gig. The reason I remember is because I’d met him a couple of times and he always seemed so fit and healthy. London Marathon and all that … sort of thing.”

  She gave me the address. It was in Wimbledon and since I was still south of the river I headed over. Plus, I was pretty certain that sooner or later the whole hijacking-and-ambulance thing was going to land on my head. I wasn’t in a hurry to rush back for that.

  “I’M NOT sure,” said Mrs. Bellrush as she offered me a cup of tea, “that I quite understand what you’re doing here.”

  I took the cup and saucer, the visitor china, I noticed, and cradled it in my lap. I didn’t dare put it down on the immaculate mahogany coffee table, and resting it precariously on the arm of the sofa was out of the question.

  “We periodically review nonhospital fatalities,” I said.

  “Whatever for?” asked Mrs. Bellrush and seated herself opposite me, neatly tucking her legs to the left. Anita Bellrush, widow of Henry “the Lips” Bellrush, was in her mid-fifties, dressed in mauve slacks and a carefully ironed white silk blouse. She had sandy blond hair and narrow blue eyes. She lived in the kind of 1930s brick-built detached house with bay windows that you can find in the suburbs all over Britain, but in this case it was located in Wimbledon. It contained a lot of good solid oak furniture overlaid with a layer of doilies, flowery chair covers, and Dresden porcelain. It was chintz but not the cat-lady chintz I was used to. Perhaps it was Mrs. Bellrush’s manner or steely blue eyes but I got the distinct impression that this was aggressive chintz, warrior chintz, the kind of chintz that had gone out to conquer an Empire and still had the good taste to dress for dinner. Any IKEA flat-pack that showed its face around here was going to be kindling.

  “Because of Harold Shipman,” I said. “You remember him?”

  “The doctor who killed his patients,” she said. “Ah, I see. You do random checks of routine deaths in order to ensure that the reporting is accurate. Presumably you also apply pattern recognition systems to see if you can spot any anomalous trends.”

  It sounded like a great idea but I suspected we didn’t because one of the first rules of police work is that trouble will always come looking for you, so there’s no point looking for it.

  “I just do the legwork,” I said.

  “Somebody always has to do the legwork,” she said. “Biscuit?”

  They were the expensive ones with the dark chocolate covering with the greater-than-five-percent cocoa solids.

  Henry Bellrush had learned to play the cornet in the army. He’d enlisted in the Royal Corps of Engineers and had risen through the ranks to major before taking early retirement at the turn of the century.

  “We met in the army,” said Mrs. Bellrush. “He was a dashing captain and so was I, it was very romantic. In those days once you were married you were out, so I moved into civvie street.” And ironically found herself in the same line of work as she had been in the army. “Only much better paid of course,” she said.

  I asked what kind of work but Mrs. Bellrush said she couldn’t tell me. “All very hush-hush I’m afraid,” she said. “Official Secrets Act and all that jazz.” She looked at me over the rim of her teacup. “Now, what is it you want to know about my husband’s death?”

  If ever a man had enjoyed his retirement it had been Henry Bellrush, what with the garden, the grandchildren, the holidays abroad, and, of course, his music. He and some friends used to play at the local pub — strictly for their own enjoyment.

  “But he joined the Musicians Union,” I said.

  “That was Henry,” said Mrs. Bellrush. “He came up from the ranks — never lost that sense of solidarity with the common man.”

  “You didn’t notice anything unusual in his behavior?” It was a standard question.

  “Such as what?” she asked, just a tad too defensively.

  “Staying out late, unexplained absences, forgetfulness,” I said, all of which got nothing. “Changes in spending habits, unusual receipts, credit card bills.” That got a reaction.

  Her eyes met mine and then she looked away.

  “He’d been making regular purchases from a shop in Soho,” she said. “He didn’t try to hide it from me and it was all there on his credit card statement. After he died I found some receipts still in his wallet.”

  I asked where they were from.

  “A Glimpse of Stocking,” she said.

  “The lingerie shop?”

  “You know it?”

  “I’ve walked past it,” I said. Actually I’d once spent about ten minutes looking in the window, but to be fair I was on patrol, at three in the morning, and I was very bored. “Are you sure he wasn’t buying a present for you?”

  “I’m sure I never received anything quite as daring as a scarlet Alloetta corset in raw silk with matching satin knickers,” she said. “Not that I would have been averse. Shocked, perhaps, but not averse.”

  People don’t like to speak ill of the dead even when they’re monsters, let alone when they’re loved ones. People like to forget any bad things that someone did and why should they remember? It’s not like they’re going to do it again. So I kept the next question as emotionally neutral as I could.

  “Do you think he might have been having an affair?”

  She stood, walked over to an antique folding desk, and retrieved an envelope.

  “Given the nature of the purchases,” she said, handing me the envelope, “I can’t think of an alternative explanation — can you?”

  Inside the envelope was a
sheaf of receipts, most of them of the kind printed out by a modern till, but a couple handwritten in what I suspected was a deliberately archaic fashion — these had A GLIMPSE OF STOCKING printed at the top.

  He might have been a transvestite, I thought, but I kept that to myself.

  GIACOMO CASANOVA, the original Italian stallion, arrived in London to find one of his ex-lovers and babymothers holed up in Carlisle House, the former residence of the Earl of Salisbury, which faced onto Soho Square. Her name was Teresa Cornelys and, for her services to dissipation, debauchery, and the home furnishing industry she was once declared the Empress of Pleasure.

  Carlisle House became London’s first members-only club. For a modest subscription one could enjoy an evening of opera, good food, and, it was rumored, convivial intimate company. It was Teresa who established the time-honored Soho tradition of packing them in, getting them drunk, and fleecing them till they squeaked. Alas, she was a better hostess than bookkeeper and eventually, after two decades, several bankruptcies, and a comeback tour she died alone and penniless in a debtors’ prison.

  The rise and fall of Teresa Cornelys proves three things: that the wages of sin are high, that you should “just say no” to opera, and that it’s always wise to diversify your investment portfolio. This was the advice followed by Gabriella Rossi, also Italian, who arrived in London as a child refugee in 1948. After a career in the rag trade she opened her first branch of A Glimpse of Stocking in 1986 where she profited from the wages of sin, albeit tastefully, said no to opera, and made sure that her portfolio was suitably robust. When she died in 2003 it was as Dame Rossi, knighted for her services to naughtiness and leaving behind a small chain of lingerie shops.

  The Soho branch was managed by a skinny blond woman who dressed in a no-nonsense trouser suit, but with no blouse, and worryingly thin wrists. She seemed genuinely amused when I showed her my warrant card and although she had no recollection of Henry Bellrush, she laughed out loud when I suggested that he might have been buying for himself.

  “I doubt that,” she said. “This particular type of corset has a ‘vintage’ waist. It’s designed to be ten inches smaller than the hips — I doubt a man could wear that.”

  The shop was artfully cluttered with antique display racks and cabinets to give it a pleasantly retro feel so that even the English could enjoy frilly underwear safe in the knowledge that it came wrapped up with an ironic postmodern bow. On one wall there were framed photographs of women, all either monochrome or in the faded tones of 1960s color photography. The women were mostly half naked or dressed in corsets and the kind of frilly knickers that probably got my father in a twist. One was the famous Morley portrait of Christine Keeler sitting backward on a rather uncomfortable-looking Scandinavian chair. Several had been autographed and I recognized one of the names — Rusty Gaynor, the legendary queen of Soho strippers in the 1960s.

  The manageress checked carefully through the receipts.

  “Definitely not a man,” she said. “Not in these sizes. Although judging from the rest of the items, we’re talking about a big healthy girl here. If I had to make a guess I would say these were bought for a stage act.”

  “What kind of act?”

  “A burlesque dancer,” she said. “Without a doubt. Probably one of Alex’s girls. Alexander Smith, puts on shows down at the Purple Pussycat. Very tasteful.”

  “A stripper you mean?” I asked.

  “Oh dear,” said the manageress. “You mustn’t call them that.”

  THE DIFFERENCE between stripping and burlesque, as far as I could tell, was class.

  “We don’t have poles onstage,” said Alexander Smith, burlesque impresario. He was a thin fox-faced man in a fawn-colored suit with 1970s lapels but not, because there are limits to decency, a kipper tie. Instead he wore a plum-colored ascot with matching pocket handkerchief and, probably, silk socks. He was so completely camp that it didn’t really come as too much of a surprise that he was married with grandkids. No gay man would have to work that hard. Smith cheerfully showed me the photographs of “her indoors” — his wife — along with little Penelope and Esmerelda, and explained why poles were the work of the devil.

  “Inventions of Beelzebub himself,” he said. “Stripping is about getting your kit off in time to the music. There’s no real eroticism to it, the punters want to see her minge and she wants to get paid. Wham bam, no thank you, ma’am.”

  Over his shoulder I watched as a fit-looking white woman on the club’s small stage rotated her hips to Lounge Against the Machine’s cover of “Baby’s Got Back.” She was wearing a dancer’s leotard and a baggy pink sweat top and I had to admit that, despite the lack of minge, I was suitably entranced. Smith turned to see what I was watching.

  “It’s about glamour,” he said. “And the art of sensuality. The sort of show you could bring your mother to.”

  Not my mother, I thought. She doesn’t do ironic postmodernism.

  I showed Smith the picture of Henry Bellrush I’d gotten from his wife. “That’s Henry,” said Smith. “Has something happened to him?”

  “Was he a regular?” I asked to move us on.

  “He’s an artiste,” said Smith. “A musician. Beautiful, beautiful cornet player. He does this act with this lovely girl called Peggy. Very classy, just him on the cornet and her moving as he played. She could hold an audience transfixed just by taking her glove off. They used to sigh when she went topless ’cause they knew it was almost over.”

  “And their relationship was strictly business?” I asked.

  “You keep using the past tense,” said Smith. “Something has happened, hasn’t it?”

  I explained that Henry Bellrush was dead and that I was conducting routine inquiries.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” said Smith. “I wondered why they hadn’t turned up for a while. In answer to your question, those two were strictly professional, he liked playing and she liked dancing. I think that’s as far as it went.”

  He also liked buying her the costumes, or perhaps he saw it as an investment. I wondered whether I should tell his wife or not.

  I asked if he had any publicity pictures of the mysterious Peggy but, although he was sure they existed, he didn’t have any at the club.

  I asked when their last gig was and he gave a date back at the start of the month, less than a day before Bellrush died. “Was it here?” I asked. Fourteen days was a long time for transient vestigia to be retained, but it was worth a try.

  “No,” said Smith. “Much more classy than this — it was part of our Summer Burlesque Festival at the Café de Paris. We hold one every year to raise awareness of burlesque among the public.”

  I EMERGED blinking into weak afternoon sunlight and before I could get my bearings I was ambushed by Simone Fitzwilliam.

  “Constable,” she said brightly, and slipped her arm through mine. “What brings you to my neighborhood again?” Her arm was warm and soft against my side, and I smelled honeysuckle and caramel.

  I told her I was still investigating some suspicious deaths.

  “Including poor Cyrus?” she asked.

  “I’m afraid so.”

  “Well, I’m determined to put that behind me,” she said. “Cyrus wouldn’t have wanted me to mope. He believed in living in the moment and double-entry bookkeeping. But then if we were all the same, where would be the fun in that? So where next will our sleuthing take us?”

  “I need to check out the Café de Paris,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said. “I haven’t been there for such a long time. You must take me, I could be your plucky sidekick.”

  How could I argue with that.

  I lied my way into the Café de Paris by claiming I was following up a spot check by Clubs and Vice and that I could be in and out in five minutes. The day manager either bought it or wasn’t being paid enough money to care either way.

  The interior was a riot of gold leaf, red velvet, and royal blue drapes. The main room was oval with a split staircase
at one end and small stage at the other. A balcony swept around the circumference that reminded me uneasily of the Royal Opera House.

  “You can just feel the history,” said Simone, clutching my arm. “The Prince of Wales used to come here regularly.”

  “I hope the food is macrobiotic then,” I said.

  “What in the world is macrobiotic?” asked Simone.

  “You know, beans and rice,” I said and stopped when I realized I didn’t know what macrobiotic was either. “Healthy food,” I said.

  “That doesn’t sound like the prince,” she said. She skipped around to face me. “We have to dance.”

  “There’s no music,” I said.

  “We can hum,” she said. “You do know how to hum, don’t you?”

  “I need to check the stage,” I said, trying to convince myself at the same time.

  She pretended to pout, but the corner of her scarlet lips twitched and gave her away. “When constabulary duty’s to be done,” she said, “a policeman’s lot is not a happy one.”

  The small stage had enough room for its in situ baby grand and maybe a trio, if the singers were thin. I couldn’t see the buxom Peggy strutting her stuff, however tastefully, without falling off the edge. I said as much.

  “Ahem,” said Simone. “I think you’ll find the stage can be extended forward to create more space. I believe theatrical people call it an ‘extendable stage.’ Mind you, I’m certain I remember the band being at the other end.”

  I could feel them, layers of vestigia etched into the walls of the Café de Paris, flashes of laughter, the smell of tea, snatches of music, a sudden sharp taste of blood on my tongue. It was like an old church far too entangled in too many lives and events to be able to pick out any one thread. Certainly nothing recent. A vestigium isn’t laid down like a groove in a record, it’s not like a tape recording. It’s more like the memory of a dream, and the harder you grasp at it the faster it melts away.