Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘Very sensible,’ commented Ironside.

  Daisy glaring through sharply shining spectacles turned and marched out.

  ‘Very interesting,’ Jack said the moment the door was closed. ‘Who’d have thought that little dried-up, old stick of a thing could ever have been anyone’s mistress, let alone Teddy Pariss’s?’

  A thought struck him.

  ‘I say,’ he added with a wide grin, ‘you don’t think she’s going in for a spot of the old fantasy, do you?’

  ‘Could be,’ Peter said. ‘But if you do a bit of arithmetic you’ll find it’s all perfectly possible. Knock thirty years off Daisy Stitchford and you’d find quite a spry little piece, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Knock thirty years off,’ said Jack. ‘I reckon the thirty years have knocked plenty off her. Still, come to think of it, you can see that if she was rounded out a bit here and there she might have been quite a dish once.’

  ‘But as she was in the ballroom when Teddy was killed it hardly matters, I suppose,’ said Peter.

  ‘Let’s accept Constable Lassington’s suppositions,’ Ironside said. ‘We were on our way somewhere, I think.’

  ‘Perhaps we ought to ring up before we go?’ Peter said. ‘I mean, Mary may have gone shopping or something.’

  ‘It’s only round the corner, isn’t it?’ the superintendent said. ‘I think we’ll risk it.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Of course, sir. It was just that I thought. . .’

  ‘Well, we must allow one or two undisciplined thoughts. This way?’

  ‘This way, sir.’

  And, when after their short walk past the pubs and the mysterious closed clubs, past the dark barbers’ shops and the bright grocers they reached the flat, Mary Lassington was there after all. As, considering the still conscientiously falling cold rain, might have been expected. Peter introduced the superintendent.

  Ironside looked round the flat with unconcealed curiosity.

  ‘Well, well,’ he said, ‘this is a great deal nicer than the station house, eh, Constable?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Very comfortable, very comfortable. Chairs by the fire. The domestic purr of the television set. And, yes, I do believe that’s a half-knitted pullover I see there.’

  Mary laughed.

  ‘I spoil him, sir, and that’s a fact,’ she said.

  ‘Ah, no,’ said Ironside. ‘A police constable cannot have too stable a background. And, bless me, I think he deserves all the creature comforts he can get, poor laddie.’

  And it was altogether a very long time before Ironside got round to asking the question he had come to put. All the while he prowled about, picking up this and that, making comments, patting and poking.

  ‘Well, Spratt, have you got a home like this?’ he asked.

  ‘Bit farther out, sir. We need somewhere bigger with the kids.’

  ‘But like this, like this, eh? All these home comforts? My, but I wouldn’t have believed it possible when I was a young constable.’

  It all seemed to delight Mary. She smiled, she blushed, she offered tea. And Ironside accepted. He praised the tea. He praised the cake.

  ‘Oh, yes, that telephone call,’ he said at last. ‘Now tell me something about that.’

  Mary told him about it to the last detail. Though, disappointingly enough, almost the only detail she had to tell was that the call had been made from a coin box.

  ‘Oh, dear me, yes,’ said Ironside. ‘I know how it is. You pick up the receiver, you hear the clatter of the coin dropping and then this voice. You call out for your husband and you think no more about it.’

  Mary smiled.

  ‘Yes, that’s really how it was,’ she said.

  ‘You’ve done it so many times before.’

  ‘Well, I have. He won’t stir when he gets in that chair of his, you know. Just sits there. Reading some old magazine of mine. Looking at the pictures of the pretty girls.’

  Ironside nodded gravely.

  ‘And was the voice today like the voices before?’ he asked.

  Mary considered, equally gravely.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘it was and it wasn’t. It could have been a voice I’d heard before, or it might not.’

  ‘Never mind, never mind,’ Ironside said. ‘You’ve done –’

  The telephone, perhaps hearing itself mentioned, shrilled out. Mary leapt up to answer it. Ironside’s eyes beamed appreciation.

  ‘It’s for you,’ Mary said to him.

  Tactfully she took the tea things out to the kitchen.

  ‘For me?’ Ironside said. ‘Now who could be wanting an old fogy like me?’

  The doctor who had been busy with Bert Mullens was wanting him. To say that Bert was still far away.

  ‘Poor fellow, poor fellow,’ said the superintendent.

  He listened attentively again.

  ‘A sleeping tablet? I see. Do you know which it was?’

  Again he listened.

  ‘Well, now, that’s most ingenious. Most ingenious of you. Dear me, yes. I shall have to draw the attention of those who want to know about such things to this. And it’s quite easy to get, is it? Well, that’s a scandal, certainly.’

  Gently he set the receiver on its rest.

  Jack was unable to contain himself.

  ‘Drugged, sir? Has Mullens been drugged?’

  ‘Yes, indeed, poor chap. With a common form of sleeping pill, distressingly easy to obtain. They’ve no doubt about it, you know. Analysis and all that. Wonderful fellows, really.’

  A sudden doubt rose up in Peter’s mind.

  ‘But, sir,’ he said, ‘I thought you told us that it was drink that knocked him out.’

  ‘Drink?’ said Ironside.

  Jack came charging in to Peter’s aid.

  ‘Yes, sir. You asked us if we’d smelt Mullens’s breath.’

  ‘Oh, indeed, I did that. I’m sorry you didn’t take the precaution. If you had, you’d have observed there wasn’t a trace of alcohol at all. That was the interesting thing.’

  12

  Detective-Constable Spratt grinned ruefully and glanced at Constable Lassington to seek what moral support he could get.

  ‘Well, sir,’ he said to Ironside, ‘you had us there all right. No alcohol on old Mullens’s breath: no question of being dead drunk.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Peter, ‘but if he wasn’t dead drunk, what had happened to him? If he took a massive dose of sleeping pills like that himself, it’s practically a confession.’

  ‘And the poor fellow still unconscious,’ said Ironside.

  Peter looked at him.

  ‘Did they say if he was in danger, sir?’ he asked.

  Ironside smiled slightly.

  ‘I gather they expect him to recover quite soon,’ he said.

  ‘Well,’ said Peter, ‘it’ll be interesting to hear what he has to say.’

  He looked at the others. Suddenly Jack’s face coloured up.

  ‘It could still be June,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking that. We’ve only her word for it that Pariss was alive when she left him.’

  ‘No,’ said Peter forcefully. ‘There’s no need to think that. Mullens could just as easily have nipped along to the office when the coast looked clear.’

  But Jack was not to be put off.

  ‘All the same,’ he said, ‘June was in with Teddy Pariss up to twenty-five past one. And there’s no use pretending she wasn’t.’

  Ironside looked at him blandly.

  ‘Ah, Spratt,’ he said, ‘if that were indeed established there would be no use in questioning it. But, you know, it’s far from established.’

  ‘What’s far from established?’ Jack said, with regrettable belligerency.

  ‘That your June Curtis saw Teddy Pariss at all.’

  Peter came quickly in before Jack could say anything totally irretrievable.

  ‘But, sir,’ he said, ‘Mullens saw June coming out of Teddy’s office. And she says she was in there. You couldn’t have much clearer evidence tha
n that.’

  Ironside smiled gently.

  ‘Except that Mullens said nothing of the sort.’

  Before either of the two constables could burst into rage he held up a warning hand.

  ‘What Mullens actually said,’ he went on, ‘was that he saw her coming out, closing the door. He never said he heard her inside, or saw the door open for her to come out.’

  ‘But –’

  Both constables spoke together.

  ‘A mere matter of wording,’ Ironside said. ‘I know what your objection must be. But you should think twice before staking your infant careers on that. It struck me all along that there was something a little wrong about the interview June said she had with Pariss. It was simply that, you remember, we noticed no smell of perfume in Pariss’s office. And yet your Miss Curtis is the sort of girl who wouldn’t feel dressed without cosmetics.’

  Neither Jack nor Peter had any comment.

  ‘But I might never have had any real suspicions,’ Ironside added, ‘if it hadn’t been for the draught in the corridor.’

  ‘The draught in the corridor?’ Peter said.

  Ironside smiled broadly.

  ‘Oh, Constable, you voice those doubts so delightfully. And yet, you know, there’s no need for them. All you have to do is to bear with me. The draught came from the slightly open double doors at the end of the corridor. I asked you to close them. You know, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised, taking that into consideration, to find that Miss Curtis instead of being with Pariss was out in that depressing little yard.’

  ‘Out in the yard?’ Jack said. ‘But why would she want to go out there?’

  ‘That, Spratt, is what we have to discover.’

  He looked at his watch.

  ‘Dear me, time is flying. I’m afraid we’ve trespassed too long on Mrs Lassington’s hospitality. We must be off. Great things will be happening at the Star Bowl ballroom.’

  Peter looked at the clock.

  ‘You mean the contest will be beginning before long?’ he said. ‘Do you want to see June Curtis before that?’

  Ironside smiled.

  ‘I think we’ll do just the opposite,’ he said. ‘I think we’ll wait to see Miss Curtis till the moment she steps off the catwalk, as they see fit to call it.’

  Peter could not stop himself giving Jack a quick look. Jack licked at his lips.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Ironside, ‘cruel, I grant you. The poor creature will be just relaxing after the ordeal of judgement, and all that. But we have to choose the moment she’s most likely to help us, you know.’

  The Star Bowl, when they got back there, was a very different place. Although the rain was stoically battering away still at the yellow-grey pavements and the impervious glossy concrete and glass exterior of the ballroom itself, it was being met by a stoicism every bit as impassive from the citizens of London gathered to watch the fun. Squealing girls in glossy mackintoshes shoved and giggled as if rain had never been invented. Their young admirers jostled and jeered in unemphatic defiance of the elements. The traditional rites of shrill whistles and deep booing groans were as thoroughly carried out as if the cold enmity of the rain was part of another world. This was the spirit which had won battles from Agincourt to Waterloo.

  A row of constables at the edge of the pavement kept the crowd in decorous check, the rain gleaming on their helmets and dripping implacably from their capes. Two of them, recognizing the superintendent, forced back the solidly enthusing teenagers to make way for him.

  But the safety of the dry, deodorized foyer proved to be only comparative. Warm and dry in the blue-carpeted luxuriousness a pack of reporters was waiting.

  The moment Ironside shoved his way in through the heavy swinging glass doors they began to sweep forward. There was a moment’s check as the leading jackal recognized his prey.

  ‘Oh, hell,’ he shouted, ‘it’s Ironside. Nothing but bloody joking.’

  But with sturdy pluck the others pushed forward and in a moment Ironside was surrounded.

  ‘Hey, Super, are you pulling in one of the girls?’

  ‘Listen, is it right a naked girl was found standing over the body?’

  ‘Is it true old Teddy Pariss was trying to date one of the competitors tonight?’

  Ironside looked round at them all. He asked a question of his own. Once more he failed to raise his voice to the necessary pitch to be heard. The reporters shushed each other angrily.

  They looked up at Ironside.

  ‘I asked if there was anybody here from the agricultural Press,’ he said. ‘There’s one or two things worrying me about my new rabbit hutches.’

  ‘Look,’ said a short, tubby, florid-faced reporter with big, round spectacles, ‘are you going to give us anything or not?’

  He glared at the craggy form of the superintendent.

  ‘Well, no,’ said Ironside, ‘I’m not.’

  He stepped forward. Somehow the ring of avid hunters broke. Ironside went on into the ballroom itself. Jack and Peter kept close to his heels. The orange-uniformed commissionaire clung to the door behind them and began a bitter and prolonged argument with the reporters.

  Inside again, the scene was changed. All the looping black cables which had been Sergeant Milk’s downfall had been banished. And with them had gone the unsavoury taggle of advertising sponsors, variety agents and photographers. Instead the huge ballroom floor, glossier than ever, had been covered with little tables each with its soft pink tablecloth and soft pink light. Most of them were already filled with their quota of gaily expectant customers. The others were filling up fast.

  Presiding over the whole scene at the back of the shallow stage, set off to perfection by the deep blue of the drapes, was an enormous, flower-surrounded, tenderly pink, glossily burgeoning heart. It almost looked as if it was throbbing with pure pleasure. And in front of it stood the victor’s golden throne.

  Superintendent Ironside looked his fill in silence.

  He turned to Peter and Jack.

  ‘Come along,’ he said in that quiet, quiet voice.

  They found themselves a corner near the little door leading back-stage.

  ‘This should do very well,’ Ironside said. ‘I’m afraid you’ll have to stand, but we’ll be able to keep a good eye on Miss Curtis and get some idea of how all this is affecting her. It’s a matter of duty.’

  Jack nodded cheerfully.

  ‘Bit of luck for me,’ he said. I wasn’t sure I was going to get here to see June. And here I am in a front row seat, except that there’s no seat.’

  Peter laughed at the joke. The huge room was warm and comfortable. He leant against the delicate-hued wall and relaxed. All round about he heard the contented chatter of the expectant audience.

  A slight discordant note struck his ear. He looked quickly and cautiously from side to side.

  And in a moment he located the source of the faint, irritable ripple on the happy millpond. Two middle-aged men in smooth suits, sitting together at one of the little tables, seemed to be having a disagreement.

  With a London policeman’s developed sense for nosing out impending trouble, Peter concentrated on the two men till he could make out quite clearly just what they were saying.

  ‘Look here,’ the podgier of the two snapped, ‘that girl of yours is a nice property, but if you ask me she’s got an agent who’s getting a bit above himself.’

  ‘Are you insulting me?’ said the other man. ‘Because if so . . .’

  He pushed back his little gilt chair in a thoroughly aggressive manner.

  Peter glanced from side to side to make sure there was no obstruction between him and the scene of the quarrel.

  ‘No, no,’ the podgy man said quickly. ‘Don’t misunderstand me, old chap. All I’m saying is that to ask that much for the rights to the torso is plain ridiculous.’

  ‘All right, all right. You want to know how much I got for the legs? Before she’s even won this bout?’

  ‘I don’t care if you got a
couple of thousand for the legs. I’m not a stockings firm. It’s the torso we’re interested in, and that’s not worth more than two-fifty to any bra outfit in the business.’

  ‘Two-fifty. Now you’re just talking nonsense.’

  Peter relaxed again. Business is business.

  Before much longer the show began. Mr Brown, transformed almost as effectively as his establishment by a midnight-blue dinner jacket in place of his check waistcoat, came on to the stage in a concatenation of spotlights. The spruce orchestra which had replaced the piano-player with the addiction to Civil Defence gave him a welcoming blare.

  He bowed deeply. The chatter hushed. He began to tell the audience about the wonders they were going to see.

  ‘You know,’ Ironside whispered, ‘it’s astonishing the versatility to be found in the most unexpected places. Here’s this chap with such talent for elegant phrases and refined jollity. You wouldn’t think he could combine that and the stark disciplinarianism we saw this afternoon, would you?’

  Jack and Peter exchanged a glance but neither offered a reply.

  Preceded by a reverent eulogy from Mr Brown, the aspirants to the title of Miss Valentine now came on to the platform. They too had progressed. No longer did they cluster together in a chilly huddle. Instead one by one they sauntered on to the stage and stood as statuesquely as they could in a well-spaced line, like Greek goddesses on the top of some convenient temple. They were to begin the contest in evening dress and made, in consequence, nobly contrasting great splashes of colour against the deep blue of the draped curtains. Except for the girl who had inadvertently chosen exactly the same blue.

  Down in the corner by the pass-door Jack sighed appreciatively.

  ‘Pretty smashing bunch,’ he said. ‘Old June’s going to have to beat some tough competition.’

  ‘We must have faith that she will,’ Ironside said. ‘I feel that, flushed with success, she’ll be really extraordinarily vulnerable.’

  Mr Brown’s reverent drone rose to its climax. The band entered with gusto upon the tune the piano-player had beaten out so wearily so many times that morning. The first contestant, Miss Greater Bloomsbury, 37 – 25 – 37, smoothed her long white gloves, lifted up her head bravely, and plunged. To the sensuous sway of the music she made her way down on to the catwalk, stopped as she reached the judges’ table, smiled with intensity, and walked on.