Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal

by H. R. F. Keating

  Jack’s home was in a big, new, ugly block of flats. They went up in a bare and empty lift, once brightly painted, now chipped and battered.

  Ironside rang the doorbell.

  A voice inside called out ‘Just a minute.’

  They waited.

  After a few seconds Sheila Spratt opened the door to them. She was wearing a flowered apron and rubbing her hands against it. Her face was not made up at all and had a thin whisk of white flour running across it. This may have given it character but it deprived it of prettiness, which in happier times it could easily have attained.

  ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said when she saw Peter.

  She led them into the kitchen where the flour for a cake was in a bowl on the gay-topped table.

  ‘Do you mind if I get on with this?’ she said. ‘I promised it to the kids, and if I don’t get it in the oven now I shan’t be able to make one later.’

  ‘Please carry on,’ Ironside said soothingly. ‘We’ll just sit down here, if we may, and put our few questions.’

  Sheila Spratt flicked open a packet of margarine, cut it decisively into blocks, dropped them into the bowl and began working them into the flour with her fingers.

  She seemed struck with the incongruity of her actions in face of what they had come to talk to her about.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  She sniffed back a tear.

  ‘I’m sorry. It seems awful to be doing this. But I can’t put off the kids. They’d want to know why. And I don’t know what to tell them. I don’t know what’s happening.’

  ‘You may know more than you realize, Mrs Spratt,’ Ironside said. ‘We’re certainly very much in the dark. But we must find your husband, and anything you can do to help us will be more than important.’

  ‘What can I do?’ she said.

  She flipped her stretched fingers against each other to tap off the clinging flour.

  ‘You can tell us if your husband said anything to you that gave you a hint he was going.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘No, it came as a complete shock to me.’

  Her fingers seemed to be about as flour-free as shaking was likely to get them. She turned towards the sink.

  ‘Stop,’ said Ironside.

  She stopped, turned back and looked at him in astonishment.

  ‘You told us he left last night,’ he said. ‘He spent the whole night away. He didn’t telephone or anything. And yet you left it till this morning before making any inquiries. Mrs Spratt, you didn’t expect your husband home last night, did you?’

  Sheila Spratt smiled wryly.

  ‘Nothing very strange about that,’ she said. ‘You might as well know, I suppose. Though till today I’ve been striving and struggling to keep it secret. There’s been plenty of nights when Jack hasn’t come home when he was off duty.’

  Suddenly the flour clinging to her hands seemed to infuriate her. She stormed over to the sink, flicked the tap viciously full on and held her hands under the spurting stream of water. A shower of hard drops leapt from the back of her hands and spattered all over the top of her frock above the apron.

  ‘Damn,’ she said.

  She walked over to the roller towel hanging on the back of the door and dabbed at herself.

  ‘At first he used the phone to make excuses,’ she said. ‘But then when I accidentally caught him out once he just simply stopped making the excuses. I got used to it. I was only worried in case other people got to know.’

  Peter Lassington looked at the bright harlequin squares of colour on the lino at his feet.

  Sheila came back to the cake bowl and stood with her short-nailed hands resting on the table on either side of it, looking at the grains and lumps of flour and fat as if she did not know what they were for.

  ‘And now it doesn’t matter,’ she said.

  ‘It matters to me,’ Ironside answered. ‘It matters to me where that young man is.’

  ‘I suppose it does,’ she said.

  ‘Now, can you tell me anywhere he might have gone? Is there any particular friend he might have got to help him?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘there is.’

  Ironside looked up from his neat, painted kitchen chair.

  Sheila Spratt gave a bitter smile.

  ‘There’s Peter there,’ she said. ‘He was the best friend Jack had in the world. Almost his only real friend, I suppose. And you can see he doesn’t know. He’s gone. Gone.’

  Mechanically but swiftly and efficiently she tipped sugar from the pan of her scales into the cake mixture, added a handful of chopped cherries, and poured in egg and milk from a jug.

  ‘I must ask you these questions,’ Ironside went on. ‘You know who I am, don’t you? I mean, more than the mere name.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Superintendent Ironside, didn’t Peter say? Are you the rubber heel squad? That’s what it’s called, isn’t it? The ones that watch the cops that go wrong. That’s what Jack used to call them.’

  ‘No,’ said Ironside, ‘they’re a necessary body of men. A police force has to consider its internal security. But I’m not one of them. I’m from the Yard, from the Murder Squad.’

  Sheila Spratt stopped her energetic stirring of the cake mixture for an instant.

  Then she went on as smoothly and efficiently as before.

  ‘You’re in charge of the case Jack got himself on. Is that it? The murder down at the Star Bowl ballroom.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ironside, ‘that’s it. That’s just it.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose it must put you out a lot, having the man working under you suddenly go waltzing off.’

  ‘I can bear it. I lost a sergeant before the case was five minutes old. They’ll send someone else soon enough.’

  ‘But then why are you spending time coming out here? I don’t understand.’

  Still the wooden spoon slapped the mixture mechanically against the side of the big bowl.

  ‘Don’t you understand?’

  ‘No. No, I don’t’.

  Ironside sat quite still on the spry little kitchen chair. His voice did not rise.

  ‘I think you do.’

  Suddenly Sheila Spratt started to cry. After a few seconds the tears began to fall into the bowl. They lay brightly glistening on the surface of the shiny yellow mixture.

  ‘Now, then,’ said Ironside, ‘tell me all about it. I’ve got to know.’

  ‘There’s not much to tell. But I thought I had to keep it from you somehow. I had to think of Jack. He is my husband. I don’t care what he’s done to me. We’ve been married all these years. You can’t wipe them out.’

  She wiped at the tears with the back of her hand.

  ‘I didn’t quite tell you the whole truth just now,’ she said. ‘When I was saying about Jack not coming home at nights.’

  Suddenly she snatched up the wooden spoon again and started to stir the mixture in the bowl as if her life depended on it.

  She said nothing.

  Superintendent Ironside leant forward and put his hands on his knees. He looked up at Sheila Spratt.

  ‘The whole truth,’ he said gently.

  ‘What?’ she replied with a quick ferocious glare.

  ‘The whole truth, Mrs Spratt. You said you hadn’t told me the whole truth. What is it?’

  Ironside’s voice was still quiet, pushing one word forward after another as if he was afraid that the least jar might upset the whole delicate structure.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ She la Spratt answered. ‘Why do you keep bothering me? Can’t you just leave me alone? Haven’t I got trouble enough?’

  ‘No, Mrs Spratt. Your troubles aren’t at an end yet. Not if you still care for your husband the way you say you do.’

  The superintendent’s voice was still quiet, still careful.

  ‘Do you think I don’t care for him?’ Sheila Spratt burst out. ‘He’s the father of my children, isn’t he? We’ve lived together all these years. Just because he goes off with – It doesn’t mean that I
have to change too.’

  ‘Goes off with who, Mrs Spratt?’

  ‘I didn’t say he’d gone off with anybody in particular. Just because he goes off. That’s all. Just goes off.’

  ‘No, Mrs Spratt. That’s just it, you see. You didn’t say who he has gone off with. You stopped yourself just in time. And it won’t do, you know. This is a murder case, Mrs Spratt. You’ve got to tell us.’

  Slowly and carefully Sheila Spratt tipped the cake mixture into the tin she had been greasing. She went over to the oven and stooped to hear whether the gas was still burning full blast or whether the temperature she wanted had been reached. Evidently satisfied, she went and fetched the cake from the table, opened the oven door and slipped the tin in.

  She straightened up.

  ‘June Curtis,’ she said. ‘June Curtis has been his mistress for months. He’s gone off with her. Gone for good.’

  17

  Sheila Spratt stood looking down at the black gas-rings of her cooker, burned to white at the tips by the many meals she had prepared for her husband and children. Familiarity is the equivalent of love. While familiarity lasts.

  ‘I’ve been expecting this for weeks,’ she said, staring at the patterned shapes of the gas-burners. ‘He’s mad about her, you know. Mad about her. Obsessed. Of course, he’s been working up to it for years.’

  A small patch of spilt food, burned to a hard brown, caught her eye and she began scraping at it with the back of her thumbnail.

  ‘You could say he had been working up to it ever since he left school, come to that,’ she went on. ‘He’s got this fixed idea that any woman he has to do with must be some sort of film star. He’s always wasting his time at the pictures. And then when he actually met a girl who’s won top beauty competitions, I knew it had to come then.’

  The thin hard layer of burnt food resisted her. She scraped at it more furiously, smiling her wry smile.

  ‘You’re wondering how we came to get married, I dare say,’ she added, flicking a glance back at Ironside. ‘I’m not a film star.’

  She turned to the stove again.

  ‘You know, Peter, don’t you?’ she said.

  Peter did not answer.

  ‘We were going to have a baby,’ she said. ‘I made him marry me. I wouldn’t let him get out of it.’

  A tiny flake came off the brown spot.

  ‘I suppose it was silly of me, if you like,’ she continued. ‘Anyone would have told me it was bound to come to this in the end, that I was bound to be worse off.’

  Suddenly she swung round and faced them squarely.

  ‘Well, if you want to know where that sex-mad copper of yours is,’ she said, ‘you’d better go and ask his beauty queen girl-friend. She’ll know, all right. She’ll know.’

  Ironside stood up.

  ‘Then we will go and ask,’ he said gravely.

  Standing in the dark hallway of the flats where the lift had deposited them among a flotsam of children’s battered toys, they discussed the Spratt children’s father, now so strongly attempting to escape from his parental responsibilities.

  ‘All that came as a shock to me,’ Peter said. ‘A hell of a shock. I mean, I am in a way a friend of Jack’s and I had no idea. I mean, no idea at all that all that was going on.’

  ‘In a way?’ said Ironside.

  ‘I beg your pardon, sir. I don’t quite get it.’

  ‘You said you were a friend of Spratt’s “in a way”.’

  ‘Yes, sir. That’s quite true, sir.’

  Ironside smiled in the darkness of the hallway with sadness.

  ‘People keep telling me you were his best friend,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry to find a less heart-warming relationship.’

  It was difficult for Peter in the gloom to make out exactly what the superintendent’s expression was.

  ‘Well, you know how it is, sir,’ he said. ‘People see you about together and decide you must have been pals all your life.’

  ‘But you were.’

  Ironside stated the objection with mild dispassionateness.

  ‘Yes, I suppose you could say that, sir. It’s true enough, as I told you, we were mates at school and all that. But I wouldn’t honestly describe Jack as my best friend now.’

  ‘Not now? Ah, well.’

  The superintendent took a deep sniff of the dank faintly child-smelling air of the hall and ventured into the open once more.

  The boisterous wind and scurrying puffs of cotton-wool cloud in the deep blue sky appeared not to be giving the least consideration to the importance of the business Ironside and Peter were engaged on. They struck a note of persistent frivolity, equally out of keeping with the urgency of the situation and the expected dignity of London weather in what was still, after all, winter.

  A detective-constable had gone missing in the middle of investigating a violent murder; it was beginning to look more and more as though his disappearance was connected with the case. And the wind continued in a thoroughly light-hearted fashion to chase dirty pieces of paper up and down the pavement. The sun continued to shine in a manner which could do no possible good. A wiggle of cloud actually sent a strip of shadow running down the whole length of the long terraced street opposite as if it was taking part in some sort of game.

  They hurried into the car.

  ‘Right,’ said Ironside, ‘Miss June Curtis. We’ll try the address she gave us in Black Horse Street. But I’ve a notion we’re going to find the lady singularly elusive.’

  June’s flat, when they reached it, proved to be at the top of a short but incredibly narrow flight of stairs in a building ingeniously fitted into a neglected space in the jigsaw pattern of Mayfair where land is measured by the square foot, if not by the square inch.

  Ironside knocked heavily at the narrow panel of the front door. There was no answer.

  He knocked again in a fashion that sent echoes up and down the constricted staircase. The noise at least produced an irritated head popping out of the equally narrow door on the floor below.

  It was a head protected by a good many graciously arranged curls in a deep shade of lavender.

  Ironside pounced on it.

  ‘We’re police officers looking for a Miss Curtis,’ he said. ‘Your neighbour. Do you happen to know where she is?’

  ‘Certainly not,’ said the head of lavender curls. ‘I don’t even know who she is.’

  The narrow door closed with firmness and well-controlled calm.

  They clattered down again and got into the car. They drove out into the excited traffic of Piccadilly, worked their way tediously round the halting jams of the Circus where the delicate statue of Eros, God of Love, had been temporarily boarded over in anticipation perhaps of Valentine’s Night junketings. Half-way up the sweep of Regent Street they turned off left and halted outside a building of modest proportions in neat, subdued pink brick. A small stainless steel doorplate bore the words ‘Star Bowl Ltd.’

  The carpets were very deep, the flowers were very out of season, the receptionists were very out of Debrett, and they learnt not a thing. No one was willing to know anything about what they called the ‘actual details’ of the late Edward Pariss’s enterprises. Certainly they would never have the addresses of any of ‘the – er – people – er – actually taking part’.

  Outside on the broad and almost empty pavement Superintendent Ironside took a deep breath.

  ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I’ve just got one idea left. It’s possible we may get a lead at her mother’s place. If we do, I shall pretend I expected it all along.’

  They waited for ten minutes to get across the steady stream of trundling red buses, snide taxis and quietly bored motorists making their way up Regent Street. The elderly bearded eccentric who sometimes camps out on one of the traffic islands gave them a wide-eyed stare as they waited to get through the far line of vehicles.

  Ironside stared back.

  ‘If it hadn’t been for Teddy Pariss,’ he said, ‘I’d be doing the same thing as yo
u, my man. Only in a way that society tolerates.’

  At last they were over and into the familiar territory of Soho. Progress was still slow in the narrow streets and people stepped off the pavements with distressing frequency. But in the end Peter spotted the tall shop-dummy in the white chef’s hat. There was a last delay as a little man in a tightly buttoned jacket pushed his barrow of hot chestnuts out into the roadway right under their noses. Their driver jammed on his brakes and muttered something. And then they were outside the peeling purple door with the extinguished neon sign above it saying ‘Fay’s Place’.

  And downstairs Fay’s Place was still Fay’s Place. So much do mortals leave their mark on this world. Several days were to pass before the signwriter would come to blot out this trace of Fay Curtis’s existence.

  And the pattern she had imposed, the impress of her personality, still lingered too. The black-topped glass tables were as smart as ever, except for a thin layer of dust. The tubular chairs still gave their air of vivid modernity, at least no more out-of-date than in the days when Fay Curtis herself had presided over their arrangement. The beach scene behind the little corner bar had not lost a flake of its paint. Its long-legged sexy girls still emanated an atmosphere of summertime abandon. Or as much of one as they had while Fay had watched over them so tenderly.

  Superintendent Ironside stood in the middle of the little room, where night after night close-locked couples had swayed in the heady embrace of the dance, and surveyed the scene.

  ‘Very nice,’ he said, ‘very nice. And what, I wonder, lies behind that alluring curtain.’

  He advanced towards the droopy black and gold curtain. And suddenly it was jerked brutally aside.

  June stood there. Dark red hair, creamy complexion, statue stance. All ripeness.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ironside, ‘now this is a piece of luck. We were hoping to find you.’

  ‘Oh,’ said June. ‘Well, I wasn’t hoping to find you.’

  ‘No? Well, a policeman is used to that.’

  June looked at him stonily.

  ‘I don’t much care whether you’re a policeman or someone come about the electricity,’ she said. ‘I just don’t want to see anyone. Not after that muck-up last night.’