One of the policemen paused to observe Samira, shivering in her minidress and bare legs. He looked at Aloysius but pointed to the girls. ‘Are they yours?’
‘They’re friends of mine, officer. To be exact, one of them is a friend and we were walking the young girl home. As a favour. To her father.’
‘Turn around,’ the officer told him.
‘What?’
‘Turn around and face the wall.’ Aloysius turned towards the wall and the shorter officer produced handcuffs and tethered Aloysius roughly.
‘What did I do?’ Aloysius’s voice quivered a little. The men from the cafe had gathered around the doorway to watch. Samira clutched Anna’s arm.
‘I am arresting you under the Sexual Offences Act 1956. I suspect you of procuring these women for the purpose of accruing immoral earnings. You don’t have to say anything but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you. Barry, pat him down.’ And the shorter officer started to go through Aloysius’s pockets.
Anna’s thoughts ran straight into her mouth. ‘You can’t do that. He’s an accountant!’
The tall man turned on her and started to advance. ‘Shut up! You’re both under arrest for crimes of solicitation.’
‘We haven’t committed any crime. He’s an accountant. This girl’s at school—’ but the officer grabbed Anna by the wrist, momentarily shocking her into silence.
‘I am arresting you under the Street Offences Act of 1959: loitering for the purposes of prostitution. You don’t have to say anything but anything you do say may be taken down and used in evidence against you.’ He signalled to Samira to offer up her arm and then he handcuffed Anna’s right hand to Samira’s left. Anna watched him do all this with a stifling sense of astonishment. The world had decided it would make no more sense.
Samira was starting to breathe oddly so Anna put her free arm around the girl’s shoulders and gathered her into a fierce and frightened embrace. From the corner of her eye she watched the crowd of men drift away from the open door and back into the darkness.
***
In West End Central Hayes dialled again and checked the clock. It was a quarter to one now, so quarter to eight in Boston. Too close to suppertime?
A boy answered the phone. ‘Butler residence.’
‘Oh, hello,’ said Hayes, English to the very tops of his ‘h’s. ‘This is Detective Sergeant Hayes calling from the Metropolitan Police in London. May I speak to the gentleman of the household?’
There was a brief silence and then he heard the boy holler, ‘Ma! There’s someone from the Neapolitan Police on the phone for you.’ The receiver went clunk against a table or floor and Hayes waited. A panting woman retrieved the phone and spoke.
‘Mrs Butler speaking; who is it calling, please?’
‘Good evening, ma’am. This is Detective Sergeant Hayes calling from the Metropolitan Police in London. I apologise for calling so late into the evening, but I am on the hunt for an American citizen who’s gone missing in London. Could I ask you a couple of questions?’
‘Well, yes of course, officer.’ She held the phone away from her and bellowed, ‘Bobbie! Turn the dinner off!’
‘Thank you so much. I wonder if you ever knew a Maria Green. She lived on Beacon Street from some time in the 1920s until her death in 1943.’
‘Maria Green? Do you know where she lived? I mean, what number?’
‘378, I believe. Just down from you.’
‘378. Oh, okay. That’s two doors down. Yes, I know the house you mean, of course I do; I’ve been here all my life. There was a banker there when I was growing up. An Englishman with a fancy accent. He was Mr Green. Definitely a Mr Green. But there never was a Mrs Green.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Well, my mother always used to say she thought him a bit of a strange one. No wife. Nor visitors. Except once or twice a year when he would hold a fancy party and all the windows would light up. They’d post a little note in through the door letting us know the date and apologising for any noise or nuisance. He was ever so polite, you see. And shy. Very shy. And then the next morning, that cook of his would come round with cakes and sweets and puddings left over from the party. She made chocolate mousse with little pieces of orange on the top and I can taste it now. I should have got myself the recipe except I didn’t think of it. I used to dream about those little pots of chocolate mousse. I think he must have died the year that I was fifteen. No more chocolate mousse after that. No more parties.’
‘I see. Thank you. I’m trying to track down a Maria Green who had two children, Nathaniel and Yolanda Green. They took over the house and mortgage when Mr Green died.’
‘Well, I never saw any sign of a wife. The servants lived on there for years and we never did know why. They didn’t seem to be serving anyone at all. And then the cook’s son went away to war and came back with his legs missing. He was in a wheelchair and he could never get in or out of the house because we’re up these steps, you see. I remember that the house became quite dirty – unwashed windows, unswept steps – after Mr Green died. The cook’s boy lived there at the end and then it was sold to a lovely family from Connecticut, the Bakers, who’ve kept it very nice these last twenty years or so.’
‘And the cook’s boy, did he have a sister?’
‘Yes he did, pretty little thing. Quite pale-skinned. Dressed herself up nice, ’specially after she was grown. Always a new dress and matching coat those last few years. Thought herself quite grand. The pale-skinned ones do, I think.’
‘The pale-skinned ones?’
‘Negroes. Pale-skinned negroes. Very proud of their looks, I find. In their lipstick and their heels, looking almost white. I don’t suppose you have people like that in London.’
‘Well … Um, I’m sorry. The cook’s boy and girl were black?’
‘They were all black, sir. All the servants were. The cook was very dark-skinned with lots of crazy hair. And the boy and girl were quite pale. You wouldn’t have known they were related at all. But I s’pose you get that with us too. My Bobby has red hair but my Glenda’s blonde. Family’s a funny thing.’
Hayes agreed with her that yes, most definitely, family was a funny thing and hung up the phone. He looked at the clock and wondered if he could call Nathaniel back in Annapolis but he didn’t have a number for anywhere except the main desk of the library. So instead he opened his notebook and tried to write it all down in a way that would make sense of what he’d learned.
***
On Marlborough Street a police car sat and steamed. Anna and Samira had been lodged in the back for nearly half an hour while the shorter officer, Officer Barry as Anna thought of him, turned the key and the tall officer stared at the engine under the lifted bonnet and swore. Aloysius had been told to stand facing a wall and wait so this is what he did. It was snowing again and the snow was piling thickly on the head and shoulders of the tall police officer and Aloysius. Anna could only imagine how cold Aloysius was, how angry. Samira had slumped beside her and Anna half suspected her of going to sleep out of terror. That’s what babies do, isn’t it? she thought; when they’re very scared, they just go to sleep.
She heard a scream of pain from somewhere around the bonnet of the car and the tall officer threw down the cloth he’d been holding and fell to his knees, burying his hand in the snow. By the wall, Aloysius looked over his shoulder at the crouching officer.
‘You know,’ he said, a little hesitantly and his voice shaking with the cold, ‘if it’s West End Central you’re trying to take us to we could just walk. It’s only ten minutes away. And we’re all handcuffed. I just meant … if the car won’t start.’
The tall officer stared at him from the snow and then he stood up and brushed the powdery white from his legs and cape. Aloysius turned his head back towards the wall. Anna watched as the officer grabbed Aloysius by the back of the head and swung him round until he was facing the car. She saw the way that Aloysius’s face had contorted in pain an
d surprise as he was pushed towards them. And then that vision was gone and the whole car rocked violently as the policeman drove Aloysius’s head into the roof. Samira woke and tried to grab at Anna, confused by her surroundings and the handcuff at her wrist. Officer Barry turned in his seat and stared at the roof of the car as if Aloysius’s head might come through it at any moment. Outside the darkened window two bodies retreated and the caped figure dumped the suited figure back into the snow beside the wall.
Aloysius’s nose and mouth ran with blood. His glasses were missing. When he opened his mouth his teeth were stained pink and red. Anna watched him roll for a minute in the snow, unable to right himself or bring his handcuffed hands to his face. She was, she realised, too afraid to speak. Officer Barry looked at the women in the back, his glance restive.
Aloysius righted himself and bent his long legs to support his weight. His head fell limply between them, exhaustion or confusion overwhelming him. Blood dripped, spotting the snow where he sat, and Anna saw how easily it tainted something that had once seemed beautiful.
Early-Morning Savile Row Blues
Thursday, 11 November
In the end they walked back to Savile Row. Aloysius was marched in front of the women wearing his shattered glasses. He didn’t speak and somewhere along the way he’d lost his hat. When he stumbled the tall policeman stood away from him and let him struggle to his feet.
Anna felt dazed. Through her tiredness she would stare down and see a vision of dark drops scattered about her feet. She thought of the bodies of those children lying under a bed of earth and ice up there in Yorkshire. Why had it never occurred to her that snow could be something sinister? Where had she got this idea that snow meant family and cosy Christmases around a fire? No good could come of the earth freezing over. It was the putting out of life, green shoots trampled underfoot. The warm, dark vitality of Roaring Twenties seemed to belong to another life altogether. A dream of pleasure; a hallucination, really. All that desire, all that want. She put it away from her. She remembered who she was.
When they arrived at last in the comparative warmth of the station the desk sergeant was having an argument with a police officer about the acceptability of arresting two men for vagrancy so that they wouldn’t freeze to death. The men in question – whose deeply lined faces seemed both ageless and inhuman in an otherworldly way – huddled on the wooden benches at the side of the room, wrapped in blankets, their feet tied up in layers of shopping bags. Anna wondered what had happened to so separate them from the world of men. And then she looked at Aloysius, whose swollen, bloodied face she could just glimpse, and wondered at the way a policeman’s blow had transformed him into an unfamiliar creature: the boxer, the hoodlum, the murderer, the thief. They had made him ugly. Perhaps she had made him ugly. After all it was she who had taken him for protection into a world that was not properly his own.
What did she know about him anyway? He was a tall boy, good at maths, needed glasses to see; he read Agatha Christie and Homer and Evelyn Waugh and wanted to propose to a girl in a rose garden that no longer existed. He had not known how to speak to the officers, but then neither had she. Was it all their fault? Was there some trick to dealing with the law that none of them had been taught? How on earth could those men imagine she was a prostitute? She was wearing woolly tights, for goodness’ sake. Of course, Anna thought, of course there will come a moment when I will simply explain and somebody will hear and the world will turn the right way up again. Sergeant Hayes, she thought. Sergeant Hayes will know exactly who I am.
The desk sergeant and the young police officer had reached an impasse over the homeless men and they were allowed to stay in the waiting area while Aloysius, Anna and Samira were processed. The tall police officer, who seemed to go by the name of Brent, was running through an account of the arrest with the desk sergeant and fresh forms were being spread out on the counter.
Samira, who had been almost entirely silent since the arrest, squeezed Anna’s hand. ‘Please. You have to get me out of this. I can’t be arrested. It’s going to kill them.’ She didn’t have to tell Anna who she meant.
‘Don’t worry,’ Anna told her, ‘I have a policeman friend. He’ll understand what happened.’
Samira’s face came alive with relief. ‘You know someone here?’
‘I do.’
‘Will he help us?’
‘I believe he will.’
Officer Barry pushed Aloysius to the edge of the counter. The desk sergeant looked at him, taking in the broken nose and blood-stained clothes.
‘Not your first time in a police station, I’m guessing. You’ll know what to do.’
Aloysius licked his lips. ‘Excuse me, officer, but I’ve never been arrested. Can you tell me what to do?’ To encounter such a genteel voice emerging from such a dark and bloodied face made the desk sergeant chuckle, though he didn’t seem to take much notice of what Aloysius had said. It was at that moment that Anna stepped forward, raised her uncuffed hand and in her best cut-glass tones she called out: ‘Excuse me, sir.’
The desk sergeant didn’t even glance at her. ‘We’ll get to you later.’
‘Excuse me, sir. I’m a friend of Detective Sergeant Hayes.’ All three officers turned to look her in the eye, and so did Aloysius for the first time since they’d been arrested. ‘Barnaby Hayes. He’ll know who I am. There’s been a sort of mix-up. Not anybody’s fault, I’m sure. But I think Barnaby Hayes would be rather upset if I was processed before you’d checked with him.’
Sergeant Brent shrugged at the desk sergeant. ‘I don’t know. She never said anything before.’
Anna exchanged a long glance with Aloysius and she saw his eyes soften and his lips tremble again. She flashed him a very small smile.
‘Detective Sergeant Hayes works eight till six,’ Brent told her. ‘He won’t be in for another five hours and I’m not leaving you lot hanging round here.’
‘Actually, he’s here. Signed back in at seven,’ the desk sergeant said. Brent blew air through his nose. He pointed a finger at the three arrestees and told them: ‘I’ll be back.’ And then he was off down the corridor into the heart of the station. Anna could see Samira and Aloysius relaxing just very slightly and she felt a rush of triumph that she had saved them from this mess that was partly of her making.
Brent returned with a rather dishevelled-looking Detective Sergeant Hayes, who stared at the three arrestees and then gave Anna a brief nod. Anna fixed him with a big, confident smile. She had unpinned her skirt while they sat in the police car and pulled it down to its usual conservative length and she certainly cut an odd figure in her woolly tights and librarian’s clothes standing handcuffed to a dark-haired, dark-skinned girl in a dress that only reached the middle of her thighs.
‘Hello, Sergeant Hayes. There’s been a terrible confusion. My friends and I had heard about someone who might have been Iolanthe’s boyfriend and we believed that he drank after hours in a cafe on Kingly Street. So we went to see if this was true and while we were chatting with the cafe owner these police officers mistook us for prostitutes … which of course we’re not. And they rather assumed that Aloysius here, who’s an accountant, was a pimp. Which of course he isn’t. And then we came here and it occurred to me that, of course, you know exactly who I am and what I do so you could help straighten this all out.’
‘Well?’ asked Brent.
Hayes wrinkled his brow. ‘This lady is Anna Treadway and she is a dresser at the Galaxy Theatre. She was Iolanthe Green’s dresser. I interviewed her on Tuesday morning and as far as I know she has nothing to do with prostitution. But … I’m not sure I can help any further than that. Sorry.’
‘But you see …’ said Anna, ‘I mean, thank you, Sergeant Hayes, but you see I can vouch for my friends. I’ve lived with this girl here in the flat below me for several years now. She’s only sixteen and she’s still at school and she comes from a really very observant family of the Moslem persuasion. And this gentleman here, who met wit
h a rather unfortunate accident, he is a trained accountant of very good standing who has been helping me in my search for Miss Green. I mean, honestly, he wasn’t meant to be in Soho at all tonight. He was meant to be at home in Streatham except that I didn’t know my way home and it was very cold and he lent me his gloves. So, you see, it’s my fault that all of this has happened and he really shouldn’t be charged with anything at all.’
Hayes stared first at Samira and then at Aloysius. The girl looked to be Mediterranean and he couldn’t quite place her age. She was wearing thick black eyeliner that was streaked across her cheeks and pale white lipstick, which had come off half her mouth. Her jacket and dress were ill suited to the weather and displayed a lot of flesh.
The coloured man’s face was smashed and bloody. His eyes and nose were swollen, so you couldn’t rightly tell what he looked like. He was certainly well dressed in a spivvy kind of way but his collar and his shirt front were stained brown and red with blood. He looked to Hayes very like what Brent said he was: indeed he could just imagine this man as a pimp. He briefly thought of Iolanthe, with her pale skin and her dark curly hair and tried to reconcile her with this man standing here. He couldn’t see them as the same race at all. Though, now he thought of it, if this man did know something about Iolanthe’s disappearance having him in custody would be useful.
‘I’m sorry, Miss Treadway, I’m happy to see you released into my care but I can’t possibly vouch for your friends. I know nothing about them.’ Hayes looked over at Brent. ‘I need another conversation with her anyway. If you hand her over she can be my problem.’
Brent shrugged. ‘I’m still booking the other two.’ He nodded to Officer Barry. ‘Uncuff her. She’s going to talk to Hayes instead.’
‘Wait. Sorry. I don’t understand – am I free to go?’ Anna asked.
‘Not exactly. You’re helping us with our enquiries. I need you to come and talk to me. The Iolanthe Green case has developed over the course of the night,’ Hayes told her as Officer Barry released her and handcuffed Samira to himself instead.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 14
