Anna took a step away from Samira, placing distance between herself and the indignity of the cuffs. ‘But what about my friends? Aloysius was in the Cue Club yesterday evening. He was at the bar. Didn’t you see him there?’ she asked Hayes.
‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t notice him. I’m sorry.’ Hayes raised his hands in a gesture of retreat. ‘I just don’t know these other people.’
Anna struggled to find a diplomatic form of words that might signal her solidarity with her friends but would stop short of annoying Brent into re-arresting her.
Samira spoke: ‘Are you just going to leave us, then?’
Anna played with her hands. ‘I don’t know what else to say. I’ll explain to Sergeant Hayes. I’ll explain who we are. I mean, there’s nothing to it, obviously. They’ll have to let you go. There isn’t any evidence.’
‘You can’t just leave me here! D’you know what will happen if I’m charged?’
‘They won’t charge you.’
Samira’s voice rose in panic. ‘D’you understand what this is going to mean … if they don’t let me go?’
‘You’ll be fine,’ Anna insisted. ‘Just tell the truth.’
‘Just tell the truth! I don’t have a policeman friend, do I? I was safe in that club. I was safe. I didn’t offer to go walking round Soho after dark with a fucking black man for protection. What world d’you think you’re living in?’
Anna looked at Aloysius but he had no intention of meeting her eye; then she looked at Hayes, imploring him to step in, but Hayes just shrugged.
‘What do you want me to do?’ Anna asked the room in general.
‘Shut up and let me sleep!’ cried one of the blanketed men lying on the benches.
‘Come on,’ said Hayes, ‘there’s nothing more you can do here now and I’ve got questions I need help with.’ He opened the door that led to the back offices and Anna followed him through. She looked over her shoulder and watched the door slam shut behind them.
‘Detective Sergeant Hayes, what will happen to them? What will happen to Aloysius? He really is an accountant.’
‘I dare say it will all come out in the wash,’ Hayes told her, not sounding at all as if he believed what he said. ‘Come on, I can’t be bothered to set up an interview room. Let’s have a chat at my desk.’
Anna followed him into a large dark office cluttered with desks, filing cabinets, boxes, stools and metal safes. A single lamp was lit above a desk that overflowed with papers and chocolate wrappers. Hayes dragged a chair over for Anna and then he slumped into his own.
‘Have you found her then?’ Anna asked.
‘Goodness, no. Found her? No, no, no, no, no.’ Hayes unwrapped a bar of 5 Centre and offered it to Anna. ‘Chocolate?’
‘Yes. Just a bit.’
He broke off two chunks and ate the rest himself. ‘But I did find her brother.’
‘Her brother who’s dead?’
‘That’s the one. He works in a library in Maryland. Not dead at all. Lost both his legs. Left in ’46, came home again the next year. Lived at the family home in Boston but couldn’t pay the mortgage, it seems. Iolanthe came home and helped him sell up. They pocketed a bit of money each and then he went to work at the Naval Library in Annapolis. Says he hasn’t seen Iolanthe since ’47.’
‘Bloody hell.’
‘My thoughts exactly. So then I talked to a neighbour who remembered Nathaniel and his sister, the children of a cook who worked for an English banker. Except the girl wasn’t called Iolanthe, she was called Yolanda. And none of them were Irish; the cook’s family were all coloured.’
‘But Iolanthe’s white.’
‘Is she?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘The neighbour said the children were light-skinned, not like the mother at all. And then there’s the odd coincidence that they all have the same name as the man they worked for. Who, as it happens, had no wife.’
‘You think the banker was the father?’
‘It would explain the pale-skinned children. It would explain the cook being left the house.’
‘And why she thought the baby might be black.’
‘What baby?’
The room went very quiet. Anna felt her heart pause in her chest.
‘What baby, Miss Treadway?’
‘We … Aloysius and myself … think that Iolanthe might have been expecting a baby.’
‘Based on what?’
‘Based on something that Aloysius was told at Roaring Twenties about how Lanny was pregnant and might not have been very happy about it.’
‘How pregnant?’
‘I’ve no idea. She wasn’t showing but she’d put on a bit of weight. Just round her middle. She couldn’t get her jeans to fit. So, three or four months maybe.’
‘And she wanted to get rid of it?’
‘That’s what we heard.’
‘And were you going to come and tell me any of this?’
‘Of course. It’s all just happened this evening. There wasn’t any time …’
Hayes cast a glance towards a window blanketed with snow. ‘If Yolanda Green is outside tonight she will freeze to death.’
‘I know.’
Hayes said nothing but his annoyance was palpable. Anna’s stomach tightened. ‘Lanny told … some people we know … that she needed an abortion. I mean … I only found this out last night. Aloysius heard it from the girlfriend of someone he was working with. But then she wasn’t keen on the method, so I don’t know if she had it. I don’t think she did. And she might have been worried the baby was going to be the wrong colour. Or … I don’t know. I don’t know who the father was. We also heard she was seeing a musician called Mark who plays cards after hours in an Italian coffee bar on Kingly Street. And then we went to speak to him but the police arrested us. This Mark man is white and quite bad-tempered and he said he thought she might have run away with someone else. He didn’t mention anything about a baby.’
‘But the baby must have been conceived back in the summer. Was she even here in August? How long have they been seeing each other?’
‘Oh. I didn’t think. No, if she was more than twelve weeks gone … She didn’t start rehearsals in London until the fifth of September. But Mark was definitely her boyfriend, he sort of said as much. Maybe he found out she was pregnant and got angry.’
Hayes rubbed his face with his hands. ‘I’m going to make some tea.’
So Hayes made tea and they sat and ran through Lanny’s interview again, trying to untangle the Irish connections from the Boston connections and the story of Nathaniel’s death from the details of Nathaniel’s life. And Hayes asked Anna about Cassidy – who she knew nothing of except the phone message – and then he asked her again about the details of the abortion Lanny had tried to procure. But Anna stuck to her story of having heard it all from acquaintances of Aloysius and said nothing about Dr Jones or the surgery in Streatham. At five, Hayes decided to call it a night and send Anna home to get some sleep.
‘Am I free to go then?’ she asked him.
‘Yes. Of course,’ he told her. ‘No charges to be brought. You need to tell me though. You need to tell me what you’re thinking before you run off again to figure it all out for yourself.’
‘What about my friends?’
‘Your friends?’
‘The man and woman you arrested. You know that the policeman did that to him, don’t you? Smashed his face into the roof of the car.’
‘Was he resisting arrest?’
‘He was suggesting that we walk back to the station because the car wouldn’t start. That tall one, the one called Brent, he did that to him.’
Hayes looked at her. What on earth did she expect he could do about it? ‘Change the system from within.’ The very idea, Dr Devlin’s little mantra, had been a joke. Of course there might come a day, many years in the future, when he was sufficiently integrated, sufficiently secure and senior, that he could do such things efficiently. But for now he was still a nothing
and a nobody. And the problem with the system was that it was entirely made up of people, and many of those people were really quite normal and decent and you couldn’t strike at them without making yourself into an arse. In fact, the more that Hayes dwelt upon it the more he could see that it wasn’t really the system that was the problem at all. It was the few bad apples, the rotten hearts, who let the rest of them down. There was no grand conspiracy to undermine, no revolution waiting to happen …
‘Thank you, Miss Treadway,’ he said. ‘I’ll bear all that in mind. Now I suggest that you go home and get some sleep.’
He opened the door into the reception area and Anna passed through. One of the blanketed men still slept on a bench, the other was gone. Beside the sleeping man a middle-aged couple sat, their hands crossed in their laps. Noticing Anna, the man sprang to his feet.
‘Ottmar! What are you doing here?’
‘They arrested Samira and then we got a call to come down. We don’t know what’s happening.’
Ekin was hovering behind him, wrapped in a donkey jacket, her hair and neck covered with a blue headscarf. She looked scared to death. Anna reached out for Hayes and touched his arm. The desk sergeant watched them both carefully.
‘These are Samira’s parents, Ottmar and Ekin Alabora. I’ve known them for years. They own the Alabora Coffee House on Neal Street.’
Hayes nodded to Ottmar but spoke to Anna. ‘It’s not my arrest. I don’t know the girl and I don’t know what she was doing.’
‘But I do,’ said Anna. ‘She was standing right next to me and Aloysius asking Mark about Iolanthe. And before that she was in Roaring Twenties, also with Aloysius and me.’
‘What were you doing out with Samira?’ Ottmar asked.
‘No! We weren’t out together. I just found her. In the club. We were going to walk her home but then we got arrested for … um … solicitation.’
‘Fuhuş!’ Ekin said and though of course Anna did not understand her she could see where Ekin was going.
‘No! No one was soliciting anyone. But the policemen saw us and they made an assumption. They seemed to think that Aloysius was our pimp and I think it had to do with the time of night and the fact that we were all … you know … different shades. You see, Aloysius is originally from Jamaica and it was that that really seemed to unnerve them.’
The desk sergeant suddenly decided that he was needed in the back office and left. Hayes shook his head at Anna. ‘I don’t think you want to make those kind of accusations.’
‘I’m not saying anything that wasn’t perfectly obvious last night.’
‘Nonetheless, I’d rather you didn’t repeat accusations of that nature. They have a habit of inciting unpleasantness and they certainly aren’t going to help your cause.’
Ekin stepped forward and looked at Hayes. ‘Mr Policeman,’ she began. ‘You have arrested a child – from a good family – and said she is a prostitute. Please could you think if it was your daughter … what would you do?’
Hayes refused to meet Ekin’s eye. Instead he gazed over the front desk at something imagined on the far wall.
‘My little girl is sitting in a cell and she is very scared and—’ Ekin broke off and turned to Anna. ‘Why won’t he look at me? Am I doing something wrong?’
Anna threw her hands in the air. Detective Sergeant Hayes, who she had just been beginning to see again as something of an ally, was now merging back into the trappings of his title.
Ekin pulled off her headscarf in frustration, the tone of her voice mounting towards anger. ‘Mr Policeman? Sir? Can you hear me now? I am asking you as a mother if you could please release my child.’
Hayes stood very still, wondering if, if he slowed his breathing enough, they would all just go away.
‘Why won’t he look at me?’ Ekin knelt down on the floor in front of him. ‘I have no pride when it comes to my babies. Could you at least look at me? Please? Come on! I am not invisible!’ And she struck the floor with her hand, sending a sharp, wet crack ringing around the room.
Very slowly Hayes turned and walked back towards the doors to the offices. Ottmar, Anna and Ekin watched him go. Ekin pulled herself to her feet and rewound her headscarf. She shook her head at Anna. ‘A policeman beat my father to death.’ Her voice was quite calm, quite matter-of-fact.. ‘They banged his head against the wall until his skull cracked. But when I walk into a police station I become invisible. There are people who would pay good money for such a power. I could be like Guy Fawkes. I could blow the whole place sky high and still no one would see me standing here.’
They sat and waited on the little benches as the sky got lighter and the homeless man in the blanket woke from sleep to be ejected out into the winter air of another Thursday morning.
In a white-painted cell in the custody suite Aloysius sat cross-legged on the floor and ran over the events of the night for the eightieth time. He would have been more comfortable on the bench but his body seemed to stop working just after they closed the cell door. He had melted to the floor and stayed there, each of his limbs seeming to weigh a thousand pounds. Completely still he sat for five hours as his mind pored over the details, examining every moment from this angle and then that angle. What had he done wrong? he wondered. What moment was it that had betrayed him? Had he seemed aggressive? Had he seemed threatening? Had he failed to carry himself with gentleness and grace? Had he answered the officers rudely? Had he patronised the policeman when he suggested that they walk? He tried to replay the encounter, inserting different words and phrases. He tried to be silent. But each one of these imagined meetings broke down, for he truly could not understand what had been going on inside the policeman’s head.
He wondered if it was a punishment for touching Anna, for daring to kiss her hand. Now and again it occurred to him that he might actually be about to go to prison and his heart would flutter with fright. At six o’clock a man brought him toast and tea on a little tray but he didn’t touch them. He couldn’t move; he doubted he could swallow at all. He felt as if he was trapped inside the mummified shell of another man, a man who had done something terribly, spectacularly wrong.
At nine o’clock Detective Inspector Knight arrived in his office to find Hayes waiting for him, holding a cup of coffee.
‘That wife of yours finally emasculated you,’ he said as he accepted the cup.
‘I just wondered if I could have a word, sir.’
‘And what word would that be then?’
‘It’s about Brent.’
‘Oh, for fuck’s sake. Shut the door. What did he do this time?’
‘He assaulted a coloured while arresting him for crimes of procuring women.’
‘And?’
‘And I have it on good authority that the man’s an accountant, not a pimp at all. Just in the wrong place at the wrong time.’
‘How’s that my problem?’
‘Well, it isn’t. It’s Vice’s. But the man has information regarding the disappearance of Iolanthe Green and I’d rather like to have him on our side. I was wondering if I could offer to get the charges dropped if he would divulge everything he knew about Miss Green. Just smooth things over and get her found. You know?’
‘I still don’t see why this is my problem.’
‘Because Fellows over in Vice hates me and if I go asking for a favour …’
Knight put down the coffee. ‘Jesus, Hayes. What happened to the fighting Irish?’
‘I think I’ve pretty much figured out what’s going on with Green. I just need a couple of people in the know to get me there. And he’s one of them. I might even take him on as an informant. You know he does the books for a lot of the coloured clubs in town. Just think how much he really knows about. Tax fraud. Bribes. Girls. Drugs …’
He left that dangling there, aware that Knight would have to be an idiot not to take the bait.
My Whole Life’s Just a Series of Interviews
Thursday, 11 November
‘Come in and sit down, Mr
Weathers. I’m Detective Sergeant Hayes. I’ve spoken with my colleagues in the Vice department and we’ve agreed that if you are willing to supply information to us, as requested, we would be less inclined to charge you with procuring and exploitation. Do you understand?’
‘Yes, sir. I understand.’
‘Good. I want to start with the disappearance of Iolanthe Green. Can you tell me how you first became aware of Miss Green?’
‘She was talked about by a woman in Roaring Twenties who said she was pregnant and asking around about people who could help.’
‘Did you meet Miss Green?’
‘No. I didn’t even know what she looked like.’
‘So, how do you come to be looking for her?’
‘Yesterday afternoon, I’d finished meeting with Count Suckle and I was doing the accounts for the Cue Club when I sat down next to Miss Treadway. You were there too. You were talking to Count Suckle.’
‘Did I speak to you?’
‘No. But Miss Treadway did and then I told her what I’d heard about Miss Green being … you know. In trouble. And then she asked me to help her find her way on the bus and then there was a snowstorm and my landlady made her toast and tea and I tried to see her home from south London. When we got into town Miss Treadway asked me if I would go with her to Roaring Twenties because I knew people there. I went and talked to a friend of mine, Derek, who works in the kitchen and he told me that Miss Green had been seeing a man called Mark who drank on Kingly Street and then while we were at the club Miss Treadway met that girl Samira and said we had to walk her home after we went looking for this Mark person. And we were standing on Kingly Street when we were arrested and brought here.’
‘And you sustained your fall.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘I believe it was very icy underfoot last night.’
‘Treacherous, sir.’
‘What I don’t understand is what took you from Paddington to south London and then back again. Where were you and Miss Treadway going?’
‘We were looking for Iolanthe Green.’
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 15
