‘If you have an errand you can send me on … Someone I can speak to. Can you give me something to do?’
‘I still think the most likely thing is that she went somewhere else to get an abortion that weekend. But I don’t know where. And I don’t know who to ask. Oh … Actually, d’you know … I do. Would you come in? Just for five minutes? I’m going to ask my flatmate.’
‘I don’t mind it out here,’ he said, staring at his feet.
‘I know. But I do. I’m not leaving you standing in the snow. Come and have a cup of tea. Have you eaten? We have toast.’ And Anna pulled Aloysius gently towards the door to the flats.
Aloysius settled himself gingerly on the sofa while Anna put bread under the grill and went to wake up Kelly.
‘Kelly?’ Anna knocked at the door.
‘Ugh?’
‘Kelly?’
‘What? Are you okay?’
‘I am. But I really need to ask you something.’
‘Okay. Wait. I’m not dressed.’
Kelly came out of her room wrapped in a kimono, her hair piled crazily to one side. She stared at Aloysius who tried to make himself look smaller by burrowing a little into the sofa and turning away his face.
‘Who’s this?’
‘That’s Aloysius. He’s a friend of mine.’
‘Okay.’ Kelly remained in the doorway of her room.
‘He was beaten up by the police. That’s why he looks like that.’
‘Okay.’
‘Iolanthe’s been missing twelve days now.’
‘Iolanthe?’
‘Green. The actress. Who I worked for.’
‘Okay. Right. Sorry. Long night.’
‘We know she was pregnant and trying to get an abortion.’
Kelly grimaced at this.
‘Your friends … the other dancers … the hostesses … They must have someone they go to. You know. When they need to. Someone who can help …’
Kelly raised her eyebrows as if to indicate that this was not an appropriate line of questioning.
‘I’m sorry to ask when Aloysius is here but no one’s going to judge you if your friends have gone looking for something. That’s just … It’s just … life. And I’m honestly frightened Iolanthe’s lying somewhere sick and no one’s coming to find her.’
Kelly blinked at Anna for half a minute and then she walked back inside her bedroom and shut the door. Anna waited for a moment but there was no sound from the room. She fetched Aloysius a plate of toast, and tea with sugar in it. ‘For the shock,’ she told him, ‘and when you’ve finished I’m going to clean your face.’
‘No! Please don’t,’ Aloysius said, recoiling into the cushions of the sofa.
‘Why not?’
‘Because it took a really long time to get a bit numb and I don’t want you poking at it. I wouldn’t say no to some aspirin.’
‘Okay. We’ve got aspirin.’ Anna went and got a bottle from the bathroom. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘you look a little scary at the moment and if we go looking for Iolanthe people might find you harder to talk to.’
‘Oh,’ was all Aloysius said in reply. He swallowed four of the pills with his tea. ‘I’ll go and have a wash.’
The bathroom was a tiny, white-painted cube; just about four foot by four foot. There was a half-bath, a sink and a small toilet which a person could sit on sideways with their knees jammed against the pedestal of the sink. Aloysius closed the door with some difficulty and ran the water. It was cold. His image in the mirror was blurred and fragmented. He took off his glasses gingerly and laid them on the shelf. They were cracked but none of the glass had been lost from the lenses. He didn’t know what he’d do if he couldn’t see.
The lower part of his face was smeared with a brown crust of blood and the end of his horribly swollen nose now pointed to the left. Despite what he had told Anna it was extremely painful, even now, and he didn’t dare touch it. There were cuts across his brows and a lot of dried blood in his eyebrows. The skin all around his eyes was swollen with a layer of black blood beneath the skin so that he looked like a boxer after a fight. He washed his hands and carefully cleaned his chin and neck and cheeks. He tried to wash some of the blood out of his brows but the pain was too much to deal with. He would try again when the aspirin had kicked in.
Aloysius had never felt more profoundly unconnected to the person he appeared to be. He realised now that the man he had become inside his head was far whiter and more handsome than the outer Aloysius. The man he had become inside his head would never have been beaten because he would have talked himself out of a dangerous situation. The man inside his head would never have had the experience of handcuffs. He would pity criminals and wonder at their mindset.
Though not technically a criminal himself – and he needed to remind himself of that quite fiercely – he had nonetheless been inducted into the role of informant, a role that carried a very strong suggestion of criminality about it.
He had informed on Dr Jones. This lady – who he had never met before last night, who had confided in himself and Anna, who had stood there in tears at the thought she had failed one of her patients – this lady might now be going to prison because of him. He would be expected to stand up in a court of law and give evidence against her. He would have to look in her face and see his own betrayal, to know that her life was quite undone because a policeman had succeeded in scaring him.
He had answered questions about Count Suckle and half a dozen of his other clients. What books did he keep? What income might exist not shown in his accounts? What sources of income were available outside the law? What tax arrangements did each of them follow? These were honest men, men he looked up to, business owners. How many of them might fail because he had given the wrong answer?
In a matter of minutes, while the world had spun unsteadily around him, he had found himself stripped of his role as a suited professional and recast as a member of the criminal underclass. How fragile his connection had been to everything that he held dear. And how fragile the connection of Dr Jones and all the rest of them. First he had been cut from his position and now he was to help in cutting down these others.
Any idea of a romance with Anna now lay by the wayside. He wouldn’t even have blamed her if she found herself revolted by his current state of dishevelment though he had felt an unmanly pang of betrayal when she had so easily left him and Samira standing at the front desk of Savile Row. He had worked hard to flatten that emotion as he sat in his cell, knowing full well that a woman was not expected to save the man she was with; nonetheless Samira’s words to Anna rang in his ears.
‘I didn’t offer to go walking round Soho after dark with a fucking black man for protection.’
The way she had said black had stilled his heart a little even in the awfulness of that moment. Drawing out the sound of the letters; pouring so much ugliness into them. He had fancied himself one of the good, brave, handsome men in an Agatha Christie novel. But the handsome man was never tinged with blackness, for what possible use would he be with skin like that? He wasn’t Captain Dobbin or Gabriel Oak or Robert Jordan. What model had he in any book at all? Was he supposed to find an echo of himself in the Emperor Seth or Chokey Cholmondeley? He was invisible – ghostly white, transparent as a wedding veil of silk – within the pages of the books he loved.
There was a tap at the door. ‘Aloysius?’
‘Yes?’
‘Are you okay in there?’
‘Yes. Sorry. Out in a minute.’
He opened the door and Anna pressed her fingers to her lips and held a piece of paper up against her chest. Then she pointed to the bottom of Kelly’s door and mimed it being slid under.
It read:
High Street, East Ham CLO 6784
Arnold Circus, Shoreditch SHO 7526
They slipped on their coats and shoes and crept out of the flat.
Colonies
Thursday, 11 November
There was a Mark. And a Cassidy. A Yo
landa who was really Iolanthe – or was it the other way around? There was a brother alive in Annapolis when Iolanthe said he was dead, holding a whites-only naval commission even though he wasn’t white. There was a pregnancy which might or might not have been ended from a completely unknown relationship. And still nobody – absolutely nobody – had seen Iolanthe Green since she walked away from the theatre on that Saturday night in October.
Hayes stood on Kingly Street and scanned the shops for coffee bars and cafes. It was violence. He could feel it. Inspector Knight thought she’d topped herself but why should she? You didn’t kill yourself just because you were pregnant. Not when you lived in a place where pregnancies could be ended.
‘Why do women normally go missing?’ Anna Treadway had asked him.
Men, thought Hayes, and his heart sank a little in his chest. Mark or Cassidy or the father of the baby had beaten her to death.
He’d never seen so many men cry until he’d joined the police. Men who’d slit the throats of their wives and children. Men who’d bottled their friends in a drunken row. Men who’d destroyed their own careers through crimes both big and small. And those were just the criminals. Policemen cried as well. He had discovered this early on. The sergeant in the dark office, filling in the paperwork of another brutal domestic, shoulders hunched, back to the room. The constable in the alley, guarding the body of a woman frozen to death, helmet down, face to the wall. Brennan cried too. Silently, in secret, until the numbness came upon him and he could cry much less. It was a relief and a sadness to him, to see death and to remain untouched.
Sometime soon, in the next few days, he would sit across the table from the man who had killed Iolanthe Green and that man would admit the crime, bewail his short temper and then he’d fall forward, his head in his hands, and sob. ‘She should have been faithful,’ he would say. ‘Shouldn’t have fucked around. Should have told me about the baby.’ And Hayes would nod and listen patiently because that’s what he’d been trained to do. You couldn’t feel angry all the time, anyway. It was exhausting. You’d never do your job.
He chose a likely-looking coffee bar set on the right section of the street and stepped inside. The air was thick with smoke and every table was occupied by men baring their forearms in shirtsleeves or else wrapped in heavy wool coats. No one wore a jacket. No one wore a tie. The only member of staff to be found was out the back frying bacon for sandwiches.
‘Excuse me,’ Hayes called through to the kitchen. ‘Metropolitan Police. I need to have a word.’ Behind him, he could sense a dozen heads turning to look at him and the level of the conversation dropped.
A heavyset man in an apron came to the counter. His face was bloated and stubbled but punctuated by a pair of remarkably blue eyes which Hayes couldn’t help staring at. ‘We got trouble, then?’ the man asked.
‘Just questions,’ Hayes told him. ‘Detective Sergeant Hayes. I’m working on the disappearance of Iolanthe Green. I believe there were some arrests outside the cafe last night.’
‘Whores and a coon.’ The large man paused. ‘A coloured.’ He eyed his clientele over Hayes’ right shoulder. Barnaby could hear the door opening and closing behind him but he didn’t turn.
‘They were looking for someone called Mark. A musician. Believed to be the ex-boyfriend or boyfriend of Miss Green.’
‘What if they were?’
‘I need to ask this Mark a couple of questions. He isn’t in any trouble. There’s a woman missing. We just need to be thorough.’
‘You trying to pin something on him?’
Hayes shot the man a large, fake smile. ‘Absolutely not. He’s not a central line of enquiry, just someone I need to say I saw.’
‘He does bar work sometimes. Filling in. Said he’d been working the Colony Room on Dean Street. Don’t know if you’ll find him there. Don’t keep his diary.’
‘Much obliged,’ Hayes told him with a nod and left, watched by two dozen pairs of eyes.
The Colony Room Club. Hayes knew it, though he’d never been in. Run by a Portuguese-Brummie Jew called Muriel, it had a reputation for filth and encouraging alcoholics to destroy themselves with drink. Soho could be so depressing.
He made his way to Dean Street, the snow and the sludge seeping through his shoe leather, the wind cracking the skin on his face. He’d had ninety minutes’ sleep last night. Ninety minutes on a bench in the canteen between talking to Anna Treadway and tidying himself up for Knight’s arrival. The warmth from the pints he’d drunk with Wingate had worn off now and he was left cold, tired and wary of Orla’s resentment when he went home.
The stairs up to the Colony Room stank of urine and uncollected rubbish. The walls around him were painted a deep unpleasant green. Half this city lives in squalor, Hayes thought. They live in the kind of filth I never once saw back home and yet it’s us – he corrected himself: it’s the Irish are said to be the filthy ones. He paused outside a black door. ‘Colony Room Club’ was painted there in a swirling cursive, ‘Members Only’. He eased it open.
The room inside was large, dark and full of people, even though it was only half past three in the afternoon. At one end was a short bar behind which a dark-haired man was pouring glasses of vodka. In front of the bar stood a gaggle of men and women, old and young, white and coloured. A man in a copper-coloured brocade suit and pork pie hat was playing jazz at an upright in the centre of the room, a cigar hanging from his lower lip. The pictures on the peeling walls hung crooked. Curtains were pinned limply to the side of archways. The floor was awash with a sea of ash. It reminded Hayes of a saloon bar or speakeasy, the kind of place he had imagined when he read adventure stories as a boy.
‘Members only, cunty,’ a woman cried from the bar. Hayes turned to find the owner of the voice.
‘Never seen him before,’ a man’s voice shouted.
‘You new here, Lady Jane?’ Hayes found that the voice was coming from a small, dark-haired woman hunched on a bar stool in the corner. Her eyebrows had been drawn on in a strong black line, her lips applied in the same manner but in red and she wore a garish emerald and blue checked dress.
Hayes fumbled in his pockets for a warrant card and held it out to her, not sure if this was Muriel.
The lady leaned a little forward, threw up her eyebrows and then announced to her courtiers at the bar, ‘It’s a fucking copper.’ Half the room turned and stared at Hayes, the other half kept drinking.
He took a step forward. ‘My name is Barnaby Hayes. I’m a detective sergeant at West End Central investigating the disappearance of Iolanthe Green. I believe you have a man called Mark working as a barman here.’
The lady with the drawn-on eyebrows – who was in fact the aforementioned Muriel – turned to the man behind the bar. ‘Who d’you murder now then, Mary?’ The barman didn’t speak.
‘Is your name Mark?’ Hayes asked him.
The barman nodded.
‘You were dating Iolanthe Green?’
‘Wouldn’t call it dating,’ the man said.
‘Fucking her?’ Muriel asked. ‘Shtupping her? Nailing her bones?’ There was an edge to Muriel’s tone. This incursion was bothering her. Mark eyed her nervously. ‘Can I have a minute to talk to the copper?’
‘You can have thirty years,’ Muriel told him and poured herself a drink.
Mark came out from behind the bar, rubbing his hands on his jeans. ‘We can talk on the stairs,’ he said. ‘Loud in here.’
Hayes nodded and together they went back through the black door and stood uncomfortably close together on the top steps. The man called Mark looked to be in his thirties, swarthy with a slick of gelled black hair. He wore wide navy-blue trousers and a pink shirt open at the collar. Hayes drew a notepad and pencil from his breast pocket.
‘Can you tell me your full name, sir?’ Hayes asked.
‘Mark Chapel.’
‘And your current place of residence?’
‘73C Berwick Street.’
‘Thank you. And can I ask fi
rst of all if you have seen Iolanthe Green since her disappearance on the thirtieth of October?’
Mark pressed himself back against the wall of the stairway. ‘I don’t have a clue what happened. I would have come forward and said if I did.’
‘Were you dating Miss Green?’
‘We had a thing, sir. A few weeks ago. Like a fling.’
‘And how long did that fling go on for?’
‘Ten days. Something like that. I was covering the bar at Ronnie Scott’s when she came in start of October time. We got chatting. I took a night off, took her out a bit. I play in bands – session guitar – and I took her along to some rehearsals and she loved all that. Not the theatre. Different world, right? There was a rumour The Who were going to play Roaring Twenties at the weekend so we went there after her show but it wasn’t the right night. She liked it though, stayed there for hours, they had to throw us out. We went out three, four times that week and then the next weekend she blows me off and a few days later I hear she’s seeing this coloured guy, Del or something, works in the Twenties. So I see her, just in passing, late October. ‘Lanny!’ I say but she walks right past me. Didn’t want to know me. Bitch.’
‘She was rude to you?’
‘She was stuck up. Used to tell me to talk less, ’cause I was boring her.’
‘And you were angry about this.’
‘I wasn’t angry. I was annoyed. She was a cow. That doesn’t mean I hurt her.’
‘I have to ask you a slightly odd question. When you were dating Miss Green were you aware of her protecting herself?’
‘Protecting herself? From what?’
‘From pregnancy.’
‘Oh! Oh. No. Well … I don’t think we talked about it. I just assumed …’
‘So you never spoke about contraception … pregnancy …’
‘Mostly we got drunk, danced a bit, fucked. Sorry, screwed. Had intercourse.’ Mark was sweating now. He struck Hayes as being nervous and also rather stupid. He made no attempt to square up to the policeman, seemed more frightened than anything.
Miss Treadway & the Field of Stars Page 18
