God is an Englishman

by R. F Delderfield

  He stood studying the hoarding some time, aware of a sense of unease and wondering what the link might be between Avery's eccentric capers and the cancellation of a dancer's contract at a music-hall. That there was some link he felt certain and his doubts extended beyond Avery and his troubles to his own financial situation that was, to a large extent, dependent on the man. A mood of depression entered into him, matching the cheerless autumn evening and the soft skitter of dead leaves in the wind, so that he had an uneasy certainty that he was approaching another, unlooked-for crisis, like the moment he had sat his horse outside the walls of Jhansi, or when he watched the riot build up in Seddon Moss and again, when he went into the double-room at Tryst and saw the corpse of Luke Dobbs in his hearth. He muttered, “Damn it, I’ll go there now and if I don’t find him I’ll take a cab to Kate Hamilton's. If anyone can put me on his track she can,” and moved on into Gray's Inn Road.

  The cab set him down at the western end of Cheyne Walk and he located the Chanticleer within minutes. It was a seedy-looking place, half a public-house, half a club, not at all the kind of establishment he would have thought a buck like Avery would have patronised. There was, as Vosper had indicated, an outside entrance to rooms above, an open door and a flight of uncarpeted stairs leading up from the mews at the side. The windows above were curtained, and the place looked unoccupied, although there was a certain amount of early activity going on at the Chanticleer to the thin accompaniment of a piano tinkling out a music-hall dirge. Standing there in the dark Adam experienced a rare sensation of futility and indecision but then it passed and he went up the stairs to a wide landing, moving with a caution not solely imposed by the blackness for, although a strong draught implied the landing window was open, there were no lamp-standards in the mews below. He struck a match and in its glare saw two heavily framed doors facing him. He tried both but they were locked and without much hope he knocked on the panels and when there was no response called, softly, “Josh? Are you there, Josh? It's me, Swann.”

  He could not be sure but he thought he detected the sound of a scrape on the far side of the door farthest from the stairs and called again, “Josh? It's me, Swann, and I’m alone.” He heard a definite movement then, very laboured and deliberate, almost as though some heavy object was being removed from the threshold and then the key was turned and the chain moved in its groove and Avery's voice, very hoarse and somehow disembodied, came to him out of the darkness, a darkness that smelled stuffy and cloying, like the smell that would issue from a long-locked chest full of clothes that had been put away damp and left to moulder.

  “Adam? Just you?” and on a rising note of urgency, “Step inside, for God's sake. Quickly, man.”

  Adam went in and the door closed, the key being turned and the chain readjusted.

  “What the devil is going on here?”

  He heard Avery laugh but there was no mirth in the sound. “A penny-dreadful with a cast of three. You sure you want to make it four?”

  Adam's irritation mounted. “How do I know until I can see you?”

  Avery said, soberly, “You might not like what you see. However, you came of your own accord. My advice is to leave by it. I’m in deep, my friend, and a great deal deeper than I bargained for. Stand where you are, I’ll light up.”

  He moved away and Adam, even in the darkness, noted his dragging step, as though he was drunk or handicapped in some way. Then, from a corner farthest from the window Avery struck a match and applied it to a table lamp that burned low, casting fantastic shadows round the large room.

  It was, as he saw at a glance, in the wildest disorder. Furniture was overturned and one curtain had been ripped from its rings and hooked back over the bracket to shut out any light from the street below. The remains of a china group of figures, nymphs, and a satyr, lay in the fireless hearth and fragments had been crushed to powder underfoot. The room was evidently a parlour adjoining a bedroom reached through closed, folding doors, and a plush table-cloth had been half-dragged to the floor and hung like a discarded banner. Its folds shrouded the upper half of a man sprawled on his back, the toes of his yellow, calf-leather boots pointing to the ceiling. Adam took it in at a glance and then looked at Avery, standing in front of the folding doors, blinking as though his eyes were having difficulty adjusting to the light. He looked ghastly, with his clothes stained and rumpled, two days’ growth of bristles on his chin, and a pallor the shade of old parchment. His left arm was resting in a roughly made sling. His right hung down and in the hand, loosely held, was a four-chambered revolver of a kind Adam had never seen. As he stared Avery made a characteristic attempt to outface the circumstances. “Not pretty, eh?” and he drew back his lips in a grimace that was more of a snarl than his usual cynical smile.

  “For Christ's sake, what kind of mess are you in, Josh?”

  Avery relaxed, laid his pistol on the lamp-table and poured brandy from a near-empty bottle into a tumbler.

  “No worse than you’d find yourself in if anyone saw you come in, Adam.”

  “No one saw me come in. Vosper had this address and gave it me at the last moment. Very reluctantly. Who the hell is that on the floor?”

  “A fool,” Avery said, offhandedly. “Take a close look. You’ve seen dead men before.”

  Adam bent and lifted the trailing edge of the table-cloth. The single eye of a young man with dark, handsome features stared up at him. Where the other eye had been was a hole sealed by long-congealed blood. There was more dried blood on the carpet where the slug had emerged from the back of his skull. A foot beyond lay a short, broad-bladed dagger, with blackish stains spreading almost to the hilt. He stood up and his eye rested on the bulge in the upper part of Avery's left arm. “You’re hurt?”

  Avery shrugged and the movement made him wince. Adam said, “Lie on that couch and let me take a look at it.”

  “Presently,” Avery said, “after you’ve seen what you’ve walked into. There's still no reason why you should stay. If I was in your situation I should walk out of that door, and forget you paid a call.”

  “You wouldn’t,” Adam said, “and you must know that I can’t, so don’t pretend to heroics. They don’t suit you, Josh. What else do you want me to see?”

  Avery pushed gently at the folding door with his foot and motioned Adam over the threshold. There was light in the bedroom issuing from two half-burned candles, set one on either side of the bed. In contrast to the parlour everything here was in order, with curtains drawn and the white coverlet stretched tight, its folds meticulously arranged. On the bed, looking exactly like a marble statue carved by a master sculptor, was the dancer, Esmerelda. She was naked save for a wisp of muslin laid crosswise under her breasts and the piece of fabric looked so incongruous that Adam's attention was at once drawn to it. The flesh under the transparent material was dark, as though heavily bruised, and the small blemish emphasised the startling whiteness of the rest of the body, composed and stilled, as was the face with eyes closed and blue-black hair carefully arranged on a spotless pillow. The photograph Vosper had shown him did not come close to doing the woman justice. Stark naked, and in death, she had the perfection of a sleeping goddess painted by someone like Botticelli or Giorgione. He said, over his shoulder, “You killed her too, Josh?”

  “No, by God! That bastard Figaro killed her. It's hard to say why unless he was afraid she had access to the loot.”

  “What loot?”

  “Everything I had. Including your rubies.”

  Adam came out of the bedroom and closed the door. Without moving from where he stood just inside the parlour Avery stared at him, still blinking.

  “Well?”

  “Let me attend to that wound first. Then we’ll talk about it.”

  Something seemed to ebb from the man. He pushed himself off the wall and slumped a little, swaying as he moved the few steps to the sofa where he sat, almost involuntarily. Removing the sling and his jacket Adam could hear his breath whistling and smell the sour odour
of his brandy-laden breath. The wound in his upper arm was not as serious as he had feared. The knife had sliced through the flesh below the biceps but it had missed the bone for Avery could still flex his elbow. It was very swollen, however, and still uncleansed. Avery lay still while Adam washed it thoroughly with a napkin soaked in brandy and water before re-bandaging it and readjusting the sling.

  “That's all the damage?”

  “A bruise or two. Figaro worked with his feet, but you’d expect that from a dancer.”

  “You had to kill him?”

  “It was him or me. But I’d have killed him anyway. She was dead when I got here.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “It's a tedious story. Most love stories are, told by a middle-aged man.”

  “You were in love with that girl?”

  “How does a man like me define love? I was besotted with her.”

  “To the extent of letting her bleed you of everything you possessed? A man like you? It's damned hard to believe, Josh.”

  “I find it hard to believe myself. All I feel for her now is pity. She should have taken her wages and got out ahead of him. She worked hard enough for them, I saw to that. But maybe she had no such intention and I’ve no means of knowing now. Not that it matters a damn, to me or anyone else. The money and rubies are past recovery, and that disposes of all obligations, mine or yours.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “What else does a man say to someone whose pocket he has picked? Does he demand the cab-fare out of range of the police?”

  “You can leave me out of it for the moment. You killed that Spaniard in self-defence. There's the wound and the weapon to prove it.”

  “That might serve a hard-used, respectable bourgeois. It wouldn’t help me much, except maybe to save my neck and even that's unlikely. A man like me makes enemies, some of them placed to pull strings. Then there's Esmerelda. When the full circumstances are known would anyone believe I didn’t kill her?”

  “What are the circumstances? Apart from her milking you?”

  “What do they matter? To you or anyone else?”

  “Damn it, man, of course they matter,” Adam blazed out. “What kind of partner would I be to turn my back on you in a situation of this kind?”

  “You might if you knew how things stood between us and have done, from the moment you came to me with that necklace.”

  “I said leave my involvement for the moment. We’ll come to that. Tell me what happened, so that I can make some kind of guess at your claim on help.”

  “Is that bottle empty?”

  Adam picked it up and poured the last of the brandy into the tumbler. There was no more than a couple of fingers and Avery contemplated the liquid, swirling it round.

  “You could begin by telling me what was so special about that dancer. She's a very beautiful woman, granted, but you’ve never had much difficulty in hiring bedspace alongside beautiful women. How did it come about that you lost your head to this extent over a particular whore? And don’t tell me she wasn’t as much a whore as any of those girls at Kate Hamilton's.”

  A flash of the familiar Avery showed in the green eyes that continued to consider him, coolly. “There are whores and whores. Some are more accomplished than others, or perhaps appear so to a man nudging fifty.” He paused a moment, still assessing the man who stood over him, “You took your fun where you found it before you decided to put on that tall hat and watch chain. Before that, when you were younger bones, were you never sexually enslaved? For a brief space, perhaps? A month or less?”

  “No, but maybe that was because we were always on the move in those days.”

  “It happens,” Avery said, “it can happen to the cockiest of us. I was capable of astonishing myself. It might have something to do with age.” A flash of his habitual charlatanry returned to him. “Take care it doesn’t happen to you, Adam. That plump little partridge you married might keep you snug and cosy for the time being, but a man oughtn’t to take it for granted until he knows all there is to know about himself. He can always turn a blind corner, as I did when I first took Esmerelda to bed.” He paused again but Adam said nothing. “That was close on a year ago and I’ve had no other woman since. Nor wanted one.”

  “You were thought of as a very warm man. What went wrong? I’ve heard artistes of her kind are well paid but surely not so well as you could pay her?”

  “That's what I thought. It's what any man in his senses would have thought. But it wasn’t so. There isn’t enough money in the world to satisfy the Esmereldas and when the well runs dry they move on, like any other nomad.”

  “So you ran yourself down to the last penny?”

  “It doesn’t happen like that,” Avery said, “it's a zig-zag track, a small-time gambler trying to claw back losses. When I began to feel the drag I plunged and when she realised what was happening and applied the screw I went under a second and third time. I wasn’t going to lose her while there was breath in my body, and that wasn’t solely the need to have her exclusively. It was more of a point of honour. My kind of honour. I knew she was fleecing me and didn’t care. What I didn’t know was that she was getting her brief from that pimp on the floor.”

  “What happened here, and when?”

  “I heard she’d missed an appearance and that her dressing room had been cleared. The prospect of cutting my losses was more than I could face. I came here with some kind of idea of forcing a decision, of latching on to her wherever she went—making sure of seeing she didn’t leave the country at all events; or maybe of getting at least your share of the money back if it was concealed here.”

  “It wasn’t?”

  “It's been transferred to the Continent in droplets, and in his name. I found that out going through his pockets.”

  “He was here when you arrived?”

  “Another two minutes and I would have missed him. Did you notice her fingers? He had trouble getting the rings off. You could say he was killed collecting his small change, or most of it.”

  He took out a ring and Adam recognised one of the smaller rubies, set in a diamond cluster not unlike the ring Avery had had made up for Henrietta. The sight of it recalled his own situation.

  “I went to these lengths to run you down because I bought Tryst. Apart from that, expensive renewals can’t be put off much longer.”

  “I knew about the house. I’d like to believe it was one reason why I acted.” He studied his empty glass. “They say a man changes every seven years. Maybe a conscience moved in to keep company with adolescent goatishness.”

  “How long have you been holed up here?”

  “They’ve been dead thirty-six hours.”

  “Why didn’t you make a run for it?”

  “It was too risky. There are always people coming and going at that bawdy house below. No. That isn’t the real reason. I’ve kissed my hand to a hundred women. Esmerelda was different.”

  He leaned back on the sofa-head, closing his eyes. For the first time Adam saw him for what he was, an ageing, used-up rake who had been experimenting with himself and most of those who crossed his path since puberty. A man without any kind of faith, who had shed belief in himself with the erosion of his belief in others, so that cynicism seeped into his mind as Figaro's blood had been absorbed by the carpet at his feet. The one thing that redeemed him, Adam thought, was his courage, and after that a self-mocking honesty that only those who knew him would recognise as such.

  “Suppose you got clear. What would you do, Josh?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Think about it then.”

  “They’ll soon be looking for her, no doubt. A person like Esmerelda doesn’t just disappear without trace. Her things are still at the hotel. I checked there first.”

  “They’re looking for her now. A man wanted to search your Guildford Street rooms. Vosper thought he was a detective. There's already a cancellation slip on her billing. If she walked out on a contract the thea
tre people will try and trace her to recoup their advance fees. We don’t have long to make up our minds, Josh.”

  “We don’t? I told you, I don’t expect you to concern yourself in this. Why should you? You’re already committing a felony by being here. Lend me what money you have about you and I’ll make a run for it.”

  “A run for where, Josh?”

  “Harwich. I’ve got a standing arrangement with a Dutch skipper there. A man like me has to keep at least one back door unlatched.”

  “They’ll be watching the railway termini. You’ve never hidden your light under a bushel. Any detective worth his salt would recognise you at a glance.”

  “I daresay I’ll give them their money's worth.”

  Adam said, slowly, “It isn’t just a matter of you, Josh. I’m involved, whether you like it or not. Or whether I like it or not. Every London customer on my books knows of our association. I’ll have a hard enough task riding this out financially. Seeing you in the dock at Old Bailey wouldn’t help and I’ve put too much of myself into Swann-on-Wheels to see it advertised in the Newgate Calendar. Did that occur to you?”