A Gathering of Saints

by A Gathering of Saints (retail) (epub)

  The house itself was two storeyed and narrow, the doorway flush against the crumbling, yellow bricks. Three cement steps, edges rotted and flanked by thick patches of weed, led up to the dark green door. The colour of the door matched the window frames and was exactly the shade of the filing cabinets at the Yard and every other government office in Whitehall and Westminster.

  A quart or two pinched from stores and brought home hidden at the bottom of a briefcase. All of Bermondsey and most of Tooting had the same petty-theft decor. Paint was hard to come by these days; lead was being used for more important things like bombs and bullets.

  ‘This it?’ asked Capstick unnecessarily. One of the photographers nodded. Capstick and Black climbed up the steps and went into the house.

  Reg Perrin, the detective sergeant from Bishopsgate who’d caught the Strype Street call, was on his hands and knees in the dark, narrow passage just inside the door. A single, low-watt bulb hung from the ceiling, operated by a length of string knotted to a short pull chain. The walls were green over rough plaster. The floor was covered with thin brown carpet, worn through in places to show the darkly varnished boards beneath.

  ‘Find anything?’ Capstick asked. Perrin grunted and climbed to his feet, brushing grime from his trouser knees.

  ‘Nothing but rising damp.’ Perrin was in his mid-thirties, a wiry, hatchet-faced Welshman, his thinning hair inevitably hidden under an ancient bowler. ‘Christ, I don’t know why we bother with places like this. Bloody Hitler’s doing us all a favour if you ask me.’

  ‘No one’s asking you anything,’ said Capstick, his voice flat. Perrin ran Bishopsgate like a feudal lord, collecting tithes from every pub and rooming-house brothel in the district. Capstick thoroughly disliked the weaselly little man.

  ‘Cats,’ said Black, sniffing the air. The atmosphere in the dank little passage reeked of ammonia.

  ‘Takes a man from CID to figure that out.’ Perrin grinned. ‘Cats belong to Wardle, the old gent who lives in the flat above.’ He nodded back towards the stairway behind him. ‘Brakeman. Retired.’

  ‘Let’s have a look inside,’ Black suggested.

  Perrin lifted an eyebrow. ‘You’ll have company, best manners, mind.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Pope and the Archbishop.’ Black nodded. ‘Spilsbury and his long-time friend Bentley Purchase, the East London coroner.’

  ‘They’re very quick,’ said Capstick, suddenly alert. ‘Who brought them along?’

  ‘Your lot.’

  The two Scotland Yard detectives went into the ground-floor flat. The door off the passage led directly into a small sitting room that looked out onto the street. An oval, braided rag rug was on the floor, with a sagging chesterfield along the far wall and an armchair at an angle to the small gas fire. There were no decorations on the walls except a Lloyds Bank calendar. The front window was cracked from side to side and filthy. The wallpaper had a floral motif that might once have been light blue. Now it was the colour of nicotine.

  A doorway led down a short passage to a three-step landing. An open door was on the right. A tiny bedroom. The mattress had been stripped of its linen. A small window set high on the wall looked out onto a bare patch of dull sky. Once again the glass was filthy.

  The steps took them down into a kitchen area. Spilsbury, hands stuffed into the pockets of his overcoat, was standing with the coroner beside a white enamelled stove. There was a refrigerator beside the stove and just past it a door, probably leading out into the back garden.

  On top of the refrigerator there was an alarm clock in a bright yellow Bakelite case. The only other furniture in the room was a pair of wooden, straight-backed chairs and a square table covered with a drooping sheet of dark blue oilcloth. On the oilcloth there was the naked body of a young man in his mid-twenties.

  In life he had been taller than the table was long. His head hung down over the near edge of the table while his legs hung over the far side. His mouth and eyes were open. Blood had settled into the face, turning it a mottled blue and bulging the eyes. The tongue, fallen back against the man’s hard palate, was almost black. The bulging eyes were brown. He was fair-skinned and had light, corn-silk blond hair, cut long.

  ‘Interesting, don’t you think?’ said Spilsbury, speaking to Black. There was no greeting or introduction. Morris Black felt a twinge of claustrophobia. The four live men stood in a room twelve feet wide and fourteen long. Between them and the body on the table there was barely room to move.

  ‘No visible cause of death,’ said Purchase. Black had met the coroner on one or two occasions, but knew him mostly by reputation. From what he understood, the pinched man with the small eyes and heavy glasses had trained for medicine at Cambridge, then switched to law. A good combination for a coroner, a quick mind and a fair hand, but what were he and Spilsbury doing here so quickly, and for that matter what were they doing here at all? Definitely odd, as out of place as the corpse they were examining.

  ‘Rather like our Polish friend,’ said Spilsbury. Black edged around Capstick and took a closer look at the body on the table. Naked, like Rudelski, and without any sign of what might have killed him. There was no shroud but the sense of the body’s having been prepared for its discovery was the same, the altar-like display on the table replacing the theatrics of the Polish flier’s rubber bag.

  Black leaned down. The positioning of the limbs was strange. The left arm lay splayed out at a forty-five degree angle relative to the torso while the right arm had been brought over the hairless chest to lie parallel to the shoulders. He felt something niggling at his memory but he couldn’t quite grasp it. Ignoring the feeling for the moment, he took his fountain pen out of his jacket pocket and gently lifted the hands, checking the palms.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Spilsbury. ‘Mr Purchase and I have already made a preliminary examination. I’m afraid there is no Z this time. Too much to hope for, I suppose.’

  Black stood away from the body. It was almost there. He let his eyes drift over the room again and finally settled on the little clock perched on the refrigerator. The hands hadn’t moved since he’d come into the room. He had an alarm clock much like it beside his bed; they ticked loudly when they were wound up. He couldn’t hear anything in the kitchen. The clock on the refrigerator was stopped at 3:25. He looked down at the body again and imagined the arms as the hands of the clock. The positioning was the same. Twenty-five past three.

  He felt a sick, hollow twinge in the pit of his stomach and simultaneously a quickening excitement. He had it now and knew what it meant, at least on one level. Time and circumstance might eventually have explained Rudelski’s murder – the rubber bag, the narcotic poisoning, even the letter carved into his hand, but not this. He felt himself flushing, embarrassed by the animal depth of his feeling. A tracking hound with a fresh scent in his nostrils. The passion that could make him forget his pain.

  Black nodded to himself. Unsolved, the death of the Polish airman would have been charged off as an aberration, a case file left irritatingly open for a time, eventually to be forgotten, buried under a dozen, then a hundred, then a thousand more pressing matters. The stopped clock and the position of the dead man’s arms changed that irrevocably.

  Frowning, Black stared down at the body, wondering if either victim or killer had once been a boy scout. That or a sea cadet. Both the clock and the body had been positioned to mimic the semaphore signal for the last letter in the alphabet.

  ‘No, Sir Bernard,’ Black said finally, sure of himself now. ‘Not one Z. Two.’

  Chapter Five

  Tuesday, September 10, 1940

  7:30 p.m., British Summer Time

  ‘By God, Morris, I thought the old man’s eyes were going to pop out of his head! Semaphore, imagine that!’ Dick Capstick sprinkled more cheese onto his pasta, wound up an enormous forkful and popped it gleefully into his mouth.

  The two men were dining together at Gennaro’s on Dean Street in the centre of Soho. The popular Italia
n restaurant was almost empty. The bombings were forcing a new schedule on London; movie theatres closed at seven and even the most popular restaurants and clubs shut down by eight. Soho, that bastion of the avant-garde squeezed in between the Bloomsbury literati and Mayfair high society, was no exception. Only in hotels with basement shelters were the old hours maintained.

  Morris Black smiled and sipped his glass of wine. His own meal, a thin Veal Parmesan, had turned into a glutinous, untouched mass on his plate. To Black, who’d been a Boy Scout for several years, the semaphore secret had quickly become obvious – the position of the clock hands and the dead man’s arms were identical: semaphore for the letter Z. Both Spilsbury and Purchase the coroner missed it altogether. Sir Bernard congratulated Black on his observation; Purchase only scowled.

  ‘It doesn’t bring me any closer to finding out who did the deed.’

  ‘Still…’ Capstick washed down the spaghetti with a swallow from his glass. ‘Put him in his place a bit.’ Black smiled again. Capstick was Labour Party born and bred and putting his superiors ‘in their place’ was an ongoing crusade.

  ‘I’m just wondering what’s going to happen when the newspapers find out about this.’ Black toyed with the stem of his glass. At the rear of the dim-lit room someone put on a phonograph record of moody violin music. ‘It’s the kind of thing that could start a panic. A madman going about killing people during the raids.’

  ‘I shouldn’t worry about it.’ Capstick shook his head as he scraped up the last of the spaghetti. ‘Mark my words, that’s why Sir Bernard and Purchase were there so quickly. Word’s come down from the top; this is to be kept hush-hush. Bad for morale and all that. Not a word gets out or heads will roll. The canteen was one great whisper about it today at tea.’ The large man wiped his plate with the last bit of bread from the basket between them, ate it, then leaned back in his chair and lit a cigarette. ‘It’ll be D-noticed already unless I’m very much mistaken.’

  ‘Something always gets out.’ Morris Black shrugged. ‘D notice or not, you know that.’ The ubiquitous D notice was an across-the-board censorship blanket used by the War Office. Black wondered what the Nazis called their version of the news blackout. A Goebbelsröte?

  Capstick shrugged. ‘I think they’re making too much of it. The fiend in question is only killing queers, after all.’

  ‘We don’t know that for certain.’

  ‘Safe enough to assume. Pretty young lads left dead with their peters lolling about in the breeze. Not going to worry the vast majority of the great unwashed, Morris.’

  ‘No, but maybe it’s going to worry a few well-placed MPs and the odd first secretary.’

  Capstick grinned. ‘Not to mention half the old Etonians in the Home Office. That is, if you believe Nosey Smith and the lads in Special Branch. Smile at one of them standing at the pissoir and he’ll have you up on charges for gross indecency.’ One of the Gennaro’s waiters was singing along with the violin music now as he swept crumbs up off the tables.

  Capstick shook his head again and spewed out a long plume of smoke. ‘I’m glad it’s your patch and not mine, Morris. They’ll want you to clear this one off with all due speed.’ The detective made a face. ‘Meaningful looks from the chief superintendent. Concerned memoranda from the Office of the Commissioner. Deathly stuff.’

  ‘I didn’t notice you staying on to lend a hand.’

  ‘I’ve got my own villains to pursue… thank God.’ He smiled across the table at his friend. ‘No joy from the upstairs lodger?’

  ‘Wardle? He’s half-blind and almost deaf. The flat was let through an agency, two months’ rent, cash in advance, paid through the post and arranged over the telephone. Wardle only spoke once to the man who took the rooms.’

  ‘Doesn’t remember anything?’

  ‘Nowt a bleeding fing,’ said Black, imitating the old man.

  ‘Nothing to go on then?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Which means you’ll have to wait for him to do it again, I suppose.’

  ‘I’m afraid so.’ Black nodded.

  Capstick consulted his watch. ‘Well, that shouldn’t be long. The Nazi hordes will be along any minute now. Maybe Queer Jack will strike again tonight.’

  ‘Oh, God!’ moaned Black. ‘Now you’ve gone and given him a name!’

  ‘And if you see the name tomorrow in the Standard, you’ll know where it came from, D notice or not.’

  ‘In which case I’d hand you over to Special Branch as a fifth columnist.’

  ‘Come along, Morris.’ Capstick laughed, pushing back his chair and climbing to his feet. ‘I’ll drive you home before the bombs begin to fall.’

  They drove through the dark, empty streets, heading west towards Shepherd’s Market. Black stared moodily out through the windscreen, lost in thought. Finally he spoke. ‘Another thing’s been bothering me,’ he said quietly.

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘How did he know?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Queer Jack. How did he know that part of the city would be bombed? First Rudelski and now this one.’

  ‘The whole bloody city is being bombed, Morris. It’s just coincidence.’

  ‘I don’t think so.’ Black shook his head. ‘Rudelski was murdered before the first big raid on the seventh.’ He glanced out of the side window at the darkened streets. ‘Before all this started. The same with the second one. He knew in advance.’

  ‘What are you on about? You’re making this lad out to be some sort of magician. Next thing, you’ll be telling me he flies about on bat’s wings and sleeps in a bloody coffin at night.’ The heavyset detective snorted loudly. ‘Either that or he’s one of Special Branch’s Nazi spies and knows when the raids are going to come.’ Capstick let out a barking laugh. ‘Christ! That’s all we need, Morris! Imagine what would happen if the newspapers got hold of that idea – a bloody homicidal Nazi gone round the bend.’ He shook his head. ‘Trust me, old fellow, it’s just coincidence.’

  Black shrugged. ‘Perhaps. I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.’

  * * *

  He had Capstick drop him off on Curzon Street then went through the passageway beside Ye Grapes and onto Market Street.

  Black paused for a moment at the corner, listening to the muted laughter from the pub as it leaked out around the blackout curtains into the cooling night air. He thought about having a quick nightcap then decided against it. He’d begun drinking shortly after Fay’s death, mostly as a sure way of dulling his feelings and bringing on sleep. Since then it had become an easy habit, and soon, he knew, it would become a necessity.

  He’d seen it happen to others often enough; colleagues at the Yard bringing their fat briefcases to and fro, bottles within tinkling as they stepped onto the lift or climbed the stairs, raspberry filigrees of broken veins growing on their cheeks and noses like rosy patches of lichen spreading on a stone.

  In the far distance he heard the sirens begin but there was no sound of approaching aircraft. Since mid-afternoon the sky had patched over with grey clouds and the Met

  Report from Greenwich had mentioned overcast across most of France and Central Europe. There would be no big raid tonight. He thought about Queer Jack again, nagged by the murderer’s apparent ability to predict the future. He tried to shrug it off. Capstick was probably right; it was nothing more than coincidence.

  Black stepped off the pavement and crossed to the three-storey building on the corner of Market Street and White Horse Street. A bakery and a greengrocer were on the ground floor, with two flats on the first floor and a third, larger one above.

  His father had purchased the building and half a dozen others like it during the Depression then deeded it to his son as a wedding present. Morris Black had lived in the uppermost flat for the entire duration of his marriage, the rents from the two other flats and the shops on the ground floor adding up to more than twice his annual salary at the Yard.

  The income had always made him slightly unc
omfortable and from the beginning he’d had an arrangement with his bank to collect the rents and put them into an interest-bearing trust account for his children. The children had never materialised but he continued with the arrangement after Fay’s death. He had no idea how much money was now in the account, nor did he care; without a rent or mortgage of his own to pay, his salary was more than sufficient.

  Unlocking the plain wooden door between the two shops, he went up the two steep flights of stairs and let himself into his flat. Since he often returned home well after dark, he’d taken to drawing the blackout curtains before leaving each morning, so the short hallway was utterly dark.

  He closed the door behind him and threw the bolt. Still working blindly, he bent down, gathered up the day’s post from the floor then walked into the living room. Only then did he turn on a light, choosing a lamp on the small table close to the gas fire rather than the switch for the much brighter wall sconces and the overhead.

  The flat was reasonably large but without too many rooms. A kitchen stood to one side of the hall and adjoined the living room. A second hallway led to a good-sized master bedroom and a smaller room he now used as a study but which at one time had been intended as a nursery. In addition to the main rooms there was a WC, a bath and a cupboard-sized box room.

  One way or the other, every square foot of the flat, box room included, bore Fay’s indelible stamp. To Black it had never been anything more than a place to live and a mild embarrassment of riches; to Fay it had been an ongoing work of art, a work in progress.

  The large rug on the living room floor was a Marian Pepler geometrical in soft shades of blue and grey, the lacquered, streamlined bar on the opposite side of the room was a British version of Bauhaus and the rosewood and moire silk armchairs on either side of the gas fire were done in the style of Paul Follot, the Parisian art deco designer. In the far corner, partially hidden behind a Japanese folding screen, was Fay’s small easel and paint table, set up close to one of the tall windows that looked out onto Shepherd Street.