by John Gardner
‘The Ascolis simply invited you, just out of the blue, eh?’
‘No, well, no. I knew Jenny Ascoli before. When she was still Virginia Anstead.’
‘Really?’ Surprised, as though he had no idea until Ricky told him. ‘And how did you know she was here, married to a famous legal eagle?’
‘Well, we kinda kept in touch over the years. Leastways she kept in touch. Little letters followed me round and around wherever I went. See, I went with her for a while, when we were both at the University of Virginia. U.Va. Charlottesville. Her daddy approved of me.’
‘Really? And you went to see her for old time’s sake?’
Ricky laughed, a deep satisfying laugh. ‘No, I went to see if she’d changed at all. You see, when I knew her, Virginia Anstead was just about the most unpleasant woman I’ve ever known.’
In spite of himself, Tommy repeated the ‘Really?’ response yet again. ‘And had she changed?’ he added.
‘Hardly. If anything, I guess Jenny Ascoli was even more unpleasant than the girl I knew as Virginia Anstead, which is saying quite something.’
‘What was so nasty about her? I’m asking because I’ve only heard good things. The rest of the Ascoli family seem to think she was the thing Max needed most in his life.’
‘Sure.’ Shore. ‘That was the impression she liked to give, the facade if you will. The whole picture that the sun shined out of where the sun don’t shine, if you know what I mean. I’d imagine the family thought she was God’s gift. But underneath she was a conniving, manipulative, two-faced bitch of a woman who must have been running poor Max Ascoli ragged.’ He paused for a moment, then shook his head. ‘Shouldn’t really talk like that, should I? Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, and she’s not yet buried. I’m sorry.’
Tommy just stopped himself from adding yet another ‘Really?’ ‘Oh, one can’t…and you saw this from the minute you met her again?’ ‘When I met her again…’
Rick had cut up all his meat, the vegetables and the Yorkshire pudding. Now he was quickly forking the food into his mouth, as if he’d been brought up in a family who only allowed you the minimum amount of time to consume a meal. ‘When I met her again she was alone — Max was in London during the week and young Paul was staying with some school friend. I called on her and she could hardly wait for me to get into the house before telling me how she’d landed a real chump of a guy, only thought about his work, brilliant at that. Said he always put his position in society first, which in a way suited her because she couldn’t really bear him.
‘She wanted to take Max for most of what he had in the way of money: why she’d married him in the first place, she said. Quite open about it to me. Told me she had been on the verge of taking him and getting out when the war came. Said she’d never wanted children, certainly never wanted to be married to a stuffed shirt like Max. Her words. On the other hand he’d given her some standing in London, and now, locally. She liked being a queen bee who could despise the man who brought her a pleasant lifestyle.’
‘How about when you met her with his whole family?’ He remembered Willoughby Sands — Happy as a sandgirl. Loved it, couldn’t get enough — of being a legal wife that is. Brilliant, great organizer, splendid hostess, the whole magic thing. Looked like a permanent honeymoon from where I was sitting.
‘Embarrassing.’ LeClare nodded to himself as though remembering certain incidents. ‘Very embarrassing. She’d make snide remarks, put him down in public — well, round the dinner table she did. My crew commented on it after we’d had the dinner party. She said things like, “My husband’s too busy keeping criminals out of prison to be bothered with things down here.’”
‘It doesn’t sound much, I know, but it was constant — “Any fool can stand up in court with a silly wig on his head and argue some stupid case for five minutes at a time. Not as if it’s arduous.” Lots of remarks like that. It was constant. She never let up and I know about being on the receiving end of that kind of thing, because I’ve been there.’
‘She ever get violent?’ Tommy knew well enough how a barrage of snide, hurtful remarks could wear down even the most placid man. He’d seen it before. Knew it could drive people to kill.
‘The violence was in the way she went about talking at him. And she could switch the moods off if she felt she should impress others.’
‘I meant physical violence.’
‘She was much too clever for that, sir. Listen, when I first met her I thought she was the most lovely creature in the world. She had that knack of making you feel you were at the centre of her life, the one person who could give her everything she most needed: and she was able to convince everyone around you that your relationship was unique. It was only after a short time, when you were kinda suckered into this situation that you realized she had another set of values. She was like a spider, pulled you in, gave you everything then strangled you. It was weird, but it was also…gee, how can I best describe it…frightening, I guess. She had the ability to emasculate you, drain away your confidence. Did to me anyhow.’
‘And you reckoned she did it to Max Ascoli?’
‘That’s what I saw when we had that dinner. Sounds glib now, but I tell ya, she was some unpleasant lady when she got going.’
LeClare told him of the kind of remarks she would use to wrong-foot Max. ‘He asked a question and she’d counter with another. Like, if he asked, “Are we having cream with this?” She’d say, “What do we usually have with it, Max?” And she’d go on and on, getting him to make some response: “Come on, Max, tell me what we usually have with this trifle.” Or, “What did you see in the kitchen this afternoon?” It was mean remark after mean remark, as though she was exposing a childish side of her husband, or showing her husband as an elderly man starting to become an idiot. He’d say, “I saw cream this afternoon,” and she’d make a big thing out of him saying it. You know, “That’s right Max. So what d’you think we’re going to have with the trifle? What do you really think? Can you make the connection, Max?”‘
‘I suppose some people’d get a laugh out of that kind of thing.’
‘Yeah? They’d think it was cute? It wasn’t cute, sir. This was downright unpleasant.’
The stewards were now bringing the pudding, a kind of blancmange, made from jelly, milk and tinned mandarin oranges, ‘God bless the 8th USAAF,’ Raleigh said loudly. ‘They provided the tinned oranges.’
LeClare seemed to have got his second wind now, starting to give Tommy more illustrations of the way in which Jenny Ascoli crushed Max. ‘To be honest, sir, when I heard there had been murder done I thought to myself: He’s killed her at last. Something’s snapped and he’s killed her. Unhappily it wasn’t so.’
The man’s still obsessed with her, Tommy thought. She had given him the business and sucked out some measure of his courage, leaving him haunted by her former self. What he was hearing added up to one man’s preoccupied memories. Aloud he asked how long he had been paired off with the woman at university.
‘‘Bout three months, I guess. One pleasant month, then a couple of months of having my confidence taken apart every day by her.’
‘It’s a wonder that Max was able to function,’ Tommy said. ‘They were married for over ten years.’
‘Jesus, yes. Life sentence.’ LeClare screwed up his face, trying to beat a path into his past.
They were served coffee back in the pleasant drawing room and Tommy sidled over to Suzie, muttering out of the corner of his mouth, like an old lag in the prison exercise yard. ‘It would seem that Mrs Ascoli was a prime grade-A bitch.’
‘I thought she was the light of Max’s world.’
‘To some of the outside world, but not deep in the heart of the marriage. Destined for murder, I’m told.’
‘Crikey,’ Suzie whispered under her breath.
Eventually people began to drift away, making excuses that they should put in an appearance at the dance, and Raleigh eased over, suggested they went over together. ‘It’l
l do no harm for you to be seen with the likes of me, Tommy.’
‘Has it come to that?’ Tommy said. ‘How will they take it, all these civilians with one brass hat?’
*
The hangar was vast, a great cavern cleared of all but one of its usual inhabitants: at the far end, one B-17 Flying Fortress — Able Mabel — stood, its nose pointing towards the dance floor, laid especially for the evening, a large raised dais for the band, who were throbbing their way through ‘Chattanooga Choo Choo’ to the delight of the dancers. Cigarette smoke hung up in the metal rafters and the couples on the floor gyrated, twisted and stomped their way through the number, spinning, truckin’ and jiving, faces serious, concentrated or grinning as they forgot the daily grind, burying themselves in the music that took them away from the hard realities of the war.
Close to where the Station CO’s party had entered to shivering salutes from the snowdrops on door duty, a lanky sergeant in shirtsleeves — silver aircrew wings pinned to his left breast — danced with a short, dumpy but very tidy Waaf, who spun away from her partner and back again with a precision that delighted the onlookers. Suzie thought to herself that the girl was like a very neatly wrapped package, her figure folded into her blue uniform to make waist, hips, breasts and legs conform to a definite, and erotic, pattern that was even exaggerated by the music and the way in which she spun backwards and forwards in time to her partner as the brass exploded its brazen chords across the temporary dance hall.
Dennis Free was by her side, reaching out to dance with her and she found herself joining in, not really knowing how to jitterbug or jive but just getting into the rhythm and leaping around, catching Tommy’s eye for a second and seeing his eyebrow raise as she strutted by, then twirled and the band shifted the tune, sliding into ‘String of Pearls’ then ‘Kalamazoo’. She was getting it now, being consumed by the music, following her partner as their hands became damp and she was filled with the exhilaration of the moment. I shall remember this until the day I die, she thought: not for Dennis and dancing with him but for everyone, for Tommy’s hoicked eyebrow and amused expression, for the faces of the GIs, US officers, Waafs and village girls she saw in the dancing crowd as they whirled past.
Then, out of the smoke, noise and sweat she saw someone she recognized: someone who she immediately knew did not want to be recognized. She was twisting towards Dennis and twirled close to his right-hand side. ‘Get me towards the Chief, Dennis,’ she said right into his ear as she went past, and he nodded, not missing a beat or a step as she kept an eye on the girl she’d seen coming out of the Falcon the other night. The girl called Queenie MacSweeney who they knew, because they’d discussed it, was a friend of the much wanted Lavender.
*
Dressed in her best, the pink skirt with all the buttons up the front that the men adored, even had bets on how high they could get, Queenie MacSweeney had trotted down to Newmarket railway station and got the Austin Seven out of their lock-up. Then she drove back to the house and went up to the flat, where Golly was trying to choose what to wear from his small wardrobe. Before the escape, Lavender had scrounged clothes for him mainly from jumble sales, which was a game and a half. Shopping at jumble sales was an art, somewhat like rugby football, because the same types of women appeared at jumble sales, made an attack on the stalls, a scrum and dash. Lavender had fought with the best of them and got a couple of jackets, some trousers and shirts that would fit him. She’d bought mostly dark clothes, like the dark-brown plimsolls. ‘Black as night,’ she’d say to Queenie. ‘That’s what he’ll like so he can blend in with the dark, hide away out of the moonlight That’s what Golly does best.’ So, Queenie got up to the flat and there he was, Golly, arguing with himself like a small child, which was, of course, what he really was — a small strong, ruthless child. ‘I thought at first I’d wear this shirt, then I wondered if I should wear this one, maybe go better with the navy sports coat. Oh, Queenie. I wish I had my duffel coat here, ’cos the duffel coat kept me nice and warm in the winter.’
‘But it’s still summer, Golly.’
‘I know but I’d be on the safe side if I had my duffel here and now, like I wish I had that pair of boots that Micky Mangle got for me. They was good boots, them.’
‘Come on, Golly, make up your mind then we can get going.’
‘In the car, Queenie. We going to have a ride in the car?’
‘Yes, Golly, and you’ll have to keep nice and quiet in the back.’
‘Under a rug, Queenie, yes, I know.’ His half-daft smile. ‘Will I have my wire that Lavender made for me?’
Queenie didn’t know the ins and outs of that; didn’t know what Golly was capable of with the piano wire with the ends bound up with insulating tape so he’d get a good purchase on it.
She got him dressed in the dark slacks, black shirt and the dark-brown sports coat. ‘Now, have you been?’ she asked him.
‘I don’t need to go.’
‘I think you do, Golly. You go, just to be on the safe side.’ And off he trotted, singing and humming away to himself, leaving out lines, changing words —
‘I know where I’m going,
And I know who I’ll marry.
Some say he’s black, but
I say he’s horny.
Fairest of them all,
My handsome, winsome Jornny.’
And the tunelessness of it with those words beat upon her whorled ear and clattered into her brain, making her frightened, not knowing what she feared.
She got him into the back of the car, got him settled down with the tartan rug that Lavender had got for them — another jumble sale — then he wanted a drink, worse than a two-year-old. She brought down a flagon of Bulmer’s and he sucked at it, there in the back of the Austin Seven, under the blanket. So they set off on the longish drive to Taddmarten where she’d have to show one of the tickets she’d got from Ed the Major.
Of course they had to stop on the way, because Golly wanted to get out and have a pee behind a bush by the roadside but they finally made it.
As they came into the village of Long Taddmarten, Queenie slowed down and turned left, off the main road. ‘Stay down, Goll,’ she said. ‘I want to take a look at something.’
She drove very slowly along the narrow road, then went down to a crawl as she approached the house, saw there were no coppers standing on guard outside.
‘Quickly, Golly. Take a look at that.’ Still dusky light outside, Double British Summertime.
‘What?’ he raised his head, peeping the wrong way to begin with, then swivelled round. ‘What m’y lookin’ at then?’
‘That’s the house, Golly. See, Knights Cottage.’
‘What is?’
‘The house, there. That’s the house where those three people were murdered. The ones being investigated by that lady policeman you’re always talking about.’
‘She there then?’ He raised the upper part of his body and reached towards the door.
‘No, there’s nobody there now, not at the moment but I expect that’s where they come to do their detecting.’
‘Ah, right. Yes. Knights Cottage. Ah.’
He stayed looking out while Queenie drove back to the main road, where she made him duck down again under the blanket. ‘And lie still, Golly.’
‘I am lying still.’
‘Just you, ma’am?’ the guard at the gate asked her when she stopped.
‘Just me, yes. Little me.’
‘You won’t be alone long, ma’am. Wish I was over to the dance tonight instead of pulling this duty.’ And a snowdrop came up behind him and asked if everything was okay, smart in his white helmet and webbing with a big Colt .45 on his hip, showed her which way to go and where to park, on the hard-standing park. ‘Not many people’ve come in cars,’ he said, mistrustful.
‘I got it, ’cos I work for the US Forces,’ glib and word perfect, aware of movement behind her in the car, Golly under the blanket. ‘Go around the bases filling in for girls off sick o
r on a rest period.’ Got the lingo off pat. ‘Working in the PX and Officers’ ’nd NCOs’ Clubs.’
‘Okay, ma’am. Move right along.’
It was like being in a foreign country, the rows of Quonset huts and the prefab buildings, over in the distance the shape of the big aeroplanes against the moonlight. My, Lavender will be surprised, really surprised to see her. And pleased an’ all.
‘Golly, keep still.’
‘Laughing my head off, Queenie. It’s so funny under the blanket,’ and behind her the blanket heaved with mirth.
‘Now,’ she parked between a jeep and a big lorry, put the lights off, killed the engine so that the sound of the band came throbbing out into the night from the hangar. ‘I’ll go and find Lavender, Golly. You have a look around then come back here in about an hour, eh?’ Gave him the spare key so he could get back down under the blanket. ‘You be careful, eh Golly.’
‘Yeah. Yeah, Queenie, I’ll be really careful,’ another burst of laughter as he slid out into the night and she was amazed how quickly he managed to disappear into the shadows but remembered that Lavender had told her he was good on his own, had moved around London and not got caught for several days: knew how to hide and, in spite of his deformities, how to get from place to place. ‘Has incredible eyesight in the blackout, Queenie.’
All smiles from the snowdrops on the door. ‘Evening, ma’am, come to have a bit of fun? Leave your coat with the sergeant over there in the cloakroom.’
She exchanged her coat for a ticket, went in to the little cloakroom and tidied her hair: gave her bodice a little squirt of 4711 she had in her handbag. Thought they had a lot of military police on the door, but a friend had told her how strict the Yanks were about counting girls on and off their bases.
Then, all pretty in her pink dress with the buttons down the front, she walked into the wall of music and the heaving movement of the crowd and, just inside the door, spotted Lavender almost at once, waved to her and began to walk in her direction. Why was Lavender looking so glum? Thought she’d be pleased to see her.
*
