Prelude to a Certain Midnight

by Gerald Kersh

  “You’re not far wrong, ‘m, I should say.”

  “The idea is, Turpentine, that if he learns self-confidence in being violent with her, he will be violent with somebody else without invitation. Is that it?”

  “Yes, in a way, that is it.”

  “Then she’s the mother of a murderer, isn’t she?”

  “If you put it that way – yes, that’s it.”

  “ – I take it that it depends entirely upon individuals concerned. They have no right to encourage that sort of thing, is that right?”

  “Never more right in your life, Miss Thundersley.”

  “But what about the beast that killed Sonia Sabbatani?”

  “Circumstances being favourable, any man can get hold of any child and do whatever he likes, and go home and have a cup of tea, and get away with it.”

  “Then why aren’t you looking for the murderer?”

  Turpin waved good-bye.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Fourteen

  The job of work upon which Detective-Inspector Turpin was employed concerned a man called Jack Emerald. One of Jack Emerald’s nicknafnes was ‘Chicken Eyes’: he was one of the most resourceful burglars in the business. He had been sent to Dartmoor after his third conviction on a formidable charge concerned with five thousand pounds’ worth of jewels belonging to a countess, but had escaped, slipping a handcuff, knocking a six-foot policeman unconscious, vaulting a six-foot wall and taking a running dive into the countryside. This was in the early autumn of the year, and Chicken Eyes Jack Emerald, having been at large for ten weeks, had been the subject of leading articles in several newspapers. Rumour, reinforced by whispered information, said that he had dressed himself up as an artist.

  This was regarded as unlikely, but not impossible. Turpin was well aware that all sorts of strange organisms lurk in the guts of the Fine Arts. The edges of the two Underworlds overlap. The fringes of art tangle with the fringes of crime. Artists ratis frequently become crooks; similarly, professional criminals almost invariably regard themselves as artists – and sometimes they are artists, in their way, like Chicken Eyes Jack Emerald. In any case, the Bohemian is second-cousin to the spiv: he has a similar light-hearted amorality, a similar slack-mouthed here-to-day-and-gone-to-morrow easygoingness, a similar tendency to hide himself under a certain kind of clothing and barbering, or lack of barbering; a similar light-fingeredness with his neighbour’s property; a similar delight in strange slangs and jargon; a similar urge to be conspicuous coupled with the same secretive-ness; a similar fatal weakness in self-revelation and a similar in-temperateness; a similar blind detestation of law and order and established things. They are fellow rebels.

  Turpin knew all this, and he knew something else more important: that Chicken Eyes had a weakness for a young lady called Cigarette, who wrote poems and short stories and had, shortly after the beginning of her association with Chicken Eyes, taken to talking authoritatively about the Underworld. Cigarette was a rebel. Against what was she in rebellion? Everything. She was an unhappy woman, and for her unhappiness she blamed her mother, whom she described as ‘an unmitigated bitch’. The mother of Cigarette had compelled her daughters to wash their hands and faces and brush their teeth every morning, to pull the plug when they used the lavatory, to say please and thank you, and to come home before midnight. Cigarette’s sisters, girls of no spirit, submitted like tame mice to this brutal ill-treatment; not Cigarette. She, as she put it, got the bloody hell out of it as quickly as she could. She came of a good family – solid landowners in the Midlands. But she seemed to be eaten up by a homesickness for the gutter. “I am a Rebel,” she used to say. By this she meant that if everybody else thought it right and proper to clean their nails, change their underclothes, blow their noses into handkerchiefs, stand up when the band played ‘God Save the King’, stub out a cigarette-end in an ash-tray, or return a borrowed book or umbrella or coat – she was determined to do the opposite.

  Ideologically she was a feminist. Cigarette was constantly conscious of the degradation of her sex. It irritated her, for example, that men proposed to women. How dare the sons-of-bitches stand around smirking and looking upon women as mere creatures to be proposed to? Cigarette invariably proposed, frankly and directly: “Look here, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I went to bed?” Only she employed a four-letter word. Of course she was talked about. But her principle was to give any gossip-monger who opened his lips something really worth talking about. Thus she would go out of her way to make scandal, and practically burst her lungs diving down to the muddiest depths of degradation, just to outdo gossip and exceed saloon-bar report.

  At the time of the flight of Chicken Eyes she was about twenty-nine years old – a big redhead with a sneering mouth. She had, by that time, given up being filthy, and dressed in a somewhat masculine style, but with a certain elegance, ordering her clothes from Waldemar’s and telling them to send the bill to her mother, whose banker sent Cigarette thirty-two pounds on the first of every month. She said that it suited her convenience at the present moment to be well-dressed: Chicky liked her that way. Chicky, it is scarcely necessary to say, was Chicken Eyes Jack Emerald. She had found him in a public-house near Charlotte Street. He had been pointed out to her two days after his acquittal in the Goldclang jewel robbery case. Everyone knew that Chicken Eyes had done the job, but the police were unable to prove it. He got away with it, and, going out to refresh himself, was pointed out to the young lady. At that period of her life – two years before – she was in the habit of lounging about the town in an outrageous state of dishevelment. She sauntered up to him and said: “Are you Jack Emerald?”

  “Well?”

  “They call me Cigarette. Does that convey anything to you?”

  “No.”

  “What do you think of me?” she asked, pressing herself against him.

  Chicken Eyes replied: “I think you could do with a good wash.”

  “Don’t you like me?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I – ”

  In spite of her dirt and the fact that (it being a warm May day) Cigarette was wearing nothing but a stained black silk dress, there was unmistakably an air of breeding about her. There was authority in her tone and in the glance of her haughty eyes. She said:

  “Do you come home to my flat or do I go home to yours?”

  Chicken Eyes looked at her, felt a surge of wrath, but wavered and at last said: “You can come back to my place, if you like.”

  He lived in a large, Edwardian block of flats built of red brick – Something-or-other Mansions – near the Gray’s Inn Road. In the taxi on the way home he said not a word. As soon as they arrived and Chicken Eyes’ door clicked shut behind them and the yellow electric light went on, he took her by the scruff of the neck, thrust her into the bathroom and washed her from head to foot with a nail-brush. Thereafter she adored him. She became elegant. She lived only for him. But her family got wind of the affair: her mother cut her allowance. So Cigarette had to work from time to time. Chicken Eyes did not like that; but there was nothing he could do about it. Burglary is an underpaid profession, or art, whichever you choose to call it. Cigarette had a knack of writing spicy little stories and naughty little paragraphs. She had begun to contemplate a novel. The two lived together in one of those strange states of armed truce in which so many couples seem to pass their lives. They quarrelled every other day, and when they quarrelled the air was thick with pots and pans. They lived in perpetually recurrent estrangement and reconciliation. An outsider might have said, observing them, that Chicken Eyes and Cigarette were implacable enemies. Yet the fact of the matter was that in their way they loved each other: only they could not live with each other. Yet they could not live without each other.

  Turpin knew that, whatever happened, the escaped burglar would inevitably come back to the girl called Cigarette.

  It was pretended that n
o one knew of the existence of this strange relationship.

  One morning, not long after his conversation with Asta Thundersley, Detective-Inspector Turpin called on Cigarette at about a quarter to ten, humbly begged her pardon for having disturbed her – which she said he had not – and begged the favour of a few words with her. She was wearing a brick-red dressing-gown over an almost transparent nightdress of a lighter colour. Turpin observed that the make-up of her mouth was smeared, her hair disordered, and that she gave out a strong odour of perfume. Cigarette had not slept alone. Over a cup of tea he said: “Speak to me as it might be man to man. You know we’re going to get Chicken Eyes in the end. Where is he? He was here last night, you know. He was, wasn’t he?”

  “I don’t know your friend Chicken Eyes, and I don’t want to know him,” said Cigarette. “Do please ask me exactly what you want to know. If I can tell you anything I will. Can I say fairer than that?”

  “Where is Jack Emerald?” asked the detective-inspector, abruptly, watching her eyes. He saw Cigarette’s eyes flicker; looked in the direction of the second glance and observed that it indicated the kitchen door. Meanwhile Cigarette was saying: “I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean; I assure you, not the faintest idea.”

  Having looked closely at the outside of the building before he entered it, Detective-Inspector Turpin knew that the back door of the kitchen opened on to a fire escape, and that this fire escape went down into the back doubles of West Central London. It was safe therefore to assume that Chicken Eyes was not in the flat.

  “This, ‘m, is nothing but a routine investigation, you understand. We are looking for a man called Emerald, and we were told he might be here.”

  “Emerald? You can’t possibly mean that burglar, or whatever he is, who keeps running away?”

  “Well, as a matter of fact, yes – that is who we do mean. This is a nice flat you have here.”

  “A dump, nothing but a dump.”

  “How many rooms?”

  “Three rooms, bathroom and kitchen. Why?”

  “I just wondered, ‘m; I’m looking for a place myself. I hope you don’t mind my calling on you like this. It’s a routine business, you understand. I’ve no right to – ”

  “Oh, I quite understand, Mr – ”

  “ – Detective-Inspector Turpin, ‘m.”

  “Turpin!” Cigarette began to giggle. “No relation to the famous Dick, I suppose?”

  “Well, I don’t know, ‘m. Nobody ever told me anything about it. Well, I’m glad this business is all over. I hate disturbing ladies.”

  “Have a drink, Turpin?”

  “It’s a little early, ‘m, but I wouldn’t say no. I’ve been up since four o’clock this morning.”

  “Whisky, gin, or sherry, Dick Turpin?”

  “Well, what are you having, ‘m?”

  “Whisky, if you will, Turpin.”

  About three-quarters of an hour later the detective-inspector said: “The caretaker tells me there is a flat going. I wonder if you’d mind very much if I just sort of took a kind of look, sort of.”

  Cigarette said: “The house is yours, Dick Turpin. The house is yours, Dickie-boy. Come and look… here you are in the lounge. Well, there is a bit of a dining-room, and quite a nice bedroom. Most important part of the house, don’t you always think? Here, see?”

  Turpin saw the disordered bed. On the floor, on the left-hand side, lay the lower half of a pair of small-sized pyjamas. “How are the bathrooms?” he asked.

  “As you see,” said Cigarette, pushing open the door; and there was a battered tube of shaving cream and a razor.

  At about half-past eleven Turpin said, casually: “He won’t be back in a hurry, though.”

  “Who d’you mean?” asked Cigarette, snarling.

  “You know who I mean. I mean Chicken Eyes,” said Turpin, suave as death. “I wouldn’t mind betting you a ten-pound note the Chicken won’t be back this side of lunch-time. I happen to know that he won’t.”

  “And how do you happen to know that he won’t?”

  “That who won’t? Who won’t what?”

  “This Chicken, or whatever you call him.”

  “Ask Millie Cloud,” said Turpin, chuckling.

  “And who the devil may she be?”

  “Ask Chicken,” said Turpin, breaking into a hearty laugh, and filling the glasses.

  Twenty minutes later she said: “You’re a liar, a liar, a liar! A dirty, dirty, dirty, dirty liar! There isn’t, there isn’t – ISN’T any Millie Cloud! I can prove it, prove it, TROVE it!”

  “All right, then, I’ll bet you twenty-five pounds.”

  “There isn’t any other woman, d’you hear? There isn’t, isn’t, isn’t any other woman! Wait and see.”

  “All right, I’ll wait and see,” said Turpin, refilling her glass. “Do you mind if I use your telephone?”

  “Use whatever you bloody well like.”

  Turpin dialled. Cigarette remembers that she heard him say: “… Oh yes, O.K… right you are, George… yes, stand by, George. Yes, George… no, George… yes, George… goodbye, George.”

  Two and a half hours after that Chicken Eyes Jack Emerald escaped for the last time. He was a sure-footed man and confident of himself on a parapet. But he had had an almost sleepless night, and made one false step. That was enough: he fell six storeys, landed flat on his back on the pavement, bounced, and that was the end of him.

  The papers called it a ‘death-leap’. It was nothing of the sort. Emerald had told Cigarette, one night, that a fortune-teller had predicted that he would die through being struck by a ball. (He had been something of an athlete once.) Cigarette wrote the story in the Sunday Special. The fortune-teller’s prophecy had come true: after all, the Earth is a ball. She got £20 for the story, and spent the money in the Bar Bacchus, maudlin and mocking in turn. Two days later her mother started to pay Cigarette’s allowance again.

  The Chicken Eyes Emerald affair took up most of the national front pages, squeezing the mystery of Sonia Sabbatani into the corners of the newspapers.

  The police were not sorry for this: they did not know where to look for the murderer.

  But Asta Thundersley raged like a raving lunatic.

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  BOOK TWO

  ∨ Prelude to a Certain Midnight ∧

  Fifteen

  SHE wanted to do something to somebody. She felt a need for a hushed Old Bailey, a Black Cap, a Sentence, a rope snapping taut and a gratified crowd outside grey walls half-cheering while a man in uniform pinned up a bit of paper. She was out for blood. First of all she tried to get hold of the Superintendent at Scotland Yard; but he had had about enough of Asta Thunders-ley and was not available when she called, nor did he reply to a six-page letter which she sent him. She made several attempts to get hold of Detective-Inspector Turpin: he, aware that he had managed, with all the good-will in the world, to put a new bee into Asta’s bonnet – which was already droning like a kicked hive – thanked God for an assignment that sent him to the north.

  For the first time of her life, Asta was conscious of a sense of frustration. She realized that the police had their difficulties, but felt that if she were the police she would manage to do something drastic and sensational. In any case, she was determined to make trouble for someone, somewhere, somehow. The Home Secretary was out of town. The Secretary for Scotland was the only other Cabinet Minister whom she knew, and he was, or pretended to be, ill. London, which she had hitherto seen as a concentration camp for persecuted dogs and starved children, now became, in her eyes, something like a criminal sanctuary full of ravening child-murderers. She could not live in peace while the killer of Sonia Sabbatani was at large. So at last she decided to do something about it on her own.

  She began by calling on the Sabbatanis. She knew them. Sam Sabbatani used to send to her house every week or so for clothes to be sponged and pressed. Now, when she saw him, she was shocked. His child had been dead for sev
en days, and the Sabbatanis were observing the prescribed eight days of mourning. He had not shaved for a week, and his cheeks, which were sunken and flabby – for he had been unable to eat since his daughter disappeared – were covered with a black-grey mat of sprouting beard. Mrs Sabbatani, in the first burst of her grief, had torn out some of her hair: there was a little raw patch on her forehead. The room was full of people; at least ten men and a dozen women. Asta arrived in the evening after they had finished the mourner’s prayer: she heard the last mutter of it and the concluding Amen as she came up the stairs; then, as she entered the room, the prayer having finished, conversation broke out. She darted forward, got Mrs Sabbatani in her wrestler’s grip, shed a few genuine tears and said:

  “Oh, my dear, my dear! Oh, my poor dear! What can I say? What can I do?” In that moment she ceased to be a crusader and wanted only to be able to work a miracle – to produce Sonia Sabbatani alive and give her back to her mother.

  “So nice of you to come.”

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can do, Mrs Sabbatani, is there? If there is, say so.”

  “Do? Do? What is there to do? It is nice of you to come. It is nice of you to think of it. What more is there to do?”

  Sam Sabbatani, who had been listening, seemed suddenly to go out of his mind. He burst into tears and began to shout in a language which Asta Thundersley could not understand: a thunderous, reverberating language made terrifying by the intensity of his emotion. He shook his fists at the ceiling and shouted. Sam Sabbatani was calling upon the head of the murderer the curse that is written in the book of Deuteronomy:

  “Cursed shalt thou be in the city, and cursed shalt thou be in the field! Cursed shall be thy basket and thy store. Cursed shall be the fruit of thy body, and the fruit of thy land, the increase of thy kine and the flocks of thy sheep! Cursed shalt thou be when thou comest in and cursed shalt thou be when thou goest out! The Lord shall send upon thee cursing, vexations and rebuke in all that thou settest thy hand unto for to do, until thou be destroyed and until thou perish quickly; because of the wickedness of thy doings whereby thou hast forsaken me! The Lord shall make the pestilence cleave unto thee until He hath consumed thee from off the land whither thou goest to possess it! The Lord shall smite thee with a consumption and with a fever, and with an inflammation and with an extreme burning, and with the sword and with blasting, and with mildew – and they shall pursue thee until thou perish…”