Full Dark House (8 page)

‘So the feet must have already been in the brazier last night. How could he not have noticed?’

‘He was in a very nervous state when he closed up. The air raid, remember?’

‘Did he leave the stand unattended at any time?’

‘He went for a wee in Moor Street earlier, but didn’t want me to know. I spoke to a couple of the other sellers before you got here. It’s a sackable offence, leaving your stall unattended. They’re meant to get another stall runner to cover for them but obviously they can’t during the raids. He’d just got back when the sirens started up, so he had to leave the cart and head for a shelter. That time, he was gone for about an hour.’

‘Do you need someone to translate for him?’

‘He’s proved to be a pretty good mime so far. I think he’s told us all he knows. Besides, we can’t get any decent translators. They’re all working for the War Office.’

‘I wonder if the rest of the body will turn up. Let’s see if anything’s been reported overnight, and check with the river police.’

‘God, it’s cold,’ complained Bryant, who had hands like ice even in midsummer. ‘Good idea. There’s a box in Charing Cross Road, save us going back to the unit. Take this chap’s name and address.’

‘Aren’t you worried he might do a bunk?’

‘I’m not going to drag him back to Bow Street for questioning. The bully Carfax will simply frighten the life out of him, and then he’ll tell them nothing.’

The pair made their way along Charing Cross Road, past bookshops that stacked salvaged paperbacks on tables outside their shops, and chemists advertising a peculiarly furtive mixture of products for gentlemen: trusses, contraceptives and nudist health magazines. They passed the old match-seller who stood on the corner of Newport Street, his blindness and missing leg testifying to an earlier conflict. Finally they reached the blue police box, and Bryant used his key to unlock it. He talked to a woman on the switchboard, and after a few minutes she called him back.

‘Seems they’ve already got the rest of her,’ he told May cheerfully. ‘At least, they’ve found a body without feet. They’re waiting for formal confirmation, but she’s already been identified informally. A dancer named—hang on, I’ve got to write this down somewhere—Tanya Capistrania. Rather exotic. Being taken out of the Palace Theatre right now,
sans pieds
. The cleaners found her with her legs wedged into the trellis of the goods lift. Suggestive, isn’t it, when you consider that the chestnut man left his stall in Moor Street, which runs alongside the theatre? Come on, let’s go over and take a look. There’s a woman who works in the box office who’s waiting to show us around. Smile nicely and she might give us the kind of tidbits she wouldn’t divulge to some ox in a police uniform.’

‘Shouldn’t we see where that chap left his chestnut stand first?’

‘Good idea.’ Bryant was still dangling the cloth bag containing the pair of feet. ‘I wouldn’t mind getting rid of these as soon as possible. I don’t want anyone thinking I’ve nobbled a couple of black market pig’s trotters.’

They slipped back through the early morning traffic, crossing Cambridge Circus, and passed under the side canopy of the Palace Theatre. May bent down and checked the gutter. He touched his index finger to the cobbles. ‘Look at this. Someone has tipped coals out. I’m surprised they haven’t been nicked. There’s quite a bit of dust around. No footprints, which is odd.’

‘The coals could have come from any one of the houses over there.’

‘You’re right.’ He rose, brushing his hand on his coat. ‘But this is where the Turk must have parked while he went for a Jimmy. It’s a very short street.’

Bryant cricked his knees to take a closer look at the coal dust in the gutter. ‘It’s like hunting in reverse, isn’t it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Finding the spoor from an act of cruelty, and trying to perceive the fading traces that lead away from it, following the dispersal of the participants rather than their convergence.’ He thought for a moment, then leaned on May’s shoulder to raise himself up. ‘There’s something out of joint here. What’s that German word?
Unheimlich?
’ He pulled his scarf protectively about his protuberant red ears. ‘A cold wind. And a rather forbidding building. Definitely sinister.’

They stepped back into the road and looked up at the theatre. The exterior of the Palace was one of the most impressive examples of late Victorian architecture left in London. Standing alone on the west side of Cambridge Circus, finished in soft orange brick with peach-coloured stone trims, it sported four domed pinnacles, matching sets of stone cherubs, complex frescoes and decorative panels, with a peaked central pediment topped by the delicately carved figure of a god (miraculously intact, given the bombing that had taken place in Shaftesbury Avenue), and below it, nearly fifty arched front windows, currently boarded up to protect its patrons against flying glass.

‘A suitably Gothic building in which to begin a murder investigation,’ said Bryant, relishing the thought. ‘But our duty is to the innocent. For that reason we must enter the realm of darkness.’

11

FORGOTTEN PEOPLE

. . .
A duty to the innocent,
thought John May, as he paid the miserable landlord of the Seventh Engineer and made his way back to rainswept London, the London of the new millennium, a place that bore only a superficial resemblance to the dark city of the Blitz. He felt old and tired, because Bryant was no longer alive to keep him young. Throughout his career he had been treated like the junior member of the team, even though there was only a three-year age gap between them. Now he was finally alone, and so bitterly miserable that there seemed little point in going on. But he had to, he decided, at least until he knew how his partner had died.

He stared through the train window at the cumuliform dullness blurring the horizon of the city, and tried to imagine what had been going through his partner’s mind. Second-guessing Arthur Bryant had never been easy. A few days before his death, Bryant had returned to the site of their first case. The memoir’s addendum suggested that he had been hoping to shed further light on the events of the past. Could he have upset someone so badly that he had placed his life in danger? Surely there was no one left to upset. The case had been solved and sealed. The characters it involved were as deeply buried as London’s bomb rubble, and just as forgotten.

In 1940 the pair of them had been little more than precocious children. They had stumbled through their first investigation, and had somehow discovered a murderer. It had been a very different world then, more private, more certain. Nearly everyone they knew from that time was dead. Who was there left to question? Who would even remember? He knew he could expect no help from the unit; they were too busy confiscating Chinese-made assault rifles from the hands of drug-addled teenagers.

May’s taxi pulled up outside his flat in a spray of effervescent drizzle. He had recently sold his house and moved to St John’s Wood, to a small apartment with bare cream walls and a marble balcony that very nearly overlooked Regent’s Park, if you stood on a chair. The old house had become hard for him to manage. Now he had a lift and a porter, and invisible neighbours who arrived and left without so much as a shoe squeak or latch click. Here he could sit and dream, and wait for death. Without Bryant, there seemed to be no alternative. It was as if the future had suddenly been walled off. He had always known that his partner would die first. Dreams of loss had disturbed his sleep for more than a decade. Bryant had laughed when he had described his nightly fears. Arthur had always been the stronger one. There was something callous in his nature that protected him from pain. Now the nightmare had sprung to life, and with it a new enemy. He wondered how he would cope alone.

May paused in the hall and sifted through the pizza deals on the mat. Beneath them he found a folded sheet of plain paper posted from the flat next door.

Dear Mr May,

I thought you ought to know that someone has been looking for you.

—Mrs R. Mamoulian

May rang the doorbell of number 7, and it was answered by a tiny old lady with unruly grey hair knotted in a bun as big as her head. She beckoned him inside with a wave of her noodle ladle. Around her slippered feet scampered a kickable dog with bug eyes. May inched his way through a blue corridor lined with fragile china animals, into an obstacle course of a sitting room. Every available inch of space was taken up with occasional tables covered in doilies, glass ducks, ceramic fish, glazed birds, antelopes, tiny gilt cups and, above the fireplace, a large porcelain bear in the coils of a snake. He wondered how the dog managed not to smash anything.

‘I wouldn’t have put a note through—we keep ourselves to ourselves,’ explained Mrs Mamoulian, ‘but he was loitering in the corridor with the lights out, and frightened the life out of Beaumont’—the dog yipped at the sound of his name—’so I called my husband. Maurice spoke to him, but the man refused to give a name or explain what he was doing outside your door.’

‘What did he look like?’ asked May, carefully unsnagging himself from a china okapi.

‘Creepy, with these awful glaring eyes and huge fangs, like a werewolf.’

‘Oh, really?’ May’s assessment of his neighbour expanded to include the option that she might be insane.

‘My eyesight’s not that good but I’m sure he was trying to force open the latch. I wanted to call the police but, well,’ she eyed the neat arrangements of china ornaments as if they contained secret mysteries, ‘you don’t want everyone to know your business, do you?’

May opened up his flat, leaving his wet bags in the hall, and seated himself in the lounge to make some calls. Ringing the Wetherby clinic, he managed to locate the doctor Bryant had seen the day before he had been blown up, and explained the situation.

‘Of course I remember him, he walked straight through into the private ward without stopping to get permission from our duty officer.’ Dr Leigh sounded distracted. He was trying to talk to someone else in his office while fielding the police call. ‘At first I thought he was one of the patients.’

That sounds like Arthur, thought May. ‘Did he tell you what he was looking for?’

‘Yes, eventually. He seemed to be in a great hurry. He wanted to check our files for long-term residents, but he wanted records going back sixty years. I told him we didn’t keep them for such a length of time, and anyway, they were incomplete because we’d had a fire here a few years ago, so he left.’

‘Did he give you the name of the person he was looking for?’

‘You’ll have to hold on.’ The receiver was dropped, to be picked up half a minute later. ‘That was the odd thing. He told me the patient was male, probably suffering from deep trauma, and would have been admitted without a name. I tried to help him but didn’t know where to begin looking. What could I say? Those who enter the clinic as residents usually have a history of treatment. Their cases are heavily documented. Mr Bryant seemed to think that we might have taken in war victims who’d lost their memories, or at least their identification documents. I told him if we had, they’d be deceased by now. I’m afraid he became rather abusive.’

‘Yes, he does that,’ May sympathized. ‘But were you able to help him?’

‘Look, I’m really not sure. We’re very busy here.’ Dr Leigh was not prepared to admit that one of their patients had set fire to the ladies’ toilets and was now locked in a cubicle, threatening to swallow his tongue if his demands weren’t met, and as these demands included the reinstatement of the Great Hedge of India and a meeting with the late singer Freddie Mercury to discuss the hidden meanings in his lyrics, they were all in for a long day.

‘He was going around questioning the nurses,’ said the doctor impatiently. ‘Wanted to know when various patients had arrived, how long they were staying, that sort of thing. But I don’t think we were able to help him.’

‘Why not?’ asked May.

‘Well, when my staff tried to answer his questions, he ignored them and went off to talk to someone in the day room.’

‘Do you know who?’

‘I have no idea. But he was making notes on some kind of a list.’

Alma Sorrowbridge put down her squeegee and gave him an odd look. She was the only woman in the Battersea street who still washed her front step, and was proud of the fact. ‘What sort of a list?’ she asked.

‘Names of people—patients. Something from the Wetherby clinic. In his room, perhaps.’

‘I’ve disinfected his floor but I left everything where it was,’ she said dolefully. ‘I couldn’t bring myself to throw nothing away. There’s a lot of boxes.’

‘Fine, then that’s where I’ll look,’ said May.

Alma folded her arms across her chest. ‘There is seventy-two of them.’

‘Good God, where have you put them all?’

‘I’m an old woman, Mr May, I got no strength left to start moving stuff about. They’re where he kept them, in the basement. Besides, I been Mr Bryant’s landlady on and off since the war. I’m not going to start touching his things now, just ‘cos he’s with God.’

‘Would it be all right if I had a quick look through?’ asked May.

‘I suppose so,’ Alma sniffed, ‘but remember,’ she raised a fat finger at the ceiling, ‘he can still see you.’

‘He always did like watching me work. Take me to the boxes.’

May spent several fruitless hours wading through the files and papers in the cartons, but they were arranged according to the workings of Bryant’s disordered mind. The human male possesses a powerful urge to collect things; Bryant had collected books, papers and magazines that revealed a lifetime of idiosyncratic behaviour. As May rummaged through the photographs of forgotten faces, the absurd news clippings, the abstruse monographs of disbarred lawyers, maverick scientists and mentally unstable professors, he knew he would find little of use. Sixty years of tangled memories; there was simply too much to decipher.

A papery cloud of moths fluttered out of a carton containing nothing but old razor blades. One box contained several hundred keys, another held only seed packets and raffle tickets.

May raised himself from his knees and dusted down his trousers. Perhaps Bryant had thrown the list away. His partner had, to his certain knowledge, visited one other place in his final days. The archive room of the Palace Theatre.

He dug out his mobile and rang ahead for an appointment. It felt good to be doing something, however uncertain. Positive action was the only way to keep his mind from sinking back.

12

INTO THE PALACE

Dr Runcorn had already instructed the Palace not to open its doors to the public that morning. The last thing he wanted was for customers to tramp any remaining evidence through the magenta pile of the foyer carpets.

Theatrical rehearsals were under way for
Orpheus in the Underworld
. The production was due to open without previews on the coming Saturday night. The unusual step of premiering on a day when the critics had normally gone to the country was deliberate. Nearly all of the first week’s performances were sold out, thanks to shocked stage whispers along Shaftesbury Avenue that the production would not survive for more than a few performances before the Lord Chamberlain closed it down. Nobody knew exactly what had been altered in this radical reworking of Offenbach’s operetta, but the scenery going in depicted all the damnations of Hell, including several freshly invented for the occasion. The carpenters were telling their mates in the public bars that they had never heard such dirty language recited on the London stage, and there were tales of skimpy costumes on the girls that put the Windmill in the shade and left nothing to the imagination.

Bryant knocked at the theatre’s main entrance. PC Crowhurst nodded to him through a gap in the boarded-over glass, and hastily unlocked the door. The interior of the Palace was mock-Gothic, with a central marble staircase that offered views back on itself like a recurring image from an Escher etching. Its steps and walls were worn pale, scoured by their nightly brush with more than a thousand bodies. Dusty electroliers hung down through the stairwell, their crystals gleaming dully like ropes of low-grade pearls.

‘Hm. Nobody home.’ Bryant peered into the frosted-glass lozenge of the box-office booth. ‘Let’s try the floor above.’ He enthusiastically took the stairs in pairs and triples, forcing May to trot beside him. ‘We’re not going to give the press anything on this one. Davenport wants us to screw the lid down tight because of the victim’s background.’

‘Which is what?’

‘Apparently her parents are Austrian. She trained in Vienna, mother’s dead, father’s Albert Friedrich, the international concert organizer. He’s a pretty well-known chap, worked with C. B. Cochran here in the twenties, but Friedrich has lost a lot of good faith lately over his attitude towards the Jews. He has enough right-wing connections in neutral territories for the FO to keep files on him. He’s also a professional litigant. I imagine he’d be prepared to make trouble for everyone if anything unsavoury leaks out about his daughter. Do you have a girl?’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘I was wondering if you had a girl. You know, a sweetheart. I don’t, more’s the pity.’ Bryant sighed and shook his head with incredulity. ‘It’s not through lack of trying. I don’t understand it. There’s supposed to be a shortage of decent men. You just don’t seem to meet the right ladies in this job.’

‘I don’t have a girl at the moment,’ May admitted. ‘I was seeing someone, but she’s been posted to Farnham and isn’t keen on writing letters.’

‘Oh well, we anchor in hope, as the sailors say. Our contact here is a woman called Elspeth Wynter, supposed to be a mine of information.’ He held up the cloth bag and checked that it was still dry. ‘I must walk these feet back soon so that Oswald can get started on them.’

‘Which one is Oswald?’ asked May.

‘Finch, our pathologist over at West End Central. Keen as mustard but such a stick you can’t help winding him up. At least, I can’t.’ He stopped and studied the framed posters arranged along the corridor ahead. ‘Thank God
No, No, Nanette
came off. All those performances of “Tea for Two” would turn anyone into a murderer. I don’t understand it; America gets Ginger Rogers and we get stuck with Jessie Matthews. Nobody up here. Let’s try again.’

Bryant turned on his heel and dodged past the confused May, rattling back down the stairs to pass into the theatre’s centre foyer. ‘I used to be quite a fan of the theatre,’ he called over his shoulder, ‘but I haven’t been since the war began. They’re all variety halls now, of course. People have lost the taste for anything serious. Who can blame them?’ He looked about and sniffed the air. ‘Theatres have a particular smell, don’t you find? Mothballs and Jeyes fluid. It’s so gloomy in here with the windows boarded up and all this cold marble, like a morgue. I wonder what D’Oyly Carte would make of the place now.’

‘Wasn’t this where Carte set up his national opera house?’ asked May.

‘Oh, it was to be his crowning glory. Nearly one and a half thousand seats spread across four floors, five bars, unrivalled backstage facilities, a modern mechanical marvel with room for more scenery than any other house in London. Poor chap opened it with Sullivan’s
Ivanhoe
in 1891. The thing ran for a while, but it was a real plodder by all accounts, po-faced, arse-numbing, no good tunes, riddled with self-importance. Audiences wanted the bouncy songs and jokes of
The Mikado,
not wailing British epics about duty and fortitude. They tried a few more serious operas, then gave up the ghost and turned the place into a variety hall.’