The Fashion In Shrouds (36 page)

‘No, my dear.' Val was almost laughing. ‘It's not as bad as that yet. I'll send out an S O S when the party begins to get rough. You think Albert's doing something?'

‘Doing something? He's moving heaven and earth.'

‘Your faith is very comforting.'

‘Faith nothing,' said Amanda. ‘It's the old firm. We're invincible.'

It was four o'clock when a reluctant Oates, with Pullen at his elbow, got on to Papendeik's.

‘Is that Mrs Valentine Ferris? This is Superintendent
Oates of the Central Department, New Scotland Yard. Mrs Ferris, I wonder if you'd mind coming down to see me? Yes, at once, please. I'll send a car for you. It's nothing to get worried about. We just want a little statement.'

‘But I've told you all I can about Caroline Adamson.' The high clear voice was nervy now and very much on the defensive.

‘I daresay you have, Ma'am.' Oates was avuncular but firm. ‘It's nothing alarming. I just want to have a little talk with you, that's all.'

‘Is it very important? The house is surrounded by reporters. I daren't set my foot outside the door.'

‘I'm afraid it is, Ma'am. Very important. Don't worry about the Press, Ma'am. We'll get you through them all right. You'll be ready, will you? Thank you very much. Good-bye.'

‘Good-bye,' said Val faintly.

At four o'clock Papendeik's phoned Mr Campion's flat without result At four-one Papendeik's called the Junior Greys, but Mr Campion had not come in. At four-three Papendeik's called Mr Campion's fiancée again, but she had not heard from him. At four-five and a half Mr Campion called Oates and, on hearing that the superintendent could not speak to him, sent him a message which not only brought the eminent policeman to the phone but sent him and Inspector Pullen, to say nothing of a couple of plain-clothes men, hurtling down to Ninety-one, Lord Scroop Street, Soho, like a pack on the scent. Mr Campion's original message sounded cryptic to the secretary who took it.

‘Ask him,' he had said, ‘ask him if one of his fat suspects had curly hair.'

IN SUMMER-TIME THE
streets of Soho are divided into two main species, those which are warm and dirty and jolly, and those which are warm and dirty and morose. Lord Scroop Street, which connects Greek Street and Dean Street,
belongs to the latter category. Number Ninety-one was a restaurant with high brick-red window-curtains and the name
Hakapopulous
in a large white arc on the glass. The main entrance, which was narrow and a thought greasy, had a particularly solid door with a picture of a grove of palm-trees painted on the glass, while the back entrance, which gave on to Augean Passage, was, as the local divisional superintendent put it in a moment of insight, like turning over a stone.

Inside, the restaurant was strangely different from its exterior. The main room, which possessed a gilt-and-mahogany staircase rising up into mysterious blackness above, was indubitably shabby, but it was not a bare shabbiness. There was a cold darkness, a muffled quiet in the big curtain-hung room. All the tables were half-hidden, if only by shadows, and the carpet, the Victorian hangings and the columns to the ceiling were all so thick and dusty that the smell of them pervaded the place like a kind of unscented incense. It was this quality which met one as one entered. The quiet swooped down on one as does the quiet of a church, but here there was no austerity, only secrecy: not the exciting secrecy of conspiracy, but the awful, lonely secrecy of passion, the secrecy of minding one's own business. It was not a pleasant room.

The divisional superintendent, a grizzled friend of Oates, who knew and rather loved his district, arrived at the back door at the moment that Oates and his company arrived at the front. This happy co-operation avoided the suggestion that anything so unfriendly as a raid was intended, and the two parties, save for those four men who were left to hang about the entrances, met in the shadows of the main dining-room, where there were only two customers, four-fifteen in the afternoon not being a busy hour with the house.

Mr Lugg and Mr Campion came out of their obscurity as Oates arrived. They had been sitting in a corner and their appearance had some of the elements of a conjuring trick, so that Pullen glanced round him suspiciously.

‘Anyone else here?'

‘No one. Only this lad.' Mr Campion's murmur was as discreet as the room itself, and they all turned to stare at the waiter on duty, who had come sidling out from behind a
column. He was a small furtive person in an oiled tail-coat and dirty table-cloth and he took in the nature of the visit in a single wide-eyed glance. Then, shying away from them like a field animal, he sent an odd, adenoidal shout up into the pit of darkness above the staircase. He was answered immediately and there was a tremor in the walls above and every chin in the room was raised to greet the newcomer. After a moment of suspense he appeared, and a small, satisfied sigh escaped Inspector Pullen.

Fatness and curliness are relative terms, but there is a degree at which either condition becomes remarkable. In each case Andreas Hakapopulous strained the description to its limit. He was nearly spherical, and the oily black hair, which carried the line of his stupendous nose to a fine natural conclusion somewhere about six inches above the top of the back of his head, was curly in the way that the leaves of the kale are curly, or Italian handwriting, or the waves surrounding an ascending Aphrodite in a pre-Raphaelite painting.

He came downstairs daintily, like a big rubber ball, bouncing a very little on each step. His welcoming smile was more than friendly. It had a quality of greasy joy in it, and he winked at the divisional superintendent with such convincing familiarity that Inspector Pullen had to glance at the other man's unbending stare to reassure himself.

‘We will all 'ave a nize bot'le of wine.' The newcomer made the suggestion as if he were announcing a rich gift to the Police Orphanage. ‘Louis, quickly. A nize bot'le of wine for everybody 'ere.'

‘That'll do.' Oates was not amused. ‘We want a few words with you only, Mr Hakapopulous. Will you please look at this photograph and tell us if you have ever seen the girl before?'

Andreas Hakapopulous was not abashed. He stood balancing on the last step but one of the staircase, exuding a strong odour of jasmine and an ingratiating affectionateness which in that particular room was almost unbearable. He put out a shapeless hand for the pasteboard and looked at it with a casual interest which, although unconvincing, was also, unfortunately, negative.

He peered at Miss Adamson's lovely, languorous face for
some moments and finally carried the photograph under the window, where he held it at arm's length.

‘Euh!' he said at last. ‘A nize little bit. Who iz shee?'

‘We're asking you.' The divisional superintendent put the words in briskly. ‘Come along, Andreas. Don't be a b.f. We're not interested in your theatricals. Have you seen her before?'

‘No.'

‘Wait a minute.' Oates was smiling sourly. ‘Have you seen the papers?'

The Greek perceived his mistake and rectified it jauntily.

‘She might be a girl who was found dead somewheres,' he said. ‘I don' know. I see something this morning. I don' take much account of it.'

‘Yes, well, you clean up your memory, my lad. Where's your brother?'

‘Jock iz upstairs.'

Andreas kept his smile, and his soft, satisfied tone. He was neither sulky nor reproachful. A divisional plain-clothes man went up to find the other member of the firm and a minor inquisition began in the dining-room.

‘Now, Mr Hakapopulous, think carefully: have you ever seen that girl in the flesh?'

‘In the flesh?'

‘Yes. Have you seen her?'

‘No.'

‘You understand me, don't you? Have you ever seen the girl alive?'

‘Has she been 'ere?'

‘That's what I'm asking you.'

Andreas smiled. ‘I don't know,' he said. ‘So many girls come 'ere. I don' think I ever saw 'er before.'

Pullen thrust his chin out and butted into Oates's inquiry.

‘Have you seen her dead, by any chance?'

‘Dead?' Andreas raised his eyebrows.

‘You heard what I said.'

‘Dead? No.'

‘Look here, Hakapopulous.' The name was cramping to Pullen's staccato style but he took it manfully. ‘Do you want to come inside and think it over? You know what the inside of a cell is like, don't you?'

Andreas laughed aloud. It was a little teetering giggle which displayed his magnificent teeth.

‘Excuse me,' he said. ‘I tell you I don' know the girl. Ask someone else. Don' let's quarrel. We understand each other. I have not seen the girl except in the papers.'

‘I see.' Oates took up the questioning again. It made an interesting picture in the gloom, the lean grey-haired policeman with the eyes which were as bleak and honest as the North Sea, and before him, supremely happy in his security, the monstrous Greek, smiling and guileful.

‘Mr Hakapopulous,' the old super was always studiously polite, ‘you have several private dining-rooms here, haven't you?'

‘Yes, for business conferences.' Andreas made the statement with unblushing simplicity.

‘For business conferences?'

‘Yes.'

‘Very well.' The glimmer of a smile passed over the superintendent's thin lips. ‘We're not going into that now. Where are these dining-rooms?'

His question was answered somewhat precipitately by the hurried return of the divisional detective, who made a startled announcement from the head of the staircase.

‘Painting?'

Pullen was across the room in an instant. The Greek's smile broadened.

‘That is so,' he admitted placidly. ‘We do a little redecoration. My brother makes a 'obby of it.'

‘Does he?' Oates was very grim. ‘We'll go up there, please.'

‘Why not?'

The entire company mounted the staircase, Campion and Lugg dropping in behind the procession. They came up into a dark, quiet passage which had four solid doors on either side and a small half-glassed one at the far end. The doors were all numbered very plainly, odd on the left and even on the right. Number Eight alone stood open. In the passage the atmosphere so noticeable in the room below was intensified. It was not unlike the box of a very old theatre Muffling festoons of drapery hung everywhere, and the strong smell of turpentine issuing through the one
open doorway came as a relief. With the turpentine fumes came a little song. Jock Hakapopulous was singing at his work.

They found him on a step-ladder, his head protruding through a hole in an old sheet which was tied about his tremendous middle with a blind-cord. Apparently he wore no shirt, for his great forearms were naked save for a thatch of long soft black hair. He was engaged in painting the cornice, and his head, which was exactly like his brother's, save that it was bald, was very near the ceiling.

The room was uncompromisingly bare. There was not a vestige of furniture in it anywhere. Even the walls had been stripped and the dirty boards of the floor were furred where linoleum had been removed

Oates avoided Pullen's eyes and a gloom descended on the raiding party. Andreas indicated the visitors.

‘The police,' he said unnecessarily. ‘They want to know if we seen a girl.'

‘That'll do.' Pullen snapped out the admonition and the pantomime with the photograph was repeated.

Jock Hakapopulous was even blander than his brother. He, too, was ingratiating, but he was an older man, and there was an underlying capability about him and a dreadful rat intelligence which were not only not negligible but, somehow, in that atmosphere, alarming.

He too professed himself unhappy not to be able to oblige. There were so many girls in the world, he said. One was very much like another. He himself had no use for women.

The divisional superintendent remarked that this fact would hardly seem to emerge from his police record, and both brothers were inordinately amused.

Since there was nothing to be seen in Number Eight, always excluding Jock Hakapopulous in his drapery, which was a sight with merits of its own, Mr Campion and Mr Lugg drifted away from the police party and explored the other rooms. As soon as they opened the doors the story was evident. Every dining-room was suspiciously clean and there were uneven, discoloured patches on the wallpaper where furniture had been removed and replaced. Every room on the floor had been recently rearranged.

‘They've got the police cold.' Mr Lugg made the
observation through closed lips. ‘There's not much those two don't know. Where are you going?'

Mr Campion did not reply. He had opened the half-glass door and was already some way down a flight of dirty stairs which he had discovered behind it.

When Oates joined him five minutes later he was still standing at the foot of the staircase looking out of the back door into the small yard which gave on to Augean Passage. The old superintendent had left the Greeks to the pack and he came down to Campion, holding the skirts of his coat closely round him like a fastidious woman.

‘Lumme,' he said expressively.

Mr Campion nodded. ‘A corner of our picturesque London,' he observed. ‘Mind that swill-can. See what this is?'

Oates glanced up the staircase and then out into the yard again.

‘A convenient get-away,' he said. ‘Get-away, or, of course, a get-in. Trusted clients take the back stairs, I suppose. Let's get out in the air. I don't really fancy the atmosphere of this place. They're a couple o' daisies, aren't they? How did you come to stumble on them?'

‘Old-fashioned footwork. Lugg and I have been round every fishy club and suspicious eatery in London. What do you think?'

‘About them?' Oates jerked his head upward and smiled with his lips only. ‘They know something, don't they?' he said.