Without the Moon (11 page)

“So let me get this straight,” Greenaway's head was thumping so loudly he had to strain to keep his thoughts in order. “That,” he pointed to the silken noose, “was for him. And this,” his finger arced to the post-mortem butchery, “was for us.”

Spilsbury raised his eyebrows. “I'm not a psychologist,” he said. “But there's something in what you say. Are you thinking the same as I am?”

With a loud backfire from its exhaust pipe, a motorbike pulled up outside. Both men watched the dispatch rider enter the building, Spilsbury's question answered before Greenaway had even opened the message that was handed to him.

“Not another one?” the pathologist said.

“Yeah,” said Greenaway. “Another one. At Sussex Gardens, Paddington.” His stomach dropped as he read it. Sussex Gardens – so close to where he had been last night that it was entirely possible he could have missed Cummins on the street by only seconds.

“You coming?” he looked back up at Spilsbury.

Too late …

14
THE VERY THOUGHT OF YOU

Friday, 13 February 1942

Herbert Coles sat alone in his living room while the horde of policemen that had arrived within the past hour went about their business just down the corridor. The first of them to arrive, a constable from Paddington, hadn't been able to get through the outside window to the bedroom and in the end had seen no other way but to kick out the hinges of the locked door, warning – or advising, as he had put it – Herbert not to follow him in there. He had left Claudette's husband to pace the floor, tortuous thoughts ripping through his mind like the wood splintering from the doorframe.

That first constable had been very young. When he had finally come back, his face now pallid, he'd asked to use the telephone. Herbert heard him request Scotland Yard CID and the divisional surgeon to report to the flat immediately. He closed his eyes, seeing the newsprint headlines on the discarded paper in the kitchen next door. Pain like he had never known before flooded every cell of his body, every ending of his nerves. The nightmares that had tormented him through his whole married life were as nothing compared to the reality of Claudette leaving him this way: going from their marital bed to a place she could never come back from.

Tears began to leak out of the corners of Herbert's eyes. He put one hand up to brush them away, while the other fell between the cushion and the back of the sofa. His fingers touched something soft.

It was one of Claudette's handkerchiefs, a piece of purple satin with red edging and an embossed red rose in the centre of the square she had folded and ironed it into. Herbert lifted it to his face, breathed in the scent of her perfume.

– . –

Jeannie Lord stopped at the top of the steps from Tottenham Court Road tube station. So far, it had not been a good day. Her train from Southend had been delayed by half an hour and then came to a halt on the tracks for another twenty minutes between Leigh-on-Sea and Benfleet. The carriage had been freezing, the view bleak – an eerie expanse of creeks and marshland, fringed by the black rolls of barbed wire that marked the edge of the Thames. Storm clouds chased across the grey sky, the estuary gazed sullenly back. Jeannie had put her head in her schoolbook, tried to concentrate on the words, even though she just wanted to scream: “Get a move on!”

She could never wait to leave the gloomy, gothic penury of her boarding school on a Friday afternoon and set out for London. Mother would always have a treat for them waiting: a trip to the cinema, a walk in Hyde Park or Kensington Gardens, window-shopping in the department stores that fringed those places, just occasionally a trip through the doors for a new handkerchief or gloves, a spray of perfume from the immaculately turned-out lady on the counter.

Best of all, though, would be dinner in Kettners. Jeannie loved Soho: the crowded bustle of it all, the street markets and spivs on Berwick Street, so many different types of people speaking all kinds of languages and wearing strange types of clothes. The food they had there she was sure you could get nowhere else, least of all Southend.

She wished she could just stay with Mother for the rest of the week and go to school in London, but Mother was adamant. It was too dangerous – and anyway, she had to pass her exams so that she would have a good job when she left school.

Jeannie had decided she would become a spy. She loved the way the Frenchwomen in Soho looked and spoke. If she could emulate them perfectly, she told herself, then she could become a secret agent, go to France and bring down a German general or two. Jeannie was always being teased at school for being a Plain Jane. None of her contemporaries would ever have guessed the reason why she always came top of the class in French, Greek and Latin. Which, of course, made her perfect spy material.

Such thoughts, along with analysis of all the people in the train carriage and then later, the tube, kept her occupied until she walked out on to Tottenham Court Road.

All the rubble and broken glass that had greeted her the week before had been cleared away from the half of the street where shops still stood and went about their business. Across the road, though, only a few fragments of blasted wall, standing out like blackened, broken teeth, remained from what had once been a row of houses. Jeannie's eyes alighted on a piece of rose-patterned wallpaper, still incongruously stuck to what must have been the inside of somebody's bedroom, and a horrible sense of foreboding descended. She hurried away, around the corner, towards Gosfield Street.

– . –

Like a macabre
pas de deux
, Greenaway arrived at the door of the ground floor flat in Paddington just as the divisional surgeon was leaving.

“Brace yourself.” He nodded as they passed. “It's him again.”

Greenaway turned to watch him go. Spilsbury hobbled across the forecourt towards him, waving him on with one of his walking sticks when he saw he was being observed. Cherrill, who had driven them there, carried both his own and the pathologist's bags from his car. Greenaway's mind flitted back for an instant to the last war and the things that he had seen there, the wraiths of the walking wounded. He shook his head and went through the door of 187 Sussex Gardens. A young constable greeted him, pointed him right down the corridor, lowering his voice as he told him: “She's in the bedroom down there. The husband's in the sitting room, I've told him to stay put.” The PC put his hand over his stomach as he spoke, an involuntary indication of what Greenaway could expect to find.

– . –

The bad feeling increased when Jeannie saw two policemen standing outside the front door of Mother's block. What could they be doing there?

Hesitantly, she walked towards them, hoping they would part and let her pass. But instead they both moved in together, blocking the entrance, staring at her intently.

“Excuse me, Miss,” one of them said. The older-looking of the pair, so old, in fact, he looked like he could have retired once before and then been sent back to work. “Would you mind telling me your name and business here?”

“Wh-Why?” Jeannie heard the tremble in her voice. “What's wrong?”

“I'm afraid there's been an incident, Miss,” the old policeman said. “We're not letting anyone through here at the moment unless we know who they are.”

Jeannie felt her stomach drop thirteen floors but she determined that she would show no fear. This was just a test, that was all.

“Miss Jean Louise Lord,” she said, pulling herself up straight. “I'm here to see my mother, Mrs Phyllis Lord. She lives in Flat number 4.”

The old policeman's eyes suddenly looked sad. “If you wouldn't mind just waiting here for a moment, Miss,” he said. Then he turned to his companion. “Go and get the old dear,” he said.

– . –

Like the other murder sites through which Greenaway had passed in the space of the last week, a stillness had settled in Claudette Coles's bedroom, as if an icy breath had frozen the scene. The feeling of déjà vu intensified as he crossed the threshold, the door leaning off its hinges at a woozy angle, and walked towards the lump on the right side of the bed. Another dark lump on another dark bed …

Greenaway pulled back the covers and saw white skin and fair hair, dilated pupils staring straight through him into infinity, mouth open in a silent scream. A black stocking made the ligature, the killer's finishing flourish to tie it up in a bow just under the left side of her chin.

Greenaway could feel his jaw tense as he heard the others enter the room behind him, the pounding beginning in his temples again. He made himself go on looking, take it all in, record exactly what he saw in his notebook with methodical detail.

A gash in her right cheek, made by clawing fingernails, wept congealed blood. Beneath her ruined face, her left breast had been cleaved away by a circular knife wound, four inches long. There was another half-inch knife wound on the right side of her nipple, as if the killer had tried to slice it off. Perpendicular to that, a deep slash six inches long carved her abdomen in two from her navel downwards, drawing the eyes down to the blood-encrusted ribbons he had made of her genitals, over which he had folded her left hand.

“You've got a madman on parade here,” Greenaway heard Spilsbury say.

The pathologist had made the same mental leap as the women of the street. He had been nine in 1888, the year of Jack the Ripper; old enough to have those unsolved atrocities seared into his brain, the materials that would form the purpose of his life. As a young man, he had made his name on the case then considered the most gruesome of the twentieth century: that of John Hawley Harvey Crippen, who dismembered his wife in his Camden Town basement and tried to dissolve her existence with quicklime. A five-and-a-half inch by seven-inch piece of skin yielding an operation scar that Spilsbury proved to have belonged to the vanished Cora Crippen gave Scotland Yard the evidence to send the bad doctor to the gallows.

During the thirty-one years since, Spilsbury had never ceased learning the stories of the dead and speaking deeds of darkness into the light of a courtroom day. But his lifetime's service had taken its toll. Less than two years ago, he had suffered a stroke, standing at his dissection table, mid-autopsy. It hadn't been severe enough to put him out of action, but it was the reason he now made his daily commute with the aid of two walking sticks. On top of that, he'd lost his doctor son Thomas in the Blitz, been bombed out of his home, his wife had gone back to her family in the country and he'd been left to barrack down with two elderly, unmarried sisters in Hampstead. His current caseload could not have been heavier, but still, he wouldn't give up the work.

Greenaway nodded, wondering how much longer the pathologist would still have the strength to go on with it.

– . –

Jeannie recognised the old lady who lived across the way from Mother. The Spanish Widow, as Mother called her, she always dressed in black, with a knitted shawl and a large crucifix around her neck. Jeannie had always been rather afraid of her stern appearance. But today the old lady approached her with an expression of grief in her dark brown eyes, and reached out to put a bony hand on her shoulder.

“Oh, Jeannie,” she said. “I'm afraid we have to go with the policemen now.”

“But why?” Jeannie replied. “Why won't anyone tell me what's going on?”

Mari Lambouri looked round at the two silent coppers and then back at her. Her other hand held rosary beads. “It's your mother,” she said.

– . –

“Mr Coles?”

Herbert opened his eyes slowly, unwilling to break the spell that the perfume had cast, the feeling that a spectral Claudette had wrapped her arms around him. When he did, he saw a large plainclothes detective in a long black coat. His face looked like it had gone a few rounds, but the sleepy brown eyes showed sympathy.

“I'm Detective Chief Inspector Greenaway,” he introduced himself. “I'm in charge of this investigation and I'm sorry to have to intrude on you like this. Is there anyone I can call for you? Anyone you could stay with, instead of waiting here?”

Herbert shook his head.

“N-no,” he said, his voice sounding strange to his own ears, as if it was coming down a long tunnel. “There was no one else but Claudette.” His watery eyes searched Greenaway's face for answers; then, finding none, dropped back down to the handkerchief he was holding.

“We're going to have to leave you for a while, Mr Coles,” Greenaway knelt down beside him, “but I'll be back within the hour, I hope, to ask you some questions.”

Herbert nodded without looking up. His finger traced the pattern of the red rose on the centre of the handkerchief.

“We'll have to take her with us,” the detective went on. “Along with the bedroom door and the wardrobe door – for fingerprints, you see? But I'm going to leave this bright young constable with you until I come back, so he can …”

“Make sure I don't go in there,” Herbert said.

“I was going to say, so he can make you a cup of tea,” said Greenaway. “Look after you. But, yes. It would be for the best if you let us clean things up here.”

“I understand,” said Herbert. “Just do what you have to do, Detective Chief Inspector.” He buried his face in the handkerchief.

– . –

Greenaway heaved his murder bag out of the door. Inside, bagged up for Forensics: two discarded French letters found on the floor by the bed, one containing fluid, and some crumpled, stained tissues. The butt of a Craven A cigarette left in the ashtray. A purse, containing Claudette Coles's identity card and some ration coupons, but devoid of any money. A Gillette safety razor, its blade encrusted in blood and a roll of Elastoplast with a thin strip neatly cut out of it.

He had one more stop to make, at West End Central, for the items found on Cummins at the time of his incarceration. The strip of Elastoplast on the back of the woman's watch they had found on the airman could be a match for that cut out of the roll of tape just recovered – and he would need to take it back to show to Herbert for identification. The silver cigarette case could have come from either or any of the women Cummins had been preying on. But there was nothing else that they had taken from her flat that he could possibly show to Phyllis Lord's young daughter.

– . –

Back at Tottenham Court Road station, Jeannie was waiting for him.