Without the Moon (2 page)

2
BLUES IN THE NIGHT

Sunday, 8 February 1942

Miss Evelyn Bourne stood in the hallway of Mrs Payne's boarding house, inhaling the aroma of the first and last meal she had managed to avoid eating there. A medley of liver, onions and mashed swede by the smell of it, and by the fact that there had been scarcely any variation to the menu in the three long months since she had taken up lodgings.

The grandmother clock chimed a sonorous six times as her eyes took final stock of the gloomy interior. Mrs Payne kept one oil lamp lit on the hall table, which emitted enough of a glow to illuminate the brass gong she used to summon her inmates for feeding, a green baize letter rack criss-crossed with black tape, and a typed and framed list of rules about blackouts, meal times and the dire consequences of guests being found in lodgers' rooms.

Miss Bourne tried to leave her gaze there, picking out the various misspellings she had detected in this treatise during her stay, which had given her a kind of bitter comfort against the pretensions of her hostess. But, as if some agent of mischief was controlling them, her eyes rolled across to the other side of the hall, to a thing that had always made her wince – a cartoon that hung next to the lounge door, of a little girl sitting on her father's shoulders with a speech bubble coming out of her mouth uttering the words: “I'se bigger than 'oo!”

It was just the sort of thing her mother would have found amusing. Miss Bourne forced her head away just as Mrs Payne, in her customary matching pinafore and headscarf, finally emerged from the boxroom she called her office, smelling strongly of L'heure Bleue and holding a piece of headed paper.

“I trust this puts everything in order, Miss Bourne,” she said, as if challenging her to find otherwise. Mrs Payne was a thickset woman in her late forties, who faced the encroachment of time with a full armoury of face powder, corsetry, setting lotion and an accent adapted from the BBC. Before the war, her premises had been a tearoom, which she had enterprisingly adapted to circumstance. With beady attention to economics, including the strict adherence to her frugal menu and a coal ration that matched the temperature of the household to that of a mausoleum, she turned enough of a profit to allow such little luxuries as black-market French perfume.

“Thank you, Mrs Payne,” said Miss Bourne, giving the settlement of her account the briefest of scans before folding it up and consigning it to the depths of her handbag.

Mrs Payne gave what she thought was a magnanimous smile. Miss Bourne had always been a mystery to her. Her appearance she found somewhat severe, those tight buns and old-fashioned cloche hats, the shapeless clothes that hung off her twig of a figure. Her unwillingness to spend each evening in the lounge chatting with the other guests had been read as a sign that she considered herself above the rest of them. But there was little else to fault: Miss Bourne had been tidy to the point that, apart from her bed linen, her room never needed cleaning, was always punctual with her payments and her mealtimes and had never once come home in company.

On paper, Mrs Payne realised, Miss Bourne had been an ideal lodger. Perhaps it was a shame that she was moving on.

“Well, good luck, dear,” the landlady said. “Where was it you said you was going to?”

“Grimsby.” Miss Bourne scowled as she said it. Perhaps, as the forbidding name would seem to imply, that place was beneath her, too.

“Nice there, is it?” said Mrs Payne. Her smile revealed a dash of coral pink lipstick stuck to her front teeth.

“It's a job,” was all Miss Bourne could find to say about it. “Much like any other one, I expect. Well,” she extended her hand, “I must be going now if I'm to catch the train to London tonight. I'll have someone come for my luggage directly as I've booked the ticket.”

“Yes, all right, dear.” On paper be damned, Mrs Payne decided, she had been right all along. There was something queer about Miss Bourne. She opened the front door, watched the woman pick up her one small travelling case and prepared to dismiss her from her mind.

Outside on the pavement, Miss Bourne hurried up the residential avenue towards the High Street and the train station. Hornchurch – she couldn't wait to see the back of it.

– . –

The clock on the station wall read twenty minutes past seven as Miss Bourne at last arrived there. If Mrs Payne had found her ex-lodger self-possessed and aloof, the booking clerk with whom she made her arrangements formulated an altogether different picture of her.

Having spent a career observing people on the move, the clerk had frequently seen women like this: leaving in a hurry, puffy around their red-rimmed eyes and working their hands together in a state of agitation. More of them than ever since the Blitz began. He felt a stab of pity for the woman in the camel-coloured coat, hiding her face under a round, knitted green hat. She stood so upright, as if she was wearing a metal corset, yet anxiety oozed out through her strained vocal cords.

“I'm sorry, madam. Could you repeat that for me?” he asked her. “Did you say that was Miss or Mrs?”

He knew it would be the former even as she choked the word out. There was something vaguely familiar about her.

“Are you quite all right, Miss?” he asked. He remembered now where he had seen her before, working behind the counter at the chemist's on the High Street, the one that had closed for business this past Friday. He wondered if the loss of her job was the cause of her distress, or whether it had resulted from a parting of a more difficult kind, if there was someone she was leaving behind here, too.

The kindness in his voice was almost more than Miss Bourne could bear.

“I'm just fed up, that's all,” she said. “Fed up with all this moving about. All I want to do is spend the rest of my days in peace.”

The clerk nodded sympathetically. “That's all we can hope for, isn't it?” he said, turning the form around for her to sign. “To get through all of this in one piece.”

“Yes.” Miss Bourne pulled herself together with a monumental act of will. It was no use having a nervous breakdown in front of this poor man. That could wait until she was on the train to London, chugging through the dark and the cold alone, with nothing else to do except reflect upon her failures. This one, and the rest.

– . –

By the time she had reached Paddington, some two and a half hours of blizzards and frozen points later, Miss Bourne had managed to rally herself. Perhaps, she thought, despite the abrupt ending of the telephone call that had sent her into the snug bar of the Railway Tavern for an hour longer than she had anticipated earlier this evening, if she just turned up at Gloucester Place, they would have to let her in. Where else was she supposed to go so late of an evening in a city she barely knew? Surely they would show some pity, tonight of all nights?

Catching sight of a porter, she walked briskly towards him. “Excuse me,” she said, “could you help me to find a taxi, please?”

The porter raised his eyes gloomily up to the station clock. “I'll try, Madam,” he said, “but you'll be lucky, this time of night.”

However, when they came out of the station, there was a cab just pulling up. It lifted Miss Bourne's spirits: this had to be a sign that she had taken the right course of action after all. She gratefully slipped a shilling into the porter's hand as he stowed her bag in the boot and informed the driver of her destination.

But the cabbie drove so slowly through the unlit streets that her agitation began to stir again. She couldn't shut the image of Mrs Payne's stupid framed cartoon out of her mind. That and the memories that came with it, of her mother's drab little Tyneside parlour, of confinement in a world she didn't want or understand – and which wanted and understood her still less. The brief moments of respite between then and now – other worlds opening suddenly in bright shafts of brilliance: intellectual discourse and political fire, the possibilities of minds meeting, of love being a hair's breadth away – only to cast her back to grey reality again each time. Each time making it harder to swallow, knowing that it could have been so different, but for her own timidity, her own stupidity. The manacles she had forged all by herself.

“This is it, love,” the driver's voice broke through her tormented reverie.

Miss Bourne blinked, looked out on the terraced crescent. It had started to snow. “Could you just wait here a moment, please?” she asked. Like the booking clerk at Hornchurch station, the cabbie caught the tremor in her voice.

He watched her pick her way down the street by the thin flicker of her torch beam, go up the steps to the front door and ring the bell. A maid opened it with a disdainful look on her face. She didn't usher his passenger in, but instead just stood there, shaking her head solemnly. As his fare began to wave her arms in argument, the maid simply shut the door in the woman's face.

She stood there for a moment, shouting at the door as flurries of snow swirled around her. Then her shoulders slumped in defeat and she slowly turned and came back to him, her brow puckered and her eyes darting from side to side.

She got back in the taxi. “They must put me up somewhere,” she said, more to herself than to him, the cabbie thought. “I've got the money to pay.”

“Where you headed, love?” he asked. “Can we find you a room nearer to where you want to get to, d'you think?”

She shook her head. “I've got to be in King's Cross in the morning to catch a train to Grimsby. But I don't want to stay anywhere around there.” She looked back towards the house that had just ejected her, desperation in her eyes.

Then, just when he thought she was going to start crying, her head snapped back round. “I know,” she said, her expression suddenly quite calm. “The Three Arts Club, just a bit further down the street here. I've stayed there before. Could you take me there instead, please?”

He turned the cab around towards Regent's Park and this time her doorstep enquiry was a success. He carried Miss Bourne's small case to the door for her and got a shilling's tip for it on top of his fare. But he was relieved to see the back of her. The cabbie had seen his share of strangeness during these days of fire and chaos, but there was something proper disconcerting about this one. He thought she was going mad.

– . –

Mrs Carolyn Jones, manageress of the Three Arts Club, showed Miss Bourne up to her room as the clock chimed the half hour past ten. Miss Bourne managed to keep the smile glued to her face until she was alone, and by holding her breath until she heard footsteps receding back down the stairs, she kept the sob from her throat.

Ten minutes later she was splashing cold water onto her face. She stopped when she caught sight of herself in the little square of mirror above the sink.

“Stop it now, stop it,” she whispered to herself. Her eyes darted away from her reflection to that of the room behind her. It was small and beige and it seemed to Miss Bourne just then that it was starting to shrink still further. For a brief, mad second, she wondered if, like Alice, she had taken something that was making her grow. She laughed, and the sound snapped her out of this thought, brought her gaze back to her mirror image.

“You haven't eaten again, have you?” she asked herself, in the tone of voice her mother would have used. “Now you're so hungry you're starting to see things. You need to eat, my girl … Eat something now.”

She lifted her coat from where she had flung it across the bed, put it back on. Smoothed her hair back into shape and carefully arranged her hat over the top of it. For a few seconds more, she scrutinised herself in the mirror, until she was certain that she looked quite calm.

Then she went back downstairs and asked Mrs Jones where she might find somewhere open to eat at this time of night. The manageress suggested the Lyons Corner House at Marble Arch. It was a bit of a walk, but Miss Bourne said she was sure she could manage it. She gave a brief, grateful smile as she closed the front door behind her.

Then she stepped out into the snow.

3
YOU RASCAL YOU

Monday, 9 February 1942

She lay on her back in the gutter that ran across the middle of a surface air-raid shelter in Montagu Place, Marylebone. It was so cold a final resting place that Greenaway could see his breath hanging on the air in front of him as he stooped into the doorway, squinting at the scene in the pallid glow of electric lantern light.

The photographer and the Divisional Surgeon had already done their work, had left the throng of police that currently surrounded the building to develop pictures and write reports. In the few moments between their departure and the arrival of the next officer called to the scene, Greenaway hoped he might be allowed enough peace to think.

A green woollen cap lay across the threshold of the shelter. Slush fell from his shoes as he carefully stepped over it to approach the tangled form beyond. It had been bitterly cold the night before, snow swirling over the city, but for once the Luftwaffe had not come calling. There was no reason for this woman to have come here.

Her feet pointed towards him, her right leg slightly raised, her skirt pulled up to her thighs. A fawn camelhair coat lay rumpled beneath her, her arms still inside the sleeves, though the garment was open, revealing a green jumper that matched the discarded cap. She probably knitted them herself, Greenaway thought, as he knelt down beside her. Now her careful work lay in savage disarray, the jumper pushed up to expose her right breast, the white vest she wore beneath roughly torn away.

Greenaway opened up his murder bag. He extracted a pair of rubber gloves and pulled them on, breathing in the iron scent of blood. The woman's head was propped upwards against the wooden bench that served as a seat, her final scream muffled by her own silk scarf, now wound tightly around her nose and mouth. Her eyes had turned glassy, unseeing, but the horror of her end still registered from the dark dilated pupils, from the swollen tongue protruding between her teeth and the gag, from the livid bruising on her neck.

Her tormented features could not show him for sure, but Greenaway did not take her modest garb and undyed, dark brown hair for that of the kind of woman who would have come in here to entertain a serviceman.

The only jewellery she was wearing was a plain wristwatch on a brown leather strap. No necklace broken in the struggle, no rings on her fingers, no brooch pinned to her coat. Just a matchbox, a powder compact and a packet of Ovaltine tablets lying by her side. Her torch had rolled a couple of yards away from her.

This woman doesn't belong here, Greenaway thought, someone had to drag her here. Someone who thought himself clever, a bit of a card – someone who had gone to the trouble, after his frenzy was through, of picking up her gloves and placing them on her chest, palms outwards in an inverted prayer, the fingers pointing towards her face.

Greenaway felt a throbbing at his temples.

“Any sign of a handbag?” he asked the D Division copper who had made the call-out just before nine that morning, when an electrician on his way to a job had found her here. The thin young man stood just outside the doorway, arms crossed and blinking against the wind.

“No, sir,” the PC answered, turning his head. “Not in here. But there's a squad of men out there looking.”

“Good,” said Greenaway, his eyes travelling around the entrance of the shelter. Loose mortar lay all over the place, fragments of which could easily find their way into the tread of a boot or shoe. He picked out some sample bags from his kit; he'd need to bag some of that up for evidence. And this …

Her watch had stopped at one o'clock. But when Greenaway lifted her wrist, it began to tick again.

“Ted.” Another shadow across the doorway, and the voice of Detective Chief Superintendent Fred Cherrill, Head of the Yard's Fingerprint Division, a hangdog face under a bowler hat, regarding him with solemn brown eyes. Greenaway was glad to see those familiar, morose features. His comrade's mind was an encyclopaedia of villainy rendered in lines and whorls, prints more vivid than any mugshot to him. Despite his senior rank, he insisted on always working murder scenes himself and nothing escaped Cherrill's gaze. If this killer was somebody they already knew, he would be indexed in Fred's mental rogues' gallery. If he wasn't, the DCS would find a sure-fire way of putting a noose around his neck.

“Fred.” Greenaway got to his feet, short stabs of pain in his knees as he rose from the concrete floor. They shook hands and Greenaway stepped back outside, exhaling the bitter aroma of death from his nostrils as Cherrill set up his powerful crime-scene lamp and went immediately to work.

Greenaway's eyes roamed up and down the street, and on to the bare branches of the trees in Regent's Park behind them, stark against the sleeting sky, and the barrage balloons that hovered over them all, like great grey elephants somehow floating in the air. Around him, workers hurried along with their heads down, wrapped and muffled up against the cold. Greenaway wondered if this Johnny could possibly be amongst them, if he was the type who liked to come back and hover around his masterwork, as the boastful arrangement of the woman's gloves suggested he might. Without thinking about it, he lit a cigarette.

Inside, Cherrill crouched down beside the body, raised his magnifying glass.

Greenaway turned a slow circle, taking in a 360-degree mental snapshot of the terrain and everyone within it. Then he fished his notebook out of his pocket, jotted down his first impressions and all the questions that sprang to mind. Finally, dropping the butt of his cigarette into the gutter, he turned his gaze back into the shelter.

“Anything?” he asked.

Cherrill, seemingly lost in his inspection, said nothing for a while. Then he looked up, eyebrows raised. “Seems to have been a left-handed job,” he said, nodding.

“Chief Inspector, sir.” Another constable approached Greenaway, an older man in the uniform of a reservist, a pair of bottle-thick glasses resting on a nose threaded with red veins.

“Stokesby, sir, Marylebone Lane – the gaffer said I should report to you.”

“Oh, yes, constable?” Greenaway took in greasy grey hair, spots of egg on the lapels of a jacket shiny with wear.

“I was on Number 13 beat last night, that is to say, Marylebone Road, Baker Street, York Street, Seymour Place and here.” Stokesby waved a notebook earnestly.

“Right,” Greenaway opened his own again, licked the end of his pencil, “and what did you see here, constable?”

“Nothing,” the reservist replied. “Well, nothing suspicious, any rate. I passed by here first at 11.30 and I always take a look inside. I did last night. I shined my light up and down, but didn't see anyone in the shelters at all. Well, there weren't any call for it, was there? I think if anyone
had
been lying on the floor round about then, I would have noticed them.”

Greenaway watched the darting little eyes behind the magnifying lenses. The reservists were usually retired policemen, but he wondered how much worse things could get for a force strained by the departure of so many younger men to the war, if myopic volunteers were all that were left to do this kind of legwork. “Did you hear anything, then, any sounds of a quarrel, a fight?”

“Nothing unusual, sir,” Stokesby scratched his head. “It was a very quiet night, last night, not many people about. No moon neither. It was very dark out here. But … what people there was about were soldiers. Four or five times I got asked where the Church Army Hostel was, so I directed them to Seymour Place.” He flapped his arm for emphasis. “Got called over to Baker Street just before midnight, reports of some shady types coming in and out of a doorway. Well, they must have pushed off before I got there, no sign of any breaking and entering on the premises. Took me lunch from 1.15 to 2.15, and I must have passed by here two or three more times during the night.” Stokesby shrugged. “Still didn't see anything out of the ordinary.”

“No vehicles parked up here?” Greenaway suggested. “Or any driving away?”

“None that I recall. I didn't see a sentry on duty either,” Stokesby looked as if he had surprised himself with this last remark. “Well, like I say, sir, it was very dark.”

Greenaway closed his notebook. “Thank you, constable,” he said. “That was very helpful. Give my regards to your gaffer, won't you?”

The throbbing in Greenaway's head was more insistent now. He rubbed his temples, hoping for it to clear. Watching Stokesby shambling away in the direction of his station, he felt acutely aware of his own years. Greenaway was a veteran of the last war, who'd taken his skills as a radiographer from the Navy to the Met and risen swiftly up the ranks, thanks to his luck on the racecourses. Swaffer had been right about his ambiguous feelings towards this new role on the Murder Squad.

The men that worked the rackets he could understand. He had grown up with them, after all, knew exactly how their calculating, chancy minds worked and therefore how to deal with them. Takes one to know one, maybe. But this pointless death, this brutal, ugly end of a woman who had managed to survive Christ knows how many air raids before she ended up dead in a shelter on a night when there were no bombs, how could he get into the mind of a man who did things like that?

“Excuse me, Chief Inspector,” the younger PC broke into his thoughts. “We've located the lady's handbag, sir. It was just round the corner, on Wyndham Street.”

Greenaway looked down at the constable's gloved hands which held the remains of a black handbag treated much the same way as its owner – left wet, torn and empty.

“Fred,” he called to Cherrill. “Something else for you here.”

Cherrill, only a few years Greenaway's junior himself, stooped his way out of the shelter. He appraised the sorry artefact with a frown.

“Doesn't look like I'll be able to get much out of that,” he said. “But we'll see what comes up when it's dried and dusted. I've done all I can here, better get her over to Spilsbury, now, see what he makes of it. Poor old boy,” Cherrill added to himself. “I don't suppose he'll like it much. What'll you do now, Ted?”

Greenaway snapped his notebook shut. “Go house to house,” he said. “Try and find out who she was first, what she might have been doing here. And who she might have been knocking about with.”

Cherrill nodded. “Well,” he said, “we're looking for a left-handed man, I'm sure Spilsbury will confirm it. Good luck, Ted.”

“And to you,” said Greenaway. “Hope you find him before I do.”

For his own sake
, he added, mentally.