The Reckoning (34 page)

‘Not really.' Billy shook his head. ‘She may be in London: those identity cards were bought from a local dealer and, after Richmond, this is the place she knows best. But we can't be certain. It may depend on where her next target is.'

‘You said there was a fifth man in danger?'

‘He's the officer who conducted the court martial,' Madden said. ‘I didn't make a note of his name at the time. It would be in the record, though.'

‘Which only Alma has seen . . .' Finch nodded grimly. ‘And by now she'll have tracked him down.' He was thoughtful. ‘Aren't you surprised he isn't dead already? I would have thought he'd have been first on her list.'

‘We've wondered about that.' Madden grunted. ‘It may mean he's no longer alive. That would be a blessing, in more ways than one. But we can't count on it.'

Finch nodded in understanding. He glanced at his watch. It seemed he had said all he had to say, and Billy sought Madden's eye. It was time they were going.

‘One last thing . . .' The architect collected himself. ‘One final warning – and this is crucial. Remember you're dealing with a dangerous opponent, even a deadly one. Give her the chance to defend herself and you may regret it.'

‘I appreciate that, sir.' Billy swallowed. ‘I won't forget it.'

‘I've already told you how swiftly she can react. It's unlikely even your most experienced officers will have come across anyone quite like her. The fact, too, that she's a woman may tend to give them a false sense of security. They had better not make that mistake.'

‘I understand, sir.'

‘I asked you if you thought she would hang for these crimes, but frankly I don't think that will happen.'

He paused then, as though to be sure that his words were fully grasped.

‘You understand what I'm saying, don't you, Inspector?' He peered at Billy.

‘Sir?'

‘I'm saying I doubt you'll take her alive.'

26

‘C
OME ON
,
LUV
,
TAKE
another look. See if you can make up your mind. Is it her or isn't it?'

Joe Grace pointed at the copies of the sketches he and Lily had brought with them. They were lying side-by-side on the table in front of Hilda Carey.

‘Get a picture of her face in your mind, first. Then look at these two drawings and think: does either one of them, or both, look anything like her?'

He caught Lily's eye and scowled. They were standing in the kitchen belonging to the boarding house Mrs Carey ran, a room still smelling of the breakfast she must have cooked for her tenants earlier that morning. Lily thought she could detect the smell of the sausages that might have sizzled in the large frying pan sitting on the stove, and heard her stomach rumble in sympathy. Their departure from the Yard had been hurried; she hadn't had time to slip up to the canteen for her usual bacon-and-dripping sandwich.

Only a hop and a skip away from Earls Court tube station, the boarding house was one of many such in that particular area of London. Indeed, they had arrived to find Mrs Carey enjoying a cup of tea with another landlady, one Edna Garfield, who had walked over from her own residential hotel (as she described
it) nearby to enjoy a mid-morning chat with her friend, and who wasn't best pleased to have had it interrupted. She was sitting now at an angle to the table with her arms folded and a look of haughty disapproval on her angular face.

What had brought Grace and Lily hotfoot from the Yard – though that hardly described their halting progress in a police car through the fog-bound capital – was a message from Earls Court nick to the effect that a woman by the name of Emily Horton had, until recently, been one of Mrs Carey's tenants.

How recently?

Up until two days ago, it turned out when they reached the address given them and found two detectives waiting there, together with a uniformed officer. What Joe had demanded to know, with his usual bluntness, was why this Horton woman's recent presence in the boarding house had only been reported that morning, when the Yard's advisory about the two women's names had been sent to all police stations in the capital three days earlier.

‘It's taking us a while to check all of them,' one of the detectives, the senior of the two, an ageing DC called Ringwood, had explained defensively when Joe had put the question to him. ‘We're still not done. You wouldn't guess how many boarding houses and the like we've got around here. Not to mention the knocking shops that don't even register, but have to be checked just the same. Plus it was over the weekend and we were short-staffed.'

‘She left on Saturday,' Mrs Carey had told them when they enquired. ‘She only stayed a week. Said she was down from Birmingham looking for a job in cosmetics. Mind you, she wasn't one for a chat. Slipped out every morning quite early and only came back late in the evening. She didn't have a ration card – said she'd forgotten to bring it – but that didn't matter. She took her meals out.'

Asked to describe the woman, Mrs Carey had scratched her head.

‘I'd call her ordinary-looking,' she had said, finally, smoothing the blonde locks she'd disturbed, which Lily could tell were dyed. ‘Not pretty; quite plain, really. Her hair was a sort of brownish colour.'

‘Sort of
brownish
?' Joe had been struggling to keep his temper. ‘What does that mean?'

Lily had intervened.

‘Do you reckon it was dyed?' she asked, and Mrs Carey's face had brightened at the question.

‘I'd say so. Yes. It didn't look quite right; not her natural colour, if you know what I mean.' It had been clear from her expression that she didn't think her own tresses suffered from the same defect. ‘To tell the truth, it looked a bit mousy.'

Joe had pulled out the sketches he had in his pocket then and showed them to her. Mrs Carey had looked at them for a long time; first at one, then the other, then back again.

‘I don't know,' she'd said finally. ‘I really don't. I mean it could be anyone.'

At that point Lily had imagined she could see steam coming out of Joe's ears.

Now they waited to see if the one last look that Joe had asked the landlady to take would bear any fruit. Mrs Carey bent closer to the table to study the drawings.

‘I know 'er.'

The two detectives turned as one to see Edna Garfield pointing a bony finger. Mrs Carey's guest had been sitting silent for so long that they'd forgotten about her presence. Unable to keep her curiosity in check, she had quietly shifted her chair round so that she could look at the two drawings.

‘That one there. She lodged with me a fortnight ago; she only stayed a week.'

She was indicating the sketch of the woman who had called on Mrs Singleton at Oxford.

‘She had her hair done up in much the same way. Very smart she looked. Bit high-and-mighty, I thought. She never had time to stop for a word.'

‘What was her name?' Lily asked before Joe could open his mouth. ‘Do you remember?'

‘No, I don't.' Edna Garfield was positive. ‘It wasn't Horton, though.'

Her face lit up.

‘But we can find out. It'll be in my register.'

Lily halted in her tracks. A howl of pain had just come from out of the fog in front of her.

‘Bleeding Jesus!'

The voice was Joe's. By the sound of it he'd just walked into something, a lamp post most likely. Moments later Mrs Garfield could be heard offering supporting testimony, though the obstruction in question was not the one Lily had imagined.

‘I'd forgotten about that postbox,' she said.

Moving forward cautiously, Lily came upon them. Joe was bent over, rubbing his knee.

‘Cor, isn't it dreadful?' Edna Garfield regarded him with a sympathetic gaze. ‘I've never seen the like of it. Twenty years and more I've been walking up and down this road, and I'm still not sure exactly where we are.'

Lily, too, had seen nothing to match it – the fog – though, like all Londoners, she'd experienced her share of pea-soupers. The newspapers said they were caused by the thousands of household fires: the smoke they sent up through the chimneys. That and what the weather experts called ‘singular atmospheric conditions', which kept the air hanging motionless for days over the great urban sprawl. But whatever it was, as time went by the
fog turned into something more like a clammy sponge. And the colour changed, too; it wasn't grey as before, but had patches of reddish-brown in it, streaks of ochre, and Lily reckoned it wasn't only the smoke from the fires that was trapped in it, but a lot of the soot as well. How else to explain the grime that you would find on the cuffs and collars of blouses and shirts at the end of each day?

‘No, wait – there's Parson's.' Mrs Garfield had just spotted a grocery shop window beside them on the pavement. ‘I know where we are. It's just a few steps further on.'

They had left Mrs Carey's and were accompanying her back to her own abode, which she had assured them was only a short walk away and which Lily, counting the streets they had crossed and the corners they had turned, calculated was no more than two and a half blocks distant from Earls Court Road. Earlier, before they had quit the boarding house, she and Joe had conferred.

‘Sarge, I've got an idea,' Lily had said. ‘If this is the same woman and if she's the one we're looking for, then maybe she's not straying far from Earls Court. All she really needs to do is keep changing her name and her appearance. It sounds as though she only moved a few streets to come here. Perhaps she's done the same thing again: maybe she's holed up somewhere nearby.'

Joe Grace had thought it over, his hatchet face set in a scowl. Lily had had some misgivings when she'd learned that he'd been added to their team and that she'd be working under him. He had the reputation of being a hard man – a right sod, to quote a detective she'd worked with on another case a couple of months earlier. But the bloke in question had been a lazy bugger, always ready to cut corners and never short of a sly dig at her expense, and she would say this for Joe (though she didn't call him that, not to his face): he was yet to make a reference to her sex or even hint that it might be a drawback. And if his
manner was abrupt, which it was, and he made little effort to put himself out, at least he treated everyone else the same way, and Lily asked for no more than that.

‘So what you're saying is that we ought to pull in more men and blanket the area, check every hotel and boarding house in a one-mile radius? And then hope we're not wrong?'

‘Something like that, Sarge.' Lily wasn't sure how he was taking her suggestion.

Joe's eyes narrowed. When he smiled, his pockmarked face split into a grin that had more crocodile than man in it. (Or so Lily reckoned.)

‘We'd have to check with the chief super first. We'd need his authority.'

There'd been no sign of their own guv'nor that morning. But shortly after Lily arrived at the office the switchboard had called to report that Inspector Styles had left a message with them to say he would be late getting in.

‘It's not a bad idea.' Grace had thought it over. ‘But I want to have a look at that register first.'

‘Here we are,' their guide announced.

They followed her up a shallow flight of steps to a door with a sign affixed to the wall beside it, saying
Rooms to Rent
. Inside was a dimly lit hallway with a reception desk. Mrs Garfield slid behind it. She reached under the counter and came up with a hefty ledger, which she plonked on the desk and then opened at a place marked by a ribbon.

‘Let me see now . . .'

The two detectives watched as she ran her finger up and down the pages.

‘A week ago . . .'

The finger stopped. She bent lower.

‘Yes, here we are. She checked out the Saturday before last.'

‘What's her name, though?' Lily couldn't contain herself. ‘What did she register under?'

Edna Garfield bent even closer to the page, a frown knotting her brow.

‘Ooh, I can't read her writing – what's that she's written?'

‘Here, let me see.' Joe's patience, never abundant, had expired. Reaching for the book, he spun it round and scanned the page. His finger moved . . . then stopped.

‘Well, well.'

His eyes glittered; his grin was truly reptilian now, a crocodile poised to bite.

‘Oakes . . .' he said, savouring the name. ‘Mary Oakes.'

‘Right? Everyone got that straight? Nobody touches her. Nobody looks at her. I don't know how long we'll have to wait inside, so any of you needs to relieve himself, he'd better do it now.'

Joe Grace glared at the four men standing in front of him – two of them were plain-clothes officers, the other two uniformed constables – not sure as yet that his words had been taken in and fully digested.

‘If she spots any one of you before she reaches the hotel, she'll scarper and it's odds-on we'll lose her in this fog. So stay out of sight. That applies particularly to the uniforms. Keep your distance, but be ready to block the road and pavement in both directions if you hear a police whistle. Any questions?'

Standing at his shoulder, Lily couldn't help but feel pleased with herself. Her suggestion that they cast a net over all lodging houses and hotels in the vicinity had borne fruit even sooner than she had hoped. Little more than an hour had passed since Grace had received the chief super's sanction to put the plan into effect, and soon afterwards, before most of the police reinforcements summoned from surrounding districts had even got there, word was received at Earls Court police station that one of their own beat-bobbies had struck oil.

‘He was checking the register at a ladies-only establishment
called the Regal up near the Brompton Road,' Joe had told Lily after speaking on the phone to the officer involved. ‘She's gone back to using the name Oakes again. It looks like she's switching from one to the other. She checked in on Saturday, soon after she left the boarding house. It's only a ten-minute walk up there.'