The Zig Zag Girl (13 page)

Edgar surprised himself by enjoying the drive to Norfolk. This was partly because Max had let him drive. If the view from the passenger seat transformed the world into something exotic and wonderful, that was nothing to the view from behind the wheel. He felt like a racing driver, a flying ace, the first of the few; arms braced, foot on the accelerator, the Sussex countryside merging into the London suburbs.

‘Take it easy,’ said Max. ‘You can be fined for speeding, you know.’

‘There’s not a police car in the country that would catch us,’ said Edgar. But he slowed down slightly.

It hadn’t been easy, persuading Frank Hodges that he needed two days away from the station. The town was full of rumours about the so-called ‘conjuror killer’, but the police didn’t seem to be any closer to making an arrest. ‘You’d think somebody would notice a man walking through the streets carrying a bloody great sword,’ was how Frank had put it. But the murderer did
seem to be able to walk the streets unnoticed and undetected. Bob had managed to trace the sword to an antique shop in the Lanes, but the owner had only been able to provide the vaguest description of the man who had purchased it. ‘I think it was a man, a smallish man. I think he had a moustache.’ Was this the same small man who had bought flowers at Brighton station before storing Ethel’s dismembered body in Lost Property? Everything pointed to the murders being committed by the same person, but his years with the Magic Men had led Edgar to distrust pointers, especially obvious ones. ‘Put something in the centre,’ Max had said, ‘create a space around it, and it becomes important.’ Was this what he was doing with the sword and the flowers, all the peripheral props? What was the important thing here?

He had had some success with tracing Diablo though. On impulse, he had rung Bill, remembering that Bill had invited the Major – and Edgar and Tony too – to his wedding. Had he asked Diablo? Well, no, but it seemed that Diablo had got wind of the event all the same. He had sent a card, delicately balancing congratulations with an appeal for money. The address was a guesthouse in Great Yarmouth.

‘Did you send him any money?’ Edgar asked.

‘A bit,’ said Bill. ‘Just for old times, you know. There’s no need to say anything about it to Jean.’

‘But why Great Yarmouth?’ Edgar wondered aloud, as they approached the Blackwall Tunnel. ‘Diablo wasn’t from round there, was he?’

‘There’s quite a nice theatre in Yarmouth,’ said Max. ‘The Windmill.’

‘Surely he’s not still performing?’

‘He’s the sort who’ll go on till he drops.’

*

Max had heard from Diablo a few times since the war. At first these communications had been fairly convivial: a suggestion that they meet for a drink, followed by a request for a recommendation to an agent or a management. They would meet in dark bars where Diablo was invariably a member. Max would hand over a fiver and write an unblushingly glowing reference. A few years down the line, and the appeals became rather more desperate, money needed to pay for food rather than drink. Diablo stopped suggesting that they meet, but he always sent a forwarding address in neat capitals. But, for the last two years, nothing. Max was ashamed how quickly he assumed that Diablo must be dead. But now, here he was, alive and well in Great Yarmouth. Well, alive at any rate.

Where did old music hall acts go to die? It was a question that had started to bother Max a lot, late at night, lying in some hotel bedroom unsure for a second exactly where he was. Was that the door or the wardrobe? Where was the light switch? What was that odd smell? Was it the plumbing or something more sinister? What the hell was he doing with his life? He couldn’t go on forever, like Diablo. Soon people like the Mulhollands wouldn’t know his name. He would just be that magician chappie who’d been quite big before the war. He was forty years old and
he’d never owned a house, mowed a lawn or fathered a child. What was going to happen to him when he could no longer remember how to perform the cup trick? Would he too end up performing at the far end of a pier at the far end of Britain?

He wondered if he was mad, cancelling his French holiday to go slogging around the country with Edgar, calling on old comrades whom he hadn’t liked much the first time, attending funerals and visiting out of the way seaside resorts. At first, despite everything, there had been a kind of excitement about it. Together he and Edgar were going to solve the mystery, bring wrongdoers to justice and lots of other wireless-play clichés. But, at Tony’s funeral and afterwards, facing his family across the endless cakes, it didn’t seem fun any more. It felt bloody depressing, to be honest.

Still, he was pleased that Edgar had cheered up today. Max knew Edgar was feeling guilty about Tony’s death (he was a great one for guilt, you’d think he was the Catholic). Max thought that sometimes he could read Edgar like a book. Tony ‘The Mind’ Mulholland couldn’t have done it better. Edgar was thinking that if he’d caught Ethel’s killer, if he’d gone to meet Tony just a little earlier, their old comrade would still be alive. Did he even feel guilty about Charis? Did he think that, if he’d been in Inverness that weekend, he could have stopped her going onto the boat? But Charis was a grown woman. She knew her own mind and she had wanted that mission. Max could still hear her voice. ‘Delighted.’ She’d looked at him, a glance
composed half of challenge and half of amusement. Max thought at the time that she had wanted to assert her authority, she was the senior officer after all. But now he wondered if it was just that she liked danger, whether it was parachuting onto a floating minefield or sleeping with two men at once. Well, either way, she was dead now. Like Tony. Like Ethel. Jesus. Max shook his head to free it from the past. It was going to be a long enough drive without him getting maudlin. Mind you, at the rate Edgar was going, they’d be in Great Yarmouth by lunchtime. Max had made one decision at any rate: he was going to leave Edgar the Bentley in his will.

*

In fact, they stopped in Cambridge for lunch. They ate at a pub in the shadow of one of the colleges, a lopsided, low-ceilinged place with ties hanging like banners from the ceiling.

‘Undergraduate humour,’ said the barman when Edgar asked him about this unusual design feature. ‘Thank God they’re all on holiday at the moment. Cambridge isn’t a bad town without the students.’

But Edgar couldn’t help imagining himself in the pub, having a pint of beer after lectures and discussing philosophy with a group of like-minded friends. Perhaps he should have stayed at Oxford after all. He could have a scarf and a bike and a basket filled with books about Marx and Hegel. Instead, he had a rented flat in Brighton and a job involving severed body parts. Perhaps he’d even be a don by now, with rooms in college or a cottage by the
river complete with a pretty wife who had a lower second in classics.

‘Don’t look back,’ said Max, when Edgar shared this fantasy. ‘That way madness lies. We all have regrets, the only answer is not to think about them.’

His face darkened as he said this, and Edgar wondered if he was thinking about Charis.

‘I felt sure I’d die in the war,’ he said. ‘So there wouldn’t be any need for all these decisions.’

‘Bloody hell,’ said Max, raising his glass of red wine to the light. ‘You’re a bundle of laughs today.’

Edgar was drinking ginger beer (he didn’t want to take the edge off his driving). ‘Didn’t you ever think you were going to die?’ he asked. ‘Even in Egypt?’

‘Never,’ said Max. ‘Closest I’ve been to death is first house at the Glasgow Empire.’

Edgar laughed. ‘From what you’ve told me about the Glasgow Empire, that’s quite close. But don’t you ever wonder why we survived when … others didn’t?’

Max shrugged. ‘It’s luck, that’s all. There’s no cosmic plan to it. There’s no great magician in the sky planning his next trick.’

‘But luck’s important too. Didn’t Tony always say he was born lucky?’

‘Well, his luck ran out in that case.’

‘Yes, it did.’ Edgar thought about Tony ‘Lucky’ Mulholland, who had been unlucky enough to cross a murderer. Was that really all it came down to in the end? Was Ethel, too, just unlucky?

‘Come on,’ Max drained his glass. ‘Let’s get on. The bright lights of Great Yarmouth await. Do you want to drive the rest of the way?’

*

It was early evening when they reached Great Yarmouth. The shadows were lengthening, donkeys were trudging home across the sands and the fish-and-chip men were putting away their stalls. The town itself, though, was clearly just hotting up for the night. Max hadn’t been far wrong about the bright lights. Edgar was amazed at the gaiety of the place. There were amusements and boating lakes and horses wearing straw hats pulling excited visitors along the promenade.

‘He might still be performing,’ he said to Max. ‘There seem to be lots of shows on.’ They stopped by a poster for a show on the Britannia Pier. There was no mention of The Great Diablo, though Max snorted to see that Tommy Cooper was topping the bill.

‘It’s all the new stuff,’ said Max. ‘Holiday camps and the Crazy Gang and knobbly-knee competitions. There’s no place for an old pro like Diablo.’

‘Well, let’s keep looking,’ said Edgar. ‘We know he was here quite recently. If I know Diablo, he’ll have found somewhere that’ll give him free drink if nothing else.’

Max had booked rooms at the Star on the North Quay. As they drove away from the seafront towards the river, the town seemed to become sadder and more tired. Some of the streets still showed signs of bomb damage and urchins stared open-mouthed at the Bentley. The quay
was busy, though, with timber being unloaded and the grey hulls of tankers looming over the terraced houses. Edgar thought of the
Ptolemy
and how long they had laboured over the precise shading of the gun towers. She was at the bottom of the Firth now.

The hotel, though faded, was solid and comfortable. Edgar dumped his suitcase and came downstairs to find Max deep in conversation with a buxom barmaid. He had a whisky in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The barmaid’s laughter was rattling the optics. Edgar knew that, given a chance, Max wouldn’t move for the rest of the night. He was inches away from starting a poker game.

‘Come on,’ said Edgar, ‘let’s go to the address that Bill gave us.’

‘What, now?’ said Max. ‘Can’t it wait until morning?’

‘Everything can wait until morning,’ said the barmaid meaningfully.

‘This can’t,’ said Edgar, propelling Max towards the door.

‘You’ve become awfully officious since you’ve been a policeman,’ grumbled Max.

‘And your standards have slipped,’ said Edgar. ‘That woman was pushing fifty.’

‘So am I,’ said Max.

‘Rubbish. You’re forty.’ And you weren’t above flirting with Ruby, who’s half your age, thought Edgar.

According to the barmaid, Diablo’s address was only a few streets away. As they walked along the riverbank,
the streets became progressively shabbier. Windows were boarded up and many of the houses looked empty. But the guesthouse, though shabby, was obviously clean and cared for. A gnome in the front window sported a sign promising vacancies.

The landlady, a pleasant, exhausted-looking woman in her sixties, seemed happy to answer their questions. Yes, she remembered Mr Parks, a very nice gentleman, she let him off his bill time and time again because he was so polite, but, in the end, well she wasn’t Job, was she? Max agreed that she wasn’t.

‘Do you have any idea where Mr Parks is now?’ asked Edgar.

‘I’m afraid not. He left in the night, owing quite a bit, I’m sorry to say. I expect he’s gone to London. He had a lot of friends there. He was a brilliant magician once, you know.’

‘He was a terrible magician,’ said a voice from the back room. A man in his shirt-sleeves appeared in the doorway. The landlady introduced him (with rather touching pride) as her husband.

‘He was always trying to do this trick where he passed a coin through a bottle,’ said the husband. ‘Never got it right. Not once. Drank lots of bottles dry, mind you, but never got the trick right.’

‘Poor Diablo,’ said Max as they set off through the darkening streets. ‘He really was a terrible table magician. And that’s where the real skill is. Anyone can do a trick on stage with the right props. But table magic – performing
a trick just a few inches away from someone – that takes real sleight of hand.’

‘I’m sure you’re brilliant at it,’ said Edgar sourly. ‘But we’re no nearer to finding Diablo, are we?’

‘Let’s go back to the seafront,’ said Max. ‘We can scout out a few of the shows. And we can get a proper drink.’

‘We don’t need to find Diablo,’ said Edgar. ‘You’re turning into him.’ But he allowed himself to be propelled back towards the centre of town.

On the Golden Mile, the lights were blazing. There were shows on both piers as well as a circus and something called a ‘Venetian Carnival’ on the boating lake. But none of these attractions featured an ageing magician called The Great Diablo. Eventually Max and Edgar ended up in a seedy ‘Private Members’ club, chosen because it seemed to be the only place in Great Yarmouth that sold spirits.

Max slouched at the bar, staring into his whisky. He was at his gloomiest and least talkative. Edgar sipped a gin and tonic and wondered whether Diablo was in fact dead. After all, members of the Magic Men seemed to be dropping like flies. Charis was dead, Tony was dead. The Major couldn’t have many years left. Soon it would be only him and Max. Oh, and Bill. Bill would live forever, surrounded by Jean and an ever-expanding family of huge children … It was a few minutes before he was aware of a disturbance in the background. The doorman, a heavy-set Irishman, was making an announcement. For the first time, Edgar realised that there was a rudimentary stage at one end of the room with tables grouped around it.
The doorman, now wearing a greenish-looking tail-coat, was standing beside a velvet curtain.

‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he intoned though, as Edgar suddenly realised, the clientele of the club was exclusively male. ‘For one night only – Suzette de Paris.’