Without the Moon (10 page)

However, under the crouching gloom of the blackout, in the unrelenting sleet, there didn't seem to be any sorts of men except bogeys tramping the streets tonight. Claudette had walked a circular route, down to Hyde Park and along beside it to Marble Arch, where she had treated herself to a cup of tea in Lyons, hoping to find company there. When this proved futile she had come back up the Edgware Road to Praed Street, speculating that it might be possible to accost some late night travellers. She stopped for a cigarette first, holding the light from her match up to her wristwatch. It was now half-past eleven.

“Rotten night, ain't it?” a voice beside her startled Claudette. She turned to see a woman whose blonde hair framed the most beautiful, flawless face. A scent of violets, along with something altogether more human, drifted up to her nostrils. “How long you been out here, love?” she asked.

“Couple of hours, thereabouts,” said Claudette, clocking the expensive coat her new companion was wrapped in. Despite the fact she had announced herself as a fellow professional, the woman looked more like a film star.

“Me and all,” said Lil. “Thought I'd give the station a whirl, but the bleedin' porter wanted one on the house, the cheeky bastard.”

“Ah,” said Claudette, thinking even that would be better than nothing at all.

Lil, on the other hand, had exhausted her rage. She had found herself drifting back towards the scene of her youthful initiation to the game, the Norfolk Square Hotel. There she found a party of businessmen stranded for the night by the bad weather. The trouble she had taken with her appearance, coupled with the tip she palmed the barman, allowed her to pass from the saloon and up to one of the rooms they had taken, where she had found the oblivion she sought in sex.

“There ain't many trains running tonight, see,” she went on to explain what she had learned during the course of her evening's endeavours. “The storms brought a load of trees down all along the line past Reading. I think I'm gonna call it a night. Maybe you should do the same.”

“Maybe,” said Claudette, still thinking about the porter. “But it's still so early. I don't like to go home empty-handed, you know.”

“I
do
know,” said Lil, giving a sympathetic smile. “Well, all right, love, ta ta.” She started to walk back towards the mews, calling over her shoulder: “And good luck!”

Claudette watched her disappear around the corner, her heart sinking with every clack of Lil's receding footsteps as the brief glimmer of interesting conversation passed like a setting sun.

As she watched, a figure stepped out of the gloom. A man, in a military greatcoat and forage cap, tall and lean, shoulders hunched against the sleet. Claudette dropped the dregs of her cigarette and hastily found another, striking a match as he came close.

The flare lit up a face with high cheekbones and light-coloured eyes, goldish-blond hair and a clipped moustache. A cigarette hung out of the corner of his mouth, wreathing him in smoke and when he spoke he sounded almost apologetic.

“Will you take me home with you?” he asked. “I have two pounds.”

He looked much better to Claudette than the porter she had been imagining and she liked the intelligent, educated sound of his voice.

“It's just around the corner, dear,” she said.

– . –

Greenaway looked down at his wristwatch, the hands inching towards one o'clock. Above the snores of the three men in the bedrooms behind him, he could just discern other noises drifting up from beneath his post by the kitchen window in Abbey Lodge. The sound of footfalls on the metal fire escape that ran along the other side of the wall, and a song being whistled off-key. While Greenaway tried to place the tune, he watched fingers slide underneath the sill that had been left ajar by half an inch, presumably to allow such access upon the return of the one man who was still missing from his billet. From the opposite side of the sink unit, the Corporal likewise observed first-hand the trick his charge had employed to evade that evening's curfew. They had been waiting long enough by now for their eyes to grow accustomed to the dark.

The fingers flattened themselves out into an upturned palm, curled around the woodwork and heaved it up. Another hand came to join it, this one carrying a gas mask, which was tossed across the top of the sink and landed with a thud on the linoleum floor. From out of the darkness rose up a tousled head and with it, thick, entwined aromas of alcohol, tobacco and sex.

Neither Greenaway nor the Corporal moved as their quarry slid under the window, unfurling long legs out across the sink in careful, practised moves. He sat there for a moment, rubbing his eyes, then turned to close the window and lower himself onto the floor. Bending down, he fumbled for the gas mask, swaying slightly like a drunkard. Then his fingers located it, grasped it and brought it back up to his chest.

“
There may be trouble ahead …
” he whispered tunelessly.

“You got that right,” said Greenaway, snapping on the light and staring into a pair of wide-spaced eyes, a face that could perhaps have been considered handsome, if it wasn't for those cold grey lamps. “Gordon Frederick Cummins, you're fucking nicked, my son.”

13
AFTER YOU'VE GONE

Friday, 13 February 1942

When Mari Lambouri opened her door on Friday morning, the brown paper package was still sitting there on her neighbour's doorstep. This time Mari didn't just carry on her way. She knew that Phyllis's young daughter, Jeannie, always came up from Southend on Friday afternoons to spend the weekend with her mother. It wasn't the fault of the girl – a solemn, studious looking fifteen-year-old – that Phyllis behaved the way she did. And by now it was abundantly clear to Mari that something very unusual – and perhaps very wrong – had occurred in the flat across the way from her. She had heard not a peep from the residence since the whistling man had departed in the early hours of Wednesday morning.

She had read the papers, too.

Taking her purse from her handbag, Mari went along the hall to see the landlord about making a telephone call.

– . –

West End Central was having the first crack at Cummins. It was protocol – DS Sheeney had called it in first, found the gas mask that positively identified the man – but it was also something of a relief for Greenaway. If he hadn't had the Corporal standing beside him when he made the arrest, Greenaway wasn't sure what he might have found himself doing. One look at that supercilious countenance and a tattoo had started up in his brain, the urge to redecorate the room in Cummins's blood surging with it, willing him to take his own justice into his own fists and to Hell with the rules he had sworn to abide by. Getting his suspect directly into custody at Savile Row had been safer for both of them. But the cold nerve of the trainee pilot lingered, prickling at the back of Greenaway's mind like blips from a half-remembered nightmare, snapshots of the carnage the killer had left in his wake mingling with other suppressed memories, of dark cold lumps in dark cold beds, back in the bad old days.

Cummins had shown no outwards concern at being confronted shinning his way into his billet, neither did he seem particularly perturbed to learn that he was wanted for the assault on Madeline Harcourt. He treated the whole situation like a prank that had backfired, offering the gas mask he'd thrown through the window as his evidence that it couldn't have been him that was up to anything naughty in St James market.

But then, neither he, the Corporal nor Sheeney knew what Greenaway was after him for. The DCI was content to let it stay that way, for now. He had deposited his quarry at West End Central at two in the morning and gone home for the first six hours of justified sleep he had managed since the case began.

Greenaway got to his desk freshly shaved and shined by ten o'clock. A pile of messages awaited him, amongst them one from Cherrill:
Results back from Forensics: dust in the boot soles from RAF bin a match for Montagu Place. Also a brown Austin Cambridge turned up at the Yard this morning.

Then there was a copy of the log of the duty sergeant who had booked Cummins in last night. In the pockets of his RAF uniform he had found a wad of notes – fifty-six pounds in total, serial numbers all duly noted – a silver cigarette case, a woman's wristwatch with a strip of Elastoplast on the back of the face, some love letters and a revealing family snapshot: proud squiresman Cummins had a wife living in Barnes.

The label in the inside pocket of the smart suit Greenaway had extracted from his locker was from a tailors in that district. The shirt hanging underneath that suit had minute dark brown splashes on the cuffs. The smell of a woman's perfume still faintly lingered on it. All these items were now at the lab in Hendon.

He reached across to call Cherrill just as the phone began to ring.

Greenaway's sense of relief drained away as he listened to his summons. He hadn't got the bastard in time after all.

– . –

Numbers 9–11 Gosfield Street belonged to a block of flats only a few minutes around the corner from the station on Tottenham Court Road. A dark flock of constables guarded the entrance, blowing and stamping the cold away. Cherrill's car was already parked outside. At the door of the ground floor flat numbered 4, the divisional surgeon exited, looking like a man with a bad hangover.

“What we got here?” Greenaway asked.

“A woman, late thirties,” the surgeon replied. “Name of Phyllis Lord. She's been strangled and then …” he shook his head, “… worse. Been dead about two days, I reckon, which ties in with what the witness called it in said. Her neighbour across the way, a Mrs Lambouri, says there's been a package left on her doormat since Wednesday morning. Mrs Lord's daughter apparently comes down to see her every Friday and Mrs Lambouri had read the papers, put two and two together. Didn't want to risk the girl walking in on anything. Thank Christ for nosy neighbours.” He jerked a thumb behind him. “I've put everything back the way I found it.”

Inside, Cherrill was setting up his lamps.

Phyllis Lord's front room was as still and cold as a mausoleum and held barely as much furniture – just a single bed pushed lengthwise against the wall with a black eiderdown thrown over it, an occasional table, a small square of carpet and a couple of wooden chairs. On the mantelpiece across the empty fireplace stood a glass candlestick and a tumbler half full of beer. There was a pile of clothing at the foot of the bed, discarded in obvious haste.

“Ted,” said Cherrill.

“Fred,” said Greenaway.

Greenaway put down his murder bag and pulled on his gloves. Cherrill picked up his magnifying glass and went straight to the mantelpiece. Greenaway felt bile rising in his throat as he walked the other way, towards the ominous lump hidden beneath the eiderdown.
Too late …

The once handsome face of the Lady was now a livid mottling of brown and purple, pink froth around her nose and mouth, caused by her own silk stocking that had been pulled taut and tied around her throat. The rest of her was covered by two blankets and a sheet. Slowly, carefully, Greenaway folded them back.

It was even worse than Evelyn Bettencourt.

Phyllis had been attacked with an armoury of different weapons. By the side of her belly lay a breadknife, its saw-edge blade crusted with blood, pointed inwards and down. A black-handled table knife, smeared with gore, lay across the top of her left thigh. On the bedsheet to her right, a yellow-handled table knife and a vegetable peeler pointed dark brown blades across to the rest of the contents of her kitchen drawers. But even the butchery inflicted upon her by all these implements had not been enough. On the sheet between her open legs, a poker with its handle broken off. Protruding from inside her, a bloodied candle.

A scent lingered in the still air, the fragrance faint, but familiar enough to snap Greenaway's synapses back to the suit in Cummins's locker.

He turned his head to where Cherrill was examining the empty candlestick with his magnifying glass.

“There's latents on here, Ted,” the fingerprint man said, “off the right hand. Which means,” Cherrill mimed the actions of the attacker, “he used his left hand to take the candle out.”

“I got him, Fred,” said Greenaway. “He's in the cells at West End Central. I just didn't get him soon enough.”

“Get him to sign something,” said Cherrill, “see which hand he uses.”

Greenaway lifted the blanket back to cover the scene already indelibly etched on each iris. “Spilsbury's on his way,” he said. “I want him to talk me through exactly how this happened before I brace the bastard.”

– . –

Herbert Coles stopped outside his flat at 187 Sussex Gardens. There was something wrong. The morning's milk delivery was still standing on the doorstep. Nervously, he looked up and down the street, a lump forming in his throat.

Herbert had spent the seven years since he had first encountered his wife on Oxford Street in a perpetual state of fear that she would one day leave him. He knew what she was and at first he had thought he could save her from that life. But perhaps that day had finally come.

He fumbled for his keys in his trouser pocket.

Twenty years older than Claudette, Herbert had been a man of comfortable means, having sold his hotel business for enough of a profit to see him through the rest of his days – or so he had thought. It had been enough to get his proposal of marriage accepted, two months after their first professional assignation in her old flat on the Edgware Road. Claudette had moved into his house on Bathurst Place and assumed the role of housewife, happily at first, but with steadily declining interest over the next three years.

It was as if Claudette sent out radio signals on a frequency Herbert could tune into, wherever he happened to be. When she started taking a little longer over the shopping of a morning, he knew it had started again. Afraid to confront his wandering wife, Herbert tried diversion tactics: he invested some of his capital to buy a café on one of the little back-streets between Paddington and the Edgware Road and gave Claudette the job as co-manager. It was a disaster. The back-street was a customer cul-de-sac and in four months, Herbert had yet to recoup a fraction of his investment selling cups of tea and bread-and-scrapes to the elderly, while Claudette let the wide boys from every mechanics' shop, bookies and pool hall in the district run up a fortune on the slate. It was almost as if she was siding with them against him. Almost as if, the darkest voices in his head would insist, she was getting some other sort of payment for her bacon and eggs.

Herbert sold the café and relocated them to Eastbourne, where he spent hard on entertainments to keep Claudette out of the arms of other men. The change of scene worked while the summer and his funds lasted. When war was declared that September, a depleted Herbert packed his wife off to her mother's in Harrogate, while he returned to London and took a job as staff manager in Oddendino's, sending her an allowance each month, his comfy nest egg by now all but wiped out.

It wasn't long, however, before he bumped into his wife on Oxford Street again. Worse than the shock of this was the news she had found her own accommodation – right across the street from him in Sussex Gardens. Almost as if she was taunting him, almost as if she was rubbing his nose in it. Herbert pleaded with her to stay out of harm's way – meaning both Hitler's bombs and the attentions of those leering, pinstriped goons who had made his venture at the café such an unmitigated failure. Claudette laughed in his face. Herbert had never been man enough for her, she said. And if he wasn't up to the job, then what was she to do but find others who were?

Despite all his wife's cruelty and caprice, Herbert did not want to lose her. He pleaded and cried and demeaned himself before her until she gave up her flat and moved back in with him – on the condition that what she did with herself while he was at work was none of his affair. In order to turn a blind eye to her nocturnal activities, he found another job, as the night manager at the Royal Court in Sloane Square, far enough away from her stamping grounds that he didn't run the risk of stumbling across her hawking for business outside the establishment's front doors. He left every evening at seven and returned the next morning at eleven, to sleep until six, then have dinner with Claudette. That arid hour was all he had left of her, but to him, it was better than the alternative.

Herbert picked up the pint of milk, still icy cold, mind spinning back to the night before. Supper had felt even more strained than usual. All the way through his attempts to make conversation, she had stared straight through him, her mind far away, in a landscape he could not comprehend. Still, she had come to see him off on the tube, and from that he had taken crumbs of consolation, enough to see him through his shift.

He pushed the front door open, almost tripping over the morning paper that lay on the doormat.

“Claudette?” he called, kneeling to pick up the
Daily Herald
.

His own voice, high-pitched and strained, echoed back at him. Normally Claudette kept the wireless on while she was in the house.

“Claudette?”

Everything felt too still, too empty. He walked down the hallway, turning the doorknob into the lounge. The blackout was still down from the night before. He put a hand to the light switch, but the illumination of the electric bulb did not extend to any clues to his wife's whereabouts. Everything was as meticulously tidy as it always was, not a hair out of place. Claudette was as obsessive about keeping the house clean as she was about rolling her own body in filth, he had always thought.

Herbert walked through the still life into the kitchen, putting the milk down on the counter top. He unfurled the paper and the headlines hit him.

WEST END KILLER STILL AT LARGE!
SCOTLAND YARD URGE ALL WOMEN TO STAY
INSIDE AT NIGHT

Herbert turned on his heel, as if some unseen entity had a dagger pressed to the base of his spine, propelling him back down the hallway to the bedroom. He flung himself at the door, but it was no use. It was locked.

The dagger pressing harder, a dagger made of ice, Herbert began to pound on the door with his fists.

“Claudette!” His voice getting higher, shriller. “Claudette!”

Then, as if the dagger had penetrated, his blood began to chill and his panic subsided into an intuitive horror of the situation. He had tuned back into his wife's frequency and already knew what lay beyond the locked door.

He stepped backwards, turned the hall light off.

Sure enough, a band of glowing yellow at the bottom of the bedroom door told him Claudette was still at home.

Herbert walked backwards some more, into the front room. With shaking hands, he lifted the receiver of his telephone.

– . –

“Depending on whether she is breathing in or out when the murderer tightens his grip, it takes fifteen to thirty seconds to strangle a woman,” Sir Bernard Spilsbury told Greenaway. “In this case,” the pathologist dropped his gaze back down to the stricken visage of Phyllis Lord, “I would estimate she died in fifteen seconds. She was trying to scream when he pulled the stocking around her neck. Everything else came after.”