Brighton Belle (18 page)

This looked more promising but half an hour scouting the district within acoustic range provided no buildings of the size and construction Vesta remembered. At the third location there was an
alleyway of lock-ups, which they checked carefully, knocking on walls and climbing up to peer into the small square windows set at the top of the peeling painted doors. Sandor wasn’t there.
They brushed themselves down and headed westwards, towards two more possibilities. Neither was fruitful. It was well after midnight, even after two, perhaps, by the time they made it back across
town to Hove, the smell of the sea suddenly coming towards them on the incoming tide as they walked down the hill towards Second Avenue. Mirabelle’s hands were shaking but she hid them behind
her back. This was the lion’s den and Vesta was reticent enough as it was.

‘This way.’ Mirabelle led Vesta to the rear of number 22 where, warmed up by the succession of commercial premises, they easily scaled the low garden wall and tiptoed across the
lawn, hearts pounding. The lights in the sleeping house were out and the dark building lay silent.

‘The doctor and Lisabetta probably sleep on the first floor,’ Mirabelle whispered, ‘and the staff will be right up at the top, I expect.’

‘Or maybe in the basement,’ Vesta pointed.

There was a window with closed curtains, which opened straight onto the lawn. That made sense if there was a live-in cook. In any case, both the basement and pantry windows were barred and the
kitchen door had a stout lock, but the sitting room to the rear had sash windows and when Vesta clambered up she found one of the sashes had not been locked. She rolled up the window silently and
pulled Mirabelle into the house behind her. Inside they scanned the dark room and then, so nervous they could hear blood rushing in their ears, they opened the door, which led to the hall. The
click of the catch seemed to echo up the stairs and Mirabelle felt her heart in her mouth but there was nothing else for it – they had to get on with the job.

She peered round the doorpost and waited for a second. Nothing stirred. The hallway remained absolutely silent. The house smelled of stale cigar smoke and abandoned port glasses, as if,
somewhere, dinner had not been cleared away. Mirabelle sneaked across the rug on tiptoes, followed by Vesta, and then she gestured towards the doctor’s study. The door was locked but the key
was in place. Getting used to the tension now Mirabelle turned it and eased the door open. Inside the women made for the doctor’s desk – a heavy mahogany Victorian piece with four
drawers down both sides and a green leather top. Sharing the torch they took one side each – Vesta started from the bottom, Mirabelle from the top. Vesta turned the key in the lock and pulled
the drawer open. She immediately gave an excited squeak as Mirabelle abandoned her side – stethoscope, torch, prescription pad and some wooden spatulas.

‘Jesus!’ Vesta whispered.

The drawer was deep, very heavy, and half-packed with gold coins. Mirabelle selected one and examined it in the torchlight. It was a sovereign. There must have been over a hundred coins in the
drawer – easily worth a couple of thousand pounds. Mirabelle slipped the coin into her pocket with Vesta staring on wide-eyed.

‘You can’t do that!’

‘It’s evidence – we might need it,’ she whispered. ‘Come on. These won’t tell us where Sandor is being kept. We need to find some keys or a lease or
something.’

Grudgingly Vesta pushed the heavy drawer back into place and they turned their attention to the job in hand. There was nothing else of particular interest in the desk and they moved onto the
chiffonier that clearly held some of the doctor’s medical equipment. Vesta peered at a speculum quizzically while Mirabelle disappeared into a small walk-in cupboard that appeared to be full
of bandages and splints. None of this was any help. She tried to think where, if she were Crichton, she might keep a key or even, come to think of it, an address book, if not in the desk.
Cautiously she pulled back from the cupboard, wondering about a hiding place in easy reach of the desk, along the bookshelves. Just as she was pushing the cupboard door closed, she happened to cast
her eyes downwards. On the bottom shelf she spotted a strange padded bandage. Trusting her instinct she picked it up.

‘Oh, my goodness!’ she whispered as she realised what it was. She held it away from her body.

‘Is that ...’ Vesta started, but her eyes widened and she stopped speaking as Mirabelle fitted the foam padding to her own stomach in the quivering torchlight, giving her the
outline of a heavily pregnant woman.

‘Do you think ...’ Vesta put two and two together.

‘Romana Laszlo,’ Mirabelle confirmed. ‘She wasn’t having a baby at all.’

‘They made it all up? But why?’

‘For a thousand pounds, maybe? It’s a lot of money ...’ Mirabelle whispered.

‘There’s more than that in the drawer,’ Vesta hissed back. ‘Never mind whatever they’re up to at the racecourse.’

And then they heard the sound.

Upstairs a door creaked and the muffled click of slipperclad footsteps pattered across the hallway on the first floor.

‘Go!’ Mirabelle whispered.

Vesta moved like a cat over to the window. She unlocked the catch and pulled it open in one movement, slipping over the windowsill and down into a flowerbed at the front of the house. Then she
took off towards the nearest cover, behind a privet hedge across the road. Mirabelle stuffed the prosthetic belly back into the cupboard. She panicked. If she got caught hauling herself over the
windowsill they’d have her just like they had Sandor. The footsteps were now approaching fast down the stairs. There was no time. Just as the study door flew open she drew back into the
cupboard. Her breathing, she realised, sounded incredibly loud. She tried to slow it as she crouched in the cramped space, peering through the keyhole.

Accustomed to the dark she saw Lisabetta run straight to the open window and look out over Second Avenue. Lisabetta drew a gun from the pocket of her dressing gown. She raised the weapon
smoothly and fired without hesitation. The muffled sound of the silenced barrel made less noise than a book toppling from a bedside table. Hardly able to breathe Mirabelle watched as Lisabetta
swore quietly. Good, she hadn’t found her target. The woman hovered a moment in the bay, clearly contemplating facing the chilly spring night in a thin nightgown and a pair of slippers with a
gun. It wasn’t feasible. Instead she snapped on the light and closed the doctor’s curtains to inspect in private what the intruders had been doing.

The drawer of the desk was slightly open and she fell to examining that. Now with proper light Mirabelle could see, as Lisabetta emptied the coins, that there were several different kinds.
Two-pound coins, five-pound coins, guineas and half-sovereigns as well as the standard sovereign she had in her pocket. Lisabetta sat in the doctor’s leather chair and poked the nozzle of her
gun into the stash, making – as Mirabelle and Vesta had done earlier – a calculation as to how much was in there. With the additional currencies it was worth even more. Lisabetta raised
an eyebrow. It was clearly in excess of what she thought he was creaming off. ‘That greedy son of a bitch,’ she muttered.

Lisabetta began to look around, wondering what else the doctor had been up to. She pulled open the other drawers of the desk. Then she sat back letting the chair swing at an angle. What was in
easy reach from here? With her beautifully manicured fingers she picked out a black notebook on the shelf closest to the desk. It was at just the right height for Crichton to bring easily back and
forth and was filed between medical books that no one else would find the least bit interesting. She opened it and flicked through pages of handwritten notes. Her eyes were ablaze with anger.

‘Middlemass!’ she hissed.

The name was familiar. Mirabelle thought a moment. Ah yes, that was the name of a man who had been murdered in London a couple of months ago in Kensington Park Gardens. She had read about it in
The Times
. The murder had been shelved by the police due to a complete lack of evidence. She had thought it was an interesting case – Middlemass had apparently been a forgettable man.
On the evening of his death he had given a woman a light with his gold Dunhill on the corner of the street. It was the last time anyone had seen him. The police had said that locals with whom the
victim had done business found him difficult to describe as there was simply nothing distinctive about him. This notebook obviously contained details of Lisabetta’s operation – other
clients, perhaps. Maybe even murders. What occurred to Mirabelle at the same time as it occurred to Lisabetta on the other side of the cupboard door was that Crichton could only be keeping the
information for two reasons. It was either to inform on Lisabetta and curry favour with the authorities or it could be used to blackmail her.

Lisabetta began to search through the book once more, calling out names in German under her breath until she stopped on a recent page where he had made a few notes in pale blue ink. Here she
almost spat with rage as she read the sentence out loud, her accent stronger than Mirabelle had heard before:
Lisabetta shows sociopathic tendencies – a complete inability to feel emotion.
I wonder if she is psychopathic?
For a moment the woman seemed stunned and then, suddenly, it hit her. She was utterly incensed. This was treason!

It was interesting, Mirabelle thought, that the doctor had misjudged her. Lisabetta appeared to have plenty of emotions. Perhaps he had meant empathy. She certainly lacked that.

Furious, Lisabetta snapped off the light and crossed to the window. She flicked the curtains aside to check the street but there was no one there. Then she turned and dialled a number on the
telephone. There was a long pause as the phone rang out. It took a while before anyone answered. Her voice, when she spoke, was cold as ice, replying to the sleepy and no doubt grumpy mumbling of
whomever she had woken.

‘I have no idea what time it is,’ she dismissed the complaint. ‘That’s by the by. I want you to go round to Cadogan Gardens, Bert. I want you to pick up my things. Pack
it all. Send it to Brighton. No, no. Not my name.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘Send it with the usual name to the usual place. You know what to do.’

Mirabelle heard Bert Jennings’ voice as a distant echo. He was arguing with her.

‘Don’t be ridiculous! I can’t be French! I will have married a Frenchman, I’m sure.’ He was objecting. ‘But you have your cut. It’s on the way and
it’s guaranteed, isn’t it? I have something to deal with here. But I won’t be long. It’s all winding up very nicely. I will be in touch soon. Send my things. The first
train, remember. The early one.’

The phone clicked. Lisabetta crossed the room.

Mirabelle could just make out her dark figure crouching in front of the fireplace. She dropped Dr Crichton’s notebook onto the grate and lit it. The dry paper cover set alight easily and
she stood back to watch it burn, turning over the ashes to make sure that not one single word of the journal remained. Then she stooped to light a cigarette on the flames, the warm light playing on
her skin. Her face looked almost diabolical.

‘Sociopathic,’ she muttered under her breath, trying the word out for size.

As the flames died she poked them with a brass fork to make sure nothing remained. Then she closed the window and crossed the room to Crichton’s locked medicine cabinet. She picked out a
small bottle of chloroform and a patch of gauze. Mirabelle prayed Lisabetta wasn’t going to come into the bandage cupboard but the woman merely checked her face in the mirror, blew herself a
sinister kiss and disappeared back out of the door.

Mirabelle exhaled. Hearing footsteps overhead she opened the cupboard door, crept into the room and checked the grate. The journal was completely destroyed. She wondered what Lisabetta was up to
but decided this was the moment to leave. She checked the desk one more time, slipped a couple of different coins into her pocket and then slid behind the curtains. Across the road Vesta had been
watching. She came out from her hiding place behind the hedge and motioned Mirabelle over. The catch clicked softly, the window slid open and Mirabelle Bevan disappeared into the darkness of Second
Avenue.

21

A happy family is but an earlier heaven.

W
aclaw Gorski couldn’t sleep. He hadn’t slept properly in weeks but usually he managed at least a couple of hours a night. Tonight
he had resigned himself to forgoing even that. He had suffered from insomnia for years but it had got far worse of late. He couldn’t stop worrying, that was the problem. It was all taking
longer than he had expected.

That evening Manni had turned up later than usual and he’d come in with a self-satisfied air that had set Waclaw’s nerves on edge. He brought food, though, and four bottles of beer.
Waclaw would have preferred some vodka. It sometimes helped get him off to sleep when all else failed. But they’d cracked open the beers together and Manni had stayed for a while and played
cards. Waclaw knew Manni counted cards, so he avoided pontoon. Instead, they played gin rummy for over an hour, betting with the little slabs of gold that were piled up on one side of the workshop.
Just for fun, of course. The gold was always returned at the end of the session.

‘I’ll play you for a night outside,’ he offered. ‘I could go on the town, you know. A fancy restaurant and a cabaret. You could take me.’

Manni laughed. ‘You know she won’t ’ave it, Waclaw. You can’t leave until it’s all done, you poor sod.’

Waclaw shrugged and lit a cigarette. ‘No one must know I am here,’ he said blankly. ‘No one must know what I am doing. Or there will be no passports.’

Waclaw hadn’t left the place for over six months. The cabin was built of pale stone on three sides with a tin roof fanning out from the huge chimney and a sheet of wooden facing on the
front. The furnace kept the place permanently hot, often unbearably so, and when he was working he opened the door wide even though Lisabetta had warned him about it several times. It was too hot
not to. He never thought he would but lately Waclaw had begun to miss the Polish winter – he fantasised about the biting chill of the air in Warsaw in January. He longed to see his breath
appear before him and rub his pink fingers to keep them warm on the Nowogrodzka as he came out of the little café where he used to have a strong black coffee and a shot of vodka. Ah, Warsaw!
It had been a long time. How much of the city was still standing, of course, he couldn’t be sure. But whether it was bomb damaged or not, Waclaw missed its ice and snow. It made him feel
alive as he walked home along the river. When all this was over he was going somewhere that had snow all winter. Not, he thought with a tinge of sadness, back to Warsaw, of course. He had long
realised that he couldn’t go back to his native country now the Soviets were in power, but perhaps Canada, Scotland or, if they’d have him, Sweden. There were several possibilities, he
was sure of it. Waclaw had stayed alive this long because he was useful and his skills extended beyond wartime. Somewhere would have him. Somewhere that was nice and cold.