Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (14 page)

“No one I know. Not at all my type,” he said with a touch of indignation. “Iphigenia, maybe; no possibility for Agamemnon.”

I knocked the torch from his hand and grabbed him by the throat. “
You can make a lot of money in Brighton
, remember saying that? And what I want to know is did you tell this boy? Look at him.”

He struggled, but though tall, he was ungainly. He stumbled back against a pile of sandbags and we both went down. I put my knee on his chest and showed him Connie’s picture again.

“This is intolerable. I told you he’d be quite, quite unsuitable.”

“The Brighton Arms,” I said. “Fun and games on a less elevated level.”

Teck made another strenuous effort to get away; I grabbed the torch and clipped him one. A thick ribbon of blood slid from his nose and suddenly he was a good deal more amenable. “I could get you work,” he said in a quick, breathless voice. “A private job for me. Maybe Brighton again, what about that? You can let me up now, we’ll work something out.”

“I’ll break your neck,” I said. “I want to know where this boy is and what you told him about Brighton.”

“The best Agamemnon, really; you were the very best.”

I hit him again. As I say, the war had unsettled us all. “Listen,” I said, “that was pleasure, this is business. Look again.”

Teck twitched and wriggled then let his head drop onto the sandbags and tried to staunch his nose with his handkerchief. “I might have done,” he said.

“Done what?” I clutched the front of his shirt. “What?”

“Told him about Brighton, the club. I only take very special people to my little pied-à-terre at the shore.”

“Why did he want to know? What was he looking for?”

“How should I know that? Who knows what’s in anybody’s mind, far less some street boy’s.”

“You’d better think,” I said, raising the flashlight. I really believe I would have done him harm if he hadn’t found his tongue.

“Something about his mate, this Damien somebody. He’d been found dead in the park. I don’t know what that had to do with the Brighton Arms, but it had nothing to do with me; I’m not that type at all—finesse and fake knives and once in a while a blunt razor. The merest scratch suffices. You know all about that!”

“Go on.”

“Nothing, just we got talking one night. And he was on about this Damien boy.”

“Where was this?”

“The Pond—a frightful dive, not my usual sort of place. He was just part of the local color, you understand. I bought him a drink. He said he wasn’t afraid of anything if the money was good. That’s what he said.”

“And you sent him there—you knew the size of him! What do you suppose happened to him?”

“Nothing, for all I know. The Blitz started and the place was hit early on by the wrath of God; there’s nothing but glass and dust left.”

“So where is he now?”

“I don’t know. He might have died in the Blitz. Honestly. I think he did go to the shore, though. I think he did. No, no,” he said as I raised the torch. “Last time I saw him, I mentioned I hadn’t seen him at the Arms. And he said that he’d looked into it. That’s exactly how he phrased it, and he said that he was going out of town for a while. ‘I’m off to entertain the troops’ was how he put it.” Teck giggled again.

“Could those two things be related?”

“I don’t know. Could be he earned a few pounds. Could be he met someone he wanted to stay clear of. I don’t think you need worry about him.”

“Why’s that?”

“He was a tough little bastard. He told me that anyone who hurt him was going to be sorry—and I believed him.”

I returned so late it was useless to attempt the house. In her perfect nanny voice, Bella had given me to understand that the place would be locked up tight by ten. Fortunately the little front gate was open. I made my way to the back, forced the door of the garden shed, and caught a couple hours’ sleep amid bales of peat moss, stacks of terracotta pots, various canisters of fertilizer and insecticides, and a peasant arsenal of hoes, cultivators, scythes, and spades. I bedded down on some old burlap sacks as the all-clear sounded, and I was up to ring the bell at nine. Nan’s friend opened the door with an approving glance at her watch.

After a pot of strong tea and some very presentable scones, I resumed work on the drawing room. This was the pattern of the next few days: toiling in the decorating vineyards before and after lunch, the occasional phone call from Nan providing a welcome break midafternoon, then out on the town amid raids and alarms to look for anyone who knew Connie or the Brighton Arms crowd. A crazy life, really. Once in a while, ignoring the risk presented by my former ARP colleagues, I visited the old Chelsea Church where Arnold was a fire watcher.

My situation improved when I was at last entrusted with a door key, partly on the grounds of my model behavior and quick progress on the decorating front, partly because “Madame would never approve of anyone sleeping in the garden shed.”
Merci beaucoup
, Madame. I now had a proper bed under the eaves, where, on early nights in, I sometimes heard incendiaries rattling down the slates. Bella and I extinguished a couple in the garden with a big bucket of sand, and, for this service, I moved into high favor. I might, I suppose, have kept my head down and bunked there indefinitely; the house was a large one, and on close examination all the walls needed work. If I’d only had canvases and an easel, I might have been quite content covering Madame’s walls in the murky shades she favored.

Instead, I sought the bright lights, metaphorically speaking—all the theater marquees were dark and the restaurants swathed in blackout curtains. I wandered up and down the pitchy streets of Soho, drinking with likely boys and chatting up prosperous steamers in the hopes of Champagne. I heard a variety of tales about the old Brighton Arms, as well as highly colored accounts of its flaming demise. Some remembered a chap who resembled my inspector; most did not, and I decided he could not have been a regular. Perhaps George was correct, but more likely he had chosen to deflect attention from himself by spreading rumors about Mordren.

Teck was another matter. Arnold had a useful friend employed at the
Daily Telegraph,
and a trip to their morgue had secured me photos of both my inspector and Teck. Perhaps it was his distinctive hair or his obsession with Clytemnestra, but the easily recognizable Teck had made an impression on half the boys of Soho; “completely potty” was the consensus.

“Violent, do you think?”

“Well, that was the stock in trade, wasn’t it? You went there to get knocked around or to knock around.” My informant was a wiry boy with black hair and a beaky nose over a sadly receding chin. “But more theatrical, that’s what he was. He liked a good deal of screaming but he wasn’t keen on damage.”

That was my impression. On the more important question of poor Damien—and also on the character of George Frahm—all were silent. The most that would be said was that the Brighton Arms was very discreet and the management heavy handed. It didn’t do to talk about their clientele or, as one boy put it, to complain of bumps and bruises. I wondered if that had been Damien’s mistake or if he’d contemplated a little not-so-discreet blackmail. There were so many possibilities with such an outfit that only my love of sex and drink kept me hard at work.

One night when the docks were being pulverized and the sky was full of fire and thunder, I decided to risk The Pond. Having seen the inspector there at the start of the whole miserable business, I’d been giving it a wide berth, but Connie had been a regular, and I’d turned up very little on him elsewhere. As I left the tube station, I stuck my tin hat on my head and tried to look purposeful. Sirens and fire engines and the rattle of ack-ack guns; oily water underfoot, sky red around the horizon, the zenith black overhead but lit with extraordinary white fireworks like giant flaming candelabras, the whole crossed by searchlights: altogether an amazing effect. Down on ground level mesmerizing blocks of flame were shooting enough heat and draft to knock a man over. I was enlisted to help one weary fireman with a hose—the rest of his squad having wandered off for a pint—and with that and the smoke and dust in the air, I was dirty enough to pass as an active-duty warden by the time I pushed through the blackout curtain and entered the pub.

Was my inspector there? In my imagination, he’d been roosting at The Pond bar ever since I’d made my escape from the museum, and I glanced around nervously as dull booms in the distance set the pyramids of glassware on the bar jittering and rattling. No, no, I was safe for the moment; my rampant imagination, formerly tethered to my easel, had again deceived me: the inspector had more pressing work than staking out a club in hopes of catching me.

I ordered wine, prompted by nostalgia rather than any hope of real vintage, and I was checking out the room—painted faces, polished nails, lots of khaki and blue sprinkled with a few of the gruff and tweed-coated—when a tall man with short cropped hair and a taut, strained face appeared at my elbow. Something military once, I guessed, correctly, for he was missing a hand, and when he turned full I could see the burn scars down the left side of his face. A pilot, probably, though Dunkirk and points east were certainly possibilities.

We started to talk, and, by force of habit, I brought the conversation ’round to Connie. By then I’d perfected my spiel. I owed him a couple of quid for delivering paintings and couldn’t seem to get in touch.

“Connie?”

“Colin Williams.” I fished the picture from my pocket. “Connie in his leisure hours.”

“Better try Miss Cherie now,” he said.

I was ready to pass on to other topics when a bell rang: the business cards and flyers of the enterprising Miss Cherie of Brighton. I had to buy my companion a couple of drinks to get the rest, but sure enough, he did know Connie, had known him first at The Pond. “A good mate in a fight,” he said rather surprisingly. “Shows you can’t always go by appearances. There he was flouncing around, forever weeping over a boyfriend and fussing with his mascara.”

“That’s our Connie,” I said.

“A tough little bugger, nonetheless. We were in this bar once and, well, I was drunk enough to forget I was missing my left. That was just after. Bought it in a training accident,” he said with a touch of bitterness. “I never got within sight of the Jerries.”

I sympathized as best I could though the military mind remains a closed book to me.

“I’d have been in difficulties without our friend. He smashed a bottle and went for the fellow; blood on the bar, I can tell you. We had quite a song and dance about it, but since I’d lost a hand for king and country—” He nodded his head and added, “I’ve had a soft spot for Connie ever since.”

“He really did go to Brighton, then? I mean, Miss Cherie?”

“Yes, that fight was in Brighton as a matter of fact, and he was Miss Cherie then. I recognized him, of course, though he was pretty good—very good really. First glance or under the influence, ninety percent would have been fooled. Gave me a wink, he did, and I said, ‘Can we dance, miss?’”

“Did he tell you why he’d left London?”

“He said he was making a killing. Broadening his clientele. But I think there was something more, because he seemed jumpy and nervous. He said being Miss Cherie all the time took the fun out of it.”

“Why do you suppose . . . ?”

“Usual reason. Somebody behind him, I’d guess. Could be you for all I know.” His eyes were chilly with the remote expression I’d noticed pilots acquired—or cultivated.

“I thought it might have been someone from the Brighton Arms.”

“The Brighton Arms is long gone. But you’ve been asking around about him.”

Clearly my inquiries had preceded me. “I owe him money. I like to pay my debts.”

“A rarity in this naughty world.” He sounded unconvinced but perhaps the Brighton Arms was a taboo topic, for he immediately began a conversation with a plump chap in an expensive suit and an ill-fitting wig. I left soon afterward, sat out an intense raid in a tube station, and snuck into the Old Chelsea Church in time to tell Arnold the latest intelligence.

“I can get Connie’s number,” he said, “if those cards and flyers are still around. No, no trouble. You remember the doorman?”

I did.

“I’ll call him tomorrow; he’s willing to be obliging.”

I hugged him. Arnold is so reliable and sensible, plus practical like Nan. I said I’d finish his shift with him and we let his usual fire-watching partner go home. Ah, romantic evenings on the edge of the inferno! From the spire, the fires of London seethed gold and crimson like the poet’s lakes in hell, but inside the spire—well, there was paradise. Nothing like contrast, I say.

Arnold was as good as his word. Nan phoned me the next afternoon, interrupting a swath of dull maroon—a deadening color, and in the dining room of all places—with the number. I went straight to the nearest phone box and dialed.

A great clinking of pennies, the clunk as the machine digested them, the furry sound of the line, the distant ringing, then a woman’s voice repeated the number I had reached.

“Could I speak to Miss Cherie, please?”

A burst of profanity and the line went dead. I tried twice more, before, in a moment of inspiration, I introduced myself as Police Inspector Mordren. Miss Cherie, aka Collin Williams, was—I cast about for what might sound impressive—“a material witness in a very serious case.”

More linguistic fireworks. “I’ve got a serious enough case right here, I can assure you. She’s skipped out on a month’s rent, and her pulling in pounds every night. Pounds, the disgraceful hussy.”

“When was this?”

“Last week. She’s been gone a full week, and there’s me keeping the room for her and going without the rent. I’m a widow, I am.” She had a good line in this vein. Each time the pips started I frantically stuffed coins into the ravenous phone box. I did learn that it hadn’t been unusual for Miss Cherie to be away for days at a time. “You can guess what she was up to.”

I thought I could, as a matter of fact. “Did she give any indication she was coming back?”