Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (19 page)

That was laying it on a bit thick, but he got my meaning, and in the end I was left to doze in the interview room until dawn when I was driven home in a police car. Francis returns with a halo of innocence if not the odor of sanctity!

I immediately searched the flat and the basement, carrying my canvas pliers as a weapon. Then I ventured out, glancing behind me to make sure there was no lingering police presence, and made my way to Holland Park Road, where the price of my visit with Nan was a close inspection of the twenty-five-foot ladder. Sadly, I had to admit it would do. Madame wanted a deep slate gray for the foyer and Bella had laid in a supply.

My mouth was throbbing and I needed a night’s sleep, but any port in a storm. I put on my painter’s kit and set to work. Nan kept me company for a bit, and when Bella departed to deal with what seemed to be an ever-increasing list of Madame’s concerns, I gave her a brief account of my travails and asked where the photos were.

She pointed to her arm, splinted and cast and supported by a sling. “I borrowed some more gauze from the nurses”—translation: she’d pinched a roll—“and I wrapped them around the cast. Except just the one—in case, you know. A good thing, too, because I couldn’t reach Arnold.”

“And they’re still there!”

“Oh, yes. That inspector sat right next to me and didn’t suspect a thing. He pawed through my bedding, the nasty man. But I’m afraid I’ll get them wet. We’ll perhaps put them with Arnold, dear boy. He’ll have a safety-deposit box.”

We conferred on this and I was looking about for a knife to cut the gauze when Bella came in, postponing the transfer of the photos. “Never mind, dear boy,” said Nan. “Safe enough.”

At dusk with the sound of sirens and planes already in the air, I put on my warden’s togs and rejoined my post. Questions there, as you can imagine. My hasty exit ahead of the inspector had provided them with many delightful speculations. “Police business,” I said mysteriously. “You just never know what you’re going to run into—or what you’ll be asked to do.”

Liam, skeptic that he was, would have liked more details. “Mum’s the word,” I said. Whatever did we do before these so-useful wartime phrases? I’d been replaced, however, on the switchboard; so, asthma and all, I’d be out on call, which is how I labored for the next few nights and was perhaps what saved my life, because I was too exhausted with the smoke in my lungs to do more than return to sleep in the early mornings.

In fact, I was so busy that I almost forgot how precarious my situation was or how little I knew. I hadn’t been back to Soho since the night Maribelle hid me; I’d never located Connie, unless that brief, almost ghostly sighting in the pub counted. The inspector wasn’t exactly knowledgeable either. His attempt to arrest me for Damien’s murder suggested he had no suspects and no evidence whatsoever or, more sinister, that he knew very well who the real killer was and was protecting him. I didn’t know which was true, though I suspected the latter. As for the other murders, if the inspector had any evidence, it couldn’t be worth much, for nothing seemed to have come of those investigations.

I checked with Nan about that, just to make sure. “Not a line, dear boy,” she said.

There it was, and yet the inspector clearly believed that, despite different weapons, location, and type of victim, the killings were all linked. I had that feeling too, and yet I could not have defined my reasons. Perhaps like everyone else I was just too tired. Work days and duty nights didn’t leave much time for anything but a few hours of oblivion, and the losses, the deaths, the mutilations of the Blitz—which I was now witnessing nightly—tended to put even sensational private violence in the shade. I might have decided that I really was in the clear and become careless but for an unsettling incident about a week after I’d gotten home.

The foyer at Holland Park Road was finished and looked like the bowels of a battleship. The twenty-five-foot ladder stood waiting to be returned, money from Madame was safe in my pocket, and we had a wet night with near-zero visibility and light raids, what one thought of now as a fine opportunity for an outing. A chance of a lift decided me. I volunteered to take some reports and supplies to a post near Soho. We zipped through the night, wheeling around bomb craters, bouncing over rubble, stopping now and again to commiserate with firemen or fellow wardens or demolition workers. As soon as I made my report, I set off on foot in the mist and drizzle in hopes the Europa was still open.

I was on a little street carved out of the rubble and parallel to Wardour, navigating by a newly issued torch, the occasional smoldering fire, and the lights of the fire trucks, when I heard an eerie tapping behind me. Blind Pew’s staff and other schoolboy tales fluttered in memory before the sound resolved itself into a woman moving swiftly in high-heeled shoes. I glanced behind, but the mix of fog and smoke was so thick I couldn’t make out anyone nearby.

Of course, sound seems to travel farther on such nights, distorting one’s sense of space. Just the same, the footsteps struck me as oddly sinister with a heavier tread than I’d have expected, and there was something forceful, even violent, in that tap-tapping. The very idea of high heels was odd on such a night. The women volunteers would be in gumboots or some sensible footgear; the ladies of the night would hardly be patrolling such an unprofitable, bomb-racked stretch. I didn’t like it. In normal life, I’d have ignored the sound or turned and shouted a hello. But this wasn’t normal life. Here instinct ruled, and though I was ready to accuse myself of cowardice, I switched off my torch and stepped into what had been a doorway and was now an improvised alley. I felt my way along the wall, listening closely. The staccato tread continued several steps more, then I heard hesitation, a sudden silence on the pavement. I edged farther into the alley, glancing back, expecting a light. None. Silence, then the tap again, but in retreat this time. I waited a moment more, feeling oddly sheepish; I’d let nerves get the better of me. Then I switched on my torch and went off for a drink.

I put this almost embarrassing incident out of my mind until the next afternoon when I returned to Holland Park Road at Bella’s urgent request. The kitchen window had finally been repaired and now the smoke damage could be tackled. Though I was not eager to see what gloom Madame wanted spread on the kitchen walls, I needed, for Nan’s sake, to keep in Bella’s good graces. I got kitted out again and I’d begun priming the wall behind the stove when Nan came in. Bella had been reading her the paper, and the first thing she said was, “Dear boy, do you know there’s been another one?”

“Another one?”

“A man with his throat cut. Last night in Soho. Imagine that.”

I could, actually.

“Right off Wardour Street.”

I went straight out to get a later edition of the papers, where they had the victim’s name—no one known to me—and his age, thirty-six. There was a picture: medium height, medium build, brown hair—though who could tell in the dark? He was a locksmith who was part of a rescue squad, going home after work. In some interior compartment, I saw the dark streets, the gray-and-black plumes of smoke, the hadean glow of half-hidden fires, and heard the tap of a woman’s heels. I’d been right to find that sinister. A little voice inside my head whispered that it could have been me, perhaps even should have been me, that I was the intended.

Blitz nerves, I told myself. Nonetheless, I’d read the story over three or four times before I got back to the house, and when I arrived, I questioned Nan again about the night she’d been hurt and about the woman she’d heard searching through our flat. But it was not until I was brushing on the paint—stroke after stroke of white, making a bright, almost luminescent surface—that certain ideas began to coalesce. That sometimes happens when I am painting at the easel, too. Ideas appear, though those are ideas for my picture. This was a picture, all right, but of a very different sort.

Someone had been following me. A woman who didn’t sound quite right. Perhaps the woman who had searched our flat? Nan did remember a tapping on the boards overhead, so perhaps she was the presence Nan had sensed in the basement, the presence that had tumbled her onto the stone steps? I thought I knew who that woman was, and where she hid so that the inspector, for all his efforts and contacts and knowledge of the night, had never even considered her. My only question now was what I should—or could—do about that.

“I need your help,” I told Maribelle for the third or fourth time; I was well down on a bottle of prewar Chablis that she’d unearthed to console me for her refusals.

The grayish light, an equal compound of wintry sun and pulverized stone, lit the room, empty except for us and a pair of drunken painters arguing about Braque’s influence on Picasso. As if! On another day I’d have urged Maribelle to chuck them out, but not today, when even art was on the back burner, when she was my best, virtually my only, hope of extricating myself from what anyone could see was a fine pickle.

“I don’t know, cunty. Police business is not my style. I have a reputation to uphold.”

“He’s killing off your clientele,” I said. “That’s not exactly good for business either.”

She considered this while I studied her large, handsome face with the high forehead and black eyes. I hadn’t been at the easel for weeks. Not seriously. I need paint, drink, and excitement the way plants need light, air, and water.

“What makes you think he’ll come here, anyway?”

“He wants to kill me,” I said. And I thought to myself, Would he were the only one!

She was of the opinion that I could take care of myself and, in lieu of assistance, offered advice I had no intention of taking. But finally, the bottle empty, my eloquence exhausted, and my despair palpable, she agreed to let me know if Connie showed up. Without hesitation, I scrawled a message to him and asked her to pass it on.

Maribelle slipped the paper into her blouse and winked. “Keep your powder dry,” she said.

Indeed. Out on the street, John shouted hello and came loping over before I could take evasive action. He had a camera slung around his neck and, as usual, looked frayed and tattered, with the greenish pallor of the true night bird. He asked about his jacket, which was safe in the flat, having been well cleaned by Nan. I relayed this, but he was still not pleased, and he was so upset by the loss of his wretched hat that I had to buy him a drink. More than one, actually.

“Have you seen George around?” I asked. We were leaning against the bar in a bomb-damaged pub—our second of the afternoon. Plaster was sifting down from the ceiling, the door was reinforced with timbers, and there was a charred panel along one wall. I diagnosed blast plus an incendiary: I’d developed an eye for the nuances of destruction.

“George?” John either feigned ignorance or had genuinely forgotten. Either was possible.

“Big, tough, and handsome, all parts in working order?”

“Oh, that George! Spot of bother with the police, I understand.”

“Still away?” I asked hopefully.

“Far’s I know. Didn’t you go looking for him?”

“I found him too—unforgettable. A unique experience.”

John had much to say about George, in particular, and unique experiences in general. That’s John in the afternoon. While in the morning he can scarcely speak without several fingers of gin, by afternoon he’s flying with the world on a string, so to speak, and snapping everything that moves. Me, too. I heard the click of the shutter, saw his smile. “Very nice,” he said. “You have a certain world-weary expression. Or is it just the Blitz? Buy us another gin, would you?”

I had little in my pocket by the time I finished entertaining John, but I left Soho lighter of heart, hoping, if not confident, that freed of George’s threats, my inspector would see that he was kept inside. I liked that idea very much. What I didn’t like was what I discovered when I got home. Key in the door as usual, rattle of the knob, followed by the familiar, cheery call of, “You’re home, dear boy!” My heart sank.

“Nan, what are you doing here?”

“Oh, home’s best. I do love Bella, but I’m managing fine.”

“Fine, you’re managing fine!” I almost shouted. “Someone has been lurking around the basement, rummaging through our flat. You’ve been knocked down, had your arm broken—it could have been your neck! Nan!”

“Dear boy, don’t upset yourself.”

“I intend to upset myself. How am I going to be out protecting the public if I’m worried about you every minute? You’re a selfish old woman!”

“Yes,” she said, “but I have the photos. Do you think I could have left them at Bella’s? She’s a demon for cleaning. Nothing untouched, nothing unturned.”

I stamped around the flat for a bit, more to impress her with the seriousness of the whole business than out of real anger. I’d talk her ’round tomorrow and get her to go back, though since Bella drove a hard bargain it would surely mean another coat of paint for the kitchen. “It’s way too late to take anything to Arnold today,” I told her. “You might have thought of that.”

“I did think of it. Anyway, Arnold’s fire-watching post is hardly the best place for photos. What I thought, dear boy, was a bit of grease-proof paper, another layer of plaster, and they’re safe as long as I am.”

“You’d be safe as long as you’re at Bella’s,” I reminded her, but I had to admit, if only to myself, that I’d found living at Holland Park Road with the perfect nanny a bit wearying. And given that chance rules all when sea mines, incendiaries, and explosives of all types are raining from the heavens, even banks and safes were probably no more secure than one old woman. In the end I rooted out some plaster of paris and added another thin layer to Nan’s cast.

“The doctor will get a surprise when this is taken off,” I said.

Nan laughed.

“It’s not too heavy? Try to lift your arm.”

“Not much worse. It felt like a lead weight before and feels about the same now.”

“About the best we can hope for.”

“I’ll stay upstairs if there’s a raid,” she said, conceding the danger now that it was too late to move her.