Fires of London (The Francis Bacon Mysteries) (5 page)

The door, then the blackout curtain, there: the pay phone just inside the entry. Luckily not in use. Coin, fumble for the coin, hear it drop. Call in. Location a block from The Pond on—gasping—get it out. Address given. “Police. I need the police.” Registered; understood. Then name. HQ wanted a name, my name. But here, after so much folly, common sense triumphed. As the pips sounded for more money, I set down the receiver. I saw that I’d left a red smear on the phone and another, the mark of my hand, where I’d held myself upright against the wall. I scrubbed both with my sleeve and staggered from the booth to a questioning look from the hairless, moonfaced barman behind the decorative glass screen.

“On duty,” I managed to say, and shoved aside the blackout curtain, as heavy as the suffocating contraction of mucus and muscle in my chest. I stumbled on the basement steps, risking a redder darkness, and crawled the last two or three, almost losing my tin hat. With a frantic gulp of air I reached the street and lunged into the night.

It took me several hours to get home—a nightmare of curbs and lampposts, of unseen lorries and sudden cars, of my emptied, struggling lungs and tortured airways, and everywhere the many varieties of darkness. In the grip of a thousand claustrophobic dreams, I found myself afraid to stop and barely able to walk. I was close to collapse when I heard the sound of water and knew I had reached a little park. The collection of railings for scrap metal has provided a number of benefits, and this green precinct was now open to the public. Low-edging hedges of privet and box scratched at my shins as I made my way along the gravel to a small fountain, where I washed my hands and face, rubbed the front of my stained uniform, and listened to the water bubble until some of my stolen breath came back.

With the faintest new light in the east, I turned west and walked home. Nan was in the kitchen, bedded down as usual on the table. She heard the taps at the sink—and probably my wheezing, too. Nan had sat up countless nights in my childhood after contact with my father’s horses and dogs touched off my attacks.

“What time is it?”

“Very late,” I gasped. “I need your help, Nan.”

She sat right up; as she always says, she sleeps like a cat. “Put on the light.”

“Don’t be scared. Not my blood.”

“Another road accident?”

“Not this time.” I told her, of course, wheezing out the details as best I could.

She was of two minds about my speedy exit. “It all depends on whether we can get the blood out.”

“I dropped my torch, too,” I said, thinking of fingerprints. “I had a serious attack.”

“Everyone has a torch these days. You can use mine. Cold water,” she added as I started to heat some water. “You need cold water for that. Soak it well and rinse it.”

“The uniform will still be wet tomorrow.”

Nan shuffled over to the coal stove and put the iron on the hob to heat. “We’ll press it dry, dear boy,” she said.

It was much later, drinking tea and watching the steam rise as Nan ironed my wet uniform that I remembered the pointed insignia—symmetrical, pointed, possibly wings? Possibly RAF? If so this body would not be ignored, because alive, he had been worth a fortune.

They came in the early afternoon. I’d gotten out of bed late after wheezing and gasping and contemplating ruination until midmorning, when I slid into uneasy dreams of enormous doorless rooms with low ceilings where thick, inescapable blankets lay heaped on my chest. I woke at noon with the light moving behind the trees and sparrows chirping. “Nan?”

No answer. I’d been aware of her several times—a small, newly fragile silhouette in the doorway from the studio to the bedroom. Watchful. She can judge an attack as well as any doctor. “Nan?”

Off to the butcher or the greengrocer’s or maybe for the paper; she can still read the headline placards at the newsagents. I pulled on my trousers and stuck my feet in my shoes, major effort. My lungs, beyond congested, had turned to suet and weren’t fit for much but Christmas pudding. When I bent to pick up my shirt, the world obligingly darkened, producing red corollas around the bureau, the bed, the straight chair. “Nan?”

I stepped into the studio, where my new canvas waited on the easel. A dark limousine with a biomorphic form screaming in the driver’s seat surges from a deep orange ground, toward the viewer. The figure was not right yet. Not quite. Something about the foreshortening of the elongated neck, but in my tattered condition I couldn’t conceive a fix. There was something odd about the studio, too. A good big wheeze of air to focus the mind: the perfume of damp wool, redolent of nights in the park and just-cleaned uniforms? No, not just. It was the table set for lunch. We always ate in the kitchen, but Nan had covered our “roulette table” with a cloth and set out the lunch things, complete with cutlery and a note stuck under the salt. Her handwriting, once a pride, was still small and well formed but prone to run away at odd angles.
Hope you feel better. Back soon.
I realized that the roulette wheel had disappeared. Then I heard the bell. Had Nan forgotten her key?

Three more rings before I managed the length of the studio and the small hall that adjoined the kitchen. “Forget your key?” I gasped, and opened the door. Chief Inspector Mordren shadowed the doorway like a barrage balloon; at his side stood a spiffy uniform with black hair and mean amber eyes. At a better time I’d have felt a real interest in him, but my lungs shut down, reawakening halos of reds and greens. The Asians think life is a dream; I think our nightmares become reality. Here was mine, police on the doorstep, some dreadful confinement threatened, and Nan out and too blind to read any message they might allow me to leave.

I couldn’t speak for wheezing.

“May we come in?” Oh, the inspector was polite, but then he was my personal cop and though he might not have known it, we had things in common. I was still uncertain whether that was an advantage or a danger.

I stepped aside. “May we come in?” was definitely better than “Come with us, sir.”

“You live here?” He was looking into the studio. Propped against the wall, a dark canvas showed a writhing biomorphic shape; the orange painting with the limo and its inadequately foreshortened passenger sat on the easel, and a heap of slashed canvas occupied the foreground. Maybe not the best accessory under the circumstances.

“Kitchen,” I pointed. “Bedroom at the back.”

The uniform was dispatched to check out the studio and the bedroom beyond. The inspector looked into the kitchen. “You’re in Air Raid Precautions?”

My uniform, pristine and only slightly damp, was hanging near the stove. “Fool even a butcher’s dog,” said Nan when she’d finished. The inspector sniffed as though maybe his nose was keener. “It’s just been cleaned.”

“Nan likes to keep everything fresh.” I spoke with a gasp and a rattle and added a little shrug to indicate the mysteriousness of the feminine mind. A terra incognita for the inspector, too, I guessed.

“You’re what—twenty-nine?”

“Thirty-one, actually.”

“Not in the military?”

“Exempt. Asthma.”

“Quite a bad case, I see.”

I dropped into one of the kitchen chairs.

The inspector took the other. “With your health, you must always be careful about your living arrangements. If you take my meaning.”

I caught a whiff of courts and jail and looked as unconcerned as possible. Thanks to the rigors of life with my esteemed father, I’m inured to bullying.

The inspector turned brusque. “You were on ARP duty last night until eleven twenty p.m. Is that correct?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do then?”

“I decided to have a drink at The Pond.” I did not give the address, and he did not ask.

“Where you used the telephone?”

“That’s right.” So they had recorded the number—and my friends at The Pond had spilled the beans. I’d expected better of them. If you can’t trust low company, civilization’s finished.

“And where you were seen leaving the phone booth,” he ostentatiously consulted a tiny notebook to show this was all duly entered as evidence, “‘in a fine state.’”

Just so. I could see there was no point in dissembling. They had me “red-handed,” as Nan liked to say, literally so in this case. “I was having a severe asthma attack, and I’d just called in the report of a mutilated body. I was entitled to be ‘in a fine state.’”

“That’s no excuse for not leaving your name. As you should have done as reporting warden.”

“As an off-duty warden, I was merely a concerned citizen, who could hardly breathe and was out of change.”

“You were obligated to wait for the police. Fortunately the dispatcher thought he recognized your voice. Otherwise, we might have regarded it as a prank call of a particularly despicable nature.”

“I’m telling you, I was panicked for air; I nearly collapsed on the way home.”

“Where perhaps you had Miss Lightfoot—that is your companion’s name, isn’t it, Miss Jessica Lightfoot?—wash the blood from your uniform? What conclusion might be drawn from that?”

Let your imagination run riot! But he had Nan’s name, which meant danger. I restrained myself and said, “That as an ARP warden responding to road accidents, I frequently need my uniform cleaned.”

“How fortunate you have an old retainer to do that for you.”

“Nan is—” I started to say, but shut my mouth. What Nan was to me was no business of his.

The inspector sat as motionless as a toad, his hooded eyes half closed. “I believe you also knew the late Damien Hiller. You bought drinks in his memory at The Pond the night after he was murdered.”

“I buy drinks for quite a few people when I’m flush.”

“But you did know him.”

“He was someone I saw around. Look, you were at the other end of the bar. I was trying to cheer up poor Connie.”

The inspector’s lips pulled back from large and crowded yellow teeth. I’d have given a lot to have been able to paint that peculiar smile. “I have no doubt that your fingerprints will match those on the torch we found beside the body.” A dramatic pause. I hadn’t realized police work required such theatrical gifts.

“It would be surprising it they weren’t. I’ve already told you that it was my torch—” But here I had to stop a minute to squeeze more oxygen up my protesting airways. I realized that the stress of keeping my lungs topped up was distracting me from the precariousness of my position. If the man had been dead a measurable time before he was found, I was in the clear, no matter what The Ponderous inspector cared to imply. But if not—I postponed consideration of that for the moment. “I literally fell over onto him. Blood everywhere.”

“How could you fall over him?” The inspector simultaneously raised and deepened his voice for an effect very different from his soft and hopeful tones when we’d met in the park—or his hoarse viciousness afterward. “You had a torch and he was lying smack in the middle of the sidewalk.”

It’s unpleasant how the most minor misadventure can lead to catastrophe. Here was another proof of the precariousness, if not the malice, of the universe. “The batteries died a few blocks from The Pond. Check them, you’ll see.”

“It was a black night,” he said. “You’d have been in territory you know well then?” His precision instrument sounded confidential now. “The Pond, the vicinity of the park?”

“Where I believe I’ve seen you.” I stared back to assure him that, although in much physical distress, I was not afraid.

Something flickered behind his small, shadowed eyes, and his hand shot out and grabbed the front of my shirt. He brought his face close to mine and there could be no mistake: This was the dark silhouette from the park. “Be careful, Mr. Bacon. No matter how this ends, your life is so irregular an immorality prosecution is ever a possibility. Remember that.”

I said it was the sort of thing that would stick in my mind.

He looked as if he would like to strike me, but he released my shirt and fell back on sarcasm and insinuation. “So you just happened to fall over him.”

“I fell over him, dropping my torch, which was useless anyway.” Another interruption for energetic wheezing. “In the darkness, it was quite horrible and the shock played up my asthma.”

“And then?” He was able to suggest the deepest skepticism in the fewest words.

“I felt around in the dark and realized I’d stumbled on a man lying dead.”

“How could you be sure?”

“When I checked the pulse in his neck, I discovered that he had the most terrible wound.” I forbore to mention my recollection of Damien or to reveal that he had haunted my dreams.

“Getting the blood on your hands that was noticed at The Pond.”

“He might have been alive,” I said. “He might have been helped.”

“You could be charged, you know,” the inspector said.

“On what possible grounds?”

He shrugged heavily and remained silent, provoking me to speak. A trick, that.

“I certainly should have given my name, but if I’d had anything to do with the man’s death, why would I have reported it? Besides, I’d only just left my ARP post.”

“Unfortunately for you, the victim had not been dead long. The timing would be close. Very close, so you would do well to take this seriously.”

“I took last night seriously and I’m barely breathing.”

“You might be risking your life daily like the RAF boys.”

“Ah,” I said. I knew where this was leading. “Damien Hiller wasn’t worth a toss, but lose an airman—Was he perhaps a pilot?”

He leaned forward eagerly, quick as a snake: “How would you know that if you hadn’t a light?”

“I felt the insignia.”

“A difficult explanation to believe,” he said with some satisfaction. “But you’ll understand the ramifications, the pressure on the investigation for quick results. You’d do, you know. People are as often convicted for what they are as for what they’ve done. In your case, ‘gentleman’s companion,’ large sums lost at gambling—”

“What about ‘public acts of immorality’?” I asked angrily. “Are you putting those on the docket as well?”

His hand shot out again and connected with the side of my face, knocking me off the chair onto the floor. “Things could go hard with you,” he said, standing up, and I would have been hit again but for the appearance of Handsome with the amber eyes. Inspector Mordren looked up, unclenched his fists, reassumed—hypocrite toad that he was—his air of calm and control. I glanced in the speckled mirror behind the sink and saw Handsome shake his head. The inspector frowned, waving his hand in dismissal. I got myself off the floor and back onto the chair. Clearly they hadn’t found the pot of gold or the rainbow’s end or anything that suggested I spent my off hours on homicide. I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. I had a tin hat and a badge and a military exemption. Unless they thought to check under the lunch dishes, there was nothing suggestive in the flat. They’d thought they had me, but they didn’t. Frightening me hadn’t worked and searching the studio hadn’t either.