The Twilight Hour (14 page)

‘If you're suggesting something illegal,' said the lawyer, ‘that could make things
extremely
difficult. On the one hand: he's up against a murder charge, although it wouldn't
wholly
surprise me if they have to drop it, I'm not sure it'll stand up. On the
other
hand, there are all sorts of practical problems with the alibi: can this person be traced; if they
are
traced will they be prepared to take the witness stand – inherently unlikely – but then if they
do,
Mr Harris's character is blackened even as he's exonerated and he's effectively pleaded guilty to another crime, which, to be frank, members of the jury might think was worse than murder.'

‘What d'you mean?' I cried. ‘What are you talking about?'

Alan groaned impatiently. ‘Darling, for heaven's sake, Colin's queer. Don't tell me you hadn't noticed.'

I felt my face turn crimson. I shut up. After the first few moments of shock, a wave of revulsion left the taste of bile in my mouth. I felt physically sick. Of course in theory I had nothing against pansies. The effete young men you saw at parties from time to time were rather sweet. I was a modern young woman, wasn't I, things like that didn't shock me in the slightest. I just felt so sorry for them.

But –
Colin
! He didn't
look
queer. He was masculine, manly, he'd done dangerous things in the war.

I sat there, feeling as if I'd been punched in the stomach. The lawyer and Alan must have gone on with the discussion, but I didn't hear a word. I was sunk in my own embarrassment and – well –
shame
: shame for Colin, shame at my own reaction, and shame at being so green. How stupid of me to suppose he'd been in love with
me
! Stupid, stupid, stupid. And as if that wasn't bad enough, I was now so obviously shocked. How humiliating! What an idiot I was! I was afraid I was going to cry. But I pulled myself together. It was selfish and childish to be thinking of myself when it was Colin who was in danger – and in danger partly thanks to me. I swallowed the lump in my throat and tried to listen to what they were saying.

‘I'll do my best to find this friend of Colin's,' said Alan, ‘but I'm not that hopeful.'

The lawyer smiled. ‘Nor am I.'

‘He doesn't even want me to, actually.'

‘He may well be right. You'll have to find out if it was a casual meeting in a public place – a pub or … club. This sort of thing is very difficult, as I'm sure you realise. Homosexual activity is illegal. Even if a witness were prepared to say they were somewhere known to be a meeting place for men with those inclinations, they'd risk everything – and the prosecution would cast doubt on every aspect of their evidence. It would have to be passed off as a different kind of meeting – just a drink in some ordinary pub where there are no such connotations.' He paused, then said in a different voice: ‘It is desperately embarrassing all round. I probably shouldn't say this, but you're Colin's friend and he's going to need all the support he can get, so I'll be frank. You probably realise anyway, more or less, how awkward this is for the Party. Some of the comrades are … rather puritanical, shall we say. There was a certain … reserve in some quarters about my taking on the case. On the other hand, I have heard rumours about Colin – things the dead man accused him of, and there is a view that I'd be better able to handle the case from that point of view.'

‘What do you mean, exactly?'

‘What I mean is that I'm representing Mr Harris as a solicitor who specialises in crime among other things, not as a fellow Party member,' said Abrahams. ‘On the other hand, my particular position, my political angle on it may benefit the Party as well as Mr Harris. But my aim is to help him.'

I didn't understand any of this. But as I'd been listening I'd decided I had to come clean. ‘There is something you have to know.'

I could tell my confession surprised the blasé Julius Abrahams because he raised his eyebrows ever so slightly. ‘That certainly fits in with my suspicions about the post mortem. Incompetent forensic procedures, if the
St Pancras Chronicle
is to be believed. That would mean that Titus Mavor was killed much earlier than the police have assumed.' He paused. ‘Give me a day or two to think about how best to handle it. From your point of view, it's a bit of a minefield, isn't it.' He looked at me, obviously puzzled. ‘Didn't you realise you should have gone to the police at once?'

‘Yes … I suppose I did, really, but … at the time … It was late and so cold and … it seemed all right to leave it till the morning. We – well, I never thought of murder.' It sounded awfully lame; and the truth was I didn't even understand myself. Stanley didn't want his name brought into it. That had seemed an adequate explanation at the time, but now I saw it explained nothing. It didn't explain my collusion with his need for secrecy. It didn't explain why he'd wanted his part in events kept quiet. It just raised more questions. ‘I just thought he'd
died
,' I said feebly. And I wasn't even sure
that
was true now. I could no longer remember exactly what I'd thought or felt at the time. Hadn't I had some sense of things being wrong even from the beginning? I couldn't remember. It was all overlaid with what had happened since.

‘Even so …' Abrahams continued to look at me. He tapped his pen on the blotting pad. Then, as if dismissing some train of thought: ‘Well … anyway, we'll find out what Colin was doing earlier in the day. That will become important if we can get the police to accept that the time of death was earlier.'

‘If I tell them the truth they'll have to, won't they?'

He smiled. ‘Not necessarily.' He paused, and then used exactly the same phrase as Doris Tarr. ‘We'll cross that bridge when we come to it.'

But it was not this languid older man who would have to cross that bridge. It was me.

fourteen

‘I'LL COME WITH YOU IF YOU LIKE,'
said Stanley. ‘I've nothing to hide. I didn't want my name brought into it, but in the circs … and there could have been a legit reason I sent you round there. I'm sure we can think one up.' It was generous of him, given that he was so keen to have his name kept out of the whole business; but at best it would only prop up my morale, and it might well raise new questions in the mind of Inspector Bannister.

‘That's sweet of you, but honestly, you'd better keep out of it. And I gave them a reason, anyway. I said I was going to look at Mavor's paintings.'

‘That won't do,' said Stanley, patiently. ‘You have to explain why you didn't report the death immediately.
That's
the problem, and that was my fault. I asked you not to. You lied to protect me.'

‘I lied to protect myself. I told a second lie to cover the first.' I'd lied to protect Fiona. Which did seem pretty eccentric now.

‘You have to spin a convincing yarn.'

‘I can't tell more lies! I've perjured myself already!'

‘Oh, Di! Grow up. People lie all the time!'

‘Not in court. Not to the police.'

Stan snorted. ‘Were you born yesterday or something? You toffs, you're living in a fool's paradise. Except most of you aren't, of course – just little Miss Innocence here. You've got a lot to learn, Di.'

‘You're such a cynic.'

‘I'm a realist, that's what. The situation is your friend Harris is on a murder charge. You think he's innocent.'

‘He
is
! Of course he is!'

‘Okay, okay. He's innocent. I mean, I agree with you. Just because they had a barney – it's a bit far-fetched. What it amounts to is what his lawyer says: the police have bungled things, but by an unlucky coincidence what you told them fits in with what they think, or want to think. You have to have a convincing story why that isn't so. On the other hand, who is this witness who saw Harris later on that evening? If we find out who it is we could go and have a word with them. Nobble them.'

He had shocked me again. This was a whole new world of murky motives and behaviour – perjury; interfering with witnesses – I'd always been taught that was completely beyond the pale.

He smiled – the look on my face must have amused him. ‘I'm joking, Di! But it never hurts to find out more about people and what's going on. I have to have another look at that site in the City. Why don't you come with me and we'll have a dekko at Mecklenburgh Square on the way back. Talk to the neighbours.'

.........

Mecklenburgh Square looked more neglected than ever in daylight. Weeds pushed up between the paving stones; façades were streaked with soot, window panes broken and boarded up, still criss-crossed with sticky paper from the war or shaded with tattered, dingy curtains. The house –
the
house – looked utterly derelict. The front door was shut now, secured with a padlock and boarded up.

Stanley marched boldly up to the house next door. It looked more lived-in than the adjacent building, was even in better shape than most of the others. Stanley pressed the single bell. We waited. Just as we were on the point of giving up, we heard footsteps.

The woman who opened the door was thin as a scarecrow. Her grey hair fell in straight strands on either side of her papery white face. She wore a shapeless grey sweater and what looked like men's trousers. A cigarette dangled from her mouth.

‘Yes?'

Stanley lifted his hat. ‘We're friends of – the late Mr Mavor. I understand he rented a room next door.'

That was bold. I wasn't sure it was a good idea. She seemed to be sizing us up. There was a shrewd and at the same time enigmatic expression on her face as she looked us over. ‘Owed you money, did he?'

‘No, no, nothing like that. But – would you mind if we came in for a moment? It's freezing cold. You'll catch a chill if we keep you on the doorstep.'

She scrutinised us more closely. ‘You were friends of Titus?' she repeated doubtfully.

‘You don't know how we could get in touch with his family? There were one or two things …' Stanley stood there, legs apart. He was such a wide boy, it was rather endearing, with his big smile and dark eyes.

He looked a bit of a shady character, I thought, but he must have won her round, for she said: ‘Oh, come in for a moment, don't stand there, it's unbearable with the door open.' She stood aside and we stepped into the dark, dank corridor. The house was the mirror image of the one next door. A once elegant staircase stretched up into the gloom. I looked up the dim stairwell and thought of Titus sprawled on his sofa. I wished I were anywhere but here.

Stanley had removed his homburg. ‘Thank you.' What was it about Stanley that rubbed people up the right way? I almost thought the woman was going to smile, but she managed to suppress the impulse.

She led us into the front ground floor room. I suppose she'd have called it her drawing room, but it was a drawing room in ruins, little short of a bomb-site; everything in it was falling apart. Even the pictures on the walls hung askew. The double doors that partitioned the room were folded back to reveal a brass bedstead in the back half. There was a round table by the front window covered with papers and books, a sagging armchair by the grate, a broken-down sofa, a battered antique chest of drawers in the recess by the window and a glass-fronted bookcase opposite the marble chimneypiece. The general impression was of collapsing sofa springs, threadbare upholstery, curtains weighed down with the dust of ages and newspapers, books, overflowing ashtrays and used cups and plates all over the floor and every surface. The slovenliness was positively bohemian; far worse than our flat, worse even than Fiona's room; so much more chaos in a far larger space.

She made a gesture that seemed to suggest we should sit down on one of the clapped-out chairs. Then, inexplicably, she laughed again, but this time the laugh turned into a hacking cough: ‘Friends of Titus,' she said when she'd recovered. ‘Titus didn't have any
friends
, not respectable looking ones like you, anyway. But I'll take your word for it that you aren't a couple of snoopers – or confidence tricksters trying to do me out of my savings or the family jewels.' She seemed to find that amusing too.

She lit another cigarette off the stub of the previous one. ‘If you
are
trying to get me for breaking some tenancy law, he didn't rent anything. He
stayed
next door. He had nowhere else to go. With the housing shortage … of course it's a dangerous structure, but then so was he.' More cackling. ‘And he hadn't any money. But I expect you know that.' Her laughter was like a saw going through wood and again turned into a cough. Still, she seemed to have warmed towards us. ‘Sit down. I'll make you a cup of tea,' she said and disappeared into the back regions of the house.

While she was out of the room I looked more closely at the paintings. I didn't know much about art, but I recognised a small portrait of a young woman that might have been by Augustus John, and an ugly surrealist effort: a Titus Mavor, perhaps.

She returned with three cups on a tin tray, and carried on talking as though there'd been no interruption. ‘Titus was my – oh, second cousin once removed or something. Member of the family, anyway. Complete sponger! His poor mother, bringing up the kid, never got a penny for it out of him, not that she needs it, but that's not the point.' She was seated on the sofa, legs apart, and seemed to have forgotten she didn't know us. She was talking avidly, like someone who didn't have much opportunity to talk, living on her own, a lonely recluse. ‘Next door belongs to me too, y'know. Derelict – shouldn't be lived in at all. I thought you might have come about that. Government inspectors or something. Found out I let him stay there. What could I do, though? Titus comes round, he's on his uppers again, desperate for somewhere to stay … I told him it was only temporary, but …' She shrugged. ‘They'll requisition it soon. I hear they give you
nothing
for it, a mere pittance, but it's worth nothing anyway. Useless. Better to pull it down and build council flats.'

‘On the contrary,' interposed Stanley, looking extremely sharp. ‘In a few years this area'll be worth a fortune.'

‘You really think so? Good heavens. Wonders never cease.' His interruption had brought her down to earth. ‘I apologise – you don't want to be hearing about my cousin's sordid end. What's one more corpse, anyway. Corpses under the rubble all over London, I expect.'

Horrific thought. ‘Oh no,' I cried. ‘Unexploded bombs perhaps, but surely not …'

‘You didn't get on with him then, Miss … Mavor.' Stanley was watching her, his curiosity obvious.

‘Joan Mainwaring's the name.' Her cigarette-laden laugh rasped out again. ‘Titus deserved everything he got. If someone else hadn't kindly done it for me, I'd have bumped him off myself sooner or later.' Her eyes, sharp and dark as two pieces of flint in her papery face, scrutinised us. ‘Were you really friends of cousin Titus? Or are you journalists or something? Or perhaps you
are
snoopers? All these rules and regulations now. Trying to get me for renting a room in a condemned building? Well, I didn't charge him rent, I can tell you. Why bother? I knew I'd never see a penny of it.'

‘No, no,' said Stanley, ‘that's not it at all.' Again he smiled at her in that way that was so reassuring, so pleasant.

‘You're not the detective. I've seen
him
. Common little man. Wouldn't be surprised if he informed on me to the authorities. Some of Titus's arty friends, then? Well, why not, I'm arty myself. Or used to be. Knew Augustus John, y'know, oh, years ago now. And when I say knew –' She broke off and cackled cadaverously. ‘I was quite a looker in my time, though you may find that hard to believe. Anyway – you've come nosing round here. What are you after? I'll lay odds you're after something.'

I decided on a direct attack. ‘We just wondered what happened. It was so dreadful. Such a shock. Poor Titus.'

She snorted. ‘Poor Titus! Don't be so wet. Treated women like dirt – one of them came to see him, I saw her leaving the house as I came home that evening, saw some woman, anyway. Wouldn't recognise her, mind … must have been besotted to be out in weather like that.'

I felt sick – it was
me
she was talking about. But the weather hadn't been
that
bad! I almost blurted it out. It had let up a bit – there'd been a storm the night before, hadn't there, but that night – I remembered again the full moon – the wind – the wasted square.

Joan Mainwaring seemed quite pleased with herself about it, but then, just as I thought she was getting into her stride, she stopped and a different, thoughtful, wary look replaced the half smile. ‘Why are you so interested? You
are
the press, aren't you? I've already had one unpleasant little whipper-snapper prowling round. Just morbid curiosity, eh? You're not the only ones. Some of his painter pals came round too. I've had more visitors since he kicked the bucket than I had in the last six months. But I ain't going to start showing people round the scene of the crime. Sorry if that disappoints you.' She cast us a cynical look. The ash fell off the end of her cigarette and scattered over her bosom. She looked and looked at us. ‘Ah – got it! Friends of the blighter who's been arrested. Colin Harris.'

I must have looked surprised, for she cackled again. ‘I do read the papers. And I've got plenty of time to put two and two together. I'm just an old woman with too little to do now the war's over. The war was different, wasn't it. Everyone had a job to do in the war. It was all hands to the pump then.' She took a packet of Players out of her cardigan pocket, offered them to us, then lit up herself. ‘I know a lot about your friend.' She looked at us, pleased with herself, an old woman of no significance, enjoying an unexpected feeling of importance. She sucked smoke deep into her lungs, blew it out in a long stream: ‘Your friend Colin Harris and Titus were old enemies, weren't they, since pre-war days. You're too young, but the crowd you run around with, I should think you'd have heard plenty of gossip from them.'

She seemed to know an awful lot about us. But how could she? ‘Did Titus talk about us?'

‘Oh! Titus talked, all right. When he was coherent, which wasn't often. All the gossip, all his grievances, all his enemies, all the insults and injuries the world had done him. Still,' she added vaguely, ‘he was family.' Ash had fallen onto her chest from the fag stuck permanently in her mouth. ‘He was living in the country with his family for a while, then when he managed to go on the wagon for a bit, he felt better, came back to town. Met an old flame, he said. That seemed to unsettle him. Apparently she's become a
film star
.' This set off another volley of hacking. ‘I met her – once – in the old days. Very fey, not quite all there, actually. But astonishingly beautiful –
d'un beauté
! You wouldn't believe. I must say I was
very
surprised to hear she has a successful career now. I never thought of her as a career girl. Seemed to have no drive, no gumption. But Titus said it was just that she'd found another man to batten on to. Abandoned her child, you know! Extraordinary! Usually it's the other way round, isn't it. They abandon you – that's what's happened with my lot, anyway. They've flown the coop. Haven't heard from the eldest in months, believe he's still in the Far East somewhere.' She didn't sound unduly put out, but the information triggered a further explosion of coughing.