The Twilight Hour (8 page)

As we went from shop to shop and then passed up and down the vegetable stalls we spoke only to consult about the food. We walked back through the gritty streets without a word. I stopped outside the French pub and said: ‘Why don't we go in here?' but Alan shook his head.

‘Might see someone we know – what are we going to say?'

Until that moment it hadn't occurred to me that we were the bearers of bad news. He was right. How could we sit among friends and not say what we knew? Yet we couldn't tell them either; it'd open up such a Pandora's box of lies. We found a café with steamy windows in a side street and sat down. Alan removed his hat – the broad-brimmed black effort, which made him look very artistic and
fin de siècle
. He was frowning and worried. ‘How do we explain why we found him, how we happened to be there?'

We sat over our coffees in a cloud of cigarette smoke. There was something nauseating about having this secret to ourselves. It was shock, it was gossip, there was an unpleasant thrill about knowing something before anyone else knew. It was frightening too; someone who'd been a disreputable but minor character in our social world, had turned the tables on us. He'd become tragic and now we couldn't laugh at him or despise him any more.

‘Why do we have to tell anyone?' I asked, but even as I spoke I imagined the gossip there'd be in the pubs and clubs and how could we just sit there and pretend to know nothing about it? There'd be news items saying he was found by a friend. It was all looking awfully awkward. ‘Talk to the others,' I said, meaning Hugh and Colin, and lit a cigarette. (I'd switched to Craven A, because I liked the packet, red with a picture of a black cat, or rather its head, in the centre.)

‘Good idea. I will. D'you mind?'

‘I'll go home with the stuff. I'm exhausted anyway, we had so little sleep.'

I was secretly pleased, because I didn't intend to go straight home. I had to confess to Stanley that I'd told Alan everything and he needed to know we'd reported the death. I felt terrible – it felt like a betrayal and I dreaded facing him. At the same time I wanted to get it over with as soon as possible, and I hadn't forgotten he'd said he'd be in the office.

As I walked down Maddox Street I saw a man and a woman coming towards me. They were walking slowly, heads bent, close together, like conspirators: Stanley and Gwendolen. As I drew near I saw that Stanley was holding her arm. I almost turned into a doorway to try to avoid them seeing me – I don't know why. Anyway, it was too late. Was it my imagination, or were they for a split second trying to avoid me too?

We drew close in the narrow stony gorge off busy Regent Street.

‘Dinah! Darling!' Detaching herself from Stanley, Gwendolen stretched out her gloved hand to me and caught me in a rigid embrace. The stiff veil attached to her hat scratched my cheek.

Stanley watched us, slightly apart, his homburg hat slightly back on his head, how he always wore it. ‘On your way to the office?'

‘I wanted to tell you –' I stopped; I didn't really want to say it in front of Gwendolen. But that was ridiculous. ‘We went to the police.' I smiled hopefully. ‘We just felt we had to …' Why was I being so pathetically ingratiating? It was obviously the right thing to do.

They stared at me. Stanley patted my arm. ‘Probably for the best.'

‘I'm sorry. Alan insisted.' It was cowardly of me to blame Alan. I'd been all for going to the police myself. As it was, I'd failed to report the death immediately and I'd broken my word to Stanley; the worst of all worlds. My words congealed in the frozen air. Why didn't Gwen say anything?

‘We're going to lunch at the Hungaria. Why don't you join us?'

‘No, no … I can't. Thank you all the same.' I was dying to talk to Stan, to ‘chew the fat' as he'd have put it, but I couldn't with Gwendolen there.

In her bold leopardskin coat she looked frozen: ‘It's such a shock. I can't believe it.' The words came slowly as though she were dragging them up from the bottom of a well.

We walked on, out into the main street and towards Piccadilly. Suddenly more words came, staccato: ‘I knew him when I first came to London, you know, when I worked as an artist's model. He drank so much, even then. Such a waste.' She pulled her fur more tightly round her. ‘Radu will be upset. He was so keen to have Titus work on the film.'

.........

When I reached home, Alan, Hugh and Colin were already in conference in the kitchen. It wasn't just the smoke and the fug – chilly and stuffy at the same time – there was a feeling of tension in the air. I put the kettle on and stood by the stove.

Alan looked up at me. ‘We were just talking about Titus. You know how Radu was hoping his name would help get financial backing for the film.'

I'd forgotten. ‘But will it really affect the film? He hadn't got involved, had he? Not really?'

‘At the very least, Radu
liked
the idea that Mavor might be involved. He loved the whole idea of Surrealism.'

‘It was more than that,' insisted Hugh. ‘Mavor may have pissed all his money away and drunk himself to death, but he's a pretty big name in the art world, you know. Well he
was
. And Surrealism went beyond the art world, anyway, they were so good at publicity. Dali especially, of course – and Titus was a sort of disciple of his.'

‘That's such rot.' Colin always seemed to be in a foul mood these days, and now he was scowling and disagreeing as usual. ‘Before the war, maybe, but Titus was a busted flush, everyone's forgotten about him now. Him dying's just the logical conclusion.'

‘That's a bit heartless. What was it he said – he was a rotten element – I suppose that's the
line
, is it, just as well we're rid of him?' Perhaps Hugh really did fear that without the name of Titus Mavor they wouldn't get any money. He too seemed in a very bad mood.

‘I didn't say that,' said Colin, ‘but you'd hardly expect me to pretend to be upset.'

‘Revolutionary honesty, I suppose.'

‘Oh, come on, Hugh,' said Alan, ‘none of us liked the man.'

‘Well, everyone knows you hated him, Colin, since that very public row in the Café Royal.'

Colin now looked so angry I quickly changed the subject: ‘I ran into Stanley and Gwen on the way home.'

‘Oh really? Had he told her?'

‘Yes. She seemed stunned.'

seven

AROUND FITZROVIA INDIVIDUALS CAME AND WENT
. They faded in and out of the raffish throng that eddied around the shabby streets, floating along from pub to pub on waves of unfulfilled hope and indecision. Mavor's death had caused ripples, but failed artists and alcoholic has-beens were two a penny and the habitués soon forgot about the pallid corpse as it was borne away downstream.

Or would have done had rumours not started to circulate. And the most awful thing was they were swirling around
us
.

The weather briefly eased. We returned to our usual haunts – the Wheatsheaf, the Caves de France, Chez Victor, the Barcelona – to find ourselves the centre of attention. They all knew we'd found Mavor. I don't know how, but they did. A miasma of notoriety followed us, almost as if we'd murdered him ourselves.

Rumours were flying around like confetti, thanks largely to Gerald Blackstone. Blackstone was the local paper's crime reporter, and as such he cultivated the police. At first the story was that ‘the cause of death has not yet been established', but soon Gerry began to drop massive hints in his reports for the
St Pancras Chronicle
that the police suspected foul play, and in the various watering holes he frequented he went considerably further.

He said the police had bungled the case from the start. You'd find him after a few beers leaning forward in a conspiratorial manner, with a little cluster of gossips hanging on his every word. There wasn't a proper forensic examination at first, he claimed. ‘But now there has been. Seems there were burn marks round the mouth and nose that they think were caused by chloroform.'

I remembered the smell in that room again; the smell that was not quite like alcohol.

According to Gerry, someone had first drugged, then suffocated the artist. The post mortem had shown that Mavor's liver and heart were seriously damaged, but – amazingly – he hadn't been drinking the night he died.

‘The cops are playing it down for the moment – embarrassing for them. Haven't you noticed, there's been hardly a squeak from them since the original news he was dead? But now the family's started to create a stink, so they're going to have to smarten up.'

A frisson rippled round the bars as the thwarted geniuses contemplated murder. Insidiously, an atmosphere of conspiracy and paranoia developed. To have actually known a murder victim swelled the hangers-on with a sense of sinister importance. Detectives were seen in the Wheatsheaf and the Barcelona. Compulsively the talk went to and fro. Had he
really
been murdered? Who could have done it? Couldn't he have sniffed the chloroform himself?

Always the big question was: why should anyone have wanted to murder Titus Mavor? What could have been the motive? Hardly burglary! He hadn't a penny.

‘What about his paintings?' Noel Valentine was most aggrieved as if Titus had died on purpose to thwart him. ‘He said I could represent him, but then he slid out of it again.'

‘Broken promises! Verbal diarrhoea, he'd promise anything,' sneered Marius Smith, who was one of the painters who'd witnessed the Café Royal brawl. ‘But that gives you a motive, eh, Valentine?'

Noel laughed. ‘Stuff that! I wanted him
alive
, didn't I. I needed his signature. And his bloody canvases.'

‘He'd have got a big spread in the
Statesman
, the
Spectator
,' said Hugh, ‘not to mention the art journals; there'd have been huge obituaries all over the show. Bad luck, to die at a time like this, when they've all been suspended because of the fuel crisis. But the
Daily Worker
did their bit, at least.' That was Hugh needling Colin again, because never mind about speaking no ill of the dead, the Communists proclaimed in no uncertain terms their disdain for the renegade painter. Whoever had written it (and we all thought it was Colin) almost implied that Mavor, having preferred the seduction of reactionary bourgeois art to the truths of socialist painting, deserved to come to a sticky end.

And now the ugly truth was slowly sinking in: Titus Mavor
had
come to a sticky end. And lurking underneath the gossip was always the frisson of fear and doubt and mutual suspicion. For the answer to the question, who would have wanted to murder Mavor, was: almost everyone we knew.

.........

When I answered the door, out of breath as I'd run down three flights of stairs, I found myself face to face with a stranger in a crombie and a trilby hat: the police. He raised his hat. Eerily, he reminded me of Neville Heath; the same neat face, the same dapper toothbrush moustache. ‘Detective Inspector Bannister,' he said. He stamped his feet to get the snow off, and I led him up to the flat.

‘Shocking weather,' he said, ‘Can't believe this freeze can go on much longer – and then again, it seems as if it don't want ever to end.'

Alan was standing tousled in the kitchen, in pyjama trousers and two sweaters. ‘Who was it?' he shouted when he heard my footsteps.

‘It's the police to see us,' I said brightly. I wasn't apprehensive; why should I be? I offered him tea or coffee, which he refused. The kitchen was such a mess that I showed him into the stale-smelling, chilly sitting room.

‘I'm sorry to trouble you,' said the inspector, ‘I'm making enquiries about the death of the artist, Titus Mavor. I believe it was you, sir, who found him and reported the death.'

Alan pushed back his tousled hair. ‘That's right.'

‘I wonder if you could just go into a little more detail as to exactly what you found. There wasn't a lot of information in the original report.'

The constable at Tottenham Court Road police station had, I remembered, been a bit casual about it all. The experience of the war, when the finding of corpses was a routine event, must have blunted his sense of urgency; it was the Aftermath effect again.

Alan described Mavor lying on his sofa and the debris surrounding him. He, like me, had noticed the way canvases had been roughly treated. Inspector Bannister ignored that information; he was more interested in Mavor's appearance, the bottles, the smell.

He also wanted to know why we'd visited Mavor on that Saturday morning. Perhaps it was naïve of me, but this did come as a surprise. I hadn't expected him to be interested in us. Alan looked blank. He'd probably forgotten what we'd told the other policeman. I certainly had. Finally Alan said hesitantly: ‘He and I – there was some talk of our working together on a film.'

A look of almost salacious interest appeared on Detective Inspector Bannister's face, as if film making were some dubious activity, somehow not quite nice. ‘A film, sir?' He put his head on one side.

Alan was happy to enlighten someone he'd all too obviously cast as a philistine. He spattered names and information about, and told Inspector Bannister rather too much, I thought, about Radu, Hugh and Colin. At the name of Gwendolen Grey the policeman smiled. ‘Ah,' he said, ‘
House of Shadows
; a very … unusual film. My wife greatly enjoyed it.' He paused. Then: ‘So the deceased was a friend of yours. Would you know, did he have enemies? Anyone who had a grudge against him? Professional rivalries, anything like that? We've heard he was a somewhat … controversial character. Colourful, but controversial. As his friend, you might be able to help us there.'

‘He wasn't a close friend, but I suppose you could say we moved in the same social circles, before the war, but then I lost sight of him again. He wanted to be a war artist, but there was never any chance of that and he rather went to the dogs, I gathered. I've – well, we've seen him a few times recently again, that's all. Isn't that right, Dinah?'

I nodded. I'd been brought up to look on the police as ‘on our side'. My father regarded them as civilian NCOs and other ranks, subordinates, good chaps, if a bit thick. Alan was the same; so far as he was concerned policemen were a kind of public version of the servant class (although of course everything was changing now and the servant class had disappeared, to my mother's dismay). Yet something about this conversation disturbed me. I had a strong suspicion the detective knew something he wasn't telling us.

‘He had a bit of a reputation with women, I gather, sir,' he said. ‘You must have known if he had a lady friend, a fiancée, anything like that – someone who might feel resentful if his behaviour wasn't up to the mark.'

‘There was a girl called … Fiona, I think,' I said. ‘We didn't really know her.'

‘Ah.' The inspector looked at us. ‘You see, a young woman was seen leaving the house in Mecklenburgh Square the evening before your visit.'

He was looking at me. My face felt hot. Oh God, was I blushing? I didn't look at Alan, and I knew he was looking anywhere but at me. I managed to shake my head, miming bafflement, swallowing hard.

Alan put in coolly: ‘You said yourself – he had a reputation.'

‘As a bit of a ladies' man, yes,' confirmed the inspector. ‘So, it might have been this – Fiona, did you say? Any idea where I'd find her?'

‘We just met her once. We didn't know her at all,' said Alan firmly. ‘And I think you're barking up the wrong tree there, if you don't mind my saying so. I'm sure she's perfectly harmless – just one of his models, probably.'

‘I see.' He stood up. ‘Well, thank you. You've been very helpful.'

After he'd gone Alan and I looked at each other. ‘Someone saw you.'

We needed something stronger than coffee. Alan found the remains of a bottle of Algerian wine.

I remembered the shadowy figure who'd passed me in the street. I'd looked back. She – he – was it she? – had looked back too. I'd thought at the time that whoever it was had gone into the house I'd just left, but that seemed unlikely; because that person would have found Titus dead and would – surely – have reported it.

‘We lied to Bannister,' said Alan. ‘We didn't say it was you who found Mavor.'

I knew that all too well. ‘If it comes out, it's going to look suspicious.'

‘Why should it come out?' Alan spoke belligerently. ‘It's ridiculous – no one could think you were involved! Anyway, we can't change our story now.' That was the problem. We were stuck with a version that was not quite the truth, and certainly not the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

‘Was it okay to tell him about Fiona? Was that the right thing to do? I hope he isn't going to think …' More guilty feelings!

‘Colman got us into this,' said Alan savagely.

Stanley was the only other person who knew I'd found Titus. So the one good thing out of all this was that Alan could hardly stop me working for him now. Our secret had bound us together.