Truth Dare Kill (5 page)

There didn’t seem to be as much damage here: no factories or docks to blitz.

Though lord knows how they missed the twin legs of Battersea Power Station. They say they’ll build another pair alongside, but I’ll believe it when I see it. It would look funny, like a table on its back. The streets were busier now, shoppers queuing for mean lumps of cheese or slivers of meat, cars rumbling along chased by their own exhaust clouds.

I was getting good and warm now and could open my coat collar a bit. I thought about the two women I’d met last night. The contrast. The accident of birth and where it leads you. I could guess how growing up was for Val, but I had absolutely no idea how it was for Kate. Money and position make everything possible. I wasn’t jealous, just curious, as you would be for another species.

Even that little blink of fear I’d seen in Kate’s eyes when she saw my scar had been quickly controlled – mustn’t show emotions in front of the servants.

But at least I knew how to contact Kate Graveney. I had her phone number, somewhere in Chelsea – of course. I was to call her the moment I heard anything.

With Val – Valerie Brown; I rolled the syllables in my mouth – I had nothing, and the thought of not seeing her again filled my day with a shadow that had nothing to do with the weather.

I came into Lupus Street and began looking for my number. I didn’t have to do much counting. I could see the gap from the corner. I walked closer but stayed on the other side of the street sizing it up. It was as though a giant bread knife had taken out a clean slice, leaving the buildings either side untouched.

I guess all the terrace buildings had been constructed one by one. I walked over. There was still some rubble in the back garden. Bare trees stood at the end, and an old shed. What was I looking for? A pair of feet sticking out of the debris? I walked into the garden. The grass was sodden and studded with bricks.

There was that depressing smell of burnt wood and plasterboard soaked by persistent rain.

I kicked a brick sticking up on the edge of the pile and saw something lying to my left. I bent and picked up a shoe. High heeled, navy blue, good leather and size 4. I didn’t need to be a Prince Charming to know whose foot this would fit.

And she was no Cinderella. I brushed it clean and stuck it in my coat pocket. I looked but I didn’t find the other one.

“Hoi! No looting here, laddy!”

I turned to see an old man in a big cardigan and knotted scarf waving his walking stick at me. His breath ballooned about his head. I put on my best smile and walked over to him.

“It’s all right, sir. I know the lady who used to visit here. She asked me to see if I could find her shoes.” I dug out the shoe and showed it to him. He still looked suspicious.

“What lady would that be? I live across the road, you know. I see what’s going on here.”

“She was using the house. It belonged to a friend.”

“The Jamesons. Been abroad, they have,” he said triumphantly. Then his wrinkled eyes narrowed. “She a blonde?”

I nodded. I bet this nosy old bugger watched every passer-by and all the goings-on.

“She might be.”

“Her and her fancy man?”

“Could be.”

His suspicious look had turned into a secretive know-it-all one. He was dying to tell me more.

“You her husband?”

I laughed. “No.”

“A private dick, then.”

So, not so daft. “This isn’t about infidelity, sir. Did you see the explosion?”

His face fell and crumpled with annoyance. “I was asleep, wasn’t I. Near threw me out of my bed. Thought it was Jerry starting all over again.”

“Did you see the ambulances?”

“Oh, yes. But I couldn’t see what they were doing. Fire engines and everything.”

I could see I’d get nothing else from him and finally had to be rude to get away from him. Lonely old bugger. I walked back towards the river and struck north towards Parliament, and to Soho beyond. I was thinking about those poor lasses that had been killed there, the last just four days ago. The trade of the victims, and the way they’d been butchered drew a pattern, but I couldn’t read it yet.

Because of their precarious line of business the first murder had barely been given a mention among all the other news. Though for my own quaint reasons I had picked up on it and began my cuttings collection. But the second jolted the city, and the third began to set up a clamour. Now it was front page with headlines talking gleefully of the new Soho Ripper and “Jack’s back!”

It was as though something wicked had followed me from the camp. I had a sense of their deaths, as though I’d known them or shared their terror. Maybe it was this that drew me towards their killing ground. Or my copper’s training. One day it would kill me.

I walked straight up Whitehall, still marvelling at how so many of those grand buildings had survived. Parliament had taken a stick or two but they’d just moved to another part of Westminster Palace. Funny, the bombs couldn’t silence old Winston but we, the grateful voters, did. It wasn’t personal, he was just leading the wrong party. But it must have hurt.

Nelson was still on his column. And pigeons had never left Trafalgar Square except to take a breather from the incendiaries. There was a lot of rubbish around. It had been a good night for some. The dustbin men were getting stuck in. I pressed on up by the Windmill with its signs claiming they never closed during the Blitz. They were promising a New Year’s Day special: half price for the first twenty customers. I slowed to take in the photos of the girls, splendid with their feathers and smiles and impossible legs.

I walked along Rupert Street. It looked different to the other times I’d come here; daylight versus dark anonymity. I entered the little hallway and knocked on Mary’s door. Silence, but it was still only late morning: time for rest, especially if there had been some new year celebrations. I knocked again, harder.

“Wat you want?! We no open, yet. Come back later!” Mary’s high thin voice cut through the door like a dentist drill.

“Mary, it’s me, Danny. It’s business.”

I heard nothing for a minute then grumbling and catches being taken off and bolts sliding. Mary’s little round face showed round the crack of the door. She wasn’t wearing make-up. She had no eyebrows. It was a shock to see how old she was. Blessed night-time.

“Wat you want, Danny? Girls not up. They need beauty sleep. Like me.”

She did.

“It’s about these murders, Mary. I need some information.” I was calling in a favour I’d done her a couple of months back. There had been a spate of stealing from the girls’ rooms. Mary thought one of them was the culprit but didn’t want the boys in blue rampaging through her house. I caught the thief on the fire escape round the back; he was the neighbour’s kid. Justice was meted out according to local custom: the kid was given a good hiding and cash changed hands in reparation. The problem stopped.

She opened the door a little wider. She was in a blue silk dressing gown that fell to her tiny feet. Her hair was tightly held in a net. She looked even shorter today, shrunken. I thought of my mother. “Why you interested, Danny? You private dick, not real Bobby.”

I smiled at Mary’s sing-song cackle; we suffered the same degree of incomprehension by the English at times.

“Call it professional curiosity, Mary. Can I come in for a minute.”

Her eyes narrowed even further, then she stood back and let me in. She glanced outside to see who might have spotted me – the neighbours, and hence the police, didn’t like callers much at any time, far less during the day.

The familiar smell of incense and cheap perfume hit me like a shovel. I would catch a whiff on my clothes for days after one of my visits. I didn’t come here often, and when I first knocked on Mary’s door it wasn’t so much about the act itself as proving something to myself. They beat the shit out of me in the camp; I wondered what else they might have knocked out.

Mary was a psychologist. She’d give Doc Thompson a run for his money. She took my measure that first time like a chef inspecting fruit at Covent Garden. She gave me green tea and talked to me, drew out a little of the story, a little of the need. Then she introduced me to Colette, a lippy dyed blonde with a happy heart. A natural at her profession. She told Colette to take her time, no rush.

I guess it worked as I’ve come back a couple of times since. Mary runs a clean house and it’s only for a wee while, till I can face up to the rejections on the dance floor.

Besides, I’d also dropped in on Mary on business, my business. I’m new to London, and it’s important in my line to know who the bad guys are and what they’re up to. You don’t want to be crossing anyone important when you’re on the scent. I learned that the hard way when I got mixed up in the affairs of a certain Annie MacGuire whose old man turned out to be making hay with the lady wife of a rival mob leader in the East End.

Annie was a brazen-haired, big-breasted girl who laughed a lot and wore more jewellery than Hatton Garden. She stormed into my office, bangles clashing like cymbals, demanding that I tail Mr Stanley MacGuire. Stanley seemed to be spending too many nights at the office. Which was tricky; Stanley’s line of work – putting the arm on late payers of the loan shark he worked for – placed his office in the back seat of a big Humber Hawk.

So I spent a couple of weeks and a lot of shoe leather finding out that Stanley was not so much putting the arm on people as putting it round a certain Laura Dayton, who had the edge on Annie by about ten years and twenty pounds. I didn’t know Miss Dayton was a Mrs and also fooling around. Or that Mr Dayton was well known for his trademark habit of breaking people’s shins with the iron bar he kept up his very big sleeve. It was an effective deterrent to folk who thought they might like a cut of his fag and booze racket.

I made my report, Annie threw a fit, but instead of – or maybe as well as; I never heard – taking it out on Stanley, she tracked down Laura Dayton to the Brickie’s Arms in the Old Kent Road and took a slice out of her rival’s younger face with Stanley’s clasp razor. Poetic justice, she must have thought. Gang war broke out, two pubs got wrecked, five people ended up in hospital, some with bits missing that would never grow again. And I began vetting my clients a little more carefully.

Mary’s ears were tuned to the jungle drums and she was happy to gossip except when it came to clients, for whom she would undergo torture to avoid naming or shaming. I followed her through to her tiny living room, and remembered to duck as we came in through the door to avoid the huge wind chimes that dangled from the ceiling. As ever, I was mildly shocked at the amount of junk on every flat surface and every wall. And, apart from the enormous pile of old newspapers in one corner, the overwhelming preference for red junk. I think the colour of my hair was the other factor in her being helpful to me.

I pushed aside an avalanche of red satin cushions and perched on the edge of her couch. Tea appeared to lubricate the conversation. “You sure you no wanna girl?

Can get one up, lazy cows sleep all day and night too if can.”

I grinned and shook my head. “What’s the story on the streets, Mary, about these killings?”

She turned her mouth down. “Very bad, very bad. Bad for girls bad for business.

Men stay away ’cos they scared of bobbies.”

I bet. “Does anyone know anything though? Anyone see anything?”

“Dead girls all work for one man. Big time pimp. No like my place. You safe here. I kill anyone who hurt my girls!” She raised her little arm and dropped it in a swift chopping motion. It was a threat not to be dismissed lightly. I doubted if Mary herself had the strength to squash a bug but she had good connections in China Town where the Tongs held sway. I also knew that Mary’s concern for the half dozen girls who worked here was more than just business or posturing; the girls themselves talked of her kindness to them. Mama Mary they called her.

“Do you know the name of the man? This pimp?”

“I know, I know all right. He Jonny Crane. Hard man. Don’t you cross him, Danny.

He chop you into chow mein. Eat you up for dinner!”

I stored the name away. “What else? Any sightings? Any disturbance?”

She shook her head. “Only bobbies. Big chief, big fat bastard. He come round, throw everything up in air. Make questions. Scare customers. Scare girls.”

A thought struck me. “What’s his name?”

“Wislen. Somet’ing like that.”

“Wilson? You mean, Inspector Wilson?”

“That him.” She nodded hard. “Stinky bad man. Always round here. He like girls, but no pay for them.”

“Wait, wait, Mary. Are you saying that Wilson comes round here and uses the girls? And that he doesn’t pay for it?”

“That right. He pig! But not here. Other houses. He know not come China Town house. Chop, chop!” She stabbed the air. “They say he hit girls and make ’em do bad stuff.” She shrugged. “That OK if girls say OK and he pay. But not for no money.”

A businesswoman to the roots of her dyed-black hair. I thought of Wilson and shuddered at what he might demand of a girl. Fat bastard indeed. I remember the first time I met Detective Inspector Herbert Wilson of the Yard. I’d been going for about six weeks and was starting to make some headway; a few clients, enough to pay the rent anyway.

Did I mention the cat? There’s a thin moggy with half a tail that comes by most days. It creeps up the stairs, pauses at the second top step and checks out the lie of the land. If it sees me at my desk and I don’t make shooing noises it comes up on to the landing and rubs itself against my door. It meows as it rubs.

I’ve taken to leaving a saucer of Carnation milk for it. That seems to work. It doesn’t come near me, doesn’t demand stroking or – god forbid – a lap, just recognition and milk, then it goes on its way, its stumpy tail the last thing I see as it glides off down the stairs.

Wilson scared the cat the day he paid me a visit. Its thin head shot up, its ears twitched, and it was away before I’d even heard the first steps. I heard his big feet clumping up the stairs. They even sounded like copper’s feet, relentless, heavy, full of their own importance. A hat sailed into view, then the shoulders of a big coat. The man wearing them was sucking for air. He held the top rail for a second or two till he got his breath. Then he came in through my open door. No knock. He just stood there wheezing, eyeing me and my place. I waited.