Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms, but after that I didn’t care.

Junkie – when did I first hear the word?

Applied to me, I mean.

It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.

‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren’t you in uniform?’

I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead, some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.

Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung toward my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the coup de grace, a swiftly raised knee that caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.

As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.

‘I hear you takin’ up the fight game,’ Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then: ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Arthur Neville, detective sergeant.’

The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.’

I nodded and left it at that.

In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.

‘Your pal from CID,’ I asked Foxy, ‘he OK?’

‘Arthur?’ Doxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o’ the earth, ain’t that the truth.’

Probably not, I thought.

He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.

‘Proposition,’ Neville said.

I shook my head. ‘Hear me out, at least.’

‘Sorry, not interested.’

His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’re carrying, right?’

‘Wrong,’ I lied.

‘You just seen Foxy; you’re carrying. No question.’

‘So?’ The H burning a hole in my inside pocket.

‘So you don’t want me to search you, haul you in for possession.’

Our voices were muffled by the fog. If Neville knew about Foxy but was allowing him to deal, Foxy had to be paying him off. If what he wanted from me was more back-handers, he had another thing coming.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

A woman emerged from a doorway just ahead of us, took one look at Neville, and ducked back in.

‘Information,’ Neville said.

At the corner he stopped. The fog was thicker here, and I could barely see the far side of the street.

‘What kind of information?’

‘Musicians. In the clubs. The ones you hang around with. Of course, we know who’s using. It would just be confirmation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy.’

Smuts were clinging to my face and hair, and not for the first time that evening I caught myself wondering where I’d left my hat.

Neville stared at me for a long moment, fixing me with gray-blue eyes; his mouth was drawn straight and thin. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

I watched him walk, coat collar up, hat brim pulled down, until the fog swallowed him up.

‘He’s a nasty bastard.’ The woman had reappeared and stepped up, almost silently, alongside me. Close to her, I could see she was little more than a girl. Sixteen, seventeen. Her eyes seemed to belong to someone else’s face. ‘Don’t trust him,’ she said and shivered. ‘He’ll hurt you if he can.’

Ethel, I found out her name was later, and she was, in fact, nineteen. She showed me the birth certificate as proof. Ethel Maude Rastrick, born St Pancras Hospital, March 17, 1937. She kept it with a handful of letters and photographs in an old stationery box hidden away inside the chest of drawers in her room. Not the room where she worked, but the room where she lived. I got to see both in time.

But after that first brief meeting in the fog, I didn’t see her for several months. No more than I saw hide nor hair of Detective Sergeant Arthur Neville. I’d like to say I forgot them both, though in Neville’s case that wouldn’t be entirely true.

Somehow I’d talked myself into a gig with a ten-piece band on a tour of second-rank dance halls – Nuneaton, Llandudno, Wakefield, and the like – playing quicksteps and waltzes with the occasional hot number thrown in. The brass players were into booze, but two of the three reeds shared my predilection for something that worked faster on the pulse rate and the brain, and between us, we got by. As long as we turned up on time and played the notes, the leader cast a blind eye.

As a drummer, it was almost the last regular work I had. The same month Bulganin and Khrushchev visited Britain, the spring of ‘56.

On my second night back in the smoke, I met Ethel again.

I’d gone looking for Foxy, of course, looking to score, but to my bewilderment, Foxy hadn’t been there. Nobody had seen him in a week or more. Flash Winston was playing piano at the Modernaires, and I sat around for a while until I’d managed to acquire some weed and then moved on.

Ethel’s was a face at the window, pale despite the small red bulb and lampshade alongside.

I looked up, and she looked down.

NEW YOUNG MODEL read the card pinned by the door.

When she waved at me I shook my head and turned away.

Tapping on the window, she gestured for me to wait, and moments later I heard her feet upon the stairs. The light over the door was cruel to her face. In the fog I hadn’t noticed what no amount of lipstick could hide, the result of an operation, partly successful, to remedy the fissure at the centre of her upper lip.

‘Why don’t you come up?’ she said.

‘I haven’t got any money.’

‘I don’t mean business, I mean just, you know, talk.’

Now that I’d noticed, it was difficult not to stare at her mouth.

She touched my hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.

An elderly woman in a floral-print overall sat like somebody’s grandmother at the top of the first flight of stairs, and Ethel introduced her as the maid and told me to give her ten shillings.

The room was functional and small: bed, sink, bucket, bedside table. A narrow wardrobe with a mottled mirror stood against the side wall. Hard against the window was the straight-backed chair in which she sat, a copy of yesterday’s Evening News on the floor nearby.

Now that I was there, she seemed nervous; her hands rose and fell from her sides.

‘Have you got anything?’ she said, and for an instant I thought she meant johnnies and wanted business after all, but then, when I saw the twitch in her eyes, I knew.

‘Only some reefer,’ I said.

‘Is that all?’

‘It was all I could get.’

She sat on the side of the bed, resigned, and I sat with her and rolled a cigarette, and after the first long drag, she relaxed and smiled, her hand moving instinctively to cover the lower half of her face.

‘That plainclothes bloke,’ I said. ‘Neville. You said not to trust him.’

‘Let’s not talk about him,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about you.’

So I lay back with my head resting where so many other heads had rested, on the wall behind the bed, and told her about my mother who had run off with a salesman in home furnishings and started a new family in the Scottish borders, and my father who worked the halls for years as an illusionist and conjurer until he himself had disappeared. And about the moment when, age eleven, I knew I wanted to be a drummer: going to see my father on stage at Collins Music Hall and watching the comedian Max Bacon, previously a dance band drummer, topping the bill. He had this huge, to me, drum kit set up at the centre of the stage, all gold and glittering, and at the climax of his act, played a solo, all crash and rolling tom-toms, with the assistance of the band in the pit.