Maxim Jakubowski - The Best British Mysteries III

I loved it.

I wanted to be him.

Not the laughter and the jokes or the showy suit, and not fat like he was, certainly not that, but sitting there behind all those shimmering cymbals and drums, the centre of everything.

‘Tell us about yourself, Ethel,’ I said after a while.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to tell.’ Her fair, mousy hair hung almost to her shoulders, and she sat with her head angled forward, chin tucked in.

‘Aren’t you going to get in trouble,’ I said, ‘spending all this time with me instead of a client?’

She looked toward the door. ‘The maid goes home after twelve, and then there’s nobody comes round till gone one, sometimes two.’

I presumed she meant her pimp, but I didn’t ask.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘you saw what it’s like. It’s dead out there.’

She did tell me about her family then. Two sisters and three brothers, all scattered; she and one of her sisters had been fostered out when they were eleven and ten. Her mother worked in a laundry in Dalston, had periods in hospital, times when she couldn’t cope. She didn’t remember too much about her father, except that he had never held her, never looked at her with anything but distaste. When he was killed towards the end of the war, she’d cried without really knowing what for.

I felt a sort of affinity between us, and for one moment I thought I might reach out my hand, lean across, and kiss her, but I never did. Not then or later. Not even months down the line when she asked me back to the bed-sitter she had near Finsbury Park, a Baby Belling cooker behind a curtain in one corner and the bathroom down the hall. But I did take to stopping by between midnight and one and sharing a little of whatever I had, Ethel’s eyes brightening like Christmas if ever it was cocaine.

Foxy was around again, but not as consistently as before. There’d been some falling-out with his suppliers, he implied; whatever arrangements he’d previously enjoyed had been thrown up in the air. And in general the atmosphere had changed: something was clearly going on. Whereas Jack Spot and Albert Dimes had more or less divided the West End between them, Spot lording it over Soho with a certain rough-hewn benevolence, now there were young pretenders coming out of the East End or from abroad, sleek, rapacious, unfeeling, fighting it out among themselves.

Rumour had it Arthur Neville had been demoted to a woodentop and forced to walk the beat in uniform, that he’d been shuffled north to patrol the leafy lanes of Totteridge and Whetstone. More likely, that he’d made detective inspector and was lording it in Brighton. Then one evening in the Blue Posts there he was, the same raincoat and trilby hat, same seat by the door. I’d been round the corner at 100 Oxford Street listening to the Lyttelton Band play ‘Creole Serenade’ and ‘Bad Penny Blues’. Not my kind of thing, really, except he did have Bruce Turner on alto, and Turner had studied in the States with Lennie Tristano, which was more my scene.

I should have walked right on past him and out into the street.

‘If you can find your way to the bar without getting into a fight,’ he said, ‘I could use another pint.’

A favourite refrain of my mother’s came to mind: What did your last servant die of? I kept it to myself.

‘Scotch ale,’ Neville said, holding out his empty glass.

I bought a half of bitter for myself and shepherded the drinks back through the crowd.

‘So,’ Neville said, settling back, ‘how’s business?’

‘Which business is that?’

‘I thought you were in the bebop business.’

‘Once in a while.’

‘Lovely tune that.’ Pleased with himself, Neville smiled his thin-lipped smile, then supped some ale. ‘The Stardust, isn’t it?’ he said.

The Stardust had sprung up on the site of the old Cuba Club on Gerrard Street, and an old pal, Vic Farrell, who played piano there, had talked me into a job as doorman. I kept a snare drum and hi-hat behind the bar, and Tommy would let me sit in whenever my hands were steady enough. Which was actually most evenings now. I wasn’t clean by a long chalk, but I had it pretty much under control.

‘Oscar still running the place, is he?’

Neville had a liking for questions that didn’t require an answer.

‘What is with you and coons?’ Neville said, ‘Taste for the fucking exotic?’

Oscar was a half-caste Trinidadian with a bald head and a gold tooth and a jovial ‘Hail fellow, well met’ sort of manner. He was fronting the place for a couple of Maltese brothers, his name on the licence, their money. The place ran at a loss, it had to, but they were using it to feel their way in, mark out a little territory, stake a claim.

Neville leaned a shade nearer. ‘You could do me a favour there. Comings and goings. Who’s paying who. Keep me in the picture.’

I set my glass on the window ledge behind me half finished. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ I said. ‘I told you before.’

I got to my feet, and as I did so Neville reached out and grabbed me by the balls and twisted hard. Tears sprang to my eyes.

‘That ugly little tart of yours. She’s come up light more’n a few times lately. Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to her, would you?’ He twisted again, and I thought I might faint. ‘Would you?’

‘No,’ I said, not much above a whisper.

‘Say what?’

‘No.’

‘Good boy.’ Releasing me, he wiped his fingers down his trouser front. ‘You can give her my love, Ethel, when you see her. Though how you can fuck it without a bag over its head beggars belief.’

So I started slipping him scraps of information, nothing serious, nothing I was close to certain he didn’t already know. We’d meet in the Posts or the Two Brewers, sometimes Lyon’s tea shop in Piccadilly. It kept him at bay for a while, but not for long.

‘Stop pullin’ my chains,’ he said one fine morning, ‘and give me something I can fuckin’ use.’ It was late summer and everything still shining and green.

I thought about it sitting on the steps at the foot of Lower Regent Street, a view clear across the Mall into St James’s Park, Horse Guards Parade. Over the next few weeks I fed him rumours a big shipment of heroin would be passing through the club, smuggled in from the Continent. The Maltese brothers, I assured him, would there to supervise delivery.

Neville saw it as his chance for the spotlight. The raid was carried out by no less than a dozen plainclothes officers with as many as twenty uniforms in support. One of Neville’s cronies, a crime reporter for the Express, was on hand to document proceedings.

Of course, the place was clean. I’d seen to that.

When the law burst through the door and down the stairs, Vic Farrell was playing ‘Once in a While’ in waltz time, and the atmosphere resembled nothing as much as a vicarage tea party, orderly and sedate.

‘Don’t say, you little arsewipe,’ Neville spluttered, ‘I didn’t fuckin’ warn you.’

For the next forty-eight hours I watched my back, double-checked the locks on the door to my room, took extra care each time I stepped off the kerb and into the street. And then I understood I wasn’t the one at risk.

Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to her, would you?

She was lying on her bed, wearing just a slip, a pair of slippers on her feet, and at first I thought she was asleep. And then, from the angle of her torso to her head, I realised someone had twisted her neck until it broke.

He’ll hurt you if he can: just about the first words Ethel had said to me.

I looked at her for a long time, and then, daft as it sounds, I touched my fingers to her upper lip, surprised at how smooth and cold it felt.