Gordon Ferris - The Unquiet heart

He was beyond first aid, or indeed second or third. Bugger. His already pale face was blanched. Lank hair spread round his head, mopping up his own blood.

One hand twitched, trying to plug the holes in his neck. The other reached out and hung itself over the brass foot-rail like a drowning man. Suddenly the tension went out of his body. With a glint and a clunk, a knife dropped from the dead fingers.

As an ex-copper I knew my civic duty was to stay and answer questions and help them all I could with their inquiries, even accompany them to the nick and spend all night making a statement. So I joined the fast and shifty queue that was moving out the back door. The landlord held the door. He wasn’t wishing us good night. He was thinking of his licence and the mess on the floor and endless questions coming his way. I came out in a side street and scampered into the dark with all the other cockroaches. This far from civilisation, it would take a while for the bell of a squad car to reach us, but no sense in loitering.

I had no doubt my man had just been murdered. It was a set piece. But who set it? Gambatti? A complicated way of doing business. Someone who found out Gambatti had arranged the meet? But why did they wait till I showed? To warn me off? To make me a witness? There are easier ways of getting through to me, though I supposed I should be grateful for the warning. But I couldn’t afford to heed it.

My heart lurched again. If they could kill a man to stop him talking, what might have happened to Eve? What was so important? I walked the long dark miles home to Camberwell, mulling over the upheaval in my life that started just eight weeks ago when she walked into it. I should have stuck with my first feelings about her and thrown her out…

Eight weeks. If you were a student of morals and manners you could earn yourself a PhD by sitting behind my desk for eight weeks. They all pass through my office: the crazies with a grudge who want me to spy on their neighbour; the tortured and vengeful who want the goods on their two-timing lovers; the desperate who think you can find the son missing since D-Day; or the wife who walked out years ago and won’t ever come back, and you can see why.

They dump their sins and suffering on my desk with diffidence or bluster, tears or temper, certainty or fear. Most times they know the answer; they just need someone else to prove it or say it out loud. It seems to help them if they pay for it, though not all of them do. They want solutions and absolution from an ex-copper trying to make a living as a private detective in a rundown flat in a bombed-out corner of South London. I don’t tell them I’m also a former Special Operations agent and a one-time inmate of a concentration camp; every Londoner has a war story. Every pub echoes to their tales. They don’t need to hear mine.

I try not to turn anyone away. But I don’t always take on a case. It’s hard to be prescriptive. Hunger stretches a man’s ethics. I’ve tried drawing up a list of stuff I will do and stuff I won’t. I made a deal with myself when I started this business that I wouldn’t do anything illegal or immoral. But it’s not as if I wrote it in stone. Like when I had to do a bit of breaking and entering to catch a bigamist: I found myself torn between the legalities of jemmying a window, and the moralities of keeping two women ignorant but happy. Ends and means. It’s a daily wrestle with a rickety conscience.

I’m not alone. In this first full year of peace we still have rationing, and rationing brings out the spiv, and the spiv has more customers than he can handle. Who doesn’t need an extra slice of meat for the kids? Who isn’t fed up with their car on blocks, when a gallon of black market petrol takes the family to Brighton to put some sea air in their smog-black lungs? The law makes us all criminals. The latest regulations from the pinstripes at the Home Office test our loyalty, and after six years we’ve had enough. It’s about personal survival.

We suspended the ten commandments in ’39 and it’s hard to slip on the strait-jacket again; especially if you felt deserted by God himself.

Occasionally there are diversions. Like the woman I was waiting for. Eve Copeland wasn’t the first reporter to take up my time, but I was hoping she had something fresh to offer. Business was sluggish right now, after the flurry of interest a couple of months ago when my face was in all the dailies. Few of the inquiries had turned into jobs. Several just wanted to pick over the entrails.

It was getting that I could spot a leech at twenty paces. At least this lady had called the day before to book an appointment. I like that. It makes a change from the people who think that because I leave my office door open and a kettle on top of the filing cabinet, they can use it as a caff.

The little clock on the mantelpiece said ten past nine. She was late. It meant I could tidy my desk and put on my no-nonsense air of busy preoccupation – two seconds. I lit another cigarette to stop my fingers from drumming on the table and I checked the time again; I had one big job prospect – warehouse pilfering – and had to get over to Wapping by noon. Eve Copeland needed to get a move on or she’d miss her chance.

She arrived at my door breathless from the three flights of stairs. She may have sounded businesslike down the wire but the phone is a dangerous invention; you build a picture of a person from a voice, and when you meet them in the flesh it’s usually a disappointment. It was the reverse with Miss Copeland. Her voice had said pushy Londoner; her face said I’m the most interesting thing that’s come into your life since Johnnie Walker Red Label – quite an achievement, given my relationship with Johnnie.

I should be used to suspending judgement on people, especially pretty women with a business proposition. But I’m a sucker for blatant femininity. Something I’m working on. She strode towards me in a dark green gabardine belted to emphasise a slim waist. A black beret topped her out. She’d just stepped out of one of those sultry French pictures they sometimes show at the Odeon Camberwell Green – watch out for the men in the one-and-nines with raincoats across their laps. I could picture her under a street lamp in Boul’ St Michel, a cigarette hanging from her painted mouth and asking for a light.

I got to my feet as she cut up my lino and plonked herself down in my client chair. It creaked with the impact. Not that she was overweight; just a wee bit exuberant for the quality of the furnishings.

“I can help your career,” she burst out.

I blinked. “You think this is a career?” I sat down slowly and waved my hand round the tired attic. Brown lino, brown walls, yellow-stained ceiling that sloped on two sides. A desk, a phone, a filing cabinet and a door to my bedroom.

And me.

She took in the room and me with a long slow look. “What is it, then? A hobby?”

The diction was street-London, but there was a trace of something else in her voice; like she was hiding a posh accent to fit in. I guessed that her particular gang in Fleet Street didn’t wear blue stockings.

“Congratulations, Miss Copeland. It normally takes people at least a couple of days to start questioning my prospects.” I made a show of checking my watch. “It took you ten seconds. Do you mind if we start somewhere simpler? Like who you are and why you’re here?”

She cocked her head and inspected me for a while. I returned the stare, noting the big features, any one of which would look out of place on an ordinary face but all together on her strong canvas of bones and angles, added up to something a little short of beautiful and a little beyond fascination. Strands of chestnut hair spilled from the jaunty beret, a tarpaulin over a briar patch.