Кейт Уотерхаус - Soho or Alex in Wonderland

All right, Alex, think back, step by step. Christine’s body, belching blood. Batty old Else, wittering away like a fookin sparrow. “Do you think we’d better find a policeman?” she’d said. We. Both of us. You and me. And he’d left her to it, shit that he was. No wonder he’d blanked it out of his memory.

No, no, it wasn’t as bad as that, and after all, it was her corpse, she was the one who’d found it, there was nothing he could add, and look at it this way, he had to get back to Leeds. And if there hadn’t been a police car cruising by he was sure he wouldn’t have run out on her, not that he had run, he’d walked, briskly; but as it so happened there was indeed a police car, cruising along Old Compton Street, so he saw no harm in leaving her with the Old Bill. Should’ve given her his name, he supposed, but the silly old cow would never have remembered it, and anyway, what for? She had the full story, or as full a story as anybody had at this stage.

So he left her waving down the patrol car and, there was no other word for it, slunk off, following the siren sound of a jazz quintet that was floating on the early-morning breeze, and presently finding himself back in the sanctuary of the Blue Note.

“So yow left poor old Else to it?” said Barry Chilton brutally, when he and James had heard about his adventure.

“Why not? It’s her story, let her have the glory,” said Alex defensively.

“It’s not her story, it’s my story,” said James Flood, glancing at his watch and knocking back his wine. “Come on, let’s go.”

But it took some time to get the bill, or rather for Alex to get the bill, since it appeared to be his shout for the second bottle that had been plonked down during Barry Chilton’s set, so that by the time they got across to Hog Court it was already swarming with police officers, who were stretching black and yellow tape across the alley even as the squint-eyed waiter came panting along Greek Street on his second lap.

“I hope he doesn’t think it’s the finishing tape,” said Detective Inspector Wills, climbing out of the police car that had brought him all of two hundred yards from the lesbian club he had been investigating. “You seem to have got here double sharp, James, or was you just passing?”

“Heard something was going on while we were down at the Blue Note,” said James carefully. Alex offered silent thanks that he had not dropped him in it.

“Oh, yes, who from?” asked the detective guilelessly. Behind him, a more junior-looking plain-clothes man took out a notebook. Oh, fook. They weren’t going to get one past this crafty bugger.

“Someone who’d just come into the club,” volunteered Barry Chilton rashly. Trying to be helpful, he was, but the silly sod was only digging them further in.

“Name?”

“I don’t know his name. Never seen him before.”

“But it’s a members-only club, Barry. Was he on his own? Did he sign the book?”

“I couldn’t say.”

“Well, it’s easy enough to find out.” Detective Inspector Wills nodded an instruction to his junior, who made a note. “The Blue Note’s very fussy about these things, unlike some clubs I could name. So what did he tell you exactly, Barry?”

“Just that there’d been a murder in Hog Court.”

“A murder in Hog Court, eh? Now what can have put that idea into his head, exactly?”

Alex felt himself sweating and hoped it wasn’t visible. Barry Chilton tugged at his beard and permitted himself an embarrassed grin. “Well, hasn’t there been?”

“I’m asking the questions for the present, son.” A uniformed sergeant came out from Hog Court, which was now brilliantly lit with arc lamps, and murmured something to the detective inspector, who nodded. Something about the doctor wanting a word. Too late for the blurry doctor, reflected Alex, but he supposed they had to go through the motions.

Detective Inspector Wills turned to James Flood. “You’re still going down to the Waiters Club? Wait for me down there, would you?”

“You’ll be making a statement, will you, Benny?”

“No, James, you will.”

The threesome skulked off sheepishly towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Passing a line of parked police cars, Alex spotted old Else sitting in the back seat of one of them, with yet another plain-clothes man who was making notes. More to the point, she spotted him too and, for once recognising him, waved, before resuming what was presumably her statement. All Alex needed.

Gerrard Street, looking like a Chinese film set with its pagoda telephone booths, paper lanterns and shopfronts stuffed with Far Eastern bric-a-brac and restaurant signs making no concessions to English, was new territory to Alex. It was like being in blurry Shanghai, he told himself, although having no conception of what blurry Shanghai might look like. The few men — there were no women, not even hookers — drifting in and out of the narrow doorways of what James told him were gambling clubs were all Chinese.

One of these shabby doorways turned out to be the unmarked entrance to the Waiters Club, and it was here that Alex, hovering while James pressed the entryphone button, had an inspired idea.

“Look, lads, if you don’t mind, I think I’m gunner sit this one out. I’ve supped enough for one day and I reckon it’s time I was hitting the road.” The tube must be running again by now, or if it wasn’t it soon would be. Go as far north as possible on that Northern line, then start hitching lifts.

“Doing a runner, are we?” said Barry Chilton nastily. He could be a belligerent bugger on the quiet.

“No, why should I, what have I got to run away from?” demanded Alex with fine indignation.

“Detective Inspector Wills,” said James Flood.

Oh, well, worth a try. Alex found himself being escorted — hustled, he could have said — down the standard rickety stairs into the standard rickety basement room, furnished with the standard fire-sale cheap Formica-covered tables and wobbly cane chairs. There was a bamboo bar, obviously bought from some failed establishment similar to the one they were in, dispensing cans of beer, dishes of China tea and soft drinks. At the far end of the room a bunch of Chinese kitchen staff, still in their uniform of blue cotton chequered trousers and soiled white bibs, were playing some kind of Oriental dominoes. Three or four Italian waiters, slouched at separate tables, shouted to one another in rough dialects across the smoke-wreathed room. A couple of taxi drivers drank mugs of coffee over early editions of the tabloids. Christ, was it tomorrow already?

James had got the beers in. “Sorry, Alex,” he said firmly. “But before Barry and I get dragged any further into this, you’re going to have to come clean to Benny Wills.”

“Come clean about what?” demanded Alex, aggrieved. “I haven’t spoken a word to the bugger. It was you two doing all the talking. Why,” aggressively, to Barry Chilton, “did you have to tell him that someone came in and said there’d been a murder in Hog Court?”

“Because they did,” pointed out Barry Chilton. “It was yow, kid.”

Well, if he wanted to put it like that. Nonetheless: “So why did you both take it into your heads to cover up for me? I didn’t ask you to.”

“You didn’t ask us not to,” said James Flood. “You’re in Soho, Alex. Nobody ever gives anything away about anybody, firm principle. It’s like being in Wormwood Scrubs. Grasses unwelcome. Why do you think it’s so difficult to do my job on this beat?”

It seemed to Alex that James enjoyed saying “on this beat”. Touch of the Humphrey Bogarts.

“Yow can’t say you haven’t got a story today, anyway,” said Barry.

“True, and I’ve got to write the swine and make it good,” said the Soho correspondent of the Examiner . “So talk among yourselves for half an hour, will you?”