Curtain Call (21 page)

‘Oh, well . . . it's just the boss here – he doesn't like us mingling with customers unless –' She shrugged, leaving the sentence uncompleted. Then a light came into her eye, and her tone brightened. ‘Thank you, again, for the other night. I did so love being at the theatre.'

Not enough to stay to the end
, thought Tom, who nevertheless gave a little bow in acknowledgement. ‘I was wondering – er, an actress friend of mine is having a birthday party tomorrow night, not far from here. Would you like to come?'

Just then the door opened and one of the barmen came out, carrying a crate of empties. His interruption flustered her again, and she made as if to go back inside. ‘I'll probably be working late tomorrow,' she said.

Tom gave her the address of the hotel anyway, not really expecting her to come, then quickly went on his way: she was too nervous to be around.

Madeleine, to her own surprise, did come to Edie's party. She was rather touched by Tom's continued interest. It seemed more than form's sake that had prompted this second invitation. Yet she couldn't fool herself that the attraction was romantic. She now felt sure that Tom was what Roddy would call a nancy boy, or, in more hostile mood, a ‘poof'. Most of his friends, to judge from this evening, were male, and in the way he spoke about his employer, Jimmy, she sensed their relationship had once occupied more than a professional footing.

Peter, the only other person there she knew, had been charming to her, but she didn't want to exhaust his company. With Tom momentarily distracted, she excused herself to go to the Ladies. Inside the cloakroom she presented herself before the row of mirrors; at the far end a woman was leaning against the sink, head bowed in thoughtful absorption. Madeleine first fixed her hair, which had come loose from its pins, and then got to work with her lipstick.

In her lateral vision she sensed that the woman was scrutinising her. It wasn't just men, you see, women too were on the hunt nowadays. She was in clubland, after all, where anything goes. A tune she half knew came into her head, and dissolved just as quickly. She kept her eyes straight to the mirror, pretending not to have noticed she was an object of interest. She took out her compact and made a show of examining her nose. The woman had just dabbed her neck with perfume – it was Jicky, the same one she used – and was now edging closer. Madeleine readied herself – and on seeing her face recoiled in fright.

‘I'm sorry, I didn't mean to frighten you,' said the woman. ‘I'm – we've seen each other before. Haven't we?'

It was a face she had recently fled, the actress, materialised as if from a sinister masque or hallucination. But how,
how
. . .? Madeleine felt her hand gripping the cold porcelain of the sink. She needed it to keep herself upright. The actress was talking to her again, and she forced herself to listen.

‘It
is
you, isn't it? At the Imperial. You came out of the bedroom. I was standing there. Please say you remember me.'

Madeleine found her voice from somewhere. ‘I do – I do remember. As a matter of fact I saw you onstage. I recognised you.'

‘You mean – at the Strand?'

‘Yes. You were playing Hester.'

Now Nina looked shocked. ‘Golly, what an odd coincidence . . . Perhaps we were fated to meet!'

She said this in a lightly musing way, though Madeleine saw from her smudged eyes that the woman had been crying. They continued to stare at one another for a few moments, not sure of how to proceed.

‘I'm Nina, by the way,' she said, holding out her hand. ‘Edie and I are old friends.'

Madeleine offered her name, and hand, in return. Nina sensed the unavoidable subject hovering between them, blocking the light.

‘That afternoon – what was he – had you met him before?'

Madeleine shook her head, and swallowed. ‘We met in the square. He – he asked me to come to his room. The money was more than I'd ever been offered. I knew it was a risk, but – it's always a risk.'

‘I saw the marks on your throat. He was going to kill you, wasn't he?'

Madeleine's affirmative was the merest twitch of her chin. She swallowed again, her voice barely audible. ‘He had a tie around my neck, choking me. I remember thinking, I'm going to take my last breath in this room, and there's not a thing I can do.' She stopped, and looked intently at Nina. ‘Then I heard a voice – your voice. If you hadn't knocked . . .'

To Nina it still seemed remarkable that they were having this conversation at all. ‘When you saw his sketch, in the paper, did you not think of going to the police?'

‘What sketch?' asked Madeleine.

Nina stared at her. ‘Of
him
. It's been in the papers, surely you've . . .'

Madeleine shrugged. ‘I haven't seen it.'

‘But it's been all over the place – the Tiepin Killer?'

A glimmer of recognition dawned in her eye. ‘I've heard people talking about that . . . You mean –?'

‘It's him. The man who attacked you. He's strangled three other women.'

Madeleine's hand jerked to her mouth, so that Nina saw only her eyes, wild with horror. It was one thing to have encountered a random woman-hater. It was quite another to know that you had escaped, by mere good fortune, a psychopathic murderer. A creature of the headlines. She felt a bolus of something lurch upwards through her gut. At a crouched run Madeleine burst into the adjacent stall and clutched the bowl, gagging. All that came up was a mouthful of foul yellow bile. Her eyes watered with the strain as she coughed again, painfully. The tiles were hard and cold against her knees, but she stayed there, shivering, gasping, not certain of what her gorge might do next. Some moments passed before she caught a fluttering movement at the corner of her eye; Nina was holding out a handkerchief, which she took with a faint gasp of thanks.

When she at last picked herself up and emerged from the stall, Nina was leaning against the wall, arms folded, a cigarette in her hand. She was considering Madeleine with a narrow-eyed look that mingled sympathy and fascination.

‘Better?' she said, to which Madeleine replied with a nod, though her face still wore a lugubrious pallor. She examined her reflection in the mirror, briefly dabbed her eyes with the handkerchief, then looked away in digust. When Nina next spoke her tone had become businesslike. ‘You do realise that you and I are the only people who can actually identify him?'

‘You saw him too?'

Nina nodded. ‘Briefly. And in poor light. You could give a far better picture of him than I could.'

‘Maybe,' she said, in a non-committal way.

‘There's no “maybe” about it, dear. You were with him for – what, twenty minutes?'

‘I'm not going to the police, if that's what you mean.'

Nina expelled a thin plume of smoke from the corner of her mouth. ‘Look, he's killed three already, and they're no nearer to catching him. You could help save a girl's life.'

Madeleine heard the implication in her words:
like I saved yours
. ‘Easy for you to say,' she replied, hearing her voice harden. ‘D'you suppose I want to tell the police how I make a living?'

‘I think they'd welcome any information.'

She looked away. ‘Not from a tart they wouldn't.'

That silenced them both for a while. Tart she may be, thought Nina, but she wasn't in the usual run; her voice, her manner betrayed hints of a life once used to better things. She didn't have that gleam of pert calculation you met so often in Soho working girls. When she had raised her head from the toilet bowl a moment ago Nina had noticed a tiny gold cross at the hollow of her throat.

‘Are you a Roman?' she asked casually.

Madeleine blinked at her, and nodded. ‘I've not . . . in a while. Are you?'

Nina shrugged. ‘My father was. He used to take us to Mass with him now and then. Does that qualify me?'

‘I think so,' Madeleine said doubtfully, and they both giggled.

After a moment Nina's expression changed, became serious again. ‘Look, I've got a friend I think you should meet – he works near here.'

‘He's not the police?'

‘No, no. He's –' She hesitated, then plunged on. ‘He drew the face of the man you . . . met. It's a five-minute walk, that's all. I just have to make a telephone call to check he's there.'

Madeleine, though unwilling, saw the obligation she was under. This woman had saved her neck. A five-minute walk. ‘I'm here with a friend. D'you mind if we just slip out?'

Once they had retrieved their coats, Nina led her out of the hotel and thence took a left into Piccadilly. They didn't say much to one another as they walked, sensing the strangeness of their coming together. Arriving at the Nines, they proceeded to an upper room that was undergoing redecoration or some other job: the smell of paint and turps curtained the air. Pale dust sheets hung on the furniture, and drugget covered the floor. The dim gaslights revealed a work-in-progress, a mural of a group portrait, though the seated figures whose outlines had been limned were all without faces.

‘Hullo – Stephen?' Nina called into the gloom. From behind a screened door a man emerged, wiping his spattered hands on a rag. He smiled uncertainly on seeing that she was not alone.

‘Hullo, I was just finishing up,' he said, turning on a table lamp.

‘Stephen, this is Madeleine.'

He stepped forward and extended his hand, which Madeleine took. ‘May I offer you a drink?'

Madeleine glanced at Nina, who said, ‘I think we could both do with one, actually.'

While he poured Scotch into tumblers, Nina tried to maintain a reassuring face for Madeleine's sake; she felt the anxiety in her silence.

‘Down the hatch,' said Stephen as he distributed their drinks with unsuspecting cheeriness. Madeleine took a sip and felt the alcohol burn in her throat, but it tasted better than what she had just disgorged in the toilet bowl. Nina was now talking in a low voice to Stephen, whose expression turned sombre as he listened. He muttered something in reply, then disappeared behind the door. When he returned he was holding another rough of the sketch, which he handed to Madeleine.

She felt a shock of recoil as she examined the pencil drawing. It seemed to be his face, in outline at least. But it would be of no use to the police. She looked at Stephen.

‘You drew this?'

Stephen nodded. ‘From Nina's description. Is it him?'

‘I thought at first it might be –' She turned in puzzlement to Nina, who said, in almost a panicked way, ‘What? What is it?'

‘The hair . . .' She thought she had recognised the eyes, the mouth, but she realised that couldn't be the case. ‘I don't think it can be the same man. He wasn't bald.'

THE CLOCK ON
the mantelpiece had chimed half past midnight, and still they remained in the upper bar of the Nines, smoking, talking. Madeleine had left a little while ago. In front of them were ranged the half-painted figures of the mural, mute and faceless, yet somehow conveying the impression of watchers; Nina found them too sinister to look at for long.

Stephen, pacing up and down, stopped for a moment. ‘Can she be trusted? After all, I mean –'

‘Why would she lie?' said Nina. ‘He tried to strangle her! She's got more reason than most to want him caught.'

That much he had to concede. ‘But how can you both have seen this man and still not agree on what he looks like?'

She shrugged. At first she had thought Madeleine was mistaken, and asked her to look more closely. It
had
to be him, surely? No – she had examined the portrait again – the man who had attacked her in room 408 had dark hair.

Nina ticked her nails against the glass tumbler, thinking. ‘Unless' – she began, looking up of a sudden – ‘is it possible there were two men there, one in the bathroom . . .?'

‘How long was it between the girl – Madeleine – running past you and your entering the room?'

‘I don't know – ten seconds, maybe, allowing for the little half-corridor that connects the door to the room.'

He thought about this for a moment, then wrinkled his nose. ‘Unlikely. Wouldn't she have noticed if another man had been there?' Another silence intervened before he spoke again. ‘It leaves one other possibility to consider.'

‘Which is . . .?'

‘Which is that the man you saw wasn't the Tiepin Killer. I know the circumstantial evidence is strong that he was in the hotel that afternoon – but it's not a cast-iron certainty. The man in 408 may just have been a random lunatic. After all, no one has identified him yet from that drawing.'

‘But it must be him – he was that close to killing her –'

Stephen shook his head. ‘But he
didn't
, which at the very least raises a doubt. This man doesn't make mistakes – he's killed three women so far and the police haven't a clue. The one person who may have encountered him has categorically stated that the sketch released to the newspapers is not the fellow who assaulted her. You see what this means?'

‘That we may have been in error –'

‘More than that, my darling. Our small contribution to the case may be seen to have misled the police. We could be accused of hampering their investigation.'

‘Not intentionally,' she said.

‘It amounts to the same thing. Because of us they may have been looking for the wrong man.'

Nina stared at him. The charge looked a difficult one to deny. It was as she had feared; they had invited catastrophe through the front door.

‘So what do we do? Tell the police I made a mistake?'

Stephen steepled his fingers, considering. ‘Best not, don't you think? Sleeping dogs, and all that.'

And, tired of pacing, he flopped down into an armchair. It was an unsatisfactory note on which to end the conversation, but Nina could think of nothing else to say. Her gaze drifted across the faceless figures on the wall. ‘When are you going to put faces on them? They rather give me the creeps.'