Without the Moon (9 page)

12
GOODBYE PICCADILLY, FAREWELL LEICESTER SQUARE

Thursday, 12 February 1942

Kate Molloy had read Swaffer's piece in the paper. She had heard what all the girls were talking about in Gladys's salon, Berlemont's pub and at the
Entre Nous
. That Jack the Ripper was raised from the dead and had taken the form of an airman.

The man that stood staring at her, outside Oddendino's in Piccadilly, was wearing an RAF greatcoat. He regarded her without speaking as he smoked his cigarette. The smile that played thinly around his lips didn't meet his widely spaced pale eyes, which seemed to look straight through her.

Kate had spent five years on the streets and liked to think she had developed a sixth sense for dangerous men. She knew she was looking at one now. But Kate had other problems pressing. Money worries. The sort that took the form of a man who wore padded shoulders and turn-ups in his suits and never went away.

As if reading her mind, the airman took two steps towards her, holding up the glowing end of his cigarette to view her face more clearly. Kate instinctively patted her hair. Another thing she'd been told. He went for blondes.

“Will you go with me?” He sounded posh. Like Jack the Airman was supposed to.

“It'll cost you two quid,” said Kate, blood quickening.

“OK.” Without blinking, he went into his pocket and handed the notes across. “Where do you live?”

Kate wasn't going to tell him that. She rented a room for business purposes, a room on which she was two weeks behind, owing to the crocodile in the pinstripe suit who would be round with his rent book tomorrow. For the moment, Kate was just one degree more frightened of him than she was of the man in front of her. The feel of money in her hands would do that to her.

“I got a place in Marble Arch,” she said.

“I'll get us a cab,” he replied.

– . –

“Madeline Harcourt's her name. Constable Skinner brought her in, just after nine,” DS Tom Sheeney told Greenaway down the phone from West End Central station, Savile Row. “Found her staggering around the Haymarket with a young night porter who could barely keep her upright. First, he thought they was drunks. But it was the porter what broke up the fight between her and the airman, round the back of St James market, and picked up the gas mask the miscreant dropped. I had PC Skinner go back to the scene and retrieve her handbag while I took her statement.”

“And where is Mrs Harcourt now?” asked Greenaway.

“St Mary's, Paddington,” said Sheeney. “She was in obvious need of medical attention, but she insisted on giving her statement first. Brave woman.”

“Yeah,” said Greenaway, “and what did you tell them at Abbey Lodge?”

“That the owner of the gas mask RAF regimental number 525987 was wanted in connection with the assault of a woman in the West End.” Sheeney looked down at his notes. “And that when he returns to his billet I want him detained.”

“Right,” Greenaway's voice sounded distant. “Thanks. That's very useful, Detective Sergeant.”

“Why?” Sheeney asked. “You want him for something, too?”

But the line had gone dead.

– . –

Inside the cab, Kate tried to make small-talk. Her most pressing concern came spilling out instead. “I'd really like to make five quid tonight,” she told the airman.

“Don't worry,” he said. “Look what I've got.”

He went into his pocket and pulled out a roll. Winking, he extracted two more one-pound notes and handed them over. Before she could stuff them into her handbag, he had got down onto the floor of the cab and began pushing up her skirt.

“No!” Kate saw the cabbie adjust his rear-view mirror, his eyes meeting hers for an instant as the airman buried his face between her thighs, rough stubble against tender skin, a worming, penetrating tongue and the feel of teeth behind it. “You mustn't!” she said, pushing his head away. “Not here.”

Without saying a word, he pulled out from underneath and returned to the seat beside her. The cabbie kept his eyes on the road as he negotiated the roundabout and headed west down Hyde Park Lane.

“Then why don't we get out here and have some fun in the park?” Kate's companion suggested.

“Don't be silly.” Kate's skin was beginning to crawl, knowing what went on in there, knowing that only a desperate woman would ever punt for business in that dark tangle of bushes and trees. “We'll be there any minute.”

The cabbie looked at her once more in the rear-view mirror as he steered off the main road and into the little cobbled mews. He saw a woman afraid, biting her lip, but she didn't return his gaze until he was driving away and she was staring after his receding tail lights, the tall figure beside her taking her arm and steering her away.

– . –

Madeline Harcourt's eyes flickered open drowsily, the world around her morphine-blurred. There was a man sitting by the side of her bed, a big man in a black overcoat leaning towards her. As he swam into focus she discerned, to her relief, that he looked more like a pugilist than a priest.

“Mrs Harcourt, I'm sorry to disturb you,” Greenaway, ignoring the frowning matron casting the evil eye from behind his shoulder, held out his warrant card. “I know you've already given your statement to my colleague at Savile Row, but I need to ask you one thing. It's very important.”

Madeline found it impossible to read whatever it was he was showing her. The letters kept running down and off the side of the card. He put it back in his pocket and brought out something else.

“Is this the man what did this to you?”

The picture shocked her surroundings back into clear focus — the hospital bed, the dressings around her neck and head, the drip inserted in the vein on the back of her right hand. It was only a sketch, but those grey, flat eyes stared out of the piece of paper just as though she was back in their infernal gaze, back in that dark doorway on St Alban's Street. Her head jerked back and she gave a strangled little gasp, her hands involuntarily rising to her throat.

“It's all right,” Matron darted between Greenaway and her patient, taking hold of Madeline's hands before she could manage to dislodge anything. “It's all right,” she soothed, “you're quite safe now.”

She turned her head and glared at Greenaway. “I trust that will be all, Inspector?”

“Thank you, Mrs Harcourt,” he said, rising to his feet.

He stood outside the hospital, gulping in lungfuls of dank night air. Sleet enveloped him as he crossed Praed Street, his feet taking him around the corner before he even knew what he was really doing, stopping short at the corner of Conduit Mews.

He looked up at the room above the garage. The blackout was down. He caught a waft of scented violets and he closed his eyes, trying to shut out the memories of a little girl with copper hair who put on a headscarf and read fortunes in the tea leaves for everyone on the street, palming coppers instead of silver, back in the bad old days.

The hands on his wristwatch moved to eleven o'clock as he stood there, fighting the urge to press on the doorbell and ask her to look into her teacup and tell him why she had reappeared again now, in this time of madness, at the centre of his investigation. Then the visions sparked in front of his lids: of Madeleine Harcourt's terrified stare, of Ivy sat on her single bed with a room of blood behind her, of Evelyn Bourne stretched out on the cold concrete floor of an air-raid shelter and an elderly pathologist, dying in his eyes. Coming back to himself, he turned abruptly on his heel.

– . –

Kate lit the gas fire and turned the knob on her meter. The bare bulb above her head flickered, casting sickly yellow light across a single bed, a cabinet beside it and one moth-eaten armchair, then went out.

Kate swore under her breath. She looked back up at her client, standing in the middle of the room, a shadow only visible in the vague glow of the fire.

“Got a shilling for the meter, love?” she asked.

“No,” he said, pale eyes boring through the gloom.

“Give me just one sec, will you?”

Her heart hammering, Kate stepped into the kitchenette and stashed the folding he had given her into a tin she kept beneath the sink. She took a saucepan from her one-ring stove and crumpled some newspaper into it, lighting it with a match.

“What are you doing?” he asked impatiently as she brought her improvised lamp back into the room with her. He had already peeled most of his clothes off.

“I just wanted a bit more light,” said Kate, slowly unbuttoning the front of her jacket.

He watched, transfixed, as she peeled off the layers, his breathing became more distinct, more animal, until she was down to her lace-up boots and necklace.

The paper in the saucepan flared, crackled and extinguished.

“Stop there,” he said. “Lie on the floor.”

Kate scowled. “I don't do kinks, mister. It's the bed or nothing.”

“As you like,” he said. He smelt like an animal too, waves of him coming up at her; a smell of raw meat and dank earth suffused, making her think of foxes and the terrifying noises they made while coupling, banshee sounds she had heard as a child, back in the wilds of Ireland. His mask over her face now, grey eyes, pointed chin and goldie-blond hair completing the vulpine transformation. His hands on her; kneading and pulling, her skin crawling beneath his touch.

“D'you want to get on top, love?” she asked, hopeful of finishing him off quickly.

As he raised himself, Kate reached into the drawer of her bedside cabinet for a French letter. She was just tearing the packet open when he slammed himself into her, both knees to her stomach, the force of it sending her vision red and bringing a scream to her throat that was abruptly cut off as his hands flew to her necklace, twisting it into a noose around her neck. Panic, survival and the instincts of five years on the streets kicked in as Kate's fists connected with his wrists and she squirmed and bucked beneath him. The pressure on her windpipe grew stronger as he shifted his weight forwards, concentrating all his strength on snuffing her out.

Kate's head started to swim from lack of oxygen but there was something animal in her, too. As he tilted, she brought her booted foot up into his stomach, kicking with such force that he crashed headfirst off the top of her, landing on the floor with a startled yelp. Kate jumped to her feet, leapt from the bed over his sprawled form and made for the door.

“Murder! Police!” Kate screamed through the red-raw pain. She felt his fingertips brush her ankle as she pulled the door open, running straight across the hall to her neighbour opposite, a barmaid named Kitty O'Toole with whom she'd always been on friendly terms, hammering on the door. “Let me in! Let me in!”

Kitty, just in from her shift at the Duke of York, opened up in an instant.

“There's a man trying to kill me!”

She took in Kate's wild eyes and naked body and pulled her inside. Across the hall, her neighbour's flat was in darkness, but by the faint glow of the fire, she could make out the form of a tall man standing there. Another door opened along the hallway, an old woman stuck her head out, took one look and shut the door again, giving Kitty just enough illumination to see that the man in Kate's room had no clothes on.

“Could you give me a light, please?” he said.

“Call the police!” Kate's voice behind her was a harsh whisper. Kitty leant across her and picked up the vase from her occasional table, the first weapon that came to hand.

“Miss,” the man repeated meekly, “could you please give me a light?”

There was a box of matches on the same table. Kitty used her spare hand to throw them towards him. They landed in the middle of the hall. As he bent down to retrieve them, she gripped the vase tighter, raising it up to smash it down on his head if he made a move towards them.

Instead he merely lit his smoke and turned back to Kate's room.

“Have you seen my boots?” he called out.

Kate crouched behind Kitty, beginning to hyperventilate. But neither of them could seem to tear their eyes away from the airman as he stumbled around the room opposite, picking up his clothes and putting them back on. He started to hum to himself, a discordant rendering of an old Fred and Ginger song.

He stepped back into the hallway. Kitty gave him her most venomous barmaid's stare, the vase raised high above her head. Kate's fingers dug into her shoulders.

“You're him,” Kate hissed. “You're Jack.”

He went into his pocket, pulled out a roll of money. Slowly, he counted out eight pound notes and threw them at her feet.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I think I've had rather too much to drink tonight.”

Then he turned and walked away, picking up the refrain of his tune as he wove unsteadily down the corridor. Kitty and Kate waited for the door to slam behind him before they collapsed into each other's arms.

– . –

Claudette Coles stood under a shop awning across the road from Paddington Station. As she took down a lungful of smoke, she wondered for a brief instant what it was she thought she was doing here.

At seven o'clock that evening she had waved her husband, Herbert, off on his Circle Line train to Sloane Square and his job as a night manager at the Royal Court Hotel. Returning to the flat they shared in 187 Sussex Gardens, she had cleared the soup dishes from the dining table, letting water wash over them and her hands in the sink as she scrubbed methodically away, willing the mindless task to erase just as easily the banal platitudes she had shared with her old man over the consumption of their meagre meal, the routine they followed night after night after night.

The next time she had looked at a clock, it was the one in her bedroom, which told her an hour had passed. She sat down at her dressing table, stared at her face in the mirror, the cracks and lines that had appeared there over her seven long years of marriage. She began to plaster over the top of them, to powder and paint. Claudette had always looked more like a schoolmarm than a Windmill girl, but there was a certain sort of man, her husband included, that relished that sort of severity.