The Unquiet heart

TWO

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.

“Where are you from?” she asked me.

“Isn’t my accent a bit of a giveaway?”

She raised her thick eyebrows. “Which part?”

“Glasgow. Sort of. Do you always answer questions with a question?”

“Do you always look a gift horse in the mouth?”

I waited. And won – this round.

“I told you on the phone I’m a reporter. I work for the Trumpet.”

“I don’t read the Trumpet.”

“Why?”

“Too many cartoons.”

She coloured. “The words aren’t bad, you know!”

“I find better ones in The Times crossword. What can I do for you?”

I prayed she had a new line. I’d been tripping over journalists since the Caldwell case blew up, each of them trying to get his angle on the story. Not that I could deflect them from what they’d planned to write before they spoke to me. I’d learned in Glasgow in my police days that you could make exactly the same statement to six newshounds, and six different fairytales would appear the next day. A waste of time, but I was prepared to waste a little more of my time just to hold the attention of Eve Copeland, ace reporter, with nice legs.

“I’m looking for a new angle on the Caldwell murders.”

I let my forehead fall on to my desk. Then I raised it with a pained look on my face. She was trying not to smile.

“That was January, three months ago. I’ve seen a hundred theories from you people, none of them based on the facts. There are no new angles. Major Anthony Caldwell was mad as a hatter and took up killing young women because he liked it. End of story.”

It wasn’t, of course; it was the beginning. But it was all that anyone was going to get out of me. She ignored my theatrics. As I raised my head she had her eyes fixed on the scar across my skull that even my red mop can’t hide. She pulled a shorthand notepad from her raincoat pocket and flicked it open. She poised a pencil over the page.

“Do you believe that?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist.”

“But you’ve known a few,” she said with a lift of a heavy eyebrow.

“I spent a few months in a loony bin if that’s what you mean. All better now.” I tapped the trailing end of the scar that terminates just above my left brow, and smiled to signify the end of that little probe.

“That’s how we ran the story. Not one of mine.” She made it clear how little she thought of her fellow hacks. “I’ve been reviewing the facts and some things don’t add up. I thought there might be a more interesting truth behind it.”

“Five murders wasn’t interesting enough?”

She stared defiantly at me. The eyes were black olives swimming in milk, and the skin round them was a soft brown with a little fat ridge beneath the lower lids; harem eyes behind the yashmak. “Not in themselves, no. They’re just numbers, unless you know something about the murderer’s mind, or the victims’. My readers want the inside story, the human story.”

“Tell them to read Tit Bits.”

“I see we start from rather different views of a newspaper, Mr McRae.”

I shrugged. “What didn’t add up?”

“Don’t tell me you’re interested?” She balanced her pad on her lap and raised both hands to her beret. She dug out a pin that had Exhibit A in a murder trial written all over it, wrenched off the cap and shook her hair out. The briar patch exploded. This woman was unscrupulous. She went on, careless of the effect on me.

“It was the sister. Not the Caldwell woman, the upper class one…” She flicked through her pad. “Kate, Kate Graveney.”

“What about her?”

“She was… unexpected. I’m good at my job, Mr McRae. Thorough. I do the leg work.

My colleagues prefer to sit in the pub and make it up. I go look for myself. And I ask questions. I asked some of the girls in Soho, the working girls. It helps being a woman – at times. They told me that the classy Kate operated a little side business, she was a competitor of theirs offering a service that none of them could – or chose to – provide.”

I kept my gaze level and waited. I wondered if she’d met any of the girls from Mama Mary’s house. I’d have a word with Mary later.

“You don’t seem shocked,” she said.

“Nothing much shocks me any more, Miss Copeland. Especially if it’s made up.”

“So it’s not true.”

“Even if it were, I imagine if you were to print it you’d be sued till the Trumpet’s last blow.”

She had the grace to look rueful. “I know, I know. But there’s another thing.

The word on the street – and I do mean the street – is that Kate also knew about the murders. Maybe even helped. You know what those rich society girls are like.”

“’Fraid not. I don’t throw enough cocktail parties up here. Maybe I should. What do you think?”

“I think you’re covering for this woman, but I don’t know why. Love? Sex? A gentleman protecting a lady’s reputation?”

“Will that be all, Miss Copeland?” I got to my feet.

“Call me Eve. Can I call you Danny?”

“Call me what you like, Eve. But I have work to do. If you don’t mind.”

“Wait, wait. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get taken seriously as a woman in this business?” She shoved her hair back from her face. Her big eyes suddenly lost their certainty. I sat down.

“No, I don’t. I guess it’s tough. Now all the men are back.”

She nodded. “All with their old jobs guaranteed. I don’t mind. It’s fair enough.

But things changed when they were away.”

For the first time since she got here she was being sincere.

“It gave me a chance. I took it. I did anything and everything. I even got blown up in an air raid.” She reached down and pulled up her skirt. She pointed to a white scar running from her knee and disappearing up her thigh.

“I had my own daily column, for god’s sake. Then all the men came home, and bang, I’m back down the ladder. Not all the way. I still do a weekly. But I need to be ten times better than they are to get back to daily. Do you see?”

She was leaning over my desk, longing written across her exotic face. It made her suddenly vulnerable. Then I noticed; the East End accent had gone. Nothing replaced it. I mean she spoke without an accent of any sort.

I nodded. “We all need some breaks, Eve. But the Caldwell case is closed as far as I’m concerned. It’s too personal. All tied up in my memory problems and headaches. I don’t want to bring them back. Do you see?”

Her face took on new purpose. She pulled back. “OK, Danny, let’s leave the past.

I can’t run to a lot of expenses, but what if I could pay you to let me inside?”

“Inside?”

“Your world. Villains and crooks. Fast women and mean men. The underworld. A Cook’s tour of the wrong side of the tracks. I want you to introduce me to thieves and murderers. There are clubs I can’t get into on my own, unless I change my profession.” She bared a set of even, white fangs. I could imagine them sunk into a story and not letting go.

I stared at her. “You’re having me on, aren’t you?”

Her soulful eyes glittered with wicked interest. “Take me out on a case.”

“Seedy hotels, following Mr and Mrs Smith?”

“You do more than that.”

I shook my head. “Was this the career opportunity you had in mind for me?”

“I pay you for information. I write it up and we both do well out of it.”

“You make me sound like a copper’s nark.”

“A man of principle, dispensing justice where the courts fear to tread,” she inscribed in mid-air.

I laughed out loud at the image. But then I thought about where next month’s rent was coming from. And I thought about being paid for spending more time in her lively company. Who could pass up an offer like that? I should have; I was barely over the last woman in my life, real or imagined. I needed repair time.

“Eve, it’s a deal. If anything comes up, I’ll give you a call, OK? My rate is twenty pounds a week. Can your paper cover that?”

“Fifteen.”

“Eighteen plus expenses.”

She nodded and grinned and stretched out a hand. We shook. Like a regular business deal. She crammed her thatch under her beret again and skewered it to her head. I saw her to the door and watched her spiral down the stairs. I would have whistled as I walked back to my desk but it would have echoed after her, and she would have read too much into it.

I thought about the warehouse prospect and wondered if I should have mentioned it. I decided to see how my meeting went this afternoon. Then I might call and let her in on it. And, if I was honest, it wasn’t just about the money.