Shamus Dust Read online

  I was sitting alongside her up against the crate, my hand cupped at the pulp behind my ear, caught the next wave of sour liquor and started retching again. I got on my feet, stood long enough to steady my head, then left her to the snow zephyrs dancing in from the alley and climbed the stair out of there, one step at a time.

  “They don’t help just looking at them, Mr. Newman. You want to say what happened? Because I don’t think it was a bus that hit you. Not today.” Louis took his aspirin bottle and shook some in my hand, screwed back the cap and dropped the rest in my pocket. I swallowed six, said no to his hip flask and looked around the tiny storeroom where we sat, walls lined with slatted shelves empty from floor to ceiling. In the end a death announces not in words but in the fall of words.

  “Miss Dillys is dead, Louis. Nobody I saw. I got in the way, just not enough in the way.”

  Louis’ gaze marked a beat. He set the hip flask on a shelf at his elbow without taking his eyes off me. “That could be most difficult for you, Mr. Newman.”

  He was right. And the more he knew the more difficult it could be for both of us. “I didn’t want you hearing it on the radio. Now help get me out of here.” Louis’ lip pursed and crinkled his moustache and we left it at that. He put a hand under my arm and the other around my wrist, the way you hoist an invalid aunt out of a bath chair, and by instalments got me from his storeroom to a service exit in the hotel basement. We didn’t talk. Likely we both were entertaining unchristian thoughts. But his look said getting in the way is never the complicated thing. The complicated thing is when you decide to make something of it.

  A wide, green-tile corridor dropped underground from the service door to the hotel’s own rail siding. From there I followed along the tracks into the deserted station, crossed a dozen and more stilled platforms floating in winter light and found the waiting room with the stair behind it that dropped down to the arches on Sun Street Passage. Dillys Valentine grew cold there where she had fallen, with nothing in her pockets to tell me anything and enough whisky on the air to give her hopes for better things to come. I sat on the crate beside her one last time, long enough to make our short goodbye. Then left her there—where she always could be found at that hour—and walked back along the alley named for a joke, into a day still weeping snowflakes.

  On Liverpool Street, a line of phone booths stood empty outside the entrance to the subway. I stepped inside one, dialed an emergency operator, left a message with the desk officer at Bishopsgate police station and hung up. It would be his second reported murder of the morning, in a square mile where the only thing you’re meant to die of is surfeit, with your stock certificates gathered around the bedside.

  FIVE

  A directory in the callbox gave me an address for Professor Garfield in Cross Key Square. But it wasn’t a square, it was an oblong with an access off Little Britain that opened on a courtyard planted with limes. It had been the yard of a coaching inn once. Snowed-in on a Christmas morning, it was a picture book collection of crowding mews houses, as deserted as the rest of the City. Over the entrance into the court a janitor’s apartment had a light showing and smoke drifting from its chimney, and beside the janitor’s mail slot was a board listing names against the house numbers. I walked the left side of the oblong as far as a blue painted front door and leaned on the doorbell, and kept leaning until a latch turned.

  The door was opened by a slim-built college boy dressed in a corduroy three-piece and a knitted necktie, wearing no trace of the smile he used for photographs. He set his feet apart and pushed his hands deep in his pockets for the look that comes with family money.

  “I’d like to talk to Professor Garfield. Mr…?” I held out a card and waited while he read it through. We waited a little longer while he took in the state of my coat and the makeshift bandage around my hand and then sighed and motioned me inside. We climbed to a drawing room at the top of a stair, where three squat windows looked out across the snow-white branches of the lime trees in the courtyard. The rest of the wall space was lined with display cases, like some forgotten wing of the British Museum. I glanced in at medals and dull coins, colored glass thin as eggshell, statuettes of gods and heroes inches tall, and small, bright patterns of mosaic. Every one of them labeled and dated.

  The college boy said, “Michael’s collection. I daresay it won’t make much sense to someone in your line of business. I’m Henry Beaufort, his personal assistant. You’ll gather he isn’t here.” He had near-set eyes, features a touch too fine, and hair tousled like the portraits on the coins in the professor’s glass cases. I wondered which came first, the way you wonder about people and their dogs.

  “In my line of business, the only thing that doesn’t make sense is poetry. Everything else I get by on.”

  He gave me his resigned smile. “We write our poetry in Latin, anyway. Look, I’m tidying up. You may as well sit down while I make some tea.”

  The room had two armchairs; leather boxes that you sit in with your knees pinned and your elbows either side of your ears, like a swimmer waiting for the start gun. They were set in the center of Garfield’s museum collection, either side of a low table. A large book lay open on the table with a magnifying glass on the page, next to a carousel of gilded angels that would turn and chime small bells when you set alight the candles. It wasn’t Christmas decoration. The house didn’t have any. Not crepe streamers or paper lanterns or presents under a tree. Not even a tree. As for the angels, they never would play the chimes because nobody would ever light the candles. The carousel was a collector’s item, like everything else in the room. I jammed in one of the armchairs and picked up the lens.

  The book was an exhibition catalogue, open at a double-spread reproduction of a very fine ink drawing, taken from an original that would have filled an entire wall. It showed a bird’s-eye view of the bombed-out City, so detailed that even without the magnifying glass it took the breath away. Look through the glass and I could follow every step I’d taken that morning. Fleet Street, West Smithfield, the house on Cloth Court. The Great Eastern, Sun Street Passage, Cross Key Square. Even the windows of the room I was sitting in, with the catalogue open in my lap. Henry Beaufort walked back in the room with a black lacquer tray, set it down and aimed his conversation for tea at the vicarage. “Remarkable isn’t it? The original was drawn during the war from a barrage balloon. You can see exactly where Michael discovered our Roman garrison fort. I was expecting he’d be here last evening when I got back to town. Why do you want to talk to him?” All delivered in the listless manner that signals rank and society for the benefit of strangers. He slid the lacquer tray along the table and folded in the second armchair, lifted the lid from a china teapot and trailed a spoon around inside it, the way he’d trail a finger in the water if I ever rowed him on the river.

  I set the catalogue beside the tray. “A Singer convertible was found abandoned in the City overnight. He hasn’t reported it missing yet, but the car is registered to Professor Garfield. Leave that aside for now. Do all his assistants get a house key, Henry? Or are you special?”

  Henry swallowed hard and forgot about his tea ceremony. “I stay here sometimes. Since the snow put an end to our fieldwork, I’ve been spending some days in the country with my mother.” The idea narrowed his mood and clouded his look. His mouth whitened around the edges. “Anyway, he spent those days with someone else. So, I can’t be that special, can I?”

  “Do you know that he did?”

  Henry had been raised to let his disappointments show. “I know he did last night. When I got back, I went into the Raglan to see if he was there. It’s our local bar. They told me he’d been in earlier and left with someone. You’re an investigator, work it out for yourself.”

  “What then?”

  “There are two flats above my father’s offices in town. We keep one for the family. No one was using it so I stayed there overnight. When I telephoned Michael this morning an
d still got no answer I came back here to wait.” Then, as if he ordinarily wouldn’t see the need, added, “My father’s an architect. Beaufort Partners.”

  I nodded and put a cigarette on my lip. “Tell me about Raymond Jarrett.”

  Henry fluttered his eyelashes. “I don’t recall the name. Should I?”

  “Maybe. He knew yours. As a matter of fact, he kept your photograph framed on the dresser in his bedroom. It ought to make him easier to remember. That is unless you autograph all your pictures.” I put a light to the cigarette and described the photographs on Jarrett’s dresser. Two people having fun on a shaded lawn one high-summer afternoon.

  It got me all of Henry’s attention. His society air evaporated. He gave me his lip-chewing repertory and then unbuttoned a hip pocket, took out his wallet and found two small square photographs the size of postage stamps from Samoa. He handed them across the lacquer tray with the look of Young Werther. “Both of us, taken last summer. I had two larger prints made from them and put in a frame for Michael’s Christmas card. Who the hell is Raymond Jarrett?”

  But I hardly knew the answer to that myself. I got Jarrett’s study-in-satin out of my pocket and let Henry get the gist. The pounding in my head was starting a cold sweat. “He was a known male prostitute, getting a little worn at the edges for trade. Lately branching into camera work and blackmail.”

  “Was? What does he do now?”

  “At around four-thirty this morning he was sitting in the professor’s roadster and had his new career cut short. What he does now is take up space in the City morgue.”

  Henry groaned, and while his eyes crimped shut and his head lolled, we made a simple exchange. I put his two summer garden pictures in my pocket with Jarrett’s and left my business card slotted in the sugar bowl on the tray. Against the hour when Henry got anxious about his boyfriend.

  SIX

  The Raglan’s saloon bar stepped down from the sidewalk on St. Martin’s le Grand. At Christmas Day noon it was a solid wall of noise and sweated faces at a line of tables that ran parallel with the bar, hot as a boiler room and swirling in a blue tobacco haze like river fog. I pushed inside and worked along the counter under loops of rocking paper chains. It was slow progress.

  Half the room away, a coal fire licked in a wide brick hearth. At the bar, a customer was easing down off a high stool an inch at a time, as if one slip could start an avalanche. I was level with him, standing in his way, put a hand flat against his chest and let him slide to the floor on his feet. At ground level he began taking an interest in his surroundings, still trying to get a bearing when he checked himself and peered in my eyes as if we might have belonged to the same library once. The mountaineer climbing the hotel steps, with the glassy smile and the smudge moustache, asked, “Have we met before?” His trademark way with conversation, three inches from the knot in my necktie and still couldn’t get me in range.

  I nodded in the direction of our last talk. “At the Great Eastern. You were decorous and sober. I was young and innocent. And if you’re thinking of leaving the building let me tell you there’s oxygen out there.” A recollection ghosted behind his eyes, but exploring it meant going back all of two hours and he swatted it away before it started nagging. By way of parting, he put his hands in front of his stomach, pulled in his chin and belched lightly, then patted my arm and stepped into the crush. I watched him leave, then climbed up in his place at the bar, took out a handkerchief and mopped under my lip. I was sweating like a stoker in a steam bath.

  A figure in the crowd had been following the pantomime. We caught each other’s eye in the mirror behind the bar. He wore a camel coat with a dark velvet collar, carried a briefcase under his arm as if nobody had mentioned it was Christmas, gave me a wry look and raised his glass. All I did was nod back in the mirror, but it was a mistake. The wry look in the camel coat floated off across the crowd. I made a giddy grab at the edge of the counter and missed. The room turned somersault, high laughter fluttered and broke in splinters, my knees went to milk. Then for the second time that morning, nothing.

  When I came around, there was a scent in the room I didn’t recognize and a wad of handkerchief taped behind my ear. I was trying to claw my shirt collar off the lump under the handkerchief, with a hand padded like a pitcher’s glove, when another hand pulled it away and a voice said, “Let it alone, it ought to have stitches. I’ve bandaged your hand as well. When you’re ready, your jacket’s hanging behind the door. You’ll find me along the hallway.”

  Floorboards creaked. A door clicked shut. The Raglan’s inn sign careened in a snow squall right outside the window. I sat up on a chaise longue, leaned my head against the wall to stop my brains spilling on my shoes and looked around. The chaise was in a tiny parlor with a side table alongside it crowded with china figurines. A gas fire burbled in a corner. In among the curios, a painted china clock was chiming a quarter till four.

  There were kitchen sounds along the hallway, and opposite the kitchen a door open on a dining room where another coal fire burned. It had a dozen places set at a table where the eating was finished, a sideboard littered with dishes, and three grown-ups with two livewire children seated in between them pulling Christmas crackers and fitting on paper hats. One of the grown-ups glanced over when I walked in the door, turned away from the children to pull aside a chair and asked, “Can you eat?”

  My stomach crawled to the edge of a pit and looked in the abyss. I shook my head. Nurse Greer wore the two lines that stitched across her forehead frowning or not, and a high, dark wave of hair fixed behind her ear with a tortoiseshell comb. She smoothed the skirt of a fashion-house dress in polka dots, and in an undertone that said it might be better than I deserved, “You look as though you’ve been hit by a bus. What are you doing here?”

  “It’s a theory, but it’s discredited. What are you?”

  She glanced around a room otherwise engaged, got up and walked to the sideboard and came back with a glass and a bottle. “I told you. When I can, I work here.”

  I sank the brandy she poured, too brittle to carry a conversation, and while the liquor worked its medicine, took out the miniature of Henry Beaufort in a summer garden and laid it in front of her on the table. She poured me a smaller one and waited. “He says he called in here last night. You recognize him?”

  She looked over the picture. “Last night? Yes, he was here. I worked the hours before closing. Who is he?”

  “When last night?”

  An eyebrow lifted and made her frown lines three. “I couldn’t say exactly. We were crowded. What has this to do with?”

  “Try, Miss Greer. About what time would you say you saw him?”

  She pouted, annoyed, coloring a little. “You really don’t care for anyone else asking questions, do you? He came in looking for someone late on. They come here together sometimes. It might have been around ten o’clock. I told him his friend had been in earlier and left.”

  I found Garfield’s picture and laid the two side by side. “He’s older, has lighter-colored hair, sports a brush moustache.”

  “His friend? Yes.”

  “Did you ever see either of them with Raymond Jarrett?”

  Perhaps she hadn’t seen it coming. Or perhaps she needed more time to think what the answer ought to be. Either way, it put an end to Christmas. Her napkin tossed at the photographs. Her chair scraped back. She chiseled an incendiary smile. “My neighbor? Is that what this is about? I told you already, I know nothing about him. Why won’t you listen to me?” She got up, smoothing out the dress again, and between bared teeth in case she wasn’t making it obvious, “You have no idea how hard you are to like when you’re awake.”

  The grown-ups and the livewires had already drifted to the kitchen across the hall. A figure collecting dishes at the head of the table looked over in my direction, stopped what he was doing and came around to where I sat. He pulled eyeglasses from his shirt
pocket and fitted them on his nose, leaned across me and took a closer look at the photographs on the table. The Raglan’s landlord had chins to spare and yellowing hair brushed in tight waves off his forehead. He wore a lime-check vest that might have struck his patrons as a little flat for Christmas Day, but that was before he remembered where he put his carnation-pink dress shirt and the stickpin for his purple tartan cravat. His mouth hooked down at the corners. A finger tapped Garfield’s photograph. “He was in here before nine o’clock, waiting for somebody who didn’t turn up. Then a youngster went over and got bought a drink. They left not long after.”

  The way he told it, they both might have been late for Bible class. I asked, “The boy he bought a drink for, he’s a regular?”

  “He was here again today lunchtime. I never saw him before last night.” I prodded Garfield’s picture aside and left Henry Beaufort’s. The Raglan’s landlord peeled off the eyeglasses and folded them back in his shirt. “Like Miss Greer said, he came in later asking after his friend and got upset when she told him he’d left with somebody else. Look, Mr. Newman.” He put a large hand on my shoulder and squeezed. “Young Estelle had a shock this morning. The matron sent her home. Lucky for you she didn’t want to be on her own and came in here, because we don’t have disorderly at the Raglan. I was for putting you on the street when you passed out. It was Estelle who said you were genuine.” He went back to collecting dishes for the kitchen and we left it that today was my lucky day. I drained off Nurse Greer’s painkiller and was last out of the room.

  SEVEN

  Superintendent Littomy kept his office on Snow Hill like a hothouse. At five o’clock on a late December afternoon it was sweating down the window glass. The superintendent lifted his gaze out of a file he was reading, jabbed a pencil at the seat opposite, winced from behind his desk lamp and launched the conversational opener of the day. “Good Christ, man, were you hit by a bus?”