Shamus Dust Read online

  Yellow light waxed in the wire-glass. The elevator hummed in the way of a Tibetan monk, clawed upward, thought about stopping, then passed right by the floor. I dropped the cigarette and hammered the button. But it never works. The light behind the glass climbed on and was gone, like moonrise in a fog.

  TWELVE

  Bishopsgate police station was as quiet as the street outside. There was an auxiliary at the desk, due a raise for what she was doing to the uniform, who said Dr. Swinford had arrived early that morning, then left, and who knew how long she’d be gone? Not her. And there was no one around to ask. Everybody in the doctor’s department was still on holiday. Then again, since I had an appointment, if I wanted, I could wait. She leaned across the counter and explained how to find the medical examiner’s laboratory, with a soft, sad smile, as if the last one who went looking never came back.

  Halfway along a wide corridor on the fourth floor, a single strip of electric light cut across the linoleum at an open door. The laboratory was somber and deserted. A place where a textbook routine might get a man hanged faster than his wife could give him an alibi. It had no gargling tubes or chalkboards or flasks of smoking alchemy. Only brass-fitted cabinets filled with instruments, and high benches in close, dark lines, closed in a reek of formaldehyde. The examiner’s own office was sectioned off a corner, a half-glass affair with regulation file cabinets, a couple of hard chairs and a desk where he could sit and survey his laboratory. Templeton had his name on the door glass, over a list of professional qualifications that took in three continents. His temporary replacement didn’t rate a mention.

  The door was unlocked. I put on a light, settled in the chair behind the desk, and pulled open a drawer left with its key in the lock, in case I wouldn’t know where to start. The drawer had a tired copy of Smith’s Forensic Medicine inside, some thumbed-over procedure manuals, and under a wad of blank forms and police letterheads, a plain manila file marked for circulation with a name-list. I slid the file to the top of the heap, opened it flat inside the drawer and started reading.

  Twenty-four hours on from his murder, Raymond Jarrett’s file was thin and mostly filled with police photographs. There were pictures of Garfield’s car, outside and in, of Jarrett’s corpse stretched across the floor of the church porch, his gunshot wounds taken close up on the slab, and of the blackmail operation he was running in the house on Cloth Court. For the rest, there were statements from Jarrett’s neighbors in the court and a stiff envelope with the contents of his pockets and his wallet tipped inside. Clipped at the back of the file there was a page of close typing that looked like notes Dr. Swinford had made for herself concerning her two Christmas Day postmortems. Behind the sheet of typing there was a carbon copy, and the doctor’s private visiting card.

  If the file held it all, Raymond Jarrett had been carrying as little on him as anybody ever does who arrives at a time and a place they weren’t expecting to die: loose change, some folding money, a stamped envelope with the flap ripped off and a check inside, four snapshots, plus the emptied-out wallet. The statements from Jarrett’s neighbors you could have written in advance. Until police arrived Christmas morning, they hadn’t seen or heard a thing out of the ordinary. More than that, no resident of Cloth Court remembered seeing or hearing anything at all at that hour, except for the nurse’s next-door neighbor; a curtain-operator with jaundice in his eyes, who was old and ill and barely slept worth the name. According to him, the nurse had left home Christmas morning for her early shift at the same time as any other morning he watched and waited. Which made him surer about Nurse Greer’s timekeeping than she admitted to being herself. And while it was always possible she might tighten up her story, somehow you doubted it. Either way, her statement wasn’t in Jarrett’s file. She would have one all her own.

  I left the drawer where I could slide it shut with my knee, pulled Doc Templeton’s telephone closer and found a line to the switchboard. A slow, burnished drawl answered when the connection made. I said, “The boy who went missing, Louis. You told me he knew a housekeeper in the hotel. Where can I find her?”

  He took a second. “That would be Miss Irene, Mr. Newman. But she’s gone. The boy came in the hotel yesterday asking for her and made a big commotion. They showed him out and then they fired Miss Irene. She got a girlfriend here in the hotel. If you want, I can ask an address and call back to you.”

  I said I’d hold the line, heard the open and close of his door to the hotel lobby and lifted the four snapshots out of Jarrett’s file. They were a sequence, not good but recent and recognizable, of Michael Garfield on a City street in winter. In the first, he was leaning into a knifing wind, hands deep in his coat pockets and a scarf wound around his chin. In the second, he had a hand raised in greeting to somebody out of camera shot. In the third, they met, the new arrival with his back to camera, in an embrace trying for comrade-to-comrade that just couldn’t make it. And in the last, Garfield had turned his friend around and they were walking together arm in arm, Henry and his professor huddled tight against the weather. The pictures were ten seconds’ work, blurred at the edges and taken through a car’s windshield. Neither of the two subjects had known the first thing about it. I dropped all four back in the file, then pulled the check from its envelope. It was the second of its kind I’d seen in one morning.

  This time it was made out to R. Jarrett Esq. in the sum of sixty-five pounds, dated 24 December 1947 and written on the same private bank as the check the lawyer had handed me not an hour before. This time the same crabbed hand that signed it W. I. Drake had also filled it out. Which made it odd on two counts. First, because a day after the check was written, Councilor Drake told me he didn’t recollect knowing Raymond Jarrett at all. And second, because as a generally accepted principle of liberal economy, it’s the tenant who pays the landlord, not the other way around.

  The line clicked and Louis caught a breath. “She’s Miss Irene Voigt, Mr. Newman. Her last name I didn’t know before. It’s not a good name to own in these parts. Lives pretty close.” He read out an address in Spitalfields and then asked, “You take any brandy for that head of yours?”

  “Every chance I get.”

  He said he was pleased to hear it and we hung up.

  I pocketed Dr. Swinford’s visiting card and the copy of her notes, put Jarrett’s file back where she left it and sat thinking it over. The doctor had clipped Jarrett’s police history at the front of his file, the one she read to me yesterday at breakfast. But she hadn’t read it all. Perhaps it had looked too obvious to mention, or it struck her as coincidence and nothing more, but the one and only time Jarrett had brushed with the law, she’d omitted the name of the arresting officer. It turned out McAlester and Raymond Jarrett went back a long way.

  When he’d pulled Jarrett in seven years before, McAlester ranked detective sergeant. Now he was detective inspector, running not only Jarrett’s murder inquiry but Dillys Valentine’s too. It bought him a lot of latitude. His to decide what interested City detectives and what they left alone, what went in and what stayed out of the record, and when and how to improvise wherever he saw a need. If you were McAlester’s boss and not prim about his methods, running two murder cases together would have its appeal. Littomy would call it effective policing. The commissioner might buy it. You just wouldn’t want to be the citizen without a solid alibi for the first hours of Christmas Day.

  THIRTEEN

  Christ Church was set across the end of Brushfield Street like a stopper in a bottle, as if it had been put there for the purpose, its spire pricking at a lowering sky. The rest of the building was one more gutted shell standing over a crypt that had been a local deep shelter until the air raids ended. Halfway to the church, a cobblestone lane joined at right, where the iron barrel of a cannon was set in the sidewalk at the street corner. Beyond it a brick row faced Spitalfields Market. The address I had was fourth along the row.

  The house was three stories ove
r a wholesale fruit supply, already closed up for the day. It had a light showing at a second-floor window, and between the store’s two peeling shutters, a street door with a mail flap. I rattled the flap until the window light went out, then twice again before a chain dragged and the door cracked open. A slight, pale girl was standing sideways in the gap. She might have been seventeen and already looked defeated, wore a thin, powder-blue cardigan stretched across a thinner cotton dress and kept her gaze fixed on her shoes. The fingers of her right hand touched at an ugly, clotted stain under her cheekbone. “Miss Voigt?” She nodded without looking up. “I’d like to talk to you about Terry Reilly.” It brought her head level. Enough to show bleak-dark eyes and the right side of a spreading lip; livid, blood-filled and stretched taut as if she had one half of a fighter’s mouth guard in her teeth. I handed her my card. “Can I come in?”

  She bowed her head to read the card over, wound a dark curl around a finger, and stepped aside to let me through. We took a dim, damp hallway growing mold in stripes, then turned aside to a parlor at rear of the store. The sourness of the room stopped me on the threshold. The girl went ahead. A voice beyond her in the gloom said, “What’d he want?” A heavy-set figure sat like a pharaoh in a sagged armchair at an angle to a smoking fire. He had padded features flushed around the edges, a reddish wad of hair and scratched at a two-day beard as if it bothered him. The shirt under his suit jacket was missing its stud collar. His left hand propped a flat bottle of cane rum on the arm of the chair and seemed satisfied with the work. The girl didn’t answer, just walked to a window opposite and leaned against it hugging the cardigan. “Irene!” The voice was a thickened squall, and when it got no reply started rasping with the effort of climbing out of the armchair.

  The girl waited till the figure sank back sweating on the seat squab, and in a monotone said, “He’s here. Why don’t you ask him yourself?” Then to me “Want a cup of tea, Mr. Newman?” I said I didn’t want to bother her. “No bother. It’ll be company.” She pushed away from the window and brushed past me out of the room.

  The figure in the armchair followed her exit glassily, peered in the doorway where I stood, then puckered and spat on the smoking coals. “War’s over, Yank.”

  The parlor wasn’t flush with furniture. It had a gateleg table set against the wall behind the armchair, a mirror in a horseshoe frame strung above it, a dresser beside the window looking out on a yard and two souvenir dishes on the dresser to help raise the tone. “It’s never over, Mr. Voigt. It only moves someplace else.” Sometimes you aim to keep it civil and still you know you’re not winning the other fellow over. “I came to see your daughter on a private inquiry. But I’ve got a question for you after all.”

  “What question?”

  I walked up beside him, nodded at the door the girl had left by. “In a year she could be almost half your size and weight. Doesn’t she begin to worry you?” His eyes hooded and his forehead worked. Somewhere a dull connection made and gave him an itch. Voigt’s left arm pulled fast across his stomach, took aim with the bottle in his fist and swung at my kneecap. That anyway was the idea. But we were past noon already, he’d been leaning on cane rum since breakfast and the liquor was dogging his reflexes as well as his mood. I stepped inside the swing, enough to let his wrist crack against my knee and not the rum bottle, grabbed his belt buckle and hoisted him out of the seat. I twisted the bottle from his grip on his way up, shoved him hard off-balance and pushed the heel of my hand under his chin, breathed deep and heaved from the shoulder. His head snapped back and cracked the plaster wall. The horseshoe mirror jumped its hook, hit the gateleg table and splintered over the floor. His mouth slacked. Liquor drizzled between his teeth. His eyelids shuttered and the handful of shirtfront I had tight around his throat was doing nothing but prop him up. I took a step back and let him glide down the wall in a heap, tossed the bottle in the armchair, straightened my tie and went to find the girl.

  Tea stewed bitter on a stovetop. Irene Voigt set two cups on a deal table in the center of a spare, cramped kitchen, pulled out a chair and kept the right side of her face turned away. “He give you any trouble, Mr. Newman?”

  “Not this time.”

  “He will do.” The voice the same flat monotone, lisping from the swelling along her mouth. “What’s Terry done now?”

  “Not a thing that I know of. I’d like to talk to him and I heard he called on you yesterday.”

  The good side of her lip curled. She tugged a square of handkerchief from a sleeve and put it up to her mouth, sniffed and looked miserable. “Terry turned up at the hotel asking for me, in a worse state than usual. He upset a customer and lost me my job. It’s why I got hit.”

  I looked across at her. The way you look at the magician when he names the card you’re holding in your hand. The smudge moustache and the sky-high eyes, last seen exiting the Raglan bar at noon yesterday. And two hours before that, climbing the steps outside the Great Eastern Hotel, absolutely promising to be decorous when he made it inside. It had to be. The same Terry Reilly who arrived to see Miss Irene and made the commotion that got him shown the door. “You’ve got a picture of Terry?”

  She thought about that, dragged the table drawer into her lap, sifted among the ration books and coupons for her identity card, then slid it across the table. A snapshot sat loose inside the card, not recent or in focus but plain enough. Reilly, younger and without his trial moustache, the same dark loop of hair across his forehead and the brooding look he never left off. No mistake. We’d met twice already, we just hadn’t been introduced. “What did he want at the hotel?”

  “What does he ever?”

  “You gave him money?”

  “I didn’t give him anything. He took what was in my purse and said it was a loan till he saw somebody, then I’d get it back. At least he bothered with a story this time.” She sniffed again. “He said he’d got a place in the West End. I told him he needed his head testing, and how was he going to pay for it? He never listens.” But we both knew how Terry would pay for West End living. I took a photograph from my pocket and set it beside her picture of Reilly. She shot it a glance. “Who’s that?”

  “Raymond Jarrett. You don’t know him?”

  “I know he looks out for Terry. I never saw him. Is that what you want Terry for, Mr. Newman? For being on the game? Can’t you leave him alone?” She would have made the contempt louder and clearer if she could have, but the words slurred through her teeth. On the side she kept toward me she was just another growing girl, pretty in the way they don’t have to try for, with freckles dotting the side of her eye and running down her cheek.

  “I’m not police, Miss Voigt. Not even Revenue. How Terry pays his rent doesn’t concern me, but I’d like to keep the photograph. I can promise to return it.”

  She shrugged, as if a promise ever made a difference.

  “Keep my card safe, Irene. He hits you again, call me.”

  The hand holding the handkerchief lowered to her lap. She swung around slowly in the chair. From her right temple to the point of her chin a dark, soft web was closing her eye, ballooning her cheek and fattening the right side of her mouth and jaw. The freckles had no chance at all. She gave some time to unfolding and refolding the handkerchief, then said simply, “I can’t ever tell you anything, Mr. Newman. You know that.” I left her sitting at the table, closed the kitchen door and went back into the parlor.

  Voigt slumped in the armchair looking bruised, nursing the empty rum bottle for warmth and fellowship. I went over to the window and its view on a hencoop backyard, turned around and said, “Jarrett’s dead.”

  He blinked and stared straight ahead at an ancient calendar yellowing on the wall. Apart from the dresser’s souvenir dishes it was the only piece of decoration in the room. Voigt cracked his knuckles one to ten, as if they were the sounds his thoughts made when they fell in place. “So?” He sat hard back, put his hands between
his knees and squeezed until his heels lifted off the floor.

  “So, you would know about Raymond Jarrett, and when he put a new face on the street, you’d hear Irene had made a friend. Which would bother you. You’re a family man, Mr. Voigt. Your daughter and Terry Reilly are one thing, but you wouldn’t want her near Jarrett on any account.” The air in the room so thick it set my head pounding. “Maybe early Christmas morning, with nobody around, you warned him off and it got out of hand. Your warnings are apt to do that. Or is it all my imagination?”

  Voigt’s forehead creased. I shook him out a cigarette before he started on the knuckles again. He reached one out of the pack, waited for a match and beat his eyelids against the smoke drifting out of his nostrils. “Irene does what she’s told. Why would I go looking for Jarrett?”

  “Because she’s an age that doesn’t stay told. And because you knew Jarrett was playing with fire.” I took a cigarette myself and kept it between my teeth, to taste something other than the room. “Jarrett wasn’t only renting loose-limbed boys to bank clerks. He had a camera and a line in limited editions and a talent for photographing clients in special moments of distress. Not just any clients. He aimed at the happy few with a reputation to lose and a wallet to try to buy it back with. City money that will pay off because it can and because it doesn’t see it has a choice. Jarrett did the homework and made the introductions. His protégés took their tricks back to his studio to get the pictures. Blackmail can look that simple. It can also make unlikely people snap, and in these parts a City bigshot getting the squeeze put on pulls a lot of police attention. You wouldn’t want Irene anywhere close.”