They had reached the body of Christine Yardley, a.k.a. Christopher, lying face downwards outside the door of her rickety block of flatlets next to the darkened bed show, and clutching a bunch of keys. She was still wearing the backless electric blue satin number he’d seen her in at the Transylvania Club, but it was pulled up nearly to her waist to reveal twisted, laddered stockings that looked pathetically tawdry in the half-light of dawn.
“Or she could well have been raped, although I see she’s still wearing her knickers. Do you know how to give the kiss of life, young man?”
No, did he hell, but in any case she was so still she looked as if she’d already had the kiss of death. Crouching, Alex gingerly clutched Christine’s still-warm shoulder and turned her over on to her side. The electric blue satin was black now with the blood that still bubbled through it from the slashing wound in her stomach. The blood that had trickled from her mouth and down her chin to the crevice of her neck where she had haemorrhaged glistened wetly. Her eyes were staring.
“Oh dear, do you think we should perhaps find a policeman?” twittered Else, nervously rubbing flaking skin from her hands.
Alex staggered to his feet, turned away, tottered a few shuffling steps and was copiously and noisily sick. There was tomato in it, as always.
9
It had been the last eventful hour of a long eventful day. Or perhaps it was the first eventful hour of a new one, who could say?
Whichever, Alex was shagged out. So, where was he again? Right, the Waiters Club in Gerrard Street, because it said so on the short, plastic-covered egg-and-chips menu on the Formica tables. Did chefs and waiters go in for egg and chips, then, he wondered irrelevantly. Must do. They’d get pissed off with serving that fancy muck all night and would want something plain when it was their turn to eat. Be that as it may, how had he got to the Waiters Club?
Presumably James and that Barry Chilton had brought him here, carried him here for all he knew, because they were both sitting opposite him, James scribbling furiously on some scraps of wrapping paper he had cadged from behind the bar. But he had no recollection of getting here. Not because of being pissed, he’d stopped being pissed when he’d thrown up, or so he told himself. No, it was because of the shock. Trauma. Or so he told himself.
All right, Alex, think back, step by step. Christine’s body, belching blood. Batty old Else, wittering away like a fookin sparrow. “Do you think we’d better find a policeman?” she’d said. We. Both of us. You and me. And he’d left her to it, shit that he was. No wonder he’d blanked it out of his memory.
No, no, it wasn’t as bad as that, and after all, it was her corpse, she was the one who’d found it, there was nothing he could add, and look at it this way, he had to get back to Leeds. And if there hadn’t been a police car cruising by he was sure he wouldn’t have run out on her, not that he had run, he’d walked, briskly; but as it so happened there was indeed a police car, cruising along Old Compton Street, so he saw no harm in leaving her with the Old Bill. Should’ve given her his name, he supposed, but the silly old cow would never have remembered it, and anyway, what for? She had the full story, or as full a story as anybody had at this stage.
So he left her waving down the patrol car and, there was no other word for it, slunk off, following the siren sound of a jazz quintet that was floating on the early-morning breeze, and presently finding himself back in the sanctuary of the Blue Note.
“So yow left poor old Else to it?” said Barry Chilton brutally, when he and James had heard about his adventure.
“Why not? It’s her story, let her have the glory,” said Alex defensively.
“It’s not her story, it’s my story,” said James Flood, glancing at his watch and knocking back his wine. “Come on, let’s go.”
But it took some time to get the bill, or rather for Alex to get the bill, since it appeared to be his shout for the second bottle that had been plonked down during Barry Chilton’s set, so that by the time they got across to Hog Court it was already swarming with police officers, who were stretching black and yellow tape across the alley even as the squint-eyed waiter came panting along Greek Street on his second lap.
“I hope he doesn’t think it’s the finishing tape,” said Detective Inspector Wills, climbing out of the police car that had brought him all of two hundred yards from the lesbian club he had been investigating. “You seem to have got here double sharp, James, or was you just passing?”
“Heard something was going on while we were down at the Blue Note,” said James carefully. Alex offered silent thanks that he had not dropped him in it.
“Oh, yes, who from?” asked the detective guilelessly. Behind him, a more junior-looking plain-clothes man took out a notebook. Oh, fook. They weren’t going to get one past this crafty bugger.
“Someone who’d just come into the club,” volunteered Barry Chilton rashly. Trying to be helpful, he was, but the silly sod was only digging them further in.
“Name?”
“I don’t know his name. Never seen him before.”
“But it’s a members-only club, Barry. Was he on his own? Did he sign the book?”
“I couldn’t say.”
“Well, it’s easy enough to find out.” Detective Inspector Wills nodded an instruction to his junior, who made a note. “The Blue Note’s very fussy about these things, unlike some clubs I could name. So what did he tell you exactly, Barry?”
“Just that there’d been a murder in Hog Court.”
“A murder in Hog Court, eh? Now what can have put that idea into his head, exactly?”
Alex felt himself sweating and hoped it wasn’t visible. Barry Chilton tugged at his beard and permitted himself an embarrassed grin. “Well, hasn’t there been?”
“I’m asking the questions for the present, son.” A uniformed sergeant came out from Hog Court, which was now brilliantly lit with arc lamps, and murmured something to the detective inspector, who nodded. Something about the doctor wanting a word. Too late for the blurry doctor, reflected Alex, but he supposed they had to go through the motions.
Detective Inspector Wills turned to James Flood. “You’re still going down to the Waiters Club? Wait for me down there, would you?”
“You’ll be making a statement, will you, Benny?”
“No, James, you will.”
The threesome skulked off sheepishly towards Shaftesbury Avenue. Passing a line of parked police cars, Alex spotted old Else sitting in the back seat of one of them, with yet another plain-clothes man who was making notes. More to the point, she spotted him too and, for once recognising him, waved, before resuming what was presumably her statement. All Alex needed.
Gerrard Street, looking like a Chinese film set with its pagoda telephone booths, paper lanterns and shopfronts stuffed with Far Eastern bric-a-brac and restaurant signs making no concessions to English, was new territory to Alex. It was like being in blurry Shanghai, he told himself, although having no conception of what blurry Shanghai might look like. The few men — there were no women, not even hookers — drifting in and out of the narrow doorways of what James told him were gambling clubs were all Chinese.
One of these shabby doorways turned out to be the unmarked entrance to the Waiters Club, and it was here that Alex, hovering while James pressed the entryphone button, had an inspired idea.