Authors: Laura Wilson
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I—’ Unable to complete the explanation, she took her purse out of her handbag, scrabbled for the coins and pushed them into his hand saying, ‘Here you are,’ and walked away as fast as she could with her heels sinking into the pebbles.
She caught up with James at the bottom of the steps, grabbing hold of his arm and yanking on it to make him stop. She saw, as he turned to her, that his face was blurry and smudged with tears. ‘What are you doing, James? I had to give him two shillings, and I’m not sure we’ve got enough money to get home without—’
‘Diana!’ He took her by the shoulders, crushing her to him in an embrace. ‘I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please forgive me.’
As he drew her towards him, she became aware of a hard, flat shape bumping against her leg. Pushing him away from her, she said sharply, ‘What’s that in your pocket?’
‘Nothing, darling. You’re imagining it.’
‘No, I’m not.’
She made a grab for it and this time he shoved her away, hard, so that he lost his balance and sat down with a bump on the bottom step. Swiftly, Diana bent down and before he could stop her yanked the half-bottle out of his coat. It was whisky, and the seal was unbroken, which explained why she hadn’t smelt it on his breath. ‘When did you get this?’
‘This morning. When you were buying stamps.’
The postcard to Anthony Renwick, who was now in hospital, had been his idea. At the time, she’d been encouraged by the thoughtfulness of the gesture, but now she saw that it was merely a ruse to get her out of the way. It also meant that they had even less money than she’d thought.
‘I’m sorry, Diana.’ As he held out his hand for the bottle, she
looked down at his face and saw the forlorn hope of the beggar. ‘Please. I can’t manage—’
‘You’ll have to bloody manage.’ Stepping backwards, she turned and, holding the bottle above her head, elbow bent, was about to hurl it away from her as far and as hard as she could, when she heard a crunch of pebbles behind her and felt something tugging at the hem of her coat. Looking down, she saw that James was stretched at full length on the ground, dragging himself on one arm in a horrible parody of a parched man in a desert, blood trickling down his wrist from a cut on a sharp stone and soaking into the exposed cuff of his shirt. He wasn’t looking at her: his eyes were fixed on the bottle.
‘I’ll walk into the sea,’ he said, quietly.
‘It would certainly be quicker than drinking yourself to death,’ said Diana, acidly. What was the point? If she threw the bottle and it shattered on the stones, there would only be another, and another, and another … ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Get up!’ She went back to sit down on the step and broke the seal on the bottle. Averting her eyes from James, who was half-walking, half-crawling, to join her, she thrust the whisky at him. Not wanting to see the abject expression and the relief on his face as he took a greedy pull on the bottle, she stared straight in front of her at the indistinct line of the horizon.
‘Bless you, darling.’
‘James …’ She couldn’t bring herself to look at him.
‘Wait.’ James took another drink. She heard him set the bottle down carefully on the far side of the step so that she could not reach it, and begin rooting in his pocket for cigarettes.
‘I can’t do this any more,’ she finished.
James fumbled with the matchbox, opening it upside down so that the matches fell out, scattering around their feet. He scrabbled after them with trembling hands, dropping as many as he collected. She watched him with growing impatience and then, unable to bear it any longer, bent down to help. They grovelled
about in silence until all the matches were restored to the box, then James, leaning his elbows on his knees to steady himself, managed to light two cigarettes.
‘You should go,’ he said, handing one over. Beneath the red blotches his face was a sickly greenish-white. ‘Go home.’
‘And leave you here to kill yourself? Anyway, what home? In case you’ve forgotten, we haven’t paid the rent in over a month.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘Stop saying that!’
‘It’s all I can say.’ James turned his head away, as if he couldn’t bear to look at her, either. ‘I’ve dragged you down far enough, Diana. We both know it’s hopeless. You said so yourself – that you couldn’t do it any more. If it’s any consolation, you can’t be half as sick of me as I am of myself.’
Wearily, Diana got to her feet. ‘It isn’t.’
James didn’t look up at her. His shoulders sagged, and she wanted to bend down and put her arms around him. This charming, intelligent, talented man who had such appetite for all that life had to offer … No, said a small, cold voice inside her head. She must recognise, as he did, that there was, quite simply, no more to be said or done. She stood for a moment, staring down at James’s bowed head, and then, very slowly, began to walk up the steps to the esplanade.
‘I love you,’ he murmured. Diana turned, but he wasn’t looking at her – the words were addressed to the sea.
As she reached the top, a torn newspaper borne on the light wind slithered round her ankles like a cat, so that she had to shake it off. Apart from a couple of spivs, jacket shoulders as wide as yokes, talking together, there was no-one around. From one of the peeling shopfronts, their garish colours faded by seaspray and long neglect, she could hear the rumble of distant, placid voices intoning numbers after the bingo caller, like responses in church.
Standing on the top step, she heard a retching sound from below
and, turning, she looked down and saw James, still sitting where she’d left him, bent forwards from the waist. Her last sight of him was a heaving back and vomit splattering the cold, grey stones of the beach.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
A battered chocolate box with grey ash scattered across the empty waxed paper casings; a bottle of powdery aspirins; a cup of cold tea, scummy white on the surface; an open pot of face cream; a plaster model of an Alsatian dog with its tail snapped off; a broken carriage clock, and a lot of dust: Iris Manning’s mantelpiece. The rest of the room was no less depressing – dingy wallpaper, filthy windows, and shoddy, chipped furniture. It stank of stale cigarette smoke and unwashed clothing. Standing on the stained rug and trying not to breathe too deeply, Stratton stared down at the tangle of grimy blankets on the bed. On the off-chance, he knelt down to look beneath the sagging frame, but found nothing except an enamel chamber pot lined with a foul-smelling crust of dried urine.
Stratton doubted if Iris had ever conducted any business in this room. As far as he knew, she’d always worked outside. There was nothing high-class about her: ten bob for a wank; fifteen for a plate; thirty for the lot. Stratton knew her from way back. They all did. She’d been living and working on their patch since she’d absconded from reform school in 1938 or thereabouts, and no matter how many times they’d taken her back, she’d always returned. Now she was missing and had been for five days, and there was nothing amongst her belongings to indicate why, or where, she’d gone. Her sister, who’d decided to look her up after a separation of five-odd years, had reported it.
Missing tarts were not exactly top of the station’s list of
priorities at any time but at the moment, with yet another spate of car thefts – there’d been a steep increase in the three years since petrol had come off ration – and Lamb’s obsession with the preparations for the Coronation in June, they were very low indeed. Stratton himself had not taken the news of Iris’s disappearance too seriously, his initial reaction being that she’d got behind with her rent and scarpered, but now he was beginning to wonder. If she had done a midnight flit, she’d surely have taken such clothes as she owned with her, but the presence of a battered valise on top of the wardrobe and several frocks inside it suggested otherwise. Bugger the Coronation, he thought: I should have got here sooner.
A loud thump and several shouts from the stairwell suggested that Policewoman Harris was not having an easy time with the house’s other occupants. Stratton clattered downstairs and found a slovenly creature in a soiled dressing gown barring the way to the kitchen. ‘You know your trouble,’ she was shouting at Harris, ‘you’ve never had it!’ Seeing Stratton, she added, ‘Why don’t you have a bash at her, take that expression off her face?’
‘That’s enough, Bessie,’ said Stratton mildly, recognising her as a tom who’d been hawking herself around Soho for nearly as long as Iris.
‘It’s not my turn,’ whined Bessie. ‘You done me last week and I paid the fine. And you have to nick me on the street or it don’t count. I know the law.’
‘We’re not here to take you in,’ said Stratton.
Bessie stuck her chin out aggressively. ‘Well, what you poking around for, then?’
‘Iris is missing, and we need to have a look round.’
Bessie, who didn’t seem at all bothered by this news, sighed and moved away from the door. ‘Oh, go on then.’
The kitchen was in an even dirtier state than Iris’s bedroom. Stratton, shifting his feet on the sticky lino, tried not to recoil as he caught sight of mouse tracks in the congealed fat of a frying
pan. He could tell by the stiffness of Policewoman Harris’s back and shoulders as she looked in the cupboards that she was doing the same. Bessie pushed the remains of a meal to one side, and, perching on one end of the newspaper-covered table, began examining the soles of her bare feet. They were, Stratton noted, hard and yellow, with deep splits in the heels that made him think of cheese left in the air for too long.
‘When did you last see Iris?’ he asked her.
‘I told
her
,’ Bessie let go of her foot long enough to jerk a dismissive thumb at Policewoman Harris. ‘’Bout a week ago.’
‘Where did you see her?’
‘Here. She was on her way out.’
‘Did she say where she was going?’
Bessie shrugged. ‘I don’t know, do I?’
‘Do you think she was going to work?’
‘’Spose so.’
‘Do you remember what she was wearing?’
‘Well, she’d have had her coat on, but apart from that …’ Bessie shook her head.
‘Where did she go when she was working?’
‘All over.’
‘Didn’t she have a regular patch?’
‘Not any more. Got taken over, didn’t it? She hangs round the cafés and pubs, mostly.’
‘Which ones?’
‘The Panda Café, mostly. And she goes into a lot of the pubs round here, but the Champion’s her favourite.’
‘Does Iris have a current man friend – someone who looks after her?’
Bessie shook her head. ‘He’s long gone – six months or more. Gave up on her and found himself something better, didn’t he? She was always saying how skint she was. Even tried to borrow some money off me. I told her, I’m not
that
stupid.’
‘You thought she wouldn’t pay you back?’
‘
Iris?
Not likely.’ Clearly feeling that there was no more to be said on the subject, Bessie pulled a grip from her hair and began poking at the grime beneath her toenails. Averting his eyes, Stratton spotted an advert, torn from a magazine, tacked to the opposite wall: a drawing of a model draped in tulle and lounging on a sofa surrounded by eager suitors, accompanied by the legend ‘Charm and Beauty Course – Change your life for just 50 guineas’. A clip round the ear and a bar of carbolic soap would be a better bet, thought Stratton. Feeling that they were on a hiding to nothing, he coughed a discreet inquiry to Policewoman Harris and, receiving a shake of the head in return, thanked Bessie for her trouble and left.
The elderly proprietor of the Panda Café had a ravaged look, as though he were in the grip of some ferocious and terminal illness. His cheeks had collapsed and his teeth – which to Stratton’s surprise were clearly his own – seemed to have grown as his gums shrank so that his mouth was always slightly open, sticky white saliva clogging its corners.
His customers didn’t look much better. Such rays of sunlight as had managed to penetrate the dirt and steam on the windows and the fug inside illuminated dandruff on shoulders, ingrained dirt on necks and clumps of bristles on imperfectly shaved chins. In one corner, an old woman was muttering to herself from behind a copy of the
Daily Mail
. Peering across at the masthead, Stratton saw that the newspaper was over three months old.
The proprietor studied the photograph Stratton had produced. Swollen-eyed and truculent, Iris Manning glared back at him. ‘I know her,’ he confirmed, ‘but I haven’t seen her for a good bit.’
‘How long, would you say?’
‘Week, ten days … Something like that. She comes in quite a lot. I’ve had to speak to her about trying to pick up men in here.’
‘Did you have any conversation with her the last time you saw her?’
‘If I did I can’t remember. Nothing out of the ordinary, at any rate. What’s happened to her, then?’
‘That,’ said Stratton, ‘is what we’re trying to find out.’
They got the same story in the Champion, and the rest of the pubs yielded no further information, except for the fact that she’d been barred from both the Red Lion and the Dover Castle for drunken and abusive behaviour. The man on the desk at the Pontefract Hotel, a flyblown and seedy establishment that rented rooms by the hour, gazed at them with watery, disillusioned eyes and told them he hadn’t seen Iris in a fortnight and didn’t care if he never saw her again because she was nothing but trouble.
‘You don’t think she could have gone off with a customer for a few days, sir?’
They’d come in a full circle and were now standing once more at the top of the street where Iris Manning lived. Stratton stared down the row of soot-blackened terraced houses, their windowsills crusted with pigeon dung, towards Tottenham Court Road. A black cat which had been sniffing around a jumble of rusty dustbins on the pavement shot him a filthy look and slunk away to merge with the shadows in a nearby alley.
‘She’s not the type for that,’ he said. ‘Not nowadays, anyway. Strictly short-time. If she’d left a note in her room I’d have seen it. Don’t suppose you gleaned anything, did you?’
Policewoman Harris shook her head. ‘The other girls were just as unhelpful as Bessie. Couldn’t remember when they’d last seen her, and didn’t care. One of them said good riddance because Iris had borrowed ten bob off her last month and still hadn’t paid it back.’