Chapter Thirty-Two
Thirty-Two
They dumped the Hillman in the east of the city, on a Zeppelin bomb site that was still awaiting cleanup.
Duncan drove in over the unreclaimed brick rubble, wove past low stubs of walls the bomb had here and there left intact.
He let Garner out, then front-ended the car in a shallow crater at the center of the site.
Cut strips from the Hillman’s canvas awning with the sgian dubh, uncapped the petrol tank, soaked the rags for a crude fuse, then lit it.
They beat a hasty retreat.
The crump as the tank blew was undramatic, would not trouble anyone sleeping in the vicinity.
Flames rose cheerily in the body of the car as they watched, the windscreen splintered and cracked.
Shadows danced on the ruined walls as the vehicle burned, soft and cozy, as if from a campfire for Gypsies out of a tale.
They put their backs to the glow, walked westward.
A cold, gray dawn crept across the city at their heels. Had almost caught up with them as they slipped into the Doorbell Club through the service entrance at the side, and shut the door on the waxing light of day.
Entering the red-lamp gloom and slightly stale warmth of the club felt like an escape of sorts.
Or maybe just a postponement.
—
The main bar was still doing business, but only just. A well-fed, suited man in his fifties with an immaculate shave and a neatly kept mustache sat in one booth, bookended by two blond girls half his age clad in scraps of translucent silk and not much else, who seemed intent on cleaning out his ears with their tongues.
At the bar, a gaunt young man in an army captain’s uniform leaned over cocktail glasses and rubbed noses with a dark, voluptuous woman visibly stark naked beneath an open French army greatcoat she wore.
Farther down, Belle D’Or held court in her usual spot, sipping from her jade cigarette holder and talking quietly to the barman.
Blackout curtains on the windows kept out the pale axe of day.
Neither clients nor working girls paid Duncan the slightest attention as he led Garner to the back of the room, where Crammond and Arthur sat in the last booth, sharing a bottle.
Belle glanced his way as he reached her, a speculative look, but she said nothing, just plumed smoke out at him and switched away with chin and shoulder like an offended cat.
“Take it I’m not as popular with our hostess as I was a couple of days ago?” he asked as he and Garner slid into the booth with the other men.
“None of us are,” said Crammond. He pushed glasses at them, poured from the bottle—some generic Scotch Duncan had never heard of.
Their Chivas Regal days appeared to be behind them.
“Ye can see her point. Lassie agrees to hide one fugitive fir me, suddenly she has two on her hands. Three, if yir friend here frae across the Pennines needs shelter, too. And it’s aww gaunnae get a lot worse when the news comes oot about whit we did in Maunston. ” He raised his glass. “Sláinte.”
They drank reflexively.
“News may not come out,” Duncan tried gamely. “Maunston’s a ghost town, we all saw that. No one outside of Special Branch or the Commission is going to find the bodies. And I can see Hardy slapping a D notice on everything anyway, at least for now.”
“They’re still gaunnae turn up the heat, Duncan. Word’ll get oot, folk’ll get scairt, hiding will get harder. Belle and I have a good working relationship, but I cannae push it.”
“Aye.” Duncan sipped his drink again. “Fair enough. Where’s Niamh?”
“Put tae bed. She wanted tae wait up with us, but Belle wouldnae have her in the bar with her face the way it is. Givin’ the wrong impression, she said.”
“Yet here I sit,” said Arthur mildly. “Can see that Mrs. Pankhurst having some issues with that.”
“Shut yir hole, Arthur, ye’re part o’ the furnishings here, and ye know it.
Listen, Duncan, she’s been well taken care of.
Belle had one o’ the girls draw her a hot bath, dose her wi’ aspirin and somethin’ fir that cough.
They put her in a good room on the third floor, 307, end o’ the corridor. Ye should gae up and see her.”
Duncan nodded. “Garner here can’t go back to Macclesfield the way things are. He will need a place, at least for now.”
“Ah wiz afraid o’ that. This is getting oot o’ hand, Duncan.”
“Agreed.”
He heaved himself back to his feet, drained his glass, and grimaced—the Scotch was some rough old stuff. He put a hand on Garner’s shoulder.
“Sorry about this. Didn’t see it coming at all.”
Garner shifted uncomfortably under his grip. “Tha’re alreet, lad. Go see thy lass.”
He went—out through the discreet dark velvet curtain at the back that led directly to the Doorbell’s broad red and gilt carpeted staircase and the rooms above.
No one on the stairs as he climbed, no one on the landings, or the red-flock-wallpapered branching corridor he took on the third floor.
The cream-paneled doors to the rooms were all drawn closed and silent, the carpet underfoot deadened his footfalls like walking on moss.
Up all night, the whisky and the men he’d killed—it piled up behind his eyes, gave everything the detached sensation you sometimes got after the shelling let up and you were stumbling around a trench trying to work out who’d died and who hadn’t.
He turned a corner, passed a single door that stood ajar near the end of the row.
The oversweet reek of cannabis smoke, wafting into the corridor.
Duncan glanced in, caught a glimpse of one of Belle’s girls flat on her back in bed, staring at the ceiling.
She was naked to the waist, breasts pooled on her chest, a fat roll-up slanted between her lips, hair a soft blond halo. Smoke hazed the whole room dreamlike.
As he hesitated, the girl rolled her head to the side and looked out at him. He thought she made a faint snorting sound, a laugh so tired it never made it fully past her lips. Her eyes on him were as empty as a Huldu’s stare.
A second girl peered round the edge of the door. Saw him, pushed it firmly shut in his face.
He moved on, knocked gently at the door of 307.
No response. He turned the doorknob gingerly, eased the door open, and slipped inside.
Big velvet curtains at the window, the room sunk in gloom.
A narrow apron of daylight seeping through onto the ceiling above the curtain rail.
Niamh was a huddled shape under the covers, face turned away, black hair combed out loose on the squashy white pillows.
He knew instantly that she was not asleep.
“Duncan?”
“Aye, it’s me.” He closed the door gently, went and sat on the bed at her side. She didn’t turn to face him. “Just wanted to see how you are. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“I’m fine, I’ll be fine.” In a low, shaky voice that said she was anything but. “Thanks—I mean, thank you. For coming to get me out of there.”
He put his hand on her shoulder, tentatively. Couldn’t tell through the bedclothes if she felt too hot or not. “You had to know I would.”
“They told me you were dead.” He felt a faint shudder go through her. Now she turned, awkwardly in the tight covers, showed him her face. She’d been crying. “I thought you were dead, Duncan. How are you not dead?”
He crinkled a grin he didn’t really feel, touched the scar along his skull. “Nothing kills me, girl. I’m like your old Irish hero there, what was it? Cuckoo Lane?”
She snorted a broken laugh. “That’s not how it’s pronounced!”
She fought free of the covers, sat up and put her arms around him, hugged him to her.
Someone had lent her a long white nightgown, a little frayed in the collar he noticed, looking at it from a couple of inches away.
She breathed deep, and he felt it catch again, felt her strain against the cough.
It came out anyway, but better, he thought, than before, less harsh and hacking.
He held her, stroked her hair. He felt how the tension ebbed from her body like collapse.
He held her some more. I was so scared, she whispered into his ear.
They said they could do anything to me if I didn’t cooperate.
He held her. Her voice grew smaller. They… did things, Duncan, they…
He held her.
Finally, she pushed herself free from his grip, held him at arm’s length. She wiped at her face with the blade of one hand, sniffed.
“Did you kill him?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Billy Crammond said you would. He said there’s no stopping you once you start.” She stared at him as if seeing him for the first time in her life. “Christ, Duncan. What are we going to do?”
“Right now, what we’re going to do is sleep. Both of us, because we both need it. After that—” He shrugged. “We’ll see. Tomorrow’s another day.”
She tilted her head at the curtains, the apron of gray light on the ceiling. “Tomorrow’s already here, Duncan.”
He grunted. “Don’t remind me.”
—
They slept spooned in the big bed, under heavy covers, seven hours straight, according to the Mappin & Webb.
He dreamed of dead men reaching for him from the branches of nighttime trees, spiders promenaded on leads by old-fashioned Victorian matrons in the park, Mebhuranon looming fanged and grinning over him like some ship’s figurehead smashing into the room ahead of the prow she jutted from.
Vague memory of sounds from the street outside, the soft insistent patter of rain at the windows, of stirring to change position once or twice, stroking Niamh’s face, planting a kiss on the nape of her neck, of soothing her when she coughed in her sleep, but these could have been dreamed, too.
When he woke for real, the apron of light from over the curtain rail had brightened and spread into long blurred fingers, reaching across the ceiling almost to the door.
The pattering at the windows had turned heavier.
The rain, at least, had not been a dream.