Chapter 14 A Favour #3
“No need to get so het up,” Archie said, adjusting his tie.
He finished his drink. It seemed to revive him and he said, “Pretty damning for you though, eh, Flynn? Your spoor’s all over that place now.
” His intonation made the word sound obscene.
So that was it—the photographs had been nothing more than bait to get him inside that flat and implicated in murder.
He was tempted to smash a glass in Archie’s face, Norman be damned.
“It won’t look good for you when they find your French lady friend’s body,” Archie said, miming putting a noose around his neck and then jerking it while making a grotesque face. “Don’t want you to take the long drop, old man.”
“She’s dead?”
“As a doornail. Didn’t you stumble across her? She was pretty hard to miss. Can’t have been a pretty sight, old chap. Bet it gave you a bit of a shock.”
“What are you talking about, Archie? There was no one in the flat, dead or alive.” (Surely he would have noticed a corpse? Lying dead behind her own front door.) “You killed her.”
“As God is my witness, I didn’t lay a finger on the woman. I swear on Mitzi’s life.”
“You bloody fucking lying sod, Archie.”
“Gentlemen, I’ve warned you. This is a respectable establishment.”
Archie cast a wary eye at the landlady and said in a clenched whisper, “I really do want those photographs back, Flynn. Remember, I’ve still got that scarf.
Goodness, is that the time? Better be getting back to the old trouble and strife, she’ll be wondering where I am. Give her your best regards, shall I?”
—
Flynn flung himself into a cab at Waterloo. To find the cab fare, he had to turn his pockets out for every last halfpenny and farthing.
When he arrived in Romilly Street, he was dismayed by the sight of yet more police—two uniformed constables in this case. They seemed to be sprouting from the ground these days. Perhaps someone had sown dragons’ teeth beneath the pavements of Soho. (Some myth that Flynn vaguely remembered.)
The taxi driver must have seen the anxious look on Flynn’s face and addressed him in his rear-view mirror. “Want me to carry on driving for a bit, guvnor? I can let you off round the corner if you don’t want to talk to the Old Bill.”
“No, no, here’s fine. They aren’t here for me.” Flynn laughed, trying to sound jocular, but he supposed he only succeeded in sounding guilty.
But he was right—they weren’t there for him, they were there for Leonora Kane.
She was holding her arms out in front of her to make it easier for one of the policemen to snap her into handcuffs.
He caught a glimpse of a man, presumably one of Leonora’s “gentlemen,” hot-footing it along the street.
The constables showed no inclination to follow him.
“I wouldn’t mind,” Leonora said to one of the policemen, “but I only popped out to pick up a sausage for my breakfast.”
“Sausage! That’s one word for it,” the policeman said. “Pull the other one.”
Leonora leered and said, “Ooh, have you got more than one, duckie? Your wife’s lucky, isn’t she?” The constable gave a filthy laugh, and Leonora rewarded him with a friendly little slap on his arm, saying, “You’ve got a dirty mind, you.”
“Now, now, Leonora,” he rebuked, still laughing. “I could have you for assaulting a representative of the law.” They could have been on stage at the Hackney Empire. The other constable was not so friendly, but every act needs a villain.
“Can I help?” Flynn asked her.
“Don’t worry, duckie, I’ll be up before the beak in the morning and I’ll be back home by lunchtime, more than likely. The desk sergeant in Bow Street always makes me a nice cup of tea. He’s even got biscuits. Garibaldis.”
“Only for you, Leonora,” the friendly policeman chuckled.
“Get a move on,” the other, less amiable, one said.
—
Unsurprisingly, Flynn slept badly. His journey in the Land of Nod was peppered with unsettling dreams, culminating in a nightmare about the Festival Cake.
In the dream there was an incessant knocking on his front door.
He opened it and found the cake standing there.
“Mrs. Ramsbottom sent me,” it growled menacingly at him.
It had grown to the monstrous size of a tank and seemed to be intent on eating him in revenge for itself being eaten.
But surely, he had argued with the cake (quite reasonably, he thought), it was Mitzi Blinkhorn who should be the object of its retribution, not him.
To no avail, as the cake opened its jammy jaws, preparing to devour him.
The knocking meanwhile continued unabated, and it took him some time to understand that the dream wasn’t real but the knocking was.
His alarm clock informed him that it was barely seven.
Only bad news came calling at this inhospitable hour.
Was it Vigo and Tapper come to arrest him for Delphine Dubois’s murder?
Or for breaking and entering in Half Moon Street?
Or for Vigo’s shepherd’s pie having gone cold by the time he got home?
Or for impersonating a policeman (Detective Inspector George Smith)?
The list of Flynn’s possible crimes was growing by the hour.
He opened the door, and his brain took some reconfiguring when he saw who was standing there.