Without the Moon Read online

  Cathi Unsworth is a novelist, writer and editor who lives and works in London. Her first novel, The Not Knowing, was published in 2005, followed by The Singer, Bad Penny Blues and Weirdo, all published by Serpent’s Tail.

  More at www.cathiunsworth.co.uk

  Praise for Without the Moon

  ‘Brilliant and brave, Without The Moon blends murder and magic to create a vision of London as a spiritual maze. Prostitutes, psychopaths, detectives, villains and psychics move through its corridors, glimpsing heaven and hell in an atmosphere that is so charged it can almost be touched. Fact and fiction link as justice is demanded. The best work yet from a genuine, original talent’ John King, author of The Football Factory and Human Punk

  ‘What a fabulous piece of work this is. It practically out-Hamilton’s Patrick Hamilton in its sense of menace and place, conducting a kind of seance with that bombed-out but brassy London of the war-torn ’40s, on each page you can practically smell the cheap scent, powder, Brilliantine and black-market whisky’ Travis Elborough

  Praise for Bad Penny Blues

  ‘The author has been compared to cult noirist Derek Raymond, but here she enters a pantheon of writers exploring London lowlife that extends from Patrick Hamilton and Colin MacInnes’ Christopher Fowler, Financial Times

  ‘There’s something about the textured layers of Cathi Unsworth’s third novel that effortlessly draw the reader into the dark and disturbing environment she creates …Unsworth lives up to her growing reputation as one of the UK’s stars of noir crime fiction, combining hardboiled prose with vivid characters and a lucid sense of place’ Yasmin Sulaiman, The List

  Praise for The Singer

  ‘A cracking page-turner that feels authentic, authoritative and evocative. And it’s beautifully written. This is a bloody good book’ Val McDermid

  ‘Brilliantly paced, plotted and stylish crime novel from the hugely talented and highly original Cathi Unsworth’ Daily Mirror

  Praise for The Not Knowing

  ‘Brilliantly executed with haunting religious imagery, interesting minor characters, great rock ’n’ roll references and a spectacular ending. The Not Knowing is a cool and clever debut. Sleep on it at your peril’ Diva

  ‘Hugely entertaining debut from a future star of gritty urban crime literature’ Mirror

  CATHI

  UNSWORTH

  WITHOUT

  THE

  MOON

  A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

  The right of Cathi Unsworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  Copyright © 2015 Cathi Unsworth

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

  First published in 2015 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd

  3 Holford Yard

  Bevin Way

  London

  WC1X 9HD

  www.serpentstail.com

  eISBN 978 1 78283 066 5

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE

  HUSH, HUSH, HUSH, HERE COMES THE BOGEYMAN

  1Mood Indigo

  2Blues In The Night

  3You Rascal You

  4The Mooche

  5Paper Doll

  6There’s Something Wrong With The Weather

  7I’ll Be Around

  8Why Don’t You Do Right?

  9Don’t Fence Me In

  10You Always Hurt The One You Love

  11In The Mood

  12Goodbye Piccadilly, Farewell Leicester Square

  13After You’ve Gone

  14The Very Thought Of You

  15Straighten Up And Fly Right

  PART TWO

  PEG O’ MY HEART

  16Ain’t Misbehavin’

  17Jeepers Creepers

  18Oh, Lady Be Good

  19Cruising Down The River

  20I Get Along Without You Very Well

  21I’ve Heard That Song Before

  22Dry Bones

  23What Would Happen to Me If Something Happened to You?

  24Killin’ Jive

  25Haunted Nights

  26Riptide

  27Sing, Sing, Sing

  28It’s A Sin to Tell A Lie

  29Jack, You’re Dead

  30Guilty

  Epilogue

  Glossary

  Author’s Note On Sources and Acknowledgements

  For Caroline Montgomery, John Williams and Pete Ayrton –

  The Crucial Three

  Soon,

  We’ll be without the moon,

  Humming a different tune,

  And then …

  Irving Berlin, “Let’s Face the Music and Dance”

  PROLOGUE

  Monday, 27 April 1942

  Greenaway stood on Waterloo Bridge, breathing in the London night. Above his head, searchlights criss-crossed the sky in broad, geometric sweeps, cutting through the clouds and illuminating the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral like some vast modernist artwork, created by the forces of war. Below his feet, heedless of all conflict, the ancient Thames roiled on.

  Greenaway’s gaze rested beyond the horizon of the blackedout city and back through time. For two unrelenting weeks this past February, he had chased a pair of killers through the unlit streets of the capital, from bedsit rooms in Paddington and Soho, through Brick Lane barbershops to the place where he now stood – a bridge being constructed even as bombs fell all around it. The carnage he had witnessed flowed through his mind in crimson waves: he had not seen the like of it since he had served his country in the last war. The bitter irony being that both the men he pursued were trained killers – Allied servicemen who used their skills not against the enemy but on the easiest of prey – the women who worked London’s streets.

  As a Detective Chief Inspector, it had been Greenaway’s task not just to catch these men but also to make sure that justice was done. Today he had failed in that duty. Only one of them was now due his rightful date with the hangman. The other was free, out there somewhere in the dark, with plenty more victims to choose from. Never before had Greenaway arrested a villain who had not been duly sentenced, but today had made a mockery of him. Which was why he had returned here. His ingrained knowledge of the criminal mind and its habitual quirks that so often overruled common sense told him that the killer might just do the same. So he watched and he waited.

  Greenaway did not allow himself to think beyond what could happen next. Like everything else today, he faced territory previously unknown. He could only trust that when the moment came, the right instincts would prevail.

  He looked down at his hands, began to rub them together. As he did, he caught something out of the corner of his eye. The thin beam of light from a torch, bouncing a trail along the side of the bridge. A figure behind it, coming his way.

  Greenaway took a deep breath. His nemesis strolled towards him.

  PART ONE

  HUSH, HUSH, HUSH, HERE COMES THE BOGEYMAN

  1

  MOOD INDIGO

  Friday, 19 December 1941

  “What’s it say, Duch?”

  The Duchess could smell her before she even heard the soft footfall, felt the weight of hands on the back of her chair. The scent of soap and violets.

  Lil’s peroxide curls brushed against her companion’s cheek as she leant down beside her. The table was set for afternoon tea, in all the Duchess’s finery – a silver pot engraved with an Oriental dragon, matching sugar bowl and tongs, hand-painted
Japanese cups of exquisite delicacy – all throwbacks to an era long departed, a way of life neither of these two women would ever know.

  Beside them, today’s copy of the Daily Herald screamed headlines of German retreat from Moscow and Leningrad. But these had been folded beneath an advertisement, ringed around in pencil, reminding readers that the paper’s most celebrated journalist, Mr Hannen Swaffer, would be lecturing tonight at the Christian Spiritualist Greater World Association, Notting Hill Gate. A gas lamp of similar vintage to the crockery, shaded in engraved pink glass, emitted a rose glow across the blacked-out parlour. Al Bowlly, by now a ghost himself, crooned on from beyond through the radiogram.

  Outside the windows, the traffic of Praed Street rumbled along as the dim remains of the afternoon shaded into evening. The heels of commuters scuffled and clacked their way towards Paddington, guided by the thin beams of torches and the shouts of newspaper vendors at the station gates. Just around the corner, in their rooms at the top of the mews, Duch and Lil were cocooned from all that; the rest of the world passed by as if it might have been a dream.

  Duch’s lashes flickered as she inhaled Lil’s scent, the calling card of a profession that linked them to the time when their tableware was new. It was the first thing Duch had ever noticed about Lil, before she even turned to see her face – that beautiful, aquiline profile and those dark brown eyes that made her think of an Egyptian queen, and the shining silvery sea of curls that foamed around her shoulders – what had attracted her in an instant. Duch considered it her fate to protect this girl, young enough to be her daughter, as well as serve her. Even if the tea leaves kept telling her otherwise.

  “Will he be all right?” As usual, Lil was not thinking of herself.

  Duch’s eyes rested on the speckled whorls while her gaze reached beyond, summoning instead the features of the man she knew resided in Lil’s mind’s eye.

  He was handsome, all right. So handsome he could have been in the pictures, one of those dark-haired, chisel-jawed men who wore his trilby at an angle and his mac folded over his arm, shrouded in the smoke of cigarettes and his own intensity as he chased the likes of Jimmy Cagney across the big screen. This one wasn’t quite a private eye though. He was a journalist, on the Evening Sentinel – or a crime reporter, as he liked to put it. His byline read Frank Power, but he wanted you to call him Tom. A man who liked to live two lives, Duch thought, and this was what unnerved her.

  They’d first met him in a club in Archer Street, the sort of place where all the Little Caesars of London, the bogeys from the Yard who pursued them, and the inky-fingered hacks who took it all down, rubbed up together of an evening. He’d lit Lil’s cigarette for her, stared into her eyes, breathed in the scent of violets and completed the trajectory of his doubles in the cinema – fallen hard for the wrong sort of dame.

  Duch couldn’t really blame Lil – there’d been times she’d been no better herself for keeping the wrong sort of company. But there was this strange sort of innocence about the girl, despite the number of men who, on any other day, would have been steaming through this parlour and into the boudoir beyond, faster than the punters at Paddington rushing for their trains. Or maybe it was because of it. Lil went at her work like it was a vocation – Duch had never met a girl before who was so popular, so good at making most every kind of man feel happy – except for him, of course.

  “Vocation” was a word Tom Power might have used himself, being as he was a Roman, but he couldn’t understand that part of Lil. He kept on wanting to save her, and Duch had been worried, for as long as the affair had been going on, that he might just end up succeeding.

  Then he’d got his call-up papers. He was being shipped out tomorrow, his regiment posted all the way to Africa. For all Lil knew, this night could be their last, and her anxiousness transmitted itself as she rested her hand on Duch’s elbow, as palpable as an electric current running between them.

  Duch exhaled slowly, trying not to take the tension into herself. She knew what she said next must be spun with the utmost care. Lil put a lot of store in what the tea leaves, the tarot and Mr Hannen Swaffer said – and the skill with which her red-haired maid with the green gypsy eyes relayed it to her. All Duch had to do was soothe her friend, repeat how the lines entwined in tiny flecks on the china represented two lives that could not be parted, that this was only a separation and not an ending. Make it sound convincing, keep Lil happy for as long as she pined for her Fleet Street player, while at the same time hoping that for all their sakes this wouldn’t really come true, that Lil would soon get bored with waiting and Tom Power would not be back this way again.

  Even if the tea leaves kept telling her otherwise.

  – . –

  Under the clouds that blotted out the moon, across the rooftops where the fire-watchers waited, around Piccadilly Circus and into a narrow thoroughfare just behind, was the club where Lil had met Tom.

  Entre Nous, read a small brass plaque by the side of the front door.

  Leaning against the bar, Detective Chief Inspector Edward Greenaway wore a frown. In the bevelled mirror behind the optics he could see an assortment of familiar faces milling in the opposite corner of the room: men in handmade suits and women swathed in mink, all dressed as if for Ascot on a Friday night in Soho. By his side, Scotland Yard Chief Commander Peter Beverley studied the form of this little parade with a benign smile, matching memorised descriptions of stolen property to the coats, stoles and jewellery currently on display, and planning forthcoming pinches like chess moves. It was a ritual that the two of them would have followed up on together until recently, Greenaway being Beverley’s former second-in-command. But the pained expression worn by the newly promoted DCI was not caused by the conspicuous consumption of the Archer Street clientele. It was the racket emanating from the piano, where a tall, gaunt man with a shock of white hair was loudly revisiting his youth.

  “Live for tonight!” bellowed Hannen Swaffer, long fingers attacking the ivories. “And scorn the morning’s care/Are not the wine-flasks full, the women fair?”

  Greenaway caught the barman’s eye, asked for a large Scotch.

  “Evening’s for drinking and for making love,” Fleet Street’s finest continued, his mind back in the Roaring Twenties and the music halls where he had once performed. “And not for asking How and wond’ring Where.”

  “Cheers,” Greenaway handed his change across the bar, picked up the glass and said to Beverley: “Think this might shut him up?”

  Beverley chuckled. “You can try,” he said.

  Greenaway crossed the small dance floor, plonked the whisky down on top of the piano as Swaffer trilled out a triumphant arpeggio.

  “Dear boy!” the journalist greeted him.

  “Swaff,” nodded Greenaway, offering his cigarette case in a further attempt to distract attention. The flare of a Ronson lit up cadaverous features, the face of a Victorian undertaker. By contrast, Greenaway’s own countenance was that of a sleepy boxer, his heavy lidded brown eyes camouflaging the restless intelligence that sparked behind them. The two men studied each other briefly. Swaffer spoke first.

  “How goes life on the Murder Squad?” he asked. “Got used to it yet? Or are you still longing for the great outdoors?” His grey eyes sparked like flints in the candlelit gloom of their basement surrounds.

  Greenaway flicked a glance to the swells in the corner, the remnants of one of the racetrack gangs that had recently been interned for their Italian heritage. Throughout the Thirties, Greenaway had pursued the London triumvirate of Elephant Boys, Sabinis and Yiddishers across the nation’s turf, a sporting life that had suited him just fine. But the war had changed all that. The Elephant Boys and the Sabinis had dispersed, their leaders respectively fleeing to America or locked up on the Isle of Man. The Yiddishers, with whom Greenaway went back furthest, had found the privations of war limited their gaming endeavours, so had turned their skills to bank robbery. But the spectacular backfiring of a daylight heist had brought t
heir leader Sammy Lehmann to book and since then, with so many younger officers volunteering, Greenaway’s superiors had decided his talents would be better spent investigating murders. He missed the Flying Squad.

  “I don’t need your help with the Ouija board yet,” he said.

  “Ah,” Swaffer touched the side of his nose conspiratorially. “But you’re still not comfortable with it, are you, confined to barracks on Tottenham Court Road?” His fingers danced across the keyboard, nicotine-stained dabs plucking out the first few notes of “The Camptown Races”. The occupants of the club began to dance, the women twirling their stoles, the men mimicking the actions of jockeys on their horses, all smiling and gesticulating in Greenaway’s direction.

  “You got me,” said Greenaway, wanting to put an end to that number before it went any further. But Swaffer stopped of his own accord.

  “Tell me,” he said, modifying the volume of his plummy tones, “one of your former colleagues from those halcyon days, a certain Ross Spooner – I gather he’s been seconded to the Ministry?”

  Greenaway shrugged. “I know they had him up the Scrubs, going through files of enemy infiltrators, at one point.” He raised his pint to his lips. “Things could be worse than the Murder Squad, I s’pose.”

  “A little bird told me,” said Swaffer, “he’s got a comfortable berth for himself, under the wing of the Chief. Bright boy, is he?”

  Greenaway summoned Spooner’s face to mind, a pale oval, dominated by wire-rimmed spectacles, fringed with unruly red hair. Unlike himself, Spooner was not a man of action. He was the type that went through files and phonebooks with a magnifying glass, joining the dots to make a case watertight. The type that was just right for MI5. He wondered where this was going and who Swaff ’s informant might be. The old devil always hinted at powerful sources within the establishment, from Churchill himself to his former employer, the deceased Lord Northcliffe, with whom he still claimed to be in constant communication.