I took my coat and hat off and slung them on the floor. I sat down and saw her face crease in pity for me. Was I in such a mess? “Second thoughts. No sit. Stand and take off all clothes. You need bath! I got a business to run and don’ need stinky men about place.”
Her tone brooked no opposition but I wasn’t sure I had the strength to stand up and struggle out of my clothes. Mary had ducked into the hall and was shouting up the stairs.
“Colette, get you lazy fat ass down here! We got smelly customer need bath!”
She turned back to me and saw me struggling. “OK, big baby. You need mama take your clothes off.” She didn’t wait to discuss it, just started in on me with expert fingers. “What you worried ‘bout, big baby? You think I no seen bare man before? Iseen plenty bare man.” She pushed me back on the paper and wrenched my trousers, socks and pants off and threw them in a heap along with suit jacket, shirt and vest.
She left me sitting, too drained to be embarrassed by my nudity, while she rummaged in a cupboard. “Put on.” She flung me a huge dressing gown in ruby-red satin.
“Was he a sumo wrestler, Mary?” The dressing gown reached to the floor when I had it on.
“Just big man, Danny. Very big!” Her little face crinkled and she guffawed at a memory I was glad not to share. “Now, first you have bath and shave, then food, then you talk. What you say?”
I say thank you, thank you, let me light some incense in homage to your gods, Mary, because mine doesn’t listen. Or if he does, he’s a bloody sadist.
Mary and Colette made me sit in the steaming tin bath while they added kettle after kettle of hot water. They fed me rice and sweet chicken and tea. Mary shaved me while Colette soaped me down. Bliss. I felt better than in weeks.
Colette left us and I lay back wanting desperately to sleep and let the world go to hang.
“Now, Danny. You talk.”
She slopped water on my face. I talked. I told her everything and she interrupted for more details of how I turned the tables at Kate’s house and how I got away from the police. Mary kept darting to her feet and bringing out old newspapers from the bundle by the door to check what I was saying against the public comments. The pile of soggy newsprint grew. It was a long and complicated story. I wasn’t sure it made complete sense, or that she was taking it all in. I was wrong.
“You sure you gave gun back?”
“I don’t know. Nothing seems real. Maybe I did keep it and used it to threaten that girl. Then I killed her.”
The jumble in my head could be read any way you like. I tried to think of myself in the witness box defending myself. It wasn’t a pretty thought: I think so, your honour, I’m not sure, your honour, I can’t remember, your honour, and so on until the jury was so convinced I was lying that they’d hardly have time for their first cup of tea before they were back with a guilty verdict.
“I no think that.”
“Why?”
“You no killer. I seen plenty killers. Can tell a man by how he is with girl. My girls say you kind. They want mummy you.”
No rosettes for my tigerish bedroom performance then. But I could have reached out and kissed Mary for that vote of confidence. I splashed water on my face to mask the tears that had sprung up.
She was shaking her head. “But big mistake, big mistake give gun back.”
“I should have wiped it at least.”
She nodded. She knew the trade. I forced my addled brain to think. A strand of excitement floated up from the murk. It grew as I worked through the implications of the newspaper report. This could be the first real mistake by the killer. If I had given the gun back at Kate’s place, it meant that it was planted next to the last girl’s body. Planted either by the murderer himself or by someone who knew him.
“The question is, how did the gun get to the murder site?”
Mary was nodding furiously. She was way ahead of me. “Caldwell he give big fat bastard gun. He plant gun.”
“Possible. But how does Caldwell know Wilson? And then there’s the question of timing. When did the gun get planted? At the time of the murder or after?”
“Could be strange man around. Doing all killing. And big fat bastard want you to swing.”
I fingered my neck. “The coincidences are piling up, Mary. Especially this last one: I ditch a gun with my prints on it the same night a woman is murdered. And the gun is magically whisked from Caldwell’s hands to Wilson’s and into the murder scene? No. I think I’ve already met the killer.”
“I think too. Sounds like you know three men who might got blood on their hands.” She raised her tiny hand and stuck three fingers in the air.
“Who’s the first Mary?”
“Why, you, Danny.” She pulled down one finger.
“I thought you said…”
“I no think that. But maybe you have a devil inside that come out sometime.”
I stared at her for a while, and believed in devils for a moment. “Maybe, Mary.
Maybe. OK, who’s next?”
She lowered the next finger. “Mr big fat bastard…”
She was right. I’d half-jokingly thought Wilson had all the attributes of a murderer. He was vicious, violent and liked hurting good-time girls who could hardly turn to the police for protection. Was that why he wanted me off the scene? The last thing he’d need was a freelancer blundering around. No one inside the force would ever suspect that the DI in charge of the hunt was the killer. He was a suspect. But not my prime one. The one I could scarcely believe. Rule out nothing, suspect everyone, check everything until you have hard proof. Those were my rules.
“He could be, Mary. Caldwell gives him the gun, Wilson kills another girl and leaves the gun with my prints on it. But if Wilson was the killer, how would Caldwell know that? And why would Wilson risk him knowing that?”
“So it Caldwell.” She dropped the last finger.
“That’s my hunch. Caldwell planted the gun with my prints on it at the site of the last murder. Caldwell is the killer.”
The detective in me – and Val’s and now Mary’s faith in me – made me cling to Wilson or Caldwell being the killer. Maybe in cahoots with each other. Tony Caldwell’s final betrayal of me. Maybe – despite my dream – he’d killed Lili in France; he’d known I was due to see her and set the Gestapo on me. Maybe he’d framed me by planting the incriminating gun on the latest victim.
What was I to believe? And who would other people believe? A CID Inspector and a decorated Army Major, or a man with a hole in his head? I could feel the noose tightening already. My brain seemed to have become paralysed.
“You get dry. Get sleep. We talk later.”
I did as I was told. At least, I lay on the tiny bed she gave me in a spare room and stared at the ceiling. So many fragments swirling around. It reminded me of the time I got so drunk that I had vertigo lying down. Yet in the debris of my life at this moment, a little Chinese woman had given me hope, just by believing in me.
Maybe that slender lifeline opened a channel in my brain, for I began to wake in the morning grasping desperately at the tendrils of a dream. The familiar one, but this time there was more. I squeezed my eyes closed and tried to project it on to my lids. I got a purchase on it and hauled it in, reel by reel, to inspect it with my conscious mind. I lay as still as a corpse. It wasn’t a dream. It was a memory of that night in Avignon. A complete memory.
The clock is striking eight and I’m walking fast down the back lanes towards the safe house. I feel the familiar knot of fear and excitement in my stomach as I choose streets which I hope aren’t being patrolled. I have good papers on me and my French will stand up to simple interrogation from the Germans, though not from a Vichy militia-man.
We have a drop coming in tonight and I need to make sure everything has been set up for it. The last load was blown completely off course and landed in the town.
It was a race across the backyards of the suburbs in the dark; we lost, and twenty Sten guns and ammo ended up in the arsenal of the Gestapo. I am determined not to lose this consignment. We have a better system of flares and I’ve doubled the number of Maquis ready to pounce on the crates.
