Jack snapped his fingers as he suddenly thought of something. “Of course. Baker, the apartment that Porgia gave to Humpty in return for the money laundering…?”
“What about it?”
“Do we have an address? I know Humpty lived over at the Cheery Egg with Laura for eighteen years, but he might have kept it on. He would have had to take all those girls
Baker rummaged through paperwork and eventually came up with an address in one of Humpty’s old arrest reports. “Here it is,” he announced: “614, Spongg Villas.”
Humpty Dumpty’s old residence was in a large block of flats that had been built by the Spongg Building Trust in the early part of the century for Reading’s trendiest set. After a period of fashionable existence in the thirties and forties, its popularity had begun to wane. Expensive to maintain, the unprepossessing block had changed hands regularly for ever-decreasing amounts as successive landlords took the rent and never bothered to bring the place up to date or even carry out anything other than essential repairs. It had started out as a good address but was now a shabby wreck, an upmarket version of Grimm’s Road, its paint long since faded and the stucco rounded and softened by the corrosive action of the wind and rain.
Jack, Mary and Baker stepped into the musty hall and were greeted warmly by the ripe odor of decay. Out of two hundred apartments, they understood from the ancient doorman, who wore a stained bellhop’s uniform, barely eight were still occupied. The others had been boarded up and the basins, baths and toilets smashed to discourage squatters. The owner was a wealthy financier who was waiting for the last tenants to leave before he flattened the site and built a deluxe car park in its place. The doorman pointed the way up the stairs. The lift, he explained, had been out of order since 1972.
Humpty’s apartment was on the sixth floor, and as Baker led the way up the creaking circular staircase, Jack looked over the banisters and up at the domed skylight, whose myriad leaks he could see had been crudely repaired with waterproof tape. The banisters were rickety, and the dust of dry rot rose when they touched them. Padlocked doors greeted them on every landing.
“Which was his apartment again?” asked Jack.
“Number 614,” whispered Baker. “This way.”
He led them slowly down the hall, through fire doors that were wedged open and past corroded wall lights glowing with bulbs of minuscule wattage. Dust rose from the aged carpet as they approached Humpty’s front door. Jack pulled out his penlight to examine it more closely. They could see that the dirt and fluff had drifted against it; the doorknob had a small spider living on it, and everything was veiled with a thin coat of dust.
“No one’s been in here for rather a long time,” observed Baker.
A low, husky woman’s voice answered from behind them.
“About a year, actually, dahlings.”
They turned to see a woman of perhaps fifty-five standing dramatically in the shaft of light that shone out of her apartment door and pierced the stygian gloom of the corridor. She watched them all with a well-practiced air of laconic indifference, a half smile on her lips. Her hair was up in rollers, and she was smoking an expensive-looking cigarette. She had hastily covered her mouth with crimson lipstick and wore a lacy blouse that was unbuttoned enough to display a large volume of cleavage. Her shoulders were draped with a light tan cashmere sweater, and she wore a knee-length skirt that hugged her well-proportioned frame tightly. She paused for a moment, leaned on the doorframe and regarded them in a manner that might have been described as “smoldering sexuality” had she been twenty years younger.
“Sorry?” stammered Jack, quite taken aback by the curious vision that had appeared in front of them.
“About a year,” she repeated. “I called them about the shower, but they never came. They’re arseholes, you know, dahling.”
She inhaled on her cigarette and blew the smoke upwards. Jack walked over to her.
“I know who you are. You’re Lola Vavoom. You used to be big in movies.”
“I will treat that feed line with the contempt it deserves, dahling. I’d never tread on Norma’s toes. Who might you be?”
“Detective Inspector Jack Spratt of the Nursery Crime Division. These are Detective Sergeant Mary and Constable Baker.”
She nodded in Mary’s direction but didn’t look at her. She put a languid hand out towards Baker, just out of his reach so he had to step forward to shake it.
“Detective Baker,” she cooed.
“
Despite her faded grandeur and worn poise, Lola had a certain grace and bearing that still made her extremely attractive.
“That’s a beautiful name. I had a lover named Baker once. He was hung like a hamster.”
“Is that good?” asked Baker, unsure of her meaning.
“It is if you’re another hamster.”
Jack managed to turn a laugh into a cough. Baker blushed, but Jack quickly took charge of the situation.
“Miss Vavoom — what are you doing here?”
“Here, dahling?” she replied with a smile. “Why, I live here!”
“We thought you’d be in Hollywood… or Caversham Heights at the very least,” added Mary, who remembered seeing Lola performing
“Hah!” Lola spat contemptuously. “Being waited on by an army of cosmetic surgeons? No thanks. What you see is what I am. I’ve not had my boobs done or my arse lifted, no nips, no tucks. No ribs removed, nothing. Those little strumpets we see on the silver screen today are mostly bathroom sealant. They buy their breasts over the counter. ‘What would you like, honey, small, medium or large?’ They give us stick insects and tell us it’s beauty. If someone of their size went for an audition in my day, she’d have been shown a square meal and told to come back when she was a stone heavier. What’s wrong with curves? Anyone over a ten these days is regarded not as an average-sized woman but a marketing opportunity. Cream for this, pills for that, superfluous hair, collagen injection, quick-weight-loss diets. Where’s it going to end? We’re pressured to expend so much money and effort to be the ‘perfect’ shape, when that shape is physically attainable by only one woman in a million. It’s the cold face of capitalism, boys and girls, preying on misguided expectations. Besides, I always found perfection an overrated commodity.”
Her voice had risen as she spoke, topping her tirade on a high C. She paused and collected herself, then continued in a normal voice.
“Sometime I’ll make a comeback, and when I do…”
Jack and Baker just stared. Lola looked from Baker to Mary and then back to Jack again. She tapped her heel against the doorframe and lit another cigarette.
“So. You’re the police. I heard about Humpty. I was sorry, I thought he was a nice guy. A bit short for my taste, but there you have it.”
“When did you last see him?” asked Jack, trying to gather his senses.
She flicked the ash off her cigarette. “About this time last year. I saw Hump come lumbering out; he never could move very fast with those short little legs of his. He looked a bit agitated, and I asked if he was all right. He was a bit startled when he saw me and said everything was fine, then went downstairs. I went back indoors, but I could still hear the shower running. Humpty never came back, and I called the maintenance engineer the following week. He didn’t turn up, and it’s still running. My guess is that they’re trying to make the building unsafe so we all have to move out.”
She looked around the shabby corridor and pulled at a piece of curling wallpaper disdainfully. It tore off easily in her hand, and she crushed the fragment to little pieces.
She suddenly looked bored. “Can I go? If you want me, you know where to find me. I don’t go out a lot.”
Lola didn’t wait for a reply. She just looked at them all, smiled at Baker, went back inside her room and closed the door noiselessly behind her.
Jack sighed and put an ear to one of the glass panes of Humpty’s front door.
“We’ve just met British cinema history,” he commented.
“She was rather a cracker in her time, sir,” declared Baker.
