Turpin knew all this, and he knew something else more important: that Chicken Eyes had a weakness for a young lady called Cigarette, who wrote poems and short stories and had, shortly after the beginning of her association with Chicken Eyes, taken to talking authoritatively about the Underworld. Cigarette was a rebel. Against what was she in rebellion? Everything. She was an unhappy woman, and for her unhappiness she blamed her mother, whom she described as ‘an unmitigated bitch’. The mother of Cigarette had compelled her daughters to wash their hands and faces and brush their teeth every morning, to pull the plug when they used the lavatory, to say please and thank you, and to come home before midnight. Cigarette’s sisters, girls of no spirit, submitted like tame mice to this brutal ill-treatment; not Cigarette. She, as she put it, got the bloody hell out of it as quickly as she could. She came of a good family — solid landowners in the Midlands. But she seemed to be eaten up by a homesickness for the gutter. ‘I am a Rebel,’ she used to say. By this she meant that if everybody else thought it right and proper to clean their nails, change their underclothes, blow their noses into handkerchiefs, stand up when the band played ‘God Save the King’, stub out a cigarette-end in an ashtray, or return a borrowed book or umbrella or coat — she was determined to do the opposite.
Ideologically she was a feminist. Cigarette was constantly conscious of the degradation of her sex. It irritated her, for example, that men proposed to women. How dare the sons-of-bitches stand around smirking and looking upon won-sen as mere creatures to be proposed to? Cigarette invariably proposed, frankly and directly: ‘Look here, don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I went to bed?’ Only she employed a fourletter word. Of course she was talked about. But her principle was to give any gossip-monger who opened his lips something really worth talking about. Thus she would go out of her way to make scandal, and practically burst her lungs diving down to the muddiest depths of degradation, just to outdo gossip and exceed saloon-bar report.
At the time of the flight of Chicken Eyes she was about twenty-nine years old — a big redhead with a sneering mouth. She had, by that time, given up being filthy, and dressed in a somewhat masculine style, but with a certain elegance, ordering her clothes from Waldemar’s and telling them to send the bill to her mother, whose banker sent Cigarette thirty-two pounds on the first of every month. She said that it suited her convenience at the present moment to be well-dressed: Chicky liked her that way. Chicky, it is scarcely necessary to say, was Chicken Eyes Jack Emerald. She had found him in a public-house near Charlotte Street. He had been pointed out to her two days after his acquittal in the Goldclang jewel robbery case. Everyone knew that Chicken Eyes had done the job, but the police were unable to prove it. He got away with it, and, going out to refresh himself, was pointed out to the young lady. At that period of her life — two years before — she was in the habit of lounging about the town in an outrageous state of dishevelment. She sauntered up to him and said: ‘Are you Jack Emerald?’
‘Well?’
‘They call me Cigarette. Does that convey anything to you?’
‘No.’
‘What do you think of me?’ she asked, pressing herself against him.
Chicken Eyes replied: ‘I think you could do with a good wash.’
‘Don’t you like me?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you think it would be a good idea if you and I —’
In spite of her dirt and the fact that (it being a warm May day) Cigarette was wearing nothing but a stained black silk dress, there was unmistakably an air of breeding about her. There was authority in her tone and in the glance of her haughty eyes. She said:
‘Do you come home to my flat or do I go home to yours?’
Chicken Eyes looked at her, felt a surge of wrath, but wavered and at last said: ‘You can come back to my place, if you like.’
He lived in a large, Edwardian block of flats built of red brick — Something-or-other Mansions — near the Gray’s Inn Road. In the taxi on the way home he said not a word. As soon as they arrived and Chicken Eyes’ door clicked shut behind them and the yellow electric light went on, he took her by the scruff of the neck, thrust her into the bathroom and washed her from head to foot with a nail-brush. Thereafter she adored him. She became elegant. She lived only for him. But her family got wind of the affair: her mother cut her allowance. So Cigarette had to work from time to time. Chicken Eyes did not like that; but there was nothing he could do about it. Burglary is an underpaid profession, or art, whichever you choose to call it. Cigarette had a knack of writing spicy little stories and naughty little paragraphs. She had begun to contemplate a novel. The two lived together in one of those strange states of armed truce in which so many couples seem to pass their lives. They quarrelled every other day, and when they quarrelled the air was thick with pots and pans. They lived in perpetually recurrent estrangement and reconciliation. An outsider might have said, observing them, that Chicken Eyes and Cigarette were implacable enemies. Yet the fact of the matter was that in their way they loved each other: only they could not live with each other. Yet they could not live without each other.
Turpin knew that, whatever happened, the escaped burglar would inevitably come back to the girl called Cigarette.
It was pretended that no one knew of the existence of this strange relationship.
One morning, not long after his conversation with Asta Thundersley, Detective-Inspector Turpin called on Cigarette at about a quarter to ten, humbly begged her pardon for having disturbed her — which she said he had not — and begged the favour of a few words with her. She was wearing a brick-red dressinggown over an almost transparent nightdress of a lighter colour. Turpin observed that the make-up of her mouth was smeared, her hair disordered, and that she gave out a strong odour of perfume. Cigarette had not slept alone. Over a cup of tea he said: ‘Speak to me as it might be man to man. You know we’re going to get Chicken Eyes in the end. Where is he? He was here last night, you know. He was, wasn’t he?’
‘I don’t know your friend Chicken Eyes, and I don’t want to know him,’ said Cigarette. ‘Do please ask me exactly what you want to know. If I can tell you anything I will. Can I say fairer than that?’
“Where is Jack Emerald?’ asked the detective-inspector, abruptly, watching her eyes. He saw Cigarette’s eyes flicker; looked in the direction of the second glance and observed that it indicated the kitchen door. Meanwhile Cigarette was saying: ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you mean; I assure you, not the faintest idea.’
Having looked closely at the outside of the building before he entered it, Detective-Inspector Turpin knew that the back door of the kitchen opened on to a fire escape, and that this fire escape went down into the back doubles of West Central London. It was safe therefore to assume that Chicken Eyes was not in the flat.
‘This, ‘m, is nothing but a routine investigation, you understand. We are looking for a man called Emerald, and we were told he might be here.’
