Текст книги "The Imposter"

Автор книги: Mark Dawson

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 28 страниц)

19

THE FIRST HOUSE THEY ROBBED WAS IN MAYFAIR. Rain had started falling at dusk, a gentle sprinkling that strengthened into an angry, drenching deluge. The cold had settled under Edward’s skin and as he ran his fingers through his wet hair, a shiver danced across his shoulders. The house was in terrace of stuccoed four-storey houses, most two bays across, joined together in the classical style. Lights were on here and there, the turrets at the top dark against the moving sky. The houses had basements and attics and faced a small square, a private garden that had somehow managed to preserve its iron railings in the face of the war effort. Skeletal trees cast long shadows that swung to and fro in the wind.

They had only ever spoken about planning but Edward had known that he would come along, too. He wanted to. Accepting Joseph’s offer had immediately brought him into his confidence. That was necessary, but he needed to bind them closer together, and that would not be possible if he stayed away, leaving him to put the plan into action. It was, he knew, like the army. A shared adventure would be a powerful tonic for their friendship. War stories were more evocative when both parties had experienced them.

Joseph looked up and down the street and, satisfied that they were unobserved, mounted the single step from the pavement and stepped beneath the portico. Edward followed him. He was fizzing with adrenaline, his senses amplified and sensitive to everything. The front door was solid and substantial and he didn’t have the first idea how they might open it. Joseph put his hand over the bell for a moment, pretending to ring it, and listened hard. When he was satisfied that all was silent inside, he descended the flight of steps that led down to the basement and the lower entrance. Edward felt as if he had lost the ability to make his own decisions and dumbly followed. The narrow space at the bottom comprised a window and door on one side and a wall beneath the row of railings on the other. His foot crunched against a stray piece of coal and he froze, his heart in his mouth, for what seemed like an age. Joseph cocked his head quizzically, as if he had heard something else, and then pressed them both back against the wall beneath the railings. The sound of slow, deliberate foot-steps approached from the street. They drew closer, so close that Edward felt as if his heart were about to stop, and then a circle of torchlight played over the window before them. It was a policeman, it had to be, and he would surely see their reflection in the glass. But the footsteps resumed, absorbed into the storm with the same deliberate rhythm.

“Bloody hell,” Edward exhaled.

Joseph shushed him with a stern glare and a finger to his lips.

He took a small six-inch jemmy from his inside pocket and inserted it into the jamb, just below the handle. He gave the jemmy a sharp pull and the lock tore through the wood. He gently pushed the door open and disappeared inside. Edward followed. They were in a kitchen. Joseph took out a small electric torch and shone it around, illuminating a large range, cupboards, a rack of pots and pans. Every creak from settling floorboards or tick from cooling pipes was someone waiting for them around the corner. The steady cadence of the clock on the wall oscillated with Edward’s breath and he thought of the jungle, and night-time O.P.s, creeping through the darkness with the morbid certainty that Jap was lying in wait, endlessly patient, a rifle aimed at his heart. He fumbled for his handkerchief and wiped the rain and sweat from his eyes.

Joseph paused to acclimatise himself to the house and then led the way onwards. They passed through the kitchen, along a narrow passageway and up a set of back stairs until they re-emerged in the hallway, the door to the street at one end and, opposite, a wide staircase that was ghostly in the darkness. Joseph flitted silently to a large door and put his ear to it. He turned the handle and the mechanism clicked, the silence of the house seeming to shatter like a bowl of black glass. He opened the door–lifting upwards to take the weight off the hinge–and went through, into what was evidently the sitting-room. Inside was all Regency, with carefully draped curtains and Madame Recamier sofas. They moved through into the drawing-room. As they slipped through the darkened spaces, Edward had the sense of the shadows closing protectively around them and he started to relax a little.

Joseph quietly turned a gilded door knob and led the way into the library. He collected two silver candelabra from the mantelpiece and appraised them, feeling their weight. A nod indicated he was satisfied, and he handed them over. He took a dust sheet from a table and gave it to Edward, too. “Wrap them up,” he whispered, his lips brushing his ear, “and stay here.”

“Where are you going?”

“Upstairs. I’ll have a look around. If I’m not back in ten minutes, get out. Use the front door–you saw where it is?”

“Yes–back there.”

Joseph nodded. He paused at the open doorway, listening, before stepping out and fading into the shadows. There was the very slightest creak as, Edward fancied, he ascended a stair, but then there was nothing. The silence was so taut that the slightest creak seemed to stretch it to breaking point.

It was pitch black without Joseph’s torch.

Somewhere above, he heard the unmistakeable creak of a floorboard.

Edward felt exposed and vulnerable and yet thrillingly alive. It was a strange combination: fright and a tremendous sense of exhilaration. Here was the adventure that his life had been missing. Cooking dinners and selling cars were for the birds. Edward wanted his life to feel like this.

The door opened again. There was a moment between the handle twisting and the realisation that it was Joseph returning when his heart felt as cold and still as a lump of ice. He was carrying a suitcase. He opened it: jewellery, silver cutlery and plate, a gold watch, some ready money.

“Not bad?” he grinned.

“The suitcase, too?”

“It’s useful. It’s a prop–you’re less likely to get stopped with one.”

Joseph unbolted the front door, closing it quietly once they were outside. The rain was still lashing the street and a peel of thunder rattled the glass in the windows. Edward loosened the umbrella and unfurled it above them. Joseph pressed in tight. “Come on,” he said with a feral grin, and set off across the pavement. They hurried away.

20

EDWARD ENDURED A NIGHT OF INSOMNIA and, when he did manage to sleep, panicked dreams. He stayed in the bedsitter, trying to come up with a way to avoid the interview that Violet had arranged. He couldn’t help it. He was gripped tightly by fear: the fear of having agreed to something that would be irretrievable, the fear of discovery, of capture, of punishment. He gave up the pretence of sleep and stood at the window with the lights turned off, staring across the chimneystacks and rooftops. It was very cold and he had burnt up all the gas. The tap of the fire was up, the broken asbestos elements grey and cold, the air like hot sour cream. Dark clouds swept across the moon and fat drops began to fall. They stroked against the pane to begin with but eventually they strengthened, drumming a relentless beat against the glass. Edward listened to them fall, unable to return to sleep.

* * *

HENRY DRAKE WAS ALREADY WAITING in the Moka coffee bar in Frith Street. Edward paused in the doorway and wondered, yet again, whether there was some neat way that he could extricate himself from this whole sorry mess. But there was not. He had rolled his predicament around and around in his mind but had come up with nothing. He could just flat-out refuse but doing that would have been tantamount to shouting from the rooftops that he had something to hide. He could have cited a desire for privacy, or a tendency towards modesty, but either would have marked him as the kind of shrinking violet that he instinctively knew would repulse the ostentatious Violet. And, more than everything, she would see his saying no as thumbing his nose at her charity. There was nothing else for it: he would just have to do his best to minimise the damage that the interview might do and get on with it. He would have to be smart and watch his step.

The bar was busy, the proprietor–an amiable Italian named Pino Reservato–passing to and from his customers. A pine bar held the till and a neat pile of mugs and saucers, and behind it steamed one of Gaggia’s clattering machines. A curving, undulating countertop stretched along the side of the room with cushioned stools set into the floor at regular intervals along it. A mural depicting various styles of ship was fixed to the wall, this theme then repeated on the counter-top. A wire cage fashioned into letters from the Chinese alphabet contained two miserable looking macaws. It was busy: office girls chatted happily with their escorts drinking Grenadilla Juice from the half-shells of coconuts; shoppers and tourists rested and took refreshment; businessmen enjoyed a quick meal, open sandwiches in the Swedish style contained continental savouries. The hubbub was convivial but it did nothing to improve Edward’s pensive mood as he made his way to the table.

Drake looked up. “Mr. Fabian?”

“Hello, Mr. Drake.”

“Call me Henry, please. Pleasure to meet you–a real pleasure.”

“Likewise, I’m sure.”

“I’ve heard a lot about you. What will you have?”

“Just a large black, please.”

Drake went to the bar and placed the order. Edward looked him over: he was a plain-looking man in his early middle age, a little shabby around the edges. He wore a stained mackintosh that was fastened with a belt, a battered old trilby and a pair of good-quality trousers that Edward saw had frayed around the cuffs. Nice things that had been allowed to go to seed, not dissimilar to his own things. What did that say about him? Edward had dug into the man’s history in preparation for their encounter, spending several hours reading his press cuttings in the National Library. Drake had been a big noise, once, Fleet Street’s rising star, but a story he had written had been discredited and he had been cast out. It had been a catastrophic error on his part: Drake had been caught lying, and if Edward had been in a better mood he might have appreciated the irony in that. He had made up ground again with a scoop on the psychopath they called the Black Out Ripper who had terrorised the West End during The Blitz but he was still running, still chasing past glories that, by the looks of things, he would never fully recapture.

Drake brought the coffees to the table and sat down. “As I say, good to meet you. I’m pleased we’ve been able to sort it out.”

“I’ve read some of your articles, Mr. Drake.”

“It’s Henry. And how did you find them?”

“Very colourful. The latest one, the ‘girl who leads a life of shame’–that one was particularly interesting.”

“Just an innocent mill-girl from Sheffield,’ Drake intoned as if Edward was about to take dictation for him. “I’m writing her confession in five instalments, a warning to other impressionable young lasses like her. As a matter of fact, I believe I left her being chased down a back street by a seedy stage-door Johnny in a cloth cap. Exciting, I thought. A nice little cliff-hanger, keep them interested.”

“What happened to her?”

“She’ll be just fine. The Sunday Graphic is a family paper, after all.”

“You’re making the whole thing up?”

“Of course I am. That’s the sell–it’s life, but hotter, stronger and neater.’

“What a peculiar way to earn a living,” Edward said. “Telling untruths. Didn’t they cause you problems before?”

“You have been doing your research, Edward. And yes, of course, you’re right, but you have to understand that newspapers are all, more or less, in two distinct kinds of business. There’s the proper news side. You know: meat will be dearer tomorrow, tax likely to rise, bond-holders beware. That sort of thing’s supposed to be true–and you might say I learnt that lesson the hard way, although we could have a long discussion about how half of what they said about me was untrue. The other side of the business is the one the money’s in.”

“And that’s what you’re in now?”

“That’s right. It’s called human interest, although you might as well just call it showbusiness. Non-stop vaudeville, changed every day, and always leave them laughing. If you can write revue sketches and begging letters and you can clean up dirty jokes, you’ve got what it takes to have a decent little career. That’s what people want to read, so that’s what I write. It’s of no importance that the mill-girl doesn’t exist, except that it saves me the trouble of convincing some deluded little thing from up north that the events that have to happen to her really did happen. It also saves my employer some money.”

“Do you tell your readers it’s all made up?”

Drake sugared his coffee heavily. “Of course not. What they don’t know can’t hurt them. Or me, come to think about it.”

“Whoever said dishonesty didn’t pay?”

“I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t me.” He sipped his coffee. Edward watched his hands carefully, the half-moons of grime caught beneath his fingernails. The man was a shyster, he thought. A confidence trickster. He recognised the signs. It took one to know one, he thought wryly. Drake replaced the cup in its saucer. “Your story, on the other hand, is all true and–from what Violet tells me–so good that it practically writes itself. War hero comes home, cold-shouldered by society, lives in cold garret, barely makes enough to feed himself, et cetera et cetera. Tell me some more.”

Edward took a breath and told the story. He had run through it a dozen times last night, removing the flourishes and his worst excesses, keeping it neat and simple. He avoided hyperbole and exaggeration, downplaying his own role in the narrative and sticking as close to the regimental history as he could, ensuring that his facts were verifiable and legitimate. Drake took shorthand notes, Edward watching biliously as his charcoal pencil scraped quickly across his notepad, each stroke another step closer to revealing his perfidy. He asked a handful of questions, referring back to his notes and seeking amplification, trying to draw him into more lurid confessions, but Edward stoically resisted. If he neutered the tale then, perhaps, there would be nothing left to tell.

Eventually Edward could see that Drake had realised that he was not going to get the juicy story he had hoped to find. He quickly became bored. After all, what did he have? A bland and inoffensive piece about a soldier coming home from war and gratefully accepting the charity of a local family. If it escaped the editor’s spike it would languish deep inside the newspaper, hidden away, soon to be forgotten. Edward noticed that his shoulders were tight and stiff and so he settled back in the seat, loosening his posture. He relaxed and congratulated himself. What was he so worried about? He had done well, handling a difficult situation with confidence and aplomb. He sank into the cushions and pretended to busy himself by spooning another sugar into what was left of his coffee.

“Ah. Here he is. About time,” Drake said to the man who had just struggled into the coffee shop with a large camera and a bag of accessories. “This is Trevor. He’ll be doing the pictures. I thought here might be nice–war hero not too grand for coffee-shop, that kind of angle. What do you say?”

“Pictures?”

“Of course. We need pictures.”

“No-one said anything to me about pictures.”

“It’s essential, Edward. Put a face to the story. Violet insisted we do it properly. You’re not one of these chaps who doesn’t like his picture taken are you? Be a shame not to, with those matinee idol looks of yours–you’ll have them all going weak at the knees. Fan mail, I shouldn’t wonder.”

Edward balled his fists so hard that his nails cut into the fleshy part of his palms. He couldn’t say no; it would look like he had something to hide. He gritted his teeth as the photographer set up a tripod and slotted his Rolleiflex atop it, inserting the film and winding it through. He tried to persuade them to let him wear his hat, and then tried to angle his head away, but the photographer was persistent and would not take the pictures until he was satisfied with the shot. Edward smiled, thinly and without warmth, as the shutter snapped open and closed.

It sounded final. It sounded like a door slamming shut.

21

IT WAS A PRIVATE JOKE between the chaps that Billy Stavropoulos was particularly well balanced on account having a chip on both shoulders. The subject of his difficult upbringing was one he returned to frequently, a setting against which his subsequent success as a criminal was some sort of underdog’s triumphant battle against the odds. He referred to himself as being from ‘the gutter’, making the assertion so often that it became a sort of catchphrase. The gutter to which he referred was Saffron Hill, yet that was not the beginning of his story. The first five years of his life were spent in Leicester, in one of the sprawling developments built on the city’s south side in the 1920s to accommodate the city’s expanding work force. His mother, Demetria, found work as a machinist in the city’s hosiery factories. His father, Khristos, was a cobbler. The city avoided the worst depredations of the depression and enjoyed growth. Billy’s early years were happy, by all accounts. They might not have been rich but they had enough money to get by, and the Stavropoulos family ‘villa’ was close enough to the factories that Demetria was able to come home to cook lunch for Billy and his two brothers. It was a comfortable first few years: adequate, mediocre, safe.

A fondness for the bottle made Khristos Stavropoulos an unreliable employee and, when it eventually cost him his job, he moved the family to London. They found a house on Saffron Hill and, compared to the relative comfort of life in Leicester, things were difficult. Khristos’ alcoholism cost him two other jobs and, as the depression exerted its influence on the city’s factories, he found himself unable to find work. He fell in with the Costello brothers and, under their aegis, was persuaded to take to burglary to provide an income for his family. A string of breakings provided a glimmer of hope that he might have finally found something he was able to stick at but, eventually, he failed even at that. He usually got lit-up before a job and one time, his reactions dulled by drink, he fell from a first-floor window, broke his leg and was arrested. He was charged and tried, the judge rubbing salt into the wound by describing him as a ‘particularly inept criminal’ before gaoling him for a year.

Khristos resorted to the bottle for succour and died a bitter and broken man when Billy was eight years old. Without the income he had provided the family could no longer afford to pay even the meagre rent on their house. Despite the offer of a lighter sentence, Khristos had not named the Costello boys as his accomplices. His loyalty did not go unrewarded and his widow and her three boys were moved into a house the family owned. They had two rooms for the four of them: a front room and a bedroom. The front room looked onto the narrow street below and had a bed that was shared by Billy and his mother. The family’s furniture comprised of two beds and a rickety wooden sideboard. The only evidence of Khristos were the mementoes that he had kept from six years as an infantryman in the Great War: a helmet that he had pilfered from the body of a dead German and a beer stein, in which Demetria occasionally kept the flowers that her boys uprooted from the local parks. It was a crushingly depressing existence. The house in which Billy spent the next ten years of his life was low-ceilinged and fetid, thin walls covered with flock wallpaper that stank of fried food and damp.

Demetria became a hoister, raiding stores in the West End and selling her spoils in Clerkenwell’s pubs. When times were hard she offered wall-jobs to the local drunks for the pennies in their pockets. Memories of her comfortable life in Leicester must have seemed like cruel taunts and she became bitter and resentful. The bottle found her, too, eventually, and she took her frustrations out on her children. It did not matter. Billy was dedicated to her, and the chaps occasionally spoke of the time they saw a man make a joke about her brassing. He had flown into such a rage they had to restrain him for fear that he would do murder.

* * *

BILLY WRAPPED HIS FIST IN HIS COAT and punched hard through the panel above the door handle. The glass smashed, the fragments shattering as they fell to the floor. He paused for a moment, and heard nothing to suggest that they had been detected. He thrust his arm through the gaping pane and unlocked the door. He went inside, with Jack McVitie close behind. The house was empty, just as Joseph had said it would be. He had been tipped off by a chap from the pub who was seeing one of the maids. The family were off abroad somewhere and the place was vulnerable. Pity for them, Billy thought. The man of the house was a successful businessman, something about the motor trade. He was supposed to be rich and that looked about right, Billy thought, judging by the state of the place.

He flicked on his torch and continued the conversation that the two men had begun as they made their way to the house. “He’s lost the plot.”

Jack closed the door behind him. “So you keep saying.”

“It’s true, though, ain’t it? Fabian’s bad news. Bloody bad news. I mean, ask yourself–what’s he doing with us? We don’t need him.”

“If you say so.”

“It was fine, the four of us, before. Me, you, Joseph and Tommy. Does Joseph think we’re going to do places five-handed? No thanks. Might as well ring Old Bill up before and tell them what we’re up to.”

They left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the first floor. The hallway was wide, wood-panelled and laid with an expensive parquet floor. Billy flipped through the mail that had been stacked on a table next to a telephone.

“What is it with him and Joe?” he said. “Has he said anything to you?”

Jack shrugged. “Nothing you don’t already know. Army pals.”

“Well, I don’t know about that. They only met right at the end, didn’t they?”

They went up to the second floor and tried doors until they found the master bedroom. They went inside. It was a large room, with a walk-in wardrobe and a bathroom leading off it. They knew what they were looking for. Billy went to the tallboy and started to turn out the drawers, strewing the clothes on the floor.

“War hero–can you believe that?”

Jack opened a wardrobe and set about emptying it. He shrugged.

“It don’t sound that likely, though, does it?–given the evidence, what the man’s like. He don’t look the type for that kind of thing.”

“Who knows?”

“He must have something on him. No other reason why Joe would’ve let him get into this with us.”

“What do you mean?”

“You know–he’s got the black on him.”

Jack scoffed, “Don’t talk rot.”

“What, then?”

Jack gave a long, exasperated sigh. “I don’t know.”

“The last thing we need at the moment is a passenger. From what I’ve been told things are going to get spicy soon.”

“You mean Jack Spot?”

Billy nodded. “You heard he’s been telling people that they need to be with him rather than with us?”

“I heard he had a word with a couple of pubs on Shaftesbury Avenue.”

“More than that. He’s been threatening blokes in Soho, too. He’s not someone Violet and George will be able to ignore like he’s not there. He’s a bloody psychopath, him and his bloody gypsies too. I heard they don’t think he’s anything to worry about.”

They worked in silence for a few minutes until Jack tipped out the cupboards of a chest of drawers. “Here,” he said, “found it.” He held up a presentation box and, inside, a diamond necklace. There was other jewellery in the drawer–rings and bracelets and necklaces–and Jack tipped them all into his pockets.

The two of them finished in the bedroom and went back downstairs.

“No,” Billy said, returning to the same theme, “that Fabian’s no good, no good at all.”

He had been picking at the same theme for most of the night, and Jack was growing weary of it. “Aye,” he said, hoping Billy might let the matter rest.

They exited through the main door and, closing their mackintoshes around them, they walked quickly away from the house.

“He’ll get us all nicked, you mark my words.”

“Look on the bright side,” Jack said, hoping to forestall another tirade. He tapped his pockets so that the diamonds clinked. “Fancy a drink?”

They walked the short distance to the main road. In five minutes they had hailed a taxi and were heading towards Soho.