Read Online Without the Moon by Cathi Unsworth - Free Book Online Page B

to close properly behind him. Conduit Mews , read the address on Swaffer’s notepaper. A narrow, cobbled thoroughfare between Paddington Station and Hyde Park, the ideal set-up for a prostitute and her maid – discreetly tucked away from the main thoroughfare and the fleapit hotels, public houses, illicit gaming rooms and bookies’ joints that studded the warren of backstreets. The workshop beside the entrance, like most of its neighbours, had been a mechanic’s garage that was now boarded up, the proprietor no doubt conscripted, the landlord not too choosey about whom he rented out the upstairs space to, under the circumstances.
    Not that Greenaway would have expected the frontwoman of this operation to have presented herself in any manner other than such that suggested she really was some kind of down-on-her-luck dowager whose circumstances had reduced her to take rooms a little further away from Belgravia than she would have wished. And no doubt the property was being well maintained, whatever was going on in there. She was meticulous about making the right impression, whoever it was she was trying to cast her glamour over. Always had been. Despite their shared areas of interest, Greenaway wondered how much even Swaffer actually knew about her.
    At the top of the stairs, a red bulb hung under a fringed shade. Greenaway could hear the muffled sound of voices and a jazz piano tinkling away. But what stopped him in his tracks was a scent that came wafting down to greet his nostrils, a perfume that brought back, in one synaptic rush, an entire world. A world of smog and dirt and deprivation, of clamorous hunger and noise. The smell of Greenaway’s childhood: the smell of violets.
    He took a deep breath, shook his head, and walked up the stairs.

8
WHY DON’T YOU DO RIGHT?
    Wednesday, 11 February 1942
    At the top of the stairs was a beaded curtain made from jet, hung to tinkle out a warning to those seated on the other side of it that fresh company had arrived. But in the pink glow of her table lamp, the Duchess waited alone. The voices and the jazz Greenaway had heard were all emanating from the radiogram beside her.
    â€œSaw me coming in your crystal ball, did you?” he said, his eyes travelling around the room, taking in the gold-and red-striped wallpaper, the red velvet love seat, the walnut casing on the radiogram and the mahogany table behind which the Duchess sat, items that looked like they’d been salvaged from her previous employer on Dover Street. It was all very ostentatious for a one-woman set-up and obviously designed to convey a different class of service. Though the feeling Greenaway got was that he was standing in a gypsy caravan. The smoke left by the last visitor still hung in heavy trails on the air.
    Finally, his gaze came to rest on the woman herself. She wasn’t wearing a headscarf festooned with gold coins, as he had more than half expected. Instead, she looked serene, regal even, with her hair swept up into a roll at the front, copper-coloured ringlets snaking around her shoulders, a cameo brooch on a velvet ribbon around her neck, pearl teardrops hanging from each earlobe. One hand holding a bone china teacup halfway to her lips, the newspaper spread out on the table in front of her.
    The Duchess arched one eyebrow. “Business is slack,” she said, tapping an immaculately manicured and painted fingernail on top of Swaffer’s headline. “As well you know. Your firm seems to have frightened everyone off the streets tonight.”
    â€œMy firm?” said Greenaway. “I thought there was a mad killer out there.”
    The flicker of a smile played across Duch’s lips as she studied him.
    â€œLil!” she shouted. “Get yer knickers on. We got the law here.”
    At her bedroom sink, flannel and carbolic between her thighs, Lil yelled out: “Oh, bleedin’ ’ell, not again!”
    But when, hastily wrapped in her silk gown