The Tango School Mystery Page 2

  "Where?"

  "Here. In Brighton."

  "So an old fascist is going to scratch together a handful of votes. Why's that got Gervase all riled?"

  Figgis reached for the paper in the in-tray. Picked it up between thumb and forefinger. Beetled his brow as he focused on the words.

  "That's where this comes in," he said. "Pope gave it to me. It summarises the relationship between Gervase and Maundsley. It seems Gervase was a strong supporter of Maundsley in the 'thirties. But he kept himself out of the spotlight. He avoided the rallies in the Albert Hall and the punch-ups with communists during marches in London's east end. So when war came, and the leading fascists were rounded up for internment, Gervase slipped through the net.

  "At least, he thought he had. But Maundsley hadn't. He was fuming somewhere inside Pentonville prison scheming for a way out. Then a supporter handed him a cache of letters Gervase had written to a fascist friend years earlier. Apparently, they contained indiscretions about a number of people. Anyway, the long and short of it was that Maundsley swapped the letters for a lighter spell inside."

  "He grassed up his supporters?" I said.

  "Some of them," Figgis said. "The powers that be decided that because he'd helped to lock up others, he didn't represent such a serious threat to the realm. They let him out. But, on the evidence in the letters, they put Gervase inside. And he stayed there until after Hitler had shot himself in his bunker. According to Pope, Gervase has hated Maundsley with a passion ever since."

  "And I assume it's Maundsley's decision to fight a Brighton seat at the election that has pushed Gervase over the edge?"

  "Correct," Figgis said. He swallowed the last of his mint.

  I leaned back in my chair. Studied my fingernails. Tried to feign insouciance. Never my strong suit.

  "I can't see how all this affects me," I said.

  "It's simple," Figgis said. "Pope wants you to use your legendary powers as an investigative journalist to find Gervase before he croaks Maundsley."

  Chapter 3

  In Antoine's Sussex Grill, Shirley slammed down her knife and fork.

  She'd lost interest in the South American-shaped steak. The blood-stained remnants lay on her plate. The steak's T-bone stuck up like the Andes.

  Another droplet of blood formed on the ceiling. It shone like a ruby.

  I glanced up at it and sighed in a resigned sort of way. I knew I wasn't going to enjoy what I had to do next.

  "I'm going upstairs," I said.

  "How?" Shirley asked.

  "There's a separate front door to the apartment in the street."

  "I'm coming with you."

  "No, it's best you wait here. If we both rush out Antoine will think we're doing a runner to avoid paying the bill."

  Shirley grinned. "Would be great exercise, cobber."

  "Not now. There are more important things to deal with."

  I crossed the room and stepped into the street. Across the road, a couple of drunks lurched out of The Smugglers. A young woman with blonde hair in a beehive, tight skirt and killer stilettos, staggered by. A taxi cruised down the street looking for a fare. The driver eyed me briefly then focused on the blonde.

  I stared up at the first-floor apartment window. The light was on and the curtains - tired brown numbers that hung like a beggar's rags - were half drawn. They let out a shard of light.

  The front door to the apartment was at the end of the building. It was recessed into the wall in a kind of porch arrangement. I stepped into the porch and rapped firmly on the door.

  Twice.

  On the second rap, the door moved. It hadn't been shut properly.

  I pushed gently and it swung open. Its hinges creaked like a pensioner's kneecaps. I stepped into a small hallway which led to a flight of stairs.

  The place was lit by a dusty bulb hanging from a short flex cable. The walls were covered with embossed wallpaper painted a muddy cream. A picture of a yacht sailing in a stormy sea had slipped sideways in its frame. An umbrella was propped in the corner. There was a threadbare grey carpet on the stairs. The hallway had the fusty smell that comes from wet clothes drying in front of gas fires.

  I moved to the foot of the stairs wondering whether this had been a good idea.

  I shouted up: "Hello! Is anyone at home? I've just come round to see if you're all right."

  Somewhere in the house something creaked. But that would be the result of the cooler air flooding in after I'd opened the front door. Natural in an old building like this.

  At least, that's what I told myself.

  I shouted again. "Nothing to worry about. I'll just come up to make sure you're all right."

  I listened. Something else creaked.

  Softly.

  But twice.

  I shouted: "I'll come up now unless you say not to."

  Nobody shouted: "Clear off and leave me alone."

  But then a dead body wouldn't.

  Nor would an intruder. Especially one whose soft-shoe shuffle made the old floorboards creak twice.

  I looked over my shoulder at the door. Wondered whether I should leave quietly and shut it behind me. Call the cops. Let them take the glory. Or a bullet in the forehead.

  The safety-first option.

  But safety-first leaves you standing on the outside. Forever wondering what it must be like to be the guy who gets the action. Never the guy who wins the medal. Or, in my case, lands the front-page story. Safety-first leaves you growing old wondering what life could have been like.

  Besides, what would I tell Shirley if I scurried back with nothing to show for my original bravado? And, anyway, I knew I had to find out who was upstairs.

  Or what was upstairs.

  I slunk up the stairs with all the enthusiasm of a Tommy going over the top at the Battle of the Somme.

  The stairs led into a landing with three doors. Two of them - one in front of me, one to the left - were closed. The door to the right was open. A light was on inside.

  I stood in the landing and listened for a sound. Any sound.

  Like a moan. Or a whispered plea for help. Or a rasp of breath from an intruder.

  But I only heard silence.

  And then a creak. Not once or twice this time. Three times. And it came from behind the closed door to the left.

  I stepped silently over and put my ear to the door. Like a nosey-parker listening in on the neighbours.

  The floorboards creaked again. But softly. As though they didn't mean to.

  I took hold of the door knob and turned it. I pushed the door gently. Nobody pushed back.

  So I flung open the door and stood back.

  A tabby cat shot out of the room with a piercing screech. It raced across the landing and stopped at the entrance to the lighted room. It turned round and stared at me. Bared its teeth and snarled. The moggie equivalent of: "Don't try anything if you know what's good for you".

  I bared my teeth back, but its eyes radiated withering contempt. Besides, I was in no mood for a staring competition with a cat.

  I stepped into the darkened room where the little beast had been imprisoned and switched on the light. It was a bedroom. There was an iron bedstead with bedclothes in the kind of tangle that comes from restless sleep rather than passionate love making. (Believe me, there are ways to tell.) There was a dressing table with a hair brush, a couple of combs and a half-used jar of Brylcreem. Across the room, the door of a wardrobe hung half open. I walked over and looked inside. The wardrobe held a couple of shabby jackets, a pair of grey flannel trousers, three shirts with crumpled collars, and a cardigan with frayed sleeves.

  Evidently, Beau Brummell didn't live here.

  There was a bedside table. A glass of water, a bottle of pills, and a book rested on it. I moved across the room and looked at the book. It was called Hitler's Permanent Wave: How the Führer Escaped Berlin and Began a New Life as a Ladies' Hairdresser in South America.

  Its three hundred pages of nonsense had been penned by
someone called Titus Scrivener. I flipped open the cover to see whether the inside flap held any further information on Scrivener. Instead I found an inscription on the title page: To Derek Clapham - time for the truth - best wishes, Titus.

  So, presumably, this was Clapham's apartment.

  He'd used an old letter as a bookmark. I opened the book at the page and studied the letter. It was from his bank. Dated five days earlier. The bank manager would like Mr Clapham to call and discuss his overdraft which now stood at two hundred and thirty-two pounds, three shillings and four pence ha'penny. At the foot of the letter Clapham had scribbled a note: "Have asked UBH for £200 loan."

  I replaced the letter and put the book back on the bedside table.

  But I'd forgotten why I was flipping through Clapham's bedtime reading. Downstairs in the restaurant, there had been blood on the ceiling.

  Up here, in the apartment, there should be a corresponding pool of blood on the floor. I'd been too diverted by a creaking floorboard and a cat to focus on the main purpose of my mission.

  If the blood had been leaking on to our table below, which room of the apartment would it be in?

  I glanced out of the window into the street to help me get my bearings. The Smugglers was slightly to my left. When we were sitting in the restaurant, Shirley and I had been exactly opposite the pub.

  So that must mean the blood was in the lighted room. The room that had been to my right when I'd come up the stairs.

  I hurried out of the bedroom, thoughtfully turning off the light after me.

  I crossed the landing and entered what was obviously a sitting room. In the middle of the room, there was an ancient settee upholstered in brown leather. The leather had long ago faded and started to crack. A small Indian rug covered the bare floorboards in front of the settee. There was an easy chair piled high with an eclectic collection of old newspapers and magazines. I spotted the Daily Telegraph, the New York Herald-Tribune (European edition), the Spectator, the New Daily, Paris Match and La Stampa.

  On the far wall, a glass cabinet held a half-empty bottle of scotch and a few glasses. I resisted the temptation to help myself.

  To my left, another door was ajar. By the half-light from the sitting room, I could see a sink piled with dirty crocks and the edge of a cooker. My brilliant deductive powers were on top of that straight away: the kitchen.

  But the kitchen was at the back of the building. And Shirley and I had been sitting at the front. So any blood must be in the sitting room, where I was standing.

  I looked around the room. Couldn't see any blood on the floor.

  Then the cat stepped out from behind the settee. It looked a lot less cocky than when we'd eyeballed one another on the landing. It slunk across the room leaving a trail of red paw-prints on bare boards.

  I took a deep breath and crossed the room. I looked behind the settee knowing I wasn't going to like what I would find.

  A man's body was lying there. He was middle-aged, had thinning brown hair, and was dressed in a pair of blue slacks and a grey pullover.

  His throat had been cut so deeply I could see neck bone showing. It was as though his neck had opened in a scream. Death must have been quick but not instant, because a pool of blood had flowed from his wound. The floor wasn't level - common in older buildings in central Brighton - and blood had drained into a crack between the floorboards. That would've been how it formed the stain on the ceiling below.

  My heart pounded hard. A troupe of acrobats turned somersaults in my stomach. The jugged hare churned like it was still alive and eager to compete in the Waterloo Cup.

  I belched and tasted the rich flavour of the hare's sauce. It wasn't as tasty coming up as it had been going down.

  I reached for the edge of the settee to steady myself. Closed my eyes and took a couple of deep breaths. Felt a little better.

  Knew that my next step must be to call the cops.

  Then a crash like a dozen tin cans rattling in a bin shattered the silence in the kitchen. Something metal and heavy landed on the floor making a racket like scrap metal falling off the back of a lorry.

  And then glass smashed like a window had just been punched out.

  I swerved around the edge of the settee and dashed towards the kitchen.

  But the moggie had been scared witless by the racket. It fled across the room. In front of me. I tripped over the animal and took off like the first man trying to fly without wings. I landed full on my front, like I'd been dumped without a 'chute twenty thousand feet from an aeroplane.

  I crashed onto the floor and felt the wind rush out of me.

  The moggie hissed and disappeared under the drift of newspapers in the easy chair.

  I lay there feeling more foolish than injured while I gasped for air to re-inflate my lungs. Then I pushed myself onto my hands and knees. I stood up and made my way gingerly towards the kitchen keeping an eye out for stray cats.

  The floor of the kitchen was littered with half a dozen pots and pans. They'd been pushed hastily from a draining board. The window behind the board was smashed so all the glass had gone. Outside the window, there was a metal fire escape leading down to an alleyway which ran behind the buildings. I climbed onto the board, avoiding shards of broken glass, and peered out of the window.

  There was no-one on the fire escape. The alley wasn't lit, but towards the far end I could make out the shape of a man. He was moving at the determined pace of someone who knew that his night's work was done.

  And that he was going to get away.

  Chapter 4

  Detective Inspector Ted Wilson took a sip from his cup.

  He said: "That coffee tastes better than anything we get back at the station."

  I said: "That's because there's a double shot of five-star French cognac in it. This is the first time ever I've seen you smiling on a murder enquiry."

  Shirley, Ted and I were sitting round a table in Antoine's restaurant. Not the one under the dripping blood stain. It was an hour after I'd witnessed the man I presumed was the killer flee the scene of the crime.

  Antoine was fretting in the background with a bucket of soap suds and a long-handled mop.

  I said: "You won't be able to reach the stain with that and the soap suds would only turn into red bubbles anyway. Best let it dry and then get it painted over. No-one will ever know."

  Antoine muttered something in Greek using words that probably weren't in Socrates's vocabulary. Although come to think of it, he'd spent a spell in prison so he could have picked up some salty language from fellow inmates.

  I said: "When you've got rid of the mop, you can bring Shirley and me another coffee with a strengthener. You'd better make Inspector Wilson's straight from the pot - or he'll be blowing up red balloons to match his nose and holding a party."

  Ted cleared his throat noisily and gave his beard a busy stroke. It was his way of trying to regain his dignity. I'd ribbed him, but I had a soft spot for Ted. He was a country boy who'd made it good in the big bad town of Brighton. He'd not picked up the naughty habits of his fellow 'tecs. His clear-up rate was better than theirs. But they were the ones who flew to holidays on a Spanish costa each year - best hotel and all the trimmings, like soap in the bathroom. They paid with the kind of greasy pound notes that get passed under the counter and stuffed surreptitiously into back pockets. Meanwhile, Ted struggled to pay for a week at a guest house in Bognor.

  I'd been pleased when he'd appeared on the scene, minutes after I'd called the cops. He'd spent the best part of an hour in the apartment before coming down to the restaurant.

  He drained his coffee and looked at Shirley and me with happy eyes.

  He said: "I've got a team upstairs going through the apartment searching for evidence. Now let's go through what you saw again."

  I said: "We've already been through it twice. Blood dripped through the ceiling. I went upstairs. Found a dead body. Tripped over a cat. Watched a killer disappear down the back alley."

  "Description?"
/>
  "Long and thin between two stone walls and littered with chip papers."

  "The man, not the alley."

  "It was dark, he was fifty yards away, had his back to me, and was wearing a heavy coat with the collar turned up."

  "It's a warmish night. It might have stood out when he came out of the alley. There'll be a witness somewhere who remembers a man like that."

  "Not if he took the coat off before he stepped out of the alley. You'll probably find it tossed over someone's back wall."

  Ted frowned and scribbled something in his notebook.

  I said: "I didn't have time to poke around in the flat."

  Ted grinned. "That must have annoyed you."

  I sniffed. But not so that Ted would think he'd got to me.

  I said: "The main clue as far as I'm concerned is the fact there was no forced entry and the front door was still open."

  Ted stroked his beard again. "Yes, I've been thinking about that. Your conclusion?"

  "I'll tell you my conclusion if you tell me yours first."

  "No, you go first."

  "I want to hear the official view."

  "You're a witness and should answer my questions."

  Shirley clunked down her coffee cup and said: "Come on, boys, this sounds like those willie-waving contests I used to watch behind the bike shed when I was at school in Oz."

  My eyes widened at that. "You watched willie-waving contests at school?"

  Shirley grinned. "There wasn't much to watch apart from cricket. And I could never get the hang of those long legs and short third mans. Besides, you got to see the long and the short of it behind the bike shed."

  I shook my head, not without a little wonder. Turned back to Ted.

  "My conclusion is that whoever killed Clapham was expected," I said. "Clapham knew who he was. The poor sap let him in never knowing what would happen."