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

the war and taken to supplementing her income with a few gentleman callers from time to time.
    This much Greenaway was able to get from the detective attending to Ivy Poole, her neighbour. Ivy, a spinster, who as Cherrill had indicated was knocking on a bit herself, worked as an assistant at what they called the fun-fair in Leicester Square, a tawdry assemblage of shooting ranges, slot machines and manky farm animals, where she was obliged to dress as an approximation of Calamity Jane, if the felt Stetson hat and shirt adorned with lampshade fringing that hung on the back of her door were anything to go by.
    Greenaway felt the sadness of wasted years as he surveyed the single bed and one-ring stove of Ivy’s little room, the solitary bowl and plate left in her sink when the meter men had roused her from her slumbers at 8am that morning to take a reading. Luckily it was the men from the Central Electric Company who had gone into her neighbour’s room ahead of her and stopped her from seeing the full horror of what was in there. But Ivy had still seen the blood.
    Now she sat on her bed wrapped in a candlewick dressing gown, clutching a long-cold mug of tea, red eyes staring into the distance. Letting the junior detective take his leave, Greenaway introduced himself and sat down next to her.
    â€œAll right, love?” he said, gently prising the mug from her hands. “D’you want me to make you a fresh one?”
    For the first time in hours, Ivy heard something other than the Frenchwoman’s words about servicemen. It was something about the size of the bogey sat next to her and the gentleness of his sleepy-lidded eyes that calmed her. Ivy’s eyes regained their focus as she slowly took him in, her shoulders slumping, her mouth attempting the flicker of a smile. She shook her head.
    â€œNo, ta, dear,” she said. “Ain’t nothing another one of them’s gonna make seem any better. Not after what he done in there. What he done to poor Nina. The bastard .”
    Greenaway leant down and opened his murder bag a fraction, enough so Ivy couldn’t see inside of it, but so that he could extract the special extra item he always carried there. He poured her out a teacup full of Scotch and handed it to her, watched her pupils enlarge for a second before she took a hefty slug.
    â€œTa, ducks.” Ivy wiped a hand across her mouth. “That was just what I did need, Inspector.”
    â€œSo what can you tell me, Ivy,” Greenaway flicked open his notebook, “that’ll help me put a noose around a bastard’s neck?”
    Ivy straightened herself up. “I saw him,” she said. “I saw the man what come in with her last night.”
    â€œYeah?” Greenaway encouraged. “Tell me what he looked like, Ivy.”
    â€œHe was a young man,” she said. “Tall and handsome, I suppose – from a distance anyway.”
    â€œYou saw him up close, then?”
    â€œI did,” said Ivy. “I heard her come in the front door about twenty to twelve. I went and turned the landing light on for her, like I always do. They was coming up the stairs, the pair of them.”
    â€œGood,” Greenaway nodded. “So you saw them both come in together. You said he was a young man, how old would you say?”
    Ivy pursed her lips. “’Bout twenty-four, twenty-five, something like that,” she said.
    â€œYou remember what colour his hair was?”
    â€œI do,” said Ivy. “It was a sort of goldie-brown, wavy at the front, but going a bit frizzy at the back, like he ain’t put enough Brylcreem on it.” She squinted as she reached back into memory. “Parted on the left, I think. He had a moustache as well, just a small one.”
    â€œNothing gets past you, does it, Ivy?” said Greenaway, taking it all down. “Good girl. You remember what he was wearing?”
    â€œA uniform, by the looks of it,” Ivy was