Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal Read online

  H. R. F. Keating

  Is Skin Deep, Is Fatal

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  1

  Which one? The red-head in the dark green jersey-wool swim-suit clinging to every sun-tanned undulation? Or the blonde lifting the big red and white beach-ball high into the air above her head ready to throw?

  Police Constable Peter Lassington, comfortably at ease, off duty, free from the constant watchfulness of the London streets, could not make up his mind.

  The blonde in the percale cotton bikini all wet from the sea and practically transparent? The red-head with the long tanned legs lying looking between half-closed eyelids at the gleaming twin-tub washing-machine just behind her? Or, what about the one in the new rainbow-striped two-piece, the one kneeling back on her heels that way looking up at the man in the sports car?

  Peter Lassington sighed.

  The phone rang.

  He picked up the receiver.

  ‘Regent 1129.’

  ‘That you, Mr Lassington?’

  He tried to place the voice. It was familiar. A woman’s. A bit out of breath. Puffy. And worried.

  ‘Yes,’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Listen, you ought to come round. Come round, quick.’

  The voice obviously felt that enough had been said. It panted hoarsely down the line. Silent, waiting.

  ‘Come quick?’

  A policeman stationed and living in the Soho area develops a certain natural caution about mysterious telephone calls. Caution on two fronts. A natural disinclination to get involved, and a carefully cultivated playing it by ear when certain friends, or half-friends, want to convey information. Or half-want.

  And at the present moment on a February morning of sleeting, chill, implacable rain the natural disinclination was perhaps a little stronger than it ought to have been in a thoroughly keen and efficient young police officer.

  The woman at the other end of the line had been thinking. She had arrived at the conclusion that not quite enough had after all been said. She breathed more hoarsely for a few seconds and then broke into speech again.

  ‘Round to Fay’s Place,’ she said.

  And at once Peter Lassington knew who was speaking. Fay’s maid. A picture of her formed in his mind’s eye, not exactly the sort of picture he preferred in that private viewing theatre, but obtrusive. Difficult to push out. The enormous form rising like a squat pyramid from hips of elephantine proportions to some wisps of residual hair clinging for dear life on to a greasy tortoise-shell comb.

  Fay Curtis’s old maid.

  ‘Yes, what is it?’ he said urgently.

  ‘You’d better come. Fay’s dead.’

  ‘Dead? Dead? What do you mean, dead? How –’

  But with a last horrendous asthmatic wheeze Fay’s maid had rung off.

  Peter Lassington sat upright in his comfortable fireside chair and thought hard.

  He looked across at his wife sitting with her sewing by the light of the window. If light was the right word for the cold, grey stuff that crept in from the cold, grey day.

  ‘Just heard something,’ he said. ‘Bit odd. Think I’d better pop round there. Won’t be ten minutes.’

  Mary looked up from the neat patch on the pillowcase in her hands to the steady grizzling rain outside. And from the rain to the magazine on her husband’s lap.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘anything would be better than reading that, I suppose. I can’t think why you bring me it every week. You’re the only one who ever looks at it.’

  Peter grunted as he heaved himself up from his chair.

  ‘Can’t think why you don’t like it,’ he said. ‘Some pretty smashing swim-suits in it. You ought to get yourself one.’

  Mary smiled down at her sewing.

  ‘Can you see me bothering with choosing which silly new bathing costume I’m going to have for next summer?’ she asked.

  In the narrow hallway, where he was already reaching down a heavy mackintosh from the little row of bright-knobbed pegs, Peter Lassington laughed.

  ‘It’s a good job I picked you to marry,’ he said, ‘since we’ve got to exist on a constable’s pay.’

  He opened the front door and hurried downstairs and out.

  The rain, like so many ranks of imperturbably British grenadiers, was beating itself stupid against the yellowish grey stones of the pavement. Peter turned up his collar and hunched his shoulders.

  He set off through the familiar streets of Soho cutting his way through, nipping along the occasional roadless court, making quick progress in spite of the thickening crowds of typists and shop assistants drably plunging through the unremitting rain in search of early lunches. He glanced at them as he strode along but had to admit that, for all their gay coloured umbrellas and glossy mackintoshes, they were not an enlivening sight. Perhaps the cold was to blame. Few feminine charms can struggle successfully against the all-embracing hug of the good, thick, woolly cardigan.

  He hurried on past the familiar shops, the little foreign groceries with windows crowded with Polish pickled herrings, Italian sausages, poppy-seed covered loaves and businesslike cans of the favourite foods of half a dozen countries.

  In the doorway of a chemist’s shop he paused for a moment and looked up at the rain to see whether it was worth waiting a few seconds for some faint slackening. Through the dripping plate-glass window the massed attractions registered on his mind – the cough medicines, bathroom scales, toothpastes, hair coloriser, slip-on fingernails, stick-on eyelashes, a pyramid of little dark brown bottles of vital energy tablets and under these, perhaps significantly, a single tube of babies’ teething jelly.

  But at Fay’s Place Fay was dead. He put his head down again and plunged on.

  Past sandwich bars already beginning to attract sodden queues of customers; past cleaners’ shops with their rows of hanging dresses steadfastly awaiting collection; past bookshops with their arrays of volumes dedicated, as their notices said, to ‘art, science and the medical’ or, to put it more prosaically, to sex; past still fairly empty pubs, darkly painted, corniced and curlicued and smelling of draught beer.

  And in less than ten minutes he was at Fay’s Place.

  Few of the hurrying lunch-seekers would have even noticed that it was there. To the outward world at this hour of the day it presented simply one door, painted purple once and subsequently covered with successive layers of London grime, and above it one small, extinguished neon sign saying palely ‘Fay’s Place’.

  Police Constable Lassington pushed with his gloved hand at the apology for a door. It swung ajar indifferently.

  He stepped quickly in.

  The corridor ahead was unlit and if there were any windows they made little difference. But he knew his way and plunged on confidently along past grimy walls and down a narrow flight of stairs with a sharp twist in it. At the bottom there was another door, crudely painted in bright red with the legend ‘Fay’s Place’ once again, this time in sloping irregular white letters.

  Again Peter Lassington put out a hand and pushed. The door clicked open and flopped right back.

  He hurried in.

  At this early time of day the clubroom was unable to rise to its
expected level of brazen gaiety. It was unfairly handicapped, to begin with, by being lit not by the discreet wall-lights in pink shades but by one single central bulb of feeble power and feebler intentions. The only window stared fishily at the unaccustomed scene and contributed no more than a dirty expanse of lustreless grey. On the surfaces of the rather old hat black glass-topped tables the rings where last night’s pools of alcohol had dried up could still be seen. The tables had been divorced, too, from their little tubular chairs and could not, deprived of this support, muster much of an air of inviting liveliness.

  Even the summertime abandon of the beach scene painted behind the little bar was no longer able to give out any very positive spirit. Its long-legged girls with their acceptably rounded posteriors and uniformly pert bosoms were no doubt making a vigorous effort to create an atmosphere of sophisticated sexuality. But in the nature of things they were bound to fail.

  Peter Lassington bit his lower lip and called out cautiously.

  ‘Anybody at home?’

  The tawdry gold and black curtain beside the bar screening off the inner part of the club parted suddenly.

  ‘Pete. What are you doing here, my old beaut?’

  It was Jack Spratt. Detective-Constable James Spratt.

  He stood holding back the flimsy curtain and looking at Peter with a questioning tilt to his customary broad grin.

  Peter, like almost everybody who found Jack barging into their world, grinned back.

  ‘You here on business?’ he asked.

  Jack ducked his head under an imaginary bombardment of vexations and grinned again.

  ‘Wouldn’t come for me health, old darling,’ he said. ‘Though I s’pose you have.’

  ‘Me?’

  ‘Yes, you. Constable Lassington. You ought to be out there in the rain pounding that old beat, boy. Not nosey-parkering into a highly unrespectable joint like this.’

  Peter relaxed under Jack’s warmth.

  ‘Not on duty, me,’ he said. ‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten up there in C.I.D., but we get time off sometimes in the uniform branch.’

  ‘Go on,’ Jack answered cheerfully, ‘you’d give your back teeth to be in the C.I.D., you know you would.’

  Peter smiled back at him.

  ‘What if I would?’ he said. ‘It’d make a change.’

  ‘So you come round here trying to get in on the act?’

  ‘Just what sort of an act is it?’

  ‘Come and have a look if you like,’ Jack said carelessly. ‘But no advice.’

  ‘All right, mate. I’ll let you muddle along on your own then.’

  Jack whirled round.

  ‘You won’t, you know,’ he said.

  He let the irrepressible grin break out again.

  ‘I’d like to see you keep your filthy little claws off any C.I.D. business once you get within a mile of it,’ he went on. ‘I know you, matey. There’s nothing you want more in the world than to get into the old plain-clothes racket.’

  Peter smiled. A self-contained, almost secretive smile.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ he said.

  ‘I do, me old beaut. I think it, and I know it. What about the way you’re busy collecting yourself a little crowd of snouts? I dare say that’s why you came in here. And I know darn well it’s the reason you’re always in and out of old Bill Sprogson’s shop.’

  ‘Bill Sprogson? What do you mean, Bill Sprogson?’

  Jack grinned like a cannibal.

  ‘What do I mean Bill Sprogson? I mean you hang about that collection of filthy books he’s pleased to call a shop, so that he’ll feed you with bits of news he picks up about who did any jobs round about.’

  ‘Well, what if I do?’

  ‘Nothing, boy, nothing. Only if you are going to try to get yourself a private snout, you want to go about it a bit more clever. You don’t want half the world to know.’

  ‘Oh, go on. Just because you happened to see me once in his place.’

  Peter was doing his best to hide his annoyance. But it was not a very good best.

  ‘Come on,’ he said, ‘let’s see old Fay, for heaven’s sake. I haven’t got all day.’

  ‘No?’ said Jack.

  He grinned again and led the way into the back parts of the club.

  In a tiny, lilac-coloured bedroom off a short corridor, painted some time ago in an unsuccessful shade of pink, Fay Curtis, presiding nymph of the earnestly striving haunt of vice that bore her name, lay dead. At her elbow her last cigarette was crushed wetly into a glass ash-tray advertising a brand of beer by means of a brightly coloured portrait of a girl in a low-cut dress.

  Peter noticed the heavy daub of violet lipstick at the tip of the half-smoked butt and was able to imagine quite clearly enough the cigarette itself as it passed the last moments of Fay Curtis’s life drooping from the corner of her too much made-up mouth.

  She was lying sprawled on a vague divan with a mess of tattered-looking candy-striped lilac sheets under her and a hopelessly inefficient flopsy pillow near her head. Peter could see, more clearly than in life, how the henna hair gave way as it approached the skull to a coarse obstinate grey. The scrawny neck lay no longer concerned about its harsh wrinkles and unprotected by the faded housecoat with its pattern of huge, bright poppies.

  ‘Poor old Fay,’ Peter said. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Gas, of course,’ Jack answered cheerfully. ‘Still, she’ll never have to pay the bill.’

  ‘Who found her?’

  ‘Big fat old girl. Calls herself a maid.’

  ‘Yeah, I know her. She rang me, as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Did she? Looks as though she was on the game once upon a time to me. Got a tattoo mark on her wrist. Lot of those old-timers had that.’

  ‘My, my,’ Peter said, ‘what will Sherlock Holmes spot next? That cigarette ash, my dear Watson, number 89 in my monograph.’

  ‘No. But I’ll tell you what I haven’t spotted,’ Jack answered.

  ‘What’s that, then? The murder weapon?’

  ‘Murder weapon, my fanny. You won’t come across a more routine suicide than this one, not if you do get to spend the rest of your blessed life in the C.I.D.’

  ‘All right, then, what haven’t you spotted? You tell me what it is, and I’ll show you where it is.’

  ‘You won’t, you know. Because it’s not here. That’s what.’

  Jack grinned at him in enjoyment of his self-made mystery.

  ‘All right,’ Peter said, ‘if you won’t tell me I can’t help you.’

  ‘No, go on,’ Jack said, caught up in his game, ‘go on, guess what it is.’

  ‘What is this? A quiz programme?’

  ‘No. No, it’s a perfectly good question. Test of detective abilities. Here you are, old woman dead on her bed, smell of gas, door and window blocked up, more or less. Perfectly routine suicide. So what’s missing?’

  ‘I give up.’

  Jack’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘You can’t give up yet. You got three guesses.’

  ‘Oh, come off it.’

  ‘No, go on. Three guesses. I tell you it’s a perfectly reasonable test of your ability.’

  ‘Go on. Who do you think you are? Chief lecturer at detective school?’

  ‘You couldn’t guess in a million years.’

  The grin was cheeky now.

  ‘Oh, couldn’t I?’

  Peter Lassington’s eyes squinted slightly in concentration.

  ‘Shilling in the gas,’ he said.

  ‘Clever stuff, clever stuff. But miles out. I told you: there’s no reason at all to think this is anything but a perfectly routine suicide. So what’s missing?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. The old girl’s garters.’

  ‘That’s two. One more.’

  Peter’s lips pursed in unlocated annoyance. Jack still grinned equably.

  And suddenly Peter laughed.

  ‘Quite simple,’ he said.

  ‘All right, if it’s so simple, what is i
t?’

  ‘A note. A suicide note. They all write them, and I can’t see one anywhere. You’d know it a mile off if she’d left one, too. Got a fist like a cow and always uses purple ink.’

  ‘That so? You really know her then?’

  ‘Listen. Am I right? Yes or no?’

  ‘Okay. You win. No note.’

  Jack took his defeat cheerfully.

  ‘It’s odd, you know,’ he went on. ‘I mean, they almost always do leave a note.’

  ‘And you’ve really looked everywhere?’

  ‘Turned the place inside out. Best detective school tradition. Start from point near door, work round systematically in a clockwise manner. Constable Spratt, which way is clockwise? Please, sir, don’t know, sir. Can’t tell the time, sir.’

  ‘And not a sausage?’

  ‘Not a sausage.’

  ‘So she didn’t leave a note then,’ said Peter.

  ‘Very splendid piece of logical reasoning, Constable Lassington.’

  ‘But I wonder what made her do it? Any ideas?’

  ‘Cor, wouldn’t you feel like turning it in sometimes if you kept a place like this?’

  ‘The club? It’s all right.’

  ‘But tatty.’

  ‘No, you should see it in business hours. Looks a bit more like it then.’

  Peter slipped a comb from his pocket, ran it twice through his well-groomed hair, and began a slow, seductive dance in the crammed little bedroom where Fay Curtis had put an end to her life.

  ‘You used to come here then?’ Jack said. ‘With Mary?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid. What do you think a girl like Mary would want in a place like this? No, I’ve looked in once or twice on duty. When there’s been a bit of a row or something.’

  ‘Can’t have been very often then. Old Fay kept things pretty quiet. I often thought she must have something going on as well as the club, the way she took such care not to have trouble.’

  ‘Yep, could be.’

  Peter shrugged.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I quite liked the old girl. Used to stop and chat sometimes in the afternoon. If I happened to be passing and things were quiet.’

  ‘You know,’ Jack said, ‘that could be why she took the quick way out.’

  ‘What could be?’

  ‘That she was up to her old neck in some racket, and things were getting too hot for her in some way or another.’