Blue Noon Page 3

  Harry picked one up and examined it, marvelling at the smooth curve of her back, a creation of exquisite proportions. ‘Good God, no,’ he said eventually. ‘Got a whole library of them. I have to say, sir, you have impressive stamina for a man of your—’

  Parkhill slammed the desk in fury. ‘That’s enough.’

  Harry reached over and helped himself to a cigarette from the teak box on the desk and lit it with the ornate table lighter.

  ‘Where do we go from here, Cole?’

  Harry took a few puffs before answering, ‘An honourable discharge.’

  A bitter laugh. ‘On what grounds?’

  ‘Medical. Malaria. Repeated bouts, very debilitating, I hear. Passage to Blighty on the next transport. Very convenient, and gets me out of your way as well. Sir.’

  ‘And the Japs’ way too.’

  ‘There is that.’

  ‘Very well,’ he spat, the irritation making his mouth twitch. ‘I’ll see the MO.’

  ‘And a letter of recommendation—’

  ‘You’ve got nothing to recommend, Cole.’

  ‘I think Mrs Parkhill might disagree.’

  A tic started in one of Parkhill’s cheeks. ‘Get out before I shoot you where you sit, you slippery bastard. One day, Cole, you’ll come unstuck. And if there is a God, I’ll be there to watch the whole thing.’

  ‘Yeah, they’ll probably be sellin’ tickets by then.’ Harry slid off the desk and stubbed out the cigarette. ‘I’ll make sure you and Mrs Parkhill get the best seats in the house.’

  ‘OK, Suki says will see you.’ Harry’s heart leapt as a terse Mister Eric delivered the news. The brothel manager wasn’t too thrilled that Parkhill had cancelled his visits indefinitely. Harry had told him the Colonel would be back—he knew how hard it was to resist the lure of Suki. In the meantime, Harry had offered to fill the man’s shoes, and Eric’s wallet. ‘Wait over at the tea shack,’ Mister Eric instructed.

  Harry crossed over the road and walked through the narrow alley, holding his breath against the stench of urine, to the stall, where he ordered his chai and sat nervously on the bench.

  It was fifteen minutes before she appeared, a clear head taller than the mass of people that she was pushing through. Despite the heat she was wearing a full-length black cotton coat but her covered form was even more seductive than seeing her naked through the screen. He was suddenly very parched. He sipped at the cold tea in front of him and cleared his throat.

  She sat lightly on the bench opposite him, as if scared to put her full weight down. Her face was astonishingly smooth and symmetrical—if she was mixed race as Mister Eric insisted, hardly any of the British blood had diluted the oriental features.

  ‘I’m—’ he began croakily.

  ‘I know who you are.’ She looked at him steadily. Her voice was neutral, almost accentless. ‘Eric tells me. Here.’ She slid a pad and pencil over to him. ‘Write your name, your date of birth and your job, please.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you want to see me, you must do this.’

  He did as he was told, writing musician as his occupation. He certainly wasn’t going to be in the army much longer, so it was as good as anything.

  ‘Wait here.’

  And she was gone. He gazed at the back of her head until it was swallowed by a sea of pointed straw hats.

  He took a refill of tea and moved into the shade, watching the coolies rush back and forth. One of the scrawny black-clad Hakka women came by at a more leisurely pace than the others, a trussed hen under her arm, the silent bird en route to its messy death at the temple in some ritual beyond Harry’s understanding.

  Then it came to him. His date of birth. His writing. These people never did anything without consulting a fortune teller. She had gone to confer with some phoney astrologer about whether to take him on. He pressed down on his anger. All she should worry about was whether he could manage her forty dollahs, not his damn’ star sign.

  It wasn’t Suki who returned a half hour later, but Mister Eric, his face clamped into an expression that tried to convey regret.

  Harry half rose. ‘What does Suki say?’

  ‘She says … no.’

  Harry slapped the flimsy table hard, cracking it down the middle, sending the cups crashing to the ground, prompting a stream of abuse from the stall holder.

  ‘Why? Tell me that. Why?’

  Mister Eric squatted down and frowned, an unhappy bearer of bad tidings. He put a hand out and touched Harry’s leg before saying quietly: ‘She asked the astrologer, Harry. Then the chim and even the bui. All said same thing. Zao gao. Have nothing to do with him. You going to come to a bad end, Harry.’

  Four

  London, 1938

  ‘AND WHICH SIDE DOES sir dress the male person?’ asked the tailor crouching before him, tape ready to measure his inside leg.

  Whichever bloody way it feels like going thought Harry, but he replied: ‘Left.’

  ‘To the left. Very good, sir.’

  For his new suit, Harry had chosen one of the lesser Savile Row houses. It was a step up from a cat’s face—the first premises opened by a cutter eager to make a name for himself—but not yet fit to mention in the same breath as Huntsman or Poole, so the tailor was keen to attract the titled and the military on its books.

  Harry asked: ‘Business good?’

  ‘Can’t complain, sir,’ said the tailor. ‘Although not for suits. Thirty-three and one-eighth.’ An apprentice repeated the figure and then scribbled it down on Harry’s order form. The tailor stood and looked at Harry’s shoulders, checking they were level. ‘Most orders are for dress uniforms at the moment.’ He picked at a bit of fluff on Harry’s lapel. ‘All this talk of war, you see. But every cloud has its silver lining. There, all done. Now would sir like an extra pair of trousers?’

  Harry nodded. Why not?

  ‘Fine. First fitting in three weeks.’

  ‘Can’t rub in a PT?’

  The tailor raised an eyebrow that a customer should know the Row’s slang for working during lunch breaks to speed up an order. Harry, though, had friends who had worked as juniors for many of the tailors and outworkers in the East End.

  ‘Well …’ The tailor scratched his head, pondering.

  ‘I don’t mind a guinea or so on the final cost. Just that most of my clothes seem to have dated rather since I went overseas. Shapes have changed.’

  ‘They have, sir. As I said, ours aren’t quite as extreme as Mr Valentine’s, but …’

  Harry had asked for the boxed shoulders, wasp waist and pleated trousers that he had seen on the dandies at the Café Royal in Regent Street the previous night. His own suit, one of Kumar’s, had seemed stiff in comparison. It turned out that a tailor called Bobby Valentine had created the radical new cut that was fashionable among the fast set. So much so, the waiting list for a genuine Mr V was upwards of six months.

  ‘Shall we say two guineas, plus half a crown each for the cutters?’ suggested Harry.

  The tailor smiled. ‘We shall see what we can do.’

  ‘Tuesday?’

  ‘This isn’t Hong Kong, sir.’

  ‘No, I’m forgetting. Friday?’

  ‘Friday. We’ll do our best.’

  Harry slipped on his Kumar jacket. ‘I’ll see you then.’

  ‘We’ll look forward to it, Colonel Parkhill.’

  The smartly clipped moustache helped to give a man in his late twenties, as Harry was, the gravitas to pass for a colonel. The rest was a matter of a little grey at the temples, an upright bearing, and a great deal of bluster. He also made sure he conspicuously flashed the papers that Mister Eric had reproduced from Parkhill’s genuine set, lifted during one of the Colonel’s early sessions with Suki. It was the best identity he had for the moment, even if his youth did occasionally spark the incredulity he could see flitting across the face of the Riley salesman, a young man with the big-boned face of good breeding.

  Harry stroked the top of the Sprite
Saloon and asked: ‘Fast?’

  ‘Very fast, sir. One and a half litre Riley engine, light body, gives a top speed of ninety-five …’

  ‘And it’s how much?’

  ‘Three hundred and ninety-eight pounds.’

  ‘I’ll need a test drive.’

  ‘No problem, Colonel. If you’ll hop in, I’ll take you for a spin.’

  Harry looked aghast. ‘No offence. But I’d rather drive by myself. Only way you can get the measure of something like this. One to one. Don’t you find?’

  The salesman adjusted his tie. ‘Sir, if it was up to me … but company policy …’

  Harry looked wistfully out of the window onto St James’s and across to Jermyn Street. His tongue ran over the back of his incisor teeth, worrying the little ridge, still unused to the recent repair that masked his chipped tooth. Harry had decided it had looked rough rather than raffish after all. ‘London’s changed, hasn’t it?’

  ‘How do you mean, sir?’

  ‘When I left, a gentleman’s word was his bond. Now look at it. All treated like common criminals. I think I’ll go across to Jack Barclay, see how he feels about a test drive.’

  ‘Just a minute, sir … There must be some way we can compromise …’

  ‘Look, I’ll leave you my service papers and watch as security. Will that satisfy you?’ He unfastened the clasp. ‘Damn’ thing’s worth more than the car.’

  The salesman left and consulted with the manager who glanced up as he examined the pay book and the Omega watch and gave the nod. The manager knew that no soldier would give up his pay book lightly.

  The doors were pushed back and Harry climbed into the saloon, turned the flimsy key and pressed the starter. The little Sprite fired into throaty life. The salesman leant in and gave the Colonel instructions on the instruments and the best route for him to take, along Piccadilly to Knightsbridge, through the park and back round in a big loop. He stood back as Harry gunned the engine and roared off, leaving a faint haze of blue smoke in the showroom. The manager winced. The demonstrator was only two days old. ‘You told him it needed running in?’ he shouted across.

  The salesman nodded glumly.

  The manager looked down at the watch, wondering when he could afford one of these nice Swiss jobs. It was only when he saw the spelling Omego that the first misgivings began to flutter in his stomach.

  Five

  TWO WEEKS AFTER HIS final fitting as Colonel Parkhill at the tailor’s, on a glorious autumn afternoon, Harry drove the Riley Sprite, now a fetching deep red colour, through the Blackwall Tunnel en route to Tunbridge Wells. By the time he reached Bromley most of the city’s horse-drawn traffic and the costermongers’ donkeys had fallen away. With a clear road ahead, he let the little car stretch her legs and wound down the window to blow out the last of the heavy cellulose and thinner fumes from the re-spray.

  Harry was as well turned out as the car, in his bespoke Valentine-ish suit, polished brogues and new cravat. He had been moving along quite nicely himself since his return from Hong Kong. He had quickly slotted into his old world of boozers and spielers, the ad hoc gambling dens that were all over the East End of London like a bag of fleas.

  At the Moon Under Water pub in Shoreditch he had bought the key to a council flat in the Dunstan Houses near Stepney Green, using some of the forged fivers that were for sale at thirty bob a throw at Daddy Ho’s in Limehouse. The flat was a nice place by local standards—it had its own lavatory, no sign of bed bugs or mice, and a fine view over to St Paul’s, or it would have been if the Civil Defence hadn’t placed two vast barrage balloons in the way.

  And, as a bonus, he had acquired Dottie, who stayed over a couple of nights a week to keep him company. She was the girlfriend of Micky Codling, one of his Hoxton pals from way back. He and Micky had undertaken their first crimes together, graduating from stealing off the barges down at the Shadwell Basin to breaking into Auntie Queenie’s cat-infested rooms when they were nine, in search of the great wads of money rumoured to be in there somewhere—Queenie was the local moneylender—only to come away with thruppence each from the gas meter. Hardly a promising debut.

  Now Micky was in the Scrubs, having progressed from gas meters to post offices. He’d been nabbed with a Webley pistol in his hand in the PO down on the Commercial Road and his fiancée, the cherub-faced little Dottie, didn’t expect to see him in natural light for another nine years. Her arrangement with Harry developed on the night he had taken her out to cheer her up after the trial.

  Lying in his bed in the flat the following morning, Dottie had explained at length how she had been a nippy in Lyons Corner House. She was sacked after pouring scalding tea into the lap of a customer who thought the nickname for a waitress meant they wouldn’t mind a quick pinch on the bottom. Now, she worked as a chambermaid at the Charing Cross Hotel.

  Harry had almost drifted off when something she said shook him awake. ‘You wouldn’t believe what people leave in their rooms after they check out. Amazing stuff.’

  ‘Such as?’ Harry had asked.

  A Wing Commander Gilbert, it transpired, had abandoned his cheque book, log book and driver’s licence in room 410. Dottie had meant to hand them in to lost property, but they were still in her uniform when she came to wash it. She had put them on the mantelpiece at her mum’s place, she explained, unsure of what to do with them.

  Harry changed down for the long climb up the hill towards Sevenoaks. In his inside pocket were the twenty-three cheques and the Wing Commander’s log book. Unlike Dottie, he knew exactly what to do with the windfall: exchange them for cash. He would avoid the banks, of course, since they had lists of stolen and lost cheque books, but would target hotels.

  As the car touched sixty across the rolling hills of the Weald, Harry ran through his forthcoming performance as the Wing Commander, talking out loud, trying to get the conspiratorial tone just right. He would go to the large hotel on the hill in the centre of Tunbridge Wells an hour or so after the banks had closed, and ask for the manager. ‘My name is Wing Commander Gilbert,’ he practised, ‘I am engaged in some extremely sensitive work for the RAF in the area and, rather embarrassingly, I have something of a shortfall in funding. Now, normally in a situation like this, I would put in a request for the Ministry to wire a cash authorisation down to a bank …’

  He carried on, outlining to himself how the Air Ministry would reimburse the hotel within a day or two, forcing himself to wriggle into the skin of the Wing Commander, until Harry from Hoxton was nowhere to be seen or heard.

  Don’t be too greedy at the hotels, he reminded himself, fifty pounds a time should do it. Success at two establishments a day and he’d be rolling in it. Wing Commander Gilbert was potentially a worthy successor to Colonel Parkhill. Harry had a feeling the pair of them were about to move up in the world.

  Six

  Le Touquet, France, early 1939

  ‘I AM AFRAID THE manager is not here today, M’sieur. I am his assistant. Perhaps I can help?’

  Harry looked around the lobby of the Hotel Atlantic to make sure nobody else was in earshot and leaned over the desk. ‘If we could talk somewhere in private. This is a sensitive matter.’

  The Frenchman nodded. ‘Of course. If you would like to step into the office, M’sieur …?’

  ‘Gilbert. Wing Commander Gilbert.’

  As Harry had anticipated, Tunbridge Wells had gone very smoothly. In fact, most of the hotels had been only too glad to co-operate with a member of the services in such uncertain times and had been happy to advance fifty pounds. The run of successes stretched right across the winter up until The Grand in Brighton. Harry was punting cheque number twelve by then, but on that occasion he had seen doubt and suspicion in the manager’s eyes. It couldn’t have been his performance, that was word perfect. However, it was just possible that warnings about a cheque book fraudster had been circulated by the police or banks.

  He had made a hasty exit from the hotel, and Brighton, just to be on the safe
side and had decided to try his luck—armed with a newly minted WC Gilbert passport made in Stamford Hill—among the Anglophile enclaves of northern France. That meant trying the hotels of Calais, Boulogne, Dunkirk, Dieppe and now the Atlantic Le Touquet, an imitation of The Ritz in Paris, only with even more brocade and imitation Louis XIV fittings. A lily well and truly gilded, thought Harry.

  The Assistant Manager indicated a chair for the Wing Commander, who said he preferred to stand. Harry moved smoothly into his story as the Frenchman examined Gilbert’s log book. He had inked in some extra nights to account for his presence in the country, carefully copying Gilbert’s tiny, dense writing. His fiction had never really been questioned on the continent because, if anything, the French were even more terrified by the ever-present rumours of fifth columnists and war than the English, and were relieved and reassured that undercover allied agents were abroad in the land.

  ‘I am afraid I am not authorised to help, Wing Commander,’ the Assistant Manager said glumly as he handed back the papers. ‘Much as I would like to.’

  ‘Oh.’ Harry was taken aback This had never happened before.

  ‘The house rule is that only M’sieur Bourg, the manager, can authorise such payments. He will be here in the morning.’

  ‘That’s jolly unfortunate.’

  ‘I’m sorry. He’ll be in first thing.’

  ‘I have to be on my way to Calais by eight.’ Before the banks open, that is.

  ‘He is here at seven thirty, Wing Commander. Are you booked into the hotel?’

  ‘Uh, no.’

  ‘Well, if you spend the night with us, I am sure M’sieur Bourg will gladly help in the morning. He was in the air force himself, in the Great War.’

  Harry hesitated. This was a dangerous development. Get in, get the money, get out, that was his normal rule. But the thought of what was doubtless a supremely comfortable bed, and perhaps a bottle or two of wine, was tempting.

  ‘Sir?’

  ‘Yes, sorry. A room would be excellent. I’ll get my bags.’