“Perhaps you’ve met him? Samuel Baker. He was one of the Rats of Tobruk:2/23rd Battalion, 26th Brigade, 9th Division. Where did you serve?”
He sidestepped her question. “You’re a private inquiry agent, I take it,” he said.
She nodded. Hatchet Face continued his bumbling around in the background. He was in her bathroom now.
“An anonymous call about something, was it?” she pressed.
“Yeah,” Hatchet Face replied, emerging. His jaw was pushed out, his eyes small. He wasn’t as good at veneers.
“It must have been a trusted source to bring a detective inspector out so early,” Billie added casually.
“Yeah,” the constable grunted.
“Anonymity isn’t what it used to be, I guess,” Billie commented.
Silence hung heavy in the air. The inspector stood by the closed front windows, observing the exchange, his hands in his pockets andthose pale eyes of his not missing a thing. Hatchet Face began bustling around again, now with even less grace, opening and closing cupboards in the kitchen and making a show of things, as if he hadn’t already failed to see what was supposed to be there waiting for them, clear as day.
Billie walked to the large front windows and peered down at the street. Her flat was at the farthest northeastern corner of the building, providing a good vantage point for watching the passing traffic on Edgecliff Road below. A block or so back from the driveway of Cliffside Flats was the parked Vauxhall. Yes, there was someone in that car, she sensed. Perhaps the same person who’d tailed her that day to the Browns’ fur shop in the Strand Arcade. How did that fit into the picture? “The Vauxhall down there. He one of yours?” she asked the detective inspector casually.
“The Vauxhall?”
“Yes. I think there’s someone watching the building.”
“Not one of ours,” the inspector said with ease, but she sensed Hatchet Face, who’d returned to the living room, stiffen.
Billie turned a dining room chair around and sat down. “The offer of tea still stands,” she said to the inspector. “Or coffee.”
“No, thank you, miss,” he replied, folding his arms.
“Are you a recent transfer?” she ventured. “I don’t believe I’ve heard your name before. Do you know Special Sergeant Lillian Armfield? Please pass on my regards if you see her. I owe her a call.”
Detective Inspector Cooper wasn’t biting. He’d closed up like a clam. A polite clam, but a clam nonetheless.
Hatchet Face was scowling and looking flushed. “Didn’t you call in a stiff last night?” he asked gruffly.
“That I did, Officer.” She threw one arm over the back of the chair and looked at him, wondering where he’d go with it. “At the People’s Palace.”
“Then you went out on the town after that? Geez, you dames are wacky. Seeing a stiff makes ’em all excited,” he said to the other man, as if he needed an audience, all the while laughing at his own joke.
“Don’t tell me you never take a drink after coming face-to-face with a stiff?” Billie queried with a level gaze, and the grin dropped from his face like a lead bubble. The inspector exhaled suddenly from his position by the window. She didn’t look at him. She kept her gaze on Hatchet Face, but he wouldn’t look at her now. His skin had turned beet red and he was clenching his fists harder than a pauper grips a coin. Given different company, one of those fists might have tried landing on her.
“There wasn’t anyone there, anyhow,” the constable managed after a moment of recovery, his repartee delivered with less confidence now. “This one justdreamsof stiffs,” he announced. That got him chortling to himself again. He was a regular one-man show, and his own audience. The inspector kept watching.
“I did not imagine it, Officer. He was there in his room at the Palace,” Billie said earnestly. Her sincerity was wasted on the constable, though the inspector was watching her carefully, in silence. “A dead person is not something oneimagines.”
“What were you doing there, in some man’s room, anyway?” It was Hatchet Face again. He really had it in for her. She’d like to know why.
“His name was Zervos,” she explained in a professional tone. “Con Zervos. He worked as a doorman at The Dancers on George Street, off Victory Lane, and he wanted to talk with me, just like Itold you coppers last night. It was late because it was after he got off work. The Dancers closes at one.”
“You accept a lot of invitations up to men’s rooms in the middle of the night?”
Billie let that ride. “Are you finished here, or do you want to go through my panty drawer?” she asked him.
“I think we’re finished,” the inspector said, seeming to have seen and heard quite enough. “Thank you for your time, miss. Sorry to have bothered you.”
She stood and handed the inspector her business card. “If you need to ask me any questions, you know where to find me. I’ll be here or at my office in Daking House. I was not making up what I saw last night, Inspector. I don’t know what brought you here today, but I’d surely like to know.”
He turned her card over in long, elegant fingers.
