Forests of the Night (2 page)

The man leaned down until his face was within inches of hers. ‘D'you hear me, you old tart? I'd rather fuck my mother than come anywhere near you.'

Somewhat unsteadily he crossed to the door and, slamming it heartily, he left.

Peter waited for some moments before he emerged from his bedroom. He wanted to be sure that the man had really gone. Crossing gingerly to his mother, he knelt down by her side. Already her bloated face was starting to bruise. As he leant his head towards hers, he could smell the stale alcohol on her breath.

‘Mam, Mam,' he cried shaking her. ‘Mam, Mam, are you all right?'

There was no response.

‘She's dead,' he told himself in a terrified whisper. Tears welled up in his eyes. ‘Oh, Mam.'

He fell on her, his head buried in her bosom as he sobbed for the loss of the mother he didn't really love.

Then suddenly, she stirred. The eyes opened lazily, the pupils rolling erratically.

‘What the bloody hell…?' she muttered thickly. ‘What the hell d'you think you're doing, you little bastard?'

Peter jumped up in shock, a mixture of relief and despair. ‘Mam, you're alive.'

His mother raised her head slightly. ‘'Course I'm fucking alive. More's the pity. What the hell to do you think you're doing, crawling all over me? Get out of my sight, you little sod. God, I wish the midwife had drowned you at birth. You're nothing but a fucking nuisance. Get out of my sight. Go on, get out of my sight, do you hear me? I never want to see you again.' She slumped back, the outburst draining the last drops of energy from her, and she slipped once more into unconsciousness.

‘I never want to see you again.'

The words seemed to echo round the tawdry room. They thundered in his brain. Peter looked down at the pathetic creature sprawled on the rug in front of him. What had the man called her? An old tart? Suddenly a new emotion entered his consciousness, causing his young body to tremble. It was anger. It was hot-blooded resentment against the woman who had ill-treated him for so long. Now he hated her, really hated her, hated her with an overwhelming fervour. He kicked her just as the man had done. ‘You old tart,' he cried, mimicking the man. ‘You're not my mother,' he added, his voice strong and devoid of emotion. ‘You're not my mother.'

Yet again her words came back to him, ‘I never want to see you again.'

Peter turned and walked back to his own room. He knew what he had to do and he was fearless in his decision. He dressed quickly and then, wrapping up some underclothes and a couple of shirts in some newspaper, he placed them in a carrier bag. He came back into the living room on tiptoe. His mother was still unconscious, but now she was snoring, her mouth agape and her tongue lolling to the side. Peter searched for her handbag and found it on the floor by the settee. Tipping out the contents, he picked up his mother's purse. There was little cash in there, but he took a ten-shilling note and five shillings in smaller coins and slipped them into his raincoat pocket.

Clutching the carrier bag, he made for the door, his heart beginning to pound. Now he was close to leaving, to making the big break, he prayed that his nerve wouldn't fail. He turned back to look at his mother, his eyes moist and his hands clenched.

‘I never want to see
you
again,' he said softly and then ran from the room, leaving the door ajar.

two

I spent the afternoon at the pictures. Well, someone has to keep the fleas company and there's quite a colony at the old Astoria. I think I am probably at my happiest, sitting in the dark amid a scattering of silhouetted strangers watching some flickering fantasy up there on the silver screen. I suppose it is an escape route from reality, from the war and my own cock-eyed, one-eyed existence.

On leaving hospital after my ‘firearms incident', with a small cheque as compensation for my injuries and a regulation black eye patch, I found myself adrift. Stamped disabled, I was no longer eligible for the army, well, the fighting army at least. I was told that they could find me a nice little safe clerical job somewhere. When I turned the offer down, I think they were relieved. I was an embarrassment to them – a reminder of their incompetence. It was the same story with my old employers, the police. They couldn't have a one-eyed copper chasing a couple of burglars down the high street. He might let one of them escape.

So what was a young red-blooded cyclops in search of some adventure in his life to do? Well, I know what
I
did. I used my compensation money along with my savings to set up as a private detective in London. If I couldn't be an official copper, I'd be an unofficial one and utilize what skills I had developed while I was in the force. I rented two rooms in Priors Court, an ancient block of flats at the north end of Tottenham Court Road; one was my office and the other was where I ate and slept. I shared the bathroom with other members of the motley crew who had found themselves washed ashore in the same building. And so Hawke Investigations came into being.

Any dreams of excitement and danger living the life of a private detective soon evaporated. At first no one came. I became a candidate for winning the world's thumb-twiddling championship. Then slowly I began to receive a trickle of clients: angry husbands and wives wanting proof that their partners were dipping their spoons in someone else's teacup and a few credit companies employing me to seek out their defaulting debtors who had run to ground. It was hardly Bulldog Drummond but it kept a roof over my head, which is more than some of the poor devils in the East End could say, courtesy of Herr Hitler's Luftwaffe.

As bleak autumn turned to harsh winter in 1940 the work began to dry up, hence my trip to the cinema. I had to pass my time somehow. The womb-like darkness of the picture palace helped for a time to mask those realities that I wished to forget. While scores of young men my age were actively fighting – and, indeed, dying – for their country, undergoing all kinds of hardship and deprivation, here I was living a comparatively comfortable life faraway from the front line. I felt guilty. The guilt was exacerbated by the fact that my brother Paul was out there somewhere ‘giving the Hun what for'. And here was I sliding down in a cinema seat, puffing on a Craven A, waiting for the big picture to start. The truth was that I hated myself. I hated myself for only having one eye.

For the next ninety minutes I joined Tiger Blake in yet another of his ‘rip-roaring adventures'. This time he was in search of
The Lost City.
Tiger had been a childhood hero of mine. I first encountered him as a comic strip in my boys' paper and then he emerged as a film star. There had been at least a dozen Tiger Blake movies and I'd seen them all. They had taken me from puberty, through my teenage years and here I was at twenty-six still following Tiger's exploits. The series was now rather old hat. Budgets had been cut, the sets were wobblier and it seemed to be on its last legs. The star, Gordon Moore, who had been in his mid-thirties when he'd played the part for the first time in
Tiger Blake and the Devil's Doorway,
was now approaching fifty and, I'm afraid, he looked it. His hair was obviously thinning and his once slender, muscular shape was running to fat. To make matters worse, his leading lady was significantly younger and resembled his daughter rather than his love interest. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the movie. It wasn't very good but it had a strange nostalgic appeal to me and for a short time I was transported back to my worry-free early teens when I wanted to be Tiger Blake, the man who, with one bound, was always able to break free from every tight corner in which he found himself. Paunchy, balding and slower in the action scenes than he had been, Tiger was still my man.

I left before the newsreel. I can't bear to watch scenes of the war. In that respect I was a coward, I suppose, but I knew it would only increase my sense of frustration and despair.

It was dusk and a thick fog had settled down on London. Pulling up my collar and tipping my hat forward, I headed for Benny's Café on Dean Street. As I walked, I glimpsed dimly-lighted shop windows through the shifting grey curtain of fog, while pedestrians, unidentifiable dark shapes, slid silently by. It was a good night to be anonymous.

Soon the bright window of Benny's Café beckoned like a beacon.

‘So it's Sherlock Holmes.' Benny gave me a wave as I entered. ‘How's business?'

‘What business?'

‘That bad, eh?'

I nodded and took a seat by the window. It was approaching seven o'clock, closing time, and I was his only customer.

‘Today's special is Brown Windsor Soup, and Shepherd's Pie.'

I shrugged. ‘That'll be fine,' I said, lighting up a Craven A. Food only interested me when I was happy, otherwise I saw it merely as a fuel to keep the body going. I dug into my pocket and dragged out some change. I was running low on funds. In my current financial circumstances that trip to the flicks had been an extravagance. Not only would horns have to be pulled in, but hooves and tail, too.

Benny was not the best of cooks – the soup tasted of gravy browning, which it probably was, and no self-respecting shepherd would have touched the pie, not even with his crook – but Benny was a friendly soul and I felt at ease in the place.

As I chewed on the strange brown stringy material that lay beneath the crusted layer of potatoes, I glanced up and saw a face staring in at me through the condensation-bleared window. It was a young face, a pale mask that bore a haunted look. A boy, somewhere around ten or eleven years old. The wide eyes stared at my plate enviously.

I smiled back at him. The face froze for a moment in fear at being seen and then vanished from sight. I went to the door and looked out. He had gone. I could hear the boy's running footsteps disappearing into the distance as tendrils of fog enveloped me.

three

After I'd finished what I could of Benny's repast, he cleared the plates away, raising an eyebrow at my leavings. ‘You'll never build your strength up if you let good food go to waste,' he said. I bit my tongue – which was somewhat more tasty than the pie – and nodded. Locking the door and switching the Open sign around to Closed, Benny came and sat beside me and offered me a cigarette.

‘You look as though you've just had an appointment with Mr Hitler himself,' he observed, blowing smoke over his shoulders. ‘Such a face.'

I grinned. ‘Nothing so exciting.' I was used to Benny mother-henning me and I didn't mind. In fact, it was quite touching.

‘Tell me, Johnny, what would bring a smile to that so unhappy mush of yours? What do you need? Mind you,' he added, waving his arms in mock horror, ‘if it's cash, you've come to the wrong fellow. Shepherd's pie and Brown Windsor soup don't make a man rich. If it did, Buckingham Palace I would live.'

I shook my head. ‘No, it's not cash.'

‘So … what? What do you need?'

I took a deep drag on the weedy little cigarette and let the smoke escape slowly until it almost masked my face. ‘A purpose,' I said.

*   *   *

I left Benny's about half an hour later and wandered around the fog-enshrouded West End for best part of an hour until inevitably my feet led me to The Velvet Cage, my second home. It was a jazz club run by a somewhat dodgy Greek character called George Cazmartis. I'd done a job for him when I first started up as a private detective. Someone was regularly dipping his fingers into the till and I'd been able to ram it shut while the hand was still there. Not exactly a pivotal moment in the history of crime detection, but it had impressed Georgie so much that he had given me life membership to the club. I could get in free anytime I liked. And I liked. It was on a par with the cinema: a dark, smoky place where one could be anonymous.

I nodded to Charlie the doorman and passed through the swing doors. Immediately I could feel the heat of the club waft towards me as though it was desperate to escape the stifling, hazy atmosphere within. It was an atmosphere I loved: the jazzy, boozy world where one could slip into veiled anonymity and soak up the pleasure.

I was just in time to catch Tommy Parker's first set with a new singer, Beulah White, who sang like Billie Holliday's sister but looked like her mother. She warbled ‘I loves you Porgy' with such sweet power that I found my eye moistening. The honeyed voice with the gravelly undertone soothed and elated and like all good singers, touched the soul. After she'd finished, I dug deep into my fading resources and bought her a drink and we fell into talking about songs and how to sell them. She believed that clichés in the lyric weren't necessarily a hindrance as long as the melody was strong enough to compensate. ‘A good tune gives added depth to the words. ‘You listen to what I do with ‘Love for Sale' in the second set,' she grinned, her white teeth illuminating her careworn face. I raised my glass in toast to this as she excused herself to ‘powder her nose'. Judging by her raddled features and dreamy eyes, I reckoned this was a euphemism for some other activity in which powder and her nose would feature.

‘Johnny. Good to see you.'

Without turning, I knew the voice. It belonged to a little fat man in a double-breasted dinner suit which was two sizes too small for him and the possessor of a nose so hooked he could have gone fishing with it. It was the owner, Georgie the Greek. I turned and gave him an insincere smile.

Casting his beady eye on my empty glass, he beckoned to the barman. ‘Jimmy, give Mr Hawke a Scotch on the house. A double.' He grinned his benevolent grin, his lips almost stretching round to touch his nose. Patting me on the back once more, he evaporated into the crowd to practise his benevolent mine-host act elsewhere. As I lifted my refreshed glass and inhaled the whisky fumes, I wondered why, despite his generosity to me, I didn't like the man. What the hell, I liked his whisky, especially when it was free.