First Kensington Hardcover Edition: August 2024
ISBN: 978-1-4967-4911-6 (ebook)
For Gwen & Stan
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, my gratitude to the friends who encouraged me for so long. Without their support there would be no book: John Callas, Vince Cefalu, Don Potter, and Jake Warga. Next, my agent, the tireless Marlene Stringer, aka M, who heard me banging on the door and opened it, if only to stop the noise. And finally, Kensington Publishing’s editor, John Scognamiglio, whose patient guidance was invaluable.
1
London, 1939. Police Constable Caitrin Colline did not like walking the beat along Ryers Road on Friday nights, and neither did her partner, Florence Simmonds. Florence, with her shambling gait and apologetic face, was a worrier by nature and would perhaps have been much happier as an undertaker than a policewoman. Apart from her unease at being on Ryers Road, Florence was concerned because Hannah, her Czechoslovakian pen pal, had recently stopped writing. Months earlier, Magrit, her pen pal in Vienna, had stopped writing too. Magrit’s last word was Anschluss. Florence did not understand German—they usually wrote in English—and only learned what Anschluss meant when she read about the Nazi annexation of Austria in the Daily Mail. It did not sound good.
Ryers Road, like all the other slum streets in London’s Docklands, was narrow, with rows of pinched houses on either side. There was no color, even on the brightest of days, and sanitation was rudimentary. Smoke from innumerable coal fires made the air sulfurous, and soot coated the walls and windows. The street gaslights cast disheartening, bilious puddles on the pavement that only made the shadows deeper.
Each house, with two rooms up and two down, was just big enough for a small family, as long as no one tried to be expressive or gained too much weight. There were few fat people on Ryers Road, and how the fecund Irish with their restless, swelling broods managed to fit into such confined spaces was a refutation of the laws of physics.
Only poor people lived on Ryers Road, along with their poor diseases and stunted horizons. And although Caitrin was not as uneasy as her partner, Florence, about being there, it was still not the best place for a woman, even a policewoman, to be, especially on a Friday night.
A rat skittering toward a drain made Florence gasp; a baby cried upstairs in number 14; the door to number 16 crashed open, and a middle-aged woman in a torn nightdress and with blood streaking her face stumbled past them to sprawl face down in the street. An instant later, a man—broad, shirtless, braces flapping around his knees—roared out of the house, pushed between the police officers, and stood over the woman.
Florence shrank back into the shadows as Caitrin approached him and shouted, “Stop that!”
He swatted her to the ground with King Kong ease and swore at the woman lying at his feet. Stunned, Caitrin rolled and cracked her truncheon hard against the man’s shin. He shrieked in pain, and she struck at his other shin, sending him to his knees as she rose to her feet.
“Don’t move.” She pinned his arm behind his back to hold him down. “Simmonds!”
“What?”
“What?” Caitrin glared at her. “Handcuffs.”
Florence edged out of the shadows and at arm’s length offered Caitrin her handcuffs. Caitrin shot her an astonished look and said, “You can see I’m perhaps a little busy here, no? A little help, maybe?”
Florence handcuffed the man’s wrists as if she were stroking a cobra and jumped back.
“There’s a call box at the end of Jubilee Terrace,” Caitrin said. “Get someone to come and pick him up.”
Florence hurried away. The woman sat up, swiped blood from her cheek, pulled her nightdress around her, stared at Caitrin as if she were some demonic apparition, and said, “What the hell are you doing to my poor Cyril?”
“If this is your poor Cyril, I’m arresting him.”
“Arresting him? What for? What’s he done?”
“For impersonating King George VI?” Caitrin stared in amazement at the woman’s bloodied face. “For assault and battery. On you.”
The woman sniffed and waved away her answer. “Oh, that’s just my Cyril. He’s had a hard week, he has, and it wasn’t him, it was the drink what did it. When it gets into him like that, it takes over. Changes his character, it does.”
“He also assaulted me.”
“Probably thought you was one of the Beezer Boys. They’re always hanging around here causing trouble, doing a bit of thieving like, scuffling with the men. Let him go; he’s all right. It’s my fault. I answered back when I shouldn’t have and forgot to stay out of his way.”
Caitrin could not believe what she was hearing. “You’re not pressing charges?”
“On my poor old Cyril? No, never, not in a month of Sundays. Let him go. With a good cuppa tea inside him he’ll be fine in the morning, and he’s got to go to the docks early. I hope you haven’t hurt him too much; we can’t afford for him to miss work. C’mon, missus, let him go. He’ll be all right.”
Caitrin freed Cyril from the handcuffs, and the woman helped him hobble back into the house. The front door closed with a bang, leaving Caitrin standing alone in the middle of the street. She stifled her frustration, dusted herself off, and hurried away to catch Florence before she could call for the Maria. And stopped.
A man stood underneath the street lamp just a few feet away, watching her. He wore a long greatcoat and a trilby that cast a deep shadow over his face.
“Miss Colline,” he said in a dry, accent-less voice.
“It’s Constable Colline.”
“We have been watching you.”
“We?”
In reply, he thrust out a hand and offered her a pasteboard card. “I was asked to give you this. Call first thing tomorrow morning.”
Caitrin took the card and half-turned away from the man to catch the light. On it was a handwritten telephone number and a name: Goodman.
“Who is this Goodman?” Caitrin said as she looked back, but the man had vanished. It was another Friday night on Ryers Road. But this one was just a bit different.
2
