Routine took over. Routine is not the reason anyone chooses to become a Scotland Yard detective.
Jack had ordered Constables Thomson and Gutterridge to approach travellers at Hampstead and Camden Town Underground stations with a photograph of Skolnik. Troy would have liked posters but as they had found no photograph of the living Skolnik the mugshot was of the corpse and Jack had argued that this was grotesque, unproductive, and would frighten children. This yielded nothing. The next day Troy released the photograph to the papers. This yielded sightings of Skolnik at Tooting Bec, Maida Vale, and South Acton, in the latter case the day after he had died.
Troy took the paperwork as part of a bargain with Jack. He searched both flat and studio, and at the end of the searching day wished he could say, “I told you so,” to anyone other than himself. He had found no paperwork of any kind in the flat, save newspaper (Skolnik had been a Daily Mail reader with occasional weekend forays into the Reynold’s News) and bog roll (the shiny sort that doesn’t do much), and in the studio had found seven shoe boxes full of bills—paid bills, for gas, electricity, water rates, and milk going back to 1927, all in chronological order. Skolnik did not appear to have a bank account, but, then, so few people did. So few people had need of one. Most people in Britain received cash in a small brown envelope on a Friday afternoon. It was known as wages. The salaried were few and far between. He did not find a photograph of anyone, he did not find a postcard, a letter, a memo, a jotting, a used bus ticket, a railway timetable . . . although he did find several sketchbooks in which rough versions of Skolnik’s paintings were even rougher in pencil or charcoal. But from this he learned two things, that Skolnik was methodical, obsessive even, and most certainly had something to hide—the disposal of the personal was too thorough to be innocent. Everybody’s life left detritus. The life that didn’t was a contrivance and hence it was suspect.
Jack got to work the pubs and caffs on and off Charlotte Street.
“Skolnik was well-known. No denying it. Twenty-odd years on the same turf and there’s scarcely anyone who wasn’t on nodding terms with him. The Newman Arms pub in Rathbone Street, right opposite his studio, saw a fair bit of him at lunchtimes. There are blokes in there who say he still owes them money, but there was no one I found with any particular resentment of that, or any particular insight into the man.
“In Gennaro’s caff, one chap described him to me as ‘a bank clerk disguised as a bohemian,’ which was pretty much echoed in the George and Dragon in Cleveland Street, where he was ‘a man who would sell his soul to have a dark, deep secret, but alas no one was buying.’
“In the Marquis of Granby he was ‘someone who’d show you a good time if he happened to find one stuck to the sole of his shoe.’
“I’ve picked up enough aphorisms on Skolnik to publish a small book. Me asking about him seems simply to have given every wag in Fitztrovia the chance to sharpen his wit on the dead. Some of it has more depth, for example, ‘a master of sophistry, half-truth, and fractions thereof.’
“Against this there are plenty of blokes—you don’t get a lot of women in these places, it’s not like it was during the war—plenty of blokes who’d agree with Mrs. Narayan, that he could be generous when flush. That bit about whipping everyone into Bertorelli’s for example. I talked to the waiters there. They say often as not when that happened, Skolnik would have no real idea who he’d brought in his wake, and frequently treated people he’d never met before who just happened to be in the pub he’d gone to for the round-up. And he never queried the bill. A waitress told me he rolled up one day with what she thought was a tramp in tow, who managed to set fire to the tablecloth. Turned out it was Augustus John. They stuck the cost of the tablecloth on the bill. Skolnik didn’t query that one, either. Didn’t bat an eyelid, she said.
“But the matter of women remains. No one ever mentioned a girlfriend, a mistress . . . and that brass in the tweed oufit who’s always in the Wheatsheaf, the one they call Sister Ann, said ‘he’s one o’ the lucky ones, ain’t ’e? one o’ them wot ain’t bovvered’ . . . well, it’s been my experience in twenty-eight short years on this planet that everyone’s ‘bovvered’ . . . so I had to ask someone, ‘was André Skolnik queer?’
“And in the Fitzroy on the corner of Windmill Street and Charlotte Street I bumped into your old pal Quentin Crisp. Who better to ask?”
Jack read his notes out in a passable imitation of Crisp’s languid baritone.
“Was Mr. Skolnik queer? Well, we none of us have it thrust upon us, and we none of us achieve it. Try as you might. Some of us are born queer. It’s the hand life deals you in the great poker game of sex, and in that great poker game of sex, André didn’t even bother to turn over the cards he’d been dealt. No, André and sex didn’t go together in the same sentence. André and money, well there you might have something. I used to call him the Cadgepenny Count. He sounded more than a little like Dracula ought to sound and he was always cadging money. I introduced him to the art schools as a model in the hope that a regular income might reduce his importuning, but what do I have of André now he’s gone? A Polish voice echoing in my ears and it’s saying, ‘Five bob and I will gladly repay you Friday.’ I’ve said this before and it’s worth repeating . . . Poland isn’t a country, it’s a state of mind.”
Troy was smiling. A Crispism never failed to produce that effect. To Jack he said, “The Cadgepenny Count. Let’s see that one doesn’t get into the papers shall we?”