CHAPTER VIII

A House in the Isle of Dogs

NIGEL WALKED THROUGH the white-tiled, echoing tube, lit by a long succession of electric globes in its roof—a roof upon which, so he felt, millions of tons of water must be relentlessly pressing. The Greenwich tunnel was almost empty at this time of the morning: a few boys sky-larking at the far end, their hoarse shouts bouncing along the tube towards him; a few housewives ambling behind him with their shopping bags: these might have been extras in an early German expressionist film, heavy with symbolism, in which the hero was shown walking through an endless, monotonous tube, casting grotesque shadows upon its curved, white-glaring walls—walking alone, isolated in some obsessional neurosis, through a tunnel which had no outlet, on a mission whose end he had no knowledge of.

Nigel shook himself out of these morbid imaginings. His mission had a quite definite purpose. “You like burrowing into the past,” Wright had said yesterday evening after the interview with Harold Loudron and Sharon: “well, you go and have a talk with Graham’s old tart to-morrow. I shall be busy elsewhere.” Wright had not been too pleased with Nigel’s jumping the gun at that last interview. He did not wish Sharon to know what the police suspected about her relationship with Graham Loudron, and Nigel’s suggestion that “records” might be a code-word between them could have put her on her guard. “But my dear chap,” Nigel had protested, “I said that to force them into the open. If she tries to communicate with him now, you’ll know there’s something in it. You’ll have them both under observation, I take it, and you’ve got a man on the telephone extension at Number 6.”

The lift took him and the housewives up to the surface. Strolling into the Island Gardens, he looked across the water. The two wings of the Palace faced him, battleship-grey in the sunshine, surmounted by their twin towers, the White Ensign flying. Between and beyond them stood the Queen’s House in its plain, incomparable elegance; and on the hill high above, the statue of General Wolfe, with Wren’s observatory beside it, held the skyline. In the Palace over there the body of Nelson had lain, on its journey between Trafalgar and the tomb, while his rough seamen swilled grog and damned their eyes and wept like babies.

A smart black ship, with the label of the General Steam Navigation Company on its funnel, swept past towards the Pool of London, followed by a singularly unvoluptuous-looking vessel, called Cyprian Coast. A Finnish tramp, its tall funnel heavily smoking, its hull rusty and patched, was moving in ballast down-river, the half-submerged screw sullenly thumping the water. A collier was unloading at the Greenwich power-station, the clatter of whose conveyers could be distantly heard: high up on the Heath-Robinson-esque structure a travelling crane shifted, then let down its grab to gouge out coal from the bowels of the ship. To its right, the oily water smoothed over the place where the body of Dr. Piers Loudron had been salvaged from the river. A quick-fire burst of riveting rattled across from a shipyard near the Trafalgar Tavern where lighters were being repaired. Away to the left, a piercing, blue-white eye opened—the dazzling flame of a welder’s burner.

Nigel walked out of the gardens, turned left, and presently right, down Barque Street into West Ferry Road. Here he turned right again, passing the ends of Schooner Street and Brig Street, and came to Yawl Street. These romantically-named streets, running south from West Ferry Road towards the waterfront, had been knocked to bits in the early blitzes of the war. The dingy houses still standing were interspersed with scrofulous patches of grass, tumbled brick, bald foundations. Apart from its name on a wall, Yawl Street hardly existed: but at its far end Nigel saw a house standing, like a single, decaying stump in an otherwise toothless jaw. This must be Nelly’s house, unless Graham had given them a false address.

The bell jangled. A yellow face appeared momentarily at a ground-floor window, then the dirty muslin curtain was pulled back again. Presently a girl of sluttish appearance opened the door; her body slouched against the doorpost, her ankles turning over above the pin-heeled shoes, she regarded Nigel with a sort of lifeless insolence.

“Nelly in?” he asked.

“No.”

“When will she be back?”

“Search me. What d’you want with her?”

“A friend of mine, Graham Loudron, gave me her address.”

“Never heard of him. She expecting you?”

“I couldn’t say. Are you on the telephone?”

“Telephone! Listen to him! This ain’t the Ritz, mister.”

So, unless Graham had written to Nelly, or walked over since the interview yesterday morning, he could not have warned her.

“Nice shoes you’ve got. Really smart,” he said.

“They’re bloody killing me, I don’t mind telling you,” replied the girl.

“One must suffer to be beautiful.”

“Come again?”

“Old French saying. Il faut souffrir pour être belle.”

The girl giggled—she couldn’t have been more than fifteen—and prinked at her elaborate, messy hair-do. “Ooh, là, là,” she replied; then looked vague, almost inanimate again. “You want Nelly?”

“That’s the idea.”

“She’s out shopping. Be back in half an hour. You like to wait?” she added, in a tone of harsh, slum coquetry.

“I’ll come back later.”

“What name shall I say?”

“Tell her it’s a friend of Graham Loudron’s. The name’s Percy Popocatepetl.”

“Get out!” laughed the girl, hugely delighted. “That’s a bleeding mountain. Had it in a poem at school.”

“Tell her the mountain’ll come to Auntie Mahomet at eleven.”

“Hey,” said the girl, who seemed disposed to make Nigel linger, “I seen you before somewhere. You a television personality?”

“Never been so insulted in my life,” returned Nigel, beaming at her. “’Bye.”

He took a bus that ran through Poplar to the north end of the Blackwall Tunnel. From the front seat on top he scanned the sprawling vistas of the borough: “a mighty maze without a plan.” There were rows of dun little houses at all angles, depressing as those of a northern industrial town thrown up in the early nineteenth century to house the new wage-slaves. There were signs of the terrible East-end bombing—derelict spaces, acres of pre-fabs. Away to his left, over a high grassy rampart, showed the masts, funnels and white upperworks of steamers in dock. Warehouses and timber-yards streamed past, Victorian tenements and blocks of flats built since the war. The bus, rounding a bend, moved cautiously over a swing bridge across an inlet that ran from the Thames, now visible again, to a ship-lined basin. Everywhere there were congregations of cranes attitudinising against the skyline, stiff-necked as giraffes, inclining their heads to pluck heaven knew what exotic produce from out the holds of ships.

What a muddle it all looks, thought Nigel: what diversity of occupations, all higgledy-piggledy, going on under my nose here—and I don’t know the first thing about them. Like this damned Loudron case. The romantic rubbing shoulders with the workaday; the beauty of ships interleaving the drabness of slums. Is there anything so exciting in the world as to see a ship steaming past the end of a street?

The bus stopped. Nigel got out. Beyond the roadway running up from the Blackwall Tunnel, a huge loading shed stood, Coast Lines Seaway in white letters on its sides, and above it the mast of a vessel flying a flag of blue, white and red in horizontal stripes. Waiting for the next bus back, riding back on it, Nigel debated with himself how he should approach the unknown Nelly: what on earth could he say to her? Would she throw him out on the first suspicion that he was trying to pump her? For all that, a pleasurable excitement rose in him after he had rung the jangling bell. Nigel’s insatiable interest in human beings had pulled him into many strange situations before now—situations in which he was helped, however, by his natural bent for approaching the new without preconceptions, for taking people as he found them.

Nelly was certainly something to take—a large woman, her hair dyed the colour of brass, lax in movement, but with a disconcerting sharpness in her grey eyes. She wore a tight, black satin dress, from whose décolletage her exuberant breasts threatened to burst out whenever she leaned forward. Pushing an enormous ginger tom off an armchair, she asked Nigel to sit down.

“Graham sent you, the girl told me.” Nelly watched him carefully. “Would you be wanting a room?”

“No, it’s not that.”

“I thought not. You’re hardly the type, are you?”

“And Graham didn’t exactly send me. He gave me your name and address. I wanted to have a talk with you.”

“I’m not in business now, you know, dearie.”

“The loss is ours,” Nigel answered, appreciatively eyeing her opulent surfaces.

Nelly broke into a rich laughter which rippled her bosom. “Go on with you! Well, Mr.—er——”

“Strangeways.”

“Can I tempt you to a glass of port?”

“That’s very kind of you.” Nigel loathed port, and never more than at eleven in the morning.

Nelly tottered over to a cupboard, her almost oval figure on top of the small ankles and feet giving her the look of one of those children’s Humpty-Dumpty toys weighted so that they always come back to an upright position. Nigel glanced out of the window, which overlooked the island gardens and the river, then round the room: it was furnished with an expensive suite of arm-chairs and sofa: two budgerigars chatted away in a hanging cage: the air was scented and stuffy.

“Cosy up here, isn’t it?”

“Not so bad,” replied Nelly, handing him a glass. Her little finger refinedly crooked, she raised her own. “Mud in your eye. Mind you, it’s not a class neighbourhood. But I got the house cheap just after the war—been saving for years—and it suits me all right.”

“So long as the lodgers pay up.”

“That’s right. Mind you, one gets all sorts. But they’re nice boys, most of them—don’t give any trouble—particularly the spades.”

“I’m glad you don’t have a colour-bar.”

“Not me.” She chuckled comfortably. “Nelly the Ever-Open Door—that’s me. We’re all the same underneath the skin, I always say.”

“Except that some have kind hearts and others blocks of stone.”

“Well, there’s that,” said Nelly, beaming at the implied compliment. “Though, mind you, a girl doesn’t get anywhere if she’s too soft. I always tell my boys, this isn’t Liberty Hall—if you start a brawl, out you go on your ear—same if you don’t pay up regularly. Course, most of them are only here a few days at a time, while their ships are in dock; and I’m not too fussy about what they bring in at night—live and let live, I always say. But I can tell you, Mr.—er——”

“Call me Nigel.”

“I can tell you, Nigel, girls nowadays—why, they’re immoral as cats.” She rolled up her eyes. “Go with any fellow for a pair of nylons, half these misses round here will. Now, when I first went on the bash, you knew where you were: a girl was either in the business or she was pure. The war changed all that. Why, with so many amateurs knocking around, we brasses couldn’t get near our beats.”

“Dilution of labour.”

“That’s right. And now with this Wolfenden stuff, the game’s not what it was. All they need’s an advert in the tobacconist’s window and a telephone and Bob’s your uncle.”

“Saves their feet, though.”

“There’s that. But, say you work with a telephone, you can’t pick your clients. You might be getting one of those blokes with glaring eyes who just want to come after you with a hammer. Well, drink up, dearie, and have another.”

Nigel drank up. Nelly took his glass, but stopped by the side window.

“There’s Abdul going out.”

“Abdul?”

“One of my regulars. He’s a lascar. That’s how I got to know Graham.”

A few months ago, said Nelly, she had gone into Abdul’s room and found Graham Loudron with him. Graham and Abdul had come across each other in the Seamen’s Hospital, where the latter was a patient. Nelly got talking with them, and they discovered that she had known Graham’s mother, Millie, during the war.

“Well, it’s a small world, isn’t it? But I expect Graham’s told you all about this.”

“No. He’s not very communicative,” Nigel replied. “But I gather he must have had a pretty hard time before Dr. Loudron adopted him.”

“Yes. He doesn’t talk about it much. But after Millie died, he was sent away to some kind of—what do they call it? I don’t know. He was five or six by then. Millie’s family wouldn’t take him: they were Holy Joes, Chapel—the sort that kicks what they call fallen women in the teeth. Anyway, this place Graham was sent to, talk about concentration camps! Poor little bleeder! Half starved, beaten regular. Shameful. He had five years of that. Then he ran away and started breaking into shops. They caught him, and he got the wrong sort of magistrate, so then he had a spell in a reformatory. Never think it, to look at him now, would you?”

Indeed I would, thought Nigel: the cold watchfulness, the faintly mocking obsequiousness, the habit of keeping everything locked up—in his room and in his mind. He said:

“Who was his father, then? Did Millie ever tell you?”

A hard, inimical look came slowly into Nelly’s grey eyes. She put down her glass of port on the table beside her. “Just what are you after? What’s your stake in this? Did you ever know Millie, by any chance?”

Nigel, taken aback, gazed at the woman’s suddenly hostile face. Then, very seriously, he said, “It’s all right, Nelly, don’t worry. I’m not Graham’s father, if that’s what is on your mind.”

Her eyes scrutinised him for a few seconds more—eyes long-used to summing up men.

“I believe you,” she said at last. “But I’d like to know what you’ve come here for, then.”

“To talk about Graham. I know the family, and they’ve asked me to help with the inquiries about their father’s death.”

“Are you police?” she asked, still on her guard.

“I’ve worked with them. And sometimes I’ve found myself working against them. But do stop looking at me, old dear, as if I was the man with the glaring eyes.”

A convulsion, which seemed to start at the neat ankles and work its way, gathering force, up her body, shook Nelly. “Gawd! Don’t make me laugh!” She slapped her bulging left breast, as if to admonish it not to leap out at Nigel, which it showed every sign of doing. She quivered and gasped with titanic laughter. “You’ll be the death of me!”

When she had finally recovered herself, she began to talk freely about Graham Loudron’s mother. Millie Robertson had lived a few doors away from her in East Greenwich. Just before the blitzes of September, 1940, they were both evacuated to a country town in the Midlands. Millie was then nineteen, and pregnant; Nelly a few years older. She had seen the younger girl through her trouble. Millie never spoke about the baby’s father, but money orders came at regular intervals. At first the two had worked in a local factory; but when an American air-force station was set up in the neighbourhood, Nelly went back—with some relief—to her pre-war profession. She took up with an air-force sergeant, following him when he was moved to another camp. Six months later, revisiting the Midland town, she found Millie in a bad way: the girl had developed tuberculosis and could work no longer at the factory; but she refused to go into hospital for treatment because she had no one to leave the baby with. Worse, her source of money then dried up. She had had to move her lodgings, and she suspected that her previous landlady was appropriating the money orders; or perhaps their sender had packed up on it.

“But didn’t she write to him?—he was the child’s father, I presume.”

“She did, once or twice, but there was no reply.”

“Well, why didn’t she go and see him? Tell him what had happened?”

“She was soft, that’s why. A girl can’t afford to be soft—not where men are concerned. Present company excepted, dearie.”

“But—damn it——”

“I remember her saying to me—it was about the only time she talked about him—she said, ‘No, Nelly,’ she said, ‘I won’t be no millstone round his neck. He’s a good man. But he’s not for my sort. I fell for him, and I had my romance with him, and I’m not going to ruin his life’.”

“She sounds a bit soft, certainly.”

“Don’t you believe it,” replied Nelly, with sudden violence. “Forget what I said about soft. That girl was a bloody angel. Never groused, never turned nasty; do anything for you, she would. I’m a tough old bag, Nigel, and I’ve always been tough. But I know a —— angel when I see one, if you’ll pardon my language. And don’t talk to me about whores with hearts of gold—there’s no such thing. If there was, I’d not have left her that time; I’d have done something about it: but I was mad about this air-force chap, and so——” Nelly shrugged her monumental shoulders.

“So what happened to Millie?”

“Use your loaf, ducky. She went on the game, too. What else could she do, without she was separated from her little boy? She doted on him, see? She couldn’t have given him half what she wanted to give him, if she’d gone on Public Assistance.” Nelly took out a heavily-scented handkerchief and dabbed at her eyes. “’Course she was too ill for it. You need to be strong as a horse. So she died. I only heard about it some time afterwards. She wasn’t one for writing letters much: but she did write to me once or twice in that last year—all about the little boy, how he was getting on, you know—never a word about herself. Here, for Christ’s sake, let’s have another glass of port.”

“What did Millie look like?” inquired Nigel when his glass had been refilled. “Have you a photograph?”

“No. Wish I had. She was—she was like a flower. One of them narcissuses. Pale and delicate looking. Sweet all through. You’d have liked her. How those Holy Joes managed to produce her is a fair mystery to me. God! it turns me up, calling themselves Christians and then dusting her off their fingers just because she’d tripped up.”

“Does Graham take after her?”

“In looks, a bit.”

“But only in looks?”

“Well, he’s got nice manners. ’Course, that Dr. Piers gave him a good education. But he’s a cold number, don’t you think? Millie was warm as a stove.”

“Still, he likes to come and hear you talk about her.”

“That’s true. But it gives me the creeps sometimes. He sits here, just as you might be sitting, and stares at me—well, like a kid when he asks you to tell a story you’ve told him over and over again till you’re fair sick of it.”

“He never talks about his father?”

“No fear. But he knows what I think about the rat, whoever he is. ’Course, he may be dead by now.”

“I meant his adopted father. Dr. Piers.”

“Not much. He did ask once if Dr. Piers had been our doctor when we lived in East Greenwich.”

“Yours and Millie’s?”

“That’s right. She was a patient of his, as it happens. And now dearie—” the grey eyes were shrewd again—“it’s my turn to ask a question. Did Graham do him in?”

Nigel’s pale blue eyes looked at her steadily. “We don’t know. We’re not even certain yet that it was murder at all. The old man had a lot of money: he left it equally among his children, so all the Loudrons had that motive.”

“Ah well,” she said comfortably, “it’ll all come out in the wash.”

“What happened to your chap?” asked Nigel after a pause. “The American sergeant?”

“He got his in one of those daylight raids.”

“I’ m sorry.”

“You needn’t be. I’ve almost forgotten him now. He was married anyway. And he knew I was a brass,” said Nelly a bit bleakly.

“I must go. Thank you for talking to me. Why don’t you come over and have tea with us one day at Greenwich?”

“Me?” She chuckled sardonically but looked pleased. “What’d your wife say?”

“She’d like it. She’s all right.”

“I guess you’re not so bad yourself.”

On an impulse, Nigel put his hands on her shoulders and gave her a kiss. “Goodbye for the present, Nelly. I’ll drop you a line about tea. Will you do one thing for me?”

She nodded, her plump fingers smoothing the cheek beside her mouth.

“If Graham comes over, don’t tell him what we’ve been talking about. Just say I came to ask if he’d been with you last Saturday night. He was, wasn’t he?”

“Yes. I gave him a room I had empty. O.K., dearie, mum’s the word. But——”

“Yes?”

“Oh, nothing, I was just thinking, maybe it’s a mercy for Millie that she isn’t alive. I don’t go for Graham much, you know, but he is her boy.”

“Don’t worry, old dear. I’ll do what I can for him.”

Nigel walked down the seedy staircase, out into the Island Gardens. As he waited for the lift to take him down into the tunnel, he studied the regulations. One clause took his fancy:

No person shall drive or conduct into the tunnel any cattle, or any animal forming part of a menagerie, or any wild animal.

Now who would want to, he asked himself. Not that it wouldn’t be agreeable to drive or conduct into the tunnel a tiger, a prize bull, or a herd of giraffes.

When he got home, Clare kissed him. “My goodness, you’ve been drinking port.”

“Yes, with an old tart in the Isle of Dogs.”

“Oh yes? Was she nice?” asked Clare, interested.

“You really are a jewel among women, my darling.”

“Am I? Why?”

“Any other woman would have said, ‘How old is she?’ or ‘You know port disagrees with you.’”