Their faces seemed to have impressed him not at all. He had shut up the garage at seven o’clock on Monday night and gone home.
Altogether, Manners and Ryan left Cridge Mews knowing little about Estelle Simpson beyond her name.
Background of a Victim
The Petersham Club was in the basement of a street off the King’s Road. Ryan walked down half a dozen steps and found himself in a room very much like that of any other small drinking club at half past three in the afternoon. There was a bar, music played quietly from a radio, a man and a woman sat in unspeaking communion on stools at the bar. The barman was a young negro. Police records showed that the owner of the club was a Mr A Kabanga, and Ryan showed his warrant card and asked to speak to him. The negro took him through a door which was concealed by a curtain, along a passage, then tapped on another door and opened it. “From the police,” he said.
The police were obviously not unfamiliar here. Ryan thought, “Hallo, someone’s been taking dropsy,” but that was no part of his present concern. The man who rose from behind a desk was small, handsome, rather too elegantly dressed. He greeted Ryan politely, raised his brows when he looked at the warrant card, offered a drink. Ryan refused it. He believed in a direct approach and now he showed the man, whom he had classified instantly as a coffee-coloured spade, a photostat of the letter found in the flat. He watched the other’s reaction carefully.
Kabanga showed no emotion other than annoyance.
“This is a copy of a letter of mine. Where did you get it?”
“You wrote it?”
“What have my relations with Sylvia to do with you?”
“Sylvia?”
Kabanga waved a neat, manicured hand. “Sylvia Gresham. Estelle Simpson is her stage name.”
“Yes.” Ryan felt himself on uncertain ground. Then this reference to fixing up something–”
“What has it to do with you? Sylvia and I have done nothing wrong.”
“She was murdered last night. In her flat. That’s why I’m here.”
Kabanga put his hands palm down upon the desk in front of him, and his dark eyes increased in size and became swimmy. He’s going to cry, Ryan thought incredulously, damned if the spade isn’t going to cry. But Kabanga did not cry. He said in a flat, almost conversational tone, “My God.” He got up, went over to a cupboard, poured himself a drink. Then he said, still in the same calm tone, “What do you want to know, Inspector?”
“How long had you known her?”
“Seven weeks.”
“She was your mistress?”
“Yes. We were hoping – we intended to get married.”
“How did you meet her?”
“She came here with a man, I don’t know his name, a film man perhaps, somebody she hoped would give her a job. They had drinks, we talked. The next day she came back alone. She liked me, you see. She could tell that I liked her.”
“You went to her flat in Cridge Mews?”
“Yes, I have done. And she stayed with me in my new house, it is in a good residential area.” Ryan had a job to repress a smile at the phrase, as Kabanga told him where The Dell was.
“You own this club?”
“I have half a dozen clubs, Inspector. You have only seen the bar, but there is another room for dinner and dancing. They are profitable, my clubs. I do nothing wrong, you understand, but they are profitable.”
“What did you mean by being able to fix something up for her?” Ryan drew a bow at a venture. “She told you she was pregnant and she’d asked you to arrange an abortion, that’s right, isn’t it?”
“Certainly not. What kind of man do you think I am?”
“I’d rather not say,” Ryan replied, deliberately insulting. The remark had its effect. Kabanga for the first time seemed concerned about his own position.
“You do not think I had anything to do with her death? I loved her. I have friends in the theatre, and I was trying to find a job for her, that is all. Sylvia was a singer. Unfortunately I do not have a floor show myself, but—”
“Was she any good?”
“I think so, yes. She had been unlucky, that is all. She was out of a job for quite a time. It worried her.”
“So that’s what she was doing for a living.”
“What do you mean?”
“She was a tom and you were poncing for her, isn’t that a fact?”
Kabanga got up and came round the desk, hands clawing at Ryan, dark eyes moist not with tears now but with anger. Ryan pushed him away. When Kabanga came forward again he caught and shook him, not gently.
“You didn’t know about it, all right, but it could be true. How often did you see her?”
“Three or four nights a week.”
“What was she doing the rest of the time?”
Kabanga shrugged. “I was not her keeper. We would have lived together, she would have given up her flat and come to live with me, but I was not her keeper. She had her own life, her own friends.”
“You saw some of them?”
“I do not think I could tell you their names. Some of them were in the dress trade, there was a man named Tom, a woman named Mina, who came in here once or twice. Some were I think in films or television. I remember an actress – what was her name – Susan Strong. She is in one of those plays that have been running for years.
The Worm Will Turn
, I think it is called.”
“Where were you last night?”
“I was here, at this club, in the afternoon until six o’clock. Then I went to another of my clubs, the Windswept, and had dinner and spent the rest of the evening there.”
“Where’s this other place?”
“In Clarges Street, Mayfair.”
“Ten minutes’ walk from where the girl was murdered.”
Kabanga looked very straight at Ryan. “Do you really believe, Inspector, that I had anything to do with Sylvia’s death?”
Ryan had known several criminals who specialised in looking a detective straight in the eye and telling outrageous lies, but he was inclined to believe Kabanga. “You understand we have to make these inquiries,” he said, much more politely. “Do you know of any enemies Miss Simpson, Miss Gresham, had?”
“She had no enemies,” Kabanga said positively.
“Somebody killed her.”
The head and shoulders photograph of the dead girl was released to the Press, and appeared in the afternoon editions. At four o’clock Sergeant Jones, who had been interrogating the other inhabitants of the Mews, returned to New Scotland Yard to report lack of progress.
“One or two of them aren’t at home, sir, including the one who lives opposite to her, man named Leighton, but nobody that I’ve talked to noticed anything in particular about her visitors.” He said a little resentfully: “Trouble is some of them are what you might call bohemians so they really wouldn’t notice unless there was a knife fight in the Mews or something like that. There was one little chap who’d often visited her in the past few weeks, but nobody seemed able to describe him except to say he was a sharp dresser. Somebody said she’d seemed friendly with Seegal and that chauffeur, Harrison. But it doesn’t seem to mean much, she was friendly with everybody, would always stop to talk if she met anybody in the street. There’s one old bitch who said she was sure the girl was no better than she should be, everyone else seems to have liked her.” Jones hesitated. “Those pictures could have been planted by whoever killed her.”
“And the knickers too?” Manners asked mildly.
“I suppose not.” Jones hesitated again. “Do you read the
Blade,
sir?”
“No, I don’t. Should I?”
“Just struck me that little figure on the card looks like a figure in a cartoon strip they run. Character called Guffy McTuffie.”
“Guffy McTuffie?” Manners was incredulous.
Jones brought in the paper, and they compared it with the card. Certainly the little figure, with its single curl of hair, looked very similar.
“I think you may have something,” Manners said. “Good work, Jones.”
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’ve got something, but what does it mean?”
The telephone rang. “Was it her pet name for a lover, he signed the card like that because she called him Guffy? In that case, what would his real name be?”
“Gussie?”
Manners picked up the receiver. The, switchboard operator said, “A Mrs Gresham on the line, sir. To do with the Cridge Mews murder this morning. Says she’s the girl’s mother.”
“Put her on.”
The voice on the telephone was warm, agitated, girlish. “I am poor Sylvia’s mother.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Her photograph was in the paper, my husband showed it to me. They called her Estelle Simpson, that was the name she passed under.”
“I see. You are Mrs Gresham.”
“Melicent Gresham.” Girlishly the voice said.
“Melicent, not Millicent, Sergeant. Melicent with an ‘e’.”
“This is Superintendent Manners, Mrs Gresham. It’s good of you to telephone. I’d like very much to talk to you as soon as possible.”
“But of course. I had no idea that I was talking to a
superintendent.
”
“Could I have your address, Mrs Gresham.” Manners wrote it down, then said, “I’ll come out myself. Yes. Goodbye.” He sat staring at the address. “The Home of Supra Peace, Tooting. Have you heard of the Home of Supra Peace, Jones?”
“No, sir.”
“That’s where the mother lives. I’m going to talk to her. You come along too. Perhaps at last we’re going to find out what this girl was like.”
“I’ll tell you what she was like. She was one of nature’s victims,” Susan Strong said. The matinee of
The Worm Will
Turn
was over, and she sat in her dressing-room talking to Ryan in the looking glass while she cleaned her face, a babyish-looking blonde in her twenties. Ryan watched the operation with interest.
“I’m not sure that I understand.”
“Well, I’ll tell you. We met, oh, about eighteen months ago, we were both in the chorus of some mouldy little musical, both wanted to be a success. But the way Estelle – that’s what I always called her, too late to change now – the way Estelle went about it, she never had a hope. She’d turn up late for rehearsals, go out for a night of heavy drinking and look really shagged the next day, fall for any man who spun her a story. Producers don’t like that sort of thing, and you can’t blame them.”
“You’re saying she was a tramp?”
“No, not exactly.” She turned round, lit a cigarette, offered him a drink. Ryan accepted. “She just believed what people said, that’s all. She couldn’t tell when they were lying to her, and she hadn’t got any self control. During the run of this musical she started sleeping first with one man in the cast, then with another. She was surprised when the first one was upset, and the second one didn’t care about her anyhow. She was the original girl who couldn’t say no.”
She was a tramp in my book, Ryan thought, but didn’t say so. Instead he asked: “Had she any talent?”
“Not much, but when did lack of talent stop any girl who wanted to get on?” She drank, went on. “Estelle wasn’t a fool. But she was silly, if you see what I mean. Now, I’m not like that. I may look silly, but that’s purely for stage purposes. I know what I want, and I mean to get it.”
I’ll bet you do, Ryan thought. “Who was she carrying on an affair with – just now?”
“Some African creep who runs half a dozen clubs. His name’s Kabanga. I didn’t like him, told her he was a creep, but she took no notice.”
“Was there any second string?”
“Not that I know of, but she mightn’t tell me. We weren’t that close. Last week she said she was going to marry Kabanga, but I didn’t pay much attention, she’d said that sort of thing before.”
“We have some reason to think she was a prostitute.” She stared at him. He told her about the knickers. She laughed.
“If I may say so, Inspector, you’re a little bit old-fashioned. There are a dozen shops in the West End selling knickers like that, and they’re sold to perfectly respectable girls. It’s like that old music hall joke, you know, ‘Which of your relations do you like best?’ ‘Why, I like sex relations best.’ You’ll be hearing that any day now on BBC television. You’re just slightly out of date.”
Ryan was nettled. He told her about the photographs.
“Am I out of date about those too?”
“No.” She sat staring. “She wasn’t in them herself?”
“No.”
“Because that, in a way, I can imagine. I can imagine her doing something stupid like that if she liked the man, or getting trapped into it somehow. But otherwise – no, I can’t explain it. She wasn’t a prostitute, though, and don’t let any one kid you that she was. She liked sex too much for that.”
“Tooting,” Manners said reflectively in the car, as they passed through South London’s suburbs. “How can a place be called Tooting? It’s ridiculous. You’d think nobody would ever live there. ‘I live at Tooting, I live at the Home of Supra Peace, Tooting.’ It’s unbelievable.”
Jones, who lived at Cockfosters, was not impressed by this observation. He was also inclined to think that the Super had slighted his Guffy McTuffie discovery. He made no reply.
The Home of Supra Peace turned out to be a large ugly red brick Victorian house, set in its own considerable grounds, just off Tooting Bec Common. Manners and Jones were shown into a room lined with bookcases, where a few rugs were thrown about on a parquet floor. A tall man with a deeply lined face got up from behind a desk littered with papers. His eyes were dark and intense, his handgrip painfully firm, his smile singularly sweet.
“My name is Kronfelder, and I am the director of this Home.”
“I was expecting to see Mrs Gresham,” Manners said flatly.
“Melly will be here in a moment. She spoke to me after telephoning you, and I thought it best that I should speak to you first to avoid any misunderstanding.”
“What sort of misunderstanding could there be?”
Kronfelder put his hands one over another. They were very white, plump hands, at variance with his appearance. Behind him a garden could be seen, with people moving about in it. “I don’t know how much Melly told you on the telephone.” Manners stayed unhelpfully silent.
“Did she say that Sylvia lived here?”
“No, she didn’t tell me that.”
“A grave decision had to be taken about Sylvia, Superintendent, to decide what would be truly in her own best interests. I don’t suppose you know very much of our work here or of the teachings that inspire the Supra Peace movement. Ouspensky, Subuh, Gurdieff, do these names mean anything to you?” Manners shook his head, Jones moved his feet. Kronfelder’s voice had grown warm, rich and expressive as he talked. “Our doctrines – yet they are not doctrines so much as beliefs not beliefs so much as instinctive certainties, mystical if you like to call them that – are a synthesis of these teachers and of others we respect, Christ, Buddha, Mahomet. They offered peace, but we try to reach something that is beyond individual peace of mind, utter harmony with the whole created world, what I call supra peace. We do this by means of group meditation, days of silence, manual labour, long periods of solitude. You may say that others too have done this, but we—”