Page 9 of Copper Script
Aaron attempted to claw his way back to the conversation he wanted to have.“Are you in the habit of writing letters to one girl after bedding another?”
“Good Lord, Ronnie, you make it sound like a compulsion.We—Babs and I—needed to agree on the costumes rather urgently, that was all.”
“So the only people who could have known you wrote the letter in those circumstances were you, your lady friend—anyone else?Servants?A spare lady in the room?”
“There’s no need to be sarcastic.”
“And did you brag about your conquest?Tell a friend, make a story of it?”
“Good heavens, man, what sort of fellow do you think I am?”
Aaron restrained himself.“Who was the other woman?”
“I’m not telling you that,” Paul said.“Have some decency.”
Wildsmith had been right about Aaron’s self-control to the extent that he didn’t spring on his cousin and throttle him.“For heaven’s sake, man, use your head.If you didn’t tell anyone about this letter, and nobody but this woman saw you write it—”
“Well, but she didn’t either,” Paul said with an air of mild triumph.“She’d already left.Having her hair done, you know, rushed off.And before you ask, I certainly didn’t tell her I was going to write to Babs.It was hardly her affair.”
Further questioning revealed that he’d put the letter in his pocket when he went to the post box rather than carrying it along the street in his hand, and that the lady friend was married to an elderly and very rich man from whom she had no intention of being parted till death did them.
Aaron left his cousin with one very strong conviction, which was that Paul could go to the devil.Other than that, he was bewildered.
If Paul was a reliable witness, and that ‘if’ contained multitudes, Aaron could think of no plausible way Wildsmith could have known about the circumstances in which he’d written his letter.He just got out of bed with another womanwasn’t the sort of thing psychics tossed out as guesses: it was far too specific.But to know it as fact would require the sort of surveillance Special Branch might provide for a Soviet spy.
This didn’t make any sense.None of the explanations he could think of made sense.
Sherlock Holmes said,When you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.It was impossible that Wildsmith could actually tell a child murderer or a recently unfaithful fiancé from their handwriting, therefore he must have dug up the information that would allow him to fake it.But surveillance of that quality took men and time and expertise, which was to say money.You might do it to impress a suitably influential client—Aaron had a vague idea that Paul’s ex-fiancée was a Bright Young Person—but the problem was, Wildsmith couldn’t have predicted he’d find anything to make such an outlay worth while.And if he had money to spend and wanted to make an impression on the smart set, why would he live in a miserable room in Pentonville rather than renting something decent, somewhere fashionable?
GK Chesterton had taken issue with the Holmes quotation.He’d said that if you told him the Prime Minister was haunted by a ghost, that was impossible, whereas if you told him that the Prime Minister had slapped Queen Victoria on the back and offered her a cigar, that was merely improbable, but he knew very well which of the two was more likely to be true.
Which was all very well, but Aaron didn’t believe in ghosts.He reminded himself of that several times as he walked home.
***
THE NEXT FEW DAYS WERErather too busy for Aaron to worry about the graphologist’s impossible fraud.He had to appear in court for the prosecution of George ‘Dapper’ Melkin for unlawful killing.
Dapper, a violent brute with a penchant for flashy waistcoats, was of the Brummagem Boys, a Birmingham outfit that had an ongoing dispute with the local Sabini gang.A Sabini man, one James ‘Nippy’ Nicholls, had died following a recent fracas; Aaron had two eye witnesses and a bloodstained gentleman’s walking stick, hollowed out and the end filled with lead, to put Dapper on the spot.
He was pleased about that.It had been a good collar, and more, he had a deep dislike of the gangs.The racecourse terrorists, as the newspapers called them, had originally confined themselves to extorting bookmakers, cheating racegoers, and fighting one another over who got to do those things in which area, but their size and reach had grown markedly since the war.The Sabini gang alone could call on some three hundred men in Clerkenwell, Finsbury and King’s Cross.Since the same area only had a policing strength of around six hundred, that was too damned many gangsters jockeying for power, offering ‘protection’ to shopkeepers and bookmakers, sticking their fingers into nightclubs and gambling dens and other such pies.Aaron had read of the problems in Chicago and New York, with their areas where the law’s writ didn’t run, and he did not want to see it happen in London.
He did not, therefore, mourn Nippy Nicholls’ death, but he did relish the opportunity to send Dapper down as he deserved.
It mostly went well, except that Dapper’s barrister made a spirited and deeply insulting attempt to suggest that the King’s Cross police in Aaron’s person favoured their local gang over the interlopers from Birmingham.Aaron kept his temper despite the provocation, the judge slapped it down hard, and Dapper got twenty years.
It was a good result.Less good were the newspaper stories the next day.Not much else was on, and Aaron found his picture in several of the papers, along with a lot more of his life story than he wanted.
“Firebrand Fowler’s Son Abandons Unions, Takes On Gangs,” Detective Constable Challice read aloud in the mess.“That’s a bit tortured.Sabini Gang ‘Protected In High Places’with quotation marks so it’s not libel.That’s not very nice, but the article isn’t too bad overall.Oh my goodness, listen to this.‘The latest heartthrob isn’t a film star: he’s a policeman.Darkly handsome DS Fowler’s Italian good looks—’”
“You have to be joking,” Aaron said.
“No, honestly, it’s in thePictorial.They’ve done a sketch.You look like Valentino.Well,youdon’t,” she added with a critical glance, “but the sketch does.”
DC Helen Challice was the second woman to join the Met’s Criminal Investigation Department, the only one based at King’s Cross.It was generally felt that women should not work on crimes of violence and murder, so she was usually set to cases more suitable for the gentler sex.Aaron could imagine Challice had an advantage when it came to interviewing a three-year-old whose father had given her gonorrhea, or a thirteen-year-old who’d been raped by four men in a row and was now pregnant, but he had no idea in what way those cases were supposed to be easier on the investigating officer.She couldn’t be more than twenty-three or so, but after six months in the job, she already looked older.
He’d come across her sobbing in an office one night, and been sufficiently reminded of his own sister that he’d first attempted comforting words, and then just brought her tea that was basically hot sugar syrup until she stopped crying.Once a few days had passed and she’d realised both that he hadn’t made her wobble into station gossip, and that he didn’t intend to make advances off the back of that unexpected intimacy, they’d settled into as close to a friendship as Aaron had at work.
She was a self-possessed young woman, with the brisk confidence of a Head Girl or a hockey captain, and she was looking at Aaron with an air of concern.“Are you not pleased?I’d have thought being compared to Valentino would be quite the boost.”
