Sunset Over Soho (Mrs. Bradley) Read online

  Titles by Gladys Mitchell

  Speedy Death (1929)

  The Mystery of a Butcher’s Shop (1930)

  The Longer Bodies (1930)

  The Saltmarsh Murders (1932)

  Death at the Opera (1934)

  The Devil at Saxon Wall (1935)

  Dead Men’s Morris (1936)

  Come Away, Death (1937)

  St Peter’s Finger (1938)

  Printer’s Error (1939)

  Brazen Tongue (1940)

  Hangman’s Curfew (1941)

  When Last I Died (1941)

  Laurels Are Poison (1942)

  Sunset over Soho (1943)

  The Worsted Viper (1943)

  My Father Sleeps (1944)

  The Rising of the Moon (1945)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1946)

  Death and the Maiden (1947)

  The Dancing Druids (1948)

  Tom Brown’s Body (1949)

  Groaning Spinney (1950)

  The Devil’s Elbow (1951)

  The Echoing Strangers (1952)

  Merlin’s Furlong (1953)

  Faintley Speaking (1954)

  On Your Marks (1954)

  Watson’s Choice (1955)

  Twelve Horses and the Hangman’s Noose (1956)

  The Twenty-Third Man (1957)

  Spotted Hemlock (1958)

  The Man Who Grew Tomatoes (1959)

  Say It With Flowers (1960)

  The Nodding Canaries (1961)

  My Bones Will Keep (1962)

  Adders on the Heath (1963)

  Death of a Delft Blue (1964)

  Pageant of Murder (1965)

  The Croaking Raven (1966)

  Skeleton Island (1967)

  Three Quick and Five Dead (1968)

  Dance to Your Daddy (1969)

  Gory Dew (1970)

  Lament for Leto (1971)

  A Hearse on May-Day (1972)

  The Murder of Busy Lizzie (1973)

  A Javelin for Jonah (1974)

  Winking at the Brim (1974)

  Convent on Styx (1975)

  Late, Late in the Evening (1976)

  Noonday and Night (1977)

  Fault in the Structure (1977)

  Wraiths and Changelings (1978)

  Mingled With Venom (1978)

  Nest of Vipers (1979)

  The Mudflats of the Dead (1979)

  Here Comes a Chopper (1980)

  The Whispering Knights (1980)

  The Death-Cap Dancers (1981)

  Lovers Make Moan (1981)

  Here Lies Gloria Mundy (1982)

  Death of a Burrowing Mole (1982)

  The Greenstone Griffins (1983)

  Cold, Lone and Still (1983)

  No Winding Sheet (1984)

  The Crozier Pharaohs (1984)

  Gladys Mitchell writing as Malcolm Torrie

  Heavy as Lead (1966)

  Late and Cold (1967)

  Your Secret Friend (1968)

  Shades of Darkness (1970)

  Bismarck Herrings (1971)

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © The Executors of the Estate of Gladys Mitchell 1943

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer Seattle 2013

  www.apub.com

  First published Great Britain in 1943 by Michael Joseph.

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  E-ISBN: 9781477868850

  A Note about This E-Book

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original British edition and includes British vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation, some of which may differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, with only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  To

  ALICE JANE BURDEN

  IN THE YEAR OF HER MAYORALTY

  Brentford and Chiswick, 1942–43

  Contents

  BOOK ONE Rest Centre

  CHAPTER ONE Blitz

  CHAPTER TWO Body

  CHAPTER THREE Preliminaries

  BOOK TWO The River God’s Song

  CHAPTER FOUR Nymph

  CHAPTER FIVE Satyr

  CHAPTER SIX Mermaid

  CHAPTER SEVEN Fugitive

  CHAPTER EIGHT Nuns

  BOOK THREE Enchantment

  CHAPTER NINE Sibyl

  CHAPTER TEN Seekers

  CHAPTER ELEVEN Encounter

  CHAPTER TWELVE Tryst

  BOOK FOUR Ulysses

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Castaway

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Voyage Home

  BOOK FIVE Sleuth’s Alchemy

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Familiars

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Muddy Beer

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN Welshman

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN Angels

  CHAPTER NINETEEN Prodigal

  BOOK SIX Dunkirk

  CHAPTER TWENTY Beaches

  BOOK SEVEN This Side of Heaven

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Spaniards

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO Merman

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Meeting

  About the Author

  BOOK ONE

  Rest Centre

  Here needs no Court for our Request,

  Where all are best,

  All wise, all equal, and all just

  Alike i’ the dust.

  Nor need we here to fear the frown

  Of court or crown:

  Where fortune bears no sway o’er things,

  There all are kings.

  Robert Herrick

  CHAPTER ONE

  Blitz

  Mrs. Bradley gave the raid an hour; then she went the round of the shelters which she was scheduled to visit. By the time she got to the Rest Centre the raid was at its height. Gunfire and bombs provided its orchestra, and searchlights, flares from the enemy planes, the brilliant pyrotechnic bursting of shells and the lurid light from buildings already burning, sufficed to illumine a scene from the inferno.

  Mrs. Bradley had become interested in the effects and results of air-raids. Noise stimulated her. She did not connect, she found, the crump of bombs, and the whistling shiver and thrill of their descent, with an active and virulent enemy, but regarded the raids with the objective interest she would have felt for natural phenomena—hurricanes, earthquakes, and landslides.

  She was amazed, however—although it had already become a commonplace—at the extraordinary calmness of the people.

  Their courage did not so much surprise her, for she was accustomed, in general medical practice, to the staggering philosophy of humanity; but their acceptance of the appalling din and danger was, to a psychologist, unexpected and very interesting.

  The Rest Centre, part of the premises of a Baptist Chapel, was in Maidenhead Close, and by the time she got to it some dozens of people had arrived. Their moods were various. Some had lost everything they had. All were, in some degree, shaken and stricken. Mrs. Bradley found plenty to do, and the people had plenty to talk about.

  “They say the Cat’s Whisker is down to the ground,” said a man who had been pulled out from under a wrecked shop near Drury Lane. The Cat’s Whisker was a s
ynonym for a thieves’ kitchen masquerading not unsuccessfully as a Soho tavern. “Bennie seen it bust up.”

  He indicated a black-faced, filthy creature whom Mrs. Bradley recognized as a young professional boxer who used the gymnasium over the sports shop on the corner of Mild Court, the next street to Maidenhead Close.

  “That’s right,” agreed this apparition. “Plug’s place, too, where I trains. Come down like a pack of cards, the blooming lot—shop, gymnasium, everyfink.”

  “And where were you, Bennie?” Mrs. Bradley enquired.

  “In the cellar. Clawed my way out. Give first-aid to a fellow with a nasty ’and, and come on ’ere for a kip. Staying with Plug while I trains. Called up tomorrow I am, so I thought I better kip down tonight, that’s all. Else I’d a stop’ there. See?”

  His manner was a curious blend of the belligerent and the self-righteous.

  “Did Plug get out?” asked Mrs. Bradley.

  “How the bloomin’ ’ell should I know?” demanded the youth. “Got meself to look after, ’aven’t I?”

  “And me to look after you,” said Mrs. Bradley, nodding. The boy was a tough little Jew called Bennie Lazarus, trained to a hair, and highly-strung.

  “Get this man between blankets and keep him as warm as you can,” she said to a St. John’s Ambulance worker who was standing by, waiting for her orders.

  “I’d have got Plug out if I could,” said Bennie, beginning to cry. “You know that, Ma. ’Im and me was like brothers.”

  “If you please, Doctor, could you come over to Mrs. Zellati a minute?” asked one of the Rest Centre staff. “She’s got a haemorrhage, but she insists on getting up and going to look for one of her children. They’re all here—we’ve counted and checked them—but she won’t believe it.”

  Mrs. Zellati was lying in the little emergency hospital which opened off the end of the basement shelter of the Rest Centre. Mrs. Bradley went in and comforted her, and then was called upon to deliver judgement on the diet of Joseph Guisser, who said he was diabetic.

  The people were of all races and classes. There were, on this particular night, Jews, Greeks, Russians, French, Chinese, Negroes, and English, of all ages and types. The Staff and Officers were almost rushed off their feet, but the service was amazingly selfless, and the people, on the whole, were patient, reasonable, and brave.

  “We had the St. Giles’ House at first,” said the Supervising Officer, “but we couldn’t take all those who wanted to come. We shall only use it as an overflow dormitory in the future. People were awfully good at helping us move across here. The local people, I mean. Some, of course, were connected with the Baptist Church, but there were others—the sort you’d never think would have put themselves out at all. They humped our bales and bundles, and worked like navvies to get us settled in.”

  The Supervising Officer was a slightly-built man with a thin face relieved from asceticism by a lively and charming smile. He was a well-known painter, and Mrs. Bradley had often admired his work in exhibitions before the war.

  The Centre, too, she admired. She felt that the Staff were proud of it. Certainly the results of their work were striking. Imagination and good taste had gone to the planning of the Centre, and the rest and recreation rooms, the dining-room, and the rooms for the children’s games all had their separate characters and were comfortable, bright, interesting, and pretty.

  There was neither an institutional smell nor an institutional air about the place; the lounge was tastefully furnished; the pictures were good; books on top of a long, low cupboard against the end wall opposite the windows gave a pleasing and friendly effect. There were flowers on a table, a carpet on the floor; curtains, apart from the usual hideous black-out blinds, to the windows. A large and comfortable settee occupied the short wall opposite the bookcase. There were armchairs about. The room looked homely and yet dignified.

  The other rooms were in keeping. There were flowers on the tables in the dining-room; toys in the children’s playroom. The planning of the rooms for their various uses had been a triumph, also. The kitchen opened into the dining-room; the dining-room into the lounge. Between the lounge and the recreation rooms were the Supervisor’s office and the Welfare Officer’s room. The sleeping accommodation for the people who used the Rest Centre was down in the basement, which had been strengthened to form an air-raid shelter. This dormitory was in two sections, one for men and the other for women, and it had emergency exits in addition to the flight of stone steps which led to the level of the street and to the outer door.

  This part of the Rest Centre Mrs. Bradley already knew well, and she also knew the small Emergency Hospital which opened off one end of the dormitory, and in which the nursing sister on duty usually sat patiently knitting. On this particular night, however, she had, like the rest, as much work as she could possibly manage.

  At last the worst of the night rush was over. More people would come in in the morning when the police had roped off areas containing, or suspected of containing, unexploded bombs. Meanwhile there was a short break, during which the Staff could snatch a cup of tea and smoke a cigarette.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s been as bad as last time,” said the Welfare Officer, handing tea to Mrs. Bradley. “What do you think, Godfrey?”

  Mrs. Bradley glanced from one to the other of the Officers. They were, superficially, a study in contrasts; studied carefully (as Mrs. Bradley, interested, had studied them), their characters showed some amazing resemblances as well as sharp differences. But even the differences were not divergent in their nature; they were co-operative, and the resemblances never had the unfortunate effect of producing competition, jealousy, or any of the lesser and meaner vices, but merely enhanced and deepened the first impression of solidarity of purpose and essential comradeship of these two people so fortunately in juxtaposition.

  The man was not less, but more, a man in that he recognized in himself some of the neater, quieter, more penetrating feminine qualities. He was, in fact, a complete human being, this almost delicate-looking aesthete, Mrs. Bradley surmised, and his strength lay in never underestimating either himself or the people with whom he had to deal. He had authority, like the flash of a sword, and humour, like sun-rays coming in brilliancy from behind cloud.

  The woman had judgement and courage, as had the man. Her authority was not like his, but seemed to rest upon her shoulders as though it were truly the mantle with which it is sometimes compared. She neither argued, drove, nor appeared to assert herself in any definite way. She was a natural leader, as sure of herself as a rock. She had integrity as well as courage, and the meaner virtues seemed to have passed her by. Mrs. Bradley heard that she had three sons, all serving, and could well believe it.

  Her humour was not keener than the man’s, but was different in quality. She was more acutely alive to the ridiculous, especially as it appeared in people’s actions; less acutely aware of the verbal shaft. The man, Mrs. Bradley thought, might die for a theory; allow himself to be martyred for an idea; the woman was of the mettle that would plough up the stubble on a battlefield, even before the battle was quite at an end. She was of the pioneer stock, intensely individual, possessed also of great acumen and a mentality masculine in its breadth, feminine in its subtlety; and yet, Mrs. Bradley surmised, for a thousand hells in the man’s life—fear, pain, self-searching—the woman would never know one. Mental and physical fear lay outside her experience, it seemed. She was self-reliant by nature; the man had learned self-reliance, probably by self-expression in his paintings. He was, pre-eminently, the artist; she, shrewd, humorous, kind, implacable as Nature or Fate.

  Mrs. Bradley could not help wondering how each would react to some of the experiences which she herself had had of crime; what attitude they would adopt towards murder, for example; whether their notions of justice would always coincide with those of the law.

  “Are you tired, Doctor?” asked the Supervising Officer.

  “She is weighing us up and finding us wanting,” said
the Welfare Officer, refilling Mrs. Bradley’s cup. “What did you think of the emergency maternity arrangements, Doctor?”

  “Marvellously adequate,” said Mrs. Bradley.

  When she returned to the basement shelter which was used as the Rest Centre dormitory she found work to keep her busy until the morning. The All Clear was sounded at five.

  Considering the length of the raid and the damage done to buildings, the number of casualties was not as large as might have been expected. It was heavy enough, however. She felt tired and depressed, chiefly with hunger, by the time she reached her rooms in Gerrard Street.

  Her premises were intact, although buildings at the end of the street had suffered considerable damage.

  A youngish man was sprawled in her longest armchair. He jumped up as soon as he saw her.

  “Hullo, David,” she said.

  “You’ve been working all night,” he said. “Lie down and rest. I’ve got the breakfast ready as far as I can. My lodgings are busted wide open, and I’ve taken my landlady to the Rest Centre. She’s crying her eyes out, poor old soul. Every stick she’s got has gone except her potted geranium, and she’s clinging to that as though it were her child.”

  “I’ve just come from the Rest Centre myself,” said Mrs. Bradley, sitting down and letting him wait on her. “I didn’t see her there, but I talked to the furnace-man about the heating before I came away, so perhaps you brought her in then. How is Mr. Piojo, by the way?”

  On the previous evening a half-breed sailor, a Spaniard on his father’s side, had been brought to her surgery. She had patched him up and had transferred him to Charing Cross Hospital.

  The young man, Harben, grinned.

  “He’s all right. They were pretty fed up with him for getting himself knifed when they wanted every bed for air-raid casualties. He didn’t want them to touch your bandages. He thought they had some special magic about them, I believe. Anyhow, he’s tough, and a clean-living sort of fellow. He’ll soon be up and about. How do you like your coffee?”

  “Black,” said Mrs. Bradley. “How did you come to be with him when he was attacked?”

  “It wasn’t he who was attacked. That knife he took on his arm was meant for my ribs, I think. Someone must have been lying in wait in Little Newport Street.”