Something More than Night E-Book

Kim Newman

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Seitenzahl: 529

Beschreibung

Anno Dracula author Kim Newman reimagines the lives of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff with his signature wit in this gripping and horrifying tale of late 1930s HollywoodHollywood, the late 1930s.Raymond Chandler writes detective stories for pulp magazines, and drinks more than he should. Boris Karloff plays monsters in the movies, and is a genial, cricket-playing member of the British filmland colony on the shores of the Pacific.Both understand that these streets are dark with Something More than Night. Together, these English public school men in exile investigate mysterious matters in a town run by human and inhuman monsters.Under Home House, the mock gothic mock mansion of a film mogul, is a mad science dungeon just like in the movies – where an experiment has gone dangerously wrong, or even more dangerously right. Fiery death spills onto Sunset Boulevard.Joh Devlin, an investigator for the District Attorney's office who scores high on insubordination, and Laurel Ives, a woman with as many lives as a cat and names to match, barely escape Home House.Fired by the DA, Devlin enlists Ray and Billy – Raymond Chandler and William Pratt (Boris Karloff) – to work the case, which threatens to expose Hollywood's most horrific secrets.These people will find out more than they should about the way this town works. And about each other.And, oh yes, monsters aren't just for the movies

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Also by Kim Newman and available from Titan Books

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

Prologue: The Styx

Chapter 1

Part One: Malibu Pier

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Part Two: Home House

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Part Three: The Night of the Storm

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Part Four: Casa Karloff

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Part Five: The Man in Chapter 30

Chapter 30

Part Six: Mystery and Imagination

Chapter 31

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Afterword and Acknowledgements

About the Author

‘Newman’s noir teams Boris Karloff with Raymond Chandler to solve gothic crimes in a 1930s Hollywood full of man-made monsters, dodgy movie studios, and ice-cold gimlets. Written in a James Ellroy rat-a-tat it’s the perfect book for a summer afternoon by the pool with plenty of cocktails. If more mysteries were written like this, I’d read more mysteries.’

Grady Hendrix, author of The Final Girl Support Group

‘Monsters and mobsters and movie sets, oh my! Only Kim Newman could have written this glorious, insane noir mash-up.’

M.R. Carey, author of The Book of Koli

‘Kim Newman is the first to spot that between the worlds of Philip Marlowe and Frankenstein’s monster is an LA-noir sweet spot where crime and horror overlap. His odd-couple pairing of Boris Karloff and Raymond Chandler is a genius crime-solving idea that pays off big time; hard-bitten, tender and a killer double bill for film lovers.’

Christopher Fowler, author of the Bryant & May Mysteries

‘Movies, monsters and Kim Newman’s sharp wit – what a treat!’

Sarah Pinborough, bestselling author of Netflix’s Behind Her Eyes

‘Something More Than Night is what happens when an encyclopaedic knowledge of film collides with pulp noir and turns Raymond Chandler’s already mean streets into something altogether more eldritch and nasty. Classic Kim Newman.’

Jon Courtenay Grimwood

‘Kim Newman is slowly making his way into the canon of English literary greats, where he’d be both entirely at home and deeply uncomfortable. He describes perfectly the way fiction has invaded our real lives, and he got there first.’

Paul Cornell, author of Witches of Lychford

‘A monstrously inventive romp through the backlots, cults and conspiracies of Old Hollyweird, in the company of the best odd-couple pairing since Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon.’

Paul McAuley, author of War of the Maps

‘Newman audaciously essays his own spin on the whipcrack wit of Chandler’s Philip Marlowe novels, carrying it off with panache.’

Barry Forshaw, Financial Times

‘An homage to a golden era of storytelling, with the chemistry between Karloff and Chandler rivalling any Hollywood double act. Intelligent, atmospheric, written with passion and wit, Something More Than Night is a must for fans of classic monsters and mysteries. A pure joy to read.’

Rio Youers, author of Lola on Fire

‘Lights! Camera! Murder! As Kim Newman brings his immense knowledge and love of literature and movies to his latest, genre-breaking novel, Something More Than Night. Nobody but Newman could pull off such an audacious and high-concept story, in which pulp writer Raymond Chandler and horror actor Boris Karloff team up to solve a murder mystery in 1930s Hollywood. For lovers of hard-boiled crime and all us “Monster Kids” out there, this is simply the perfect entertainment.’

Stephen Jones, World Fantasy Award-winner

‘Kim Newman is a national treasure. No one is better able at mixing horror and comedy, real history and dread fantasy. Something More Than Night is part film noir parody, part a delightful celebration of the heyday of Hollywood, and all imaginative epic – it’s as strong, heady and dangerous as the bathroom gin of the Prohibition speakeasies he recreates so well.’

Robert Shearman, World Fantasy Award-winning author of We All Hear Stories in the Dark

Also by Kim Newman and available from Titan Books

Anno Dracula

Anno Dracula: The Bloody Red Baron

Anno Dracula: Dracula Cha Cha Cha

Anno Dracula: Johnny Alucard

Anno Dracula: One Thousand Monsters

Anno Dracula: Seven Days in Mayhem (graphic novel)

Anno Dracula 1899 and Other Stories

Anno Dracula 1999: Daikaiju

The Night Mayor

Bad Dreams

Jago

The Quorum

Life’s Lottery

The Man From the Diogenes Club

Professor Moriarty: The Hound of the D’Urbervilles

An English Ghost Story

The Secrets of Drearcliff Grange School

Angels of Music

The Haunting of Drearcliff Grange School

Video Dungeon (non-fiction)

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Something More Than Night

Print edition ISBN: 9781789097719

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789097740

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd.

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: November 2021

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

© Kim Newman 2021. All rights reserved.

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Robert Chandler and Billy Chainsaw

[The characters of hardboiled detective fiction] ‘lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night.’

Raymond Chandler, Introduction to Trouble is My Business (1950)

‘Having gone through the greatest epic of struggle I have ever heard in Hollywood, Boris Karloff is a mellow and sad man… He has the appearance of a rajah. His eyes are dreamy, defeated, tragic; the eyes of a man who has suffered much…

He does not seem to be in tune with the materialistic world. I would hazard the guess that he may often find it hard to keep his dreamy and poetical nature in rhythm with modern life. Unfailingly polite, he is nevertheless aloof. There is a rose in his soul which the searing wind of Hollywood has never touched.’

Jim Tully, ‘Alias the Monster’, The New Movie Magazine (1932)

PROLOGUE

THE STYX

1

Real drinkers make good murder suspects.

Amateur souses establish alibis wherever the bender takes them. The pie-eyed sot blundering into the floorshow has a club full of witnesses to testify he was across town from the alley where his former business partner got gunned. The loud, sozzled sister lodges in the memory of the waiter who has to mop up her vomitus on the evening when her husband was defenestrated in another state. Cops give such Saturday night lushes the lightest of grillings before turning the spotlight on the next most likely suspect.

Serious drunks slide through shadows.

Those ferociously intent on poisoning themselves body and soul do so alone. Their step quickens under street lights and slows in the darks between. Coat collars up, hat-brims low. They favour dim holes with short-sighted bartenders who know no names. They leave behind only moist circles.

They could be guilty of anything.

Sometimes – too often – that’s the stripe of drinker I am. Fuzzy on dates and places, unclear about what I’ve done and with or to whom. Not sure whether the night’s monsters were half-way unreal.

Oh, that’s another thing.

There are monsters.

I have seen their faces and I know their names.

*   *   *

It was late 1931 or early ’32. As I mentioned, dates get fuzzy.

I was in the habit of working conscientiously from nine till one, then drinking at (or for) lunch. A belt or two often turned into a bottle or more. Afternoons seldom found me returning to the twelfth-floor offices of the Dabney Oil Syndicate, above the Bank of Italy on South Olive Street. Secretaries covered for me, if they were so disposed… and didn’t when they’d had enough. They always had enough in the long run.

The firm kept me on – at the rank of Vice-President – because they got a good morning’s work. Paperwork was done, briskly and with precision. The hot thumbtacks behind my eyes didn’t cloud my head for figures. My British accent lent their piratical concern an air of respectability. Not that I’m British – I was born in Chicago. But I am an English public school man. That means something, even at three or four sheets to the wind.

The title of Vice-President was misleading. I was a superior sort of bookkeeper, labouring under the handicap of being reasonably honest in a crooked business. No one in California oil – even in offices with rose-pink Tennessee marble floors – avoids getting their hands dirty as derrick wrenches. My manners convinced investors they weren’t being robbed. Under me, lesser bookkeepers pumped adding machines as if they might pay out tokens. A percentage of our stenographers couldn’t type above three words a minute but were eager to persuade out-of-town clients they’d had a fine old time in Los Angeles.

In most cities, dirty money smells like a newly printed slick magazine, so sharp you can cut your throat with a ten-spot. LA bills are soft, grubby with petroleum. Rolled between fingertips, they feel damp as orchid petals. Touch a lit match to one and it flares like magician’s flash-paper. All that’s left is ash and a stain. And a smell you stop noticing after a while.

In the dying days of the Herbert Hoover Administration, alcohol was illegal in these United States. The dedicated wine-bibber had to seek premises with no visible street address, knuckle-rap on a steel door, remember a foolish password and know a friend of Sam’s. The government-approved stock of earlier and later years was not served. No federal snoopers checked for impurities, calculated alcohol percentages or ensured absence of rat-pellets. In actuarial terms, I was at less risk charging enemy machine guns in the Great War than I was downing paraffin gimlets in times of peace.

Drinking wasn’t done in gay public places either – but in cellars, vacant lots and back-rooms. My preferred afternoon avenues to oblivion were second- or third-run movie theatres. Not the two-thousand-seater picture palaces on Broadway, with Versailles mirrors and plaster sphinxes, but concrete boxes called the Rex or the Lux – or perhaps the Styx. You were ushered to a row of bolted-together dentists’ chairs and charged fifteen times the price of admission for a bottle in a brown paper bag with ‘peanuts’ written on it.

Smoke ghosts swirled in the projector beam, gold-digger legs dancing and cowboy guns puffing. Auditoria rattled with the tinny sounds movies made when they first started to talk. Characters set off firecrackers, tap-danced, honked car-horns and breathed husky songs. I did not patronise such places as a devotee of the cinematic arts. Or as an admirer of Miss Janet Gaynor or Strongheart the Wonder Dog.

I was only here for the peanuts.

That afternoon, the picture was Frankenstein.

Little of the original remained. My third form at Dulwich College scorned Mrs Shelley’s novel as insufficiently terrifying fudge. Her Monster was as given to quoting Milton out of context and at length as our tedious house master. Schoolboy sophisticates with a yen for the horrors preferred the much-confiscated ghost stories of M.R. James. In a rare instance of American literary pride, I argued for Robert W. Chambers’ The King in Yellow. Now, that’s a frightening book.

My eye was occasionally drawn to the screen.

After murky doings in a graveyard, Frankenstein settled into drawing-room guff staged and played to the standard of a 1910 touring production of Mrs Tanqueray’s Past. A soppy blonde and her second-string swain drew hoots from the back row.

A dwarf with a tiny cane scuttled around a laboratory. A brain in a jar was stolen. The wrong brain. This abnormal cerebellum was sewn into the skull of the bandaged giant. The subject was hoisted up to the eaves in a crackle of electric arcs while cabinets of machinery fizzed and flashed.

I was disturbed by Henry Frankenstein, maker of the Monster. His haggard cheeks reminded me of the haunted mask that floated in my shaving mirror. A fellow drinker, I figured. The actor’s accent gave him away as another English public school man.

‘It’s alive, it’s alive, it’s moving… it’s al-i-eve!’

The picture abandoned the drawing room for a stone-clad ruin, a cathedral filled with purposeless contraptions. I felt lightning strikes in my temples, my spine, my teeth.

I was on my second peanut bag when the Monster appeared.

Movies were getting clever with monsters. Before the Vitaphone, Lon Chaney would tear off a mask and stick his face – all eyes and teeth – into the camera. The orchestra (and the audience) provided the mute heroine’s scream. At such moments, my friend Warren Lloyd and I would sit at opposite sides of the theatre and laugh out loud. Audiences can be infected with forced, inappropriate hilarity. The experiment was usually a roaring success. Two or three times, I got popped in the eye or kicked into the foyer. I lacked Warren’s talent for defusing the wrath of those who resented being drafted as sociology specimens on their evenings out.

Lon Chaney had died, talkies were all the rage and Hollywood had a vacancy for a bogey man.

In the opening credits, the actor playing Frankenstein’s Monster was billed as ‘?’. Question Mark. Had Mr Carl Laemmle of Universal Pictures scouted the freak shows of the world for a stitched-together face? Plenty of broken mugs were around. Broken minds too.

The audience at the Styx was sparse. Not a few had peanut bags. Some even munched peanuts. The film fostered apprehension. We were grownups, no longer scared of ghosties and goblins. A good percentage of us had been through the War. We lived in a country where cops could knock you down or lock you up for having a hip-flask. But I could feel the fear. I was a part of it. A frisson can be delicious, like the thrill of turning a page to find out what horrors lurk in The King in Yellow. Years on, the anticipation of fright wasn’t a tingle but a knife to the throat. We grew sick as impatience blended with dread.

The actors not playing monsters were shrill. Was the film running fast? The fug of drink usually slows time. Rat-tat-tat tommy guns in a gangster picture sound like the parp-parp-parp of a flatulent frog. Here, the doctor, the girl, the swain and even the dwarf hurried through their lines as if they wanted the curtain rung down before sunset, afraid to walk home in the dark.

After the spectacle of electric vivification came earnest talk of infinity and promethean ambition… and finally the entrance of the Monster.

A door opened. Did it creak? It ought to have.

Bulky shoulders in a workman’s jacket. Big boots. That flat head.

No one breathed.

At that time, I was – in Hollywood terms – a civilian. I knew stars by name but had no idea what a director did. I had heard of Mary W. Shelley, but not James Whale. He was the madman who directed Frankenstein, the real maker of monsters. Whale didn’t have Question Mark pop up like Lon Chaney-in-a-box or clutch like the Cat who clawed the Canary. Whale opened the door and had the Monster walk into the room backwards. The first we saw was the rear of his misshapen head, terminals on his neck, black hair lank.

I wanted to raise the wrapped bottle, but my hands didn’t work. The world was out of focus, pictures wavering on dust motes, but the screen was clear and fifty yards across.

Question Mark turned to the audience.

Those eyes – heavy lids, inkblot irises, clear agony. That twist of a mouth. The black cheek sore, like potato blight. A gaunt martyr’s face. A Monster, all right – assembled on a slab at Universal Pictures, shocked to life by stage lightning. But also… another English public school man.

The audience did not laugh. A small boy shrieked.

Cuts brought the Monster’s face closer, made it bigger. A looming moon of hurt.

The horror was that I knew that face.

I knew what those eyes had seen.

‘Billy,’ I exclaimed involuntarily, ‘Billy Pratt!’

PART ONE

MALIBU PIER

2

A telephone call at 2.30 a.m. is never good news.

At the first ring, Taki’s claws hooked through my pants, pricking the meat of my thighs. Our cat, mistress of the house, arched her back, fur rising like porcupine spines. I shooed her off my lap and picked up the phone.

‘Raymond Chandler, speaking,’ I said.

‘R.T.,’ came that insidious whisper, ‘it’s Billy.’

I knew who it was even before he gave his name. In this hemisphere, only Billy uses my initials. And, of course, his voice is famous.

At the muffled sound of him, Taki relaxed.

Cats love Billy. As do women. And small children he hasn’t drowned.

William Pratt is now known as Boris Karloff.

Nine or so years previously, he gave me a shock in Frankenstein. Not like the shock he gave everyone else. My terror was more intimate – a shock of familiarity, of remembering…

Nearly thirty years before Frankenstein, in a cricket pavilion in England, Billy became my secret brother. So he remains, decades on at the far edge of the United States. The story that explains our association is one – as the fusty, careless Conan Doyle would have it – ‘for which the world is not yet prepared’. Translated into language people might actually use, coughing up that yarn would be a one-way ticket to the booby-hatch.

Radio comedians who do ‘Boris Karloff’ pretend he has a lisp. But no little bird flutters in Billy’s upper register. His susurrus never slurs to mush, just hints that it might. As the Mummy, he deftly sidestepped elephant trap phrases like ‘the scroll of Thoth’. His real imitable tic is a slight elongation of the vowels, like the mid-word pause a vicar takes to suppress a nasty notion about a parishioner in the third pew.

An English public school voice, ostensibly mild rather than monstrous – yet with something sinister in it. His eye-gleam is simultaneously a twinkle of charm and a glint of malice.

Billy plays monsters because he understands them.

Monsters can sport an old school tie. Many do.

A ghost in blue pyjamas appeared at the door of my study.

‘Raymio,’ she whispered in reproach – more chilling than a call from the talking screen’s reigning Demon King.

Taki padded over to the ghost and licked her lacquered toes.

‘R.T.? Are you still there?’

‘I’m sorry, Billy,’ I said. ‘It’s Cissy.’

‘Ah, your sweet white-haired mother. Give the old dear my best wishes.’

‘It’s Billy Pratt,’ I said.

The ghost vanished, pulling shut my study door.

My wife closes doors on any part of me that disappoints or frightens her. She locks her own doors too. We share much, but not everything. She keeps the secret of her true age as djinni conceal the names that give sorcerers power over them. I do not expose her, too much, to the drinking – now it’s legal, I am mostly dry – or the secretaries. Or the monsters.

Cissy sleeps through most nights. I do not.

We change addresses often, as if dodging bailiffs… or, as it would have been in the pulp magazines that butter my crusts, on the run from a remorseless, methodical killer who would eventually poke a gun-barrel through the door-crack of any hideout. Cissy and I hole up in rented apartments and small houses, moving out of the city and then back to its fringes. Monrovia, Arcadia, Pacific Palisades. No-places, mostly – a fair drive from anywhere people have heard of. The air heavy with sea salt, oil stink, desert wind and scents of flora nurtured with stolen water. Mimosa, manzanita, grevillea, yarrow, hummingbird sage.

I was eventually cashiered from Dabney Oil for bringing the profession of rapine and banditry into disrepute through spotty attendance, persistent drunkenness and misconduct with female office staff (secretaries). After that, I spent a long decade honing a new craft, equally inimical to polite company and far less remunerative.

I write mysteries. Not novels, not books – mysteries.

In outline, I have a non-mystery set to go. English Summer, subtitled A Gothic Romance. It has just one murder in it. P. Marlowe, Esq. wouldn’t get out of bed for just one murder. After I shove Marlowe over a waterfall, I’ll write about manners and morals rather than mugs and murders. Manners and morals are fit subjects for novels. Cissy, not a devoted Black Mask reader, says my stories are romances at bottom. My questing knights wear hats rather than helms and brandish automatics rather than lances.

‘Is it her?’ I asked Billy.

Cissy says all the she-cats in my stories – the blondes in need of rescue, the dark ladies with guns in handbags – are portraits of our Taki’s moods. One reason I stay unfashionably married despite proximity to America’s divorce resorts is that my wife is my most perceptive, imaginative critic. Alexander Woollcott wouldn’t look half so good in blue pyjamas – and, besides, I doubt he’s a natural redhead.

I don’t disabuse Cissy about my belles dames sans merci.

My wife doesn’t need to know about Ariadne.

Billy didn’t breathe the name either… but I usually heard from him when her great wings beat and palms bent in the backwash.

‘It’s not her,’ he said. ‘Though she’s in it, I’m sure.’

In horror movies, Frankenstein’s Monster had a Bride and Dracula a daughter – ghosts of Ariadne, who retired from acting before those scripts were written. In her brief screen career, she might have been one of the spectre concubines in Dracula, the pale blonde with dark sisters.

Her face never changes – a girl’s, with ancient eyes. Green eyes, threaded with red.

She hadn’t followed us from Dulwich drizzle to Hollywood sunshine. If anything, we were drawn in her wake. After knocking about the world, Billy and I both ended up where dreams were made. The fountains of terror and wonder.

At the other end of the line, I heard rain and the crash of waves.

‘Where are you?’

‘Malibu Pier,’ said Billy. ‘You know the one.’

‘I ought to. It’s where I killed that bloody chauffeur.’

‘Ah, so you do know who did it? Is that a confession?’

‘Yes, I with my typewriter, I killed the chauffeur. Strictly, he killed himself – wedged the pedal and aimed the big black Buick at the ocean.’

‘Did you also take off the unfortunate’s face – and the greater part of his noggin – with a shotgun?’

‘No,’ I winced. ‘I have some standards. I don’t write your sort of story.’

‘Someone does,’ he said. ‘Someone imagines your sort of story and my sort of story mixed together. Mystery and horror.’

‘You didn’t call in the middle of the night to discuss which pulp to sneak off the stands – Dime Detective or Terror Tales?’

‘No, I’m with the police. You know the police. They aren’t overly fond of you.’

‘I shouldn’t wonder.’

‘Ah, but they love me. Murder children on the silver screen and everyone loves Uncle Boris. Sneer at coppers in a mucky book and you’ve enemies for life.’

I had a spasm. Did I have an alibi?

Even sober, I make a good murder suspect.

Taki side-eyed me as if she knew I was guilty. She’d rat me out in a second, for all that she was loved, fed and made obeisance to. The feline would land a new sugar daddy as easily as a showgirl gaffs her next monied scion.

‘Have you been arrested?’ I asked.

‘Good Lord no. The bracelets slapped on an Uppinghamian! It would never do. I am, sad to say, merely called on to identify the corpse.’

‘The fellow without a face?’

‘Indeed. And not wearing a chauffeur’s uniform.’

‘The dead man went off the pier in a car?’

‘A big black sedan. Does that sound familiar?’

It did and Billy knew it would. The Big Sleep, my first book-length mystery, features a similar incident. That corpse is Owen Taylor, chauffeur to the Sternwood family. P. Marlowe expresses only minor interest in a below-stairs fatality he has not been hired to investigate. Therefore, little thought is given to the question of whether Taylor ended his own life or was murdered. The loose end flaps.

If Chandler, R.T. had known so many readers, professional and amateur, would find the flunky’s demise so fascinating a subject, he’d have clipped a coroner’s report to the typescript. The world should have moved on but we were back to poor inconsistent Owen Taylor, who only appeared in The Big Sleep as a corpse. Someone invented only to be killed off. Mystery readers demand regular homicides, relevant or not, explicable or otherwise.

‘Could this be the work of one of your demented fans, R.T.?’

A few years earlier, Billy and I tangled with ‘Prospero Prince’, a wealthy bibliophile whose hobby was recreating highlights of the tales of Edgar Allan Poe – pulling a party girl’s teeth, bisecting a tennis pro with an Inquisition torture device, stuffing a gossip columnist up a chimney. Prince had to be tricked into a final homage – ‘A Cask of Amontillado’, played in the wine cellar of the Spanish mission he’d decorated as the House of Usher. We walled him up and walked away. He’s almost certainly run out of air by now. The crimes were kept out of the papers, but at least two movies – one starring Billy – were inspired by whispers that went around about them.

‘Not likely,’ I said. ‘Prince had the dough to get a giant pendulum razor custom-made to Poe’s specifications. My demented fans can’t afford big black Buicks. They ride the Red Cars. Or steal bicycles.’

‘You have readers among the police. It was they who thought of you.’

‘I’m happy to autograph flyleaves in office hours.’

‘I shall relay the offer. It might give them cheer after a gruelling night shift. Fishing an automobile from the vasty deep is tricky. The operation involves a motor-tug, a diver with a foul disposition and chains and pulleys and braces.’

‘Why are you in Malibu? It’s a long way from Coldwater Canyon.’

‘The police insisted I attend. In the glove compartment of the car they found a waterlogged motion picture script. The Man They Could Not Hang. I played in that for Columbia a year or so ago. It is, in point of fact, my copy of the script of The Man They Could Not Hang.’

‘How can they tell?’

‘I mark my sides. In this script, Dr Savaard’s lines are underscored by my distinctive flourish. Dr Savaard was the role I played. They couldn’t hang him. He was brought back from the dead. By electric shock.’

‘You speak in films? I’ve only heard you grunt.’

‘Grrr… arrrh,’ said the Monster.

It was always like that between us. English public school men joshing, Old Uppinghamian and Old Alleynian. Even when it was no joshing matter. Especially when it was no joshing matter.

‘How did the Faceless Man come by your copy of a script?’

‘I rather think I gave it to him. There’s a dedication on the title page. I wrote that. But he wrote the script itself. I think it’s Joh, R.T. Joh Devlin.’

Now I understood why he’d called.

‘I’ll be right over, Billy.’

‘We’ll still be here. The police are having a devil of a time finding a coroner at this hour.’

‘The police generally have problems finding people.’

‘Perhaps they should hire Philip Marrow.’

‘Marlowe.’

‘I said that.’

‘Sure you did, Bela. Sure you did.’

3

Joh Devlin. Not John, not Joe. Formerly Johan Dieffenbach.

Everyone in this story changed their name. Cissy was born Pearl Eugénie Hurlburt. William Henry Pratt became famous as Boris Karloff. Ariadne was once known by an ululation of awe and terror emitted by knuckle-walkers whose general vocabulary was the Monster’s ‘grrr… arrrh’. Alone in this muddle, I kept the name I was given at birth. I showed my father what I thought of him when I put Chandler on lurid dust jackets.

My mysteries sold well enough to keep us out of the poorhouse. But not well enough for us to be too fussy about addresses. Or our car. It was not big, not black and not a Buick.

In my drinking days, there would have been a bottle in the Packard roadster’s glove compartment. Now, there weren’t even any gloves – just a sad street guide, useless three years after publication. Los Angeles continually knocks half of itself down to drill for oil or build restaurants shaped like the meals they serve.

The city spills out into the desert like a stain. White stucco palaces rise along the coast, permanent as chalk dentures. Studio heads have clifftop mansions made by their set construction departments.

Rain had been falling for a day and a half. Cacti were swollen like sponges. The downpour petered out as I got to the Pacific Coast Highway. Signs put out to warn of mudslides had been pushed into the road by sliding mud. Driving round them was like avoiding barbed wire in No Man’s Land.

Billy’s voice struck terror in me. Not the way it did to everybody else.

Our personal, shared fear was unique. It made us a couple, shutting out Cissy or whichever of his seven or eight wives Billy was presently married to. Universal kept trying to cast him as Bluebeard, but that story was too close to home.

Billy Pratt’s greatest role wasn’t the Monster. Billy shared Frankenstein with Mary Shelley, James Whale, a little Greek make-up man named Jack P. Pierce, and every child in a cardboard mask at Hallowe’en. No, Billy’s best part, for which he could claim sole rights of authorship, was Boris Karloff.

Asked where the name came from, he would lie. ‘A distant connection of my mother’s had a name like Karloff.’ No one has a name like Karloff. Not even in Russia. At Uppingham, being a Pratt was to invite kicks to the ankles on the stairs. ‘Oh look, chums, Pratt’s taken a prat-fall! What a prize prat is Pratt!’ Kicks came often because young Billy looked more like a Patel than a Pratt. Dark-complected even before California sun, his family tree had roots in India. ‘A touch of the tar-brush,’ they used to say, ‘but a useful bat.’ Knowing Uppingham, I imagine they still say that. At Dulwich College too.

It’s an open secret that some of the best English public school chaps are scarcely English at all, even if they play cricket with Sir C. Aubrey Smith, insist on tea breaks at eleven and four and perform music hall songs with freshly filthy lyrics to raise funds for blitzed blighters back home. Basil Rathbone is South African and George Sanders is Russian.

I am myself American and Irish Quaker and was in a Scots regiment of the Canadian army. But I broke my face playing rugby. I am a typical English public school man. To place stories with Black Mask, I had to study American idioms the way Joseph Conrad – a favourite author of Billy’s, as it happens – learned English as a second language before turning to fiction. I write in a language I don’t generally speak, though Philip Marlowe’s vocabulary – and, more damagingly, his combative attitude – creeps in after the third gimlet.

Billy had taken a long route from Dulwich to Hollywood. Shedding the Pratt name, he’d shipped out like a remittance man to act in melodrama for Mounties and gold-panners. Joh knew Billy from Canada the way I know him from Dulwich. Not in an anecdote fit for a studio biography, but from an ungodly mess of the sort men like Joh Devlin were paid to keep out of the papers.

Perhaps Joh was Best Man at one of Billy’s early weddings, where the bride was an understudy and the parson the company’s senior character actor in a clergy costume from The Importance of Being Earnest. Maybe Billy saved Joh’s life in a bar-room fight out of a Robert W. Service poem. That would be like Billy, especially if he ended the brawl not with a roundhouse right to the unshaven jaw of an angry fur trapper but a kiss on the lips of the lady known as Lou while wrestling the garter-holstered shiv out of her stevedore-sized hand.

Needing his life saving would be like Joh.

Until now.

In my mysteries, P. Marlowe drinks my brand of coffee (Huggins Young) and favours my cocktail (the gimlet). He smokes a pipe like I do – the only thing he has in common with Crockpot Holmes. The rest of Mr Marlowe is Joh Devlin. Fired from the DA’s office for insubordination. Licensed private investigator. Twenty-five dollars a day and expenses – no divorce business. All Clients Distrusted Equally – plutocrat and plug-ugly. A good man to have on your side or in your debt. A bad man to cross. A hard man to know.

In a mystery, Joh would be the hero. In life, as it now turned out, he was the corpse.

Billy owed him and I owed him. Joh mixed the mortar in the cellar while Prospero Prince recited ‘The Raven’ to us at gunpoint. Joh shot Ape Ricotte… found Valda Darnay telling fortunes in Ensenada… told me the mystery writer whose far-fetched murder methods I’d poked fun at had spitefully smeared my typewriter keys with curare… spirited Billy out of a Mississippi blind pig when the Ku Klux Klan decided he was dark-skinned enough to be hunted by men with torches – not an unfamiliar situation for the Monster. We didn’t even pay him his day rate. That meant we were on his side and in his debt and the two of us together weren’t half the man he was. But we would do our best for him. Obligation was drummed into us at our schools.

Joh was another secret Billy and I shared. Another strand in the web that held our lives together – our worlds of crime and horror.

It didn’t do in writing a mystery to fix on the culprit before doing the detective work. Only real cops decide on a killer when the call comes in, then beat a confession out of him to tidy up the story. Guilty parties are brought to book by that method – if only coincidentally. Big criminals remain out of reach – too well-connected to arrest, too venomous to kill.

It couldn’t be Ariadne.

Or not just Ariadne. There was more to the web than its mistress.

Ariadne gave Prospero Prince an inscribed first edition of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque… was worshipped beyond reason by the formidable Mr Ricotte… and designed the fall wardrobe Valda Darnay wasn’t wearing much of in the photographs Joh was hired to locate and destroy.

Still, it wasn’t always her.

Inland, the black sky closest to the mountains frayed to blue.

The sun was up by the time I got to Malibu.

4

The entrance to the pier was an arch between stubby towers. The gates were off their hinges. The Knopf sub-editor who carped that an automobile couldn’t get up enough speed in the approach to plough through the barrier was proved wrong. I considered composing a limerick to mark this belated vindication.

‘Chandler?’ asked the motorcycle cop.

Dawn light made oily rainbows on his black cape.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Go on through,’ he said, standing aside as if ushering me into an exclusive area of the casino where I could be robbed more politely of much more money.

I stepped onto the boards and smelled yesterday’s fish. That was enough to make me seasick.

‘So, writer,’ the cop called out to my back, ‘who killed the chauffeur?’

‘You’re the policeman,’ I said. ‘It’s most often a gypsy with a limp and a glass eye, I believe.’

‘Yeah, or a Mex.’

Some accuse my mysteries of unfair depiction of the salaried police.

The cop chuckled, shaking water off his sou’wester.

The boards creaked. The further I walked from the shore, the louder the noise of the surf beneath.

In the near distance, a Coast Guard cutter passed. It was fitted with guns, grapples and mortars – for action against gambling ships moored beyond the three-mile limit rather than to counter any distant threat from Japan. It circled in search of anyone thrown out of the wreck. The likelihood that such a person would be living was diminishing.

A thin man stood at the end of the pier, next to a jagged break in the railings where something had crashed through, his back towards me. He wore white linen pants, a heavy black jacket padded at the shoulders and a wide-brimmed hat. His silhouette was unmistakably the Monster’s.

Muddy tread marks showed the long, straight run a driver had taken, with – going by the not unquestionable reasoning I gave in The Big Sleep – a living hand on the wheel to make it suicide rather than murder. The pier wasn’t supposed to be driven on and some boards had cracked under the weight of the car. If I’d seen this before I wrote that scene, I’d have used that detail.

The Monster turned to face me, supple of waist and slim at the hips, though bow-legged. His crooked smile was a practised cover for a wince that showed in his narrowed eyes.

I remembered that smile from when we were twelve. His dark hair was silver-streaked now, but the smile was the same.

He extended his arm to wave, then brought it over as if bowling at me.

From instinct, I sidestepped. A Pratt delivery could crack pads, shins or the wicket.

Despite all his injuries on and off film sets, Billy moved like a cat. No wonder Taki loved him.

‘Where’s the body?’ I asked, nearing the end of the pier.

Billy pointed at a stretch of the railings, where a chain usually hung between white two-by-fours. The chain was unhooked, allowing access to rickety stairs.

A flatbed salvage barge was moored at a small jetty. A derrick had hauled a car out of the water. Cops and crew gathered around, examining the car’s crumpled snout and smashed headlamps. Not a Buick, but a Studebaker Champion. Not black, but dark olive green. That squashed the demented Raymond Chandler devotee theory. Fans are sticklers for getting these things right. Prospero Prince didn’t disembowel the tennis pro with a giant razor yo-yo.

Besides, I recognised the car.

It was Joh’s.

‘There are bullet-holes in the trunk,’ said another caped cop.

‘They were there before,’ shouted Billy.

We both remembered that evening. Not fondly.

‘Looks old,’ admitted the cop. ‘Wonder why he didn’t get them fixed.’

‘Sentiment,’ said Billy.

‘Whatever you say, Mr Karloff.’

A movie star, no matter how gruesome, gets instant respect – more so the further away from Hollywood they venture. Shackled by contracts, a star is but a pampered slave on his home backlot – as they learn if they try to toss a shoddy script back at Jack L. Warner or L.B. Mayer. But the magic glow pulses bright when they walk among real people. As a restless youth, Billy had slunk out of England in disgrace. On his return as a movie monster, he was greeted like prodigal royalty. Numerous Pratts who’d made respectable careers as diplomats or judges (one sent Gandhi to jail) must have felt they’d wasted their lives.

‘Is that Chandler?’ shouted a man with a misshapen hat and a cigar that cut through the fish smell. I knew a cop hat and a cop cigar when I saw them.

‘It is he,’ responded Billy.

‘Come down,’ said the policeman, flapping back a wet lapel to show a badge. He hadn’t been issued bad weather gear and was soaked. The new-risen sun crinkle-dried his coat, tightening it around his upper arms. He had a moustache like a wipe of grease. His expression was rosier than mine would be if I worked a job where regular early morning calls involved messy, stupid death.

‘This is Detective-Lefftenant William Corder,’ said Billy

‘“Lefftenant”,’ echoed Corder. ‘Cute.’

‘My apologies,’ said Billy. ‘Loot, not Leff. Detective-Lieutenant.’

I climbed down to the jetty, not gripping the rusty chain banisters too tightly. Cissy always warned me against tetanus. The plainclothesman stuck out a hand and helped me aboard the barge.

‘Corder,’ I said. ‘That’s a murderer’s name.’

The cop looked at me as if I were screwy.

‘He means the wicked squire who strangled Maria Marten in the Red Barn,’ said Billy, who descended the stairs with confidence and ease. ‘Happened in 1827 or so, in Suffolk.’

‘Out of my jurisdiction,’ said Corder.

‘You’d think I’d have played the rascal,’ said Billy. ‘Murder in the Red Barn was a warhorse when I stormed barns in the Great North West, but Actor-Managers copped the plum roles. In those days, I was a callow juvenile. Carlos the Gypsy, honest lover of poor murdered Maria. I hanged Corder at the curtain. A last act string-’em-up always gets a cheer in Saskatchewan. Up there, they applaud by shooting the ceiling.’

This close to the pier, there were eddies around the pilings. Brown kelp floated on brown froth. I tried to get my sea-legs. Billy stepped onto the unsteady deck, at ease on water like all true Britishers.

‘This is Chet Stuckey,’ said Corder, indicating a sun-bronzed lifeguard type in a wool cardigan. ‘From the medical examiner’s office.’

So the police had finally scared up a coroner. Stuckey bared perfect teeth in a grin. For a moment, I thought he was going to ask for an autograph. He had an open notebook.

‘I have to warn you,’ said Stuckey. ‘It’s not pretty.’

‘I’m used to not pretty,’ I said. ‘I was in the War.’

‘And I was in Scarface,’ said Billy.

Stuckey stood aside. The cop crowd parted.

The driver’s door was open, popped out of its frame. Sat at the wheel was the man without much of a head. A double-barrelled shotgun wired to the steering column aimed upwards where a soft underchin might have been, looped cord around the triggers. Had he set out to kill himself twice? A Jekyll and Hyde homicide-suicide. Another party might have rigged the gun, though the makeshift ingenuity was Joh Devlin all over. His wet white hand – smaller in death – flopped on the running board.

I was grateful for the fish stink and Corder’s cigar.

The death-smell gets into your mouth. You taste it for months.

‘Was a brick or block of wood wedged on the pedal?’ Billy asked.

‘Nothing was found,’ said Corder.

‘So he drove himself?’ I asked.

The cop shrugged. ‘Is that a deduction?’

‘It’s a question.’

‘Which you’ve no business asking,’ he said. ‘You’re here as… let’s say, a material witness. That’s a usefully elastic term.’

‘Gentlemen, please,’ said Billy, as if reprimanding players who were bad sports enough to argue with an umpire. ‘We only wish to help.’

‘We’re grateful for the assistance,’ said Corder.

Even the top cop on the scene deferred to Boris Karloff.

‘Show him the wallet,’ said Billy.

Corder handed me a sticky leather billfold.

In compartments were Joh’s Screen Writers Guild membership card, private investigator’s licence, business cards (in several names, misleadingly representing the bearer as several brands of licensed busybody) and about thirty dollars in bills. I didn’t envy the cop who’d had to go through the dead man’s pockets.

‘Devlin’s wallet,’ said Corder. ‘Which doesn’t mean this is Devlin.’

I knew what he meant. I’d read enough mysteries.

‘I shouldn’t be the one to say this,’ I said. ‘But no one really dresses up a dead tramp in their clothes, stuffs his pockets with personal items, then trusts even this much mutilation to ensure misidentification. That only happens in Crime Club selections written by women with three names.’

‘Books give people ideas,’ said Billy.

‘Are Joh’s fingerprints on file?’ I asked. ‘With his licence application?’

‘Search me,’ said Corder. ‘Shouldn’t you know that?’

I’d always meant to ask Joh how exactly Marlowe would go about obtaining and keeping a licence and the rights and responsibilities entailed. Too late now. This was the first time I’d even seen a detective’s licence. My mysteries skirt day-to-day detail. Erle Gardner knows enough law to pepper his Perry Masons with procedural guff. I rely on invention. As Cissy says, I prefer romance to research.

Stuckey looked at the dangling hand. Getting prints off it would be another prize job.

Billy examined the red mess spread in lumps and patches across the car’s rear seats, ceiling and windows. Some smeared when seawater washed in. Enough stuck where it had been blown to be disturbing.

‘Joh Devlin has – had – a silver plate in his head,’ said Billy. ‘That’s it there.’

A twist of metal was embedded in the upholstery. Stuckey went in with big tweezers and pulled it out.

‘Is this the body or is this evidence?’ he asked Corder. ‘My envelope or yours.’

The cop shrugged. A finer point to be settled later.

‘The War again?’ Corder asked.

‘Uh-huh,’ I said. ‘Prohibition. Police Sergeant with a nightstick.’

‘Nice people in your circles.’

I shrugged, exasperated. ‘Your circles too. Joh tried to bring his own bottle into a protected speakeasy. The cop was standing guard for a beer baron. Not exactly legal, not exactly surprising.’

Billy kept looking into the car. He couldn’t help but seem ghoulish. It was in the lines of his face. His eyes caught light even in the bar of shade cast by his hat-brim. He contemplated the ingredients of a friend’s head. The puzzle had too many pieces missing ever to make a picture you’d want to look at.

‘Any idea why Devlin would ice himself?’ asked Corder.

‘Honestly, Detective, no,’ I said. ‘I don’t understand suicide.’

‘So I hear. I’ve not read that book of yours.’

‘I expect you have little time to read in your profession.’

‘I like a book on a stake-out,’ said Corder, around his cigar. ‘Nonfiction, for preference. In Le Suicide, Émile Durkheim says egoistic suicide is prompted by excessive individuation and estrangement from social norms, altruistic suicide by subsummation of the will to a group’s goals and beliefs, anomic suicide by moral confusion and lack of social direction and fatalistic suicide by a sense that futures are pitilessly blocked and passions violently choked by excessive discipline. Into which category would you say Mr Devlin falls?’

‘Egoistic, definitely, Professor,’ I said.

‘Who knows why a chump chumps?’ commented the bullet-hole connoisseur cop.

‘In this case, Wellbeck, the question is still if rather than why.’

Wellbeck was put in his place. As was I.

If Corder claimed he’d read Durkheim in the original French, I’d now believe him. Individuation. Subsummation. Anomic. He used words out loud I wouldn’t put in print.

The cop turned back to me.

‘When did you last see Devlin?’

‘A month ago. He helped my wife and I move apartments. You can get a lot of luggage in this car. The trunk is surprisingly roomy.’

‘Mr Karloff?’

‘Not as recently in person, but we talked on the telephone only last week. He wished to discuss a story. Columbia need something for me.’

‘A picture, huh. Have a title?’

‘The Man Who Lost His Head.’

‘Ouch.’

Billy bared his teeth.

‘Know how people kill themselves in California?’ asked Corder. ‘Pills and booze… razor blade in the bath-tub… walks into the sea or off those cliffs up there… cars, well, yes, sometimes – though that’s a better way to break your back or mess up your face than end it all… guns, by all means, and manners, all the time. We’re still cowboys out here. But people don’t, in my experience, combine cars and guns. It’s baroque is what it is. Excessive and unnecessary. The Hays Code dislikes suicide as a plot device and so do I. Except this isn’t only suicide. Not even the most egoistic Selbstmord ever catalogued by Dr Freud. Not with the scene setting from your book, Mr Chandler, and that script of yours, Mr Karloff, peeping out so we couldn’t miss it. This death is a whopping smoke signal, designed to summon you two… which makes me wonder just what this is about. Why him? Why me? And, most of all, why you?’

I was squirming. Billy was calm.

Neither of us wanted to speak.

So, at this opportune moment, came a tapping – as of someone gently rapping – from the submersible Studebaker.

‘Hear that?’ said Officer Wellbeck.

‘Fish in the trunk?’ suggested Stuckey.

The sound definitely came from inside Devlin’s car. More a scraping than a rapping now. A human sound. Fortunato’s fingernails against the brickwork as the air gave out. I felt cold in the sunshine.

Without asking permission, Billy yanked open the trunk.

In a gush of water, out tumbled a very wet, very alive woman.

5

With an elongated sigh, she fainted or fell asleep. Her face glistened. We all knew she was a wrong thing. If, as I suspected, her swoon was a sham then she knew it too and didn’t want to answer questions.

‘How long was the car in the sea?’ asked Stuckey.

‘Two hours at least,’ said Wellbeck. ‘Nightwatchman called in from the phone in the kiosk around eleven thirty. Half an hour – maybe forty minutes – to scramble a crew for the barge. Then it was a mare fixing chains and working the winch.’

‘Was it completely underwater?’ asked Corder.

‘Sea’s not deep here, but the trunk was in the drink.’

‘Air pocket?’ suggested Stuckey.

‘Bullet-holes,’ Wellbeck reminded everyone.

We looked at the car and the woman in the big puddle. Her chest rose and fell, so she was breathing.

‘How is she alive?’ asked Corder.

‘Search me,’ said Wellbeck. ‘She just is.’

Billy and I exchanged a look. We’d been here before.

People who know magic isn’t real look straight at a ghost and see a flapping bed sheet. They deal with an irrefutable demonstration of how things really are the way an oyster deals with a speck of grit. The truth gets coated in a hard, shiny shell that can be worn proudly. A pearl is a lie you can roll between your teeth.

Corder, Stuckey and even Wellbeck weren’t stupid or they wouldn’t have their badges. Yes, there are stupid cops and officials. They get where they are through graft, nepotism or because a machine needs an oilable cog. Those boys are cushioned against having to do dirty jobs in the middle of a rainy night. You have to be clever and honest – and, therefore, unpopular – to rate duty like that.

So, these smart people were confronted with an impossible woman. It threw them, at least for a moment. They could not complete the course without jumping a high fence.

Which they would do, even if it gave them a headache.

Eventually, smart people just tell better lies to themselves.

‘There must have been an air pocket,’ said Billy, showing mercy. If a movie star – even Boris Karloff! – said something in a British accent it could be taken down in shorthand and typed up in the report.

‘He’s right,’ said Wellbeck, not even realising he was going back on what he’d just stated. ‘Air pressure or something.’

‘Stands to reason,’ said Stuckey – though it surely didn’t.

Corder wiped his forehead with the back of his hand. His hat was still damp. He chewed the cigar and narrowed his eyes. Maybe he had an inkling of what Billy and I knew. A lot of cops do but school themselves to look away. It’s how they stay sane – if they do.

The woman coughed in her sleep. A little water leaked out of her mouth.

She was not drowned. Not nearly.

So the bullet-holes must have been plugged. The Studebaker’s roomy trunk perhaps had a sturdy rubber seal. That must be it. And enough air for an hour or two. Though, if the trunk were air-tight, why was the woman wet? We’d seen water pour out with her.

She coughed again and her eyes popped open.

The train of cop thought I’d followed – sure Corder was getting uncomfortably close to chewing on a bone that’d poison him – got blown off the tracks. There was a woman to be looked after. A lady from the sea.

In the early morning sunlight, she stirred to life.

‘Mermaid,’ said Billy, quietly.

That was ridiculous, of course. No gills.

But this woman had something.

If she’d worn make-up, it was washed off. Her black hair was short, except for an asymmetrical fringe. I couldn’t imagine how it would look dry. She had a swan neck, a chin dimple and high cheekbones. One of her green-blue eyes was alarmingly bloodshot.

Stuckey, unused to living patients, touched the side of her head as if probing a fatal wound. He peered into her red right eye.

‘Petechial haemorrhage,’ said the Boy Coroner. ‘You see this with strangulation. No ligature marks, though.’

The woman sat up and pushed Stuckey off.

It had probably never occurred to him that the dead might be sensitive about how they got that way.

The woman’s wet silk dress was transparent, stuck like cellophane wrapping a bon-bon. Her figure would draw the eye in dry church clothes. Now she looked like the centrepiece of a Spicy Mystery cover, tethered to a hooded fiend’s altar.

If suddenly aware they are essentially nude and surrounded by pop-eyed men, most women instinctively adopt the classical pudica pose, hand over the pubis, arm across the breasts. Instead, this woman’s hands flew up like startled birds and fixed her hair. Our Aphrodite had no shame about her figure, but was bothered about something else.

Satisfied, she let her hair be. The longer side of her fringe was a raven’s wing masking her red eye.

So that was the trick.

Stuckey leaned closer, still concerned.

‘I’ve had this since school,’ she said, waving him away. ‘Nothing to be done about it. And it’s a vitreous haemorrhage, not petechial.’

Stuckey backed off.

Her accent was English – neither cut-glass nor corner-house, with a slight, appealing nasality. I had an urge to ask her which school she meant. They played rough games, apparently.

Without asking, Billy slipped Wellbeck’s rain-cape off him. Kneeling with an audible creak, he gallantly wrapped the cloak around the woman. She looked up to thank him and saw Boris Karloff smiling sweet reassurance. The Monster, the Mummy, Fu Manchu. Her wrist covered her mouth as if she might scream. Billy patted her shoulder, understanding. She smiled tightly, without showing teeth.

‘Miss?’ said Corder.

‘… Bostwick,’ she replied. ‘I’m Leila Bostwick. Where’s Joh Devlin?’

Stuckey tried to position himself between her and the open car door, but she saw the headless body. She didn’t stifle another scream, but her mouth set firm. A tell. This wasn’t her first corpse-viewing.

‘I don’t understand,’ she lied.

Then she pretended to faint again.

Everyone bought it, except me and Billy.

‘You’re not Leila Bostwick,’ Billy told her. ‘At least you weren’t Leila Bostwick in the Home House case. You were Ives, then. Laurel Ives.’

‘They called you “Witch-Eye”,’ I added.

She kept up the sham swoon.

But she heard us. Leila Bostwick. Laurel Ives. Witch-Eye.

Joh had hunted down other names she’d used. Carolyn Vedder. Philippa Zhan. Pamela Grayle. He’d shown us her head shot, from when she was in the movies.

We’d been told her original name was Stephen Swift.

British families get set in their ways when it comes to christening firstborns. A little thing like sex is no reason to break with tradition.

Not even Stephanie Swift. Stephen.

No wonder she’d taken to changing it every chance she got.

Billy and I knew the Home House case. Joh Devlin always insisted that story wasn’t finished. We wanted that book shut, but he kept scratching at the cover. Here we were, in the next exciting chapter. A lid popped off a can and worms were loose.

The papers made out that Joh rescued Laurel Ives from the Home House Horror Man – also known as ‘Frank N. Quine’. Good press didn’t do much for Joh Devlin in the short – or, now, the long – run.

Having pulled the girl out of death’s dark embrace, why would Joh try to send her back – and rush on ahead himself? I already knew three versions of the Home House story – the official announcements, the stuff in the scandal sheets and Joh’s inside dope. Now, there was obviously a fourth. Onion layers around a heart of darkness. It would never stop.

Unless we stopped it. Billy and me. Corder was right about the smoke signal.

Joh had dropped this on our desk. We both had debts to him that – as English Public School Men – we were obliged to settle.

Billy picked the woman up. He got a good grip under her shoulders and knees but her arms flopped. Girls rescued by Clark Gable wrap their arms around his manly shoulders. Girls abducted by the Monster lie back in a faint. Their dangling arms get caught in the bushes.

A label inside her wet dress was legible in mirror-writing.

‘By Ariadne’.

PART TWO

HOME HOUSE

6

Three years before Joh Devlin’s Studebaker went off the pier, the Home House case was page one news for weeks.

No one could miss Home House itself. In a city where everything is new – plated with chrome and polished to shine, then replaced rather than cleaned – it takes fortunes to fake oldness. Designed and built inside six months in 1932, the exterior of Home House was in a mock Gothic colossal style that might have been imagined by Ann Radcliffe in a laudanum dream. The interior was metropolitan moderne.

Home House was a gift from Ward Home to his son, on the occasion of a wedding that didn’t take place. Ward Home Senior was an oilman so glutted with wealth he could have left the Dabney Syndicate on the side of his plate as not worth the wear on his porcelain teeth. Ward Home Junior returned the presents his bride-never-to-be hadn’t absconded with, but still moved into his new-old house on the day the final Welsh slate tile was fitted in the roof.