Free Without the Moon by Cathi Unsworth

and slippers, she opened the bedroom door, the sight beyond surprised her. From the superior cut of his dark overcoat and the bashed-about look of his face, Lil would have assumed that the man standing in their parlour, twirling his trilby around in his right hand, was one of the lot her Tom was always on about, the racetrack hoodlums who hung about down Archer Street. As he nodded his head in greeting, she was sure that was where she had seen him before, at the bar of the Entre Nous .
    â€œLil,” said her maid, “this is Detective Chief Inspector Greenaway. He’s an old acquaintance of mine and a friend of Mr Swaffer’s. The man who put the great Sammy Lehmann behind bars, no less. Ain’t you, Ted?”
    Lil frowned as her eyes flickered between Duch and the big detective.
    â€œWell, what you after me for?” she asked him. “I ain’t done no bank jobs lately.”
    â€œI think he wants to ask you about what you heard in the hairdresser’s, love,” said Duch. “That airman what attacked your pal Lorna. See, Ted’s the head of the Murder Squad these days,” Duch rolled her eyes. “He’s out to catch a real villain.”
    â€œOh,” said Lil, sitting down. Greenaway did likewise, flicking open his notebook.
    â€œAll right,” she turned towards him in a cloud of perfume that made his head swim. “Where d’you want me to start?”
    â€“ . –
    Daphne Maitland stood in the first-floor sitting room of her Gloucester Place townhouse, arms clasped in front of her in a manner of penitence, eyes staring into the fire. Swaffer, sitting in a Regency armchair of a similar vintage to his surrounds, inhaled the contents of his brandy glass and waited for her to begin.
    â€œOne of the women you mentioned in your piece,” she began. “One of the victims …” She drew in a breath and shuddered.
    â€œWas known to you,” Swaffer ended the sentence for her. “Miss Evelyn Bourne, I imagine. The lonely chemist from Newcastle.”
    His hostess turned her head sharply. “But how …” she began.
    Swaffer put his glass down, opened his palms outwards. “It’s not so hard to divine, my dear. Despite your concern for good works, I can’t imagine how you would have come across the other unfortunate lady of the night. But Miss Bourne wasn’t like that, was she? She was a socialist, an intellectual, so I was told. I expect you met her at a Party meeting,” he picked up his glass again, eyes never leaving hers. This time it was Daphne who felt a curious intensity, as if the journalist was riffling through the contents of her mind. “Or some similar gathering.”
    Her eyes dropped back down to the carpet.
    â€œActually, I met her by complete coincidence,” she said. “In the summer of 1940, in a tiny little village in Leicestershire called Appleby Magna. I was posted there by the Women’s Land Army. Evelyn was a travelling saleswoman for a pharmaceutical firm; she had this hopeless old banger that conked out on the way to Burton-on-Trent one night. She got stranded at the village pub, where I was hiding from the ruddy-faced farmer who wanted me to do a little bit more than just milk his cows.”
    She reached for the cigarette case she had left on the mantelpiece.
    â€œI could see she was as lost as I was,” Daphne continued. “Sitting there in the corner, alone with her lemonade, trying to disappear into the furnishings.” She lifted a jade table lighter to ignite her smoke.
    â€œWe got talking,” she continued. “Well, I got talking. Evelyn seemed so terribly shy; she could barely say boo to a goose. But after a bit of prodding, I discovered we had a few things in common. As you say,” her eyes briefly met Swaffer’s again, “it was mainly politics. I told her I had joined the WLA because of Lady Denman and how I hoped I was going to be able to