Black Butterfly Read online

  Whatever could have made him do it?

  I looked down at the yawning, saturated grave as though it might provide answers. The rain thudded off the oak and the brass tablet bearing my friend’s name.

  ‘Requiescat in pace,’ I murmured.

  I supposed that investigating Miracle’s demise would bring my career neatly, if depressingly, full circle.

  An unnecessarily ginger vicar droned through the usual eulogies and then clapped shut the soggy pages of his Bible. I tossed a posy of flowers into the grave: crimson roses for mourning, violets for modesty, sunflowers for loyalty and baby’s breath for love everlasting. Propped against a nearby headstone was a rather ugly arrangement of blooms, done up into the shape of a bottle of squash. The ‘M’ for ‘Miracle’ trademark had been picked out in poppies.

  I noticed my gloves were smeared with wet mud but Miss Beveridge was there in an instant, proffering a clean handkerchief. As I rubbed at the red stain, my gaze met that of a very fat man I’d not seen previously.

  He was perhaps seventy years, plum-purple, chewing rather noisily on something or other and regarding his fellow mourners with what I can only describe as a sort of amused contempt. The features were somehow familiar and I realised, as Miss Beveridge and I left the graveside, that this must be Miracle’s brother, Quintin. Although we had only met once or twice, I felt compelled to offer the usual sentiments. The girl and I fell into step with him as he ambled towards the gated exit.

  ‘Mr Miracle?’

  He turned a smiling moon-face towards me. ‘I am he.’

  Nodding to Miss Beveridge, he gestured towards the inscription on a nearby headstone that had almost disappeared under slick, dark ivy. ‘“Only sleeping”,’ he read aloud. ‘God, what a thought! What would we do if the buggers woke up, eh?’ He plunged his hand into his pocket. ‘Can I tempt you with a liquorice comfit?’

  ‘Thank you, no,’ I said.

  ‘My dear?’ he offered.

  Miss Beveridge shook her head. ‘No, ta.’

  ‘I don’t know if you remember me,’ I said. ‘My name’s Lucifer Box.’ Liquid mud squelched onto my black shoes. ‘I was a friend of Christopher.’

  ‘I’m afraid I must get on—’

  ‘I wonder if I could speak to you’, I said quickly. ‘In private?’

  He looked about, as though hoping for a better offer. Then, shrugging, he said, ‘Very well. It’s slackening off,’ he noted, holding out a gloved hand and peering at the heavens. ‘Shall we sit?’

  We made our way to a grim little shelter, larded all over in municipal green paint. Here and there, the metal had erupted into rusty pustules like on the legs of a pier. Miss Beveridge stood dutifully to one side and shook the droplets from her umbrella.

  Quintin Miracle eased himself onto the bench and stared happily into space, chewing like a cow with its cud. His piggy eyes twinkled mischievously and his hand darted into his trousers. ‘How about an Allsort?’

  Again I demurred.

  He made a happy little noise. ‘Your loss, chum. Though, entre nous, I’m not so keen on the coconut ones. If I had my way, they’d do away with them and just have more liquorice. Lovely black liquorice. Shiny as a beetle’s back. The world could stand more liquorice, don’t you think, Mr…?’

  ‘Box.’

  ‘Box, yes. I remember you now.’

  ‘I’d like to speak to you about your brother,’ I said.

  ‘Would you indeed? I shall get his lolly,’ he said abruptly.

  With distaste, I realised that this was not some fresh obsession centred around Wall’s ice cream. ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. I’ve seen the will. Oodles of cash. I’ve always fancied opening a little sweetie shop.’

  ‘Mr Miracle—’

  ‘Well, I say sweeties. I mean liquorice, obviously. Can’t get enough of the stuff. If I had my way it wouldn’t be so damned small. Imagine! A sherbet fountain as big as a golf-bag! I can afford it now.’

  Miss Beveridge glanced across at me and rolled her eyes.

  I decided to try another tack. ‘Where do you stand on the Pomfret Cake?’

  Quintin’s face lit up. ‘Ah! A connoisseur! Charmant!’ The fat hand nipped into the sweet packet again, retrieving a treasure trove of colourful Allsorts, along with assorted bus tickets and fragments of tobacco. All ended up crammed into his mouth. ‘Old Norman.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Pomfret. Old Norman for Pontefract. Where the cakes come from. Entre nous,’ he repeated, then winked slyly, as though sharing a great confidence, ‘they’re a bit on the insubstantial side for my tastes. But, like the bootlace, they have their charms. Now, what was it you wanted to know?’

  ‘Your brother—’

  ‘Well, we were never close,’ he sighed. ‘But it’s very sad and all. I remember when we were boys, Papa took us on an outing to the Bassett’s factory in Sheffield. Such delights! Pipes, tablets, Blackjacks—’

  ‘Can you think of any reason why he would have wanted to take his own life?’

  ‘The business with the motor car, you mean? None at all.’ He smiled and his teeth were streaked yellow-black. ‘Though he was never the same after the Somme, you know.’

  I looked down, sadly. ‘Yes, I do know.’

  ‘Poor old Chris. Always had the looks, of course. Mama’s golden boy.’ Was there a trace of bitterness in the younger Miracle’s tone? ‘Suppose he just couldn’t face it.’

  ‘Face what?’

  ‘Getting decrepit and ugly. But what’s the alternative, eh? That’s what I always say. For myself, I’ve embraced it! Quite like being a smelly old gargoyle. Takes time to cultivate a tum like this!’

  He patted his belly and cackled so hugely that remnants of rain shivered from the awning of the shelter onto the concrete.

  ‘Funny thing is,’ he continued, ‘he’d seemed so much more full of life lately. Got quite interested in his business. Though why choose ruddy ginger pop, or whatever it is, of all things? I mean, I tried to convince him otherwise. Plenty of attractive alternatives, what?’

  ‘Liquorice?’ I asked innocently.

  ‘Naturally! There was a prime site for sale near York—’

  ‘Yes,’ I drawled. ‘Remarkable lack of foresight on his part.’

  Quintin wiped a dewdrop from his red nose. ‘Mind you, that hadn’t been going so well of late. The squash lark.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. Some sort of boardroom battle. A take-over bid.’

  ‘Really?’ I asked, intrigued. ‘By whom?’

  ‘Search me,’ said Quintin, winding a liquorice bootlace round his fat finger and nibbling on the end. ‘Last letter I got from Chris mentioned it. He sounded a bit down in the dumps. They were offering more and more loot but he didn’t want to sell. Shareholders thought differently. Perhaps that explains why he did…what he did.’

  ‘Perhaps. Though he never seemed the type.’

  ‘Type?’

  ‘To take his own life.’

  Miracle’s brother grunted. ‘Well, Mr Box, I suppose they never do.’

  I rose and smoothed down my trousers. ‘Thanks very much for your time. And again, my condolences.’

  He nodded, smiled childishly, looking out over the dripping graveyard. ‘Imagine! A sherbet fountain as big as a golf-bag!’

  Miss Beveridge was standing a little way off. I joined her and we walked towards the car.

  ‘Find out what you wanted, sir?’ she asked.

  ‘Not really.’ I shrugged. ‘Perhaps I’m reading too much into my friend’s death. This was very kind of you, by the way. Bringing me here.’

  ‘Not at all, Mr Box.’

  ‘Please,’ I said. ‘Call me Lucifer.’

  Miss Beveridge flushed slightly. ‘Oh no, sir. Couldn’t possibly do that.’

  ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Wouldn’t be right, sir. I mean…you being who you are and all.’

  I laughed and adjusted my damp hat. That tingling anticipation was rising within m
e again. ‘I was recently complaining to Mr Playfair that I have no wish to become venerable. What’s your name? Christian name, I mean?’

  ‘Coral.’

  I stopped and held out my hand. ‘Hello, Coral.’

  She gave a nervous laugh and shook it. ‘’Ello…Lucifer.’

  ‘See?’ I said, walking on. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it? Now then, my glittering career. Where had we got to?’

  Coral Beveridge’s face became suddenly animated, like a child asking for her favourite bedtime story. ‘Dr Fetch! Dr Fetch!’ she said excitedly.

  ‘Ah, now you’re talking. Dr Cassivelaunus Fetch. The Man with the Celluloid Hand. He formed A.C.R.O.N.I.M. around the turn of the century–when I was in my full vigour and you, my dear Coral, were no more than the first gleam of a twinkle. Fetch and I crossed swords many a time back in the good old days.’

  ‘How did he lose the ’and?’ she asked wonderingly.

  I chuckled. ‘I can laugh about it now, although it was rather serious at the time. Fetch dressed himself up as a woman and infiltrated the Suffragist movement. His intention was to go one better than Mrs Pankhurst and throw a horse under the King.’

  ‘Flippin’ ’eck!’

  ‘Audacious scheme. Would have worked but…’

  ‘But for you, sir.’

  ‘Lucifer.’

  Miss Beveridge acknowledged my gentle rebuke with a nod. I smiled. ‘My God. I haven’t thought about Fetch in years.’

  ‘You almost sound as if you miss him,’ she noted.

  ‘Perhaps I do. Those were glorious days. Best of my life, really.’

  I shivered, though not through cold, feeling glad to put the cemetery behind me. We had reached the car and Miss Beveridge held open the door for me. ‘Now then,’ I murmured, placing a gloved hand over hers. ‘How about that lunch?’

  She looked at my hand on hers and said: ‘Oh!’

  Then she glanced down quickly at her shoes. ‘No…no, thank you, sir. I mean…I think I’d better be getting home.’

  I withdrew my hand as though scorched. ‘Coral, I’m so sorry. I thought that perhaps you and I…’

  And now she looked me full in the face and laughed. The delicious tingle of anticipation began to disperse. My face fell. ‘I thought you might be keen to, you know…You seemed as if you might want to…’

  ‘Oh, I’m right keen on that!’ she blurted out. ‘But you’re too old for me, sir. I like a nice firm cock, me.’

  .5.

  BLOOD ORANGE

  By the evening, the rain had stopped. The muggy atmosphere, however, remained. Somewhat deflated by Miss Beveridge’s brutal assessment, I returned to Downing Street to plan a night of oblivion.

  Rank has its privileges. Long-time readers may be pleased and a little relieved to know that, after a lifetime of penury, my elevation to the post of ‘Joshua Reynolds’ had brought with it a juicy stipend. This, combined with a renewed interest in the painters of the turn of the century, had finally allowed me to spruce up Number Nine to my satisfaction. Well, I didn’t spruce it up, of course, but rather employed a battery of truculent youths in blue overalls to do it for me. Whilst I sat in happy contemplation, lads with oily hair and big boots happily clod-hopped over the dust-sheets, slurping at treacly tea and giving me the occasional devastatingly proletarian smile. One or two had even been persuaded to pose for me and–oh, their terrible beauty! Wondrously surly versions of Sargent’s Madame X, draping the looped straps of their overalls off bare, creamy shoulders.

  But there was no one waiting for me in Downing Street now. I had planned to bathe and change but instead, restless and out of sorts, I decided to drive the Bentley up to Town.

  Soho thrummed like a wire across a drum–reeking of camphor from summer clothes, with the sizzle of neon café signs and the scents of expectation: tobacco, coffee, sweat, sex. Wide-open restaurant doors belched Bolognese over the smell of the drains and tarmac.

  I zipped past Little Italy and swung right into Dean Street. A youth in a bum-freezer absently sloshed a pail of soapy water across the pavement, forming a black bloodstain. His hair shone with Brylcreem and a desperate moustache clung to his lip like an anemone to a wet rock.

  I slowed down in the traffic. He caught my eye and, clearly having finished his shift, wandered over. ‘Peps?’ he offered, laying an elbow on the sill of the open car window. ‘Weed? Bennies? Barbs?’

  ‘How thrilling of you to offer,’ I said. ‘However, I think I can struggle through the evening without artificial stimulants. Thanks all the same.’

  The youth just shrugged and shambled away from the Bentley towards a pale blue moped that was parked on the kerb. He kick-started it and the engine rattled and fired. Where was he off to, I wondered. Pockets stuffed with cheap fags, pills and French letters, roaring through the sultry night…

  The traffic shifted and I headed north towards Oxford Street, passing narrow entranceways as quaint as Eastbourne beach huts. In most, below stuttering red lamps, hovered ghostly whores. Out of the tail of my eye, I caught the slash of pink blouse and pink mouth, stockings with holes in them the size of two-bob bits, cheaply peroxided hair tumbling out of bent pins. As I drove by, the girls drifted in and out like figures on a weather house, and fugitive memories sprang up unbidden. How gaily I had trawled these same streets as a young man, a raffish De Quincy, my scarlet-lined opera cloak shielding each of my couplings as completely as the veil of the night itself.

  The car was idling again. I glanced over my shoulder and the image thrown back in a tobacconist’s window–an old man hunched over a steering wheel–banished all such nostalgia.

  Then another memory intruded. An occasion, a lifetime ago, when wee me, dressed in a little sailor-suit, had been ushered into the presence of a dying aunt. She was a vision in black bombazine, extending a fragile hand from the dark pit of her bath chair to stroke my smooth cheek. ‘Ah,’ she had cooed, ‘little Lucifer. How I wish I could change places with you…’

  Now, in the plate-glass reflection I seemed to see myself stretching out a withered claw to touch the face of youth with envy, envy, envy…

  I shook my head. Christ! I was being ridiculous! I’d never been a maudlin soul and had no intention of starting now. Throwing the car briskly into first, I dodged the traffic of Oxford Street and headed for the fabled Blood Orange.

  Three storeys tall, the club staggered between a pair of more respectable buildings like a drunk between two coppers, the windows of its tumbledown, mucky Queen Anne façade bobbing with shadows and candlelight. In its twenties heyday, it had been the epitome of glamour. Now, in its dotage, it had a seedy appeal all its own. I parked the car in a cobbled mews that stank of last night’s relief, then went up worn steps into a kind of vestibule.

  A bare bulb caked in dust threw ugly shapes over the chocolate-brown walls and the fretwork of a tiny, asthmatic lift. With a melancholy sigh, cables twisting and coiling like the undulations of a charmed cobra, the lift arrived with a jarring thump. I pulled open the grille, got in, and jabbed at the soiled green button, which had seen too many thumbs.

  The lift juddered upwards two floors and then decanted me into a big, dark room, every available surface covered with shards of broken mirror, grotesquely reflecting the heaving mass of jabbering, laughing faces. A shifting miasma of tobacco smoke rolled under the low ceiling like a storm cloud.

  I intended to get very drunk.

  I headed for the curved bar, where sat a big man with a neck like a block of ice cream. He was forcing flat champagne onto a sad-eyed girl in her mother’s furs, whilst two skinny queens in evening dress hooted at each other, their wolfish features shattered, split and reflected in the mirrored walls. Incongruously, a teenage Boy Scout (I couldn’t seem to get away from them at present) was wandering from table to table with a collecting tin. A gross, red-eared fellow, like an ogre in a fairy tale, slipped a coin into the tin and then waved the lad away.

  There was a loud bellowing laugh and the man at the
bar slumped to the floor, one shoe off, his threadbare sock wet through.

  I knew them all. Loved and loathed the pack of them. Such was the Blood Orange.

  However, at one of the two dozen tables, sat a stranger; an insignificant-looking bald man with little puffs of white hair sprouting from behind each ear. His white silk scarf had twisted up the points of his collar to give him a Pickwickian air.

  Although I didn’t recognise him as an habitué of the club, his face was nevertheless oddly familiar.

  Leaning like a question mark against the wall right by him was a young man of Negroid appearance, though pale for one of his race. Toreador-slim in skinny suit and tie, his glossy black hair was cut in a straight fringe, and acid-green socks showed above pointy shoes.

  He watched the Pickwickian from under sleepy eyelids.

  Dismissing them both from my mind, I made my way to the bar where stood, presiding over this whole carnival of damnation, a colossal female in canary yellow. At that very moment, she was knocking back a pint of Dog’s Nose and pulling a flap of skirt out of the cheeks of her buttocks.

  My dear servant Delilah was now as old as the hills and as white-haired as I. But age had not withered her, nor custom made stale anything but the irrepressible reek from her armpits. We’d been through a hell of a lot together, and when fortune had finally come my way, in a mood of sudden philanthropy, I had granted her freedom from domestic service. With her savings, she had bought the leasehold on the crumbling Blood Orange, and the rest, as they say, is hysteria.

  ‘A brandy and soda, my good woman,’ I demanded, sneaking up behind her and giving her a playful punch on the arm.

  The old bruiser span round, fist raised, a mad-dog gleam in her eyes. Her mouth was smeared with lipstick and had the appearance of an open sore. ‘Mr Box! Mr Box, sir!’ she cackled, enfolding me in her immensity. ‘What a sight for sore ’uns! Cor, I nearly felled ya there. Get sat down and I’ll fetch you some plonk.’ She propelled me towards a splintering stool.