No Business Of Mine
No Business Of Mine
James Hadley Chase
NO BUSINESS OF MINE
COPYRIGHT © 1947
This book is for, my friend, Philip Lukulay,
who always cheated me in hand-tennis, and I
was always forgiving . . .
I would personally like to thank Mr. Cliff from London
who sent me a copy of this novel and “More Deadly
Than The Male.”
Thank You very much . . .
NO BUSINESS OF MINE
By
JAMES HADLEY CHASE
ROBERT HALE LIMITED
63 Old Brompton Road London S.W.7
Chapter I
MY name is Steve Harmas and I am a Foreign Correspondent of
the New York Clarion. During the years 1940-45 I lived in the Savoy
Hotel with a number of my colleagues and told the people of America
the story of Britain at war. I gave up the cocktail bar and the comfort
of the Savoy when the Allied Armies invaded Europe. To get me to go
was like peeling a clam off a wall, but my editor kept after me, and
finally I went. He told me the experience would give me character. It
gave me a pain you-know-where, but it didn’t give me character.
After the collapse of Germany, I felt I had had enough of war and
hardship, and I changed places with a colleague without him knowing
anything about it, and returned to America and two-pound steaks on
his ticket.
Several months later I was offered an assignment to write a series
of articles on post-war Britain. I didn’t particularly want the job: there
was a whisky shortage in England at the time, but there was a girl
named Netta Scott who used to live in London when last I was there,
and I did want to see her again.
I don’t want you to get me wrong about Netta Scott. I wasn’t in
love with her, but I did feel I owed her a great deal for giving me such
a swell time while I was a stranger in a strange country, and quite
unexpectedly I found myself in the position to do so.
It happened like this: I was reading the sporting sheet on my way
to the office, still in two minds about going to England, when I noticed
that one of the horses running in the afternoon’s race was named
Netta. The horse was a ten to one outsider, but I had a hunch and
decided to back it. I laid out five hundred dollars, and sat by the radio
with butterflies in my stomach, awaiting the result.
The horse won by a nose, and there and then I decided to split the
five-thousand-dollar winnings with Netta: I caught the first available
plane to England.
I got a big bang out of imagining Netta’s reaction when I walked in
on her and planked down before her five hundred crisp, new one
pound notes. She had always liked money, always grumbled about
being hard up, although she would never let me help her once we got
to know each other. It would be a great moment in her life, and it
would square my debt at the same time.
I first met Netta in 1942 at a luxury night club in Mayfair’s Bruton
Mews. She worked there as a dance hostess, and don’t let anyone kid
you dance hostesses don’t work. They develop more muscles than
Strangler Lewis ever had by warding off tired business men who are
not as tired as all that. Her job was to persuade suckers like me to buy
lousy champagne at five pounds a bottle, and to pay her ten shillings
for the privilege of dancing her around a floor the size of a pocket
handkerchief.
The Blue Club, as it was called, was run by a guy named Jack
Bradley. I had seen him once or twice, and I thought then he looked a
doubtful customer. The only girl working in the club who wasn’t
scared of him was Netta: but Netta wasn’t scared of any man.
The story goes that all the girls had to do a night shift with Bradley
before they could qualify for the job of hostess. They told me that
Netta and Bradley spent the night reading the illustrated papers when
she qualified, but that was only after she had blunted his glands by
wrapping a valuable oil painting around his thick neck. I don’t know
whether the yarn was true: Netta wouldn’t talk about it, but knowing
her, I’d say it was.
Bradley must have made a packet out of the club. It was
patronized almost entirely by American officers and newspaper men
who had money to burn. They burned it all right in the Blue Club. The
band was first class, the girls beautiful and willing, and the food
excellent; but the cost was so high you had to put on an oxygen mask
before you looked at the bill.
Netta was one of twelve girls, and I picked her out the moment I
saw her.
She was a cute trick: a red head with skin like peaches and cream.
Her curves attracted my attention: curves always do. They were a blue
print for original sin. I’ve seen some female hairpin bends in my time,
but nothing quite in Netta’s class. As my companion, Harry Bix, a hard-
bitten bomber pilot, put it, “A mouse fitted with skis would have a
grand run down her, and would I like to be that mouse!”
Yes, Netta was a cute trick. She was really lovely in a hard,
sophisticated way. You could tell right off that she knew her way
around, and if you hoped to get places with her it was gloves off and
no holds barred; even at that she’d probably lick you.
It took some time before Netta thawed out with me. At first she
considered me just another customer, then she regarded me with
suspicion, thinking I was on the make, but finally she accepted the
idea that I was a lonely guy in a strange city who wanted to make
friends with her.
I used to go to the Blue Club every evening. After a month or so
she wouldn’t let me buy champagne, and I knew I was making
progress. One night she suggested we might go together to Kew
Gardens on the following Sunday and see the bluebells. Then I knew
I’d got somewhere with her.
It finally worked out that I saw a lot of Netta. I’d call for her at her
little flat off the Cromwell Road and drive her to the Blue Club.
Sometimes we’d have supper together at the Vanity Fair; sometimes
she’d come along to the Savoy and we’d dine in the grill-room. She
was a good companion, ready to laugh or talk sense depending on my
mood, and she could drink a lot of liquor without getting tight.
Netta was my safety-valve. She bridged all the dreary boredom
which is inevitable at times when one is not always working to
capacity. She made my stay in London worth remembering. We finally
got around to sleeping together once or twice a month, but as in
everything we did, it was impersonal and didn’t mean a great deal to
either of us. Neither she nor I were in love with each other. She never
let our association get personal, although it was intimate enough.
That is she never asked me about my home, whether I was married,
what I i
ntended to do when the war was over; never hinted she would
like to return to the States with me. I did try to find out something
about her background, but she wouldn’t talk. Her attitude was that
we were living in the present, any moment a bomb or rocket might
drop on us, and it was up to us to be as happy as we could while the
hour lasted. She lived in a wrapping of cellophane. I could see and
touch her, but I couldn’t get at her. Oddly enough this attitude suited
me. I didn’t want to know who her father was, whether she had a
husband serving overseas, whether she had any sisters or brothers. All
I wanted was a gay companion: that was what I got.
We kept up this association for two years, then when I received
orders to sail with the invading armies we said good-bye.
We said good-bye as if we would meet again the next evening,
although I knew I wouldn’t see her for at least a year, perhaps never
see her again: she knew it too.
“So long, Steve,” she said when I dropped her outside her flat.
“And don’t come in. Let’s say good-bye here, and let’s make it quick.
Maybe I’ll see you again before long.”
“Sure, you’ll see me again,” I said.
We kissed. Nothing special: no tears. She went up the steps, shut
the door without looking back.
I had planned to write to her, but I never did. We moved so fast
into France and things were so hectic that I didn’t have the chance to
write for the first month, and after that I decided it was best to forget
her. I did forget her until I returned to America. Then I began to think
of her again. I hadn’t seen her for nearly two years, but I found I could
remember every detail of her face and body as clearly as if we had
parted only a few hours ago. I tried to push her out of my mind, went
around with other girls, but Netta stuck: she wouldn’t be driven away.
So when I spotted that horse, backed it and won, I knew I was going to
see her again, and I was glad.
I arrived in London on a hot August evening after a long,
depressing trip down from Prestwick. I went immediately to the Savoy
Hotel where I had booked a reservation, had a word with the
reception clerk who seemed pleased to see me again, and went up to
my room, overlooking the Thames. After a shower and a couple of
drinks I went down to the office and asked them to let me have five
hundred one pound notes. I could see this request gave them a jar,
but they knew me well enough by now to help me if they could. After
a few minutes delay they handed over the money with no more of a
flourish than if it had been a package of bus tickets.
It was now half-past six, and I knew Netta would be home at that
hour. She always prepared for the evening’s work around seven
o’clock, and her preparations usually took the best part of an hour.
As I was waiting in a small but select queue for a taxi, I asked the
hall porter if he knew whether the Blue Club still existed. He said it
did, and that it had now acquired an unsavoury reputation as it had
installed a couple of doubtful roulette tables since my time.
Apparently it had been raided twice during the past six months, but
had escaped being closed down through lack of evidence. It seemed
Jack Bradley managed to keep one jump ahead of the police.
I eventually got a taxi, and after a slight haggle, the hall porter
persuaded the driver to take me to Cromwell Road.
I arrived outside Netta’s flat at ten minutes past seven. I paid off
the driver, stood back, and looked up at her windows on the top floor.
The house was one of those dreary buildings that grace the back
streets off Cromwell Road. It was tall, dirty, and the lace curtains at
the windows were on their last legs. Netta’s flat, one of three, still had
the familiar bright orange curtains at the windows. I wondered if I was
going to walk in on a new lover, decided I’d chance it. I opened the
front door, began the walk up the three flights of coco-nut-matted
stairs.
Those stairs brought back a lot of pleasant memories. I
remembered the nights we used to sneak up them, holding our shoes
in our hands lest Mrs. Crockett, the landlady who lurked in the
basement, should hear us. I remembered too, the night I had flown
over Berlin with a R.A.F. crew and had arrived at Netta’s flat at five
o’clock in the morning, too excited to sleep and wanting to tell her of
the experience, only to find she hadn’t come home that night. I had
sat on the top of those stairs waiting for her, and had final y dozed off,
to be discovered by Mrs. Crockett, who had threatened to call the
police.
I passed the doors of the other two flats. I had never discovered
who lived in them. During the whole time I had visited Netta I hadn’t
once seen the occupiers. I arrived, a little breathless, outside Netta’s
front door, and paused before I rang the bell.
Everything was exactly the same. There was her card in a tiny
brass frame screwed to the panel of the door. There was the long
scratch on the paint-work which I had made when slightly drunk with
the latchkey. There was the thick wool mat before the door. I found
my heart was beating a shade quicker, and my hands were a little
damp. It seemed to me all of a sudden that Netta had become
important to me: I’d been away too long.
I punched the bell, waited, heard nothing, punched the bell again.
No one answered the door. I continued to wait, wondering if Netta
was in her bath. I gave her a few more seconds, punched the bell
again.
“There’s no one there,” a voice said from behind me.
I turned, looked down the short flight of stairs. A man was
standing in the doorway of the lower flat, looking up at me. He was a
big strapping fellow around thirty, broad and well-built but far from
muscular. With a frame like a hammer-thrower, he was yet soft, just
this side of fat. He stood looking up at me with a half-smile on his
face, and the impression he gave me was that of an enormous sleepy
tom-cat, indifferent, self-sufficient, pleased with himself. The waning
sunlight coming through the grimy window caught the gold in his
mouth, making his teeth come alive.
“Hello, baby,” he said. “You one of her boy friends?” He had a
faint lisp, and his corn-coloured hair was cut close. He was wearing a
yellow and black silk dressing-gown, fastened at his throat; his pyjama
legs were electric blue, his sandals scarlet. He was quite a picture.
“Go jump into a lake,” I said. “Jump into two if one won’t hold
you,” and I turned back to Netta’s door.
The man giggled. It was an unpleasant hissing sound and for no
reason at all it set my nerves jumping.
“There’s no one there, baby,” he repeated, then added in an
undertone, “she’s dead.”
I stopped ringing the bell, turned, looked at him. He raised his
eyebrows, and his head waggled from side to side ever so slightly.
“Did you hear?” he asked, and smiled as if he were privately amused
at some s
ecret joke of his own.
“Dead?” I repeated, moving away from the door.
“That’s right, baby,” he said, leaning against the door-post, giving
me an arch look. “She died yesterday. You can still smell the gas if you
sniff hard enough.” He touched his throat, flinched. “I had a bad day
with it yesterday.”
I walked down the stairs, stood in front of him. He was an inch
taller than I and a lot broader, but I knew he hadn’t any iron in his
bones.
“Calm down, Fatso,” I said, “and give it to me straight. What gas?
What are you raving about?”
“Come inside, baby,” he said, smirking. “I’ll tell you about it.”
Before I could refuse, he had sauntered into a large room which
stank of stale scent and was full of old, dusty furniture.
He dropped into a big easy chair. As his great body dented the
cushions a fine cloud of dust arose.
“Excuse the hovel,” he said, looking around the room with an
expression of disgust on his face. “Mrs. Crockett’s a slut. She never
cleans the place and I can’t be expected to do it, can I, baby? Life’s too
short to waste time cleaning when one has my abilities.”
“Never mind the Oscar Wilde act,” I said impatiently. “Are you
telling me Netta Scott’s dead?”
He nodded, smiled up at me. “Sad, isn’t it? Such a delightful girl;
beautiful, lovely little body; so ful of vigour — now, just meal for the
worms.” He sighed. “Death is a great level er, isn’t it?”
“How did it happen?” I asked, wanting to take him by his fat
throat and shake the daylights out of him.
“By her own hand,” he said mournfully. “Shocking business. Police
rushing up and down stairs . . . the ambulance . . . doctors . . . Mrs.
Crockett screaming . . . that fat bitch in the lower flat gloating . . . a
crowd in the street, hoping to see the remains quite, quite ghastly.
Then the smell of gas — couldn’t get it out of the house all day.
Shocking business, baby, really most, most shocking.”
“You mean she gassed herself?” I asked, going cold.
“That’s right, the poor lamb. The room was sealed with adhesive
tape . . . roll upon roll of adhesive tape, and the gas oven going full