The girl stood beside the late night coffee stand on the Bayswater Road, under the orange glow of the streetlight. Bleached blonde hair and an upturned nose, something about her that was slightly different from the other toms. The cut of her dogtooth coat more stylish, the nails that held the Styrofoam cup polished and neatly manicured. Maybe that was why the other girls that passed were giving her daggers.
Or maybe it was because she was talking to Pete at all.
But there was something else coming off her that was at odds with her veneer. The smell of fear, the chink of vulnerability in her eyes as she motioned him away from the main drag and into a sidestreet, out of the lights and the wandering eyes.
“Yeah,” she said, reaching into her white leather bag for her cigarettes. “I know Geordie Sue… I mean, I knew… Oh shit.” She dropped her lighter.
Pete stooped to pick it up, lit the cigarette for her, cupping his hand around the flame. Waited for her to calm down and tell him about the girl who had come drifting down the Thames, three months after Brownyn Evans had been lifted from the earth.
The body had come to rest on a floating pontoon on the Upper Mall, just north of Duke's Meadows, outside the London Corinthian Sailing Club, at the beginning of another bright, sunny day. Another tiny slip of a girl, only five foot two with shoulder-length brown hair. Naked but for the stockings wrapped around her ankles and the remains of her torn brown knickers stuffed halfway down her throat.
The post mortem revealed that she had died by drowning… but not necessarily before she landed in the Thames. There were no bruises, cuts or abrasions on her to suggest she had been assaulted or forced into the river, but there was no logical reason to assume she was a suicide, not with that gag in her mouth. Not with the stockings round her ankles, just like Brownyn Evans’ had been.
They got her name when her death mask, photographed with eyes propped open, was beamed out on the early evening news, nearly giving her father a heart attack. The former miner from Newcastle identified his errant daughter as Susannah Houghton, aged 30, who he hadn't seen in twelve years, not since she skipped off from her job at the chicken factory one morning and never came home again.
She had made a new name for herself in London, several new names, in fact. The nighthawks who frequented the coffee stand at Charing Cross called her Sybil Smith. The loiterers of King's Cross had her down as Margie Mitchell. In West Norwood, where she had lived for a while in a rented room, she was both Suzy Houghton and Susannah Lee. But ask the streets around Pembridge Villas, Notting Hill, where she had shared her last address with her common-law husband Gary Vine and their young daughter Cheryl, and she came back as just Geordie Sue.
“She was a good mate, was Sue,” the girl said. “We met on the stand there, way back when. Looked out for each other the last time a girl got killed, remember that one from Holland Park?”
Pete nodded, wondering if he had talked to her then too.
“I used to babysit for her when she got together with Gary, lovely little girl she's got… I mean…. Cheryl, she called her. Pretty little thing…”
She inhaled deeply, shutting her eyes.
“You're all right, love.” Pete tried his best to sound soothing, praying that she wouldn't just crack and give up, that she would know something he could use this time.
For he had been powerless to do anything about Bronwyn Evans except pass on what he knew about her former activities in Soho to Dai, leads that got lost in the tangled web the little Welsh girl had woven around her short, unhappy life.
There had been no verifiable sightings of Bronwyn since the summer of 1963, when she had been living in a basement flat in Battersea with a blonde girl. They only stayed a matter of weeks before there had been an argument with the landlord over a gas bill. The girls had agreed to go, but left without taking any of their belongings. The landlord still had them, neatly folded away into two cardboard boxes. A few tatty dresses and worn-down shoes all that was left of Bronwyn's short time on this earth. That and a reputation that lingered, like the smell of mothballs and gin, over the rags of her existence.
Bronwyn had fled Barry at the age of 16, after her ma died and her old man could no longer cope with the effort of controlling her. She had been pretty, her brother told the investigating officers, and the photos of her younger self bore this out — black curly hair that fell over one eye and a crookedly endearing smile. Bronwyn had craved the bright lights, dreamed of being an actress. Ended up in Whitechapel, servicing long distance lorry drivers in groups of three or more, ponced by a woman called Beryl Crudgington – Bream's Big Tits Beryl – who had a way with waifs and strays, putting a roof over their heads and turning their silly dreams into performances of a different kind, flat-back acting that paid the rent on the dismal rooms she was providing.
But despite all Beryl's careful tutelage, her methods of discipline including regular thrashings with a wire coat-hanger, and no matter how many years she wore her heels down pounding them, it seemed that Bronwyn could never learn the code of the street.
If the Welsh girl had made an enemy of Sampson Marks, he was far from the only one. Beryl had given up on trying to earn from her when it became apparent Bronwyn was mixing business with favours, turning every trick into a potential new ponce and drinking her wages before she could be relieved of them. She went disastrously freelance, having to flee the East End when one Bethnal Green nightclub owner caught her committing the cardinal sin of whispering trade secrets while entertaining two plain-clothes on his premises without the slightest realisation of who they really were.
Still chasing those bright lights, Bronwyn headed west, dreaming of a new career as a dancer. She was hired and fired by every strip club in Soho, Paddington and Bayswater, congenitally unable to turn up on time, sober or presentable. She went back on the game, got herself beaten up so badly that stripping would never again be an option. She told her last landlord she'd been working as a waitress and he believed her, letting her and the blonde flatmate move in. He lived above them and they never brought any men back to the flat.
The blonde was another mystery vanished into the ether. Nobody could say who she had been and it was highly unlikely she'd come forward voluntarily. Without an exact time of death, every suspect had an alibi. Without any viable leads or even enough evidence left from her skeleton to prove how she had even been killed, the trail of Bronwyn's murderer had gone as cold as her bones.
Until now. The main incident room for Susannah Houghton was being run out of Shepherd's Bush, but every detective in London was engaged in chasing her killer and for Notting Hill CID it was a point of pride: Sue was a local girl. Maybe now Pete's blonde informant was about to turn up the heat.
“Why do you think anyone would want to do this to her, love?” he asked the question gently, pulling out his own cigarettes when she stamped hers out and offering them over. “Did she ever get involved with anybody you thought was dangerous?”
“They all are.” The girl's voice went flat as she said it, staring past Pete into the night. But after he had lit her up and she'd spent another speculative minute looking him up and down, measuring him up for trust, she started to talk.
“Sue was a specialist, if you know what I mean. The kinky stuff. Thrashing the arse off old colonels or doing girl shows for house parties, that kind of scene. I mean, you get decent gelt for that graft, but you never know what could be coming with some of them upper crust bastards.”
Her eyes hardened and she moved closer to Pete, lowering her voice. “One time, Sue told me, she got picked up by this chauffeur in Charing Cross. Said he was working for some old Lord, wanted to give his son a 21st birthday present, needed someone experienced. She gets driven to a house in Eaton Square, twenty five quid up front, butler shows her to a room and tells her to go in and strip, lie on the bed and wait for his Lordship. Tells her to be gentle with him ’cos he's very shy,” her voice dripped with scorn, “turns out the lights as he goes. So Sue's lying there in total darkness, waiting. Hears someone coming towards her, reaches out to touch him and gets a handful of fur.”
Connections snapped through Pete's brain as she spoke: kinky parties, big houses, Simon Fitzgerald…
But: “Fur?” he frowned. This was a new one.
The girl scowled, shook her head. “All of a sudden the lights came on.” She clicked her fingers. “Sue's being fucked by a gorilla. Well, a geezer in a gorilla suit. But being as rough with her as an actual gorilla, she said.”
“What the bloody hell…” Pete began.
“But that ain't all.” The girl was in full flow now. “When she gets over the shock of that, she realises there's a whole balcony full of toffs above her, watching the performance. Lords and Ladies all done up to the nines, wearing these little tiny black masks, drinking Champagne and laughing at her. You know, she done some funny stuff in her time, did Sue, but that really scared her…”
“What kind of a person thinks that's funny?” Pete spoke as much to himself as to his informer.
“Well you know who lives in Eaton Square don't you? That Baron Whatsisname off the telly, one who's always rabbiting on about art, you know who I mean.” Her eyes darted away from Pete and around the houses, as if she had said too much, as if the walls themselves might be listening in. “Not that I'm saying it was him, mind but…”
“They can't always be that choosy about what girls they can get to do that kind of thing…” Indeed they couldn't – it was only four months since Harold Macmillan had had to resign over Profumo, when the curtain was finally raised for everyone to see the real workings between Upstairs and Downstairs, a big stage version of what had been going on in Ladbroke Grove for years. Now here was a brass telling Pete that another prominent peer was mixed up in the same kind of dirty business.
“Did she ever mention a fella called Sampson Marks, or The Chopper?” he asked, feeling his pulse quickening, his palms starting to sweat, feeling her slipping away.
The girl dropped her gaze along with her cigarette, stamped it out with the toe of her white plastic boot.
“I tell you what,” she said. “You wanna go and see a fella called Ernie Tidsall, ask him what he knows about Sue and all them parties.” She hitched her bag back over her shoulder, looked down the street, started to walk. “He's a smudger, another kind of specialist, you get me?” Her pace quickened as Pete turned to follow her, heels tapping along the pavement, moving back towards the shadows, the dim squares of Bayswater.
A smudger. A photographer. Gypsy George and his bag of filth…
“You'll find him down the other end of Queensway,” she said, jabbing a finger in the air ahead of her. “Westbourne Grove, above a paper shop. Now, if you don't mind, I'd best be off.”
Pete let her go, grateful for as much as she had given him. Watched her walk to the corner, turn underneath the lamppost and look back at him.
“When you find the bastard what did for Sue,” she called, making a punching motion in the air. “Give him one from me.”
I walked out of Holland Park tube and turned left onto Lansdowne Road. Diagonally across from me rose a high tower like a castle's keep made out of red brick, tiny little windows all the way up it. I stopped, sucked in a breath as I read the sign on the wall: Lansdowne Studios.
I was standing on the spot where Bobby Clarke had waited in vain for a boy to come and rescue her, got into a long black car instead. Across the road from the studios where James had been working, making his music late into the night.
Which was, in turn, bang opposite the place I was actually looking for. A modest two-story detached house that, judging from the grey cast of the stucco, had seen better days. Probably during the Twenties, in the aftermath of the First World War, when a grieving nation had been desperate to try and reach their lost boys on the other side, at The Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association.
It felt to me like I had been living through another season of death. Ever since last November, when President Kennedy was assassinated and then, two days later, we watched his killer gunned down in front of the TV cameras. Shortly after, and much closer to home, a little boy called John Kilbride went missing from his home in Hyde, Manchester. He would not be back for Christmas.
December came with a personal reprieve – Macy's in New York invited me and Jackie to design a range for them, flew us over the Atlantic to meet them. Our week there still felt like a dream, from the excitement of the flight to the first appearance of the spectacular Manhattan skyline and the delights of the city itself – the yellow cabs, the Christmas lights, Central Park in the snow. We had such a good time that I almost forgot my worries about Jenny and Dave, almost chased away the shadows of the dead girls.
But all the time, Mya's card sat in my purse, waiting for me to use it.
Christmas and New Year passed in a blur of clinking glasses and excessive food, the start of the Big Freeze. I got a card from Jenny saying that things had gone so well with the film and its director, Robert Mannings, that they had gone and got married. On Christmas Eve in the Eternal City – I envied her the romance of it all, not to mention the climate. As 1964 dawned in blizzards and ice, Toby started work on a new series of canvasses, while Jackie and I found ourselves gracing the cover of Vogue, alongside a brace of other young designers, as the people putting London on the style map.
Then, on the first night of February, I fell asleep and into another horrific world. When the papers confirmed what I'd seen wasn't just a nightmare, but the murder of a real girl, someone called Sue Houghton, I reached the card out of my handbag, dialled the number and held my breath.
Mya told me to come over right away.
She answered the door herself, her little round face more lined than the last time I had seen her, her hair a shade greyer, but her eyes still bright and clear.
“Come in, my dear,” she said. “I'm so glad you found us.”
“Thank you for seeing me at such short notice,” I said.
“Not at all, I was expecting you. Please, come through.”
“How's Cedric?” I asked, as she led me into a room at the front of the house that looked more or less like any normal sitting room would do, but for the framed photographs along the wall of Winifred Moyes, Sir Arthur Conon Doyle and a host of other Spiritualists in black lace or mutton chop whiskers; the crystal ball on the middle of the dining table.
“He's very well, thank you dear,” she said, ushering me into an armchair by the fireplace. “Thank you for asking. But let's talk about you first, you have a lot to tell me don't you? A lot of trouble on your mind.”
She sat down opposite me, fixed me with an intent stare. “Give me your hand a minute.”
The moment our fingers touched, I realised we were not going to ‘talk’ in the normal way. It was going to be like the time I had first met her, at the AGOG party at Chris and Dave's, when I'd somehow lost half an hour in her company. She was going to read my mind. No wonder she was so good in the circus, I thought, before my eyelids drooped.
I reach into my handbag for another purple heart, my black patent leather handbag that I have filled with everything I need to take me away from here and into my new life. I have £27 10s in my brown plastic purse, the diary I got from the bookies with all my secret numbers, my powder compact and my tissues, my cigarettes but one thing missing – a picture of her. Her who I left sleeping in her cot: How would you like a new Mammy, bonny lass, this one has never done you any good, after all. A prayer that she will never see what I have seen, never be what I have been. Her who I left sleeping while her Daddy snored next door, while I stole away on the bus down the long avenue, the avenue with all the trees where I knew men and they knew me, took me to their parties and made a fool out of me, stripped me and slapped me and snapped me.
My heart constricts with rage as the speed hits home, tightness in my chest as I remember that big house up in Eaton Square, the man in the gorilla suit fucking me senseless to an audience of the great and the good, staring at me up on a minstrel's gallery with fucking masks on their faces and diamonds in their hair, laughing and laughing as he grinded and grinded, the scream in my throat that wouldn't come out, stuck there, lodged there for all time.
Flit through the trees where everyone's on their knees, to another big house up in Kensington and men dressed as women and women dressed as men, women with harnesses strapped round their waists with big fucking dildos strapped round their waists, fucking me and sucking me and cameras out taking it all down, flash bang wallop! What a picture, what a photograph. Ernie in his studio, that dingy old house on Westbourne Grove, taking yet more for the family album, snapping away until there is nothing of me left, nothing but a shell of a woman taking purple hearts from a big black patent leather handbag, me on my way to Shepherd's Bush market, to the night coffee stand where he said he would meet me, he who will take me away from all of this and make me a proper woman again.
We're going to live in Mortlake, he said, in a big house there, a proper house with a stream running through the back garden, with water to wash all the sins away, all the many sins that stain my thirty years on this earth. My halo a flashbulb and I get off the bus and I walk down Shepherd's Bush Green, my black leather court shoes clacking on the pavement, my best shoes, most demure shoes and I cross the road down the Goldhawk Road, towards the market, towards the night stand where I know he is waiting to take me away from all this, my aching body and my vacant soul.
And I see him leaned up against his car, lighting a cigarette, cupping his hands to shelter the flame, big sheepskin coat against the cold of the night and as I do another car pulls up next to me and a fairground organ starts to play a distorted melody, like it's coming up through water, the water to wash my sins away. I look and see a long black car and in the back seat there are two women staring at me, but there is something wrong with them, their heads are on at funny angles. But they are staring at me and staring at me, this woman with the blue and white striped summer dress, this woman in mustard yellow and their eyes are round and their mouths are round, and I try to look away from them, look at the front of the car instead but the front seat is empty, there is no one there, this car is driving itself and I open my mouth and the long black car pulls away fast leaving me there on the corner of Goldhawk Road.
Leaving me there with him, him who smiles by the light of the flame that ignites his cigarette, illuminates something moving in the back seat of his car. He who comes walking towards me and an alarm bell starts ringing, screaming Danger! Danger! And an alarm bell starts ringing, screaming Danger! Danger!…
It had been the telephone that had pulled me out of the vision the first time. As my eyes opened now, it was the clock chiming the hour. Mya still had hold of my hand, her pupils completely dilated as she stared at me and for a moment I thought I saw her surrounded by the same blue light that was pouring out of them, a feeling of great power radiating through her. Then she let my hand drop and I blinked. She was back to being the little old lady that had let me through the door.
“There is a lot of work for us to do,” she said. “The murdered women screamed out for help and you picked up their cries.” She made a counting motion with her hands while she spoke, as if the fingers that had touched mine continued to relay her information, but her piercing eyes never left mine. “It's not just because you are Sensitive, dear. Somehow there is a connection between you and whoever has been taking them. Think really hard and tell me, what do you think the connection could be?”
“Over the road,” I said, fear crawling through me, the last image of something moving in the back of the car, a thick, black shape, death in men's clothing. “Lansdowne Studios. A man I lived next door to was working there at the time the first one was taken. He was trying to create a new sound, using radios to make strange effects. I heard him playing some of it, the very night I dreamt about the first one – I thought that his music had given me a nightmare. Later on, I found out he had also been playing with tarot cards, using a ouija board, holding amateur séances, all the things I was taught never to do. And he's still doing it, still looking for ghosts in churchyards, talking to black cats at midnight…” I cut myself short, realising how angry I sounded.
“I mean,” I said, “I don't think he killed anyone, but I do think that all his messing about somehow let something through.”
“How very interesting,” Mya said, nodding to herself as she digested the information. She pointed to one of the framed photographs that hung over the fireplace. “Do you know this man? Sir Oliver Lodge, his name is.”
A melancholy-looking chap with a balding pate, bushy eyebrows and a beard that pointed upwards, flecked with white streaks that were matched by the wavy hair that ran over his ears. I might have seen him before, in one of Grandpa's books of distinguished Spiritualists, but I couldn't place him.
“The inventor of the wireless,” Mya enlightened me. “Sir Oliver worked on the theory of what we call the aether, that everything in time and space is operating on its own particular frequency and if we learn how to tune in, we can tap in and out like a radio does. It might help you to understand what you still find so hard about all of this.”
“Of course,” a spark went off in my head, “that's what it felt like, tuning into them.”
“Everyone has their own wavelength,” said Mya, “the vibrations that keep us here and keep us whole. But that frequency changes at the moment we pass, as if the dial on the radio had suddenly slipped. Your dial keeps tuning into the last moments of transmission, the SOS signal, if you like.”
“So,” I tried to rationalise what she was telling me, “you think that these experiments in sound somehow helped me to tune into them?”
Mya nodded. “By accident rather than design. The man who was making the music opened up the channel and you tuned in. Did you know him very well?”
“No,” I said. “I never actually met him. But the man who used to share the flat with him, I am very close to. Only it's impossible that he could have anything to do with this. He was dead against the séances, he had nothing to do with them.”
From what I'd seen in Lenny's flat, it was James who was the malign influence. But there was someone else, wasn't there, who linked me to him?
“Dave Dilworth.” I snapped my fingers. “You know, who borrowed the stuffed animals from Cedric. He started a band and this man, James Myers is his name, is producing them. Their records are,” I shivered at the memory, “very sinister. Like horror movie music. They were the soundtrack to the second vision I had, to Bronwyn Evans. And then this last one too.”
Mya put her fingertips together, closed her eyes. I recalled how fond Cedric had been of Dave, wondered if that was why she frowned.
She sat there like that for some time. As the clock ticked away the minutes, I wondered if she had fallen asleep, if the effort of all this had been too much. Then she suddenly opened her eyes, leaning forwards in her seat.
“Go and see him,” she said. “He'll tell you something you need to know.”
“I don't know.” I was flustered now. Surely she didn't think Dave…?
“I'm not saying that.” She had read my thoughts again. “Spirit has shown you many things to guide you, but what we do here on Earth is our own responsibility. Now, I have a message from your pa.”
I caught my breath. The only time I had ever wished for the gift was to hear from Pa again. But I never had, not in all these years.
Mya smiled. “He says for you to take courage. Try not to be afraid, he walks beside you always and protects you with his love. He says,” she gave a soft chuckle, looking to her right as if Pa was actually sitting there, talking to her, “there are no dead.”
I felt tears spring into my eyes. “But what can I do?” I asked. “The police can't seem to solve this case, the first girl died five years ago. You're not telling me that I can?”
“No, I'm not.” Mya's eyes were gentle now. “But you can help. You might be surprised, but not all policemen are sceptics. I have a very good friend at the Notting Hill police, a detective no less, who would listen to anything you could tell him. Now dear,” she leaned herself onto the arms of the chair, slowly rose to her feet, “I think we have both done enough for today. Please, think about what I've said and know that my door is always open. Don't keep your troubles to yourself any more. You have seen these things for a reason and now you should act upon your knowledge.”
When I stepped outside onto Lansdowne Road I was almost surprised by the sunshine. I felt like I'd been inside the Spiritualist's for days, in a world between light and shade. I stared up at the tower opposite for a moment, thinking about all that Mya had said. Then I crossed the road and walked back towards Ladbroke Grove.
The door creaked open to the shabby house on Westbourne Grove, a rotten door with peeling paintwork, sagging on its hinges like an old itinerant stooped over his bundle of rags. The man who opened it was similarly careworn, small with very pale skin and what was left of his hair combed across his balding dome in greasy strands, a tatty old brown cardigan over a stained yellow shirt and grey trousers shiny with age. He stared through bottle-thick glasses in black National Health frames held together by sticky tape, his top lip twitching, revealing yellowing teeth.
“Hello Ernie,” said Dick Willcox.
“Fucking hell,” said Ernie Tidsall as Dick and Pete pushed past him into the hall.
“Up here, is it?” Dick started running up the stairs, while Pete put a restraining hand on the little man's shoulder. He reeked of sweat and stale cigarette smoke, and something else; a chemical smell that Pete realised must be that of developing fluid and stop lotion. The suspect was a photographer, after all.
“Wh-whaddyou want?” Ernie squirmed under Pete's grasp as Dick's size tens crashed around upstairs. “I ain't done nothing.”
“Yep,” Dick shouted from above. “We've come to the right place.”
Pete smiled at the little man. It was not a pleasant smile, as it didn't reach his eyes, which bored into the brown pupils behind Ernie's specs with an intimidating intensity.
“Good,” he shouted back then said to Ernie: “Would you care to show me around?”
Ernie shrank from under him and his voice went up several octaves.
“Look, what's this all about? I'm telling you, I ain't done nothing.”
“Nobody ever has, have they Ernie?” replied Pete. “Now I've asked you nicely to show us around, so please,” he took his arm off Ernie's shoulder and pointed it in the direction of the stairs, “be a good lad and don't give us no bother.”
Ernie screwed up his face and balled his fists, stamped his foot in rage. He looked like a petulant mole. “Bloody bogeys!” he screamed.
Pete continued to point at the stairs.
“Get up there Ernie,” he said. “I'm not telling you again.”
Ernie's shoulders slumped. Cursing and muttering, he did what he was told.
Dick stood lounged against a doorway on the first floor. In his hand was a black and white photograph of a naked woman. A naked woman trussed up with ropes and a gag in her mouth.
“Regular little David Bailey we've got here,” he said to Pete. “Here's his studio.” He pointed through the doorway to a sparsely furnished room, painted white, with two spotlights and a screen, a camera on a tripod in front of an old brass bed made up with black satin sheets. “And behind us is his dark room. A very dark room if this one's anything to go by.”
Pete took the picture and studied it hard. He didn't recognise the woman but he recognised the look in her eyes. Bombed out, vacant, gone.
“Look!” Ernie had begun stamping his feet again, dust flying up from the hallway carpet. “You can't just barge in here and do what you like! You ain't got a warrant!”
“Oh sorry, Ernie,” Dick put his hand inside his jacket and took the document out, “do you mean this? We just wanted to make sure we had the right place first. Now we know that we have, everything's all official and above board and Scotland Yard are just a phone call away. I'm sure they'd love to see what you've got set up here.”
Ernie's face turned red and then green as he peered at the paperwork.
“But there's no need for us to call them yet,” said Pete, blocking the top of the stairs with his full frame in case Ernie got any ideas about running away. “We just want a little chat with you, about an old friend of yours. Tell us what we need to know and we might just leave you in peace.”
Ernie took his spectacles off, mopped his sweaty brow with a handkerchief taken from his trouser pocket. Another cloud of chemical vapour hit the air as he did.
“What friend?” he said weakly.
“I think you know,” said Dick. “You've probably got the negatives of her back there, and we've got plenty of time to check.”
“Susannah,” Ernie said. “Geordie Sue.”
“That's right,” said Pete. “Now we're getting there.”
The blonde had been right about Ernie. Most of the girls on the Bayswater, Holland Park beat knew the one-time smudger for The Kensington Post who'd found an easier way of acquiring his own studios than the tedious grind of a local rag. A few folk at the Post still remembered him, with about as much fondness as his current crop of models. Ernie was the sort of guy who gave everyone the creeps, especially the women. Or so Dick's mate on the Sports desk had told them, over a few jars in his local, as he passed across Ernie's address from the files. It was on Westbourne Grove, confirming the blonde's story.
They'd kept the gaff under obs for a while, watched a couple of women come and go out of the front door, Ernie's silhouette moving behind the blinds and the tell-tale red light of his dark room. It wasn't hard to get the warrant. All leads on Houghton's killer were considered high priority.
“Why don't you have a seat?” said Dick, picking up a black vinyl barstool from beside the bed in his studio and plonking it down in the middle of the spotlights. “Tell us a bit more about Geordie Sue.”
Ernie had stopped his stamping now, turned very white and started shaking. Sweat was rolling off his forehead faster than he could mop it up with his hankie.
“Sh-she was just a tart,” Ernie said, cowering, his fingers resting on the side of the barstool, not wanting to sit. “Like all the rest. There weren't nothing special about Sue.”
“Oh aye?” Pete wandered over to one of the spotlights, found the switch and turned it on. Watched Ernie flinch, put up his hand as if he was about to be physically assaulted. “That's not what we heard. We've been told Susannah was a girl with a lot of special talents, a useful lass for a man like yourself.”
“Very special talents, Ernie.” Dick leaned close to the smudger's sweaty face. “’Cos let's face it, she weren't exactly your classic pin-up material, now was she?” He strolled over to the other lamp. “She weren't no Diana Dors.” There was a fizzling noise then a snap as he turned it on. “Not even a Christine Keeler. Here Ernie, you never did any shots of her did you? ’Cos now they could be worth a few bob.”
“No!” Ernie screamed. “I never knew Christine Keeler, I never knew Mandy Rice-Davies, or the doctor or any of them! You said this was about Geordie Sue, not about them!”
Dick and Pete exchanged a glance and at the same time both began to walk in a circle around Ernie and between the lights, the Blakeys on their shoes loud on the linoleum floor, their footsteps slow, insistent. Ernie continued to grip the side of the stool without sitting, unsure of where to look now, getting hotter under the spots by the second.
“No need to get touchy, Ernie.” Dick continued to keep his tone light, friendly. “Tell us about Geordie Sue then, how did you meet her? Were you formally introduced?”
“No,” Ernie said, still mopping his brow. “I met her at the coffee stand, what do you think? Just another scrubber willing to drop her knickers for a few quid, there's enough of them out there, you should know.”
“She did more than just drop her knickers, though, didn't she Ernie?” Pete said. There was a horrible smell in this room, underneath the chemicals and the fag smoke. Of old sweat and dried semen, of spilt booze and cheap perfume, of degradation and disgust. “Is this how you shoot them, Ernie, under these lights? Gets a bit hot, doesn't it? Not very comfortable, I shouldn't think.”
“What do you care?” Ernie snapped back. “It's easy enough for them. I don't touch them, I don't hurt them, they get paid and everybody's happy. I do them a favour. It's safer for them than…”
“Getting into a car with a strange man?” Dick finished the sentence for him. “A strange man who could be a killer?”
Ernie's shoulders heaved. “I didn't kill her,” he said, his voice wobbling, on the edge of tears. “I ain't seen her. The last job she did for me was before Christmas, a bit extra to buy some toys for her kid, that's all it was and I ain't seen her since. I swear to God.”
“What kind of pictures?” asked Dick. “A nice Nativity scene, was it? Susannah as the Virgin Mary?”
Ernie looked at the floor, hands wringing at his sopping hanky.
“I can easily check.” Dick moved towards the door.
“No,” said Ernie waving a hand like a drowning man. “It was a group shot. That's what I used her for, mainly. Not many girls are up for that scene, not the young ones anyway. Not the pretty ones. But you can get away with using the older tarts for them ones. No one really looks at their faces.”
“Who are your clients, Ernie?” Pete stopped walking for a second, turned and faced the little man. “Who do you sell the photos to?”
Ernie shook his head, still looking at the floor. Farted loudly, bowels coming loose with the agitation. Another bad smell to add to the miasma in this room.
“That wasn't,” the smudger whispered, twisting the hanky round and round in his hands, “that wasn't what you said you wanted to know.”
“Well you haven't told us much yet have you?” Dick bellowed into his earhole.
“I don't think he wants to,” said Pete. “I don't think he understands the notion of a polite chat. Perhaps we'd better just call Scotland Yard after all.”
“Or take him down the station. I'm sure the boys would love to take a look at Ernie's family album.”
Ernie looked from Pete to Dick and back to Pete again. He was quivering all over, ready to collapse. He fumbled in his pocket and drew out a little brown bottle of prescription pills, shook a couple loose into his hand and swallowed them.
“All right then, arrest me,” the little man said, finding a reserve of courage from his medication. “At least then I'll be entitled to a solicitor. I ain't telling you nothing more, you bastard bogeys.”
“He's an old hand isn't he?” said Dick, looking mildly amused.
“He might well be,” agreed Pete, looking anything but, “but it didn't take us long to find him. You should have been a lot more careful, shouldn't you Ernie?”
“Better get us a bunch of lads to help us, make sure we don't leave anything behind,” said Dick. “Looks like there's too much for us to carry in that dark room. Phone was in the hallway, wasn't it, Ernie?”
Pete read Ernie his rights as Dick summoned the radio car. Ernie said nothing, wrapped his arms around himself like a child and stared at the floor.
“Who are you scared of, Ernie?” Pete whispered as the siren sounded down Bayswater Road. “Who's worse than being arrested?”
Jackie made a knocking motion at the side of my head.
“Sorry,” I said, turning away from the window, through which I had been staring blankly at the wall opposite, and back round towards her. “I was miles away.”
“That I can see.” Jackie sat herself down on the corner of the table, folded her arms. “You've been off with the fairies all afternoon. Something troubling you, pet?”
“Well, sort of.” I looked past her to where Lenny was hunched over his desk, tapping away on his little adding machine, a pencil clenched between his teeth.
Jackie raised an eyebrow. “S’all right,” she said. “He can't hear you. He's so locked in his world of financial intrigue he wouldn't even notice if a troupe of naked dancing boys came through here doing the can-can. Would you Lenny?”
She raised her voice as she asked the question.
Lenny continued tap-tapping away, eyes locked on his ledger.
“So,” she turned back round to me again, “come on, let's have it.”
“It's…” Jackie had at least managed to make me smile. But I could tell from her demeanour she wasn't going to let it just lie there. “Well, it's a bit hard to explain. I mean, it's not that I don't want to tell you, it's just a bit… awkward.”
“Ah,” she nodded, “would a drink help you to spit it out?”
“It might do, actually,” I said, thinking about the empty house I would otherwise be going back to. Toby had finished his canvases now and Pat had taken him over to the States with them, to San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York. He would be away for a month this time, our longest ever time apart.
“Good,” she said. “There's this place I've been meaning to take you.” She winked, slid off the table. “We can leave him to count his pots of cash.”
Round the corner of the King's Road on Bramerton Street, illuminated by a solitary lamppost, was a green door in a high white wall, a gateway to a secret world.
“This is the place,” said Jackie. “I've been scoping it out for a while, reckon you'll like it. It's kind of,” she smiled mischievously, “interesting, shall we say.”
The woman behind the green door looked like Cleopatra, or at least, the way Liz Taylor played her, all thick black eyeliner and thick black hair. She stared at us through the smoke of the black Sobranie that rested on her bottom lip, with glittering eyes to match the décor of the entrance.
“Hello Jacks,” she said in a voice that was as theatrical as her appearance. “And what do we have here?” She removed the cigarette with fingers that flashed with rings and ended with purple-painted talons, fixing her gaze on me.
“This is Stella Reade,” said Jackie, “my business partner. Stella, this is Gina, she runs the show here.”
“Just business?” A smile twitched at the corner of the woman's mouth as she offered me her hand. “Bona. Now, the rules here are simple: Jackie vouches for you and signs you in, you pay me ten shillings for the privilege and if either of you can't handle your shandies like ladies, you'll be out on your ear. We don't like having to entertain Miss Lilly around here. All right, darling?”
“Er…” Her grip was hard and I couldn't understand half of what she was saying. “Yes,” I replied as she finally released me. “That's fine, thank you.”
I dropped the money into her upturned palm and followed Jackie down the vertiginous steps to the basement bar.
The square cellar room was thick with smoke and bodies. Heads turned as we navigated our way through, nostrils finely tuned to the smell of interloper. Some of them flashed hostile glances, others deliberately pressed themselves against me, smirking as I tried not to notice. The way half of them were built and dressed you would never have guessed that they weren't actually men.
“What you having?” Jackie finally elbowed her way through to the counter, nodding at the stout, cropped-haired blonde at the bar.
“Red wine, please,” I said, smiling at her. Up until now, Jackie had been reticent about actually letting me into her other world. This was her way of showing me she could be trusted with any uncomfortable secrets.
“Red wine and a G&T, please Smithy,” Jackie ordered. “Right,” she said when they arrived. “We'll go through here, it's a bit less crowded.”
Behind the bar was another small room, with a pool table and a few chairs arranged around it, a row of pegs for coats along the wall, a bit like a miniature youth club. There were a couple in the middle of a game, but the rest of the seats were empty. We made for the furthest corner.
“Well,” Jackie said as we settled ourselves down. “What d’you reckon to my little home from home?”
“It's really… something else,” I said.
She laughed. “I thought it were about time you should see how us lesbians lived.”
I glanced over at the pool players. One of them looked just like a Teddy boy, complete with long ginger sideburns, green drape jacket and brothel creepers. The other, in a tight-fitting black dress, black bouffant hair and muscular, tattooed arms, was recognisably female, if aggressively so.
“Is everyone here a lesbian?” I whispered.
“Mainly.” Jackie surveyed the room. “You get some old omis come in, theatrical types, you know, or painters. Ancient old fruits, like most of our tutors at college. A few famous faces passing through, an’ all, I've seen that Di Dors down here more than once.” She took a sip of her drink, pointed her little finger back through the bar towards the jukebox, where a gaggle of painted ladies lounged, selecting tracks with bored expressions on their faces. “Those lot are working girls, taking some time off where no one will bother them. That's what Gina meant by entertaining Miss Lilly – Lilly Law's the police. She don't want them sticking their beak in.”
Her words sent a shiver through me.
“Oh,” Jackie waved her hand, “you don't need to mind them, they keep themselves to themselves…”
“It's not that,” I said. “Jackie, remember that day in Lenny's flat?”
She cocked her head. “I'm hardly likely to forget it,” she said.
“Well, remember what I told you about my family and their funny ways?”
“Yes, love, what about it?” She dropped her jokey tone, became serious, concerned.
“Well, unfortunately, I seem to have inherited something from them after all.”
“What? You've not been seeing ghosts, have you?” She put her hand over her heart.
“Not quite,” I said. “I've been having dreams… nightmares, really. Only worse.”
I did my best to explain it all, then gave her Mya's interpretation of events.
“She thinks that James's experiments are what made it happen – his musical ones, that is. Though I blame rubbish that we threw in the bin that day myself.”
“Christ,” Jackie said. She had listened to my story in silence, not passing any judgement, just encouraging me on with a few gentle words when I thought I was going to start crying. I knew she would find it all very hard to believe, but to my relief, she didn't act as if she thought I had gone round the bend.
“That bloody James,” she said. “I don't know if this has got owt to do with it, but he's in a bit of a bad way, now, you know.”
Jackie scowled. “He got arrested last November, coming on to Lilly in some khazi on the Holloway Road. Total bloody set-up.” She shook her head. “Reason I know is, I was at Lenny's when he got the call to bail him out. Lenny were that embarrassed. He didn't want us to know, for obvious reasons. But I've come to realise, whenever James clicks his fingers, Lenny still comes running to sort out his mess for him.”
“Did he then?” I said. “There was nothing about it in the papers, was there?”
Jackie snorted. “Well lucky for James Myers, poor old JFK got shot the next day, so no one was really all that bothered about him. It got a couple of lines in the Standard or something. Just enough for him to start getting blackmailed.”
“God,” I said, “I had no idea.”
“Aye, well you wouldn't, he keeps it all to himself, does Lenny. Well, most of time. Until James gets so dizzy on his pep pills that he starts smashing up telephones with his bare hands, then he finds the need to talk about it.”
“I thought we'd got him away from all of that,” I said, “I thought him and Pat…”
Jackie shook her head. “That's not the same, for either of them,” she said. “That's just a form of entertainment. Pat likes his rough and Lenny likes his posh, but with James it goes deeper. Like I said to you all them years ago, they really are like man and wife.” She rolled the ice around the bottom of her glass. “D’you want another one?”
As she went to the bar, I realised that it wasn't just me who had needed to have this conversation. Jackie was definitely at ease here though, I thought, as I watched her chat to the bartender. Then, as if drawn by magnets, my gaze drifted towards the women by the jukebox. One with her hair done like Dusty Springfield had started to sing along to a track by her idol, swaying her hips along to the languid beat.
“So,” Jackie sat back down, passing my drink across, “what else did this Mya woman have to say about our beloved Mr Myers?”
“I told her about him working with Dave,” I said, “and how their horrible record was in one of my dreams before I'd even heard it in real life. She said I should go and see him, that he'd have something important to tell me. But now you've got me thinking. The last time I saw Dave must have only been about two weeks before James got arrested.”
“Yeah, it was at Toby's end-of-show party at Duke Street. We were really pleased to see him; it had been such a long time. Seemed like he was on good form too, telling lots of funny stories about his band. Then Toby wandered off somewhere and Dave started to get a bit weirder. Started going on about these ghost hunts he'd done with James, making out that it was really funny – maybe it is to him. Only now I'm wondering if he was just laying it on thick about James to get rid of Lenny, ’cos as soon as he did, Dave completely changed. Started asking all these questions about Jenny, if I'd seen her, if she was still OK…”
“He'd only just found out from Chris about Giles and the riot,” I said, “and he was really worried about her. He reckoned,” for some reason I started to whisper, as if I cared that the pool-playing Ted and her moll might hear, “that Giles really is her brother and her dad had him arrested on purpose, to teach her a lesson for running off to Italy.”
“You what?” Jackie frowned. “That's mad.”
“That's what I thought,” I said. “But remember the way she reacted that day? Ranting about not going back to her parents, how scared she was of them? And she did call him her brother, we both heard that.”
“Oh yeah.” Jackie nodded slowly, then went into her Jenny impersonation: “Daddy could have him released just like that. Well,” she dropped the level of her own voice now, moved her chair closer to mine, “I suppose if he could, then he must be able to get him arrested in the first place too. Lilly Law.” Her eyes darted around the room. “More bent than anyone round here.”
“Well that's just it,” I said. “Chris proved it, didn't he? But what Dave said that sounded even more mad was that Jenny's dad can get them to do whatever he wants. I thought a lot about that too. That policeman Chris exposed never did have to stand trial, did he?”
“No,” said Jackie. “And that would also explain why our Jenny's just hitched herself to a new sugar daddy.”
We stared at each other in silence for a minute.
“So,” Jackie eventually said. “Are you going to go and see him?”
“I've tried,” I said. “But he's never in when I go past his house. He's probably on the road somewhere, he said they do a lot of touring. And they don't have a phone, so I can't just ring up and ask Chris if he knows when Dave's next around. I suppose I could put a note through his door, but how on earth do I explain it without seeing him face-to-face? I know he's a pretty broad-minded guy, but can you imagine? Oh hi, Dave, I've been having all these psychic transmissions from dead prostitutes caused by your producer and I wondered if you could tell me a bit more about that? Oh and, only three months after you first told me, I am beginning to get worried about Jenny…”
“I take your point,” said Jackie. “I think I need another drink.”
“So do I,” I replied, nodding. “Is it OK to stay at yours tonight?” I added, watching the Dusty blonde taking her leave and suddenly feeling afraid of being on my own.
The curtains at the end of our bedroom in Arundel Gardens twitch and out comes Dave, wearing his top hat and a funeral director's black coat. He opens his mouth and there's a sound of a toilet flushing and I find myself on the pavement outside Lansdowne Studios. From the top of the building comes a light like a searchlight, or the sweeping beam of a lighthouse and a weird organ tune starts up, sounding like it's being played underwater. Consumed with a fear that I have been here before, I try to run, but my footsteps are so slow, as if the pavement is made out of treacle, that though I put my whole body's weight into trying to move forwards, my progress is agonisingly slow.
In my mind, I know I have to find Toby. The first house I come to has a green front door and I can hear laughing and music coming from behind it. It opens up and there's Jackie, framed in an orange glow, wearing a black suit. She smiles at me and says:
“Here you are at last, come in. We've all been waiting for you.”
“Is Toby here?” I ask, looking past her down a long hallway with chandeliers and a curving staircase, hearing voices everywhere.
Jackie chuckles. “You might find him in here,” she says and raises an eyebrow. “But I think he's hiding.”
I leave her on the doorstep and walk into the room on the left. There are a lot of men in here, all dressed in black, and I scan them desperately to find Toby. They all turn towards me, their hands over their mouths, whispering to each other. Lenny and Bernard Baring sniggering together, looking at me and then looking away. Pat flashes past, unlike the others he's wearing a blue suit, the same intense shade as his eyes. I grab hold of his arm, ask: “Where's Toby? You must know, where is he?” But Pat shakes his head, says: “Let him tell you,” and walks off into the crowd.
I look behind him and see her, the girl in the blue and white dress, but the dress is now ripped open and her breasts spilling out, covered in bruises and scratches. No one seems to be paying her any attention, despite her outrageous appearance. She looks at me with dull, dead eyes, tears leaking from each corner. “My father's house has many rooms,” she says, and turns her head towards the door. I walk through it and find myself at the foot of the stairs, where Chris is walking down, a bulging folder under his left arm. He looks shocked to see me.
“Don't go up there,” he says. “Please don't, Stella.”
“But I must,” I say. “Toby's up there,” and I push past him to where the girl with the mustard-coloured dress stands in a doorframe, under a red light, grinning a gap-toothed smile. She raises up a smeared glass to me and I can see the red mark around her neck, the deep incision into her flesh.
“For now we see through a glass darkly,” she says, “but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.” I feel another great wave of fear and stumble up the next set of stairs in front of me, into a vast ballroom where people are dancing in full evening dress, but wearing black masks over their eyes. I look around, desperately trying to locate Toby, and another woman sways in front of me, naked but for a dog collar around her neck with a lead attached to it. Her face looks ancient and her body is battered, she shakes her head and says: “Though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal.”
Then a man wearing a gorilla suit yanks the lead and pulls her away as the whole room full of people in evening dress burst into peals of laughter and I turn and run from that place to another staircase, lit only by a shaft of moonlight coming from a skylight above. I hear Pa's voice coming down that silvery trail, saying: “And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing.”
“Pa!” I cry, looking around frantically. But he isn't there, Toby isn't there, it's just me alone in a dark house, all the music and laughter below me has stopped.
There is a door in front of me and I know that I don't want to go through it; I know that I shouldn't, but it opens anyway and I am at the top of the house in a dark attic room and in the middle of the room is Jenny, wearing a long white dress, her skin glowing like the moonlight. On one side of her are three other women, on the other side two. I realise with a jolt that one of them is the Dusty blonde from the club tonight and that she, like all the rest of them, has marks around her neck the same as the women downstairs, the ones who are already dead. I try to close my eyes, knowing that they are the ones yet to come.
“Look at me,” says Jenny and my eyes are impelled towards her, the silvery glow emanating from her growing brighter and brighter, her face both beautiful and terrifying. She puts her hand on her stomach and I suddenly realise that she is pregnant, that this is what's making her glow.
“This,” she says, “is how it all begins and where it all ends.”
And I felt the ground disappear from under me as I fell backwards, hitting the bed like I had fallen from the ceiling. My heart was beating like a jackhammer and I didn't know where I was, all I could see were the shapes of the furniture around me and I thought for a second that I was four years old, in my grandparents’ house at the time of the Blitz, when a fireball had come down from the sky.
Then the door opened and Jackie was standing there in her pyjamas, the hallway light spilling into the dark, and telling me where I was and when it was.
“Christ, Stella,” said Jackie. “That must have been a right bloody nightmare. You were screaming so loud I thought someone had got in here.”
I tried to open my mouth to speak but nothing would come out.
Ernie in the interview room, still not talking. Not sweating so much since his brief arrived; the kind of stiff upper lip who could have passed off as one of the Cabinet with his steel grey hair and handmade suit. Dick down there with DI Dennis Fielder; the gaffer scenting a whiff of a headline, wanting to break Ernie down before sending him over to Shepherd's Bush and letting them take all the credit.
Pete was upstairs in the CID room, going through Ernie's prints with a couple of aids and an old DS called Stanley Coulter, a big man with a round face framed with white curls and sorrowful, saucer-shaped blue eyes that lent him the aura of an overgrown choirboy. Pete appreciated Coulter's eyes. Coming towards retirement age, there was not a lot those melancholy lamps hadn't shone over before. Although Ernie may have displayed some of it in a slightly different way.
The negs had gone off to the lab to be printed; surprisingly there weren't that many of them, only the results of Ernie's most recent session, it seemed. But that still left them with boxes of filth, all separated into different categories and catalogued in blue biro, a fussy, fastidious hand. FOXY DOXIES represented the high end of Ernie's business, the best looking girls falling out of frilly French maids outfits and polka dot bikinis. Pete had seen plenty of this kind of stuff before, it was the sort of thing the Soho shops put out front with the nudist books and incongruous travel guides. Round the back would be the specialist stuff, like FEATHER GIRLS — hard-faced women in steel corsets walking naked men wearing gas masks on collars and leads, brandishing horsewhips over sagging old buttocks. Or FLOPSIE’S MOPSIES, the orgy snaps that Ernie had been so loath to discuss – and no wonder – this was fucking and sucking rendered in forensic close up, along with every spot, bruise and semen-splattered cold sore. But it was HOUSE OF WHACKS that formed the most interesting passage of Ernie's oeuvre.
Men with canes, whips and paddles, their faces always carefully out of shot. The lens instead homing in on the flesh of the women, the welts rising out of their skin, black slashes across round white buttocks, thighs patterned with weals. Women with gags in their mouths, women with their hands tied behind their backs. Sometimes in specialist gear to restrain them, leather and vinyl straps, mostly just trussed up with their own lingerie, silk stockings and the cord from a dressing gown.
Not so big a jump from this to Susannah Houghton with her pants stuffed down her throat and her stockings around her ankles. From Bobby Clarke with her dress torn open to expose her breasts. A killer buzzing on a tableau of degradation and violence, hating women so much he couldn't even leave them dead with any dignity – could his lust have been fuelled by images like these?
“I think I've found her.” Tom Spinks, one of the young aids, held up a print he had been studying for some time. “This is the one we're looking for ain't it?”
“Bleedin’ hell.” The other aid, Bob Bates, scratched his chin. “That's a sight you don't see every day.”
Indeed it wasn't. Geordie Sue in her birthday suit, skinny arms and bruised legs, breasts lying flat as pancakes across her spotty chest – with a dildo strapped around her waist that she was using to poke a similarly malnourished coloured woman in a wonky beehive wig. The expression on her face was supposed to imply ecstasy, but looked more like she was struggling to remain conscious.
“So that's what having a speciality means,” said Pete, shaking his head. Fear and anger welled up inside him. Fear that if he got too close to Ernie, he would find that too much of Wesker and his methods had rubbed off on him. Fear that the anger would take over.
“There's lots more of her in here.” Spinks rifled through the prints in his box. “They must have done a whole action sequence. Yeah, look at this, they're spanking each other.” He passed another one round. “And now out come the whips. Dead into this kinky gear is old Ernie, eh?” Spinks was trying to come across as a man of the world, but his face was flushed, a mixture of embarrassment and shock at what he was seeing.
“Recognise the other girl?” asked Coulter. “She could be a bit of local colour. Look at this…”
Pete's gaze followed where Coulter's finger pointed, to the trackmarks between the coloured girl's fingers, her motivation clearly delineated. Susannah didn't appear to have any, but she had also been a drug addict. It was Drinamyl that Geordie Sue lived on, big purple pills that were always rattling round her handbag, keeping her rattling on for days. You would need to be on something pretty strong to face doing any of this.
“Another local dish,” said Coulter with a sigh. “Well, in the darker parts of town anyway. That'll be how she ended up coming to do something like this. Would have been supplying her ponce and all, I don't doubt.”
A name rose from the past to the front of Pete's brain, unfinished business from 1959. Algy ‘Baby’ Ferrier, ex-boxer, Bobby Clarke's ponce, where was he now?
“Well she's the only spade in here so far,” noted Spinks. “From what I've seen, anyway.”
“Yeah.” Bates rifled through the pile. He was more worldly-wise than Spinks, found Ernie's snaps amusing, something to talk about down the pub after work. “It's always the jig on the receiving end of it too.”
“Maybe Oswald Mosley commissioned them,” said Pete, only half joking.
“You know,” said Coulter, turning one of the 8x10s at right angles to try and make sense of what he was seeing, “you could be onto something there. Not Mosley hisself, I mean, but it is always the toffs who want this sort of thing, all this caning and spanking, the feather girls, you know? Your average Joe just wants it simple, straightforward. Tits and arse, in and out, no messing. But it takes a certain kind of mind to appreciate this malarkey, and you'll usually find it's one that's been forged on the playing fields of Eton. All those beatings and buggery, it scars them for life.”
“Aye.” Pete nodded, a Tatler & Bystander photograph flashing through his mind, the clean white teeth and Dean Martin hairstyle of Sir Alex Minton, shaking hands with a Cabinet minister, the caption noting they were both Eton old boys.
Coulter put the picture back in Spinks’ box. “We'll mark these up for evidence,” he said to the aid. “Get a blow-up of the black bird's face and circulate her, get on to it now, if you don't mind.” Turning to Pete: “I bet you a tanner she comes from Powis Square.”
“Powis Square.” Pete nodded, watching eager Spinks almost collide with Dick and DI Fielder coming through the door. The gaffer had his pipe clenched between his teeth, a gleam in his eyes suggesting he was riled enough to bite the stem in half. Dick's hair was standing up at haphazard angles where he had been raking his hands through the Brylcreem and his eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of a thousand Woodbines.
“It's bloody impossible,” Fielder announced. “The man has a snake oil salesman for a solicitor. He's claiming this,” he snatched up a picture from the nearest box, a close-up of a girl holding a spurting penis, eyes screwed shut, as she received a full facial, “is all in the name of art! That our dirty mac down there, Ernest Tidsall, is engaged in the pursuit of aesthetic excellence following the muse of contemporary photography. Can you bloody believe it?” He stared at the unlovely artefact for a moment. “I suppose this is the Bayswater Botticelli.” He flung it across the room.
Dick raised one eyebrow. “Don't suppose you've found any nice landscapes in amongst that lot then?” he said. “Some pretty sunsets, maybe?”
“Not on your life.” Coulter shook his head. “But we did find Geordie Sue.”
“Aha.” Fielder turned his gimlet eye over the proffered print. The DI had only arrived at Notting Hill this New Year and had done little to endear himself since. Unlike his predecessor, Wally Palmer, who had worked the district man and boy, Fielder appeared to be a careerist copper who had never worn down a pair of soles in his life. On the contrary, his shoes were always polished and he liked to go about in a Gannex car coat like Harold Wilson, which only added to the general feeling of suspicion about him. But here was a chance for him to change that perception.
“We're getting a blow-up done of her friend here's face to circulate, think she's likely to be local,” Coulter explained. “See if we can't pick her up and ask her in for a chat.”
“Good,” said Fielder, chewing on the end of his pipe as his mind whirred. “We're going to need more than we've got here to stop Tidsall making bail. I've got a feeling there's something left behind in that studio. The negatives for instance — how come there weren't more of them? Is he hiding them or destroying them? And if he's such an artist, why would he want to do that?”
“If he's such an artist,” said Pete, “what does he do for his proper living?”
Fielder snapped his fingers. “That's it. Go back and see if you can't find his books. If we can't get the bugger for obscenity, maybe we can get him for some kind of tax dodge.” The gaffer's face lit up. “Like Al Capone.”
Pink streaks of dawn were spreading above the chimney pots by the time Pete and Coulter returned from the flat on Westbourne Grove. They'd found what they were looking for under Ernie's spartan single bed, in the little bedsitter room that adjoined the studio and darkroom. A box of ledgers going back ten years or so. They'd had another search for any more negatives, been through every book on his shelves just in case, but there was nothing to find. Ernie tidied up after himself.
His books, written in that same minuscule hand, revealed only the income and expenditure of a legitimate photographer. Neatly spaced columns showing the bills for rates, utilities, materials, stationery, telephone. Income from The Kensington Post, Reuters News Agency, the occasional national newspaper, commissions to take wedding photographs. Brown envelopes stuffed with receipts matched the entries in each column, including letters of thanks from the fathers of several brides.
Outside, the morning shift started taking parade.
“Damn it.” Fielder's enthusiasm was dimming in the cold light of morning, as he stood over a pile of paperwork every bit as unyielding as the prisoner downstairs. “We can't prove anything from this. We can ask the Yard to look into him, get the Revenue to do a check, but as for now…” He stared with watery eyes at the clock on the wall.
“Willcox, come with me to the magistrate's. Coulter, Bradley, clear this lot up and have it sent to Scotland Yard.”
He shrugged himself into his Gannex. Dick, who had been nodding off in a corner, made a moaning noise as he got to his feet, stretched and tried to smooth down his crumpled shirt and readjust his tie. He looked sorely disappointed. All of them felt it, like the ash in their mouths and the hollowness in their stomachs. So near and yet so bloody far.
“I'll go to the canteen,” said Coulter, “get us some tea and a bacon sandwich.”
Pete nodded. A weariness was in his bones but his mind was still racing. Alone in the CID room, he found his fingers tapping out an old jazz rhythm on the tabletop, ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Louis Prima. His fingers danced across the scarred wood towards one of the legers, Ernie's cashbook for the tax year of 1959-60. The dates blinked to him like beacons as he picked up the book.
The song played louder in his head, drums beating a heady tattoo, brass and Benny Goodman's clarinet swirling. His finger ran down the back inside cover of the ledger. Felt a ridge underneath where the paper was glued to the cardboard back of the book. Frowned and flipped the book open, put it on the table, kneeled down so he could look at it flat, gently touching the surface again.
The two back pages had been glued down over the back cover. Very neatly, if his fingers hadn't told him, he might have missed it just by looking.
He pulled out the drawer underneath the table, rummaged around for a scalpel. Remembered just in time to put on a pair of gloves before slipping the blade underneath the glued pages, carefully guiding it along the edge of the card it was stuck to. Turned the book around and slid the blade under the next side and the next. Delicately lifted up the pages with the edge of it.
Taped down to the back of the book, neatly folded into a sheet of tracing paper was a single frame of negative.
Pete held it up to the light. It was a woman standing between two men, he could see that much. Looked to be wearing a party frock, her consorts in suits and ties.
“What have you got there?” Coulter at the door with the breakfast tray.
“One of Ernie's missing negs.” Pete's heart was hammering now, a woozy rush of adrenalin against the sleepless night. He could smell the bacon and his stomach lurched. “Hidden in the back of this cashbook. Bloody hell.” He grabbed one of the teas off Coulter's tray, gulped down the hot, sweet liquid. “I've got to get this down the lab.”
He reached for his coat as Coulter squinted at the frame.
“This doesn't look like filth,” he said. “What would he be hiding this for?”
“Precisely.” Pete took another gulp of the tea and snatched up the bacon sandwich. “Thanks for this Stan, but I've got to go.”
Out the door and running, running against time.
There it was in black and white. Three faces smiling up at them: two white, one black, all of them dressed in their party finery. Two dead, one still out there in Powis Square, or somewhere very close to it.
“Well I'll be blowed,” said Pete.
“Isn't that the singer chap?” Fielder's brow furrowed as he leaned over the print, stabbing a finger towards the wonky grin of Simon Fitzgerald. “One who offed himself last year with a load of sleeping pills? Wife was a bit of a fan of his. Can't think why.”
“I know who that is.” Coulter's finger hovered over the black face. “George ‘Lucky’ Steadman, Jamaican, fairly handy light middleweight, handier still at poncing. Nicked him for that a few times, not to mention stealing, dealing, card-sharping and fighting – and that's just off the top of my head.”
“And I know who she is.” Pete pointed to the girl in the middle of them. “She is, or was Roberta ‘Bobby’ Clarke. The first of them.”
“The first of them?” Fielder repeated, not following.
“The first of the Thames-side Murders, sir, June 1959, Duke's Meadows in Chiswick.” Shivers down the backbone. Ernie had been granted bail in the hours between Pete leaving the station and coming back with the print. “This is a connection between her and Houghton; this could be the proof that it is the same killer. Why else would Ernie be hiding it?”
He was pretty sure he recognised where it had been taken too. Teddy Hills’ club.
“Jesus Christ!” Fielder snapped. “Blasted bloody solicitor. Go back and rearrest him. Better still, I will. Come on, let's go.”
The shabby front door on Westbourne Grove was no longer locked. It stood eerily ajar, a paper pushed through the letterbox, mail lying on the mat untouched. Pete pushed it all the way open with his finger, walked over the threshold, feeling the chill, hearing the silence. Knowing that something wasn't right in here.
Fielder pushed past him, the photograph in his hand. “Mr Tidsall,” he shouted down the empty corridor. “Mr Tidsall, this is the police.”
He bounded up the stairway. Pete and Dick exchanged glances. Shut the front door behind them as they listened to his fruitless search from room to room, slumping into the despondency of what was to come now the chase was over.
“Stella dear, this is Detective Sergeant Stanley Coulter.” Mya came back through the parlour door with a big, slightly crumpled-looking man at her side. He was wearing the sort of saggy brown suit that my pa would have favoured, a trilby hat in his hand and a raincoat over his arm. His head was covered in a thick layer of startling white curls, but it was his eyes that really drew your attention. They were huge, like twin blue moons, and looked as full of sorrow as that spooky old song.
Somehow, he wasn't how I expected a policeman to look – like someone you could trust.
“And Stanley, this is Stella Reade.”
He put his hat down on the table, reached out a big paw of a hand.
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs Reade,” he said, in a voice that rolled with northern vowels and was as surprisingly gentle as his shake. “Please, call me Stanley.”
“Stella,” I said, smiling despite my reservations. I had been back to see Mya a couple of times before she had convinced me that the only way I could make use of my disturbing visions was to tell someone who had the power to do something about it. Now I was less apprehensive about having let her talk me into it. Stanley Coulter was not a man you could easily picture planting bricks on people or winking at homosexuals in public toilets.
We all sat down around the table that had been set for tea with best rosebud china. Mya poured us all a cup, while Stanley passed around the milk jug and the sugar bowl. There was an easy familiarity about the way they smiled at each other that suggested their friendship went back a long way.
Stanley waited until both Mya and I were sipping our teas before he took out his notebook and pen and placed them on the table beside him. Then he lifted his own cup and took a thoughtful taste, nodding his head in approval. Replacing it in its saucer, he turned his big blue eyes on me.
“I'd like to thank you for taking the time to talk to me,” he said. “It's very good of you and I assure you, anything that passes between us in here will remain confidential. That's for our mutual benefit. There's plenty on the force would think me mad if they knew I'd been coming here.” He gave a sad smile. “I'm coming up for retirement this year. Thirty years in the game and the only thing I've really learned is that there's more things in heaven and on earth than I'll ever understand. But Mrs Matheson here has helped me to prove things I would have had no other way of knowing. I'm not overstating the case to tell you that the help she's given me has saved lives, brought terrible men to justice.”
Mya didn't say the words out loud, but as he turned to her and patted her hand, I could hear her thinking them.
“Now,” he looked back at me, the smile fading from his eyes, “this is shaping up to be a very difficult and nasty case. We've no substantial proof that the three women were killed by the same man, it just looks increasingly likely – they were all mixed up in a very dangerous world to begin with. So anything that you can tell me, anything at all, would be very useful.”
“Now dear,” Mya turned to me, “you just tell Stanley what you saw in Spirit. Try and remember everything you can, dear, you don't know which parts could be the most significant.”
She put her hand over mine and I closed my eyes, gathering up all my thoughts.
I didn't stop talking for another hour.
I heard the clock chime. Stanley Coulter stopped, his pen poised in mid-air over his notebook. “Go back to the first one again,” he said. “You said she was thinking about a man she called Baby?”
I nodded. Far from fragmenting, as I had feared it might when I started talking, the memory of Bobby standing on the pavement just outside this room remained crystal clear. “He was her boyfriend but she was fed up with him, I think he had beaten her up a few times. While I was with her, her whole body ached.”
“Did you see what Baby looked like?”
“I think he was a black man. And so was the man she was waiting out here for. The one who didn't come.”
Coulter nodded. “I think I know who this Baby is. If I remember right, he had an alibi at the time, but it won't hurt to go back and talk to him. I've a feeling I also know who the other fella might be. You say you didn't get a name?”
“No.” Bobby's last thoughts went through my mind as if I was watching a film. “But he had a big round face and a gap between his front teeth. Quite a sweet face, really.”
Stanley smiled as he wrote down this detail.
“Now the second one, Bronwyn, she was at a nightclub when she encountered a man she already knew, a man she called The Chopper…”
“Yes.” I shuddered at the thought of that hatchet face, those cruel lips. “He looked horrible, like Mr Punch. He didn't kill her, but he gave her to the men who did.”
Stanley tapped the end of his pen against his pad. “The nightclub is an interesting detail. Ties in with some new evidence.” He jotted down a few more of his thoughts.
“But it doesn't appear with the third one, Susannah Houghton.”
“No, she was definitely running away. The man she was going to meet had promised her a new life, a house in Mortlake…”
“Mortlake,” Stanley said. “Where Bronwyn Evans was buried.”
As we stared at each other, I felt a sickening lurch of fear.
“He tricked her,” my voice came out as a whisper. “There was someone else in the back of his car…”
That dread black shape squirmed through my memory and my cup, which had been sitting innocently beside me on the table, suddenly toppled out of its saucer and over the edge of the table, rolling across the floor until it smashed against the fire grate.
“It's all right Stella.” Mya was immediately at my side, holding my hand, while Stanley leapt up to deal with the mess, his face as white as chalk. As Mya's fingers closed around mine, the vision began to recede and fragment. I no longer felt I was standing in a Shepherd's Bush midnight coming face to face with death, but was looking instead at the shafts of pale April sunshine slanting through the blinds in the parlour of the Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Assembly.
“Sorry,” I said, feeling the beginnings of a migraine start to pluck at my temples.
“Shhh now, you've nothing to be sorry for.” Mya put her hand on my forehead.
“Stanley,” she said, “can you take the cup through to the kitchen, put it in the sink and pour cold water over it. Then come back in here, please.” The way she spoke was quite commanding and he did as he was told. My breath was coming in short gasps, as if I had been running, but while Mya's hand remained on my head, the pain that was threatening subsided, along with the nausea that normally came straight behind.
Stanley came back and sat down in his chair next to mine.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
I nodded, wondering the same thing about him.
“Let's all join hands for a moment,” said Mya. “I'll say a blessing to clear the air.”
We all bowed our heads. “Now may the Lord bless us and keep us,” she began, her tone strong and clear. “May He give us light to guide us, courage to support us and love to unite us. This day and forever more, amen.”
“Amen,” we repeated and sat for a moment with our eyes closed. I opened mine before the detective did and saw a lone tear trickle down his cheek, which he brushed away on the back of his hand as he stood up.
“Well thank you again, Mrs Reade.” His voice was as sombre as his face. “I can see how hard this is for you and I'm sorry for it, I really am.”
“Well, Stanley,” Mya said, “let's all pray that what Stella has seen can help you catch this monster. She has been given the gift for a reason.”
Stanley put his hat on his head, picked up his coat from the back of his chair. “Aye, well,” he said, “I'd best take my leave of you now, there's a lot for me to follow up on here. Thank you again, Mrs Reade, you've been more than helpful. I hope we get to meet again in happier circumstances.”
We shook hands once more and then Mya threaded her arm through his and walked him back to the front door, murmuring something that I couldn't quite catch. A single tear of my own rolled down under my chin as I watched them.
I dreamt about the next one that night.
My white boots crack sharply along the pavement as I walk under the tall trees and smile to myself, thinking about all the money in my white leather handbag, all the easy money me and Ron clipped down the tennis club tonight. A couple of arty types, easy marks, working their way down a bottle of Bells while Ron works away at the tables. Let ’em build up a big pile of chips and then take ’em out on the courts and blow what's left of their brains out through their dicks while my clever fingers work inside their wallets. Send ’em back in and let Ron cash in the rest.
Daft buggers still didn't know what hit them when they staggered out two hours later and a ton lighter. Best graft I ever done since I hooked up with Ron, no more flophouse tricks for me. No more Ernie and his flash, bang wallop, to hell with him, I hope the bogeys closed him down. I've got a new daddy now and the silly old berk thinks he got an even split, don't realise what I do with ’em once I get ’em outside. Still, what he don't know won't hurt him and it keeps me safe and all, keeps me out of the life that did for Sue.
Soon have enough to get out of the Smoke for good, go back up to Lincoln or Stamford, Peterborough or Cambridge, somewhere where no one ever has to know what I been doing these past five years. I'll be showin’ soon and that ain't good for trade.
I put my hand on my stomach as I walk up the steps to my front door. “All for you, babe,” I whisper. “All for you.”
“Tut tut tut, Maggie. Someone's been talking out of line.”
The voice comes from behind me and I almost jump out of my skin, out of my best dogtooth check coat, my keys dropping out of my hands and onto my doorstep.
I turn and he's standing there, at the bottom of the steps, under the plane tree, out of the glow of the streetlamp. Never even saw him as I walked past. A tall, broad man in a sheepskin coat, his hat pulled down low so I can't see his face but his voice so familiar it slices through my nerves like a long sharp dagger to the pit of my stomach, my stomach that is budding with life.
“Don't know what you're on about.” I try to bluff him out, stoop to pick up my keys, knowing I have to get inside, get away from him. But fear makes me scrabble and miss, my fingers not so clever as he comes bounding up the steps. For one second I think I have them and then he snatches my hand up, yanks my arm behind my back so hard it takes my breath away, sends sparks shooting before my eyes and my keys flying into the dark. I open my mouth to scream but his hand closes over it, his hand in a leather glove that smells of damp and death.
“I told you not to be so bloody stupid. I said I'd come for you if you didn't keep it shtum. That bogey pay you to tell him about Ernie, did he?”
His eyeballs are dark holes that bore through mine and he smells of stale sweat and cheap aftershave, a smell that takes me back to a room above a shop in Westbourne Grove, a room all painted white with a big black bed in the middle of it, a room with lights that flash for the photographs of me and Sue and Christ knows who all fucking and sucking and moaning together. The room I never wanted to go back to and thought I'd got rid of, got out of to protect the life that squirms inside my stomach, the life that isn't soiled by that room of lies and lights that flash too bright.
“You love money so much don't you?” he says as he pins me against the door, one leg in front of the other so that I can't even kick him where it hurts, all my tricks deserting me and just red hot fear replacing thought, the banging of my heart like jackhammers roaring in my ears. “Yeah? Well now you're gonna pay it all back…”
He marches me back down the steps and towards a big black car, a long black car under the trees with something moving in the passenger seat and a back door that opens by itself as my knees go weak and he pushes me in, slamming the door behind me.
I look up and she is sitting there.
Geordie Sue with her head at a funny angle, her eyes full of tears, a big black handbag on her lap lying open and a photograph of her daughter Cheryl fallen out onto the leather between us.
I stare at her and I know that I am done for, a kick inside my stomach and my bladder starts to empty all over the black leather seat. The engine starts up behind the wood partition that stops me from seeing who or what was on the passenger seat and a strange music starts with it, like a fairground organ being played under water, the scream of a cat and the car starts moving off.
Warm on the wet leather seat with my hand on my stomach and now you will never be mine, you will never be at all, all the money in the world can't help us now.
I woke up in a bed that was much too warm, the sheets all tangled around me.
For once I could be glad that Toby was still in America, that he hadn't witnessed me wetting our bed in the fear of that vision, the most terrible one yet.
Searching for her in Powis Square, along the speakeasies of Westbourne Park Road, up through the back streets of Moorhouse Road and Artesian Road, over Westbourne Grove and into Bayswater. Moving through a warren of mews, each with its own olde worlde pub adorned with hanging baskets, where shiv boys and toms shared their counter space with retired majors and red-faced Norfolk farmers. Stop-checking the cars that cruised past Hyde Park at a less-than-purposeful pace, shining a flashlight into the backseats of parked vehicles. Wearing out leather walking up and down sets of stairs in the flophouses and fleapit hotels that made up the trade of Leinster Square. All the twilight places you would expect to find a working girl.
It had only come to Pete days later, as he walked back home past the construction site for the new flyover behind Ladbroke Grove. They had been so busy searching for Ernie and the coloured lass, his own thoughts so wrapped up in the photograph of Bobby and Simon Fitzgerald, that he had forgotten perhaps the most important thing.
The girl who had led them to Ernie.
When he tried to describe her to the brasses who would talk to him in those dodgy pubs or at the late night coffee stands, they wrinkled their noses and averted their eyes. Receptionists in the grim hotels of Leinster Square, where so many rooms were rented by the hour, were most adamant they had never had anyone of her description staying on their premises. Undercover WPCs got no further eliciting the confidences of a nervous and distrustful community. She had vanished, as completely as Ernie.
They had found no traces of a bank book nor a passport inside the smudger's deserted flat, so it was widely assumed he had left the country, was smart enough to prepare contingency plans should he ever get busted. Fielding brooded on his missed opportunity, used his influence to take out an APB and spent his days haranguing people on the telephone. But there hadn't been any sightings of a man matching Ernie's description taking a boat, train or aeroplane out of the country. His bank account, now being inspected by Her Majesty's Inland Revenue at Fielding's behest, reported no activity in his account either. They kept the flat under obs but it remained defiantly dark, lights out and no one coming in. It was as if all the subterranean trade of Bayswater knew at once the place had suddenly become radioactive.
Anxious days and haunted nights; and all the while Joan's stomach growing, a glow about her illuminating her face as she had brightened up the house. She was counting the days – only a month to go. Pete tried to shut out the dead girls when he returned home, tried to reach back to that summer's morning on Hunstanton cliffs and savour the joy of impending fatherhood with his wife.
But fear hovered over him, like the tall cranes that massed around the demolished remains of Rillington Place, old ghosts exorcised and concreted over, a vast gravestone of a motorway to rise over the horror, diverting traffic away.
When he shut his eyes each time he went to bed, a snapshot was burned against his retina: Bobby Clarke and Simon Fitzgerald smiling back at him. Bobby Clarke and Simon Fitzgerald in front of the bar at Teddy Hills’ club. He had to find the blonde again before she joined them.
But no one had seen her on the street.
No one saw her go into the water either.
Thirty-five days after Geordie Sue surfaced on the Upper Mall, the dawn of Tuesday April 8 broke over the naked body of a woman, beached among the refuse on the mud flats revealed by high tide at Corney Reach. A police boat caught sight of her first. For the past month, patrols had been incessantly scouring the banks of the river, on the land and from the Thames, going over the places where the bodies had been found – Mortlake and the area around Gobbler's Gulch. Searching for something they must have missed, some clue that would let anything about these crimes make sense – but still the killer had managed to laugh in their faces, to deliver a new victim right under their noses.
No one wanted to identify her either. She lay in the morgue for a week without a name to go with her empty face or the tattoo on her right arm, a gravestone in the shape of a cross and the words: John in Memory inscribed underneath it. The autopsy revealed she had died from drowning but not whether this had been before or after she was dropped into the Thames. She had been dead for several days and the savage wound on her chest had been caused post-mortem, probably from a passing boat's propeller. She was also four months pregnant.
Which explained why she looked had looked so much better fed and more bonny. She had been glowing with child too.
Only when the £12 10s rent went uncollected from her landlady in Denbigh Road, did they find a reluctant witness to her identification. The blonde was Margaret Rose Stephenson, aged 26, originally from Lincolnshire, from a part of the Fens close to Joan's home village.
“Blow me,” said Joan when she read it in the paper. “That's not ten miles away from where I was born.” She leant over to study the photograph, one hand protectively over her stomach as if shielding the unborn infant from what was waiting out in the world. “I don't think I know her though.” Joan's brow furrowed. She was two years younger than Margaret Rose and when you saw the picture of her the papers had dug out, as a hopeful-looking nineteen-year-old, you could see a kind of local resemblance in the roundness of her face and the snub nose, an honest, open, country face. Pete tried to remember if the blonde had had cornflower blue eyes too, but he couldn't. He could only see her in the darkness, half lit by the yellow glow of the coffee stand.
“Poor thing.” Joan's voice softened and she shook her head.
They had kept from the press the detail about the pregnancy. One of the theories the cops at Shepherd's Bush had come up with was that the girls could have been killed by botched illegal abortions, but the officers there didn't want anyone's feathers ruffled until they could get a proper inside line on who was behind them. Pete thought the idea was way off the mark, but he was glad that Joan had been spared that detail.
“Ten miles,” he said, leaning down to kiss her goodbye. “By heck.”
Joan looked up at him, sadness and worry clouding the cornflower blue. “Be careful, love,” she said. “Don't take this too personal because of where she's from. She can't have been very much like me really, can she?”
Pete smiled and shook his head. Joan didn't know that he had met Margaret Rose Stephenson before, nor that he could possibly have prevented her death, but she knew the way his mind worked all right. And she was right. The dead woman wasn't very much like Joan at all. Her life had been neither honest nor open, which explained why the hoteliers of Leinster Square were so reluctant to recall her and why she was anathema to the other working girls.
With their ever-open chequebooks, the press unearthed stories faster than the police could from the tight-lipped toms of W2. It seemed they knew plenty about Margaret Rose, who was also known as Sheila Dunn, Janey Reid or Rose Dunhill, and was quite happy to lend her name to others in order to further muddy her true identity.
Their stories told of how the high-minded Margaret didn't like to perform for her money. Instead she had a neat alternative, hiring rooms by the hour wherever there was a receptionist with a sympathetic ear. The scam went two ways – she would either tell the john to wash himself in the sink before their tryst, or else promise she was going to do something ‘different’ for him and begin running a bath in the room next door. Whichever trick she used, he would be out of his clothes first, enabling Margaret Rose to grab his wallet and slam the door, locking it behind her as she fled.
If the john was angry enough to complain to the receptionist, who had by then received her cut, then the smiling clerk would inevitably ask if he wanted her to call the police. His rage would at once become as impotent as his hopes of a sneaky leg-over had been.
Thorny Rose was also said to have dabbled in blackmail – possibly with the help of Ernie, a subject that kept Fielding up at nights and Pete along with him. If ever she actually did undress for one of her hapless pick-ups, it would only be because she had a photographer waiting in the next room with a loaded camera. Then blushing Rose would pretend to be just as shocked as her prey, when presenting the mark with a contact sheet and telling him how much the snapper wanted for the negatives. That way she could charge double on every trick.
She had boasted about it all quite freely and it had made the other girls hate her. Which gave the newspapers something quite different from the previous three mysteries to work with. A girl the whole country could learn to hate too.
A girl who was asking for trouble.
Meanwhile, Shepherd's Bush had been through the contents of her flat. They had found a name in a diary that they were anxious to put a face to. Someone called ‘Sexy Ron’, no surname, no telephone number. Possibly a boyfriend, possibly and more interestingly, one of her consorts in blackmail. A timid neighbour had admitted to hearing a row late on the Friday night before her body was discovered, Margaret Rose and a man telling her not to be “so bloody stupid”. Maybe he was Sexy Ron. Maybe he was the killer.
Whatever he was, the tedious job of making door-to-door calls to anyone called Ronald who had any previous was something that had been taking up much of Pete and Dick's time recently. Four Rons into their shift and not one of them under fifty, they were taking their time over tea and buns in the canteen, putting off the fifth Ron, an inhabitant of Lancaster Road who had been given a caution for drunken disorder in 1947, as long as they possibly could. It was there that Tom Spinks found them, eking out a final cigarette over the remains of The Kensington Post.
“Desk Sergeant asked me to look for you,” he said. “You don't know where the gaffer is by any chance?”
“No,” said Dick folding down the top of the racing pages and exhaling a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “We ain't seen him, not that we've been looking. He's probably out at some top brass lunch in Mayfair.”
“We're only talking to fellers called Ron today anyway,” said Pete, looking up from the boxing. “Gaffer's orders.”
“Well then, you'd better come,” said Spinks. “There's a bloke at the front desk called Ronald McSweeney. Wants to confess to the murder of Margaret Rose Stephenson.”
The music is just the way I like it. Loud bebop jazz played by a trio from the States, a big fat spade on the bass, a dark-haired Jew at the keyboard and another hep negro, tall and thin, with shades like Ray Charles and a goatee beard, blowing his guts out through his horn. They're all sweating and shaking under the lights and I'm shaking my arse right along with them, grinding my black leather boots down into the floor, knowing I'm looking good in my tight black sweater and pencil skirt, the figure that rode the flying trapeze in Blackpool still supple and lithe. Here in the smoky basements of Westbourne Park Road I can become myself, all my French blood singing to that wild slapping bass, that hot, hectic trumpet, the voodoo rhythm of the drums. Oh yes, once you get down with the brothers there's no going back to whitey. These boys know how to smile and dance, they have better food, better music, sharper clothes…
I shudder as he hits the top note, an unwelcome thought corkscrewing through my brain, a memory of what life was like before I found my way to Ladbroke Grove. Another thing I like about the spades, they don't go in for any of that kinky shit, just a straight screw does them fine. Even talk to you afterwards, let them share your problems, treat you like a human being, not just a piece of meat to be bought and sold.
The tall negro on the podium in front of me swoops down into a bow as the applause reverberates through the room, cut through with whoops of approval. I try to catch his eye as he takes out a handkerchief from his breast pocket, wipes his brow. An itch inside me that needs to be scratched, that those long, long fingers could find. But he spins round, gives a nod to the bassplayer and they start into a new tune, a rhapsody in red for The Blue Parrot Club. I give myself up to it, whirl round in a circle and as I do, I catch the eye of another, weaving his way through the tightly packed bodies towards me.
I frown and look around me, the drums pounding loud in my ears like they're sending me a warning, a prickle down my spine despite the heat of the room. Me, he is looking at me from under the rim of his hat, I know this man and he knows me, put my circus skills to good use when I first came to town. I dance away from him, duck and weave through the bodies, making my way towards the Ladies. Step inside, trip through the women leaning over the sink to put their lipstick on in front of the mirror, and lock myself in the one cubicle that has a catch that works. I pull out a reefer from my black plastic handbag, my fingers shaking as I light it up, lean back against the door.
What's he doing here? What's he want from me?
That bad memory catches the corner of my brain again, a man whose teeth are too bright, whose hair is too slick, whose fingers are too small, a white man in a white house a blonde wig in his hands, a long, blonde wig …
The drums pounding through the walls, louder and louder.
Hammering on the toilet door. “Ain't you finished in there? Come on, I'm bursting, gonna wet myself in a minute, you don't hurry up.”
Take another drag and everything swirls as I lurch forwards, a feeling of nausea not from the smoke but from that memory that I bat away to the back of my mind, unlock the door and let the grumpy little tart push past me, steady myself on the sink as she slams the cubicle door, still squawking her complaints like a chicken.
Look at my face in the mirror, my black hair up in a chignon, my straight nose and my dark eyes, my French eyes from my father, a steward in the Free French Navy. Hear the drums beat out a warning: Get out of the room, get out of the room…
Duck my head through the door of the Ladies, can't see the man with the hat, just Shorty lounging against the wall. One of my regulars, sturdy little Bajan in a snap brim hat, swaps sweet times for sweeter smokes, flashes me a smile and I know I can trust him.
“Do me a favour?” I say, thrusting my handbag at him. “Look after this for me for a minute…”
“Sure t’ing sweet’eart,” he drawls, giving me a quizzical look as he slides it under his arm.
“Just need to step outside for a while.” I tip him a wink and he nods knowingly, puts his finger up to the side of his nose.
Don't want that man to know what's in my handbag. Come back for it later, just get out of the room…
My eyes sweep around as I head for the cloakroom, paranoid now, my blood pumping in time to the voodoo drums. Still can't see him as I put on my brown coat with the black leather collar, feel for the coins I have left in my pocket, a plan starting to form in my head as I run up the steps past the doorman, out onto Westbourne Park Road.
Head for the Globe and find one of the big boys to protect me.
My black leather boots clatter down Powis Terrace, the same beat as the drums that I still hear pounding through my brain, the tall negro blowing the high note out of his horn…
Reach the corner and stop. The Globe right in front of me but my eyes drawn to the right of it, to where a long black car is parked outside my house, to where my front door is open, an orange glow spilling out from the hallway. All the music suddenly stops as my eyes are drawn up to the window of my flat, another orange glow up there even though I turned the light off and locked the door before I came out tonight, my keys still in my handbag that I left with Shorty.
All thoughts of the Globe and my plan drain out of my mind, replaced by a static hum and somehow my body is no longer my own as I walk towards my front door, as if compelled by a magnetic force to step through into the hallway and up the stairs ahead, not even shutting the front door behind me.
Another type of music starting up as I climb the steps to my room, a pop record I have heard in a coffee bar and never liked, an echoing guitar and a man's voice swathed in reverb, getting louder and louder as I approach the door to my room… The door to my room that is open and as I stand on the threshold and look inside I see him standing by the kitchenette counter, a cup in his hand, see him with his hat pulled down low and then something else, something in the corner of my vision, a black shape moving…
Feet running, loud up the steps outside, and then the front door slammed and I hit the bed like I had dropped from the ceiling, my eyes open in the brightness of our bedroom, the lights all on and my heart beating like the pounding of drums. For a second I thought the girl with the black hair had come running back up Powis Terrace and into our house.
The room lurched as I sat up, stars dancing in front of my eyes, a magazine sliding off my chest and onto the floor. I must have fallen asleep reading it as I was still fully dressed apart from my shoes, which I'd kicked off before. The fear pounding through my veins was so sharp I felt like my hair must be standing on end and it was only as my vision cleared, to the sound of pans being clattered around in the kitchen below, that I realised it was only Toby down there, back from a meeting with clients at last.
I looked at the clock. It was 2am. A wave of panic swept through me. The girl with the black hair was just around the corner. I had to do something. I had to help her.
I slid off the bed. My legs felt like lead, my head was thick with sleep and disorientation, as if I was completely drunk.
“Shoes,” I said aloud, trying to locate them. As my head turned, my vision blurred again for a second, streaks of white light across the side of my pupils. Then I made out the errant footwear poking out from under the bed, reached out and picked them up. But I couldn't seem to get them back on, I kept falling backwards onto the mattress every time I tried.
“This is stupid!” I cried out. “I've got to help her!”
Abandoning the shoes, I moved towards the door, only to find I couldn't seem to walk in a straight line either, banging my hips against the wall and then the doorframe as I tried manoeuvre. I made it as far as the top of the stairs and then stood there, swaying against the banister, hideous vertigo rooting me to the spot the moment I looked down.
“Darling?” Toby's face appeared in the hall underneath me, his brow crinkling into a frown as he looked at me swaying there. “What's wrong?”
“We've got to help her,” I said, tears springing into my eyes as terror prevented my legs from moving. “But I can't… I can't…” I thought I was going to topple over, pitch headlong down towards him and Toby must have had the same idea, as he started running up the stairs towards me.
I sank down to my knees. “I can't… I can't…” was all I could say.
Toby put his arms around me, pulled me away from the stairs and back into the bedroom. His eyes were wide with fright and his breath heavy with alcohol.
“What is it darling, what's wrong? Have you had a bad dream?”
I stared at him. Had he guessed? Did he realise? Would he help me to help her?
“Toby.” My voice was little more than a whisper. “Please. Go outside, to the end of the street. If there's a big black car parked outside the house on the corner by the Globe, come back and call the police.”
“What?” His expression shifted slightly, from worry into incredulity.
“Please,” it came out louder this time, “please just do it. Somebody's being murdered at the end of our street, we've got to help her, Toby!”
Now he looked worried again. He stood up, glanced from me to the door, uncertain of what he should really be doing.
“If the car is there you have to call Notting Hill police,” I stumbled on, twisting the counterpane round my fists in frustration, “ask for Detective Sergeant Stanley Coulter and tell him there's another one happening right now. He knows me, he'll believe me!”
Toby opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it and instead made for the door. I heard him run downstairs and then out of the front door.
I drew my legs up around me, shivering uncontrollably. I had let it all out now. But I had to, I had to try and help her, to stop this…
Toby's footsteps echoed down the empty road and came to a stop.
I heard him turn and walk back slowly. With every step, the knot in my stomach grew tighter and tighter. He slammed the front door, turning the locks behind him and then came back up the stairs, leant against the doorframe of the bedroom, staring at me aghast.
“Darling,” he said very quietly, in a tone of strained patience you might use on a child. “There was absolutely nothing there. You must have been having a nightmare, it wasn't real. Have you been drinking?”
“Oh God,” I said, bile rising in my throat. “I think I'm going to be sick.”
He put a hand up to his forehead as I ran into the bathroom. And all I could think of as I heaved and retched was that look in his eyes.
All my worst fears coming true because I couldn't control myself this time, couldn't close the gap between the worlds fast enough.
He was still standing there like that when I came back.
“Stella,” he eventually said, a quaver in his voice now. “You're not…”
He dropped his hand down and his eyes were red.
Dimly, I tried to think. Was it possible? The last night before he had gone to the States we had… But no, I'd had my period since then. And since he'd come back, well we hadn't… His jetlag, he said… His drinking more likely…
He closed his eyes for a moment, a moment that looked like a sigh of relief.
“Ah,” he said, opening them, blinking. “Well, I was just thinking,” he moved towards me, patted me on the shoulder, “you know, being sick, having nightmares…It would have made sense, don't you think?”
“I'm sorry, Toby,” I said. “But nothing seems to make very much sense to me at the moment.”
He flinched, ever so slightly.
“Oh well,” he said, “perhaps you'd better try to get to sleep now.” His mouth twitched upwards into a grim approximation of a smile. “I'll come and join you in a moment, I was just making some supper. Lots of drinks tonight, but they didn't do much in the way of food, you see, I was pretty much starving when I came in. If you don't mind…”
“Fine,” I said, rolling away from him, my face burning with fear and shame. “Do what you like.” I stared at his reflection in the dressing table mirror as he rubbed at his eyes and then turned to walk away.
She must have had a funny definition of ‘sexy’ must Margaret Rose. For the little man sitting in the interview room was only about five foot two, his scuffed shoes barely reaching the floor as he swung them backwards and forwards in a state of high agitation. Up close he looked around sixty, a shock of grey hair rising up from a furrowed forehead, dark little eyes moving fretfully underneath bushy white eyebrows, tiny hands ripping a cigarette packet to pieces. Dressed in a bottle-green worsted suit with a brown cardigan buttoned up underneath it, nicotine-stained teeth and wiry grey hair curling out of his nostrils. Bits of dried egg down his front. About as far away from being desirable to a 26-year-old con-woman as you could possibly imagine.
But Sexy Ron McSweeney, reeking of a night's sweated-out whisky, couldn't wait to tell them how he was the murderer. He jumped to his feet as they walked through the door. “At last,” he shouted, “oh my Godfathers, at last. It was me what done her officers, I've got to get it off my conscience, I can't bear thinking about it no more.”
“Steady, Mr McSweeney,” said Pete. “Let's just take some details off you first.”
Sexy Ron looked at them bewildered. “But don't you want to get this over with? I can take you to the spot, to the exact spot where I done her.”
“We just have to confirm that you are who you say you are first,” said Dick. “If you don't mind sitting back down, this shouldn't take too long.”
McSweeney did as he was told, but hesitantly, perhaps reading from the sceptical expressions behind the two detectives’ arched eyebrows and half smiles that they were about to make him sweat some more.
By the time DI Fielder had got back from wherever it was he had been to join them, Pete and Dick had ascertained that Ronald George McSweeney, born 1908 in Preston, former Royal Navy and merchant seaman who had gone ashore for good in the London of 1950, was currently the live-in caretaker at the Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club. But far from upholding the genteel standards expected of his post, McSweeney had been living a double life, opening the bar again after the regular patrons had gone home and ushering in instead an entirely different class of night owl. Gamblers, bookmakers, gangsters and of course, brasses, formed the core of his illicit clientele and this was how he had come to meet Margaret Rose, who helped to supply him with suitably flush and inebriated marks to play poker with.
He couldn't remember how the argument started, he said. He knew it was because he was under pressure – he had been caught trying to steal a hearing aid in the West End and was due to stand trial for it at Marylebone Magistrate's. He'd been advised that he would probably get away with a fine, it being his first offence and all, but the very idea of going to court had shaken him to his core, triggered a bout of heavy drinking unknown since his landlubber days began. When Margaret Rose started to get unreasonable about her cut of the night's takings, money that he would no doubt be needing himself shortly, if he wasn't going to get sent to jail, he simply lost his temper.
“I made up some old spiel about us having to visit a mate in a pub in Chiswick to get some gelt he owed me to pay her off,” McSweeney told them. “It was just so as I could get her somewhere I knew we couldn't be seen, somewhere I could get rid of her quickly. We was down by the water there and I must have put my hands around her throat or something, ’cos stand on me, I looked down the next minute and there she was, dead. The thing is, they teach you these things in the Forces,” he said, his eyes drifting away, “I didn't know me own strength.”
Fielding didn't greet their news with much enthusiasm. McSweeney was in the cells by then, still pacing about, desperate to show them to the murder spot.
“Just the Stephenson girl,” Fielding said for the fifth time, “that was all he copped to. Not Clarke, Evans or Houghton. No mention of any of them.”
“No sir,” said Pete. “The thing is, he's in such an agitated state I don't think he's thinking properly. He can only focus on telling us about Stephenson, not that he can remember actually killing her. Says one minute she was alive, the next minute she was dead at his feet, so he presumed the worst.”
“Did what any self-respecting strangler would do in his position,” said Dick. “Stripped her, rolled her in the river, took her clothes home and burned them.”
“He didn't happen to tell you where he spent last night, did he?” Fielding asked wearily.
“Getting pissed in the Princess Alexandra,” said Dick, checking his notebook. “The landlord sold him another bottle to take to bed and said he was helped away by some mate of his he was drinking with.”
“He couldn't face reading another story about poor Margaret Rose in the newspapers,” added Pete. “And the drinking couldn't help him to forget.”
“Right,” said Fielding, striking a match and taking it to his pipe. “Then there's not much chance he was out driving round Brentford with a dead body in the back of his car.”
“I don't think he said he had a car, sir…” Dick was still studying his notebook, it took a beat before the words sunk in and he looked up startled. “What did you just say?”
“The reason I've been gone all morning,” said Fielder. “Every senior officer with links to any of the Thames-side murders got the summons. There's been another one. Not in the river this time, she was dumped in a cul-de-sac in Brentford in the early hours of this morning; naked as the day she was born. From what we know so far it looks like she was another tart and it looks like she was strangled.”
“Indeed,” said Fielding. “But as you have just said, a lot of Mr McSweeney's story has already proved to be true. I'm afraid we're going to have to take a little trip with him to Chiswick. Let's hope we can get there before,” he winced at the thought of the latest headlines, “Jack the Stripper strikes again.”
“I just don't get it.” Dick lifted his pint off the counter of the Edinburgh Castle, across the road from the station. “He got the time and place exactly right. How could he know that if he didn't kill her?”
Pete shrugged. “Buggered if I know,” he said.
They had taken McSweeney out in the radio car, let him guide them to the Windmill pub in Chiswick and then retread his route to Corney Steps, where he claimed to have rolled Margaret Rose's body into the Thames. His version of events tied in so tightly with the facts there was nothing they could do but charge him.
“We must have missed something,” Pete added, but he couldn't think what. His brain had all but seized up trying to make sense of the funny little man. If McSweeney had gone to pieces over a stolen hearing aid, how could he be so eager to cop the blame for the blonde, land himself on a murder charge? And what about all that snide money he'd been making at the tennis club? He'd had the wit about him to keep all that from his employees for months on end, but now his nerves were so shot he'd given them all that information on a plate as well. His life was a shambles – but on the subject of Margaret Rose's murder, he was crystal clear.
“And what about this other bird?” Dick said. “Who was she?”
Pete looked past him to where the pub door was opening, a mess of white curls coming through. “I don't know that either,” he said, “but it looks like we might be about to find out.”
Coulter had his notebook in his hand, a purposeful look on his face. “Pete,” he said, “Dick. Pick your brains for a minute?”
They settled themselves in a table in the snug.
“The girl they found this morning,” Coulter said, “was another local. Mathilde Bressant, resident of Talbot Road, the only white woman in a house full of West Indians. Came from Scotland, apparently, but she must have been half French with a name like that.”
“Ooh la la,” said Dick, raising his eyebrows. “That why she had a taste for the exotic?”
“Hmmm, well.” Coulter flicked open his notebook. “This is what I want to ask you about. Mathilde, or Tilly as they called her, was last seen leaving The Blue Parrot Club on Westbourne Park Road about ten to two this morning.”
“The Blue Parrot?” Pete felt a tingle down his spine.
Coulter gave him a knowing look. “That's right. She left her handbag down there with one of the darkies, said she was just stepping out a minute, but she never came back.”
“Isn't that the club where Bobby Clarke's boyfriend was supposed to have been on the night of her murder?” Pete said.
“That's what I'd hoped you'd say,” said Coulter, smiling. “Algernon ‘Baby’ Ferrier and his mate George Steadman, the one in Ernie's photograph with Clarke and Simon Fitzgerald. We need to find them. They used to spend a lot of time at the Blue Parrot, the pair of them, but they've not been seen around in recent years. Which makes me think that some fine copper must have done society a favour and put them behind bars. If that's the case, it'll make them easier to interview. Would you mind giving me a hand checking out their records?”
“’Course,” said Pete, “be a welcome distraction from Sexy Ron McSweeney.”
“Ah yes,” Coulter said, raising his index finger. “To return the favour, let me give you this. I've had a tip-off about one of the fellows Stephenson was playing cards with on the night she died. An artist, no less.” He flicked backwards through his notebook. “Let's see. Oh yes. Bernard Baring is his name. Lives on the top floor of number 24 Powis Square. I would have looked him up myself, but with all of this I've not had the time. Maybe he can tell you a little more about what Stephenson and Sexy Ron were up to.”
“They keep bohemian hours, these artists, don't they?” he said.
“Yeah.” Dick picked up the remains of his pint and drained it. “If we get a move on, we might catch him having breakfast…”
Pete had never seen a place like it. From floor to ceiling, the top floor flat of 24 Powis Square was one great collage of paintings and postcards, pictures ripped from magazines and canvases of what looked to him like children's cartoons. A portrait of General Kitchener pointed his finger towards him, his moustache a forest of flowers with bluebirds flying out of it. Trapeze artists swung off the side of his military cap, a butterfly sat on his nose. JOIN THE CIRCUS was written above his head. It was signed at the bottom: Bernard Baring.
“I take it,” Pete squinted at the signature, “this is one of your own, sir?”
The artist nodded, the peevish expression on his thin face intensifying.
“This what you think of the army, is it?” Pete went on.
“It's satire.” Baring spoke in a condescending public school accent at odds with his scruffy appearance. “That's what Pop Art mainly is. An ironic commentary on our times, using the mediums of popular culture and folk art. But I don't think that's what you've come here to ask me about, is it?”
“No it isn't,” agreed Pete, “I'm just curious as to how good a living you can make out of stuff like this.”
“I do all right.” Baring stared down his pointy nose.
“I quite like this one,” said Dick, staring at a canvas of a racing car with a big target on the side of it. He turned and smiled at the artist. “How much would it cost me?”
Baring didn't bat an eyelid. “Five hundred guineas,” he said.
“Bloody hell.” Dick looked across at Pete. “No wonder he can afford to go throwing it about at the Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club.”
Pete kept his focus on the artist; saw the expression of shock bloom in his eyes as his long thin fingers flew up to his mouth.
“Holland Park Tennis Club?” Baring tried to keep his tone incredulous. “Do I look the athletic type to you?”
“Oh, we know you weren't there to actually play tennis,” said Pete, hardening his gaze. “You were there for the poker. You move in higher circles than we do of course, but surely you realised that was an illegal game?”
“Who said I was playing poker?” Baring's voice went up an octave. “Someone must be spinning you a line, officer.”
“We've got the dealer in custody down the station,” Pete said. “He kept his own sort of visitors’ book and your name was in it.”
This was a line, but it tripped Baring anyway. “Oh my,” he said, fingers fluttering up to his lips again.
“The thing is,” Pete continued, “it's not the gambling we're really interested in. It's the fact that he came into the station this morning claiming to have murdered a prostitute who was running the game with him. The same night that you were there, playing poker with him. Do you recognise her, sir?” He took the mugshot out of his jacket pocket. “You might have been the last person to see her alive.”
Baring's grey eyes widened as he took her in, fear flickering across his sharp face.
“Do you want to sit down and talk about it sir?” said Dick. “Or do you want to come down the factory with us, make sure we're telling the truth?”
Baring sank down onto his Victorian chaise longue, looking like he could do with some smelling salts. Pete let him have a minute to collect himself while he pulled up an armchair to face him. Dick stood where he was, leaning against the doorframe.
“All right, I'll admit that I did see her,” the artist said. “But I was just there to play cards, I don't mess about with common street filth like that. As it was, that horrible little man took me to the cleaners for a hundred pounds.” He shuddered, then dragged his gaze up from the floor to meet Pete's. “She was still there when I left, which would have been about midnight. And I didn't touch her, I assure you.”
“All right,” said Pete. “That horrible little man is called Ronald McSweeney. How did you find out about his card game, sir?”
“I don't know.” Baring shook his head dismissively, looked away again. “I was at a club in Kensington and somebody mentioned it, I can't remember who. I thought I'd just go for a giggle, I was halfway in my cups already. I don't like being taken for a fool,” colour suddenly flushed into his cheeks, “but I was certainly a mug punter that night, wasn't I? I was hoping to forget all about it.”
“Well,” said Pete, “maybe if you can help us out, we can forget you were there as well. I just want to know, if you can recall, how was McSweeney behaving that night? Did he seem at all agitated? Drunk or angry, perhaps?”
Baring shook his head slowly. “Not that I can recall. He seemed perfectly collected to me. Perfectly able to deliver me of a large amount of money with a smile on his face. He couldn't possibly have been drunk.”
The bitterness in his voice was genuine. Pete nodded at Dick, got to his feet.
“If anything else comes back to you,” he said, “call Notting Hill CID. Remember, this is about a murder, sir, not a game of cards.”
Baring nodded, whispered an insincere ‘thank you’, but made no effort to show them out.
“Do you believe him?” asked Dick as they clattered back down the stairs.
“Aye,” said Pete. “He lost his purse all right and he never touched her either, the toffee-nosed sod.”
Pete stood by the front door, looked back up the stairs. “You saw all the pictures he had on his walls. Not one of them was of a woman.”
“He went on treating me like Miss Haversham until it was all in the papers. They printed her address and a quote from one of the investigating officers,” I said. “Detective Sergeant Stanley Coulter. Toby didn't know what to think of me after that. I tried to explain it to him, like you said I should and you were right, you know. We have been married for nearly five years and we shouldn't have any secrets from each other. But I don't know if it was because I'd never told him any of this before or if,” my voice caught in my throat, “if I'd always known he wouldn't understand.”
“Oh Stel,” Jackie caught hold of my hand and squeezed it, “and you've kept this to yourself all this time. Why didn't you say something?”
“I don't know. I guess I was just hoping that once he'd had some time to come to terms with it, he'd accept that it's not because I'm mad or turning into an alcoholic.” I gave a bitter laugh at that thought. “But as I said to you in the first place, most people can't bring themselves to think about death in any way, shape or form. And it's not just that, either…”
“We've just never had a moment, have we?” Jackie said. She was right, this was the first time in nearly two months we had actually managed to be alone together. And that was only because we'd had a rush on and had to work late on some samples. Lenny had left ten minutes before, and as soon as he had, it had all come pouring out of me. The dead girls, Stanley and Toby, what a mess my life was in. Work had been the only thing keeping me sane since that terrible night.
Jackie took a pin out of the side of her mouth and stuck it into the dummy's head.
“Well,” she said, “let's call it a night, we're never going to get this right now, we're too tired, the both of us. Why don't we go for a drink, d’you fancy coming down the club again?”
“I don't know,” I said, “last time we were there, I saw that girl…”
“Oh, don't start thinking like that,” Jackie chided. “It's not your fault, you didn't make it happen – like I said, prozzers go down there the whole time. You can't start thinking like that, love, otherwise you will send yourself round the bend. But, I suppose, it is a bit crowded down there for us to have a decent chat.”
“Would you come back to my place?” I could hear the note of pleading in my voice. Toby was away again, in France this time, and the only thing worse than his empty bottles and withdrawn silences was being alone in that house. Every time I shut my eyes I could hear Mathilde Bressant's footsteps running down the street.
“You could stay the night and then we could come in early in the morning. Maybe we can even puzzle this out,” I put my tape measure round the neck of the dummy wearing the toile that we just couldn't seem to get right, “after a few drinks.”
Jackie nodded. “’Course I will, pet. We'll get some newspapers out and turn them into patterns on your kitchen table, just like our student days.”
“This is the scariest part. When the police got there the next day, her front door was still open. There were two cups sitting by the kettle with coffee granules in them, like she'd just been making them both a nice drink. And there was a record going round on her turntable. Guess who it was?”
Sitting round the kitchen table with cheese on toast, wine and Ella Fitzgerald on the record player, I had somehow found it easier to tell Jackie about the girls than say any more about Toby. Mathilde Bressant had affected me worse than the others, not just because of the proximity of my house to her abduction, or the way Stanley had described her flat to me. It was more the proximity of her life to my own. When I had seen her photo in the paper, looking over her shoulder as if she had never wanted her image to be captured, she looked so beautiful, like the sort of girl who would come into our shop.
Mya had also been upset to discover that Mathilde had once worked at the circus in Blackpool, on the flying trapeze. Maybe it was her French blood, but she was much more of an adventurer than any of the other girls had been, she had a spirit that hadn't been crushed by the things she had done for money. And for the short time I had been with her, I had shared one thing with her entirely – her taste in music.
“That bastard James?” said Jackie.
I nodded. “Got it in one. The latest one from that horrible-looking blond boy, HP Sauce or whatever his name is.”
Jackie curled her upper lip. “James was screwing him and all,” she said. “Broke Lenny's heart all over again.”
“The thing is, though,” I said, “she didn't even like that sort of music. She liked jazz.”
Jackie shuddered. “That is scary,” she said, reaching for the bottle of wine just as the telephone started ringing. “Oh my God.” Jackie withdrew her hand and crossed herself. “I nearly dropped the damn thing. Who's that calling at this time of night?”
I looked up at the clock. The hands were nudging towards eleven.
“It might be my husband,” I speculated. “He doesn't often know what time it is. Excuse me a minute.” I went out into the hall to get it, lifted the receiver with a sense of trepidation.
“Oh Stella darling, you are in!” Jenny's voice came singing down the line. “I thought you might be out somewhere glamorous but I had to give you a try. How are you?”
I was so relieved it was her and not Toby phoning up to say he loved me the only way he did nowadays – when he was pissed and full of remorse – that I started to laugh. “I'm fine, Jenny, how are you?”
“I'm brilliant and you won't believe this, but we're back!”
“Right around the corner from you, my dear, we've just rented a house in Elgin Crescent. Bob's got himself a big production up in Elstree, pots of cash and a little role for yours truly. But I said we couldn't live all the way out there, we had to come back and be near our friends. God I've missed you, Stella. This film lark is all right, but there's no one decent to talk to. No one,” she laughed, “who's ever read anything but a script.”
“I can imagine,” I said, wondering what this Bob would be like, if he was just a sugar daddy like Jackie thought.
“And how's your lovely Toby? And Lenny and Jackie?” Jenny said.
“Toby's away in Paris at the moment,” I said, glad we could leave it at that. “But Lenny's fine and Jackie's here with me now. We're just scheming round the kitchen table like we did when we were students. We're trying to think of something brilliant but at the moment we're stuck.”
“I wish I could join you.” Jenny lowered her voice to a conspiratorial whisper. “Maybe I could help to inspire you. What are you working on?”
“Well,” I said, “we've been looking at all this Italian tailoring the mod boys are wearing and wondering how we can make an equivalent for girls. Only skirt suits somehow look too matronly, too old-fashioned, even in a nice tonic fabric.”
“But that's easy,” said Jenny. “Don't do it with a skirt. Do trousers instead. You know how Jackie always wears men's suits and they look so good on her. Why not dress all of London up like dykes?”
“You're wicked!” I said. “But I love it. Let me go and tell her.”
“Oh but before you do, are you doing anything next Saturday? We thought we'd have a housewarming party, but only if you can all come.”
“I'm sure we can,” I said. “We might even run you up a suit for it.”
“Excellent. Look forward to seeing you then, then.” Jenny rang off.
“What was all that giggling about?” Jackie said as I came back into the kitchen. “Not Toby, I take it?
“It was Jenny,” I told her. “She's moved back to London with her sugar daddy.”
“Well, well, well.” Jackie chuckled. “I must have magicked her up with my voodoo pin.”
“You bloody did as well,” I said. “She's just given us the most brilliant idea…”
“So,” I said, standing on the doorstep of Jenny's new house, “what do you think?”
Both Jackie and I were wearing samples of our new trouser suits. Hers was in black – she could never bring herself to wear much in the way of colour – but mine was done in the tonic fabric I had liked so much, blue shot through with purple.
“Wow!” Jenny herself looked wonderful in a white crochet trapeze dress, her hair falling over her shoulders, her skin the colour of honey. “You look fab, the pair of you. What brilliant mind could have thought of that?”
“Which colour do you like the best?” I asked her.
She cocked her head to one side. “The black is classic,” she considered, “but I love that blue.”
“Just as well, then.” Lenny, who had been standing behind us, took his hands from behind his back and presented her with her own version of the suit I was wearing. “Here you go ducks. Welcome home.”
“Oh thank you.” Jenny was almost tearful as she looked from one of us to the others then attempted to pull us all into one big hug.
“Now come in, come in,” she said. “I can't wait to show you around.”
She led the way down a white-painted hallway with a long Persian runner down the middle of the dark floorboards, into a big, open-plan kitchen that looked out onto a rambling garden beyond. The back door was open and most of her guests seemed to be out there amongst the trees and the hollyhocks that were swaying on the breeze of a warm summer evening. Even the weather had turned out for Jenny; it was the start of a summer as long and hot as the winter had been cold and hard.
“Is Toby not with you?” she asked, hooking the suit over a chair and opening the door of the fridge.
“We've come straight from work,” I said. “So I take it he hasn't arrived yet?” I tried to keep the annoyance from my voice. “Oh well, he did only come back from Paris last night, he probably hasn't sorted himself out yet.”
“You know what men are like,” said Lenny.
Jenny paused for a moment with a bottle of Champagne in her hand. I knew she was trying to discern what I was hiding in my eyes; that Toby hadn't returned until dawn. Somebody must have put him in a cab and helped through the front door, otherwise I don't believe he would even have remembered the luggage that was left neatly lined up in the hallway. I had found him snoring on the sofa, a virtual mirage of booze fumes around him, and left him a note about Jenny's party. All day long I had been hoping against all real hope that the memory of our student days would somehow make him come back to me, turn him back into the Toby I had known then and not the one who so clearly couldn't stand me any more.
“Well,” she said, “we're not waiting for him, are we?”
She popped the cork and poured us all a glass and we toasted her return, then she gave us a tour of the house. It must have just been redecorated, as all the walls were dazzling white and all the floorboards polished. There were Persian rugs in nearly every room, apart from a games room downstairs that had its own bar and pool table, where Bob could entertain his film friends, Jenny said. In all the others were pieces of mahogany furniture and great, gilt-framed mirrors, lots of spider plants and cacti all over the place. But strangely, there were no paintings anywhere, no signs of all that art she had told me she was making in Italy. Just lots of framed posters of all Robert Mannings’ films, and in his study, a whole shelf full of awards and photographs of him and Jenny with their film-star friends.
“It's only the garden that really needs some work,” she said, leading us back out there. It was overgrown; the hollyhocks, cornflower daisies and violets competed with rampant ground elder, buddleia and long grass. But once it must have been laid out by someone who knew what they were doing, as even in its wild state, it looked beguiling.
Mannings himself was standing talking to a group of people I didn't recognise, underneath a willow tree. He was a tall man with dark brown hair going grey at the temples, wearing cream slacks and a pale yellow open-necked shirt that offset his deep tan, the casual attire of the successful, middle-aged filmmaker. As he turned to face us, I noticed how broad his chest and muscular his arms were and wondered if Jenny had, after all, married him for some sort of protection. The house and its contents were proof enough of how much money he must have had, but the smile on his face as he looked at Jenny, which illuminated his dark eyes, Roman nose and the deep laughter lines round his mouth, told me that he had married for love alone. As she leaned over to kiss him, the depth of affection in her own eyes was equally clear to see.
A bumblebee droned past and I followed its course towards a pale pink hollyhock, watched it disappear inside a flower. The sun was setting behind us, casting long shadows across the ragged lawn. I knew that Toby wouldn't be coming.
“Shall I try on the suit, then?” said Jenny, putting her hand on my arm.
I nodded, blinking back the tears that had been forming in my eyes, dragging the corners of my mouth up into a smile.
“Come and help me, then,” she said.
Their bedroom was right at the top of the house; she liked it the best because it had an en suite bathroom. But what she hadn't shown us the first time was that the wardrobe doors actually opened up into a whole other room, her very own dressing room.
Inside were rails of clothes, carefully colour co-ordinated, with matching shoes and handbags all lined up underneath. But what was even more arresting was the portrait of her that hung on the far wall.
“My God,” I said. “It's that gingham dress you were wearing the first time I met you.”
“Good, isn't it?” Jenny smiled. “Dil painted it, back when we were at St Martin's. I'd like to have it up somewhere where everyone can see it, only it makes Bob feel jealous. Silly, isn't it? But then, men are.”
She was waiting for me to say something about Toby, but I couldn't trust myself. Instead I said: “I saw Dave a while back, he seemed very worried about you.”
“Really?” she said lightly. “I can't think why.”
“He told me to tell you that he'd always be there for you, no matter what.”
“God,” said Jenny. “Was he drunk?”
“I don't think so,” I said and we stared at each other in silence for a moment. It was funny, although he had captured a great likeness of her, Dave's portrait looked somehow faded compared to the real Jenny, the way her hair and skin looked so blooming, so full of light… Suddenly it dawned on me.
“Jenny,” the words just fell out of my mouth,“you're pregnant, aren't you?”
A huge grin spread across her face. “Yes I am, that was what I brought you up here to tell you, I wanted you to be the first – well, the second to know. I'm nearly two months gone.” She put her hand over her stomach. “It's going to be a little girl, I know it is. And do you know what? I can't wait to stop this acting lark and just have her all to myself. So there isn't much time for me to fit into your lovely new suit, I'm afraid.”
“But that's wonderful,” I said, unable to stop the tear that now rolled down my cheek. “Congratulations, Jenny.”
She opened her arms and I walked into her embrace. When we parted, there was a brightness in her eyes too.
“Now then,” she said, “come on, let's try it on and then we can go and tell everyone else.”
We must have stayed until about midnight, getting to know Bob and his friends, discussing how the nursery should look. Somehow, in those few hours, I managed to forget about Toby and everything else, to just enjoy the company, the infectiousness of Jenny's good news. Until Jackie started yawning and asked if someone could call her a taxi.
“Come on, ducks,” said Lenny to me. “I'll walk you home.”
Nobody had mentioned Toby's absence beyond Jenny's initial enquiry. I wondered if they were all feeling sorry for me, had an irrational sensation that they knew something more than I did. I tried to shake it off as we walked back down the meandering curve of Elgin Crescent, across Portobello, glimpsing Henekeys up the road, where a new group of art students were no doubt enjoying the decadent nights I'd once known in there. Turned down the square, and crossed Talbot Road, past the Globe nightclub and up Powis Terrace to my front door.
I looked up at the house. There were no lights on.
Lenny looked at me worriedly. “Do you think everything's OK?” he said. “Do you want me to come in with you?”
The sense of dread that had been bearing down on me since we left Jenny's now felt like a lead weight in my heart. I nodded mutely, my hands shaking as I tried to fit my keys into the front door.
He squeezed my hand before he opened the door and I thought about him and James, how he had been made to feel this way too. His warmth gave me a tiny bit of courage.
We walked into the hallway together, turned on the light.
Toby's luggage was still where he had left it.
I put my head through the sitting room door. He had obviously managed to rouse himself from the sofa. Remains of a meal, the carcass of a roast chicken and half a loaf of bread left out on the kitchen table suggested that he had managed to feed himself as well. An empty wine bottle there too, I couldn't help but notice.
“He must have just gone to bed,” I said. “He didn't make it that far when he got in this morning.”
Lenny shook his head. “Do you want me to check? I'm not leaving you here on your own if he's being a bastard.” There was a vehemence to his voice I had never heard before. Jackie must have said something to him, I thought, although I had told her little enough. But after tonight it seemed pointless to pretend that there wasn't a problem, Toby's very absence had made that public, after all.
“It's OK,” I said. “I'll do it. I don't want you to have to see what state he might be in.”
“All right,” said Lenny. “But I'm staying here, just in case.”
Every step up those stairs my feet seemed to get heavier and heavier, and even as my hand rested on the bedroom doorknob, I knew I shouldn't go in there, I knew I wouldn't like what I would see. But something inside me that was stronger than my fear made me open the door anyway.
A shaft of silvery moonlight through the curtains, which hadn't been drawn, illuminated the scene, although at first it was hard to make sense of the tangle of limbs and hair lying in the mess of my marital bed. But once I had managed to decode what I was actually seeing, I was still somehow able to close the door without waking them up, to walk back down the stairs like a zombie to where Lenny was standing in the frame of the kitchen door.
“He's in bed all right,” I told him, “with your old friend Pat.”
A little old man blinking in a barrage of flashbulbs. “I've been a bit silly really,” Ronald McSweeney was telling the man from the BBC, “and I can only say that I'm grateful that the judge took the same view, that there was no evidence against me, and dismissed the case today.”
Standing on the steps of the Chiswick courthouse, he looked like a man freshly woken from a dream and gave a nervous laugh as the assembled pressmen continued to fire their questions at him.
“I've always wanted a quiet life, and that's what I intend from now on. To leave London and go up to the North, somewhere a bit more peaceful.”
“I'll help you move,” said Dick, throwing a scrunched-up paper ball at the TV screen. “With my size tens up your jacksie, you silly old sod.”
Pete stared at the screen, wondering for the millionth time what made McSweeney do it. There was still no answer, but he couldn't shake the feeling he had missed something about this sad, shabby little man, the same thing as he had missed with Ernie.
Who's worse than being arrested?
He got to his feet, shift over and eager to get back home. “Aye,” he said. “He'd best get himself as far away from here as possible if he knows what's good for him.”
The assembled detectives continued to throw paper darts and balls towards the cathode news conveyor, along with choice expletives. Two months, eight thousand interviews and four thousand statements since Mathilde Bressant's body had been found, the final elimination of McSweeney from the Stripper inquiry was no cause for them to celebrate.
For a while, Bressant's corpse had offered some hope of a breakthough, for she had not been clean like the rest of them. She was covered, from head to foot, with metallic paint spray. Black and orange, black and yellow, black and green and more black. In the two days that the coroner estimated she had lain out of view between her death and her discovery, she must have been close to a place where primary and secondary colours, priming, undercoating and finished paintwork were applied by spray. In other words, a garage.
At last they had a location — if they could find the car mechanic's where these colours had been used, they could find the murderer. But how many little one-man operations were there in London? And how many amateur enthusiasts who liked to tinker around with motors? Two months, eight thousand interviews and four thousand statements later, they still hadn't found a colour match in any of the places they had been. It had only served to make their search seem even more impossible.
The senior crime reporter from The News of the World had been moved to help try and flush out the killer by penning him an open letter in a front-page splash that went on for three pages, conjuring a Dickensian vista of London's lowlife, “the sprawling, teeming, vice-ridden jungle” that stretched from Shaftesbury Avenue to Queensway. He taunted the killer for always picking little women, none of them over five foot three. But he hadn't known the detail that disturbed Pete the most about Bressant's body. Four of her front teeth had been broken, one of them wedged halfway down her throat. The coroner couldn't work out how the killer had done it — there were no other marks of violence.
The streetwalkers themselves were now running a sweepstake, from the bar of the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road, on which one of them would be next. Trying to laugh at the shadow of death that stalked their tapping feet. Each one offered the same theory. The killer was local, a man who knew them all, knew who was friends with whom. That he was working off a long-held grudge, playing peek-a-boo with their lives.
In between all the madness though, there had been joy. Joan had given birth to a perfect little boy, Pete's most fervent prayer answered. They had christened him James Edward, after Pete's dad, but most of the time they called him Little Jim. It was him Pete was thinking of as he stepped towards his front door now. He wanted to be able to spend a few hours with the lad before he had to go back out to meet Coulter. For the searches he and the Detective Sergeant had been making on tangential matters had finally begun to bear fruit.
Buried beneath the mountain of official Prostitute Murders paperwork, they had finally found the files on Algernon Ferrier and George Steadman – and what interesting reading they made. The latter was in Wormwood Scrubs, where he had been languishing since being nicked the night of 19 June 1959. The former was today being released from HMP Strangeways after a three-year stretch for living off immoral earnings. Coulter had predicted where Ferrier would go to celebrate his first night of freedom.
They moved through the smoke and the hot bodies pressed together under coloured light bulbs, stooping their heads in a little basement room, the air charged with perfume and sex and the sound of a wild trumpet coming from the tiny stage at the back, where a tall negro, his skin slick with sweat, was blowing out his soul.
Coulter stopped, inclined his head to the right. Pete followed the motion to a booth by the side of the makeshift rostrum. Sitting there was another tall, handsome coloured man, in a powder blue, one-button suit, canary yellow shirt open at the neck and a snap brim hat tilted on the back of his head. Flash of gold tooth and white arm, a skinny little vixen in a red cocktail dress on his lap, wrapped around his shoulders, sticking her tongue into his ear. His hand moving up her thigh as they closed in towards them, rocking together as the drummer powered the tune into delirium.
“Good evening, Algernon,” Coulter's voice breaking the spell. “Thought I'd find you here. And if it isn't little Minnie Brown, too. Does your ma know you're out, Minnie? On a school night too…”
As if an electric current had passed between them, the couple snapped out of their embrace. Little Minnie's eyes flashed up at the detective standing over her, her mouth dropped open into a perfect ‘O’, and faster than a fish could shimmy, she was off her boyfriend's lap and out towards the door.
The negro made a grab for the bottle of rum wobbling on the table in her wake. Looked up, outrage in his eyes like the sudden flare of a match, cooling just as quickly as Coulter got there first, fist closing around the bottle's neck.
“A little word in your shell-like, Ferrier,” he said.
He sat in the interview room with his legs splayed and head down, alternately dragging from his cigarette or spitting on the floor.
“Well, will you get a load of Mr Cool.” Coulter sat down opposite him. “Gets caught breaking his parole within five minutes of coming home and he's not even sweating. Life's been dull without you, Algernon. ”
Ferrier's top lip curled upwards into a sneer.
“Ya gonna charge me with that?” he said and spat on the floor again. “Or we just be talkin’ bullshit all night?”
“That depends,” said Coulter, nodding at the folder tucked under Pete's arm, “on how good your memory is.”
“This should take you back.” Pete put the print of Fitzgerald, Clarke and Steadman down in front of him.
Ferrier ignored it, started whistling between his teeth.
“See, what I've been longing to ask you,” said Coulter, “is what George Steadman was doing out with your woman. That why they call him ‘Lucky’ is it?”
“What you talking about?” Ferrier eyeballed the picture, an expression of shock that he quickly tried to disguise.
“Well, if you cast your mind back, Algernon, it was not long after this photograph was taken that your old lady was found dead by the side of the river in Chiswick,” Coulter said. “The first of the Jack the Stripper murders, they're saying now.”
“And if you'll notice,” Pete added, “the dress she's wearing. It's the same one she was in when she was found. What we've been asking ourselves is, could this have been taken on the same night?”
“Were you present when this photograph was taken?” asked Coulter.
Ferrier narrowed his eyes, dragged hard on his cigarette and exhaled in Coulter's face.
“I don't know nuttin’ about it,” he said. “I ain't never seen it before in my life. What you tryin’ to frame me for here?”
“Well it's like this,” said Coulter. “As my colleague just pointed out, the photograph has only recently come to light as a result of our investigations into the so-called Stripper murders. And while the gentlemen of the press may be keen to make out that these murders are the work of just one man, it's not something we can take for granted, is it? I would say that this picture,” Coulter leaned forwards and tapped his finger on the print, “might suggest a motive for Miss Clarke's murder that has not been considered before. Like here she is, only hours away from her date with death, out on the town with her boyfriend's best pal. People might reasonably ask, where is her old man? Why wasn't he out with them at Teddy Hills’ club in the West End, rubbing shoulders with television star Simon Fitzgerald…”
“God rest his soul,” put in Pete, sitting back on his chair, watching Ferrier's body language subtly change.
“God rest his soul indeed,” nodded Coulter. “There's a lot of death in this picture, don't you think, Algernon? A lot that isn't explained. So, for instance, as I was postulating earlier, if you were present when the photograph was taken, if it was all friends together, there wouldn't be a jealousy motive, would there?”
Ferrier was trying very hard to keep up his macho front, but he had begun sweating as Coulter had been talking, had taken off his hat and begun rubbing his hands through his hair, stopped his spitting on the floor.
“Jealous?” he said and tried to laugh, tried to look incredulous, but a vein started pumping above his left eye. “I ain't jealous of shit. That dress? I bought that for her myself, cost me a whole week's bread. I looked after that girl. She didn't have no complaints.”
“So,” said Pete, lighting himself a Player's and offering one to Coulter, deliberately not extending the courtesy to Ferrier. “You buy her a fancy frock, spend all that money on her, and this is what she does to you.” He caught Ferrier's gaze. “A night on the tiles with George, eh?” Pete shook his head. “Not the sort of night she was getting round here with you, was it? She was wearing your dress and yet it was George who was showing her a good time.”
Ferrier blinked first. Dropped his gaze and shook his head.
“Then you found out about it, didn't you?” Pete went on. “Found out about it and didn't like it. A few hours later, your jealous rage is spent and poor old Bobby's lying dead, that dress you bought for her ripped to bloody pieces. See, I know it is the same dress,” Pete bored into Ferrier with his eyes, shifted his weight forwards as he did, “because I was the one that found her.”
“No, man.” Ferrier leaned backwards, raised up his palms. “You bluffin’ me. You know I didn't do it.” He looked across at Coulter. “I had an alibi, man, I proved it at the time.”
“We didn't have this photo then,” said Coulter. “And not to put too fine a point on it, we know that the coloured community do their best not to co-operate with the police, cooking up alibis for each other when it suits. So I went back over all the notes we had here that pertained to yours.” Coulter pulled out his notebook and flicked it open. “You were at the Blue Parrot Club on Westbourne Park Road, same as you were tonight. Interesting that.” Coulter nodded over to Pete, who on cue, took out his own notebook.
“Meanwhile,” he said, “I did some checking up on old Lucky George. Seems he got arrested in Shepherd's Bush only two nights after Miss Clarke's murder, trying to break into a chemist's. Claimed that he was doing it out of desperation since he couldn't afford the drugs he'd been prescribed for injuries recently sustained in a fight. A pretty professional going over he'd had, as well; they've got it all recorded. The doctor reckoned it must have been someone who really knew how to hurt. A boxer, for instance.”
Pete sat back himself now and watched it all go through Ferrier's mind, watched his face twitch and his eyes flicker as he pictured how this would look in court, how neatly it would fit together in the minds of the undoubtedly all-white jury. The coloured man put his head in his hands.
“It doesn't look good, does it Algernon?” said Coulter. “Now, we've spoken to George,” he bluffed, “and he doesn't want to be dragged back through all of this mess either. So in order to help himself stay out of trouble, he admitted that you beat him up over the girl. On the same night she was murdered.”
“What?” Ferrier's head came up, his eyes shining with outrage. “Oh no, man, he can't have done. He can't have done that to me.”
“Got it all typed up neatly,” Coulter said. “He'll appear in court if he has to. See, we've been putting in a lot of extra hours on this one, but I think it's all been worth it.”
Ferrier slammed his fist down on the desk. “That Judas!” he said, his voice descending an octave. “He lyin’.” He looked at Coulter. “Lyin’ to save his own sorry arse. You know why he in the can now? He in there ’cos he wanna be, ’cos he too scared to be out inna world on his own, the lyin’, theivin’, yellow-bellied motherfucker.”
“He is that, aye,” said Coulter. “But why, Algernon? Why did you beat him up and why did he feel the need to get away so urgently? If he wasn't running from you, then who?”
Ferrier started to say something and then shook his head, stamped his foot. Fear was rising off him like steam, coursing through the room, pumping behind his dilated pupils. He was trapped and he knew it, between the devil of grassing his old mate up or the deep blue sea of a trial for Bobby Clarke's murder.
“He tricked her out,” he eventually mumbled.
“I beg your pardon?” Coulter said. “Can't quite hear you, Algernon.”
“Bobby,” said Ferrier, eyes level with Coulter's now, the whites all yellow and bloodshot, the pupils black as midnight. “George tricked her out that night. He was supposed to be meeting her when she came off work to take her home, but instead, he told some fellas he be drinking with they could take her to a party. Took twenty five pounds off them for the privilege.”
He scowled, still sore at the memory of that lost fortune. Feeling it worse than the loss of Bobby. Icy prickles ran up and down Pete's spine.
“Twenty five quid?” he said. “Who could afford to give him that kind of money?”
Ferrier slowly lifted the index finger of his right hand, his punching hand, stabbed it down on the photograph.
Pete and Coulter exchanged glances. “Let me get this straight,” said Coulter. “Are you telling me that George sold her to the man in this picture here? To Simon Fitzgerald?”
Ferrier leaned towards them, his voice a hiss. “Why’n't you ask him? See wha’ the big man has to say about it now?”
“All right Algernon.” Coulter got to his feet, scraping his chair back loudly. “You're nicked.”
“Wha’?” Ferrier was incredulous. “But I jus’ helped you out, man…”
“No you didn't.’ Coulter loomed over him, his face a thundercloud dripping icy words like rain. “You just made a highly fanciful accusation about a man who can't defend himself in order to try and get yourself off the hook. You're a liar and a ponce, Ferrier, and I don't want you back on the streets turning some silly little schoolgirl into your next Roberta Clarke. Women aren't safe around you and I intend to keep you as far away from them as I possibly can. So I'm arresting you for importuning a minor. That should keep you where I want you until we prepare this case for trial.”
“There's someone here to see you.” Jackie put her head round the door of her spare bedroom, where I had been sleeping for the last week. “He says he wants to explain himself. D’you want me to tell him to sling his hook?”
“Toby?” I stared at her with eyes swollen by seven nights of tears and insomnia.
She nodded, her own eyes glittering with rage.
“No,” I said, picking myself up off the bed where I had been languishing in a spare pair of her pyjamas and an old tartan dressing gown. I knew I looked awful and I wanted him to see it, see what he'd done. “It's about time. I want to hear what he's got to say.”
“All right,” Jackie said and bit her lip. She was leaning across the doorframe like a shield. “Shall I show him into the kitchen then?”
“If you don't mind.” I brushed a strand of hair out of my eyes. “And Jackie,” I said as she made to move away, “is it OK if I do this alone? I'm sorry that it has to be here.”
She grimaced. “No, no,” she said, “’S’all right. I'll make myself scarce, pop over the club for a game of pool. But I'll not be long. And you just ring Gina if you need me, the number's on a card by the phone.”
If my own appearance was that of an emaciated scarecrow, Toby's was worse. When I walked into the kitchen he was staring out of the window, over the rooftops of Chelsea. My heart moved painfully in my chest as he turned around, blond hair flopping over red-rimmed eyes, hollow cheeks and skin the colour of ash. So far away from the first time I had seen him, caught in a shaft of sunlight in the life-drawing room at the Royal, so full of determination and purpose, glittering like a god. Now he looked more an itinerant, an old school blazer over an ancient striped shirt and jeans only held together by the paint stains, the expression on his face so acute in its misery that I actually felt sorry for him.
“Stella,” he whispered, a tear dropping from the edge of his long lashes. “I'm so, so, sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen…” His face crumpled and he began to shake, holding out his arms imploringly. What could I do but walk back into them?
It took a while for both of us to stop. But in the end, I couldn't bear his embrace any more.
“Let's have a cup of tea,” I said. “Try and talk about it.”
He nodded, wiped his eyes with the heels of his hands, sat down unsteadily on one of Jackie's chairs, which was too small to properly accommodate his lanky frame.
I gathered my thoughts about me as I went through the ritual of lighting the gas, warming the pot, scattering the tealeaves. Thinking of Sunday teatimes back in Bloxwich, Ma reading futures in the bottom of the cups, Pa sat by the fire with his pipe and a paper, the ticking of the clock and the purring of the black and white cat at his feet, those last few bittersweet hours together before Monday morning.
I put a cup down in front of him, took my own across to the chair opposite. It wasn't a very big kitchen, with only a little fold-down table that could fit into the space. But somehow, Jackie and I had managed to spend most of our time here rather than any other room, just as I had spent so many lonely hours at Powis Terrace only feeling comfortable in the kitchen.
Toby took a tentative sip and put his cup down on the table in front of him. His eyes roamed across the room and out of the window, anywhere but meeting mine.
“How long,” I asked, “has it been going on?”
He winced, his mouth twisting up and down.
“I tried so hard not to,” he said. “I tried to fight it, really I did, you have to believe me, Stella. I didn't want to give in to it. I wanted to be true to you.” His eyes did flick up to mine then, and he gazed at me imploringly.
“How long, Toby?” The iciness in my voice startled me. That feeling I had had, walking home with Lenny, had actually proved to be correct. The reason he was so angry was because he already suspected something had been going on between Toby and Pat. He knew something about Toby's past that I didn't.
“Only since,” more tears streaked down his face, “we were in the States. It all seemed different there, like it was just a dream that would fade away when I came back home. I was going to put it behind me, honestly I was. But when I got back and you were acting so strangely, I just couldn't handle it…”
“So you used that as an excuse,” I said, “to reject me. I told you my deepest, darkest secrets and you just treated me like the madwoman in the attic so you could run to your boyfriend without feeling guilty.”
“No!” His voice rose up an octave. “It wasn't like that, Stella. I just didn't know what to do, it all seemed so…”
I waved my hand. “Don't bother,” I said. “I was always afraid that you wouldn't understand, that's why I never told you anything about it before. Even though I felt so guilty that I had kept a secret from you. Hilarious, isn't it, you were keeping your own from me long enough.”
“Stella…” He reached his hand across the table, tried to take hold of mine, but I pulled it away. “Please, you've got to believe me. I did, I mean I do still really love you. You were everything to me, encouraging me, standing by me when we had no money, always keeping everything together, the house looking nice, food on the table for all our friends. And you work so hard yourself, you're so talented, I was so proud of you.”
Now it was me who couldn't look at him.
“Why did you marry me in the first place?” I said, my eyes fixed on the kettle and the steam drifting out of the spout.
“Because I loved you. You were the smartest, funniest, most beautiful girl I had ever met. I didn't even know there could be a girl like you. We were so close, weren't we, I felt almost like we could read each other's minds…”
“Ha!” I turned to face him. “But I thought you didn't believe in things like that?”
My humiliation was making me cruel, making me want to hurt him.
He flinched, his voice dropping to a whisper. “I didn't ever say that, Stella.”
“So,” I went on, holding onto the rage so I wouldn't break down, needing to know every painful detail, “you thought that if you married me, you could stop being homosexual?”
“Lenny told me,” I said, “about the heart-to-heart you once had with him about the boy who was in bed with your mother. The real reason why you left home, and, I suppose, were so eager to start the straight life. I always did wonder how I could have been so lucky, that you would propose to me just like that, just when I needed it. It was because you were still trying to get over him, wasn't it?”
Toby shook his head. “No,” he said, “no it wasn't. That was nothing but a stupid schoolboy thing, I had grown out of it a long time before I met you. I never wanted to end up like this, you know. Like my bloody father.” His voice broke and he began to sob.
“Oh,” I said, the full realisation of everything he must have gone through seeping through my consciousness and along with it another wave of pain, of love ruined and hopes dashed. “So that was it.”
The anger all crumbled into ash, into pity for the man who was still my husband, sitting there crying, his whole life in tatters over something he could no more control than I could cut out my communications with the dead.
“The funny thing is,” I reached my hand across to him,“Lenny believed that you'd put it behind you too. He thought you really loved me, that's why he was so angry when he started to hear rumours about you.”
“What does it matter now?” Toby gripped my hand tight. “I'm a bastard and I've ruined everything, just like my father ruined my mother's life. That's why I was so scared, you see, Stella, that night you had the nightmare, or whatever it was. I thought you were turning into a secret alcoholic like Pearl did, and I knew that it was all my fault.”
“That's funny,” I said. “I thought it was you turning into one.”
“I have been, I admit it,” he said. “Trying to block it all out. And even in the end I took the coward's way out, letting you find me like that instead of just coming clean.”
“Well,” I said. “What do we do now?”
“You must come back to the house,” he said. “I'll move out, I'll find somewhere else.”
“No,” I said, “I don't think that's right. You need that space to paint in…”
“God, never mind about that,” Toby said. “It's your home.”
I looked at him, horrified at the thought of it. My home was a haunted house.
“I'm sorry but no,” I said. “I can't go back there.”
He shut his eyes, his own moment of realisation dawning.
“Of course you can't,” he said, letting go of my hand. “Oh God, Stella, what a mess.”
I couldn't think of anything else to say. We sat listening to the clock ticking, the sounds of traffic drifting up from outside. Sunday evening coming down.
“Well,” he finally said, “I suppose you'll be wanting a divorce?”
“I don't know,” I said, his words bringing fresh tears at the thought of the finality of it all. “I hadn't thought about it.”
“I wouldn't contest it,” he said. “But if you were to bring a charge of adultery… If you were to say what happened… If you talked to the press… It would ruin me Stella, I could go to jail, you wouldn't do that to me would you?”
Only now did he start to sound like a child and it turned my blood to ice. Was that the real reason for the grey face, the tears, the offer of the house? Was it all out of self-pity, that he was terrified of the power I could have to destroy his life completely? And did he really think I could do that to him, no matter what he had done to me?
“No I wouldn't,” I said, “and the fact that you even think that I would just goes to show, for all your fancy words about love, you never really knew me at all. I think you'd better go now, Toby.”
“Just go.” I stood up, cutting him off. “I'm not going to get you arrested if that's all you're worried about. You can divorce me for desertion, you can do what the bloody hell you want, just leave me alone.”
He tried to say one more thing, as he stood at the door to Jackie's flat, but I had heard enough. I shut the door in his face.
Jackie let me stay at hers until I found a flat I could afford to rent. Lenny helped me pack up and move. He talked to Toby, made sure the house would be empty while we did it. “You did me a mitzvah,” he told me, “now I'm doing one for you.”
My new lodgings were in Sutherland Place, a quiet road of tall stucco houses and beautiful linden trees, in a mainly Irish enclave that had formed around the St Mary of the Angels church at the top of the road. The landlord rented to art students, he was pretty tolerant and didn't charge much, which was just as well, as I was determined not to take a penny from Toby. We were making enough money from the shop not to have to slum it completely, although it was back to one big room with a kitchenette, the electric on a meter and a tiny bathroom. But my room faced west, with a huge window letting in plenty of light, and somehow the feeling of the place was perfect, far from the oppressive darkness I had come to associate with Powis Terrace. I felt sure I wouldn't be scared to be alone here.
Once we had unloaded, Lenny went to take the van back and go and bring us supper. I felt a sense of calm I hadn't known for a long time as I slowly unpacked, putting out the kitchen things first so that we could eat in relative comfort, making a space on the little, round Formica-topped table. It was a funny thing, I realised – despite all that had happened in Ladbroke Grove, the idea of moving out of the area completely had never crossed my mind. It was still the only place that had ever felt like home.
Here I was determined to make a fresh start.
Lenny came back with some packages, fish and chips and a bottle of ice-cold white wine. It was the second week of July, another warm day hazing into a golden sunset. We opened the big sash window and positioned our chairs so that we could look out across the rooftops and the trees. We were only five streets east of Powis Terrace, but it was a completely different world.
“Mazel tov,” said Lenny, raising his glass. “To your new home. I have to say, you've been very brave about this all. I'm proud of you, girl.”
“Mmm,” I said, the hot, salty chips tasting like the best food in the world. “Well, that's because of you and Jackie. It would have been a lot harder if I didn't have you.”
“I don't know about that,” he said. “I can't help thinking that I let you down. I should have warned you about that Pat, once I got to really know him, I realised he was bad news. All that glitter, but underneath…” He shook his head. “It won't come to a good end, you mark my words.”
“You wouldn't want to know some of the people he's mixed up with,” Lenny said. “Pat likes his highlife high and his lowlife low, believe me. He's in with some right East End rough and they all love him ’cos he's a minor aristocrat. He's like the devil himself, Pat Innes, he turned your Toby's head.”
“Do you really believe that?” I asked. “That Toby wasn't just pretending all the time?”
“I do, dear,” Lenny nodded gravely. “I mean, look, he was surrounded by omis in the art world. All those old queens like Bernard Baring throwing themselves at him the whole time. But he never so much as batted an eyelid. I would tell you if he did.”
“Baring,” I said, narrowing my eyes, wondering if Stanley had paid him a visit yet. It had startled me to see his face pass through the memory of Margaret Rose Stephenson and her last game of cards, but not entirely surprised me. I only wished I knew the man he was playing cards with, the one she managed to rob. But at least it had given Stanley something to go on.
“Frightful old cow,” said Lenny, leaning over to refill my glass. “No, let's not talk about them any more. Let's just think about the good things – like them suits flying off the rails, the cover of Vogue, like Jenny and her baby and your new home. Let the devil take the rest of them.”
I clinked my glass against the side of his. “Mazel tov,” I said.
“Right, well,” said Coulter, coat on and sheaf of paperwork tucked under his arm. “That was a good night's work. Very satisfying to finally put at least one villain in his place. See you at the magistrate's in the morning.”
Leaning against his locker, Pete smiled. He had been more than impressed by how Coulter had turned the tables on Ferrier and all his reasons for doing so. They were both looking forwards to paying George Steadman another visit at the Scrubs the next day.
“It certainly was,” he said. “Good night, Stanley.”
He opened his locker and frowned. There was something in there that hadn't been when he had left the station earlier this evening. A thick, brown envelope.
He picked it up. It was addressed to Detective Sergeant P Bradley, with the street and number of the police station below; and above, underlined, By Hand. The handwriting was all in neat capitals, rendered in black ink.
“Stan?” he said, but Coulter had already gone.
The envelope was bulky but light, a layer of tape securing it shut. As he weighed it up in his palm, Pete had an ominous feeling. Maybe it was better not to open it here. Maybe if he did, he wouldn't make it back home at all.
They had scores of tip-off letters each week, it was probably another nutter or nosy neighbour, he told himself as he walked back down Ladbroke Grove. But even as he thought it, he knew there was something different about this. The elderly, vengeful and insane residents of this parish didn't tend to write By Hand on their envelopes. That was the mark of someone a bit higher up the social scale.
Joan was already asleep by the time he got home, her arm around the dog that lay protectively by her side across their bed. He looked in on Jim, sucking his thumb as he lay in his cot, so tiny and peaceful in his innocence it made Pete's heart contract. He knew that if Joan had given birth to a girl he would have loved her all the same. But the reason he had been lighting so many candles in St Mary's while she was pregnant was to pray that they wouldn't have to bear any of the things that could happen to a little girl in this world.
He dropped a gentle kiss on Jim's forehead, walked into his study. Took out some gloves, a scalpel and an evidence bag from his briefcase. Slid the blade under the tape and opened the package up, tipped it upside down.
A small bundle and a note fell out onto the table. A key, wrapped up in tissue paper, again neatly fastened with tape. And a blank postcard, with the words: Locker 272 Paddington Station typed onto it.
“You were on duty, but you never saw anyone hand this in?” Pete dropped his cigarette and stamped it out before it burnt his fingers; he had smoked it almost down to the quick. Bert Dugdale, the last man on front desk the night before, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, his face the same shade as the contents of an ashtray.
“I must have just nipped to the gents for a moment, or turned my back to look for something,” he said. “And when I came back it was just there. Never saw a dickie bird. Sorry Sarge, but you know what it's like…”
“Maybe it was a magician and he disappeared in a puff of smoke,” said Pete. “Like that fag you were smoking out here. Like you'd better do right now, in fact.”
Pete turned his mind back to the contents of Locker 272, hidden inside exactly the same sort of envelope that the key had come in: the rest of the photographs from the session that had produced the shot of Bobby Clarke, Lucky George and not-so-fortunate Simon.
That particular one was missing and there were no more featuring Bobby and George, but Fitzgerald's outfit, hairstyle and the backdrop of Teddy Hills’ club were exactly the same. In the frames, a lot of people he didn't know, a handful he wished he'd never known and a couple of faces he hadn't seen for a very long time. Not since the days when he studied Tatler & Bystander each week, in fact.
At various tables, all grinning for the camera, were Harold Wesker with Francis Bream and Big Tits Beryl. Bronwyn Evans with Sampson Marks. Simon and Teddy himself, of course, but more surprising than any of them, the handsome face and Dean Martin hairstyle of the man whose firm was currently erecting the enormous flyover, splitting West London in two with a million tons of concrete. Sir Alex Minton beamed out from behind a magnum of Champagne. To his right, looking slightly befuddled, was Lord Douglas Somerset, the man that Gypsy George had been in the process of robbing just a few months after these photos had been taken.
All of them in the same room on the same night.
The night that Bobby Clarke was murdered.
When he studied the pictures a second time, he began to notice more familiar faces from his time at West End Central. Sidney Hillman, the mechanic from Shaftesbury Avenue that Wesker had been so keen to arrest and make for the Togneri racket gang. Nobby Clarke and Iain Woods, the felons with a bomb hidden in their car. Horace Golding, the shopkeeper with the stolen lighters; Wally Green, the deaf-and-dumb man who'd menaced the doorman at the Establishment with his sign language; and Kingsley Puttnam, the cricketer he'd last seen spitting out blood in the cells on the day of the Greek riot. All the people that Wesker would later systematically fit up – was it all in order to shut them up?
Pete had learnt there'd been a frisson in the club that night. The straight punters wouldn't have seen it. But to the twitching eyes of Hillman et al there would have been a story unfolding. They would have noticed Fitzgerald's lascivious eye on Bobby, how Marks got Steadman well oiled, worked on him, how the two men came to an agreement – the kind of logistics only those with a certain criminal way of thinking would see. And Wesker, wise to it all, observed their twitching, saved the info.
No one else at the station knew the connections between all these people. No one in the entire force, but for a senior police officer – now a leading light in the ongoing prostitute murder investigation, now Detective Chief Inspector Bell of the Yard – could possibly realise the significance they would have for Pete. Was it he who had left the envelope? Was it Bell who was prompting him to ask: be an honourable Coldstreamer and join these dots together for me? Who else could know what these photographs were saying to him:
If it was Bell, then that would explain how the envelope had magicked its way into his locker. But it also meant that he couldn't tell anyone else what he knew. Not Dick, not Coulter, and especially not Joan. He had gone to Paddington Station on the way back from the magistrate's, where the judge had agreed with Coulter's summation of the case against Ferrier and sent Bobby's old beau to Brixton on remand.
Pete had told Coulter he needed to meet with a snout in the pool hall near the train station and would see him back at CID in an hour, en route to their second visit to Steadman. Snouts was always a good one to use with the older man, he was so deathly silent about his own.
On the concourse of Paddington Pete had gone into a cubicle in the gents to look through the contents of locker 272, the cold chills worsening as print followed print and face followed face.
He'd wandered back out on the concourse reeling like a drunkard, like he'd taken a powerful left hook to the temple. Sat himself down on a 15 bus going back to the Grove, at the front, near the wing mirror so he could look behind and see if a black Rover happened to be following him. Got off at Notting Hill and walked the backstreets to the station, expecting to hear the sound of a powerful car gliding up beside him any minute. Stopped on the steps and looked behind him. Ladbroke Road empty, save for a young mother pushing her pram, a Jack Russell terrier following at her heels.
There were no more messages waiting for him inside. In an attempt to calm his nerves, he had gone through yesterday's rosters while he waited for Coulter, found that Dugdale had been on duty when the envelope must have arrived. But now he was still none the wiser.
The questions kept coming, breaking over each other like waves in his mind. Why had Ernie held the Bobby Clarke shot back for himself? He must have realised its significance, so what kind of scam was he playing? Blackmail? Or perhaps some kind of life insurance?
Did the people Ernie had taken these shots for – Marks or Hills he presumed, but maybe even Wesker himself – realise that shot was missing? That it had even been taken?
Pete looked at his watch. Ten thirty. It was time to go back through the door and up the steps to CID and Coulter. To lock the envelope in his desk, put the key in his pocket and try to keep his face open, his smile even, as he struggled to find a way out of the maze in his mind.
I stood on the cobbles of Vernon Yard, looking up at the shuttered windows. It was seven o’clock on a Saturday evening, the first time I had attempted to get back in touch with Dave since the implosion of my marriage, the first time I had really felt up to it. A clattering of feet on stairs and the grind of a succession of locks being rolled back suggested that this time I had been lucky, dropping by on the off-chance.
But it was Chris, not Dave, who opened the door.
“Stella,” he said, “this is an unexpected surprise.” His eyebrows raised, but his smile said that it wasn't an unpleasant intrusion.
“Hello Chris,” I said, more pleased to see him than I had anticipated. Or maybe it was just the relief of finding that there was still life in Vernon Yard after all. “Do you mind if I come in for a minute?”
“Please, do come up,” he said. “I've just made a pot of tea.”
I followed him up the stairs to the ramshackle kitchen, took in the same enormous wooden table with its assortment of ill-matching chairs, Welsh dresser sagging under the collection of strange carvings and curios, and walls plastered with artwork from floor to ceiling. Only now there were some startling new additions to the range.
Posters of Dave wearing his top hat and pulling a mad face, printed on white, yellow, red and lime green backgrounds, with the slogans VOTE LUNATIC; LUNATIC FRINGE PARTY and VOTE DIABLO: BETTER A LOON THAN A CROOK in bold typeface surrounding his gurning visage.
Chris laughed. “Were you not aware of David's political activities?” He reached a couple of Cornishware mugs down from the dresser. “He will be disappointed. He's trying to get himself elected to Parliament, would you believe? He stood for Profumo's seat in Stratford last year – that's what those BETTER A LOON THAN A CROOK posters are all about. And these,” he gently booted a stack of cardboard boxes by the side of the dresser, “are all full of leaflets for the General Election. He's hoping to do a bit better this time, so he's releasing a single too. He's going on the radio tonight, to talk about it all.”
“My word,” I said, wondering how these things could have passed me by. All the years that I was so desperate for us to get rid of the Tories and now we were on the verge of booting them out, I'd been so wrapped up in my problems, I'd hardly even noticed. “Which station is he on?”
“His own,” said Chris, turning to fish out a bottle of milk from under the sink, “he's got a friend with a boat and a bit of local knowledge, they managed to get a pirate signal going from an old Napoleonic fort in Kent. He won't actually tell me where it is, he's sworn to secrecy about that, but it works, they've done test transmissions before.”
I felt my knees weakening as I sank down in the nearest chair. Could this be the connection that Mya was talking about? Did she know that Dave had been messing about with radio too? I struggled to make sense of it as my eyes ran up and down the walls.
Chris went chatting on about Dave's accomplishments as he poured out the tea. It was only when he set a mug down in front of me that I notice the pile of folders on the table, the opened notepad that he must have been writing in before I'd interrupted him.
“Chris,” I said, “am I stopping you from working?”
“Not at all,” he closed the pad and pushed it and his files to one side, “I was just going back over some details, just in case I missed something. I find it gets increasingly hard to stop myself from doing that, especially when David's not here to distract me. You've saved me from myself, that's all, no need to look so worried.”
“Positive,” he replied, but his expression changed as he watched me. “How's life been treating you then, Stella, it's been a long time since our paths last crossed?”
“Where to start?” I said, lifting my tea. There was something reassuringly sturdy about his choice of blue-and-white striped mug, just like the solid unpretentiousness of Chris himself. For a moment I felt like spilling the beans about everything.
“That was a funny time, last time I saw you,” I said instead. “Jenny and the riot. Still, I suppose it helped in your case against that crooked policeman.”
“It could have done,” he said, “if the police hadn't put their wagons in a circle around him, carted him straight off to the loony bin so he never had to face the charges.” He took a sip of his tea. “It was a very strange situation with Jenny, though. I didn't feel entirely good about it. I mean, her friend Somerset definitely did need our help, and I'm glad that through that, we managed to get the proof of Wesker's crooked ways. All of that was well worth doing.”
He shook his head. “It was just Jenny herself, the effect she had on David when she left him. I must confess, I never did understand their relationship very well, but he was devastated. Still is, which is what I think this,” he gestured to the posters on the wall, “is really all about. Trying to get her attention back.”
“I know,” I said. “I saw him at a party last year for Toby's summer show. He was with his band but he'd come specifically to try and find Jenny. Only she'd already moved to Italy. He was really agitated, told me lots of weird things about her family and how she wasn't safe. He'll probably be even worse now. She's just moved back to Ladbroke Grove with a film director husband and a baby on the way. Perhaps you can break it to him gently.”
“Ah…” Chris stared through the steam rising from his cup. “I see. That is going to be difficult. And where's Toby this evening, by the way?”
“I'm surprised you don't already know,” I said. “But we've,” I struggled for the most tactful expression, “separated. He was cheating on me.”
“Oh?” Chris put his cup down. “I am sorry to hear that. Although maybe not surprised.”
“Really?” I said, startled by this information. “How come?”
“The crowd that Toby started hanging around,” he said, “were no good. Hastened my departure from the world of modern art and David's too, I think. Especially when they started stealing all our ideas, it made it a bit difficult for us to stay friends with him. I'm sorry, but I think Toby's head was turned by people who had no real love of art at all. Just of money.”
“That's so strange,” I said. “They're the very words that Lenny used – that he'd had his head turned. Which people do you mean?”
“Bernard Baring was the worst,” said Chris. “He copied David's circus trope, only he found a way of prettying up what we thought were radical ideas, made himself a small fortune out of it. There is a kind of art in that, I suppose, taking the threat out of it and just leaving the surface gloss. Toby was luckier because his ideas were more opaque, you could more or less read into it what you wanted. I mean, if you really looked at ours now, the things we did in ’58,’59, probably seem very dated. Everything was specific to that time, to those months. Toby's work could come from any time, any place. That's why they adopted him, you know,” he smiled. “They needed the credibility.”
For a moment I thought he was mocking me, but there was nothing malicious in his face, only something like sympathy, something like regret.
“What about Pat Innes,” I asked. “What do you know about him?”
“Nothing at all good,” he said, with such a big grin that I started to laugh.
“That's better,” he said. “Want another cup?” His eyes flicked up to the clock as he rose from his seat and collected the mugs. “David should be coming on the radio any minute now.” He made his way to the windowsill where their wireless sat. “He said he left it tuned into the right place…”
Chris flicked the switch and the machine crackled into life, Dave's voice filling the room with a clarity I had not expected. “It's 7 o’clock and time to rock. Your dial is tuned to 197 longwave, Radio Diablo, don't touch that dial!” he announced, and it was all I could do to stop myself from looking around to see where he was hiding. For a second it really did feel like he and Chris were playing an elaborate joke.
“We're playing the hottest sounds from the underground,” Dave's disembodied voice went on, “starting with a cat who really knows how to sing, rather than scream, which is what I do. Here's the genius Ray Charles and ‘What I'd Say’…”
As the sound of the record filled the room, we both began to laugh.
“He's rather good at it, isn't he?” Chris stared admiringly at the wireless. “All that jive talk of his really comes into its own on the radio.”
We sat entranced as Dave continued to play a mix of resolutely American jazz, rock’n’roll and R&B tunes, talking nineteen-to-the-dozen in between. It was only when he got near the end of the broadcast that I remembered why I had come here.
“And now,” Dave announced, “time for a bit of self-promotion. As you may or may not know, I, Del Diablo, am standing for Parliament in the General Election on October the fifteenth, representing the Lunatic Fringe Party. A vote for me is a vote against the crooked cabal who have been running the country for their own personal gain these past unlucky 13 years; and against shifty Harold Wilson who promises you a New Britain but can only offer you more of the same old, a con-man dressed up as the common man. Only I can truly claim to represent you, the young, the working class, the hepcats who don't care to fit inside society's moral straitjacket. I am of sound mind and clean criminal record – so why do I call myself a Loon, I hear you cry? Well, my wide-eared friends, it's because compared to the villainous skulduggery we've had to put up with for so long, the policies of an honest man are bound to sound a little mad. You dig? So here's to an end to the class system, an end to sexual repression and the right to dance for all. With that in mind, here's the latest cut from my band of groovy ghouls, Del and the Diaboliks, a tribute to the outgoing Tories, if you like. It's called, ‘Bring Out Your Dead’ and it's produced, as ever, by the Head Honcho of Holloway Road, my main man James Myers.”
There was a loud burst of revved-up engine, thundering tom-toms and a maniacal cackle as the song lurched through the airwaves. I tried to suppress the shivers, to make myself enjoy the mock-horror musical hall theatricality of it, Dave's ridiculous lyrics about zombies and the twanging, propulsive guitar, all wrapped up in James's trademark supernatural echo. Chris was clearly loving it, tapping his foot and a wooden spoon along to the beat on the table's edge, that big grin still on his face.
But I couldn't stop the feeling of dread seeping through me. The five faces peering through the window of my mind, the fingernails tapping on the pane. How could I face Dave, I wondered to myself, how could I talk to him about this? What was I supposed to say, how would I even begin?
“Stella?” Chris's voice seemed to be coming from down the end of a long tunnel. I looked up and it was as if the room had blurred and then slowly come back into focus. The broadcast had come to an end; there was nothing but static coming from the wireless.
“Sorry,” I said, trying shake the feeling away, “I must have just drifted off for a minute there.”
“Well that was some feat with that racket going on.” Chris turned the radio off.
I tried to laugh, but the fear was inside me now. I got to my feet in a rush.
“Well,” I said, “I'd better be on my way now, I've taken up enough of your evening already.”
“Oh really?” he said. “There's no need.” His brow furrowed. “I was enjoying myself. I'm sorry if David's silly band put you off.”
“No, it's not that,” I lied, flustered now, imagining that his clear blue eyes were seeing straight into my mind. “I was enjoying myself too, I just didn't realise time had flown so quickly, and there's something I should get back to…”
He put his hand on my arm. “Well,” he said, “then at least let me walk you home?”
“Oh, you don't have to do that,” I said, hearing the fear leaking through my voice.
“I'd feel better if I did,” he said. “You never know who's out there these days.”
Chris didn't ask any questions as we walked home through the twilight, past the glowing lights and laughing punters spilling out of Finches and the Warwick Castle, the places where the girls plied their trade and a man in a long black car stalked their heels. He just linked his arm through mine and talked about everyday things, the latest books he'd read and films he'd seen, things that friends would talk about.
“Well,” he said, as we reached my doorstep, “here we are, then.” He let go of my arm, put his hands back in the pockets of his jeans as I took the keys from my bag and opened the front door.
“Thanks Chris,” I said, “that was really good of you.”
“It was nothing,” he said. “I really enjoyed seeing you. You must drop by more often.”
I didn't want to say goodbye to him. I wanted to invite him in, to tell him everything that was weighing down my mind. But something else was upon me, a sick feeling in my blood I had come to recognise too well.
“I will,” I said, looking back at him in the lamplight. “Give my love to Dave as well. We'll all have to get together soon.”
He nodded. “Will do. Well then, cheerio.”
I shut the door, shut my eyes. It was coming, she was coming, the next one out there just beyond the door, out in Ladbroke Grove, tapping her heels towards her death, walking into Jack's embrace.
My steel-tipped white sling-back sandals spark on the pavement as I head towards my front door. Another night's graft over, Wimpy burger and strawberry milkshake sloshing in my stomach from my meal with Wendy before, cold slime of lubricant leaking into my knickers from the bunk-up against the wall after. Ten bob note in my purse for the trouble, should see the wains all right for another few days.
I put my foot on the first step, look up to the flat, hear a voice say: “Mavis!”
Turn and see him standing under the trees, under the trees where he knew me. Flare of a match as he lights a cigarette illuminating a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat pulled down low, but not the face between. I know who it belongs to though; know it of old. Sexy Ron, procurer for the rich and famous, leaning against a long black car, the sort he always drives. Knows me by one of my many outlaw names.
“Got a job if you want it,” he says, smoke around his face like a wraith. “Your speciality.” Gives a little chuckle, knows what Mavis is good at, better money than a drunken fuck round the back of the pub at closing time. “Shouldn't take more than an hour.”
I look back up the steps at the orange glow from the window where Rita Hayworth's looking after the wains – Rita Hayworth she calls herself, I ask you. Dyed red hair and a chipped front tooth, silly auld bag looks more like Will Hay in drag. She won't mind if I take an hour more, she'll be away with the gin by now.
I open my handbag, drop the doorkeys back in and catch the reassuring glint of cold steel in the sodium glow of the streetlight. That's my protection, Glasgow-style. Nae Jack the Stripper's going to get his hands on me.
I straighten my back as I walk towards him, undo the top button of my grey jacket, a sneer on my red lips. He opens the back door of the car, makes a little bow, says: “After you Madam,” then closes it behind me, soft thud of metal on metal as I slide into the leather seat, the smell of real money warming my nostrils. Madam is right. As I often tell the other girls, I've just about serviced all of Burke's Peerage in my time, and most of it thanks to this one. He sets me up with these queer auld dears who want the arse thrashed offa them, pay handsomely for the privilege. Sometimes I think I could go on thrashing and thrashing and thrashing forever, drown out the noise of the wains screaming for their tea, the noise of my landlord screaming for his rent, the noise of the whole fucking world wanting something offa me.
I watch the arc of his cigarette as he flicks it from his fingers under the trees, under the trees where he sold me, climbs into the driver's seat and starts the engine, a gentle purr as he pulls away, moving through the black night, gliding into a stream of red and white. I lean back and close my eyes, remembering the times in the past, the whips and leads and sagging old arses, white flesh turning red and red faces twisting purple in the agony of ecstasy. Me lying naked on a blasphemous altar while a procession of men dressed in black cloaks queue up to take me, one by one, still with their shoes and socks on as they dump their load, hoity toity bastards all. Then little kid on a street corner shouting: “Fourpence for a feel, Mavis!” while all his friends snigger behind their hands. The things I have done, the many lives of my 31 years…
I open my eyes, shake the thoughts away and look in my handbag again. My fingers touch the blade, a talisman, then slide over to my powder compact, check myself in the mirror.
A strange music starts up from the front of the car, the sound of a motorcycle revving up and a heavy drumbeat caught in a spectral echo. Nearly as funny as this face that stares back at me. Doesnae look like mine. Looks much younger, prettier, like a French girl with black hair whose face I have seen somewhere before but can't quite picture where. I blink and I look again; a lassie from Lincolnshire with her hair like Dusty Springfield stares back at me, icy fingers running down my spine. Swallow and blink and look again and a hard-faced scrubber with shoulder-length brown hair, the girl I knew as Geordie Sue curls her top lip into a sneer and I shut the compact, look out of the window.
Not where I was expecting to be at all.
These are not the white mansions of Belgravia, the shady halls of Kensington, where all this malarkey usually takes place. A patch of wasteland Christ knows where, barbed wire and the squat shapes of unlit industrial buildings, far from the glow of streetlights, close to the dark currents of the Thames. The car stops and my stomach lurches, this is not what should happen. Fucking bastard better not try to pull a fast one on Mavis, I think, grabbing my knife as the door opens and he leans in towards me, but even as I pull up the blade, hands reach round my face from behind me, someone else there on the back seat, pushing something into my face, something that makes me drop the knife and stops the scream that's forming in my mouth, the scream into this black and unholy place, the scream that will never now be heard by any living soul but goes on and on and on…
I woke up with her scream in my throat, the world slipping from underneath me, onto the armchair I'd passed out on in my darkened room, my hair plastered to my face with ice cold sweat. Dear God no, dear God no, oh God, oh someone out there, help me.
How George Steadman had ever come to be nicknamed ‘Lucky’ was a mystery even he could no longer recall. Five years of prison food had softened his once formidable frame into rolls of flab, the barber's clippers had less to curtail each week and half of that was frosted over with grey. Steadman had never been handsome like Ferrier to begin with, but his round, jovial face and gap-toothed smile had won over enough ladies back in his day. Including little Bobby Clarke, who had let herself believe that he would come Lucky for her and carry her away from the increasingly violent and demanding Ferrier, from the trees that lined Holland Park Avenue and the backseats of the cars that loitered beneath them.
A sorry story which, if he let himself reflect on it, could still almost bring a tear to Steadman's eye. He was reflecting on it now, as for the second time in only a week these bogeys had come to visit him, to dig around at what he had thought was safely buried long ago. He felt like he was wide awake in the middle of a nightmare.
“I wouldn't never hurt Bobby,” he kept trying to explain to the older policeman, the one he remembered from the prime of his youth. “I never hit a woman in my life. I ain't like Baby, he the bad one, he the one who hurt her.”
But it was the other bogey who was scaring Steadman, the one with eyes like two blue diamonds, the one that stood leaning against the wall and said nothing, just chilled him to the bone with his stare. Blue eyes hypnotise, as Steadman's mother used to say. He had a horrible feeling that he was going to tell this one more than he ever wanted to.
Pete, staring back at him, was thinking exactly the same thing. Steadman wasn't a hard case like Ferrier. He had neither the brains nor the instinct of a predator, which was probably why his boxing career had never amounted to much. Every time Pete tried to lock eyes with him, Steadman's sorrowful browns slid back down towards the floor.
“That's not what he's been saying.” Coulter leaned across the desk. “He told us that you were very lustful over Miss Clarke, that you'd already had a falling out about it and he'd warned you off her. So what was this, George?” He tapped his finger on the photograph that lay between them. “Took her out and buttered her up with a taste of the highlife, then drove her down to those Elysian fields of Gobbler's Gulch to claim what you thought was rightfully yours? Then, when she didn't want to play her part of the bargain, you started getting rough with her? Ripped the dress off her and had your way anyway? I mean,” Coulter shook his head regretfully, “you are a big man, George, and I daresay, a bit punch drunk from your time in the ring. You probably didn't know your own strength.”
“No!” Steadman rubbed his eyes. He didn't want a policeman to see him cry. But he couldn't stop the memories of Bobby, the kisses and caresses they had shared, the way she was so nice to him, like no other girl had ever been. The way he had betrayed her.
“But on the other hand…” Steadman heard the other bogey walk towards the desk, the Blakeys on his shoes harsh against the concrete floor. “There is this matter of twenty-five quid. Your mate Ferrier is still pretty pissed off about it. I don't think he was making that bit up.”
“But I gave it to him…” Steadman began and then looked up, aghast. He wasn't supposed to have said that.
Pete smiled. “Ah,” he said. “But what I want to know is, who gave it to you?”
Fear crawled in Steadman's stomach like the claws of a beast. He felt his sphincter muscles loosening and desperately tried to hold back from breaking wind, from avoiding the hypnotic pull of the blue eyes.
“Was it this man, George?” Coulter tapped the end of a cigarette down on Simon Fitzgerald's face before lighting it. “That's the daft story Algernon told us. We didn't believe him, of course. What would a man in his position be doing giving that much money to a lad like you? He could have got himself a lot better than that for free.”
Coulter exhaled in Steadman's face; the smell of it turned his already roiling stomach. “We reckon it was a yarn he was spinning to get himself off the hook,” the older detective went on. “As you just said yourself, Algernon was the one who was hurting Bobby. He killed her, didn't he? You can tell us, George. Tell us enough to put him away. He won't be able to touch you where he's going.”
Steadman looked from the photo to Coulter and then back down again, at Bobby's smiling face, his own cheerful visage and the man in the middle of them, the little singer she had liked so much, who had been so kind to them that night. Tears rolled down his cheeks unstoppably now as the memories came rushing in.
Bobby telling him to meet her at one, at the coffee stand by Holland Park tube, that this would be her last night on the game before they went away together, forever. The sparkle in her eyes as she kissed him goodbye and headed off for Leicester Square. Then the way he'd been drawn into an after-hours game of cards at Teddy's, the man who put the whisky in his hand and went on filling up the glass, the hand on his shoulder as he leaned towards him and whispered in his ear. The man with a face like a butcher's board…
Him staggering home in the early hours, Bobby all forgotten, twenty-five quid in his pocket instead. Baby arriving, screaming with rage, where was she, what had he done with her? Baby hitting him and Steadman letting him, putting up no defence, deserving each blow for what he'd done. Then the next day and the report on the news about Bobby, knowing now he'd done worse than sell her out and stand her up.
The detective that turned up on his doorstep shortly after.
Steadman had turned over the chemist's ineptly on purpose, wanting to get caught. Fear creating the only solution to his problem he could muster. Got to get off the street, stay off the street until all of this was nothing but a distant memory. He already had two previous convictions. One more would guarantee him five years out of harm's way.
But now these double-talking bogeys were saying that Baby had killed her. That if he just told them it was Baby and not him, then Baby would die, Baby would die too, hanged by the neck for murder.
Baby, who had looked after him in London when he'd first come off the boat. Baby who had got him fights and money and seen him all right. Baby whom he had also betrayed. He couldn't say it, they couldn't make him…
Steadman's eyes rolled towards those two blue diamonds and hung there, mesmerised.
“It was The Chopper,” he heard himself say. Knowing he was doomed as he did so, not caring any more. Whatever else he had given away, they couldn't make him kill Baby.
Pete inhaled sharply, a rush of jubilation and relief coursing through him so fast he almost felt faint.
“What did you say?” asked Coulter. “What do you mean, The Chopper?”
“I know what he means,” Pete said. “He means Sampson Marks, otherwise known as The Chopper. Owns a strip club in Soho and has shares in Teddy's gaff. A real ladies’ man, isn't that right, George?”
There was no lying, no fight left in George Steadman's eyes, only the weariness of utter defeat.
“You know this Marks fella then?” Coulter asked as they took their leave of the Scrubs. “I've heard of him before, in connection with all this, just trying to remember where…”
“He's what they call a bit of a Soho character.” Pete knew he had to chose his words carefully, had to hide how he'd come about this knowledge. But it was difficult; he wanted to share what he knew so much that only the thought of Bell stopped him. “I used to go to Teddy's club with Joan when we were courting, he was a bit of a boyhood hero of mine and she liked the shows. I got to know a few things, like you do. Marks is Teddy's silent partner. They call him The Chopper because he likes to use an axe on his enemies. Funny thing is, he looks like one too.”
Coulter frowned. “Well there've not been any axe marks on any of our girls,” he pointed out. “So how does that fit into the picture?”
“He's a procurer,” said Pete. “He's into girls, pornography, mixing it with highlife and the lowlife. And if supplying Jack isn't tantamount to killing them himself, then I don't know what is.”
Coulter stared at him. “You're right,” he said. “What should we do next? Pass it on to the gaffer?”
Pete nodded. “Get him to get one of his pals in West End Central to run The Chopper in. I'm sure Marks doesn't know about that photograph either and I'd love to know what effect it has on him. I wonder what he could tell us about our missing friend Ernie…”
“Well,” said Coulter, “this should put the smile back on his face.”
But when they walked into CID, the room was in uproar. DI Fielder was surrounded by detectives all talking and shouting. His hair had turned another shade greyer, the sheet of paper in his hand said why.
Dick Willcox was standing closest to the door as they entered. “You've missed the main event,” he informed them. “There's been another one. Found at 5.30 this morning outside a garage forecourt in Acton. A garage, yeah – but not the garage we were looking for. Bastard's taunting us, you ask me.”
“The body has been taken for tests,” Fielder was saying, “to ascertain whether traces of paint residue are a match for those found on the Bressant corpse…”
Coulter looked at Pete, both thinking the same thing, the older man saying it out loud: “We've not been fast enough.”
I woke up on Sunday morning with only one thought in my head. I had to go and see Mya, had to tell Stanley what I had seen. My head was full of Mavis's visions, faces looming out at me from her memory. Only, as I stood beneath the shower trying to get myself together, it came back to me that I already had a commitment that day.
I had promised Jenny I would go to her house and help her choose some designs for the nursery. Sunday was the only day she didn't have to be on set, the only time I didn't have to be at work. Bob liked to spend his Sunday morning playing football and then going to the pub, so we'd have some time to ourselves.
I could go and see Mya first, I reasoned, slowly getting into my clothes and styling my hair in the mirror. Only what state would I be in after that? I hardly wanted a repeat of the night of Mathilde and Toby. There was nothing for it, I realised, I would just have to see her first, have to try and push everything else to the back of my mind. At least she didn't live very far away from the Spiritualists.
I tried my best to look composed as I arrived on her doorstep, but straightaway something happened to throw me, something I hadn't expected. She wasn't alone.
“Stella,” she said, leading me through to the kitchen, “there's someone I want you to meet. He's not staying long, only when I told him you were coming he wanted to just say thank you for the huge favour you did him last summer.”
As we walked into the room, he was leaning against the kitchen sink, a shy smile on his face and cup of coffee in his hand. Quite a handsome man from a distance, with blond hair cut into a mod style, a Jermyn Street shirt and narrow-fitting trousers. It was only when you got closer that you noticed the broken nose and the scar that curved in a semi-circle around his top lip.
It was the scar that did it, that jogged the memory out into the open.
“This is Giles,” said Jenny as he offered me his hand.
“So pleased to meet you,” he said, smiling with eyes identical to Jenny's. “You really saved my bacon,” he gave a little laugh, “from those filthy pigs.”
As our hands touched I felt a crackle of static electricity running through me. I was back in the Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club with Margaret Rose Stephenson, Ronald McSweeney, Bernard Baring and him…
Giles Somerset. Jenny's brother. He was the other man playing poker that night.
I dropped my hand as quickly as I could, muttered a vague greeting as I tried to blink the vision away from my eyes. It was no good. The room started to go out of focus.
“Oh,” I said, grabbing hold of a chair. “I'm sorry, I seem to have come over all faint.”
Jenny gave a little snort of amusement. “You always have this effect on girls, don't you Giles?” But when she saw my face, her expression turned serious.
She pulled out the chair for me, sat me down. “Oh, you do look pale,” she said. “Do you want a glass of water?”
I nodded, looking up at Giles the way Margaret Rose had from her knees, feeling the damp grass underneath me, my hand snaking into his pocket…
“I say,” said Giles, “you're not up the duff as well, are you? Must be contagious.”
“Giles.” Jenny elbowed him in the ribs. “Don't be so rude. Stella's just had a bit of a time of it recently, haven't you darling? You still not feeling yourself?”
She put the water down on the table in front of me, concern in her eyes, her identical eyes. Dave had been telling the truth about those two, when you saw them together there was no denying it.
Another face loomed out at me, seemed to hang in the air between them. I knew who he was all right, I had seen his face enough times in the paper. He was their father, in a black robe, still wearing his socks as he put his hands on Mavis…
“Are you sleeping all right?” she asked.
She thought I was upset about Toby, I realised, which was probably half the reason she had wanted me to come here today. We had talked briefly about it on the phone, but it was obvious she wanted to hear more, know all the details. At that moment, it seemed like a blessing – it was a good enough reason, after all, and the only way I could plausibly explain my behaviour.
I took a sip of the drink and closed my eyes for a minute, silently praying for an end to this transmission.
“Not really,” I said, glad that the room was back in focus when I opened them again. “It's been so hard getting used to it all.”
“I know,” she nodded understandingly, put her hand on my shoulder and gave it a little squeeze. “I'm sorry, I should have realised.”
Giles cleared his throat. “Well I'd better leave you ladies to it,” he said, putting his cup down in the sink.
“Yes,” said Jenny, “you can see yourself out, can't you?”
“Hope to see you again sometime,” he said, “when you're feeling better.”
I smiled as best I could, seeing the vulnerability in his face, the childishness that made Jenny want to protect him, her words coming back to me from the moment she found out about his arrest. “Giles has a tendency to… Get involved with people he shouldn't…”
“Me too,” I lied. “Sorry about this, it's so embarrassing. I'm sure I'll be all right in a minute.”
“Oh Stella…” Jenny sat herself down on the chair opposite me. “Has it been really awful for you? I mean, of course it has. I can't believe it myself, not you and Toby. You were always such a good advert for love, before…” she stopped herself mid-sentence.
“Before Toby had his head turned?” I pre-empted her. “By the devil Pat Innes? That's what everybody keeps telling me.”
I hadn't really wanted to talk about this, but now, in the strange half-state that Giles had unwittingly engendered in me, I found that I couldn't stop.
“Was I so blind that I couldn't see what was happening right under my nose?” I said. “It's funny, you know. When I think back, I was actually having my doubts about those two on the day of our opening party. Only I stopped myself from thinking about it.”
“Really?” said Jenny. “I never would have guessed.”
“It was that suit he was wearing,” I said. “For so long he had been dressing like a slob, doing his painting in his old school shirts and the same filthy pair of jeans. It didn't matter how much money he made. I thought it was quite sweet, really, that he was just reverting to his upper class type, you know, the way country squires always seem to go around with their trousers held up by bale twine and straw in their hair. But when he met Pat, he started paying more attention. He looked so beautiful that day, in that blue suit, I really thought he'd made the effort for me. Only now I can see it. He even told me that Pat picked it out for him. Oh God.” I felt myself on the verge of tears again, another realisation hitting home. “And to think I made those suits for us that look almost exactly the same…”
“Oh Stella, sweetheart.” Jenny took hold of my hand as I raised it to brush the tear away.
“Those suits were my idea, remember? But that was a funny old day, wasn't it?” Her eyes clouded as her mind reeled back. “I said that Toby should choose his friends more carefully, didn't I?”
“I thought you meant Baring,” I dared myself to say.
“I did mean him,” she said, her eyes fixed on some far horizon. “Bloody little bastard. He went to school with Giles, you know, he was always going on about Artistic Baring, the scholarship social climber. I dreaded ever having to meet him, and when I did I knew he was another one of the many people I had to keep him away from.”
Yes, I thought, I can see why.
“But he was always so transfixed by those kind of people. Spiders. He can never realise what they're really after. Not his friendship, just his money, his title, his father's influence. He's such an easy mark. And Pat Innes is just the same, if not worse.”
Her grip on my hand tightened and I flinched.
“Oh God,” she said, letting go. “I'm sorry. I'm supposed to be comforting you, but here I am, banging on about myself again. Maybe I should have said more at the time, but I never thought that Toby was the sort that would get taken in, honestly I didn't. I thought he had more guts. More sense.”
“So did I,” I said. “But it's interesting to find out these things, at least it gives me some sort of reason for it, that it wasn't anything I did wrong.”
“How could it have been?” she said. “You were the one who did everything for him.”
“Well,” I said, “me and Chris and Dave. They got him his first show, all the commissions from Lady Maybury. And how did he repay them? We hardly ever saw them once he'd had a taste of success. He was embarrassed by they way he treated them too. He couldn't look them in the eye. He knew Baring was ripping them off and making a fortune out of it. I always thought he was the worst of my enemies,” I admitted. “I knew he hated me and he was always putting down everything I did, belittling all my work.”
“He hates women full stop,” said Jenny.
“I thought Pat was doing me a favour that day, throwing him out,” I said. “But he was only getting him out of the way so he could move in himself.”
Jenny shook her head, stood up and put the kettle back on.
“I always thought I was a pretty good judge of character,” she said, staring out of the window. “But Toby had us all fooled, didn't he? You're right, though, about him reverting to upper class type.” There was a slight tremor in her voice. “They're all a bunch of heartless bastards and they always get what they bloody well want, whatever the cost.”
Her hand went up to her stomach.
Dave hadn't made any of it up, I realised. He was right about everything. Those faces I had seen in Mavis McGruder's mind, that procession of lords and policemen, aldermen and politicians all lining up beside a blasphemous altar to take her, one by one. They were all part of it, part of the reason why Mavis and Mathilde, Margaret Rose and Susannah, Bronwyn and Bobby all had to die.
I suddenly couldn't stay with her any longer. I had to go and see Mya. Revelations were unfolding in my mind like a line of dominoes falling and I couldn't control it much longer.
“Listen, Jenny,” I said, getting to my feet. “Do you mind if we do this another day? Only I think I'm getting a migraine, I'd like to go home and lie down.”
“Oh dear,” she said, but relief was written over her features. She had said things she didn't mean to as well. “Do you want me to call you a taxi?”
“No,” I said, “it's not far. Maybe the fresh air will do me good, get the blood circulating again. I'm really sorry I've been such a washout.”
“Don't be,” she said. “I'm really sorry that you've had to go through all this. You helped me so much getting Chris to sort out Giles, I should have done something for you in return. Are you sure you'll be all right?”
I managed to make it up the hill to Mya's, to fall into her parlour and tell her.
“I've got to see Stanley. There's been another one, a woman called Mavis, last night. And she started to show me who it was, how it all connects, where he takes them.”
“My dear girl.” Mya's face went white as she put her hand over my forehead.
“She knew him, the driver,” I said, going into a trance, “he was Sexy Ron, the real Sexy Ron…”
When Pete and Coulter told their story to Fielding, he couldn't get to the West End fast enough. Virtually stood over them as they filled in all their paperwork, Steadman's statement typed up, Ernie's pictorial evidence to go with it. Then, when he'd snatched it up and fled, the two men caught up with the details of the latest body.
She'd been discovered in a quiet cul-de-sac in a residential neighbourhood of Acton. A chauffeur living across the street had heard a car driving off quickly at 2.30am and had thought no more about, it until he got up three hours later and looked out of the window to see what he thought was a tailor's dummy, lying on the garage forecourt opposite.
Her parents had christened her Maureen Easton, but the name on her National Assistance card and Family Allowance book was Patricia Fleming, aged 31, resident of Lancaster Road W11. To most of the Notting Hill bobbies, however, she was Mavis McGruder, a loudmouthed old hand who liked telling tall stories about being the mistress of lords.
Seemed her fantasy world extended to the flatmate who had made the formal ID. Rita Hayworth, she called herself. For the past four days she'd continued to babysit Mavis's children, Gloria, four, and Johnny, six, until the knock came on her door this morning. It wasn't certain what would happen to the children, they would probably be taken into care. Their father had been a squaddie, but he had long since vanished. Rita had never known him at all.
“I heard her walking home,” she had told the investigating officers. “I knew it was her as she was wearing those sling-backs, make a hell of a noise on the steps. She must have got halfway to the front door when I heard her stop, come back down and walk on up the road. All I can think of is that she must have seen someone she knew, someone she trusted. She always said The Stripper would never get her and she carried this knife in her handbag she'd taken off some fella who tried to use it on her. Mavis was no pushover, believe you me. But this is just terrifying — he was waiting for her right outside our front door. I don't know how I'm ever going to get over it…”
Pete tried to take it all in, add the new information to the reams of notes in his book. Day turned into night, a return visit to the Scrubs postponed for the morning, he and Coulter instead attempting to work out a strategy for Steadman. How could they get him to confess to a court, when he was clearly so terrified? Without his testimony, they would have nothing concrete on Marks, it was imperative to make sure he stuck to the story.
Pete couldn't help but think that Steadman's fear was a mirror of McSweeney's fear, a mirror of Ernie's sweaty distress.
The exhilaration he'd felt at the start of the day had long turned into exhaustion by the time Pete rounded the corner of Oxford Gardens that night, the folder of photographs in his briefcase now, still weighing up whether to share them with Coulter or not.
Something outside his gate that startled him back into wakefulness.
Detective Chief Inspector Bell sat in the backseat, a briefcase on his knee, the shadow of a smile flickering underneath his moustache. “I always thought you had initiative, Bradley,” he said. “But I must say, you have surpassed even my own expectations.”
“Thank you, sir,” said Pete, feeling himself colour uncomfortably with the praise. “But I was only following your lead. I have to say, it was something of a relief to make sense of it all,” he stopped himself, not wanting to gabble in front of his senior officer. “So,” he said. “Sampson Marks. Have you spoken to him, sir? What's he told you?”
Bell's shrewd eyes ran across his face as he spoke, as if he was weighing up every word. “Let's take a little drive,” he said, “and I'll tell you about it. Here…” He fished into his inside jacket pocket and produced two cigars in long, silver tubes. “In the meantime, I think you've earned this.”
They drove down Ladbroke Grove, past the ever-increasing construction of the new flyover, down Holland Park Avenue and along to Shepherd's Bush. Pete thought that they would be heading for the station there, but Bell's driver didn't stop, instead he turned down Brook Green towards Hammersmith. The DCI must have seen Pete frown.
“Nothing to worry about, Bradley. We need to have a chat somewhere private before we proceed, a bit of a de-briefing, so to speak. As you will appreciate, now that these two cases of ours have dovetailed somewhat, there are still some sensitive matters pertaining to the Wesker affair that are best left off the record.”
“Of course,” Pete said, remembering the two aids that had gone down as a sacrifice for Wesker's crimes, the magnitude of what he actually knew.
The car pulled into a little sidestreet, right beside Hammersmith Bridge. Bell opened the door. “Let's take a walk,” he said. “It's a fine night.”
Pete got out, looked up at the bridge, a fantastical construction of Victorian ironwork with towers like a fairytale castle, painted dark green and gold, illuminated now by the streetlights, the dark river rippling below. He remembered how much he had admired Sir Joseph Bazalgette's construction as a young copper, how he had read up as much as he could of the history of the place. But now, this stretch of the Thames was forever tainted by the stain of murder, the memory of Bobby Clarke's vacant eyes on that sunny morning, five long years ago.
As if reading his mind, Bell said: “I don't know about you, but when I want to get to grips with a case, I find myself walking back over the territory time and time again. Something always draws you back, the idea that you could have left something behind, forgotten to mark some important detail. That's what impressed me about you so much when we first met,” he led the way down the promenade by the river's edge, “not so far away from here.”
“I know what you mean, sir.” Pete looked across the river to the curve of woods beyond, how quickly London seemed to fall away from this point. They continued to walk in silence for a while, until they came to the end of the quayside.
“Sampson Marks,” said Bell, stopping to lean on the wall, look down at the depths below them. “A nasty piece of work all round. And now it seems that it was he who Wesker was protecting, which makes things nastier still.”
“Aye,” said Pete. “But at least we have the proof now, to connect Marks not just with Roberta Clarke, but Brownyn Evans too. We've got Steadman's statement that Marks procured Clarke from him on the night of the murder, he knew where to turn up to get her, the rendezvous she was supposed to be making with Steadman. And Evans at a table with Marks – plus everyone else Wesker fitted up being there. At least we know why Wesker did it all now. We just have to figure out who he did it for, but surely, you can't be far away from that now, sir?”
Bell frowned, drew deeply on his cigar, turned his face towards Pete's, his eyes running up and down him again, the way they had in the car.
“Wesker's out of bounds to us now,” he said. “It pains me to say it, but that's the way it is. We can't use him in this.”
“We shouldn't need him,” said Pete. “If I may say, I think we've got enough to lean on Marks and make him confess. If not for being the murderer, then at least for procuring the girls for the guilty party.”
“I see,” said Bell, nodding slowly. “Do you want to go through it as you see it, step by step. I'm not going to take notes, this is between us. But I need to have it all clear in my mind.”
Pete took a deep breath, tried to get his thoughts in order.
“All right,” he said. “So we have, in the room on the same night, Marks, Wesker and Francis Bream – we know their connection. Then there's six of the people that we know Wesker fitted up, let's put them all to one side for a moment as I think we can safely say that makes them all innocent.”
Bell nodded. “An accurate analysis. Go on.”
“Teddy,” said Pete, “who's going to be there anyway, it's his club, and Simon Fitzgerald, who often performed there. Roberta Clarke and Brownyn Evans, the first two victims. George Steadman, who confessed to me he had sold the services of Roberta Clarke to Marks while in an intoxicated state towards midnight on that night.
“Then we have Sir Alex Minton and Lord Douglas Somerset, Somerset being of particular interest to me for two reasons. One, that I nicked a burglar coming out of his house way back in the summer of 1959, an investigation that Harold Wesker suddenly came out of his jurisdiction to take over when it was revealed that what the man had been stealing was some kind of pornography. Two, that the burglar appeared to be in cahoots with Somerset's youngest son Giles, who was then nicked himself at the Greek riot by none other than Harold Wesker.”
“Good God,” muttered Bell, turning his face towards the river. “Continue, please, Bradley.”
“There are twelve other people in those photographs who I don't recognise and couldn't tell you of their significance. But we do know that Ernest Tidsall was the photographer, and that he kept one frame from that session hidden away in his ledgers, some kind of insurance policy, I would say. Tidsall also had photographs of the next two victims, Susannah Houghton and Margaret Rose Stephenson, girls that he used as pornographic models. We know that Marks had links to the filth trade and that racket is central to the work of CID at West End Central. Tidsall has been missing since April, since he was questioned in connection with the Houghton murder. No one's touched his bank account since, and it would be my opinion that he is no longer with us. That's why he left the insurance policy.”
Bell turned his face back towards Pete. His expression was grave.
“Go back a minute,” he said. “To the photographs.”
“Yes sir,” said Pete. “I'm not going to ask where you got them from, but surely, however you did, that must be the connection you need to lean on Marks. He can't deny it, can he? It's all there in black and white.”
Bell dropped the end of his cigar onto the floor and trod on it, sending sparks up into the air and along the edge of the quay.
“I'm going to have to ask you for them back now,” he said, “and I think you know what I'm going to say next.”
“Precisely,” said Bell. “Honourable Coldstreamer. You never showed them to anyone else, did you?”
“Good.” Bell's pace quickened, eager to get back to the car now. “Where are they now?” he said, opening the door for Pete.
“Here.” Pete lifted them out of his briefcase, handed them across. As the Chief Inspector took the envelope, Pete was pleased to see that the relief in the other man's face mirrored his own.
“Bradley,” Bell said, “you are an exceptional detective. You'll always have my gratitude, even if no one else ever knows of this.”
“That's enough for me sir,” said Pete. “Just take care of them. I hope you've got the negatives safe and all.”
Bell looked up at him, his eyes steady and calm. “It won't be long now,” he said, tapping on the glass to his driver. “Back to Oxford Gardens, please.”
The next morning, Coulter was standing by Pete's desk, his face like a bowl of grey porridge. “I've just had a call from the governor at the Scrubs,” he said. “I'm afraid it's bad news.” He pulled out a chair, sat down wearily. “George Steadman was found hanged in his cell at 6.15 this morning. It appears he ripped his sheets up to make the noose. Left a note to his mother, saying how sorry he was.”
Coulter put his head in his hands as Pete stared at him, dumbstruck.
“This is worse than I thought,” the old detective said. “Much worse.”
“Stella?” Dave stood blinking on his doorstep. It was the middle of the day, but clearly he had just rolled out of bed and pulled an old army greatcoat over the top of his pyjamas, his hair a wild cloud that just about hid the dark rings around his eyes. As I stared at his raggedy scarecrow frame, all the clever opening lines I had rehearsed dissolved into the greyness of a wet autumnal afternoon.
Dave hadn't managed to win a seat at the General Election, just as Stanley still hadn't managed to solve the case. The day of Harold Wilson's slim triumph over the Tories had dawned misty and grey, the end of a three-month long heatwave. Gloomy weather had persisted all week since.
According to Stanley, the atmosphere in Notting Hill nick had also turned much colder, since the discovery of Mavis. He feared that his boss had been given orders to shelve all the evidence Stanley had been amassing on the case, or at least pass it over to his superiors for them to bury. The only way he thought they could bring the killer to justice now was to force something out into the open, something that couldn't be covered up. Seeing Dave was the only thing left I could think of that might help him, even if it had taken all this time to finally pin him down. But now it didn't look like I had caught him at a very opportune moment.
“Sorry,” I said. “Is this a bad time? I can come back later…”
“No,” he shook his head, “it's really nice to see you. Please, come in love.”
The kitchen looked like a hurricane had hit it – clothes, newspapers, leaflets and flyers all over the place. I picked my way through the carnage to the table, moved a rucksack off the nearest chair and sat down, while Dave rummaged about, finding the kettle, cups and matches.
“’Scuse the state of the place,” he said. “But I only just got back.”
Lying on the table was a newspaper with him on the front cover, the headline IS THIS REALLY THE FACE OF MODERN BRITAIN? in outraged capitals above it.
“Sorry you didn't win,” I said, staring at it. “But it looks like you had some success after all.”
He grinned, setting cups down around the general mess. “Yeah,” he said, “got right up their noses, didn't I? That's all you can do with these bastards. If you can't beat ’em, take the piss – they can't bloody stand it, can they?”
“No,” I said, taking a sip of the tea and trying not to wince at the industrial strength of it.
“What can I do for you, then, love? I'm sorry I ain't been in touch sooner, Chris did tell me you'd been looking for me, but this politics lark just takes over your life. Oh, and sorry to hear about Toby, too,” he added. “The arsehole.”
I laughed. “Don't be,” I said. “I'm beginning to realise that he did me a favour.”
“Oh yeah?” There was a knowing look in Dave's eye, but I didn't want to go down that road, I had to ask him the important things before the conversation got swept round to more sociable matters.
“Anyway,” I said, “it's about Jenny.”
His face changed instantly. The laughter lines mutated into a frown.
“Yeah?” he said. “Chris told me that, an’ all, about her getting married, having a baby. Don't worry, I won't be hanging round her new house bothering her and Sonny Jim if that's what she's worried about. Did she ask you to come round and tell me that?”
“No,” I said, “she didn't. Please don't be offended, Dave, it's not that at all.”
“Sorry.” The anger drained back out of his face as quickly as it had flared. “I didn't mean to come across so bolshy.” He reached a tobacco tin out of a pair of jeans from the heap beside his chair. “It's just, it's still a painful subject for me, even after all this time.”
He extracted a rolling paper and made a line of tobacco down the middle of it. “I tried everything to forget about that girl, you know,” he said. “Joining a band, running for parliament – every kind of distraction you could think of. Only it all keeps coming back to her in the end.”
He licked the edge of the paper, rolled up a skinny cigarette.
“I met Giles,” I said. “He is her brother, isn't he? It's so obvious when you see them together, only I never had before. Would you mind me asking, why is it such a secret that they're brother and sister?”
Dave gave a sharp laugh. “I would have thought that was obvious,” he said. “But then how could you know? I bet she never once invited you back to her house, did she? Never told you nothing personal in all the years you've known her?”
“No,” I said. “That was the first time I'd ever met anyone from her family.”
“Well her and Giles is,” he struck a match and inhaled deeply, blew a plume of smoke across the room, “a case of same dad, different mum. Jenny's old man, Sir Alex,” he pronounced the name with scorn, “cuckolded Giles's old man, Lord Somerset. It's one of the ripping wheezes these toffs get up to all the time. Somerset couldn't care less, he already had all his heirs at their posts, despatched his duty, as it were. Jenny reckoned he was queer anyway.”
I choked on the sip of tea I had taken, thinking about what Toby had said about his father.
“I know.” Dave leant over and patted me on the back. “It's a bleedin’ distasteful matter all round. But you got to understand: they live in a different world to us proles. Minton and Somerset had a good war together, that was all what counted. They're still having a good war now, as it goes. Only instead of plotting which bits of Jerry to drive their tanks through next, they use Somerset's grace and favour to plot which bits of London Minton can roll his bulldozers into instead. It won't surprise you to learn that they don't like the idea of poor people living around here,” he said. “Let alone darkies, wops, paddies, spics or any other form of Johnny Foreigner. So they've built a load of horrible concrete boxes to shut them all in, keep them in their place.
“And now there's this motorway – Connecting the Western suburbs to the heart of the City, yeah?” he quoted from the banners that fluttered from the construction site. “Ain't it beautiful. Driving their bulldozers right through people's houses, right past their windows, splitting this manor down the middle and changing it all forever. Like I said, Minton and Somerset have made a fortune from their wars. So what do it matter to them if one of them puts the other one's missus in the club? What do it matter what the resultant offspring think about it either?”
“When did Jenny find out?” I asked, my mind swimming.
“When she was about thirteen.” Dave screwed his cigarette into an old tin ashtray, as if he wished he was boring it into the side of Sir Alex's head. “Her old man reckoned the two of them were getting a bit too close for comfort. Which was bloody ironic, considering,” he turned his head away, “what he'd been doing to her.”
“Oh God,” I whispered, suddenly realising what it was that had always been missing from Jenny. The strange silences, the blankness. The careful way she always avoided revealing anything too personal about herself and how she had lost that ability the moment someone she really cared about was in danger. The illusion she gave of seeming too knowing for her years, yet too childlike for her pulchritudinous appearance. The way she had put her hand over her stomach to protect her unborn child as she thought about it all, that morning in her kitchen. Her own father…
“I think I need a drink.” Dave rummaged around in his coat pocket, extracted a bottle of brandy and slugged a load into his teacup.
“Want some?” he said as an afterthought, offering it over to me.
“I think I do,” I said, grateful for the burn of it down the back of my throat.
“Ugh,” said Dave, knocking back his. “Do you often take confessional like this, your Grace?” He tried to smile.
“No,” I said, “and I had no idea. But it makes sense of so many things…”
He nodded. “She hates him, Jenny does. I didn't realise the extent of it when I first met her, I thought a few pranks would sort him out.”
He poured the rest of the bottle between my cup and his. “He was building in Kensington then, making a right horrible old pile – civic architecture, he called it. Ugly was more like it. So we started a protest movement, No More Ugly. Had a demo right outside his site, got in all the papers. All them Fleet Street hacks fucking loved it, Minton's glamorous daughter protesting against him. We even knocked Princess Margaret off the Daily Mail's gossip column for a day. Worked a treat in pissing him off, so she told me.
“But then,” Dave took another, smaller sip, put his teacup down, “she had another bright idea, that we go one further. Old Somerset was getting a bit senile in his dotage, you see. Left his private library unlocked one day and Giles found some interesting things in there.” Dave's stare intensified. “Incriminating photographs, apparently, and a couple of reels of film, showing the sorts of things him and Minton got up to with all their influential friends. I wish I had actually seen them so I'd know for sure, but I'm pretty sure we're talking the same circles here as Profumo – another part of my largely fruitless mission to carry on this work.”
I started to feel light-headed and not just from the brandy.
“Jenny's idea was to sell them to the press, those same old bastards that had been drooling all over her at the demo.” His scowl deepened. “She thought she had some influence there, how naïve can you get? The pair of us were. It was only then that I found out how much power her old man really has.”
Dave's almond eyes burned straight past me into the dark corners of the past. “There was this geezer I knew from Finches, Gypsy George they called him,” he said. “Irish fella, bit of a tinker and the best cat burglar in the Smoke, never been collared in his life. I reckoned we couldn't fail if he screwed the drum. How wrong I was. Not only did George get caught red-handed with all the loot, but Sir Alex then had some top copper come down from West End Central to take care of all the evidence. George got sent to Pentonville,” he shook his head, “where, supposedly, he hanged himself three months later. I might as well have rung his neck myself.”
“Oh God,” I said, shutting my eyes, seeing a ballroom full of people in tuxedos and tiaras, all laughing at Susannah Houghton, who lay naked on a bed, squirming beneath a man in a gorilla suit. Hearing Bernard Baring bragging about witnessing this spectacle to Pat Innes, the pair of them laughing.
“This copper from the West End,” I said. “He's not the same one…”
“That Chris was investigating? Yeah,” he said. “And we all know how that ended. Like a bad joke, ain't it?”
“It's worse than that,” I said, now knowing why Mya had always wanted me to see Dave, now knowing what the final connection was.
Me and Vera at the bar in the Warwick Castle, the usual Friday night larks. “A tanner says he gets me next.” Vera slams her money down on the bar along with the rest. The landlord sweeps it all up, puts it in the pot. Must be a lot in there; nae more bodies for months now. Auld Jack's been getting slack.
“Hey,” I say, catching his eye as I put my empty glass down. “Another one in here, eh? And one more for my pal.”
“That's your thirteenth this evening, love,” the landlord comments, raising his hairy old eyebrows like he's giving me a warning.
“So?” I say. “You think I'm superstitious?”
I know he's thinking what everyone else round here is saying. That Jack got the wrong one last time; he took Mavis thinking she was me. Same Glasgow accent, same name: Patsy Fleming a girl we both pretended to be, me for the bogeys, Mavis for the Social. Cannae remember who thought of her first.
“Cheers.” I clink glasses with Vera, know what she's thinking and all. About the time we stood in court for the doctor, the things we saw and the stories we told to keep it all safe. The big houses in Mayfair and Kensington. The smaller rooms in Bayswater and Paddington, the red lights and the flashlights, the smell of stale sex and cheap perfume. Ernie and Margaret Rose, Mavis and her Lords. The reason Vera sleeps with her doors triple locked and her windows bolted, the reason we are out tonight in our matching outfits, turquoise suits with fox trim collars, brown suede shoes, very refined. Which one of us d’you think is which tonight then, Jack?
The light slides like a halo off the rim of my glass as I down the amber liquid, the taste of home and a song starting up on the jukebox, that old cowboy song by the fella who played Biggles. A girl singing back-up like she's singing from under the earth, a sound that sends prickles down the back of my neck.
“D’you want another, pet?” says Vera, putting her empty glass down and wobbling on her new shoes, leaning back on the bar for support.
The light swims before me, down the side of my glass and around the optics, swirling around Vera's head, her blonde curls with black roots showing, red lipstick stuck to her front tooth, jacket slightly gaping at the front. She's a big girl, Vera, not like me. I am slight but full of Glasgow courage and now fancying it's time I roped myself a cowboy before the night is out, pay for some more of this good stuff.
“Nah,” I say, “my purse is empty. Let's go ride the high country, eh, hen?”
Vera cackles and leans against my arm as we walk up Portobello Road in our matching suits and our matching heels, trying to remember the words to Biggles’ song as we go, only getting as far as the chorus, two of us bellowing a name: “Johneee…”
“Ladies,” comes a voice from beside me.
I stop and turn, wondering where I have heard that voice before. A big man in a sheepskin coat, leaning against a long black car, smoking a cigarette. I try to make out his face in the glow of the streetlamp but then another voice joins in from across the road.
“Fancy a ride?” A thinner, smaller man walks across to us, not too much hair on this one.
“Where to, cowboy?” asks Vera, stumbling into him, her hand on his arm, an old shabby mac, not too much brass on him either from the looks of things.
“Not far,” says the big man, moving towards me, his eyes in the dark the only things I can see, two glowing coals in a face of shadows. I touch the cross around my neck, wondering where I know him from, thinking back into a past blurred by too much whisky and too many tall tales to know for sure where everything starts and everything ends…
“We'll travel in convoy,” he says to me, “to Chiswick. I know the way. He's from out of town.”
Vera whispers in my ear. “I'll take your number plates, you take mine.” Scared Vera, thinking about the doctor, thinking about Jack.
“Madam…” He beckons me towards the open back door and I slide inside across leather seats, a nice car that smells of money, thinking I got the best deal here, I don't like the look of Vera's, as the car pulls out of Portobello Road and turns left on Labroke Grove, underneath the trees where everybody sees, right under the trees of Holland Park Avenue, the spreading plane trees, where I knew a man and he knew me…
“So,” he says, looking at me in the driver's mirror, “Ernie's been looking for you.”
The words hit me like a punch in the stomach.
I look at his eyes in the mirror and see Ernie staring back, Ernie who they say is now buried under the new flyover, a ton of concrete for his grave. I blink and I swallow and I look again and I see the eyes of Margaret Rose sending me a warning, the second warning of the night I haven't heeded. I look behind me and there is no car, there is no Vera following, only a reflection in the wing mirror, Mavis's eyes all full of sadness and I hear him laugh as his hand moves towards the dial of the radio, a crackling sound filling the air as I remember who he is.
“No!” I try to speak. “Don't touch that dial! No.” I open my mouth but no sound comes out. “Don't touch that dial!” But his fingers close in on the knob and the whole picture dissolves in front of my eyes as he tunes me out for the last time…
“No!” I heard my own voice in my ears, screaming: “Don't touch that dial!”
I opened my eyes and the room came into focus, the parlour of the Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association. My right hand was still in the grasp of Stanley's, his big blue eyes wide with shock. My left was held by Mya, her eyes still closed, her own right hand frantically writing out messages on the pad in front of her:
VERA THE DOCTOR AND ME – MAVIS ME AND PATSY – ERNIE IN THE FLYOVER DEAD AND BURIED – MAVIS SAYS THE KING IS IN HIS KASTLE AND RON IS BY THE RIVER! FIND HIM BY THE RIVER!
Pete and Coulter sat in the lamplight, in the living room, as Joan and the baby slept overhead. A bottle of whisky on the table in front of them, piles of their notes surrounding it, connecting mugshots of the departed with their best suspects for the killer, while the grandfather clock counted down the night.
Fielding had returned to CID from his meeting about Steadman not with any news of Sampson Marks’ imminent arrest, but instead, full of the latest information on Mavis McGruder to share with his men.
The lab reports had come in. Analysis by infra-red and ultra-violet spectro-photometers revealed an exact match between the paint stains found on Mavis and those on Mathilde Bressant, along with identical traces of sacking, rubber and wood. The rubber was the same kind used for lining a car boot, Fielding explained, and the area of the bodies in contact with it suggested that they had been curled up to fit inside the rear floor of a vehicle, a station wagon or a big car. The killer had waited for rigor mortis to pass so he could manipulate them into a convenient position for transportation.
“The laboratory's analysis is that the bodies have not been near an actual paint spray shop, but in or near premises where cars were resprayed during repairs, which narrows down our search somewhat,” he had told the assembled CID officers. “If we can find that repair shop, we can find our killer. I want you to continue to visit every mechanic in the district, in pairs, with evidence bags in which to collect your dust samples. One of you will ask to see the manager, keep him detained talking about his paperwork, while the other collects the samples out of sight. We don't want them to know why we're really there, we've already lost too many important witnesses in this case…”
He had let his eyes rest on Pete as he said it, a distinct lack of warmth in them too.
When the hubbub had abated, Coulter tried to have a quiet word with him about Marks, but Fielding's reply was terse, dismissive. Something about The Chopper already being part of an ongoing investigation that couldn't be interrupted, that it was the Flying Squad's call and he could say no more about it.
Pete wondering what this really meant.
July turning into August, tramping round garages as per Fielding's orders, sending the envelopes back to the lab, scanning the papers daily for any mention of a Soho strip club owner getting arrested. August turning into September, the long hot summer as stifling as the unanswered questions between Coulter and Pete that weighed heavier by the day.
October and the General Election: Harold Wilson snatching victory from bumbling old Alec Douglas-Home by a matter of 900 votes. No such reward for the pipe-smoking, Gannex-wearing gaffer of Notting Hill nick: still no samples to match the paintwork on the corpses. Meanwhile, Sampson Marks still at liberty, photographed with the Beatles and the Stones at an art gallery in Mayfair, smiling like a proper renaissance man.
Pete had just been studying this latest affront to public decency when Coulter had come into the canteen, looking more anxious and haggard than Pete had ever seen him.
“Pete, Dick,” he said, sitting down between them. “A question for you. How far did you get in your search for the Sexy Ron in Stephenson's diary before that fool McSweeney got in the way?”
Pete and Dick exchanged glances.
“I think we did about four of them.” Dick scrunched up his brow. “Weren't we on the way to Ronald number five when we were so rudely interrupted?”
Pete nodded. “I can go over my notes but I'm sure you're right. I seem to recall Ronald number five was an ageing drunk from Lancaster Road, seemed pretty pointless to us at the time.”
“Well,” Coulter's fingers tapped on the table-top, “I've been going over everything in my notes this weekend and I think that's where we've gone astray. What say we go back over the list, discount anyone who looks too long in the tooth to be Sexy Ron and go back to looking for him?”
“Why not?” said Dick, scraping back his chair. “I for one am sick to death of talking MOT certificates and grovelling round on garage floors.” He started stacking up their empty plates and cups on a tray, got up and took it back to the counter.
“Have you had a tip?” Pete whispered while he was gone.
“Aye,” said Coulter, staring after Dick, “from one of the girls.” He sat in silence for a moment then turned his eyes towards Pete. “I've got a bad feeling,” he said, “that there's going to be another one turn up any minute now.”
“Come over this evening,” Pete offered. “Joan's making stew and cobblers.” He knew Coulter well enough by now, the older man liked just the sort of food he did. “There'll be plenty enough to go round, and I know she'd love to see you. Then maybe we can discuss it some more.”
They'd been at it for hours now, the clock inching its way towards midnight.
“D’you know,” said Coulter, rubbing his tired eyes, “I've only ever had one case in my life as bad as this. I can still lose sleep over it now. He was a mad man like this one, killed seven women right under our noses. Seven women and a baby girl.”
“Christie?” Pete stared into Coulter's eyes, melancholy lamps in the dark night.
Coulter nodded. “Did you know he was a policeman, for a while?”
“No,” hairs bristling on the back of Pete's neck, “no, I never did.”
“Well, they keep it pretty quiet these days,” Coulter said, “but he worked up Harrow Road during the war.”
Pete's hand clenched around his glass. “Stan,” he said. “I think I've finally realised what it is that we missed. It's been playing on my mind that me and Dick forgot something when we were checking up on McSweeney.”
“Oh yes?” Coulter blinking himself back from his reverie.
“Now I know it.” Pete's pulse quickened. “The man McSweeney was having a drink with, the night Bressant was murdered. We asked the landlord if McSweeney was in the Princess Alexandra at the time he said he was and he confirmed it. Said he'd been drinking with a friend. Only I never thought to get a description of the fella he was with. God,” he smacked his palm to his forehead, “what a fool!”
“What are you saying?” Coulter frowned.
“It wasn't a friend of his helping to drown his sorrows, was it?” said Pete. “It was someone else giving him his orders. Telling him that he had to come down the station and confess to murdering Stephenson, telling him the exact time and place to tell us, so that his story couldn't be argued with. Making us look like fools when the next body turned up. And there's only one person who'd know that, isn't there?”
“The killer,” said Coulter. “Our Jack.”
“Yes,” said Pete, “someone so bloody scary that McSweeney would rather give himself up than face the consequences of what might happen if he didn't. I always knew McSweeney's story was balls, he was a bloody con man, running that poker game Christ knows how long without turning a hair. But the fear coming off him that morning, by God. Same as Ernie when we arrested him, and who knows what ever happened to him? Same as bloody Steadman. We need to go back to that landlord, Stan, and pray to God he's got as good a memory for faces as a magistrate…”
“Hold on a minute,” said Coulter. “Who do you think he's going to tell us it is?”
“Marks,” said Pete, “I'm sure of it. If he can just give us a good enough description…”
“I don't think so,” said Coulter, shaking his head.
Pete stared at him. “What?” he said.
“I mean, I think you're right about McSweeney getting his orders from a man in the pub, that makes sense,” said Coulter, “I'm just not sure it would be Marks coming out in the open, doing something as reckless as that. Why would he, if he's so powerful? Wouldn't he have one of his lackies do his dirty work for him, just in case someone in the pub did have a good memory for faces?”
“Bugger.” Pete, who had been halfway out of his chair sat right back down. “You're right. Course he wouldn't. He'd have us chasing round after some minor villain, while he sat back and laughed at us, way he has been all along.”
“Well let's just think about this,” said Coulter, rubbing his hands together, “think about the kind of villain that could put so much fear into men like Tidsall, McSweeney and Steadman. Now, I knew Steadman pretty well and he wasn't a man to be easily intimidated – stupid he may have been, but cowardly he wasn't, not in the ring nor out of it. That meeting you had with the artist fellow suggested that McSweeney was a fairly consummate professional too. And Tidsall thought he was in the clear the moment he got that fancy lawyer, I wonder who was paying for that?”
“Marks,” Pete scowled, “has more than enough money to cover that.”
“Ah,” said Coulter, looking at him like a kindly teacher who expects to get the right answer from his star pupil next time, “but is his empire so great that he can engender the kind of fear that would have McSweeney and Steadman putting themselves away for him for years on end, rather than face his wrath? Are his tentacles that long, that far-reaching?”
Pete suddenly felt his stomach drop from a great height. The photographs. The proof that Wesker had fitted up all those people just to stop any of them from talking about what they might have remembered seeing that night.
“Oh my God,” he said, his mind racing, looking through Coulter and back onto the banks of the Thames and DCI Bell, turning his face away from the light.
“There are still some sensitive matters pertaining to the Wesker affair that are best left off the record…”
If Wesker wasn't covering up for Marks, who was he really taking his orders from? Who had that kind of power?
Black-and-white images flashed through his mind, a succession of faces smiling for Ernie's camera. Stopped on Sir Alex Minton and Lord Douglas Somerset.
They were the most powerful men in the room, Pete realised. Powerful enough to have Wesker sent up from West End Central when Gypsy George nicked that bag, that bag of filth, of pictures just like the ones Ernie took, “on the orders of Scotland Yard's finest, Detective Inspector Reginald Bell” as he had heard Wesker say with his own ears.
Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Bell to whom Pete had handed over every shred of evidence about Wesker they had, every card he would ever have had to play against an operation more ruthless, corrupt and extreme than he could have possibly imagined.
“Oh my good God no,” he said as his whisky glass cracked under his fist, Joan's best crystal splintering into his hand, blood and whisky all over her polished table top.
Bell and The Bastard. Bell and The Bastard. They had been in it together all along. He hadn't been sent to West End Central to uncover corruption, he realised, but to weave himself into the very web of it, to prove how laughably honest he was, how trusting…
He looked up at Coulter, unable to speak, unable to comprehend the mess he had made of the table, only knowing that now they could never catch Jack, whichever face in the frame he actually was. Now he could never tell Coulter, either. If he opened his mouth he was doomed, done for…
“Steady on, lad,” Coulter said gently, getting to his feet and coming over to Pete, helping him out of the chair and into the kitchen, running cold water over his cut hand and inspecting the lacerations.
“It looks all right,” he said, “nothing deep enough for stitches I don't think, which is just as well, I don't suppose either of us fancied a visit to St Charles's at this time of night. Where d’you keep your first aid kit?”
Pete motioned with his head to the right cupboard and Coulter found the TCP and the bandages, cleaned him up and dressed his wounds, went back into the lounge and cleaned that up too, started making them both a cup of tea while Pete just stood there, shaking. Thinking about everything he could lose, everything he held dear, everything that slept above him, so peaceful and oblivious to it all.
“Now then.” Coulter steered him back into the lounge, sat him down and put the tea in front of him.
“Drink,” he ordered. “It'll do you good.”
Pete did as he was told, felt his mind start to focus again as the hot sweetness kicked in.
“So,” said Coulter. “Christie wasn't the only bad apple, then?”
He said it as if he had known it all along.
Pete clenched his injured hand, shaking his head, looking up at the man sitting opposite, a sudden flicker of hope that the old detective really was the man he thought he was. Not like Wesker. Not like Bell.
Coulter reached across, put his hand over Pete's fist. “It wasn't just the poor sods he buried in his home – another one died because of that devious bastard,” he said quietly. “A man who'd still be walking around today if I'd only believed him. Timothy Edwards, poor backwards beggar who swung for him first. Oh, you can say that it wasn't just my fault, that he had a judge and jury trial, twelve good men and true. But I know my part in it and I know what it is you're feeling now, how it'll go on and haunt you for the rest of your days if you let him walk away. I'm not asking you how you know what you know. There are certain things I could never explain to you either. But if you want to get this bastard, this animal, whatever it takes, then I'm with you, all the way.”
Pete felt tears pricking at the back of his eyes, staring at this man who reminded him so much of his father.
“I've been such a fool,” he said.
Coulter shook his head, started to say something reassuring, but Pete cut him off.
“I had the evidence, Stan, more than enough to incriminate Marks and all his well-connected friends. I was left an envelope in my locker, the night we arrested Ferrier. If I'd only opened it a few minutes earlier, before you left, you would have seen it too. A key to a locker in Paddington Station, where there was another envelope. Full of all the other photographs Ernie took that night in Teddy's club. I couldn't even begin to tell you who was on them, Stan, I wouldn't want you to know, it could kill you.”
He rubbed his forehead with his good hand. “No one saw that envelope delivered, it was Dugdale on shift that night and he was round the back, having a fag, when it miraculously appeared. There was no postmark on it, no stamp. It were that slick I assumed it must have been sent from on high.”
Waves of despair and rage washed over him as he admitted it.
“So I gave them back to the person I thought had left them for me. And now I know he's the one we'll never get past, the reason we'll never be able to bring in Jack, however much we want to. The next day, Steadman was dead and Fielding came back with all that crap about Marks being under the Sweeney's watch. Sent us to look round garages all summer long and gave all the evidence we had, every damn bit of it, to the very people who are going to bury it all. Bury me, too.”
Pete was close to breaking down, the thought of Joan a widow and Little Jim an orphan…
But Coulter didn't turn a hair. “Photos,” he said, raising his eyebrows. “They wouldn't happen to have featured a couple of fellows named Minton and Somerset by any chance, would they?”
“How do you know?” asked Pete, astonished.
“Remember the night you brought Gypsy George in?” the older man said. “Well I was one of the privileged CID who actually got to see some of the contents of his envelopes. And there was more than just one set of prints in there, a lot more. So tell me, was it just the photographs that were left for you in the locker? No negatives or anything?”
“And it was back in July that you handed them over to this fellow from on high?”
“Well then, in that case, I would say that you're safe. They've left you alone nearly four months haven't they? Can only mean one thing – they haven't got the negatives either. And they still haven't worked out how you got the prints in the first place.”
Coulter was like a magician Pete thought, pulling another rabbit out of his hat each time it seemed that all was lost. He felt a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth.
“They think I think they gave them to me,” he realised. “My ignorance has been keeping me safe all along.”
Coulter nodded. “So long as you never find out and give the game away,” he said, “then I doubt anyone will touch either you or your mystery benefactor.”
He leant forwards, patted Pete on the shoulder.
“Sleep easy, Pete,” he said. “That's what I reckon you should do now. Have a good night's kip and then, when you're up to it, just give some thought to what we've been discussing. If you're willing, we can resume our own private investigations tomorrow. Starting with the landlord of the Princess Alexandra.”
“Would you look at this?” Lenny dropped yesterday's paper down disgustedly on my desk. It was open at the arts and entertainments page, just where I anticipated it would be. He had seen it too.
A doe-eyed Beatle and a sharp-faced Stone standing either side of them, Toby was pictured clinking Champagne glasses with Pat on the opening night of his latest show at Duke Street. But it was the man standing between them that had nearly made me drop my own edition on the tube floor when I'd first seen it. “Club owner and entrepreneur Sampson Marks” the caption had referred to him. But I knew him as someone else, had seen his true profession through the eyes of a murdered girl:
“Those two bastards,” said Lenny, jabbing his fingers down to cover the faces of the pop stars, “are responsible for sending poor James round the bend. And this one,” he lifted them up again, pointed his index finger down onto the hatchet face, “is the reason I moved halfway across London to hide myself in a bank.”
“Really?” I said. I was surprised enough at him mentioning James to me, let alone having prior knowledge of Marks.
“Oh yes,” said Lenny, “I used to be a bit of a wild one in my youth, but not half as much as him. He used to come round all the clubs, all the pool halls in Bethnal Green, getting his protection money with a bloody great cutlass. Slashed a friend of mine from ear to ear with it. Then he took a shine to me, and that's when I had to get out of the East End.” Lenny shuddered at the memory. “I didn't want to end up being one of his boys, wearing a Glasgow smile if I said the wrong thing one day. And now they're saying he's got a nightclub in the West End?”
“Doesn't say what kind of nightclub, does it?” I pointed out.
“Not hard to guess, though.” Lenny took his finger off The Chopper's face. “My godfathers,” he said, “didn't I tell you that Pat was mixing with the worst kind?”
“What's all the commotion?” Jackie came through the door. She was uncharacteristically late and as I turned my head to greet her, I couldn't help but notice she was looking a bit ruffled, her hair not in its usual immaculate style, her eyes a trifle bleary.
“It's Toby,” said Lenny. “He's hanging out with gangsters now.”
“You what?” Jackie deposited her bag on the desk and came over, rubbing her brow.
Lenny showed her the offending newspaper item. “I know him,” he informed her. “He was the terror of Bethnal Green. Ought to be locked up, by rights. Like I said to Stella, it's all going to come to a bad end for Toby, he gets himself mixed up with this lot.”
“And what were you saying about that other pair?” I wanted to know, tapping my fingers down on the picture. “About them sending James around the bend?”
“Oh,” Lenny's face went bright red, “I probably shouldn't have mentioned that. It's not their fault really,” he sat down, “it's all them pills he's been taking for so long. He thinks the Beatles, the Stones and Phil Spector are spying on his studio and stealing all his ideas. Smashed up half his equipment looking for bugs.”
“Is that where you were last night?” asked Jackie. “When you were supposed to be down the Gates with me?”
“Don't worry, pet, turns out you did me a favour, standing me up.” There was a definite twinkle in her eye. “Who'd like to make me a cup of tea and I might just tell you why?”
“I'll do it.” Lenny shot out of his seat.
I raised an eyebrow at Jackie. “Well, well,” I started to say, but the ringing phone cut me off.
By the time I had finished the call, there was a cup of steaming tea in front of me and two pairs of eyes watching me impatiently, eager for Jackie to get on with her story.
“I'm sorry,” I said, still trying to puzzle out what I had just heard, “but that was Jenny. For some reason she's been taken into the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea and she wants me to come and visit her, bring her some books, this evening. She said it was just the results of a blood test or something she had to have for the baby, just routine. But isn't the Royal Marsden…”
“The cancer hospital,” said Jackie.
Propped up in her bed on crisp white pillows, her skin glowing clear and her hair fanned around her like a halo, Jenny didn't look like someone who could possibly have a life-threatening disease. It was only when I got close that I saw the lines furrowing her forehead as her eyes worked down the front page of the newspaper she was holding.
It wasn't yesterday's paper that was keeping her captive. Jenny was reading the West End Final edition of the Evening Post that proclaimed the discovery of another dead nude with the blunt headline: JACK IS BACK.
“Oh here you are.” She looked up sharply as I closed the door to her private room. “Did you bring them? Emile Zola and Jean-Paul Sartre? At last I'll be able to catch up with all those great minds you were reading years ago. Make a nice change from this.” She tossed the paper onto the bedside table.
“All present and correct,” I said, emptying the contents of my bag out for her. I piled the books next to her flowers and fruitbowl and as I did, I couldn't help but glance at the paper.
They didn't have a name for her yet, nor even a photograph. The picture instead showed a man standing by a pile of branches, a dustbin lid in his hand. “Not another one,” I said.
“I'm afraid so.” The cheer drained out of Jenny's voice.
“What is this?” I picked up the paper, looked closer at the picture. “Is this where they found her?”
She nodded. “In Kensington, this time. By one of the vile buildings Daddy made. The very one I once made a protest against, in fact.”
I looked across at her, over the now very large and perfectly formed bump in her stomach. “Jenny,” the cheery façade I'd been determined to plaster across my face crumbled at the sight of it, “what's going on? Why are you here?”
She raised her eyebrows. “It's nothing,” she said, “honestly. I had one dodgy blood test in my ante-natal, which is why I've got to stay in overnight, they want to double check it. I'm sure when the next results come back it'll all have been for nothing.” She moved her hands up to encircle her neck. “It's a touch of glandular fever, that's all. Nothing so bad as…”
She bit her lip. Glanced towards the door and then back at me.
“What time do you make it?” she asked.
“It's just after seven,” I said, checking my watch.
“Good, then we have a while,” she said, indicating the chair by the side of her bed, “before Bob gets here.”
I sat down, moved closer to her as she lowered her voice.
“Stella,” she said. “You know you helped me once when I had no one else to turn to?”
I nodded, holding my breath, wondering whether what she was about to come out with was the same thing that had been haunting my every waking moment.
“Well, I think I'm going to need to ask you for another favour. And it won't be an easy one either.” Her eyes were as heavy as stormclouds.
She swallowed. “I need to go and see my mother,” she said, “and get back something from that house. She's been trying to offer me an olive branch for years,” her eyes flicked down to the counterpane, where she began picking at a loose thread, “but she's not going to get it,” her gaze flashed back up, “unless she gives me what I want. I've got a feeling I can make her do it too. I've got a feeling things haven't been going so well for mother lately. Only I need to speak to her, make sure I can get her on her own. And that's where you come in.”
A prickle of fear moistened my palms but I tried not to let it show. Instead I nodded and smiled, encouraging her to continue while I battened it down.
“If I can get to see her, would you come with me?” she asked. “It's not just because I'm so fat I have to lean on you, it's the moral support I need more. It'll be hard for me to go back to that house, you see.” She dropped her gaze again, resumed tugging at the thread. “I didn't have a happy childhood, Stella. Money doesn't buy you that. Quite the opposite, in fact.”
“I think I understand,” I said, not wanting to break any confidences, but not wanting her to have to say it out loud. “It's why Dave was so worried about you, you know, when I saw him that time…”
She gave a brief smile that could have been a grimace. “Dil,” she said, “dear old Dil. The only man who never judged. That's why I could talk to him. How much did he tell you?”
“That your father is a dangerous man,” I said, trying not to blink, trying not to give in to the fear that coiled around my guts.
She nodded. “He is. But Stella,” she left the thread, put her hand over mine, reading my obvious discomfort, “don't think I'm going to let him anywhere near you. If we do go back to my parents’ house it will only be on the condition that he isn't there, that no one else sees us. I think mother will agree to it, it's the only chance she's going to get of seeing her granddaughter, after all. It's just that you might have to see a few things that are,” she paused, her fingers clenching against my hand, “pretty bloody vile. Do you know anything about sado-masochism, Stella?”
I nodded, trying to pluck courage from thin air.
“I do,” I said. “I've seen some pretty bloody vile things myself.”
She nodded, as if I was verifying something she had thought all along.
“I knew I could trust you,” she said. She leant back on her pillow, her eyelids fluttering. “Thank you, Stella.” She squeezed my hand and let it go, closed her eyes.
Silence welled around us as I stared at her, forcing back the tears. Heard somebody turn the handle of the door and looked round to see Robert Mannings, his arms full of flowers.
“Gosh,” Jenny came back round, “I nearly drifted off then. You don't realise what having a baby does to you, how much they knock you out. Oh Bob,” she looked over my shoulder and smiled, “here you are, darling.”
“I should go,” I said, standing up. “Let you two have some time together.”
“Thanks, Stella.” Jenny smiled dreamily.
Mannings nodded, grunting his assent. The dark rings around his eyes and the way he could barely force a smile told me that he was taking this way worse than Jenny was. Either that, or she was only telling me half the story with her glandular fever line. I could hardly bear to look at him either. All I could see was Jenny standing there, in my dream, glowing, wearing her long white dress.
The blonde girl sat at a table in the far corner of the Warwick Castle, downing her second glass of whisky as she went over her story again. It was three weeks since her friend had gone missing, three weeks’ worth of whisky but still nothing had blurred the memory of that night.
“We went to Oxford Street, shopping, you know,” she said. “Ended up buying the same outfit, a turquoise two-piece with fur trim, still got mine in the closet at home, I can show it you if you want. I haven't worn it since.” She shivered, took another gulp of her drink. “It was Jeanie's idea of a joke, if we wore the same outfit Jack the Stripper wouldn't know which one of us was which. ’Cos the rumour had been going round that when he took Mavis, he was really after Jeanie. They both came from Glasgow and they both used the same name, Patsy Fleming, a little scam they cooked up to fool you lot.” Her kohl-rimmed eyes looked up for an instant at Coulter's, then back down at her empty glass.
“Why would he be after Jeanie, Vera?” Coulter asked.
She picked the glass up, rolled it round in her fingers.
“Because of the doctor,” she said, eyes following the motion. “Dr Ward. We both testified for him last year. Twice. Marylebone and the Bailey. I'm sure you've got it all on record. We tried to prove he weren't poncing us, he was just our gentleman friend, which he was. But you know what happened.” Her eyelashes flicked upwards and she stared at Coulter. “Look, d’you mind if I have another one in here?” She lifted up the glass. “Only it gives me the willies to keep going back over all this.”
“I'll go.” Pete didn't want to break Coulter's concentration, nor the thread of the blonde girl's story. For according to Vera, the body discovered yesterday morning, Wednesday the 25th of November, on a patch of wasteland behind the car park on Hornton Street, Kensington, was her missing friend Jeanette White. Nobody else had been able to come up with a name for her so far, only the description of a decomposed naked body of a five-foot-one-inch woman with short black hair, a tattoo on her right arm of a bunch of flowers with Jeanette written on top of it and Mum and Dad in a scroll underneath. She had been dead about a month.
But Coulter had sprung into action as soon as the news came through. Headed straight to the Warwick Castle looking for this Vera as if he already knew she would have all the answers for him. Maybe he did. So much of Coulter's information seemed to come from the girls themselves, Pete was sure this must have come from one of the other Portobello toms who'd seen them drinking together in this pub, on the night of October 23rd.
That night, Jeanette and Vera had staggered out of here with thirteen whiskies each under their belts and been picked up by a couple of men on the corner of Portobello Road and Elgin Avenue. Each man had his own car and they were supposed to be travelling in convoy to Chiswick, where the girls had been told the business would take place.
“This for Vera?” asked the landlord, raising his bushy, salt-and-pepper eyebrows at Pete. “On the house.”
All that money in the pot, Vera was the only one to claim it back alive.
“Jeanie's one was definitely local,” the blonde was telling Coulter as Pete came back with her drink, “I could tell by his accent. My one said he was from out of town, which was why we were supposed to be following Jeanie's car, but he sounded pretty London to me. Anyway, Jeanie's john must have done a shortcut, we lost him round the Bush somewhere. Funny, ain't it?” She snatched up the glass Pete had placed in front of her and took a hefty slug. “It was a flash motor he was driving, a Zephyr I think, one of them ones with the big grilles at the front. How could you lose one of them? I was going to take the number plates down,” she said and grimaced, “but my john made me sit in the backseat and I couldn't get a good enough look at them from there.”
“Well,” Coulter shifted in his seat, trying to hide his disappointment at this last comment, “never mind that, Vera, you've been a great help to us so far, better than anyone else as a matter of fact. Which is why I have to ask you if you wouldn't mind performing one last act of kindness for Jeanie and come with me to the morgue to identify the body. After you've finished your drink, of course.”
The blonde's eyes travelled nervously round the pub. “All right,” she said. “I suppose it is the least I could do.”
It didn't take long for Pete and Dick to dig up the records of Jeanette White and Vera Barton, their dalliance with the late osteopath Dr Stephen Ward. Both of them had twice testified that they had only known him socially as part of a West London party scene involving a lot of painters, actors “and those even higher up the social scale” as White had put it, “winking at the judge as if to implicate him too” according to the Daily Record. Pretty and vivacious, Jeanette had gone down well with the press at both trials, even if the prosecution had made mincemeat of her claims. But she had never been the star of this particular show and unlike some of her younger, more luminous co-defendants, she hadn't been able to capitalise on that momentum, start herself up a singing career out of it.
Jeanette had gone straight back on the beat.
“Imagine the headlines we're going to get as soon as we release her ID,” Dick said. “Profumo Girl Is Stripper Victim? The Doc, The Tart And The Stripper? They're going to have a field day with us, send a load more nutters our way too, no doubt.”
“Aye.” Pete stared at the newsprint, a photo of Jeanette outside the court, lighting up a cigarette. Side on, her profile was sharp, her nose too long, not such a looker as Miss Keeler or Miss Rice-Davies after all.
“I wonder,” Dick continued, “how this all fits in with the filth angle in ours – Ernie, Houghton, Stephenson and the rest. What's the betting they were all part of the same circle?”
“Odds-on,” said Pete, a succession of black-and-white snapshots running through his mind, icy fingers running down his spine. “Something else that's strange,” he realised. “Why was this one left in Kensington? All the others have been in or near the river. For some reason, I always thought that was the thread, maybe because mad men are so often fixated by water. But this…”
Jeanette's body had been found by a warden working for the civil defence station hidden underneath Hornton Street. He had noticed that one of their dustbins was missing its lid and saw the glint of metal from what looked like a big pile of rubbish and branches, followed the trail and picked it up. Found a dead face staring back at him.
None of the others had been hidden this way.
But more than that, there was something about the location that was nagging at Pete. Hornton Street. Where had he seen that name before? Why was it so significant?
He looked back down at the paper. It was Mandy Rice-Davies’ grin that reminded him. Reminded him of another blonde with an insouciant smile and hair like Brigitte Bardot, waving a placard saying NO MORE UGLY and standing in front of a building site her father was working on. A building site in Kensington…
“Oh, so you have got a theory, then?” Dick said. “Well, for what it's worth, here's mine, only keep it to yourself if you don't mind, it's a little bit controversial.”
Pete looked up from his paper. “What?” he said.
“I reckon he's one of us.” Dick dropped his voice down to a whisper. “A copper. In on the investigation. ’Cos it seems to me like he's laughing at us. Leaving the last one outside a garage, when we were looking at garages. Then this one, right on top of a civil defence bunker…”
Pete stood up. “Show it me on the map,” he said. “Where this one were found. I want to try and make a picture of it in my mind.”
“Do you think I'm onto something then?” said Dick.
“Lads,” a voice came from behind them. Coulter was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the first smile that had passed over his countenance for a very long time. “There's an outside chance I could retire a happy man,” he said. “Not only did Vera make the formal ID, but she also took the time to help draw up some indentikit photos of the two men she and Jeanette went off with. Take a look at these ugly mugs, see if they ring any bells for you.”
He placed them face up on the desk.
“This is Jeanette's john,” he said.
Pete looked, saw a wide face with thick lips, dark crew-cut hair and a pair of sticking-out ears. A furrowed forehead with thick eyebrows meeting in the middle, cruel little eyes beneath. “She said he was tall,” Coulter elaborated, “about five foot eleven, six foot and probably between thirty and thirty-two years of age. Wearing a sheepskin jacket and driving a black Ford Zephyr. Speaks with a London accent. This one,” he tapped his finger down on the second picture, “is his accomplice, the one that Vera drew the lucky long straw for.”
Pete looked, saw a narrow face with slightly wavy hair, going thin on top. “This one is shorter and of a lighter build,” said Coulter. “About the same age, maybe younger. Said he was from out of town but Vera didn't buy it, thought the two men knew each other well, acted as if tag-team tart-hunting was a sport they were familiar with.”
Pete felt the blood hammering through his temples as he looked from one face to the other. Felt the ground shifting under his feet as he stared at Jeanette's john. It was exactly the same face the landlord of the Princess Alexandra had sketched out for them a month or so ago. Now he knew for sure.
Jeanette's john was Ron, Sexy Ron. Not McSweeney, nor any other late-night denizen of Ladbroke Grove, but someone Pete had known all along. He hadn't actually featured in any of Ernie's pictures, but he hailed from West End Central all the same. Wesker's right hand man, the sacked, disgraced former Detective Constable Ronald Grigson.
And his accomplice, Vera's john, looked like none other but Francis Bream.
The car pulled up on a quiet side road behind Kensington High Street, on the corner of Holland Park. “This is it,” said Jenny.
Swathed in a long back coat, hat and mittens, Jenny's body was an uncomfortable bulk compared to the pale thinness of her face. But determination smouldered in her blue eyes as she leant towards the driver.
“We shouldn't be any longer than twenty minutes,” she said.
He nodded, stray wisps of sandy hair bouncing on the crown of his pink, freckled head. “Right you are, love,” he said, picking up a newspaper from the passenger seat, folded at the sports pages.
“Good,” she turned to me, “are you ready, nursey?”
I smiled as best as I could, feeling awkward in my stiff clothes, thick black stockings and sensible shoes. It had taken Jenny just over a month to organise this meeting, during which time she had been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health, she said. Over Christmas she'd kept a full house, inviting round hordes of people to examine her bump and help put the finishing touches to the nursery. None of them had suspected there was anything wrong with her. Only Mannings’ fearful eyes, the times when he excused himself to stand outside smoking, gave anything away to me.
Jenny had put a lot of preparation into this moment. The nurse's outfit and medical bag had come from one of their friends who worked in costume, the perfect way of smuggling me in without making her mother nervous. Her father was finally away on business, out of the country, and she'd made her mother promise to give their staff the afternoon off. I didn't have to do anything, she assured me, but wait for her.
I opened the car door, went round to the other side to help Jenny out. As my feet touched the pavement, a flash of memory, another's memory, buzzed through my mind.
Mathilde Bressant, holding a long blonde wig.
I caught my breath, closed my eyes for a second, before taking Jenny's arm and walking with her to the gate of a palatial white mansion, encased by a high brick wall and surrounded on all sides by tall fir trees that bent in the bitter, southeasterly wind, as if to shield it further from prying eyes.
“Don't be scared,” Jenny said, pressing the buzzer on the wall by the gate.
“I'm here,” she told the intercom.
The gate clanged, and with an electronic buzz, began to open. We crossed the threshold, walked up the garden path to the front door, where a woman stood waiting beneath Doric columns, in front of the door.
A small woman in a mauve Chanel twinset and a pale yellow blouse, couiffured blonde hair forming a helmet around her pinched face. Ropes of pearls around her neck and gold bracelets at her wrists made her look weighed down by wealth, like her jewellery could snap her skinny limbs at any minute. There was still a ghostly imprint of former beauty hidden under her heavily made-up face, the shape of her high cheekbones, which Jenny had inherited. But she was too skeletal, too artificial and much too nervous.
“Jennifer.” Her voice came out high and reedy and she pitched forwards clumsily, watery eyes taking in her daughter's appearance with painful intensity.
“It's all right, mother,” Jenny said, catching hold of her arm. “There's no need to panic, that's why I've brought my nurse along.”
Mrs Minton tried her best to smile, corners of her mouth twitching like a landed fish. She quickly averted her gaze to me, blinking furiously as she offered me her hand.
“Rosemary Minton,” she said. Her hand was frail but her perfume was overpowering. It almost masked the waves of alcohol fumes coming off her breath, but my nose was sensitive to such things.
“I'm Sister Innes,” I said, the black joke temporarily calming my nerves. “Patricia. I'm here to make sure that Jenny's OK, but I won't get in your way.”
Jenny nodded encouragingly. “Pats can just wait in the kitchen,” she said. “We'll only call her if we need her.” She put her hand over her stomach and I watched her mother's eyes drawn towards it hypnotically.
“I'll show her the way.” Jenny moved forwards, opening the door, leading us into a hallway that looked just as I had imagined it, right down to the sweeping central staircase with its red carpet, the family portraits adorning the walls and the immense chandelier hanging from the ceiling.
“I'm sorry,” Mrs Minton said to me as she closed the door behind us, “but I've let my staff have the afternoon off. Will you be able to make yourself comfortable?”
“Of course she will.” Jenny swept me down the corridor, the eyes of her ancestors following us as we went. The eyes of her father, not of her mother.
She winked as she left me in front of a range big enough to cook for an army.
“Hold tight, Pats,” she said. She had no fear at all, on the contrary, Jenny looked thrilled with the way this game was going. But the moment she disappeared to join her mother, the dial in my brain switched on.
I saw Susannah Houghton blinded in the flash of a camera, a weird carnival coming into focus around her, of men dressed as women and women dressed as men, half naked and painted, wearing feathers and dildos and wielding whips, heard the high-pitched noise of artificial laughter echoing around a ballroom.
I took hold of a chair, stumbled down into it, shutting my eyes. Tried to visualise instead a blue light around me, the face of my pa, holding tight to what Mya had told me:
“Take courage. He walks beside you always, keeping you safe with his love.”
It only seemed like five minutes before I heard footsteps behind me and almost jumped out of my skin. Jenny was back in the room, her eyes wide and her face flushed.
“Where's your mother?” I asked, my heart hammering.
“Out cold.” She held up a tiny phial. “It pays to be a good patient, you know. You get to learn all sorts from nurses, especially what works best with gin. Now come on, we've got to do this fast. Pass me your bag.”
My hands shook as I handed it over, but Jenny moved with such speed she didn't notice, snapping it open and dropping the phial in, producing a large ring of keys from its depths. I had imagined she would need some time to talk her mother round to whatever it was she wanted to get from her, I had never envisioned her doing anything like this.
Not for the first time I felt awed and slightly scared by Jenny.
“This way,” she said, moving towards a different door to the one we'd come in by. “The servants’ entrance gets there faster.”
I found myself running to keep up with her, through the door and down a flight of stairs, down into the bowels of the house. Though I tried to keep a hold of the image of Pa, the dial started to slip again, transmissions flashed before my eyes
Mavis on a blasphemous altar, a line of men in cloaks queuing up to take her. Raising her head to look at me as I stood beside them, mouthing the words that I dreaded to hear:
“The King is in his Kastle. He's the dirty rascal.”
We were running down a long corridor, towards a black door in a wall painted red. Jenny stopped in front of it, thrust the medical bag at me and began counting through the keys on her ring, her hands moving in the same fashion that Mya's fingers had counted my visions back to her.
“This one,” she said, putting it into the lock and turning it. The door opened and she turned to face me, her face glowing with exhilaration and power.
“The bag,” she said, taking it back from me. Her eyes ran me up and down. “It's all right, Stella,” she said, putting her finger up to touch my forehead. “You just stay here, it'll be all right. You don't have to come inside. Stay on this side.”
I opened my mouth but she had already turned, gone into the room. I took a step to follow but what I saw made me reel back against the wall, turn my face to it, shutting my eyes, trying to block it out.
I was no longer sure which world I was in. Faces and images raced in front of my eyes on fast forward, and I felt sure that if I turned I would see the room pulsing red, pulsing danger and death. I started to slide towards the floor, trying to focus on the blue light, focus on Pa.
I heard the words as if he had spoken them directly into my ear. But when I opened my eyes, it was Jenny standing over me, putting a cool hand onto my forehead.
“It's done,” she said, “we can go.”
The black door was closed behind her. She took hold of my hand and led me back down the corridor, up the stairs, into the kitchen, where the pale daylight of the winter afternoon slanting through the windows seemed totally incongruous.
“How long have we been here?” I said, my throat raw and dry as if I'd been screaming.
Jenny looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes, all done. You did brilliantly, Stella, now let's get out of here.”
She punched some numbers into a keypad by the front door and we ran out, down the garden path, towards the opening gate. I could no longer think clearly, only that surely in her condition Jenny shouldn't be running, and why did she say I'd done brilliantly when I'd done nothing at all?
The driver was standing by the gate as we got there; something about him suddenly struck me as familiar, something about those pale strands of sandy hair, but I couldn't place where I'd seen him before. I felt as if I'd sunk an ocean of booze.
“Take this,” Jenny handed him the bag, “and help me get her in the car. She's had a bit of a funny turn.”
As I fell down on the back seat, she gave a laugh, a wild and triumphant sound. Then she turned towards me, her eyes blinding, iridescent. “Come on nursey,” she said. “Let's get you home.”
I don't remember getting there, only brief fragments of the driver helping Jenny shoulder me into my room and laying me down on my bed. Jenny leaning over me, planting a kiss on my forehead and whispering: “Thank you.”
Then the dial slipped and it was night.
I step out of the car and onto the curb, the clack of steel-tipped stilettos on pavement, stomach lurching as I stumble, black velvet and vodka curdling inside. The world spins around me for a moment, gradually comes back into focus as I watch his tail lights disappearing under the trees.
All I know is that this is not where I'm supposed to be. I put my hand up to my hair which I've just had waved, the style of an actress I'd admired, a vague memory tapping at the corner of my skull. Should I not be over in the Bush tonight? Giving Mandy a hand with the kids? So how in God's name did I land myself here? The old black velvet had me in its spell. Now what am I supposed to do?
I look up for the moon but I can't see it through the branches of these trees. Maybe they've taken it down. Better try and get my bearings some other way.
There's a tube station, but it's all shut up for the night, and I can't make out the lettering that moves like an Art Nouveau swirl over the door, the windows gazing back at me blankly, like whatever else is going on around here, this is surely none of my business. That's right. It's time to call it a night.
I tighten the belt on my long, wool herringbone coat, try to keep the chill from my bones as I walk around the corner. Mother of God, what a horrible place. A high tower like a castle's keep made out of red brick, little tiny windows all the way up it but just one light on, one yellow light, right at the top. It's like a lighthouse, sweeping its beam across a dark and choppy sea. They've taken down the moon and put this here instead, put a lighthouse here to lure me onto the rocks. Fear lurches in my belly as I back away from it, stumbling again in my rush, turning around the corner past the tube station, onto the lonely avenue.
The party's over. A tune comes into my mind, something my da used to play on the phonograph back home in Watling Street, before I came to London and all of this charade. A song that played while I danced too long in that place with the flickering candles. But it seemed so right, the way he held me tight, like a beautiful dream that was never going to end. So much for that now. It's time to call it a night.
This isn't the moon, nor the beam of a lighthouse that's coming towards me now. It's a pair of headlights in a long black car that slows down as it catches me in its rays, slows down and turns around across the road, comes to a halt just where the last one did, just where I came in. Is he a cab, come to take me home? I can't make it out.
He winds the window down and says something to me, but it's lost in a burst of static like a radio being turned on, the dial slipped between stations. I lean in towards him.
“Can you take me to Shepherd's Bush, mister?” I hear myself say, and I see him nod, reach out to take the handle of the rear door…
My fingers touch metal and the dial slips.
A squeal of feedback and a burst of static, a cat screams and a woman laughs. The sound of a guitar like the revving of a motorbike engine, the ominous thump of bass, coming up distorted into the night air, like music being played underwater.
They had pored over the map, marked with red pins for the bodies. Apart from Jeanette White, every single one of them had been found in or around the Thames west of Hammersmith. That was where to look.
Somewhere that looks like a factory, or an electricity sub station, with cooling towers and transformers.
Closing in between Brentford and Acton, last resting places of Mathilde Bressant and Mavis McGruder, areas of industrial sprawl. Looking for factory estates with motor repair shops on them, going through lists of employees, security guards, nightwatchmen. Endless lists that took months to comb through; beyond Coulter's retirement, beyond Christmas and New Year, into the early days of 1965.
Then the name they had been searching for came up. A phone call confirmed it.
On the 13th of January, Pete stood on a railway bridge in Acton, looking across the embankment towards the Swan Factory Estate. A bleak, brown range of low brick and concrete buildings, cooling towers rising out of them, corrugated iron and barbed wire fencing circling them, crouched and frowning under a grey sky.
There were thirty-five factories employing six thousand people on the Swan Estate, a sports ground and plenty of wasteland in between. Unrestricted public access 24 hours a day, which was good. Pete didn't want to have to show his credentials. He had the name of the boss of every operation and a cover story about looking for work as security, a riff on his army and police background that sounded feasible, if anybody stopped him to ask.
Pete walked through the southwesterly wind that brought particles of rain stinging against his face. Walked towards the disused Oldham Aero Engine factory, gone bust last August but still left open and unsecured, the premises belonging to the estate, new tenants not yet found. Followed some employees from neighbouring companies as they took a short cut through the empty hangar to a café on Westfields Road beyond it, taking in the old mattresses, discarded beer cans and used rubbers that lay amongst the dust and the still machinery, signs of Oldham Aero developing a night time identity to rival Gobbler's Gulch and Ronald McSweeney's tennis club.
Turned east towards the next large building, parallel to Oldham Aero, a big brick construction with its name painted in three-foot high letters along the front and sides. YATES & LISTON MOTOR ENGINEERS & COACH BUILDERS.
Went down the side of it, listening to the hammer and clang of the machines, the whirr of the extractor fans, the hiss and whoosh of the paint sprayers. Crossed the road towards the premises at the rear of it, Eastfields, another aircraft firm specialising in precision casting bodywork.
Between these two factories and Oldham Aero, waste ground studded with low buildings. Pete circled back towards them, found a block of men's toilets, an outbuilding housing transformers, another solitary men's toilet, a locked switch-room and a boiler house.
Abandon hope all ye who enter here chalked on the wall of the boiler house.
Walked through the wind and the stinging rain, following a metal pipeline towards a transformer shed. Walked around it, noticing vents on each side tacked over with wire mesh. Felt a prickling down his spine, his blood starting to hum, like the moment before you got up from your corner and danced to the middle of the ring.
Two sliding locks on the door were all that kept the shed closed.
Pete took his torch from his coat pocket, drew back the locks with his gloved hands. Took one look behind him, saw only the dull humps of buildings through the drizzle. Stepped through and closed the door.
It was freezing inside the shed, the wind coming in through the wire mesh vents on either side of him moaning loudly in his ears. His throat felt dry as he switched the torch on, dry and tight, heart hammering in his ribcage as the circle of light swooped across the pipes and valves, across the brick and brass and then stopped as it fell on something that was not metal nor stone, something that was curved and curled and shrouded in sackcloth.
He stepped towards it, his own breath hanging on the air in a cloud, knelt down and touched the sacking. Pulled it away from the white, nude body of a girl, a girl with black hair waved and cut into a bob, a girl who looked so very much like Bobby Clarke, except that her blank, black staring eyes screamed out above a mouth that had been stoppered, a cry that had been cut off forever by the fruit of the original sin –
A bright, hard, green apple forced between her lips.
He lurched upwards, blood pounding, reeled backwards, into something cold, something hard, something pushing against the back of his neck.
“Bradley?” The voice sounded surprised. “I weren't expecting you.”
He had come in so silently that Pete hadn't even heard above the noise of the wind, the shock of the sight before him. Or maybe Grigson had been there all along, skulking in the darkest corner of his lair.
“But then,” he went on, “I always did make you for a rubber heels bastard. I could smell it on you, like flies round shit. What are you, then? The advance party?”
Pete tried to push down the rush of fear that jumped in his gut, keep his voice level.
“Hello Ron,” he said. “Who did you think it was going to be?”
The man behind him gave a low chuckle. “Don't give me that old pony,” he said. “You know full well who I mean.” He shoved the gun into the side of Pete's face, rubbed the cold metal up and down his cheek. As he moved in closer, Pete could smell the decay on his breath, the grease on his hair. He smelt like a man who'd been sleeping rough, a man who'd scarcely been home since November. Grigson's wife said she'd last seen her husband on Christmas Day, but he hadn't stopped for long.
“We'll both just have to wait for him, won't we?” he said. “Should make life interesting.”
Pete stared down at the defiled woman at his feet. “Who is she?” he asked.
“I dunno,” Grigson said. “Just some Paddy whore I bumped into. She weren't on the list.”
“She looks just like the first one.”
“D’you know,” Grigson's tone turned incredulous again, “that's just what I thought. She was in the same place and all, just outside Holland Park tube, seemed like it was meant to be. I mean, all this trouble over that silly little tart. Got me so mad that I couldn't resist it. I did have a funny feeling about her when I saw her though, for a minute I thought she might have come back to haunt me.” He gave a sharp laugh. In his fugitive state, Grigson was beginning to unravel. “’Til she opened her gob, that is. No, I reckon it was fate what put her there,” he went on. “Brought it on herself, she did. And you got to admit, I did a good job on her. Used all the same methods. You'd never be able to tell her from an original, ’cept he always took the apple out of their mouths before I dumped them. I thought I'd leave it, give you flatfoot bastards something more interesting to go on. Something that might explain the motivation.”
All the time Grigson was speaking, Pete had been calculating the distance between his heel and the other man's knee, the trajectory a bullet would take if the trigger were to be squeezed. The gun rested upwards, towards the ceiling. A discharge might temporarily blind him, his skin would get burned, but he wouldn't get hit.
“You a religious man yourself then, Ron?” he asked.
He didn't wait for the reply, just kicked back hard with his right leg, swivelled round to the left, brought up his fist as hard as he had ever punched. Fist connected to jaw as the gun went off, deafeningly loud, the flare of it illuminating Grigson crumpling, the gun dropping out of his hand.
Adrenalin was pumping so hard, Pete couldn't even work out if he had been hit. As Grigson floundered, he kicked the gun as far into the darkness as he could, launched himself on top of the other man. Slowly realised that everything still seemed to be working properly. And that Grigson wasn't putting up a fight. The blow to the jaw had KO'd him. He scrambled for the torch he'd dropped on the concrete floor, felt his fingers connect with it just as the door swung open.
“Pete!” Bream's eyes rapidly took in the tableau before him. “You got him?”
Pete looked from him to Grigson, eyes rolled to the back of his head.
“Looks like it,” he said, getting to his feet. “No thanks to you.”
“Sorry, I was…” Bream started to say, but then his eyes fell on the body of the woman, her flesh luminous in the dim light. A muscle twitched in his cheek.
“Not another one,” he said, walking forwards. “Who is she?”
Pete stepped aside, brushing filth from his coat. “I don't know,” he said. “She wasn't on the list, apparently.”
Bream winced, gaze transfixed on the apple in her mouth. “Christ.”
Pete put his hand on Bream's arm, noticed the broken skin on his knuckles. “What's the list, Frank? Can you explain any of this to me?”
Bream shook his head. “I'll do my best,” he said, dragging his watery eyes away from the corpse and back towards Pete's. “Suppose I should start at the beginning, shouldn't I?”
“Clarke got killed because Simon Fitzgerald took a fancy to her,” said Bream, “one night at Teddy's. Badgered Marks to get her to come to this party they were having, the usual swingers stuff. Said he had to have her, a right petulant sod about it he was. But they were making a lot of gelt off Simon in them days, so they indulged him.”
Pete flashed back to their last night at Teddy's, Marks talking to the corpulent manager, a brown envelope passing between their hands.
“The Chopper went out to get her, taking our friend here with him. A couple of hours later they were driving her back to Gobbler's Gulch.”
“It was Fitzgerald?” Pete frowned.
“It was an accident,” said Bream, “a bit of rough stuff gone too far. Marks got Grigson to help him wash her clean and then dump her, made sure his pet copper was tied into it. Must have got someone else down to the murder scene too – remember how you told me that the body had been moved after you found her, that night in the pub with Dai? That's when I realised no one was playing straight.”
Pete nodded, slow throbbing pain coming into his knuckles now as the adrenalin receded.
“Anyway, nothing happened for months, so they were beginning to feel safe – until you nicked Gypsy George O’Hanrahan with the Somerset family album. Wesker was impressed by how you took O’Hanrahan down, thought you had balls, which was why I encouraged him to offer you a transfer. He trusted me, The Bastard did; thought I was his eyes and his ears. Grigson was dead against it, he read you right from the off, but Wesker was sure there wouldn't be no trouble once you were all tied up in all their bagwork, bringing in all Ernie's faces. Trouble was, right in the middle of us cleaning up the streets of Soho, there was another party and another dead tart to dispose of.”
“Bronwyn Evans.” Pete tried to keep up with his former colleague. “Or Gladys Small, as they called her. What happened to her?”
Bream rolled his eyes. “Simon got ants in his pants again,” he said. “Asked The Chopper for a girl. Well, remember I told you about Big Tits Beryl? She'd been having a bit of bother with Evans, who was a drunk, loud-mouthed sort of tart, her best years long behind her, if she ever had any in the first place. Marks knew her of old, knew she was a liability. He must have thought that if Fitzgerald went off his rocker again, here was one girl who wouldn't be missed. That time, they tried to dispose of her more carefully, but even so, Marks couldn't resist winding us lot up by burying her opposite the first one, just to see how much of a flap he could get us into. Worked and all, didn't it?”
Pete shook his head. “My God,” was all he could say.
“So, anyway,” Bream went on, “you know what comes next. The riot, the pieces of brick. Grigson gets the sack, Wesker gets carted off to the funny farm – and with all his protection gone, Fitzgerald goes and tops himself, even before the Welsh tart's body is found. That was the end of the first Jack the Stripper. But the second one was a whole lot more sinister.”
The wind shrieked through the air vents, icy fingers caressing their ears, their noses. Pete shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “Go on,” he said.
“Something else happened on the day of the riot, that wasn't realised until later,” Bream said. “Wesker had retained some of Gypsy George's stash for safekeeping. Not all of it, just the pictures taken at Teddy's,” he raised his eyebrows, “and the negatives. The stuff that might incriminate him, should it ever fall into the wrong hands. Only in all the bother that day, they somehow got lost…”
“You,” Pete began, but Bream winked, put his finger to his lips.
Bream had the photos on him, that night at Teddy's. Had taken them into the lion's den.
“See, Marks,” Bream said, “was only one little cog in a much bigger wheel.”
Minton, thought Pete, Somerset.
Bream nodded, as if reading his mind. “And the ones much higher up than him decided something must be done. They'd already had one of their mates, a respected MP, taking a hit. Not to mention the unfortunate doctor who'd tended them with such care.” Bream glanced down at Grigson, poked at him gingerly with his toe to make sure he was still out cold. “They didn't want no more call-girl scandals. So one of them had a bright idea. Dim old plod still hadn't twigged Simon Fitzgerald for Clarke and Evans, didn't look like we ever would, and Si weren't in a position to tell any tales. So why not just carry on his work? Make it look like the killer was still around. Resurrect him, turn him into a figure of nightmare who preyed upon ladies of the night, killed them in mysterious ways and left their bodies in places designed to fool us all? Let the press use their all-too predictable brains to come up with a name for him, something the public would enjoy – leave them nude and it wouldn't take long. And so the second Jack the Stripper was born.”
Pete shook his head, all the pictures falling into place now.
“They made a list of all the girls they reckon posed the worst threat. The regulars at these parties,” Bream continued, “the ones who worked for Ernie. Then the mastermind behind this fiendish plan volunteered his services to play the part of Jack.”
The throbbing in Pete's knuckles was intensifying, along with the expression in Bream's green eyes.
“He had his reasons, you see. He had this daughter he was rather more fond of than any decent father should be. Only she'd rebelled against him and made him look stupid, turned her back on him, slipped out of his grasp. He weren't used to not getting his way and his jealous rage turned him into a monster. He'd been in the army, seen active service; he knew how to be cruel and how to do it without leaving a mark. He took out his sadistic lust on these women, and good old Grigson here, now that he weren't any use in an official capacity no more, got to be his bagman.
“See, Grigson was in a unique position – the girls all knew him as a good source of income, they'd go off with him willingly, even the ones who were all tooled up to take on the Stripper.” Bream gave a bitter laugh. “Trouble is, it took me too long to work this all out. And when I did, it weren't just a matter of finding him. That was easy enough, he hadn't moved house or anything. No, my problem was that I had to persuade him I was still as bent as he thought I was. Still the same old Bream, the clown they all took me for, just wanting to relive old times, chasing skirt and getting pissed, way we used to do in the old days. Months of talking bollocks and standing rounds it took me. I thought I had him, that night on the ’Bello…”
“That's why he went rogue,” said Pete. “He thought they'd sent you after him, that the game was over and they were taking care of the loose ends. That's why he left Jeanette White in Kensington, it was a warning. That's why he did for this poor beggar, that's what he was telling me…”
A long groan rose up from the floored bulk between them. Grigson was coming round.
“Better get him cuffed up,” said a voice from the doorway.
The two men turned at the same time.
A dark shape against the pale light.
“The van's parked just around the corner.” DCI Bell motioned with his head.
For the briefest of moments, Pete and Bream exchanged glances, then bent down to haul Grigson up to his feet, not a phantom any more but a woozy, stinking man in a dirty sheepskin coat. His left eye had closed up where his injury had started to swell, his head lolled down on his chest. They pushed him towards the door and he stumbled like the walking dead.
Bell put his hand on Pete's chest. “Stay here a minute,” he said. “You go on, Bream.”
Bell waited until Bream was out of earshot before he crossed the threshold, walked over to where the dead girl lay. No flicker of emotion over the face of this senior detective, this old war hero, as he studied the corpse. Just a regretful shaking of his head. Pete would never know how long the DCI had been standing there, listening to him and Bream talk. Never be able to read what was going on behind those hard grey-green eyes.
“Have you recovered all of the missing photographs now, sir?” he said instead.
Bell continued to stare at the corpse.
“Sampson Marks,” he said, “you will be pleased to know, is enjoying his last moments of liberty. Thanks to the continued efforts of both Bream and yourself, the case against him is now complete. He will be arrested and charged within the hour. You are an exceptional detective, Bradley, as I said to you before.”
“An honourable Coldstreamer,” said Pete.
“But I'm afraid,” Bell said softly, “old army mottos only stretch so far.”
Pete realised he was staring down the barrels of a neat little pistol, so small it was almost hidden in the cuff of the DCI's coat.
“Then you'll want to make sure the negatives are kept safe,” Pete said, dragging his eyes upwards to meet Bell's, “out of harm's way. Won't you, sir?”
A second stretched out like an elastic band, as Pete's mind spiralled backwards, seeing Vera Barton's white face in the Warwick Castle, the spooked reflection of Jack in her eyes. Coulter sitting in the lamplight in his living room, closing his hand over Pete's fist. Joan in the hospital holding Jim in her arms. Mavis McGruder's children, their faces pressed against a window pane in Lancaster Road, waiting for a mammy who was never coming home. A record spinning round on the turntable of Mathilde Bressant's empty flat, coffee granules still in the cups. Margaret Rose Stephenson in the glow of the coffee stand on Bayswater Road. Ernie Tidsall, shaking under his own spotlights. Susannah Houghton, bending over a black girl, already dead in her eyes. Bronwyn Evans taking a last drink as The Chopper put his arm around her. Simon Fitzgerald with his hand on a showgirl's arse, fear and paranoia dancing across his face. Sir Alex Minton and Lord Douglas Somerset, Harold Wesker and George Steadman, laughing in the lights of Teddy's club. Teddy himself at the bar, offering him a drink. And little Bobby Clarke, lying under a willow tree, the summer air all still around her. Dad walking in front of him, walking towards the river, looking back and putting his big paw of a hand, calloused by the years spent digging under the earth, around Pete's tiny fingers singing: “Willow, weep for me”…
He heard the click of the safety catch, shut his eyes. The wind howled through the air vents like the screaming of the dead.
Opened his eyes again to see Bream standing behind Bell, pressing a pistol behind the DCI's ear. “Now,” Bream hissed.
“Bream?” Confusion spread across Bell's face as he lowered his arm. “What's the meaning…”
“I'm not working for you.” Bream snaked his arm around the DCI's shoulder, took the gun from out of his hand. “I never was.”
He released the safety catch of his own pistol, a smile playing across his face.
“How does it feel, sir?” he asked. “How do you like it?”
Bell stared at Pete, fear in his eyes as well as outrage. “Bradley,” he said, “do something. Can't you see what's happening? He's still in league with Grigson…”
“No sir.” The smile vanished from Bream's face. “I'm working for Detective Chief Inspector Alan Ponting, have been for the past six years. My brief was to discover how it was that Sampson Marks had become untouchable. Who was protecting him and why. DCI Ponting's very much looking forward to hearing your explanation.”
Beads of sweat had broken out across Bell's forehead, but he clenched his jaw, stared straight ahead.
“And I think you owe DS Bradley here an apology before we go,” Bream continued. “He's a much better detective than you are. He's the only one that didn't take me for a mug.”
The relief that coursed through Pete's veins was so strong he had to stop himself from laughing out loud. He felt giddy, light-headed.
Bell's mouth was working but it was some time before anything came out.
“I'm sorry,” he said. “I appear to have underestimated the pair of you.”
“That's right,” said Bream. “You did.” He looked over Bell's shoulder at Pete.
“You'll excuse me for not offering you a lift back, but as you can see, my car's already chock full of villains.”
“What about…” Pete looked down at the woman's corpse.
“I'll see to it,” said Bream. “You just get out of here.”
Bream grimaced. “I expect the bigger cogs in this wheel of ours will find a way of keeping him safe. Just as they'll do for DCI Bell here, I'm sure. This is all the justice we get, I'm afraid, Pete. That and the knowledge that we kept our own hands clean.”
Pete nodded. Stooped down to retrieve his torch and as he did, he couldn't stop himself from taking the apple out of the girl's mouth and hurling it into the far corner of this makeshift mausoleum, from closing her eyes and offering up a silent prayer for her soul.
Another burst of static and Holland Park Avenue dissolves, takes her with it, leaving me standing in a long red corridor, at the bottom of this house, this big white house in Kensington. On the threshold of a room that throbs like a big, beating heart, my fingers on the metal of the door handle, my wrist turning.
“My father's house has many rooms.” Jenny's voice in my mind as the door opens.
My eyes travel around his lair. Take in the rack with all the straps. The hooks for all the whips and paddles, the leather hoods and restraints. The coat-stand draped with a long black cape and long blonde wig and behind it, surrounded by red velvet curtains and candelabras, the blasphemous altar itself.
Strange markings are carved all over it, signs I cannot decipher, rude hieroglyphics spelling out unholy creeds. All the walls painted red and in the centre of all this, a black and dreadful shape that begins to take human form, the form of a man sitting in a black leather chair. A light switches on behind his head and projects a beam out in front of him, a screen above the altar, showing a silent film.
A little boy and a little girl, both with white blonde hair, playing in the garden that surrounds this house, underneath the tall pine trees, the trees that bend in the southeasterly wind, bend to protect the lair beneath.
A little boy and a little girl in bright sunshine, skipping under the trees, turning to laugh at the camera with two pairs of identical eyes. His eyes, not their mothers’.
He sits and he watches. Sits there naked, a man I have seen in the papers so many times, a man remaking London to his own design, now naked, red scores across his shoulders and his hair no longer neat, his teeth no longer clean, tears streaming down his face.
On the black tiled floor beside him, scores and scores of photographs ripped from inside brown envelopes. Every one of them identical. A little boy and a little girl with white blonde hair in the bright sunshine, smiling back at him with his eyes, his eyes…
The film starts to tear, starts to burn, burn into a black hole and then something else emerges, a flame from within the blackness. Margaret Rose Stephenson in her dogtooth check coat, holding up a candle before her. “Rejoice not in iniquity,” she says, her voice sounding out loud as she steps out of the frame to stand in front of him against the red wall, “but rejoice in truth.”
He looks at her with wild eyes, his hair falling in sweat-soaked strands across his forehead, veins pulsing at his temples like worms. “But you're not here!” he screams. Reaches down and picks up one of the photographs from the floor, holds it up to her candle.
“Whether there be prophecies…” His head cracks round as another voice fills the room. Mathilde Bressant in her black sweater and pencil skirt, standing underneath the coat-stand, playing idly with the strands of the blonde wig in her hands. “…they shall fail.”
He bares his teeth, streaked and stained in blood.
“You are not here!” he repeats, throwing the picture towards her.
“Whether there be tongues,” Mavis lounging sideways on the altar in her grey suit, her flick knife snapping open in her hand, winking at him, “they shall cease.”
He gets to his feet, slips on the black tiled floor, falls into the piles of photographs. “None of you are here!” he rages, picking up handfuls and throwing them into the air.
“Whether there be knowledge,” Jeanette White leaning against the rack in her new turquoise twinset, raising a pint glass full of coins towards him, “it shall vanish away.” She smiles and turns the glass upside down, pouring the coins over his head.
“For we know in part,” the woman I have just left on Holland Park Avenue now standing behind him in her herringbone coat, holding a small silver bell that she rings above his head, “and we prophesy in part.”
He staggers to his feet, in the middle of the circle they have made around him, clenches his fists and throws back his head. “None of you are here!” he bellows and the red walls shake at his fury, the sound of interference, a radio somewhere starting to hiss as the women shimmer and then disappear. He begins to laugh, long beads of drool stringing from the corners of his mouth. Reaches down, but as his fingers touch the photographs, there is another loud burst of feedback and a sudden flash of light.
“I am here,” she says, dressed in white, hovering above him with the blue light pouring out of her, enveloping the room. “Daddy dear.”
He looks up at her, his face contorted with horror and desire. Reaches out his hand to try and touch her but it goes straight through her, her laughter pealing out of her, echoing around the walls, the room beginning to shake again, the sound of a howling wind.
“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” Jenny's voice cutting through the gale, “but now I have put away childish things.”
He staggers, clutches his chest, and as he does so, Jenny rises to the top of the room, filling the place with a blinding light.
“And now abideth faith, hope, Love,” her voice so loud now that the walls are starting to crumble, “these three; but the greatest of these is Love.”
The walls collapsing and the last thing I see is him falling, screaming, into the void of blackness that opens up beneath him.
“This is where I've been keeping them.” The dapper little old man opened the door and turned on the light. “I think you'll find they're all in order. Please, come in, have a good look around.”
I walked into the room, my eyes travelling from floor to ceiling. A room full of pictures, collages and canvases, dazzling in their colour and beauty. All the work that Jenny had produced at St Martin's, the pictures she had painted in Italy, she had entrusted to the care of her former tutor Murray Partridge. It was all in the letter she had left for me.
I had been bed-bound for two weeks after our visit to her parents’ house, exhausted by the fever that had burned through me that afternoon and into the night that followed. Jenny had called a doctor out for me, then sent someone else to come and look after me, bring me the envelope that contained the letter. There was nothing more she could do herself – her contractions had already started.
My eyes took in sketches of nudes, life-drawings from the late Fifties, in pencil and charcoal or sometimes with a colour wash, drawn in a draughtsman's hand that rendered them three-dimensional with deceptively skilful ease. The nudes becoming more Cubist as her style developed, but still recognisably women, generously proportioned, coloured so as to make the skin seem to glow off the canvas.
Montages featuring American car number plates, Coca-Cola bottle tops and a badge proclaiming I love Elvis. Icarus falling from the sun, first sketched in charcoal, then painted in oil, bright blue and yellow, the colours like a stained glass window. An actual pastiche of a stained glass window, the figure of the Queen of Sheba at its centre.
More collages: Japanese flags and American pulp paperback covers, Edwardian fashion plates, planets hovering over purple skies and enormous pin-up women rising over cathedrals. Jean-Paul Belmondo with a huge red rose on the top of his hat. Marilyn Monroe and Mata Hari. Vivid reds and clashing purples, Surrealism to the untrained eye, but now that I knew her real story, Jenny's singular purpose leapt out at me, her grasp of humour and contradiction wise beyond her years.
Then there was a portrait of Dave, leaning forwards, his chin resting on his knuckles, staring at her with laughter in his eyes. The image was almost as clear and precise as a photograph, with a blue wash for a backdrop and then, on a red curtain above him, four slightly stretched caricatures of her own face laughing back.
Most movingly of all, a self-portrait from 1958. Something slightly askew with it, as there always are with self-portraits, the faces you know best always the hardest to capture. Jenny had been brutal on herself, coarsening her features, her hair pulled back from her face in a rough ponytail, an ungroomed look I had never seen in life. But her eyes so big and full of pain and sorrow, they were the focus of it. Jenny looking deep into her own soul and offering it up to the canvas.
“Isn't she beautiful?” said Mr Partridge, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief.
“I never realised,” I said, feeling like an explorer, long in the desert, who had stumbled through a crevice into a fantastical lost world.
If you have opened this letter, she had written, then it means I am no longer with you. So I am afraid I'm going to have to ask you yet another favour…
Jenny had safely delivered her daughter, Martha Jane Mannings, that same evening. She had been able to hold the baby, make sure she had all her fingers and toes, before she passed from this world to the next. She didn't have glandular fever. She had a rare and malignant form of leukaemia that her pregnancy precluded her from being treated for. Shortly after giving birth she had begun to haemorrhage and there was nothing they could do to staunch it. It happened so quickly and she was already unconscious, so she wouldn't have suffered, I was told.
Unlike her father, who, shortly after his return home, had suffered a massive stroke and fallen into a coma. He had remained in an intensive care unit ever since, trapped in the limbo between life and death. The best possible place he could be.
Martha has another inheritance, you see, apart from her monetary one. And I wish you to be the guardian of it. Mr Murray Partridge was my tutor at St Martin's. Everything of worth that I have ever drawn or painted is in his keeping and now I would like to pass it on to you, to look after for Martha until she is 21. Don't think me awful, Stella, but you are the only person I can trust not to get too sentimental about it, extract things from it for personal reasons, or try to sell any of it. When you see it all, I believe you will know why it's so important for her to have it.
Now I stood in Mr Partridge's flat in South Kensington, in the room he had kept just for her, understanding everything as the tears rolled down my face.
He took hold of my hand with his long, delicate fingers.
“It seems such a pity,” he said, “that no one will ever get to see them now.”
“I don't know about that,” I said. “I think I know a way they can.”
The body of the eighth girl wasn't found until the 16th of February 1965. She was an Irishwoman called Coral Sweeney, who left a husband and two children behind in Shepherd's Bush and further family in Dublin. They never got to see any justice done, never got to know who it was that had snatched away their wife, their mother, their daughter, their sister. Coral was discovered, a month and six days after she failed to come home, on a patch of wasteland on a factory estate in Acton, the place that Mavis had shown me. Strangely, the corpse showed no signs of decomposition – the man who had found her was overcome by how beautiful she looked. According to the coroner, she must have been kept in cold storage for all of that time, before being left there.
At that point the head of the Stripper enquiry, Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Bell, announced his retirement, blaming the strain of the investigation for his decision. In the same newspaper, but much further towards the back, was a short report of a suicide. Former detective Ronald Grigson had left a note for his wife saying that he couldn't go on, before locking himself in the kitchen, fixing a tube to his gas supply and asphyxiating himself. His profession at the time of his death was given as a night watchman on the Swan Factory Estate.
DCI Bell was replaced by a man called Alan Ponting; the head of Scotland Yard's murder squad, who had just hit the headlines putting Sampson ‘The Chopper’ Marks behind bars. Ponting promised a speedy conclusion to the hunt but he would have no such result. The Stripper case was never solved, not officially, anyway.
Jack was gone, the dial stuck on static.
PS, Jenny had written at the end of her letter, if you look in the Emile Zola book you so kindly lent me in hospital, you will find something that I took from you the very first day that we met. It was silly of me, only I wanted us to be friends so much that I thought if I took something personal of yours, then, like a witch, I could somehow make that happen.
Inside the book were two pieces of card, that shielded something delicate, wrapped up in tissue paper. It was a poppy I'd found growing through a crack in the paving stones, on a street in Bloxwich that had been reduced by the Luftwaffe to a river of glass. Pa had watched me pick it and shown me how to preserve it.
We held the exhibition in March, when the first buds of spring were showing through. For her friends it was like another wake, but a more hopeful one than the distressing hours after her funeral had been. For once, we were all together – Dave shaking hands cautiously with an equally nervous Mannings, then both of them staring at the bundle in his arms, the bright blue eyes of Martha that were just like her mother's, and slowly beginning to smile, slowly letting their defences down as they took her through the treasures that had been left for her.
Jackie and Maria, the girl she had met in the Gateways Club, now the manageress of Brockett & Reade, now sharing the flat in Chelsea with her too. Lenny doing his usual showman's trick, talking to all the visitors and telling them about Jenny, putting his arm around Giles when it all got too much for him. The oldies hanging back, finding much to discuss between them; Cedric and Mya, Stanley and Mr Partridge.
Chris by my side, where he had been ever since Jenny sent him round to take care of me, repaying the favour I'd done for her one hundredfold. Both of us amazed at the way his gallery had come back to life. Back from the dead.
And Jenny in my mind's eye, white and glowing, like an angel.