The taxi arrived at Wimpole Street.
‘Denison Beck – Medical Electrician’ was one of four brass plates on the door, the others belonging to an ophthalmic surgeon, an aural surgeon and an F. C. Motherwell who offered ‘American dentistry’.
The door was answered by a porter dressed in a maroon Eton jacket and bow tie. He didn’t look well. There was a film of sweat on his forehead and a haunted look in his eyes.
He asked them their business and ushered them in, staggering slightly as he walked towards the staircase.
‘Are you all right?” Skelton asked, wondering if he was just very drunk, as porters often are, even in Shakespeare. ‘Do you want me to get you a doctor?’ 48
It seemed a foolish thing to say. Like standing in the Champs-Élysées and saying, ‘Would you like me to get you a Frenchman?’ There were probably forty or fifty doctors in Wimpole Street and another hundred around the corner in Harley Street.
‘I’m fine, thank you very much for asking,’ the porter said but, all the same, looked up at the staircase in the way that Whymper might have considered the Matterhorn.
‘I’m sure we can find our own way,’ Skelton said.
The porter looked grateful. ‘Just at the top of the stairs,’ he said, ‘first door on the right.’
The door was opened automatically with some sort of buzzer. They moved from the lino of the hallway to a carpet so thick you could turn an ankle. A woman, dressed, coiffed and be-rouged to look like a waxwork introduced herself as Miss Alison. She sat at a spindly writing desk before a display of buttons and a telephone. Selecting a green button, she purred into the telephone.
‘Mr Beck is expecting you,’ she said. Another green button caused the door opposite magically and silently to open.
Beck’s consulting room would have met with Marie Antoinette’s approval; a precise shambles of pastel colours, gold bits, plaster and woodwork carved into ribbons and flowers, and more gold bits. Beck himself sat on a throne behind a desk that was the size of a spare bedroom. It had more gold curly bits attached. None of the electrical apparatus he used for his ‘treatments’ was in evidence, but his desk was blessed with at least four times as many buttons 49as Miss Alison’s. Skelton guessed that some of them were to do with the telephones of which there were three, some of them to make doors open, some of them to make lights come on and go off. Others possibly made the moon come out or fomented revolution in Istanbul.
Introductions were made. Beck stood and padded silently towards them, the carpet visibly bouncing beneath his patent leather shoes like ancient peat, and pressed a button on the wall. A panel slid silently to one side revealing a mirror-backed drinks cabinet. Some of the drinks were yellow. Two were blue. Like the desk, the chairs and the walls, all the glasses and decanters had gold curly bits on them.
‘Drink?’ Beck asked. His voice, like that of Miss Alison, was the purr of a cat set loose in Billingsgate.
‘I wouldn’t say no to a cup of tea,’ Skelton said.
‘What about you, Mr Haynes?’
‘Hobbes,’ Edgar said. ‘Yes, please. Tea with a spot of milk and no sugar.’
Beck flicked a red switch on his desk, picked up one of his telephones and ordered tea for three. He ushered Skelton and Edgar into satin chairs and arranged himself in front of a bookshelf, his dove grey suit flowing over him like water, his silk shirt the palest yellow, with tie in a contrasting lavender. Skelton found himself wondering how he got his hair to do that – to remain soft and blonde and apparently brilliantine-free but still all in one place except for one lock at the front, which fell over his unlined forehead. 50
He was a fraud. Skelton had known men like him at Cambridge – all absinthe and quails’ eggs and girlfriends. Rarely out of a punt. Never clever enough to notice they were dim. Did no work then crammed in the week before finals just enough to scrape a degree, an achievement that, often as not, coincided with Dad endowing a new wing for the library or filling the Master’s cellar with the ’96 Graham’s Quinta dos Malvedos.
‘I’m sure you’re very busy, Mr Beck.’
‘No,’ Beck said. ‘I’m not busy at all. The police have insisted we shut down the practice until all this business is settled.’
‘Well, the sooner we can get it settled, the better.’
Edgar passed Skelton a sheet of paper on which he’d scribbled some reminders and took out his own fountain pen and notebook. Beck sought sanctuary on the throne behind his desk. Skelton stood and paced.
‘Now, I’m sure I don’t have to point out to you the seriousness of the charge that’s been brought against you. Manslaughter can attract a sentence of life imprisonment. You’re in fact very lucky you’ve been let out on bail now.’
Beck adopted an expression of apprehensive concern and Skelton, astonished at how little of the man was remotely genuine, turned away in case an involuntary sneer of contempt should infect his lips.
‘The 1861 Offences Against the Person Act is somewhat open to interpretation and offers certain ambiguities that could be turned to our advantage.’ 51
He spoke for a quarter of an hour, mostly about Lord Hewart’s learned observations on Rex versus Bateman, with special reference to mens rea and animus nocendi, and added some thoughts on the police’s fumus boni iuris.
When he had finished, Beck let a few seconds go before saying, ‘I have many influential friends. To be honest, I doubt whether there’ll be a trial at all.’
Skelton sighed. Of course he had. And their intervention would more than likely secure a miscarriage of justice, just as it already seemed to have led to his presently sitting on his throne rather than being locked up in a Brixton remand cell.
Skelton nodded slowly as if considering the proposition. ‘And while it is earnestly to be hoped that their influence will indeed procure the desired effect, I think, perhaps, as a fall-back position, we should proceed on the assumption that there will be a trial and, unless we construct a robust defence, you will be sent to prison for a very long time.’
Beck examined his manicured fingernails and adjusted a marble ornament on his desk. In prison, there would be no manicures. No marble ornaments.
‘Several lines of defence suggest themselves,’ Skelton said. ‘The police, I believe, have already brought in medical and electrical experts to examine the equipment you use in your treatments. Their reports, inasmuch as I can understand them, seem to suggest that it could very easily induce a fatal heart attack.’
‘In the hands of an incompetent, of course it could. Just 52as medicines can kill if misprescribed. Just as the surgeon’s scalpel can kill more easily than it can cure. But I am not a bungler, Mr Skelton. See.’
Beck flicked one of the buttons on his desk. A buzzer sounded and a green light came on above a door.
‘If you’d care to come this way, Mr Skelton, Mr Holmes.’
‘Hobbes,’ Edgar said.
Beck led the way into the treatment room.
It was a disappointment. A year or so earlier, Skelton and Mila had been to see a German film called Metropolis at the Vaudeville in Reading. They hadn’t liked the film. Too long and too silly. The plot had involved a mad scientist who made a robot woman in a room filled with huge, complicated electrical things, some of which exuded lightning. Skelton, in his mind’s eye, had conjured something similar for Beck’s treatment room. There was a chair with some wires connected to copper hoops – possibly armbands or headbands – which in turn were connected to a small wooden box that housed switches and a dial; and a sort of bed or couch, similarly equipped with copper hoops and wires. It was nowhere near big enough or fancy enough to make a robot woman although, according to the brief, experts who examined it were sure it was enough to kill a real one.
Aubrey had said he could get experts prepared to say the opposite, but pitting experts against experts, Skelton knew, was never a good idea. The jury gets confused and reverts to prejudice and instinct. If they took a dislike to Beck, and 53there was no reason to think they wouldn’t because Skelton certainly had within a few seconds of meeting him, he’d get life.
The best bet, under the circumstances, would be to counter the jury’s instinct with snobbery. If Beck could persuade some of his ‘influential clients’ – lords, bishops, statesmen – to stand up in court and swear that he was the finest of men who put the safety of his clients above all else and whose treatments had magically cured their lifelong ailments, they’d be home and dry. It went against the grain, of course, and would be a travesty of justice akin to young Ewers walking away with a wigging and a fiver, but, as was the case with Ewers, if Beck walked free he would have done his duty as defence barrister.
The ‘influential clients’ would have to be selected with care. No chequered pasts, no Sunday paper scandals, no skeletons in cupboards allowed.
When they were back drinking tea among the gold curly bits in the Marie Antoinette room, Skelton asked if Beck could furnish them with a client list.
‘I am afraid that won’t be remotely possible,’ Beck said.
‘No?’
‘I work here under conditions of the strictest confidentiality. Many of my patients have personal health issues which they would prefer their own wives and husbands not to know about. The idea that they might discuss them in a court, have them reported in the press and bandied about as servants’ gossip is unthinkable, not to say a despicable and 54professionally ruinous betrayal on my part. If any of them are to be approached in relation to this matter, then I shall approach them.’
‘Has it occurred to you, Mr Beck, that there is a lot more than a professional setback at stake here?’
Beck sat very upright, ‘And as a man of my word and a man of honour, let me tell you, Mr Skelton, that a life spent in the world’s filthiest dungeon would be preferable to a betrayal of trust.’
‘He’s probably worried that his clients would be queuing up to denounce him as a fraud,’ Edgar said, in the taxi back to Foxton Row. ‘That’s why he doesn’t want to give us the names.’
Skelton chuckled. ‘The police will have gone through his papers, anyway, won’t they?’
‘One would have thought so.’
‘There’ll be a client list in there, I shouldn’t wonder. Or an appointments book or some such. Ask Aubrey to get hold of it. If we pick out a few with more socially acceptable complaints than spermatorrhoea, I’m sure we can sort something out.’
Back at Foxton Row, the post had brought Skelton’s weekly letter from his Welsh cousin, Alan.
He had two Welsh cousins, twins, Alan and Norah. Their mum was Mabel, Skelton’s mum’s sister, who came from Leeds, but their dad, George, was from Rhyl, where he now managed the Pavilion Theatre. 55
There was a strong possibility that cousin Alan was touched in the head, not least because, in puberty, the time when many boys begin to show an interest in girls, Alan got interested in angels. They appeared to him. They spoke to him and told him to do God’s work.
It took him a while to work out what this meant – doing God’s work – but after a certain amount of experimentation, trying one thing and another, he came to realise that it was touring the country in a caravan, preaching, singing and playing the banjo. He’d been doing this ever since.
His sister, Norah, for the want of anything better to do, had joined him. She sang better than Alan and played the accordion to a very high standard and the two of them lived in an Eccles De Luxe Four Berth caravan drawn by a Morris Oxford saloon, both bearing signs saying, ‘The Joy of Jesus Mission’.
There aren’t many people in this world who relish being sung at by evangelists, but Alan and Norah had the good sense to lay more stress on the ‘Joy’ than the ‘Jesus’, and lightened the load of ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ and ‘Love Divine All Loves Excelling’ with comic, novelty and music hall favourites. At the moment, everybody wanted to hear ‘Yes, We Have No Bananas’, but ‘Make Yourself a Happiness Pie’ was also popular, as was the perennial favourite ‘When Father Papered the Parlour You Couldn’t See Pa for Paste’. They had a good repertoire of more sentimental songs, too. Their special version of ‘I Ain’t ’Alf Proud of My Old Mum and She Ain’t ’Alf Proud of Me’ was always met with 56a warm round of applause and wet sniffles of appreciation.
Earlier in the year, while in Scotland, they had learnt to dance the tango and had decided that that dance, as long as you avoided any of the unwholesomeness that infected the movements when Argentinians and Rudolph Valentino did it, was in no whit at odds with the teachings of Our Lord. So now, as well as the preaching (which some have said was more like a comic monologue than a sermon) and the singing, they liked to get their congregations up and dancing to the strict chum chum chum chum rhythms of Norah’s accordion.
Their meanderings – where they directed the Morris Oxford and where they decided to stay – were driven by perceived need. Wherever they heard of a spot that had been beset by fire, flood, disease or disaster, that was where, they knew, they would find people most in need of the Joy of Jesus.
Cousin Arthur Skelton, the famous barrister, of course, always knew where the worst crimes of murder and mayhem were to be found, so often they allowed their footsteps to be guided by him. And sometimes they were able to unearth nuggets of information that were useful to their cousin’s pursuit of justice – most notably a couple of years earlier in the case of Mary Dutton, the so-called Collingford Poisoner. Alan saw nothing untoward in acting as a sort of informal detective for his cousin. As far as he was concerned the three of them, himself, Norah and Arthur, were united in their devotion to a common cause – bringing honesty, truth, fairness, virtue and joy to a naughty world. 57
In return for their nuggets, Arthur’s financial support of their mission had, down the years, never been less than generous.
Alan usually wrote a letter a week and, more often than not, Arthur’s replies would come wrapped around a postal order or cheque.
c/o The Newport Street Congregational Church, Newport Street, Burnley, Lancashire.
Monday, 10th November 1930
My dear cousin Arthur,
I hope that this letter finds you in good health and that little Elizabeth had a lovely birthday. Did our card and present arrive on time?
It is Norah who always remembers these things. I am so hopeless that sometimes I cannot even remember my own birthday never mind those of friends and relatives, but Norah is quite meticulous about such matters.
I hope the book is not too old for her. Norah said that she remembered reading The Children of the New Forest when she was a girl, so she knew that it was a sensible and wholesome book. What worries me, though, is that Norah would have been eleven or twelve when she read it and Elizabeth, correct me if I am wrong, is just nine. Then again, I expect Elizabeth is a good bit more advanced in her reading 58than Norah was when she was that age. Norah has always been very clever, but the school we went to did not cohere to the same educational standards as schools do nowadays. There were only two teachers for all the ages. One of them hit you all the time and the other fell asleep, so all we really learnt was how to keep quiet.
I was never much of a reader at any age except for the Bible.
Our big news is that we are now Moral Hygienists – if that is a word. Should it be ‘hygienist’ or ‘hygiener’ or perhaps some other variation? Anyway, that is what we are, and I expect a bit of an explanation is in order.
You remember when we were in Scotland, our friends there, Beryl and Jack, very kindly taught us how to dance the tango. I am sure I told you about that. Anyway, since leaving Scotland, during our time in Liverpool and Darlington and Burnley we have been incorporating the tango dancing into our meetings, along with the singing and the preaching. And very popular it has been, too. So popular, in fact, that we have enhanced it with other dances – the foxtrot, the one-step, the lancers, the slow waltz and even the quickstep, which seems to be all the rage at the moment with the youngsters.
Well, gradually the dancing seems to have become the main attraction. Indeed, it is more popular than the singing ever was and a good bit more popular 59than the preaching. It has allowed us to invite a bigger congregation and, perhaps more significantly, a younger crowd, to share the joy of Jesus.
Here in Burnley we have recruited a happy group of local musicians – trumpet, clarinet, and a trap-drummer – to augment Norah’s accordion and my banjo. Both the trumpeter, Clifford, and the clarinettist, Ronald, can improvise in the ‘hot’ style. It is instructive to observe the way in which their wails and trills put ‘pep’ – which is, I would like to point out, another word for ‘joy’ – into the dancers’ feet. It makes me wonder whether the usual po-faced understanding of what the music of angelic hosts sounds like is all wrong. Is it possible, I wonder, when Gabriel blows his horn, that what comes out bears more similarity to Paul Whiteman than it does to J. S. Bach? Paul Whiteman is an American bandleader, by the way. Clifford, the trumpet player, has many of his gramophone records.
Sometimes the music seems to infect the dancers so that, even if they are ‘sitting this one out’, they find themselves dancing all by themselves in a style they call ‘jazzing’.
The Joy of Jesus finds expression in many different ways: Shakers shake, Quakers quake and the young people of Burnley jazz.
Anyway, at last Wednesday’s meeting, towards the end of the evening, when I had said the final 60prayer and led the singing on ‘Whiter than Snow’, three rather official-looking people, two ladies and a gentleman, all dressed very severely in black, brown and navy, turned up and stood waiting at the back of the room.
This made me a little apprehensive because, from their manner and appearance I assumed that they had come to tell me off about something. We are, at the moment, based in a hall attached to a Congregational church. Traditionally, the Congregationalists take a dim view of joy, and particularly of dancing. Though some allege that their views on such matters have relaxed a little since the seventeenth century you can never be sure, so it would not have surprised me one jot or tittle to hear that some fusty church elders or suchlike had got wind of our cavortings and sent a deputation to put a stop to them.
Mercifully, I was wrong, and when I approached the stern-looking trio, they introduced themselves as representatives of the Chaundler Fund for the Promotion of Moral Hygiene.
Norah and I knew of their work. You probably do, too. You sometimes see their representatives at railway stations. They wear brass badges announcing their affiliation, keep an eye out for unaccompanied young women and take them to one side for a friendly word.
By coincidence, not long ago we had chatted to one of these representatives at Lime Street station in 61Liverpool. She said that you get a lot of Welsh girls coming there on trains from the valleys of South Wales and the small towns of North Wales, filled with hope that the big city will offer something better than a constant struggle to put food on the table and a husband scarred from working in the pit or at the furnace.
The Chaundler ladies offer advice about where the young women can stay and what places and people they should avoid. And they give them a leaflet with the address of their headquarters where they can go in the event that they find themselves in trouble of any sort. They also keep an eye out for men – who loiter in railway stations looking for unaccompanied young women, but with less innocent intent – and, if necessary, report them to the police as procurers or white slavers.
The rivers of temptation that sweep young women into the mire of prostitution run deep and run wide.
The two rather severe ladies who arrived at our meeting were sisters, Miss Price and Mrs Brandon and the gentleman was Mrs Brandon’s husband. They told us that their particular concern at the moment is the generation of girls, just coming into womanhood, who were made fatherless by the war and have been brought up by widows. These are girls many of whom, with no proper breadwinner in the family, have been denied decent food, never mind 62clothes and luxuries all their lives. At fifteen, sixteen or seventeen, they make the dangerous discovery that there is a certain kind of man who will happily pay their entrance to the films or dance halls, who will buy them chocolates and even frocks if they want them, who will perhaps take them for rides in motor cars, and the ways in which they can repay these men cost them nothing except their moral hygiene, an attribute upon which they have probably never learnt to place much value.
Miss Price and Mr and Mrs Brandon had heard from other volunteers working in the area about our meetings in the Congregational hall and had learnt of their popularity with young women.
This is true. As I say, before we introduced the dancing, most of our meetings were conducted in a sea of white hair and creaking ailments. Now we find ourselves assailed by giggling youngsters.
There are always more girls than boys, perhaps because they like dancing more, or perhaps because boys have more places they can go, billiard halls, boxing clubs – or you see groups of them on waste ground, whatever the weather, playing pitch and toss for farthings and ha’pennies.
Girls do not seem to mind dancing with each other, – or, as I mentioned earlier, ‘jazzing’ on their own. In fact, they might even prefer another girl as a partner because she is more likely to know the steps and be 63able to execute them without risk of injury. And they can be sure that there will be no funny business going on, or expectations made of them.
Anyway, Miss Price and Mr and Mrs Brandon could see the way in which our mission – to introduce people of all ages to the joy of Jesus – could be combined with their mission – to protect young women from the serpentine enticements by which they are so often beset.
They also pointed out that, although it cost as much as a shilling to get into a commercial dance hall, our ‘dances’ are absolutely free and are accompanied by a certain amount of religious and moral instruction. We have always seen the dancing – this must be stressed – as an addition to and never a replacement for – the preaching and singing. It is very gratifying to note the enthusiasm with which the young women, half-drunk with the joy of dancing, will, at the end of the evening, join in with ‘The Old Rugged Cross’ or ‘I Am H.A.P.P. Y.’.
So, Miss Price and Mr and Mrs Brandon put a proposition to us. They intend to put us on a circuit, like a variety circuit, through the towns of Lancashire, Cheshire and Shropshire, then up through Staffordshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, and thence back through Yorkshire to Lancashire again.
We will spend three or four nights in each place. They will arrange the halls and put advertisements in 64the newspapers to herald our arrival. This will be a great blessing. Usually, upon arriving in a town, we have to spend a good two or three days tramping around looking for a suitable hall that will have us, then perhaps a week or so building a decent sized congregation.
In addition, they have offered to pay for all of our petrol and provide us with an allowance (very generous, too, at 45s a week) to cover our food and other living expenses.
All we have to do in return is to gear the preaching towards the aims and purposes of the charity, distribute their pamphlets, and work with local volunteers to keep an eye out for the girls and women in greatest danger, with a view to steering them towards the advice and, if need be, financial assistance that is available.
To this we have readily and happily agreed. It will be a completely new adventure for us, and we have no doubt that having everything so organised cannot but be of great assistance to our mission.
Well, I shall sign off now because I can hear Norah calling. I got beetroot juice on my knitted waistcoat yesterday and she says that it will never wash out. I do not see what is wrong with having a bit of beetroot juice on your knitted waistcoat, but she says that people will think I am dying of a fatal wound. There is a chap in the market here who sells woollens at very reasonable prices. I would not vouch for the quality 65but as long as it is grey and covers the fraying on my shirt front, I am not fussy.
I am ever yours faithfully in the joy of Jesus,
Alan.