Denison Beck’s flat was in a mews not far from the Cadogan Hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested. He answered the door himself, in his shirtsleeves, his hair unbrushed.
His greeting was surly.
‘Are you sure this isn’t something that could be dealt with on the phone?’
By way of answer, Skelton pulled a quarter-inch of photograph out of the envelope.
‘Oh, you’ve found those. You’d better come in.’
The flat was nowhere near as Marie Antoinette as the consulting rooms. Chairs, sofa, rugs and curtains were all in drab greens and yellows. The room admitted little in the way of daylight. Even though it was a bright morning out, 216the electric light was switched on.
There was a half-empty bottle of brandy and a glass on the table, next to an overflowing ashtray. Beck didn’t invite them to sit, so they remained standing.
‘Did Enoch give them to you?’ he asked.
Skelton nodded.
‘I feared he might. Did you pay?’
‘Five pounds.’
‘You could easily have beaten him down to ten bob. Who’s seen them?’
‘Enoch, myself, Mr Hobbes here, Aubrey Duncan and Aubrey’s assistant, Rose.’
‘Nobody else?’
‘Enoch mentioned that the plan was to use them for purposes of blackmail.’
Beck ran a hand through his hair. ‘I’m afraid that all backfired horribly. It’s the reason I’m in the mess I’m in. I suggested to one or two of the clients I might have photographic evidence documenting their … peccadilloes. Rather than helping me, they said that if I breathed a word they’d have the charge beefed up from manslaughter to murder and then they’d make sure I’d hang. And I have no doubt they could do it. Would you like a brandy? Whisky?’
‘It’s a little early.’
Beck poured himself a generous measure.
Edgar lit a cigarette, emptied the ashtray into the grate and gave the fire a bit of a stir. It was cold. ‘I wonder,’ he said. 217‘is the electrical therapy side of the business a going concern, or is it there just as a cover?’
Beck’s pride was wounded. ‘I am a fully qualified medical electrician. Many of my clients know nothing at all about the Special Treatments Room.’
‘Did Mrs Roberts take the electrical therapy or was she exclusively Marcia the Whip?’
‘Oh, you worked that out, did you? That’s what’s so unfair about the whole matter. I’m accused of killing a woman with equipment she never went near. And there seems to be a battle going on. Half the judiciary, like you, think the evidence against me is negligible, and the other half know that, if that is the case, they can merely get the police to manufacture more evidence, and perhaps they have the power to secure a conviction with no evidence at all. And it gets worse. One of the clients – a judge – told me that this man …’ Beck rummaged through the photographs until he found one of a client dressed as a baby with nappy and dummy lying across the lap of Marcia the Whip, who was dressed impeccably as a Norland nanny. ‘I knew him only as Mr Green. Do you know who that is?’
Skelton looked closely. The face was obscured by shadow.
‘It’s Norris Lazell,’ Beck said.
Norris Lazell was known, or at least rumoured, to run a south London gang the members of which had a reputation for ruthless and unmerciful violence. Members of his gang had frequently been arrested and some of them sent to the gallows, but Lazell, like the Chicago gangsters whose exploits 218filled the newspapers, always made sure nothing could be traced back to him.
‘If Lazell found out I’d had this photograph taken, he’d kill me, probably in some slow and unimaginably painful way. You heard about Walter Ingram?’
Walter Ingram was a rival gangster. His body had been found welded into an oil drum along with twenty or thirty rats.
‘In fact, I’d imagine that if he found out you’d seen the photograph, he’d kill you, too. And Enoch and Aubrey Duncan and … who was the other person you mentioned?’
Skelton and Edgar looked with suspicion at every passer-by on Sloane Street.
‘So, what should we do with the photographs?’ Skelton asked.
‘I’d say we hide them in a drawer and pretend we’ve never seen them.’
‘Pervert the course of justice, you mean?’
‘If that’s how you choose to describe it.’
‘Couldn’t I get disbarred for that?’
‘Better than being welded into a bin full of rats, wouldn’t you say? In Chicago, I believe, they use Tommy guns. They drive past in a car spraying bullets.’
Skelton pulled his hat tighter down on his head. The action, he knew, would not protect him against a Tommy gun attack, but he felt he had to do something and pulling your hat down is something to do.
219The usual Wednesday letter from Alan was waiting for him at Foxton Row.
c/o The Chaundler Fund
Princess Street
Manchester
Monday 24th November 1930
My dear cousin Arthur,
Many thanks for the gramophone records. Was it you who did the packing, or the shop where you bought them? Whoever it was did a marvellous job and they arrived intact. My favourite is ‘Airman! Airman! Don’t Put the Wind Up Me’ and ‘Sitting on a Five-Barred Gate’, both of which we shall most certainly include in our repertoire (in fact, as I’m writing this at one end of the Eccles, Norah is writing out the band parts for ‘Airman! Airman!’ at the other.)
I have a confession to make. The more we go about our new mission with the Chaundler Fund, the more I become aware that we may be working under false pretences.
Norah, by the way, after her shaky start, has become a compelling and persuasive preacher. She does herself proud, she does the mission proud and she does the Chaundler Fund proud. But more and more we are unsure whether she is speaking to the right people. 220
As you know, our role as Moral Hygienists is to save the young women who come to our meetings from the snares and temptations of loose living and the slippery slope that leads to prostitution. But here’s the thing. Over the past few weeks, we must have chatted with hundreds of young women before and after the meetings, but – and Norah will bear me out on this – we have yet to meet one that I would say is in danger of finding herself on the slippery slope. The fly in the ointment to my way of looking at things is wholesomeness. The places in which we hold our meetings – church halls, working men’s institutes – are wholesome, our appearance is wholesome, the way in which we address them is wholesome, the songs we sing are wholesome, and, even though we play tangos, jazz and tunes with titles that some might describe as suggestive, there is something you cannot quite put your finger on about the way we play them that is wholesome. And thus, for the most part the young people we attract are wholesome.
But there is another element to the congregation that we – having been instructed by the Chaundler Fund to concentrate on the youngsters – barely notice. Every night, there is a fair smattering of older women. To be honest, at first we assumed that they were the mothers and aunties of the younger ones, come perhaps in the role of chaperone. 221
It was Ron, the clarinet player, who taught us otherwise.
As you may remember, when he decided to team up with us, we warned him that we would not be able to pay or even feed him. He assured us that as an old soldier he would be able to fend for himself.
This is how he does it.
Obtaining money for food and drink is easy. All he has to do is go into a pub, take out his clarinet, stand on a table and play ‘The Flight of The Bumblebee’, at possibly double the tempo that Rimsky-Korsakov intended it to be played. It is a feat that is bound to leave any audience agog. He follows it with a ragtime piece called ‘Kitten on the Keys’, originally composed for the piano, but adapted for clarinet with the most entertaining swoops and slides. People first of all pay money to hear the tunes again, then they pay to hear requests. Ron, as well as being a near-miraculous sight-reader has an astonishing ear and memory for a tune. At times people even bet him that he doesn’t know the tune they are about to request. He always wins.
So that is how he makes money for his food, drink and clothing. He finds accommodation every night simply by announcing, at the end of the meeting, that he has nowhere to stay and if anybody could offer him a bed for the night, he would be very grateful. And always one of the older women, the ones we took to be aunties and mothers, would volunteer to put 222him up. And we thought that was nice. Kind aunties and mums taking the homeless young chap into the bosoms of their families.
Then, one day, Solomon, a cornet player who works during the day as a clay blunger at Dudson’s, heard us saying something to that effect and slyly pointed out that the women were not mothers and aunties and that Ron was a very good-looking and charming young fellow.
It took – such is our naivety – a good few minutes before the implications of what he was saying came home to Norah and me, and then a much longer time for us to work out what, if anything, we should do about it. If it was true what Solomon was implying, then Ron’s behaviour was clearly unacceptable, not merely on the broader moral grounds, but also because it flew in the face of our mission as Moral Hygienists leaving us open to accusations of gross hypocrisy.
Solomon told us that since the first night we came to the Stoke-on-Trent area, Ron has been staying with the same woman, a Mrs Shipley in Hanley.
Obviously, if it was true that Ron and Mrs Shipley were engaged in some sort of unfitting liaison, we would have to inform him that his services were no longer required. But neither Norah nor I were willing to do this on the grounds of what really amounted to no more than gossip from Solomon, so we determined 223to get to the bottom of it all by going to see Mrs Shipley.
We found the house, part of a run-down terrace on a dingy road. We knocked. Mrs Shipley came to the door. She said that Ron had popped out, but insisted we come in and have a cup of tea.
She made us tea and even had a bit of cake, that she told us Ron had bought. Her son would be home from school soon, she said.
It is difficult to tell people’s ages when their lives have been hard. A thirty-year-old woman who has given birth to five or six children and struggled to feed them can look about the same age as a fifty-year-old duchess. Mrs Shipley was perhaps thirty or thirty-five but had only one child and had also managed to retain a youthful posture and instead of the pinched wrinkles you see so often, she had an open, intelligent face.
Not wanting to rush to judgement, we thanked her for having Ron to stay and hoped he wasn’t being too much trouble. Her reply – she mentioned that the only trouble was his snoring, but he usually stopped if you held his nose – was shameless.
There is nothing more confusing than a contented sinner. Since it was impossible to believe that she did not know the difference between right and wrong, one could only assume that she flaunted her sin so shamelessly and so readily in the hope of eliciting some reaction. If we were going to condemn her to 224hell fire, she wanted to get it over with so that she could kick us out before cutting the cake.
Jesus, when he encountered the woman who had been accused of adultery by the scribes and Pharisees and sentenced to be stoned to death, said, ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.’ Then, he told the woman he did not condemn her and instructed her to ‘sin no more’, and we have every reason to believe that, chastened by and grateful for Our Lord’s intervention, she truly renounced her adulterous ways.
Then in Luke 7, He has his feet washed with tears by the woman, often assumed to be a prostitute, whose sins are many. And He says, ‘Thy sins are forgiven.’ And ‘Thy faith hath saved thee.’
You see, saving people from sin who want to be saved from sin is all well and good, but the Gospels are a little more ambiguous about what to do in the case of unrepentant sinners. As I understand it, from Matthew 18, you’re supposed to have a word with the sinner. If that does not work you get a lot of people, the congregation of your church, for instance, to have a word. And if that does not work, then ‘Let him be to you as the Gentile or tax collector’. By which I suppose Our Lord meant banished from decent society, but it’s hard to be sure.
St Paul in his first letter to the Corinthians, advises them, when they encounter a man who is living adulterously with his own stepmother and seems, if 225anything, quite proud of doing so, ‘to deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus’.
Chatting there with Mrs Shipley, drinking tea and eating cake, to be honest, the very last thing on my mind was delivering her to Satan for the destruction of her flesh.
She met a boy in 1917. They intended to get married. Then he got called up and dragged off to the barracks in Lichfield. They tried to arrange a marriage first time he got leave, but it proved too difficult and not long after that he was sent to France and never came back. The boy, called Leslie, the same as his dad, was born a few months later. Shipley is her maiden name. And she calls herself ‘Mrs’ rather than ‘Miss’ because ‘some people are funny about a boy having a “Miss” as his mum’.
Because she never married, she was unable to claim a war widow’s pension. She got a job at one of the potteries, but as soon as the slump came in ’21 she was laid off and had not worked since and probably never will now.
I rarely have time to read the newspapers, but Mrs Shipley keeps abreast. Apparently, it was thought, when the American stock market crashed October before last, that it would have no effect over here. This has proved incorrect. In the past year – I did not know the figures but have seen the evidence clearly enough 226– unemployment has doubled and there are those who say it could double again next year.
Dole for one such as Mrs Shipley is a pittance if they’d let her have anything at all. At times it seemed her only choices were starvation or the workhouse. Men were her salvation.
‘There was a chap for a while who used to visit every Tuesday and Friday afternoon. A married man. He was good fun. We couldn’t go out or anything because we’d be seen, but we’d have a laugh. I used to live for those Tuesdays and Fridays. And yes, he gave me money. I was a “kept woman”, I suppose. But I can’t think I could have got by any other way. And when he went there was a chap who moved in for a bit and then another one who had a sort of country cottage out towards Cheddleton where he used to take me, and he had a bike there and taught Leslie how to ride it. And if you want to call it prostitution, then that’s what it is, but I’ve kept my boy fed and clothed and I’ve had a very nice time doing it. I’ve had companionship. Sometimes that’s all I’ve had. I mean, Ron buys me a bit of cake now and then, but he’s hardly a sugar daddy is he?’
And then she said: ‘I’ve been up your dances and heard what you have to say and I’m all for what you’re talking about. It’s a terrible thing for a young woman to have to do, but what you should know is that some of the time, the reason the young women don’t have to 227go on the streets is ’cos their mums are already there. I mean, I’m all right. I’ve managed to look after myself a bit and if I do my hair nice and put a bit of rouge on, I can look presentable enough to stay off the streets and be a “kept” woman. I’ve been able to be choosy about the men I’ve had to do with. And I hate to think what it must be like for them as can’t be choosy. And anyway, Leslie’s twelve now and I hope I can keep him at school so’s he can get a decent job in an office and keep me because if he doesn’t, I’m going to be out there on the streets. I don’t see as I’ve got any alternative.
‘And don’t tell me there’s widows’ benefits you can claim. Yes, some people get a war widow’s pension, but then there’s Mrs Batkin who used to live over the road. Five kids. Her husband came home gassed. It took him three years to die and then they turned round and said she couldn’t have a war widow’s pension because even though it was the war that killed him, he didn’t actually die in the war. I don’t know what happened to her in the end. She moved away. Probably in the workhouse.
‘Have you seen the forms you have to fill in to get the Widows’ and Orphans’ Pension?’
I had to confess that I had not, although I have since been to the trouble of acquiring one. The filling in does not seem too difficult – unless of course you cannot read or write – but the form includes a page and a half of information about who is entitled to the 228benefits and under what circumstances, none of which makes a blind bit of sense.
I quote, ‘And whereas by Section 18 of the Pensions Act it is provided that a person whose husband, father or mother, as the case may be, had died before the commencement of the Pensions Act is entitled to a pension in the like circumstances and under the like conditions as if the husband, father or mother is deemed to have been insured at the time of his or her death for the purposes of the Pensions Act if he or she would have been or would have been deemed to have been so insured by virtue of any employment if the Pensions Act had then been in force …’ and so on and so on. Can you, a Cambridge man and a trained lawyer, understand a word of that? I certainly cannot and I would imagine there are armies of curmudgeonly officials who do not understand it, either, but rather than owning up to their ignorance, for fear of making a mistake, deny everything to all-comers.
Leslie, the son, a smart boy who knows a lot about trains and is a wizard at mental arithmetic came home, then Ron. He was a bit taken aback to see us there. Caught red-handed in adultery by his religious colleagues. We complimented him on his choice of cake and said we would see him later for the meeting, thanked Mrs Shipley for her kind hospitality, and left.
I certainly do not think that Mrs Shipley, or Ron for that matter, should be delivered unto Satan for the 229destruction of the flesh.
I am sure that in your line of work you frequently encounter real sinners who perhaps deserve to be delivered unto Satan and that you have done much good work in saving the innocent from false accusation. Religious instruction, and particularly the letters of St Paul, do rather steer one towards a belief in moral absolutes, but more and more, I am finding it hard to make that clear distinction between the black and white of sin and virtue. Everything, once you start properly to explore the circumstances, is in the grey area between.
Mrs Shipley would be in no doubt that these men with whom she has adulterously consorted have brought joy into her life. What if your vacuum salesman Harold Musgrave bought more joy with his amorous exploits than Norah and I can ever hope to with our missionary work? Are we wasting our time? Do I really believe that there is a genuine distinction to be made between virtuous joy and sinful joy? Are the virtuous more filled with joy than sinners, and, if so, why do they so rarely look it?
Such thoughts are unsettling. If God is, in this way, testing my faith, then I pray most fervently that I shall not be found wanting.
I am ever yours faithfully in the joy of Jesus,
Alan.
P.S. Some of the records you so kindly sent are by ‘Jack Payne and his BBC Dance Orchestra’. Am I to assume from this that Mr Payne’s music can be heard regularly on the BBC? I have always assumed that a wireless set would not be a practical proposition in the Eccles because of aerials and batteries and so forth, but Ron tells me that with modern equipment this might not be the case. If Ron is correct in this respect, investment in the right sort of equipment would enable us to keep our repertoire bang up to date, which would be a great advantage these days when fashions in music and in dancing seem to change so quickly. It would not do to be seen by the young people as ‘old hat’.