I cannot follow them into their world of death,
Or their hunted world of life, though through the house,
Death and the hunted bird sing at every nightfall.
HENRY REED, ‘Chrysothemis’
Not everyone has a house cleaner who knew Dylan Thomas and Francis Bacon, and who was born into an aristocratic family and went to Wellington College and Cambridge University. I had one, called Mr Ashburner, and he disappeared from my life as suddenly as, fifty years before, he had disappeared from the life of his own family. This is what I know about Mr Ashburner and the strange period before and after his death, six years ago.
Antony Wentworth Ashburner was born near Lausanne Switzerland in 1921 and fell down the basement steps, outside my house in Primrose Hill, on a wet and windy April Fool’s Wednesday in 1998. He died on 4 April, in the Royal Free Hospital, Hampstead, never having regained consciousness. A coroner in the tiny, neo-Gothic court in Old St Pancras churchyard decided that the fall had been an accident, leading to severe brain damage, and that internal bleeding was the primary cause of death. There was no sign of a stroke or heart attack and certainly no suggestion that he was pushed. He seems to have slipped on a wet step, while wearing rather smoothsoled shoes.
Mr Ashburner was the son of Harley Wentworth Ashburner, a retired lieutenant colonel in the British army (born in the 1850s), and of Beatrice Blanche Adele Julia Emma Doxat de Champvent. She came from a long line of Swiss aristocrats which can be traced back to the thirteenth century. The English Ashburners claim that Beatrice’s family were a dark and unstable breed. Both parents were divorcees when they married, shortly after the First World War. Beatrice Ash-burner, a Roman Catholic, was excommunicated after her divorce.
Antony and his sister, Ann, born a year after him, were brought up in the isolated and imposing Doxat family chateau at Champ-vent, near Yverdon-les-Bains in the Vaud canton. It is a private residence now, but for a while after the last World War it seems to have been open to the public. Brother and sister were brought up by nannies and servants and had little contact with their elderly father – and not much more with his young wife. Letters from Ashburner’s mother, written to him just after the Second War, suggest considerable cruelty offered in his direction by his father. The children’s summer holidays were spent on the Côte d’Azur and were shared, on occasion, with the offspring of Haile Selassie and a governess.
By the early 1930s the family had moved to Cheltenham. Ann went to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, which she hated and was expelled from. Ashburner was sent to Wellington College in Berkshire, an establishment aimed at those intended for the army. In photographs of ‘Hardinge Dormitory’ in 1936 and 1939, Ashburner looks quite normal and rather more handsome than most of his fellow pupils. In a 1965 letter to the Labour politician Patrick Gordon Walker, following the notorious Smethwick by-election, he recalled that he owed ‘a debt of gratitude to [Patrick’s brother] Robin Gordon Walker’, who was his form master at Wellington and, so he says, the only good influence in his life until he was about twenty years old. Gordon Walker was subsequently to leave the school under something of a cloud. A friend tells me that Ashburner gave him an amusing account of trying to lose his virginity, as a teenager, in a brothel in Tunis.
According to his sister, he went up to Cambridge in 1939 to read law. If he did go to Cambridge it didn’t suit him and he transferred to Birmingham, where he probably read English. There is a mysterious and evocative poem by the Birmingham poet Henry Reed, called ‘Chrysothemis’, which gives an insight into Ashburner’s life in the Second City. After his death, I found a galley proof of the poem in his untidy flat at the wrong end of Ladbroke Grove. There was a dedication, handwritten in ink: ‘To Antony from Henry, December 1942’. The poem is darkly Eliotic and casts light on an important, if brief, relationship. It was published in John Lehmann’s New Writing and Daylight that winter.
In a letter of 1965 – to Dorothy Baker, a BBC Third Programme script-editor – Ashburner recalls this acquaintance during a brief spell when he was living in the basement flat of a house belonging to Professor Sargent Florence, the left-wing economist and sociologist. This was Highgrove, a Birmingham house famous enough to be the subject of a short TV film by David Lodge. Ashburner’s flatmate was Dr Bobby Case, a pathologist at St Chad’s Hospital. ‘I wondered then,’ he wrote to Baker, ‘and I have sometimes wondered since, how it was that Bobby Case managed to get hold of so much offal for our dinners – in view of wartime shortages…’
Highgrove, a large house, now demolished, was the haunt of writers and radicals, such as Auden and Spender, as well as the novelist and Birmingham University lecturer Walter Allen – whose name can be found in Ashburner’s surviving address book. Highg-rove was a Midlands bohemian hang-out unknown to most metropolitans. Perhaps, like Julian Maclaren-Ross, another acquaintance, Ashburner was one of the misfits and deserters incarcerated in the psychiatric wing of Northfield military hospital in the Birmingham suburbs, one of W. R. Bion’s patients (guinea pigs).
What else did he do in the war? Reed went on to work at Bletchley Park. My mother-in-law, who was in the same section, remembers him taking a female colleague out for lunch. Reed’s Bletchley Park friend, Michael Ramsbotham, has no recollection whatever of Ash-burner. Was he a conscientious objector? In my more fanciful moments I imagine he was a spy, although I’m not sure which side he would have been on. By the end of the war, he was living in Fitzrovia and working at Foyles bookshop. He wasn’t keen on Christina Foyle, he told me.
Ann remembers her brother in 1946 at an old haunt of mine, the now celebrated Marquis of Granby pub in Charlotte Street – with its clientele of gangsters, bookies and homosexuals in search of rough trade. She hadn’t seen him since the start of the war, until she discovered him drinking in the company of Dylan Thomas and Francis Bacon – like a fugitive character from a novel by Patrick Hamilton. He mentioned to me, while scrubbing my sink, that he had known such people as the ‘two Roberts’ (the painters Colquhoun and MacBryde) and Tambimuttu, the poet and editor. I hadn’t realized how close he had been to them. Walter Allen, who had been in Fitzrovia since the middle of the war, is a likely link to the world he called ‘New Grub Street’. Ann says that Dylan Thomas acknowledged her presence by making an outrageous pass.
The last his family heard of Ashburner, until Ann’s daughter read the ‘Deaths’ column in the Daily Telegraph, was around 1950, when Ashburner was living in Paris and performing in a British Council theatrical tour. Ann assumed that he had been dead for years and thought it likely he had been a homosexual and thus something of an outcast. I noted with grim humour the name of her house at this time: ‘Ashen Faggot’.
In his letter to Dorothy Baker, Ashburner refers to a manic tour of Sheridan’s The School for Scandal, in which he took part with Barbara Bray (later a commissioning editor for BBC drama). He wonders if it would make a good piece for radio. He tells her that he is about to take a group of American women around the world and hints that the experience might also provide some promising material for comedy: ‘Their itinerary alone is a masterpiece of unconscious humour.’
In 1951 Ashburner was reported as a missing person. He had left his flat with no trace. I have found very little evidence of his life between 1951 and 1964. A ration book of 1952–3 gives two addresses: 21 Romilly Street in Soho and 193 Gloucester Place in Marylebone. At some stage in the 1950s he moved west to 14 Cambridge Square in Paddington, to a house which has now been demolished. He talked of an unpleasant landlord.
I have found a rental agreement for a radio from 1953 (the year I was born) and a 1962 court summons for non-payment of five instalments. How he earned a living I can’t say. There are a few comedy scripts for radio, some rather good, including one about a ton-upvicar. Henry Reed, as the successful author of the early ‘alternative’ radio comedy series about the absurd ‘twelve-tone composeress’ Hilda Tablet, would have been a contact at the BBC. I imagine that Ashburner hung around BBC pubs such as the Stag, just north of Oxford Street. There must have been many part-time jobs. He spoke of a spell as a pressure-cooker salesman, another echo of Maclaren-Ross.
By 1964 Ashburner had moved to 170a Ladbroke Grove, his last address. Suddenly, for a brief period, there is a lot more evidence about his life. At forty-three, he is a prolific letter writer: to newspapers, local council officials and utilities employees. There is a large file of correspondence (1964–5) about the banning of William Burroughs’s novel The Naked Lunch by the chief librarian of Kensington, Mr S. C. Holliday. Ashburner waged a one-man campaign to have the book restored to the shelves. He wrote to, and received positive replies from, figures such as: Anthony Burgess, Samuel Beckett, Kingsley Amis, Al Alvarez, Kenneth Armitage, Brigid Brophy, Vera Brittain, Cecil Beaton, John Calder and his old friend Walter Allen. He was also in correspondence with the very 1960s-sounding ‘Sexual Emancipation Movement’. In February 1965, following coverage in the press – the Express referred in a piece about the case to a ‘bloke called A. W. Ashburner’ – the ban was lifted.
Copious press-cuttings and letters show that Ashburner interested himself in the public reaction to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965. It is not clear why this was so. He seems in general to have been a militant and witty campaigner on behalf of causes ranging from animal welfare to the arms trade. Churchill doesn’t fit this profile – maybe the cuttings were research towards a late radio skit? Cheque stubs show regular payments to charities such as Save the Children and Amnesty. Given his likely income in his last years, the sums donated represent considerable generosity. Another significant batch of papers from the early 1960s, found in that dark basement flat, show that Ashburner was cited as a co-respondent in a divorce case. This needs unravelling: was he a legal convenience for a friend or was this a real affair? If so, it leads to his unlikely metamorphosis into a domestic cleaner.
An important facet of his life was his work as an international tour guide. Passport stamps prove that he travelled the world, while employed by a rather dubious-sounding New York company called Gramercy Travel Systems: Honolulu, Tokyo, Manila, Phnom Penh, Bangkok, Colombo, Madras, Calcutta, Agra, Teheran, Beirut, Cairo, Tel Aviv, Athens. The Hong Kong Star (22 October 1966) carries the headline WANTED: 16 ESCORTS FOR BACHELOR GIRLS and a photograph of Ashburner surrounded by his earnest and affluent, mainly American, middle-aged charges. He is quoted as remarking: ‘The tours are strictly for single people. The only condition is that everyone comes on his or her own…We’re not a lonely-hearts club, just a company with a gimmick.’ He is pictured wearing a shiny mohair suit, looking like a lounge lizard, a professional seducer of naive or willing women.
In a crowded cupboard in Ladbroke Grove – which also contained a leather-bound early edition of Paradise Lost – there were many guide books, maps and phrase books from this rather glamorous period of his life. Disturbingly, there were also contact prints showing Chinese soldiers standing over pits full of dead bodies. The photographs must have been taken by Ashburner himself, as they were found among routine shots of tourist sites and lady clients.
At some point in the mid 1960s, just after the documentation dries up, Ashburner became a cleaner, at first working for an agency. I don’t know why he did this. Perhaps he felt he’d tried hard enough to be a writer, didn’t fancy more travelling, was disappointed in love – or gave upin order to lead a simple, fairly ascetic life. The anguished and moving letters from his mother, after the war, seem to be answers to questions provoked by a nervous breakdown and suggest a seriously disturbed childhood under the shadow of a cruel father. Given the details we have about his life, you don’t have to be an over-zealous Freudian to wonder why a man in his forties with so many abilities decides to dedicate the rest of his life to domestic cleaning. He worked for my parents-in-law, Pamela and Daniel Waley, who found him through a neighbour of theirs in the 1970s – and then he worked for my wife, Cat, and for me from 1980, when we moved to Primrose Hill after our brief exile in South London. There were other clients, though precious few at the time of his death, when he had about £1,500 left in the bank.
Was he a good cleaner? He was very good at floors and all the serious stuff requiring strenuous arm effort and bending down. He was average at dusting and he wouldn’t do ironing. He had a marvellous way of asking for new cleaning fluid or Hoover bags, through simple notes left in amusing places which reminded you of your basic duty in a few well-chosen words: ‘More Ajax?’ He was great fun to be with and became part of our life, spreading his discreet, benign, pragmatic and strangely unworldly charm through the atmosphere of the house. I think he liked the houses he worked in as places of calm and quietness, and one had the feeling that in some odd fashion he had chosen you, rather than the other way round. He was always kind and courteous and would present you with gifts of his homemade jam and marmalade. He was a very serious gourmet and chef. The most impressive part of his dingy flat was the kitchen with its recipe books and huge array of utensils, pots and pans. He was extremely helpful in advice on culinary techniques and on where to buy the best ingredients. He even wrote a charming menu for my parents-in-law’s Burmese cat, Pushkin. He had once been a devotee of the cheaper cuts at Harrods and of the Whiteley’s Food Hall, as well as a believer in organic meat.
Ashburner was an expert solver of crossword puzzles, like my mother-in-law, Pam. She remembers his first words to her upon entering her flat in 1975: ‘Books do furnish a room. The last time I saw Maclaren-Ross was at Maida Vale station.’ Although he was friendly and engaging, one never asked him direct personal questions. My mother-in-law can recall only one occasion on which he offered any information about himself – that his father had no brothers. Another time, suffering from an enlarged prostate gland, too ill and depressed to work, he did confide in my father-in-law, who recalls that: ‘I talked to him on the phone at some length, trying to reassure him (in particular about the operation involved, which I had undergone myself). I also offered to lend him money if this would enable him to have the operation properly and thus shorten the period of waiting. He politely refused, saying that he had the necessary sum in reserve, if required. Anyway, he had the operation and was soon back at work and in his normal spirits.’
We don’t know who his friends, if any, were. He took very carefully planned holidays, alone, for four weeks every summer, usually in a remote part of France, chosen for its cuisine and ornithological interest. He sent amusing postcards. His cleaning seems to have been a way to pay for these summer trips. Spanish was his final linguistic effort, replacing jazz on the Walkman head-phones he wore while scrubbing the floor or bath. He was a good musician, took musicianship classes at the City Lit and had a piano in his flat, on top of which we found sheet music for works by Debussy and Satie, borrowed from Marylebone Public Library. He was fit, if rather overweight, and cycled from Ladbroke Grove to north-west London right up to his death. He always wore cycle clips and a daffodil-coloured cycling cape. He had a knapsack on his back and moved along at a stately pace.
When the portly figure of Mr Ashburner had fallen down the steps that wet Wednesday morning, my wife did not know, as she left the house by our front door to go to work, that he was lying just below her. When she got home at about three o’clock that afternoon she found an ambulance outside the house. Someone had seen him, after six hours, lying unconscious outside the basement front door, his head resting by a large flowerpot, arms outstretched, legs crossed and reaching up the steps. He was taken to hospital and died without regaining consciousness – although a friend and I attempted to get some response by playing Mozart and Sidney Bechet to him. During this time we entered his flat and tried to discover his next of kin. Nothing gave us a clue. When he was pronounced dead on the Saturday, my father-in-law put an announcement in the papers. Ashburner’s niece rang from Devon – the last place he had taken a long summer holiday and where he was booked to go again in June – to say that she had been looking for a birth notice and saw his name by chance. She wondered if it was her ‘long-lost Uncle Antony’. I met her, and her mother, Ann, with other members of the family, a few days later at the Polish Daquise café in South Kensington, which seemed the right sort of anachronistic setting for such a strange gathering. Slowly, the extraordinary tale unfolded and we were all struck by the astonishing convergence of lives and events we were witnessing. Ann had assumed that her brother was long dead, and was so upset, both by the death and the recollection of his disappearance, that she didn’t attend the cremation at Mortlake – where we read some Wordsworth and played pieces by Schubert, Sidney Bechet and bird song. Only five of us were present for the cremation, we found no other friends. In July we went down to Devon to scatter the ashes on a hillside near Colyton. They were picked up by a sudden gust of wind and disappeared into the clear summer sky.
There is a more personal side to this story and one I can’t easily describe. Throughout the whole episode of his death I was in a distinctly strange state of mind. I kept reading T. S. Eliot, especially ‘The Waste Land’, ‘Ash Wednesday’ and ‘Four Quartets’, and lines came to me during the period after the accident, each of which appeared to be some morbid sign of a metaphysical drama going on around me in the ‘Unreal City’. I was like a frenetic cabbalistic student in my keen attention to patterns of seemingly trivial details and my sense of psychic charge and shape across time and space – although I stopped short of drawing lines over maps to find hidden geometries of fate. Eliot, I later discovered, went to Lausanne to recover from a breakdown, and began to write ‘The Waste Land’ at the time Ashburner was born there. ‘April is the cruellest month,’ of course, and man can know only ‘a heap of broken images’. There is the figure of the ‘drowned Phoenician sailor’ shown by Madame Sosostris in her ‘wicked deck of cards’, and above all the ‘Hanged Man’ she cannot find – upside down and in exactly the position as Ashburner when he was found. ‘Fear death by water’ was a line I couldn’t keepout of my mind and it still alarms me.
I was also reading Sir Thomas Browne’s Urne Buriall and Garden of Cyrus, and looking closely at Paul Nash’s illustrated editions of Browne, as well as his other work of the early 1930s – made when he was living in a mansion flat in St Pancras. Everything had the quality of a sign and I kept seeing, everywhere I walked in London, Browne’s famous quincunx – the cross with five points which he believed showed the true Christian-Platonic and geometrical order of creation. When I visited Ashburner’s body, draped in gorgeous purple, in a small sepulchral room in the morgue in Old St Pancras churchyard, I noticed the quincuncial security bars on the office windows. When I read an official document, I kept seeing, like William Carlos Williams, the number five. The steps where Ash-burner fell had a lattice pattern on them. ‘For all things are seen Quincuncially.’
My wife died of a rare sarcoma in January 2001, after a mercifully short illness, and I have always connected that terrible event with Mr Ashburner’s fatal accident and the period surrounding it. Such experiences are frightening. At one point, looking desperately for some cause and miracle cure, I was nearly persuaded by a theory linking cancer with natural radiation disturbed by the flow of underground rivers. Cat’s consultant looked at me kindly and questioningly when I mentioned it. Cat felt guilty that she had not noticed Ashburner that morning, though she had no reason to blame herself for a death which was certain from the moment of the fall. Maybe she had some other feeling the accident had provoked. There was much in common between them and, for her, he was a very special person. She was shattered by his death in a way I don’t think I was. Looking back I can’t really say in what way the two deaths were connected, except that in my mind they still are, by a host of words and images and peculiar sensations about fire, the number five, rose gardens, ashes, the years 1596 and 1965, water, exotic birds, the north side of Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, Wednesday, the letters H. D., and a myriad other things which tantalizingly float around in my psyche and only hint at sense.
[Richard Humphreys]
Maurice Sendak says that the Wild Things in his story were inspired by his aunts and uncles who used to come to tea on Sundays in Brooklyn and loom their whiskery faces close to his and kiss him and sit him on their laps and pet him with their leathery hands; he expresses a kind of Swiftian revulsion at the memory of their huge hairy noses and ears and moles, their bloodshot eyes and rotten teeth. ‘I lived in apprehension,’ he remembers, ‘that, if my mother cooked too slowly and they were getting very hungry, they would lean over, pinch my cheek, and say, “You look so good, we could eat you up.” And in fact we had no doubt they would. They ate anything in sight.’1
But the Wild Things who roll their terrible eyes and show their terrible claws don’t fill Max with disgust, and he glories in his becoming their king. Likewise they inspire anything but revulsion in us, Sendak’s devoted readers, child and adult: his clumsy lolloping monsters beckon us to their wild rumpus, just as irresistibly as they call to Max in his wolf suit.
I didn’t take any of the Wild Things for females, it must be said, until I read Sendak’s memoir, but many much-loved stories are full of old hags: the silhouette of the humpbacked, beak-nosed crone and her wavering wheedling speech bring instant recognition that magical reversals lie ahead. ‘Old Mother,’ says Cinderella – or Gretchen – or Belle – or the sister who gets to spit diamonds and pearls; the encounter with the hag is always the beginning of something, something that is going to be exciting (even when you know what’s coming because this is one of your favourite stories). Of course, the old hag can be a wicked witch, like Baba Yaga or the ancient fairy with the grudge in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, but as often as not, she’s like one of Sendak’s Wild Things, and can be tamed.
When I first came to live in North London, there were two pubs called after old hags: Old Mother Red Cap opposite the tube station at Camden Town and Mother Shipton at the corner of Prince of Wales Road and Malden Road.2 But in the late 1980s, they both changed their names: the old women have disappeared.
Mother Red Cap went back to the seventeenth century: the alehouse appears on old maps, and by the eighteenth century had become a large coaching inn standing on open ground at the three-way junction of carriageways travelling north; in a later engraving, the pub has a large garden to the side. In 1704, a certain Margaret Bartholomew was recorded as the alehouse keeper at Mother Damnable’s, and it seems that this legendary figure, aka the ‘Witch of Camden Town’ or the ‘Shrew of Kentish Town’, lies behind the pub’s name.
Jinney Bingham, she was called, and her mother was a pedlar’s daughter in Scotland, who brought her husband, Jacob Bingham, into the family trade when he was serving in the army up there. He was a brickie from Kentish Town, and after they married, they went peddling round the country together. On one of their wanderings, Jinney, aged sixteen, met Gipsy George Coulter, had a baby and went to live with this ‘ne’er do well’; but he was done for sheep-stealing, ‘from some meadows near Holloway’, and hanged at Tyburn.
It is the stuff of ballads; it could be a story by George Borrow or Thomas Hardy or Angela Carter…I have it from a local historian, called Harold Adshead, who wrote about Jinney in a small magazine called Enquiry in May 1950.
Jinney did become the heroine of a ballad, but not until after Gipsy George swung from the gallows. The hardships of her life gathered: further adventures, further disasters with unsuitable partners followed hard upon one another: first a drunken reprobate called Darby, then another called Pitcher. Between these two men, her parents were accused of bringing about a young girl’s death through the black arts. They were both hanged, too.
Then Pitcher died, found burned to a crisp inside their stove. Jinney’s family history did not help: she was charged with his murder. A witness testified – bizarrely – that Pitcher would often take refuge in the oven to escape her tongue-lashings. Somehow, perhaps because this convinced the court, she was acquitted. She became a loner, living in a cottage her father had built on a piece of uncultivated ground near the crossroads at Camden Town. A three-way crossing: trivia, which is one of the names of the Goddess of the Underworld, Hecate. The likes of Jinney turn into hell hags; her dangerous reputation grew, and she was shunned.
One night a man on the run took shelter with her, and stayed. He had money, and Jinney began to prosper. But there were reports of fights and words. Then he too was dead. Rumour spread that she had poisoned him, and though no case was brought, her life afterwards became solitary again. Crowd-stirrers and witch-baiters came by to torment ‘Mother Damnable’; so did petitioners wanting their fortunes told, their aches and pains mended, their reluctant lovers bewitched. When her nostrums did not do the trick, mobs railed at her, and she ‘would lean out of her hatch-door’ and let fly a volley of oaths.
Pedlars, gypsies, vagrants, thieves, hanged men; unmarried mothers, unruly women, promiscuous partners, huddling in hovels at crossroads: Jinney’s circumstances offer a copybook case for stigmatizing her as a witch. In the early to mid seventeenth century, the fear of witchcraft flared up and flourished at the very apex of society as well as among the poor. King James I was the author of Daemonologie, published in Edinburgh in 1597 (and the monarch for whom Shakespeare wrote Macbeth), meanwhile, labourers were squeezed by agricultural policies and wars and religious conflicts. The reputation for brawling and cursing and shouting also stuck to many of the women persecuted in the witch craze (‘scolds’, ‘nags’, ‘shrews’), because, as the historian Christina Larner argued in her book about the cases in Scotland, vulnerable females – especially old women – who fell on hard times for one reason and another did lash out. The tongue has no teeth but a sharper bite, especially if you have no other weapons.3
Of course, I accept that Jinney Bingham might well have been a very nasty piece of work, a Bluebeard of the taverns of North London.
This description was published in a pamphlet when she was old:
‘She had a red cap, made of a musqueteer’s sash; on her head, no hair, neither graceful nor gorgonic appeared; she had a large bottle nose; vast, heavy, black, shaggy eyebrows; her eyes were sunken, and her lank leathern cheeks were deeply furrowed. Her forehead, which was high, was wrinkled; her mouth was wide, and from each corner oozed a white frothy slaver; her look was steadfast and unperturbed; on her shoulders was thrown a dark grey frieze with black patches, which at a distance resembled flying bats.’
There’s also a vivid portrait of her from 1676, the year of her death: she’s wearing her wrap of shreds and patches, crouching by a stove, with a spilled tankard beside her, broken pots and shattered panes in the mullion window behind her, and on the wall an emblem of rats tied by their tails upside down and grappling. This print bears the legend, ‘Mother Damnable the remarkable Shrew of Kentish Town, the person who gave rise to the Sign of Mother Red Capon the Hampstead Road near London…’
In this picture, Jinney Bingham in her rags and tatters looks just like one of the old beggar women in fairy tales who call at the door and ask for food and warmth: when the heroine welcomes her and does her kindness, the old hag turns into the Lilac Fairy or the queenly fairy godmother, and showers her with gifts. This was the image that inspired the pub sign that disappeared in 1985 when the pub changed its name to the World’s End. It’s a vast barn of a place now, rebuilt on the site in 1820; its interior bizarrely tricked out with olde shoppe fronts, and lots of faux Camden Town heritage tat including a board giving Mother Red Cap’s story, and a repro pub sign hanging from an upstairs gallery that makes the old hag look like Lenin.
On the other side of the street there’s the Black Cap, a pub famous for its drag nights and carnival mood – one of the early gay and lesbian meeting places (now ‘London’s Premier Cabaret and Dance Bar’), and already thriving back in the 1980s as part of the scene. I knew someone then who came across it by chance, and I heard ‘The Black Cat’ instead, which seemed right, witchy and Gothic. But Carol, who became an habitué there, thought it alluded to the black capa judge donned when he sentenced someone to death.
But this too is a vanishing, because on the old maps the pub was called Mother Black Cap and stood opposite the Mother Red Cap on the site of the present tube station, before moving down the High Street to its present address.
Calling someone Mother didn’t necessarily claim her as family: the name was used to address a woman in charge of something, like a tapster or innkeeper, a midwife, a nun. It survived in my childhood in the convent: we called the different ranks and offices of the nuns Mother Superior and Reverend Mother, Mother Bridget, Mother John. This usage has fallen away too in progressive orders. Mother is still sometimes used in collectives, among the sannyasins of gurus. It was a handle, like Dame, and, indeed, in nursery rhymes and ballads, the two are interchangeable: Old Mother Hubbard, Old Dame Trot – the perfect name for an English drag queens’ hang-out, according to a long, bawdy, raucous tradition (most recently followed by Sir Ian McKellen completely over the top as Widow Twankey). The appellation and the performance are carnivalesque – they act to turn things topsy-turvy, disgust into attraction, fear into pleasure, a stranger into a friend, hideous old aunts and uncles into stomping delirious cuddly Wild Things. It’s an ancient, deep, effective kind of magic – apotropaic, like monsters guarding the threshold. Old Hags are tomb guardians for the mean streets. But they’re being put out of sight, because in some commercial quarters, this kind of performative comedy is a survival skill that’s too rude, too uncouth, too monstrous.
When I first came to live in Kentish Town, there was another local pub called after an old hag, the Mother Shipton. She wasn’t a local character but a national legend, a famous Yorkshire prophet, who was born Ursula Sontibles (or Sontheil) in Knaresborough in 1488.4 According to the legend, she was a monstrous Gargantua of an infant, with ‘great goggling, sharpand fiery eyes…which gave such light that needed not a candle to dress her by’. Her crowing could silence thunder, still a storm…
Her mother withdrew to a nunnery when her strange offspring was two; she repented, it was said, of the union with Ursula’s father, the devil.
After this unpropitious start in life, the orphaned Ursula flourished: she married Toby Shipton and was happy, though child-less, and worked numerous cures and other wonders for her neighbours, prophesying the Fire of London among other things. At that time, even though belief in witchcraft was certainly lively, a wise woman, a cunning woman, an old mother ran much less danger than in later times of religious fervour and terrors, when Old Mother Red Cap lived in Kentish Town.
After her death in 1561, Mother Shipton inspired pamphlets, ballads, chapbooks, engravings; imitators of her riddling sayings and warnings issued almanacs and broadsides filled with apocalyptic doggerel easy to decipher for any time in any place. With a finger raised, a scroll in her other hand, and hairs sprouting from the inevitably large mole on her chin, chapfallen and hook-nosed, Old Mother Shipton is the Nostradamus of the Dales.5
The ‘Dropping Well’ near Knaresborough where she held her surgeries has the power to turn anything to stone. If you hang up your trainers or keys or hat or scarf or football in the mouth of the cave, or put your teddy there among the hundreds of other soft toys that have been left as offerings, you will find them petrified if you come back a few years later, made larger, whiter, smoother, like Niobe turned into a weeping mountain or Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Mother Shipton has Gorgon powers from beyond the grave, and the limestone rock, steadily dropping its calcifying tears, is still executing her ordinary miracles.
In 1989, the Mother Shipton in Prince of Wales Road was spruced up and renamed the Fiddler’s Elbow – another erasure, another witch vamoosed, just like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz.
Does any of this matter? On the scale of things, with all the other problems near and far, hardly. But there are reasons for minding, apart from the general loss of memories and stories that connect people and places. The new names have so little character compared to the old ones; when the old hags dropfrom view, so does an idea of human vagaries and fates, of idiosyncratic and oddball people, with strange histories and surprising fortunes – good and bad. Pub names and signs are some of the oldest surviving traces of exchanges and folklore in a particular place. More and more names and phrases in the public arena are tied to adverts and commodities – global creep of meanings for everybody and no one. They’ve gone because no pub owner wants to admit that there’s any link between disreputable winos and what they are selling. Perhaps they’ve disappeared too because we’ve become sensitive to the sight of derelicts with their tins of Strongbow and plastic-bagged bottles and don’t want to be reminded. Perhaps the old hag is just too rude for the times.
But I think this delicacy reveals a kind of literal-mindedness at work that weakens the spirit of revelry as a form of resistance and an expression of honesty. Old hags are comic, they’re burlesque, they’re Mister Punch in a dress; perhaps that’s indeed not very nice, perhaps it is indelicate and rude and even frightening and ugly. They enshrine terrible attitudes in the past, as Jinney Bingham, ‘Mother Damnable’, suffered. The new names – the World’s End, the Fiddler’s Elbow, the Oxford – reveal a turn away from facing this; they’re sort of empty, neutral, nicely repressed. That this should have started to happen in the 1980s and continues still in Camden Town – rapidly turning from a backwater into one of the roughest, hardest, nastiest areas of night-time London – shows the depths of deception and double-think that now prevails in our ways of describing and understanding ourselves.
A few years ago, I was walking back home past the Catholic church, Our Lady Help of Christians, and found long flower-laden limousines double-parked nose to tail, with the undertakers waiting outside the closed doors while the service proceeded. The pavement was cordoned off, and I couldn’t cross to the church side to see what was going on as a row of black-suited men stood in a phalanx on the pavement making sure passers-by passed by. I asked one of them what was going on. He said, ‘Never you mind.’ Then I realized, this funeral had to be the send-off for the Irish construction boss who had been knifed a few days before in the Vulture’s Perch on the Kentish Town Road. He told one of the drinkers in there to show respect for some Nationalist song or some such, and the drinker – so the story goes – was of a different persuasion in the matter of Ireland. He left the pub, went to the nearby steak house, ordered a steak, waited for the steak knife to be laid at his place and then went back to the pub and took on the man who had dissed him.
The pub closed and was bought by Richard Branson. That didn’t change its fortunes. Somebody else came along and tried, renaming it the Jorene Celeste. That was a few years ago, and it has muddled
along since, with lots of hanging baskets in Day-Glo colours against walls painted the fiercest hues from the Outdoor Gloss chart. But last month, I noticed it was scaffolded; with a presentiment, I took a photograph of the sign.
With a name that sounds so close to the Mary Celeste, that incarnation was perhaps ill-chosen: in 1872, after the ship’s name was changed from the Amazon, the Mary Celeste put to sea with a cargo of tobacco and was later found drifting and empty, the crew and passengers all vanished. I Googled ‘Jorene Celeste’, and searching didn’t turn upany more old hags or crones or witches (or amazons), but it did home in on a Mother – the pub owner’s mother, who had been on the stage under that name.
There are other pubs in the chain – one in Islington, one in Dublin – but the Jorene Celeste in my part of London has now been painted upmarket dark grey inside and out, and been renamed the Oxford. The fruit and veg barrows that used to be parked on the pavement outside have been cleared away, and the Bosnian family – aunt, uncle, nephew – who traded there for a decade since they came during the war, have now moved on. I once saw one of our local drunks come by begging; the aunt gave him some fruit, which he took with a flap of his hand, and a cheers.
[Marina Warner]
Daniel Defoe was the first to write about ‘London Flesh’, the legendary meat of the hern supposed to ‘confer Magical Powers upon those who Partook of it’. Defoe, in fact, invested money in its unsuccessful commercial production. Perhaps that was why he wrote his famous pamphlet which, while pretending scepticism, actually gave the impression that the meat, sold mostly in the form of a paste, had supernatural properties.
De Quincey, Lamb, Dickens and Grossmith all claimed to have sampled London Flesh, usually in pies, sausages or pastes, but only Lamb was convinced that he had briefly become invisible and known the power of flight (over Chelsea Gardens). The Flesh was rumoured, of course, to be human and Dickens raised the name of Sweeney Todd in Household Words, but Doctor ‘Dog’ Donovan of Guy’s was convinced that the meat was ‘undoubtedly that of the female hern’. That said, the rumour persisted.
The hern was never abundant and the last pair in the London area was seen in Kew in 1950, but legend had it they were raised in captivity in Hackney Marshes up until the Second World War. Patrick Hamilton and Gerald Kersh both claimed to have been taken to a hern farm (Kersh was blindfolded) and seen dozens of the creatures penned in cages hidden behind trees and bushes, where they were offered hern pâté on cream crackers. ‘London Flesh,’ reports Hamilton, ‘as sweet and smooth as your mother’s cheeks.’
‘There’s a book in heaven,’ said Coleridge, who was convinced that the Flesh was human, ‘in which is recorded the names of all who dishonour the Dead. Graveyard Desecrations and any form of Cannibalism, including the eating of London Flesh.’
London believes it remembers the horrible story of the cannibal tramwaymen of Hampstead Heath and how they devoured on Christmas Day the passengers and crew of the No. 64 tram, which mysteriously returned empty to the Tudor Hamlets terminal. This is the true story of that event.
No complete list of passengers has ever been made but we do know that a party of some dozen revellers left the Red Mill public house on Tufnell Hill and made their way to the tram stopto board the 64. Witnesses saw and heard them, commenting on their cheerful drunkenness and the somewhat lewd behaviour of the young women who, removing hats and veils, bared their entire heads at passers-by. We also know that the vicar of St Alban’s, Brookgate, was last seen boarding at the Tessy O’Shea stop, because his brother walked him there. A young mother with three rather boisterous children also boarded, though it was possible they disembarked before the 64 began its crossing of the Heath. The night was foggy. The gas was out across a fairly wide area, due to air in the pipes at Highgate, the GLC said. Indeed the Gas Light and Coke Co. were held partially responsible for police officers not at once investigating after the tram failed to reach Tudor Hamlets. The gas being restored, the tram mysteriously returned to its own terminus. All that was found aboard was a leverman’s uniform capand two ladies’ hats, which told their own grim story.
At that time there was no fashion for elaborate headgear or, indeed, the casual doffing of it as there is today. At least two young women had been aboard, yet at first the police tried to treat the case as one of simple abandonment. They thought the overhead power rail had come adrift from its connector and passengers had decided to walk home. But neither the leverman nor the conductor reported for duty. The Home Office decided to investigate the mystery and sent Sir Seaton Begg and his friend Dr ‘Taffy’ Sinclair relatively late on Boxing Day. Unhappy at being called away from their festivities, the two men came together at Tudor Hamlets, in the office of Mr Thorn, the regional manager of the Universal Transport Company.
Thorn was a red-faced, anxious man whose perspiration made
Best known for its stories of Billy Bunter and the boys of Greyfriars, the Magnet ran many ‘Tramway’ romances during the 1920s. Almost always set in London and its environs, tram tales were enormously popular.
dark stains on his scarlet, gold and white uniform. He was somewhat in awe of Begg and Sinclair, their reputations being familiar to all who followed the news.
‘It will be my head on the block, gentlemen,’ he reminded them, ‘if the UTC determine negligence here. Of course, we are used to tram robbers on the Heath, but in all my years we have known only one killing and that was when a barker went off by accident. It has always been prudent of levermen to obey a command when they receive one, especially since we are insured for material loss but not for the death of our employees. Guild tramwaymen never do more than wound. Those flintlock pistols they affect allow for little else. It is to everyone’s advantage that their guild, formed in 1759, laid down strict regulations as to weaponry, masks, mounts, uniforms, and so on. Do you have any suspicions, gentlemen?’
Removing his wide-brimmed slouch hat Sir Seaton Begg brushed at the brim with his sleeve. ‘It’s rare for a tramwayman to disobey his own strict codes. They would soon lose the goodwill of Londoners and therefore their guarantees of secrecy and shelter. Nor is it like them to abduct women and children. Either this was a gang feigning to be real tramway thieves or we are dealing with rogues who hold their guild honour at nought.’
‘It would be yet another sign of the times,’ murmured the tall Welshman, the detective’s lifelong friend and amanuensis. ‘When tramwaymen go against their traditions, then the next thing we’ll see will be the looting of graves.’
‘Quite so,’ said Begg, taking out an enormous briar, filling it with black shag and lighting it from a vesta he struck against the bricks of the terminus. Soon heavy black smoke filled the hall as, puffing contemplatively, he paced back and forth across the stone flags.
‘Remarkable,’ offered Sinclair, ‘that no passengers were reported missing.’
‘And only the leverman’s wife called in to say he had not come home.’ Begg paused frowning. ‘The conductor lived alone?’
‘A widower,’ said Mr Thorn. ‘His mother is in Deal with relatives.’
‘Young women? A mother with children?’ Sir Seaton drew thoughtfully on his briar. ‘Could they all have disembarked before the terminus?’
‘It’s not unheard of, sir.’
‘But unlikely, I’m sure you’ll agree. I think it’s probably time we took a tram back to the Red Mill. Can you spare us a leverman, Mr Thorn?’
‘We’re still on a skeleton schedule for the holidays, but in these circumstances…’ Guild rules usually demanded that every tram carry both a driver and a conductor. ‘I can’t see anyone objecting here if only the leverman takes out the Special. I’ll give the appropriate instructions. We should have her connected in fifteen minutes.’
Grey clouds regathered over the Heath as the Special began the long climb up Tufnell Hill. The Red Mill’s tethered sails strained against air bending foliage across the horizon like mourners in procession.
Snow had melted into the grass and mud puddles reflected the sky. Crows called with mysterious urgency and there was a strong, fecund smell. Dr Sinclair remarked on the unseasonable warmth. Only a few roofs and the steeple of St Valentine’s, Hampstead Vale, could be seen below until the Mill was reached. There, they looked on to Tudor Hamlets and the suburbs beyond Highgate, red roofs, green cedars and pines, the bones of elms supporting untidy nests, all gauzed in smoke from the chimneys.
Disembarking, Begg strolled up the path, through the ornamental metal gates and began to ascend worn granite steps to the Red Mill. Sinclair, examining the soft ground, bent to frown over something. ‘Hello! That’s odd for this time of the year!’ He straightened, now giving his attention to something on the other side of the path. ‘I wonder why –?’
A bass voice greeted them from the door of the hostelry attached to the Mill. ‘I’m sorry, gents, but we’re closed until New Year’s Eve.’ Sinclair looked up to see the large red-bearded publican standing there.
‘Except for guests who ride hunters, it seems.’ Dr Sinclair smiled and pointed to the evidence. ‘One doesn’t have to be a High Mobsman to know that tramway thieves always convene here for the holidays.’
Sir Seaton shared his friend’s humour. ‘Don’t worry, Mr O’Dowd,’ he told the publican, ‘we’re neither peelers nor wildsmen and have no direct business to discuss with your guests. Would I be wrong if I understood Captain Anchovy to be stabling his horse here for the Season?’
A cheerful, handsome face appeared behind O’Dowd’s broad shoulder as, with his famous dashing grace, a man in the white wig and elaborate long waistcoat of a guild member stepped forward, lowering and uncocking a huge horse pistol, the traditional tool of his trade.
‘Festive greetings to ye, Sir Seaton. I trust you and your companion will take a glass with us?’ He smiled as he shook hands with the detectives. Together they entered the heat of a public bar filled with tobeymen of every rank. Any suspicion of the newcomers was swiftly dispelled and within moments the two investigators were imbibing goblets of mulled wine while Captain Anchovy and his men volunteered their aid in solving the mystery. Their own honour, they said, was at stake.
Tom Anchovy in particular was inflamed with disgust. ‘My dear Sir Seaton, that 64 was indeed our intended prize as she came up Tufnell Hill. But it was Boxing Day and we had no intention of stealing anything but the hearts of the ladies aboard. All were brought here. Three children were given presents and old men of pleasant humour were presented with a glass of wine. Only a few refused our hospitality – the mother of the children, a good-hearted reverend gentleman whose abstinence we respected, and that sour fellow who had refused to quit the Inn on our arrival and refused to share his vitalls with us. On any other occasion we might have taken him for ransom.’
‘And he was –?’ Sir Seaton lifted the beaker to his lips.
‘Henry Marriage, sir. A humourless walking cadaver if ever I met one. Yet even he was permitted to retain his valuables. I don’t mind tellin’ ye, Sir Seaton, that had it not been Christmas I would have had his last stitch and kept him for ransom!’
‘Is that Marriage of Marriage’s Opiates by the river?’ asked Dr Sinclair, placing his finished beaker on the bar and nodding with approval as O’Dowd refilled it. ‘The millionaire who lives in a house on his own wharf?’
‘The same, Dr Sinclair. Do ye know him?’
‘Only by reputation. A solitary individual, they say. A dabbler in the alchemist’s art. He’s published an interesting book or two. No charlatan, but no great scientist, either. Many of his findings and experiments have been discredited. He’s considered a mere amateur by the medical and scientific guilds.’
‘I understand nothing of such things, sir. But I’ll swear to this – when that tram left last evening he was safe and sound, as was every living soul aboard. Though he chose to go with them, all but Henry Marriage were as cheerful as when they had embarked. If that 64 was taken, then it would have been on the high stretch of track below the ruined village.’
‘Why so?’ Begg inquired.
‘Because we watched her lights until they were out of sight and young Jaimie Gordon here was on his way to join us, taking the low road up the Vale. He’d have spotted anything untoward.’
Sir Seaton was already slamming down his glass and cramming his hat on to his handsome, aquiline head. ‘Then I can guess where the tram was stopped. Come on, Taffy, let’s board our Special. I’m much obliged to you, Captain Anchovy.’
‘Delighted to have helped, sir.’
After a further quick word with the tramwayman, the two meta-temporal investigators were again on their way.
A Blériot ‘bat’, no doubt taking the day’s mail to France, flew high overhead as the 64 rattled to a stop below the ruins of Hampstead Model Village, which lay on the brow of the hill above the tramline whose branches had once serviced the inhabitants of Lady Hecate Brown’s failed evangelical dream of a healthy environment where a good Christian life and enlightened working conditions would be the antidote to all the ills of the city. Her failure to supply the model village with familiar recreations, public houses and fried fish shops caused even the most enlightened artisans to view her idealistic community as a kind of prison. The village had flourished as a middle-class enclave until, without servants or city facilities, the bourgeoisie chose the suburbs of Tudor Hamlets and Lyonne’s Greene. The tram service had been discontinued, though the tracks were intact, lost beneath the encroaching weeds and brambles.
As Begg and Sinclair disembarked, the sky clouded darker and it began to rain heavily. Peering with difficulty through the ever-thickening mist, Begg quickly saw that his intuition had been right.
Sinclair was the first to observe how the track had been cleared through the swampy ground leading up to the ruins. ‘Look, Begg. There’s the shine of brass. A tram was diverted at this very spot and went upHam Hill towards the old village. What do you make of it?’
‘The best place to take a tram off the usual routes, Taffy. The emptied vehicle was sent back on its way, perhaps to divert attention from whatever dark deed was done here. Let us pray we are in time to save those poor souls – victims, no doubt, of some rogue band caring nought for the rules and habits of an old guild!’
With difficulty, they followed the line up the muddy terrain, their boots sinking and sliding in ground normally frozen hard.
As the rain let up, Ham Hill’s ruins were seen bleak beneath a lowering sky. The air was unseasonably muggy; thunder rolled closer. Melted snow left pools so that the hill might have been the remains of Hereward’s Romney fastness. Sinclair suppressed a shiver as a sudden chill crept up his spine. The afternoon’s gloom was illuminated by a sudden sheet of lightning throwing the ruins into vivid silhouette.
‘Press on, Taffy,’ murmured Seaton Begg, clapping his friend on his sturdy shoulder. ‘I sense we’re not far from solving this mystery!’
‘And maybe perishing as a consequence.’ The mordant Welshman spoke only half in jest.
Making some remark about the ‘dark instincts of the Celtic soul’, Begg tramped on until they at last stood on the outskirts of the ruins, looking down at Tufnell Vale whose yellow lights offered distant reassurance.
No such friendly gas burned in the ruins of Hampstead Model Village, yet a few guttering brands lit the remaining glass in the low church chapel, said now to harbour all manner of pagan ritual and devil worship. The nearby Anglican church had been desanctified on orders from Southwark but the ragged walls remained. Close to the church blazed three or four bonfires built from the wood of old pews and other religious furniture.
Begg and Sinclair kept to the cover of fallen walls and shrubbery. Human figures gathered around the fires.
‘Vagrants, perhaps?’ murmured Sinclair. ‘Do such people still exist?’
Signalling his friend to silence, Begg pointed to a collapsing house sheltering the bulky shapes of horses. Rough laughter and uncultured voices told Begg they had found another tramwayman gang. ‘Guildless outcasts, Taffy, by the cut of their coats. Rejected by every mobsmen’s association from here to York.’
Keeping well down, the detectives crept closer. Unlike Tom Anchovy’s men, guildless tram thieves were known for their cruel savagery.
‘It’s been years since such a gang was seen this close to London,’ whispered Sinclair. ‘They risk life imprisonment if caught!’
Begg was unsurprised. ‘I knew Captain Zodiac was outside Beaconsfield and suspected of several tram robberies in that region. Quickly, Taffy, dropdown.’ He flung himself behind a broken wall. ‘That’s the rogue himself!’
A tall, white-haired man in a black greatcoat sauntered towards one of the fires, eyes burning like rubies in the reflected light. A handsome albino with skin the colour of ivory, Zodiac was an old enemy of Begg. The two were said to be cousins who had often crossed swords.
As they watched, Zodiac approached a thin individual, as tall as himself, on the far side of the fire. It was Sinclair’s turn to draw in a sharpbreath. Henry Marriage, one of the missing passengers, seemed to be on friendly terms with the most notorious tram thief in Europe!
It grew darker and now all the inhabitants of the ruins were mere silhouettes.
‘We can’t take ’em single-handed,’ murmured Begg. ‘We’d best return to the depot and telegraph to Scotland Yard.’
Picking their way carefully down the hill, they had scarcely gone twenty yards before dark shadows surrounded them. They heard a horrible, muffled noise.
Moving towards them across the unnaturally damp ground, big pistols threatening, came an unsavoury circle of leering tram robbers.
‘Good evening, gentlemen!’ The leader doffed his cocked hat in a mocking bow. ‘Always pleased to welcome a few more guests to our holiday harum-scarum!’ He removed the shutter from his night-lamp, showing the face of their unfortunate tram driver. The leverman’s hands were tied before him and a gag had been forced into his mouth. He had been trying to warn his passengers of his own capture!
The mobsmen had not reckoned with the two detectives being armed. In a flash Begg and Sinclair produced the latest repeating Webleys! ‘Stand, you scum,’ levelly declared the investigator. ‘You no doubt recognize this revolver which I intend to use to advantage.’
The triumph draining from their decadent features, the mobsmen fell back, knowing full well the power and efficiency of the Webleys over their own antique barkers. Then a voice cut through the misty air. Sharpas a diamond, it bore the tone of a man used to obedience.
‘Fire one chamber, Sir Seaton, and count yourself responsible for the death of an innocent woman.’
Turning their heads, the investigators saw Captain Zodiac, a bright lantern in one hand, pressing his barker against the head of a dishevelled coster girl grinning stupidly from under her raised veil, her hat at an unseemly angle.
Sinclair stifled a cry of outrage. ‘You fiend!’ He did not let his Webley fall, nor did he disengage the safety catch. ‘What have you done to that poor young creature?’
‘I, sir?’ An almost melancholy smile played across the mobsman’s pale lips. ‘What d’ye think I’ve done? Murdered her?’ The light from the lantern gave his red eyes a savage sparkle.
‘Drugged her!’ Sinclair muttered in disgust. ‘You’re cowards as well as kidnappers.’
Captain Zodiac’s face clouded for a moment before resuming its habitual mask. ‘She’s unhurt, sir. But aggressive action on your part might alter her circumstances.’
‘No doubt one of the missing passengers, but where are the children?’ demanded Sir Seaton.
‘Safe and sound with their mother and full of mince pies,’ Zodiac assured him.
‘Then show them to me.’
‘I’d remind you, Sir Seaton, that you are at a disadvantage.’
‘And I’d remind you, Captain Zodiac, that I am a servant of the Crown. Harm me or those under my protection and you’ll answer to Her Majesty’s justice.’
‘I have been escaping that justice, sir, for longer than you and I have travelled the moonbeam roads. Put that fancy barker aside and be my welcome guest.’ He stepped away from the giggling young woman as Begg and Sinclair reluctantly reholstered their weapons. Then, tucking the woman’s somewhat limparm into his, Captain Zodiac led them back to the central fire, built just outside the ruined chapel where more of his gang and their captives could clearly be seen.
All but the wide-eyed children were in artificially good humour. Another pair of young women wore their hats on the backs of their heads. Sinclair guessed they had been well supplied with alcohol but Begg shook his head, saying softly, ‘Not beer or spirits, I think, Taffy, old man. I suspect another hand in this, don’t you?’
Sinclair nodded gravely. ‘Do we share the suspicion of who it was put Zodiac up to this crime?’
‘I think we do, Taffy.’
Then they were standing among the other prisoners. Only the young mother showed signs of concern. Even the reverend gentleman cheerfully led the leverman, the conductor and a youth wearing the cadet uniform of the Farringdon Watch in a rather jolly hymn.
‘See how our guests enjoy their Boxing Day?’ Captain Zodiac offered Begg and Sinclair a somewhat cynical grin. ‘And all with their pocket books in place.’
‘Drugged with laudanum.’ Sinclair picked up an empty black bottle, sniffing it just as tall lugubrious Henry Marriage stepped into the firelight, extending his hand. Sinclair ignored the gesture, but Begg, ever the diplomat, bowed. ‘Good evening, sir. Are these villains holding you to ransom?’
Marriage’s hearty manner thinly disguised an evasive expression.
‘Not at all, sir.’ He stared around him somewhat helplessly.
‘Or is Captain Zodiac in your employ?’ demanded Sinclair. ‘Why do you only bind our driver?’
‘He’ll be released at once.’ Captain Zodiac signed for the leverman to be released. ‘He offered my men violence. Whereas these other good fellows accepted our hospitality –’
‘And were drugged into doltishness.’
‘Please, sir, are you here to helpus?’ The young mother clutched imploringly at Sir Seaton’s sleeve.
With his usual gentle courtesy towards the fair sex, Sir Seaton smiled reassurance. ‘I am indeed, madam. What charming children! Is their father here?’
‘I am a widow, sir.’
‘My dear lady!’
‘We have not been mistreated, sir.’
‘I should hope you have not!’ interjected Henry Marriage. ‘I doubt if your children have ever eaten so well!’
‘You have been feeding them, Mr Marriage?’ Dr Sinclair offered the thin man an intense glare of inquisition.
‘I returned from visiting a generous relative who gave me the hamper. It was meant for my family at home.’
‘Indeed, sir,’ said Sir Seaton. With the toe of his shoe he touched a large, open basket. Stencilled on its side were the words MARRIAGE’S OPIATES, MARRIAGE’S WHARF, LONDON E. ‘This is the Christmas Box, eh?’
‘The same, sir.’
‘You were sharing it on the tram before Captain Zodiac appeared?’
‘He was very generous, sir.’ The conductor looked upfrom where he sat beside the fire. ‘I know it’s against regulations, but the company generally turns a blind eye at Christmas. Of course, we didn’t take any alcoholic beverage.’
‘Quite so. What did you enjoy from Mr Marriage’s hamper?’
‘Just a piece of game pie, sir. Some ginger beer. And a couple of sandwiches.’
‘Whereupon you reached the old Hampstead Model Village stop, broke down and, at Mr Marriage’s suggestion, continued uphere, eh, conductor?’
‘Such merry yule fires, sir. Who could resist ’em? It was commonly agreed, sir, even by that reverend gent, there could be no happier way of celebrating Boxing Day until rescue came.’ A stupid, sentimental grin crossed the conductor’s long face.
‘Except by you, madam, I take it?’ Again Sir Seaton turned to the mother.
‘I’ve been pained by a bit of a dicky tummy since we had the goose at my husband’s brother’s house. I’d rather hoped the children and me’d be home by now. But it was either come here or stay on the tram.’ She was close to tears. Again Begg laid a gentlemanly hand on her arm. ‘And Mr Marriage promised you his protection.’
‘He did, sir. The tramwaymen have offered us no harm. But they’re a bad example, sir, and –’
‘Captain Zodiac and his men make no threats. They keep the traditional tramwaymen’s Christmas truce.’ Marriage was insistent. ‘I offered them a handsome fee to act for our safety when the tram broke down. They helped us guide it up the old line to this spot where we could find some sort of shelter.’
‘How on earth did the tram find its own way back to the terminal?’ Dr Sinclair was clearly not entirely convinced by this story.
‘She slipped backwards, sir, once the horses were untethered,’ offered the conductor. ‘Somehow she must have reconnected to the overhead power line and continued her journey. It has been known, sir, for such things to happen.’
‘So I understand.’
‘Stranding us here, of course,’ explained Henry Marriage. ‘Well, it seems you’ve brought another vehicle to take everyone home and no harm done. We are all grateful to you, Sir Seaton and Doctor Sinclair. I am prepared to stand guarantee for Captain Zodiac. My honour depends upon promising safe conduct to all parties. I shall elect to stay as evidence of good faith and come morning shall board a fresh tram on the regular morning route. This will give Captain Zodiac and his men time to make themselves scarce. A fair bargain, eh, Sir Seaton?’
‘Very fair. And very noble of you, Mr Marriage.’ Speaking with a certain irony, Sir Seaton was careful not to challenge anything. They were seriously outnumbered and had many innocents to consider. Since Zodiac the Albino was mixed upin this affair Begg was convinced not everything could be above board. He had several reasons to suspect Marriage’s tale. Nevertheless, he did not object when the tramwaymen lit the way with their lanterns to lead the happy party back down the hill. At last the passengers were safely aboard and the leverman reinstalled at his controls.
The passengers cheered as the overhead power rail sparked in the darkness. The magnificent Special hummed, lurched and began to move forward. ‘A generous soul, that Mr Marriage,’ declared the conductor. ‘We’d be mighty hungry by now had he not been so free with his hamper.’ He reacted with a muttered explanation as Dr Sinclair’s eyes stared sternly into his own. ‘I speak only the honest truth, sir. I’ve done nothing against Company tradition.’
‘Of course you haven’t, conductor,’ interrupted Sir Seaton, his hand on his friend’s shoulder. ‘You must now ensure your charges arrive safely at the terminus.’
‘My duty, sir.’ The conductor saluted, shaking off his euphoria.
Next, the two detectives returned swiftly to the tram’s boarding platform. ‘We have to go back, of course,’ said Begg.
‘Absolutely, old man!’
As soon as the tram took a bend, they dropped quietly from the platform. Ankle-deep in marshy ground, they moved rapidly back to the village.
‘You noticed their eyes, I take it, Taffy?’
‘Drugged! All but the mother and children. Something in those meat pies, eh?’
‘Opium or Indian hemp. That preposterous story of a generous relative!’
‘And at least two of the party were not returned to the tram.’
‘Two young women? Exactly!’
‘No doubt they imbibed more freely from the hamper’s contents than any of the others.’
‘Hurry, old man! Knowing Marriage’s obsessions, you can guess as readily as I what the fiend intends.’
The detectives rapidly regained the camp, creeping carefully up to the ruined chapel where Zodiac’s gang continued to make merry. Yet of the leader or Henry Marriage there was no sign.
Drawing his Webley, Begg motioned towards the ruined Anglican church. Sinclair had already noticed lights shining through the broken stained glass. They heard voices, what might have been laughter, a stifled cry and then a piercing scream. Caution abandoned, they rushed the building, kicking open the rotting doors.
‘Oh, for the love of God!’ Sinclair was almost forced backward by the horrible smell. The scene’s bestial reality was unfit to be seen by anyone save the curator of Scotland Yard’s Black Museum. Two young women hung in ropes above the remains of the church altar. One was bleeding from deepwounds in her lower extremities. Her blood dripped into two large copper basins placed there for the purpose. She had fainted, but her companion shrieked in terror through her gag. Henry Marriage, long razor in hand, prepared to perform the same operation upon her as the gloating albino placed bowls in readiness.
Marriage seemed completely deranged but Zodiac was fully alert, his face a mask of hatred as he saw Begg and Sinclair. His long white hair hanging loose to his shoulders, he snarled defiantly, lifting a copper bowl to his lips.
Levelling his pistol, Begg snapped off a single shot spinning the bowl from Zodiac’s hands. Sinclair darted forward and with an expert uppercut knocked Marriage to the floor. The razor fell with a clatter from the opiate merchant’s hands.
Growling like a wild animal, Zodiac produced his own pistol, but Begg’s revolver sounded again. Zodiac’s weapon went flying. Sinclair jumped up to the altar and, using Marriage’s razor, severed the cords, lowering the two young women gently down as he kicked the bowls of blood clear.
Next Begg leaped forward to press the barrel of his Webley against Zodiac’s heart. The albino raised his hands, his ruby eyes glaring.
Knowing that the shot would alert Zodiac’s men, Sinclair turned to face the door.
Motioning with his revolver Begg forced Zodiac to stand between them and the entrance. Henry Marriage groaned and came to his senses as the first outlaws appeared in the doorway.
‘Stand back there!’ The metatemporal investigator held his Webley against the albino’s head. But Zodiac’s gang was already circling the altar.
His lips rimmed with blood, mumbling curses, Marriage climbed to his feet, his eyes staring into space.
‘As you guessed, Taffy, he believes he possesses supernatural powers.’ Begg motioned with his pistol.
‘Let’s hope we are not alone, old man. We decidedly need help from those who promised it…’
‘Without them we’re dead men, I agree. Have you any spare ammunition, old man?’
‘None.’
Grimly, Begg and Sinclair prepared for the worst. Aware of their dilemma, Zodiac grinned even as Sir Seaton’s pistol pressed against his head.
The investigator knew his captive too well to demand he call his men off. Whatever dark evil Zodiac practised, he was no coward and would die before allowing the two detectives to escape.
Ironically, Henry Marriage came to their aid. Drugged eyes rolling in his head, he lifted uphis arms and ran for the door. ‘I am free!’ he cried. ‘Free! Invisible, I shall climb like an eagle into the sky.’ His long arms flapping at his sides, he stumbled towards the entrance and, before the astonished outlaws, ran wildly into the night. Zodiac laughed grimly. ‘He believes the spell has worked. He forgets our ritual was interrupted.’
‘Silence, you monster!’ Sinclair covered as many outlaws as he could. Savouring anticipated triumph they tightened the circle…
From outside came a fusillade of shots and they heard Marriage screaming in frustrated rage. ‘No! No! I am invisible. I fly. You cannot –’ There descended a sudden silence.
Taking advantage of this unexpected turn Zodiac broke free to join the mass of his own men. Grabbing a pistol from one of them, with his red eyes blazing, he curved his pale lips in a snarling grin. ‘You’re lost, Begg! Arming the levermen and the vicar won’t save you!’
Then a figure appeared in the smashed doorway. A gold-trimmed tricorne on his bewigged head, a black domino hiding his upper face, he had pushed back his huge three-caped coaching coat, two massive barkers in either beringed hand. Captain Tom Anchovy laughed as the guildless tramwaymen fell back in fear. Behind him, in the fancy coats and three-cornered hats of their trade, pressed his men, contemptuous of the outlaws bringing their trade into disrepute.
‘Drop your arms, lads, or we’ll blow you all to the hell you thoroughly deserve!’ rapped Anchovy.
But Captain Zodiac, using the cover of his men, disappeared through the far door.
‘After him, quickly!’ ordered Tom. Some mobsmen followed the albino into the night.
Realizing how outnumbered they were, the remaining outlaws gave up their pistols with little resistance, leaving Sir Seaton Begg, Dr Sinclair and Tom Anchovy to bind the young women’s wounds and get them decently covered.
‘Their hats will be waiting for them at the terminus, no doubt,’ said Dr Sinclair. ‘They owe their lives to that lost headgear.’
‘Indeed they do, Taffy. It was our clue that two young women were still held by Marriage and Zodiac. All the others we saw still had their hats, even if worn at a rather unladylike angle!’ He warmly shook hands with the tobeyman. ‘You turned upin the nick of time, Captain Tom. Thanks for keeping your word to help us. We remain on opposite sides of the law, but I think we share a moral purpose!’
‘Probably true, sir.’ Captain Anchovy prepared to leave. ‘We’ll truss those rogues thoroughly. Should we catch Zodiac, he’ll also be left for the peelers to pick up. Boxing Day’s almost over and we must return to our regular trade if we’re to eat. Marriage’s hamper out there was sadly empty of all its vitalls.’
‘Just as well. You’d best warn your men that those pies and sausages were poisoned with hern meat and opium. They won’t die, but they’ll be unable to ride for a day or two should they try any.’
‘I’ll tell ’em at once. Good luck to ye, gentlemen!’ The daring tramwayman disappeared into the night.
‘That’s what I saw at the Red Mill,’ said Sinclair. ‘The tiny tracks of the crested hern. I’ve studied the little creatures a fair bit and was surprised to find some still around London. Brought too early out of hibernation by the unseasonal weather and easily caught by Marriage while staying at the Inn. Some opiates, and his food was ready for those unsuspecting passengers.’
‘From what I know of his debased brand of alchemy, Taffy, hern meat is only thought efficacious if fed to female virgins first. Partaking of the flesh, or preferably your victim’s freshly drawn blood, imparts great supernatural powers, including those of invisibility and flight. Luckily, he proved himself a liar with that tale of his hamper being a relative’s gift. It clearly came from his own warehouse.’
The doctor shuddered. ‘Thank God we were able to stop him in time.’
The two men strolled from the ruined church to see that Anchovy’s men had already bound Zodiac’s followers. Anchovy mounted his magnificent black Arab and saluted them as they appeared. ‘If I know Zodiac he’ll be long gone in the direction of London, to lose himself in the twitterns of Whitechapel. No doubt our paths will cross again! As for Henry Marriage, I could have sworn my men filled him with enough lead to sink the HMS Victory, yet he, too, has disappeared. Perhaps his beliefs had substance, eh?’ With that the gallant tramwayman doffed his tricorne in a deep bow, then turned for distant Waymering where Begg knew he lived a double life as Septimus Grouse, a Methodist parson.
Though weak from their experience, the two young victims had recovered somewhat by the time another Special arrived towing a hospital car and a prison van full of peelers. Attended by expert doctors, the women were made comfortable in the hospital car while Zodiac’s gang were manacled to hard benches, destined for Wormwood Flats.
Thus the tale garbled by the yellow press as ‘The Affair of the Hampstead Cannibals’ was brought to a successful conclusion and all innocent lives saved. Enjoying their pipes the pair relaxed in the first-class section of the tram’s top deck.
‘I think I’ll be returning to the Red Mill as soon as possible,’ murmured Sinclair thoughtfully.
‘You’re curious to retrace the stages of the case, Taffy?’
‘What’s more interesting, old man, was finding those London hern tracks when all naturalists are agreed the species became extinct during the latter part of the last century. I’d like to find another specimen.’
‘And vivisect it?’ inquired Sir Seaton in some disapproval.
‘Oh, not at all. I want to see it in the wild for myself and confirm that Henry Marriage, God rest his soul wherever he may be now, did not destroy the entire race. After all, it isn’t every day one discovers that the past can yet be recovered, however small that part might be.’
With a sudden rattle the tram began to move forward. Its buzzing electric engine could not quite disguise the sound of Sir Seaton Begg’s approving grunt.
Note: Although every effort was made to keep this tale secret, enough of it leaked out to associate a gang of tramwaymen (some say Turpin himself) with stories of cannibalism on Hampstead Heath around the turn of the century.
[Michael Moorcock]
All the things that have disappeared…but yet they remain, remain in the past, exist in the past. But what precisely do we mean and understand by saying something exists in the past? Where is my childhood now? Where is the Tufnell Park I knew fifty years ago? Where exactly are they? And can I get a cheapday return there?
First off, Tufnell Park. It hasn’t disappeared because it never existed. I don’t mean just the park bit, but the whole thing, Tufnell Park. Yes, it has an existence now, though it never existed before, and I’m not talking in riddles here.
I’ll ask you a question or two. But first, let’s all agree that the very centre of Tufnell Park, the epicentre if you like, the cynosure, the omphalos even, is the Boston (Arms), the grand Victorian pub surmounted by a cupola that dominates the junction of roads here.
The ‘observatory’ tower and cupola of the Boston public house rising up in Tufnell Park like a great brick and stone built ship, murmurous of times past and athwart with memories, an unsleeping sentinel…
Some may argue that perhaps the Underground station across the way is the centre. It isn’t. It doesn’t have the commanding presence and exuberant grandeur of the Boston.1
Now, having established the centre, start walking south down Fortess Road. Where exactly does Tufnell Park end and Kentish
Town begin? Or try walking northwards upJunction Road. How far does it extend before becoming Upper Holloway, the neighbourhood favoured by Mr Pooter?
Nobody knows the answers to these questions. This is the ontological end of topography.2
And the neighbourhood still awaits its chronicler, even of the antiquarian Tufnell Park in Ye Olden Tyme style.3
Countless memories of childhood, so how about this? It’s 1951 and I’m four years old and I’m standing in the tarmacadam playground (long gone) to the fore of a somewhat forbidding block of flats, Faraday House,4 on York Rise, just a few minutes’ walk from the Boston. This is where my grandmother lives, my father’s mother.
I’m in my Sunday best and I’m eating a water ice that my mother has just bought for me from Morris’s corner café (gone) just across the road. The smell of a hundred Sunday dinners drifts out from the flats and it mingles with the smoke from the steam trains that hurry on by just the other side of the allotments (they eventually sprouted a school and a block of flats).
I ask my father whether we can go to the park. He replies that
we’ve already been to the park, Parliament Hill Fields. No, I mean I want to go to the park, the Tufnell Park. I knew Parliament Hill, but Tufnell Park by now had attained mythical status and held out the promise of somewhere magical with swings and sandpits and boating lakes and streams and rivers and, perhaps, even mountains and wild beasts!
There isn’t one, he explains. There isn’t a Tufnell park.
I couldn’t understand this. How could somewhere be called Tufnell5 Park if there wasn’t a park to go to? The world was not what it promised to be…
I walked across the playground and saw that a large rectangular manhole cover by the retaining wall had been opened again. I gazed down and saw swiftly running water,6 sparkling in the sunlight, looking fresh and cold…
Stand to the front of the Boston facing away from it and travel back in time, say two hundred or even a thousand years, and what do you see? Fields and open land and trees, but coming up from the direction of distant London and passing to your right and then ascending the heights towards Highgate is a country lane, a lane of great antiquity. It’s gone under many names but seems to have settled down as Maiden Lane7 in the 1700s. The lane began at
Battlebridge (the present-day King’s Cross8) and ended on Highgate Hill just below the village. It now has a retitled tripartite existence as York Way, Brecknock Road and Dartmouth Park Hill.
Maiden Lane was Tufnell Park’s genesis.
In 1813 the Archway Road was excavated and constructed, a sort of Highgate bypass, to avoid the notoriously steep ascent of High-gate Hill. The only approach was up the Holloway Road and it was soon deemed necessary to build another approach for traffic coming from the west. Thus Junction Road was laid out from Kentish Town northwards to the foot of the new road where the Archway Tavern now is.9
Junction Road cut across Maiden Lane, so the nascent Tufnell Park now had a crossroads, if nothing else.
In the 1850s, with the unrelenting growth of London, the land hereabouts was being developed and a short road was projected from the west side of the Holloway Road sporting some twenty or so villas for the newly emerging middle class.10 This road was eventually projected further westwards until it came to a halt at the crossroads of Maiden Lane and Junction Road where, by this time, there was now a Boston Arms (not the present building) and several villas just to the north.
Housing now developed at an accelerated rate and to meet up with the growth of population the Boston Arms was pulled down and replaced in 1899 by the magnificent building we now see.
In 1907 the Underground station was to open,11 but it was opening at a locale that had no name. As was often the case the name would have to come from an adjacent road. The main options were Fortess Road, Junction Road and Brecknock Road. None of them sounded right. Tufnell Park (Road) got it, more euphonious than the others and with a promise of a park. Thusly a neighbourhood was conjured out of the ether. But there never was a park.
1951 again and I’m standing outside the Boston with my mother. My father is inside seeing a man about a dog. I have a glass of R. White’s lemonade in one hand and a packet of Smith’s crisps in the other (I haven’t untwisted the little blue salt packet). My mother holds a gin-and-orange and is telling me about a highwayman called Dick Turpin who lived in a cave on Hampstead Heath, or so she was told when a child. I’m wondering whether he still lives there when my attention is attracted to the bells and clacking and the whoosh of the electric motor of a passing trolley bus12 as it glides down the cobbles of Fortess Road, its pantograph sparking on the overhead power lines.13
Can we go on a trolley bus? Yes, we’re going to Inverness market in Camden Town…
All of my family, on both sides, were from the neighbourhoods here, living in the many streets that sprang up in Queen Victoria’s
Railway Age. They were the working class whose labour made the wealth of the nation. They were hardy, uncomplaining and accepting, and they all spoke in a peculiarly North London accent with broad, flattened vowels that has now disappeared.
Here are some of them:
Auntie Ivy – Wrotham Road; Great Aunt Em – York Rise; Uncle Bill – near the Black Cat, Camden; Eddie Frewin – Melton Street; Alfred Weeks – Royal College Street; Ruby Constance Hodgson – Leighton Road; Cecil Frewin – Little Albany Street; Jessie Pretoria Berry14 – Faraday House; Auntie Flo – York Rise; Aunt Nell – Churchill Road; Jessie and Jim Bastow – Faraday House; Emma Hatchard – York Way; Aunt Lally – Polygon Buildings; Auntie Dolly – Grafton Road; James and Caroline Frewin – William Mews, Euston Road; George and Ellen Weeks – Werrington Street…
…all of whom sometimes drank in the Boston and all of whom are now dead with their memories, hopes, fears, ambitions and loves buried with them. But to me their manes remain in this part of London.
And, of course, the Boston remains too.
[Anthony Frewin]
Christine rang Maddox on his mobile. A little accident, she said. A bump.
‘Was anyone hurt?’
‘No, no one was hurt.’
He made his way to the side street in Shepherd’s Bush where it
had happened. A one-way street temporarily blocked off by roadworks at the junction with Goldhawk Road. Estate agents on the corner. Christine had reversed away from the roadworks and at five miles an hour hit a silver Toyota coming out of the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agents.
By the time Maddox arrived, the driver of the silver Toyota was in full magnanimous third-party mode, confident the insurance companies would find in his favour. Maddox hated him on sight. Too reasonable, too forthcoming. Like providing his address and insurance details was some kind of favour.
Maddox’s son, Jack, had got out of the car and stood staring at the small pile of shattered glass on the road, seemingly transfixed by it. Christine was visibly upset, despite the unctuous affability of the Toyota driver and Maddox’s own efforts to downplay the situation.
‘It’s only a couple of lights and a new wing. No one was hurt, that’s the main thing.’
Two days later, Maddox and Jack were walking past the top of the side street. The roadworks had been removed and a car was exiting into Goldhawk Road without any difficulty.
‘Is that where the accident happened, Daddy?’ asked the little boy.
‘Yes.’
Jack stopped, his big eyes taking in the details. The fresh asphalt by the junction, the concealed exit from the sunken car park behind the estate agents.
‘Is it still there?’ the little boy asked.
‘What? Is what still there?’
‘The accident. Is the accident still there?’
Maddox didn’t know what to say.
They were getting ready to go out. Christine was ready and Maddox was nearly ready, a too familiar scenario. She waited by the front door, smart, made-up, tall in new boots and long coat, enveloped in a haze of expensive perfume.
‘Are you nearly ready, Brian?’
That she added his name to the harmless query was a bad sign.
It meant her patience was stretched too thin. But he’d lost his car key. He’d looked everywhere. Twice. And couldn’t find it.
‘Where did you last have it?’ she shouted up the stairs.
The unhelpfulness of the question grated against his nerves.
‘I don’t know. That’s the whole point.’
He started again. Bedroom (bedside drawer, dressing gown). Jacket pockets. Kitchen.
‘Have you looked in your box?’
‘Yes, I’ve looked in my box.’
They each had a box, like an in-tray, in the kitchen. Christine never used hers, but always knew where everything was. Maddox used his, but still managed to lose at least one important item every day. Wallet, phone, keys. Chequebook, bank card. Everything always turned up, sooner or later, but in this case, not soon enough.
‘I can’t find it. I’ve looked everywhere.’
Heavy sigh.
If the atmosphere hadn’t become tense he would jokingly accuse her of having hidden it, of trying to make him think he was losing his mind. But that wouldn’t play now. They were beyond that.
‘It’s probably at the flat,’ she said, loading the word with her customary judgemental emphasis.
‘How could it be at the flat when my car’s outside?’ he snapped before realizing that she must have been joking.
‘It’s a pity you don’t have a spare key,’ she said.
‘It’s a pity your car’s in the garage,’ he retorted, ‘about to be declared uneconomical to repair. Look, Christine, it’s very late. I can’t find it and I certainly won’t find it with you hovering, getting all wound up, so I suggest you get a cab and I’ll follow.’
‘But what if you don’t find it?’
‘I’ll find it. I’ll be there, just a little late, that’s all. You go. You’ll easily pick up a black cab on the Green. You’re only going to Ladbroke Grove.’
Sweating, he listened as the front door was opened and shut –slammed. Gate clanged. Fading echo of footsteps receding. He felt the tension flow out of him and collapsed on to the nearest chair. He loosened his tie and reached for a glass.
In their bedroom he pressed the power button on his laptop. While waiting, he stared blankly at the framed poster on the wall. A production he’d been in more than twenty years ago. Colossus. Clive Barker’s play about Goya. He allowed the faces of cast members to run through his mind, particularly those who’d gone on to other things. Lennie James – you saw him on television all the time now. A part in Cold Feet. A one-off drama, something he’d written himself. That prison series. Buried. Right. Buried in the schedules.
Aslie Pitter, the most naturally talented actor in the cast. He’d done one or two things – a Channel 4 sitcom, guest appearance in The Bill – then disappeared. Maddox had last seen him working for a high-street chain. Security, demonstrating product – he couldn’t remember which.
Elinore Vickery had turned upin something at the Waterman’s. Maddox had liked her, tried to keepin touch, but there was an invisible barrier, as if she’d known him better than he knew himself.
Missing out on a couple of good parts because of his size (five foot five in stocking feet, eight stone dead), Maddox had quit the theatre and concentrated on writing. Barker had helped with one or two contacts and Maddox sold a couple of horror stories. Over the years he’d moved away from fiction into journalism and book-length non-fiction. The current project, New Maps of Hell, hadn’t found a home. The publishers he’d offered it to hadn’t been able to reject it quickly enough. They didn’t want it on their desks. It made them uncomfortable. That was fine by Maddox. He’d worry if it didn’t. They’d want it on their lists, though, when it was too late. He’d finish it first, then pick one editor and let the others write their letters of resignation.
He read through the afternoon’s work, then closed the laptop. He opened his bedside drawer and there was his car key. He looked at it. Had it been there before? Of course it had. How could it not have been? But he’d not seen it, so it might as well not have been. It had effectively disappeared. Hysterical blindness? Negative hallucination?
He pocketed the key and went downstairs. The door closed behind him and the car started first time. He sneaked past White City – the exhibition halls were gone, torn down for a future shopping centre – and slipped on to the Westway. He didn’t think of Christine as he approached Ladbroke Grove, but of Christie, John Reginald Halliday. The former relief projectionist at the Electric, who had murdered at least six women, had lived at 10 Rillington Place, later renamed Ruston Close before being demolished to make way for the elevated motorway on which Maddox was now driving. The film, starring Dickie Attenborough as the killer and John Hurt as his poor dupe of an upstairs neighbour, who swung for at least one of Christie’s crimes, had been filmed in Rillington Place itself. Maddox understood, from comments posted on ghoulish message boards on the internet, that the interiors had been shot in No. 8 and the exteriors outside No. 10. But when the police, acting on a tip-off from Timothy Evans, yanked open a manhole cover outside No. 10, Attenborough could be seen peering out through the ground-floor window of the end house in the terrace, No. 10, where three of Christie’s victims had been walled upin the pantry, his wife, Ethel, being found under the floorboards in the front room. For Maddox it was the key shot in the film, the only clear evidence that they’d gained access to the charnel house itself. The only other explanation being that they’d mocked up the entire street in the studio, which he didn’t buy.
The case accounted for five pages in Maddox’s book. He concentrated mainly on the interweaving of fact and fiction, the merging of film and reality. Attenborough as Christie. No. 8 standing in for No. 10, if indeed it did. The internet also yielded a piece of Pathé film footage of the demolition of Ruston Close. Two men with pickaxes. A third man speaking to camera. A burning house. Shots of the house at the end of the street with the white (replacement) door. Clearly the same house as that in the film. But there was no sound, the reporter mouthing inaudible commentary. Maddox lured a lip-reader to the flat, a junior editor from one of the publishers that had turned down his book. She reminded him of Linzi with her green eyes and shoulder-length streaked hair. Even in heels she didn’t reach Maddox’s height, but she had a confident, relaxed smile. She held his gaze when he spoke to her and appeared to be looking into his eyes, but must have been watching his lips, as she relied heavily on lip-reading.
Maddox was careful to make sure she was looking in his direction before speaking to her, probably over-careful. She must have spent a lifetime compensating for situations in which people wouldn’t have made such allowances. Working backwards from the first words she managed to lip-read and then having to catch up. So much information assumed rather than known for certain, but Maddox could relate to that. In some areas of life he, too, knew nothing for certain. The deaf woman’s name was Karen. He assumed the proposal for his book had been rejected by someone senior who had given Karen the unpleasant job of telling the author, but he didn’t know that for certain. Possibly she’d read it and rejected it herself and only agreed to provide lip-reading services because she felt bad about it.
When she entered the flat, Maddox felt at ease. In control. He apologized for the loud, bass-heavy music coming from the downstairs flat, but she said she couldn’t hear it.
‘I thought you might be able to feel it,’ he said.
‘It’s a new building,’ she said. ‘Concrete floors. Otherwise…’
He showed her the footage. She said it wasn’t straightforward. The quality was poor and the picture kept pixellating, plus the reporter unhelpfully turned his head to the side on several occasions.
Maddox asked her if she would come back and have another go if he was able to tidy the picture up a bit.
‘I don’t think I’ll be able to get much off it for you,’ she said.
‘If you wouldn’t mind just trying one more time, perhaps when you’re less tired,’ he said. ‘It’s very important to me, for my book, you know.’
*
Maddox pulled into one of the reserved spaces outside a block of purpose-built flats in the depressed residential trapezium bordered by Green Lanes and the roads of West Green, Seven Sisters and St Ann’s. He listened to the ticking of the cooling engine for a few moments as he watched the darkened windows of the second-floor flat. The top flat.
The street door had been left open by one of his neighbours. He walked up.
Inside the flat, he left the light switched off, poured himself a drink and sat in the single armchair. He pulled out his phone and sent a short text message. Orange street-lighting cast a deathly glow over the cheap bookshelves stacked with pulp novels, true crime, horror anthologies and dystopian science fiction. His phone chimed. He opened it, read the return message and replied to it. When he’d lived here, the room had been dominated by a double bed. Moving into Christine’s house had allowed him to turn the tiny flat into the dedicated office he’d always wanted by burning the bed on the waste ground out the back. He’d considered giving it away, since selling it had struck him as tiresome: placing an ad, answering calls, opening the door to strangers. Easier to burn the damn thing and all the memories associated with it. So then he’d moved his desk from the east end of the room, under the Velux window, to the west-facing windows overlooking the street.
Another text arrived. He read it and closed the phone without replying.
As usual, loud music was playing in the downstairs flat.
He drained his glass and let his head fall back against the soft cushion. The Artex ceiling had attracted cobwebs and grime, but he doubted he would ever feel the need to repaint or clean it. Very few people ever came here. Linzi had spent a lot of time in the flat, of course. He laughed bitterly, then chewed his lipand stared at the ceiling, sensitive to the slightest noise in spite of the thump of the bass from the downstairs flat. Christine had hardly stepped over the threshold. She’d been once or twice soon after they’d met, but not since. There was no reason to. It was clear from the odd comment that she resented his keeping the flat, since it was a drain on resources, but as he’d argued, there was no room in the house for all these books and tapes. Not to mention the stuff stored in the loft. He chewed his lip again.
He switched on the stereo and the ordered chaos of Paul Schütze’s New Maps of Hell clattered into battle with the beat from below. Schütze’s 1992 release was the constant soundtrack to any work he did on the book in the flat. (On the rare occasions that he worked on it at the house, he played the follow-up, New Maps of Hell II: The Rapture of Metals.) He believed it helped. It started out as an aid to getting the mindset right, he sometimes imagined telling Kirsty Wark or Verity Sharpin a television interview, and soon became a habit, a routine. I simply couldn’t work on the book without having the music playing in the background. It was about the creation of a hermetically sealed world. Which, I suppose you have to admit, hell is. Although one that’s expanding at an alarming rate, erupting in little pockets. North Kensington, Muswell Hill. London is going to hell, Kirsty.
He opened a file and did some work, tidied up some troublesome text. He saved it and opened another file, ‘Dollis Hill’. Notes, a few stabs at an address, gaps, big gaps. He was going to have to go back.
He replayed the mental rushes. Autumn 1986. A fine day. Gusty, but dry, bright. Walking in an unfamiliar district of London. A long road, tree-lined. High up. View down over the city between detached houses and semis. Victorian, Edwardian.
The entryphone buzzed, bringing him back to the present with a start. He closed the file. He got to his feet, crossed to the hall and picked up the phone.
‘The door’s open. Come up,’ he said, before realizing she couldn’t hear him.
He remained standing in the hall, listening to footsteps climbing the interior staircase. When the footsteps stopped outside his door there was a pause before the knock came. He imagined her composing herself, perhaps straightening her clothes, removing a hair from her collar. Or looking at her watch and thinking of bolting. He opened the door as she knocked, which startled her.
‘Come in,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming.’
All Maddox had done to improve the image on the video was change the size of the Media Player window so that the reporter’s mouth, while slightly smaller, was less affected by picture break-up.
While Karen studied the footage, Maddox crossed to the far side of the room. He returned with a glass of red wine, which he placed beside the laptop. Karen raised a hand to decline, but Maddox simply pushed the glass slightly closer to her and left it there. Finally, while she was watching the footage for a third time, her hand reached out, perhaps involuntarily, to pick up the glass. She took a sip, then held the glass aloft while studying the image of the jaunty reporter: Michael Caine glasses, buttoned-up jacket, button-down shirt, hand alighting on hiplike a butterfly.
Maddox watched as she replayed the footage again. Each time the reporter started speaking, she moved a little closer to the screen and seemed to angle her head slightly to the left in order to favour her right ear, in which she had a trace of hearing, despite the fact there was no sound at all on the film. Habit, Maddox decided.
Karen leaned back and looked at Maddox before speaking.
‘He’s saying something like newspaper reports…of the investigation…into the discovery of the burned-out bodies of two women…Fifteen – or fifty – years ago…Something of the century. I’m sorry, it’s really hard.’
Her speech was that of a person who had learned to talk the hard way, without being able to hear the sound of her own voice.
‘That’s great. That’s very helpful, Karen. It would be fifteen, not fifty. I didn’t even know for certain that he was talking about Christie’s house. Burned-out, though, are you sure? That’s strange.’
‘No, I’m not sure, but that’s what it sounds like.’
Karen’s choice of expression – sounds like – reminded him of a blind man who had asked Maddox for helpcrossing the road as he was going to see the doctor.
Maddox went to fill upher glass, but she placed her hand over it.
‘I’ve got to go,’ she said. ‘I said I could only stopby for a minute.’ Maddox stood his ground with the wine bottle, then stepped back.
‘Another time,’ he said.
‘Have you got something else you want me to look at?’
‘I might have. If it’s not too much of an imposition.’
‘Just let me know.’
He showed her out, then switched the light off again and watched from the window as she regained the street. She stopped, looked one way, then went the other, as if deciding there and then which way to go. Hardly the action of a woman with an appointment. He watched as she walked south towards St Ann’s Road and disappeared around the corner, then he sat down in the armchair and emptied her wine glass. His gaze roved across the bookshelves and climbed the walls before reaching the ceiling. He then sat without moving for half an hour, his eyes not leaving the ceiling, listening to the building’s creaks and sighs, the music downstairs having been turned off.
He took a different route back, climbing the Harringay Ladder and going west past the top of Priory Park. He floored the pedal through the Cranley Gardens S-bend and allowed the gradient to slow the car so that he rolled to a stopoutside No. 23. There he killed the engine and looked upat the second-floor flat where Dennis Nilsen had lived from October 1981 to February 1983. One of Nilsen’s mistakes, which had led to his being caught, was to have left the window in the gable dormer wide open for long periods, attracting the attention of neighbours.
Maddox looked at his watch and started the engine. He got on to the North Circular, coming off at Staples Corner, heading south down Edgware Road and turning right into Dollis Hill Lane. He slowed to a crawl, leaning forward over the wheel, craning his neck at the houses on the south side. He was sure it would be on the south side. He definitely remembered a wide tree-lined avenue with views over central London. Land falling away behind the house. Long walk from the Tube. Which Tube? He didn’t know.
He turned right, cruised the next street. He wasn’t even sure of the street. Dollis Hill Lane sounded right, but as soon as he’d got the idea of Cricklewood Lane off the internet that had sounded right too.
He’d gone there, to 108/110 Cricklewood Lane, after reading on the net that that was where they’d shot Hellraiser. When he got there and found it was a branch of Holmes Place Health Clubs, he worked out it must have been the former location of Cricklewood Production Village, where they’d done the studio work.
Some time in the autumn of 1986, Maddox had come here, to a house in Dollis Hill. A movie was being made. Clive Barker was directing his first film. Hellraiser. They were shooting in a rented house and Maddox had been invited to go on the set as an associate of Barker. He was going to do a little interview, place it wherever possible. Could be his big break. It was good of Clive to have agreed to it. Maddox remembered the big white vans in the street outside the house, a surprising number of people hanging around doing nothing, a catering truck, a long table covered with polystyrene cups, a tea urn. He asked for Steve Jones, unit publicist. Jones talked to him about what was going on. They were filming a dinner-party scene with Andrew Robinson and Clare Higgins and two young actors, the boy and the girl, and a bunch of extras. Maddox got to watch from behind the camera, trying to catch Barker’s eye as he talked to the actors, telling them what he wanted them to do. Controlling everybody and everything. Maddox envied him, but admired him as well. A make-up girl applied powder to Robinson’s forehead. A hairdresser fixed Ashley Laurence’s hair. They did the scene and the air was filled with electricity. Everyone behind the camera held their breath, faces still and taut. The tension was palpable. The moment Barker called, ‘Cut,’ it melted away. Smiles, laughter, everyone suddenly moving around. Maddox noticed the hairdresser, who looked lost for a moment, diminutive and vulnerable, but Steve Jones caught Maddox’s arm in a light gripand cornered Barker. The director looked at Maddox and there was a fraction of a second’s pause, no more, before he said, ‘Brian,’ in such a warm, sincere way that Maddox might have thought Clive had been looking forward to seeing him all morning.
They did a short interview over lunch, which they ate on the floor of a room at the back of the house.
‘We’re surrounded by images which are momentarily potent and carry no resonance whatsoever,’ Barker was saying in transatlantic Scouse. ‘Advertising, the pop video, a thing which seems to mean an awful lot and is in fact absolutely negligible.’
Maddox noticed the hairdresser carrying a paper plate and a cup. She sat cross-legged on the floor next to another crew member and they talked as they ate.
‘What frightens you?’ he asked Barker.
‘Unlit streets, flying, being stuck on the Tube at rush hour. Places where you have to relinquish control.’
Once they’d finished, Maddox hung around awkwardly, waiting for a chance to talk to the hairdresser. When it came – her companion rising to go – he seized it. She was getting up too and Maddox contrived to stepin front of her, blocking her way. He apologized and introduced himself. ‘I was just interviewing Clive. We’ve known each other a couple of years. I was in one of his plays.’
‘Linzi,’ she said, offering her hand. ‘I’m only here for one day. The regular girl called in sick.’
‘Then I’m lucky I came today,’ he said, smiling shyly.
She was wearing a dark green top of soft cotton that was exactly the same shade as her eyes. Her hair, light brown with natural blonde streaks, was tied back in a knot pierced by a pencil.
‘Are you going to stick around?’ she asked.
‘I’ve done my interview, but if no one kicks me out…’
‘It’s a pretty relaxed set.’
He did stick around and most of the time he watched Linzi, promising himself he wouldn’t leave until he’d got her number. It took him the rest of the afternoon, but he got it. She scribbled it on a blank page in her Filofax, then tore out the page and said, ‘Call me.’
The chances of finding the house in darkness were even less than in daylight. He’d been up to Dollis Hill a couple of times in the last few weeks, once in the car and once on foot. Lately, he’d been thinking more about Linzi, and specifically about the early days, before it started to go wrong. He’d spent enough time going over the bad times and wanted to revisit the good. He wanted to see the house again, but couldn’t. He needed to locate it for his book. He’d rewatched the film, which contained enough shots of the house’s exterior that it should have been easy to locate it, but it didn’t seem to matter how many times he trailed these suburban avenues, the house wasn’t there. Or if it was, he couldn’t see it. He’d begun to think it might have been knocked down, possibly even straight after the shoot. It could have been why the house had been available. In the film there was a No. 55 on the porch, but that would be set dressing, like the renumbering of 25 Powis Square, in Performance, as No. 81.
He looked at his watch and calculated that if he was quick he could get to Ladbroke Grove in time for coffee and to drive Christine home, thereby reducing the amount of grief she would give him. Negligibly, he realized, but still.
In the morning, he feigned sleepwhile she dressed. Her movements were businesslike, crisp. The night before had been a riot, as expected. When he had turned up at the dinner, two and a half hours late, she had contented herself with merely shooting him a look, but as soon as they left she started. And as soon as she started, he switched off.
It didn’t let up even when they got home, but he wasn’t listening. He marvelled at how closely he was able to mimic the condition with which Karen, his lip-reader, had been born. Thinking of Karen, moreover, relaxed him inside, while Christine kept on, even once they’d got into bed. Elective deafness – it beat hysterical blindness.
When he was sure Christine had left the house – the slammed door, the gate that clanged – he got upand showered. Within half an hour, having spent ten minutes pointing the DVD remote at the television, he was behind the wheel of the car with his son in the back seat. South Tottenham in twenty minutes was a bigger ask by day than by night, but he gave it his best shot. Rush hour was over (Christine, in common with everyone who worked on weekly magazines, finished earlier than she started), but skirting the congestion charge zone was still a challenge.
He parked where he had the night before and turned to see that Jack was asleep. He left him there, locked the car and walked up. He had decided, while lying in bed with his back to Christine, that it would be worth going upinto the loft. Somewhere in the loft was a box containing old diaries, including one for 1986. He had never been a consistent diarist, but some years had seen him make more notes than others. It was worth a rummage among the spiders’ webs and desiccated wasps’ nests. His size meant he didn’t bang his head on the latticework of pine beams.
The loft still smelled faintly of formalin. He suspected it always would until he got rid of the suitcase at the far end. He shone the torch in its direction. Big old-fashioned brown leather case, rescued from a skip and cleaned up. Solid, sturdy, two catches and a strap with a buckle. Could take a fair weight.
He redirected the torch at the line of dusty boxes closer to the trapdoor. The first box contained T-shirts that he never wore any more but couldn’t bear to throw away. The second was full of old typescripts stiff with Tipp-Ex. The diaries were in the third box along. He bent down and sorted through: 1974, a shiny black Pocket Diary filled mainly with notes on the history of the Crusades; 1976, the summer of the heatwave, Angling Times diary, roach and perch that should have been returned to the water left under stones to die; 1980, the deaths of his three remaining grandparents, three funerals in one year, coffins in the front room, all burials; 1982, his first term at university, meeting Martin, his best friend for a while. Martin was a year older, which had impressed Maddox. The age difference hadn’t mattered. Everything was changing. Leaving school, leaving home. Living in halls. Martin was a medical student. They would stay uplate drinking coffee and Martin would smoke cigarettes and tell Maddox about medicine, about anatomy and about the bodies he was learning to dissect.
Maddox could listen to Martin for hours. The later they stayed up, the more profound their discussions seemed to become. Maddox watched as Martin dragged on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for an eternity, stretching the moment, before blowing it out in perfect rings. When Martin talked about the bodies in the anatomy lab, Maddox became entranced. He imagined Martin alone in the lab with a dozen flayed corpses. Bending over them, examining them, carefully removing a strip of muscle, severing a tendon. Getting upclose to the secrets, the mysteries, of death. Martin said it didn’t matter how long he spent washing his hands, they still smelled of formalin. He held them under Maddox’s nose, then moved to cuphis cheeks in an affectionate, stroking gesture.
‘You don’t mind, do you?’ he said, as his hand landed on Maddox’s knee.
‘Could you get me in there? Into the lab?’ Maddox asked, shaking his head, picturing himself among the bodies, as Martin’s hand moved uphis thigh.
‘No. But I could bring you something out. Something you could keep.’
Martin’s hand had reached Maddox’s lapand Maddox was mildly surprised to discover that far from objecting, he was aroused. If this was to be the downpayment on whatever Martin might fetch him back from the dissection table, so be it.
‘I’ve got something for you,’ Martin said a couple of days later, ‘in my room.’
Maddox followed Martin to his room.
‘So where is it?’ Maddox asked.
‘Can’t just leave that sort of thing lying about. But what’s the rush?’
Martin lay down on the bed and unbuckled his belt.
Maddox hesitated, considered walking out, but he felt certain he’d always regret it if he left empty-handed. Instead, he knelt beside the bed and spat into his palm.
Afterwards, Martin pulled open his desk drawer.
‘There you go,’ he said.
Maddox withdrew a strong-smelling package. He started to work at the knot in the outermost plastic bag, but it wouldn’t come easily. He asked Martin what it contained.
‘A piece of subcutaneous fat from the body of a middle-aged man. If anyone ever asks, you didn’t get it from me.’
Maddox returned to his own room on the seventh floor, washing his hands on the way. He cut open the bag and unwrapped his spoils. The gobbet of fat, four inches by two, looked like a piece of tripe, white and bloodless, and the stench of formalin made him feel sick and excited at the same time. Maddox was careful not to touch the fat as he wrapped it up again and secured the package with tape. He opened his wardrobe and pulled out the brown suitcase he’d liberated from a skip in Judd Street.
He saw less of Martin after that. At first he contrived subtly to avoid him and then started going out with Valerie, a girl with fat arms and wide hips he picked up in the union bar on cocktails night. He wasn’t convinced they were a good match, but the opportunity was convenient, given the Martin situation.
The piece of fat remained wrapped up in its suitcase, which smelled so strongly that Maddox had only to open the case and take a sniff to re-experience how he had felt when Martin had given him the body part. As he lay in bed trying to get to sleep (alone – Valerie didn’t last more than a few weeks) he sometimes thought about the man who had knowingly willed his cadaver to science. He wondered what his name might have been and what kind of man he was. What he might have been in life. He would hardly have been able to foresee what would happen to the small part of him that was now nestled inside Maddox’s wardrobe.
When Maddox left the hall of residence for a flat in Holloway, the case went with him, still empty but for its human remains. He kept it on top of a cupboard. It stayed there for two years. When he moved into the flat in N15, he put the suitcase in the loft, where it had remained ever since. The piece of fat was no longer in Maddox’s possession, but the suitcase was not free of the smell of formalin.
Maddox’s 1986 diary was at the bottom of the box. It took only a couple of minutes to find what he was looking for. ‘Hellraiser, 11 a.m.’ he’d written in the space reserved for Friday 10 October. A little further down was an address: 187 Dollis Hill Lane.
He drove to Dollis Hill via Cranley Gardens, but on this occasion didn’t stop.
‘Why didn’t I think of checking my old diaries before, eh, Jack?’ he said, looking in the rear-view mirror.
His son was silent, staring out of the window.
Turning into Dollis Hill Lane from Edgware Road, he slowed to a crawl, oblivious to the noisy rebuke of the driver immediately behind him, who pulled out and swerved to overtake, engine racing, finger given. Maddox brought the car to a halt on a slight incline outside No. 187. He looked at the house and felt an unsettling combination of familiarity and non-recognition. Attraction and repulsion. He had to stare at the house for two or three minutes before he realized why he had driven past it so many times and failed to recognize it.
Like most things recalled from the past, it was smaller than the version in his memory. But the main difference was the apparent age of the building. He remembered a Victorian villa, possibly Edwardian. The house in front of him was new. The rendering on the front gable end had gone upin the last few years. The woodframed bay windows on the first floor were of recent construction. The casement window in the topflat, second floor, was obviously new. The mansard roof was a familiar shape, but the clay Rosemarys were all fresh from the tile shop. The materials were new, but the style was not. The basic design was unchanged, from what he could remember of the exterior shots in the film, which he’d looked at again before coming out, but in spite of that the house looked new. As if a skeleton had grown new muscle and flesh.
‘Just like Frank,’ he said out loud.
‘What, Daddy?’
‘Just like Frank in the film.’
‘What film?’
‘They made a film in this house and I came to see them make it. You’re too young to see it yet. One day, maybe.’
‘What’s it about?’
‘It’s about a man who disappears and then comes back to life with the help of his girlfriend. It happened in that room up there.’ He pointed to the top flat. ‘Although, the windows are wrong,’ he said, trying to remember the second-floor window in the film. ‘I need to check it again.’
The only part of the exterior that looked as if they’d taken care to try to match the original was the front door.
As he’d walked from the Hellraiser set back to the Tube two decades earlier, he’d read and reread Linzi’s number on the torn-out piece of Filofax paper. He called her the next day and they arranged to meet for a drink.
‘Why are you so interested in this house, Daddy?’ Jack asked from the back seat.
‘Because of what happened here. Because of the film. And because I met somebody here. Somebody I knew before I met your mother.’
Linzi lived in East Finchley. They went to see films at the Phoenix or met for drinks in Muswell Hill. Malaysian meals in Crouch End. He showed her the house in Hillfield Avenue where he had visited Clive Barker.
‘Peter Straub used to live on the same road, just further up the hill,’ he told her.
‘Who’s Peter Straub?’
‘Have you heard of Stephen King?’
‘Of course.’
‘Straub and King wrote a book together. The Talisman. They wrote it here. Or part of it, anyway. King also wrote a story called “Crouch End”, which was interesting, not one of his best.’
Maddox and Linzi started meeting during the day at the Wisteria Tea Rooms on Middle Lane and it was there, among the pot plants and mismatched crockery, that Maddox realized with a kind of slow, swooning surprise that he was happy. The realization was so slow because the feeling was so unfamiliar. They took long walks through Highgate Cemetery and across Hampstead Heath.
Weeks became months. The cherry blossom came out in long straight lines down Cecile Park, and fell to the pavements, and came out again. Linzi often stayed at Maddox’s flat in South Tottenham, but frowned distastefully at his true-crime books. One morning while she was still asleep, Maddox was dressing, looking for a particular T-shirt. Unable to find it, he climbed up the ladder into the loft. Searching through a box of old clothes, he didn’t hear Linzi climbing the ladder or see her head and shoulders suddenly intrude into the loft space.
‘What are you doing?’ she said.
‘Shit.’ He jumped, hitting his head. ‘Ow. That hurt. Shit. Nothing. Looking for something.’
‘What’s that smell?’
‘Nothing.’
He urged her back down the ladder and made sure the trapdoor was fastened before pulling on the Eraserhead T-shirt he’d been looking for.
Whenever he went into the loft from then on, whether Linzi was around or not, he would pull the ladder up after him and close the trapdoor. The loft was private.
When he got back to the flat that evening, he went upinto the loft again – duly covering his tracks, although he was alone – and took the small wrapped parcel from the suitcase. The lid fell shut, the old-fashioned clasps sliding home without his needing to fasten them. Quality craftsmanship.
When it was dark, he buried the slice of tissue in the waste ground behind the flats.
As the decade approached its end, the directionless lifestyle that Maddox and Linzi had drifted into seemed to become more expensive. The bills turned red. Maddox started working regular shifts on the subs’ desk at the Independent. He hated it but it paid well. Linzi applied for a full-time job at a ladies’ salon in Finsbury Park. They took a day tripto Brighton. They went to an art show in the Unitarian Church where Maddox bought Linzi a small watercolour and she picked out a booklet of poems by the artist’s husband as a return gift. They had lunch in a vegetarian café. Maddox talked about the frustrations of cutting reviews to fit and coming upwith snappy headlines, when what he’d rather be doing was writing the copy himself. Linzi had no complaints about the salon. ‘Gerry – he’s the boss – he’s a really lovely guy,’ she said. ‘Nicest boss I’ve ever had.’
They spent the afternoon in the pubs and secondhand bookshops of the North Lanes. Maddox found a Ramsey Campbell anthology, an M. John Harrison collection and The New Murderers’ Who’s Who. On the train waiting to leave Brighton Station to return to London, with the sun throwing long dark shapes across the platforms, Linzi read to Maddox from the pamphlet of verse.
‘“This is all I ever wanted/to meet you in the fast decaying shadows/on the outskirts of this or any city/alone and in exile.”’
As the train rattled through Sussex, Maddox pored over the photographs in his true-crime book.
‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a caption: ‘Brighton Trunk Crime No. 2: The trunk’s contents.’
‘Very romantic,’ Linzi said as she turned to the window, but Maddox couldn’t look away from the crumpled stockings on the legs of the victim, Violette Kay. Her broken neck. The pinched scowl on her decomposed face. To Maddox the picture was as beautiful as it was terrible.
Over the next few days, Maddox read upon the Brighton Trunk Murders of 1934. He discovered that Tony Mancini, who had confessed to putting Violette Kay’s body in the trunk but claimed she had died accidentally (only to retract that claim and accept responsibility for her murder more than forty years later), had lodged at 52 Kemp Street. He rooted around for the poetry pamphlet Linzi had bought him. He found it under a pile of magazines. The poet’s name was Michael Kemp. He wanted to share his discovery of this coincidence with Linzi when she arrived at his flat with scissors and hairdressing cape.
‘Why not save a bit of money?’ she said, moving the chair from Maddox’s desk into the middle of the room. As she worked on his hair, she talked about Gerry from the salon. ‘He’s so funny,’ she said. ‘The customers love him. He certainly keeps me and the other girls entertained.’
‘Male hairdressers in women’s salons are all puffs, surely?’
Linzi stopped cutting and looked at him.
‘So?’ she said. ‘So what if they are? And anyway, Gerry’s not gay. No way.’
‘Really? How can you be so sure?’
‘A girl knows. OK?’
‘Have you fucked him then or what?’
She took a stepback. ‘What’s the matter with you?’
‘How else would you know? Gerry seems to be all you can talk about.’
‘Fuck you.’
Maddox shot to his feet, tearing off the cape.
‘You know what,’ he said, seizing the scissors, ‘I’ll cut my own fucking hair and do a better job of it. At least I won’t have to listen to you going on about Gerry.’
He started to hack at his own hair, grabbing handfuls and cutting away. Linzi recoiled in horror, unable to look away, as if she were watching a road accident.
‘Maybe I should tell you about all the women at the Independent?’ he suggested. ‘Sheila Johnston, Sabine Durrant, Christine Healey…I don’t know where to start.’
It wasn’t until he jabbed the scissors threateningly in her direction that she snatched upher bag and ran out.
The next day he sent flowers. He didn’t call, didn’t push it. Just flowers and a note: ‘Sorry.’
Then he called. Told her he didn’t know what had come over him. It wouldn’t happen again. He knew he’d be lucky if she forgave him, but he hoped he’d be lucky. He hadn’t felt like this about anyone before and he didn’t want to lose her. The irony was, he told her, he’d been thinking his flat was getting a bit small and maybe they should look for a place together. He’d understand if she wanted to kick it into touch, but hoped she’d give him another chance.
She said to give her some time.
He shaved his head.
He drove down to Finsbury Park and watched from across the street as she worked on clients. Bobbing left and right. Holding their hair in her hands. Eye contact in the mirror. Gerry fussing around, sharing a joke, trailing an arm. As she’d implied, though, he was distributing his attentions equally among Linzi and the two other girls.
Mornings and evenings, he kept a watch on her flat in Finchley. She left and returned on her own. He chose a route between his flat and hers that took in Cranley Gardens in Muswell Hill. He parked outside No. 23 and watched the darkened windows of the top flat. He wondered if any of the neighbours had been Nilsen’s contemporaries. If this man passing by now with a tartan shopping trolley had ever nodded good morning to the mass murderer. If that woman leaving her house across the street had ever smiled at him. Maddox got out of the car and touched the low wall outside the property with the tips of his fingers.
Linzi agreed to meet up. Maddox suggested the Wisteria Tea Rooms. It was almost like starting over. Cautious steps. Shy smiles. His hair had grown back.
‘What got into you?’
‘I don’t know. I thought we’d agreed to draw a line under it.’
‘Yes, you’re right.’
At the next table a woman was feeding a baby.
‘Do you ever think about having children?’ Linzi asked, out of the blue.
‘A boy,’ Maddox said straight away. ‘I’d call him Jack.’
Maddox didn’t mention Gerry. He took on extra shifts. Slowly, they built up trust again. One day, driving back to his place after dropping Linzi off at hers, he saw that a board had gone up outside 23 Cranley Gardens. For sale. He rang the agents. Yes, it was the topflat, second floor. It was on at £;64,950, but when Maddox dropped by to pick up a copy of the details (‘DELIGHTFUL TOP FLOOR ONE BEDROOM CONVERSION FLAT’), they’d reduced it to £59,950. He made an appointment, told Linzi he’d arranged a surprise. Picked her up early, drove to Cranley Gardens. He’d never brought her this way. She didn’t know whose flat it had been.
A young lad met them outside. Loosely knotted tie, shiny shoes. Bright, eager.
Linzi turned to Maddox. ‘Are you thinking of moving?’
‘It’s bigger and it’s cheap.’
Linzi smiled stiffly. They followed the agent up the stairs. He unlocked the interior door and launched into his routine. Maddox nodded without listening as his eyes greedily took everything in, trying to make sense of the flat, to match what he saw to the published photographs. It didn’t fit.
‘The bathroom’s gone,’ he said, interrupting the agent.
‘There’s a shower room,’ the boy said. ‘And a washbasin across the hall. An unusual arrangement.’
Nilsen had dissected two bodies in the bathroom.
‘This is a lovely room,’ the agent said, moving to the front of the flat.
Maddox entered the room at the back and checked the view from the window.
‘At least this is unchanged,’ he said to Linzi, who had appeared alongside.
‘What do you mean?’
He looked at her and realized what he’d said.
‘This flat’s all different. I’ve seen pictures of it.’
The story came out later, back at Maddox’s place.
‘You took me round Dennis Nilsen’s flat?’
He turned away.
‘You didn’t think to mention it first? You thought we might live there together? In the former home of a serial killer? What the fuck is wrong with you?’
‘It’s cheap,’ he said, to the closing door.
He watched from the window as she ran off towards West Green Road. He stayed at the window for a time and then pulled down the ladder and went upinto the loft. He pulled up the ladder and closed the trapdoor. He opened the big brown suitcase. It was like getting a fix. He studied the dimensions of the suitcase. It was not much smaller than Tony Mancini’s trunk.
*
Christine was at work. Maddox read a note she’d left in the kitchen:
‘We need milk and bread.’
He went into the living room and took down the Hellraiser DVD from the shelf. Sitting in the car with Jack outside the house on Dollis Hill Lane, Maddox had noticed something not quite right about the windows on the second floor. They were new windows and set in two pairs with a gap between them, but that wasn’t it. There was something else and he didn’t know what. He fast-forwarded to the exterior shot of Julia leaving the house to go to the bar where she picks up the first victim. The second-floor window comprised six lights in a row. For some reason, when rebuilding the house, they’d left out two of the lights and gone with just four, in two pairs. But that wasn’t what was bothering him.
He skipped forward. He kept watching.
Frank and Julia in the second-floor room, top of the house. She’s just killed the guy from the bar and Frank has drained his body. Julia re-enters the room after cleaning herself upand as she walks towards the window we see it comprises four lights in a row. Four windows. Four windows in a row. Not six. Four.
Maddox wielded the remote.
Looking upat the house as Julia leaves it to go to the bar. Second floor, six windows. Inside the same room on the second floor, looking towards the windows. Four, not six.
So what? The transformation scenes, which take place in that second-floor room at the front of the house, weren’t shot on Dollis Hill Lane. Big deal. That kind of stuff would have to be done in the studio. The arrival of the Cenobites, the transformation of Frank, his being torn apart. It wasn’t the kind of stuff you could shoot on location. But how could they make such a glaring continuity error as the number of lights in a window? Six from outside, four from within. It couldn’t be a mistake. It was supposed to mean something. But what?
‘Daddy?’
Maddox jumped.
‘What is it, Jack?’
‘What are you watching?’
Maddox looked at the screen as he thought about his response.
‘This film, the one shot in that house.’
‘The house with the windows?’
‘Yes.’
‘Why is it important?’
‘I don’t know. No, I do know.’ His shoulders slumped. ‘I don’t know. Maybe it’s not.’
He drove to the supermarket. Jack was quiet in the back. They got a trolley. Maddox stopped in front of the newspapers. He looked at the Independent. Although he’d first met Christine on the Independent arts desk, it wasn’t until they bumped into each other some years later, when they were both freelancing on TV listings magazines at IPC, that they started going out. Although they were equals at IPC, Christine had routinely rewritten his headlines at the Independent and while he pretended it didn’t still rankle, it did. Not the best basis for a relationship, perhaps. Then a permanent position came up on TV Times, and they both went for it, but Christine’s experience counted. They decided it wouldn’t affect things, but agreed that maybe Maddox should free himself of his commitments at IPC. He said he had a book he wanted to write. Together they negotiated an increasingly obstacle-strewn path towards making a life together. If they stopped and thought about it, it didn’t seem like a very good idea, but neither of them had a better one.
Maddox looked around to check that Jack was still in tow, then moved on.
He stood silently in cold meats, swaying very gently.
‘Gone,’ he said quietly. ‘All gone. Disappeared.’
‘What, Daddy? What’s gone?’
‘Wait there, Jack. I’ll be back. Don’t move.’
He walked to the end of the aisle and turned the corner. He walked to the end of the next aisle and then the next, looking at the items on the shelves, familiar brands, labels he’d seen a thousand times. All meaningless. He recognized nothing. What was he looking for? Bread and milk? Where were they? He couldn’t remember. He went back to where he’d left the trolley. It was there, but Jack wasn’t.
He looked upand down the aisle. The brand names that had meant nothing to him a moment ago now leaped out at him, shouting, screaming for attention. It was as if the two sides of the aisle had suddenly shifted inward. Jack was nowhere to be seen.
‘Jack!’
Maddox ran to the end of the aisle and looked both ways. He looked up the next aisle, then up the next and the one after. He kept calling Jack’s name. Shoppers stopped and stared, but Maddox moved faster and shouted louder. He looked at the line of tills and wondered if Jack had gone that way. He could already be out of the store, wandering around the car park, about to be run over or abducted. He told himself to calm down, that he would find him, but at the same time another voice suggested that sometimes the worst thing imaginable did happen. It had before, after all. Would this be the next case heard about on the news? A half-page in the paper. London man loses child in supermarket. Brian Maddox, forty-two, took his eyes off his son for one moment and he was gone. But he hadn’t taken his eyes off him for just one moment. He’d gone to the next aisle, or the one after. He’d gone away. He could have been gone five minutes. Ten, fifteen.
‘Jack!’
‘Sir?’
A young lad, a shelf stacker, was standing in front of him. Maddox told him his son had disappeared. The shelf stacker asked for a description. Maddox gave him one and the lad said he would start from the far end of the store and advised Maddox to start from the other. They would meet in the middle and most likely one of them would have found Jack. Maddox did as he was told and neither of them found Jack. Maddox was short of breath, dry in the mouth, his chest rising and falling, unbearable pressure being exerted on his temples. He could no longer call out Jack’s name without his voice breaking. More staff were on hand now. They took Maddox’s arms and led him to an office where he was sat down and given a drink of water.
‘Maybe the boy’s with his mother?’ someone suggested.
Maddox shook his head.
‘Do you have a number for her?’
Maddox produced Christine’s number. He was dimly aware of a phone call being made. The office was full of people. Managers, security, cashiers. They swapped remarks, observations. Some expressions hardened. ‘What did she say?’ a voice asked. ‘There is no son,’ another one answered. ‘No kids at all, apparently.’ A security guard replayed videotape on a monitor. Grainy, vivid. Maddox entering the store on his own with a trolley. Standing in front of the newspapers, on his own. Leaving the trolley in cold meats. No unattached children.
They gave Maddox another glass of water while waiting for the police to arrive. The store didn’t want to press charges. ‘What would be the point?’ Maddox was free to go. ‘Has this happened before?’ Shake of the head. ‘If it were to happen again, the store would have to consider taking action…Very upsetting for other shoppers…You will see someone?’
Maddox sat in the car park, behind the wheel of the car. He hadn’t got what he’d come for. The milk and the bread. Maybe it didn’t matter any more. He sat in the car for a long time and only turned the key in the ignition when he realized the sky over Central London was beginning to get dark.
He didn’t go to the house. He didn’t imagine Christine would be there, but it was kind of irrelevant either way. Instead, he drove to South Tottenham. He drove through the top of the congestion charge zone. It didn’t matter any more. It was rush hour. It took an hour and a half to get to N15. The street door was open. He walked up, entered the flat. Thump-thump-thump from downstairs. He took out his phone and sent a text message, then stood by the window for a while watching the street. He left the phone on the window ledge and pulled down the ladder and climbed into the loft, retrieving the ladder and closing the trapdoor behind him. Stooping, he walked over to the suitcase, which smelled strongly of formalin. He knelt in front of it for several minutes, resting his hands on the lid, then touching the clasps.
He released the clasps and opened the case.
It was empty.
He frowned, then sat and stared at the empty case for some time, listening to the creaks of the beams and the muffled basslines from the downstairs flat. He wondered if Karen would come, how long she might be. He wasn’t sure what he would do when she arrived.
Slowly, he rose, then lowered the upper half of his body into the case, folding his legs in afterwards. Inside the case, the smell of formalin was very strong. He stared at the pine beams, the cobwebs, the shadows clinging to the insulating material. He could still faintly hear his neighbour’s loud music, which Karen had been unable to hear, and then, rising above it, the clear and unmistakable chime of his phone, down in the flat, announcing the arrival of a text message. He started to uncurl his body and the lid of the case fell forward.
He had twisted his body far enough that the hump of his shoulder caught the closing lid.
He climbed out and lay down next to the suitcase.
A minute later his phone chimed a reminder.
He thought about Linzi. Linzi had been good for him, until things went bad. He wondered where she was. He looked at the empty suitcase again and plucked a long fine strand of fair hair from the lining. He thought about Karen and her need, unacknowledged, to be looked after. He remembered how vulnerable Linzi had seemed when he saw her for the first time.
Karen would be along soon. Probably. She hadn’t let him down yet.
He still had options.
[Nicholas Royle]
The urban village of Battle Bridge left the London map in 1836 when a monument to George IV was erected at the junction of Euston, Pentonville, Gray’s Inn and Pancras roads, and King’s Cross was born. As unpopular as the king himself had been, the sixty-feet-high edifice, with the plinth built on to a one-storey building, survived for just nine years. In its short, unloved life it had served as a pub and a police station.
[Sarah Wise]
TOLMERS SQUARE, NW1
Neighbourhood of small, early-Victorian townhouses surrounding church, built on the site of medieval Totten Hall manor, at the north-east junction of Euston and Hampstead roads. Home to around 1,000 people – families, squatters, students, those on low incomes – and subject of bitter, seventeen-year fight against plans to raze and replace with office blocks. Battle won, in the mid 1970s, in landmark victory for better urban planning, but at a price: original square demolished and replaced by banal high-density, low-rise estate.
[Sarah Wise]
THE OLD MILL, TUFNELL HILL, NW5
A popular spot with working-class Londoners from the Edwardian era to the 1920s, especially on weekends and bank holidays. Trams terminated here. The Mill at one stage incorporated extensive dining rooms, a mosaic hall and an hotel. After the tram route was discontinued, the Mill and its outbuildings fell into disrepair – until it was bought by the reclusive Tom ‘Tubby’ Ollis in 1960 and converted to a recording studio with living accommodation. It has been used by, among others, Bob Dylan, Dave Stewart, Elvis Costello, Martin Stone and Jah Wobble. Ollis gave up touring with the DeepFix but continued to record for this and other rock bands as a sessions musician. He restored the Mill to full working condition. Passengers on the upper decks of buses can sometimes catch a glimpse of the sails turning, high above the trees (they supply some of the studio’s electricity). Public access has been denied for some years.
[Michael Moorcock]