A Lesser Evil

by Lesley Pearse

  But as it gradually became dark, Fifi gave way to anger. She was hungry, cold and dirty and she felt she couldn’t stand another moment of it.

  ‘We really are going to die, aren’t we?’ she suddenly screamed out. ‘Stuck here getting thinner and thinner until we’re too weak to even stand. And you won’t even talk to me to take my mind off it.’

  ‘What do you want me to talk about?’ Yvette said, looking surprised. ‘You are such a child sometimes, Fifi, always ze drama.’

  ‘It doesn’t bloody well get any more dramatic than this,’ Fifi snarled at her. ‘I can’t take it any more.’

  Yvette got up and walked over to Fifi, putting her arms around her and holding her tightly.

  ‘Hush now,’ she said soothingly. ‘Screaming and shouting won’t make it any better.’

  Fifi burst into tears, and Yvette led her back to the mattress, wrapped the blanket around her as though she was a small child and cuddled her close.

  ‘How can you be this calm?’ Fifi asked after a while when her sobbing had abated. ‘Aren’t you frightened?’

  ‘Yes, I am frightened,’ Yvette admitted. ‘I am just as hungry as you too. But I ’ave been very hungry and frightened before in my life, and perhaps this is why I seem calm now.’

  ‘When you first came to England?’

  ‘No, all I remember of that was the cold, not fright or hunger. But in Paris I was very scared, for every day the Germans come and round up Jewish people to take them away. We did not know then where they were taking them, but we knew it wasn’t good. Sometimes my mama and I ’ad no food at all, for who needs a dressmaker when your country has fallen to the enemy?’

  ‘Did the Nazis take you then?’ Fifi asked through her sniffles.

  ‘No, because Mama sent me away. She couldn’t come with me, she had to sell what little we ’ad to pay for me to go. She said she would come for me as soon as the war was over.’

  ‘Did she come?’

  Yvette shook her head. ‘The Nazis took her and she died on the train journey to Poland. They say there were so many people in each carriage that many could not breathe. It was bitterly cold too, and they ’ad no food or drink.’

  Because of their plight Fifi could actually feel what it must have been like for Yvette’s mother, whereas before this would have been just another horrible story that she could imagine, but without really grasping its stark reality. Mere words could not convey her horror and disgust that anyone could do such a thing to another human being, or how appalling it must have been for Yvette to discover her mother died in such a way. It was dark now and she couldn’t see the Frenchwoman’s face but she knew she was crying. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t know what else to say. It’s just too terrible.’

  ‘Maybe it was better that she died there, before she see the camp,’ Yvette said in a choked voice. ‘She was at least with people she knew. I stay after the war is over, waiting for news, then when the Red Cross find her name on a list, I come here.’

  Fifi thought of her own mother then. She could see her waiting outside the infant school gates with Patty, Peter and Robin sitting at both ends of the pram. Her mother would open her arms wide for Fifi to run to them, and she’d scoop her up and kiss her. How strange it was that such a lovely image should come into her mind now, when in the past she had chosen to remember only slights, arguments and all the negatives! Just a couple of days ago she was blaming all her misfortune on her family, and she felt ashamed of that now. She thought that if she ever got out of here she would make a determined effort to see all the good in her life, and forget the rest.

  She remained silent for some time, holding Yvette in her arms, hoping that the warmth of her body would comfort her. But questions kept bobbing into her head; there was just so much more she needed to know about her friend.

  ‘But what was it like for you during the war years? You must have been just a young girl?’ she asked eventually.

  ‘I was eighteen when it ended,’ Yvette said with a catch in her voice. ‘But I was not like a young girl any more. I think it would ’ave been better to die in the train with Mama.’

  ‘Why? Weren’t the people you were sent to kind to you?’

  ‘Kind! They see me as just a young Jewish girl who can be sold to anyone with a few francs. You ask why I am not married. Fifi, I would sooner die than ever ’ave a man touch me again.’

  Chapter sixteen

  The air in the office of Trueman Enterprises was thick with cigar smoke. Jack Trueman was sitting back in a big leather swivel chair, a glass of whisky in one hand, gesticulating at Del and Martin with his cigar.

  ‘I want you up in Nottingham pronto,’ he said, his tone one of a man well used to giving an order and having it obeyed immediately. ‘That slag is out of order, and you are to stay there until he knows it.’

  Jack Trueman was close on sixty but he kept in shape by working out in a gym and swimming fifty lengths of his swimming pool each morning, so he looked far younger. Over six feet tall, with wide shoulders and a craggy face, he had never been considered a handsome man, but age had given him distinction. His dark hair had turned silver and he wore his handmade Savile Row three-piece grey suit and gold watch with the air of a man born to money. It was only his cockney accent that gave away his true origins, and the lack of warmth in his dark eyes warned people he was a human shark.

  Anyone who had seen his mock Tudor mansion in Essex would be surprised he didn’t run his large empire from a prestigious office suite in Mayfair. But the two small cluttered rooms above a bookshop in St Anne’s Court in Soho, where he’d started from some forty years earlier, suited him just fine. He owned the building and ran the Mandrake drinking club in the cellar. Mirabelle’s, a stripclub, the Bastille coffee bar and Freddy’s nightclub, which he owned too, were all within three minutes’ walk. But he also had full and part shares in many other businesses as diverse as garment manufacturers, restaurants, a couple of hotels in Paddington and gambling clubs in all the big cities.

  It was the club in Nottingham he had a problem with. The manager had been creaming off the profits for some time, and he wanted Del and Martin not only to go up there and teach him a lesson, but to bring back what Trueman believed he was owed.

  ‘Right, guv,’ Del nodded. ‘How bad are we to hurt him?’

  ‘Bad enough that he won’t try it again. But not so bad he’ll need a hospital. He’s good at his job, and he can keep it if he pays up. But if he don’t –’ Trueman made a sort of chopping gesture with his cigar, implying that they could lame or blind the man for all he cared.

  Del went to the door as if to leave. Martin began to follow him but stopped abruptly and looked back at Trueman.

  ‘What about the women?’ he asked. ‘They need food and water. Shall we go out there first?’

  ‘You leave that to me, son,’ Trueman replied with a grin which didn’t reach his eyes. ‘Get off to Nottingham now and quick about it.’

  Martin hesitated. It was Friday, and they hadn’t been out to the barn again since they took the second woman on Tuesday night. But Del tugged at his sleeve in a silent reminder it wasn’t a good idea to argue with the boss.

  Once down the stairs and out into St Anne’s Court, Martin turned to his friend. ‘Look, Del, we’ve got to go out there first,’ he insisted. ‘They’ll be starving, and they’ve probably got no water left either.’

  ‘In case you’ve forgotten, we gave the key back on Wednesday, so we can’t get in there,’ Del said. ‘So stop banging on about them, he’ll have got someone else going out there. Not that the mouthy bitch deserves anything anyway.’

  It was raining very hard, and neither Martin nor Del was exactly thrilled to be ordered to Nottingham on a Friday afternoon. Anywhere north of Watford felt like a foreign country to them, and by the time they’d done their business up there, they’d be forced to doss down in some fleapit before the drive home. That would mean they’d be shagged out for Saturday night, the busiest night of th
e week.

  A couple of strippers from the Mirabelle came into the Court, huddled together under an umbrella. When they saw Del and Martin their faces brightened.

  Most of the men they met in the club were middle-aged at least, and usually weirdos. To the strippers Del and Martin were white knights as they gave the girls some protection and dealt with troublemakers. Del took advantage of their admiration and trust, and often sold them amphetamines so they could lose weight and work longer hours. But then, Del took advantage of almost everyone, including Martin.

  ‘Coming in the club later, boys?’ the red-haired one asked.

  ‘Not tonight, sweetheart,’ Del said, flicking out his snowy-white shirt cuffs from his dark green mohair suit jacket. ‘We’re off on some business. Might catch you tomorra night, though.’ He looked at Martin and jerked his head as the signal they had to go. Martin knew then that Del had already forgotten about the women in the barn.

  Fifi, and what she’d told him, had been haunting Martin. Del insisted that she was talking a load of old cobblers and that the reason the boss captured her was because her old man had pulled a stroke on him and then legged it. The other woman was supposed to have kept the books in one of the boss’s businesses, and she’d been ripping him off. Del said they were only being held until Dan Reynolds surfaced and the Frenchwoman had been taught a lesson.

  But Martin didn’t believe this. He’d already been told Dan was a bricklayer, he even knew where he worked, and as far as he knew there was no Frenchwoman employed to do the books in any of Trueman’s businesses.

  There was nothing remotely unusual about Martin and Del being sent to deal with a bloke who’d stepped out of line. That was a major part of their job. He’d be given a good kicking, locked up for a few days, and released once he’d learned his lesson about crossing Jack Trueman. But they had never captured and locked up a woman before. Women who upset Trueman, and they were invariably tarts, mostly got the threat of a face rearrangement. As far as Martin knew, that always got them back in line. He’d never yet been ordered to hurt a woman.

  And whatever Del said, Fifi was no tart. Then there was that story about the kid being murdered. He’d gone through some old newspapers at his gran’s last night, and there it was, just as she said.

  Del even had an answer to the coincidence that the two women and John Bolton all lived in the same street. He said that the boss owned property there, and as Dan Reynolds, the Frenchwoman and John Bolton had all worked for him, they got the places as a perk. But Martin remembered that Bolton had owned his own house, and if Trueman did own any property in South London, it was the first he had heard of it.

  As to the coincidence that the murdered kid lived in the same street as the others, Del said that was all it was, a coincidence and nothing to do with the boss. But to Martin, the whole thing stank to high heaven, and it seemed that Del had been around bad smells for so long he didn’t notice them any more.

  Martin had known Del since they were six-year-olds living in the same tenement block in Rotherhithe. They played together, played truant from school, even got sent to the same village in Sussex when they were evacuated.

  Martin’s gran always said that if he hadn’t palled up with Del he’d be working in a bank now instead of doing what she called ‘the donkey work for hoodlums’. It was certainly true Martin was far brighter than Del, and if he hadn’t become so involved with him, he probably could have gone to grammar school.

  But the war years bound him and Del together, starting when they ran away together from Sussex, got on a train and hid under the seats to escape the ticket inspector. From then on they were always up to mischief, and they got away with most of it thanks to the blackout and lack of parental guidance. Del’s mum was always off somewhere with a fancy man while his dad was overseas, and Martin only had his gran. Martin often felt bad now that he’d worried his gran so much. She was a good sort, and she hadn’t thought twice about taking him on when his mum died and his dad scarpered.

  She was close on eighty now, and rehoused in a nice place in Dagenham, but she still grumbled about Del’s influence on her grandson. She said Martin should come home at nights to her, rather than staying with Del and his missus Jackie in Hackney.

  Martin always laughed when his gran said he would come to a sticky end. But deep down he thought she might be right. He wished he could make the break from his old pal and find a legitimate job, but he couldn’t. Jack Trueman didn’t like what he called defectors. That’s what John Bolton had been, and he’d ended up in the river.

  ‘What’s up?’ Del asked as they drove out towards Barnet. ‘You ain’t still worried about that bint, are yer?’

  ‘No,’ Martin lied. He knew Del had no tender feelings for women, not even Jackie. He would kill anyone who tried to take her from him, but he didn’t value her as a person, only as a possession. ‘Just a bit pissed off at having to go to Nottingham.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s a drag having to go on a Friday, but look on the bright side; you know what the birds are like up there, crazy about Londoners.’

  Martin did know what the girls up there were like, still wearing their hair up in those huge stiff beehives and thick, pale makeup. He liked girls to look the way Fifi did, with clear, glowing skin, and long, loose silky hair.

  Last Tuesday when they were sent to pick Fifi up they were told by Trueman she was a looker, but Martin hadn’t expected anything so classy. She looked all clean and neat, the prettiest face he’d seen in years, and when she got into the car he could smell perfume like flowers, not the strong stuff most girls wore that made him gag.

  She was brave too, standing up to Del. What on earth made her old man walk out on her? But that must’ve been true or the story about him being taken ill over the weekend wouldn’t have made any sense to her. She must love him too, or she wouldn’t have hopped in the car so readily.

  It had to be bloody cold in that barn at night. She didn’t even have a coat, only a little jacket. What if she or the other one got ill?

  ‘I’m starving,’ Del announced a little later as they reached Barnet. ‘Let’s stop and go and get some fish and chips. They’ll all be closed later on.’

  Martin wasn’t hungry, but he could do with a cup of tea. They’d been stuck in the office for ages and the snooty secretary didn’t offer them one.

  They parked up, found a fish-and-chip shop with tables to eat at, and both ordered cod and chips. Martin ate the fish but didn’t want the chips, and when he felt in his pocket for cigarettes he found he had only one left.

  ‘I’m just going to get some fags,’ he said, getting up.

  There was a newspaper shop just three doors down. Martin bought his cigarettes and a couple of bars of chocolate for later. He was just about to go back to the café when he saw the rack of birthday cards. It was his gran’s birthday in a week’s time, and he often forgot to buy a card in time to post it.

  He was glancing through them, looking for the kind she liked with a soppy verse, when he saw a card that said ‘Missing You’.

  It had a teddy bear on the front with a tear running down its cheek, and once again he was thinking of Fifi.

  ‘Come on, Fifi, do some exercises with me, that will make you warm again,’ Yvette pleaded. She stood over the younger woman, who was lying on the mattress, and held out her hand.

  ‘I haven’t got the energy,’ Fifi said weakly. ‘I feel giddy when I stand up.’

  Yvette felt giddy too. She’d had her last meal on Monday evening, not long before the man came and took her away. It was now Friday afternoon and she couldn’t count half a pork pie and a bit of bun on Wednesday as a meal. There was only about two inches of water left in the bottle now and once they were forced to drink that she knew they would become really distressed.

  In her heart Yvette believed they were going to be left to die. She had thought long and hard about it, and knowing what she did about the men behind all this, it made sense.

  Why run the risk of being seen by
someone coming out this way, of perhaps being outwitted as they attempted to kill them, when time alone would do it for them? It would be so much harder for the police to build a case against anyone when rain and wind had removed car tracks and any other evidence. She had no doubt that before using this barn, the men behind this had made certain that the owner wasn’t going to turn up here for some time. The chances were their bodies would be completely decomposed by the time that happened.

  Of course, only the most evil and cold-blooded person could let two people die of thirst and starvation, and she doubted that all the top man’s henchmen and bully boys came under that category, but a powerful man would take that into consideration. Yvette had been taken by two different men to the ones that took Fifi. It would be easy enough to tell one set of men that the others were bringing them food. Yvette knew that when their bodies were finally found, none of the men involved were going to admit to any part of it, whatever their feelings. They would have to remain silent for fear of incurring a similar fate for themselves.

  Yvette had often wished for death in the past, her life held nothing that she wanted to hold on to. She had no family to grieve, nothing to look forward to, and she’d gladly be released from her guilt. She didn’t fear death in itself, but she was afraid of a slow and agonizing one.

  She looked up at the bars above her. It would be so simple to climb up there and use the belt on her skirt to make a noose to hang herself. She had seen a man hanged in France, and knew death came quickly.

  But she couldn’t do that, not with Fifi with her. Fifi believed the best of people, and she would want to hang on, convinced that no one could leave a couple of women to die of starvation.

  Yvette couldn’t share her optimism. It wasn’t as if they could count on the police finding them. Even if Dan and Frank were convinced that something bad had happened to Fifi, and had demanded the police search for her, they weren’t likely to come out this way looking. And it might be days before anyone realized Yvette was missing too. If the police couldn’t squeeze the names of the men who’d been at his card game out of Alfie Muckle, there was absolutely no chance he’d do or say anything to help find her and Fifi. Besides, Alfie was a mere pawn in this game. If he wasn’t safely in prison, he’d almost certainly be dead, as John Bolton was.