by Mike Ripley
Alice Knighton had heard of Mr Albert Campion through her husband’s subediting job in Fleet Street. Jonas Knighton had on numerous occasions described Mr Campion; not physically, but as a presence. He was a man, her husband judged, behind many a headline, but his name was rarely mentioned in any story. He was thought to be ‘well-connected’, as the saying went, not just within the upper strata of society but also within the police.
The fact that she had exchanged several ‘good afternoons’ with Lady Amanda and had once even complimented her on her backhand was all the confidence Alice Knighton needed.
‘Forgive the intrusion, Lady Amanda, but might I take a moment of your time?’
‘Of course. Mrs Knighton, isn’t it?’ Amanda replied politely.
‘Please, call me Alice. We have met, briefly, here at the club. I hope I am not intruding.’
‘Intrude away, dear lady, just don’t mention tennis,’ said the man at the table. ‘Our family is famous for being bad losers.’
‘And also incredibly lucky winners,’ said Amanda without missing a beat. ‘This is my husband, Albert.’
Alice Knighton appraised the man as he stretched his long, thin frame until he was standing and offering a handshake. He was older than his wife – perhaps by a dozen years or more, she guessed – with the sort of fair hair which would go a gentle white but never grey with old age. Oddly, the large round tortoiseshell glasses he wore did not notably enhance the features of his pale face, rather they added to the overall air of him being innocently unmemorable.
‘I do hope you don’t find this inappropriate, Lady Amanda, but could I ask if you have an Italian girl?’
Mr Campion raised his eyebrows but bit his tongue and remained silent as the question had been clearly posed as a woman-to-woman matter in which mere males had no valid opinion.
‘No,’ said Amanda, ‘our son is beyond the nanny stage now and we have always managed a small household without much trouble, and though my husband does require a disproportionate amount of care and attention, I would not wish that on anyone. Are you trying to find a home for an Italian girl?’
Alice Knighton shook her head. ‘It’s nothing like that, Lady Amanda.’
‘Just Amanda, please.’
‘Well, you see, Amanda, we have given a home to an Italian girl and I can honestly say we’ve – that is, my husband and I and our children – have all been very happy with her.’
She paused and it was Mr Campion who gently filled in the gap.
‘But? I thought I sensed a “but” coming.’
‘You did, Mr Campion, you did. Seraphina – that’s her name – seemed such a good girl, I thought nothing of recommending her to some of my friends here at the club. You know, women of like mind, who wouldn’t take advantage but perhaps could use a bit of help occasionally, picking children up from school, taking them for a walk in the park, babysitting on the odd night, that sort of thing.’
‘The girl was happy to be loaned out, so to speak?’ asked Amanda.
‘She seemed perfectly happy and never complained and the houses she went to were delighted with her. They were all good families, of course, who thanked her with little presents and it wasn’t as if she had to travel far as they all lived nearby. Bayswater, Kensington – all good addresses.’
‘So what exactly is the problem?’
‘This is very delicate, Amanda, and I’m not sure how to put this, but over the past two weeks I have had telephone calls from the police asking me to give them Seraphina’s whereabouts on certain days.’
‘You’d better start calling me Mrs Campion,’ said Amanda.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘I think it is my husband’s attention you desire rather than mine.’
Alice Knighton blushed and averted her eyes to her teacup, but her embarrassment was fleeting.
‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said, ‘and I should not have so rudely interposed, but I understand that Mr Campion has some influence with the authorities.’
‘Reports of my authority and influence,’ Campion said, examining his glass of lemon squash as if it were a perfectly mixed cocktail or a fine wine, ‘along with those of my magical powers and prowess on the cricket field have all been terribly exaggerated, but it is true that I have friends in low places. May I ask if these official enquiries were anything to do with your Italian girl’s passport or work permit, or perhaps some dubious political affiliations?’
‘No, nothing like that. The police were checking up on certain dates when Seraphina had been helping out the Blenkinsops – you must know them, Nigel and Sarah. He’s something in the City and they love the theatre but their usual sitter had let them down.’
‘So you loaned them the services of this Seraphina? I must say, that’s a jolly fine name.’
Alice Knighton could not decide whether Mr Campion was mocking her or being deliberately slow. ‘Well, you could put it that way. The only problem was that a few nights later the Blenkinsops were burgled while they slept. Luckily they slept through the whole thing. Just imagine if they had woken up and come face-to-face with a burglar!’
‘A frightening prospect,’ Mr Campion agreed, exchanging a suspiciously innocent glance with his wife. ‘Are you saying that the police were suggesting that Seraphina was somehow involved?’
‘I have no idea what they were thinking, but on the night in question Seraphina was at home at Northumberland Place, with us, watching television.’
Mr Campion thought for a moment and said, ‘Television – yes. I was thinking we ought to get one of those … but I digress. So you were able to provide Seraphina with a cast-iron alibi; moreover, a genuine one, yes?’
‘Of course it was. Seraphina was not out of our sight that evening and I will swear on a stack of Bibles that she never left the house during the night. I told them that, and then I told them exactly the same thing when they rang again and asked about the Symingtons’ and the Warnocks’.’
‘Let me guess,’ said Mr Campion, ‘you had loaned Seraphina to the Symington and the Warnock households, and they too had subsequently suffered burglaries.’
‘Exactly!’ Alice Knighton was delighted that Mr Campion at last seemed to be paying attention. ‘But on both those occasions, Seraphina was at home with us; I swear she was, and I told the police that.’
She looked to Amanda for support but Amanda remained non-committal and, with a gracious bob of the head, deferred to her husband.
‘Does your Seraphina have any family or friends in London; Italian ones, that is?’
‘She’s never brought anyone to the house, but I know she spends her days off over in Clerkenwell in what they call Little Italy.’
‘Oh, dear,’ said Mr Campion.
Mr Campion explained patiently and repeatedly to Alice Knighton that he was not a policeman and had absolutely no more influence on police matters than the average rate-paying citizen, He did, however, have more than a nodding acquaintance with a certain senior officer, Chief Superintendent Yeo, who might be persuaded to reveal the current state of police thinking on the matter. He could not, of course, make any promises and Mr Yeo would be firmly within his rights to tell Mr Campion to withdraw his inquisitive nostrils.
Good as his word, Campion telephoned Yeo that very evening and was mildly surprised, though of course he did not show it, to find that the chief superintendent was fully conversant with the domestic problem of Mrs Knighton’s friends and neighbours.
‘Yes, we’ve had a real spate of house-breaking in Bayswater and Notting Hill over the last month or so, properties belonging to Blenkinsop, Symington and Warnock off the top of my head and maybe one or two others that have gone unreported. The thieves were very careful, in and out very fast, leaving no mess, almost like they knew what they were looking for. Quite selective, they were – going for jewellery, silverware, even a mink coat which the lady of the house only noticed was missing after we asked her to check, her not having the need of it what with the heatwave this year.
Put my best divisional inspector on it, son of an old colleague of mine and one of our rising stars, chap called Charlie Luke.’
‘Him I have come across,’ Mr Campion said, ‘and I could not think of a better man for the job. For any job, come to think of it.’
Chief Superintendent Yeo, always happy to hear his protégé praised, promised that Luke would ring Campion with an update on his investigation, which the Divisional Detective Inspector duly did three days later, though when he did it was with a heavy heart and grimness in his voice.
‘I understand you were making enquiries about an Italian national, a female by the name of Seraphina Vezzali. I’m afraid I have to tell you that she was found in the early hours of this morning on the pavement outside St Peter’s Church on the Clerkenwell Road. It looks as if she’s been beaten to death.’
‘Stop kicking yerself,’ said Lugg.
‘You didn’t know the girl,’ said Amanda.
‘She was only seventeen,’ said Mr Campion.
A week after breaking the news on the telephone, DDI Charles Luke called on the Campions to update them on his investigations.
Luke’s divisional CID team had already suspected that the Bayswater break-ins had been if not an ‘inside job’ then a job with insider information and had, with painstaking police thoroughness, searched for the common thread which would link the homes of the victims. The usual suspects were the first to be vetted – milkmen, postmen, window-cleaners, dustbin men, meter-readers, newspaper boys and anyone whose visit to the property would go unremarked but who would have the opportunity to spy out the lie of the land. And, as usual, those suspects turned out to be invariably honest and, for the purposes of the investigation, unrewarding. Next came the occasional visitor or passer-by – delivery drivers, market researchers and door-to-door salesmen known to have been working the area, even rag-and-bone men (Bayswater offered rich pickings) – and again they turned out to be an innocent lot. Finally came that most difficult of categories, the irregular and infrequent or unique visitor to a suspicious number of the houses which had been robbed.
But in two households, and then three and then four, one name did crop up: Seraphina, that charming Italian girl who lives with the Knightons in Northumberland Place – so good with children, so polite, so … innocent.
‘It’s a trick as old as Dickens,’ Charles Luke told them, having refused a fine malt whisky on the grounds that his anger needed no fuel.
‘Are we talking Ikey Solomon here?’ asked Mr Campion.
‘I see you’ve done your history homework.’
‘Never mind ’is nibs’ akker-demicals – who’s this Ikey Solomon and does he need a bit of a sortin’ out?’ Lugg contributed to the discussion.
‘Ikey was a legendary fence who dealt in stolen goods in the early nineteenth century and got gangs of kids to break into houses or pick pockets for him. He was the inspiration for Dickens’ character Fagin in Oliver Twist, which is a book, so you’ve probably never heard of it, though there was a jolly good film of it not long ago with a rather controversial portrayal of Fagin by a young chap called Alec Guinness.’
‘Guinness, eh?’
‘Yes, I thought that might get your attention. Now please be quiet and let Mr Luke continue.’
‘Well, you can guess, can’t you, Mr Campion?’ said Luke. ‘Young Italian girl in London all alone, naturally seeks out other Eyeties. Where does she find them? Where else but Clerkenwell: Little Italy. ’Course, it’s nowhere near what it was before the war when most of them were interned, but a few of the bad eggs have found their way back and some new bad eggs have arrived in the last few years, from down south: Salerno, Naples, places like that. They’re the sort who have a twisted sense of family values, if you know what I mean.’
‘I think I do,’ said Campion.
‘They trade in pressure, putting the squeeze on Italians over here by threatening their families back home. They get them to thieve for them or distribute smuggled goods – booze, cigarettes, drugs – and the centre of the fencing operation, or one of them, is a restaurant up near the Mount Pleasant sorting office, run by a family called Bolzano. Seraphina Vezzali has been identified as working there as a waitress odd days, cash-in-hand, of course. It would have been easy enough to snare her into helping out the other side of the family business.’
‘Is your intelligence reliable?’
‘I stand by it. Westminster Division actually recruited a couple of young Italian lads back in ’forty-eight, children of long-term residents who’d been interned, though they’d never had any truck with Mussolini and wanted to be British. They’ve come in very useful, keeping an eye and an ear on Little Italy for us.’
‘And they are aware of this Bolzano family?’
‘Very much so. There’s a pair of brothers, Marco and Stephano, running the restaurant – it’s called the Pergoletta, by the way – but they’re just foot soldiers. Thank you.’
Luke took a cigarette from the silver case offered by Campion and then a light from, he noticed, a well-manicured but slightly shaking hand.
‘The Bolzanos aren’t the kingpins, they’re part of a bigger family business based in Italy, a business based entirely on crime and involving ties of loyalty so tight they make some of our East-End gangs look like strangers on a morning commuter train into London Bridge. Everything is run on a code of silence so nobody peaches or informs, at least not to us, but maybe the chaps in Interpol will have better luck.’
‘Interpol?’ grunted Lugg. ‘What’s that then?’
‘ICPO,’ said Campion, ‘the International Criminal Police Organization based in Paris. The telegraphic address is INTERPOL and that became their nickname. They’re going to make it official next year, not that anything they can do is going to help poor Seraphina. Do we know how it happened, Inspector?’
Luke breathed out smoke like a dragon. ‘Nobody’s talking, but we have a theory – well, I have a theory. Some Fagin character – for my money one of the Bolzanos – was using the girl, wittingly or unwittingly, to pass on information about the big houses she visited, though obviously not the place she lived herself, what valuables they had, if the owners had regular nights when they went out, that sort of thing. Maybe she realized what she was being used for – and we’ve no evidence she made any money out of the burglaries – and decided enough was enough. There again, she might have got wind of our enquiries, especially after she showed up on our radar and we contacted Mrs Knighton, and got into a blue funk. Either way, I reckon she went to Clerkenwell to hand in her resignation, so to speak.’
‘But her resignation was not accepted,’ said Campion softly.
Luke shrugged his oak beam shoulders. ‘Tempers flared; perhaps she threatened to come and tell us what had been going on, who knows? But some nasty sod thought Seraphina needed a good slapping to shut her up and it went too far. That’s me being charitable, by the way.’
With venom, Mr Campion crushed his cigarette into a glass ashtray and said, ‘Charity is not a consideration in this case.’
‘Albert, please do not make this personal,’ Amanda pleaded.
‘I can’t help it, my darling. My help was asked for and I failed to respond quickly enough.’
‘I think the die was already cast by the time Mrs Knighton approached you,’ said Luke. ‘Whether the girl had a change of heart or realized she’d be played for a dupe or was just scared, we’ll never know. She did the worst thing she could have and went to Little Italy where she thought she was among her own people. They beat her to death and dumped her body on the pavement in front of St Peter’s Church.’
‘Do you have any suspects?’
‘My money would be on Marco Bolzano. He’s the brawn of the outfit, but truth is we’ve got no hard evidence and certainly no witnesses. We’ll keep looking, though, Mr Campion, I’ll make sure of that. Seraphina didn’t have much of life but she won’t be forgotten.’
‘No,’ said Campion slowly, ‘she will not.’
A
fter several false starts, Mr Campion had discovered how to dip the headlights on Precious Aird’s VW campervan and he was negotiating the narrow country road between Pontisbright and Sweethearting before Lugg, after a long period of contemplative silence, returned to the subject.
‘So yer thinking – an’ I know you are ’cos I can hear the cogs whirring – that the Bolzano that visited the Mad Major was one of the Bolzano brothers back in Little Italy in ’fifty-five.’
‘I suspect it was.’
‘And now he’s gone home to the real Italy.’
‘So it would seem, if dear old Gerald is to be believed.’
‘And you had no idea this Bolzano bloke had been living in Heronhoe for what, ten years or more?’
‘Honest Injun, I did not.’
‘Pah!’ Lugg scoffed. ‘Don’t credit that with a bag of toffees. You’ve never forgotten that poor girl’s murder and you told me to keep an ear open for any gossip about Clerkenwell more or less the minute I arrived here.’
‘So I did,’ Campion agreed, ‘and you are perfectly correct about Seraphina Vezzali, but I wasn’t thinking about the Bolzanos specifically, rather the real power behind the Clerkenwell throne: the Italian family business that the Bolzanos worked for.’
In the darkness of the VW’s interior, Mr Campion thought he could actually hear, even above the chugging of the engine, Lugg’s face contort in puzzlement.
‘Then answer me this,’ said Lugg eventually, ‘what’s the connection between some Italian villains, all this digging in fields and a treasure linked to the Abdication which hardly anybody really believes exist?’
‘Elspeth,’ said Mr Campion, keeping his eyes on the road ahead and the pools of light from the van’s headlamps. ‘Who is also, sadly, dead.’
ELEVEN
Tales from the Tap Room
The return journey from Frinton and driving in the dark had tired Campion more than he would care to admit and he was grateful to see the lights of Heronhoe Hall as he turned into the driveway. Lugg, in contrast, had a spring in his step once he realized he had arrived in time for dinner and, even if it was a meal of cold cuts, they were, after all, Harrods’ cold cuts.