Charlie

by Lesley Pearse

  ‘I see,’ she said, staring at him coldly.

  Spud observed that her blue eyes were the same colour as the sky outside the window behind her, her skin still as smooth as a child’s. He had often wondered why such a good-looking woman could be so evil, for that was what she was.

  ‘And what were you thinking this piece of news was worth?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s up to you, Miss,’ he said quickly. He slid his hand into his inside pocket and brought out the handout. ‘Maybe ’e is what ’e says, but it’s odd, ain’t it?’

  She gave it no more than a cursory glance and dropped it to her desk. ‘I expect he’s employed by one of those terribly dull film companies. They are forever sending out young people in the faint hope they might find something worth turning into a tedious documentary,’ she said. ‘But thank you, John Joe, for bringing it to my attention.’ She opened her desk drawer and pulled out a £20 note. ‘That’s for your trouble, and of course it goes without saying you won’t mention our little chat to anyone else.’

  ‘Of course not, Miss Dexter, and thank you,’ he said, pocketing the note before she could change her mind. ‘I’ll be off then.’

  Spud almost ran to the nearest pub. He knew she was seriously rattled, or she wouldn’t have given him a twenty. It had turned out to be a very good day.

  Daphne Dexter studied the leaflet for some time after Spud had gone, wondering who on earth this Andrew Blake could be. If he had been working for a film company he would have used their headed paper, and his approach to Spud was far too amateurish for a detective, private or with CID. Of course he might be just what he said he was, a kid doing some freelance research work for a serious writer. But who could have given him that name DeeDee?

  Only a handful of people knew it. The period she used it for wasn’t more than eighteen months, and it was as dead as a door-nail by 1953, when she was twenty-four. That was nineteen years ago!

  Daphne Dexter had got where she was today, the owner of an extremely successful company, by paying attention to small details. Back in the late Fifties when she was after buying a crumbling, rat-infested house in the back streets of Paddington, she made sure she knew all there was to know about the sitting tenants before buying it for next to nothing from the landlord.

  Blackmail was a far easier way of persuading someone to leave a property than violence. She used it quite casually at that time. Just a word in the Jamaican’s ear that she knew he’d entered the country on forged documents, and he and his family disappeared the same day. The other family were obtaining National Assistance fraudulently, and that had the same effect.

  Within three years she owned four such houses, and had them crammed with the kind of tenants who didn’t complain about overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and high rents. They were all West Indians and grateful for anywhere to live.

  Keeping an ear to the ground, checking people out became a way of life. And the East London thugs she’d known from childhood, and her own brothers, were invaluable to keep her tenants in order. People said she was lucky, but then they didn’t know that what appeared to be luck was in fact often inside information. She heard a whisper that the notorious landlord Peter Rachman was about to be thoroughly investigated, long before he knew it. She emptied out her houses and sold them all. By the time his name became common knowledge throughout England, she was buying up other houses in more select areas and renting them out to young Australians, New Zealanders, and Americans, who wanted to sample ‘Swinging London’. They had to get their friends to sleep on their floors to pay the high rents, but the ‘Bleeding Heart’ brigade didn’t concern themselves with young visitors to England.

  Then there were the clubs which turned over a small fortune, all of which went back into property. Daphne Dexter knew the club world inside out already, and each place she opened had a distinct style to appeal to a different kind of clientele. The traditional strip clubs were always a good money-spinner, the punters paid through the nose to get in, were fleeced on the price of drinks, but got a good show. She started the first peepshow place in Soho, and even though the thought of men masturbating in tiny booths while they watched a girl strip was nauseating, it was a brilliant money-spinner. Instead of a man being able to sit for the whole evening for the price of a ticket, he had to pay to watch each girl. There was no bar to stock, no waitresses, or tills to be dipped into. Just four or five girls doing the same routine over and over again.

  Then there were the kids’ clubs. Bare walls, coloured light shows and a hip disc jockey. Word of mouth brought the kids flocking, she could sell soft drinks at huge profits and the drug dealers had to pay a high premium or they didn’t get in to sell their wares.

  But all of that was over now. She sold up the clubs back in 1969 when she saw the writing on the wall. She’d managed to wriggle out of the charge of supplying drugs to her customers with a smart lawyer. But it had frightened her. The success of the Krays’ conviction meant the police were getting sharper, kids were becoming a bit more discriminating about their entertainment, and she no longer had the stomach for sleaze and pornography. Now all the properties she bought, renovated and sold again were in smart areas, everything was above-board, right down to her tax returns.

  The last thing she wanted now was old skeletons falling out of the cupboard.

  *

  The following Saturday afternoon Andrew called at his friend John’s flat in Hampstead. It was raining hard, but he braved it in the hopes there might be a few letters for him, along with sharing a few cans of beer with his friend. They had been friends since they met as freshers at City University two years ago, and it was John who’d got him the job at Jack Straw’s Castle. John had jacked in his job a few weeks ago as he needed time to study.

  ‘There’s two letters arrived for you,’ John said as he let Andrew in. ‘What are you up to, Andy?’ he asked curiously as he handed them over. ‘You’re not having it off with a married woman or something, are you?’

  Andrew laughed. John was a studious type, thin, glasses and a mop of hair that looked like dirty straw. Because he had so little success with girls and spent all his time thinking about them, he regarded any unusual behaviour on the part of others as evidence that they were having an illicit relationship. ‘Certainly not. Would I use your address for that?’

  They went into the living room. Andrew handed over the cans of beer, then sat down to read the letters. As always, the flat was like a show place, clean and tidy to the point of obsession. John’s parents were wealthy and they’d bought the flat for their son as an investment. John fancied himself as a bit of an interior designer; all the furniture was Scandinavian design – bleached pine chairs and table, red and white checked armchairs and ultra-modern spindly lamps.

  Andrew opened the handwritten envelope first, just because it looked more interesting, and in a woman’s writing. It was only half a page, and very badly written, from an address he didn’t recognize in WC1.

  ‘If you want to now who killed Freddie Mills, I’m the persun who can tell you,’ it said. ‘I have to be carful because they wach me. But if you right and tell me were to meat you I can tell you then.’ It was signed Julie and a surname Andrew couldn’t read. At the bottom of the page was a postscript. ‘Do not give my adress to aneone.’

  Andrew sniggered. He didn’t think he’d be taking her up on her offer! He opened the typewritten one. It had a Shepherd’s Bush address.

  ‘Dear Mr Blake,’ he read. ‘While in a sweet shop in Soho today, the owner showed me your handout because he knew I had a great deal of knowledge about Soho during the Fifties and he thought I could maybe help you. I worked as a living-in barmaid at the Garrick for some years, and as I was young then I visited all the clubs too, and knew most of the people who worked in them. The area has changed so much since then, but I could give you pointers as to what’s still the same, what’s missing now, and show you my collection of photographs.

  ‘I shall be home on Friday, 2 September and if you
’d like to call at around three in the afternoon we could have a chat. I’m sorry if this time is inconvenient, but I’m working all this week until then, and afterwards going away for a little holiday.

  Yours sincerely,

  Martha Grimsby (Miss)’

  Andrew gave a whistle of approval. She sounded perfect, the right age, the right type. And well away from Soho.

  ‘Are you going to explain what you’re up to?’ John asked plaintively.

  ‘Basically I’m trying to solve a bit of a mystery,’ Andrew said. He was loath to give any detail, it was Charlie’s business after all. ‘Charlie’s dad disappeared a couple of years ago and hasn’t been seen since. I’ve been trying to find out what happened.’

  ‘Oh, I see.’ John looked disappointed it wasn’t something more salacious. ‘So who are those letters from?’

  ‘Just people offering a bit of information. One’s definitely a crank, but the other sounds hopeful.’

  ‘But you’ve split up with Charlie,’ John said. ‘Why are you bothering?’

  ‘To get her back of course,’ Andrew said. ‘Let’s have a beer and put some sounds on.’

  Almost a week later, on Thursday evening, Charlie was packing her suitcase in her hotel bedroom. She couldn’t leave York until the course finished the next day at five, but she wanted to be ready to leave on the first train after that.

  Despite her reservations about coming up to York, it had done her a power of good. She’d acquired a new skill plus the promise of a pay rise. But most of all she’d had time to sit back and look at her life as a whole, rather than just one piece of it.

  She had found that the love she felt for Andrew was undiminished, despite all the protestations she’d made to the contrary. Her complete trust in him might be severely dented, but an inner voice kept telling her that she had over-reacted and allowed herself to be torn apart by irrational jealousy.

  Rita had been right in saying men like Andrew were scarce. For the last two weeks she’d been thinking over all he did when her mother died, the support and friendship he’d offered in those black weeks that followed, and decided he deserved a second chance.

  Even the change in weather seemed to bear out all she felt. The long, hot summer had ended suddenly two days ago, blue skies and sunshine being replaced with cold autumnal winds, rain and leaden skies. It was time to take stock of what was important, and what wasn’t. And plan for the future.

  At three the following afternoon, Andrew was in Shepherd’s Bush for his appointment with Martha Grimsby. Tittmus Street was a very short street of small terraced houses, which led back on to the Goldhawk Road. After riding along it once and finding no room between the closely parked cars, he went back to the beginning of the street and left his scooter there. He took off his waterproof jacket and tucked it with his helmet into the box on the back of the scooter, combed his hair then made his way back to number 5.

  ‘Miss Grimsby?’ he asked when the door was opened by a dark-haired woman. ‘Andrew Blake.’

  ‘Yes, I’m Martha, do come in,’ she said.

  Andrew was surprised by her, he’d expected someone older, plump and brassily blonde. Martha was perhaps in her forties, but she looked younger. She was wearing baggy grey trousers, a hideous flowered smock-type garment on top, and her hair was scraped unflatteringly back off her face, but she had beautiful blue eyes, perfect, unlined skin and a kind of presence that suggested she had been, and could still, with a bit of effort, be something of a sensation.

  ‘You must excuse the state of my home,’ she said in a low, husky voice. ‘I’ve had some builders in doing work for me and they’ve gone off and left it in a fearful mess. We’ll have to sit in the kitchen.’

  Andrew could see what she meant. The two small rooms they passed by on the way down the hall had bare plaster and the floors were littered with tins of paint and bags of cement and timber. The stairs were bare too, the walls were in the process of being stripped.

  ‘How much longer will they be doing it? It must be awful for you,’ he asked politely. He hadn’t imagined a barmaid who lived in Shepherd’s Bush would be so well-spoken. But then he reminded himself that he shouldn’t think in stereotypes.

  ‘I hope it will be finished when I get back from my holiday,’ she said, ushering him into a long, narrow kitchen. ‘All my furniture is upstairs, and it’s quite chaotic.’

  The kitchen had clearly just been finished. It was all white with red knobs on the cupboards. Martha urged him to sit down at a small breakfast bar by the window and immediately offered him coffee.

  ‘Nothing much else in the cupboards,’ she said with a smile as she opened one and all there was inside were mugs, a bag of sugar and a jar of coffee. ‘Everything’s packed away upstairs. Of course when I suggested you came today I imagined at least the front room would be finished. I’m rather embarrassed to be only able to offer the kitchen.’

  Andrew assured her he didn’t mind one bit. As soon as she sat down opposite him they went straight into the conversation about Soho. ‘I was just seventeen when I got the job in the Garrick,’ she said. ‘I made out I was eighteen and I used to put on lots of makeup to make myself look older. The first year I was frightened out of my wits most of the time. We used to get such tough types drinking in there.’

  Andrew sat back and listened as she spoke of many of the characters he’d already heard about several times. Like Angie she mentioned the many ex-servicemen around in those days, but she claimed most of them were company representatives rather than in insurance and banking. ‘Heaven only knows when they made their calls,’ she said. ‘They’d come in the bar around twelve, stay till closing time, then go on to afternoon drinking clubs. Most of them were very tedious, they talked constantly about their exploits during the war. But of course I was young, and I looked forward, not backward like them.’

  She went on to explain how these men’s drinking habits shaped post-war Soho. ’You see, the licensing laws were very strict, but operating a system where clubs opened and closed at different times, it was possible to drink solidly from noon until three or four in the morning. The men who owned the afternoon clubs were some of the very worst sharks. They not only fleeced the customers, but their staff too.

  ‘It was very hard to get somewhere to live at that time, so they offered the girls who worked for them a flat above the club and charged them an exorbitant rent, and quite often the girls had to have sex with their boss too, as part of the deal. Of course it wasn’t long before the girls found the only way to pay the rent was to charge customers for sex as well.’

  Andrew was riveted by this candid exposure. It had no real bearing on what he wanted to know, but it was giving him a real insight into the world Sylvia and DeeDee found themselves in.

  ‘Now, when the afternoon clubs closed for the evening, those same girls would go on to other clubs, sometimes just to socialize, but often they might do a spot in a strip club as well. Later they’d go on to the night clubs. A really resourceful girl with stamina and determination could be making money from four or five different sources, and all within the law.’

  Martha smiled at his shocked expression. ‘They didn’t consider themselves tarts,’ she said quickly. ‘That was a name only given to the women who touted for business on street corners. If you meet anyone who tells you she was a hostess, she was one of these girls.’

  Andrew was warming to this woman. Unlike Angie she wasn’t hiding behind euphemisms, she laid it right on the line. When he said this to her she laughed.

  ‘Well, I was just an onlooker, Andrew. I worked at the pub for long hours and I’d dream of getting married, moving to a nice little house in the suburbs and having children. The more I saw of that world from the safety of the Garrick, the less Soho had to offer me. As it turned out I didn’t get to move to the suburbs, I married a man in the licensing trade and we ended up in a pub in the Strand.’ She paused for a moment. Andrew wondered what had happened to her husband. She’d put ‘Miss’ on her le
tter.

  ‘The marriage didn’t work out,’ she shrugged. ‘He drank too much and I cut my losses and then moved into office work. And here I am now, divorced, no children, but a nice little house of my own, or it will be when all the work is finished. I don’t have any connection now with any of those people I once knew in Soho. It’s a time I look back on with some nostalgia, but I’m very glad I got away from there when I did.’

  Andrew suddenly felt very relaxed. He thought she was a nice woman, intelligent, and open-minded. It had been exciting talking to Angie, getting glimpses into her seedy world, but he felt a whole lot more comfortable with Martha.

  He asked her then what she knew about the Lotus Club.

  ‘Oh yes, I remember that one,’ she said with a smile. ‘It was a quite unique place. It opened about nine at night as I remember and it was primarily a drinking club, but they had strippers too. Some of the best in Soho, or so the men said. It had an excellent reputation, not one of the clip joints, a good atmosphere and a pianist and a bit of dancing. It was always packed. But why do you want to know about that club, Andrew? It wasn’t a famous place, it certainly wasn’t representative of the clubs of that time.’

  Andrew took a deep breath before answering. His original plan to say nothing to anyone about his real motives for gathering information didn’t seem to be getting him very far. All he really had was a lot of useless information about Soho in general and time was running out before Charlie got back. It would impress her far more if he had something solid and meaty to tell her, and maybe in her excitement she’d forget the past and let him back into her life.

  Martha certainly didn’t look or sound like a gangster’s moll, she had no connections with Soho any longer. Just a middle-aged woman who would probably be intrigued to hear about the Lotus Club owner’s disappearance, and it would focus her mind solely on the one place and the people who drank in there back in the Fifties and early Sixties.

  ‘I’m not really researching a book,’ he said. ‘In fact I’m the boyfriend of Charlie Weish, the daughter of the man who owned that club. I’m just a student, and I’m sorry if I led you up the garden path at first, but I did have my reasons.’