The Black Mile

by Mark Dawson

  The newsroom was frantic, final touches being put to pages before they went down to the blockmaker. A photograph of Churchill gazing at France through a pair of binoculars was being captioned; “I’ve Got My Eye on Hitler” was the current favourite. David Lloyd George’s article on “How Hitler Will Try to Invade Us” was being proofed, ‘The Man Who Won The War’ saying the invasion would materialise within the next few days and that, if the Führer grasped the nettle, it’d be the most dangerous endeavour he’d ever undertaken. London, Lloyd George opined, might be for Hitler what Moscow was for Napoleon.

  He took out the bottle of pills and tipped two into his palm. He washed them down with whiskey.

  Chattaway’s investigation would be over soon. His stories wouldn’t stand scrutiny. He hadn’t thought about it at the time, but part of him always expected to be caught. He’d made up too much: people, visits, conversations. It wasn’t wrong. He took stories he heard, drunken gossip and tittle-tattle, and wove them together to make something compelling. It was alchemy. He’d wondered about the propriety of it, at the start. But Chattaway had loved it. He rationalised: he was providing entertainment. There was a skill in making the stories credible and not everyone could do that. Justification came easily. Blending fact with fiction and creating something completely original. It was alchemy. No-one else was doing anything remotely like it.

  Chattaway wouldn’t see it that way.

  The paper wouldn’t.

  He was going to get slung.

  He knew what that meant: no-one would ever employ him again.

  The pills started to buzz.

  He had to make it impossible to fire him.

  He had to find a story so special that it made him indispensable.

  He rolled up the sheet of paper, pushed it into the metal tube. “Copy!” One of the boys scurried over, collected the tube, dropped it down the ten-inch hole in the centre of his desk. A steel pipe slid down through the floor of the building, ending in the composing room and the in-basket of the head printer. The horoscopes would be composed and set and added to the metal frame for the page, ready for printing. The process had enthralled him once: his words multiplied a million times. That thrill was dead; shit was still shit, no matter how many times you printed it.

  School.

  His apprenticeship.

  The long slog to Fleet Street.

  All for this.

  He needed dynamite.

  14

  FRANK MURPHY reached an arm across to the bedside table, knocking over an empty bottle and a candle. He found the alarm and switched it off. Eight o’clock. He stared up at the ceiling, at the spot where the leak from the room above had rotted the plaster and left the laths exposed.

  He struggled out of bed and pulled the black-out aside. A seventh-floor view from the police Section House at 42, Beak Street: London basking under a bright, hot sky.

  He’d done the rounds again last night. None of the girls could be persuaded to get off the street. The Ripper had been quiet for nearly three months and they reckoned he was finished. He was dead, they said, or called up, or sated. That mad frenzy of violence and then, what?––nothing? Frank listened to them over cups of tea and coffee in twenty-four hour cafés and wished he shared their optimism. He didn’t know where the Ripper was either, but he didn’t think he was done. He was waiting for the call to tell him that another body had been found. It wouldn’t be a surprise at all. Impossible that he would just stop. It didn’t happen like that.

  He bought them their drinks and, when they had finished talking about the Ripper, he asked them about Eve. None of them had seen her and so, eventually, he called it a night. He had come back to the Section House, brewed a pot of strong black coffee, and spread the Ripper files out across the room. Hoping, maybe, that staring at the pages would reveal a connection he had missed. It hadn’t. He’d fallen asleep, the pot of coffee on the floor and papers scattered over the bed. The files brought him nightmares instead.

  He got up, unsteadily, tripping over a pile of papers. Field reports, interview transcripts, photographs, lists of witnesses, notes on suspects. A map with scrawled markings denoting the location of each victim. He couldn’t stop. He had a recurrent nightmare now: Eve, fifteen years old and alone, the Ripper stalking her in the darkness. Until she came home he wouldn’t stop working the case.

  He didn’t really have the space to be untidy. The cubicles in the Section House were tiny, eight by seven and separated by a six-foot partition that didn’t reach the top of his head. There was a bed, a steel locker, a flap which folded down to make a table, a chair, a shelf and a cardboard hat-box. He’d tried to resist having to fall back on owed favours, a first-class detective Inspector cheek-by-jowl with newly-minted P.C.s who didn’t have the money for their own drums. But there was no other choice: he couldn’t afford the mortgage on the house plus rent for a place. There hadn’t been anything else for it. Back in with the lads, as if the last twenty years had never happened. But what was the alternative? A kip-shop? No chance: he’d nicked blokes in Sally Army dosshouses and the worst room in the worst Section House would be like a suite at the bloody Ritz compared to that.

  He thought of Julia. They argued, they blamed each other. She said it was better he move out. He told himself it was only temporary. Once he found Eve, things would get back to normal. He’d move out of here and back to the house. They’d get over it. Sort it out. This was just a short-term thing.

  He stripped down to his undershirt and pants and walked across the landing to the communal bathroom. He sat down and emptied his bowels. There was half a quart of Black and White on the cistern. One of the other lads must have left it there. He hefted the bottle, thought about it, dismissed it, put it back. He hadn’t touched a drop for two months. Clean and sober. He missed it––it was necessity, not choice. He needed a clear head. Couldn’t afford to be distracted.

  He went back into his room, sparked up a match and lit the gas, filled the kettle and boiled it. He emptied his washbowl out the window, filled it with hot water and shaved. He found his dickie and held it up: the collar, cuffs and front were clean enough, you wouldn’t be able to see the soiled underarms with a jacket on. He did up the collar and fixed his tie. He searched for a pair of clean slacks. He settled his homburg on his head, locked the flimsy door behind him and set off.

  Summer had been a scorcher, the mercury up in the nineties. A blue sky with no clouds stretched overhead. No vapour trails, either: no Jerry, although everyone was saying that was just a matter of time. Croydon aerodrome had taken a bit of a spanking last week. The newspaper sandwich boards were all about invasion. The blokes at the nick had been going on about it all week. Something was going to happen, that was for sure. He was coming, that was what the experts were saying. Old Adolf was coming.

  o o o

  THE PHOTOGRAPHER’S PLACE WAS IN St Martin’s Court, just off Leicester Square. A brass nameplate was fixed next to the door: GREGORY BUTTERS, ESQ. Frank knocked.

  Butters opened it. “Mr. Murphy.”

  “Are they ready?”

  “Yes. Hold on.”

  He went back inside. Frank peered through the crack in the door: a desk; a sink; shelves heaving with magazines, books with plain covers and spines, photographic equipment and flasks of chemicals. A small printing press.

  Butters returned with a box. “Here”––Butters passed him a glossy piece of paper––“I think they’ve come out rather well.”

  Frank looked at it: it was a photograph of Eve with an ice cream. It was taken on Brighton pier over the May Day bank holiday. A wide-boy with a camera had been touting for trade. Eve was wearing a sun hat. It was just before her fifteenth birthday. She was on the fuzzy cusp between girlishness and womanhood; her expression mixed shyness with pride, timorousness with the stirrings of confidence. She was beginning to believe that she was pretty: she had her mother’s eyes and nose, her long dark hair contrasting delicate, porcelain skin. Frank had never doubted it: she w
as going to be a heart-breaker.

  He swallowed hard.

  “What do you reckon?”

  “Very good. How much do I owe you.”

  “An oncer’ll do it.”

  Frank took out a pound note and gave it to Butters.

  “She’s a pretty one.”

  “My daughter,” Frank warned.

  “Right you are. Mind me asking what you need them for?”

  “Never mind that.” He didn’t feel like talking.

  “Fair enough. You need any more, you come and see me.”

  “Thank you.”

  Frank ambled towards Leicester Square, staring at the picture. The lengths he’d gone to find her–– He’d spoken to the female police who patrolled the railway stations, long-distance bus terminals, all-night cafes and milk bars, public parks and prostitute-ridden districts of the West End. They looked after the callow girls who’d been caught up in what they thought would be a glamorous, exciting life but what usually turned out to be a life of vice to pay for their addiction to chink marihuana. Night after night, he waited with the big blue police tender––“The Children’s Wagon,” they called it––as it drove between the Royal Parks. Every night, he checked the girls that had been swept up; girls who’d escaped from remand homes, detention institutions, or who answered to descriptions of missing girls circulated within London by every police force in the country. He made sure they were safe, that they had somewhere to sleep, that their loved ones were informed.

  But there’d been no sign of Eve.

  He had wandered off-course. He turned and made for Savile Row.

  o o o

  FRANK BREWED A POT OF COFFEE, shut the door and lifted the lid off the gramophone player. He had brought it to the office when he moved out of the house. He kept a small collection of records on the sideboard next to the player and he shuffled through them for something suitable: Benny Goodman, Jimmy Lunceford, Count Basie. He selected Johnny Hodges, slid the record from the brown paper sleeve, stroking dust from the vinyl, and set it on the turntable. He carefully lowered the stylus and, after a moment’s hiss and crackle, gentle swing music filled the room. Frank listened for a moment, letting his mood settle, and then sat down to work.

  Bill Tanner had called a meeting tomorrow, and he needed to prepare. Tanner was the D.C.I. from the Murder Squad who had taken over the Ripper enquiry after the third victim. Frank knew him through his father and it hadn’t taken long to agree with the old man’s assessment: he was out of his depth in the Squad. Ex-military, the kind of snooty attitude you’d expect from a bloke with that background, looking down his nose at the rank and file, not nearly as clever as he thought he was. Frank had come across plenty of his type in the Army. Promoted beyond his ability because he had the same school tie as Nicholas Lezard, the Detective Super in charge of C1. The D.S working as Tanner’s bagman was a good sort, though. Salt of the earth. Most of the time, when he wanted things done, Frank dealt straight with him.

  He had a stack of Ripper boxes against the wall. Chapter and verse on the inquiry: ten cardboard boxes full of documents. He’d handled the case from the start and knew it was trouble when the second girl was found, strangled in a one-bedroom Manette Street knocking shop. The confirmation that they were dealing with a multiple killer came with the third body; his old man called for the Murder Squad and Tanner was the detective in the frame. Frank had been assigned to the team along with every other able-bodied officer on Division who could be detached.

  The first side of the record finished. Frank got up and flipped the platter.

  They’d made no progress. Tanner bumbled around without logic or reason, no real idea what he was doing. He had them chasing ghosts, leads that never went anywhere. Wasting time they didn’t have. Frank carved his own furrow, attending the daily briefings but following his nose. He approached it from different angles. He spent one week solid going over the hundreds of interviews that had been conducted: men with form for sexual violence recently released from prison; men with bedroom kinks grassed up by wives and girlfriends; punters who’d been with the victims. He knew the Ripper was in the files––he was convinced of it. They would have had him in a station, answering questions, locked up. And then they let him out to kill again.

  Victim number five.

  He was taking the piss.

  They were fighting a losing battle.

  Demands on the Met were rising. Blokes were would be needed on the street once the bombing started. Every day seemed to bring it closer. Men would be removed from the enquiry. The investigation would be gutted. Tanner would go back to the Yard. The Nazis would make it a duel.

  Him against the Ripper.

  And Eve was out there.

  15

  HENRY DRAKE’S CAT, Mr. Pickles, wrapped himself around his legs, mewling. Henry stepped over him and into the kitchenette. It was only a single room, rented from the old dear who owned the building for eighteen and two a week. A mattress, a little sofa, a table and a desk. The kitchenette was an open cupboard with a curtain strung across the entrance and the bathroom was across the hall, shared with the other tenants. A slop-pail stood by the foot of the bed, on the top of which floated a handful of cigarette butts and a beer can. An empty bottle of Benzedrine tablets was on the desk––he was going to need some more. A small strip of carpet was placed next to the bed, on top of the oilcloth covering the rest of the floor.

  There had been nothing else for it. He had been running up against his overdraft before and now he had been suspended––his pay docked––things had come to a head. He hadn’t had a choice. He couldn’t afford his previous place. Perhaps if he had stopped the drink and the drugs–– but that was never going to happen. He needed them, now more than ever, and it was out of the question. He’d drifted around rented dives until he found this place. It was a glorified kip-shop but it was cheap and it did the trick.

  He fed the cat with scraps from yesterday’s fish supper, and, making sure the black-out was pulled completely across the window, clicked on the lamp and sat down at his desk. His Ripper materials were stacked around him, unsteady towers of boxes and files. He’d put them into packing crates and taken them home; no sense in leaving them in the office, and it gave him a chance to keep on with the story after he knocked off. Stacks of paper littered the desk. Ideas. Brainstorms. Newspaper articles torn out, circled with red ink. Off-the-record interviews with witnesses. Information bought from hooky police: post mortem reports, witness statements, crime scene snaps. Court transcripts. A map of Soho was tacked to the wall: he’d circled the five crime scenes.

  It still all came back to the Ripper.

  It was his surest way back.

  Another murder might give him something to get his teeth into, an angle he could follow, a final dot to join. What if he was able to find something the police hadn’t found? A pattern that had been missed? A connection that might bring the culprit to justice?

  They couldn’t fire him then.

  But the Ripper wasn’t co-operating. There had been nothing new since the last girl had been found. Murphy and the Met were floundering.

  He plucked a sheet of paper from the mess: a list of names and telephone numbers. He had taken it from the front desk at the paper. It was a job for a cub reporter: calling back the cranks and lunatics who contacted the newspaper with stories. Nutters who saw ghosts. Paranoiacs who swore blind the next-door neighbour was a Kraut agent. It was a job no-one else wanted, so he didn’t see the harm in swiping it for himself. Finding a story out of the trash was a long-shot bet.

  It was depressing.

  But until something new happened in Soho, it was the best he could do.

  He went through to the communal telephone in the hall, thumbed in change and dialled the first number on the list.

  The call connected. “Top Hat.”

  He looked at the name. “Jackie Field, please.”

  “Who’s this?”

  “Henry Drake.”

  “Don’t
know no Henry Drake, mate.”

  “I’m a journalist.”

  The tone changed instantly. “Hello, sir. You’re calling about the story?”

  “How can I help you, Mr. Field?”

  “What paper are you from?”

  “The Star.”

  “You lot pay, right?––for good ones, I mean?”

  “If they’re worthwhile. Why don’t you tell me what it is?”

  “Not on the telephone. Can we meet?”

  “You’ll have to give me a better idea of what it’s about. If I went to speak to everyone who called with a story––”

  “The fellow from the government. The geezer who makes the aeroplanes. In the papers last week. You know him?”

  “Viscount Asquith?”

  “That’s the fellow.”

  “What about him?”

  “I’ve got pictures of him.”

  Henry sighed impatiently. “Doing what?”

  “Having intimate relations with a brass.”

  Henry’s attention had been wandering; now it bore down on the conversation.

  “What do you say to that? The story behind it all, too, everything. I’m telling you, Mr. Drake, it’s big. A scandal.”

  Henry pressed the receiver to his ear. “Where would you like to meet?”

  “Come to the Top Hat. Ask for me at the bar. We’ll talk then. Bring cash. It won’t be cheap.”

  MONDAY, 2nd SEPTEMBER 1940

  16

  CHARLIE SAT WITH HIS BACK TO THE EMBANKMENT, staring out over the mottled surface of the river. He chewed his cheese sandwich and poured out the last of the tea from his Thermos. He had an hour for lunch but he never took more than half; he was permanently busy and there was never time. Take this morning: a telephone call had come in, a local face had been collared for a breaking and he wanted to arrange some preferential treatment by spilling his guts about a bent bobby. Odds-on it was mud-slinging: chummy flinging as much dirt as he could, hoping some stuck, hoping he could get a few months shaved off his lagging in exchange for “co-operating with the police.” A typical assignment on C1.