by Lissa Evans
‘We were a battering ram,’ Mattie was wont to say. ‘Together, we broke down the door,’ but beyond that splintered door had been a dozen more doors and, scattered by their momentum, some women had tried one and some another, and some had given up and turned away, and it seemed to The Flea that all that unity and passion, all that wild energy, had dissipated. And she herself and her ilk, trudging soberly behind, had somehow ended up in the vanguard …
‘Miss Lee?’
It was Ida, glass-cloth in one hand, looking around the kitchen door with a faint air of excitement.
‘The telephone was ringing and ringing, Miss Lee. I thought maybe you hadn’t heard, so I answered it.’
‘Thank you – you’re right, I hadn’t. So who is it?’
‘It’s for Miss Simpkin, Miss Lee.’ Ida left a tiny dramatic pause. ‘It’s the police!’
Mattie followed the constable on the familiar route down to the cells – not that she had ever been incarcerated in the basement beneath Hampstead police station, but the maroon-glazed brick, the broad staircase (wide enough for the passage of a prisoner between two escorts) and the trill of carbolic that failed to mask an ammoniacal bass note were all so reminiscent of the interior of Bow Street or Havant Row that one almost expected to hear a polyphony of female voices, all bellowing slogans or singing as they awaited their appointment with the magistrate.
‘When are you lot going to shut up?’ a Bow Street policeman had once enquired, and from every cell had come the shout of ‘Never!!’
But there was no noise at all here, save for the clank and swish of someone mopping the floor.
‘Are you all right, Miss?’
Mattie found that she had paused, gripping the rail. She inhaled sharply. ‘Yes, I am perfectly well,’ she said, resuming her descent.
‘The witness is here, sir,’ called the constable, knocking on a door at the foot of the stairs, and the man who exited the room was the sergeant who’d visited the Mousehole. Beal. An intelligent face, though not a friendly one.
‘Thank you for attending, Miss Simpkin,’ he said; his tone was dry.
‘I wasn’t aware that there was an element of choice.’
‘No, that’s correct, though it’s not something we usually have to enforce. Most honest citizens are pleased to be able to help us catch criminals.’
‘But as I mentioned on the telephone, I scarcely had a glimpse of the thief.’
‘You might surprise yourself,’ he said. ‘People think they’re not going to remember, and then they see the perpetrator and it’s like spotting an old friend. In a manner of speaking.’
‘And how did you catch him? Has he committed another crime?’
‘I can’t tell you that.’
‘And what would happen in the event that I recognize him? Will the case go to court?’
‘I can’t tell you that, either. Are you ready? You don’t need to say anything when you’re in there – each of the men will be holding a number, and when you’ve decided, give me a nod and we’ll come back out.’ He opened the door halfway and then realized that Mattie was making no move to follow him.
‘Through here, please.’
‘Yes, I’m coming.’ And yet she could not unglue her feet. Above her head, a bulb emitted a soupy yellow glow.
It was the lack of windows, she thought; one always needed a glimpse of sky, however grey, and a horizon on which to fix one’s gaze. In her subterranean cell in Holloway, the weak electric light had made her feel purblind. Her prison dreams had been not of food, or of home, but of shutters prised open, of daylight spilling in. She still couldn’t abide a closed curtain.
‘Is something the matter, Miss Simpkin?’
‘No, nothing at all.’ And as she spoke, she was already starting the process of gathering herself together again, tucking in weakness, trussing herself like a parcel, just as she had done twice daily on hearing the approaching rattle of the feeding trolley, the purposeful footsteps of the doctor and the wardresses. By the time her cell door had been opened, by the time she’d been pinned down, the core of her had been unassailable.
‘I am quite ready,’ she said.
‘On your feet, eyes ahead!’ shouted someone as she entered the narrow room – no more than a section of corridor, really. Ten or twelve men, sitting on a long bench, stood up and formed a loose line; each held a square of cardboard bearing a number. They were all working men. Sawdust speckled the trousers of one, another had ink smudges on his hands, another smelled marvellously of horses. The youngest was a pimpled beanpole of sixteen or so, the oldest a man in his fifties with a soldier’s bearing, a frayed collar and a nose that he hadn’t been born with – a soft, pale sausage of a nose, conjured up by a surgeon to cover God knows what battlefield horror. He alone was disobeying the instruction to look straight ahead, his gaze flicking around the room. Briefly, his eyes met Mattie’s, and they seemed to be relaying a bitter joke: What a farce, eh? Is it likely that a man who looks like me would commit a public crime? I’m ruined but I’m not a fool.
‘Are these men volunteers, or are they being paid?’ asked Mattie, turning to the sergeant.
Before he could speak, there was a cough from behind her that seemed to conceal the word ‘neither’.
‘Or have they been coerced?’
‘I’d be obliged, Madam, if you could continue to look along the line,’ said the sergeant, evenly.
‘I was merely enquiring,’ she said.
‘This isn’t the time or place to discuss the matter.’
‘Ah! – familiar phrase. I have discovered over the years that there is never a correct time or place to question those in authority. As in Tennyson’s Ulysses, the “margin fades, forever and forever when I move”.’
Sergeant Beal’s face remained expressionless, but a certain blotchiness was creeping up the skin of his neck. ‘To repeat my request, can you continue to look along the line and see if there is anyone you recognize.’
‘Very well. If only to release these men from an unasked-for, unrewarded and somewhat humiliating task.’
‘Attagirl,’ muttered the soldier.
There was actually no need for further scrutiny on Mattie’s part since she had seen from the moment she’d entered the room that the person who had robbed her was standing fourth from the right. Nevertheless, she walked to the end of the row, pausing for a moment in front of Number 12, a man with olive skin and a narrow moustache.
‘Buon giorno, Signor Fazio,’ she said.
‘Buon giorno, Signora.’
Sergeant Beal opened his mouth to speak.
‘Signor Fazio delivers our laundry,’ said Mattie. ‘I have met him only under strictly legal circumstances. Now, I think I have seen everything that I need to.’
The sergeant led her out into the corridor.
‘Well?’ he asked, when the door was closed once again. ‘Apart from the Italian, did you recognize anyone?’
She hesitated for a second, searching for a strictly truthful answer. ‘I saw no one that I would be prepared to swear in court was the thief.’
‘You’re not in court now.’
‘Indeed.’
‘So if there’s someone who rings a bell, you should say so.’
‘Most of these men, I imagine, live or work in the vicinity – as do I. It’s quite likely that I have seen several of their faces before.’
‘But not in the act of stealing your bag.’
‘You forget that I didn’t see him until he was running away. The back of a man’s head is rarely distinctive.’
‘Dark hair, you said in your original statement.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘A young man with dark hair.’
‘I don’t believe that I used the word “young”.’
Beal jerked his head impatiently. ‘This isn’t a debating club, Miss Simpkin. You were robbed and the police force is trying to bring the perpetrator to justice. Why won’t you help us?’
‘You truly wish to
know?’ – and, though, judging by his face, he didn’t, she couldn’t stop herself now; half an hour in a police station had primed the fire and pumped the bellows. – ‘Because I have suffered – and have seen many others suffer – repeated and unprovoked violence at police hands. I have been punched, kicked and vilely assaulted while engaged in the democratic right of taking a grievance to the doors of Parliament. I have seen burly officers throw women half their size to the pavement – women whose crime was to carry a banner no bigger than a handbag. I have seen unarmed men hit across the face with truncheons, their hands stamped on as they crawled away. On the many occasions I was arrested, I never once offered resistance and yet was treated like a dunghill cur, with nary a protest from the officers in charge as their men acted like hired thugs. I have seen the so-called upholders of justice, and I have realized that the word “justice” is simply and only that: a word.’
A sudden noise made her turn: the constable had opened the interior door and was peering through. ‘Sorry, sir,’ he said, ‘but some of the men are asking if they can go.’
‘One minute,’ said Beal. The door closed again.
‘I, too, would like to leave,’ said Mattie.
‘Where would you draw the line, Miss Simpkin?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
Beal looked like a dog at a foxhole, his gaze fixed and bristling. ‘If your house was burgled or if you saw a murder or a kidnapping, would you call the police then? Or would you prefer anarchy – criminals roaming the city, everyone taking the law into their own hands? What if the man who robbed you has robbed other ladies as well – ladies less able to defend themselves? What if he goes and does it again? What if he’s a nasty little thug who deserves to be convicted? Where’s your justice then? You have to put your prejudice aside. For the public good.’
Mattie snorted – a Peeler lecturing her on her debt to society!
‘Prejudice implies an unfair bias. My views are based on facts.’
‘Facts from twenty years ago, at a time when you were deliberately and repeatedly breaking the law.’
‘Laws upheld by those who were apparently beyond the reach of it themselves!’
The words – a declamatory near-shout – hung in the air for a second or two, and then Beal stepped back and rapped sharply on the door.
‘Let them out,’ he said.
‘So I’m free to go now?’ asked Mattie.
Beal looked at her for a long, hard moment and then nodded. ‘And I hope you never find yourself in urgent need of our assistance, Miss Simpkin,’ he said as she turned to mount the stairs, and the chill of the words stayed with her as she emerged on to Haverstock Hill.
‘Please, Mattie, do try not to give them your impression of a mule with a sore hoof,’ The Flea had said before she’d left for the police station, but once again the visceral had overridden the expedient, and now she appeared to have made an enemy. An enemy who had actually fought rather well – there was, she was forced to acknowledge, a certain uncomfortable truth at the core of his argument. Those who preyed on the weak should not go unpunished.
A fine rain was falling, and Mattie opened her umbrella and took inadequate shelter beneath a leafless plane.
Yards away, the police station door opened, and the men from the line-up began to file out, the beanpole breaking into an immediate sprint after the 168 bus as it laboured up the hill. Signor Fazio tipped his hat at Mattie and the man with the nose gave her a nod. She waited. Ten minutes passed, and then the door opened again, and Number 9 walked down the steps. He paused to light a cigarette, flicked the match away, and saw Mattie standing beneath its trajectory. His eyes widened.
‘A word, please,’ she said.
‘What?’ He turned away and started to walk down the hill. She furled her umbrella and hurried after him.
‘I would like a word with you.’
‘You’re bleeding joking.’
‘I’m bleeding not.’
He looked round then, the view of his face directly comparable to the one she’d seen on the Heath.
‘You’re a thief,’ she said.
‘And you’re mental.’
He broke into a run. Mattie did the same. The Amazons had had a splendid effect on her muscular fitness.
Passers-by were beginning to watch and point.
‘Stop now,’ she called, ‘or I shall continue to follow you, intermittently shouting the word “Thief!”’
‘Christ Almighty.’ The man halted so abruptly that Mattie almost cannoned into him. ‘What?’ he asked. ‘What the fuck do you want?’
He was young, no older than eighteen, his clothing cheap and flashy, his expression one of angry bafflement. Close up, the sharp cheekbones looked not so much Slavic as undernourished.
‘You stole my bag,’ she said.
He looked at her as if she were speaking in Swahili. ‘You can’t pin it on me now, you stupid cow, you had your chance.’
‘Nevertheless, we both know the truth.’
‘Says you.’
‘Presumably I was not the first that you robbed, nor the last, though perhaps I was the only one to see your face.’
‘I haven’t done nothing. The rozzers are always trying to pin stuff on me, you’d think I done every bleeding crime in Camden.’ He spoke the words with practised outrage, glancing back at the police station as he did so.
‘What did you do with the contents of my handbag?’
‘I never took your fucking handbag.’
‘Besides the purse, and various other items, there was a volume by Thomas Fuller.’
‘Dunno what you’re talking about.’
‘I presume that you immediately recognized its value and took it to a book dealer?’
His gaze swivelled towards her.
‘It was a third edition,’ she said. ‘I imagine worth at least fifty pounds.’
He looked suddenly shorter, a tent-peg hit with a mallet.
‘Possibly more,’ said Mattie, wielding her weapon again. The boy’s lips moved involuntarily, as if essaying the word ‘more’.
‘Do you still have it,’ she asked, ‘or did you throw it away? If the latter, then I’m afraid that you threw away both wisdom and profit.’
‘Shut up.’
‘If, in future, I hear of any similar robberies – and I shall read every crime report in the Ham & High, the Euston Observer and the North London Mercury, scouring them for a modus operandi that matches your own – I will go straight back to the police and tell them I was mistaken.’
He tried to laugh at that. ‘They won’t take no notice of you.’
‘I am not easily ignored.’
The laugh died.
‘Fuck off,’ he said, succinctly, turning away. This time, she let him go. He walked off down the hill with an attempted cockiness that struck her as pathetic, an ambulatory version of swearing; the rain, heavier now, was moulding his jacket to shoulders as narrow as a girl’s. She thought of the relish with which she’d informed him of his mistake, and felt discomfited. He was Ignorance and Want personified – one should pity and not gloat; one should think of volume two of Fuller’s Worthies of England lying in a dustcart, covered in tea-leaves and rancid cheese-parings, and wince at the symbolism.
Raising her umbrella, she set off for home. There was much to be done.
Flats were being built at the end of Croker Road, and The Flea paused to watch a man push a brick-filled wheelbarrow across a plank that spanned the gap between an open-backed lorry and the first floor of the new building. He took the angled journey almost at a run, the plank bowing beneath the weight, his boots dislodging dust that sifted slowly to the pavement, eight or nine feet below. The barrow wheel thumped on to a solid surface, and The Flea breathed again. An unskilled labourer, she thought, doing a job that required the precision of a circus artiste.
She crossed the road and turned along a narrow passage between a rag shop and a butcher, skinned rabbits hanging above the sawdust, and emerged into a square.
There was a railed garden at the centre – a sparse lawn and a few shrubs, and a bench, currently unoccupied. One end of the bench was in sunlight, and she sat and took out her notebook.
‘I would advise you never to fill in record cards during the visit itself,’ her tutor, Miss Beering, had been wont to say, on the health visitor certificate course at Bedford College. ‘Do not forget that, in many households, producing a notebook is suggestive of the policeman collecting evidence. Rely on your memory and make your notes afterwards. Similarly, call out when you visit, rather than use the door-knocker. To many people, a “rat-tat-tat” means only the rent-collector or the bailiff.’
The King family, basement flat, 14, Hatfield Road.
Alfred King, 41, labourer; Dorcas King, 27; Alice, 10; Enid, 9; Raymond, 5; James (Jimmy), 2; 3 other infants died shortly after birth.
5/4/28 Mr King suffering from TB. Clear decline since last visit, now bedridden. Mrs King worried about Enid’s cough and has heard of the Sunshine Homes. Asked me to enquire about Enid and Raymond getting a place. The children receive free milk from the Needs Fund, but Mrs King says she cannot afford meat, and they share potatoes for two meals a day. All four children appear ailing. Mrs King is taking in sewing but is behind with the rent, and is awaiting a Relief Committee decision.
The children were as pale as porridge. On a visit last autumn, The Flea had – very softly, and in the course of listing sources of possible help – mentioned the Mothers’ Clinic in the Tottenham Court Road, and had seen Mrs King give a start and glance over at her husband, who was sleeping in a chair. ‘He won’t have none of that,’ she’d muttered, barely moving her lips. ‘Says it’s all wrong.’
‘I see. There are … I’ll just mention this, for your information … there are methods now which are the … the sole concern of the wife.’
Dorcas King had glanced at her husband again, and this time her expression had been hopeful. ‘He wouldn’t have to know?’
‘No. Perhaps you might want to think about it? The clinic is open every morning and there’s no charge. And you may be absolutely certain of their discretion.’