Passion in the Peak

by John Buxton Hilton

  ‘You mean buy you into it, don’t you?’

  ‘Keep your voice down, for God’s sake. The boss went spare. He got on the phone straight away to Peak Low Hall. God knows what they said to him. He’s hardly spoken to me since.’

  That call would have gone first through the switchboard. Who would have been on duty on Saturday afternoon? Kershaw remembered a blonde in Reception who had not cared to be disturbed from a letter she was writing.

  Kenworthy did not want it to look as if he considered Julian Harpur his first priority, did not propose to jump at the call of the Harpurs. In any case, it was high time that he had a word with this character Tandy.

  Such had been the pressure on accommodation in Peak Low that Tandy had been unable to find anywhere to lay his head in the village. He had to make do with lodgings that people looked on as something of a joke: a bed, a chair and an old whitewood table in a granary on a hill-farm two miles from the village. Kenworthy went on foot. It was a bracing morning, with leaf-shoots beginning to sprout on the hawthorn and a great deal of bird activity in the hedgerows. As he neared the farm, he saw that a police car was parked outside it, and decided to prolong his walk in some other direction until it had driven off. Then he saw Gleed come out of the house with another officer. He had a second change of mind and hurried towards them.

  Gleed laughed at the sight of him.

  ‘Two minds with but a single thought—but I’m afraid our bird’s flown. How free are you to come and go from Peak Low, Simon?’

  ‘As free as I care to make myself.’

  ‘Free to go to London?’

  ‘Or Paris, or Tokyo.’

  ‘Because Tandy didn’t sleep here last night. Paid off his rent and went off about tea-time, taking all his worldly effects in his banjo-case. From all accounts, he’s the sort of Cockney who becomes physically ill if he’s out of the Smoke too long. Of course, I’m getting the Met on to him. But you, Simon—looking for characters in London is your métier. And one never knows what priority requests from outside forces are going to get. Besides, this is something that belongs to your vintage, not to today’s men.’

  ‘You mean Wayne Larner’s early years?’

  ‘The Stalag. The Stalagmites. Izzy Ginsberg. Susan Bistort, if you can find her. I know I have a nerve to ask.’

  ‘I reckon I’d have been on my way by tomorrow at latest.’

  Chapter Sixteen

  Kenworthy walked the Seven Sisters Road in steadily increasing gloom, mostly inspired by the bulldozing passage of time. It always depressed him to contemplate the unrolling of the decades backwards to the end of the war. What made him feel his age was that he did not share with some other people their sharp differentiation between this era and that: between the years of be-bop, skiffle, Carnaby Street, Aldermaston and junkies under Eros. There was a sameness about the post-war years in Kenworthy’s memory. Time had simply passed. He could roughly demarcate the phases drawn by the social historians. But when he really wanted to orientate himself, it was to his cases that he looked, to his promotions and his provincial journeys. What had been so very different between the ’fifties and the ’seventies? 1970 was as far away from him now as the First World War had been when he was a kid at elementary school. The New Look, Mods and Rockers, the years of the Teds, were as distant as the gay Nineties had been when he, a fifth-former, had just been elevated to the Second Eleven for his slow off-spinners.

  It was no use pretending that he had ever known the Stalag, that he had ever heard of Izzy Ginsberg. But he knew both well enough by prototype: the catchpenny coffee-bar in a dirty basement, the coaxing of money out of inflated adolescent pockets, the decibels amplified to the level of damage to eardrums.

  There had been a time when Kenworthy could have dissected anything he wanted to know out of Seven Sisters Road by waiting for it to come to him on a street corner—or by looking for a recognizable elbow on a bar counter. There had been a pub he had always had a soft spot for: frosted windows, red plush, even Pearly Kings on Saturday nights. He dropped in there now, and the windows still looked better suited to a urinal. But the plush had gone, and the bar was a battery of lagers brewed in the UK and masquerading behind gothic lettering. Two barmen were under-employed, and one of them took his time about serving him.

  Kenworthy went back into the street. Who had he known in Holloway and Finsbury Park? Nobby Clarke, who’d done a few months for illegal possession of transistors. Hell! Nobby must be in his eighties now. Dodger Allen, who’d never lost hope of earning half a crown for grassing titbits three weeks old. Hadn’t he picked it up that Dodger had died of a lung cancer, oh, five years ago? Or was he thinking of Pete Smalley, taking for his own use a pedal cycle without the consent of the owner?

  Of course, Kenworthy told himself, he could always amble as far as the nearest blue lamp, see if there was a desk sergeant old enough for them to have common acquaintances. But even desk sergeants these days looked as if they’d just come out of the sixth form.

  A fifty-yard frontage of lock-up shops was missing. The rubble where they had stood was screened off by wooden hoardings: a poster (last year’s) for a folk-concert, racist graffiti.

  ‘Mr Kenworthy, sir—’

  Five feet four of senior citizen—a chalk-stripe jacket and a food-stained club tie to which its wearer could not conceivably be entitled.

  ‘Sorry?’

  It was bad not knowing the man, but the Tich was too cheerful to show disappointment. Kenworthy must have been a bigger event in his life than he had been in Kenworthy’s.

  ‘Go on, sir, you couldn’t forget a mug like mine.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be for want of trying,’ Kenworthy said.

  ‘Billy Jarvis. The Tankersley Gardens business.’

  Memory cleared, points coincided, slots slid open.

  ‘Come and have a drink, Billy.’

  ‘On the wagon, Mr Kenworthy.’

  ‘Give me pleasure, watching you down a tomato juice.’

  ‘Makes me feel such a twit.’

  ‘Let’s find a pie and peas, then.’

  ‘On a diet.’

  ‘You poor old bugger. You’ll be telling me next you’ve gone straight.’

  ‘That’s not very kind, Mr Kenworthy. And they told me you’d retired.’

  That of course was something that no one of Billy’s vintage could never meaningfully believe. They could not think of Kenworthy as independent, stirring abroad without devious purpose. Billy Jarvis was glad to see him. It was often those to whom Kenworthy had given the roughest time who were the most tickled to see him again.

  Kenworthy finally took Billy to a café of Billy’s own choice. And they said, times had changed: the shack, the counter, the till, the aproned proprietor—they could all have existed along a stretch of ribbon development in the ’thirties. Kenworthy looked at the dejected cakes nominally protected from flies by sliding panels of smeared glass.

  ‘Have a wad, Billy?’

  ‘One won’t hurt, will it? Not supposed to, though.’

  ‘So how’s it going, Billy? Evidently somebody’s dead keen on keeping you alive.’

  The Tankersley Gardens murder had been something less than a mystery. It had been domestic and obvious, except for one untidy cross-trail that had to be cleared. A melancholy innocent had to be exonerated before an upper corridor at the Yard would stop belly-aching. And the man who could give the poor sod an alibi had been Billy Jarvis, whose sole concern had been to divert attention from where he had been himself that evening. Kenworthy had had to run him in on a petty charge, but had stood up in court with a plea that he had been most helpful in another case.

  ‘The Stalag, Billy?’

  ‘That’s what Jerry used to call PoW camps, isn’t it?’

  ‘In one context. This was a dirty little coffee-shop with jangling guitars. Looked a bit like a cubby-hole in Colditz, which was why the landlord played it as it was. Izzy Ginsberg.’

  ‘You mean the Henhouse?’


  ‘The Stalag, Billy.’

  ‘Izzy called his joint the Henhouse.’

  ‘Maybe he’d given it a bit of a whitewash.’

  ‘He had three girls singing there. The Battery Birds. They didn’t last long.’

  ‘Did you ever hear of a group called The Stalagmites?’

  ‘No. But some of these groups only lasted a week or two. I might have been away on business while they were on the bill.’

  ‘Or atoning for business.’

  ‘What’s atoning mean? Mr Kenworthy—I don’t like being got at. I haven’t had a hand on my shoulder for ten years.’

  ‘Neither have I. Now—these Stalagmites—’

  ‘Honestly, Mr Kenworthy—you’ve got me beat.’

  ‘This group had Wayne Larner in it. He made his start with Izzy, when he was sixteen or seventeen.’

  ‘I know he was Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Temporarily.’

  ‘And got done away with.’

  ‘He served his musical apprenticeship just round the corner.’

  ‘Everybody knows that. Izzy used to yack on about it, him being the one that gave the lad his first chance. And never saw a penny for it, never heard a word of thank-you. Because this chap came into the caff, can’t remember his name, pulled a face over the coffee, Izzy said—but hoicked the whole lot of them off at the end of the week. Izzy lost a lot of trade, being left without music at short notice. Music don’t grow on raspberry bushes in the Seven Sisters Road.’

  ‘Exactly. It’s The Stalagmites we’re talking about now, Billy.’

  ‘I can’t remember what they were called. It’s all one bloody big noise to me.’

  ‘There was a girl singing with them.’

  ‘Was there? I never went there. Izzy didn’t exactly cater for the likes of me.’

  ‘Susan Bistort—that was her stage name. Bickerstaffe, it said on her birth certificate.’

  ‘Right little tart, she’d be.’

  ‘I want to find her, Billy.’

  ‘Mr Kenworthy—I know sod-all about people like that.’

  ‘I know who you could ask.’

  ‘Who’s that, then?’

  ‘Alfie Tandy.’

  It was clear from Billy’s face that the name meant something to him.

  ‘What had Alfie Tandy to do with Wayne Larner, Billy?’

  ‘You know Alfie, Mr Kenworthy. Wasn’t it you who did him once for wasting police time? Because he was one of those nutters who go round confessing to crimes that they didn’t do?’

  ‘Not me, Billy.’

  Nor was it. But Kenworthy knew well enough the flock of cranks and inadequates, the schizos and psychopaths, who would go to any lengths to draw attention to themselves: Lil White, Percy Pople, ‘Napoleon’ Dean, to mention a few regulars. They made unnecessary work. They cluttered the place up when you wanted space. Somebody had to go through the motions of listening to them, getting it down on paper, filing it—just in case.

  ‘When a geezer got stabbed on a corner of Enkel Street,’ Billy said.

  ‘Not my case. What’s Alfie ever had to do with any singers, Billy?’

  ‘He was always hanging round them. Izzy didn’t want him in his place. He never spent anything, and the sight of him was enough to keep Izzy’s regular customers away. And the group didn’t want him either, because he was a pain in the arse. Well, if you don’t know Alfie Tandy, Mr K, you don’t know him. A miserable old bugger, and a bloody know-all at that. I mean, it wouldn’t matter whether it was an electric guitar or a motorbike engine. Alfie might know sod-all about it, but he’d tell you how to handle it, if you get me.’

  ‘I get you, Billy. Here—buy yourself some smokes.’

  ‘Had to give them up, Mr Kenworthy.’

  ‘Well, put it in your funeral club. And Billy—Sue Bistort—Bickerstaffe—I don’t know what she calls herself nowadays. She was once married to Wayne Larner, whose real name as you very well know, was Johnny Lummis. She went to the Cowell Street Comprehensive with the rest of The Stalagmites. I want to talk to her. And I’m not here for long. Tomorrow morning, Billy—here.’

  ‘It’ll cost money, Mr Kenworthy. Bus fares—’

  ‘I’ll make it worth your while, Billy.’

  A man was stabbed on the corner of Enkel Street. Kenworthy remembered. One of Arthur Hurd’s cases. Arthur had retired before Kenworthy had: and now Kenworthy did have to go to a blue lamp and tell an old comrade story to pick up his traces. They proved retrievable. Arthur lived in a semi on the favoured side of Streatham Common.

  Kenworthy had never worked with Hurd: they had always been parallel. But they knew a lot about each other, and could talk elliptically, in a sort of oral shorthand. No need for footnotes.

  ‘Stabbing. Enkel Street. Early ’sixties, Arthur.’

  ‘Pub insult.’

  ‘Where did Alf Tandy come into it?’

  ‘Where he always came into things. Trying to reckon he’d done it—when he hardly bloody knew what had been done.’

  ‘And I believe you nicked him for it.’

  That was unusual. It meant a lot of work for a piddling result. Sometimes you, or a social worker, if you could find one with the time, would talk a habitual confessor into going in as a voluntary patient. More often, you made sure he was truly in the clear and kicked his arse out of it.

  ‘I had to nick him. He wouldn’t be satisfied. He was difficult. Totally unreasonable. When I’d torn his statement to shreds, he insisted on making another, quite different. I’d warned him before. So I did him for wasteful employment. And that meant another court appearance, another day down the pan. He got a conditional discharge. But the beak told him he’d go down if he did anything like it again—and do you know what? That brought an element of realism into Alfie’s life. He never did come that caper again.’

  Hurd claimed not to remember much about Tandy, but, chatting round him, it was remarkable how much came back to him. Kenworthy picked up more than dead bones.

  A war baby, first lot: the result of one of his father’s five-day leaves from France. Nothing known about his early years, except that they had been in the East End. He had done dead-end jobs in the ’thirties. Delivering green-groceries on a bicycle, storeman’s toe-rag, boilerman. He had no form, had been in no kind of trouble until the urge to confess got into him. He had been in the war—Pioneer Corps, if Hurd remembered correctly: private soldier, heavy labour, relaying railway track in France after the invasion.

  When he came home, he got hooked on further education—WEA, LCC evening classes. You mention it, he’d been to a class about it: current affairs, book-keeping, Roman London, home loom weaving, appreciation of opera. And besides Evening Institutes, public libraries had been invented for his special benefit. He had increased his word power from more first chapters than any other man in Greater London: Geology, the Royal Houses of Europe, Zen Buddhism.

  ‘He’d learned it all and he’d understood nothing,’ Hurd said. ‘I remember asking him which books he’d thought worth reading twice. He looked at me as if I was mad. What sort of a nana would want to read the same book twice?’

  One detail revived another.

  ‘After the war, he tried to get into the Beefeaters, but for some reason that he never knew and always resented, they turned him down. So he became a night-watchman, a hospital porter, and for a short and stormy spell, a traffic warden.’

  ‘Unmarried?’

  ‘Who’d saddle herself with Alfie? Lived in a YMCA hostel for years. Was in digs when I pinched him.’

  So Tandy had ended up in the dock, and they had found a formula to save him from becoming a charge on the tax-payer: a conditional discharge. It was obvious that nobody had ever tried to go into Alfie Tandy in depth. Nobody had ever had time to. Kenworthy said all the right things to Arthur Hurd and spent the night in his own bed.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Kenworthy spent a second night at home, but it was a short one, because he arrived back in London late from
a visit to the seaside. The reason for this excursion was the zeal of Billy Jarvis who, perhaps because he did not appreciate the full value of the goods he was delivering, presented his accounting slips with apologies.

  ‘I know 80p seems a lot for buses, Mr Kenworthy, but them’s the fares, these days. And I don’t think two quid for snacks is out of the way, is it? And I hope you don’t mind—I had a half of lager.’

  ‘Thought you were off the hard stuff, Billy.’

  Billy had done better than Kenworthy had dared to hope for, but he had not had to be spectacularly clever. There were alumni of the Cowell Street Comprehensive who had not moved all that far from home, among them contemporaries of The Stalagmites. Consequently he had been able to put Kenworthy in touch with Sue Bickerstaffe. (She went under another name these days, but that was irrelevant, and had to do with a marriage that was not a marriage, and that was too complex for Kenworthy to bother to follow.)

  Susan Bickerstaffe was one of the most pathetic alcoholics that he had ever encountered. For whereas one of the most notorious characteristics of the addict is the ability to get supplies whatever other shortages there may be in her life, Sue Bickerstaffe had sunk below the means to satisfy her craving. This played into Kenworthy’s hands—but it was not a situation that brought him pleasure.

  In professional necessity he could adapt himself to most conditions, but he kept returning to the thought that Susan Bickerstaffe might at one time have had more likeable traits: and she was barely yet out of her thirties.

  She needed—not wanted—gin, and he took her where there was gin for her to see. He bought her gin—not readily, and at longer intervals than she would have opted for. He hated himself for doing it, and he knew that when the effects of the topping-up had worn off, she was going to be in a worse state than he had found her in.

  Her thoughts were in confusion, but she told him things. She told him things that she was contemptuous of him for not knowing. She kept forgetting who he was—if she had ever grasped it in the first place—and he did not try to tell her where his interests really lay.