The Mammoth Book of Roaring Twenties Whodunnits

by Mike Ashley

  Rothstein’s office was a clutter of papers, pamphlets and books. They were piled everywhere, including the only desk and on both of the two chairs in the tiny room. Rothstein hurried to shift papers from one of the chairs, making new drifts of revolutionary didactic in the process. Banks reckoned his boss BT ought to see the room for himself. If the Revolution was being organized from here, then he might change his mind about the Red Peril. An old safe, the green paint peeling from its sides, stood in one corner. A Victor. Opening it would present no problem to Banks. But then, if it was names Special Branch wanted, it wouldn’t take too much effort. Banks could see stacked on the shelf behind Rothstein’s head a set of battered wooden drawers labelled ‘Members’ and with letters on each drawer. But Banks had a specific job to do, and it didn’t involve rocking the boat. He was here to find out what had scared Potter’s anonymous friend.

  Rothstein settled in the creaky chair behind the desk, motioning Banks to the other.

  “So, you’re an ex-serviceman, then.”

  Banks grinned self-consciously. “Is it that obvious?”

  “From your manner, and the set of your hat, I would say so.”

  Banks fiddled with the brim of his bowler, now cradled in his lap. He wanted Rothstein to get comfortable with him, let him feel he knew him. Banks had long ago found he had a knack of making people think he was deferring to them. An outward show of deference had kept him out of trouble in the army, and in the police force. His only outward expression of his true feelings – supporting the Police Strike – had brought him trouble in triplicate. It had earned him a nickname, got him into trouble, and also in debt to his guv’nor at one fell swoop. Constraint was his watchword now. And with Harry Rothstein his diffidence paid off again.

  It was not long before the man took him for granted, and talked openly in his presence. Within a couple of days he was a fixture in the shop. And on flirting terms with Amy Clark.

  “If things were different, I would be asking you out, Amy Clark. Unless, that is, you and Mr Rothstein are . . . ?”

  Amy smiled gently, and blushed. “Mr Rothstein has other . . . interests, Mr Banks. If what were different?”

  “If I had a job. No, when I have a job. And it’s John, by the way.”

  Amy blushed and continued pounding the typewriter keys. “The railways are just not taking anyone on, Mr B . . . John. I understand that.”

  His “cover” story was that he was a railwayman, unemployable because he was a Trades Unionist. Amy was being kind to him, saying there were no jobs available. He moved closer to her, rearranging the piles of pamphlets on the shop counter. It was a quiet evening, and Harry had dropped in on his way from work earlier to check if there were any messages. There weren’t, and he was glad to be persuaded to leave it for one night. It provided Banks with an opportunity to poke around, and ask Amy some questions.

  “Harry works in the building trade, doesn’t he?”

  “Oh yes. He’s started working on those new buildings that are going up to house the Empire Exhibition next year.”

  “At Wembley?”

  “Yes.” Amy sounded really proud that Rothstein was involved with the construction of the new-fangled exhibition halls fashioned from tons of concrete. The fact that they were being built to bolster up the fading notion of Empire, seemed not to have occurred to her. Banks could see the naïve enthusiasm of the girl would not stretch to perceiving the conflict in it for a member of the Communist Party. But he wondered why Rothstein should agree to be involved in such a piece of pointless make-work for unemployed servicemen. He was about to dig deeper, when the bell on the shop door rang, and two men walked in.

  One was wearing a blue serge suit with a waistcoat and a cap on his head. In his hand he gripped a wooden walking stick by the shaft. So Banks could see that the handle was of cheap metal, in the form of a dog’s head. The other man, a little younger, wore a shabby grey suit and a trilby hat. Banks would have gauged the older man’s age to be around twenty-seven or twenty-eight. The one in the grey suit looked a little nervous at the sight of Banks, whom he clearly did not expect to be in the shop. The other man, however, put on a jaunty air, and swaggered into the centre of the shop floor. He was still gripping his stick as though it were a cudgel.

  “Hello, Amy. Is Rothstein in the back, then?”

  He had a slight accent, a colonial twang that Banks couldn’t quite place.

  Amy looked hesitant. “I’m sorry, you’ve just missed him. He’s gone home.”

  “Then we’ll see him tomorrow evening. At the Grapes. Will you tell him?”

  He stared, not at Amy, but straight at Banks as he spoke. Daring him to get involved. In any other situation, the policeman would have been pleased to pull him in. But the strong arm of the law was not what was required here, and Banks dropped his gaze with a slight shrug of his shoulder. None of my business, it said. When the door had slammed behind the two men, he looked across at Amy. She let out a sigh, almost as if she had not breathed since the men had entered.

  “Who were they?” he asked. She frowned, as if embarrassed for witnessing Banks’s own humiliation. Or for his obvious curiosity.

  “Mr Marsh, and Mr Brown. Brown’s the one with the stick. They’re new recruits, but I not sure about them. I do know Harry seems a bit cagey when they are around. I’m glad he wasn’t here tonight. I don’t like them”

  “William Thomas Marsh and Jack Alfred Brown,” averred O’Nions, shuffling through the slim files on his desk. “Both ex-servicemen, both drawing their twenty-nine shillings’ dole. Brown’s South African, and served with the South African Heavy Artillery until his discharge in 1917.”

  “Which explains the accent.” Banks silently rebuked himself for not recognizing it in the first place.

  “Marsh was in the Navy. Dismissed the service in 1920. Nothing suspicious about Brown, except for petty pilfering. In fact, I wouldn’t have put either down as revolutionaries on the evidence of their police files. Forget about them.”

  Banks nodded, but reserved judgement. In 1919, there had been evidence of Soviet incitement of sailors to go on strike and seize British ports. Of course, it had all been nonsense, and nothing had happened. But Marsh had been drummed out of the Navy the following year. In his business it didn’t pay to be too sceptical. However, he moved on to more significant matters.

  “There is the letter. That could be what got Potter’s friend all skittish.”

  “What letter’s that? Who from?” O’Nions was a little annoyed that his sergeant had been holding back information.

  “Amy Clark told me about it. It was delivered by hand about a week ago. Rothstein’s hardly let it out of his sight ever since. Apparently, he read it in his office, and emerged as white as a sheet. Amy thought it might have been bad news about Comrade Lenin.”

  O’Nions shot Banks a black look, irritated by his use of the Bolshie epithet.

  “I’m just reporting what she said, guv’nor.” Banks went on, determined to have a dig at his boss. “But it wasn’t. About Comrade Lenin, that is.”

  “What was it about, then?” grumbled O’Nions. Even though he knew Banks was deliberately needling him, getting back in what small way the sergeant could for his hold over him, he remained calm. He needed Banks’s undercover skills more than the sergeant realized. He needed him to find this letter.

  “I don’t know, and nor does Amy.”

  “Then you better get back to your little lady-friend, and get your hands on it.” O’Nions leered. “The letter, that is. Meanwhile, I will talk to Mr Potter. See if I can winkle out his friend’s name from him.”

  Tommy Fields looked at the end of his tether. Harry couldn’t believe it. The man was due to play in a Cup Final soon, and he was downing drinks like there was no tomorrow. Harry conveniently forgot how many pints he had drunk to drown his own problems.

  “What’s the matter with you, Tommy? Can’t you see people are looking? They know who you are. If it gets back to Mr King that his
shining example of the finest aspect of the people’s game, his well-honed athlete, is no more than a falling-down drunk, you’ll be off the team.”

  Tommy drained the dregs of the pint glass in front of him, and lit another cigarette. A sneer painted itself on his bleary features.

  “Harry ‘All-men-are-equal’ Rothstein, just listen to him. He can quote the Communist Manifesto till it comes out of his arse, but he still calls the bosses Mister. You might as well be touching your forelock at the same time. If Mister King wants me out of the side, then that’s that.”

  Harry’s face flushed at the footballer’s scornful comments. He had always thought Tommy was a fellow socialist at heart. He’d even thought to ask him to help set up a football side to tour the Soviet Union. That would really have got him in well with Moscow. Maybe after this business was all over. At the moment, he felt like pushing his fist in the man’s red and bloated face. But he was a patient, loving man, was Harry Rothstein. And besides, he needed Tommy.

  “Of course you must be in the side. Otherwise how can you help me? Anyway, you’re the best winger I’ve seen in years. Ted Vizard’s got nothing on you.”

  The mention of Bolton Wanderer’s outside-left seemed to rouse Fields from his morose demeanour. He narrowed his bleary eyes, and leaned closer to Rothstein.

  “Tell me how important I am again . . .”

  “Sorry, mate.” Roth stein’s mood suddenly changed. “Gotta go and have a pee. Tell you about it later.”

  He slid out from behind the heavy table, and began elbowing his way to the lavatories. Tommy stared gloomily at his empty glass, as his friend made his way through the crowded, smoke-filled bar. A man in a worn, blue serge suit stepped over his outstretched feet on his way to the rear door. The stick he clutched in his hand smacked against Fields’s ankle, but the footballer was too far gone to care. A pinched-faced man in a grey suit sat down beside the footballer, and gave him a friendly pat on the shoulder. Neither saw the slim, unassuming man with the bowler hat set square on his head step carefully past also going towards the lavatories.

  “I am beginning to sniff out a Communist conspiracy here, Potter.”

  Albert Potter, seated opposite O’Nions in the latter’s office, could not help himself. He smiled involuntarily, squinted through his pince-nez spectacles at the Special Branch man, and then allowed the guffaw welling up in his chest to burst forth. O’Nions’s face turned a dangerous shade of puce at the laughter, and Albert realized he was not joking. Suppressing the continuing urge to titter, he shook his head in disbelief. He had heard of the Head of the CID’s obsession with the Red Peril, but had not realized it had infected the pedestrian mind of the Superintendent too.

  “Really, Superintendent. You must see that the British Communist Party is nothing more than a bunch of well-intentioned radicals on the one hand, and airy-fairy intellectuals on the other. The first lot are so pig-headed they’ll never do as Moscow tells them. And the second – well, you said so yourself – they’re Parlour Bolsheviks. Quite harmless.”

  He sat upright in the hard chair O’Nions had placed him in, wishing he hadn’t agreed to meet the man on his home ground. The back of the chair pressed uncomfortably into his spine, and he felt he was under interrogation.

  O’Nions leaned closer, his ham fists splayed out on the surface of his desk. This was not what he wanted to hear. He would have to play his trump card.

  “Are you saying Junius Premadasa is harmless? That speech he made in Hyde Park recently was downright seditious. Pity the Defence of the Realm Act has lapsed. During the War, I could have had him picked up from the street, and imprisoned before the day was over.”

  “How did you . . . ? When did you hear . . . ?” Albert Potter paled, and sank in his uncomfortable seat. He thought Junius’s friends had managed to keep his little indiscretion secret. Precious few had heard him on his soap-box anyway. It now seemed news had got to Special Branch. He wondered who else had got wind of the speech. And how did O’Nions know that the unnamed friend he had referred to at the beginning of this business had been Premadasa?

  The truth was, O’Nions hadn’t known. But the fact that Junius Premadasa, MP and prominent member of the British Communist Party, had not been seen for several days in his usual haunts, had made him a prime candidate. He was the Parlour Bolshevik of all Parlour Bolsheviks. O’Nions leaned back in his chair, and positively basked in his own reflected glory. His little trick had worked. Potter had confirmed his suspicion.

  “Good job he’s done a bunk, Potter. Otherwise, I might have been inclined to pull him in for a little talk anyway.” O’Nions focused his beady little eyes on Potter, causing beads of sweat to prickle on his forehead. “You don’t know where he is, do you?”

  Albert gulped, and shook his head. Why did O’Nions have this uncanny knack of making you feel you were lying to him, even when you weren’t?

  “That’s a shame, Potter, but maybe you could ask around. It might be safer for him if he were in protective custody. There’s some nasty customers out there, you know.”

  Banks stood at the urinal contemplating the pattern on the ornate green tiles in front of his face. He relieved himself of the beer he had had to consume while observing Rothstein’s meeting with the well-built man he hadn’t immediately recognized as Tommy Fields. It was the red, bloated face that had put him off. The man had obviously been drinking even before his session with Harry Rothstein. But the blond quiff had been familiar, and it was not long before Banks had placed it. West Ham was his team, after all, and a blurry photograph of Fields had been in the local paper when he had signed on for the Hammers. What was the man doing looking so out of sorts with only days to go to the Cup Final? It was just at that juncture that Roth stein had rocketed out of his seat and made a dash for the lavatories. Banks had made his move, and had almost bumped into someone. He immediately identified the man with the walking stick as the South African Brown. He was also making a beeline for the lavatories. Banks gave it a few seconds, and followed.

  Peering cautiously round the door of the urinals, he was surprised to find neither Rothstein nor Brown there. He was walking down the row of toilet cubicles pushing on doors, however, when a figure emerged from the last one. It was Brown, who rushed past him without showing any signs of recognition. Banks told himself that Brown’s presence was just a coincidence. Except for one thing. There was no flushing sound from the end cubicle from which Brown had emerged. What had he been up to? With his own bladder bursting, he unbuttoned, and contemplated the matter of Rothstein’s disappearance. It wasn’t too difficult to engineer. The lavatories were outside the back of the pub, and it was easy to clamber over the wall in the yard, and disappear down the alley into the darkness. Had he been meeting Brown, or escaping him?

  And where did Fields fit in to this? Banks suddenly thought of the Wembley site where Rothstein worked, and the great stadium where the Cup Final would shortly be played for the first time. With Fields in the West Ham team. He buttoned up, and hurried out of the lavatories. Maybe he could learn something by having a word with Tommy Fields. He pushed his way back through the growing crowd in the public bar to where Fields had been sitting. But Fields had disappeared too. And by the look of the upended glasses on the table still dribbling beer across its surface, he had gone either in a hurry, or by force.

  Sunday evening, 22 April 1923.

  The British Empire Exhibition site

  By now the British Empire site had taken on an other-worldly appearance. A borrowed arc light glaringly illuminated the hole in the ground with a stark white light. Equally impenetrable shadows contrasted with the brightness wherever the lamp failed to shine. Two elongated shadows hovered against the wall of the west tower like wingless angels. Superintendent O’Nions and Sergeant Banks peered into the pit, where the pathologist was about his gory business.

  “If you hadn’t kept losing all the bloody suspects, Sergeant Banks, we might know whose body this was!”

  Banks could s
ee the sweat running down O’Nions’s florid face. The man was yanking at the stiff, old-fashioned collar he had taken to wearing since his elevation to Superintendent. Poking his fat fingers in between collar and flesh, attempting to relieve the pressure. Banks still favoured a soft-collared shirt, though he was still obliged to wear a tie. The weather had turned sultry, almost tropical, but officers were still expected to dress respectably. His guv’nor’s collar looked as though it was tightening round his fleshy neck, strangling him. Either that, or O’Nions was visibly swelling in front of his eyes. Too many undisturbed Sunday roasts, and too much sitting on his fat arse in the office, probably. Banks was glad he still worked out in the streets. He was glad, too, that he was well removed from the obsessions of the higher ranks. He preferred having O’Nions between him and BT’s obsession with the Red Peril.

  The trouble was that O’Nions knew he was not dealing with the pressure from above very well. He needed results to please BT, and just when he wanted them most, all the prime movers had gone to ground.

  “With so much damage to the body, how are we going to know if it’s Rothstein, Fields or Premadasa we have down there.”

  “Or some tramp, guv’nor.”

  O’Nions snorted in derision at the sergeant’s remark.

  “Who accidentally cut off his own head and hands, before setting himself alight?”

  “I can maybe answer your question, Superintendent.”

  The voice drifted up from down in the pit.

  “What’s that, doctor?” O’Nions was sceptical that, if he couldn’t work out whose body it was, then some bloody pathologist would have no chance. He was confounded by the reply.

  “The body. Would it help to know that he wasn’t English. From the skin colour – where he isn’t burned, that is – I would say he was from the sub-continent. Indian, perhaps. Or Sinhalese.”

  O’Nions face coloured at the pointed nature of the doctor’s retort. He turned away into the darkness.