The one thing he hadn’t told me was that Jack Notyre’s other name was Tony Mancini and for six weeks he’d been carting around in a trunk the corpse of Violette Kay. Violette Kay, the woman I’d once seen dancing as one half of Kaye and Kaye on the Palace Pier and again as Mrs Saunders in the Skylark.
THIRTY-FIVE
Victor Tempest exercise book three
There had been a lot going on I didn’t know about — or maybe didn’t want to know about. For instance, whenever I’d seen Charteris in Brighton he’d been living with Notyre/Mancini and Violette Kay. The last time, after he’d killed Violette, Notyre had moved another woman in for a bit — the waitress from the Skylark. On that occasion, Charteris stayed with Notyre nearly a month with the poor dead woman in an increasingly smelly trunk at the bottom of the bed.
Charteris and Notyre had met in prison in July 1931. Charteris was in for a month for stealing. Notyre was in for three months for loitering with intent in Birmingham. They palled up in London on and off over the next couple of years.
The police questioned Notyre about Violette Kay on Friday 13th July in connection with the murder victim found in the left-luggage office at the station. At the time he said she’d gone away and because she was not in the age range specified by the pathologist who’d examined the torso we’d let him go. But somebody must have been suspicious — or Notyre thought they were — because on that Sunday 15th July he did a runner.
First, he and Charteris went dancing until the early hours, then on to an all-night restaurant. They went back to the flat for a couple of hours until at 4.30 they returned to the all-night restaurant. Charteris walked with Notyre to Preston Park — they thought the police would be watching Brighton central station — and put him on the first train to London.
‘You were in Brighton on the tenth of May,’ I said to Charteris, in his formal interview in the Royal Pavilion. ‘Where were you staying then?’
He looked shifty.
‘I was staying with Jack — but not that night.’
‘Just as well or you’d have been sharing a bed with a corpse. Where were you?’
‘I was at the Grand with the Galloping Major. When I got back the next day, Jack had this big black trunk and said he was packed and ready to move. Said that Violette had buggered off with a bookie. I went and hired a trolley for a couple of pence and helped him wheel it up to his new place. The trunk weighed a bloody ton. He said he had crockery and stuff in it and I had no reason to disbelieve him. I didn’t know I was carting Violette around.’
Charteris had always been a plausible liar so I didn’t know how much he knew about the murder. Certainly he had a good alibi for the murder itself — he would have had to be a pretty cool customer if he’d helped earlier in the day, then gone to the Blackshirt meeting at the Pavilion in the evening.
Early in 1935 I left the police. A combination of things. My bosses didn’t like the relationship I’d had with the press. And word had got back I’d been with the Blackshirts at Olympia. They didn’t seem to know about Philip Simpson and I didn’t say. It was ironic that I’d been thinking of quitting the BUF yet my membership had lost me my job.
I’d been hesitating because I’d been impressed that Mosley had set up a youth movement that was a bit like the Boy Scouts — Baden-Powell was a fascist sympathizer, of course. There was a lot of paraphernalia — uniforms, badges, saluting, flags — but the idea was a good one.
I went up to Chelsea for a meeting with Joyce and Knowles.
‘I’m ready to move up. Is there anything for me?’
Knowles picked up a sheet of paper.
‘You’re from Lancashire, yes?’
‘My family is.’
‘You still have family there?’
‘Not who speak to me.’
I think my mother’s father was still alive but we didn’t have anything to do with him.
‘We’ve got a problem up there. Last week a group of our members in Colne overheard a bunch of men talking in a foreign language. Someone told our members these foreigners were learning about cotton so they could go back home and set up in competition. Defending cotton is one of our main aims. Our members attacked the foreigners. Beat them perhaps too enthusiastically. And then we discovered the foreigners were a bunch of Esperantists from Burnley and Bacup, in Colne to celebrate the opening of their new premises.’
I burst out laughing. Joyce and Knowles both gave me fierce looks.
‘You have to admit-’ I started to say, then stopped when Joyce gave me a warning look. ‘That wouldn’t happen under my command,’ I said more soberly. ‘I’ve been a policeman. I know how to assess situations.’
‘The BUF official policy is against chain stores and in favour of local shopkeepers. A number of chain stores are moving into those northern towns. That and cotton must be our focus.’
Joyce leaned forward, his hands clasped.
‘Are you up to it? Will you help us revolt against the united muttons of the old gangs of British politics?’
Two weeks later I was back in the town of my ancestors. My district stretched across through Accrington and Burnley to Nelson and Colne. I found the BUF were popular in the north-west because of that history of individualism that came out of Methodism decades before. The Tories usually got a lot of working-class votes and even the unions were conservative. The cotton manufacturers were major contributors.
But the set-up was a bit of a joke in my area. My second-in-command was the head of the woman’s unit, Nellie Driver. First thing she said to me was: ‘A God-fearing non-boozer can thread ten needles whilst the boozer is still trying to pick the needle up.’
She complained all the time that nobody saluted her with a ‘Hail Nellie’ when they saw her. Nellie moaned that in Nelson they had to share premises with a spiritualist group doing shell and photograph seances. The spiritualists kept putting their notices over the Blackshirt ones on the joint noticeboard — and wouldn’t let them use the sink.
The Blackshirts were the biggest load of misfits you could imagine. Crooks, faddists, Mormons, pacifists, Christadelphians, antivivisectionists. None of them would go out on the street selling our newspaper because they didn’t want anyone to know they were members and they were frightened of getting beaten up by the Reds.
One bloke who worked on a lathe in a factory offered to knock off some knuckledusters from odd scraps of brass or some other hard metal. The north-west was tough in those days. My uncle had been kicked to death in a drunken brawl with some Irish navvies outside a pub in Burnley back in 1922. An argument, the newspapers called it. Some bloody argument. The papers blamed the number of pubs in Burnley for the violence — there were fifty-six licensed houses within three hundred yards of the market hall.
There were fights every night. Fists, feet and broken glasses. If you went down, it was all over. Weavers, colliery workers and navvies all fought in their clogs. They had wooden soles, shod with iron. If you were on the dole and had no money, you shod your clogs with bits of old car tyres cut to shape.
I couldn’t stay in this job. I realized I’d made a mistake when a few weeks later, in March 1935, the word came about a change of emphasis in our message. We were told to give more prominence to the question of the Big Jew and the Little Jew. Jews had always been prominent among those disrupting Blackshirt meetings. The memorandum insisted it was not about race, it was about nationality. Some Jews were acting against the British national interest through their role in international finance. They were in fact an ‘alien menace’.
I have my faults but anti-Semitism isn’t one of them. And it was clear Mosley had taken this decision to appeal to the worst kind of bigots, although anti-Semitism was rife in his class as a matter of course. I didn’t think it would wash in the north-west. Not so much because the folk were particularly tolerant, just that there were hardly any Jews around, except in Manchester.
Was picking on people really ‘the steel creed of the iron age’?
I went down
to London to give my notice in person. I wasn’t sure what exactly I was going to do with my life but I couldn’t in all conscience do this.
Just before I left, I had a strange encounter in a butcher’s shop in Clayton, over Bradford way. The butchers were called Pierrepoint and the open secret was that three of them had another job. Hangmen. Henry and then his brother Tom were both Official Executioners as a sideline. Henry had not long ago been fired for turning up drunk in Chelmsford and fighting with his assistant. Tom had taken over.
Then Henry’s son, Albert, had applied. They were all non-descript but Albert was a very quiet one. He was an assistant first, in 1931, and told me he was looking forward to being in charge. He said this while wearing a bloodstained white coat with cuts of meat in trays before him, skinned pigs and legs of lamb hanging on steel hooks behind him.
People remain a mystery to me.
I got in to see William Joyce back in London. His office was bedecked with BUF flags. He looked up from behind a long polished desk and didn’t ask me to sit down. He listened but shook his head throughout my little speech.
‘As you wish,’ was all he said at the end, returning to his work.
As I was standing on the pavement outside, wondering where to go next, Martin Charteris came down the steps behind me in his civvies with Tony Frederick, the former music hall performer.
‘What are you doing here?’ I said to Frederick.
He pointed at the camera slung round his neck.
‘I live here now. I’m the official photographer for the BUF.’
He excused himself and strutted off down the street. I watched him go, then turned to Charteris.
‘You here to see the Galloping Major, then?’ I said.
‘Nah, I work here too. I’m head office now. You got time for a drink?’
‘I’ve got nothing but time. How’s your friend Tony Mancini?’
Mancini/Notyre had got off his murder charge thanks to his cunning barrister, Norman Birkett.
Charteris laughed at that.
‘You’ll see.’
We walked across St James’s Park. Charteris stopped me at one point and indicated the bushes beside the lake.
‘I’ve spent a lot of time in those bushes with guards from the barracks across the road in St James’s Palace. Do you fancy a quick one?’
I looked at the big grin on his face.
‘Not my thing, Charteris. You know that.’
He laughed again and led the way across to Piccadilly, then over into Soho.
‘You can tell me now, Charteris,’ I said at one point. ‘Did you help stuff her in the trunk?’
He didn’t say anything, just winked.
He took me along Wardour Street. We turned into a gloomy hallway with a cramped set of stairs ahead of us. On the right was a solid-looking door. He swung it open and ushered me in.
THIRTY-SIX
Victor Tempest exercise book four
The club was as rough as they come. The floor was sticky from years of spilled beer and worse. The room smelled of stale booze, disinfectant, tobacco and sweat.
The pugnacious-looking men playing billiards at the two beaten-up tables paused to watch our progress to the bar. Other men sat around bar tables littered with cards and dominoes, their heads haloed with smoke from the cigarettes clamped between their teeth.
A tough customer at the bar turned at our approach. About five feet ten, broad-shouldered, hard eyes.
‘Martin — always a pleasure.’ He glanced at me. ‘You’re bringing the law here?’
‘Ex-law,’ I said.
‘He’s one of us, Baby, one of us,’ Charteris said, his smile nervous. He turned to me. ‘Don, I’d like you to meet Tony Mancini.’
The man nodded. I looked at Charteris.
‘What are you playing at? I’ve met Tony Mancini and this isn’t him.’
The man at the bar grimaced.
‘You met Cecil England. Also known as Jack Notyre. He nicked my fucking name and my reputation.’ He stuck his chest out. ‘Trust me — I am the one and the only Tony Mancini. “Baby” to my friends.’ He put a grotesque expression on his face. ‘On account of I look so angelic.’
He stuck out his hand. I took it and he tried to crush mine. Then he looked over my shoulder. I glanced back to the door. Eric Knowles was loitering there. He nodded and disappeared up the stairs.
Mancini let go of my hand.
‘Excuse me,’ he said. ‘Duty calls.’ He looked over at the barman. ‘Get these gents whatever they want.’
He followed Knowles up the stairs and I looked at Charteris.
‘What’s going on? Did you see who just turned up?’
‘Business in common. The Big Jew and the Little Jew. Baby is having trouble with the Little Jew — kike gangsters who run half of Soho. Except the BUF is going to come to some arrangement.’
I looked around.
‘With Italian hoodlums.’
‘Don’t be such a snob, Don. We all want the same thing in the end. Self-betterment.’
I took a sip of my drink.
‘What’s the story on Baby?’
‘Ha — well, there’s a weird thing about him and the Trunk Murder-’
But I didn’t hear what it was. What I heard instead was the hurried, heavy tread of half a dozen policemen who burst into the room a moment later.
‘Police raid!’
The barman was already out of a door behind the bar and Charteris and I were right behind him. Charteris went left, I went right and that’s the last I ever saw of him.
I went back to Wardour Street in 1942 with some mates on leave. The bar was still there but Baby Mancini wasn’t. In October 1941 he’d gone to the gallows for the murder of a Jewish gangster in a brawl in the club upstairs.
THIRTY-SEVEN
Victor Tempest exercise book four cont.
At the outbreak of the war I’d immediately volunteered. I’d enlisted as Victor Tempest. I’m not quite sure why — perhaps because the name sounded heroic. I felt prepared, but the violence I’d witnessed in the police and in the Blackshirts had not prepared me for the dreadful reality. I was taught how to kill in commando training but it still seemed like a game at which I could excel. Detached, I did well in training, keeping a cool head in the most heated of simulated situations. With secret masculine pride, I thought I would make an efficient killer. Until I tried to kill for the first time.
I was with a group of partisans in Greece. We decided to wait in ambush by the side of a narrow road between the German barracks and the nearby village where the soldiers drank. It was night. Six German infantrymen approached. They were armed but they had been drinking all evening and were off their guard. They had no idea there were partisans in the area.
We couldn’t afford to attract the attention of the rest of the garrison so we had knives and garrottes. We waited in bushes as the infantrymen, talking loudly, drew nearer. Two of the soldiers were trailing behind the others. These were the targets for me and a scraggy teenager called Mikos.
The other soldiers went by. It was a bright moonlit night and I could see them clearly. Young, open-faced men. One of them was chuckling as he told a story about his sister’s wedding day. (I was by that stage of my life proficient in German.) Another was wearing steel-rimmed spectacles. My senses quivered. I could smell the alcohol on their breath as they passed by. I felt I could hear their hearts beating.
Cicadas rasped in the long grass. I waited for the two who were trailing to draw level. Slender young men with cropped blond hair. They were discussing poetry. When they were within five yards of my hiding place, one of them looked up at the stars and quoted a poem by Rilke that I knew well.
The moment they passed, Mikos ran out, wrapped his hand round the mouth of the nearest one and drew his knife across his throat. The soldier who had quoted Rilke stood stock still, open-mouthed in surprise. The partisans jumped out at the other soldiers. For a moment I was unable to move, then I too dashed on to the road. I rea
ched the young soldier, whipping the wire garrotte up and round his neck.
Almost in slow motion, the soldier raised his arm to ward me off. I stepped behind him to tighten the garrotte as I’d done many times in training. I twisted the wooden ends. His hand was caught between the wire and his neck. I was bigger and stronger. I twisted harder, felt the wire cut deep into the hand. A terrible gurgling noise came from the soldier’s throat.
I looked down into my victim’s twisted face. For a long moment our eyes met. I could see the pleading and the terror. I couldn’t look away as I tightened the garrotte another turn. I held him off balance, cradling his head.
The soldier was scrabbling desperately at my leg with his free hand. Blood was running in huge gouts down his trapped hand. I noticed the long fingers and wondered absurdly if the young man was a pianist as well as a lover of poetry. I was thinking that this wasn’t going to work. I would never get through the hand so that the wire could do its job on the neck.
Mikos came up in front of us. He moved close and thrust his knife up beneath the ribs of the soldier. I saw the terror go from his eyes and then watched them slide back to look again at the stars — athough I knew the man was already dead, had felt his dying exhalation softly brush my cheek.
Later, I casually mentioned that I had heard the German Mikos had killed quoting poetry. Mikos, who was desperate to grow a moustache but was not yet old enough to produce more than straggly whiskers, stroked his top lip. He was illiterate but he wasn’t stupid.
‘Would it have been easier if he had been a peasant like me?’
And the answer was, yes, it would have been. But that was before I learned people could weep at the beauty of Beethoven’s music in the evening after a day shovelling fellow human beings into ovens.
In London, on a brief leave three months later, I fell into conversation with a fellow commando in our club bar. We didn’t swap names but he was an Irish fellow from south of the border. A literary man. We spent an intense couple of hours trying to get at it until he said:
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