The Garden Party

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘It probably wouldn’t be a good idea, really, but it’s your call,’ Penny Yewdall replied, as a young mother, beaming with pride, approached from the opposite direction pushing a pram. She and Sandra Barnes smiled warmly at the woman who returned their smiles.

  ‘At night they burnt the two bodies.’ Sandra Barnes carried on with her story, seemingly, thought Penny Yewdall, finding it easier to talk after her initial reluctance. ‘That smell . . . so sickly sweet . . . I’ll never forget it; the smell that burning flesh makes is horrible . . . the way the bodies twisted in the flames.’

  ‘You saw that!’

  ‘They made us watch it, all in a line. They made us line up to watch the murders and they made us line up to watch the cremation. Some of the girls fainted at the cremation as well. I didn’t; I kept telling myself that at least they’re dead, not feeling anything. And the following day . . .’ Sandra Barnes added, ‘they did it all again.’

  ‘More victims?’

  ‘No, no, I mean that they built another fire and a guy they called “The Butcher”, he cut the charred bodies with a saw and a machete and put the bits on the second fire. They used coal to build the second fire for some reason, probably because it produces more heat than wood produces. But in the morning after the second fire there were just bones in the ash, no flesh at all, and the bones were put in a big cardboard box and given to a gofer, and The Butcher said, “You know what to do with them?” and the gofer says, “Yes, Mr Harley.”’

  ‘Mr Harley?’ Penny Yewdall queried.

  ‘Yes,’ Sandra Barnes replied confidently. ‘It was “Yes, Mr Harley.” I had, I still have a friend with that surname so I remembered it, it registered, “Yes, Mr Harley.”’

  ‘Mr Harley,’ Penny Yewdall repeated. ‘So The Butcher was called Harley. That is very useful. Did you get to know any of the other girls?’

  ‘Chatted to a few, but really only got to know one; she was a hard street girl on the outside but lovely on the inside. She had been brought there with the other street girls on the coach with the promise of two hundred pounds for one night’s work.’

  ‘Do you remember her name?’

  ‘Elizabeth Petty. She was known as “Long Liz”. We came to be quite pally, but just for the duration of the party. A really tall girl, over six feet, and she was a bit of a history lesson,’ Sandra Barnes added.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well you see one of Jack the Ripper’s victims was also called Long Liz.’

  ‘Yes, I seem to remember that, “Long Liz” Stride, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sandra Barnes nodded. ‘“Long Liz” Stride and she was all of five feet seven inches tall. Poor diet, no sun getting through the smoke over East London in the 1880s meant that the people were short, so short that someone who stood five feet seven inches tall was called Long Liz because of her height. But in the early twenty-first century a girl from the East End has to stand in excess of six feet to earn a nickname like Long Liz, so we are larger and taller and healthier.’

  ‘A history lesson, as you say,’ Penny Yewdall agreed, smiling. ‘We learn something every day.’

  ‘Indeed, Long Liz was a tall East End girl with no qualifications, she took a few wrong turns, accumulated a few petty convictions . . . so she ended up on the street; just a basically good girl trying to survive.’

  ‘“Long Liz” Petty,’ Penny Yewdall repeated, committing the name to memory. ‘Interesting name.’

  ‘So . . .’ Sandra Barnes once again looked down at the pathway upon which she and Penny Yewdall were walking; it consisted of plain black asphalt mixed with grit to create a harder-wearing surface. ‘So, the party continued but the men were flagging by then and the two murders had put a real damper on things.’

  ‘I’ll bet.’ Penny Yewdall sighed.

  ‘Yes, I think by then that the men just wanted to get back to their manor and get up to the pub. A weekend of it would have been sufficient for most of the men, if not all,’ Sandra Barnes added, ‘but a week, a whole week of readily available young females . . . all those naked bodies, it just stopped getting exciting for them and started to get tedious; but Snakebite was adamant that it was Arnie Rainbird’s coming out party, like he was a debutante or something, and so it was going to last the long week, including two weekends. He wanted it his way and he always got it his way, and so it went on until the second Sunday afternoon when the old woman unlocked the room where all our kit was stored and handed out the plastic bags, and we passed them round amongst us until we found the bag with our own clothes in it. When we were all good and presentable we were told to get back on the bus. I sat with Long Liz on the journey back but we didn’t talk, no one did; the journey was undertaken in utter silence. I mean utter and complete silence. It was as if we were all dazed. Anyway . . .’ Sandra Barnes paused, ‘getting to the end of the tale now.’

  ‘You’ve done very well,’ Penny Yewdall replied warmly, ‘very well indeed.’

  ‘Thanks. It’s not been easy but it’s been good to talk about it. Sometimes you have to talk about things . . . Well –’ Sandra Barnes looked down, took a deep breath, and paused before she continued to relate her experience at the garden party – ‘we were dropped off at High Barnet tube station and all the street girls and also the five play babes were given an envelope each . . . containing fifty pounds, but written on the front of the envelope was the name and address of each one of us. I mean, they called out the name on each envelope and when a girl put her hand up the old woman handed the envelope to her. You see, at some point during the week the older woman must have been through the plastic bags containing our clothing and handbags and had noted the identity of each of us, including our address, and my envelope had my parents’ address up here in Chesterfield, not the address that Tony Sudbury had installed me in as his plaything.’

  ‘Oh . . .’ Penny Yewdall groaned, ‘oh my. So they were telling you that they knew your identity and address?’

  ‘Yes.’ Sandra Barnes took another deep breath. ‘Just telling us, all of us, not to go to the police, and no one complained because just then life had become very, very precious. Very precious indeed.’

  ‘I know that emotion,’ Penny Yewdall replied.

  ‘Do you?’

  ‘Yes,’ Penny Yewdall said firmly, ‘yes, I do . . . but that’s another story.’

  ‘So there we were in a bus outside High Barnet Underground Station receiving fifty quid in really cheap brown envelopes and nobody made any kind of complaint or comment. We had seen two men murdered in a horrible way, been made to watch the way their bodies had been disposed of, two women had been battered half to death – I still had a black eye from the slap the older woman gave me a week earlier. We had all been used in every way that a man can use a woman. After that the one hundred and fifty pounds we had, or the street girls had, been short-changed by was like a penny on the pavement – it just wasn’t worth stopping to pick it up. Even before we got to High Barnet I was thinking, did it really happen? At the tube station we just wanted to get off the bus; life, like I said, had just become so very, very precious.’ Sandra Barnes walked a few paces before continuing. ‘When we got off the bus, the girls just went either of two ways: about half went down the inclined path to the tube station and the rest, me being one, waited for the next London Transport bus to take us into the city. Liz, Long Liz, went down the path to the tube station and that was the last I saw of her. No one talked while we were waiting for the bus and we stood well apart from each other. When the double-decker number 134 came we did the same, just sat well apart from each other.’

  ‘I can understand that,’ Penny Yewdall replied. ‘I mean, you represented a reminder of a horrible event for each other, didn’t you? What did you do then?’

  ‘Returned to the flat in Earl’s Court, I did that journey in the T-shirt, cut-down jeans and shoes with no socks, and spent just one more night there, packed my bags, posted my resignation of my job, got a train north. I buried the memory of the garden p
arty for a year or two and then it returned piecemeal; sometimes when I can’t sleep the memory floods into my mind, like a film which just keeps repeating itself over and over and over again.’

  ‘Would you make a statement?’ Penny Yewdall asked.

  ‘No. No. No . . .’ Sandra Barnes shook her head vigorously. ‘No statement. I’ll help all I can, off the record, but these people have my parents’ address, and so they can find me easily enough. I can’t go into witness protection; my husband is well settled in his career. I am now Mrs Sandra Wynstanley. I like my name, it has a certain ring to it . . . and my daughters are well settled in their school. So, sorry. No written and signed statement. No verbal evidence in the witness box.’

  ‘Police!’ Big-boned, bearded Frankie Brunnie spoke authoritatively into the intercom which was attached to the solid wooden gate which stood at the bottom of the driveway separating Johnnie ‘Snakebite’ Herron’s house from the public highway.

  ‘What’s it about this time?’ The replying voice was gruff, moaning, hostile. ‘You’re harassing me. You got nothing better to do?’

  ‘Just a few questions, Mr Herron,’ Brunnie replied in a deliberately calm, though still very seriously toned voice. ‘It’s nothing to be alarmed about, just a routine visit.’ He stood upright and he and Victor Swannell surveyed the scene about them. It was indeed as Penny Yewdall had said Charlie Magg had described it: a long, straight, roughly surfaced – almost cratered in places – driveway ran between two fields used for grazing cattle and was strongly fenced at either side. At the top of the ground a long, wide mound of soil, grass covered, went from left to right; behind it were to be seen the bright red tiles of a recently built house, though the house itself was hidden from view.

  ‘Wait.’ The voice leapt out of the intercom. ‘I’ll get the dogs in . . . just a couple of minutes.’

  Frankie Brunnie bent down so his mouth was close to the intercom. ‘We can wait, we are not going anywhere.’ He stood upright again and he and Swannell waited in silence, both men enjoying the escape from inner London, both savouring the vast expanse of green, the rural smells and scents, the birdsong and the occasional fluttering butterfly. It was, they both found, a pleasant excursion to the house of Herron in Bedfordshire. For famed London Town is, they had both learnt to accept, overcrowded, dirty and malodorous. Presently the male voice once again leapt from the intercom. ‘All right,’ he said with a clear note of resignation. ‘You can come in now; the gate will open and close by itself.’ The gate then clicked open upon being released from its locked position and swung wide silently. Brunnie and Swannell returned to their car and then drove through the gateway and up the unevenly surfaced driveway. As he drove, Swannell saw in the rear-view mirror that the gate was closing behind them, clearly responding to a timing mechanism. He drove slowly until he reached the top of the drive and turned left into a forecourt, which was indeed large enough to accommodate a coach and a number of other cars, in front of a two storey house, which appeared to be about twenty years old. Swannell parked the police car beside a blood-red Ferrari, beyond which was a black two-seater Audi. The front door of the house was open as the officers arrived and in the doorway stood a tall, well-built man. He had long, silver hair which he wore in a ponytail; he was clean-shaven with a pinched face and cold, piercing eyes. He had, thought both Brunnie and Swannell, ‘criminal’ written all the way through him like a stick of Clacton rock. A small King Charles spaniel sat at his feet, then, upon the approach of the officers’ car, stood and barked aggressively.

  ‘Not the sort of dog or dogs we were expecting,’ Swannell remarked as he and Brunnie got out of their car, though he did so with a smile.

  ‘The Dobermanns are in the cage,’ the man replied aggressively. ‘He does for the house. The Dobermanns are for the grounds. So what do you want?’

  ‘Just a chat and a little information,’ Frankie Brunnie replied as he and Swannell approached the man. ‘You are Mr John Herron?’

  ‘Yes,’ the man snarled, ‘that’s me.’

  ‘The owner of this property?’

  ‘Yes.’ Herron hissed his reply through clenched teeth. ‘So what is it you want?’

  ‘A few answers to a few questions,’ Swannell replied, still smiling. ‘Questions about yourself, this house, the goings on in this house and in the garden at the back of the house.’

  ‘Goings on?’ Herron seemed alarmed. ‘There’s no goings on in this house.’

  ‘Nothing to worry about then is there?’ Swannell approached Herron. ‘Do you chat here on the front step, or inside?’

  ‘Here,’ Herron replied, then pushed the spaniel with his foot and said, ‘Quiet!’ He turned to Swannell. ‘It’s a good day. Here will do.’

  ‘You know, Johnnie,’ Brunnie said. ‘You don’t mind if we call you Johnnie . . .? You know, Johnnie, folks who don’t invite us into their homes make us suspicious because we always think it means they have got something to hide.’

  ‘It makes us want to come back mob-handed, search warrants and all. And we like doing that.’ Swannell added.

  ‘We open every cupboard, open every drawer, pull up the carpets . . . all that number,’ Brunnie added. ‘But you know that, you’ve been served a search warrant before now.’

  Herron breathed deeply, clearly fighting to contain his anger. ‘You’ll have done your checks.’

  ‘All criminal records checks done, mate,’ Swannell replied. ‘The Bedfordshire Police know you . . . in fact, they are very interested in you . . . and also the Metropolitan Police.’

  ‘That’s us,’ Brunnie smiled.

  ‘You’re from the Met?’ Herron spoke sharply with a clear note of alarm in his voice.

  ‘Yes, all the way from New Scotland Yard via the Bedfordshire Police in Luton, just to see you.’ Swannell stood square on to Herron. ‘Nice day for it.’

  ‘So you’ll know I am not wanted for anything.’ Herron’s breath smelled of mouthwash. ‘I’ve done no crookin’ for years.’

  ‘That we know of,’ Swannell replied. ‘So what have you been doing in order to be able to afford a pile of bricks like this?’

  ‘This and that.’ Herron avoided eye contact with both officers. ‘Mostly that.’ Then he stepped aside. ‘You’d better come in; I can do without a revisit. Hope you’ll see and hear what you want and leave me in peace. I just want a quiet life.’

  Swannell and Brunnie stepped over the threshold and into the entrance hall of the house which they saw was wide, well illuminated with natural light, and spacious. A slender, auburn-haired woman, dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and much younger than Herron, appeared from a corridor to the right of the foyer and upon receiving a glare from Herron, turned and went back the way she had come, rapidly so.

  ‘That was the trouble and strife,’ Herron announced dismissively. ‘The third.’ Swannell watched the woman leave the entrance hall noting how frightened she seemed.

  Herron glanced at Swannell in the exact manner he had glared at his wife. Then he said, ‘This way, please.’ He led Swannell and Brunnie into a vast, to their eyes, and garishly decorated, to their taste, living room. The floor was covered by a yellow carpet neatly fitted to each wall, the walls were papered in yellow patterned wallpaper, the ceiling was painted a light shade of blue. The furniture was a matching set of white settees and armchairs. A glass-covered coffee table interrupted the floor space. The wide window looked out on to the back lawn of the house; a huge lawn surrounded by Leylandii reaching upwards for perhaps twenty-five feet. An outdoor swimming pool and barbecue area were also noted by the officers. ‘So you have questions?’ Herron sat on a chair but kept Swannell and Brunnie standing.

  ‘It’s about Arnie Rainbird,’ Swannell announced. ‘You know Arnie Rainbird?’

  ‘Arnie? Yes, I know Arnie, haven’t seen him for years, but yes, I know Arnie, course I know Arnie; we go back a long, long way. He’s retired, just an old blagger put out to grass same as me; we both enjoy the quiet life now so a visit from the
Old Bill puzzles me.’

  ‘I dare say it would,’ Swannell smiled. He, like Brunnie, was tall but he was of a slighter, thinner build and smartly dressed, an observer might think, in a lightweight summer suit. ‘It’s actually not just about Arnie Rainbird, Johnnie, it’s also about a felon called Sydney Tyrell. Remember him, Johnnie; tall, old geezer?’

  ‘And it’s also about a short geezer called Leonard Convers,’ Brunnie added.

  ‘Tyrell, Convers.’ Herron pursed his lips and shook his head. ‘Can’t say I know them . . . now or ever.’

  ‘Really? You see we think you might know them,’ Swannell pressed forward. ‘You’ll have read about the bones?’

  ‘The bones?’

  ‘Found in a wood up in Ilford. It made the news, we got good press coverage. They were buried in a wood.’

  ‘Yes . . . that . . .’ Johnnie ‘Snakebite’ Herron pointed to a plasma TV screen mounted on the wall opposite the window. ‘Yes, I did catch that item, didn’t pay it much attention though.’

  ‘Shame, because those were the bones of Tyrell and Convers, they were their earthly remains.’

  Herron’s jaw slackened, his eyes dilated, slightly but nonetheless noticeably. It was, thought Brunnie and Swannell, an interesting and noteworthy reaction. ‘So what has that got to do with me and Arnie Rainbird?’

  ‘Ah.’ Swannell smiled. ‘That is the question; we are here in order to ask you to help us to answer just that question. You see, you and Arnie were in the same firm at about the time that Convers and Tyrell got chilled . . . then heated up in a sense.’

  ‘We were?’

  ‘Yes,’ Brunnie replied, ‘and Tyrell and Convers, we don’t know how they fitted in, if they fitted in at all, but we do believe they were gofers, a pair of low grades.’

  ‘Well that explains it.’ Herron smiled. ‘Always a lot of gofers, always a lot of them, can’t be expected to know them all.’