OxCrimes

by Peter Florence

  For the most part, though, the Old Bill weren’t up to much any more, weakened as they were by the demands of war, and Felder and his boys could outrun most of them. Young Tam was just unlucky, that was all. Even then, it could have gone much worse for him: rumours abounded that Blackie Harper over in Seven Dials had been shot by a soldier while stealing suits from a bombed-out gentleman’s outfitters but the details of the killing were hushed up for the sake of morale, it being bad enough having Germans slaughtering Londoners without our own boys giving them a helping hand. It was said, too, that Billy Hill, who was carving a reputation for himself as the leading figure in London’s criminal underworld, was very interested to know the name of the solder who had fired the fatal bullet, for Blackie Harper had been an associate of Billy’s, and good staff were hard to come by in wartime.

  But Billy Hill and his kind operated on another level from men like Felder, even if Felder aspired to greater heights. Felder, Greaves and Knight: they sounded like a firm of solicitors, but they were just bottom-feeders, scouring the dirt for food while trying to avoid being gobbled up by the bigger fish. All three, along with the unfortunate Young Tam, had been liberated by the Germans at the start of the war, when the prisons freed any man with fewer than three months left to serve, or any borstal boy with six months under his belt. Knight, Greaves and Young Tam fell under the latter category. Felder was older, and already on his third conviction for receiving stolen goods when he was released in 1939. He was spared conscription because he had lost his left eye to a catapulted stone when he was eight years old, and was careful to exaggerate the paucity of vision in his remaining organ. Young Tam, meanwhile, was mentally defective, and Knight had come over from Northern Ireland to find work in London only a few weeks before he was locked up in borstal for assault, and was therefore technically ineligible for conscription, although he hadn’t bothered to present himself to the relevant authorities in order to clarify his status. Finally, Greaves had spectacularly flat feet. All four, even Young Tam, should have been required to do civilian work under the terms of their exemption, but they did their best to remain under His Majesty’s radar, for they would not grow wealthy digging potatoes or cleaning up after the sick and dying in one of the city’s crowded hospitals. Quite the little band they were, Felder had sometimes thought: a one-eyed man, an idiot, a flatfoot and a Belfast Protestant with an accent so thick that he might as well have been speaking Swahili for all the sense he made to anyone but his closest associates. It seemed that Billy Hill, high on his throne, needed to have few concerns about them for the time being.

  And now they were three. It was a blessing, in a way, that Young Tam was no longer with them. True, he would always do as Felder told him, and he was strong, and good with his fists, but Felder’s ambitions did not allow for a mental cripple. Billy Hill had no idiots working under him, because idiots wouldn’t make a man rich. Early in the war, Hill’s gang had used a car to break into Carrington’s of Regent Street and nab six thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, a sum that boggled Felder even now. Hill was selling everything from silk to sausage skins, and it was whispered that the war had already made him a millionaire. By contrast, Felder’s biggest score had come in 1941, when he and Knight had been fortunate enough to find themselves only streets away from the Café de Paris on Coventry Street as the supposedly secure basement ballroom was blown to pieces by a pair of German bombs that descended down a ventilation shaft, killing over thirty people. Under the guise of evacuating the wounded, Felder and Knight had stripped the dead and dying of rings, watches and wallets. They’d made hundreds on that one night, but things were never as good for them again.

  Now he and Knight stood on a patch of waste ground that had once been a redbrick terrace, and stared at a house silvered by moonlight. It stood like a single jagged tooth in the ancient mouth of the street. Its survival had no logic to it, but then Felder had long ago learned that, like the mind of God, the nature of bombs was ultimately unknowable. Some hit and did not explode. Some took down one house or shop while sparing all else around, or, as the unfortunate patrons of the Café de Paris had learned, struck with an uncanny precision at the only vulnerable point in an otherwise secure structure. And then there were bombs that annihilated whole communities and left, as in this case, a single residence standing as a monument to all that once had been. The house was slightly larger than the ones that had been lost, but not unusually so: a lower-middle class house in a working-class street, perhaps. But Felder had cased it after his keen eye spotted the quality of the curtains on the windows, and a quick glance through one of the front windows had revealed what looked like original paintings on the walls, shelves of books, and, most enticing of all, a sideboard full of polished silverware. Discreet inquiries established that it was the home of a widow, Mrs Lyall, and she lived alone, her husband having departed to the next world during the final days of the last war.

  As a rule, Felder tried to avoid burgling occupied houses: it was too risky, and brought with it the likelihood of violence if one of the occupants awoke. Felder wasn’t above inflicting violence but, like any clever man, he avoided it when he could. Still, times were hard, and growing harder by the day. Despite his ambitions, Felder had resigned himself to the fact that he needed to ally himself to another for a time if he was to improve his position in life, and Billy Hill’s gang seemed to offer the best opportunities for wealth and promotion. Hill would require an offering, though, a token both of Felder’s potential and his esteem for the crime boss. That was why, after some thought, Felder had elected to cut Greaves out of the evening’s work – in fact, to cut him loose forever. Greaves was weak and slow, and too good-natured for the likes of Billy Hill. He also had principles, to the extent that he had refused to accept a cut of the Café de Paris proceeds offered to him as a gesture of goodwill by Felder, even though he had not been present on the night in question. Robbing the houses of the dead was one thing, it appeared: stripping their bodies was another. Felder had no time for such sensitivities, and he doubted that Billy Hill would either.

  Felder had a cosh in his coat pocket, Knight a knife and a homemade knuckleduster fashioned from wood embedded with screws and nuts, which he preferred to the more traditional models easily available on the street, Knight being a craftsman in his way. The weapons were only for show. Neither man anticipated much trouble from an elderly woman but the old could be stubborn and sometimes the threat of violence was required to loosen their tongues.

  Felder turned to Knight.

  ‘Ready?’

  ‘Aye.’

  And together the two men descended towards the house.

  Later, as he was dying – or rather, as one of him was dying – Felder would wonder if the house and its occupants had been waiting for him, if, perhaps, they had always been waiting for him, understanding that the laws of probability, the complex crosshatching of cause and effect, suggested his path and theirs must surely cross. He didn’t consider Knight’s part in the process. Knight did as he was told, and so Felder’s decision to target this particular widow was the moment at which the die was cast. But Knight could have made a determination of his own at any of a hundred, a thousand forks in the road between Felder’s conversation with him about the house and the moment that they entered it. After all, thought Felder, as he bled from wounds unseen, wasn’t that the old woman’s point? Not one, but many. Not infinite, but as close to infinity as made no difference to a man like Felder, especially not at that most crucial juncture of all, the line between living and dying, between existence and non-existence.

  And, yes, some small consolation might have been derived from the knowledge that this was the end for only one Felder, had it not been the end for the only Felder he had known, and would ever know.

  But all that came later. For now there was only the house, its windows hooded, like the eyes of hawks, by the ubiquitous blackout curtains. They did not enter by the front door but climbed the still-intact wall that surrounded the back g
arden and found, not entirely to their surprise, that the kitchen door was unlocked. Once inside, they saw that the tidy little kitchen, with its pine table and two chairs, was lit by a candle encased in a glass lamp, and there were similar candles in the hall, and halfway up the stairs. Beneath the stairwell was a locked door, leading down, they presumed, to a basement. They heard no sound but the ticking of an unseen clock.

  It was Knight who first noticed the patterns on the walls in the hall, taking them initially to be some strange manner of floral wallpaper and then, as he drew nearer, deciding – still erroneously – that what he was seeing was a network of cracks in the plaster, almost like the craquelure on the surface of a painting. (Knight had shared little of his background with Felder and the others. Equally, they had not troubled themselves to inquire into another man’s business if it did not concern them, especially when the man in question gave no sign that such an intrusion would give him great pleasure in any case, but Felder had come to realise that Knight knew something of art and literature, and was better educated that his thick dialect might have led one to assume. In fact, Knight came from a house filled with paintings, and a family that talked easily of abrasure and blanching, gresso and glair. Had he been privy, before he died, to the insights gifted to Felder, then he might have appreciated more the story told by the patterns on the walls.)

  Both men drew closer, Felder’s fingers reaching out to trace what was gradually revealed to be ink work on the otherwise unadorned walls of the house, an intricate design that resembled most closely the thin branches of some form of creeping briar, as though the interior had been invaded by a pestilential vegetation, its greenery now lost to the breath of winter, had it ever enjoyed foliage to begin with. The effect was further enhanced by the addition of red dots at apparently random points, like winter fruits somehow clinging to a dead bush. Beside each red sphere was a pair of initials: E.J., R.P., L.C., but never the same combination of letters twice.

  And although it was impossible to find a logic to the entirety of the tracery, it did seem to Felder and Knight that, on an individual level, its creator began with a single line which then split after an inch or so, one line continuing on to divide again while the other terminated in a horizontal dash over the vertical, like a dead end. Yet even here deviations from the norm sometimes occurred in the form of a series of dashes that, on occasion, eventually found their way back to the main thread. Similarly, numbers were appended to certain lines, which Felder took to be dates or, in particularly involved cases, hours, minutes and seconds. The designs covered the walls up to the ceiling, a few even extending on to the ceiling itself, a stepladder by the front door permitting access to such heights. They continued along the wall beside the stairs, and Felder presumed, up to the floor above their heads. The kitchen, by contrast, appeared devoid of any adornments, largely because it was barely spacious enough to accommodate its cupboards, sink and a four-ring gas cooker, until Knight, in a fit of curiosity, returned there and opened one of the doors on the wall, revealing a further network of bifurcating branches drawn, and even cut, into the interior panelling.

  Again, waiting for death – a death – to approach, Felder saw another crucial juncture here, a point in events when lives might have been saved, when both men could have turned and left the house, for although they had not yet spoken, still their shared unease was evident on their faces. Then Felder thought of Billy Hill, and a share in the wealth that the war was bringing to those ruthless enough to seize opportunities when they were offered. Hill would not have turned away in the face of such inky manifestations of madness. Instead he would have reckoned the creator more vulnerable still to his predations, and honed in on easy pickings.

  Beyond the kitchen lay a dining room, empty and dusty, with a closed pair of interconnecting doors leading to the front room. As with the hall, the walls were covered with lines.

  Only now did Felder become aware of a presence in the front room, the one in which he had earlier glimpsed the books and paintings and, most interesting of all, the glass-fronted cabinet filled with silverware. It was the merest shifting of shadow against shadow, and the slightest exhalation of breath. A chair creaked, and Felder recognised the sounds of a sleeper responding to some small disturbance, such as the unfamiliar noise created by two men entering a house that was not theirs. Footsteps shuffled on carpet. The door began to open.

  Knight reacted first. He was past Felder before the older man could even make a determination of the situation. Knight pushed hard against the door. There was a single shout – a female voice, old, querulous – and then a series of muffled impacts beneath which Felder discerned the breaking of fragile bones, like a quail being consumed behind closed lips.

  Felder entered the room to find Knight straddling an old woman on the floor, one knee on her chest, his fist raised to strike again, her eyes already assuming the strange vacancy of hurt and shock. Felder gripped Knight’s wrist before he could strike her again.

  ‘Stop!’ he said. ‘For Christ’s sake, you’ll kill her!’

  He felt the downward pull of Knight’s right hand, the urge to harm, and then the tension went out of the younger man. Knight rose slowly and wiped his hand across his face. It left a smear of the woman’s blood on his nose and cheeks. Knight rarely acted in this way, with heat and anger. He was, by nature, a cold being. Gradually, the rage went out of his eyes.

  No, not just rage, saw Felder: fear too.

  ‘I – ’ said Knight. He looked down on the old woman and shook his head. ‘I – ’ he repeated, but nothing more came to him.

  Felder knelt and gently took the woman beneath the chin, turning her head so that she was facing him. Her nose was broken, that much was clear, and her left eye was already closing. He thought that Knight might also have broken her left cheekbone, maybe even damaging the eye socket itself. Her mouth was bloodied, the upper lip split, but, as with Knight, something of her true self was now returning after the attack. Her right eye was bright. She tried to rise. Felder helped her to her feet, aided by Knight, even though the woman weighed little more than the clothing she wore, and they almost carried her to the armchair in which she had been dozing.

  ‘Get her some water,’ said Felder, ‘and a cold cloth for her injuries. Jesus.’

  Knight did as he was told. Tenderly, Felder brushed a length of grey hair back from the woman’s face and tucked it behind her right ear.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘That wasn’t meant to happen.’

  The woman didn’t respond. Her single undamaged eye merely regarded Felder with a kind of disappointment.

  Knight returned, a dripping tea towel in one hand, a cup in the other. From the right pocket of his jacket, Felder noticed, peeked a bottle of brandy. Felder reached for the cloth, but Knight paused at the door, his eye fixed on the wall in which the window lay. Felder followed his gaze. More lines, more forks, more patterns, more red, inky berries. On three sides the walls were filled with bookcases and cabinets. Only here, around the window, was there space to continue the house’s peculiar decoration.

  ‘Never mind all that,’ said Felder. ‘Give me the towel.’

  His words broke the spell, and Knight handed over the damp towel and the cup of water. Felder used the cloth to clean away some of the blood. He had hoped that its pressure might also keep some of the swelling down on the damaged eye, but when he touched the towel to the area the woman gave a pained yelp, and Felder knew that his initial suspicion had been correct: Knight had broken some of the bones in her orbital rim. Felder forced her take water, then emptied the rest on to the rug and indicated that Knight should fill the cup with brandy instead. Knight opened the bottle, took a long draught for himself, and then poured two fingers of brandy into the cup. Felder made the woman drink once more, and used the cloth to wipe away the trickle that dribbled down her chin.

  ‘It’ll help,’ he said.

  He hooked her hand around the cup. Her respiration was shallow, as though it pained her to tak
e deep breaths. Felder saw again Knight’s left knee buried in the woman’s tiny, flat chest. He held his hand over the spot, not wanting to touch her breast.

  ‘Does it hurt here?’ he asked.

  She gave a small nod. Felder looked away.

  ‘You should go,’ said the old woman. She spoke the words on an exhalation, wheezing them out.

  ‘What?’ said Felder.

  ‘You should go. They won’t like it.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You told me that she lived alone!’ said Knight. A clean blade appeared in his hand, extending itself like tempered moonlight.

  ‘Shut up,’ said Felder, his attention fixed on the woman. ‘Who?’ he asked again, but she did not reply, and her right eye flicked away from him to the bookshelves over the fireplace.

  Felder stood. He turned to Knight.

  ‘If anyone else lived here we’d have heard from them by now, with all that racket you made,’ he said. ‘Still, search the house. We’re in this now, and we may as well milk it for all we can. Jewellery, money, you know the drill.’

  ‘Why don’t you ask her where she keeps it all?’

  ‘Have you seen the size of this house? It’s not Buckingham Palace. There can’t be more than a few rooms upstairs.’

  ‘I know, but – ’

  ‘Maybe you want to hit her again, see if you can kill her this time.’

  Knight looked away.

  ‘What are you going to do?’ he asked.