One Fight at a Time

by Jeff Dowson

  Nicholson was shaking his head, but Pride was on a roll.

  “We’ll put an iron gate and some barbed wire across the entrance from the road. With a big sign. PRIVATE PROPERTY, KEEP OUT. SITE AQUIRED FOR RE-DEVELOPMENT.”

  “Okay,” Nicholson said. “But what happens when people start to notice vehicles and staff coming through that gate and begin to wonder?”

  “We’ll only use it at the beginning, while we’re bringing in the generators and the stuff we need to set everything up. Two visits at most.”

  “Cleaners?...”

  “Our own blokes. Be a change for them for a couple of days. After that, once the staff are here, they’ll share the chores.”

  “And then?...”

  “Then we’ll close the place up tight. At the back of the ward, there’s a path through the woods to the road between Cleeve and Wrington. A country lane, with a bus stop about two hundred yards from the end of the path. That’s how everybody will get to work. We will have to use the front gate when we do the turnaround. Women out and in. Once every few weeks.”

  Nicholson was trying to like the idea, but he was still struggling a bit. He thought of something else to worry about.

  “Surely there’ll come a point when too many people will know about this scheme,” he suggested. “All the once pregnant mothers for a start.”

  “They’ll be footloose and fancy free,” Pride said. “Paid off and living miles away. Part of the agreement.”

  “Not one that you can enforce.”

  “But a situation we keep an eye on. Alright, it’ll end up costing more, but not much.” He paused and watched the clockwork ticking in Nicholson’s head. “Of course this is something we won’t be able to keep going. Maybe only two or three years. By which time, we’ll have enough money to close the place up and figure out something else to do with the site. It’s a win win Sam.”

  The clockwork in Nicholson’s head was winding down. Pride summed up.

  “Our clients will never know where the babies come from. The business with them will be done in an office somewhere. Your job to find one. Small and simple; no signs on the door. We’ll hand over the kids, complete with birth certificates; the clients will hand over bags full of dosh. Hell Sam, the office could be staffed, occupied and running within days. And within weeks, we could be counting the money.”

  Nicholson walked the length of the ward. Turned, paused, then walked back to Pride. Smiling.

  Now he was hooked.

  Chapter Six

  Grover found Blenheim Villas, Cumberland Road, with more ease then he had imagined. They sat facing a footbridge which crossed the river to Southville. Five small town houses, each of them with three floors, the top one apparently an attic conversion, betrayed by the small dormer windows. Grover stood on the bridge and inspected the row. And found himself considering Roly Bevan’s conception of re-build. Grover knew a thing or two about bombed buildings and fixing them up. And he had seen houses on Zimmerstrasse in better condition than Blenheim Villas. They looked like Bevan had simply put the roofs back on and tarted up the brick and stone work.

  Number 5 was at the end of the row, to Grover’s left. He crossed Cumberland Road, opened the wooden gate in front of the house and walked the half a dozen paces to the front door.

  There were three bells in an ascending row. The top bell was, to keep everything crystal clear, the Top Flat bell. Grover pressed it. Three times. Eliciting no response from the tenant. He tried the bottom bell. If there was someone in, he or she would have less far to travel to the front door. Again, there was no sound from inside the house. He pressed the middle bell and was rewarded with success. He heard someone descending the stairs. A voice called out “Coming”. Four or five seconds later, a lock clicked and the door was swung open, by a thirty something brunette with long dark hair and glasses on the end of her nose. With the thumb and third finger of her right hand, she pushed them up to the bridge of her nose and looked up into Grover’s eyes.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Grover said, “I’m looking for Nick.”

  “Top floor flat.” She pointed to the left hand side of the door frame. “It’s the top bell.”

  “Yes, I’ve pressed it. There’s no answer.”

  The woman looked Grover up and down, impressed by the uniform.

  “You’re an American,” she said.

  Grover smiled. “You know, I get that all the time,” he said.

  She smiled back. “So what do you suggest?”

  “May I come in and go upstairs and put a note under his door?”

  “I suppose there’s no harm in that.”

  She stepped back and allowed him to move past her. He set off up the stairs. She called after him.

  “Make sure you shut the front door properly on your way out.”

  At the head of the stairs, he turned one hundred and eighty degrees and walked along the landing past the woman’s flat. The door was open. A radio was playing inside the flat – the signature tune for Worker’s Playtime. The sound faded as he reached the next set of stairs and began to climb again. These stairs were narrower and less substantial than those from the hall to the first floor. They had been installed to create access to the original attic space. No oak boards or banister rail. Cheap, planed hardwood from a builder’s merchant. The door at the top of the stairs was small. Panelled pine, sawn along the top and bottom and down each side to fit the space - barely two feet wide and less than six feet high. It looked like somebody had put the door in a vice and squeezed.

  One of Roly Bevan’s best builds obviously.

  Grover turned the door handle and pushed. The door refused to open. He knew it was not locked. It was hanging out of true and jammed into the door frame space. He leaned his right shoulder against the door and pushed harder. The door opened and swung into the room. A squarish space, fifteen by fifteen, the living area immediately in front of him, at the far end, the tiny kitchen. Grover assumed that the door to the right of the kitchen, led to the bathroom. There were half a dozen pieces of furniture in the room. A single bed, small cabinets on either side of it, one of them with a lamp standing on it. A small dining table and a couple of chairs sat in front of the dormer window. In the centre of the room, a sofa was separated from the bed by a cheap, Formica covered, coffee table.

  That was all Grover took in. There was a man asleep on the sofa, lying on his back. Grover stepped closer. The man was not as he imagined the twenty-one year old Harry to be. And he was not asleep. He was dead. His throat cut.

  Grover moved closer, careful not to touch, or step on, anything which might record his presence in the room and stared down at the sofa. The man’s hands appeared to be tied behind his back. The wound in his neck was long and gaping open. His blood had leaked all over the place, obviously for some minutes. The cushion his head was resting on, was stained dark red. Bits of skin, forced away from the wound by arterial blood pressure, had stuck to the fabric.

  There were few people more experienced in dead bodies then Ed Grover. He stared at the young man for a long time. Then surveyed the room, taking everything in forensically. There was no telephone in the flat. He left the room and went down a floor.

  Rachel – the brunette with the glasses – called the police from the coin box phone by the front door and extended temporary hospitality to Grover. The conversation had not gone much beyond names and ‘what was an American was doing in Bristol?’ when a black Wolseley 6/80 pulled into the curb outside Blenheim Villas.

  The constable driving the car, PC Walker, stayed behind the wheel.

  Detective Chief Inspector Robert Bridge climbed out on to the pavement and inspected the facade of number 5. Had he voiced an opinion, it would have been close to Grover’s assessment. Detective Sergeant Tom Goole, got out of the other side of the Wolseley and claimed the moment.

  “Christ... Bevan got this patch-up scheme past the planning people did he?”

  He walked around the back of the car and joined his boss on
the pavement. Goole was light on his feet and a couple of inches shorter than Bridge. Slim, fair haired, with blue eyes, solid cheek bones and a square jaw. He had been on Bridge’s Serious Crimes Team, since his promotion from DC three years earlier. The SCT was an elite squad, based in the Bridewell at the western end of Broadmead. It was the only historic building still standing in that part of Bristol; somehow the Luftwaffe had missed it.

  “Roly Bevan has influence,” Bridge muttered. He opened the gate and walked towards the front door.

  Approaching his mid-50s, Bridge was an experienced, hard-nosed copper with a direct approach to the job of catching criminals. And he did so, with some of the best officers culled from the Bristol, Bath, Somerset and Gloucester Constabularies. All of them hand-picked and as tough as they could be moulded. He led them, with an understanding of human nature that had been absorbed through years on Bristol streets. Consequently he never spent a great deal of time puzzling and pondering. On most occasions and in most cases, he simply knew what to do and got on with doing it. And this rubbed off on the whole Serious Crimes Team. Which was just as well, because he expected no less from his subordinates than the one hundred per cent he put in. In return, he allowed this platoon of quick witted coppers to operate with as much freedom as they needed. It had worked well, so far. Bristol was developing a reputation for not having to call in detectives from Scotland Yard to deal with crimes like murder. Although the ACC was always prepared to remind Bridge that his ‘bunch of commandoes’ was constantly under review.

  Bridge stood straight and tall. Wider in the shoulders than Goole, with dark hair and dark eyes. He had a scar across the bridge of his nose and over his right eyebrow; the legacy of an encounter with a razor gang when he was young beat bobby, back in the 30s.

  Grover answered the doorbell, introduced himself and led the detectives up to the top floor. They paused outside the door to the flat.

  “It wasn’t locked,” Grover explained.

  “Does it lock?” asked Goole. “It doesn’t fit the frame.”

  “It seems Roly Bevan doesn’t spend money, if he can get away without doing so,” Grover said.

  Bridge looked at him.

  “What do you know about Roly Bevan?”

  “Only what I’ve heard.” He looked at his wrist watch. “I’ve been in the city less than two hours.”

  “Long enough, it seems, to stumble across a dead body.”

  Grover looked into Bridge’s eyes. If the detective only knew how many stumbles there had been.

  Bridge led the way into the flat, moved to the sofa and looked down at the man lying on it.

  “Who is he?”

  “I’ve no idea,” Grover said.

  Bridge turned back to him. “So what are you doing here?”

  Grover had no desire to get Harry and the Morrisons involved, but the explanation for his presence in the flat had to be the truth. So he gave the two detectives an account of his day since he left Fairford. Ended by saying that his host’s son Harry was a friend of Nick, the tenant of this flat, and he had come to see if Harry was here.

  Goole pointed to the dead man.

  “Is this him. Nick?”

  Grover shrugged.

  “Could be. I never met him.”

  “And of course, we can check all his with Mrs...” Goole flicked back a couple of pages of his notebook.

  Grover helped him out. “Mrs Morrison, yes.”

  “How do you know her?” Goole asked.

  “I met her on Good Friday 1941. The day of the big raid. A friend of mine staying in Bedminster was killed.”

  “What were you doing in England in ’41?”

  “I was in the US Eagle Squadron. You can check all of that too.”

  Suddenly Goole was embarrassed. The Eagle Squadron had been special. The American soldier they were looking at, had been over here, helping out long before the rest of his countrymen. He stopped asking questions.

  Bridge took time to scan the room. He circumnavigated the sofa, all the while, staring down at the carpet. Goole moved across to the door right of the kitchen and found the bathroom. Bridge arrived back where he had started. He asked Grover how long he was planning to be in Bristol.

  “I’m on a three day pass. I’ll be here until Wednesday evening.”

  There was the thumping tread of feet on the stairs. Bridge told Grover he could go. Grover met the forensics team on the landing. He stepped to one side as the photographer, medical examiner, fingerprints man and two uniformed officers moved past him into the flat.

  He walked down the stairs, knocked on Rachel’s door, said goodbye to her when she appeared, then continued down to the front door. Outside, he crossed the street, turned, and looked back at number 5. One question in his head.

  What the hell was he getting in to?

  Chapter Seven

  Roly Bevan had just finished reading the sports section of the Sunday Express. He shuffled the broadsheet pages back together neatly – even after reading, he hated his newspaper to be untidy – folded it and placed it on top of his desk as though it were still on the newsagents display stand. He looked down again at the front page headline.

  SENIOR CIVIL SERVANT IN BLACK MARKET SCANDAL

  The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance had accepted a case of whisky from Reg Dalton, a black marketeer and very small-time, aspiring gang leader. In return for what, it was not yet clear, but His Majesty’s employee was in the process of being publicly humiliated at the enquiry set up by Board of Trade boss Harold Wilson. The government’s success rate in the fight against black market operations was low, but here was an opportunity to demonstrate the solemn integrity in which it rejoiced.

  Bevan smiled, reached across his enormous leather topped desk, flipped open the lid of a gilt cigar box and picked up a corona. The best that only black market money could buy. He lit the cigar with a fat, gold desk lighter, sat back in his swivel chair and blew smoke rings at the ceiling.

  His office was on the floor above the bar of the Mighty Albion in Barton Street, at the western end of St Philips. A quietly run down suburb that had succeeded in being anonymous and neglected since before the outbreak of war. The sort of place from which an experienced chancer like Bevan could operate smoothly and un-noticed. Not that the interior of his office was low profile. The room was nineteen feet square. Roly had re-laid the office floor and sound-proofed it, to ensure that the noise of carousing did not reach him from the bar and saloon below. And he had filled the space with big bits of furniture. Faux Hollywood art deco. The chandelier, the sofa and the big, heavy, dark oak dresser, looked like they had been transplanted from the set of The Magnificent Ambersons. An oasis of knocked-off class in a desert of bomb craters, dirty streets and grimy pubs. Not that Roly would be seen dead living around here. His home was a regency house in Clifton. He kept his 1939 Mark V Bentley in the garage in the lane behind his house and drove to his place of business every day in a dark green 1945 Austin 10.

  All in all, allowing for a little irritation here and there, times were fine for Roly Bevan. He paid good money for his Neville Reed suits, his Oxford shirts, Burlington Arcade ties and two tone shoes – he had seen George Raft wearing a pair of Florsheims in Each Dawn I Die. He dressed to make an impression. No fifty bob tailor was coming anywhere near him with a tape measure.

  But the sweet contentment of his morning was about to go down the pan. There was a knock on the door, Bevan called out “Come in” and Patsy Halloran did so. Now in his late 50s, bald except for a fringe of close cropped grey hair ringing his head like a collar, he carried too many extra pounds for his five feet eight frame. Once a promising flyweight, too many parties while on the rise and too many drinks on the way down had left their mark. He had run up the stairs and he was out of breath.

  “Problem Boss,” he said and took in some more air, “McAllister wants to fight Langley.”

  Bevan stared at his gym manager, who took another deep breat
h.

  “Langley will murder him,” he said.

  “Mac says not.”

  “That’s because he’s over-optimistic.”

  “Boss...”

  “Langley beat Jimmy Wilson in the south west area welterweight final I know, but Wilson is too told, out of condition and way past his best.”

  “That’s right. That’s why Mac thinks he can take Langley.”

  “That’s what he thinks is it? He’s a dear boy, but he should leave whatever thinking capacity he has for the ring. Langley won’t take the fight unless it’s top of the bill. The best that Mac will get is a bout on the under card. Where he might scrape a win on points. But the purse will be tiny. He’ll be lucky if he gets twenty-five quid.”

  Halloran opened his mouth to reply. Bevan held up his hand.

  “Out of the question Pat. In the meantime, work the boy harder.”

  Halloran dropped his head, sighed and lifted it again.

  “I thought you’d say all that. So, can you come down and explain it to Mac?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake...” His morning good mood thoroughly dissipated, Bevan got to his feet. “I’ll be there in couple of a minutes.”

  Halloran left the office. Bevan stood up, crossed the room, took his jacket from the bentwood coat stand, shrugged himself into it, stood in front of the full length mirror hanging on the office door and smiled at the image looking back at him. Five feet ten and a half inches tall – the half was important – slim, lean and square shouldered. Proud of his long dark hair, he had a Denis Compton cut, immaculately Brylcream’d. The suit was his second best work day outfit; a light grey, wool, pin striped ensemble, which comprised a wide shouldered jacket, matching waistcoat and loose legged trousers with inch and a half turn-ups. He adjusted the collar of his pale blue shirt and straightened his pale yellow tie. Pulled his shirt cuffs gently from his jacket sleeves and inspected the gold cuff links inscribed with his initials. Then twisted the cuffs so that the gold studs were directly in line with his fourth fingers. He shot his jacket sleeves forwards and pulled his waistcoat down towards his hips; smiled at his reflection once again and left the office.