One Fight at a Time

by Jeff Dowson

  Now Mel spoke.

  “Have you wondered if you’re too close to all this?”

  Grover turned to face her. “Too close. How can I possibly be too close?”

  “Alright. Let me ask that question another way. What is driving your need to do this?”

  “Need?”

  “That’s what I said. You shouldn’t be here. You should be thousands of miles away.”

  Grover moved back to his chair and sat down again. He looked at Mel on the other side of the table.

  “I’m here by force of circumstances. In the same way I was in Normandy. In Berlin. But...”

  He stopped. Mel waited again, giving him time. He pulled his thoughts together.

  “I have killed countless men. Deliberately. Sometimes under orders, sometimes in anger, sometimes in fear. Sometimes in a state which came close to madness probably. And, in the end, it became routine. It was just what I did. Me and a whole bunch of buddies. Day by day, for a year. Berlin was a god awful place, a stink hole, a charnel house. Smelling of rubble, dust and death – like the morning I stood in the ruins of the Rex cinema. Corpses turned up all over Berlin. This time, people I didn’t kill. And in the end that became much harder to deal with. Before, we were on a mission. Now we were tidying up. And it was truly, heartbreakingly desperate.”

  He took a deep breath, then looked directly in to Mel’s eyes.

  “There was a girl in a rain-soaked alleyway. Fifteen, maybe sixteen years old. Killed probably, over a couple of lumps of coal, a handful of potatoes, or a loaf of bread. Because she was trying to get by. In a place where the misery just went on and on. You mentioned ‘need’. Well, in that moment I needed to do something. I needed to know all about that girl. I needed to find someone to mourn for her.”

  “And did you?”

  “No. I was transferred to another part of the city, so that I wouldn’t.”

  Grover paused. Mel waited.

  “Then there was Nicholas Hope. Another body I stumbled over. And like the girl in the alley, maybe, in his own way, he was just trying to get by too.”

  “This is different surely.”

  Grover shook his head.

  “Doesn’t feel like it. Yes, this is a different place and time. But it feels the same. Another murder on my watch, if you see what I mean.”

  He sat back in his chair. Finished. Mel chose carefully what she wanted to say next.

  “Ed, we’re getting somewhere with this. It’s unravelling. Slowly. And Mark Chaplin has come out of the woodwork. A relationship that Harry has kept very low key.”

  Grover responded. “So why would Chaplin come visiting and risk meeting us all?”

  “Because Harry was doing as he was ordered,” Mel said. “Staying at home. And because they had to talk. About something which Harry, Chaplin and the Punch and Judy man are determined not to share.”

  “So we find out what that is and we make a huge step forward?”

  “That’s a fair assumption, yes.”

  Grover looked across the table at Mel, the portrait of Gabriel Fincher, founder of the firm, on the wall behind her. She smiled, then looked beyond Grover, to the clock on the wall. 6.15.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” she said. “It’s my father’s birthday. And we’re all going out to celebrate.”

  “All?”

  “Parents, grandparents, two brothers, one sister, an uncle and aunt and two cousins.” Mel stood up. “Stay here and finish the biscuits.”

  Grover watched her leave and close the door. He began counting. Two, four, six, seven, eight, ten, twelve members of Mel’s family. Celebrating together. It was a decade since the members of the Grover family had done that. Christmas 1939. Since then, his brother had married and moved to Detroit, his mother had died and he had become an uncle to a boy and a girl he had never seen. And home was an ocean away.

  He stared at the be-whiskered Gabriel Fincher, who had sat down at this table in January 1836 and made plans. Messrs Reade and Holborne had hitched their wagon to his star somewhere along the way and gone on to leave a substantial legacy. The firm was one hundred and fourteen years old. Rich, prestigious and comfortable, in a building which was twice that age, which cocooned and kept warm the clever people who worked in it, like an old sweater. Only one of them had a founder’s name – the Head of Chambers, Alexander Reade, the great great great grandson of the man on the wall behind him. Grover turned around in his chair. Herbert Reade, bearded as well as be-whiskered, upright, grave and solemn, looked down at him with unblinking Victorian confidence. Which, Grover surmised, came from ruling over a fifth of the world.

  The British were good at this stuff, he reflected. Tradition. Like warm clothes in the night air; best when they’re old and shaped by the years to fit. There was a knock on the door. Grover looked across the room. The door opened and Neil Adkins poked his head around it.

  “You’re still here,” he said.

  “Sorry. Should I have left by now?”

  He got to his feet. Adkins moved into the room.

  “Not at all, not at all. I was just wondering if you have any plans for this evening.”

  “No.”

  “Then may I invite you to dinner? My wife would like to meet you. So would my two daughters. They’re convinced you must be Audie Murphy.”

  “He’s got more medals than I have, but I’m taller than he is. And thank you, yes I will come to dinner.”

  “I need five minutes to sort my desk out for tomorrow.”

  He left the room. Grover looked around, once again, at the generations of Finchers, Reades and Holbornes. And marvelled for the umpteenth time, at the grace and courtesy of the British people he had fallen among.

  *

  The Adkins family lived in a late Georgian villa, overlooking the Downs. Four hundred acres of protected woodland and green lawn space on the north side of the Clifton Gorge. A glorious slice of Bristol’s historic common land, free to all citizens. The Downs played host to funfairs every May and August and to Bertram Mills’ Circus for the first week of the school summer holidays. And to the Downs Football League, every Sunday morning during the football season. Eighteen teams and reserve sides played between goal posts erected at opposing ends of adjacent football pitches. If you stood on the Westbury Road, you could watch all twelve matches at the same time.

  The Adkins girls were twins. Twelve years old, hair in bunches, dressed in green and blue. And going to be as stunning as their mother. Sarah Adkins was in her late thirties, red haired, tall, sophisticated and probably unflappable in all situations. The women were obviously the cool members of the family. Adkins, the brisk, organised man at work, was the opposite at home. Fussing and asking for jobs to do, while the household went on with business around him. At 8 o’clock, the girls said ‘goodnight’ to Grover and went upstairs to bed. Adkins said he would be up to put the lights out in twenty minutes. Sarah said that dinner would be ready in half an hour.

  Adkins wanted to talk with Grover and ushered him into the study. The two man sat down in the soft brown leather armchairs on opposing sides of the fireplace. A gas fire burned in the re-built grate, humming along quietly.

  “You like Jerry Wharton I understand,” Adkins began.

  “Sure. Who couldn’t like an existentialist, communist, Punch and Judy Man?”

  “Indeed. But you ought to know, he’s rumoured to be a homosexual, existentialist, communist, Punch and Judy Man.”

  He sat back in his armchair and crossed his right leg over his left. Grover did the same. The leather in both chairs creaked. Adkins waited for his guest to process the information.

  “Rumoured to be,” Grover eventually said. “Do we believe rumours?”

  “We might do well to, in this case. Jerry Wharton is...” He searched for an appropriate word. “...Colourful.”

  Over the past ten years, Grover had encountered the odd ‘colourful’ soldier. He had never considered it much of an issue. Of all the elements in Jerry Wharton’s ‘c
olourful’ portrait, Grover’s fellow countrymen would, in all probability, consider being communist his major misdeed. Homosexuality was not the greatest American sin. Unnatural, disgusting and ungodly though he was considered to be, the faggot was a featured player. The star, with his name above the title, was the left winger.

  US soldiers had American newspapers flown in from home. The news arrived three days late. But back in February, Grover had taken more notice than usual. The representative of his home state had got into the headlines. Speaking at a local meeting of the Women’s Republican League, Wisconsin’s Senator Joseph MacArthy had waved a scrap of paper at his audience and announced he had the names of two hundred and five communist party members working in the State Department. The daughters of America were shaken to the core. And MacArthy was on a crusade. A couple of weeks later, Grover had heard him on US Forces Radio. He spoke in a tuneless kind of plainsong and whined on monotonously. Grover had only voted once, but he’d voted Democrat and within moments, he had lost interest in MacArthy’s nonsense. During the war, he had found Lord Haw Haw more likeable. He pondered on what would happen when MacArthy unearthed his first homosexual communist. You begin by railing against the fringe and before you know it, a whole bunch of other ‘colourful’ people become targets too.

  Adkins voice seeped back to him.

  “There were over fifteen hundred prosecutions for homosexual behaviour in Assize Courts last year. Eleven hundred and ninety-five convictions.”

  “Carrying what sort of penalty?”

  “Serious buggery – rape in other words – the sort of thing perpetrated on Nicholas Hope, carries a life sentence. Other activities can earn up to five years. Consenting homosexual acts, defined by law as ‘gross indecency’, get anything from six months to three years.”

  “Small wonder nobody’s talking,” Grover said.

  Explanation over, Adkins watched Grover thinking and waited. Grover shuffled in his chair. The leather squeaked again.

  “Should we proceed then,” he said, “on the assumption that Harry is not talking because he was in a homosexual relationship with Nicholas Hope? If that was the case and it gets into court and the jury don’t believe his alibi...”

  “Which we know is more than likely,” Adkins said.

  “We’ve got a serious double whammy here.”

  “I assume, that colourful Americanism means that Harry –”

  “It means that both buggery and murder will be thrown at him. Jesus. He won’t have a prayer.”

  “It gets a little easier if he’s having a relationship with Mark Chaplin,” Adkins suggested.

  “Sure, but he still has to admit to that. Instead, he’s sticking with watching Dirk Bogarde shoot Jack Warner.”

  “At least now you can make an educated guess at why.”

  “Because he’s on a hiding to nothing.”

  “Psychologically, it goes deeper,” Adkins suggested. “Harry is so frightened of being exposed, he’s prepared to risk offering himself up to a charge of old fashioned, heterosexual murder as the lesser of two evils. If, as we’re assuming he was with Chaplin or Wharton, or both, on the night of the murder; that alibi could net him three years in prison, followed by years in purgatory.”

  He looked long and hard at Grover.

  “Ed... In Harry’s shoes, given that choice, what would you opt for?”

  Sarah knocked on the door and called from the hall that dinner would be ready in ten minutes. Adkins got up out of his chair.

  “I’m going to tuck the girls in. See you at the table.”

  *

  El Paradis closed at one in the morning. The clients had gone and Xavier Carrera and his Rumba Band were unwinding with shots of Bacardi. Rachel was getting changed. Leroy Winston was standing under the canopy outside the front door. He was joined by Fidel Johnson the saxophone player.

  “Good to get some fresh air,” Johnson said. “Though not much of a novelty for you I guess.”

  “I don’t mind it on a night like this,” Winston said. “I’ve taken to watching the stars. I’ll get a book and learn something about them one day.”

  The sound of singing drifted to him from his right. He looked along the cobbles to the junction with Colston Street. A quartet of men, a little the worse for wear, swayed up the incline, singing the Bristol Rovers club song.

  Goodnight Irene, Irene goodnight

  I’ll see you in my dreams

  Goodnight Irene goodnight...

  “Gasheads,” Winston said.

  “Not a version that Lead Belly would recognise,” Johnson muttered.

  Winston was late recognising the man in the middle of the group. Bert Harker had his quorum this time. And all four of them unloaded on Winston and Johnson.

  The sax player was the first to go down. He was swung round and hauled head first, into the stone wall to the left of the canopy. It took two men to do it, but it left Winston on his own. Two behind him, two in front of him.

  Harker spat at him. “This time, Darkie, this time.”

  The way back into the club was blocked. The men who had dealt with Johnson moved shoulder to shoulder and slammed into Winston’s back. He was propelled forwards into the arms of the other two. He managed to swing away and around Harker and give himself a split second to manoeuvre. He balled his right fist, raised it and chopped down hard on the bridge of Harker’s nose. There was a scream of pain and Harker staggered backwards, hands up to his face, blood leaking between his fingers. Winston had no time to do any more. The man to his left swung a leg and kicked him in the crutch. He yelled out, sucked in air and buckled to his knees. He looked up. In front of him, one of the party, was nursing Harker, trying to stem the blood. The last of the quartet was a step away. He raised his right hand. The brass knuckle duster caught a flash of light from the canopy as it arced towards Winston’s cheek. Winston swung his head, but not quickly enough. The knuckles missed his cheek, but arrived in time to rip into the left hand side of his neck. Winston felt the tear and sensed the skin on his neck open. Instinctively, he reached up with his left hand to protect the wound. Which put an end to the contest. The man who had kicked him did it again, aiming at the right hand side of his face. The toe of his boot made contact with Winston’s jaw, swinging his head back through ninety degrees. Winston spun on his knees and fell face down onto the cobbles. He managed to roll over and look up. Harker was on his feet, staring down at him.

  “You fucking black bastard,” he hissed.

  Blood danced off his nose and dropped onto Leroy’s face.

  “Fucking black cunt.”

  Harker kicked him in the left kidney. Winston rolled over to protect it. And was rewarded with a kick in the spine. Pain shot up to his neck and back down again. He braced himself for another kick, just as he heard Rachel’s voice, shouting from the club doorway. Then Xavier’s. Then Zampa’s. He saw feet running away, the sound of their boots amplified through the cobblestones underneath his right ear. He closed his eyes and tried to ignore the pain.

  *

  Harry was sitting at the kitchen table, dressed in jeans and his pyjama jacket, drinking tea. He looked at the clock on the wall above the fireplace. 1.25. He had slept for an hour or so around midnight. But now he was wide awake. He reached for the teapot again. He heard slipper shod footsteps on the stairs.

  Ellie walked into the kitchen in her green woolly dressing gown.

  “Are you alright?” she asked.

  Harry nodded. Asked his mother if she would like some tea. She said yes and sat down facing her son. He collected a cup from the sideboard, poured milk into it, filled it with tea and passed it across the table.

  “We all know you didn’t go to the pictures last Saturday night,” Ellie said, getting straight to the point. “Your alibi won’t stand up in court. And the fact that you’re sticking to it, in order not to say what you were actually doing, only helps the prosecution case.”

  Harry sipped his tea. Ellie watched him.

  There
were more footsteps on the stairs. Grover padded into the kitchen in shirt, trousers and socks.

  “You couldn’t sleep either,” Ellie said.

  “I heard you two get up.”

  “Tea?” Harry asked.

  “No thanks.”

  He sat down at the table, in the chair next Ellie.

  “I was going to leave this until tomorrow morning. But as long as the three of us are here...”

  Harry got to his feet.

  “I think I’ll take my tea upstairs. Hope you both get back to sleep. See you in the morning.”

  Ellie and Grover watched him leave the kitchen. Listened to his footsteps until the sound died away. Ellie sighed.

  “What were you going to say?”

  “Just an idea I’ve had. But tomorrow morning will do.” He pushed the chair back and stood up. “Goodnight.”

  Ellie sat at the kitchen table alone.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Harry woke up and looked at the bedside clock. 6.05. He stared up at the ceiling for a couple of minutes, then rolled over and got out of bed. His jeans were on the chair in front of his table. A shirt hung over the back of it. He dressed, put on his socks and dark brown shoes. From the bottom of the wardrobe he pulled out the canvas holdall he had packed during the night. Light and easy to carry, but with enough capacity for a change of clothes, his sponge bag and his notebooks. He shrugged into a grey tweed jacket, left the bedroom, moved along the landing and down the stairs, stepping around the floor boards which creaked. He crossed the kitchen into the wash house, unlocked the back door and slipped into the yard. Walked down the yard, opened the yard door, stepped into the lane behind the house and closed the door behind him.

  Arthur left for work at 8 o’clock. Ellie and Grover met in the kitchen half an hour later.

  “Has Harry stirred yet?” he asked.

  Ellie shook her head. “He’s got nothing to get up for, has he?”

  She was tired. Sleeping badly every night, fear and uncertainty beginning to grind here down. Having Harry at home was the best thing of course, but he was not talking to her. Not really.

  Grover was not on top form either. Harry had a date at the Assize Court in five days. Time was running out and Ellie had to be given something optimistic to cling on to. He left the kitchen and went back upstairs. He knocked on Harry’s bedroom door. There was no response. He opened the door and stepped into the room.