Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Recognise the other girl?” asked Coulter. “She could be a bit of local colour. Look at this…”

  Pete's gaze followed where Coulter's finger pointed, to the trackmarks between the coloured girl's fingers, her motivation clearly delineated. Susannah didn't appear to have any, but she had also been a drug addict. It was Drinamyl that Geordie Sue lived on, big purple pills that were always rattling round her handbag, keeping her rattling on for days. You would need to be on something pretty strong to face doing any of this.

  “Another local dish,” said Coulter with a sigh. “Well, in the darker parts of town anyway. That'll be how she ended up coming to do something like this. Would have been supplying her ponce and all, I don't doubt.”

  A name rose from the past to the front of Pete's brain, unfinished business from 1959. Algy ‘Baby’ Ferrier, ex-boxer, Bobby Clarke's ponce, where was he now?

  “Well she's the only spade in here so far,” noted Spinks. “From what I've seen, anyway.”

  “Yeah.” Bates rifled through the pile. He was more worldly-wise than Spinks, found Ernie's snaps amusing, something to talk about down the pub after work. “It's always the jig on the receiving end of it too.”

  “Maybe Oswald Mosley commissioned them,” said Pete, only half joking.

  “You know,” said Coulter, turning one of the 8x10s at right angles to try and make sense of what he was seeing, “you could be onto something there. Not Mosley hisself, I mean, but it is always the toffs who want this sort of thing, all this caning and spanking, the feather girls, you know? Your average Joe just wants it simple, straightforward. Tits and arse, in and out, no messing. But it takes a certain kind of mind to appreciate this malarkey, and you'll usually find it's one that's been forged on the playing fields of Eton. All those beatings and buggery, it scars them for life.”

  “Aye.” Pete nodded, a Tatler & Bystander photograph flashing through his mind, the clean white teeth and Dean Martin hairstyle of Sir Alex Minton, shaking hands with a Cabinet minister, the caption noting they were both Eton old boys.

  Coulter put the picture back in Spinks’ box. “We'll mark these up for evidence,” he said to the aid. “Get a blow-up of the black bird's face and circulate her, get on to it now, if you don't mind.” Turning to Pete: “I bet you a tanner she comes from Powis Square.”

  “Powis Square.” Pete nodded, watching eager Spinks almost collide with Dick and DI Fielder coming through the door. The gaffer had his pipe clenched between his teeth, a gleam in his eyes suggesting he was riled enough to bite the stem in half. Dick's hair was standing up at haphazard angles where he had been raking his hands through the Brylcreem and his eyes were bloodshot from the smoke of a thousand Woodbines.

  “It's bloody impossible,” Fielder announced. “The man has a snake oil salesman for a solicitor. He's claiming this,” he snatched up a picture from the nearest box, a close-up of a girl holding a spurting penis, eyes screwed shut, as she received a full facial, “is all in the name of art! That our dirty mac down there, Ernest Tidsall, is engaged in the pursuit of aesthetic excellence following the muse of contemporary photography. Can you bloody believe it?” He stared at the unlovely artefact for a moment. “I suppose this is the Bayswater Botticelli.” He flung it across the room.

  Dick raised one eyebrow. “Don't suppose you've found any nice landscapes in amongst that lot then?” he said. “Some pretty sunsets, maybe?”

  “Not on your life.” Coulter shook his head. “But we did find Geordie Sue.”

  “Aha.” Fielder turned his gimlet eye over the proffered print. The DI had only arrived at Notting Hill this New Year and had done little to endear himself since. Unlike his predecessor, Wally Palmer, who had worked the district man and boy, Fielder appeared to be a careerist copper who had never worn down a pair of soles in his life. On the contrary, his shoes were always polished and he liked to go about in a Gannex car coat like Harold Wilson, which only added to the general feeling of suspicion about him. But here was a chance for him to change that perception.

  “We're getting a blow-up done of her friend here's face to circulate, think she's likely to be local,” Coulter explained. “See if we can't pick her up and ask her in for a chat.”

  “Good,” said Fielder, chewing on the end of his pipe as his mind whirred. “We're going to need more than we've got here to stop Tidsall making bail. I've got a feeling there's something left behind in that studio. The negatives for instance — how come there weren't more of them? Is he hiding them or destroying them? And if he's such an artist, why would he want to do that?”

  “If he's such an artist,” said Pete, “what does he do for his proper living?”

  Fielder snapped his fingers. “That's it. Go back and see if you can't find his books. If we can't get the bugger for obscenity, maybe we can get him for some kind of tax dodge.” The gaffer's face lit up. “Like Al Capone.”

  Pink streaks of dawn were spreading above the chimney pots by the time Pete and Coulter returned from the flat on Westbourne Grove. They'd found what they were looking for under Ernie's spartan single bed, in the little bedsitter room that adjoined the studio and darkroom. A box of ledgers going back ten years or so. They'd had another search for any more negatives, been through every book on his shelves just in case, but there was nothing to find. Ernie tidied up after himself.

  His books, written in that same minuscule hand, revealed only the income and expenditure of a legitimate photographer. Neatly spaced columns showing the bills for rates, utilities, materials, stationery, telephone. Income from The Kensington Post, Reuters News Agency, the occasional national newspaper, commissions to take wedding photographs. Brown envelopes stuffed with receipts matched the entries in each column, including letters of thanks from the fathers of several brides.

  Outside, the morning shift started taking parade.

  “Damn it.” Fielder's enthusiasm was dimming in the cold light of morning, as he stood over a pile of paperwork every bit as unyielding as the prisoner downstairs. “We can't prove anything from this. We can ask the Yard to look into him, get the Revenue to do a check, but as for now…” He stared with watery eyes at the clock on the wall.

  “Willcox, come with me to the magistrate's. Coulter, Bradley, clear this lot up and have it sent to Scotland Yard.”

  He shrugged himself into his Gannex. Dick, who had been nodding off in a corner, made a moaning noise as he got to his feet, stretched and tried to smooth down his crumpled shirt and readjust his tie. He looked sorely disappointed. All of them felt it, like the ash in their mouths and the hollowness in their stomachs. So near and yet so bloody far.

  “I'll go to the canteen,” said Coulter, “get us some tea and a bacon sandwich.”

  Pete nodded. A weariness was in his bones but his mind was still racing. Alone in the CID room, he found his fingers tapping out an old jazz rhythm on the tabletop, ‘Sing, Sing, Sing’ by Louis Prima. His fingers danced across the scarred wood towards one of the legers, Ernie's cashbook for the tax year of 1959-60. The dates blinked to him like beacons as he picked up the book.

  The song played louder in his head, drums beating a heady tattoo, brass and Benny Goodman's clarinet swirling. His finger ran down the back inside cover of the ledger. Felt a ridge underneath where the paper was glued to the cardboard back of the book. Frowned and flipped the book open, put it on the table, kneeled down so he could look at it flat, gently touching the surface again.

  The two back pages had been glued down over the back cover. Very neatly, if his fingers hadn't told him, he might have missed it just by looking.

  He pulled out the drawer underneath the table, rummaged around for a scalpel. Remembered just in time to put on a pair of gloves before slipping the blade underneath the glued pages, carefully guiding it along the edge of the card it was stuck to. Turned the book around and slid the blade under the next side and the next. Delicately lifted up the pages with the edge of it.

  Taped down to the back of the book, neatly folded i
nto a sheet of tracing paper was a single frame of negative.

  Pete held it up to the light. It was a woman standing between two men, he could see that much. Looked to be wearing a party frock, her consorts in suits and ties.

  “What have you got there?” Coulter at the door with the breakfast tray.

  “One of Ernie's missing negs.” Pete's heart was hammering now, a woozy rush of adrenalin against the sleepless night. He could smell the bacon and his stomach lurched. “Hidden in the back of this cashbook. Bloody hell.” He grabbed one of the teas off Coulter's tray, gulped down the hot, sweet liquid. “I've got to get this down the lab.”

  He reached for his coat as Coulter squinted at the frame.

  “This doesn't look like filth,” he said. “What would he be hiding this for?”

  “Precisely.” Pete took another gulp of the tea and snatched up the bacon sandwich. “Thanks for this Stan, but I've got to go.”

  Out the door and running, running against time.

  There it was in black and white. Three faces smiling up at them: two white, one black, all of them dressed in their party finery. Two dead, one still out there in Powis Square, or somewhere very close to it.

  “Well I'll be blowed,” said Pete.

  “Isn't that the singer chap?” Fielder's brow furrowed as he leaned over the print, stabbing a finger towards the wonky grin of Simon Fitzgerald. “One who offed himself last year with a load of sleeping pills? Wife was a bit of a fan of his. Can't think why.”

  “I know who that is.” Coulter's finger hovered over the black face. “George ‘Lucky’ Steadman, Jamaican, fairly handy light middleweight, handier still at poncing. Nicked him for that a few times, not to mention stealing, dealing, card-sharping and fighting – and that's just off the top of my head.”

  “And I know who she is.” Pete pointed to the girl in the middle of them. “She is, or was Roberta ‘Bobby’ Clarke. The first of them.”

  “The first of them?” Fielder repeated, not following.

  “The first of the Thames-side Murders, sir, June 1959, Duke's Meadows in Chiswick.” Shivers down the backbone. Ernie had been granted bail in the hours between Pete leaving the station and coming back with the print. “This is a connection between her and Houghton; this could be the proof that it is the same killer. Why else would Ernie be hiding it?”

  He was pretty sure he recognised where it had been taken too. Teddy Hills’ club.

  “Jesus Christ!” Fielder snapped. “Blasted bloody solicitor. Go back and rearrest him. Better still, I will. Come on, let's go.”

  The shabby front door on Westbourne Grove was no longer locked. It stood eerily ajar, a paper pushed through the letterbox, mail lying on the mat untouched. Pete pushed it all the way open with his finger, walked over the threshold, feeling the chill, hearing the silence. Knowing that something wasn't right in here.

  Fielder pushed past him, the photograph in his hand. “Mr Tidsall,” he shouted down the empty corridor. “Mr Tidsall, this is the police.”

  He bounded up the stairway. Pete and Dick exchanged glances. Shut the front door behind them as they listened to his fruitless search from room to room, slumping into the despondency of what was to come now the chase was over.

  Fielder standing at the top of the stairs, fuming.

  “Sweet suffering Christ!” he yelled. “He's gone.”

  26 CAN’T BUY ME LOVE

  “Stella dear, this is Detective Sergeant Stanley Coulter.” Mya came back through the parlour door with a big, slightly crumpled-looking man at her side. He was wearing the sort of saggy brown suit that my pa would have favoured, a trilby hat in his hand and a raincoat over his arm. His head was covered in a thick layer of startling white curls, but it was his eyes that really drew your attention. They were huge, like twin blue moons, and looked as full of sorrow as that spooky old song.

  Somehow, he wasn't how I expected a policeman to look – like someone you could trust.

  “And Stanley, this is Stella Reade.”

  He put his hat down on the table, reached out a big paw of a hand.

  “Pleased to meet you, Mrs Reade,” he said, in a voice that rolled with northern vowels and was as surprisingly gentle as his shake. “Please, call me Stanley.”

  “Stella,” I said, smiling despite my reservations. I had been back to see Mya a couple of times before she had convinced me that the only way I could make use of my disturbing visions was to tell someone who had the power to do something about it. Now I was less apprehensive about having let her talk me into it. Stanley Coulter was not a man you could easily picture planting bricks on people or winking at homosexuals in public toilets.

  We all sat down around the table that had been set for tea with best rosebud china. Mya poured us all a cup, while Stanley passed around the milk jug and the sugar bowl. There was an easy familiarity about the way they smiled at each other that suggested their friendship went back a long way.

  Stanley waited until both Mya and I were sipping our teas before he took out his notebook and pen and placed them on the table beside him. Then he lifted his own cup and took a thoughtful taste, nodding his head in approval. Replacing it in its saucer, he turned his big blue eyes on me.

  “I'd like to thank you for taking the time to talk to me,” he said. “It's very good of you and I assure you, anything that passes between us in here will remain confidential. That's for our mutual benefit. There's plenty on the force would think me mad if they knew I'd been coming here.” He gave a sad smile. “I'm coming up for retirement this year. Thirty years in the game and the only thing I've really learned is that there's more things in heaven and on earth than I'll ever understand. But Mrs Matheson here has helped me to prove things I would have had no other way of knowing. I'm not overstating the case to tell you that the help she's given me has saved lives, brought terrible men to justice.”

  “He's one of us, dear.”

  Mya didn't say the words out loud, but as he turned to her and patted her hand, I could hear her thinking them.

  “Now,” he looked back at me, the smile fading from his eyes, “this is shaping up to be a very difficult and nasty case. We've no substantial proof that the three women were killed by the same man, it just looks increasingly likely – they were all mixed up in a very dangerous world to begin with. So anything that you can tell me, anything at all, would be very useful.”

  “Now dear,” Mya turned to me, “you just tell Stanley what you saw in Spirit. Try and remember everything you can, dear, you don't know which parts could be the most significant.”

  She put her hand over mine and I closed my eyes, gathering up all my thoughts.

  I didn't stop talking for another hour.

  I heard the clock chime. Stanley Coulter stopped, his pen poised in mid-air over his notebook. “Go back to the first one again,” he said. “You said she was thinking about a man she called Baby?”

  I nodded. Far from fragmenting, as I had feared it might when I started talking, the memory of Bobby standing on the pavement just outside this room remained crystal clear. “He was her boyfriend but she was fed up with him, I think he had beaten her up a few times. While I was with her, her whole body ached.”

  “Did you see what Baby looked like?”

  “I think he was a black man. And so was the man she was waiting out here for. The one who didn't come.”

  Coulter nodded. “I think I know who this Baby is. If I remember right, he had an alibi at the time, but it won't hurt to go back and talk to him. I've a feeling I also know who the other fella might be. You say you didn't get a name?”

  “No.” Bobby's last thoughts went through my mind as if I was watching a film. “But he had a big round face and a gap between his front teeth. Quite a sweet face, really.”

  Stanley smiled as he wrote down this detail.

  “Now the second one, Bronwyn, she was at a nightclub when she encountered a man she already knew, a man she called The Chopper…”

  “Yes.” I shudd
ered at the thought of that hatchet face, those cruel lips. “He looked horrible, like Mr Punch. He didn't kill her, but he gave her to the men who did.”

  Stanley tapped the end of his pen against his pad. “The nightclub is an interesting detail. Ties in with some new evidence.” He jotted down a few more of his thoughts.

  “But it doesn't appear with the third one, Susannah Houghton.”

  “No, she was definitely running away. The man she was going to meet had promised her a new life, a house in Mortlake…”

  “Mortlake,” Stanley said. “Where Bronwyn Evans was buried.”

  As we stared at each other, I felt a sickening lurch of fear.

  “He tricked her,” my voice came out as a whisper. “There was someone else in the back of his car…”

  That dread black shape squirmed through my memory and my cup, which had been sitting innocently beside me on the table, suddenly toppled out of its saucer and over the edge of the table, rolling across the floor until it smashed against the fire grate.

  “It's all right Stella.” Mya was immediately at my side, holding my hand, while Stanley leapt up to deal with the mess, his face as white as chalk. As Mya's fingers closed around mine, the vision began to recede and fragment. I no longer felt I was standing in a Shepherd's Bush midnight coming face to face with death, but was looking instead at the shafts of pale April sunshine slanting through the blinds in the parlour of the Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Assembly.

  “Sorry,” I said, feeling the beginnings of a migraine start to pluck at my temples.

  “Shhh now, you've nothing to be sorry for.” Mya put her hand on my forehead.

  “Stanley,” she said, “can you take the cup through to the kitchen, put it in the sink and pour cold water over it. Then come back in here, please.” The way she spoke was quite commanding and he did as he was told. My breath was coming in short gasps, as if I had been running, but while Mya's hand remained on my head, the pain that was threatening subsided, along with the nausea that normally came straight behind.