Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  Stanley came back and sat down in his chair next to mine.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  I nodded, wondering the same thing about him.

  “Let's all join hands for a moment,” said Mya. “I'll say a blessing to clear the air.”

  We all bowed our heads. “Now may the Lord bless us and keep us,” she began, her tone strong and clear. “May He give us light to guide us, courage to support us and love to unite us. This day and forever more, amen.”

  “Amen,” we repeated and sat for a moment with our eyes closed. I opened mine before the detective did and saw a lone tear trickle down his cheek, which he brushed away on the back of his hand as he stood up.

  “Well thank you again, Mrs Reade.” His voice was as sombre as his face. “I can see how hard this is for you and I'm sorry for it, I really am.”

  “Well, Stanley,” Mya said, “let's all pray that what Stella has seen can help you catch this monster. She has been given the gift for a reason.”

  Stanley put his hat on his head, picked up his coat from the back of his chair. “Aye, well,” he said, “I'd best take my leave of you now, there's a lot for me to follow up on here. Thank you again, Mrs Reade, you've been more than helpful. I hope we get to meet again in happier circumstances.”

  We shook hands once more and then Mya threaded her arm through his and walked him back to the front door, murmuring something that I couldn't quite catch. A single tear of my own rolled down under my chin as I watched them.

  I dreamt about the next one that night.

  My white boots crack sharply along the pavement as I walk under the tall trees and smile to myself, thinking about all the money in my white leather handbag, all the easy money me and Ron clipped down the tennis club tonight. A couple of arty types, easy marks, working their way down a bottle of Bells while Ron works away at the tables. Let ’em build up a big pile of chips and then take ’em out on the courts and blow what's left of their brains out through their dicks while my clever fingers work inside their wallets. Send ’em back in and let Ron cash in the rest.

  Daft buggers still didn't know what hit them when they staggered out two hours later and a ton lighter. Best graft I ever done since I hooked up with Ron, no more flophouse tricks for me. No more Ernie and his flash, bang wallop, to hell with him, I hope the bogeys closed him down. I've got a new daddy now and the silly old berk thinks he got an even split, don't realise what I do with ’em once I get ’em outside. Still, what he don't know won't hurt him and it keeps me safe and all, keeps me out of the life that did for Sue.

  Soon have enough to get out of the Smoke for good, go back up to Lincoln or Stamford, Peterborough or Cambridge, somewhere where no one ever has to know what I been doing these past five years. I'll be showin’ soon and that ain't good for trade.

  I put my hand on my stomach as I walk up the steps to my front door. “All for you, babe,” I whisper. “All for you.”

  “Tut tut tut, Maggie. Someone's been talking out of line.”

  The voice comes from behind me and I almost jump out of my skin, out of my best dogtooth check coat, my keys dropping out of my hands and onto my doorstep.

  I turn and he's standing there, at the bottom of the steps, under the plane tree, out of the glow of the streetlamp. Never even saw him as I walked past. A tall, broad man in a sheepskin coat, his hat pulled down low so I can't see his face but his voice so familiar it slices through my nerves like a long sharp dagger to the pit of my stomach, my stomach that is budding with life.

  “Don't know what you're on about.” I try to bluff him out, stoop to pick up my keys, knowing I have to get inside, get away from him. But fear makes me scrabble and miss, my fingers not so clever as he comes bounding up the steps. For one second I think I have them and then he snatches my hand up, yanks my arm behind my back so hard it takes my breath away, sends sparks shooting before my eyes and my keys flying into the dark. I open my mouth to scream but his hand closes over it, his hand in a leather glove that smells of damp and death.

  “I told you not to be so bloody stupid. I said I'd come for you if you didn't keep it shtum. That bogey pay you to tell him about Ernie, did he?”

  His eyeballs are dark holes that bore through mine and he smells of stale sweat and cheap aftershave, a smell that takes me back to a room above a shop in Westbourne Grove, a room all painted white with a big black bed in the middle of it, a room with lights that flash for the photographs of me and Sue and Christ knows who all fucking and sucking and moaning together. The room I never wanted to go back to and thought I'd got rid of, got out of to protect the life that squirms inside my stomach, the life that isn't soiled by that room of lies and lights that flash too bright.

  “You love money so much don't you?” he says as he pins me against the door, one leg in front of the other so that I can't even kick him where it hurts, all my tricks deserting me and just red hot fear replacing thought, the banging of my heart like jackhammers roaring in my ears. “Yeah? Well now you're gonna pay it all back…”

  He marches me back down the steps and towards a big black car, a long black car under the trees with something moving in the passenger seat and a back door that opens by itself as my knees go weak and he pushes me in, slamming the door behind me.

  I look up and she is sitting there.

  Geordie Sue with her head at a funny angle, her eyes full of tears, a big black handbag on her lap lying open and a photograph of her daughter Cheryl fallen out onto the leather between us.

  I stare at her and I know that I am done for, a kick inside my stomach and my bladder starts to empty all over the black leather seat. The engine starts up behind the wood partition that stops me from seeing who or what was on the passenger seat and a strange music starts with it, like a fairground organ being played under water, the scream of a cat and the car starts moving off.

  Warm on the wet leather seat with my hand on my stomach and now you will never be mine, you will never be at all, all the money in the world can't help us now.

  Stick it in the family…

  I woke up in a bed that was much too warm, the sheets all tangled around me.

  For once I could be glad that Toby was still in America, that he hadn't witnessed me wetting our bed in the fear of that vision, the most terrible one yet.

  Outside in Powis Terrace, cats were screaming.

  27 SHE’S NOT THERE

  Searching for her in Powis Square, along the speakeasies of Westbourne Park Road, up through the back streets of Moorhouse Road and Artesian Road, over Westbourne Grove and into Bayswater. Moving through a warren of mews, each with its own olde worlde pub adorned with hanging baskets, where shiv boys and toms shared their counter space with retired majors and red-faced Norfolk farmers. Stop-checking the cars that cruised past Hyde Park at a less-than-purposeful pace, shining a flashlight into the backseats of parked vehicles. Wearing out leather walking up and down sets of stairs in the flophouses and fleapit hotels that made up the trade of Leinster Square. All the twilight places you would expect to find a working girl.

  It had only come to Pete days later, as he walked back home past the construction site for the new flyover behind Ladbroke Grove. They had been so busy searching for Ernie and the coloured lass, his own thoughts so wrapped up in the photograph of Bobby and Simon Fitzgerald, that he had forgotten perhaps the most important thing.

  The girl who had led them to Ernie.

  When he tried to describe her to the brasses who would talk to him in those dodgy pubs or at the late night coffee stands, they wrinkled their noses and averted their eyes. Receptionists in the grim hotels of Leinster Square, where so many rooms were rented by the hour, were most adamant they had never had anyone of her description staying on their premises. Undercover WPCs got no further eliciting the confidences of a nervous and distrustful community. She had vanished, as completely as Ernie.

  They had found no traces of a bank book nor a passport inside the smudger's deserted flat, so it was wid
ely assumed he had left the country, was smart enough to prepare contingency plans should he ever get busted. Fielding brooded on his missed opportunity, used his influence to take out an APB and spent his days haranguing people on the telephone. But there hadn't been any sightings of a man matching Ernie's description taking a boat, train or aeroplane out of the country. His bank account, now being inspected by Her Majesty's Inland Revenue at Fielding's behest, reported no activity in his account either. They kept the flat under obs but it remained defiantly dark, lights out and no one coming in. It was as if all the subterranean trade of Bayswater knew at once the place had suddenly become radioactive.

  Anxious days and haunted nights; and all the while Joan's stomach growing, a glow about her illuminating her face as she had brightened up the house. She was counting the days – only a month to go. Pete tried to shut out the dead girls when he returned home, tried to reach back to that summer's morning on Hunstanton cliffs and savour the joy of impending fatherhood with his wife.

  But fear hovered over him, like the tall cranes that massed around the demolished remains of Rillington Place, old ghosts exorcised and concreted over, a vast gravestone of a motorway to rise over the horror, diverting traffic away.

  When he shut his eyes each time he went to bed, a snapshot was burned against his retina: Bobby Clarke and Simon Fitzgerald smiling back at him. Bobby Clarke and Simon Fitzgerald in front of the bar at Teddy Hills’ club. He had to find the blonde again before she joined them.

  But no one had seen her on the street.

  No one saw her go into the water either.

  Thirty-five days after Geordie Sue surfaced on the Upper Mall, the dawn of Tuesday April 8 broke over the naked body of a woman, beached among the refuse on the mud flats revealed by high tide at Corney Reach. A police boat caught sight of her first. For the past month, patrols had been incessantly scouring the banks of the river, on the land and from the Thames, going over the places where the bodies had been found – Mortlake and the area around Gobbler's Gulch. Searching for something they must have missed, some clue that would let anything about these crimes make sense – but still the killer had managed to laugh in their faces, to deliver a new victim right under their noses.

  No one wanted to identify her either. She lay in the morgue for a week without a name to go with her empty face or the tattoo on her right arm, a gravestone in the shape of a cross and the words: John in Memory inscribed underneath it. The autopsy revealed she had died from drowning but not whether this had been before or after she was dropped into the Thames. She had been dead for several days and the savage wound on her chest had been caused post-mortem, probably from a passing boat's propeller. She was also four months pregnant.

  Which explained why she looked had looked so much better fed and more bonny. She had been glowing with child too.

  Only when the £12 10s rent went uncollected from her landlady in Denbigh Road, did they find a reluctant witness to her identification. The blonde was Margaret Rose Stephenson, aged 26, originally from Lincolnshire, from a part of the Fens close to Joan's home village.

  “Blow me,” said Joan when she read it in the paper. “That's not ten miles away from where I was born.” She leant over to study the photograph, one hand protectively over her stomach as if shielding the unborn infant from what was waiting out in the world. “I don't think I know her though.” Joan's brow furrowed. She was two years younger than Margaret Rose and when you saw the picture of her the papers had dug out, as a hopeful-looking nineteen-year-old, you could see a kind of local resemblance in the roundness of her face and the snub nose, an honest, open, country face. Pete tried to remember if the blonde had had cornflower blue eyes too, but he couldn't. He could only see her in the darkness, half lit by the yellow glow of the coffee stand.

  “Poor thing.” Joan's voice softened and she shook her head.

  They had kept from the press the detail about the pregnancy. One of the theories the cops at Shepherd's Bush had come up with was that the girls could have been killed by botched illegal abortions, but the officers there didn't want anyone's feathers ruffled until they could get a proper inside line on who was behind them. Pete thought the idea was way off the mark, but he was glad that Joan had been spared that detail.

  “Ten miles,” he said, leaning down to kiss her goodbye. “By heck.”

  Joan looked up at him, sadness and worry clouding the cornflower blue. “Be careful, love,” she said. “Don't take this too personal because of where she's from. She can't have been very much like me really, can she?”

  Pete smiled and shook his head. Joan didn't know that he had met Margaret Rose Stephenson before, nor that he could possibly have prevented her death, but she knew the way his mind worked all right. And she was right. The dead woman wasn't very much like Joan at all. Her life had been neither honest nor open, which explained why the hoteliers of Leinster Square were so reluctant to recall her and why she was anathema to the other working girls.

  With their ever-open chequebooks, the press unearthed stories faster than the police could from the tight-lipped toms of W2. It seemed they knew plenty about Margaret Rose, who was also known as Sheila Dunn, Janey Reid or Rose Dunhill, and was quite happy to lend her name to others in order to further muddy her true identity.

  Their stories told of how the high-minded Margaret didn't like to perform for her money. Instead she had a neat alternative, hiring rooms by the hour wherever there was a receptionist with a sympathetic ear. The scam went two ways – she would either tell the john to wash himself in the sink before their tryst, or else promise she was going to do something ‘different’ for him and begin running a bath in the room next door. Whichever trick she used, he would be out of his clothes first, enabling Margaret Rose to grab his wallet and slam the door, locking it behind her as she fled.

  If the john was angry enough to complain to the receptionist, who had by then received her cut, then the smiling clerk would inevitably ask if he wanted her to call the police. His rage would at once become as impotent as his hopes of a sneaky leg-over had been.

  Thorny Rose was also said to have dabbled in blackmail – possibly with the help of Ernie, a subject that kept Fielding up at nights and Pete along with him. If ever she actually did undress for one of her hapless pick-ups, it would only be because she had a photographer waiting in the next room with a loaded camera. Then blushing Rose would pretend to be just as shocked as her prey, when presenting the mark with a contact sheet and telling him how much the snapper wanted for the negatives. That way she could charge double on every trick.

  She had boasted about it all quite freely and it had made the other girls hate her. Which gave the newspapers something quite different from the previous three mysteries to work with. A girl the whole country could learn to hate too.

  A girl who was asking for trouble.

  Meanwhile, Shepherd's Bush had been through the contents of her flat. They had found a name in a diary that they were anxious to put a face to. Someone called ‘Sexy Ron’, no surname, no telephone number. Possibly a boyfriend, possibly and more interestingly, one of her consorts in blackmail. A timid neighbour had admitted to hearing a row late on the Friday night before her body was discovered, Margaret Rose and a man telling her not to be “so bloody stupid”. Maybe he was Sexy Ron. Maybe he was the killer.

  Whatever he was, the tedious job of making door-to-door calls to anyone called Ronald who had any previous was something that had been taking up much of Pete and Dick's time recently. Four Rons into their shift and not one of them under fifty, they were taking their time over tea and buns in the canteen, putting off the fifth Ron, an inhabitant of Lancaster Road who had been given a caution for drunken disorder in 1947, as long as they possibly could. It was there that Tom Spinks found them, eking out a final cigarette over the remains of The Kensington Post.

  “Desk Sergeant asked me to look for you,” he said. “You don't know where the gaffer is by any chance?”

  “No,” said Dick f
olding down the top of the racing pages and exhaling a stream of smoke towards the ceiling. “We ain't seen him, not that we've been looking. He's probably out at some top brass lunch in Mayfair.”

  “We're only talking to fellers called Ron today anyway,” said Pete, looking up from the boxing. “Gaffer's orders.”

  “Well then, you'd better come,” said Spinks. “There's a bloke at the front desk called Ronald McSweeney. Wants to confess to the murder of Margaret Rose Stephenson.”

  28 A WORLD WITHOUT LOVE

  The music is just the way I like it. Loud bebop jazz played by a trio from the States, a big fat spade on the bass, a dark-haired Jew at the keyboard and another hep negro, tall and thin, with shades like Ray Charles and a goatee beard, blowing his guts out through his horn. They're all sweating and shaking under the lights and I'm shaking my arse right along with them, grinding my black leather boots down into the floor, knowing I'm looking good in my tight black sweater and pencil skirt, the figure that rode the flying trapeze in Blackpool still supple and lithe. Here in the smoky basements of Westbourne Park Road I can become myself, all my French blood singing to that wild slapping bass, that hot, hectic trumpet, the voodoo rhythm of the drums. Oh yes, once you get down with the brothers there's no going back to whitey. These boys know how to smile and dance, they have better food, better music, sharper clothes…

  I shudder as he hits the top note, an unwelcome thought corkscrewing through my brain, a memory of what life was like before I found my way to Ladbroke Grove. Another thing I like about the spades, they don't go in for any of that kinky shit, just a straight screw does them fine. Even talk to you afterwards, let them share your problems, treat you like a human being, not just a piece of meat to be bought and sold.