Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  The tall negro on the podium in front of me swoops down into a bow as the applause reverberates through the room, cut through with whoops of approval. I try to catch his eye as he takes out a handkerchief from his breast pocket, wipes his brow. An itch inside me that needs to be scratched, that those long, long fingers could find. But he spins round, gives a nod to the bassplayer and they start into a new tune, a rhapsody in red for The Blue Parrot Club. I give myself up to it, whirl round in a circle and as I do, I catch the eye of another, weaving his way through the tightly packed bodies towards me.

  I frown and look around me, the drums pounding loud in my ears like they're sending me a warning, a prickle down my spine despite the heat of the room. Me, he is looking at me from under the rim of his hat, I know this man and he knows me, put my circus skills to good use when I first came to town. I dance away from him, duck and weave through the bodies, making my way towards the Ladies. Step inside, trip through the women leaning over the sink to put their lipstick on in front of the mirror, and lock myself in the one cubicle that has a catch that works. I pull out a reefer from my black plastic handbag, my fingers shaking as I light it up, lean back against the door.

  What's he doing here? What's he want from me?

  That bad memory catches the corner of my brain again, a man whose teeth are too bright, whose hair is too slick, whose fingers are too small, a white man in a white house a blonde wig in his hands, a long, blonde wig …

  The drums pounding through the walls, louder and louder.

  Hammering on the toilet door. “Ain't you finished in there? Come on, I'm bursting, gonna wet myself in a minute, you don't hurry up.”

  Take another drag and everything swirls as I lurch forwards, a feeling of nausea not from the smoke but from that memory that I bat away to the back of my mind, unlock the door and let the grumpy little tart push past me, steady myself on the sink as she slams the cubicle door, still squawking her complaints like a chicken.

  Look at my face in the mirror, my black hair up in a chignon, my straight nose and my dark eyes, my French eyes from my father, a steward in the Free French Navy. Hear the drums beat out a warning: Get out of the room, get out of the room…

  Duck my head through the door of the Ladies, can't see the man with the hat, just Shorty lounging against the wall. One of my regulars, sturdy little Bajan in a snap brim hat, swaps sweet times for sweeter smokes, flashes me a smile and I know I can trust him.

  “Do me a favour?” I say, thrusting my handbag at him. “Look after this for me for a minute…”

  “Sure t’ing sweet’eart,” he drawls, giving me a quizzical look as he slides it under his arm.

  “Just need to step outside for a while.” I tip him a wink and he nods knowingly, puts his finger up to the side of his nose.

  Don't want that man to know what's in my handbag. Come back for it later, just get out of the room…

  My eyes sweep around as I head for the cloakroom, paranoid now, my blood pumping in time to the voodoo drums. Still can't see him as I put on my brown coat with the black leather collar, feel for the coins I have left in my pocket, a plan starting to form in my head as I run up the steps past the doorman, out onto Westbourne Park Road.

  Head for the Globe and find one of the big boys to protect me.

  My black leather boots clatter down Powis Terrace, the same beat as the drums that I still hear pounding through my brain, the tall negro blowing the high note out of his horn…

  Reach the corner and stop. The Globe right in front of me but my eyes drawn to the right of it, to where a long black car is parked outside my house, to where my front door is open, an orange glow spilling out from the hallway. All the music suddenly stops as my eyes are drawn up to the window of my flat, another orange glow up there even though I turned the light off and locked the door before I came out tonight, my keys still in my handbag that I left with Shorty.

  All thoughts of the Globe and my plan drain out of my mind, replaced by a static hum and somehow my body is no longer my own as I walk towards my front door, as if compelled by a magnetic force to step through into the hallway and up the stairs ahead, not even shutting the front door behind me.

  Another type of music starting up as I climb the steps to my room, a pop record I have heard in a coffee bar and never liked, an echoing guitar and a man's voice swathed in reverb, getting louder and louder as I approach the door to my room… The door to my room that is open and as I stand on the threshold and look inside I see him standing by the kitchenette counter, a cup in his hand, see him with his hat pulled down low and then something else, something in the corner of my vision, a black shape moving…

  Feet running, loud up the steps outside, and then the front door slammed and I hit the bed like I had dropped from the ceiling, my eyes open in the brightness of our bedroom, the lights all on and my heart beating like the pounding of drums. For a second I thought the girl with the black hair had come running back up Powis Terrace and into our house.

  The room lurched as I sat up, stars dancing in front of my eyes, a magazine sliding off my chest and onto the floor. I must have fallen asleep reading it as I was still fully dressed apart from my shoes, which I'd kicked off before. The fear pounding through my veins was so sharp I felt like my hair must be standing on end and it was only as my vision cleared, to the sound of pans being clattered around in the kitchen below, that I realised it was only Toby down there, back from a meeting with clients at last.

  I looked at the clock. It was 2am. A wave of panic swept through me. The girl with the black hair was just around the corner. I had to do something. I had to help her.

  I slid off the bed. My legs felt like lead, my head was thick with sleep and disorientation, as if I was completely drunk.

  “Shoes,” I said aloud, trying to locate them. As my head turned, my vision blurred again for a second, streaks of white light across the side of my pupils. Then I made out the errant footwear poking out from under the bed, reached out and picked them up. But I couldn't seem to get them back on, I kept falling backwards onto the mattress every time I tried.

  “This is stupid!” I cried out. “I've got to help her!”

  Abandoning the shoes, I moved towards the door, only to find I couldn't seem to walk in a straight line either, banging my hips against the wall and then the doorframe as I tried manoeuvre. I made it as far as the top of the stairs and then stood there, swaying against the banister, hideous vertigo rooting me to the spot the moment I looked down.

  “Darling?” Toby's face appeared in the hall underneath me, his brow crinkling into a frown as he looked at me swaying there. “What's wrong?”

  “We've got to help her,” I said, tears springing into my eyes as terror prevented my legs from moving. “But I can't… I can't…” I thought I was going to topple over, pitch headlong down towards him and Toby must have had the same idea, as he started running up the stairs towards me.

  I sank down to my knees. “I can't… I can't…” was all I could say.

  Toby put his arms around me, pulled me away from the stairs and back into the bedroom. His eyes were wide with fright and his breath heavy with alcohol.

  “What is it darling, what's wrong? Have you had a bad dream?”

  I stared at him. Had he guessed? Did he realise? Would he help me to help her?

  “Toby.” My voice was little more than a whisper. “Please. Go outside, to the end of the street. If there's a big black car parked outside the house on the corner by the Globe, come back and call the police.”

  “What?” His expression shifted slightly, from worry into incredulity.

  “Please,” it came out louder this time, “please just do it. Somebody's being murdered at the end of our street, we've got to help her, Toby!”

  Now he looked worried again. He stood up, glanced from me to the door, uncertain of what he should really be doing.

  “If the car is there you have to call Notting Hill police,” I stumbled on, twisting the counterpane round m
y fists in frustration, “ask for Detective Sergeant Stanley Coulter and tell him there's another one happening right now. He knows me, he'll believe me!”

  Toby opened his mouth to say something, then thought better of it and instead made for the door. I heard him run downstairs and then out of the front door.

  I drew my legs up around me, shivering uncontrollably. I had let it all out now. But I had to, I had to try and help her, to stop this…

  Toby's footsteps echoed down the empty road and came to a stop.

  I heard him turn and walk back slowly. With every step, the knot in my stomach grew tighter and tighter. He slammed the front door, turning the locks behind him and then came back up the stairs, leant against the doorframe of the bedroom, staring at me aghast.

  “Darling,” he said very quietly, in a tone of strained patience you might use on a child. “There was absolutely nothing there. You must have been having a nightmare, it wasn't real. Have you been drinking?”

  “Oh God,” I said, bile rising in my throat. “I think I'm going to be sick.”

  He put a hand up to his forehead as I ran into the bathroom. And all I could think of as I heaved and retched was that look in his eyes.

  He didn't believe me.

  He thought I was mad.

  All my worst fears coming true because I couldn't control myself this time, couldn't close the gap between the worlds fast enough.

  He was still standing there like that when I came back.

  “Stella,” he eventually said, a quaver in his voice now. “You're not…”

  He dropped his hand down and his eyes were red.

  “Pregnant, are you?”

  Dimly, I tried to think. Was it possible? The last night before he had gone to the States we had… But no, I'd had my period since then. And since he'd come back, well we hadn't… His jetlag, he said… His drinking more likely…

  “No,” I said.

  He closed his eyes for a moment, a moment that looked like a sigh of relief.

  “Ah,” he said, opening them, blinking. “Well, I was just thinking,” he moved towards me, patted me on the shoulder, “you know, being sick, having nightmares…It would have made sense, don't you think?”

  I sank down on the bed.

  “I'm sorry, Toby,” I said. “But nothing seems to make very much sense to me at the moment.”

  He flinched, ever so slightly.

  “Oh well,” he said, “perhaps you'd better try to get to sleep now.” His mouth twitched upwards into a grim approximation of a smile. “I'll come and join you in a moment, I was just making some supper. Lots of drinks tonight, but they didn't do much in the way of food, you see, I was pretty much starving when I came in. If you don't mind…”

  “Fine,” I said, rolling away from him, my face burning with fear and shame. “Do what you like.” I stared at his reflection in the dressing table mirror as he rubbed at his eyes and then turned to walk away.

  29 YOU REALLY GOT ME

  She must have had a funny definition of ‘sexy’ must Margaret Rose. For the little man sitting in the interview room was only about five foot two, his scuffed shoes barely reaching the floor as he swung them backwards and forwards in a state of high agitation. Up close he looked around sixty, a shock of grey hair rising up from a furrowed forehead, dark little eyes moving fretfully underneath bushy white eyebrows, tiny hands ripping a cigarette packet to pieces. Dressed in a bottle-green worsted suit with a brown cardigan buttoned up underneath it, nicotine-stained teeth and wiry grey hair curling out of his nostrils. Bits of dried egg down his front. About as far away from being desirable to a 26-year-old con-woman as you could possibly imagine.

  But Sexy Ron McSweeney, reeking of a night's sweated-out whisky, couldn't wait to tell them how he was the murderer. He jumped to his feet as they walked through the door. “At last,” he shouted, “oh my Godfathers, at last. It was me what done her officers, I've got to get it off my conscience, I can't bear thinking about it no more.”

  “Steady, Mr McSweeney,” said Pete. “Let's just take some details off you first.”

  Sexy Ron looked at them bewildered. “But don't you want to get this over with? I can take you to the spot, to the exact spot where I done her.”

  “We just have to confirm that you are who you say you are first,” said Dick. “If you don't mind sitting back down, this shouldn't take too long.”

  McSweeney did as he was told, but hesitantly, perhaps reading from the sceptical expressions behind the two detectives’ arched eyebrows and half smiles that they were about to make him sweat some more.

  By the time DI Fielder had got back from wherever it was he had been to join them, Pete and Dick had ascertained that Ronald George McSweeney, born 1908 in Preston, former Royal Navy and merchant seaman who had gone ashore for good in the London of 1950, was currently the live-in caretaker at the Holland Park Lawn Tennis Club. But far from upholding the genteel standards expected of his post, McSweeney had been living a double life, opening the bar again after the regular patrons had gone home and ushering in instead an entirely different class of night owl. Gamblers, bookmakers, gangsters and of course, brasses, formed the core of his illicit clientele and this was how he had come to meet Margaret Rose, who helped to supply him with suitably flush and inebriated marks to play poker with.

  He couldn't remember how the argument started, he said. He knew it was because he was under pressure – he had been caught trying to steal a hearing aid in the West End and was due to stand trial for it at Marylebone Magistrate's. He'd been advised that he would probably get away with a fine, it being his first offence and all, but the very idea of going to court had shaken him to his core, triggered a bout of heavy drinking unknown since his landlubber days began. When Margaret Rose started to get unreasonable about her cut of the night's takings, money that he would no doubt be needing himself shortly, if he wasn't going to get sent to jail, he simply lost his temper.

  “I made up some old spiel about us having to visit a mate in a pub in Chiswick to get some gelt he owed me to pay her off,” McSweeney told them. “It was just so as I could get her somewhere I knew we couldn't be seen, somewhere I could get rid of her quickly. We was down by the water there and I must have put my hands around her throat or something, ’cos stand on me, I looked down the next minute and there she was, dead. The thing is, they teach you these things in the Forces,” he said, his eyes drifting away, “I didn't know me own strength.”

  Fielding didn't greet their news with much enthusiasm. McSweeney was in the cells by then, still pacing about, desperate to show them to the murder spot.

  “Just the Stephenson girl,” Fielding said for the fifth time, “that was all he copped to. Not Clarke, Evans or Houghton. No mention of any of them.”

  “No sir,” said Pete. “The thing is, he's in such an agitated state I don't think he's thinking properly. He can only focus on telling us about Stephenson, not that he can remember actually killing her. Says one minute she was alive, the next minute she was dead at his feet, so he presumed the worst.”

  “Did what any self-respecting strangler would do in his position,” said Dick. “Stripped her, rolled her in the river, took her clothes home and burned them.”

  “He didn't happen to tell you where he spent last night, did he?” Fielding asked wearily.

  “Getting pissed in the Princess Alexandra,” said Dick, checking his notebook. “The landlord sold him another bottle to take to bed and said he was helped away by some mate of his he was drinking with.”

  “He couldn't face reading another story about poor Margaret Rose in the newspapers,” added Pete. “And the drinking couldn't help him to forget.”

  “Right,” said Fielding, striking a match and taking it to his pipe. “Then there's not much chance he was out driving round Brentford with a dead body in the back of his car.”

  “I don't think he said he had a car, sir…” Dick was still studying his notebook, it took a beat before the words sunk in and he looked up
startled. “What did you just say?”

  “The reason I've been gone all morning,” said Fielder. “Every senior officer with links to any of the Thames-side murders got the summons. There's been another one. Not in the river this time, she was dumped in a cul-de-sac in Brentford in the early hours of this morning; naked as the day she was born. From what we know so far it looks like she was another tart and it looks like she was strangled.”

  “Damn,” said Pete.

  “Indeed,” said Fielding. “But as you have just said, a lot of Mr McSweeney's story has already proved to be true. I'm afraid we're going to have to take a little trip with him to Chiswick. Let's hope we can get there before,” he winced at the thought of the latest headlines, “Jack the Stripper strikes again.”

  “I just don't get it.” Dick lifted his pint off the counter of the Edinburgh Castle, across the road from the station. “He got the time and place exactly right. How could he know that if he didn't kill her?”

  Pete shrugged. “Buggered if I know,” he said.

  They had taken McSweeney out in the radio car, let him guide them to the Windmill pub in Chiswick and then retread his route to Corney Steps, where he claimed to have rolled Margaret Rose's body into the Thames. His version of events tied in so tightly with the facts there was nothing they could do but charge him.

  “We must have missed something,” Pete added, but he couldn't think what. His brain had all but seized up trying to make sense of the funny little man. If McSweeney had gone to pieces over a stolen hearing aid, how could he be so eager to cop the blame for the blonde, land himself on a murder charge? And what about all that snide money he'd been making at the tennis club? He'd had the wit about him to keep all that from his employees for months on end, but now his nerves were so shot he'd given them all that information on a plate as well. His life was a shambles – but on the subject of Margaret Rose's murder, he was crystal clear.