Bad Penny Blues

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Bad Penny Blues Page 28

by Cathi Unsworth


  “You know what men are like,” said Lenny.

  Jenny paused for a moment with a bottle of Champagne in her hand. I knew she was trying to discern what I was hiding in my eyes; that Toby hadn't returned until dawn. Somebody must have put him in a cab and helped through the front door, otherwise I don't believe he would even have remembered the luggage that was left neatly lined up in the hallway. I had found him snoring on the sofa, a virtual mirage of booze fumes around him, and left him a note about Jenny's party. All day long I had been hoping against all real hope that the memory of our student days would somehow make him come back to me, turn him back into the Toby I had known then and not the one who so clearly couldn't stand me any more.

  “Well,” she said, “we're not waiting for him, are we?”

  She popped the cork and poured us all a glass and we toasted her return, then she gave us a tour of the house. It must have just been redecorated, as all the walls were dazzling white and all the floorboards polished. There were Persian rugs in nearly every room, apart from a games room downstairs that had its own bar and pool table, where Bob could entertain his film friends, Jenny said. In all the others were pieces of mahogany furniture and great, gilt-framed mirrors, lots of spider plants and cacti all over the place. But strangely, there were no paintings anywhere, no signs of all that art she had told me she was making in Italy. Just lots of framed posters of all Robert Mannings’ films, and in his study, a whole shelf full of awards and photographs of him and Jenny with their film-star friends.

  “It's only the garden that really needs some work,” she said, leading us back out there. It was overgrown; the hollyhocks, cornflower daisies and violets competed with rampant ground elder, buddleia and long grass. But once it must have been laid out by someone who knew what they were doing, as even in its wild state, it looked beguiling.

  Mannings himself was standing talking to a group of people I didn't recognise, underneath a willow tree. He was a tall man with dark brown hair going grey at the temples, wearing cream slacks and a pale yellow open-necked shirt that offset his deep tan, the casual attire of the successful, middle-aged filmmaker. As he turned to face us, I noticed how broad his chest and muscular his arms were and wondered if Jenny had, after all, married him for some sort of protection. The house and its contents were proof enough of how much money he must have had, but the smile on his face as he looked at Jenny, which illuminated his dark eyes, Roman nose and the deep laughter lines round his mouth, told me that he had married for love alone. As she leaned over to kiss him, the depth of affection in her own eyes was equally clear to see.

  I suddenly felt very alone.

  A bumblebee droned past and I followed its course towards a pale pink hollyhock, watched it disappear inside a flower. The sun was setting behind us, casting long shadows across the ragged lawn. I knew that Toby wouldn't be coming.

  “Shall I try on the suit, then?” said Jenny, putting her hand on my arm.

  I nodded, blinking back the tears that had been forming in my eyes, dragging the corners of my mouth up into a smile.

  “Come and help me, then,” she said.

  Their bedroom was right at the top of the house; she liked it the best because it had an en suite bathroom. But what she hadn't shown us the first time was that the wardrobe doors actually opened up into a whole other room, her very own dressing room.

  Inside were rails of clothes, carefully colour co-ordinated, with matching shoes and handbags all lined up underneath. But what was even more arresting was the portrait of her that hung on the far wall.

  “My God,” I said. “It's that gingham dress you were wearing the first time I met you.”

  “Good, isn't it?” Jenny smiled. “Dil painted it, back when we were at St Martin's. I'd like to have it up somewhere where everyone can see it, only it makes Bob feel jealous. Silly, isn't it? But then, men are.”

  She was waiting for me to say something about Toby, but I couldn't trust myself. Instead I said: “I saw Dave a while back, he seemed very worried about you.”

  “Really?” she said lightly. “I can't think why.”

  “He told me to tell you that he'd always be there for you, no matter what.”

  “God,” said Jenny. “Was he drunk?”

  “I don't think so,” I said and we stared at each other in silence for a moment. It was funny, although he had captured a great likeness of her, Dave's portrait looked somehow faded compared to the real Jenny, the way her hair and skin looked so blooming, so full of light… Suddenly it dawned on me.

  “Jenny,” the words just fell out of my mouth,“you're pregnant, aren't you?”

  A huge grin spread across her face. “Yes I am, that was what I brought you up here to tell you, I wanted you to be the first – well, the second to know. I'm nearly two months gone.” She put her hand over her stomach. “It's going to be a little girl, I know it is. And do you know what? I can't wait to stop this acting lark and just have her all to myself. So there isn't much time for me to fit into your lovely new suit, I'm afraid.”

  “But that's wonderful,” I said, unable to stop the tear that now rolled down my cheek. “Congratulations, Jenny.”

  She opened her arms and I walked into her embrace. When we parted, there was a brightness in her eyes too.

  “Now then,” she said, “come on, let's try it on and then we can go and tell everyone else.”

  We must have stayed until about midnight, getting to know Bob and his friends, discussing how the nursery should look. Somehow, in those few hours, I managed to forget about Toby and everything else, to just enjoy the company, the infectiousness of Jenny's good news. Until Jackie started yawning and asked if someone could call her a taxi.

  “Come on, ducks,” said Lenny to me. “I'll walk you home.”

  Nobody had mentioned Toby's absence beyond Jenny's initial enquiry. I wondered if they were all feeling sorry for me, had an irrational sensation that they knew something more than I did. I tried to shake it off as we walked back down the meandering curve of Elgin Crescent, across Portobello, glimpsing Henekeys up the road, where a new group of art students were no doubt enjoying the decadent nights I'd once known in there. Turned down the square, and crossed Talbot Road, past the Globe nightclub and up Powis Terrace to my front door.

  I looked up at the house. There were no lights on.

  Lenny looked at me worriedly. “Do you think everything's OK?” he said. “Do you want me to come in with you?”

  The sense of dread that had been bearing down on me since we left Jenny's now felt like a lead weight in my heart. I nodded mutely, my hands shaking as I tried to fit my keys into the front door.

  “Here,” said Lenny, “let me.”

  He squeezed my hand before he opened the door and I thought about him and James, how he had been made to feel this way too. His warmth gave me a tiny bit of courage.

  We walked into the hallway together, turned on the light.

  Toby's luggage was still where he had left it.

  I put my head through the sitting room door. He had obviously managed to rouse himself from the sofa. Remains of a meal, the carcass of a roast chicken and half a loaf of bread left out on the kitchen table suggested that he had managed to feed himself as well. An empty wine bottle there too, I couldn't help but notice.

  “He must have just gone to bed,” I said. “He didn't make it that far when he got in this morning.”

  Lenny shook his head. “Do you want me to check? I'm not leaving you here on your own if he's being a bastard.” There was a vehemence to his voice I had never heard before. Jackie must have said something to him, I thought, although I had told her little enough. But after tonight it seemed pointless to pretend that there wasn't a problem, Toby's very absence had made that public, after all.

  “It's OK,” I said. “I'll do it. I don't want you to have to see what state he might be in.”

  “All right,” said Lenny. “But I'm staying here, just in case.”

  Every step up those st
airs my feet seemed to get heavier and heavier, and even as my hand rested on the bedroom doorknob, I knew I shouldn't go in there, I knew I wouldn't like what I would see. But something inside me that was stronger than my fear made me open the door anyway.

  A shaft of silvery moonlight through the curtains, which hadn't been drawn, illuminated the scene, although at first it was hard to make sense of the tangle of limbs and hair lying in the mess of my marital bed. But once I had managed to decode what I was actually seeing, I was still somehow able to close the door without waking them up, to walk back down the stairs like a zombie to where Lenny was standing in the frame of the kitchen door.

  “He's in bed all right,” I told him, “with your old friend Pat.”

  31 NOT FADE AWAY

  A little old man blinking in a barrage of flashbulbs. “I've been a bit silly really,” Ronald McSweeney was telling the man from the BBC, “and I can only say that I'm grateful that the judge took the same view, that there was no evidence against me, and dismissed the case today.”

  Standing on the steps of the Chiswick courthouse, he looked like a man freshly woken from a dream and gave a nervous laugh as the assembled pressmen continued to fire their questions at him.

  “I've always wanted a quiet life, and that's what I intend from now on. To leave London and go up to the North, somewhere a bit more peaceful.”

  “I'll help you move,” said Dick, throwing a scrunched-up paper ball at the TV screen. “With my size tens up your jacksie, you silly old sod.”

  Pete stared at the screen, wondering for the millionth time what made McSweeney do it. There was still no answer, but he couldn't shake the feeling he had missed something about this sad, shabby little man, the same thing as he had missed with Ernie.

  Who's worse than being arrested?

  He got to his feet, shift over and eager to get back home. “Aye,” he said. “He'd best get himself as far away from here as possible if he knows what's good for him.”

  The assembled detectives continued to throw paper darts and balls towards the cathode news conveyor, along with choice expletives. Two months, eight thousand interviews and four thousand statements since Mathilde Bressant's body had been found, the final elimination of McSweeney from the Stripper inquiry was no cause for them to celebrate.

  For a while, Bressant's corpse had offered some hope of a breakthough, for she had not been clean like the rest of them. She was covered, from head to foot, with metallic paint spray. Black and orange, black and yellow, black and green and more black. In the two days that the coroner estimated she had lain out of view between her death and her discovery, she must have been close to a place where primary and secondary colours, priming, undercoating and finished paintwork were applied by spray. In other words, a garage.

  At last they had a location — if they could find the car mechanic's where these colours had been used, they could find the murderer. But how many little one-man operations were there in London? And how many amateur enthusiasts who liked to tinker around with motors? Two months, eight thousand interviews and four thousand statements later, they still hadn't found a colour match in any of the places they had been. It had only served to make their search seem even more impossible.

  The senior crime reporter from The News of the World had been moved to help try and flush out the killer by penning him an open letter in a front-page splash that went on for three pages, conjuring a Dickensian vista of London's lowlife, “the sprawling, teeming, vice-ridden jungle” that stretched from Shaftesbury Avenue to Queensway. He taunted the killer for always picking little women, none of them over five foot three. But he hadn't known the detail that disturbed Pete the most about Bressant's body. Four of her front teeth had been broken, one of them wedged halfway down her throat. The coroner couldn't work out how the killer had done it — there were no other marks of violence.

  The streetwalkers themselves were now running a sweepstake, from the bar of the Warwick Castle on Portobello Road, on which one of them would be next. Trying to laugh at the shadow of death that stalked their tapping feet. Each one offered the same theory. The killer was local, a man who knew them all, knew who was friends with whom. That he was working off a long-held grudge, playing peek-a-boo with their lives.

  In between all the madness though, there had been joy. Joan had given birth to a perfect little boy, Pete's most fervent prayer answered. They had christened him James Edward, after Pete's dad, but most of the time they called him Little Jim. It was him Pete was thinking of as he stepped towards his front door now. He wanted to be able to spend a few hours with the lad before he had to go back out to meet Coulter. For the searches he and the Detective Sergeant had been making on tangential matters had finally begun to bear fruit.

  Buried beneath the mountain of official Prostitute Murders paperwork, they had finally found the files on Algernon Ferrier and George Steadman – and what interesting reading they made. The latter was in Wormwood Scrubs, where he had been languishing since being nicked the night of 19 June 1959. The former was today being released from HMP Strangeways after a three-year stretch for living off immoral earnings. Coulter had predicted where Ferrier would go to celebrate his first night of freedom.

  They moved through the smoke and the hot bodies pressed together under coloured light bulbs, stooping their heads in a little basement room, the air charged with perfume and sex and the sound of a wild trumpet coming from the tiny stage at the back, where a tall negro, his skin slick with sweat, was blowing out his soul.

  The Blue Parrot Club.

  Coulter stopped, inclined his head to the right. Pete followed the motion to a booth by the side of the makeshift rostrum. Sitting there was another tall, handsome coloured man, in a powder blue, one-button suit, canary yellow shirt open at the neck and a snap brim hat tilted on the back of his head. Flash of gold tooth and white arm, a skinny little vixen in a red cocktail dress on his lap, wrapped around his shoulders, sticking her tongue into his ear. His hand moving up her thigh as they closed in towards them, rocking together as the drummer powered the tune into delirium.

  “Good evening, Algernon,” Coulter's voice breaking the spell. “Thought I'd find you here. And if it isn't little Minnie Brown, too. Does your ma know you're out, Minnie? On a school night too…”

  As if an electric current had passed between them, the couple snapped out of their embrace. Little Minnie's eyes flashed up at the detective standing over her, her mouth dropped open into a perfect ‘O’, and faster than a fish could shimmy, she was off her boyfriend's lap and out towards the door.

  The negro made a grab for the bottle of rum wobbling on the table in her wake. Looked up, outrage in his eyes like the sudden flare of a match, cooling just as quickly as Coulter got there first, fist closing around the bottle's neck.

  “A little word in your shell-like, Ferrier,” he said.

  He sat in the interview room with his legs splayed and head down, alternately dragging from his cigarette or spitting on the floor.

  “Well, will you get a load of Mr Cool.” Coulter sat down opposite him. “Gets caught breaking his parole within five minutes of coming home and he's not even sweating. Life's been dull without you, Algernon. ”

  Ferrier's top lip curled upwards into a sneer.

  “Ya gonna charge me with that?” he said and spat on the floor again. “Or we just be talkin’ bullshit all night?”

  “That depends,” said Coulter, nodding at the folder tucked under Pete's arm, “on how good your memory is.”

  “This should take you back.” Pete put the print of Fitzgerald, Clarke and Steadman down in front of him.

  Ferrier ignored it, started whistling between his teeth.

  “See, what I've been longing to ask you,” said Coulter, “is what George Steadman was doing out with your woman. That why they call him ‘Lucky’ is it?”

  “What you talking about?” Ferrier eyeballed the picture, an expression of shock that he quickly tried to disguise.

  “Well, if
you cast your mind back, Algernon, it was not long after this photograph was taken that your old lady was found dead by the side of the river in Chiswick,” Coulter said. “The first of the Jack the Stripper murders, they're saying now.”

  “And if you'll notice,” Pete added, “the dress she's wearing. It's the same one she was in when she was found. What we've been asking ourselves is, could this have been taken on the same night?”

  “Were you present when this photograph was taken?” asked Coulter.

  Ferrier narrowed his eyes, dragged hard on his cigarette and exhaled in Coulter's face.

  “I don't know nuttin’ about it,” he said. “I ain't never seen it before in my life. What you tryin’ to frame me for here?”

  “Well it's like this,” said Coulter. “As my colleague just pointed out, the photograph has only recently come to light as a result of our investigations into the so-called Stripper murders. And while the gentlemen of the press may be keen to make out that these murders are the work of just one man, it's not something we can take for granted, is it? I would say that this picture,” Coulter leaned forwards and tapped his finger on the print, “might suggest a motive for Miss Clarke's murder that has not been considered before. Like here she is, only hours away from her date with death, out on the town with her boyfriend's best pal. People might reasonably ask, where is her old man? Why wasn't he out with them at Teddy Hills’ club in the West End, rubbing shoulders with television star Simon Fitzgerald…”

  “God rest his soul,” put in Pete, sitting back on his chair, watching Ferrier's body language subtly change.

  “God rest his soul indeed,” nodded Coulter. “There's a lot of death in this picture, don't you think, Algernon? A lot that isn't explained. So, for instance, as I was postulating earlier, if you were present when the photograph was taken, if it was all friends together, there wouldn't be a jealousy motive, would there?”

  Ferrier was trying very hard to keep up his macho front, but he had begun sweating as Coulter had been talking, had taken off his hat and begun rubbing his hands through his hair, stopped his spitting on the floor.

 

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