Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Mazel tov,” said Lenny, raising his glass. “To your new home. I have to say, you've been very brave about this all. I'm proud of you, girl.”

  “Mmm,” I said, the hot, salty chips tasting like the best food in the world. “Well, that's because of you and Jackie. It would have been a lot harder if I didn't have you.”

  “I don't know about that,” he said. “I can't help thinking that I let you down. I should have warned you about that Pat, once I got to really know him, I realised he was bad news. All that glitter, but underneath…” He shook his head. “It won't come to a good end, you mark my words.”

  “What do you mean?” I said.

  “You wouldn't want to know some of the people he's mixed up with,” Lenny said. “Pat likes his highlife high and his lowlife low, believe me. He's in with some right East End rough and they all love him ’cos he's a minor aristocrat. He's like the devil himself, Pat Innes, he turned your Toby's head.”

  “Do you really believe that?” I asked. “That Toby wasn't just pretending all the time?”

  “I do, dear,” Lenny nodded gravely. “I mean, look, he was surrounded by omis in the art world. All those old queens like Bernard Baring throwing themselves at him the whole time. But he never so much as batted an eyelid. I would tell you if he did.”

  “Baring,” I said, narrowing my eyes, wondering if Stanley had paid him a visit yet. It had startled me to see his face pass through the memory of Margaret Rose Stephenson and her last game of cards, but not entirely surprised me. I only wished I knew the man he was playing cards with, the one she managed to rob. But at least it had given Stanley something to go on.

  “Frightful old cow,” said Lenny, leaning over to refill my glass. “No, let's not talk about them any more. Let's just think about the good things – like them suits flying off the rails, the cover of Vogue, like Jenny and her baby and your new home. Let the devil take the rest of them.”

  I clinked my glass against the side of his. “Mazel tov,” I said.

  33 THE IN-CROWD

  “Right, well,” said Coulter, coat on and sheaf of paperwork tucked under his arm. “That was a good night's work. Very satisfying to finally put at least one villain in his place. See you at the magistrate's in the morning.”

  Leaning against his locker, Pete smiled. He had been more than impressed by how Coulter had turned the tables on Ferrier and all his reasons for doing so. They were both looking forwards to paying George Steadman another visit at the Scrubs the next day.

  “It certainly was,” he said. “Good night, Stanley.”

  He opened his locker and frowned. There was something in there that hadn't been when he had left the station earlier this evening. A thick, brown envelope.

  He picked it up. It was addressed to Detective Sergeant P Bradley, with the street and number of the police station below; and above, underlined, By Hand. The handwriting was all in neat capitals, rendered in black ink.

  “Stan?” he said, but Coulter had already gone.

  The envelope was bulky but light, a layer of tape securing it shut. As he weighed it up in his palm, Pete had an ominous feeling. Maybe it was better not to open it here. Maybe if he did, he wouldn't make it back home at all.

  They had scores of tip-off letters each week, it was probably another nutter or nosy neighbour, he told himself as he walked back down Ladbroke Grove. But even as he thought it, he knew there was something different about this. The elderly, vengeful and insane residents of this parish didn't tend to write By Hand on their envelopes. That was the mark of someone a bit higher up the social scale.

  Joan was already asleep by the time he got home, her arm around the dog that lay protectively by her side across their bed. He looked in on Jim, sucking his thumb as he lay in his cot, so tiny and peaceful in his innocence it made Pete's heart contract. He knew that if Joan had given birth to a girl he would have loved her all the same. But the reason he had been lighting so many candles in St Mary's while she was pregnant was to pray that they wouldn't have to bear any of the things that could happen to a little girl in this world.

  He dropped a gentle kiss on Jim's forehead, walked into his study. Took out some gloves, a scalpel and an evidence bag from his briefcase. Slid the blade under the tape and opened the package up, tipped it upside down.

  A small bundle and a note fell out onto the table. A key, wrapped up in tissue paper, again neatly fastened with tape. And a blank postcard, with the words: Locker 272 Paddington Station typed onto it.

  “You were on duty, but you never saw anyone hand this in?” Pete dropped his cigarette and stamped it out before it burnt his fingers; he had smoked it almost down to the quick. Bert Dugdale, the last man on front desk the night before, shifted uneasily from one foot to the other, his face the same shade as the contents of an ashtray.

  “I must have just nipped to the gents for a moment, or turned my back to look for something,” he said. “And when I came back it was just there. Never saw a dickie bird. Sorry Sarge, but you know what it's like…”

  “Maybe it was a magician and he disappeared in a puff of smoke,” said Pete. “Like that fag you were smoking out here. Like you'd better do right now, in fact.”

  “Yes sir.” Dugdale retreated.

  Pete turned his mind back to the contents of Locker 272, hidden inside exactly the same sort of envelope that the key had come in: the rest of the photographs from the session that had produced the shot of Bobby Clarke, Lucky George and not-so-fortunate Simon.

  That particular one was missing and there were no more featuring Bobby and George, but Fitzgerald's outfit, hairstyle and the backdrop of Teddy Hills’ club were exactly the same. In the frames, a lot of people he didn't know, a handful he wished he'd never known and a couple of faces he hadn't seen for a very long time. Not since the days when he studied Tatler & Bystander each week, in fact.

  At various tables, all grinning for the camera, were Harold Wesker with Francis Bream and Big Tits Beryl. Bronwyn Evans with Sampson Marks. Simon and Teddy himself, of course, but more surprising than any of them, the handsome face and Dean Martin hairstyle of the man whose firm was currently erecting the enormous flyover, splitting West London in two with a million tons of concrete. Sir Alex Minton beamed out from behind a magnum of Champagne. To his right, looking slightly befuddled, was Lord Douglas Somerset, the man that Gypsy George had been in the process of robbing just a few months after these photos had been taken.

  All of them in the same room on the same night.

  The night that Bobby Clarke was murdered.

  When he studied the pictures a second time, he began to notice more familiar faces from his time at West End Central. Sidney Hillman, the mechanic from Shaftesbury Avenue that Wesker had been so keen to arrest and make for the Togneri racket gang. Nobby Clarke and Iain Woods, the felons with a bomb hidden in their car. Horace Golding, the shopkeeper with the stolen lighters; Wally Green, the deaf-and-dumb man who'd menaced the doorman at the Establishment with his sign language; and Kingsley Puttnam, the cricketer he'd last seen spitting out blood in the cells on the day of the Greek riot. All the people that Wesker would later systematically fit up – was it all in order to shut them up?

  Pete had learnt there'd been a frisson in the club that night. The straight punters wouldn't have seen it. But to the twitching eyes of Hillman et al there would have been a story unfolding. They would have noticed Fitzgerald's lascivious eye on Bobby, how Marks got Steadman well oiled, worked on him, how the two men came to an agreement – the kind of logistics only those with a certain criminal way of thinking would see. And Wesker, wise to it all, observed their twitching, saved the info.

  No one else at the station knew the connections between all these people. No one in the entire force, but for a senior police officer – now a leading light in the ongoing prostitute murder investigation, now Detective Chief Inspector Bell of the Yard – could possibly realise the significance they would have for Pete. Was it he who had left the envelope? Was it Bell
who was prompting him to ask: be an honourable Coldstreamer and join these dots together for me? Who else could know what these photographs were saying to him:

  Which one of you is Jack?

  If it was Bell, then that would explain how the envelope had magicked its way into his locker. But it also meant that he couldn't tell anyone else what he knew. Not Dick, not Coulter, and especially not Joan. He had gone to Paddington Station on the way back from the magistrate's, where the judge had agreed with Coulter's summation of the case against Ferrier and sent Bobby's old beau to Brixton on remand.

  Pete had told Coulter he needed to meet with a snout in the pool hall near the train station and would see him back at CID in an hour, en route to their second visit to Steadman. Snouts was always a good one to use with the older man, he was so deathly silent about his own.

  On the concourse of Paddington Pete had gone into a cubicle in the gents to look through the contents of locker 272, the cold chills worsening as print followed print and face followed face.

  He'd wandered back out on the concourse reeling like a drunkard, like he'd taken a powerful left hook to the temple. Sat himself down on a 15 bus going back to the Grove, at the front, near the wing mirror so he could look behind and see if a black Rover happened to be following him. Got off at Notting Hill and walked the backstreets to the station, expecting to hear the sound of a powerful car gliding up beside him any minute. Stopped on the steps and looked behind him. Ladbroke Road empty, save for a young mother pushing her pram, a Jack Russell terrier following at her heels.

  There were no more messages waiting for him inside. In an attempt to calm his nerves, he had gone through yesterday's rosters while he waited for Coulter, found that Dugdale had been on duty when the envelope must have arrived. But now he was still none the wiser.

  The questions kept coming, breaking over each other like waves in his mind. Why had Ernie held the Bobby Clarke shot back for himself? He must have realised its significance, so what kind of scam was he playing? Blackmail? Or perhaps some kind of life insurance?

  Did the people Ernie had taken these shots for – Marks or Hills he presumed, but maybe even Wesker himself – realise that shot was missing? That it had even been taken?

  Pete looked at his watch. Ten thirty. It was time to go back through the door and up the steps to CID and Coulter. To lock the envelope in his desk, put the key in his pocket and try to keep his face open, his smile even, as he struggled to find a way out of the maze in his mind.

  34 THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SUN

  I stood on the cobbles of Vernon Yard, looking up at the shuttered windows. It was seven o’clock on a Saturday evening, the first time I had attempted to get back in touch with Dave since the implosion of my marriage, the first time I had really felt up to it. A clattering of feet on stairs and the grind of a succession of locks being rolled back suggested that this time I had been lucky, dropping by on the off-chance.

  But it was Chris, not Dave, who opened the door.

  “Stella,” he said, “this is an unexpected surprise.” His eyebrows raised, but his smile said that it wasn't an unpleasant intrusion.

  “Hello Chris,” I said, more pleased to see him than I had anticipated. Or maybe it was just the relief of finding that there was still life in Vernon Yard after all. “Do you mind if I come in for a minute?”

  “Please, do come up,” he said. “I've just made a pot of tea.”

  I followed him up the stairs to the ramshackle kitchen, took in the same enormous wooden table with its assortment of ill-matching chairs, Welsh dresser sagging under the collection of strange carvings and curios, and walls plastered with artwork from floor to ceiling. Only now there were some startling new additions to the range.

  Posters of Dave wearing his top hat and pulling a mad face, printed on white, yellow, red and lime green backgrounds, with the slogans VOTE LUNATIC; LUNATIC FRINGE PARTY and VOTE DIABLO: BETTER A LOON THAN A CROOK in bold typeface surrounding his gurning visage.

  “What are all these?” I said.

  Chris laughed. “Were you not aware of David's political activities?” He reached a couple of Cornishware mugs down from the dresser. “He will be disappointed. He's trying to get himself elected to Parliament, would you believe? He stood for Profumo's seat in Stratford last year – that's what those BETTER A LOON THAN A CROOK posters are all about. And these,” he gently booted a stack of cardboard boxes by the side of the dresser, “are all full of leaflets for the General Election. He's hoping to do a bit better this time, so he's releasing a single too. He's going on the radio tonight, to talk about it all.”

  “My word,” I said, wondering how these things could have passed me by. All the years that I was so desperate for us to get rid of the Tories and now we were on the verge of booting them out, I'd been so wrapped up in my problems, I'd hardly even noticed. “Which station is he on?”

  “His own,” said Chris, turning to fish out a bottle of milk from under the sink, “he's got a friend with a boat and a bit of local knowledge, they managed to get a pirate signal going from an old Napoleonic fort in Kent. He won't actually tell me where it is, he's sworn to secrecy about that, but it works, they've done test transmissions before.”

  I felt my knees weakening as I sank down in the nearest chair. Could this be the connection that Mya was talking about? Did she know that Dave had been messing about with radio too? I struggled to make sense of it as my eyes ran up and down the walls.

  Chris went chatting on about Dave's accomplishments as he poured out the tea. It was only when he set a mug down in front of me that I notice the pile of folders on the table, the opened notepad that he must have been writing in before I'd interrupted him.

  “Chris,” I said, “am I stopping you from working?”

  “Not at all,” he closed the pad and pushed it and his files to one side, “I was just going back over some details, just in case I missed something. I find it gets increasingly hard to stop myself from doing that, especially when David's not here to distract me. You've saved me from myself, that's all, no need to look so worried.”

  “You sure?” I said.

  “Positive,” he replied, but his expression changed as he watched me. “How's life been treating you then, Stella, it's been a long time since our paths last crossed?”

  “Where to start?” I said, lifting my tea. There was something reassuringly sturdy about his choice of blue-and-white striped mug, just like the solid unpretentiousness of Chris himself. For a moment I felt like spilling the beans about everything.

  “That was a funny time, last time I saw you,” I said instead. “Jenny and the riot. Still, I suppose it helped in your case against that crooked policeman.”

  “It could have done,” he said, “if the police hadn't put their wagons in a circle around him, carted him straight off to the loony bin so he never had to face the charges.” He took a sip of his tea. “It was a very strange situation with Jenny, though. I didn't feel entirely good about it. I mean, her friend Somerset definitely did need our help, and I'm glad that through that, we managed to get the proof of Wesker's crooked ways. All of that was well worth doing.”

  He shook his head. “It was just Jenny herself, the effect she had on David when she left him. I must confess, I never did understand their relationship very well, but he was devastated. Still is, which is what I think this,” he gestured to the posters on the wall, “is really all about. Trying to get her attention back.”

  “I know,” I said. “I saw him at a party last year for Toby's summer show. He was with his band but he'd come specifically to try and find Jenny. Only she'd already moved to Italy. He was really agitated, told me lots of weird things about her family and how she wasn't safe. He'll probably be even worse now. She's just moved back to Ladbroke Grove with a film director husband and a baby on the way. Perhaps you can break it to him gently.”

  “Ah…” Chris stared through the steam rising from his cup. “I see. That is going to be difficult. And where's Toby
this evening, by the way?”

  “I'm surprised you don't already know,” I said. “But we've,” I struggled for the most tactful expression, “separated. He was cheating on me.”

  “Oh?” Chris put his cup down. “I am sorry to hear that. Although maybe not surprised.”

  “Really?” I said, startled by this information. “How come?”

  “The crowd that Toby started hanging around,” he said, “were no good. Hastened my departure from the world of modern art and David's too, I think. Especially when they started stealing all our ideas, it made it a bit difficult for us to stay friends with him. I'm sorry, but I think Toby's head was turned by people who had no real love of art at all. Just of money.”

  “That's so strange,” I said. “They're the very words that Lenny used – that he'd had his head turned. Which people do you mean?”

  “Bernard Baring was the worst,” said Chris. “He copied David's circus trope, only he found a way of prettying up what we thought were radical ideas, made himself a small fortune out of it. There is a kind of art in that, I suppose, taking the threat out of it and just leaving the surface gloss. Toby was luckier because his ideas were more opaque, you could more or less read into it what you wanted. I mean, if you really looked at ours now, the things we did in ’58,’59, probably seem very dated. Everything was specific to that time, to those months. Toby's work could come from any time, any place. That's why they adopted him, you know,” he smiled. “They needed the credibility.”

  For a moment I thought he was mocking me, but there was nothing malicious in his face, only something like sympathy, something like regret.

  “What about Pat Innes,” I asked. “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing at all good,” he said, with such a big grin that I started to laugh.

  “That's better,” he said. “Want another cup?” His eyes flicked up to the clock as he rose from his seat and collected the mugs. “David should be coming on the radio any minute now.” He made his way to the windowsill where their wireless sat. “He said he left it tuned into the right place…”