Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  “Well,” Coulter shifted in his seat, trying to hide his disappointment at this last comment, “never mind that, Vera, you've been a great help to us so far, better than anyone else as a matter of fact. Which is why I have to ask you if you wouldn't mind performing one last act of kindness for Jeanie and come with me to the morgue to identify the body. After you've finished your drink, of course.”

  The blonde's eyes travelled nervously round the pub. “All right,” she said. “I suppose it is the least I could do.”

  It didn't take long for Pete and Dick to dig up the records of Jeanette White and Vera Barton, their dalliance with the late osteopath Dr Stephen Ward. Both of them had twice testified that they had only known him socially as part of a West London party scene involving a lot of painters, actors “and those even higher up the social scale” as White had put it, “winking at the judge as if to implicate him too” according to the Daily Record. Pretty and vivacious, Jeanette had gone down well with the press at both trials, even if the prosecution had made mincemeat of her claims. But she had never been the star of this particular show and unlike some of her younger, more luminous co-defendants, she hadn't been able to capitalise on that momentum, start herself up a singing career out of it.

  Jeanette had gone straight back on the beat.

  “Imagine the headlines we're going to get as soon as we release her ID,” Dick said. “Profumo Girl Is Stripper Victim? The Doc, The Tart And The Stripper? They're going to have a field day with us, send a load more nutters our way too, no doubt.”

  “Aye.” Pete stared at the newsprint, a photo of Jeanette outside the court, lighting up a cigarette. Side on, her profile was sharp, her nose too long, not such a looker as Miss Keeler or Miss Rice-Davies after all.

  “I wonder,” Dick continued, “how this all fits in with the filth angle in ours – Ernie, Houghton, Stephenson and the rest. What's the betting they were all part of the same circle?”

  “Odds-on,” said Pete, a succession of black-and-white snapshots running through his mind, icy fingers running down his spine. “Something else that's strange,” he realised. “Why was this one left in Kensington? All the others have been in or near the river. For some reason, I always thought that was the thread, maybe because mad men are so often fixated by water. But this…”

  Jeanette's body had been found by a warden working for the civil defence station hidden underneath Hornton Street. He had noticed that one of their dustbins was missing its lid and saw the glint of metal from what looked like a big pile of rubbish and branches, followed the trail and picked it up. Found a dead face staring back at him.

  None of the others had been hidden this way.

  But more than that, there was something about the location that was nagging at Pete. Hornton Street. Where had he seen that name before? Why was it so significant?

  He looked back down at the paper. It was Mandy Rice-Davies’ grin that reminded him. Reminded him of another blonde with an insouciant smile and hair like Brigitte Bardot, waving a placard saying NO MORE UGLY and standing in front of a building site her father was working on. A building site in Kensington…

  “Oh, so you have got a theory, then?” Dick said. “Well, for what it's worth, here's mine, only keep it to yourself if you don't mind, it's a little bit controversial.”

  Pete looked up from his paper. “What?” he said.

  “I reckon he's one of us.” Dick dropped his voice down to a whisper. “A copper. In on the investigation. ’Cos it seems to me like he's laughing at us. Leaving the last one outside a garage, when we were looking at garages. Then this one, right on top of a civil defence bunker…”

  Pete stood up. “Show it me on the map,” he said. “Where this one were found. I want to try and make a picture of it in my mind.”

  “Do you think I'm onto something then?” said Dick.

  “Lads,” a voice came from behind them. Coulter was standing in the doorway, illuminated by the first smile that had passed over his countenance for a very long time. “There's an outside chance I could retire a happy man,” he said. “Not only did Vera make the formal ID, but she also took the time to help draw up some indentikit photos of the two men she and Jeanette went off with. Take a look at these ugly mugs, see if they ring any bells for you.”

  He placed them face up on the desk.

  “This is Jeanette's john,” he said.

  Pete looked, saw a wide face with thick lips, dark crew-cut hair and a pair of sticking-out ears. A furrowed forehead with thick eyebrows meeting in the middle, cruel little eyes beneath. “She said he was tall,” Coulter elaborated, “about five foot eleven, six foot and probably between thirty and thirty-two years of age. Wearing a sheepskin jacket and driving a black Ford Zephyr. Speaks with a London accent. This one,” he tapped his finger down on the second picture, “is his accomplice, the one that Vera drew the lucky long straw for.”

  Pete looked, saw a narrow face with slightly wavy hair, going thin on top. “This one is shorter and of a lighter build,” said Coulter. “About the same age, maybe younger. Said he was from out of town but Vera didn't buy it, thought the two men knew each other well, acted as if tag-team tart-hunting was a sport they were familiar with.”

  Familiar with…

  Pete felt the blood hammering through his temples as he looked from one face to the other. Felt the ground shifting under his feet as he stared at Jeanette's john. It was exactly the same face the landlord of the Princess Alexandra had sketched out for them a month or so ago. Now he knew for sure.

  Jeanette's john was Ron, Sexy Ron. Not McSweeney, nor any other late-night denizen of Ladbroke Grove, but someone Pete had known all along. He hadn't actually featured in any of Ernie's pictures, but he hailed from West End Central all the same. Wesker's right hand man, the sacked, disgraced former Detective Constable Ronald Grigson.

  And his accomplice, Vera's john, looked like none other but Francis Bream.

  42 YOU’VE LOST THAT LOVING FEELING

  The car pulled up on a quiet side road behind Kensington High Street, on the corner of Holland Park. “This is it,” said Jenny.

  Swathed in a long back coat, hat and mittens, Jenny's body was an uncomfortable bulk compared to the pale thinness of her face. But determination smouldered in her blue eyes as she leant towards the driver.

  “We shouldn't be any longer than twenty minutes,” she said.

  He nodded, stray wisps of sandy hair bouncing on the crown of his pink, freckled head. “Right you are, love,” he said, picking up a newspaper from the passenger seat, folded at the sports pages.

  “Good,” she turned to me, “are you ready, nursey?”

  I smiled as best as I could, feeling awkward in my stiff clothes, thick black stockings and sensible shoes. It had taken Jenny just over a month to organise this meeting, during which time she had been discharged from hospital with a clean bill of health, she said. Over Christmas she'd kept a full house, inviting round hordes of people to examine her bump and help put the finishing touches to the nursery. None of them had suspected there was anything wrong with her. Only Mannings’ fearful eyes, the times when he excused himself to stand outside smoking, gave anything away to me.

  Jenny had put a lot of preparation into this moment. The nurse's outfit and medical bag had come from one of their friends who worked in costume, the perfect way of smuggling me in without making her mother nervous. Her father was finally away on business, out of the country, and she'd made her mother promise to give their staff the afternoon off. I didn't have to do anything, she assured me, but wait for her.

  I opened the car door, went round to the other side to help Jenny out. As my feet touched the pavement, a flash of memory, another's memory, buzzed through my mind.

  Mathilde Bressant, holding a long blonde wig.

  I caught my breath, closed my eyes for a second, before taking Jenny's arm and walking with her to the gate of a palatial white mansion, encased by a high brick wall and surrounded on all sides by tall fir trees
that bent in the bitter, southeasterly wind, as if to shield it further from prying eyes.

  “Don't be scared,” Jenny said, pressing the buzzer on the wall by the gate.

  “I'm here,” she told the intercom.

  The gate clanged, and with an electronic buzz, began to open. We crossed the threshold, walked up the garden path to the front door, where a woman stood waiting beneath Doric columns, in front of the door.

  A small woman in a mauve Chanel twinset and a pale yellow blouse, couiffured blonde hair forming a helmet around her pinched face. Ropes of pearls around her neck and gold bracelets at her wrists made her look weighed down by wealth, like her jewellery could snap her skinny limbs at any minute. There was still a ghostly imprint of former beauty hidden under her heavily made-up face, the shape of her high cheekbones, which Jenny had inherited. But she was too skeletal, too artificial and much too nervous.

  “Jennifer.” Her voice came out high and reedy and she pitched forwards clumsily, watery eyes taking in her daughter's appearance with painful intensity.

  “It's all right, mother,” Jenny said, catching hold of her arm. “There's no need to panic, that's why I've brought my nurse along.”

  Mrs Minton tried her best to smile, corners of her mouth twitching like a landed fish. She quickly averted her gaze to me, blinking furiously as she offered me her hand.

  “Rosemary Minton,” she said. Her hand was frail but her perfume was overpowering. It almost masked the waves of alcohol fumes coming off her breath, but my nose was sensitive to such things.

  “I'm Sister Innes,” I said, the black joke temporarily calming my nerves. “Patricia. I'm here to make sure that Jenny's OK, but I won't get in your way.”

  Jenny nodded encouragingly. “Pats can just wait in the kitchen,” she said. “We'll only call her if we need her.” She put her hand over her stomach and I watched her mother's eyes drawn towards it hypnotically.

  “I'll show her the way.” Jenny moved forwards, opening the door, leading us into a hallway that looked just as I had imagined it, right down to the sweeping central staircase with its red carpet, the family portraits adorning the walls and the immense chandelier hanging from the ceiling.

  “I'm sorry,” Mrs Minton said to me as she closed the door behind us, “but I've let my staff have the afternoon off. Will you be able to make yourself comfortable?”

  “Of course she will.” Jenny swept me down the corridor, the eyes of her ancestors following us as we went. The eyes of her father, not of her mother.

  She winked as she left me in front of a range big enough to cook for an army.

  “Hold tight, Pats,” she said. She had no fear at all, on the contrary, Jenny looked thrilled with the way this game was going. But the moment she disappeared to join her mother, the dial in my brain switched on.

  I saw Susannah Houghton blinded in the flash of a camera, a weird carnival coming into focus around her, of men dressed as women and women dressed as men, half naked and painted, wearing feathers and dildos and wielding whips, heard the high-pitched noise of artificial laughter echoing around a ballroom.

  I took hold of a chair, stumbled down into it, shutting my eyes. Tried to visualise instead a blue light around me, the face of my pa, holding tight to what Mya had told me:

  “Take courage. He walks beside you always, keeping you safe with his love.”

  It only seemed like five minutes before I heard footsteps behind me and almost jumped out of my skin. Jenny was back in the room, her eyes wide and her face flushed.

  “Where's your mother?” I asked, my heart hammering.

  “Out cold.” She held up a tiny phial. “It pays to be a good patient, you know. You get to learn all sorts from nurses, especially what works best with gin. Now come on, we've got to do this fast. Pass me your bag.”

  My hands shook as I handed it over, but Jenny moved with such speed she didn't notice, snapping it open and dropping the phial in, producing a large ring of keys from its depths. I had imagined she would need some time to talk her mother round to whatever it was she wanted to get from her, I had never envisioned her doing anything like this.

  Not for the first time I felt awed and slightly scared by Jenny.

  “This way,” she said, moving towards a different door to the one we'd come in by. “The servants’ entrance gets there faster.”

  I found myself running to keep up with her, through the door and down a flight of stairs, down into the bowels of the house. Though I tried to keep a hold of the image of Pa, the dial started to slip again, transmissions flashed before my eyes

  Mavis on a blasphemous altar, a line of men in cloaks queuing up to take her. Raising her head to look at me as I stood beside them, mouthing the words that I dreaded to hear:

  “The King is in his Kastle. He's the dirty rascal.”

  We were running down a long corridor, towards a black door in a wall painted red. Jenny stopped in front of it, thrust the medical bag at me and began counting through the keys on her ring, her hands moving in the same fashion that Mya's fingers had counted my visions back to her.

  “This one,” she said, putting it into the lock and turning it. The door opened and she turned to face me, her face glowing with exhilaration and power.

  “The bag,” she said, taking it back from me. Her eyes ran me up and down. “It's all right, Stella,” she said, putting her finger up to touch my forehead. “You just stay here, it'll be all right. You don't have to come inside. Stay on this side.”

  I opened my mouth but she had already turned, gone into the room. I took a step to follow but what I saw made me reel back against the wall, turn my face to it, shutting my eyes, trying to block it out.

  I was no longer sure which world I was in. Faces and images raced in front of my eyes on fast forward, and I felt sure that if I turned I would see the room pulsing red, pulsing danger and death. I started to slide towards the floor, trying to focus on the blue light, focus on Pa.

  “There are no dead.”

  I heard the words as if he had spoken them directly into my ear. But when I opened my eyes, it was Jenny standing over me, putting a cool hand onto my forehead.

  “It's done,” she said, “we can go.”

  The black door was closed behind her. She took hold of my hand and led me back down the corridor, up the stairs, into the kitchen, where the pale daylight of the winter afternoon slanting through the windows seemed totally incongruous.

  “How long have we been here?” I said, my throat raw and dry as if I'd been screaming.

  Jenny looked at her watch. “Twenty minutes, all done. You did brilliantly, Stella, now let's get out of here.”

  She punched some numbers into a keypad by the front door and we ran out, down the garden path, towards the opening gate. I could no longer think clearly, only that surely in her condition Jenny shouldn't be running, and why did she say I'd done brilliantly when I'd done nothing at all?

  The driver was standing by the gate as we got there; something about him suddenly struck me as familiar, something about those pale strands of sandy hair, but I couldn't place where I'd seen him before. I felt as if I'd sunk an ocean of booze.

  “Take this,” Jenny handed him the bag, “and help me get her in the car. She's had a bit of a funny turn.”

  As I fell down on the back seat, she gave a laugh, a wild and triumphant sound. Then she turned towards me, her eyes blinding, iridescent. “Come on nursey,” she said. “Let's get you home.”

  I don't remember getting there, only brief fragments of the driver helping Jenny shoulder me into my room and laying me down on my bed. Jenny leaning over me, planting a kiss on my forehead and whispering: “Thank you.”

  Then the dial slipped and it was night.

  I step out of the car and onto the curb, the clack of steel-tipped stilettos on pavement, stomach lurching as I stumble, black velvet and vodka curdling inside. The world spins around me for a moment, gradually comes back into focus as I watch his tail lights disappearing under the
trees.

  All I know is that this is not where I'm supposed to be. I put my hand up to my hair which I've just had waved, the style of an actress I'd admired, a vague memory tapping at the corner of my skull. Should I not be over in the Bush tonight? Giving Mandy a hand with the kids? So how in God's name did I land myself here? The old black velvet had me in its spell. Now what am I supposed to do?

  I look up for the moon but I can't see it through the branches of these trees. Maybe they've taken it down. Better try and get my bearings some other way.

  There's a tube station, but it's all shut up for the night, and I can't make out the lettering that moves like an Art Nouveau swirl over the door, the windows gazing back at me blankly, like whatever else is going on around here, this is surely none of my business. That's right. It's time to call it a night.

  I tighten the belt on my long, wool herringbone coat, try to keep the chill from my bones as I walk around the corner. Mother of God, what a horrible place. A high tower like a castle's keep made out of red brick, little tiny windows all the way up it but just one light on, one yellow light, right at the top. It's like a lighthouse, sweeping its beam across a dark and choppy sea. They've taken down the moon and put this here instead, put a lighthouse here to lure me onto the rocks. Fear lurches in my belly as I back away from it, stumbling again in my rush, turning around the corner past the tube station, onto the lonely avenue.

  The party's over. A tune comes into my mind, something my da used to play on the phonograph back home in Watling Street, before I came to London and all of this charade. A song that played while I danced too long in that place with the flickering candles. But it seemed so right, the way he held me tight, like a beautiful dream that was never going to end. So much for that now. It's time to call it a night.