Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  Bell continued to stare at the corpse.

  “Sampson Marks,” he said, “you will be pleased to know, is enjoying his last moments of liberty. Thanks to the continued efforts of both Bream and yourself, the case against him is now complete. He will be arrested and charged within the hour. You are an exceptional detective, Bradley, as I said to you before.”

  “An honourable Coldstreamer,” said Pete.

  “But I'm afraid,” Bell said softly, “old army mottos only stretch so far.”

  Pete realised he was staring down the barrels of a neat little pistol, so small it was almost hidden in the cuff of the DCI's coat.

  “Then you'll want to make sure the negatives are kept safe,” Pete said, dragging his eyes upwards to meet Bell's, “out of harm's way. Won't you, sir?”

  A second stretched out like an elastic band, as Pete's mind spiralled backwards, seeing Vera Barton's white face in the Warwick Castle, the spooked reflection of Jack in her eyes. Coulter sitting in the lamplight in his living room, closing his hand over Pete's fist. Joan in the hospital holding Jim in her arms. Mavis McGruder's children, their faces pressed against a window pane in Lancaster Road, waiting for a mammy who was never coming home. A record spinning round on the turntable of Mathilde Bressant's empty flat, coffee granules still in the cups. Margaret Rose Stephenson in the glow of the coffee stand on Bayswater Road. Ernie Tidsall, shaking under his own spotlights. Susannah Houghton, bending over a black girl, already dead in her eyes. Bronwyn Evans taking a last drink as The Chopper put his arm around her. Simon Fitzgerald with his hand on a showgirl's arse, fear and paranoia dancing across his face. Sir Alex Minton and Lord Douglas Somerset, Harold Wesker and George Steadman, laughing in the lights of Teddy's club. Teddy himself at the bar, offering him a drink. And little Bobby Clarke, lying under a willow tree, the summer air all still around her. Dad walking in front of him, walking towards the river, looking back and putting his big paw of a hand, calloused by the years spent digging under the earth, around Pete's tiny fingers singing: “Willow, weep for me”…

  He heard the click of the safety catch, shut his eyes. The wind howled through the air vents like the screaming of the dead.

  “Put it down, sir.”

  Opened his eyes again to see Bream standing behind Bell, pressing a pistol behind the DCI's ear. “Now,” Bream hissed.

  “Bream?” Confusion spread across Bell's face as he lowered his arm. “What's the meaning…”

  “I'm not working for you.” Bream snaked his arm around the DCI's shoulder, took the gun from out of his hand. “I never was.”

  He released the safety catch of his own pistol, a smile playing across his face.

  “How does it feel, sir?” he asked. “How do you like it?”

  Bell stared at Pete, fear in his eyes as well as outrage. “Bradley,” he said, “do something. Can't you see what's happening? He's still in league with Grigson…”

  “No sir.” The smile vanished from Bream's face. “I'm working for Detective Chief Inspector Alan Ponting, have been for the past six years. My brief was to discover how it was that Sampson Marks had become untouchable. Who was protecting him and why. DCI Ponting's very much looking forward to hearing your explanation.”

  Beads of sweat had broken out across Bell's forehead, but he clenched his jaw, stared straight ahead.

  “And I think you owe DS Bradley here an apology before we go,” Bream continued. “He's a much better detective than you are. He's the only one that didn't take me for a mug.”

  The relief that coursed through Pete's veins was so strong he had to stop himself from laughing out loud. He felt giddy, light-headed.

  “Go on,” Bream said.

  Bell's mouth was working but it was some time before anything came out.

  “I'm sorry,” he said. “I appear to have underestimated the pair of you.”

  “That's right,” said Bream. “You did.” He looked over Bell's shoulder at Pete.

  “You'll excuse me for not offering you a lift back, but as you can see, my car's already chock full of villains.”

  “What about…” Pete looked down at the woman's corpse.

  “I'll see to it,” said Bream. “You just get out of here.”

  “But what about Jack?”

  Bream grimaced. “I expect the bigger cogs in this wheel of ours will find a way of keeping him safe. Just as they'll do for DCI Bell here, I'm sure. This is all the justice we get, I'm afraid, Pete. That and the knowledge that we kept our own hands clean.”

  Pete nodded. Stooped down to retrieve his torch and as he did, he couldn't stop himself from taking the apple out of the girl's mouth and hurling it into the far corner of this makeshift mausoleum, from closing her eyes and offering up a silent prayer for her soul.

  “Stay lucky, Pete,” said Bream.

  44 THE CARNIVAL IS OVER

  The dial slips…

  Another burst of static and Holland Park Avenue dissolves, takes her with it, leaving me standing in a long red corridor, at the bottom of this house, this big white house in Kensington. On the threshold of a room that throbs like a big, beating heart, my fingers on the metal of the door handle, my wrist turning.

  “My father's house has many rooms.” Jenny's voice in my mind as the door opens.

  My eyes travel around his lair. Take in the rack with all the straps. The hooks for all the whips and paddles, the leather hoods and restraints. The coat-stand draped with a long black cape and long blonde wig and behind it, surrounded by red velvet curtains and candelabras, the blasphemous altar itself.

  Strange markings are carved all over it, signs I cannot decipher, rude hieroglyphics spelling out unholy creeds. All the walls painted red and in the centre of all this, a black and dreadful shape that begins to take human form, the form of a man sitting in a black leather chair. A light switches on behind his head and projects a beam out in front of him, a screen above the altar, showing a silent film.

  A little boy and a little girl, both with white blonde hair, playing in the garden that surrounds this house, underneath the tall pine trees, the trees that bend in the southeasterly wind, bend to protect the lair beneath.

  A little boy and a little girl in bright sunshine, skipping under the trees, turning to laugh at the camera with two pairs of identical eyes. His eyes, not their mothers’.

  He sits and he watches. Sits there naked, a man I have seen in the papers so many times, a man remaking London to his own design, now naked, red scores across his shoulders and his hair no longer neat, his teeth no longer clean, tears streaming down his face.

  On the black tiled floor beside him, scores and scores of photographs ripped from inside brown envelopes. Every one of them identical. A little boy and a little girl with white blonde hair in the bright sunshine, smiling back at him with his eyes, his eyes…

  The film starts to tear, starts to burn, burn into a black hole and then something else emerges, a flame from within the blackness. Margaret Rose Stephenson in her dogtooth check coat, holding up a candle before her. “Rejoice not in iniquity,” she says, her voice sounding out loud as she steps out of the frame to stand in front of him against the red wall, “but rejoice in truth.”

  He looks at her with wild eyes, his hair falling in sweat-soaked strands across his forehead, veins pulsing at his temples like worms. “But you're not here!” he screams. Reaches down and picks up one of the photographs from the floor, holds it up to her candle.

  “Whether there be prophecies…” His head cracks round as another voice fills the room. Mathilde Bressant in her black sweater and pencil skirt, standing underneath the coat-stand, playing idly with the strands of the blonde wig in her hands. “…they shall fail.”

  He bares his teeth, streaked and stained in blood.

  “You are not here!” he repeats, throwing the picture towards her.

  “Whether there be tongues,” Mavis lounging sideways on the altar in her grey suit, her flick knife snapping open in her hand, winking at him, “th
ey shall cease.”

  He gets to his feet, slips on the black tiled floor, falls into the piles of photographs. “None of you are here!” he rages, picking up handfuls and throwing them into the air.

  “Whether there be knowledge,” Jeanette White leaning against the rack in her new turquoise twinset, raising a pint glass full of coins towards him, “it shall vanish away.” She smiles and turns the glass upside down, pouring the coins over his head.

  “For we know in part,” the woman I have just left on Holland Park Avenue now standing behind him in her herringbone coat, holding a small silver bell that she rings above his head, “and we prophesy in part.”

  He staggers to his feet, in the middle of the circle they have made around him, clenches his fists and throws back his head. “None of you are here!” he bellows and the red walls shake at his fury, the sound of interference, a radio somewhere starting to hiss as the women shimmer and then disappear. He begins to laugh, long beads of drool stringing from the corners of his mouth. Reaches down, but as his fingers touch the photographs, there is another loud burst of feedback and a sudden flash of light.

  “I am here,” she says, dressed in white, hovering above him with the blue light pouring out of her, enveloping the room. “Daddy dear.”

  He looks up at her, his face contorted with horror and desire. Reaches out his hand to try and touch her but it goes straight through her, her laughter pealing out of her, echoing around the walls, the room beginning to shake again, the sound of a howling wind.

  “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child,” Jenny's voice cutting through the gale, “but now I have put away childish things.”

  He staggers, clutches his chest, and as he does so, Jenny rises to the top of the room, filling the place with a blinding light.

  “And now abideth faith, hope, Love,” her voice so loud now that the walls are starting to crumble, “these three; but the greatest of these is Love.”

  The walls collapsing and the last thing I see is him falling, screaming, into the void of blackness that opens up beneath him.

  “This is where I've been keeping them.” The dapper little old man opened the door and turned on the light. “I think you'll find they're all in order. Please, come in, have a good look around.”

  I walked into the room, my eyes travelling from floor to ceiling. A room full of pictures, collages and canvases, dazzling in their colour and beauty. All the work that Jenny had produced at St Martin's, the pictures she had painted in Italy, she had entrusted to the care of her former tutor Murray Partridge. It was all in the letter she had left for me.

  I had been bed-bound for two weeks after our visit to her parents’ house, exhausted by the fever that had burned through me that afternoon and into the night that followed. Jenny had called a doctor out for me, then sent someone else to come and look after me, bring me the envelope that contained the letter. There was nothing more she could do herself – her contractions had already started.

  My eyes took in sketches of nudes, life-drawings from the late Fifties, in pencil and charcoal or sometimes with a colour wash, drawn in a draughtsman's hand that rendered them three-dimensional with deceptively skilful ease. The nudes becoming more Cubist as her style developed, but still recognisably women, generously proportioned, coloured so as to make the skin seem to glow off the canvas.

  Montages featuring American car number plates, Coca-Cola bottle tops and a badge proclaiming I love Elvis. Icarus falling from the sun, first sketched in charcoal, then painted in oil, bright blue and yellow, the colours like a stained glass window. An actual pastiche of a stained glass window, the figure of the Queen of Sheba at its centre.

  More collages: Japanese flags and American pulp paperback covers, Edwardian fashion plates, planets hovering over purple skies and enormous pin-up women rising over cathedrals. Jean-Paul Belmondo with a huge red rose on the top of his hat. Marilyn Monroe and Mata Hari. Vivid reds and clashing purples, Surrealism to the untrained eye, but now that I knew her real story, Jenny's singular purpose leapt out at me, her grasp of humour and contradiction wise beyond her years.

  Then there was a portrait of Dave, leaning forwards, his chin resting on his knuckles, staring at her with laughter in his eyes. The image was almost as clear and precise as a photograph, with a blue wash for a backdrop and then, on a red curtain above him, four slightly stretched caricatures of her own face laughing back.

  Most movingly of all, a self-portrait from 1958. Something slightly askew with it, as there always are with self-portraits, the faces you know best always the hardest to capture. Jenny had been brutal on herself, coarsening her features, her hair pulled back from her face in a rough ponytail, an ungroomed look I had never seen in life. But her eyes so big and full of pain and sorrow, they were the focus of it. Jenny looking deep into her own soul and offering it up to the canvas.

  “Isn't she beautiful?” said Mr Partridge, dabbing at his eyes with a handkerchief.

  “I never realised,” I said, feeling like an explorer, long in the desert, who had stumbled through a crevice into a fantastical lost world.

  If you have opened this letter, she had written, then it means I am no longer with you. So I am afraid I'm going to have to ask you yet another favour…

  Jenny had safely delivered her daughter, Martha Jane Mannings, that same evening. She had been able to hold the baby, make sure she had all her fingers and toes, before she passed from this world to the next. She didn't have glandular fever. She had a rare and malignant form of leukaemia that her pregnancy precluded her from being treated for. Shortly after giving birth she had begun to haemorrhage and there was nothing they could do to staunch it. It happened so quickly and she was already unconscious, so she wouldn't have suffered, I was told.

  Unlike her father, who, shortly after his return home, had suffered a massive stroke and fallen into a coma. He had remained in an intensive care unit ever since, trapped in the limbo between life and death. The best possible place he could be.

  Martha has another inheritance, you see, apart from her monetary one. And I wish you to be the guardian of it. Mr Murray Partridge was my tutor at St Martin's. Everything of worth that I have ever drawn or painted is in his keeping and now I would like to pass it on to you, to look after for Martha until she is 21. Don't think me awful, Stella, but you are the only person I can trust not to get too sentimental about it, extract things from it for personal reasons, or try to sell any of it. When you see it all, I believe you will know why it's so important for her to have it.

  Now I stood in Mr Partridge's flat in South Kensington, in the room he had kept just for her, understanding everything as the tears rolled down my face.

  He took hold of my hand with his long, delicate fingers.

  “It seems such a pity,” he said, “that no one will ever get to see them now.”

  “I don't know about that,” I said. “I think I know a way they can.”

  The body of the eighth girl wasn't found until the 16th of February 1965. She was an Irishwoman called Coral Sweeney, who left a husband and two children behind in Shepherd's Bush and further family in Dublin. They never got to see any justice done, never got to know who it was that had snatched away their wife, their mother, their daughter, their sister. Coral was discovered, a month and six days after she failed to come home, on a patch of wasteland on a factory estate in Acton, the place that Mavis had shown me. Strangely, the corpse showed no signs of decomposition – the man who had found her was overcome by how beautiful she looked. According to the coroner, she must have been kept in cold storage for all of that time, before being left there.

  At that point the head of the Stripper enquiry, Detective Chief Inspector Reginald Bell, announced his retirement, blaming the strain of the investigation for his decision. In the same newspaper, but much further towards the back, was a short report of a suicide. Former detective Ronald Grigson had left a note for his wife saying that he couldn't go on, before locking
himself in the kitchen, fixing a tube to his gas supply and asphyxiating himself. His profession at the time of his death was given as a night watchman on the Swan Factory Estate.

  DCI Bell was replaced by a man called Alan Ponting; the head of Scotland Yard's murder squad, who had just hit the headlines putting Sampson ‘The Chopper’ Marks behind bars. Ponting promised a speedy conclusion to the hunt but he would have no such result. The Stripper case was never solved, not officially, anyway.

  Jack was gone, the dial stuck on static.

  PS, Jenny had written at the end of her letter, if you look in the Emile Zola book you so kindly lent me in hospital, you will find something that I took from you the very first day that we met. It was silly of me, only I wanted us to be friends so much that I thought if I took something personal of yours, then, like a witch, I could somehow make that happen.

  Inside the book were two pieces of card, that shielded something delicate, wrapped up in tissue paper. It was a poppy I'd found growing through a crack in the paving stones, on a street in Bloxwich that had been reduced by the Luftwaffe to a river of glass. Pa had watched me pick it and shown me how to preserve it.

  We held the exhibition in March, when the first buds of spring were showing through. For her friends it was like another wake, but a more hopeful one than the distressing hours after her funeral had been. For once, we were all together – Dave shaking hands cautiously with an equally nervous Mannings, then both of them staring at the bundle in his arms, the bright blue eyes of Martha that were just like her mother's, and slowly beginning to smile, slowly letting their defences down as they took her through the treasures that had been left for her.

  Jackie and Maria, the girl she had met in the Gateways Club, now the manageress of Brockett & Reade, now sharing the flat in Chelsea with her too. Lenny doing his usual showman's trick, talking to all the visitors and telling them about Jenny, putting his arm around Giles when it all got too much for him. The oldies hanging back, finding much to discuss between them; Cedric and Mya, Stanley and Mr Partridge.