‘And they didn’t see you?’
Cedric shook his head violently. ‘I saw them and I dodged back from the window. Mister, I was scared. I saw them split up – three go one way, three go the other and the others go towards the gate. But I could only see to the end of the road, you can just see the gate from here, from my room.’
‘I’d like you to show me,’ Mickey said.
Mrs Barclay looked ready to object. But she took another look at Henry and conceded defeat. She nodded at her son and Mickey and Cedric made their way upstairs. Henry stayed put.
‘And when will Mr Barclay be home … or is he too hiding somewhere in this house?’
Her expression was laden now with utter loathing and contempt. He had crossed a line. ‘My husband died. In 1917, my husband died. He left me with a two-year-old boy and, because he was an officer, a small pension. I have fought tooth and nail to raise my son, and to raise him properly so that he can take his place in the world and earn an honest living. I have skill at dressmaking and tailoring, and that has seen us through.’
She turned her face away from Henry and pointedly ignored him until Mickey and her son returned.
‘I don’t think there’s much more that Cedric can tell us,’ Mickey said, taking in the frosty silence.
Henry rose and thanked the woman formally and he and Mickey left.
‘What the devil’s got into you today?’ Mickey demanded as they walked back to the car. ‘First that tomfoolery at the gypsy camp, and now that. The woman was not a suspect.’
‘Perhaps not. But she lied to us.’
‘You’ll find nothing as protective as a mother, you know that. Or you should do, knowing your Cynthia. She was frightened, Henry. When people are afraid they act in what they see as their own best interests, not in ours, you know that.’
Henry shrugged. ‘What could be seen from the boy’s room?’
‘What he said. A little of the gate, and a little of the road as it turns uphill. So, they came up, mob handed, and they came armed. There would have been broken heads and, if there were gunshots, perhaps dead too, but as neither side is prepared to tell us anything useful …’
‘Pieces begin to fall into place,’ Henry said thoughtfully. ‘And you are right, I behaved badly. To the woman, anyway.’
‘And if word of this gets back, any of it, it will show neither of us in a good light.’
‘If it does, then I will shoulder the blame,’ Henry said with equanimity.
‘Lord, but you can be an awkward bastard when the mood takes you,’ Mickey said.
There were two messages waiting for Henry when they arrived back at the Crown. The first had been sent down from central office and was information that he’d asked for, but he was very surprised to recognize his niece’s hand on the second letter. He’d left Cynthia the pub’s address, just in case she needed to reach him, and she must have allowed Melissa to use it. Melissa and Henry had a regular correspondence. He took the letter upstairs and waited until he’d run a bath before opening it. He settled into the bath, hoping to ease his bruises and telling himself that he had in fact been a complete idiot and that Mickey was right and he deserved the reprimand. Opening the letter, he found that there was also an enclosure from Cynthia; just a quick loving greeting, but he was glad of it.
Dear Uncle Henry, Melissa wrote,
I learned something interesting today from Nanny. I asked what it meant when people talked about kith and kin. I know kin means family and Nanny said that kin means people who are blood relations to you or who are accepted as family even though they might not be blood relations, but kith is people that you are meant to be couth to. Nanny told me that the word comes from couth and uncouth, and that it is probably Anglo-Saxon.
Don’t you think it’s funny, Uncle Henry, that some words have come to be only used one way now and not the opposite? We talk about uncouth, but we very rarely say anybody is couth. At least I’ve never heard anybody say that somebody is couth, but Nanny says that is because the word has become kith. She said it had transmuted. I had to ask how to spell that. It’s like gormless. Nanny likes the word gormless, but she tells me that gorm is also a word, that somebody can be gormful or gormless.
Uncle Henry, I think you are thoroughly gormful.
I am looking forward to our shopping trip. I am also looking forward to Cyril coming home at the end of this week.
Your faithful niece, Melissa
Henry laughed aloud and then realized that his ribs hurt when he laughed, so he stopped. ‘If you’d seen me today, Melissa, you would have decided on gormless rather than gormful, I think,’ he said.
When he arrived downstairs he found that Mickey had been doing his best, using the pub telephone, to contact Malina Cooper, and had finally got through. His suspicions aroused at a voice he did not recognize, the caretaker had not been at all sure that Mickey’s credentials were correct when he had told him that he was a police officer. He’d also been very concerned that the young lady might be in trouble, or that something might have happened to her brother or her family, and when Malina finally came to the phone Mickey could imagine the man hovering in the background and listening to the conversation.
‘I told her we paid a visit to her Aunt Sarah and that we were concerned for her welfare. She took some convincing, but she’s finally agreed to meet us, though she didn’t want to meet until Kem could be with her. As she is not due to have contact with him again before this Sunday I was at pains to insist she see us sooner, and she finally agreed that after work tomorrow she and a friend will convene to a Lyons’ Corner House and she’ll listen to what we have to say.’
‘And is she cut from the same cloth as her aunt?’
‘Oh, very much so, I would say. How are the ribs and the knuckles?’
‘As you would expect,’ Henry confessed. ‘I forget sometimes that I am no longer a young man.’
‘You’re not an old man either, but you are old enough to have more sense.’
‘So,’ Mickey said, when they had settled in their usual corner. ‘Time to collate what we have, I think. What we know so far, and what we don’t.’
Henry nodded, taking his notebook from his pocket and setting it on the table beside an open map.
Mickey was flicking through his own notebook. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So on Wednesday last, the fifth of December, we were called out to examine two bodies, brought ashore at’ – he pointed at the map – ‘approximately this point, here. The initial story was that they had been found deeper in the channel and brought to shore by a man and boy who called themselves Frederick and Eddy Garth, Eddy being the boy, and claimed they were skipper and third hand aboard a sailing barge called the Delilah.’
‘A story which is untrue in most of its detail,’ Henry continued. ‘And this’ – he unfolded the communication that had been waiting for him on their return to the Crown – ‘indicates that the Delilah, though she certainly exists, is not a sailing barge but a lighter. And they have no crew aboard of that name, and they have never had crew aboard of that name. So far we have no one who recognizes the photographs either.
‘As the constable told us, lighters are flat-bottomed barges, generally used within docks to row goods and people to and fro. An unpowered lighter would not be out in the middle of the Medway and would be unlikely to be found even in Otterham Creek.’
‘But that’s not to say our man might not have been a lighterman at some point,’ Mickey suggested. ‘We know that people resort to half truths rather than full lies because it helps keep the story straight. So it’s still worth pursuing.’
‘Very true, and it will take time. There are a lot of docklands to search in the Thames and the Medway, and a lot of people to question, and it is an itinerant population.’
‘So,’ Mickey continued, ‘we know the identities of both men, Billy Crane and Max Peterson, and we know that Billy Crane was one of Bailey’s crew and we have it on information from Thomas Boswell that Crane was, as he put it, a “fa
voured child”. Probably an actual illegitimate child of Bailey’s and so he’s likely to take this personally. I’m inclining towards the idea that Bailey was not responsible for these two deaths, but only for that of Grigor Vardanyan.’
‘On balance, I agree with that analysis. But that third death, our little Armenian informant and card-sharp, that certainly bears all the hallmarks of Josiah Bailey and his gang.’
‘So this brings us to the information from ten years ago, when the Beaney family were burned out of their home and taken elsewhere – if we are to believe in the witness statement about the wagon and the car. A story we cannot test or prove. On the other hand, why would anyone lie about such a thing?’
‘And,’ Henry added, ‘we now know that Dalina Beaney and her children made their way to the gypsy encampment at Ash Tree Lane and that their family took them in and cared for them. That Dalina died there. We must get a death certificate to establish that point, but I see no immediate reason to doubt it.’
‘It’s quite likely the children will have a copy anyway,’ Mickey asserted. ‘And we’ll gain more knowledge of that end of things when we meet the daughter tomorrow. But now we begin to get strange. Bailey, and we must assume that it was Bailey at this point, sends twelve armed men out in search of Dalina Beaney. Only twelve, which in the context of the size of the encampment seems a little inadequate, and perhaps speaks to lack of knowledge or intelligence, or both. And speculating purely on coincidence, I would guess that the name was given to him by Grigor Vardanyan. Now that name could mean something or nothing. He was beaten so badly he’d have said anything, but we also have the coincidence of location, of the Beaney family being driven out and of the finding of Bailey’s two men close by that spot.’
‘And given that the cottage was probably owned by kin of Dalina’s, that makes me think she saw it as a safe haven, away from Bailey and the life she had lived with her husband in London. Perhaps she hoped that he would not return from the war.’
‘The devil looks after his own,’ Mickey said morosely.
‘We both came back.’
‘I rest my case.’
‘We can’t see all the permutations yet, all the connections,’ Henry added, ‘though the shadows of connections are beginning to emerge. But I’m troubled by the violence meted out on the little card-sharp. Either he held out for a long period of time or he gave the wrong information; he told Bailey what he did not want to hear.’
‘Perhaps he didn’t know exactly what it was that Bailey wanted – and perhaps Bailey didn’t either.’
‘So then, we have the boy Cedric seeing these men arrive and telling his mother. We have the mother reporting this to Sergeant Frith, who then blabs the information at the gypsy camp. Now we’ve no reason to believe that there is a connection between the encampment and Bailey – in fact, quite the opposite – but that doesn’t excuse Frith talking about a witness when it’s obvious that only those overlooking the street on the night of the attack could possibly have witnessed anything. That’s a handful of people; it would be easy for anyone to discover who this witness was and what they had seen. At the very least, it is careless and unprofessional.’
Mickey raised his glass and drank, peering at his boss over the rim.
‘I will not rise to that bait, Mickey. So, where do we go from here?’
‘We speak to the girl. We keep looking for the man and boy. Do we know where Grigor was living?’
‘That too was in the information sent today. He had a room above a clockmaker’s shop. A man named Abraham Levy. He was interviewed today, but I would like to go and speak to him again.’ Henry consulted the notes he had been sent. ‘It seems he had not seen his tenant for three or four days, but that that was not unusual. He paid his rent and was a quiet tenant.’
‘So tomorrow when we return to London, we will pay this Abraham Levy a visit.’
‘And we need to find the young man, Kem Beaney, or Cooper as he is now.’
‘His sister says that he is likely to be at sea until Friday or Saturday night. They plan to visit the mother’s grave on Sunday,’ Mickey told him. ‘In the meantime we will see what his sister can tell us. Speaking of sisters, what did you make of Sarah Cooper?’
‘Intelligent, loyal and tenacious,’ Henry said. ‘I am not surprised her sister went to her in times of trouble. I find it less likely that the sister did not confide in her, at least in some measure.’
‘Do you mean to go and see her again?’
‘Perhaps. We will find out what the children have to say first. It’s possible the mother told them something before she died. The other thing that puzzles me is the method of killing. Billy Crane and Max Peterson were both killed by single stab wounds, but the method and the weapon were different in each case. One seems to be a knife, straightforward enough, and an accurate upward thrust which anyone with a little practice would be able to manage. The second is more puzzling. What weapon was used, and why? And I still draw parallels with the death of Martha Howells in January this year. That is still unsolved, and her body was probably only discovered by chance. It’s quite likely it would have been swept away into the river after the floods, and no one would have been the wiser.’
‘True,’ Mickey agreed.
It had been Henry himself who had picked up the body and carried it to a point above where the floodwaters looked set to rise. He’d taken her into an old theatre building, and the water had come in much faster than anyone had anticipated, the Thames breaking banks, damaging walls and houses and drowning those in basements. Henry had been trapped with the body for fifteen hours before the waters receded enough for a boatman to reach them.
‘And did she have a link to Bailey? Now there’s a question no one had reason to ask at the time.’
Henry looked thoughtful and then shrugged. ‘She was a prostitute, well known, and her associates were all interviewed. But – and this is one thing that surprised us all, if I remember – until recently, she’d worked out of a house in Princelet Street, along with three other girls. She was from the south of England, but of the other three one was Italian, one French and the other, I believe, was Dutch. It struck me as strange, but maybe not so strange. You know how many foreign nationals there are in the sex trade in London.’
Mickey nodded. ‘And how many men there are that see these foreign girls as exotic. Safer to work from premises, I’d have thought, so why did she stop? Was that ever established?’
‘As I remember, the girls just said she’d left about a week before she died. The woman who ran the house told us that girls come and go all the time, and she saw nothing strange in that. Or so she said.’
‘This has always niggled you,’ Mickey commented.
‘You know I hate to leave things untied. All of this might be coincidence, of course.’
‘It might be,’ Mickey agreed. ‘But you don’t think so, and neither do I.’
SEVENTEEN
It could, Henry wrote in his journal, be seen almost as a commonplace to find a prostitute dead, or for one to be assaulted. Such has been an occupational hazard probably for as long as prostitution has existed, but it is certainly so in the big cities, and London is no exception.
On the night we found Martha Howells dead, she was one of two prostitutes discovered murdered. Because they were not victims of the flood they are not listed among the fourteen dead, casualties of poverty and natural disaster. But they were victims nonetheless. The other, whose name I do not recall because I was not directly involved, had been bludgeoned and her earnings stolen. But Martha Howells had been stabbed once, with a weapon of unusual shape which has not yet been identified.
I happened to be with a group of constables close to the foreshore – or what had been the foreshore before the water came in. I have to say it was a terrifying event. Poor families crammed into basements were inundated within moments and the lucky ones were pulled out by neighbours or by police officers or by passers-by. Many were trapped on higher floors and were left fo
r hours without help, or water or heat. They were the lucky ones, in some ways. I remember we spotted this woman – or rather, we spotted her body – and the first assumption was that she was another drowning victim. Her clothes were sodden and her hair had fallen forward on to her face. She was lying face down on the ground and it was only when we turned her, to check for signs of life, that we saw the blood on her chest and realized that the cause of death was not drowning.
The water was coming in rapidly and the constables with me were of more use helping with the evacuation, so we picked her up and carried her to higher ground. I can remember the roar as something gave way, I still can’t be sure what, but the water was suddenly all around, and had risen from ankle deep up to my knees. Had we arrived any later her body would have been washed away and none been any the wiser.
Henry paused, remembering. That had been an appalling night. Dark and freezing, and most of those on patrol had spent it sodden and miserable, doing what they could for those who had lost everything.
But what had Martha Howells to do with Max Peterson and Billy Crane? It was not so neat a wound as that which I saw on this second body, that of Max Peterson. It was as though the woman had been in motion, turning perhaps when the blow had been struck. The man, bound and possibly even held still, had not moved and therefore the weapon had gone in straight and clean and so it looked, at first, like a bullet wound. The internal shape of both is the same, I am sure of it.
Was there a link, Henry wondered, or was he just looking for patterns where none existed?
The following morning they returned to London and delivered their initial reports and just after midday they went to visit Abraham Levy, the clockmaker over whose shop Grigor had lodged.
Abraham Levy was a tall man, lean and stern in appearance, but his voice and tone told another story. When they entered he was discussing a clock with a customer. ‘You can leave it with me,’ he said, ‘but I’m warning you, it will be expensive. This clock has not been made, not been produced for fifty or sixty years. If I must make parts for it, then I must make parts for it. If the clock is precious enough to you, then I will make parts for it. I can give you an estimate and then you can say, Abraham, this is too much, and I won’t take offence.’
Kith and Kin Page 13