Kith and Kin

by Jane A. Adams

  He glanced up to look at the two men who had entered and then returned his attention to his customer. ‘Maybe you should keep this clock just for the show of it? Maybe you should buy a new clock for telling the time. A clock that will tell you the right and proper time, and not what it thinks the time ought to be. Clocks are like people, when they get older they get forgetful.’

  Abraham and the customer obviously knew each other well and the woman laughed. ‘I will think about it, Abraham,’ she said. ‘And perhaps you are right, perhaps I should give my old forgetful clock a nice retirement and just buy myself a nice new clock. Perhaps one of those electric ones. Perhaps one without a pendulum.’

  It was obvious to Mickey that this conversation picked up on old themes and that the woman was gently goading the clockmaker because Abraham threw up his hands in horror. ‘A clock without a pendulum is a clock without a heart. My dear, you cannot be serious. I will find you a nice new clock, with a pendulum, with a good tick.’

  ‘I will have to think about it,’ she said. She picked up the box that must contain the errant clock and Henry held the door for her as she left.

  ‘And you must be more policemen,’ Abraham said. ‘Two I had here yesterday, two more today, it seems. If you want to see the boy’s room come through the back and go up the stairs. It is the second on the right.’ He flipped up a panel in the counter and let them through and Mickey introduced them both.

  ‘If you have a few moments, we would like to ask some questions,’ Mickey said.

  ‘Then when you come down I will have made tea,’ Abraham told them. ‘And I’ll put the sign on the door to say that I’m closed for a little while and you can ask your questions – and I hope they are more intelligent questions than those idiot constables asked me yesterday.’

  The stairs were narrow and uncarpeted, but the room itself was tidy and, though sparse, had everything that might be needed. A bed, a two-ring stove, a sink plumbed into the corner. To one side of the sink was a rack for draining pots and the shelf above held shaving gear, so the sink obviously served two purposes, the washing of both the person and his crockery.

  ‘I’ve seen far worse living places,’ Mickey commented. ‘At least it’s clean and there doesn’t seem to be any damp.’ He dumped his bag down on a chair and extracted the camera. ‘Not much point looking for fingerprints,’ he said, ‘not if the constables were up here yesterday. We’d have to find them and fingerprint them for elimination and that would take Lord knows how long. And they’d object, you just know they would. I had one idiot say it made him feel like a criminal, last time I had to do that.’

  He stopped grumbling and looked around. ‘Besides,’ he said, ‘I suppose this poor little room doesn’t fully count as a scene of crime. It won’t take long to cover this, at any rate,’ he said, surveying the tiny space. ‘I wonder if there’s another lodger in the second room.’

  ‘Not likely to be there at this hour, if there is,’ Henry said, ‘but I’ll take a look inside and we can talk to the clockmaker about it when we go down.’

  He was back inside a few moments, reporting that the room appeared to be empty and unlived in. It was set out in a similar way to Grigor’s. Mickey had begun to take photographs and Henry tracked him around the room, searching after Mickey had catalogued. It did not take them very long and the haul of items that went into manila envelopes and then into the murder bag was small. A few letters, some newspaper clippings, receipts from a tailor – for a shirt, to have its collar turned – and a pawnbroker, for a pocket watch. No money and no valuables. A few spare clothes, but it seemed that most of what Grigor owned he was wearing or carrying when he met his death.

  They went back downstairs and Abraham let them through to a small back room. He took the kettle from the top of a barrel stove and filled the tea pot and then went back into the shop to turn the sign to closed (‘Back in ten minutes’). He obviously expected them to take only a little of his day.

  ‘So,’ he said. ‘You’ll be wanting to ask me how long he lived here and I will tell you, about a month. You will be wanting to ask me how well I knew him and I will tell you, not well at all. He was quiet, he paid his rent mostly on time, he never made any trouble. Once he left for a few days and he told me he was going to be away. He said, Abraham, I will be away from Thursday through to Monday. This time he did not tell me he was going, and so I worried for him. Now it seems I was right to worry.’

  ‘You say you did not know him very well and yet you worried for him. You liked him, then?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘I liked him as well as anyone can like a man they do not know very well, but who lives under their roof. Though technically my roof is next door, and usually I have two lodgers here. It’s cheaper than keeping a guard dog and certainly cheaper than installing any kind of alarm system. Not that I have much faith in alarm systems. A good lock, now that is a good thing, and a good dog is another good thing. Two lodgers, even better.’

  ‘And did you have two lodgers at this present time?’

  Abraham shook his head. ‘I had two. A young man called Anthony who left because his family needed him. That would be ten days or so ago and I can give you his address, should you need it. And poor, poor Grigor. Now I have no lodgers, and that young man has no life.’

  Henry sat at his desk, Mickey opposite, and together they examined the items they had taken from Grigor’s room. On the way back they had called at the tailor’s and also the pawnbroker, where they retrieved a cheap brass pocket watch. The tailor’s had proved to be a small business run out of the front room of one of the terraced houses, just a few doors down from Abraham’s shop. A woman and her daughter did repairs, made over and mended, and sometimes made from scratch. They had removed the collar from the shirt, turned it so the wear was hidden on the inside and reattached the collar, sewing a strip of binding over the seam so that it was left smooth.

  Henry, perhaps reminded of Mickey’s act of kindness to the man and boy who claimed to have found the bodies, had felt obliged to pay for the work that had been done.

  He was reminded also of the woman, Cedric’s mother, whom they had met the day before – though it was in his mind that she would not have made any kind of association between her own situation and the work done by this East End woman and her daughter. Mrs Barclay would have viewed herself as a cut above, Henry thought.

  ‘According to the pawnbroker, the watch was in and out of hock at least once a month,’ Mickey commented. ‘And it’s a perfectly ordinary watch, no inscription, no dents and scratches, as you’d expect if it’s just been carried in a pocket. And the shirt is a perfectly ordinary shirt, probably bought second-hand, with a stitched-on collar like that.’

  Henry nodded. It was still a commonplace for poorer people and working men to wear shirts with a small stand-up to which a starched linen or celluloid collar could be fixed for Sunday best. But the trade in second-hand clothing was a lively one and the shirt looked much mended and had obviously had a long life.

  He looked up at Mickey, something striking him in what his sergeant had said. ‘But Grigor had only been out of gaol for a little over a month. The pawnbroker told you it had been in and out of hock on a regular basis; that might well be true, but it can’t have been Grigor who pawned it.’

  ‘So, he did it for someone else? But he kept the pawn ticket. Or maybe he’d acquired the watch from someone, a payment of a debt, or he stole it – no, that’s unlikely. The pawnbroker clearly knew the watch so he’d surely not have risked hocking it in a place where the real owner might have been able to see it.’

  ‘Or the pawnbroker was wrong,’ Henry suggested. He turned the watch in his hands. It was a very ordinary watch with a plain brass case, not scratched or dented, as it might be had someone simply kept it in their pocket. Mickey kept his in his waistcoat and it too was smooth and relatively unscathed, bar the one small dent that Mickey tolerated because of the memory attached to it.

  ‘One plain brass watch looks pretty much lik
e another. If he looked down his register and saw a regular entry for a brass watch, he might have made an erroneous assumption, I suppose.’

  Henry sighed and set the timepiece down on his blotter. ‘The only thing of interest that I can see are the press cuttings. People cut things from newspapers for a reason; these are yellowed and old, so Grigor must have had them for some time, and yet I can’t see the relevance.’

  Mickey had laid them out on the table, side by side. The first was about an arrest, and they had been able to cross-reference that and find out that it was eight years old. The man named was Nathaniel Timmins, and he had been arrested for the armed robbery of an off-licence. A passer-by had tried to intervene and Timmins had opened fire, shot him in the arm. The man had survived and Timmins had been arrested only a short time later. Charged with armed robbery and attempted murder, he was now serving a very long sentence.

  The second recorded a wedding, but not a local one. It was a picture of the bride and groom, a Mr and Mrs Cowdrey, and the wedding had taken place in Bradford in Yorkshire. A request had been sent for a copy of the marriage certificate.

  ‘This could simply have been a friend or family member getting married. They might have sent the clipping to Grigor if he couldn’t make it to the wedding.’

  ‘Entirely possible,’ Henry agreed. ‘Cynthia keeps all sorts of things like this, but if she kept a clipping of a wedding I would have expected her to have kept the invitation as well. And if the association was close enough for the bridegroom to have sent a record of it, would you not expect that there would have been an invitation as well? Or am I being fanciful?’

  Mickey shrugged. ‘Belle keeps all kinds of stuff too. For that matter I suppose we all do. It doesn’t always stay together, though, does it? Not unless you’re like Cynthia and put everything into an album.’

  Henry acknowledged that. ‘Then these other two.’ One of these clippings they had also been able to cross-reference. It was a trial at which Bernard Spilsbury had given evidence and the clipping showed the great man coming out of court, surrounded by press photographers and newspaper reporters and onlookers in the background. There was no text, just the press photograph and, looking closely through a glass, Mickey had spotted that Grigor himself was in the crowd, which was perhaps reason enough to keep it.

  The last was a shipping timetable and recorded sailings to South America. The date on this was three years past.

  ‘A seemingly random selection,’ Mickey said. ‘I’m hard pressed to find any connection or meaning. There might not be a connection or a meaning.’

  ‘And yet he kept them. And there was little enough in his room, no photographs, no correspondence from friends, no scribbled notes or shopping lists, none of the usual things you’d expect to find.’

  ‘His needs seem to have been few,’ Mickey said. ‘Perhaps so few that he knew them by heart and never needed to write them down. Not everyone makes notes of everything.’

  Henry gathered this small set of possessions together and put them back into the manila envelope. More pieces of a jigsaw puzzle with no picture on the box.

  On impulse, he opened the envelope again and withdrew the clippings and slipped them into his pocket. Mickey looked questioning.

  ‘I mean to show them to the girl later. To Miss Cooper. It’s possible she may recognize something; she told you that she knew Grigor, so …’

  ‘It’s possible,’ Mickey said. But it was clear he had his doubts. ‘And there is still nothing on the man and boy; they seem to have vanished into thin air.’

  Someone who was trying to vanish into thin air was Thomas Boswell. He’d seen the newspaper reports – Max and Billy, and now Grigor – and he had, as it were, seen the writing on the wall and decided that retreat was the better part of valour on this occasion. However, where to hide? That was the challenge.

  The day he had seen Bailey, the day he had been interviewed by the police, Tommy’s sense of self-preservation had begun to kick in and he had thought about leaving. Then he’d heard about what had happened at the gypsy camp and had witnessed the beatings Bailey had dished out; after that there had been Grigor, and he had really begun to worry.

  He had assured Bailey that Dalla and the kids had disappeared for good, caught the train and gone over the hills and far away, when it seemed that all that had really happened was that she had walked a few miles down the road and gone back to her family.

  The fact that no one had seen hide nor hair of her since that night would not matter to Bailey now. The fact that the woman had obviously wanted to stay out of sight and had simply gone to people she trusted rather than leaving the area, well, Bailey would not give a damn about that. Dalla had been told to go, and she hadn’t gone. Bailey senior had decided to show mercy to the woman and the kids, he didn’t see the sense in starting vendettas he didn’t have to start, but the son was cut from different cloth.

  Though he would never say it out loud, Tommy considered Josiah Bailey junior to be ‘touched’.

  The fact was, Grigor must have told Bailey something about Dalla; otherwise why send people out to the camp? What had Grigor known? Had he been aware, all along, that Dalla had taken the children there? Had they been in touch with him all along?

  Tommy didn’t know what to think and he wasn’t sure what all the implications were but he was damned certain that none of them were going to be good for him.

  That afternoon, after he’d heard about the beatings, heard about Grigor, Tommy had returned to his room and packed his bag. It hadn’t taken long. He then shoved the bag under his bed, just in case anyone came round in the meantime. There was no point in trying to leave before it was full dark and he had some chance of getting away. Tommy knew that if he walked down the road carrying a bag before the streets were cleared for the night and everyone tucked up inside their homes, then he’d be seen and Bailey would want to know the meaning of it – and Tommy knew he couldn’t provide any satisfactory answers, even if it could be supposed that Bailey might listen to any. So he waited, waited alone in his dark room; he didn’t want the lights to show and announce that he was there. He sat in silence until after midnight and then he let himself quietly out the back door and set off, keeping to the shadows.

  He had little idea as to final destination. But for now he just wanted to get out of Bailey’s territory, and preferably somewhere where he wouldn’t be recognized. Tommy had never risen in the ranks, but he’d acted as a messenger, been where trouble was, been visible even if in the background, and so he didn’t want to end up in anyone else’s territory, either.

  He had a little money, not much but enough for a ticket somewhere. Tommy figured he’d work it out whenever he got wherever he was going, so he walked and walked, and finally made it to Victoria station. He was told there was a slow train just about to head out to Brighton and Tommy, who had rarely been out of London, decided that was as good a destination as any and he bought a one-way ticket. One thing was for sure, he was never going to come back. His skin might not be valued by many, but it was the only skin he’d got and Tommy was determined to keep it.

  EIGHTEEN

  1925

  The day Josiah Bailey discovered that Ricky Clough was back in London was the day Harry Forbes had been fished out of the Thames. He’d been in the water long enough for his face to be unrecognizable though whoever had killed him had smashed it with a brick, just to be sure, and his fingertips had been removed. But the tattoos on his back had been enough to enable those who knew him to identify him.

  The police had put out the usual notices, calls for the man’s kin to come forward and identify the body, but no one had. Forbes didn’t have family and none of Bailey’s crew was going to lay claim to him.

  ‘How did he die? Who did him?’ Bailey demanded to know. Forbes had been one of his lieutenants for the past decade. A trusted man. Whoever struck against Forbes had struck against him.

  He was to find out the following day. A letter had been sent to him, handwriting an
d spelling not worth a damn but with a message clear enough.

  I hear they found Forbs. Thought I let you know I came back.

  It was signed Rico.

  Enclosed were newspaper reports about Clough’s escape and the deaths of two prison officers. The serious wounding of a third.

  Clem Atkins had made sure to be present to observe Bailey’s reaction to the news.

  Josiah Bailey had turned milk pale and then pillar box red.

  ‘You all right there, boss?’ Clem asked him. ‘Bad news, is it?’

  Bailey glared in his direction but seemed not to see Clem or to recognize the words. Incandescent with fury, he threw the letter down and stormed from the room. Clem picked it up.

  ‘What is it?’ Tommy Boswell asked.

  ‘See for yourself.’

  Tommy read carefully, his lips moving as he picked out the words. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Not that mad bugger. I thought we were well rid of him.’

  ‘Seems not. And it seems our Josiah is a little vexed by the news.’

  ‘What do you expect?’ Tommy said. ‘The lunatic damn near killed him. Took a half dozen of us to hold him back. It was only the old man who could control Rico and even he had trouble.’

  Clem nodded. ‘Rico owed the old man,’ he said. ‘Respected the father, so far as he respected anyone, but he had no time for the son. Not after Manfrid.’

  Tommy looked puzzled. ‘But Clough killed Manfrid. We were all there. Saw it.’

  ‘And Bailey ordered it.’

  ‘And if Clough hadn’t done it, some other poor bastard would’ve, and then Cloughie would have had them. It had to be Clough that did it. Anyway, he enjoyed it. Mad as hell he was when he knew Manfrid had cheated him.’