‘Doesn’t mean he didn’t hate Bailey for it.’
Tommy wasn’t sure about the reasoning of any of this, but then he’d always avoided Clough as far as he could. Not like Clem. Clem seemed to have actually sought him out, chosen to spend time with him. ‘If you say so,’ Tommy said. ‘Don’t know I understand any of it, though.’
Clough laughed. ‘You ain’t there to understand anything, Tommy boy. The likes of you are just around to do as you’re told.’
Josiah Bailey sat in his room and remembered the feel of Clough’s hands at his throat. They should have killed him that night, done him in. He was insane, always had been, and the old man knew that as well as Josiah did.
Kin, the old man had told his son. ‘I lost our eldest in the war. You came back, and so did Ricky.’
‘He’s not fucking kin. He’s not family.’
‘Isn’t he?’ Josiah senior had looked at his boy and Bailey remembered how he had felt cold inside. He put a hand to his neck, the memory of fingers still so strong he felt he might choke on it.
‘I don’t believe you.’
‘You calling me a liar? When your mother was carrying our youngest she weren’t well, but a man still has his needs. Oh, she knew about it, knew about them all. Your mother wasn’t stupid, she just knew when to turn a blind eye.’
‘You bastard. He’ll kill me one day, you know that.’
‘Or you’ll kill him. Cain and Abel. I warned you about him, didn’t I? Warned you not to get too close, when he first came here. I’d have found him something that took him far away, given him the means to go and kill elsewhere, but no. You knew what he was and that’s what called to you. I told you, you may be fascinated by the man now but one day, when you see him clear enough, that fascination will turn to fear and in time that fear will turn to terror. I told you, you do not encourage a man like that. You find him somewhere else to be, somewhere he can’t do harm to you and yours.’
‘You can do that now. Send him away.’
‘Have him killed, you mean? I could, but I don’t have a mind to and you, my boy, are not strong enough to have it done despite me. You ain’t the only one fascinated by Rico Clough. You have to wait until that fascination turns to fear and then to terror before men will act. While they think the devil’s on their side they’ll put up with having to step over the bodies, excuse the carnage. Look the other way. I’ll tell him he’s to lay off, leave you alone.’
‘You think he’ll listen?’
‘For now, yes. But there’ll be a time when he won’t, or when I won’t be here.’ Josiah senior shrugged. ‘And who’s to say which will come first?’
He had left Bailey to think on his words, this father of two sons who would be at each other’s throats until one got the upper hand.
Josiah had thought that he’d dodged the bullet when Rico had been put away, but now he was out, was back, and Bailey knew the time would come when Rico would find him out – and this time no one would intervene.
NINETEEN
1928
At five thirty p.m., Henry and Mickey arrived at the Lyons’ Corner House where they had been told to meet Malina. Two young women sat alone at a corner table. Mickey guessed that this was the girl and her friend.
He introduced himself, confirmed her identity and then he and Henry ordered tea and cake for the four of them.
‘I’d like Tilly to stay,’ Malina told them. ‘She knows all about me, she’s my friend from work and we have rooms on the same floor. And it looks far more respectable if there’s two of us.’
‘Of course,’ Mickey said. ‘We just want to ask some questions, and we also want you to know that we’re concerned about your safety, you and your brother Kem. I believe your aunt has already spoken to you.’
‘Aunt Sarah phoned,’ she confirmed. ‘Told us what happened.’
‘They came looking for your mother. It was clear they had no idea that she was dead,’ Henry said gently. ‘Do you have any idea why they might have come looking for her?’
The tea and cake arrived and Tilly, trying to be useful, arranged plates and cups. Malina seemed to be considering her response.
‘We know that in December 1918, your family had to leave their home. That men came in the night and took you away in a wagon. I think you were meant to disappear, but instead your mother took you to the camp at Ash Tree Lane. We know that your father was a violent man and we are surmising that he crossed Josiah Bailey senior in some way and that this brought the trouble down on your heads. Beyond that, we are guessing.’
Tilly poured the tea. She kept glancing at Mickey and then at Henry as though they were creatures from some strange world that she had no part of. She looked flushed and slightly excited. To be this close to real detectives!
Malina was not so impressed but she was curious, and after a while she said, ‘She was fierce, was Dalla. Our mother made a decision that night not to let anyone boss her about ever again, and she never did.’
She gave Henry a look that dared him to contradict.
‘So you remained there. At the gypsy camp.’
‘At Ash Tree Lane. Yes, for a bit anyhow. About five years or so, all told. No one came looking for us there. I don’t suppose it occurred to anyone that we hadn’t run as fast and as far as we could go. No one would have expected us to stop just a few miles away.’
‘No, I don’t suppose they would. Why did you?’
‘Family,’ she said. ‘We have family there. It were safe.’
‘Your mother’s family, they are agricultural workers?’
‘Mostly. A few went to sea, like Kem. A few worked with the showmen, running the fairs. Kin ties by marriage, you know. I might have done the same. There was a young man I liked and who liked me and we walked out for a bit, but then our ma died and I had a think about what the future might be like with him and what it might be like without him, and I decided that I’d rather do without.
‘I was seventeen when I came up to London, found a job in a ribbon shop. A haberdashery.’ She spoke the word as though it carried hidden magic. ‘I did that for a time and then I found some office work and I went to night classes to do my typing and shorthand.’
She paused again. ‘Typing and shorthand,’ she said, ‘and there was our ma barely able to put a letter together. She’d have been proud, though, I reckon.’
‘And Kem?’
‘He didn’t get on with the book learning,’ Malina admitted, ‘though he went to school some of the time and he can get by with the reading and the writing and whatever numbers he needs. He joined the library,’ she added. ‘Kem likes to read. History, mostly. History tells you how things began, and that tells you how they might go in future.’
Henry nodded thoughtfully. It was an unexpectedly perceptive comment and somehow chimed with his sense that this whole sorry mess itself had a long history.
‘And why do you think your father was killed?’ he asked the young woman in her serviceable, dark blue coat.
She looked down at the table, playing with her cake, and then she shrugged as though to say what did she have to lose now?
‘Ma thought it was something to do with the war,’ she said.
‘The war?’ That was an unexpected response.
‘Something that happened in that last autumn and winter, just before it ended and then maybe just after, before the men had all got home. Our dad came back in late November and he was dead by that first week of December, so whatever it was, I don’t believe there was time for much to happen after they’d come home. He’d only been back a couple of weeks – though that was enough, frankly. We wished him gone pretty much as soon as he’d arrived.’
‘We know he was a violent man.’
‘Always. No stopping him. She knew she shouldn’t have married him right from the start, but it was too late to back out once they’d tied the knot. Before that, even. You don’t make promises and then not keep them.’
‘And that’s why you decided to leave your young man be
fore any promises were made or implied?’ Mickey asked gently. He’d said little until now, preferring to watch and consider. ‘Malina, what could have happened in the war? What could have happened that made your father a target?’
She shrugged. ‘It was just what our mother believed. I don’t think she knew anything. That’s why they let us go that night. If anyone had thought we knew anything at all, we’d have been found dead in the cottage fire or something, and who would there be to ask questions?’
‘Your family might have asked. Your mother’s kin,’ Mickey surmised.
‘Travelling folk. Who would take notice of them?’
She paused, thinking, then said, ‘The men who came, the one in charge said they couldn’t be doing with liars. I remember that.’
‘With liars. Lies about what?’
‘They didn’t tell us. That was all they said. We packed our bags and they loaded us into the cart and we left. They burned the cottage down behind us and then took us to the station, left us there.
‘Our mother made us wait until she was sure the men had gone and then we started to walk. We walked through the night. Freezing cold it was. Then we got to Ash Tree Lane and our Sarah took us in.’
‘Did you stay with her?’
‘A few nights, but there weren’t room. They fixed us up with an old showman’s wagon. It had been empty, just used for storage, so the men got together and made it weather tight and the women got together and found us bedding and whatever else we needed, and we got the stove going and we lived there.’
Put like that, it sounded so simple and so obvious, but Henry could sense the pain behind the words. And fear.
‘Did your father’s family not want to know what had become of him? Did they not blame your mother?’
She shook her head. ‘He was second cousin to our mother,’ she said. ‘But they knew he was a bad lot and getting worse, and he’d taken up with people they didn’t approve of. It was expected, in a way. They made enquiries, wanting to find out at least what had happened, but I don’t think they ever did. I never knew anyone to blame our mother or us.’
‘You know it would be safer if both you and Kem left here?’
The young woman shook her head again. ‘We don’t run,’ she told him firmly. ‘You can’t spend life looking back over your shoulder, and that’s what we’d be doing, isn’t it?’
‘Especially if you are responsible for the deaths of Billy Crane and Max Peterson,’ Mickey said. ‘If there is evidence that you are, then it wouldn’t be just Bailey’s men you’d be running from.’
She laughed then, unexpectedly, and heads in the tearoom turned to look at her.
Henry frowned but Malina seemed totally undaunted by him. ‘Why would we want them dead?’ she asked. ‘That Max Peterson, we never met him, and as far as I’m concerned, if Billy Crane killed our dad, he did us a favour.’
‘You assume that your father is dead?’
‘Course he’s dead. They told us that. I stood by the kitchen table and they said sorry, but we had to kill your husband, we can’t be doing with liars. You remember things like that, clear as day, you remember things like that. Why would they be lying? What would they gain by lying about that?’
She leaned back in the chair and sipped her tea as though, as far as she was concerned, this interview was over and done with. But her next question took Henry by surprise.
‘Where did you two meet up, then?’ she asked, glancing from Henry to Mickey and back again.
‘In the war,’ Mickey told her. ‘Like a lot of other people.’
‘That’s just it, though, isn’t it? People meet up in places like that. At the Front, I mean. And after. The way the government tells it, it was all very organized, wasn’t it? Someone blew the whistle at eleven o’clock on the eleventh of November and it all ended and people came home, but it wasn’t like that, was it? It took time and it took organizing and what was really going on afterwards was chaos. Makes me wonder who my dad met and what they sold to him, what story. Makes me wonder what lies he told. And when you think about it, he’d been away four years by then, what could he possibly have to lie about to Josiah Bailey? What could he possibly know that might have affected Josiah Bailey? Like I said, he was only back two weeks and then he was gone. Dead. Branded a liar, and for all I know he probably was. He was everything else.’
‘Interesting questions,’ Mickey said. ‘And do you have any answers for them?’
She hesitated, then shook her head. She looked at her friend and Tilly nodded encouragingly. ‘Look,’ she said, ‘it’s probably nothing, but my mother and father were arguing a few nights before. I thought at first she was accusing him of having an affair, of having another woman somewhere, but now I’m not so sure. She was talking about women and girls. Women and girls, some of them no older than I was then. She said, how would he feel if it was me, and he said …’ She paused and looked again at Tilly. Tilly took her friend’s hand and clasped it tight. ‘And he said that it was good that I was getting to an age where I might be of some use. And then he laughed.’
‘And you were how old?’
She gave Mickey a look that was almost coquettish and then she became more serious. ‘I was twelve, Kem was ten, we were just kids.’
There was silence for a few moments and then Mickey asked, ‘What was your relationship with Grigor Vardanyan?’
‘Relationship? I didn’t have anything you could have called a relationship. We both knew him, Kem and me, from before we moved down to Upchurch. We saw him from time to time after that, when we came visiting up here, but after we left for Ash Tree Lane I heard nothing from him until I came back to London.’
‘And then?’
‘I spotted him one day. He was working a street corner close to Paddington station. Still the same old Grigor; still the same patter, the same old tricks.’
‘And you spoke to him?’
She nodded. ‘Your lot came and moved him on. He picked up his suitcase and started walking and, I don’t know, suddenly it seemed like a nice idea, to go and say hello.’
‘So, you spoke to him and he remembered you?’
She laughed. ‘Didn’t recognize me at first. I’d been a kid when we last met up but he was five years older than me and hadn’t changed so much so I recognized him straight off.’
‘And you saw him again?’
‘A couple of times. Kem and me, we met him when Kem was ashore. I didn’t like to see him on my own, in case he got the wrong idea, you know?’
‘You were protecting your reputation.’ Henry nodded.
She must have thought he sounded flippant because she glared at him. ‘Sometimes a reputation’s all a young woman’s got,’ she told him sharply.
‘I meant no offence,’ Henry assured her. ‘Would Grigor have mentioned seeing you to anyone else? To Bailey, maybe?’
‘Why would he? Grigor knew our story. He was a good lad, I can’t see him bringing trouble to our door. Not unless … unless he was forced. Anyway,’ she said, ‘it’s been two years or more since our paths crossed. He was banged up, wasn’t he? Arrested and did eighteen months inside. I decided then and there I’d have to keep him distant when he got out.’
She looked regretful, Mickey thought. ‘You seem disappointed by that,’ he observed. ‘You liked him more than you wanted to, perhaps?’
Malina shook her head. ‘No, it wasn’t that, or at least not just that. You see, no one really knows much about me at work or where we stay. I’m Miss Cooper at work and the same at the residential club. I’ve worked hard to be respectable and to be acceptable. Tilly here, she’s the only one that knows about the gypsy blood … I’m not ashamed of it, you know,’ she told Mickey sternly.
‘Nor should you be. Any society that breeds women like your Aunt Sarah should be a source of pride, but we understand that not everyone sees it that way.’
She smiled. ‘Sarah is strong, just like my mother was. When Sarah speaks, people listen. Our people, anyway. But I’ve cho
ices to make. I go back home and I marry and I have children and I fit in there or I make my way in the world outside and I try and fit in here.’
‘It must be harder for a woman,’ Mickey said thoughtfully. ‘Family blood being reckoned along the female line.’
She was curious, now. ‘Not many gadje know that,’ she said. ‘But, yes, it makes it harder. There are expectations that Kem doesn’t have to deal with.’
Henry reached into his pocket and withdrew the press cuttings that he had taken from Grigor’s room. He laid them out on the table. ‘Would you take a look at these and tell me if you can think why Grigor might have kept them?’
She and Tilly looked closely at the clippings. ‘This, I sort of understand,’ she said, indicating the picture of Bernard Spilsbury. ‘Grigor was fascinated by him. He’d queue up for hours when he was going to give evidence, try and get a ticket for the courts.’
She glanced at Henry to make sure he understood. He nodded. He had seen queues snaking around the block, members of the public hoping to get into court. Spilsbury’s rise to fame had been precipitate since the Crippen affair, when he had brought a microscope into court and allowed the jury to examine the evidence – a sample of skin – for themselves.
‘You can see Grigor in the picture,’ he said, pointing to the face in the crowd they had spotted earlier. So, given that context, the photograph was probably explained. A little digging could probably tell them what case he had been watching from the public gallery.
‘People thought he was stupid, that he’d never make anything of himself, but he wasn’t, you know. He was just in the wrong place to have brains. They didn’t do him any good, did they?’
‘Is there anything else?’
She shook her head. ‘The woman looks sort of familiar, in the wedding picture. But the name means nothing. The other things. No, I’m sorry, I can’t tell you anything, except … Nat Timmins, I think he was part of the same crowd when we were kids. He was a lot older, but Grigor probably knew him.’
‘He probably knew a lot of criminals,’ Henry commented. ‘Why the interest in this one and in this particular incident?’
Kith and Kin Page 15