The Soho Noir Series

by Mark Dawson

  Joe Sabini ground the old gears as they headed south, passing through the rows of housing that had been built around the station. The traffic grew dense and cars were crammed tight: a pair of children sat on their on their mother’s lap in a taxicab, four beefy men crushed into the back of an Austin, another clung to the running board of a Wolseley as it cut a hazardous path down the median, bullying its way around the stalled line. Engines growled and horns sounded, the impatience of the drivers curdling into jealously for those who were already there and anger because they were not.

  Eventually, they pulled up in a broad field that had been allocated for parking and disembarked. There were fifteen men, all big, most of them drunk, all ready for a fight. Harry jumped down and squinted into the sky. The winter sun had pierced the cloud and now the light came slanting and yellow across the park and the racecourse beyond; jockeys massed around an entrance, garish colours springing out vividly.

  Harry waited for his brother and threw his arm around his shoulders as they set off for the gate.

  “Alright?” he asked.

  “Right as rain.”

  Life was good, Harry thought.

  Fred Sabini explained what they were going to do. Several of the bookies had changed sides, he said. They had shunned the Sabini’s protection and taken up with the Brummagem Boys. One of them was a man named Reynolds. He was the leader, a man who had always been difficult to deal with, truculent and ungrateful, and he had gathered the others to his standard. They would be making an example of him today.

  They paid their entrance fee and passed through the turnstiles into the half-crown enclosure. They moved towards Reynold’s stand. An assistant, young and with Brylcream plastered on his hair, stood on a box paying out money. Another examined odds in the ten shilling enclosure through a pair of binoculars, the sun glittering against the lens. Reynold’s himself was taking a bet from another punter, tic-tacking fresh odds with a grubby hand against the skyline as he did so.

  Harry felt venom in his veins, the thrill of violence straightening his body like lust.

  “Ten to one, Freya’s Sunrise, ten to one,” Reynold’s assistant called, and “They’re off,” somebody else said. The crowd hurried from the refreshment tent and flexed towards the rails carrying glasses of ale and currant buns. The bookies wiped the odds from their boards, Reynolds still pressing for new action even as the horses pounded around the bend: ‘Twelve to one, Freya’s Sunrise”. The horses came by in a tight clutch, with a sharp sound like splintering wood, and then they were gone. The crowd, mostly disappointed, went back to the ale tents to refresh their glasses, and the bookies put up the runners in the next race and began to chalk up new odds.

  Harry Costello’s thoughts floated back across the last year: trenches filled with blood and viscera, death and disease; bayonet charges across fields of mud; troopships clambering across mountainous seas; the grim return to London; the eternal grind of poverty.

  Scarpello.

  Benneworth.

  A year bracketed by blood.

  And then he thought of Isabella, beautiful Bella, and the way that she looked at him when he had proposed, and then the shout from Fred Sabini went up and the men charged, the bookies’ stands overturned and stomped underfoot, the first punches thrown, the first flashing of razors, and as Harry followed after his brother and flung himself into the fray, he knew––he was quite certain about it––that everything was going to be just fine.

  For Stanley George Rayner

  1919 – 2013

  THE IMPOSTER

  PROLOGUE

  Southend Harbour

  June 1946

  SATURDAY NIGHT, three in the morning, and Billy Stavropoulos was making a hell of a racket, kicking and pounding like mad in the boot of the car. Edward Fabian ignored it––they were nearly there––and drove on. Rain lashed the streets, thundering against the roof. The area around the harbour had taken the brunt of a German raid seven years earlier. The rainwater that ran into the gutters was slurry-coloured from brick dust; the tarpaulins that had been nailed over vanished windows flapped incessantly; wild flowers sprouted amongst the ruins. The harbour itself was surrounded by derelict buildings, some of them flattened by the bombs, others looking like they ought to have been. Lines of boats were secured to the moorings, their rigging jangling and rattling as they rose and fell on the tide. There was a strong smell of fish on the wind. Grey streets, blotched and stippled with yellow light, led away into the murky distance.

  Edward slowed the car to a stop. It had been given to him by detective inspector Murphy. It was new, probably impounded from some unlucky chap Murphy had arrested, and it still smelt fresh. It was a good car, not as impressive as Edward’s Triumph, but good nonetheless. It was almost a pity that Edward was going to have to torch it when he was finished, but there was no sense in leaving forensics that might lead back to him.

  Jimmy Stern was sitting next to him in the passenger seat, staring ahead, impassive. Only the almost imperceptible grinding of his teeth revealed his nervousness. “Ready?” he said.

  Edward breathed deeply, the cold damp air burning his lungs.

  Jimmy put a hand on his arm. “Edward––we’ve got no choice. We’ve got to do it.”

  The cabin’s courtesy light illuminated the ugly bruises on his uncle’s face. “I know we do,” he said.

  He opened the car door. There was a dim and economical streetlight at the other end of the harbour but here it was black. It was closer to sleet than to rain, the edged drops seeming to slash their way through the buttonholes of his raincoat. It lashed into him and he was drenched in seconds. He went around to the back of the car and opened the boot. The light clicked on, illuminating the body inside. Billy was curled up in the narrow space, his wrists handcuffed, his knees against his chest, his ankles roped together and with a rough sack tied over his head. He started to moan, the rag that they had stuffed into his mouth turning his protests into an indecipherable mumbling.

  Edward slid his hands beneath his shoulders, gripped hard and hauled him out.

  PART ONE

  Calcutta

  May 1945

  1

  THE TROOPSHIP PASSED THROUGH THE MUDDY ESTUARY of the Hooghly River. Edward Fabian and the rest of the men disembarked amidst the great ships of His Majesty’s Navy and were taken by coach through the wide, throbbing, chaotic Calcutta streets. It was a spectacular place that pulsed with life, a place of the most vertiginous contrasts; during the fifteen minute drive to their billet Edward saw a corpse slumped against smoke-stained Victorian statuary, a sparkling American limousine bumping up against a rickshaw pulled by a half-naked tonga-wallah, a blind beggar asking for change from a Naval officer in full regalia, fakirs pushing knock-off suits to men wearing every uniform of the Allies in the Orient. India was poverty cheek-by-jowl with opulence and Calcutta was its apogee. Edward had become accustomed to the rhythm of the jungle: days of monotony between engagements, hours spent in silence broken only by the calls of parakeets and cuckoo-shrikes. Here was its complete opposite: innumerable mendicants, children imploring passers-by for buckshee, slums of swarming multitudes. Plunging into it was a shock to the senses.

  They were to be billeted in the vaulted chambers of the Museum, beds jammed among the cabinets and display cases, cool radiating from the marble floor. The welcome was more than Edward could have dared imagine. There were dhobis to launder his clothes and dersis to fix them; after months of sleeping on hard ground or a sodden slop, he had proper rope-and-frame beds; there were baths with unlimited hot water and soap; a spacious canteen with bustling memsahibs fussing over huge pots of curry and dahl. After months of trench foot and pack sores, months of sleep disturbed by threat of Japanese soldiers coming across the wire, months freighted with the constant fear of death; this was absolute luxury.

  Edward slept the sleep of the dead for twelve hours. When he awoke he went out to explore. The men were paid eighteen rupees a week and Edward had not drawn anyth
ing for the better part of six months; that accumulated into a tidy little sum to spend in a place as cheap as Calcutta. He even looked the part. The men had been given new suits of green fabric, the regimental black cat insignia stitched proudly on the shoulders. He polished his badges and fastened them to his bush hat. He bathed, washed himself with Lifebuoy and slapped Brylcream into his hair. He found his crutch, and, taking the weight off his injured foot, he set out.

  He had only paused briefly in India on his way to the front and he was anxious to see the sights. Chowringhee, Calcutta’s central avenue, exerted a pull that few serviceman could resist. It was a wide thoroughfare that followed the route of the Maidan, a railway carrying noisy trams laid out between it and the river. The road was jammed with traffic: coolie-drawn rickshaws, military vehicles, battered trucks, countless bicycles. Sacred cows, garlanded with flowers, enjoyed the right of way and wandered wherever they chose. The pavement side of the street bustled with life, the ramshackle shops and stalls promising everything the Empire had to offer. Edward sauntered happily, stopping for a shave from a slender barber who massaged the scalp and shoulders with ridiculously strong fingers. He bought chapatis and curry from roadside shacks, gambling that his guts were up to the challenge. He bought a Conan Doyle compendium for a handful of rupees. He allowed himself to be jostled into the heaving pit of humanity that was the Hogg Market and, by the time he was spat out at the other end, he found himself in possession of a miniature Taj Mahal carved from ivory, a new pair of shoes, a landscape of an Indian sunset in an enamel frame and a much lightened purse.

  The light began to fade and Edward threw himself into a headlong bacchanal. He gorged on a steak dinner from Jimmy’s Kitchen, ogled the twenty-foot high cut-out of Jeanne Crain in ‘Leave Her to Heaven’ that had been lashed to the awning above the Tiger cinema, and joined the soldiers in drinking the bars of Chowringhee dry. He eventually found himself in the Nip Inn. The atmosphere was rowdy and febrile, hundreds of drunken soldiers and sailors taking advantage of an opportunity to get drunk and forget the war. As Edward drank his first pint a brawl broke out between a group of naval ratings and half a dozen airmen. Punches were thrown and furniture shattered. The management had long since given up trying to stop the fighting. They let the participants punch themselves out and then ejected those who were still standing.

  Edward was standing at the bar with his second pint of warm beer. He looked out at the sea of green and blue uniforms. He was aware of the American airman behind him and tried to back out of the way so that the man could get to the bar to order his drinks. His crutches made moving awkward in such an enclosed space; the man was impatient, edging forwards, his shoulder jarring against Edward’s arm and spilling his pint.

  “Careful, friend,” Edward said.

  “What about it?” The man was drunk.

  “Pushing and shoving isn’t going to get you anywhere.”

  “Better mind your manners, cripple,” he said, indicating the crutches.

  “Take it easy,” Edward said, trying to placate the man. He was tall and brawny and there were two other flyers in uniform standing behind him. “I don’t want any trouble.”

  “Maybe you’re going to get some, anyway.”

  The man hit him with a straight jab to the nose. Edward’s pint smashed against the floor as he staggered back against the bar. The American came forward as Edward dropped his crutch and fired out a right to the body and then a left to the jaw, both blows landing hard and sending the American reeling backwards. The bar was suddenly silent, and then hugely raucous again as the crowd parted, a space forming for the combatants and dozens of drunken soldiers struggling for the best vantage point.

  Edward had to half hop on his right leg, but he still managed to stop the man’s rush with two straight lefts to the face, and the American, grown wary, responded by drawing the left, then by ducking it and delivering his right in a swinging hook towards the side of the head. Edward absorbed it on his forearms and hobbled forwards, firing out another one-two combination, but he was suddenly cold-cocked by a second man who emerged from the baying crowd from his left. The blow was high up but, when it landed, Edward felt the descent of the black veil of unconsciousness across his mind. For an instant, or for the slightest fraction of an instant, he paused. In the one moment he saw his opponent ducking out of his field of vision and the background of white, watching faces fade away; in the next moment he again saw his opponent and the background of faces. It was as if he had slept for a time and just opened his eyes again, and yet the interval of unconsciousness was so microscopically short that there had been no time for him to fall. The audience saw him totter and his knees give, then saw him recover and tuck his chin deeper into the shelter of his left shoulder. He stumbled into the ring of spectators and was shoved back into the space again, the crowd’s bloodlust not nearly sated enough to allow him an easy way out. His foot burned with pain and he shook his head to try and clear away the grogginess. The American came forwards, swinging powerful rights and lefts into Edward’s gut, driving the air from his lungs. A low blow followed, way below the belt, and, with Edward’s guard down, a powerful right cross connected flush on his jaw. The black veil fell again and this time he dropped to the floor, scrabbling for purchase amid the sawdust, spit and spilt beer.

  A moment passed, then another. His awareness returned and found his crutch and struggled to his feet, his knees like water.

  The crowd to Edward’s left parted as a man in British army uniform shoved his way through.

  “Let’s be sporting and even the odds, eh?”

  The American sized the newcomer up. “More the merrier,” he said. His two friends stepped forward with him.

  The newcomer fired the first punch, a hook, with the twisted arch of the arm to make it rigid, and with all the weight of his half-pivoted body behind it. The American, caught on the side of the jaw, went down like a bullock hit between the eyes. The raucous audience whooped its appreciation. The new man could drive a blow like a trip-hammer.

  One of the others came for Edward. He clinched to save himself, then, going free, allowed the man to get set. This was what he wanted. He feinted with his left, drew the answering duck and swinging upward hook, then made the half-step backward, whipping the crutch in his right hand full across the man’s face, the wood catching him against the jaw and crumpling him so that he fell backwards halfway over the bar.

  Edward and his new ally stood shoulder-to-shoulder. The final American, facing both of them now, thought better of it. He raised his hands in surrender and helped drag his dazed comrades away.

  Edward turned to the new man. “I had it under control,” he said, gasping for breath.

  “Sure you did,” the other said with a hard laugh. He pointed at Edward’s face. “Your nose––”

  Edward dabbed his fingers. They came back smeared with blood.

  He grinned. “Jesus––”

  “Here,” the other man said, handing him a handkerchief.

  “Thanks,” Edward said, holding the fabric to his nostrils. “You’d never guess––I’m supposed to be a handy boxer.”

  “You are?”

  “Had a few bouts over here. Army Boxing Association. I was decent––well, until I got shot, anyway.”

  “Your foot?”

  “Jap bullet. Went right through it. I’m on medical leave.”

  “Didn’t stop you then, did it?” the man observed. “That was a hell of a whack you gave him.”

  “He left his chin open,” Edward grinned. “Rude not to take the invitation.” He extended his hand. “I’m Edward Fabian.”

  The other man gripped it firmly. “Joseph Costello. Nice to meet you.”

  “You want a beer?”

  * * *

  EDWARD AWOKE EARLY THE NEXT MORNING. He had a terrible hangover and he desperately needed the bathroom. He got out of bed, knowing he was going to be sick yet moving slowly because he knew just when he was going to be sick and that there would be
time for him to get to the bathroom. The marble floor was cool against his naked knees as he crouched before the latrine and voided his guts, dunked his head in a sink of cold water and washed. He tried to remember the rest of the night. They had stayed for another few pints and then Joseph had negotiated a discount with a pair of Eurasian prostitutes. Edward remembered seeing Joseph’s girl pushing him down an alleyway for a wall job. Then there had been more beer, and he didn’t remember much at all after that.

  He looked at his reflection in the mirror and couldn’t help but grin. His eyes were bleary, bloodshot and crusted with sleep. He imagined he could see a patina of green on his skin. His nose was purple and crusted with dried blood. It had been quite a night. He hadn’t had so much fun for months. Joseph was infectious company. A capital chap. He would be very happy to go out with him again that night.

  When he eventually found his way to the mess for breakfast it was afire with gossip. The reports were that earlier that morning an American B-29 Superfortress named after the mother of its pilot had been loaded with what was being described as a ‘super weapon.’ They said that this weapon was an ‘atomic’ bomb, that it had been dropped onto a city on the southern tip of Japan, and that the city had been scraped from the face of the Earth. Edward did not believe it but, as time passed, gossip was confirmed that made it plain that something momentous had happened. They had heard talk of ‘secret weapons’ before, of course; Hitler had his V1s and V2s and everyone assumed that the Allied boffins were working on something similar. The concept of an ‘atomic bomb’ was meaningless to them then but over the next few hours astonishing details were added that made it plain that whatever this weapon was, it was no mere rocket.