by Mark Dawson
Drake brought the coffees to the table and sat down. “As I say, good to meet you. I’m pleased we’ve been able to sort it out.”
“I’ve read some of your articles, Mr. Drake.”
“It’s Henry. And how did you find them?”
“Very colourful. The latest one, the ‘girl who leads a life of shame’––that one was particularly interesting.”
“Just an innocent mill-girl from Sheffield,’ Drake intoned as if Edward was about to take dictation for him. “I’m writing her confession in five instalments, a warning to other impressionable young lasses like her. As a matter of fact, I believe I left her being chased down a back street by a seedy stage-door Johnny in a cloth cap. Exciting, I thought. A nice little cliff-hanger, keep them interested.”
“What happened to her?”
“She’ll be just fine. The Sunday Graphic is a family paper, after all.”
“You’re making the whole thing up?”
“Of course I am. That’s the sell––it’s life, but hotter, stronger and neater.’
“What a peculiar way to earn a living,” Edward said. “Telling untruths. Didn’t they cause you problems before?”
“You have been doing your research, Edward. And yes, of course, you’re right, but you have to understand that newspapers are all, more or less, in two distinct kinds of business. There’s the proper news side. You know: meat will be dearer tomorrow, tax likely to rise, bond-holders beware. That sort of thing’s supposed to be true––and you might say I learnt that lesson the hard way, although we could have a long discussion about how half of what they said about me was untrue. The other side of the business is the one the money’s in.”
“And that’s what you’re in now?”
“That’s right. It’s called human interest, although you might as well just call it showbusiness. Non-stop vaudeville, changed every day, and always leave them laughing. If you can write revue sketches and begging letters and you can clean up dirty jokes, you’ve got what it takes to have a decent little career. That’s what people want to read, so that’s what I write. It’s of no importance that the mill-girl doesn’t exist, except that it saves me the trouble of convincing some deluded little thing from up north that the events that have to happen to her really did happen. It also saves my employer some money.”
“Do you tell your readers it’s all made up?”
Drake sugared his coffee heavily. “Of course not. What they don’t know can’t hurt them. Or me, come to think about it.”
“Whoever said dishonesty didn’t pay?”
“I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t me.” He sipped his coffee. Edward watched his hands carefully, the half-moons of grime caught beneath his fingernails. The man was a shyster, he thought. A confidence trickster. He recognised the signs. It took one to know one, he thought wryly. Drake replaced the cup in its saucer. “Your story, on the other hand, is all true and––from what Violet tells me––so good that it practically writes itself. War hero comes home, cold-shouldered by society, lives in cold garret, barely makes enough to feed himself, et cetera et cetera. Tell me some more.”
Edward took a breath and told the story. He had run through it a dozen times last night, removing the flourishes and his worst excesses, keeping it neat and simple. He avoided hyperbole and exaggeration, downplaying his own role in the narrative and sticking as close to the regimental history as he could, ensuring that his facts were verifiable and legitimate. Drake took shorthand notes, Edward watching biliously as his charcoal pencil scraped quickly across his notepad, each stroke another step closer to revealing his perfidy. He asked a handful of questions, referring back to his notes and seeking amplification, trying to draw him into more lurid confessions, but Edward stoically resisted. If he neutered the tale then, perhaps, there would be nothing left to tell.
Eventually Edward could see that Drake had realised that he was not going to get the juicy story he had hoped to find. He quickly became bored. After all, what did he have? A bland and inoffensive piece about a soldier coming home from war and gratefully accepting the charity of a local family. If it escaped the editor’s spike it would languish deep inside the newspaper, hidden away, soon to be forgotten. Edward noticed that his shoulders were tight and stiff and so he settled back in the seat, loosening his posture. He relaxed and congratulated himself. What was he so worried about? He had done well, handling a difficult situation with confidence and aplomb. He sank into the cushions and pretended to busy himself by spooning another sugar into what was left of his coffee.
“Ah. Here he is. About time,” Drake said to the man who had just struggled into the coffee shop with a large camera and a bag of accessories. “This is Trevor. He’ll be doing the pictures. I thought here might be nice––war hero not too grand for coffee-shop, that kind of angle. What do you say?”
“Pictures?”
“Of course. We need pictures.”
“No-one said anything to me about pictures.”
“It’s essential, Edward. Put a face to the story. Violet insisted we do it properly. You’re not one of these chaps who doesn’t like his picture taken are you? Be a shame not to, with those matinee idol looks of yours––you’ll have them all going weak at the knees. Fan mail, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Edward balled his fists so hard that his nails cut into the fleshy part of his palms. He couldn’t say no; it would look like he had something to hide. He gritted his teeth as the photographer set up a tripod and slotted his Rolleiflex atop it, inserting the film and winding it through. He tried to persuade them to let him wear his hat, and then tried to angle his head away, but the photographer was persistent and would not take the pictures until he was satisfied with the shot. Edward smiled, thinly and without warmth, as the shutter snapped open and closed.
It sounded final. It sounded like a door slamming shut.
21
IT WAS A PRIVATE JOKE between the chaps that Billy Stavropoulos was particularly well balanced on account having a chip on both shoulders. The subject of his difficult upbringing was one he returned to frequently, a setting against which his subsequent success as a criminal was some sort of underdog’s triumphant battle against the odds. He referred to himself as being from ‘the gutter’, making the assertion so often that it became a sort of catchphrase. The gutter to which he referred was Saffron Hill, yet that was not the beginning of his story. The first five years of his life were spent in Leicester, in one of the sprawling developments built on the city’s south side in the 1920s to accommodate the city’s expanding work force. His mother, Demetria, found work as a machinist in the city’s hosiery factories. His father, Khristos, was a cobbler. The city avoided the worst depredations of the depression and enjoyed growth. Billy’s early years were happy, by all accounts. They might not have been rich but they had enough money to get by, and the Stavropoulos family ‘villa’ was close enough to the factories that Demetria was able to come home to cook lunch for Billy and his two brothers. It was a comfortable first few years: adequate, mediocre, safe.
A fondness for the bottle made Khristos Stavropoulos an unreliable employee and, when it eventually cost him his job, he moved the family to London. They found a house on Saffron Hill and, compared to the relative comfort of life in Leicester, things were difficult. Khristos’ alcoholism cost him two other jobs and, as the depression exerted its influence on the city’s factories, he found himself unable to find work. He fell in with the Costello brothers and, under their aegis, was persuaded to take to burglary to provide an income for his family. A string of breakings provided a glimmer of hope that he might have finally found something he was able to stick at but, eventually, he failed even at that. He usually got lit-up before a job and one time, his reactions dulled by drink, he fell from a first-floor window, broke his leg and was arrested. He was charged and tried, the judge rubbing salt into the wound by describing him as a ‘particularly inept criminal’ before gaoling him for a year.
Khristos resorted to
the bottle for succour and died a bitter and broken man when Billy was eight years old. Without the income he had provided the family could no longer afford to pay even the meagre rent on their house. Despite the offer of a lighter sentence, Khristos had not named the Costello boys as his accomplices. His loyalty did not go unrewarded and his widow and her three boys were moved into a house the family owned. They had two rooms for the four of them: a front room and a bedroom. The front room looked onto the narrow street below and had a bed that was shared by Billy and his mother. The family’s furniture comprised of two beds and a rickety wooden sideboard. The only evidence of Khristos were the mementoes that he had kept from six years as an infantryman in the Great War: a helmet that he had pilfered from the body of a dead German and a beer stein, in which Demetria occasionally kept the flowers that her boys uprooted from the local parks. It was a crushingly depressing existence. The house in which Billy spent the next ten years of his life was low-ceilinged and fetid, thin walls covered with flock wallpaper that stank of fried food and damp.
Demetria became a hoister, raiding stores in the West End and selling her spoils in Clerkenwell’s pubs. When times were hard she offered wall-jobs to the local drunks for the pennies in their pockets. Memories of her comfortable life in Leicester must have seemed like cruel taunts and she became bitter and resentful. The bottle found her, too, eventually, and she took her frustrations out on her children. It did not matter. Billy was dedicated to her, and the chaps occasionally spoke of the time they saw a man make a joke about her brassing. He had flown into such a rage they had to restrain him for fear that he would do murder.
* * *
BILLY WRAPPED HIS FIST IN HIS COAT and punched hard through the panel above the door handle. The glass smashed, the fragments shattering as they fell to the floor. He paused for a moment, and heard nothing to suggest that they had been detected. He thrust his arm through the gaping pane and unlocked the door. He went inside, with Jack McVitie close behind. The house was empty, just as Joseph had said it would be. He had been tipped off by a chap from the pub who was seeing one of the maids. The family were off abroad somewhere and the place was vulnerable. Pity for them, Billy thought. The man of the house was a successful businessman, something about the motor trade. He was supposed to be rich and that looked about right, Billy thought, judging by the state of the place.
He flicked on his torch and continued the conversation that the two men had begun as they made their way to the house. “He’s lost the plot.”
Jack closed the door behind him. “So you keep saying.”
“It’s true, though, ain’t it? Fabian’s bad news. Bloody bad news. I mean, ask yourself––what’s he doing with us? We don’t need him.”
“If you say so.”
“It was fine, the four of us, before. Me, you, Joseph and Tommy. Does Joseph think we’re going to do places five-handed? No thanks. Might as well ring Old Bill up before and tell them what we’re up to.”
They left the kitchen and climbed the stairs to the first floor. The hallway was wide, wood-panelled and laid with an expensive parquet floor. Billy flipped through the mail that had been stacked on a table next to a telephone.
“What is it with him and Joe?” he said. “Has he said anything to you?”
Jack shrugged. “Nothing you don’t already know. Army pals.”
“Well, I don’t know about that. They only met right at the end, didn’t they?”
They went up to the second floor and tried doors until they found the master bedroom. They went inside. It was a large room, with a walk-in wardrobe and a bathroom leading off it. They knew what they were looking for. Billy went to the tallboy and started to turn out the drawers, strewing the clothes on the floor.
“War hero––can you believe that?”
Jack opened a wardrobe and set about emptying it. He shrugged.
“It don’t sound that likely, though, does it?––given the evidence, what the man’s like. He don’t look the type for that kind of thing.”
“Who knows?”
“He must have something on him. No other reason why Joe would’ve let him get into this with us.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know––he’s got the black on him.”
Jack scoffed, “Don’t talk rot.”
“What, then?”
Jack gave a long, exasperated sigh. “I don’t know.”
“The last thing we need at the moment is a passenger. From what I’ve been told things are going to get spicy soon.”
“You mean Jack Spot?”
Billy nodded. “You heard he’s been telling people that they need to be with him rather than with us?”
“I heard he had a word with a couple of pubs on Shaftesbury Avenue.”
“More than that. He’s been threatening blokes in Soho, too. He’s not someone Violet and George will be able to ignore like he’s not there. He’s a bloody psychopath, him and his bloody gypsies too. I heard they don’t think he’s anything to worry about.”
They worked in silence for a few minutes until Jack tipped out the cupboards of a chest of drawers. “Here,” he said, “found it.” He held up a presentation box and, inside, a diamond necklace. There was other jewellery in the drawer––rings and bracelets and necklaces––and Jack tipped them all into his pockets.
The two of them finished in the bedroom and went back downstairs.
“No,” Billy said, returning to the same theme, “that Fabian’s no good, no good at all.”
He had been picking at the same theme for most of the night, and Jack was growing weary of it. “Aye,” he said, hoping Billy might let the matter rest.
They exited through the main door and, closing their mackintoshes around them, they walked quickly away from the house.
“He’ll get us all nicked, you mark my words.”
“Look on the bright side,” Jack said, hoping to forestall another tirade. He tapped his pockets so that the diamonds clinked. “Fancy a drink?”
They walked the short distance to the main road. In five minutes they had hailed a taxi and were heading towards Soho.
22
EDWARD AND JOSEPH arranged to meet three days after the burglary at Piccadilly Circus. Joseph was waiting for him beneath the statue of Eros.
They embraced warmly.
“What’s the plan?” Edward asked. “We’re going for a drink?”
“That’s what I was thinking,” he said.
“Where? Soho?”
“Actually, I was thinking the Ritz.”
Edward looked down at his tatty second-hand suit and scuffed shoes and sighed. “Don’t be daft––they’re not going to let me in looking like this.”
“I was thinking we’d make a stop and get you some new clothes first.”
Edward did not complain. They set off, Joseph leading the way. They had to walk past West End Central police station in order to get to the Savile Row tailor’s that Joseph had in mind. The station had taken a direct hit during the Blitz and it had only been open again for a few months. A pair of detectives slouched at the bottom of the steps with cigarettes in their mouths and uniformed men emerged for the start of their beats. Edward walked on, eyes down, resolutely aimed towards the pavement.
Joseph chuckled at his discomfort. “Stop being so bloody flighty,” he said once they had put the station behind them. “It’s been a week."
It wasn’t that that Edward was worried about. He knew that they were in the clear there but he would allow Joseph to think that he was anxious. He would expect that of him, surely. “Policemen always make me feel guilty,” he explained. “But it’s not normally with reason.”
“We’re not getting caught. Nothing’s happened, has it?”
“No––not yet. But––”
“So we’re fine. Old Bill don’t know nothing. Relax, Doc––we’re in the clear.” They walked on a few steps and Joseph reached into his jacket pocket. “Look, it’s natural to be nervous. I’d be lying if I
said it didn’t put me on edge, too. But you know it was worth it, don’t you? Here––this is for you.”
He reached across and handed Edward a thick, brown envelope.
He peeled back the seal of the envelope. A thick wedge of banknotes was inside. “How much?”
“Three hundred.” Joseph said it with a wide grin. “Not a bad little tickle for your first job, eh?”
Edward could hardly believe it. “You said a hundred, maximum.”
“It was worth more than I thought.”
Edward put the envelope into his pocket. “Capital,” he said.
“Not bad for half an hour’s work,” Joseph said.
Joseph had arranged a series of appointments for them: a tailor, a shirt-maker, a cobbler. The first appointment was at Dege & Skinner. They were greeted deferentially by a tailor and showed inside. The shop was as quiet as a library and redolent with the dry smell of fresh fabric. There was barely enough space on the wall behind the counter to display the Royal Warrants. George V had been a regular customer, the Duke of Windsor had continued the family tradition and Clark Gable and Tyrone Power represented Hollywood’s royalty. It was impossible not to be impressed.
“Good morning, gentlemen. What can we do for you today?”
Joseph said he was going to buy three suits: one off the rack, to wear immediately, and another two that were to be made bespoke. The cost would be around forty pounds, the tailor said, before asking Edward whether he would be ordering the same. He gaped: forty pounds? The most expensive item of clothing he had ever bought was a suit for his interview at Trinity, and that had cost a fiver from Selfridges in the Christmas sales.