Victory Disc

by Andrew Cartmel

  Miss Honeyland sighed. “Something like that, I fear, yes. So in any case he is now busy sourcing just such a turntable and promises that he’ll have digital copies for us shortly.”

  I repressed the urge to tell her that I had just such a turntable and could have copied all the discs for her many times over by now. Instead, I said goodbye and hung up. Nevada came over and sat with me, carrying Turk in her arms. The cat settled contentedly into her lap as soon as she sat down. This was a trick I’d never been able to achieve. The only way I could guarantee that either of our cats would sit in my lap was by coming to a firm decision that it was time to get up and leave my seat. That would generally bring them at a run to install themselves more or less permanently.

  “I fancy a drive to the country,” said Nevada.

  “Do you?”

  “Yes. Southeast Kent. Guess who I would like to visit.”

  “A certain ferret-faced local historian? The one that Gresford-Jones so memorably evoked?”

  “Yes. I definitely had the feeling that old Gresford-Jones was holding something back about the so-called Silk Stockings Murder.” The crime that sent Johnny Thomas to the gallows.

  I nodded. “I think he was holding something back, too. And he definitely didn’t want us talking to Ferret Face.”

  “So it’s decided, then,” said Nevada.

  * * *

  We borrowed Tinkler’s car and Clean Head volunteered to drive, so of course there was no chance of Tinkler not coming along, too.

  “I can hardly wait,” he said. “I’ve always wanted to plunge into the cut-throat world of local historians.”

  The ferret-faced party in question was actually named Jasper McClew. He had been easy enough to track down on the Internet, where he had a considerable presence as a remorseless, and amazingly boring, blogger. On his website he clearly stated that he was an authority on, among many other things, the Silk Stockings Murder. He was surprisingly taciturn concerning any details about the subject, though.

  I suspected that this was because he wanted people to buy his pamphlets on the murder, which could either be purchased by mail order as a hard copy, or downloaded as a PDF for a PayPal payment. He also operated tours, for which he charged what I thought was an eye-watering sum.

  Still, we were on expenses, so I booked one.

  We drove down on a bright, clear Saturday morning after a night of heavy rain. The roads were still gleaming as Clean Head piloted us out of London. We drove down the M25 to Kent, skirting Canterbury and Dover and then a string of smaller hamlets. “Here’s Ringwould coming up,” said Tinkler.

  “Great name,” I said.

  “I’ve always thought of it as a combination of ringworm and leaf mould.”

  “He’s cheery today,” said Clean Head.

  “He’s a local boy,” said Nevada. “Local boy made bad.”

  “That’s me,” said Tinkler. “I’m bad.”

  Clean Head was still laughing at this as we drove through Walmer, heading towards Deal, and passed a petrol station with a minivan parked outside. On the side it had a trippy painting of a silver crescent moon against a purple background, spattered with turquoise stars. Across it was written, in flowing lettering: Ms Moon is sending us to sleep with her healing silver rays.

  We all stared at it in astonishment, except Clean Head, who was reassuringly single-minded and intent on her driving.

  “It’s a companion piece,” said Tinkler, “to that other stupid hippie van.”

  “What stupid hippie van?” said Clean Head. He filled her in as she negotiated the turn onto Walmer Castle Road. Walmer Castle itself, which followed shortly, looming up on the right as we drove beside the sea along Kingsdown Road, was an elegant and surprisingly modest structure of interlocking curves of stone. Clean Head explained that it was a classic ‘Tudor rose’ configuration.

  She was obviously champing at the bit to go and look at the castle. And Tinkler was champing at the bit to be alone with her. So we got them to drop us in Kingsdown, turning down an alley and pulling up onto pebbles near a pub called the Zetland Arms. This was not our ultimate destination, but was near enough. We waved goodbye to them as the car pulled away and walked among the little lanes lined with houses, between the beach and the road.

  We sniffed the salt air, heavy with the iodine tang of seaweed. It smelled good.

  Jasper McClew’s house was a mildewed little white cottage with a sign outside advertising TOURS, HISTORICAL WALKS AND LECTURES. His anxious bearded face was looming in a window, watching us approach, and the door clicked open as soon as we came through his gate. People seemed to be eagerly expecting us these days.

  The ferret-faced local historian actually had a round, somewhat childish-looking face with an incongruous fringe of dark beard. He looked oddly familiar. Maybe he was just a familiar type.

  He was wearing baggy brown corduroy trousers and a white shirt and a glistening tie with small black and bright green squares printed on it. On his feet he was wearing white socks and sandals. He ushered us into his small living room. It had a bay window that admitted a pale, watery light and looked out on other houses and, beyond them, the flat, pebbled beach.

  After about ten minutes he remembered his manners and offered us some coffee, trotting off to the kitchen. Nevada and I sat and looked at each other.

  There were books everywhere in the room, including some piled in precarious towers on either side of the armchair in which he’d been sitting. Nevada and I were in matching armchairs opposite, thankfully not hemmed in by books. Jasper’s own chair was obviously his reading spot. There was a standing lamp stationed behind it, angled so as to provide a beam of light over the shoulder while books were carefully studied and absorbed.

  All the books, as far as I could see, were about Kent. Southeast Kent.

  Local history.

  As he laboured in the kitchen over the coffee—for which I didn’t have particularly high hopes—I leaned over to Nevada and said, quietly, “He reminds me of someone.”

  “He looks like E.T. with a beard,” said Nevada. “Have you seen E.T.?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then that’s who he reminds you of.”

  I had my doubts about this thesis, but for the time being I wasn’t immediately able to refute it. “He’s not so ferret-faced,” whispered Nevada. “Though he is a bit ferret-like in other ways.”

  This was true. The first words out of his mouth had been concerning our ‘agreed fee’ and he’d accepted the proffered cash with naked satisfaction, explaining, “I have to put this on a professional footing.” He’d then put on a pair of spectacles and carefully and lovingly counted the bank notes in front of us.

  Perhaps I was being unkind to ferrets, who were unlikely to exhibit any such uniquely human avarice.

  He brought back the coffees on a tray. Mine was every bit as bad as I expected it to be, and after one polite sip I set it aside, resolving to never touch it again. Our host sat in his chair, ignoring his own cup. He took off his spectacles and put them on the nearest pile of books, on top of a handsome Victorian volume about the Goodwin Sands with a blue cloth cover embossed with gilt. There was an air of finality about the way he did this which didn’t suggest he’d be getting up any time soon. This did not bode well for our promised tour.

  “Well, should we get going?” I said. Nevada shot me a look. “As soon as we’ve finished our coffee, I mean.” I noticed she wasn’t drinking hers either. I wondered how long we’d have to sit here, all of us ignoring our hot beverages, before it would be decent to just abandon them and leave.

  “We can’t go just yet,” said Jasper. “I took some laxatives this morning and I’m just waiting for them to kick in.” He drummed his fingers on a pile of books, then gave a high-pitched laugh. “Don’t want to step outside the front door and then—wham—have them suddenly take hold. We wouldn’t want that.”

  I glanced at Nevada, who gave me a studiedly bland look. “No,” I said. “We wouldn’t want t
hat.”

  “You know, it’s funny.” Jasper frowned thoughtfully. “My bowels have been giving me gyp all week. Bunged up. Bunged. Up. And at the same time I’ve been blocked with my writing. Not making my usual progress. I suspect there’s some profound connection between the creative process and something as basic and primal and human as the digestive process. I wonder what would Jung have said?”

  “He would have probably said to eat more fibre,” said Nevada.

  We sat there for a quarter of an hour, during which time I grew tired of studying the framed antique maps of the Kent coast on the walls and very nearly fell asleep. I was just nodding off when Jasper abruptly got to his feet and said, “All right, I suppose we’d better be going. It doesn’t look like anything is going to happen.”

  We expressed our commiseration and tried to conceal our relief. “Just wait here. I’ll get my shoes on.” He went into the hallway where, through the open door, we watched him struggle to remove his sandals and then put on a pair of Hush Puppies. He was bent over at the waist, tying his shoe laces when he suddenly uttered a sharp, triumphant grunt as though he’d discovered a precious gemstone lying on the floor.

  He hastily sloughed off his shoes again and trotted down the hallway in a semi crouch. Nevada turned and looked at me. A door slammed somewhere in the house, then silence. “The suspense is killing me,” said Nevada. There was a pregnant pause, then the toilet flushed, a door opened and our host reappeared and hastily put on his shoes and beckoned to us.

  As a mephitic stench came roiling down the hallway, we all fled out into the fresh air. Turning to lock his front door, Jasper took his glasses off and put them in his pocket. Then he squinted around and led us towards the main road. There, with much peering because clearly he could hardly see, he led us along Cliffe Road, which curved as it went uphill and became Upper Street. Luckily, even if he couldn’t see much, he could hear the cars coming, and we made our way up the narrow lane without getting run over.

  “This part of Kent has more pubs per capita than anywhere else in the UK,” he yelled at us over his shoulder. “Though very few of them are the scene of such a famous murder.” He was striding ahead of us, which gave us the chance to talk about him without being heard.

  I said, “Why has he taken his glasses off?”

  Nevada shrugged. “Vanity.”

  “You mean he thinks he looks better that way?”

  Nevada shrugged again. “Whatever he does he still looks like E.T. with a beard.”

  Jasper McClew crossed the road ahead of us and paused at the entrance of a side street to our left. We caught up with him outside a pub called The Feathers. He stared up at it proudly.

  “This is where it happened.”

  14. TOUR

  The pub had a white stucco front and narrow, leaded windows. There was a crooked look to it thanks to it being built on a sloping hillside stretch of street. Jasper McClew led us inside and to the bar. Then he stepped back a little, to clearly signal that he had no intention of paying for anything.

  I ordered drinks for Nevada and myself and, reluctantly, one for our tour guide. So far our tour had consisted of him hurrying up the street ahead of us, from his house to his local pub. Perhaps I did him an injustice—he had also shouted the occasional remark over his shoulder, to be lost in the wind. The barman pulled him a pint of some expensive-looking real ale then went off to find a bottle of the Rhône red Nevada had carefully selected from the pub’s wine list.

  While we waited for him to return, I looked around the bar and noticed a framed newspaper on the wall. I went over to inspect it. It was a yellowing front page.

  ‘Silk Stockings Killer Hangs’ declared the big ominous black letters of the headline. Nevada came and looked over my shoulder. “My god. He was so young.” There was a photo of Johnny Thomas in his air force uniform. The portrait had obviously been taken long before the crime. He looked like a fresh young cadet. She leaned closer, peering at the picture in the dim light of the pub. “He looks so unhappy, he might have had some kind of premonition.”

  “That he was going to end up on the gallows?” Nevada nodded. “Or die in some other horrible fashion,” I said. It was, after all, a time of war and sudden unpleasant death was not in short supply.

  Jasper joined us, happily sipping the pint I had paid for. “Right up there,” he said.

  Nevada looked away from the picture of the terrified young airman. “I beg your pardon?”

  “Right up there,” he said, pointing at the ceiling. It was some kind of chunky textured white surface—now yellow with the nicotine of yesteryear—with dark old wooden beams running across it. Affixed to the beams were various allegedly antique objects—a lantern, a large pewter tankard, some strange agricultural tool—which represented a serious navigational hazard to anyone who was tall and especially, I imagined, tall drunks. Jasper was pointing to a nondescript patch of ceiling above us, an area free of such clutter.

  “What’s right up there?”

  “The room. The murder room. The room where they spent the night together. Her last night on Earth.” As Jasper warmed to his spiel Nevada glanced at me. It looked like we were about to get our money’s worth from the tour. And I was beginning to wish we weren’t.

  “Johnny Thomas brought the beautiful young woman he was having an extramarital affair with to this very pub. And they slept together in the room above us. Although, as I understand it, there was very little actual sleeping taking place.”

  “What with all the sex and murder,” said Nevada.

  Jasper ignored her. “Johnny Thomas chose this particular pub because his uncle owned it. Indeed, young Johnny had come down here to work regularly in the pub during the many summers of his teenage youth before the war.”

  There hadn’t been that many of those summers, I reflected. In fact, precious few.

  Nevada looked at me and said in a stage whisper, “Isn’t that a tautology? ‘Teenage youth’?”

  You kind of had to admire the way Jasper just kept ploughing on. “His uncle had promised him there would always be a room for him to stay whenever he visited. Even in wartime. Even when he was with a woman who wasn’t his wife. His mistress. The mysterious and exotic Gillian Gadon.” It was like listening to some kind of machine play back for the hundredth time a recording of the story. Except not as interesting.

  “Johnny’s uncle knew what was going on, everyone in the pub did, but they turned a blind eye. And when his uncle was castigated for this by the prosecutor during the murder trial—he was accused of running ‘an immoral house’—he replied defiantly. He said, ‘The lad was liable to die soon, like so many of the other brave lads’—there was applause in the courtroom at the mention of the brave lads and the judge had to call for silence—‘so why not let them have a little fun?’ And there was a murmur of approval throughout the courtroom and the judge had to slam his gavel and restore order.”

  I wondered if any of this had actually happened, though I had to admit that, despite myself, I was getting caught up in his account.

  This ceased almost immediately, as he shot off on a tangent. “Note the way the uncle cleverly contextualised Johnny Thomas as one of a large body of brave young men for whom the public, and therefore hopefully the jury, would have admiration and sympathy. He did a surprisingly effective job of image control, or at least he would have done if it wasn’t for the untiring efforts of the wife.”

  “What wife?” I said.

  “Johnny Thomas’s wife,” said Nevada. “The wronged woman.”

  “Exactly,” said Jasper, nodding vigorously. “And that’s exactly the way she made sure she had herself depicted in the press. The wronged woman. Cruelly betrayed by her husband, the bestial sex murderer.”

  But apparently the uncle wouldn’t let her get away with it. He wouldn’t allow the stereotypes to settle. He kept insisting that Johnny was innocent, that he’d loved the girl, Gillian Gadon, that he would never have killed her. That someone else had killed her.
An unknown third party. But when he tried to sway opinion in that direction, the wife responded by dragging her kids into the equation.

  “He had children?” said Nevada. “Johnny Thomas?”

  “Yes. Three. Ages two, four and six. All girls.” Three little girls who got to see daddy going to the gallows.

  “It’s fascinating, really, the way the uncle and the wife shaped public discourse, and polarised it, over the whole sensational story of the Silk Stockings Murder. Their conflict and disagreement was widely covered in the press. For a few days the war was off the front pages, and the public of Britain actually welcomed the distraction. Meanwhile the wife and the uncle were struggling for control over who got to define the incident. In the terms of historiography, they were competing for authorship and interpretation of the agreed narrative.”

  Our eyes must have begun to glaze over at this juncture because he got back to the main event. “But, despite the best efforts of his loving uncle, Johnny Thomas was doomed to be hanged by the neck until dead for the very murder that took place in the very room above the very spot where we are standing now.”

  Luckily, before he could say ‘very’ again, the barman finally came back with a dusty bottle of hopefully very fine Rhône red. I’d thought he’d forgotten all about us. Jasper fell silent while Nevada carefully watched—supervised, actually—the barman as he opened the bottle and poured us both a glass of wine.

  “That looks rather good,” said Jasper. “Perhaps I should try some.”

  “Best stick to the beer,” said Nevada. “You wouldn’t want to mix. The grain and the grape, you know. Probably bad for the digestion.”

  “You here for Jasper’s tour?” said the barman, giving us a sidelong glance as he carefully went through the wine list to make sure he hadn’t undercharged us. He was plump and ruddy-faced, with a tonsure of thinning grey hair that made him look like a mad monk. We conceded that we were. “Nice to see some people with hair for a change,” he said.

  “Yes, thank you, Andy,” said Jasper. He scooped up a tray and set all the drinks on it, bustling away from the bar. He didn’t look back to see if we were following him, but we were. I was ducking to avoid the various lethal pieces of rustic ironware that were hanging from the ceiling. They were presumably there to give a period feel to the pub. Although the chief feeling they would impart would be a bruised skull for anyone not nimble enough to dodge them.