The Man in the Street

by Martin Howe

  Also by Martin Howe

  White Linen

  About the Author

  Martin Howe is a journalist who has worked for the BBC, Channel 4 and a news agency in Washington DC. Writing literary fiction is his escape from the constraints of factual news. The Man in the Street is his second novel.

  mbhowe.com

  Facebook.com/MartinHoweAuthor

  Twitter: @_MartinHowe

  Instagram: @martin.howe.925

  Copyright © 2019 Martin Howe

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

  Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of research or private study, or criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publishers, or in the case of reprographic reproduction in accordance with the terms of licences issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside those terms should be sent to the publishers.

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  ISBN 978 1838599 058

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  In memory of my sister Jane

  1959-2019

  “Swiftly the

  Day Advances.”

  * * * *

  I had waited long enough.

  I turned to Fascism.

  Why?

  Because, although democracy appeals to me, it has proved itself in practice, a perpetuated lie.

  Because I am sick of muddling through.

  Because I am tired of drifting along in the wake of garrulous statesmen.

  Because I want to be positive rather than negative.

  Because I realize that England is being left behind in the race for supremacy in a New Era.

  Because I see no need for some 900,000 men, women and children to starve in a civilized country.

  Because I want to be a citizen of an A.1 nation.

  Because the Old Gang have failed disastrously.

  Because I must bow to the demands of the Future.

  Because I cannot help myself.

  * * * *

  I am the Man in the Street.

  The Blackshirt, No. 26. Oct 21st-Oct 27th, 1933

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  THREE FUNERALS – ALMOST

  Chapter 2

  BLACK HOUSE

  Chapter 3

  DEAD AND BURIED

  Chapter 4

  OLYMPIAN HEIGHTS

  Chapter 5

  GOD WILLING

  Chapter 6

  TRAITOR

  Chapter 7

  TWO SIDES OF THE SAME COIN

  Chapter 8

  FASCIST MAN

  Chapter 9

  PIECE OF ETERNITY

  Chapter 10

  RIGHT REVEREND

  Chapter 11

  BOO TO A GOOSE

  Chapter 1

  THREE FUNERALS – ALMOST

  “This is the life, a proper funeral – it’s all cremations these days – the church ceremony a flight of fancy, the interment a grounding in nature, the rites a time to grieve. If you want to, that is.”

  It was bitterly cold. David hoped he wasn’t smiling. Some of the mourners looked distressed – they must be the family; but most – those he knew from work – appeared dutiful. The detective sergeant and his two constables standing conspicuously under the large oak nearby didn’t leaven the atmosphere – even if they were out of uniform – reminding people, as they did, why they were there. The police officers had interviewed almost everyone here, some on more than one occasion, and David wondered why they had bothered to turn up. He gazed listlessly over the heads of the bereaved – there was scarcely a cloud in the sky. Something was concerning him and it was a surprise when he grasped what it was. He did want to grieve along with the others he realized, not for the deceased like they were, but for his own loss of virtue. He had changed.

  An insatiable curiosity about the dead man had brought David early to the village, prowling the sleepy winding streets as the locals gradually emerged, their progress marked by cheery greetings on the briskness of the morning, on the chances of a flurry of snow. He had climbed the steep tree-lined incline to the late-Saxon parish church his mind vivid with images of his late employer and had been startled by the bent figure of the verger, who appeared suddenly in front of him in the road. The old man had just finished sluicing out the church’s eleventh century thatched porch, steam still rising from the sodden flagstones, and was preparing to sweep up the leaves and other rubbish that had gathered beneath the timbered Wych Gate.

  “It’s always the same,” he had complained to David as he leaned on his broom, “the vicar’s given up and the police do nothing. There’s no local bobby like there used to be. I’m left to clean up the mess.” He’d pointed over to the gable end of St Peter’s, “Look at the graffiti. On a church, for God’s sake. It never used to happen. When I was a lad the locals would have given the layabouts a good hiding.”

  The stonework to the right of the ornate doorway, bordered with the sculpted heads of the twelve disciples, was covered in a host of elaborate tags and slogans, executed mainly in black spray paint. Slashes of colour adorned crude re-workings of the name “Bozo”. Pink acrylic spelled out declarations of love, of who had had who, or who wanted to have who. There was a rash of “Kurts” around the edge of the free-form mural, the lettering fresh and distinct. Politics crept in here and there. “Thatcher is a cow” was daubed in large faded block capitals across the middle of the wall.

  “You here for the funeral?” The verger asked. David nodded.

  “You know we don’t get many of them anymore, the place is full up. Today’s lot go back years in the village. Got their own plot. Although I don’t remember ever seeing what’s his name … the one being buried today – certainly never in church. Lived in London didn’t he?”

  The churchyard wasn’t large, but cluttered. Headstones were stacked, two-deep, against a new brick wall that separated the graves from the neatly trimmed gardens of three modern bungalows. David heard a baby crying as he wandered past searching for evidence of fresh excavation. The burial site should have been easy to find but it was in the corner hard against the wall, hidden by a large rectangular Victorian brick memorial topped with a heavy flagstone and overhung by the branches of a spreading Yew tree. The last resting place of the Beckinsale family had only just escaped being swallowed up in a recent parish property speculation boom.

  “Lucky right to the end,” thought David, “Bloody typical, Larry Beckinsale always got his own way, even in death. Anybody else and they’d have been scattering their ashes over next door’s herbaceous border.”

  The hole was covered with wooden boards and the dark earth piled against the neighbouring tomb was encrusted with frost. There was a dank smell. The rimy brickwork was icy to the touch as David steadied himself. He noticed it was not a Beckinsale that was buried there but an Emily Fitzwilliam, spinster of the parish, who died after a long illness at the age of eighty-five in 1868. The large
capstone had been pushed off-centre and rocked slightly when nudged. David could peer inside. It was empty. Suddenly the friable soil began to shift beneath his feet and a fall of frozen earth clattered on wood. He jumped back to avoid pitching onto the planks. Unsettled he glanced round then went to sit on a pile of neatly stacked granite slabs that had once been a memorial-cross and wiped the mud from his shoes. Looking down the hill David could see over the roofs of the village to the mist-shrouded fields beyond. The sun was breaking through. A crisp, immaculate, light-drenched, winter day had been forecast and he knew that would help him get through the next few hours.

  The funeral was almost over. Handfuls of heavy clay were about to shower down on the glistering coffin, breaking the observance spell. The mourners would start talking, moving away, many looking forward to a drink in front of a roaring fire. In the lull between the fading words of the vicar and the first patter of the smothering earth that would finally bury the bastard, David understood that he was glad to have come this far, to have given nothing away.

  The grieving widow, the weeping daughter, the son who couldn’t face coming to the church; there were always victims. David had never met any of them so why should he care? The only connection was that he’d worked with a relation of theirs and that didn’t warrant making a special effort to offer his commiserations. His signature in the office condolences card was enough. He moved off and joined his work colleagues, Chris and Paul.

  “Let’s have a pint, this has been thirsty work,” he said.

  “Too bloody right, I’m fucking frozen.”

  “I shouldn’t have come, I’ve already got a cold and this’ll finish me off,” Paul coughed into his open hands, then beat his chest.

  “If you didn’t, you’d be back at the top of the list of suspects. Mine’s a lager. See you in a couple of minutes.”

  Chris waved as he disappeared into the crowd.

  “Chris, it’s your round,” Paul shouted at the top of his voice, then sheepishly looked round as he remembered where he was, “He always does that, every sodding time, it really gets to me.”

  David shrugged.

  “I mustn’t get pissed, last time I was at a funeral I had one hell of a hangover.”

  ° ° °

  It had been twenty-three years earlier and they were burying his grandfather, the Reverend Anthony Coxon-Dyet. That funeral had been different from Larry Beckinsale’s in a number of ways, but there were also similarities. The icy weather then had been as raw. David could still remember his aching hands and numbed feet. His grief had been painful too, he’d felt mangled by a depth of feeling unfamiliar to him at that stage in his young life. He had cried when he’d first heard the news of his grandfather’s death and he wept again as the rites were read. He had not been the only emotional one there that day. Whereas, at Larry’s burial there had been few expressions of open grief among the mourners, more a stolid forbearance. His grandfather’s death had also involved the police, but they were out of the picture by the time of the funeral. One, a sergeant, had shown up though – off duty – and it turned out he had been one of grandfather’s “boys” years before.

  “The whole business has devastated me,” he had said, “who would have believed it?”

  David certainly couldn’t at the time. Years later he felt he had a better understanding, yet even then his revered ancestor lacked substance, his murky past revealing only glimpses of his true self, the body of his motivation shaded by history.

  In the end the “Controversy”, as it was known, blew over – the Diocese finally compromised and agreed to hold a funeral service in St Botolph’s before his grandfather’s cremation at the local municipal crematorium – but still the journalists were there in droves. Parishioners packed the church and some of the congregation even spilled out into the cold.

  The Bishop stood on the very spot where they had found the body and praised the “Good Christian.”

  “He was,” he said, “a priest who had selflessly helped others. A man of firm beliefs and staunch principles. But,” he went on, “it would be dishonest, on such an occasion, not to say that his strong views had often led him into conflict with me, his Bishop, and the wider church. However, he was always gracious when brought to book, and he accepted I had to do my duty.”

  The Bishop concluded his eulogy with banal platitudes, or so it had seemed to David, “This overflowing church is a testimony to the goodness of the man and to the purity of his mission. His death marks a great loss.”

  David couldn’t cope with such idiocies and if he hadn’t been enlisted as a pallbearer he’d have slipped away. Nobody brought up how his grandfather had died and there was no attempt to explain why. No talk of the unseemly clash over what should happen to his remains, only resolved by the last minute intervention of the Archbishop. Maybe, thought David, these people aren’t here for the best of reasons. In the end, the organist played the hymn, “Abide with Me,” David helped carry his grandfather out of the church to the waiting hearse. There was a two-minute silence and everyone went home. David had got very drunk.

  ° ° °

  The Reverend Anthony Coxon-Dyet, or plain Tony Cox as he was known then, had almost died years earlier. As his life turned out he chose his own time to bring it to an end and left others to dispose of his remains. It could so easily have happened the other way round.

  He had just opened a bottle of beer. It was a glorious Indian summer day in late September. A warm breeze was disturbing the partially closed curtains in the living room, a haze of dust danced in the bright shaft of sunlight that spotted the floral wallpaper on the party wall. Outside it was quiescent and the house was empty. Eric was lying in the garden. Tony returned to work clutching his beer in a mood of intoxicated well-being that he had, in happier times, associated with languorous afternoons of endless cricket, sprawled in the green shade, surrounded by smiling, chattering girls.

  He enjoyed tunnelling. The strenuous exercise kept him in shape and there was a wonderful sense of achievement, when he finished. He was also out of the way. Alone. You could have too much of people. Hours scraping away with a trowel, followed by a beer and a tepid bath lifted him for the rest of the day.

  His basket full of damp earth, he rose without thinking.

  “Bloody hell.”

  Tony’s head hit a wooden beam. It moved. He dropped to his knees knocking against one of the new upright supports that he’d been meaning to nail in place. It shifted. He barely had time to touch his bleeding scalp, before his body was slammed forward. The collapsing roof winded him. He was trapped buried face down on the floor of the tunnel. He desperately sucked in air through clenched teeth as blood and soil trickled into the corners of his mouth. A naked bulb swayed in the subsiding draught, casting harsh light over the ripped sand and clay. Tony swore the earth was bleeding but it was beer seeping out of the overturned bottle. He waited – how long he didn’t know – for hands to grasp his ankles and pull him free. They never came.

  “Where is that bastard Eric?” he thought.

  He would have liked to believe that as he passed out he was thinking of his wife, his young children, his friends. Maybe even the ironic newspaper headlines reporting his death, “Englishman dies tunnelling out of English prison camp”; “An Englishman’s home is his tomb”; “The hidden secrets of number 13 Ballarat Road – an Englishman dies in a desperate bid to escape.” But he was thinking of none of these things. All he could see was a woman’s thighs, pale and creamy, as white as the milk spilling from an overturned churn in rhythmic waves across the red-tiled floor of a dairy.

  Chapter 2

  BLACK HOUSE

  6th June 1934

  Tony Cox sat in the public bar of the Duke of York and stared out through steamy, mirrored windows across the busy Kings Road to the building opposite. A grimy facade, colonnaded entrance, u-shaped gravel drive-way and tall sentinel plane trees surrounded b
y high black iron railings – it was much as he had been expecting. More run-down perhaps: the paintwork was peeling in places and the gates were hanging slightly askew, wedged open by heaped gravel and tufts of grass. Several windows were boarded up on the side close to the pavement on Cheltenham Terrace and the shutters were closed on the august double windows that overlooked the buses and cabs on the main road. He knew the building had been a teachers training college, but it no longer had the feel or look of an academic institution, maybe it never had, but to Tony it seemed like the hub of something important.

  As he watched, a motorbike, belching exhaust, swerved into the drive, skidding slightly on the gravel. The rider dismounted and stood by his bike. Lifting his goggles he stared expectantly out into the crowds thronging the highway. Moments later the imposing black front doors swung open behind him and two men in dark uniforms strode out. They stood to attention at the top of the flight of steps that led up to the grand entrance. In the hallway shadowy figures flitted back and forth. Tony glanced away, took a sip of his beer, and looked back. Nothing. The rider had taken a couple of steps across the courtyard and was shaking his head and shouting up at a suited man who had appeared between the two guards.

  “This is a delicious pint.” Tony thought. “I’ll have another if Eric doesn’t get here soon. Who’d have thought it, the bloody Smoke, aren’t I the lucky one?”

  There was a burst of laughter and somebody was clapping. A young man was on his knees at the far end of the bar clutching a table.

  “Five pints and nothing to eat; your wife will have your guts for garters,” the barman was shaking his head, “who’s going to clean up that mess?”

  “And he’s thrown-up on his trousers. I always told him he doesn’t know when to stop”, said another man with a wide-eyed grin. He was the one slowly applauding.