by Milly Adams
Leon leaned back. Norton had taught him all that, and it made him laugh to have passed on the lesson ter both his accountants, who must think he were a man of the world. ‘So,’ he mulled. ‘Still time to expand.’
Tony looked puzzled. ‘Don’t know about that, this area’s pretty established. Got a few families working it.’
‘Be there anything that says it ’as ter be a family, Tony?’ Leon heard the ice in his own voice, and so did Tony, who sat up straight, his hand trembling as he removed the cigar from his mouth, coughing slightly. ‘Course not, Mr Harkness. You are surrounded by the equivalent of a family; after all, what is a group likes ours if not a family.’
Leon shrugged, and waved him away. ‘Send in Dougie on yer way out.’ That was it. Leon had things to think about.
Tony looked from his cigar to the ashtray. Leon waved again. ‘Tek it with yer, but don’t drop ash on me floor.’ Tony scuttled to the door, and tapped four times, then again. The door opened. He rushed through it. Leon heard him yammer, ‘Quick, he wants you.’
Leon roared, ‘Who be ’e, the cat’s doo-da?’
Dougie entered and closed the door on Tony’s frantic apology. Dougie was huge, and muscle-bound. He’d been a bare-fist fighter and was still useful, and though he had once been Norton’s man he’d the sense to put down his knuckledusters when Leon invaded the premises out of hours. That had been after that Mrs Holmes beat him off the old man and away from his son Joe, his own property. Just like that Polly she were, and whatever that Tony do say, you needed a family to build an empire to make you like a king. He glanced back at the tank. ‘A king,’ he roared.
It were all the boy’s fault. He could have come quiet out of the school playground after he’d paid a couple of blokes to find where he was. He’d travelled all the way down to Woking himself, he had, thinking the boy would do as he were told. But he’d said, ‘No, Da’ and run back into the building. His own lad said no. Leon still couldn’t work it out, the ruddy toe-rag. So he’d had to go to the Holmeses’ house.
He shook his head, remembering the hammering in his head, the blood dripping down the back of his neck when that Polly’s ma had whacked him with the frying pan, again and again. He felt the rocking of the train when he took off from the garden. He’d gone to London, course ’e had, cos where else did he know. He’d gone there from the ’ome for kids with no folks when he were fourteen, and then to t’cut, but this time as he walked from Waterloo to nowhere in particular, he’d thought how Norton had kicked the bucket, so why not take on his place, and his men?
He’d stopped in a pub, hired some loafers, promising them jobs if they did well. They’d all gone in, whacking with clubs, but it were half empty, with almost no booze behind the bar. It was so easy it were like a knife going through a slab of butter. Norton’s men had put down their clubs, and fists, no problem. Leon had told them their boss was dead from a bomb on the bungalow. And he’d told them he’d see to ’em if anyone squealed to the cops about him being back in town, but if they stayed they’d get their wages, just the same. No one had squealed, or if they had, no coppers had come. Mark you, it cost a bit to keep those two cops on Norton’s payroll sweet, but it were worth it.
Dougie moved slightly, bringing Leon back from the past. ‘We got a lot of work to do, Dougie, cos the game ain’t over yet, cos though the war might be soon there’ll be rationing for many a day for’ards. Now, what about me boy, Joe? Any news from any snouts? He ain’t in Woking cos the Holmes house is shut. Got anything on the Holmes name yet?’
‘Not a whisper, boss. But I ’ad a thought. Shirley’s ma sent her the local paper from Hastings way. All sorts in that, about school things, and the like. What say we ask ones we know with folks about the country to send in the local rags? Might be summat.’
Leon was nodding. That weren’t a bad idea. ‘You’ll see to that, then, will yer Dougie cos I’ve other things on me mind. Now, I been thinking about the scheme o’ things and I got to make a plan, I have, Dougie, cos why pay a wholesaler when I could take over that end for meself, eh? Think on, Dougie. What if I get rid of me middleman at t’docks …’
Dougie nodded, his eyes sharp, but shocked. ‘Mario’s got a bloody army, boss.’
‘Then that’s what we’ll get an’ all. I’ll need a bit of a one to get me boy back when we do find ’im, anyway. And I needs ’im back as we get big.’
Leon was thinking his Joe could read proper and his mind were quick with figures, and family were family, when all were said and done, and the gangs that had them were stronger by far. After all, the lad’d take over the business one day, so he would keep his mouth tight shut and loyalty sharp, he Lionel Harkness’d see to that. ’So, yer get thinkin’ about how to find ’im.’
Dougie said, ‘Right you are, boss.’
He paused and Leon could almost hear his thoughts grinding like wheels in the big bloke’s head. Dougie finally said, ‘Maybe I’ll get Shirley, the club hostess, to talk to everyone she knows and them in the club as she takes the fags round. She might get her personal punters, if yer know what I mean, on to it too. Bit of blackmail works well. Get ’em to ask round about his name. Harkness, right?’
‘Try Holmes, cos that’s bloody Polly’s surname, and ’Opkins.’ Try Woking. Try Buckby way but they wouldn’t be that stupid to hide ’im there. They’d know I’d ask, and I damn well have already. But try again. Try places along the cut. Maybe Tyesley. Ask if anyone knows the name, eleven year he be. Haul in them papers too and I’ll pay Shirley a bit extra to read ’em in the day before the club really opens for business.’ Leon looked thoughtful. ‘Tell ’er to thin ’em out for me. I’ll get me reading up a bit to recognise them names in the ones she puts on me desk. You keep on with the narks in the cop shops too, and around the bazaars, eh?’
‘There are the evacuees registers too, boss. But it’ll be a needle in a haystack.’
‘Yer think I don’t know that?’ Leon smashed his fist on the table. Dougie braced himself. Leon thought for a moment. ‘All right, tell yer what. You’re going to try and get the other names, the last names of the girls on that damned boat that Polly Holmes runs. I’ll get that private investigator bloke on that too, make it a race. Who finds ’em first gets a bottle of Scotch. We can check where them girls are from an ’all, and get ’em papers specially, and check for the last names that match them girls’ at the schools. How’s that for bloody brilliant. Someone should ’ave thought o’ that before.’ Leon glared at Dougie.
Dougie nodded. ‘I should ’ave, I’m right sorry, boss. I’ll get on now.’
Dougie turned, and left. Leon sat back in his chair, pulled the accounts towards him, and started to go through the figures. He weren’t sure how long to go on paying the coppers in the bloody sticks for news. It hadn’t worried him that much before cos he’d been so busy, but now he were building up his empire it more than mattered that the boy was here. It were weak for a bloke to let his boy ’ide.
He looked at his cigar in the ashtray. The smoke was curling in the slight draught from the door. He hurried over and banged it shut. He worked on the figures for a couple of hours and they were all kosher. He rose, pulled back the rug, lifted the boards and opened the safe with the new combination.
Leon placed the books in. Back went the boards, and the rug, and then he poured himself some whisky and sat looking at his fish, working out just how all that the Babbaro family at Limehouse had could become his and Joe’s. Then they’d be known as the Harkness Family, and they’d bring the money flooding in, which would show those who’d seen him off from the canal just who they’d been dealing with, just as he’d shown Maudie when she’d talked back once too often. He wondered what lock she were laying in, or what pound. Then shrugged. What did it matter?
Chapter 19
Mid February and the girls’ work on the cut continues
Sylvia’s butty, Horizon, was tied abreast Marigold as they headed up the cut with holds full of aluminium. She thought she’d dream
for the rest of her life of tying up tarpaulins, then untying the wretched things with fingers scraped raw by the rope, and blistered, calloused and frozen. Would she also dream of the chilblains on her fingertips, her calves and toes? It wasn’t so bad while everything was numb, but in the warm cabin at night, as the three of them ate supper, the itching and throbbing drove them nearly insane.
She had mentioned in a letter to Mrs B, at the start of February, that they hadn’t been bothered by chilblains so badly before, and Mrs B had sent wintergreen from the medicine cupboard in the Butler’s Pantry, saying that everyone was tired from the war so things were catching up with them. That evening they’d rubbed it in, and the itching seemed worse as the heat rose, but after a while there did seem to be an improvement, or enough of one to be worth the stink of wintergreen in both cabins.
Verity called from the counter of Marigold, ‘Cocoa, Sylv?’ She was holding a steaming mug, her woollen hat pulled down, her scarf up.
‘Oh please.’ She clambered on to their counter, took it and returned to her tiller though she didn’t need to, because Marigold could steer for both. As she sipped her cocoa she wondered what the end of the war would mean. Would she and Steve still be together in London, as he continued in the Fire Service, or at Howard House to start afresh? She thought yet again of the feel of his kisses, of the words they had said, and knew that wherever he was after the war, she would be. But what about the other two? Would they go to Howard House with Saul and Tom, and leave her and Steve behind? The thought troubled her.
Verity was saying, as they headed along the pound between Fenny Stratford and Stoke Bruerne, which was an area blissfully free of locks, ‘If only we knew where our two men actually were.’
‘Well, we don’t, so that’s that,’ said Polly, ever the practical one.
Verity pouted. ‘Yes, but …’
Sylvia joined in, ‘Would it help to worry about specifics? If you knew they were trying to find a way over the Rhine as our Allied armies seem to be doing, while the German rearguard fights to delay them every step of the way, wouldn’t it get to you even more? I don’t want to know every fire or every V2 that explodes in Steve’s neck of the woods.’
The two girls looked at her. Verity grimaced. ‘Heavens, she’s slopped her cocoa, the little fire-brand.’
Sylvia shrugged, grinning a little. ‘Well, I can’t bear it when you’re both so worried.’
‘You are too, about Coppernob,’ Polly said quickly, ducking as two swans seemed to sweep low over the cut. They heard the swish of their wings over the pat-patter. That was the only annoying thing about being towed abreast, thought Sylvia. If she was on a short tow behind she didn’t hear the motor. She laughed. Honestly, how ridiculously fussy they were all getting. Was it because they were so close to the end?
Just then they heard Bet’s hunting horn ahead, and slowed. Yes, there she was, approaching as she headed south. She hailed them from fifty feet away. ‘’Ow do,’ Bet called. ‘How did it go at Solly and Jacob’s?’
‘Crikey, haven’t we seen you since then?’ It was Polly, who had finished her cocoa and was now rolling a couple of cigarettes. ‘Hey, moor up for lunch, there are studs either side of the cut here.’ As she said this there was activity in the sky to the right. ‘Fighter escorts for the bombers,’ Verity said. ‘Why, oh why, won’t Hitler surrender?’
Bet called, ‘Good idea. What have you cooking? We three’ll scoot across the bridge with our Spam fritters, or have you got enough in your pot? And, Lady Verity, the Russians have found Auschwitz, such a terrible death camp apparently and quite beyond imagination. They came upon it as they approached from the east, so the German hierarchy will be trying to get rid of more camps and the evidence of their crimes, so that’s one of the reasons they won’t surrender, and of course, because they’re insane, the lot of them, they probably still think they can win.’
The girls moored and all squashed up in Marigold’s cabin. Bet, Evelyn and Mabel added their Spam to the Marigold’s carrots, gravy and baked potatoes. Meat would be a treat they’d have tomorrow. Verity, Bet and Evelyn sat on the cross-bed, their enamel plates on the pull-down table; Mabel sat on the end of the side-bed. Polly and Sylvia squeezed up on the side-bed too, resting their plates on their knees. The talk was desultory, until Bet smiled across at Sylvia.
‘I hear from Mrs Green that Coppernob has booked in for a night at the guest house when you girls arrive, all freshly bathed and smelling sweet. It sounds serious.’
‘I love him,’ Sylvia said. The others looked up in surprise. She had never said it before but she did, with all her heart and soul. Bet looked anxious. ‘What about Coppernob?’
Verity poured water from the jug into their enamel mugs. ‘Of course he loves her, you can tell it a mile off. Perfect, all of it. Two coppernobs together; such sense to it.’
Sylvia was nodding, because there was.
Mabel was thirty, an actress who had decided to do her bit, though she wasn’t keen on the callouses, because, as she had explained, they could so affect her career. Now she said, ‘There’s not a lot of sense to love, but it makes the world go around, and everything worthwhile.’ She looked at the others and smiled. ‘The line from a play I was in.’
The others weren’t sure quite how successful her career had been but no one dreamed of asking; after all, what business was it of theirs?
Bet ate the skin of her potato, then said, ‘Evelyn, stop poking yours about. I know you don’t like it, but the skin contains some vitamin that’s supposed to be good for us, and it’s roughage, which helps—’
Mabel cut across her. ‘Must we have another reminder of your thoughts on the use of roughage, oh trainer of ours? I want to get back to how your meeting with Solly and Jacob went, Verity. I hope the old reprobate is recovering well?’
The talk continued as Sylvia brewed tea, half listening to the account of Verity and Polly’s time with Solly and Jacob while she’d been with Steve at the reunion. Every letter Steve sent, every night she lay in her cross-bed, brought him back to her, the feel of her hand in his, the telephone calls she made to the fire station when they had finished playing darts at the stop-over pubs. And now, there was to be a meeting in Tyseley, which was Steve’s first four-day leave for over a year, taking advantage of what seemed like a lull in the rockets, as the Allies took over sites set up in occupied countries.
She passed the mugs around, knowing they’d all light up cigarettes. Even a few months ago she’d have scooted them up on to the counter, but not now. Now, nothing like that was important, and she wondered afresh at the tense, unhappy, fearful girl she had been.
She listened, concentrating on Verity, as she told of Solly.
‘As you probably know, Bet, he lives with Jacob in Golders Green now, and was very perky on the whole, wasn’t he, Polly?’ She went on to tell them of Jacob’s wife, Rachel, who adored Solly. She was from somewhere near Budapest, in Hungary, and had arrived in Britain in 1937 with her parents, when they had decided Hitler was turning his anti-Semitic rhetoric into actions and wouldn’t stop at Germany’s frontiers. Her father had helped for a while in Solly’s shop but there was little enough work for one, let alone two.
Polly said, ‘Oh, poor Solly, do you remember his face, Ver, when Jacob said that it was a gift to the world when the V2 made such a bonfire of the whole lot?’
Verity was tapping her cigarette against the ashtray. ‘I know, but Solly was playing along, wasn’t he? What was it they were saying about Rachel’s father, Mr Teller? He’d gone missing, or something? They didn’t dwell on it because it was clearly too raw.’
‘Yes, they think it must have been a V1 or 2 that got him,’ Polly continued. ‘I know they’ve asked around, and left his name, Emmanuel, with the Red Cross, but we should all keep an ear open just in case we see it on a list of – well, found people, or missing people, I suppose. But in spite of their worry they insisted we were to ask for help as regards Leon, should we ever need it, which was typical of
them. I expect they’ll keep an ear to the ground for him as well.’
Bet was shaking her head. ‘They seem lovely, and as for Emmanuel, the trouble is that with a V1 or V2 people sort of get blasted to smithereens, just like Timmo’s brother Thomo so … Was it Emmanuel’s office that was hit?’
Verity couldn’t remember if he even had an office. ‘He’d picked up what work he could, apparently, since leaving Hungary. His English was good, and he’d been an accountant in Budapest, and worked from home I think. They’ve tried telephoning those clients who were in his address book, just in case they could pinpoint where he was, but with no luck, and often no answer. So many have closed down, or moved away, or been hit.’
It was all so sad, because Emmanuel had been Solly’s friend. Not that Solly was from Budapest; indeed, he had been born in the East End, but most of his family were still over in Hungary. Sylvia said, ‘We’re going to see the three of them again, perhaps when we get back from this trip. I mean, when you’ve spent a few hours in the dark with a man, you have a sort of bond.’
She knew perfectly well what she’d said, and waited for the hoot of laughter, which duly came and lifted the moment, but then Polly grew serious. ‘I will bring up Leon again when we see them. You never know.’
As they puffed away and sipped tea, busy with their own thoughts, Sylvia smiled at Verity and Polly. The three of them could so easily transfer to Howard House if the men agreed, or at least this was what the three of them discussed in the evenings, when the day’s work was done, and Granfer, Maudie and Lettie could too. But would they all agree? She sighed, and put all such worries aside, because they could do nothing like that for the men until the end of the war, but if Leon wasn’t found, they could perhaps persuade the Buckby family to move at least. She fed Pup who sat beside her on the side-bed with a piece of leftover potato skin.
Later, as they echoed their way through Blisworth Tunnel, they discussed whether to call in on Granfer and see how things were with Maudie. Bet had said that Fran still wasn’t sure that Maudie was 100%, when they nipped in on their way back from Coventry just now.
