by Jessie Keane
‘Few days ago,’ he said, and shrugged as if this was the natural order of things.
‘Hey! You!’ said Clara sharply. One of the young waiters paused and stared at her. ‘Yeah, you. Put your back into it, will you? Every day from here on in, if this club’s closed up with damages it’s a day of your wages lost.’
The manager’s attention sharpened at that. ‘Here, we can’t have that. You got to pay the staff—’
‘When they’re leaning on their bloody brooms like that? I don’t think so,’ said Clara. ‘And that goes for you too. Get this show on the sodding road by the weekend’s trade, or you’re out the door.’
Soho was a whole new experience for Clara, but business was business and she had a feeling for it, a sure touch. From the Starlight she went with Toby on a tour of the other damaged clubs, rallying the troops, getting things moving.
‘Let’s hope to Christ Sears has tightened up on the doors,’ said Toby as they sat in the office over the Heart of Oak a week later.
Clara blew out her lips in exasperation. Talking to Fulton Sears was like addressing a slab of rock. The lights were on but the dogs weren’t barking, that was the impression she got of Fulton Sears. He was a gormless idiot. He’d been bruised and battered but unapologetic when they’d queried him about the damage to the clubs. She wondered if he had the intelligence to run doors. She wondered if Toby had made a big mistake in hiring him. And that manager at the Starlight! His casual attitude had enraged her and she wasn’t about to overlook it.
‘That Starlight manager’s a lazy bastard,’ she said. ‘And the staff are taking it easy, knowing he doesn’t give a stuff.’
‘What do you advise?’
‘Sack him. And those two no-hopers he’s got there – Flash and Lightning, the so-called waiters. Get someone in who’ll have the job done fast. This rate, you’ll be losing money until Doomsday.’
‘I’ll see to it,’ said Toby, eyeing his wife with a new respect. He’d been reluctant to wed, but it had become a necessity. He’d been stung a couple of times by chancers thinking to ‘out’ him or milk him of money to keep the secret of his shameful homosexuality. Marriage had been his solution, but initially it was a resented one, a hated one. Now, he could see that there might be advantages to it: he and Clara could work together, and it could prove beneficial to both of them.
‘Why don’t you have a good look around the other clubs?’ said Toby. ‘See what you think.’
‘OK,’ said Clara.
Clara hated to see inefficiency. It galled her. And if it was allowed to go on in Toby’s clubs it would cost her, and Bernie too. She couldn’t forget that. So she carried on touring the clubs, reporting back, working hard.
She was both fascinated and appalled by the things she heard on the streets of Soho: slavers and chinks and Eyeties and all kinds of sex for sale. It was all new to her. But it was exciting too, exhilarating. She relished the chance to make her mark.
She called in at the Juniper, where the clientele was mostly of the ‘queer’ variety and all the hosts were pretty young boys with lavishly made-up eyes. This, she guessed, was where Toby would spend his evenings, given the choice. But could he? Probably not. He had a reputation on the streets to protect, and she was part of that. His wife.
She felt sorry for Toby, protective of him. He was a bender and couldn’t help it; but the situation was fraught with risk. He could easily get caught in one of these ‘badger traps’ so common in Soho, where people – even pillars of the community – were lured into compromising positions with young men and then blackmailed for the rest of their days or reported to the police and prosecuted for acts of gross indecency between male persons.
All the beautiful boys in the Juniper eyed her with scorn and she felt that they probably knew, all too well, that her marriage was a lie, that her husband preferred the company of men. She was what they called a ‘queen’s moll’ or a ‘fag hag’. But she had to maintain the deception, live it every day; just like Toby.
In the Heart of Oak, she couldn’t fail to notice the poor quality of the ‘hostesses’. The Juniper’s array of young male beauty, probably having been personally chosen by her husband, was of a much higher quality. These girls looked like exactly what they were: part-time low-end brasses.
She continued her tour of inspection, determined that none of the clubs should escape her attention. She had promised Toby that she would do the rounds, and suggest things – if he didn’t mind? He didn’t. All in all, Toby seemed very happy to have her on board as part of the firm’s management, was clearly content with their sexless ‘marriage’ – and he was obviously relieved that she didn’t bear a grudge over Venice.
A few more clubs, and she had seen and assessed them all. She reported back to Toby one evening in the office over the Carmelo Club. He was behind his desk, puffing on a thin cheroot, flicking through Today magazine. He looked every inch a ruler of the streets in a bespoke toffee-beige suit and dark-blue watered silk waistcoat.
There was a malacca cane leaning against the desk that Toby sometimes carried with him. It looked like an affectation, but Clara knew it concealed a long, vicious steel blade. Toby had meant it when he told her about the booby traps. When they left this room tonight, she knew he would not only lock the office door but also set up tripwire so that anyone trying to get in there would go arse over tit straight down to the bottom of the stairs.
‘Paul Raymond’s in the shit again,’ said Toby.
‘For what?’ asked Clara, sitting down.
‘He’s been up in Marlborough Street Magistrate’s Court, charged with keeping a disorderly house. He’s appealing against the verdict.’
Clara shrugged. She’d fast become anaesthetized against the shock of Soho life. All the journalists called it ‘the Square Mile of Vice’, and they were right. The sheer diversity of the people on these streets – Italians, French, Cockney barrow-boys, Chinese, Caribbean islanders – was staggering. Tarts chatted on street corners, espresso machines hissed in overheated cafés, bookies loitered to take illegal off-course bets, teenagers clustered in coffee bars, tapping their feet to rock’n’roll, touts enticed suckers into clip joints. And clubs like Toby’s, like Marcus Redmayne’s, like Paul Raymond’s, walked an uneasy line between lawlessness and keeping the authorities sweet.
‘Well, what do you think, now that you’ve seen the lot of them?’ asked Toby.
Clara got out her notebook. She thumbed through the pages. ‘You’re right, the takings in some of the clubs don’t seem that good. And I can see why. The girls are rough. When a man comes into a club where he’s going to be fleeced for a lot of money, does he really want to see a collection of unwashed whorebags lounging about the place? I don’t think so.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Toby, ‘why don’t you start taking the girls in hand? Would that suit you?’
‘Perfectly,’ said Clara.
Then Toby frowned. ‘Actually,’ he said, stubbing out his cheroot in a green marble ashtray, ‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about something, Clara. Marcus Redmayne has made me an offer on the clubs.’
‘Well . . . ’ she paused, absorbing this bombshell. ‘Is it a good offer? Would you accept?’
‘No! Fuck him. Sears says Redmayne was behind the clubs being vandalized. He saw him in the Oak while it was going on. I asked Redmayne about it. He denies it, of course, but Sears was certain. There’s a grudge thing going on between those two, so I don’t know who to believe. What I think is that Redmayne is trying to intimidate me and he’s put in a very low offer. I don’t want to accept, and I’ve told him so.’
Clara let out a breath. She felt relieved. She was starting to enjoy the club work, she didn’t want to lose it quite yet. Bloody Marcus Redmayne! She didn’t like the idea of him damaging their livelihoods, their clubs – and she thought he would make a dangerous enemy. Would he accept a refusal? She had a feeling he wouldn’t.
‘So that’s that, then,’ she said, but she felt uneasy.
Toby’s mouth jerked upward in a smile. ‘Yeah. Let’s hope so.’
They went home together – the separate-bedroom situation had been sorted out to their satisfaction right from the outset – and they were sitting chatting into the night, sharing a brandy, when Bernie arrived home.
‘Oh – I didn’t think you’d still be up,’ she said, blushing when she peeked into the drawing room and found them there.
Clara was aware of some other presence out in the hall, someone standing behind her sister. She stood up; so did Toby.
‘Come in, Bernie, don’t stand there like a lemon,’ said Clara.
Bernie came reluctantly into the room; and behind her came David Bennett, the photographer. Clara bit her lip and out of politeness stepped forward to be introduced to the man who seemed to be always tagging along behind her sister like a bad odour.
‘Mrs Cotton? Nice to meet you,’ he said.
Clara shook his hand. He was too tall, too pale, too thin. He looked like he needed mothering, and she thought that probably appealed to Bernie.
‘This is my husband, Toby,’ she said, and the two men shook hands.
Clara could see that Toby wasn’t immune to David’s charms either.
‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘Will you have a drink?’
And so the evening passed pleasantly, with Toby and Bernie happily chatting away to David while Clara watched, smiled, listened – and thought that she was going to have to find a way to nip this relationship of Bernie’s in the bud.
She watched the interplay between Toby and David with interest and wondered if David might be bisexual. If Toby liked the man, even if he bedded him, it was no skin off her nose. Perhaps, if things went that way, it would turn out for the best, spare Bernie from marrying some nobody without a pot to piss in. She didn’t like the adoring way Bernie looked at him. She didn’t like it at all.
David Bennett, one way or another, was going to have to go.
47
Fuck all that for a game, thought Henry as he came up from the subway station at Leicester Square. He felt elated. He’d walked out of the Claremont School for Boys and hadn’t looked back. He was free as a bird. He’d just turned sixteen, he had a change of underwear and a few pounds in his bag, and here he was in the big city.
His plan was to get to Soho, there were hundreds of clubs there, get a job as a bouncer on a door. He’d sleep rough for a few nights if he had to, until he got his first pay packet. That was OK. Anything was better than being back at Claremont with the Hoorays.
He couldn’t forget that it was big sis Clara who had condemned him to that. Sent him away. Disposed of him like he was rubbish, like she couldn’t bear to have him anywhere near her.
And why not?
He was, after all, a monster. The thing with the damned dog. And the thieving, let’s not forget that, and turning on that poor tutor, acidic old bastard. All his fault, all down to him, of course. So Clara had kicked him out the door, sent him off to posh land where he’d had to toughen up quick, or die. Well, maybe she’d done him a favour. Because now he could fend for himself, big time. Now he was tough, and strong, and no one crossed him if they knew what was good for them.
Henry went knocking on doors that evening, approaching doormen and saying, ‘Your guvnor in? He got any jobs going?’ Girls wandered up to him, but he ignored their ‘Fiver for a shag’ offers and walked on. That night, he slept on a bench in Soho Square, keeping his penknife in his hand in case anyone should disturb him during the night.
No one did.
He was one more vagrant, one more loser dossing down rough on the streets.
The following day, he got some food in a café and then that evening tried again. Door to door to door. He felt dizzy in the end, he’d tried so hard, but no luck.
He began to feel that maybe he’d be better off back at the rotten Claremont, where at least he’d be fed and sheltered. Next day followed the same pattern, and every doorman turned him down, said, ‘Shove off, mate, we ain’t got no vacancies,’ and more girls wandered up, propositioned him.
He’d end up dossing on the bench again, he could see it coming. The clubs were starting to close up for the night. It was dark, drizzling rain and he was shivering. Then another girl came up to him, a tall blonde, and said five quid for a shag, how about it, lovey?
‘All right,’ he said. Anything was better than being stuck out here.
So she took him back to her flat.
Fifteen minutes after coming for the first time, Henry was ready for a reload and Sal – that was the girl’s name, and she had the body of an angel, with fabulous tits and an arse you could balance a pint on – climbed aboard again, pumping at him until Henry exploded once more with the force of his desire.
‘Blimey!’ Sal fell back laughing onto the bed. She was panting and sweaty. ‘That your first time then?’
Henry went red in the face. ‘No,’ he said.
‘It was. Go on. Admit it to your Aunty Sal. I won’t tell.’
‘It’s not my fucking first time, OK?’ said Henry angrily. It was. But no way was he going to tell anyone that. He was good at keeping secrets. He’d had to be.
‘Don’t worry, this bed’s like the confessional,’ said Sal cheerfully, reaching over for two cigarettes from the pack, lighting them, then drawing a deep drag on hers while inserting the other between Henry’s lips. He’d been smoking on and off since he was eleven, so this was nothing too shocking. ‘Anything said in here, stays here. All right?’
Henry looked at her and decided that she was all right. Her flat was a tip, and it was in Houndsditch, which held bad, bad memories for him, but Sal herself was OK. Good enough, anyway. Now all he had to do was persuade her – somehow – to let him linger here until tomorrow, just spend the night.
Not that he could afford a night.
If one shag took half an hour at a fiver, then he’d have to stump up forty quid by breakfast, and he barely had a tenner left. So it was time to turn on the famous Henry Dolan charm. He could do that – charm the birds out of the trees, when he wanted to. And he wanted to, needed to, right now.
‘You’re something special, you know that?’ he said to her, smoothing back a wisp of blonde hair from her face. ‘You’re beautiful.’
Sal wasn’t, and she knew it. She had big poppy eyes and he knew now that she was not a natural blonde. She looked down his body. A very fit body, it was, strong and muscular and with fine smooth skin. The hair on his head was copperbrown, but around his penis the hair was a brilliant fire-engine red. She liked that. She smoothed her hands over his chest.
‘It’s nice to be appreciated,’ she said.
‘I can’t believe anyone wouldn’t appreciate you.’
Sal’s mouth twisted. ‘You’d be surprised.’
‘What’s this?’ Henry took her jaw in his hand, brought her face down to his and kissed her mouth. ‘Boyfriend trouble?’
‘Take a tip from your old Aunt Sal,’ she said, pulling away, lying on her back, blowing out a plume of smoke from each nostril. ‘Never fuck your landlord.’
‘What, is he giving you grief then?’
Sal rubbed her forehead and frowned. ‘Well, he has been. You don’t ever want to get too involved with a bloke like Yasta Frate. Wish I’d thought of that before I let him . . . well, anyway, old stuff. History.’
Sal sat up suddenly. Her back was long and strong. Henry ran a hand down over it, trailing a shiver of sensation from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine. She peeped at him over her shoulder.
‘You want to stay tonight?’ she asked. ‘No charge, OK?’
Henry nodded, sat up, put his mouth where his hand had just been.
Gotcha! he thought.
48
‘Christ,’ said Marcus.
Gordon and a couple of Marcus’s other boys were with him in the office over the Calypso; he was sitting behind the desk and they were standing. All of them were looking at what was on the desk.
The sodden eighteen-by-eighteen-inch cardboard box was on the floor now. Its gruesome contents had been removed and set out on Marcus’s desk, with a newspaper to soak up the blood.
Not that Pistol Pete’s head was bleeding much any more; someone had cut it from his shoulders quite cleanly and now there it sat, his face staring almost serenely ahead, blind to everything, his eyes filming over, his skin tinted a waxen grey. On either side of Pete’s head were his hands, neatly sliced off at the wrists.
Gordon looked sheet-white and sick. He pulled a chair toward him, and slumped into it. ‘Where did you say they found it?’ he asked, gagging.
‘On Sonya’s doorstep. She phoned me straight away. Fucking hysterical, she was,’ said Marcus.
Christ, he thought. Pete.
He’d known Pistol Pete like, always. And now . . . where the hell was the rest of him? Nothing but his head and hands here, cut from his body with something, looked like a machete maybe, or maybe not. So neat. There’d been no note, no phone call, no warning of anything more to come. Someone had just taken Pete, his right-hand man, off the street and chopped his head and hands off, and presented it at his girlfriend’s door like a sick perverted gift.
Only a few days back, he’d been talking to Pete, laughing and joking with him.
Now, he was dead.
‘I want to find out who did this,’ said Marcus.
They all nodded.
‘I want their heads, too,’ he said. ‘And their dicks,’ he added, as an afterthought.
49
‘All right. Here’s what we’re going to do,’ said Clara. It was late afternoon and she’d gathered together all the girls who worked in the Heart of Oak, which was mostly a drinking and gaming club. ‘Or rather, here’s what you are going to do.’ She gazed around at the girls and felt something close to despair. Dirty clothes. Scuffed shoes. Matted, unbrushed hair. The stench of days-old sweat overlaid by cheap perfume and a whiff of stale cigarettes. Toby hadn’t been interested in the way the girls appeared to the punters because the girls didn’t appeal to him. ‘You look a state, the lot of you.’
