Noose

by Bill James

  ‘Wondered what?’ Amber said. ‘About me? About him?’

  ‘Him. Whether he was the same one. The same Ian Charteris. I can see now the age is about right.’

  Charteris felt a second, disturbing, frightening tug into the past. At least disturbing, and maybe frightening. First Daphne West, now this. But he couldn’t work out yet what the sister meant. ‘Age about right for what?’ Ian said. ‘Have we met before? I’ve done other hospital tales from here.’

  She answered to Greg Amber, not to Charteris. ‘Back in 1941 he got a man hanged, you know.’

  ‘He what?’ Amber said.

  ‘He was a kid of eleven or twelve then,’ the sister replied, ‘and he got a man hanged. His words helped get a man hanged. They did quite a bit of hanging in those days.’

  ‘No, I didn’t know,’ Greg said. ‘That right, Ian?’

  Yes, it was right. How did she know about it, though? Why should she care about it, though? Why should she blurt it now, though? ‘A man got himself hanged,’ Ian said. ‘He stuck a knife into his brother because of money. All sorts saw it. Several described what happened.’

  ‘But you told the story so well in court the jury was bound to convict,’ she said.

  ‘He’s good with stories,’ Amber said.

  ‘It wasn’t a story,’ Ian said. ‘Daphne West tonight is a story. The other was evidence. There’s a difference.’

  ‘What is this, Ian?’ Amber said.

  ‘You read about it in the Press at the time, did you?’ Ian asked her. ‘You must have some memory!’

  She nodded. ‘Yes I did read about it in the Press. But I knew about it anyway. It had touched my life.’

  ‘I don’t get it,’ Ian said.

  ‘You sent a man I loved, and who loved me, to the drop,’ the sister said. ‘He’d been swindled, and because he struck back against that duplicitous, greedy bastard brother he was hanged.’

  ‘Oh, God,’ Ian said.

  ‘Is that right, Ian?’ Amber asked.

  ‘This is terrible,’ Ian said.

  ‘It’s right all right,’ she said.

  Yes, it might be. ‘Back then, he did tell me he was on his way to see a lady,’ Ian said. ‘You?’

  ‘Me,’ she said.

  ‘An air raid had stopped him. We talked by the public shelter in our street. I was going to bring you a note from him to say what had happened.’

  ‘Were going to, but didn’t.’

  ‘I couldn’t.’

  She spoke again to Amber: ‘And this one actually went down to the prison to see the execution notice posted – so proud of himself, purring while the noose snapped a neck inside, glorying in it, squinting at the notice on the prison door eventually, saying it had been done nice and tidily. People made a fuss of him. His mother advertised him.’

  ‘Were you there as well, then?’ Ian said.

  ‘As well?’ she said.

  ‘Oh, there was a woman present who scared my mother,’ Ian said.

  ‘Not me. Why would it be? But I had to be there.’

  ‘You sent those postcards – the nine postcards?’ He softened his voice. As Percy Lyall had said, Charteris could do that, and do it well.

  ‘Postcards?’ Amber said.

  ‘There were anon postcards,’ Ian said. ‘But what happened to you afterwards?’ he asked her. ‘You moved to London?’

  ‘Afterwards, this is what happened to me, in due course,’ she said, giving a little wave, apparently meaning the hospital and her job.

  ‘Have you got … well, a family?’ Ian asked.

  ‘Would I have?’ she said, and walked away, back towards her office.

  ‘I don’t follow all this,’ Amber said. ‘What nine postcards?’

  ‘Leave it. Daphne’s the story.’ That’s how Ian would prefer it. He knew that however he wrote up Daphne West and phoned the words in, the Daily Mirror machine would shape it to the correct tabloid formula. In fact, when his piece led the paper next day, it struck Ian as one of the most brilliant and ruthless exercises in coding he’d seen for at least weeks. He did not claim complete credit – wouldn’t want it; he’d have liked the report to be gentler with Daphne. Same genes? One or two gifted sub-editing touches had been applied, though.

  By ‘coding’, he meant that the story appeared to say one thing but actually said something else, something much more risky and unpleasant. Well, naturally: if it were not risky and unpleasant no code would be necessary. Newspapers often went in for what might be called ‘reverse writing’ when the topic was legally dangerous. For instance, suppose the prevailing idea was that Mr A had murdered his wife, Mrs A; a reporter would ask Mr A, ‘Did you murder your wife, Mrs A?’ Of course, Mr A would reply, ‘No.’ And the paper could then say: ‘Mr A denied yesterday that he had murdered his wife, Mrs A’ – which meant everyone deduced that Mr A had murdered Mrs A, but the paper couldn’t get done for libel.

  The essence of the Daphne West story as published lay in two words placed reasonably close to each other during the opening few sentences. The words had alliteration, both beginning with g, but although the paper loved alliteration, it did not contribute all that much here, possibly nothing. No, but one of the core rules of tabloid reporting was this: if the adjective ‘glamorous’ – as in ‘glamorous star of film and television’, or ‘glamorous model’, or ‘glamorous girl-about-the-night-spots’ – yes, if the adjective ‘glamorous’ appeared somewhere near the word ‘gas’, as noun, or adjective itself, as in ‘gas stove’, the story’s real message – immediately cottoned on to by the reader – was this: ‘beautiful woman’s failed love-affair suicide attempt’, no matter what it seemed to say on the surface about a mere accident involving the beautiful woman and gas and/or gas stove.

  Naturally, Ian knew this convention and, besides, he didn’t want to say anything too blunt about Daphne’s attempt. Sis? He’d had to say something, therefore, without saying it. He had, of course, lined up ‘glamorous’ and ‘gas’ in his copy. But he hadn’t done it with top skill. The sub-editing magic, or voodoo, recast his sentences, and managed to place ‘gas’ only just over thirty words from ‘glamorous’, rather than Ian’s fifty, so that even someone fairly dim and interruptedly reading the paper while strap-hanging on the Tube, or washing up in a breakfast cafe, would get the underlying hints. Suicide, or a try, was a crime in Church and State law and plainly to accuse someone of it might be offensive and could be libellous. Even leaving the illegality out of things, it would be harmful to the career of a famous figure to suggest s/he despaired of everything and, therefore, actually and evidently despised the public and its adulation, or even despised the public because of its adulation, and would prefer sudden death, thanks very much. Thus, the code.

  Another way to hint that what had happened derived from no mischance or carelessness, but from a boredom with – even contempt for – life, was to say in the story: ‘All seemed to be going so brilliantly for her/him lately, yet a few more minutes’ delay would have meant the end of this superbly promising career of the star from Such-and-Such and Such-and-Such.’ Ian had written it like this, with Daphne West’s name filled in and the stage, film and TV credits. It was an invitation to readers to look beyond the career glitter, and mawkishly wonder whether all that kind of stuff could really satisfy, because her love life must be rocky, just like any quite ordinary person’s might be.

  Tabloids relished – lived by – mawkishness but would have called it ‘basic human emotion common to all’. The Mirror longed to strengthen the tie-in with a large part of the paper’s ten to fifteen million daily readership, and gravely preached how a rise to money and fame could not necessarily satisfy. Subs liked to supply a moral and knew basic Scriptural teaching, such as ‘What shall it profit a man/woman if he/she shall gain the whole world and lose his/her own soul?’ Soul here having a wide significance, and meaning, among other factors, domestic and bed joy with a hubby or wife chosen for truly loving, not materialistic reasons.

  Ian’s s
tory came out under the main headline ‘TWO MINUTES FROM DEATH’ plus beneath, in smaller type, ‘TV Star’s Miracle Escape’, then ‘by Ian Charteris’ although it wasn’t quite all his own work: subs didn’t get bylines and were paid more in lieu. In the Daphne West coverage, a head-and-shoulders picture of her from the Mirror archive occupied three columns to the right. The report began: ‘Glamorous TV, film and stage actress Daphne West told me yesterday from her hospital bed of the night she almost died alone and helpless in her luxury apartment. “If neighbours had not smelled gas and broken down the door it would have been too late. I could not be more grateful to them,” whispered still-in-shock Daphne, star of TV drama series The Whitfields and movies Loving and Mid-Atlantic.’

  To report lavish thanks for being saved was another tabloid device that indicated someone had been trying to kill himself/herself and felt enraged with the damn nosy twerps who’d intervened and done the decent, life-saving bit. The sub-editor had rejigged Ian’s copy, placing her quotation up near the start. This meant the reader could be whacked very soon with ‘gas’ after the opening ‘Glamorous’. In Ian’s version he had slackly used the second sentence of the story not for gas but to elaborate on the nature of Daphne’s beauty – complexion, natural blondness, green-grey eyes. This could all come later.

  The guts of the piece remained approximately his, though. At the fifth or sixth paragraph now it said: ‘Twenty-year-old Daphne nervously tugged at her long, corn-coloured hair and described the accident with her gas stove that proved so nearly fatal. “I had put a saucepan of water on one of the rings intending the water to boil and remove some stains on the inside of the saucepan. I sat down in the kitchen to wait and must have dozed off. I have been working very hard on my new film, Light Years, and getting up at four o’clock every morning for weeks. The water must have boiled over and put out the flame. But the gas continued to flow and fill the room.”’

  In the afternoon, he had a telephone call from his father. ‘I saw your byline on a Mirror story, Ian, about the actress Daphne West.’

  ‘Yes, Dad?’

  ‘Is she all right?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘I’ve always taken an interest in that girl.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Her career.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘A very talented kid. I’ve followed her successes. Did she have love trouble? That’s how it sounds in the paper.’

  ‘No, no, an accident.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘When newspapers write about something in that way it generally feels like a suicide attempt.’

  ‘Is that right?’ Ian thought he heard a door open behind his father’s voice and then a woman, almost certainly Ian’s mother, yelled something aggressive and curt, but he didn’t get the words. The phone at his father’s end was put down with a real smack.

  That sounded very absolute and final – topic closed. But, of course, it wasn’t – the opposite, in fact. Why was the conversation hastily and definitively cut like that? The past had a lot of answering to do.

  TWO

  Fragments of that past – fairly important fragments – lay in Ian’s childhood. Occasionally during those gone years it would be reasonable to say Ian starred – for instance, getting a man hanged. As the sister at St Thomas’s Hospital had said, there’d been quite a fuss made of him because of his part in that incident. Children who got someone hanged were rare, even though hanging itself then was not.

  But at other times in this period, it would be his father who captured the spotlight. Mr Charteris liked best to talk of those episodes. What Ian’s father loved speaking to him about as a boy was ships. Mr Charteris described very exciting moments, and Ian knew some of them must be true. Ian used to listen and didn’t get completely fed up, even though he had heard these memories before, especially that terrible sad stuff starting when the weight of the young woman’s wet clothes pulled her under in dark water close to the pier. This tragedy happened a long time before the war and that air-raid shelter murder mentioned by the angry hospital sister. Ian’s father was definitely the one who figured big in the pier event, but it would have mighty effects on Ian’s life also, although he didn’t realize it while only a youngster. It affected his mother’s life too, as could be seen outside the prison that day following the execution in 1941, but he didn’t understand this either at the time. Just after they’d read the door notice saying everything had been as it should be, his mother suddenly wanted to leave and go home. Eventually, he was able to guess at why his mother refused to linger in that crowd at the gates. He came to realize she had glimpsed a woman she loathed and feared and wanted no contact with.

  As a boy, Ian would never show by making a face or yawning that he’d like a change from his father’s ship stories, please. He believed he should be good to his father and try to enjoy the yarns about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse. Every boy should be good to his father because fathers were so much older and really thought they were interesting when they talked about the same past things nearly every time they opened their gob. Ian felt certain his father did not deliberately try to bore Ian as a punishment for something, although he did bore Ian. His father thought he had to go over and over this stuff because Ian found it really thrilling, and he did, first time he heard it.

  Ian realized he might be lucky in some ways. Not many boys had fathers who’d been in sea adventures and could talk about tides and spray from the bow so high it hit the wheelhouse, or a woman struggling in the sea where her soaked clothes dragged her down and down under the hull of the ship. When Ian thought of this he was reminded of something in a film called Mutiny on the Bounty, which he had seen in the Bug and Scratch, where the cruel Captain Bligh could punish men by having them thrown over one side of a ship and pulled on a rope under the vessel and out the other side. This was called keelhauling. Or if the captain thought someone had been really bad they would be pulled under the whole length of the ship, not just the width. The men on deck tugging the rope would try to get the man on the other end out from under the ship as fast as they could or he would drown. Captain Bligh didn’t care. He had a lot of breadfruit to take somewhere and plant, and so he thought the crew should behave themselves. Even if the men did not drown they would be cut all over their bodies by being banged against the hull as they were pulled. Ian’s father could tell a tale which was nearly as good as a film, Ian had to admit this.

  His father worked on a sand dredger in the Channel because of the war. But before it started he had a job on a pleasure paddle steamer. Those ships stopped sailing after 1939. They would have used coal needed for the war effort, and, in any case, there might be dangerous magnetic mines dropped by German aircraft in the Channel. Instead, Mr Charteris had joined the crew of the dredger. It brought sand from near Flat Holm island, needed to make new airfields and shelters and defence posts. Of course, the dredger might get blown up by a mine, but there’d only be six men on board, not a lot of passengers. In any case, after a raid by German bombers the dredger used to go into dry dock to be what was referred to as degaussed. This meant the boat would be given some electric treatment that stopped it drawing magnetic mines towards itself. If a magnetic mine was pulled against a ship, one of its spikes would get broken and allow chemicals to mix and cause an explosion, blowing a hole in the hull. Most paddle steamers were ‘mothballed’ as soon as the war began – that is, kept in a dock or a river somewhere until peace came again. A few did other kinds of work carrying cargo, instead of passengers.

  ‘The ships were known as the Masthead fleet,’ his father would say. ‘There were four. All pleasure paddlers are laid up now or converted to small freighters owing to what’s known as “hostilities”. I worked on one called …’ He would pause and snap his fingers in a fond, encouraging way then. ‘But perhaps I’ve told you that before, Ian, and you’ll remember the name of the vessel.’

  ‘You used to work on th
e King Arthur, Dad.’

  ‘The P.S. King Arthur. The Paddle Ship King Arthur. In the old days, many ships, even the biggest, relied on sails. So, ships with engines powered by steam took the P.S. in front of their names, if they had paddles, or S.S. – meaning Steam Ship, if they had propellers. And later, when some ships used oil instead of coal, they had M.V. meaning Motor Vessel. But the King Arthur was steam, a paddle steamer, closed stokehold, burning coal at more than two tons an hour when flat out. It’s as if I can see her now – a proud, bold-looking craft, two silver-painted funnels, the paddle boxes making her broad amidships, of course, sort of tubby, and on a good summer’s day the decks crowded with passengers, off to a holiday in, say, Ilfracombe or Weston-super-Mare, or returning. Or just an afternoon and evening non-landing cruise around Lundy Island, sometimes a choir outing, with singing of famous pieces from The Messiah and Chou Chin Chow, which would resound above the noise from the engine room and the paddles digging into the waves.’

  From adulthood, Ian would occasionally still look back to those days when Mr Charteris did his reminiscing, and could recall that as a boy he had a foolish, very limited idea of what words could do. He’d detested it when people said ‘as if’ and especially when his father did. Always what he considered rubbish came next. ‘As’ and ‘if’ – each of these meant not really, so two of them must mean really not really. Of course, his father couldn’t see the King Arthur and her funnels then. Ian and Mr Charteris would be talking in the kitchen at home. His father might be looking at a cupboard or the sink, and they were nothing like a paddle steamer.