Land Girls: The Homecoming

by Roland Moore

  Connie resigned herself to the mixed emotions of facing an evening alone. There would be no more disagreements or friction, but she’d miss him. As she approached the porch, she was surprised to find a visitor waiting on the doorstep of the vicarage. It was Roger Curran, the reporter from The Helmstead Herald. He tipped the small trilby on his head at her. Connie wasn’t sure if it really was a small hat or that it just looked small on his large head. He smiled warmly at her.

  “Mrs Jameson! I have the most splendid news.”

  “Oh yeah? What’s that, then?”

  “Do you know? I’ve often heard that vicar’s wives make the very best tea.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on it,” Connie said under her breath. But with nothing more pressing to do, she invited the journalist inside, slopped water into the kettle and put it on the stove.

  The two of them were soon sitting around the dining table and Roger Curran’s podgy fingers were taking a second biscuit from the plate Connie had provided. He sipped at his tea and winced slightly. Connie knew it wasn’t one of her best efforts, but she found making tea really unaccountably tricky. She had made Roger Curran a ‘milky horror’ (as she liked to call it), with too much milk and too little tea. She guessed that he might revise his patter about vicar’s wives making the best tea from now on as he sipped it with a grimace.

  “I’ll come straight to the point, Mrs Jameson,” he said, wiping a crumb from his lips. “It seems my little story has been picked up by one of the national newspapers.”

  Connie looked surprised. She wasn’t sure whether she felt happy about that. “Well, can’t you stop them?”

  Roger smiled. “Oh no, it’s a good thing. It means I get credit for a story that many more people will read. And that means a lot more people will know about your heroism. And I hope I’m not talking out of turn when I say that although the story is just the sort of inspiring thing that Blitz-torn London needs to read, its success is also due to how fine you look in the photograph, Mrs Jameson.”

  Connie felt uneasy at the attention. Henry wouldn’t be happy about her being seen as some sort of poster girl for plucky Britain. The wolf-whistles outside the pub were enough to get Henry’s back up, without any added spotlight. She put it out of her mind and asked about the explosion. Had the police found out who was responsible yet?

  Roger shook his head, spraying crumbs like a Labrador shaking itself from a bath. “They’re not sure. But the remains of the device were the same as one used to blow up a post-office truck a month ago. And the station guard at Brinford recalled a tall man taking the train, the same one you got, every day for the seven days before the crash. He wasn’t on it on that fateful day, but people are saying that his other journeys were for reconnaissance. Check the timings and that.”

  It chilled Connie that a seemingly ordinary commuter, a man who would go unnoticed in the daily bustle, could have been there timing the journey to the precise second.

  After another biscuit, Roger Curran tipped his small hat a second time and left the vicarage (his tea largely untouched). The story would be in a national newspaper! Connie shrugged. She hoped it would still be tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper and then it would all be forgotten about. But she would be wrong. It was a story that would change her life.

  Margaret Sawyer froze in fear as she approached her house. Roger Curran, the reporter from The Helmstead Herald was standing outside the front door. He’d come to the house. No one ever came to the house!

  He rapped on the knocker, brushed the biscuit crumbs from his tank top and cleared his throat. He glanced nonchalantly at the neat front garden, decorative rows of small box bushes trimmed into squares alternating with rhododendron bushes that were showing their last flowering for the season. The whole design was so regimented that Roger Curran assumed a soldier must live here.

  Margaret ducked down behind a wall, peering over the top to see if Vera or Michael would answer. She prayed that neither of them were inside the house. Vera might be out selling vegetables and Michael was probably in one of the outbuildings, tending to his seedlings. And even if Michael was at home, he rarely answered the door, so she thought she might be safe on that score.

  After what seemed like an age, Roger Curran turned on his heel. He glanced up at the house one last time and made his way down the path. He passed the low wall where Margaret was hiding, but didn’t see her. She was relieved. So much for eagle-eyed journalists!

  As she watched the rotund figure amble away down the lane, Margaret hoped with all her heart that he wouldn’t return and that would be an end to it.

  Chapter 5

  Two days earlier.

  The rain lashed down, turning the London pavements into glistening onyx walkways in the dying light of early evening. Vince Halliday shivered against the cold and pulled the collar up on his great coat. The coat used to belong to a GI, but Vince had won it in a game of poker. Or, to be strictly accurate a rigged game of poker. Still, who was complaining? Vince had a new coat out of it and the GI had learnt a lesson in not being gullible.

  Vince was a powerfully built man in his early thirties with icy-blue eyes, slicked-back hair and an air of menace about him. Braces held his trousers high on a frame that had little definition. Vince’s body was wide and he didn’t taper at any point. He just went straight up and down, like a wide, imposing fence post. He enjoyed playing on his intimidating presence, liking the discomfort that other people could feel when near him. Vince’s keen eyes darted from side to side as he crossed the Fulham Road, weaving around a pony and trap and then a car to make it to the other side. He made his way across to an alleyway, which was illuminated by the light of a single window from a block of flats. Vince squinted as his eyes adjusted to the gloom, wary of being jumped. Fulham was a rough area.

  At the end of the alley, in a small, rain-lashed courtyard, was a butcher’s van. As Vince approached, two heavy-looking men, pin-stripe suits and trilby hats denoting their status as wide boys, quickly appeared from the van. The one with the pencil moustache indicated for Vince to follow them. Vince’s fingers gripped the cosh in his pocket. He might need it. As was always the case in Vince’s life, when he met someone, he’d weigh them up for their potential threat value. Could he win against them in a fight? Vince decided that he could take these two apart if he had to. But he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

  “You got it?” Moustache Man said as they swept under an awning and walked into a warehouse.

  “Does it look like I’ve got it?” Vince replied, with contempt.

  Moustache Man threw a look at his partner, a man with a large hooked nose and heavy eye brows. An ex-boxer, thought Vince. He thought he could still take him apart in a fight. Moustache Man was also assessing the situation. Was he losing face by being talked to in this way? Should he do something? But before he could decide on a course of action, an older voice bellowed from the recesses of the damp warehouse.

  “Vince! I see you brought the crappy weather with you!”

  A rotund man in a light-grey pinstripe suit appeared from the gloom and shook Vince warmly by the hand. Vince clocked that he was wearing a signet ring on each finger. It was his trademark: jewellery that could double as a knuckle duster. This was Amos Ackley – a comical-looking figure with a shiny bald head. But Vince didn’t underestimate the appearance of this man and was somewhat relieved when he got his hand back in one piece from the crushing hand shake. A handshake that was designed to intimidate. Amos Ackley was an amusingly named, but vicious, gangster and black-market trader, a man who had run most of Kensington, Fulham and Putney since 1937. As the authorities concentrated their efforts on the immediate effects of the war, the air raids, the destruction, the looting, Amos had seen his shady little empire expand, filling the darkness left by lawlessness. Now he liked to think of himself as Mr Black Market, a man who could get you anything you needed even without a ration book. He had the police in his pocket on the understanding that Amos wouldn’t commit too many open atrocities on the s
treets of South London. But that was fine, the only people who usually felt his wrath were gangsters further down the food chain or those civilians, as he called them, who dared to resist his attempts at extortion and blackmail.

  “Bit of rain is good for you,” Vince said, smiling.

  Moustache Man and Eyebrows circled round to stand either side of Amos Ackley. Vince noticed that both the heavies had a hand in their pockets. It didn’t matter if they didn’t actually have weapons in there because, like the crushing handshake before it, he knew this was being done to intimidate him. To show him who was boss.

  “Now then, I’m looking forward to my Sunday lunch, Vince,” Amos smiled.

  “The sirloin is out of this world,” Vince replied. “Succulent.”

  Amos laughed. “Hark at you, the flaming expert.”

  “I’ve had too much bad meat in my time to not know the difference, Mr Ackerly,” Vince smiled.

  “And you’ve lifted a lorry full of this stuff?”

  Vince knew he didn’t have to go into specifics about where it had come from. Amos wasn’t interested in provenance. “It was supposed to be filling a load of yank stomachs, but their supply chain got broken, didn’t it? I just need the three hundred and it’s yours, van included.” He knew three hundred pounds was a lot of money, but then he was selling a huge amount of premier quality sirloin steak. And in a country where meat was rationed, the sales potential of that meat was phenomenal.

  Amos cracked his knuckles. A dark smile flickered over his face. Vince felt uneasy. Had he misremembered how much they’d agreed on? Or was Amos going to try to short-change him?

  Or, the worst scenario of all, did Amos know what Vince was up to?

  That morning, Vince Halliday had opened his eyes without getting a wink of sleep. He’d been too nervous. This was the big one. It would be a day filled with danger but, if it went well, it would end in incredible rewards. Three hundred pounds would set him up. It would allow him to get out of the rat hole where he lived and start again somewhere else. He stared at the yellowing ceiling paint and the plaster rose around the light. All being well, this would be the last time he woke up in this run-down tenement.

  There was a soft tap on the door. Vince swung his thick legs off the bed and pulled up his trousers, hooking the braces over his shoulders. He opened the door a fraction, saw the friendly face of a wide-eyed girl with a battered cloche hat, and let her in.

  It was Glory. Her real name was Gloria Wayland, but Vince liked calling her Glory. Although she always wore her desperately unfashionable cloche hat, Vince had never bothered to ask why. He guessed it had some sentimental value; but delving into that area had little interest for him. She was seventeen, tall and thin. Gangly from being undernourished from all her years in a children’s home in Bow. When she left at the age of sixteen, she joined the Women’s Auxiliary Army and learnt to drive an ambulance. But one night, a road near Shockley Aerodrome had been bombed and Glory crashed her ambulance into a ravine. With trauma from the accident, Glory’s army career was cut short and she found herself on Civvy Street. It was a harsh place to be, and soon Glory was penniless and living on the road. That’s when Vince had befriended her. There was no romance or sex involved, just the simple and unedifying business arrangement which Vince had found had worked with girls so well in the past. He would befriend a woman who needed help and then turn her to a life of crime. Many of Vince’s scams would require a female face: someone to lure and distract his targets. This was particularly true of the wedding-ring scam. In this caper, Vince would encourage the girl to flirt with a rich married man (the target) in a bar or restaurant. Then the girl would take the man to a rented room, with the prospect of having sex. But once there, Vince would threaten the man with violence unless the man handed over his wedding ring. Then with the wedding ring in his possession, Vince could extort money by blackmail from the rich man, threatening to give the ring to the man’s wife and to explain how he’d come by it.

  Glory was fairly good at the wedding-ring scam and they’d worked it successfully four times together. But just as often, she failed, due to her awkwardness and lack of confidence, to lure the man to the room. She knew that Vince had her on borrowed time. She had to prove her worth to him soon or she’d be replaced and out on her ear.

  “Is it too early?” Glory asked.

  Vince shook his head. “Haven’t slept a wink anyway.”

  “Me neither,” Glory said nervously.

  Vince pulled a suit jacket over his shirt. The fabric was shiny and old. He turned up the collar around his neck.

  “I was thinking,” Glory said as she sat on the end of the bed. Vince looked at her sad and fragile face. “I was thinking that maybe we should just tick along as we are.”

  Vince went to interject, but Glory wasn’t finished.

  “I mean we’re making money each month from the wedding rings and everything.” She knew she was on thin ice; knowing that Vince wasn’t happy with her success rate.

  “Not enough, though.” Vince bent down so his face was level with the young girl’s.

  “Trouble is, it’s a lot of work keeping them in line,” he said. “Each time I go to collect a payment, I think that this will be the time they jump me or they’ll have a mob of mates waiting or the police.”

  “But this is too dangerous …” Glory pleaded.

  “By tonight, we’ll be out of here. Three hundred pounds, Glory.” He let the words sink in. “Think what we could do with that money.”

  Glory had thought about it. A lot. With her share, she wanted to move to the country and put some money down on a cottage somewhere. She’d have ducks in the garden and then she’d find a husband and they’d live in the lovely cottage together. That was her plan. Each time she said it, Vince found it ridiculous, but he kept the thought to himself.

  Vince planned to move up north and start a club. It’d be a club with roulette wheels and dancing girls. He’d make a fortune from the GIs and the business men up there. That was his plan.

  Glory still looked scared and uncertain.

  In truth, Vince Halliday was just as scared and uncertain. This wasn’t a business deal. Vince wasn’t really selling meat for money. That’s because he didn’t have the meat. Well, he had some, but not three hundred pounds worth. This was a scam. And if this scam, the big one, went wrong then he probably wouldn’t live to tell the tale. But if it went right, then all his Christmases would come at once.

  He had to brave-face it for the young girl’s sake. Had to gee her up and get her on side.

  “After tonight, we don’t have to grub around no more,” Vince said. “After tonight, we can relax and live all our dreams, yeah?”

  Glory looked at him, searching for the truth in his eyes. Did he believe what he was saying? Wasn’t he scared? After a long moment, she decided he was being honest and that he really believed it. She didn’t realise he was lying.

  “Right, that’s the spirit, girl,” Vince said, slipping on his brogues. “Let’s go and get a cup of tea …”

  In the warehouse, a long, tense moment passed. Vince was certain that his heart was beating so loudly that everyone could hear it – like a klaxon warning of his guilt. Amos cracked a smile at last and revealed his hand.

  “I ain’t paying the full three hundred,” he said, letting the words sink in without following them up. Vince gave a that’s-your-prerogative kind of smile, but inside he was fuming and he wanted answers and explanations. Who did this jumped-up idiot think he was, welching on the deal?

  “Really?” Vince said, as neutrally as he could manage.

  Moustache Man sneered at him. Vince turned away from the underling with contempt.

  “I’ll pay two hundred.”

  “But Mr Ackley-”

  “Don’t Mr Ackley me, son. Three hundred’s a heck of a lot of money to find. Come to think of it, two hundred is too. It’ll wipe me out until I can sell on the meat,” Amos Ackley explained. “But the way I see it, you’ve got a v
an full of prime steak that’s going off by the second. So it’s a buyer’s market.”

  Vince looked the rotund figure in the eye. The moment hung in the air. Finally, he agreed. Okay, then.

  Amos grinned and laughed. His signet-ring-adorned hand came thrusting out and crushed Vince’s hand in a shake to seal the deal.

  “Deliver it here in an hour,” Amos said.

  Vince’s throat felt dry. Here was the moment of truth. The moment at which he had to pull the con.

  “It’s being driven to the common, at Barnes,” Vince said.

  “But I want it here,” Amos spat.

  “It’s too risky bringing it here. The old bill know about this place, don’t they?” Vince said. “The common is neutral. We’ve never used it before.”

  Amos Ackley looked at his colleagues. Moustache Man shrugged. It didn’t seem to make much difference, did it? It wasn’t that far to go.

  “Who’s driving it?” Amos asked.

  “Glory,” Vince replied. “That girl I work the rings with.”

  Amos thought she was a good kid. He liked her. He started to walk away. “My men will meet you there in an hour and they’ll transfer the meat into this van. And then I’ll give you the money.”

  “No,” Vince said, the word coming out a little too abruptly. Amos Ackley stopped in his tracks at this unexpected and potentially confrontational utterance.

  “What?”

  “I need a deposit.” Vince smiled.

  “How much?”

  “Half,” Vince said, eyeing Amos without breaking his gaze.

  A shark-like grin spread on Amos’ face.

  “Get lost.”

  “Come on, you’re already stiffing me on this deal. I need something,” Vince replied. His throat was hoarse and his chest felt like it would explode with his pumping heart.