The Garden Party

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘The Baptist?’ Yewdall queried. ‘Twenty ten?’

  ‘The Baptist, he’s one of Arnie Rainbird’s soldiers but he’s not like Arnie. The Baptist doesn’t like claret but Arnie Rainbird doesn’t object to it.’

  ‘The outlaw on the railway line,’ Tom Ainsclough suggested, ‘like him? When his head was cut off by the wheels of the express train a few pints of the stuff would spout from his neck at the next beat of his heart with such force that it would carry ten or fifteen feet from his body, that sort of claret?’

  ‘Yes, like that, that was mucho claret, Arnie Rainbird style, but the Baptist, he doesn’t like blood. He’s not soft about it, he just doesn’t like mess. He gets results but keeps it neat. So he uses water. He drowns them. Folk that Arnie wants iced get drowned because he uses the Baptist these days, or part drowned if they need a change in the old attitude department. So after this dark-haired teacher girl gets a right good slap, while she’s still dazed, the old Baptist takes her to the swimming pool, dragging her by the hair with all the girls still looking on, and gives her his special bad attitude treatment.’

  ‘Being the twenty ten?’ Ainsclough anticipated.

  ‘Right, governor, shoves her head under the water for twenty seconds, takes it out for ten, under for twenty, out for ten, and he keeps that up for fifteen minutes, possibly longer. Well that teacher girl she never showed no lemon after that and none of the other girls did either. Well, that was on the Saturday, the first Saturday. Arnie Rainbird had one girl made an example of and after that there was peace, but by the Tuesday or the Wednesday I was chatting to her. She was meek and mild by then with her boat race still bruised from the slap; looking like a black eye. She was just sitting there shivering even though it was in the middle of summer, but it was in the morning so possibly it was still a bit nippy and she had no clothes on, not a stitch – that’s how they kept them in the house; took all their kit, clothing and shoes. Anyway, we just got to talking, we were in the kitchen and I made her a cup of tea and by then a little niceness went a long way with her.’

  ‘That I can understand,’ Yewdall said dryly.

  ‘So after that,’ Charlie Magg continued, ‘after that we talked when we could, when she could, when things were quiet. I never forced myself on her. I could have done and she couldn’t have refused. That was the party game, a few men had their way with her because the rule was anything goes to celebrate Arnie Rainbird getting out, and I mean anything.’

  ‘But you didn’t, Charlie?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘On my honour, darling, there’s stuff you do and there’s stuff you don’t do. There’s a code among villains and I loved me old mum. Thank the Lord she isn’t here to see this, but she set me on the right path when it comes to women. If a girl needs a slap that’s one thing, but never take advantage. Only take what’s on offer. I got this belief. If a mother doesn’t want her sons to grow up to batter their old ladies, she doesn’t batter the sons. Simple.’

  ‘There’s a lot of truth in that, Charlie.’ Yewdall nodded. ‘I think that’s fair comment.’

  ‘You think so, darling?’ Charlie Magg’s eyes gleamed.

  ‘Yes . . . yes, I think there is. You see I used to work in the Female and Child Unit,’ Yewdall explained, ‘and I never met a man who had a down on women who didn’t also have some issue with his mother. But anyway . . . carry on with your story. You’re doing well, Charlie.’

  ‘All right.’ Magg paused, then continued, ‘So, me and this girl . . . Sandra!’ Magg’s face lit up. ‘I remember now, Sandra, her name was Sandra. It’s coming back to me now. I haven’t thought of her in years . . . years. So anyway we became pals, me and Sandra.’

  ‘Do you remember her surname?’ Ainsclough held his pen poised over his pad.

  ‘She never told me. I never asked.’

  ‘What can you remember about her?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘She was British but she had grown up in South Africa, in Cape Town, and she had a strong South African accent. So when the party happened she was not long back from there. She taught in a primary school in the East End.’

  ‘Big place?’ Yewdall probed.

  ‘Yes, can’t remember which borough, but her parents lived in the north country, in the North of England.’

  ‘Another big place,’ Ainsclough added.

  Charlie Magg glanced around. ‘Her parents lived in a town with a church which had a twisted spire, so she said, but she didn’t say “twisted”, she used another word.’

  ‘Crooked?’ Ainsclough suggested. ‘A crooked spire?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Magg jabbed a finger in Ainsclough’s direction. ‘Yes that was the word she used, a crooked spire. Why? Do you know the town, governor?’

  ‘Chesterfield.’ Ainsclough smiled.

  ‘You know the town, governor?’

  ‘Can’t say that I know it, Charlie,’ Ainsclough replied, ‘but I have seen the crooked spire often enough. You can see it from the train, really close. It’s a famous north of England landmark. Either it became twisted by a fire, or by subsidence, but it’s safe and still stands without needing any shoring up, and it’s strong enough to hold the bells which peel loudly when they need to be rung. So I know the crooked spire and where it is but I’ve never set foot in Chesterfield itself.’

  ‘Well, Chesterfield it is then,’ Charlie Magg replied. ‘She, Sandra, said she just wanted to look up at the crooked spire, that’s all she wanted to do. She just wanted to go home to her old mum and dad. She told me she left home to go and live in London; she wanted to see a bit of life. Reckon she did that all right. By the time the party was halfway through all she wanted to do was get back up north and look at the church spire in her parents’ town.’

  ‘That’s useful, Charlie.’ Yewdall smiled. ‘Very useful. If you remember anything else about her, you’ll tell us?’

  ‘Yes.’ Charlie Magg reclined in his chair. ‘I don’t mind telling you about her, she’s not a blagger.’

  ‘So tell us about the house where the party was held. We believe it was up in Bedfordshire?’ Ainsclough asked.

  Charlie Magg seemed to the two officers to become more relaxed. ‘Well, I am happy to tell you about the house, all I can really, because I don’t know much. That’s not going to harm anyone.’

  ‘Fair enough.’ Yewdall nodded in agreement. ‘So does the house have a name? Can it be identified by some distinctive feature like a clock tower or a stable block, or a landscaped garden . . . a date in the wall, a tall tree . . . anything like that?’

  ‘Ah.’ Charlie Magg held up a stubby, nicotine-stained finger. ‘You have the wrong idea there, darling, totally barking up the wrong tree there, governor. Not just the wrong tree, you’re in the wrong part of the forest, so to speak.’

  ‘We are?’ Yewdall was intrigued. ‘So what was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t an old mansion like you seem to think, governor.’ Magg grinned. ‘No, not a two-hundred-year-old stately home; the house is only about twenty years old, brand new as buildings go. Brick built, just two storeys, ground floor and first floor, angled roof because flat roofs don’t work, not modern ones anyway. A veranda on the level of the first floor, shallow roof, so no attic space to speak of, but I went up there anyway; just couldn’t resist a poke around. Honestly, it looks like something out of Gone with the Wind the house does, only it’s made of brick and is practically brand new. It doesn’t have a cellar either, just a crawl space beneath the floorboards on the ground floor. It’s all “what you see is what you get”.’

  ‘Can it be seen from the road?’ Tom Ainsclough asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, it can, but it’s at the end of a long, and I mean long, drive which goes between two fields, then there’s a bit of a gravel area in front of the house. The gate at the bottom of the drive is kept locked. The post is delivered to a mailbox which is set in the gate, so no one really needs to call at the house. Each day someone walks down the drive to collect the mail from the letterbox bolted to the gate. I did it once; it t
ook me twenty minutes there and back.’

  ‘So a drive about half a mile long?’ Yewdall estimated.

  ‘Dunno, darling.’ Magg shrugged. ‘Can’t say I ever meas-ured it.’

  ‘Well, if the average walking pace is four miles an hour, that’s one mile every fifteen minutes, which makes the drive about half a mile long, possibly a little more . . . about three quarters of a mile long . . . a twenty minute walk there and back.’

  ‘If you say so, darling.’ Magg glanced to his left. ‘If you say so.’

  ‘Did you ever see anyone looking at the house from the road?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘No, I never did and you can’t anyway,’ Magg explained, ‘you can see just the top of the roof from the road; it’s like the land hides the house from view of the road. I mean, if the roof was just two feet lower you couldn’t see anything of the house. So you’re looking across green fields full of cattle, then there’s a thin line of red tiles, then greenery beyond the line of red tiles. The driveway is well fenced off and they have dogs in front of the house, but the dogs can’t wander round the back of the house.’

  ‘Alsatians? Dobermanns?’ Ainsclough asked.

  ‘Staffordshires,’ Magg replied, ‘well they were Staffies back then, six of them. They’d see any intruder off. May have different dogs now. During the party there was always a couple of minders watching the front of the house, and they had to be introduced to the dogs.’

  ‘I see.’ Yewdall spoke thoughtfully. ‘So what is at the sides of the house and the back?’

  ‘Some land at either side, but fenced off so you can’t walk from the drive down the side of the house to the garden at the rear,’ Magg explained. ‘The only way to the garden at the back of the house is through the house and then out again through the back door.’ Magg shook his head. ‘The garden is as big as a football pitch. It is surrounded by a high fence of interlacing wire and within the fence they planted those fast growing plants that all the fuss is about . . . look like trees.’

  ‘Leylandii?’

  ‘If that’s the name. Grew fast with massive roots. You can’t get past the wire, can’t see through those Ley . . . whatever,’ Magg explained. ‘Very private.’

  ‘Leylandii,’ Yewdall said. ‘What’s in the garden?’

  Charlie Magg exhaled. ‘Not much as I recall. A swimming pool close to the house – that’s where the Baptist did his party piece with Sandra, the school teacher – that was on your left as you leave the house by the back door. On the right was a barbecue, brick built and a permanent construction.’

  ‘I know the type.’ Ainsclough nodded.

  ‘After that not much, just a flat lawn.’

  ‘Who owns the house?’

  ‘Mate of Arnie Rainbird’s.’ Magg sniffed. ‘A geezer by the name of Snakebite.’

  ‘Snakebite?’ Ainsclough wrote the name on his notepad.

  ‘Snakebite,’ Charlie Magg repeated, ‘Johnny “Snakebite” Herron. Usually he just gets called Snakebite. He’s another active geezer who keeps his head down. He can keep himself well off the Old Bill’s radar. Don’t know what Snakebite’s game is; probably people smuggling like Arnie Rainbird.’

  Yewdall and Ainsclough glanced at each other, and Ainsclough said, ‘Well, that about wraps it up, Charlie. Thanks, we’ll put that word in for you.’

  ‘Thanks, governor.’ Charlie Magg stood. ‘Tower Hamlets.’

  ‘Tower Hamlets?’ Ainsclough also stood, as did Penny Yewdall.

  ‘Yes, I just remembered that’s the manor where she worked,’ Charlie Magg said enthusiastically. ‘Sandra, the dark-haired school teacher from . . . what’s that town?’

  ‘Chesterfield?’

  ‘Yes . . . her . . . she worked in a primary school in Tower Hamlets; that’s the manor she worked for, the local authority.’

  ‘Tower Hamlets.’ Yewdall smiled. ‘Thank you, Charlie.’

  ‘Yes.’ Tom Ainsclough also smiled. ‘Thanks, Charlie, it’s been very useful, very useful indeed.’

  ‘They was here for a good while they was, both of them, for a good while, that’s why I remember them, I expect. Yes, I expect that’s why. Find I tend to forget things, but I can remember those two.’ Violet Mayfield revealed herself to be a red-faced, short-haired, plump woman with noticeably puffy ankles, so Frank Brunnie observed. This was caused, so his present lover, a nurse, had told him, by a weak heart. Violet Mayfield’s heart had evidently weakened with age and was not by then able to pump her blood efficiently round her body, and so a proportion of it fell according to gravity and collected round her ankles. Brunnie thought Violet Mayfield to be in her late fifties, quite young, he felt, for someone to fail the ‘puffy ankle test’; too young for a weak heart, but then that’s life, he pondered; it is essentially unfair. It deals different hands to different people. Some women who were born on the same day as Violet Mayfield would still be slender, still swinging golf clubs gracefully, while dressed in slacks, or thinking it nothing to go on a ten or fifteen mile hike carrying a loaded rucksack, and equally, equally still, others would be bedridden, unable to rise without assistance. There is, Brunnie had found, just no rhyme nor reason to it all. Violet Mayfield’s home was a terraced house on Matlock Street in Stepney. Brunnie and Swannell both found it cramped and cluttered, and smelling heavily of damp. Matlock Street was, it transpired, a short, narrow road, perfectly straight, lined on either side with mid to late Victorian era, flat-roofed terraced houses which abutted the pavement and comprised a basement, a ground floor and an upper floor. As they drove slowly along the road looking for Violet Mayfield’s house, both Brunnie and Swannell noted how valued the houses seemed; many were lovingly painted in bright colours, or had carefully varnished doors. It was clearly an area of the East End which was becoming fashionable and was being gentrified. Violet Mayfield’s house was close to the corner of White Horse Road and had, by contrast, a scruffy, uncared-for appearance. Within, Brunnie and Ainsclough met the clutter and the musty, damp smell, and both yearned for an open window and a modicum of breathable air.

  ‘But is it the two men we are interested in who you remember?’ Swannell clarified. He handed a print of the E-fits which had appeared in that day’s early edition of the Evening Standard.

  ‘Oh yes . . . yes, I don’t need to see the photographs again. It was those two.’ Violet Mayfield took hold of the prints of the E-fits anyway and studied them closely. ‘Yes, same two men. Definitely. One tall, one short. I mean there was nothing like what you might call strange about them, just two blokes who shared the basement room. Two single beds, mind. I don’t allow any of that nonsense in my house. No, my old man would turn in his urn if he knew that was going on; yes, he would turn in his urn. But I had no complaints about them; they came and went and paid their rent on time. They was as good as gold, really, as good as gold. Then they were not here . . . just gone. Seems like they just left.’

  ‘You mean they did a moonlight flit?’

  ‘No . . . no, they couldn’t have done because I take my rent in advance, always have done; two weeks in advance for that reason. They left all their kit behind, all their stuff – clothes, dole signing card – things they’d need they left behind, yes, they did, all of it, all of it ’cept what they stood up in, I suppose. I suppose they took that. I mean they had to do that, didn’t they?’

  ‘What were their names?’ Swannell asked. ‘Can you remember?’

  ‘Leonard Convers and Sydney Tyrell. Tyrell was the tall one, yes, he was; Tyrell the tall . . . so Convers was the short one.’

  ‘You have a very good memory.’ Frankie Brunnie smiled warmly.

  Violet Mayfield returned the smile. ‘Wish I could say that but I can’t, darling. Like I told you, I forget things easily these days. No, it’s their rent books with their names on the front. I kept them didn’t I? But I do like to keep my brain alive, what’s left of it. I write figures down and add them up or subtract them from each other, and multiply and divide as well. My old man went demented in the
end. I don’t want to be like that, not at all. I knew he was going demented when he put his underpants on his head one day.’

  ‘Yes.’ Brunnie nodded. ‘I have heard that this is often one of the early symptoms.’

  ‘Really?’ Swannell turned to Brunnie.

  ‘Yes,’ Brunnie addressed Swannell, ‘as is forgetting a word just before you are about to use it and having some sense that it’s going away from you, as if it is being lifted out of your head and then disappears up into space.’

  ‘Yes –’ Violet Mayfield looked up at the ceiling – ‘my Albert was like that. He forgot words, then he put his underpants on his head, then he got to thinking that he was a little boy. Eventually they took him to hospital and he didn’t come back, poor old soul. So I exercise my brain for half an hour each and every day, so I do.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Swannell smiled. ‘Keep it up.’

  ‘Well, it’s for my own sake isn’t it? I mean, as much as anything it’s for my own sake.’

  ‘So, the two men, Convers and Tyrell . . .’ Swannell refocussed the discussion and beside him he noticed Frankie Brunnie take out his notepad and his ballpoint pen.

  ‘Yes, those two.’ Violet Mayfield handed the E-fit back to Swannell. ‘Convers and Tyrell, well, they left seven years since. I have their rent books; I still got them. I keep them all. It helps me to put a face to a name.’ She stood slowly, awkwardly, levering herself up out of the armchair in which she sat, struggling to her feet and then she walked unsteadily to the sideboard which stood against the wall adjacent to the fireplace and pulled open a drawer. Extracting two small brown-coloured rent books from the drawer, she turned and handed them to Swannell, returned to her chair and sat in it, heavily so.

  ‘Seven years ago.’ Swannell nodded slightly as he opened the books and read the last entry in each. He handed the rent books to Brunnie who also glanced at the last entry in each and then gave them back to Violet Mayfield. ‘Did they leave anything?’

  ‘Yes, like I said, they left everything, everything they were not wearing when they left my house for the last time; clothes, shoes, all their knick-knacks. They didn’t have much, so not a lot was left.’ Violet Mayfield breathed with clear difficulty.