The Ruffian on the Stair

by Gary Newman

  The remains of an unidentified man were found in the early hours of this morning amid the ashes of an outhouse of the Collingwood Arms public house in Pereira Street, Bethnal Green. The wooden structure had been used as a coalhouse and oil-store, and a rum bottle and the fragments of a clay pipe were found at the fatal scene. It would seem that some unfortunate vagrant had used the outhouse as a shelter for the night, and, while in an intoxicated state, had lit his pipe near a paraffin-can, thus unwittingly causing the conflagration. An inquest is to be held on Friday.

  I scrolled up the following Friday’s number of the paper, to find an even shorter report on the inquest: death by misadventure, victim unknown. Just another faceless vagrant going under the wheels of London. Rivers must have known the Collingwood Arms, and that it had an oil-store in the back yard: maybe he’d accidentally strayed into the shed one night, on his way to the pub jakes. Nor would the cabbie have been fazed by a couple of toffs’ – or at least the conscious one – asking to be put down among the bins behind a lowlife pub in Bethnal Green. Toffs had their amusements lined up in all sorts of funny places, and maybe Rivers had increased the cabbie’s tip to five bob . . .

  And, of course, when much later Rawbeck’s absence from his known haunts had begun to be noticed, there’d have been absolutely nothing to connect his seeming disappearance with the death of an unknown tramp in an oil-store blaze in Bethnal Green. Certainly, in the standard books on Rawbeck I’d read to date, there’d been no hint of such a connection, though many allusions had been made to the artist’s penchant for hanging out in low places.

  But there was another figure who’d gone missing on that autumn early morning in 1899 – Forbuoys the flautist. He reminded me of the songbird in the French chanson, desperately singing to attract a mate. Had Carrie been at the bottom of the mental turmoil that had led him to his quietus in the dark waters of the Thames, his pockets filled with stones – and a razor that wasn’t his own?

  If my guess was right, I could picture the fatal scene at Convocation, with Forbuoys playing his dirge on the flute for the benefit of the gathered illuminati, then the company breaks up, Rawbeck leaving first, then my grandfather – whether under his own steam or helped – then Rivers, who has his own plans for the night . . . If my surmise was right, for Forbuoys everything would have taken on the shape of Carrie: perhaps he’d thought Rawbeck and my grandfather were sneaking off after her that night . . . Maybe the pub with the magic window had been a former meeting place for the showgirl and whoever in the Camden Hill circle might be enjoying her favours at the time, all except lonely Philip Forbuoys, that is. Maybe he’d followed Carrie to the pub on previous occasions, longing but not daring . . .

  Anyway, it all comes to a head. Forbuoys, an obsessive type, finally cracks – if he can’t have Carrie, he’ll eliminate the principal opposition – Rawbeck and my grandfather – with one master-stroke. Rawbeck will die on the spot, and the young Sebastian will hang later for his murder. At the end of the magic mushroom session, having laid his plans, Philip Forbuoys leaves the house, equipped with either my grandfather’s or a second-hand razor, and makes for the pub in East Hackney.

  Imagine his horror when, on arriving in the assignation room, he finds neither Rawbeck nor my grandfather, the artist having already been done in by the Vickybird, young Sebastian having already come out of his trance on the bed and done a runner, and Tarquin Rivers having got rid of the artist’s body. The drama has already been played out . . . Forbuoys looks round the room, only to see a phantasmagoria of blood. Unhinged, he flees the scene, and an agonized wander through the City of Dreadful Night follows, till the poor flautist finds some sort of peace in the black eddies under Tower Bridge. As my grandfather might have put it: pax cineribus.

  The only initiate not in on the murder of his guru and pandar, Rawbeck, is effete Jimmie Toland, whose innocence is borne out by the fact that he’s the only one of the principal players who doesn’t run away after Rawbeck’s disappearance. No doubt things are explained to Jimmie later by the Vickybird or his London representative. They’d have pointed out to him, too, how urgently desirable it was that the Vice Squad shouldn’t come into possession of proof of what his private life had been, and of the part they might play in keeping it all among friends. At a price, of course . . . The Vickybird would have remembered how Rawbeck had blackmailed him into being nice to Jimmie and his more exotic clients, and, with the boot on the other foot, wouldn’t have been kind to Toland.

  It all held together, I mused, as I drove back to Essex on that late afternoon. I decided to stop off at Frank Hague’s shop in Wivenhoe to find out if the lFrenchman, Ramier, whom I’d caught that forenoon trying the door of their boathouse, had been to see Frank, as he’d said he would.

  Frank must have been on his travels since I’d last seen him, nine days before, for there was a car-park ticket marked Folkestone on the windscreen of his shabby Ford, which I found parked in the entrance to the cobbled yard at the side of his shop. He was busy with a customer when I went into the front shop, so I walked over to the wall where his pictures hung, pride of place going to an actual Stanley Spencer sketch, though a very minor one. It was a little pencil job of a Thirties shopgirl – Woolworth’s Girl – her bobbed hair pulled in with a grip, and a peculiarly moving look on her face made up of equal parts of weariness and wistful unintelligence. The old-fashioned doorbell tinged behind me as the customer left.

  ‘How Spencer loved his subjects . . .’ came Frank’s voice over my shoulder.

  ‘Mmm . . . he thought people were all holy.’

  ‘I could never take that leap,’ Frank said. ‘I just see them as human.’

  ‘Bit of a tall order, isn’t it? But I suppose that’s the difference between the likes of us and a genius. Take a fiver for it?’

  ‘Plus a few noughts! How’s tricks?’

  ‘Trickier than ever – how’s France?’

  For a moment, I could read consternation on the ruddy, bearded face.

  ‘The car-park ticket on your banger outside – Folke-stone . . .’

  ‘Oh, that – no, not France. I was down in Folkestone yesterday – at a fair.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’

  ‘Just browsing – pictures and prints – I’m trying to build up a competence in it. Funny you should mention France . . .’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, pricking up my mental ears.

  ‘There was a Frenchman in here round lunchtime, looking at the pictures, just as you’ve been doing.’

  ‘Was he after anything in particular?’

  ‘Not really – he said he was studying the English “sensibility”, as he put it. Nice chap – you get more and more Continentals coming over now – I’m all for that.’

  Monsieur Ramier must have been casing the shop, I reflected, just as he’d been casing the Hagues’ boathouse earlier on in the day.

  ‘I’m all for them coming over, too,’ I took up Frank’s thread, ‘but it depends on what they’ve come over for.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re going to tell me what this is all about, Seb.’

  ‘Was this Frenchman tall and thin – formal suit – with his hair in a Tintin quiff?’

  ‘Yes. Go on.’

  ‘I was going to say that he says his name’s Ramier, and I caught him trying the handle of the boathouse door this morning. I referred him to this shop, in fact.’

  ‘Ah, you just happened to call at the boathouse, then?’

  I thought I detected the suggestion of a taunt in Frank’s voice – the Pat thing – but maybe it was just my conscience.

  ‘I followed him to the boathouse, in fact. He’s been sniffing round the lighthouse and other places I’ve been to recently. He said he was looking for Pat, and I know she spends a lot of time there.’

  No doubt there’d be a number of callers at their joint weekend retreat – now Pat’s province – that Frank wouldn’t know about, nor, I guessed, want to know about.

  ‘Just thought I’d tell yo
u,’ I concluded. ‘Bods trying doors when they think no one’s looking’s a bit out of order.’

  ‘I appreciate it, Seb – thanks for telling me. I’ll warn Pat, and we’ll be double-checking locks and alarms in future.’

  I refused Frank’s offer of a drink, left and went back to my car, wondering whether I should have said more to Frank, but no – Pat was his wife, and I’d given him fair warning about Ramier. She’d insisted on buying the damned Rawbeck print at the auction in the first place, so let her take the consequences, whatever they were going to be. Clearly, one of them was that she was going to be given the stalking treatment by the inquisitive Frenchman.

  I stopped in my tracks for a moment: I’d referred to Ramier as a ‘bod’ and ‘the Frenchman’, but if there was anything in the story he’d told me over brunch in the yacht-emporium cafeteria – if he really was descended from Carrie Bugle – then we were related! Mon cousin, or whatever! Really, what I’d learned just a few hours before at the Family Records Centre in London was going to take some getting used to . . .

  But now I simply had to tell Leah about my latest – and up to now most momentous – findings. I got into the car and drove straight to her flat on the university campus. I found her in, and we sat on the sofa in her little sitting room and talked over what I’d discovered up in London.

  ‘Your father’s origins explain his behaviour,’ she remarked. ‘His diffidence – his obvious desire to sink into the background.’

  ‘Like an uninvited guest,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes, when he found out he wasn’t really your grandmother’s son, he’d have felt like an imposter – there on sufferance.’

  ‘I’m sure Nanny would have given him all the affection, and Grandfather the security, he’d needed for a happy life.’

  ‘I don’t doubt that one bit, but your dad would’ve known . . . He’d have internalized the thing, probably thought that if he was discreet about it, saw to it that it never went beyond the family circle – and the half-dozen or so anonymous figures who’d have been privy to his birth certificate – then it wouldn’t make any odds. Just build his life around it, but be discreet – above all, be discreet . . .’

  ‘I’d never really seen it in that light, Leah, but it makes sense, especially in the light of social attitudes in Dad’s day. He had to protect his identity – that’s so important to us, after all.’

  ‘Oh, but it’s all we’ve got, Seb . . . It goes without saying that your father would have been totally screwed up about sex, too. Probably no girlfriends in his youth, not getting married till he was in his forties. I wonder what gave him the confidence then?’

  ‘Dad went straight from school into an engineering apprenticeship – he ended up as a technical director in a big aircraft plant near Southampton. He was very much on the technical side, and came into his own during the war as a sort of army boffin. What few real friendships he made during his life all dated from the war.’

  ‘That boost to his self-image – along with the uniform – would have given him just enough self-confidence to make a play for your mother.’

  ‘She was an assistant – no doubt bored stiff with the job – in a bookshop in Harrogate when Dad was running an army course near there. He told me that on about six separate occasions he’d gone into the shop and bought completely unreadable books, just for an excuse to get into conversation with her! He was tall and slim, then, with sandy hair – quite good-looking in the English fashion. I can just imagine his initial chat-up line: “Girl like you must get pretty cheesed off in a hole-in-corner place like this . . .”’

  We both chuckled.

  ‘And you must’ve been gobsmacked,’ Leah went on, ‘to find out that Carrie Bugle had been your real grandmother.’

  ‘I’ll say, but it hasn’t really sunk in yet.’

  ‘You say that your grandfather fixed up Carrie and her other son, Philippe, with jobs and accommodation on Jersey?’

  ‘Mmm . . . from 1921 till 1925, when Philippe got called up for the French army. They’d been on their uppers in France, and Grandfather had done the decent thing by them.’

  ‘And I’ll bet that Carrie’s booze habit would have given him plenty of opportunities to develop his Christian forbearance!’

  We both laughed.

  ‘And you really think your grandfather and Nanny Rolvenden actually succeeded in keeping your father away from Carrie and his half-brother in Jersey? Your father’d have had school holidays, Christmasses and so on . . .’

  ‘Dad would’ve been twenty-one when his real mother and her son landed on the island, and by then he’d have had his nose well and truly to the grindstone at his job in Southampton. As for Carrie and Philippe, I’m sure there’d have been some sort of understanding between Dad and Grandfather.’

  ‘So many compartments to your grandfather’s life!’ Leah exclaimed. ‘And how uneasy your father must’ve been: never off guard, always the Keeper of the Secret . . .’

  ‘I feel a lot closer to Dad now, after what I’ve just learned in London.’

  ‘I daresay, Seb, but think of Carrie, too – your newly discovered grandmother – when all’s said and done, she was a music hall artiste and celebrated model – her image is still to be seen in art galleries and prints. Rejoice and be proud, dammit – she was a star!’

  I laughed, but then a sudden sadness overwhelmed me.

  ‘Right, right, Leah, but, God – they’re all gone:

  Grandfather with his compartments and confessions, Carrie with her flaming red hair and hips like a snake’s, Dad with his pipe and his reticences, Nanny with her character and kindness and her hair in earphones. All gone as if they’d never been: just temporary smears of sensation . . .’

  Something avid and challenging came into Leah’s dark eyes.

  ‘Then it’s all the more important, Seb, that we make them enjoyable sensations.’

  I moved across the sofa to meet her.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Two days later, on the Wednesday evening, I received an unprecedented visit from my son Paul. Unprecedented, because, as far as I knew, it was the first time he’d ever set foot on the headland. Added to my usual feelings towards my estranged son – guilt, sorrow, irrational anger at him for not loving me – was the conviction that what he’d now come to see me for was not for the ears of his mother. He could always have phoned or emailed me: no, it must be important to him.

  I came downstairs from my computer, answered his ring at the door, and ushered him into the sitting room, where he flung himself on to the cane sofa, which creaked in elderly protest. Paul sat and glowered up at me while I struggled for something to say.

  ‘How’s your –’ I began to dance round the subject of his mother.

  ‘This French guy,’ Paul interrupted me. ‘Ramier. He was in the village post office at Thruxton this morning – I thought he’d left the area? He checked out of the Low Light in Southwold on Monday morning. Mum said we wouldn’t be seeing any more of him: what’s going on? Is he working with the little Irish guy? I think it’s time you –’

  ‘I don’t know about Brogan, but the Frenchman’s a hotel-keeper from Normandy – or that’s what he says he is – and has a notion we’re related through an old flame of Grandfather’s. I’m looking into that.’

  ‘Ah, the Adventures of St Sebastian again . . . Christ, Dad – get a life!’

  Thanks, at least, for the ‘Dad’ . . .

  ‘Is that all his game is, then?’ Paul went on. ‘Genealogy?’

  I shook my head. ‘Some sort of painting’s involved – by a Victorian artist who disappeared in unexplained circumstances way back. Brogan’s after it, too, and I daresay there are others. I’m looking into that, too.’

  I was waiting for Paul to demand whether I’d put Ramier on to his mother and him, but he didn’t, which suggested to me that Reet had already prepared him for the visit to the area by the Frenchman. And not a mention so far of Reet’s visit to the auction rooms . . .

&
nbsp; ‘Did Ramier talk to you in the post office this morning?’ I went on.

  ‘Just a little nod – he gives me the creeps, with that Men in Black suit and the dark glasses.’

  ‘Well, there’s nothing you can do about his being up there: I daresay he’ll still be sniffing around for this painting I mentioned, and has it occurred to you . . .’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That he might think that you’re stalking him . . .’

  My son’s eyes widened with puzzlement – they were brown like Reet’s, and I couldn’t help noticing how his features were becoming more and more like mine as they strengthened with age.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous, Dad!’

  ‘Have you had any real contact with Ramier? Talked to him, I mean?’

  ‘Not directly: early on last week the landlady from the Low Light Inn rang the Holt when Mum wasn’t in, and I took the call.’

  So that was how the missus of the Low Light had mistaken my voice for my son’s when I’d rung the inn!

  ‘She said a French gentleman had just checked in,’ Paul went on, ‘and that he wanted to let Mum know he’d be ready for their appointment. When I told Mum later, she said all right, and closed the subject. You know how she can be . . . But she’s been all sort of preoccupied ever since.’

  ‘Look, Paul: just go about your normal business, take the usual precautions, and don’t worry . . .’

  But my son was distinctly rattled, if the clenched fists and fugitive eyes were anything to go by.

  ‘Ramier’s in the open, now,’ I went on, ‘and he’d be mad to try anything illegal – I just think he’s a chancer – maybe a dodgy antique dealer.’