by Jessie Keane
‘Dinner?’ he asked again, smiling, when she said nothing.
Finally Ruby nodded. ‘OK,’ she said.
‘Come on. Let’s get a taxi . . .’
And he tucked her hand over his arm and led her away from the crowds at the stage door. Ruby looked back. Vi was gazing across at her. As their eyes met, Vi gave her a long, knowing wink.
20
1922
Leroy wasn’t there when Alicia opened up the shop next morning, and she felt a twinge of disappointment. She went through the motions of serving customers. Then she locked up to get home to make Ted’s dinner at one. She came back at two, opened up . . . Still no Leroy.
Feeling glum, she worked on and was glad when it was time to shut up shop. The kids were at her mum’s today, she didn’t have them to worry about. As she locked the door, Leroy appeared at her side.
‘Hiya, sweetness,’ he said with a grin.
‘Oh! Hello.’ Alicia pocketed the key and looked at him. He was so exotic, so beautiful. She knew she was staring.
A silence fell between them.
‘You got to get on home right now?’ he asked at last, very softly.
Alicia glanced at her watch. She didn’t, not really. Ted would be dozing, and he wouldn’t want his tea for at least another hour. ‘Well, I should . . .’ she started.
‘Half an hour?’ he asked.
‘Half an hour for what?’ asked Alicia.
His eyes were playing with hers. ‘For whatever you want, sweetness. Up there in my room. Some music, maybe . . . ?’
Ted would be asleep. The kids were with Mum. She could say – if anyone asked – that she’d been reorganizing the stock or something, couldn’t she?
‘I loved your music,’ she said.
‘Then come with me,’ he said, his voice like honey.
Alicia hesitated. ‘Someone might see. I’m a married woman . . .’
‘I’ll go first. You follow.’ And he turned and went back across the quiet street.
Alicia stood there looking after him, her heart in her throat, her pulses racing.
She was only going over there to listen to music, wasn’t she?
No. She knew that wasn’t it. Not at all.
She shouldn’t do this. But she looked left and right. There was no one she knew about, not right now. She quickly crossed the street and went through the door he’d left open, closing it softly behind her.
She was standing in a dingy hallway. He was at the top of the stairs, gesturing her to follow. She hurried up, afraid that at any moment his landlord was going to appear and ask what the hell was going on.
By the time she reached the top of the stairs she was laughing and breathless at her own daring. He led the way along the landing, unlocked a door, slipped inside. She followed, and he locked it behind them. They fell against the door, both laughing now, and suddenly he was kissing her, and the laughter stopped.
‘Oh,my sweetness, my Alicia,’he murmured against her mouth. ‘You’re so beautiful.’
She thought that he was, too. She put her arms around his neck and pulled his mouth back to hers, thinking of Ted, of her mum with the kids, of her grinding, lonely life with nothing to look forward to but middle age, old age, death.
But here was life. Here was Leroy,so strange to her,so wonderful, bursting with life.
This was a gift from the gods, it had to be.
Now they were tearing at each other’s clothes, giggling like children, pulling at fastenings, popping buttons, and finally they fell naked, laughing, onto the crumby little bed in the corner of this horrible room.
‘So beautiful,’ he said, marvelling as the daylight from the grimy window fell on her skin.
Alicia squirmed and tried to hide her body. She had huge purple stretch marks on her stomach from having the kids. Her breasts had drooped from feeding them.
‘Oh God, don’t look at me,’ she said, embarrassed.
‘You’re perfect,’ said Leroy in those velvety tones.
‘No – you are.’ She gazed at him. He looked like an African carving,so smooth and muscular,his skin as fine as dark polished leather. ‘We shouldn’t be doing this,’ she said fretfully.
But it was thrilling, arousing; she’d never felt so alive. When he caressed her, when he pushed inside her, she knew – at last! – the meaning of total bliss.
Leroy had to cover her mouth with his hand to stifle her cries; his own were muffled against the silky white curve of her shoulder.
‘This is wrong,’ said Alicia afterwards, when they lay quietly together. But she no longer cared about her stretch marks or her saggy breasts: he thought she was beautiful, and so she was.
‘How can it be?’ he asked, and kissed her again.
21
Joe and Charlie realized that they were going to have to hit the mail van in a way that was more subtle than they would have liked. They would have to hijack the whole thing, take it off somewhere quiet.
They started checking timings, rehearsing the robbery repeatedly. On little-used country roads they worked out exactly what they would do, time after time; and on the third rehearsal, to their absolute shock, a copper cycled past and asked what they were doing.
But Charlie was quick thinking. While the others, Joe included, stood there dumbfounded, he said cheerily: ‘We’re going to be shooting a film here soon for the war effort. We’ve got to make sure it’s all perfect for the next take.’
To the group’s amazement, the copper then went happily on his way, saving them the trouble of having to do something drastic to him.
They followed the Post Office van discreetly and recorded journey and location times; Charlie had his boys check parked cars along the quieter parts of the route so that they knew which ones they would nick on the night when the robbery went ahead. They had an electrician fix the traffic lights in the street selected for the hit. It was north of Oxford Street, running parallel to it.
The traffic lights were under the gang’s control. There were roadworks in the street, which was all to the good; it would slow the van even more.
Finally, all was as perfect as it could be; they were ready.
‘Bloody traffic lights. Day or night, the damned things stop you,’ said the driver of the mail van.
The postman was sitting beside him, yawning. He hated night work, but what could you do? The lights were red. The street was silent, a few parked cars about, nobody walking around. It was four o’clock in the morning, who but a nutter or a night worker would be abroad at this hour?
The guard leaned over from the back and said: ‘Gawd, won’t I be glad to get home to the missus. What’s the lights red for at this time of the night? Not a damned thing happening.’
Suddenly a black Riley parked to the left of the stationary van screeched out from the curb and blocked the van’s way forward.
‘Oh, shit,’ said the driver, and threw the van into reverse. In his rear-view mirror he saw a Vauxhall saloon draw up close behind. ‘Shit!’ he yelled.
Men in gloves and masks were tumbling out of the two cars. The driver pressed the siren button just as the door on his side was yanked open and he was jerked out of his seat and thrown into the road. He lay there, winded, as the postman was hauled out, and thought, What’s wrong with the bloody siren?
It didn’t make a sound.
Charlie’s knack of always having boys on the inside was paying dividends yet again. The siren had been disabled.
The driver fought back instinctively, but he was punched, kicked, coshed into submission. Finally he just lay there, dazed and bruised, while they piled the postman and the guard alongside him. They looked like a pile of meat on a slab, there was blood everywhere.
‘Silly buggers, it’s not your money,’ said Joe in disgust. ‘Fucking well lie there, will you?’
It took just eight minutes. One man got in the Riley, another in the Vauxhall. The rest of them piled into the van. All three vehicles roared away into the night, and the driver, the postma
n and the guard lay there, groaning on the street, until they were found by an early worker passing by at half past six; then the police were called.
They dumped the two stolen cars at Covent Garden market, which was already busy with deliveries of fruit, vegetables and flowers being made; no one would notice the cars parked there until much later.
Then they all took off in the van. And everything was going fine, they were roaring with laughter, excited after the tension of the heist . . .
That’s when they hit the bloody dog.
It was just a mutt, white with black patches here and there. A mongrel – big and bony and plug-ugly. And it ran straight out in front of the van. Chewy, who was at the wheel, braked hard, but they all felt the bump as the thing was struck.
‘Fuck!’ said Chewy.
‘Drive on,’ said Joe.
Charlie looked around. All was quiet. ‘Hold on. I’ll take a look.’
The poor damned thing was lying there with its back leg jammed half under the front wheel on the passenger’s side. It was alive, but there was a lot of blood. It was whining.
‘Back up a bit,’ Charlie called to Chewy.
The dog’s whining changed into a howl as the van backed up, off its leg. Fucking thing. He couldn’t leave it lying there in agony. He pulled the cosh out and took aim at the dog’s head: give it a good hard whack and send it on its way. But then he hesitated, staring down at the dog’s pleading eyes. They were somehow full of hope, full of expectation that he, Charlie, would help. The stump of a tail twitched in a pitiful wag.
‘Fuck!’ said Charlie with feeling, and he put the cosh away and gathered the dog up in his arms, went round to the back of the van and slung the thing in on top of the money bags. It stopped whimpering. Maybe it had slipped away, died. He hoped it had, poor bastard.
‘Shit, you’re having a laugh!What we supposed to do with that?’ demanded Joe.
The knock on the door was loud and insistent and went on and on. The widow Tranter tumbled from bed, knocking into the side table in her alarm and haste.
What the hell?
She switched on the little lamp beside her bed and looked at the time. It was five thirty in the morning, not even light yet. She pulled on her robe and hurried down the stairs, crossing to the door. She halted there. The knocking had stopped. Now it started again.
‘Come on,’ she heard from the other side.
‘Who is it?’ she called.
‘Who do you think, Father fucking Christmas? Open the bloody door.’
She opened it. Charlie was standing there and he was holding a bundle of tattered black and white fur in his arms. The light from her living room glinted on wetness, redness; blood. She shrank back. What the hell now?
Charlie stepped forward and dumped the whole revolting mess into her arms. She felt blood seep straight through her robe and stick clammily to her skin. There was a big ugly head, a wet black nose nudging at her. The thing whined. She looked at it in complete disgust and disbelief. Her eyes lifted and she stared, thunderstruck, at Charlie.
‘What . . . ?’ she started.
‘Look after it, will you?’ he said, and he turned on his heel.
‘You’re not seriously . . .’
‘Things to do,’ he said, walking away.
‘Wait a minute,’ she snapped.
‘Quiet, don’t want to wake the neighbours,’ he warned, looking back at her, holding a finger to his lips.
‘Charlie fucking Darke, come back here!’ she hissed.
But he was gone.
After they’d dumped the dog at the widow Tranter’s, they drove the van off to the yard in Camden Town. It was all prearranged, carefully thought through by Charlie. Another van was waiting there, and this one was second-hand. It had false plates, and a new coat of navy-blue paint. Charlie had had partitions built into the thing so that the banknotes would be stashed in there, invisible.
By eight o’clock Charlie and Joe and their accomplices had stuffed the van full of notes. Charlie had doled out three thousand pounds each to Chewy, Ben and Stevie on the spot.
‘You get the rest in six months, that way no slip-ups,’ said Charlie as he handed over their wedge. His own much bigger share would be stashed where only he could find it. The same went for Joe’s. They’d already agreed that neither of them should know the whereabouts of the other’s loot. It was safer.
The boys didn’t have to count it. They’d been Charlie Darke’s gang since schooldays, they trusted him implicitly.
Then Charlie and Joe jumped up into the cab, the gates were opened, and they drove the haul away.
‘Piece of piss,’ said Charlie, grinning as they headed off to Essex.
22
Ruby had succumbed to temptation. She was in bed with Cornelius when he broke the bad news to her.
‘I’m married,’ he said.
She’d been lying there in his arms and she had never been so happy in her entire life. Her mind had started skipping forward, dreaming of courtship, marriage, babies . . . impossible, stupid dreams, she knew that. She also knew that she shouldn’t have slept with him, not yet, but these were desperate times, terrible times, weren’t they. Vi was so right. They could all be dead tomorrow. You had to grab life whenever you could. And she had. She was in love. She loved him.
But what was he saying? Married? Well, Vi had warned her. But still, she felt as if her entire world had caved in.
‘I’m sorry, darling. I know it must come as a shock.’
‘Well, I . . .’ Ruby didn’t know what to say.
A shock? Yeah. It was certainly that.
‘How long . . . ?’ she asked, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She should be angry. She knew that. But all she felt was crushed.
‘Five years.’
Now she felt the anger building, taking hold. She glared at him. Her big golden beautiful man. Three dinners and then straight into bed at his house in one of the city’s more select squares. She preferred being here, in bed, to the expensive restaurants he took her to. In company, she was all too aware that other women wanted him. They probably threw themselves at him all the time. Here, in his house, they were alone, and that was better: she felt more secure.
Only – she wasn’t secure at all. He was married.
She had a sudden appalling thought. ‘My God. Is she here . . . ?’
He was shaking his head. ‘She lives in the country. We have a small manor house.’
A small manor house.
Ruby had never felt more conscious of who she was, where she had come from. Her dad ran a corner shop. She was nothing special. Oh, she was good-looking. People stared at her in the street, with her long legs and her olive-skinned beauty, her long fall of lusciously wavy black hair. But she was nothing, she had come from nothing. While he . . . from birth, he’d been blessed with wealth. He was easy with it, and now he was telling her, oh so casually, that he was married, and that his wife lived in a manor house in the country.
‘You bastard,’ she burst out.
He looked dismayed.
Ruby started hitting him, hardly knowing what she was doing, only that she was gutted, she was completely destroyed, and he was lying there as if surprised at her reaction. He caught her wrists, held her still.
‘Don’t,’ he said.
‘Bastard,’ she said again, trying to get free and failing.
‘I suppose now you won’t want to see me any more.’
Ruby stared at his face. She was panting with fury. But then she remembered the other thing that Vi had told her about men like him. That they owned the world, that they were taught from birth that they could have anything: the chairmanship of the company, the house in the country, the swanky place in town, the tolerant wife, the accommodating bits of fluff on the side.
Except, Ruby wasn’t feeling very accommodating. She jumped out of the bed and started flinging on her clothes. She glared at him as she did so.
‘Fucking well right I don’t,’ she
said. ‘What do you take me for?’
He shrugged. He looked unhappy, but he didn’t look that cut up about her reaction.
‘Look, I didn’t lie to you,’ he said.
‘You didn’t tell me the truth, either.’
‘I know. But this has been so marvellous. I suppose I simply put off the evil hour.’
‘Because you knew how I’d react.’
‘I thought you’d be angry.’
‘I am angry.’
‘I’m sorry. I hoped you might have understood.’ His head went down. ‘My wife and I, we . . .’
‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t start giving me that.’ Fully dressed, Ruby snatched up her bag. ‘Spare me the “my wife don’t understand me” bollocks.’
‘Ruby . . .’
‘Goodbye, Cornelius.’
She left, before she started to cry.
23
1922
After the first time,Alicia met with Leroy often over the following weeks. They fell joyously into bed together, then lay there sated, listening to his jazz records. He gave her a 78 rpm by Jelly Roll Morton, and she sneaked home with it, played it on the Maxitone when Ted was out down the Legion.
For a while, life was blissful.
Until she found out she was pregnant.
Alicia knew that Leroy would look after her: he had told her so.
‘It’s yours of course,’ she said, as they lay in bed together. ‘I haven’t slept with Ted since I got up the duff with Joe. He wasn’t interested after that.’
But Leroy was unfazed by her expectant state. She had been frightened of telling him, of breaking their perfect little dream in two, but she needn’t have worried.
‘I’ll take care of you,’ he said.
They lay there and planned their future together, somewhere far away from here. She would take the boys, of course – she couldn’t leave her kids. But they would have to get away. She couldn’t pass the newborn off as Ted’s. That was impossible.
