Heartman: A Missing Girl, A Broken Man, A Race Against Time

by M. P. Wright

  I’d already taken one beating from somebody who didn’t want me snooping around into Stella Hopkins’ disappearance. Whatever she had been up to, it was a helluva lot more suspect than the perfect picture of a sweet little mute girl that Earl Linney had made her out to be. I’d come this far in my search and had little to show for my efforts. Linney was happy to hand out his cash to me, but all I had come up with in the last few days to earn any of it was the word of a rummie hooker who claimed she seen Stella at the illegal drinking den that I was now standing across the road from, and a good kicking to my ribs.

  But something in my gut told me to stick with it, rather than tell the alderman to stick his money and get out while the going was good. I was never any great at taking advice, especially my own. So I thought I may as well poke my battered nose a little further into the trough and ask around some more. The scared shopkeeper whose fretful gaze was burning into my back seemed like as good a place to start as any.

  I walked in. The bell on the door rang. It announced my arrival to the old fellow, putting him even more on edge than before. He’d have preferred it if I’d stayed out on the street in the snow. He was white, in his late sixties, bald with red-flushed cheeks and a port-soaked bulbous nose. The shop smelt of oak-aged fortified wine barrels, spilt brown ale and cigars. I felt right at home.

  “Can I help you, mister?” He asked the question with all the warmth and friendliness of a female alley cat spitting at a horny tom.

  “Yes. You got a two-ounce tin of Wills’ Golden Cut tobacco?”

  The old fellow pulled a circular black tin off the shelf without turning away and placed it on the counter in front of me. “That’ll be five shillings eleven.”

  I gave him the money and put the tobacco into my jacket pocket while he rang up the amount on his till, dropping the coins into the cash register individually as if he need to check that they were real by the sound they made when they hit the metal tray in the opened drawer. I was half-expecting to see him bite into one of them, just to make sure I wasn’t trying to fiddle him. Instead, he handed me my change.

  “Thanks. I’m looking to find a place to rent,” I lied. “What’s it like round here, man?”

  “Well, it’s not how it used to be since . . .” He stopped speaking, suddenly realising that he was about to state how the area had gone downhill since the arrival of anybody who had black skin. He looked me up and down nervously and thought better of continuing, which was a good job, as I was about to kick his honky ass through the store-front window. After reconsideration, he began to speak again, his Bristol accent becoming heavier as he spoke.

  “Anyways, it depends on what you looking for, don’t it, and how much you wants to pay? Most of the ’ouses round these parts are moonlight flit holes. One minute they’re filled to the brim, next they’ve all pissed off cos they can’t afford the bloody rent. You won’t have much trouble finding a place round ’ere, son.”

  He’d given me his best answer and smiled, waiting for me to get the hell out of his shop.

  “I’d heard from a fella in a pub last night that the place on the corner over there has rooms to rent.” I pointed to the corner property on Richmond Road. The old fellow burst out laughing at me.

  “You can find yourself a room in there if you want, son. But I don’t think you’ll be getting much sleep if you does.” He continued to laugh to himself.

  “Why’s that?”

  I’d got him on a roll. “Keep talking, brother,” I thought to myself.

  “On account that they got more shenanigans going on in that place than you can shake a stick at. Strange bloody sorts come and go. There are whores going in, plying their bloody trade after dark. Loud music that’s playing all hours of the night and day. No consideration for anybody else in the street.” The old man suddenly leaned forward towards me across his cracked Formica counter. “What amazes me is that considering the police always seems to be knocking on that bloody door they never brings anybody out in handcuffs.”

  “Police?” I asked, the tone in my voice implying a sense of innocence I did not possess.

  “Yes, the bloody police. They think I don’t see it all going on. But I bleedin’ well know different. Thing is, when they do turn up, it’s not your bobbies in a panda car types. These blokes are in plain clothes. I see ’em turn up, go in and come out again half an hour later laughing and joking. So you tell me, they in there checking the place for overcrowding? I don’t bloody well think so.”

  Somehow, I thought the mean-spirited old bastard might have a point.

  12

  Jocelyn Charles’ body was found dumped in undergrowth on the Arches bridge that crosses the Cheltenham Road in Montpelier, not far from the area that she worked at, around six thirty on Thursday evening by a British Rail signalman who had stopped to take a pee in the sidings at the edge of the track. As he relieved himself, his urgent stream of urine had caught her bloodied, grey, lifeless face where she’d lain hidden in between the blackberry briars and nettles. She had been beaten and had her throat slit, and stuffed inside her mouth were four neatly folded one-pound notes.

  Jocelyn was quickly identified by one of the local beat coppers who had arrested her in the past for soliciting on the streets. Her demise hadn’t come as any great shock to the police. If you were on the game, ending up dead in a ditch was par for the course, as far as they were concerned. But the money left ceremoniously in her mouth was an altogether different matter. A whore carved up and flung down a railway embankment was one thing. A call girl killed by one of her punters generally had her belongings taken, especially any cash. But this was different.

  The banknotes discovered were a cruel warning and a message that had spread across the city like wildfire, but nobody, including the police, understood what it meant. Nobody, that is, except me.

  It was Friday evening, just after six, and I was sitting in the open snug room of the Star and Garter, my body still aching, waiting for Vic to arrive. Even from the back end of the pub, I could hear the morbid chattering, the rumour and hearsay from the locals at the bar discussing the discovery of the dead call girl Jocelyn Charles.

  I took a hefty swig of my beer from the jug-handled tankard before returning back to the copy of the Bristol Evening Post, whose headline featured the prostitute’s murder across its front page in bold, black aggressive print. There was no mention of the folded money in her mouth in the paper. That sordid piece of information had filtered its way through the pubs, clubs, fish and chip shops, off-licences and street corners across the St Pauls and Montpelier areas overnight, its origins no doubt derived from the tongue of a slack-mouthed member of the Bristol constabulary. Bad news travels fast. The news of a violent death gets around even quicker.

  But where I was born, we believe in the bogeyman. The harbinger of such dark news of death is often fearful that their demise may follow hard on the heels of such bleak tidings. So we don’t speak ill of the dead. We leave death well alone.

  Just less than a week ago, I had been sitting in the same pub, minding my own damn business, reading a newspaper, broke and jobless. Now I had money in my pocket and a job I didn’t want, and I was one of the last people to see Jocelyn Charles still alive and possibly about to be linked to her murder enquiry. I’d a helluva lot to thank Alderman Earl Linney for.

  I watched Vic breeze through the pub, dressed in a long dark leather coat and blue jeans, his body loose and heading towards the bar. I called over to let him know where I was sitting and he acknowledged me by raising his cupped hand to his mouth to ask if I wanted another pint. I nodded my reply over to him. I made it a habit never to refuse a pint of beer, something my cousin knew only too well.

  “How’s it going?”

  Vic brought over two double rums and pint stout chasers, carefully holding the four glasses in his huge splayed-out fingers. He placed the drinks onto the table and sat in the chair opposite, staring at me.

  “Brother, you got a face on you like you just stepped
in dog shit and you had to scrape it off your heel with your damn hand.”

  He cracked up laughing before slugging his rum back in a single gulp, setting the empty glass down in front of him. He then started on his ale, downing a half of it before he spoke again.

  “So let’s git this straight. That miserable look you got on your face is all down to that frowsy, dead cock-rat they gone an’ found up on the Arches last night?”

  Vic was the exception to the rule when speaking ill of the dead. He wouldn’t be checking over his shoulder for the bogeyman. He’d made a deal with that duppy along time ago. Vic was the bogeyman.

  I leant across to Vic, folding my arms and lying across the table, my voice at a quiet pitch.

  “Look, man, somebody snuffed out Jocelyn Charles because she spoke to me in the Speed Bird club on Wednesday night, and whoever did it left the cash I’d given to her inside that poor woman’s mouth to make a point.”

  “Yeah, what point them trying to make then?”

  Vic didn’t bother to be quiet.

  “Well, whoever killed Jocelyn would have beaten it outta her befo’ she died to find out what she’d said to me. Then they stuffed the four pounds that I gave her into her mouth. She’d have told whoever was knocking five strips of crap off her hide how some guy had been asking about Stella Hopkins going missing. And about the shebeen on Richmond Road and the white guy that Hopkins left with that night. Somebody don’t want that information going any further, Vic.”

  “You give that whoring bitch your name the other night?” Vic asked.

  “No. But that don’t make a damn bit of difference: my prints are on the money the police found in her mouth,” I snapped back.

  “Keep cool, brother. Hell, everybody’s prints are on goddamn money, you fool. Just cos she got four notes rammed in her mout’ with your fingerprints on don’t mean they can put you in the frame fo’ killing the bitch. Git your head straight on this.”

  Vic was right. I’d spent the better part of the day worrying about how I could go down for Jocelyn’s murder rather than thinking why she’d been killed in the first place for the information she had given me.

  Stella Hopkins’ disappearance was clearly a secret worth killing for. I got me to thinking if Stella was even alive. Perhaps her dead body was also in a ditch somewhere? I told Vic about my conversation yesterday afternoon with the old shopkeeper in Montpelier and his various sighting of the plain-clothes coppers who he’d watched going in and out of the shebeen on Richmond Road.

  “They most probably on the take. You know how those bastards work, JT. They know there’s shit going down in there. They just wanna piece of it.”

  “Maybe so, but how many white folks you know go inside a shebeen, Vic? Damn, most wouldn’t even know what the hell one was. Yet Jocelyn Charles sees some white guy walk out with Stella Hopkins one night and you possibly got honky police cutting in on a piece of the action from the booze and whores.” I looked at my cousin hard before continuing. “I gotta decide, man: I either say fuck it and git out now or I stick with it and try and find the girl. If I stay on this, I need to git into that shebeen to find out what the hell’s going on, cos if this shit gets any deeper, my ass is gonna be heading fo’ a prison cell.”

  Vic smiled at me, shaking his head from side to side, his criminal mind weighing up the pros and cons of my situation. He chose his next words of wisdom carefully before enlightening me with them. When he finally spoke, his words were as profound as ever and came in the form of a question.

  “JT, firstly, when have you ever said ‘fuck it’? And there’s another ting ’bout all this that’s putting a bug up my ass,” he said, his tone contemplative and serious.

  “Yeah, what’s that?” I asked him suspiciously.

  “Earlier this week you told me that you didn’t wanna be dragging me into any trouble I had no place being in . . . right?”

  “Yeah, that’s right, and I meant it.” I looked at him, searching inside for the right words of apology, my shame at dragging my kin into possible danger surely evident by the look on my face.

  “Well, ever since you’ve been searching fo’ this dummy Stella Hopkins, all you’ve given me is muthafuckin’ trouble, just like you did when we were kids. Shit . . .” He laughed at me before picking up his pint and leaning over across the table, getting real close to the side of my face. “Anyhow, you fool,” he whispered into my ear, “You don’t need to go into no hooker’s shebeen when you got yourself a Clarence Mayfield on the gate door o’ one o’ those damn places.”

  He leisurely sat back into his chair and winked at me.

  13

  Clarence Maynard was one big, mean brother. But he had not always been like that. He was born in a rat-infested back alley in Basseterre on the island of St Kitts. His birth was not welcomed by a devoted mother and father who would love and care for his every infantile need. Instead, he was callously dumped outside the Catholic sister’s mission on Cayon Street by the drunken old harpy who had given birth to him in the hope that he would fare better in life in the hands of those of a more devout Christian nature. His deluded, rum-soaked mama was wrong. Clarence endured the harsh discipline of the nuns at the local orphanage, where he grew to understand the meaning of cruelty and how, if applied with the right menace, it got you the results you required. The godly women in black taught him that. It was a heartless lesson he never forgot.

  One night, tired of the endless abuse and beatings he’d received from a leather strap, Clarence threw his bedding from the second-storey window of the orphanage and followed it out. He hit the ground running, not daring to look back. The sisters never reported him missing and nobody cared if he was alive or dead. His speedy flight from the ruthlessness of the religious order saw him return to the place of his birth and there, at the tender age of ten years old, on the streets of the island’s capital, he found a different kind of family, and they would care for him in their own way, rearing him up as one of their own and educating his mind in the harsh ways of the street. He spent the rest of his childhood and youth among the whores, pickpockets and lawless lowlives that inhabited the city’s dark underworld. By the time he left St Kitts at the age of eighteen, for a new life in England, he had become a very different kind of human being from the skinny, scared and frightened kid who had run from his pious, punishing carers.

  Now, at the age of twenty-eight, his extreme stature and a powerfully built frame had made him infamous within the Caribbean community in the St Pauls area. It had been developed through hours of pushing weights at Cut Man’s gym, going head to head with tough young boxers eager to prove themselves in the ring, and eating huge steaming plates of rice and peas, which he heartily consumed with his beloved fried chicken. If Clarence wasn’t working or fighting, you’d find him stuffing his gargantuan face with soul food.

  The hard years on the streets and lack of formal schooling had made Clarence a violent-tempered and dimwitted man who stood side by side with the pimps and the criminal underclass, always on hand to do their dirty work for them. He’d muscle in on punters who were stupid enough to try to run out on paying up for the services of the local prostitutes. He collected bad debts from degenerate gamblers on behalf of greedy bookies and applied strong-arm tactics for money-hungry loan sharks. He also worked at minding the doors of local pubs, clubs and shebeens.

  Everybody knew of his connections to the local criminal fraternity, and unless you moved in those circles, hung out with hookers or crossed one of the big men who used his bulk to enforce their bidding, it was unlikely you’d ever make contact with him. Clarence simply kept himself to himself. This was no bad thing. Clarence Maynard was in the employ of Papa Anansi, and like all men who live their lives in the heart of crime and violence, he had to keep secrets, and Clarence guarded the secrets of others – and his own – very well, or so he thought.

  It was just after eleven thirty on Friday evening, and Vic and I were sitting, parked up around five doors from the shebeen on Richmond
Road in a 1963 Mark One black Ford Cortina that Vic had borrowed from Carnell Harris. It was in pristine condition both outside and in. The comforting smell of leather had come off the red upholstery when I first got in, but that hadn’t lasted for long. Vic had insisted on lighting up and smoking a joint as we patiently waited and watched Clarence Maynard’s formidable figure open and close the front door of the illegal hooch house to his bosses’ many nefarious guests. The radio was tuned in to a late-night local station and was playing Sam Cooke’s “Twisting the Night Away”. Vic tapped his fingers on the steering wheel in time to the beat as he blew out another mouthful of cloudy marijuana smoke into the already smoky interior.

  “Jesus! Do you have to do that in here?” I coughed as I wound down the window.

  “Hey man, this is some o’ Carnell’s finest shit. You can’t git better. I gotta sit in this hearse with you, freezing my ass off; I sure as hell need someting inside of me to keep me mellow.”

  “Where the hell did Carnell git this motor from, Vic?”

  I recognised something about the car. I just couldn’t put my finger on it.

  “You know Errol ‘Sure Ting’ Toleman?” Vic asked me without turning his head away from watching Clarence’s activities on the door of the shebeen.

  “Errol, the bookies’ runner, this is his car?”

  Now I remembered seeing Sure Ting’s ugly mug driving about in it.

  “Well, these wheels were Sure Ting’s.” Vic smiled.