Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  “I noticed her as we were driving down the road here, I was looking towards the river and I could see her dress, although I wasn't quite sure what it was at first. It didn't look right, somehow, so thought I'd stop and take a look. I got out the car, and I reckon I'd be about fifteen yards away from her when I realised I was looking at a body. When I got up close I saw a young-looking woman, about twenty, twenty-two, short brown curly hair and brown eyes, in a blue and white striped summer dress, lying with her feet towards the river. The front of her dress had been ripped open and her torso was bare. She wasn't wearing a brassiere, or any stockings or shoes and there was no sign of a handbag neither. I knelt down beside her and saw red marks on her neck and collarbone, scratches like, and from the way her mouth was open and her eyes were bulging, I would expect she had been strangled.”

  DI Bell nodded, pen poised in midair over his notebook. “I see,” he said. “And what do you make of that then?”

  Pete had been going over the details in his mind ever since, searching for the clues that would give the killer away, the peculiarities they would be able to use to catch him. Only this was the first time he had seen a murdered woman and he had to put that shock and pity behind him and concentrate, like the pathologist would, on what those peculiarities were.

  “Two things that strike me as odd,” he offered, hoping that he wasn't about to make an ass of himself in front of this much older, more experienced man. “One, the fact that she wasn't wearing any shoes and her feet were dirty. I don't think she was killed where she lay, I think she was dragged here after and left.”

  Even as he said it he didn't know quite why he'd had this sudden conviction, the words had just come to him and now they had spilled out in the open, he wondered if he was fantasising, overstepping the mark.

  But Bell's expression said otherwise. A spark went off in those grey-green eyes.

  “Interesting,” he said. “And what was the second thing?”

  “She wasn't wearing any make-up,” said Pete. “None at all. She had her best dress on but no paint on her face. What woman goes out like that?”

  Bell's eyes narrowed. “Good point, Constable. So you think our killer did a bit of a clean-up job, so to speak?”

  Pete felt himself flush.

  “It does sound daft…” he began.

  “Not at all,” said Bell. “You've been very observant.” He snapped his notebook shut. “Good day, Constable Bradley.”

  As he stalked away towards the murder scene, Pete saw the scowl on Alf's face. He realised that he hadn't mentioned his superior officer to DI Bell at all and wondered if there would be consequences. The adrenalin drained out of him. Suddenly, he felt bone tired.

  They spent the beginning of their next shift stopping embarrassed couples from parking their cars in Duke's Meadows and asking them questions instead. Of course, it was futile. Given the nature of their night's assignments, they didn't want their details taking down and nobody would admit to being in the vicinity on the night of 16 June 1959. But the landlord of the pub directly across the river, The Ship in Mortlake, had something to offer. About five to midnight he'd seen the headlights of a car on the other side of the river. Almost as soon as he clocked them, the lights had gone off and he'd heard a piercing scream, a woman's scream that suddenly stopped, as if “choked off”.

  He was sure of the time, the landlord was. He'd looked at the clock as soon as it had happened.

  More information circulated. Two nights before, in Ranleigh Gardens, Chiswick, a good-looking model had been attacked on her way home by a fair-haired man who jumped out of a doorway and tried to strangle her. She had bitten him hard enough for him to drop her and run off. Could the two crimes be connected?

  Then the pathologist's report came in. The girl had been manually strangled, fingers on the side of her neck, thumbs on the windpipe, until she was dead. Abrasions on her back suggested she had been hauled over the front seat of a motor car, and marks on her heels that she had been dragged across the ground to the foot of the tree. She was dead no later than 2am. And just before she'd died, she'd had sex.

  She couldn't be indentified by her fingerprints. If the state of her body had revealed her profession as the oldest one in the world, she hadn't any convictions for it. They didn't have the victim's identity for thirty-six hours, until her face went in the papers and the girl she had shared a flat with in Holloway came forward.

  The dead woman was a prostitute, Roberta Clarke, who preferred to be called Bobby. She had worked with her roommate, Maureen Knowles, up in Finsbury Park, down Bayswater Road and around Notting Hill. Bobby had a false name that she used sometimes, Ellie Driver, but that wasn't on any records either, suggesting that maybe she'd not been on the game for long. She had only just turned 21 — the key hadn't opened the door very far for poor Bobby.

  Once they had her identity, they found out a lot of other things too. But for Pete, following events as closely as he could from his lowly foot soldier position, that was when the details blurred and contradicted themselves, when the timeline shifted and the things of which he was certain could no longer be put into any logical order.

  The last person to have seen Bobby alive was a self-described handyman from Stamford Hill called Harvey Webb, who claimed to have dropped her off at Holland Park tube at ten past one in the morning.

  One hour and ten minutes after the landlord was certain he had heard the scream.

  He'd made arrangements to pick her up again at half past three, but the only person waiting for him then was a copper, who'd brought him in for questioning — the area was a well-known pick-up spot. Once Bobby had been discovered, Harvey was brought back in and questioned hard, but in the end, they'd let him go. He had a witness at a coffee stand who'd seen him between 1 and 2am, and stains on Bobby's dress from where she appeared to have wet herself with fright on a leather seat, didn't match to the upholstery of Harvey's Morris Ten.

  Bobby's boyfriend, a West Indian boxer called Algy ‘Baby’ Ferrier also had an alibi. He had been at a club in Westbourne Park Road called The Blue Parrot during the crucial timeframe. It was shady deeds in Dark Town: Baby existed in the semi-legitimate milieu of late night speakeasies that proliferated around Ladbroke Grove, where he always had a spaced-out-looking white woman in tow, providing him with his readies no doubt. He was bent all right, but there was nothing that could be done to put him in the frame for this one, much as some would have wished it. Talk about Bobby got more lewd when it was revealed she had been consorting with a coloured man. In the minds of many, the tart had got what she deserved.

  But Pete couldn't think of her that way. He could only think of the crushed body on the riverbank, so tiny and alone in the perfect dawn of the day she'd never see. He read the accounts of her life and then looked between the lines of them. Bobby Clarke hadn't known much happiness. She'd been deserted at regular intervals throughout her childhood, first by her fortune-hunting father, then by her mother. Her paternal grandmother had brought her up, along with her sister Patricia, and they were joined from time to time by their errant father and the latest in his line of new brides and accompanying half-sisters. Always sisters. Her father, it seemed, singled Bobby out as the biggest disappointment to him, constantly berating her for her appearance and habits. Stifled in a Victorian house full of women and no honourable men, no wonder she'd wanted to run off to London and then not had the first clue how to look after herself.

  It was the mother, down from Cheltenham with her second husband, who came to claim the body. Mr Clarke had made himself absent; no doubt the shame was too much for him.

  Other stories added more layers of conflict to the events of the night itself. Screams had been heard in Holland Park at 12.30am, neighbours had seen a man grabbing a woman by the throat in a beige shooting wagon, but nobody had intervened. That was the trouble with that neighbourhood, it was a dangerous place to mind anybody's business but your own, so the witnesses said. The beige car surfaced again, driving at speed fr
om Chiswick Bridge at 1.15am. But then so did a yellow Ford, a yellow and black Ford Consul and a big black car, possibly a Daimler.

  The days turned into weeks and the story dropped off the front pages. Pete got reassigned to day patrol, probably at the behest of Alf, who had been increasingly brusque towards him since that morning with DI Bell. Pete didn't mind. He had been accepted as an aid and would be transferred shortly to begin his new job in a different part of London. He wondered if Bell had something to do with that, too, perhaps the strange events of that morning had set the wheels of fate in motion. Or perhaps he was just being fanciful.

  Just before he left Chiswick, he heard the strangest thing. He'd taken to ending his week's shift by treating himself to a few pints of brown in The George, a big, red brick pub opposite the station on Chiswick High Road. He didn't have much of a social life in London; still thought of himself as an outsider, but this move to days had given him one new friend at least.

  It was a Friday night, before his first weekend leave for six weeks, and he was in there with the older Sergeant he'd been recently assigned to, Dai Jones. A tough, bald Welshman, Dai was the polar opposite of Alf: a man who was scrupulously clean and possessed of a fierce intelligence, someone that you could really learn from. More than that, Dai's background was not unlike Pete's own. He'd worked down the pits as a young man, before the War had delivered him, as he'd put it, up from the earth and onto the sea. They could relate to each other and enjoyed each other's company, both on the beat and out of work hours. Dai was so clever, Pete often wondered why he had never been promoted beyond Sergeant.

  “Be my bad temper,” Dai would reflect, without any bitterness. “I have been known to blow my top from time to time. Doesn't do you no favours with them starched shirts upstairs, but what do they know about real work, eh? I told too many people to bugger off in my time, that's my problem, but the thing is, I was always right. That's what they don't like, see. That's what you got to be careful of if you want to go right to the top.”

  They were in the saloon bar, propped up against the counter, that way Dai said, you could always keep one ear to the loose talk that might be blowing in the wind and one eye on the rest of the room. He was never really off-duty, and mid-way through one of his War stories, his dark eyes began to glitter. A man Pete had never seen before was coming over.

  “Evening Dai,” he said. A man in his mid-twenties, thin and with sandy hair that he'd tried to plaster down but still had bits sticking up at the back, a loose tie around a flushed red neck and a baggy, threadbare suit.

  “Evening Francis.” Dai put his pint down on the counter, wiped the foam from his top lip. “What you doing so far from home?”

  “Oh, you know. Like to keep an eye on the old patch.” The sandy man grinned and scratched his head, sending more unruly locks springing upwards. “See what's going down out here in the sticks.”

  “Dah.” Dai grimaced. “Be your work brought you over won't it? You want to stick your nose into one of ours, is it?”

  “Can I get you another?” He ignored the jibe and looked over at Pete. “Or am I interrupting something vital? Telling you how he sunk the Bismark, is he?”

  Pete tried to suppress a smile as Dai feigned outrage.

  “Can't you remember anything I told you? It wasn't the Bismark, it was a bloody U-boat, May the 9th, 1941. Bismark was before my time, 1939 that was. You see,” he nodded to Pete, “it just goes in one ear and out the other. I hope you're going to make a better student than this one. Pete Bradley, this is Francis Bream. He used to be my batman down here until somehow he got himself a promotion and they shipped him out to West End Central with all the other spivs and gangsters.”

  Laughing, Pete leaned over and took the other man's hand. With his scruffy hair and pencil moustache, Francis Bream did have a touch of the spiv about him.

  “Call me Frank,” the fellow said. “And don't pay too much attention to this old seadog's stories. Now can I get you both a drink?”

  They accepted, but Dai still retained his aura of suspicion.

  “Now then,” he said, lifting his fresh pint and examining the cloudy brown liquid as if it might contain twigs. “What they really got you down here for?”

  “I told you.” Bream shook his head. “I'm just looking in on me old company. Nothing ever happens around here anyway, does it? Oh, apart from that tart they found by the river…”

  “Oh, so that's it, is it?” Dai said. “Well, you're in luck, boyo. It was Pete here that found her.”

  “Oh.” Bream raised his eyebrows. “Was it really? Must have given you quite a shock, her sitting there like that.”

  Pete frowned. “What do you mean sitting there?”

  “That's where she was, wasn't it, sitting up against a tree looking out at the river?” Bream looked at him quizzically. “She can't have looked all that dead from a distance.”

  “No, you've got it wrong,” said Pete. “She wasn't sitting. She was lying on the ground by the side of the tree. Flat on her back, she were. That's why I couldn't quite make her out, why I went over for a better look.”

  Bream shook his head. “Strange,” he said. “That's not what I heard. I had a mate came down there from CID, swears he saw her plain as day, sitting up against the tree. Said that was why it looked so eerie, from the back it just looked like she was sunbathing, you'd never guess something was wrong.”

  He fixed Pete earnestly with bloodshot green eyes.

  “You pissed, Francis?” asked Dai. “He knows what he saw. How many people do you know go sunbathing at five o’clock in the morning? Someone's pulling your leg, old son.”

  “No.” Bream shook his head earnestly, hair bobbing up and down like straw in a bird's nest. “Mac was definitely there, and it really spooked him. He's one of those dead straight ice-creams he is, not the type to make things up. Maybe the pathologist moved her.”

  Dai snorted. “Now you really are talking daft. Alec Jobson was the pathologist on that one. Twenty years in the service he's been, when would you ever catch him pulling a stunt like that? I'm telling you Francis, you listen to that canteen chatter too much. It's all Chinese whispers, that's all.”

  “Well,” Bream considered. “I believe you.” He nodded at Pete. “But I believe my mate Mac, too. Someone must have moved her, maybe one of the other coppers…”

  “If you say so, sunshine.” Dai shook his head and swiftly made to turn the conversation in another direction. He was obviously embarrassed that this old colleague of his was talking this way, making no sense and appearing to be half cut as well. Bream let the subject drop, finished his drink and then ambled away.

  They watched him pick up his coat and hat from the rack by the door. His lightweight mac was crumpled, like he'd slept in it. There was something irrefutably seedy about him, Pete thought, but he didn't take the man for a liar or someone who'd deliberately stir things up. He wondered if someone really had moved the body, someone with a bad sense of humour.

  “Do you really think…” he began.

  “No I don't,” Dai cut him short. “You don't want to pay any attention to Francis Bream. Bloody dreamer he is.” He turned back to the bar, pulled out his wallet from his breast pocket. “Bloody bad penny,” he added under his breath, too quietly for Pete to hear.

  2  DREAM LOVER

  I awoke to the sound of children laughing and screaming in the communal gardens outside. Streams of sunlight fanned above the sagging curtains that struggled to cover the French doors at the end of our bedroom, spilling weird shapes across the lumps of furniture below. Not for the first time, I thought, those curtains will have to go.

  Toby was still sleeping beside me, his face looking so innocent and childlike in sleep that I felt a great warm rush of love coil around me. I stared at him, content and happy, luxuriating in the knowledge that he was mine, all mine. Then the memory of the night before pushed into my consciousness like an unwelcome guest, bringing with it the faint traces of a headache clinging to my
temples. For a second, it took me back to another time and another place, a murky, formless memory from early childhood of waking up with the exact same feeling, in the nursery of my grandparents’ house, in the time of the Blitz. It was a feeling I wanted to swat away.

  I slipped out of bed, shrugged on a Chinese silk dressing gown lying over the chair by our bed, a beautiful, embroidered work of art that I had bought on the Portobello Road for pennies. I reminded myself that I was here now, far from Bloxwich and all the bad times.

  The room was a mess, the remains of last night's meal and an empty bottle of wine on the floor, furniture from the rest of the house all crammed in a huddle in front of the French doors, along with stacks of canvasses and Toby's easels. We were painting the flat room by room, saving this one for last. Last night we had all but completed the big front room that would be our sitting room-cum-dining room and it occurred to me that both the headache and the nightmare could well have been exacerbated by paint fumes.

  I gathered up the crockery onto a tray and slunk out of the messy bedroom and into the hall, where it was cool and quiet. Our flat was cut off from the rest of the rented rooms in the house by a heavy door at the top of the stairs. Down here was a little kitchenette, a bathroom and the wonderful front room, all of it ours to do with exactly as we pleased.

  The kitchenette, where I went to now, was my least favourite room. It was pokey, without a window and only an ancient ceiling fan to extract the aromas of some of the exotic cooking we had been trying out on our little two-ring stove. There was a tiny sink, above which a cranky old heater dished out hot water in fits and spurts, and next to that, a pantry we had made from an old cupboard with a printed curtain tacked over the front of it. We kept the icebox under the sink in the bathroom, the coldest room.

  On top of the stove, last night's pans sat crusted with the incriminating remains of vegetable curry and rice. Shaking my head, I put the tray down on the draining board and then moved them into the sink, pouring a little detergent in each and then timidly turning on the tap.