Bad Penny Blues

by Cathi Unsworth

  There had been no verifiable sightings of Bronwyn since the summer of 1963, when she had been living in a basement flat in Battersea with a blonde girl. They only stayed a matter of weeks before there had been an argument with the landlord over a gas bill. The girls had agreed to go, but left without taking any of their belongings. The landlord still had them, neatly folded away into two cardboard boxes. A few tatty dresses and worn-down shoes all that was left of Bronwyn's short time on this earth. That and a reputation that lingered, like the smell of mothballs and gin, over the rags of her existence.

  Bronwyn had fled Barry at the age of 16, after her ma died and her old man could no longer cope with the effort of controlling her. She had been pretty, her brother told the investigating officers, and the photos of her younger self bore this out — black curly hair that fell over one eye and a crookedly endearing smile. Bronwyn had craved the bright lights, dreamed of being an actress. Ended up in Whitechapel, servicing long distance lorry drivers in groups of three or more, ponced by a woman called Beryl Crudgington – Bream's Big Tits Beryl – who had a way with waifs and strays, putting a roof over their heads and turning their silly dreams into performances of a different kind, flat-back acting that paid the rent on the dismal rooms she was providing.

  But despite all Beryl's careful tutelage, her methods of discipline including regular thrashings with a wire coat-hanger, and no matter how many years she wore her heels down pounding them, it seemed that Bronwyn could never learn the code of the street.

  If the Welsh girl had made an enemy of Sampson Marks, he was far from the only one. Beryl had given up on trying to earn from her when it became apparent Bronwyn was mixing business with favours, turning every trick into a potential new ponce and drinking her wages before she could be relieved of them. She went disastrously freelance, having to flee the East End when one Bethnal Green nightclub owner caught her committing the cardinal sin of whispering trade secrets while entertaining two plain-clothes on his premises without the slightest realisation of who they really were.

  Still chasing those bright lights, Bronwyn headed west, dreaming of a new career as a dancer. She was hired and fired by every strip club in Soho, Paddington and Bayswater, congenitally unable to turn up on time, sober or presentable. She went back on the game, got herself beaten up so badly that stripping would never again be an option. She told her last landlord she'd been working as a waitress and he believed her, letting her and the blonde flatmate move in. He lived above them and they never brought any men back to the flat.

  The blonde was another mystery vanished into the ether. Nobody could say who she had been and it was highly unlikely she'd come forward voluntarily. Without an exact time of death, every suspect had an alibi. Without any viable leads or even enough evidence left from her skeleton to prove how she had even been killed, the trail of Bronwyn's murderer had gone as cold as her bones.

  Until now. The main incident room for Susannah Houghton was being run out of Shepherd's Bush, but every detective in London was engaged in chasing her killer and for Notting Hill CID it was a point of pride: Sue was a local girl. Maybe now Pete's blonde informant was about to turn up the heat.

  “Why do you think anyone would want to do this to her, love?” he asked the question gently, pulling out his own cigarettes when she stamped hers out and offering them over. “Did she ever get involved with anybody you thought was dangerous?”

  “They all are.” The girl's voice went flat as she said it, staring past Pete into the night. But after he had lit her up and she'd spent another speculative minute looking him up and down, measuring him up for trust, she started to talk.

  “Sue was a specialist, if you know what I mean. The kinky stuff. Thrashing the arse off old colonels or doing girl shows for house parties, that kind of scene. I mean, you get decent gelt for that graft, but you never know what could be coming with some of them upper crust bastards.”

  Her eyes hardened and she moved closer to Pete, lowering her voice. “One time, Sue told me, she got picked up by this chauffeur in Charing Cross. Said he was working for some old Lord, wanted to give his son a 21st birthday present, needed someone experienced. She gets driven to a house in Eaton Square, twenty five quid up front, butler shows her to a room and tells her to go in and strip, lie on the bed and wait for his Lordship. Tells her to be gentle with him ’cos he's very shy,” her voice dripped with scorn, “turns out the lights as he goes. So Sue's lying there in total darkness, waiting. Hears someone coming towards her, reaches out to touch him and gets a handful of fur.”

  Connections snapped through Pete's brain as she spoke: kinky parties, big houses, Simon Fitzgerald…

  But: “Fur?” he frowned. This was a new one.

  The girl scowled, shook her head. “All of a sudden the lights came on.” She clicked her fingers. “Sue's being fucked by a gorilla. Well, a geezer in a gorilla suit. But being as rough with her as an actual gorilla, she said.”

  “What the bloody hell…” Pete began.

  “But that ain't all.” The girl was in full flow now. “When she gets over the shock of that, she realises there's a whole balcony full of toffs above her, watching the performance. Lords and Ladies all done up to the nines, wearing these little tiny black masks, drinking Champagne and laughing at her. You know, she done some funny stuff in her time, did Sue, but that really scared her…”

  “What kind of a person thinks that's funny?” Pete spoke as much to himself as to his informer.

  “Well you know who lives in Eaton Square don't you? That Baron Whatsisname off the telly, one who's always rabbiting on about art, you know who I mean.” Her eyes darted away from Pete and around the houses, as if she had said too much, as if the walls themselves might be listening in. “Not that I'm saying it was him, mind but…”

  “They can't always be that choosy about what girls they can get to do that kind of thing…” Indeed they couldn't – it was only four months since Harold Macmillan had had to resign over Profumo, when the curtain was finally raised for everyone to see the real workings between Upstairs and Downstairs, a big stage version of what had been going on in Ladbroke Grove for years. Now here was a brass telling Pete that another prominent peer was mixed up in the same kind of dirty business.

  “Did she ever mention a fella called Sampson Marks, or The Chopper?” he asked, feeling his pulse quickening, his palms starting to sweat, feeling her slipping away.

  The girl dropped her gaze along with her cigarette, stamped it out with the toe of her white plastic boot.

  “I tell you what,” she said. “You wanna go and see a fella called Ernie Tidsall, ask him what he knows about Sue and all them parties.” She hitched her bag back over her shoulder, looked down the street, started to walk. “He's a smudger, another kind of specialist, you get me?” Her pace quickened as Pete turned to follow her, heels tapping along the pavement, moving back towards the shadows, the dim squares of Bayswater.

  A smudger. A photographer. Gypsy George and his bag of filth…

  “You'll find him down the other end of Queensway,” she said, jabbing a finger in the air ahead of her. “Westbourne Grove, above a paper shop. Now, if you don't mind, I'd best be off.”

  Pete let her go, grateful for as much as she had given him. Watched her walk to the corner, turn underneath the lamppost and look back at him.

  “When you find the bastard what did for Sue,” she called, making a punching motion in the air. “Give him one from me.”

  22 ANYONE WHO HAD A HEART

  I walked out of Holland Park tube and turned left onto Lansdowne Road. Diagonally across from me rose a high tower like a castle's keep made out of red brick, tiny little windows all the way up it. I stopped, sucked in a breath as I read the sign on the wall: Lansdowne Studios.

  I was standing on the spot where Bobby Clarke had waited in vain for a boy to come and rescue her, got into a long black car instead. Across the road from the studios where James had been working, making his music late into the night.


  Which was, in turn, bang opposite the place I was actually looking for. A modest two-story detached house that, judging from the grey cast of the stucco, had seen better days. Probably during the Twenties, in the aftermath of the First World War, when a grieving nation had been desperate to try and reach their lost boys on the other side, at The Christian-Spiritualist Greater World Association.

  It felt to me like I had been living through another season of death. Ever since last November, when President Kennedy was assassinated and then, two days later, we watched his killer gunned down in front of the TV cameras. Shortly after, and much closer to home, a little boy called John Kilbride went missing from his home in Hyde, Manchester. He would not be back for Christmas.

  December came with a personal reprieve – Macy's in New York invited me and Jackie to design a range for them, flew us over the Atlantic to meet them. Our week there still felt like a dream, from the excitement of the flight to the first appearance of the spectacular Manhattan skyline and the delights of the city itself – the yellow cabs, the Christmas lights, Central Park in the snow. We had such a good time that I almost forgot my worries about Jenny and Dave, almost chased away the shadows of the dead girls.

  But all the time, Mya's card sat in my purse, waiting for me to use it.

  Christmas and New Year passed in a blur of clinking glasses and excessive food, the start of the Big Freeze. I got a card from Jenny saying that things had gone so well with the film and its director, Robert Mannings, that they had gone and got married. On Christmas Eve in the Eternal City – I envied her the romance of it all, not to mention the climate. As 1964 dawned in blizzards and ice, Toby started work on a new series of canvasses, while Jackie and I found ourselves gracing the cover of Vogue, alongside a brace of other young designers, as the people putting London on the style map.

  Then, on the first night of February, I fell asleep and into another horrific world. When the papers confirmed what I'd seen wasn't just a nightmare, but the murder of a real girl, someone called Sue Houghton, I reached the card out of my handbag, dialled the number and held my breath.

  Mya told me to come over right away.

  She answered the door herself, her little round face more lined than the last time I had seen her, her hair a shade greyer, but her eyes still bright and clear.

  “Come in, my dear,” she said. “I'm so glad you found us.”

  “Thank you for seeing me at such short notice,” I said.

  “Not at all, I was expecting you. Please, come through.”

  “How's Cedric?” I asked, as she led me into a room at the front of the house that looked more or less like any normal sitting room would do, but for the framed photographs along the wall of Winifred Moyes, Sir Arthur Conon Doyle and a host of other Spiritualists in black lace or mutton chop whiskers; the crystal ball on the middle of the dining table.

  “He's very well, thank you dear,” she said, ushering me into an armchair by the fireplace. “Thank you for asking. But let's talk about you first, you have a lot to tell me don't you? A lot of trouble on your mind.”

  She sat down opposite me, fixed me with an intent stare. “Give me your hand a minute.”

  The moment our fingers touched, I realised we were not going to ‘talk’ in the normal way. It was going to be like the time I had first met her, at the AGOG party at Chris and Dave's, when I'd somehow lost half an hour in her company. She was going to read my mind. No wonder she was so good in the circus, I thought, before my eyelids drooped.

  I reach into my handbag for another purple heart, my black patent leather handbag that I have filled with everything I need to take me away from here and into my new life. I have £27 10s in my brown plastic purse, the diary I got from the bookies with all my secret numbers, my powder compact and my tissues, my cigarettes but one thing missing – a picture of her. Her who I left sleeping in her cot: How would you like a new Mammy, bonny lass, this one has never done you any good, after all. A prayer that she will never see what I have seen, never be what I have been. Her who I left sleeping while her Daddy snored next door, while I stole away on the bus down the long avenue, the avenue with all the trees where I knew men and they knew me, took me to their parties and made a fool out of me, stripped me and slapped me and snapped me.

  My heart constricts with rage as the speed hits home, tightness in my chest as I remember that big house up in Eaton Square, the man in the gorilla suit fucking me senseless to an audience of the great and the good, staring at me up on a minstrel's gallery with fucking masks on their faces and diamonds in their hair, laughing and laughing as he grinded and grinded, the scream in my throat that wouldn't come out, stuck there, lodged there for all time.

  Flit through the trees where everyone's on their knees, to another big house up in Kensington and men dressed as women and women dressed as men, women with harnesses strapped round their waists with big fucking dildos strapped round their waists, fucking me and sucking me and cameras out taking it all down, flash bang wallop! What a picture, what a photograph. Ernie in his studio, that dingy old house on Westbourne Grove, taking yet more for the family album, snapping away until there is nothing of me left, nothing but a shell of a woman taking purple hearts from a big black patent leather handbag, me on my way to Shepherd's Bush market, to the night coffee stand where he said he would meet me, he who will take me away from all of this and make me a proper woman again.

  We're going to live in Mortlake, he said, in a big house there, a proper house with a stream running through the back garden, with water to wash all the sins away, all the many sins that stain my thirty years on this earth. My halo a flashbulb and I get off the bus and I walk down Shepherd's Bush Green, my black leather court shoes clacking on the pavement, my best shoes, most demure shoes and I cross the road down the Goldhawk Road, towards the market, towards the night stand where I know he is waiting to take me away from all this, my aching body and my vacant soul.

  And I see him leaned up against his car, lighting a cigarette, cupping his hands to shelter the flame, big sheepskin coat against the cold of the night and as I do another car pulls up next to me and a fairground organ starts to play a distorted melody, like it's coming up through water, the water to wash my sins away. I look and see a long black car and in the back seat there are two women staring at me, but there is something wrong with them, their heads are on at funny angles. But they are staring at me and staring at me, this woman with the blue and white striped summer dress, this woman in mustard yellow and their eyes are round and their mouths are round, and I try to look away from them, look at the front of the car instead but the front seat is empty, there is no one there, this car is driving itself and I open my mouth and the long black car pulls away fast leaving me there on the corner of Goldhawk Road.

  Leaving me there with him, him who smiles by the light of the flame that ignites his cigarette, illuminates something moving in the back seat of his car. He who comes walking towards me and an alarm bell starts ringing, screaming Danger! Danger! And an alarm bell starts ringing, screaming Danger! Danger!…

  It had been the telephone that had pulled me out of the vision the first time. As my eyes opened now, it was the clock chiming the hour. Mya still had hold of my hand, her pupils completely dilated as she stared at me and for a moment I thought I saw her surrounded by the same blue light that was pouring out of them, a feeling of great power radiating through her. Then she let my hand drop and I blinked. She was back to being the little old lady that had let me through the door.

  “There is a lot of work for us to do,” she said. “The murdered women screamed out for help and you picked up their cries.” She made a counting motion with her hands while she spoke, as if the fingers that had touched mine continued to relay her information, but her piercing eyes never left mine. “It's not just because you are Sensitive, dear. Somehow there is a connection between you and whoever has been taking them. Think really hard and tell me, what do you think the connection could be?”

&nb
sp; “Over the road,” I said, fear crawling through me, the last image of something moving in the back of the car, a thick, black shape, death in men's clothing. “Lansdowne Studios. A man I lived next door to was working there at the time the first one was taken. He was trying to create a new sound, using radios to make strange effects. I heard him playing some of it, the very night I dreamt about the first one – I thought that his music had given me a nightmare. Later on, I found out he had also been playing with tarot cards, using a ouija board, holding amateur séances, all the things I was taught never to do. And he's still doing it, still looking for ghosts in churchyards, talking to black cats at midnight…” I cut myself short, realising how angry I sounded.

  “I mean,” I said, “I don't think he killed anyone, but I do think that all his messing about somehow let something through.”

  “How very interesting,” Mya said, nodding to herself as she digested the information. She pointed to one of the framed photographs that hung over the fireplace. “Do you know this man? Sir Oliver Lodge, his name is.”

  A melancholy-looking chap with a balding pate, bushy eyebrows and a beard that pointed upwards, flecked with white streaks that were matched by the wavy hair that ran over his ears. I might have seen him before, in one of Grandpa's books of distinguished Spiritualists, but I couldn't place him.

  “The inventor of the wireless,” Mya enlightened me. “Sir Oliver worked on the theory of what we call the aether, that everything in time and space is operating on its own particular frequency and if we learn how to tune in, we can tap in and out like a radio does. It might help you to understand what you still find so hard about all of this.”

  “Of course,” a spark went off in my head, “that's what it felt like, tuning into them.”

  “Everyone has their own wavelength,” said Mya, “the vibrations that keep us here and keep us whole. But that frequency changes at the moment we pass, as if the dial on the radio had suddenly slipped. Your dial keeps tuning into the last moments of transmission, the SOS signal, if you like.”