That Old Black Magic Read online

  “She sings and cooks like an angel,” Norrie had informed him. “He spends his life in the pub down the street playing the piano and the black market. You’ll thank me for this.”

  As Janet opened the door to him, Spooner could see how well she had absorbed the skills of stagecraft. Her hair was the colour of conkers, pinned up around a face illuminated by bright green eyes and a red smile. Though now in her forties, she had kept her figure and manicured fingernails, despite her daily grind of washing, polishing, sweeping and conjuring enough food for her guests.

  The Ross Spooner she was expecting to receive was a talent scout, sent up from London by her former manager – which was what was proclaimed on the card Spooner proffered to her at just gone four o’clock that afternoon. Janet looked from this to the young man standing there. He wore green tweeds, flecked with orange and blue, a pale yellow shirt and burgundy waistcoat. A red Paisley bow tie, inexpertly fashioned, flopped around his collar and his glasses tilted over the bridge of his nose. His hair, set free from the grease that had previously confined it, sprouted up in corkscrew waves.

  “Ah, hello, Mr Spooner.” The smile with which she greeted him left no doubt that this transformation had passed muster. “I do hope you had a pleasant journey. Please, let me show you to your room.”

  Spooner followed her up the stairs, catching sight of himself in the mirror by the coat stand as he passed. Norrie had helped design this new look, which Spooner created from items rescued from the back of his wardrobe that had been given to him when he first left home. He looked like one of the self-styled aesthetes who gathered on the Occult floor of his father’s bookshop. Some of them had worn smoking caps, others had a monocle to peer through, but none of them was a frequent visitor to the barber’s shop. As a youngster, he had been almost as fascinated by them and their disregard for conventional attire as he had been by the books themselves and, as he blinked back at his reflection, he still couldn’t believe it had been so simple to become one of them. Nor yet understand why it was that he felt so much more at home in this disguise.

  The final part of it was a battered diary-cum-address book, which contained the details of all Triple-U’s native to the Midlands who might know how to perform a Black Mass, alongside actual showbiz contacts supplied by Norrie. As a precaution, this tome had been prematurely aged in tea and roughed up at the edges until it resembled the sort of dog-earned aide-memoire anyone in his new profession might be expected to keep in their inside jacket pocket.

  At the top of the stairs, Janet turned to him. “I’ve given you the best seat in the house, dear. Any friend of Norrie’s…” She opened the door on a small but cosy room, with a sloping roof and a skylight that looked out over an undulating vista of roof tops; the green tiles, golden spires and red brick crenellations fashioned by the Victorians, and beyond, the tall chimneys and cooling towers that formed the sooty crown of the industrialists. A clean towel had been hung under the hand basin, there were coat hangers adorned with lavender bags inside the wardrobe and, on the bedside chest of drawers, stood a green reading lamp. There was a desk beneath the window with books lined up against the wall, and a tiny glass vase in which Mrs Howell had arranged a sprig of heather. The new Spooner drank in these creature comforts – lavish by the standards of his digs in Woodstock – and felt instantly at home.

  “Now, will you have everything you need here?” his landlady enquired. “I spoke to Norrie about you using the telephone,” she raised one eyebrow a fraction, “and you can take the private one in our office whenever you need to, you just let me know. Breakfast is between seven and eight. I’m afraid there’s not much I can offer you, things being the way they are, but I can guarantee you’ll have porridge, toast and marmalade.”

  “Sounds perfect,” Spooner said. “Thank you very much, Mrs Howell. Oh, and—” he put his father’s battered old leather briefcase down on the bed and extracted a small, beautifully wrapped package of French chocolates from it, “these are from Norrie.”

  The landlady took them from him with a gasp of delight. She smelled of lavender and even her floral work pinafore had been fashioned from a pattern in Vogue. This mixture of fastidiousness with lingering traces of glamour reminded Spooner of his grandma.

  “Oh, do call me Janet, dear.” She twinkled a smile. “Everyone I like does. Now, would you like a cup of tea after your long journey? You must be dying of thirst.”

  An hour later, he was still sitting in the lounge, on his third cup of tea and picking at the remains of a second cheese scone. Apart from the William Morris-style wallpaper, Staffordshire dogs and pots of aspidistras, his surroundings were not so different from those of his recent work experience: around the walls hung a rogue’s gallery of framed publicity stills for all manner of performers, each of them signed to Janet and Bob.

  Clara Brown was not among their number.

  The Chief had given Spooner a copy of Kohl’s photograph to take with him. Norrie had studied her with a frown; expressing his bewilderment that one so beautiful could have become involved in such a terrible thing.

  Kohl told the Chief that Clara had been famous before the war. He first met her when she was fronting a popular orchestra in a prestigious café club in Hamburg, where he was living in the early thirties. They had fallen in love and taken an apartment together, despite the fact that Kohl was married; splitting himself between two worlds was nothing new for him and besides, they didn’t get to spent too much time there together.

  Clara spent long periods travelling, her engagements taking her all over Europe and into influential circles. It had been her idea that he should start learning English properly. Kohl was no longer sure if that had been part of a scheme to start a new life together in a different country or a forewarning of things to come. Clara had always known a lot of important people in the military, even before the war. It was she whom he credited for his surprising selection for the Abwehr, a feat she had been able to achieve only once she had firmly established her own importance to them.

  Kohl had been transferred to Dulwich hospital after his interrogation at Camp 020, and the Chief continued to visit him. Though he had been treated for his broken ankle and the effects of exposure, he remained frail and his mind seemed to be deteriorating in pace with the news that signals to Clara continued to disappear into the ether without receiving a reply, as if he were fading along with his imagined lifeline.

  Having not been present at any of the Chief’s interviews, Spooner had assembled his own picture of the hapless spy from their briefings. He had learned that Kohl had been born to German parents in Luxembourg in 1898, the strange dialect the doctor in Ramsey had noted him speaking in his delirium being Lëtzebuergesch, a mixture of German, French and Dutch. He had served as a soldier in the First War, a horror he was not keen to revisit, and had begun the second in the much safer backrooms of the German meteorological service – perhaps another of Clara’s string-pulling exercises to keep him out of harm’s way until he could be parachuted back to her in England. Spooner wondered what their attraction had been and how it had kept them together for so long.

  Part of it was down to the amulet he had worn around his neck, the symbol of Baphomet. Kohl claimed that he and Clara had been bound together in a ritual marriage more powerful than the Christian vows he had made to the wife he had discarded. But Kohl’s beliefs had been tested too far the moment he was hanging over the hatch of the Heinkel, when he had, he admitted, called upon his old God for mercy. He had convinced himself it was this moment of weakness that had doomed the pair of them.

  The Chief was, however, dubious about Kohl’s ability to tell the whole truth, even when his life depended on it. He had discovered that a large part of the lovers’ estrangement in the thirties had been the three years Kohl had spent in a Swiss jail for dealing in counterfeit gold and fake passports.

  “I don’t know why it is,” the Chief surmised, “but there are certain women that find this kind of shiftless bastard irresistible. Agen
t Belladonna would appear to be one of them.”

  “She’s a pretty girl,” Janet now added her tuppenny’s worth. “But I’m afraid there’s something I don’t like about her. What kind of singer did you say she was? Oh!” the sound of the front door opening distracted her. “There’s our Bob.” She got to her feet as her husband, almost obscured by the amount of bulging brown paper sacks he was carrying, barrelled into the room.

  “Bob, dear!” Janet cried delightedly. “Are these all for me?”

  As she began the process of relieving him of his burdens, Bob was gradually revealed. He was an inch taller than his wife, with a barrel-shaped chest and long legs. When his arms were free enough for him to unwrap the large, hand-knitted scarf and take off his flat cap, there was a handsome face with high cheekbones, hardly marred by his glass left eye, the result of an industrial accident in his youth that, he had told Norrie, he considered a blessing as it had saved him from fighting in the First War.

  “This is Ross,” Janet introduced him, “Norrie’s new scout, up from London. Why don’t you two get acquainted while I take all this through to the kitchen? My word,” she peered into the top of a package, “this must be my lucky day.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” Bob smiled, removed a glove and offered his hand to shake. “Bob Howell, at your service, kid. Now, d’you reckon there’s enough tea in that pot to stretch to a cup for this poor old devil?”

  Having divested himself of his outer layers, Bob sat down in the seat that Janet had vacated. “Just a little bit of milk, please,” he directed. “And two sugars. Now, who’s this?” he picked up the picture of Clara his wife had left on the arm of the chair.

  “Ach, she’s one of the singers Norrie wanted me to take a look at on my trip, if I can find her,” Spooner explained, stirring in the sugar and putting the cup down on the table in front of his host. “Clara Brown. She’s supposed to be local.”

  “Is that right?” Bob frowned at the photograph. “Funny. The face does look familiar, but I don’t think I could have told you her name. What kind of music we talking about?”

  “I’m told she’s a very strong jazz voice,” said Spooner, repeating the spiel Norrie had formulated. “A distinctive style as well as a look. See, I’m trying to find some better singers for the dance bands that are playing the big hotels in London just now. There’s a real demand for them, but it’s hard to get it right – a lot of the musicians we’re using have come from classical backgrounds and they’re just too stiff. I’m looking for someone who can give it a bit more, well, swing. And I’ve been told she fits the bill.”

  Bob nodded. “Tell you what, I’ve got a regular spot Fridays, playing piano in the pub at the end of the road here. Why don’t you pop in later and I’ll help you ask around? Someone’s bound to know her.”

  This was exactly what Spooner had been hoping to hear. “That’s very kind of you,” he said, glancing at the clock on the mantelpiece. He was now only half an hour away from his first appointment, at the Hippodrome on Hurst Street. Its exiled Cockney manager, Bertram Adams, was another old pal of Norrie’s, who apparently kept a record of his signings that was the Rosetta Stone of show business. “What time are you on?”

  “I start at eight,” said Bob, “and after that, they can’t stop me. I’ll go on ’til they throw me out.”

  4

  YOU AND THE NIGHT AND THE MUSIC

  Saturday, 15 February 1941

  The manager of the Hippodrome was waiting on the bottom step of his establishment, built in 1895 and boasting a soaring Moorish tower that was currently more of a source of grief than pride to him. He was holding a torch so that it pooled enough light around him to render him visible, smoking a cigar and making routine glances up towards the sky.

  “Ross Spooner, ain’t it? Norrie’s boy? Bertie Adams, pleased to meet ya,” he offered his hand through the window Spooner had lowered to greet him. “Lovely motor you got there, son.” He removed the cigar from his lips and caressed the paintwork with his gaze. “You want to put that round the back. Don’t want her getting too many admiring glances, know what I mean?” He returned the cigar to his mouth and gave the street the same kind of penetrating glare he had been shooting up at the sky earlier. “Let me show you,” he said, opening the passenger door and hopping in. “Just turn her right here,” he said, pointing the torch out of the window, “next to the bombsite. That’s it.”

  As he made the manoeuvre, Spooner saw that whatever had once stood next to the Hippodrome had been reduced to another pile of twisted metal, brick and ash.

  “Must have been a close shave,” he observed.

  “Yerse. Tony’s Ballroom, that was,” Bertie nodded sanguinely. “Took a direct hit. We was luckier; an hour away from opening time when the raid started and all my staff was already in. I got everyone up on the roof and caught all them bleedin’ little incendiaries they was dropping, put out every last one of ’em. Took all night and I had to sacrifice one of me best dress shirts to use as mittens. Still worries me every night, that bleedin’ tower – it’s a landmark for the Boche, ain’t it? That’s it, son, pull her in over here, next to me old Jag there.”

  Spooner parked beside a gleaming silver Roadster. “Perfect.” Adams nodded. “You’ll be safe here, son. Even if I have to go back up the bleedin’ roof again to make sure of it.” He gave a loud guffaw. “This way.”

  Spooner followed his host through a door and along a corridor that passed around the back of the stage. He could hear a comedian doing his patter and the oceanic roar of a full house showing their appreciation. Trotting ahead of him, Adams’ stocky, bandy-legged frame was covered in a blue dogtooth suit, his black hair swept around his bullet-shaped head in artful waves. He looked every inch the ringmaster.

  Opening his office door, Bertie cleared a sheaf of papers from a chair and pulled it out to face the one at his desk while Spooner stood staring. The room was chock-full of stage props: balsa wood palm trees, stuffed birds in ornate cages, fabric flowers and ostrich plumes, and framed playbills for entertainments stretching back into the last century. A crystal chandelier hung overhead and a ring of filing cabinets lined the walls. Everything was covered in a layer of fine dust and the musty smell of Adams’ cigars.

  “Now then,” his host disappeared from view as he rummaged in his desk drawers then emerged, triumphant, with a bottle of Scotch and two glasses. “Here we go. Now we can get down to business.”

  “To business,” Spooner agreed, knocking back a slug. Though he would have preferred to be prudent, he didn’t think his new alter ego would refuse such hospitality. Besides, it was good quality Scotch. “Now then,” he opened his briefcase. He had more gifts to bestow and this time, besides the box of cigars, there was some legitimate business from Norrie: contracts and publicity photographs of new acts he was sending to Adams. In exchange, Adams went through a similar list for him, which included three musicians intended for the over-stretched hotel ballrooms of the Smoke. Two of them were performing on the bill that evening, so Spooner could judge for himself how good they were, the other was so well known to both parties they didn’t need an audition, and would be on the first train the next morning.

  This business talk and mutual contract signing took around half an hour, before the way was clear to Spooner’s real purpose. Returning his signed papers to the briefcase, he brought Clara out to show his host. “I think Norrie mentioned that we were also trying to find this woman: Clara Brown. She’s quite a memorable face, hasn’t she?” he said hopefully.

  “Yerse, Norrie did say there might be one for the old ledger,” Bertie said, taking the photograph. To Spooner’s relief, his expression suggested recognition. After Bob’s response, Spooner had started to wonder if Clara might just have been a German hausfrau after all, her jazz-singer-spy persona either the product of Kohl’s delirious ramblings or a desperate bid to keep himself from the firing squad. But that was a chance the Chief had not been prepared to take.

  “That’s one si
ngular boat race, all right. And she does ring a few bells. But I can do one better than the Memory Man.” Bertie tapped on the side of his nose and winked. Swivelling around in his chair, he opened the bottom drawer of a filing cabinet with a key kept on his fob chain, brought up a leather-bound tome and placed it on the table.

  “I’ve kept this book over thirty years,” he explained, “and I’ve been up ’ere in Brum for the last five of ’em. This is me Bible, son. If I ever booked this gel before, then she’ll be in here.” He rubbed his palms together and opened it up.

  Inside was a list of names and numbers, arranged under colour-coded sections relating to the nature of the acts. Each entry included the dates they had been engaged and comments to remind Bertie about a performer’s work and other qualities that might encourage him to book them again – or not. This minutiae was rendered in a special coded shorthand, so that, should the disaster ever occur that it fell into a rival’s hands, it would appear incomprehensible.

  “Clara Brown,” he said, flicking through his list of singers. “Nothing under that name, but…” he trailed a nicotine-stained finger down the edge of the page, licked the end of it and turned the leaf over, “bear with me, son. I can feel something stirring.” Without looking up, he poured them both another drink.

  “Nah, nah,” Bertie flicked through another page, showering the table with ash. “Not ’er, not ’er and definitely not ’er but, ’old on a minute,” he bent forward, a smile spreading across his face, “’ere we go. Spellbound,” he read, his finger travelling across his own tiny lettering. “Female musical duo. Songs of theatre and music hall, folk tunes and murder ballads, performed on piano and violin. Clara Brown and Anna Hartley. And look here,” he studied the attendant cryptography. “Anna’s a blonde, scrapes the catgut. Clara’s a redhead, plays the Joanna. Go down well with the table-tappers, I’ve put here.” He laughed, looking up. Then his focus shifted beyond Spooner, as the words kindled sparks of memory. “Yerse, that’s right,” he said. “I do remember this pair. They had a lot of ginger old songs about ghosts and witches. Folk songs they collected.” His gaze returned to Spooner. “And that’s the sort of fing you’re after, is it? I thought Norrie wanted jazz singers?”