Bad Penny Blues Page 4

  I stood well back as it belched and gurgled into action, spurting a jet of boiling water into the curry pan, pausing for a second to make vomiting noises, then steadying itself into a more reasonable flow. When I had filled both pans, I turned the tap back off with a teatowel over my hand. The exertion had already left it red hot.

  In the cupboard on the wall I found a jar of aspirins, filled a glass from the more reliable cold water tap and drank them down. I would have a quick bath while the pans soaked, I thought, then I'd see about breakfast.

  The electricity meter was in the hall, and we kept a jug full of pennies beside it to keep it fed. Another bargain from Portobello, it was a Spanish water pitcher with a gay painting of a cockerel on the side that I liked to think was one of Picasso's. It wasn't, of course, but there was a sizeable Spanish community around here, displaced from Gibraltar during the War, who sold plenty of crockery like this, along with delicious olives, jamon and cheese on the market stalls. Like the West Indians, who had started to come over at the beginning of the decade, they gave this ramshackle place a colour and vibrancy all of its own.

  It was so different from the digs in glum Earl's Court that I had taken when I first moved down here. The houses here were similar to the ones there – early Victorian stucco turned almost black with dirt and soot, carved into guesthouses and cheap rooms to accommodate as many transients as possible. But there was an aura of dank melancholy that hung over the rooftops like a shroud there. It was full of pubs catering to a steady trade of dispossessed alcoholics, ancient prostitutes and hobbling War veterans with hollow, staring eyes. Here it was far, far different. A secret world where every doorway was hiding a new intrigue and different types of music pumped under every floorboard, from American jazz to Jamaican ska to Irish rebel songs.

  Of course, a lot of people said that it was a dangerous area. Last summer there had been a full-scale riot, started by racialist Teddy Boys from Notting Dale. It had gone on for days, and even now the Fascists were still trying to stir up trouble. Oswald Mosley was out canvassing for the local elections, hateful slogans were daubed on the walls and a coloured man called Kelso Cochrane had been stabbed to death on the railway bridge in Westbourne Park only a month ago. But things hadn't turned out the way Mosley wanted. Instead the residents had bandied together to follow Cochrane's funeral cortege down Ladbroke Grove, over a thousand of them, black and white. The world was changing and it really felt like here was where that change would begin. As far as I could see, it was the only place for an artist to be.

  Now that I had completed my first year at the Royal, I could consider myself an artist, and I couldn't resist wandering back to the front room as my bath filled up to view the proof. It had been Toby's idea that one of the geometric designs I had been working on should become a mural at the far end of the room. The Point of No Return, he called it, it was black and white lines disappearing into circles and over false horizons, something I'd worked out doing technical drawing at school and had been playing about with ever since. I'd even utilized it to make screenprinted scarves and shopping bags, some of which I'd sold to admirers who had seen me wearing my own. I was studying General Art and Design, but Toby reckoned I could easily branch out into fashion if I wanted.

  Toby had added his own signature to our mural, something that came directly from his work. A big, red circle in the top right corner, a little trail of smaller ones in the bottom left. These were his ‘notes’, for Toby, the Fine Artist, was developing his own style of painting, based on the strange jazz records by Roland Kirk and Charles Mingus that he bought from an even stranger couple of guys who had their own record shop on Ledbury Road.

  I had found that music difficult to get into at first, but after a while, it made sense. The records were atmospheres, filmic dreams, suggesting the shapes of stories and letting you fill in the pictures in your head. Or in Toby's case, across many canvasses, where the notes became blurs and blobs of colour and light, as if he were capturing sound. One of the guys from the jazz shop had told Toby about a couple of his friends who were running a gallery out of a semi-derelict house nearby and he was hoping to have his first exhibition there soon.

  I studied our mural delightedly, feet sticking to the painted-splattered dustsheets on the floor. It had really turned out better than I had ever hoped.

  Just like the rest of my life.

  It was only just over a year ago that the letter from the Royal had come, promising me the chance of a future far away from the tall chimneys and dull canals of the Black Country. A moment of bittersweet joy, for it was my Pa who had so wanted me to follow my muse all the way, not to give in to the conformity of what the rest of the world expected. Pa, who had spent his own teenage years in the bloody trenches of Normandy. He would have been so proud of that letter.

  But Pa was five years gone by the time it arrived, a victim of a horrible disease called Ankylosing spondylitis, which caused his spine to curve forward until he was bent in half, humiliating and deforming him before it led to the kidney failure that eventually killed him. But even with all the pain that he went through and the foreknowledge that he was going to die, he never stopped encouraging me, never stopped being my gentle, funny, loving Pa.

  “The most important thing in life,” he told me, “is never to grow up.”

  After he passed, life became gradually more unbearable. Ma was struck more by terror than by grief, the terror of being without a husband, an emptiness that I could in no way compensate for. Both my maternal grandparents followed Pa into the grave shortly afterwards, leaving the pair of us still more bereft and alienated from each other. It pushed me into my studies. I took my A-levels in Art, English and TD, and at the same time, attended night classes at the local art school for an Ordinary National Diploma, building up the portfolio that would get me into the Royal, mixing with the students in our one coffee shop afterwards, stretching out my 9pm curfew to its limits.

  Then Ma came home with another man. A fat, red-faced man called Dennis, whom she had met in church, of all places. A man like that never should have been anywhere near our church. I was deeply suspicious of him and my last year at home had been one of exquisite torture that only the letter had relieved.

  But, I reflected as I lowered myself into the now full bath, in a way, it had been our mothers that had bonded Toby and me. Strained maternal relations was one of the things we had in common, that had turned our relationship serious.

  I met Toby at the Fresher's Ball, thanks to the only other girl on my course, a short, vivacious northerner called Jackie whom I also shared digs with in Earl's Court. Jackie had done her foundation course in York, along with a serious-looking beatnik called George, who was now in Toby's class at the Royal. We ended up sharing a table that night and the party carried on throughout the rest of term. Together we had explored all the delights of London, from the jazz clubs in the bombsites of Tottenham Court Road to the Angry Young Men at the Royal Court in the King's Road. Then, just after Christmas, Toby had proposed.

  We waited until I turned 21 before we married at Chelsea Town Hall, with Jackie and George as witnesses. Afterwards we drank Champagne and ate steaks in Au Père de Nico's, nearby on the King's Road. Then I gathered up my belongings from Earl's Court and decamped to Ladbroke Grove.

  I had sent Ma a postcard from my ‘honeymoon’, a picture of a red London bus. I didn't know if she'd received it yet, or if she would even care when she did. There was not a lot she could do about it now.

  I stepped out of the bath onto the new, black and white lino we had laid down a few days previously. The bathroom was the first room we'd done, the easiest one. The white paint sparkled off the walls through the frosted glass window. Our whole idea for the flat was to make it fairly austere with just a few eye-catching pieces in each room, the mural being the pulling point of the front room. In here, it was a big Rococo mirror we'd hung above the sink – it looked somehow ridiculous and imaginative at the same time.

  I wrapped one of t
he big, fluffy white towels we had got from Woolworths around me. The headache had gone, replaced with nothing worse than hunger pains. I thought of fresh bread from the bakery, fresh oranges from the market to squeeze for juice, the prospect of finding more treasure on the stalls and of Toby's exhibition. I let my memories gurgle away like the water down the plughole and got ready to get on with the day.

  3 MEAN STREAK

  “The old men who are supposed to be in charge of this country have sat back and watched a crisis develop without lifting so much as a finger. While they live it up in Hampstead, Highgate, the Cotswolds and Bournemouth, ordinary, working-class, white Britons are forced to live next door to people who are used to an entirely different way of life. You know what I'm talking about, don't you?”

  A cheer rose up from the throng surrounding the flatbed truck on the corner of Ladbroke Grove and Lancaster Road. The speaker was an unprepossessing man, short and slight, dressed in an immaculate double-breasted grey suit, a starched shirt and tie, with a severe haircut that accentuated his high widow's peak.

  Yet the words that he'd been casting across the assembly at the street corner, a turnout of working men from the coal and coke yard in their blackened shirtsleeves, drinkers lured over from the Kensington Park Hotel across the way, housewives in their headscarves and the Teddy Boys who acted as stewards, were evincing a rapid transformation.

  “Carnivals in the street!” he raged, the words filling his meagre frame with an electrifying fury. His audience, captivated now, boomed back their approval.

  “Jungle rhythms pounding out at all hours of the day and night! Free sex and lots of it!”

  Pete stood under the streetlight on the opposite corner to the ranting man, just outside the KPH. Through the open door of the saloon bar, he could see a handful of men drinking in quiet determination to ignore the hullabaloo on the street outside. From the length of time he'd been in Notting Hill – two months now, as an aid – he knew that most of the regulars at this pub-cum-b&b were Irish. Mosley's Unionists had been playing hard for their support, recalling his condemnation of the black and tans in the Twenties, when the then youthful firebrand Labour MP had been the only politician to rail about the injustices in Ireland in Parliament. But despite his diligent doorstep visits, his incessant, snake-charmer repartee, there was a hardcore here defiantly turning a deaf ear. Like the drinkers in the KPH. Among them sat a huge black West Indian, with the build of a boxer and a look of cold fury in his eyes as he stared straight ahead of him, a vein pumping on his temple, slowly cracking the knuckles of each hand over and over again.

  Pete had wanted to experience something beyond the mundane beat of Chiswick and now he had got it. The streets around Ladbroke Grove were like a frontier town in the Wild West, roughly divided into three territories. To his right, down Lancaster Road and up to Latimer Road was the area known as Notting Dale and it was from the little rows of cottages there that most of these Teddy Boys sprang. To his left, on the other side of Portobello Road, were the roads owned by the Polish landlord Peter Rachman, whose houses overflowed with West Indians. Down the middle of Rachman's lands, joining Ladbroke Grove to Royal Oak, ran Westbourne Park Road. To its north, the immense coal and coke yard sprawled down the side of the Grand Union canal, to the south a warren of streets inhabited by the Irish.

  There were other immigrant communities here – Spanish, Indians, a smattering of Portuguese and a subculture of writers and artists drawn by the cheap rents and shady, shifting atmosphere of the place. But the Teds, the West Indians and the Irish, there were your fighters. To Pete's wide eyes it seemed that on every corner, at ever hour of the day and night, there was a brawl taking place. Be it Teds jibing at the equally dandified young coloured men, or a posse of drunks supporting each other while they took turns to vomit into the gutter, all the men here hunted in packs with the women screeching on their encouragement from the sidelines.

  Tonight's BUP rally was another way of exploiting these tensions. Oswald Mosley was an old man now, 63, the firebrand of the Left turned disgraced Fascist who'd spent the War in prison, washed-up, Pete would have thought, to everyone's ears but his own. But the lieutenant who was working up the crowd for him now obviously thought different. Thought he had tapped into something here.

  During the riots last summer, a lot of Pete's new colleagues had told him, it wasn't just Teddy Boys stirring things up. There'd been others amongst them, older faces, posher accents urging the violence on. Two of Mosley's sons went about dressed like Teds themselves, he'd seen pictures of them in The Daily Mirror, dandies playing at thugs.

  As he scanned the faces in the crowd, Pete wondered if there were any agents provocateurs here amongst them. Wondered if this mob needed any more stoking before the fuse was lit and things turned ugly. He was well aware of the powerful effects that a good speaker could have on those who already had rebellion pumping through their veins; he had seen the shop stewards at work outside the pit back home. But this meeting was for a different end to the justice those men had demanded for the miners. This was a corrupt and evil gathering. His skin prickled in the heat of the late summer evening. In the civvies he now wore to blend in with the crowd, he missed the feel of the baton on his belt for the first time since coming out of uniform.

  There were a couple of beat bobbies from F Division that had drifted over as the rally began and now stood further down the pavement on his side of Lancaster Road, feigning a calm interest, chatting to a group of men who had taken their pint glasses outside to watch. But Pete could see they were as alert for trouble as he was. His job as an aid was hardly different from theirs, he was sent to patrol the streets looking for opportunist criminals as well as getting a feel for the neighbourhood and recognising the persistent sources of trouble. The problem was, keeping track of them all, there were so many rackets going on in the Grove.

  “And what do I say to these immigrants?” the orator continued his tirade. “I say look, my friends, you have beautiful warm islands with clear blue skies and warm, warm seas where you can swim. You have wonderful golden beaches. Go back and dance on them, not on our staircases at night.”

  In the lounge bar of the KPH, a white man put his hand on the shoulder of the West Indian boxer, who looked up at him and shook his head, then spat on the floor.

  “Yeah,” bellowed a thickset Ted standing yards in front of Pete, his chest puffed out and his hands deep in his pockets. “Send ’em all home!”

  His companion, an acne-riddled beanstalk in an oversized mauve drape coat laughed hard and added a familiar taunt: “Lassie for dogs, Kitty Kat for wogs!”

  They didn't sound like the offspring of a Knight and a Mitford deb.

  Pete shifted uneasily from his left foot to his right. One of the beat bobbies had come forwards a bit, to the edge of the crowd, while the other stayed where he was, keeping his back. Another couple appeared at the corner of Westbourne Park Road, outside the big old Elgin pub there, a villainous dive where Mosley did a lot of his canvassing. If any more of them turned up, Pete realised, the thieves around the rest of the Grove would have a field day. Maybe it was time he moved along himself.

  Still a new face on this patch, he wasn't supposed to give himself away as a copper until the moment he made an arrest. He'd been deliberately keeping his profile low, getting himself acquainted with the clientele of the pubs that demarked the unseen boundaries of the territory. The KPH had been this evening's first port of call and he had intended to work his way via the Elgin up to Portobello, where trouble of a differing kind from Mosley's rabble-rousing had been anticipated.

  In a few hours, at midnight tonight, a new law came into effect that was poised to have a dramatic impact on the nefarious business of this neighbourhood. The Street Offences Act would make it a crime for a prostitute to loiter or solicit in a street or public place, including all those shady little mews and unlit passageways that bisected the streets and squares around here.

  The places Bobby Clarke had known. />
  It wasn't just because the area offered more scope for his brain than Chiswick that Pete had asked for a transfer to Notting Hill nick, although this was what he told himself and the divisional chief at the interview. The Chief Superintendent at Hammersmith had viewed his request with one eyebrow raised but let him go anyway. They needed men who were keen for this kind of work.

  Pete was still haunted by Bobby, and her killer, who was still at large. At the inquest, just two days ago, DI Bell's summation to the coroner's jury had been an echo of the words Pete spoke to him on the riverbank: “My impression is that she was not strangled where the body was found, but it looks as if the crime was committed elsewhere.” Despite a nationwide appeal and a fine-tooth-comb search for her bag and shoes, they had come no further than that.

  Now Pete had seen for himself the spot where Harvey Webb had set her down that night on Holland Park Avenue, where the girls all waited under the tall plane trees. It was just five minutes’ walk from his base at the top of Ladbroke Grove. He'd hung around the coffee stand by Holland Park tube station and spoken to a few of them. Some had made him as a copper straight off and refused to pass the time of day, but there were a couple of girls, younger ones, who hadn't minded admitting that the crime had really spooked them, that they had taken new precautions since then. Many had started working in pairs, so that one could take down the number plate of any car her friend got into, just in case she never came back. Between them, they had tried to finger a likely candidate for the murderer from the pool of knowledge they had of the men that used this part of town on a regular basis. But as one girl had told him:

  “There's so many queers out there, how can you really tell? But, if you ask me it's the ones who don't act queer you have to be more careful of. The ones who act respectable…”