Cathi Unsworth is a novelist, writer and editor who lives and works in . She began her career on the legendary music weekly Sounds at the age of nineteen and has worked as a writer and editor for many other music, film and arts magazines since, including Bizarre, Melody Maker, Mojo, Uncut, Volume and Deadline. Her first novel, The Not Knowing, was published by Serpent’s Tail in 2005, followed the next year with the short story compendium London Noir, which she edited, and in 2007 with the punk noir novel The Singer. Bad Penny Blues is her third novel.

More at www.cathiunsworth.co.uk

Praise for Bad Penny Blues ‘In Bad Penny Blues, Cathi Unsworth fashions a magnificent tapestry of period and place, confirming her status as one of Britain’s most potent writers of noir. The exciting, dangerous, experimental mood of Notting Hill is conveyed with realistic harshness and a tinge of nostalgia’ Marcel Berlins, The Times ‘The author has been compared to cult noirist Derek Raymond, but here she enters a pantheon of writers exploring London lowlife that extends from Patrick Hamilton and Colin MacInnes’ Christopher Fowler, Financial Times ‘Cements her reputation for eerie plots, evocative settings and deeply- drawn characters… should propel her into a new league ****’ Henry Sutton, Daily Mirror ‘There’s something about the textured layers of Cathi Unsworth’s third novel that effortlessly draw the reader into the dark and disturbing environment she creates… Unsworth lives up to her growing reputation as one of the UK’s stars of noir crime fiction, combining hardboiled prose with vivid characters and a lucid sense of place’ Yasmin Sulaiman, The List ‘The kind of swinging rock/n/roll crime novel that your folks should have warned you about. Set in the seedy London of the ’50s and ’60s, it’s one quality counter-cultural thriller… What more could you want for company on a dark winter’s night?’ NME

Praise for The Singer ‘A cracking page-turner that feels authentic, authoritative and evocative. And it’s beautifully written. This is a bloody good book’ Val McDermid ‘Brilliantly paced, plotted and stylish crime novel from the hugely talented and highly original Cathi Unsworth’ Daily Mirror ‘If Cathi Unsworth’s searing debut novel, The Not Knowing, was the perfect sound check, The Singer is the incredible show that everyone should be talking about…Gritty, raw with an authenticity that proves the author knows her stuff. Quite simply, Cathi Unsworth rocks’ Daily Record ‘[An] excellent slice of muso-noir…gripping’ Metro ‘This is not just essential reading, it’s also the ultimate punk noir novel’ Bizarre

The Not Knowing ‘Brilliantly executed with haunting religious imagery, interesting minor characters, great rock ’n’ roll references and a spectacular ending. The Not Knowing is a cool and clever debut. Sleep on it at your peril’ Diva ‘Hugely entertaining debut from a future star of gritty urban crime literature’ Mirror ‘Unsworth’s debut ushers the reader into an early ’90s twilight world of Ladbroke Grove bedsits, dingy magazine offices and seedy Camden pubs – a louche, lovingly evoked milieu…Unsworth has concocted a powerful story’ Time Out Bad Penny Blues

Cathi Unsworth A complete catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library on request

The right of Cathi Unsworth to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

Copyright © 2009 Cathi Unsworth

The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, dead or alive, is coincidental and not intended by the author. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

First published in 2009 by Serpent’s Tail, an imprint of Profile Books Ltd 3A Exmouth House Pine Street London EC1R 0JH website: www.serpentstail.com

ISBN 978 1 84668678 8

Designed and typeset by olio at Neuadd Bwll, Llanwrtyd Wells f Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

SGS-COC-2061 For Mum and Dad Consider the thought of re-incarnation as the ability to dissect the secret history inherent in our genetic coding and the multiple atrocities which have polluted our bloodlines. Contemplate suffering as an acute oversensitivity to geography and the army of ghosts which litter the landscape, who have given their lives leeched of blood to the whimsy of brutarians who denigrate life by celebrating death. Imagine that every stone, stairwell and street has absorbed the life, death and fear of everyone and everything that has come before you and your job is to give voice to this nightmare. This is my murder. Lydia Lunch, This is My Murder

We’ve kept an almost open mind and things have wandered in we’ve tolerated much and gone deaf with the din we’ve put up with the mess the stains, the smell, the crowd but now this thing that once was us drags chains and wears a shroud Shock Headed Peters, Hate on Sight Prologue

I step out of the car and on to the kerb, the clack of steel-tipped stilettos on pavement. The sound sends a crackle into the still air of 1.10 a.m., like a radio has suddenly been turned on between stations; a hiss of interference and the distant sound of garbled voices speaking in foreign tongues. I look back into the window of the black Morris Ten. He is leaning across the seat, an earnest smile on a battered face, one front tooth chipped, dark hair greased back off a furrowed forehead. Christ, he’s eager, I think. And then a dark wave sweeps through me: resignation, boredom, something close to madness tapping on the corner of my skull. I know what it is, it’s the feeling of being trapped. I want to get out of whatever it is I’ve got myself into but I don’t know how, I’m caught up in a current that’s taking me down. He’s saying something, but I can’t make out what it is, the sound of the radio is coming in louder, a sudden burst of an orchestra tuning up. But I hear myself talking back to him clearly, saying: ‘Half-past three.’ This seems to please him. His grin deepens along with the lines on his forehead and he says something else, pointing at the side of the road. It’s lost in the hiss of static, a sound like a toilet being flushed. Now he’s leaning back into his seat, putting his hand on the |||||| Cathi Unsworth |||||| gearstick, pulling away up the avenue, red tail lights under the trees, under the trees where nobody sees… A sudden eerie note rises up around me, like a church organ maybe, but distorted, echoing around the trees and the empty road. I shiver involuntarily. It has been hot, stifling all day, and I’ve got on my new summer dress, but suddenly I feel a chill wind blowing up from nowhere. The dress that Baby bought me, I think, and the thinking of that name prickles out the aches in my body. The back of my neck and my right arm feel heavy, pain beating a dull tattoo through my blood like a finger running down a plastic comb. I become aware of a cold wetness in my knickers, a fresher pain down there too, a reminder of where the man in the car has just been, where too many other people have already been before. These thoughts run into my mind unbidden and I don’t want them, memories swirl that need to be blotted out, lest those fingers start drumming louder on the side of my skull, the sparks of madness start to flare. I’m standing on the corner of this long, wide avenue next to a tube station that’s all shut up for the night. For some reason I can’t read the lettering over the door, can only make out an Art Nouveau swirl of letters, but I feel like I know this place, I have been here at this time of night many times before. The station stares back at me through blank, empty windows. Squat and silent, it sits back on the pavement, detached, like whatever else is going on round here is surely none of its business. I stroll past it, hearing the clack of my feet and the strange music, that distorted organ motif and the crackles of radiowaves, a sound like bubbles being blown under water. I turn around the corner, drawn towards it, and realise the music is coming from the building diagonally across the road from me. A high tower like a castle’s keep made out of red brick, little tiny windows all the way up it but just one light on, one yellow light, right at the top. The spook symphony is coming from the window, getting louder and louder.

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I suddenly think of a lighthouse, sweeping its beam across a dark and choppy sea. And the vision fills me with fear, like I have suddenly seen my death coming towards me, the light across the water, luring me to the rocks… I turn away, catching my breath, clutching my handbag tighter. I realise that whatever plans I have made for this night are all going to fall through, that the boy I am expecting to meet here is not going to come. He was just using me like everyone else, I think, laughing at me, at how stupid I am, how easy. I hurry away from the tower, back towards the tube and on to the avenue. I want to block the music from my head but it swims around me, laps at the corners of my brain and I can’t think straight. The man in the Morris Ten, was he supposed to be coming back for me or was I just spinning him a line? I don’t remember but I can’t wait here, I don’t want to be in this part of town, with another me waiting under every tree, yet I can’t go home either, bad things lurk there too, more beatings, more fuckings, more petty humiliations. All the things I wanted flash through my mind: to be a mother, a wife, with a spotless kitchen in a nice house, an embroidery in a frame hanging over the fire saying Home Sweet Home, a memory of my childhood and my sister Pat. All the things I will never be and never have and everything I tried not to think about, all coming down fast to the refrain of a ghostly keyboard requiem. Then suddenly, all the sounds disappear. Headlights are coming towards me up the avenue, a long dark car gliding slowly along, crawling beneath the trees, as if in slow motion. This is it, I realise, and somehow the knowledge sets me free of my anguished thoughts, fills me instead with the numbness of acceptance. This is the beam from the lighthouse, the lights across the water calling me home. I pat my hair, which is short and neat and recently cut, in the style of an actress I had admired. I smooth down the front of my blue-and- white summer dress. This is how I look on my last night on earth and

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I step forwards towards my fate, lean into the window as it slowly winds itself down. There are two people in there, but their faces are lost in the shadows. I know that the nearest one is speaking to me but all I can hear is the hiss of radio interference. The music is starting up again but it no longer disturbs me, I’m numb and I know where I am going. My thoughts and my body are no longer mine. My hair and my dress are no longer mine. I get into the back of the car and it pulls away, in a U-turn across the avenue, picking up speed as it heads west, towards the lonely shore. A woman’s voice says softly, sadly: ‘Bobby…’ And I woke up, lurching forwards into a sitting position, drenched with cold sweat. I put my hands up to my head, feeling the fringe of my long blonde hair plastered to my forehead, desperate to make sure it was my hair and not hers. For a moment, between two worlds, I couldn’t make out where she ended and I began, her thoughts and her memories had been so strong that they seemed as if they were my own. But they were so terrible, so alien, so shocking. Images of brutal couplings in the back seats of cars, underneath trees, in shabby rooms with other people watching, faces of old and ugly men, faces of black men, the certainty that I had a sister called Pat and most of all, that overwhelming sense of fear… Fear and pain. God, she had hurt. I put my hand up to my shoulder where the worst of it had been. It wasn’t tender at all. I hadn’t slept on it badly, triggering the sensation. That had all been part of the dream too. Where had she come from, this woman with the short hair and the striped dress? I was so disorientated that it took a few seconds to realise that the music, that weird music that had soundtracked this nightmare, hadn’t disappeared with it. It was coming through the wall next door. Those ghostly

||| xii ||| |||||| Bad Penny Blues |||||| keyboards and that radio tuning in and out of stations, it was actually real. The fear this phantom woman had felt coursed through my veins like quicksilver and I grabbed hold of Toby’s arm, shaking him awake, gabbling: ‘What’s that noise, that horrible noise?’ He stumbled out of his own slumbers with a low groan, rolling towards me and propping himself up on his elbow. ‘That noise, Toby, what is it?’ My voice was shrill with panic. ‘Uhhh,’ he grunted, putting an arm around me, patting me gently on the leg as if to calm me down. He was never very good at waking up. ‘That?’ he said. ‘Uhhh, sorry, I should have warned you about that. It’s the boys next door. They say they’re musicians and that, my dear, is what their music sounds like. Bloody horror show.’ He rolled across me and turned on the bedside light, his face suddenly illuminated by a comforting orange glow as a tired smile spread across his crumpled features. He looked so handsome with his hair all falling forwards in his eyes that I immediately calmed down. ‘Come here,’ he said, pulling me back down beside him. The night had been so hot we had kicked most of the covers off the bed, but like the woman in the dream, I suddenly felt cold. ‘It’s a horror show all right,’ I said, nestling into the warmth of him. ‘It gave me such a nightmare.’ ‘Oh Stella,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry. I really should have warned you, but I suppose I just got used to them and their odd little ways while I was still a gay bachelor myself.’ His words made me giggle. We had been married for only one week, spending what would have been our honeymoon if we’d had the money ostensibly redecorating, but not really getting very much further than where we were now. It didn’t matter. We still had the rest of the summer to turn the basement of 22 Arundel Gardens from Toby’s bachelor pad into the marital home of Mr and Mrs Reade. ‘What time is it anyway?’ he asked, looking over at the alarm clock. ‘Ten past one! Horror show hours and all.’

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It gave me a shudder, that did. Now I was awake and safe, the nightmare was beginning to fracture and dissolve, recede into the shadows. But one thing I could clearly remember was that I – or rather she – knew exactly what the time was. Toby must have felt it because he cuddled me closer, found the edge of a blanket and covered me over with it. ‘You cold?’ he asked, and I let it go at that, not wanting to tell him what it really was in case he thought I’d gone a bit strange, mad even. It had been a horribly vivid dream, an insight into a world I didn’t want to see again. And whatever had caused it – the music, the newness of my surroundings or just too much cheese before bedtime – I wanted to forget about it quickly. I resolved to banish the woman in the blue and white dress from my thoughts. It was because of our honeymoon that I managed to do so; we were so engrossed in our own little world that we didn’t bother to buy the papers in the week that followed, otherwise I might have read about the body of a woman that had been found by the river in Duke’s Meadows, Chiswick, wearing a blue-and-white striped dress. It was a mercy, really, that I didn’t. It would have shattered the idyll of the summer of 1959, the end of our first year at the Royal College of Art and the beginning of our marriage. There were so many things that we didn’t know about each other then and ignorance was bliss. Toby’s kisses were warm on my eyelids as I finally fell asleep, the sound of a new world coming through the wall.

||| xiv ||| PART ONE

With This Kiss

1959 1

Roulette

Dawn crept stealthily over the Thames, the first shafts of sunlight stealing through the mist that clung to the grass, collected in the hollows at the base of the poplars, chestnuts and weeping willows that lined the banks of the river. Police Constable Pete Bradley watched golden beams glitter on the surface of the water and wound down his window to breathe in the new morning. At this time and this place, it didn’t feel like he was in London at all. The Thames Road between Hammersmith and Chiswick Bridges could almost remind him of home sometimes, and this was one of those occasions. The houses that backed on to the road here had long gardens full of honeysuckle and roses. There were piers for fisherman and wharves for sailing boats, little old pubs and ancient churches, almost like a perfect village green that had somehow managed to escape the pounding that the Luftwaffe had meted on the rest of the capital. The river wound its course around to his left, fringed on the other side by trees, not a building to be seen. The only other traffic on the road at this time of day was the milk carts and delivery vans, bringing today’s headlines about the Mau Mau in Kenya and Liberace’s libel victory into the newsagents, fresh bread and groceries to the shops. For a second, Pete transposed the image of the Thames with that of the River Wharfe, saw in his mind the rolling limestone

||| 3 ||| |||||| Cathi Unsworth |||||| hills of his childhood and remembered the feeling of excitement that such a dawn would have inspired in his ten-year-old self. Fishing net and sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, his hand safe inside Dad’s huge, rough paw, both of them singing ‘Willow, Weep For Me’ or ‘Listen To The Mocking Bird’, one of those old twenties songs he couldn’t listen to now without an ache in his heart. A loud snore from the back seat interrupted his reverie. Acting Sergeant Alf Brown lolled on the seat, his head back and his mouth open, revealing a gob full of fillings and a fat, greying tongue. Never a one for these night patrols, Alf was always conking out on the job. He lay in a slovenly repose, his waistline straining against the blue serge of his uniform, the sweet smell of whisky emanating every time he exhaled. Pete exchanged glances with Alan Corbishall, another young PC like him, who had drawn the short straw for the driving while Pete operated the radio. Alan rolled his eyes. ‘At it again,’ he said, ‘the old soak.’ Pete shook his head. He’d not been in the force long, less than a year since he’d passed out from Hendon and he wasn’t finding it exactly as he’d imagined. There were too many ‘superiors’ like Alf who seemed to have grown rotten with age, careless perhaps, or maybe just too jaded. They’d had their heyday in the fiery chaos of the Blitz and now, in these days of peace and austerity, they were burnt out from lack of drama and the sly profits of the black market. To hear them talk you wouldn’t think that tons of bombs raining down on the city night after night was any kind of hardship or terror; on the contrary, living on the edge like that had given them a purpose that the dull 1950s singularly lacked. It had made them all into Dan Dare. Now, it seemed, they could only reclaim that spirit of derring-do from the bottom of a bottle. Pete had applied to become an aid to CID, the first step towards

||| 4 ||| |||||| Bad Penny Blues |||||| becoming a detective, wanting something to stretch his mind more than the plodding routine of the beat bobby would allow. He knew he had to start at the beginning, with the drunks and the domestics and the petty thieves, but even so, he wanted to be doing something of real use. He knew he had it in him. He’d got this far after all. The young copper stuck his head out of the window, inhaled the smells of river and dew and divined the start of another hot day. It was ten past five by his wristwatch and they were approaching Barnes Railway Bridge, where the landscape subtly altered: the rather grand houses of Mortlake sat stoutly on the other side of the river, while on this side, buildings had given way to the green expanse of Duke’s Meadow. Or ‘Gobbler’s Gulch’ as Alf referred to it. A piece of common ground where, under cover of darkness, illicit trysts took place in the back seats of motorcars – frustrated young lovers, cheating spouses, brasses and their johns getting sweaty under the shady trees. Alf never tired of delving into his stock of dirty jokes about it when he was actually compos mentis. But in the first light of dawn it was empty and its rolling banks looked pretty inviting, a good place to stretch out and enjoy a picnic. ‘Willow, weep for me…’ Pete could hear the words of that song in his head again, as he caught sight of one such sturdy old specimen. As his eyes travelled slowly down its gnarly branches to the trunk, the smile left his face. Something was there. An odd shape. Something not right. ‘Slow down a minute,’ he said to Alan. ‘What d’you reckon that is over there?’ At first it looked like a collection of bags had been dumped under the tree, blue and white bags. But not quite… Alan put his foot on the brake and peered over. ‘I can’t quite make it out, Pete. D’you want to take a look?’

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‘Aye,’ Pete opened his door. ‘It’s probably nowt, but just in case.’ It was the strangest sensation, as if an unseen force was propelling him out of his seat and towards the riverbank, out through that fresh new morning that had only seconds of its stillness and innocence left to give him. The hairs prickled on the back of his neck. A flash of Dad walking in front of him, fishing rod over his shoulder; the feelings of a ten-year-old boy on a bright summer day; knowing with the certainty of a ticking clock that those feelings were about to run out, would be lost forever the instant he got close enough to those blue and white bags to work out what they were. What she was. It was a woman, a tiny woman. In a blue-and-white dress that had been torn savagely open, ripped right down to her waist, exposing her breasts. She was lying with her feet towards the river, her head turned towards the right, with her legs slightly crossed and her left arm extended as if it had been trying to grasp something. Pete pulled up short for a second and the world stilled, the twittering of birds and distant hum of the city all blanked out, as if he were standing in the middle of an invisible cocoon. He knew for certain she was dead and more than that, she’d been murdered. This is it then, he thought. This was the reason he had joined the force, to do something better with his life than toil and die down pit. But even as he thought it, he had another realisation and it was one that would never leave him: But I’ve got here too late. I can’t help her now. Carefully, he knelt down on the grass beside her. Poor little lass looked like a broken doll. The skin on her face was waxy white and devoid of any make-up, her short dark hair wet with dew, her brown eyes wide open, staring into infinity. He tried to read the

||| 6 ||| |||||| Bad Penny Blues |||||| expression, remembering the books he’d read about Victorian detectives and their conviction that you could catch the image of the murderer in the lens of the victim’s eye. Bloody rubbish that were, he thought, but still, he wanted to have some kind of communion with her, some kind of insight into what it was that she saw, who it was that had done this to her. But there was no expression left. Her eyes were glazed. Her mouth was open too, but not slack. Her jaw was set hard, she had been gasping for her last breath. Looking down, he saw the scratches on her neck and her collarbone. Of course, he thought, she’s been strangled. Her skirts were bunched up around her waist, revealing a white slip. Pete looked down her bare legs to her dirty, shoeless feet. He fought the urge to close her eyes for her and stood up stiffly instead, remembering his duty not to touch a thing but to recall all the details, to look for anything that didn’t make sense. Well, the shoes being gone for a start. And a handbag? He cast his eyes around the grass. If she’d had one, it wasn’t here now. ‘Clever bugger, eh?’ he said aloud. He heard a shout and looked back towards the car. Crumpled, bleary Alf was hurrying towards him, his eyes as red as his face, eager to reassert his authority. ‘Get on the radio,’ Pete called. ‘We’ve got a dead body here.’ Of course, as soon as they had called the station it was no longer their case. Top brass from the Criminal Investigation Department were dispatched and while they waited for them all to arrive, Alf and Alan stood guard at the scene, making Pete stay in the car, on the radio. He watched as a series of cars and vans pulled up, disgorging a posse of sergeants and aids who hurried to take charge of the situation, set up a tarpaulin across the scene for the pathologist to do his work away from prying eyes. A tall, stern-looking man in a tan gabardine mac and a trilby emerged from a black Rover and walked briskly towards Alf,

||| 7 ||| |||||| Cathi Unsworth |||||| taking a notebook out of his pocket. His seniority was made plain by the way Alf contorted himself, puffing out his chest but wiping a nervous hand across his forehead as he talked, shifting his weight from foot to foot. After a few moments, the man in the mac closed his notebook, gave a brief nod and began walking in Pete’s direction. He had a clipped moustache and grey-green eyes, not without a trace of humour in them, Pete thought, despite the severity of his face. All the same, he got out of the car sharpish and stood with his back ramrod straight. ‘PC Bradley?’ The man had the voice of an officer as well as the bearing. ‘DI Bell, CID. I gather you were the one who found the body?’ ‘Yes sir.’ ‘So what can you tell me?’ ‘Well.’ Pete felt a bead of sweat trickle down his forehead. It wasn’t just that the day was hot again already, but that this was a man who wouldn’t suffer fools like Alf, who would demand that the facts were relayed to him clear and precise. ‘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 I 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

||| 8 ||| |||||| Bad Penny Blues |||||| mouth was open and her eyes were bulging, I would expect she had been strangled.’ DI Bell nodded, pen poised in mid-air 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

||| 9 ||| |||||| Cathi Unsworth |||||| 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 Meadow 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 2 a.m. And just before she’d died, she’d had sex. She couldn’t be identified by her fingerprints. If the state of her body had revealed her profession as the oldest one in the world, she

||| 10 ||| |||||| Bad Penny Blues |||||| 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 room-mate, 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 twenty-one – 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 2 a.m., and stains on Bobby’s dress from where she appeared to have wet herself with fright on a leather seat didn’t match the upholstery of Harvey’s Morris Ten.

||| 11 ||| |||||| Cathi Unsworth ||||||

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 time frame. 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 12.30 a.m.,

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