A Lesser Evil (37 page)

Nora was on tenterhooks all night. The club was packed to capacity, every one of her girls dancing and drinking with customers, and as she mingled, checking that the bigger groups had enough drinks, smiling and chatting, making sure everyone was happy, she felt she was being watched closely. She was familiar enough with Soho by then to know that a powerful man who employed enforcers would also have informers and spies, and if John helped her, he’d be in the firing line next.

But John didn’t come near her again, and by two in the morning when the band was close to ending their final set, she thought he must have had second thoughts about helping her. She was just chasing up a round of drinks for one of the bigger tables when Charles Lownes, a regular at the Starlight, came up and asked her to dance.

Charles was a bit of a joke in the club as he had the bearing and accent of an old Etonian. He always wore a dinner jacket, pleated-front dress shirt and bow tie. He was in his early sixties, and knocked back whisky as if he had hollow legs. Everyone assumed his wealth was inherited as he was usually one of the last to leave the club when it closed, and always seemed to be going off on little jaunts to Paris and the South of France, usually with a woman half his age.

Nora didn’t often dance with customers, especially at the end of the evening when they were drunk, and she hesitated.

‘Come on, my dear,’ he said, leaning closer to her. ‘John asked me to take care of you, and the only way I can do it is if you act as if you think I’m the answer to a maiden’s prayer.’

Nora glanced over her shoulder. John was mixing a cocktail, and he looked right at her and winked, then looked away.

Charles was a good dancer, light on his feet, and as usual none the worse for the amount of drink he’d put away.

‘Trust me,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Whatever I say or do, go along with it.’

He kept up a show of trying to woo her right until the club closed, then said in a voice loud enough for everyone around them to hear that he was taking her somewhere for a nightcap. Nora thought this was because if the thugs saw her go with him they’d assume she’d taken their advice, and they’d be round in the morning to collect her earnings.

John was nowhere to be seen as she and Charles left the club. Duncan, one of the other barmen, had been left to lock up.

Outside in the street the night air was clean and crisp after the smoky atmosphere in the club, but there were still a great many people about, many of them staggering drunk. A cab was waiting for them, and Charles helped her in. Nora glanced out through the back window but couldn’t see anyone watching them.

‘Wimpole Street,’ Charles told the driver, and as the cab moved away he sat back on the seat and put one finger on her lips as if warning her not to say anything about her predicament, for the driver might hear.

It transpired that Charles did live in Wimpole Street, but although he got the cab to drop them there, the minute the cab drove off he led her away. He took her to a mews at the back of neighbouring Harley Street, to a small flat above what had once been stables.

The flat was clean but very austere, the furniture nothing more than a bed, a couple of armchairs and a stove in the kitchen. Charles said it belonged to a friend who normally kept it for his domestic staff, but this friend was out of the country and had asked Charles to oversee some urgently needed repairs. Apologizing for the lack of comforts, he said he would be back in the morning with some food, but warned her she must not go out, answer the door to anyone or put the light on in the room at the front.

She spent over two weeks in that flat, nearly going out of her mind with boredom and loneliness. Charles came most mornings with food, a book or a magazine, and he also brought some toiletries and clothes as the sequined cocktail dress and high-heeled shoes she’d arrived in were incongruous in her new surroundings. He could never stay for more than a few minutes, and if he knew what was going on at the club in her absence he didn’t tell her.

She was scared too. She would jump at any sudden noise, and with every car that drove into the mews she fully expected Earl and his men to be coming to get her.

On the twelfth day, Charles brought her a newspaper to read.

‘Look on the third page,’ he said with an impish grin.

The headline was ‘Missing Hostess Abducted’. There was also a photograph of her, taken in the Starlight club.

She read with some amusement that on the night Charles brought her here, her neighbours reported they had heard her coming in around twothirty in the morning, and some while later heard the sound of her door being forced, male voices shouting and furniture being knocked over and broken. When they looked out of their own front door, they saw two men half-dragging an injured person down the stairs who they assumed was Amy Tuckett.

Charles went on to tell her that he and John now knew that the man behind the bully boys was a man called Jack Trueman. Nora recalled meeting him just once in her first week at the Starlight, a big man with dark hair, strong, craggy features and cold eyes. One of the girls had told her he owned several clubs, casinos and the kind of hotels in Paddington that were used by prostitutes. Even she said he was a man to steer clear of.

John turned up later that day and told her Amy Tuckett had got to stay missing. It was he who fabricated Nora Diamond, with false references and a National Insurance number. He jokingly called her ‘the woman who never was’, but cautioned her that if she ever broke her cover, she would be in very real danger. He said Jack Trueman was entirely ruthless, and he made sure that anyone who crossed him came to regret it bitterly.

The Ava Gardner hairstyle and the glamour-girl clothes had to go. Nora dyed her hair dark brown and put it up in an unflattering bun. Charles bought her a matronly navy blue costume and sturdy court shoes, and the transformation was complete. She became the formidable and very correct Miss Diamond.

Then, finally, she was able to walk out of that mews flat door, when John sent her to the vacant flat in Dale Street.

He knew it had become empty because he lived with his parents and two sisters at number 13. He thought it an ideal place because he could continue to keep a discreet eye out for her. At the same time he couldn’t intervene on her behalf with Mr Capel, the landlord, because he didn’t want anyone to know he had any connection with her. She told Mr Capel she’d just come up from Sussex to find work in London.

From the day Nora moved into Dale Street, if she ran into John they would just nod and smile like strangers. It was the only way it could be, but she would have given anything for his continuing friendship. She hated Kennington, the flat was awful, and at that time she had no money to decorate or make improvements, but it did feel safe with Frank downstairs, and a newly married couple upstairs.

John had managed to pack a few of her personal trinkets while he was waiting for the men to barge in and hurt her, but however touched she was that he’d done that for her, in reality she’d lost everything for a second time.

This time she had to begin again, finding a job without relying on her looks to give her a headstart. She would also always be looking over her shoulder, afraid of being recognized.

She had felt very alone when she first came to London, but there were people back in Dorset, friends, distant relatives and acquaintances, she cared about, and who presumably cared about her. But once Amy was gone, Nora could never contact any of them again. She cried as she burned her address book, for without her history, who was she?

Soon afterwards she got a job at the telephone exchange, and before long she was promoted to supervisor, in charge of eighteen young telephonists. In some ways it was very similar to her job in the club, except she was no longer a glamorous figure and she couldn’t afford to let anyone get close to her for fear of revealing her true identity.

Nora had never lost her affection for John, despite her disappointment that he allowed himself to get sucked into crime. Even before he met and married Vera, and bought number 13 from his landlord, his name was linked with some of the most formidable and crooked businessmen she’d met in her Soho days. There was Peter Rachman, an unscrupulous slum landlord who charged sky-high rents to naive and frightened West Indian immigrants, Ronald Beasdale who was in illegal gambling, and Albert Parkin who ran protection rackets.

It was two years ago that she discovered John had become involved with Jack Trueman. There was an article in the paper about the new nightclub Trueman had opened in Soho, and a picture of the club’s interior showing John as the manager behind the bar.

Nora knew John was smart enough to have concealed his identity that night in her flat when he’d thrashed Earl and his men. She knew too that he would never expose her either. But she was appalled to think John would go to work for such a man as Trueman. How could a man who had once risked his own life to help a vulnerable woman join forces with the thug who was responsible?

Yet looking at it realistically, she knew that John couldn’t possibly have remained the same as he’d been a decade before. He had always wanted the ‘good life’, and he’d taken short cuts to get it. Everyone described him as a villain or a gangster, he’d been in prison, and probably done many bad things which had eroded his idealism. She naively hoped that he’d taken the club management job because he was trying to go straight; she knew it wouldn’t be easy for a man who’d done time to find work.

That was certainly the way it looked. Almost every evening she saw him come out of number 13, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, and his car was back in the morning. She even heard the street gossip that Vera was happy again because he was home with her more – she’d had a miserable time while he was in prison.

Then one Friday evening over a year ago, she saw John and Jack Trueman going into number 11, with Alfie grinning at the door like a Cheshire cat.

The passing years hadn’t changed Trueman that much, though his hair was silver rather than dark. She guessed he must be close to sixty, but he looked far younger and still very fit.

She didn’t know which she was most shocked and appalled by, the thought of John consorting with a maggot like Alfie, or seeing the man she’d been told would maim her if he found her, right across the street. Terrified, she drew her curtains, locked the door and sat quaking in her chair, fully expecting the door to burst open any minute.

Yet by the following morning she was calm again. Clearly there was a good reason why John had brought Trueman to meet Alfie, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. She told herself that businessmen operating in Soho often had nasty characters like Alfie in their pay, and as John had grown up here in Dale Street and known Alfie all his life, perhaps he thought he could be useful to his boss.

She never saw John go into number 11 again after that night, but she had seen Jack Trueman several times, often in the company of a younger, swarthy man who was equally well dressed. She came to the conclusion that perhaps the men didn’t mind slumming it if the stakes were high there or the card games were exciting. She wasn’t at all happy about Trueman coming to the street, of course, every Friday night she was a bag of nerves, but it did spur her on to put her name down with several flat-letting agencies, and she hoped she’d be able to leave very soon.

To her shame she remembered feeling nothing but relief when she heard that the Muckles had been arrested. Not anger at what they’d done to their child, not even a tear for Angela, just relief because Trueman wouldn’t be coming to the street ever again.

But now John was dead, and as Frank had pointed out earlier to Fifi, it was unlikely to be pure coincidence that two people from the same street had been murdered. Nora felt that something more than gambling must have been going on in number 11, and almost certainly John was killed because he intended to expose it.

She knew that she ought to go to the police right now and tell them about Jack Trueman, but they would ask why she hadn’t come forward before. When she was interviewed after Angela’s death she’d been asked if she knew or could describe anyone who attended the card games, but she’d told them quite brusquely that she wasn’t in the habit of watching out of her window. To backtrack now was impossible. She couldn’t name Trueman without explaining how she knew him and that would mean exposing her past and putting herself in danger.

She walked over to the window and looked out. There was a police car outside number 13. ‘Poor Vera,’ she murmured and her eyes welled up with tears of sympathy.

Frank spent the early part of the evening cleaning his kitchen and tidying cupboards, and only went into his living room when it was dark outside. He moved over to the window to draw the curtains before turning on the light, but paused as he saw Yvette coming out of her house. To his surprise she was hand-in-hand with a man.

After all the misery and anxiety of the past weeks, and the news of John’s death today, the sight cheered Frank slightly. He liked the Frenchwoman and in all the years she had lived opposite he’d never known her to have a boyfriend. It was too dark to see if she was dressed up to go somewhere special, but it looked as if she was undecided about something, for she was pulling back.

Frank smiled as the man put his arms around her. Yvette had been living like a hermit for so many years that perhaps she was reluctant to go out. But Frank drew the curtains, not wishing to seem like a nosy neighbour, and he heard the car drive off seconds later.

He turned on the lamp and television and sat down, but as he reached for his pipe he thought he might go and knock at Stan’s door later and suggest they went down to the Rifleman. He’d become almost as reclusive as Yvette in the last few weeks, and it was time he stopped this.

*

The following morning Fifi left the house for work at quarter past eight. She had hardly slept at all, for images of Angela, Dan, and even John Bolton’s body being pulled from the river kept crowding into her head.

It was drizzling and rather cold, and as she walked up the street she thought gloomily of the winter months ahead. The windows in the flat were ill-fitting, the gas fire was ancient and inefficient, and she guessed she’d be frozen most of the time. If Dan didn’t come home when he got her letter, perhaps it would be best to try to find a bedsitter, for being miserable but warm had to be better than being miserable and cold.