GBH (29 page)

Otherwise the torturings and the killings would have continued and Fowler would have gone down and taken James with him. Fowler had enough on file to see to that. And Collins, and perhaps Farlow, if the Shepherdsons were involved.

Parsons had been particularly concerned about that. Parsons hadn’t wanted any more Law in the headlines.

James smiled again.

“What’s tickling you?” Ray said. “Got a feather in your Y-fronts?”

James shook his head and sat down at the glass-topped desk.

“I was just thinking about Parsons,” James said.

“Yeah,” Ray said. “How about him?”

“Amazing, really,” James said. “When he first approached me, I’d expected dark warnings concerning the wages of sin.”

“Yeah,” Ray said, “instead of just wages.”

“Well, now, be fair,” James said. “His seat on the board isn’t purely due to that particular kind of self-interest. After all, he’s extremely well placed to make sure there isn’t the kind of surface activity that would lead to the Force being brought into any further disrepute. He was very concerned about that.”

“Like Collins and Farlow were concerned,” Ray said.

“For totally different reasons,” James said. “Be fair.”

“The Filth’s the Filth,” Ray said.

James shrugged.

“They all helped, in their own ways. All three of them.”

Which, to an extent, was true. But without Parsons, of course, the other two could never have been rowed in.

Together, he and Parsons had reached an agreement.

The agreement being, irrespective of method, remove the Fowlers. Continue the running of the business, so that its dissolution wouldn’t lead the press into further pastures of police corruption.

A more stable figurehead, maintaining a lower profile.

And a seat on the board for Parsons, to ensure the maintaining of the organisation’s low profile. Which would keep the Commissioner happy.

What he didn’t know always kept the Commissioner happy.

“You have to remember,” James said, “if it hadn’t been for Farlow, we’d never have discovered your arrangements with the Shepherdsons before Fowler got to you.”

“There is that, I suppose.”

“Certainly there is. And your new status, as surrogate figurehead.”

“I have to admit,” Ray said. “It certainly worked out a treat.”

A treat, James thought. Not only Fowler, but the Shepherdsons as well.

Parsons had been particularly pleased about that.

The trick had been that neither Fowler nor the Shepherdsons had known what was going on.

Fowler had had to think that Mickey had been involved with Ray; it had had to look as if he’d killed Ray before Fowler could get to him and make him talk. Killing Glenda had been a stroke of genius. It had made Mickey look more like the candidate they’d wanted him to seem, more as if the Sheps were trying to fit Fowler up.

And all the Shepherdsons had thought was that Fowler had tumbled to Ray. They genuinely hadn’t understood about Glenda, and their supposed association with Mickey.

And Fowler had swallowed. To him, it looked as if Mickey and the Sheps were combining together in a takeover bid.

And when Collins had fed Fowler the pack of lies about what Johnny was supposed to have said, that had been the clincher.

Ironic—Collins’s reward was the money for the lies. Paid for by Fowler.

Farlow’s reward came from Parsons; not to point A
IO
in his direction.

When the inevitable explosion had arrived, James hadn’t
counted on the way the Shepherdsons had retaliated for Johnny, with Jean.

But that couldn’t have worked out better, either.

The only trouble had been, Fowler had got out alive.

And he hadn’t gone to Wales, where James could have had him seen to.

But at least for the time being, he’d been out of the picture; business since the aftermath had been got under way.

It was going to take a miracle to find out where he’d gone to ground; Parsons hadn’t wanted the Law to find him. He’d wanted the legend printed in the press to be preserved, missing believed dead.

And it had made a good press. O’Connell had been very helpful in that respect. The Law had come out of it looking as if they’d just been about to collar the lot of them before they topped each other.

But it was going to take a miracle to find him.

A miracle, apparently, had happened.

It had taken the shape of madness.

Hardly surprising, after what the Shepherdsons had done to Jean Fowler, brooding on it in his isolation.

Ray picked up the copy of the Grimsby
Evening Telegraph
and looked at the news item again. The headline read:

ACCIDENTAL DEATH OF MAN ON BOMBING RANGE:
TRAGEDY AS MAN TRIES TO AVOID MISSILES

The story went on to describe how the body of a Mr. Roy Carson, an occasional visitor to the area, had been discovered in a tank used as a target in RAF rocket manoeuvres on a beach near Mablethorpe. It was assumed Mr. Carson had ignored the red warning flag and had taken cover in the tank when the manœuvres had begun.

“Handy,” Ray said, indicating the newspaper.

“Not if we hadn’t cleared the house it wouldn’t have been.”

“No,” Ray said.

He lit a cigarette.

“What I can’t understand,” he said, “was all that business at the end; all that screaming and shouting for some bloke called Lesley.”

“It wasn’t,” James said.

“Beg pardon?”

“It wasn’t a he. It was a she. On the phone, he kept saying she, Lesley. She’s here. All that.”

“At the time, Gerry and I thought he’d got some assistance who’d hopped it as soon as we turned up.”

“No, it was definitely female, whoever he was referring to.”

“Yeah, I know,” Ray said. “But he was on his own when we done him. But it didn’t stop him screeching his head off as if she was in the immediate vicinity.”

James stood up and picked up his and Ray’s glasses and took them over to where the drinks were.

“Maybe she was female company he’d got hold of. Could even have sent down for her,” Ray said.

James shook his head.

“He wouldn’t. Whoever she was, he’d picked her up up there. He wouldn’t risk it.”

Ray thought about it. With his track record, he knew a lot of the girls on Fowler’s books.

“Lesley,” he said. “Lesley.”

James came back to the table and set the brandies down on the glass top.

Ray picked up his glass, shook his head.

“Lesley,” he said.

He swilled the brandy round in his glass.

“No,” he said. “No; the only Lesley I can think of who we ever had was a bird called Lesley Murray.”

“Who was that?”

“Used to be a fair piece. A singer. Good, as I recall. Sang at the Moulin for a while.”

“What happened to her?” James said.

“I remember Mickey pulled her out one time, told her to meet this particular bloke in a pub. Just pull him, get a lift home. Nothing else. ’Course, the fellow she was pulling was only Jean’s old man, wasn’t he? And she naturally didn’t know the steering had been fixed, did she? Or she wouldn’t have gone, would she? So, what happened to him, happened to her.”

“I remember,” James said. “A casualty, so to speak.”

“Yeah,” Ray said. “Anyway, that’s the only Lesley I can call to mind, in my experience of the firm. I mean, he didn’t even know her name. She was just somebody Mickey fixed up for him.”

James took a sip of his brandy.

“Well,” he said, “I’ll say one thing for him.”

“What’s that?”

“He kept an extremely acceptable brandy.”

“Yeah,” Ray said, drinking. “Very nice. Very warming.”

THE SEA

E
DDIE WALKED INTO THE
Dunes, holding the rolled-up newspaper, but this time there was no thigh-slapping, no three-chord mental harmony to add a spring to his step.

Howard had his pint ready, as usual, by the time he reached the bar.

Eddie put his change down, took a deep drink.

“Better?” Howard said.

Eddie took another drink, dropped the newspaper on the bar’s surface.

“Seen this?” Eddie said.

“I’ve seen it.”

Eddie shook his head.

“Lucky for some,” Howard said.

All right, Eddie thought. Make your remarks, you stupid old puff. You don’t have to think about the extra you’re now no longer going to get.

“Still,” Howard said. “Not surprising, really.”

“How do you mean?”

Howard mimed tippling a glass.

“Yeah,” said Eddie. “Well.”

He took another drink.

“You haven’t seen Lesley about, have you?”

“Not today.”

“Only we’re playing the Kings Arms at Tealby tonight. Haven’t made the arrangements. About the time.”

“Been in the South?”

“Yeah. No sign.”

“Probably be in later on.”

“Yeah.”

Eddie drank the remains of his pint.

“Anyway,” he said, “I’ll go and have another look.”

Leaving the newspaper on the counter, Eddie walked out of the Dunes and along the mini-promenade until he came to the row of bollards at the top of the ramp. The sky was clear and blue and the beach was almost golden in the morning sunshine.

The fellows on the funfair were testing the ferris wheel again. Eddie watched them for a few moments, the black shadows of the circle and the struts revolving over him like a spool from some giant film projector.

Then, after a few moments, he walked down the ramp, towards the street and the South, in search of Lesley.

Afterword

Derek Raymond on Ted Lewis

GBH
IS A NOVEL
as direct as it is stunning. The impact of the opening scene, in which a group of villains, led by its psychopathic leader, tortures another villain, suspected of grassing, to death—indeed the tracking down of grasses and inside traitors, whether inside the mob or inside the police—underlines the author’s loathing of all denunciation; and the book as a whole, which never relaxes its grip for a paragraph, has as shattering an impact on the reader as did its famous predecessor,
Jack’s Return Home
[also published as
Get Carter
].

Ted Lewis died of alcohol in 1982 while he was still in his forties; and his death was a major loss. For, as the contemporary black novel in Britain is concerned, he was the prototype, the first in the field of my generation anyway, of the rebirth of black writing, so much so that, in
GBH
, the hallucinating effect that his portrait of the killer, described in the first person, has on the reader is one that the latter is unlikely to forget for some time—if, indeed, he ever succeeds in forgetting it.

Another point that needs stressing here is that, if Lewis is not much better-known than he should be in his own country, it is because, in the days when he was writing (I hope, I think the situation has improved now) the better written, the blacker, and more direct a novel was, the more liable it was to upset the
delicate sensibilities of squeamish publishers whose blind devotion to—and thus fear of alienating—middle-class taste (which, above all, dreads reality in literature and anything that cannot be mentioned in the drawing room) was true across far too wide a sample of British editors. The bowdlerizing attitude reduced the quality of most British fiction to the level of the simpering dare, and of course, also biased editorial views in their commercial judgment—a judgment which, by the way, was at times ridiculously, indeed, quite spectacularly wrong. To take a classic example, my own first publisher’s reaction to Len Deighton’s
The Ipcress File:
“Interesting, but of course sheer fantasy … could be of no interest to the general reader …”

Moreover, the result of this attitude was that even if an enterprising junior editor in a big firm went out on a limb and accepted such novels as Lewis’s, the governors upstairs, by not lifting a finger to promote them, went subliminally out of their way to make sure they were sabotaged.

Yet you have only to read him to see that Lewis was one of the first British writers in the sixties to take Chandler literally—“The crime story tips violence out of its vase on the shelf and pours it back down into the street where it belongs”—and
Jack’s Return Home
is a book that I and plenty of other people at the time considered to be a classic on these grounds, besides the sheer writing ability that it displays, and still do. But it, too, has doubtless become unavailable, out of print, pulped, thanks to the attitude—virtually amounting to disinformation—prevalent in that section of British publishers that I have just referred to, which seems unshakably convinced that as long as Agatha Christie and P.D. James are selling all right, then you’ve quite honestly covered the ground, as well as not spitting on the Union Jack.

What this means, as I have said, is that they have covered a good deal of startling and original work with ground—i.e. buried it.

And besides, how wrong can you be? The difference between what people want to read now, as opposed to what their parents read fifty years ago, has changed as utterly as the problems that confront society (social realities which literature ideally exists to reflect) and that is why more and more black work is being produced in the UK now which has no point of reference whatever with the two writers I have just named.

What a pity Ted Lewis didn’t live to see it.

Reading
GBH
I am mindful that its author was from the north of England; he was born in Manchester and studied for four years at Hull Art School—very probably at the same time as Peter Everett, who wrote
Negatives
, another very black novel, grossly underrated in Britain, which Cape published (rather nervously, if the incomprehensible jacket is anything to go by) in 1964, and which was subsequently filmed by Claude Chabrol. This book, just like Lewis’s work, put murder back in the street too, in the suffocating slum existence of Notting Hill; it, too, joined madness and sexual perversion to murder (none of the three ever travel apart, whatever the M’Naghten Rules may say) just as Lewis’s novels did.