Nameless (10 page)

Charlie stepped forward and dumped the whole revolting mess into her arms. She felt blood seep straight through her robe and stick clammily to her skin. There was a big ugly head, a wet black nose nudging at her. The thing whined. She looked at it in complete disgust and disbelief. Her eyes lifted and she stared, thunderstruck, at Charlie.

‘What . . . ?
’ she started.

‘Look after it, will you?’ he said, and he turned on his heel.

‘You’re not
seriously
. . .’

‘Things to do,’ he said, walking away.

‘Wait a minute,’ she snapped.

‘Quiet, don’t want to wake the neighbours,’ he warned, looking back at her, holding a finger to his lips.

‘Charlie
fucking
Darke, come back here!’ she hissed.

But he was gone.

After they’d dumped the dog at the widow Tranter’s, they drove the van off to the yard in Camden Town. It was all prearranged, carefully thought through by Charlie. Another van was waiting there, and this one was second-hand. It had false plates, and a new coat of navy-blue paint. Charlie had had partitions built into the thing so that the banknotes would be stashed in there, invisible.

By eight o’clock Charlie and Joe and their accomplices had stuffed the van full of notes. Charlie had doled out three thousand pounds each to Chewy, Ben and Stevie on the spot.

‘You get the rest in six months, that way no slip-ups,’ said Charlie as he handed over their wedge. His own much bigger share would be stashed where only he could find it. The same went for Joe’s. They’d already agreed that neither of them should know the whereabouts of the other’s loot. It was safer.

The boys didn’t have to count it. They’d been Charlie Darke’s gang since schooldays, they trusted him implicitly.

Then Charlie and Joe jumped up into the cab, the gates were opened, and they drove the haul away.

‘Piece of piss,’ said Charlie, grinning as they headed off to Essex.

22

Ruby had succumbed to temptation. She was in bed with Cornelius when he broke the bad news to her.

‘I’m married,’ he said.

She’d been lying there in his arms and she had never been so happy in her entire life. Her mind had started skipping forward, dreaming of courtship, marriage, babies . . . impossible, stupid dreams, she knew that. She also knew that she shouldn’t have slept with him, not yet, but these were desperate times,
terrible
times, weren’t they. Vi was
so
right. They
could
all be dead tomorrow. You had to grab life whenever you could. And she had. She was in love. She loved him.

But
what
was he saying? Married? Well, Vi had warned her. But still, she felt as if her entire world had caved in.

‘I’m sorry, darling. I know it must come as a shock.’

‘Well, I . . .’ Ruby didn’t know what to say.

A shock? Yeah. It was certainly that.

‘How long . . . ?’ she asked, because she couldn’t think of anything else to say. She should be angry. She knew that. But all she felt was
crushed.

‘Five years.’

Now
she felt the anger building, taking hold. She glared at him. Her big golden beautiful man. Three dinners and then
straight
into bed at his house in one of the city’s more select squares. She preferred being here, in bed, to the expensive restaurants he took her to. In company, she was all too aware that other women wanted him. They probably threw themselves at him all the time. Here, in his house, they were alone, and that was better: she felt more secure.

Only – she wasn’t secure at all. He was
married.

She had a sudden appalling thought. ‘My God. Is she here . . . ?’

He was shaking his head. ‘She lives in the country. We have a small manor house.’

A small manor house.

Ruby had never felt more conscious of who she was, where she had come from. Her dad ran a corner shop. She was nothing special. Oh, she was good-looking. People stared at her in the street, with her long legs and her olive-skinned beauty, her long fall of lusciously wavy black hair. But she was nothing, she had come from
nothing.
While he . . . from birth, he’d been blessed with wealth. He was easy with it, and now he was telling her, oh so casually, that he was
married
, and that his wife lived in a manor house in the country.

‘You
bastard
,’ she burst out.

He looked dismayed.

Ruby started hitting him, hardly knowing what she was doing, only that she was gutted, she was completely
destroyed
, and he was lying there as if surprised at her reaction. He caught her wrists, held her still.

‘Don’t,’ he said.

‘Bastard,’ she said again, trying to get free and failing.

‘I suppose now you won’t want to see me any more.’

Ruby stared at his face. She was panting with fury. But then she remembered the other thing that Vi had told her about men like him. That they owned the world, that they were taught from birth that they could have anything: the chairmanship of the company, the house in the country, the swanky place in town, the tolerant wife, the accommodating bits of fluff on the side.

Except, Ruby wasn’t feeling very accommodating. She jumped out of the bed and started flinging on her clothes. She glared at him as she did so.

‘Fucking well
right
I don’t,’ she said. ‘What do you take me for?’

He shrugged. He looked unhappy, but he didn’t look
that
cut up about her reaction.

‘Look, I didn’t lie to you,’ he said.

‘You didn’t tell me the
truth
, either.’

‘I know. But this has been so marvellous. I suppose I simply put off the evil hour.’

‘Because you knew how I’d react.’

‘I thought you’d be angry.’

‘I
am
angry.’

‘I’m sorry. I hoped you might have understood.’ His head went down. ‘My wife and I, we . . .’

‘Oh, for God’s sake don’t start giving me
that
.’ Fully dressed, Ruby snatched up her bag. ‘Spare me the “my wife don’t understand me” bollocks.’

‘Ruby . . .’

‘Goodbye, Cornelius.’

She left, before she started to cry.

23

1922

After the first time,Alicia met with Leroy often over the following weeks. They fell joyously into bed together, then lay there sated, listening to his jazz records. He gave her a 78 rpm by Jelly Roll Morton, and she sneaked home with it, played it on the Maxitone when Ted was out down the Legion.

For a while, life was blissful.

Until she found out she was pregnant.

Alicia knew that Leroy would look after her: he had told her so.

‘It’s yours of course,’ she said, as they lay in bed together. ‘I haven’t slept with Ted since I got up the duff with Joe. He wasn’t interested after that.’

But Leroy was unfazed by her expectant state. She had been frightened of telling him, of breaking their perfect little dream in two, but she needn’t have worried.

‘I’ll take care of you,’ he said.

They lay there and planned their future together, somewhere far away from here. She would take the boys, of course – she couldn’t leave her kids. But they would have to get away. She couldn’t pass the newborn off as Ted’s. That was impossible.

‘It’ll be fine,’ he assured her, enfolding her in his arms. ‘We’ll go away. We’ll work things out.’

She didn’t see him next day outside the shop, or the next. She started to worry. Was he ill? The day after that
,
taking the Jelly Roll Morton record he’d lent her as an excuse, she went and knocked at the door over the road. An old woman with a whiskery chin answered, scowling out at her.

Alicia swallowed nervously. ‘Um . . . Mr Bird lent me this record; I’m just returning it to him.’

‘Ain’t you Ted Darke’s wife?’ she asked.

‘That’s right.’ Alicia’s palms felt wet.

‘Seen you in the shop,’ said the woman.

‘Can I . . . is Mr Bird in?’

‘Him and his mates moved out yesterday,’ said the woman. ‘Said they were going to try their luck in Manchester or somewhere like that. Sorry.’

The woman shut the door.

Alicia staggered blindly back home, clutching the record. Ted was out. The boys were with Mum. She went up to the bedroom and with shaking hands put Leroy’s record on the gramophone. Then, crying as she listened to Jelly Roll singing about love, she started planning how she was going to get rid of Leroy’s baby.

24

‘They’re saying they think US Army deserters carried it out,’ said Dad over breakfast as he read the paper.

Charlie was staring disapprovingly at Ruby, who was off her grub, probably fallen out with some boy or other. ‘Eat that up, Rube, for God’s sake. There’s people starving and you’re pushing that damned egg round the plate – it’s driving me mad.’

Charlie and Joe, seated on either side of the breakfast table, had not even exchanged a look when Ted spoke. Both kept their heads down, mopping up egg with thick slices of bread.

‘This mail van robbery,’ their dad went on. ‘Would you bloody believe it? Look at this. The Postmaster General said the system had been in place for thirty years and had worked fine. Well, it ain’t working
now
, is it? Two hundred thousand pounds gone, and no one knows where.’

Neither Charlie nor Joe looked up. Ted glanced at them both. He knew they were into all sorts. But this?

He wondered.

A month later, two boys were playing on the edge of the flooded sandpit near their home in Dagenham. It was a brilliant summer’s day, the sun glinting dazzlingly off the water so that at first little Toby doubted the evidence of his eyes. He had to blink, and look twice. There
was
something floating in the water. He yanked a branch down off a tree, and belted his mate Dan with it as he passed by.

‘Oi!’ shouted Dan, laughing.

But Toby had moved on; he was down at the water’s edge, using the branch to haul in the bits of dark cloth he’d spied there. He pulled them out one by one, dripping, from the water.

‘What are they?’ asked Dan curiously, peering over Toby’s shoulder.

There were six of them in total.

Toby’s dad was a postal worker; Toby knew exactly what they were.

‘They’re mail bags,’ he told Dan. ‘You don’t think . . . ?’

Everyone had heard about the mail van robbery, it had been plastered all over the papers and Toby’s dad had joked that he wished he’d thought of it first, he’d have done it himself.

‘There’s a reward for information,’ said Dan excitedly. ‘Thousands of pounds!’

‘I’m gonna take these home and tell Dad,’ said Toby.

Toby’s dad took the mail bags to the police, and when he got back home Toby asked him about the reward. His dad told him that the police would be coming round tomorrow to speak to him about the find. Toby could hardly contain himself, the reward was a
fortune.

‘But don’t go getting your hopes up,’ said his dad, settling down with pipe and slippers for the evening. ‘If it leads to an arrest, they might pay out. If not, there’s no chance.’

25

‘So how’s the mutt?’ asked Charlie when he went round to the widow Tranter’s house.

Rachel Tranter looked him straight in the eye.

‘You haven’t been near in over a month. He could be dead and gone, what do you care?’

Charlie was smiling, but underneath he was anxious. This last month since the job had played hell with him. Friends had been hauled in for questioning, and a couple of his boys had been found with a few stolen notes, but the most the Old Bill could get them for was possession. They had been acquitted as receivers. Which came as no surprise to Charlie, because he’d gotten into the jury and made sure of the verdict.

But the police weren’t about to let it go. Charlie had got a bit too lively with a steel pipe and, although the postman was out of hospital now, the driver and the guard were still in a very bad way.

Charlie sensed the Old Bill were still snooping around his territory, trying to see if they could pin this on him. But they couldn’t and he knew it. He was home free. So was Joe and so were the rest of the boys. Nevertheless, these were worrying times. He had to keep his head down.

‘What, you been counting the days, have you? You’ve missed me?’ he asked her.

Rachel didn’t even dignify that with a reply. She led the way into the lean-to, and there the dog was, in a box lined with a tatty old red tartan blanket. When Rachel came in it stared up at her, its big threatening jaws open in a grin, and its stumpy tail started to wag. Then it saw Charlie and emitted a low growl.

‘Well, he’s a good judge of character, I’ll say that for him,’ said Rachel.

‘Ungrateful little sod! I saved the bastard’s neck and this is how he repays me.’ Charlie reached down to pat the dog’s head, and it snapped with its teeth. Charlie fell back. ‘Good God.’

The dog jumped to his feet. He had a peculiar gait, with his left back leg hanging an inch or two in thin air, unused. But he shambled forward three-legged and was eyeing up Charlie in a very unfriendly manner. Rachel grabbed his collar and held him still.

‘I cleaned him up after you brought him round, stitched up the wound with thread and bound it up,’ said Rachel, patting the dog’s head while he strained and snarled at Charlie. ‘I thought I’d come out here one day and find him dead, but he slept for a day or two and then started to want food, and after that he mended. The leg’ll never be right, but it don’t seem to bother him much.’

‘Well, I couldn’t leave the poor bastard just lying in the road, could I?’ But looking at the snarling dog, Charlie now wished he’d done exactly that. Little fucker didn’t know the meaning of the word gratitude.