The Monster Man of Horror House (3 page)

“Take
it with you,” was Mr Lloyd’s assessment when the doctor told him that young
Reginald was out of danger.

“Certainly,”
the doctor toadied.

So
rather than seeing a life of comfort and privilege, Reginald spent his first
ten years in the local orphanage, starved of love and Vitamin D. It could’ve
turned out so differently for my father but then in the spring of 1932 the
Reverend Charles Eckett took pity on the gangliest waif in St Mary’s of the
Blessed Salvation (and Norwich) and offered him the thing orphans the world
over spend their days and nights dreaming of – a home and a family to
call his own.

The
good Reverend and his wife weren’t able to have children of their own you see
so they’d done the Christian thing and plucked a child off life’s scrap heap.
And as far as they were concerned, the more wretched and pitiful that child
was, the brighter the gesture shone.

Reginald
Coal knew clean sheets and warm embraces for the first time in his short life and
he took to them immediately. He lost the rickets that had blighted his early
years, filled out his shirts and year-by-year became a man. In fact, had
Chancellor Hitler not gone and sidetracked my dad’s progress by invading Poland,
he might’ve even gone to Oxford or Cambridge. Instead he went to North Africa.

Like
so many men who saw action in the war, my father rarely spoke of his
experiences, but he must’ve been in the thick of it because he started out a humble
private in Tobruk and ended up a Captain by the time he got to Rome and he had
a chest full of medals to show for the journey.

Amongst
those medals was the Victory Cross.

Oh
how Granny Coal and the Lloyds would’ve loved to have been seen with Reginald
now.

Yet
he never made a big deal of his decorations. They were simply symbols that he’d
done his duty, nothing more. He’d lost too many friends along the way to
exploit his ribbons for his own gain, so when he returned from the war he put
them in a biscuit tin, swapped his peak cap for a billycock and turned his
thoughts to furthering his education.
 

And
so after two years and a thousand candles worth of revision Reginald Coal
finally made it to Oxford.

“Why
was he still called Coal?”

“What?”

“Why
was he still called Coal? Why didn’t he change his name to Eckett like his new
dad, the Reverend?” Tommy asked.

“He’d
had the name Coal for the first ten years of his life. It was given to him
because of where he’d been found,” I explained. “The Reverend thought it
important that my father not forget his origins. Anyways, stop interrupting,” I
chided, tapping my pipe against the oil drum and reaching into my pouch to replenish
my smoke.

Now
this was quite a feat for a boy born to an unwedded mother and left to die on a
filthy slag heap. And it was even more of an astonishing fete when you consider
that while he’d been studying for his exams, he’d been working a full-time job
to support mother and me. I’d been born in 1945 almost nine months to the day
the RAF had flown the celebrated Captain Coal back from Italy for a week of
richly deserved leave, so we here were and waiting for him in a country cottage
just outside King’s Lynn when he returned for good in 1946. My mother, Rhea
Eckett, was the Reverend’s niece, and my father had presumably married her out
of duty to his adopted father or because he’d figured patience was no longer a
virtue once the air started to crack with machine-gun fire. I don’t know, maybe
I’m being a little hard on my parents. Maybe my father genuinely loved my
mother and connected with her in ways that only the heart could understand.
It’s possible, but knowing her for the miserable, nagging old shrew she’d been,
despite her being my own beloved mother, I’m sure Captain Coal VC could’ve done
better.

After
five more years of cramming, revising, studying and working, my father was
eventually called to the bar in 1953 and he went on to become one of the finest
criminal barristers of his generation.

He
represented them all over the next fifteen years he did, from Donald Copper,
the bodies in the deep freeze killer (hanged) to sir Henry Davenport-Fielding,
the maid-murdering adulterer with friends in high places (also hanged – his
friends were obviously out the day he needed them). Of course my father had his
successes too, like Penny Wilson, the Wimborne widow who escaped the rope only
to see out her days knitting scarves from her Holloway cell – the same scarves
that each of her lovers had come a cropper against when they’d tried to break up
with poor Penny. And then there was Ryan Douglas, the Colchester kidnapper, not
only acquitted of any involvement in the disappearance of Beryl Ashby, but
celebrated on the underground poetry circuit after his anthology,
Through the Eyes of a Ghost
was
published to great acclaim following his trial. It charted his and Beryl’s
turbulent relationship and his [suspected] hand in her abduction and murder,
and turned the young Ryan into a
cause célèbre
. In fact, he
might’ve gone on to even greater literary heights had Beryl’s father, Gordon
Ashby, asked him for his autograph when he’d come off stage at The Black Cat
instead of stabbing him in the neck. Still, Gordon Ashby made for a very
sympathetic defendant in his own right and it bolstered my father’s reputation no
end when he represented him in the subsequent trial and stood by his side
throughout – right up until the trapdoor fell away beneath him.

But
then that was the fifties for you. Forget about your pop stars and matinee
idols, the kidnappers and killers that filled the papers in those days were
just as big a names as any wobbly legged singers that flashed the pan –
especially when one of them ‘took the drop’. So through his tireless support of
sensationalist murderers and his impeccable war record my father became a
household name.

Now
I have to say right off the bat that I’d always been in awe of him, perhaps even
a little afraid if I’m honest. Not because he was a harsh man – quite the
opposite in fact – but because he was such a good and admirable man.
Throughout my early years, I couldn’t help but feel that I never quite measured
up to my father’s own impossible standards. Of course he’d never said anything unkind
to me, nor was he ever judgmental or cruel, but his praise always fell short of
wholehearted and his gratitude for chores performed was perfunctory rather than
sincere.

But
like I say, please don’t think poorly of my father because he wasn’t a bad man.
I was just a disappointing child if truth were told.

Mother
left us for that great dress shop in the sky in the autumn of ’62, which was very
hard on me at the time, being that I was an only child and all, but I tried not
to linger on it because I didn’t want to appear milk soft in front of my
father. Instead, we simply tightened our routine to take in the slack, learned
how to use the mangle and did enough housework between us to ensure we were
never out of vests, socks or clean handkerchiefs for the week.

I’d
left school by this time and was doing my apprenticeship with a local electrics
firm. I wasn’t the academic type, which was another regret of my father’s, but
I made up for this by repairing the television set when it blew a valve shortly
before the Queen’s Speech on Christmas Day of the same year.

“That
should do it,” I said, turning the knob on the front of the box and almost
choking on my nerves as the television hummed and crackled for a full thirty
seconds before eventually a dot of light unfolded on the glass and a picture appeared
to fill the screen. I turned up the sound and
Good King Wenceslas
filled the living room to serenade us on our day
of enforced confinement.

My
father studied the picture for a second or two then looked at me and nodded.

“Good
show, John. A fine job,” he said, before settling back in his armchair to hear
Her Majesty’s thoughts on this past year.

And
there you have it, the nicest thing my father ever said to me. It made me feel
ten feet tall and so proud I could’ve sung, though that would not have done at
all. Instead I just sat there with my father listening to the Queen’s speech
without hearing a word of it.

It
was the best Christmas I ever had.

ii

Six weeks later, in the depths of the blackest February I had ever known, my
father came to me in the night. He woke me from my slumber, from my very bed,
shaking me with a terror in his eyes and a sweat on his brow. I’d never seen
him like this before. I’m not sure anyone had, not even the Germans, but a fear
had gripped him as if the very hounds of hell were after him, so I grabbed the
scotch off the sideboard and did what I could to calm him down.

“I
didn’t mean it. It wasn’t my fault!” he sobbed over and over again as he wolfed
down his whisky and cradled his knees.

“What
father? What didn’t you do?” I asked, but he could barely bring himself to look
at me, let alone answer. “Father, please tell me,” I implored and father eventually
took an almighty belt of scotch and muttered something under his breath that
barely qualified as a croak. “What?” I had to ask several times before I
finally made it out.

“I
killed someone,” he snivelled. “I killed a girl.”

To
say I was stunned doesn’t really do my reaction justice. I was knocked flat by
a wrecker’s ball, brushed off, straightened out, put back into my pyjamas and stood
on my feet again, all within the blink of an eye.

My
father had killed someone!

My
father had obviously killed lots of people – they didn’t give VCs to mildly
curious bystanders – but they’d all been German or Italian and they’d
been out to kill my dad first.

But
a girl?

My
dad had killed a girl?

“Who
was she?” I asked, now trembling in the darkness almost as much as my father.

“I
don’t know,” he sobbed. “A girl of the street. A girl of easy virtue.”

“Easy
virtue?”

“Oh
God, don’t look at me like that John, I didn’t know she was a madam, I swear I
didn’t,” he said when he saw me baulk.

“I
believe you father,” I quickly assured him. “But what happened?”

My
father didn’t say anything for a few seconds; he just held out his glass for
more scotch and looked to me in pity. I half-filled his tumbler then reached
for a glass myself. I normally wouldn’t have dreamed of taking a drink in front
of my father, but I surely needed one and reasoned my father would cut me some
slack now that he’d taken to killing prostitutes.

“It’s
cold out there,” he started. “It’s bitter to the bones with a fog so thick you’d
need an axe to get through it in parts. So when I saw her standing by the side
of the road shivering, I just thought she needed a lift home. I swear John, I
swear on my father’s good name I had no idea she was a harlot.”

This
was my father all over. He was such a good man that he some times bordered on
the naïve. Ridiculous really when you think about it, especially for a criminal
barrister, but more often than not my father’s blind spot was the evil in other
people.

“Of
course she readily accepted,” he almost laughed, shaking his head at his own stupidity.
“But then once we got out into the Lanes I realised my mistake when she… well,
let’s just say she drew my attention to the true nature of her occupation.”

I
blinked a few times in the darkness, none the wiser as to how she might have
done this, but shocked all the same, as was the reaction that was called for.

“Go
on,” I urged, despite my mind’s eye lingering on the passenger seat of my
father’s car as he examined the young lady’s credentials.

“Well
I er… I thanked her for her kind offer, but regretfully declined, then fostered
her with a few shillings to compensate her for her inconvenience and offered to
drop her back at her place of business.”

“Where
was it father?”

“It
doesn’t matter. But I never want you going there, you hear me?” I immediately
promised him that I wouldn’t, although it occurred to me later that I couldn’t
very well avoid the place if I didn’t know where it was.

“Anyway,
the young lady accepted my shillings but then said she recognised me from the
papers and said it would cause a right stir if it were known this big shot
barrister was out at night picking up tradeswomen in the night – if I
knew what she meant.”

“What
did she mean?”

“Blackmail
John. She meant to cry wolf or worse if I didn’t feather her nest. Oh John,
there’s no fool like an old fool,” he lamented.

“You
could’ve gone to the police, dobbed her in for a tart,” I argued.

“It
would’ve been my word against hers.”

“Then
it would’ve been no contest,” I said.

“Perhaps
to you, John, and to some of my friends, but I am a criminal’s barrister. I am
on the side of the enemy as far as the police are concerned and how they would
love the chance to bring me down,” he explained, before staring into the
shadows at the carcass of his tattered career and wondering how a lifetime of unblemished
service could’ve brought him to this.