Shadows in the smoke, p.35
Shadows in the Smoke, page 35
“And what would that be?” Spottsy asked very, very quietly.
“Your narrowboat, the Phoenix,” I said, jumping right in. “Without that old girl, I don’t know how I’d have survived being dead,” I said. “That No. 7 turned out to be real lucky for me, as is witnessed by the fact I’m still here.”
“The Phoenix, eh? You could buy a whole fleet of fuckin’ lorries, a warehouse, and a motorboat with your share of the money.”
“Too true, Jack. But as I said, Lady Luck definitely smiled on me while I was on the Phoenix, and that counts for an awful lot.” I couldn’t push it too hard; I didn’t want Jack to think me a steamer. But then again, there’re few occupations more larded with superstition than thieving for a living, and Jack knew that as well as me. “And when it comes down to something as important as luck, it’s never just about the money, is it, Jack?”
He nodded, as he did the sums again in his head. It’d make his take thirty per cent of the reward money—more than the bloody Rotterdammer, more than the old schnorrer in the Garden, and almost as much money as the crafty sod who’d put up the job in the first place. Not too shabby, considering.
“And you’ll be the middleman for me? Sort out all the arrangements? Make sure it all goes hunky-dory?”
“No one’s likely to welsh on the deal, are they, Jack, not once word gets round you’re involved.”
“All right then, Jethro,” he said. “It’s a deal. You keep the Phoenix, I’ll keep your share of the payout.” He took his leather glove from off his right hand, spit on his palm, and held out his hand. I did the same. We shook on it and the deal was struck. “Mazel und broche.” And with ‘good luck and blessings’, the good ship, Phoenix, lucky No. 7, was now all mine.
No, I hadn’t gone ‘Dolally’.
Simple truth was, I owed Jack Spot for helping save my life; Tommy Nutkins, too. And even though neither of them would ever use it to call in a favour—well, Spottsy would—in my book, the credit and debit columns always need to be kept in balance.
Not forgetting that, when all was said and done, I’d still end up with some serious cash in my pocket, split fifty-fifty with Ray, of course.
FINDING TRUE NORTH
And just where on God’s green would I have been without Ray Karmin to guide me? I’d been that worked up about Darby bloody Messima and all his dark deeds, literally seething with anger, seeing nothing but blood red, I was in dire danger of losing my head for real. Ready, set, and raring to go challenge Messima and all the other bastards in NORTO to a fight to the death on any stretch of cobbles they cared to choose. Not that Messima or any of the other gang bosses would’ve gone toeto-toe with me, not when they had whole armies of hard men ready and waiting to do their fighting for them. So whichever way you looked at it, there could’ve only ever been one ending: I’d have been beaten to a bloody pulp, cut into little pieces with carving knives and choppers, stuffed in a bag, and thrown in the river.
And how had Ray dealt with it all, dealt with me? He’d seen me coming apart at the seams and steered me back into the shadows so I’d have a better chance of coming through it all alive and still in one piece. He’d had me hide away with Glover for a couple of weeks—out of sight and out of mind— until all the blind hot rage had had time to dampen down, and had even had me thinking it’d been my idea from the very start. But the plain truth was he’d stage-managed all the exits and the entrances and I’d played the many parts as written—I’d played dead, I’d played the ghost, I’d played the bastard, I’d even played the fool—and here I was still very much alive and kicking, and a lot of it down to Ray. Family aside, hands down, my very best ‘old china.’
Talking of which, Joanie played merry hell with me when I called to tell her I was really alive. But I’m no steamer; I got to Church Street late enough at night for it to be all but deserted and telephoned her from one of the Apostles. That way she had a few minutes to compose herself. I did too. The front door was on the latch and as I closed the door behind me and turned to climb the stairs the light in the stairwell went on and I looked up and saw Joanie standing on the landing outside her flat. She peered down at me, in the dim yellow light, as if to prove to herself that it really was me, but she didn’t say a word. Neither did I. I just continued to climb my way back up to the land of the living.
Then there we were, face to face, and the tongue-lashing when it came was like a volcano erupting and she rained blow after blow after blow against my chest with her tiny fists and, between sobs, called me every despicable name under the sun. Then she shook her head from side to side as if to dismiss me and turned and went back into the flat. I gave it a few moments and followed her. I heard a noise and saw Bubs, Joanie’s old man, standing in the shadows in the living room, waiting for the storm to subside. He smiled and nodded a greeting and pointed in the direction of the kitchen, and I smiled back and nodded and went on through.
Joanie was standing over by the sink, facing the window, still sobbing. Then, bit-by-bit, relief slowly overcoming grief and anger, her sobs finally subsided and she sighed a huge sigh and wiped her eyes on the sleeves of her dressing gown and silently began making a pot of tea. She turned and just stared at me, blankly, still not saying a word, and we both waited in silence for the tea to mash—a few of the very longest moments of my life—then she served up three cups, called for Barry to come in from the other room, and we all sat down at the kitchen table.
“You better tell me what happened,” she said, her voice dull and flat and dangerous. “And if you tell me a single lie, Jethro, I swear to you, I’ll murder you again, myself.”
So I told her.
She didn’t like it when I told her why I had no choice but to play dead and why I had no choice at all in not telling her the truth of it at the time.
“If there was any chance at all I was really alive, Messima, the whole lot of them, would’ve reckoned that you’d know the truth of it and they would’ve had eyes watching you and the Victory from morning until night, just on the off chance that you or someone let something slip. And if for one instant they thought me alive, they’d have taken you hostage and just waited for me to come get you. Your grim visage was the only real protection I had.”
“He’s right, Joanie,” Bubs said, softly. “Even you mentioned a good few times as how there always seemed to be a lot of new faces in the cafe.”
“Did ‘Buggy’ Billy know you were alive?” she asked, ignoring Barry.
“Never spoke a word to him,” I said. “I know he’s a hell of an actor and might’ve covered it well, but again, I didn’t want to put someone I love in any more danger than they already were.”
It seemed to mollify her. And after all, it was only a white lie.
It was Ray Karmin I’d told, not “Buggy” Billy. Thing being, to all intents and purposes Ray was someone else entirely and someone entirely unknown to her.
When I finally went upstairs again to my own little flat—at last back in my own skin, as it were—the letter from Joanie I’d dared not open, let alone leave a thumb or fingerprint on, was still there on the kitchen table, undisturbed, unopened, and unread.
During the War, every single time I’d gone away again to sea, Joanie had posted a letter urging me to come home safe and sound, and somehow even with the millions of tons of merchant ships being sunk around me, right, left and centre, and sometimes even from under me, I’d always managed to return. It was as if her very prayers for my safe passage were given form and each letter became a totem of the never-to-be-taken-for-granted, wished-for good luck and good fortune. So when she’d heard the rumours I’d been lost to the river, she’d again written down her plea for my eventual safe return and sent it to me—via the Victory, this time—for delivery to the flat, the only place in all the world she knew I’d always return to if there was still breath in my body.
I all but choked as I read her words.
Jethro, my dear, dear brother, come back to me, to us, we all need you to be alive and in our lives. Know that you’re always in our hearts. Keep you safe ‘til next, wherever you are. Your loving sister, Joanie. x x x x x
I still have Joanie’s letter in a little silver frame standing on my desk, next to an old brass pocket-compass I used when up on the lids. In my life, I’ve found that true north can be found by the most surprising of means.
Word of my resurrection soon made the rounds, along with all the usual references to me and my nine lives. “Buggy” Billy and his boys helped get the word out that Messima had simply wanted to put the frighteners on me because he suspected I’d helped Jack Spot on the Heath Row job, and that me not being a steamer, I’d got out of town as fast as my little legs could carry me and gone North, to Leeds or thereabouts. It seemed to fit with most people’s rather dismal view of me: that I really had lost my bottle for all things creeping and criminal. And that suited my needs perfectly.
Me taking a well-deserved holiday was out the question, as Joanie and all the rest of them would only start worrying again that I’d gone missing. So for the next couple of weeks or so, I made the rounds of the markets, the billiard halls, the spielers and the pubs, then I did the theatres and the coffee shops and Gambas and the all the rest of it, knowing all eyes would be on me. The more happy-go-lucky I appeared, the more people seemed to accept me, pleased that at least something or someone was back to normal.
Even ‘Binnsy’ seemed pleased to see me. And when he spotted me walking down the street, that first day back, he whipped off his glasses and wiped them over and over again with his dirty handkerchief, as if he couldn’t believe his eyes. He got such a laugh from the usual bunch of layabouts holding up the walls of the Tube station, he repeated the pantomime for weeks until it wore as thin as his skin.
“Hat-trick of aperpays, is it, Jeffro?” he said.
I nodded. “Ta, Binnsy,” I said, “I need to catch up on events.”
“Then it’s off for a cuppa over the Bridge, is it?” he said, to remind me again that he never missed a thing.
“Yeh, I could murder a cup of tea,” I said.
“Nice to have you back among me regulars,” he said.
“You can say that again, Binnsy,” I said.
“Nah, wot I meant was, I missed yer money,” he said, coughing a huge gob of phlegm and spitting it into the gutter. “See yer, Jeffro,” he said.
“Not if I sees you first,” I replied.
“Gertcher!” he wheezed. And I waved the linens over my shoulder, like a battle flag, pleased as ‘Punch’ to be finally out of the shadows and back in the land of the living, or at least what passed for it around Church Street.
IN CAMERA
Live and let live? Not always. It’s a different world on the other side of the looking-glass. The guilty are dealt with differently there. One presumes for the public good, but the rest of us back in the real world rarely seem to be the better for it. There’s ‘the letter of the Law’ and then there are those who, in purported Defence of the Realm, read between the lines and make annotations in ink invisible to the likes of you and me. And should a servant of the people ever prove untrustworthy or become an embarrassment to any of the noble institutions of Law and Order, wiser heads and colder hearts prevail. More often than not the problem is then dealt with behind closed doors, in camera—as those in the know would have it—where people or things are very quickly and quietly swept under the carpet. Or they’re confined between the covers of some obscure report and hidden away at the back of the file cupboards of State, along with all the rest of the skeletons.
Such was the case, it seems, with Ernest H. P. Watts, former Deputy Assistant Commissioner (‘L’ Division) of Scotland Yard, despite Simon having given me his word things wouldn’t be hushed up. To be fair to Simon, though, the final decision wouldn’t have been his. If you learn anything at all from your time in the shadow world, you learn you have little or no influence on events and you’re never ever privy to anything you don’t need to know.
What I do know is that both Watts and Messima were at the Yard on the same stretch of corridor, at the same time, on the same day, and that it was no accident. It’s an old police trick. Two suspects, each unaware the other’s been brought in for questioning, both then given a quick sight of the other and led to believe their erstwhile partner-in-crime has already implicated them in some way. Nothing too specific at first, everything left to the imagination, which not unnaturally soon runs riot, with inevitable results. Later, it’s a simple matter of filling in the blanks on the official reports as to who said what, when, about whom, so that everything matches up.
I can well imagine how it happened, and with Walsingham directing the action it would’ve all been timed down to the second. The police sergeant enters—Down Stage Left—and hands Watts the message. Watts reads it and smartly exits the anteroom, accompanied by the sergeant, and off they march up the corridor, Watts believing he’s been summoned to an urgent meeting with the Home Office permanent under-secretary or some such luminary. Meanwhile, Detective Chief Inspector Robert Browno and his detective-sergeant enter—Up Stage Right—and escort Darby Messima and his brief along the same corridor, from the opposite direction—Messima, not under arrest, but under the impression he’s been brought in to help the police with enquiries into some incident or other at one of his many Soho nightclubs.
And thus the two unsuspecting parties bump into each other as they round the corner—Up Stage Left. It’s hard to say whether it’s Watts or Messima who reacts the most as they’re suddenly brought face-to-face, but I see the two men being so startled that not a single word passes between them, the frowns and puzzled looks exchanged more than enough for the poison to do its work. After which Watts is escorted off in one direction while Messima and his solicitor are led away in the other and then taken into an interview room, which marks the next scene.
It’s all total conjecture on my part, of course, but I think it highly likely that an interview did take place that day. And I suspect DCI Browno and his detective-sergeant would’ve stayed with Messima and his brief only until such time as a uniformed senior police officer accompanied by a tall, distinguished-looking, grey-haired gentleman in civvies entered the interview room. I’m sure Messima and his solicitor would’ve been not a little surprised to then see both Browno and his sergeant exit, never to return.
I can hear Simon Bosanquet conducting the interview in his trademark flat, monotone delivery, devoid of all emotion. He’d have only done it for effect, but I know from personal experience just how devastatingly effective it could be—the slow, relentless assembly of tinder dry facts that left you in no doubt at all the authorities were in possession of evidence that could see you burn at the stake, if not in hell. After all, the facts were plain enough. That one Darby Alphonse Solano Messima had been a prime mover in the setting up of NORTO, an illegal confederation of London gangs. An unholy criminal alliance that sought to operate in parallel with an illegitimate court system— the so-called Shadow Court—the sole purpose of which was to establish NORTO’s authority and maintain it by the meting out of extreme and unusual punishment upon accused wrongdoers.
I suspect Simon wouldn’t have given Messima too much time to ponder before also informing him that by undertaking such acts, he, Darby Messima, and others as yet unnamed, had wilfully and maliciously perverted and obstructed the course of justice. And that any and all actions conceived and carried out under the aegis of said criminal organisations—NORTO and Shadow Court—constituted serious offenses against the public peace and the good order of the Realm, and that all such offenses were indictable under both Sections One and Two of the Defence of the Realm Act.
Messima, when cornered, was as dangerous as a rat with rabies. So I not only see him denying everything, but going hard on the attack, denouncing the whole affair as a clear case of entrapment and that if it ever came to court he was sure he’d be both acquitted and exonerated. At which point he’d sue the Metropolitan Police for every penny they possessed.
That would’ve probably been the moment Simon Bosanquet asked Messima to confirm or deny his presence at the death of the late Nigel Fox MP, or even perhaps asked him to clarify his relationship with a man called Earnest H. P. Watts—two things Messima would’ve wanted kept under wraps at all costs. At which point, Messima likely told his brief to “go fuckin’ wait outside.” Then with Messima, to all effects, in camera, all Simon had to do was play the all-incriminating wire-recording.
I don’t know how long it would’ve been before it dawned on Messima that he’d more than met his match in Walsingham and Bosanquet, but I’m sure that after a few moments’ sober reflection, seeing that his little outburst had had absolutely no effect, he’d have realised that his usual ‘Plan B’ of bribery had even less chance of working. So he’d have then resorted to the only possible way-out left him. Something, say, along the lines of: “It’s become very clear to me that Watts has lost his bottle and turned ‘nose’ to save his own skin. And such being the case, I have a few things to say in my own defence, and if you’re interested, I’m willing to make a statement.”
Granted, I may have adopted a little bit of poetic license in all that, but I reckon that if the interview happened, it was something along those lines. Had to have been.
I have no idea when or where Colonel Walsingham had his little heart-to-heart with Watts, but it probably took place around that time or very soon after. I’m sure the powers-that-be were all extremely concerned about the potential damage to the good standing of Scotland Yard should the real facts ever surface. There’s little doubt though the result would’ve been much the same whoever it was pulled the strings—Walsingham or some exalted person even higher up the greasy pole of State—but pull them they did.
E.H.P. Watts, Esq., erstwhile DAC-‘L’ of Scotland Yard, having apparently suffered an acute nervous breakdown, was quietly removed from office and sequestered in an exclusive private sanatorium that specialised in the treatment of unfortunates afflicted with advanced delusions of grandeur.
