Bottled Spider Read online

  ‘Oh, Mr Harvey,’ she wailed. ‘I’ve done my best with her, our Cath, I can’t do no more.’ She only came up to around the middle of Harvey’s chest which meant she had to look up at him, her pert face a paradoxical mixture of gravity and foolishness. She wore a scarf over her head like a snood, and what hair peeped out in Victory Rolls on to her forehead showed more than a passing enthusiasm for peroxide.

  For a second Suzie could have sworn she saw a look of complicity pass between the woman and the detective, and this she stored away for a rainy day. It was certainly clear that the woman knew him well.

  ‘I can ask no more than that of you, Vera.’ The smile around Big Toe’s mouth softened but never made it to his adamantine eyes and you didn’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to know that Vera was Cathy Watts’ mum. She had a button nose; a mouth exaggerated with lipstick, and eyebrows plucked clean then pencilled in: giving her the look of permanent surprise.

  ‘Help her. Please, Mr Harvey, help our Cath. They’ll be the death of me else, those boys.’ The note was pitched a shade too high to be convincing. There was, Suzie thought, some coded subtext going on.

  ‘How’s Archie?’ the DCI asked.

  ‘Went and volunteered. At his age, I ask you.’

  ‘He can’t be much older than you, Vera.’

  ‘Forty-six,’ she rolled her eyes. ‘Forty-six last September. Too old for the forces. I told him, but he would go, then of course they said not yet. Maybe next year. Now he’s with the Home Guard.’ She pronounced the aspirates with care, no discarded aitches here. She’s been in service, Suzie considered. Some smart town house — Kensington, Knightsbridge. Brought up among the moneyed classes.

  ‘If he’s joined the Home Guard we can all sleep safe in our beds then, Vera.’

  ‘Oh, yes ... Yes, indeed. They’ve been training for street fighting, climbing all over the roofs down Alma Road, near the school.’

  Harvey grunted. ‘Well, your Archie always did like climbing didn’t he, Vera?’ He grinned.

  ‘Yes ... Well ... Yes ... I’ve got to get home, get his tea for him. He’s out on parade Tuesdays and Thursdays. Drop in when you’re passing, Mr Harvey. We all miss you down Alma Road.’ She gave him a nod, then another, once more with feeling and one for the insurance. She glanced at Suzie as though she were some foreign person with two heads and scales, then left, heels clicking loud and quick on the bare stone floor of the corridor.

  Big Toe was still smiling to himself as they moved on into the ward.

  Both of the girls looked defeated, their faces disfigured and lumpy as though reflected in distorting mirrors. They were swollen, so that their flesh looked as though it had been fashioned out of bread dough which, in turn, had been coloured in deep violet, scarlet, vermilion and that dark blue that signifies a blow so hard that the bruise reaches right to the bone.

  The flesh around both of Cathy Watts’ eyes was swollen, the eyelids large, inflated and a harsh blue-black. When the girl tried to raise the lids her face contorted into almost a caricature of pain as the skin was stretched tighter.

  Beryl’s eyes were in a similar condition and her lips were painted with iodine, which seemed to exaggerate the deep V-shaped splits distorting her mouth in such a way that you could glimpse her teeth through the crevasses.

  Both patients were in plaster: each with a damaged leg and arm, while Beryl’s right hand lay immobile in a splint.

  The girls seemed to listen to Big Toe, only you couldn’t really tell how much they took in. When either of them painfully pried an eye open it would gaze not at either of their visitors, but somewhere towards the doors leading into the ward, as though watching for an unwelcome arrival.

  Suzie thought she could smell the fear — almost see it — and Big Toe had no comfort for them. He had only one message: we know who did this to you and we have a good idea why they did it. Just tell us ...

  ‘Cough the lot so we can take care of it.’

  They forced out their stories, croaking from the throat, breaking through the pain of wounded lips: each with the same tale — ‘Fell off me bike. Don’t know. Just fell off our bikes ... Our bikes ... Fell off. Terrible ... It hurts,’ they groaned.

  ‘Silly cows,’ he said of the girls as they drove back to the nick. ‘Remember them, Mountford. Remember them well.’

  She could hardly forget them.

  Detective Chief Inspector Harvey took his right hand off the steering wheel and raised it, fingers splayed: a gesture of either madness or frustration.

  ‘You’ve seen their injuries. To the animals who did all that it was merely a spanking. Meant very little. If one of them had died they wouldn’t have thought much about it. Those girls’ll probably have some kind of pain for the rest of their lives, and the men who did it’ll possibly hound them for ever. These people have biblical memories — unto the third and fourth generation.’

  And what had they done to deserve losing a few teeth, badly broken bones, and get their faces turned into a purée? ‘Probably held back a few quid. Doing that more than twice would merit that kind of beating. But it could be that one of them had simply spoken out of turn. Very strong on getting the respect they think they deserve, the Balvaks.’ He spat out the name, but it didn’t ring true somehow: like a punch with no weight behind it. ‘The Balvak twins. Sergeant Mountford. Charlie and Connie Balvak. Today Camford. Tomorrow the underworld.’

  ‘And the Balvaks live right here,’ he said. ‘Right here in the Cut.’

  The industrial district policed by Camford Hill nick was small — a radiator factory for a famous car; a printing works; and the large railway goods yard, known to the Great Western Railway as Camford Hill Yard, and to others as the Cut. The railway goods yard was in fact the reason for the district of Camford existing at all.

  Within two months of war being declared last autumn the radiator factory and the printing works had moved out into the country but Camford Hill Yard was immediately enlarged, instantly becoming part of the war effort; and Camford Hill Yard lay on the western extremity of the town. Next, to the east of the Yard, was the dark, cramped, mean, huddled sprawl of grubby, dark-brick houses, each with a tiny walled yard and outhouse, backing on to each other and segmented by narrow unadopted alleys which flooded in heavy rain, or silted up with uncleared rubbish. With the coming of steam, this dense domain had been built to house the railway personnel who worked the sheds, tracks, loading bays and sidings that made up the Yard.

  Three pubs served the Cut — the Thomas Picton, the Earl of Uxbridge and, naturally, the Duke of Wellington. The largest and most influential of these was undoubtedly the latter, with its long, ornate and mirrored public bar and the huge room at the back, the scene of all kinds of sporting and quasi-political events. Its first landlord had been Mullard Balvak, son of a Balkan refugee, grandfather to the Balvak twins, who grew up as the young princes regent to the predominant ruler of the locale.

  Carl Balvak, the twins’ father, well-known drunk, second-generation landlord of the Duke, wanted to see his sons installed in his place, but never did, dying suddenly at half-past six on an August evening in 1935, leaving the running of the pub to his wife, Nellie — sour, mean, brutal and foul-mouthed.

  It was in the following year, Big Toe told Suzie, that the twins took over the pub, and from the moment they took over the Duke they owned the Cut. ‘Loans, protection, the slate, gambling, the girls, the corner shops and every bit of villainy that went down in this manor, and quite a lot outside as well.’

  He was silent at the wheel for a minute, then he announced, ‘I think I’ll take a trip down the Duke tonight with Pip and Squeak. Have a word with the Balvaks and their precious wives. Not that it’ll do any good.’

  ‘Pip and Squeak, Guv’nor?’

  ‘Magnus and Thomas. We’ve got another DC, Wilfred Purser. Pip, Squeak and Wilfred, we call them.’ It was the name of a children’s cartoon in one of the daily newspapers.

  ‘You think you’ll ever nick them — these Ba
lvaks?’ she asked.

  ‘Well ...’ He tilted his hand, palm down, fingers parted, but for all his talk, Suzy thought she could detect a lack of resolution in his manner.

  ‘Nasty bits of work, the Balvaks.’

  Takes one to know one, she thought as they turned into the parking spaces behind Lockup Alley and the nick. Suzie glanced up, catching Big Toe smiling down at her. He switched off the engine and turned towards her. ‘What do they call you, apart from Mountford and Sergeant?’ The smile was like the smile of a cartoon reptile. Have to be careful of Big Toe, with his soft voice, the cold, dark eyes and the chameleon smile.

  ‘So, what they call you, eh?’ he asked again.

  ‘You already know, Guv — Suzie.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Susannah. That’s my real name. My mum only called me that when she was cross with me.’ She felt as though she was giving away a part of her soul telling him that.

  ‘“Oh Susannah, don’t you cry for me,”’ he sang softly. Then: ‘Well, Suzie, you can make a difference here if you use your common sense and keep your nose clean.’

  ‘Yes, Guv.’ She saw the glint in his eye. Big Toe trying to sell himself to her.

  ‘No tales out of school, right?’

  ‘Right, Guv.’ She didn’t believe a word of it.

  ‘So, I’m taking Pip and Squeak over to have a little talk with the twins,’ he told her as they walked back to the CID office. ‘Just let them know that we know who did the girls. Never hurts to put it on the table, let them see we’ve got their cards marked. We won’t get them for it of course.’

  ‘I come, Guv?’ She made it sound a bit cheeky.

  ‘You, Suzie? No, Suzie. You’ve got to type up the day’s reports, Suzie. Give me a few minutes and I’ll have mine ready for you, Suzie.’ Then, as they reached the office: ‘Any more at home like you, Suzie?’

  ‘I’ve got a married sister, Charlotte, and a brother, James.’

  She could see Charlotte and James clear as day as she spoke about them. She was the second of the Mountford children: twenty-two years old now and physically the image of her sister. They could have been twins, and she was brought up with a start because she realized it was now over five years since her father had been so suddenly killed.

  Resigned and triste with the memories, she sat down behind the big old Underwood typewriter in the CID room. If she had learned anything it was that life was for getting on with. You didn’t sit and mope or grumble. You made your own luck. So she gathered the pages of scrawl together and added Big Toe’s when he came out of his office ready to take Magnus and Thomas off ‘down the Cut’.

  So she got on with typing the reports.

  A little after six Shirley Cox came in with her coat on, gas mask over her shoulder.

  ‘That’s me finished for the day. Okay by you?’ she asked.

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘You’ll be okay, Skip?’

  ‘I’ll be fine, Shirley. You get off home and watch yourself.’

  ‘I’m planning to go down the Palais. Get an hour’s dancing in before Jerry arrives again.’ Most nights you heard the warning siren wail around eight o’clock.

  ‘Got your eye on someone?’ Suzie asked.

  ‘There’s an auxiliary fireman I quite fancy.’ She grinned almost sheepishly. ‘It’s worth hearing the siren go to see him leg it out of the Palais.’

  ‘Enjoy yourself, Shirley, and watch out for the fireman’s lift.’

  WDC Cox paused by the door, then came quietly back. ‘Skipper?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Be careful, Skip. Careful of the lads. It’s not my place to say it but they try it on. Pretend they’re mates and that. But they’re not. They don’t like even the idea of women in the job. Come to that I don’t think any of them really like the Guv’nor either, but he’s got a big reputation and they’ll always side with him.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll remember.’

  ‘You be careful with them, Skipper. They’ll take advantage like any other bloke, and they’ll have no respect for your rank either. Any of ’em’ll have a hand up your skirt, or all over your tits, as quick as look at you, so take care.’

  ‘Thanks, Shirley. I mean it, thanks.’ But she couldn’t meet the girl’s eye. She was uncomfortable with the sexual innuendo and had the recurring thought that she really had to do something about that side of life. Even Charlotte had called her a complete innocent and she supposed she was.

  ‘You mind what I say, Skip. Take care.’

  ‘I will, thank you.’ She was going to leave it at that, but couldn’t. ‘You don’t think any of the lads trusts the Guv’nor then?’

  There was a pause. Then: ‘Not really. No. It isn’t my place to say it because the scrambled eggs think he’s wonderful. And, of course he has his contacts. After all, Big Toe comes from here. Went to school in Alma Street and all that.’

  ‘He comes from the Cut?’

  ‘No, Empire Street. Runs parallel to Alma. Nicer houses. His dad was a designer at Reveltons and his mum was a draughtswoman there. Toe really does know everyone. He was at school with the Balvaks and he doesn’t like people knowing that, though I didn’t tell you, Skip.’

  ‘No, course you didn’t. You take care tonight, now.’

  Big Toe and the two DCs did not get back until just before seven thirty — as Suzie was getting ready to leave — so it was a little after nine before she put the key into her door, just as the sirens started their wail and the anti-aircraft guns began to thump.

  Most days after that she ate in the canteen because it was cheap and easy and she was able to catch up on the latest gen around the station. She heard very little more about the case of the two girls and when, over sausages (‘mysteries’ as they now called them) and chips one lunchtime, she asked Pip Magnus and he told her they had disappeared. ‘Gone to Cathy’s aunt I think the Guv’nor said.’ He chewed on his sausage, swallowed and added, ‘We should have given the Balvaks a good smack when we went to see them.’

  ‘You think that would have been wise. Pip?’

  ‘No, but it’d make us feel a lot better. The Guv’nor’s always belting suspects. Does the trick though. Calls it aggressive interrogation. Knuckle dusting.’

  From the first day at Camford, Suzie suspected Big Toe Harvey of being violent. Often at the end of a day when they had successfully charged a suspect he would lapse into a kind of braggadocio, the thin, frangible coating of allure that he often put on would disappear totally, and his pugilist walk would become more pronounced. At these times Suzie thought he looked as though he was spoiling for a fight: it was the way he eyed people, the quick darting look followed by the hard glare, the eyes locking on. Yet with all her reservations she got on with him after a fashion — certainly better than she did with her stepfather, the Galloping Major.

  Then on one night at the end of the first week of December Suzie didn’t get home at all, and life totally changed for her.

  Four

  It was a Friday night when the bombs came to Camford.

  The warning siren sounded earlier than usual. The pattern of raids was changing, and by early December the ports and dockyards were catching it — Southampton, Portsmouth, Plymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Liverpool. The strategy had started to alter around the middle of November with the heavy raid on Coventry: the one that ripped the heart from the city, killed over five hundred people, left twice that number homeless, and reduced the proud medieval cathedral to a ruin.

  But on this Friday night, the only bombs to fall in the London area were the ones they dumped on Camford. Tonight’s raid on London was only a token force: a feint to tie up the ARP, Rescue and Fire services, make them prepare for a further heavy onslaught that would not come. Every other Nazi bomber base in occupied Europe sent aircraft to the British ports and docks. It was what the RAF called a ‘spoof’ raid.

  The whole of Camford’s CID were gathered in the nick in the late afternoon because Big Toe Harvey wanted to discuss a ser
ies of street robberies that had taken place within a triangle made up of Linden Road, Elm Way Gardens and Oakley Crescent — ‘the Nobs’ Hill’ of Camford, a good couple of miles away from the dark, uneasy Cut.

  ‘We’ve been getting more than our fair share of these muggings.’ Big Toe used the old nineteenth-century slang that formerly referred to the vicious garrotting carried out in street attacks of that time — often by women. ‘Four in Linden Road, one at the corner of Elm Way Gardens and three more in Oakley Crescent,’ he listed, ticking them off on his fingers. ‘All women, all on consecutive Wednesdays, and all between six and seven in the evening. That’s a pattern we need to look into. The streets’re bad enough in the blackout without footpads skulking around.’

  At night, what little traffic there was drove with feebly hooded headlights, while pedestrians tried to move around in pairs — girls nearly always went about locked to each other, arm in arm, usually giggling with fear. Regulations had reduced cylindrical battery torches to an almost opaque glimmer, while the chunky square ones — like miniature car headlights — had the beams blocked off except for a narrow strip of light angled downwards so that people watched their feet and, inevitably, bumped into things.

  Big Toe was getting into his stride. ‘This must stop, it’s a return to the Dark Ages.’

  Suzie thought they’d already returned to the Dark Ages with the Blitz, but she didn’t say anything.

  ‘Thin end of the wedge,’ grunted Pip Magnus, taking the piss.

  Kerbstones and the edges of pavements were painted white, and people took to draping light-coloured scarves around their necks, or even sewing pieces of cloth on to the back of their coats.

  ‘Wednesdays? Why Wednesdays? Do they all have their bridge parties on a Wednesday, I wonder? Check up on that, Shirley.’

  Shirley checked up and found it was indeed a favourite day for bridge. Many older women who now worked in shops took advantage of the Wednesday early closing. It was the same with afternoon whist drives. They had whist drives on Wednesday afternoons down at St Leonard’s and at the Roman Catholic Church, St Thomas of Canterbury, a mile or so from Elmway Gardens. One of the victims had been returning alone from St Leonard’s Parish Hall having won ten shillings and a lardy cake at the whist drive. The thieves stole her watch and handbag. Significantly they left the lardy cake.