The Thing Itself (14 page)

The press went even more insane when Violette Kay's body was found on 15th July. Her friends had reported her missing and thought she might be in the trunk found at the station. Mancini was called in and acted suspiciously enough for the police to call round at his house the next day to question him again. He'd scarpered. A decorator reported a foul smell in the basement.

Strangely, neither Mancini's landlord nor landlady had a sense of smell. They had noticed nothing.

The two Trunk Murders were front-page news; didn't matter what else was going on in the world. Well, except for about a week later when the front pages were taken with the story of how on 22nd July, in Chicago, John Dillinger – America's Public Enemy No. 1 – had been shot to death by FBI agents as he came out of the Biograph Cinema. One policeman apparently shook hands with the corpse. A mob gathered to dip their hankies in his blood. Later, at the autopsy, someone stole his brain.

Needless to say, every copper in Brighton went to see the film he'd been watching when it came out over here, probably hoping the glamour of police work Chicago-style would somehow rub off. It was
Manhattan Melodrama
, with William Powell as a public prosecutor sending up his best friend, Clark Gable, for murder.

Dollfuss, the Chancellor of Austria, was murdered on 25th July but that was buried somewhere on page three. A bloke in Ohio who had slipped on a banana skin and died made the bottom of page one.

Anyway, to cut a familiar story short, Mancini was eliminated as a suspect in the Brighton station trunk murder (it was being called No. 1) but put on trial for murdering Violette Kay (No. 2). His barrister, name of Norman Birkett, got him off, claiming that Kay had been murdered by one of her clients and that Mancini had come home and found the body and panicked that he would be blamed so he'd packed her in the trunk.

By mid-September, with 12,000 letters, cards and telegrams on file – plus notes of phone calls – the police were no nearer finding either the identity of the first trunk murder victim or her murderer. Nor ever were. No policeman ever had a clue. Except one. Me.

N
ow I need to go back a couple of years to just after I joined the force. I came under the influence of Charlie Ridge, who rose through the ranks and eventually became chief constable in the late fifties before being brought up on corruption charges. He ran crime in Brighton by the fifties but even in the early thirties he had his arrangements.

I don't mean I became crooked. This was something else. He'd been in the force in 1926 and got stuck in against strikers in Brighton during the General Strike. He'd been befriended by a bunch of toffs who'd provided a mounted auxiliary volunteer support for the police just so they could break a few working-class heads. They regarded strikers as communists who should be treated like dogs.

Quite a few were members of the British Fascists and Charlie joined them. He persuaded me and my friend, Philip Simpson, to join Sir Oswald Mosley's new party, the British Union of Fascists.

Simpson wasn't slow to put the boots in dealing with what he called ‘oiks'. He was a bit of a bastard, actually. He had a vicious streak although he didn't have the muscles for it – he was a long streak of piss. So he was always ready with his baton. He would disable with blows to elbow and neck, and once they were down he started kicking.

I heard about one occasion he almost went too far. He'd started to get into it with this bloke. The bloke had been around. He could see the way this could go.

‘Don't knock me about,' he said. ‘If I'm doing any wrong, take me down to the station and charge me.'

But Simpson kept pushing and shoving him, trying to make the man retaliate so he could book him for assault. The man wouldn't, though, so Simpson used his baton to knock him down, then gave him a good kicking.

Charlie Ridge came along. The future chief constable was a sergeant then. He didn't stop the fight. He ordered the bloke to get up and fight like a man. The bloke wouldn't (he had more sense) so Simpson kept kicking him between his legs. Eventually, Ridge told Simpson the bloke had had enough and the two bobbies left him passed out in the street.

The man later complained officially. The kicking had ruptured his urethra. He was in hospital for three months being operated on, then a month convalescing. Simpson and Ridge denied anything had happened and, of course, they were policemen so they were believed.

You could always count on the magistrate to side with the bobby when it came to giving evidence. They were pretty uncritical, however unlikely your story was.

Simpson hated costermongers, I don't know why. He was always moving them on – at least until he worked out a system of getting them to pay him to look the other way. God help them if they didn't pay up.

I didn't go for any of his kind of behaviour. Bobbies had to be tough, of course. Generally, they were pretty rough – their batons weren't just for show. I didn't use mine much. You had to be careful. A mate of mine walloped somebody over the head and killed him.

My way was fists and boots. But they'd know what I was doing. I wasn't like Simpson. I'd take my tunic off, fold it and put in on the floor, put my helmet and belt on top of it. Nobody would ever touch my uniform during the ensuing fight.

It was a fair fight, except I always aimed to get my retaliation in first. We were taught only to use sufficient force but we'd also been blooded – well blooded – in the boxing ring. We boxed all the time. And, of course, they taught us a few things about self-defence when we signed up.

But speed and the first good blow would usually do the trick. You had to be fit then – not like coppers today who couldn't chase a thief down a street if they wanted to, which most of them don't.

I did try to play fair. I didn't always come out on top, but if I did come unstuck, I'd never complain of assault, unless they started it. If I started it, then the most they had to fear was a charge of obstructing an officer in the execution of his duty.

I would explain away the injuries by saying I'd fallen or walked into a wall because other bobbies saw it as weakness to be beaten, whatever the odds. Having said that, most policemen in Brighton got hurt sooner or later. It was just part of the job.

Some districts of Brighton were particularly hostile to policemen. Policemen who were a bit uppity were given these roughest areas as punishment beats. One street was known as Kill Copper Row. Generally, it made more sense to give someone a leathering for something small instead of nicking him. Problem was, in these no-go areas, kindness was taken as weakness.

And come closing time every pub in Brighton was a potential trouble spot. Gangs fighting when the pubs had closed on a Friday and Saturday night would turn on any bobby daft enough to try to break it up.

I liked night duty, even in the bad weather, because you could give it to them hotter then. The real hooligans, I mean, not some poor bloke who'd just had a couple of drinks too many.

For me it was the razor gangs. Nobody carrying a cut-throat razor, a switchblade knife or a knuckleduster is a man in my eyes. If I came up against anyone like that, then my truncheon did come out – and I didn't much care how I used it.

S
o there we were, Ridge, Simpson and me: fascists together.

Oswald Mosley intrigued me. He'd started out Tory, then gone to Labour, then struck out on his own with his New Party when Ramsay Macdonald headed the new National Government in 1931. And the secretary of the New Party was a crime writer I liked called Peter Cheyney.

The New Party had been trounced in the 1931 general elections. On 1st October 1932 Mosley had launched the British Union of Fascists with a flag-waving ceremony in the old New Party offices at 1 Great George Street up in Westminster.

These days, fascism has terrible connotations and we associate it with the far right. But at the time it had a perfectly proper place on the political spectrum. It was just a radical movement. My leanings were actually to the left, except that I didn't like unions.

Mussolini – who created the name fascism in Italy – was much admired, even after his ruthless attack on Abyssinia. He was admired by the upper classes for bringing firm government that held back the perceived threat of the Red Menace that the Russian Revolution had conjured up. He was admired by the young and the progressive for looking to the future, not to the past. In Italy, the trains ran on time.

Mosley took on his mantle in Britain. Although from a wealthy background, he presented the British Union of Fascists as a classless organization in which merit was the only qualification for advancement.

He presented the BUF as a youth movement against the ‘old gangs' of British politics. He wanted to cure unemployment and prevent Britain's economic and political decline.

I was an energetic young man, eager to get on. The police force was incredibly hierarchical – it took Charlie Ridge thirty years to rise from constable to chief constable. The BUF was for me, especially as Stanley Baldwin from the old establishment called Mosley ‘a cad and a wrong 'un'. That was almost all the recommendation I needed.

The big newspaper proprietor Lord Rothermere was a fan of Mussolini and he backed the BUF in the
Daily Mail
. That's where I read about them and that's why I joined, alongside Philip Simpson.

Neither of us fancied the uniform – we had enough of uniforms in the day – or the processions or the flag-waving but we could tolerate them.

When we joined, Mosley wasn't interested in all that Protocols of Zion nonsense. The BUF stood for religious toleration, not anti-Semitism. Mussolini was the same, actually – it was the National Socialists in Germany who added that to the mix. In fact, other British fascist groups – and there were many factions – called the BUF kosher fascists.

It probably sounds now like I'm protesting too much. I probably am. Anyway, anybody could join and the first thing I realized was that anyone did. Philip, Charlie Ridge and me usually went up to London for our meetings, but there was a Brighton branch that we went to a couple of times that was full of eccentrics.

The Brighton meetings were something and nothing – someone would give a talk, then we'd go to the pub for a drink. There was a bloke called Tony Frederick who was a music hall performer. A dancer. He and his wife – well, he said she was his wife – performed as Kaye and Kaye. He just seemed to be down on everything, a man full of envy. His wife would join us for a drink afterwards. Her dress was a bit gaudy and she was past her best, but she was nice enough. She had a big thirst.

There was quite a lot of those types in the party – people who'd failed in life and were now trying to get in through the back door. I got friendly with a young chap called Martin Charteris who was at both meetings. He worked as an attendant in the public lavatories at the Brighton railway station – that's what I mean about the BUF being open to everybody.

He was a sharp bloke, a couple of years older than me, with a quick sense of humour. He said he split his time between Brighton and London. He couldn't wait to get his uniform. Mosley had designed a black shirt based on a fencing jacket – he fenced épée for Britain even though he had a gammy leg. Mosley thought the shirt reflected ‘the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace'. Charteris just fancied prancing around in his shirt and his jackboots.

The first meeting I attended, in London, Peter Cheyney gave a talk. I fancied myself as a writer – I was always scribbling on whatever piece of paper came to hand, even if it was only my diary – so I got chatting to him. He wrote crime novels. Not those Agatha Christie country house ones, though. These were what were later called hard-boiled. American pulp. Lots of violence.

Anyway, Charlie, Philip and I didn't want to join under our real names because we were bobbies. When I told him I wanted to be a writer, Cheyney suggested I join under the name Victor Tempest, which had a good sound for a crime writer. So that's what I did and the name stuck.

I actually went to a dance hall with Charteris in Brighton one evening. Shelleys. We both met girls and went our separate ways, and I didn't see him again for a good few months. I took the girl to a show at the end of the pier and Kaye and Kaye were on down the bottom of the bill. They didn't set the stage alight.

I spent most of my time off in Brighton on the seafront or I'd nip up to London. The line got electrified in 1933 and a third-class return fare was only 12s 10d. I liked the seafront best, though. The smells – all the seafood stalls and the fish-and-chip shops. The bustle – locals going about their business and visitors in big, screeching gangs.

I remember fortune tellers' booths decorated with pictures of Tallulah Bankhead; waxwork dummies in amusement booths; cafés with signs saying ‘Thermos flasks filled with pleasure'; and my favourite – the booth promising ‘Ear piercing while you wait'. As if, at other booths, you had to leave your ears and come back when they were done.

I used to hang out in the Skylark, a café that was rough but attracted a lot of girls. Around September 1933, I got chatty with a regular in there called Jack Notyre. Only about five feet seven and he had a stutter, but the girls seemed to like him. In fact, he had to fight them off.

I was a bit younger than him – he was in his early twenties – but we were both single and enjoyed a joke and liked a game of cards for pennies. Then one day it turned out he wasn't exactly single. An older woman turned up, a bit the worse for wear, and sat with him. He seemed a bit embarrassed, she being so much older. He introduced her as Mrs Saunders. They lived together.

I recognized her, though she didn't recognize me. She'd been Tony Frederick's dancing partner and ‘wife'.