The Thing Itself (13 page)

Where the hell did the obits get that story about the identity of the Brighton Trunk murderer? Bob Watts put his newspaper aside. He looked out across the Thames to the mudflats on the other side, focusing on a crew trying to get a boat into the water down a concrete ramp. They were choosing a bad time. The tide was turning and any minute the tide coming in and the tide going out were going to create a stasis on the water that it would be hard to work through.

His father had always liked this high-ceilinged Victorian pub with its ornate balcony hanging over the river. It was just a couple of hundred yards from his river-front Georgian house by Barnes Bridge. Watts was having a drink in his dad's memory as a break from sorting through the piles of papers in his father's musty study.

A tourist boat went by from Ham, heading up to Westminster. As it went under Barnes Bridge, its sluggish wash hit the base of the pub and the oarsmen at the same time. The pub weathered the surge of water. The rowers did less well.

Watching them, Watts phoned his father's agent, Oliver Daubney, an old-style publishing man approaching retirement.

‘Bob, terribly sorry to hear about Don's death – but not a bad innings, eh?' Daubney had a mellifluous drawl.

‘This stuff in the obits about dad knowing the identity of the Brighton Trunk Murderer? Did that come from you?'

‘It's what Don told me – and if it helps to sell the autobiography . . .'

The rowers, soaked, were clambering over the side of their boat, lugging their long oars with them.

‘He once told me he didn't have a clue,' Watts said.

‘You should always take what fiction writers tell you with a pinch of salt.'

Watts sipped his drink.

‘Is there an autobiography?'

‘So he told me,' Daubney said. ‘And I had no reason to doubt him.'

‘You don't have it, then?'

‘I'm waiting for you to find it among his papers. Have you thought any more about your own autobiography?'

Daubney had been keen to take advantage of Watts' notoriety post-Milldean to rush out an autobiography of some sort. Watts had decided he should wait another couple of decades.

‘I haven't begun my career yet, Oliver,' he joked. ‘I told you that.'

Daubney chuckled.

‘I'll tell my son to get back to you after I'm gone.' He paused. ‘How are you getting on with the papers?'

‘Badly. I haven't even found a will – but it is early days.'

‘Not in his bureau? Your dad was an orderly man.'

‘Nothing there.'

‘You know there are always a couple of hidden drawers or compartments in those old bureaux?'

Watts laughed.

‘I didn't – but that's typical of my dad to hide things away. Him and his bloody secrets.'

B
ob Watts ran his hands over his father's mahogany bureau, pushing randomly at extrusions. A concealed drawer sprang out from one side.

He took out a large brown envelope marked for his attention. In the envelope were smaller envelopes marked ‘Will', ‘House Deeds', ‘Insurance Policies', ‘Passport', ‘Birth Certificate' and ‘Bank Details'. He skimmed the will. There were no surprises. Everything split three ways, with small bequests for grandchildren. He shuffled the other envelopes and saw a second one also addressed to him.

He took it over to the wingback chair in the bay window. Slit the envelope with his father's ivory-handled letter-knife. There was a single sheet of paper inside. A letter, dated only a few weeks earlier, addressed ‘Dear Robert'. He thought for a moment. He was pretty sure the date was the last time he'd seen his father, in a pub beside Kew railway station. He laid the letter on the chair-arm and got a whisky from his father's old-fashioned drinks cabinet.

Settled again, he picked up the letter.

Watts dropped the letter into his lap and sipped his drink, looking down at the rushing Thames. The wind whipped a tree branch against the long window. The rain started again, sluicing down the glass. He put music on. Arvo Part's
Lamentate
. Melodic for him, but suitably melancholic. He let the tears prick his eyes.

G
eorge Watts, Bob's brother, came from Australia for the funeral. George was an accountant. Quite successful. The two brothers didn't have much in common – didn't even look alike – but Watts took him down to their father's local to talk about this and that, looking over the river Thames, then went back to the house and talked some more until both made their excuses and went to bed.

Watts put his brother in his father's room at the front of the house. Whilst staying at Barnes Bridge, he hadn't been able to sleep in his father's double bed in the large front bedroom. The room in which, if the obits were to be believed, his father had bedded the world-famous ballet dancer.

Instead, he slept in the poky box-bedroom at the back of the house, overlooking his father's pleasant courtyard garden. It had been used by the live-in Polish housekeeper, but Watts had given her a month's paid leave whilst he decided what to do with the house. She had gone home to see her family in Kielce.

There were only three mourners at the graveside. George decided it was because his father had outlived everybody. Watts wasn't so sure – and was stupidly disappointed that the enigmatic woman had not turned up and solved her mystery for him. Watts's sister, Alicia, could have come over from Canada but had refused. She had sided with her mother after the divorce and had refused to have anything to do with her father. According to Molly, Alicia took a dim view of her brother's ‘shenanigans' too.

The funeral was a dank affair in the chapel in Mortlake cemetery, then the three men went over to stand around the tree planted in Kew Gardens in memory of Donald Watts. They stood in the driving rain, Daubney and George sheltering under Daubney's incongruously gaudy golf umbrella. Watts's black umbrella turned inside out so he abandoned it and stood, rain-bedraggled, contemplating the sapling shaking in the wind, feeling stupid.

After, they had a desultory lunch in a small restaurant beside Kew station. Daubney, a trencherman all his life, attempted to liven things up by telling stories of the celebrated fellow residents of The Albany, his home off Piccadilly for the past fifty years. George remained taciturn.

‘So who was the ballet dancer?' Watts said after a solemn toast to Donald Watts aka Victor Tempest.

‘Bob, I hardly think that's appropriate at such a time,' George said, his Aussie accent grating on Watts. ‘We're remembering our mother too.'

Daubney winked at Watts.

‘You know, of course, how he came to adopt the name Victor Tempest?'

Watts and his brother shook their heads.

‘It was suggested to him by a crime writer he met in the early thirties. Peter Cheyney. Heard of him? No? Well, Cheyney was a best-seller in England, though he never did very well in the United States, where he set most of his books. Perhaps because his fervid attempts at American slang came out as cockney. He was a supporter of Oswald Mosley's National Party – its secretary, in fact, though I don't think he was in its successor, the British Union of Fascists, for very long.'

Daubney paused to take a sip of his wine.

‘Don – your father – was a serving policeman at the time so had to join the Blackshirts under another name. He'd told Cheyney that he intended to be a writer and Cheyney thought Victor Tempest sounded good, both as
nom de guerre
and
nom de plume
.'

‘Whoah – back up there, Oliver,' Watts said, putting down his own wine glass. ‘You're saying Dad was a fascist?'

George shook his head wearily.

‘Our father was an anti-Semite too? That's the last bloody nail in the coffin.'

Watts and Daubney looked at each other. Daubney cleared his throat.

‘Apt words on such a day as this,' he said.

George looked from Daubney to Watts, then all three men burst out laughing.

‘But it's not funny,' George said. ‘I don't have time for prejudice of any sort.'

Daubney nodded.

‘Your father was one of Mosley's biff-boys for a while. But when Don joined, it was a youthful passion and there was no hint of anti-Semitism. Mosley was regarded as more of a radical than a fascist. The moment the Nazi anti-Semitism came in, Don went out.'

George raised his glass and the others followed suit.

‘To Dad, then – the complicated old bastard.'

They chinked glasses.

Watts turned to Daubney.

‘There was this beautiful woman once, came to the house – George doesn't remember . . .'

‘Here we go again,' George said with a sigh and a smile. ‘He tried this on me last night.'

Daubney leaned over and squeezed Watts's arm.

‘Families
are
secrets, Bob. And some never get revealed. Others just lead to yet more secrets. You can't know everything. So many things you wished you'd asked at the time. So many things you just have to let go.' He picked up his glass again. ‘Some things never will make sense – you just have to accept that.'

After lunch Watts walked his brother and Daubney into the foyer of the tube station. George had his overnight bag with him. He was staying with his wife up in central London – she had declined the invitation to come to the funeral – before they set off for a tour of Scotland. Daubney was going back to The Albany.

Watts dawdled until they'd gone, then wandered into the pub next to the platform, relieved to be alone. The last time he'd been with his father was in this pub. Nursing his drink, he stared blankly at the trains arriving and departing.

B
ob Watts had piled his father's exercise books beside the wingback chair in front of the window looking over the Thames. A bottle of his father's whisky was set on the table beside the chair with a jug of water and a shot glass. It was raining again, pocking the waters of the river. He picked up the first book.

A lot has been written about these two 1934 murders. The one of a prostitute by her pimp, the other of an unidentified woman by person or persons unknown.

At the time the public confused the two – thought one man had done both. And, at first, that's what the police thought. But here's how it was.

On either 10th or 11th May, a small-time crook and pimp called Tony Mancini – I recall he went by other names too – killed Violette Kay, his prostitute mistress a decade older than him, in their basement lodgings on Park Crescent, off the Upper Lewes Road in north Brighton. He crammed her, fully clothed, into a trunk and moved digs to Kemp Street, up near the station.

He took the trunk with him and kept it by his bed. Some say he ate his meals off it. He told Violette Kay's sister that Violette had gone off to the Continent for a good job – she had been a music hall performer until the drink and the morphine got to her.

Nearly a month later, on Derby Day, Wednesday 6th June, between 6 and 7 p.m. in the evening, someone else left a trunk at Brighton railway station's left luggage office.

The next day, incidentally, Oswald Mosley and his Blackshirt biff-boys tore into hecklers at his Olympia rally with coshes and razor-blades. A party of Blackshirts had gone up from Brighton on the morning train.

On 10th June, in the evening sun, a boy and a girl taking a walk on the beach at Black Rock found a head half-wrapped in newspaper in a rock pool. The boy persuaded the girl to leave it there, on the idiotic grounds it was the remains of a suicide the police had finished with.

On Sunday 17th June 1934 – a hot, close day – the attendants at the left luggage office at Brighton station were being overpowered by a foul smell coming from somewhere in their store. They narrowed it down to the trunk that had been deposited on Derby Day. After a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, I went up there with a colleague and we opened the trunk. It fair stank. It wasn't Violette Kay inside – she was still in a different trunk at the end of Tony Mancini's bed. It was the naked torso of a woman wrapped in brown paper.

Once this hit the newspapers, it was bedlam in Brighton. We were overwhelmed with information – no computers back then. It was big news every day. When the big news should have been Adolf getting into position to try to take over Europe. I remember that at the end of June Hitler ordered the massacre of almost a hundred of his former supporters whom he now saw as opponents. They were calling it the Night of the Long Knives. But that didn't even make it on to the front page because there was some daft new clue found in Brighton.