A Willing Victim (48 page)

‘I have a communiqué,’ he said, ‘from Venus. They wish you to know that Condition Green is currently in operation.’

‘Condition Green?’ Stratton repeated the words loudly in the hope of masking Feather’s sniggering.

‘Yes. The threat of war has passed. Human life has been declared safe.’ Feather snorted loudly and Stratton flapped a discreet hand in the direction of the desk in an effort to shut him up. ‘Your agencies,’ continued Heddon, ‘may stand down. There may, of course, be other occasions – it is, I fear, an unstable time – but, for the time being, we may consider ourselves in the clear.’

‘I’m very pleased to hear it,’ said Stratton.

‘I thought I should let you know immediately. After all, we don’t want resources diverted with these other crises going on.’

‘No, indeed,’ said Stratton faintly. ‘I’m most grateful.’

The little man acknowledged this with a brisk nod of his head,
then, snapping into a salute, barked ‘Over and out,’ and, turning smartly, marched across the lobby and out of the door. The young man with the pens and the woman with the bulbous handbag stared after him, mouths agape. Stopping in front of Feather just long enough to mutter, ‘Thanks a bunch, pal,’ Stratton followed, turning left down Vigo Street on his way to Piccadilly Circus. There weren’t many people about at this hour – businessmen and shoppers, mostly, not pausing to look in the windows but hurrying under the sullen sky with their packages, seeking tea or buses or taxis before the next lot of rain fell. Stratton descended to the underground and, finding an empty telephone kiosk, squeezed himself in and closed the door.

The receiver was waxy against his ear, the mouthpiece rank with the ghost breaths of a thousand conversations. The operator’s voice came on the line, followed by a jumble of whirrs and clicks, and then, rising out of it, Diana’s voice, crisp and clear, ‘… 653?’

Stratton pressed button A. ‘It’s Edward,’ he said. ‘I just thought you’d like to know that the world isn’t going to end after all.’

The roots of many of the doctrines of the ‘alternative religions’ that comprise what we now tend to refer to as ‘New Age’ beliefs can be traced back to the Theosophy Movement begun by Madame Helena Blavatsky (1831–1891) which, in turn, spawned various spiritual leaders, the best known being Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925), G.I. Gurdjieff (1866?–1949), P.D Ouspensky (1878–1947) and J. Krishnamurti (1895–1986). However, the mid-fifties saw both the end of Britain as a world power (in Suez) and the alarming intensification of the Cold War (in Hungary) with the attendant prospect of nuclear holocaust, and this, together with the postwar decline in adherence to established religions, seems to have provided fertile ground for a bumper crop of all sorts of gurus.

The societies and organisations founded at this time took inspiration either from Eastern religious traditions and practices (meditation, yoga and the like), or from science fiction, then growing in popularity, with their leaders claiming to have received visitations from extra-terrestrial beings. All, however, represented a rebellion against spiritual orthodoxy, and, for those attracted to them, provided answers to the questions that we all, at some point, ask ourselves, such as, ‘Why I am here? What is the point of it all? What happens when I die?’, and so forth. Responses from outsiders ranged then, as they do now, from baffled incredulity to trepidation about whether their friends and relatives are being brainwashed, but for those within, there is only
one mystery: why doesn’t everybody else see the light and join up as they did?

My parents found answers to their questions – and later, each other – when they joined such an organisation (independently, for they had yet to meet) in the late fifties. The organisation’s name is immaterial, but, in common with many others of its type, it was founded by a charismatic egotist who formed a connection with an Indian guru; it spiritualised the trivial and mundane; it had very strict rules governing everything from day-to-day conduct to gender roles, and it took up a hell of a lot of everybody’s time and practically all of their mental space.

I, unavoidably, also became a member, and remained so until my early twenties. As Alexander Waugh remarked when discussing his famously Catholic grandfather, the great novelist Evelyn Waugh, ‘the zeal of the convert is seldom passed down on the hereditary principle’. It certainly didn’t get passed down to me. In the case of my parents – intelligent, kind, conscientious and wholly delightful people – their enthusiasm and commitment knew no bounds. My father remained a member of the organisation until his death in 2010, and my mother still attends. For me, it was different. I was constantly told, from an early age, how fortunate I was to be in contact with the teachings of a man who was in a higher state of consciousness, with the implication that I must have done something quite wonderful in a previous life to have been accorded such a privilege in this one. I spent half my time wondering if there hadn’t been some hideous cosmic mistake, and the other half feeling like an undeserving fraud. We were also told that those who had been wicked in previous lives were born disabled or disadvantaged. I never heard any of the adults question this pronouncement, or others like it, and the resulting atmosphere of serene, intolerant complacency was one that I grew to find unbearable. One thing I learnt quite early on was that people are never more dangerous, or – at least 99 percent
of the time – wrong, than when they ‘know’ they are right, especially if the ‘knowledge’ has a spiritual underpinning. (Oddly, my experience didn’t turn me into an atheist. I suppose it should have done but, like DI Stratton, I feel that God seems somehow more ‘factual’ than logical explanations for faith allow).

Although I wasn’t around in the 1950s, I have drawn extensively on my memories of how people in the organisation looked, behaved and spoke in the writing of
A Willing Victim
. I’ve left out a lot of the dottier stuff on the grounds of implausibility – there are still some things I can hardly believe myself, even though I was witness to them – but I’ve tried to give an accurate and, I hope, entertaining account of the sorts of things that go on in such organisations.

I have taken a small liberty with the dates of Billy Graham’s ‘London Crusade’. The American evangelist (b. 1918) made his first visit to London in March 1954, preaching to thousands of people at north London’s Haringey Arena (in use as a sporting and events venue until 1958). Billy Graham has visited the UK many times since, although not in 1956.

The book begins on the 31
^st
October 1956, which was in fact a Wednesday, not a Tuesday. I have altered the days of the week in order to fit the time scheme.

Lastly, cinema buffs may have noticed a reference to a film about an alligator. This is based on an anecdote told by the actor Donald Sinden about a film in which he starred with Jeanie Carson, Diana Dors, James Robertson Justice and Stanley Holloway. It was called
An Alligator Named Daisy
– hence the consternation when the creature proved, in a way which left no room for doubt, that it was male. It was directed by J. Lee Thompson for the J. Arthur Rank Organisation, and went on release in the UK in December 1955.

L.W.

January 2012

I am very grateful to Tim Donnelly, Claire Foster-Gilbert, Stephanie Glencross, Nicholas Green, Jane Gregory, George Harding, Liz Hatherell, Maya Jacobs, Claire Morris, Lucy Ramsey, Anna Webb, June Wilson, Jane Wood and Florence Mabel Basset Hound for their enthusiasm, advice and support during the writing of this book.

August 1958, Notting Hill Gate:
Puncture wound to chest, entered right-hand side in 4th intercostal space, 4 in deep, penetrated to the heart …

DI Stratton shifted irritably in his office chair – it was half-past midday and sweltering, and his shirt seemed to be plastered on to his back – and pushed the pathologist’s report aside. In the black and white photographs Herbert Hampton looked more annoyed than dead, and the stains on his clothing might easily have been the result of carelessness with ketchup or HP Sauce. Seated on the floor in his underwear, with a bald head and a petulant expression, he made Stratton think of a giant baby who’d been pushed over by an older sibling and was preparing to start howling about it. At least, Hampton’s top half made him think this. His lower half – a map of varicose veins and a partially visible scrotum so low and loose that it looked like pebbles at the bottom of a pigskin bag – just made Stratton think of the sad indignities of getting old and being murdered in your vest and underpants.

He’d been found by a girl: Shirley Maples, aged seventeen, typist, on her way home from the ABC Royalty, Ladbroke Grove, where she’d attended the six o’clock performance of a film with her friend Sandra Mills. Glancing at the map of his new manor, he saw that Shirley Maples lived in Colville Terrace and Sandra Mills – also a typist – lived in Talbot Road, which was just around the corner.
Stratton thought he could picture the streets: rusted railings, crumbling front walls, and rows of tatty five-storey Victorian houses, each one occupied by a dozen – or perhaps even two dozen – people.

Both girls lived with their parents. They had watched
Raintree County
, which apparently, with the rest of the programme, lasted three whole hours, and Shirley arrived back home at half past nine. When she’d climbed the stairs to the family’s top floor flat, her father had sent her back down again and across the road to give the week’s rent to Mr Hampton and, while she was at it, to fetch him a bottle of Mackeson from the pub down the road. He never got his beer. Stratton imagined her pushing open the door of Hampton’s flat and standing hypnotised, before she began to scream. He shuffled the papers until he found her statement. Scanning to the end, he read:
My dad says it’s the coloureds that do these things
.

The office door swung open and a large man he recognised as PC Jellicoe – two days into his new post, he hadn’t got all the names down yet – appeared with a cup of tea and a rock bun on a plate. ‘’Ot, ain’t it? ’Ere you go.’

The voice was an exaggerated Cockney – the London equivalent of the country dweller’s exaggerated yokel act, put on for strangers – and there was a sort of menacing joviality about it, as if daring him to pull rank. Stratton wondered if he’d been put up to it. As the first appointment of a Superintendent who’d only been there a year himself, he was bound to be an object of suspicion, especially as his first task was to investigate a crime that the natives had failed to solve.

PC Jellicoe, who’d put the tea and bun on the table, nodded encouragingly. ‘Thought you might like a cuppa after your lunch.’

‘Thanks,’ said Stratton. He took a sip of the tea, and picked up the rock bun.

‘Just like Muvver useta make.’

Stratton took an experimental bite and encountered a concrete-like substance. ‘Yes, if Muvver was a bricklayer. Still, it’s the thought that counts.’

No snorts of laughter from outside, so it obviously wasn’t a setup, just Jellicoe having a sniff round the newcomer and, presumably, reporting back. Jellicoe studied him in a manner that made him think of a man trying to decide whether a piano would fit through a doorway. After a moment, his face broke into a grin. ‘They are a bit of a facer.’ Pointing at Stratton’s map, he added, ‘That’s where that bloke Hampton was done a couple of Saturdays ago, isn’t it?’

Stratton, well aware that Jellicoe knew exactly what he was looking into, took this to be an olive branch of sorts and said, ‘That’s right – Colville Terrace.’

‘What that little lot –’ Jellicoe nodded at the papers on the desk – ‘won’t tell you is that all round there, Colville Terrace, Colville Road, Powis Terrace, Powis Square … most of them houses belong to Danny Perlmann. He’s got quite a lot in St Stephen’s Gardens too,’ indicating the street with a stubby finger, ‘and Chepstow Road, Westbourne Gardens, Pembridge Square. Got a bloody great mansion in Hampstead, I heard, and he drives about in a Roller full of blondes. Hampton was one of the rent collectors. But …’ Jellicoe heaved a big, puffy sigh. ‘It’s a disgrace, really. Not saying it hasn’t always been a problem round there – gyppos and all sorts, more your criminal class than your working class, if you see what I mean – but now with the darkies everywhere, it’s got to be the worst slum in London. Some of them club together and buy a house and then they want the tenants out so they can bring in their own sort. We had a Nigerian bloke a couple of weeks ago trying to evict a bunch of Irish – brawling in the street, they were, furniture thrown about all over the place, and what with that business in Nottingham over the weekend, coloured stabbing whites and all sorts …’

‘The Chief Constable said that wasn’t a racial riot,’ said Stratton, who’d spent quite a lot of the previous Sunday morning reading about the ‘milling mob’ of fifteen hundred people who’d rampaged through the streets of St Ann’s.

Jellicoe sniffed. ‘Not a racial riot my arse – wouldn’t have happened if the darkies hadn’t been there. Anyway, bit different from your old patch in the West End, isn’t it?’ In other words, thought Stratton: let’s see what you can do in a really tough manor, glamour-boy.