Authors: JOHN YORVIK
Spending two days lying low and getting my strength back in the Hackney hideout, I’d been able to do a lot of thinking. I decided if I was going to find Marty, there was one obvious place to start, and that was with Amy, the source of all our problems. The challenge would be to get to her without drawing the unwanted attention of the police, the press and the Polish.
On Dani’s advice I’d completely altered my look. I’d exchanged the hoodie and jeans for a sharp cut brown blazer and a trilby hat, which allowed me to arrange my hair so it covered up most of the scratches. The finishing touch was a pair of aviator glasses. Looking in the mirror before I left the house, I in no way resembled the photofit in the paper I was reading. The headline read:
Has the Pentonville Strangler Killed Again?
And underneath that were the details of how brave Polish have-a-go hero Anton Podrasjki fell onto the Victoria line at Euston station as he pursued the Strangler down the tunnel. The question is: was he pushed? Afterwards, the Strangler, like some phantom from the deep, disappeared without a trace.
It was clear that the newspapers were intent on creating a mythical figure in the mould of Jack the Ripper to spread fear for the sake of spreading fear. The
Pentonville Strangler
was being tried in absentia and was already being ushered into the serial killers’ hall of infamy.
I looked up from the paper and took a sip of coffee. I checked my watch. It was one o’clock. Time the court was in recess. Fifteen minutes later cameramen and press photographers began to congregate on the steps. The doors of the court were opened and a tall Arab man dressed in a pinstripe suit emerged accompanied by his female lawyer. They approached the press. The Arab held his clasped hands in the air and shook them in triumph. This ignited a frenzy of flash photography. I folded my newspaper, slipped it into my blazer pocket and stood up.
I worked my way through the crowd of photographers who were rowdy and jostling for a better position. A limousine pulled up at the bottom of the steps. A security guard was now leading the Arab and the lawyer down to the car. I stood in front of one of the paparazzi and let myself be pushed along towards the lawyer as the crowd closed the gap behind them. Pretending to aid their passage down to the car by holding out a protective arm, I managed to drop something into the lawyer’s coat pocket without drawing attention to myself.
* * *
Because it was cheap and anonymous, I took a room in my old haunt, the Arcadian Guest House. This time on the top floor. The same guy was on reception reading his book as I paid and picked up the key. When I got to the top floor, I sent a message to the phone I’d dropped in the lawyer’s pocket saying it was imperative she met me at the hotel to discuss an urgent legal matter. I’d signed it ‘Marty Stewart’. I got a quick response saying she’d be there soon. I closed the curtains and opened the bottle of whisky I’d picked up on the way to the hotel and poured out a shot. I watered it down with tonic from the minibar and sat next to the window with the blinds cracked open. It had been five years since I’d seen her. Five years out in the cold.
It was winter 1996, on a dark, snowy afternoon in London. Only an hour earlier, I’d arrived from Madrid, where I’d spent the best part of the year working in bars and clubs in the heat of the Spanish night. Now, I stood shivering under Crouch End’s famous clock tower, pinching together the lapels of my overcoat, as I tried to make sense of the directions I’d scribbled down in haste a day earlier.
“Excuse me,” I said to a girl in a maroon hat. “Do you know the way to...?” and I showed her the paper with the map and the address.
She squinted affably at the paper and smiled to herself, then she looked at me and said in a cut-glass accent, “I don’t, but ask in that bar over there, they’re sure to have an A–Z”.
“Which? That one over there?” I said pointing to a wine bar with a grand Art Deco façade.
“Tell you what, I could do with a glass of wine. Why don’t you follow me and I’ll show you?”
“Follow you? Sounds good.”
I picked up my duffle bag and followed her over the road into the wine bar, which was festooned with tinsel and had large oak tables and real fires.
“Jay.”
“Elisabeth,” she said, holding out her hand to be shaken.
I went to the bar and ordered two glasses of Rioja and asked if I could borrow an A–Z.
When I sat down, Elisabeth showed me on the map, where I would be staying and I took out my notebook and drew a quick street diagram. She leant over the book and noticed a list of Spanish verbs I’d written down at the top of the page.
“Interesting,” she said. “¿Habla Usted Español?”
“Solo las palabrotas,” I said.
As we drank, I told her the story of my time in Spain, working in bars and freelancing as a journalist. Tall tales of how I’d pitched a story of flamenco junkies to a music mag and got mixed up with cut-throats and gypsy girls in the back streets of Madrid. Every time I told it, it grew more outlandish, more distant from the truth, but still, people seemed to eat up that kind of stuff.
While I tried to get the waiter’s attention to order another bottle, she teased me about my journalistic ambitions. To her, the young English writer abroad was a tired cliché. And although I liked her honesty, I feigned being offended for a while.
“Tread carefully...” I warned, but was interrupted.
“Yes, I know how it goes. You lay them down before me, and I’ll walk on them. That you can depend on.”
“Any dreams of your own?”
“It’s always been a dream of mine to spend the night with someone... working class. You know, fuck the poor.”
“Admirable. Charitable even.”
“But...?”
“But a little too easy for you. And very much a cliché, too, after Lady Chatterley.”
“Well, there aren’t many outlets left for upper class angst. Just what can one do to escape the monotony of shooting parties and society weddings?”
A few lost hours later, we trod drunkenly through freshly fallen snow to where my digs were to be for the next few months. I stood awkwardly outside the door. Elisabeth did the same. Was I supposed to kiss her now? No, I thought. I was playing a longer game.
“I suppose now that I know where it is I’m staying, I should walk you home,” I said
“But you just have,” she said.
I just had. Elisabeth turned out to be Amy, Marty’s mischievous other half. And when she opened the door with her key, Marty was waiting in the hallway.
Amy told Marty I’d been lost and had asked her for directions around the corner from the flat.
“When I saw the address, I couldn’t believe it,” she said.
Nothing was said about our time in the wine bar, so my loyalty to Marty was already compromised. And as Marty poured out the wine
,
I knew he’d already picked up on our lingering eye contact. But I couldn’t help myself with Amy. She was just the kind of daring troublemaker I could never say no to. And with Marty away on business most of the time, we were able to carry on our affair for weeks before Marty found out, which he eventually did, which is when he gave me that line:
“Not now, but sometime when you think that all this is forgotten. I’ll crawl into your room as you sleep and slit your throat.”
This was followed by the all too ambiguous retraction a few minutes later. The next morning I’d packed before either of them were awake and hit the road with my duffle bag over my shoulder and my head bowed in shame.
I checked my watch. I was about to give up when there was a knock at the door. I stubbed out my cigarette in the ashtray and walked across the room. I paused with my hand on the door handle and waited until there was another knock. This time it was louder. I flung open the door, took her by the shoulders and pulled her inside the room. I pressed my lips on hers. Then as if remembering her anger, she pushed me away and slapped my face.
“You’re fucking with my head!” she screamed.
Then seconds later she pulled me back towards her and we kissed. I pushed her up against the wall and rucked up her pinstriped skirt. She hung her arms around my neck and lifted up her legs and wrapped them around my waist. I felt her hot breath in my ear.
“Do it,” she said. “Hurt me again.”
* * *
She calmed down, and helped herself to a large whisky.
“Did anyone see you with Natasha Rokitzky?”
“Just some drunken yobs outside her block of flats, possibly some guys in a pub. And Marty, of course.”
“Can you be placed at the crime scene at her time of death?”
“The police haven’t confirmed her time of death in the papers.”
She was thoughtful for a while.
“You need to get an alibi for your blackouts on Friday and Saturday night. Someone who doesn’t go out much and lives alone.”
“That’s taken care of.”
“Good. Anything at all connecting you to the crime scene.”
“A few cigarette butts and a glass I used. But the place has been cleaned since I was there.”
“That would make most DNA evidence inadmissible. Chances are the police haven’t got anything but a description that resembles you. And a few coincidences. Like when you visited her place of work to interview someone. Not forgetting the fact she was in a relationship with your best friend, which means you moved in the same circles. In my opinion, you’ve still got plausible deniability.”
“Plausible deniability?”
“Yes, I think you have reasonable grounds to deny your involvement in her death despite the fact that you may be guilty.”
“Do you really think I’m capable of murder?”
“Well, if you have to ask,” she joked. “One potential problem I foresee is if you’re the only suspect in the investigation. In that case things might begin to conspire against you. Two suspects are always better than one.”
“Lucky I have access to one of London’s best legal brains.”
“Look, if you invited me here to get me involved in...” and she tried to get out of bed, but I held her back.
“No, that’s not why. Stay,” I said. And I held her until she stopped struggling.
“I love it when you act tough,” she said, suddenly returning to form.
“Actually, I’m investigating the murder myself.”
On hearing that Amy started laughing.
“Well, God help you,” she said, pinching some flesh on my chest and giving it a painful twist. “I mean, it’s not the first occasion you and Marty have been involved with the same woman. But this time she ended up dead, huh? Should I be worried? Did you get me here to finish off the job?”
I took her arms and pinned them down by her sides.
“Maybe I’ll write my memoirs,” I said. “
My Life as the Pentonville Strangler
. You’d have a starring role.”
“You wouldn’t?”
“Wouldn’t I?”
She started struggling again, inviting me to play. So I lay on top of her as she bucked and twisted with her hips until I couldn’t resist her any longer. She bit hard on my bottom lip causing me to let her arms free. Then she drew blood with her nails on my back. She was always such a fucking handful...
An hour or so later, I woke her with a coffee and she sat up in bed to drink it. I lit a cigarette and sat beside her with the ashtray on my knee. It was time to get what I’d really come here for.
“What happened after I moved out of the flat that day?” I asked. “Did you stay together afterwards?”
“We didn’t speak for weeks and slept in separate rooms. I really thought it was over, until one night he came back from one of his trips up North. He was in a real state.”
“What kind of state?”
“He was in a mess like I’d never seen him before. He was delirious, muttering something about his mother. Then he took off his top and showed me his body. He was covered in burns, said he’d helped someone escape from a car wreck on the A1. He refused to go to the hospital. I had to go to the pharmacist and buy ointments and bandages and treat him myself. He was in bed for a week before he emerged. And from that day on, we acted as if you, the affair, hadn’t happened.”