She Died Young (13 page)

‘You speak very good English – all of you.’

The Hungarian laughed. ‘In school we must learn Russian – our second language. But it is a form of resistance that we instead in our free time learn English, you know.’

‘Well, that’s good news, because I don’t speak Hungarian.’ He nearly mentioned that he spoke Russian, but at the last moment thought that might make his new friend suspicious. ‘So I shouldn’t have been able to talk to you otherwise,’ he lied. ‘I’m Charles Hallam, by the way.’

‘My name is Ferenczy Andras. In Hungary we say the last name first. You should call me Andras.’

‘I write for the local paper, the
Oxford Mail
.’ This was not a complete lie. Following a group visit to the Soviet Union in his second year, together with others whose National Service had consisted of the Russian course organised by the Navy, he’d got an article on Russian student life published in the local paper. ‘It would be terrific if I could interview you – you could talk about your experiences – if you felt like it …’

‘Yes … that would be – that is – provided my identity … you see my parents are still there … reprisals …’

‘Of course. What about a coffee? If you’ve the time.’

Again the Hungarian hesitated. Then he smiled. ‘I find my friend. You don’t mind? He can come too?’

Actually Charles did mind, but he could hardly object. The friend’s rosy cheeks, round brown eyes and friendly smile made a striking contrast to Andras’ brooding gloom. He seemed in excellent spirits. ‘Meszarov Gyorgy.’

Charles led them to the coffee bar in the High.

‘Good coffee,’ said Gyorgy. ‘Not like in the hostel.’ He smiled. ‘But bad coffee is not our big worry just now.’

‘You’re staying at the hostel then – most of the Hungarian students are there, aren’t they?’

‘No. Andras is in the hostel. But I am one of the lucky ones. I am placed with family. If that is lucky. I am not sure.’ He turned and spoke to his companion in Hungarian. Andras smiled and shrugged.

‘Oh?’

‘Professor Quinault. Is asking questions. And his wife, she seems … she does not like me, perhaps.’

‘Professor
Quinault
? He’s my supervisor. I’m a D.Phil. student. Postgraduate.’

‘D.Phil.?’

Charles started on a laborious explanation of the British research system, but soon felt he was boring his audience and instead turned the conversation and focused on them. It was disappointing that Gyorgy seemed the friendlier and more outgoing of the two, lively and ready for a laugh despite the traumatic escape from his homeland and the uncertainty of his future. Andras looked down into his coffee and smoked. He had beautiful hands with long fingers.

‘Let’s meet again, shall we? I can show you round Oxford a bit, if you’d like.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Gyorgy was all enthusiasm. ‘That is very nice indeed. You come to the hostel, I am always there, but Andras does not like it there, so he use my room at the Professor’s house.’

Andras looked into the distance. But then he said: ‘Better to come to the house. The hostel is so noisy. If you want to talk, write article, that is much better. So you should come to the house. I hate the hostel.’

chapter
16

B
LACKSTONE COULD JUST ABOUT
remember how once waking up had meant springing out of bed and getting down to business. These days the return to consciousness was slow and painful. He groaned, rolled over and squinted at his watch, groped for his fags and lit a cigarette as he stumbled to the window.

He pulled the curtains apart and looked down at the street far below. At mid-morning London was chilly under a white sky. The pavements were crowded with Christmas shoppers like scurrying ants. How he hated Christmas – the cheap tinsel, the garish lights and decorations, the droning canned music, and worst of all, the mad compulsion to spend money. How much better London had been in the blackout.

He washed and dressed and descended in the smoothly purring lift. He walked to the nearby Maison Lyons for coffee, but the very thought of eggs made him feel sick. He lit up, breathed in and felt better. The second cigarette of the day was the one that really made the difference. The first was just resuscitation.

Years of smoking and alcohol had played havoc with his digestion and somewhere in the back of his mind he knew about the diseases that were waiting, but he’d crushed that dread firmly into the mental cupboard that contained all his nightmares, all the unspeakable horrors of life. He was a hard-bitten reporter. Dead bodies were his living, no gruesome mutilation he hadn’t seen. But there were other, worse threats menacing him, to be at all costs never thought about at all, those diseased bodies his father had been so fond of describing.

He drank two strong cups of coffee with plenty of sugar and smoked as he turned the pages of
The Times
. He scanned the deaths column on the front page and the sport at the back. Anything else was for later.

He’d decided to pay another visit to North Kensington. He was curious to know why Sonia had pushed him in that direction. She must have heard something. She was a reliable source of information.

He took the tube to Holland Park and walked along Ladbroke Grove. The residential streets were eerily quiet. The stucco barracks, walls darkened with soot, stared down emptily. Railings were broken or gone, windows blank or draped with dingy muslin, and the Greek columns and heavy porticos were a baroque monument to a failed grandeur that had perhaps never existed, save in the mind of some long-dead property developer.

There was a chip shop in the Golborne Road. It was shut. Blackstone stood back and looked up at the façade of the house next door. Curtains half dragged across; loose pointing, blackened bricks. He pressed the bottom bell.

He waited for a long time. Why did residents always take so long to answer the door in this part of the world? At last it was opened.

She was wrapped in a dressing gown that had once been white, but her smile lit up the grey day. What a vivid flower on this dung heap.

‘Is Dr Jones at home?’

‘He is. Is he expecting you?’ The Irish accent was of a piece with her black curly hair and blue eyes.

‘No. But I hope I can see him. If he can spare me a few minutes. The name’s Gerry Blackstone.’

‘Pleased to meet you. I’m Rita. Come in, will you please.’ She was so friendly he could hardly stop himself from planting a kiss on her rosy cheek. What vitality! And she had none of that air of sullen suspicion he was used to in this part of London.

‘Rita!’ At the deep-throated roar from inside the cavernous building, the girl jumped. ‘What the hell you doing out there? In this frigging freezing—’

‘I’d better get back inside …’ With an apologetic smile at Blackstone she scampered away into the gloom.

The journalist advanced into the passage. The brown varnished wallpaper was peeling away. The place smelled rank and gamey, of leaking gas, paraffin, fried onions. He walked to the back of the house where, in a room overlooking a small garden, he knew he’d find his friend. Dr Darcy Jones.

The grizzled old West Indian sat very upright in a cane armchair. He wore an ancient but well-preserved lounge suit. His eyes, behind old-fashioned round spectacles, were light coloured, as was his skin. A stick rested at the side of his chair.

‘Good morning, my friend. We haven’t seen you for a while. I’m glad of a visit. Sit down. Would you like something to drink? Some tea or coffee? Rita is an obliging girl. She won’t mind.’ The old man rang a small brass bell that stood on the octagonal table beside his chair. ‘I wish Carl treated her better. Mind you, he doesn’t beat her or anything of that kind, but he shouts all the time. Shouts at me too. A real shouter. Always been a shouter. In the meantime, how can I help you? I assume there’s a reason for your visit.’

‘It’s about Sonny Marsden, Dr Jones.’

Darcy Jones had lived in England for a long time, many years before the first post-war West Indians arrived on the
Windrush
. He was from a different generation, a different background, an old intellectual, a Marxist, indeed. He’d written books, mixed with radicals in the 1930s, but now, aged and ailing, he was living out his life in his chair, surrounded by his books, still writing, but forgotten.

He suffered from arthritis, asthma and weak kidneys, and in old age his mind, undamaged, had turned to local matters. What he didn’t know about North Kensington and Paddington was not worth knowing.

‘Sonny Marsden? I hardly think there is anything new I can tell you, my boy. You’re acquainted with the man. His activities are an open secret.’

‘Would he commit a murder?’

Dr Jones stared at the reporter. ‘He’s hot-tempered. Like my son. They get so riled up, these young men. I say to him, keep calm, you’ll achieve more that way, but they don’t seem capable of listening.’

‘There’s a girl been murdered. She used to be Marsden’s girlfriend, or so I heard.’

There was a knock on the door of the room. Rita entered.

‘Would you be so kind as to make us some tea, dear?’

‘Sure, darling. What’s this, though, about a murder?’

Blackstone thought he’d never seen such blue eyes. ‘She was called Valerie – did you know a Valerie at all?’

Rita shook her head. And she smiled, apologetic, as though she’d have been so much happier to be able to oblige.

‘A looker. Blonde. Like Marilyn Monroe.’

‘Ah …’ Now she hesitated. ‘To be sure …’ but she looked doubtful. ‘I’ll be thinking while I’m making the tea – I’ll ask Carl.’

Dr Jones sighed. ‘She’s a good girl. I’m afraid she’s wasted on my son. And to think I named him after the great Karl Marx himself. But that’s another story. Tell me, though, why are you so interested in this other young woman?’

‘I’m a crime reporter.’

Dr Jones stared at Blackstone. He stroked his goatee beard. ‘These crimes are personal tragedies, I understand that. But you turn them into gruesome entertainments. Isn’t that so? And you ignore the systematic crimes of society. Why aren’t you or one of your colleagues looking into the crimes the system perpetrates on its people? Look around here, for a start. Much of the property is actually owned by the Church, would you believe. And yet in this one London borough you’ll find more crimes of injustice than you could report in a year – in these rotting houses.’

‘I know. It’s a standing joke, isn’t it? The Church Commissioners – landlords to the biggest brothel in Europe.’ Blackstone fished for his cigarettes as he took a turn about the cluttered room; so many books, in shelves and piled on the floor. Wooden shutters divided the room; beyond them in the front room was the old man’s bedroom. Blackstone knew that, because on his previous visit the old man had had bronchitis and had been propped up in bed. He seemed better today.

‘Sit down, Mr Blackstone, you’re just like those boys, my son and his friends, always so restless. Let me tell you what you should write about in your paper. The degeneration of this city. How this slum came to exist. How Thomas Cubitt, the Victorian philanthropist, bought hundred-year leases from the great aristocratic families who owned London and how he built these houses for the rich, for rich, bourgeois families with many children and many servants. I’ve studied the history of the area. They did not anticipate the future well, those Victorians. It turned out differently from their expectations. Married couples had fewer children. There were fewer servants after the so-called Great War. Better-off families moved to the suburbs. Then, after the recent war, respectable working-class tenants moved into council housing. And now those hundred-year leases are coming to an end. The great families are selling off their land and the leaseholders are trying to get rid of the tail end of their leases. And you see the result. There’s sub-letting, illegal tenancies, it’s worth no-one’s while to do the repairs, and on the other hand there are new owners who will get evictions by fair means or foul.’

That had been a feature of the Christie case: Christie and his wife – who at length became one of his victims – had hated the West Indians and their landlord had deliberately moved several immigrants into the house where they lived with the idea of annoying them so that they moved out.

‘It certainly is something the
Chronicle
should take up,’ conceded Blackstone. An investigative team; he might mention it to the Little Man. ‘But I specialise in murders,’ he added.

‘Specialise!’ Dr Jones drew his lips down in distaste.

Rita returned with the tea. She’d asked Carl about Valerie, ‘but there was never a girl with such film-star looks down in these parts. They’d all be remembering a girl like that.’

Blackstone watched her pour the tea and present a cup to Dr Jones. She was gentle and solicitous. She patted the cushions at Dr Jones’ back and the old man patted her hand and smiled up at her as he thanked her.

Blackstone envied him for having such a lovely creature to minister to his needs – how different from his own uncared-for existence. When she passed him his cup he thanked her with a smile as engaging as he could muster. She tidied up a few of the papers lying on the ground. Blackstone wished she’d stay, yet was impatient for her to go, as he wanted to continue his talk with the old man.

After she’d shut the door behind her, Dr Jones said: ‘Carl’s up in court again next week. This time I fear it’ll be a prison sentence.’

‘I’m sorry to hear that.’ He waited a moment. ‘You see, someone suggested Marsden might have had something to do with this girl’s death – the story I’m investigating. As a matter of fact, I knew the girl.’

The pale old eyes observed him. ‘You are a sentimentalist at heart – all you gutter journalists.’

‘That’s a bit unfair.’ But maybe, conceded Blackstone silently, maybe there was a grain of truth in the old man’s words. Had he really cared about Valerie? And had she been telling the truth, or was hers just another sob story to ease the money out of his pocket?

‘Sonny Marsden’s a pimp. He’s had connections with many young women. But if Carl recalled nothing, then it is probably not true. In which case you have to ask yourself why someone told you that.’

Blackstone hadn’t quite thought of it as deliberately misleading. Sonia didn’t give much away; the information she passed along was always calculated. But she never misled people. Someone, perhaps, had misled
her
. But that only raised a further question: why? And who?

‘Men like Sonny Marsden give us all a bad name. It’s a slur on the whole community. And you and your brethren writing up all the scandals in your gutter press, you do us no favours. There are many Jamaicans, Trinidadians and all the rest who work hard over here, send money back, hope to bring their wives and children, lead respectable lives. Sonny Marsden’s brother is one such, I believe. Why don’t you write about that side of things? How they had dreams, dreams that were disappointed. They come here thinking the streets are paved with diamonds and all they find is pavements of broken glass.

‘This country is anti-coloured people,’ continued Dr Jones. ‘There is so much prejudice here. Everyone – even men such as Sonny Marsden – was so proud of being British before they came here. But now they’re disillusioned. And disillusionment leads to cynicism and either apathy or anger. And you could be in a position to do something to counteract the trend. You could write about what is really going on instead of salacious tales of gangs and prostitution.’

‘I’m a crime reporter,’ repeated Blackstone. He knew Jones was right, but there was nothing he could do about it. He wrote about what people wanted to hear. The Little Man insisted on that.

He stayed, knowing Dr Jones was lonely, and the conversation moved back to the safer territory of the Church Commissioners and their negligence. Religion was one of Dr Jones’ bugbears. He was an atheist and the hypocrisy of his pious landlords gave him a perverse satisfaction.

Rita returned to collect the tea tray.

‘Wait!’ He’d almost forgotten. He took out the postcard of the California Club. ‘D’you know anything about this place, by any chance?’

Rita held it, frowning. She shook her head. But then: ‘I tell a lie. I did have a friend worked there … I think that was the name … yes. Dawn. She’s not there any more, though. She went to a much grander place, that big club in Soho.’