PRETTY GIRLS MAKE GRAVES: a gripping crime thriller (Camden Noir Crime Thrillers Trilogy Book 1) (11 page)

“And then, by coincidence the next day they just happened to find a bag of coke in my locker,” said Mickey shaking his head in disgust and then downing the rest of his pint.

“They planted coke on you?”

“No, it was my coke alright,” he said, the indignation showing in his face. “But I wasn’t the only one, ya kna? All the detectives had coke. We shared it out after a raid. It was common practice. We’d take half a dealer’s stash and then prosecute them for a lesser charge. It was win win.”

“Then what? Did you fight it?”

“They gave me the choice of resign or face investigation. I resigned and became a private detective. I’ve still got plenty of contacts from twelve years on the force.”

“You get much work?”

“Mostly divorce cases and industrial espionage.”

“Industrial espionage. What catching people at it?”

“No, doing the espionage. Pays well.”

After a few more bottles of brown ale, we got the Marty conversation out of the way. Mickey wasn’t surprised Marty was in trouble. But he was prejudiced; Mickey had once got on the wrong side of Marty when he was 19 and came off very badly in a fight. Ended up in hospital. I changed the subject.

“What happened to the Jazz Cafe?”

“Christ, have you been away that long? It burnt down five years ago. Arson.”

“Insurance job?”

“That’s what we thought at first. It benefitted a lot of people. Including the owners of Ransom Amusements down in London. But there was nothing to connect the arsonist with any of the interests.”

“They caught him?”

“He caught himself. Burnt to death.”

“Who was he?”

Mickey rasped his beard, searching his memory,

“Guy by the name of Jarp or Jarpy something like that. Local thug from the Meadow Well”

“Jarpy? Jim Sharpel?”

“Aye, that was him. Did you know him?”

“I used to live on his patch and I’ve got the scars to prove it. He put me in hospital for two weeks.”

“I guess you could call it karma then.”

I had a few more drinks with Mickey and then staggered down to the train station through the fog. I waited for the next London train with a cup of strong coffee in my hand and smoked a last cigarette before boarding the train. A football match had just finished and the station was full of fans and police with dogs. It was a mixed blessing. Marty was unlikely to show up with them around. But you could never be sure. I remained on edge until the train reached York and a dozen soldiers got on and sat next to me. I knew Marty wouldn’t show himself with so many potential vigilantes around. While they drank and told stories, I drifted off to sleep and dreamt of my father boarding the boat at Craster as the train pulled on to London.

Chapter Twelve

The fog had reached London too. A dense mass of grey cloud was choking the city. Through the mist and damp, Dani and I were on our way to meet the only living link to Jack Lewis we’d been able to find. Of course, Lillian Stewart had known him but she was unlikely to shed any light on his life in her state. It turned out that the man we were about to meet was of some significance in the boxing world, so I’d set up a faux interview at his apartment in the hope of gleaning some details of Lewis’s life. Or rather his death.

We were late, so we were now running along Oxford Street chasing the number 10 bus. I was carrying our pint-size cartons of hot coffee while Dani had her camera equipment in a metallic case around her neck and was holding our research file under her arm. We finally leapt aboard at the stop near Selfridges. I bought the tickets from the driver, making sure the bus was going via Kensington. Then we went upstairs and sat at the front to drink our coffees. Through the murkiness I could see the street was jammed with black cabs and red buses.

As we journeyed, Dani briefed me on her research:

“Sam McCormick O.B.E., born in Belfast in 1917, was a middleweight army boxing champion during the war. He never turned pro, but in the 1950s he opened the Chessington Boxing Club in the East End of London and trained local boys in the art of pugilism. The Chessington Club specialised in taking in and reforming juvenile delinquents, thus attracting donations from the great and the good, and over the years it was celebrated for producing numerous professional boxers. He is now retired and is honorary chair of two children’s charities.”

“Sounds like an exemplary life,” I said. “He must be hiding something.”

“Anything on Jack Lewis?” I asked.

Dani handed me her coffee to hold, pushed her long black hair out of her eyes and rifled through her notes until she found the right page.

“Jack Lewis, born in 1945, was a member of the Chessington Club from the age of 12. Trained by Sam McCormick himself, he was winner of several youth tournaments and became a professional boxer at the age of 18. Not much is known about his personal life. He died in unfortunate circumstances on January 15th, 1971, aged 26, an accidental shooting.”

I exhaled sharply. “A short and brutal life. And died in 1971, the year Marty was born.”

Dani pressed the bell and we got off the bus, dumping the empty cups in a bin. McCormick’s flat was in Pinehurst Court not far from Ladbroke Grove. It was a large Victorian housing block that had been converted into luxury portered flats. Not exactly the sawdust and jellied eels I imagined would have been the habitat of an old East End boxer, but I wasn’t about to judge a man for bettering himself.

I found McCormick’s bell and rang it. Almost immediately the intercom crackled and a calm voice with a slight Irish brogue asked who it was. I told him it was North London Free Press and we were buzzed in.

Before getting in the lift, we had to get past the doorman, an imperious man who made us show our press badges and sign a visitors’ logbook noting the time and date. The lift itself was a reproduction 1920s cage with mirrors. Dani was in love with it and took numerous photos of the ornate metal work and Arthur Mucha style swirls in the paintwork. But my concern was that the lift was as insecure as it looked. We got in and it creaked, chugged and spluttered its way up to the fifth floor where Sam McCormick was waiting for us on the landing.

For a man of 84, McCormick was surprisingly sprightly with a thick head of white hair above a rosy face. He was dressed in a neat grey suit, white shirt and bow tie. He showed us into the living room, which was decorated in leather and distressed wood. When we’d sat down and I’d got my Dictaphone ready, McCormick’s maid came out and served us coffee and biscuits.

Once we were settled, McCormick said, “So, what would you like to know?”

He had a very refined way of speaking. Not at all how I’d imagined a working class boxer would sound. But maybe McCormick was old style and prided himself on his elocution when speaking to the press.

“We’d like to share with our readers the story of the Chessington Boxing Club.”

“Sure. Go ahead. First question,” said McCormick, like a seasoned interviewee.

“Just tell us about when you first had the idea to open the club. And how did... I don’t know... a working class man, fresh out of the army raise the capital to buy a Victorian Bath House and convert it into a working boxing club?”

At that point Dani took a photo of a clearly taken aback Sam McCormick.

“Well, I like a man who comes to the point,” he said recovering his composure. Although I hadn’t intended to have him up against the ropes so early, I’d evidently touched a raw nerve. I would have to be more careful if I was to maintain the interview long enough to ask about Jack Lewis.

“Well,” I explained, “your achievement required not just boxing nous but business acumen.” He looked suitably flattered at this and we ploughed on into the history of the boxing club, carefully avoiding the subject of money for the rest of the interview.

After half an hour, at Dani’s prompting, we moved into McCormick’s snooker room on the second floor of the duplex, where he kept his boxing memorabilia. The walls were covered in black and white photos of his boxing days. Dani took photos of as many as she could.

At this stage I decided it was time to go in for the kill. I took the photocopy of Jack Lewis out of my file and showed it to McCormick.

“Ah, yes,” he said, “Lewis v Cullen, 1966. That was a great fight. Lewis KOed him in the eighth round.”

“Would you say Jack Lewis was a typical product of the Chessington Boxing Club?”

“Yes, I would say that. And a good example of the power of sport to reform. He was first brought to me by a local bobby when he was 12. His mother was a prostitute and his father, well, nobody knew who his father was. Young Jack was always in trouble, robbing and fighting, a ne’er-do-well. We took him in. Taught him discipline. Made a man out of him.”

“Like in the army?”

“You could say that. If it wasn’t for the Chessington Boxing Club, Jack Lewis would have been in and out of prison his whole life.”

“So, can you shed any light on his death?”

McCormick’s hand shook spilling his tea into the saucer he was holding. It looked like anger at the question rather than fear of what I was getting at. Finally he composed himself and addressed the question.

“I really would rather not go into it. It isn’t a very happy story to associate with Chessington. There are plenty of other boxers we could talk about.”

“Yes, but if you’ll bear with me, Jack Lewis was very successful and his story will add colour. It will be of great interest to our readers. And draw more attention to the good work the Chessington Club does for the community. It’s a balancing act.”

McCormick looked thoughtful, like he was weighing up the pros and cons.

“Is it true there was a gangland connection to his death?” I probed.

“Why are you so interested in Jack Lewis?” he said with disgust. “I think you are here under false pretences, Mr Lishman. And there’s a name for that. It’s called ambush journalism.”

“I must declare an interest, Mr McCormick. I went to school with Jack Lewis’s son. Nothing untoward in my asking...”

McCormick slammed down his cup onto the tray. “This interview’s over,” he shouted. “Now. Would you please leave.”

And with that he got up and went to the intercom and spoke into it. A minute later the porter was at the door to escort us from the premises. We got into the lift together. I ushered Dani behind me and stood watching the porter who looked like he was about to attack me. Dani lifted her camera and snapped his photo over my shoulder. I turned to glance at her and she was smiling. She was enjoying this. Sometimes I felt like I didn’t know her at all.

* * *

It was one o’clock. We were back in the basement of the women’s refuge in Hackney. I was researching the two charities involved with Chessington Boxing Club on the internet when Dani began pegging up a new batch of photos. I stopped what I was doing and went over to have a look. From the ones taken of the photos in McCormick’s snooker room, there were two of Jack Lewis. One was annotated:
‘Jack Lewis sparring with Sim Fratelli, 1964’.

The other showed Jack Lewis holding an award belt. To his right was Sam McCormick. To his left was a man in a Harris Tweed overcoat, with hair slicked back and a slightly forced smile on his face.

“Lishman,” Dani called over from the other end of the washing line, “come and have a look at this”.

I went over to where Dani had pegged up the last photo.

“Don’t you recognise who that is?” said Dani.

I looked at a black and white photo of a stocky youth with dark hair having his gloves laced up by someone. He was side on to the camera. In the background were a group of people dressed up in tuxedos and evening gowns, no doubt VIPs there to watch the fight.

“No, never seen him before in my life.”

“It’s Tommy Burns. From AmizFire,” Dani said triumphantly. “You remember, the man with the bad aura.”

“I can’t see it, Dani. It’s just some guy.”

“Take it from me. I study faces for a living.”

“We’ll have to get that verified. It was almost forty years ago.”

“No need.”

“If that’s true, Dani. There are dozens of connections here, but I fail to see what it all means. Chessington is connected to AmizFire via Tommy Burns. Natasha Rok worked at AmizFire and was connected to Marty. Jack Lewis, Marty’s father, was at the same boxing club as Tommy Burns at the same time. Natasha Rok was Polish and you have the Polish guys who attacked Marty and me at Old Street and the ones who chased me through Euston station.”

“Lishman to Marty Stewart. Lishman to Natasha Rok. Lishman to Dani. Lishman and Dani to Free Press. Free Press to AmizFire. Everyone and everything is connected.”

“True. So, we have to find an approach that avoids the usual pitfalls of most 21
st
century amateur investigators.”

“What are the pitfalls?” said Dani.

“Well, there are three approaches. First, you have Conspiracy Theorists who slavishly see conspiracy in everything. Finding links between all the key players of a world event or assassination in a way which throws the official story into doubt: A went to school with B, who was at university with C, who was A’s third cousin, and so on. Conspiracy Theorists may be right some of the time, but it’s the times they are wrong that destroys their credibility. And credibility is cultural capital. Serious investigators, who diligently construct their cases on solid foundations, can be lumped in with Conspiracy Theorists if they come to the same conclusion that A and B and C are co-conspirators.

“After Conspiracy Theorists, you have Coincidence Theorists, who routinely refute all of the links the Conspiracy Theorists have made by claiming that bizarre coincidences happen all the time.”

“So that’s me then,” said Dani.

“Right. Finally you have the smuggest of them all, the Incompetence Theorists, who reject both the Conspiracy and the Coincidence Theorists by pointing to the inadequacies of most civil servants, private security firms and the like and extrapolating that the world is badly run even at the highest levels of society. Their claim is that most so-called conspiracies are just an attempt to cover up a botched job. You see, Coincidence, Conspiracy and Incompetence Theorists all tend to switch off their discernment and hold to their world view. Real investigators may have hunches, instincts and theories, but they will use them to direct their research and only make pronouncements based on credible evidence.”

“So what’s our approach?”

“Bloodhound.”

“Meaning?”

“We follow our leads. Doggedly.” I put a cigarette between my lips and lit it.

Dani laughed and walked back over to the tray of photos and started pegging more of them up to dry.

“I’ll see if I can find Sim Fratelli. We know for a fact that he knew Jack Lewis.”

“Here’s another one of Tommy Burns,” she shouted over.

I went over to see. This time there was a young boxer receiving a cup from a man in a suit. Drinking champagne in the background you could see the man that Dani thought was Tommy Burns in conversation with the unnamed man in the Jack Lewis photo.

“If Tommy Burns is involved, I doubt he’ll want to talk. We have to get as much on him as we can before we approach him. Wait a minute. That woman just behind Burns, that’s Lillian Stewart. That’s Marty’s mother.”

“Another coincidence?” said Dani.

“I think I need another one of these already,” I said, holding up the cigarette I’d just lit.

* * *

I got off at Bethnal Green station and walked up the street perpendicular to Bethnal Green Road. There was a line of men selling cheap cigarettes outside a supermarket. I bought four packs for ten pounds. The writing on the packet looked like Cyrillic script. I couldn’t find a country of origin, but I guessed they were Russian or thereabouts judging by the look and accent of the men. There was an old woman wearing a red headscarf sitting on a blanket against the wall next to the supermarket. By her side, displayed on the blanket, were ten Zippo lighters laid out in a row.