The Garden Party (24 page)

‘Fergus McAlpine.' Petty nodded. ‘Fergus McAlpine. The party went on all week and we heard things, we got to know who was who. I overheard Charlie Magg say to The Baptist . . . you know about The Baptist?'

‘Yes,' Penny Yewdall said, ‘we know a little about him but anything you can tell us will be useful.'

‘Well, Charlie Magg was talking to The Baptist and The Baptist said, “Good job you were there, Charlie, McAlpine has a thing about women.”'

‘So that was Fergus McAlpine?' Yewdall clarified. ‘The small ginger-haired, rat-faced, geezer who beat up the two women, that was Fergus McAlpine?'

‘Seems it was.' Liz Petty drained her glass.

‘Another drink?' Penny Yewdall asked, and stood and walked to the bar.

‘So,' Penny Yewdall said as she sat back at the table with a vodka for Liz Petty and another orange juice for herself, ‘Sandra told me about The Baptist.'

‘Yes . . . thanks.' Liz Petty sipped her drink. ‘Pearl told him Sandra had been lippy and, well, let's just say The Baptist took Sandra and showed us all how he got his nickname, and Sandra didn't give no more lip to anyone after that. No one did.'

‘Yes, so then later in the week we understand something really bad happened?' Yewdall probed.

‘Yes, the two straggly-haired geezers . . . can't tell you much.'

Penny Yewdall felt a pang of disappointment.

‘I was one of the first ones to faint, darling.' Liz Petty shrugged her shoulders. ‘I mean, I may have been on the street for five years by then, but I was still only twenty years old and I'd never seen anyone battered to death then drowned, just to make sure.'

‘You saw that?' Yewdall asked.

‘Not all of it; like I said, I fainted, little food for four or five days then watching that.'

‘So what did you see?' Penny Yewdall noticed the barman standing closer to where she and Liz Petty sat, noticeably closer; not looking at them, but listening, intently so.

‘Towards the end of the week it was, two geezers got pulled through the house and on to the back lawn . . . thin, wasted, long hair and beards, pleading for their lives; they were rabbiting on about not grassing on anyone, but the guy Arnie Rainbird wasn't having any of it. They took one guy and put him down and started working him over with golf clubs; that noise, a squelching sound, blood in his mouth, but they avoided hitting his head. I fainted so I didn't see much after that.'

‘Who assaulted the victim?'

‘Charlie Magg and Fergus McAlpine.'

‘Sure?'

‘Yes, definitely.' Liz Petty looked about her. ‘I hate this smoking ban, I need a fag . . . but, definitely, I remember. Charlie was the guy who liked women. He never took advantage all week but he could give a geezer a fair slap, and Fergus McAlpine, well, he just took everything he could get and hated men and women equally, I remember thinking that before I passed out. So, yes, it was Charlie Magg and Fergus McAlpine who did the business with the golf clubs.'

‘What was the next thing you remember?'

‘I came to and people were just standing round, the men and the women. I stood up and for some reason I walked over to the swimming pool and saw the water was streaked with blood. I was told someone had stabbed him in the stomach after The Baptist had drowned him.' Liz Petty bit her fingernail. ‘Can't think why anyone would do that. I mean, if the geezer was dead by then. I need a smoke.'

‘To let the gas escape from the body,' Yewdall replied, ‘that must have been the reason.' Yewdall took a sip of her drink. ‘But if you didn't see that . . .?'

‘No, I can't say I saw that, but I saw the body had been carried to the bottom of the garden and laid across a bonfire. The bonfire wasn't lit,' Petty explained.

‘Yes, I understand,' Yewdall replied, ‘it was ready to be lit.'

‘Yes, then they did the same thing to the other poor toerag, calling him a grass. Pretty well as soon as they started on him I fainted again.' Petty spoke apologetically. ‘I'm sorry.'

‘I think I would have done the same,' Yewdall replied comfortingly, ‘no reason to be sorry for anything. So then . . .?'

‘Well, then I came to again and sat on the lawn for an hour or so, as did the other women and a few of the men. No one was saying anything, then it was Sandra Barnes' Tom, he seemed to be put in charge of the women. He came out of the house and said, “Right . . . on your feet”, and we walked to the bottom of the garden and stood in a line and watched them burn the two corpses. The air just filled with a horrible sickly sweet smell, I'll never forget it, and again the women just started collapsing either side of me as the bodies burnt.'

‘Fainting?'

‘Yes . . . and they kept that fire going all that evening and into the night, with one bloke tending it and separating the bones from the rest, and he kept saying to us, “This is what happens if you grass.”' Liz Petty paused. ‘So that's why there's no old statements from this girl, darling, I don't want that end. I don't want my bones to be put in a cardboard box and given to Pearl's husband to be dropped in the river.'

‘Her husband?' Yewdall queried.

Petty took another sip of her vodka. ‘One evening, Pearl was having a real bitch with the guy, telling him what a wimp he was, “You really are, Des, you're a proper wimp. You turned out no good, you're just not up to it any more, no bottle at all”, and how “Father” would have been ashamed of him. So, Pearl, the woman who slapped Sandra Barnes, was the wife of Des, who I also heard being called “Desmond” by another of the geezers.'

‘That's interesting.' Penny Yewdall looked at Liz Petty. ‘Very interesting. They were keeping it in the family.'

‘Seems so. So, Des, or Desmond, the coach driver, was given the box of bones and told to tip them into the Old Father. He must have driven away in a motor because the coach didn't move. So he would have found a bridge and into the river they went, somewhere quiet,' Liz observed, ‘can't see him tipping them off Tower Bridge, but upstream where the Thames is narrow and there's small footbridges. I'd have gone there if I was him.'

‘Fair enough.' Penny Yewdall sat back into the bench seat which ran along the wall. ‘That would make more sense.'

‘So, the next old morning I was on swimming pool cleaning with Sandra Barnes' Tom . . . or her ex Tom, barking at us like he was a sergeant, “I want it scrubbed sparkling and I mean sparkling”, throwing his voice, making it echo round the empty swimming pool, but not shouting.'

‘Projection.' Penny Yewdall smiled. ‘It's called projecting your voice.'

‘Well, he projected it all right, “Any of you what don't give a hundred and ten percent just isn't going home. We've had one fire, we can have another” . . . Ah . . . yes.' Liz Petty put her glass down. ‘He said, “It's a deep river, plenty of room for your bones as well”, so that is when I knew where Des had tipped the bones, in the Old Father, but not exactly where.'

‘All right.' Yewdall paused. ‘So you remember Sandra Barnes. Do you remember any of the other women?'

‘Just Davinia.'

‘Davinia?'

‘Yes, she wasn't a brass. She was like Sandra, a rich man's mistress, and, like Sandra, she only found out where her old man got his dosh from the hard way.' Petty shrugged.

‘Do you remember anything about her?'

‘She was a bit posh. She had her rent paid for by her man in return for “benefits”. She and I were washing up once – we liked washing up because there was food to be pilfered – and we talked about making a run for it, but we decided against it. The garden was fenced in with twenty foot high wire fencing and the front was guarded by dogs. We were barefoot; the only phone in the house was fixed to take incoming calls only and it never rung, not once. So we decided that we just had to stick it out. Probably a good job we did, because that was just before we saw those two guys murdered. They would have made a right example of us if we had run for it; four bodies on the fire, not two.' Liz Petty rolled a cigarette. ‘So I'm here, still alive, still kicking. I survived.'

‘Do you,' Penny Yewdall asked, ‘recall anything about Davinia?'

‘Full of regret, full of shame, full of guilt, blaming herself for being stupid. She kept saying, “I am so stupid, stupid, stupid. How could I have got caught up in all this?” I remember she came from Reading.' Liz Petty laid the roll-up on the table. ‘Her father was a solicitor and her mother was a clergywoman, a curate, I think she said. I don't know what a curate is but it's something to do with the church.'

‘It's all right.' Yewdall smiled briefly. ‘We know; it's like the bottom rung of the hierarchy. You start as a curate and end as an archbishop . . . but that's helpful.'

‘Interesting.'

‘Yes, not many clergywomen in the Church of England in Reading with a daughter called Davinia and whose husband is a solicitor.' Penny Yewdall took out her notebook and wrote her telephone number on a blank page, and then added ‘Penny' beneath it. ‘That's my phone number.' She handed the notepaper to Liz Petty. ‘The last number is actually a “one”, but I wrote “seven”, as you see. You have to remember it's a “one”. That number could make things difficult for you if the wrong people find you in possession of it.'

‘OK.' Liz Petty read the number then folded the piece of paper and put it in her handbag. ‘Thanks. Oh, I remember that Pearl's brother was one of the gang.'

‘Her brother?'

‘The one man who she showed any time for, and just about the one man that had any time for her. They were like husband and wife, and after Pearl had that bitch against Desmond, the bus driver, she said, “At least I have a brother who's got the bottle it takes, if I haven't got a husband with it”, and then she added, “He even calls you ‘Mr Harley'; his own brother-in-law . . . he calls you ‘Mr Harley'. That says it all . . . it says it all.”'

‘Again, how interesting that is.' Penny Yewdall smiled. ‘How interesting. It really was all in the family, but listen, Liz . . .'

‘Yes?'

‘Just think about the offer of witness protection. We can use you in the witness box and you can use a fresh start. Arnie Rainbird can make people disappear but so can the police, though not in the same way, of course.' Penny Yewdall reached for her handbag. ‘I promise, no one will find you.'

‘You can really do that?'

‘Yes, we really can.' Penny Yewdall stood. ‘We both benefit. Can I buy you another drink before I go?'

‘Yes, thank you. I'll go outside and smoke my fag, but another drink sounds good.' Liz Petty fumbled in her bag for her cigarette lighter. ‘I've got some thinking to do. A new start, what street girl wouldn't want that?'

‘It was all so, so silly, so very, very, silly . . . the waste . . . so silly.' Diana Wortley placed her aluminium walking stick to one side of her legs and looked down at the carpet. Beside her was a small table on top of which were plentiful bottles of tablets and bottles of medicine.

It was tragic. Vicary read the cluttered room. Here, he thought, was despondency and here was life's unfairness. ‘It was not silly, Miss Wortley, it was a tragedy.'

‘No . . . no.' Diana Wortley shook her head. ‘It was silly, take it from me, Mr Vicary. It was very silly, very stupid youthful silliness which led to the tragedy, and without the silliness there would have been no tragedy.' Diana Wortley had a thin, wasted frame, her face was drawn, her eyes sunken. ‘He was going to be a people's lawyer, so he said, not a rich man's lawyer; that was young idealist Daniel. He wanted to champion the underdog and because of that he felt he had to rub shoulders with the East Enders. How could he represent them, he would say, he would ask . . . how could he represent them if he didn't understand them? So he'd take me drinking in pubs down the Mile End Road, and in Stepney and Whitechapel. He was such a naïve idealist, poor Daniel. You know you don't have to know what someone smells like if they don't wash or change their clothes for three days in order to represent them. Lawyers argue points of law. They can prepare their case from documents and photographs. A lawyer need never even meet his client, but Daniel didn't see it that way. Anyway, he eventually got into a fight; looked at someone the wrong way or something.'

‘Which you saw, I presume?' Vicary asked.

‘No . . . well, apparently . . .'

‘Sorry? I don't understand. “Apparently” you saw the fight?'

‘Yes, apparently.' Diana Wortley forced a smile. ‘I recall sitting in the pub; the next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital, shaking like a leaf, but even now I don't remember anything of the in-between. I had . . . I still have what I understand is called “Hysterical Island Amnesia”, HIA for short. I sustained no injuries, no bang on the head – which can also cause island amnesia; no physiological reason for it, so it's all in the mind. I am the classic hysterical female. And then on top of that I go down with multiple sclerosis.'

‘I am sorry.'

‘That's life. You didn't have to look very hard to find me, did you? I was living with my parents when Danny was murdered and I am still living with my mother; Father died a few years ago.' Again she forced a smile. ‘Some life, eh?'

‘Again,' Vicary replied, ‘I am sorry. I wish I could do something.'

‘Thank you, anyway. So I was unable to tell the police anything and I still can't tell you anything. I attended the trial of Arnie Rainbird, I went each day with Daniel's parents and it all hinged on whether Danny had a weapon in the form of a broken bottle and was threatening Rainbird with it. The prosecution said that Danny had dropped the bottle and was offering no resistance. And in a pub full of men, only one stepped forward and gave evidence against Rainbird, confirming that Danny had dropped the bottle well before Rainbird stabbed him. The jury found against Rainbird and he went down for life, for murder. He was a brave man . . . I mean the man who gave evidence. He was very brave. Arnie Rainbird's conviction was later overturned on appeal, but he was still convicted of the lesser charge of manslaughter. I believe he's out of prison now, only served ten years. The manslaughter charge meant he could apply for an earlier parole.'