—
The crowd began to melt and the newspaper boy continued on his way, his spirits lifted by having been a witness to something historic. He suddenly remembered an apple, old and wrinkled, that he had squirrelled away first thing that morning. He retrieved it from his pocket and chomped on it like a horse. It was wonderfully sweet.
The toff with the cigar spotted him and said, “Good show, eh?,” as if he valued his opinion, and then cuffed him amiably on the side of his head and rewarded him with a sixpence. The boy danced happily away.
As he left, he heard someone in the crowd yelling, “Thief!” It was a term that could have applied to any of them really, except perhaps the man who had been watching the proceedings from a discreet distance, in the back of an unmarked car. Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher—“Frobisher of the Yard,” as John Bull magazine had styled him, although somewhat inaccurately as he was currently on loan to Bow Street station in Covent Garden, where he had been sent to “shake things up a bit.” Corruption was acknowledged to be rife there and he had been tasked with seeking out the bad apples in the barrel.
John Bull had recently asked Frobisher to write a series of articles based on his experiences in the force, with a view to making them into a book. Frobisher was not a narcissist—far from it—but he had been enlivened by the proposition. He had always been a books man and a literary challenge was something that took his fancy. Now, however, he was not so sure. He had suggested it be called London After Dark, but the magazine said they preferred the title Night in the Square Mile of Vice. He didn’t know why he had been surprised by this when every cheap rag howled with lurid tales of foreign men seducing women into venality of one kind or another, when in reality they were more at risk of having their handbags torn from their arms in broad daylight.
Nothing had yet been published, but every time he submitted something to John Bull they asked him to make it racier, more “sensational.” Racy and sensational were not part of Frobisher’s character. He was sober-minded, although not without depth or humour, neither of which was often called on by the Metropolitan Police.
He was idly following the progress of a couple of women who were stealthily working their way through the crowd, skilfully picking pockets. Frobisher recognized them as subalterns in the female Forty Thieves gang, but they were comparatively small fry and of no interest to him at the moment.
A pair of cream-and-black Bentleys—one owned, one rented for effect—drew up and the Coker clan divided themselves between them and drove away, waving as if they were royalty. Crime paid, fighting it didn’t. Frobisher felt his law-abiding bile rising while he had to quash a pang of envy for the Bentleys. He was in the process of purchasing his own modest motor, an unshowy Austin Seven, the Everyman of cars.
The delinquent Coker empire was a house of cards that Frobisher aimed to topple. The filthy, glittering underbelly of London was concentrated in its nightclubs, and particularly the Amethyst, the gaudy jewel at the heart of Soho’s nightlife. It was not the moral delinquency—the dancing, the drinking, not even the drugs—that dismayed Frobisher. It was the girls. Girls were disappearing in London. At least five he knew about had vanished over the last few weeks. Where did they go? He suspected that they went in through the doors of the Soho clubs and never came out again.
He turned to the woman sitting next to him on the back seat of the unmarked car and said, “Have you had a good look at them, Miss Kelling? And do you think that you can do what I’m asking of you?”
“Absolutely, Chief Inspector,” Gwendolen said.
The Queen of Clubs
At the Amethyst, Freddie Bassett, the head barman, presented another oversized floral offering to Nellie. “Welcome home, Mrs. Coker,” he said. No “Nellie” for him, he never cheapened himself by being anything less than formal with the family. He had his standards. He had trained at the Ritz before losing his post there due to an unfortunate incident involving two chambermaids and a linen cupboard. “You can imagine the rest,” he said to Nellie when he applied for the job at the Amethyst. “I’d rather not,” she said.
Nellie disliked flowers, considering them to be too needy. They should be reserved for weddings and funerals in her opinion, and not her own, thank you very much. Nellie wished to leave the world unadorned, as she had entered it, with not so much as a daisy.
Instead of flowers, she would rather be given a box of cakes from Maison Bertaux around the corner in Greek Street—chocolate éclairs or rum babas, preferably both. She had a terrific sweet tooth, acquired from the soor plooms and Hawick balls of her Scottish childhood. The food had been the worst thing about prison. Her daughters had brought boiled sweets for her on visiting days in Holloway. Nellie had acquired many thoughts on prison reform during the course of her sentence and top of the list would be a tuppence’ worth weekly allowance of sweets—marshmallows and coconut ice, for preference.
When she entered Holloway six months ago, the staff of the Amethyst had sent her a cornucopia befitting a harvest festival—a large bouquet of flowers and a basket of fancy fruits that had been composed by a Covent Garden trader who was a regular patron of the club. The staff had badged it with the words Good Luck, the letters cut out from fancy embossed silver card that had been rummaged from the obscure cupboard that housed the club’s New Year decorations.
This extravagance had been removed by a wardress as soon as Nellie stepped inside the forbidding walls, and the exotica of pineapple, peaches and figs had been divvied out between the staff while Nellie dined on meagre prison fare—a regular round of pea soup, suet pudding and beef stew, a rancid dish that had never met the cow it claimed to be acquainted with.
Before Nellie went to sleep that first night, a flower—a rose, a red one plucked from the bouquet—was poked through the hatch in her cell door. It was unclear to Nellie what spirit it had been given in—contemptuous or consoling. Her cellmate, a Belgian woman who had shot her lover, was less confused. She snatched the rose and stamped it beneath her boots until the petals stained the cold stones of their cell floor.
* * *
—
The club had only just closed and most of the staff had stayed on to pipe their captain back on board, although the band had packed up and gone (they clung stubbornly to their autonomy). They had played “God Save the King” over an hour ago, the final heroic survivors of the night swaying to attention. Nellie was strict (her rules were adhered to even more strictly when she was in absentia)—no one sat for the King, not even the most inebriated. Now only a couple of regulars lingered, amiably dipsomaniac boulevardiers, adding to the chorus of pages, porters, waiters and the breakfast chef, who all echoed Freddie: “Welcome back, Mrs. Coker.”