A Lesser Evil

  Just his looks were enough, for he had magnetic dark blue eyes, black hair and smooth olive skin. On Nora’s first night he slipped her a double whisky with a wink, understanding she was nervous. It was he who told her which were the valuable punters and which ones were troublemakers. He also told her which girls needed encouragement, and the ones who were likely to give her grief.

  For six months Nora was supremely happy. She stopped dwelling on her trust funds that had been plundered, the disgrace and shame Reggie had put her through. Sometimes she even felt strangely grateful, for she now had a far more fulfilling, glamorous life, and total independence.

  But then one night three men came into the club. Big, tough-looking men with rough voices and faces that had clearly been moulded by fists, but wearing hand-tailored suits and gold watches. Such men were commonplace in Soho. They lived on the profits of vice, villainy or thuggery, but they were always big spenders, and usually behaved impeccably when they came to the Starlight.

  These three men hadn’t come for an evening’s entertainment, however, they’d come to see her. They demanded to know where Reggie was, saying he owed them £15,000 for gambling debts, and they showed her an IOU signed by him.

  Of course she told them that he’d robbed her and run out on her and that she had no idea where he was. But they said that as his wife, she would have to pay.

  She just shrugged it off, told them it was nothing to do with her, and that she couldn’t possibly be held responsible. When they left quietly, she assumed they’d accepted what she’d said.

  But the following night, she’d just got into her flat in the early hours of the morning when the doorbell rang. She opened it, thinking it was the woman who lived above her, and there were the men again.

  They pushed her aside and barged in, one holding her back so she couldn’t phone the police. They turned the whole flat upside down, pulling out drawers, going through the wardrobe, even the bookcase, and when they found nothing but £20 in her purse, they threatened her.

  One of the men held her arms behind her back, while the leader, whom they called ‘Earl’, ran a knife menacingly down her cheek.

  ‘You are a good-looking woman, and I expect you want to stay that way. So pay us and you can.’

  She was terrified, instinctively knowing by the cruelty in his cold blue eyes that he’d enjoy scarring her for life. She cried and told them again and again that she had nothing but what she earned at the club. He said that for the time being he would settle for £50 a week, and he would be round to the club every Friday night to collect it. As the men left, taking the money from her purse with them, Earl turned at the door and smirked menacingly.

  ‘Don’t even think about going to the police or you’ll find yourself waking up in hospital with your face rearranged. And don’t try and run for it either. We’ll soon track you down and make you regret it.’

  Nora guessed that they had found out about her wealthy background and didn’t believe that Reggie had taken everything. She realized, too, that if she’d taken an ordinary job in an office or shop, she would never have come to their notice. But by taking a position in a Soho nightclub, she might just as well have advertised herself in the national newspapers.

  She didn’t dare go to the police for fear of the men carrying out their threat, but she couldn’t leave her flat and job either. For five weeks she paid them, each time pleading that she couldn’t continue to do so as that was all she earned.

  She was sick with fear and anxiety, she couldn’t sleep or eat, and the few pounds she had tucked away for a rainy day were soon eaten up in living expenses.

  But on the sixth Friday, Earl said that in future they wanted £100 every week, because at the rate she was paying it back she’d be on her old age pension before the debt was cleared.

  She pleaded with him, insisted there was no possible way she could give him that much. But Earl just laughed at her.

  ‘You’re sitting on a gold mine,’ he said with a sneer. ‘You might be knocking on a bit, but there’s blokes who’d pay thirty or forty quid to fuck you. So do it and stop snivelling. Next week we want a ton.’

  John came over to her after they’d left the club. ‘What’s going on, darlin’?’ he asked.

  ‘Nothing,’ she said, trying to smile, but she was so scared she was shaking.

  ‘I know that crew,’ he said, his usual wide grin disappearing. ‘What have they got on you?’

  She fobbed him off with a quip about one of them asking her for a date and getting nasty when she refused, but John wasn’t easy to fool, and she felt him looking speculatively at her whenever she was sharp with one of the girls or a customer.

  The following Friday night she was a bag of nerves. She didn’t even have £50 to give them as she’d had to pay a month’s rent.

  They came in at nine, before the club got busy, went straight over to a table on the far side of the bar and beckoned to her. She was so scared of Earl that she could hardly manage to tell him that all she had for him was £40.

  ‘You ain’t listened to a word I said,’ Earl said contemptuously. ‘I don’t like that. So get hustling, doll! You owe me and I’ll be back to get it.’

  She could barely walk out to the staff restroom, she was trembling so badly, and once in there she was violently sick. A couple of her girls came in and saw her, but she managed to tell them she must have got food poisoning.

  She was still hanging over the toilet bowl when she heard John come up behind her.

  ‘I never saw food poisoning come on just through talking to a rat,’ he said, but he wasn’t mocking her, his tone was kindly and anxious.

  She had to tell him all about it, and he got a wet cloth and wiped her face, then hugged her and let her cry on his shoulder.

  ‘I wish I could tell you they won’t carry out their threat,’ he said in a low voice. ‘But I’m afraid they will. You see, it’s not them your old man owed the money to, it’s their boss. And they’re as afraid of him as you are of them, so they have to get a result.’

  ‘What can I do then?’ she cried, realizing that John must know who their boss was. ‘I can’t get the money, I can’t go to the police, and they’ll track me down wherever I go! I can’t live in fear like this.’

  ‘I’ll hide you,’ he said. ‘You’ll have to leave the job and your flat. There’s no way I can protect you while you’re still around here. Now, do exactly as I tell you and you’ll be okay.’

  John’s plan was that she had to go back into the club and act as if everything was normal. He said he expected they’d posted a lookout to make sure she didn’t run for it. Meanwhile he’d work out a plan and tip her the wink when it was time to go.

  Nora was on tenterhooks all night. The club was packed to capacity, every one of her girls dancing and drinking with customers, and as she mingled, checking that the bigger groups had enough drinks, smiling and chatting, making sure everyone was happy, she felt she was being watched closely. She was familiar enough with Soho by then to know that a powerful man who employed enforcers would also have informers and spies, and if John helped her, he’d be in the firing line next.

  But John didn’t come near her again, and by two in the morning when the band was close to ending their final set, she thought he must have had second thoughts about helping her. She was just chasing up a round of drinks for one of the bigger tables when Charles Lownes, a regular at the Starlight, came up and asked her to dance.

  Charles was a bit of a joke in the club as he had the bearing and accent of an old Etonian. He always wore a dinner jacket, pleated-front dress shirt and bow tie. He was in his early sixties, and knocked back whisky as if he had hollow legs. Everyone assumed his wealth was inherited as he was usually one of the last to leave the club when it closed, and always seemed to be going off on little jaunts to Paris and the South of France, usually with a woman half his age.

  Nora didn’t often dance with customers, especially at the end of the evening when they were drunk, and she hesit
ated.

  ‘Come on, my dear,’ he said, leaning closer to her. ‘John asked me to take care of you, and the only way I can do it is if you act as if you think I’m the answer to a maiden’s prayer.’

  Nora glanced over her shoulder. John was mixing a cocktail, and he looked right at her and winked, then looked away.

  Charles was a good dancer, light on his feet, and as usual none the worse for the amount of drink he’d put away.

  ‘Trust me,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Whatever I say or do, go along with it.’

  He kept up a show of trying to woo her right until the club closed, then said in a voice loud enough for everyone around them to hear that he was taking her somewhere for a nightcap. Nora thought this was because if the thugs saw her go with him they’d assume she’d taken their advice, and they’d be round in the morning to collect her earnings.

  John was nowhere to be seen as she and Charles left the club. Duncan, one of the other barmen, had been left to lock up.

  Outside in the street the night air was clean and crisp after the smoky atmosphere in the club, but there were still a great many people about, many of them staggering drunk. A cab was waiting for them, and Charles helped her in. Nora glanced out through the back window but couldn’t see anyone watching them.

  ‘Wimpole Street,’ Charles told the driver, and as the cab moved away he sat back on the seat and put one finger on her lips as if warning her not to say anything about her predicament, for the driver might hear.

  It transpired that Charles did live in Wimpole Street, but although he got the cab to drop them there, the minute the cab drove off he led her away. He took her to a mews at the back of neighbouring Harley Street, to a small flat above what had once been stables.

  The flat was clean but very austere, the furniture nothing more than a bed, a couple of armchairs and a stove in the kitchen. Charles said it belonged to a friend who normally kept it for his domestic staff, but this friend was out of the country and had asked Charles to oversee some urgently needed repairs. Apologizing for the lack of comforts, he said he would be back in the morning with some food, but warned her she must not go out, answer the door to anyone or put the light on in the room at the front.

  She spent over two weeks in that flat, nearly going out of her mind with boredom and loneliness. Charles came most mornings with food, a book or a magazine, and he also brought some toiletries and clothes as the sequined cocktail dress and high-heeled shoes she’d arrived in were incongruous in her new surroundings. He could never stay for more than a few minutes, and if he knew what was going on at the club in her absence he didn’t tell her.

  She was scared too. She would jump at any sudden noise, and with every car that drove into the mews she fully expected Earl and his men to be coming to get her.

  On the twelfth day, Charles brought her a newspaper to read.

  ‘Look on the third page,’ he said with an impish grin.

  The headline was ‘Missing Hostess Abducted’. There was also a photograph of her, taken in the Starlight club.

  She read with some amusement that on the night Charles brought her here, her neighbours reported they had heard her coming in around twothirty in the morning, and some while later heard the sound of her door being forced, male voices shouting and furniture being knocked over and broken. When they looked out of their own front door, they saw two men half-dragging an injured person down the stairs who they assumed was Amy Tuckett.

  Charles went on to tell her that he and John now knew that the man behind the bully boys was a man called Jack Trueman. Nora recalled meeting him just once in her first week at the Starlight, a big man with dark hair, strong, craggy features and cold eyes. One of the girls had told her he owned several clubs, casinos and the kind of hotels in Paddington that were used by prostitutes. Even she said he was a man to steer clear of.

  John turned up later that day and told her Amy Tuckett had got to stay missing. It was he who fabricated Nora Diamond, with false references and a National Insurance number. He jokingly called her ‘the woman who never was’, but cautioned her that if she ever broke her cover, she would be in very real danger. He said Jack Trueman was entirely ruthless, and he made sure that anyone who crossed him came to regret it bitterly.

  The Ava Gardner hairstyle and the glamour-girl clothes had to go. Nora dyed her hair dark brown and put it up in an unflattering bun. Charles bought her a matronly navy blue costume and sturdy court shoes, and the transformation was complete. She became the formidable and very correct Miss Diamond.

  Then, finally, she was able to walk out of that mews flat door, when John sent her to the vacant flat in Dale Street.

  He knew it had become empty because he lived with his parents and two sisters at number 13. He thought it an ideal place because he could continue to keep a discreet eye out for her. At the same time he couldn’t intervene on her behalf with Mr Capel, the landlord, because he didn’t want anyone to know he had any connection with her. She told Mr Capel she’d just come up from Sussex to find work in London.

  From the day Nora moved into Dale Street, if she ran into John they would just nod and smile like strangers. It was the only way it could be, but she would have given anything for his continuing friendship. She hated Kennington, the flat was awful, and at that time she had no money to decorate or make improvements, but it did feel safe with Frank downstairs, and a newly married couple upstairs.

  John had managed to pack a few of her personal trinkets while he was waiting for the men to barge in and hurt her, but however touched she was that he’d done that for her, in reality she’d lost everything for a second time.

  This time she had to begin again, finding a job without relying on her looks to give her a headstart. She would also always be looking over her shoulder, afraid of being recognized.

  She had felt very alone when she first came to London, but there were people back in Dorset, friends, distant relatives and acquaintances, she cared about, and who presumably cared about her. But once Amy was gone, Nora could never contact any of them again. She cried as she burned her address book, for without her history, who was she?

  Soon afterwards she got a job at the telephone exchange, and before long she was promoted to supervisor, in charge of eighteen young telephonists. In some ways it was very similar to her job in the club, except she was no longer a glamorous figure and she couldn’t afford to let anyone get close to her for fear of revealing her true identity.

  Nora had never lost her affection for John, despite her disappointment that he allowed himself to get sucked into crime. Even before he met and married Vera, and bought number 13 from his landlord, his name was linked with some of the most formidable and crooked businessmen she’d met in her Soho days. There was Peter Rachman, an unscrupulous slum landlord who charged sky-high rents to naive and frightened West Indian immigrants, Ronald Beasdale who was in illegal gambling, and Albert Parkin who ran protection rackets.

  It was two years ago that she discovered John had become involved with Jack Trueman. There was an article in the paper about the new nightclub Trueman had opened in Soho, and a picture of the club’s interior showing John as the manager behind the bar.

  Nora knew John was smart enough to have concealed his identity that night in her flat when he’d thrashed Earl and his men. She knew too that he would never expose her either. But she was appalled to think John would go to work for such a man as Trueman. How could a man who had once risked his own life to help a vulnerable woman join forces with the thug who was responsible?

  Yet looking at it realistically, she knew that John couldn’t possibly have remained the same as he’d been a decade before. He had always wanted the ‘good life’, and he’d taken short cuts to get it. Everyone described him as a villain or a gangster, he’d been in prison, and probably done many bad things which had eroded his idealism. She naively hoped that he’d taken the club management job because he was trying to go straight; she knew it wouldn’t be easy for a man who’d done time t
o find work.

  That was certainly the way it looked. Almost every evening she saw him come out of number 13, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, and his car was back in the morning. She even heard the street gossip that Vera was happy again because he was home with her more – she’d had a miserable time while he was in prison.

  Then one Friday evening over a year ago, she saw John and Jack Trueman going into number 11, with Alfie grinning at the door like a Cheshire cat.

  The passing years hadn’t changed Trueman that much, though his hair was silver rather than dark. She guessed he must be close to sixty, but he looked far younger and still very fit.

  She didn’t know which she was most shocked and appalled by, the thought of John consorting with a maggot like Alfie, or seeing the man she’d been told would maim her if he found her, right across the street. Terrified, she drew her curtains, locked the door and sat quaking in her chair, fully expecting the door to burst open any minute.

  Yet by the following morning she was calm again. Clearly there was a good reason why John had brought Trueman to meet Alfie, and it had nothing whatsoever to do with her. She told herself that businessmen operating in Soho often had nasty characters like Alfie in their pay, and as John had grown up here in Dale Street and known Alfie all his life, perhaps he thought he could be useful to his boss.

  She never saw John go into number 11 again after that night, but she had seen Jack Trueman several times, often in the company of a younger, swarthy man who was equally well dressed. She came to the conclusion that perhaps the men didn’t mind slumming it if the stakes were high there or the card games were exciting. She wasn’t at all happy about Trueman coming to the street, of course, every Friday night she was a bag of nerves, but it did spur her on to put her name down with several flat-letting agencies, and she hoped she’d be able to leave very soon.

  To her shame she remembered feeling nothing but relief when she heard that the Muckles had been arrested. Not anger at what they’d done to their child, not even a tear for Angela, just relief because Trueman wouldn’t be coming to the street ever again.