I went down to the Skylark to see if Charteris had anything to report but he wasn’t around. I hadn’t seen him in Brighton for a while.
Then the trunk was discovered at Brighton station’s left luggage office and bedlam broke out. On 19th June I spotted Charteris hurrying along the prom. He didn’t have time to talk — couldn’t wait to get away in fact.
‘What does the Galloping Major have to say about Olympia?’ I said.
Charteris was darting looks left and right.
‘Look, it’s doing my reputation no good being seen with a bobby in public.’
‘What does he say?’ I insisted.
‘I haven’t seen him for ages. That was just, you know. .’
‘What do you think?’
‘I wasn’t there. Sounds like some Reds got what was coming to them.’
‘Are you down here for long?’
‘Two or three weeks,’ he said. ‘I’m staying with Jack Notyre.’
The next couple of weeks were hectic as we dealt with the avalanche of information coming our way. The next time I saw Charteris, he was at least a witness and possibly an accomplice in the second Brighton Trunk Murder.
The one thing he hadn’t told me was that Jack Notyre’s other name was Tony Mancini and for six weeks he’d been carting around in a trunk the corpse of Violette Kay. Violette Kay, the woman I’d once seen dancing as one half of Kaye and Kaye on the Palace Pier and again as Mrs Saunders in the Skylark.
THIRTY-FIVE
Victor Tempest exercise book three
There had been a lot going on I didn’t know about — or maybe didn’t want to know about. For instance, whenever I’d seen Charteris in Brighton he’d been living with Notyre/Mancini and Violette Kay. The last time, after he’d killed Violette, Notyre had moved another woman in for a bit — the waitress from the Skylark. On that occasion, Charteris stayed with Notyre nearly a month with the poor dead woman in an increasingly smelly trunk at the bottom of the bed.
Charteris and Notyre had met in prison in July 1931. Charteris was in for a month for stealing. Notyre was in for three months for loitering with intent in Birmingham. They palled up in London on and off over the next couple of years.
The police questioned Notyre about Violette Kay on Friday 13th July in connection with the murder victim found in the left-luggage office at the station. At the time he said she’d gone away and because she was not in the age range specified by the pathologist who’d examined the torso we’d let him go. But somebody must have been suspicious — or Notyre thought they were — because on that Sunday 15th July he did a runner.
First, he and Charteris went dancing until the early hours, then on to an all-night restaurant. They went back to the flat for a couple of hours until at 4.30 they returned to the all-night restaurant. Charteris walked with Notyre to Preston Park — they thought the police would be watching Brighton central station — and put him on the first train to London.
‘You were in Brighton on the tenth of May,’ I said to Charteris, in his formal interview in the Royal Pavilion. ‘Where were you staying then?’
He looked shifty.
‘I was staying with Jack — but not that night.’
‘Just as well or you’d have been sharing a bed with a corpse. Where were you?’
‘I was at the Grand with the Galloping Major. When I got back the next day, Jack had this big black trunk and said he was packed and ready to move. Said that Violette had buggered off with a bookie. I went and hired a trolley for a couple of pence and helped him wheel it up to his new place. The trunk weighed a bloody ton. He said he had crockery and stuff in it and I had no reason to disbelieve him. I didn’t know I was carting Violette around.’
Charteris had always been a plausible liar so I didn’t know how much he knew about the murder. Certainly he had a good alibi for the murder itself — he would have had to be a pretty cool customer if he’d helped earlier in the day, then gone to the Blackshirt meeting at the Pavilion in the evening.
Early in 1935 I left the police. A combination of things. My bosses didn’t like the relationship I’d had with the press. And word had got back I’d been with the Blackshirts at Olympia. They didn’t seem to know about Philip Simpson and I didn’t say. It was ironic that I’d been thinking of quitting the BUF yet my membership had lost me my job.
I’d been hesitating because I’d been impressed that Mosley had set up a youth movement that was a bit like the Boy Scouts — Baden-Powell was a fascist sympathizer, of course. There was a lot of paraphernalia — uniforms, badges, saluting, flags — but the idea was a good one.
I went up to Chelsea for a meeting with Joyce and Knowles.
‘I’m ready to move up. Is there anything for me?’
Knowles picked up a sheet of paper.
‘You’re from Lancashire, yes?’
‘My family is.’
‘You still have family there?’
‘Not who speak to me.’
I think my mother’s father was still alive but we didn’t have anything to do with him.
‘We’ve got a problem up there. Last week a group of our members in Colne overheard a bunch of men talking in a foreign language. Someone told our members these foreigners were learning about cotton so they could go back home and set up in competition. Defending cotton is one of our main aims. Our members attacked the foreigners. Beat them perhaps too enthusiastically. And then we discovered the foreigners were a bunch of Esperantists from Burnley and Bacup, in Colne to celebrate the opening of their new premises.’
I burst out laughing. Joyce and Knowles both gave me fierce looks.
‘You have to admit-’ I started to say, then stopped when Joyce gave me a warning look. ‘That wouldn’t happen under my command,’ I said more soberly. ‘I’ve been a policeman. I know how to assess situations.’
‘The BUF official policy is against chain stores and in favour of local shopkeepers. A number of chain stores are moving into those northern towns. That and cotton must be our focus.’
Joyce leaned forward, his hands clasped.
‘Are you up to it? Will you help us revolt against the united muttons of the old gangs of British politics?’
Two weeks later I was back in the town of my ancestors. My district stretched across through Accrington and Burnley to Nelson and Colne. I found the BUF were popular in the north-west because of that history of individualism that came out of Methodism decades before. The Tories usually got a lot of working-class votes and even the unions were conservative. The cotton manufacturers were major contributors.
But the set-up was a bit of a joke in my area. My second-in-command was the head of the woman’s unit, Nellie Driver. First thing she said to me was: ‘A God-fearing non-boozer can thread ten needles whilst the boozer is still trying to pick the needle up.’
She complained all the time that nobody saluted her with a ‘Hail Nellie’ when they saw her. Nellie moaned that in Nelson they had to share premises with a spiritualist group doing shell and photograph seances. The spiritualists kept putting their notices over the Blackshirt ones on the joint noticeboard — and wouldn’t let them use the sink.
The Blackshirts were the biggest load of misfits you could imagine. Crooks, faddists, Mormons, pacifists, Christadelphians, antivivisectionists. None of them would go out on the street selling our newspaper because they didn’t want anyone to know they were members and they were frightened of getting beaten up by the Reds.
One bloke who worked on a lathe in a factory offered to knock off some knuckledusters from odd scraps of brass or some other hard metal. The north-west was tough in those days. My uncle had been kicked to death in a drunken brawl with some Irish navvies outside a pub in Burnley back in 1922. An argument, the newspapers called it. Some bloody argument. The papers blamed the number of pubs in Burnley for the violence — there were fifty-six licensed houses within three hundred yards of the market hall.