Bourbon Creams and Tattered Dreams Read online

  ‘It’s cold outside,’ Matty said quickly. ‘Let me at least put on my coat and hat.’

  ‘Bring your coat, leave the fuckin’ hat,’ Frank said, holding his glass out to Tom to be refilled. Matty shrugged off the bodyguard’s beefy hand.

  ‘Neville, would you get my coat? It looks like the Blue Lotus will have to do without me tonight.’

  ‘I’m sorry, my dear,’ Neville said, helping Matty on with her coat.

  As Frank drained the champagne glass and picked up his hat, Matty saw a worried look pass between Tom and Minetti.

  ‘What’s the rush? Have another drink,’ Minetti said.

  ‘You got a reason you want me to stay?’ Frank asked, a look of suspicion on his scarred face.

  Minetti shrugged and spread his palms wide. ‘Suit yourself.’

  Matty’s legs were turning to water. If it hadn’t been for Neville’s hand beneath her elbow she would have sunk to the floor. It was all going wrong. The signal from Freddie should have come by now. She felt Neville’s hand tighten and then she heard it. A faint whistle, two tones, as if Freddie were piping an admiral aboard a ship. Wally reached inside his jacket, Tom moved to her side and now they would hand her over to Frank. Her body was rigid with fear, but she could do it. She wouldn’t be with him for long, just the time it took to walk out of Neville’s and into the Sabinis’ waiting arms. But just then the door was flung open with such force that it came loose from its hinges.

  A man charged through the door, bellowing, ‘Rossi’s ours!’ He was pointing a gun at Frank and was followed by three others, dark-suited, broad-shouldered and all armed. They hadn’t waited. Tom wrapped his arms round her and Matty watched the scene play out, almost in slow motion.

  Frank jumped up, unseeing and vulnerable. He groped for his own gun. ‘What the fuck are you doin’ here?’ he shouted.

  ‘Work it out! You don’t double-cross the Sabinis.’

  Frank’s mouth twisted in fury as realized he’d been set up by the ‘Bermondsey mafia’. He delivered a vicious back-handed swipe at the nearest target, which happened to be Minetti. Frank’s bodyguard tossed aside a delicate chair and charged across the room, head down, straight into the path of a Sabini gun, and was felled with a single downward chop of the barrel. He didn’t get up. Now Frank was on his own in a room filled with Sabinis.

  He pulled his own gun and lunged at Matty, firing wildly in her direction, blinding her with a burst of flame. A ringing deafness gave way to a high-pitched buzz as he fired again and a bullet whizzed past her ear, shattering a pane of the bow window. Another shot rang out, and she gagged on the smell of cordite and burned flesh. She felt Tom’s arms let go of her as his body thudded to the floor. ‘Tom!’ she screamed and fell to her knees beside him.

  The gunshots had brought Sugar from the bedroom. ‘You was meant to wait outside for ’em! Just grab Rossi!’ Sugar ordered the Clerkenwell mobsters, who were focused on ducking more of Frank’s misdirected bullets. But Frank now had Matty in his sights, her shining dress a beacon in his benighted world. Slumped across Tom’s inert body, she didn’t see Frank coming and he reached her before either Wally or Sugar could. Frank grabbed her hair and all the men froze, guns poised.

  Frank waved the gun in a frenzied circle. He yanked her up in front of him. ‘Walk!’ he ordered. Smoke from gunfire and river mist curling through the broken windows seemed to have fogged her reactions. She couldn’t move her feet. ‘Move!’ Frank hissed into her ear. Then another voice, from another world, another time came to her. Almost a stage whisper, but very insistent. ‘Don’t block me, dear!’ the voice said and she was instantly transported back to her early days on the stage, when she’d unwittingly stood in front of an old trouper, blocking the audience’s view of him.

  ‘Don’t block me, dear!’ he’d whispered, giving her a good dig in the back to emphasize that he wasn’t going to be upstaged.

  The cardinal stage rule had become so ingrained in her being that as soon as she heard Wally utter the words ‘Don’t block me, dear,’ she dodged to one side. Wally fired and the bullet thudded with precision into Frank, smashing him against the elegant table and sending candlesticks flying in all directions. Now Matty understood why Bernie had insisted it was better she never find out the thing Wally really was best at.

  Flame from scattered candles spilled along floorboards dust-dry with age, painting Neville’s Persian rug in new colours of russet and gold as fire folded it into embers. Sparks caught a faded tapestry hanging above the fireplace and soon a blaze was licking up dry plaster and lathe walls, reaching searing fingers to where Matty lay, groping the burning floorboards, searching for Tom.

  ‘Leave Rossi, he’s had it. Just get out!’ she heard one of the Sabinis shouting. The old house had caught like a tinderbox and whichever way she looked furnishings and fabrics were ablaze. Then she heard a long, agonized groan, the old captain’s house death cry, as burning timbers collapsed and the entire river frontage, including the massive bow window, detached itself and fell, crackling and hissing into the Thames below.

  She heard screams, shouts, as black billowing smoke engulfed them. She thought she heard Neville sobbing and Sugar shouting for Freddie. But all she could think of was Tom. She couldn’t see him, couldn’t feel him. He was gone. She lifted her head and, as she cried out for help, was hit by a blast of heat so intense that she heard her hair crackle and singe. A wall of flame sprang up, barring her way to the door, as figures like ineffectual demons danced behind the flames, powerless to help her.

  ‘Matty, Matty!’ she heard Freddie half scream, half sob. ‘Get her out! Chrissake, Sugar, help me get her out!’

  Holding her stole to her face to block out the searing smoke, she tried to make herself heard. ‘Freddie, I’ve lost Tom!’ she screamed. But her words were drowned out by a loud crack. She looked up to see the plasterwork ceiling crumble to ash and fall.

  ***

  There was nothing left of Neville’s bolt-hole by the Angel except a pile of charred timbers and a mound of rubble. There would be no more intimate champagne suppers for two, no more clandestine visits from Lady Fetherstone, no more high-society entertaining along Bermondsey Wall. Neville had collapsed at the sight of what the conflagration had done to his hideaway, and was now being tended to by a local doctor who’d left his pint on the bar of the Angel pub and come running when the fire broke out. Freddie, Sugar, Minetti and Wally watched like four silent minstrels, soot-blackened and red-eyed as firemen scoured the debris.

  ‘Keep back!’ a fireman warned Freddie as he walked forward into the steaming pile, stepping on to a charred, smouldering beam. ‘It ain’t out yet. It could flare up again any minute!’ he warned.

  Sugar pulled him back. ‘Come on, mate, there’s nothing else you can do.’

  ‘Did you see Matty get out?’ Freddie asked Sugar, his normally strong voice, hoarse and faint. He cradled his hands, burned raw from battling through flames to reach Matty.

  Sugar shook his head. ‘Nah. I see her dress catch fire, then the whole ceiling come down. I didn’t see her no more. I’m sorry, mate.’

  ‘What about Tom?’

  ‘He was with Matty, then Rossi shot him and I see him go down...’ Sugar scrubbed at his face, smearing soot-like war paint over bony cheeks.

  ‘I got Rossi,’ Wally said, his voice exhausted and hollow.

  ‘Dead?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Dad always did say there was only one thing I was good for. Rossi can’t touch our Matty no more,’ Wally replied, his face etched with sadness.

  ‘She’s free now,’ Freddie echoed in a dull, husky voice, staring at the blackened hulk of a house, and the even blacker Thames beyond.

  *

  When the ambulance arrived to cart off Neville and Minetti to St Olave’s Hospital, the three ex-Elephant Boys refused to leave. They stayed through what remained of the night, until the last red-hot brick had cooled enough for the firemen to sift through them all. They moved methodically from wha
t had been the front door, to what had once been the back wall but which was now a precarious precipice jutting out over the river. When the first body was brought out, Sugar put his massive arm round Freddie and squeezed him till his friend’s bones crunched.

  Wally said. ‘Stay here, mate. I’ll go and find out.’

  He was allowed to view the charred remains and came back in seconds.

  ‘It’s Rossi,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure?’ Freddie turned haunted red-rimmed eyes to his friend.

  Wally jerked his head towards the firemen. ‘As far as they’re concerned he burned to death, but I knew what I was looking for.’ Wally pointed to the centre of his forehead. ‘That’s where I aimed and that’s where it went. It was Rossi all right.’

  Sugar nodded. ‘’Kin good riddance.’

  ‘Did they find—’ Freddie began to ask, but Wally interrupted him.

  ‘No, no one else. Fred, they think Tom and Matty are in there somewhere, but the fire was so fierce, there might not be a lot left...’ Wally looked towards the firemen, who were rolling up their hoses. ‘They say they’ll come back when it’s light, look some more.’

  ‘No!’ Freddie dropped to his knees and the two friends hunkered down beside him. ‘No, I ain’t having it.’ Freddie’s big frame seemed suddenly shrunken. ‘I ain’t going nowhere, not till I find her.’ Tears coursed down his cheeks, carving white rivulets in their sooty coating. ‘How can I go home and tell Sam and Nellie our Matty’s gone?’

  ‘You can’t.’ A voice came from out of the smoke-filled half-light and all three men looked up sharply at the intrusion.

  Will stood, ashen-faced and bare-headed before them. A breeze off the river blew pale cinders around his head, which settled on to his dark hair like fat snowflakes.

  ‘Will! How did you find out?’ Freddie sat back on his haunches, wiping a sleeve hastily across his eyes.

  ‘Neville telephoned Ma Feathers at her London flat. We’re staying there. Feathers drove me here.’ He looked over his shoulder as his friend joined them.

  ‘We dropped Mother at St Olave’s Hospital and came straight here. Is there anything we can do?’ Feathers asked.

  Freddie turned bleak eyes towards the smouldering ruins. ‘Tom and our Matty are still in there, somewhere, but the firemen couldn’t find them...’

  ‘But we’re not giving up, are we?’ Will drew back Freddie’s gaze to his own, which at that moment bore all the fierce determination of his mother and all the stubborn intransigence of his father.

  Freddie’s eye brightened briefly. ‘No, we’re bloody well not giving up.’

  ‘Well, I’m not telling Winnie her Tom’s gone neither,’ Wally said.

  ‘All right then. If they’re packing it in,’ Sugar stared with disdain at the retreating backs of the exhausted firemen, ‘we’ll just have to find ’em our fuckin’ selves.’

  He put his massive hands under Freddie’s armpits and hoisted him up as if he were light as a child. ‘Come on, Fred. Let’s get crackin’.’

  The men picked their way through what had been Neville’s drawing room. Bending low, they sifted plaster dust and turned over sooty bricks, rooting around blackened candelabra, which reached out of the rubble like fossilized branches of ancient trees. When they had swept the entire remains they converged cautiously at the edge of the back wall, which was now little more than a jetty, jutting over the Thames. Freddie looked over the edge. There was a slow groan as a part of the floor tipped forward, sending all the men off balance for an instant.

  ‘Back up!’ Sugar shouted and they all retreated.

  Freddie lay cautiously on his stomach so that he could peer over the edge of what was left of the house. ‘You hold me legs, Sugar, in case the whole bloody lot goes!’

  ‘What, do you think they’ve gone in the water?’ Sugar asked, taking hold of his friend’s feet.

  ‘Maybe,’ Freddie answered just as a loud crack rang out. The floor beneath him jolted and the remains of the front wall fell into the river with a hollow slap that reverberated among the pilings beneath them.

  ‘You’re too heavy, Freddie! Let me do it, I’m the smallest,’ Will urged.

  ‘No, you stay where you are!’ Freddie shouted.

  But Will kneeled down beside him. ‘You’ll be no good to Matty if you bring the lot down. I’ve got more chance!’

  ‘He’s right, mate. Let shorty ’ave a go,’ Sugar said.

  As the floor joists moaned again, Freddie gave up and eased himself slowly backwards. Will took his place and edged out on his elbows until his torso was hanging over the river. Though he was shorter and lighter than the others he was athletic and well-muscled, so that his own upper-body strength supported him, suspended in mid-air above the swift-flowing river. Some of the foreshore had been exposed by the ebb tide, but the river ran so swiftly down to Limehouse Reach and the estuary beyond that anyone who had toppled into its irresistible stream at this point would by now have been swept far beyond Greenwich.

  ‘Can you seen anything?’ Freddie asked.

  ‘Just a bit further...’ Will snaked forward. ‘Give me the torch.’ He reached back a hand and Freddie slapped the torch into it.

  Bleached fingers of weak early morning light reached between the algae-draped wooden piles that supported this part of the house as it jutted out over the foreshore. Will shone the torch between the dank struts.

  ‘I think I can see something! I’m going down!’ He handed the torch back to Freddie. ‘Shine it down there.’ Will pointed to a place where two beams about a foot thick had intersected, forming a fork just above the water line. He swung himself round and began to lower himself over the edge. Freddie took a step forward. ‘No! Stay back, Fred, your extra weight could bring it down. I can just reach a beam with my foot.’

  Freddie froze and they all watched in silence as Will lowered himself down. All that was now visible of him were his fingertips. And then they disappeared.

  After a tense minute Feathers called to his friend. ‘Will? Are you there yet?’

  ‘Nearly there!’ came the muffled reply, and then, ‘Oh my God!’

  ‘What?’ the others shouted in unison

  ‘Something moved... I think it’s Tom! He’s wedged between the pilings!’

  A shout went up from the waiting men, but Freddie voiced the question that followed their elation. ‘What about Matty – is she there too?’

  28

  From the Ashes

  October–November 1932

  She had lost Tom. That had been her last conscious thought, before fire consumed her every sense. Incandescence robbed her of sight, roaring flames deafened her, stifling smoke filled her nostrils and her hands lost all feeling as, skin melting, she had searched the flames for Tom. Then her dress of silver and gold brocade caught fire, and in a moment’s clarity she knew what she had to do. She had no choice. She gave herself up to the fire and let herself fly.

  Diving through the gaping hole where the bow window had been, her one thought was that death by water was preferable to death by fire. The flight, which in real time was a matter of seconds, felt to her like a slow eternity. From the corner of her eye, she was aware of a comet-like tail blazing behind her, the remnants of her dress in flames, turning her into some mythical burning bird. She ended her flight with a stinging slap into the unyielding embrace of water, which hissed around her like a thousand snakes as filthy Thames water extinguished the flames. She swallowed mouthfuls of the stinking river and immediately felt the tide tugging her, expecting any moment to be snatched away by the current. But something impeded her progress, hammering at her ribs. It seemed the tide had carried her into the path of an algae-covered piling. She wasn’t on fire any longer, neither was she drowned, so where was she? Disorientated in the green-black shifting darkness, she grabbed the slippery piling and began to tread water. Suddenly her feet found slime, the yielding sludge of Thames mud. She was in the shallows! The ebb tide had left a thin strip of foreshore and now sh
e began to half swim, half trudge through the muddy shallows towards it.

  She grasped the slippery wooden beams to help pull her forward through the water. She reasoned that these must be the pilings that supported the old captain’s house, in which case she was not far from help if she could just get to the beach. She was about to shout for help when something caused her to stop. Had she heard a sound? She froze. There it came again and she whirled round, setting up a ripple that splashed and sucked at the beams. And then she saw it, a lighter shape nestling in the black geometry of angles made by the beams. Finding a looped mooring rope attached to an iron ring, she grasped on to it and inched back out into the stream. Immediately her feet were taken from under her, and then as she managed to pull herself upright, a hand brushed her cheek and she screamed. The scream echoed around the cavern made by the river wall and what remained of the old captain’s house above her. She reached up. Her fingers touched fingers. She looked up into Tom’s pale face. His cheek was pillowed on a tangled mass of algae and he had been caught, like her, between the crook of two pilings. Unlike hers, his perch was further out into the stream and he was not holding on for dear life. With each slap of a wave, the tide was easing him inch by inch off the pilings and she could see him slipping slowly into the water.

  She didn’t consider that he was dead. She thought she’d lost him, and now she’d found him again. She wasn’t going to let him go. She remembered the time when he’d hauled her up out of the mill race; perhaps she could do the same. She grasped his hand and attempted to pull him further into the angle of the two pilings, but he was too heavy and she was below him, with nothing to brace herself against. She would simply have to climb up to where he was and hold him there till the tide went out further. She gripped the cross-beam with two hands and, like a trapeze artiste, swung herself up so that she was sitting astride the beam with Tom in front of her. Encircling him with her arms, she pinned him with her body into the cleft where he had come to rest and laid her head on his back.