The Best British Mysteries III

Drummer Unknown by John Harvey

There’s a photograph taken on stage at Club Eleven, early 1950 or perhaps late ‘49, the bare bulbs above the stage picking out the musicians’ faces like a still from a movie. Ronnie Scott on tenor sax, sharp in white shirt and knotted tie; Dennis Rose with his trumpet aimed toward the floor, skinny, suited, a hurt sardonic look in his eyes; to the left of the picture, Spike Robinson, on shore leave from the US Navy, a kid of nineteen or twenty, plays a tarnished silver alto. Behind them Tommy Pollard’s white shirt shines out from the piano, and Lennie Bush, staring into space, stands with his double bass. At the extreme right, the drummer has turned his head just as the photo has been taken, one half of his polka-dot bow tie in focus but the face lost in a blur of movement. The caption underneath, reads DRUMMER UNKNOWN.

That’s me: drummer unknown.

Or was, back then.

In ten years a lot of things have changed. In the wake of a well-publicised drug raid, Club Eleven closed down; the only charges were for possession of cannabis, but already there was heroin, cocaine.

Ronnie Scott opened his own club in a basement in Chinatown; Spike Robinson sailed back across the ocean to a life as an engineer; and Dennis Rose sank deeper into the sidelines, an almost voluntary recluse. Then, of course, there was rock ‘n’ roll. Bill Haley’s ‘Rock Around the Clock’ at number one for Christmas 1955, and the following year Tony Crombie, whose drum stool I’d been keeping warm that evening at Club Eleven, had kick-started the British bandwagon with his Rockets: grown men who certainly knew better cavorting on stage in blazers while shouting, ‘I’m gonna teach you to rock,’ to the accompaniment of a honking sax. Well, it paid the rent.

And me?

I forget now, did I mention heroin?

I’m not usually one to cast blame, but after the influx of Americans during the last years of the war, hard drugs were always part of the scene. Especially once trips to New York to see the greats on Fifty-Second Street had confirmed their widespread use.

Rumour had it that Bird and Diz and Monk changed the language of jazz the way they did – the complex chords, the flattened fifths, the extremes – to make it impossible for the average white musician to play. If that was true, well, after an apprenticeship in strict tempo palais bands and pickup groups that tinkered with Dixieland, they came close to succeeding where I was concerned. And it was true, the drugs – some drugs – helped: helped you to stay awake, alert, keep up. Helped you to play an array of shifting counter rhythms, left hand and both feet working independently, while the right hand drove the pulse along the top cymbal for all it was worth. Except that in my case, after a while, it wasn’t the drumming that mattered. It was just the drugs.

In a matter of months I progressed, if that’s the word, from chewing the inside of Benzedrine inhalers to injecting heroin into the vein. And for my education in this department I had Foxy Palmer to thank. Or blame.

I’d first met Foxy at the Bouillabaisse, a Soho drinking club frequented by mainly black US servicemen and newly resident West Indians, of whom Foxy was one. He was a short, stubby man with a potbelly beneath his extravagantly patterned shorts and a wisp of greying beard. His ears stuck out, foxlike, from the sides of his head. A scaled-down Foxy would have made the perfect garden gnome.

‘Hey, white boy!’ he hailed me from his seat near the piano. ‘You here to play?’

‘Maybe.’

‘Forgot your horn?’

For an answer, I straightened my arm and let a pair of hickory drumsticks slide down into the palm of my hand.

A bunch of musicians, mostly refugees from some dance-band gig or other, were jamming their way through ‘One O’clock Jump’, but then a couple of younger guys arrived, and Foxy pulled my arm toward him with a grin and said, ‘Here come the heebie-jeebie boys.’

In the shuffle that followed, Tony Crombie claimed his place behind the drums, and after listening to him firing ‘I Got Rhythm’ at a hundred miles an hour, I slipped my sticks back out of sight.

‘So,’ Foxy said, planting himself next to me in the gents, ‘that Tony, what d’you think?’

‘I’m thinking of cutting my arms off just above the wrist.’

Foxy smiled his foxy smile. ‘You’re interested, I got somethin’ less extreme.’

At first I didn’t know what he meant.

The Bouillabaisse closed down and reopened as the Fullado. Later there was the Modernaires in Old Compton Street, owned by the gangster Jack Spot. Along with half a hundred other out-of-work musicians, I stood around on Archer Street on Monday afternoons, eager to pick up whatever scraps might come my way: depping at the Orchid Ballroom, Purley, a one-night stand with Ambrose at the Samson and Hercules in Norwich. And later, after shooting up, no longer intimidated or afraid, I’d descend the steps into the smoke of Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms where Club Eleven had its home and take my turn at sitting in.

For a time I made an effort to hide the track marks on my arms, but after that I didn’t care.

Junkie – when did I first hear the word?

Applied to me, I mean.

It might have been at the Blue Posts, around the corner from the old Feldman Club, an argument with a US airman that began with a spilt pint of beer and escalated from there.

‘Goddamn junkie, why the fuck aren’t you in uniform?’

I didn’t think he wanted to hear about the trumped-up nervous condition a well-paid GP had attested to, thus ensuring my call-up would be deferred. Instead, some pushing and shoving ensued, at the height of which a bottle was broken against the edge of the bar.

Blind luck enabled me to sway clear of the jagged glass as it swung toward my face; luck and sudden rage allowed me to land three punches out of four, the last dropping him to his knees before executing the coup de grace, a swiftly raised knee that caught him underneath the chin and caused him to bite off a sliver of tongue before he slumped, briefly unconscious, to the floor.

As I made my exit, I noticed the thin-faced man sitting close by the door, time enough to think I recognised him from somewhere without being able to put a finger on where that was. Then I was out into the damp November air.

‘I hear you takin’ up the fight game,’ Foxy said with glee, next time I bumped into him. And then: ‘I believe you know a friend of mine. Arthur Neville, detective sergeant.’

The thin-faced man leaned forward and held out a hand. ‘That little nonsense in the Blue Posts, I liked the way you handled yourself. Impressive.’

I nodded and left it at that.

In the cracked toilet mirror my skin looked like old wax.

‘Your pal from CID,’ I asked Foxy, ‘he OK?’

‘Arthur?’ Doxy said with a laugh. ‘Salt o’ the earth, ain’t that the truth.’

Probably not, I thought.

He was waiting for me outside, the grey of his raincoat just visible in the soft grey fog that had drifted up from the river. When I turned left he fell into step alongside me, two men taking an evening stroll. Innocent enough.

‘Proposition,’ Neville said.

I shook my head. ‘Hear me out, at least.’

‘Sorry, not interested.’

His hand tugged at my sleeve. ‘You’re carrying, right?’

‘Wrong,’ I lied.

‘You just seen Foxy; you’re carrying. No question.’

‘So?’ The H burning a hole in my inside pocket.

‘So you don’t want me to search you, haul you in for possession.’

Our voices were muffled by the fog. If Neville knew about Foxy but was allowing him to deal, Foxy had to be paying him off. If what he wanted from me was more back-handers, he had another thing coming.

‘What do you want?’ I asked.

A woman emerged from a doorway just ahead of us, took one look at Neville, and ducked back in.

‘Information,’ Neville said.

At the corner he stopped. The fog was thicker here, and I could barely see the far side of the street.

‘What kind of information?’

‘Musicians. In the clubs. The ones you hang around with. Of course, we know who’s using. It would just be confirmation.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘you’ve got the wrong guy.’

Smuts were clinging to my face and hair, and not for the first time that evening I caught myself wondering where I’d left my hat.

Neville stared at me for a long moment, fixing me with gray-blue eyes; his mouth was drawn straight and thin. ‘I don’t think so,’ he said.

I watched him walk, coat collar up, hat brim pulled down, until the fog swallowed him up.

‘He’s a nasty bastard.’ The woman had reappeared and stepped up, almost silently, alongside me. Close to her, I could see she was little more than a girl. Sixteen, seventeen. Her eyes seemed to belong to someone else’s face. ‘Don’t trust him,’ she said and shivered. ‘He’ll hurt you if he can.’

Ethel, I found out her name was later, and she was, in fact, nineteen. She showed me the birth certificate as proof. Ethel Maude Rastrick, born St Pancras Hospital, March 17, 1937. She kept it with a handful of letters and photographs in an old stationery box hidden away inside the chest of drawers in her room. Not the room where she worked, but the room where she lived. I got to see both in time.

But after that first brief meeting in the fog, I didn’t see her for several months. No more than I saw hide nor hair of Detective Sergeant Arthur Neville. I’d like to say I forgot them both, though in Neville’s case that wouldn’t be entirely true.

Somehow I’d talked myself into a gig with a ten-piece band on a tour of second-rank dance halls – Nuneaton, Llandudno, Wakefield, and the like – playing quicksteps and waltzes with the occasional hot number thrown in. The brass players were into booze, but two of the three reeds shared my predilection for something that worked faster on the pulse rate and the brain, and between us, we got by. As long as we turned up on time and played the notes, the leader cast a blind eye.

As a drummer, it was almost the last regular work I had. The same month Bulganin and Khrushchev visited Britain, the spring of ‘56.

On my second night back in the smoke, I met Ethel again.

I’d gone looking for Foxy, of course, looking to score, but to my bewilderment, Foxy hadn’t been there. Nobody had seen him in a week or more. Flash Winston was playing piano at the Modernaires, and I sat around for a while until I’d managed to acquire some weed and then moved on.

Ethel’s was a face at the window, pale despite the small red bulb and lampshade alongside.

I looked up, and she looked down.

NEW YOUNG MODEL read the card pinned by the door.

When she waved at me I shook my head and turned away.

Tapping on the window, she gestured for me to wait, and moments later I heard her feet upon the stairs. The light over the door was cruel to her face. In the fog I hadn’t noticed what no amount of lipstick could hide, the result of an operation, partly successful, to remedy the fissure at the centre of her upper lip.

‘Why don’t you come up?’ she said.

‘I haven’t got any money.’

‘I don’t mean business, I mean just, you know, talk.’

Now that I’d noticed, it was difficult not to stare at her mouth.

She touched my hand. ‘Come on,’ she said.

An elderly woman in a floral-print overall sat like somebody’s grandmother at the top of the first flight of stairs, and Ethel introduced her as the maid and told me to give her ten shillings.

The room was functional and small: bed, sink, bucket, bedside table. A narrow wardrobe with a mottled mirror stood against the side wall. Hard against the window was the straight-backed chair in which she sat, a copy of yesterday’s Evening News on the floor nearby.

Now that I was there, she seemed nervous; her hands rose and fell from her sides.

‘Have you got anything?’ she said, and for an instant I thought she meant johnnies and wanted business after all, but then, when I saw the twitch in her eyes, I knew.

‘Only some reefer,’ I said.

‘Is that all?’

‘It was all I could get.’

She sat on the side of the bed, resigned, and I sat with her and rolled a cigarette, and after the first long drag, she relaxed and smiled, her hand moving instinctively to cover the lower half of her face.

‘That plainclothes bloke,’ I said. ‘Neville. You said not to trust him.’

‘Let’s not talk about him,’ she said. ‘Let’s talk about you.’

So I lay back with my head resting where so many other heads had rested, on the wall behind the bed, and told her about my mother who had run off with a salesman in home furnishings and started a new family in the Scottish borders, and my father who worked the halls for years as an illusionist and conjurer until he himself had disappeared. And about the moment when, age eleven, I knew I wanted to be a drummer: going to see my father on stage at Collins Music Hall and watching the comedian Max Bacon, previously a dance band drummer, topping the bill. He had this huge, to me, drum kit set up at the centre of the stage, all gold and glittering, and at the climax of his act, played a solo, all crash and rolling tom-toms, with the assistance of the band in the pit.

I loved it.

I wanted to be him.

Not the laughter and the jokes or the showy suit, and not fat like he was, certainly not that, but sitting there behind all those shimmering cymbals and drums, the centre of everything.

‘Tell us about yourself, Ethel,’ I said after a while.

‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing to tell.’ Her fair, mousy hair hung almost to her shoulders, and she sat with her head angled forward, chin tucked in.

‘Aren’t you going to get in trouble,’ I said, ‘spending all this time with me instead of a client?’

She looked toward the door. ‘The maid goes home after twelve, and then there’s nobody comes round till gone one, sometimes two.’

I presumed she meant her pimp, but I didn’t ask.

‘Besides,’ she said, ‘you saw what it’s like. It’s dead out there.’

She did tell me about her family then. Two sisters and three brothers, all scattered; she and one of her sisters had been fostered out when they were eleven and ten. Her mother worked in a laundry in Dalston, had periods in hospital, times when she couldn’t cope. She didn’t remember too much about her father, except that he had never held her, never looked at her with anything but distaste. When he was killed towards the end of the war, she’d cried without really knowing what for.

I felt a sort of affinity between us, and for one moment I thought I might reach out my hand, lean across, and kiss her, but I never did. Not then or later. Not even months down the line when she asked me back to the bed-sitter she had near Finsbury Park, a Baby Belling cooker behind a curtain in one corner and the bathroom down the hall. But I did take to stopping by between midnight and one and sharing a little of whatever I had, Ethel’s eyes brightening like Christmas if ever it was cocaine.

Foxy was around again, but not as consistently as before. There’d been some falling-out with his suppliers, he implied; whatever arrangements he’d previously enjoyed had been thrown up in the air. And in general the atmosphere had changed: something was clearly going on. Whereas Jack Spot and Albert Dimes had more or less divided the West End between them, Spot lording it over Soho with a certain rough-hewn benevolence, now there were young pretenders coming out of the East End or from abroad, sleek, rapacious, unfeeling, fighting it out among themselves.

Rumour had it Arthur Neville had been demoted to a woodentop and forced to walk the beat in uniform, that he’d been shuffled north to patrol the leafy lanes of Totteridge and Whetstone. More likely, that he’d made detective inspector and was lording it in Brighton. Then one evening in the Blue Posts there he was, the same raincoat and trilby hat, same seat by the door. I’d been round the corner at 100 Oxford Street listening to the Lyttelton Band play ‘Creole Serenade’ and ‘Bad Penny Blues’. Not my kind of thing, really, except he did have Bruce Turner on alto, and Turner had studied in the States with Lennie Tristano, which was more my scene.

I should have walked right on past him and out into the street.

‘If you can find your way to the bar without getting into a fight,’ he said, ‘I could use another pint.’

A favourite refrain of my mother’s came to mind: What did your last servant die of? I kept it to myself.

‘Scotch ale,’ Neville said, holding out his empty glass.

I bought a half of bitter for myself and shepherded the drinks back through the crowd.

‘So,’ Neville said, settling back, ‘how’s business?’

‘Which business is that?’

‘I thought you were in the bebop business.’

‘Once in a while.’

‘Lovely tune that.’ Pleased with himself, Neville smiled his thin-lipped smile, then supped some ale. ‘The Stardust, isn’t it?’ he said.

The Stardust had sprung up on the site of the old Cuba Club on Gerrard Street, and an old pal, Vic Farrell, who played piano there, had talked me into a job as doorman. I kept a snare drum and hi-hat behind the bar, and Tommy would let me sit in whenever my hands were steady enough. Which was actually most evenings now. I wasn’t clean by a long chalk, but I had it pretty much under control.

‘Oscar still running the place, is he?’

Neville had a liking for questions that didn’t require an answer.

‘What is with you and coons?’ Neville said, ‘Taste for the fucking exotic?’

Oscar was a half-caste Trinidadian with a bald head and a gold tooth and a jovial ‘Hail fellow, well met’ sort of manner. He was fronting the place for a couple of Maltese brothers, his name on the licence, their money. The place ran at a loss, it had to, but they were using it to feel their way in, mark out a little territory, stake a claim.

Neville leaned a shade nearer. ‘You could do me a favour there. Comings and goings. Who’s paying who. Keep me in the picture.’

I set my glass on the window ledge behind me half finished. ‘Do your own dirty work,’ I said. ‘I told you before.’

I got to my feet, and as I did so Neville reached out and grabbed me by the balls and twisted hard. Tears sprang to my eyes.

‘That ugly little tart of yours. She’s come up light more’n a few times lately. Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to her, would you?’ He twisted again, and I thought I might faint. ‘Would you?’

‘No,’ I said, not much above a whisper.

‘Say what?’

‘No.’

‘Good boy.’ Releasing me, he wiped his fingers down his trouser front. ‘You can give her my love, Ethel, when you see her. Though how you can fuck it without a bag over its head beggars belief.’

So I started slipping him scraps of information, nothing serious, nothing I was close to certain he didn’t already know. We’d meet in the Posts or the Two Brewers, sometimes Lyon’s tea shop in Piccadilly. It kept him at bay for a while, but not for long.

‘Stop pullin’ my chains,’ he said one fine morning, ‘and give me something I can fuckin’ use.’ It was late summer and everything still shining and green.

I thought about it sitting on the steps at the foot of Lower Regent Street, a view clear across the Mall into St James’s Park, Horse Guards Parade. Over the next few weeks I fed him rumours a big shipment of heroin would be passing through the club, smuggled in from the Continent. The Maltese brothers, I assured him, would there to supervise delivery.

Neville saw it as his chance for the spotlight. The raid was carried out by no less than a dozen plainclothes officers with as many as twenty uniforms in support. One of Neville’s cronies, a crime reporter for the Express, was on hand to document proceedings.

Of course, the place was clean. I’d seen to that.

When the law burst through the door and down the stairs, Vic Farrell was playing ‘Once in a While’ in waltz time, and the atmosphere resembled nothing as much as a vicarage tea party, orderly and sedate.

‘Don’t say, you little arsewipe,’ Neville spluttered, ‘I didn’t fuckin’ warn you.’

For the next forty-eight hours I watched my back, double-checked the locks on the door to my room, took extra care each time I stepped off the kerb and into the street. And then I understood I wasn’t the one at risk.

Wouldn’t want to see anything happen to her, would you?

She was lying on her bed, wearing just a slip, a pair of slippers on her feet, and at first I thought she was asleep. And then, from the angle of her torso to her head, I realised someone had twisted her neck until it broke.

He’ll hurt you if he can: just about the first words Ethel had said to me.

I looked at her for a long time, and then, daft as it sounds, I touched my fingers to her upper lip, surprised at how smooth and cold it felt.

And then I left.

Discreetly as I could, I asked around.

The maid had taken a couple of days off sick; only the usual slow but steady stream of punters had been seen entering the building. Up and down the street, nobody had noticed anything unusual.

SOHO VICE GIRL MURDERED, the headline read.

I traced Ethel’s mother from one of her letters, and she promised to come to the funeral, but she never did. I stood alone in a little chapel in Kensal Green, fingers drumming a quiet farewell on the back of the pew. Outside, the first leaves were starting to fall. When it was over I took the tube back to Oxford Circus and met Tom Holland round the corner from the Palladium as arranged.

Holland was young for a detective inspector, no more than thirty-two or -three; something of a high flier, he’d recently transferred from the City of London police to run one of the CID squads at West End Central.

The year before, ‘55, the Mail had run a story about police corruption. Alleging many officers in the West End were on the take. The Met issued a bald denial. Everyone from the commissioner down denied the charge. What evidence existed was discredited or lost. No one was suspended, cautioned, even interviewed. Word was unofficially passed round: be less visible, less greedy.

Holland was the only officer I knew who wasn’t snaffling bribes. According to rumour, when a brothel keeper slipped an envelope containing fifty in tens into his pocket, Holland shoved it down his throat and made him eat it.

He was just shy of six foot, I guessed, dark-haired and brown-eyed, and he sat at a table in the rear of the small Italian Café, shirtsleeves rolled back, jacket draped across his chair. Early autumn, and it was still warm. The coffee came in those glass cups that were all the rage; three sips and it was gone.

I told him about Neville’s involvement with pushers and prostitutes, the percentage he took for protection, for looking the other way. Told him my suspicions concerning Ethel’s murder.

Holland listened as if it mattered, his gaze rarely leaving my face.

When I’d finished, he sat a full minute in silence, weighing things over.

‘I can’t do anything about the girl,’ he said. ‘Even if Neville did kill her or have her killed, we’d never get any proof. And let’s be honest: where she’s concerned, nobody gives a toss. But the other stuff, drugs especially. There might be something I can do.’

I thought if I went the right way about it, I could get Foxy to make some kind of statement, off the record, nothing that would come to court, not even close, but it would be a start. Place, times, amounts. And there were others who’d be glad to find a way of doing Neville down, repaying him for all the cash he’d pocketed, the petty cruelties he’d meted out.

‘One month,’ Holland said, ‘then show me what you’ve got.’

When I held out my hand to shake his, his eyes fixed on my arm. ‘And that habit of yours,’ he said. ‘Kick it now.’

A favourite trick of Neville’s, whenever his men raided a club, was to take the musicians who’d been holding aside – and there were usually one or two – and feign sympathy. Working long hours, playing the way you do, stands to reason you need a little something extra, a little pick-me-up. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink. Men of the world. Just hand it over, and we’ll say no more about it. Oh, and if you’ve got a little sweetener for the lads…lovely, lovely.

And ever after, if he walked into a club or bumped into them on the street, he would be into them for another fifty plus whatever they were carrying. Let anyone try saying no, and he was sorted good.

Inside a matter of weeks I talked with two pianists, a drummer, a guitarist, and three sax players – what is it with saxophonists? – who agreed to dish the dirt on Neville if it would get him off their backs. And finally, after a lot of arguing and pleading, I persuaded Foxy to sit down with Holland in an otherwise empty room, neutral territory, and tell him what he knew.

After that, carefully, Holland spoke to a few of Neville’s team, officers who were already compromised and eager to protect themselves as best they could. From a distance, he watched Neville himself. Checked, double-checked.

The report he wrote was confidential, and he took it to the new deputy assistant commissioner, one of the few high-ranking bosses he thought he could trust.

It was agreed that going public would generate bad publicity for the force and that should be avoided at all costs. Neville was shunted sideways, somewhere safe, and after several months allowed to retire on a full pension for reasons of ill health.

One of his mutually beneficial contacts had been with a businessman from Nicosia, import and export, and that was where Neville hived off to, counting his money, licking his wounds.

I was at the airport to see him off.

Three and a bit years ago now.

I took Tom Holland’s advice and cleaned up my act, the occasional drag at some weed aside. Tom, he’s a detective chief inspector now and tipped for higher things. I don’t play any more, rarely feel the need. There are a couple of bands I manage – groups, that’s what they call them these days – one from Ilford, and one Palmers Green. And I keep myself fit, swim, work out in the gym. One thing a drummer has, even a second-rate ex-drummer like me, is strong wrists, strong hands.

I don’t reckon Neville staying in Cyprus forever, can’t see it somehow; he’ll want to come back to the smoke. And when he does, I’ll meet him. Maybe even treat him to a drink. Ask if he remembers Ethel, the way she lay back, twisted on the bed, her broken neck…