“I don’t know. But it certainly wasn’t me.” He sipped his coffee. Edward watched his hands carefully, the half-moons of grime caught beneath his fingernails. The man was a shyster, he thought. A confidence trickster. He recognised the signs. It took one to know one, he thought wryly. Drake replaced the cup in its saucer. “Your story, on the other hand, is all true and––from what Violet tells me––so good that it practically writes itself. War hero comes home, cold-shouldered by society, lives in cold garret, barely makes enough to feed himself, et cetera et cetera. Tell me some more.”
Edward took a breath and told the story. He had run through it a dozen times last night, removing the flourishes and his worst excesses, keeping it neat and simple. He avoided hyperbole and exaggeration, downplaying his own role in the narrative and sticking as close to the regimental history as he could, ensuring that his facts were verifiable and legitimate. Drake took shorthand notes, Edward watching biliously as his charcoal pencil scraped quickly across his notepad, each stroke another step closer to revealing his perfidy. He asked a handful of questions, referring back to his notes and seeking amplification, trying to draw him into more lurid confessions, but Edward stoically resisted. If he neutered the tale then, perhaps, there would be nothing left to tell.
Eventually Edward could see that Drake had realised that he was not going to get the juicy story he had hoped to find. He quickly became bored. After all, what did he have? A bland and inoffensive piece about a soldier coming home from war and gratefully accepting the charity of a local family. If it escaped the editor’s spike it would languish deep inside the newspaper, hidden away, soon to be forgotten. Edward noticed that his shoulders were tight and stiff and so he settled back in the seat, loosening his posture. He relaxed and congratulated himself. What was he so worried about? He had done well, handling a difficult situation with confidence and aplomb. He sank into the cushions and pretended to busy himself by spooning another sugar into what was left of his coffee.
“Ah. Here he is. About time,” Drake said to the man who had just struggled into the coffee shop with a large camera and a bag of accessories. “This is Trevor. He’ll be doing the pictures. I thought here might be nice––war hero not too grand for coffee-shop, that kind of angle. What do you say?”
“Pictures?”
“Of course. We need pictures.”
“No-one said anything to me about pictures.”
“It’s essential, Edward. Put a face to the story. Violet insisted we do it properly. You’re not one of these chaps who doesn’t like his picture taken are you? Be a shame not to, with those matinee idol looks of yours––you’ll have them all going weak at the knees. Fan mail, I shouldn’t wonder.”
Edward balled his fists so hard that his nails cut into the fleshy part of his palms. He couldn’t say no; it would look like he had something to hide. He gritted his teeth as the photographer set up a tripod and slotted his Rolleiflex atop it, inserting the film and winding it through. He tried to persuade them to let him wear his hat, and then tried to angle his head away, but the photographer was persistent and would not take the pictures until he was satisfied with the shot. Edward smiled, thinly and without warmth, as the shutter snapped open and closed.
It sounded final. It sounded like a door slamming shut.
21
IT WAS A PRIVATE JOKE between the chaps that Billy Stavropoulos was particularly well balanced on account having a chip on both shoulders. The subject of his difficult upbringing was one he returned to frequently, a setting against which his subsequent success as a criminal was some sort of underdog’s triumphant battle against the odds. He referred to himself as being from ‘the gutter’, making the assertion so often that it became a sort of catchphrase. The gutter to which he referred was Saffron Hill, yet that was not the beginning of his story. The first five years of his life were spent in Leicester, in one of the sprawling developments built on the city’s south side in the 1920s to accommodate the city’s expanding work force. His mother, Demetria, found work as a machinist in the city’s hosiery factories. His father, Khristos, was a cobbler. The city avoided the worst depredations of the depression and enjoyed growth. Billy’s early years were happy, by all accounts. They might not have been rich but they had enough money to get by, and the Stavropoulos family ‘villa’ was close enough to the factories that Demetria was able to come home to cook lunch for Billy and his two brothers. It was a comfortable first few years: adequate, mediocre, safe.
A fondness for the bottle made Khristos Stavropoulos an unreliable employee and, when it eventually cost him his job, he moved the family to London. They found a house on Saffron Hill and, compared to the relative comfort of life in Leicester, things were difficult. Khristos’ alcoholism cost him two other jobs and, as the depression exerted its influence on the city’s factories, he found himself unable to find work. He fell in with the Costello brothers and, under their aegis, was persuaded to take to burglary to provide an income for his family. A string of breakings provided a glimmer of hope that he might have finally found something he was able to stick at but, eventually, he failed even at that. He usually got lit-up before a job and one time, his reactions dulled by drink, he fell from a first-floor window, broke his leg and was arrested. He was charged and tried, the judge rubbing salt into the wound by describing him as a ‘particularly inept criminal’ before gaoling him for a year.
Khristos resorted to the bottle for succour and died a bitter and broken man when Billy was eight years old. Without the income he had provided the family could no longer afford to pay even the meagre rent on their house. Despite the offer of a lighter sentence, Khristos had not named the Costello boys as his accomplices. His loyalty did not go unrewarded and his widow and her three boys were moved into a house the family owned. They had two rooms for the four of them: a front room and a bedroom. The front room looked onto the narrow street below and had a bed that was shared by Billy and his mother. The family’s furniture comprised of two beds and a rickety wooden sideboard. The only evidence of Khristos were the mementoes that he had kept from six years as an infantryman in the Great War: a helmet that he had pilfered from the body of a dead German and a beer stein, in which Demetria occasionally kept the flowers that her boys uprooted from the local parks. It was a crushingly depressing existence. The house in which Billy spent the next ten years of his life was low-ceilinged and fetid, thin walls covered with flock wallpaper that stank of fried food and damp.
Demetria became a hoister, raiding stores in the West End and selling her spoils in Clerkenwell’s pubs. When times were hard she offered wall-jobs to the local drunks for the pennies in their pockets. Memories of her comfortable life in Leicester must have seemed like cruel taunts and she became bitter and resentful. The bottle found her, too, eventually, and she took her frustrations out on her children. It did not matter. Billy was dedicated to her, and the chaps occasionally spoke of the time they saw a man make a joke about her brassing. He had flown into such a rage they had to restrain him for fear that he would do murder.
* * *
BILLY WRAPPED HIS FIST IN HIS COAT and punched hard through the panel above the door handle. The glass smashed, the fragments shattering as they fell to the floor. He paused for a moment, and heard nothing to suggest that they had been detected. He thrust his arm through the gaping pane and unlocked the door. He went inside, with Jack McVitie close behind. The house was empty, just as Joseph had said it would be. He had been tipped off by a chap from the pub who was seeing one of the maids. The family were off abroad somewhere and the place was vulnerable. Pity for them, Billy thought. The man of the house was a successful businessman, something about the motor trade. He was supposed to be rich and that looked about right, Billy thought, judging by the state of the place.