What was the point of making pals who would be dead within the week? Once, we were playing marbles in our trench and someone straightened up and was shot through the head. At Mons, in those tremendous twenty-two hours, the deaths of my fellow men seemed a very small thing. Why, in the first thirty minutes I saw two thousand gallant men lay down their lives.
I learned not to stop to help wounded men and I was not alone in that.
The years passed. Every day I expected to be killed. Every winter I expected to freeze to death. I began the war in fear. Shuddering, corrosive fear. I was surprised at how long a man can live in fear. But then I decided I was going to die and I accepted it. Fear replaced neither by fatalism nor resignation but by certainty.
In that I was wrong. I lived. But at what price? I have not shed a tear for twenty years. I am unable to feel anything except self-loathing. My body is not my own. I came back from the Great War cut off from everything and everybody. I pretend, of course. I make a facsimile of living.
I survived the war: the Hun couldn’t kill me. But the Spanish flu almost did. The pandemic. Millions died — more than in the Great War. I was laid low in a hospital in London for months. I recovered, although I didn’t know until later that it had made me sterile.
I resumed a life. Of sorts.
FIVE
After the war I had an appetite for the ladies and the money to feed it. Then, in 1925, up at the racecourse, I met a young woman and her swaggering brother. The young woman took a shine to me, her brother less so. They were both cockneys but were Italian by descent. The brother worked for the Sabini family, who controlled the rackets on many racecourses.
The young woman worked in Liberty in London. I was footloose. I moved up to London. She held out for marriage. In a moment of foolishness — she was a beautiful woman and lust was about the only emotion I was capable of feeling — I married her.
We honeymooned in Siena, her family’s city of origin. She hoped for children but it didn’t happen. The Spanish flu. I joked it could be worse. I knew of people who had contracted sleeping sickness through the influenza and hadn’t woken up yet. She didn’t find me funny. She got depressed. Blamed me. Blamed herself. There were rows. She had a fiery temper.
Oswald Mosley founded his fascist party and I joined straight away. I wore the blackshirt uniform with pride. I was interested in a better Britain. My wife and I visited Italy when we could. Mussolini was doing great things. He was keeping the Socialists down. The trains ran on time.
Her brother was wary of my uniform but reluctantly accepted me when he discovered we had something in common. Hatred of kikes. The big Jew and the small Jew, as Sir Oswald described it. I hated them for bringing our country down. My brother-in-law hated them because the Italian gangs were at war with Jewish ones for control of Soho and the racecourses.
Her brother warmed to me further when I saved him from a beating at Brighton racecourse. He was openly a gangster now. I happened to be around when a man came at him with an open razor. Man? He was little more than a teenager but with an evil face — a long razor slash down one side of it. I knocked him to the ground without really thinking twice, but he had two older men nearby who I could tell knew how to handle themselves.
We squared off but then it all drizzled away.
My wife put on weight as only Italian women can. Screamed at me. I took mistresses. One in particular. She knew the Chinese method. It was whispered Wallis Simpson knew it too. If it made a king abdicate, what chance did I stand?
My brother-in-law saw us together one day. I was expecting a beating — knuckledusters and coshes.
‘The racecourse thing?’ he said. ‘We’re even.’
I killed my mistress for her infidelity. There was a knock on the door. I let my wife in. I didn’t ask what she was doing there. I’d long suspected she was having me followed.
She stood by the radiogram looking at the body on the rug, the blood thickening around it. She pointed at the saw on the table.
‘What were you intending to do with that?’
‘What do you suppose?’
She looked at me for a long moment. Looked at the apron covered in bright red flowers.
‘And then?’
I raised my shoulders slowly. Let them fall.
‘I hadn’t thought that far.’
She nodded.
‘Do you have any knives? Kitchen knives?’
‘A set,’ I said.
‘Good. But we also have to do some shopping.’
‘What are we buying?’
‘We’re buying a trunk.’
My wife and I were standing looking down on the open trunk and the body beside it, the knives and the saw on the table, when the apartment door opened. Her big and burly brother entered.
‘I asked him to help,’ she said.
He was carrying a parcel of brown paper wrapped in twine and a large can of olive oil, presumably from one of the Sabini brothers’ restaurants.
‘Let’s get to it,’ he said, scarcely glancing at the body.
Later, on the drive down to Brighton, I asked him: ‘What’s the plan?’
He smirked.
‘You’re mine now.’
We were trying to get the trunk out of the car, parked on the cliff edge across the road from the racetrack, when I spotted a middle-aged couple watching us suspiciously.
‘Change of plan,’ he said, pushing the trunk back into the boot and slamming it closed.
When I got home, late in the evening, my wife was waiting in the kitchen with an open bottle of Chianti. She handed me a glass.
‘Welcome home,’ she said.
I drank the wine. It tasted coppery.
‘Keep the apartment on for another six months,’ she said. ‘I’ll take the legs and feet in a suitcase to King’s Cross luggage office tomorrow. When it’s discovered, the police will think it’s the White family’s handiwork.’
The White family ruled Islington and King’s Cross, though it also had a piece of Soho.
‘Then our life can resume.’
I put my glass back on the table. I had to ask.
‘What did your brother do with the head?’
SIX
When the trunk was found at Brighton left luggage office, the press dubbed it ‘The Brighton Trunk Murder’. A few weeks later there was a second so-called Trunk Murder. That had nothing to do with me.
By then there had been a knock on my own door. A routine enquiry from a bored local policeman. The people near the racecourse had noted the registration of my car. I expected this. My brother-in-law had tutored me.
I told the bobby my car had been out of my possession at the time. Stolen. The policeman was satisfied with my answer. He did not even ask to see the vehicle.
It was the last I heard from any policeman. The torso was never identified. The murder was never solved.
