The following is an extract from Natalie Marlow’s novel The Red Hollow, published by Baskerville in March 2024.
Chapter One
Thursday, 1 February 1934
William stood near the office window, tea tray in hand, and stared out onto Needless Alley. It was not quite eight o’clock, and Birmingham was bathed in a mucky morning light. February was a short but cruel month: a time of itching, preparatory greyness, with the whole world poised for something to bloom. It was only twenty-eight days until March, and yet, burgeoning spring, with its daffodils in Cannon Hill Park and city dawn chorus of sparrows and pigeons, seemed far away.
Outside, two women teetered along a pavement slick with ice. The brims of their hats pulled fashionably over their eyes, and the collars of their coats drawn up against the chill air, William only recognised them as the shopgirls from the neighbouring Maison Chapeaux when the plump one craned her neck and flashed him a pretty smile. William balanced the tea tray on the corner of his desk, managed a tentative wave, and noticed how his shoulders ached from lack of sleep.
William had read through the night. A foolish act at his age, but he’d borrowed a book from Boots Library and was due to return it. The book, a reportage on German fascism, was full of chill, dispassionate detail on rising militarism, and university departments dedicated to creating poison gas, and rampant anti-Semitism fuelled by the popular press. William had woken, gritty-eyed, after a few hours’ sleep to the dark of a winter morning knowing his fresh understanding of world politics had done nothing but sour his stomach.
He turned away from the window and cleared some of the detritus from his desk, so the tea things were no longer precariously balanced. And there he sat, waiting for Phyll and the start of their daily routine, a comforting, if unprofitable, round of tea drinking, smoking, trawling through the daily papers, and hoping the telephone might ring.
William didn’t have to wait long. Soon, he heard the familiar clicking of the Yale lock, the sound of Phyll’s soft, quick tread on the staircase, and the clatter of his office door. There she stood, in the doorway, smart in dark overcoat and trilby. Ruddy-cheeked, she was laden with both the newspapers and breakfast – bacon rolls from the café near her digs.
‘This place stinks like a navvy’s armpit.’ She wrinkled her nose and moved towards the desk. ‘Open the window and let in some air before we choke to death.’
‘I suppose it is a bit ripe in here.’ William tipped the contents of the overflowing ashtrays, and the greasy remnants of the previous night’s supper, into the wastepaper basket, but his shame-fuelled attempt at tidying only served to disturb, and intensify, the stench. And so he did as he was told, opening the window a crack, propping the sash with a ratted copy of the News of the World. He sniffed decorously at his shirt. Clean on yesterday, he would pass muster, just. ‘We’ve done nothing but smoke like chimneys and eat chips since the New Year. If we don’t get a bit of honest toil soon, we’ll fall into ruin.’ He returned to his desk, and then lifted the lid from the teapot, inspecting the state of the brew. ‘Shall I be mother?’
‘Have you heard nothing from Mr Shirley?’ Phyll glanced at the silent telephone, placed the newspapers and rolls on William’s newly cleared, if not clean, desk, and took a seat. ‘I do prefer to take my tea with lemon, Billy.’
‘You’ll be demanding petits fours next.’ William handed her a cup of black tea. ‘Shifty’s still got the hump over the Morton business, but he’ll come round. Holding grudges is bad for business. We must give him time, though. I did hurt him in a very tender spot.’
‘His wallet?’ she asked.
‘Indeed.’
Since he and Phyll began their partnership, they had worked the sum of two cases. An errant husband found in the tender embrace of a buxom neighbour, and a lady bookkeeper, who had absconded with charity funds, discovered living in Bournemouth with a retired games mistress. Business was slow, and would continue to be so until Shifty Shirley, Birmingham’s most pragmatic man of law, was back on side.
William reached for his bacon roll, peered beneath the bread, took a bite, and flicked through a copy of the Birmingham Post. ‘Still up for the pictures tonight?’ he asked. ‘King Kong is on at the Select.’
‘No, thank you. I can’t seem to get behind this giant marauding ape you’re so wild for.’ Phyll opened Picturegoer Magazine and ignored her bacon roll. ‘You know what I like. German Expressionism, light comedy with plenty of dancing girls, gangster flicks, or pictures starring Fredric March. I find everything else is unbearable.’
‘What about Flying Down to Rio?’ William licked bacon grease from his fingertips. ‘They strap the dancers to the wings of an aeroplane and none of the girls are wearing brassieres.’
‘You seem terribly well-informed.’
‘I made a study of the poster when I was hanging around the lobby of the Odeon last Friday. I had nothing better to do since you’d ditched me.’ Immediately, William regretted the dig. Phyll had already apologised for standing him up. He picked at his friendships like a child worrying a scab. It was a bad habit, and it had thrown Phyll into a cool silence. William broke it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Having no work is getting on my nerves. Christ, if things don’t pick up, I might have to go back to clerking, and I’m too old for all that adding-machine bullshit.’
‘Thirty-six is hardly geriatric.’
‘No one wants a middle-aged office boy. It’s embarrassing.’
‘What else can you do?’ she asked. ‘I mean, what other work experience do you have?’ There was something of the schoolmistress about her tone, but William chose to ignore it.
‘I was a decent soldier, I suppose.’ William added an extra sugar lump to his tea and watched it dissolve into the brew. ‘But there’s no way I can go back into the army. I’ve got flat feet, and I’m too knackered to fight another war. I might write a stern letter to Herr Hitler and tell him to fuck off out of it.’ He glanced at Phyll’s uneaten breakfast – a waste. ‘Besides, there’s the baby to consider. Queenie might be the richest unwed mother in Ladywood, but I want to stay alive and be a proper dad.’
In truth, William and Queenie had never talked about how they would care for their child. William associated his fatherhood with the terrible events of the previous summer and had, until now, let Queenie rule. However, he also knew that if he didn’t assert himself soon, his relationship with his son would devolve into that of indulgent, if infrequent, visits where he would behave like some nervous bachelor uncle. Tomorrow, at his son’s christening, William knew he would play little to no part, but he abhorred the idea of being on the sidelines of his own child’s life. His every instinct raged against it.
‘Look, Billy, I’ve found just the tonic to make you feel young again. The divine Marlene, double spread.’ Phyll placed the open magazine flat on William’s desk and prodded Dietrich’s creamy décolletage with such force William thought the star might bruise. ‘Isn’t she splendid? So very stylish. She has it in buckets. I don’t believe I shall ever get over seeing her in Morocco. What a film.’
‘I wish she’d come to Birmingham and lead me astray. That would take my mind off war. Me and Marlene indulging in a bit of Entente Cordiale.’
‘Ladies first, Billy. Ladies first.’
Outside, the distant hoot of factory sirens called the day shift into work. The draught from the open window caught the back of his neck. William wanted it shut, preferring a cosy fug, but Phyll was a fresh-air fiend. ‘Here’s a story just for you.’ He rattled the newspaper in Phyll’s direction. ‘Your lot are at it again.’
‘Sapphists?’ She didn’t look up from her Picturegoer. ‘Have we formed a political party? If we’re marching, I do hope our shirts are a nice lavender stripe.’
‘No, nudists.’
‘I’m not a nudist. I simply appear naked in the cause of art.’ Phyll had recently taken up life modelling at the art school. The bohemian milieu suited her personality, and baring all to a bunch of budding commercial artists paid the rent.
‘Listen to this.’ William began to read aloud, grinning. ‘The cult of nudism is spreading to the Midlands.’
‘Spreading? How vulgar.’ Phyll returned his smile, happy to play the game. ‘It’s a wonder such filth got past the copy editor.’
‘It gets better.’ William continued. ‘The cult of nudism—’
‘Did you say cult?’
‘I did indeed.’ He shot Phyll a music-hall wink. ‘The cult of nudism, firmly established in Germany and other Continental countries, is rapidly gaining followers in England with at least ten thousand believers in this country. There has been a practising colony near Coventry for some time. Plans are well advanced for the establishment of a camp at Four Oaks, Sutton Coldfield, next season.’ William took another bite of his bacon roll and shivered at the blast of February air hitting the back of his neck. ‘It’s not natural. Not even in Coventry. What are the people of Sutton Coldfield thinking? I’d rather get rickets.’
‘You are quite bandy-legged.’
‘No, I’m not.’ He flipped over the page, making small, greasy smudges on the newsprint with his fingers. ‘That northern bank job has gone from bad to worse.’
‘Is Stoke-on-Trent in the north?’ she asked.
‘Stoke-on-Trent is like Camelot; no one truly knows where it is.’
‘Staffordshire.’ Phyll yawned. ‘And that’s a Midlands county.’
‘The coppers finally found the lady bank clerk. Dead in a ditch outside of Lichfield. Christ.’ William placed his copy of the Birmingham Post on top of Marlene Dietrich, covering her louche, Teutonic glamour with a grainy photograph of an English rose, all mousy brown and respectably pretty. ‘Poor kid had been there for months. I feel for the parents. It was a frozen drainage ditch, you know, in a farmer’s field. She was under the ice. The coppers had to use a pickaxe to get her out. The ice must’ve preserved her body, though. They say she was raped and then beaten to death.’
‘These newspaper reports, they seem so prurient. I wonder how many copies this poor woman’s death has sold. She looks so kind and happy. The sort of girl who’d befriend the outcasts at school.’ Phyll reached for the newspaper, peered at the photograph, and let out a great sigh of exhaustion. ‘A woman goes to work in the morning, safe, boring, conventional work, and by the end of the day, she is raped and murdered. For all our talk of equality of the sexes, modernity, rationalism . . . Oh God, it’s horrific. It’s the twentieth century, and we’re still not safe.’ Phyll looked up at him, her honest eyes wide under her thick, unfashionable brows. ‘Why do men do it?’
‘Because they want to, and because they like it, and because other men let them.’ This was the truth, plain and simple. A pause came, akin to a two-minute’s silence, and William used it to think about his dead.
Phyll placed her hand on his shoulder and squeezed, in a brief, but comforting, contact. William’s aching muscles relaxed at her touch.
‘Did you see this about the necklace?’ She pointed to a line of newsprint further down the page, and then handed the Birmingham Post back to William, whistling through her teeth.
William shook his head, and began, once more, to read aloud. ‘Police now believe the gang are not professional jewel thieves and intended to steal five hundred guineas kept in the safe deposit box. Our Northern Correspondent . . .’ He nodded to Phyll. ‘Stoke is north, then. Our Northern Correspondent,’ William repeated, ‘can confirm the necklace of sixty flawless blue-pink pearls and thirty rubies which was stolen in the heist is worth twenty thousand pounds. The anonymous owner of the safe deposit box has offered one thousand pounds as reward for the return of the necklace.’
The return of the necklace. Bringing the murderers to justice was immaterial to the man who offered the reward. William wondered why women didn’t go on the rampage at each outrage their sex suffered. He smiled, thinking of Queenie. She once abducted a notorious pimp and left him naked and trussed up like a loin of pork, rope cutting into his flabby, pale skin, outside a police station on the Coventry Road. If Queenie was the future of womanhood, every misdemeaning fucker with a pair of bollocks ought to watch his back.
However, one thousand pounds would see he and Phyll right for a year, giving them breathing space to establish themselves as respectable private detectives. Then, of course, there would be the publicity. Perhaps he should get his arse up to Stoke-on-Trent and have a sniff about. William shook the thought from his head. This wasn’t the pictures. Who did he think he was, Bulldog Drummond? He had no connections in Stoke. Besides, he was fated to be universally hated by all coppers and most journalists – the men he would need on side if he was even to begin solving the case.
The shrill, insistent call of the telephone interrupted William’s hesitant dreams of wealth and fame. He stared at the machine, frowning, as if momentarily unsure how to deal with the thing.
It was Phyll who answered, her manner formal, professional. ‘Garrett and Hall, private enquiry agents.’ Her slim body tensed at the male voice, an inaudible hum to William, at the other end of the line, and then she nodded sharply, twice. ‘Yes, this is she. Yes, I understand. Yes, of course.’ Perching on the edge of the desk, handset cradled between her shoulder and chin, she scribbled flowers on the blotting pad in thick, deep pencil marks. ‘What do you mean by an incident? . . . Has Freddy regressed in his treatment? . . . What exactly happened and when?’ With each question came another flower. Soon there would be a garden. ‘You don’t want to give details over the telephone. I understand, yes. We’ll come right away. Right away, Dr Moon.’ Phyll dropped her pencil and glanced at her watch. ‘Yes, we’ll be with you within the hour.’ William heard the decisive click of the call ringing off. Phyll replaced the handset on its cradle, her once ruddy cheeks now pale. ‘That was the psychiatrist who runs the residential home where my brother lives.’ She ran her finger over the blotting-paper garden and bit her lip. ‘There’s been some kind of problem, an intruder. The doctor wants us to investigate.’
‘Is he rich?’ asked William. ‘Can he afford us?’
‘Oh yes, Billy.’ Phyll seemed suddenly closed off to him, as if she were protecting some vulnerable core of herself. ‘He’s quite wealthy. I believe all our family money has gone in paying his fees.’
