Bingham and Stella Pinero, the famous actress, now installed as Director Elect of the new theatre (as yet only half built) and Acting Director of the Theatre Workshop were running a Festival Month. It would raise money; money was always tight. It would bring publicity; publicity was always valuable. Things were rolling forward, with four plays now in preparation, the casts engaged. Life was hotting up.
The four plays were The Cherry Orchard. The early Rattigan: French Without Tears. Arthur Miller would be represented by Death of a Salesman, because Miller, like Maugham, was having a renaissance, and Ben Travers came forward with Rookery Nook. She was also doing short runs of plays with small casts. Stella had cast the plays with cunning and some shrewdness, hoping to cater for all tastes and entrap the favour of the critics. The favour of critics was like a wary beast that you had to lure to you and then entice to your bosom.
If only half the famous names signed up by Stella arrived in due course to play their parts, and attracted all the tourists that were hoped for, then all the sneak thieves, dips, confidence men and petty criminals from outside the Second City and as far as Hong Kong and Australia would swarm in to join the native criminal population.
A few miles up river, over Waterloo Bridge, up the Strand and turn left, you were into Virginia Square. This square of tall dusty houses now converted into offices was small, blocked off at one end by the back of a large chain store, and lined on one side with coaches setting off on various tours round London. Tickets could be bought from itinerant sellers carrying small boards which displayed the names and prices of the various tours, and covered with advertisements themselves on caps, shirts and jackets. One or two of them had been mugged for the money they carried, it was a job not without hazard.
A Tour of Westminster Abbey and the City Churches; See Harrods and Visit The Tower; A Mystery Ride round London; A Total Terror Tour. See the Most Evil Places in London. Guaranteed Trembles. The Ultimate in Fear.
The coach firm which ran the Terror Tour was called Trembles Ltd, and you might joke that the coaches were owner-occupied because the two brothers Tremble who owned the firm were also the drivers. One brother did the Mystery Tour and the other the Horror. The classy tour of Westminster and Harrods was advertised but did not actually exist. Anyone who asked for it was persuaded to take one of the others. Horror or Mystery, it didn’t matter which, the itinerary was more or less the same, the Horror being the more popular.
The Trembles had thought of this particular tour because of their name being what it was. Before this they had run tours to Spain, but you could have enough of Spain and sun and they had, and also of passengers who got drunk and run in by the local police and they were fed up with this too. A change was as good as a rest. The Horror Tour was never likely, they thought, to bring in the police. Also, the coaches were getting old and no longer up to the long runs. It was a modest business, always teetering between profit and disaster.
In fact, this tour was very popular with foreign visitors. It did most business in the evenings when customers were young, noisy and happy. Sometimes a little drunk and amorous, but always very willing to be frightened. But not too disappointed, in fact, if they were not, and the tour was, to tell the truth, not very terrifying. There was a coffee-bar at the back of the bus with a big Thermos and people helped themselves, but the tour usually ended up at a pub renamed not long before as the Ripper and Victim, known locally as the Rip and Vic, before a swift ride back.
The Terror Tour bus was small, because it is easier to arouse terror in a small group than in a large one. It was painted a sombre dull black and the windows were shaded green. So were the lights inside.
Not crowded tonight, thought the driver as he collected the tickets, and rather an elderly group. So much the better, he might get home early. On the other hand, more bodies, more money, and he was hard up. He sighed. The horses had not been running well lately. Those that could fall down had fallen down, those that should have finished first had finished last. It was Friday, a spring evening in early March.
He had much on his mind. He was, he felt bound to admit, a man who liked to oblige his pals. Perhaps it was a weakness, but there you were. He had an old friend, known to him all his life, they had been at school together and their fathers had worked side by side in the Docks. He liked him, but what a talker!
Tremble thought back to the young Tremble who had been led into all sorts of trouble by this same persuasive friend. Like the time they’d caught a Russian spy. Except he hadn’t been. Poor chap, a survivor of Hitler’s camps and then caught by two kids and locked up in a broom cupboard. Dad had tanned his backside for that exploit.
People didn’t change. Russian spies, Libyan terrorists, IRA bombers, and a murderer, a great circus of them, all walking out of his pal’s mind down Regina Street. Murder Street. And what were you to believe?
He mused: after all, it would only be an extra bit on his trip. Might amuse the punters.
Still, even among friends, nothing was for nothing, and cash was always useful.
The ghost of the young Tremble stirred inside him, issuing a warning. What was he getting into? As always with his friend, he had the uneasy feeling that he was taking part in a play, the plot of which had not been fully revealed to him.
He closed the door of the coach, and at the appointed hour set forth.
At 9.20 p.m., he was over the water in Coffin’s territory, had passed St Luke’s Mansions (where Coffin was learning his part) and the Theatre Workshop without comment, although both were brightly lit. But they were not in pursuit of brightness, but of darkness. The coach turned down a narrow road, badly lit.
‘Here we are in Murder Street,’ he announced. The coach passed slowly down the road.
Here on the left, at No. 6, the murderer Dr Brittany did away with his wife, his mother-in-law, and the cook, with arsenic. That was in 1914, just before war broke out; he escaped but he was caught in the end and hanged on Armistice Day. Three doors down, and again on the even side of the road at No. 12, the axe murderer, Joseph Cadrin, did in his victims and buried them in the garden.
‘How many, sir? It was never rightly established, the bodies being cut up so. Nineteen twenty-seven, that was. A lot of the victims would have been tramps and dossers.’
He slowed the coach to a crawl so that they could all get a good look and flash away with their cameras, taking photographs if they wanted. Sometimes he stopped and let them out, but not tonight. He didn’t think they felt like it somehow. He didn’t himself.
‘That’s all on this side, except just towards the end there was a young woman found dead in the basement, though that could have been suicide.’ He sounded regretful. ‘But on the other side of the road, odd numbers, four people and a dog died in a fire in No. 7, arson, that was. Yes, they have rebuilt that house, sir, but you can see which house it was, looks newer. And here and here …’ He went through the catalogue: at No. 15 (no, there was no No. 13 but 15 would have been it if there had been) rape and suicide; at 23 a double murder; and at 29 a single death by stabbing. Yes, it was a longer road on that side, the old match factory cut into the other side.
He changed gears and put on some speed. Time to get on. He felt quite tired himself. Goodness knows, they’d all swigged enough coffee en route, ought to be as bright as crickets. But no, sodden was the feeling.
9.30 and they drove off into the darkness. There are some darknesses which seem to swallow people up. This one did.
The bar of the Theatre Workshop was a great meeting-place. That evening a small but animated group had gathered after the curtain had gone down. It was the custom for the cast of the play then in
