It is impossible to read Unsworth's newest without thinking
of music. Even if she hadn't added the keynotes of chapters
named after 60's era songs, or subtly threaded in music as a
backdrop to the events, the rhythm of the layered scenes and
syncopated action combined with the deep tones and high
notes of mood would lead you there. To the music, add Cathi
Unsworth's skill at imparting artistic vision, one scene
sketched in with chiaroscuro contrasting with the vibrant
eye-searing colors of op art in the next; and reading BAD
PENNY BLUES becomes more than a mental exercise, as closely
as possible the author has made it a feast for many senses.
Set mostly in the 1960's, a series of murders is seen
alternately through two sets of eyes.
Policeman Peter Bradley finds the first victim early in his
career. As he matures, the unclosed cases of 'Jack the
Stripper' impel him to take steps he might not otherwise,
uncovering corruption at the heart of all he was raised to
respect. After he marries and has a child, he becomes even
more vulnerable to the powerful men who don't want the
murders solved.
At the dawn of the 60's, Stella Reade is a newly-wed, newly
graduated art student ready to support her artist husband in
his career, and her search for happily-ever-after. When she
awakens from a vision of the first murder, she tries to pass
it off as a nightmare, refusing to believe her family gift
is set to ruin the happiness of her new life. As she
continues to have visions seen through the eyes of the women
killed, she can no longer deny what is happening but is
unable to share her burden with her husband.
Inextricably woven with the times of 1960's political unrest
and race riots, BAD PENNY BLUES seduces and disturbs as
Unsworth shows both sides of the London coin; the exuberant
life of experimental music, art, and lifestyles a few
streets over from the ugliness of organized crime,
prostitution and poverty.
As the pieces of the mystery all come together, you are so
closely tied with the lives of the two main characters it is
difficult to find space to take a breath. Hunched over,
gripping the pages, you are taken on the final swoops of the
roller coaster and left immensely satisfied as you come to
the end of the ride. Cathi Unsworth has a damn interesting
past, but an even brighter future as a writer.
Police Constable Pete Bradley has done one year in the force
and dreams of moving up the ladder. He's assigned as an aid
to CID and working a routine nightshift with his partner
when they stumble across a young woman's body. She was
working as a prostitute when she was strangled, her body
dumped by a riverbank. His search for her killer brings him
deep into Soho's underbelly.
Meanwhile Stella, a young fashion designer with a promising
career ahead of her, is woken by terrifying nightmares that
echo the last hours of the dead women.
Sixties London explodes in all its ferocious colour, with
fascists and Teds, migrants and hippies living in close
proximity. Bad Penny Blues is a tender paean to the city, a
novel with a twisted mystery at its heart.
Set against the background of 1960's London Bad penny Blues
explores the murky world of the unsolved ‘Jack the Stripper’
murders of the 1960s in which the bodies of eight working
girls were found in or along the Thames.
The killings sparked the biggest manhunt in Metropolitan
Police history, but the killer was never found. In Bad Penny
Blues Cathi aims not to solve the mystery, but rather, as
she puts it, to “create a parallel universe in which an
explanation can be offered that ties together a series of
intriguing coincidences uncovered during the course of my
research.”
Excerpt
PROLOGUE
I step out of the car and onto the curb,
the clack of steel tipped stilettos on pavement. The sound
sends a crackle into
the still air of 1.10am, like a radio has suddenly been
turned on between
stations; a hiss of interference and the distant sound of
garbled voices
speaking in foreign tongues. I look back into the window of
the black Morris
Ten. He is leaning across the seat, an earnest smile on a
battered face, one
front tooth chipped, dark hair greased back off a furrowed
forehead.
Christ, he’s eager, I think. And then a
dark wave sweeps through me: resignation, boredom,
something close to madness
tapping on the corner of my skull. I know what it is, it’s
the feeling of being
trapped. I want to get out of whatever it is I’ve got
myself into but I don’t
know how, I’m caught up in a current that’s taking me
down.
He’s saying something, but I can’t make out
what it is, the sound of the radio is coming in louder, a
sudden burst of an
orchestra tuning up.
But I hear myself talking back to him
clearly, saying: "Half-past three."
This seems to please him. His grin deepens
along with the lines on his forehead and he says something
else, pointing at
the side of the road. It’s lost in the hiss of static, a
sound like a toilet
being flushed. Now he’s leaning back into his seat, putting
his hand on the
gearstick, pulling away up the Avenue, red tail lights
under the trees, under
the trees where nobody sees…
A sudden eerie note rises up around me,
like a church organ maybe, but distorted, echoing around
the trees and the
empty road. I shiver involuntarily. It has been hot,
stifling all day, and I’ve
got on my new summer dress, but suddenly I feel a chill
wind blowing up from
nowhere. The dress that Baby bought me, I think and the
thinking of that name
prickles out the aches in my body. The back of my neck and
my right arm feel
heavy, pain beating a dull tattoo through my blood like a
finger running down a
plastic comb. I become aware of a cold wetness in my
knickers, a fresher pain
down there too, areminder of where the man in the car has just been,
where too many other
people have already been before. These thoughts run into my
mind unbidden and I
don’t want them, memories swirl that need to be blotted
out, lest those fingers
start drumming louder on the side of my skull, the sparks
of madness start to
flare.
I’m standing on the corner of this long,
wide Avenue next to a tube station that’s all shut up for
the night. For some
reason I can’t read the lettering over the door, can only
make out an Art
Noveau swirl of letters, but I feel like I know this place,
I have been here at
this time of night many times before. The station stares
back at me through
blank, empty windows. Squat and silent, it sits back on the
pavement, detached,
like whatever else is going on round here is surely none of
its business.
I stroll past it, hearing the clack of my
feet and the strange music, that distorted organ motif and
the crackles of
radiowaves, a sound like bubbles being blown under water. I
turn around the
corner, drawn towards it, and realise the music is coming
from the building
diagonally across the road from me. A high tower like a
castle’s keep made out
of red brick, little tiny windows all the way up it but
just one light on, one
yellow light, right at the top. The spook symphony is
coming from the window,
getting louder and louder.
I suddenly think of a lighthouse, sweeping
its beam across a dark and choppy sea. And the vision fills
me with fear, like
I have suddenly seen my death coming towards me, the light
across the water,
luring me to the rocks…
I turn away, catching my breath, clutching
my handbag tighter. I realise that whatever plans I have
made for this night
are all going to fall through, that the boy I am expecting
to meet here is not
going to come. He was just using me like everyone else, I
think, laughing at
me, at how stupid I am, how
easy.
I hurry away from the tower, back towards
the tube and onto the Avenue. I want to block the music
from my head but it
swims around me, laps at the corners of my brain and I
can’t think straight.
The man in the Morris Ten, was he supposed to be coming
back forme or was I just spinning
him a line? I don’t remember but I can’t wait here, I don’t
want to be in this
part of town, with another me waiting under every tree, yet
I can’t go home
either, bad things lurk there too, more beatings, more
fuckings, more petty
humiliations. All the things I wanted to be flash through
my mind: a mother, a
wife, a spotless kitchen in a nice house, an embroidery in
a frame hanging over
the fire saying Home Sweet Home, a memory of my
childhood and my sister
Pat. All the things I will never be and never have and
everything I tried not
to think about, all coming down fast to the refrain of a
ghostly keyboard
requiem.
Then suddenly, all the sounds disappear.
Headlights are coming towards me up the Avenue, a long dark
car gliding slowly
along, crawling beneath the trees, as if in slow motion.
This is it, I realise
and somehow the knowledge sets me free of my anguished
thoughts, fills me
instead with the numbness of acceptance. This is the beam
from the lighthouse,
the lights across the water calling me home. I pat my hair,
which is short and
neat and recently cut, in the style of an actress I had
admired. I smooth down
the front of my blue and white summer dress. This is how I
look on my last
night on earth and I step forwards towards my fate, lean
into the window as it
slowly winds itself down.
There are two people in there, but their
faces are lost in the shadows.
I know that the nearest one is speaking to
me but all I can hear is the hiss of radio interference.
The music is starting
up again but it no longer disturbs me, I’m numb and I know
where I am going. My
thoughts and my body are no longer mine. My hair and my
dress are no longer
mine. I get into the back of the car and it pulls away, in
a U-turn across the
Avenue, picking up speed as it heads west, towards the
lonely shore. A woman’s
voice says softly, sadly: "Bobby…"
And I woke up, lurching forwards into a sitting position,
drenched with cold sweat. I put my hands up to my head,
feeling the fringe of
my long blonde hair plastered to my forehead, desperate to
make sure it was my
hair and not hers. For a moment, between two worlds, I
couldn’t make out where
she ended and I began, her thoughts and her memories had
been so strong that
they seemed as if they were my own. But they were so
terrible, so alien, so
shocking. Images of brutal couplings in the back seats of
cars, underneath
trees, in shabby rooms with other people watching, faces of
old and ugly men,
faces of black men, the certainty that I had a sister
called Pat and most of
all, that overwhelming sense of fear…
Fear and pain. God, she had hurt. I put my hand up to my
shoulder where the worst of it had been. It wasn’t tender
at all. I hadn’t slept
on it badly, triggering the sensation. That had all been
part of the dream too.
Where had she come from, this woman with the short hair and
the striped dress?
I was so disorientated that it took a few seconds to realise
that the music, that weird music that had soundtracked this
nightmare, hadn’t
disappeared with it.
It was coming through the wall next door. Those ghostly
keyboards and that radio tuning in and out of stations, it
was actually real.
The fear this phantom woman had felt coursed through my
veins like quicksilver
and I grabbed hold of Toby’s arm, shaking him awake,
gabbling: "What’s that
noise, that horrible noise?"
He stumbled out of his own slumbers with a low groan,
rolling
towards me and propping himself up onto his elbow.
"That noise, Toby, what is it?" My voice was shrill with
panic.
"Uhhh," he grunted, putting an arm around me, patting me
gently on the leg as if to calm me down. He was never very
good at waking up.
"That?" he said. "Uhhh, sorry, I should have warned you
about that. It’s the
boys next door. They say they’re musicians and that, my
dear, is what their
music sounds like. Bloody horror show."
He rolled across me and turned on the bedside light, his
face
suddenly illuminated by a comforting orange grow as a tired
smile spread across
his crumpled features. He looked so handsome with his hair
all falling forwards
in his eyes that I immediately calmed down. "Come here," he
said, pulling me
back down beside him. The night had been so hot we had
kicked most of the
covers off the bed, but like the woman in the dream, I
suddenly felt cold.
"It’s a horror show all right," I said, nestling into the
warmth of him. "It gave me such a nightmare."
"Oh Stella," he said. "I’m sorry. I really should have
warned
you, but I suppose I just got used to them and their odd
little ways while I
was still a gay bachelor myself."
His words made me giggle. We had been married for only one
week, spending what would have been our honeymoon if we’d
had the money
ostensibly redecorating, but not really getting very much
further than where we
were now. It didn’t matter. We still had the rest of the
summer to turn the
basement of 22 Arundel Gardens from Toby’s bachelor pad
into the marital home
of Mr and Mrs Reade.
"What time is it anyway?" he asked, looking over at the
alarm
clock. "Ten past one! Horror show hours and all."
It gave me a shudder, that did. Now I was awake and safe,
the
nightmare was beginning to fracture and dissolve, recede
into the shadows. But
one thing I could clearly remember was that I — or rather
she — knew exactly
what the time was.
Toby must have felt it because he cuddled me closer, found
the
edge of a blanket and covered me over with it.
"You cold?" he asked, and I let it go at that, not wanting
to
tell him what it really was in case he thought I’d gone a
bit strange, mad
even. It had been a horribly vivid dream, an insight into a
world I didn’t want
to see again. And whatever had caused it — the music, the
newness of my
surroundings or just too much cheese before bedtime — I
wanted to forget about
it quickly. I resolved to banish the woman in the blue and
white dress from my
thoughts.
It was because of our honeymoon that I managed to do so; we
were so engrossed in our own little world that we didn’t
bother to buy the
papers in the week that followed, otherwise I might have
read about the body of
a woman that had been found by the river in Duke’s Meadows,
Chiswick, wearing a
blue and white striped dress. It was a mercy, really, that
I didn’t. It would
have shattered the idyll of the summer of 1959, the end of
our first year at
the Royal College of Art and the beginning of our marriage.
There were so many
things that we didn’t know about each other then and
ignorance was bliss.
Toby’s kisses were warm on my eyelids as I finally fell
asleep,
the sound of a new world coming through the wall.
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