A Lesser Evil - Lesley Pearse [128]
From the day Nora moved into Dale Street, if she ran into John they would just nod and smile like strangers. It was the only way it could be, but she would have given anything for his continuing friendship. She hated Kennington, the flat was awful, and at that time she had no money to decorate or make improvements, but it did feel safe with Frank downstairs, and a newly married couple upstairs.
John had managed to pack a few of her personal trinkets while he was waiting for the men to barge in and hurt her, but however touched she was that he’d done that for her, in reality she’d lost everything for a second time.
This time she had to begin again, finding a job without relying on her looks to give her a headstart. She would also always be looking over her shoulder, afraid of being recognized.
She had felt very alone when she first came to London, but there were people back in Dorset, friends, distant relatives and acquaintances, she cared about, and who presumably cared about her. But once Amy was gone, Nora could never contact any of them again. She cried as she burned her address book, for without her history, who was she?
Soon afterwards she got a job at the telephone exchange, and before long she was promoted to supervisor, in charge of eighteen young telephonists. In some ways it was very similar to her job in the club, except she was no longer a glamorous figure and she couldn’t afford to let anyone get close to her for fear of revealing her true identity.
Nora had never lost her affection for John, despite her disappointment that he allowed himself to get sucked into crime. Even before he met and married Vera, and bought number 13 from his landlord, his name was linked with some of the most formidable and crooked businessmen she’d met in her Soho days. There was Peter Rachman, an unscrupulous slum landlord who charged sky-high rents to naive and frightened West Indian immigrants, Ronald Beasdale who was in illegal gambling, and Albert Parkin who ran protection rackets.
It was two years ago that she discovered John had become involved with Jack Trueman. There was an article in the paper about the new nightclub Trueman had opened in Soho, and a picture of the club’s interior showing John as the manager behind the bar.
Nora knew John was smart enough to have concealed his identity that night in her flat when he’d thrashed Earl and his men. She knew too that he would never expose her either. But she was appalled to think John would go to work for such a man as Trueman. How could a man who had once risked his own life to help a vulnerable woman join forces with the thug who was responsible?
Yet looking at it realistically, she knew that John couldn’t possibly have remained the same as he’d been a decade before. He had always wanted the ‘good life’, and he’d taken short cuts to get it. Everyone described him as a villain or a gangster, he’d been in prison, and probably done many bad things which had eroded his idealism. She naively hoped that he’d taken the club management job because he was trying to go straight; she knew it wouldn’t be easy for a man who’d done time to find work.
That was certainly the way it looked. Almost every evening she saw him come out of number 13, wearing a dinner jacket and bow tie, and his car was back in the morning. She even heard the street gossip that Vera was happy again because he was home with her more – she’d had a miserable time while he was in prison.
Then one Friday evening over a year ago, she saw John and Jack Trueman going into number 11, with Alfie grinning at the door like a Cheshire cat.
The passing years hadn’t changed Trueman that much, though his hair was silver rather than dark. She guessed he must be close to sixty, but he looked far younger and still very fit.
She didn’t know which she was most shocked and appalled by, the thought of John consorting with a maggot like Alfie, or seeing the man she’d been told would maim her if he found her, right across