If Lavonia moved to London in her late teens, she might have caught the disapproving eye of Bob Fabian:

Not one of them had any more morals than a hen. What makes a girl become a prostitute? I think I can tell you – it is sheer laziness and vanity … Her love gestures are as automatic and insincere as the wide smile on the face of a tired chorus-girl. A whore is a bad apple. There is a big brown bruise on her soul, of self-indulgence and selfishness. I do not think that there exists in London any such person as an honest prostitute. They taint any flesh they touch.

This is tough reading but it is the honest opinion of an old-school copper who has seen too much of what organized vice does to people – and what it would do to Bella. How Lavonia met Fernand Modena and how she became part of his stable is unknown, but trying to go it alone in a strange city were danger lurked on every corner was never really an option. The girls who haunted Piccadilly, Curzon Street, Half Moon Street in Mayfair, or Gerard Street, Old Compton Street and Lisle Street in Soho had their designated pitches – and God help the wide-eyed, snaggle-toothed Romany girl who tried to muscle in. Lavonia’s relationship with Modena, potentially lethal as it may have been, was symbiotic – they needed each other.

But that relationship came to an abrupt end in November 1935 and Lavonia was suddenly on her own. If Lavonia wanted to maintain her lifestyle – and it was certainly more lucrative than selling pegs from a painted wagon – that meant one thing in 1937; the Messinas.

Despite the title of Dick Kirby’s excellent book Mayfair Mafia (Pen and Sword, 2019), the Messina family were not actually Mafia. In fact, they left their native Sicily to avoid that family obsessed gangsterhood, drifting to Malta in 1896 and arriving in London by 1934. As Kirby says, ‘the Messinas were unable to lie straight in bed’ and the culture of corruption around them spread to witnesses, lawyers and of course the girls they ran. Because the Messinas were, above all, pimps. Most of them were pretty handy with a razor, but open violence was not their stock in trade – they left that to the racecourse gangs like the Sabinis, Billy Hill and Jack ‘Spot’ Comer – they probably stayed wide of Fernand Modena in Soho because the place was already spoken for and moved their girls out to the west, Mayfair, Hyde Park, Holland Park and Bayswater.

The father was Giuseppe, a peasant with some carpentry skills. He and his wife produced five sons who were chips off the old block and a daughter, the white sheep of the family who may have embarrassed the others. The oldest son was Salvatore, who married a French prostitute with an Italian name, Maria Burratti. He adopted the name Arthur Evans, to blend in better with London society. If the real Arthur Evans, the famous archaeologist, had found out about this, he would have been very annoyed! Next came Alfredo in 1901, who married Andrée Astier, known as Colette, who had well over a dozen convictions for prostitution in her first year in the country. Alfredo called himself Alfred Martin. After him, in 1908, came Eugenio, who did a little gun-running and drug smuggling on the side. Probably a genuine psychopath, he styled himself Edward Marshall. Two years later, Attilio arrived, the only member of the family whose photograph I can find, taken as a young man. He is darkly handsome, with the tall Homburg and sharp suit fashionable among inter-war gangsters. Canelo was the youngest boy, born a year after Lavonia in 1915. He married prostitute Ida Pomirou from France and used the moniker Charles Maitland. Margherita, the youngest, was the white sheep.

Giuseppe’s wife, Maltese-born Virginia, could claim British citizenship by virtue of her place of birth and that would come in handy later. In the meantime, the Messinas with their growing brood moved to Egypt in 1904 and set up a number of brothels, made legal there in that year. They trafficked girls as young as four. With the International Civil Police Organization (later Interpol) breathing down their necks, the Messinas were kicked out of Egypt in 1932 and obtained British passports for the entire family by leaning on and/or bribing customs officials.

The law relating to prostitution was chaotic. Keeping a ‘disorderly house’ (brothel) had been illegal since 1751, but the last legislation relating to prostitution dated from 1912; even the fine of £2 for soliciting had been set in 1839 and had not changed by the time Lavonia paid hers. It was not even an offence to procure a woman for sex if she was already a working girl. The definition of a brothel was equally confusing; only if two or more women lived under the same roof could the police act – a girl on her own got away with it. The penalty for keeping a brothel, however, was steeper – £100 or a three-month prison sentence for a first offence; £250 or six months for a second. Even these sums, however, did not deter the Messinas, whose large team of girls earned them thousands in three years, especially when the war started and the Americans arrived. ‘We Messinas,’ Attilio bragged, ‘are more powerful than the British government. We do as we like in England.’

Violence between pimps was commonplace, with the girls getting in the way. Charles Balalla was shot dead in London in 1926 by ‘Mad Emile’ Berthier. Casimir Micheletti, known as ‘The Assassin’ had his club and dancing school firebombed three years later.

The Messinas tended to avoid trouble when they could, claiming to be diamond merchants and operating in the areas from Park Lane through Oxford Street to Regent Street. Under their aegis came hotels with high reputations in polite society – the Ritz, Claridge’s and the Berkeley. Robert Fabian knew the clubs well, on first-name terms (although he was always ‘Mr Fabian’) with doormen, cab-drivers, maitres d’ and hoteliers themselves. He made a point of introducing himself to new girls on his patch. ‘This is Ursula,’ one barman did the honours in a club in Frith Street. ‘She’s a Polack. Ursula, this is Mr Fabian, Chief of the Manor – you don’t give him any nonsense and he’ll treat you fair.’

Kate Meyrick was the formidable hostess of the 43 Club in Gerrard Street, as used to handling peers of the realm as the lowlife who occasionally tried to gatecrash her premises. The Big Apple was an up-and-coming black venue that would burgeon in the 1950s, with jazz and the cloying scent of ‘reefers’ (marijuana). Hell was run by Geoffrey Daybell and in Wardour Street was the Shim-Sham Club. The laws against the sale of liquor, almost as silly as the Volstead Act which brought prohibition to America, cramped the style of these clubs and barmen had to be careful with men like Fabian on the prowl. The Studio in Knightsbridge, the Esquire in Piccadilly, the Unity in Jermyn Street and the Strangers in St James, the Messinas and their girls were probably known in all of them.

Some of the Messinas’ girls merely had the job of getting themselves invited into a club where the ‘house’ would fleece the punters accordingly. There were 295 registered clubs within a mile of the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus and fifteen unregistered that the police knew about – ‘a total’ computes Fabian, ‘of 310 places, ablaze with lights and activity into London’s dawn, where music, dancing, drinks and companions await the well-filled wallet.’ That wallet got there by courtesy of Messinas’ girls, who ‘for £2 would cuddle a baboon’.

It was, in the end, all about money for girls like Lavonia Stratford; money to survive. Rates varied, especially when the ‘Mug’ (punter) wanted a special service, perhaps involving bondage or what today we might call ‘cosplay’; but the usual in the late 1930s and early 1940s was £5 a session. The session was brief – the ten-minute rule that the Messinas insisted on became widespread and was reduced still further for the benefit of the Americans after 1942 (who also paid double or triple for the privilege). On average, girls like Lavonia earned £4 an hour, far above the rate of a shop girl or factory worker. Remember, too, that employment like factory work or farming only came on the market as a result of the war itself, because of the sudden shortage of manpower. Before that, girls were employed as shop assistants, secretaries, telephonists and maids. If Lavonia’s education was as patchy as I believe it was, at least some of that work would have been beyond her.

We next come across Lavonia, still listed as Lavinia Stratford, in 1939. By now she was 25, still using her maiden name, so had not officially married. And she was still in London; her address is given as 120 Princess Court, Bayswater. This was a fashionable apartment block built eight years earlier, in the art deco style that the Thirties loved. Tellingly, she is listed as having ‘private means’. This could be that she had the private income of a respectable lady, a legacy from the family so that ‘trade’ and similar inconveniences would not bother her. Or it could mean that her income was literally a private matter, the cash she received from the ‘Mugs’, 80 per cent of which she had to give to her ‘protectors’, the Messinas. Bayswater in those days was not the upmarket part of London it is today. ‘Ladies of the night’ with their faux furs, cheap jewellery (perhaps even wedding rings) and Gibson shoes lived in the Bayswater Road.

The reason that Lavonia Stratford is listed at all in 1939 is that by now there was a war on. The government realized that with such chaotic upheaval going on, there could not be a conventional census in 1941, so they opted for a register two years earlier instead.

As it happened, Lavonia Stratford would not have appeared on a 1941 census even if it had gone ahead.

Because Lavonia Stratford would be dead.

Chapter 19

The Last Days of Bella

At the time, the press attributed the murder of three prostitutes in London between August 1935 and May of the following year to a single killer, the ‘Soho strangler’. No one had forgotten the media frenzy that surrounded the Whitechapel murders of 1888, when newspaper sales had rocketed out of all proportion. There were certainly similarities in the 1930s cases – all the victims were prostitutes, with accompanying ‘street’ names. Paulette Estelle was ‘French Marie’; Josephine Martin was ‘French Fifi’; Constance Hinds was ‘Dutch Leah’. And the MO was similar too – strangulation, even if hands, a silk scarf, a silk handkerchief and piano wire were the actual weapons involved.

‘Dutch Leah’, also known as ‘Stilts’ because of her love of high heels, was found dead in bed by her husband, Stanley King, on 9 May 1936. She had been garrotted with wire and her head smashed in, probably by an iron. She was lying with her clothes disarranged, as though ready for sex. But pathology determined that no sex had taken place, any more than it had for Bella, whose slip was not torn, whose knickers were complete.

In the case of ‘French Fifi’, the Russian girl was found in her flat in Archer Street, Piccadilly by her maid, the elegantly named Felicité Plaisant. Like ‘Leah’, ‘Fifi’ was heavily in debt. She was found to owe 40 guineas to one person (over £3,000 today), £20 to someone else. But the fact that she had a maid spoke volumes. These women were not domestics in the conventional sense; they worked for pimps and reported on the girls to ensure that they were not keeping their earnings dark. I believe that Bella would have had one too, hovering around the Princess Court address. The maid would have noticed everything – the regulars who liked the girl with the Birmingham Roma accent and the funny teeth that made her look cute and fresh-faced as opposed to the usual Soho drabs. Mary McLeod, a prostitute murdered in Stepney in 1952 was 50, but years of alcoholism made her look much older; and without wishing to be unkind to the dead, was far from an oil painting. Bella’s maid would have seen the ‘one-offs’ come and go, men given the slang term ‘Steamers’. Robert Fabian knew these men too. As head of the Met’s Vice Squad, he met many of them, caught literally with their trousers down in raids all over the West End. ‘The great majority,’ Fabian wrote, ‘are soft-hearted men. Nine out of ten … are looking for romance. They have a few drinks, and wander out into the streets, hoping to discover under some lamp post a young creature who has been driven by hunger or despair into proffering her body.’

Stefan Slater, a professional criminal psychologist writing many years after the hard-bitten London copper, comes to much the same conclusion. The average prostitute (although he concedes that there is really no such thing) hails ‘from a poor background’, a background like that of a gypsy girl, living hand to mouth in a community regarded as outcasts by the rest of society. ‘She is probably in her mid-to-late twenties’ – Bella was 26 or 27. She ‘has a criminal record’. Bella/Lavonia did; she was arrested for soliciting along with her French oppos and Fernand Modena.

And her maid would have reported it all to the next Fernand Modena, the next pimp, the lowest of the low who offered his girls ‘protection’ at a price and took a huge cut of their income. Bob Fabian said there were two ‘highly experienced’ institutions scouring the London streets looking for likely lasses. One was the Met itself, especially the ‘Zombies’, the women police officers who drove the ‘Children’s Waggon’ that parked outside a different central park every night. The other group was made up of the pimps, the ‘Johnsons’, who picked up girls lost, on the run, looking for romance and adventure just as their future ‘Steamers’ were. Lavonia Stratford had been one of these at some time in the early to mid-1930s. Her circumstances after 1935 cut her adrift again. And the only organized people-trafficking gang in London then were the newly arrived Messinas. She was hired – still a fresh-looking country girl. Perhaps she did use the name Bella, continuing the exotic-sounding, chic ambience of the French connection. And if she was now working for the Italians, who was to know?

But the rates had gone up. While she probably paid Fernand half her wages, she had to pay the Messinas 80 per cent. They secured the flat for her in Princess Court and they collected the money she earned on a regular basis. Fifteen years after Bella died and when the power of the Messinas was broken, it was still going on. Conservative MP Arthur Baxter wrote in 1956:

I have some friends living in Bayswater, just off Hyde Park and they tell me that practically every night – and I have seen it myself – up comes a car with a couple of men who take money from the prostitutes in that area … These women are drawn up like a guard of honour – or dishonour – three yards apart. We love London, but its streets are the most disgraceful in the world.1

What happened in the case of Lavonia? I believe that her particular pimp was Eugenio Messina, known as Gino, who styled himself Edward Marshall. The last ‘client’ seen in the company of ‘Dutch Leah’ was described as ‘tall, slim, clean shaven, long hair, slouching gait, foreign’. Was that Gino too? Was ‘Dutch Lena’ one of his girls and was she short-changing him, as I believe Bella was? Fabian knew these pimps, the riff-raff the Victorians had called ‘bullies’ for a good reason. A ‘pimp’s only pride,’ Fabian wrote, ‘is in his ability to intimidate a woman. He will shred her face unforgettably. A slender phial of acid dropped inside her clothing and then shattered with a blow from his fist. Or he can set fire to her hair …’

Or he can take out her teeth one by one. That is why a tooth had been extracted from Bella within a year before she died. That was why no dentist could be found who had done the work. The travelling community, especially in the days before a national health service, never went within a country mile of a dentist’s surgery. Bella was keeping money back; her maid had a quiet word in Gino’s ear and Gino went to work on her, taking out a tooth this time, as a warning. But next time …

She was terrified. Caught out in a lie, her pimp had worked her over already. Back in the Hagley area were her people and probably her child. She ran. She caught the next train to Birmingham, fighting her way through the crowded platform, jostling in the corridor with servicemen with kitbags and gas masks. She would have been carrying one too and an identity card; you could not be too careful.

If she caught the GWR’s train from Paddington, she would have got off at Birmingham Snow Hill, and made her way on the stopping service to Worcester to Hagley, into the country, passing through Halesowen and Bromsgrove, past the buildings where the haunting question would appear about her three years later – ‘Who put Bella in the wych elm?’ She found her people, perhaps on the Nimmings, but more probably elsewhere and she told them she was on the run. Perhaps she found her child again and cuddled him or her on the steps of a Vardo wagon in some country clearing as the night sky glowed red with the bombing raids over Birmingham. She ditched her clothes. She gave away the smart, fashionable ‘uniform’ of the London prostitute and took whatever people gave her in return; a shapeless slip made from a coat lining, an old khaki skirt stitched together in panels. Even her frilly lace panties went, exchanged for a plain blue pair, like respectable women wore. Her top was stitched together with old wool that a gypsy woman had knitted together by the firelight. She had got rid of her bra – travellers did not use them. And anything else that betrayed her past vanished too – her handbag, her identity card, even the gas mask. She tried to lose herself again in the anonymity of the travelling people, people whose names were unknown but who called themselves ‘Smith’ and kept their heads down.

Outside that tight-knit community, which had probably not seen her for ten years, no one knew who she was. The name Lavonia, the possible nickname Bella – it meant nothing to anybody. She was safe here.

Perhaps she lived like this for days or weeks; it cannot have been longer. It was the summer of 1941 and the papers she never read carried brief, cryptic stories about the arrival of a mysterious German airman calling himself Hauptman Horn. But all that was eclipsed by news from the east – Hitler had turned on his former ally Stalin and had invaded Russia. So it was true – the man was mad, after all.

Then, Gino found her. It was probably not difficult. She may have told him months before about her people, the great settlement of Black Patch which was still a vibrant folk memory for her. And Gino was not a stupid man. He sniffed out likely girls in London, grooming them for work. He knew what Lavonia looked like and where her haunts were. He may have driven from hotel to hotel for a couple of days, eking out his petrol allowance so that no one asked too many questions. He signed himself in as Edward Marshall and had a ready identity card to match. He had a story ready too – explaining what he was doing in the Midlands in the first place, should any nosy copper ask awkward questions.

When he found her, why did she go with him? Why not scream, run, bring her menfolk to her defence? We have no idea. Perhaps she had no menfolk to hand. If her father was dead or had never been on the scene, if she had no brothers, that would have left her isolated. And then there was Gino. Yes, she was afraid of him. And, yes, he had hurt her. But he could be charming, kind even and they may have had a certain rapport. He was in his mid-thirties, perhaps mercurial, perhaps dazzling; the Heathcliff to his Cathy.

She kissed her child, promising to come back soon. Yes, Gino would have said, that would be fine, but he needed her in London. Then they drove away, south perhaps, towards the capital, making for the bright lights. Except that they never got there. Somewhere along Hagley Wood Lane, he stopped the car. She was not afraid. She knew this road well, had told him all about the wood she had known as a child, where she had picked bluebells and danced around that funny old tree, the one she could just make out from the road, the dying one with its curious hollow trunk.

He may have suggested they have one last look at it, one last glimpsed memory of childhood before going back to the Blitz and the Steamers, the life she hated but which made money. Lavonia never quite got to the tree because Gino stopped her. He grabbed her from behind, pulling her striped cardigan up over her face and ramming it into her mouth, pressing her nostrils closed with her hand. There was a razor in his pocket, and he would fall back on its use if he had to. It was dark now, the car silent on the road with its headlights off. She struggled because she could not scream, the shoes she could not bear to be parted from scraping in the undergrowth as her breath ran out and her heaving lungs gave up. He felt her slump in his iron grip and let her fall. He checked her pulse. Nothing.

And he looked around him. Night in the middle of nowhere. He had known the slums of Cairo and every dark corner of Fabian’s London. But here, he was all but lost and in wartime, a car in darkness caused suspicion. He would find a hotel, sign in as Edward Marshall and decide what to do in the morning.

Where did he stay? The Lyttleton Arms perhaps or the Gypsy’s Tent, if either of them took paying guests at the time. Travellers in wartime were not as common as they had been before 1939, but a man with nerve and a plausible story could get away with it. Still, the body bothered him. He had left it lying in the open, the woman he had had to shut up. Nobody walked away from Gino Messina, trying to take his money. Nobody. Perhaps the finding of her body would leave the necessary message to other girls in his stable, as it might have done already in the case of ‘Dutch Leah’. But that had been a risk and he had a feeling he had been seen with her in the hour or two before he killed her. What if someone had seen him with Lavonia? What if one of the gypsies talked? That was not likely; the travelling people kept to themselves and they did not like policemen any more than Gino did. No, this body would have to be hidden and he knew just the place.

He had seen corpses before and had created a couple too, but even so, he had to steel himself to the task in hand. He did not know that Constable Jack Pound walked his beat along Hagley Wood Lane, that Sergeant Richard Skerratt might have been watching him from the Clent Hills. He did not know that the Home Guard patrolled the area regularly and that terrified people from Birmingham drove out this far to find shelter from the bombs. Still less did he know that gypsies camped at the Nimmings, yards from where he had left Lavonia and that courting couples might trip over the body. So the next day, he went back.

Mechanically, he checked the corpse. The stiffness of rigor mortis had all but gone. She was not carrying a handbag, a purse or a wallet. She had no identification on her at all. He hauled her up and felt his heart thump. Some animal had ripped off her right hand and he could not see it anywhere. A badger? A fox? He knew nothing about English woodlands, but he knew exactly where to hide the evidence. The old wych elm that Lavonia had talked about, with its gnarled bark and writhing roots, its branches stretching to the sky like the rays of the sun. She was only 5 feet tall and not heavy, for all her dead weight, to a man like him. He lifted her, balanced her awkwardly on the opening of the trunk and let her fall, her own weight pulling her down, her knees buckling as her feet hit the internal base of the trunk. Her head lolled back and she looked at him through sightless eyes, her arms thrust upwards, wedged in the wych elm, like a parachutist suddenly cut from her harness and her silk.

Gino looked around. There was no sign she had ever been there. Nor had he. He wandered back through the bracken to his car. Then, he was gone.

Is this – or something like it – what happened to Bella? Was she really Lavonia Stratford, the little gypsy girl who had got in with the wrong crowd and had she paid the ultimate price? I cannot prove it; not any of it. The men who could, the men who had that job back in 1943, the police and the pathologists, signally failed her. There are reasons why and, with the passage of time perhaps we should be tolerant.

In 1988, Bob Hoskins, himself of Romany descent, made a film called The Raggedy Rawney. Rawney is often spelt Rani, Roma for woman. Bella was most assuredly a ragged woman as she was found in the wych elm. But that is not how she started out. She was a flesh and blood human being, like the rest of us. And she deserved an altogether better end.

Bibliography

BEGG, Paul, BENNETT, John, Jack the Ripper CSI: Whitechapel, Andre Deutsch, 2012

BEGG, Paul, FIDO, Martin, SKINNER, Keith, The Complete Jack the Ripper A to Z, John Blake, 2010

CALDER, Angus, The People’s War, Pimlico, 1969

CAVE BROWN, Anthony, Bodyguard of Lies, Star, 1977

CAVE BROWN, Anthony, The Secret Servant, Sphere Books, 1988

COLEY, Joyce, Bella: An Unsolved Murder, History into Print, 2007