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.
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