Victor Tempest’s final exercise book
I never saw Knowles again, but in 1945 I attended the Nuremberg trials. I was trying to make sense of what had happened in the war. Not the people I had killed, but the millions murdered. Nuremberg had been chosen as the venue for the trials for symbolic reasons. It was there Hitler had held his grandiose rallies; there he had passed a law stripping Jews of their German citizenship. For the same symbolic reason the RAF had pretty much demolished the medieval quarters in bombing raids. Nuremberg was war-wrecked, its citizens gaunt and exhausted.
Lord Birkett was the British black-capped judge pronouncing the death sentence on Nazi war criminals in the Palace of Justice. The last time I’d seen him, he’d been plain Norman Birkett, barrister, successfully defending Tony Mancini, aka Jack Notyre, at Lewes Crown Court against the charge of murdering his mistress, Violette Kay.
The man hanging the criminals Birkett sentenced to death was Albert Pierrepoint, the butcher from Clayton I’d met in 1935. It had taken him until 1941 to move from assistant to official executioner. He told me that when I bumped into him in a bierkeller. I reminded him of our last meeting, almost ten years earlier.
‘I remember,’ he said. ‘You still a Blackshirt?’
‘That was a mistake,’ I said. ‘We stood for order but we caused disorder.’
‘Some mistakes you can recover from. I deal with people whose mistakes have consequences they can’t evade.’
‘When were you first in charge of the whole thing?’ I asked. ‘The hangings.’
‘1941. Seventeenth of October. Pentonville Prison. Happy enough fellow. Last thing he said before he went through the hatch was “Cheerio”.’
Pierrepoint and I sipped our beer. It was rubbish but then we’d bombed the breweries to buggery.
‘I did tell him he should have had a word with my dad,’ he said.
I frowned.
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘Well, I was hanging him for knifing somebody in a brawl but he also told me that, years before, he’d chopped up some lass and he’d had a bugger of a time doing it. Didn’t know anything about jointing meat, you see. My dad, now, he could have jointed an elephant without breaking sweat.’
My mind reeled from more than the drink.
‘What was this man’s name?’
Pierrepoint thought for a moment.
‘Antonio Mancini. “Baby” to his friends. Soho gangster. Knifed a thug from a rival gang. A Jewish gang. It could have gone either way — who lived, who died, I mean. It would have made no difference to me — one of them would have dangled from the end of my rope.’
‘Baby Mancini.’
‘Daft name for a grown man, I know.’
I nodded slowly.
‘I met him once,’ I said. ‘Just for five minutes.’
Pierrepoint was an unnervingly placid man. He remained still, watching me, waiting for more.
‘This lass,’ I said. ‘He killed her?’
He shook his head.
‘I don’t think so. Helping out his brother-in-law after the fact, apparently.’ He shrugged, though he seemed to make heavy work of the gesture. ‘Strange favours some folk do.’
‘Who was his brother-in-law?’ I said. ‘It wasn’t a bloke called Martin Charteris, was it?’
Pierrepoint frowned.
‘No idea.’
And that should have been it with regard to the Brighton Trunk Murders and the hangings of Albert Pierrepoint and the two Tony Mancinis. But, of course, nothing ever finishes. No story is ever really done.
A year later I was back in London working for military intelligence. I bumped into Pierrepoint again. I was on my way to meet Ian Fleming — he had some girls lined up. But this bloke and his feelings for his chilly occupation fascinated me. Since I’d last seen him, he’d executed at least two hundred Nazi war criminals. Now he was back at Pentonville, hanging home-grown traitors.
Over a pint he said: ‘Good job you got out of the Blackshirts when you did. I hanged two of your former comrades yesterday. Lord Haw-Haw and another bloke who’d been high up. Mosley’s unofficial ambassador to Italy. Picked up in Germany.’
‘Eric Knowles?’ I said.
‘You knew him too?’
I was remembering the time Charteris had taken me to Tony Mancini’s club. As we were standing at the bar, Eric Knowles had come in and gone upstairs.
I laughed. A bleak laugh.
‘Albert, as I get older I’m not sure I know anybody.’