It was 9 a.m. and I was sitting on my hotel bed adding the last touch to a diagram and sipping a medicinal Grouse before finally getting my head down when the telephone rang.
The voice on the other end was as brash as a barker in a penny arcade.
'William, I was expecting your fucking answerphone.'
'Hi, Richard, I was up all night rehearsing.'
'Good boy, well you can spare me three minutes.'
I held the phone away from my ear while he coughed a phlegm-filled cough. 'How’s things in der Fatherland?'
'Better.'
'You wowing them yet?'
'About to.'
'Glad to hear it ’cos I’ve got some good news for you.'
'What?'
'There’s a scout travelling over on Saturday to take in your show.'
'Saturday?'
'Christ, don’t drop dead of enthusiasm.'
'No, that’s great news, Richard, it’s just Saturday’s the first night of the new act. I would’ve liked a chance to iron out any glitches that come up.'
'Don’t worry, the adrenalin’ll carry you through.'
Richard hacked out another round of coughs and I wondered where he’d heard of adrenalin.
'Who’s he scouting for?'
'TV, BBC3 to be exact, a late-night show. This could be what you’ve been waiting for.'
'So do you want me to meet him? Wine and dine him?'
'No, keep schtumm. He likes to go incognito. A lot of the big scouts are like that. But forewarned is forearmed. Save you screwing it up.'
'Thanks, Richard.'
'Don’t mention it, son. Just thank me by keeping sober and avoiding making a balls up.
This could be the big one. He was most insistent, no comics, no dancing girls, no singers, he only wants conjurers. This could have your name on it, Will.'
Glasgow
MY TRAWL THROUGH the Mitchell Library’s archives had revealed that one particular case was mentioned every time the murdered nightclub owner Bill Noon, or his father, Bill Noon senior, appeared in the newspapers. Bill had referred to it obliquely on the night we met and I’d read about it in the Telegraph’s report of Sam and Bill’s death, though its significance had been lost to me then.
On the morning of the Friday, 13th March, 1970, Mrs Gloria Noon had left her home at about 12.15 in the afternoon. She had never been seen or heard of again. There were no witnesses to her departure, but Gloria had spoken on the telephone to her sister, Sheila Bowen, at about midday. Gloria had asked Sheila for a recipe for pork and apple casserole.
When Sheila phoned back a quarter of an hour later after searching out the recipe book there was no reply, though Gloria had been expecting the call.
Gloria’s six-year-old son Billy went uncollected from school; her car lay untouched in the driveway. Gloria’s makeup was spread out in front of her dressing-table mirror as if she had been interrupted in the act of applying it. Gloria had withdrawn no large sums of cash, nor did she pack any clothes, she had left her Valium and contraceptive pills in the bathroom cabinet. Her keys, purse and reading glasses were still in her handbag, which lay open on the bed she shared with her husband. Her passport lay undisturbed at the bottom of her underwear drawer. There was no sign of an accident or a struggle, no note; no woman was discovered wandering the local lanes with amnesia. Mrs Gloria Noon had simply disappeared.
Sheila told police that she and her sister had talked of more than recipes that morning.
Gloria had finally decided to leave her husband, taking her young son with her. According to Sheila the boy was the only reason Gloria had stayed in her marriage.
It was confirmed that Gloria had been seen two weeks earlier by the casualty department of her local hospital, claiming to have fallen down the stairs. The doctor who’d examined her had written in his notes that he considered her injuries more consistent with an assault than a fall. Her sister claimed that Gloria had been beaten by her husband and that this beating, the most recent in a long series, was the reason Gloria had finally decided to leave — that and the encouragement she’d received from her lover.
Gloria had never named the man she was leaving Bill senior for, fearing the danger he’d be in if her husband discovered his identity and knowing that divorce courts looked unsympathetically on women who indulged in extramarital affairs, even the wives of dubious businessmen who made easy with their fists.
'She wouldn’t have done anything that interfered with her chance of getting custody of Billy,' her sister had insisted. 'And she would never have left him.'
But of course the affair had jeopardised Gloria’s chance of custody. And she had most certainly left her son. The question was, had she left voluntarily?
If you could hang a man on hearsay, Bill Noon would have mounted the gallows in double-quick time. But he’d insisted that with the exception of his abandoned son he was the most confused and upset of anyone involved. He denied any knowledge of an affair and insisted that though they ‘had their ups and downs like any married couple,' he knew of no plan to leave him. Gloria liked a drop, they both did, and once or twice he’d raised his hand but he’d never have seriously hurt her. The gin and not his fists were to blame for her fall and her bruises. He disputed his sister-inlaw’s account, accusing her of being jealous of Gloria’s lifestyle and of actively wanting their marriage to fail. He poured scorn on the idea that his wife would confide anything in her sister. He even slandered the recipe for pork and apple casserole.
Though the newspapers recorded Bill Noon’s denials it was clear whose side they took, even after he had posted a substantial reward for news of his wife. Bill Noon stared out from their photos, photogenic as a Kray twin hard man, while Gloria’s sister, Sheila, sat dignified in full suburban bloom, or was pictured working honestly and industriously in her husband’s outfitting shop.
For a while Gloria was sighted almost as regularly as Lord Lucan. A holidaymaker thought he saw her walking along a beach in Majorca. She’d dyed her hair brown and was holding the hand of a thin aristocratic-looking man. She was seen on a bus in Margate, wearing a headscarf of the kind favoured by the queen. A hiker had passed Gloria walking along a cliff-top in Wales. She’d looked troubled and they’d thought of asking if she was OK.
It was only later that it occurred to them who she was. What attraction coastlines had for the disappeared Gloria Noon was never explored in the press.
After a while the sightings of Gloria diminished, though over the years people continued to claim to have glimpsed her. Generally after the press had resurrected her story, something that happened whenever a respectable married woman went missing.
Though, unlike Gloria, these women always seemed to turn up, in some form.
Gloria Noon had become her disappearance, a bundle of newspaper clippings, a police file, a chapter in true crime books and an entire Pan paperback, The Friday the Thirteenth Vanishing. The police denied her case was closed, but admitted there was little they could do with no evidence, no witnesses and no body.
The most spectacular resurrection of the publicity surrounding the case had come with Bill Noon senior’s remarriage twelve years after his first wife’s disappearance. Several newspapers had run a copy of the wedding photo. Bill junior acted as best man. He stood at the front of the group photograph, handsome face stiff and unreadable. And if you looked closely, it was possible to spot a younger, thinner James Montgomery in the back row of the bravely smiling wedding party, grinning like a man who’d just come into a good thing.
I took all the clippings I had managed to get copied about the disappearance of Bill’s mother and laid them across the floor of my room. Then I took out the map and the photograph that I’d filched from Montgomery and laid them side-by-side. I lifted the photograph and stared at the newspaper held in Montgomery’s hand. The print was small, but it was still possible to read the headline and the date, 13th March 1970, the day of Gloria’s disappearance. I looked again at the map and felt certain that this was the last resting place of Gloria Noon.