Chapter 4
That night, it took a long while for me to go to sleep. The morning would be two weeks since I had discovered his body, and Tom had filled the days since with his spirit. As I laid in the dark, idly scratching a dogs head, I thought about the clues that had been left. A small boy bullied and called a queer, who had grown up gay and finding love with a larger man. It all fitted a profile.
Then, there was the make-up mirror, as used by professional entertainers. The clothing, in a size for the younger Tom, had obviously been bought for use but deemed superfluous. There was nothing in the house of Alberts’, and nothing in the house that linked the lad who bought the jazzy outfits to the man who had lived here. My guess was that we would find it all in the cabinet.
I must have slept well, as I was woken by a dog tongue on my face. I hauled my body out of bed and went to the kitchen door, opening it to let two bundles of energy race across the back garden to their favourite toilet spot. I went and did my own business and then put food in their bowls and put them outside. Margaret wandered into the kitchen.
“I still can’t believe that we start the day at this ungodly hour.”
“It is the hour that god sends up the sun, even on days we can’t see it.”
“Ooh! Listen to the vicar. I’m going to have my shower. See you in half an hour.”
I made myself a cup of instant coffee, and stood by the sink, looking out at the back garden and taking sips of drink. I started to think about a garden. Tom had lived here for so long without any flower beds, anywhere around the house. It would only be the weeds that provided colour, and he must have liked colour, if those shirts were anything to go by. I was planning raised beds across the back, alternating flowers and vegetables, when Margaret came back in, looking radiant.
“Bathrooms’ free. Is the water hot?”
“It won’t take long. I’ll be back when I’m looking civilised.”
“Boys never look civilised. It doesn’t come with the territory.”
I went off to the bathroom and had my shower. The bathroom smelt like lavender body wash, and it was at hand, so I did my hair and body with it. When I was dressed, I went back into the kitchen and turned on the gas burners to create a chefs’ breakfast. Margaret came up behind me.
“Who’s been sleeping in a gay man’s bed, then?”
“What girl didn’t tidy up her body wash?”
“Hey, we need more shower caddies to carry two lots of things. Keep with the lavender, Tony, it smells good on you. Are we ready for the big reveal after we’ve washed up?”
“We have to be. I’m betting that we’ll find a wardrobe full of female clothing, shape-making underwear, and impossible heels.”
“I’m with you on that, with all the other clues. The thing that I keep coming back to is why he locked them away. There must have been some cataclysmic event.”
“Big words on a Sunday morning. I’m glad we have something serious to think about.”
I cooked us a good breakfast, noting that we’ll need to start buying eggs. When we had washed up, we took turns in brushing teeth, and finally stood in the master bedroom, with the key now in my hand. I put it in the lock and turned it.
“Here goes nothing!”
The door swung open to reveal a wall of drawers. I put my hand behind the edge of the closed door and found bolts, top and bottom. The door opened to reveal about a dozen colourful dresses, the sort that you see on stage. Below them were pairs of impossible heels.
“We were right!”
“It was almost inevitable. Open up the drawers, starting from the bottom, and let’s see what they contain.”
“If it’s female underwear, you can do the touching.”
“Chicken!”
“Sorry, sis. No chickens here any longer.”
The lower drawers did contain female underwear. Margaret lifted out some things and commented about the obvious high quality. About waist level, the drawer contained two scrapbooks. We went through to the kitchen with them and put the kettle on. Sitting with a fresh cup of tea, we took one each. I looked at mine.
“This is a scrapbook of newspaper cuttings about a police raid on a nightclub, in Soho, in nineteen ninety-four. It was a place called ‘Shackles’.”
She turned her book so I could look at the flyer, which showed someone wearing one of the dresses in the cabinet, sitting at a white piano, with the heading, ‘Tanya Hyde in Shackles’. I got up and went to the office, coming back with the three DVDs. They were three copies of a recording of Tanya Hyde, but not released until twenty-o-five. The release was issued by an independent company, called ‘Parker Productions’ and the cover apologised for the quality, as the discs had been made from the original Super Eight film.
“It looks like we now know who the Parkers are. These would have been available ten years after they came here.”
“This scrapbook is great! Tanya grew out of Tom in drag to be an attractive and talented performer. There’s cuttings from gay papers about the performances.”
I went back to the cuttings I was looking at. It appeared that the bust was done by a particularly nasty vice squad. There were several letters to the editor regarding the heavy-handed actions. The last cutting showed Tanya, from the flyer, with a story about the compensation that had been paid to the star entertainer along with a number of other staff of the club. All had been charged with ‘drunk and disorderly’ although no breath or blood tests were offered. As I turned that page, an envelope dropped out of the book. I opened it and read the single page it had contained.
‘Tony, if you’re reading this, it means that I died earlier than expected. There are some facts about my case that were never made public, and the compensation hearing was carried out behind closed doors. Albert and I were paid out because on the night I was arrested, on stage, they charged me, and every person working in the club, with being drunk. I was tossed into a cell with five guys, still in my stage outfit, and was gang raped by them for two days. The guards didn’t come when I was screaming. They didn’t stop Albert suffering a similar treatment in a cell with five Angels. They threw us out into the street, where we were taken to a clinic by friends. We both had to be operated on to repair the damage. That vice squad had been paid by a gang that owned other clubs to close us down and were eventually brought to justice. We left London with our money and a life-time problem that made it difficult to crap, and impossible to have sex. We did have enough love for each other to live normal lives, together. Thank you for your care and love for me when Albert passed away. All the best for the future. Tanya’.
I sat for some minutes. The big bed had never been the site of sexual release, only love and cuddles. Albert must have been sleeping in the other room, and Tom had done everything he could to eradicate the painful memories. Margaret put what she was looking at down and looked at me.
“You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”
“One that’s now left this world. Read these cuttings first, and then this letter. It’s the cataclysmic event that we suspected. I’m going to walk around the garden and throw a ball for the dogs.”
I spent some time with the dogs, hardly able to see from the tears in my eyes. Margaret came out to join me, her panda eyes showing that it had got to her as well. We stood in the garden, holding each other, until the crying stopped. We went back inside and put the scrapbooks back in the drawer. I locked the cabinet as we both couldn’t face the contents any more today.
I got the letter that the lawyer had given me. It made a lot more sense now. I checked that my phone had enough battery life and made the call to the number on the bottom.
“Good morning, Hector Parker, can I help you?”
“Good morning, Mister Parker. My name is Anthony Underwood and I’m calling you from the house where Tom Anderson used to live. You may be more aware of his stage name, Tanya Hyde.”
“Wow! That’s a blast from the past. Is Tanya still tickling the ivories?”
“I’m sorry to tell you that I discovered Toms’ body in the garden here, all of two weeks ago.”
“I’m very sorry to hear that. Tanya and Dad will probably be chewing the fat, then. He passed a few years ago. Is Albert still cooking up a storm?”
“Again, I’m sorry to say that he died about the same time as your father. Look, I’m Toms’ cousin, and he left the house to me, including a cabinet that I only unlocked this morning. It contains some of Tanyas’ stage gear and scrapbooks. I know about his time in Stevenage, and I have been a regular visitor here since I was thirteen, but this performing, and the police raid, is all very new and confronting.”
“It was more than confronting at the time! I was only in my teens, and it knocked Dad for six. It took months to clear the names of all the staff, but, by that time, the customers had all moved on. Shackles never reopened and is now a tapas bar with the odd flamenco evening. I would love to talk with you more. Can you come to London for a couple of days? I can put you up in a little hotel that I have shares in.”
“I do have a bit of time on my hands. It will be me and my sister, as we’ve both been discovering the secret life of our cousin.”
We talked some more, and I agreed to come to London on Wednesday, calling him when we arrived. He gave me the address of the hotel and we finished the conversation.
“That was interesting, sis. That was Hector, as Harvey passed on about the same time as Albert. We’re going to London for a couple of days, accommodation curtesy of Hector. From what he said, I think that Tom and Albert disappeared without trace when they left. I can understand why Tom never recreated Tanya after that, it would have been too traumatic. That also tells us about the clothes he did keep, all from pre-Tanya days. He must have dumped all of the daytime Tanya outfits and bought new Tom gear between there and here.”
“We’ll have to leave the dogs with Francis while we’re away. Are we going to tell anyone about all this?”
“I don’t think it would do any good, but we could give Uncle Eddy a copy of that DVD to look at, if Tanya was as good as the cuttings suggest. It was, after all, just a role that Tom played to earn some money. It must have all started in his last years with the music school and snowballed from there until he was Tanya twenty-four seven.”
We did other things for a while and then I did lunch. After that, we sat in the lounge, glasses of wine in hand, and watched the DVD of Tanya ‘tickling the ivories’. It was like looking at someones’ old holiday movie. The vision tended to jump a few times, but the content was eye-opening. Having known Tom so well, I could see him under the wig, the paint, the over-the-top dress and the heels. It was a fabulous performance of piano playing, singing, and working with an appreciative audience. When we ejected the disc, I put it back in the case.
“That was the Tom I knew when he was teaching me to play. After I had mastered something classical, he would leave the room and come back with some music to lighten the moment. I would never finish a lesson on a serious note. Just about every song on that DVD was something I’d played and sung. He would always sit behind me, at the desk, when I played. I wonder if it brought back happier days.”
“That, Tony, will only be proved if the drawers we haven’t looked in still have the scores. With the right make-over, you could recreate that show.”
“Don’t be silly, I don’t have the nerve.”
“Tony may not have the nerve, but I bet that Antonia Hyde would nail it.”
She smiled and I laughed, so lifting our spirits. I rang Uncle Eddy and arranged to see him at home, on Monday afternoon.
Before we left the house on Monday, we opened up the cabinet again and looked in the drawers that we hadn’t checked. A couple contained falsies, waist clinchers and thigh pads, one held a mass of cosmetics that Margaret said would have gone hard by now, and one was full of music scores that I remembered. Above the drawers was a cupboard, with half a dozen wigs on foam heads. Margaret pulled one down.
“There must have been good money in those days. The wigs are human hair and very well made, the underwear is about as good as you can get without being a millionaire, and the cosmetics were all expensive at the time. Tanya was doing very well for herself. That brings me to something that’s been niggling at my brain. That show had her with a lot of jewellery that flashed like the real thing. So far, we’ve found nothing here, and there wasn’t a photo in the house, not of Tom, Albert, or even his school pictures. Where are they?”
“We haven’t looked for things like that. There’s the rest of the filing cabinet, or, to take a leaf out of the spy novels, there could be an envelope with a deposit box key, taped to the underside of one of the drawers in the house.”
We went and looked in the filing cabinet, finding a lot of old accounts, tax records and payment slips for Albert from the Two Chimneys and Tom from the school. Then we pulled out every drawer in the house, including the ones in the cabinet, and checked underneath. We found nothing.
I made us lunch, and we were sitting there afterwards, when Margaret laughed.
“Tom was Tanya for a few years, right?”
“It would have been from about eighty-nine, when he graduated, to ninety-five. What has that got to do with it?”
“Six years living as a woman, a successful performer and immersed in femininity would have given him a lot of insights into how a woman thinks. Where does a woman hide her secrets?”
“I don’t know, perhaps under her knickers?”
“If I didn’t know better, my sweet brother, I would suspect that you know more about how women think than you let on. Back to the Cabinet!!”
We opened up the cabinet again and started with the drawers from the bottom, with Margaret lifting everything out. We found what had eluded us in the third drawer up, under the knickers. It was two envelopes, with two different bank branches written on the outside and Toms’ full name in the bottom corner of the local one, and the name of Tanya Rebecca Hyde on the other, in London. They both contained a numbered key.
We closed the cabinet again and went back into the office, putting both envelopes on the desk. I sat on the piano stool and Margaret sat in the office chair and we tried to get our heads around this new development. The whole affair was like one of the spy novels that Tom liked to read. I had read quite a few myself. On the shelf was his Ken Follett collection and my eyes followed the spines until I stopped. I got up and pulled one from the shelf.
“This isn’t the time to start reading a novel, Tony. We have a problem to solve.”
“We needed a key to our problem, sis. This is ‘The Key to Rebecca’ and written by Toms’ favourite author. It’s a spy novel, set in Cairo.”
I flicked through the book and a folded paper fell out. I picked it up and opened it, then laughed. I passed it to Margaret. She looked at it and gave me an evil grin.
“So, the deposit box, in London, that is in Tanyas’ name, can only be opened by a female who can answer a question based on one of her songs. I could do the female bit and you know the words to the songs. Problem is, it needs the female to answer the question. You do know that means that the contents are probably jewels, deposited by Tanya, and that the only way we’ll know is if we make you look like a woman.”
“That one can wait a bit longer, sis. You’re not having your evil salon ways with me! We can look in the other box on the way to see Uncle Eddy, as it’s in Letchworth. If it’s photos, they may like them.”
We drove into Letchworth and went to the bank. They wanted to know how I had the key, and I explained. They rang the lawyer to confirm and then the box was brought to us in a side room. When we opened it, we saw a load of photos. Tom must have cleared the house after Albert and put the frames out in the rubbish. Margaret had a plastic bag folded in her handbag, and she got that out and we transferred the photos to it. She put the two wads of banknotes from the box into her bag. We told the bank that the box wasn’t needed any longer and gave them the key. Before we left, Tom’s account was finally transferred to my name and new cards would be in the post.
At Uncle Eddys’ home, we brought them up to date with some of our discoveries and spread the photos out on their dining room table. That brought laughter and a few tears. There were the school pictures, some of Tom outside a building that looked like a college, one of him on his graduation day. There were several of Tom and Albert, or should I say, Tanya and Albert, and we had to explain our deductions about their time in London. There were a few of Tanya in full showgirl mode. My Aunt had to sit down when she saw them.
“She was so beautiful! That’s a very elaborate outfit.”
I showed her the DVD.
“It was what she wore as Tanya Hyde, a night club performer. I have this DVD of one of her shows, and she was totally fabulous. It all came to an end when the club was raided one night, and it never reopened. That’s when the two of them came here.”
“When was that, dear?”
“About the end of ninety-four or early ninety-five, as far as we could tell.”
“That’s odd. Tom didn’t get in touch again until around ninety-nine. He told us that he had a job teaching music in Letchworth. We didn’t question that. Can we keep the photos?”
“I’d like to keep one of Tom and Albert, as I knew them, and a couple of her showgirl ones as keepsakes. It would have been good to see Tanya live. You’ll know why when you watch the DVD.”
“We’ll do that, tonight, when we’re alone. I know that we’ll both have a cry. You know, you look a lot like him in those college pictures.”
We stopped and got the frames needed for the pictures we had kept. Back at home, we loaded the photos in them. One was in the lounge, one was in the kitchen, and Margaret made sure that one of the showgirl ones was on my chest of drawers in the bedroom. We rang home and invited our parents for dinner on Tuesday evening. There was a lot to tell and show them.
Tuesday was a busy day. We spoke to Francis about looking after the dogs for a few days from Wednesday morning. I went into Letchworth to get the things for dinner. On my way around, I stopped at a car dealer and discussed trading in my Honda on a small car that Margaret could drive. I made us lunch and Margaret finished her cleaning. In the afternoon, I sat at the piano with the big stack of scores on the desk, making sure that I knew all the songs that I had learnt, and then working through the few that I hadn’t played before. By the time I left the room to start dinner, I reckon I could answer any question that was asked.
I got the dinner prepared and Margaret came in, looking fabulous. I left her to look after things and went for a shower and get dressed. We had decided to act like hosts for this evening, as we wanted to appear responsible and adult, considering what we were going to show them.
My parents arrived and we sat them in the lounge with glasses of wine.
“We’ll have dinner, but before that, there are some things that we’ve discovered that you should know about. Margaret will take you through some of it while I finish cooking, then there’s a DVD to watch and then we’ll show you some other things we’ve found.”
I went to the kitchen as Margaret started to give them some of the background. We had dinner and they were sat in the lounge as we played the DVD while I was washing up. Mum was amazed and in awe of the performance. Dad had his legal face on, and not giving any indication of what he was thinking. After that, we took them into the master bedroom and opened up the Cabinet of Curiosities to show them the actual show outfits. Mum was even more amazed as Margaret spoke about the quality of everything. Back in the lounge, Dad spoke.
“If you inherited the house and contents, everything in the cabinet belongs to you. From that DVD, Tom was very successful, right?”
“Right, Dad. There was a fair bit of money floating around in those days. We think that Tanya had about four years on top of her game.”
“Now, the estate still has to go through probate, agreed?”
“The lawyer said that only red tape would slow it down, and, as the sole beneficiary, I could consider it as proven.”
“The show has Tanya adorned in what looks like diamonds?”
“Quite right. We have found, in the cabinet, two envelopes. One had a box key from a bank in Letchworth where Tom had his money. That contained a load of photos which we left with Uncle Eddy. Tom had cleared the house of them after Albert died. The other contained a box key at a bank in London that we think contains the jewels.”
“That’s something for the future. If they’ve been there twenty-odd years, another few days won’t harm. There will be a cost that needs to be paid before they allow you access.”
“That has already been considered.”
I could see Margaret trying hard to keep a straight face. Dad thought a bit more.
“If Tanya was so successful, there has to be a reason why she ended up, back as Tom, and teaching music in a school.”
“Exactly, Dad. I would rather let you read about it before we tell Mum. We haven’t told Uncle and Aunt. Tom was here for a few years before he got in touch with them.”
“All right. I’ll tell you when we get home, darling. It must be something serious if that’s the way you want to play it.”
I took him through to the office and pulled both scrapbooks out of the filing cabinet.
“One is from her career, and the other is why it stopped. There’s a short letter at the end with more information that turns it from serious to something utterly awful.”
I left him to it and went back to the lounge, where Margaret was telling Mum about our trip to London in the morning. Dad was a quarter of an hour before he joined us.
“I’ve put the files back in the filing cabinet, son. I’ll tell you about it tomorrow evening, love, after I’ve had the chance to do some research through my contacts in London. I do remember the events in the paper. It was quite a story at the time and took the legal profession some time to calm down. I can fully understand your thinking, children. Eddy doesn’t need to know the full story. We can let him remember his son as a someone with two successful careers. I thought that you had both moved forward in the last couple of weeks, but you’ve shown more responsibility than I could ever have wished for. Enjoy your trip. I think that it’s time we went home, darling, and let our kids get their sleep.”
Marianne Gregory © 2026