‘Any evidence of narcotic use?’ Jane asked, ignoring the grisly object as best she could.
‘Why?’ Simpson asked, the dome of his forehead wrinkling. ‘Should there be?’
‘I’m not sure.’ Jane shrugged. ‘Just curious.’
‘Any narcotic in particular?’ Simpson asked.
‘Morphine. Heroin.’
Simpson shook his head. ‘No evidence of intravenous use. No punctures on the arms or legs that I could find.’ His tone also made it quite clear that if there had been any punctures to find he would have discovered them. Simpson smiled briefly then turned away for a moment, searching the shelf behind him. He took down a wooden rack of test tubes corked with rubber stoppers and placed it on the table. He then brought up a small ceramic bowl from below the table, opened one of the test tubes and poured half its contents into the bowl.
Using his tongs and a scalpel he quickly carved a small piece of muscle tissue from the abdomen of the corpse and dropped it into the ceramic container. ‘Sulphuric acid and formaldehyde,’ said Simpson. ‘Turns bright magenta and then blue in the presence of morphine or heroin.’ Jane peeked into the bowl. No purple, no blue. ‘Your man was not an addict,’ Simpson stated flatly.
‘What about the head wound?’ asked Jane.
‘Large calibre, two shots, probably from an automatic pistol.’
‘A forty-five?’
‘Possible. Probable. I’ll know more after I’m done.’
‘Anything in the clothes?’
‘Packet of Players Medium, Vestas, twenty pounds and some silver. Punched ticket, Cambridge to London. Also a three-day pass.’
‘No wallet?’
‘No.’
‘I’d like to see the pass,’ said Dundee. Simpson reached down onto a shelf below the table and came up with a cardboard square protected by a small cellophane bag. He handed it across to Dundee.
‘It looks genuine, but they’re easy enough to forge.’ He handed it back. ‘Is that it?’
‘As far as personal effects are concerned, yes.’
‘Anything else out of the ordinary?’ Dundee inquired.
‘You tell me,’ Simpson said with a small smile. ‘Considering his dog tags said he was a Jew.’
Dundee and Jane scanned the corpse. Dundee saw it first. ‘Shit,’ he said quietly.
Simpson saw the direction of the American major’s glance and nodded. ‘Quite so,’ he said.
‘Oh, dear,’ said Jane. Colour rose in her cheeks and she looked sidelong at Miss Lefebure, then back at the corpse. ‘He isn’t circumcised.’
‘Indeed,’ said Simpson. ‘In this day and age being circumcised is no real proof of being a Jew but being uncircumcised is proof positive that you are not.’
‘The dog tags are phoney then,’ said Jane. ‘Probably stolen.’
Simpson nodded again. Miss Lefebure’s clacking went on without a pause. The pathologist reached out to roll the corpse half on its side and used his free hand to point to a tattoo on the upper biceps of the man’s left arm. Within a crudely drawn heart there were two pairs of initials and a single word encased in a scroll:
W.B.
L
B.K.
FOREVER
‘One presumes this means the victim’s name is not David J. Kelman,’ said Simpson.
Jane looked down at the ruined face on the table. ‘Then who the hell was he?’
‘His dental work is not American; that’s really all I can tell you.’
‘Locating the real Kelman might give us a place to start,’ suggested Dundee. ‘I’ll need a telephone.’
‘Just outside,’ said Miss Lefebure, smiling sweetly. Dundee left the room.
Jane stepped away from the table and went over to Molly Lefebure. She lifted her camera. ‘Where can I get these developed?’ she asked.
‘I could do it for you here,’ Molly said, ‘but I’m days behind. Do you normally do your own developing?’
‘I prefer it.’
‘Take them to the Press Club then.’ The woman smiled. ‘They have the facilities. It’s on Salisbury Square. Just off Fleet Street at Ludgate Circus. Any cabbie can take you there.’
‘Thanks,’ said Jane. She offered the young woman a cigarette. ‘You worked here long?’
‘A bit more than a year now.’ The young woman beamed. Jane lit Molly’s cigarette and she puffed contentedly, completely inured to the ambience of the mortuary. Behind her Jane could hear the sound of a bone saw.
‘Like it?’
‘Love it.’
‘Takes all kinds I guess,’ said Jane. She turned back to Simpson. ‘Major Dundee mentioned something about gold dust.’
‘That’s right. Under the nails of both hands.’
‘Where would you normally expect to find that?’
‘Dental technicians, pawnbrokers breaking up old jewellery for smelting. A manufacturing jeweller himself, perhaps.’
‘Any military trades that handle gold?’
‘None that I know of. The military uses nickel and even civilian dentists don’t use what appears to be twenty-four karat.’
‘Best guess?’
Simpson bent over the body again and began tapping away at the remains of the man’s face with the mallet.
Molly shrugged. She puffed on her cigarette thoughtfully, her other hand fingering the string of black pearls around her long, swannish neck.
Simpson spoke. ‘He’s not in the military at all. The uniform is a disguise.’
Chapter Six
Bushy Park administrative HQ turned out to be a ghastly conglomeration of sprawling, one-storey concrete-block buildings set on the edge of the Hampton Court Palace grounds. One side faced the Kingston Line embankment of the London and South Western Railway and the other faced the red-brick- and-mortar town-house suburbs of South Teddington. The headquarters complex was still under construction, with the muddy ruts of heavy equipment, an erratic symphony of shouted, incoherent orders, the rumble and roar of bulldozers and the belching exhaust fumes from a fleet of large olive drab trucks in constant motion completing the picture.
A Military Policeman at the main gate gave them directions. Dundee drove the Dodge to a gravel parking lot in front of ‘A’ Building, a long, barracks-like structure with four shorter wings sprouting out of each side. Once inside, Dundee and Jane eventually tracked down the head of Records Division, a round-faced young captain named Singletary with an office the size of a shoebox, crammed with filing cabinets. He wore circular, steel-framed spectacles and he was clearly barely old enough to shave. The silver bars on his shoulders looked as though they’d just been taken out of the presentation box that morning and Jane was reasonably sure the West Point ring on the third finger of the man’s left hand was polished with a soft cloth every night.
‘I’ve never had to deal with this kind of request before,’ Singletary said cautiously, eyeing the JAG insignia on Dundee’s collar.
‘Always a first time,’ Dundee answered.
The young captain’s glance slid over to Jane. ‘I’m not sure I’m supposed to divulge personnel information with… civilians present.’
‘Think of her as my adjutant.’
‘Yes, sir, but still… a Warco and all.’
Dundee pointed to Singletary’s West Point ring. ‘Digit still teaching Military Hygiene?’
‘Digit’ was the nickname given to the academy surgeon, Colonel Walter DeWitt. The colonel was best known for the rigid, greased finger he used during the annual cadet physicals and his animated, graphically described lectures to the plebes in first year ‘Beast Barracks’ on the horrors of what he referred to as ‘autoerotic manual personal stimulation and self-abuse.’
Singletary’s eye flickered to Dundee’s left ring finger and found nothing. He looked across the desk, his round face flushing darkly. ‘You knew the colonel?’
‘Intimately.’ Dundee smiled. ‘Three long years of him.’
‘But you don’t wear…’
‘The
ring? Never felt the need to advertise.’
‘What class?’
‘Twenty-nine,’ Dundee answered.
The round-faced captain went on the defensive. ‘Any letters?’
‘Major “A” in Baseball, Minor in Pistol and Long Distance.’
Singletary’s face fell slightly. ‘I had a Minor in Golf.’
‘Good for you,’ Dundee said with a nod.
‘And I was on the staff of the Pointer,’ Singletary added.
‘Howitzer,’ said Dundee, smiling pleasantly. ‘Editor-in-Chief.’
The Pointer was the Academy’s biweekly magazine and the Howitzer was the annual yearbook. Of the two, the Howitzer was far and away the more prestigious. Dundee watched as Singletary sagged slightly in his chair, beaten.
‘About Second Lieutenant Kelman,’ Dundee prompted.
Singletary slid a file folder off the pile on his left and flipped it open. ‘He’s attached to the Fifteenth Bomb Squadron at Polebrook,’ said the captain. ‘A bombardier.’
‘Where’s Polebrook?’
Singletary flushed brightly. ‘I’ll have to look it up.’
‘Why don’t you do that.’
Singletary went away and came back a minute later. ‘Northampton,’ said the round-faced man. ‘Not far from Kimbolton.’
‘Call Polebrook and ask Kelman’s C.O. to have him ready for an interview in someplace reasonably private.’
‘He’ll want to know what this is all about,’ said the captain, making a last stab at regaining control of the situation.
‘I’ll tell him when I see him.’ Dundee smiled and put his hand out across the desk. ‘You’ve been a great help, Captain. Thanks.’
Grudgingly, Singletary shook the outstretched hand and mumbled a reply. Jane and Dundee headed back to the parking lot outside the building and climbed back into the Dodge.
‘You had him thoroughly rattled,’ said Jane as they pulled away from the low cinder block building and headed for the main road.
‘The West Point experience isn’t something you forget overnight,’ Dundee answered, smiling. ‘As far as our moon-faced captain back there is concerned, he’s still in first-year Beast Barracks and I’m still an upperclassman who can make him drop and give me fifty push-ups any time I have a mind to.’
‘Were you really the editor-in-chief of that publication you mentioned?’
‘The Howitzer? No.’
‘I didn’t think so,’ said Jane, smiling.
‘I didn’t letter in any sports, either,’ Dundee continued. ‘In fact, the only thing I was ever famous for was being the cadet with the most demerits overall in the history of the academy.’ He laughed. ‘I’ve always been quite proud of that.’
‘How do we get to Polebrook?’ said Jane.
‘There’s a road atlas in the glove compartment. You can be the navigator, Watson.’
‘Right you are, Holmes.’ Jane reached for the book.
Polebrook was forty miles or so from London but there was no main route and it took them the better part of two hours to get there.
From the air, Polebrook would have looked like a giant, scruffy, off-centred X carved out of the surrounding fields of yellow rapeseed, the X circumscribed in turn by an equally scruffy perimeter track. Cradled between the shorter upper arms of the X there was a patchwork of hangars, maintenance sheds, barrack huts and a large fuel dump. Originally built in 1940 for RAF Bomber Command, the runways had been extended to accommodate B-17s several months before and in June it had been officially handed over to the Ninety-seventh Bomber Group, making it the first operational American airbase in England with two full squadrons of Flying Fortresses calling it home.
Dundee showed his pass at the main gate and they drove along the hardstand towards the administration offices. They passed half a dozen B-17s lined up beside the runway, all of them with names and luridly coloured, cartoon-like devices painted on the noses. One in particular caught Jane’s eye – Double Trouble, the illustration being twin naked women dive-bombing out of a cloud with propellers whirling on the tips of their large pink breasts.
‘They all have names and pictures like that?’ she asked.
‘A lot of them,’ Dundee said. ‘Kind of like good luck charms, I think.’
They drove to a small wooden building tucked in just behind the concrete-block control tower. The driver informed Dundee and Jane that Second Lieutenant Kelman was waiting for them inside.
The building was so new it still smelled of sawdust and fresh paint. Inside it was bare bones, with a low stage, a blackboard and fifteen or twenty wooden folding chairs. It must have been a preflight briefing room. Kelman, very much alive, was dressed in his flight suit and was sitting in one of the chairs in the front row, a dark brown A2 leather flying jacket draped over the back of it. Dundee could see a large patch on the back of the A2 Jacket: Black Dog, with a snarling hellhound breathing fire. The bombardier was in his early twenties with sandy brown hair and the beginnings of a moustache. He stood as Dundee and Jane entered the briefing room and snapped off a smart salute to Dundee in acknowledgement of his senior rank.
‘Sit down, Lieutenant.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Kelman dropped back into the wooden chair. Dundee sat down on the edge of the stage, facing Kelman, and Jane remained standing.
‘Permission to smoke, sir?’
‘Of course,’ said Dundee. Kelman brought out a package of Luckies and lit up. Dundee brought out his pipe.
Kelman took a drag on the cigarette and pushed smoke out through his nose. Unlike the corpse in Southwark Mortuary, Kelman had no yellowed nostrils or nicotine-stained fingers. ‘Can I ask what this is all about?’
‘Sure,’ said Dundee. He brought out the dog tags and leaned forward, handing them to Kelman. The young man held one up, reading the information.
‘Son of a bitch,’ he whispered. He looked up at Dundee, then over to Jane. ‘Sorry.’
‘They are yours then?’
‘Yes.’ Kelman frowned. ‘Where did you get them?’
‘From around the neck of a corpse,’ said Dundee bluntly. ‘Someone shot him twice in the face then pushed him off a train.’ He paused. ‘I don’t suppose you’d know anything about that, would you, Lieutenant?’
Kelman had gone pale. He stared down at the dog tags, then back at Dundee. He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘When did you lose the tags?’
‘April.’
‘You were over here that early?’ Dundee asked.
Kelman nodded. ‘We were training at Swanton Morley with an RAF squadron,’ he explained.
‘How did you lose the tags?’
There was a long silence. ‘I’d rather not say,’ Kelman mumbled.
‘Why?’
‘It involves a woman.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Jane quietly, with feigned consternation.
Dundee looked down at Kelman’s hands. He was wearing a wedding ring. ‘Married?’
‘Yes.’ The young man nodded. ‘Just before we left the States.’
‘The woman in question is not your wife then?’
‘No.’
‘An English girl?’ Jane asked.
‘I don’t think you could call her a girl, really.’
‘Prostitute?’
‘I wouldn’t call her that either.’ Kelman paused, frowning. ‘I don’t think you would anyway.’
‘Why don’t you tell me what happened,’ said Dundee. ‘There’s no reason your new wife is going to have to know.’
‘Do I have to?’
‘You can do it now, in private, or you can do it before a board of inquiry. Up to you.’
There was a pause. Kelman kept on puffing away at his cigarette. The roof of the small wooden building shuddered as a flight of bombers came in low over the airfield. ‘All right,’ said Kelman finally.
‘Where?’
‘A club.’
‘Where is the club?’
‘London. I’m not sure where exactly. It was called
the 43.’
‘Gerrard Street,’ said Dundee, turning to Jane who now had a small notebook out, jotting things down with a small stub of pencil. ‘Soho, just off Piccadilly Circus. Run by a very nasty little creature named Kate Meyrick. Club is stretching it a bit; a whorehouse with liquor is more like it. Bar downstairs, rooms up.’ He paused. ‘What was the frail’s name?’
‘Annie.’
‘Last name.’
‘I don’t know.’ Kelman flushed again. ‘She was Irish.’
‘Aren’t they all,’ said Dundee. Jane gave him a quizzical look and Dundee explained. ‘It’s always been that way; poor girls from Cork and Limerick and Dublin who can’t find any work at home. It’s worse now with all the soldiers. Not enough pros to go round.’ He turned back to Kelman. ‘So you went up to one of the rooms with Annie?’ Dundee asked.
Kelman nodded. ‘Yes.’
‘Had relations with her?’
‘I’m not sure,’ said the young man. ‘I’d like to think that I didn’t but I can’t remember. I think I passed out.’
‘Slip something into your drink?’
‘She might have. I was pretty drunk before I got there.’
‘Dog tags were gone when you woke up?’
Kelman nodded again. ‘Everything was gone. Annie, the dog tags. Wallet.’
‘Did you report the theft to the police?’ asked Jane.
‘No,’ said Kelman. ‘The woman who owns the club asked me not to. Said she’d be in a lot of trouble if it came out.’ He flushed. ‘Said I could have one for free the next time I was on leave if I kept my mouth shut. She gave me a card.’
‘Have you used it?’ Dundee said.
‘No.’
‘Does your C.O. know anything about this?’ Dundee asked.
An American Spy Page 6