by Graham Ison
Hardcastle had waited nearly half an hour in the fog for a tram to arrive at the stop on Victoria Embankment, and when it did arrive it was crowded. Once he had taken the fares, the conductor alighted and returned to the front of the tram. For the rest of the journey, he walked slowly ahead of it with an acetylene gas lamp. Trams had been known to run down lost pedestrians in such weather, despite the constant ringing of the vehicle’s bell.
As a result of the delay, it was nearly nine o’clock before Hardcastle let himself into his house, remembering to shake his umbrella and leave it on the doorstep before he entered. It was the house in Kennington Road, Lambeth, in which he and his wife Alice had lived since their marriage some 25 years ago, and was a few doors down from where the famous Charlie Chaplin had once resided.
‘Is that you, Ernie?’ called Alice from the kitchen.
‘Yes, it’s me, love.’ Hardcastle hung up his hat and coat and, as was his invariable practice, checked the hall clock against his hunter before entering the kitchen. ‘Sorry, I’m late, love,’ he said, and kissed his wife. ‘What’s for dinner? It smells wonderful.’
Alice turned from the range and flicked a lock of hair from her forehead. ‘I spent fifteen of our meat coupons on a sirloin of beef, Ernie,’ she said, ‘which only leaves us three points for the rest of the week. But we’ve got to have a decent bit of beef once in a while.’
Hardcastle nodded. ‘At least we’re better off than the Germans,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard that they’re eating cats and dogs over there, and they’re making their bread from potato peelings and sawdust.’
Alice stopped what she was doing. ‘Is that true, Ernie?’ she asked. ‘Oh, those poor people.’
‘Poor people be damned,’ said Hardcastle vehemently. ‘They shouldn’t have started it by marching into Belgium.’
‘Yes, I know all about that,’ said Alice, who was an avid reader of the Daily Mail, ‘but just think of the poor children. They didn’t have anything to with the war.’
Hardcastle knew better than to argue with his wife, and changed the subject. ‘Talking of which, where are our children this evening?’ He always referred to their offspring as children, even though Kitty was twenty-two, Maud twenty and young Walter had just turned eighteen.
‘Kitty’s got the back shift on the buses, Maud’s gone out with her young man, and Wally’s gone to the Bioscope in Vauxhall Bridge Road with a pal of his to see some film about cowboys and Indians.’
‘It’s time Kitty gave up that job on the buses. It’s too dangerous.’ It was something that Hardcastle frequently said.
‘Well, you try to talk her out of it, Ernie, but I doubt you’ll have any better luck than me.’
Hardcastle knew that to be true. Kitty Hardcastle was a headstrong young woman and had taken a job as a conductorette with the London General Omnibus Company to relieve a man to fight. But despite his own attempts to dissuade her, nothing would convince her to change her mind.
‘And what’s this about Maud having a young man?’ demanded Hardcastle. ‘I didn’t know anything about that.’
‘Well, you’re never here to find out, Ernie, are you?’ said Alice accusingly. ‘She met a young army lieutenant who she was nursing, and they’ve got quite keen on each other.’ Maud had been nursing at one of the large houses in Mayfair that had been given over to the care of wounded officers. ‘When he’d recovered, he was posted to Armoury Barracks in Hoxton training young soldiers, and he invited her out to the theatre tonight. They’ve been walking out for quite some time now.’
‘An officer, eh?’ Hardcastle was impressed. ‘It’s a shame Kitty can’t find someone like that. The last I heard she was going out with a City copper, of all people.’ He was unreasonably critical of the City of London Police, and regarded it as little less than impertinence that they should have responsibility for a solitary square mile in the centre of the Metropolitan Police District.
It was not until Tuesday morning that Hardcastle received a message from Dr Spilsbury requesting his attendance at St Mary’s Hospital.
‘I’ve just completed my examination of this fellow’s cadaver, Hardcastle,’ said Spilsbury. ‘It was a single gunshot to the back of the head that did for him.’
‘I take it you’ve recovered the round, Doctor Spilsbury.’
‘There it is.’ The pathologist pointed his forceps at a bullet resting in an enamel kidney-shaped bowl on a side bench. ‘I’d estimate the age of this man to have been in the late thirties.’
‘You’re absolutely right, Doctor. He was born on the twenty-third of July 1879, and I was told that he was unlikely to be fit for the army,’ said Hardcastle, repeating the information he had received from Frank Harvey, Ronald Parker’s manager at the gas company.
‘I can certainly confirm that for you, Inspector. He most certainly was not fit. He suffered from pulmonary emphysema and that would have precluded him from service in the army or navy.’
‘He wouldn’t have passed a tribunal to assess his physical fitness for active service, then, Doctor?’
‘Not if I’d had anything to do with it, Hardcastle,’ said Spilsbury.
The cab delivered the two detectives to the main door of New Scotland Yard. Followed by a hastening Marriott, Hardcastle, his agility belying his bulk, bounded up the steps that led to the front entrance of the central building. A uniformed constable pulled open the heavy door for him and saluted.
Once inside, Hardcastle immediately turned left and hurriedly descended the staircase. At the end of a long corridor he and Marriott entered the tiny workshop of Detective Inspector Percy Franklin, the Yard’s acknowledged ballistics expert. So enthusiastic was Franklin that the authorities at Scotland Yard had eventually yielded to his demand for somewhere to carry out his tests and experiments. On the wall of his tiny workshop there were cutaway diagrams of rifles, pistols and revolvers, and the bench at which the shirt-sleeved Franklin was working was littered with parts of firearms. To the unskilled eye, it seemed that there was no order to them, but Franklin knew every piece and where it belonged and how it fitted.
In furtherance of his passion, Franklin had struck up a friendship with Robert Churchill, the gunsmith, whose premises were in the Strand. The two of them were frequently to be seen sitting by the fire in the nearby Cheshire Cheese public house, enthusiastically exchanging information about firearms. From time to time, Franklin would call in at Churchill’s small establishment to watch the gunmaker firing bullets into the heads of sheep, a ready supply of which came from the butcher next door. From these experiments, Franklin had learned, among other things, about how powder burns could determine the distance at which a firearm had been discharged. On one particular occasion, back in 1913, it had helped Franklin to prove that what at first was believed to be a suicide was actually a murder.
‘Good morning, Ernie. Don’t tell me, your visit has something to do with a body found floating in the Thames yesterday.’ Franklin swung round on his stool, and put down the magnifying glass he had been using to examine a pistol. ‘I’ve been expecting you.’
‘You’re very well informed, Percy.’ Hardcastle placed a round on the bench. ‘Dr Spilsbury recovered this bullet from the skull of Ronald Parker, our victim. What can you tell me about it?’
Franklin placed the bullet on a piece of green baize cloth, and with the aid of a jeweller’s eyeglass, examined it closely, occasionally turning it this way and that with a pair of forceps. ‘A seven-groove, point four-five-five ball round, Ernie,’ he said, at last looking up. ‘It’s almost certainly from a military weapon, probably a Webley and Scott, and anything between a Mark One and a Mark Six.’
Hardcastle was impressed by Franklin’s apparent expertise, but at once slightly sceptical that the firearms specialist could deduce so much just by looking at a bullet. ‘Can you tell me which particular revolver it came from, Percy?’
Franklin emitted a short, contemptuous laugh. ‘Not unless you can show me the weapon, Ernie.’
‘I will, Percy, you may rest assured.
‘Well, I hope you do, Ernie,’ said Franklin, ‘because I can’t tell you anything more until you do. I’m not a bloody magician, you know.’
‘Really?’ said Hardcastle. ‘And there’s me thinking that you were.’
‘Come into the office, Marriott,’ said Hardcastle when the two detectives were back at Cannon Row police station. He settled himself behind his desk and filled his pipe. Once he had lit it to his satisfaction, he leaned back in his chair, a reflective expression on his face. ‘We’ll have to give some serious consideration to this here murder of ours, m’boy.’
‘D’you think Parker’s wife had anything to do with it, guv’nor?’ said Marriott, lapsing into the informality of address that his chief had used.
‘Not unless she owns an army revolver, m’boy.’
‘Daisy Benson’s husband might have one, guv’nor. She told us he was a staff sergeant in the Army Ordnance Corps.’
‘But would he have had a revolver? The Ordnance Corps isn’t an active service regiment, is it?’ Unusually for Hardcastle, he was admitting that Marriott’s knowledge of military matters was superior to his own.
‘Not in the same way as the artillery, the infantry, the cavalry or the Tank Corps, but the Ordnance Corps is responsible for supplying weaponry to the army. If Staff Sergeant Benson works in an ordnance depot, he’d be able to lay hands on a revolver without any difficulty, and cover up the loss by showing that it had been condemned as unserviceable.’
‘That’s all very interesting, Marriott,’ said Hardcastle, reverting to the formal mode of address, ‘but there’s only one flaw in your theory: Daisy Benson said that her husband is in France. So how does he shoot Parker, wrap him up in a sugar sack and drop him in the river, even if he’d known that Parker was enjoying Mrs Benson’s favours?’
‘He might’ve come home on leave and caught them at it, sir. And if he had, I don’t suppose it’s the sort of thing Daisy would’ve told us about.’
‘He needn’t necessarily have caught them in the act,’ said Hardcastle, unwilling to let Marriott tailor the enquiry to fit in with his own theory. ‘He might’ve been tipped off, despite what Daisy Benson said about her neighbours not suspecting anything. I can’t even scratch myself without my neighbours appearing to know about it. Anyway, he wouldn’t be the first soldier to get that sort of letter while he was at the Front.’ He put his pipe in the ashtray. ‘But that’s all pie in the sky. We need solid evidence.’
‘We’ve only Daisy’s word for it that her old man’s in France, sir,’ said Marriott, unwilling to give up on his notion. ‘For all we know, he could still be in Aldershot. If he was ever there in the first place. What’s more, he could’ve been on leave at the time Parker was topped.’
‘Well, that’s easily resolved, Marriott. Have a word with Colonel Frobisher’s people.’ Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Frobisher of the Sherwood Foresters was the assistant provost marshal of London District, and as such was Hardcastle’s point of contact for all matters military. ‘But you needn’t bother the colonel. Drop in on his clerk, Marriott, and see what he can tell us. What’s his name?’
‘Sergeant Glover, sir,’ said Marriott.
‘Ah yes, that’s the fellow.’
Charles Marriott crossed Whitehall and strolled the short distance to Horse Guards Arch where the APM had his office. Buses ground their noisy way up and down the broad thoroughfare, and the pavements were thronged with pedestrians, many of whom these days, wore either army or navy uniform.
The outgoing King’s Life Guard had just been relieved of its twenty-four-hour stint of duty and Marriott, never tiring of a sight he had seen on many occasions, paused to watch the khaki-clad troopers ride through the archway on their return to Hyde Park Barracks.
Sergeant Cyril Glover of the Military Foot Police looked up in surprise as Marriott entered the office.
‘Blimey, your guv’nor not with you this morning, Charlie?’ Glover was accustomed to seeing Marriott in the company of his DDI.
‘Not today, Cyril. He does occasionally let me out on my own.’
‘The colonel’s not here at the moment, Charlie, if it was him you wanted to see,’ said Glover. ‘He’s gone to Duke of York’s HQ to give evidence at some court martial they’ve got going on there. Apparently some idiot of a second-lieutenant got involved in a fist fight over a woman outside the Army and Navy Club, of all places,’ he added, shrugging as though such events were an everyday occurrence.
‘It doesn’t matter, Cyril. It’s you I wanted a word with. We’ve got a murder running and one of the names to come up is that of a Daisy Benson who lives in Kingston. She’s a bit of a flighty madam, probably on the game, and she told us that her husband’s a staff sergeant in the Army Ordnance Corps somewhere in France. But we’ve got our doubts that he’s actually there.’
‘D’you think he’s up for this topping, then, Charlie?’
‘It’s a possibility,’ said Marriott cautiously.
‘And I suppose you want me to find out where he is, Charlie.’
‘That’s the general idea, Cyril, and possibly if he’s had any Blighty leave recently. What are the chances?’
Glover shook his head at the sheer enormity of the task that Marriott had set him. ‘Charlie, there are millions of men under arms across the water. It could take a few days at best, but I’ll see what I can do.’
‘Well?’ Hardcastle looked up as Marriott entered his office.
‘I spoke to Sergeant Glover, sir, but he said it could take a few days to find out about Staff Sergeant Benson.’
‘A few days? You wouldn’t think there was a war on, would you?’ Hardcastle put down his pipe. ‘If someone wanted to know where one of our policemen was stationed, I could find out in minutes, Marriott, not a few days.’
‘Yes, sir.’ Marriott was ill-disposed to encourage one of the DDI’s acerbic diatribes about the army’s efficiency or lack of it. But he felt that he had to defend the military, particularly as his brother-in-law was a sergeant-major in the Middlesex Regiment serving in France. ‘There are nineteen thousand men in the Metropolitan Police, sir, all in London apart from those at Windsor Castle and the Dockyard Divisions. The army’s got millions all over the place.’
‘They’re not trying, Marriott,’ said Hardcastle, loath to admit that his sergeant had a point. ‘I suppose we’ll just have to wait and see.’
‘Excuse me, sir.’ The station duty constable appeared in Hardcastle’s doorway.
‘What is it, lad?’
‘There’s a Mr Harold Parker downstairs, sir. He wants to report a missing person.’
‘Did he say who was missing?’ asked Hardcastle, although he had guessed that it concerned his murder victim.
‘He said it was his brother, a Ronald Parker, sir.’ The PC paused. ‘I thought you’d wish to know, because he was the bloke you pulled out of the river yesterday morning, wasn’t he, sir?’
‘I don’t go about pulling people out of the river, as you put it, lad,’ snapped Hardcastle. ‘Not unless they’re still alive. You know I don’t stand for that sort of sloppy statement. You wouldn’t give evidence in court like that, I hope. The body was found and recovered by Thames Division officers.’
‘Yes, sir. Sorry, sir.’
‘Where is this here Harold Parker?’
‘In the interview room, sir.’
‘Come, Marriott. We’ll see what this fellow has to say for himself.’
Dismissing the constable, Hardcastle and Marriott descended to the small interview room on the front of the police station.
‘Mr Harold Parker?’
‘That is I, sir.’ Parker stood up and tucked a clay pipe into a pocket. He was a big, ruddy-faced man, dressed in a heavy Guernsey sweater, moleskin trousers, a reefer jacket, and a red kerchief. He had stout boots on his feet, and held a soft peaked-cap in his hand.
‘I’m Divisional Detective Inspector Hardcastle, Mr Parker. One of my constables tol
d me that you wish to report a Ronald Parker missing.’ He waved a hand to indicate that Harold Parker should sit down.
‘I hope I’m not wasting your time, sir, but the missus and me called on his wife Mavis down at Kingston last Sunday afternoon,’ Parker began, ‘expecting to see Ron as well. But he wasn’t there and Mavis said she hadn’t seen him since Thursday. She did seem a bit worried though, but I somehow got the impression that it wasn’t that that was vexing her. Then she said that Ron had talked about going to Holland.’ He shook his head as though unable to comprehend the reason for such a venture. ‘Why on earth he should want to go to Holland is a mystery. Apart from which, I’ve no idea how he’d get there? There aren’t any passenger services to the Hook. Anyway, I thought that I ought to have a word with you. I moored nearby half an hour ago and as you’re the nearest police station, I came in here.’
‘It so happened that you came to the right police station, Mr Parker, but I’m afraid we have bad news for you, sir,’ said Marriott. ‘Your brother’s body was recovered from the Thames yesterday morning.’
‘Oh no! Was he drowned?’
‘We have yet to establish the exact cause of death,’ lied Hardcastle. He did not intend to tell Harold Parker that his brother had been murdered, at least not yet.
‘Are you sure it was Ronald?’
‘As sure as we can be, Mr Parker,’ said Marriott. ‘We recovered correspondence and a pay packet that leave us in little doubt.’
‘My God! What a tragedy.’ Parker shook his head in disbelief. ‘He was the mildest man you could hope to meet. Poor Mavis. Ronald was a God-fearing good husband, you know.’
Hardcastle knew that to be untrue. ‘We’re endeavouring to find out how he died, Mr Parker,’ he said, even though he was well aware that his brother had been murdered. ‘Would you tell me again when you visited Mavis Parker? Just to make sure.’
Parker took a small diary from his trouser pocket and thumbed through the pages. ‘Last Sunday, the third of March, Inspector. It’s not often that I get a Sunday off these days.’