‘Very well, sir.’ she said to the inspector. ‘He invited me to the PRC, I’ll go and see him.’
‘Thank you, Eve, much appreciated. I’ll get some men to watch the building, and inside if possible. Don’t worry; you won’t be alone. Just yell and you’ll be rescued.’
Eve wished she had his confidence that she was in no danger. Maybe Mum was right. As she remembered from Zoya’s post mortem, Major Parkes was very skilled as a swift dealer of death. She just hoped she could keep out of reach of his grasp long enough to get an admission from him.
She first went home and changed into a more fetching outfit likely to soften up the major. Then she walked across the Green and strode straight into the PRC as usual. The building was silent, as if the residents were absent or sleeping. Most likely sleeping, as few people had much rest during the last two nights’ bombing.
The door to the major’s office stood open and he was writing at his desk. He looked up, surprised, as she entered.
‘Hallo, Eve. How nice to see you again so soon. You changed your mind then?’
‘Yes, I did what I had to do quicker than expected. I’m sorry about earlier, I was a bit preoccupied. I hope you didn’t think me rude.’ Eve switched on her best smile and the most charm of which she was capable. She looked around the room for a chair and pulled one towards the desk and sat. The usual things littered his desk, including the almost empty bowl of sweets. Sharps toffees. Of course. There had been a waxed paper near Zoya’s body, and one in her bedside drawer.
Simon saw Eve looking at the toffees.
‘Help yourself. They’re a passion of mine, can’t stop eating the things. I know they’re bad for my teeth.’
That’s the least of your worries, thought Eve. If I have my way you won’t have to worry about your bloody teeth any more. Now she knew what she was up against she remembered something else about Simon Parkes that had been worrying her for days. On the Monday when she had first met him, as she was leaving after lunch, he had said something about Zoya being strangled. He couldn’t possibly have known then that was how she died because they didn’t have the PM results. He could only have known if he had killed her himself. And he must have been the one who passed around the word about Zoya’s pregnancy.
Eve thought it was a good moment to try a risky question.
‘How did you know Zoya was pregnant, Simon?’
He looked up at her, puzzled, ‘You must have told me.’
‘No, I didn’t know until after the PM and you told Borys and Miss Archer before I mentioned it.’
‘I don’t know. I must have heard it from somewhere. One of the girls I expect,’ Simon blustered. ‘Anyway, what does it matter? It had nothing to do with me.’
‘No, I know. It was Borys’s baby. But I bet you were jealous about it when you were going out with Zoya.’
‘What do you mean? I wasn’t taking Zoya out.’
‘Don’t be daft, Simon. It’s obvious. No-one else around here could have afforded all that lovely underwear and the evening gown, or trips to the Blue Angel. It had to be you.’
Simon Parkes stood up, the expression on his face transformed from benevolent friendliness to a vicious snarl. He picked up his stick and started to walk round to Eve’s side of the desk. Eve didn’t budge from her chair. Somehow she had to see this through.
‘So what if I took her out a few times and gave her a few things. That doesn’t mean I killed her. Why would I do such a thing? Do you think I was jealous of Borys?’ He spoke with deep contempt.
‘No, Simon, I don’t think it was just jealousy. I think it was something much more important than that. I think Zoya found out about your treasonous activities with the Right Club and threatened to expose you. You had to kill her before she let the world know what you were doing.’
Simon lunged at Eve with his cane, catching a glancing blow on her arm. She finally stood and circled round his desk to the side near the windows. One of the desk drawers was ajar and she slid her fingers in and opened it further. So simple and so foolish of him. At the top the drawer’s lay the proof she needed, Zoya’s identity card and a bunch of keys. Simon’s evident fury erupted into violence and he again lunged across the desk towards her. She ducked, not wanting to be within range of his stick or, worse his strong and skilful soldier’s hands.
‘You stupid bitch! What do you think you’re doing, playing amateur detective. How are you going to prove any of this? There were no witnesses; such a wet evening. Zoya went down without a sound; no-one heard a thing. No silly girl was going to prevent us from stopping the Americans coming into the war. You’ll see. Within a week it will all be over and the Germans will be welcomed at Whitehall. There’ll be a Victory Parade in Trafalgar Square and right will prevail. All but for a silly prudish Polish girl and you, Miss Duncan and your ferreting around. The baby had nothing to do with it. It wasn’t mine. She wouldn’t let me near her. After all the money I spent on her too.’ As he spoke his voice rose, louder and louder and his eyes grew wild and spittle sprayed from his mouth in a mad parody of his leader.
Eve knew that the policemen waiting in the hall had heard every word. The arrogant major had forgotten how easy it was to creep into the building. He stabbed towards her again and she nimbly sidestepped the blow, grateful for his wound as she was sure that, fully fit, Parkes could have dealt a fatal blow.
‘Aargh!’ he cried out in frustration and fury.
The door was flung open and Inspector Reed himself strode in, followed by a sergeant and two constables.
‘That’s enough, Major Parkes.’ he called. ‘You are under arrest for offences under the Defence of the Realm Act and for the murder of Zoya Pienkowski. Take him away, Constable.’
Struggling between the two officers, Parkes was led from the house, violently shouting obscenities over his shoulder. Watching them go, Eve thought about what she would tell Charlie. This would show him that she was a proper detective after all.
Inspector Reed turned to Eve.
‘Well, done Miss Duncan, you got him to admit it in the end. You do realise, I suppose, that if he and the Right Club had succeeded in their aims, they could have changed the entire course of the War?’
‘I do now, Inspector. I knew it would turn out to be important and not just a murder of no account.’
A Murder Close to Home
Chapter One
London, 1941
No-one had any idea that the milkman was missing until it was time to get up and face the day. Nobody noticed that he wasn’t on his regular dawn round. Most of his customers were tucked up in their beds, oblivious to everything but exhaustion following night after night of air raids and very little sleep for weeks on end. The attack of the night before had centred on the East End and the City of London. If the residents turned east from Shepherd’s Bush they could see the vicious mayhem in the distance, hear the thrump of high explosives and see flames billowing over venerable buildings. They heard no sirens locally, just relative silence. For once residents could sleep in their own beds rather than camping out in the Underground stations or the concrete public shelters, amidst the sights and sounds, and smells, of hundreds of other families.
On that Monday morning the first sign that something was wrong was at about six o’clock when Mrs Grant, who lived in a ground floor flat in Pennard Road, near the market, looked out of her front bay window, after removing the blackout curtains, and noticed a horse busily devouring the display of daffodils and wan tulips from the trough attached to the basement railings. Her fury drove her to put on dressing gown and slippers and brave the chill early morning to shoo the animal away.
‘Give over,’ she yelled as she hurried down the front steps, waving a walking stick she had grabbed from the hallstand. ‘Leave me flowers alone!’
Mrs Grant had invested precious time, money and energy trying to bring some springtime colour and even beauty to the street. Her efforts had not been spectacularly successful as the cold March air, the soupy atmospher
e, full of sulphur, cordite and pulverised brick, the result of continual nights of bombing, did little to encourage even limited horticulture. The daffs’ bright yellow was mottled with a coating of brick dust and the tulips had wilted in pathetic defeat. Some collapsed completely, like weary convicts on hard labour, over the sides of the trough.
Approaching the horse, which had so far utterly ignored her protests and seemed determined to finish his breakfast, Mrs Grant realised that he was still harnessed to the milkman’s cart. The metal crates for the bottles were almost empty fortunately, because the horse had dragged the dray up onto the pavement causing it to lean at a precarious angle. The danger of spillage was obvious but not grave. Mrs Grant was surprised that the horse was tethered to the front of the dray, as regulations stipulated that horses left for any length of time had to be tethered facing their carts so that they couldn’t bolt in the event of a raid. Nowadays life was full of such regulations and, in spite of paper shortages, almost every postal delivery brought a new set of draconian and often petty instructions issued by the Ministry of Information or some other body formed to further the smooth administration of the war.
Grabbing the horse’s bridle, Mrs Grant tried to yank the animal away from her flowers, but the weight of the dray behind him prevented her from budging him more than a few inches, and in any case she quailed at the determined look in his eye and the size of the teeth with which he was munching her daffs. Stubborn as a donkey, he stood his ground.
‘Come on, move over, you daft bugger,’ she said.
Other residents had emerged onto the pavement by then and a couple of men, who knew more about horses than Mrs Grant, backed the dray into the road.
‘Where the hell’s Malcolm?’ someone that knew the young milkman asked. ‘He should be looking after his horse.’
‘Now someone had better take this lot back to the dairy.’
The men selected a volunteer to march the horse and dray back to the milk depot in Hammersmith, with instructions to complain about Malcolm’s dilatoriness in abandoning his responsibilities.
‘Probably in some lonely housewife’s bedroom, having a good time,’ one wag suggested with a bawdy wink, and most of the onlookers laughed. Several pairs of speculative eyes scanned the street, trying to deduce which house he might be in.
Mrs Grant recalled belatedly that she was standing in the chilly street with only her dressing gown over her nightdress and had even forgotten to take the curlers out of her hair. With a sharp cry of embarrassment she dashed indoors and was not seen again that day until her mortification had subsided. The mutilated flowers in the trough gave up their tenuous hold on life.
*
When Eve Duncan got up at seven thirty she was not aware that there was any problem with the milk or the person who delivered it. Pete, her boyfriend, had spent the night and left early for the police station. He would have waited until he got to work, just a short walk away across Shepherd’s Bush Green, to make a cup of tea. He knew by now that Eve didn’t appreciate being woken earlier than was absolutely necessary and he would have crept around, dressed in his uniform and slipped away quietly. Jake, Eve’s black and white terrier, was curled up, contented and gently snoring, at the end of the bed. Pete must have let him out, even if it was only for a few minutes. But Eve would have to give him a quick walk before she left for work at Mount Pleasant, in Farringdon Road, where she was a supervisor in the Censor’s Department.
Eve dreaded going to work. It wasn’t that she disliked her job - it was interesting and, since she was in charge of several other young women, rewarding and responsible. No, it was the journey to work itself that depressed her. Since the Luftwaffe started bombing London last September in the terrible remorseless onslaught known as the Blitz, the sights had become ever more upsetting. Every night, and sometimes during the day, the sirens sounded to alert everyone to the fact that a squadron of bombers was approaching to deliver its payload of high explosives and incendiary bombs on London. The epicentre of this aggression was the docks and the City of London. But many bombs landed in areas much further West, in the centre of London and in the suburbs. Nowhere was safe. It was a war of attrition designed to sap the will and morale of Londoners, but somehow it had had the opposite effect.
The Blitz assaulted all equally. Bombs did not discriminate between rich and poor, high and low. Mansions and cottages, venerable government offices, department stores and the meanest of small shops had all been attacked. A bomb had even hit Buckingham Palace. As a consequence the citizens of London were united in solidarity against the Germans and had developed a gritty determination to survive the bombings, against which they had little defence. Anti-aircraft guns strived to shoot down the bombers from atop the highest buildings, and barrage balloons hung in the air at strategic points to stop aircraft from flying low over the city. But none of this saved London from brutal devastation and hardly a street had escaped damage of some kind. But Londoners still carried on, going to work every day and carrying out their normal tasks. Their fighting spirit proved to be extraordinary.
The sight of the damage and the human cost filled Eve with sadness and on her journey to work she could not help witnessing some of the worst of the damage. She took the bus, sitting in her favourite seat on the top at the front, but it was often diverted to avoid newly fallen heaps of masonry littering the route. Shards of glass from windows broken by blasts surfaced the street, causing the tarmac to glitter like a jeweller’s velvet. Last week Oxford Street had been blocked completely. A shell had hit a double-decker bus and the bright red vehicle lay at a grotesque angle in the road, its rear wheels stuck in a giant crater and its front end inserted into the windows of a department store’s first floor. A crane was later brought in to remove it. Eve heard that all but two of the passengers, and the driver, had survived, but there had been many broken bones.
Eve grabbed Jake’s lead and took him for a brief dash around the nearest part of Shepherd’s Bush Green. The men were out winching up the barrage balloon over the lorry anchoring it in place. It was refilled each morning with the hydrogen gas that kept it afloat. Eve waved to the crew. After many mornings of seeing them at their work they were well known to her and they recognised her slight form and ginger curls as she walked her dog on the Green. Several of the men were quite elderly and she was not sure that they should be doing such hard work. But there were so few young men around now, with everyone called up, that anyone fit enough was recruited to do the labour necessary to keep the Hun at bay.
As soon as she returned home, Eve gave Jake food and water for the day. Charlie, Eve’s best friend, usually came in and took him for a walk later if his work allowed him the time. Charlie spent most of his working life in the market, trading from a variety of stalls, where he picked up information that might be useful to the police. The market was a magnet for the criminal element, fencing stolen or looted goods or selling black market contraband. Some people thought of Charlie as a wide boy, but Eve knew he had a good heart. She was in constant fear that he would be called up for active duty as, sooner or later she was sure, his paltry medical excuses would wear thin and someone in authority would insist that he joined his compatriots at the Front.
Before long Eve was on the bus. She preferred the front seats on the top deck from where she could see clearly what ruin the previous night’s bombing had wrought on her neighbourhood and on the route through the centre of the city. As last night’s raid had been more or less confined to the East End, there was nothing new to be seen today. She witnessed the clean-up crews working like swarms of ants, picking up rubble and salvaging what they could from the earlier wreckage and making the roads passable again. The air raid wardens directed operations, once the Fire Brigade had put out any fires caused by incendiary bombs. Some of them relished their power and indulged in extravagant displays of bossiness, but others showed more compassion towards those who had lost their businesses or, sometimes, everything they possessed, in the raids.
Even at the end of a full day at work Eve was still not aware that Malcolm, the United Dairies’ delivery man, was nowhere to be found.
Chapter Two
Eve was looking forward to the evening when she would be going dancing at the Hammersmith Palais with Pete, so long as an air raid didn’t stop them. There had been occasions when, with the sound of bombs exploding in the distance, the customers of the Palais carried on regardless; the management allowing the clientele to dance for as long as they wished in a wild, hedonistic whirl. The band played on, their instruments producing as much volume as they could muster and the master of ceremonies forced to bellow over the racket outside to make himself heard. This continued for as long as everyone felt safe enough to remain or until the sound of the Luftwaffe’s bombers overhead drowned out the sound of the band. Then they would leave, in as orderly a way as they could manage, from the multiple exits and into the concrete air raid shelter nearby or down into Hammersmith underground station. Even there the atmosphere continued to be full of fun and collective bonhomie. Occasionally a professional musician or singer from the band would entertain them, or someone with a tin whistle or a kazoo would make music and the braver and more agile dancers would continue to gyrate on the platform or in the limited space in the shelter until they were stopped by people who wanted to sleep.
That Tuesday, when Eve arrived home from work, after greeting the leaping, joyous Jake, she put the kettle on the gas to make tea. She had just shaken off her shoes when the bell at her basement door sounded. That morning it had been dark when she left her flat and she had known it would be dark again when she got home, so she had left the blackout on the windows and as a result she couldn’t see who was at her door, but she assumed it was Charlie.
Murders in the Blitz Page 9