Besides overhauling my spring wardrobe I did what every right-minded woman does in April—indulged in a new coiffure. This meant that much spare time had to be spent at the hairdresser’s, because I am a sucker at doing my own hair. So one Saturday afternoon I was under the dryer in a tasteful off-white and mushroom-pink cubicle, reading Vogue. The mortuaries were behind me for the weekend and I was all set for a chic, gay time in town. Or so I thought. But suddenly an assistant peeped under the dryer at me, “Miss Lefebure, you’re wanted on the phone.” Arrayed in white dust-cover and hairpins I hurried to the phone, to hear CKS asking, “Miss L., how far is your beautifying process under way?”
“I’m under the dryer.”
“How soon will you be dry?”
“In about twenty minutes.”
“Can you come out slightly damp and pick me up at Guy’s? There is a murder in Shoreditch mortuary.”
“I’ll be right along.”
The hairpins were removed and a limply becurled Lefebure scurried into the Underground. By the time I reached Guy’s I looked alarmingly like a French poodle. CKS kindly made no comment. We whizzed away to Shoreditch, and a few minutes after our arrival there I was sitting on a stone slab—originally intended for corpses—dashing off shorthand notes while CKS, Mr. Heddy, the coroner, Chief Superintendent Greeno (at that time an area superintendent) and DDI Kean bent over the body on the p.m. table.
The only person who was ever tactless enough to mention my astounding appearance that afternoon was the coroner’s officer, and he couldn’t resist whispering to me, “Now, Miss Molly, I know what you’d look like if you were a Fuzzy-Wuzz.”
I would have liked, that afternoon especially, to have looked soignée and efficient, because it was my first encounter with that famous detective, Mr. Greeno, and as Dr. Keith Simpson’s secretary I did not want to create a poor impression with the high-ups at Scotland Yard. Moreover, the high-ups at the Yard all made terrific impressions upon me; indeed on first meeting them I was generally scared quite literally stiff. Mr. Greeno was no exception. More than anything he resembled a huge, steel-plated battle cruiser, with his jaw thrust forward instead of a prow. He spoke little, noticed everything, and was tough, not in the Hollywood style, but genuinely, naturally, quietly, appallingly so.
I found myself misquoting Hilaire Belloc, on the subject of the Lion—but it did just as well for Mr. Greeno:
“His eyes they are bright
And his jaw it is grim,
And a wise little child
Will not play with him.”
Thus was the area superintendent, Mr. Edward Greeno, when he came stalking into Shoreditch mortuary with two lesser detectives crunching on his heels. The grim light of battle glimmered in his eyes, and he started asking questions in a rather rasping voice that sent shivers down my spine. He was on the warpath, and I thought: “God help the poor fool he’s after.”
By the time the postmortem had been in progress for some ten minutes any sympathy I felt for the killer concerned in the case had dwindled away, for it was one of those brutal, senseless, ugly coshings which reek of stupidity and cowardly violence.
The dead man was an aged pawnbroker who had kept a shop in the Hackney Road, a poor, little, skinny old man. Nine days previously he had been beaten up in his shop by two men, who had got away, leaving him unconscious on the floor. They had dealt him five savage wounds on the head; the only thing which had, amazingly enough, prevented him from being killed outright was the felt hat he had been wearing. Dr. Simpson examined this hat, which had been brought to the mortuary, with great interest, remarking how astonishing it was that a mere felt hat could, to some extent, protect the head.
But in spite of the felt hat the blows on his head had ultimately proved fatal to the old pawnbroker and nine days later he died, and a murder hunt began.
Besides beating up the old man the thieves had also coshed, and killed, his dog, presumably to stop it barking.
During the p.m. Mr. Greeno showed us a big, heavy spanner, with which it was suggested the old man might have been struck. Certainly the spanner did seem a likely weapon, but, as it turned out, it was not the one the killers had used.
We soon learned the true story of the case, for within a few days of the p.m. at Shoreditch Mr. Greeno arrested and charged two youths with the murder.
Their names were Dashwood and Silverosa. Both were ex-reformatory boys, both had criminal records stretching back to their early teens. Civilized, enlightened attempts had constantly been made to convert them into good citizens, but without success. They had been given lectures and lessons and handwork and physical training and fresh air, and interviews with psychologists and dozens and dozens of reports had been made about them; everything had been tried, except a good hiding. Nobody had thought of that. Or, if anybody had thought of it, the notion had always been dismissed as impossibly barbaric. So these two young men had drifted on their merry way, using their Stone Age tactics without compunction, till finally they had bit an old man—and his dog—a little too hard, which removed Dashwood and Silverosa abruptly from the hands of the reformers into the incipient clutches of the hangman.
As there is no honor among thieves, and especially not among the younger generation of pseudo-gangsters, Dashwood and Silverosa both made statements in which each did his best to pin the actual violence upon the other. Silverosa said:
“Two weeks ago last Thursday I went with Dashwood to a café where we had dinner. He told me he had a gun and he showed me a revolver. He told me he was going to do a job. I asked him, ‘Where?’ and he said, ‘Anywhere, I don’t care as long as it is something.’ We went along the Hackney Road, and he said the gun was only for putting the frightening powder in. We were going past a pawnbroker’s. He said, ‘We might as well go and do this if you are coming.’ I said, ‘All right, only no violence.’ He said, ‘All right.’ We waited until closing time as it was early closing day and only one o’clock. We saw the pawnbroker come out and put the shutters up and go back into his shop and we walked in after him. I closed the shop door and when I turned around I saw the old man falling down. I didn’t see Sam strike him but I surmised what he had done. I said, ‘You silly sod, what did you do that for?’ He said, ‘I had to, he was going to blow a whistle.’ I wiped some blood off the old man’s head with my overcoat. I said to Sammy, ‘Well, we’ve done the damage, we had better do what we came here to do.’ We took some rings from the safe and off the table. We walked into Mare Street and took the bus to Walthamstow High Street…”
Dashwood, in his statement, admitted striking the old man, but tried to suggest that it was Silverosa who had started the struggle with the pawnbroker. His statement reads:
On Thursday, 30 April, we went to a pawnbroker’s…The dog started barking. I hit the dog between the eyes. George and the old man were scuffling, and we both jumped on him to hold him down and he started shouting. I said, “For Christ’s sake quiet down, or you will get hurt.” The old boy went on shouting. George said, “Look out!” I bent over the old boy to shut him up and he put his arms round my neck, I bent over him and hit him on the top of the head with the revolver…
Actually, of course, it did not matter which of the two had struck the fatal blows. Both had been present at the time of the murder, and therefore both were guilty of murder. But this was something beyond their stunted powers of comprehension. Less than uneducated, reared solely on a culture of picture papers, blaring radio, films, cigarettes, back streets, pin-table saloons, and easy money, eternally bored, fed to the back teeth with everything and everybody, including themselves, bad-tempered, impatient, and carrying great, great big chips on their shoulders, they were brought, like two sulky, bickering children, into court. They were at loggerheads with one another and they were soon at loggerheads with their counsel, the famous Serjeant Sullivan, with whose services they presently abruptly dispensed, saying they preferred to conduct their own defense. Their method of defending themselves was for each to accuse
the other of striking the old man. Alas, they had no revolvers with them at the Old Bailey; they couldn’t shoot the judge, or frighten the jury, or silence the prosecuting counsel by coshing him on the head. They could do nothing except bluster and lie, and snarl and scowl at one another, and so they were sentenced to death and, in due course, were “topped,” as they themselves would have called it.
In other words, the society which had hesitated to birch them had no hesitation in hanging them.
Which seems a rather back-to-front way of going about things.
CHAPTER 9
“In the Spring a Young Man’s Fancy”
Spring 1942 was made for romance. There were a great many young men home on leave, the most beautiful sunshine, all the birds singing, and all the trees bursting into bud all at once, like delicious green explosions of summer.
My days were spent happily around the mortuaries, on my job, my evenings gaily gallivanting around town with my escorts; a perfect combination of work and pleasure. Unfortunately the escorts were, almost invariably, appalled by the idea of my work and read me long, severe, prosy lectures on the subject. (Males have a weakness for long, severe, prosy lectures.) When they had finished their leaves and returned to the wars they bombarded me with long, prosy, lecturing letters.
My girlfriends, on the other hand, all envied me my job, and were constantly pressing me for gruesome details. “Do give me the latest news of any good murders, darling,” they would write. “And how are the mortuaries getting on? Still as great fun as ever?”
Whereas a boyfriend’s epistle would say, “Next time you write, please don’t mention stiffs. They give me the willies…”
But oddly enough, when the sexes get together at my flat over a supper party or some such, I discover that they reverse the process. If the subject of crime arises, it is the males then who clamor, in true he-man style, to hear gruesome details, see photographs, while the women, much to my interest, stage an equally determined volte-face.
The little lady who, when alone with me, adores discussing a case in full detail and laps up any pictures I have, now, for example, curls up in a chair and says weakly, “Oh Molly, please, not more about that awful job, I can’t bear it.”
“Poor Mary,” murmurs her husband, or boyfriend, as the case may be, bending protectively toward her, “she just can’t stand that sort of thing. She’s not like you, Molly. You’re tough, but Mary’s very feminine and foolish.”
Mary flutters her eyelashes, exchanges a meaningful look with me, and then heaves a long long feminine foolish sigh.
“I was going to show Mary my pictures of the Wigwam case,” I say briskly and brightly. “Wouldn’t you like to see them, Mary darling?”
Mary, who last time she came to visit me, alone, could not be torn away from the Wigwam pictures, now gives a cry and waggles her head in violent protest, covering her eyes.
“For heaven’s sake,” says her husband, “if you show her things like that she’ll never get over the nightmares. She just can’t stand that sort of thing. I don’t mind seeing ’em” (bracing himself, like Gary Cooper going to shoot up a posse), “but Mary’d better hide her face, she can’t stand that sort of thing. She’s very feminine and foolish…”
Women are much harder-boiled than men, but they’ll fight to the last ditch before they let the men know it…
To return to Spring 1942. One evening I was getting ready for a stroll on Hampstead Heath with a Forces Françaises Libres, a young man who liked to lean over the rather muddy waters of Ken Wood Lake and recite Verlaine with great meaning. I was in the middle of doing my hair when Keith Simpson came through on the phone, exclaiming happily that as it was such a fine evening, and as there was a very interesting shooting case at Wandsworth mortuary, he proposed to pick me up in the car and then drive over to Wandsworth to spend an hour or so sorting out the case with the CID.
It was a strict rule with me my job always came first—and, of course, to be honest, I felt much more inclination to spend the evening at Wandsworth mortuary sorting out an interesting shooting case with the CID than meandering beside Ken Wood Lake with a youth gloomily chanting:
“Un grand sommeil noir
Tombe sur ma vie;
Dormez, tout espoir,
Dormez, toute envie!”
So I rang the Forces Françaises Libres and explained to him that Ken Wood must be some other time, as a CID case had suddenly etc., etc. A voice from the other end of the line demanded with Gallic point, “But why, why do you not prefer me to a corpse?” Then came the customary lecture, and I made my stock speech about finding my work absolutely fascinating, whereupon the FFL burst into furious yowls, said some very nasty things about necrophilia, and ended abruptly and rather hysterically, exclaiming, “There must be something WRONG with you…to prefer a corpse…it’s so unnatural…you wait, when next I come home on leave I will SHOW you!”
Shortly afterward I was well on the way to Wandsworth—and I suppose the FFL was comforting himself with appropriate stanzas of Verlaine. Or, much more probably, a drink at the Spaniards.
The case at Wandsworth was very interesting. The body was that of a young soldier, found lying dead in a pond on Wimbledon Common, with a bullet through his head. The CID thought at first that it was a murder, but after a long and painstaking examination of the body Dr. Simpson found that it was a suicide.
Next morning we drove with the CID across the Common to look at the pond where the body was found. The CID had now learned more about the dead soldier than they had known the previous night. He had recently had VD, but also, which was worse, a series of army lectures on the subject, and these latter had so alarmed and depressed him that he had decided to shoot himself.
So he had gone to the pond and there, standing on the bank, had shot himself, falling forward into the water. A rather unusual suicide, which at first not unnaturally led to suspicions of murder.
Dr. Simpson spent some time at the pond, examining the ground around and reconstructing the soldier’s death. I stood on the bank, under the green springy trees, and looked into the water, where clots of blood and fragments of brain still floated, like exotic crimson water flowers. And I thought that if the soldier had only been a young middle-class intellectual, instead of a respectable working-class boy, he would have written a short story about his experience, and joked about the VD lectures, and built up his ego with it all, until he was bursting with superiority, like Maupassant and Hemingway rolled into one.
But, alas, he was a nice boy, that soldier, so he ended by blowing his brains into a pool. If only he had written short stories! For, as Somerset Maugham says, anything is grist to the writer’s mill. A pen, some paper, and anything, but anything, can quickly be worked out of the system.
CHAPTER 10
Case of a Lifetime
Now every detective dreams of that great, big case which is going to come rolling along one day to bring him fame and promotion. And every crime reporter dreams of a similar great, big case, his own exclusive scoop, which will make him the idol and envy of Fleet Street. While pathologists (though, of course, in a somewhat more dignified manner) dream of that great, big case which will turn up one day, to make Spilsbury with his Crippen, and Glaister and Brash with their Ruxton, look slightly insignificant. And every pathologist’s secretary dreams of being around with her chief when that great, big case comes rolling along.
Well, a great, big case did come rolling along, and it was great and big, but, in the way of this world, the detective didn’t welcome it because he was already up to his eyes in work, the pathologist was very careful not to become too enthusiastic about it because he didn’t want to be disappointed, and the gentlemen of Fleet Street, God bless them, never even got a sniff or whisper of it until all was well under way. Aha, there was I, sitting, literally sitting, on one of the most interesting corpses of the century, one of the best murders in this country’s crime history, and the Fleet Street gentlemen didn’t know. I would see them
all at the Old Bailey, polite exchange of smiles, “good mornings.” Gentlemen, back in my little back room at Guy’s there is a corpse that is literally making murder history, and you just haven’t got a clue. Aha, what a scoop! (And the late journalist in me wriggled for pure joy.)
It all began very lethargically, on Friday, July 17, 1942. A squad of demolition workers were toiling in the hot sunshine, clearing the bombed premises at 302 Kennington Lane, Lambeth. Presently one of them pried up a stone slab with his pickaxe and there, underneath, lay the remains of a body. The demolition worker was not in the least excited by this. The remains, he thought, of just one more old air-raid casualty, or one more old corpse out of this here old graveyard—for they were working in a cellar which adjoined an ancient graveyard. He stooped to pick up the body; parts of the arms and legs were missing, the skull rolled loose as he moved it. Casually he dumped the body on one side while he and his mates finished clearing the ground around; then they went to the local for a drink, and it was not until the end of the day that their foreman reported the discovery of the body to the coroner.
The coroner’s officer next morning telephoned Dr. Simpson. “We’ve got a p.m. here for you to do, sir, and there’s some old bones been brought in too, bits of some old air-raid casualty. The coroner would like it if you’d just take a look at them after you’ve done the p.m., though there’s not much in them.” It was a hot, lazy July Saturday morning and, as we hadn’t much to do, we were able to go right away to Southwark mortuary.
When we arrived the p.m. case was lying ready for CKS on the p.m. table. (It was just some ordinary noninquest case.) West was standing by the side table, trying to improve the appearance of a large, very untidy brown paper parcel.
Murder on the Home Front Page 5