Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  There was one afternoon in particular that I remember. It started at Stratford with a doodle-bomb which went around three times. We were all in the mortuary of Queen Mary’s Hospital: CKS; Tiny, the giant mortuary keeper, formerly of the Guards; Cook, the coroner’s officer; the hospital superintendent; and myself. Suddenly we heard the thing coming and we all froze: CKS with his knife in his hand, Tiny clutching the sponge he was swabbing with, Cook with an eye on the window (to see if he could see), the superintendent holding a sheaf of notes on the postmortem case, and myself seated at my typewriter. The doodle-bomb hum-bummed over and droned into the distance, cheered by Tiny. Then its engine started growing louder again. “It’s not coming back?” shouted Tiny—I think he would have added more if I had not been there. Cook ran out to see and returned, “Yes, it’s gone around in a circle. The town clerk’s up on the roof next door, watching it.” Back it came and we all froze again. Over it went and drooled away, as before. We listened. Yes, it slowly veered around and began the tedious approach for the third time. “It’s ours,” said Tiny. “Twice was a blooming miracle but three times is too much to hope for. Well, here goes.” “The town clerk’s still up there watching,” reported Cook. “Thinks it’s firework night, maybe,” murmured Tiny. With baited breath we listened to our old gallivanting friend the doodle-bomb taking a third look down on Queen Mary’s Hospital, Stratford. To our astonishment he passed over once more, but crashed a short distance beyond on the railway yards. “I never want to go through an experience like that again,” said Tiny, “and, by God, I’ve had some.”

  Just as we left Stratford for Leyton another doodle-bomb passed over, going in the same direction as ourselves. When we reached Leyton mortuary Miles greeted us with the news that this bomb had dropped on the bus garage at the Baker’s Arms. We left Leyton for Whipps Cross Hospital and another bomb went over, apparently aiming for Whipps Cross Hospital. We had to make a detour because of the damage around the neighborhood of the bus garage. When we reached the hospital we found the doodle-bomb had crashed a short distance from the hospital gates. A wrecked truck lay in the roadway; trees were shattered as if by a gale, and their green leaves covered the pavement as if torn down by a premature and violent autumn. We drove to the mortuary in the hospital grounds. The ambulances with the casualties from the bus garage incident were driving up to the door of the Casualty Department all the time. Stretchers were carefully lifted out and borne into the hospital building. But sometimes the stretchers were brought over to the mortuary instead.

  In the mortuary already lay the driver of the wrecked truck. The windscreen had been shattered in his face and his throat was widely cut from ear to ear, as decisively as if he had been a fanatical suicide. Goodwin was standing thoughtfully staring down at him.

  Other cases were brought in, among them a woman, obviously a housewife, from one of the small houses near the bus garage. She was laid gently on the floor. CKS fetched out his thermometer and took her temperature. Apparently there was a theory that immediately after death the temperature of the body shoots up to an unprecedented height. CKS decided to put this theory to the test, and during the flying-bomb era he took several temperatures of persons just dead, but so far as I remember found nothing very remarkable about their temperatures.

  While he bent over the dead housewife I stood by with my notepad, contemplating the woman who had just been killed in a front line which was no less a front line because it was in London. She was just a plain, ordinary London housewife in a shabby dress and flowered apron. Perhaps when the bomb crashed she had been peeling the potatoes for her husband’s supper, I thought. And when the husband, and maybe a grown-up daughter or two, arrived home that evening it would be to find their little house a pile of laths and mucky plaster and mother taken to the mortuary. And that story was being repeated daily, all over London.

  I thought of my own mother in our house in North London and wondered, for a brief moment, whether she was still intact. But what was the point of wondering that? As she herself would say, “Kismet.”

  Kismet was kind to me and my family. A few days later when I was at Leyton another bomb, all in key with the Simpson daily round, went off just across the road; it was an occasion to be remembered, because while Miles and I heaped on top of each other for shelter under the sink—a silly place, really—Dr. Simpson crouched for shelter under the p.m. table, which was complete with a body, and the sight of one who hoped to live crouching under a corpse was rather striking. It seized my imagination even though I was shaking with fright, and CKS commented upon his sheltering place with a rather crooked smile as soon as he had scrambled out again after the explosion. Then we went out into the street, with our ears zinging from the blast, to watch the great black coils of oily, stinking smoke undulating overhead, while what appeared to be fragments of charred paper showered down groundward. As we watched, the inevitable stream of people came hurrying; first the ARP squads, then the cyclists, and then the running neighbors, all frantically rushing to the rescue of the people in the wrecked little houses. And then came the ambulances…

  At Whipps Cross, one morning, we obtained our best close-up view of a bomb. It was chugging along, approaching the end of its flight, and CKS stopped the car and we both jumped out. I began making a beeline for some bushes, but my companion shouted at me to pull myself together. “You’re perfectly safe, Miss Lefebure. It’s traveling away from us. What a magnificent view of the thing! And what an extraordinary color it is!”

  Envying my pathologist’s Anglo-Saxon calm I struggled to master my Gallic twitterings, meanwhile peering upward at the little demon above us. “Oh, isn’t it pretty! In a nasty sort of a way” was my feminine comment. A delicate shade of bluey-green, with a beautiful long plume of vivid scarlet and orange flame spurting out behind it like a dragon’s breath in reverse. So small, so mechanical, it went into a glide and flew lower and lower, to dive suddenly over the houses of Walthamstow—landing, I afterward discovered, on a candy shop I had often patronized when I was a reporter, and blowing the place to bits.

  One day MacKay phoned us to say that the Home Office had an identity job for us at his mortuary. Identity and reconstruction. A special job.

  We went along next morning and found MacKay waiting in the sunny little mortuary yard. He had two big trestle tables out there, too, the sort of tables one associates with Sunday school treats, only instead of being loaded with goodies these tables were loaded with bits and pieces of people.

  “A flying bomb scored a direct hit on a brick surface shelter, Dr. Simpson, in which there were some twenty people. All killed, of course, and impossible to identify in the ordinary way. Can you help sort them out a bit?”

  “I’ll try, MacKay,” said Dr. Simpson cautiously. “Have we any kind of a list of who they probably were, giving approximate ages and so on? That would help.”

  “The ARP wardens have given me a list of suggested names, with the ages and descriptions, but it’s very sketchy.”

  So we started work. For two mornings we worked on that hideous human jigsaw puzzle, linking this foot with that hand, this heart with that foot, going by the apparent age and physical condition of the fragments, while the sun shone, the factory next door broadcast “Music While You Work,” and footsteps clacked unconcernedly along the pavement the other side of the mortuary wall.

  In the end we had sorted out everything excepting one or two odd bits that proved quite impossible to catalog.

  The knowledge that the job, beastly as it was, simply had to be done by somebody or other gave one just enough strength of purpose to do it. At the end CKS very nicely gave me a generous bonus, but even a generous bonus cannot dispel the memories of a job like that, I discovered.

  Nevertheless, the casualty list for the flying-bomb era was remarkably low, all things considered. But the damage done to houses was very high. In due course my own home in Southgate “had a flying bomb,” although not very seriously.

  One gravedigger-cum-mortuar
y-assistant I knew, a crablike man with sandy whiskers and a great liking for political discussion, became very fond at this time of talking over the war with me. He was very thrilled by the Russians (weren’t we all?), and I particularly enjoyed the way in which he would raise an arm and exclaim, “After this war I, for one, will never lift a finger against Russia!”

  He always followed the fortunes of the Russian armies with detailed interest and was, I recall, especially concerned over the fate of Kharkov. He said to CKS one day, “Well, Dr. Simpson, I see Harkov has fallen at last. Or so Jerry says.”

  “Now that’s interesting, the way you call it Harkov, instead of Kharkov,” remarked CKS, looking up from the p.m. “Are you a student of Russian? Is that the correct pronunciation, Harkov?”

  “Well, Dr. Simpson, I don’t speak Russian, no, I don’t,” said my friend, tilting back his head and leering from under his swollen lids in a particularly horrid way he had, “but Alvar Liddell, ’e says Harkov, and ’e speaks nice.”

  But presently the flying bombs became the main topic of our conversations. Sandy Whiskers took a dim view of them, but remained philosophical withal. “I don’t start the night in the Anderson (shelter), no, I don’t. I begin it in bed and hope for at least a bit of sleep before I get disturbed. But of course, I don’t get it. Well, when the warning goes we all gets into our clothes and hurries out to the shelter. Well, you can reckon I reach there in pretty quick time. But my missus, she’s always last, she takes such a long time to dress. You see, she always wears one of these ’ere abominable belts and it takes quite a time to put on.”

  By “abominable belt” I realized he meant an abdominal belt. But, when all is said and done, abominable is, I should think, a pretty good name for them.

  And so it went on. The doodle-bombs by day. The doodle-bombs by night. Those weapons that were supposed to make Britain panic and sue for armistice.

  I have often tried to decide which British quality most contributed to the defeat of Hitler. Was it the determination to ignore danger and carry on at all costs? The Keith Simpsons who wouldn’t have their timetables disturbed by “wretched things” like flying bombs? Or the astonishing national idiosyncrasy for cracking a joke at any price, so that a Tiny could talk about fireworks night with apparent death boombling overhead? Or philosophical resignation: “Hope for a bit of sleep, but of course I don’t get it”? Or sheer British cussedness; Hitler wants to win, so we aren’t going to let him?

  It was the combination of all these traits, no doubt. But, upon the whole, I think the main reason for the success of the British was that they enjoyed the war. They enjoyed it not in the sense that they found it fun, but in the sense that they found it immensely satisfying. Satisfying to all their inherited instincts and traditions. It gave them the chance to do all the daring things they have excelled at throughout their long history, and a lot of new, twentieth-century daring things into the bargain. It employed their genius for voyaging and fighting all over the globe. It gave them the chance to become commandos and raid enemy territories after the style of Drake singeing the King of Spain’s beard. For six glorious years they were able to be soldiers, sailors, airmen, guerrillas, frogmen, spies, bomb experts, nurses, rescue workers, ambulance drivers, explorers, plotters, schemers, saboteurs. As a race they have thrived on adventure, and this war brought them adventures galore. It gave them a feeling of great purpose, for it united them in a just cause, and as a people they love just causes. It gave them a chance to be great, and they have a marvelous capacity for greatness.

  And, after Dunkirk, they had an unswerving faith in their ultimate victory.

  As for the word panic, it wasn’t in their language. Never has been. Never will be. Hitler produced the V-1. Hitler produced the V-2. So what? The British knew Hitler was going to go under in the end. And sure enough, when the time was ripe, under he went.

  CHAPTER 20

  Body in a Hole

  A woman reporter, interviewing me once about my work with Dr. Simpson, asked, “Is it really glamorous and exciting, working on a case with men from Scotland Yard?”

  I replied that it could be exciting but was never glamorous, and indeed was sometimes so unglamorous that even the excitement rather had the edge taken off. And, as I spoke, I thought of a certain blazing day in August when CKS and I went down to Bedfordshire to assist two detectives from the Yard in a very unglamorous case indeed.

  It was August 17. The V-1s had diminished in volume a little, and the V-2s had not yet started. The first flush of the invasion had faded and life, which had been so hectic, had become somewhat turgid, so that a murder in the country seemed an attractive idea.

  The train chugged along through the sun-baked countryside and I stared out of the carriage window, occupied with idle thoughts. Presently CKS began talking about Chief Inspector Beveridge, the officer who had been called from the Yard to help the Bedford police unravel the case. “Beveridge is one of the Yard’s leading personalities, very keen, highly efficient, perceptive,” said CKS, adding, a trifle ominously, I thought, “You’ll find him rather quiet, but he notices a lot.”

  That meant Mr. Beveridge would probably notice me if I did anything foolish. I vowed a silent vow that that afternoon I would shine as a very keen, highly efficient secretary. One of those sorts who are a hundred percent bang on.

  Unfortunately the English countryside on a hot afternoon always has a dimming effect upon me: the lazy hazy fields, the claustrophobic hedges, the somnolent trees, the tranquil milky cows. In less than no time I am well on the way to becoming a bovine yokel myself. So by the time we had exchanged the train for a car and had driven to a nice, rose-entwined little village police station, I felt more like a nap under a shady bank than a postmortem. I was also hot and dying of thirst. But as we got out of the car I bethought me of Chief Inspector Beve­ridge’s eagle eye and did my best to shake myself up.

  Inside the police station everything smelled of polished wood, ink, roses, and dusty ledgers. The station sergeant was waiting on the doorstep to greet us, and he ushered us into the office where the chief inspector and his detective sergeant assistant were waiting for us.

  Chief Inspector Peter Beveridge was a large man with a fresh complexion, youthful blue eyes, a shy smile, a very firm handshake, and a quiet voice which expressed great authority. Like all the Yard high-ups I ever met, he filled me with immediate respect.

  Behind him, to my utmost relief, stood Detective Sergeant H. W. Hannam, whom I had met several times before and knew as an understanding ally. Always the last word in courtesy, he bowed and shook hands. Then the station sergeant fetched us cups of tea while Mr. Beveridge launched into a brisk résumé of the case.

  I whipped out my notebook and began taking shorthand notes. My cup of tea stood on the sergeant’s desk by my elbow, steaming gently; the most seductive cup of tea I ever saw but quite untouchable. Efficient secretaries don’t stop taking notes to swig tea. Alas!

  The suspected murder had taken place several days previously, said Mr. Beveridge, for the body, which had been lying among some bushes in the Kempston Ballast Hole, was seriously decomposed. The discovery of the body had been made on August 15, appropriately enough by a retired police constable who had been taking his dog for a walk. The dog had drawn his master’s attention to the body. The local police surgeon examined the body after it had been moved to the mortuary and found grave fractures to the skull. Murder was immediately suspected. The Yard had been asked to assist the Bedford police in their investigations early on the morning of the seventeenth, and now here were the four of us assembled in Kempston police station.

  From time to time during this résumé of the available facts Mr. Beveridge turned to Sergeant Hannam, who had taken a small sheaf of notes from his briefcase. Mr. Hannam checked these notes with his chief’s information. I scribbled shorthand feverishly. When Mr. Beveridge had finished telling Dr. Simpson about the discovery of the body he said, “I suggest we go along to the Ballast Hole first t
o see for ourselves where the body was found and then visit the mortuary. The car is ready to take us.”

  “Exactly as you wish, Mr. Beveridge.”

  “Are we all ready?”

  I swallowed two or three despairing gulps of tepid tea, Mr. Hannam put his notes away, Dr. Simpson picked up his bag, the station sergeant kindly took our typewriter, and out to the waiting car we went.

  As we rode along the dusty lanes to the Ballast Hole, Chief Inspector Beveridge said, “If the body is very decomposed it may prove difficult to identify.”

  “The teeth should help us there,” observed CKS.

  “Yes, I was thinking we might have to resort to the teeth.”

  The local mortuary was not far from the Ballast Hole. From inside the little brick mortuary itself came the buzzing of flies, the sound of water running, and a reek of rotting body and disinfectant. In the mortuary yard a group of police officers and young detectives were gathered rather anxiously around a drain, at which they were all peering. Mr. Beveridge greeted them briskly and was informed, nervously, that some of the dead man’s teeth had accidentally been washed down this drain. Mr. Beveridge replied, “Get them out. We must have those teeth.”

  Leaving this worried company to retrieve the teeth, the chief inspector headed our little party in the direction of the Ballast Hole. Two Bedford police officers accompanied us. We climbed a five-barred gate, which was secured with a padlock against all comers, even the CID, and marched down a very long, hot, crunchy cinder track.

  The Kempston Ballast Hole was the kind of place criminals seem to be particularly devoted to. It was an area of shrubby wasteland among rusty railway sidings, old railway sleepers, and derelict trucks. It was painfully reminiscent of T. S. Eliot. I lurched along the cinder track inwardly reciting: