Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  I peeked into the bathroom, which had an eau-de-nil décor, and was very neat except for the windowsill, which was crowded with a variety of things, ranging from toilet paper and cosmetics to a large selection of douche preparations.

  Dr. Simpson, Mr. Narborough, and Superintendent Beveridge were sitting talking in the little lounge which Miss Rose’s clients had obviously used as a waiting room. Indeed, it bore that waiting-room look and could have belonged to a doctor, a dentist, or a fortune-teller with equal propriety. There was the inevitable suite of sofa and easy chairs, covered in the equally inevitable rexine cloth, and in the middle of the carpet was another little table with another crochet mat, but with an ashtray instead of a vase. The curtains were a depressing blue decorated with orange cape-gooseberry motif, and on the mantelpiece stood a pair of uninspiring china figures. An oval mirror hung between them, dead center. The lady, I noticed, didn’t provide magazines, but perhaps, I thought, she made a point of not keeping her clients waiting very long.

  It was an impersonal, cheerless room, and Maisie Rose had obviously never gone in there. Her room was the kitchen. Here was her sanctuary, the room where she ceased to be Maisie Rose, a highly professional West End prostitute, and became Gertrude Rose, a cozy, domesticated, cheerful, sentimental soul. Here everything was in glistening cream and turquoise-blue paint, with spotless china and glass on the little dresser, together with a highly colored Oriental tea set which would have gladdened any housewife’s proud heart. There was—because it was 1945—a tin of “Poison Gas Ointment Number 1,” ready for an emergency which never came, but for which all good fighting citizens, including Maisie Rose, were bravely prepared. There was also a big box of Bienaimée face powder, a neat little sewing basket, an American candy bar, a pink comb, and a packet of cheap cigarettes.

  By the table was a very cozy little green armchair. On the table was a fresh black-yellow-and-white check tablecloth, a pair of reading glasses, and a black handbag. Somebody had had a drink from a milk bottle; a half-full glass stood by the bottle. Mr. Narborough, who was pottering around the kitchen, too, went through the handbag and announced there was no wallet; neither could he find one anywhere else in the flat, and it looked as though the murderer had had sufficient presence of mind to take this with him.

  I was scrupulously careful, of course, not to touch anything as I looked around. Mr. Cherrill would not have thanked me if he had discovered my fingerprints scattered about.

  The scullery was not so spic-and-span as the kitchen. The charlady had not completed her morning’s chores before discovering the body. There was a basin of dirty washing in the sink. Some underclothes dangled on a little line outside the scullery window.

  Back in the kitchen I contemplated a very highly colored calendar depicting Christ arrayed in gorgeous attire with a prayer printed underneath asking Sweet Jesus to have mercy on us and remember us. Mr. Narborough came and looked at this with me, muttered “Umph” and went back to sorting out some papers. Over the mantelshelf were several snapshots of babies and little children—evidently young nephews and nieces of the deceased. There was also a small photograph of Maisie Rose herself, clearly taken some years previously. It was not a good photograph, however, being speckled and underexposed, and gave little idea of how she had really looked. There was a funeral card propped beside it, “In Ever Loving Memory”—with ivy and a cross. And there was a Free French Christmas card, showing a poilu sitting on a hillock gazing pensively at a distant Eiffel Tower and murmuring “Bon Noël.” This card had been colored in by crayon, by hand.

  I was musing upon all these clues to a rather confusing personality and thinking over what Henry Miller has written about prostitutes—their incurable sentimentality, good nature, thriftiness, domestic virtues, and so on—but I couldn’t recall if he had ever mentioned devout prostitutes. Henry Miller is by far the best writer on prostitutes. He is never sentimental about them, and some of his stories are truly very funny. I was thinking of one particularly funny one when CKS popped his head around the kitchen door and said, “Oh, there you are, Miss L. Come along, we’re getting to work.”

  I trotted after CKS and the DDI down the little passage into the bedroom, which was crowded with burly gentlemen from the Yard and all Inspector Law’s paraphernalia of cameras, flashlights, and tripods. Mr. Cherrill gave me what is known as a Big Hello, and Dr. Simpson instructed me to stand by the fireplace to be out of the way.

  The bedroom had been just as neat and tidy as the rest of the flat. There was a big double bed, a chest of drawers, and a dressing table, just as nice a mahogany suite as anybody could want. There were one or two little items perhaps not quite comme il faut: a box of contraceptives on the bedside table and a pair of ladies’ shoes dropped, spontaneously as it were, on their sides by the bed, as if kicked off in a moment of abandon. But there were some more very nice photos of the little nephews and nieces over the mantelpiece, and a portrait of Maisie Rose taken several years earlier, showing her to be a handsome brunette with a lively, pleasant face and wearing a cute little cap and a coat with an enormous fur collar.

  On the whole it was a bourgeois, orderly, respectable enough room, not at all what the aspiring novelist would have conjured up. But on that March afternoon the scene in that room would have defied all powers of fiction, however imaginative the writer. That room that afternoon had to be seen to be believed.

  The bed was tossed, disordered, and sodden with blood. Lying obliquely across it on her left side lay Maisie Rose, clad in a blue satin nightgown, her bloodstained hands raised to her breast and a cloth placed over her head. This was exactly how the charlady had found her, so the murderer must have put the cloth there; perhaps he didn’t like to see what he had done. Dr. Simpson now gently removed the cloth. The murdered woman’s head and face had been shattered by blow upon blow of the shillelagh. She really had been battered to death.

  Upon the floor by the dressing table lay the shillelagh; a wooden club like a polished tree root. It was heavily bloodstained and had a long dark hair sticking to it, no doubt the dead woman’s.

  Dr. Simpson, Mr. Beveridge, and Mr. Narborough now made a thorough examination of the room, and of the body as it lay on the bed. Some short hairs were removed from the dead woman’s body; they were proved subsequently to be hairs from off a man and were an important clue. The temperature of the body showed that death had taken place during the early hours of that morning. The injuries to the woman’s hands and forearms indicated she had put up a violent struggle to protect herself.

  The body was presently removed to Southwark mortuary, and here a detailed autopsy was made on the remains of Maisie Rose. Although she had lived in such a clean little flat and had dressed so neatly and smartly, she concealed behind this façade an active gonorrhea and old syphilis. (I suppose one might refer to them in her case as mere occupational diseases.) Of course, dead and without any makeup she didn’t look in the least like her attractive photograph. Her skin was sallow, lined, and coarse, and she looked considerably more than the forty-four she had admitted to. In her favor, she had well-marked, strong eyebrows and a nose suggestive of humor. But otherwise there seemed little to say for her.

  Of course, dead people never are attractive. The lovely waxen corpse, as CKS would sometimes observe to me, is purely a creation of fiction. The dead may occasionally be impressive, but never beautiful. Even little babies look like weary imitation flowers. As for murdered people, they invariably look dreadful, so perhaps I was altogether wrong to judge Maisie Rose now as she lay on the p.m. table. Dressed up in Leicester Square, well made up, under the brilliant electric lights, she no doubt looked a very different proposition. Or even sitting in her cozy kitchen, mending her stockings and thinking of her nephews and nieces.

  On her rather coarse, thick, short fingers she wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring, and a solitaire on the middle finger of her right hand. Mr. Narborough said he had heard she had had a husband some time in her life, but the story of her
life was very vague.

  The story of her life was very vague…There she lay, this well-known West End prostitute, Irish born, of forty-odd years, unglamorous and diseased, one who had once been in the big money, but who “wasn’t very expensive or exclusive these last few years,” as DDI Narborough put it. She had had a tidy flat and a cozy kitchen full of family snapshots and a religious calendar and a funeral card. And she had been battered to death by a sensitive gentleman who had covered her bleeding and broken face with a cloth in order to mitigate the horror of the scene…

  While CKS completed the postmortem, Mr. Narborough and I wrapped the shillelagh up in cellophane paper, a delicate operation, for we had to handle it very gingerly in order not to dislodge the long dark hair or leave fingerprints of our own on it. It was to be taken to the police laboratory for examination, together with the small hairs found on the deceased’s body.

  The case looked a promising one. Investigations at first went well. We learned that the Yard had two suspects, both American servicemen. They were almost without doubt responsible for Maisie Rose’s death, but before the police had collected enough evidence to arrest them—but only just before—the two men crossed the Channel to fight the foe. Nothing could be done. They could not be traced and brought back to London, and so the word UNSOLVED had to be written against the murder of Maisie Rose.

  What happened to her murderers nobody will ever know. Perhaps they met their just desserts in the form of German bullets. Maybe they were lucky and finally returned home as two worthy American veterans, to be welcomed royally and proudly toasted by some small town. Nobody will ever know.

  Just as I shall never know about Maisie Rose, with her nice little flat in Little Heaven, her ancient but abysmal profession, her family snaps, her calendar with its prayer, “Sweet Jesus have mercy on us and remember us.” A Graham Greene character in every respect. Impossible for me, with my unsubtle Protestant background, to understand. Or is that so? Maybe we like to think too much. Maybe faith is indeed sufficient. In which case I need not bother my so-called brain with Maisie Rose, but merely breathe the prayer which somebody slipped into my hand once as I came out of a church in Montmartre, “Sacré Cœur de Jésus, ayez pitié de nous.”

  CHAPTER 24

  Murder at “Charley Brown’s”

  Poplar Coroner’s Court and mortuary stand in Poplar High Street, just past the bowling green. To find them you drive along Commercial Road into dockland, along the West India Dock Road into Chinatown—or what the Luftwaffe left of Chinatown—and turn left at Pennyfields and thence into the High Street. Here new blocks of fine flats and little prefabricated houses jostle with old, slummy, sooty buildings between which blow winds tangy with dockyard water.

  The name Chinatown is still one which journalists like to write with a shudder and detective writers mouth with glee. Chinatown—it conjures up everything that is murky and mysterious, and vicious. But Chinatown today is really very mild. Most of it was bombed out of existence and the parts that are left are most respectable.

  You still see notices and posters in Chinese on the street walls, and Chinese signs outside the little shops and laundries. There are many Chinese restaurants, one or two of them famous among Chinese gourmets, and there are little Chinese seamen’s hostels, very clean and well kept, and Chinese seamen’s missions, and small, dark houses with broken-down backyards where you may espy through the cracks in the fences rather Oriental-looking ducks and fowls squatting around in interesting Chee Yang attitudes. But all this is a mere shadow of what Chinatown once was, and the shadow is fading and may well one day be gone. For, I am told on excellent authority, the Chinese of Chinatown in recent years have indulged greatly in intermarriage, and now there is only one pure Chinese family left in the district, the family of a famous restaurateur.

  Nevertheless, when Chinese witnesses turn up in court they still insist upon taking the oath in Chinese fashion, with a little pile of saucers to break and much rigmarole. (The coroner’s officer used to complain that with saucers getting to be the price they were, Chinese witnesses were becoming an expensive luxury.) And still, as you go through Chinatown, Chinese voices come from doorways and courtyards, singsong, light and strange, the language which has sounded for so long in this peculiar little corner of London, a corner once so fabulous and fearsome, and still full of memories.

  It is interesting that during all the years I was with CKS we did only one postmortem on a Chinese. This was a man found hanging in a bombed-out house in Chinatown. He had been hanging there some months before anybody discovered him, and he had become quite mummified. He was plainly a suicide, but the police were unable to learn anything about him. Was he some tragic sailor who had returned to find his home and family blown to dust and had decided that life was no longer worth living without them? Nobody will ever know.

  The Coroner’s Court and mortuary were built just before the war to replace out-of-date premises. By a miracle they escaped any grave damage by bombs, which dropped all around in a charmed circle, but always just missed the domain of HM Coroner, Mr. W. H. Heddy.

  The Coroner’s Court is Tudor in design, with much old oak paneling and heavy beams. The mortuary is startlingly contemporary in design, a bit like the South Bank Exhibition. The p.m. room is mainly of glass and porcelain tiling; the walls are mostly vast windows, and there is subtle strip lighting in the ceiling. It might well be a chic Paris atelier. An excellent idea in a less hectic era, but during the war years this mortuary was either wide to the winds of heaven or windowed with thick blackout paper. From time to time it would be boldly equipped with new glass: “All shipshape again, Dr. Simpson,” the mortuary keeper would proudly announce. Next morning there he would be, sweeping up the glass…

  The gray and pale-blue décor of the p.m. room is tasteful and restrained. There is an office for the doctors, paneled and furnished in light oak, businesslike and dignified, but in those war years very drafty and dusty because it too had no windowpanes left. There is a fine, glittering cold-storage room with vast, smooth-humming refrigerators. But the pièce de résistance of the mortuary is the viewing room, the little room to which relatives go to view and identify their dead.

  Imagine an ornate alcove, rather than an actual room, with a big window for the said relatives to look through at…ah, yes, at poor old Joe, or Liza, or Harry, stretched out on a magnificent bier between two giant standard lamps, against an exotic backcloth reminiscent of the painter and stage designer Léon Bakst. Dramatic concealed lighting heightens the effect. It is certain that Joe, Liza, and Harry never lay in such splendor all their lives; rickety old beds, seedy bedrooms, were no doubt their lot, drab and uncomfortable. But now that death has robbed them of all feeling and all pride here they lie, in the most sumptuous style imaginable.

  The relatives of the deceased invariably express immense gratification.

  Opposite the viewing room is a little room for the Jewish watcher.

  Jewish custom demands that the dead must be watched; the body, until burial, must be attended by a guardian, a mourner. This body watcher must not, under Jewish religious law, be a relative of the deceased. So a professional body watcher is hired.

  These watchers are often old women, either very stout or very skinny, dressed in a collection of shabby garments apparently collected over the course of years and donned in bulky layers. They sit in their little rooms in the mortuaries, if not actually watching the dead at least very close at hand, and they brew and drink unspeakable tea, and snooze, and knit knit knit, through the long and weary hours when everything in the mortuary is dark, and silent, and still.

  Armed with their knitting they always made me regard them as cousins to those old women who used to squat at the foot of the guillotine during the Terror. There was one at Poplar whom I would have liked to have asked if she did not find the mortuary at night rather creepy, but I could not summon the courage to question her. She was not an inviting personality.

  The watchers are well
provided for at Poplar, however, with a little room exactly opposite the viewing room, across a narrow passage, and a window of their own to peek through exactly facing the viewing-room window. So the watcher has only to raise her eyes from her knitting to be able to cast a vigilant glance at the corpse under her care.

  The assistant mortuary keeper at Poplar in those days was a long-faced, lugubrious man who meandered vaguely about, dropping things and losing things and saying “Righty-o” to everything. As he bent over the bodies, sewing them up, he always crooned, “You Are My Sunshine…”

  Once, when CKS was in a great hurry, I rushed into the p.m. room, snatched up what I thought was my white p.m. gown, and began putting it on. But the strange, sour-sweet odor of the dead made me stop and take a second look at the garment; it was a shroud. I gave a shriek and tore it off. It was a horrid experience for me, but it gave “You Are My Sunshine” a rare and hearty laugh.

  He thought I was very prim and choosy. When he stripped the bodies he would drop their clothes in piles on the floor, and when these unsavory garments were scattered around my feet I used to sniff and give him looks. Once when I had a very low chair and asked if he could find me a cushion or anything similar to sit on he picked up a bundle of clothes he had just taken off a very dirty-looking army deserter and trotted up to me with them, rolling them together into a cushion-shaped bundle as he advanced. I refused point-blank to sit on them. “You Are My Sunshine” was definitely miffed. He considered me a spoiled type, I could see.