Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  The murdered girl, young as she was, had already become known locally as a sort of unprofessional prostitute. Her murderer was a little sailor, but although the police knew his identity they were never able to get enough of the right kind of evidence to arrest him. So the little sailor went on his way, no doubt rejoicing.

  CKS was rather disappointed at the nonarrest of this sailor. But in wartime murders have a habit of ending inconclusively. We had one case that summer which could never actually be proved a case of murder, although it seemed suspiciously like it.

  The case concerned a Waaf who was found drowned in the River Nene on the Isle of Ely. Chief Inspector Thorp and the local police struggled with this baffling case for five weeks and in the end were obliged to leave it as unsolved.

  The dead Waaf was a young married woman of twenty-eight. She was found in the River Nene, described as a dangerous river, by a local constable. The body, when found, had been in the water for about a fortnight. Dr. Simpson thought that death was due to drowning, but it was difficult for him to say so categorically because the body was so badly decomposed. He found nothing to suggest foul play, but again the state of decomposition made any definite conclusion very difficult.

  It was believed that the girl, who had disappeared on her way back to camp after a leave, had been hitchhiking. The Isle of Ely was miles out of her course back to camp, there was no explanation as to why, or how, she had gotten there, and the police nursed a strong suspicion that she had been attacked by somebody giving her a lift and afterward her body had been conveyed and dumped there. When found, her shoes, stockings, and knickers were missing, but these clothes might have been washed from off the body by the river; indeed the shoes most certainly would have been.

  The police were their usual thorough, dogged selves, but without success. Excerpts from two police statements will reveal some extent of their inquiries. The first, from PC Cox, reads:

  “I have made numerous inquiries of persons living in the vicinity of the river, and also of roadmen, postal workers, farm laborers, lorry drivers, haulage contractors, and of tradesmen delivering goods, in an endeavor to obtain information, but without success.”

  And here is one of the detective officers in the case, Det. Sgt. J. Davis, reporting:

  “Every possible and conceivable inquiry has been made to obtain information as to the movements of deceased on May 4, 1945” (the day she finished her leave and departed from home for her camp), “and since, prior to the finding of her body, but to date without success. Special and detailed inquiries have been carried out by all police forces throughout Central Midlands, the whole of the Eastern Counties and Greater London.”

  What more could be asked? Everything had been done that could be done, but with no result. So an inquest was held in order that the case might be officially wound up, and to this inquest CKS went, taking me with him.

  The inquest was held at Thorney, on a rather dull June day. The fen country, which so fascinates some people, holds no attraction for me. Like the psalmist, my help comes from the hills. The Isle of Ely and its surrounding countryside depress me.

  The inquest was held in a small dance hall at the back of the Rose and Crown. A few idle locals had turned up in a mood of curiosity, and there were several police officials, all very spit-and-polish.

  The dead girl’s husband was there, a young man in a Royal Air Force uniform, together with his mother. We all sat in rows in the hall, watching the jury assemble and waiting for the coroner to arrive. I found myself sitting next to Chief Inspector Thorp. I had met him on several previous occasions, and now we chatted amicably. Mr. Thorp, witty, energetic, and sartorially distinguished, reminisced nostalgically about the boat he owned and the happy prewar voyages he had made in her. His memories had reached the Côte d’Azur and he was brooding aloud over Cannes harbor and Saint Tropez while the twelve good men and true clumped into the hall and took their places on the chairs reserved for the jury. Farmers, local tradesmen, retired white-whiskered old gentlemen, and the like, they all had big red faces, obstinate English jowls, and slow, deliberate glances. They stared around the courtroom at us all, clearly saying, “Now we’re the jury and we’re the people who finally count, you know, and we’re here to unearth the truth of this matter and give a just verdict, so you needn’t try to take us in, even though you are policemen and pathologists and whatnot.”

  At last the coroner arrived and the hearing began. It was certainly a problem case. The young widower told us his wife had been happy, healthy, and contented, he could think of no reason why she might have wished to take her life, and he could give no explanation as to how she might have come to drown in the River Nene, which was so far from the camp to which she had been returning. His mother then described how the girl had spent her leave with her, had been cheerful and fit and had left to return to camp in the best of spirits. She recalled that the girl had said something about hitchhiking back to the camp.

  Dr. Simpson explained to the jury that so far as he could ascertain, the girl had been drowned and had not sustained any injuries suggestive of foul play. However, he had to point out that the advanced decomposition of the body made it difficult to draw any definite conclusions.

  Chief Inspector Thorp described his inquiries and explained they had yielded absolutely no information and there was no point therefore in continuing them. Detective Sergeant Davis and PC Cox said their pieces to the same effect. The coroner then summed up. He pointed out that the dead woman might have fallen in the river by accident, although there was absolutely no known reason why she should have wandered so far from her route back to camp as the River Nene. She might have committed suicide, although there was no reason why she should have done so. On the other hand she might have been the victim of foul play. There was no way of telling how she had come to be in the river, there was only the plain fact that her body had been found in the Nene and, so far as could be judged, she had died from drowning.

  The jury listened with wary, earnest attention, consulted among themselves for a little and then returned a verdict that death was from drowning.

  There was no other verdict possible. The mystery of this young woman’s death remains a mystery to this day.

  After the inquest we all went out into the yard of the Rose and Crown, where the sun was now belatedly shining. Our train back to London did not leave for an hour, and while we were debating what to do during that hour Mr. Thorp came smilingly up to us to say we had been invited to a birthday tea party and led us, despite our polite protests, into the Rose and Crown.

  Now the Rose and Crown was where Mr. Thorp had been staying the past five weeks, and during this stay he had clearly grown to be on the happiest terms with the publican and his family. It was their little daughter who was having the birthday—and the tea party—and she had invited Mr. Thorp, and as we were his friends what was more natural than that we should be invited, too?

  Consequently we found ourselves in a large dining room, staring at the most marvelous spread any of us had seen for years. It was difficult to believe wartime England could produce such a tea. There were all kinds of sandwiches and scones and cakes, tarts and jellies and blancmanges, trifles and biscuits and bon-bons. There were wonderful, luscious, strawberries-and-cream. And there was a heavenly pink birthday cake, with cherries on it, and candles.

  The children had not yet been brought in to the table; we could hear them playing party games in another room, creating a joyous bedlam. We felt we simply could not desecrate such a miraculous tea table, so we each had a cup of tea, a sandwich, a little cake and then, with a chorus of happy-birthdays and thank-yous we departed. Mr. Thorp remained behind at the Rose and Crown, looking very happy and obviously about to make a second, much heavier, attack on the party tea, in the company of the little guests.

  While we sat admiring the party tea table the young widower and his mother sat on a bench in the yard under a chestnut tree, drinking tea that was brought to them there. “What a strange thin
g life is,” I thought. A drowning that was perhaps a murder, an inquest, a birthday tea party, children playing “Oranges and Lemons,” a Yard inspector and a Home Office pathologist admiring the glacé cherries on a cake, June sunshine, strawberries-and-cream, two mourning people sitting sadly on a bench, sipping tea and staring drearily at nothing. To what does it all add up?

  In that same month of June, CKS went down to Leigh-on-Sea on a double murder at a bungalow. I missed this trip, to my intense annoyance, because it fell on one of my rare afternoons off. Not that I minded missing Leigh-on-Sea and its celebrated ozone. At the beginning of the Blitz I had been dispatched once a week by my editor, who owned a paper at Southend as one of his side concerns, to rustle around Southend and environs collecting, or trying to collect wedding and funeral notices from an almost entirely nonexistent population. Everybody had been evacuated from Southend and its neighboring resorts. German and British planes were fighting it out overhead as I pattered around those hot and deserted streets, where nine houses out of ten were empty and boarded up and where, needless to say, absolutely nobody was getting married and only a few aged people were dying, a few aged people who had refused to be evacuated and had remained to perish of heart failure in the citadel. These one or two funerals were to me nuggets of gold in the arid desert. Otherwise there was nothing, nothing. At least, nothing in the way of local news. Plenty was happening, but not for me to write about. The sky was peppered with barrage balloons, floating lazily and tranquilly, the planes fought above them, parachutists could be seen if you were lucky—or if you weren’t lying facedown on the pavement at the time, praying—bailing out from shot-up planes which were screeching down groundward. Shrapnel fell in little showers, more cruelly than the summer rain. Yes, Southend was hot that year, both with the sun and the Battle of Britain. I never saw the sea. I am told one frequently doesn’t see the sea at Southend for ages, because the tide goes out so far, but even if the tide had been up I wouldn’t have noticed it. I was too anxious to care about the sea. All I wanted to do was to get back to dear old London intact. So around and around I ran, clutching my little notebook, visiting the only citizens left in Southend: the undertakers and the clergy. The undertakers all complained because business was so terrible, there was nobody left in Southend to die, and how on earth was one expected to make a living under the circumstances? I uttered sympathetic tuck-tuck noises. The clergy were as unemployed as the undertakers, but most of them seemed pretty cheerful and were seizing this period of enforced leisure to catch up on their gardening, while one vicar told me he was writing all his sermons for the next twelve months.

  So, you see, I knew Southend—and Leigh—quite well, in a rather original sort of way. Let me add that these original experiences had left me with a horror of these two celebrated resorts. I believe that in normal times they are quite nice places. But, to parody Sarah Bernhardt: for me, between air raids, not.

  So I wasn’t exactly sorry to miss Leigh-on-Sea, but I was sorry to miss the murder. Also I was sorry I missed the drive down, with CKS and Chief Inspector A. G. Philpot, a big, pithy man who later found fame in the Chalk Pit murder case.

  The murder was an interesting one because of a unique clue. The victims were a Mr. and Mrs. Lucas, an elderly couple who had retired to Leigh to a bungalow and ozone. The newspapers described them as “wealthy,” but in reality they were not. The husband was a former pawnbroker. They were found battered to death in their home, and the motive of the crime seemed to have been robbery in the first place, for the bungalow was ransacked.

  The detectives, searching around the bungalow, found a partly emptied milk bottle on the back doorstep, and this milk bottle immediately became the darling of Superintendent Cherrill’s heart, for on it were some splendid bloodstained fingerprints. The thief-cum-murderer had apparently hurried from the bungalow with still gory hands and, suffering from an acute thirst, he had spotted the milk bottle and immediately had picked it up and enjoyed a zesty swig. He had then put it down on the step and gone his way.

  “See what happens, Dr. Simpson, when you’re not a beer-​drinking man,” observed Mr. Philpot.

  It seemed incredible that anybody could be so careless. The murderer might just as well have left a card with his name and address on it. Mr. Cherrill took the bottle back to his laboratory, and in no time the murderer was arrested.

  But our most interesting murder case that summer was one which occurred in July, a horrible case, with a little girl as its pathetic victim. It was an all-night job, in the depths of remotest Suffolk.

  We received the call to do the postmortem one hot July afternoon. Scotland Yard phoned to say that Chief Inspector Greeno had been put in charge of the case and would take us down to Suffolk with him. I was at Dr. Simpson’s flat, typing a manuscript, when the call came through, and we waited there until six o’clock, when Mr. Greeno arrived. He had with him Detective Sergeant F. Hodge, his invariable partner in crime, and downstairs waited a big sleek police car, in the back of which was stowed Mr. Greeno’s “murder bag” and an attaché case full of cigarettes “for when we interview people,” as Mr. Greeno explained.

  We all piled into the car and off we went. Mr. Greeno told us what he knew of the murder, and I tried to take it down in shorthand and wondered, not for the first time, at that story of George Bernard Shaw, who wrote his plays in impeccable shorthand on the tops of buses. However did he do it?

  Mr. Greeno said that the murder victim, a little girl of fourteen called Daphne Bacon, had been to Sunday school the previous day with her twin sister, across the fields from her home at Aldringham, a sleepy village where nothing ever seemed to happen. Life at Aldringham was so tranquil, indeed, that the appearance of a soldier in a black beret who hung around the village for several days—and who was said to have accosted one or two women in the locality—was regarded as a violent sensation. But Daphne was too young to worry about soldiers and the fields around her village were too familiar for her to think twice about walking in them alone. When she came out of Sunday school she hurried home ahead of her sister and her friends. On the way back she encountered the soldier, sitting on a stile…

  Shortly after five o’clock some picnickers heard moans and feeble cries for help coming from a rye field. They found the little girl, terribly battered about the head and in a semiconscious condition. One ran for help, the others did what they could for the child, who managed to gasp out an account of how she had been attacked by the soldier. Then she collapsed into total unconsciousness. She was rushed to Ipswich Hospital and operated on, but it was hopeless and an hour or so later she died.

  The soldier had meantime disappeared.

  This was the story of the case which Mr. Greeno gave us. Then, as the drive was a long one, conversation in the car turned to other things, the car purred steadily on along the Essex roads, between dusty summer hedges and through quiet little towns, while the fine summer evening pleasantly waned. As we approached Col­chester Mr. Greeno suggested we should stop there for dinner at the George. Dr. Simpson agreed; it seemed that on a previous murder job together they had made an excellent dinner at the George. So to the George we went.

  That was my first visit to the George and Colchester. After the war I got to know the place well, for my sister Elizabeth spent several years scenic-designing for Robert Digby’s repertory company at Colchester, and many an evening have I sat in the George talking with members of the rep company and drinking cherry brandy. But I never went to the George without thinking of my first visit there with Chief Inspector Greeno, CKS, and Sergeant Hodge. We sat in the lounge, sipped sherry, and talked not about Michael Redgrave’s Macbeth and Olivier’s Mr. Puff and how ridiculous so-and-so had looked in those bishop’s gaiters in last week’s production of Robert’s Wife, but about murder. Murders past and murders present. And then we all went into the dining room and ate a very large dinner and talked about food, and holidays in Cornwall, and the Three Pilchards at Polperro, and had a very merry time. Rather dif
ficult to believe we were on a murder investigation!

  After the George came the road again. Essex gave way to Suffolk and sunset to twilight. The motion of the car made me feel sleepy, and the gentlemen were talking cricket, which was not a subject liable to keep me on tenterhooks, anyway. But at length we arrived at Ipswich, which naturally brought my thoughts around to Mr. Pickwick and the Lady in Curlpapers, and while I was reflecting cozily on these things the car stopped at the hospital and our party was joined by the county pathologist, Dr. Eric Biddle, formerly at Guy’s and a great personal friend of Dr. Simpson’s. He climbed gaily into the car, cheerful and charming. Conversation, which had flagged, received a new impetus from Dr. Biddle and he was soon talking, very delightfully, about the forthcoming election, the ancient Vikings, and Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

  So on and on we went. Now we were gradually drawing toward the coast, and the sky, darkening as it was, assumed a translucent quality which betrayed that the sea was not so very far away. Presently we slackened in speed, the car was approaching Aldringham, at last we scrunched slowly along a rough and narrow lane and stopped outside a farm. Here two or three members of the Suffolk police awaited us. We got stiffly from the car and walked toward them.

  It was now after ten at night; the light was the palest, dimmest gray and everything was silent as water, excepting for the crickets whirring in the grass. There was just enough light left for us to view the field where the murder had taken place. However, before we went to the field, Mr. Greeno (as always very definitely the man in command), asked if accommodation had been fixed for himself and Sergeant Hodge. The hapless officer who had arranged these things replied that accommodation had been fixed at a temperance hotel. Mr. Greeno quivered in the dusk.