Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  “A temperance hotel?”

  “Yes, sir. It was the most convenient place I could find for you.”

  “Temperance hotels,” replied Mr. Greeno witheringly, “are never convenient. Find another hotel. Get on the telephone and book me rooms at the Dolphin.”

  “I’ll try, sir.”

  The rest of the party gurgled delightedly. Obviously all shared Mr. Greeno’s views on temperance hotels.

  For my part I have never stayed at a temperance hotel and would literally have to be dragged into one, because a dictum instilled into me by my father went, “Never go to a temperance hotel, my dear child. People who don’t drink don’t know how to eat, either. The result is they get all bunged up with wind and water, and a bloke who is all bunged up with wind and water’s no good to anyone. Just one big bellyache. Keep off temperance hotels.”

  Therefore I perfectly understood Mr. Greeno on temperance hotels.

  The officer went off to telephone the Dolphin as instructed, and the rest of us walked a short distance farther up the lane to the stile; the stile on which the soldier in the black beret had loitered. “And nothing’s been seen of the fellow since the murder?” observed Mr. Greeno.

  “No, sir. He’s made himself scarce. But we’ve had a man here all the time keeping a watch, in case.”

  “Yes, he may come back. Anything more known about him?”

  “Two or three attacks on women and girls by a soldier have been reported in the neighborhood recently, prior to the murder. It sounds as if they might be the work of the same chap.”

  We came to a gate in the hedge and went into a rough meadow which led into the rye field. The rye was tall, ripe, and ready for cutting, growing thick and sere, the long-bearded heads hanging heavily and smelling bitter and dusty. We skirted around the field by the hedge, a local officer leading the way. “This is where she was first attacked, sir. There’s a bloodstain here, a pretty large one.” Somebody produced a torch, and CKS and Mr. Greeno bent over the dark ground. After examining this place we followed a track beaten through the rye, obviously made by the soldier trampling through the rye dragging the girl along the ground after him. Blood was sprinkled on the stalks of rye along this track, and these the detectives collected. “He pulled her by the feet, her head trailing,” commented CKS. We spent some time examining this track, collecting bloodstained pieces of rye and grass.

  Then we came to the place where the dying girl had been left lying and had finally been found by the picnickers. Here there were more heavy bloodstains and we spent some time there while the two pathologists and the detectives peered minutely at everything. I was kept busy putting stalks of rye into the little buff envelopes and labeling these and jotting notes. The night was falling fast, and a hungry throng of mosquitoes had come out to feast on our legs. It was sheer torture, and to add to it I couldn’t slap or scratch myself or exclaim, but had to stand coolly taking notes and gumming down envelopes, as if there were no such things as mosquitoes. Furtively I rubbed my legs one against the other, swearing to myself. The rest of the party were protected somewhat by their trousers; undoubtedly my legs were the main target. But at last somebody did remark upon the insects. But Mr. Greeno and CKS were so engrossed they wouldn’t have turned a hair, I do believe, had they been attacked by a swarm of vampire bats.

  It seemed a very long time to me before we left that rye field. It was now quite dark. We stumbled back into the lane and halted once more by the stile. Instructions were issued that a watch should be kept there all night and that if anybody came along they were to be closely questioned. I am glad I did not have to take part in this eerie vigil.

  Then back our original party drove to Ipswich for the postmortem. The journey nearly sent me to sleep; it was after eleven and I always find travel by night a sleepy business. At Ipswich we went for a few moments into Dr. Biddle’s house, where we had hasty coffee and sandwiches. I made a quick attempt to tidy myself up, my hair was literally on end, but I was past the quick tidy-up stage, and I had to resign myself to spending the rest of the night looking like a headhunter from Borneo. I made a pass at myself with a lipstick and scurried off to join the gentlemen, who were all agog to get to the mortuary. Thence we repaired, just after midnight, and at 12:15 a.m. the two pathologists started the p.m.

  This was in the p.m. room of the Suffolk County Hospital, but to be perfectly honest I do not remember the occasion very clearly, for the autopsy was a lengthy one and before long I was engaged in an awful struggle to keep awake. Not only to keep awake, but somehow or other to appear alert and bright-eyed and to take Dr. Simpson’s dictation.

  The two pathologists of course were wide awake and intently bending over the body. Behind them Messrs. Greeno and Hodge, both also wide awake, peered intently, too. The surgeons who had operated on the girl, the anesthetist, and two house officers stood around the table in white surgery coats and heavy mufflers—it was very cold in the p.m. room—and tried to appear as lively as Dr. Biddle and CKS. The several police officers present allowed themselves occasional semistifled yawns—which was a relief to me—while the mortuary attendant blinked and swabbed, swabbed and blinked, and looked as if he took a very dim view of murders. But the most touching sight were three little students, Guy’s students, who happened to be at that time (under some emergency training scheme or the other) working at Suffolk County Hospital and who had turned gallantly out to watch CKS do this p.m. Poor creatures! Muffled in coats and scarves they stood there, like Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and I kept jerking myself awake by watching them jerking themselves awake.

  The autopsy showed that the girl had been attacked with a stick or some similar heavy weapon. She had warded off the first blows with her hands, but had ultimately fallen to the ground and while lying there had received two further very savage blows to the head. After this she had been dragged along the ground, head trailing, through the rye. The cause of her death was shock from multiple fractures of the skull with contusion of the brain.

  As a matter of fact that midnight autopsy was a tragic occasion for other reasons than those we knew at the time. The little body on the p.m. table aroused everyone’s pity, but we could not know that within a few weeks Dr. Biddle himself would die of violent head injuries, an emergency brain operation being performed in that same hospital in a desperate attempt to save him. He was an enthusiastic motorcyclist, and while driving a sidecar he had himself constructed, and of which he was very proud, he crashed head-on into a concrete road obstacle. Therefore the p.m. report which he and CKS constructed together was finally put before a jury by CKS alone.

  But luckily that night—or rather morning—the two pathologists, who were also such great friends, did not know that this was the last murder case they were going to work on together. When the p.m. was over we said good-bye to the members of the hospital staff who had attended the postmortem, and to Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and returned to Dr. Biddle’s house. He wanted us to have something more to eat before the journey back to London, but CKS had discovered there was a train at two-forty-something-or-the-other, and so he and I made one of our famous whirlwind departures. Mr. Greeno put his car at our disposal and we vanished into the night, leaving Mr. Greeno and Dr. Biddle joking together in the roadway…

  The two-forty-something-or-the-other was late, and the distinguished pathologist and secretary waited for it, perched disconsolately side by side on an empty luggage truck on the windy deserted platform, and shuddered. Presently along came a goods train, the longest I’ve ever seen, an infinite line of trucks rocking along like a procession of elephants linked trunk-by-tail, I thought, all wearing heavy metal anklets and clanking and mumbling and clinking and grumbling their way to the next town and the next circus. And then they had gone, and their metallic bumps and jostlings had dwindled into the darkness, and after what felt like an age our train arrived. We seemed to be the only passengers on it. We fell into a carriage and dozed dismally and uncomfortably, like two wretched strays, all the way to Lo
ndon.

  “Well, if this is what being a detective means, you can keep it,” I thought at one point, and then fell into a bitty doze again.

  At Liverpool Street we were met by a Flying Squad car—oh blessed vehicle! sleek and shiny and driven by a detective who was well known to us, for he had accompanied us on several country jobs himself. He looked spruce and natty and lively as a lark, so that you would have thought it four in the afternoon instead of four in the morning. We made a last, brave attempt to appear frisky ourselves. Nevertheless, we sank rather limply into the seats of the car as we were whisked away through the city by our friend, who was chuckling over a drunk he had just trodden on in a doorway. “A Canadian. Just mumbled ‘Um-um’ and went on sleeping, peacefully as they come. They certainly breed ’em tough.”

  “You’re on a spell of night duty?”

  “Yes. Sometimes we hit lively spots, but it’s all very quiet tonight.”

  We drove down the empty, silent streets, glistening and cold as steel in the earliest early light. Outside Mansion House a constable stood on point duty, even though there wasn’t any traffic. “Keep a constable on duty outside the Mansion House all night every night,” explained our driver. “Always somebody on duty there.” In that deserted roadway the man looked weird and fantastic, standing motionless, gestureless, controlling traffic that never came in a London that appeared completely dead.

  About ten past four I had the exquisite, glorious, miraculous delight of laying me down in my bed. And then it was morning, an alarm clock was ringing, and Poplar mortuary was waiting with three p.ms. to be done at nine sharp…

  The soldier in the black beret was finally arrested for little Daphne’s murder, and on the last day of October CKS and I drove to Bury St. Edmunds for the trial. It was a very sunny, golden day, and we drove through Epping Forest, where the trees too were golden with autumn leaves. We passed through Bishop’s Stortford and from thence to Newmarket, where races were being held. Crowds of people were going to the races, including several gaunt old gypsy women in long black cloth coats trimmed with the famous “mog” (cat). I thought secretly I would have liked to have spent the day at Newmarket while CKS tootled on to the trial alone (not the thoughts of a Perfect Secretary by any means), but when we reached Bury it had a sound and scent of assizes, lawyers, and judges which was positively nineteenth-century and Dickensian. Sergeant Buzfuz might have appeared at any moment, I felt, along with Messrs. Snubbin, Skimpin, and Phunky, and we had lunch in an hotel thronged with red-faced English legal types who could all have sat as models to the artists Cruikshank or Phiz.

  After lunch we strolled around the ruins of the old castle and then it was time to go into court. The courtroom was dark, somber, crowded, and very stuffy. While we were waiting for the trial to begin, we were told some anecdotes about the prisoner, the soldier in the black beret, and the reign of terror he had imposed upon the women of the villages near Aldringham in the weeks preceding the murder.

  During the war often the strangest things happened so that even the sleepiest little country villages felt the impact of the violent world around them.

  When the prisoner appeared in the dock he was smiling broadly and seemed as proud and pleased as pie. He continued to beam all the way through the trial, and it was no surprise when he was found guilty but insane. He was sentenced to Broadmoor.

  We left Bury in the late-afternoon sunlight and drove past broad fields of sugar beet, where cheerful parties of Italian prisoners of war, in shabby old uniforms, were taking up the beet crops to load onto trucks. The sun sank, the light dwindled, and a thick fog arrived. We also became involved in a fierce stream of traffic returning to London from Newmarket, so our journey home was highly unpleasant, driving virtually blind in the fog, only able to distinguish with difficulty the rear light of the car ahead of us, and the fog slowly freezing us. And it had been such a lovely day, almost like summer. But now, with a vengeance, we were driving into darkness, fog, London, and winter. October was gone; it was November. The last country murder of that summer season was finished, ahead of us lay fogbound London and all its sooty crime. So we drove back into the Smoke.

  CHAPTER 26

  The Black in the Smoke

  Time: the early hours of an autumn morning. Place: Lambeth Bridge. Character on stage: a police constable. He is walking slowly across the bridge and approaches a small brick National Fire Service pump house, disused now that the war is over. The constable flashes his torch methodically at the pump house and then flashes it hastily again, going close to look. There is a narrow aperture in the wall of the pump house, and through this aperture somebody has stuffed the body of a rather large man. The constable looks again, just to make certain, and then hurries off to a call box.

  Later in the morning: a number of detectives arrive, headed by square-set, rosy-faced Chief Inspector Chapman. With him is Dr. Keith Simpson. They spend a considerable time poking around the pump house. Then they drive away, and an undertaker’s van comes up and the body of the large man is with difficulty removed from the pump house and taken to Southwark mortuary…

  Mr. Chapman was present at the p.m. The dead man had been shot through the back of the head with a small-caliber revolver at very close range. Mr. Chapman, at that early stage, could only tell us that the Yard thought the deceased was probably a taxi driver named Everitt, and it was suspected he had been mixed up with the black market.

  After the p.m. Mr. Chapman returned to the Yard for a conference on the case, while CKS and I went around to Guy’s to write a detailed report. We finished it just before lunch and Dr. Simpson said, “I’d like to recheck Everitt’s sitting measurements, Miss L. After you’ve had a bite could you stroll around to the mortuary and get West to help you take them? Measure him in a sitting position, sitting upright. Can you manage that, do you think?”

  I replied I certainly could and borrowed CKS’s tape measure for the job. After a quick lunch I scurried around to my fellow conspirator, Harry West. He was sitting in his little office, drinking a cup of tea and eating Spam sandwiches. I explained my mission and West said of course he’d help, anything any time you ask, Miss Molly. So into the refrigerator room we went.

  The premises were deserted at that hour, and we had the entire mortuary to ourselves. This gave us a gay and lively feeling. West opened the big refrigerator and drew out a long metal tray on which lay the murdered man. With considerable skill West slid the tray onto a trestle table. The dead taxi driver was, as I have said, a very large and heavy man, and moreover he was stark stiff with rigor mortis. West suggested he should raise the man to the required sitting posture and that I should measure him. I agreed and West, with difficulty, propped up the body. But then came a snag. I wasn’t tall enough to reach from the tray on which the body sat to the top of the deceased’s head. West said we’d better swap. I would have to prop up the body while he measured it.

  No sooner said than done. He took the tape measure and I put my shoulder to the dead man’s brawny back. But there is nothing in the world so unresponsive and difficult to manage as a stiff. There was a sudden heart-rending shriek from me…and a yell of horror from West as I collapsed backward with the naked and dead taxi man clutched in my arms. I fell flat backward under his weight and West, whose horror had turned to laughter, had a lot of trouble rescuing me. It was a ghastly moment, and I became convulsed with, let me admit it, hysterical giggles. The dead man looked as if he must have been a pretty obstinate person in life; he was certainly so in death. Somehow we got him sitting upright again, with West holding him, and somehow I managed to reach and take the measurements. It was the most remarkable lunch hour I have ever spent.

  The dead man, Dr. Simpson decided, had been shot from behind, at very close range, unexpectedly, while he was seated at the wheel of his taxi.

  A week or two now passed, with the police busy over their investigations.

  London’s black market was, by the end of the war, a vast racket system attracting a
n array of crooks and criminals of all sorts. The “regular” London underworld was at that time swollen by hundreds of deserters from the services of the Allied nations; men in hiding who turned to the black market as their only possible source of income.

  The dead man was soon identified for certain as one Frank Everitt, a fifty-six-year-old driver employed by a Brixton taxi pool which specialized in conveying people home from West End nightclubs in the small hours. Everitt, however, had not been precisely what one might term a crystal-clear character. He was an ex–police sergeant, an ex–Home Guard corporal, and he was reputed to have been a “copper’s nark” (otherwise, a police informer). This wasn’t true, but the Yard did think it worthwhile probing other allegations that Everitt had been a “tea-leaf carrier,” that is, a taxi driver who conveys crooks around in the darkness.

  Whether this was so or not never really emerged, although it was presently pretty plain that he had been carrying a couple of crooks at the time he met his death. It certainly was established that Everitt, for the past fifteen years, had been living a double life. He enjoyed the pseudonym “the Duke,” because he had a weekend residence in Gloucestershire, which his associates considered very classy, indeed positively aristocratic. Hence the title of the Duke. To others he was known as “Honest Frank,” a name which may or may not have had a satirical ring. Besides the ménage in Gloucestershire he rejoiced in two other addresses: one in Battersea, where he didn’t live, and one in Streatham where, during the week, he did live.

  He was a married man who had succeeded in living apart from his wife for the past fifteen years. He had a substantial banking account. He appeared, on the surface, to be making a success of this Jekyll and Hyde existence. However, police probing revealed that he had been a person of uneasy disposition; acquaintances hinted he had behaved like a man who carried a “secret fear.” There was some evidence that the Duke had been planning to quit London for good; it had become a little too hot for him. But why?