Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Nobody would answer that one, although it was clear there were several who could. Mr. Chapman received numerous anonymous phone calls about the Duke’s associations with a black market gang headed by a foreigner, probably a Russian. Obviously many Londoners who preferred to remain nameless were taking a keen interest in the Yard’s investigations. And reporters who began sleuthing around on their own investigations, anxious to get some exclusive inside stuff, were told to “lay off” by similar anonymous phone callers. The underworld wasn’t going to welcome front-page exposés of the Duke’s private life—or lives.

  The murdered man’s taxi had meanwhile been found abandoned on a pile of rubble in a North Kensington cul-de-sac. It was plain that Everitt, as Dr. Simpson had claimed, had been shot from behind while in his driving seat. He had then been lifted on to the backseat of the taxi, driven to Lambeth Bridge, and stowed away in the pump house. His taxi man’s registration badge had been torn from his jacket. His pockets had been ransacked. Under the driver’s seat was found the top of a propelling pencil. The pencil itself, however, was missing.

  CKS and Mr. Chapman were both of the opinion that one man alone could not have lifted the bulky Everitt from the taxi, carried him to the pump house, and squeezed him through the aperture of that little building. The murder definitely looked like a two-man job. And presently a witness came forward to say he had seen Everitt pick up two well-dressed men at 12:15 a.m. October 18 (the morning of the murder), close by the Richard Cœur de Lion statue outside the House of Commons.

  Tracing these two men, however, proved impossible, even though Mr. Cherrill did discover what were thought to be the murderer’s fingerprints on the steering wheel of the taxi.

  So the investigations into the Duke’s death hung fire for a fortnight; then a second murder occurred. This second murder never actually led to the solving of the mystery of the Duke’s death, officially, but after the second killing had been unraveled the Yard dropped investigations into the Everitt case. There really seems little doubt that the men who killed Everitt were the men who killed…

  …the man who was found lying in the back of a small saloon car parked near a Notting Hill bomb site between five and six in the morning two weeks after the Everitt murder. He too was found by a constable on patrol. This constable shone his torch into the car and saw a man stretched out on the backseat, his hat over his face, apparently asleep. The constable tried to waken the man, and in so doing dislodged the hat, which fell aside to reveal the bloodstained face of a very obvious corpse.

  Investigations into this case came under Chief Superintendent George Somerset (later to take charge of the Hendon Detectives’ Training School). Mr. Somerset was quickly able to identify the dead man as one Reuben Martirosoff, known generally as “Russian Robert”; no other, in fact, than the foreign black market gang leader Mr. Chapman had anonymously been phoned about so often in connection with the Everitt murder.

  The car in which Martirosoff was found lying was his own, and he had driven out in it, Mr. Somerset ascertained, at 11:00 p.m. the previous night, in a great hurry, in response to a phone caller who wanted Russian Robert to meet him at Edgware Road Underground station.

  Dr. Donald Teare did the p.m. on Russian Robert. He found that the deceased had been shot, as Everitt had been shot, with a small-caliber revolver, at very close range, through the back of the head. Russian Robert had clearly been killed in the early hours of the morning he was discovered in his car.

  The police now began a detailed search of London’s black market.

  This intensive search presently produced the information that Russian Robert had frequently been seen in the company of two Poles, one of whom was named Marian. These two Poles were working several rackets in the black market, including the “handbag game,” deals in foreign currency and in looted jewelry, and so on. Finally, Mr. Somerset succeeded in arresting the man Marian, whose full name was Marian Grondkowski.

  Grondkowski was a good-looking young man of thirty-three, a Polish Army deserter, who had started his adventurous career gun-running for the Spanish International Brigade, had fought with the Brigade, escaped to France after being taken prisoner in Spain, had fought with the French in World War II, had fought with the Foreign Legion after the fall of France, volunteered for the Polish Army, and thus had come to England. After two years in a Special Sabotage Unit he had deserted and resorted to London’s black market for a more profitable and less gallant livelihood than soldiering. He ran very successful rackets in foreign currency exchange and was not slow to threaten his clients with a revolver if intimidation were necessary to make them come across with currency or jewelry. He was not at all a salubrious character, and it was no surprise to the police that the bloodstained fingerprints Mr. Cherrill discovered on Russian Robert’s steering wheel belonged to Grondkowski.

  In Grondkowski’s pocket was a small piece of paper bearing the name and address of a Henryk Malinowski.

  The police went to Malinowski’s lodgings and found Russian Robert’s signet ring among Malinowski’s things. He was therefore arrested and taken to the Yard.

  Malinowski was also a Polish Army deserter, aged twenty-five. He had fought in the defense of Warsaw in 1939, had been taken prisoner by the Germans and put in a concentration camp, had escaped, joined the Foreign Legion, had come to England and enlisted in the Polish Armored Division, and had deserted from the division in May 1944. He had been caught and sent to the international military prison, from which, nothing daunted, he had escaped. He had then come to London, where he started working foreign currency rackets. Both he and Grondkowski had finally joined forces with Russian Robert, thirty-nine years old, Caucasian born; an international crook with convictions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, Potsdam, London. Yes, Russian Robert had been around. He had, however, reached the stage where getting around was difficult, since he had been permanently banished from France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and South America. So he had settled down—for the time being, at any rate—in London, where he led a lucrative existence as a fence and a black marketeer in currency.

  Exactly why the trio reached the point where Grondkowski and Malinowski found it necessary to murder Russian Robert is not known. Which of the two Poles actually shot Russian Robert is not known, either, although Grondkowski’s fingerprints were on the steering wheel. Both men habitually carried revolvers, and neither of them could have entertained scruples about killing after the lives they had led.

  Grondkowski, questioned at the Yard, accused Malinowski of doing the actual shooting. He said on the night of the murder they had met Russian Robert at an Underground station, had had drinks with him and had discussed future black market plans. Finally, they had come out of the pub and had all gotten into Russian Robert’s car, which had refused to start. So the two Poles pushed the car while Russian Robert remained at the wheel. Malinowski then muttered to Grondkowski that he was going to finish Russian Robert off. Grondkowski told his companion he was crazy to think of such a thing. Soon they got the car to start; Grondkowski climbed into the seat next to the driver while Malinowski got into the back. They had only driven a short distance when Malinowski shot Russian Robert point-blank in the back of the head. As soon as he had fired Malinowski leaned over and grabbed the steering wheel, and Grondkowski stopped the car, opened the door, and got out. He had decided to have nothing further to do with the matter. But Malinowski threatened to shoot him, too, so he was obliged to assist in lifting Russian Robert into the backseat. After Malinowski had ransacked the murdered man’s pockets, the two shared his money between them.

  But there has never yet been a murder in which two killers have been involved without each accusing the other of doing the actual deed of destruction. Malinowski in his turn described how Grondkowski had done the shooting. “It was I who sat beside Robert. Marian was in the back. Then I heard a shot and Robert’s head fell forward. Marian asked me to find the brake and I stopped the car. I got out of the car and did not do anythin
g.” In other words, a complete reversal of roles.

  Marian insisted (according to this version) that Malinowski must help him move the body into the backseat. But Malinowski refused, so Grondkowski pulled the dead man into the rear seat single-handedly. He then ransacked the deceased’s pockets, and the cash found therein was divided between the two Poles, Grondkowski getting the larger share.

  At Grondkowski’s lodgings the police found a .32 automatic which was undoubtedly the weapon used for the murder.

  Which man actually fired the shot didn’t really matter technically, for under the law both were chargeable with the murder. Both of them were tried, found guilty, and executed.

  Everything pointed to the fact that in all likelihood they had shot Everitt, too. He had been killed in exactly the same fashion as Russian Robert and with a similar, although not identical, weapon. And articles belonging to Everitt, including the propelling pencil which had lost its cap, were found in Grondkowski’s pockets. But at the time of his arrest for the killing of Russian Robert there was not enough hard evidence available to charge him with the murder of Everitt, too.

  It is said that Chief Inspector Chapman visited the two Poles in their condemned cells shortly before they were executed in an eleventh-hour attempt to discover whether they had shot Everitt. Mr. Chapman never disclosed whether they talked or not.

  So the public will never know whether Grondkowski and Malinowski shot taxi driver Frank Everitt. The final verdict of the coroner, Mr. Harvey Wyatt, was one of “murder against a person or persons unknown.”

  There was an interesting little tailpiece to this story. On the morning of November 12, about a fortnight after Russian Robert had met his death, another Pole, a young soldier of twenty-six, was found dead on Westminster Bridge, kneeling in a huddled attitude at the side of the National Fire Service pump house there, with close-range firearm wounds of the head. (He was, most conveniently, only a few hundred yards from Scotland Yard’s main entrance.)

  The police thought this might be yet a third black market murder, so they began making full investigations into his death, and Dr. Simpson was asked to do a p.m.

  Det. Supt. W. Parker and DDI Swain began searching for the revolver with which the dead man had been shot. They asked themselves if it might not be the weapon which had been used for killing Everitt. But this Pole, whose name was Tadeusz Rybczynski, had clearly committed suicide, Dr. Simpson discovered.

  The evidence at the inquest bore out his findings. Two British servicemen turned up to give phlegmatic British evidence. They had been on leave in London and had been crossing Westminster Bridge at 1:00 a.m. on November 12 when they had noticed a young Polish soldier leaning on the balustrade of the bridge beside the pump house. He looked deeply depressed and self-occupied, and one of the witnesses, turning to the other, said briefly, “Come on, let’s get out of this. There’s going to be another suicide…”

  So, being British, they left him to it. A chap can commit suicide if he wants to, dammit!

  Nobody could discover why Rybczynski shot himself. He did not appear, however, to be in any way connected with the black market, and his death provided no clues to the Everitt killing. And certainly there were plenty of personal reasons why a lonely Pole, in England in 1945, should commit suicide. It has not been a happy thing, since 1939, to be Polish.

  Not for honest Poles, anyway. For the Grondkowskis and Malinowskis life was simple; life always is simple for them. First of all, fighting kept them busy, and then they found crime more lucrative than fighting, so they turned to crime. The black market provided them with a satisfying existence. Not for them homesickness or despair; they forged ahead in a devil-may-care, hand-to-mouth, flourishing style, that went very well until they forgot themselves and adopted Foreign Legion tactics in real Hollywood manner. They blocked the Duke’s light, they blocked Russian Robert’s light. But you can’t get away with things like that in the Smoke. To quote one of my more colorful acquaintances, “Block a light, and the horse’s nightcap is a stone ginger.”*

  * Kill someone, and the hangman’s noose is a sure thing.

  CHAPTER 27

  I Find a Successor

  By the late autumn of 1945 I had been working for Keith Simpson nearly five years. Those five years had been so interesting they seemed like no time at all. I had seen between seven and eight thousand autopsies, and the work fascinated me more even than when I had started it. But the time had come for me to change to another sphere.

  The war had finally wound up, and letters from India indicated that my future husband would be home some time at the end of November. We had decided to marry as soon as he arrived home. J. pointed out that I could either go on working after I was married or retire and devote myself wholeheartedly to domesticity. Being a determined careerist I decided to retire from my job the day before I married him and settle down to a profound bout of matrimony.

  “You see, it is like this. I am not really at all a domesticated person,” I explained. “But I’ve thought it out, and I reckon I can do about eight years hard domesticity, but I doubt if I’ll be able to stick it much longer than that. So I’ll do eight years and devote myself to having children and taking care of them while they are really little. Then you’ll have to let me broaden my activities and have a serious attempt at the writing. Okay?”

  “Okay,” said J. “Fair enough.”

  It was with a sad heart, nevertheless, that I set about looking for a successor to my job with CKS. I knew quite well that marriage and mortuaries wouldn’t mix; I also firmly believed that when a woman marries she should genuinely devote herself for several years at least to nothing but marriage (it’s the only way to learn the business properly and make it work), but all the same it made me very dismal to think I would have to give up my mortuary existence with Dr. Keith Simpson. The least I could do for Dr. Simpson, I felt, was to bequeath to him a new secretary who was absolutely a hundred percent Perfect. The sort of secretary people dream about. Then he would be able to say, “Well, it’s true Miss L. married and left me, but if she hadn’t done so I would never have found Miss X, and that would have been a calamity, for Miss X is…” And here my imagination soared into starry-eyed visions of what Miss X would be.

  So I started looking for Miss X. She proved exceedingly difficult to find.

  I let it be known among my good friends at Guy’s that I was ultimately marrying, and that a successor would therefore be needed. The response was terrific. Apparently nearly every young woman in the place had a burning desire to work with Keith Simpson and learn the ins and outs of murder.

  Because the stream of applicants was so heavy one of the other secretaries let me use her office during the lunch hour. So there I sat, behind an impressive desk, interviewing would-be successors.

  Would-be…Would-be? Yes, aching to be, until they came to that question, “Oh, by the way, I wouldn’t have to go into the actual mortuaries, would I?”

  “You would work in the mortuaries, dear.”

  “But not along with the bodies, surely. Don’t you have your office somewhere else?”

  “You sit alongside the corpse and type. Dr. Simpson dictates his p.m. report as he does the actual p.m. When he’s dictating his findings in the heart he is cutting up the heart. The same with the brain, and so on. But don’t you worry about that. You’ll soon grow to love it. It’s terribly interesting.”

  They made it very clear they wouldn’t grow to love it, and returned to their own work with eager expressions.

  I began to feel pretty desperate. Then one day while I was walking in the Guy’s quadrangle there came up to me the secretary of one of the senior members of the hospital staff. She was fortyish, very smart, highly efficient, charming, an experienced and perfect secretary to her fingertips. She smiled and began:

  “Excuse me, Miss Lefebure, but I hear that you are soon getting married and that you are looking for somebody to take over your job.”

  I replied that was so.

&nbs
p; “I think I might be interested. You see, I’ve been doing my present job for a very long time now, and I really should adore a change. Besides, I have always envied you your work with Dr. Simpson. I’m frightfully interested in crime.”

  “What about the bodies?” I had grown wary by this time. “You would find that you worked all day every day in public mortuaries, doing p.ms. It’s nothing but p.ms., really, the job is one continuous round of postmortems which you attend with Dr. Simpson.”

  “Oh, but I wouldn’t mind the mortuaries. Bodies don’t worry me in the least; I’m perfectly used to seeing bits and pieces of people all the time. I’ve always wanted to see a postmortem examination. But let’s discuss it some other time, shall we? I really ought to fly now. Can you have lunch with me tomorrow?”

  We arranged a luncheon date, and she turned toward the car park and I began hurrying to the Medical School. As I was tripping up the front steps CKS shot out of the entrance, greeting me with, “Come on, Miss L. I’ve arranged to do a quick one at Essex County Hospital before we go to Buckhurst Hill.” He was running down the steps past me as he spoke, and I wheeled around in my tracks and scooted after him. We dashed across the quadrangle to the car and were in it and driving out into the Borough in a flash.

  Next day I met the distinguished secretary who coveted my job. “Now, let’s discuss things,” I began. She shook her head.

  “My dear, it wouldn’t do for me at all.”

  “But you said you didn’t mind bodies and mortuaries,” I said.

  “Oh, I’m not worried about the bodies. The trouble is I’m too old. I was watching you and your Dr. Simpson yesterday, sprinting across the quad. My dear, I can’t run like that, I haven’t run like that for years. I’d never keep up with him. I’ve never done an awful lot of sprinting anyway, and I’m too old to start now.”