Murder on the Home Front
Page 27
So that was the end of that. She continued with her senior member of the staff. Moodily I recompiled the list of qualifications required by applicants. It now read:
“Typing.
Good verbatim shorthand.
Tact.
Interested in crime.
No objection to mortuaries and corpses.
Reasonably fast runner.”
After this the applications dwindled and finally dried up, even though I rustled around among all my friends who had so often declared they would give anything to have a job like mine. It was no use. The ones who didn’t object to bodies couldn’t run fast, or skip around, while the rare ones with athletic abilities had no inclination toward mortuaries.
“Women,” I complained angrily to my sister, “don’t seem to be able to run and they don’t seem to be genuinely keen on dead bodies.”
She thought it was terribly funny.
And then the clouds lifted. One day at Guy’s a physiotherapist came up to me and said, “Oh, Miss Lefebure, I do hope you haven’t found anybody to take over your job yet.”
I replied I hadn’t.
She looked pleased and explained she had a cousin to whom she had mentioned my job and the cousin had expressed a very keen desire to know if it were still going vacant. “She’s working with the Brighton police. She’s a trained secretary, very efficient and reliable, and extremely interested in crime.”
“Does she mind postmortems? For it’s all postmortems. Close up,” I said hopelessly.
“Oh, she’d rather enjoy them, I think. Her father’s a vet, so she’s used to cuttings-up.”
I became much more interested. “Is she a brisk, nippy type? I mean, can she move fast? Can she run?”
“She’s very healthy and lively,” said the physiotherapist, looking a trifle surprised. “I daresay she could run quite fast if she had to.”
“That sounds marvelous.” I tried not to become too optimistic.
CKS was very charming and understanding about my leaving him and assured me, with a twinkle in his eye, that the first ten years of marriage were the worst.
On November 1 Miss X, whose real name was Jean Scott Dunn, came along to Harley Street for an interview. It all went swimmingly. At the end of November J. flew home from India, we got married, and Miss Dunn took over my job. Suffice to say she has proved to be a far more Perfect Secretary than I ever was, lightning quick, highly efficient, everything I had planned Miss X to be.
Apart from being a perfect secretary she is very charming, and I am happy to say we are excellent friends.
As for me, I soon discovered I had exchanged the comparative peace and quiet of the mortuaries for a life of nerve-racking hurly-burly.
From time to time I go back to Guy’s to visit my old friends, and occasionally then I get a peek into a mortuary. I have heard retired reporters remark upon the nostalgia which fills them when they return to their old office, see the familiar old typewriter standing on the familiar old desk. The same nostalgia grips me when I see a body lying on a p.m. table.
Yes, I still miss the job sadly. I miss the mortuaries, the murders, above all I miss all those very good friends I made. The coroners’ officers and mortuary keepers, the police officers and detectives I met, the eminent personalities I knew, and the more humble yet equally individual and interesting people who kept me so happy in their company…I miss them all. Those five years I spent as Dr. Keith Simpson’s secretary were five of the happiest and most absorbing years of my life.
This is not to say that I am not happily married, because, thank heaven, I am. But sometimes, at teatime, seated amidst the din and turmoil of nursery tea, I long suddenly for those afternoons in the Gordon Museum, eating anchovy toast and tranquilly describing carcinomas of the bowel and tumors of the breast. Or I think how nice and quiet the corpses were. How altogether better balanced my nerves were, in those days when I devoted myself to crime, to autopsies and violent deaths and gruesome murders. Motherhood and domesticity have undoubtedly undermined me. Nowadays I jump when doors slam, and wake up imagining burglars are moving around my kitchen in the small hours. The dear old public mortuaries, without exaggeration, were sanctuaries compared with my present existence. Murders are infinitely less exhausting than motherhood.
Which is not something I am saying merely for effect. Like everything else in this book it’s the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth…
Photos
Dr. Keith Simpson
Harry West, the Southwark mortuary keeper
Mr. Ireland, assistant to the Gordon Museum, checking data with the aid of a skeleton.
Harry Dobkin
The Trial of Harry Dobkin (Jarrolds)
The Baptist Chapel cellar where the body of Mrs. Dobkin was found. (The sticks arranged in front of the fireplace show where the body lay.)
The remains as they appeared on discovery, covered with dust and cobwebs.
The remains after they had been cleaned of debris. (Notice how the lower legs and forearms have been chopped and also the charred effects from burning.)
Joan Pearl Wolfe’s skull, as shown to the jury. (This was the first time the skull of
a murdered person had been produced in court.)
Section of the birch stake with the murdered girl’s hairs adhering to it.
The hooked knife with which Sangret stabbed Joan Pearl Wolfe.
August Sangret
Albert Pierrepoint, the public executioner
The assistant chief constable of Kent, K. Horwood; Dr. Simpson; and Chief Superintendent F. H. Smeed on their way to the scene of a crime.
The River Lea, where Mrs. Manton’s body was found. (The stake was placed by the police to show the exact spot.)
The police slide shown in local movie theaters.
The body of Robert Smith in Kempston Ballast Hole.
The stake with which Smith was killed. Inset shows enlargement of hair adhering to the stake.
Alec de Antiquis lying shot on the pavement. (A photographer who happened to be passing took this picture.)
Charley Brown’s. The door through which the stabbing took place.
Reuben Martirosoff
Frank Everitt, otherwise known as the Duke
Acknowledgments
The author wishes especially to thank Dr. Keith Simpson for generously allowing her access to his records.
Acknowledgments are due to the following for permission to use photographs in their possession: to Thomas Fall for the photograph of Dr. Simpson; to Mr. G. H. Higgins for the photograph of de Antiquis; to Express Newspapers for the photographs of Frank Everitt, Reuben Martirosoff, Auguste Sangret, and “Charley Brown’s,” and for the photographs of Assistant Chief Constable Horwood, Dr. Simpson, and Chief Superintendent Smeed.
Questions for Further Discussion
1. Early in the first chapter, the author writes, “There are people who say corpses don’t talk, but indeed they do. They talk of easy lives in pleasant homes, of hard, dirty lives in rooms where lice crawl up and down the walls and the ceiling drips, like a decaying skin, in clammy stinking drops to the floor.” Is this statement reflective of a major theme in the book? Why or why not?
2. Does Miss Molly’s choice to work for Keith Simpson strike you as brave? What do the reactions of her family and friends tell you about the choices available to women at the time?
3. Some of the cases Lefebure discusses are cut-and-dried, while others are quite complicated. Which stories resonated the most with you? Why?
4. How does the author give you a sense of the Blitz and the setting in which her story unfolds?
5. There are moments in Murder on the Home Front that are quite funny. Do you think that humor can ever counteract the sadness of death?
6. In some of these cases, notably the trials of McDonald and McKinstry, the guilty evade punishment in the legal system. Do you think that Lefebure implies that they’ll meet with another form of justice?
7. Lefebure write
s, “Nobody could look into the murderer’s mind and probe the quick and heart of the matter…It is this ultimate secrecy of each one of us which makes the story of everyday life so fascinating.” Do you agree with the second part of her statement? Why or why not?
8. The last execution by hanging in the United Kingdom was carried out in 1964, less than two decades after the book’s end. What might you infer about the author’s view of the death penalty from her depictions of executions?
9. At the end, when the author has to look for her replacement, she finds it difficult to find someone who’s not squeamish. Would you ever be able to take on a job like the one she did?
About the Author
Molly Lefebure was secretary to acclaimed forensic pathologist Dr. Keith Simpson during the Second World War. Her memoir of her time at the Department of Forensic Medicine was originally published in 1955 as Evidence for the Crown. She went on to write children’s books, a biography of Coleridge, and several novels. She became a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature before her death in 2013.
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Welcome
Editor’s Note
Foreword
Chapter 1: A Good Job for Corpses
Chapter 2: My First Day in the Mortuaries
Chapter 3: Life in the Mortuaries
Chapter 4: My First Murder
Chapter 5: Tale of Two Lovers
Chapter 6: Murder on Waterloo Bridge
Chapter 7: Portrait of a Merry Widow
Chapter 8: Thoughts and Episodes of Spring
Chapter 9: “In the Spring a Young Man’s Fancy”
Chapter 10: Case of a Lifetime
Chapter 11: The Wigwam Murder
Chapter 12: The Gentle Art of Hanging
Chapter 13: Interiors
Chapter 14: Portrait of a Fairy
Chapter 15: Severe Testing of a Secretary
Chapter 16: Underworld
Chapter 17: Murder in a Fog
Chapter 18: War Work
Chapter 19: A Secret Weapon
Chapter 20: Body in a Hole
Chapter 21: Private Diary
Chapter 22: Boys of the New Brigade
Chapter 23: “’Tis Love, ’Tis Love That Makes the World Go Round…”
Chapter 24: Murder at “Charley Brown’s”
Chapter 25: Coming through the Rye
Chapter 26: The Black in the Smoke
Chapter 27: I Find a Successor
Photos
Acknowledgments
Questions for Further Discussion
About the Author
Newsletters
Table of Contents
Copyright
Copyright © 1954, 1955 by the beneficiaries of Molly Lefebure
Cover © 2014 by Hachette Book Group, Inc.
All rights reserved. In accordance with the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976, the scanning, uploading, and electronic sharing of any part of this book without the permission of the publisher is unlawful piracy and theft of the author’s intellectual property. If you would like to use material from the book (other than for review purposes), prior written permission must be obtained by contacting the publisher at permissions@hbgusa.com. Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.
This Grand Central Publishing edition is published by arrangement with Sphere, an imprint of Little, Brown Book Group, 100 Victoria Embankment, London EC4Y 0DY.
First published in Great Britain in 1954 by Heinemann Books.
First U.S. Edition published in 1955 by Lippincott.
Published in 2013 by Sphere.
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ISBN 978-1-4555-7607-4
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