by Rennie Airth
‘I understand she was on her way to visit her aunt. Does she live nearby?’
‘Just round the corner, in Montague Street. A Mrs Laski. She’s a widow, quite an elderly lady. Naturalized. Been living here since the Twenties. She’d sat up all night waiting for her niece to arrive, then rang the station this morning. By that time we’d found the girl’s wallet, so I had to take her over to Paddington to identify the body. Poor woman. Rosa was her only family. She got here soon after war broke out, but her parents were still in Poland, and they’re gone now most likely, or so Mrs Laski reckons.’
‘Gone?’
‘They’re Jewish,’ Cook explained. He caught Billy’s eye.
‘Anyway, she worked for a couple of years in the Polish community, Rosa did. Looking after refugee families, that kind of thing. But she wanted to be in the country – she grew up in a village – so she joined the Land Army. Her first job was on a farm in Norfolk, but that packed up earlier this year when men invalided out of the services came home looking for work. That’s when she was sent to Surrey. To Mr Madden’s place. This was the first time she’d come up to London. She was planning to spend the weekend with her aunt and then go back on Monday.’
The inspector’s face split in a yawn, and Billy wondered how much sleep he’d been getting. It was a problem everyone faced these days, a sort of national disease. After five years of war, five years of rationing and restrictions, a deep fatigue had settled like snow on the whole population. It could be dangerous, particularly in a job like theirs, his and Lofty’s. It was easy to miss things.
‘What about men friends?’ he asked.
‘None, according to the aunt. When she came here from France at the start of the war she travelled with a Polish boy, but he was just a friend, and anyway he joined up and was killed in North Africa. She was shy with men, Mrs Laski says. Old-fashioned when it came to the opposite sex.’ Cook shrugged.
‘In other words, she wasn’t the sort of girl who would have picked up a man, say. Or let herself be picked up.’
‘Out of the question. Or so her aunt reckons. I put it to her myself. Had to. Anyway, the girl was alone when the warden ran into her. That’s for certain.’
Billy grunted. He trod on his cigarette. ‘Are you done then?’ he called out to the two men who’d been busy in the yard. One was named Hoskins, the other Grace. With more than twenty years on the force, Billy had made the acquaintance of just about every plainclothes man in London at one time or another, and worked with a good many of them.
‘Finished, sir.’ It was Hoskins who replied. Plump, and purple in the face despite the gelid air, he’d been making heavy weather of all the bending required by their task and stood breathing heavily beside the taped barrier that he and his partner had just erected at the edge of the yard with the help of a pair of iron stakes salvaged from the rubble. They were busy decorating it with a police notice on which the words KEEP OUT were printed in large capitals.
‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’
Trailed by Cook, Billy crossed the street and went down on his haunches to examine the objects the pair had retrieved and laid on a strip of cardboard. Besides the apples spilled from the basket they’d found two brown paper parcels, each containing a plucked chicken, three jars of homemade jam and a crock of honey.
‘She must have brought those up from the country,’ Joe Grace remarked. A thin, hard-faced man with the rank of detective-sergeant, he’d been one of a team of which Billy had been a part that the Yard had set up before the war to deal with the smash-and-grab gangs active in the capital at that time. ‘There are two loaves of bread and a round of cheese jammed in at the bottom. We left ’em there.’ He nodded at the basket which still lay beside the taped outline of the body. ‘We also found these.’ He indicated three matched buttons lying separate from the larger items, one of them still with a curl of thread attached to it. ‘They were on the ground, near where her head was. Must have come from her coat.’
‘No, they couldn’t have.’ Cook intervened. ‘The buttons were all done up when we found her. There were none missing.’
‘Where’s it now?’ Billy asked.
‘At the mortuary. She was still wearing it when they took her away.’ He turned to Grace. ‘Is that all?’ he asked.
‘Pretty much.’ The detective shrugged. ‘The rest was just odds and ends.’ He pointed to a handful of items deposited near the edge of the piece of cardboard which included an empty bottle of lemon rum, a broken comb, two hairpins and the chewed stub of a lead pencil, all coated with dust. Completing the haul were four charred matchsticks, which Billy examined with interest. He noticed that although their tops were blackened the stems beneath had hardly been touched by the flame.
‘Looks like someone was trying to strike a match in the wind,’ he remarked. ‘And lately. The wood’s still fresh. There’s no sign of weathering.’ He rose, stretching his cramped leg muscles.
Cook spoke to the two plainclothes men. ‘You can put all this stuff back in the basket and take it to the station. Her suitcase, too. I’ll deal with them later. We’ll have to put up posters in the area. We need to know if anyone saw the girl earlier. Other than the warden, I mean.’ Yawning, he glanced at Billy. ‘Well, what do you think?’
Billy reflected. So far he’d heard nothing to suggest that Lofty wasn’t right in his assessment. It seemed likely the girl had encountered her killer by accident in the darkness of the blackout. If so, it was a crime of chance, just as the chief inspector had supposed. But he wasn’t ready to make his report quite yet. Sinclair’s caution about leaving no loose ends was still fresh in his ears.
‘What about slipping over to Paddington?’ he suggested. ‘I’d like a word with Ransom. He should be done by now.’
The corpse lay on a steel-topped table, hidden from sight except for the head and shoulders, which the orderly on duty in the mortuary had exposed by drawing back the white cloth covering it. Looking down at the lifeless face, so pale it seemed drained of blood, Billy recalled the photograph Lofty had shown him in the car coming over, a snapshot of Rosa Nowak which he’d obtained from her aunt. The dark-haired girl pictured in the snapshot had faced the camera with a remote and sorrowful expression, no trace of which remained now.
‘Well, there she is, poor lass.’
An elderly man, one who’d either been retained like many past retirement age, or volunteered to do what amounted to war work, the orderly offered his opinion unprompted.
‘Hardly looks dead, does she?’
It was true enough, Billy thought. Apart from a swelling on one side of her neck and a faint, livid mark in the same area the girl might have been asleep. As though it only needed a touch to awaken her. Glancing sideways at Cook, he saw the Bow Street inspector bending lower to peer at the white throat.
‘Can’t see that she was choked,’ he remarked.
The two detectives had arrived at the hospital only to discover that the man they’d come to see wasn’t immediately available.
‘Dr Ransom’s busy with another autopsy,’ the receptionist informed them. ‘A buzz bomb came down in Wandsworth last night, but they only dug out the bodies this morning.’
Left to their own devices, they had found their way downstairs to the mortuary, a grisly sanctum whose green-painted walls exuded a clammy cold unaffected by the change of seasons, where the orderly, at their request, had brought out Rosa Nowak’s remains from one of the refrigerators built into the walls of the echoing chamber.
‘You can wait if you like,’ he told them. ‘The doctor should be here any time now.’
Billy had been looking around. ‘Are those her clothes?’ he asked, pointing to a pile of women’s garments on a table in the corner.
The orderly nodded. ‘Dr Ransom said you might want to see them.’
Billy led his colleague over to the table and together they quickly solved the mystery of the loose buttons found at the scene of the murder. Examining the girl’s coat, which was made of
dark blue wool and might have had a naval past, they found it was fitted with a removable hood of the same material attached by buttons sewn on to the collar. Only two of these were still in place. Loose cotton threads showed where three others had in all probability been ripped off.
‘I’d forgotten about the hood,’ Cook admitted. ‘We didn’t see it at first. It was hidden beneath her body. I only noticed it when the ambulance men picked her up.’
Other signs of deft needlework were visible on the young woman’s underclothes, which were undamaged but had obviously been darned and patched more than once. The embroidered blouse she’d been wearing, on the other hand, looked new, and to both detectives’ surprise proved to be made of silk.
‘What’s that?’ Billy’s eye had been caught by a saucer standing on a shelf above the table. He took it down.
‘Looks like a matchstick.’ Cook peered at the charred fragment of wood which was all the saucer contained.
‘Wonder what it’s doing there.’ Billy was still examining his find when the swing doors behind them opened and Ransom strode in, thrusting an arm into the sleeve of a white physician’s coat.
‘Sorry to keep you, gentlemen. We’re like the Windmill Theatre here. We never close. I’m afraid there’s another cadaver awaiting my attention, so this’ll have to be brief. Hello, Inspector.’ He nodded to Billy. ‘I didn’t know you were on the case.’
‘I’m not, strictly speaking, sir.’ Billy put down the saucer and went over to shake hands with the pathologist. ‘Mr Cook’s in charge. But the chief inspector has an interest in it. I’m to report back to him.’
‘Sinclair, eh? Then we’d best be on our toes.’
Ransom blew out his cheeks. A heavy-set man with jutting eyebrows, he had a reputation in the Met as a joker, famous for his bons mots.
‘You’ve seen the corpus delicti, I take it.’ He moved over to where the wheeled table stood. The two detectives followed. ‘There was little in the way of injuries to record. I dare say you noted the lividity on her neck and the swelling’ – he pointed to the slight disfigurement on the slender column of the throat. ‘The only real bruises I found were on her knees. She must have gone down when he grabbed her. See …’
He pulled the cloth off the girl’s legs, showing the purple marks on her bare kneecaps.
‘But that’s all, really. There was no evidence of a struggle. She didn’t get a chance to fight back. There was no skin under her nails, nothing of that sort. It was quick and clean.’
Billy glanced at Cook, thinking he might want to handle the questioning, but found that his colleague had chosen that moment to fall into a doze. Lofty’s lack of sleep had finally caught up with him; he was swaying on his feet, his eyelids fluttering.
‘No evidence of a struggle, you say?’
‘That’s right, Inspector.’
‘He didn’t sexually assault her, then?’
‘Good heavens, no.’ Ransom frowned. ‘Why on earth … ? Oh, yes, of course.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘It did look that way last night when we found her. The inspector and I discussed the possibility.’ He nodded at Cook, who’d come awake with a start. ‘I checked for it, of course, when I made my examination, even though her underclothes weren’t disturbed. But she wasn’t touched. Not there, at any rate. In fact, she was virgo intacta. Not that it makes any difference now, I suppose.’ He shrugged.
‘But if he strangled her …’
‘Strangled?’ Ransom’s bushy eyebrows rose in exaggerated amazement. ‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes, sir, you did.’ Angry with himself for having drifted off, Cook spoke sharply. ‘Last night, at the murder scene.’
‘Then I apologize. It was a hasty judgement.’ Ransom spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. ‘Put not your trust in pathologists. Particularly those called out in the blackout and made to examine bodies by torchlight. No, she wasn’t choked. Her neck was broken. It’s clear from the evidence. Let me show you.’ He removed the cloth from the girl’s head and shoulders again. ‘Do you see the swelling on her neck and that mark on the side? It shows that the killer grabbed her from behind, slipped his right arm around her neck and snapped her spinal column. And to anticipate your question, yes, he was a strong man, but it wouldn’t have required any special skill, particularly if she wasn’t expecting it. Just a good wrench of the head. The whole business would have been over in a second.’
He covered the girl’s head and shoulders again and then waited to see if the two detectives had any questions. A frown had appeared on Cook’s face as he’d listened and he caught Billy’s eye.
‘So what you’re saying is, he must have meant to kill her.’
‘It would seem so.’ Ransom shrugged. ‘It’s hard to see what other purpose he could have had in mind.’
‘But … but that doesn’t make sense.’ Cook spoke before he could stop himself.
‘Possibly.’ The pathologist looked owlish. ‘But that’s your department, Inspector, not mine. Now, if you’ve no more questions …’ He stood poised to leave.
‘One moment, sir.’ Billy spoke up. ‘That matchstick on the shelf over there. The one in the saucer. Where does it come from?’
‘What matchstick where?’ Ransom’s eyes swivelled in the direction of his pointing finger. ‘Oh, that. Yes, I found it tangled in her hair. Blown there by the wind, I dare say. She’d been lying on the ground for some time. Why do you ask?’
‘We found others at the scene. It looked like somebody had been trying to light one.’
‘The killer, do you mean?’ Ransom showed renewed interest.
‘Perhaps. But we can’t be sure.’ Billy glanced at Cook. His jerk of the head suggested it was time they too departed.
‘Yes, but … but why would he have done that?’ The pathologist was clearly intrigued by the notion. ‘If it was him, I mean.’
‘I’ve no idea.’ Billy’s shrug was noncommittal. ‘But he may have been looking for something – something he thought she had on her.’
4
‘SHE WAS A DEAR GIRL, very likeable. But so hard to get to know. Still grieving, I fear.’
Helen Madden mused on her words. Seated on a settee facing the fire that her husband had lit in the drawing-room a short while before, she turned her gaze on the flickering flames.
‘She kept surprising us with her talents. Soon after she came I gave her a piece of parachute silk that had come my way and she made two embroidered blouses from it. They were quite beautiful. She was wearing one of them the day she went up to London, I remember.’
Helen glanced across at Sinclair, who was seated in an armchair on one side of the wide fireplace.
‘And then we only discovered a week ago that she was a pianist. There was a call for volunteers to perform at a concert for the patients at Stratton Hall and Rosa came forward. She played two Chopin nocturnes and you could have heard a pin drop. I asked her afterwards where she had learned and she said her father had taught her. He was the schoolmaster in the village where she grew up. He must have been a remarkable man.’
Again she paused.
‘But these are just odd details. We didn’t really know her. She was so quiet. So withdrawn.’
Sinclair frowned. ‘You said “still grieving”. What did you mean?’
Helen looked at him. ‘Are you aware she was Jewish?’ she asked.
Sinclair nodded.
‘It so happened she was in France when the Germans invaded Poland. Or perhaps it wasn’t by chance. Her father had arranged the trip for her. He sent her to stay with an old university friend of his in Tours; it may be that he saw what was coming and wanted her out of the country. In any event she never heard from her parents again, nor her two younger brothers, though of course she kept hoping. For as long as she could. Until the truth came out.’
Helen regarded the chief inspector for a moment, then turned her gaze to the fire, where the heaped logs flamed and cackled, sending sparks flying up the chimney. Sinclair, too, remained sile
nt. Two years had passed since the Foreign Secretary had risen in the House of Commons to confirm the reports that had been circulating for some time of the wholesale massacre of Jews in occupied Europe. He recalled a phrase from the joint declaration issued by the Allies, which had named Poland ‘the principal slaughterhouse’.
‘We only talked once, properly, I mean.’ Helen put a hand to her brow. ‘But I could see how much the thought of her family, and of what must have happened to them, had affected her.’
Madden stirred in his chair. He was sitting across the fireplace from the chief inspector, his face half-hidden by the deepening shadows in the room.
‘There’s not much more we can tell you, Angus,’ he said. ‘The last time I saw Rosa was at the farm on Thursday, just before Helen arrived to drive her to the station. She was weighed down with her bag and a basket of food I’d given her to take up to her aunt, and she kept trying to thank me for them. She wasn’t a high-spirited girl. Reflective, rather, as Helen says. But she seemed cheerful enough that day; she was looking forward to seeing her aunt.’ He paused for a moment, then spoke again: ‘Tell us a little more about the murder itself. From what you said first, it sounded like a chance crime. Is that still your opinion?’
‘Yes and no. Which is to say, there’s now a question mark hanging over the case.’ The chief inspector grimaced. ‘It all revolves around the injury she suffered, the manner in which she was killed. But it’s a bit like trying to make bricks without straw. There just isn’t enough evidence to be certain, one way or the other. But I’ll lay it all out for you and you can tell me what you think. What you both think,’ he added, with a glance at Helen. ‘Just give me a moment to collect my thoughts.’
Though inured like all by now to the rigours of wartime travel, to the misery of unheated carriages, overcrowded compartments and the mingled smell of bodily odours and stale tobacco, he was still recovering from his trip down from London that afternoon when for two hours he had sat wedged in a window seat, gazing out at a countryside that offered little relief to eyes weary of the sight of dust and rubble, of the never-ending vista of ruined streets and bombed-out houses which the capital presented. Stripped to the bone by one of the coldest winters in recent memory, the fields and hedgerows through which they crawled had a lifeless air, while the sky above, grey as metal, had seemed to press on the barren earth. Scanning the paper he had bought at Waterloo, four pages of rationed newsprint filled mostly with war dispatches, his eye had lit on a single paragraph reporting the discovery of the body of a young Polish woman in Bloomsbury whose death was being treated by the police as suspicious. An account of the crime that Billy Styles had compiled and handed to him the day before was in his overnight case on the luggage rack above. The chief inspector had reviewed its contents a number of times without being able to come to any conclusion, an admission he had made to Madden when they had spoken on the telephone the previous evening.