Bottled Spider

by John Gardner

  Mum doesn’t lock her door so he goes straight in this time. Knocked last night so as not to give her a shock.

  ‘Oh, Golly, how wonderful. You’re back before you expected to be. I got the turkey in the oven, so we can have a good old blowout. I got some crackers an’ all.’

  ‘Plum duff, Mum? You got plum duff as well?’

  ‘Course I have. Got everything for my Golly: roast spuds, carrots and swedes all mashed together, sprouts, bread sauce, mince pies, rum butter, plum duff with custard.’

  ‘Oh-my-oh-my-oh-my,’ chuckles Golly, a child again, listening to the wireless as they did Wind in the Willows, and it’s Ratty taking Mole on a picnic. ‘Old Adolf en’t stopping us enjoying our Christmas, then,’ he giggles with glee.

  ‘Take mor’n old Hitler to stop us enjoying Christmas. Come on in, Golly, it’s right cold out there. Come in and make yourself comfy; I don’t suppose you heard the King’s broadcast, but the nine o’clock news just started on the BBC. You hear about the terrible goings in Overchurch?’

  ‘What, the murder? I heard tell something about it. Someone mentioned it.’

  ‘Get your coat off, young Golly. Sit in the warm. Listen to the news, it’s Alvar Liddell reading it.’

  So he sat and listened while the familiar scents of Christmas came wafting in from his mum’s little kitchen. Then, towards the end of the news —

  ‘In Hampshire tonight police are investigating the brutal murder of a housewife in the village of Overchurch, near Andover ...’

  You’re on the news, Golly. You’ve made it. On the BBC.

  ‘... The murdered woman, Mrs Vernon Fox, was discovered dead by her two children, who raised the alarm. She was strangled with piano wire as she prepared the Christmas dinner. Detective Chief Superintendent the Honourable Thomas Livermore, who is investigating the case, said late this afternoon that it was too early to link this crime to the death of the BBC announcer Josephine Benton. Miss Benton was also strangled with piano wire in her home last week.

  ‘Mr Livermore said, “There are similarities in the two cases, but that is all I’m prepared to say at this time.” The murdered woman’s husband has been given compassionate leave from the Royal Marines.’

  Golly sat rigid with shock.

  ‘What’s up, Golly? You look like you seen a ghost. Golly, what’s the matter?’

  ‘I what? I what, Mum?’

  ‘Look like you seen a ghost.’

  ‘No ... No, Mum! They got it wrong! That was a lady policeman that got herself murdered. That’s what I was told. Lady policeman. Her who was in the papers after that BBC woman was strangled. Choked. With the wire.’

  ‘Oh, no, Golly, whoever told you that got it all wrong. It’s just a girl whose husband’s off fighting the war. Got two children, they said on BBC at lunchtime. One handicapped, can’t walk, hear or talk, they said. Crippled deaf mute.’

  ‘No, surely not, Mum. It was a lady policeman they said to me. Lady policeman. Got to be.’

  She had gone back into her kitchen, quite used to Golly’s fancies and obsessions, getting on with the Christmas dinner. Golly took a deep breath. She was right. He’d made a terrible mistake. In his head he saw the girl again, standing in her kitchen and it was the lady policeman he had seen before. It had to be.

  But it wasn’t.

  ‘Put the crackers out, Golly. They got indoor fireworks in them it says on the box. They’ll be good. They’ll be good fun, fireworks.’

  You must always do as you’re told. Golly.

  The Banshee would come. He’ll come here, and if Golly didn’t get it right —

  Golly, you’ll be put in a hole, that’s what’ll happen to you. Put in a hole.

  Twenty-One

  When he woke — on the way back to London, after his forty winks — Dandy Tom leaned back in his seat and quietly gave Suzie Mountford a little lecture on the art of interrogation. She had told him she was unhappy about the way she’d questioned Jo Benton’s friends, so he felt it was his duty to provide her with a short course in technique. Tips of the trade, he called it. ‘Time,’ he said, ‘is the most precious commodity in the interrogator’s arsenal,’ and he continued to go through the entire repertoire of a skilled inquisitor.

  He talked about the techniques that would put a subject at ease, and so lead him into the quicksands where he might miss his footing and stumble to destruction, giving her wisdom culled from barristers and policemen who’d made their names as interlocutors of great cunning.

  ‘Lead them gently towards that trick question, the one that really matters, then watch their hands and their eyes. It’s like that old Christmas game: hands behind the back with a coin; place the coin in one hand then bring both fists at arm’s length in front of the body. You can always name the hand with the coin in it because everyone slightly favours the “hot” fist with his eyes.’

  Sitting in the dark, in the back of the car, Dandy Tom, in his well-cut suit, handmade shirt, silk tie, splendidly tailored overcoat and the custom-made shoes, dispensed wisdom over a good ten miles. ‘Here endeth the lesson,’ he said finally and went quiet, closed down as the Wolseley ate up the road.

  The Ghost of Christmas Past came into Suzie’s mind. The fireproof imitation fir tree they had in the corner of what her mother liked to call the drawing room. Real candles burning on it when they had the presents and during afternoon tea. Some of the decorations that Daddy had bought years ago: a bird with a wonderful spun-glass tail, baubles that looked as though they were covered in frost, others with dimpled sides sparkling with colour. She thought of her sister, laughing and happy. Never again. What a way to be spending Christmas, she thought summoning up courage to ask him, ‘You ready to give me the answers to those riddles yet, Guv?’

  ‘Which riddles would those be, Suzie?’

  ‘You told me to go away, and find the answers to two questions. Where would you hide a car? And what would you do with a poisonous spider kept in a bottle?’

  He asked if she had any answers.

  ‘I’m not sure, Guv. Unless you’d hide a car among other cars. Like hiding a tree in a forest.’

  ‘Well done.’ He was not patronizing. ‘Terrific. Top of the class. And the bottled spider?’

  ‘Use it to frighten people?’

  ‘Or worse,’ Molly from the front.

  ‘That’s about right, but so far it’s only a theory based on some research. Molly knows some of it, but not all.’ He raised his voice to the driver. ‘Brian, stop your ears. This is none of your business. A terrible amount of work’s been done in the last few days. Now it’s time to open Pandora’s box for you, Suzie.’

  Brian grunted, and Dandy Tom continued without a pause. ‘We’ve been looking through the records of other forces as well as the Met.’ He had searched back a few years, checking on possible killings involving piano wire. ‘It’s a tedious business, getting other people to match files for you. We put a series of questions to the major forces in the United Kingdom; they’ve gone through their records and we’ve collated the results.’ The results, according to Tommy Livermore, were sobering. Since October 1938 they had turned up records of eleven unsolved murders in which piano wire had been the instrument. ‘That amounts to either a large number of coincidences or one person: a single repeat offender.’

  Suzie sensed him smiling in the darkness. It could not have been a simple job to gather these records. Everything had to be sorted manually, then telephoned, mailed or couriered up to DCS Livermore’s murder room set up in Scotland Yard, among the offices of the Reserve Squad. Some people had burned much midnight oil to gather the statistics. ‘The first thing that’ll strike you is the distances involved in what appears to be a completely random business,’ the Chief Superintendent said.

  ‘The first recent killing was almost right under our noses. October 24th 1938, Ealing Common. Found on the morning of the twenty-fifth. Mary Elizabeth Tobin, aged sixteen, strangled with a piece of piano wire. Strangled and raped. She’d been out, up
in the West End. She came home in a box.’

  This is number one and the fun has just begun.

  Pause as he reached into his memory. ‘Not another until January 14th, 1939, and then it’s a long way off. Geraldine Williams, aged twenty-seven, strangled with piano wire in her own kitchen at 25 Northumberland Avenue, Jesmond, Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumberland. In broad daylight. Strangled, raped and then abused with a kitchen knife.’

  Pause to hold back the ghastly day. ‘And there are added details: pan of water left simmering on the gas stove. Bedroom drawers rifled. Small amount of money stolen. That ring some bells?’

  Suzie grunted, and Dandy Tom continued — 7 February 1939, Gillian Hunt, Birmingham, industrial Midlands. ‘Happened in what passes for daylight around those dark satanic mills. In the victim’s own kitchen, complete with pan simmering on the hob.’ Are we dealing with a frustrated chef? Or someone who just likes kitchens. Kitchens become the favourite crime scenes.

  20 April 1939, Dover, on the Kent coast, Pamela Lynne Harwood. Right under Dover Castle walls this time, and a different kind of wire. ‘But the feel was for our chum. Deep cuts on the thighs and vagina. Unpleasant.’ Dandy Tom spoke as though he was already entering into a close relationship with this shadowy killer.

  24 May, Southampton, Brenda Bishop, again the victim’s own kitchen. No pan of water, but there are stab wounds in the usual places. Vicious, deep gashes that were becoming par for the course. Very violent this one.

  ‘Harrogate, Canterbury, York. June, July and August.’ Tommy Livermore supplied names of victims but Suzie didn’t retain them. Without photographs or further details they were mere shadows.

  Types and shadows have their ending ...

  ... For the newer rite is here

  ‘Then a fallow period. Nothing at all for the rest of 1939, unless we’ve missed something, which is possible.’ So, nothing until Patricia Cooke, in her own kitchen in the village of Snitterfield, Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, in May. She is followed in June by Marie Davidson, thirteen years old, in her dad’s cottage near Trumpington, just outside Cambridge. ‘With which we start to come up to date: December, Josephine Benton, Borough of Camford, London.’

  ‘A busy little bee,’ Molly Abelard muttered. Suzie thought there was something deeply unpleasant about Molly Abelard.

  Tommy Livermore repeated all the crime sites as though he was ticking them off on his fingers, ‘Ealing Common, London; then right up to the North East, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Back to the Midlands, Birmingham. Down to the South Coast, Dover. Along the coast to Southampton. Then Harrogate in the North. Right down again to Canterbury in Kent. Back up to Yorkshire for York. Then down to the Midlands again with Stratford. Up to Cambridge, then London, Camford, for Jo Benton.’

  Suzie tried to visualize the map, and in the darkness it seemed as random as scattershot.

  ‘He’s bouncing all over the place, like a ping-pong ball,’ she thought, then realized she’d said it out aloud.

  ‘And today,’ Dandy Tom said quietly, ‘the village of Overchurch, rural Hampshire. And only these last two seem to make any sense. What do you say, Suzie?’

  ‘His job takes him all over the country.’

  ‘Either that or he has a bike — I’m sorry, Suzie, not very sensitive of me. Give me the options.’

  ‘Perhaps he’s a lorry driver, delivery of goods. Or a representative, selling for his company. One whose work takes him all over the shop.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s a bit random isn’t it? There’s no obvious pattern. Reps who go around selling things for their firms prefer to work through areas. These are random journeys. Don’t make sense. They’re spotty, scattered.’

  ‘Some kind of engineer who has to maintain a piece of equipment?’ Suzie tried.

  ‘The equipment would have to be quite minimal I would’ve thought; if that wasn’t the case there’d be local maintenance. What were you thinking of?’

  ‘Cinemas?’ she suggested. ‘Projection equipment?’

  ‘That’s good. But now we have the last two. Jo Benton and your sister. Let’s presume they’re connected — which they probably are. Why?’

  ‘You already told me why, sir. He could’ve taken exception to a woman being in charge of the investigation.’

  After a long pause. ‘If that’s the case he’ll soon find out he’s wrong and ...?’

  ‘Come after me again?’

  ‘If it’s important to him, yes. Possibly he’s more interested in the killing. Got the flavour for it back in the autumn of 1938. Then, like topsy it just grow’d and grow’d. Which is where another of my theories comes in. If you want someone dead, what do you do?’

  ‘Kill him ...’

  ‘Or?’

  ‘Hire someone to do it for you.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  ‘Isn’t that a bit melodramatic, sir?’

  ‘Not if you’re a melodramatic person who wants someone dead for melodramatic reasons. We live in a climate where death is commonplace. Has been in Europe for the past few years: the Spanish Civil War; Russia and Finland, now this.’ You’ve kept this pretty close to your chest, Tommy. Nothing in the press, no memos zipping between the Yard’s Reserve Squad and other stations.

  ‘We’ve been playing this close to the chest,’ Livermore said, again as though reading her mind. ‘I’m anxious not to alert anyone. Haven’t even owned up to the connection between Camford and today’s horror.’

  There was silence for about a mile, then Dandy Tom spoke again. ‘It’s difficult to hold the entire picture in your head. Tomorrow we’ll look at the map I’ve set up at the Yard. Give you the distances, the scattershot of deaths.’

  ‘We need photographs as well, don’t we?’ Suzie asked. ‘They’re not real people unless we see them. Just names, apart from Jo Benton and my sister.’ The sadness hurtled up into her throat and behind her eyes, so that she gave a small involuntary sob.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ he growled, quickly. ‘Tomorrow we’ll take a real look.’

  ‘And a peep at your other theory, Guv. The bottled spider?’

  ‘Yes, that as well. I’m a great fan of the Animated Bioscope, Suzie. Going to the pictures. I’ve been known to sneak in on a Saturday morning with the kids. They didn’t have Saturday morning pictures when I was a lad, so I’ve been making up for lost time. At my local Picture Palace of a Saturday morning they’ve been showing two serials: Custer’s Last Stand — which appears to have gone on for years — and a creepy thing called The Clutching Hand. In that little piece the villain has been quietly murdering jockeys with black widow spiders. Keeps them bottled up, then releases one into a gelatine capsule and seals it in just before the race, when he slips it down the back of his victim’s shirt. The heat of the jockey’s body melts the gelatine, out comes the black widow, which sinks its fangs into the jockey’s naked flesh. Jockey then slides gracefully from his mount and ends up dead on the track. It’s a load of extreme rubbish of course, but I wondered ...’

  ‘Yes, sir?’

  ‘... wondered if it was feasible. Wondered if what we had here was a killer being manipulated by someone else, sent shooting all over the place to confuse people. Like some kind of bomb, or rocket, that could be guided to its target, or a deadly spider in a bottle, ready to be tipped down the victim’s shirt. Maybe it’s too fanciful.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say that, sir.’ She wasn’t totally convinced.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Tommy Livermore stopped it there. ‘Brian, put the wireless on. Let’s have something cheerful.’

  A woman sang with great gusto, ‘There’ll always be an England, and England will be free, if England means as much to you as England means to me.’

  Suzie remembered singing patriotic songs like this at school. ‘I vow to thee my country — all earthly things above.’ It meant about as much as the words of ‘There’ll always be an England’. She felt absurdly guilty. She was much more concerned with there always being a Suzie than an England. Especially today. Already mi
ssing Charlotte like a lost limb. Needing to weep for her. But policewomen don’t weep. Not in public.

  *

  They came into London through Hammersmith, then into disfigured Kensington High Street. It was dark and quiet on the road, not a soul stirring in the streets on this Christmas night. Nothing above them either. Nothing unloading bombs. London had been lucky, with relative peace over Christmas. Not so up north, where Manchester had taken a dreadful pounding starting on the Sunday night when folk were out at carol services and other church activities on that last grey, damp Sunday before Christmas. It began round about Evensong time and went on for thirty-six hours.

  By Christmas Day a snow of charred paper was carried to the dormitory areas, while there was no gas or electricity to cook a Christmas dinner in the entire Greater Manchester area.

  ‘You want to go straight to the Yard, Guv, or home?’ Brian asked as they reached the Albert Hall. Across the road Prince Albert was huddled up against the bombs, though still not looking at the book he held.

  ‘Upper St Martin’s Lane, Brian. I’ll direct you when we get there.’ He turned his face towards Suzie. ‘Is there an entrance at the back of your block of flats?’

  ‘Yes, fire escapes from every flat at the back, Guv. Why?’

  ‘I don’t want to leave you on your own. Understand?’

  ‘Of course, sir. Very good of you.’

  ‘Not good of me at all. I’m not a good person, Suzie. I just don’t want one of my people getting throttled with piano wire. You can never tell with a fellow like chummy. I think it’s too soon for him to come looking, but who knows?’

  When they got to Suzie’s building the Guv’nor told her to stay in the car, then he got out and went to the other Wolseley which had pulled up just behind them. She turned right around to watch as he spoke to the people inside and was joined in the street by Ron Worrall. The pair of them walked back to the corner of St Martin’s Lane and disappeared. Why didn’t he take Molly? she wondered, and as if she’d heard Molly said, ‘The Chief’s good to his officers. He’s the best chief super in the Met, and I don’t care who knows it.’ Her voice had an attractive throaty croak, like Jean Arthur’s voice, Suzie thought.