Bottled Spider

by John Gardner

  ‘Laid it all out, as one does. Response was we can argue about that later. Most important job is to get Golly into a dungeon in chains and surrounded by the Guards Armoured Division to keep him in.’ They had done everything but suggest that the ‘’Orrible Murder by Disfigured Crazy Bloke’ would help the war effort. ‘Took me a terrible time to persuade them that two arrests are better than one, my view.’

  In the end he had done the trick and they met him half-way. He had until Monday morning to nab Golly. If they hadn’t got him by midnight on Sunday there’d be a statement to the press and the BBC, complete with photographs, not that pictures would do any good for the BBC, who’d closed down its meagre TV broadcasts at the beginning of the war.

  ‘This is the man we’re really searching for,’ the press handout would say. ‘Come forward anyone who has a clue and, Detective Chief Superintendent Tommy Livermore go back to directing traffic up the Mall and round Buck House now, no messing.’

  First thing Monday there would be banner headlines saying that they were really searching for this unfortunately disfigured chap who’s a nut case, and has been going round choking people with a bit of piano wire, and racking up quite a score. And please would everyone have a good look round, keep your eyes peeled and all that, eh?

  ‘So, that’s it. We’ve got three days, because you can’t count today. Yes, Billy?’

  Mulligan’s hand shot up. ‘What’s to stop our comrades in arms from blowing the gaff to the press, Guv?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing, except the brass’ve agreed not to spill the beans, even to their own people. I agree, Billy, rather trust a school of sharks but I’ve no option.’

  Until midnight on Sunday the manhunt was to run under the cloak of being a military exercise in collaboration with some army units and the Home Guard, hence ‘Bullring’. He had even scrounged a couple of Lysander aircraft, and they would be in play by first light tomorrow. To add further realism they were asking real estate agents to check empty properties.

  ‘And good luck to them,’ Tommy Livermore said. ‘I gather they’ll be warned that the exercise is to be realistic, and told to speak softly and carry a big stick.’

  ‘Anything goes,’ he told them. ‘All options open. Golly’s as cunning as a bag full of blue-based baboons and he’ll probably travel only by night, but I wouldn’t bank on it.’

  This last raised a laugh.

  The first combined police and Home Guard squads for ‘Bullring’ were to be marshalled by two experienced trackers who were being flown south from the commando school: Achnacarry in Scotland. These squads would be spread out in a line around a mile to a mile and a half long. ‘They’ll start as soon as possible from a point just the other side of Basingstoke,’ he gave them a map reference, ‘and they’ll head in the general direction of Reading. Combing the ground and flushing Golly Goldfinch out.’

  ‘And we’re not going with them, Guv? That’ll make a change,’ from one of the lads.

  ‘We’ll stay here and prepare for trapping him when the manhunt fails.’

  ‘That an option, Guv?’ from Shirley Cox, who was making herself comfortable with Dandy Tom’s unit.

  ‘More than an option, Shirley. It’s a definite possibility. Golly Goldfinch may not be a fully loaded gun, but he’s sly and I wouldn’t put it past him to evade them. The trick with a man like Golly is to lure him, like you do a trout. And I think we’ve got the perfect fly for him. Any more questions? No? Well, remember, this is a training exercise, and you’ve never even heard of Golly Goldfinch.’

  *

  At five-thirty Golly let himself out of the back door, sniffed the air and thought he could scent snow, then he slunk quietly away from the buildings and made for the open countryside. He never travelled very far from the roads and lanes that ran past Basingstoke, but by seven he was close to Old Basing and could make out the church with houses huddled in its shelter. He was also aware of more traffic than last evening: people he supposed were going home after visiting friends over Christmas. For a lot of people it would be back to work in the morning.

  He noticed quite a few high-sided three-ton military trucks, and motorcycles. He knew the trucks because he had seen a lot of them in London since the start of the war, and he knew they were full of soldiers because as the trucks went along the roads he could hear a raucous singing; and some of the words were carried back to him on the freezing air.

  People like Golly, men and women who are different, often have special talents. They can sense things, and tonight Golly sensed danger and difference. Somehow he knew he was being hunted. He wondered how and why, because he hadn’t done anything since the woman policeman — or the woman he thought was the woman policeman. Why would they be searching for him, then? He used primitive logic and reasoned that it wasn’t a personal matter. They were simply searching for the man who had killed the woman in Overchurch, and they were taking it seriously, that’s why they had the Army in as well as the police. He would have to be on his guard.

  As he got to the other side of Old Basing, looking out over the dark fields ahead he saw shapes moving and heard noises coming over a great distance, as they do at night. He’d have to hang back because he could just make out these men walking slowly in a long line, spanning a couple of fields at least.

  A motorcycle roared up the road to his right, and he stood stock still, not moving, until it slowed down and stopped. Close to the hedge he realized there was a roadblock ahead, like the one he had seen last night. So he crawled gently up to the hedge and listened to the crack. There was always a bit of good crack when there were soldiers or policemen about.

  The ditch ran along his side of the hedge, so he rolled into it making his way forward, crawling on his hands and knees until the roadblock was about five yards in front of him. Three or four men stamped their cold feet in the middle of the road trying to keep warm, talking among themselves.

  *

  ‘So we’d best put faces and personalities to the victims, Suzie with a zed.’

  The Spear Carriers were back at work, Abelard had returned to her surveillance off Rupert Street and the lads manned the telephones. It was almost six o’clock. Tomorrow, he told her they would give her what he called ‘A short course in survival, just in case.’

  ‘Just in case of what?’

  ‘Just in case Golly gets through and comes after you.’

  Her stomach flipped and she couldn’t work out whether it was Dandy Tom’s presence or fear of Golly coming for her with the wire.

  He laid out folders and a large book, then escorted her up to the map of the UK. For the first time she appreciated the wide area the killer had covered. A lot of miles and a random list of victims.

  ‘Why the blazes weren’t all these linked to one man before this?’

  ‘It’s what I asked; and there’s no simple answer, heart. The fellow’s clever, for one. He may be unstable, obsessive, and short on one kind of intelligence. And it’s possible that he’s been manipulated. My point of view, just a gut feeling. That apart, he’s never been seen — except for two glimpses near Stratford. If it is really Golly, then he has the ability of will-o’-the-wisp.’ He was also cool and calm, Suzie thought. ‘He worked very fast; even hung about at the scene of his atrocities, almost until the last minute.’

  ‘And one of the obvious motivations is sex.’

  She looked back at the map, made a little moue, wondered how much crime, how many murders, had sex as the prime mover.

  ‘There is another side to it,’ Tommy Livermore continued. ‘Most of the people he’s picked all have an easy suspect in their lives, close to them. The reason why so few of these cases have been linked to one another is because the investigating officers have suspected, chosen, and concentrated on one person. They’ve been isolated. Damn it, in the case of Debbie Howlet — Owlet, as she was known to her friends — there’s a man actually doing time for her murder.’

  Suzie frowned.

  ‘See why I’ve been playin
g this close to my chest?’

  ‘And you’re sure this one — Owlet? — can be pinned on to Golly.’

  ‘Make up your own mind, but there are going to be red faces in some county constabularies when we get him.’

  ‘Tears before bedtime?’

  He nodded. ‘Bucketsful.’ He touched the map, and pointed. ‘Here we go,’ he began, ‘October 24th 1938. Mary Elizabeth Tobin. Aged sixteen. Ealing Common.’ He opened the book and there was a cheeky looking girl staring back at them. Oval face, nice smile, slightly thick lips, dark hair cut in a bob. Tommy Livermore told her the background — father, Ambrose, was a storekeeper in a factory the other side of Ealing that dealt with fancy glassware. Mother, Peggy, housewife, had met her Ambrose in the 1920s at a dance. Live wires, settled down once they were married and Mary Elizabeth was on the way. On the way probably before they tied the knot. Mary Tobin was intelligent but didn’t apply herself at school.

  ‘Man mad,’ her father said. She was in the second year of her first job, in a local cinema. Usherette. ‘All them films turned her into a dreamer,’ her mother told a newspaper. 24 October was a Monday, and Monday was Mary’s day off. No cinema on Sundays and the two days following the weekend were slow days. Four usherettes, two of them got Mondays off and the other two got Tuesdays. ‘Used the house like a hotel,’ her father wailed, the eternal litany of parents.

  ‘She’d gone up West for the day,’ Tommy said, ‘in her best Sunday clothes, a beige suit, her raincoat and a beret. What she actually did was meet a forbidden boyfriend.’ Her dad had told her she was never to see him again because there was evidence they were ‘going too far’. She had gone too far with him on 24 October as well, in a flat they’d borrowed from a friend of his in Harrow. They’d had a meal in Lyons Corner House, Marble Arch. Then they went to the pictures — Rebecca from the Daphne Du Maurier novel, starring Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, George Sanders and Judith Anderson — then over to Harrow where they’d been at it like stoats, according to the pathology. But she was raped later on Ealing Common. Underclothes found several yards from the body and they’d done tests on what was left. Very difficult.

  The DI in charge of the case had given a lot of time to Mary Tobin’s prohibited boyfriend, Danny Taylor. Interrogated him with extreme hostility. Taken samples from him — forensics. Drew a blank. The DI, a man called Bligh — as in the mutiny — gave up hounding him with great reluctance. Tommy Livermore had spoken to him. ‘Still thinks the lad was implicated in some way, even though all the evidence is against it.’ Poor little bobbed Mary Tobin.

  He showed her the pictures of the crime scene. Not the kind of thing you’d see in your local photographer’s window, but she’d looked at worse. Tommy went into the minutiae of the murder, every tiny detail and then some. He made Mary Tobin live again, breathed life into her, described her laugh as Danny had so vividly described it — ‘Like two sweet chiming bells, that was the sound of her laugh. You’d get a whole peal of them when she was really happy.’ Great resurrectionist, Dandy Tom. As she listened to him, Suzie began to feel close to these murdered girls. After all she was one of this sisterhood by Charlotte’s blood. She shivered, and wondered about the location of her own grave, and how ready it might be.

  He moved on to Mrs Geraldine Williams, aged twenty-seven, in her kitchen far away in the North East: in the nice little semi-detached house in Northumberland Avenue, Jesmond, that pleasant suburb of Newcastle-upon-Tyne with its beauty spot, Jesmond Dean, where people enjoyed the trees and the ornamental lake and the Repertory Theatre, where they put on a different play each week.

  Dandy Tom filled in the particulars. Geraldine Harkness had been married for two years. No children, but there were rumours that things were not going well with the couple. There had been straws in the wind before the wedding, at St John’s, Newcastle. Indeed, Geraldine had nearly backed out of things only a week before she was married.

  Arthur Williams, the groom, was a fiery little Welshman: short-tempered and self-opinionated, a clever electrical engineer who had landed himself an excellent job with the NES — the Newcastle Electricity Supply Company.

  It had been a stormy romance, and the marriage was, after two years, if not stormy at least passing through troubled waters. On the morning of 14 January 1939, Geraldine had gone down to the shops at eleven o’clock, red hair bouncing against her shoulders, dressed very smartly. ‘Always smart, Geraldine was,’ said the woman who sold her the fish. ‘You never saw her out without a hat and gloves. Very modish.’ She had bought two plaice fillets, presumably for their evening meal, a small lamb chop and a packet of twenty Craven A cigarettes, with the black cat on the packet. She was killed while she was grilling the lamb chop and doing a few chips to go with it for her lunch.

  When Arthur Williams came in, unexpectedly, at ten to one she was dead on the kitchen floor and whoever killed her had thoughtfully removed the chop from the grill and taken the chip pan off the hob, substituting a pan of water — already simmering when Arthur came in. It was quite clear that she had been raped, her skirt was up, underclothes were missing and there were four jagged cuts made near to the junction of her thighs.

  When he showed her the photographs, Suzie said it was as though the killer was trying to cross out her sexual organs. Dandy Tom thought that was a most perceptive comment.

  Of course, the local police said. And again, of course. Arthur Williams came home unexpectedly, killed his wife, raped her and rearranged the scenery. Then he went out once more and drove round the block. When he returned he was able to walk in and yell blue murder.

  One of the reasons the murder didn’t get much publicity down South was because the CID up in Newcastle believed they had a good case. No matter that they had nothing really firm to go on. Nobody had seen Arthur until he drove up to the house at ten minutes to one, when three people actually saw him arrive, looking calm and unruffled. There were twelve men and women who had either seen or served Geraldine when she went down to the shops. Nothing else: nobody saw a third person enter or leave the house; nobody heard anything untoward; and Arthur could account for all his movements from eight thirty that morning until twelve fifteen when he left a job to drive home, because he was working in the area. Yet the police spent nine and a half months trying to break Arthur Williams’ alibi, or make the facts fit. They never did, and now Arthur was a sergeant pilot in the RAF and married to a girl he had met in Harwell, Oxfordshire, where there was an Operational Training Unit for Bomber Command.

  Gillian Hunt, 7 February 1939, had a flat near the famous Birmingham Repertory Theatre where she worked as an assistant stage manager. Eighteen years old, learning her trade, being paid a pittance but the little flat was rent free, one of the perks. Again it was a lunch time. She had hurried back to the flat to grab a bowl of soup she’d made over the previous two days, out of a ham bone and vegetables.

  They were rehearsing Antigone and had broken for ninety minutes at noon. Her closest female friend, Daphne Strong — another ASM — would never forgive herself. She usually shared lunch with Gill, but she had to go to the post office to deal with several small but urgent matters like cashing a postal order from her aunt and posting her laundry back to her mother. ‘If I’d gone with Gill, as usual, I’m sure this would never have happened,’ she told the People.

  Again there was a man: older, married with the extra-marital relationship already on the blink. ‘My fault,’ the man, Percy Bankman, told the police. ‘She was such a splendid girl. I shouldn’t have led her on. We both knew it was wrong, but I never told her how wrong —’ His wife was pregnant and he had behaved unforgivably, embarking on an affair that was totally one-sided. At the beginning Gill was very committed, prepared to wait for a divorce. Didn’t realize that she was being used: a sexual stopgap. ‘Divorces don’t grow on trees,’ Dandy Tom said apropos of nothing.

  It was the Bankmans’ third child, and the police had a field day, discovering he had found surrogates for sex during the closing sta
ges of all his wife’s pregnancies. During the first days of the investigation it became clear that Dianne Bankman, the wife, had known about his adultery for several weeks. Her sister was interviewed and told the police that Dianne had given Percy an ultimatum: either she goes or I do. Percy had a problem because that was roughly what Gill was also saying to him by this time and he didn’t want to give up either of them.

  It was from Gill’s sister, Georgina Hunt, and her friend Daphne Strong that the police had built up a picture of the murdered girl: long legs, great figure, a bit of a gypsy to look at, pitch black hair and large dark eyes. She was demonstrative, tactile and very confident. ‘Had a wonderful speaking voice, better than most actresses,’ Daphne said. ‘She was determined to learn all she could about the theatre.’

  Daphne told the police, ‘There are some lines in Hamlet that always make me think of Gill — “You would play upon me; you would seem to know my stops; you would pluck out the heart of my mystery; you would sound me from my lowest note to the top of my compass.” That was Gill, absolutely. She was a great manipulator, but didn’t realize it. In many ways an innocent, but warm and soft. Pliable if you like, while she, unknowingly, beguiled others.’

  And Percy had nothing in the way of an alibi. He said he was on a train from London to Birmingham New Street at the time of the death, but nobody recognized him and he hadn’t kept the ticket. Worse, he had stayed with a friend in London the night before but the friend, who was a bit of a toper, hadn’t got the dates right, so didn’t give him the alibi he so desperately needed. Once more, a local police force thought they had him bang to rights, went for him with all guns blazing. Even now, to this day, like the Geraldine Williams case in Newcastle, there were CID officers who still believed Percy Bankman had killed the girl.

  So, Dandy Tom leaped forward to 20 April and Pamela Lynne Harwood. Pam Harwood, thirty-one years of age, a barmaid by trade, stumbling half drunk that April evening, her short, straw-coloured hair dirty and in need of shampoo, too many boyfriends to be healthy. A mess, now dead under the walls of Dover Castle with few clues to unravel the puzzle. ‘Not elementary, my dear Suzie.’ Cause of death a piano wire ligature and a deranged volley of knife thrusts. If ever there was a case that should have been matched up it was the sad and sorry death of Pam Harwood.