by John Gardner
The killings went on unconnected, as if the collators and criminal records people were blind. Brenda Bishop, a blowsy bottle blonde who used too much makeup and was closer to forty than she was to thirty. ‘A loud girl, our Brenda,’ said a local publican. A loud, vulgar, common piece. ‘I think this was her destiny,’ said a friend. ‘I’m not being crude, but she seemed to fit the part — murder victim, know what I mean?’ Southampton, 24 May 1939. This one was very violent: windpipe crushed in her throat, a fury of knife thrusts and cuts. She had fought and the killer had gone mad when she was dead as though killing her several times.
Sarah Tewksbury in Harrogate, nineteen, librarian, a bit of a prude, no sense of humour. ‘Could be a bit shrill,’ a friend told the police. ‘Harsh,’ said her immediate superior at the library. ‘Never seemed to make the most of herself.’ Dead in her kitchen by a wire ligature and stab wounds, 5 June 1939. Among the books in her little rented house were unexpected finds, some pieces by the Marquis de Sade — Justine and Juliette — in English, printed in Egypt, and a lurid book titled The Kiss of the Whip by nobody recognizable. In her wardrobe scandalously erotic and tarty underwear. They never uncovered what she got up to, or with whom. The investigation was still open. ‘Not all of the local forces seem to agree with us as yet,’ Dandy Tom said before passing on to:
Stephanie Cross, a Canterbury girl. Eighteen years old, a devout Christian, just left school and trying to make up her mind about her future. Helping in the cathedral bookshop, part-time and living at home. Father, mother and brother Donald were away on 20 July — going to see old friends in Margate. When they returned at seven that evening there was their lovely daughter, choked in the kitchen. The photographs of her before the murder showed a ravishing natural blonde, sun-tanned, bright, intelligent. Apart from the photograph there was not much to go on — the headmistress of her school, four or five friends. ‘You get the feeling that she was still a child,’ Tommy said, ‘still a bit of a blank page waiting for a life to be written on it. And now that’s not going to happen.’
The terrible waste weighed in on Suzie. All these girls robbed of their real time, some destroyed before they’d even lived. Like me, she thought. If he came after me and killed I would also die before I’d lived. She didn’t count school, a secretary’s job, working in a Knightsbridge store, and being a woman cop as living. Not in any real sense. There had to be more. Had she almost stumbled across the more with Dandy Tom Livermore?
In August ’39, it was a case of too much detail. Debbie Howlet, known to her friends as Owlet, thirty-three, hotel receptionist. Lively. Put herself about. Before the present job in York she had been learning the hotel trade in Switzerland, but had come home quite suddenly after what was called ‘a bit of a scandal’ with one of the guests in Zurich. The Swiss were not amused, which is normal with a people who accept mistresses as long as they are kept at bay in the next town, and had one of the highest suicide rates in Europe. In this case it was obvious that the man had made the running while the lady got the blame. ‘It’s the same the whole world over, ain’t it ’alf a bleedin’ shame?’ Tommy Livermore sang in a cracked and strained cockney.
Before Zurich, Debbie had tried her hand working at a hotel in Dublin, then a spell serving in Marks & Spencer in Bath, and latterly a few months managing a cinema in Leeds.
Finally she moved to York in the May of ’39 and in between there were boatloads of boyfriends. ‘Marched off the boat and straight into her bed,’ a detective sergeant was supposed to have said. The officer in charge of the investigation caused an unpleasant rumpus after telling a reporter that, as far as he could see, ‘her knickers could’ve understudied a yo-yo’. It was printed in the News of the World to the disgust and delight of many.
She didn’t live on the premises of the Bishop’s Parlour, where she was the receptionist, but round the corner in a tiny basement flat, where she was found dead of the usual method on 9 August — a Friday. The current boyfriend, Nicholas Booker, also thirty-three and prone to violence, was arrested and charged the next day. Booker was brought to trial, protesting innocence, but found guilty and sentenced to death, dragged from the dock shouting, ‘I never done it!’
The appeal failed but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment, because there was concern over the police holding back evidence that could have assisted the defence.
He was still in jail, in Dartmoor, and still saying he never done it.
By this time (it was nine o’clock in the evening) Suzie found it all too much, surrounded as she was by the ghosts of Golly’s victims whom Dandy Tom had conjured from their graves. Indeed, Dandy Tom had become incredibly single-minded. He had made Suzie hear the voices of the dead, look into their sad eyes and smell the strawberry or melon scent of their hair. He had come so close to breathing life into them that she could almost explore their bodies. They thawed from their cold stone state into pulsing flesh and blood again under his lengthy erudite command of language.
‘Now we know that these piano wire killings are down to one bloke, we can try and slot it all together. With things of this nature, investigation’s often like peeling off the layers of an onion.’
Suzie had a mental picture of herself in some dreamlike kitchen peeling onions. ‘Tommy, I’ve had enough,’ she protested, quietly so as not to frighten the lads.
‘We’ve only got Cooke at Snitterfield and Marie Davidson at Trumpington, then we’re home and dry. Into Jo Benton and the rest. Let’s get on with it, heart. Finish it. It’ll only take a half-hour. Probably less.’ Dandy Tom sounded positively ghoulish.
‘I’ve got the message.’ She looked at him imploringly, and he melted, telephoned a little place he knew, tucked away up near Covent Garden. ‘They get the choicest titbits,’ he said. And they also had introductions to the porters over at Smithfield, the city’s principal meat market. ‘Under control,’ he told her. ‘Make yourself comfy and I’ll feed you, okay?’
She said it was more than okay, and nearly forgot herself, almost kissing his cheek in front of the lads. Then, just as they were leaving, Bert rang from Hampshire and they were delayed a further twenty minutes as Tommy listened to the scenes-of-crime man go on about what he’d found in Ailsa Goldfinch’s cottage.
He got Brian, his favourite driver, to take them over to Covent Garden in his, Tommy’s, private car, a lean and hungry looking maroon Daimler that smelled of polished leather. ‘Brian, Sergeant Mountford and I are on urgent police business,’ Dandy Tom said.
‘So I see, sir, and I couldn’t be more delighted.’ Brian was smiling as they drew up a stone’s throw from the restaurant, hidden away in a side street. Tommy took her hand, held on and led her along the dark street; long confident strides, his strength flowing through the firm grip. She almost had to run to keep up with him.
He was obviously known in the place, ‘Mr Livermore, sir. I’m so delighted you could come.’ A white-haired French patron, conducting them to their table in the long, narrow room, and his wife coming out from behind the tall cashier’s desk. The room was half full, many of the men in strange uniforms, Poles, Suzie thought. Poles and Czechs. The prettiest girls were with French officers and the room smelled of wine, bread and pungent cigarettes. At the far end, in front of the cashier’s desk was a large piece of white card with ‘All Clear’ written on it in heavy green crayon. No doubt the words ‘Air Raid in Progress’ could be found on the reverse, written in red.
‘And how is His Grace?’ the patron asked, signalling for the headwaiter to take over. ‘And Lady Eunice. They are well?’
‘Excellent health and spirits, thank you.’
‘And madame.’ He bent low towards Suzie as she took her seat.
‘On great form, thank you.’
She asked for a Dubonnet; Tommy ordered a gin and tonic and the instructions were passed down the chain-of-command, from the patron to the headwaiter to the bar waiter. ‘And a bottle of your 72,’ Tommy added. ‘If you have any left.’
Finally s
ettled in the restaurant, Suzie realized her appetite had returned. She hadn’t really enjoyed a meal since Charlotte’s death.
‘They haven’t given us a menu.’
‘Bit of a surprise, heart,’ Dandy Tom told her. ‘Asked them to whip up a Christmas dinner,’ he said, and there it was, a consommé to start, then the full moment of traditional turkey and all the trimmings as the headwaiter said, and Dandy Tom did a little imitation of Oliver Hardy fiddling with his tie and saying, ‘Dinner is soived, from the soup to the nuts.’
‘Home farm again?’ she giggled.
‘Only the turkey.’ He grinned like a schoolboy, and she knew for the first time, looking at his soft, polished and bronzed skin, and the wary reserve in the hazel-flecked eyes, that this was a man who needed to be loved.
So she sat back, enjoyed the dinner, listened to him as he told stories and kept off the matter at hand. Both matters in fact — death and where they were going. It was only when they were drinking a coffee that didn’t taste of chicory that she brought them both back to earth.
‘So,’ she said softly, ‘what have we really got here, sir?’
‘The two of us?’
‘Unless you’ve been giving me the wrong signals, or I’ve been reading them badly?’ She made this last into a question.
‘No, you’ve been translating me very precisely. As I think I’ve said before, I knew from the moment I walked into that block of service flats and saw you looking like Christmas Eve. Never happened to me before. Haven’t got you out of my mind since. Off-putting, actually, heart.’
He wasn’t an ‘actually’ kind of person, so she looked up sharply and saw he was smiling, making fun of himself.
‘I’m glad. It’s the same with me, as I know I’ve already told you.’
‘Tell me more,’ he asked, so she did, for about twenty minutes, and he listened attentively, and made the right noises at the right places — and meant it. ‘Now,’ she finally asked, ‘what about the maniac we’re dealing with? You still want me on the case?’ She had been concerned about his manner while he had been going through the details of the killings. She thought maybe he had suddenly developed reservations about working on this case with a woman he suddenly felt strongly about.
He smiled: the slow burn. ‘You’re quick, heart. You pick up on things. I had some doubts earlier ... not about you, but about what I may probably have to put you through. All solved now. One’s personal risk can sometimes obscure the long view. And the long view’s difficult enough at this time in history, because we’re up against another maniac who’s pouring bombs on us and killing several hundred people a week. Makes it tricky. My point of view anyway.’
‘Tommy — do you like being called Tommy?’
‘Darling would be a mite better, heart.’
She was suddenly embarrassed, dropped her eyes and reached over to cover the back of his hand with hers. ‘What did Bert want?’
‘Quite good news. He’s found a box full of goodies at the cottage. It’s marked “Golly” and it was taped up. Inside there was a card addressed to his mum from Cambridge, with the right date on the franking; a knife; and some of the missing underwear.’
‘Whose?’
‘Not sure yet. Have to look through the reports, but from his description and my memory it’s probably Geraldine Williams and the Harwood girl. Souvenirs, I guess.’
‘You really going to stake me out like a tethered goat?’
He thought for a moment. ‘No, like a sheep.’
They laughed, then she became nervous again, embarrassed.
‘What I think would be best —’ he began.
‘Can I just, perhaps, get on with the job, and stay visible — visible to Goldfinch, I mean?’
‘It was what I was going to suggest. It would make it easier for us to keep tabs on you, dear heart.’ That smile would be her undoing. Then he said, ‘You weren’t happy about the interviews you’d already done. How about giving them a second shot?’
She didn’t reply.
‘I’ve forgotten who you’ve done. Tell me again.’
She went through her list, ‘Jo Benton’s agent, Webster; the fiancé, Fermin; Squadron Leader O’Dell; the actor, Gerald Vine; Barry Forbes, adviser to the PM; and Josh Dance, at the house agency.’
‘You fancy any of them?’
She looked up sharply.
‘I mean as possible manipulators?’
‘Oh, yes. No. No, not really.’
‘What does “not really” mean, darling heart?’
That stopped her dead in her tracks, and she swam in his eyes for a moment. Then, ‘Well I’ve got to see Josh Dance again anyway.’
‘Remind me.’
‘To ask about Emily Baccus. See if she was connected to anyone else we’re aware of. He’d know her history.’
That’s who she looks like. Oh yes, of course. Now you see it, now you don’t.
‘Okay. Give him a ring. Take a look into her family tree. I should be peeping into yours as well.’
‘Oh, I’m not nearly good enough for the likes of you, sir.’
‘You’d better be.’
Another bit of drowning in each other’s eyes. ‘So you don’t fancy any of the others?’
‘I don’t see Gerald Vine manipulating Golly Goldfinch. To do what? Deal with that little ASM in Birmingham because she gave him the wrong cue?’
‘Barry Forbes?’
‘I’d hardly think he’d be getting his own back on any of our victims. He’s got enough to cope with advising Mr Churchill.’
‘More than enough, because old Winnie’s already got some brilliant financial advisers. Can’t really see why he wants someone like Barry Forbes. You said he was a bit stroppy.’
‘Thinks the sun shines out of his navel and places adjacent.’
‘Flint?’
‘Desperate Daniel Flint? Could be. Shifty. Small somehow. Small-minded, I mean.’
‘Give him another whirl, heart. And this Dance character. You’re edgy about him, aren’t you?’
‘He was wounded in France, before Dunkirk. Devastatingly good-looking, but there’s something not quite right there.’
‘Take Shirley Cox with you.’
She didn’t reply and knew in the far corner of her mind that she wasn’t going to do that. ‘You are going to keep me covered, aren’t you, Tommy?’
‘Try and stop me.’
She studied his face for what seemed to be a long time. ‘You going to take me home, sir?’
‘Why not?’
When they got back to Upper St Martin’s Lane he came up with her. Did all the usual things. Checked the rooms, and the fire escape, looked behind the curtains. And in the cupboards, then kissed her in the hallway. Long, satisfying with plenty of sighing between the kisses.
‘Will you stay?’ she asked. ‘I’d feel safer if you stayed.’
‘If I asked you to marry me, what would you say, heart?’
‘Yes, of course. Yes. I’d say yes. Yes, please.’
‘Good. That’s settled then. I’ll tell my mother tomorrow.’ He smiled at her, the smile as long as the last kiss.
‘You got a spare room?’ he asked.
‘Yes.’
‘Then I’ll stay,’ he said. ‘No hanky-panky.’
‘Oh, yes,’ she said. And he kissed her again, and ‘Oh,’ she said, and ‘Ah,’ he said.
About an hour later, Suzie gave a little sigh, rolled over and groaned a bit and winced. ‘Tommy darling, that means you’ve got to marry me.’
‘Well, of course, heart. My intention, actually. Eh?’
She wondered if her eyes were as bright as his.
‘More,’ she said.
*
Golly was in trouble. Over all those years Golly had been in control. Since childhood it was his trick, seeing how long he could remain standing still, in command of his muscles. He was very, very good at it, standing still. In heat and freezing cold. Among trees or lying in bushes, silent in the middle of
a field.
And now, in this ditch, his muscles went out of control. He supposed he had overdone it, all night in those trees behind Falcon Cottage, followed by half of the day. That’s what had done it. He’d got terribly cold and now, lying here listening, he had spun out of control.
He listened to the men on the roadblock, and couldn’t understand half of what they said to one another. They were arguing — ‘Bloody “Bullring”,’ one of them kept saying, kept repeating this one word, ‘“Bullring”. Bloody “Bullring”. I don’t believe it for a minute. This is for real. They’re saying it’s an exercise, but it’s real and happening. Why the hell’ve we got live rounds? Tell me that, if it’s an exercise why’ve they given us live rounds?’
‘The officer who briefed us, he said they’d have aircraft up tomorrow. That doesn’t sound like an exercise. Does it? What?’
‘Yea, he’s right,’ said another. ‘I heard that old Mr Tyler from up Marsh Cross, him that works at Armitage, Simmons & Faulds, estate agents, he’s going round all their empty properties, and he’s got a couple of policemen with him. They told him to take some protection with him, and he has done. Couple of big seething coppers.’
‘This is really happening. They’re after someone and don’t want to tell us who they’re after.’
‘Or what?’ said a fourth man sounding sinister.
‘Yeah. “Operation Bullring”. “Operation Bullshit” more like.’
Then the motorbike came up and the dispatch rider cut his engine, and Golly could hear what was said. ‘They’re about three-quarters of a mile away. Moving really slowly. Be here in about half-an-hour.’
‘How much ground they covering?’