Death Scene

by Jane A. Adams

  ‘Mummy says that the place where you’re going today, the place where the poor young lady was murdered, they made a film of one of Mr Dickens’s books there.’

  ‘I didn’t know that. Do you remember which one?’

  Melissa looked at her mother. ‘It was Little Dorrit,’ Cynthia told him. ‘I believe that they used the old fort as a setting for the Marshalsea prison. Joan Morgan played the lead role. We have some of her pictures in the albums, don’t we, Melissa? I thought it might be nice – if you get the chance, that is – if perhaps you could take a few photographs of the fort and maybe the studio to add to Melissa’s collection?’

  Henry smiled at his sister, not fooled by the fact that she had now passed her scrapbooks on to her daughter. Cynthia, he thought, was still a little star struck for all her good sense. ‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he promised.

  Mickey and Henry left the family finishing their breakfast and set off back for Shoreham-by-Sea.

  ‘Did you ever regret not having children?’ Henry asked, and immediately wished he hadn’t. It was an unusual question for him and he wasn’t sure it was an appropriate one.

  ‘I think I would have made a good father,’ Mickey said. ‘I’m not so sure my wife would have made a good mother. And I think it takes both. If one of you is in disagreement then it can’t be much fun for the children, can it?’

  ‘No, it can’t. But I think there are men out there who have children just so that they can impose their will upon them. Some men seem to take pleasure in that.’

  Mickey nodded but didn’t reply. He knew who was being referenced and didn’t want to encourage the melancholy that set in when Henry thought about his childhood. Henry took out his journal and began to write, his hand shaking a little as the car rumbled and jerked and bounced along the potholes. A memory had come to him, triggered by the conversation with Cynthia, and he knew that he needed to get it down or it would bother him all day.

  I recall the smell of my father’s study. Chemicals and coal dust and ancient books.

  I had to learn, he would say. I must develop the skills I would need to take over from him and he would tell his few friends and many acquaintances that he was ‘training the boy’.

  Training the boy meant standing over me while I rolled pills and worked for hours with the pestle and mortar, grinding powders, writing tiny neat labels with hands that were too frozen and stiff to wield a pen.

  Truthfully, I can think of circumstances in which I might have enjoyed the work, but our father stood over me with a wooden rule in his hands and at any sign of failure – and his exacting standards made failure inevitable – he would smash my hands with the rule.

  And he would laugh. ‘You’re useless, boy. Useless.’

  I am past caring about this now, he is long gone. But I do care for all of those other small beings whose lives are crushed and broken by uncaring, cruel fathers. Life is tough and mean enough without our protectors becoming our torturers and taking pleasure in the fact.

  They drove straight into Bungalow Town, having arranged with the local force to have constables meet them there that morning. Henry was to remain at Cissie Rowe’s bungalow while Mickey went along to Jimmy Cottee’s. He would leave the car on the Old Fort Road and walk the rest of the way.

  ‘Happy hunting.’ Mickey grinned before striding off.

  ‘Happy hunting indeed,’ Henry muttered. He joined the constables on the veranda and told them that everything, and he meant everything, needed to be brought out and set on the beach. Two constables then set to searching the furniture and two more would help Henry inside.

  A small crowd had gathered to watch the proceedings, including Dr Clark and his wife and children. They looked justifiably concerned and Henry tried to reassure them that everything would be put back as it had been before. For the first time he sensed hostility amongst the local people. They had been more than happy for him to investigate, eager for whoever had committed this dreadful crime to be brought to book, but did the consequences have to be paraded so very obviously for everyone to see? Somehow emptying the contents of Cissie’s bungalow brought it home to everyone that she was no longer there. That she had no further need for her furniture or her pictures or her books. It was, Henry realized, almost as though her corpse had been stripped naked and laid out for all to see, the young woman’s life laid utterly bare.

  For the next two hours Henry worked beside the constables. The two on the beach had examined the furniture even more thoroughly than he and Mickey had done on that first day. He had given them orders that nothing need be taken apart that could not have been dismantled easily and quickly by the owner. If Cissie Rowe had hidden anything among her belongings then it would have to have been in a place accessible to her. There were two reasons that had caused him to decide that this task should be undertaken outside, on the beach, in public view. One was practical: there was very little room for manoeuvre in the bungalow and the searchers would be falling over one another. The second was more subtle. He knew how the neighbours would feel, seeing this, and he hoped that consciences would be disturbed and memories jogged as the full force of realization came home to them.

  Inside the bungalow he and the constables examined the floorboards and the panelling and all the fixtures and fittings. He had also set one of them to look at the water tank again. It had been examined twice already, first by Constable Prentice and then by Mickey Hitchens, but Henry thought it would do no harm to look again. He also had the constable take a ladder to peer under the eaves – though this was more for show than anything. Had Cissie Rowe formed a habit of regularly taking a ladder and poking around under the corrugated roof, someone would have noticed.

  Towards noon, when even Henry had stripped off his coat and was continuing in his shirt sleeves, a message came from the police station that a young woman called Evelyn Cunningham, the same young woman that Cissie Rowe was rumoured to have quarrelled with over a gentleman friend and who had subsequently lost her job, was waiting for him at the police station. It seemed that the police hadn’t tracked her down but friends from the studio had been in touch and told her what questions had been asked and urged her to come forward herself.

  Henry left the search and drove back into town, glad that Mickey had left him the car. The day was hot for September and he would not have relished the twenty or so minutes it would have taken to walk back.

  Evelyn Cunningham was waiting for him in a small side room off the main reception. She seemed very composed, and had a friend with her whom Henry recognized as Violet, from the studio. They were drinking tea and chatting though she began to look a little anxious when Henry appeared and took a seat opposite. This room was larger than the one in which he had interviewed the boy and there was room for a small table and three chairs.

  ‘Is it all right if my friend stays?’ Evelyn Cunningham asked him, and Henry assured her that it was. ‘Only I’m a bit nervous about being here. I’ve never been inside a police station before, not even to report a lost dog or anything like that.’

  Henry thanked her for coming and told her that it had saved the police a lot of time in tracking her down.

  ‘Tracking me down? But I’ve done nothing.’

  Henry cursed his choice of words. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I put that badly. I’m very grateful that you have come to us; as I say, it has saved us a lot of time.’ He glanced at the friend, wondering how much she knew and whether Evelyn Cunningham would mind talking about her previous romantic involvement in front of her. He decided that if Miss Cunningham had brought the woman with her she must already have considered this. He wondered which of the several young men whose names they had obtained from Muriel Owens this particular young woman had been attached to.

  ‘We were told that you had a disagreement with Miss Rowe. Over a young man?’

  She frowned. ‘She was always a flirty sort, and I told my Richard – when he was my Richard, you understand – I told my Richard not to take her seriously. She flirt
ed, if you pardon the expression, with anything in trousers, if you pardon the expression. It was just her way. If the man took no notice—’

  ‘And how often did that happen?’ her friend interjected.

  ‘Well, I suppose that’s true,’ Evelyn agreed. ‘The truth is, I thought that Cissie Rowe was my friend and therefore she would leave my Richard alone. I was wrong about that, wasn’t I? The more he ignored her the more determined she seemed to be. Anyway, it all came to a head one day at the studios. I caught her brushing a hair off his shoulder, all intimate like. I mean, what woman does that, if she’s not stepping out with a man, or related to him, or something? I mean, would you come up to me and brush a hair off my coat?’

  Henry shook his head. ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘That would not seem proper, not if I didn’t know you well.’

  ‘I suppose Richard did know her fairly well.’ The friend screwed up her nose and forehead, as though having to think about this very carefully.

  ‘It wasn’t that so much, it was the way Richard responded to her. You could see he liked being that close to her. She was standing so close you couldn’t get a hand between them. I mean, if you’re dancing with somebody, well, fair enough, but not when you’re just supposed to be talking. If you see what I mean?’

  Henry nodded. ‘And so you challenged them?’

  ‘No, not really. I took Richard’s arm and we left and I just gave her a look, you know. A look.’

  ‘And then what happened?’

  ‘Well, a few days later, Richard told me that he didn’t think we should be seeing each other any more. That he thought I was jealous and difficult. And perhaps we should take a little break from one another. That was how he put it. Take a little break from one another. I mean, what man comes out with something like that? I was sure it was Cissie putting words into his mouth.’

  ‘And you did separate …?’

  ‘And the next thing I know, only a couple of weeks later he’s collecting Cissie from studio and they are off out together. Dancing and dinner. You don’t take somebody dancing and to dinner unless things are well advanced, do you? You might take a walk first, or even go to the cinema, or take tea somewhere. But dancing and dinner, on the same night? That told me that they had been planning this for quite some time. Quite some time before we … separated. And then she arrives at the studio a few days later and she’s wearing a necklace. One none of us had seen before. A gold locket, it was. Old-fashioned looking, but still very nice.

  ‘Well, I wasn’t going to ask where she’d got it from, but some of the other girls did and you can guess what she told them.’

  ‘That Richard had given it to her.’

  ‘I never thought that was likely,’ Violet said. ‘Where would Richard have got the money for something like that, even if it wasn’t a new thing? Even if it was bought second-hand. It still looked pricey.’

  ‘All I know is that in all the time we were together – and it was a full six months, you know – he never bought me more than chocolates, or even offered to. Not that I would have let him. We never talked about getting engaged or anything. But even so. After two weeks, or a little more? And it wasn’t the first or the only time.’

  Henry nodded; that chimed with what they had learned the day before. He guessed that the two women had a lot more to say and so, taking a leaf out of Mickey’s book, he sent for more tea and settled down to listen.

  Mickey Hitchens had almost finished his search and was ready for the trek back along the beach, prepared to tell his boss that he had found nothing, when one of the constables called him.

  The young man was standing precariously on a wobbly chair and poking away at the ceiling of the railway carriage.

  Metal ribs supported the roof and the constable was sliding a knife behind one of these.

  ‘What’ve you found there, lad?’ Mickey asked him.

  ‘It’s probably nothing, Sarge, but there’s a bit of paper been jammed in between the rib and the roof. I thought it might be worth a look, but I’m having trouble getting it out. I poked it with the blade of my pocket knife and I’ve actually wedged it further in. I must have poked it the wrong way.’

  Mickey felt in his pocket and withdrew his own pocket knife. He handed it to the young man. ‘Here,’ he said, ‘try the blade on that. It might be a little thinner than yours.’

  The constable took it, looking curiously at it. ‘A German knife, Sarge?’ He looked a little surprised.

  ‘The company what made that is called Mercator and was making decent blades a long time before their countrymen decided they wanted a fight,’ Mickey told him. ‘I acquired that there blade in 1916 and it’s been with me ever since. Its original owner having no more use for it, if you get my meaning.’

  The constable must’ve been a child when the war ended, Mickey thought. He was no more than eighteen now. Mickey watched as he probed behind the rib once more and poked the piece of paper out. Mickey could see that whoever had slid it in there had chosen a spot where the rib had a tiny bend on it so it didn’t sit quite flush to the carriage roof. In his enthusiasm the constable, instead of using the blade to fetch it out, had inadvertently pushed the scrap further into the wedge formed between the curving rib and the curving ceiling.

  ‘So what have we got then, lad?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘Looks like a pawn ticket, sir, seems a funny thing to be putting up in a place like that. But I suppose you’re not likely to lose it that way, are you? I suppose it’s a kind of a safe place.’

  Mickey took the knife and the pawn ticket from him and looked at both thoughtfully. ‘A safe place indeed,’ he said. ‘Now the two big questions we have are, did Mr Cottee put it there himself and, if he didn’t, did he know about it?’

  The ticket was a little ragged after being poked with a knife blade and scraped out from beneath the rib. Mickey, who always kept a few spare envelopes in his pocket for just such a purpose, even when he didn’t have the murder bag with him, tucked the ticket into one of them and wrote details on the outside of where it had been found and how.

  ‘Well observed,’ he said. ‘What the devil made you look up there?’

  The young man shrugged. ‘Not sure, sir, but I had looked everywhere else and found nothing so it was just, well, the last place I could think of, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, while you’re up there, take a look at the rest. Just to be sure.’

  Mickey helped him to check the remainder of the railway carriage that had been Jimmy Cottee’s home but they found nothing else and finally Mickey turned back towards where his boss was supervising the search of Cissie Rowe’s bungalow. Before he had put the ticket away he had noticed two things. One was that the pawnbroker was based in London and the second that the object that had been pawned was a gold brooch. At that moment Mickey would have bet a month’s wages that either Cissie Rowe had put the pawn ticket in its hiding place or Jimmy Cottee had done it for her.

  He was inclined towards the former option.

  SIXTEEN

  Mickey Hitchens arrived back at Cissie Rowe’s bungalow to find that his boss was no longer there. The search of the murdered woman’s home had turned up nothing new, he was told. He asked about paperwork or receipts and was directed to a small stack of letters and bills and a few more photographs that had been gathered together. Most of these were things that Mickey had seen before. Receipts for dresses bought, a few more photographs of studio friends and two letters from Muriel Owens written when the Owenses had been on holiday.

  Previously Mickey had discounted these assorted documents as being of no interest but now he looked again and noticed that two of the receipts, one for a dress and one for a winter coat, were from London shops. He took tweezers from the murder bag, carefully extracted the pawn ticket from its envelope and looked at the address. The shops that had supplied the clothes were undoubtedly more upmarket than the pawnbrokers, but in terms of distance they were no more than a few streets away.

  Interesting, Mickey thought. Interesti
ng too that he knew that the pawnbroker had previously been under observation, suspected of receiving stolen goods – though nothing had ever stuck, despite the fact that he’d been brought in for questioning on a number of occasions.

  Now, Mickey thought, why would a young woman in need of a pawnbroker go all the way to London to find one? It might be that she wanted to be discreet, of course, in which case why not go to Worthing or Brighton? Her face was as likely to be recognized in the city as it was in any of the local towns.

  ‘It looks like rain, sir. Can we start to bring things back inside? Or should we find tarpaulins and cover them down?’

  Mickey looked around the empty shell of what had been Cissie Rowe’s home. It seemed that everything that could be extracted from its structure had already been discovered. As good a search as possible had been done. Then he remembered that the kitchen and the bedroom were, like Jimmy Cottee’s home, constructed from railway carriages; the chances were they had the same steel ribs supporting the roof.

  ‘You can start to bring stuff back into the middle room,’ he said. ‘And can someone find me a chair, something to stand on?’

  A chair was provided and Mickey took it through to the bedroom and began to look for likely places where something like a pawn ticket might be hidden. Standing somewhat uncertainly on a dining chair he began to poke about, watched in puzzlement by one of the constables. ‘Anything I can be of help with, Sarge?’ he asked, eyeing with some trepidation the rather square, rather bulky man on the rather small, rather slender chair.

  ‘Just be ready to get out of the way should I fall off this thing,’ Mickey told him, and the young man took another step back.

  For several minutes Mickey poked and prodded but found nothing and then he struck lucky. Folded and flattened and tucked between rib and ceiling he found a slip of paper, and then a second. The first was another pawn ticket; the second was what appeared to be a list of jewellery, and beside the list what could possibly be initials.