A Commonplace Killing - Siân Busby

by A Commonplace Killing (epub)

  “I’ll see what I can do, Jackie, but I’m busy.”

  “You’re a true gent, Mr Cooper, sir; one of the best.” Cooper continued along the corridor with the encomium ringing at his back. “No. I tell a lie: the very best. You’re on the level, sir, God bless you, and that’s the truth.”

  Crumpled detectives littered the main incident room; men like him: badly shaved, balding, dressed in ill-fitting, indistinct blue suits, and crammed into a smoky room the colour of putty. They were making telephone calls, drinking tea, smoking, pinning things on to large noticeboards; they were slumped in attitudes of resignation, frustration, dismay, their elbows leaning on desks cluttered with overflowing ashtrays, unfinished cups of cold tea, stacks of reports.

  “We’ve picked up a murder,” he told his number two, who sighed dutifully. “Afraid so, old man; some poor tart rather carelessly got herself strangled last night.”

  “People are so inconsiderate,” said the detective inspector.

  “Aren’t they though.”

  “Don’t they know there’s a crime wave?”

  Cooper grinned lightly. “Frank Lucas is running things for me, but obviously I shall have to give it some of my attention.”

  The number two was a paunchy fellow of about thirty-five, but looked older; he had only just returned to the service after four years in the army, years which had intensified a tendency to mask chronic dyspepsia with an unconvincing cheeriness.

  “Just tell me what needs doing, chief,” he said, suppressing the need to wince from the pain of an incipient ulcer.

  Cooper handed over the samples. “These need to go to Hendon.”

  The detective inspector winced again. “This afternoon? There won’t be anyone there, you know. It’s Sunday.”

  “Well, I wanted half an hour alone with this first, in any case,” said Cooper. He held up the bag containing the mackintosh. “Any chance of a cuppa?”

  Cooper took himself into a small side room and spread out the mackintosh on a large table set beneath trammels of pipes, thick with paint, running along the walls and across the ceiling. He scrutinised every inch of the mackintosh through his glass until he had a crick in his neck, and the garment was covered in careful crayon circles: green for grass stains; yellow for what looked like semen. There was no blood that he could see, which was perhaps odd given the circumstances, but he quickly discovered a short hair, of a different colour to the victim’s, stuck to the inside of the collar. There was also a dry-cleaning ticket pinned to one of the seams, and he sighed to himself as he placed the latter in an evidence bag, imagining how Lucas would respond to being told to trace the laundry: the sceptical pout; the sharp draw on the ever-present fag; the economic lift of the eyebrows. And doubtless, Upstairs would be of a like mind.

  But then, he told himself, murder is murder.

  When he was quite certain that he had exhausted the possibilities of the mackintosh, he handed it over to the DI to be sent to the lab, and went into his office to pass a cursory eye over the deep pile of notebooks belonging to the “N” Division detectives serving under him. He was supposed to read and sign them off each week but he was always behind with his paperwork. Usually he would do anything to avoid catching up, but he needed a distraction – something to occupy his mind so that he didn’t keep telephoning Lucas.

  The waiting is always the worst part of an investigation. He had men going through the local lists of missing women. They had sent a good description of the victim to Scotland Yard to be circulated by teleprinter to every police station in the country. There were photographs for the Police Gazette. They were conducting house-to-house inquiries in the area around the murder site, and a search of every front garden and dustbin between it and the nearest main road. The woman’s fingerprints were being checked, and in a day or two, if she was known to the police, they might even have a name. In three or four days, if she was not known to the police, the whole exercise would have been an utter waste of time and manpower. You just never knew. You simply had to wait: knowing that every minute of waiting meant even more distance between you and the murderer.

  He knew the theory, had assisted on any number of murder investigations, and led a few on his own account; but all of this experience had taught him only that he lacked the flair, the intuition that separates a first-rate murder investigator from the dull, work-a-day plod. He was tenacious, occasionally given to flashes of insight; but when it came to homicide all he really knew to do was follow procedure.

  He sighed and tossed away the last of the notebooks. Detectives, he decided, provide a desultory, barely literate read, with their unavailing tallies of unsatisfactory interviews with pawky snouts. It was depressing to learn of crimes that had yet to be committed; of the lorry loads waiting to be hijacked; the coupons hitherto unstolen; the shops unlooted; the safes uncracked – knowing that there was bally-all that you could do about most of it. And even if there was… He was painfully aware of the rest of his life stretching out before him in a long never-ending stream of crime report sheets. After a few moments of thinking like this, he rubbed his eyes back to alertness and removed his feet from the desk. Then he picked up his pen, unscrewed the barrel and recorded a few scant pieces of information: the sort of reassuring twaddle that the detective superintendent liked to see. When he had done this, he took himself down to the cells to see how the interviews with the two crooks they had nabbed last night were going.

  If there was ever need of proof just how much CID had suffered since the war, it was writ plain on the boyish, worried face of the junior detective sergeant – a fellow named Quennell. It takes a good long while to train a detective, and a lot of good men weren’t coming back for one reason or another, and there had been very little recruitment for the duration. The remainder were not always of the highest calibre. Quennell was still wet behind the ears, smooth-chinned, no more than a few months out of uniform and a good few fathoms out of his depth.

  “Have you been playing them off against one another?” Cooper asked. “Telling each of them that the other one has landed him in the – you know what – up to his filthy neck.” Quennell blinked back at him, doubtful. Cooper took a slurp of tea. “I don’t have time to help you on this, Quennell. We picked up a murder today.”

  “Oh yes, sir, I heard about that.”

  Cooper sighed.

  “Let me have a word,” he said.

  He went into the first room. Little Jimmy Dashett was one of those to whom war had given a swagger, a sense of entitlement: nothing more than a cosh-boy, the hooligan sort who is nothing without a knuckleduster in his pocket. Cooper knew instinctively that there was little chance of extracting any worthwhile information from him. To begin with, Jimmy would know nothing about the racket; and it was evident that although the stupid kid had grown up before his time, he still had a lot to learn about how things worked. He told him to take his feet off the table and sit up straight. With a good deal of sneering and ill-graced shifting, the kid complied.

  “I’m not interested in you, Jimmy,” he said. “You’re small fry as far as I’m concerned. I’m after bigger fish. Tell me about Johnny Bristow.”

  The kid smirked.

  “What about him?” he said.

  “We know all about his rackets.”

  “So what do you need me to tell you for then?”

  Cooper was always unerringly polite when interrogating prisoners, and had never found it necessary to raise his voice when doing so, no matter how wearing it was hearing the same old lies and excuses over and over again. However, he had to suppress the urge to clip Little Jimmy Dashett round the ear.

  “We already know about the eggs, Jimmy,” he said. One hundred and eighty thousand of them coming up from the West Country, on their way to a Ministry of Food warehouse. “That’s a big operation. A job like that requires money up front; it takes planning. Oh, you’ll have your part to play, I don’t doubt, but what do you stand to get from it? A pony? A few petrol coupons?”

&nbs
p; “You won’t get me that way, bogey,” said Little Jimmy, who had evidently seen too many gangster pictures.

  “I’m not trying to get you, Jimmy; I’m just wondering why you should be looking at six months’ stir. A bright boy like you? Why should you break your mother’s heart? Spending Christmas sitting on the edge of a hard bunk, staring at the floor, eating cold mashed potato – when all the while the real villain is out there, jitterbugging the night away, probably with your girl?”

  Cooper stopped talking and drank his tea. He could see that Jimmy was thinking about it, weighing up his options. Cooper was quite content to sit there in silence as he finished his tea, set the cup and saucer neatly upon the table and sat back in his chair with his arms folded in front of him. He could have waited all afternoon, but not so the young detective sergeant.

  “Answer the detective inspector,” Quennell said. Little Jimmy Dashett lifted up his head and levelled a huge gob of spit at him. He was smirking triumphantly as the flatfoot standing beside him grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

  “I never come copper on anyone,” he was shouting above the kerfuffle of scraping chairs and table legs, “and I ain’t starting now.”

  Cooper handed the boy detective a handkerchief and looked levelly at Little Jimmy Dashett.

  “Seems you can’t do some people a favour,” he said. The kid looked away first. “Charge him with assaulting a police officer. I’m going to see if we can get more sense out of his chum.”

  The other crook was an old hand at the game of interrogation, well known across north London as Quiet Sid, on account of his being the most garrulous individual in the whole Metropolitan Police area. Quiet Sid made Max Miller look like Helen Keller, and was the sort of villain detectives like: the sort who cannot keep their mouths shut no matter what the stakes; the sort who like to brag to anyone who will listen. Cooper was very good at listening.

  “I suppose I’m under starter’s orders,” Quiet Sid said even before Cooper had had a chance to settle into his chair. Within minutes Sid had come up with a whole scenario in which he knew everyone and everything; every angle of every dodge.

  “The front’s a barber’s shop on Fonthill Road,” he was saying, “little four-by-two running the game – goes by the name of Manny Cohen…”

  “Every policeman in London knows Manny Cohen,” sighed Cooper. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

  Sid fingered another crook, a rival of Johnny Bristow for supremacy in north London.

  “You would not believe the extent of the operation, Mr Cooper. The other week they shifted a million cigs – foreign import. They took them out of the boxes and sold ’em loose – export, see: foreign – not Turks or Greeks…”

  After Sid had run on in this way for a good fifteen minutes, Cooper leaned forward and looked at him in earnest.

  “Sid, tell me about Johnny Bristow.”

  Quiet Sid sucked in a draught of breath until he whistled, then he withdrew to his side of the table and shook his head.

  “Nah nah,” he said. “You won’t find his dabs on anything, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Mr Cooper.”

  Cooper rubbed his eyes and settled back in his chair. He was tired and hungry, and it was occurring to him that in some profound sense, he didn’t give a damn about black-market eggs and cigarettes and Jew fences. The run-of-the-mill crook, such as Quiet Sid, was an open book to him, in it for the dibs, the readies, and although he had never been motivated by greed, Cooper could understand a man who was; there was no mystery there. He needed to give some time to attempting to understand how a man had come to strangle a woman with his bare hands. He didn’t want to, but he had to, and the necessity of the task depressed him. He signalled to the detective sergeant to take over, and leaned across the table to shake Sid’s hand.

  “Thanks, old man,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

  Cooper had another cup of tea in his office and then walked over to Caledonian Road. The walk helped to clear his head a little, and the clarity lasted until he arrived at the station and discovered that Lucas still had nothing to report. No missing persons report matching the dead woman had turned up; nobody living near the murder scene had heard or witnessed anything untoward; so far the dustbins had failed to yield a handbag.

  “Extend the house-to-house,” Cooper said.

  Lucas drew on his ever-present cigarette. “I’m running this investigation with one detective sergeant and two beat coppers,” he said.

  “Stupid suggestion,” said Cooper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

  He hovered over the incident room like a spectre; from time to time he and Lucas sat either side of a large table going over the evidence, positing theories.

  “Something about this doesn’t sit right,” Cooper said for the ’umpteenth time. “No sign of any struggle, apart from the bruise on her hand. Looks like she removed her own drawers; they spread a mackintosh out on the ground beneath her.”

  “Could have been a pimp came across them,” said Lucas. “Maybe she was treating a client, or keeping the money back. Pimps don’t like that.”

  Cooper shook his head. “A pimp would have beaten the living daylights out of her. Besides, there was no evidence that more than the two people were there.”

  Lucas tapped the ash from his cigarette into a large tin ashtray.

  “I can pull in Greek Tony, if you like. He runs a lot of the local girls.”

  “She just doesn’t look like a tart to me.” Cooper ran his hands across his stubble. “What are we missing, Frank? What’s gone on here?”

  The DI sighed. “Why don’t you go and get yourself something to eat, sir?” he said.

  Cooper grinned. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to get rid of me.”

  “Can’t have you pegging out on us, guv’nor.”

  “Oh, no fear of that, old man; no fear of that…”

  13

  Half an hour later Cooper was emerging from the underground at Piccadilly Circus, and stepping into a stupefying heat. Without the lights, Town was bereft of whatever illusory glamour it might once have possessed; the badly dressed staggered drunkenly past him in clouds of brilliantine, cigarette smoke and cheap scent, and it wasn’t long before he was wondering why on earth he had bothered to come.

  He headed for a restaurant which he vaguely remembered as one that would be serving dinner on a Sunday night, but it was only as he turned into the street that he recollected it was also the place where he had first met Marjorie. How on earth had he forgotten that? Perhaps it was a good sign – proof that he was finally moving on. Bill had wanted so badly to show her off to him, so they had made up a party. He’d gone there with a girl whose name he had forgotten. The mere fact that he had ever done such things as going out to dinner with friends, with a girl, seemed implausible to him now. Of course, this would have been before the war: ’36. ’37.

  After they’d eaten their main courses, Marjorie and the other girl had gone off to powder their noses and Bill had leaned over and said:

  “That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

  The restaurant was still there, although it had evidently suffered as much as he had in the intervening years and had declined into the sort of place where they tell you the price in shillings so it sounds cheaper. He paid a small fortune for a couple of boiled potatoes swimming in greasy Bisto and a well-grilled chop which he needed his magnifier to locate; pudding was half a tinned pear and a sponge finger steeped in evaporated milk; the slice of bread and margarine which he had with it was by far the best part of the whole meal. It was hardly the Café Royal, but he supposed it was better than enduring the misery of a cup of tea in the all-night Express Dairy. He tried not to look about him at the other sad and lonely men hunched over their bowls of soup; it wasn’t just that it was dispiriting: looking around a public place marked you out as a copper as surely as if you had walked in with a blue light on your head.

  He walked back to the underground, t
he tarts stepping out from the shadows invariably retreating as soon as they clapped eyes on him. The tarts could tell at a glance: the way he walked, the Homburg, the battered mackintosh; they could smell it on him, for all he knew. He wondered when the fishnet stockings and little veiled hats of the pre-war era had given way to mottled flesh and cheap headscarves.

  “Hello, dearie!”

  He doffed his hat and shook his head.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Any time, dearie. I’m always here, I am. It’s a nice clean room.”

  As he walked away he wondered if he would ever be that lonely. He didn’t want sex; he wanted something else. He could not bear to contemplate what it was he was missing. Besides, he was too much of a prig, too fastidious. His first experience, as a boy of fifteen, finding himself in the midst of war – not the Hitler War, the other one: the one they still called the Great War – had marked him for life. He had been urged on by the older fellows – they were going over the top at dawn. “You don’t want to die a virgin, do you, Jimmy?” He had never had occasion to think about such a profundity before: a few weeks earlier he had worried about nothing more than his batting average in the school first eleven. Death. Sex. The stark absurdity of the juxtaposition had struck him even then; an irony of laughable tragedy, like that of the condemned man eating a hearty breakfast half an hour before the drop. It had seemed to him then, and it did now, to be both the most pointless and the most important thing in the whole world. The woman had smelled of garlic and stale rosewater, and was naked apart from her stockings, which were rolled down to her knees, and a dirty cotton shift. Her breasts had been large and greasy. He hadn’t known what to do, was utterly clueless, shocked by the way his body seemed to know more about what was going to happen than he did, and the woman had long since grown weary of educating lines of terrified, stupid boys. He kept thinking about his mother and his sisters. The other men had laughed and jeered when he emerged from the tiny attic room, pale and trembling and feeling slightly sick, less than five minutes after entering it; and the joke only wore off when most of them disappeared over the top the next day.