A Commonplace Killing - Siân Busby

by A Commonplace Killing (epub)

  “I had assumed that she’d been beaten, raped and strangled over some argument about money, or for resisting her attacker’s advances,” he said, “in the common way of these things.” He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a streetwalker asking for the money after conducting the business…”

  “I bow to your greater knowledge of these matters, Detective Inspector,” said the pathologist.

  “She was found in a place known to be a favoured resort of prostitutes,” Cooper said. “But then I had wondered about the condition of the clothing. She wasn’t beaten up, either, so it seems unlikely that her ponce was responsible. As a matter of fact, the more I look at it, the less like a streetwalker she appears.”

  The doctor had turned his attention to the woman’s left hand.

  “Well, I’ve had a good many prostitutes over the years…” he said, pausing for comic effect, just as, Cooper supposed, he must have done countless times before in lecture theatres, waiting for the gales of sycophantic laughter to die down before proceeding to a consideration of the pathology of sex murder. Cooper frowned and a look of irritation creased the doctor’s features. “No,” he said, bending in closer over the woman’s left hand, “she doesn’t look like a prostitute.”

  “So what the blazes was she doing there?”

  “Perhaps she didn’t want to take him home to meet her husband.” The doctor was holding up the woman’s left hand. The faint white mark on the third finger was so obvious Cooper could not believe that he had missed it. You damn fool, he thought. He hadn’t even looked for a ring because he had assumed that he was investigating the humdrum killing of a common prostitute. How many times had he told the men under his command, never ever assume: let the evidence tell its own story? He ran an appraising, thoughtful thumb over the nap of his Homburg. First, a victim with no identity, and now he had no motive.

  “Do you ever read the News of the World?” The question took Cooper by surprise. “My driver assures me that hardly an edition goes by without mention of some returning serviceman murdering his errant wife.” The pathologist sighed wearily. “The women of Britain have committed the ultimate betrayal. Not just adultery, but adultery with Yanks, Poles, Canadians, I-ties…”

  Cooper was feeling slightly queasy. The formaldehyde, the buzz of the electric light bulb, the drain holes in the metal table and the blood-stained implements; they were all conspiring against him, and for a brief moment it was as though everything solid was falling away before him and he thought he might actually pass out.

  “I blame the cinema…” the pathologist was saying, “it glamorises prostitution… It must be almost impossible for a genuine streetwalker to make a living these days, there are so many amateurs about… A highly sexed woman, deprived of sexual satisfaction, will quickly be brought to nymphomania… It’s a disease that has become endemic since the war.”

  Cooper watched the rest of the post-mortem in a sort of reverie, turning various possibilities over and over in his mind, mentally browsing the murder scene, until he was certain, as certain as anyone can ever be of anything, that he had not missed a single clue: a hair, a cigarette end, a few blades of grass, a good-quality gentleman’s mackintosh, a pair of dirty stockings, a shred of green wool. The idea that someone else, other than her lover, might have committed the murder – a jealous husband or boyfriend, perhaps – appealed to him; but try as he might, there was no indication that anyone else had been at the murder site, apart from the victim and her killer.

  The heat and turmoil of the streets came as a shock to him after the morgue chill; the blood red of the buses on St Pancras Way startling after the white tiled vacancy. She was leaning against the squad car chatting with some young fellow and smiling so prettily it almost took his breath away. Like a coward he tried to sneak off without her seeing him, chuckling mirthlessly at his own preposterousness.

  “Sir, Sir! Oh I say! Sir!” She saluted smartly the instant he turned around. “Golly! I nearly missed you! What a chump I’d have looked!”

  He removed his hat and held it limply with the bag of samples from the pathologist.

  “Policewoman Tring, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, well! What on earth are you doing here?”

  She smiled at him and shook her head as if regarding an errant but nevertheless endearing child.

  “DI Lucas says we can’t possibly have you spending all day going up and down the Northern Line, so he’s sent me to take you out to Hendon and anywhere else you need to go.”

  “Quite unnecessary. Waste of resources…”

  She put her head to one side and fixed him with a look of such compassion and understanding that he was forced to jut out his chin in order to dam a spontaneous wellspring of feeling.

  “It’s alright,” she said. “I want to help. Please, let me help you.”

  17

  It got on her nerves the way Evelyn had to flirt with every man who gave her the time of day. She’d had words with her about it before now: how it looked common, cheap; how no man likes a woman to be too obvious.

  The kid was chatting away with the young man in the swingback jacket and the vulgar woman as if they had known each other all their lives. He looked as if he had come by money in all the ways that had proliferated since the War, and Evelyn was making no attempt to conceal the fact that she was after some of it.

  “Oh Dennis,” she screeched with laughter, waving her hand at him, “what a thing to say. Isn’t he terrible, Lil? Eh, Nesta? Isn’t he a one? Oh, don’t! Don’t!”

  She had her long skinny brown legs up on a chair, and kept smoothing her skirt down over her knees in a way calculated to draw attention to them; she threw her head back to laugh at everything he said; she was wafting a cigarette around her, enveloped in hazy blue. Evelyn would do anything for a cigarette.

  Dennis had ordered more teas and coffees for them, slices of white bread and margarine, fruit cake. The cross-eyed waitress had almost thrown it at them, before going back to the counter, where she stood huffing and sighing, fanning herself with one of the little card menus. The stout man standing by the urn remained oblivious to it all, engrossed in his sporting paper, pausing only to lick his thumb and forefinger every so often, in order to turn the page, slowly and with immense care.

  The heat and the steam, Nesta and Evelyn shrieking with laughter, it all made her feel a little too queasy to “tuck in”, as Dennis put it. I must look a state, she thought. It was so hot, and she could feel the damp of her skin, like a layer beneath her clothes.

  “Is that the time? I really ought to get going,” she said for the umpteenth time, nudging Evelyn. “I need to try and get a lettuce for our supper, dear.”

  Evelyn and Nesta had brought their chairs in close around the table, and she was boxed into a corner, so it was difficult to leave without drawing attention to herself. And then every now and again Dennis would cast a wolf-whistle look in her direction. He had also taken to rolling his eyes at her whenever Nesta said anything, and she had begun to make little gestures of complicity back towards him: a knowing raise of the eyebrows, a half-smile, a slight shrug of the shoulders. She couldn’t deny that she was flattered by his attention – he was young enough to be her son – and it gratified her to think that he preferred her, in some way, to Evelyn, and perhaps the cross-eyed waitress, too, even though she was old enough to be their mother. If I leave, she thought, there’s no knowing what will happen. Certainly, Evelyn would not leave – not where there was a nice-looking man handing out free cigarettes; she needed to keep an eye on the kid, who did not have the common sense and experience to deal with a man who was so obviously out to pick up a woman.

  “Tuck in, blondie,” Dennis was saying. “Get some of that fruit cake down you.”

  She smiled and patted at the back of her head, wondering what it would be like to find herself upstairs on a bus with him, letting him stroke her leg as far up as she dared, him talking a lot of rot as he made little grabs at her w
aist and tried to kiss her. Not that she was as bothered with that sort of nonsense as she had once been. Marriage to Wally and then the war had rid her of any traces of sentimentality she might once have had with regard to men; but she still liked the attention. And so she remained in the dreadful café, with Evelyn’s legs, and Nesta’s cackle, and the plate of bread and marge, all making her feel ill.

  “Ooh! Sauce!” shrieked Evelyn. “Are you making suggestions? Is he trying to carry on? Is he?”

  Nesta choked on her own laughter.

  “We should all go on somewhere,” she said, wiping her eyes with a handkerchief.

  “Yes,” said Evelyn, “we couldn’t half do with cheering up, couldn’t we, Lil?”

  He was looking back at her, his lips wrapped around a cigarette which he was lighting with a good-quality lighter. He lifted his top lip in a sort of half-smile, half-sneer.

  “I’m not in the habit of going to public houses,” she said.

  Evelyn looked as if she was about to say something, but then thought better of it.

  “We could go to the flicks,” she said. “You like the flicks, don’t you, Lil?”

  “I’ve already seen the big picture that’s on at the Mayfair,” she said. “I went on Wednesday. It wasn’t very good.”

  “Empire, then. You often go to the Empire on a Saturday.”

  She sniffed. “Last time I went the bill was very poor – a plump girl singer with lank hair and a very vulgar comic.” This was true, although she omitted to tell them how a man in the row behind her had struck up a conversation when his hat rolled underneath her seat. He had a strong chin and a thin moustache like William Powell’s; he was dressed in a suit and co-respondent shoes like Max Miller’s. She had taken out her compact several times during the first half, using it to simultaneously conceal and signal her interest in him, watching his reflection watching her. In the interval she had discreetly followed him to the bar (she had fancied a gin but there wasn’t any, which was just as well as she never bought her own drinks), but when she saw him chatting to the cigarette girl she had lost her enthusiasm for flirting.

  She thought now of taking out her cigarette case, knowing that if Dennis saw her with it he would reach across and light her.

  “There’s gin at the Feathers,” said Nesta.

  “Gin,” Dennis said. “You and your bloody gin. It’s all you think about.”

  This made Evelyn shriek. “You and your bloody gin! What is he like? I ask you! You ain’t half a one, Dennis! In’ he a one, Lil!”

  He casually removed the cigarette from the corner of his mouth and blew a steady stream of smoke into the air above their heads. He did all of this without taking his eyes off her, and for a moment it was as if everything ran in slow motion, and only the two of them were solid and real. She wondered if he could get nylons and vanishing cream and French girdles without coupons. Perhaps he would take her off somewhere. Dinner and dancing, somewhere smart, like Mirabelle’s where the film stars went. Some of these spivs were earning two or three thousand pounds in a single week: he probably had access to all sorts of nice places and preferential treatment. She imagined herself drinking champagne in a nightclub while Dennis lit two cigarettes, one for her and one for him – those Russian ones, with the coloured paper tube to them – like Paul Henreid in Now Voyager.

  “I haven’t seen the picture at the Odeon,” she murmured, casting him a sidelong glance. She wasn’t sure if he had heard her because Nesta and Evelyn were making such a racket; and maybe it was just as well that he hadn’t. She imagined him making love to her, telling her over and over again that he could not believe that she was forty-three and the mother of a seventeen-year-old son.

  18

  He supposed that the trip to Hendon with Policewoman Tring (he had yet to discover her first name) could have gone a little better, and that it hadn’t been entirely down to his being a damn fool. He was naturally a cautious man, but Hendon was almost the countryside; as they sped from the bomb-sites, unrelenting grey succumbed to green fields, trees flitted past the car window; the sky above an unbroken, solid bank of blue. All of this was enough to put even the most circumspect man off his guard. He was the sort of man who demanded more of a relationship than mere bodily stimulation (although it could not be denied that Policewoman Tring was jolly good-looking); and the older he grew the more he hankered after something essentially amiable and decent: a sharing of common interests, mutual respect. She was a good deal younger than he was, but not by so much that they would have nothing whatever in common. By the time she was fifty he would be in his sixties and the gap between them would have been breached fairly satisfactorily. He always found it difficult to think about the future. He closed his eyes for a moment and told himself that there had been enough past.

  “Here you are in the middle of a dreadful crime wave,” she was saying when he came to. He had dozed off for a moment or two, lulled by the warm air passing through the open window and the hum of the motor. “You have nowhere near enough decent officers to help you, and now you’re stuck with this awful murder. And here am I, sir. Now, I don’t want to blow my own trumpet, but I’m bright, efficient, hard-working, and I can do a damn sight more than drive a car and make the tea.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” he said.

  “I was a section leader in the ATS.”

  “That’s very impressive,” he replied, realising, too late, that she probably thought he was being condescending. She shifted in her seat as she changed gear with undeniable force, and remained silent for the rest of the journey to Hendon. They walked mutely into the laboratory, carrying the bags of evidence between them.

  He reckoned that the chap from the lab was in his early thirties, and rather good-looking in that boyish, eager way that many academic sorts convey. He was lean, with large intelligent eyes and dark hair that flopped across his brow so that he had to keep sweeping it back. Cooper noted the slight smile which passed across the boy’s thin lips on being introduced to Policewoman Tring; and he noted the unabashed grin which she proffered in return. The lab rat was Doctor somebody or other: women loved doctors. They made better husbands than policemen.

  “I would love a cup of tea,” he said to Policewoman Tring. “The journey has left me rather dry.” He knew she was angry with him, and he felt a bit of a heel knowing damn well that he was despatching her in part because he didn’t want her making eyes at the scientist (the slight look of disappointment that crossed the young man’s face had not escaped his attention). However, it was the case that he would always have acted thus given the situation: the sort of conversation he was about to have was not one to which a young woman ought to be party.

  “The pathologist,” he told the chap from the laboratory, as they pored over the samples, “is of the opinion that this was not a straightforward case of assault.”

  “Jolly good. I like things to be out of the ordinary.”

  Cooper bristled openly at the bright and breezy manner in which this was said.

  “Yes, well. The pathologist is of the opinion that whereas intimacy almost certainly took place shortly before death, it was evidently consensual.”

  “Tut tut.”

  Cooper’s expression was set very stern; he was beginning to dislike the young man and could not imagine that Policewoman Tring would care for the cavalier manner in which he approached such a serious business.

  “Something that has been puzzling me…” he continued, satisfied that he had conveyed his disapproval sufficiently. “She was lying on the mackintosh. It’s rather good quality. I’m assuming it belongs to the murderer.”

  The lab rat inspected the garment cursorily.

  “Mmm. It’s possible that the semen stains might yield a blood type,” he said. “And with a bit of luck it won’t be a common one.”

  Cooper, who had become acutely conscious of Policewoman Tring, who was standing a few feet behind him bearing a cup of tea, nodded abruptly in an effort to move the conversation on from bodil
y fluids.

  “Her clothing had been tampered with, but wasn’t torn,” he said, “and she appears to have removed her own under things.”

  The scientist whistled.

  “Quite a gal, eh!”

  Cooper, who did not appreciate gallows humour and, unusually for a detective, had never shared an unsavoury joke with a pathologist over a dissected corpse, frowned. The horror was there: it was the one sure thing in life. Why try and dissipate it with an off-colour observation? The young man took the hint, shrugging carelessly.

  “We’ll send the grasses over to Nottingham for analysis,” he said. “Should have something back in a week or two, with a bit of luck. We’ll look at the brick dust here.”

  “There’s a green fibre,” said Cooper. “It looks like tweed or something. It was underneath her fingernails.”

  The boffin brightened considerably.

  “Okey dokey,” he said. “Now you’re talking!” He winked at Policewoman Tring. “I’m part of a team here engaged upon a taxonomy of woollen materials…”

  How pleasant, Cooper thought sourly, to deal only with certainties.

  “Really?” Policewoman Tring said coolly. “That must be so interesting.” He could have kissed her there and then.