Frobisher had cut a slight, shuffling figure in the gleam of the cold store, shrivelling before Cooper’s eyes in his customary way, until all that was left was the merest impression of a man diminished by the solid weight of grief. Embarrassed by yet another outpouring, Cooper had felt obliged to step aside and leave the wretched fellow to his lamentation while he examined the blank space of the tiled floor, despising himself as he assessed the sobs and imprecations. There can be no room for sentiment in a detective; as any one of them will tell you, the most innocent-seeming has often turned out to be the most blameworthy. Or was that something detectives tell one another in an attempt to assuage their consciences? And even if he had detected guilt, what did that really tell him? He had witnessed many times how the close relations of murder victims often appear to betray a guilty conscience: reproaching themselves for not having prevented the death of their loved one; feeling keenly the reprehensibility of a less than satisfactory final encounter. Regret was so closely aligned to guilt that it was often difficult even for the most seasoned detective to tell the difference between the two. He thought of the guilt he had felt at his own father’s passing; the self-censure that he had conducted on a daily basis since Marjorie had left him. She was not dead – she was merely with her people in Bristol, as far as he knew – but she had passed out of his life as surely as if she were dead, without ever knowing that he would love her until the end of time; and he would never forgive himself for that.
“Bass or gin?” asked the barmaid. She was a blonde, large-breasted, and was smiling at him.
“Two Bass, please.”
“Haven’t seen you in here before,” she said as she opened the bottles.
“I’m here with someone I work with. It’s his local.”
“What do you do, then?”
“We’re detectives.”
He could tell that she was impressed: as she poured the beers she was smiling even more at him. She wasn’t his type, naturally, but then she wasn’t obvious in the way of most barmaids. As a matter of fact, she seemed to him to be a very nice sort of girl.
“Like Humphrey Bogart in The Maltese Falcon?” she said.
“Not really…”
“I love Humphrey Bogart.”
“Actually, it’s quite dull most of the time.”
He had succeeded in disappointing yet another woman. She was still smiling at him as she handed over the beers and took his money, but now she was smiling in that professional way of barmaids everywhere, such that only a fool or a drunkard would be taken in. He returned her smile with a forced little effort of his own and retreated as fast as he could.
“Do you think the husband did it?” he said as he set down the beers.
Lucas drew fiercely on his cigarette.
“What, that thin streak of piss?” he said.
“There’s untapped frustration and fury there,” Cooper said, sipping on his beer. He wasn’t entirely convinced by his argument, but it is quite true that you are far more likely to be murdered by someone close to you than by a stranger. And it would certainly make things a lot simpler. “Crippen was a very softly spoken gent,” he said.
Lucas laughed.
“What about the girl?”
“Not a chance,” said the DI. “Women never strangle. They don’t have the strength.”
“She was wearing the same colour lipstick and nail varnish as the victim.”
“Nah… she’s his fancy woman, that’s all,” said Lucas.
“She’s half his age…”
“It’s the times we live in, sir. What can I say…?” Lucas drank half of his beer in one slow steady draught, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand when he was done. “Fact is, either you know who done it, or you don’t,” he said. “If you do, then the job’s simple: prove it. If you don’t, well… The thing of it is, guv, we don’t know.”
“Come on, old man. Nil desperandum. This morning we had no idea who the victim was…”
Lucas drank the rest of his beer and finished his cigarette. He stood up and began to put on his raincoat.
“I have to be getting home,” he said, “if the wife hasn’t locked me out. I was supposed to help her put up some curtains in the back bedroom. She’s been waiting for me to do it since we took down the blackout.” He sighed. “You did the right thing never marrying, sir.”
Cooper took another sip of his beer.
“The lady wouldn’t have me,” he said.
Lucas picked up his hat from the table and ran his thumb along the soft edge of the brim; he was looking down at Cooper with a slight frown. “Do me a favour, sir,” he said. “Try and get some kip. You look bloody awful, if you don’t mind me saying.”
“Thanks.”
Lucas set his hat on his head and tipped it back with two fingers in a sort of salute.
“Goodnight, sir.”
“Goodnight, old man.”
Cooper let the last few drops of beer trickle down the back of his throat and then made his way out on to the street.
He walked over to the Frobisher house and leaned against a wall on the opposite corner and filled a pipe. It was still just about light, a crepuscular glow shimmering around the house skeletons; in the distance a train shrieked and groaned. He did not know what he was expecting, but some instinct had brought him there and sometimes instinct is all you have to go on and there is little point in ignoring it. He decided to stay until satisfied one way or another: it did not take long. He recognised them as soon as they turned on to the street. She was ginned up and laughing, her head flung back, dressed in a little veiled hat and a dress which, although understated, was too small for her, and clung to her hips and breasts lasciviously. He was making clumsy grabs at her waist and shoulders, pathetic, drink-retarded expressions of lust, which she deflected half-heartedly, laughing all the while. Cooper smoked his pipe and watched them make their way up the front path and in at the front door. It didn’t tell him anything he did not already suspect, but at least now he knew for sure.
Back at the flat, Mrs Oscar had restored everything to order. There was a neatly folded pile of clean shirts and collars; there was tea, milk and bread; his butter ration sat on the pantry shelf. On the shelf beneath the bathroom mirror there was a packet of razor blades. He could have wept with gratitude, but instead he made himself a piece of toast by way of celebration.
It was too late for music. He considered listening to the Egmont Overture, something exhilarating, life-affirming, but it would only have aroused something in him and he did not want to think or feel. He poured a whisky, tasted a bit, let it scald his throat, then topped up the glass with water. He swallowed the whole lot in one gulp and went and lay down on his bed in the darkened room. After a few moments of stillness he kicked off his shoes, pulled his tie over his head and tried to sleep.
22
The next morning, the Tuesday, in the absence of anyone else from CID, he was called to a tobacconist’s on St Ann’s Road which had had its cashbox rifled and all its cigarettes taken. Kids, the shopkeeper reckoned; like everyone else, he didn’t know what the world was coming to. Wearily, Cooper took an inventory of everything that had gone and gave instructions to the fingerprint chap; then he walked back to “N” Division HQ and went in search of a cup of tea.
Walter Frobisher and Evelyn Wilkes were going to give their statements later on that day, but he reckoned that the chances of learning anything new were about as good as a bloke’s chances of finding himself handcuffed to Madeleine Carroll. He assumed that the same logic could be applied to the interview he was now having with the victim’s son, Douglas, but it was worth conducting all the same. The kid had his father’s pale lashes and hair; the same blue eyes, but his were more substantial, as Walter Frobisher’s must once have been. Douglas was also twice the man his father was: no blubbing for him. A couple of times it seemed that he might be in danger of giving way to his feelings, but the stout lad held on to them pretty tightly. Cooper always found such stoicism unacc
ountably moving; generous outpourings of emotions always left him feeling slightly nauseated.
“We had tea at about half past five,” Douglas was telling him. He spoke in a pleasant well-modulated voice: the product of a reasonable grammar school, Cooper reckoned. He assumed that grandparents had secured the same for him, since there was little evidence that Frobisher had the wherewithal. “I wanted to go out, so Mother got tea ready a bit earlier than normal, and when we’d done, she asked me to go out and telephone the Odeon to find out what the big picture was. It was Gaiety George, with Richard Greene and Ann Todd. The evening screenings were at 6.20 and 7.45.”
“Approximately how long did that take you?”
“I was probably gone about fifteen, twenty minutes – I stopped off to buy a newspaper.”
“So you were out of the house for a short period somewhere between six and six thirty?”
“Yes, something like that… I think I was probably back before six thirty.”
“When you returned to the house, were you aware of anything unusual?”
“No. Mother said she quite fancied the picture, but she was feeling tired so wasn’t sure if she’d go or not.”
“She was feeling tired?”
“Yes, but she often says that. She’s tired a lot of the time, I suppose.”
“After you told your mother about the film, what happened then?”
“I cycled over to Tufnell Park to meet up with a pal and some girls we know.”
“What time did you get back?”
“About half past eleven.”
“And did you notice that your mother was out?”
“Dad told me the next morning that she’d gone down to see Auntie Mavis in Jaywick.”
“Is that something your mother does quite often?”
“She’s done things like it, though not since Father came back. During the war, she’d sometimes get stuck in town in the blackout and stay in a hotel or something. It wasn’t especially unusual… It didn’t strike me as all that odd, especially because Father didn’t seem concerned. I wondered if Mother had walked out – she’s always saying she will one day.”
“Is she?”
“She gets a notion, sometimes. Says she can’t stand being in the house with Dad, and if it wasn’t Grandma’s house she’d go somewhere else. She’d say other things too, like she’d put her head in the gas oven – that sort of thing.”
“All of that must have been somewhat difficult for you…”
The boy shrugged and for a brief moment Cooper thought he might give way to feeling; he was relieved to see the boy was striving manfully for composure.
“I knew she didn’t mean it,” he said, “about the gas oven, I mean. I don’t suppose I’d have been all that surprised if she did leave. But that’s only thinking about it now. At the time I really didn’t think about it very much at all. I just expected her to come home when she was ready…” He fell silent for a moment. “I might have supposed Dad had made it up,” he said, “about Mother going to Jaywick – so I wouldn’t worry, you know, when she didn’t come back the next day…”
“Why do you suppose he would have done that?”
“I don’t know – maybe because he knew she had gone into town or something and it didn’t seem – you know – respectable.” The boy sighed deeply. “You will find who did this, won’t you?” he asked, his pale-blue eyes searching Cooper’s. “Sometimes I can’t believe it’s happened, and then other times all I want to do is beat the man who did it to a bloody pulp.”
“Of course you do. I’d feel the same if it was my mother.” Cooper had one more question he needed to ask. “Did your mother have any friends – anyone she might have stayed with?”
The boy thought for a few moments, before shaking his head.
“I don’t know of anyone she’d be friendly with,” he said, “outside of the family.”
Cooper spent the rest of the morning being availed of the north London black market – a welcome respite from the doings of the Frobisher household, the gloom and dinginess of which had settled upon him like a layer of thick dust, and bouts of sheer despair. He did not want to see Walter Frobisher dangle at the end of a rope – he did not wish to see anyone dangle at the end of a rope, come to that – but it could not be denied that the wretched fellow had a motive; and add to that the fact, highly suspicious in itself, that the fellow had not reported his wife’s disappearance, that his only alibi was the word of a shiftless girl who it appeared was also his mistress, and the curious matter of the mackintosh, which quite possibly had been bought in the same shop where Frobisher happened to be employed as a doorman, and it would not have required Sherlock Holmes to draw things to a conclusion. He was sorry for the boy, naturally, who, if he were to follow this line of inquiry, might well be deprived of two parents; but there was the distinct possibility that Frobisher, as a returning serviceman, would attract a degree of leniency, though you couldn’t rely on that: juries and judges had an unpleasant knack of disappointing your expectations. He thought some more about it, before coming to the realisation that what really prevented him from pursuing the matter was the knowledge that he despised Frobisher, and you really can’t condemn a man because of his weak features, weak character and weak morals. He rubbed his brow, lit a pipe and wondered how much longer he ought to give it before calling a halt to the investigation. Upstairs were applying the thumbscrews in regard to the black-market eggs, and Lucas had already instructed the murder team, such as it was, to give priority to numerous other urgent matters over the investigation into Lillian Frobisher’s death. For all intents and purposes the investigation was being conducted by the two of them alone, and Cooper knew that he would not be able to depend upon the undivided attention of his adjunct indefinitely.
Mrs Mavis Jackson of Jaywick Sands was a stouter and more affluent version of her dead sister. She had come up to London in order to attend to her mother, but before she did so there were a few things she reckoned that the police ought to know concerning Lillian Frobisher. Cooper took her into one of the interview rooms where she settled herself into a chair with a studied, self-conscious poise that nevertheless belied her bulk. She joined together her plump, immaculately white-gloved hands and set them purposefully upon the table.
“This has come as a great shock to me, Inspector,” she began. She had overcome her north London vowels with a thin veneer of respectability.
Cooper ran through the usual stuff, expressing sympathy, gratitude, reassurance that everything possible was being done, before coming to the point.
“Do you know of anybody who would wish your sister ill?”
Mrs Jackson pressed her lips tightly together with all the disapproval she could muster. “Lillian and I have never been close, Inspector,” she said. “And you may rest assured that I know nothing of her cavortings since she came back to Holloway.”
“Cavortings…?”
Mrs Jackson drew a deep breath, and moistened her lips delicately.
“It is not my custom and habit to speak ill of the dead, Inspector,” she said, before continuing to do just that with an undue haste, “but it has to be said – my sister has not led a blameless life.”
Cooper had the curious sensation he occasionally experienced in an investigation: the inkling that he was about to learn something of immense significance.
Once she had started to speak ill of her sibling, Mrs Jackson was unable to stop.
“She’s always been flighty, Inspector, but I had no idea how low she could sink until she came to stay with me in Jaywick during the war. The way she carried on… well… it was shocking. Truly shocking. Running about with all sorts; out till all hours – when she troubled to come back at all, that is. I warned her time and again that she was taking risks and would come to a bad end if she didn’t take more care, and I made it quite clear that I did not approve of her carrying on – not while she was under my roof – but she refused to listen. It was as if something had been unleashed within her,
Inspector, some animal force…”
“When you say ‘carrying on’, you mean with other men?”
“She was off every night, leaving me to take care of Mother and Douglas.” Mrs Jackson leaned in closer across the table and whispered: “Yanks.”
“I see.”
“She made no secret of it. They’d come to the house to take her off in their motor cars. No shame… It was disgusting, Inspector. It was Joe this, and Jerry that, going on about how they took her to dinner and into public houses, and for spins in the countryside. They’d give her things as well.”
“What sort of things?”
“You know – lipsticks, perfume, stockings… She never went without, Inspector, not like decent women had to do…”
“A lot of married women went off the rails during the war,” he said. He was mildly surprised to discern a certain reluctance to fully embrace the notion; he found it distasteful. And he could not suppress the thought that a lot of men must have gone off the rails too. War was inimical to family life, after all. “Do you happen to know if she continued with this way of life after she returned to London?”
Mrs Frobisher considered for a moment or two.
“It wouldn’t surprise me, Inspector, but I’m afraid I really couldn’t say for sure. She came back to Holloway in March 1944, so there would have been plenty of opportunity before Walter came back from the army.” She was unable to resist a slight sneer at the mention of her sister’s husband.
“Indeed. I wonder, do you remember anything specific about any of these men?”
He was thinking that it ought to be a simple enough task to identify the nearest GI base to Jaywick, but nigh on impossible to trace any individual GI – most of whom would have gone back to America in any case.
“I tried to turn a blind eye, Inspector. There were so many of them…”
Cooper sighed.
“And this was something,” he pursued, “that started during the war – as far as you know…”
A Commonplace Killing - Siân Busby Page 14