A Commonplace Killing - Siân Busby

by A Commonplace Killing (epub)

  “Morning, sir,” the boy detective said. Cooper caught him casting a quick look askance at Tring.

  “What the blazes is going on here?” Cooper bellowed; he was surprised by the power of his own voice, somehow finding its way from the depth of his misery.

  She had snapped to it now, and was smiling. If she was shocked or anxious about having been overheard she didn’t show it.

  “Where did you get those blasted chocolates?” Cooper thundered. “No, don’t answer that. Chances are, I don’t want to know. Great Scott, we’re running a murder investigation here…” She was hastily putting the lid on the box, trying to tidy it away out of sight. “If this is what happens when we let women…” He didn’t finish the sentence He didn’t have to. He was gratified to see her flush red all the way up from her neck. She was biting her lip and he wondered if she might be on the brink of tears; he was ashamed at the horrible pleasure he derived from the thought. “Quennell,” he barked, “get over to St Ann’s Road right away; there’s been a break-in at a grocer’s.” Sod off, you little bastard, was what he wanted to say, but he rarely expressed anger: he was a master of suppressed rage, of suppression in general. Then he turned on her. “And I want that paperwork on my desk in fifteen minutes.”

  “Yes, sir,” she said, “right away, sir.”

  He was feeling such a cad, but he had to keep up the pretence or else all would be lost. He stalked across the office and sat down heavily, fumbling with his pipe, with a match that wouldn’t strike. The crumpled men had lifted their heads to glance at him with mild concern as he passed by their desks, but now they were yawning, stretching, returning their attention to their telephones, their cigarettes, the vast piles of papers in front of them. Oh Christ, he thought, whatever am I going to do? He was descending into despair and for a moment was gripped with a panic that he would not be able to stop falling, not ever. Shut up, you stupid bastard. Get a grip, man. People have been dying in their millions all over the world and you’re fretting over some blasted girl. The sheer ludicrousness of the situation made him laugh, abruptly and entirely without any humour. He had finally succeeded in lighting his pipe, and sucking on it, was drawing in the comforting smoke in long, deep breaths.

  When he opened his eyes, she was standing in front of him, clutching a sheaf of papers to her shapely bosom.

  “Here’s all the paperwork, sir,” she was saying. He noticed that there was a deep crease of concern between her eyebrows. Of course, he should have known that she was far too efficient to let an idiot like Quennell with his blasted BM toffees hold her back in the pursuit of duty. “I do hope everything’s alright.” She deposited the forms into his in-tray, but lingered for a moment longer than was necessary. “Would you like me to fetch you a cup of tea and another slice of cake?” The crushed remains of the Victoria sponge were on the desk in front of him.

  “That would be very nice,” he said. “Thank you.”

  He felt like a child who had just thrown a tantrum, and instead of punishing him, his parents had reacted with shocked concern. When he met her eyes they were filled with pity.

  “I should have thought of it earlier. I suppose that cake’s all you’ve had to eat this morning.”

  “Please.” He couldn’t keep the groan from his voice. “Just…” He puffed on his pipe, letting the smoke conceal him in his shame. “A sandwich would be simply marvellous,” he said.

  She smiled kindly at him.

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  She turned to leave, but he called her back.

  “I didn’t mean it,” he said, “about women, I mean. I think you’re doing a splendid job.”

  “Thank you, sir.” She was looking very serious. “It matters to me what you think. In fact” – she took a deep breath – “it matters more than anything.”

  33

  It didn’t take him long to determine that Nesta had pretty well cleaned him out of everything of any value. The travel clock was gone, so was every penny of his cash, and the cufflinks – though when he came to think about it, he had a vague remembrance of going with her to the Jew fence to sell them; if so, this must have occurred at some point, he was guessing, on Saturday night before they went to the Feathers. He ground his fists into his temples as he tried to drag the memory out of his brain, until he was exhausted. He’d been pretty sick at the tobacconist’s, only just making it to the lav in time, and now he was feeling like he was going to spew again, even though he had nothing left to throw up, apart from the few glasses of water the tobacconist’s wife had given him. He sat on the edge of the bed with his head in his hands and waited for the feeling to pass. Then, when he was quite sure that the floor wasn’t moving, he stood up and went out on to the landing.

  “You filthy, rotten whore!” he shouted at the top of his voice. He banged furiously on her door with the heel of his hand. “What have you done with all my stuff, you stinking bitch?” He tried the handle of her door, which was unlocked, and burst into the room. It only took a few moments to realise that she had gone: the room was empty, though the stale smell of her still hung about.

  The landlord, a dreary halting old boy, had come up the stairs.

  “You can’t make that sort of a racket, you know,” he was saying. “You can go and find somewhere else to live if you keep that up. This is a respectable house.”

  “Where’s she gone?” he groaned. “She’s taken everything.”

  He was feeling desperate, his head pounding; he had to steady himself against the iron bedstead to stop from fainting.

  “Mrs Jones?” the landlord said. “She left on Sunday afternoon. Said she needed to get out of London for a bit. Wasn’t sure if she’d be back. I’ve got someone coming to look at the room in a couple of hours.”

  He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. His pal wouldn’t be back on leave for another week, and he was too ill to go down to King’s Cross and pinch a suitcase.

  “I ain’t got no money,” he said. “She’s taken everything. Hasn’t even left me with a brass ha’penny.”

  His legs were shaking as he went back into his room. His eyes wouldn’t focus properly. He rummaged desperately through all the pockets of his clothes; he was looking for loose change, but turned up nothing, not one stinking penny. He snatched the green swingback jacket from the back of the chair where he had left it, and patted it all the way down the front. To his amazement, there was something solid in one of the front pockets. He reached in and retrieved a silver cigarette case that he could have sworn blind he had never seen before in his life. He sat down on the bed and inspected it wonderingly, turning it over and over in his hand. There was an inscription on the front of it: it looked like an “L” and “F”, and he supposed that it must have been in the suitcase even though he had no memory of it. Why had he put it in his pocket? Perhaps he’d been meaning to sell it along with the cufflinks? Well, that was his only hope now. He reckoned he’d get a few bob for it, though he couldn’t risk taking it to a regular pawn shop. He smoked a cigarette and by the time he was done with it, he had sort of worked things out as much as he could and knew what he wanted to do. He was feeling a little bit better as he lay down on the bed clutching the cigarette case to his chest; he racked his brains to see if he could remember whereabouts in Holloway the Jew fence had been. After a few minutes of this effort, he closed his eyes against the pain in his head. A bad feeling was setting in around his heart and guts, very bad, a sort of fear. It had something to do with forcing himself to remember, with the missing part, with whatever it was that had been blasted out of him. It was such a horrible feeling that he thought he ought to give up the remembering for a while.

  If I ever see that bloody bitch again, he was thinking, I’ll choke the life out of her with my bare hands, so help me God.

  34

  He had just finished a bowl of Brown Windsor soup that tasted suspiciously like an Oxo cube dissolved in hot water, when the big break in the case came. He had more or less reached the en
d of the road. For the most part all a detective has to do is keep an ear cocked, but he had no desire to hear any more. He was done with it. Not just the sex murder, but the whole ruddy lot. He wanted to go away, somewhere, anywhere; as far away as possible from the smell of gas and the dust, from the smuts burning in the back of his throat, from narks and cups of cold tea; from her. He knew that he had nobody but himself to blame for the misery of his life.

  All suffering is the result of the careless drift towards blissful numbness, the foolish pursuit of reassurance and peace. There was to be no peace, he understood that now; not for him, not for anyone. If he was a religious man perhaps he might have persuaded himself that there was always something to hope for, but he had lost his taste for redemption in the mud of ’17.

  He would never have supposed, therefore, that redemption, when it came, would come to him in the form of a nineteen-year-old waitress with a squint. He was mopping up the last of the Brown Windsor soup with a stale roll, when Tring appeared before him with the news that Joyce had telephoned.

  “She recognised him at once,” she was saying, breathless with the excitement of it all.

  He would probably never feel excited about anything ever again, but he did permit himself a slight flicker of anticipation. She was smiling at him and her eyes were bright and shining.

  “Dennis?” he said.

  Tring frowned slightly.

  “No, ’fraid not,” she said. “But Nesta Jones’s soldier boyfriend has just walked into the café. I’ve told Joyce to make sure he waits for us.”

  Cooper grabbed his hat from the table and they both moved quickly to the motor.

  “Just imagine,” she was saying as she manoeuvred the car on to the main road, “we might have the whole case wrapped up within a few hours.” He smiled indulgently. It was unlikely, but you never knew. “It’s a great breakthrough, isn’t it, sir?” She glanced at him, looking for reassurance.

  “It’s certainly an exciting development,” he conceded. Just because he was dead inside, it didn’t entitle him to clamp down on the hopes and dreams of others. “Jolly well done, Joyce and you.”

  “Me? I didn’t do anything!”

  “Yes, you did. You made Joyce feel that she was part of the investigation. If I had gone into the café on my own, chances are that she would never have telephoned us. She’d have been more concerned about defying her boss.”

  They pulled up outside the café, and as he stepped on to the pavement and put on his hat, Cooper could see Joyce through the window. She was chatting to a tall young man with close-cropped fair hair. He stood aside to let Tring walk in ahead of him, and the waitress grinned shyly at her in greeting.

  “This is Corporal O’Leary,” she said. “He’s friends with Mrs Jones.”

  The Irishman tipped a finger at Cooper.

  “I was her friend,” he said. “We’ve been down in Brighton over the past few days, but we had a row about her drinking. She’s a terrible woman when she’s had a drop of gin.”

  “Whereabouts in Brighton can we find her?” asked Cooper.

  “Oh, she’s not in Brighton any more – as far as I know.”

  “Any idea where she is?”

  The soldier shook his head.

  “She left the hotel we’d been staying in without paying the bill,” he said. “I had to fork out the best part of two quid.”

  Another blasted brick wall, Cooper thought. Tring was hovering beside him, and he wanted to protect her from the disappointment.

  “When Mrs Jones was in London,” Cooper said, “do you happen to know where she stayed?” He wasn’t at all sure if it had been that sort of relationship – the soldier couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, twenty-four – but nothing surprised him any more.

  “Oh yes,” said Corporal O’Leary. “To be sure. I’ve been there quite a few times. Nesta liked to have little parties.” As a matter of fact, he could take them there now; it wasn’t very far. They could easily walk there, but he didn’t have a problem with going in the motor.

  Nesta had been living in the spindly etiolated house for the best part of two years, and the spindly etiolated landlord had been somewhat surprised at the suddenness with which she had departed on the previous Sunday. She had, or so she had told him, come into a bit of luck and fancied taking herself off to the coast. As he led the way up the stairs he told them that he hoped they wouldn’t take long as he was expecting somebody who was interested in taking the room. The landlord opened the door and Cooper stepped inside. The room was small, dark and devoid of any of the usual signs of occupation. The brown flocked wallpaper had, he hoped, seen better days; there was a rug, thrown over floorboards that had been painted black, which had had great gouges chewed out of it by moths. There was a lingering stale smell, which had been overlaid with Flit, presumably coming from the mattress as a precaution against bugs. It didn’t take Cooper more than a couple of minutes to deduce that there was nothing there worth finding. Tring hung back in the doorway, watching him so closely as he moved about the room he felt obliged to put on a bit of a show, cursorily picking up the edge of the counterpane, opening and closing each of the empty drawers of the dressing table in turn, unlocking the door of the empty wardrobe. When he had exhausted all possibilities he sighed deeply and stood in the middle of the room stroking his chin.

  They were just thanking the landlord when another door on the landing creaked open and a young fellow appeared before them, not much more than twenty-two, twenty-three, Cooper reckoned. He was probably quite good-looking, but had gone rather to seed.

  The kid was contemplating Policewoman Tring with a sneer, and then he turned on Cooper.

  “About bloody time too,” he shouted. His speech was slurred and he appeared to be swaying slightly in the doorway.

  “Now, now, Dennis,” said the landlord. Tring gasped and Cooper’s heart lurched into his mouth. “We don’t want any trouble, do we?”

  “Hope you find the filthy old bag,” the fellow continued. It was dark on the landing, but Cooper scrutinised the boy’s face until quite certain of a small fading bruise just above his left cheekbone. “When are you going to find my money?”

  “What money’s that, then?” asked Cooper.

  “She stole all my money,” the kid was saying. “Every fucking penny.”

  “Language,” said the landlord.

  “Something oughter be done. You can’t have people going around stealing other people’s money.” His protest subsided into a fit of coughing. He didn’t look at all well and was gripping the door jamb; for a moment he looked as if he might collapse. Tring instinctively reached out and grabbed his arm.

  “Help me get him back into his room,” she said.

  They managed to bring the young man to the edge of his bed, where he sat with his head between his knees, Tring keeping a slight pressure on the back of his neck. She asked the landlord to fetch a glass of water, and looked at Cooper with huge, startled eyes. He could see the rise and fall of her breasts beneath her jacket. He lifted his hand, waving it slightly in a practised gesture of reassurance and quiescence, and she let out a deep sigh of composure.

  Cooper grazed the room; it was his custom and what detectives did. He spotted the green tweed jacket almost immediately.

  “Is this yours?” he inquired carelessly.

  The young man looked up briefly. “Yes,” he said.

  “Nice jacket. Very good quality. Generous cut.” It wasn’t enough, of course; he knew that. But there were too many coincidences, and coincidences always made him suspicious. “Where do you find a jacket like that?”

  The young man shrugged. “Got it down Petticoat Lane,” he said. Cooper knew he was lying.

  “Mind if I have a look around? Just in case Mrs Jones has left any evidence…”

  Cooper didn’t wait for permission. He moved skilfully around the room. In the wardrobe there was a neatly pressed sailor’s uniform hanging alongside some items of very good-quality clothing; there was
a brown leather suitcase that must have cost a bob or two. He picked up a pair of brown brogues that would have set anyone back fifteen guineas.

  “Sailor, eh?” he said, familiarly.

  “I was. Spent four years on the Atlantic convoys.”

  “Hard going, I’ll bet.”

  The kid shrugged again.

  “I think I’m going to be sick,” he said.

  Tring took the glass of water from the landlord.

  “Drink this,” she said. “You’ll feel better.”

  “What’s your name, son?”

  “What d’you need to know my name for?”

  “It’s standard procedure when investigating a theft to take down the victim’s name.”

  “Dennis. Dennis Belcher.”

  Cooper nodded circumspectly. Tring was beseeching him with her eyes, but he wasn’t going to rush. His eyes came to rest on the bed where the boy was sitting. It was unmade and the linen was in need of a good laundry. He ran his eyes over it until something caught his eye.

  “Looks like Mrs Jones didn’t take everything,” he said.

  Dennis turned to where Cooper was indicating, and picked up the silver cigarette case.

  “Funny thing,” he said. “I never seen that before today. I thought maybe she’d had it from another room and the ugly thieving bitch left it behind while she was going through my things. It’s got an inscription on it.”

  “Mind if I take a look?”

  Dennis handed him the cigarette case with a slight shrug and a sneer. Cooper turned it over in his hand, opening it; closing it. Most of this was done for show: he had made out the “L” and the “F” within a couple of seconds. And he didn’t doubt for a moment that Walter Frobisher would be able to identify it as the property of his late wife.

  He looked at the kid while considering his next move. Tring was pretty strong and he could certainly look after himself. The boy, on the other hand, looked like death warmed up and, as far as he could tell, was unlikely to be carrying a weapon.