Hardcastle's Secret Agent

by Graham Ison

  ‘If we asked you to sit with a police artist, d’you think you might be able to help him produce a likeness?’ suggested Bradley, scratching thoughtfully at his moustache.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. I could try, I s’pose.’

  ‘Before we do that,’ said Hardcastle, ‘I think it might be as well if we interviewed your friend, Miss Doris Jackson. Perhaps you’d give my sergeant her address.’

  Mavis took a diary from her handbag and thumbed through it. ‘She’s got a flat in Fairfield Road in Kingston. She shares it with another clippie called Marion Ferguson.’

  ‘How old is Doris Jackson?’

  ‘About my age, I s’pose. I never thought to ask. Well, one doesn’t, does one?’ she said, and primped her hair again.

  Once Mavis Lavender had left, no doubt to regale the impressionable with a story of how she was helping the police to solve a murder, Detective Sergeant Jack Bradley, who claimed to know about London Transport, very quickly found out when Doris Jackson would be off duty.

  ‘She finished at twelve noon, guv’nor.’

  Hardcastle glanced at his pocket watch. ‘No time like the present.’

  EIGHTEEN

  The flat that Doris Jackson shared with Marion Ferguson was on the first floor of a rather old building in Fairfield Road, overlooking the cattle market. The market, normally there most days except Sundays, had become smaller since the outbreak of war. Many of the marketeers were now in the armed forces, and there was some doubt that the market would survive.

  The two detectives eventually found Doris Jackson’s flat and rang the bell.

  ‘Yeah?’ The bottle-blonde woman who answered the door took the cigarette out of her mouth long enough to pose that monosyllabic question, before promptly replacing it. Planting one hand on her hip, she openly examined the two men, her gaze travelling from their heads to their toes and back again. Her grey trousers would definitely have been frowned upon by certain sections of society, as would the V-necked pullover worn without a blouse.

  ‘Miss Doris Jackson?’

  Without answering Hardcastle’s question, the woman turned and shouted, ‘Doris, there’s a couple of dishy men at the door asking for you.’

  ‘Who are they?’ asked a disembodied voice from somewhere in the flat.

  ‘Who are you?’ asked the woman, turning back.

  ‘Divisional Detective Inspector Hardcastle, and Detective Sergeant Bradley.’

  ‘Oh, Christ!’ uttered the woman. ‘It’s the rozzers, Doris. What you been up to?’

  ‘Well, don’t leave ’em on the doorstep, Marion, otherwise the neighbours will think we’re running a knocking shop. Bring ’em in.’

  Turning to address Hardcastle and Bradley, Marion said, ‘Come on in. You’ll have to take us as you find us. We tend to lounge about once we’re off duty.’

  The two CID officers were shown into a sitting room. Apart from a pair of stockings hanging from the mantelshelf and held in place by a couple of ornaments, and several copies of Picturegoer magazine abandoned on a chair, the room was clean and tidy.

  ‘I’m Doris Jackson.’ The young woman could not have been any more than five foot five inches tall, and her brown hair was cut quite short. Barefooted, she was wrapped in a towelling dressing gown that reached her ankles, and looked to be several sizes too large for her. ‘Excuse my appearance,’ she said, ‘but I’ve just had a bath. You’d be surprised how dirty you get just by being on a trolleybus for eight hours.’

  ‘You should try doing point duty.’ Bradley recalled spending eight hours directing traffic in central London and being really dirty from constant exposure to petrol and diesel fumes.

  ‘Have you come about Joyce?’ Doris asked, indicating with a wave of the hand that Hardcastle and Bradley should sit down. ‘Mavis Lavender told me she was coming to see you.’ She suddenly noticed the stockings and snatched them from the mantelshelf. ‘Sorry, we weren’t expecting visitors.’

  ‘Yes, Mavis Lavender came to see us this morning,’ said Hardcastle. ‘She told us about a man who befriended Joyce Butler at the Surbiton Assembly Rooms. D’you remember this man? It was the night she was murdered – Tuesday just gone.’

  ‘Not really – I too busy talking to Ruby for most of the night, but I do remember someone she was dancing with the night before. He was quite a big chap and seemed nice enough, what little I saw of him. They went off dancing and that’s the last Mavis and me saw of them.’

  ‘Did you actually see them leave, Miss Jackson?’

  ‘No. One minute they were on the dance floor and next minute they’d gone.’

  ‘Did you learn the man’s name, by any chance?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘No. I think Joyce was afraid that one of us might pinch him. He was more … How’s best to describe it? He was more grown up, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Mature?’ suggested Bradley.

  ‘That’s it. He was a very confident dancer too. You could tell by the way he swept Joyce on to the dance floor. Much better than these eighteen-year-old kids who think they’re grown up just because they’re wearing a uniform. Fumbling Freddies, I call ’em. Hands everywhere and hoping to get their end away before they get killed, I suppose.’ Doris’s philosophy of life was far beyond her years. ‘Poor little buggers.’

  ‘Would you know him if you saw him again, Miss Jackson?’ asked Hardcastle.

  ‘I sure would,’ said Doris. ‘D’you think it was him who killed Joyce?’

  ‘That I don’t know, but I’d certainly like to speak to him about the events of that evening. Should you see him again, let me know. But whatever you do, don’t approach him.’ Hardcastle turned to the other woman. ‘Were you at the assembly rooms dance hall that night, Miss …?’

  ‘Marion Ferguson, and no, you won’t catch me going anywhere near that sort of place. I have enough trouble dealing with amateur Don Juans when I’m at work. Mind you, there’s one or two bus drivers who’ve received my knee in their crutch, and that dampened their ardour, I can tell you.’

  Hardcastle sat down behind his desk and took out his pipe. ‘I suppose it’s a lead of sorts, Jack, but we’ve got no description of the man who took her home, apart from his being mature, and we don’t even know that he was the one who did take her home. For all we know it could have been some other bloke.’

  ‘Now we know that Joyce was a professional tom, it widens the list of suspects, guv’nor, but no way we can prove that any of them was responsible for Joyce Butler’s death,’ said Bradley, stating the obvious.

  Ignoring Bradley’s truism, Hardcastle suddenly flicked his fingers. ‘The fireman!’

  ‘Fireman? What fireman?’ Bradley failed to follow his chief’s line of thinking, albeit momentarily. ‘Ah, the bloke in the ground-floor flat at Ravenscroft.’

  ‘That’s him. Leading Fireman Eric Simpson of Kingston fire station. I wonder if he’s on duty at the moment.’

  ‘I’ll find out,’ said Bradley. Five minutes later, he was back. ‘Yes, guv’nor, he’s there.’

  ‘There’s somewhere over here where we can talk, gents,’ said Simpson. ‘But if we get a shout, I’ll have to leave you. Unless you want to come with us,’ he added with a wry grin. He led them across the main area and behind a couple of fire appliances to a small room.

  ‘The night after Joyce Butler was murdered, you’d just come off duty.’

  ‘That’s right.’ Simpson took out a packet of cigarettes and offered them. Bradley accepted, but Hardcastle, a pipe smoker, declined.

  ‘Is it all right to smoke in here?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘Yeah, sure. If the place catches fire, we know how to put it out. We’ve done the course.’ Simpson chuckled at the thought. ‘Mind you, there’d be an enquiry. And an enquiry means paperwork. Lots of it.’

  ‘I know what you mean.’ Hardcastle had suffered a mountain of paperwork when, as a sergeant, a Flying Squad typewriter for which he had signed had gone missing.

  ‘The night of the murde
r,’ said Bradley, opening his pocketbook, ‘you told us that every time you saw Joyce Butler, she was on the arm of a different bloke. And from what you’d seen, there’s no shortage.’

  ‘Absolutely right,’ said Simpson.

  ‘Did you ever see a man who’s been described to us as mature and, the witness said, was quite a big chap?’

  ‘Can’t say I have,’ said Simpson thoughtfully. ‘Mind you, most of the men she had with her were mature. I don’t know why they weren’t in uniform. I suppose they might have been and changed into civvies to go dancing.’

  ‘Did you ever go to the Surbiton Assembly Rooms?’ asked Bradley.

  ‘No,’ said Simpson. ‘Passed it a few times on our way to a shout, but we were more often going in the opposite direction. Towards Hawkers.’

  ‘I’ll give you my telephone number, Mr Simpson,’ said Hardcastle, ‘and if you do think of anything, perhaps you’d give me or Sergeant Bradley a ring.’

  Just as Hardcastle and Bradley were about to leave, an air-raid siren sounded from the roof of Kingston police station.

  ‘Any minute now the bells will go down,’ said Simpson, using a hand to cup his ear in pantomimic anticipation. Sure enough, seconds later the alarm sounded in the fire station and suddenly the area was alive with firemen, in ordered chaos, rushing to the appliances. ‘They’re after Hawkers again,’ he said.

  On Tuesday the sixth of August 1940, just seven days after the murder of Joyce Butler, Police Constable Albert Stringer, a fifty-seven-year-old police pensioner who had been recalled to service at the outbreak of war, was patrolling Charing Cross Road. Although it was still light, he was walking at less than the four miles an hour laid down in the regulations for beat duty men. But it was a speed that suited Stringer, a man who never rushed at anything. One of his strengths, and a strength particularly suited to police duty, was his temperament. Before taking any action that might be considered rash or unwise, he would consider the situation carefully. And he did so now.

  There had been an air raid the previous day when a shop premises had been destroyed and buildings on either side had been badly damaged. Superficial damage, mainly broken windows, had been done to several other nearby structures and ‘Business as Usual’ signs had appeared in those shop windows that were still intact.

  Stringer occasionally sought out insecure premises and other unusual matters that required police attention. At nine thirty, just half an hour before he was due to go off duty, he glanced into the rubble-strewn shop, and spotted the body of a woman in the ruins.

  It was not unusual to find dead or injured members of the public in the aftermath of an air raid, but not twenty-four hours later. A body as open to view as this one would be sent straight to the mortuary by the heavy rescue squad, whose members would have remained at the bomb site until they were satisfied that there were no more victims buried. Furthermore, the body had not been there an hour ago, the last time Stringer had walked this part of his beat. On closer examination, he noted that the victim was quite a young woman, probably in her early twenties. Ducking under the barriers erected by the local authority, he knelt down, removed his steel helmet, and felt for a pulse, but to no avail. One thing was certain – she had not been killed by a bomb; she had been strangled. For a moment or two, he tugged thoughtfully at his greying beard.

  Going to a nearby telephone box – still in working order despite the best efforts of the Luftwaffe – he called Kingston police station and told the duty officer what he had found. He returned to the body and within minutes a black Wolseley police car drew up and Detective Inspector Bob French alighted, accompanied by Detective Sergeant Bernard Turner.

  ‘What have you got here, then, Stringer?’

  Succinctly, and with his customary care, Stringer explained, once again, the circumstances under which he had come across the dead woman.

  ‘And you said this body wasn’t here an hour ago?’ asked French.

  ‘That’s correct, sir.’

  ‘Searched it, have you?’

  ‘No, sir. I thought it better to wait for you.’

  ‘Good man.’ French glanced at his sergeant. ‘See what you can find, Bernie.’

  ‘Her handbag’s still here, guv’nor,’ said Turner, extracting it from where it had been partly concealed by the body. He opened it and examined the contents. ‘There’s a bit of cash here, guv, and her identity card says she’s Mavis Lavender and her address is shown as Gamages’ hostel. Gamages is a department store at Holborn Circus.’

  ‘I do know where Gamages is, Bernie,’ said French wearily. ‘Robbery wasn’t the motive, then.’ He removed his trilby hat and scratched his head. ‘Better send for the duty pathologist, I suppose. Get on the blower, Bernie, and organize it, will you? And call out the DDI.’

  It had just gone eleven o’clock when Walter Hardcastle heard the telephone ringing. Cursing beneath his breath, he padded downstairs in his bare feet.

  ‘Hardcastle,’ he said as he answered the phone.

  ‘It’s DS Turner, sir.’ Turner went on to explain briefly about the body that PC Stringer had found in the ruins of a shop in Charing Cross Road. The moment Turner mentioned the name of Mavis Lavender, Hardcastle was wide awake. By the time he had finished the call, his wife, Muriel, was standing at the top of the stairs wrapped in her dressing gown.

  ‘Have you got to go out, love?’

  ‘Afraid so. Another dead body.’ Hardcastle sighed.

  ‘I’ll make you a cup of tea while you’re getting dressed.’

  Hardcastle telephoned DS Bradley and told him about the murder of Mavis Lavender.

  ‘I’m on my way, guv’nor.’

  Hardcastle was met by Detective Inspector Bob French and Detective Sergeants Bernie Turner and Jack Bradley, Hardcastle’s own assistant, at the bombed-out shop where Mavis Lavender’s dead body had been found.

  ‘I reckon you’ll be able to shed more light on this topping than I will, guv’nor,’ said French.

  ‘Possibly, Bob,’ said Hardcastle guardedly, and briefly explained about the murder of Joyce Butler and his interview with Mavis Lavender the previous morning. ‘It looks to me as though whoever murdered Joyce Butler was afraid that Mavis Lavender had seen him pick up Joyce at the Surbiton Assembly Rooms and was worried that she’d identify him to us.’

  ‘There’s not much point in murdering her after she’d identified him to us,’ suggested Bradley.

  ‘Maybe so, but it would certainly stop her giving evidence at a trial, Jack.’ Hardcastle wondered whether the hope of a distant trial was being too optimistic, given the present paucity of evidence.

  It was just after midnight when Dr Francis Camps arrived. A distinguished pathologist, Camps had been instrumental in bringing a number of murderers to justice.

  His examination of the body was quick and thorough and, having made a few notes, he asked DI French to arrange the removal of the body to Kingston hospital where he would carry out a post-mortem examination.

  It was when the ambulance crew were lifting the body that Detective Sergeant Bradley spotted something shiny that had been beneath the woman’s body.

  ‘This looks interesting, guv.’ Bradley picked up the object that had caught his eye; it was a small gold-coloured badge consisting of a facsimile bullet bearing a pair of wings.

  ‘What on earth is that, Jack?’ Hardcastle asked.

  ‘I haven’t a clue, guv. Whatever it is, it might, with any luck, belong to her killer.’

  ‘Take possession of it as an exhibit, Jack,’ said Hardcastle. ‘God knows what it is, but obviously we need to find out quickly.’

  ‘That’s two of their group who’ve been murdered now, guv’nor,’ said Bradley. ‘D’you think we should put a guard on the other two: Ruby Watson and Doris Jackson?’

  ‘I was just thinking that, Jack, but there’s a difficulty with Doris Jackson: she’s a bus conductress.’

  ‘Perhaps a woman officer in plain clothes,’ suggested Bradley, ‘but we’d have to cl
ear it with the transport authority, otherwise it will cost a fortune if our girl has to pay for eight or so hours on a bus every day.’

  ‘I’m not underestimating our women officers, Jack, but I’d rather we put a male officer on that duty, because I think if this bloke goes for Doris, he’s more likely to do it in public when he can make his escape. And we’d need a very fit young officer to chase him and still have enough strength left to put a hammer-lock-and-bar on him when he catches him. But I think we should use a WPC to look after Ruby Watson as she’s a hairdresser. At least, that’s what she told you when she picked you up at the Surbiton dance.’ Hardcastle shot an amused glance at his sergeant. ‘Or perhaps you’d like to take up the job yourself, seeing that you got on so well with her.’

  ‘I’ll pass on that one, guv’nor, if it’s all the same to you.’

  ‘We’ll use a WPC, Jack. Having a man hanging around in a ladies’ hairdressing salon would look a bit suspicious.’

  Their conversation was interrupted by the wailing of the air-raid siren. ‘Here we go again,’ said Bradley, as the first heavy throb of Dornier bomber engines was heard overhead.

  George Large, the superintendent in charge of the Fulwell bus depot from which Doris Jackson worked, was eager to assist the police. As befitted his name, George Large was a big man, his waistcoat straining at its buttons. His white shirt had a detachable celluloid collar that appeared to be a size too small and his striped necktie was neatly tied.

  ‘She’s one of our best conductresses,’ he said. ‘I wouldn’t want to lose her. So, anything I can do to help the boys in blue, just say the word.’

  ‘If you can give me details of her schedule,’ said Hardcastle, ‘that’ll be a start. Would it be all right with you if my man collected Miss Jackson from her home address and took her to work from there?’

  ‘Of course it would, Inspector.’

  ‘In that case, I’ll telephone his name to you as soon as I get back to Putney and I’ll tell him to introduce himself to Miss Jackson when he arrives. That just leaves the question of cost.’