Denial of Murder

by Peter Turnbull

  Tuesday

  THREE

  Geoff ‘the milk’ Driscoll hummed a catchy tune to himself as he turned his milk float off the Ridgeway and into Lingfield Road. The first thing he did as he straightened the float was to check the road surface ahead of him for any footwear lying upon it. He smiled gently as he saw that the road surface was clear of any debris, although the remnants of the blue and white police tape which had enclosed the area where, twenty-four hours earlier, he had found the corpse of the man, still hung from the shrubs, utterly motionless in the morning air. His discovery of the body had caused a stir in the dairy and that morning, as he was loading up the float, he had enjoyed much attention from his fellow rounds men who had pressed him for details.

  Driscoll proceeded up Lingfield Road and then slowed the float to a halt as he saw the body. It was lying precisely where he had found the other body of the man but between two cars which had been parked closed to each other, thus concealing it from view until Driscoll was almost alongside it. A pair of red shoes lay on the ground nearby. Unlike the body he had found the previous day this one was female and, also unlike the body he had found the previous day, this body was Afro-Caribbean.

  ‘This,’ Driscoll murmured softly to himself, ‘just cannot be happening to me.’

  He applied the handbrake of the float, stepped out of the vehicle and walked, calmly this time, up the steps he had run up the previous morning. Once again he knocked at the door of the large Gothic Victorian house with its complicated roof line and turret windows, and once again the door was opened, casually so, by the same, tall, well-built man who wore the same blue paisley patterned dressing gown. ‘Sorry, Squire,’ Driscoll said, employing a familiarity of address he had not used the previous morning, ‘but you are just not going to believe what I have found on the road outside your house.’

  Once again the householder remained utterly calm, then he nodded slowly and said, ‘I will call the police,’ before shutting his door on Driscoll.

  It was, once again, the dawn which woke Tom Ainsclough, as it so often did because of his wont to sleep with the curtains of his bedroom open. He rose slowly, feeling utterly refreshed after a solid eight hours of deep sleep, and sat on the edge of his bed. He half turned, placed his palm on the other side and found that it was still warm from Sara, who had quietly left the house without waking him, having lain there. Ainsclough stood at the window and looked out across the suburban garden to Lambeth Hospital where Sara would be, by then, working as a staff sister. Ainsclough washed, dressed and breakfasted. He then left the upper portion of the house, taking the stairs down to the common hallway he and his wife shared with the Watsons, who were the mortgagees of the lower conversion of the house. The Watsons were also a young and childless couple, who had proved good neighbours. The wife of the union was, like Sara Ainsclough, also employed as a nurse at Lambeth Hospital.

  Ainsclough departed the house, turned left and walked up the Victorian terraced development that was Hargwyne Road, intending, as usual, to take the Underground from Clapham North into central London and to New Scotland Yard. As he walked he thought, once again, that he and Sara working shifts, sometimes arriving as the other was departing, was what kept their marriage healthy, in that they saw just sufficient of each other to maintain a sense of mutual intrigue.

  Harry Vicary smiled warmly and leaned back in his chair. ‘Well,’ he said, glancing briefly to his left out of his office window at the River Thames and the buildings opposite before returning his attention to his assembled team of officers, ‘the two murders are either connected, or somebody has got it in for poor old, sunny old, leafy old Wimbledon. Any suggestions? What does the team think?’

  ‘They’re both connected, sir.’ Frankie Brunnie returned the smile. ‘They have to be.’

  ‘Of course they are.’ Vicary leaned forward and rested his elbows and forearms on his desktop. ‘And the car, also burned out in the same place that the car was burned out the previous evening.’

  ‘The same two streets,’ Penny Yewdall confirmed. ‘That’s more than a coincidence.’

  ‘We can also consider the possibility that someone is sending us a message,’ Tom Ainsclough offered.

  ‘Either that,’ Victor Swannell also leaned forward in his chair, ‘or it is just plain sloppy on the part of the felons. That would be my guess. They might have realized that that part of Wimbledon is a good place to get in and out of without being picked up by CCTV cameras, they know the routes in and out, and they have discovered all those overgrown front gardens to hide in. They did it successfully one night, and so they decided to dump the second body and torch the second car in the same two locations but, by doing so, they have invited us to link the victims. Quite a serious mistake on their part.’

  ‘Or someone is sending us a message, as Tom suggests,’ Penny Yewdall added.

  Vicary sipped his tea. ‘Sadly, I have to report that the police helicopter wasn’t available last evening; it had a pressing errand involving the chase of a high performance car … a stolen high performance car, the driver of which was intending to carve up all the traffic on the North Circular. It couldn’t be diverted to search for infra-red images of people playing hide and seek in suburban front gardens south of the river. So, if there is a connection between Gordon Cogan and last night’s victim, we must find it ourselves.’ Vicary paused. ‘Tom and Penny … I want you two to stay teamed up.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Yewdall and Ainsclough replied in unison as they glanced approvingly at each other.

  ‘I want you two to look at last night’s victim, attend the post-mortem … you’re particularly looking for a connection with Gordon Cogan. If it’s there you’ll find it.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Yewdall answered for herself and Ainsclough.

  ‘Victor and Frankie.’

  ‘Yes, boss,’ Brunnie replied enthusiastically.

  ‘I’d like you two to go back and look at the murder for which Cogan was convicted. Penny and Tom talked to Gordon Cogan’s brother yesterday after he viewed and identified the body of Gordon Cogan at the Royal London Hospital. They have recorded their findings in the file. You’ll read it, of course, but in a nutshell Gordon Cogan pleaded not guilty despite compelling DNA evidence, and according to his brother he did not seem to be a man in denial. He had put up his hand to an earlier offence because he was guilty of that, and so he seemed to have been a man who possessed a powerful sense of integrity. He was also a highly educated man – three university degrees, no less – and thusly was someone who, one would think, would know the compelling weight DNA evidence carries. Yet he offered no defence at all. He just pleaded not guilty. It seems to have been the case that his attitude was, “Yes, I know all about DNA and its importance as evidence, but I didn’t do it”. And then, after ten years of being IDOM he suddenly changes his plea. It’s as if there is a story there, and it’s a story which he did not share with his elder brother. So that’s what I want you two blokes to do … go back into that murder, talk to any interested parties, find out, if you can, exactly what Gordon Cogan’s story was. As I said … if you can.’

  ‘Yes, boss.’ Frankie Brunnie spoke confidently. ‘Leave it with us.’

  Harry Vicary leaned backwards and paused as if in thought, then he leaned forward. ‘You know, it doesn’t take two to observe the post-mortem for the police … so … Tom … if you could do that, please … if you could observe the post-mortem, then that will free you up, Penny, to go and visit Gordon Cogan’s victim-cum-pupil … or rather, I should say, his pupil-cum-victim. She’s in her thirties now and is known to us, as Derek Cogan said that she would be. Just petty stuff, but she’s known.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Yewdall replied with prompt alertness.

  ‘Go and talk to her … that’s a one-hander, I think. Are you happy to visit her alone?’

  ‘Very happy, sir.’ Yewdall nodded. ‘It’s a one-hander, as you say, woman to woman.’

  ‘Good, then after you have visited her, team up with
Tom to look at the background of last night’s victim. Look for a connection with Gordon Cogan.’

  ‘Yes, sir,’ Penny Yewdall replied with enthusiasm.

  ‘Good.’ Vicary leaned backwards. ‘So we all know what we are doing? If any of you should stray into another task, then let me know.’ He patted his phone. ‘I must know where each of you is at all times.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Understood.’ Frankie Brunnie replied for the team as the officers stood.

  ‘There was just nothing, nothing at all happening in his life.’ Lysandra Smith revealed herself to be a small woman, slight to the point of being borderline anorexic, Yewdall guessed, who lived in a high-rise council flat on an estate of sixties ‘Brutalism’ design in Stepney. She had, Yewdall noted, grown from a love-struck schoolgirl into a woman with a hard face and steel-cold eyes, who had a worn and used look about her. Yewdall felt she had ‘sex-trade worker’ written all the way through her like a stick of seaside rock, either retired, semi-retired or still fully active, Yewdall couldn’t tell, but she intuitively knew that Lysandra Smith could tell more than a few stories of the street. Yewdall read the living room in which she and Lysandra sat. She noted that the room, and probably the rest of the flat, was kept in an untidy and cluttered manner. It was furnished with inexpensive items and had a musty smell. A tabloid newspaper was strewn on the plastic cover of the settee while a packet of cheap cigarettes and a yellow disposable cigarette lighter stood on an inexpensive and flimsy-looking coffee table, the surface of which was heavily stained with circular rings caused by the base of hot coffee and tea mugs being placed directly on to it, rather than on coasters. Lysandra Smith wore brightly coloured plastic bangles on both wrists but no jewellery at all and certainly no wedding band. The woman wore faded blue denims, a loose-fitting red T-shirt and was without footwear. She sat hunched forward in an armchair which stood next to an old portable television set. Penny Yewdall began to feel itchy as she sat opposite Lysandra Smith in an identical armchair. ‘That’s it … that was it,’ Lysandra Smith looked downwards at the matted carpet and seemed to Yewdall to avoid any eye contact with her, ‘nothing was happening in his life. He was a ruined man struggling to make ends meet … like I tell you … the gospel truth is … his Sunday lunch was a tin of spaghetti hoops and sometimes not even that. He had lost everything. And I mean everything. He tried to stay off the booze but when he did get some cash he’d be off round the “offie” for a bottle of vodka which he’d take home and demolish. Once or twice he’d go on a two- or three-day bender but that wasn’t often. He never had that sort of money. Hardly ever, anyway.’

  ‘So you kept close to him?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Not so close,’ Lysandra Smith replied with a certain sadness in her voice. ‘We were lovers and I visited when I could get away, but it wasn’t easy. Then I got pregnant and that certainly didn’t help my situation any.’ She reached for the packet of cigarettes, opened it and offered one to Penny Yewdall, who shook her head briefly, smiling her thanks as she did so. Lysandra Smith put the cigarette to her lips and lit it with the disposable lighter. She then tossed the lighter back on to the coffee table top with a clatter. Yewdall watched as Lysandra Smith inhaled deeply and then exhaled the smoke through her nostrils with a sense of gratitude about her, as if the nicotine was clearly reaching her. ‘We had to keep it on the old Q.T., didn’t we? I mean, like very Q.T. We couldn’t breathe a word to no one, could we?’

  ‘I don’t know, couldn’t you?’ Yewdall continued to ‘read’ the room which began to say ‘retired brass, now on the dole’. She sensed that Lysandra Smith had finally left the street behind her … perhaps not fully … but definitely ‘retired from the game’; otherwise, Yewdall reasoned, there would be indications of a greater degree of spending power around her flat.

  ‘No, we couldn’t say a word. Not a dicky bird.’ Lysandra flicked the ash from the end of her cigarette on to the knee of her jeans and rubbed it into the weave of the denim. ‘It was my old man, wasn’t it? He was not well impressed with me seeing Gordon, not impressed at all. But despite that we’d still manage to meet up from time to time. There was a pay phone in the hall of the home where he had a bedsit. I’d phone him when I could get away, and that wasn’t often, and we’d arrange to meet up and we’d go and sit for an evening in some dingy battle cruiser or other. We had no money to speak of, and so we’d make the drinks last as long as we could. We’d sit there until the landlord started to glare at us, then we’d walk out into the night.’ Lysandra Smith inhaled and then exhaled through her mouth as she continued speaking, so that the cigarette smoke egressed in small, disjointed clouds. ‘Then one night he said that he’d been thinking and he’d decided that we should stop seeing each other. He said that he had no income or future to speak of. He couldn’t support no one … he couldn’t support a family. He said that he was finished before he was started. Gordon said that we should stop seeing each other and that I should find someone else; that I should get married and have a life.’

  ‘How did you feel about that?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘I wasn’t happy about it but I saw the sense in it. By then I was pregnant but I wasn’t showing so Gordon didn’t know.’

  ‘He wasn’t the father?’ Yewdall pressed.

  Lysandra Smith shook her head firmly. She leaned forward and this time the recipient of the ash from her cigarette was a badly chipped green porcelain ashtray with Bass Charrington embossed on the side in gold lettering, clearly taken from a pub by some person, or persons unknown, some years previously and which had, by some circuitous route, eventually ended up in the flat of Lysandra Smith in Stepney. ‘So all in all, I thought he was right.’ Smith inhaled more smoke. ‘He was a broken man, young but broken, like Humpty Dumpty … no one was going to put Gordon Cogan together again … The man I had that schoolgirl crush on was clean and neatly turned out, very well-spoken, well educated, looking so … so … awesome in his university gown, not a confident teacher but finding his feet, a man we still looked up to despite his nervousness. Then a few months later he was smelly, unshaven, unwashed, wearing drab clothing with hot, searing breath, and unable to make a living. All right, so I was part of his fall from grace, I was part of that, his downfall … but he just wasn’t the geezer I had gone to Ireland with. So yes, in the end I thought he was right, there was no future for us, none at all, and it also meant that I wouldn’t be at risk from my old man anymore.’

  ‘At risk?’ Yewdall probed. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Yeah … my old man was a bit … physical. He can still be a bit violent.’ Lysandra Smith’s voice trailed off. ‘I mean, when I came back from Ireland he gave me a dreadful hiding, a real leathering he gave me, so he did.’

  ‘Social services had ensured that you were safe, so we were told,’ Yewdall observed.

  ‘Well, yes,’ Lysandra looked up at the ceiling, ‘they visited my old man and my old woman before I was returned and got an assurance that I’d be safe, but my old man’s words don’t mean nothing. They visited again once I’d been home for a few days and found that all was OK. It was when my old man realized that they wouldn’t be calling on us no more that he took his belt off and half an hour later he put it back on again. He waited for ten days before he did it. He was clever like that. He knew the value of not showing his hand too early on.’

  ‘I am sorry,’ Yewdall said softly. ‘You were not to blame … your parents should have known that.’

  ‘My old man didn’t see it like that, did he? He …’ Lysandra’s Smith’s voice faded as they heard a sound of shuffling from the room above the living room. ‘Oh, he’s up early today; he doesn’t usually stir until well gone midday.’

  ‘He?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Pancras,’ Lysandra Smith explained. ‘My son, Pancras.’

  ‘Lovely name.’ Yewdall smiled.

  ‘He hates it,’ Lysandra Smith looked sideways, ‘but his father gave it to him. He said it would toughen him up at school. His father said that the othe
r children would ridicule him and so he’d learn from that to stick up for himself and that’s what’s happened … it’s hardened him up all right and he’s taken after my old man. He’s very violent – it’ll be his downfall.’

  ‘Oh …’ Penny Yewdall allowed a note of disappointment to enter her voice. ‘I am sorry to hear that.’

  ‘His father is in Parkhurst. He’s doing twenty years for armed robbery and keeps throwing away any hope of parole with his bad attitude. He’s just anti-authority … got involved in a prison riot once and got five more years added to his sentence for that. He was sent down when Pancras was three years old and the only male influence in Pancras’s life since then has been my old man. I reckon Pancras will be up and coming downstairs now because he’ll have heard your voice; he’ll be wanting to know who you are. He’s very … what’s the word? Territorial. He wants to know about everything that goes on in this house.’

  ‘Why … how old is he?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Fifteen.’ Lysandra Smith replied in a matter-of-fact manner.

  ‘Fifteen …’ Yewdall gasped.

  ‘Yes. He’s well used to hearing daytime television but a visitor … that will have got him out of bed. But me … little me.’ Lysandra Smith shrugged. ‘Think of it … Gordon Cogan, then Elliot Reiss, an armed robber … I mean, tell me, am I a magnate for losers or am I a magnet for losers?’

  Yewdall could only smile a sympathetic smile in reply.

  ‘He’s already known to you.’ Lysandra Smith dragged heavily on the cigarette.