‘My first husband was killed crossing the Heathway,’ the older woman explained after a period of silence had descended on the room. ‘He worked for the Ford Motor Company, like an awful lot round here do. He was walking home one night when he was knocked down and run over, just opposite the Tube Station.’
‘He was about halfway home,’ the younger woman added, seeming to have calmed herself. The older woman nodded and for a brief moment the two women seemed to the officers to be on the same side. ‘Hit and run. The driver didn’t stop and the police never caught him.’
‘More than halfway home,’ the older woman added. ‘He liked to walk home; he always used to say that it kept him fit.’
‘We are sorry to hear that,’ Swannell said softly. ‘Such tragedies always leave a family permanently scarred, emotional scarring that never heals.’
‘Yes, permanent scarring,’ the older woman echoed, ‘that’s what it feels like … inside your head … a scar that won’t heal.’ She pointed to another photograph on the mantelpiece showing a soldier posing next to a tank. ‘That was him when he was in the army. He was a good man. I made the right choice. He was good to us.’
‘Our Janet made her room so cosy,’ the daughter commented.
‘You visited your sister in Acton?’ Brunnie asked. ‘Or do you mean her room here?’
‘Her room in Acton,’ the daughter clarified. ‘She and I shared a bedroom here. But yes … I visited her in Acton a few times. It wasn’t a squat; I don’t know why I said it was a squat. She rented it, her room, and she made it so cosy.’ The younger woman looked at Swannell and Brunnie. ‘It was a real eye-opener for me; I’d never been out of Dagenham before, not really. The house, that house in Acton, it was full of rough people, all young still but not going anywhere, none of them … and there was Janet, my little sister, living among that lot … but at least she was away from the mad Irishman.’
‘The mad Irishman?’ Swannell queried, as a brilliantly clean red and white delivery van, glinting in the sun, drove slowly past the women’s house on Fanshawe Crescent, which had revealed itself to be an angled rather than a curved crescent of refurbished small two- or three-bedroomed terraced houses, with small gardens to the front and also with small gardens to the rear.
‘Her second husband,’ the younger woman explained with clear indignation. ‘The mad Irishman, that’s her second husband. My dad wasn’t cold in his grave, and she brings him, the mad Irishman, back from the pub one night.’
‘That’s a lie!’ The older woman shouted. ‘You bitch … you lying little bitch, that’s a cheap lie. Your father was in his grave for a year – more than a year – before I met Sean, and we met at the Cruse Club. Not down the boozer.’
‘The Cruise Club,’ Swannell asked, ‘as in a sea cruise … a sailing club?’
‘C.R.U.S.E.,’ the younger woman explained smugly, ‘there’s no letter “i” in the name. It’s a social club for widowed and divorced people held in the church hall near here. I went once just to see what was going on. It was just a set of desperate old wrinklies trying to get off with each other. I tell you it really made me want to puke. I wanted to vomit all the way home.’
‘You just wait till you lose your man,’ the older woman hissed. ‘That’s if you ever get one. You’ll be there; you’ll be down the Cruse Club.’
‘I won’t!’
‘Yes, you will,’ the older woman snarled. ‘Just you wait. You’ll be down there.’
‘Won’t. Won’t. Won’t,’ the daughter chanted vehemently. ‘Won’t. Won’t. Won’t. Won’t.’
‘Ladies, ladies, please,’ Swannell once again appealed for calm. Then he asked, ‘You said you visited Janet in her bedsit in Acton? Sorry … Sylvia, is it?’
‘Yes,’ the younger woman stated, ‘I’m Sylvia. That one’s Vera … Vera Wood, and just as thick as a plank of wood, she is, like as thick as two short planks of wood.’
‘That’s enough! This is my house!’ Vera Wood shouted. ‘You don’t talk to me like that, not in my house.’
‘Not any more, it isn’t. Not any more is it your house,’ Sylvia Frost replied, still in anger. ‘You signed it over to the mad Irishman when you met him.’
‘When we married,’ Vera Wood spoke defensively, ‘I made him co-owner. Not full owner. Half is in my name.’
‘As bad as.’ Sylvia Frost once again turned away from her mother and addressed Swannell. ‘My father worked hard to pay off the mortgage, to give his family some security, some start in life, a little financial leg up, and what does she do? She only gives half of it to Sean Wood, who’s never done a stroke of work in his life.’
‘He works hard,’ Vera Wood protested. ‘He’s a grafter.’
‘That’s when he is in work, but most often he’s on the dole. And when he’s working he’s only down some hole in the road.’ Sylvia Frost turned to Swannell and Brunnie. ‘My dad had a proper job – he was a Ford Motor Company foreman … and she buries him and marries a navvy, a penniless navvy, and she gives him half the house, the house my dad worked each day to buy.’
‘Please, please …’ This time it was Frankie Brunnie who tried to calm the household, although he conceded that he was finding the visit to the Frost/Wood home to be quite an interesting, though not particularly enjoyable, exposé of family dynamics. ‘Your visits to Acton, Sylvia … to your sister’s flat …?’
‘Yes,’ Sylvia Frost took a slow, deep, temper-calming breath, ‘yes, I dare say you haven’t come all the way to Dagenham to listen to me and her having a bitch session. So how can I help you?’
‘Well … for a start,’ Brunnie asked, ‘how was your sister Janet when you last saw her?’
‘You should be married now,’ Vera Wood grumbled in a low voice.
‘I’m thirty-two, I’ve still got time,’ Sylvia Frost replied sourly.
‘I was nineteen,’ Vera Wood said proudly. ‘Nineteen.’
‘Please … ladies …’ Brunnie pleaded. ‘Sorry, Sylvia … you were saying your sister, when you last saw her … what was she like?’
‘In a word,’ Sylvia Frost looked at the carpet, ‘in a word, she was a mess. She was a right mess. Her room which she had made all cosy had become a mess, a real tip … and she was a mess.’ Sylvia Frost paused. ‘She was a heroin addict by then, you see. You probably know that already … injecting herself with the stuff.’
‘Yes, we do know,’ Brunnie advised. ‘We read the file.’
‘Her eyes were shrunken and yellow round the edges, her skin was pale … deathly white. She wasn’t eating, hardly anything at all, anyway. She was never a big girl, none of us in this family are, but when I last saw her she was so … so … frail … as thin as a rake. Her door was always open, I noticed that. She wasn’t bothered about keeping it locked. Other people in the house would just wander in and out of her room at will; it was like she hadn’t got the energy to defend her territory, but she hadn’t got anything worth stealing anyway, not by then.’ Sylvia Frost’s tone of voice became resigned. ‘She was my little sister and she ends up like that, at just seventeen years old.’
‘Did you ever meet anyone else?’ Brunnie asked. ‘I mean … did you ever meet anyone else who lived in the house at the time?’
‘I met the guy who strangled her. I remember him very well. He was quite nice, I thought, but he was sober when I met him. When he strangled our Janet he was on a bender.’ Sylvia Frost paused as if in thought. ‘I also met a real hard cow of a black girl … she was bad news – short and heavy. I remember I thought she had a personality as black as the Tower of London ravens. I’ll tell you that girl would sell her own mother for a wrap of heroin. She was like that. Hard and cold, out for herself and only for herself.’
‘Just like you would.’ Vera Wood turned to her daughter. ‘You’d sell me.’
‘So we agree on something. I knew we would eventually. Of course I’d sell you, but who’d buy you?’ Sylvia snarled in reply. ‘I’d get more for something I wiped off the sole of my sh
oe.’
‘Bitch!’ Vera Wood screamed. ‘Bitch. Bitch.’
‘Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!’ Sylvia screamed her reply. ‘Cow. Bitch.’
‘Girls!’ Victor Swannell used the word without thinking and was surprised when both women responded by instantly falling silent but still continued to glare at each other. ‘Just try to keep calm, will you? At least until we have gone. Please.’
‘You know, at his trial,’ Sylvia Frost turned to Swannell and Brunnie, thus breaking another brief period of silence which had fallen on the room, ‘the boy who … the man who strangled our Janet pleaded not guilty and you know, a bit of me actually believed him.’
‘I didn’t,’ Vera Wood snorted and looked into the empty fire grate.
‘Well, you never met him, did you?’ Sylvia Frost snapped. ‘I did. He was really a nice boy, a gentle, well-spoken young man. He used to be a teacher, so he said. I don’t know why he gave up a good job like that, don’t know what his story was that he drops from teaching to live in a bedsit in a house like that … but anyway, our Janet and him palled up and Janet told me that they had even sank into the same pit once or twice.’
‘They were lovers!’ Swannell exclaimed. ‘We didn’t know that.’
‘No … they were never that close but he was always looking out for our Janet, he was always very protective of her, and I think Janet was looking for a father figure – someone to protect her. At least I think that she was. She didn’t want a drunken Irish navvy who shouted all the time, but someone like our dad who used to dote on his two little girls. Our dad was a good man.’
Vera Wood made a low growling sound but passed no comment.
‘Well, he was a good man,’ Sylvia Frost insisted. ‘Anyway, our Janet told me that Gordon Cogan would stick up for her and that he would try to stop her taking heroin … but that wasn’t easy … and they’d sometimes spend all night with each other, more just for company really, but it wasn’t a full-on romance.’
‘I see,’ Swannell replied. ‘I fully understand what you mean.’
‘So …’ Sylvia Frost continued, ‘I was well surprised, really very well surprised when he was charged with her murder. I can tell you that that really was a bolt from the blue.’ She paused. ‘But if he was on a bender, like he was supposed to be … and when men get a drink in them they change … but then … even allowing for that, Gordon Cogan was so slightly built for a man … I mean that he was all brain … just the opposite of her husband.’ Sylvia Frost pointed to her mother. ‘Who now owns half this house, incidentally.’
‘Bitch!’
‘Cow!’
‘All right, all right, ladies …’ Frankie Brunnie appealed, ‘let’s still try to keep it calm, shall we?’
‘Well, tell that cow!’ Sylvia Frost shouted. ‘Tell her to keep calm, needling me like that. She’s got no cause to do that.’
The two women, mother and daughter, then both sat forward in their chairs and began to speak harshly at each other, both speaking at the same time, and both speaking incessantly. Brunnie glanced at Swannell, who nodded, and the two officers quietly stood and silently walked out of the room, during which time the two women did not stop shouting at each other. They were still shouting as Brunnie and Swannell walked down the narrow entrance hall, opened the door and softly let themselves out of the house. Brunnie thought it doubtful that the two women had even noticed the two officers taking their leave.
Driving slowly down Fanshawe Crescent, towards the junction with Parsloes Avenue, Brunnie commented, ‘You know, Vic, it’s visits like that that make me glad I am not married and have my own family.’
‘It doesn’t have to be like that back there. That was just awful, but I bet those two can’t live apart from each other, despite what we’ve just seen.’ Swannell glanced to his left at the row of modest but self-respecting terraced houses. ‘But I know what you mean. The single life has its compensations, if not indeed its advantages, but that was a useful visit, nonetheless. Very useful. Our time was not wasted by doing that visit.’
‘You think?’ Brunnie queried.
‘Well, I think it means we can safely shut down one line of enquiry. No one in that house has the means or the motive to murder Gordon Cogan. His killer is elsewhere other than the Frost/Wood household, despite his conviction for the murder of Janet Frost. Neither of those two women wants revenge.’
Brunnie drove the car on to Parsloes Avenue and then turned right towards Wood Lane. ‘Interesting that you say “conviction”,’ he observed, ‘not “the murder of”. Are your thoughts perhaps turning to embrace the issue of a possible wrongful conviction?’
‘Yes,’ Swannell replied quietly, ‘yes they are.’
Brunnie slowed the car to allow an elderly woman to cross the road. ‘So are mine.’
Victor Swannell returned home to his house on Warren Road in Neasden, north London. He slowed his car and parked it on the concreted-over area in front of his house. Once it had been a small lawn surrounded by a privet hedge, but the narrowness of Warren Road had obliged all households on the road to give over their front garden to parking space. Swannell got out of his car and heard the hum of traffic on the North Circular road. The noise from it was incessant – always, always there. At night it abated somewhat but was still constant. It was something which he, his family, and all other residents of that part of Neasden had learned to live with.
He walked up the path beside his house and entered by the rear kitchen door. His wife stood at the sink and glanced at him as he entered, then returned her attention to the washing up. In the lounge his daughters were glued to an Australian soap opera being shown on the television and did not even look at him.
Later on he went out for a stroll, to take in the evening, and his mind turned to the Frost/Wood household in Dagenham. He did not envy their household but he had to concede that at least they had some form of family life.
It was more than he felt that he had.
Later that evening Frankie Brunnie sat opposite the long-necked, brown-eyed nurse in the Cross Keys. They had eaten late and had then decided to go out for a nightcap. They had found the pub to be pleasingly quiet, as it so often was mid-week, and had settled into a corner seat and talked in soft conversation. Towards the end of the evening the landlord walked jovially from table to table and laid small straw baskets containing pieces of roast chicken on each of the occupied tables. It was, thought Brunnie, a generous and a pleasingly hospitable act. He and the nurse thanked the landlord and began to help themselves to the chicken. Despite their late meal, Brunnie and the nurse ate all the contents of the basket, with Brunnie taking the greater proportion of the meat for himself.
‘Well,’ Brunnie took a napkin and gently wiped grease from the nurse’s slender fingers, ‘your next meal is never guaranteed, even here in the west.’ He smiled. ‘So if it’s there, eat it.’
‘Too right,’ the nurse replied. ‘Too right.’
Still later during that evening, upon returning from the Cross Keys, the nurse and Frankie Brunnie stood at the window in Brunnie’s flat and looked out upon Walthamstow High Street, which lay to the left and right beneath them. During the day the high street was the location of the longest street market in London, but by night it was quiet, containing only a few people who strolled home along the whole pedestrianized length of the roadway.
‘I love you.’ Frankie Brunnie turned to the nurse and smiled, holding eye contact.
‘And I love you.’ The nurse returned the smile and slid his hand around Brunnie’s waist. ‘I love you so very much indeed.’
Wednesday
FIVE
‘Well, we have had some extremely interesting developments.’ Harry Vicary glanced to his left out of the window across the Thames to the buildings on the Surrey Bank, which were, at that moment, gleaming in the morning sun. He then turned and smiled at his team. ‘Courtesy of Penny, we know now that Gordon Cogan’s victim … his first victim, the schoolgirl, is the daughter of Tony “the Pestilen
ce” Smith. The Metropolitan Police have been after him for years … we’ve been wanting to put him away since I was in uniform. We can dismiss any attempt at revenge on the part of Janet Frost’s family, courtesy of Victor and Frankie’s visit to their home. Also, Cherry Quoshie left an interesting present for us. I won’t report where she left it for us to find, but Tom was there when it was discovered, though we still don’t know how Cherry Quoshie and Gordon Cogan are connected, but connected they will be. Once we find that connection, once all the dots have been joined up, then the case will begin to crack open. One further development I have to notify you of is that we have received a letter from someone claiming to have information about the murder of Gordon Cogan.’ Vicary held the letter in his hands. ‘It’s from one Philip Dawson … he gives an address in Poplar. He asks to be visited … he refuses to come to the police station.’
‘Refuses?’ Frankie Brunnie repeated. ‘He refuses …?’
‘Well, it suits us,’ Victor Swannell commented. ‘It means we have to visit him, so we’ll see where he lives, and we’ll collect more information about him that way. I can cope with that.’
‘Can you please forgive my ignorance?’ Penny Yewdall sat forward. ‘I have, of course, heard of “Pestilence” Smith, but how did he acquire his name … his nickname, I mean.’
‘He and his “family” or “firm” seem to spread a pestilence wherever they go but they have no particular manor to call their own, so their activity isn’t localized,’ Vicary explained. ‘It’s like he is, or they are, an airborne pestilence which covers London and the Home Counties with links to European firms and families. People will tell us about “the Pestilence” but no one will testify. It’s as if, as I say, it is airborne and you can’t escape it. Potential witnesses tend to disappear … and, like any pestilence, he gets everywhere. If it’s illegal and if it’s a good earner then Tony “the Pestilence” Smith is likely to have a hand in it.’
Denial of Murder Page 10