Denial of Murder

by Peter Turnbull

  ‘I really doubt it,’ Harris replied. ‘This is known locally as “death row”. I am the youngest person in these houses. All my neighbours retire early each evening, and all have their provisions delivered, like old Eric, whom you have just met. Sorry if I have been of little help.’

  ‘You have been of some help, Mr Harris. We didn’t know when the fire was but now we do … the van leaving on Sunday but returning on Monday … and the renters keeping out of sight, it’s all useful. Very useful. It’s all very useful.’

  Close at hand, but out of sight, a cuckoo sang.

  SIX

  The woman had a long, thin, drawn face, with sunken eyes and long, greasy, shoulder-length hair. She had long, bony fingers which she wrapped round the door as she peered out at Penny Yewdall and Tom Ainsclough through the narrow gap which she permitted between the door and the doorframe. She glanced wonderingly at the officers’ identity cards and then gazed at Ainsclough and Yewdall in a seemingly confused and timid manner.

  ‘Look,’ Yewdall spoke calmly, ‘we assure you that it would be a lot easier if you would let us in – much, much easier. You see we, my colleague and I, are from New Scotland Yard. We are members of the Murder and Serious Crime Squad and we are not at all interested in crimes that can be dealt with in a magistrate’s court; anything lower than crown court material is of little concern to us. The crimes that we investigate get people put away for life, not fined twenty pounds and bound over to keep the peace.’

  ‘We can smell the cannabis,’ Tom Ainsclough added, with a serious tone in his voice, ‘and we are not bothered about it, not in the slightest. All London smokes dope, we know that. Just don’t smoke spliffs of blow in our presence. We just want some information, then we’ll be on our way: we’re not here to toss your drum.’

  ‘Yeah …?’ The woman suddenly sounded hopeful in a pathetic, almost childlike manner. ‘So this is not a bust?’

  ‘It’s not a bust,’ Yewdall assured her. ‘Just keep it out of sight until we’ve gone.’

  ‘All right … all right.’ The woman opened the door and revealed that she was wearing a faded gold-coloured T-shirt emblazoned with the name ‘Benidorm’ and a short denim skirt. Her thin, almost emaciated legs stopped in a pair of ancient, much worn and torn sports shoes. Penny Yewdall thought the woman to be in her late thirties, possibly older. She was, thought Yewdall, like so many people one meets in London, people who have immersed themselves in the ‘hippy’ lifestyle and are unwilling or unable to move on and take their place in the adult world of employment and civic duty and personal responsibility, like men in their sixties who keep their hair in ponytails, use expressions like ‘far out’ and keenly urge others ‘to keep it together’.

  ‘So what do you want?’ the woman asked. ‘What can I tell you?’

  ‘We believe that Cherry Quoshie lived here?’ Tom Ainsclough glanced up and down Tredegar Road, Tower Hamlets, London EH3 and saw unsurprisingly that the road had been largely redeveloped since the end of the Second World War, though a few of the flat-roofed, three-storey Victorian houses had escaped the wrecking ball, one such being situated near the junction with Ordell Road, and being the last known address of Cherry Quoshie. The remaining buildings in the area, he noted, were flats built in the sixties.

  ‘Lived! Lived, you say?’ the woman spluttered. ‘She still does live here.’ The emaciated woman spoke in a strong east London accent.

  ‘No, she doesn’t.’ Penny Yewdall remained calm. Her voice remained warm. ‘Can I ask if you are a relative?’

  ‘No … no … not by blood, anyway, but you can see that,’ the woman replied anxiously. ‘I mean, last time I looked in the mirror I was a white bird. Cherry is a black chick and we are not related by marriage.’

  ‘Yes … sorry … but we have to ask,’ Yewdall explained calmly. ‘In circumstances such as these we always have to be sure as to whom we are talking … it’s essential.’

  The woman seemed to the officers to become even paler, her sunken eyes widened, her narrow jaw slackened. ‘What do you mean … in these cir-circumstances?’ the woman stammered. ‘And did Cherry Quoshie live here? Murder and Serious Crime Squad? Just what on earth has happened? What are you saying? What’s going on …?’

  Yewdall drew a deep breath and said, ‘I’m very sorry but we believe Cherry Quoshie to have been murdered.’

  The thin and wasted woman gasped loudly and then staggered backwards with weakening knees into the hallway and sat heavily on an upright chair which stood beside and beneath a green payphone which was bolted to the wall. ‘Oh …’ she gasped again, equally loudly, ‘oh … oh …’ The woman buried her head in her hands and she too breathed deeply. ‘I wondered where she had gone. I mean, I have not seen her for a few days right enough … but murdered … not Cherry … not her …’

  ‘So when did you last see Cherry Quoshie?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Well, like I said, a few days ago.’ The woman glanced at Yewdall. ‘What’s today, sweetheart?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ Ainsclough spoke with restrained impatience, ‘today is Wednesday.’

  ‘So … a few days ago, but you know that’s Cherry, she comes and goes. She stays away for a day or two but she’s never been away for as long as this. So if this is Wednesday,’ the woman took her head from her hands and sat upright, ‘a few days. She wasn’t here last weekend so I reckon Thursday or Friday was the last time I saw her. I get lost with the days, you see … They all blend and merge with each other. But Thursday or Friday, that’s a bit of a long time for Cherry to stay away. Oh … my … murdered. You read of such things but when it happens …’

  ‘Does …’ Yewdall paused. ‘I mean, did Cherry have any particular friend or group of friends?’

  ‘Only her mate, Anna.’ The woman seemed to be staring into space. ‘Just Anna … Anna was Cherry’s only mate. If anyone knows anything about Cherry, it will be Anna.’ Her voice developed a vacant tone, as though, Yewdall thought, her mind was wandering. ‘Only Anna … Cherry and Anna … If anyone knows anything …’

  ‘All right, all right,’ Ainsclough spoke sharply, ‘where do we find Anna?’

  The woman shrugged her thin shoulders. ‘Dunno …’ she replied. ‘Dunno where Anna lives; never did know where Anna lives.’

  ‘Does Anna have a surname?’ Yewdall pressed. She was also by then beginning to find the woman’s fecklessness annoying.

  ‘Day,’ the woman continued to stare into space, ‘she’s called Anna Day … that’s her handle … Anna Day … this is heavy … this is too heavy …’

  ‘Age?’ Ainsclough continued to press the woman for information. ‘Do you know how old Anna Day is?’

  ‘About Cherry’s age, I reckon,’ the woman replied, ‘about that age.’

  ‘So late thirties?’ Yewdall clarified. ‘Cherry Quoshie was thirty-seven. Anna Day is that sort of age?’

  ‘I reckon,’ the woman answered with another sullen shrug of her thin shoulders. ‘Yes, I reckon so, a bit older than me but … neither of us will see twenty-five again, that’s for sure. You know, I envy men. If I was a man I’d be halfway through by now, but that’s life, sweetheart, men get out early, but women just go on and on. We don’t get that sort of Donald Duck. I could live for another fifty years … imagine that, that’s one heavy thought – fifty more years of this.’

  ‘All right!’ Ainsclough snapped. ‘Enough … no more moping. Did Anna Day call on Cherry Quoshie at this address?’

  ‘No,’ the woman shook her head slowly, ‘Cherry Quoshie was a bit of a lone bird, and she never got no callers. She always left her drum to go and call on people at their own drum or to meet up somewhere like some pub or other, but no one ever called on her here, not once in the two years I’ve been here.’ The woman took a deep breath. ‘I met Anna Day when I went for a drink with Cherry and Anna Day came with us. Cherry would tell me now and again that she’d been out with Anna but Anna Day never came here.’

  ‘Which is Cherry’s room?’ Ye
wdall asked, sharply.

  ‘Upstairs front … I mean top floor front.’

  ‘We’ll need to look inside,’ Ainsclough insisted.

  ‘Help yourself, mate.’ The pale and wasted woman allowed a surly and cynical edge to enter her voice. ‘I can’t imagine Cherry will be bothered about the Bill going through her things, not now. I should think that she’ll be past caring now. So on you go, darlin’, red door at the top of the apples and pears. Red door.’

  ‘That’s a good way of looking at it,’ Tom Ainsclough growled as he and Penny Yewdall walked in single file past the seated woman and began to climb the stairs. As they did so, they met the full damp-induced mustiness of the dark, old house, and found it difficult to draw breath.

  Ainsclough and Yewdall discovered Cherry Quoshie’s room to be disorganized. Clothing, they saw, lay strewn upon the floor and on the bed, which was unmade, with grimy-looking sheets which did not seem to the officers to have been changed for many weeks. Most worrying of all was the number of scorched pieces of tin foil and the large number of small hypodermic needles to be seen. Yewdall and Ainsclough cautiously and instinctively remained on the threshold of the room.

  ‘I’ve never been in here before.’ The thin, wasted woman who had opened the door to the officers by then stood behind and between them, having followed them up the stairs unseen, silent, creeping cat-like after them.

  Tom Ainsclough turned. ‘Don’t enter this room,’ he commanded. ‘Apart from the fact that there are syringes everywhere, it will have to be searched. I am surprised that the door has no lock.’

  ‘None of the drums have locks, darlin’,’ the woman replied, continuing to peer curiously into Cherry Quoshie’s room. ‘We don’t need them. None of us have anything worth stealing and we’re all girls in here anyway … so what’s the point of locks on the doors?’

  ‘How many of you live here?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Three. Mind you, I dare say it’s two now.’ The woman continued to gaze at Cherry Quoshie’s room. ‘And I thought my old drum was untidy … love a duck. Mine’s a palace compared to this. No wonder Cherry kept herself private.’

  ‘Who is the third woman?’ Penny Yewdall asked.

  ‘Betsy,’ the thin and wasted woman replied. ‘It’s Betsy. Betsy lives in the basement. She sleeps during the day and she walks about at night. She’s a bit weird … she’s been in the mad house but she takes her medication these days … that keeps her levelled … but she’s still weird. Harmless but weird. She’s a person of the night all right. She spends her summer nights sitting under a tree in Victoria Park. The park is fenced off but the night people always find a way in … and sometimes she goes up to Stratford Marsh and sits by the river all night … but that’s Betsy. Harmless. Like I said, weird but harmless.’

  ‘So what was Cherry Quoshie like as a person?’ Yewdall turned back to look at Cherry Quoshie’s room. ‘Apart from being private, that is?’

  ‘She was a hard old cow, sweetheart,’ the woman replied, also still looking at Cherry Quoshie’s room. ‘You can take it from me, darlin’, Quoshie was a hard old cow … one hard old face. She really was. I wouldn’t pick a fight with her, love a duck I wouldn’t. I kept well out of her old way. Very well out of it. She’d come home, slam the door behind her, pound up the stairs then stay in her room until she left the house again, pounding down the apples and pears and then she’d slam the door hard behind her as she left the house. Don’t know what she ate as she never used the kitchen we share – she must have eaten outside, in cafes or in mates’ drums … but she was a big old girl. I mean, if we had ever got into a skirmish she would have flattened me no bother … but we never did ’cos I kept well out of her face. I kept well on my side of the river when it came to Cherry Quoshie – believe me, well on my side of the river. It’s how you survive living in drums like this, keeping out of each other’s way and by realizing who is the top dog.’ The woman paused. ‘I’ve seen her once getting into a skirmish with another girl in a pub … two black Amazons going at it like they were battling each other for their lives. It was easily, easily ten times worse than watching two men mixing it.’

  ‘That I can well believe,’ Yewdall murmured. ‘If you were to give me the choice of fighting a man or a woman I’d take the man any day of the week. Women are unpredictable.’

  ‘Well, these two Amazons wrecked the boozer and then they toed it down the road like two good mates when they realized the Old Bill was just around the corner and about to arrive any minute. I mean, trying to kill each other then running off into the night side by side … well, that’s Tower Hamlets for you, isn’t it? They well and truly wrecked the battle cruiser but the Old Bill didn’t arrest them because no one saw nothing, did they?’

  ‘Same old, same old,’ Ainsclough growled. ‘Then when you need the police we can’t get there quick enough …’

  ‘So …’ Penny Yewdall smiled briefly at Tom Ainsclough but brought the conversation back into focus, ‘what did Cherry Quoshie do for a living?’

  ‘Cherry, what did she do for a living …?’ The thin and much-wasted woman sounded genuinely surprised at the question. ‘She was on the game, wasn’t she?’

  ‘We don’t know,’ Ainsclough replied icily. ‘Was she?’

  ‘Yes, she was,’ the woman answered equally coldly, ‘she was a sex worker. She worked King’s Cross. The poor cow. She was a very low-end tart, really low end. She worked the street taking who and what she could and not charging much. She left at about six o’clock and got back making a lot of noise at midnight … about midnight … no … no … usually after midnight in point of fact … seven days a week, rain or shine. But she hardly made any money; it was not easy for her … it was hard for her … she was a big-boned black girl with a wide, flat nose and awful bad teeth and breath, trying to compete with thin fifteen-year-old white runaway girls. She had to work hard for very little, and that’s the truth. That’s the way of it on the street, but you’d know that, I suppose.’

  ‘We do,’ Yewdall replied. ‘We know what it’s like.’

  ‘Well, sweetheart, Anna Day could tell you more … but I will tell you this for nothing and that is that she was a well-frightened girl all the last week that I saw her, really scared … Cherry, I mean, not Anna. Cherry was frightened and it takes a lot to frighten Cherry Quoshie … or it took a lot to frighten her.’

  ‘Frightened?’ Yewdall repeated.

  ‘Yes … scared stiff, she was really edgy,’ the woman vigorously scratched her side. ‘I mean, in the middle of last week I saw her from the street, so I did. She was standing at the window of her drum and looking out like she was expecting someone … but you know she was not standing in clear view, she was well hidden by the curtain. I saw the curtain move, you see, and then Quoshie’s face peered round it just for a second, looking out like she was looking for someone but it was like she didn’t want no geezer to see her. That was obvious, because she went and hid herself again very quickly. She didn’t want to be seen all right.’

  ‘When was that?’ Yewdall asked.

  ‘Middle of last week, darlin’,’ the woman replied. ‘The old days you know, they run into each other. Wednesday today, you said …’

  ‘Yes, Wednesday,’ Ainsclough growled, ‘like yesterday was Tuesday and tomorrow is Thursday, so today is Wednesday.’

  ‘Look, don’t you get sarcastic, darlin’, don’t you get all high and mighty.’ The thin woman turned on Ainsclough, ‘It’s all right for you, you’ve got a job, it gives your life structure, some reason to get out of bed each new day. Me … nothing happens in my life what didn’t happen the day before and won’t happen the day after … so I lose track of the days of the week. Except Sunday. You hear the church bells on Sunday, that’s how I know when it’s Sunday.’

  Ainsclough did not reply and accepted her rebuke. He conceded that she was correct. If he lived her half-life existence then the days would eventually begin to blur into each other for him also.

  Penny
Yewdall asked, ‘Do you do drugs?’

  ‘Not if I can help it,’ the woman replied. ‘I avoid them if I can, and the heavy bevvy. Trying to avoid that poison as well. It’s not easy but I’m winning more than losing.’

  ‘Good for you.’ Yewdall smiled approvingly. ‘Do you work the streets?’

  ‘Now and again … but … and it’s happening more and more frequent … I’m losing that skirmish. I’m like Cherry was, I’ve got less to sell than a lot of the girls so I have to work harder … but I don’t have to work as hard as she used to work … not yet anyway … But what’s a chick like me to do if she wants to eat? Cherry said she’d take me down to King’s Cross but I can still work Piccadilly. I’ve got the figure for Piccadilly still, so I go there. There’s more men there who like their anorexics … seems that a living skeleton is a turn on for them … but I can see King’s Cross on the horizon … Like I said, though, a girl’s got to eat.’ The woman shrugged. ‘Even if the one meal of the day is beans on toast, a girl must still eat something, and fodder costs money, so it’s the “Dilly Lady” for me more evenings than not.’

  ‘Did Cherry ever say what she was frightened of?’ Ainsclough asked.

  ‘Or who?’ Yewdall added. ‘What or who was she frightened of?’

  ‘No … well, she didn’t hardly tell me nothing.’ The wasted woman shook her head. ‘We hardly ever spoke, but she may have said something to Anna Day; she only ever seemed to talk to Anna Day.’

  ‘So …’ Yewdall asked, ‘you don’t know where Anna Day lives?’

  ‘No clue, darlin’,’ again the woman shook her head, ‘but you do. I mean, she’s well known to the Old Bill, so she is … you’ll have an address on your files. She’s got a few convictions and she was last up before the beaks just recent like, a couple of weeks ago, so her address will not have changed since then … it’s not likely to have done anyway.’ The woman paused. ‘Well, it might have changed because Cherry told me once that Anna has a pimp who smacks her around so she moves address quite often to try and escape him, but he keeps tracking her down and when he finds her he gives her a hospital slap and then sends her out working again.’