The Year of the Gun

by Chris Nickson

  A few more orders then just the three of them remained in the office.

  ‘It’s the damnedest thing I ever heard,’ Ellison said.

  ‘Maybe she was meeting someone,’ Lottie said. ‘Having an affair.’ It was the only thing she could imagine. The others stared at her. ‘Think about it for a minute. It makes sense, meeting where no one knows them. And it would explain why no one’s reported her missing – it was all illicit from the start.’

  ‘It’s plausible,’ McMillan agreed with a nod. ‘But how do we go about proving it?’

  She thought quickly. ‘We need to check all the hotels. They’ll want somewhere fairly anonymous, so it won’t be a boarding house. Make up an artist’s sketch of her face, see if it rings any bells.’

  Ellison was gazing at the floor, gnawing at the skin beside his thumbnail.

  ‘OK, that’s good,’ he said with approval. ‘And if she was meeting someone, you should be able to track him down.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean he’s our man.’

  ‘There’s a good chance of it. Even if he’s innocent, he still has a hell of a lot of questions to answer.’ He looked at his watch. ‘I need to go back to HQ, I’ve got an operation happening in an hour. Can you keep me informed? And I might have something for you tomorrow or the day after.’

  McMillan stubbed out his cigarette, adding to the tall pile in the ashtray. ‘That’s a good idea of yours.’

  ‘I could be completely wrong,’ Lottie said.

  ‘It sounds right. And we won’t know until we try.’

  She hesitated for a moment before speaking again.

  ‘Have you thought..?’

  ‘What?’ He looked at her with curiosity.

  She didn’t want to say it. But the words needed to come out, whether he liked them or not.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to call Scotland Yard in on this. They have all the resources, everyone will co-operate with them.’

  ‘And they don’t know Leeds from a hole in the ground.’ He pursed his lips together. ‘Believe me, I’ve thought about it every night when I’ve been trying to get to sleep. But these murders all happened here. They’re my responsibility.’

  ‘I had to say it.’

  ‘I know. But we’ll slog our way through. Let’s get people moving and see what they can shake up.’

  Through the day there was nothing. Just a sense of growing frustration. Uniforms were checking all the hotels. By evening they’d had no word and Lottie began to doubt her idea. There could be so many other reasons for the woman to be in Leeds.

  ‘We’ll see what the morning brings,’ McMillan told her as she finished her shift. ‘There’s nothing we can do.’

  That didn’t stop her worrying on the bus home, or as she made her tea. She kept all the leaflets from the Ministry of Food in the cupboard over the draining board. Something from Potato Pete tonight, perhaps; use up those spuds. But where did they come up with such stupid names?

  The radio was playing in the dining room. The American Forces’ Network, crackly as ever, but more lively than anything the BBC broadcast. There was energy in the swing music that the staid British dance bands could never capture. That American eagerness for life. A bit like Cliff Ellison.

  Stop it, she thought. He was a very pleasant man, but that was all. Soon enough it would be spring. Already the evenings were longer. This weekend she’d probably be able to start turning over the soil in the garden. Digging for victory.

  She and Geoff had always grown what they could, long before it became a necessity, setting aside an area for fruit and vegetables. The front might show a sharp, pristine face to the world, neatly mown green lawn and rose borders, but the back was more haphazard and utilitarian.

  Working in the garden was where she missed him most. They’d always done it together. Sunday mornings, rain or shine, only taking a break during the winter months. Geoff had taught her about plants, although God only knew where he’d learned.

  Now the whole street had muddy patches in their gardens for growing food. He’d have been pleased by that.

  ‘RIGHT,’ McMillan said into the phone. ‘We’ll be there in a few minutes.’

  He marched out of his office, pushing his arms into his overcoat.

  ‘We might have something,’ he said. ‘Get your skates on.’

  In the Humber she played with the choke until the engine was purring evenly, then set off through town. The Queens Hotel stood next to the railway station. It had a sleek, modern design, white stone that stood out against the dark Victorian fustiness of Leeds.

  She’d never been inside before; the closest she’d come was the little newsreel cinema down the street which showed the Pathé news. But the hotel’s style carried beyond the façade to the Art Deco desk. DC Smith stood by it, talking to a fat, sweating clerk.

  ‘Tell the Chief Superintendent what you told me,’ Smith prompted.

  The clerk cleared his throat. ‘Room 315 was supposed to leave yesterday.’ He glanced at the faces to make sure they all understood. ‘But we had no record of departure, so this morning I went up with my pass key. There was a Do Not Disturb notice on the handle; the chambermaid said it’s been in place since the guests arrived.’ He paused, expecting questions, but none came. ‘Inside there was a suitcase. The bed had been slept in. No sign of anyone there, though.’

  ‘Who took the room?’ McMillan asked. ‘When did they arrive? How did they pay?’

  ‘It’s right here.’ He pushed the hotel register across the counter and pointed with a stubby finger. ‘A week ago. Captain and Mrs Jackson. Our guests pay when they leave.’

  A home address in Birmingham. She jotted it in her notebook. It didn’t look as if Pamela Dixon had been going to her parents’ funeral after all.

  ‘Does anyone remember them, what they looked like?’

  ‘I was working then,’ the clerk said. ‘We get so many people coming through, especially these days. They were both in uniform, I remember that. But…’ he shrugged. ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘I need to take a look at the room. No one’s cleaned in there?’

  ‘No, but we have another booking—’

  ‘It’ll have to wait. Smith, I want the evidence people down here. Fingerprints.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘Let’s take a look, shall we?’

  The room was smaller than Lottie expected. It smelt empty, neglected. Stale tobacco in the air, a dozen cigarette ends in the ashtray. Only one had lipstick, she saw. A double bed, but the covers were only turned down on one side; a dent in the pillow. A door led through to the en-suite bathroom. Very posh, she thought. Make-up by the sink, a toothbrush on its own in the glass.

  A hairbrush sat on the dressing table, and next to it, on the floor, a small suitcase, the lid tossed back to show a woman’s underwear and a nightgown.

  ‘Like the Mary Celeste, isn’t it?’ she commented.

  ‘There’s definitely something wrong here,’ McMillan agreed.

  Lottie checked the wardrobe; nothing hanging inside. The windowsills were empty too.

  ‘She was here, wasn’t she?’

  He nodded. ‘What I’d like to know is who was with her and where the hell he is now.’

  Plenty of different fingerprints, but it only took a few minutes to find a match for Pamela Dixon. On the suitcase, the hairbrush, in the bathroom.

  ‘Take prints from all the people who work at the hotel,’ McMillan ordered. ‘Eliminate everyone you can. Send all the prints to Records, see if there are any matches.’

  ‘There’s one big question,’ Lottie said eventually. She’d been sitting quietly, sipping a cup of tea and thinking. ‘Miss Dixon obviously arrived with someone. But as far as I can see she never slept at the hotel and she ends up dead in a cold storage in Holbeck. Clothes in her suitcase, but she’s still in uniform.’ She looked at McMillan. ‘How?’

  ‘If I had the answer to that one, the killer would already be in custody.’

  ‘And the two other death
s?’

  He shook his head. ‘I don’t know. I just don’t know. Whoever she was with is the obvious suspect.’

  ‘But he’d need to know Leeds,’ Lottie pointed out, ‘and have a key to Cohen’s place.’

  The telephone rang and he picked it up. ‘Yes. That’s fine.’ He frowned. ‘Are you certain? Positive? OK, thank you.’ He put down the receiver slowly. ‘That was the pathologist,’ he said, lighting a cigarette. ‘The underwear we found at Shire Oak Road belonged to Pamela Dixon. He checked hairs under the microscope; they match.’

  ‘But that means he killed three girls in three nights.’

  ‘More than that, it means he has to be someone who’s local, who knows Shire Oak Road, Kirkstall Abbey, and Cohen’s cold storage.’ He counted out the points on his fingers. ‘And he has American friends.’

  ‘Doesn’t that narrow it down?’

  ‘Not enough. Not by a long shot.’ He let out a weary sigh. ‘We don’t have any names.’

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘Start trying to unpick this mess and see where it leads us. Let’s just hope Ellison can find something at his end.’

  ‘Maybe one of her friends in Portsmouth will know who she was meeting here.’

  ‘Maybe.’ He said it like a man without much hope in his soul.

  McMillan told her to give out the tasks, and she saw the disappointment on the faces of the men. More work, not less. Another job piled on the growing heap, each more urgent that the last. But there was no point in apologies. They meant little and they were soon forgotten. This was what they did.

  ‘I’d like to take a look at the luggage Dixon brought with her,’ Lottie said. ‘And what she had in her pockets, too.’

  ‘Go down to evidence,’ McMillan told her. ‘It’s all there. What are you thinking?’

  ‘Nothing.’ She shrugged. ‘Maybe it’ll give me an idea.’

  Down in the cellar, the evidence room had the kind of aching, permanent cold that penetrated to the bone. Her fingers felt frozen as she opened the catch on the suitcase and pushed back the lid, taking out each item and laying it on the bench. The underwear was nothing unusual. None of the banned lace or frills. Cotton, not silk; no one had been giving her extravagant gifts. Most of it had the St Michael tag from Marks & Spencer. A pair of darned stockings. A folded Utility dress with the CC41 label and another, cotton, older; she hadn’t even hung them up to take out the wrinkles.

  The cosmetics were ordinary enough. Probably black market, but there was nothing unusual in that. Lottie’s face powder was from under the counter and she didn’t like to think what might be in it.

  Old hairbrush, a lipstick that looked as if had been made by heating several old ones together. There was absolutely nothing unusual about Pamela Dixon at all. Nothing to give a hint of who she’d been, how she’d seen herself.

  She tipped out the contents of a paper bag pushed into the pocket in the lid of the case. National Identity Card in Dixon’s name. A travel warrant from Portsmouth to Birmingham and back. That was interesting: no mention of Leeds, but it fitted in with the funeral story. No letters, nothing that could incriminate anyone. Pamela Dixon was almost anonymous.

  ‘Anything from Birmingham yet?’ Lottie asked McMillan when she returned to the office, brushing dust and dirt off her uniform.

  ‘The police there are supposed to be checking.’ He sorted through the sheets of paper crowding his desk. ‘Haven’t heard back yet.’

  ‘Her warrant is Portsmouth to Birmingham and back, and she didn’t have a train ticket for Leeds.’

  ‘She could have hitchhiked,’ McMillan said.

  ‘Bit iffy if you have an assignation.’ She chewed her lip. ‘Why Leeds? It’s the other end of the country to where she’s stationed.’

  ‘It could be to make sure no one would recognise them.’

  Yet that didn’t feel quite right, Lottie thought.

  ‘Unless one of them is very well-known, they could have picked a hundred other places that were closer.’ She paused. ‘Maybe she came to him. It makes sense. If he’s the killer, he knows Leeds, after all.’

  McMillan was nodding. ‘It would fit.’ His face brightened a little. ‘It might even answer one or two questions.’

  ‘Not enough to give us anything solid, though.’

  ‘It’s a start,’ he assured her and tapped his fountain pen against the desk. ‘He signed himself as Captain Jackson.’

  ‘What about it?’ Lottie asked.

  ‘There are thousands of captains around. It’s not a rank that stands out. Just high enough to gain some respect, but not be noticed. And a young man can be a captain these days.’

  ‘So maybe he’s not in the service and got a uniform from somewhere?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ McMillan admitted. ‘I’m throwing ideas in the air. But if he wasn’t really in the army, I think Dixon would have worked that out quickly enough.’

  ‘Maybe she did,’ Lottie suggested. ‘Perhaps that’s why she’s dead.’

  ‘Possibly. But that doesn’t explain the rest.’ He tapped with the pen again. ‘They have a perfectly comfortable hotel room but they go out and find a cold, dirty house on Shire Oak Road. Why?’

  She couldn’t picture a reason.

  ‘Another thing,’ Lottie said, seeing the room in her mind. ‘They’re lovers, but the bed in the room has only been disturbed by one person sleeping there. Surely the first thing they’d do once they were alone…’

  ‘And she’d had sexual intercourse before she died.’ He stared at her. ‘What’s the line from that book? “Curiouser and curiouser”?’

  ‘Who’s questioning the staff at the Queens?’

  ‘A couple of Specials. It’s all we can spare.’

  ‘I could talk to the chambermaids,’ she offered.

  He weighed her words for a long time.

  ‘I can’t. I’m sorry, but not when there are other coppers around. It’s not allowed,’ he reminded her kindly. ‘You know that as well as I do. I know you’re good, but…’ He let the sentence trail away. And he was right. She was an auxiliary. Her duties were limited, and they didn’t include any real police work. When no one else was around it was a different matter. If others could see, they might complain.

  ‘I’ll go to the canteen and fetch us more tea, then.’ She tried to sound bright, but inside she felt disappointment. They had women police constables on the force, more than just the two that existed twenty years earlier, but they were stretched with work, too. Everyone was these days.

  It stung, but she should have known. McMillan would stretch the rules when he could, but even he daren’t break them completely. The same way he’d always been. She was the one who flouted orders.

  He was still staring into space when she returned carrying two cups. Lottie put his on the desk and left quietly.

  ‘Come on,’ McMillan said from the door of her office. ‘We’re going back to Holbeck.’

  ‘Something new?’ She put her cap on her head and slipped into her raincoat.

  ‘I want another gander at that cold storage. Too many people there before.’

  People were streaming out of the factories on their dinner breaks, standing on the steps, lighting cigarettes and drawing down the smoke. Women outnumbered men. Hundreds of them, hair tied up in turbans and scarves, many wearing boiler suits, trousers, or overalls. She parked as close as she could to Cohen’s building.

  ‘There wouldn’t be people around to see him shifting a body first thing in the morning, especially with the blackout,’ McMillan said as he gazed around. ‘Nowhere that overlooks this place, either.’

  He strode by the special constable guarding the building with a quick salute. Lottie gave the man a smile. On duty there hour after hour was a thankless task.

  The storage room had that animal smell of pelt. No matter how they treated the skins, that never seemed to fade. She had a cheap fur coat in the wardrobe at home with the exact same scent.

 
‘Why would people keep their coats in storage in the middle of winter?’ she wondered out loud. Sables, minks, others she couldn’t identify, but all expensive and soft to the touch.

  ‘Maybe the owners have gone away or died.’ He was crouching, looking at the rough chalk outline on the floor that showed where Pamela Dixon had been. ‘No attempt to hide her. No blood anywhere on the floor in here. Anyone walking in would have seen her right off. Unless…’ He paced around the small room. ‘You see those long coats in the corner?’

  About ten of them, all ankle length, almost touching the floor.

  ‘Yes,’ Lottie replied, not sure what he meant.

  ‘What if he’d hidden the body behind those and he was disturbed pulling it out?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ She wasn’t so certain. ‘Wilkins—’

  ‘What about him?’

  ‘He said he hadn’t seen a vehicle outside here.’

  He could have parked close by. Kept it away from the door to avoid suspicion.’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t know, it’s all guesswork. One thing’s certain, though; he was pretty sure he wouldn’t be disturbed. He knew the fur business.’

  ‘And Cohen’s business in particular.’

  ‘Yes.’

  McMillan stood in the doorway, surveying the scene, then turned and started down the corridor. More chalk marked where Wilkins had been, another cross showed where they’d found the cartridge.

  ‘He must have been around here when he shot Wilkins,’ he said. ‘Then he ran.’ Out in the light again, he began to walk around the block. ‘Three dead women, one wounded copper, and we still hardly know a damned thing more than when we began.’

  ‘Maybe some of the interviews will tell us more.’

  Someone had to remember something, Lottie thought. One little thing, just one, would seem like a leap forward.

  She could feel McMillan’s frustration; it came off him in waves. By the time they reached the Humber he was ominously silent. She’d seen this before. Better not to say a word until he was ready to speak. She turned the ignition, put the car in gear and began to drive back to Millgarth.