The Trebelzue Gate

by Anna Fitzwilliam

  ‘And what did he say?’

  ‘He said it was better than doing nothing.’

  When they arrived at the police station the desk sergeant regarded them unsmilingly.

  ‘Chief Constable’s office has been on. Twice.’

  Monica was looking in her bag for a notepad.

  ‘They want you to phone back, pronto.’

  ‘And as soon as I am in my office I will be able to phone back.’

  She spoke with a controlled, clipped politeness. The constantly resentful attitude among the staff was wearying, it had begun to try her patience.

  She took out the notepad. Because she was attempting to decipher her notes without her glasses, she had to announce the points in a brief précis. The desk sergeant thought that she was being deliberately curt; he took silent umbrage, poising his ballpoint pen above the daybook in a study of patience tried by unreasonable demands.

  ‘Dougal Michie … that’s C-H-I-E, no T… was at RAF St Mawgan … where is he stationed now? Engineer…. Anything and everything on the WAAF case … won’t be much … there’s a related D notice …’

  ‘WAAF case M’am?’

  ‘Yes, you know the one, there can’t be that many, surely?’

  ‘There was a WAAF had her purse pinched in Dorothy Perkins on Saturday afternoon M’am,’

  ‘Really, sergeant? Well that just goes to show, doesn’t it? What I would like you to find for me is everything pertaining to an assault on a WAAF some …’ she turned to Sergeant Bee who was waiting impassively behind her ‘… eighteen months ago?’

  ‘Just about that, yes,’ he replied.

  She waited while the desk sergeant wrote laboriously.

  ‘Then,’ she paused again, ‘known sex offenders in the area and any reports of attacks on women in last five years…’

  ‘Five years,’ he repeated and circled the figure.

  ‘Five years. Also, could you contact this man…’ she passed Peter Goodchild’s memo page over the counter, ‘Lieutenant McLean, he’s the USNAWF commander’s PA, tell him I need an appointment with the commanding officer, as soon as possible – stress that it’s urgent, can you. Right, now, we need to organise personnel for the incident room, Sergeant Bee has made a list…’

  The desk sergeant read over the names ‘That’ll mean double shifts for Toy and Ellery if you take them,’

  ‘They won’t complain about that, will they?’ said Martin Bee.

  ‘You might like to ask them, first though.’

  ‘Fair enough.’

  ‘Can you add the new WPC to the list?’ Monica asked.

  ‘What, Maureen Jones?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘She’s only been here five minutes,’ said the desk sergeant.

  ‘Then it will be valuable experience for her, won’t it? Sergeant Bee, I’d like you to make a start with the names on the list of our victim’s boyfriends. I will go and speak to the chief constable’s office.’

  She sat down at her desk, undid the cellophane on the packet and lit one of the Benson and Hedges. Inhaling, she was disappointed that she did not experience the rush and the heady, woody taste of a first cigarette. She supposed she had not stopped for long enough. She asked the switchboard to connect her to the chief constable. She had not seen Commander Scott since her interview panel.

  ‘He has been expecting your call,’ said his secretary, pointedly.

  ‘Monica, better late than never,’ broke in the commander.

  ‘I’ve been with the victim’s family,’ she said.

  ‘And up at the RAF base’s headquarters too, so I understand, there’s been a bit of back and forth with the MoD. Everything going well is it?’

  ‘As far as I can tell, yes,’

  ‘Good. Now, press statement,’

  ‘I’m …’ she began but he talked across her

  ‘Important to get it done, Monica. We’ve already had to field a lot of interest here. Get it right and get it out. It will have to come to me first of course. See to it asap, would you m’dear.’

  He rang off before she could respond.

  In the main CID office the chosen staff were packing boxes of stationery and equipment with cheerful purpose. Ellery placed a cushion on top of his box. The cushion had a floral cover and was much flattened by use. His colleague Alan Toy asked if the piles were playing up again. Ellery told him to bugger off. On their way down to the car park, one of the men called back to WPC Jones to make sure she had brought the kettle and the teabags.

  In loose convoy they drove up to RAF St Mawgan. At the guardroom the policemen were issued with passes. They looked critically at the small oblongs of mustard yellow card.

  ‘Not exactly high security is it,’ said one, ‘My boy could make better than this, and he’s seven.’

  When they arrived at their SECO hut Monica stood in the corridor half listening as the others unpacked and argued over desks. The building reminded her of the site where she had first met Garth, in the closing months of the war. It had been a secret establishment, hurriedly installed in the grounds of a country house. She and three other clerks from the Admiralty had been sent down to organise a filing system for the chaotic mass of paperwork generated by its workings. On Friday evenings the establishment, known as NEDDIE, organised a dance and social event. Members of staff who appeared exhausted, and in some cases quite ill, shuffled each other around the canteen floor to music from a gramophone or a trio of amateur woodwind players. There was beer in washstand jugs. Lacking a partner, Monica wandered out into the warm twilight to stroll among the huts. During the war, thousands of SECO huts appeared like mushrooms in rural valleys and manor parks, colonising acres which had been the preserve of shy deer and birds and insect life. The flora and the quiet fauna of dun covered naturalists’ notebooks were abruptly displaced, frightened away by the whirring of machinery and the popular tunes whistled in the dark and the electric lights which burned all night. She remembered that the SECO huts always smelled of sawn wood and stewed tea and cigarette smoke and the strong gum on Manila envelopes. The grass rides between the huts were trodden bare by a constant traffic of people and machinery and postal communications. Messengers, elderly men or chipper young girls with canvas satchels, tracked endlessly back and forth. Sometimes they brought fibreboard cartons like laundry boxes branded with a TOP SECRET stamp; once a consignment of tin hats, like a totem of tortoises, which had defied its brown paper wrapping. Following the pathway worn between the huts, Monica reached the big house. At the terrace French doors stood open onto the library. The original books had been removed from the shelves, packed away for the duration. In their place were paper cover editions supplied by the Canadian Red Cross – she found Nicholas Nickleby, and Leaves of Grass, Alice Duerr Miller’s The White Cliffs of Dover. At the sound of footsteps she turned to see a man standing in the doorway. He was very drunk. His shirt collar was open, an old school tie was serving as a belt to hold up his trousers. Tufts of his iron coloured hair stuck out at angles from his head. In one hand he held a quart bottle of Watney’s Pale Ale.

  ‘Duchess!’ said Garth and he made her a theatrical bow.

  ‘Message from the Doc’ said Sergeant Bee, appearing in the corridor beside her.

  ‘I’m sorry, what was that Sergeant?’

  ‘Message from Dr Skerrett, he’s got the preliminary PM results ready for you,’

  ‘I’d better get to the hospital then,’

  ‘Shall I come with you?’

  ‘No, you stay here and make sure everything’s running properly. And have someone go out and get me a couple of rolls of lining paper, would you – you know, the sort that you find in an ironmonger’s or a painter and decorators’ shop.’

  David Skerrett was waiting in the basement corridor of the hospital. He held out his hand,

  ‘I don’t think we’ve ever been properly introduced, have we? Come into the crypt, I’ve got the initial report ready for you. Do you mind if I call you Monica, by the way?’

/>   ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Sure? Very well, Monica,’ he held open the swing door into the pathology room.

  ‘I expect that I have a reputation for being a bit stand-offish,’ she said.

  ‘Have you? Canteen gossip doesn’t reach me. But you know what they’re like, the Cornish, they won’t give you the time of day until you’ve been here for twenty years and or have at least three cousins buried in the churchyard. If it hadn’t been for my boat I’d never have come. What brought you down here?’

  ‘Oh, various things, you know, time for a change and so on. And it meant promotion.’

  ‘And how are you finding it?’

  ‘Difficult, to be honest.’ She was unexpectedly affected by his sympathetic interest. She stopped herself saying anything more and looked around the room to avoid his gaze.

  ‘Well, I’m sorry to hear that, but let’s be honest, the police force as a whole is not the most enlightened of institutions. It’s pretty hidebound about a woman being in a senior position and when it’s the police force in Cornwall ... Anyway, Monica, would you really want to be one of the boys?’

  ‘Not really, no.’

  ‘Well then, there we are. Now, to our poor child on the slab.’

  ‘She isn’t much more than a child, is she?’

  ‘No, she’s not. Do you have children yourself?’

  ‘Just a stepdaughter, round about her age, I suppose,’

  ‘I’ve got four, God help me, it took us a while to work out what was causing it,’ he picked up a clipboard. He had completed the report in narrow lettering of black, forward sloping handwriting.

  ‘Right, initial findings show a healthy, well-nourished female between 18 and 25 years of age. Time of death four to six hours before she was found, that makes it around midnight on the 23rd June. The cause of death was strangulation by ligature. Someone came at her from behind, using a strong narrow band of semi-rigid material – leather, plastic - a belt maybe. She was dragged for some way, I would guess immediately post-mortem – there’s some abrading to the heels and lower legs, whoever did it was holding her under the arms to move her. There’s some residue and staining around the heels, where she was dragged, I’ve sent a scraping to the lab in Exeter to see if it can tell us anything. Provisionally, my theory would be that she was killed somewhere else, dragged to a vehicle possibly and then dumped in the gateway. But by my reckoning the murder site can’t have been very far away,’

  ‘How can you be sure?’

  ‘Ah ha, I knew you were going to ask me that. Livor mortis suggests that she was lying in the same position as she was found very soon after death.’

  ‘Are there any signs of sexual assault?’

  ‘No, she was definitely sexually active but no indication of assault.’

  ‘That’s something, I suppose.’

  He set down the clipboard with care, ‘One rather major consideration though,’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘She was pregnant. About sixteen weeks.’

  ‘Oh dear oh dear,’ said Monica.

  ‘I know. It makes a bloody awful situation worse, doesn’t it?’

  He crossed to the wash basin. Monica stood watching the swirling patterns made by the white lather as he soaped his arms to the elbows.

  ‘I don’t know,’ the doctor was saying, speaking over his shoulder, ‘What a world. Anyway, you must come over to Polruan one night and meet Mary, have supper with us, I’ll get her to fix it up. And I’ll let you know as soon as I have the results back from Exeter – but don’t hold your breath on that.’

  When she returned to the hut they looked at her expectantly.

  ‘Any further developments, M’am?’ asked Ellery.

  ‘Some,’

  ‘Right, only the Chief Constable’s secretary and the press office have been on, several times, about the press statement. Apparently, the military connection is getting the journalists all excited.’

  ‘Then they’ll just have to contain themselves. We don’t even know if there was a military connection,’ she said.

  ‘Very good, M’am,’ he turned away to Detective Constable Toy. Monica saw the muscles of his neck move and knew that he was pulling a face.

  She went to her own office and read the memos that Sergeant Bee had ranged neatly along the blotter. After that she began to draft the press statement. She lit a cigarette and then realised that there was no ashtray or bin. Reluctant to ask, she went to the little cleaner’s room at the end of the corridor and found a saucer. She was aware of them looking up at her as she passed the duty room doorway. The preparation of press statements always caused her anxiety. She knew that this anxiety was unfounded: her command of language was strong, her composition proficient and she made frequent reference to the dark blue pocket Oxford Dictionary which was always kept in the righthand drawer of any desk she was assigned. Nevertheless, she worried, writing and paring back and rewriting. It was the release of the words to the public domain, letting them out from those strongholds of an investigation – the pocket notebook fastened by the band of elastic, the statement held by metal bulldog teeth to the clipboard. Once released, the words could not be amended or retracted. Her thoughts and guesses, her intuition and speculations, the goods and chattels of a victim’s life or a perpetrator’s intent, passion and hatred, love and ennui and irrational jealousy, random chance and overdue accounts and the weather in the streets, all must be reduced to a brief, incontrovertible statement. Two or three hundred letters struck out crisp and black by the metal typebar.

  She began and filled three quarters of the foolscap page. She lit another cigarette and, with what she called her censor’s blue pencil, revised the text and underlined the salient words.

  Half an hour later, there were four neat sentences. She had never yet failed to produce a perfect statement; her work had been borrowed for examples in training manuals. Still she worried. Garth had once said that it was not possible to succeed at anything for ever because eventually fortune always insists upon an obverse. She lit another cigarette.

  Sergeant Bee looked in, she handed him the statement and he read

  ‘Devon and Cornwall Police have launched a murder enquiry after the body of a young woman was found in North Cornwall. The body was discovered beside the B3276 road, close to RAF St Mawgan. The young woman has not been named but it is understood that she lived and worked locally. The next of kin have been informed.’

  He nodded and passed back the sheet of paper. ‘We’ve got everything we need up here, M’am, they’ve been very good, the RAF, linking us up with the station and all. There’ll be cover all night on the phones, the first four bods will be coming on shift from 8 tomorrow and PC Sweet is taking the night shift in the patrol car, at the crime scene,’

  ‘That all sounds very good Sergeant, thank you.’ She felt hollow with hunger and tired and uncertain of herself. She wondered whether she could invite the sergeant for a drink.

  ‘Let go,’ Garth used to say when she was anxious and preoccupied about her work, ‘Just let it go for an hour. Sit yourself down, have a drink and relax for goodness’ sake. It will all still be there in the morning, large as life and twice as ugly, but at least you will have had some respite and you’ll be able to see things more clearly.’ And at first she would resist his persuasions but eventually she would give in and he would pour them both a drink. She calculated that if Martin Bee refused her invitation and was embarrassed it would be awkward, but if he agreed he might only be doing so under sufferance and that would be worse.

  ‘Did the doc have much for us?’ the sergeant asked.

  ‘He did. Strangled from behind using something like a strap or a belt, then dragged along after she was killed. He thinks she was moved after death, but only a short distance. He’s sending off samples from some grazing to her feet. And, you might say we’re investigating two murders now – she was pregnant, about four months.’

  ‘Damn,’ said the sergeant and slowly shook his head.

&nbs
p; ‘Yes. David Skerrett also said there was no sign of sexual assault which I suppose is a mercy … even so, we can’t rule out a sexually motivated crime – we need that list of known sex offenders - suspected as well as convicted. Now, let’s call it a day here, I’m going to take some files home with me and we’ll make an early start tomorrow.’

  Approaching home, Monica slowed the car. The single ribbon of road through the village was quiet. A man in rolled shirtsleeves stood idle on the threshold of his cottage, he tipped out the dregs of tea from a mug and then held it hooked on the fingers of one hand, gazing reflectively at the roadway. He nodded as she passed. In the window of the pub a small poster advertised a euchre tournament. Closing the front door, Monica kicked off her shoes, put the pile of files on a chair and went to look, without expectation, into the fridge. It was empty except for some butter. She took a can of soup from the damp cupboard. Garth, in his good times, had been the one to cook for them both.

  Omelettes were his speciality, and mixed grills. ‘Baveuse’ he would say, flipping over the burnished flap of yellow egg into a semi-circle. ‘Bav-euse’, he would repeat the word with the intonation of a radio comedian’s double entendre. Recollecting, she smiled for a moment. When someone dies, she thought, or at least when they no longer inhabit themselves, their catchphrases and mannerisms go with them and are lost. The people left behind may remember now and then, but once they too are gone nothing remains of those habits and traits which made up a life and passed a lifetime. At any one moment in time the globe swarms like a hive; its vastness, its civilisations and huge histories underpinned by million multiples of the small things of ordinary lives - the tune hummed, the hat flicked onto the coat peg, the last mile home is the longest remark at the end of a road. Monica wondered what the beautiful young woman would leave to the recall of those who had known her. Some trick with her hair perhaps, flicking her head to make movement in its ends, or twisting a strand around her finger into a temporary ringlet.