Fifth Column

by Mike Hollow

  He picked his way carefully through the clutch of exhausted-looking ARP workers and bombed-out residents who had gathered near the mobile canteen.

  “Ruddy air raids,” he said. Out of habit he moderated his language in the hearing of the public, although the dazed faces of those made newly homeless suggested they would neither notice nor care if he turned the air blue. He found Price and led him farther down the street, to a spot where they would not be overheard. “I reckon we’re off duty now, so we’re entitled to a bit of peace and quiet.”

  They perched side by side on a low brick wall, and Stannard passed a mug of tea and a bun to his colleague. Price took them, but his mind seemed elsewhere.

  “These air raids,” said Stannard. “I can’t be doing with them. Get on my wick, they do. And the perishing blackout. I nearly did myself a mischief last week. Did you hear about that butcher in Plaistow who had a light on in the flat over his shop in the middle of an air raid?”

  Price nodded slowly, as if making an effort to catch up with the conversation.

  “Like a lighthouse, it was,” Stannard continued. “And he’d gone out somewhere and locked it up after him. Nothing for it but to break in – nearly caught my wrist on the broken glass, I did. People like that should be made to do compulsory roof-spotting duties. See how they like it with incendiaries landing all round them. They might think twice then about lighting the street up and leading the bombers in.”

  He was surprised to hear a quiet laugh from Price. The tea must be doing him good, he thought.

  “Was he done for it?” said Price, sounding more himself now.

  “The butcher? Oh yes, fined thirty pounds at the magistrates’ court, he was. More than six weeks’ pay for a copper, but not for the likes of him, I should reckon. Probably making a bit on the side, putting a pound or two of best beef under the counter for his favourite customers – the ones who don’t mind slipping him a few bob extra to get a treat for supper. Sometimes I wonder why we bother.”

  “Hanging’s too good for them: that’s what I say,” said Price. Something about Stannard’s story seemed to have spiked his interest and brought his mind back from wherever it had been. “I mean, is that what we fought the war for?”

  “Exactly,” said Stannard. “Mind you, I was too young for the last one.” He did a quick mental calculation of how old Price had probably been during the Great War. “Were you in it, then?”

  “Yes, I was in the Army. Two and a half years I did – terrible times. Biggest mistake we ever made, that war.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Fighting Germany, that’s what. I mean, look at it: they’re like us, aren’t they? Hard-working, serious people, civilized. How did we end up on the same side as the French and the Russians? We should never have let ourselves be talked into getting involved in a European war in the first place, and certainly not a war against the Germans.”

  “Yes, that’s what my mum says. My dad was in the war too, but he was killed at Passchendaele. I don’t remember him at all – I was only two when he went off, and he never came back. Three hundred thousand casualties on our side in that battle, they reckon. My mum says it was all a stupid waste.”

  “It was. They said it was a war for civilization, but I think we’d all have been better off if there’d never been a war. And now look where it’s got us: sitting here in the gutter while everything people have worked for all their lives is burning around us.”

  “So do you reckon we’ve gone and made the same mistake again?”

  Price didn’t answer immediately. He sipped his tea, as if thinking about the question.

  “That’s not for me to say. I’m not saying that’s what I think, but I know there’s plenty who do.”

  “My mum says we’ve only got ourselves to blame after the way we treated them at Versailles. She says we tried to ruin them and now we’re suffering the consequences.”

  “Reaping the whirlwind, some might say.”

  “You can say that again. We’ve seen a bit of a whirlwind tonight, all right.”

  “Yes. Whatever people say about this war, I can’t help thinking it could all so easily have been very different.”

  “Certainly couldn’t have ended up much worse,” said Stannard. “I mean, they’ve beaten us in Norway, beaten us in France, and now it looks as though they’re doing their damnedest to beat us here too.”

  He downed the last mouthful of tea from his mug and brushed a few crumbs off his tunic in a futile gesture towards tidiness.

  “Still, won’t do to sit around here feeling sorry for ourselves, will it? Time for you to get home to your wife, and for me to try and bag a hot bath at the section house.”

  “I’ll take the mugs back to the Sally Army,” said Price, picking them up from the wall as he got to his feet.

  “Thanks,” said Stannard, peering up at him. “Feeling a bit better now, are you? You didn’t look at all well when we found that poor girl’s body.”

  “Yes, I’m all right, thanks. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Good. Glad to hear it. Got to keep your pecker up, haven’t you? Mind you, I’d have thought you were used to seeing dead bodies, what with being in the Army in the war and all. Wouldn’t have thought it would affect you like that.”

  “Yes, well never mind. I just felt a bit ill, that’s all. Is that all right?”

  “Of course,” said Stannard. “Just being curious. Sorry I asked.”

  CHAPTER 5

  Jago did not enjoy these times. The post-mortem room at Queen Mary’s Hospital always seemed to carry the chill of the grave. The stone floor and the white glazed tiles that lined its walls were cold and unwelcoming, and the stark electric light exposed its emptiness. There was no hope here: it was like walking into a tomb.

  He thought of the crypt at St John’s Church, where the dead, their spirits having flown who knew where, were abandoned to decay slowly into dust. This place had the same feel. The only difference was that here they were allowed neither burial nor decay until the due process of medicine and the law saw fit to release them.

  During his first spell at the front in France there’d been a Catholic in the platoon. A gentle and dutiful man, he used to talk about purgatory – sometimes he’d seemed more concerned about that than about dying. As Jago sat in the trench listening to him explaining the word, it had seemed like a kind of lostness, a hovering mid-way between life and death. Even then he didn’t like the idea, didn’t like things being unresolved – and it was the same now, he realized. He liked the case to be closed, the matter resolved one way or the other. No loose ends.

  This mortuary was supposed to be part of the process of settling the uncertain, but it seemed to him more than anything another place of lostness. The young woman whom he had not met until she was dead was lost to life, lost to her family, to her lover if she had one. Right now she didn’t even have a name. Whoever she was, all that remained of her was the mortal flesh she had once animated with tears, laughter, a smile, a sigh, now laid out in this municipal crypt, this repository of the dead that was as cold and lifeless as she was.

  He followed Dr Anderson into the room and his nose caught the familiar mingled odours of death and disinfectant. He stopped short. Facing him were two shelves loaded with ranks of naked bodies, each with a label tied to its big toe. Anderson turned and caught the surprise on his face.

  “First time you’ve been here since the air raids began, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Jago.

  “Things have got a bit busier, as you can see. Nearly all of these are casualties of the raids. We don’t even have enough shrouds to cover them. Just having to make do, like everyone else.”

  Jago composed himself and followed the doctor to the post-mortem table. His boss, Divisional Detective Inspector Eric Soper, was already there, standing silent and sober-faced, with Cradock looking uncomfortable alongside him. Probably worried the DDI might ask him a difficult question, Jago thought.

&n
bsp; With a brief nod to Cradock and a “Morning, sir” to Soper he took his place beside the table. One small mercy, he thought: at least the mortuary assistant had found a sheet to cover the corpse. By the time Jago was nineteen he’d seen enough mutilated bodies for a lifetime; twenty and more years on he had no desire to examine whatever injuries this poor woman had suffered in more detail than was necessary for his investigation.

  He hoped Anderson’s findings would be brief. To his relief, the doctor began his report.

  “Not a lot to say about this one, gentlemen,” he said. “As you know, the body was found on a site in Canning Town that had been bombed overnight –”

  “Yes, yes,” the DDI interrupted. “But is there any evidence of foul play?”

  “If you’ll bear with me, Mr Soper,” said Anderson with a smile that Jago thought was more generous than his chief deserved, “I’ll come to that in a moment.”

  “Get on with it, then,” said Soper. “Some of us have got a lot of work to do today.”

  “I imagine so,” said Anderson.

  Jago suppressed a smile. He was surprised that a doctor as young as Anderson, who looked not a day over thirty, should be so composed under fire from Soper. But perhaps there were Sopers in the medical world too, he surmised. The man had probably had his own tartars to contend with. Or maybe you became a bit philosophical about power and rank when you spent your days fishing around in dead bodies. He reined his thoughts in as Anderson resumed his report.

  “The first thing I would note,” said the pathologist, “is that there’s very little sign of injury on the body. The main wound is to the back of her head, and I found particles of brick and small splinters of wood in it. Given the fact that she was found on the ruins of a bombed house, much of which consisted of brick fragments and smashed timbers, this in itself is not conclusive. I understand the police surgeon who first attended the scene suggested her death could have been caused by a bomb blast, and this would indeed be possible. Since the air raids began we’ve seen a number of casualties found dead without a mark on their bodies – they’ve died because the blast has effectively suffocated them. Such a blast could have thrown her back onto the rubble, where she could have injured her head on landing.”

  “So are you saying it was a bomb that killed her, not murder?” said Soper.

  “No. I’m saying that would be a reasonable deduction, were it not for my next observation, which is a second wound to the left side of the head. This one has some splinters of wood but no brick, which is curious but not something from which one can draw any reliable conclusion.”

  “But if you can’t conclude anything from it, how can that mean it’s murder?”

  “I’m sorry. I should have said that my second observation is about other injuries, and that there are two parts to it.”

  “Good grief.”

  Jago was finding the scene unexpectedly entertaining, but thought it prudent to try to steer the conversation in a more fruitful direction, if only to save Dr Anderson from possible injury to his own person.

  “And would part two be the part that suggests the possibility of murder?” he asked.

  “That’s for you to decide, Inspector. The second part of my observation concerning other injuries is that I find on the body a particular pattern of bruising which I believe is not inconsistent with strangulation.”

  “Can you explain?”

  “There are fingertip bruises in the muscles on both sides of the voice box, and the upper horn of the hyoid bone is fractured.”

  Anderson reached a hand out towards the sheet.

  “Would you like –”

  “No,” said Jago quickly, “I don’t want to see, thank you very much. You don’t need to show me. I’ll take your professional word for it.”

  “This damage would be consistent with her having been strangled, and from the front rather than from behind. That in turn could indicate that the victim was lying on her back at the time, particularly since there is bruising on her upper body consistent with the application of pressure by a knee, together with more bruising on her back that I would expect to see if she’d been lying on a pile of loose bricks and other debris, as she was, when that pressure was applied.”

  “So the murderer knelt on her while she was lying on her back on the rubble, and strangled her?” said Jago.

  “So it would seem.”

  “And how does the wound to the back of the head tie in with that?”

  “The bleeding from the wound would indicate that she suffered that injury before death, so you might choose to infer that the assailant knocked her to the ground before attempting to strangle her, but I cannot be certain of that.”

  “And is that all?”

  “Just one other thing. There are more bruises on the left of her neck than on the right, which would suggest that whoever strangled her was right-handed.”

  “That narrows it down, then,” said Cradock under his breath.

  “What was that, Constable?” said Anderson.

  “Nothing, doctor. Just thinking out loud.”

  “Before we go,” said Jago, “was there any indication that she’d been interfered with?”

  “Interference of a sexual nature, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “I found no evidence of sexual violence, but there is evidence of sexual experience.”

  “Would that be recent activity?”

  “Not so recent as to have been part of the assault, but beyond that I can’t tell.”

  “And what’s your estimate of the time of death? At this stage that’s more important to me than knowing precisely how she died.”

  “Judging by her body temperature and the fact that she’d been lying outside on a September night for some time, I would estimate that death occurred at some point between nine o’clock and midnight last night.”

  “Thank you,” said Jago. “That’s very helpful. Isn’t that right, sir?” he added, turning to Soper.

  “Yes, very good, doctor, very good,” said Soper. “I think that concludes our business here. We’ll leave you to clear up while I have a word with the detective inspector. Come along, John, let’s get some fresh air.”

  Jago headed straight for the door and stepped outside, but found himself waiting for Soper, who he assumed was giving some parting advice to the pathologist. For once, he was pleased at the prospect of further conversation with the DDI, if only because it got him out of the mortuary. It was not a place he liked to be. It brought back memories – being taken at the age of fourteen to see a dead body for the first time when his father died. The shock of witnessing death where he had always known life had left a deep mark in him. He knew it was his dad, and yet it wasn’t – he was there and yet not there. Within another five years Jago had seen men ripped open and torn apart by bullet, shell, and shrapnel, and knew more than he’d ever wanted to know about the raw and bloody detail of human flesh. Ever since those days he’d had no difficulty picturing a heart that no longer beat, lungs that no longer breathed, a stomach that would never again be gripped by fear. But the departure of life from a body he could not understand.

  He had a vivid childhood memory of an aunt who’d shocked him by talking about the fires of hell as the destination of the dead. But the mortuary he’d just been standing in, he thought – that was where they really ended up, and nothing could be farther removed from the picture she’d painted. For him now, fire and brimstone meant the savage insanity of battle, that devil’s playground where the evil one man can do to another was loosed from all restraint. That was hell. He wondered whether the room he’d just left was a more accurate picture of the lostness of death – a cold and empty eternity of regret.

  The click of the mortuary door interrupted his train of thought, and the DDI appeared at his side.

  “So, John, you’ve no idea who this woman is?”

  Jago reeled his mind back to the case.

  “No, sir. No identity card on her, and nothing else to identify her. If
she had a handbag, that’s gone missing too.”

  “Could it be a robbery, then? A robbery that went wrong?”

  “I really couldn’t say. We’ve got nothing to go on yet.”

  “And strangled, that doctor says. That sounds a bit more deliberate.”

  “Quite possibly, sir, yes.”

  Soper appeared to ponder Jago’s words for a short while, then continued.

  “I’ve been meaning to ask you about this Dr Anderson. A bright chap, judging by what some people say. Is that right?”

  “Yes, sir – a rising star, by all accounts.”

  “Hasn’t made a proper name for himself yet, though, has he?”

  “Only a matter of time, sir, I should think.”

  “Hmm, I’m still not sure about him. He looks too young. Are you sure he knows his stuff? You know what it’ll be like if this gets to court and it turns out he doesn’t – counsel for the defence will tear him apart.”

  “I could imagine him giving them a run for their money.”

  “That’s as may be. But when it comes to pathologists giving evidence in a murder case, juries like to see a big name from one of the London hospitals blinding them with science.”

  “Judges too, I believe,” said Jago. “Put an eminent pathologist in the witness box and some of them treat him like Moses down from the mountain, that’s my impression. Pity the poor defendant if a professor’s decided he’s guilty.”

  “At least we get a conviction. With this young Anderson we can’t be sure. He just doesn’t look the part.”

  “Perhaps justice would be better served if we told him to wear a top hat and spats in court.”

  Soper looked askance at Jago.

  “What? Of course not. That’s not what I mean, and you know it. All I’m saying is we need a pathologist who can put together a cast-iron case, or we’ll be laughed out of court.”

  “And a true case, sir. If you want my opinion, I’d rather put Dr Anderson up for the prosecution than some of those big names you were referring to. I’ve heard he’s very highly regarded by his peers, and from the little I’ve seen of his work I’d be happy to stake my reputation on his evidence. He may be only at Queen Mary’s Hospital now, but I think he could run rings round some of those old buffers. Besides, there’s a war on, and we should be thankful we’ve got him just up the road.”