A Commonplace Killing (18 page)

D
ouglas was a good boy. It was a blessed relief to her that he had turned out so well, since, gracious, it had not been easy raising a child single-handed, with a husband in the army, and all through a war as well, with all the worry that ensues. He had dried the dishes for her, before going out for the evening. He was the only one who thought of her. Evelyn had gone up to her room to listen to dance music on her wireless as soon as she’d finished her tea; and Walter had gone and sat in his armchair with a pipe without saying a word. Only Douglas had commented on the food that had taken her all morning to gather; and it would never have occurred to either of them that she might want a little help after having been on her feet all day. Douglas, however, didn’t have to be asked. He was a good son to her. She had no doubt but that he would make something of himself: certainly, he would not be a failure like his father.

He was putting on his bicycle clips.

“I’m off now, Mum,” he said. He smiled at her. They weren’t one of those families that hugged, or in other ways made a
spectacle
of themselves. “Have a good time at the flicks.”

“I still haven’t decided,” she said. She put a hand to her brow as if she had one of her headaches coming on, but in truth she was feeling a twinge of guilt thinking about her motive for going to the pictures, even though there was only an outside chance that the spiv would be there. He probably hadn’t even heard her say about the Odeon; besides, he probably had scores of young girls hanging about him. It was more likely he was going drinking with that awful woman. The Feathers. She knew where that was, but she could never have gone into a public house by herself, and there was no way that she was going to give Evelyn the satisfaction of witnessing her disappointment; for she was certain that she was destined to be disappointed.

With Douglas gone, she was alone in the kitchen with Walter. She hated finding herself alone with Walter. It agitated her. He was smoking a pipe and arguing with the wireless about the youth of today. The wireless was saying that the youth of today were essentially decent and hard-working and would help to build a better Britain; what was more they had grown up in the egalitarian atmosphere of the war, where everyone, regardless of their family connections, had pulled together, side by side. Walter had never heard such absolute tosh in all his born days, and although she would have died sooner than admit it, she agreed with him. Not because there was going to be a
communist
revolution, as Walter was declaring, but because there had never been and never would be a time when everyone pulled together. There were lucky people and there were unlucky people and that was all there was to it.

“Oh do shut up, Walter.”

It did not make her feel any better when he did just that, but then she hadn’t expected it to.

He took his pipe out of his mouth and turned to look at her.

“When are you off out, old girl?” he asked.

“I haven’t decided whether I’m going or not.”

“Not like you to stay in on a Saturday night.”

It got on her nerves the way he claimed parts of her, owning the right to tell her what she did and what she didn’t do; his entitlement to comment on her every move, as if he knew her.

“I don’t have to go out,” she said. “There’s no law says I have to.”

“No, no,” he murmured, drawing back into himself, “of course not…”

He puffed away on his pipe with an irritating modicum of contentment and that sad stupid grin on his face, and she toyed with staying in just to spite him, to show him that she could do whatever she liked and he did not know her or own her or control her; but the only thing she had to look forward to was Saturday night and the pictures. It would have been like cutting off her nose to spite her face.

“I’m going to look in on Mother before I go out,” she said.

“You do that, wifey. You do that.”

Mother was sleeping. Evelyn had emptied the commode, and put the towel and the nightdress from the morning into a bucket of disinfectant to soak; the saucer of milk and digestive biscuit had been cleared away. That was two bob well spent, she supposed, although why Evelyn couldn’t just do these things was beyond her. As long as things got done and she didn’t have to do them, what did it matter? But it rankled, that she had to think like this, make excuses.

She went into her bedroom to get ready. She sat on the edge of the bed and changed her stockings, an action she performed with enormous care. She had only these two pairs left. She’d had them off a spiv who was selling them from a suitcase outside the North London Stores on Holloway Road. She would rather die than go out in bare legs. She fixed the back of the left stocking to her girdle gingerly because the suspender was hanging on by a thread, and she had sewn it back on so many times that there was now little of the fabric left. The whole girdle was on its last legs, but there was as much chance of replacing it as there was of being taken out to dinner by Franchot Tone. She was wondering whether she ought to put on a different costume, but after she had looked at her reflection in the mirror she decided just to change her blouse, which was not looking at all fresh.

She crossed to the tallboy and poured a bit of water into the washing bowl, washed her face and applied a damp flannel to her underarms and between her legs. This simple action made her feel much better. Then she rinsed the stockings she had taken off and draped them over the dressing-table mirror to dry. She could feel herself beginning to wake from apathy, from hopelessness. Thank goodness for the pictures, she thought; whatever would I do without my Saturday nights? She did not allow herself to think about the spiv; instead she lit her Saturday evening cigarette and inspected her face in the mirror through the softening smoke. A little bit of powder; mascara; rouge: a slick of Damson Delight to match her nails. All that was required was for Evelyn to see to the back of her hair and she would do. She stubbed out the cigarette and went out on to the landing.

“Evelyn,” she called out, “Evelyn, will you see to the back of my hair?”

Evelyn had a very small room in the attic. It contained little more than a small bed, washing stand and chest of drawers, on top of which sat Evelyn’s wireless. She could hear the wireless as she climbed the stairs. Dance music. Benny Goodman. And as she reached the door, she could hear something else too: a sigh emanating, slight and brief, but enough to prompt an
inexplicable
pang of jealousy, so suffused was it with satisfaction; deep relief. She could not remember the last time she had been capable of emitting such a sigh, but it awakened all kinds of sensations, too powerful to bear.

“Evelyn,” she repeated, “can you fix the back of my hair for me?” She tapped lightly on the door before opening it and entering the room.

At first she wasn’t sure what she was looking at, but gradually the spectacle of Walter, perched on the edge of the bed with his trousers around his ankles, stroking Evelyn’s head, which was nestling in his lap, swum into focus. Walter was blinking at her, as if dazed; after a few moments Evelyn lifted her head with immense languor, and leaned back on her heels.

Her first impulse was to laugh. Walter looked so ridiculous, and the whole situation seemed so ludicrous, so comical. Then she began to feel an implacable fury. She unleashed a torrent of abuse, forged in every slight, every abuse of her good nature, every frustration she had ever experienced. It was all directed at Walter, who sat there on the edge of the bed, blinking at her but not saying a word. The humiliation of the situation reeled around in her head, blinding her, deafening her to her own voice, to any objections that either of them might raise, to Benny Goodman, to life itself. When she had exhausted her stock of vile names and terrible threats, she pulled off her wedding ring and flung it at him in a triumphant gesture. It struck the bed-rail, rolled across the floor, and Walter raised that awful, sad smile.

“I’m so sorry, Lillian,” he said mildly. “Please say you forgive me.”

For some reason his cringing, pathetic manner made her even angrier.

“What do you mean by that?” she demanded. “Do you
seriously
expect me to forgive you after what you’ve done? What sort of fool do you take me for?”

Evelyn had been standing next to the bed all the while, her stupid mouth hanging open.

“It just happened, Lil,” the kid said, shrugging.

“And if you call me Lil one more time,” she said, “you’re going to wish you had never been born!”

Walter buried his face in his hands and rocked himself
backwards
and forwards on the edge of the bed, in his braces and shirt sleeves with his trousers around his ankles, weeping. For one brief moment she felt a softening towards him, but then the sense of her own humiliation, her endless frustration, was intensified by the pitiful spectacle before her, rallying her once more.

“You can both go to hell!” she cried. “I’m done with this rotten life! I’m going and I hope to God I never have to see either of you again!” She turned on her heels and stalked out of the room, slamming the door behind her. Outside on the landing she took a deep breath or two. Her heart was pounding, but she felt alive for the first time in an age. She could hear Walter sobbing, and the dance music, which made it all seem as if it had happened in a film; she could hear Evelyn complaining, her indignant tone, though she could not hear what the kid was saying. She gathered her breathing: she had relished the drama of the
situation
, but it was more than that. Walter had betrayed her with a common little slut and in doing so he had provided her with the perfect justification for whatever it was she intended to do next.

She went into the bedroom and grabbed her handbag, running down the stairs to the front door. I really am out of control now, she thought; and the thought at once appalled and thrilled her. And as she stepped on to the broken street she knew that there was to be no going back: whatever had gone before, it was done with, over.

T
he morning that war broke out he had been sitting at his table eating a plate of bacon and fried bread. This, of course, was back in the days when he had Sunday mornings to himself, to be spent at leisure, with the prospect of a pleasant day before him – smoking his pipe while taking a stroll in the park, perhaps; listening to his gramophone records. If he could ever have been said to have experienced contentment that was certainly the last time he had known it. As Chamberlain’s weary intonation gave way to the siren yearn, he had put down his knife and fork and crossed to the window. The street below looked just the same as it had done an hour before, but everything had changed irrevocably. You blasted fools, he thought; meaning himself as much as anyone. You blasted, blasted fools. A few people had come out of their homes, and were peering up and down the road, then up at the sky, evidently murmuring to one another, unsure what to do next, what to expect; and seeing them he had felt a mild rage like a distant rumble of thunder. How could this be happening again? Lessons unlearned, his own culpability in permitting peace to come to an end for the second occasion in his lifetime: all those times he had looked at the newspapers with dismay before turning the page. When the telephone rang he had known it would be something bad. Marjorie’s voice on the other end of the line was agitated, distraught.

“I’m so sorry, my darling,” she was saying. “I’m so sorry. Please, please don’t hate me.” He had stopped listening after a moment or two; the terrible words “it’s over, it’s over” resounding in his head, breaking his heart. “Please try to
understand
. I can’t leave Bill. Not now. And I can’t go on as we have been. He might not be coming back. You must see that. I’m so sorry, my darling. So very, very sorry.”

It was over. Over. Her wretched voice; the terrible lies she was uttering offering no consolation whatever.

“You know, I will always love you, Jim. Always. Always…”

It was just something people said at such times: it meant nothing; but of course he understood; of course he forgave her. He forgave her everything. How could he not? She had made his life so wonderful; he had not known that it was possible to be so happy. He took to heart all the usual sentimental rubbish you say at such moments; and might even mean, too, at the time. And meanwhile, outside, the world spun crazily towards
destruction
. What did it matter whether he was happy or unhappy? Whether he lived or died? He had let her go, resolving never to try and look for her; never to see or speak to her again. It was over. Everything was over; and the world was at war for the second time in his life.

It would have been unsurprising if Marjorie had contrived to keep their affair going: a lot of perfectly decent people went haywire in the war, after all. Plenty of married women got a taste for adultery, and what red-blooded man can look at a woman whose husband is away without thinking he could give it a go. It was just his luck, he supposed, to fall in love with the exception to the rule. The idea of sacrifice, of duty, made her even more wonderful in his eyes; made him love her even more deeply.

Which was not to say that he had a low opinion of the Lillian Frobishers of the world: he was suspicious of moral judgment, and besides, what did it matter what she had done when she had harmed nobody? Others would say that she was not a victim but an active participant in her own demise: an amateur prostitute, as the vulgar, DI Lucas, the pathologist, the yellow press, would have it. Well, he saw a more profound force at work. He had no interest in why one might be provoked to crime, but he had a compassion for the victims of crime; and that included those who left their doors or windows open, who went into low pubs or on to racetracks, who walked the dark streets late at night. There had been a slow, groggy return to normality once the war had ended, like waking from a hangover; and the return to normal life, or to what had passed for it before September 1939, had not been a simple matter for more people than cared to admit it. Lillian Frobisher was evidently among them. A highly sexed woman deprived of sexual satisfaction is quickly brought to the verge of nymphomania. It is not admirable; but nor is it entirely blameworthy. A woman can be as tormented by her desires as any man: perhaps more so; for her emotional life is an all or nothing business. No, he could not condemn Lillian Frobisher any more than he could condemn Marjorie. He had no idea whether the victim had suffered the pangs of remorse as his lover had done, and perhaps it didn’t matter: she had risked everything for love, for sex, and she had paid the ultimate price.

He was no less determined to find her killer. And now that he had expunged every last vestige of suspicion in regard to Walter Frobisher, he found himself drawn towards the vortex of grief established by the wretch who had strangled a woman, after first making love to her, and then run off with her handbag. He thought not so much of Lillian Frobisher, of her terror, her surrender – though he did think of that at various points in the day – but of the boy Douglas, striving so manfully to deal with loss, and, yes, of Frobisher too: his pale, red-rimmed eyes and sad, cringing smile. In his desire to avenge the needless death of a woman who, if not blameless, was certainly undeserving, in his eyes at least, he had seen to it that the word had gone out among north London’s criminal underworld. It was a village in which everyone knew everyone else, yet nobody knew of a
good-looking
young spiv named Dennis. Of course, it was entirely possible that Dennis might be the bastard’s alias, but the artist’s impressions supplied by Evelyn Wilkes had been met with blank expressions from all the usual suspects. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the testimony of the waitress, Cooper might have supposed that Dennis was nothing more than a phantom conjured up for the convenience of Evelyn Wilkes; but unless there was some conspiracy between the pair of them, the reason for which had thus far eluded him, that seemed unlikely. Somebody had
strangled
Lillian Frobisher, and as things stood at the moment, the mysterious Dennis was the chief suspect. In short, he knew who had dunnit, and now all he had to do was find him and make it stick. It was a waiting game: it was nearly always a waiting game. Wait until the fellow walked into the café or the Feathers; wait until he came to the remembrance of some nark or other; wait until he made a mistake.

He had gone home after working late at divisional HQ and was trying to sleep when the case began to break, though the beginning of the end did not come in the way he had expected. He had woken twice in the couple of hours since nodding off, after finding himself up to the waist in the quagmire with the whizz bangs flying overhead, a thick blanket of mist enveloping him. When will it end? he asked himself on the second
occasion
, a question he rarely asked any more, having decided long ago that it never would. He tried to switch his dreary thoughts to more pleasing ones of Policewoman Tring, arriving at a momentous decision: he would let her know, by dint of some romantic gesture, what he thought of her. A romantic gesture being entirely at odds with his character, he had no idea what form it would take, eventually, in the course of a two-hour fractious meditation, working it down from something vague involving roses to an invitation to share a sandwich and a coffee somewhere away from the station canteen. And having set upon this as a suitable course of action, he was trying to sleep once more, on the grounds that no good ever came from lying in bed thinking about a woman, when the telephone rang.

It was one of those telephone calls that begin with “Mr Cooper, I have something for you…” or words to that effect; the sort of call that he had taken countless times, as has every
detective
in the world. This particular one led him, a mere forty-five minutes later, to a bombed-out building behind a packaging factory in Tottenham Hale: paneless windows, their
relinquished
glass crunching underfoot; stairs gone for a Burton; floors suspended flying-buttress-like from debilitated walls. Against one such, rolls and rolls of fabric and boxes and boxes of nylons and silk undies, worth thousands, were stacked ten feet high, twenty feet wide.

He had just had the measure of the haul in the wavering beam of his torch before three villains rushed at him and the uniform who had accompanied him. He managed to land a punch in the face of one of them, a satisfying, pulpy crack greeting his fist; he could hear the panting and scuffling of the struggle between the flatfoot and one of the other villains, who was knocked backwards, colliding with him. He punched him hard on the side of his head, this time hearing the sickening crack of his own knuckles, and the fellow fell to his knees. In the meanwhile he had dropped his torch, which rolled across the floor, illuminating, in intermittent swathes of light, the third crook in the act of attempting to escape. The uniform lunged at him, grabbing him in a rugby tackle and pulling him to the ground. Cooper seized him by the lapels and secured him in this manner while he was cuffed. The first crook was groaning on the floor, holding his battered face as he rolled back and forth; the second was already on his knees as they prepared to put on the bracelets, his hand up, imploring for mercy.

Cooper’s collar was flapping, his hair hanging over his eye. He sucked the blood from his knuckles, as the back-up squad hauled the villains into the back of a motor and took them to the station. He knew them, of course: they were old hands at thieving, blacketeering, and doubtless working for Johnny Bristow; if so, they’d be better off in custody. Johnny wouldn’t be pleased with them: they had allowed themselves to be caught with the goods, taken entirely by surprise, with no weapons on them. Johnny would draw the conclusion that one of them might well have supplied the tip-off; it was a possibility that Cooper himself was considering. In the space that the Johnny Bristows of the world inhabited there was no such thing as loyalty; it was all treachery and suspicion, which is all you can expect if you hang about with men who would sell their own grandmothers for a ten-bob note.

When he went to see him in the interview room, the oldest of the crooks, the one who had begged, entertained him with the usual whine.

“You know me, Mr Cooper: I want to go straight, honest, but it’s hard without the dibs.”

“Shut up.” Cooper was in no mood for it. “I’ve had a long day, and I’m tired of listening to rubbish. Just tell me who’s behind it. You haven’t the brains to pull a stunt like this, or the readies.” You need capital to buy vans, bribe dockers and employ idiots; you need brains to plan a job; you need buyers lined up. “How much has he paid you? A pony? Fifty? A hundred? Whatever it was, it isn’t enough. You’re looking at a long stretch this time.” Cooper’s fist was aching, so was his head. He leaned across the table. “I want names,” he said.

In point of fact, he wanted one name in particular: one snitch was all it would take to bring him in. The crook appealed to his better nature, mutely, with a sort of sad, broken expression.

“I can’t tell you that, Mr Cooper. You know how it is,” he said. “I got a family.” The crook had a long scar down one side of his face which he was fingering now. “I got responsibilities.”

“This could be your chance to get out. You’re too old for all this.”

The crook shook his head, slowly, almost regretfully.

“It’s going to go badly for you,” Cooper warned. “Assaulting police officers, resisting arrest – and that’s before we move on to the receiving stolen property charge…”

There was a brief flicker in the fellow’s eyes, and catching it, Cooper leaned back in his chair and waited. Afterwards he reckoned that he had been on the brink of hearing the name “Johnny Bristow” fall from a villain’s lips, when the wretched desk sergeant appeared at the door of the interview room.

“Damn and blast to hell,” Cooper muttered under his breath. “What the blazes is it now?”

It was only the serious expression on the desk sergeant’s face which prevented Cooper from telling him to go away in far from polite terms.

“I think you had better come and see this, sir,” said the sergeant, and Cooper could tell at once that he really had to do as he was bid.

The contents of the pockets of all three villains were in the process of being locked away, their owners having signed the inventories. The desk sergeant pointed at a clothing
coupons-book
that was nestling among the detritus.

“It was only as I was putting it away that I looked at it more closely. I should have done it at the time, only I thought it was his, you see.”

Cooper turned the book towards him. It was written there quite clearly. A blind idiot could have seen it. On the front of the book where it said “Name” was written in a perfectly legible hand: Douglas Frobisher; and in the space following the word “Address” was the last-known residence of the strangled woman.