Murder on the Home Front (15 page)

Some of the clothes removed were occasionally so extraordinary even I couldn’t put a name to them. The results of home dressmaking courses, perhaps. “Why not make your own lovely lingerie, and save pounds?”

These disrobing episodes always amused me, but I always sat there very straight-faced, giving advice when asked.

I could never get them to appreciate the difference between a corset and a roll-on. But perhaps it didn’t really matter.

Many of the senior officers from the Yard filled me with considerable awe and at first meeting one or two of them quite scared me. One of these was Chief Supt. F. Cherrill, for so many years head of the world-famous Scotland Yard fingerprint department. Mr. Cherrill recently retired, but when I knew him he was at the zenith of his celebrated career, and indeed a man to be reckoned with, as famous in his own line as Spilsbury was in his.

We first met at Hammersmith. I recall it vividly.

In Hammersmith mortuary yard there grew a large castor-oil plant. Why, nobody knew; not even MacKay, the mortuary keeper, who generally knew everything concerned with his mortuary, and a lot more besides. But why there was a castor-oil plant in the yard MacKay just didn’t know. “Do you like castor-oil plants, MacKay?”

“Not particularly, Miss Molly, do you?”

“No. Does the coroner like castor-oil plants, MacKay?”

“I’ve no idea.”

Dr. Simpson definitely disliked the castor-oil plant. It got in his way when he parked the car.

One afternoon he had parked the car so close to this plant that when I climbed out of the car I became entangled in its greenery. I was dickering about with the wretched thing when a very loud, highly amused voice boomed, “Hullo, Eve. Looking for a fig leaf?”

Disentangling myself I looked up in some horror. There, standing in the mortuary doorway, grinningly surveying me, was a very large, solid, rather portly gentleman, even larger because of his vast gray overcoat. There was something about the goblin humor of his grin that sent me scurrying off to the coroner’s office for refuge. “Who’s the man in the gray coat and the bowler hat?”

Said the coroner’s officer, with bated breath, “Why, that’s Mr. Cherrill, the fingerprint expert. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?”

Of course I had.

Gathering my courage I went back to the mortuary. Mr. Cherrill gave me another grin; he could see he had scared me, and it tickled him.

Gradually, in the course of several encounters, I got to know him and ceased to be so scared of him, although his quality of gnomish humor always kept me on the qui vive, ready to jump. He knew it too, and, I suspect, enjoyed teasing me.

Dr. Simpson frequently sent specimens from postmortems to Mr. Cherrill at the Yard, and I would be sent to take them to him. Visiting a high-up at the Yard was quite a business, at any rate, during the war. I had to fill in and sign a chit, which was then taken to the officer to be visited, who would scan it and say, “All right, let her come up.” Then a large police sergeant escorted me to the office of whoever I might be visiting; perhaps Chief Constable (now Commander) Hugh Young or Deputy Commander Rawlings, or perhaps one of the chief inspectors, but most often Mr. Cherrill.

One day as I walked into his office, he waved my chit ferociously at me and growled, “Can’t you write better than this?”

“It’s the awful pens the Yard provides, Mr. Cherrill.”

“Don’t blame our pens.”

“They’re dreadful.”

“So is this scrawl.” He contemplated it and shook his head.

“Can you read character from handwriting, Mr. Cherrill?” I ventured.

“I certainly can. I’m an expert at it. Want me to tell you yours?”

“No, thank you. It might be too disconcerting.”

“I know all about you,” he said, tapping the chit and grinning.

“I expect you do. At the Yard you all know everything about everybody, with or without the aid of handwriting.”

However, despite my horrible writing he not long afterward asked me if I would like to be
his
secretary. The offer didn’t seem to be a legpull, either, for he assured me I would come in most useful in his department, and rising briskly from his chair took me for a brief tour of the amazing place, pointing out this or that job I would be useful for.

I found it all absorbingly interesting, although it was very hard to believe there were enough crooks in the country to necessitate those vast stacks of fingerprint files. It gave one an alarming glimpse of the size and extent of the underworld. Record after record after record of criminals’ fingerprints. The efficiency of the system of filing was impressive to a degree. Mr. Cherrill was rightly very proud of it all, but when he again said, “Now, wouldn’t you like to be my secretary?” I repeated, in the style of a Mrs. Micawber, that much as I appreciated the offer I would never, never, never desert Dr. Keith Simpson.

At one stage we kept Mr. Cherrill supplied with fingers, with which he did several important experiments.

Another time, when CKS and I had been visiting him about some fingerprints on a revolver, he remarked as we were saying good-bye, “Oh, Dr. Simpson, before you go I wish you’d do me a favor.”

“Anything, Mr. Cherrill, anything,” responded CKS affably.

“I’ve got one or two bits of a young woman here,” explained Mr. Cherrill confidentially, “——— ———” (giving her name), “you remember the case, Dr. Simpson? Sometime back now.”

Dr. Simpson said he remembered.

“I had one or two odds and ends of her brought up here for me to look at, pickled, you know, of course, and I put them away in a cupboard afterward and forgot all about ’em, but I don’t want them cluttering the place up, we’re very short of space here, so I wondered if it’d be too much to ask you to pop them in your hospital incinerator; would that be too much trouble?”

“No trouble at all, Mr. Cherrill.”

“Let me find her, then.” He began poking around his cupboards, pulling out parcels and packages, shaking his head, pushing them back and muttering, “I know she’s here somewhere. I’ve got her somewhere. Bother the girl, where on earth is she?”

After a bit CKS said, politely, “What about leaving it till some other time, Mr. Cherrill? You can find her at your leisure, and I’ll take her next time I call.”

“But damn it, I know I had her here in one of these cupboards.”

A stickler for efficiency, he was most annoyed at his failure to find the lady, or what portions he had of the lady, and fumed around his office, grumbling, “I know I’ve got her here somewhere.”

We had to leave without her. The matter was never mentioned again, and I could never summon the courage to ask Mr. Cherrill if he
had
found her.

CHAPTER
15

Severe Testing of a Secretary

When August came CKS retired to his cottage for a fortnight’s “rest.” He took me with him for part of the time, for he was in the middle of writing his textbook, and it seemed to him that a rest was a splendid opportunity for doing some concentrated dictating and typing.

Most of the work we did out in the garden; the weather was lovely, and it certainly was a pity to stay indoors. I am not, however, perhaps so fond of fresh air as I should be, and I felt a slight exasperation with the playful little breeze that used to come along and create lively havoc with the pages of the manuscript. It was especially trying as we had reached the section of the book on poisons, and the section of the book which dealt with poisons struck me as somewhat nightmarish—from a typist’s point of view:

“Dinitrocresols; dinitronaphthols; dinitrophenols: dinitrothymols.

“Para-aminobenzenesulphonamide; its salts; derivatives of para-aminobenzenesulphonamide having any of the hydrogen atoms of the para-amino and sulphonamide group substituted by another radical; their salts (substances of the sulphonamide group)—”

And so on.

Nevertheless, in spite of the intimidating aspect of the typescript, it was very nice in the garden, with the sunny countryside spread before me, terminating in a horizon of gentle blue sky and Dunstable Beacon, while in the cornfield at the back of the cottage the harvesting machine went around and around with a familiar clank and rattle which reminded me, vividly and pleasantly, of the Exmoor farm Augusts of my childhood. And the work on the textbook was enlivened with bouts of gardening, picnics, jaunts to Whipsnade, climbing trees, swimming, going to look at some neighboring pigs—a delightfully snoozy pastime—and entertaining Americans from a nearby Army Air Force camp. The beautiful weather held, everything was honey-balmed, warm and tranquil, and then…along came the wasps.

They were everywhere: in the larder, the kitchen, the dining room, on the buns and in the jam at teatime; they even prowled around the toothpaste in the bathroom and investigated our gin slings before dinner. Obviously there was a nest of them somewhere in the immediate neighborhood. We scouted around, but found nothing.

Then, during a game of badminton, a shuttlecock fell into a small thicket of elderberry bushes, and when CKS emerged from retrieving it he looked quite excited. “I’ve discovered the wasps’ nest. A vast thing, hanging from a branch. When the children are in bed we’ll deal with it.”

“We” meant himself and me, for Mrs. Simpson was visiting friends for the day.

So, when the children were safely in bed, CKS said, “Come on, Molly, let’s settle those wasps.”

“Do you intend smoking them out?”

“No, I’ve a better idea than that.”

He fetched a kitchen stool, garden shears, and a very large glass specimen jar, with a lid to it; one of the jars you could pickle a whole baby in, if you wanted to. This he gave to me to carry. It was heavy and slippery and I put both arms around it and hugged it to my bosom, nervous of dropping it and breaking it.

“What
are
we going to do?”

“I’ll cut the nest from the branch, drop it gently into the jar, and you’ll clamp the lid on, presto!”

It sounded a highly daring scheme, a little too daring if the wasps got any inkling of our plan—and wasps are suspicious creatures, apt to draw hasty conclusions. No, I didn’t think it sounded an awfully good idea, not really a good idea at all.

I tried to hint this tactfully.

“What about getting stung?”

“If we’re quick and clever enough they won’t have time to sting us.”

That gave me even more of a sinking feeling. I knew he would be quick and clever enough, but what about me with the slippery jar and the lid?

We were now trotting across the badminton lawn, CKS with stool and shears, myself with the jar. We climbed over the little wooden fence into the thicket, and after a couple of minutes’ wary battle with brambles below and crisscross branches and catchy twigs above, found ourselves face to face with a big, buff-colored object which hung, like a giant and overripe pear, from a branch of a particularly large bush.

CKS put down his stool and stood on it. He stationed me under the nest, holding the jar open and the lid at the ready. Everything was very still, no wasps around, no humming or buzzing. But who knew what little eyes were watching, what little black antennae quivering, what little
zzzzz
y conversations going on? “Chaps, he’s after our nest!” And forth they’d seethe…

Lefebure, as you can see, was all of a twitter and very near flinging down the jar and bunking off. But somehow or other I managed to stay my ground, clenching my teeth and clutching the jar like a life preserver and expecting to be stung all over in a twinkling. CKS meanwhile balanced precariously on the stool, making tentative snips at the surrounding twigs.

“Clearing the decks a bit for action,” he explained.

Still no sign of life from the wasps.

CKS was very gingerly in his movements—this was the
clever
part. In a minute would come the
quick
bit.

“If wasps are like bees (and bees can communicate, according to the people who study them), then, if wasps are like bees, I reckon a big SOS is going out right now,” I thought. I peered up at the nest, and CKS braced himself with the shears.

“Steady with the jar, Molly?”

“Steady with the jar.”

“Then here she goes.”

He severed the branch one side of the nest, then the other, holding the branch dexterously at the second cut and steadying the nest as much as possible, then lowering it with infinite care into the jar. I had the lid clanged into place in a trice. We each drew a deep breath.

“Nice work.”

With the air of victors we left the thicket and marched back across the garden to the little terrace, where a table with drinks was ready for the brave.

“They’re a very quiet set of wasps,” I observed. I put the jar on the table and we stared at its contents inquisitively. But the wasps remained strictly indoors.

“Do wasps retire for the night early?”

“I really have no idea. I’ve never studied wasps very closely.”