Murder on the Home Front (16 page)

“I would have thought they’d be out and about quite late these nice light evenings.”

We studied the dormant nest thoughtfully as we sipped our drinks. Each of us nursed the same unbearable suspicion, but, womanlike, I was the first to voice such a thing.

“Could it be last year’s nest?”

“Could be,” said CKS. We stared at our prize some more. “Possibly,” he said. “In fact it does appear to be deserted,” he concluded.

“What a pity.” But I didn’t mean it. I was thinking how lucky we’d been. For wasps are belligerent insects, and if the nest had been inhabited we should have been seriously attacked, without a doubt.

Presently a neighbor dropped in for a drink. He was something of a naturalist, so we showed him the nest. To our horror he didn’t hesitate to lift it from the jar.

“Quite a nice one. Last season’s, of course. Where was it?”

“Among the elderberry bushes.”

He dropped it casually back in the jar. “Quite a nice one.”

Next morning a farm laborer found a wasps’ nest in a bank a few yards up the lane, and he smoked the occupants out, much to the delight of the local children and the dogs. The wasps, sure enough, came pouring forth in a frenzied crusade and one or two of the children and dogs were stung in the course of the battle. I only learned of all this by hearsay, though, for at the time of the incident I was in the garden, typing.

CHAPTER
16

Underworld

Among the Americans who visited at Dr. Simpson’s cottage were several medical men, and they used to enjoy coming up to London on their short leaves and spending a morning or afternoon going around with us. They were interested not only in the actual postmortems, they were also fascinated by the glimpses these little tours gave them of London’s private life, as it were; the peeps at her courts, her police, her criminals, slums, and underworld dramas. Our formal, traditional court procedure never failed to thrill and impress our guests, while the fact that our police invariably went unarmed struck them as an astounding combination of the heroic and the foolhardy; they decided that our criminals must be less tough than the American variety and therefore our police were not in such danger as the cops back home, but then along came a tough case or two to disprove this theory, which left but one possible conclusion, voiced by a puzzled but frank visitor who exclaimed, “I guess you British must be crazy, after all.” Our slums, I suspect, rather surprised and horrified them, although they were too polite to say so; they were all very courteous sightseers.

Generally, of course, they knew London only as a place of theatres, clubs, and West End rendezvous—these trips with CKS showed them the other face of this vast, schizophrenic city.

One really beautiful morning in September we had with us a doctor from Denver. A call came for us to go with the CID to a South London lodging house where a man had killed himself. So we drove through the warm, bright sunshine, which all the more exposed the dirt of the dingy streets, to a gray, sooty, dreary crescent, not so very slummy in aspect, but unpleasantly dim and drab.

Outside the house we were to visit, a little crowd of local residents had gathered, people as gray, dim, and drab as the houses they lived in. The DDI led our party up to the peeling front door and knocked; a spiky woman with untidy, streaky blonde hair and a lined, thin face answered our knocks. She let us in and indicated the door of one of the front downstairs rooms. “In there.”

We went in.

Immediately up jumped the smell and leapt at us; the overwhelming smell of real, thick dirt, a smell so intense it seems alive, a veritable animal. There was no genuine air in the room at all, there was only this atmosphere that you breathed and swallowed in slabs. The DDI made a rush at the window, but of course it was not only shut tight but also stuck fast. Its panes were so dirty one could scarcely see out of them, and the muslin curtains which draped them were elephant-gray with grime and sheltered the corpses of long dead and shriveled flies.

Despite the bright day outside, the room was extremely dark, so that we peered around. There was no electricity or gas to put on to help us to see, there was only a bit of old candle stuck in a little jar on the mantelpiece. However, we could, in the dim light, make out an iron bed with tousled clothes piled on it, and sprawling on his back on top of these, stripped naked to the waist, the dead man, with a streak of scarlet blood flowing across his lean and livid chest.

As our eyes became accustomed to the gloom we could make out more of this horrible room, which would have provided Maxim Gorky with some good material, from the once green-papered walls—now blotchy and peeling with damp, so that they appeared to be suffering from some ghastly skin disease, as did the lumped, clotted, and pitted surface of the filthy ceiling—to the squat, slow, fat bug which was taking a trip along a crack by the fireplace. In one dark corner was a wooden table, spread with an old sheet of newspaper, and on this stood a filthy mug, some pieces of twisted cutlery and a tin plate heaped with fragments of cold potato and cabbage in congealed gravy. By the table was a rag-strewn chair and an old trunk. On a second table stood a pile of dusty gramophone records and an old portable gramophone. There was a small bedside stand with all sorts of filthy odds and ends on it, and beneath this was an unspeakable bucket which had been used for everything from chamber pot to scrap bin, and which had obviously not been emptied for several days. The last item to be dropped in it was an emptied Lysol bottle.

Over the mantelpiece were pinned pictures from newspapers of various leg lovelies.

This was the “home” of a Londoner in the year 1943.

The room, with its shapes, its shadows, its gloom, was all dull green, moody sepia, and dismal black, and in the center was the black iron bed with the tumbled filthy bedclothes, and spread-eagled across it the dead man, his livid greenish-white face, arms and chest glimmering in the darkness around him, his dark-trousered legs dangling over the side of the bed, terminating in heavy—how heavy—black surgical boots; two club feet, booted, heavy as lead. One felt the eternal despair of those heavy feet. But one’s eyes were torn from the tragic feet to the violently crimson, thickly brilliant blood flowing from the wound under the heart. His arms were flung out in a gesture of wild pain and final surrender. The right hand was deformed; close to these twisted fingers glittered a newly bought knife, streaked with blood.

We all stood staring. It was indeed a picture dramatic and ruthless as a Hogarth, dark and haunting as an El Greco…

The body was presently removed to the mortuary and the suicide reconstructed by Dr. Simpson and the CID. The knife the man had stabbed himself with was very sharp and brand-new; he had no doubt bought it to kill himself with. His stomach was full of Lysol; his courage to stab himself had failed at the last and he had tried to poison himself instead, thinking it would be an easier death. The poison was agony. He had therefore seized the knife and thrust it into his heart.

This was the grim drama of the cripple’s last moments. But what had led up to those last frantic moments? At the inquest a few days later we learned all about that.

The chief witnesses at the inquest were the streaky landlady, arrayed in all her dismal best, which included a coat with a large orange fox collar and a big, shiny, imitation-leather handbag, and another crippled man, an emaciated, nervous, sick-looking individual, in dirty raincoat and an old felt hat, who propelled himself into court in an invalid chair with big wheels. His thin, colorless face, with its hollow cheeks and too-large, dark eyes, was not unintelligent, he bore the air of an aspiring intellectual. He bore, too, the impatient, overstrung, querulous manner of the chronic invalid.

This man had been a great friend of the deceased, for he had lived in the same lodging house, just across the hallway, and the two cripples had spent their evenings together talking. The man who had killed himself, Joe, had lived in the house for twelve years. At the time of his death he was thirty-five. He had two clubbed feet, a deformed right hand, and a severe duodenal ulcer. He had supported himself for many years by playing the gramophone in the main streets of Fulham, Hammersmith, Putney. He had never been a very merry man, said his friend, but recently he had become depressed, and very, very strange.

“How do you mean, very strange?” asked the coroner, glancing up from his writing pad.

“Delusions, sir, delusions. That, and his ulcer, you could see he was in a very bad way. He suffered awful agony.”

“What kind of delusions were they?”

“He saw Jesus floating in a tree.”

The coroner began to write again. “Anything else?”

“Oh, yes, a lot of things. St. Peter hanging from the peg at the back of his door, and the saints, and sometimes Jesus on the cross also hanging on the peg on the door. You could hear him, sir, shouting in there in the evenings, ‘Get out of my room! Get out!’ Because these visions, sir, they terrified him.”

There was a pause—the coroner’s pen scratched a little.

“He kept a diary,” went on the witness. “He was always writing in this diary about these visions he saw.”

“Yes,” said the coroner, taking up a worn, rather large diary, “I have it here. He writes a great deal about religious matters in it, I see.” The coroner read slowly from a page, “I wish to be with God. I am going to join my God.”

“He was a very religious man, especially at the end, in fact you might say he was almost a religious maniac,” went on the witness. “He believed in all these visions he saw, thought they were all real. No use at all telling him he imagined ’em. He thought St. Peter had come with a message for him. And he let himself get in a shocking state; hair grew long, wouldn’t shave, wouldn’t eat. All he did was to see these visions and talk about religion. Quite a mania. In the end I wouldn’t discuss religion with him. Anything else, but not religion, although naturally sir, I too believe in a Great Sublime.”

“Quite so, quite so,” murmured the coroner. He wrote some more, then looked up again at the witness. “Did he see these visions only in his room?”

“At first, sir, yes, but in the end he was seeing ’em everywhere. He started seeing crosses and the like in my room, but I said to him, ‘Get out of my room, I won’t have you seeing things like that in here.’”

“‘I am going to join my God,’” quoted the coroner, glancing at the diary again. “That sounds as though he contemplated taking his life. Did you ever hear him threaten to take his life?”

“Toward the end he often did. Threatened to drown himself. I said to him, ‘Don’t do that, boy, the water is so cold.’ But I had a feeling something of the sort would happen in the end.”

The landlady now came into the witness box and told much the same story as the previous witness. “You could hear him shrieking and shouting alone in his room in the evenings, shouting, ‘Get out! Get out!’ Once or twice I went to him and asked whatever was the matter. He said, ‘It’s St. Peter, he’s hanging on the peg on my door and he looks awful, I don’t want him in here.’ Of course, there was nothing there, really, but he was certain there was. I didn’t like it at all—my house has always been respectable.”

“Didn’t you tell a doctor?”

“He wouldn’t see a doctor. He was in an awful way, though. Bloody crosses all around him, he said.”

“Can you tell us about the evening he died?”

“About half past nine I went to his room to take him some milk. It was all very quiet, no answer when I knocked. He’d been very quiet all evening, because usually, you know, you could hear him talking and calling out to himself, like, but that evening he’d been very quiet, which I’d thought unusual. So, well, I felt a bit nervous. In the end, after I’d knocked several times, I opened his door. The room was all dark. I shone a torch, he was lying on his bed, I saw blood, so I went into Mr. Motspur’s”—Mr. Motspur was the previous witness—“and told Mr. Motspur, ‘He’s been and done himself in.’ Of course it did, and it didn’t come as a shock, because he’d been going a bit queer in the head lately, like I said.”

“Was he regular with the rent?”

“Oh, yes, always regular with the rent.” She gripped her handbag a little more firmly and explained, “It was all those crosses and things he saw worried him, and then he kept on saying he would go to God.”

“Quite so, quite so,” murmured the coroner again.

“I didn’t turn him out because he was always regular with the rent and, in a way, I was sorry for him, but I had to warn him about the shouting and seeing things because, naturally, others in the house didn’t like it. But he didn’t take no notice. Went on as bad as ever.”

“Quite so.”

“It was the visions worried him, especially that St. Peter. And he kept saying he would join his God.”

The coroner found a verdict of suicide while of an unsound mind. After the inquest the landlady and Mr. Motspur left the court together, he propelling himself in the wheeled chair, she walking beside him, uncomfortable in her best shoes. I watched them going up the street, talking together, back to that dark and dirty house where the voice which had called to St. Peter to get out was now silent, where Jesus no longer floated in a tree. But the landlady and her lodgers would talk about it all for many a long day: Joe, who had gone queer in the head, and seen visions, and in the end done himself in. Joe, the pal who had turned dotty, Joe, the lodger who had been so bad for a respectable house. Come, don’t you remember poor old Joe? Used to play the gramophone in Putney High Street and the Broadway. Crippled hand and both feet. You remember Joe.