Murder on the Home Front (27 page)

Dr. Simpson and I had our first glance of the captain’s killers in the dock of Mansion House Court, presided over by the Lord Mayor of London, an awe-inspiring “beak” if ever there was one, but who apparently made little impression on the two young thugs, who stared brashly around them and leered from time to time with an apparent sense of something they considered humor.

So there they stood, side by side in the dock, rather undersized, with the pale, thin faces of young Londoners. Their hair was a trifle too long and their ties a trifle too gaudy. Their eyes were cynical, hard, and cold, and the expression in them both shrewd and stupid, the eyes of those who have learned to observe much but who comprehend singularly little of what they observe. Their minds moved within tight little boundaries, shut in by four ready-made fences labeled respectively, “I’m a Have-Not”; “Nobody’s Going to Exploit Me”; “Don’t Try to Pull That on Me”; and “Never Heard of It.”

The Jenkinses and Hedleys of this world won’t accept anything they’ve never heard of, and as they’ve heard of little outside their slum alley and small-time criminals’ sphere they are necessarily very limited people. Their chief response to anything and everything is “Couldn’t Care Less.”

Basically, the two young men in the dock had had their sensibilities stultified and shriveled by the great, great big chip each of them carried, one almost might say flaunted, on his shoulder.

The corners of their mouths drooped in sullen lines of perpetual discontent and boredom. (For another basic factor in the lives of these wretched juveniles is that despite their constant attempts to seek out excitement they are always, always bored.) They smoldered with resentment and stared at us all as if we had committed an unspeakable crime against them, for which they could never forgive us. (Which no doubt they both firmly believed.) Although they were both very young they gave a spine-chilling impression that they were already habitually criminal and that all the help in the world would be too late. It certainly was likely, I thought, that they’d never had a decent chance from the start, but one realized equally well that any helping hand held out to them would be promptly bitten. They were quite the most petrifyingly depressing couple I had ever set eyes on.

In their Birchin Street bid to get rich quick they had stolen jewelry valued at £3,795, but nobody was really very worried about this. (Excepting, very probably, the jeweler from whom the things had been stolen!) They were charged with the murder of Captain Binney and the callous details of this murder, or more, properly, killing, were red-hot in everybody’s mind.

One of the counsel representing them was a gentleman of whom it might be said that “he was a real character from Dickens.” (One of the unattractive ones.) The fact is of course that Dickens took his characters from life—except his heroines—and this counsel was an obvious descendant of a Dickens prototype, one of those legal portraits the author so loved to draw. He bore a peculiar and even alarming resemblance to a carrion crow, standing with his big, voracious head sunk between his humped shoulders and his beaky nose thrust forward. When he spoke he rasped and croaked. He was determined to get us all ruffled and uneasy, like scared little birds in a hedge. As soon as CKS got into the witness box to give evidence, for example, the carrion crow tried to ruffle him by attempting to get
me
turned out of court.

The carrion crow did this by complaining that I was taking up too much room in the bench reserved for lawyers and professional witnesses. He said that because I was taking up too much room his clerk was obliged to squeeze in a seat in a back bench where he couldn’t hear properly. The carrion crow wanted to know who I was and what business I had in the court.

CKS replied I was his secretary and I always accompanied him into court in order to take shorthand notes of his evidence.

The carrion crow responded I was still taking up too much room and he must insist I move to another seat.

One of the representatives of the Director of Public Prosecutions rose in the bench behind me and said politely that there was plenty of room in his bench if I would care to move there.

The carrion crow replied leeringly and sneeringly with nasty intimations that one could understand perfectly well the gentleman’s eagerness to have the young lady beside him, but she would still be taking up valuable room to which she was not entitled.

The young lady went puce in the face with rage and embarrassment, and so did the gallant from the DPP’s office. Dr. Simpson had also assumed a very angry tint. However, dignity and restraint triumphed. After being moved for a few moments from seat to seat, each move being objected to by the carrion crow, I came to rest in a seat from which all his croaking and cawing could not dislodge me. His wretched clerk moved downstage to the place where I had originally been sitting and huddled there clutching a tatty little notebook and a stump pencil. The Lord Mayor surveyed the scene for a moment and then, bowing his head politely toward me, said, “And now, I trust, the young lady is comfortably installed?”

The young lady, by this time the shade of a peony, murmured rather inaudibly that she was comfortably installed, thank you.

This little pantomime gave great satisfaction to Jenkins and Hedley, indeed I think they thought such clever maneuvering would ensure an ultimate verdict of not guilty. The carrion crow looked pleased, too. But everybody else, apart from the carrion crow’s clerk, who looked scared, appeared furious and fed up; and this was unfortunate, for Jenkins and Hedley had infuriated everyone sufficiently already, without the assistance of the carrion crow.

His objection to me, however, was but the first of a long series of objections, which he carried over from Mansion House to the Old Bailey, where he objected to evidence, statements, jurymen, witnesses, merely for the sake of objecting and causing trouble. Perhaps there was nothing else for him to do. The position of the defense in this case was very weak. The evidence against Jenkins and Hedley was of a nature that condemned them from the start.

However, only one of them had been at the actual wheel of the car, knocking the captain down, running forward over him, then reversing over him and finally driving for over a mile with him caught underneath the vehicle. Jenkins, seated next to the driver, never at any time appeared to have protested violently against Hedley’s decision to make a getaway at all costs, but his plea that he had not been driving and was not therefore directly responsible for Captain Binney’s death could scarcely be refuted. The result of the trial was that Hedley was sentenced to death and was hanged, while Jenkins received eight years’ penal servitude.

But this story, alas, doesn’t stop here. It had a sequel, every jot as brutal as the killing of Captain Binney.

Early one afternoon in April 1947 three young men, their faces masked with scarves, drove into Charlotte Street, off the Tottenham Court Road, and staged a holdup in a jeweler’s shop. But the holdup, owing to the inexperience and impetuosity of the youngest member of the trio, was bungled. A member of the shop staff pressed a warning buzzer, a revolver was fired in panic by one of the bandits, and the next moment all three desperadoes were racing from the shop to their car. But at that very moment a large truck parked itself in front of their car. The three, panic-stricken now, began running wildly up the street, and it was then that a passing motorcyclist made an attempt to stop them. There was the report of a revolver again and the motorcyclist fell, dying, to the pavement. The three young men fled on. One of them jumped on to the running board of a passing taxi, but was turned off again as the driver already had a fare. This youth and another then ran into a nearby block of offices. The third disappeared down a side street.

There was so much confusion in Charlotte Street that none of the spectators of the crime noticed the two youths vanish into the offices, and as the taxi driver hadn’t witnessed the shooting he didn’t realize he had just had a murderer ask him for a lift. He placidly continued on his way with his fare.

Therefore the three young bandits and killers made a getaway.

Within an hour or two the newspapers were splashed with huge headlines describing the murder of the motorcyclist, Alec de Antiquis. The story of his killing shocked the nation and threw London’s usually hard-boiled underworld into a state of agitation, too, for gunmen are not approved of by the British underworld, any more than they are approved of by Whitehall or by suburbia; although the underworld disapproves for different reasons. A gunman not only brings down dire trouble on to his own head, but he stirs up the police and public to a degree that gets everybody uncomfortable all the way around. There is a public clamoring for the police to be armed, judges call for stiffer sentences, people declare that flogging should be brought back; in short, everyone toughens up. Besides, there are definite professional standards among crooks. Skilled criminals take a dim view of gangster rough stuff. Any clod can run around shouting, “Stick ’em up.” Professional criminals have scornful things to say about hoodlums. Gunmen are beyond the pale, and the Antiquis shooting was therefore considered an outrage in all strata of society.

The detective put in charge of this case by Scotland Yard was the debonair but dangerous Robert Fabian, by this time a chief inspector of reputed flair.

The Antiquis case followed only shortly upon a similarly outrageous shooting in Winchmore Hill, when a young gunman named Thomas fired at and killed a detective-constable. Thomas, found guilty of murder, had not been hanged, as capital punishment had been experimentally suspended. Public opinion, divided on the great problem of the death sentence, now hardened. Hanging was reintroduced and the nation awaited not only the arrest of the Antiquis killers but also their execution.

But the killers weren’t all that easy to catch.

Although several people had seen Antiquis shot, descriptions of the youths concerned were unreliable and vague. All three of them had been effectively masked, all three of them had been moving quickly, and the raid on the jeweler’s, the shooting, the shouting, the general confusion and horror, had made it difficult for spectators to register any clear impressions of the bandits. Clues consisted of a discarded and unfired revolver, without fingerprints, however, and the bandits’ car, which was a stolen one as is usual in such cases, but which afforded little information. A .45 bullet was found embedded in the woodwork of the jeweler’s shop, and Sir Bernard Spilsbury removed a .320 bullet from Antiquis’s body at the postmortem. Chief Inspector Fabian had but little to go on, therefore, when he started his investigations.

A check was begun on all young men recently released from reformatories. Detectives began combing London’s underworld. Mr. Fabian rounded up and interviewed everybody who had been near or in Charlotte Street at the time of the crime, among these the taxi driver. As a result of his interview with this driver, Mr. Fabian and his men were soon exploring the offices into which the taxi driver had seen the two young men run.

An office boy had also seen two men, in a hurry, going up in the office lift about the time of the shooting, and had later noticed one of them lounging against a windowsill in an empty room while the other leaned idly against a banister. The lad was able to describe both of them fully to Mr. Fabian.

A truck driver had also noticed them go into the building, although he had not realized that they were involved in the shooting. Presently he had also seen them coming out of the offices. He remarked that one of them had been wearing a raincoat when he hurried into the building but was without it when he came out.

A raincoat. Just a dirty, shabby, cheap raincoat.

Mr. Fabian began combing the office premises for this raincoat. At length it was found in a lumber room, tucked underneath a counter. It was a stained, crumpled garment; in its pockets were a cap, a pair of gloves, and a piece of white cloth such as the bandits were said to have masked their faces with.

The police routine procedure of taking a garment to pieces was followed, and stitched under the lining of the armpit Chief Inspector Fabian found a manufacturer’s stock ticket. This was painstakingly traced and led to a factory in Leeds, and from thence the trail led to South East London. In a shop in Bermondsey the raincoat was traced to a purchaser, a youth who was already known by Mr. Fabian to be a relative of a certain Charles Henry Jenkins.

Now Charles Henry Jenkins held considerable interest for Mr. Fabian. Although he was only twenty-three, he had eight convictions already marked up against him. The last had been two years previously, when he had seriously assaulted a police constable. For this assault Jenkins had been sent to the reformatory, and he had come out, Mr. Fabian discovered, six days before the Charlotte Street crime. This meant that he would be broke and anxious to do a job as soon as possible after his return from the institution of correction. And, knowing Jenkins as he did, Mr. Fabian guessed this job wouldn’t be one that the reformatory would approve of.

Charles Henry Jenkins was the brother of Thomas James Jenkins, still inside, serving the eight years the judge had given him for his part in the Binney murder.

Charles Henry, at the time of the Antiquis case, was, as I have said, twenty-three. Thomas James, at the time of the Binney case, had been twenty-four. Charles Henry, like his brother, was tough, cynical, and highly experienced in certain ways of this unhappy world. When Chief Inspector Fabian had him brought to the Yard for questioning he remained very cool, even sardonic. He said he had borrowed the raincoat from his relative but had a day or so later loaned it to another man in the Tottenham Court Road district. He refused to give the name of this person. “I’m not the sort who squeals,” he declared indignantly.