Murder on the Home Front (28 page)

Mr. Fabian let Jenkins go but issued strict orders he was to be watched. Then he began checking up on Jenkins’s associates and soon found two who answered to the description of the bandits. One was twenty-year-old Christopher James Geraghty, already a desperate young thug. At eleven Geraghty had stolen a car. Later he was convicted of assault and sent to the reformatory. After coming out, he had taken part in a six-thousand-pound jewel holdup and had struck a shop assistant on the head with a revolver, very seriously injuring him. For this he had been sent to prison. He had returned to liberty a month or so before the Antiquis shooting.

The second youth was Terence Peter Rolt, aged seventeen. He had only two petty offenses against his name so far but he was not an impressive character, and Chief Inspector Fabian had him brought in with Geraghty for questioning.

Both had alibis for the day of the Charlotte Street shooting.

Jenkins, Geraghty, and Rolt were all let at large again, and all were trailed assiduously by the police. Foolishly the trio fixed a meeting at a Clerkenwell public-house. At this meeting, which was also, unbeknown to the bandits, attended by detectives, Jenkins, Geraghty, and Rolt were plainly very nervous and on edge. They held a brief consultation together and then parted.

Mr. Fabian decided he knew enough by this time to arrest them. Once they were safely shut away informants from the underworld came forward, ready to tell the inside story of the Antiquis case. This is what Chief Inspector Fabian learned:

When Jenkins came home from the reformatory his friends staged a party for him at the public-house in Clerkenwell. Geraghty and Rolt were the hosts. At this party possible jobs for the future were discussed—the immediate future, for Jenkins was flat broke and needed money in a hurry. He finally made some plans, but Geraghty and Rolt were not implicated in them. However, three days after the party Jenkins got in touch with Geraghty. He was in a furious temper. He had, he said, taken part in an armed holdup in a Queensway jeweler’s and had afterward been tricked out of his share of the loot by his partner in the holdup. He was now even more completely broke than he had been before, if such a thing were possible, and he urged Geraghty to do a job with him without delay.

They had, at the party, tentatively discussed the Charlotte Street raid, and now they drew up a hasty scheme to put this plan into action the very next day. Rolt was called in to drive the car. He was also to help grab some of the stuff from the shop while the other two held up the staff with their guns.

These plans were hastily made, too hastily. Rolt, in his inexperience and excitement, entered the shop too soon, mistaking a signal. As a result chaos ensued. Instead of getting rich quick the three found themselves in the dock at the Old Bailey, watching Mr. Fabian exhibit to the court the “murder” gun, which had finally been found by a small child on the Thames foreshore.

Jenkins, standing there scowling at the jury, no doubt thought of his brother who had stood there three years previously, charged with murdering Captain Binney. But Thomas James had managed to escape the gallows. There were no mitigating circumstances to save Charles Henry. Along with his pal Geraghty he was sentenced to death.

Rolt was too young to hang. He went to penal servitude instead.

Jenkins and Geraghty remained completely cynical and hard-boiled to the end.

Is this the close, then, of the Jenkins story, which began with the death of Captain Binney and developed a second chapter three years later with the death of Antiquis? Not really. For the other evening I saw in the paper that Thomas James Jenkins, only recently released from his imprisonment for the Binney case, had just been sentenced at the Old Bailey to another long term of imprisonment on a charge of robbery with violence. Here, therefore, society faces a truly violent and hardened criminal.

The Jenkins brothers and those like them have provided postwar Britain with a brigade of thugs who do not hesitate to cosh, slash, and shoot. Most of them are to all intents and purposes illiterate. They are fundamentally cowardly, which is why they carry guns (not to mention brass knuckles, razors, and sheath knives). They suffer terribly from boredom, and their minds and conversation are dry as dust, save for occasional gleams of a brutal and sardonic sense of humor. (I have discovered they can appreciate the humor of Continental X films more quickly and subtly than educated, refined audiences! How, for example, they enjoyed
Le Garçon Sauvage
when it was shown at Kingston.)

They are the children of the age of Hitler’s secret weapons. Perhaps they and the rest of their kind, in whatever country they may be, are the Nazis’ real secret weapons: horrible germs left behind to impregnate the future. Cosh, slash, stab, shoot, and don’t give a damn for anyone or anything.

For their juvenile admirers they possess glamour. For the more perceptive they are as repugnant and abortive as any of the little monsters put up in pickling jars in the Gordon Museum…

One last word in this story, but not a dismal word this time. To commemorate the courageous and public-spirited Captain Binney, his relatives have created a Binney Medal, which is given annually to the member of the public who displays the greatest bravery and resolution in trying to prevent a crime. In this way the memory of a very gallant man is kept alive, and honor is paid to other citizens who do not hesitate to stand up to violence, the ordinary people who refuse to knuckle under to thugs and who, by their courage and spirited devotion to the laws of decency, help to prevent Britain from turning into a Chicago or a Nazi Germany.

CHAPTER
23

“’Tis Love, ’Tis Love That Makes the World Go Round…”

Early in the New Year of 1945 I learned I had won fourth place in a novel competition. It wasn’t a very important competition, and fourth place is certainly not first, but it served to give me a sense of some slight literary achievement, and I decided the time had come to adopt a more dignified approach to my work. I considered the matter and decided the first step toward dignity was to buy myself a proper blotter. Hitherto I had contented myself with small, odd pieces of blotting paper, mostly, I regret to say, gleaned from Court Number One at the Old Bailey, but now that I was truly a budding author I would invest in a proper blotter.

The kind of thing I really fancied, of course, was in hand-tooled scarlet leather. But it was 1945, austerity prices had reached a fantastic high, and I was obliged to buy something less grandiose, made of black American cloth posing as leather and, I must admit, very nearly succeeding. Very nearly, alas, not quite! Shams distress my aesthetic principles, but there was a war on. So I bought the American cloth article, but to compensate for its American clothness I chose the largest blotter possible. It was almost the size of the top of a card table, and when I stepped from the shop, complete not only with outsize blotter but also plenty of magenta blotting paper to go with it, I felt like Henry James, Thomas Hardy, and Arnold Bennett all rolled into one.

The journey home by Underground in the rush hour was not too easy. The blotter was desperately awkward and earned me many hard looks, but I ignored these and dreamed of the masterpieces I was going to blot dry on my blotter. When I emerged from the Underground I strode off feeling on top of the world; a Nobel Prize winner for literature wasn’t in it. But presently dignity gave way to sheer exuberance and I began to run simply from joie de vivre. I was prancing up the hill, full steam ahead, when somehow or other I managed to get the giant blotter wedged between my legs, and down I fell—
slap!
—full length on my face. I struggled up slowly, with two damaged knees, my hair all falling down and the soigné little chignon I wore in those days dangling over my right ear. At this point a youth rode by on a bicycle, shouting as he rode, to a pal, “Do you see green in my eyes?” For some reason I thought he was addressing me and I yelled furiously at him, “No, I certainly do not!” (My fall had thoroughly rattled me.) He looked absolutely startled, then said, soothingly, as to a mad person, “That’s all right, ma’am, that’s all right.”

I felt quite idiotic and thoroughly fed up with the wretched blotter. Picking it from the pavement I gave it a first-class cursing, using all the expressions I had learned, as a reporter, from my chief subeditor. Then I limped home, no longer feeling in the least like Henry James, Thomas Hardy, or Arnold Bennett.

The blotter, as a result of this episode, bore several scratches and was dog-eared in one corner. But I was soon too busy scribbling away to bother much. And after I had once or twice knocked the ink bottle over it and burned a hole in it with a cigarette and got nail varnish on it, I was thanking my stars it wasn’t scarlet hand-tooled leather.

So time passed, very pleasantly. Mortuaries by day, scribbling by night. The cold weather began easing off, and spring started to peek at us again, in a coy and fitful manner at first and then more boldly. In mid-March we had a call to Portsmouth on a suspected murder. It was a very blustery day, and when we arrived we found our old friend Superintendent Fuggle blowing about in his vast overcoat even more astonishingly than on our previous visits.

He told us that the body of the queried murder victim was already in the public mortuary. It was the body of a man, strongly bound, and he had been found floating in the waters of the dockyard.

We all went along to the mortuary. There on the p.m. table was the body of a partially clad man, bound very securely with strong cord. He was quite trussed up in a most complicated fashion, rather like one of those street buskers who get a partner to rope them up and then, apparently in the face of all possibility, free themselves from their bonds. Somebody had had a busy time knotting up this wretched man. But after CKS had examined him carefully he announced, much to everyone’s amazement, that the man was a suicide. He had sustained no violent injuries of any kind, he had died of drowning, and the trussing and tying, as CKS demonstrated to the detectives, was most ingeniously, but clearly, done by the man himself.

“The most determined suicide I ever saw in my life,” said Mr. Fuggle. “He’d certainly made up his mind to drown all right.”

Subsequent investigations proved that the man had been a very strong swimmer and had tied himself up in this fantastic manner because he hadn’t wanted to spoil his chances of drowning by striking out for the shore automatically when he found himself going under.

We returned to London, therefore, without a murder investigation to keep us busy, but feeling cheerful all the same, because the hospitality of Portsmouth police had proved as delightful as ever and we had enjoyed an excellent tea and conversation with the chief constable and his elegant aide. (I particularly recall the sardine sandwiches. One would have liked to ask for the recipe of the mixture.)

Next day, while we were doing a p.m. at Southwark, PC Griffin, the then coroner’s officer for Brixton, poked his head around the mortuary door, saying, “Dr. Simpson, you’re wanted by the CID.”

“What have they got this time, Griffin?”

“Any more old bones?” chimed in West, who had not yet forgotten the Dobkin case.

“They’ve got a very nice murder at Brixton, Dr. Simpson. Well-known prostitute, living in Little Heaven, sir, thought she’d like to spread her wings and try the other Heaven for a change.”

“Surprised she thought she’d get there,” said West.

“Little Heaven, where is that?” I asked.

“It’s the name of a locality in Brixton that used to be very popular at one time with top theater people, and especially variety people. Marie Lloyd lived there, one time. It’s a district of big houses; most of them are now divided into flats. This prostitute worked in the West End, sir, but she’s picked a customer who’s given her something she wasn’t expecting and cracked her head open for her. Chief Superintendent Beveridge and the DDI will be around there after lunch, sir, two o’clock. Shall I tell them you’ll be there, too?”

“Please, Griffin.”

Griffin returned to the telephone, and we finished the postmortem while West told us anecdotes about Little Heaven and about Marie Lloyd, a famous performer whom he claimed to have known in his early days and who had been a wonderful woman, he said, and a great Cockney. “You don’t get Cockneys like that now. She talked real Cockney and thought real Cockney. These people on the wireless that call themselves Cockneys, why, they don’t know what real Cockney sounds like. I can hear her calling me now, when she saw me going along the street, ‘ ’Arry boy!’ ” West produced the earsplitting, lemon-sharp, piercing cry of greeting of the genuine lady Cockney. “Trying to turn refined is ruining the Cockneys,” concluded West. “But I’m proud of talking Cockney.”

Personally I could have listened to him all day.

After lunch we collected Griffin and drove to Little Heaven. It was a shabby old suburb with rambling brick houses which still clung to the shreds of respectability and a sad air of has-beenness. We found the flat we wanted without any trouble, for it was in an old brown house outside which stood a formidable array of unmistakable CID cars. One of them had just brought the DDI, Mr. F. Narborough, to the scene, and it was he who opened the front door of the flat to us.

Mr. Narborough, who has since retired from being a detective to run a successful hostelry instead, was a very cheerful, stocky man who was something of a gourmet. We had met him lunching once or twice at La Coquille, and he confessed to us, this afternoon at Brixton, that he had a date to meet his wife and two friends at Frascati’s that evening. “But there it is. If I ever arrange to meet my wife anywhere somebody gets murdered, and I either keep her waiting for hours or have to cancel the whole thing.”