Murder on the Home Front (29 page)

The flat in Little Heaven was a very neat, tidy place. It looked rather small and overcrowded when we walked in because it already contained Mr. Beveridge, recently appointed a chief superintendent, Mr. Cherrill and his fingerprint apparatus, and Yard photographer Percy Law with all
his
apparatus. There were also several other detective officers, mostly strangers to me, who were hurrying around with intent expressions doing a variety of things at once. The telephone was ringing, people were giving and carrying out instructions, flashlights were flashing.

Mr. Narborough led us into a tiny sitting room and gave us an outline of the case. While he was talking we were joined by Mr. Beveridge. The victim of the murder, Mr. Narborough explained, was a forty-four-year-old prostitute named Gertrude, alias Maisie, Rose. “She had been in the big money in her time,” said Mr. Narborough. “Had a beat in the Leicester Square area, near the Hippodrome. Very smart and quite a good looker, but of course she was beginning to show signs of wear, and times for her weren’t what they had been. Still got plenty of clients, but not the old class. Most of her clients for the past two years have been Yanks. Used to pick them up in town and then bring them back here by taxi.

“She had a woman who came in every morning to clean and do the chores. When she arrived this morning—had a key to let herself in—she found Miss Rose wasn’t up, but thought she was merely taking a lie-in [staying in bed late], as she did sometimes, and decided to let her sleep. However, it grew late, the charlady knocked on Miss Rose’s door once or twice to rouse her, but there were no sounds of Miss Rose getting up, and finally she went into the bedroom. There she found Miss Rose lying battered to death in a bed full of blood. Apparently she’d been beaten up with the shillelagh she always used to keep beside her bed to defend herself with against clients who turned nasty. It’s a real Irish shillelagh, Dr. Simpson.”

“I shall like to see that,” said Dr. Simpson.

“Mr. Cherrill’s looking for fingerprints in the bedroom at the moment and the photographers are busy, too; I think we’ll have to wait until there is a little more room in there,” observed Mr. Beveridge.

While we waited to go into the room where Maisie Rose lay murdered by her own shillelagh, I spent a quiet little time prowling around the flat on my own behalf. One of the disadvantages of being a woman is that you never get the chance to see half the things in this world. What chance would I normally have of poking around a prostitute’s flat? None. If I ever wished to write about a prostitute I would have to draw upon my imagination for the details of her home. Now here I was in the flat of a well-known member of the profession, so I lost no time in collecting a little data. I trotted quietly around with my own notebook, peeping here and poking there and smiling big, sweet smiles at Mr. Beveridge whenever he cocked an eyebrow at me, wondering what I was up to.

It was all very clean, tidy, and respectable; an example to many of the homes we went into in the course of our work. Everything had just been redecorated, too, and not many homes got redecorated during the war. The little hall was papered with brand new yellowy-orange paper scattered with a design of yellowy-orange berries. There was an empty umbrella stand and a little round occasional table with a snowy white crochet mat in the middle of it, and in the middle of the mat a gaudy glass vase, the sort of vase people win as prizes at fairs. This had a chip out of it. This vase, and its owner, were the only two things in the flat that had been chipped. Everything else was in excellent order.

I peeked into the bathroom, which had an eau-de-nil décor, and was very neat except for the windowsill, which was crowded with a variety of things, ranging from toilet paper and cosmetics to a large selection of douche preparations.

Dr. Simpson, Mr. Narborough, and Superintendent Beveridge were sitting talking in the little lounge which Miss Rose’s clients had obviously used as a waiting room. Indeed, it bore that waiting-room look and could have belonged to a doctor, a dentist, or a fortune-teller with equal propriety. There was the inevitable suite of sofa and easy chairs, covered in the equally inevitable rexine cloth, and in the middle of the carpet was another little table with another crochet mat, but with an ashtray instead of a vase. The curtains were a depressing blue decorated with orange cape-gooseberry motif, and on the mantelpiece stood a pair of uninspiring china figures. An oval mirror hung between them, dead center. The lady, I noticed, didn’t provide magazines, but perhaps, I thought, she made a point of not keeping her clients waiting very long.

It was an impersonal, cheerless room, and Maisie Rose had obviously never gone in there. Her room was the kitchen. Here was her sanctuary, the room where she ceased to be Maisie Rose, a highly professional West End prostitute, and became Gertrude Rose, a cozy, domesticated, cheerful, sentimental soul. Here everything was in glistening cream and turquoise-blue paint, with spotless china and glass on the little dresser, together with a highly colored Oriental tea set which would have gladdened any housewife’s proud heart. There was—because it was 1945—a tin of “Poison Gas Ointment Number 1,” ready for an emergency which never came, but for which all good fighting citizens, including Maisie Rose, were bravely prepared. There was also a big box of Bienaimée face powder, a neat little sewing basket, an American candy bar, a pink comb, and a packet of cheap cigarettes.

By the table was a very cozy little green armchair. On the table was a fresh black-yellow-and-white check tablecloth, a pair of reading glasses, and a black handbag. Somebody had had a drink from a milk bottle; a half-full glass stood by the bottle. Mr. Narborough, who was pottering around the kitchen, too, went through the handbag and announced there was no wallet; neither could he find one anywhere else in the flat, and it looked as though the murderer had had sufficient presence of mind to take this with him.

I was scrupulously careful, of course, not to touch anything as I looked around. Mr. Cherrill would not have thanked me if he had discovered my fingerprints scattered about.

The scullery was not so spic-and-span as the kitchen. The charlady had not completed her morning’s chores before discovering the body. There was a basin of dirty washing in the sink. Some underclothes dangled on a little line outside the scullery window.

Back in the kitchen I contemplated a very highly colored calendar depicting Christ arrayed in gorgeous attire with a prayer printed underneath asking Sweet Jesus to have mercy on us and remember us. Mr. Narborough came and looked at this with me, muttered “Umph” and went back to sorting out some papers. Over the mantelshelf were several snapshots of babies and little children—evidently young nephews and nieces of the deceased. There was also a small photograph of Maisie Rose herself, clearly taken some years previously. It was not a good photograph, however, being speckled and underexposed, and gave little idea of how she had really looked. There was a funeral card propped beside it, “In Ever Loving Memory”—with ivy and a cross. And there was a Free French Christmas card, showing a poilu sitting on a hillock gazing pensively at a distant Eiffel Tower and murmuring “
Bon Noël
.” This card had been colored in by crayon, by hand.

I was musing upon all these clues to a rather confusing personality and thinking over what Henry Miller has written about prostitutes—their incurable sentimentality, good nature, thriftiness, domestic virtues, and so on—but I couldn’t recall if he had ever mentioned
devout
prostitutes. Henry Miller is by far the best writer on prostitutes. He is never sentimental about them, and some of his stories are truly very funny. I was thinking of one particularly funny one when CKS popped his head around the kitchen door and said, “Oh, there you are, Miss L. Come along, we’re getting to work.”

I trotted after CKS and the DDI down the little passage into the bedroom, which was crowded with burly gentlemen from the Yard and all Inspector Law’s paraphernalia of cameras, flashlights, and tripods. Mr. Cherrill gave me what is known as a Big Hello, and Dr. Simpson instructed me to stand by the fireplace to be out of the way.

The bedroom had been just as neat and tidy as the rest of the flat. There was a big double bed, a chest of drawers, and a dressing table, just as nice a mahogany suite as anybody could want. There were one or two little items perhaps not quite
comme il faut
: a box of contraceptives on the bedside table and a pair of ladies’ shoes dropped, spontaneously as it were, on their sides by the bed, as if kicked off in a moment of abandon. But there were some more very nice photos of the little nephews and nieces over the mantelpiece, and a portrait of Maisie Rose taken several years earlier, showing her to be a handsome brunette with a lively, pleasant face and wearing a cute little cap and a coat with an enormous fur collar.

On the whole it was a bourgeois, orderly, respectable enough room, not at all what the aspiring novelist would have conjured up. But on that March afternoon the scene in that room would have defied all powers of fiction, however imaginative the writer. That room that afternoon had to be seen to be believed.

The bed was tossed, disordered, and sodden with blood. Lying obliquely across it on her left side lay Maisie Rose, clad in a blue satin nightgown, her bloodstained hands raised to her breast and a cloth placed over her head. This was exactly how the charlady had found her, so the murderer must have put the cloth there; perhaps he didn’t like to see what he had done. Dr. Simpson now gently removed the cloth. The murdered woman’s head and face had been shattered by blow upon blow of the shillelagh. She really had been battered to death.

Upon the floor by the dressing table lay the shillelagh; a wooden club like a polished tree root. It was heavily bloodstained and had a long dark hair sticking to it, no doubt the dead woman’s.

Dr. Simpson, Mr. Beveridge, and Mr. Narborough now made a thorough examination of the room, and of the body as it lay on the bed. Some short hairs were removed from the dead woman’s body; they were proved subsequently to be hairs from off a man and were an important clue. The temperature of the body showed that death had taken place during the early hours of that morning. The injuries to the woman’s hands and forearms indicated she had put up a violent struggle to protect herself.

The body was presently removed to Southwark mortuary, and here a detailed autopsy was made on the remains of Maisie Rose. Although she had lived in such a clean little flat and had dressed so neatly and smartly, she concealed behind this façade an active gonorrhea and old syphilis. (I suppose one might refer to them in her case as mere occupational diseases.) Of course, dead and without any makeup she didn’t look in the least like her attractive photograph. Her skin was sallow, lined, and coarse, and she looked considerably more than the forty-four she had admitted to. In her favor, she had well-marked, strong eyebrows and a nose suggestive of humor. But otherwise there seemed little to say for her.

Of course, dead people never are attractive. The lovely waxen corpse, as CKS would sometimes observe to me, is purely a creation of fiction. The dead may occasionally be impressive, but never beautiful. Even little babies look like weary imitation flowers. As for murdered people, they invariably look dreadful, so perhaps I was altogether wrong to judge Maisie Rose now as she lay on the p.m. table. Dressed up in Leicester Square, well made up, under the brilliant electric lights, she no doubt looked a very different proposition. Or even sitting in her cozy kitchen, mending her stockings and thinking of her nephews and nieces.

On her rather coarse, thick, short fingers she wore a wedding ring and an engagement ring, and a solitaire on the middle finger of her right hand. Mr. Narborough said he had heard she had had a husband some time in her life, but the story of her life was very vague.

The story of her life was very vague…There she lay, this well-known West End prostitute, Irish born, of forty-odd years, unglamorous and diseased, one who had once been in the big money, but who “wasn’t very expensive or exclusive these last few years,” as DDI Narborough put it. She had had a tidy flat and a cozy kitchen full of family snapshots and a religious calendar and a funeral card. And she had been battered to death by a sensitive gentleman who had covered her bleeding and broken face with a cloth in order to mitigate the horror of the scene…

While CKS completed the postmortem, Mr. Narborough and I wrapped the shillelagh up in cellophane paper, a delicate operation, for we had to handle it very gingerly in order not to dislodge the long dark hair or leave fingerprints of our own on it. It was to be taken to the police laboratory for examination, together with the small hairs found on the deceased’s body.

The case looked a promising one. Investigations at first went well. We learned that the Yard had two suspects, both American servicemen. They were almost without doubt responsible for Maisie Rose’s death, but before the police had collected enough evidence to arrest them—but only just before—the two men crossed the Channel to fight the foe. Nothing could be done. They could not be traced and brought back to London, and so the word
UNSOLVED
had to be written against the murder of Maisie Rose.

What happened to her murderers nobody will ever know. Perhaps they met their just desserts in the form of German bullets. Maybe they were lucky and finally returned home as two worthy American veterans, to be welcomed royally and proudly toasted by some small town. Nobody will ever know.

Just as I shall never know about Maisie Rose, with her nice little flat in Little Heaven, her ancient but abysmal profession, her family snaps, her calendar with its prayer, “Sweet Jesus have mercy on us and remember us.” A Graham Greene character in every respect. Impossible for me, with my unsubtle Protestant background, to understand. Or is that so? Maybe we like to think too much. Maybe faith is indeed sufficient. In which case I need not bother my so-called brain with Maisie Rose, but merely breathe the prayer which somebody slipped into my hand once as I came out of a church in Montmartre, “
Sacré Cœur de Jésus, ayez pitié de nous
.”