Murder on the Home Front (33 page)

The soldier had meantime disappeared.

This was the story of the case which Mr. Greeno gave us. Then, as the drive was a long one, conversation in the car turned to other things, the car purred steadily on along the Essex roads, between dusty summer hedges and through quiet little towns, while the fine summer evening pleasantly waned. As we approached Colchester Mr. Greeno suggested we should stop there for dinner at the George. Dr. Simpson agreed; it seemed that on a previous murder job together they had made an excellent dinner at the George. So to the George we went.

That was my first visit to the George and Colchester. After the war I got to know the place well, for my sister Elizabeth spent several years scenic-designing for Robert Digby’s repertory company at Colchester, and many an evening have I sat in the George talking with members of the rep company and drinking cherry brandy. But I never went to the George without thinking of my first visit there with Chief Inspector Greeno, CKS, and Sergeant Hodge. We sat in the lounge, sipped sherry, and talked not about Michael Redgrave’s Macbeth and Olivier’s Mr. Puff and how ridiculous so-and-so had looked in those bishop’s gaiters in last week’s production of
Robert’s Wife
, but about murder. Murders past and murders present. And then we all went into the dining room and ate a very large dinner and talked about food, and holidays in Cornwall, and the Three Pilchards at Polperro, and had a very merry time. Rather difficult to believe we were on a murder investigation!

After the George came the road again. Essex gave way to Suffolk and sunset to twilight. The motion of the car made me feel sleepy, and the gentlemen were talking cricket, which was not a subject liable to keep me on tenterhooks, anyway. But at length we arrived at Ipswich, which naturally brought my thoughts around to Mr. Pickwick and the Lady in Curlpapers, and while I was reflecting cozily on these things the car stopped at the hospital and our party was joined by the county pathologist, Dr. Eric Biddle, formerly at Guy’s and a great personal friend of Dr. Simpson’s. He climbed gaily into the car, cheerful and charming. Conversation, which had flagged, received a new impetus from Dr. Biddle and he was soon talking, very delightfully, about the forthcoming election, the ancient Vikings, and Beethoven’s piano sonatas.

So on and on we went. Now we were gradually drawing toward the coast, and the sky, darkening as it was, assumed a translucent quality which betrayed that the sea was not so very far away. Presently we slackened in speed, the car was approaching Aldringham, at last we scrunched slowly along a rough and narrow lane and stopped outside a farm. Here two or three members of the Suffolk police awaited us. We got stiffly from the car and walked toward them.

It was now after ten at night; the light was the palest, dimmest gray and everything was silent as water, excepting for the crickets whirring in the grass. There was just enough light left for us to view the field where the murder had taken place. However, before we went to the field, Mr. Greeno (as always very definitely the man in command), asked if accommodation had been fixed for himself and Sergeant Hodge. The hapless officer who had arranged these things replied that accommodation had been fixed at a temperance hotel. Mr. Greeno quivered in the dusk.

“A temperance hotel?”

“Yes, sir. It was the most convenient place I could find for you.”

“Temperance hotels,” replied Mr. Greeno witheringly, “are never convenient. Find another hotel. Get on the telephone and book me rooms at the Dolphin.”

“I’ll try, sir.”

The rest of the party gurgled delightedly. Obviously all shared Mr. Greeno’s views on temperance hotels.

For my part I have never stayed at a temperance hotel and would literally have to be dragged into one, because a dictum instilled into me by my father went, “Never go to a temperance hotel, my dear child. People who don’t drink don’t know how to eat, either. The result is they get all bunged up with wind and water, and a bloke who is all bunged up with wind and water’s no good to anyone. Just one big bellyache. Keep off temperance hotels.”

Therefore I perfectly understood Mr. Greeno on temperance hotels.

The officer went off to telephone the Dolphin as instructed, and the rest of us walked a short distance farther up the lane to the stile; the stile on which the soldier in the black beret had loitered. “And nothing’s been seen of the fellow since the murder?” observed Mr. Greeno.

“No, sir. He’s made himself scarce. But we’ve had a man here all the time keeping a watch, in case.”

“Yes, he may come back. Anything more known about him?”

“Two or three attacks on women and girls by a soldier have been reported in the neighborhood recently, prior to the murder. It sounds as if they might be the work of the same chap.”

We came to a gate in the hedge and went into a rough meadow which led into the rye field. The rye was tall, ripe, and ready for cutting, growing thick and sere, the long-bearded heads hanging heavily and smelling bitter and dusty. We skirted around the field by the hedge, a local officer leading the way. “This is where she was first attacked, sir. There’s a bloodstain here, a pretty large one.” Somebody produced a torch, and CKS and Mr. Greeno bent over the dark ground. After examining this place we followed a track beaten through the rye, obviously made by the soldier trampling through the rye dragging the girl along the ground after him. Blood was sprinkled on the stalks of rye along this track, and these the detectives collected. “He pulled her by the feet, her head trailing,” commented CKS. We spent some time examining this track, collecting bloodstained pieces of rye and grass.

Then we came to the place where the dying girl had been left lying and had finally been found by the picnickers. Here there were more heavy bloodstains and we spent some time there while the two pathologists and the detectives peered minutely at everything. I was kept busy putting stalks of rye into the little buff envelopes and labeling these and jotting notes. The night was falling fast, and a hungry throng of mosquitoes had come out to feast on our legs. It was sheer torture, and to add to it I couldn’t slap or scratch myself or exclaim, but had to stand coolly taking notes and gumming down envelopes, as if there were no such things as mosquitoes. Furtively I rubbed my legs one against the other, swearing to myself. The rest of the party were protected somewhat by their trousers; undoubtedly my legs were the main target. But at last somebody did remark upon the insects. But Mr. Greeno and CKS were so engrossed they wouldn’t have turned a hair, I do believe, had they been attacked by a swarm of vampire bats.

It seemed a very long time to me before we left that rye field. It was now quite dark. We stumbled back into the lane and halted once more by the stile. Instructions were issued that a watch should be kept there all night and that if anybody came along they were to be closely questioned. I am glad I did not have to take part in this eerie vigil.

Then back our original party drove to Ipswich for the postmortem. The journey nearly sent me to sleep; it was after eleven and I always find travel by night a sleepy business. At Ipswich we went for a few moments into Dr. Biddle’s house, where we had hasty coffee and sandwiches. I made a quick attempt to tidy myself up, my hair was literally on end, but I was past the quick tidy-up stage, and I had to resign myself to spending the rest of the night looking like a headhunter from Borneo. I made a pass at myself with a lipstick and scurried off to join the gentlemen, who were all agog to get to the mortuary. Thence we repaired, just after midnight, and at 12:15 a.m. the two pathologists started the p.m.

This was in the p.m. room of the Suffolk County Hospital, but to be perfectly honest I do not remember the occasion very clearly, for the autopsy was a lengthy one and before long I was engaged in an awful struggle to keep awake. Not only to keep awake, but somehow or other to appear alert and bright-eyed and to take Dr. Simpson’s dictation.

The two pathologists of course were wide awake and intently bending over the body. Behind them Messrs. Greeno and Hodge, both also wide awake, peered intently, too. The surgeons who had operated on the girl, the anesthetist, and two house officers stood around the table in white surgery coats and heavy mufflers—it was very cold in the p.m. room—and tried to appear as lively as Dr. Biddle and CKS. The several police officers present allowed themselves occasional semistifled yawns—which was a relief to me—while the mortuary attendant blinked and swabbed, swabbed and blinked, and looked as if he took a very dim view of murders. But the most touching sight were three little students, Guy’s students, who happened to be at that time (under some emergency training scheme or the other) working at Suffolk County Hospital and who had turned gallantly out to watch CKS do this p.m. Poor creatures! Muffled in coats and scarves they stood there, like Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and I kept jerking myself awake by watching them jerking themselves awake.

The autopsy showed that the girl had been attacked with a stick or some similar heavy weapon. She had warded off the first blows with her hands, but had ultimately fallen to the ground and while lying there had received two further very savage blows to the head. After this she had been dragged along the ground, head trailing, through the rye. The cause of her death was shock from multiple fractures of the skull with contusion of the brain.

As a matter of fact that midnight autopsy was a tragic occasion for other reasons than those we knew at the time. The little body on the p.m. table aroused everyone’s pity, but we could not know that within a few weeks Dr. Biddle himself would die of violent head injuries, an emergency brain operation being performed in that same hospital in a desperate attempt to save him. He was an enthusiastic motorcyclist, and while driving a sidecar he had himself constructed, and of which he was very proud, he crashed head-on into a concrete road obstacle. Therefore the p.m. report which he and CKS constructed together was finally put before a jury by CKS alone.

But luckily that night—or rather morning—the two pathologists, who were also such great friends, did not know that this was the last murder case they were going to work on together. When the p.m. was over we said good-bye to the members of the hospital staff who had attended the postmortem, and to Winkin, Blinkin, and Nod, and returned to Dr. Biddle’s house. He wanted us to have something more to eat before the journey back to London, but CKS had discovered there was a train at two-forty-something-or-the-other, and so he and I made one of our famous whirlwind departures. Mr. Greeno put his car at our disposal and we vanished into the night, leaving Mr. Greeno and Dr. Biddle joking together in the roadway…

The two-forty-something-or-the-other was late, and the distinguished pathologist and secretary waited for it, perched disconsolately side by side on an empty luggage truck on the windy deserted platform, and shuddered. Presently along came a goods train, the longest I’ve ever seen, an infinite line of trucks rocking along like a procession of elephants linked trunk-by-tail, I thought, all wearing heavy metal anklets and clanking and mumbling and clinking and grumbling their way to the next town and the next circus. And then they had gone, and their metallic bumps and jostlings had dwindled into the darkness, and after what felt like an age our train arrived. We seemed to be the only passengers on it. We fell into a carriage and dozed dismally and uncomfortably, like two wretched strays, all the way to London.

“Well, if this is what being a detective means, you can keep it,” I thought at one point, and then fell into a bitty doze again.

At Liverpool Street we were met by a Flying Squad car—oh blessed vehicle! sleek and shiny and driven by a detective who was well known to us, for he had accompanied us on several country jobs himself. He looked spruce and natty and lively as a lark, so that you would have thought it four in the afternoon instead of four in the morning. We made a last, brave attempt to appear frisky ourselves. Nevertheless, we sank rather limply into the seats of the car as we were whisked away through the city by our friend, who was chuckling over a drunk he had just trodden on in a doorway. “A Canadian. Just mumbled ‘Um-um’ and went on sleeping, peacefully as they come. They certainly breed ’em tough.”

“You’re on a spell of night duty?”

“Yes. Sometimes we hit lively spots, but it’s all very quiet tonight.”

We drove down the empty, silent streets, glistening and cold as steel in the earliest early light. Outside Mansion House a constable stood on point duty, even though there wasn’t any traffic. “Keep a constable on duty outside the Mansion House all night every night,” explained our driver. “Always somebody on duty there.” In that deserted roadway the man looked weird and fantastic, standing motionless, gestureless, controlling traffic that never came in a London that appeared completely dead.

About ten past four I had the exquisite, glorious, miraculous delight of laying me down in my bed. And then it was morning, an alarm clock was ringing, and Poplar mortuary was waiting with three p.ms. to be done at nine sharp…

The soldier in the black beret was finally arrested for little Daphne’s murder, and on the last day of October CKS and I drove to Bury St. Edmunds for the trial. It was a very sunny, golden day, and we drove through Epping Forest, where the trees too were golden with autumn leaves. We passed through Bishop’s Stortford and from thence to Newmarket, where races were being held. Crowds of people were going to the races, including several gaunt old gypsy women in long black cloth coats trimmed with the famous “mog” (cat). I thought secretly I would have liked to have spent the day at Newmarket while CKS tootled on to the trial alone (not the thoughts of a Perfect Secretary by any means), but when we reached Bury it had a sound and scent of assizes, lawyers, and judges which was positively nineteenth-century and Dickensian. Sergeant Buzfuz might have appeared at any moment, I felt, along with Messrs. Snubbin, Skimpin, and Phunky, and we had lunch in an hotel thronged with red-faced English legal types who could all have sat as models to the artists Cruikshank or Phiz.