A Commonplace Killing (8 page)

“L
il! Lil! Wait for me!” Evelyn was pink and breathless with the effort of catching her up. “I thought it was you. I saw you from the other side of the road!”

“Glory! If I’d known you were coming out, you could have saved me a job,” she said. “Honestly, Evvie, you never think. Do you know, I had to queue nearly two hours for bread.” She held up a string bag containing a small split tin loaf, a few buns, a slab of stale fruit cake and a parcel of chopped meat slices. “All morning, and look what it’s got me. And the boy in Jolly’s was very rude to me, just because I wasn’t sure if I had enough points. ‘Don’t you know your entitlement after all this time, madam?’ I ask you.”

“Cheeky little sod,” said Evelyn. She had linked arms with her and was steering them both through the crowds. “Got any cigs, Lil?”

“No, I haven’t. And you shouldn’t smoke in public. It looks very common. Didn’t your mother teach you anything?” Evelyn smiled back at her blankly. There really was no point: the girl would not be told. “I was thinking of walking down to the coster at Finsbury Park Station. It’s very rough down there, but I heard a woman in the greengrocer’s say that you can get lettuces there for ninepence.”

“No,” Evelyn said.

“I wasn’t going to pay a shilling for one the size of an orange.”

“Ooh! Hold up a minute…” The girl had stopped in the middle of the pavement, forcing everyone else to go around her. She was turning over the side of one of her shoes. “Oh, I can’t hardly walk in these, Lil. Innit awful? I feel like a tramp going out in them, honest I do.”

She looked at the girl’s long brown legs extending from her little white ankle socks. The legs were the product of hours spent sun-bathing in the backyard with her skirt hitched up. She really was very common.

“There’s ever such a nice pair in Lilley and Skinners…” the girl was saying. She raised an eyebrow but said not one word, while Evelyn appeared to consider something. “Here, Lil,” the kid said after a moment, “why don’t you give me a couple of your mum’s points?”

She hated the way the girl called her ‘Lil’.

“You’re joking, aren’t you?”

“I’ll pay you for them.” Evelyn’s plump, pretty face was
puckered
into a fawning smile.

What with? The kid hadn’t had a job for months.

“You know, if you didn’t keep turning them over like that they’d do you for years.”

“I’ll give you a quid for five of your mum’s coupons.”

“Where are you going to get a pound from?”

“I’ll put your mum on the po every day for a month, and put the talc on her bedsores.”

Evelyn hated seeing to the bedsores more than she hated anything else.

“Evelyn, I am not giving you any of my mother’s coupons.”

Beneath her blonde sausage-roll curls the kid was scowling at her. People were staring. She hoped there wouldn’t be a scene. She hated any sort of scene.

She smiled tightly.

“You’re making a terrific spectacle, you know. It’s too hot, Evelyn, and I’m exhausted. I’ve been on my feet all morning tramping about the place, enduring the rudeness of Saturday boys and greengrocers and bakers and goodness knows who else.”

She continued along the Holloway Road, leaving the girl behind her on the street. A nice lettuce would be just the ticket. She was imagining Evelyn standing there; it would probably take five minutes before some fellow spotted her and asked her if she was alright. He’d compliment her and suggest that they go and have a cup of tea somewhere and the silly girl would let him run his hands up her leg beneath the table while she asked him if he had any clothing coupons.

Oh for goodness sake! You’re not her mother, she told herself. But it was no good. She stopped and turned round, relieved to see Evelyn a few feet from where she had just left her, looking at the furs in a shop window.

“Evvie.” The girl looked up at her, expectant. “Why don’t we go and get a cup of tea somewhere? I could do with a nice sit down. I’m all in.”

The girl gripped her arm and they walked the rest of the way to Nag’s Head and turned down Seven Sisters Road. The café was a few yards ahead of them on the other side of the road, opposite Woolworths, and when she saw it she realised that she hadn’t had anything to eat or drink since first thing. It was no wonder she was feeling so queer. A cup of tea; a teacake or a roll and butter: she’d feel better then. They crossed the street. A Number 43 bus passed along the top of the road on its way to somewhere better, and she thought: maybe this time Evelyn will do as she is told. Maybe it would all be alright. Maybe the ninepenny lettuces would be green and crisp and the size of a football; like they used to be.

I
t didn’t matter that it was a Sunday. By definition, crime is no observer of propriety, and observance is for respectable people, living decent lives, and there’s never anything decent about a police station, no matter what day of the week it is. The front desk at “N” Division HQ in Stoke Newington was its usual hive of suspicion, recrimination, skulking and general
deplorability
. The desk sergeant, stood behind the ledger desk, barely had the opportunity to salute the guv’nor as he walked in at the front door: two telephones were jumping off their cradles in front of him, and a third was clamped to his ear. They exchanged a nod as Cooper made his way through the huddle of local characters, some emitting silent menaces, some greeting him with a rueful shrug, the hall ringing with various sides of numerous convoluted stories, wheedling, insinuating, carping, ingratiating, imploring. Beat coppers sidled past him, some of them looking as shifty as the crooks they were escorting. Everyone was guilty of something; it was contagious. A stout middle-aged woman in a dress that was a couple of sizes too small for her was negotiating with a harassed flatfoot, assuring him that none of it was down to her and it would be a mercy if those who were to blame were held to account.

Cooper avoided eye contact. He knew a good deal more about most of the villains in that corridor than was proper. He knew where that one bought his paper; which brand of cigs that one favoured; how many sugars the chap in the checked cap had in his tea and the chemist where he bought his
indigestion
remedy. He knew that Johnny Bristow called on the girl of that one over there whenever the fellow was out of town, and he was certain that one day he would run across that fellow and that piece of information would prove very valuable indeed. The criminal underworld was a sort of village; despite being presently flooded with deserters and demobees with nothing better to do than cause trouble, it was still a close-knit community and information had a habit of leaking like water from a sieve.

“Mr Cooper, Mr Cooper!”

He carried on walking as a weasel-faced Irishman pursued him along the corridor, plucking at the sleeve of his jacket. Like all narks, Short-time Jackie was a fount of information on any crime that didn’t involve him.

“I’m afraid it’ll have to wait, Jackie, whatever it is,” he said. “I’m busy.”

Short-time Jackie carried on walking, looking about him, nodding at a couple of prick-the-garter merchants who, slinking down even further on the bench they were sitting on, sneered in response. Jackie tapped the side of his pickled nose with his finger.

“I might have something for you, Mr Cooper, sir,” he said in a whisper. “A certain someone has had a tickle, if you follow my meaning.” He looked over one shoulder and then the other, and when he spoke again his voice had dropped even further into his boots. “A nice tickle, I should say.”

Cooper stopped walking and absent-mindedly slipped the nark five bob. Jackie winked a rheumy eye.

“O’Leary’s up at Archway,” he said. “I’ll be there any night you care to drop by, Mr Cooper, sir. They got gin. On tap.”

“I’ll see what I can do, Jackie, but I’m busy.”

“You’re a true gent, Mr Cooper, sir; one of the best.” Cooper continued along the corridor with the encomium ringing at his back. “No. I tell a lie: the very best. You’re on the level, sir, God bless you, and that’s the truth.”

Crumpled detectives littered the main incident room; men like him: badly shaved, balding, dressed in ill-fitting, indistinct blue suits, and crammed into a smoky room the colour of putty. They were making telephone calls, drinking tea, smoking, pinning things on to large noticeboards; they were slumped in attitudes of resignation, frustration, dismay, their elbows leaning on desks cluttered with overflowing ashtrays,
unfinished
cups of cold tea, stacks of reports.

“We’ve picked up a murder,” he told his number two, who sighed dutifully. “Afraid so, old man; some poor tart rather carelessly got herself strangled last night.”

“People are so inconsiderate,” said the detective inspector.

“Aren’t they though.”

“Don’t they know there’s a crime wave?”

Cooper grinned lightly. “Frank Lucas is running things for me, but obviously I shall have to give it some of my attention.”

The number two was a paunchy fellow of about thirty-five, but looked older; he had only just returned to the service after four years in the army, years which had intensified a tendency to mask chronic dyspepsia with an unconvincing cheeriness.

“Just tell me what needs doing, chief,” he said, suppressing the need to wince from the pain of an incipient ulcer.

Cooper handed over the samples. “These need to go to Hendon.”

The detective inspector winced again. “This afternoon? There won’t be anyone there, you know. It’s Sunday.”

“Well, I wanted half an hour alone with this first, in any case,” said Cooper. He held up the bag containing the mackintosh. “Any chance of a cuppa?”

Cooper took himself into a small side room and spread out the mackintosh on a large table set beneath trammels of pipes, thick with paint, running along the walls and across the ceiling. He scrutinised every inch of the mackintosh through his glass until he had a crick in his neck, and the garment was covered in careful crayon circles: green for grass stains; yellow for what looked like semen. There was no blood that he could see, which was perhaps odd given the circumstances, but he quickly
discovered
a short hair, of a different colour to the victim’s, stuck to the inside of the collar. There was also a dry-cleaning ticket pinned to one of the seams, and he sighed to himself as he placed the latter in an evidence bag, imagining how Lucas would respond to being told to trace the laundry: the sceptical pout; the sharp draw on the ever-present fag; the economic lift of the eyebrows. And doubtless, Upstairs would be of a like mind.

But then, he told himself, murder is murder.

When he was quite certain that he had exhausted the
possibilities
of the mackintosh, he handed it over to the DI to be sent to the lab, and went into his office to pass a cursory eye over the deep pile of notebooks belonging to the “N” Division detectives serving under him. He was supposed to read and sign them off each week but he was always behind with his
paperwork
. Usually he would do anything to avoid catching up, but he needed a distraction – something to occupy his mind so that he didn’t keep telephoning Lucas.

The waiting is always the worst part of an investigation. He had men going through the local lists of missing women. They had sent a good description of the victim to Scotland Yard to be circulated by teleprinter to every police station in the country. There were photographs for the Police Gazette. They were conducting house-to-house inquiries in the area around the murder site, and a search of every front garden and dustbin between it and the nearest main road. The woman’s fingerprints were being checked, and in a day or two, if she was known to the police, they might even have a name. In three or four days, if she was not known to the police, the whole exercise would have been an utter waste of time and manpower. You just never knew. You simply had to wait: knowing that every minute of waiting meant even more distance between you and the murderer.

He knew the theory, had assisted on any number of murder investigations, and led a few on his own account; but all of this experience had taught him only that he lacked the flair, the intuition that separates a first-rate murder investigator from the dull, work-a-day plod. He was tenacious, occasionally given to flashes of insight; but when it came to homicide all he really knew to do was follow procedure.

He sighed and tossed away the last of the notebooks. Detectives, he decided, provide a desultory, barely literate read, with their unavailing tallies of unsatisfactory interviews with pawky snouts. It was depressing to learn of crimes that had yet to be committed; of the lorry loads waiting to be hijacked; the coupons hitherto unstolen; the shops unlooted; the safes uncracked – knowing that there was bally-all that you could do about most of it. And even if there was… He was painfully aware of the rest of his life stretching out before him in a long
never-ending
stream of crime report sheets. After a few moments of thinking like this, he rubbed his eyes back to alertness and removed his feet from the desk. Then he picked up his pen, unscrewed the barrel and recorded a few scant pieces of
information
: the sort of reassuring twaddle that the detective
superintendent
liked to see. When he had done this, he took himself down to the cells to see how the interviews with the two crooks they had nabbed last night were going.

If there was ever need of proof just how much CID had suffered since the war, it was writ plain on the boyish, worried face of the junior detective sergeant – a fellow named Quennell. It takes a good long while to train a detective, and a lot of good men weren’t coming back for one reason or another, and there had been very little recruitment for the duration. The remainder were not always of the highest calibre. Quennell was still wet behind the ears, smooth-chinned, no more than a few months out of uniform and a good few fathoms out of his depth.

“Have you been playing them off against one another?” Cooper asked. “Telling each of them that the other one has landed him in the – you know what – up to his filthy neck.” Quennell blinked back at him, doubtful. Cooper took a slurp of tea. “I don’t have time to help you on this, Quennell. We picked up a murder today.”

“Oh yes, sir, I heard about that.”

Cooper sighed.

“Let me have a word,” he said.

He went into the first room. Little Jimmy Dashett was one of those to whom war had given a swagger, a sense of entitlement: nothing more than a cosh-boy, the hooligan sort who is nothing without a knuckleduster in his pocket. Cooper knew
instinctively
that there was little chance of extracting any worthwhile information from him. To begin with, Jimmy would know nothing about the racket; and it was evident that although the stupid kid had grown up before his time, he still had a lot to learn about how things worked. He told him to take his feet off the table and sit up straight. With a good deal of sneering and ill-graced shifting, the kid complied.

“I’m not interested in you, Jimmy,” he said. “You’re small fry as far as I’m concerned. I’m after bigger fish. Tell me about Johnny Bristow.”

The kid smirked.

“What about him?” he said.

“We know all about his rackets.”

“So what do you need me to tell you for then?”

Cooper was always unerringly polite when interrogating prisoners, and had never found it necessary to raise his voice when doing so, no matter how wearing it was hearing the same old lies and excuses over and over again. However, he had to suppress the urge to clip Little Jimmy Dashett round the ear.

“We already know about the eggs, Jimmy,” he said. One hundred and eighty thousand of them coming up from the West Country, on their way to a Ministry of Food warehouse. “That’s a big operation. A job like that requires money up front; it takes planning. Oh, you’ll have your part to play, I don’t doubt, but what do you stand to get from it? A pony? A few petrol coupons?”

“You won’t get me that way, bogey,” said Little Jimmy, who had evidently seen too many gangster pictures.

“I’m not trying to get you, Jimmy; I’m just wondering why you should be looking at six months’ stir. A bright boy like you? Why should you break your mother’s heart? Spending Christmas sitting on the edge of a hard bunk, staring at the floor, eating cold mashed potato – when all the while the real villain is out there, jitterbugging the night away, probably with your girl?”

Cooper stopped talking and drank his tea. He could see that Jimmy was thinking about it, weighing up his options. Cooper was quite content to sit there in silence as he finished his tea, set the cup and saucer neatly upon the table and sat back in his chair with his arms folded in front of him. He could have waited all afternoon, but not so the young detective sergeant.

“Answer the detective inspector,” Quennell said. Little Jimmy Dashett lifted up his head and levelled a huge gob of spit at him. He was smirking triumphantly as the flatfoot standing beside him grabbed him by the shoulders and hauled him to his feet.

“I never come copper on anyone,” he was shouting above the kerfuffle of scraping chairs and table legs, “and I ain’t starting now.”

Cooper handed the boy detective a handkerchief and looked levelly at Little Jimmy Dashett.

“Seems you can’t do some people a favour,” he said. The kid looked away first. “Charge him with assaulting a police officer. I’m going to see if we can get more sense out of his chum.”

The other crook was an old hand at the game of interrogation, well known across north London as Quiet Sid, on account of his being the most garrulous individual in the whole Metropolitan Police area. Quiet Sid made Max Miller look like Helen Keller, and was the sort of villain detectives like: the sort who cannot keep their mouths shut no matter what the stakes; the sort who like to brag to anyone who will listen. Cooper was very good at listening.

“I suppose I’m under starter’s orders,” Quiet Sid said even before Cooper had had a chance to settle into his chair. Within minutes Sid had come up with a whole scenario in which he knew everyone and everything; every angle of every dodge.

“The front’s a barber’s shop on Fonthill Road,” he was saying, “little four-by-two running the game – goes by the name of Manny Cohen…”

“Every policeman in London knows Manny Cohen,” sighed Cooper. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Sid fingered another crook, a rival of Johnny Bristow for supremacy in north London.

“You would not believe the extent of the operation, Mr Cooper. The other week they shifted a million cigs – foreign import. They took them out of the boxes and sold ’em loose – export, see: foreign – not Turks or Greeks…”