Murders in the Blitz (14 page)
Eve had hardly been home for ten minutes when the air raid siren began to wail.
‘Bugger,’ she cried out vainly, ‘couldn’t you at least wait until I’ve had a bath?’
This was always happening. She’d get home from work at Mount Pleasant, planning a hot soak before making her meagre supper or going to the pub with Pete or Charlie, when an air raid warning would sound and she would have to gather together her emergency bundle of torch, blanket, pillow, water and a bit of food and with Jake on his lead she would set out for the shelter or the tube station. She could practically find these essentials in her sleep and often had to if the electricity was out. The most important thing was the torch as the streets were impenetrably dark. Even then the beam had to be shielded outside. People had been arrested, fined and even imprisoned for as little as striking a match to light a longed for cigarette in the blackout, however ridiculous that might seem. How could the pilot of a bomber see a lighted match from a few hundred feet above London? Like everyone else, Eve was getting totally fed up with it. When would this bloody war be over?
This evening there were people she knew in the shelter and they played a riotous game of cards before settling down to try and get some sleep. Someone was singing and playing an accordion farther along the crowded platform. The pungent stench of chemical toilets pervaded the air, but that was better than a couple of months ago, before the authorities had installed them in the interest of hygiene. Before that the men at least had used the railway line - the electricity was switched off for safety - to relieve themselves.
Trying to blot out the sounds of violence from outside, Eve pulled the pillow around her ears and attempted to sleep. Jake curled up close beside her. He had finally got used to these disturbances; at first he had whined with fear at the racket, but now he seemed to have come to accept that Eve would keep him safe.
They emerged from the shelter at about 4.30 am after the All Clear sounded; the sirens singing on a different note. Bleary eyed, the crowd shambled back to their beds to sleep for a few hours before work. Jake had snoozed in the shelter and now skittered around, wanting to play. He tried to drag Eve towards the Green, but somehow she summoned the strength to pull him home.
‘Not now, Jake. I’ve got to get some proper sleep,’ she said.
As she approached the building where she rented the basement flat, she heard the sound of a milkman’s float; the horse’s hoofs crunching through the newly fallen debris and broken glass from windows shattered in the night raid. How amazing it was, she thought, that everyone just keeps going, regardless of what the Germans throw at us. She was reminded of Malcolm who had met his end on his milk round, just doing his job in the early hours. Who could it have been that decided to kill him during his work? How did they manage to get away with it without being seen?
Eve crawled into bed with thoughts of the milkman with his horse and dray parading, harness jingling, through her mind. Before long she was fast asleep.
*
On Thursday morning Eve woke, washed and dressed in the usual rather drab clothing that she considered suitable for conducting enquiries in, and went to the police station to report to Inspector Reed. Charlie, who was supposed to meet her there, had not appeared yet, but she hadn’t expected him to be on time. She knew that he had spent the night with his latest lively blonde girlfriend - they were always blonde whether it was natural or came from a bottle - and would probably be late.
Inspector Reed received her report with his habitual aplomb and approved her plan to go to look at Malcolm’s house to see if that gave her any ideas as to what had happened to him.
‘Have you found out about the black market chaps he was dealing with?’ he asked. ‘I think they hang out in the pub.’
Eve couldn’t help wondering why, if they knew where to find the black market spivs, they didn’t just go and round them up and put them inside.
‘I know what you’re thinking, Miss Duncan,’ Reed said. ‘We’ve got leads on a lot of these people, thanks in part to your friend Charlie Spalding, but we’re just keeping our eyes on them for the time being. I want to watch and see who the people are supplying the goods, where it’s all coming from and so on. We’ll have a big round up one of these days, but in the meantime we’re waiting for them to dig their own graves,’ he finished with relish.
‘I understand, sir. We’ll ask around in the pub at lunchtime. Charlie may know something too, I’ll ask him.’
‘I think he almost certainly will,’ the inspector answered dryly. ‘Don’t let that young man lead you into trouble, Miss Duncan.’
Eve thought this a little unfair as Charlie was a reliable source of information to the police. It seemed odd to also regard him as a criminal. She walked to the front of the station and waited in the lobby for Charlie to arrive. She would have liked to poke around the Miller’s house alone and see what she could find. But the inspector insisted that she have someone to protect her and Charlie was all she had. The police were far too busy to allow a constable to accompany her. That is why she had this job, after all.
‘Sorry I’m late.’ Charlie rushed into the lobby after another fifteen minutes, unshaved, looking as if he had dressed in the dark, but without losing any of his glamour. ‘Where’re we going this morning, titch?’ He slung one of his long arms round Eve’s shoulder. She shrugged it off in annoyance. He might be her best friend, but his fecklessness drove her mad sometimes.
‘Come on, Charlie, don’t waste time, you’re bloody late as it is. We’re going to look at Malcolm’s house.’
Charlie ignored her admonition, as usual.
‘It was a big raid last night,’ he remarked, ‘Some house in Uxbridge Road, just a couple hundred yards down from me, copped a direct hit. Horrible mess. The ARPs are there now, clearing up.’ This cryptic message indicated that the authorities were removing the bodies and looking after the survivors, if any. The horrific sight of these cleanups had become almost commonplace and now anyone who was passing helped the wardens do their grisly work, picking up body parts and conveying them to the mortuary. The swimming baths in Blomfontein Road were being used as an emergency morgue to store bodies after bombing raids, until the authorities were able to identify them. Stacks of coffins were stored in the changing rooms and the Coroner used the manager’s office.
Charlie lived in a couple of squalid rooms above a barber’s shop in the Uxbridge Road, close to this latest atrocity. Eve knew he would have done what he could to help before coming to join her.
‘You were lucky then,’ said Eve without emotion, but thinking inwardly how close they all were every day to losing their friends and families to random death. She was tempted to pull Charlie closer to her in a gesture of friendship, but she hadn’t forgiven him for being late.
They hurried to Arminger Road and, using the key that the inspector had given Eve, they let themselves in.
The little house already showed signs of neglect. Dust hung in the cold airless rooms and covered every surface with a thin layer of grey. The noxious stench of decaying food emanated from the kitchen. Eve went in and found, in the larder, a curdled bottle of milk and some rancid bacon and mouldy bread. She poured the milk down the drain and wrapped the rotten food in old newspapers and put it all out in the dustbin on the pavement and the empty milk bottle on the step. This didn’t help much with the smell so she opened all the windows. It didn’t matter about the blackout curtains any more as there was no-one living here who would show a light. She reminded herself to tell the Housing Department that this place was now empty. It meant that someone made homeless by the bombing would have somewhere to live, even temporarily. The air raids had created a dire shortage of housing.
Whilst Eve was busy in the kitchen Charlie began to scan papers in the sitting room. The sparsely furnished room held a two-seater sofa and an armchair facing the fireplace, a low table and an ornately carved oak sideboard with a wireless on it. Apart from a few family photographs, an ashtray full of dog ends and a vase of dead daffodils, the surfaces were clear. It didn’t look as if Malcolm had spent much time there after his mother left for the nursing home. There was not even a discarded teacup.
Eve joined Charlie in the front room and they began to look through the sideboard drawers. These revealed a selection of cutlery and table linen. The bottom drawer of the three was more interesting. It contained the usual documents, birth and marriage certificates, for Malcolm and Dot and also for earlier Millers who were probably all deceased. Eve had noticed that no-one could ever throw away these important pieces of paper. After all, in time they were the only evidence that the people concerned had ever existed. Eve put the relevant documents to one side; they would probably be needed by the coroner or someone official. And Dot Miller would need to have her birth certificate. Eve would see that it was sent to Northampton for her.
A small shoebox that had probably once held a child’s footwear, housed a collection of fading photographs, their deckled edges curling up with age, showing elderly couples in their best Edwardian going-to-church outfits, looking sheepish for the camera, obviously longing to escape its scrutiny. There were also pictures of what was probably Malcolm as a baby, grinning jovially in his mother’s arms. A man appeared in some. That must be Malcolm’s deceased father, thought Eve.
At the bottom of the drawer, underneath the box of photos and a few other souvenirs, postcards from seaside resorts and the like, was a foolscap size brown envelope with a cardboard back that contained a collection of school photographs. Ellerslie Road Elementary School 1931, it said across the top of the first image of a couple of hundred children and several adults, their teachers presumably. The children at the back must have been standing on chairs and the little ones at the front were seated on the ground. The children looked as if they were aged between six and ten or eleven. Eve scrutinised the innocent young faces brimming with promise. Some had cheeky confident grins, shy ones had downcast eyes, good looking ones had knowing expressions, aware of their power.
‘Oh, look, Charlie, Malcolm’s school photo in 1931. I wonder which one is him.’
They scanned the picture more closely and could just discern a faint pencil mark like an arrow over one of the taller boys standing at the back.
‘That must be him. He was tall even then. Ten years ago, so he must have been eleven.’ Eve stared at the photograph, saddened by the fact that the lad in the photograph was now dead, his life snuffed out so young. She felt more determined than ever to find his killer.
The remainder of the school photographs were from a later era, when Malcolm was at Secondary School. He seemed not to have bothered to get one every year and they showed just the one class, not the whole school.
Having exhausted the contents of the sitting room, Eve and Charlie went upstairs. What was obviously Mrs Miller’s room, judging by the few feminine touches, was almost completely empty except for the furniture. An oak bedstead took up most of the space and someone had stripped it and rolled up the mattress, exposing the springs. A matching wardrobe stood against the opposite wall and a table with a mirror on top acted as a dressing table at the window. The curtains were firmly drawn as if whoever had cleared the room had felt that it should remain blacked out. Mrs Miller must have taken all her portable possessions with her to St. Barnabas as nothing personal remained.
The cottage had no bathroom, in common with many of the older houses in the area. A privy stood in the back yard and the little family would have used the kitchen sink to wash and shave. A galvanised tin bath hung on the wall out in the yard to be brought in on bath nights, where it would be stood in front of the sitting room fire and laboriously filled with water heated on the stove. Eve had never thought of her rooms as luxurious, but at least she had fixed plumbing, mains drainage and an inside toilet.
Charlie found Malcolm’s bedroom more interesting than the rest of the house even though it yielded little in the way of evidence. It seemed that Malcolm still clung to his boyhood hobbies and several carefully constructed balsa wood aeroplanes hung from strings attached to the ceiling. Perhaps his father had helped Malcolm to make them before he met his death.
Malcolm’s personal habits had not been very hygienic and dirty clothes were strewn around the room and across the floor. The chest of drawers held hardly any clothes and the wardrobe housed only a cheap grey suit and a pair of polished black shoes. His Sunday best, thought Eve. There were no books, photographs or anything to indicate what Malcolm did when he was not working or chasing girls. His bedside table drawer revealed a few ticket stubs from football matches and the dogs as well as the remains of some betting slips. Perhaps they should pay a visit to White City stadium and see if anyone there knew the young milkman. Eve knew that the criminal element, as well as using the pubs to meet, also gathered at football matches and race meetings. That line of enquiry might lead to something.
Taking what useful material they had found, the documents, the photographs, the ticket stubs and betting slips, Charlie and Eve left the house feeling that they had learned little.
They had been back in the police station only a few minutes when they realised that something was going on. Eve deposited the bundle of papers, now in a paper bag, and left it with the desk Sergeant. Pete Heller, Eve’s boyfriend, saw them in the lobby and came over. He bubbled with excitement, in a rush to leave on some mission.