Murder on the Home Front (31 page)

Mr. Hatherill is famous at the Yard for, among many things, his great command of modern languages. He is a much-traveled police officer of international repute. I had heard much about Mr. Hatherill but had never met him before. Dr. Simpson introduced me to him, and we shook hands. The eyes behind the horn-rimmed spectacles had the usual penetrating Scotland Yard quality.

The murder at “Charley Brown’s” was in the classical Limehouse tradition. The murderer was a carousing seaman and the victim was a customer of the pub. He had been stabbed in a brawl which had taken place at “Charley Brown’s” the previous night. “Always was a dangerous job, keeping order at ‘Charley Brown’s,’ ” murmured West. The tale had an up-to-date twist, however, for the brawling seamen this time were U.S. naval enlisted men.

Mr. Hatherill went to the p.m. room to take a quick look at the dead man, and I went, too. The victim was well built, in his midthirties. He wore gray flannel trousers and a bloodstained shirt. He lay stiff and toes up on the p.m. table. “Before the autopsy we’ll take a look at the scene of the trouble,” said Mr. Hatherill. He had already been to the dockyard to interview the sailors concerned. “They’re only kids. But they were certainly armed to the teeth when they went out for a drink last night! Knives, knuckle-dusters [brass knuckles], everything. Astonishing.”

We got into our respective cars and drove, a rather grim little procession, through Chinatown to the gray, dismal, dusty tavern. All the windows of the establishment, like all the other windows in that bomb-rocked district, had been blown in and their glass was replaced by thin boarding. The place, therefore, wore that blank, blind expression so common among London buildings during the war.

Coroner’s officer West knocked at the door of this moribund place; a pale, scared, red-eyed woman opened it. We were shown into the big public bar. It was dark and in considerable disorder; no attempt had been made to clear up since the night before—which had obviously been some night. The air was acrid with the smell of stale beer and cigarette smoke. Laden ashtrays were scattered around, dirty glasses, emptied bottles. Chairs and tables huddled in perturbed groups. Tatty Oriental hangings on the walls and big Japanese lanterns dangling like dispirited mobiles from the ceiling added to the littered atmosphere of the place. At the farther end of the bar, however, was a clearing in the disorder. Here, starkly, stood a plain wooden chair beside a large pool of blood.

The publican now hurried in to tell us about the happenings of the previous night. He too was pale and shaken in appearance, and his shirt was ripped in several places by the sailor’s knife—for there had nearly been two murders.

Apparently, the previous evening, a party of young U.S. naval seamen had come in to “Charley Brown’s” and, as the evening had worn on, had become very difficult. Finally they had started a brawl, so the publican had called upon a customer to perform the difficult duties of chucking them out—which he did with consequences that were to prove only too tragic for himself a moment later. Together both publican and customer routed the U.S. Navy and they were bolting the door and breathing “Good riddance” when the sailors, who had lurched away up the street, returned. One thrust his arm through the thin emergency paneling of the blitzed door (it had been a door with glass panels originally), and in his hand this sailor held a knife with which he stabbed at random, ripping the publican’s shirt and fatally wounding the other.

The stabbed man was assisted to the chair already described…the pool of blood on the floor told the rest of the story.

The publican and his daughter answered Mr. Hatherill’s questions and watched Dr. Simpson as he produced his tape measure and took measurements of the doorway in which the stabbing occurred. But there was not very much to examine, really, in this dark, dank old bar, haunted by other days and other sailors and flickering now, by this blind and swaggering stabbing, into a last flame of its former fire. We said good morning to Charley Brown’s shirt-slashed successor and went back to the mortuary.

The stab wound of the dead man was deep and had been quickly fatal. The U.S. sailor may have been little more than a kid, as Mr. Hatherill had said, but he hadn’t brandished his knife in the air merely playfully.

So the evening at “Charley Brown’s” culminated in a U.S. naval court martial in offices overlooking Regent Street. There were assembled U.S. naval officers bulky in gold braid, and able-bodied seamen bristling with revolvers, and there was a general atmosphere of bustle and efficiency which seemed very impressive until I got involved in it and found myself, on CKS’s behalf, having to fill in umpteen forms in triplicate, when I decided there was an unnecessary quantity of red tape.

The courtroom itself was guarded by a gentleman heavily swagged with immense holsters, who took a very dim view of me. He didn’t see why I needed to go into the courtroom at all and eyed me suspiciously whilst I, with equal suspicion, eyed his holsters. Finally he allowed me in. But having got me in there he didn’t know where to seat me.
Not
with CKS and the other professional witnesses, because I wasn’t a professional witness.
Not
with the court shorthand writers.
Not
with the legal gentlemen. Where did one seat a pathologist’s secretary? He looked around, humming and hemming, and finally decided on the Press Bench. Next minute I was squeezing in beside my old acquaintance,
News of the World
chief crime reporter Norman Rae.

He gave me a terrific wink. “Sit down and behave yourself or you’ll get us all shot.”

I had never been in a courtroom like it before. The naval high-ups glittered in a row one side of the room, the professional witnesses, lawyers, press, and the rest sat on the other, while on a chair in the center lolled the prisoner, a boy of nineteen, absorbed in reading a pile of “funnies” and paying no attention to the trial whatsoever.

Norman Rae drew my attention to the shorthand machines the Americans were using; something between typewriters and tape machines combined. “Your boss is all a one for speed and efficiency. Next thing you know he’ll be getting you one of those.”

“Next thing you know you’ll be using one yourself.”

“I shall hand in my resignation before you catch me with a contraption like that. Life is complicated enough as it is.”

Dr. Simpson was now called upon to give evidence. There was no witness box; he was permitted to stride up and down—if he chose—before the braided gentlemen while two lawyers, prosecution and defense, each in turn roved around him in cagey circles, peppering him with Humphrey Bogart–ish questions. CKS, endowed with a great sense of humor, and at the same time nourished in the Englishman’s tradition of formality and respect for ceremony on serious occasions, was seized, I perceived, with both amusement and amazement. Nevertheless, he maintained an admirably deadpan countenance, even when they handed him the fatal weapon and said, “Now, Doc, just show the court how
you
think the stabbing was done.”

He took the knife, considered, then struck a realistic pose and made several stabbing gestures.

“Is this a dagger that I see before me, the handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee…”

We all watched this dramatic performance with keen interest, excepting the prisoner, who chewed gum and selected another “funny.”

The verdict was one of guilty, and the prisoner was sentenced to the electric chair. But because of his youth, President Roosevelt intervened and a long term of imprisonment at Sing Sing was substituted.

Thus ended the stabbing at “Charley Brown’s.” Not the first stabbing there, by any means, but perhaps the last. For Limehouse has become decorous and quiet; a respectable neighborhood, cleaned up and polished and law-abiding. The undesirables of the capital have moved to other parts, farther west, with excursions into the south and north. If you want to live in a really well-behaved part of the world these days, where you can rely on having neighbors who never break the law and respect the steady, bourgeois virtues, you should move eastward to take up residence in Limehouse.

CHAPTER
25

Coming through the Rye

Dr. Simpson, in between postmortems, managed to do a great deal of lecturing and teaching, and as time went by more and more examining. Some of the students suspected I knew the questions he proposed setting them (actually I didn’t), and a few bolder spirits used to waylay me in the Guy’s quadrangle and make nervous attempts to wangle information out of me.

Their answers to the written section of the forensic medicine examination gave CKS considerable entertainment, for medical students, like women novelists, never seem to be able to spell. There was one youth who gave particular delight, I remember, for, during an account of the effects of carbon-monoxide poisoning, he observed that, “Many a night watchman has come to an untimely end whilst sitting in his hut gazing pensively at a red-hot brassiere.”

I enjoyed the examination periods because I found myself with spare time on my hands and was able to go shopping, or swimming, or poking around London or the secondhand bookshops. On one free afternoon I climbed the Monument, taking with me a girlfriend from Dr. Ryffel’s department. She plodded doggedly up the three-hundred-odd steps, while I panted up in front of her, gaspingly giving her details about the Plague, for she was a German and ignorant of London’s history. The ascent was a dark, dank, and airless one, and we were thankful to emerge at the top, on a narrow parapet well enclosed with railings. I remarked, “It’d be very difficult to commit suicide from up here,” and my friend paled a little and said yes, she supposed it would. Then she peeked between the railings over the edge of the parapet and went a little paler. I was enraptured and intoxicated by the feeling of height and space and exclaimed repeatedly, “Isn’t it heavenly? Oh, wouldn’t you just adore to be a pigeon, able to
launch
yourself into the air?” With appropriate launching gestures. She sank back from the dizzy view and shook her head. “Shall we eat our sandwiches up here?” says Lefebure, eagerly. “No, no. I think we should eat them on London Bridge.”

I was very sorry to have to tear myself finally from the wonderful view and make the descent of those horrible, dank stairs. It was an excellent threepenny-worth of exercise and panorama, I must say. It would have been cheap at nine pence.

On some of the slack examination days I used to “catch up with the filing,” to use a Simpson expression. I had a small numbering mechanism with which I used to imprint the filing cards, and as I was dealing with figures running in odd thousands, and as thousands get me quite flummoxed, so that I quickly forget even how to count, I always emerged from these filing sessions feeling like a cowpuncher who has been trying to brand a herd of stampeding steers. Indeed, the nervous strain of those periods spent “catching up with the filing” did more damage to my nervous system than any gruesome mortuary scene.

These filing sessions, too, always left me deeply depressed, for they made me realize what a mug I really was, and how far, far removed from being a Perfect Secretary. “A secretary,” they had taught us at secretarial college, “is made or marred by her files.”

That last summer I spent with CKS brought us a remarkable crop of murders. They were all in the country and entailed trips to places as far apart as Plymouth and the Isle of Ely.

The Plymouth job, I must admit, CKS went to without me. It was a very long journey and he decided to make it alone. I was sorry, because just before the war I had worked on a paper at Plymouth and had had very happy times there, so I felt disappointed not to be able to revisit the scene of my first experiences as a junior reporter. But CKS went off by the late afternoon train from Waterloo and was back by midday next day, looking a trifle worn.

The case, to use his own words, was a sordid one. A girl of fourteen years, not inexperienced with men, had been found lying strangled by the side of the military road leading from Bloom Hill to Egg Buckland. (I had done a lot of horse riding around there with one John Dingle, a fellow reporter, whose main ambition seemed to be to break every bone he possessed.)

The murdered girl, young as she was, had already become known locally as a sort of unprofessional prostitute. Her murderer was a little sailor, but although the police knew his identity they were never able to get enough of the right kind of evidence to arrest him. So the little sailor went on his way, no doubt rejoicing.

CKS was rather disappointed at the nonarrest of this sailor. But in wartime murders have a habit of ending inconclusively. We had one case that summer which could never actually be proved a case of murder, although it seemed suspiciously like it.

The case concerned a Waaf who was found drowned in the River Nene on the Isle of Ely. Chief Inspector Thorp and the local police struggled with this baffling case for five weeks and in the end were obliged to leave it as unsolved.

The dead Waaf was a young married woman of twenty-eight. She was found in the River Nene, described as a dangerous river, by a local constable. The body, when found, had been in the water for about a fortnight. Dr. Simpson thought that death was due to drowning, but it was difficult for him to say so categorically because the body was so badly decomposed. He found nothing to suggest foul play, but again the state of decomposition made any definite conclusion very difficult.