Read Murder on the Home Front Online
Authors: Molly Lefebure
After lunch we strolled around the ruins of the old castle and then it was time to go into court. The courtroom was dark, somber, crowded, and very stuffy. While we were waiting for the trial to begin, we were told some anecdotes about the prisoner, the soldier in the black beret, and the reign of terror he had imposed upon the women of the villages near Aldringham in the weeks preceding the murder.
During the war often the strangest things happened so that even the sleepiest little country villages felt the impact of the violent world around them.
When the prisoner appeared in the dock he was smiling broadly and seemed as proud and pleased as pie. He continued to beam all the way through the trial, and it was no surprise when he was found guilty but insane. He was sentenced to Broadmoor.
We left Bury in the late-afternoon sunlight and drove past broad fields of sugar beet, where cheerful parties of Italian prisoners of war, in shabby old uniforms, were taking up the beet crops to load onto trucks. The sun sank, the light dwindled, and a thick fog arrived. We also became involved in a fierce stream of traffic returning to London from Newmarket, so our journey home was highly unpleasant, driving virtually blind in the fog, only able to distinguish with difficulty the rear light of the car ahead of us, and the fog slowly freezing us. And it had been such a lovely day, almost like summer. But now, with a vengeance, we were driving into darkness, fog, London, and winter. October was gone; it was November. The last country murder of that summer season was finished, ahead of us lay fogbound London and all its sooty crime. So we drove back into the Smoke.
Time: the early hours of an autumn morning. Place: Lambeth Bridge. Character on stage: a police constable. He is walking slowly across the bridge and approaches a small brick National Fire Service pump house, disused now that the war is over. The constable flashes his torch methodically at the pump house and then flashes it hastily again, going close to look. There is a narrow aperture in the wall of the pump house, and through this aperture somebody has stuffed the body of a rather large man. The constable looks again, just to make certain, and then hurries off to a call box.
Later in the morning: a number of detectives arrive, headed by square-set, rosy-faced Chief Inspector Chapman. With him is Dr. Keith Simpson. They spend a considerable time poking around the pump house. Then they drive away, and an undertaker’s van comes up and the body of the large man is with difficulty removed from the pump house and taken to Southwark mortuary…
Mr. Chapman was present at the p.m. The dead man had been shot through the back of the head with a small-caliber revolver at very close range. Mr. Chapman, at that early stage, could only tell us that the Yard thought the deceased was probably a taxi driver named Everitt, and it was suspected he had been mixed up with the black market.
After the p.m. Mr. Chapman returned to the Yard for a conference on the case, while CKS and I went around to Guy’s to write a detailed report. We finished it just before lunch and Dr. Simpson said, “I’d like to recheck Everitt’s sitting measurements, Miss L. After you’ve had a bite could you stroll around to the mortuary and get West to help you take them? Measure him in a sitting position, sitting upright. Can you manage that, do you think?”
I replied I certainly could and borrowed CKS’s tape measure for the job. After a quick lunch I scurried around to my fellow conspirator, Harry West. He was sitting in his little office, drinking a cup of tea and eating Spam sandwiches. I explained my mission and West said of course he’d help, anything any time you ask, Miss Molly. So into the refrigerator room we went.
The premises were deserted at that hour, and we had the entire mortuary to ourselves. This gave us a gay and lively feeling. West opened the big refrigerator and drew out a long metal tray on which lay the murdered man. With considerable skill West slid the tray onto a trestle table. The dead taxi driver was, as I have said, a very large and heavy man, and moreover he was stark stiff with rigor mortis. West suggested he should raise the man to the required sitting posture and that I should measure him. I agreed and West, with difficulty, propped up the body. But then came a snag. I wasn’t tall enough to reach from the tray on which the body sat to the top of the deceased’s head. West said we’d better swap. I would have to prop up the body while he measured it.
No sooner said than done. He took the tape measure and I put my shoulder to the dead man’s brawny back. But there is nothing in the world so unresponsive and difficult to manage as a stiff. There was a sudden heart-rending shriek from me…and a yell of horror from West as I collapsed backward with the naked and dead taxi man clutched in my arms. I fell flat backward under his weight and West, whose horror had turned to laughter, had a lot of trouble rescuing me. It was a ghastly moment, and I became convulsed with, let me admit it, hysterical giggles. The dead man looked as if he must have been a pretty obstinate person in life; he was certainly so in death. Somehow we got him sitting upright again, with West holding him, and somehow I managed to reach and take the measurements. It was the most remarkable lunch hour I have ever spent.
The dead man, Dr. Simpson decided, had been shot from behind, at very close range, unexpectedly, while he was seated at the wheel of his taxi.
A week or two now passed, with the police busy over their investigations.
London’s black market was, by the end of the war, a vast racket system attracting an array of crooks and criminals of all sorts. The “regular” London underworld was at that time swollen by hundreds of deserters from the services of the Allied nations; men in hiding who turned to the black market as their only possible source of income.
The dead man was soon identified for certain as one Frank Everitt, a fifty-six-year-old driver employed by a Brixton taxi pool which specialized in conveying people home from West End nightclubs in the small hours. Everitt, however, had not been precisely what one might term a crystal-clear character. He was an ex–police sergeant, an ex–Home Guard corporal, and he was reputed to have been a “copper’s nark” (otherwise, a police informer). This wasn’t true, but the Yard did think it worthwhile probing other allegations that Everitt had been a “tea-leaf carrier,” that is, a taxi driver who conveys crooks around in the darkness.
Whether this was so or not never really emerged, although it was presently pretty plain that he had been carrying a couple of crooks at the time he met his death. It certainly was established that Everitt, for the past fifteen years, had been living a double life. He enjoyed the pseudonym “the Duke,” because he had a weekend residence in Gloucestershire, which his associates considered very classy, indeed positively aristocratic. Hence the title of the Duke. To others he was known as “Honest Frank,” a name which may or may not have had a satirical ring. Besides the ménage in Gloucestershire he rejoiced in two other addresses: one in Battersea, where he didn’t live, and one in Streatham where, during the week, he did live.
He was a married man who had succeeded in living apart from his wife for the past fifteen years. He had a substantial banking account. He appeared, on the surface, to be making a success of this Jekyll and Hyde existence. However, police probing revealed that he had been a person of uneasy disposition; acquaintances hinted he had behaved like a man who carried a “secret fear.” There was some evidence that the Duke had been planning to quit London for good; it had become a little too hot for him. But why?
Nobody would answer that one, although it was clear there were several who could. Mr. Chapman received numerous anonymous phone calls about the Duke’s associations with a black market gang headed by a foreigner, probably a Russian. Obviously many Londoners who preferred to remain nameless were taking a keen interest in the Yard’s investigations. And reporters who began sleuthing around on their own investigations, anxious to get some exclusive inside stuff, were told to “lay off” by similar anonymous phone callers. The underworld wasn’t going to welcome front-page exposés of the Duke’s private life—or lives.
The murdered man’s taxi had meanwhile been found abandoned on a pile of rubble in a North Kensington cul-de-sac. It was plain that Everitt, as Dr. Simpson had claimed, had been shot from behind while in his driving seat. He had then been lifted on to the backseat of the taxi, driven to Lambeth Bridge, and stowed away in the pump house. His taxi man’s registration badge had been torn from his jacket. His pockets had been ransacked. Under the driver’s seat was found the top of a propelling pencil. The pencil itself, however, was missing.
CKS and Mr. Chapman were both of the opinion that one man alone could not have lifted the bulky Everitt from the taxi, carried him to the pump house, and squeezed him through the aperture of that little building. The murder definitely looked like a two-man job. And presently a witness came forward to say he had seen Everitt pick up two well-dressed men at 12:15 a.m. October 18 (the morning of the murder), close by the Richard Cœur de Lion statue outside the House of Commons.
Tracing these two men, however, proved impossible, even though Mr. Cherrill did discover what were thought to be the murderer’s fingerprints on the steering wheel of the taxi.
So the investigations into the Duke’s death hung fire for a fortnight; then a second murder occurred. This second murder never actually led to the solving of the mystery of the Duke’s death, officially, but after the second killing had been unraveled the Yard dropped investigations into the Everitt case. There really seems little doubt that the men who killed Everitt were the men who killed…
…the man who was found lying in the back of a small saloon car parked near a Notting Hill bomb site between five and six in the morning two weeks after the Everitt murder. He too was found by a constable on patrol. This constable shone his torch into the car and saw a man stretched out on the backseat, his hat over his face, apparently asleep. The constable tried to waken the man, and in so doing dislodged the hat, which fell aside to reveal the bloodstained face of a very obvious corpse.
Investigations into this case came under Chief Superintendent George Somerset (later to take charge of the Hendon Detectives’ Training School). Mr. Somerset was quickly able to identify the dead man as one Reuben Martirosoff, known generally as “Russian Robert”; no other, in fact, than the foreign black market gang leader Mr. Chapman had anonymously been phoned about so often in connection with the Everitt murder.
The car in which Martirosoff was found lying was his own, and he had driven out in it, Mr. Somerset ascertained, at 11:00 p.m. the previous night, in a great hurry, in response to a phone caller who wanted Russian Robert to meet him at Edgware Road Underground station.
Dr. Donald Teare did the p.m. on Russian Robert. He found that the deceased had been shot, as Everitt had been shot, with a small-caliber revolver, at very close range, through the back of the head. Russian Robert had clearly been killed in the early hours of the morning he was discovered in his car.
The police now began a detailed search of London’s black market.
This intensive search presently produced the information that Russian Robert had frequently been seen in the company of two Poles, one of whom was named Marian. These two Poles were working several rackets in the black market, including the “handbag game,” deals in foreign currency and in looted jewelry, and so on. Finally, Mr. Somerset succeeded in arresting the man Marian, whose full name was Marian Grondkowski.
Grondkowski was a good-looking young man of thirty-three, a Polish Army deserter, who had started his adventurous career gun-running for the Spanish International Brigade, had fought with the Brigade, escaped to France after being taken prisoner in Spain, had fought with the French in World War II, had fought with the Foreign Legion after the fall of France, volunteered for the Polish Army, and thus had come to England. After two years in a Special Sabotage Unit he had deserted and resorted to London’s black market for a more profitable and less gallant livelihood than soldiering. He ran very successful rackets in foreign currency exchange and was not slow to threaten his clients with a revolver if intimidation were necessary to make them come across with currency or jewelry. He was not at all a salubrious character, and it was no surprise to the police that the bloodstained fingerprints Mr. Cherrill discovered on Russian Robert’s steering wheel belonged to Grondkowski.
In Grondkowski’s pocket was a small piece of paper bearing the name and address of a Henryk Malinowski.
The police went to Malinowski’s lodgings and found Russian Robert’s signet ring among Malinowski’s things. He was therefore arrested and taken to the Yard.
Malinowski was also a Polish Army deserter, aged twenty-five. He had fought in the defense of Warsaw in 1939, had been taken prisoner by the Germans and put in a concentration camp, had escaped, joined the Foreign Legion, had come to England and enlisted in the Polish Armored Division, and had deserted from the division in May 1944. He had been caught and sent to the international military prison, from which, nothing daunted, he had escaped. He had then come to London, where he started working foreign currency rackets. Both he and Grondkowski had finally joined forces with Russian Robert, thirty-nine years old, Caucasian born; an international crook with convictions in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Istanbul, Potsdam, London. Yes, Russian Robert had been around. He had, however, reached the stage where getting around was difficult, since he had been permanently banished from France, Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and South America. So he had settled down—for the time being, at any rate—in London, where he led a lucrative existence as a fence and a black marketeer in currency.