Read Murder on the Home Front Online
Authors: Molly Lefebure
Between 12:30 and 1:00 a.m. McKinstry was in Waterloo station asking for a chit to sleep at the YMCA. He was noticed by a policeman to be in possession of a woman’s handbag containing the identity card of Peggy Richards. McKinstry explained he had been drinking with a woman all evening, and when they came out of the public house at closing time she hit him on the head with her handbag, and he caught hold of it, and then she ran off, leaving him with it.
Next day McKinstry went to stay with friends outside London…
Meanwhile the storekeeper by the bridge had been indulging in some of that amateur detection so dear to the Englishman’s heart. The discovery of the scarf on the bridge had given him a hunch, so at the first peep of daylight he was out on the bridge again, back to the spot where he had found the scarf, peering over the parapet. And below him he saw, lying on the mud, what he had half-hoped, half-feared to see: the body of a woman. He went straight off to dial 999.
McKinstry was soon traced by the police and made a long statement to them, which was read to the Old Bailey jury. McKinstry in this statement said that he and his pal arrived at Waterloo and went to the Wellington, the pal saying, “What about some drinks and some women?” McKinstry said that was okay by him, so they had some drinks and bought some contraceptives a man was selling. McKinstry bought some drinks for Peggy Richards and suggested they should go out. They went into the street and he had her in a doorway. He paid her five pounds. (When questioned about this in the witness box he said, “I gave that good and hearty,” meaning that there had been no dispute about this financial transaction.)
Then they went for a walk. The woman was running along beside him chewing the fat about something and he said, “Oh shut up, you goddamn bitch.” They went to Waterloo Bridge and sat on what he later agreed might have been a parapet—apparently at the time he thought it was a windowsill, or so he said. There he had her again…After they had finished, insisted McKinstry, she struck him on the head with her handbag, and ran off leaving him with it.
The prosecution submitted that the end of this statement was false and that Peggy Richards had not hit McKinstry with her handbag and then run away, but that the two had had a violent quarrel by the bridge parapet, probably because she wanted a further sum of money from him, and that he had finally, in his temper, tried to strangle her and then pushed her over the parapet.
The case for the defense was that Peggy Richards
had
run away from McKinstry, but had then picked up some other, unidentified, man, and it was this unknown warrior who had killed her and not McKinstry—who, said the defense, at the time of her death was in Waterloo station asking for a chit to sleep at the YMCA.
The jury accepted this defense, and McKinstry was acquitted.
Like his compatriot McDonald, McKinstry returned to Canada. And like McDonald he met his death there violently soon after his return. McKinstry perished in a fire.
At three o’clock one December afternoon we found ourselves driving around Bethnal Green with a young CID officer, looking for a block of tenements which we will call Berkshire Buildings. (These low-smelling places always have high-sounding names.)
Round and round the intricate maze of narrow elephant-gray streets we drove; the CID man as lost as we were, for he was new to the area. A melancholy landscape it was, of interminable dirty little brick houses whose little sooty windows stared, achingly bored, at the fog already uncoiling in preparation for the night. The more we searched, the more we became lost, until finally we asked the way of two scruffy little boys who would have made admirable Dead End Kids, and they replied, “They’s Berkshire Buildings, down there.” But they were wrong, and we had to ask the way again, this time of a wizened old lady in rusty clothes, who was hobbling along on bad feet, carrying an unwrapped loaf of bread under her arm. She directed us correctly.
Berkshire Buildings were built according to the usual style: gray blocks of flats in gray asphalt yards. They were by no means modern; built, I should say, at the end of the last century when they were no doubt considered the ultimate word in working-class accommodation. Probably a lot of people declared them far too luxurious for workers.
The gray yards were deserted, for the children were not yet home from school, but women’s voices echoed from the doorways, and everywhere babies were wailing thinly. A leaking water pipe discharged a brown unsavory deluge down a wall, splashing into large hideous puddles in the yard below, where paddled and piddled a very hairy, preoccupied-looking poodle. We entered dark doorways, encountered many odors, found flats 1–64, 99–145, but couldn’t find number 82, which was the one we wanted. At last CKS asked a vacuous, slatternly young woman who appeared with a little girl in a dirty pink coat, and she said, pointing, “Through that door there, mate.”
The tenements were arranged on a system of tiers of corridors connected by staircases open on every landing to small balconies, which no doubt was designed to keep the buildings ventilated but which mainly succeeded in sweeping the place with perishing, dust-whirling drafts. The staircases were dark and their stone steps were worn by many, many weary feet. There was a great smell of rotting plaster, human dirt, latrines, cooking, and dampness. The staircase and corridor walls were adorned with chalk sketches and scrawls of all kinds, from the harmlessly jocular and sentimental to the indecent. The buildings echoed with footsteps, babies crying, dishes clattering, and radios playing. Silence was obviously unknown there.
The blocks were each four stories high with a kind of penthouse communal laundry under the roof. Here were long stained sinks and fixed clotheslines. On each floor, I discovered, was a lavatory, which served all the flats on that floor, and a washroom with a very dirty sink—there were no bathrooms. For a bath the flat dwellers had to go around to the local public baths. None of the flats had running water; all water had to be fetched from the washrooms.
The lavatories and washrooms were filthy, stinking places, their doors swinging wide open on to the corridors, up and down which the stinks wafted freely.
We found flat number 82, and when we rang, the coroner’s officer unexpectedly opened the door to us. He had already arrived on the job. He ushered us in and we stood looking around us. The flat contained two small rooms and a large cupboard, and was the home of a young widow who worked in a nearby factory and who extended her intimate favors to a commercial traveler who lodged with her whenever he was in London. She was, from all accounts, a lively, happy, easy soul, and now here she was, when we arrived, lying dead on her bed, wearing a particularly shattering magenta velvet frock with lipstick and chipped nail varnish to match. She was plump, dark-haired, with blunt features. She had told a neighbor the previous week that she was four months pregnant and intended doing something about it. There was reason to suppose that the something had now been done, with drastic results.
She had also told the neighbor, during the conversation, that she had already tried slippery-elm bark (a popular but not very effective working-class abortifacient) and nothing had happened, so she would have to have “a go at something else.” The morning of the day of our visit to her flat, the neighbor said, the young woman had complained of a pain, and about noon she had died.
Dr. Simpson and the CID officer began looking for a syringe of the sort which is widely used for bringing about abortions, both by small-time abortionists and the pregnant women themselves.
We all poked about the flat, looking here, there and everywhere. It was a great opportunity for me to discover how a young woman factory worker in Bethnal Green lives, and I fetched out a notebook and began jotting down notes.
The living room was small, untidy, confused, and by the standards of any select suburban housewife it was pretty squalid and dirty, but judged by the standards of many of the houses and homes we visited it wasn’t too bad. Indeed, when one considered the plumbing facilities—or rather, the complete lack of them—the flat did its occupant credit. Certainly, it was all somewhat of a litter, but then there was really no room for a decent-sized wardrobe, or a chest of drawers. And the air in the flat was stale as old biscuits, and when we tried to open the window we couldn’t, because the window had stuck fast years back and would never open again, unless somebody brought a sledgehammer to it, but that of course was not surprising because in many East London homes fresh air is looked upon as highly dangerous. A nice, warm, smelly, woolly fug is considered essential to good health and high spirits.
There was a large kitchen-type table in the living room, a rather broken-down sofa and an aged easy chair with boggly springs. There was a gas stove, on which stood a frying pan in which three sausages lay congealed in cold fat. Above the stove was a shelf with saucepans and cooking things. There was a kitchen range, too, but that clearly had not been used for years. Over the range was a mantelpiece, and I amused myself by cataloguing the things on it: an alarm clock, two aspirins in a tiny unopened cellophane package, a box of rouge, a very dirty little powder puff, three bottles of cough mixture, hairpins, a small woolly mat, cotton, needle already-threaded with white cotton, a letter in a stamped envelope, all ready for posting, and a colored photograph of a small child in a turquoise-blue frock.
On hangers on the wall, strewn over the easy chair, and on pegs on the back of the door were the young woman’s coats and dresses. She had certainly indulged in plenty of clothes. Quite nice clothes, too. Cheap, but smart.
In her bedroom was a chair arrayed with more clothes. More dresses hung on the bedroom door. There was a shelved holdall with gingham curtains; here we found a pair of downtrodden shoes, a large roll of cotton wool, a box of face powder, a hairbrush, combs, hankies, undies neatly folded, a pattern for a dress and a length of uncut dress material, scissors, nail varnish, stockings, letters, face cream, and so forth, all neatly stowed away.
The bed on which the dead woman lay was tousled, tossed, unsavory. Under the bed was a red-and-green wooden toy truck, brand-new and obviously intended as a present for somebody. There was also an enamel chamber pot. At the foot of the bed was a small zinc bath.
CKS and the detective had so far found nothing they were looking for, so they turned their attention to the large cupboard which led out of the living room. Such a very large cupboard, it was almost a sort of windowless closet, intended to be used as larder, brush-and-broom cupboard, boot cupboard, wardrobe, box room, everything. (One can imagine what this cupboard would be like in a large, untidy family.) There was a food safe in it, and more clothes hanging on pegs, a bucket, a mop, broom, shelves on which were folded linen and blankets, pots and pans, kettles, cleaning powders and soap, matches, a few books, two or three bottles of beer and a bottle of gin, and, tucked away at the back of the top shelf behind some other things, the syringe CKS was looking for.
So our search had not been in vain. And it had certainly taught me far more about life in Bethnal Green than if I had read dozens of books on the subject. I stood in this stuffy, yet damply cold, cheerless, waterless flat—let me repeat, not a drop of running water in any of these flats, all water, whether for washing, cooking or drinking, to be fetched from the smelly washrooms—and I wondered what I would have turned out to be like had I been born and bred in Tudor Rose Buildings. I walked to the window, pulled aside a very grimy net curtain and stared down into the yards, now noisy with children. A glorious vista of gray asphalt, tall, dreary posts and sagging fixed clotheslines, and a centerpiece of surface air-raid shelters, the brick sort, with flat concrete roofs. And I noticed that the roofs of these shelters were chockablock with every possible kind of junk and litter. Old bicycle tires, old cloth cap, old gas-mask case, old saucepans, empty tins and bottles, old cabbage stumps and vegetable peelings, cigarette cartons, moldy loaves of bread, newspapers, jam-pot lids, apple cores, old bones, leg of an old chair, old lampshade. At first I couldn’t understand how these things had got there. Then I realized they had all been tossed out of the windows of the flats by the irresponsible occupants and had landed on the shelter roofs instead of falling into the yards, where in due course, I suppose, such litter would either have been picked up by children or cleared away.
In short, if there was any light refuse knocking around your flat in Tudor Rose Buildings you just slung it out of the window—so long as you could open the window. Obviously quite a lot of people did manage to open their windows—to throw their rubbish out.
So I stood staring at the littered shelter roofs and the children and the clotheslines and at all the dirty curtained windows of the other flats, where radios played and babies cried and harassed women scolded and shouted and dropped plates and clattered and cursed and coughed, and I was still staring gloomily when the undertakers arrived to remove the dead woman to the local mortuary, and we drove there, too, leaving Tudor Rose Buildings behind us…
The postmortem showed that the young woman died from a septic abortion. The syringe had been used to give her an injection of hot soapy water, which had started an abortion, but as the syringe had in little likelihood been sterilized before use, and as the circumstances and surroundings of the syringing had no doubt been squalid—either a dirty bedroom or dirty kitchen—septicemia had set in. There were no injuries to the uterus or surrounding parts, and this strongly suggested that the woman had not performed the syringing upon herself, but had sought aid from some other person—maybe the helpful neighbor, maybe a local abortionist—and maybe the helpful neighbor and the local abortionist were one and the same person. Who can say? In cases of this kind the police never get very far. The women who know what has been going on never talk.