by John Gardner
She remembered the Blitz humour of that stay at The Royal Victoria – ‘Glad you didn’t try Marples Hotel,’ the porter said. ‘They’ve got no rooms at all.’ Later they found that Marples – in the city centre – had received a direct hit in December 1940, killing over sixty people: Sheffield’s worst air raid incident so far.
She rang The Royal Victoria and left a message asking Tommy to telephone as soon as he got in. She suspected the receptionist she left the message with was the snooty one with the snub nose and superior manner: the one who had been unpleasant and condescending when Suzie and the rest of the Reserve Squad stayed there: the one Tommy seemed to like: all over her with, ‘Oh, Miss Hunter this, and Miss Hunter that.’ Her name was Christine Hunter and Tommy started calling her ‘Our Chrissie’ which hadn’t gone down well with Suzie.
While she waited for Tommy to phone she wandered around the flat, hated being there alone, loathed it ever since the psychotic, murderous Golly Goldfinch had jumped her in the bathroom during that terrible time at the end of 1940. She hated being alone there now, just not used to it: twitchy, moving through the rooms, mind teeming with the horrid memories, touching things to calm her, the locks on the doors, Tommy’s Harris tweed jacket with the big leather buttons – she buried her face in it and inhaled, getting the scent of him, the soap and his tobacco – picked up his ties one by one, old school, police college, a blue with white polka dots, red with the same and a splendid silk creation by Sulka; then the pistol they kept, illegally, in the drawer of the bedside table, checking the mechanism, letting the magazine drop out of the butt, then slamming it home again, making certain there was one up the spout.
In the largest room, at the front, looking over the street, Tommy had hung a painting over the fireplace. He’d brought it up from Kingscote: a copy, Canaletto, Venice, The Grand Canal, a big canvas that she’d have sworn was an original, but he’d never have let on, any more than he’d ever call the artist by his proper name. ‘Ah, old Cannelloni,’ he’d say, ‘good enough to eat.’ That was Tommy: sound, tough copper and schoolboy. She smiled, getting his measure again. Getting it at last.
She was in the front room – the drawing room as her mother called it – looking down on Upper St Martin’s Lane, when the telephone rang and she lunged for it, almost tripping over. But it was James asking if she’d do him a favour. ‘Not today, Suze, but sometime next week.’
She told him to hurry up because she was expecting Tommy to ring.
‘Thing is Suze, that Maren. Emily. One that drove me up.’
‘Oh, yes?’ Well done, Jim. Hormones raging, I’ll bet.
‘Well, we’ve got a kind of tentative date. Been talking to her on the blower.’
‘She’s an OR.’ Meaning other rank, meaning officers keep your hands off.
‘Commandos don’t bother about things like that.’ A bit lofty and full of himself. ‘I want you to cover for me if necessary: back me up with the ma if I say I’m in London for a medical appointment or something. Actually I do have to go back to the hospital soon so it might not be needed.’
She told him of course she would back him up, tickled that her little brother was showing interest in young women. In truth she found it amusing: ‘Old Jim,’ she thought. ‘You can’t get into much trouble, seeing as how you’re a cripple.’ Then she asked how their mother was.
‘Picking fruit. Bottling it. Jams and pickles. All that.’
‘Enjoying having you home?’
‘Think I’m a buffer between her and the GM.’ GM for Galloping Major.
‘And the children?’ Her sister’s kids, Charlotte’s children, Lucy and Ben. Ben, who could not speak and could not hear, locked into his own world, in his head.
‘They’re great. Ben can do a lot of signing now. Seems to know who I am.’
As they said goodbye, Suzie told him, ‘Watch your back, Jim.’ One of Tommy’s favourite warnings.
‘Not my back I’m worried about. Not with Maren Emily Styles,’ Jim closed the connection, Suzie put down the receiver and the phone rang immediately, Tommy breathing in her ear. ‘Who you been talking to, heart?’ Smile in his voice.
‘My brother. Getting the hots for that Maren who drove him over on Sunday.’ She started to tell him about the goings on at Churchbridge, Winifred Lees-Duncan not being the body.
‘You’re absolutely certain, heart?’
‘That Winnie Lees-Duncan’s alive? One hundred and fifty per cent. Absolutely pukka gen. There’s no doubt.’
‘Then who’s the nun, heart?’
‘Someone who knows the Lees-Duncan family that’s for sure, though I don’t trust the father: John Lees-Duncan, gentleman farmer.’
‘OK. Sum him up, heart.’
‘Cold, uncompromising, arrogant. You’re made for one another.’
‘Well, tough ’cos I ain’t coming back.’
‘Tommy,’ just this side of pleading.
‘No can do, heart. They need me here, we’re up to five runners now and I fancy myself as an interrogator. You can do the job. I mean you’re so good with nuns. Know ’em like the back of your whatsit. Brought up with ’em and all that. Sat at their feet, what?’ Tommy the bluff, pleasant cove who got on with everybody.
‘How’s Chrissie?’ Suzie asked.
‘Chrissie?’ Tommy pondered, as though trying to match the name with a face.
‘Yes, Tom. Chrissie Hunter, receptionist, long legs, snub nose, “Coming, Mr Livermore.”’ Doing a passable imitation of Jack Benny’s rasp-voiced retainer, Rochester: now a favourite of the Jack Benny radio show, a hit on the BBC since the US troops had arrived in the UK. Rochester’s favourite cry was, ‘Comin’, Mr Benny.’
‘Oh, yes. Chrissie,’ kind of savouring the name. ‘Yes, I remember. I think she’s left here. Haven’t seen her, heart. Now, the nuns…’
‘Tell me what to do, Tom.’
‘See the nuns, that Mother Rachel’s a good un. See her and make sure they’ve got a pretty picture of La Winnie in the flesh as it were. Then go back to the gallant John Lees-Duncan and give him a look-see. Find out if he recognises her. Show it around a bit.’
‘You ring him first, Tommy? Please. I need him brought down a peg or three before I see him again. Lean on him and tell him he’s got to cooperate.’
‘I’ll get the Assistant Deputy Commissioner to do it…’
‘Super.’ And perhaps, she asked, he could get someone in Gloucester to mark Lees-Duncan’s card as well.
‘If he’s so unpleasant…’
‘It’s probably me.’
‘Check him out with CRO, and ask the Branch just to be on the safe side. Talk to Woolly.’ Woolly was Woolly Bear, Superintendent Basil Bear, the 2i/c of Special Branch, an old chum of Tommy’s. (‘School together, heart. Used to share a study back in the dark ages.’)
‘And don’t forget you’ve got to see the parson, whatname, Harding, father of Joan, Novice Bridget, isn’t it? Mother Rachel’s done the dirty work – broken the news – but we’ll have to follow up.’
‘OK. But what if they haven’t got a photo of Winnie, or the one purporting to be Winnie?’
‘Nip down the mortuary and take a photo. Nothing difficult about that. We do it all the time. Open the corpse’s eyes and put a lot of shine on the face to light the eyes, give them some life. Does the trick. Get it nice and grainy. Nobody’ll know the difference.’
‘I can’t do all this by myself, Tommy. I need some help.’
‘Stop whining, woman. Take Dennis, he’s free.’ He chortled at his watery joke. Dennis Free was free. ‘Just do it, old heart. You’re always grumbling about not being trusted with a case of your own. Well, now you’ve got a case of your own. Go to. Take Dennis and Shirley and do it. Dennis knows how to take pretty pics: he’ll do it.’ Pause, count of three. ‘And while he’s at it he can take a picture of the other corpse, the bloke. Give them a flash of that an’ all.’
Silence for a moment, then – ‘Second thoughts, heart, have your pal Magnus get his tame pho
tographer to do it. Owes you a favour, eh?’
‘Piece of cake,’ she said, up to her knees in the irony, and hung up on him wondering if he was making a fuss of Christine Hunter and fuming at the idea of Magnus being an old pal.
She rang Pip Magnus at the Silverhurst Road nick and got the runaround so she used Tommy’s name and rank so the CID Department finally patched her through. Yes, of course he’d do that. With the girls – his word – the damage was all off the faces and they could hide the vivid extra mouth the bloke had developed where his throat had been cut. ‘Nothing to it at all, guv. When d’you want the prints?’
‘Yesterday but first thing tomorrow’ll do.’
‘You want them delivered to the Yard?’
‘I’ll send one of my boys in for them. Coming down your way tomorrow anyway, Pip,’ pause, ‘and Pip?’
‘Yes, guv.’
‘Don’t publish in the local gossip column or I might just reciprocate with some jolly stories of your time at Camford with that old lag Harvey.’
‘Right, guv.’ No shame.
Tony Harvey, one-time detective inspector, now doing an unpleasant stretch in the Scrubs. A copper who was bent as a bradawl, and had been caught bang to rights, in spades.
* * *
In room thirty-six of The Royal Victoria Hotel, hard by Sheffield’s Victoria Railway Station, Tommy Livermore stretched and thought, for a second, how nice it would be to get out of his clothes and settle down in bed. No chance of that. His old acquaintance ‘Razzy’ Berry, head of Sheffield’s CID – amazing how the old-boy network oiled everything official – waited for him downstairs. Over at the nick they had two men helping with their inquiries into Doris Butler’s death: Kenneth Craig and Pete Hill, both close friends of the late Mrs Butler. Close friends and possible murderers. Could be either of them.
For a moment, Tommy had a picture, vivid in his head, of Doris Butler lying spreadeagled in her little kitchen with her straw-coloured hair matted dark red and brown, and her head twisted at an unnatural angle. On the small dresser there was an apple with one bite taken from it, the flesh in the bite starting to brown, a packet of Bisto and another of powdered egg nearby.
Tommy Livermore had a golden rule with murder investigations: always get close to the victim and try to forget his or her faults. Doris Butler (née Haynes) had been silly: silly to have got herself married in 1938 at barely seventeen years of age; silly to allow her instincts to remain out of control; silly to encourage her men friends to disregard her marital status; silly to continue seeing other men in 1940 when her husband, Roger Butler – later Corporal Butler of 1st Hampshires (only in the Army could a lad from Sheffield find himself in the 1st Hampshires) – went off to war to be killed four years later on D+2 when his head was neatly removed by a passing shell fired from a German tank. Doris by then was already dead, battered to death in her kitchen by, Tommy was certain, one of her many other lovers. She was, as Ron Worrall succinctly put it, ‘cock happy’ a term with which Tommy wholeheartedly agreed.
It had been Ron who had first alerted Tommy to the area of half a dozen beech trees and undergrowth just outside the Butler’s little garden, on the edge of the scrubby meadow – Blue Fields as it was erroneously called. The trees afforded an excellent view of the house, and in its early June foliage the tiny oasis provided good cover that had obviously been used well by some watcher. The ground was trampled and scuffed, there was a selection of cigarette butts trodden into the earth (they counted fifteen in all) and the bark of one of the beeches had been picked off like somebody nervously picking a scab from a grazed knee. When he stood in this natural hide, Tommy saw that the bark would have been almost level with an average man’s waist. He pictured a faceless person standing, silent and unmoving with murder in his heart, fingers scratching at the crusty bark.
Doris would have told this shadowy lover, ‘Don’t be silly. He never touches me. Might not even be married.’ And the man would watch as Doris and Roger chased each other round the house and, maybe in this warmer weather, even leave the bedroom window open at night so that the observer could hear the sounds of the marital sport and so be driven into a frenzy of jealousy. Frenzy was the right word. Tommy had seen the results of sexual jealousy many times. Sex was a mainspring of murder. Many a nice young man or woman had been led fatally astray by sex which had the power to drop a bomb of madness into the brain.
On their first visit to the little semi-detached house in Bluefields Road, number 65, Suzie had done the door to door with Dennis Free and Shirley Cox, turning up a file full of rumours, hints and innuendoes: ‘No better than she ought to have been,’ was the common thread. ‘Had a number of men friends – mind you I’m not accusing her of anything wrong,’ cropped up a lot, and everyone said they, ‘didn’t really know her, Doris. Not really. Kept herself to herself.’ She never went down the Star and Garter, the pub at the end of Bluefields Road where the Butlers had lived since their marriage in ’38: the fields almost devoid of grass, wasted, like a burnt piece of desert, blackened and ravaged by the railway that passed by on its way to London, and on some days slick with the smoke from the steel works.
Even the next-door neighbour, Phyllis Carter, said she hardly ever saw Doris, but she had once successfully borrowed two chairs from her, the night her husband, Martin – a wopag with the Fleet Air Arm, currently in HMS Formidable – had been home on leave and they’d had a bit of a knees-up. ‘I arsked her to come and join us, but she never took no notice.’ When Suzie had looked puzzled she told her that a wopag (pronounced Wop. A.G.) was a Wireless Operator Air Gunner. ‘Brave buggers them wopags.’
Tommy, in room thirty-six of The Royal Victoria Hotel, glanced in the mirror, straightened his tie and put on what Suzie called his charming face. He was ready to go out to work in the interrogation rooms down the nick. Charm he considered was half the battle. Charm beat badgering, hectoring and brutality hands down. Mind you, Tommy believed that in every charming man there was an intransigent bastard crying to get out. No wonder the newspapers of Fleet Street called him Dandy Tom.
Yet all in all, at that moment, tired and about to face a possible killer, Tommy would have given a great deal to be with Suzie Mountford, though he’d never let her know.
* * *
In the nick, Pete Hill was what they called medium height, late thirties, running to fat with a sulky face and shifty eyes. Ron and Laura Cotter were already with him in an interview room reeking of uneasy silence. Big elegant Ron Worrall with his Roman coin cufflinks and the highly polished brogues which he wore like a badge of office, and little Laura, perfectly built with a penchant for the poems of A E Housman, her thoughts shaped to Housman’s thoughts –
Mine were of trouble,
And mine were steady,
So I was ready
When trouble came.
* * *
‘Hallo, Pete.’ Tommy smiled at him. ‘Sorry to have bothered you, but we think you may be able to help us.’ The direct approach, using Pete’s Christian name like an old friend. People didn’t do that on first meeting, even in a holding cell or, as in this case, an interrogation room, and it threw Pete a couple of degrees.
‘Aye.’ A shade to the left of taciturn.
For the first twenty minutes or so it felt almost like a casual conversation in a bar: Tommy relaxed and pleasant: Pete anxious to assist. Starting off with the whens and wheres.
‘We’re inquiring into the death of Doris Butler.’
‘Aye. Tha wants me to help wi’ inquiries. Sarn’t said,’ nodding towards Ron Worrall.
‘Good.’ Tommy sat himself down facing Pete. ‘You were, I believe acquainted with Doris Butler?’
‘Aye, ’course I knew her. She were—’
‘A close friend?’ Tommy cut him off.
‘My younger brother was at school wi’ her. That’s how I met her. I were two classes ahead of her.’
‘Then you were at school with her as well.’
‘Aye, a’were.’
‘Wha’, our Doris?’
‘When did you last see Doris, yes.’
‘Saturday night the end of week before D-Day. Before invasion.’ He really said, t’invasion, but the t’ was silent.
‘And where would that have been?’
‘St Giles’ Hall. Dance. Dance there most Saturdays. I said to Alf Binns that there weren’t so many military people about. Not so many uniforms.’ Touch of a vulpine grin that was not very attractive. ‘Now we know, don’t we? They’d all gone south, ready for t’invasion. Bloody marvellous.’
‘And you saw Doris Butler at the dance?’
‘She’s there most Saturdays.’
Ten minutes on Doris and the dancing, then Tommy slewed onto another subject:
‘Why aren’t you in uniform, Pete?’
‘Me?’
Tommy nodded. ‘I’m not talking to anyone else.’
‘On account o’ me leg.’
‘What about your leg?’
‘Broke it. A fracture t’doctor said. Fractured me leg in 1937 and it wasn’t set proper. Mum said stay in bed and it’ll be all right: I mean, we wasn’t paid up on panel then. But it never set proper.’
And on to hammer in on Pete’s present employment.
‘Where do you work? What profession?’ This last a bit of a stretch. Tommy was half convinced that Pete Hill was involved in something dodgy. Wrong, Tommy.
‘I’m a qualified electrician wi’ me own business. Hill and Ashworth. Electrical maintenance. No job too small.’
‘And you go out and about?’
‘Aye.’
‘You climb ladders; you wriggle through attics; you adapt to difficult and different exigencies?’
‘Aye, I do, if that means what I think it means.’
‘And you manage to dance?’
‘After a fashion, aye. Can’t run, though. Can’t run and can’t march. Have difficulty climbing. Have to do a lot of marching in t’armed forces.’
‘So I’ve been told, yes.’
‘Very keen on marching they are. Never understood t’reason mesen’. I mean you’re there to fight, en’t you? Not to march, unless you’re on ceremonial stuff, like in front of Buckingham Palace.’
