by John Gardner
‘When you’re out on a job, wiring say, don’t you have to climb?’
‘I’m gaffer. I get others to climb if I can’t.’
‘You danced with Doris on that Saturday night, Pete? A week before the invasion?’
‘No.’
‘Had your own girlfriend, did you?’
‘Danced wi’ a girl called Eileen Shanty. We been seeing each other regular. Fat Eileen they call her, but she pleases me. I favour girls you can get hold of.’
Tommy Livermore muttered, ‘Let me have girls about me that are fat,’ then appeared to be lost in thought, trying to make up his mind about some profound problem.
Finally Ron Worrall leant forward and spoke for the first time, ‘Pete, would you be willing to have an X-ray?’
‘X-ray? X-ray where?’
‘See if you’ve got a bone in your leg, Petey.’ Tommy’s face in a hideous grin.
Pete Hill looked as though his nose had been poked into a skunk’s tail. ‘Look, now. Wha’…?’
‘We want to make sure you’ve got a bone in your leg, Pete.’ Laura almost giggled.
‘Now wait a minute. I came along to help. Tha’s what the’ wanted, and … You can’t think I … Oh no.’
‘Oh no what, Pete?’ Tommy’s face wasn’t even creased.
‘Wha’s this about? Tell me that.’
‘What d’you think it’s about, Pete?’
‘Well, obviously, Doris. I mean you said so.’
‘Yes. And…?’
‘And she’s been done in. Murdered. Some bugger stopped her clock.’
‘Yes, and we know you were a regular visitor to her house, Pete. You went to see her at least every third night when her husband was away. That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’
‘By heck. You think I—’
‘Want to eliminate you as they say, Petey,’ Ron explained. ‘Eliminate you from our inquiries.’
‘But I was looking out for her. You must know that. I’m poor Roger’s cousin after all. He bloody asked me to look after her. If he was still alive I couldn’t bloody face him.’
‘His cousin,’ Tommy stated flatly. Not that it made any real difference of course, but it would have been nice if someone had said something. Some ninety-five per cent of murders were committed by a member of the family.
‘Aye. Roger’s mother and my mother. Sisters. So we’re first cousins.’
‘You didn’t think to mention this sooner?’
‘Well, everybody knows, just like they know Doris was a bit of a tart. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but it’s true. Never was close to her, not until Roger went off, got hisself called up. I tried to tell you, but you shut me up.’
‘You simply said you knew her.’
‘That’s what you asked. Did I know her? And what’s all this about X-rays?’
‘My sergeant’s sense of fun,’ said Tommy already forming a few sentences in his head: what he’d say to old ‘Razz’ Berry’s CID. Relationship of one of the suspects. Aloud he asked Pete Hill where he was on the night of 5th/6th June.
‘I were in London.’
‘Really?’
‘Aye, really.’
‘Anyone see you there?’
‘Three American officers and three or so other representatives from electrical firms. I were appearing in front of a board wi’ Cherry Ashworth my business partner.’
‘She’s not in HM Forces either?’
‘It’s a he and no, seeing he’s in his late sixties, near seventy. Was a sleeping partner until war started up. We shared a room in this American place out towards Rutland Gate: answering questions and showing off our knowledge to t’Americans,’ soft t again, unheard. ‘So’s they would use us as civilian contractors in their military hospitals and places. We applied for it; all official. We do it anyway for t’Army, Navy and RAF, but the bloody Yanks seem to have to test us out first. Make sure we’re fit enough to do it for them. Yes, I were with them having me breakfast on t’Monday when news of t’landings came out.’
Tommy thought a small vulgar expletive. Am I wasting my time? he wondered, then told Hill that he was free to go.
‘But stay in Sheffield; we’ll need to talk again.’
‘I can’t promise. The work I’ll be doing for them Yanks’ll be down south. In t’badlands.’
‘You’ve got a car and a special petrol allowance, no doubt?’
‘Aye.’
‘I whistle and you’ll come running back. Understand?’
‘Aye.’
Tommy had developed a blinding headache, so he sought out Detective Chief Superintendent Berry and asked if he would make Kenneth Craig, their other suspect, comfortable for the night.
‘Oh, and perhaps you’d get your brilliant officers to check up on his background. I’ve just discovered Pete Hill is Roger Butler’s cousin.’
‘Didn’t you know?’ ‘Razz’ Berry sounded as though the entire world knew of Pete Hill’s relationship to the late Roger Butler. In fact he made Tommy feel positively ignorant.
‘On second thoughts let Craig go home, then get your lads to make certain he’s not related to the victim,’ he added. ‘I’ll talk to him tomorrow. Tell him to come back about nine o’clock and have one of your lads keep obbo on him so we can be sure he won’t take flight. And Hill as well. I’ll want a word with him again. If only for the experience.’
Tommy reflected that this was all very English, the way they went about the investigation: asking questions, staying polite for most of the time. Very English and vaguely amateur night. What irked Tommy was that he thought of himself as totally professional. A dedicated copper.
When he got back to the hotel, Christine Hunter was on duty at reception.
‘Mr Livermore, how lovely to see you back again. I’m on all night so if there’s anything you need – anything – just give me a tinkle.’
Tommy heard Suzie’s voice, ‘Coming, Mr Livermore.’
‘Yes, Christine. Thank you,’ he said with a controlled smile. Walking towards the lift he thought, ‘Not even to help with the seven armies in Normandy.’ Christine Hunter was a lot of woman. Far too much woman for one man, and he already had one of those back in London.
CHAPTER EIGHT
At dawn’s early crack Suzie rang the Reserve Squad offices on the fourth floor of New Scotland Yard. Billy Mulligan picked up and said, ‘You’re ringing me at the crack of dawn, Suz – ma’am,’ correcting himself. ‘Let me guess.’
‘I want to use the Railton. Got to go to Gloucester.’
The Railton was the saloon car they had half-inched from the Flying Squad. Dull red and a bit flash.
‘And you want Dennis to drive it over to St Martin’s Lane with Shirley Cox. Sort of any time now.’
‘You are conversant with all things, Billy.’
‘’Course I am. Know a lot an’ all, ’cos I’ve already talked to the chief.’
‘Who is also the great, wise and omnipotent…’
‘Take it as read.’ Billy, it was said, had known Tommy in another, earlier life, like Brian. For Suzie he was the nearest thing to perfection as far as the job was concerned: even appearing to have a private line into the future.
‘I don’t suppose we’ll need them but you’d better tell Shirley and Dennis to bring overnight bags.’
‘Just in case.’ Even at a distance, over the telephone, Billy was able to be silent and deadpan at the dreadful pun. ‘I already told them.’ There was a rustling of paper at his end. ‘This John Lees-Duncan,’ he said with great care, reading it off a flimsy. ‘The ADC (Crime) is having a word with him it seems; and Mr Livermore says someone in the stratosphere at Gloucester nick is going to talk to him as well. Make sure he’s not going to be obstructive.’
‘Great. Tell Dennis and Shirley we’re going up Silverhurst Road – the convent – first.’ Suzie thanked him, closed the line and dialled the number for the Branch, as they called Special Branch, asking for DCS Bear. Just as Tommy had told her – Talk to Woo
lly Bear.
‘Bear,’ said Bear.
Suzie introduced herself and mentioned Tommy’s name.
‘Ears,’ said DCS Bear which Suzie translated as the way some educated people said, ‘Yes’. ‘Ears. Mr Livermore said you might telephone.’
‘About a joker called John Lees-Duncan, sir.’
‘Ears. John Reginald Palmer Lees-Duncan, born February 1894.’
Ten years out, Suzie thought, doing the mental arithmetic. She had put him down as sixty plus. He was barely fifty.
‘Mr Livermore says you’re above average and can keep things to yourself so I’ll send a file over.’
Above average: keep things to yourself. Patronising sod. ‘So you have something, sir?’
‘Not a great deal. Straws in the wind sort of thing.’
‘I’d be interested in anything, sir.’
‘’Course you would, but not on an open line, Mountford.’
Tommy said that people in the Branch were paranoid ‘because they’re always listening in to people they imagine people’re always listening in to them’.
‘Got a couple of pages. Not Charles Dickens, but it has a little flavour. Prefer you keep it to yourself. Mind you do,’ Bear said. ‘I’ll send it right up.’ Pause, little cough. ‘You’re the Montford got in all the papers a few years back, aren’t you?’
Suzie loathed being called Montford. ‘Ears,’ she said, about to close the line, but Detective Chief Superintendent Bear cleared his throat and asked if Mr Livermore was there.
‘On a case, sir.’
‘Where?’
‘Sheffield.’
‘What case?’
Suzie didn’t imagine it; Woolly Bear’s tone altered, subtly, nothing dramatic but the words were snapped with an edge, something clouding his query. She told him, Sheffield, murder and Doris Butler, beaten to death in her little kitchen.
His reaction – she thought of it later – was as though he had gone off the boil. ‘Oh, yes. Right. Right.’ Not with her, taking a couple of steps back from the conversation. Then he again said, ‘Right,’ and wished her good day.
She dialled Billy to tell him something would be coming up from the Branch and would he send it over with Dennis, presuming that Dennis and Shirley hadn’t yet left.
‘You been talking to the Branch, ma’am? Better watch yourself. Chief says the Branch gets in your head and meddles with it: drives you nuts then spits you out piecemeal.’
‘The chief thinks that of a lot of things, Billy.’ She sat back and found anger sweeping around her head, touching the nerve ends.
Mr Livermore says you’re above average and can keep things to yourself. Then she thought it was funny, Bear’s reaction to Tommy being in Sheffield. Not funny ha-ha, but funny peculiar.
Really? She thought again, then reflected on how lucky she was. Only in the Reserve Squad, only under Tommy Livermore would she, and the other girls, get any proper respect. They certainly wouldn’t in Mr Bear’s Special Branch. Tea girls and typists, that’s all they’d be there.
When Suzie first joined the Met she realised double quick that her job would probably not be tracking down criminals or keeping order on the streets. In training they were acclimatised to obeying orders.
Usually without a second thought.
Someone of higher rank gave you an order on the parade ground and you conformed to the instruction without considering the outcome. It was the way of conditioning the mind and body. Through bullying hot afternoons drill sergeants screamed at them. At the time much of this had seemed facile to Suzie, who recalled the near hysterical tantrum an unpolished button had caused – ‘Reprehensible!’ the parade inspector had screeched, almost levitating. ‘Absolutely reprehensible and unforgivable.’ A tarnished button. But she never had dirty buttons again.
On another occasion the drill sergeant shouted at her, ‘What’s the matter with you, girl? You, Mountford? What’s the matter? Got itchy-coo?’
It had taken much detection to discover that ‘Itchy-Coo’ had been the title of some popular song from a previous generation.
The shouting, screaming and bullying did the trick and her class of policewomen went off to their first postings safe in the knowledge that as long as you obeyed an order nothing much could go wrong. Obey orders to the letter and you were as safe as a mouse in a cheese shop.
This was in the late 1930s, when Suzie first joined the Met, and even then the public perception of women policing the capital was mixed and strange: clergymen agonised over whether to give up their seats on the underground to allow uniformed policewomen to sit down; magistrates pondered the question of men feeling emasculated if arrested by a woman.
One magistrate said, ‘It must hurt a man’s feelings, to be arrested by a woman.’
It should hurt his feelings, Suzie thought with a touch of bite and bile. Quite rightly so.
But it was a long time before Suzie even had the opportunity of arresting a male. In many ways she grew to feel that she was not in the job to fight crime; she was there to serve the male police officers – do the typing and filing, even the occasional bit of shopping, make the tea, do the odd spot of cooking, making sandwiches or knocking up fried sausages while nipping out to get a few penn’orth of chips so that the blokes went to bed with full stomachs.
When not doing office or household chores the policewomen as often as not were nurses, looked after children, comforted the bereaved, dealt with people in shock and guarded women prisoners. Sometimes reports came in of women police officers working in plain clothes to trap drug dealers selling cocaine in the underground lavatories of Piccadilly Circus. Suzie even knew one of them when she was on the beat working out of Vine Street Police Station in the West End, but that kind of excitement did not seem to come her way: until 1940 when she was working in the Criminal Records Office at Scotland Yard itself.
By 1940 times were changing something chronic: women manning anti-aircraft guns in city parks, women riding motorbikes through bomb blasts to get messages to other units, brave women driving ambulances through the horror that was the nightly bombing. Women starting to do a hundred and one other things.
At the time, Suzie was vaguely aware of the idea that a lot of women were unlikely to be happy when their lives returned to the old normality of peacetime; When it was all over, when they sounded the last all clear, when the bluebirds circled the white cliffs of Dover and when the lights went on again all over the world, as Vera Lynn, Anne Shelton and a dozen others sang. Having tasted a kind of freedom and a terrifying excitement, many women would feel unsettled living their lives as housewives.
Working in CRO – the Criminal Records Office in Scotland Yard – meant she was again back on secretarial duties, typing information onto 5" × 2" filing cards, filling up daunting forms, answering telephones, finding files when they were requested, sitting for hours on end in front of an Underwood typewriter in that long room ruled over by a male sergeant of the old school.
She was there every day in CRO at the beginning of the Blitz when her life changed for ever, without warning.
The night before it all happened she hadn’t gone ‘down the shelter’ in the basement of the building in Upper St Martin’s Lane. Instead, she stayed in her bed, awake for a time as the bombs exploded nearby, frightened like everybody else because it was bloody frightening; but stoicism was often good camouflage for courage and you didn’t let on that you were terrified when your friends were around: bravado really. On that night there were no friends about but she still lay shivering in her bed, her head under the clothes, her mind searching for something to calm her nerves.
In the morning she was late for duty, blaming last night’s raid for her tardiness, trying to sound perky and cheeky. The CRO sergeant, Rex Fulbright, wasn’t having any of it, said he was in the raid as well and he wasn’t late, was he? His voice leaping to a rising screech; told her there were orders for her and she’d be up the creek with no paddles if she didn’t shape up. Hardly knowing what was g
oing on she found herself in front of the woman police superintendent in charge of A4, the policewomen’s branch of the Met, a leathery lady, hands the colour of kippers and with an irritating drawl and the faint scent of horse.
Naturally she thought she was in trouble, but it was quite the reverse. She couldn’t take it in, what the super was telling her. Since the fall of France, since Dunkirk, in spite of police duties being mainly reserved occupations, the Met was haemorrhaging manpower. More than ever women were now required to take on jobs that were previously only the preserve of men, that’s what the female super told her. She, Susannah Mary Mountford, was to be promoted and as from today would be an acting, temporary, unpaid woman detective sergeant, posted to the Camford Hill nick where, eventually, because of air raid injuries and shortages of manpower, she found herself the ranking officer in an unpleasant headline murder. Learn on the job, they told her, and learn she had to.
The victim was already notorious, a BBC announcer, a new breed because she too was a woman: Jo Benton, a girl who had been criticised for paying no attention to the BBC’s official guidebook regarding vulgar language, the one that was later known as the infamous Green Book.
The British Broadcasting Company seemed terrified of comedians, newsreaders, narrators and commentators using smutty expressions, and good old Jo Benton had plunged in following a freezing weather forecast with the deathless line, ‘Well, winter draws on, eh?’ which every schoolboy knows is interpreted as ‘winter drawers on’, a phrase specifically alluded to as forbidden in the BBC’s guidelines on coarse speech. This goes to show how touchy the BBC was and how relatively innocent the listening public: but then it had to contend with people like Max Miller and George Formby who sang about Mr Wu who ‘had a funny eye that flickers, you ought to see it wobble when he’s ironing ladies blouses’.
Anyway, Jo Benton ended up being garrotted with piano wire in her smart house in Camford and Suzie Mountford became the CID plain-clothes sergeant in charge of the investigation causing Fleet Street newspapers to tell everyone it was shocking that one of the fair sex could be leading male detectives as the head of such an unsavoury case. The fact that the Blitz was in full swing and the manpower shortage was acute didn’t appear to enter the minds of correspondents who complained to the papers about the unsuitability of young women getting their hands dirty with murder, signing their letters ‘Concerned of Banbury’, and the like.
