Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

Yes, that first day on my new job seemed strange, and I arrived back at my digs that evening feeling pretty tired. But very pleased with myself, because I had been in mortuaries, and watched postmortems, and, moreover, not felt ill.

  My landlady was waiting for me, all agog. “Did you see any of those dreadful postmortems?” she asked.

  “Yes, eight.”

  “Eight? Never!”

  And making noises of disapproval she went to fetch my dinner, the centerpiece of which was a dish of chops.

  When she brought in those chops I realized, with a jerk, that I must either eat them, resolutely, or become a vegetarian for life.

  Somehow or other, I ate them.

  “Well, dear,” said my landlady, popping in presently to see how I was getting on, “would you like another chop?”

  I said no, thank you.

  “Oh, I hope this awful job isn’t going to affect your appetite.”

  I replied firmly that I had no intention of letting it do anything of the sort, but I felt I had eaten enough chops for the evening. And turned my attention, with relief, to stewed fruit and junket…

  CHAPTER 3

  Life in the Mortuaries

  The world of coroners, courts, and mortuaries in those days was very definitely overshadowed by a Great Man; a modest, unassuming Great Man, but Great, for all that. He, of course, was Sir Bernard Spilsbury.

  I was introduced to Sir Bernard at Hackney Coroner’s Court, about a fortnight after I had started work with Keith Simpson. “Spilsbury” had become such a legend it was difficult to believe there really was a man, Spilsbury. I had always visualized him as a slight, somewhat mysterious person, slinking from shadow to shadow, carrying a bag of autopsy instruments. When I met him he was certainly carrying the celebrated bag, but there the likeness between the imagined and the actual Spilsbury abruptly ended.

  Sir Bernard Spilsbury looked, more than anything else in the world, like a prosperous gentleman farmer. Very tall—though stooping slightly in his later years—powerful, with broad shoulders and a very ruddy, open, earnest face, you would have said he was an expert on dairy herds, or sugar-beet crops, or agricultural fertilizers, but you would not have suspected that he was Sir Bernard Spilsbury. He was reserved, modest, and courteous in manner, very serious, very intent on his work. Indeed, he appeared to exist for nothing but his work. And above everything was his complete integrity.

  His handwriting was the most astonishing I have ever seen. He wrote his p.m. reports by hand, and the writing was like some hieroglyphic which professors despairingly pore over. I once sat next to him at the Old Bailey; while waiting to give evidence he took two notebooks from his famous bag and proceeded to copy notes from one book into the other. These notes were written in green ink and each completed page was a bewildering sight. He sat there very quietly and absorbedly writing, waiting to give evidence which would probably prove to be the vital evidence of the trial, yet, when I sat down beside him, humble secretary that I was, he had a “Good afternoon” and a charming smile for me.

  He always gave evidence in a quiet voice, with marvelous clarity, and his evidence carried enormous weight with the juries.

  I never saw him do a p.m.—I wish I had. He did not like to have people in the mortuary while he worked, except those persons who absolutely had to be there.

  He was accorded a vast respect. For a mortuary keeper to announce, “I’ve got Sir Bernard coming here to do a p.m. this afternoon,” was the equivalent of saying that King Solomon was due to appear in all his might and glory. Not that Sir Bernard was the least ostentatious. Very far from it. Nevertheless, he carried an aura with him, an aura which had been thrust upon him, one sensed. I think that so far as he was concerned he might have been perfectly content to have spent his life poring over a microscope examining unsensational slides. But Fate had arranged things differently. He became a front-page figure of exceptional proportions.

  Once I went to St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, where Dr. Simpson was to do a postmortem. St. Bartholomew’s is London’s oldest hospital, and the autopsy instruments the attendant proffered Dr. Simpson looked as if they might very well have been used by St. Bartholomew himself. Dr. Simpson politely refused them. “I always carry my own instruments,” he explained. Said the attendant, “Sir Bernard Spilsbury always uses these.” “Nevertheless,” replied Dr. Simpson, gently but firmly, “I prefer to use my own.” “But,” said the dazed attendant, “Sir Bernard Spilsbury always uses these!”

  There was a gleam in Dr. Simpson’s eye as he again expressed polite preference for his own instruments. The attendant was literally dumbfounded. He simply could not believe it. It was as though a trumpeter from another land had visited the royal court of ancient Egypt in its heyday and refused the proffered use of Tutankhamen’s trumpet.

  Despite these adulations Sir Bernard was a deeply modest man; a quiet, withheld man, withheld not in pride but in natural reticence.

  It was said, and was probably true, that nobody ever really succeeded in getting to know him. Everyone looked forward to the day when he would publish his memoirs, but he never kept systematic personal notes of his work; he was not, one suspects, very much inclined to reminisce to the world at large, and so the memoirs never appeared. When he died he carried innumerable thrilling stories with him.

  For it is not just the inside knowledge of the facts of the big, front-page murders which make a pathologist’s work so intensely interesting, it is also the astonishing, infinitely varied, little incidents of day-to-day life in the mortuaries. You could spend a hundred years in London’s mortuaries and never be bored.

  One morning, for example, walking into Hammersmith mortuary, I was drawn up short by the sight of an enormous hairy man lying on the p.m. table, the nearest human thing I have ever seen to a gorilla, clasping between huge Neanderthal hands folded on his huge Neanderthal chest a dimity posy of snowdrops. I stood staring, and MacKay, the mortuary keeper, came up to me.

  “Former British Fascist, Miss Lefebure. Used to be a P.T. instructor to the Hitler Youth Movement in Germany. Looks the type, doesn’t he?”

  “But why is he cuddling that dear little bunch of snowdrops, MacKay?”

  “Special request of a relative, Miss Lefebure,” said MacKay, drily.

  “My, my, my,” I murmured. A lot of my time in those early days was spent in murmuring “My, my, my.”

  Laughable things occur frequently in the mortuaries; but the laughter they provoke is of the internal, wry sort; grotesques, like details from a Bosch.

  A day or two after the Fascist and the snowdrops I was at Poplar mortuary. As I walked past the huge refrigerator where the bodies were kept I saw two undertakers, splendid in their black coats and top hats (they had come direct from a funeral), tussling to remove a very stout matron from one of the metal refrigerator trays.

  “Blimey,” said one of the undertakers, “she’s frozen to it, mate. We’ll never get her off.”

  They stood the tray up on end, against the wall, in the hope the plump matron would slide off, but there she remained, stuck to her tray, up against the wall, like some unique mural decoration.

  “She’s stuck orright. What’ll we do? Can’t wait for her to thaw.”

  “Chip her off,” responded the other.

  So they borrowed two chisels, and chipped her off. Tinkle-tinkle went the ice while, as they had no notion I was listening, for I had disappeared into the doctor’s office, they made appropriate but unprintable comments about the plump matron…

  Episode three, which showed me how strange some of my duties were to be, concerned a pair of new gloves I bought one day on my way to work, and the slashed wrist and hand of a suicide, a young window cleaner with a broken heart who had cut his throat and wrists. The wrist wounds were especially fine ones, from the pathologist’s point of view, and Keith Simpson asked the coroner for permission to remove a hand and wrist to place in the Gordon Museum. So the hand was removed. Then came a problem.

  “What
can we carry it back to Guy’s in?”

  Dr. Simpson’s gaze roamed around the mortuary and fell on my table.

  “Miss Lefebure, what about that nice little bag your new gloves are in? Might I borrow that?”

  “But of course, please do.”

  So the new gloves went in my pocket, and I tripped out of the mortuary bearing the hand in the pretty little candy-striped paper carrier bag which a chic shop assistant had given me barely an hour before. What would she, poor creature, have said?

  CHAPTER 4

  My First Murder

  The telephone bell was ringing all the time we worked, with messages from coroners’ officers. “Three cases at Hackney, one a suspected food poisoning.” “Two at Walthamstow, one an old woman fell out of bed, the other an infanticide.” “A suicide at Wandsworth, cut throat.” “Two straight cases and a drowner at Southwark.” And so it went on. And then one day in June the Leyton coroner’s officer (PC Goodwin, since retired), was explaining over the phone, rather breathlessly, that he had a murder, a shooting by a soldier, who had already given himself up. “It is a murder, but it isn’t a real good murder,” explained the excellent man. “I’m sorry it isn’t a real good ’un. You haven’t had a real good ’un yet, have you, Miss Molly?” (Because of the difficulty of the name Lefebure, they all called me Miss Molly.)

  Goodwin had a definite notion of what a murder should be. “Not much of a murder, sir, just a husband run a sword through his wife,” he observed on another occasion. But Goodwin had definite notions on a variety of subjects. He was very talkative, even for a police constable. He also had a nice disregard for convention. Once, I remember, at Whipps Cross Hospital, he disappeared from the p.m. room into the adjoining chapel, a small room with a bier and prie-dieu, used as a viewing room. Goodwin was in there for some five or ten minutes, then he bobbed back to us, beaming. “Guess what I’ve just been doing, Dr. Simpson.” “I’ve no idea, Goodwin.” “Just eaten half a dozen oysters,” said Goodwin.

  But to return to Leyton, where I saw my first murder victim—the victim of a murder that was just a shooting, as Goodwin said. Indeed, he was right. A young soldier, a deserter, had wandered around for a week, “waiting for a chance to kill somebody,” as he scrawled in his pocket diary, and had finally selected, completely at random, an elderly man who was picking vegetables on his allotment. Having shot the man, the soldier gave himself up.

  Not a big, front-page case at all. I had to wait till the following September before a “proper” murder came our way, a “good ’un.” Then it was the Surrey police, phoning us to say they had “a sticky job at Weybridge.”

  So to Weybridge we drove, to a nice, pretty little house called “The Nook,” the home of an old lady who had retired to Surrey for rest and quiet. Through the flower-filled front garden, dozy in the September sunshine, we walked, into a hall where the furniture lay overturned and fragments of smashed glass were scattered everywhere on the carpets. Up the stairs, past many paintings of tranquil religious subjects, into a bedroom, the most disordered room I have ever seen.

  The bed was piled with tossed clothes, coverlets, a pink wool shawl, jewel cases, scarves, trinkets. The dressing table was a-scatter with little oddments—all the drawers were pulled open. A piece of material was jammed in the wardrobe door. On the floor was a jumble of an elderly lady’s straw hats, a red brooch, watch chains, a pink eiderdown quilt on which rested a bottle of brandy and a bottle of lotion, and an upturned oil stove with a bloodstained petticoat around it. Another bottle of brandy was on the bedside table. Meanwhile, unaware of the disturbance, a little clock stood placidly ticking on the mantelpiece, staring calmly at nothing with its small, round face…

  Lying in the midst of this confusion, between the upturned stove and a small, overturned table, half on the eiderdown and half on the carpet, clad only in a pink cotton nightgown, was an old, white-headed woman, flat on her back, her arms flung out, her right hand still grasping a tumbler with a drain of brandy in it. She had a black eye, and a dark trickle of blood ran from her nose and the corner of her mouth.

  Around her now milled several detectives, powdering the furniture surfaces for fingerprints, while two Scotland Yard photographers, who had somehow managed to squeeze into the room with their apparatus, were taking flashlights. Dr. Simpson, Supt. T. Roberts of the Surrey County Constabulary, and myself squeezed ourselves in, too. We were joined by the Weybridge pathologist, the late Dr. Eric Gardner, and he and Dr. Simpson began collecting clues.

  Some hair, a cigarette end, the broken handle of a comb, some bloodstained cottonwool were handed to me, and I put them in little buff envelopes, to which I fastened descriptive labels. Nothing was touched by hand; forceps were used for picking up these things and placing them in the envelopes. Dr. Simpson also took scrapings from under the old lady’s fingernails, for such scrapings may provide such important information as hairs, clothing fibers, often from the murderer. He also took measurements of the room, the body, and the position in which it lay.

  Meanwhile Superintendent Roberts gave us a résumé of the crime, so far as the facts were known. The old lady was a Miss Salmon, who lived alone at “The Nook.” From time to time, however, there came to stay with her an eighteen-year-old seaman, an orphan, whom she had befriended out of the kindness of her heart, and practically adopted. His name was Cusack.

  On the night of the murder Cusack came home with a Canadian private. Both were drunk when they arrived at “The Nook,” and both helped themselves from the old lady’s cellar to more drinks. Miss Salmon, probably thinking it best to keep quietly out of their way, went up to bed.

  The postman, calling at the house next morning, could get no reply, so he put a ladder against the back bedroom window, climbed up, and looked in. There was the old lady lying dead on the floor and the room ransacked.

  The horrified postman called the police. When they arrived they found Cusack wandering drunk in the front garden and a Canadian soldier lying dead-drunk on the kitchen floor. Both had their pockets stuffed with valuables belonging to Miss Salmon.

  Miss Salmon’s bedroom door was locked on the inside, and barricaded too from inside by a chair. But whether Miss Salmon was responsible for these defenses or not was a problem.

  The postmortem the two pathologists performed on her, in a pretty little mortuary surrounded by great scarlet dahlias and drowsy September bees, showed that this poor old soul of eighty-two had been punched and battered unmercifully and finally been left lying on the floor to die. Death was due to shock from her injuries.

  Dr. Simpson said she would have been too weak to lock and barricade her door herself after the assault, so the detectives returned to “The Nook” and did some experiments with the bedroom door. They discovered that this door could be locked from outside and the key then be pushed back into the bedroom quite easily, and the door could be barricaded within the room, from without, too.

  Cusack made two statements to the police. In the first he said, “I walked into the room and pushed at her with my hand, hitting her in the face with my right hand. She fell down on the floor and stayed there. She fell between the wardrobe and the dressing table. She did not move after this.”

  But shortly after making this statement he evidently decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and so up came another statement, in which he accused his Canadian friend, McDonald, of the main violence, and even claimed that himself had shown concern for Miss Salmon. This second statement reads:

  “She opened the door and McDonald caught hold of her, I believe around the throat. She did not have time to say anything. She struggled with him and tried to scream but she could not make much noise because he kept hold of her. He then laid her on the floor between the wardrobe and the dressing table, and pulled a silk eiderdown off the bed and laid it over her. She was still struggling and knocking her heels on the floor. He said, ‘Hold that over her.’

  “I held it over her. The old lady then got her head out from u
nder the quilt and said, ‘What is all this?’ I then struggled with her and put the quilt over her head again. I then went down the dressing table drawers and I got out some jewelry. The old lady then started to struggle again and McDonald said, ‘I will attend to her. I think I will have to tap her.’

  “I said, ‘If you are going to, do not hit her too hard, because she is old.’

  “He then took the quilt off her face and said to her, ‘Are you going to be quiet?’ She started screeching and McDonald lifted her head just off the floor a little and hit her with his right hand in the face. She still carried on screeching and he then hit her hard in the face. She moaned a little and was then quiet. He then left her alone and we both went to the chest of drawers and took out some stuff. He said to me, ‘I think she is kicked out, or dead.’”

  Cusack and McDonald were charged with murder. Cusack didn’t appear for trial, however, for at the time of the crime he had been in an advanced stage of pulmonary tuberculosis and he was dying in Brixton prison when, in January 1942, McDonald appeared at the Old Bailey.

  McDonald was a big, husky dumbbell, who could have felled his frail alleged old victim with one blow.

  His defense was that it was Cusack who had assaulted poor old Miss Salmon, and the jury agreed with him and found McDonald not guilty.

  McDonald was able to return to his native Canada, a free man. But shortly after his return he was killed in a road smash. And Cusack had already died in prison.

  CHAPTER 5

  Tale of Two Lovers

  The September sun which had shone so warmly and brightly the day we had assisted with the “sticky job at Weybridge” waned to the paler light of October, and October, in its turn, faded into the first days of winter. The mortuaries became rather chilly places to work in, and I was always rather pleased when the lunch hour came and I found myself at Guy’s, in a warm dining room, eating lunch with friends from the hospital administrative staff. For by this time I had many friends at Guy’s.