Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Of course, we weren’t able to get back to Guy’s every day. Lunch was eaten everywhere and covered every variety of meal, from sausage rolls gobbled as we bowled along the Mile End Road in the car to repasts at the Ivy or La Coquille. Sometimes we even ate sandwich lunches in the mortuaries, and there was the famous day when Dr. Simpson, who was always telling West that the floor of Southwark mortuary was clean enough to eat off, dropped a Spam sandwich onto the said floor, which, although certainly very clean, was nevertheless a mortuary floor. There was a heavy silence, during which West eyed Dr. Simpson expectantly. Then Dr. Simpson, with a half grin, half grimace, said, “Well, West, here goes, I said it.” He stooped, picked up the sandwich and ate it. “Well done, sir!” exclaimed West.

  But usually, two or three times a week, we lunched at Guy’s and, just to ensure that devotion to the job remained at top level, once or twice a week there would be a p.m. to do, immediately lunch was over, in the hospital p.m. room. To these postmortems, of course, the students came.

  Their attendance varied. For some less spectacular autopsies our audience was meager. But if the case was of any special clinical interest the crowd was usually large, and if we had a criminal case it became necessary for CKS and myself literally to fight our way into the p.m. room.

  One Thursday at the end of October, CKS informed me I would have to take a very quick lunch indeed, as there was a murder job in the Guy’s p.m. room. So I swallowed a hasty plate of sausage toad-in-the-hole, skipped the chocolate mold which followed, got together my typewriter and briefcase—and a large supply of those little buff envelopes to pop hairs and fibers and fingernail scrapings into—and scurried away to the p.m. room.

  As I approached, a strange sort of roaring noise was heard, and when I opened the door I found myself on the very edge of an enormous crowd of young men, all craning their necks and talking excitedly at the tops of their voices. I tried saying, “Excuse me, please,” but nobody took the slightest notice, so then I punched one or two of them in the back, but they still ignored me, so finally I tried hitting them behind the knees with my typewriter and, in this unladylike fashion, fought my way through to the p.m. table which was the center of all the excitement.

  On the table lay a girl, gory with stab wounds. Beside the table stood Gibb (the now late-lamented and always much-loved Gibb), the p.m. room assistant, who usually ruled the students with a rod of iron but who was on this occasion permitting the uproar to pass uncommented, wisely realizing, no doubt, that youth must occasionally have its fling. However, he exerted his influence sufficiently to clear a small space for me, my typing table, my chair, and my typewriter. Immediately, two students climbed on my table, to gain a better view of the p.m., and another swarmed up the back of my chair, perching like an acrobat. “Gentlemen,” said Gibb, “you will have to get down from there.” They got down.

  At this point Dr. Simpson arrived with Divisional Detective Inspector Hatton, Detective Inspector Keeling, and the coroner’s officer. Their entry was greeted by a deafening stamping of the feet, a form of emotional display common to students and convicts. On this occasion it implied a big bravo, as it were. Dr. Simpson pointed out that the postmortem was a very important and serious one, that it was only by the courtesy of the CID that the students were able to see it (another thunderous stamp for DDI Hatton), and requested strict silence. Immediately all present became very grim, folded their arms on their chests, and assumed expressions suitable to incipient Spilsburys—or, shall we say, Simpsons.

  Certainly there was little to laugh at in the case which now unfolded itself to the company. The girl on the postmortem table was a pretty blonde of twenty-four, who came from the Old Kent Road, and who had been stabbed to death the previous night by her fiancé.

  Her breasts, left side, and back were crimson with thirty-four stab wounds. Her hands had been slashed in her desperate attempts to protect herself from the young man’s knife.

  Brown, the fiancé, a twenty-year-old boy, so DDI Hatton told us, had known the girl, Rosina, for about four years, and they had become engaged the previous April. Rosina’s father was against an early marriage for the young couple. Presently he began to suspect intimacy between them, and on the Sunday before the murder he accused them of this. Both denied any such thing. Rosina’s mother said they were “not playing the game.” Her father told them “to keep the courtship clean.”

  Brown replied he loved Rosina, and if he could not have her nobody else should. He was convinced by this time that Rosina’s parents were trying to break up the engagement. He lay awake all Sunday night, worrying. Finally he decided to kill Rosina, rather than lose her.

  The girl had arranged to go to a dance with Brown’s sister on Wednesday evening, returning afterward to his home. At noon on Wednesday Brown phoned Rosina and told her he wished to speak specially to her that evening. So, after Rosina and Brown’s sister had returned from the dance and had had family supper, Brown took the girl to an upstairs room, where they would not be disturbed.

  A little later his stepfather, mother, and sister heard screams coming from upstairs. The stepfather and daughter ran upstairs. They opened the bedroom door. There was no light in the room, so the old man lit a candle and went in. Rosina was lying on the bed with blood flowing from her. Brown was weeping and exclaiming he wanted his Rosina. In the general confusion which followed he left the house and at 10:45 p.m. went up to a constable in the street and said, “Call an ambulance. I’ve stabbed my young lady.” The constable went with Brown to his home. When the constable tried to examine the body Brown pushed him aside, sat on the bed, embraced the dead girl, and cried, “Rosy, speak to me.”

  The constable examined the room and found a bloodstained dagger behind the door and a black-handled kitchen knife on the carpet. Brown said, “I have stabbed the girl and I hope she is dead and that I die, too.”

  At the police station he began to talk. He said, “You don’t know how I loved that girl. Her father has tried to part us. I intended to do this tonight. If I can’t have Rosina, then nobody else will.”

  He made a statement in which he said, “I first met Rosy four years ago. We first had connection about five months ago, and her father had suspicions about it. He found a letter from Rosina to me which confirmed his suspicions. He therefore accused us and told a cock-and-bull story that somebody had told him about us. Rosy’s parents had always tried to guide our lives. I was determined they were not going to part us. I made up my mind before leaving Rosy’s home that I would kill her.”

  Describing how he murdered her he said, “We sat on the bed and I told her how much I loved her. Then I told her I had made up my mind to kill her. I think she thought I was kidding. Then I picked up the knife. She screamed and I let fly.”

  This was the tale which DDI Hatton now told the hushed throng in the p.m. room. Dr. Simpson examined the girl’s wounds; she had been stabbed thirty-four times, with great violence. A frenzied onslaught.

  We saw Brown, the accused fiancé, next day at the inquest. He was in the custody of two prison warders. He shambled into the court; a wreckage of a youth, ashen gray in the face, his lower lip hanging, his nose red with weeping, his bespectacled eyes pink-rimmed and dull. During the inquest he huddled on the edge of a bench, his hands clasped between his knees, leaning dazedly forward. His elder brother, a soldier on leave, was present in the public seats. Brown, as he left the court between the warders, made a brave attempt to smile and salute him.

  Later the brother, with a pal, was allowed five minutes’ conversation with the prisoner in the little anteroom next to the mortuary. Dr. Simpson and I were waiting in the yard outside and we could hear the young men’s voices; and then, after a mere few seconds, Brown’s brother came out, weeping. He stood outside in the yard, blowing his nose into his handkerchief. A cigarette end was flung through the door of the anteroom where Brown and the other young man were making disjointed conversation. Then Brown was led away by the warders. He was gray and helpless, like
a piece of flapping old paper.

  Soon after we saw him again, in the police court. He looked just the same: ashen and dazed and shambling. His stepfather appeared as a witness. He was a small man in a too-big overcoat, and he nervously handled an old cloth cap. He wore the same dazed expression as the accused.

  The case came up for trial at the Old Bailey in November, before Mr. Justice Hilbery. Brown had been considerably tidied up for this important appearance. Dressed in new clothes and with a haircut, he no longer looked so much like a derelict fragment of newspaper. He was still very pale but quite composed, and bore himself with a quiet courage. He looked, in fact, as if he had come to grips with the situation, and so indeed he had. Apparently he had with difficulty been persuaded to plead not guilty. For he wanted to die. He knew quite clearly that he wanted to die. He had said so from the start, but now he really meant it. But other people concerned wished him to try to live and so, in a very quiet voice, he pleaded “Not guilty.”

  Rosina’s father told the court how he had found, and read, the fatal letter. He gave his evidence with understandable bitterness against Brown. But even Court Number One at the Old Bailey can react in an irrational fashion, and this display of outraged fatherly virtue, sincere and perfectly appropriate as it was, annoyed the court, whose sympathies clearly lay with the lovers.

  Describing how he had found the letter, Rosina’s father said he had come home from work late and going into the kitchen had accidentally knocked Brown’s jacket from the back of a chair. Three letters had fallen from the pocket. Two were in pencil, one in ink. He had read the letter in ink. Having read the letter, he accused Brown of wrongful conduct with his daughter and told him to keep the courtship clean. Brown replied he loved Rosina and would not let anybody else have her…

  When the angry father had left the witness box, defending counsel set to work on the only possible line of defense: that Brown was insane. It was a pity he could not simply have appealed to the humanity of the court—nobody there wanted the boy to hang, excepting the boy himself. Everyone was intensely sorry for him. But our law says all murderers must hang, unless they be proved to have been insane at the time of the crime, or are unfit to plead, and it was impossible to prove Brown insane, even though his poor, tearful old stepfather climbed pitifully into the witness box to tell us how Brown’s granny had always considered the boy a little mental, and one or two other witnesses also appeared to give similar evidence. It was no use. There was not sufficient hard evidence. The judge began summing up the case.

  The court became very crowded as the trial drew to an end, and I was obliged to squeeze into a seat on one of the public benches. I found myself next to Brown’s stepfather. The poor old man had a heavy cold; he reeked of wintergreen and cough lozenges. Distress bowed him down. I could scarcely bear to glance at his face as the jury filed from the court to consider their verdict. We waited; they soon returned. The verdict was the only one possible: guilty. Brown was sentenced to death. He was perfectly tranquil, standing very still and upright with his hands lightly resting on the ledge of the dock. But his poor old stepfather at my side burst out sobbing. He huddled weeping there, in his enormous old overcoat, helplessly wiping his face around and around with a stained handkerchief, and for the first time I understood what a murder really means in horror and anguish. I wished with all my heart I could say something to the old man to comfort him, but there was nothing to say. With tears in my own eyes I hurried out of Court Number One of the Old Bailey, where the sword of justice pierces so exceeding sharp.

  As for Brown, he went cheerfully to the condemned cell at Wandsworth prison and there awaited his death, repeating constantly to his warders that he was happy at last because now he would soon be with his Rosina.

  So ended the tale of two lovers, played not in sun-splashed Verona, but in the Old Kent Road. But whether in Verona yesterday, or the Old Kent Road today, the heartbreak is always the same.

  CHAPTER 6

  Murder on Waterloo Bridge

  One morning not very long after the sensational postmortem at Guy’s, we walked into Southwark mortuary to do two not very exciting cases and found that West had a third body waiting for us: an ugly, weatherbeaten prostitute of about thirty-five to forty, dirty and slovenly, daubed with lipstick, rouge, and river mud. She had been found early that morning, lying on the Thames foreshore beneath the new Waterloo Bridge, which, at the time, was not yet open to the public.

  She looked, at first sight, to be a suicide, but West hinted he thought there was something “fishy” about her. West claims to have a nose for “fishy cases.” He added that late the previous night a man and woman had been heard quarreling on the bridge, and presently a soldier was seen leaving the bridge, but no woman. Later a woman’s scarf was found on the bridge, beside the parapet, and when daylight came this woman was seen lying dead in the mud below.

  Dr. Simpson began the p.m. and before many minutes discovered the woman to be severely injured. He looked at West with a twinkle in his eye. “Quite right, West. There’s something very fishy about this one. You had better ask the Coroner’s officer to inform the CID.”

  Further examination showed that a fierce attempt had been made to strangle the woman; there was a fracture of the voice box, indicating a violent grip on the throat. Bruising on her back suggested she had been roughly forced against the bridge parapet. There were also severe internal crushing injuries with fractures of the ribs, and fractures of both thigh bones, which were caused by her fall over the parapet onto the concrete piles and mud flats below. The woman, said CKS, had died immediately following the fall.

  It was at this point that Area Superintendent Reece, a shrewd man with a big laugh and amazing eyebrows, arrived at the mortuary. After he had discussed the case with Dr. Simpson he hurried off to start investigations and we went back to Guy’s and prepared a report for the CID. Then for four days we heard no more about the matter. But on the fourth day came a very early morning phone call for me from CKS saying that the CID wanted him to visit Waterloo Bridge with them, and could I be ready if he called for me in twenty minutes?

  Twenty minutes later we were on our way to Waterloo Bridge.

  It was a cold morning and the bridge, still in the process of completion, was broad, white and windy, like the deck of a huge liner. A party of detectives, all very burly in thick overcoats, escorted us along the bridge to the spot where the murder had taken place. We all craned over the parapet to stare down at the place, some thirty feet below, where the body was found. Knowing that CKS didn’t like heights, and fearing to see him plunging in the wake of the unhappy murder victim, I caught hold of the hem of his coat and hung on tightly.

  While we stared, somewhat dizzily, down at the mud Mr. Reece confided that the woman had been identified as one Peggy Richards, a prostitute from Deptford, and that the police believed she had been murdered by a Canadian soldier. “We haven’t arrested him yet, but we’ve got him taped,” explained Mr. Reece.

  There was some more discussion of technical aspects of the lady’s fall from the parapet, and then we all walked back across the bridge, admiring the view in general and commenting on the beauty of the Thames and the fairness of the morning. Then Mr. Reece and his party drove off along the Embankment to the Yard, and we hurried off to start the day’s postmortems.

  The Canadian soldier, a private named McKinstry, appeared at the Old Bailey some two months later. He was a stocky, bespectacled, balding man who stood stolidly in the dock listening to the case put forward by the prosecution. This was that McKinstry had come up to London on fourteen days’ leave, and on arriving at Waterloo station had gone with a friend to a public house close by, the Wellington. Peggy Richards was also at the Wellington and remained there until closing time, in the company of several soldiers. At closing time she was seen outside the public house and a little later was noticed walking in the direction of Waterloo Bridge with a Canadian soldier.

  At midnight a watchman on the bridge hea
rd a man and woman quarreling. He told a man who kept a store near the bridge; together they went out onto the bridge and there they found a Canadian soldier standing by the parapet. It was very dark, because of the blackout, so they helped the soldier off the bridge. Then they went back to see if they could find the woman. There was no woman to be seen, but by the parapet, where the soldier had been standing, they found a woman’s scarf.

  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.)