Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  “What’s that, West, our old bones?”

  “The old bones, sir. But I’ve just taken a dekko [glance] at ’em, sir, and they look a bit fishy to me. The DDI’s been told they’re here, sir.”

  “Well, I’ll take a look at them in a minute, when he arrives, but let’s polish this p.m. off first.”

  We were just finishing the p.m. when in came Divisional Detective Inspector Hatton, followed by Detective Inspector Keeling.

  Mr. Hatton is a very big, round-faced man, devoted to what he called “hard facts.” He was, at that time, up to his eyes in work—black market offenses, I believe he once said—and so he very understandably hoped that the “old bones” were those of an air-raid casualty, or an old body from the graveyard, and nothing more. He frankly said so. DI Keeling said nothing. Keen, quiet, very interested, he watched CKS untie the string of the brown paper parcel…

  The body…but one could scarcely call it a body. It was really no more than an incomplete skeleton, with a few withered tissues adhering. The skull was loose from the trunk. Dr. Simpson, at that first examination, could say no more than that these remains were of a person some twelve to eighteen months dead, and that without doubt they were female, as the uterus (womb) was discernible. The body was small, so he added it might be that of a girl, maybe a young woman bomb casualty. He asked to be allowed to take the remains around to Guy’s, where he could work on them at his leisure, for any attempt to reconstruct them would obviously require hours of painstaking work.

  So West presently carried the parcel around to Guy’s for us.

  When CKS and I went into the Gordon Museum on the following Monday, there lay the brown paper parcel, and this time it was Ireland who was contemplating it with interest. CKS untied the string again, and then we stood staring at this withered, dried thing. Corpses, subjected to modern methods of examination, do talk, talk plenty, but it did look as though it would require a miracle to extract much more than a peep from this one.

  The first thing Ireland did was to exchange the lady’s brown paper wrappings for a more respectable white dust sheet. Meanwhile, CKS remarked, “Well, the probability is that she’s no more than an air-raid victim, but even so she will provide me with a very interesting essay in reconstruction; some entertaining spare-time work.” And he gave me a grin. “Spare-time work” was a joke between us by that time.

  On that Monday evening, when I went home, I left him happily in the Gordon Museum, cleaning the body with little bits of rag. Next day it was greatly improved in appearance. Cleaned of the dust and grit and the withered tissue it looked, even to me, to be considerably more informative. Dr. Simpson pointed out to me that the body did not seem to be an altogether normal air-raid casualty. The skull, for example, had been severed from the trunk very cleanly. The lower jaw was missing, there was no scalp tissue adhering to the skull, except one very small particle at the back of the head—and bomb blast does not scalp its victims like that. Neither did any of the facial tissue remain, not even a small tag. The lower parts of the arms and legs were missing; these amputations scarcely tallied with mutilation by falling debris—the limb extremities might have been chopped off, but scarcely shattered. Lastly, there were marks of burning upon the head, down the left side of the body, and at the level of each knee.

  Could it be that the remains were those of a murder victim, and that an attempt had been made to dispose of the body, and destroy all clues to identity, by chopping off the head, stripping it of all face and scalp tissue, removing the lower jaw, chopping off the hands and feet, and then burning? If so, the job had been crudely done; a body is a difficult thing for an inexperienced person to dismember; somebody seemed to have had a grisly time carving and hacking at this one.

  A light of anticipation now began to shine in Keith Simpson’s eyes. He set to work to see to what extent he could establish the identity of the remains. He began by estimating the height of the dead woman in life by means of the famous Pearson’s formula; applied to one of the long bones of the body. The only bone available here was the left humerus—upper-arm bone. I was asked to work out the problem.

  Now at mathematics I am a complete dolt. Even simple arithmetic of the adding-up and taking-away sort stumps me. So I huddled desperately over Pearson’s formula, finally announcing to my distinguished employer that I estimated the dead woman to have been eight foot nine in life. There was a strained silence…Then he took the pencil and paper from me and worked it out himself. Correct result: five feet one inch.

  The next step was to discover the age of the woman. This was done by X-raying the various bone fusions, or sutures. The palate suture confirmed that the woman had been between forty and fifty.

  Examination of the small piece of scalp still adhering to the back of the skull showed her to have had dark brown hair, going gray.

  Examination of the remains of the womb showed that she had suffered from a fibroid growth.

  So now we knew that the body was that of a woman aged between forty and fifty, height five feet one inch, with dark brown hair going gray, and suffering from a fibroid tumor of the womb. She had been dead between twelve and eighteen months.

  It was at this point that DI Keeling came to call on us with a significant gleam in his eye, and a most interesting story.

  Mr. Keeling had discovered that the wife of a former fire-watcher, one Harry Dobkin, at 302 Kennington Lane—the premises where the body had been found—had been missing for the past fifteen months. And Mr. Keeling had a hunch that this shriveled corpse now lying in the Gordon Museum was Mrs. Harry Dobkin.

  Dr. Simpson told him the details of height, age and so on, that he had established, and confessed his own suspicions that the remains might be those of a murder victim. Thereupon Mr. Keeling, not daring to hope too much, but nevertheless in somewhat of a delicious twitter, hurried away to see if he could check these facts with actual identity data of the missing Mrs. Dobkin. He went, in short, to visit Mrs. Dobkin’s sister. (Who had fifteen months ago reported Mrs. Dobkin’s disappearance to the police.)

  And Dr. Simpson, in an heroic endeavor to control his own excitement, remarked to me, “If she is Mrs. Dobkin, and we can reconstruct her, it’ll be a classical case, the kind of case that comes once in a lifetime. But it’s almost too much to hope for. In all likelihood, Miss L., she’s nothing more than an air-raid victim…”

  Next day—July 21, it was a date to remember—Dr. Simpson came into the Gordon Museum after lunch, tucked the body, still wrapped in the dust sheet, under his arm, and requested Ireland and myself to follow him; Ireland with the microscope, myself with typewriter. Away marched our small procession, to the Pathology Block; Keith Simpson, myself, Ireland. We climbed four flights of stairs—owing to air raids the electric lift was out of order, which was hard luck on Ireland, for the microscope was very heavy—and found ourselves in the Department of Clinical Chemistry, through which CKS guided us, to conduct us finally into a very small room leading from the main laboratory. Triumphant and corpse-encumbered, he flourished a welcoming hand. “Miss Lefebure, Ireland, allow me to usher you across the threshold of the Guy’s Hospital Department of Forensic Medicine.”

  We stepped, with respect, into the Department of Forensic Medicine. All three in there together, we could scarcely turn around for want of space. CKS said solemnly, “From small births grow great institutions.”

  “Hear, hear, Dr. Simpson,” said Ireland, putting down the microscope, with relief, on the laboratory bench. I put down the typewriter, CKS put down the queried Mrs. Dobkin, and that was the christening ceremony of the Department of Forensic Medicine, Guy’s Hospital.

  It was, so far as accommodation went, indeed a small birth. Our new “Department” was about ten feet long and five feet wide; a rather brash visitor observed that there literally was no room to swing a cat. He received the frigid reply, “I see no reason why anybody should wish to swing a cat.”

  A long bench ran the length of the room, and there was a very large win
dow over the bench, affording a view of a brick wall, above which was a strip of smoky Southwark sky. The room contained two laboratory stools, Keith Simpson’s microscope, his reference books, a huge blotter, my typewriter, and the scales and weights of Dr. Ryffel, the Home Office analyst, head of the Department of Clinical Chemistry, whose weighing room this really was; he had, as it were, kindly sublet to us.

  In addition, of course, there was the body; that fragmentary body, wrapped in a dust sheet, which might perhaps be Mrs. Harry Dobkin. Might be a “case of a lifetime.”

  The hopes which we pinned upon this body, very tentatively at first, gradually gained strength, for Mr. Keeling was working hard at his end of the case and his discoveries tallied remarkably with those of Dr. Simpson. For example, Mr. Keeling learned that Mrs. Dobkin, missing from home for fifteen months, had been five feet one inch tall, aged forty-seven, with dark brown hair going gray. She had attended the London Hospital for fibroid tumor of the womb, and had refused an operation to remove this tumor.

  All this corresponded exactly with the data CKS had extracted from the remains: woman with fibroid tumor of the uterus, some fifteen months dead, estimated height five feet one inch, aged between forty and fifty, with dark brown hair going gray. Within the privacy of Guy’s we began confidently calling the body “Mrs. Dobkin.” “Miss L., would you take Mrs. Dobkin down to Surgical X-ray, please? I want Miss Newman to take some photographs of her.” So down to Surgical X-ray I would go, with Mrs. Dobkin (in her dust sheet) under my arm—she weighed very little—and for a while I would sit with her perched on my knee before a galaxy of lights while Miss Newman took photographs. (I had better add that I did not appear in the photographs.)

  On the Saturday following the opening of the Department of Forensic Medicine, CKS and I went with Mr. Keeling to the premises in Kennington Lane where the body was found.

  Number 302 Kennington Lane was a disused house partially rented out as a paper store, and it was here that Harry Dobkin had worked as a fire-watcher. Number 304, next door to 302, was a bomb-wrecked Baptist Chapel, and it was in the cellar at the back of this chapel that the body was found.

  It was rather a gruesome spot, this chapel, damaged by blast and fire. The cellar had previously lain buried under the fallen vestry, but this debris had been cleared by the demolition men, exposing the cellar to open air. A crazy little spiral iron staircase which once led from the chapel down to the vestry now clung airily to the charred chapel wall, its bottom step leading foolishly into space. The cellar contained nothing but the flagstone under which the body was found, and a rotten old wooden box in which the body may have been temporarily concealed.

  We spent about half an hour in the chapel that first visit. We returned the following Monday, along with Area Superintendent (now Deputy Commander) Rawlings, Chief Inspector Davis, and Detective Sergeant (now Chief Inspector) Dawes, as well as DDI Hatton and DI Keeling. Chief Inspector Davis had been in charge of the investigations which had taken place some fifteen months earlier, when Mrs. Dobkin was first reported missing by her sister, Miss Dubinski.

  Miss Dubinski had told the police that her sister was living apart from her husband, Harry Dobkin, and had constantly to press him for arrears in the maintenance money he paid her. On April 11, 1941, Mrs. Dobkin told her sister she was meeting Dobkin, presumably once again to ask him for arrears. After lunching with her mother and sister at their flat, Mrs. Dobkin went out—and was never again seen by them. But at 6:30 p.m. she was seen by a waitress in a café at Dalston, having tea with Dobkin. They left the café together; after that nobody ever saw her alive again.

  Next day, April 12, her handbag was found at Guildford post office. As it contained her identity card, ration book, and rent book, the loss would certainly have been a serious one for her, yet she never made any attempt to claim this handbag. The police view at the time was, and still is, that Dobkin planted the bag in the post office himself, as a false clue.

  At 5 p.m. that same day Miss Dubinski reported the disappearance of her sister to Commercial Road police station. She insisted her sister had come to some harm at the hands of Dobkin—who in the past had frequently treated her violently. Dobkin was interviewed by the CID on April 16. He made a statement describing the meeting with his wife on April 11. He said that after they left the café in Dalston his wife got on an eastbound bus and he hadn’t seen her since. He thought she had lost her memory and wandered off. He added that though his wife knew the Kennington Lane address where he fire-watched she had never visited him there.

  Four nights after Mrs. Dobkin disappeared, the night of April 15–16, a somewhat mysterious fire broke out in the cellar of the Baptist Chapel. There was no enemy action that night, so incendiary bombs were out of the question, and no inflammable material was known to have been kept in the cellar. Dobkin, the fire-watcher, said the fire started at 1:30 a.m., but he didn’t call the fire brigade. Neither did he put the fire out. At 3:23 a.m. a passing constable saw the fire and called the brigade. Dobkin was there, very flustered. The fire was fierce by that time and, although there can be no doubt Dobkin started it, it seemed to have become a much larger conflagration than he had intended. The brigade made no search of the premises when they had extinguished the fire. But at 5 a.m. the minister of the chapel, Mr. Burgess, arrived. He went down into the cellar, where the fire had obviously started. Dobkin had gone off duty, but the minister found in the cellar remains of a straw mattress—where certainly no straw mattress had ever been before. Moreover the mattress had been ripped open and straw taken from it and scattered in small heaps over the cellar floor. Mr. Burgess reported this to the fire brigade. At 2 p.m. he again visited the cellar. During the intervening period somebody else had been down there, the straw had been tidied up, and a garden fork left in the cellar. Now thoroughly suspicious, Mr. Burgess visited the cellar yet again at 7 p.m. to have a little talk with Dobkin, who by that time was on duty. Dobkin was not very clear in his account of the fire. He seemed very jumpy, too. He advised Mr. Burgess not to go down into the cellar as it was dangerous; he said he himself had been down there and it was very rough. Mr. Burgess was not at all satisfied with this interview and more than suspected that Dobkin had started the fire himself. He confided these suspicions to his private diary.

  A description of the missing woman was circulated, with a photograph, in the Police Gazette. Miss Dubinski herself inserted a photograph and description of her sister in the News of the World, three times. But all with no result. Meanwhile, Inspector Davis and Sergeant Dawes searched the chapel on April 28 and again on May 1 and 2. They made a very interesting discovery. The cellar extended for some distance under the floor of the chapel itself, and away under here they found a freshly dug hole, shallow, like a grave, some six feet long by two feet wide. But it was empty. Had it been dug as an intended burial place for Mrs. Dobkin?

  Sergeant Dawes searched the place on all fours till he wore his trousers away at the knees, to use his own expression, but he found no body anywhere. Dobkin gave up his work as fire-watcher on May 20; the police, having drawn a blank, reluctantly abandoned their investigations; and the matter was forgotten, until the sunny Friday, fifteen months later, when the demolition workers pried up the flagstone…

  And now here we were all at the chapel, with Sergeant Dawes once again crawling on all fours under the chapel floor, to show Dr. Simpson and Mr. Keeling, also on all fours, where the intended grave had been.

  I wanted to crawl under the floor, too, but was firmly assured by a stern male chorus that it was too dirty for me. So I had to remain in the chapel above, with Messrs. Rawlings, Davis, and Hatton, peeking down at the three explorers from time to time through the cracks in the rotting floorboards.

  The chapel was by now a very dilapidated, jim-jammy old place indeed, especially in the rain—it was raining that morning. It made me think of a Tom Sawyer–Huck Finn ghost haunt. The roof was full of holes, through which the rain dripped onto the rows of dirty mute pews below, wher
e hassocks and old hymnbooks moldered together. On the dais at the end of the building a battered harmonium lolled like a lunatic and pages of holy music lay scattered around it like grimy snow. The place seemed to be awaiting a congregation of Baptist ghosts.

  Presently CKS, DI Keeling, and Sergeant Dawes emerged from the cellar, all three rather red in the face from being bent double so long, and very dusty. It certainly did seem, observed CKS, that a hole had been dug under there as an intended grave. “Yes, and he never put her in it, miserable old swine,” said Sergeant Dawes, angrily rubbing his knees. “There was I sniffing around that empty grave, and the body not twenty yards from me, under the slab. So near, and yet so far!”

  And both he and Mr. Davis looked extremely glum, while Mr. Keeling grinned delightedly, for the case had now passed from the hands of Chief Inspector Davis to DDI Hatton, under the supervision of his area superintendent, Mr. Rawlings.

  This was because Miss Dubinski had originally reported her sister’s disappearance to Commercial Road police station, where Mr. Davis had at the time been DDI. He and Sergeant Dawes had consequently made the first investigations, which had resulted in such a disappointing blank. But now Mr. Davis was a chief inspector at the Yard, and, moreover, the body had been unearthed in Kennington and reported by the coroner, Mr. Wyatt, to the Southwark CID, and the chief of that CID division was Mr. Hatton. So the Dobkin case had become his pigeon. And Detective Inspector Keeling, his aide-de-camp, positively glowed with excitement to think that such a plum of a case had come his way, but Mr. Hatton looked very phlegmatic, standing with his hands in his pockets, staring moodily at the cellar where the body had been found. He was up to his eyes in work, he grumbled, and really hadn’t wanted a murder just then.

  The next day we were all at the chapel again. It was a blazing hot day, but CKS had had an idea, and Mr. Rawlings had agreed it was an excellent idea, so here we all were: Mr. Rawlings, Chief Inspector Davis, DI Keeling, Sergeant Dawes, the coroner’s officer, two or three police constables who had volunteered to assist, and two demolition workers who had been more or less press-ganged by Mr. Keeling. Mr. Hatton was absent; he was tracking down some black marketeers, explained Mr. Keeling.