Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Of course war-weariness didn’t take everybody the same way. Some it made drink a lot. Others took to bed—with others—a lot. Some became hideously gay, brave, and hearty. Others became sardonic and bored. Some seriously depressed. The Cockneys sharpened their celebrated wit until it had an edge which cut as painfully and bitterly as grass. A few took to prayer, or started work on a second vegetable allotment, or began a new baby. My grandmother, who was over ninety, crocheted a full set of dinner mats and read right through all the big Russian novelists. She would look up at me from her Turgenev or Gogol—“He’s a wicked man, this Fyador, and look what he’s done to that poor Masha”—and, breathlessly, would plunge back into the book.

  Of course I was really one of the last people with a right to complain, for I had a deeply interesting job and Dr. Simpson allowed me three weeks’ holiday a year, all in one lump, and often I got an extra fortnight later in the year, too. So when my holiday came I was able to rush up to Cumberland and there work all my wartime spleen out of my system in a marvelous orgy of rock, rope, and long, long tramps over the fells. Part of the time I might manage to get my sister or some friend to come with me, but often I was alone up there, on the fells all day without seeing a soul, for the war had removed all the hikers and hostelers, along with their wretched orange peel, and had left the district as God intended it: for sheep, shepherds, ravens, and climbers.

  These interludes devoted to trying to break my neck on rocks, or capering twenty-mile stints over the tops, purged my system and Lefebure would return south in fine fettle, ready to have another bash at being a perfect secretary—and taking the war on the chin.

  I realized how lucky I was to have these breaks, when so many people were going through the war without any breaks at all.

  Dr. Simpson had a very delightful cottage at Tring, where he had installed his family, and I paid frequent happy visits there. It was wonderful at the end of a day’s work to whisk out of dirty old Euston into the quiet of a country summer evening.

  It was always marvelous, during the war, for a Londoner to get away from London, even if only for an hour or so. Others flocked to London to spend giddy leaves, but we all wanted to get away from London. We had had London with a vengeance. London was the fortress we held and where so many of us died, and it was a relief to escape sometimes from its gray, scarred battlements.

  As the war went on, Dr. Simpson got more and more “country jobs.” These trips were always intensely interesting, even if not enjoyable in the ordinary sense of the word, and they introduced a spicy variety into a job which already was very far from being dull.

  One spring day in 1943 we were called down to Kent on a queried murder. It was our first visit to Kent. CKS observed that quite apart from the murder, it should be rather a nice outing.

  Very soon we were on our way. The train moved swiftly into the Garden of England and I stared hard out of the window. I didn’t know Kent at all. Of course I had realized it would be flat, but not so flat. A flat landscape makes me sink, very sinky, and this landscape soon had Lefebure in the depths. Oh, those rows and rows of little fruit trees, planted in dead-straight lines, all gesturing stiffly and singing despondently, “Spring will be a little late this year…” Ah, that flat earth, which never at any point rose toward the cold March sky. I remembered the comment a friend once made to me about the fen country: “Such desperately platonic scenery, strictly no interesting protuberances.” It was the same, I found, with Kent.

  When we arrived at Maidstone we were met by a very trim little policewoman driving a very trim little car. She took us to the HQ of Kent County Constabulary, where we met Chief Supt. F. H. Smeed; a very big, burly, charming man with a slow, warm smile. He was about the only thing I approved of in Kent, that afternoon, anyway.

  Now we all bundled into a very large car and drove off into the wilds of the Garden of England. The landscape was as pancake-flat as ever and, in this part of the Garden, entirely devoted to cabbages.

  Our destination was a very small hamlet, little more than a single row of cottages, set at a crossroads. They were not the sort of cottages you automatically visualize at the mention of cottages. These dismal habitations huddled about the crossroads, gritty-faced and gray-roofed, each with a long, narrow front garden all mud and sog and withered wintry plants.

  The cottage we had to visit was sandwiched in the center of the main row. Waiting in the garden for us was a young detective who let us into the cottage. It was very dark inside and icy cold. As soon as we stepped into the place a fearful stench greeted us; the acrid, clinging, clanging odor of positive habitual filth.

  The rooms were unbelievably dirty, and although you couldn’t see the bugs you knew they were there. There were filthy old chairs and curtains and broken furniture, and bits of food lying around, and newspaper on the kitchen table instead of a tablecloth. Filthy clothes and muddy old boots were slung about. There were broken, unwashed crocks and hideous saucepans. The place was rotten and reeking with dirt.

  On the kitchen floor, between a chair and the table, lay a dead, middle-aged woman, as filthy and unkempt as the cottage. She was fully dressed and had on a muddy overcoat and boots.

  The coroner’s officer began telling us about the case. This woman, he said, had left her husband and come to live in this cottage with a laborer and their two illegitimate children. She and the laborer were given to drinking bouts and the previous evening had gone off on a pub crawl together. They had arrived back home at about eleven; neighbors heard them quarreling and banging about.

  According to the laborer, he had gone up to bed, leaving his woman sitting in a chair in the kitchen. When he came downstairs in the morning he found her lying dead on the floor.

  The neighbors, however, told the police about the quarreling and banging around, and the CID accordingly decided to look into the matter.

  Dr. Simpson and the detectives now moved gingerly about the filthy kitchen, taking measurements and searching for an explanation of what had really happened.

  “Don’t touch anything, miss, or you’ll pick something up,” advised the coroner’s officer. “It’s the dirtiest place I’ve ever been in.”

  It was ghastly to think of children living in such a cottage—which was only fit as an abode for black beetles, and not highly particular beetles at that.

  I wondered, as I frequently still wonder, why the State cannot prosecute people for being dirty. After all, filth is a menace to the entire community. It seems odd that people can be prosecuted for bad morals, but not for being physically dirty. If this woman had taken up the career of a prostitute she could have been fined, but as a filthy housewife she could not be fined. Personally I feel that a clean prostitute is better than a stinking, dirty housewife who lets her children live like cockroaches.

  Of course parents can be fined for neglecting their children, but the neglect has to reach the most appalling proportions before anything can be done about it. I suppose this woman was a borderline case.

  Dr. Simpson and the detectives had now decided that the laborer’s account of the incident was true; there were no signs of a struggle having taken place in the kitchen, and the injuries to the woman’s head were simply in keeping with her having fallen and struck her head on something as she fell. The body was removed to the local mortuary, and the p.m. CKS performed there confirmed this. She had fallen, struck her head, and died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  So that was our first trip to Kent.

  One of the things which never ceased to give me a feeling of surprise in my job with Dr. Simpson was this business of being able to go into other people’s homes. Criminal investigation is an Open Sesame. Nevertheless, I always felt a trifle amazed when I found myself as a matter of course walking into some stranger’s house—even though I was in the company of the CID.

  Shortly after this Kent case we went, for example, to a North London suburb to investigate a murder. We found ourselves, with the local DDI, inspecting a nice, clean comfortable ho
use in a nice, tidy, respectable suburban street. We looked into slightly disordered bedrooms, into a nursery with a dolls’ house, rows of dolls, a large rocking horse. We glanced into the drawing room with its piano and upholstered furniture, the dining room with its highly polished table and chairs. But the kitchen was the room that mattered most to us, for there in dressing gown and pajamas lay the mistress of the house, murdered.

  She had been stabbed, and there was blood everywhere. A tap of the gas cooker had also been turned on, and the room was full of gas. The police opened the window and doors. The murderer had perhaps turned on the gas tap to make it look like a case of suicide—though this was a forlorn hope—or perhaps (this seemed a more likely theory) to ensure that if the woman did not die from her stab wounds she would die from coal-gas poisoning.

  It was an awfully strange thing to stand in this clean, modern, well-kept kitchen, very much like one’s own kitchen at home, to see a stabbed woman lying on the floor at one’s feet and blood spattered all over the nice, clean kitchen. It was such an amazing combination of the ordinary and the outrageous. Something day-to-day and homely slashed with complete horror.

  What had really happened in that kitchen? What had been said, what so violently and dreadfully done? Dr. Simpson was able to tell us what was done, but nobody but the murderer could tell what was said and why the violence which was done was done, and some of all this he would rapidly forget, or would not care to repeat. A murderer can give a bare description of that last scene between himself and his victim, but he can never tell everything.

  Tolstoy, in The Kreuzer Sonata, makes the murderer tell the tale of how he killed his wife, but although he leads up to the killing in great detail, and can tell you in great detail how the dying woman looked after the attack, propped up in bed, swathed in bandages and full of speechless indignation and shock, the actual account of the killing is jerky and vague—as accounts of killings by the killer always are jerky and vague. Tolstoy knew exactly how a murderer describes the murder, how his mind afterward is a medley of memory and blank.

  The violent actions of the moments of assault, the overwhelming emotions accompanying the actions, are too much for the mind to assimilate; it is all movement and no reflection, like a torrent rushing headlong over a rocky steep. Afterward, when the hand has dropped the weapon, or the fingers relaxed from the throat, and the actual feel of the killing gone—and these purely physical sensations cannot survive more than a second or so—there is nothing to remember because there is nothing truly to remember with. One can, for example, remember a conversation with a lover long, long afterward, but the sensation of physically loving cannot truly be remembered. It can only be recaptured by loving again, and then no two episodes of love will be exactly the same twice over. Moments of physical love and moments of murder are ephemeral; they cannot be preserved in the memory. They can never be adequately described because they are simply experienced in the flesh, the mind never has a chance to reflect. Everything in murder and love is felt. Anybody who thinks about love doesn’t love. He—or she—is merely a coldblooded Gallup-poll type. And if a person about to do murder stopped for one instant to think, the result, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, would be that he wouldn’t become a murderer. Only a very few murders are premeditated and thoughtfully carried out. It is when the moments jump up and chase each other around and around in a frenzy that passion exists—and afterward the person who was in the middle of the whirl just cannot remember. Lovers can’t remember, neither can murderers. Never truly remember.

  The murderer in this North London case, the murdered woman’s husband, was arrested, tried, found guilty, and executed, but the real, inside story of the crime never emerged. Only the bare facts came to light. The murderer was a quite brilliant Indian research chemist in his early forties. His wife was a nice, healthy, unspectacular Englishwoman of the same age. She was, so far as could be ascertained, a tranquil, devoted housewife and mother. There were two children—both at boarding school at the time of the murder. This took place early one May morning. A neighbor described afterward how he had heard screaming just before seven and, on looking from his window, observed at the bedroom window of a nearby house a woman in blue pajamas shrieking for help. Then a man, also in pajamas, appeared behind her and pulled her away from the window and the screaming stopped.

  The neighbor left it at that. The English carry their belief in personal freedom to a fantastic degree; if wives wish to hang screaming from their windows and husbands want to pull their screaming wives indoors and slam the windows shut—why, then let them. It’s a free country, and it’d be pretty bad form to interfere.

  A little while later this same neighbor saw the husband of the erstwhile screaming woman leave his house burdened with two suitcases and walk away up the road.

  Not long afterward a charwoman discovered the wife dead in the kitchen.

  The cause of her death was shock from blunt wounds of the head, accelerated by coal-gas poisoning. She had clearly been chased around the house by her attacking husband and killed, after a struggle, in the kitchen. But why?

  Only the husband could say why, and he never offered any explanation.

  Dr. Simpson could reconstruct the actual killing. The CID could search the man’s house and investigate his private affairs and build up the salient outline of the case. Nobody could look into the murderer’s mind and probe the quick and heart of the matter. There was no Open Sesame for that.

  It is this ultimate secrecy of each one of us which makes the story of everyday life so fascinating. Each one of us has a secret room which is inviolate.

  CHAPTER 14

  Portrait of a Fairy

  The Dobkin case had involved us in an aftermath of quite considerable literary activity, for CKS wrote—and read—a paper on the case for the Medico-Legal Society, and after this he wrote an article on the same subject for the Police Journal.

  Dr. Simpson, as a Home Office pathologist, subscribed regularly to the magazine, and it was felt that his secretary might also read it. Some articles, however, were not unnaturally far above my simple secretarial head, such as “A Numerical and Dual-Purpose System of Fingerprint Classification” or “Spurious Gems and Their Scientific Detection.” But there were other articles, for instance, “Drunk In Charge; Some Hints on Evidence and Procedure” by Inspector Frederick Pickard of the Birmingham City Police, that I studied avidly, for it was crammed with hints which I felt might one day come in very useful. For example, this quote of advice of Sir Henry Curtis-Bennett to a motorist:

  “If you are ever stopped by the police, don’t for goodness sake touch the car in any way, as you will be said to be leaning on it for support. Don’t sway at all when you are walking, or you will be said to be staggering under the influence of drink. Spring smartly to attention, stand upright outside the car, and say, ‘I am not guilty of whatever you are about to charge me with doing.’”

  The Dobkin case article was such a success Dr. Simpson wrote another on the Wigwam Murder, and after this he contributed regularly to the Journal, with accounts of his more important and interesting murder cases.

  Besides these articles he had begun writing his students’ textbook on forensic medicine, so I found myself with a lot of “spare time” typing to do. The “spare time” came mostly in the afternoons, when it did come. CKS would leave me upstairs in our Department, while he went to work downstairs with Ireland in the Gordon Museum. I would sit typing, seated on my high stool at the departmental bench, under which still lay the remains of Mrs. Dobkin, wrapped in her dust sheet.

  At first there were other people up there with me, at work in Dr. Ryffel’s big laboratory, but as the light dimmed, the short, dreary light of English winter afternoons, they would finish their work and go home, for there were no blackout arrangements on the top floors of the Pathology Block (ours was the top floor but one), so no electric lights could be used after blackout time, and consequently when dusk fell it was necessary to end laborat
ory work for the day. The Pathology Block, built just before the war, was the work of an optimistic architect who had designed the laboratory walls almost entirely of wide glass windows, and these proved very difficult during the war; during air raids they were rather a menace to the people working doggedly in the laboratories, and so far as blackout went they were impossible to cope with. Consequently in midwinter work in the upper floor labs ended about four o’clock.

  I had instructions from CKS to join him in the Museum for tea around about 4:15. By that time all the upper floors were deserted save for myself, and just after four a porter, somewhere in the bowels of the building, switched off all the lights on the upper floors with a master switch, thereby plunging me abruptly into near darkness. Then, foolish as it sounds, I became hideously aware of my lonesome state and of the murdered Mrs. Dobkin lying under my bench, an inch or so from my feet. It was not so much that I feared her—poor, stupid, inoffensive little woman, nobody could have feared her, either in life or death; but I had a terrible phobia that if I looked up I should see Harry Dobkin glaring at me through the windowpane, pallid and sweating, as he had glared at me at the Old Bailey. As soon as the lights went out, therefore, Lefebure leapt up, gathered together her typewriter and papers and beat a precipitate retreat down the four flights of stairs (the electric lift stopped working, of course, when the porter switched off the juice), and after a final nervous canter along a dark corridor arrived at the Museum, trying to appear as casual as possible, although by that time severely out of breath.

  Presently I began timing myself so that I had packed up and left the Department just before the lights went out. This worked nicely, but then the wretched porter began switching off the electricity earlier and earlier, and therefore I arrived in the Museum earlier and earlier, too, thereby creating an impression of one unduly eager for her tea, and finally calling from CKS the comment, “Miss L., you’re turning up at ten-to-four these days, although you know there’s no tea until quarter past. You won’t get enough typing done if you stop so early. It isn’t all that dark upstairs, surely you can manage the last quarter of an hour up there without a light?”