Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

  Far below us, bathed in fathoms of fog, the traffic moaned and bickered in muffled accents. In the lounge, where we waited, the madeira and music made a strange prelude to the murder investigation which lay ahead. Indeed, it was so novel an episode to be introduced into the middle of our day that we found ourselves exchanging sly glances of amusement. “Old Chapman will think we prime ourselves well for a murder,” said CKS, pouring more madeira and starting off the “Variations” all over again. “I hope he turns up before it grows pitch dark. It’s not going to be easy getting to Luton in this weather.”

  Just before three there was a ring at the front door, and Chief Insp. William Chapman presented himself, together with Detective Sergeant Judge. (Now chief superintendent and chief inspector, respectively.) Mr. Chapman is shortish, bulky, pink, and smiling. Mr. Judge is tall, lean, dark, and rather serious. They wore heavy coats and thick scarves and advanced with wary detective tread into our exotic atmosphere of madeira and music. However, it took little persuasion to embark them on a madeira each, too, and for a brief while everything was quite partyish, rather than murderish. But soon we were all packing into the police car which was waiting in the street below, Mr. Chapman asked us if we minded his pipe; we said we didn’t, so he lit it, and the journey began.

  The driver of the car was a Flying Squad man who had formerly been one of Sir Philip Game’s personal drivers, and he obviously regarded the fog as an interesting obstacle sent by a benevolent Providence to enliven what would otherwise have been a rather dull journey. With a grin of delight he plunged us into the thickest pockets of gloom, losing his way and finding it again repeatedly, laughing meantime hugely at the joke which no other driver in London saw. We avoided lampposts and the like by miracles, and every now and again he asked us gaily if we thought the car was on the pavement. There was not much way of telling whether the car was on the pavement or not, so we pressed merrily on, without accident, which suggested we were on the roadway after all.

  At last we were out of London, the dense yellow fog melted into a dense white one, and our driver assured us he thought we were on the right road for Luton. We kept our eyes open for signposts, lost our way, found it, lost it and found it again, and finally arrived, via St. Albans, at Luton.

  I was already slightly acquainted with Luton, remembering it as a peculiarly dismal, drear, dank, dispiriting dump. Renewing the acquaintance, I found Luton to be just as much of a dismal, drear, dank, dispiriting dump as ever. The fog pawed it with mangy pads, mud clotted its streets, its inhabitants meandered pallidly and moodily past the depressing war-time shops. Our car drew up outside the town’s police headquarters—a heavily sandbagged edifice—and we were greeted by Det. Insp. Thomas Finch, of Luton CID, who took us into his office and regaled us with cups of tea and what slight information he had so far managed to collect about the murder.

  “At quarter past two yesterday afternoon, November nineteenth,” said DI Finch, “two sewer men who were testing the water level of the River Lea, which flows through the outskirts of Luton, found the body of a naked woman bound with cord and wrapped with sacks lying in the water. A public footpath skirts by the river, and along this path large numbers of people walk daily on their way to the Vauxhall factory. But yesterday morning was foggy; not many people noticed the sacked object lying in the river, and the few who did merely supposed it to be refuse of some sort or the other. So until the sewer men climbed down the bank to test the water level the sacks held their secret intact.

  “The sewer men were testing water levels on the eighteenth, too, in that same part of the river, but they are certain the body wasn’t there then.

  “It seems to me,” continued Mr. Finch, “that the murder took place somewhere else, not in the actual vicinity of the river, and the body was brought there for disposal in the water on some sort of vehicle. I’ve searched the banks of the river and the waste ground around, but there’s nothing to indicate the murder took place there. So far as traffic tracks by the river go, however, the only ones to be found are on a nearby bridge; we’ve checked on them and they belong to a milk truck which stops on the bridge every morning, so it doesn’t seem a very likely vehicle. All the same, I’ve had the tracks preserved. You never can be too careful.

  “The sacks in which the body was wrapped have so far given us no clues, neither has the cord binding the body. But they may help at a later stage.”

  “And the body?” put in Mr. Chapman, puffing at his eternal pipe.

  DI Finch shook his head. “Not a lot to go by yet, but we hope Dr. Keith Simpson will be able to help us there. She’s a youngish woman, completely naked, no rings or anything like that, no birthmarks. There’s an old stomach scar, and one interesting thing is she hasn’t any teeth, which seems a bit unusual at her age; might be useful. She’s been pretty badly knocked about. But before you go to look at her I suggest you pay a visit to the river, just to see where she was found.”

  So we all drove to the river. But river, perhaps, is a misleading title for the shallow, muddy stream winding its way between dispirited acres of waste ground and allotments. The Lea, at this stage of its career, was a bare six inches deep, fringed with muddy banks tufted with unhealthy grass. To mark the exact spot where the body had lain a small stake had been planted, surmounted by a piece of soiled white rag.

  Dr. Simpson and Mr. Chapman stood on the footpath and stared at the stream. Then they slithered down the bank and stared at it some more. Then they climbed back up the bank, inspected the ground around, inspected the milk truck tracks, surveyed the dismal scene of stream, stake, banks, and allotments again. There was nothing much to be learned from this riverside jaunt. The body had lain in the stream, some four feet from the bank; Dr. Simpson thought it had most likely been rolled down the bank into the water, and with this both Mr. Chapman and Mr. Finch agreed. Then we all returned to the cars and drove to the hospital to examine the body.

  The Luton and Dunstable Hospital proved a very modern, attractive building, with a clean, white, light mortuary. The dead woman was lying on the p.m. table, still bound, but no longer wrapped in the sacks. At these sacks, ordinary coarse potato sacks they appeared to be, Dr. Simpson and Mr. Chapman peered attentively, but there were no clues—foreign hairs, fibers, or so forth—visible to the naked eye; so the sacks were carefully put on one side, to be sent away for laboratory examination.

  Police photographs of the woman, wrapped up as when she had been found, were shown to us.

  CKS then turned to the body on the p.m. table. The first thing he did was to take the body temperature—this had fallen to that of the surroundings. Full rigor mortis was also present. This indicated that the woman had died during the afternoon or evening of November 18. She had clearly been dead when dumped in the river. Because the water was shallow she had lain only partly immersed, and skin changes suggested she had lain there for only a very short time, some twelve to eighteen hours at the most, which meant she had been put there probably during the darkness of November 18–19.

  The cords which bound her were carefully examined. Her legs had been tied before death, the trunk after death. So she died while she was being trussed up, no doubt, although she was unconscious when the murderer began the job of trussing her—but he, of course, was more than likely under the impression she was already dead.

  There was nothing about the cord, at that stage of the investigation, which could provide the detectives with clues. It was put aside with the sacks to go to a laboratory.

  Dr. Simpson then began searching the body for anything which might offer identity clues. She was a well-built woman, with dark brown hair, worn short, brown eyes, aged between thirty and thirty-five, five feet three inches tall. She was completely nude. There were no rings on her fingers. She had no birthmarks, but there was an old appendix scar. Although she was only a young woman she had no teeth, which, as DI Finch had already observed, might prove a useful identity clue. The state of her gums showed she had worn false teeth, but these had
been removed. She had had a child, or children, and she was five and a half months pregnant again now, at the time of her death.

  Police photographs, full-face and profile, were taken, but without very much confidence, because the injuries the woman had received to face and head had resulted in so much bruising and swelling that she obviously looked very different now, in death, from her everyday living self.

  These injuries showed that she had been gripped across the throat by a right-handed person, from in front, and while gripped thus had been pressed against a wall, or onto the floor. There was no asphyxiation, however, and no serious attempt had been made to strangle her. She had, in fact, been killed by an extremely violent single blow, from the edge of some very heavy blunt weapon. This blow extended across the left side of the face, from chin to ear. The ear was split; so was the cheek over the cheekbone. The upper and lower jaws were fractured.

  Mr. Chapman, watching Dr. Simpson examining these injuries, remarked, “It’s not going to be much use bringing people in to identify her when she’s been knocked about like that. I doubt if her own mother, if she has one, could recognize her now.”

  This blow from the blunt weapon had clearly rendered the woman immediately unconscious and had felled her to the ground. In falling she had struck and injured her right temple and side of her head, splitting the scalp above the ear.

  The actual cause of death was brain hemorrhage, and Dr. Simpson thought it must have taken the woman some thirty to forty minutes to die, from the time she received the terrible blow from her assailant. But as she was unconscious, her killer no doubt thought her dead and began undressing and trussing her soon after she fell, motionless and bleeding, to the ground. By the time he had completed the job she was dead.

  He then somehow conveyed the body to the river, rolled it down the bank into the water, and left it.

  So the police now knew, without a doubt, that the woman was murdered. They knew, in some detail, how she had been killed. They knew, pretty closely, when she was murdered (the afternoon or evening of November 18). But they didn’t know who the unhappy woman was—and until they knew who she was they couldn’t discover her murderer.

  Before we left the mortuary, samples of her hair and her fingernail scrapings were taken. It was also decided to preserve her feet in the hope her shoes might be found. Her fingerprints were taken, and a specimen of her blood for grouping. (This proved to belong to group O.)

  Night was quickly falling when we all left the hospital mortuary and returned to Luton CID headquarters. Mr. Chapman and his faithful Sergeant Judge began discussing with DI Finch the problem of where they should lodge during their stay in Luton. CKS and I interrupted this little conference to say good night, for we were now returning to London, in the squad car which had brought us down. Mr. Chapman gave us a smile.

  “You’ll have a great journey in this fog, Dr. Simpson.”

  “You’ll be glad you are staying here, Mr. Chapman.”

  “So long as we don’t have to stay here too long. I’ll be getting in touch with you to let you know how we progress, or to ask you for further help if we need it. And now, for the present, many thanks, and good night. Have a good drive back to town.”

  And his smile spread in mischievous ripples over his face, as we all shook hands.

  Cheerful man! He was going to need all his buoyancy, all his humorous optimism, before his sojourn in Luton was done…

  Our driver was not quite so perky as he had been on the outward journey. An afternoon’s waiting around at Luton had dampened his spirits. He turned his car’s hood toward London and the trek began.

  The fog grew thicker and thicker, darker and darker, as we neared town, till finally we were crawling gropingly about the northern suburbs, in a desperate miasmic gloom, with only the vaguest notion of where we were. We pulled down the windows and stuck out our heads, peering against an atmosphere slightly less transparent and congenial than a dirty horse blanket. The fog engulfed us, choked us, seeped into us, while we stared unavail­ingly for some kind of street sign which would help us to decide our whereabouts.

  Our driver was enjoying himself again now. “This is quite a fog. Can you see anything, Dr. Simpson?” asked the man at the wheel.

  “Not much,” said CKS, peering hard at nothing.

  “Am I on the pavement?”

  “No, I can just make out the curb. You’re doing very well.”

  We forged slowly ahead and then, from out of the murk, came a furious hoarse yell. “Look out, look out, you fool! What kind of a driver d’you think you are?”

  And the beetroot-red face of a madly indignant citizen appeared suddenly, mouthing and pop-eyed, right beside us. “Speed like that, night like this, pavement…might’ve…nasty acci…,” and then he had dissolved back into the fog, was totally gone, as astonishingly as he had appeared.

  Our driver, hugely tickled, repeated again and again, “What kind of a driver d’you think you are?” Then he added, “And what was that about speed? We’re going about five miles an hour. I can’t go any slower. Why didn’t he look where he was going? We weren’t on the pavement.”

  “I didn’t think so,” said CKS.

  “He was ambling about in the road. Typical idiotic London pedestrian. Never mind, though. Worse troubles at sea.”

  In the end we found Russell Square Tube station, and there they put me down. They shouted “Good night,” and crept away into the fog again, to look for Dr. Simpson’s flat.

  By next morning the fog had almost cleared and we were able to continue our routine mortuary work without any trouble.

  We looked forward to hearing from Mr. Chapman. And so indeed from time to time we did. But all he had to tell us was that he and Sergeant Judge were groping together in a fog thicker and more enduring than the one we had traveled back from Luton in. A fog of complete mystery in which they peered and searched and questioned, week by week, without any ray of information to light them in their investigations.

  Now every big detective has his special reputation, and Mr. Chapman was—still is—famous for his tenacity. He will persevere with a case long after other men exclaim, “Give up!” Therefore, with the Luton sack murder, he stuck grimly to his searching. Every now and again he came up to the Yard for a conference, and on these occasions he would also perhaps pop along to see Dr. Simpson; the round-faced, pink-cheeked personality who has been nicknamed, rather well, “the Cherub”; only a cherub with a wearily determined glint in his eyes as the weeks with the Luton job wore on.

  “How’s it going, Mr. Chapman?”

  “Oh, we keep hoping,” he replied always, with a sound that was half a regretful grunt and half a chuckle.

  Photographs of the dead woman were being exhibited in Luton shop windows, flashed on the screens of local cinemas.

  MURDER. POLICE ARE STILL ANXIOUS TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY OF THIS UNFORTUNATE WOMAN. HERE IS HER PICTURE. The picture was accompanied by her description.

  But her injuries, just as Mr. Chapman had feared, had distorted her face to such a degree she was quite unrecognizable. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, for example, saw the photograph at the cinema, but never recognized it as her mother.

  The father had told his children that Mother had left home after quarreling with him, and since she had done this once before, and since, moreover, “letters from her” arrived regularly for Grandma, the children suspected nothing.

  The two boys saw the photograph in a shop window and they did tell their father that it looked like their mother, but he replied it couldn’t possibly be, as she had called home to “fetch some clothes” only a day or so previously. After that the children nursed no further suspicions.

  The police ran a house-to-house inquiry: “Do you recognize this woman?” One man, a neighbor of the murdered woman, did half-recognize the picture and told his wife, “You know, that picture, it’s a funny thing, but I thought it looked a bit like that Mrs. Manton down the road, that’s been gone from home the past few weeks.
” His honest spouse told him not to be a damn fool. So he buried his suspicions. Nobody wants to look a fool.

  The nail scrapings taken at postmortem had proved uninformative. Mr. Chapman had had plaster casts made of the dead woman’s jaws in the hope some dental surgeon might recognize them, but although the dead woman’s dental surgeon was one of the people interviewed in the house-to-house search he did not identify either the casts or the photograph of the murdered woman.

  Everything that could be done was done. Four hundred and four missing women were accounted for in the process of the search. Six hundred and eighty-one addresses of women whose whereabouts were unknown to their relatives were traced. Thirty-nine identity visits were paid to the body and nine persons identified it in genuine error as the body of four other women.

  Two hundred and fifty truck drivers who had called at the Vauxhall works at about the time of the murder were traced and interviewed.

  Cleaners’ records were searched. Streets and refuse dumps were combed for discarded or fragmentary clothing. Inquiries were distributed through the press, the BBC, in the Police Gazette, to all county and borough police throughout the country. Scores of persons were interviewed who had heard screams, or seen suspicious persons, or happenings, on or about November 18–19.

  During the house-to-house search a police officer actually called at the home of the dead woman, but nothing aroused his suspicions, for the two boys he spoke to there didn’t think it necessary to mention that their mother had “gone away.” They didn’t recognize the photograph, either.

  A neighbor saw the boys being questioned, but when her turn for questioning came she didn’t say anything about her neighbor down the road who was missing from home—why should she? Bertie Manton, the missing woman’s husband, had said his wife had gone to Grantham to visit her brother. The neighbor knew, too, that the absent Mrs. Manton was pregnant, but why tell a policeman that? Goodness, there’s nothing very special about that. As for the photo, once again it went unrecognized.