Murder on the Home Front

by Molly Lefebure

However, we made the descent by the lift; an emergency affair, all groans and squeaks and stops and jerks, but the pride and joy of the individual who had fixed it up and who met us on the ground floor with a happy smile and the observation, “Going smoother now, ain’t she?”

  “Mah-velous,” breathed Sylvia.

  Back at the mortuary we found DDI Smith (now Chief Inspector Smith, celebrated for being in charge of the Craig shooting case). Mr. Smith, suave and deliberate, always carried the most perfectly rolled umbrella, and I always wanted to ask him if he rolled it himself, for it was the veritable work of an artist. But I never did ask him, because I wasn’t certain if it were the kind of thing a humble secretary can ask a dignified DDI.

  The p.m., during my absence, had taken a dramatic turn. That the man was dead some time before the hot iron was planted on his chest was now amply evident, for examination of the brain revealed that it was not the blow from his father’s fist that had killed him, but the sudden rupturing of a developmental cerebral aneurism. This meant, in other words, that the man might have dropped down dead at any time, and although the quarrel with his father might have precipitated his death because of his excitement, it could not be considered to be the cause of his death in any way.

  So the father had not killed his son, although I don’t suppose remorse ever ceased to torture him at the memory of this foolish fight over the family blackout.

  It was not long after this South London episode that we had a call to East London, to a murder in Leyton. Goodwin, the coroner’s officer for that district in those days (he retired after the war), explained that it wasn’t much of a murder, “just a husband quarreled with his wife.”

  He met us at the police station and escorted us to the house where the murder had taken place, talking nonstop all the way, telling us what was known of the case. (The time of our visit was about two in the afternoon.)

  “The DDI’s held up, Dr. Simpson, says he’ll be along as soon as he can, and same with the coroner.”

  “In that case, Goodwin, we’ll push on with the job.”

  “As I thought, sir. Well, sir, it goes like this. Screaming heard by neighbors at 12:15 pip emma [p.m.] today, sir. Husband seen to leave house in a hurry at 12:30 pip emma, sir. Encountered PC in street (one of our chaps, sir), and told him he’d just killed his wife. PC went to look and sure enough, there she was, sir. Everything left as husband left it, for you to see, Dr. Simpson. Apparently he believed she’d been trying to poison him, at least, that’s his story. The neighbors say they quarreled together a lot. They’d spent all last night down an air-raid shelter. Here’s the house, sir.”

  It was a little terrace house, divided into top and bottom flats, like so many little Leyton houses. How often had I, a nervous cub reporter, stood on such a doorstep, come to collect the details of a wedding or golden marriage anniversary. And now here I was on the doorstep with Dr. Keith Simpson and PC Jack Goodwin, waiting while the latter with real police aplomb took out a door key and opened the front door and then led us up a narrow, steep, short flight of stairs into a little sitting room.

  The table was laid with the remains of a meal, and tea things, and there was a half-full cup of now-cold tea and a plate of unfinished bacon and fried bread. But it was not an enticing table, being thickly spattered with blood, as were the carpet, the furniture, the walls, even the ceiling. On the floor lay a woman, stuck clean through with an enormous samurai sword.

  “Used to hang on the wall as an ornament,” said Goodwin, indicating a hook over the mantelpiece.

  CKS got out his thermometer and tape measure and I got out my notebook, pencil, and little buff envelopes. Then we set to work, taking temperatures and measurements and collecting hair, fingernail scrapings, and so on. We were very absorbed in this work, so that we didn’t precisely notice what Goodwin was up to, although I did think, in passing, that he seemed to be rattling and clinking and splashing a lot in the adjacent kitchen, very hausfrau.

  Presently CKS said, “Okay, Goodwin, I’ve done all I have to do here. Perhaps the undertaker could come around now and shift the body to the mortuary for us.”

  “Righty-o, Dr. Simpson,” says Goodwin. Then the astonishing creature adds, proudly, “Tidied things up a bit, haven’t I?”

  Tidied up he certainly had. He’d cleared the table. He’d washed up all the breakfast things; the china and the cutlery and the blood-spattered plates, everything. He’d swabbed up all the bloodstains from the furniture, the walls. In fact he’d got the room quite apple-pie, and if it hadn’t been for the lady lying skewered on the hearth-rug you wouldn’t have known there had been a murder at all.

  CKS looked slowly around. “Goodwin, I just don’t know what your DDI will say. You’ve successfully abolished every clue.”

  Goodwin’s jaw dropped. He had expected, I think, a word of praise. Poor old Goodwin.

  I don’t know if the DDI did say anything. Fortunately it was a case in which fingerprints and bloodstains were not vital. The husband had given himself up to the police and had made a full confession, and at the trial he was found to be insane. As for the actual murder, one can scarcely ask for more evidence than a samurai sword thrust into the front of the victim and protruding several inches from the back. A warning, as CKS told the Guy’s students afterward, never to keep dangerous ornaments about the house…

  Goodwin, I might add, was a constant source of joy to me, besides being quite a friend. I remember him once hurrying into Wanstead mortuary where there were two bodies awaiting postmortem examination: one case of his, from Leyton, the other a case belonging to the Woodford coroner’s officer. Goodwin hurried in, exclaiming, “Dr. Simpson, just take a look at my brain first, would you, to see if I’ve got a hemorrhage.”

  “All right, Goodwin, hop on the slab and I’ll take a look,” said CKS.

  Goodwin snorted. He knew Dr. Simpson knew he always referred to bodies from Leyton in the first person singular. For example, “Well, if you ask me, Dr. Simpson, I’ve got a fractured femur.” Or, “Dr. Simpson, I’ve got a ruptured gastric ulcer, when can you do it?” “Dr. Simpson, I’ve got a fractured skull and queried abdominal injuries, taken into Whipps Cross Hospital, dying.”

  A last word for Leyton mortuary: a small, concrete building presided over by Miles, the dour but really very kindhearted and likeable mortuary keeper, a man very proud of, and devoted to, his job. We were there a few days after the samurai sword case, quietly doing a p.m. on a natural death (a local ARP man, I remember), when the door of the p.m. room opened and my dear, one-and-only PC Albert Bultitude looked in.

  PC Bultitude was all bultitude, and adorable.

  “Good morning, Dr. Simpson. Good morning, miss. Excuse me looking in like this, but I wanted to see old Bill, if he’s here.”

  “There’s nobody here but ourselves, Mr. Bultitude, and Miles, who is in the viewing room. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone else here this morning.”

  “Isn’t that Bill you’ve got there, Dr. Simpson?”

  “Here, Mr. Bultitude?” exclaimed the startled CKS, indicating the body.

  Mr. Bultitude drew closer, and peered.

  “Yes, that’s old Bill. He was a great pal of mine, poor old chap. Thought I’d like to drop in and take a last look at him.”

  “Certainly, Mr. Bultitude. You are very welcome,” said CKS, quickly recovering his poise.

  Mr. Bultitude stood peaceably by awhile, looking his friendly last on old Bill, who was in the final stages of dissection. Then Mr. Bultitude thanked Dr. Simpson again, beamed good-bye to us both, went into the mortuary yard, heaved himself on his bike, and with a genial wave to us pedaled away.

  “A touching little tribute of friendship,” said CKS. “I trust my friends will do the same for me.”

  Such, then, were the opening months of 1944, grimmest of all those grim war years. Tragic things were happening, but there were still moments for certain wry glimpses of humor. Soon it was going to become much more difficult to see the funny side o
f things. Indeed, if it had not been for the stalwart Londoners around me, determined to keep smiling at all costs, I should probably have sunk hopelessly in an abyss of Gallic gloom. Fortunately my friends, by their own solid example, kept my morale from sinking. “Keep your pecker up, Miss Molly, and I’ll see you get a blood orange at Christmas,” said PC Doughty, of Shoreditch. Which is a good piece of London philosophy.

  CHAPTER 19

  A Secret Weapon

  June 6, 1944, Invasion Day, found me waking dazedly in a green-and-silver dawn which shook with the noise of the outgoing planes streaming across the sky. Between the tremendous roaring of the planes came brief pauses of silence and then I could hear the birds singing in the garden as if they could not care less about the enormous sound above them. I lay in bed and thought, “Today must be our Invasion Day—at last.” And I wish I could say that I raced out into the garden to take a look at the planes. But I didn’t. I fell asleep again.

  The radio at breakfast time confirmed that the Invasion was really on, and I hurried off to work in a state of tremendous excitement and apprehension. This was the day we had all been waiting for, and working for, and praying for, during the past four long years, and we all both delighted in it and dreaded it. Everybody held their breaths, waiting for news of what was happening on the landing beaches. The entire British nation had its fingers crossed.

  I met CKS at King’s Cross and we drove out to the eastern suburbs, where we had our first postmortem cases for the day. When we reached Whipps Cross Corner we saw a long, very long, convoy of Red Cross field ambulances, little, square, khaki-colored vehicles plastered with the huge red crosses on white circles, scurrying along the road to the distant Essex coast. There were so many of them. And one hoped, helplessly and no doubt foolishly, that they wouldn’t all have to be used.

  When we reached Wanstead mortuary we found Goodwin waiting for us in the little yard, for once at a loss for words. We hurried into the mortuary for our first case of the day and were greeted at once by a faint, but unmistakable, smell of bitter almonds. It meant only one thing. “A cyanide poisoning, Goodwin?” said CKS, not so much questioning—he had no need to question—as remarking. Goodwin came and stood by the old-fashioned slate p.m. table and nodded at the young man who lay there, in battle dress.

  “He was along with his regiment waiting in a boat at the docks, and I suppose the waiting got him down a bit, and he’d got the cyanide along with him, being a windy one, and just before they started out he was found dead in his berth.”

  CKS turned the soldier’s rather blunt-featured, cyanosed face up to the light and we all stared at him in silence. Without putting it into words we all felt that he was a blot upon our escutcheon. Nevertheless, being mere civilians, we had a delicacy about saying so. Therefore we just looked at him, without spoken comment.

  When CKS opened the body the smell of almonds, that unmistakable odor of cyanide, came out strongly. It is a quick death; the one, of course, which Himmler chose.

  That was our first p.m. on D-Day: the young soldier who was cut up in Wanstead mortuary while his erstwhile comrades were landing in Normandy.

  The rest of that day we did less topical postmortems. In the evening came the news that the landings had been, so far, successful, and there were the voices of Churchill, Eisenhower, and De Gaulle on the radio.

  Chester Wilmot, in The Struggle for Europe, describes how Hitler’s plans to launch a gigantic V-1 bombardment of Southern England and especially of London went astray. On the night of June 12 one lone bomb, out of an intended salvo of 128, landed in London. It claimed only one or two victims and on the following morning, June 13, CKS was asked to do a p.m. on one of these, a woman.

  The V-1 had landed in the Shoreditch neighborhood, and Doughty, the coroner’s officer, was terribly hush-hush when he telephoned me.

  “The Home Office wants Dr. Keith Simpson to do a postmortem on the victim of an incident.”

  “What kind of an incident?” asks the ever-inquisitive Miss L.

  “Enemy action, Miss Molly.”

  “Yes, but what sort of enemy action, Doughty?”

  Doughty hummed and ha’d and at last said that so far as he could make out it had been some “sort of a rocket-bomb.”

  “The Secret Weapon?” I asked him.

  “Don’t know, Miss Molly. I suppose it might be.”

  As events soon proved, it was the Secret Weapon all right, but on that first morning of the offensive we didn’t know any more about the matter than what Doughty had told me over the phone. The woman on the p.m. table at Shoreditch mortuary had died of a blast from a high explosive of some kind or the other, and her injuries were ordinary blast injuries.

  On the night of June 15–16 the offensive began in earnest. A woman surgeon friend of mine in North London spent all June 16 operating on casualties brought in from a Kentish Town incident, while I sat typing in Keith Simpson’s flat, listening to the explosions going off, spasmodically, around us. We were informed that we were being attacked by pilotless rocket-bombs, and a few days later one which had landed intact was put on view at Leicester Square, and I went along to look at it—I think I paid sixpence to see it. But soon I was seeing an excess of them, doodling across the sky, and I wondered why on earth I had wasted sixpence to look at a V-1.

  The Londoner’s pet name for them was “doodle-bombs,” with less decent variations on the theme. They were, frankly, nerve-racking. They were also, I thought, so completely German; a form of death utterly mechanized, completely lacking the human touch, deriving from those masterminds that invented mobile gas chambers for killing Jewish children, and human-soap factories. Yes, the doodle-bombs made dying a completely ignoble process. A rather ridiculous little airplane buzzing across the sky, drooling and lurching like a besotted bumblebee, finally to cut off into silence and plunge in a top-heavy, helpless dive onto streets and houses and people, sending everything and everybody up in fragments, with a bang!

  It was so inhuman it verged on the farcical. A little airplane, flying by radio, traveling so far and then automatically going off with a bang and killing you. What a bloody silly way to die!

  We soon all got used to the business of hearing a bomb boombling nearer and nearer and wondering, “Is it going to pass over, or is it going to cut out and land on me?”

  Hitler, of course, was meantime optimistically assuring his chiefs of staff that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, because the British civilians, under the impact of this fearful onslaught, would panic and ask for an armistice.

  But although most people found the V-1s a much more grueling ordeal than the Blitz, there was no panic, because everybody at home knew that this attack was all part of the German counterattack against the Allied Invasion, and it was as much the civilian’s duty to stand up to the doodle-bombing as it was the soldier’s duty to do the fighting in France. Therefore the Londoner’s watchword “Grin and bear it” once again became a battle cry, although the grinning was, by this time, somewhat dour.

  The doodle-bombs seemed to have a definite timetable, and this timetable coincided wonderfully neatly with that of Dr. Keith Simpson. He liked, if possible, to work south and west in the mornings and east in the afternoons. The doodle-bombs chose the same system. Mornings they plumped around Hammersmith, Wandsworth, moving toward Southwark at midday—when we too moved over to Southwark. By the time we reached Shoreditch at two o’clock or so they were also flocking down upon Shoreditch, traveling farther afield to Stratford, Leyton, Walthamstow, Ilford, and East Ham as we went.

  I suggested, a little timidly, that we might change our routine around a bit. But CKS greeted this proposal with a frigid look. “Certainly not. We really cannot allow these wretched bombs to interfere with our work, Miss L.”

  One afternoon, as Doughty of Shoreditch and I picked ourselves up from the floor from under his office desk, where we had been taking inadequate emergency cover while a flying bomb exploded a few blocks away, I said, “Dough
ty, if I come here often enough these afternoons I know I’ll cop it.”

  He gave me a rueful grin. “Why, Miss Molly, d’you think we’ve got one labeled for us here?”

  “I do.”

  Next afternoon we didn’t go to Shoreditch, but about four o’clock Doughty phoned us to say that a bomb had landed just outside the Coroner’s Court, damaging the place severely—​fortunately he had been in the basement of a neighboring building—and quite destroying the funny little old Victorian mortuary and, what was infinitely worse, the wonderful old fifteenth-century weavers’ houses the other side of the churchyard. As for the beautiful old church, that was still more or less standing, but blown through and through, so that it was merely a shell.

  How often I had said I would go in that church some time when I had the afternoon off, to see the ancient registers with the names of Shakespeare’s original players inscribed in them, and the Elizabethan plate, and the other wonderful things in there. But I hadn’t hurried to visit these marvels, and now they had been blown into dust, to whirl around desolate street corners and pile on deserted bomb sites and make the gritty pavements more gritty and more bitter.

  All Londoners nurse memories of those days. The street shelters where some of the women and old folk would sit all day, talking in the sun, ready to dodge under cover when the sirens sounded. The Underground at night, crowded with people come to sleep down there, all sociable as field mice, cheerfully retiring for the night in improvised bunks, which the occupants modestly fixed up with curtains. (My sister got a kick from peeking around these curtains at people and saying, “Hello.” Some of the things said to her in return were not quite so friendly.) The constant boodle-oodle-oodling and the rending crashes, every incident immediately followed by a stream of people hurrying forth on bicycles and on foot to give whatever assistance was possible at the scene of disaster. The innumerable cups of tea that were made, the narrow-squeak stories that were swapped, the Union Jacks that appeared—as in the old Blitz—stuck on the piles of wreckage.