by John Gardner
Suzie identified herself.
‘Search warrants, Sergeant.’ The auxiliary constable spoke low again, as if he had an obstruction in his throat, almost a whisper.
‘Okay. Where’re you from, constable?’
He wore a civilian mackintosh over his uniform, and he fumbled under it for his warrant card. ‘Constable Christie, Reg Christie. Charing Cross.’
‘DCS Livermore’s casting his net wide tonight.’
‘He was over with us at Charing Cross, talking to a witness on one of his cases. Now he’s at Vine Street, so someone had to collect these. I was pleased to do it. Especially for the Chief Super.’
The manila envelope contained two warrants — both for Derbyshire Mansions, numbers two-twenty and three-twenty. She nodded to him. ‘Thanks, Reg.’
‘Thank you, Sergeant. I’m off duty now, but I can always —’
‘No, we’ll manage. You got far to go?’
‘Notting Hill. Rillington Place.’ He had a proprietary air. It could have been one of the most fashionable parts of London. ‘Thank you, Sergeant.’ The soft voice sounded almost knowledgeable, shaded with a North Country accent. Suzie nodded to him again, secretly relieved when he had gone.
Twenty minutes later Tommy Livermore came in with a whole retinue.
‘Orchestra, dancing girls, the lot,’ Suzie murmured.
‘And a male voice choir.’
He had his own sergeant, Billy Mulligan, big and very subservient; several DCs who seemed devoted to him, and seven extra people.
‘Spear carriers,’ Livermore called them. They were in fact three forensics officers, two scenes-of-crime constables and a photographer, plus a hard-faced WDC with short, straight, dirty gold hair, done as a straight back and sides with a parting on the left. Her name was Molly Abelard and she hardly ever left the Guv’nor’s side.
Suzie was completely surprised, knocked out — she realized later — when she saw Livermore in the flesh. On the telephone he came across as a slightly jovial, avuncular individual, even fatherly at a pinch. So she had pictured him as short-sighted, stooped, with a thickening waist and probably a walrus moustache and bottle-glass spectacles.
In person, though, he looked incredibly young and rather dashing: the kind of man who could easily pass himself off as a fighter pilot in mufti. He had a tall, spare frame, which meant he was just over six feet in his stocking feet, slim and muscular, with a bronzed, lived-in face that gave the immediate impression that its owner came straight out of the top drawer.
‘Well — Suzie with a zed — at last. How do you do?’
And she realized that the paternal interpretation she had put on his voice was totally out of order — particularly when she looked into his eyes.
‘Sir. Mr Livermore. Crikey, you’ve come mob-handed, sir.’
‘Well, to be absolutely honest with you, Suzie, I’m a bit of a lazy devil when it comes to detection.’ The voice, when heard close, mouth to ear, was rich, and sounded like the product of a very expensive education, with an undertow of Scotland. Not the broad Glaswegian, but softer, only a hint. There one minute, gone the next. ‘So what I’ve done,’ he continued, ‘is I’ve carved out a bit of a private army for myself.’ He clocked off the names and specialist skills of his people, ending with, ‘— and last but not least, the menacing Molly Abelard, whom I suspect will be hauled away any minute to teach hulking great commandos the terrible arts of silent killing. Oh, my God!’ He had come up against the huge cubist painting that dominated the foyer. ‘That’s pretty horrific isn’t it?’
‘Pretty, sir, no. Horrific, yes.’
‘Ah.’ DCS Livermore looked at the great slabs of paint — blue and white on a pale green background, interlocking squares, reaching back to infinity. ‘Yes,’ he sighed, ‘— the sound of water escaping from milldams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, brickwork and the scent of rotting apples ... Ah yes, sets the heart racing.’
He gave a rakish smile that lifted one side of his mouth; and at that moment she saw two things clearly; first, that he was wearing a wonderful double-breasted overcoat. The coat was open, unbuttoned, revealing a magnificent double-breasted suit that screamed Savile Row from every inch of the heavy cloth, while alleluias to the tailor’s art were sung from each stitch. Second, she realized that he reminded her of the actor Rex Harrison whom she’d seen in a film — Night Train to Munich — only last month, which in many ways was a lifetime ago.
On his head there was, of course, an Anthony Eden Homburg, set at the slightest of angles.
‘Gosh,’ she said, but not out loud.
‘So, Suzie?’ He touched her arm with strong, firm fingers. ‘Hadn’t we better go to? Shrink the distance between us and the divine and lamented Miss Benton’s secret love nest?’
‘Yes, of course, Guv. You did know that we have two warrants?’ As she informed him of this, Suzie glanced at Shirley who merely stood there with mouth slightly agape, and eyes loaded with lust. Indeed, Suzie thought.
Dandy Tom, someone had called him. She really should take more notice, hone her skills of observation, and sharpen the talent of paying heed. During her basic training an elderly experienced CID officer had said, ‘Listen to people telling you about what has occurred. Then listen again. Listen to the music behind the words.’ The music behind DCS Livermore had been Dandy Tom all along, and she should have known it.
‘Well —’ he cupped her elbow, and it felt that she was being gently driven in whatever direction he wanted to go — ‘when you mentioned not being able to get into the other young woman’s flat — Emily Baccus’s flat? — I felt we could probably kill two birds with a single pebble.’ The neat and pleasant smile surfaced again. ‘Now, where do we start?’
‘Flat two hundred and twenty, Chief,’ snapped Molly Abelard who had materialized at Tommy Livermore’s shoulder as though she carried a book of spells that would see him through any door or wall, over any border, and certainly dry to the other side of any lake, river or sea that he required to traverse.
‘That it, Suzie?’
‘Yes, Chief,’ she said, still in a state of wonder.
‘You the porter?’ he asked Cyril Nutkin.
‘Yes, sah! Sarn’t-Major Russ, sah! Royal Fusiliers, sah!’
‘A London regiment, that, eh?’
‘Yes, sah!’
‘Good man, take the lead.’ And with that, they tagged on behind the sergeant-major, piling into the large lift with the hideous pink-tinted mirrors, discovering immediately that it was too small to take all of them. With exceptional courtesy, the DCS told the supernumeraries that he would send the lift back down for them. In the meantime they were to hire patience. ‘I won’t start until you arrive. I promise that on oath,’ and he accompanied the guarantee with an extravagant gesture.
So, they ascended to the second storey, and followed the sergeant major along the corridor to flat two-twenty. This short journey gave Suzie the chance to reflect on the extraordinary impact Tommy Livermore seemed to have on her. He was, she decided, one of those figures produced only in England. He was an anomaly, a rarity, seen only once in a generation: a gentleman detective, which is really a kind of oxymoron, like military intelligence. So far, she had only met his like among the pages of Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham.
She also knew, by some magic assimilation of Dandy Tom’s personality, and his obvious idiosyncrasies, that he would be brilliant at anything he chose to do.
She was also getting the female equivalent of what she knew boys referred to as ‘the Horn’. This last was rather pleasant and carnal, and at this late stage she suddenly knew by instinct that man and woman’s purpose was much nicer than she had thought possible.
They marched firmly along several corridors, and stopped outside the substantial doorway of 220, DCS Livermore held up his hand; DS Mulligan pointed to both sides of the door and two DCs took up positions to left and right. Livermore indicated to Suzie that he wanted her on his left — Molly Abelard, natu
rally, was glued to his right side. Now, as the supernumeraries appeared, Dandy Tom waved Sergeant-Major Russ into place in front of them, keys at the ready.
The DCS pressed the bell push and from far away they could hear the muted tone of the buzzer.
Nothing.
Press again. Longer.
Nothing.
‘How long, O Lord, how long?’ he pleaded aloud.
‘I give ’em three long ones as a rule, sah,’ said Cyril Nutkin.
Dandy Tom leaned against the bell and waited.
Still nothing.
‘The keys, Sarn’t-Major!’
Cyril Nutkin stepped forward and slipped one key into the dead bolt and a Yale key into the lock, murmured the incantation, ‘Hope she hasn’t dropped the sneck,’ and turned the keys.
The door swung inwards and the stench hit them. And Suzie knew the stench, she had smelled it down in the Cut the other night, and many times in the after-blitzed streets of morning London.
The rancid, sweet, raw, rotting scent of death.
‘Stay back!’ Tommy Livermore shouted. Throwing an arm in front of Suzie, he turned his head and called back towards his forensic people. ‘David, after me, now, please. And Peter, you as well. Quick as you can.’ Suzie heard one of the men gag as he got into the hallway, a fifteen feet by fifteen area done in a warm red brick paper, with cream paintwork and a deep-pile chessboard carpet under foot. The walls were hung with old theatre posters — Mr Garrick. Mrs Woffington. Mrs Siddons — Richard III: The Constant Couple: The Grecian Daughter: in cheap black print on old, creased paper, mounted on red board under glass in Hogarth frames.
Suzie took a step forward and saw Colly Cibber’s name on a slightly larger poster. A door was wide open, to the right. She went another couple of paces feeling the draught of fresh air on her face. She was in a pleasant sitting room — drawing room, her mother would have probably called it. There were four armchairs covered in a pattern that repeated little roses. Perfectly acceptable, but not her taste. Some nice mahogany occasional tables; a couple of pictures she wouldn’t have minded owning: oil, Venice, Bridge of Sighs through a romantic mist; a watercolour view of some scene from high up above a port — South of France, she thought — pink tiled roofs, white walls, a line of dark arches and a sweep of sand; last, a large canvas, oil again, a sweeping scene of moorland, grim, inhospitable with a wonderfully calculated wind blowing low over the scrub and bushes. If you looked long enough, you would feel that wind on your face and your hair would move with it.
The two long windows, with their heavy gold velvet curtains and the scalloped valance, had been thrown open, and the door to the bedroom which led off directly from the left of a fake fireplace, was open.
‘It’s okay. Careful. Gently with her.’ The voice came from one of the forensic men. Then. ‘Right Guv, you can open the windows now, we’ve got her temperature.’
By this time Suzie had reached the door and could see the two forensics lads gently removing a rectal thermometer from the thing with crêpe skin on the bed, inching her back into the dent she had made when she first landed there.
Suzie walked quietly to the bed and looked at the terrible face, the long jet black hair clawed and stuck over her scalp, rivers of dried sweat that had plainly formed a delta down one side of the face that was frozen in a merciless agony: the tongue starting from the open mouth, blue and suggestive, the eyes half closed, as if she was on the point of waking, and around the neck, biting clear into the flesh, the wire ligature, with the insulating-tape ends standing up obscenely from behind her shoulders.
‘Well done, Sergeant Mountford,’ Dandy Tom congratulated her for not showing the revulsion she felt. ‘Who is she?’ he asked.
In life, Suzie reckoned, she would have been attractive — a neat button nose, high cheekbones, a generous mouth, long thick black hair brushing the shoulders, and the body, tall, slim, very attractive, though life must have left it, she imagined, at least a couple of days ago.
‘I’ve never seen her before,’ she said, sad for the corpse.
‘Sarn’t-Major Russ?’ The voice loud, coming from the stomach and the back of the throat.
‘Sah?’
‘In here.’ The thud of Cyril Nutkin’s stamped approach.
‘Seen plenty of bodies, Sarn’t-Major? Not afraid of cadavers?’
‘No sah.’ He appeared in the doorway, all full of himself, preparing for one of the great moments in his life.
‘Then tell us who this is, Sarn’t-Major.’
‘Yes, sah. That’s Miss Baccus, sah. Miss Emily Baccus from three-twenty. Oh my Gawd! Oh Christ.’ And he pitched forward in a dead faint.
‘Molly,’ Tommy Livermore sang out. ‘Get rid of him. Molly.’ and Molly Abelard detached herself from her charge’s side, and with a couple of deft movements slung the little porter across her shoulders in a fireman’s lift, marching out of the room stiff-legged, carrying him as though he were a babe.
‘You’re going to need the doctor, Guv,’ one of the forensics men, Dave, had moved close to him, hardly raising his voice.
Dandy Tom nodded. ‘Get everyone doing their jobs. Photographs. Fingerprints. Everything. The lot. Go through it like grease through a goose. I’ll be in search of the doc. With me, Suzie with a zed.’
They sat in Emily Baccus’s flat — 320: DCS Livermore at a table cradling the telephone, Suzie perched on the edge of a deep leather easy chair, not that leather chairs are ever easy, she thought.
Cyril Nutkin, still looking queasy from his brush with the corpse, had let them in.
‘You’d better go and have a quiet lie down in a darkened room, Sarn’t-Major,’ the DCS told him.
‘Don’t know what come over me, sah.’ It was almost shamefaced. ‘Maybe the herring I had for my tea was a bit orf.’
‘I should imagine that was it. I think we should hang on to the keys of both the flats for the time being, oh, and Sarn’t-Major — a word to the wise.’ He stooped over Russ’s shoulder, adjacent to the right ear, almost whispering. ‘I would like you to understand that everything you’ve seen tonight is confidential; so please don’t go telling any little friends in Fleet Street that there’s been a death here. We like to control these things for as long as possible. A few hours at least, and even then you’re deaf, blind and dumb. Understood?’
‘Yes, sah. Of course, sah.’ and having absorbed the lesson that the shock of sudden death is not made easier by the passing years, Sergeant-Major Russ, porter of this parish, departed in an uncertain peace.
‘Will he keep, shtum, Suzie? Will he curb his tongue?’
‘Only until tomorrow or at sight of remuneration, whichever comes first, sir.’
He nodded sadly. ‘Cynicism is alive and well in Camford, then.’
‘Upper Saint Martin’s Lane actually, sir.’
Tommy Livermore gave her his quizzical look, the one with the raised right eyebrow. Her mother was able to do that, but she could never quite master the trick.
He had taken off his beautiful overcoat and the homburg and now he passed a hand over his thick dark hair. She saw the signs of frosting at his temples and thought how attractive it was. In fact, Suzie Mountford went into quite a reverie as he telephoned some secret number and asked if he could have a particular professor of pathology over as soon as possible.
‘Tell him it’s Tommy Livermore and he owes me a favour,’ he said. ‘I have a body conveniently stashed away in Derbyshire Mansions, Marylebone. Almost on the corner of New Cavendish Street.’ He gave the flat number, and when the conversation had finished, he looked around him with interest. ‘Well, Suzie,’ he commenced, ‘let’s go over the easy stuff. This apartment, three-twenty, is the natural home of the lady we’ve already discovered sadly shuffled off this mortal coil in the secret abode of the deceased Josephine Benton. Right?’
‘Right sir. Absolutely, sir.’
‘Bearing in mind that you have only had a glimpse of the body, is it possible that Miss Baccus could’ve m
et her quietus at the hands of the same person who slaughtered Jo Benton?’
‘That’s difficult, sir. I don’t really know —’
‘Suzie, I just want to listen to you think it through, aloud, heart, if you would.’
‘Sir, I’ve had no —’
‘— real experience? I know that. But you have common sense and maybe a little bit of logic. Who knows? Just talk me through it; start the wheel turning for me.’
‘It looks as though Emily Baccus was killed with piano wire, choking, crushing the windpipe. Insulating tape wound round the ends of the wire, and the wire doubled after one layer of tape was attached.’
‘Why doubled?’
‘The wire doubled so that the tape wouldn’t slide off. They were all attacked from behind —’
‘Who’re the “they”?’
‘You know, Guv.’
‘Humour me.’
‘In the past few months at least three other women have been choked with piano wire, and two of them were teenagers.’ She reeled off the cases — the Davidson girl, Marie June, strangled with piano wire, grips at each end made out of insulating tape; the genital area had been gouged deeply with a broken bottle and there was a pan of water boiling on the kitchen range.
Patricia Cooke found strangled with wire, Snitterfield, near Stratford-upon-Avon, similar to Davidson; eyes skewered; pan of water on the range; no assault on the lower abdomen and genital area.
‘Then there’s Jo Benton, our Camford case. She had everything done to her — the wire, sexual assault, eyes and the wild attack on the genital area: ripped with a knife; and there was a pan of water on the hob. And last of all, this one, tonight ...’
‘I think we’ll find out it was a few days ago, heart.’
‘Right. Whenever. Emily Baccus —’
‘We need that officially. I don’t think the dashing Sarn’t-Major can be relied on, even though I think it probably is Miss Baccus.’
Dandy Tom smiled, all consuming, Suzie thought. Dandy Tom and his all-consuming smile, fresh from their success at Whitehall 1212 — this last was the well-known telephone number of New Scotland Yard. ‘You know what the ripping or cutting of the genital area means, don’t you?’ he asked.
