Bobby shrugged, rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t find any easy excuses to explain himself. “Soapy, what’s a woman of the night?” he asked instead.
“Not something you want to be losing sleep over at your age,” said Soapy. “Now go on, clear off to school. And comb your hair while you’re about it.”
– . –
Greenaway drained the last dregs of the chicory grounds being passed off as coffee from the station canteen while he typed up his notes on Muldoon. The bitter taste went with the picture he was formulating of the man he had left in the cells at Bow Street court prison the night before, adding to the report he had taken from the Canadian’s RSM to what he had found in the room in Mole Cottage.
Muldoon, it appeared, had been taking a keen interest in the story of Gordon Cummins. He had collected cuttings of every murder – preferring the Daily Mail ’s coverage, but with a few Heralds, Daily Mirrors and an Evening Standard thrown in – underlining the words “strangle”, “stockings” and the myriad allusions to “working girls”, “ladies of the night” and “ladies of easy virtue” in red pen throughout the copy. Evelyn Bettencourt’s murder seemed to have excited him the most, but perhaps that was because all the papers had managed to get hold of glamorous publicity pictures she’d had taken in her actress days, her hair in marcel waves. WHORE he had written across her forehead, adding a drawing of a bow tied around her neck and further amateur cartoonist’s attempts at splurges of blood and flying daggers. A further SOCK IT TO HER, BUDDY!!!! in the margin.
On the one hand, this was evidence that could lead a jury to believe that Muldoon had been an admirer of Cummins, and had set out to murder a prostitute in imitation of the techniques he had been poring over in the papers, by strangling her with her own stocking – perhaps even in tribute to his now captured hero. But, on the other, it could equally well convince them that Muldoon was stark raving mad.
The crux of Greenaway’s dilemma was how easily a clever barrister could apply the M’Naghten Rule as defence of temporary insanity – which, should it be accepted, would mean Muldoon avoided a date with the gallows. The script for this practically wrote itself: the aftershock of the carnage Muldoon witnessed in France unhinging his mind, the lack of any subsequent action in the field leaving those horrors to fester in the bad company he kept in barrooms – the drunks, the prostitutes, the smooth-talking likes of Raymond “the Maestro” Parnell – all taking advantage of a man not in his right mind. In this scenario, the jury would be invited to consider Muldoon as a war hero, the killer himself a victim of cruel and capricious circumstance.
A hat Muldoon seemed to have already tried on. He hadn’t invented his sister in Quebec; shortly after his return from France, his CO had received a petitioning letter from her, begging for Muldoon’s discharge on grounds of his delicate mental health. She referred obliquely to an incident in his youth for which “he should have received proper treatment” without actually stating what this was. But it had, she said, caused previous “temporary lapses” from his “normally kind and gentle nature”.
Muldoon’s CO was having none of it. Twenty-mile runs in full pack and nights in solitary in the barracks’ slammer were his way of dealing with the pernicious Private’s regular post-France acts of insubordination. That none of these measures seemed to have had much effect on him would only strengthen a defence barrister’s argument in favour of M’Naghten, Greenaway feared – especially if that barrister were to get his hands on the sister’s letter.
His defence against that line took the form of a six-foot-two pinstriped spiv. Raymond Parnell might not initially play well for a jury, but if Greenaway could get his testimony that Muldoon had tipped him off about the cigarette lorries in Leatherhead then Muldoon could be shown to have a well-hinged criminal mind that acted at all times entirely out of calculated self-interest.
The handsome, saturnine face of Sammy Lehmann flashed through Greenaway’s mind as he formulated his plan, giving him a cocksure little wink: “I might be in the Moor thanks to you,” the gesture seemed to imply, “but my boys are still running things nicely, you mug …” Greenaway batted him away with the return of his typewriter carriage. Before getting to that, he first had to make sure the murder charge stuck. It was time to meet Muldoon in the cold light of day.
– . –
“How’s he spent the night?” Greenaway enquired of the Duty Sergeant at Bow Street.
“Quietly,” the other man replied. “Didn’t ask for anything, other than a paper. I was finished with mine so I give it him. Thought it’d be nice for him to see his handiwork splashed all over the front page.”
“You’re right about that,” said Greenaway. “Give him something to add to his collection. I found quite a pile of Penny Dreadfuls in his kitbag already.” The clippings were stowed in his murder bag, awaiting further discussion.
Arriving at Muldoon’s cell door, he opened the hatch. The noise was enough to send the prisoner up from the bunk that took up half the width of his place of confinement and onto his feet. He stepped sideways towards the door and saluted as it opened.
Greenaway and the Duty Sergeant exchanged glances.
“At ease, Muldoon,” said Greenaway. The Canadian dropped his hand but not his gaze. In contrast to their previous meeting, his expression had altered from hostility to something approaching deference – though he hadn’t been so mindful of the rest of his appearance. The pencil moustache was now virtually indistinguishable from the rest of the thick stubble that shadowed the lower half of his face, and the cloying smell of his cologne seemed to intensify with the underlying musk of unwashed hair.
“Had a good night’s sleep?” Greenaway enquired.
“Sir,” Muldoon said.
“Ready to have that little chat now, son?”
“Sir,” Muldoon repeated, “are you the same Detective Inspector Greenaway who caught the Blackout Ripper, sir?”
Greenaway moved closer to the Canadian, looking hard into his dark eyes. “Why?” he asked. “Do you fancy him or something?”
Muldoon flinched, took a step backwards. “Say what?” he said, frowning.
“Cummins,” said Greenaway. “I found all those clippings you kept in your room at Mole Cottage. Bit of an unhealthy interest you were taking in him, don’t you think? Or do you find him as dashing as those poor, unfortunate women did?”
The furrows deepened on Muldoon’s forehead and he gave a little laugh. “Gee, I don’t know what you mean, sir. I always take an interest in murder mysteries. I read all the Edgar Wallace and Sherlock Holmes books in the barracks library, got a big collection back home. Everybody loves that stuff, don’t they? And you took a real life Ripper down. Man, you’re a hero. It’s an honour to be arrested by you.”
It was Greenaway’s turn to frown. “Me the hero? Funny, I had the idea it was Cummins you were looking up to. Thought maybe it was him who gave you the idea. I mean, Peggy Richards was strangled with her own stocking, just the way Cummins liked to do it.”
“Peggy Richards?” Muldoon maintained his expression of incomprehension. “Who’s she?”
“The woman you threw off Waterloo Bridge,” said Greenaway. “The woman whose handbag you stole and tried to fence in the Running Horse last night.”
Muldoon laughed as if Greenaway was telling him a joke. But his cheek twitched and his eyes shifted their focus from Greenaway’s to a space a few inches above his head.
“You’re telling me I killed somebody?” he said. “What, are you nuts?”
“I’ve got her body down the morgue and her ration book in your kitbag,” said Greenaway. “You’re such a murder-mystery fan, you tell me what it looks like.”
Muldoon’s eyes came back to him, narrowed. “You’ve got her body at the morgue?” he said. “Well I guess then you should show her to me.”
Greenaway’s eyebrows shot up and nearly didn’t come back down. “You what, son?”
“I want to see her.” Muldoon stared defiance. The twitch in
his cheek grew more pronounced and beads of sweat started to form on his forehead. “I want to see the body.”
Greenaway turned to the Duty Sergeant so he didn’t have to look at this unsavoury show of mounting excitement before he’d had more chance to gather his thoughts.
“Now there’s a request you don’t hear every day,” he said.
“Indeed,” said the Duty Sergeant, looking like he’d caught a bad smell. Something worse, even, than Muldoon’s aftershave.
“Let’s see what we can do about that, shall we?”
– . –
Twenty minutes and one phone call to Chief Commander Peter Beverley later, Greenaway and Muldoon were handcuffed together in the back of a car, travelling towards Southwark Morgue. Having discussed Muldoon’s behaviour with his superior officer and oldest ally in the force, Greenaway had decided not to engage his prisoner in any small talk, just observe his actions. He was convinced the Canadian was putting on an act. The formal autopsy was due to take place that morning. He wanted to see how much of that Muldoon could stomach.
He was also sure, as they walked the short journey from the pavement to the room where Spilsbury was preparing for his task, that Muldoon was getting a kick out of attracting attention to himself this way. His demeanour had brightened considerably since they had left Bow Street with all eyes following the pair of them. It was the same at the morgue. While Greenaway manoeuvred them past the front desk and down the corridors, he could feel Muldoon puffing himself out, his stride becoming a swagger, as if in his head he was a film star walking down a red carpet. When they entered the autopsy room, perhaps he mistook the bright lighting for the Klieg lamps of his vivid imagination, the stern form of the pathologist standing by the body on the gurney for somebody about to give him an Oscar for his canny portrayal of a Chicago hood – or maybe even a Blackout Ripper. But when Spilsbury stood aside to let him witness the outcome of his last date, all Muldoon’s talent suddenly seemed to desert him.
Greenaway watched his prisoner’s face as he contemplated reality. The smile fell away from his lips and the colour drained from his face as his eyes took in the livid hues of blue, black, purple and yellow that adorned the smashed contours of the body before him. Then wandered across to the row of instruments laid out ready to dissect the damage in minute detail: the saws, scalpels, tongs, blades and receptacles. Involuntarily, he raised his left hand, the one that wasn’t handcuffed to Greenaway’s, to shield his eyes. Then he turned away.
“Seen enough already?” asked Greenaway. “Don’t you want to stay for the autopsy? It starts in ten minutes and I’ve got permission for you to be here. That’s if you don’t have any objections, Dr Spilsbury?”
“No, indeed,” said the pathologist. “Be my guest.”
Muldoon shook his head furiously but didn’t say a word. He kept his thoughts to himself all the way back to Bow Street, where Greenaway left him in his cell with a bit more information to chew on.
“I’ll be getting the fingerprint tests back this afternoon from the lady’s handbag,” he let Muldoon know. “Then I expect I’ll be back to see you. With my charge sheet.”
Muldoon stood facing the wall. “You’ll get nothing from me,” he muttered, without turning around.
– . –
Greenaway had only just reached his office at Tottenham Court Road before one of his brighter detective sergeants stuck his head around the door. “That sketch in the papers has done the trick,” he said. “We’ve had two people come in this morning claim to know the Waterloo Bridge woman. A dockworker from Deptford says he’s been living with her the past two years, and an Irish nurse from Bethnal Green thinks it’s her sister.”
“Bethnal Green?” Greenaway turned over the information in his mind. All roads seemed to be leading back to the place. An Irishwoman, too – the old PC from Charing Cross he’d done his pub crawl round the Strand with had said Peggy Richards was Irish. “Well, well.”
“They both seem genuine to me,” the DS went on. “Who would you like to see first?”
“The man,” Greenaway decided. If the woman from Bethnal Green really was the sister of the deceased, then she would need to identify the body. Which had better wait until after Spilsbury had finished his work in the morgue.
– . –
He looked to be in his late thirties, had a wide, ruddy face dotted with the open pores and thick lines that come with long years of working outdoors, a thatch of thick, curly hair that once had been dark brown but was now all but frosted over. He wore a donkey jacket over blue overalls and a pair of steel-capped work boots, and he was twisting the peaked cap he carried between his hands in an anxious fashion.
“Inspector Greenaway here is in charge of the investigation, Charlie,” the DS said. “Will you tell him everything you’ve just told me?”
“’Spector Greenaway,” the man’s bloodshot brown eyes travelled around the patchwork of maps, mugshots and paperwork that crowded the wall behind Greenaway’s desk, lingering uneasily on the sketch of Gordon Cummins before finally meeting Greenaway’s gaze. “Charles Beattie,” he said, raising his rough paw to briefly grip the DCI’s. “Call me Charlie.”
The man spoke with a slight undercurrent of wheeziness that was the hallmark of a Thames dockside worker. “Charlie,” said Greenaway, “please take a seat, make yourself comfortable.” He nodded to the DS, who bowed out, closing the door behind him.
Charlie Beattie sat down slowly, taking from the pocket of his jacket a folded copy of the previous day’s Herald, which he unfurled on the table top between them, smoothing his hand over the creases across the police sketch on the front page.
“She was my missus,” he said, looking back up at Greenaway. “My Peg.” Then he leant forwards, putting his head in his hands in an attempt to hold back his tears.
The DCI took out his cigarette case, offered it across.
“Here,” he said. “Take your time, Charlie.” The docker fumbled out a smoke, the hand that had gripped Greenaway’s own with assured strength only moments earlier now racked with tremors. Greenaway lit him up, watched him throw his head back and gulp down a lungful. Another three drags and he had composed himself.
“Least I thought she was,” he said. “Two years we been living together like man and wife. I thought we was happy. Thought I’d got her away from all that …”
Through Greenaway’s mind, a re-run of Herbert Coles, sitting on his sofa, breathing in the perfume that lingered on his wife’s handkerchief. The wife whom he also thought he had got away from all that lying in pieces in the room next door.
Charlie took another hefty drag.
“Where do you live, Charlie?” Greenaway asked.
“Number twenty-three Castell House, Deptford Church Street.”
“And you work on the docks?”
“That’s right.”
“And when was the last time you saw Peggy?”
“Tuesday morning,” Charlie said. “But things ain’t been right since last Saturday. Since Valentine’s Day.” He shook his head, exhaling clouds. “She’s a bit of a romantic, see, my Peg. Gets these ideas in her head and there’s no stopping her. That was one of them times. She was planning something, I dunno what, but Saturday morning she was full of herself, Saturday night it was like she’d lost a quid and found a ha’penny. I couldn’t get it out of her what went on, we ended up having a right old row about it. She was still sulking Sunday and Monday, then Tuesday night, she never come home. She has done that sort of thing before, mind. Only this time … This time I got the feeling she’d blown the gaff for good.”
“What made you think that?” Greenaway asked.
Charlie rubbed at his eyes with his cuff. “The things she took. She had all her paperwork with her, and all the coupons we had in the house. Put her best clothes on and all …” Seeing the cigarette burning down to the filter, Greenaway pushed the ashtray towards his interviewee and opened his case again. Charlie stubbed the end of the old fag out and took a new one w
ithout losing his composure.
“But she didn’t think it through properly, did she? Whatever went on Saturday got her so riled up she didn’t know what she was doing. Else,” he fished into the other pocket of his jacket, “she’d have took this, wouldn’t she?”
Greenaway took the green passport the docker held out to him. The name on it was that of Margaret Theresa McArthur. The photo was of the woman he had last seen in the morgue, only taken twelve years earlier, when she was fresh-faced and beautiful. The address given was the Halls of Residence at the London Hospital, the occupation a trainee nurse.
Greenaway shook his head.
“I never even knew that was her name,” Charlie said, staring straight through Greenaway, to a place where the detective could not follow. “She never told me nothing about her past, her family. She never wanted to talk about it at all. I always thought she must have run away from home, some terrible old man she had over there, which was why she wouldn’t never marry me. I thought it was because perhaps she couldn’t. The only thing she brought with her ’sides her clothes and her handbag was all these books she kept. Romantic poetry, she called it, Wordsworth and that. Used to quote it at me sometimes, when she was in a good mood, which like I say, she was, most of the time. Only she went and left all them behind,” he said, his eyes filling up. “All them books she loved so much. Oh, Peg. What d’you have to do it for, eh, girl?”
23
WHAT WOULD HAPPEN TO ME IF SOMETHING HAPPENED TO YOU?
Friday, 20 February 1942
Frances sat in the CID room, eyes darting around like a nervous bird’s. The officer who had taken her details had given her the seat at his desk and even made her a cup of tea while Chief Inspector Greenaway was busy interviewing another witness who had arrived before her. Frances had no idea there could be so many detectives all in one place, talking across each other, taking telephone calls, banging away at their typewriters and generally making such a noise it was a wonder that any of them could think. The grim visages on the many WANTED posters adorning the walls stared down at her, with expressions that ranged from moody to outright demented. Frances took another sip of her cooling tea, made too weak and too sweet for her liking. It was all she could do to keep seated and not make a last-minute bolt for the exit.
Without the Moon Page 19
