by Paul Charles
There, I’ve admitted it.
‘So will you start an investigation?’ I felt compelled to ask the WPC.
‘It’s an investigation you want, is it?’ she replied in her quiet, charming Donegal accent. ‘Sure, the only investigation we’d be interested in here would be the destruction of private property,’ she continued, taking great trouble to eye the damaged door up and down.
‘But what about Jean Simpson? She’s been missing for ages now,’ I protested.
‘Would Miss Simpson be your girlfriend?’
I dithered on that one. I was on the verge of saying, well, she’s a girl and she’s a friend, but I’m not sure she’s a girlfriend. If pushed by the police I’d have had to admit that maybe she was more than just a girl who was a friend, but thankfully, Mary Skeffington saved the day by walking across the room and confidently taking my hand.
‘Actually, I’m David’s girlfriend – Jean Simpson is a friend of David’s; she met him on her first day down in London, in fact.’
‘Okay, good to know,’ WPC McGinley replied, writing a quick note in her wee black book.
She started to stare at me intently, as if waiting for me to give her some more information to put in her book. I mean, come on now – how are you not going to look anything but guilty under such circumstances?
No further information forthcoming she continued with, ‘Miss Simpson’s next of kin can report her missing, if they so choose.’
She saw I was about to protest once again and so she quickly followed up with, ‘With regard to your destruction of private property, Mr Buchanan, in this instance I’m prepared to let you off with a warning.’ I’m sure I saw her wink at her colleague before she concluded with, ‘Mr Buchanan, you and you alone are responsible for making good the damage to the door.’
And with that, she and her colleague left us to meekly tidy up the mess I’d made of said door – no doubt full details of which were now also officially logged in her wee black book.
Chapter Thirty-Two.
Then what?
Then we left the flat, and Mary and I walked home in silence. And I started to try to figure out what you’d do with a body, say a body weighing eight-odd stone – how would you get rid of it? More importantly, how would you get rid of it without leaving any clues, or without drawing undue attention to yourself?
Wimbledon Common was an obvious bet but only if you’d a car. You could hardly hail a taxi and shout, ‘Wimbledon Common, Guv – the darkest and remotest part you can find, I need to dump this suitcase.’
And he’d say, ‘Now let’s see, Guv; we’re going to have to put this in the front, Guv. Cripes, heavy, ain’t it? I’m going to have to charge you the rate for two regular suitcases. Now, where was it you wanted to go? Oh yeah, I remember, Wimbledon Common. Let’s see, we’ll have to go via Kingston. Oh, you know a quicker way do you? Okay, we’ll go your way then, if you insist. Oh yeah, as it happens, I know the place you mean. Yes, I know the very place, up by the Windmill. We need to take a left just after the Vatican Embassy. You in a hurry, Guv? Did you see United over the weekend? Crap! They’ve been crap the whole ten years I’ve been supporting ’em! Now if they run their football team the same way Wilson ran this country they’d win absolutely everything. Harold Wilson, now he’s the Guv, isn’t he Guv? Oh, we’re here already. I think you were correct, Guv, your way just might have been the quickest.’
I’m sure that’s what he would have said, or words to that effect.
But you can see the problem, can’t you? How disposing of a body is a tad tricky? Perhaps you could hire someone. But how much would that all cost? And surely you’d leave yourself open to blackmail?
What to do with a body.
Burn it?
Bury it?
Hide it?
Let it be discovered, just make sure there are no incriminating marks left on or about it? That way, of course, you could help with the inquiries yourself and by being very helpful, no one would ever doubt you, would they?
Thinking about it and running with the theory that we are each the best supporters of our own weight, why not have the body itself accompany you to the scene of the proposed crime? Say Jean Simpson had telephoned me and threatened me, threatened to inform Mary about our adventures. Couldn’t I have said, ‘Okay, you win, I’ve had a brilliant idea for an encounter – meet me tonight at midnight up by the Windmill on Wimbledon Common.’ How brilliant would that be? She’d be helping me cover up her own murder! No taxi drivers, no one to witness me carting a body about the vast Common in the depths of night. I’d simply walk with her under the cloak of darkness, murder her there, and dispose of her body on the spot.
I dwelled on this idea for a time and then snapped out of it and returned my mind to the scene back at her flat. Could her flat be the last place she’d been seen? Had there been someone there with her? Could it have been the mystery person she’d been with the night she’d avoided both John and I? It had been tidy – no sign of a scuffle, and no sign of blood. Someone else had been there, though, on that I could be sure – they’d misfiled her empty album sleeve and not turned off her stereo system.
So did that mean they’d forced her out of the house? Or did it mean they’d returned to the scene of the crime to mount a cover-up?
Or perhaps the stereo system, the record left on the desk, the badly filed album sleeve were all deliberate clues left by Jean herself? If so, they were clues for no one else but me. Did Jean want me to notice that something was wrong?
Okay, now bear with me – let’s go down this road for a few minutes. If the above scenario was, in fact, fact, then could I assume that the person in Jean’s flat was someone she knew, someone who hadn’t needed to force an entry? Either they had taken the trouble to pack away the record or they’d let Jean do it. So had things still been civil at that point? But surely Jean must have feared this person to go to the trouble of leaving so subtle a clue for me. Yes, yes, of course – great point! Yes of course, really a brilliant point, even though I do say so myself.
Next suspect!
Jean Kerr. See how quickly you can go from thinking someone is missing and feeling sorry for them to placing them front and centre on your suspect list? But seriously, could Jean Kerr have physically threatened her friend to the extent that she would obediently do as bid? Having seen Jean Kerr in action – you remember, at Tiger’s party when she’d gone all Wild West on Mary – I wasn’t so sure I could rule her out. Then, of course, there was that incident where Jean Simpson told me about Jean Kerr’s old boyfriend, Brian. Do you remember, the one who apparently was into boys? The one who’d disappeared from the face of the Earth, just like another friend of Jean Kerr’s had recently done?
What about Mary? Was Mary capable of physically terrorising Jean? Or John? I couldn’t really see Mary physically overpowering anyone, but what about John? Surely he would have had the strength? Mind you, any of the above – any of us in fact – could have taken her from her flat at gun- or knife-point.
Yes, this certainly shone a different light altogether on the matter.
But why was I alone being left agonising over this? It’s just that it seemed to me that the two local police were showing little to no interest in the fate of Jean Simpson.
As we arrived back at Mary’s flat, soaking wet and weather beaten, I found myself wondering where Jean was at that very moment. Could she really be in some dark hole? How strong was the possibility that she had already met her Maker?
Another week passed. Still nothing happened. Jean Simpson’s mother did, however, finally contact the police. This was due in some way, I think, to me bugging her. The bottom line was that Jean’s mum just didn’t want to believe that anything unpleasant had happened to her daughter. She told me this after she rang the police. She rang me back to apologise for burying her head in the sand – her words, not mine. She said that she felt that if she treated the situation as problem-free, then it would remain problem-free. Once she started to treat her
daughter as a missing person, then and only then would it became a problem for her.
Two more police officers visited me and Mary, meaning that our names were now definitely in the Jean Simpson Missing Person File. The Derby Police had already spoken with Jean Kerr and apparently she’d not been in London herself for several weeks, so she didn’t have any other information to give them. They’d also spoken to John Harrison; he’d elected to visit the police station, and apparently he was helpful. Mary and I didn’t really have much additional information to give them either, apart from above that was.
They told us the number of girls who disappear in London each year – not quite as many as you’d think, but still in the hundreds. They also told us that their inquiries hadn’t given them reason to be unduly concerned about Jean’s wellbeing. In short, they were confident that she’d turn up.
Despite their assurances, they kept asking me about the Marquee Club and the kind of people she’d met there.
‘Did I think,’ they’d asked, ‘that she could have met up with a bunch of hippies and headed off down to Bristol?’
I told them I didn’t think so, realising that John had obviously seen fit to take them into his confidence with one of his theories.
They said, ‘Don’t be so sure!’ They said there were lots of communes starting up and down the country, but particularly in the West Country, and lots of beautiful girls were ending up in them.
I still didn’t tell them about my Bob Dylan Record-Sleeve-With-Fingerprints-All-Over-It clue. You see, I hate to say it, but I hadn’t entirely ruled out Mary. Is that an awful thing to admit about your intended? I wondered if I could find a way of getting back into Jean’s flat to have another rummage. You see, I was hoping I could somehow plant Mary’s fingerprints on the sleeve. Not to implicate her, of course, no – to set her free. If only I’d handed the record to her that night we kicked the door down to the two Jeans’ flat; I could’ve given the record to Mary to pass to WPC McGinley. Don’t you see? That way Mary’s prints would’ve shown up for a reason other than murder. Clever, eh?
Yeah, very clever, but sadly just a week or so too late.
It’s funny, the way we deal with the bad stuff when we have to. You know, Jean Simpson was missing and I personally feared the worst, yet everyone was just getting on with their lives, even her mum. Is that why we fear dying so much, because we know we’re going to be quickly forgotten? Or is it because we fear the devil, or dread going to Hell?
I asked Mary and she said: ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think that the older we get the less we actually fear Hell. When I was younger I used to actually think that I could go to a place called Hell and that I would physically burn there. That was probably my biggest fear – that was the worst thing in the world I could ever imagine happening to me. You know, being physically burned. But then for a period of about seven years I replaced my fear of Hell with my fear of the dentist. And then, after I’d been to the dentist about a dozen or so times and he’d thrown his worst – or maybe that should be his best – at me, and I got through it, then I started to think, well, perhaps there is something worse than the dentist.’
‘So what’s your biggest fear now?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it’s no longer a fear. Because of us,’ she said quietly. ‘But for a time recently I feared a loveless life. But getting back to your original question, I do think we all fear dying because we fear we’re going to be forgotten. But we have to be forgotten, don’t we? The survivors couldn’t possibly continue walking around, carrying the baggage of everyone they’d ever known to die.’
‘Interesting, I’d never considered that before.’
‘David, are all these thoughts of mortality to do with Jean?’
‘I suppose,’ I admitted. ‘Do you think you get to Heaven automatically when your life is taken from you as opposed to being judged when you die of natural causes?’
‘Oh David, don’t get morose on me.’
Was that response just a tad flippant? Perhaps lacking in understanding?
‘There are enough people worrying about Jean without you carrying it all on your shoulders,’ she added, pressing home her point.
‘That’s part of the problem Mary; no one seems to really care about Jean Simpson at all.’
‘One positive thing though is coming out of all of this worrying of yours,’ she said, lightening up a bit.
‘And what’s that?’ I replied, taking the bait, hook, line and sinker.
‘Well, if nothing else, all your concern is proving that you at least had nothing to do with her disappearance.’
I basked in this newfound feeling of security. Not that I really know why it should have been such a relief for someone – even the girl I loved – to realise I was blameless in this Jean Simpson drama. The relief, however, was brief, because a few seconds later she added, doing her best to form her two dark eyebrows into a straight line, ‘unless you’re trying to throw everyone else, including me, off your trail.’
Chapter Thirty-Three.
Trail… now there is a word to get you going. It certainly got me going, as in, it was time to stop messing around and get on the trail of the person, or persons unknown who had, on or about July 20, 1969, caused the disappearance of one Jean Simpson.
You’re up to speed with who my main suspects were: Jean Kerr, John Harrison, Mary Skeffington and my ‘mystery person’, the aforementioned Harvey Lee.
The more I thought about it the less far-fetched it became; I mean, Jean Simpson being assassinated. Could Mary Skeffington murder Jean Simpson with her bare hands? I’d have to say, most definitely not. But could she have hired someone – maybe even this Harvey Lee character – to do the dirty work for her? Now that had to be a possibility, didn’t it? The same went for Jean Kerr; surely she could have stayed up in Derby and hired a hitman to do her dirty work for her? But even if Jean Simpson had died at the hands of a hitman, said hitman would’ve had to have been paid, so that brought us straight back to the people on my list.
Yes, I agree with you – I would have to include myself on the list. Well, it’s only fair isn’t it? But then what is truly fair in love and murder?
I started to think about police procedure at this stage. Would the police investigate all their suspects simultaneously or would they mark them off their list, one by one, until there was only one left – their perpetrator? Mind you, did that mean that, if you were the last person to be investigated, you were also the last and therefore the only person left on their list of suspects? Surely that would mean that by the process of elimination and deduction you were the only possible perpetrator, not to mention the only one available.
No, the police couldn’t really afford to go up so many potentially blind alleys; they’d have to juggle all the balls in the air at once. But whereas they had the resources to do that, I certainly didn’t.
Not that any of the police resources were on display. Should the Wimbledon CID have treated the case seriously and actually opened an investigation into the disappearance of Jean Simpson, I still would’ve been at least two steps ahead of them at that point. The first clue involved the Dylan record sleeve. The second clue involved my encounters with Jean Simpson. So, what I now needed to know was, which one of my suspects had discovered that Jean Simpson and I had been messing around?
And how could I find this out without letting the others know about it too?
I had to get deeper.
But why me? Why not her mum, or John Harrison? Jean Kerr was on sick leave again in Matlock so, well, she could be forgiven for not risking putting herself through any further strain. But surely John Harrison or Mrs Simpson Senior or the police, or even a combination of all of the above should have shown just a wee bit more concern? Did John’s reticence put him under the spotlight? Did my desperate need to find out, throw the spotlight on me?
I just had to get back into Jean’s flat and take that Dylan record sleeve. I then had to figure out how I could check it for fingerprints, and then I had to
get fingerprints of my suspects, including Harvey Lee. Should there be a stranger’s set of prints on the sleeve, Harvey Lee would jump right to the top of my list.
I think I reached this point on a Saturday morning. Luckily enough, Mary was off to Bath to see her mum that weekend, so I figured I’d take the Monday and Tuesday off work and use the four days to go about this investigation properly. I felt I should go to Derby as soon as possible. I needed to speak to Jean Kerr and to Jean Simpson’s mum, and I needed to do it face to face.
Like the proper detective I felt I was becoming, I also believed a quick visit to John Harrison was in order before I left for Derby. I’d do it in person, and there was no time like the present, so I immediately left for his flat in the upper end of Worple Road.
The end of Worple Road away from Wimbledon Hill Road was interchangeable with any other London suburb. Like, as I walked up Worple Road that day, I could just as easily have been walking up any street in West Hampstead, Balham, Streatham, or even Dulwich for that matter.
John didn’t seem very happy to see me turning up uninvited on his doorstep. I was quite intrigued to see the inside of his flat, since I’d never been there before.
‘Aye David, I was just thinking of going for a spot of breakfast,’ he announced, ‘do you fancy joining me?’
‘Good game,’ I replied, ‘good game.’
‘Just give me a second to fetch my coat and I’ll be right with you,’ he added and shut the door in my face, denying me an opportunity to nosey around his living quarters.
Ten minutes later, we were in his local greasy spoon. He ordered the works: two super sausages, three rashers of bacon, two runny fried eggs, a tomato cut in half and fried, baked beans, three rounds of toast and some potatoes that had obviously been in the frying pan at least three times too long. I, on the other hand, took the more conservative approach: two poached eggs and baked beans on toast. We both washed down our belly-fillers with a mug of excellent tea.
