by J P Lomas
Despite the rotting sash windows being raised behind their bars, the flat was still suffused with the stinging aftermath of the smoke. The fire had been set in the back hallway and initial findings suggested that petrol had probably been poured through the cat-flap on the back door.
Sobers wondered why the black iron bars had been fixed to the windows at both the back and front of the premises? He could understand the iron grille drawn down over the display window of the shop, but these bars made the Spartan flat feel yet lonelier. He’d seen plenty of commercial properties in London fitted with steel shutters at night, but in his first few months down in Devon he’d seen nothing like this. His former colleagues in the Met might have been winding him up when they told him that everyone down here still left their key on a piece of string behind the latch, or under a flowerpot by the front door, yet the fear of crime was not as evident here.
The room was modestly furnished with a large television set, a sagging two-seater sofa, pine coffee-table and matching built in bookshelves on opposite sides of the gas fire. There was no sign of a telephone upstairs, or even a point for one. Paperbacks about the War, or thrillers seemed to have been the main literary choices. Len Deighton, Jack Higgins and Alistair Maclean were all well represented. An old fashioned Dansette record player on a shelf by the window was accompanied by a miserly selection of records: a few Big Band LPs, a couple by Gracie Fields and rather incongruously Elvis’ ‘Jailhouse Rock’ – or maybe it wasn’t so bizarre a choice given the barred shadows now slanting across the room.
An old fashioned toilet with its cistern mounted high up on the wall was next door to small bathroom which contained no more than a few personal effects in a pine cabinet and a deep bath which looked as if it had been put in before the War. A small kitchen had a square Formica topped table squeezed into a gap between the fridge and the gas cooker. The Belfast sink still contained the victim’s dirty plates from his last supper the night before. There was no washing machine; not even a twin-tub. The only thing which surprised Sobers was the bowl and litter tray under the table – he hadn’t put his victim down as a pet owner. Maybe he needed a mouser? The standards of hygiene in the flat hadn’t impressed the detective, who was most fastidious about keeping his bachelor pad sparkling clean.
The lack of any clues was disheartening. Sobers had come down to the West Country in a bid to make a new start. And yet his first case was already presenting him with more problems than he had anticipated in his Devonian exile. Perhaps this was his penance for working on a Sunday?
Chapter 3
Jane had found out rather more than her boss, not from the sister, who seemed reluctant to talk about her brother’s life, but from the local paper, or more precisely Debbie Rowe – the journalist she’d seen taking photographs outside the Littleglen Nursing Home in Honiton.
She’d suspected that Winnie Lowe had used infirmity as an excuse to spare herself a long interview about her younger half-brother. At 13 years older than George, she might have had that excuse, except for the way the nurses had kept talking about her as ‘sprightly’ and ‘the life of the party’. She certainly didn’t look like an octogenarian; Jane might easily have placed her in a bracket from late 60s to early 70s. Winnie had in fact been sitting upright in a wingback chair in the television room when Jane arrived. The BBC were showing pictures of a beaming Mrs Thatcher outside Downing Street and Winnie seemed to be remonstrating with an elderly man to her right who had affixed a red rosette to his lapel and was trying to sing ‘The Red Flag.’ Winnie, was jabbing a plastic Union Jack (probably left over from the Royal Wedding celebrations) at him and encouraging other residents with their flags to wave them vigorously.
The nurses, thought Jane, if not Winnie, were probably glad of her arrival.
She’d been taken to Winnie’s ground floor room; it had probably once been a study or music room in the detached Victorian family house which had preceded this private nursing home. A single bed was along one wall, with a dressing table opposite – though the table itself was clearly a chipboard one with a white plastic veneer bought from somewhere like MFI. The two cane chairs and coffee table by the window, overlooking what once may have been the croquet lawn were the real deal.
‘They’re mine,’ explained Winnie sinking into the left hand chair and fixing Jane with her steely grey eyes, ‘sold the rest when my husband died – they don’t let you take much here.’
‘They’re very nice, Edwardian?’
Jane was putting all her knowledge gained from Sunday evenings devoted to tea in front of ‘Antiques Roadshow’ to the test.
‘Late Victorian,’ corrected Winnie with a hint of triumph, ‘they belonged to my mother. There was a dining set too. That was also sold – it’s not cheap being looked after.’
‘You don’t look like you need much looking after,’ smiled Jane and her compliment was meant. The small woman in front of her exuded vigour and her eyes gleamed with a combative spirit.
‘I’m 80 and lived alone. When Arthur died five years ago, I was left with a house that was too big for me and a few friends who liked to play cards every Wednesday; I don’t like playing cards – but I don’t think a WPC has come to talk to me about my friends, or furniture.’
‘I’m a Detective Sergeant actually,’ Jane flushed.
‘So it’s not just in politics we’re taking over – I wanted to be a nurse when I was a girl. My father told me not to be so bloody silly and introduced me to Arthur. He was part of that Lost Generation and I spent the next half century of my life being lost too; particularly when I couldn’t give him a son.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. I never wanted a child, yet it seemed to upset everyone else. Forty-four years of being unhappily married to a bank clerk in Sidmouth – that was my life. I always thought if I was someone on the telly I’d be Mrs Mainwaring in ‘Dad’s Army’ – you know the wife they never show you while the men get to have all the fun.’
‘I see.’
She didn’t though.
‘So why has a Sergeant come to see an old biddy like me? Have you found out I did my husband in?’
For a moment, Jane thought she was serious.
‘I’ve come to break the news that your brother’s body was discovered earlier this morning in his flat.’
For a moment there was a pause.
‘I don’t have a brother. My only brother died in Normandy in 1944.’
She said it with such conviction that Jane felt like believing her.
‘Perhaps I should have said half-brother?’
There was still no reaction from the elderly woman, apart from the tiniest of flickers in her eyes.
‘George Albert Kellow, born September 1st 1916? Lived at 3a, The Parade, Littleham Cross, Exmouth?’
‘My brother’s name was Harry Edward Kellow. He was born on October 2nd 1917 and killed at Normandy on 6th July 1944, a month after the D-Day landings. Next year will be the 40th anniversary of his death.‘
The next part of the speech seemed less rehearsed and contained the only evidence of frailty evinced by Winnie Lowe.
‘I’ve been laying flowers on his grave every year since the War ended. Harry was my only brother, Sergeant.’
Jane could see the tears welling in Winnie’s eyes and hear the tremble in her voice; despite the facts in her notebook she felt she was telling her the truth, or at least a truth. Even though she had discovered from papers found in Kellow’s flat, contradictory evidence that both George and Harry had indeed been Winnie’s half-brothers from her father’s second marriage.
Winnie’s unsteady hand had then reached out to pull on a white cord which dangled from the Victorian cornicing and which must have been put there to call for assistance. The elderly woman, now looking her eighty years, had already reached the bed, when a nurse came in answer to the call; the look of reproach from the severe looking matron was enough to tell Jane that Mrs Lowe wasn’t going to provide her with any more assistance that d
ay.
It was only when she was outside the neo-Gothic pile which made up the ‘Littleglen’ that Jane felt she had been treated to a performance. She’d no doubt, that like most good lies, a lot of truth had been mixed in with it; nevertheless somehow she had been stitched up like a kipper. And she didn’t know what that meant either…
It was only when she saw Debbie Rowe taking a shot of the front of the building that she began to get the truth of the matter and began to understand how small, small town mentalities could be.
****
Kellow’s bedroom was more enlightening for Sobers; grudgingly he was beginning to think of the man he’d only seen on the slab as a person with a name. Again there were the same barred windows, which this time overlooked the courtyard at the back. The scene of crime boys had informed him it would have been relatively easy for someone to force the lock on the gate to the alley leading down the side of the building to the back, although it bore no signs of having being tampered with. The padlock on the back gate had been cut with a bolt cutter, which along with gloves and a screwdriver made up the kit of many an average burglar.
A couple of new semis were being squeezed into a patch of land backing on to the rear of the parade. Some of the owners of the large Victorian villas on the avenue, had obviously decided their back gardens were too outsized for the 1980s and so as well as converting their properties into more profitable flats had made a killing on the land. The flimsy fence dividing the back of the building plot from the backyards of these shops was already a suburban fox run and a series of gaps in it offered easy access to the back path running behind the shops on the parade. And the tiny rill running parallel to the path wouldn’t have prevented a newt from crossing over. Walking around to the front of the houses, he’d found that the building site was easily reached by an access road which had once served as a driveway to one of the villas and now simply had a sign advertising the development and warning trespassers to keep out. Maybe his colleagues in the Met had been right after all about the lax security down here? And the on-going development meant that there were no residents who might have witnessed something on the night of the murder.
The speed at which the building work was progressing startled Sobers, who shared the prejudice of many of his London friends that life in the sticks was still catching up with the Steam Age. On the Friday, he had only seen what appeared to be a muddy field and a few trenches from the windows at the back of the property, but now he could see a low line of breeze blocks marking out the ground floor plan of at least one nascent semi. His assumption that no-one worked in the country at weekends, based mainly on the impossibility of finding anywhere to buy washing powder on a Sunday morning, had meant that he hadn’t yet alerted forensics to the possibility of the site holding any interest for the investigation. By now two days of building work would have made the ground all but worthless in the hunt for clues. So much for getting a head start, he was already screwing up his first case.
Sobers could already feel his recent promotion becoming an ever increasing weight. The local police may well have failed to find that schoolgirl who went missing in the ‘70s, yet there was no proof she was dead. He had a body, was making mistakes and wasn’t local. He thought back to the film he’d seen the previous year with Ronnie, the one where the two American hitch-hikers were given a frosty welcome in a Yorkshire pub, before one of them was devoured on the moors by a werewolf and the other spent the rest of the picture trying to avoid becoming a zombie. He’d laughed at the time, yet the way people often looked at him down here gave the scene a resonance he felt was increasingly familiar.
He peered under the single bed, hoping to find a suitcase full of money, or at least a clue as to why this man had been murdered – instead he found a knee length grey sock and an out of date copy of the ‘Radio Times’. The wardrobe yielded a no less conservative taste in clothing, but the bedside drawer proved more productive, as at the back he found a black box. Looking inside he found three black and white photographs and a string of medals.
****
‘He was a war hero,’ Debbie explained to Jane as they sat sipping tea in a café on Honiton High Street, ‘everyone else at the paper was sent to cover the election and I was left in the office when the call came about the fire and so the editor was forced to give me a share of the story.’
By ‘everyone else’, Jane assumed Debbie meant the male reporters on the local rag – the people who could be trusted with the serious stuff; they’d clearly not been prepared for their cub reporter to pick up one of the few murder stories ever to hit the town.
‘They sent me off here to get a quote and a photo from his sister, whilst the big boys get to see your boss.’
Jane could see that Debbie was wise enough to know she was being side-lined. The girl, woman would have been correct, yet misleading, must just have left school – though she looked and sounded like she’d stayed on to take her A’ Levels. Jane had seen many of her friends leaving even before their O’ Levels and drifting into being shop assistants, waitressing or helping out at play groups. The pretty redhead with the Bonnie Tyler curls seated opposite her, had clear ambitions.
‘While you to get to meet the side-kick,’ Jane smiled.
‘What’s he like? I mean you don’t get many coloureds down here.’
‘If you write that he’s black, he’ll be more likely to co-operate with the press.’
‘Sorry, have I put my foot in it? – I’ve never heard them called black that much – a lot of people I know call ‘em much worse…’
‘I know. But the world’s changing Debbie – for them as well as us.’
‘I didn’t mean anything by it,’ Debbie replied with a visible pout forming on her pretty lips.
‘I know – look if you tell me what you’ve found out, I’ll try and get you an exclusive. Sounds like a deal?’
‘You mean it?’ the pout had disappeared as swiftly as a summer’s cloud and Debbie’s brown eyes shone with the brightness of youth.
‘So what have you dug up?’
‘Well, while everyone else was being given the good stuff to do, they sent me to go through the archive and dig up what we had on him.’
Jane had already guessed that if the man had remained local all his life, as was a reasonable assumption for the working class, war time Devonian generation, then trawling through the files at the local paper may well have been her next move. A lot of police work seemed to involve being in darkened rooms looking through paper files, though, if you were really lucky some organisations had placed their documents on microfiche. Perhaps someday there would be an easier way of finding information?
‘He was one of them!’
For a moment Jane thought Debbie was trying to tell her Kellow was black – her brow furrowed.
‘No, not one of them, one of them!’
‘Them?’
‘He was a gay, a queer… you know, a chutney ferreter!’
Jane wondered if she’d ever been quite so unworldly as Debbie. She had been only a few years older than Debbie when David Bowie first began his gender-bender business and had managed to take that in her stride. She’d even preferred it when Larry Grayson had taken over from Bruce Forsyth on The Generation Game and if she ever went as far as admitting to enjoying ‘Are You Being Served?’ she would have picked the comically camp Mr Humphreys and his ’I’m Free’ catchphrase as one of her favourite characters on TV.
As a woman in the police, she liked to think that made her incapable of prejudice and though it had taken her aback a little to be assigned a black D.I, she had prided herself on her readiness to accept him as a fellow officer. Mind you, although she’d pretended to disapprove of the two WPCs she’d heard giggling about the size of his truncheon, she hadn’t been averse to giving a speculative glance or two in that direction – well there was no smoke without fire as her sister-in-law kept saying.
Out on the streets, she wasn’t utterly surprised by the way so many people seemed to think s
omeone else was in charge, as she’d spent years trying to get people to take her seriously. If anyone found out that she had a house husband, they’d probably think he was gay – that’s why she told any colleague who enquired (she had long given up the need to placate those who thought she was a dyke) that Tim was a teacher -which was almost as bad in police circles…
‘That’s good research.’
Debbie blushed beguilingly and revealed that her grandmother had lived in the town all her life and as soon as she said the name to him had commented that ‘’he were the one who got into all that trouble round the time of the Coronation.” Following this up, Debbie had discovered that her grandmother’s memory was playing her a little false, as 1952 and 1953 revealed nothing about George Kellow. Fortunately for her endeavours, the local paper was only a weekly and the archive for the first quarter of 1954 had turned up trumps.
‘He was released from Exeter Gaol, having being sent down for public indecency! They made a lot of him being a disgraced war hero too. Apparently he was at Dunkirk and some place called El-Alabama!’
‘El Alamein’, corrected Jane, before finding the need to add apologetically ‘I took History at A’ level.’
‘I took English Lit, French and R.E. – got a ‘B’ and two ‘Cs!’ Debbie beamed.
Jane felt now was not the time to reveal her superior grades in English, History and Geography and diplomatically asked the tyro journalist to press on.
‘He also won a load of medals, they made quite a bit about him getting the Military Medal at Dunkirk and being awarded a bar for El-Alamein. Though I’m sure that doesn’t mean they gave him a pub, as he was a butcher wasn’t he?’
