“What’s that?”
“He doesn’t know we know he’s a Russian called Vladimir.”
“Speaking of a chink of doubt, sarge, there was something the reverend said that made me uneasy.” Thackeray explained about Eli Mountjoy’s suggestion that someone else might have carried out one of the murders.
Cribb was intrigued. “Did he have a reason for this theory?”
“No.”
“It’s a strange thing to suggest.”
“He did say something about the women being too scared to walk the streets while Bill was at large. He said they’d all come back to Pimlico now.”
“He’s right about that. I think I’d better meet your clergyman. What’s his address?”
Thackeray had to admit he hadn’t enquired.
“No matter,” Cribb said. “He’s a local. We’ll find him.”
The same evening they called at the Terminus Wash-house in Lupus Street and met Mrs Lettice Mountjoy. She was sitting inside the entrance with a pile of folded towels on a table beside her. There was also a large urn of soup simmering over a paraffin burner. She was about forty-five, slim, with a lined face. She was wearing a white pinafore over a black dress.
“Is this where the sins are washed clean?” Cribb asked.
“Ladies only, I’m afraid,” Mrs Mountjoy said.
“Gentlemen sinners need not apply?”
“It’s the rules,” she said without a smile. “The mission hires the bath from ten o’clock until two. We aren’t permitted mixed use.”
“I understand,” Cribb said. “You are Mrs Lettice Mountjoy? We’re police, wanting a word with your husband.”
“Oh, dear.”
He held up his hand. “It’s all right. He’s been helping us over these murders. He’s a public-spirited man, your husband.”
“He’s more than that,” she said with animation. “He’s a saviour.”
“And are they saved for good, or do they go back on the streets after the bath and the soup?”
She looked upset by the suggestion. “It’s permanent in almost every case. He’s very persuasive.”
“And let’s not underestimate your part in the process. Has he brought any in tonight?”
“Not yet, but he will.”
“We’ll wait, then. He’s on the streets every night, is he?”
“Except Sundays.”
“So in the past three weeks, when these horrible murders were happening, he’s carried on as usual, out every night saving souls?”
“There were three days last week, Monday to Wednesday, when he was unable to do it. He was suffering from a bad cough.”
“So he spent those nights at home inhaling friar’s balsam?”
“He was at home, yes.”
Tuesday was the night the fourth victim, Mary Smith, had been killed in Buckingham Palace Road.
There was not long to wait. Out of the mist came a hansom cab, and from it stepped the Reverend Mountjoy looking so worthy of his calling that a halo wouldn’t have been out of place. He helped down a young woman heavily rouged and in a fur jacket. His wife greeted her charitably and handed her a bar of carbolic soap and a clean towel and took her into the bath-house.
Cribb introduced himself. “I want to clarify something you said to Constable Thackeray here.”
“By all means.”
“You suggested someone other than Razor Bill might have carried out the fourth murder.”
“I floated the possibility, no more,” Mountjoy said. “It seemed to me that if some person were disposed to kill one of these unfortunate women, they might adopt the same modus operandi as the murderer in the expectation that Razor Bill would be blamed for the crime.”
“It’s an ingenious idea,” Cribb said. “Do you have any reason for believing it happened?”
He hesitated. “Nothing tangible.”
“As a religious man, you’d owe it to the One Above to tell me everything, wouldn’t you?”
Now the Reverend Mountjoy coloured deeply. “It’s no more than a theory, sergeant. I’m a pastor, not a policeman.”
“Did you know any of these unfortunate women who were killed?”
“Only one. The latest.”
Thackeray said, “Strike a light!”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I didn’t know her as, em –”
“In the Old Testament sense?” Cribb said.
“Gracious, no. I knew her at arm’s length, as a sinner I tried to save. Some, unhappily, will not be persuaded whatever I say. Some, a few, give promise of redemption and then back-slide.”
“They take the bath and the clean towel without meaning to reform?”
“Who can say what they truly intend?”
“Was the fourth victim, Mary Smith, a back-slider?”
“Regrettably, yes.”
“That must be a savage blow.”
“A kick in the teeth,” Thackeray added.
“But I wouldn’t have wished her to suffer, if that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Far from it, sir. To change the subject, I was wondering if my constable and I might be permitted a look inside the bath-house.”
“Absolutely not,” Mountjoy said in a shocked tone. “That young woman will be in a state of nature by now.”
“I wouldn’t trouble yourself about that,” Cribb said. “In her profession she’s used to being seen by all and sundry.”
“It would be improper.”
Cribb smiled. “It’s our immortal souls you’re concerned about, isn’t it?”
He spread his hands. “You are God’s creatures, too. If you must see inside – and I can’t understand why it’s necessary – you can come back at two after midnight, when we leave the premises.”
“As you wish.”
They watched Eli Mountjoy climb into the waiting cab for another rescue mission.
“We can just walk in,” Thackeray said.
“No, we’ll play his game,” Cribb said. “Let’s find somewhere to eat. I don’t like the smell of this soup.”
They returned at two, when the streets were more quiet. The Reverend Mountjoy was waiting while his wife washed the soup bowls.
“How many did you save tonight?” Cribb asked.
“Three, if the Lord pleases.”
“Good going. Can we look inside now?”
“Certainly. There’s no one in there.”
Cribb insisted that the couple came in with them, so Mountjoy led the way and turned up the gas for a proper view of the interior. The air was still steamy, and wasn’t the sweetest to inhale. To the left was a row of wash basins, each with a simple mirror over it. Opposite were the bathrooms. Cribb glanced inside the one that had been used for the mission and immediately turned away. The wash basins interested him more.
“It brings it all back,” he said. “When I started out in the police, I lived in a section-house without running water. Used a wash-house like this as a daily practice. Penny a wash and shave, twopence for a second-class bath, which was a once-a-week treat.”
“Have you seen enough?” Mountjoy asked, impatient with the reminiscing.
“Not quite. I’m picturing this place in the morning, full of working men standing at the basins shaving. Do you own a razor, sir? No, you wouldn’t, with such a fine beaver as yours. For a clean-shaven man like me, a razor is an everyday object. I keep mine beside the kitchen sink at home. But in those days I’d leave it in the wash-house after my shave, tucking it out of sight above the basin. There were ventilation windows over the mirrors just like these.” He reached up and ran his hand along the ledge under the window. “Dusty.”
“It would be.”
“What do you know?” Cribb said. “Someone else has the same idea.” He took down a razor from the ledge.”
“There’s nothing remarkable in that,” Mountjoy said. “You’d find others up there, I’m sure.”
“Yes, I’m not saying this is the murder weapon. I’m just satisfying myself that a razor could
be acquired by anyone using this wash-house on a regular basis.”
“Razor Bill, you mean?”
“No, I was thinking of the killer of Mary Smith. That murder has been troubling your conscience, hasn’t it?”
“I didn’t do it.”
“No, sir, I’m not suggesting you did, but you have a suspicion who did, which is why you came to see us. You’ve noticed things at home, heard things said, perhaps. You don’t know for sure, but you have a horrible suspicion Mary Smith was killed by your own wife Lettice. Hold her, Thackeray.”
Lettice Mountjoy had already made a move for the door. Thackeray grabbed her by the wrist and hauled her back.
Cribb switched his words to her. “You’re the one who works inside the wash-house. You’re the one with access to the razors.”
Thackeray, a strong man, had to struggle to hold her. This devoted woman, the gentle soul who welcomed fallen women to the mission, was abruptly transformed into a virago. “Yes,” she said with chilling ferocity, “I killed Mary. The night he was at home I collected a razor from here and went looking for her. He told me he feared she’d gone back on the streets, and she had. She didn’t deserve to live after the chance of redemption he gave her, after the solemn promise she gave him. He’s a saintly man. These feckless sluts hold his happiness in their hands, and this one betrayed him. I’m not sorry.”
Mountjoy had covered his face and was sobbing.
“You did the right thing, reverend, passing on your suspicions,” Cribb said, as Thackeray handcuffed Lettice Mountjoy and led her outside. “It could have happened a second time.”
“But I blame myself. She acted out of loyalty to me.”
Towards dawn, when statements had been made, and a long spell of duty was coming to an end, Thackeray said to Cribb, “Was the Reverend right, Sarge, about the motive? Was it loyalty that drove her to kill that woman?”
“Loyalty, my foot. She was jealous. Didn’t you hear what she called them – ‘feckless sluts’? There her own husband was, saving all these woman’s souls and taking her for granted. All right if they reformed, but heaven help them if they didn’t. Makes you grateful for the job we’re in.”
“Why is that, Sarge?”
“Our wives never know what we get up to.”
Thackeray observed a philosophic silence. Cribb didn’t need to know what Mrs Thackeray had said about the clean-shaven chin and the rouge on the pillow.
NEEDLE MATCH
Murder was done on Court Eleven on the third day of Wimbledon, 1981. Fortunately for the All England Club, it wasn’t anything obvious like a strangling or a shooting, but the result was the same for the victim, except that he suffered longer. It took three days for him to die. I can tell you exactly how it happened, because I was one of the ball boys for the match.
When I was thirteen I was taught to be invisible. But before you decide this isn’t your kind of story let me promise you it isn’t about magic. There’s nothing spooky about me. And there was nothing spooky about my instructor, Brigadier Romilly. He was flesh and blood all right and so were the terrified kids who sat at his feet.
“You’ll be invisible, every one of you before I’ve finished with you,” he said in his parade-ground voice, and we believed him, we third-years from Merton Comprehensive.
A purple scar like a sabre-cut stretched downwards from the edge of the Brigadier’s left eye, over his mouth to the point of his chin. He’d grown a bristly ginger moustache over part of it, but we could easily see where the two ends joined. Rumour had it that his face had been slashed by a Mau Mau warrior’s machete in the Kenyan terrorist war of the fifties. We didn’t know anything about the Mau Mau, except that the terrorist must have been crazy to tangle with the Brigadier – who grabbed him by the throat and strangled him.
Don’t ever get the idea that you’re doing this to be seen. You’ll be there, on court with Mr McEnroe and Mr Borg – if I think you’re good enough – and no one will notice you, no one. When the game is in play you’ll be as still as the net-post, and as uninteresting. For Rule Two of the Laws of Tennis states that the court has certain permanent fixtures like the net and the net posts and the umpire’s chair. And the list of permanent fixtures includes you, the ball boys, in your respective places. So you can tell your mothers and fathers and your favourite aunties not to bother to watch. If you’re doing your job they won’t even notice you.”
To think we’d volunteered for this. By a happy accident of geography ours was one of the schools chosen to provide the ball boys and ball girls for the Championships. “It’s a huge honour,” our headmaster had told us. “You do it for the prestige of the school. You’re on television. You meet the stars, hand them their towels, supply them with the balls, pour their drinks. You can be proud.”
The Brigadier disabused us of all that. “If any of you are looking for glory, leave at once. Go back to your stuffy class-rooms. I don’t want your sort in my squad. The people I want are functionaries, not glory-seekers. Do you understand? You will do your job, brilliantly, the way I show you. It’s all about timing, self-control and, above all, being invisible.”
The victim was poisoned. Once the poison was in his system there was no antidote. Death was inevitable, and lingering.
So in the next three months we learned to be invisible. And it was damned hard work, I can tell you. I had no idea what it would lead to. You’re thinking we murdered the Brigadier? No, he’s a survivor. So far as I know, he’s still alive and terrifying the staff in a retirement home.
I’m going to tell it as it happened, and we start on the November afternoon in nineteen-eighty when my best friend Eddie Pringle and I were on an hour’s detention for writing something obscene on Blind Pugh’s blackboard. Mr Pugh, poor soul, was our chemistry master. He wasn’t really blind, but his sight wasn’t the best. He wore thick glasses with prism lenses, and we little monsters took full advantage. Sometimes Nemesis arrived, in the shape of our headmaster, Mr Neames, breezing into the lab, supposedly for a word with Blind Pugh, but in reality to catch us red-handed playing poker behind bits of apparatus or rolling mercury along the bench-tops. Those who escaped with a detention were the lucky ones.
“I’ve had enough of this crap,” Eddie told me in the detention room. “I’m up for a job as ball boy.”
“What do you mean – Wimbledon?” I said. “That’s not till next June.”
“They train you. It’s every afternoon off school for six months – and legal. No more detentions. All you do is trot around the court picking up balls and chucking them to the players and you get to meet McEnroe and Connors and all those guys. Want to join me?”
It seemed the ideal escape plan, but of course we had to get permission from Nemesis to do it. Eddie and I turned ourselves into model pupils for the rest of term. No messing about. No detentions. Every homework task completed.
“In view of this improvement,” Nemesis informed us, “I have decided to let you go on the training course.”
But when we met the Brigadier we found we’d tunneled out of one prison into another. He terrified us. The regime was pitiless, the orders unrelenting.
“First you must learn how to be a permanent fixture. Stand straight, chest out, shoulders back, thumbs linked behind your back. Now hold it for five minutes. If anyone moves, I put the stopwatch back to zero again.”
Suddenly he threw a ball hard at Eddie and of course he ducked.
“Right,” the Brigadier announced, “Pringle moved. The hand goes back to zero. You have to learn to be still, Pringle. Last year one of my boys was hit on the ear by a serve from Roscoe Tanner, over a hundred miles per hour, and he didn’t flinch.”
We had a full week learning to be permanent fixtures, first standing at the rear of the court and then crouching like petrified sprinters at the sideline, easy targets for the Brigadier to shy at. A couple of the kids dropped out. We all had bruises.
“This is worse than school,” I told Eddie. “We’ve got no freedom at all.�
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“Right, he’s a tyrant. Don’t let him grind you down,” Eddie said.
In the second and third weeks we practised retrieving the balls, scampering back to the sidelines and rolling them along the ground to our colleagues or throwing them with one bounce to the Brigadier.
This was to be one of the great years of Wimbledon, with Borg, Connors and McEnroe at the peaks of their careers, challenging for the title. The rivalry would produce one match, a semi-final, that will be remembered for as long as tennis is played. And on an outside court, another, fiercer rivalry would be played out, with a fatal result. The players were not well known, but their backgrounds ensured a clash of ideologies. Jozsef Stanski, from Poland, was to meet Igor Voronin, a Soviet Russian, on Court Eleven, on the third day of the Championships.
Being an ignorant schoolboy at the time, I didn’t appreciate how volatile it was, this match between two players from Eastern Europe. In the previous summer, 1980, the strike in the Gdansk shipyard, followed by widespread strikes throughout Poland, had forced the Communist government to allow independent trade unions. Solidarity – the trade union movement led by Lech Walesa – became a powerful, vocal organisation getting massive international attention. The Polish tennis star, Jozsef Stanski, was an outspoken supporter of Solidarity who criticised the state regime whenever he was interviewed.
The luck of the draw, as they say, had matched Stanski with Voronin, a diehard Soviet Communist, almost certainly a KGB agent. Later, it was alleged that Voronin was a state assassin.
Before all this, the training of the ball boys went on, a totalitarian regime of its own, always efficient, performed to numbers and timed on the stopwatch. There was usually a slogan to sum up whichever phase of ball boy lore we were mastering. “Show before you throw, Richards, show before you throw, lad.”
No one dared to defy the Brigadier.
The early weeks were on indoor courts. In April, we got outside. We learned everything a ball boy could possibly need to know, how to hold three balls at once, collect a towel, offer a cold drink and dispose of the cup afterwards, stand in front of a player between games without making eye contact. The training didn’t miss a trick.
Murder on the Short List Page 5
