One Fight at a Time

by Jeff Dowson

  Bridge closed the shed door and turned around. The washing line was rigged and Mrs Rawlins was pegging out a bed sheet. Goole was standing next to her holding a bag of wooden clothes pegs, the washing basket at his feet. Mrs Rawlins held on to the edge of the bed sheet with her right hand and stretched out her left. Goole gave her a peg.

  “We didn’t meet all that often,” Mrs Rawlins was saying. “And when we did, it was just to say hello, or make some comment about the weather. But he had a few visitors.”

  “Anyone you got to know?”

  “No.” She pointed to the basket. “Pass me a pillow case.”

  Goole did so. She held it up to the line and he fished another peg out of the bag.

  “Was there a regular visitor?” Goole asked. “Someone you think Mr Hope might have been close to.”

  “A young man,” she said. “About the same age as Nick I would guess. Dark curly hair. He was left handed.”

  Bridge ducked under the washing line.

  “How do you know that Mrs Rawlins?”

  He moved to Goole’s side.

  “He opened the front door for me once. Turned the knob and pulled the door back with his left hand.” She gestured to the next pillow case. “I notice things like that. I’m left handed as well.”

  Goole picked up the second pillow case. Gradually, he and Mrs Rawlins worked their way to the bottom of the basket. Bridge went back to the shed, took one of the chairs out of it, sat down in it and did some thinking. The line of sheets and pillow cases and blouses and skirts and finally underwear, grew longer. Goole dropped the peg bag into the empty washing basket, picked it up and gave it to Mrs Rawlins.

  “A line of washing drying in the sun is a glorious sight,” she said. “Thank you sergeant. Would you like a cup of tea?”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have time Mrs Rawlins,” Bridge said. “But thank you for your help.”

  The policemen escorted the lady to her kitchen door, then walked round the side of the house and back to the Wolseley. Goole was irritated.

  “Enjoy your moments in the sun, did you, Sir?”

  “If Harry Morrison is left handed,” Bridge said. “If his prints are on the scene and if the shoe print fits...”

  Goole was deaf to his boss’s rationalisation.

  “No one at the Bridewell will believe what I’ve just spent the last ten minutes doing,” Goole said.

  “We may have the killer.”

  “No one,” Goole muttered.

  “Best to leave the underwear out of your report,” Bridge suggested, as he reached for the kerbside passenger door handle.

  Goole stared at him across the roof of the car.

  *

  Harry was picked up an hour later. Photographed and fingerprinted and installed in an interrogation room at the Bridewell, with a uniformed constable and a cup of tea. Then left alone to worry, while Bridge and Goole compared notes.

  “Morrison’s fingerprints were found on both of the suitcase latches and on the case leather,” Goole said.

  “So did he search it, looking for something in particular?” Bridge asked. “Or did he look through it once, as anybody might, out of interest or curiosity?”

  Goole went on. “The boffins matched the two sets of bloody fingerprints in the flat. Half a dozen belong to Hope. On his shirt, trousers and the sofa cushions. And there’s one of Morrison’s. A left hand, index and second finger print on Hope’s shirt. We need to match the boot print on the carpet.”

  “Go and prise them off Morrison’s feet,” Bridge said.

  *

  There were only three customers in Barclays Bank in East Street. One at each of the grilles to the right of Senior Cashier, Cynthia Bowles. Mr Thomas the butcher, whose shop was three doors along the street, Miss Harvard from the Ministry of Pensions and National Insurance Office around the corner, and a gentleman she did not know who had recently opened an account.

  Cynthia looked up at the clock on the wall to her left. 3.24. Mr Hoover the taxi driver, would arrive in moments. He always did, just before closing time on Friday afternoons, to pay in the week’s takings. From behind her grille, she could see across the floor and out through the big street window.

  A dark green Morris Oxford pulled up outside. Mr Hoover got out, crossed the pavement and walked into the bank. Cynthia gave him her best smile. Mr Hoover smiled back. Pushed a bulging cloth bag though the space at the bottom of the grille. Cynthia emptied it and began counting the coins and notes.

  The same routine was being played out at five other banks in Bedminster. The National Provincial, Lloyds, the Midland, Martins and the Westminster. Five other taxi drivers in dark green Morris Oxfords, with amounts that varied by a pound or two, depositing money into their accounts, moments before their banks closed for the weekend.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Ellie closed up early. Grover kept her company in the kitchen. He had made several cups of tea she had let run cold and a corned beef sandwich he was trying to persuade her to eat. She stood up, went into the wash house, banged about a bit, then came back into the kitchen. If she had intended to pick up something, either she had forgotten about it, or it wasn’t where she had thought it was.

  “Eat this sandwich,” Grover insisted.

  “In a minute,” she said, distracted. “I’ll get to it, I’ll get to it.”

  “Then sit down. Please.”

  “Shouldn’t we be at the Bridewell?”

  “To do what Ellie? Pace up and down in the foyer?”

  She looked at Grover and apologised. “I’m sorry.”

  She looked at the clock on the mantelpiece. 1.15. Harry must have been at the police station for a couple of hours now.

  Grover read her mind.

  “We’ll know soon,” he said. “Try and stay calm.”

  Easy to advise, but impossible to do. Especially for someone whose only contact with the law so far had been the odd chat about the weather with her local beat bobby.

  Harry was the most important being in her life. He had been born in the midst of the deepest depression the western world had ever known. Worked for, eagerly expected, and welcomed joyously after a scare at seven and a half months and a monstrously difficult labour. Ellie was forty-three and was told by Doctor Morris that she could not have any more children. Arthur was working three days a week, she was taking in washing and they lived in a two roomed flat above a butcher’s shop on St John’s Lane. The offer from the Wilson sisters to manage the Gladstone Street shop, was a godsend. The twins had turned eighty and were no longer sprightly enough to work every day. In the four years leading up to the war, Ellie turned the place around. The twins died in the autumn of 1938, Sophia from simple old age and Emily six weeks later, from a broken heart. Ellie took over the shop and moved herself, Arthur and Harry into the flat upstairs.

  Ellie had confronted the pre-war struggles and beaten them. She had coped with the bombs, the deaths of friends and neighbours, the years of rationing and the post-war reorganisation. For Harry. Her first and only son. For Arthur too, of course, but she did not have to worry about him. He was always where he should be, as sure as night turned into day. Arthur was a constant. Harry was a work in progress and the beating heart of her day to day existence.

  Somebody knocked on the shop door. Then the bell rang, the door banged and the bell rang again. Ellie looked alarmed. Grover held out his right arm and got up from the table.

  “I’ll go.”

  Detective Sergeant Goole was standing in the shop doorway with a uniformed WPC next to him.

  “We have to talk to Mrs Morrison again,” Goole said.

  Grover led the way into the kitchen. Ellie was standing with her back to the fireplace. She nodded at Goole. WPC Bailey introduced herself. Goole looked at the sandwich on the table.

  “I’m sorry. Are we disturbing your lunch?”

  Ellie shook her head. “Please go on.”

  Grover moved across the room and stood beside her. She stretched her left
arm and took his right hand. Goole got on with what he had come to say.

  “Harry is under arrest Mrs Morrison. Charged with the murder of Nicholas Hope. He is currently on remand in the Bridewell. Tomorrow morning he will appear at the City Central Magistrates Court.”

  Ellie gripped Grover’s hand tighter.

  “May I see him?”

  “Not tonight. But you will be allowed to talk to him at some point after his court appearance tomorrow. If you wish, WPC Bailey will stay with you for the rest of the day. To make sure you are fine and to answer any questions you may have.”

  “No thank you,” she said. “I understand the situation perfectly. I know Harry didn’t do this thing. It’s only a matter of time before you discover this also. Now, I would like you both to leave.”

  “Perhaps you should consider taking some legal advice Mrs Morrison. If necessary, the court can provide –”

  “Please go sergeant.”

  Grover shepherded the police officers back the way they had come. Ellie heard the shop doorbell ring twice. Then her shoulders slumped. She sat down. Lifted her arms, placed her hands on the table, palms down and began to cry. Grover watched from the kitchen door. She became aware of him. She sat up straight, wiped the tears from her cheeks with backs of her hands.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to do that.”

  Grover moved towards her.

  “We’ll fix this. I promise.”

  He sat opposite Ellie, took his wallet out of the inside pocket of his jacket and found the card Zoe Easton had given him three days ago.

  “Have you heard of these lawyers?” He read Ellie the name on the card. “Fincher Reade and Holborne.”

  “Yes I have. They’re posh and probably very expensive. One of their barristers recently prosecuted a multiple shooting. The case was in the headlines for weeks. And it’s pronounced ‘Hoeburn’. The last name.”

  *

  There were half a dozen circular cast iron tables on the quayside in front of the Nova Scotia, with matching chairs arranged around them. Zoe Easton carried her drink out of the pub and sat down to wait for Grover. She looked at her watch. 3 minutes after 6. She leaned back in the chair and squinted up into the warm sun. The temperature had climbed steadily during the day and the legacy was a soft spring evening. She sat in a well of quiet, ringed by the noise of distant traffic. Hotwell Road was a hundred yards away, across the other side of the floating harbour.

  To the left, the water in the Cumberland Basin was perfectly still. Held captive by Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s massive lock gates. The Avon had always been a problem for Bristol. The Severn Estuary had the second highest tidal range in the world – something around fourteen and a half meters – and the Avon turned and twisted its way into the city via the infamous horseshoe bend. Ships could only arrive and leave on the high tide. So imprisoned behind the lock gates, the water in the floating harbour kept Bristol’s dockside in business.

  To the right looking east, the harbour stretched almost a mile. Past the warehouses, the workshops, the boat builders and the ships chandlers; the Bristol Gas Company and Parsons Timber yard; the two massive steam cranes which propelled themselves along tracks parallel to the waterside; the Western Coal Company depot, the quayside in front of it black with coal dust. And beyond, the narrow left hand spur, which directed the water and small pleasure craft into the city centre.

  Zoe could see as far as the right hand dog leg turn, where The Ambassador was moored – a mighty four-masted square rigger which made a fortune for her owners during the slave trading years. Now preserved for the nation, an icon of the British Empire, the concentrated evil of her trade had been distilled by time. For two and six a head, students of maritime history could walk around this symbol of glories past. A time when Britannia ruled the waves, when a fifth of the globe was coloured pink and the essence of history was a matter of business.

  And business was what the burghers of Bristol had always understood. The city, built on a swamp by the Avon and across the hillsides surrounding it, raised the money for John Cabot to sail to the New World. And pioneered what became the city’s ‘golden age’. During which fortunes were made by merchants operating the infamous Triangular Trade. Copper, cloth, guns and ammunition delivered to the slave traders in West Africa. Slaves packed on board in hundreds, toe to toe and shoulder to shoulder, transported across the Atlantic to the Caribbean. Rum, sugar and raw cotton ferried from the plantations of America’s southern states to England. Later, the city played host to a number of Brunel’s projects, until the money ran out. Then the motor car arrived and jammed up the city centre. Recently, the Luftwaffe had done its best to sort out the problem but had simply made a hell of a mess – about which, the town planners were still locked in division. Meanwhile the city’s traffic moved no faster than the coaches and the sedan chairs of two hundred and fifty years ago.

  Zoe saw Grover walk on to the quayside from Merchants Road, a little surprised by how pleased she was to see him. He walked with a kind of slow motion ease, which she enjoyed watching.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Am I late?”

  “No more than a minute or two,” she said. “Sit down.”

  “No, I’ll get a drink. Do you want another?”

  “No thanks, I’m fine.”

  She watched him cross the quayside and disappear into the darkness of the pub. He came back with a pint of Badger IPA, which was brewed in a back yard a few streets away from the pub. Grover had got used to warm English bitter during his time in Norfolk. Later, on the US military bases, he had reverted to the cold lagers of Budweiser and Schlitz. Imported in millions, they even kept up with the advance across Europe. He knew what a badger was and faintly suspected the aroma his glass was wafting towards his nose. But hey, what the hell, when in Rome... He sat down, took a mouthful of the beer, waited a moment and then swallowed.

  Zoe watched him. He managed to grin at her.

  “An acquired taste do you think?” she asked.

  “No no,” he enthused. “I like it.”

  Zoe raised her gin and tonic in salute.

  “Nice to see you again,” Grover said. “You look great.”

  “Thank you,” she said. “You look like you’re fitting in well.”

  “These are all the clothes I have. Must do something about that.”

  “Slouch a bit and you won’t look like a soldier at all. Aren’t you supposed to be out of Uncle Sam’s employment any time now?”

  “I deferred it. For a couple of weeks. I like it here in the west country.”

  Zoe tilted her head to one side. “Really?”

  She took a sip of gin and tonic and put the glass back on the table.

  Grover looked around. Along the quayside and across the wrinkled surface of the water, strobing gently in the evening sun. Zoe watched his face as he relaxed. Then he looked at her, looking at him. He took another drink and stared eastwards along the floating harbour, towards The Ambassador.

  “Impressive looking ship.”

  “It was built here. In the late seventeen nineties. For one of the city’s slave traders.”

  Grover put his pint of IPA back down on the table.

  “My great grandfather was a slave trader.”

  Zoe stared at him. Grover began the story.

  “Amongst other things. Most of them to do with privilege and greed and none of them to do with being a decent human being. He was born in 1842. His family owned a huge chunk of West Virginia. Right on the nail American old money. The family tree, drawn in copper-plate and authenticated all the way back to George Washington, hung proudly in the entrance hall. Framed in gilt. That’s gilt without a ‘u’.”

  Zoe smiled. “Is the house still there?”

  “Starbuck’s cavalry burnt it to the ground. Great grandfather saved some livestock. He built a slightly more modest dwelling on the corner of the estate that he managed to salvage, and ended up with a contract selling horses to the Union Army. I don’t kn
ow how he managed to rationalise that. I suppose he just didn’t give a damn.”

  “So what happened down the line?” she asked.

  “His son, my grandfather, got drunk in the Grand Hotel in Charleston one night in the summer of 1895 and lost it all in a poker game.”

  Zoe shook her head in disbelief.

  “You think that only happens in westerns? Wait for the rest of the story.” Grover took another drink of Golden Badger, shifted in his chair and went on. “He moved across the border into Kentucky, built a shack in the hills and dug coal. My dad was born in Pike County in 1898. One time battleground of the Hatfields and McCoys. Heard of them?”

  Zoe nodded.

  “My dad hated the place. He got out on the eve of his sixteenth birthday and rode a freight car west to St Louis, Missouri. Got himself a job as a kitchen hand on a riverboat and worked his way north to Minneapolis. Learnt a trade, became a skilled lathe operator, put down some roots and got married. Mom worked as a secretary in the Town Hall. They bought themselves a house, I was born in 1921 and everything looked good. Then my dad was run down by a drunk in an Oldsmobile and everything started to go wrong. Mom moved us to Tomah Wisconsin, where she had a sister. We lived in a series of rented rooms, on temporary jobs, hand-outs and welfare. Until I joined the Tomah PD.”

  “And your mother’s dead now?”

  “Yeh. Died of cancer while was I helping to rescue Europe from Hitler.”

  Zoe looked at him, concerned.

  “You sound bitter.”

  “Don’t mean too. I’m not. The intention was to be ironic. Should have known better. I’m told we Americans aren’t good at irony.”

  Zoe smiled, sat back in her chair and changed the subject.

  “Okay,” she said. “You rang.”

  Grover nodded. “Yes I did.”

  He took another drink from the beer glass, put it down on the table and studied it for a second or two, before he went on.