The Murder Book

by Jane A. Adams

  Acting Chief Inspector Carrington had finally arrived, profuse in his apologies and calling out for tea to be brought to them both in his office. Inspector Johnstone followed him in and took a seat on the visitor’s side of the desk.

  He said little until the constable had come in with their tea, Carrington filling the conversational void with talk of his journey in that morning and the shock of having such a terrible event in their little community.

  ‘So,’ Detective Chief Inspector Henry Johnstone asked when the constable had left. ‘What do we know about the dead woman and her child? And the young man in the third grave?’

  Across the desk from Henry, Carrington sipped his tea. ‘The woman’s full name is Mary Elizabeth Fields. She’s been married to George Fields for the last twelve years and they have one child from that marriage – or they had. Ruby Fields, aged seven years. According to neighbours there was a boy too but he died in infancy. George Fields was a canal man before the canal links closed in 1924. A lot of good men lost their jobs that year but after the floods …’

  ‘In 1920, I believe,’ Henry said.

  ‘That’s right, yes. After the floods there was so much silt in the canal basin, so much damage that the industry went into rapid decline. By 1924 they had to give it up. Fields, I understand, then went off to sea, took to the fishing boats sailing out of Immingham and Grimsby but from what my sergeants tell me, from what the neighbours have told them, the work has been slack and the pay has been bad.’ He shrugged. ‘It is a familiar story around these parts, whether it’s in farming or fishing or any other industry you care to name.’

  ‘You are remote, here,’ Henry said. ‘I was surprised at just how far this little town is from anywhere else.’

  For a moment Carrington looked offended then he just nodded. ‘I suppose for a Londoner it must seem that way,’ he said. ‘But before the floods we were among the largest of the inland ports in the country. Coasting vessels could travel from the sea ports, via the Louth navigation canal, right into the town.’

  Henry let the man talk for a while then he set his cup down with a loud chink upon the saucer. ‘I haven’t always lived in London,’ Henry Johnstone said.

  Carrington paused, waiting for him to elaborate. Instead, Inspector Johnstone said, ‘And the dead woman?’

  ‘Of course. Of course.’ He frowned at Henry, clearly irritated. ‘So the woman, Mary Fields, has a record for soliciting. In fact, she has a record both before and after her marriage. It seems that while her husband was away she entertained herself by entertaining men, and from what the neighbours say he couldn’t seem to break her of the habit.’

  ‘And his response to this habit?’

  ‘It seems that most of the time he closed his eyes to it, or at least that’s what they say. Though how any man could do that I don’t know.’

  ‘Sometimes women do what they must,’ Henry said quietly, ‘and their men accept that because they must.’ He could see the disgust on Carrington’s face. Carrington picked up his cup and sipped more tea as though to wash the taste of that comment away.

  ‘And is the husband known to be violent?’ Henry Johnstone asked.

  ‘He has no record of violence. In fact, he has no record at all. The neighbours claim not to know him because the woman and child moved to the house only a week or so ago and he was already away.’

  ‘And yet they seem to know a great deal about the woman.’

  ‘They saw men come and go from the house and drew their own conclusions. It seems one neighbour knows her from where they both lived before. Mrs Ida Cook.’

  ‘And yet this Mrs Cook claims to know nothing about the husband? Despite having lived close to Mrs Fields before?’

  Carrington frowned again. ‘I don’t think she claims to have been close to the woman, only that they lived in the same street. I’m sure your methods will extract more information than our enquiries have done.’

  ‘I’m sure they will. And the child, what is said about her?’

  Carrington scowled. ‘Nothing is said about her – she was a child. The neighbours say she was always well turned out and clean and that she was fed and went to school. Her teachers say she worked hard – she wasn’t exceptionally bright but she had friends as you would expect. What else is there to say about a seven-year-old girl?’

  Henry nodded but there was no sense in that nod that he agreed with Carrington and he made no immediate reply.

  ‘It’s a truly terrible business,’ Carrington said, trying again to fill the silence. ‘A ghastly business.’ He shifted uncomfortably as Henry Johnstone looked at him again as though suddenly remembering that he was there.

  ‘We must track down her clients, see what they can tell us about this woman.’

  Carrington looked uneasy. ‘That might not be the best course,’ he offered.

  ‘And why would that be?’

  ‘I would have thought that obvious. You risk causing distress to other families. Men might be thoughtless and stupid enough to stray but why should their wives and children suffer for it? I’ve no doubt respectable men …’

  ‘Respectable men, one of whom may have killed Mrs Fields.’

  ‘More likely it was someone she refused to deal with, some workman who lived locally who had too much to drink, maybe broke into the house with the intention of …’

  ‘And ordinary labouring men are not respectable, of course,’ Henry challenged. ‘There was no sign of a break-in. No sign of violence in any other part of the house from what I could see. No, she let her killer in. She took him upstairs.’

  ‘That’s as may be, but to suggest in the first place that any respectable man would have dealings with such a woman and then gone on to kill her, kill her child, kill … whoever that young man might have been …’

  ‘Murderers come from all classes and cultures. I’m astonished I have to point this out to you.’ Chief Inspector Johnstone paused. ‘In fact, I’m astonished that you summoned us here at all. It’s clear you want our investigation to be superficial, swift and draw conclusions that implicate no one locally. So why call us here?’

  Carrington scowled at him. ‘It’s the right of any police force in the country to request additional help from Scotland Yard.’

  ‘And so it is. It is also the expectation that when that help is requested the officers attending should be able to follow the evidence wherever it leads. And it’s not as though you are lacking able investigators locally. You could have sent to Brigg and asked for Superintendent Dolby. He’s a sound man and is a scant, what, dozen miles away? Or did you suspect that he might have too much local knowledge?’

  ‘I don’t like what you’re implying.’

  ‘Neither do I, and I hope I’m proved wrong.’

  ‘And what exactly do you mean by that?’

  ‘I mean that I hope you are correct and no … respectable … men are involved. But I will follow where the evidence leads me, and I will speak to anyone that I think might have known this woman or had dealings with her.’

  He got up and plucked his hat from the table top. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll take up no more of your time. I’m sure you’re a very busy man.’

  Outside, Henry Johnstone shrugged into his dark, broadcloth coat and put on his hat. He might not have handled that as well as Sergeant Hitchens would have liked, Henry thought. Hitchens would have told him that he could have been a little more diplomatic and Henry would have told Hitchens that Carrington reminded him of Brigadier Staines, at which Mickey would have shrugged and grinned. Hitchens and Henry Johnstone had met a scant few months before the war had ended and Brigadier Staines was a man they had both come to hate.

  He walked slowly down Broadgate, noticing the shops and listening to the snatches of conversation. A young woman in a blue cloche hat over a neat dark bob smiled at him as he passed and Henry tipped his hat politely. A group of men in heavy jackets and flat tweed caps gossiped outside a pub and Henry paused to listen.

  ‘Mazzled, he w
ere – could barely stand up right. I said to him … I said, “You’d best get yourself home before your woman comes out after you with rolling pin. Got a temper on ’er has our Alice.”’

  Henry walked on. Briefly he found himself following two young women, chatting, he presumed, about a friend. ‘But it was such a ghastly colour and then she wanted a matching hat.’

  Henry almost smiled at that; it sounded like something his sister might say.

  The town looked prosperous and busy. The market square was packed with stalls. Henry decided to get the lie of the land, to walk the area and think.

  It was a Wednesday and therefore the market was on. Henry walked between the stalls selling mostly local produce: fruit and vegetables, meat and cheese and a stall selling cheap cloth. Another sold crockery packed into baskets in layers of straw. He glanced at the names on the shopfronts: M.C. Cousins, J.A. Birkett – establishments that looked settled and ancient and belonging. He wandered out of the marketplace and back on to Eastgate, then on to Cannon Street, away from the crowds.

  Henry paused outside the Louth Playhouse Cinema and lit a cigarette. His cigarette case was battered, made of old brass and engraved with the initials A and G. It was worn smooth from handling; the rounded edges felt satisfying and soothing in his hand. He tucked it back into his pocket. He noticed that Hitchcock’s Easy Virtue was playing at the cinema a few weeks after it had finished its run in London. He’d gone to see it with his sister when she’d come up to town. Cynthia made sure she kept an eye on him. She was only two years older but had taken on the role of senior sibling with the same seriousness and intensity that she took on everything else.

  ‘So you’re still doing this ghastly job then,’ she’d asked him as she had at just about every meeting in the last ten years. It was almost her equivalent of saying hello. She usually followed it up with something like ‘I’d have thought you’d seen enough of that during the war’, but on that occasion, he remembered, she had resisted. She’d just smiled, kissed him on the cheek, asked him how he had been and told him he looked tired. Then tried her other gambit: ‘You know you only have to ask and Albert will find you something in the company – he always tells me to remind you. You’d be more than welcome.’ And Henry, as always, wondered if his brother-in-law had actually extended this invitation and what he could possibly offer to a company that manufactured copper tubing anyway. Cynthia had, somewhat surprisingly, married into money and, having produced the heir, the spare and the one that might be useful to be married off somewhere, she had focused her energies on being a capable and welcoming hostess for her husband’s many acquaintances and business associates.

  She was proud of her little brother, though. He knew this and on those rare occasions that he attended one of the frequent social gatherings she hosted she introduced him as, ‘My brother, the murder detective.’

  Henry walked slowly back to the crime scene.

  Sergeant Hitchens had left, he was told – gone in search of a photography studio in the hope of using their darkroom. He had taken Constable Parkin with him. Henry went on into the house and stood in the narrow hallway.

  For a few moments he listened to the silence, street sounds muffled, cars and footsteps and a bus pulling up at the stop across the road. No neighbours with adjoining walls, the little house stood alone connected to the shop next door by the yard an external wall and the gate. He guessed that the premises had been originally built as a single unit, perhaps a flat over the shop for an employee and a home for the owner – this house – next door with the yard, big enough for deliveries or for storage in between.

  What must once have been a symbol of prosperity was now damp and dank and run down. He laid a hand against the wall, felt the cold and wet seeping through and knew that if he clawed at the faded wallpaper it would come away in his hand.

  Henry turned away and went into the front parlour, noting that this would have been a larger house than most in the terraced row, having a hallway from which the stairs ascended rather than a front door opening straight into the front living room and enclosed stairs rising, usually from behind a door in the middle room. Once this would have been a cherished and proud home; now it was sparsely and cheaply furnished with a single upholstered chair and a couple of what looked like Victorian hall chairs, flat seated and straight backed together with a small, drop leaf table.

  It looks like a waiting room, Henry thought.

  There were no personal possessions in this room, no pictures of books or photographs. Nothing to give a clue as to the residents. Perhaps she wanted it that way, if this was where she first brought her clients? Perhaps it was simply that they owned so little there was nothing to spare for this formal, underused little room.

  He moved out into the hall again and through into the middle room. This, he thought, was where mother and child would have spent their time, here and in the kitchen beyond. The fire had been made up, ready to light, and two chairs and a little stool set beside it. A handful of books sat on the windowsill and there were cheap ornaments and a vase on the mantle. The vase had been stuffed with wild flowers. He recognized pink campion and there were wild rose petals that had fallen on to the tiles.

  The kitchen was clean and tidy, the food left out on the table beside two unused cups – one with an mismatched saucer, one without. Had she planned to make supper and tea for herself and child after she’d dealt with her client?

  Client, Henry thought. Somehow that sounded better than …

  But she had opened the door and shown her murderer into the front parlour and then taken him upstairs to her bedroom. And he had killed her and her child and also the young man … He must have had a key, Henry thought. So a friend or a relative. Or possibly someone who had lived in this house before?

  Henry went up the stairs and into what was obviously the child’s bedroom. Clothes hung on a hook behind the door and a pair of shoes had been placed beneath a chair, a doll on the bed and a rag rug beside it. Another hand-pegged rug, larger this time, had been cast across the foot of the bed to be used as an extra covering.

  Everything pointed to the child being well-cared-for despite the evident poverty. Where would they have gone to, Henry wondered, after they left this temporary place?

  The larger bedroom at the front of the house was evidently the crime scene. He had earlier seen the blood on the floor and the wall but now the curtains were open and the violence of the scene was clearer. He could visualize where the young man had lain and where the child had been sent crashing against the wall. Another rag rug on the floor by the bed had been kicked aside and the bedclothes were pulled back, the sheets rumpled. There was no blood on the bed itself, which lent credence to the idea that the woman had been strangled or suffocated. The room and the house were very quiet. He wondered what would have been heard that night had there been anyone outside. Had the woman screamed? Had the child cried out? Was that what had brought the young man running in or was he already there? Had there been some arrangement that he should come round and check on the woman and child and let himself in?

  There had been two cups on the table in the kitchen; for the woman and child? Or for the woman and the young man?

  Henry turned away and went back downstairs and then out into the street. He knew that the local police and Mickey would have spoken to the neighbours but he also knew that it was worth him questioning them again. Mickey’s approach elicited one kind of response and his, sometimes, quite another. The difference in attitude, appearance and even accent meant that people often gave a different kind of answer. It was useful to know this.

  After a quick word with the constable on duty Henry proceeded to knock on doors.

  George Fields had woken with a hangover. For a short while he hadn’t known where he was – curled in the doorway of a derelict building at the bottom of Thames Street. He must have crossed the canal, George realized. It was a miracle he’d not ended up in the damn thing. He was on the outskirts of town and freezing cold on an early m
orning that, though it promised sunshine, was still very chilly. June, he’d been told, had been a difficult month. Hot days but chilly nights and some very cold rain. He was grateful that he’d not been rained on.

  His first thought was that he had been robbed. He had no concept of how he’d arrived or exactly where he was but a quick check of his pockets and duffel assured him that he still had his pay and his possessions. He remembered, then, finding out that his wife and daughter had left, not knowing where they had gone and the crushing disappointment he had felt. Disappointment because he realized that the landlord had moved them on because Mary had been at it again. At which point he’d gone and got drunk.

  George took a deep breath. His watch told him that it was eleven in the morning. He must have been out for hours and a quick check of how much money he had left reinforced the fact that he had drunk heavily. He dimly remembered being thrown out of the last pub and staggering off. He had been lucky; he’d ended up here, out of everyone’s way and invisible and he’d not been rolled; thankfully he still had his money.

  Painfully, George got to his feet and looked around. He was down by the canal. He’d been sleeping in one of the warehouse doorways, abandoned now since the canal had gone out of use. It made sense that he had found his way here. It had been where he’d worked for a long time and where he met Mary.

  He’d have to find them, George thought. Whatever Mary was, she was still his wife. He still loved her and nothing in the world would persuade him to abandon Ruby. Thinking about his child seemed to fill him up, his belly, his chest, his heart flooded to bursting point. He would ask around – someone would know when and where they’d gone – and then he’d have it out with her once and for all. Tell Mary it would have to stop. He’d said it before but he meant it now. Ruby was getting older and this could not go on. He’d even do what she wanted and head south to where she had family in Newark and in Nottingham. She’d been trying to persuade him to move down there, get work closer to where she’d grown up. He was now of a mind that this would not be a bad idea; if she had her family around her she might be more inclined to behave. And it was certainly no good for Ruby the way this was going – a few weeks in this house, a few more in these rooms, a few days in some other dank, dark lodging house. What kind of life was that for a little girl?