No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries)

by John Gardner

  When they reached the nick, Dennis asked if he should go back and pick up the Gloucester boys (his description).

  ‘Let them wait,’ Suzie told him. Then she instructed him to liaise with the duty sergeant and find a hotel for tonight. ‘Nothing simple,’ she added. ‘I want something elaborate.’

  ‘And organise their transport at the same time?’ Dennis queried.

  ‘Of course,’ Suzie straight-faced, as though she’d remembered it.

  ‘We spending the night here?’ Shirley Cox sounded as though she’d just woken up, hadn’t been listening.

  ‘Give Dennis a hand, Shirl. I’m going to phone Billy, then the chief.’

  Inside she spent a few minutes with DI ‘Waiting’ Gaimes who agonised for a while about which office she should use.

  ‘If I can be of any help…’ he said, almost cryptically, before leaving her in his office, then returning to see if she’d like tea and biscuits.

  She rang the Squad’s offices on the fourth floor of New Scotland Yard and got Billy Mulligan. They always had someone on duty and it was usually Billy whose marital status was a bit dodgy at the best of times. Billy often slept in the little bedroom off Tommy’s office. She pictured him there now, seated at Tommy’s desk playing with the model guillotine the chief had brought back from the Paris Exhibition in 1937, the walls decorated with original front pages from The Police Review and The Police Gazette, also an original wanted poster for Crippen and Ethel Le Neve.

  ‘What’s going on, ma’am?’ Billy asked from the comfort of Tommy’s captain’s chair.

  ‘Precious little.’ She sounded clipped and prickly, realised it and tried to calm down. ‘I need two cars here in the morning, about ten’ll do. Here in Gloucester.’

  ‘Send me a couple of loaves and two small fishes and I’ll do lunch for everyone at the Yard.’ Billy always made heavy weather out of transport.

  ‘Come on, Bill, it can’t be that difficult.’

  ‘Not more’n usual. And for an encore I’ll nip over St Mary’s Paddington and make their dead patients do the Post Horn Gallop.’

  ‘Just organise the transport, Billy. They’re prospective clients: John Lees-Duncan, his daughter and the head gardener, Tovey. Lees-Duncans know and they’re all in the frame. Don’t ask me how but they are.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  ‘Good. Ten o’clock at The Manor, Lees-Duncan’s gaff, and have those bodies from the convent nice and laid out ready for their families to have a butcher’s.’

  ‘Ah.’ The light dawned. ‘Of course, ma’am.’

  ‘You talked to the chief?’

  ‘He asked if I’d talked to you.’

  ‘We’re staying here overnight. I’ll let you know where as soon as Dennis’s organised it.’

  ‘Doubt if Dennis could organise the proverbial boozy party in a distillery, beggin’ your presence, ma’am.’

  ‘He has my confidence as well. Back tomorrow, Billy.’

  ‘Oh, your brother’s been looking for you.’

  ‘The Royal Marine?’

  ‘You’ve only got one, haven’t you?’

  ‘What’s he want?’

  ‘Bed for the night, I think.’

  ‘Ah.’ Suzie grinned to herself. Young James was on the loose in London, she thought. ‘If he rings back tell him, yes. He’s got a key and I won’t be back until tomorrow, lateish.’

  There was a knock at the door and a young WPC came in with a tray – tea and biscuits. Dennis hovered in the background.

  ‘Got us rooms. New Inn, Northgate Street: used to be an inn for pilgrims.’

  ‘That’s us all right, pilgrims. You fix the pick-up?’

  ‘What pick-up?’

  ‘The boy and girl in blue from here.’

  Dennis frowned, said he’d do it now, and she phoned the Lees-Duncans, got Sturgis who fawned a lot but said he’d make sure they were all ready by ten. He also promised to advise Tovey. Then she tried The Royal Victoria in Sheffield. They rang Tommy Livermore’s room but he didn’t pick up, so she called the nick. They said he was in an important conference, which was code for interrogation so she told them her name and rank saying this was equally important. The WPC who was manning the telephone told her to hold, then returned and said Mr Livermore would be with her in a minute.

  Suzie sipped the tea and ate a biscuit. There were two small sugar lumps in the saucer and, even though she’d given up sugar and sweets, she took a lump, put it between her teeth and sucked a dribble of tea through it, feeling the sugar dissolve as she sucked, the sweetness exploding in her mouth. She thought of Tommy then, suddenly, he was there at the end of the line.

  ‘Suze, heart, what a lovely surprise.’

  ‘Tommy.’ She gave it her best erotic breathy delivery: two notes, up and down, rising and falling.

  ‘Heart. What’s new?’

  She gave him a brief summary of the hints and evasions of the Lees-Duncan and Tovey families; of the identification of the masquerading nun and everything that went with it, the gardener’s daughter using the Lees-Duncan name and the suspicions she had.

  ‘Take ’em down the Tombs and sweat ’em.’ Tommy did his atrocious New York accent. It was their old joke. B-movie thrillers often had cops taking suspects, ‘down the Tombs’ – the New York City prison (you could get buried there) – to be interrogated.

  ‘It’s what I am doing, darling. Gonna give ’em the toid degree.’ The third degree was interrogation with physical encouragement – again spoken of freely in Hollywood movies. ‘One question, though. Just to make sure I’m not dreaming.’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Someone told us that Michael Lees-Duncan was in Mexico while his brother lived in Scotland.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Who told us?

  ‘Attila the Nun, wasn’t it? No, her sidekick. Novice Mistress. Eunice. Sister Eunice.’

  Winnie had two brothers, one of whom lives abroad, somewhere. In Mexico I think, Michael Lees-Duncan. The other – Gerald – last heard of somewhere in Scotland. That’s how things stood in 1940 anyway.

  ‘That’s how I remember it.’

  ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because John Lees-Duncan says both his sons walked out on him in 1939, and he didn’t know where they were from that day. Says a friend saw Michael in New York later in ’39, and he glimpsed Gerald in London in ’42. That was it.’

  ‘So where did Sister Eunice get her gen?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Only one answer.’

  ‘Quite. Listen, heart, send me your interim report when you’ve written it up. And copies of the pretty pictures you had done, plus the one you got from Attila the Nun.’

  ‘Roger. How’re you doing?’

  ‘A hundred and one suspects, plus a DS whom Woolly had on attachment here, having a look round, browsing. Bloke called Mungo.’

  ‘Not Dave Mungo?’

  ‘You know him?’

  ‘Met him briefly when I was doing that work last year. With Curry Shepherd and the secret squirrels.’

  ‘Maybe you should be doing the work here, heart. What did you know of him?’

  ‘Too smooth; smooth as creamed potatoes…’

  ‘… or a baby’s top lip. Unless you blunder into something among the Lees-Duncans of this world you’ve still got a mountain of work to do – the holy sisters at the convent, then their place in Farnborough, and…’ an afterthought, ‘have you seen that other girl’s parents yet? The cleric? Sister, Novice Bridget Mary. Harding was the name. Better get on and do that.’

  ‘You’re all work, Tommy.’

  ‘Me? I’m a bundle of love, heart. I’m the prisoner’s friend and I’m jolly well incarcerated by love for you.’

  ‘You say the sweetest things, Tommy. And I love you as well.’ Tommy, she knew, could be dead romantic when he put his mind to it.

  ‘I should bloody well think so and all,’ he said now. ‘Sleep well and dream of me.’
/>   ‘Of course, angel.’

  ‘And don’t forget to send me all the paperwork.’

  At that moment Tommy Livermore had no way of knowing that this request was going to turn the Doris Butler murder case inside out.

  Dennis and Shirley were waiting just inside the main doors, protected outside by an anti-blast wall of sandbags.

  ‘All aboard whose coming aboard,’ Dennis said, raring to go. Shirley was hungry and said so. ‘One of the WDSs says they do a good hotpot at the New Inn.’ She licked her lips, overstating as usual.

  They were almost outside when a police cadet came stumbling after them – ‘WDI Mountford, ma’am, there’s a telephone call for you.’

  It was her brother, James, ringing from a telephone box in Leicester Square, so he said. ‘Thank heaven I’ve tracked you down, I’m harry flakers.’ He sounded frantic, which didn’t ring true. ‘They’ve taken off the plaster. I can walk … Well hobble. Going to give me a new posting soon.’

  ‘What d’you want, Jim?’ All heart.

  ‘Can I use the flat? I don’t want to trail back to Newbury tonight.’

  ‘You’ve got a key. I won’t be back until sometime tomorrow. Use the spare room and for heaven’s sake don’t answer the telephone in the main bedroom, it’s a bit iffy.’

  ‘Trust me, sis. Great.’

  It was only after she cradled the phone that she realised her brother might not be on his own. She put her head back and laughed aloud.

  * * *

  SS-Gruppenführer Max Voltsenvogel had flown back to Berlin. He spoke to three people in the intelligence community, then went down to Rastenburg where the Führer was still directing things, ordering the arrest of the officers implicated in the bomb plot. There was to be a big show trial and it seemed that the Führer was more interested in vengeance than the slowly disintegrating situation in France.

  It was not pleasant at the Wolf’s Lair; in the summer, the log-built wooden buildings trapped the heat, there was the pervading sweet smell of rotting vegetation from the nearby marshland, and the camp was under constant attack from biting insects: gnats and mosquitoes. An unhealthy place.

  Max wanted to see and be seen, and he was pleasantly surprised to note that the attempted assassination appeared to have given the Führer a temporary new lease of life. He was directing the search for the July plotters with a fresh vigour. More, he did appear to be making concrete plans to counterattack the Allied assault along the coast of northern France. He looked older, his eyes glinted feverishly, he had trouble with his left arm, but he could still give the impression of confidence, the certainty of victory.

  (Only a few months later he disintegrated into a shuffling mockery of himself.)

  ‘The winter will hold them up, just as it delayed our forces in Russia,’ he claimed – though ‘delayed’ appeared to be a significant understatement. He also said the difficulty the Americans and British had experienced around Caen and other areas had completely thrown out their invasion plans. Yet below Caen the Allies were holding up armour, so allowing their other forces to head for the Seine.

  Hitler’s version of the situation was pie in the sky and this concerned Voltsenvogel. Initially he had maintained that they were ‘going to get the thrashing of their lives on the beaches’. Now they were off the beaches. The fighting along the established bridgeheads was desperate, terrible carnage, but the six armies that had been landed in Normandy were making progress; and here was Hitler thinking about counterattacking in the winter when they were hardly nudging September.

  SS-Colonel Voltsenvogel drove out to the airfield and ordered his pilot to fly the Storch back to his headquarters: to Group Odin in Holland.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Lieutenant James Mountford, Royal Marines, came out of the telephone box his face blossoming into a wide smile, ear to ear, like a Cheshire cat, cream all gone. The jeep was parked five paces away, by the kerb, Leading Wren Emily Styles, wearing her Maren beret, sitting at the wheel in shirtsleeves, there in Leicester Square, dusk coming on.

  ‘Upper St Martin’s Lane, Styles,’ he commanded, the goofy grin almost consuming her. ‘Upper St Martin’s Lane, and don’t spare the ’orses. We have somewhere to rest our weary ’eads.’

  ‘So we don’t have to trail round hotels.’ Emily pronounced it ’otels just like she’d been taught at the snooty school where they’d tried to educate her, without any real cooperation.

  Emily Styles, tall, slim, leggy – she would hoik her skirt high on her thighs when driving – sumptuous in the upper areas, glossy brunette with a small, almost urchin, face, big brown eyes and a moist mouth, lovely lips. ‘I’ve probably got a touch of the tarbrush,’ she would say, looking in a mirror, licking the lips and pushing her nose up with a forefinger to better examine the nostrils. There was certainly a thickness there, and her lips suggested something of the Negroid physiognomy even though she came from good county stock. She sometimes wondered if an ancestor had strayed in the colonies and now the secret was out.

  That morning she had driven James from Newbury to the hospital near Oxford where the plaster cast was removed from his foot, and they had examined the wound in his shoulder, pronouncing it healed. Satisfied that he was heading towards fitness they gave him some remedial exercises and allowed him to take off the sling. He was told that he now had to get used to walking and using his arm. ‘You’ll be getting a new posting in a matter of weeks,’ the surgeon commander said. ‘We need all the able-bodied men we can find, though I don’t see you back with your old unit for a few months. No more commando-ing as yet. Just get the foot and shoulder back in action, good man. Right, send in the next.’

  James said, ‘Aye-aye, sir,’ which is the correct thing to say to surgeon commanders, with the red lines between the gold stripes of rank.

  When he told Leading Wren Styles she asked, ‘You going to practise on me, sir? Using the arm, I mean. Doing your remedial exercises?’

  ‘’Course I am.’ Toss of the head. They had become quite chummy from the telephone calls and the drive to the hospital. Now James did not have to worry about what he was going to tell his mum about tonight. Mums, he considered, still expected to be told everything even though he was a commissioned officer supposedly fit to lead great big hairy marines into battle.

  He navigated while Emily drove, across to Trafalgar Square and on towards Charing Cross Station on their right – ‘I know the way now,’ she yelled happily – left up St Martin’s Lane, and at the top pulling up outside the Edwardian block of flats.

  They had eaten earlier, in Oxford, a tiny café opposite the House. The café did wonderful egg and chips, and James pointed out Christ Church College opposite, starting to explain that colloquially it was referred to as the House. She waved him aside saying her brother had been up at the House. 1935–38, got an oar on his bedroom wall to prove it.

  Now, outside the flats she screwed up her face and said, ‘This is where I came in, sir.’ Hopped out, disabled the jeep, removing the rotor arm, getting her little issue suitcase (‘my ditty bag’), scooping up the cardboard box of supplies she had liberated from the Wrenery kitchens next to the hospital – eggs, bacon, a loaf of bread, pint of milk and a link of sausages the cooks said were gash – Navy for surplus to requirements, going spare.

  James had his case but took the rotor arm and slung her navy raincoat and her jacket over his arm, peeping into the box. ‘Well done, Suzie didn’t say if she had any food stored away.’

  ‘Suzie? Your sister the cop?’

  ‘That’s the one. She nearly arrested our stepfather once. At least that’s what she says. I wasn’t there at the time.’

  ‘Hope she doesn’t bust in here and arrest us in the middle of the night.’

  ‘She won’t; she’s on some Agatha Christie case out in the sticks.’

  She stayed close to him as they went into the building. ‘Don’t have to help you up the stairs this time, do I, sir?’

  ‘Don’t have to help me cop an armfu
l of bust either.’ In fact it wasn’t easy going up the stairs. After only a few hours out of plaster his foot was bloody uncomfortable.

  ‘Don’t know what you mean, sir.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  In the hall, just inside the door of the flat she said how nice it was. ‘I thought that when I brought you here before. Roomy, isn’t it? High ceilings. Great. Wonderful.’

  He showed her around: the big drawing room she’d seen last time, with the phoney Canaletto over the fireplace, the kitchen – tidy and clean – the bathroom, where he thought it best not to mention what had gone on in there during the Blitz: the attempt to murder Suzie in that room, better keep quiet; didn’t want to scare the pants off her. On reflection though … then the dining room with the Caroline table Mummy had bought for a song, just along from the two spare bedrooms, one with a big double bed, rust-coloured curtains and the two pictures his father had bought his mother on their honeymoon, big canvasses, dark autumnal woodland scenes; James could never see the point, too gloomy for his taste.

  Emily in the corridor still loved it all, talking too quickly, too much, about the high ceilings, space, the mouldings on the dado, picture rails and the ornate lighting roses. ‘Smashing flat,’ she said, knocked out. ‘Wonderful,’ again.

  ‘Needs decorating.’ He looked at the outdated light blue paper with the little gold fleur-de-lys above the dado and the slashed crimson below: all faded and tatty now: old-fashioned trying to be up to date, the paintwork chipped and discoloured.

  ‘Same everywhere,’ she said. ‘When the war’s over I expect your sister’ll do it up, get the decorators in; Sanderson’s will be selling loads of new wallpaper.’

  ‘And Jimmy will go to sleep, in his own little room again.’ James sang a snatch from ‘Bluebirds over the White Cliffs of Dover’. ‘It’s Mummy’s really,’ sounding distracted. ‘Bought it with a legacy soon after she was married. When Daddy died and she remarried she never told my stepfather. We thought she was hanging on to it as a bolthole, just in case the marriage went wrong. Then Suzie sort of commandeered it, left home and took over.’