A Commonplace Killing (10 page)

H
e woke to the familiar sound of Mrs Oscar coming in at the front door. It appeared that he had yet again fallen asleep in his armchair; a cold pipe was lying on his chest where it had fallen from his lips and dottlings of grey ash speckled his vest. His char was used to coming across him like that; she made her customary observation that he ought to take care to put his pipe out before nodding off lest he burn down the entire block.

Cooper washed, shaved hurriedly and painfully; dabbed toothpowder on the worst of the scrapings; put on a clean shirt from the pile Mrs Oscar had just delivered; pulled the day before yesterday’s still-knotted tie over his head; grabbed his jacket from the back of the chair, patting the pocket for his pipe and tobacco pouch; remembered that he had left them on the arm of his chair; went back to fetch them; grabbed his hat from the stand; thanked Mrs Oscar (who was complaining about the powdered cheese excrescence on the grill pan) and went out of the door.

He spent the entire Tube journey to Caledonian Road
strap-hanging
and immersed in nostalgia for fried eggs and bacon: real eggs, not American powdered; two of them, with glossy yolks, the colour of daffodils, and perhaps a few mushrooms on the side. He stopped off at a café on his way to the police station and bought a papery bread roll lined with slippery portions of brawn. It was quite disgusting, but he was so hungry he ate it in two bites, arriving at the murder conference with just enough time to wash away the lingering salt and slime with a cup of tea, which a dowdy, plump A4 Branch woman had set down on the table before him.

The incident room was clogged with the accumulated sweat, tedium, cigarette smoke and flatulence of the previous night. It was hellish hot. The windows hadn’t been opened in years. Cooper took a seat at the head of the table. Lucas delivered a summation of the case, smoking lugubriously and constantly, issuing streams of grey dispiriting smoke which cast a pall over the large map which was pinned on the wall behind him, and to which he turned at frequent intervals, jabbing it with a
nicotine
-stained index finger. Lucas passed around photographs of the body and the murder site; he read from the witness
statements
. There was a scale drawing that one of the uniforms had prepared, indicating the distance between the body and the road, and the location of the piece of limestone where the woman might have stood with her killer prior to the act of
strangulation
. The small team absorbed all of this information with wearisome, dutiful interest; occasionally one of them would write down something, his gaze passing from the evidence to the DI and back again.

“Has the handbag turned up yet?” Cooper inquired as the exposition of the case came to a close.

Wordlessly Lucas tipped the contents of an evidence bag on to the table: a cobbler’s ticket, a packet of headache tablets, a small hairbrush.

“PC Hawkes here found this lot on top of a hedge up on the main road,” Lucas said in between attempts to light another cigarette.

The DI jabbed the map.

“He found it here – about a quarter of a mile from the murder site,” he said. Then he cupped his hand over the cigarette and tried the lighter again, successfully this time.

The young uniform perked up, evidently delighted to find he was the object of the guv’nor’s undivided attention.

“The house is underneath a street lamp,” he said, “located at the exact spot where the street lighting begins heading
southeast
from the murder site to Holloway Road.” He scanned his notebook earnestly. “I checked with the occupant of the house, sir,” he continued, “a Mr J Scholes, who assured me that the items mean nothing to him or anyone in his household. And,” he added entirely unnecessarily, but in the traditional manner of earnest coppers, “I believe him.”

“There’s a good chance there’s a finger-or thumbprint on some of it,” said Cooper. “Have it all sent over to the Yard, and ask them to compare anything they find to the victim’s dabs.”

Lucas drew on his cigarette, a steady stream of smoke flowing from his nostrils.

“So,” he said, “the murderer carries away the victim’s handbag until he has left the unlit streets and arrives at the first place where he can examine its contents clearly. He stands beneath a streetlamp and goes through the contents of the handbag, discarding anything on top of the hedge that was of no value to him.”

Cooper permitted himself a slurp of tea.

“Anything turn up from missing persons?”

Lucas shook his head.

“And we’ve definitely gone through all the lists?”

“Yes, sir,” said the detective sergeant.

Cooper sighed heavily and drummed his fingers on the table-top.

“I find it exceedingly hard to believe that nobody is missing this particular person,” he said.

The DS rubbed his chin sagely. “A lot of people disappear in London, sir,” he said, “and I dare say a good many of them are never missed.”

Cooper sighed again. “We’ll give it one more day and then we’ll issue a photograph of the dead woman. How are we getting on with the door-to-door inquiries?”

Lucas clamped his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and leafed through a thick untidy pile of papers on the table in front of him.

“They’ll take another day at least to complete, sir,” he said, “and that’s only the quarter-mile or so around the murder site. I take it you want us to talk to everyone? Only some of those lodging houses are very overcrowded.”

Cooper massaged his forehead with his thumb and index finger.

“It’s possible,” he said, “that the murderer is the only person in a position to notice that this woman has disappeared.

“He might be a fancy man, a ponce – the sort of bastard who goes through a woman’s handbag moments after strangling her,” said Lucas.

“Perhaps she was keeping some money back,” said the
detective
sergeant. “That’s probably why he took the handbag.”

“It’s possible,” said Cooper, suddenly feeling keenly the hopelessness of it all, “although a pimp is more likely to have beaten her up – either before or instead of murdering her. The only sign of any struggle is the bruise on her knuckles.”

“Perhaps the fellow she’d gone with got fresh,” suggested the detective sergeant. “Maybe she changed her mind at the last minute. Or maybe he asked for something perverted.”

“If he was a common pick-up,” Lucas said, “he’ll be
impossible
to find.”

Cooper nodded circumspectly.

“Keep a note of any not-at-homes,” he said. Procedure, he thought. Procedure. “And keep going back until they’re there.”

Lucas was slowly turning his cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, his mouth forming a shrewd pout around it.

“What about the raincoat, sir?” he asked.

Cooper set down the laundry ticket he had found pinned to a side seam on the table.

“It’s a very good-quality gentleman’s mackintosh,” he said. “I’ve arranged for photographs and so forth. I dare say we might well be able to identify the store it came from. I shall telephone the manufacturer later on today.”

He tapped the ticket with his index finger.

“Start locally.”

There was a general shifting in the room, telling glances exchanged between Lucas and the detective sergeant.

“That could take some time, sir,” said Lucas. He was giving him the look, the one with the raised eyebrows.

“Yes, I dare say, but we are investigating a murder, Detective Inspector.” He paused for effect and in order to finish his tea. “I think we’re done here,” he said. He stood up to leave. “I’m going to HQ now, and I’ll be at the morgue after that. I’ll telephone at regular intervals to check on progress.”

Lucas was looking at him; he could tell that the DI knew that he was scared: scared he’d make a mistake, scared he’d miss something; scared he wouldn’t catch the bastard. He wondered if Lucas was scared.

“I’ll have someone drive you back to Stoke Newington, sir?” Lucas said.

“No need for that. I’ll take the Tube.”

“There’s no Tube to Stoke Newington, sir.”

“I’m aware of that, Detective Inspector.” He put on his hat and slung his raincoat over his arm. “I shall call in at regular intervals,” he said.

The journey by public transport from Caledonian Road to Stoke Newington High Street is a bit of a bugger, requiring multiple exchanges of tardy buses, and most sensible people would consider it utter folly to even entertain such an
undertaking
. Cooper shared the general reservation, but his
overriding
concern was that the driver Lucas sent for would turn out to be Policewoman Tring, and it was on this account that he wasted the best part of three-quarters of a precious hour standing at a bus stop in Manor House, before arriving back at the station house and a telephone call from the detective
superintendent
, wishing to be informed of all that had transpired over the weekend.

“Perhaps we should bring in someone from the Yard while you’re on this,” the super said on hearing of the murder. The super was not talking about a Murder Squad detective; he was offering the services of the Ghost Squad, so-called undercover detectives who were recognised by every criminal in London, who raced about in an Austin Sixteen taking all the credit for every battle won in the war against crime. Most ordinary
detectives
despised and envied the Ghost Squad in equal part, and Cooper was no exception.

“That won’t be necessary, sir,” he said, cursing inwardly.

“Well, if you’re sure you can manage…”

It was astonishing how quickly the successful recovery of a lorry-load of black-market sugar and the apprehension of two known villains had been forgotten.

“Don’t you worry, sir,” he lied, “the two blighters we collared on Saturday night have already given us some useful leads.”

“No honour among thieves, eh, Jim?” said the super.

“Something like that.”

After checking on the cells, where the boy detective looked at least a decade older than he had looked the night before, Cooper returned to a welter of telephone messages (none of them from Lucas), read through some information pertaining to Johnny Bristow which had come by way of an anonymous letter sent by someone purporting to be a “concerned member of the public”, and put in a telephone call to the manufacturer of the mackintosh. Then he had a quick look at some
surveillance
photographs of two crooks in the act of taking possession of what appeared to be a van-load of cauliflowers. Thanks to his sharp eyes and prodigious memory for the faces of north London’s criminal underclass, he was able to put a name to one of them, and men were promptly despatched to bring the rascal in. Then he had a cup of tea, and took the call to the mackintosh manufacturer.

“Ah yes, the Westmoreland,” said the voice at the other end of the line, “one of our more exclusive lines.”

The manufacturer gave Cooper a list of retail outlets, which were, for the most part, the sort of gentleman’s outfitters to be found in any provincial town. It would take weeks to contact them all.

“Do you sell any in London?”

“Oh yes,” said the manufacturer, sounding more than a little affronted, “Gamages are always most eager to take any we can supply.” To hear him the uninitiated would assume that Gamages was akin to the Royal Family.

“Gamages in Holborn?”

“As I said,” smarmed the voice on the other end of the line, “it’s a garment of distinction.”

Cooper thanked the manufacturer for his time, and briefly considered sending someone over to Gamages. It was
immediately
apparent to him that as the only person whom he could send was himself, and he was due at the morgue, this was a task that would have to wait.

He was feeling pretty bloody by the time he arrived at King’s Cross: hunger was largely to blame. After several
increasingly
frustrating attempts, he eventually succeeded in finding a working telephone and caught up with the office; then he telephoned Caledonian Road, only to be told, infuriatingly, that DI Lucas was “out on inquiries”.

He stopped to buy a newspaper and some pipe tobacco, had an ill-tempered exchange with the vendor, who was of the opinion that the bread ration was all on account of the
government
making a priority of Huns over decent British men and women, went out on to the bomb-splintered street and perused the headlines in the hot glare of the sun.

WOMAN FOUND STRANGLED ON BOMB-SITE.
SCHOOLBOYS’ TRAGIC DISCOVERY.

He was not all that surprised to discover that his sex murder had become the subject of several column inches of pure
sensationalism
. The reporter had succeeded in bringing to the attention of the public all the salient points of the case: the “bomb-
shattered
terrace”, the wilderness used as a “lover’s lane”, the “
silk-stockinged
leg”, his own bafflement (“the police are clueless”). It was all there, gleaned from interviews with the children who had made the “shocking discovery”, and those occupying the houses abutting the murder site. The general consensus was that everything was in decline and London was in the grip of a crime spree. He consoled himself with the thought that as the reporter had included a reasonable description of the woman in the article, it was always possible that someone who knew the victim might see the report and come forward. Knowing full well that the chances of this happening were about as good as his chances of winning the football pools, he considered what he would say when the newspaper reporters eventually ran him to ground. Everything that could possibly be done, he would tell them, in order to bring the killer to justice, is being done. You may be sure of that.

H
e had never grown accustomed to the chill stink of the morgue; the morbidness of the white tiled walls; the circular drain holes cut into the metal of the operating table between the ankles of the dead; the trays to catch the fluids and the harsh glare of the bare electric bulb buzzing overhead. The formaldehyde induced in him nervous anxiety and incipient nausea, and the crushing awareness that he was not a homicide detective.

The pathologist was bent over the body, utterly absorbed in the task of collecting samples of hair from the dead woman’s immaculately coiffed head. The girl assistant of the previous day was nowhere to be seen.

Cooper waited a few moments before coughing discreetly.

“Cooper! You sly dog!” In his leather apron and outsized surgical gloves, the surgeon seemed diminished, even comical. The elegantly suited professional man of the day before had been usurped by an innocent enthusiast, eyes agog behind thick magnifying spectacles.

“Please don’t let me hold you up,” Cooper said. His eyes passed over the Y-shaped incision extending from the dead woman’s navel to her shoulders; when he came to her face, his first thought was that she looked older, more haggard, than he remembered from the day before. The effects of death, he supposed.

The pathologist had finished with the head and had turned his attention to the woman’s hands. Cooper noted that her fingernails, and toenails, were painted a deep red, similar to the lipstick-stains on the cigarette end he had found at the murder scene. He had a strong dislike of lipstick on cigarettes; as a matter of fact, he didn’t really approve of women smoking.

“Cause of death still strangulation?”

“Rather,” said the pathologist without looking up. “The thyroid cartilage has been broken – most likely the result of the neck having been gripped tightly,” he said cheerfully. “The thumb of the right hand will have done most of the damage.”

Depending on whether or not she is breathing in or out, it takes between fifteen and twenty seconds to strangle a woman to death: marginally quicker if she is screaming at the time. Cooper tried to imagine what it would feel like to press your thumb against a person’s throat for that length of time as you squeezed and squeezed the life out of them, watching them struggle for breath, for life. It was a dispiriting and unedifying experiment.

The pathologist had selected a pair of tweezers from a tray of instruments and was using them to retrieve something from underneath one of the woman’s nails. Now he was holding up whatever it was that he had found and beckoning Cooper to come in closer.

“No skin,” he said, meaning that the woman had not scratched her attacker in a desperate fight for life, “but this might prove more useful to you.”

The tweezers had captured a single strand of green wool.

The evidence was not as compelling as a fingerprint might have been, but it was certainly better than the samples of hair which the pathologist had doubtless already collected from the woman’s thighs and genitals; and better too than the short dark hair that he had found on the collar of the mackintosh. Plenty of men had body hair, but not all of them wore green wool jackets; put it all together and, who knows, maybe you had the missing part to a puzzle you had yet to solve.

He rubbed his chin speculatively.

“That’s interesting,” he said. The pathologist dropped the fibre into a glass phial. “Any distinguishing marks?”

“Afraid not, old boy. I’ve arranged for X-ray photographs to be taken of the jaw, and I’ll see that they’re sent to the
British Dental Journal
. Other than that, all I can tell you with any certainty is that she was five foot four, had potatoes for supper and was in the early stages of kidney disease. Oh, and she’s given birth.”

Cooper looked at the woman.

“She was a mother,” he said.

“Well, she’s given birth, at least once. Not necessarily the same thing.”

Cooper brooded upon the information as the pathologist turned over the woman’s right hand, indicating the bruised knuckles.

“She might not have scratched her assailant,” he said, “but whoever was on the receiving end of that fist will have a nice contusion somewhere on his phizog.”

Cooper sighed resignedly. It was all so simple. All he had to do was find a dark-haired bastard with a green wool jacket and a bruise on his chin. He was in a damned hole, and could see no way out of it.

“I’ve kept the stockings for you,” the pathologist was saying. “The outside edges are a little bit dirty but not damaged. She evidently spent some time on her back with her legs more or less flat and wide apart.”

“That’s normally how it goes when a woman is being raped.”

The pathologist looked up abruptly, blinking at him behind the huge spectacles.

“Raped?” he said, somewhat astonished. “Why ever do you say that?”

“Well – I had assumed…”

“There’s no physical evidence of rape, old man; no tearing, no bruising to the vagina or thighs – nothing that I can see.” Cooper absorbed the implication of this while the pathologist elucidated. “Judging by the pattern of dirt on the calves of the stockings and the presence of what appears to be seminal fluid and pubic hairs in the vicinity of the upper legs and genitals, it’s likely that sexual intercourse took place some time before death – but highly probable that it was consensual.”

“So why was she strangled?”

The pathologist was peering at him with those huge
magnified
eyes.

“You’re the detective, old man,” he said.

Cooper floundered. His vision of a woman fighting off a fellow who had got fresh with her had dissolved before his eyes; he was groping about in the dark for another scenario – the limits of his imagination reached. Perhaps the murderer was a sadist, he thought, like “Captain” Neville Heath and the Blackout Ripper: the sort of cad who enjoys watching women suffer. He entertained the thought of having someone call around all the local divisions in pursuit of unsolved sex murders: if any sort of a pattern were to emerge he would be able to leave the whole filthy business to the Murder Squad and return to black-market eggs. It was a pleasant enough prospect for the short while he meditated upon it, until he recollected that the dead woman had not been brutalised, the fact of her consent making it all so much worse to his mind as he struggled with the idea of a man strangling a woman to whom he had just made love.

“I had assumed that she’d been beaten, raped and strangled over some argument about money, or for resisting her
attacker’s
advances,” he said, “in the common way of these things.” He paused for a moment to gather his thoughts. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard of a streetwalker asking for the money after conducting the business…”

“I bow to your greater knowledge of these matters, Detective Inspector,” said the pathologist.

“She was found in a place known to be a favoured resort of prostitutes,” Cooper said. “But then I had wondered about the condition of the clothing. She wasn’t beaten up, either, so it seems unlikely that her ponce was responsible. As a matter of fact, the more I look at it, the less like a streetwalker she appears.”

The doctor had turned his attention to the woman’s left hand.

“Well, I’ve had a good many prostitutes over the years…” he said, pausing for comic effect, just as, Cooper supposed, he must have done countless times before in lecture theatres, waiting for the gales of sycophantic laughter to die down before proceeding to a consideration of the pathology of sex murder. Cooper frowned and a look of irritation creased the doctor’s features. “No,” he said, bending in closer over the woman’s left hand, “she doesn’t look like a prostitute.”

“So what the blazes was she doing there?”

“Perhaps she didn’t want to take him home to meet her husband.” The doctor was holding up the woman’s left hand. The faint white mark on the third finger was so obvious Cooper could not believe that he had missed it. You damn fool, he thought. He hadn’t even looked for a ring because he had assumed that he was investigating the humdrum killing of a common prostitute. How many times had he told the men under his command, never ever assume: let the evidence tell its own story? He ran an appraising, thoughtful thumb over the nap of his Homburg. First, a victim with no identity, and now he had no motive.

“Do you ever read the
News of the World
?” The question took Cooper by surprise. “My driver assures me that hardly an edition goes by without mention of some returning serviceman murdering his errant wife.” The pathologist sighed wearily. “The women of Britain have committed the ultimate betrayal. Not just adultery, but adultery with Yanks, Poles, Canadians, I-ties…”

Cooper was feeling slightly queasy. The formaldehyde, the buzz of the electric light bulb, the drain holes in the metal table and the blood-stained implements; they were all conspiring against him, and for a brief moment it was as though everything solid was falling away before him and he thought he might
actually
pass out.

“I blame the cinema…” the pathologist was saying, “it
glamorises
prostitution… It must be almost impossible for a genuine streetwalker to make a living these days, there are so many amateurs about… A highly sexed woman, deprived of sexual satisfaction, will quickly be brought to nymphomania… It’s a disease that has become endemic since the war.”

Cooper watched the rest of the post-mortem in a sort of reverie, turning various possibilities over and over in his mind, mentally browsing the murder scene, until he was certain, as certain as anyone can ever be of anything, that he had not missed a single clue: a hair, a cigarette end, a few blades of grass, a good-quality gentleman’s mackintosh, a pair of dirty stockings, a shred of green wool. The idea that someone else, other than her lover, might have committed the murder – a jealous husband or boyfriend, perhaps – appealed to him; but try as he might, there was no indication that anyone else had been at the murder site, apart from the victim and her killer.

The heat and turmoil of the streets came as a shock to him after the morgue chill; the blood red of the buses on St Pancras Way startling after the white tiled vacancy. She was leaning against the squad car chatting with some young fellow and smiling so prettily it almost took his breath away. Like a coward he tried to sneak off without her seeing him, chuckling
mirthlessly
at his own preposterousness.

“Sir, Sir! Oh I say! Sir!” She saluted smartly the instant he turned around. “Golly! I nearly missed you! What a chump I’d have looked!”

He removed his hat and held it limply with the bag of samples from the pathologist.

“Policewoman Tring, isn’t it?” he said. “Well, well! What on earth are you doing here?”

She smiled at him and shook her head as if regarding an errant but nevertheless endearing child.

“DI Lucas says we can’t possibly have you spending all day going up and down the Northern Line, so he’s sent me to take you out to Hendon and anywhere else you need to go.”

“Quite unnecessary. Waste of resources…”

She put her head to one side and fixed him with a look of such compassion and understanding that he was forced to jut out his chin in order to dam a spontaneous wellspring of feeling.

“It’s alright,” she said. “I want to help. Please, let me help you.”