A Commonplace Killing (2 page)

In constructing this story I have followed closely the police files on several murders committed in London in the immediate aftermath of World War Two, ensuring that details of detective procedure and police investigatory methods at that time are as accurate as possible. All the locations exist or existed at the time; anything else that is knowable has been reconstructed with as much attention to verisimilitude as possible. Everything else is the product of my imagination. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.

T
hat neglected triangle where the Camden, Holloway and Caledonian Roads intersect, long oppressed by soot and the continuous rumble of the railway, its bounds set by the gloomy bulk of the women’s prison and the desolation of the empty Livestock Market, had been done for long before the Hitler War blasted every last vestige of respectability to smithereens. From the tops of buses you could see how, in other parts of town, the bomb-sites had been transformed by clumps of
fireweed
, willow-herb and ragwort; but in Holloway only fireplaces and doorframes, like overturned tombstones, protruded from rubble patches scattered with the broken bones of chimney pots. Within a few minutes’ walk, you might find yourself passing Pentonville on hanging day, or the Crippen murder house; but for the most part Holloway languished in obscurity: a meagre landscape of peeling stucco and thwarted ambition unrolling in street after nondescript street of villas built in more aspirant times and gradually declined into bed-sitting rooms inhabited by prostitutes, Irish navvies, coloureds, army deserters. And then came the V-weapons, almost putting the whole lot out of its misery.

Most of that particular terrace was just about clinging on; which is to say that although a good portion of it was awaiting demolition, there was at that time only one house-sized space, marked off by a piece of rusting corrugated iron that guarded access to a bare stretch of emptiness, sparing passers-by one of those startling glimpses of the horizon, so unsettling to Londoners which, since the War, had become a common hazard of going out. We had come to refer to these vacant spaces as “bomb-sites”; this one, like all the others, was utterly devoid of life, history and anything else of value, with the
exception
of one unremarkable London plane. This tree was now all that stood between the street and the precipitous gully of the London and North Eastern Railway, since the Jerries, in aiming for the railway, had obliterated instead a cramped row of soot-blackened houses which had overlooked the track for the best part of a century. The bomb-site was now entirely at the mercy of regular wet suffusions of acridity; and every time a train shrieked along the tracks to and from King’s Cross, the shattered houses on either side of it shuddered, silently
relinquishing
fragments of masonry.

A gang of kiddies spotted the leg sticking out from behind the plane tree. Through the smut-laden steamy shimmer, the heat of a midsummer morning, there was a woman’s leg,
stockinged
and dressed in a high-heeled shoe, extending from a just-glimpsed skirt hem. The kiddies assumed it belonged to a shop-window dummy, dumped along with the pram skeleton, the chipped and overturned lavatory, the rubber johnnies and the lipstick-stained cigarette ends. They were going to throw stones at it when they realised that the leg belonged to the body of a woman. You could see nearly all of her chest. Her
wide-open
eyes stared past the plane tree leaves to the sky beyond. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth, swollen like a lump of raw liver. The blue and red stripes around her neck told at a glance how life had been wrung out of her by a pair of human hands.

Nobody–not even the kiddies–was all that surprised to find her there. These things happened: more and more these days. Holloway was a dump, peace not yet a way of life, and the war had laid waste to everything, leaving common decencies bereft and clinging on for dear life, shrapnel-pocked, shuddering in the aftermath of the great prolonged shriek as they let go of the old certainties.

H
er first thought upon waking was that bread would be going on the ration on Monday and she had better get up quickly and go down to Nag’s Head in search of some. She checked her wristwatch. It was seven o’clock, which meant that there would already be a queue outside the baker’s, even though he didn’t open until eight. Some people had nothing better to do than stand in queues all day. She couldn’t bear the thought that she might be one of them. She sighed and considered not getting up, not joining the queue, not buying bread. She wondered how much longer this was going to go on for. How much more she could take. Everything was somehow less than what it had been before–before the war–before the war had begun; before it had ended. The war had been over for more than a year, but it was still there, still deciding everything. The war this; the war that; before the war; during the war; and no, after the war. It got on her nerves.

She had been tired since 1939. It had been exhausting, wondering whether you were going to die in the next air-raid, worrying yourself sick about Douglas. Walter had only had a desk job, but he had still been sent overseas; she had lain awake at nights wondering what she would do if he was sent home a cripple. She hadn’t given a great deal of thought to how they would carry on if he came home whole and entire, because hardly anyone thought that far ahead in the war. You told
yourself
that there would be a time when everything was like it had been before, but you didn’t really believe it; hoping against hope, that was it, for six years. Even as she was taking down the blackout curtains she was wondering how long it would be before she would be putting them up again.

Walter, in the bed beside her, rolled over on to his side, snoring slightly; the bed-springs creaking. The whole house creaked. It was a pity that the Germans hadn’t brought the whole lot down, then they might have got one of those Orlit homes, like she’d seen in a newsreel: fitted kitchens, indoor lavs and little bits of garden.

“Jerry-built rot,” Wally had said. “Temporary homes for temporary lives.”

But the pre-fabs were better than the bomb-site they lived in, which was falling to pieces around their ears. They couldn’t even go in the front parlour because of the bombing.

It’s the future, she thought. You had to move with the times. And the idea of staying put appalled her. It wasn’t just the house – she had lived in plenty of dumps before–it was everything. It was Holloway; it was making do; it was standing in queues all day until your legs ached; it was Walter. It wasn’t that she had wanted him to be dead; it was just that she hadn’t wanted him to come back to her. The day he came home he had sat at the kitchen table in his uniform, with his kit-bag on the floor, eating a plate of fish-paste sandwiches.

“We shall have to give it a go, old girl,” he declared, “be a proper family again–for the boy’s sake.” And the whole course of the rest of her life had been decided.

She should have told him there and then that the War had changed everything, but you felt obliged to pretend the past six years hadn’t happened; that everything was still like it had been: it was what everyone was doing. And with his sad grin, looking so diminished, so battered and spent, she had felt sorry for him. She sighed and followed a crack across the width of the ceiling. If she was to have any chance of finding some bread, she would have to get up and commence the drudgery of her day. Bread was going on the ration on Monday. She sighed again. It all fell on her shoulders, always, and she was sick to death of it. She fantasised about putting her head in the oven, or swallowing a mouthful of bleach. The notion always made her feel a brief flicker of triumph. They would all be sorry then, she thought.

She left the bed and crossed to the dressing table. It was already bright and sunny outside; not that she bothered to look out of the window: she knew what was there, and it was nothing worth seeing. The sun’s glare only made everything look worse, and no matter how warm it was outside, inside the house it was always damp. She listened to the familiar sound of
something
falling between the walls, and thought about running away. Why shouldn’t she have the sort of life where you dressed for dinner and met people for cocktails? This line of thinking always brought her down, and she was soon telling herself not to be such a bloody fool. Men were not going to fall like ninepins any more: she would end up desiccated and lonely, working as a waitress in a nasty little café and living in dingy lodgings somewhere awful, somewhere just as bad as Holloway. Kentish Town. Brecknock. A good smack in the eye that would be.

It was usual, at this point in the habitual train of thought, that she would gratify herself by asking how they would all get by without her doing everything; imagine Walter finally
realising
how much she did for him. She didn’t think much about Douglas: he was nearly eighteen, courting and working in an office; she doubted that he would miss her all that much. Her sister Mavis would have to come up from Jaywick to take care of Mother, which would serve Mavis right. She had treated them all like dirt when they went to her in the war: people who’d been billeted on strangers were treated better. She had hardly bothered with Mother for the past three years, and no doubt wouldn’t bother with her now. She had no doubt that Mavis would have Mother put away, and there was no way she wanted that on her conscience. It often came to this impasse; or
sometimes
she would persuade herself that Douglas was at that
difficult
age when a son needed his mother. If she was able to assure herself that both Douglas and Mother would get along without her, then she would work herself into indignation asking why she should be the one to leave when she was the one who had worked her fingers to the bone keeping everything together all through the war. And besides, it was her house–or rather it was Mother’s house – so why should she be the one to go and live in a bed-sitting room? Surely, Walter ought to be the one to leave. She generally sat at the dressing table for some time, as she did on this particular morning, turning all of this over and over in her mind before acknowledging that she was stuck with her rotten life.

She reached across for her pigskin handbag, rummaging inside it for her cigarette case and lighter. It was a filthy habit that she had picked up during the war, partly on account of her nerves, and partly because when you were out with a gang they all smoked, and the men liked to offer you one so that they could reach across to light it for you. There was something really rather marvellous about steadying a man’s hand as he lit you; looking deep in his eyes. Being a mother, she had not had to take a factory job or join the services; she had chosen instead to do her bit for married servicemen on leave, GIs looking for a little fun before they went off to the front: all those wonderful men, so handsome in their uniforms. During the war any reasonably good-looking girl could have had the time of her life; and even though she had been touching forty, she had been more than a little good-looking. She supposed that now that the war was over there really was no reason any longer to smoke. She supposed that she ought really to give it up. Cigarettes were so expensive these days, and decent ones difficult to come by; but she only ever had two at the most: one in the morning and one on a Saturday evening when she went out to the pictures or the variety hall. She didn’t go mad when the shops ran out, not like Evelyn did.

She was inspecting her features in the mirror for signs of aging; the smoke softening the blow. She pulled the skin of her cheekbones taut and told herself that nobody would ever guess that she was forty-three with a grown-up son. Then she irritably stubbed out her half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray. Her frayed nerves showed on her unmade-up face: six years of sirens and bomb blasts and red tape and shortages. She pulled out her hair rollers one by one, releasing dyed, but not brassy, blonde curls; she brushed them out bitterly. She supposed the back must look a frightful mess; she would ask Evelyn to help her with it later on: she liked to look nice when she went to the pictures. It was all she had to look forward to these days.

She tied her dressing gown around her and crossed back to the bed. Wally stirred slightly, muttering to himself as she picked up the chamber pot from underneath his side of the bed. She went out on to the landing, pausing at the top of the stairs.

“Evelyn,” she called up to the attic, “I say, Evelyn, I’ve got to go out and buy some bread.”

She stood in the drab wall-papered silence, listening to the pattern of her breathing, following the line of another deep crack along the length of the banister.

“Evvie, dear,” she repeated, a little louder this time. “Would you mind getting Walter and Douglas their breakfast while I’m up at the shops?”

There was a low murmur of assent from the attic; the creak of bed-springs. She went downstairs and emptied the chamber pot in the outside lav.

The kitchen was also the parlour, since a V-weapon, which had taken out a fair bit of the street, had rendered the front part of the house unsuitable for occupation. The parlour ceiling had fallen down with the impact, which had also taken out the windows, which were still boarded up. At meal-times four of them crammed around the drop-leaf table in the kitchen with the wireless in the middle, getting on one another’s nerves, until Douglas and Evelyn went to their own rooms, leaving her alone with Walter and their accumulation of weariness, regret and resentment. She threw a couple of pieces of coke and some rubbish from the scraps pail into the boiler and fanned the fire by opening and closing the door. The boiler took a while to get going, and Wally insisted on its being turned off by ten o’clock every morning in order to conserve fuel. How fortunate it was for the rest of them that she was always up in time to ensure that there would be enough hot water. She stabbed at the fire for a few moments, then banged the poker on the grate and went to look inside the bread crock. There was almost half a loaf, enough to do for breakfast. She ran it under the tap until it was almost saturated, crossed to the range, lit the gas and popped the sodden loaf in the oven. Then she filled the kettle and waited for it to boil.

Mother’s tray consisted of a cup of milky tea and one or two digestive biscuits, and laying it and taking it up to the old lady was the sort of task which Evelyn could easily have offered to take care of each day; but Evelyn hardly ever did anything without being asked, and most of the time it was easier to do it yourself. She had only herself to blame for allowing this situation to develop, and perhaps because of this, it played badly on her nerves.

Evelyn was a nice kid, if a bit common; and although there were plenty of things about her that drove her potty, in the main they got along pretty well. They had met at a dance in the last year of the war. She had felt sorry for the girl. Both her parents had been killed in the same incident, leaving the kid on her own and only seventeen. When Evelyn had been bombed out of her lodgings, she hadn’t thought twice about asking her if she wanted to rent the attic room; the extra money had come in useful, and they had been company for one another, sharing ups and downs, confidences. It was better to go out on the town with another woman, even if people did assume that Evelyn was her daughter. When the war ended, Evelyn lost her job in the factory and had been living in the attic–rent-free!–ever since. Lately it had seemed that liberties were being taken. Rooms were hard to come by and they could easily have asked fifteen bob a week for the attic: the exact sum on numerous “To Let” postcards in the tobacconist’s window. If the kid had ever once offered to help out around the house instead of paying rent the situation would have been a little more acceptable, but the offer was never made. Perhaps this was just as well: she could clean the whole house from top to bottom in the time it took Evelyn to put on her stockings; and once the kid had put the best part of a cabbage in the pig-bin. It got on her nerves, but she could never have put Evelyn out on the streets. The kid was flighty and none too bright: left to her own devices she would almost certainly end up in trouble or in Holloway prison, or both.

She swallowed a few mouthfuls of tea and ate half of one of Mother’s digestives before taking the tray upstairs. There was no point depending on other people. Only the selfish, like Walter and Evelyn and Mavis, seemed to be able to do that. Her problem was, she was not selfish, which meant she was put upon. She had stayed out of pity for them all. It felt better to think about it that way; better than acknowledging that you stayed because you were afraid to leave.

Mother’s room was curtain-heavy, thick with dust and chamber-pot odours. Apart from during air-raids, when they used to shove her underneath it, the only time Mother had ever left her bed in the past couple of years was to be sat on the commode. She leaned over the tiny white head that was poking out from the top of the candlewick bedspread and checked it for signs of life, and when she was sure that Mother had not passed away in the night, briskly pulled back the bedclothes. The waft of ammonia smarted her eyes.

“Mother,” she said, “wake up, dear. It’s time for you to go.” The old lady blinked dazedly as the sodden nightdress was pulled over her fragile bones. “Let’s get you on the po, dear. One. Two. Three…”

With the poor old thing drooped on the commode in naked and bewildered silence, she checked the bed. The frayed towel that Mother had been lying on was sopping wet, but the bedspread was only a little bit damp, and only needed airing. She opened the window and put it on the ledge. The towel and the nightdress would all need washing, but unless she could persuade Evelyn to take care of it, that would have to wait.

“I’m going up to Nag’s Head,” she said as she wiped down the rubber undersheet, Mother gazing at her in wonder. “I’ve got to try and get some bread. It’s going on the ration on Monday.” She fetched another threadbare towel from a pile at the end of the bed and spread it over the rubber sheet.