A Commonplace Killing (3 page)

Before putting Mother back into bed, she inspected the worst of her bedsores, sprinkling Fuller’s Earth on them; then she slipped a clean nightdress over the frail bones. She lifted the old lady off the commode, amazed, as she always was, that someone could be so diminished and yet still be here.

“You haven’t the foggiest what I’m on about, have you, Mum?” she said. “Never mind, dear: you’re better off out of it. You really are.”

The commode was full, which was good because it meant that the fresh towel would stay dry for a while. The amount of washing she did was terrible. She closed the seat. She would offer Evelyn a bob or two to deal with it. There was no time now to make another trip to the backyard, and it wasn’t as if Mother would know one way or another. If she’d had more time she might have wiped the poor old thing’s face and brushed her hair so that she looked a little less senile, but as far as anyone could tell, Mother didn’t mind about that either.

She always used to look smart as a bandbox, she thought. Then she broke up the digestive biscuit into a saucer of
lukewarm
tea which she placed on the night-table. She knew that it would still be there the next time she checked.

D
ivisional Detective Inspector Jim Cooper had been asleep in his armchair for no more than a few hours, perhaps three or four, when the telephone woke him on what was supposed to be his first day off in three months. Nodding off had not been a simple matter: it had taken a large glass of whisky and almost the whole of the Stokowski recording of the St John Passion–
It is done; such comfort for suffering human souls! I can see the end of the night of sorrow
–which was the last thing he could remember before the jangling of the telephone roused him.

His first thought was that it would be something bad. His second, as he stumbled to the hallway to pick up the receiver, was that he had been a damn fool to drink a tumbler of whisky on a pretty much empty stomach, especially when he ordinarily touched nothing more rigorous than a half-pint of Bass, and that only very infrequently. His third thought was that, with whisky at twenty-five bob a bottle (always supposing you could lay your hands on the stuff), the blasted jigger had cost him the best part of one and threepence.

He snatched up the receiver.

“Got a woman here who’s been strangled, sir.”

Unless discussing Arsenal FC or the post-war decline in goalkeeping, Detective Inspector Frank Lucas, the senior CID officer on duty at Caledonian Road over the weekend, was a man of very few words –all of them spoken with a weary
inflection
guaranteed to induce enervation in even the most ebullient of listeners.

“She’s on a bomb-site, sir,” Lucas continued, not waiting to be asked, “just off the Cally Road. Next to the railway line.”

Cooper cursed. Tucking the receiver under his chin, he hunted among the accumulation of grubby scraps of paper on the hall table for a pencil and, having found one, attempted to scribble on the wall the address that Lucas was giving him. He cursed again when the lead snapped.

“I’ll send a car, sir,” said the detective inspector with an audible sigh; then there was a click and everything went dead.

Cooper dropped the receiver on to the rest, ran his hands through his hair and cursed again.

He had known it would be something bad, but this was terrible. A random sex killing is every detective’s worst
nightmare
: they have the tendency to shatter the precarious routine of your life, eighteen hours a day for the foreseeable future; then there are the newspaper reporters; the misguided and the lunatic coming forward with their false leads and confessions, all of which must be checked out; and let us not forget Upstairs applying the thumbscrews. But worse than any of this is that every detective knows–even before he embarks on the
investigation
–that the chances of ever resolving a random sex killing are about as good as your chances of marrying Ingrid Bergman.

Caledonian Road. Cooper mused upon the rotten blasted luck of that. A few streets to the west or south and his
opposite
numbers in neighbouring “G” or “Y” Divisions would be thumping the wall in frustration. There was no comradeship: the Metropolitan Police Force was in the middle of an unprece dented crime boom; the number of offences committed since VE Day was more than twice that of 1939 and, despite numerous enticements, the force was still seven thousand men short. Scotland Yard could be depended upon to supply
fingerprint
experts, photographic boys and the boffins in the lab at Hendon, but the only way HQ would concern itself any further with such a commonplace matter as the murder of a tart in a bad area was if the DDI buggered up. And Jim Cooper was unlikely to do that.

He had not a single blemish on his conduct record; it had taken him just five years to make CID; and he had been the youngest ever DDI in London when he took over “N” Division at thirty-nine. No doubt they’d have preferred a family man, but it was war-time and most of the family men had joined up. He had not joined up, a despicable fact which in his more self-pitying moments made him want to grind his fists into his temples. His reasons for not joining up were lamentable, pathetic even. He had no wife and family to think of, and other men who did had thought nothing of making the gesture. He had done his bit in the last lot, drowning a thousand times a day in Passchendaele mud; but so had plenty of others who hadn’t thought twice about joining up again. It was hard not to hate yourself for that. All through the war, every day, he must have asked himself a hundred times: “Am I a coward?” Of course, policing was a reserved occupation – some poor bloody idiot had to ensure that law and order were enforced after all–but this did not excuse him in his own mind. It counted for nothing when you walked into a pub and a chap in uniform looked you and your lounge suit up and down and muttered, “Some people!” as he pushed past you on his way out. The disgust conveyed in those two words…

And so, it didn’t matter to Cooper that his appointment as DDI was as solid as they come; that everybody reckoned that he was among the very best when it came to the delicate tasks of tailing spivs and extracting information from narks; that even the most determined crooks had a sneaking regard for him. London was doubtless lucky that he had stayed behind and helped to see her through her darkest hour, but he took no personal pride in the fact. He knew every dismal inch of his manor from St Ann’s Road to Highbury Vale, thousands of villainous faces were etched into his memory, he had sent many deserving souls to prison, recovered hundreds of thousands of pounds’ worth of stolen property, but as far as he was concerned none of it counted one jot.

He ran an appraising hand across his stubble and wondered how bad it would look for a divisional detective inspector to attend a murder scene unshaven; then he made his grudging way to the bathroom, where he took down his razor and shaving mug from the shelf above the sink and inspected his bloated and sagging features in the mirror. He was a little stouter than was ideal and well worn to the point of shabby, but his keen blue eyes could usually be depended upon to give a surprisingly youthful beam to the rest of him. Marjorie had once told him that he looked like the film star Joel McCrea. They’d been to see
Wells Fargo
at the Savoy on Holloway Road. He was trying to remember whether it was the first time they’d been to the pictures together, or the only time. He glanced at his watch and was pleased by what it told him. It had taken, what, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes: usually he was thinking about Marjorie as soon as he opened his eyes of a morning. Perhaps I am finally forgetting her, he thought; then he caught his reflection in the mirror. Who was he trying to kid? He had been miserable as sin every day since she had left him; and he knew damn well he would never forget how happy he had been. For a moment he wondered if he might cry. Come along, old man, he urged: it was a long time ago; almost another world. Before the war; before everything changed for ever. He certainly didn’t look like a film star today. He grimaced at the bleary visage in the mirror. As a matter of fact, he looked even more battered than usual, if such a thing were possible. The youthful eyes were bloodshot and had retreated into the grey puffiness that surrounded them; and somewhere in the course of the previous evening’s
roughhousing
he had collected a nice shiner on his right cheekbone. He stroked it. Nothing like the glint of a brass knuckleduster coming towards you to keep you in your place. He sighed. It was no more than he deserved.

He whipped up a meagre, rationed lather in his shaving mug, slapped it over his cheeks and chin and then scraped it off,
painfully
, ineffectually, resentfully, with a blunt safety razor. He had always held that not shaving on a Sunday was one of the few benefits to be derived from bachelorhood, which is in so many ways a wretched condition for a man to find himself in at
forty-four
; but Sundays were no longer any different from any other day. Weekend leave was a thing of the past; nights routinely broken by urgent summonses to derelict buildings, damp canal sides, desolate railway depots and all the other dismal settings which the most dispiriting areas of north London had to offer. Lorry-loads of tea, butter, cigarettes, whisky, even typewriters, were disappearing all over “N” Division, and the streets of Tottenham and Stamford Hill and Holloway were awash with stolen and forged coupons. There were opportunities for crime in every public house, variety hall, café and shopping street the length and breadth of the manor. And it was all, all of it, his problem.

He’d spent the night just past lying on a flat roof in Tottenham Hale, overlooking an alley reeking with other men’s piss, watching the comings and goings from an “abandoned” warehouse. When he had given the order to his men, they’d come under a hail of bricks, bottles, blackjacks and armoured fists, but no razor-studded spuds. A pity, he thought ruefully; I could have done with a decent shave and a nice baked potato. They’d made two arrests and taken a haul of several thousands of pounds’ worth of black-market sugar, though they had been looking for eggs – people can just about survive without
stockings
and cigarettes, but they need to eat – and he reckoned this success ought to keep Upstairs out of his hair for a couple of days while he dealt with the blasted sex murder. A couple of days would have to do it: Upstairs had a notoriously short memory. It was barely a fortnight since, after two whole days and nights spent cramped in an Austin 7, he’d secured a
thousand
pounds’ worth of chocolate bars; a week before that it had been ladies’ shoes, yet neither of these successes had kept the super off his back for more than a day or two. And then there was the blasted paperwork. He was always behind with his paperwork. This is not to mention the unedifying
meditation
upon the greed and the numerous lusts and jealousies of others; the welter of human despair that confronted him; the hour upon hour of tooth-combing though evidence – most of it spurious; the hour after hour spent interviewing cocky spivs who were better dressed, better fed, and in every way more gratified than he was. He could have measured out his life in the cups of cold, grey tea he had shared with weasel-featured informants, or in the ten-bob notes he could ill afford, shelled out to the same. A couple of days ago one of his narks had told him that he had it all wrong: “It ain’t the crooks you oughter be watchin’ out for, Mr Cooper,” he’d said; “it’s the general public what’s the real villains. If they didn’t want things they can’t ’ave there’d be no black market. It’s all down to them, see. Them and the government.”

He had to admit that there was something in that. Looking for a little bit extra from under the counter or off the back of a lorry had become a national pastime. Counterfeiting,
swindling
, short-changing, stealing: the desperate pursuit of nylons, tea, whisky, sausages and cigarettes had made criminals of everyone. Except, that is, Jim Cooper. For in these morally etiolated times, when most people would have happily sold their own mothers for twenty Players, DDI Cooper would have nothing whatsoever to do with blacketeering. He sensed that to relent on this one point of principle would have made a mockery of everything: and there was more than enough bathos to his life already.

Done with eviscerating his face, he wiped off the residual soap on a tea-towel and (styptic pencils having gone the way of button boots and tinned salmon) dabbed a little bit of tooth powder on the more painful of the grazes. He supposed that the red weals did, at least, assure onlookers that he had shaved, since there was precious little other evidence of the same
elsewhere
on his raspy chin. What he would give for a packet of safety blades.

He went into the kitchen and refixed yesterday’s collar to yesterday’s shirt and looped yesterday’s still-knotted tie over his head. Then he collected his jacket from its home on the back of the kitchen chair, patting it for his pipe and tobacco pouch. The Welsh rarebit he had attempted to make for his supper the night before was mocking him from the dresser table, and as he watched it slide off the plate into the scraps pail, he made a mental note never again to grill Canadian powdered cheese. He had been driven to such drastic action by extreme want: he had been hungry ever since the day war broke out.

The parp of a motor horn from the street below was his cue to collect his ancient Homburg and crumpled mackintosh from the coat-stand in the hall; and as he closed the front door and ran down the stairs he entertained thoughts of a nice little café he knew on the Seven Sisters Road, wondering if there would be time to stop off for a cheese roll and a quick cup of tea on his way to the murder site. But then he remembered that it was Sunday and the café, along with everything else, would be shut.

I
t got on her nerves, the way Walter peered at the mirror as he cut his ridiculous little ’tache with such exaggerated care; the way he stood in front of the fireplace in his collarless and cuffless shirt, his braces dangling either side of his legs. He’d always been vain, but he was no longer a good-looking man, and it irritated her that he still behaved as though he was. She could not abide the way his chin, never strong, had by now almost completely vanished; his straw-coloured hair was thinning; his icy blue eyes were now slush. Everything about him reminded her of all that they had once been; of all that they might have been. She suppressed the urge to sweep away his shaving things, lined up on the mantelpiece along with the clock and their wedding photograph, just as she suppressed the need to sweep away Walter.

He appeared to be listening to the wireless, but Walter never listened to anything; like all men painfully unaware of their own limitations, he preferred the sound of his own voice.

“Fancy them wanting communism,” he was saying, in a voice flecked with incredulity and indignation.

“Who wants communism?” She hated the way he always had to put in his tuppence-worth, engaging with the BBC as if he was an equal.

“The Jews,” he said, as if only a moron would have failed to follow his line of thinking.

She scalded the teapot with water from the kettle. Evelyn and she often had a good laugh at his expense. “Oooh Walter,” the kid would say, wickedly, “you ought to be on
The Brains Trust,
really you should.” And Walter, being so vain and so lacking in humour, had no idea that he was being mocked, and would preen, unbearably smug.

“Fancy them wanting communism,” he continued, “when they’re the biggest capitalists of all.”

She spooned tea from the caddy into the pot.

“You have to feel sorry for them, though, don’t you?” she said. “They’ve had a rotten time of it, poor sods. It’s no wonder they want a revolution.”

Walter did not respond. He was concentrating all of his efforts on attaching his collar and cuffs. In the mirror she could see where his pale hair was thinning in two neat lines either side of his head.

“I didn’t know you were going in early,” she said. “I’d have got you up if you’d told me. I’ve been up since before seven.” She poured him a cup of tea and set it down on the table, alongside a plate of toast and marge scrapings. “I’m going to Nag’s Head to try for some bread. It’s going on the ration on Monday.”

Walter gave a sardonic little laugh.

“More of our food going to feed fat Germans,” he said.

“I don’t know about that.” She found a perverse pleasure in contradicting him. “They’re living on liver sausage made out of sawdust.”

“They deserve to,” he said. “They deserve to starve.”

“What, even the kiddies?”

Walter spat on the palms of his hands and slicked back his hair. She congratulated herself. Twice in one morning: it was childish, she knew, but she enjoyed shutting him up.

“Have you got half a crown I could have?”

“That depends. What do you want it for?”

“I want it to treat my fancy man to tea at Lyons. What do you think I want it for? I’ve hardly got a penny left to spend on the necessaries. There’s a pile of washing in Mother’s room that needs doing, and I was going to give Evelyn a couple of bob…”

He put his hand in his trouser pocket and jangled his change, searching through the coins on his open palm, before selecting a half-crown, which he tossed on to the table.

“She won’t do a damn thing without payment,” she said. “Can’t you say something to her? She just ignores me and you know how much I hate a scene. Why should I have to shriek up the stairs like a fishwife every time the floors need mopping?”

Walter was chewing on his toast, his jaw clacking as it moved from side to side in a sort of circular motion. His teeth didn’t fit him properly.

“We could get fifteen bob for that room if she wasn’t here,” she said.

“Don’t know who you’d get, though, do you, old girl?” He took a slurp of tea. “Wouldn’t do to have a stranger in my own home. Don’t think I could stand for that.”

She was going to say that it wasn’t his home; it was her mother’s home; and if it was left to him they’d still be living in two rooms over a stationer’s up at Archway. A fine start to married life that was.

He wiped his ’tache with the edge of his finger, first one side then the other.

“Utter tosh!” he declared to the wireless. “Atom bombs are over in a flash. Never even know what’s hit ’em. Not like the tortures those little yellow beasts inflicted on the poor ruddy POWs. If the Hun had dropped an atom bomb on us we’d be getting over it by now.”

You silly sod, she thought; we’d all be dead. Perhaps that’s what he had meant: the dead were out of it, weren’t they? It’s the rest of us who have to suffer it all.

“Do we have to talk about the war,” she said. “It gets on my nerves.”

“Well, you had better get used to it, old girl.” He put on his doorman’s overcoat and checked in the mirror that the gold braid epaulettes where lying straight on his shoulders. “I’m afraid that this is the world we live in. Two world wars have given it to us, and we shall just have to get on with it.”

Walter swept his coat sleeve across the peak of his cap before placing it on his head, tugging it into position fore and aft. He was presently engaged as a doorman – he preferred
commissionaire
– at Gamages, the department store. It was all he could get. Before the war he had been in insurance, but they were all Freemasons and his old firm hadn’t been prepared to take him back when the war ended. Or so he said. He’d never advanced much in all the years he was there, and she doubted that that was all down to the Freemasons. She wished he would find something in the insurance line: they were in arrears with the Provident. She could let it lapse, but it seemed terrible to do that.

“I’ll tell you what, old girl,” he said, “it isn’t how I imagined my life going.” What did he expect, she thought bitterly, with his modest talents, his ill-formed opinions on everything, his fading Deb’s Delight looks?

Walter put his foot up on the fender and bent forward to polish his shoe, furiously rubbing a cloth back and forth. She drank a cup of tea. It’s not his fault, she thought; he couldn’t help it that he wasn’t any longer the handsome boy in the immaculate blazer who’d laid himself out on the grass with his head in her lap. Canvey Island; the summer of 1925. It wasn’t his fault, but she blamed him all the same. They were both browned off, and disappointment was all they shared these days. It isn’t really anybody’s fault, she told herself. It’s
everything
. It’s the memory of before the war and during the war; and now they were after the war and instead of looking forward, she was looking back and she could not bear the mockery, the reproachfulness of memory. Walter had finished polishing one shoe and was putting his other foot on the fender, and she wondered if he felt the same as she did; whether he longed for all the things they could not have: hope, passion, tinned peaches, Pond’s Cold Cream.

He kissed her on the top of her head.

“Goodbye, old girl,” he said. Then he tilted his head to one side and said, in an exaggerated stage Cockney: “Now be-hiyive!” It was their little joke; a joke which, like Walter’s hair, had grown thin over the years. He wagged his finger at her in mock
admonition
. “Behive wifie–else I shall have to spank you!”

She heaved a sigh of relief when she heard him close the front door behind him, releasing an immense knot of tension which she had been holding in her stomach without realising.

Oh God, she thought. Could I possibly be any more
miserable
without him?