Murder on the Home Front (26 page)

Apart from this murder and the rocket-bombs life went on tranquilly, it would appear from the diary, with a great deal of ballet going and occasional entries such as:

I really must diet and give up alcohol, but every time I swear to devote myself to Health and Beauty and not to touch another drop for six months, I immediately receive an invitation to a party and find myself having some more.

Or:

My financial position is still worrying. I don’t save nearly enough. I go out and about far too often. I buy too many books. It is most distressing. I should check myself and live like a hermit.

It was at this moment that MacKay of Hammersmith lent me Thoreau’s
Walden
. I regret to say it bored me profoundly and left me with an utter distaste for hermits.

November 9.

Dr. Keith Simpson said he had some needlework for me to do in the Museum, so I went down there and found he had four little embryos, in varying sizes, which he wanted me to sew on a piece of mica to put in a pickle jar. They were fascinating little things, ugly, but beautifully made. I had a good opportunity to examine them as I stitched them on to the card. Both Dr. Simpson and Ireland complimented me on the neatness with which I did the job.

I had thought at first CKS wanted me to darn a sock or something.

November 11.

Last night CKS had a call to a murder, a country job, but as the weather was bad and I am down with a cold he went without me. The trip was to Beccles, in Suffolk, with Chief Inspector Greeno. This morning my boss tottered home, very pink in the nose and blue in the face, indeed looking thoroughly frozen, rather as if he had returned from the Russian Front. He assured me that I had missed nothing. Apparently he spent the midnight hours crouching in a ditch, in the snow, together with Mr. Greeno and the body of a murdered Waaf. This was followed by an autopsy on the said Waaf at two in the morning in Beccles mortuary.

He kept saying to me, “You didn’t miss a thing, Miss L., just a horrible night freezing in the snow.”

Apparently the wretched girl was murdered after a dance. It’ll be a job with a great deal of work in it for Mr. Greeno.”

This Beccles case proved to be a very interesting one indeed, and before it was over I had heard a great deal about it. The victim was a twenty-seven-year-old Waaf called Winifred Evans. She had been found lying in a ditch, as described, wearing a full outdoor Waaf uniform that was considerably disarranged.

Typing CKS’s postmortem report, I learned that she had been a respectable young woman, completely healthy. She had been knocked onto her face and dragged along the ground, had been rolled, or turned, onto her face, and thus heavily pinned down by somebody violently kneeling on her (with such violence indeed that her liver was ruptured), after which she had been subjected to a most savage sexual assault.

The effect of being knelt upon with the face pinned to the ground was suffocation. Her death, therefore, was due to asphyxia.

There were no foreign hairs found upon the girl’s body. Indeed there were at first no clues at all to the identity of her killer.

Near the aerodrome where the girl was stationed there was an Italian POW camp, and Chief Inspector Greeno interviewed two hundred of the men there. But meanwhile one of the dead girl’s Waaf colleagues had come forward with some interesting and important information.

She said that on November 8 Winifred Evans went to a dance at Norwich. She returned at midnight. She was due to go on duty, and she changed from her dance things into working gear. Then the unlucky girl walked away to the working site where she was due to report. She was followed by a Leading Aircraftman Heys.

Heys, according to Evans’s colleague, had appeared on the scene shortly after midnight. He was drunk and asked to be directed to Number One site. The Waaf colleague directed him and he then said, “Can I thank you?” She replied briskly, “No. Get down the road.” He went away then, walking off along the road which Evans had just taken…

At 1:00 a.m. Heys returned to his billet. His shoes were noticed to be very muddy, and he had long scratches on his hands. No comment was made at the time.

When Mr. Greeno was told all this he went straight away to interview Heys. He found that Heys’s uniform jacket had very recently been sponged and brushed, but despite this it had several large, faded brown stains on it; they looked very much like bloodstains which somebody had unsuccessfully tried to remove. There were similar residual stains on Heys’s trousers, which had also been recently sponged and pressed. These clothes were sent to the police laboratory, and the stains were shown to be human bloodstains, but they were unfortunately too weak to give positive results for blood grouping.

Nevertheless, they showed, without any doubt, that Heys had recently got his uniform very heavily stained with human blood and that he had made energetic attempts to remove these stains from his clothes.

Chief Inspector Greeno charged Heys with the murder. Heys said, on being charged, “I didn’t do it…I can’t think what to say to my wife.”

It did not really matter very much what he said to his wife. He was found guilty in due course, and hanged. But it was a very interesting example of how a murderer leaves the scene of his crime with “Murder” written all over him and how, try as he might, he cannot efface this inscription, “Murder.”

CHAPTER
22

Boys of the New Brigade

Lunch hour in the city on December 8, 1944. A muddy, cold day, people hurrying everywhere, already thinking of Christmas, trying to do a little shopping in between snatching a jostling, crowded lunchtime snack and getting back to the office. Traffic teeming in the roadways, people teeming on the pavements. The usual, chock-a-block, scampering, high-blood-pressure city lunch hour.

The usual? No, not quite the usual. For on this day a new page of London’s criminal history was commenced. The page which tells the story of her young postwar gangster boys: the Jenkinses, the Geraghtys, the Ginger Kings and Craigs and Colemans.

Even today the nation is still shocked and bewildered by the exploits of its youthful thugs, whose very youth seems to add to their complete callousness. But in December 1944 these monstrous little juveniles were an entirely new experience for London, and people were completely dazed by what happened in that city lunch hour…

It was just on two o’clock and the hordes of office workers were hurrying back to their offices. People going along Birchin Lane, one of those narrow city streets, saw a car draw up outside a jeweler’s. Nothing very unusual about that. In the car were two youths, one of whom leapt from the car carrying an ax, rushed to the shop window, smashed the glass with his ax, snatched a tray of rings and a pearl necklace, and then dashed back to the car, leapt into his seat, and slammed the door shut as the driver started the car. The many people who saw this smash-and-grab raid taking place so audaciously under their very noses were too astonished to do anything, all save one, a retired naval captain, fifty-six-year-old Ralph Douglas Binney. He, in true naval tradition, placed himself fair and square in the roadway before the accelerating car, his arms stretched out in a human barrier.

The driver drove straight into Captain Binney, knocking him down, then passing full over him, then passing back over him as the young brute at the wheel put the car into reverse and backed at rapid speed down the street for several yards until he gained Lombard Street and accelerated into a frenzied dash for freedom.

Captain Binney was trapped by the undercarriage and was borne away, shouting wildly for help. The crowds on the pavement shouted too, with horror and fury. Women screamed. But the car didn’t stop. Along Lombard Street it was chased by another car, but to no avail. Over London Bridge sped the car, up the Borough, swerving perilously into Tooley Street, with Captain Binney shouting, “Help! Help!” and appalled onlookers able to do nothing. As the car swerved around the corner into St. Thomas’s Street Captain Binney was flung forth from under the car and rolled against the curb. The car disappeared around another corner.

The sickened people on the pavement ran to Captain Binney and he was carried across the street into Guy’s Hospital. But he had been terribly injured, and in spite of the speedy medical aid he received he died within a few hours.

In all, he had been dragged along the roads for a mile and sixty-six yards.

The city police were in charge of this case and immediately began searching for the car. It was soon found, abandoned in an unfrequented alley near the Elephant and Castle. It was a stolen car and provided some useful clues. The people in Birchin Street who had witnessed the smash-and-grab were able to furnish full descriptions of the two young men, especially the one who had actually smashed the shop window. The police began combing the Elephant and Castle area, and it was not long before the two young men had been identified and arrested.

They were a twenty-four-year-old welder, of Rotherhithe, named Thomas Jenkins, and one Ronald Hedley, a laborer, aged twenty-six, of no fixed abode. Hedley was the driver of the car, Jenkins had been the man of action; the ax-wielding smasher-and-grabber. Both of them were well-known “Elephant Boys.”

These Elephant Boys were a group of young toughs from the Elephant and Castle area who posed in the role of juvenile gangsters and who had already caused a good deal of trouble in the Elephant area—hence the name “Elephant Boys.” The attention of the police had become drawn to them some time before the Binney murder. Several of the Elephant Boys were already gracing reform institutions; others of their company—the senior members, as it were—had graduated from thence back to Elephant Land, there to become the lords and leaders of all the aspiring hoodlums in the locality.

Now juvenile street gangs had once flourished all over working-class London, particularly in such salubrious neighborhoods as Hoxton, Whitechapel, Limehouse, Bethnal Green, and the like. They had given the police and social reformers of the Victorian era many headaches. But as the worst slums of London were cleaned up and working-class conditions improved, the street gangs disappeared, or at the least became harmless play gangs rather than dangerous groups of young street marauders and budding criminals. The 1939 War, however, revived the street gangs. The London children, at the start of the war, were evacuated en masse to the country, but many of them returned to London as the months passed, especially those who came from the less responsible, slap-happy, neglectful homes. Parents with little sense of duty allowed their children to come back to bomb-rocked London: “Our Albert’s come ’ome. Couldn’t stand it in the country. Rather have him ’ere with us and take the risk.” I’ve heard several mothers saying it to me. What a London for the children to come “home” to! Often “home” had been blasted sky-high and the family lived in shelters, or Rest Centers. Anyway, whether home was standing or not, nights were invariably spent down the shelters, or on the platforms of the Underground, in a hugger-mugger of humanity. The schools were closed, so during the day the children ran wild in the streets. Lacking any authoritative supervision and coming from the “homes” they came from it should not surprise anybody that they were soon developing into young gangsters; for although school education had ceased, the cinema was still open to them and they learned a good deal there. Nobody bothered about these children, nobody checked them. Young Londoners are by nature daring and full of enterprise and individuality; characteristics that can be developed for good or bad. These children lived in a world shattered by bombs and rockets, the very background of their lives was violence, the newspapers were full of “heroic” war stories, tales of daring and desperation. Their only culture, if culture it could be called, derived from comics and films. The children got the rest of their specialist education from the streets themselves: firsthand education from the wide boys, the spivs, the boys on the Black, the young crooks who had been to the reformatories and who returned covered with glory to impart their cynical philosophy and squalid experiences to admiring and eager juniors.

Street gangs were soon flourishing everywhere. Toughest among them were the Elephant Boys and their rivals, the Brick Boys of Brixton. Jenkins and Hedley were two of the seniors the Elephant Boys particularly cared to emulate.

But Jenkins and Hedley themselves cannot be explained as products of the war years. Jenkins was nineteen when the war broke out, Hedley twenty-one. No doubt the war encouraged their tendencies toward lawlessness and provided them with unusually favorable opportunities to become callous young criminals, but it cannot be said in extenuation of these two that they did not go to school because all the London schools were closed, or that their home life had been disrupted by the bombing. They both went to school, they both had “homes” of a sort. The truth is they were the products of the thirties. The decade of unemployment, chips on shoulders, and sloppy thinking. Religious conviction waned, the old values declined. Emphasis was on rationalism and intelligence. But most people are neither rational nor very intelligent. Hence all the muddle.

I think it was Bernard Shaw who once remarked that it requires far more self-discipline to be a free-loving atheist than a God-fearing conservative. Jenkins and Hedley were two of the very many who simply weren’t up to being self-disciplined atheists, and nobody had taught them to be God-fearing conservatives, because that would have been old-fashioned. So they followed their own inclinations and took to being good plain cavemen, in an up-to-date Chicago style. Thus they combined the old and the new.