Read Murder on the Home Front Online
Authors: Molly Lefebure
Murder on the Home Front (3 page)
“She’s stuck orright. What’ll we do? Can’t wait for her to thaw.”
“Chip her off,” responded the other.
So they borrowed two chisels, and chipped her off. Tinkle-tinkle went the ice while, as they had no notion I was listening, for I had disappeared into the doctor’s office, they made appropriate but unprintable comments about the plump matron…
Episode three, which showed me how strange some of my duties were to be, concerned a pair of new gloves I bought one day on my way to work, and the slashed wrist and hand of a suicide, a young window cleaner with a broken heart who had cut his throat and wrists. The wrist wounds were especially fine ones, from the pathologist’s point of view, and Keith Simpson asked the coroner for permission to remove a hand and wrist to place in the Gordon Museum. So the hand was removed. Then came a problem.
“What can we carry it back to Guy’s in?”
Dr. Simpson’s gaze roamed around the mortuary and fell on my table.
“Miss Lefebure, what about that nice little bag your new gloves are in? Might I borrow that?”
“But of course, please do.”
So the new gloves went in my pocket, and I tripped out of the mortuary bearing the hand in the pretty little candy-striped paper carrier bag which a chic shop assistant had given me barely an hour before. What would she, poor creature, have said?
The telephone bell was ringing all the time we worked, with messages from coroners’ officers. “Three cases at Hackney, one a suspected food poisoning.” “Two at Walthamstow, one an old woman fell out of bed, the other an infanticide.” “A suicide at Wandsworth, cut throat.” “Two straight cases and a drowner at Southwark.” And so it went on. And then one day in June the Leyton coroner’s officer (PC Goodwin, since retired), was explaining over the phone, rather breathlessly, that he had a murder, a shooting by a soldier, who had already given himself up. “It is a murder, but it isn’t a real good murder,” explained the excellent man. “I’m sorry it isn’t a real good ’un. You haven’t had a real good ’un yet, have you, Miss Molly?” (Because of the difficulty of the name Lefebure, they all called me Miss Molly.)
Goodwin had a definite notion of what a murder should be. “Not much of a murder, sir, just a husband run a sword through his wife,” he observed on another occasion. But Goodwin had definite notions on a variety of subjects. He was very talkative, even for a police constable. He also had a nice disregard for convention. Once, I remember, at Whipps Cross Hospital, he disappeared from the p.m. room into the adjoining chapel, a small room with a bier and prie-dieu, used as a viewing room. Goodwin was in there for some five or ten minutes, then he bobbed back to us, beaming. “Guess what I’ve just been doing, Dr. Simpson.” “I’ve no idea, Goodwin.” “Just eaten half a dozen oysters,” said Goodwin.
But to return to Leyton, where I saw my first murder victim—the victim of a murder that was just a shooting, as Goodwin said. Indeed, he was right. A young soldier, a deserter, had wandered around for a week, “waiting for a chance to kill somebody,” as he scrawled in his pocket diary, and had finally selected, completely at random, an elderly man who was picking vegetables on his allotment. Having shot the man, the soldier gave himself up.
Not a big, front-page case at all. I had to wait till the following September before a “proper” murder came our way, a “good ’un.” Then it was the Surrey police, phoning us to say they had “a sticky job at Weybridge.”
So to Weybridge we drove, to a nice, pretty little house called “The Nook,” the home of an old lady who had retired to Surrey for rest and quiet. Through the flower-filled front garden, dozy in the September sunshine, we walked, into a hall where the furniture lay overturned and fragments of smashed glass were scattered everywhere on the carpets. Up the stairs, past many paintings of tranquil religious subjects, into a bedroom, the most disordered room I have ever seen.
The bed was piled with tossed clothes, coverlets, a pink wool shawl, jewel cases, scarves, trinkets. The dressing table was a-scatter with little oddments—all the drawers were pulled open. A piece of material was jammed in the wardrobe door. On the floor was a jumble of an elderly lady’s straw hats, a red brooch, watch chains, a pink eiderdown quilt on which rested a bottle of brandy and a bottle of lotion, and an upturned oil stove with a bloodstained petticoat around it. Another bottle of brandy was on the bedside table. Meanwhile, unaware of the disturbance, a little clock stood placidly ticking on the mantelpiece, staring calmly at nothing with its small, round face…
Lying in the midst of this confusion, between the upturned stove and a small, overturned table, half on the eiderdown and half on the carpet, clad only in a pink cotton nightgown, was an old, white-headed woman, flat on her back, her arms flung out, her right hand still grasping a tumbler with a drain of brandy in it. She had a black eye, and a dark trickle of blood ran from her nose and the corner of her mouth.
Around her now milled several detectives, powdering the furniture surfaces for fingerprints, while two Scotland Yard photographers, who had somehow managed to squeeze into the room with their apparatus, were taking flashlights. Dr. Simpson, Supt. T. Roberts of the Surrey County Constabulary, and myself squeezed ourselves in, too. We were joined by the Weybridge pathologist, the late Dr. Eric Gardner, and he and Dr. Simpson began collecting clues.
Some hair, a cigarette end, the broken handle of a comb, some bloodstained cottonwool were handed to me, and I put them in little buff envelopes, to which I fastened descriptive labels. Nothing was touched by hand; forceps were used for picking up these things and placing them in the envelopes. Dr. Simpson also took scrapings from under the old lady’s fingernails, for such scrapings may provide such important information as hairs, clothing fibers, often from the murderer. He also took measurements of the room, the body, and the position in which it lay.
Meanwhile Superintendent Roberts gave us a résumé of the crime, so far as the facts were known. The old lady was a Miss Salmon, who lived alone at “The Nook.” From time to time, however, there came to stay with her an eighteen-year-old seaman, an orphan, whom she had befriended out of the kindness of her heart, and practically adopted. His name was Cusack.
On the night of the murder Cusack came home with a Canadian private. Both were drunk when they arrived at “The Nook,” and both helped themselves from the old lady’s cellar to more drinks. Miss Salmon, probably thinking it best to keep quietly out of their way, went up to bed.
The postman, calling at the house next morning, could get no reply, so he put a ladder against the back bedroom window, climbed up, and looked in. There was the old lady lying dead on the floor and the room ransacked.
The horrified postman called the police. When they arrived they found Cusack wandering drunk in the front garden and a Canadian soldier lying dead-drunk on the kitchen floor. Both had their pockets stuffed with valuables belonging to Miss Salmon.
Miss Salmon’s bedroom door was locked on the inside, and barricaded too from inside by a chair. But whether Miss Salmon was responsible for these defenses or not was a problem.
The postmortem the two pathologists performed on her, in a pretty little mortuary surrounded by great scarlet dahlias and drowsy September bees, showed that this poor old soul of eighty-two had been punched and battered unmercifully and finally been left lying on the floor to die. Death was due to shock from her injuries.
Dr. Simpson said she would have been too weak to lock and barricade her door herself after the assault, so the detectives returned to “The Nook” and did some experiments with the bedroom door. They discovered that this door could be locked from outside and the key then be pushed back into the bedroom quite easily, and the door could be barricaded within the room, from without, too.
Cusack made two statements to the police. In the first he said, “I walked into the room and pushed at her with my hand, hitting her in the face with my right hand. She fell down on the floor and stayed there. She fell between the wardrobe and the dressing table. She did not move after this.”
But shortly after making this statement he evidently decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and so up came another statement, in which he accused his Canadian friend, McDonald, of the main violence, and even claimed that himself had shown concern for Miss Salmon. This second statement reads:
“She opened the door and McDonald caught hold of her, I believe around the throat. She did not have time to say anything. She struggled with him and tried to scream but she could not make much noise because he kept hold of her. He then laid her on the floor between the wardrobe and the dressing table, and pulled a silk eiderdown off the bed and laid it over her. She was still struggling and knocking her heels on the floor. He said, ‘Hold that over her.’
“I held it over her. The old lady then got her head out from under the quilt and said, ‘What is all this?’ I then struggled with her and put the quilt over her head again. I then went down the dressing table drawers and I got out some jewelry. The old lady then started to struggle again and McDonald said, ‘I will attend to her. I think I will have to tap her.’
“I said, ‘If you are going to, do not hit her too hard, because she is old.’
“He then took the quilt off her face and said to her, ‘Are you going to be quiet?’ She started screeching and McDonald lifted her head just off the floor a little and hit her with his right hand in the face. She still carried on screeching and he then hit her hard in the face. She moaned a little and was then quiet. He then left her alone and we both went to the chest of drawers and took out some stuff. He said to me, ‘I think she is kicked out, or dead.’”
Cusack and McDonald were charged with murder. Cusack didn’t appear for trial, however, for at the time of the crime he had been in an advanced stage of pulmonary tuberculosis and he was dying in Brixton prison when, in January 1942, McDonald appeared at the Old Bailey.
McDonald was a big, husky dumbbell, who could have felled his frail alleged old victim with one blow.
His defense was that it was Cusack who had assaulted poor old Miss Salmon, and the jury agreed with him and found McDonald not guilty.
McDonald was able to return to his native Canada, a free man. But shortly after his return he was killed in a road smash. And Cusack had already died in prison.
The September sun which had shone so warmly and brightly the day we had assisted with the “sticky job at Weybridge” waned to the paler light of October, and October, in its turn, faded into the first days of winter. The mortuaries became rather chilly places to work in, and I was always rather pleased when the lunch hour came and I found myself at Guy’s, in a warm dining room, eating lunch with friends from the hospital administrative staff. For by this time I had many friends at Guy’s.
Of course, we weren’t able to get back to Guy’s every day. Lunch was eaten everywhere and covered every variety of meal, from sausage rolls gobbled as we bowled along the Mile End Road in the car to repasts at the Ivy or La Coquille. Sometimes we even ate sandwich lunches in the mortuaries, and there was the famous day when Dr. Simpson, who was always telling West that the floor of Southwark mortuary was clean enough to eat off, dropped a Spam sandwich onto the said floor, which, although certainly very clean, was nevertheless a mortuary floor. There was a heavy silence, during which West eyed Dr. Simpson expectantly. Then Dr. Simpson, with a half grin, half grimace, said, “Well, West, here goes, I said it.” He stooped, picked up the sandwich and ate it. “Well done, sir!” exclaimed West.
But usually, two or three times a week, we lunched at Guy’s and, just to ensure that devotion to the job remained at top level, once or twice a week there would be a p.m. to do, immediately lunch was over, in the hospital p.m. room. To these postmortems, of course, the students came.
Their attendance varied. For some less spectacular autopsies our audience was meager. But if the case was of any special clinical interest the crowd was usually large, and if we had a criminal case it became necessary for CKS and myself literally to fight our way into the p.m. room.
One Thursday at the end of October, CKS informed me I would have to take a very quick lunch indeed, as there was a murder job in the Guy’s p.m. room. So I swallowed a hasty plate of sausage toad-in-the-hole, skipped the chocolate mold which followed, got together my typewriter and briefcase—and a large supply of those little buff envelopes to pop hairs and fibers and fingernail scrapings into—and scurried away to the p.m. room.
As I approached, a strange sort of roaring noise was heard, and when I opened the door I found myself on the very edge of an enormous crowd of young men, all craning their necks and talking excitedly at the tops of their voices. I tried saying, “Excuse me, please,” but nobody took the slightest notice, so then I punched one or two of them in the back, but they still ignored me, so finally I tried hitting them behind the knees with my typewriter and, in this unladylike fashion, fought my way through to the p.m. table which was the center of all the excitement.
On the table lay a girl, gory with stab wounds. Beside the table stood Gibb (the now late-lamented and always much-loved Gibb), the p.m. room assistant, who usually ruled the students with a rod of iron but who was on this occasion permitting the uproar to pass uncommented, wisely realizing, no doubt, that youth must occasionally have its fling. However, he exerted his influence sufficiently to clear a small space for me, my typing table, my chair, and my typewriter. Immediately, two students climbed on my table, to gain a better view of the p.m., and another swarmed up the back of my chair, perching like an acrobat. “Gentlemen,” said Gibb, “you will have to get down from there.” They got down.