A Commonplace Killing (23 page)

T
hey had left him for a good long while in the bare
brown-and-cream
painted room, prison sound echoing all around. At least it seemed a good long while. He had no way of knowing for sure, and time had been dragging on, like in a dream, since the detective, the quiet one, the one who was trying to be his pal, had arrested him for the murder of some bint he had never heard of. Now they were back with another cup of tea and a plate of fucking biscuits. If he had any more tea he’d need to take a piss and he wasn’t sure they’d let him, especially not the other copper, the arsehole who hated him. The feeling was mutual.

“Had time to think, Dennis?” the quiet one was asking him. If he hadn’t known better he might have believed the bastard was actually worried about him. He reminded him of one of the navy chaplains who always had a slightly queasy smile on his fat chops. “Got anything you’d like to tell me?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said, “and I can’t see what evidence you’ve got to pin this on me. Can’t you tell me?”

The detective sighed and turned down the corner of his mouth.

“No,” he said. “I’m afraid I can’t. Not just yet.”

The other detective lit a fag and passed it to him across the table. Then he took a photograph from the pile of papers in front of him and slid it over. 

It proper shook him up. He was wondering about all the other times he’d been well and truly lit up – got so weak in the head and lost his place in the world. He looked at the photo for several moments.

“Is that her?” he asked.

“Do you know her?” the friendly detective was looking all concerned.

He needed to think this through. He remembered, vaguely, a woman who looked a bit like this one. If he tried hard, he could, in a flash, see her face upturned towards his and smiling at him through a gin and Bass fog. He thought he could even remember the sweet powdery smell coming off her.

He knew it looked bad. He was afraid of what would happen next. He pushed the photograph away from him, thinking that he might be sick if he looked at it any longer. He drew hard on the cigarette until it made him cough, bringing tears to his eyes.

“The thing is,” he said, “I don’t remember. Everything’s a blur. I’d had rather a lot to drink.”

The bastard detective pounded his fist on the table so hard their teacups jumped in the air.

“Do you know her or don’t you?” The other detective kept his eyes on him all the while and didn’t say a word. “I’m sick of all this tosh about not remembering,” said the arsehole. “Tell you what, sunny Jim, you had better start getting your memory back pretty damn quickly.”

“I told you before: I got a knock on the head and when I’ve had a bit to drink I don’t always know where I am, what I did, stuff like that.”

He swallowed hard. He didn’t want to cry in front of them. He pinched the fag hard between his thumb and forefinger until it was all but done with. Then he ground out the stub, stroking it against the side of the ashtray.

 

Cooper wished on these occasions that he could have the certainty of a man like Lucas, who for the most part occupied a black-and-white world where the line between right and wrong was clearly defined, rigid. On those occasions when he cared at all, which, increasingly, was not often these days, Cooper could not allow himself to be certain about anything. He could not inhabit a stark landscape of Right and Wrong, as all policemen must for the sake of their own souls, where he and all those like him were “good” and men like the prisoner were “bad”. He understood that it helped to tell oneself that such men got what they deserved, but he had come to expect no such justice in this out-of-kilter world. He supposed that if he did care he would never sleep at night.

He rubbed his eyes as the boy told them, yet again, that he could not remember anything at all between entering the Castle public house at eight o’clock on Saturday night and waking up in his rooms on Tuesday morning. He let the kid tell him again about the knock on the head, the missing part, the effect drink had on him, and let weariness wash over him; the same weariness he always experienced when crooks went through their patter. Everyone was innocent; nobody was guilty. It was a wonder so much crime was committed. The same weariness when he read the newspaper or listened to the wireless. The drift towards the inevitable: Yanks against Russians; fear of Stalin instead of Hitler; Germany; the Balkans; Nuremberg; the atom bomb; Buchenwald. He sighed and turned his teacup in its saucer. What did it matter, really, if the kid did it, or said he did it, or went on and on about his blasted war wound? Lillian Frobisher was dead and nothing would bring her back. Lucas, beside him, pounded the table in frustration. He believed in guilt, confession, retribution. The kid went on again about how he couldn’t remember. He wasn’t sneering now. He was scared. He looked as if he might cry, his head wreathed in cigarette smoke; he reached across the table, stroking the end of the gasper in a ruminative gesture against the side of the ashtray. Cooper was aware of him looking straight at him, his skinny face pinched with fear.

“Tell me, mister,” he said. “If a fellow went with a woman and they got into a fight or something and she ended up dead, would it still be murder?”

Lucas sat back in his chair smoking absently, flabbergasted, ash falling unnoticed, unimpeded on to his lapels.

Cooper swallowed hard. “Is that what you’re saying happened, Dennis?” he asked.

The kid was crying.

“Am I going to hang?” he said. “Help me, mister. Help me. You don’t wanna see a young fellow like me strung up, do you?”

Then all at once the kid slumped his voice trailed away. “I wanna get it over with,” he said.

There was a hard lump of something cold like lead in the centre of Cooper’s chest, as he turned to the uniform in the corner of the room.

“Take Mr Belcher back to the cells,” he said.

It was over.

P
olicewoman Tring and he went together to the funeral of Lillian Frobisher. It always seemed the least he could do, even when a case remained unsolved. Of course he had succeeded in finding the murderer of the unfortunate woman, so her family and friends were warm and receptive. It embarrassed him. It was nothing, really, he assured them. Routine police work. A team effort. Tring had arranged for a utility wreath of red and pink carnations on behalf of “N” Division. It was the last occasion on which he would see her; although she stayed on at Cally Road to complete the paperwork in connection with the investigation, he had no reason to go there. She was to drop him a line a few weeks after, saying that Hendon was to train police officers and she was going to apply and would he support her application. Of course he would. He had rehearsed what he would say to her, a ludicrous fantasy, should she ever decide to take an interest in him. He was to tell her that he had gone to a place of perpetual gloom and misery and that there was nothing to be done about it. You don’t want anything to do with me, he would say; I’m old and battered and I don’t any longer see the point of much. He could see her green eyes soften. Let me help you; I want to help. But he didn’t want her to. That’s just it – he would only end up despising himself even more if he were to trap her in his self-loathing. Upstairs wanted him back at division HQ hunting down black-market toothpowder and rubber heels and knicker elastic. It hadn’t taken long for the arrest of Dennis Belcher to recede from the superintendent’s attention: a few days. It had, after all, been nothing more than a commonplace killing.

Walter Frobisher, in his hard-worn suit, and clutching his battered bowler, thanked him earnestly, tears streaming down his face, until Evelyn, cheapening one of the victim’s smart black costumes, a couple of sizes too small for her, came across and slipped her arm through his, pulling him away. He and Tring thanked Lillian’s sister for the kind invitation to join the mourners at the pub for a glass of brown ale, but declined. “Brown ale,” the sister had said. “I ask you.”

As they prepared to leave, Douglas Frobisher approached them, his face blotchy with grief. He put out his hand and Cooper shook it warmly.

“I’m sorry, old chap.”

Douglas thanked him politely.

“One thing,” he said as Cooper and Tring turned to leave. “Would mum… would she… did she…” – his face crumpled – “is it a bad way to die? Was there pain? I keep thinking of her alone and frightened.” Tears were streaming down the kid’s face. Tring stepped forward and put her arm across his shoulder.

“It’s over for her, son,” said Cooper. “It would have been over for her very quickly. No time to fear anything. No time at all.”

The boy nodded, wiping tears away with his fists.

“Thank you, Inspector” he said. “I’m so glad that you caught him and he’s going to hang.”

T
he condemned cell at Pentonville; he can hear the maudlin singing coming from the Irish pub across the Cally Road.

 

Cooper, like most, if not all detectives, if they are being honest, yearned always for a confession. Especially in a hanging matter. They rarely came; not like in the crime novels. He knew that the boy was guilty – the evidence told him that – but he wanted to be certain that the boy knew that he was guilty; that he could remember some part of that evening’s events; the moment at which Lillian Frobisher had had the life squeezed out of her.

“Tell me, Dennis, it doesn’t matter now, but I’d like to know: did you do it?”

The boy shrugged.

“If they say I did,” he said, “then I suppose I must have done.”

T
hey lay back on the stony ground, looking at the stars. He lit two cigarettes and handed one to her and they smoked in silence, the glowing tips dancing against the black
unforgiving
sky. After a while she heard him snoring beside her. Hardly glamorous, is it, dear? she thought. Hardly cocktails at Quaglino’s. The shattered buildings, the bonfire air, the trains shrieking, rattling, shunting down the line a few yards away, the wet and gritty soot catching in the back of your throat, settling on your hair and clothes. Soon, in a minute or two, she would get up, put on her drawers and make her way back through the shabby unlit streets. Normally she would take a bus the short distance from Caledonian Road, but there was nothing to fear now. It would be like the war and not like the war. She would not be making her way through dawn streets to the sound of pavements being swept, the tattered curtains fluttering in front of windows that were no longer there. No siren. No All Clear. No crashing. No splintering. No falling bombs. No Yank airmen with boxes of “candy”. No longing sighs and yearning regrets and fond heartfelt goodbyes. So young. So handsome. So brave. Steadying your hand as they lit you. Oh dear, Lillian, she thought, what have you come to? Now she knew for sure that there was nothing else; nothing at all. Just more and more of the same until it all ended.

She felt the spiv stir beside her, moving in the shadows. She would ask him to walk her home. She wondered how much he’d give her for her mother’s coupons. Her thighs were stiff and there was a slight chill across her bare breasts. She
reckoned
she must look a state. She needed to powder her nose. She needed to get on. She groped the ground beside her for the pigskin handbag; it was a few moments before she realised that it was gone, and a few moments more before she realised that the spiv was kneeling on the ground beside her, going through its contents.

“You little bastard,” she cried. She got on to her knees and tried to take the bag from him. “You thieving sod!” She sloshed him. He tried to slosh her back, but missed. She tugged at the handbag. “Give me that, you little bugger. You sod. You thieving bastard.” They grappled over the bag. “Don’t be like that. blondie,” he was saying.

“Don’t you blondie me…” He wrenched the bag from her and she toppled backwards with the force. She started screaming. “Thief! Thief!”

“Shuddup, you silly cow,” he was saying. “Shuddup. Shuddup. Shuddup.”

The last thing she saw was his white face looming over her, his hands coming towards her. Oh, the shame. The shame was all hers.