A Commonplace Killing (4 page)

I
t was dazzling and hot as he walked from the flats towards the car, where his driver was leaning against the bonnet. She stood smartly to attention the instant she saw him, her wide attractive mouth forming a smile. She was an A4 Branch girl: pretty, well shaped, with a slight look of the actress Wendy Hiller about her. She had reddish hair that was tucked under her cap; her fresh complexion had a healthy smattering of freckles. When he was closer to her he could see that she had very fetching green eyes. He had more or less given up the habit of looking at girls’ figures, but even he could see that she had a jolly good one, beneath the shapeless bulk of the A4 Branch uniform. His detective’s sense for such things led him to conclude that she was about twenty-five, twenty-six: too young for him. But then all the A4 Branch women were too young for him, apart from those who were the same age as him, and so resolutely unattractive that it was no mystery to anyone why they had never married.

She held open the door for him.

“Policewoman Tring,” she said. “I’ve been assigned to drive you around today, sir.”

She possessed all the attributes of fresh air, common sense and decency. He liked her.

He tossed his hat and mackintosh on to the back seat and settled into the motor; she shut the passenger door, walked around to the driver’s side and got in next to him.

“And how are you this morning, sir?” she asked as she started the motor.

He felt a little like a young charge being taught manners by Nanny, but he didn’t mind.

“Well, a nice kipper wouldn’t have gone amiss,” he said. “And I don’t mean one of those creosote-dipped frights they try and pass off on you these days either. Of course, you’re too young to remember the delights of the pre-War kipper.”

She was manoeuvring skilfully out of the parking space.

“Oh, I don’t really care for fish, sir,” she said, “and you have to queue such a long time for it, don’t you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Oh no, I don’t suppose you would, sir. I meant your wife, of course.”

“Afraid I’m not married.”

He had no idea what made him tell her that. He hoped to God it didn’t sound like a pass.

“Me neither,” she said.

“Well, no – of course not…”

She was laughing now.

“Why? Am I really that frightful?”

“Oh no, no – not at all.” He really was a damn fool.

She glanced down at her uniform.

“Actually,” she said, “they’re going to relax the marriage bar.”

“Are they really? I hadn’t heard.”

“Do you approve?”

“We need all the chaps we can find at the moment.”

“Even lady chaps?”

He smiled and turned to look out of the window. She
indicated
left and headed towards Clissold Park.

“Isn’t it a lovely day?” she said, after a little while had elapsed. “Not a cloud in the sky!”

The park was dotted with dogs, skipping children, courting couples: all the usual evincements of hope. Everyone was supposed to believe now that there was a change in the air: a spirit of fairness and justice; an end to the inequities of the old pre-war world. All of that. Otherwise, everyone said, what had it all been for? He despised this popular notion almost as much as he despised the one that held that somehow everything had declined after six years of death and destruction. He, for one, did not miss the acridity, the brick dust clogging your lungs, the broken glass crunching underfoot, the flames blistering the sky, the bucket loads of decomposing flesh. And nor did he feel any nostalgia for Hitler and the obscenity of the horror camps; the reducing of human beings to scorch marks in a matter of seconds. He had no time for either point of view: as far as he was concerned war changed nothing. It didn’t last time and it won’t this time. He was certain of that. Everything will just keep ticking on until the next one.

“Yes,” he said, “lovely day. Pity we have to spend it on a murder.”

“Did you have plans, sir?”

No, he had not had plans: even if he had genuinely believed this was to be his first day off in Lord knows how long, he would not have had plans. As it was he was probably relieved that work had spared him the guilt and misery of spending a lovely day alone in the flat, with a pipe and the gramophone.

“I was planning to go into HQ at some point,” he said. “We nabbed a couple of wide boys last night.”

“No peace for the wicked.”

“No. Not really.” He thought for a moment. “I suppose I might have gone into town for a spot of lunch.” This was partly true, in so far as he had to eat and there was nothing in the flat, not now he had flagrantly wasted his last slice of bread and an entire ration of powdered cheese. He hadn’t even had a cup of tea since some time the previous evening: he had run out of milk and he couldn’t abide tea without milk; not that this mattered very much as he had run out of tea as well. “I’m
absolutely
famished; can’t stop thinking about hot buttered toast.”

“Oh dear!” she said, with what sounded like genuine dismay.

“It’s entirely my own fault; I’m as useless as a sign in an Aberdeen shop that asks customers to count their change before leaving.”

It was a feeble joke, hardly Max Miller, but he laughed in spite of himself for the first, and last, time that day. Her legs were only a few inches from his and pretty enticing, even in the thick black stockings and the flat black shoes of the A4 Branch. He angled himself away from temptation.

“I don’t suppose you’re useless at all, sir,” she was saying, sounding rather like a nanny giving encouragement to a
backward
child. He drummed his fingers on the dashboard and looked out of the window. “I might go to the flicks if we finish in time,” she said.

“Unlikely,” he said. He scarcely went to the cinema these days, only to see the news if he had time; pictures were awful rubbish for the most part, and it was depressing walking home alone afterwards. “Too warm for the pictures today, anyway,” he said.

“Yes. I suppose it is.” They fell silent for a few moments; she turned up the Blackstock Road. “All this frightful crime,” she said. “It seems hardly a day goes past without some awful murder or other.” He sighed. “Look at that awful man they caught in Eastbourne the other day.”

“Bournemouth,” he corrected.

“The one who murdered those poor girls in the boarding house.”

“Neville Heath.”

“He was an officer!”

She shuddered.

“Actually, I think he just posed as one.”

“And then there was that poor little Welsh girl who was shot dead. And a week later another poor little mite – strangled – in Kent of all places! Ten years old! And that woman strangled in Piccadilly. I heard they’d questioned three Yanks about that!”

He did not want to discuss sex murders with her.

“Maniacs have been with us since the days of Jack the Ripper,” he said. She paid him no heed.

“It’s something to do with the post-war psychology,” she averred. “Thousands of men – trained killers – let loose on the world. They’ve seen terrible things; they’ve suffered and they’re scarred. And of course a good many of them are deserters.”

He loathed the pseudo-psychiatric drivel that had become part of common parlance since the war. Thanks to
John Bull
magazine and the Home Service, everyone was now a blasted Freudian; just the other day he’d heard some fellow on a bus talking about how the Germans had a “persecution complex”, whatever the dickens that was. Not uncommonly for a
detective
, he had no interest whatsoever in why men do bad things.

“All crooks have their reasons,” he said, “which they will give if asked and sometimes even if not asked: poverty; drink; absent fathers; absent mothers; a bump on the head… It’s all absolute tosh to my mind.” He had heard it all at one time or another and the self-pity of a certain type of criminal
nauseated
him. As far as he was concerned using war as some sort of justification for misbehaviour was simply more of the same. He’d been through another war before the last one, and he had suffered and seen terrible things – along with millions of other men, most of them, like him, schoolboys. Were they all
irrevocably
scarred, too? He pondered for a moment before deciding, with no particular ill-feeling, that he probably was.

“But aren’t you curious, sir? Don’t you want to understand what motivates them?”

“Not really. To be curious about a thing you have to find something surprising in it, and I’m afraid that nothing surprises me any more.”

“I see.” She appeared to be pondering this. “So you don’t think that there’s anything about the current situation…”

“There’s certainly a good deal of crime at the moment, if that’s what you mean,” he said, “but most of it is of the
humdrum
sort. To my mind very little is fundamentally different from what went before; there’s just more of it. People break the law in the first place because they want to; and in the second, because they can. War-time. Peace-time. That’s really all there is to it.” She seemed dubious. “There certainly are a lot of young men who have been thrown out of the services and are unable to find a situation. They’ve spent all the money they received selling their demob suits and they think they might as well turn to crime. But the sort of crime which the majority of them turn to has nothing to do with murdering schoolgirls, or strangling good-time girls, or chopping up their wives and burying them in the cellar. For the most part, it simply has to do with one racket or another. The dibs, the gelt, the mazuma, the moolah: that’s the only motive any of them require. The war – rationing, shortages and so forth – has supplied a capital opportunity. You might say that the current crop of villains are merely supplying a demand.”

They were passing the dreary expanse of Finsbury Park, where every blade of grass had been turned brown by the hot summer sun; or maybe by the war, which had limned the whole world in a sepia wash. Everything had looked just as drab when he had come back from France in 1918. He was young then, of course; a boy who could still recall the sharp colours of
childhood
, and the contrast had hit him with the force of a blow. Perhaps the colour had never returned in all that time and he simply hadn’t noticed, becoming gradually accustomed to the dun, muted tones.

The desolate railway arches of Finsbury Park Station were looming before them, and he was thinking tormenting thoughts of fried egg and bacon when he spied a familiar figure a short distance away, making its limping progress towards the Astoria picture-house. Cooper did not believe in a criminal type, not as such; but he could always tell a villain by the way he dressed. The fellow he had just spotted was wearing a suit of profligate cut and a ten-guinea hat set at such a cheap angle it looked no better on him than a costermonger’s cheese-cutter cap would have done. He knew precisely who it was by the unbalanced gait, a legacy of the Ardennes offensive.

“Hello,” he murmured. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about.”

“Do you know him, sir?”

“Know him? I’ve known him since he was six years old with his backside hanging out of his trousers and his father’s old boots tied on to his feet. He used to stuff the toes with
newspaper
so they wouldn’t fall off when he was running away from the police.” Cooper smiled at the recollection. “He grew up over there in the Bunk, on one of the worst streets in London.”

The crime-ridden area adjacent to Finsbury Park Station had almost been bombed clean away, but its traces were still apparent in every villain in north London, and no doubt would be for generations to come.

“Pull over, will you?”

She stopped the car in front of the Clarence Hotel, and Cooper wound down the window.

“On your way to church are you, Johnny?”

Johnny Bristow, one-time juvenile delinquent turned spiv, stopped in his tracks. He wasn’t the sort who stood around on street corners trying to sell half a pound of black-market butter; Bristow planned big jobs and made contact with big buyers, and every detective in the Metropolitan Police Force was after him. Cooper automatically checked for a blackjack that might well have been protruding from the waistband of the boy’s trousers, but was not: a pity as he could have had him for that.

“What do you want, you flat-footed bastard?”

Cooper was not troubled by the newer sort of wide boys. Most of his colleagues saw trouble everywhere in these
post-war
days, but he knew criminals as a class, and understood that they were all the same when it came down to it: mostly pretty stupid. The current crop of third-rate spivs were kids who had grown up fast on the streets during the air war, burgling bombed premises from the age of ten; little sods who deserved a damned good hiding from fathers whom they never knew, or who were away on active service or dead. Some of them, like Johnny, had grown into violent thugs armed with razor-studded
potatoes
and bottles of acid, but they were still kids. That was what war did: it blighted youth, one way or another; it extinguished innocence at a stroke; it made contentment and happiness an impossibility: it made boys grow up too fast; or rather it made them think they had grown up. They all cried for their mothers when a judge sentenced them to be flogged, or hanged.

“Now, now, Johnny,” Cooper said. “That’s no way to greet an old friend.”

“I ain’t done nothing, so you ought to leave me alone. Go and catch some crooks, why don’t you. I’m a respectable
businessman
. Your wages come out of my rates, copper.”

“I didn’t realise that they were letting blacketeers and slum landlords into the Rotary Club these days.”

The boy snorted.

“Trying to impress your girl are you, Mr Cooper?”

Cooper had to admit that there was probably an element of truth in that.

“Picked up a couple of your chums last night, Johnny. Quiet Sid and ‘Little’ Jimmy Dashett. They’ve been very naughty boys. Just thought you’d like to know that they shan’t be joining you for tea and crumpets for a while.”