A Commonplace Killing (9 page)

After Sid had run on in this way for a good fifteen minutes, Cooper leaned forward and looked at him in earnest.

“Sid, tell me about Johnny Bristow.”

Quiet Sid sucked in a draught of breath until he whistled, then he withdrew to his side of the table and shook his head.

“Nah nah,” he said. “You won’t find his dabs on anything, I’ll tell you that for nothing, Mr Cooper.”

Cooper rubbed his eyes and settled back in his chair. He was tired and hungry, and it was occurring to him that in some profound sense, he didn’t give a damn about black-market eggs and cigarettes and Jew fences. The run-of-the-mill crook, such as Quiet Sid, was an open book to him, in it for the dibs, the readies, and although he had never been motivated by greed, Cooper could understand a man who was; there was no mystery there. He needed to give some time to attempting to understand how a man had come to strangle a woman with his bare hands. He didn’t want to, but he had to, and the necessity of the task depressed him. He signalled to the detective sergeant to take over, and leaned across the table to shake Sid’s hand.

“Thanks, old man,” he said. “I appreciate it.”

Cooper had another cup of tea in his office and then walked over to Caledonian Road. The walk helped to clear his head a little, and the clarity lasted until he arrived at the station and discovered that Lucas still had nothing to report. No missing persons report matching the dead woman had turned up; nobody living near the murder scene had heard or witnessed anything untoward; so far the dustbins had failed to yield a handbag.

“Extend the house-to-house,” Cooper said.

Lucas drew on his ever-present cigarette. “I’m running this investigation with one detective sergeant and two beat coppers,” he said.

“Stupid suggestion,” said Cooper. “Stupid, stupid, stupid.”

He hovered over the incident room like a spectre; from time to time he and Lucas sat either side of a large table going over the evidence, positing theories.

“Something about this doesn’t sit right,” Cooper said for the ’umpteenth time. “No sign of any struggle, apart from the bruise on her hand. Looks like she removed her own drawers; they spread a mackintosh out on the ground beneath her.”

“Could have been a pimp came across them,” said Lucas. “Maybe she was treating a client, or keeping the money back. Pimps don’t like that.”

Cooper shook his head. “A pimp would have beaten the living daylights out of her. Besides, there was no evidence that more than the two people were there.”

Lucas tapped the ash from his cigarette into a large tin ashtray.

“I can pull in Greek Tony, if you like. He runs a lot of the local girls.”

“She just doesn’t look like a tart to me.” Cooper ran his hands across his stubble. “What are we missing, Frank? What’s gone on here?”

The DI sighed. “Why don’t you go and get yourself
something
to eat, sir?” he said.

Cooper grinned. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d say you were trying to get rid of me.”

“Can’t have you pegging out on us, guv’nor.”

“Oh, no fear of that, old man; no fear of that…”

H
alf an hour later Cooper was emerging from the
underground
at Piccadilly Circus, and stepping into a stupefying heat. Without the lights, Town was bereft of whatever
illusory
glamour it might once have possessed; the badly dressed staggered drunkenly past him in clouds of brilliantine,
cigarette
smoke and cheap scent, and it wasn’t long before he was wondering why on earth he had bothered to come.

He headed for a restaurant which he vaguely remembered as one that would be serving dinner on a Sunday night, but it was only as he turned into the street that he recollected it was also the place where he had first met Marjorie. How on earth had he forgotten that? Perhaps it was a good sign – proof that he was finally moving on. Bill had wanted so badly to show her off to him, so they had made up a party. He’d gone there with a girl whose name he had forgotten. The mere fact that he had ever done such things as going out to dinner with friends, with a girl, seemed implausible to him now. Of course, this would have been before the war: ’36. ’37.

After they’d eaten their main courses, Marjorie and the other girl had gone off to powder their noses and Bill had leaned over and said:

“That’s the girl I’m going to marry.”

The restaurant was still there, although it had evidently suffered as much as he had in the intervening years and had declined into the sort of place where they tell you the price in shillings so it sounds cheaper. He paid a small fortune for a couple of boiled potatoes swimming in greasy Bisto and a
well-grilled
chop which he needed his magnifier to locate; pudding was half a tinned pear and a sponge finger steeped in
evaporated
milk; the slice of bread and margarine which he had with it was by far the best part of the whole meal. It was hardly the Café Royal, but he supposed it was better than enduring the misery of a cup of tea in the all-night Express Dairy. He tried not to look about him at the other sad and lonely men hunched over their bowls of soup; it wasn’t just that it was dispiriting: looking around a public place marked you out as a copper as surely as if you had walked in with a blue light on your head.

He walked back to the underground, the tarts stepping out from the shadows invariably retreating as soon as they clapped eyes on him. The tarts could tell at a glance: the way he walked, the Homburg, the battered mackintosh; they could smell it on him, for all he knew. He wondered when the fishnet stockings and little veiled hats of the pre-war era had given way to mottled flesh and cheap headscarves.

“Hello, dearie!”

He doffed his hat and shook his head.

“Not tonight.”

“Any time, dearie. I’m always here, I am. It’s a nice clean room.”

As he walked away he wondered if he would ever be that lonely. He didn’t want sex; he wanted something else. He could not bear to contemplate what it was he was missing. Besides, he was too much of a prig, too fastidious. His first experience, as a boy of fifteen, finding himself in the midst of war – not the Hitler War, the other one: the one they still called the Great War – had marked him for life. He had been urged on by the older fellows – they were going over the top at dawn. “You don’t want to die a virgin, do you, Jimmy?” He had never had
occasion
to think about such a profundity before: a few weeks earlier he had worried about nothing more than his batting average in the school first eleven. Death. Sex. The stark absurdity of the juxtaposition had struck him even then; an irony of
laughable
tragedy, like that of the condemned man eating a hearty breakfast half an hour before the drop. It had seemed to him then, and it did now, to be both the most pointless and the most important thing in the whole world. The woman had smelled of garlic and stale rosewater, and was naked apart from her
stockings
, which were rolled down to her knees, and a dirty cotton shift. Her breasts had been large and greasy. He hadn’t known what to do, was utterly clueless, shocked by the way his body seemed to know more about what was going to happen than he did, and the woman had long since grown weary of educating lines of terrified, stupid boys. He kept thinking about his mother and his sisters. The other men had laughed and jeered when he emerged from the tiny attic room, pale and trembling and feeling slightly sick, less than five minutes after entering it; and the joke only wore off when most of them disappeared over the top the next day.

He, however, did not die: much to his amazement, he had lived to have sex again; to love. He had lived and he had loved. It was at once the most pointless and the most important thing in the whole world.

He snorted with derision at the psychoneurotic cycle he was concocting, like some blasted Freudian; but even so, he was unable to prevent his thoughts coalescing around the memory of Marjorie. It had ended badly, but while it lasted there had been such happiness, he was sure of that. How he despised this sort of introspection. He should never have gone to the
restaurant
: something had been stirred; and now he was missing her scent, her voice, her warmth, her being. He was missing the person he had been when he was with her. When, he wondered, had he become so dull, so sagging, so tired, so hungry? Were all men like him when they reached their forties? Were they all tired and hungry and more than a little scared?

Marjorie had left him on the day that war broke out: such a small thing in the greater scheme, but not to him. To him it was the biggest thing in the whole world. An atom bomb of the heart. And now here he was and nobody would ever want him again. Well, he supposed, at least he had been spared any more misery; and when he came to think about it, this was probably what he had hankered after all along. A strong desire to avoid the misery of human entanglements was what had led him to choose Marjorie: a woman he knew he could never have had all to himself. His best pal’s girl. Never again. He was done with all of that. From now on Mrs Oscar was the only woman he wanted in his life; the thought of his redoubtable charlady restoring to him a degree of mental equilibrium.

Descending into the dust-laden heat of the underground, he chided himself for such maudlin thinking and put it down to the quest he was now engaged in. A sex murder is bound to bring down your spirits. A warm breeze coming from the tunnel riffled through his untidy hair, and as he reached up a hand to smooth it he told himself, for the second time that day, that he really must get a haircut, and realised, with a start, that for the past few moments he had been thinking not of Marjorie, but of Policewoman Tring. Damn the girl, he thought. Damn her freckles and her legs; damn her kindness; damn her
seriousness
; damn her smile. And why must she be so damned
attractive
? His thoughts swung between the A4 Branch girl and the murdered woman as he rattled his way back to north London on the Tube. Legs, breasts, waved hair and painted nails: it all swirled before him in his tired imagination. He pondered the paradox of the good-quality man’s mackintosh, spread out upon the ground as if by a latter-day Walter Raleigh, and the man who had done that, and whether he was thinking all the while as he did so that he would soon be choking the life out of the woman he was about to seduce. He had seen plenty of times before the proof that desire all too often turns to murder but how this came to be still puzzled him. He wondered about the woman who had neatly stepped out of her drawers. He wondered whether there was terror in her eyes when she did that and whether this had appealed to the killer; whether terror in a woman’s eyes could ever appeal to him; whether it secretly appealed to all men. He wondered and he wondered, until he was quite sure that none of it made any sense to him. Then he yawned and closed his eyes for the last two stops, disembarking at Caledonian Road and making his perplexed, weary way to the station, where he spent several hours going through the missing persons lists again and again until Lucas told him, firmly, finally, that he had better face it: nobody was missing her. Nobody. By the time, around about two o’clock in the morning, that Lucas called it a day and despatched everyone homewards, he was feeling about as useful as a bottle of Scotch at a teetotallers’ convention. He walked back to Stoke Newington, through dark streets heavy with loneliness, shadowy with the ruins of lives and homes and businesses, past a huge hoarding hanging from the exposed end of a bombed terrace urging him to “Save for Reconstruction”.

Back home he drank a glass of Scotch and fiddled with the wireless for several minutes before remembering that the
accumulator
had run down; then he went and sat in the armchair, put his feet up on the bookshelves, smoked a pipe and listened to a gramophone record of Fischer’s performance of Schubert’s Impromptus. He was slipping in and out of drowsiness, wondering whether Schubert had known he had only a few months to live, before he died of VD. He listened for intimations of mortality in the rise and fall of the melody, in the silences between each cadence; he pictured the hand hovering above the keys in the delayed moment. At some point in the night he awoke suddenly to the certainty that he was still in the foxhole, up to his balls in freezing shit and mud, with his hands clamped over his head, waiting, praying, praying, waiting for the final chord: for darkness. He was surrounded by the spectres of men struggling for breath in the suffocating swamp, their livid hands clawing against the sky. It took him a few moments to remember that he had crawled out of the foxhole, his heart pounding, his breath coming in short steamy bursts; he had run across the wasteland, with bullets whistling past his ears, explosions
shattering
the ground. He was not a ghost: he was one of the legions of the undead, dying their slow, silent deaths. He hated it when he thought like this, but sometimes one is just too tired. He let himself slip away, succumbing to the thick impenetrable mud, to the sense of impending doom that had accompanied the moments before sleep every night for the past thirty years.

S
he had been in the café before – before the war – when it had been a cosy little place, with pretty floral prints on the wall and clean gingham tablecloths. The pictures were still there, but now they were barely discernible beneath a sticky coating of dust and a thick haze of cigarette smoke that made her eyes water. One bare light bulb hung from the centre of the ceiling alongside a strip of fly paper, and the whole place was suffused with post-war staleness: rot, accumulated grime, softened by intermittent bursts of steam emitting from a vast urn that was set upon the counter. The urn was tended by a large unshaven man who was wearing a striped butcher’s apron over a singlet, his thick arms covered in tattoos. He was reading the
Sporting Life
and every so often he licked his thumb and forefinger to turn the pages. He was concentrating hard and did not look up when they walked in; the waitress, who was leaning on the front of the counter, audibly sighed when she saw them.

She wanted to leave, but Evelyn had crossed to a table and was already asking for two cups of tea and two buttered teacakes. This was typical of Evelyn, who always did just as she pleased; she had a nerve, ordering tea and buns when she didn’t have a penny on her. She went and sat down: at least their table was near to the open door, through which a forgiving breeze cut across the thick moist air.

At the next table a blowsy woman with heavy features was drinking a cup of tea and smiling at them. The woman was thickly powdered and rouged and her eyebrows had been plucked to obscurity and then retraced with heavy black mascara. She was dressed in a short-sleeved brown pin-dot dress from which obtruded plump arms ending in grubby white gloves; a fox-fur collar was draped across her shoulders. She had on a reblocked man’s hat that had been dyed mauve and adorned with a little spotted veil that fell shy of one eye. There could be no doubt what sort of woman she was.

“Ooooh, hot, isn’t it?” she was saying to Evelyn, plucking at the front of her dress. “I’m in a bath of perspiration, I am.”

“They say it’s got something to do with the Atom Bomb,” Evvie said. “They” was Walter, reacting to something he had heard on the wireless the other day.

“Oooer,” said the stout woman. She had a piece of fruit cake, which she held as delicately as she was able in her fat gloved fingers, before pushing it into her mouth. “I was going to the coast this weekend,” she said, brushing the crumbs from her hands, “to get away from the heat. I can’t abide the heat. I was going with my friend.” There was something about the way the stout woman said the word “friend” that made her stomach turn. “But he’s had to go back to barracks.” The stout woman leaned conspiratorially towards them, and they were assaulted by a cheap pungency that struggled to overcome the smell of stale perspiration: like Flit sprinkled on a
bug-ridden
mattress. “I don’t suppose you’ve got a threepenny bit, have you, love?” she said in a hoarse whisper. “Only my suspender’s gone, isn’t it.” The stout woman pulled up the hem of her dress to reveal a fat thigh bulging over the straining top of her stocking.

“I don’t have any money on me, but my friend does,” Evelyn said, turning to her, “don’t you, Lil?”

Glaring at the kid, she rummaged in her pigskin handbag for her purse while the stout woman watched closely. She was careful not to bring the purse out, but clicked it open from the depth of her bag, stealthily retrieving a coin and slipping it towards the stout woman, who pushed it underneath the top of the stocking and then stretched the rubber of the suspender over the bulge of her thigh until the two met.

“Much obliged to you, I’m sure,” she said, reaching out her hand. “Nesta Jones. Pleased to meet you.”

She overcame her revulsion sufficiently to lightly touch the soiled glove that was being held out towards her, suppressing an uneasy feeling that she would live to regret this small gesture of civility.

“I’m Evelyn,” said the wretched girl, “and this is my friend Lil –.”

“Mrs Frobisher.”

Nesta was eyeing up the string bag of groceries that was lying on the table in a way that made her feel uncomfortable. She held her handbag tight on her knee.

“Did you manage to get any bread?” Nesta was asking. “Only I must have been up and down the Holloway Road half a dozen times and there’s not a crust to be had anywhere.”

“I had to queue for most of the morning,” she said.

A sly smile.

“I know where you can get tinned peas,” Nesta said, “seeing as how you’ve done me a good turn, like. I can let you have some for one and threepence.”

“You can get them for tenpence at the Co-op.”

“If they have any in,” said Nesta.

“And you need points as well,” chimed in Evelyn. She could have strangled the stupid kid.

Nesta’s tongue darted out and licked her lips.

“That’s right,” she said. “Three points! I ask you! Three points for a tin of peas!” Nesta took a slurp of coffee. “What about tinned soup? Two bob to you.”

Evelyn nudged her.

“I’m afraid my husband doesn’t really approve of those sort of dealings,” she said. In truth, Walter was happy enough to eat a bit of BM ham if it came his way; he just didn’t approve of what he called the “slimy types” who supplied it.

“Husbands!” exclaimed Nesta. “Mine was a right bugger. Meaner than ten thousand Scotch Jews rolled together. It was a blessing to me when he died. Take it from me, love,” she said to Evelyn, “you’re better off without them.”

Evelyn laughed.

“Oh, I’m in no hurry,” she said. “I’m out to have a good time, me.”

“Well, why not?” said Nesta. “You’re only young once.”

She could feel one of her heads coming on. She groped in her handbag for the packet of phenacetin she knew was in there somewhere. The waitress brought their order of two cups of tea and two teacakes, slapping them down on the table. The kid had a nice figure, but it was a shame about the squint. A squint is such a misfortune to a girl. She swallowed the headache tablet with a mouthful of tea.

“Miss,” she called across to the retreating girl, “I wonder, might I have some sugar, please?”

“Sugar’s here,” said the waitress. She jerked a thumb at a bowl that was sitting on the counter. It was armed with a single spoon that was attached to the tea urn by a grimy piece of string.

“Evelyn,” she said, “be a dear and get me some sugar, will you?”

She hadn’t noticed the young man sitting in the corner nearest to the counter, but he had noticed her.

“How many d’you want, blondie?”

He was stirring a cup of coffee; his upper lip, wrapped around an unlit cigarette, was turned up in a sort of sneer, but he was not sneering at her: he was sneering at the world, and the thought of such dangerous contempt gave her a queer sort of thrill. He was rather a good-looking fellow, very smartly dressed in a green tweed jacket, nylon shirt and fancy tie. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a man so well dressed; certainly not since the war, and probably never in Holloway.

“Oh, thank you,” she said, with a faint smile that was
calculated
to encourage while not appearing to do so. “That’s very kind, I’m sure. Two please.”

Evelyn kicked her under the table.

“Here,” she whispered. “I reckon he likes you.”

The young man came across to collect her cup and saucer, and she assumed an air of indifference as she finished off the half of buttered teacake, dabbing genteely at the corners of her mouth with her little finger. She did not want to look like a possible, but at the same time she was flattered. He crossed to the counter and she noticed that his jacket was the
swingback
sort and beautifully cut. It was like one she had seen Leslie Howard wearing in some picture before the war. She didn’t know you could buy jackets like that any more. Tweed was so scarce. She wondered how many coupons you’d need.

“I reckon he’s a spiv,” whispered Evelyn. “Here, Lil, you’ll be alright there.”

“Ssshh, Evvie. They’ll hear you.”

She glanced at Nesta, who was leaning over the back of her chair.

“Here, Dennis,” she called across to the young man, “Paddy’s been called back to barracks.”

He shrugged and heaped two spoonfuls of sugar into her cup. He stood at the counter with his back to them, stirring methodically.

“Paddy’s my friend,” confided Nesta. “He’s a terribly jealous boy. Isn’t that right, Dennis?” Dennis ignored her. “Oh, terrible jealous, he is. Can’t bear another man looking at me – especially when he’s had a drink. It’s the Irish in him, see. Hot-tempered lot they are. Mind you, gives me a bit of a lift, I can tell you.” Nesta winked at her and began to cackle.

“That’s the Irish for you,” said Evelyn, slurping her tea.

The young man brought her cup back to their table and as he set it down she glanced up, briefly, and smiled at him.

He smirked.

“Shut up, Nesta,” he said. “Blondie here doesn’t want to hear about you and your disgusting habits.”

Nesta flung her head back.

“What’s the matter with you, Dennis?” she screeched. “It’s only natural, isn’t it? I’m not doing any harm. She knows what I mean, don’t you, love?”

She did not respond. She didn’t want to give the young man the wrong impression of herself.

“Here, you alright, love?” Nesta was peering at her. “Only you look a bit peaky.”

“I’m perfectly fine, thank you.”

“It’s the heat,” said Evelyn.

“Dripping, I am,” said Nesta.

The young man had returned to his table and was leaning back on his chair so that the front legs were lifted clear of the floor; he lit a cigarette and aimed a steady stream of silvery smoke at the ceiling.

“Here,” said Evelyn, “have you got a spare cig?”

He shrugged, taking a cigarette from the packet and lighting it for her with the glowing tip of his own.

Evelyn settled back in her chair to smoke, casting her a knowing look.

“I heard they got gin in at the Feathers,” said Nesta.

“Good for them,” said Dennis.

“There hasn’t been any gin in weeks, has there, love?”

“Oh, I wouldn’t know,” she said, “I’m not really one for drink.”

“What do you do in the evenings, then?”

“She likes to go to the pictures, don’t you, Lil?” Evelyn said. She stubbed out the last of her cigarette in her saucer. “Or the Empire. Sometimes you go to the Empire on a Saturday night, don’t you, Lil?”

She glared at the stupid kid.

“Are you going there tonight, love?”

“I haven’t really thought about it, to be honest.”

“Oh, you should,” said Nesta. “You look like you could do with a good night out. Give yourself a break from that husband of yours.” She began to laugh again: a horrible rattle that seemed to come from deep in the back of her throat. “You look all in, if you don’t mind me saying.” Nesta pressed a
handkerchief
against her mouth as the cackle subsided in a prolonged bout of wheezing and coughing. She dabbed at her eyes, which were watering. “Isn’t that right, Dennis? She looks all in, doesn’t she?”

Dennis shrugged.

“Oh, I dunno,” he said. He stubbed out his cigarette and reached for another from the packet on the table. “She looks alright to me.”