Murder on the Home Front (18 page)

Our driver was not quite so perky as he had been on the outward journey. An afternoon’s waiting around at Luton had dampened his spirits. He turned his car’s hood toward London and the trek began.

The fog grew thicker and thicker, darker and darker, as we neared town, till finally we were crawling gropingly about the northern suburbs, in a desperate miasmic gloom, with only the vaguest notion of where we were. We pulled down the windows and stuck out our heads, peering against an atmosphere slightly less transparent and congenial than a dirty horse blanket. The fog engulfed us, choked us, seeped into us, while we stared unavailingly for some kind of street sign which would help us to decide our whereabouts.

Our driver was enjoying himself again now. “This is quite a fog. Can you see anything, Dr. Simpson?” asked the man at the wheel.

“Not much,” said CKS, peering hard at nothing.

“Am I on the pavement?”

“No, I can just make out the curb. You’re doing very well.”

We forged slowly ahead and then, from out of the murk, came a furious hoarse yell. “Look out, look out, you fool! What kind of a driver d’you think you are?”

And the beetroot-red face of a madly indignant citizen appeared suddenly, mouthing and pop-eyed, right beside us. “Speed like that, night like this, pavement…might’ve…nasty acci…,” and then he had dissolved back into the fog, was totally gone, as astonishingly as he had appeared.

Our driver, hugely tickled, repeated again and again, “What kind of a driver d’you think you are?” Then he added, “And what was that about speed? We’re going about five miles an hour. I can’t go any slower. Why didn’t he look where he was going? We weren’t on the pavement.”

“I didn’t think so,” said CKS.

“He was ambling about in the road. Typical idiotic London pedestrian. Never mind, though. Worse troubles at sea.”

In the end we found Russell Square Tube station, and there they put me down. They shouted “Good night,” and crept away into the fog again, to look for Dr. Simpson’s flat.

By next morning the fog had almost cleared and we were able to continue our routine mortuary work without any trouble.

We looked forward to hearing from Mr. Chapman. And so indeed from time to time we did. But all he had to tell us was that he and Sergeant Judge were groping together in a fog thicker and more enduring than the one we had traveled back from Luton in. A fog of complete mystery in which they peered and searched and questioned, week by week, without any ray of information to light them in their investigations.

Now every big detective has his special reputation, and Mr. Chapman was—still is—famous for his tenacity. He will persevere with a case long after other men exclaim, “Give up!” Therefore, with the Luton sack murder, he stuck grimly to his searching. Every now and again he came up to the Yard for a conference, and on these occasions he would also perhaps pop along to see Dr. Simpson; the round-faced, pink-cheeked personality who has been nicknamed, rather well, “the Cherub”; only a cherub with a wearily determined glint in his eyes as the weeks with the Luton job wore on.

“How’s it going, Mr. Chapman?”

“Oh, we keep hoping,” he replied always, with a sound that was half a regretful grunt and half a chuckle.

Photographs of the dead woman were being exhibited in Luton shop windows, flashed on the screens of local cinemas.

MURDER. POLICE ARE STILL ANXIOUS TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY OF THIS UNFORTUNATE WOMAN. HERE IS HER PICTURE
. The picture was accompanied by her description.

But her injuries, just as Mr. Chapman had feared, had distorted her face to such a degree she was quite unrecognizable. Her seventeen-year-old daughter, for example, saw the photograph at the cinema, but never recognized it as her mother.

The father had told his children that Mother had left home after quarreling with him, and since she had done this once before, and since, moreover, “letters from her” arrived regularly for Grandma, the children suspected nothing.

The two boys saw the photograph in a shop window and they did tell their father that it looked like their mother, but he replied it couldn’t possibly be, as she had called home to “fetch some clothes” only a day or so previously. After that the children nursed no further suspicions.

The police ran a house-to-house inquiry: “Do you recognize this woman?” One man, a neighbor of the murdered woman, did half-recognize the picture and told his wife, “You know, that picture, it’s a funny thing, but I thought it looked a bit like that Mrs. Manton down the road, that’s been gone from home the past few weeks.” His honest spouse told him not to be a damn fool. So he buried his suspicions. Nobody wants to look a fool.

The nail scrapings taken at postmortem had proved uninformative. Mr. Chapman had had plaster casts made of the dead woman’s jaws in the hope some dental surgeon might recognize them, but although the dead woman’s dental surgeon was one of the people interviewed in the house-to-house search he did not identify either the casts or the photograph of the murdered woman.

Everything that could be done was done. Four hundred and four missing women were accounted for in the process of the search. Six hundred and eighty-one addresses of women whose whereabouts were unknown to their relatives were traced. Thirty-nine identity visits were paid to the body and nine persons identified it in genuine error as the body of four other women.

Two hundred and fifty truck drivers who had called at the Vauxhall works at about the time of the murder were traced and interviewed.

Cleaners’ records were searched. Streets and refuse dumps were combed for discarded or fragmentary clothing. Inquiries were distributed through the press, the BBC, in the
Police Gazette
, to all county and borough police throughout the country. Scores of persons were interviewed who had heard screams, or seen suspicious persons, or happenings, on or about November 18–19.

During the house-to-house search a police officer actually called at the home of the dead woman, but nothing aroused his suspicions, for the two boys he spoke to there didn’t think it necessary to mention that their mother had “gone away.” They didn’t recognize the photograph, either.

A neighbor saw the boys being questioned, but when her turn for questioning came she didn’t say anything about her neighbor down the road who was missing from home—why should she? Bertie Manton, the missing woman’s husband, had said his wife had gone to Grantham to visit her brother. The neighbor knew, too, that the absent Mrs. Manton was pregnant, but why tell a policeman that? Goodness, there’s nothing very special about that. As for the photo, once again it went unrecognized.

The midwife who had paid Mrs. Manton prenatal visits had been told, like the neighbors, that she had gone to Grantham. The Luton Food Office had been told the same story.

As for the dead woman’s mother, she had no more suspicions than her grandchildren, for “letters” arrived regularly from her daughter, posted in London—apparently the absent woman had gone from Grantham to Hampstead. The old lady had to have her daughter’s “letters” read aloud to her, for she was almost blind…

The English are a great race for detective fiction, and they enjoy murder on the radio, television, the films. Nearly all the people interviewed by the detectives must have had at least one murder thriller tucked away on a bookshelf, they must have switched on the wireless at night to listen to a murder play, or trotted around to the cinema to see a film with corpses, cops, killer, and witnesses complete. But when a policeman arrived on their doorstep, showing a photo of a murdered woman, “Do you by any chance recognize this photograph? Here is her description,” the crime-fiction addicts found it impossible to grasp the situation in all its reality. Murder is something you read about, listen to on the wireless, see at the pictures, discover in print every Sunday morning when you open your newspaper, but you never come across it in your own everyday life. It happens to other people, maybe, in other districts, but it doesn’t happen in your family, or among your neighbors, or down your street. Now this description says a woman between thirty and thirty-five, height five feet three inches, hair dark brown, bobbed, eyes brown, heavy dark eyebrows, no teeth of her own, five and a half months advanced in pregnancy. Well, that’s the very description of Mrs. Manton who lives a few doors up and who’s away from home, but you never even think of this because Mrs. Manton’s a neighbor, and things like murder don’t happen to neighbors, only to strangers you read about in the newspapers. Even if you do think, “Well, that sounds rather like Mrs. Manton,” you know you’re being silly, because Mrs. Manton has gone to her brother’s at Grantham, Mr. Manton told you so. And besides, that photograph the policeman’s showing you, you’ve never seen that face in all your life. So you tell him, “No-o-o. It isn’t a face that’s known to me at all.” And he says he’s sorry he’s had to trouble you and you say no trouble at all and good afternoon and go inside and shut the door, and you hear him knocking at the next house. Well, and what’s the use of him going there? They won’t know any more about it than you do. And you finish your housework and have a cup of tea, and the evening draws on, and your hubby comes home, and after supper there’s that murder play on the wireless…Such is life.

Such was life in Luton. “No, I’ve never seen that face.” “Sorry, I’ve no idea who it is.” Hundreds of doorsteps, hundreds of questions and answers, hundreds of interviews. Hundreds of phone conversations, chits and reports and statements, hunches followed up, dead ends arrived at, hopes dashed. The days become weeks, the weeks months…one, two, three months.

It begins to look as if it can go on forever,
POLICE ARE STILL ANXIOUS TO ESTABLISH IDENTITY OF THIS UNFORTUNATE WOMAN
…

At last, on February 21, an extremely detailed reexamination was made of all clothing and property that had come into the hands of the police during the inquiries; a kind of “stock-taking,” as it were. Among the items of clothing was a piece of a black coat, and as this was being meticulously reinspected there was found, in the padding, a dyer’s tag which had not been noticed before. So the dyer was immediately traced and interviewed. His record book showed that the coat came from a Mr. Manton, of Regent Street, Luton, in March 1943.

The detectives had already been up and down the length of Regent Street—so near, and yet so very far! And now back they were again, this time making some very discreet inquiries, which revealed that Mrs. Manton had not been seen since November 18, which was, of course, the date of the suspected murder.

Chief Inspector Chapman now called at Manton’s house. The door was opened by a girl, and immediately Mr. Chapman knew the search was ended, for, to use his own words, “The girl was the image of the dead woman.” She was, in fact, the deceased’s daughter.

Manton was interviewed that same day at a local National Fire Service station where he worked. He admitted to Mr. Chapman that he hadn’t got on very well with his wife; they had quarreled over her friendships with soldiers and his with a local barmaid. On November 25 they had had a big quarrel and she had “slung her hook”—that is, she left. She had gone first to her brother’s at Grantham and then to London.

Manton was shown the identity photograph of the dead woman and he said, “No, that’s nothing like my wife.” He added, “I wouldn’t do a thing like that. Besides, she’s alive, we have letters from her.” To prove this point he identified four letters the deceased’s mother had received from North London, between the end of December and the beginning of February, purporting to be written in Mrs. Manton’s hand and signed “Rene,” which was the name she used. The letters described how she was getting on in London.

Mr. Chapman noticed that in these letters the name Hampstead was spelled without the “p.” Manton was accordingly asked to write, “Hampstead.” He did so, and left out the “p.” There was no doubt he had written the letters himself, traveled to Hampstead and posted them to his near-blind old mother-in-law, who was unable to examine the handwriting herself. The postage dates of these letters coincided with the dates of his leaves from the NFS.

Manton said he remembered that his wife left him on November 25 because that was the last day of four days’ leave he had had, and it was on that last day of leave that they had quarreled.

Asked to describe his wife, Manton said she was dark-eyed, dark hair, five to six months pregnant, had an appendix scar, and no teeth. She had worn false teeth, he added, and he gave Mr. Chapman the name of his wife’s dental surgeon.

This dental surgeon—who had already once been interviewed by the police without result—recognized a photograph of Mrs. Manton in life. He produced records of Mrs. Manton’s teeth which showed that roots remained in her jaws, but no teeth. X-ray photographs already taken of the dead woman’s jaws corresponded exactly with these dental records. So did the plaster casts Mr. Chapman had had made of the jaws.

There could therefore be no argument about the identity of the dead woman. She was Mrs. Manton all right.

Mr. Chapman made some more inquiries about Manton. He found that his leave in November had ended on the eighteenth, not the twenty-fifth. The neighbors and relatives insisted they had not seen Mrs. Manton after the eighteenth.

Mr. Cherrill was called to Luton, and he found a pickle jar in the Mantons’ house with a beautiful thumbprint on it which matched the thumbprint taken at the time of the postmortem.