Murder on the Home Front (19 page)

There was ample evidence now on which to arrest Manton and charge him with the murder of his wife. On being charged he broke down and made a fresh statement:

“I am sorry I have told you lies about my wife…I killed her, but it was only because I lost my temper. I didn’t intend to.”

They had quarreled frequently, he said, and in 1942 she had left him but had returned. However, the quarreling had continued as badly as ever. At last, on November 18, when they were having tea alone together, they started quarreling again and she flung a cup of hot tea in his face. He lost his temper, picked up a very heavy wooden stool which was near his feet under the table and hit her about the head and face with it, several times. She fell backward onto the floor.

“When I came to and got my sense again I see what I’d done. I saw she was dead and decided I had to do something to keep her away from the children. I undressed her and got four sacks from the cellar, cut them open and tied her up in them. I then carried her down to the cellar and left her there. I had washed up the blood before the children came home to tea. I hid the bloodstained clothing in a corner near the copper.”

After dark, continued Manton, he brought the body up from the cellar, got out his bike, laid the body across the handlebars and wheeled his gruesome load down to the river. Here he laid it on the edge of the bank and then watched it roll down into the water.

Next day he burned the clothes and the false teeth.

After this statement detectives made a detailed search of Manton’s house and found old blood splashes on the living room walls, the ceiling, and the doorjamb. A bloodstained envelope was found on the cellar stairs. All these stains belonged to group O—the dead woman’s blood group.

In the front room was a dismantled bike—Manton’s.

The stool, Manton said, had been broken up for firewood and burned, not long after the murder.

Mrs. Manton’s sister recognized the portion of black coat, the vital clue, as part of a coat Mrs. Manton had had dyed black for a funeral.

How the coat had been torn up and thrown on a rubbish dump—for it was on a rubbish dump a detective had first found it—was never fully explained. Manton had most likely destroyed all his wife’s clothes and disposed of the fragments here, there, and everywhere. He hadn’t reckoned with detectives who even search rubbish dumps.

So this fragment of a torn dyed coat, in which was sewn a dyer’s tag, provided, after three months’ hard and fruitless investigation, the vital clue in the Luton Sack Murder. This clue turned up only just in the nick of time, too, because Mr. Chapman was on the point of giving up the case as hopeless.

Manton was tried at Bedford Assizes and found guilty. It was considered, however, that there were extenuating circumstances and so he was not hanged. But he died, not long after, in prison.

And that is the story of the Luton Sack Murder. A story of tenacity and incredible patience. A story, I think, of how our police
are
really rather wonderful.

CHAPTER
18

War Work

By this time, of course, the authorities had made a spirited attempt to call me up. I had, however, been able to persuade them that I was doing more useful work as Dr. Keith Simpson’s secretary than I would do if I were called into the Women’s Services, or even put in a munitions factory. But at the start of 1944 another attempt was made to get me into uniform. Again I put forward the reasons why I considered I was more useful to the State in my present job than I would be as an ATS, a Wren, or a Waaf, or a factory hand wielding a spanner, and my eloquence this time persuaded the female official at the Labor Exchange that I had really best remain a civilian for the duration.

“After all,” she observed kindly as she closed the interview, “we can’t all expect to have a close-up view of the war. Some of us have to stay put in our ordinary jobs.”

I thought of the stay-at-home view I had already obtained of the war, and it seemed to me to have been quite comprehensive. The Big Blitz in East London, the bodies of scores and scores of air-raid casualties, including some of the victims of the Bethnal Green shelter disaster, several postmortems on spies hanged at Wandsworth prison, and the gradual accumulation during the course of my daily round of innumerable war anecdotes: soldiers returning to shoot unfaithful wives, deserters holding up and killing unfortunates in order to get money from them, timid youths taking cyanide to avoid their call-up, and a hundred and one other stories, combining to give me a broad and vivid picture of life in wartime England.

So when I heard I was to continue in my ordinary job I didn’t feel I was being cheated of any wartime experience. It wasn’t the more orthodox experience I would have obtained in the Services, but it was experience of the war for all that.

And indeed in the first month of the new year a case came along which was peculiarly a “war crime,” one of the first of the cases of that era of wartime crime which was to prove such a tricky period for the police, posing them innumerable new problems and straining their resources to the utmost; the era of a war-swollen, mobile population, troops on the move, deserters on the run, refugees drifting hither and thither, an era of black markets, new rackets, new racketeers, of smuggling and all manner of unlawful “larks,” the whole of that wartime crime wave leading to the postwar wave of spivery and violence, the gunnings and the coshings, and the dismal dark-night exploits of the juvenile gangsters…

It was a cold, gray day in mid-January when we were called to a comfortable, middle-class Surrey suburb. Our destination there was a half-timbered, pseudo-Tudor homestead standing in a tidy, privet-hedged garden. There, in the heavily oak-paneled lounge hall, we found a large party of CID officers, headed by Area Supt. William Rawlings and DDI George Somerset. The burly figure of Mr. Cherrill bustled in all directions searching for fingerprints, while Percy Law, the famous Yard photographer, was shooting off flashlights.

The focal point of this activity was the body of a middle-aged, gray-headed woman who lay, gagged and bound, on the hall floor.

DDI Somerset told Dr. Simpson the little that was already known of the case. The Tudor residence was the home of a Greek shipowner, who was at present away on business. The dead woman was his housekeeper, a forty-seven-year-old refugee named Klara Steindl. She had been living all alone in the house during her employer’s absence.

The Greek was reputedly a man of some financial substance, and in the house were several impressive-looking safes. Somehow the knowledge of these safes had leaked out. The house was visited by burglars who set to work to crack one of the safes. Miss Steindl, it seemed, had heard them and gone to investigate. She had been struck one or two—not very serious—blows and had been gagged and bound and left lying, helpless and dumb, in the hall while the burglars finished rifling the safes. They had then beaten a retreat, leaving Miss Steindl still lying, trussed and gagged, in the hall.

At first she had been unconscious, but Dr. Simpson’s examination of her showed that she had recovered consciousness and had struggled frantically to release herself. She was already in breathing difficulties from her head injuries and the gag, and her struggles precipitated asphyxiation. The dead woman was blue in the face and had clearly struggled wildly for some time to loosen her bonds, but had succeeded only in choking herself.

Thus a burglary became a murder case.

At first the detectives all seemed very hopeful. Mr. Cherrill had obtained some good fingerprints and before long had definite suspects “all taped for the job,” as Mr. Somerset said. But then something went wrong. The suspected men vanished. Apparently they had left England in order to fight for King and Country, and that was that. Opposite the Steindl case had to be written the most unpopular word in any detective’s vocabulary: UNSOLVED.

Quite a number of suspected murderers were to escape retribution during the following months by being drafted for overseas service just in the nick of time. The Steindl case was one of the first.

It was also our first murder case of the year, and one way and another 1944 was quite a year.

Dr. Simpson and I often drove past St. Paul’s School on our way to Hammersmith. The boys, of course, had all been evacuated at the beginning of the war, but the school buildings seemed to be used as some kind of military headquarters. Especially in the first months of 1944 unusual activity could be noticed there; military guards appeared at the gates, large and very impressive staff cars were drawn up outside, and various gentlemen sporting scarlet braid and decorations were glimpsed entering the driveway. “Some sort of staff conference seems to be going on,” observed CKS. “Now, if we were German spies…”

One afternoon we saw Gen. Bernard Montgomery leaving the place in a large limousine; our car drew up beside his at the traffic lights, and we had an excellent view of the keen, penetrating, rather foxy face, which was so much more witty than one had expected.

We discussed these local excitements with MacKay of Hammersmith, who was gloomy about it all. “Let’s hope Jerry [the Germans] hasn’t noticed the goings-on,” he said.

Jerry had, and St. Paul’s School and neighborhood received several nights of intense bombing.

The school wasn’t too badly damaged, but the streets around suffered.

The morning of February 24, when we turned into the road which took us past St. Paul’s we saw sights which, though by now familiar, never failed to sicken. Gaps torn between the rows of houses, deep craters in front gardens, brimming with high piles of earth, rubble, plaster, laths, bricks, tiles, fragments of furniture. Houses with their sides or fronts torn away, exposing rooms where ceilings sagged, wallpaper flapped in tattered strips, pictures dangled crookedly, a tossed bed lurched, tables and chairs poised drunkenly. Everywhere was broken glass; not a window in the district seemed left intact. The car crunched over broken glass as we drove slowly along the road. The houses that still stood stared blindly and darkly at nothing; but how many holes had been torn in their ranks! “Poor old houses,” I thought, “poor London houses.”

When we had crunched slowly through the glass-sprinkled streets and had made a big detour because of a large yellow notice, “
DANGER—UNEXPLODED BOMB
,” we finally arrived at the mortuary. That precise, white-tiled domain over which MacKay ruled so efficiently had become a place of chaos, and MacKay charged around it like a furious rhinoceros.

So many fatal casualties had been taken that previous night into the Civil Defense mortuary that there had been an overflow into MacKay’s mortuary—which was, of course, intended for coroner’s cases only. All over the floor of the Hammersmith mortuary now lay bodies, the bodies of bomb casualties, which are unlike the bodies of any other casualties, for they are so dusty, and raggled and crumpled, so tattered and degraded. Old people, young people, little children, lying there battered and begrimed, some shattered and crushed by falling debris, some with their insides blown out, some burned and blasted, blackened and charred, some literally blue in the face from violent asphyxia, and one or two, astonishingly, apparently unblemished, wax-pallid and tranquil, like novelette corpses.

MacKay and his assistants hustled around, tying identity discs to the bodies, putting any belongings found on them into little bags which were then tied to the bodies, too.

In the yard outside the coroner’s office swarmed anxious people, searching for lost relatives. Their faces wore stunned, slightly astonished expressions. Not many of them wept. They were all too shocked for tears.

A youngish woman was talking to a big, broad police constable, who was bending toward her with a solicitous, almost tender expression. She was saying, in an odd, flat, matter-of-fact voice, “You see, I don’t know quite what to decide about their funeral. My husband’s at sea, in the Navy, and they were our only children, only the two of them, you see, and I don’t quite know how he would like them buried.”

She looked at him in that matter-of-fact way, and you could feel that she was stunned beyond all normal sensation, while the policeman looked down at her with eyes that were bright with tears and when he spoke his voice sounded thick.

“Well, if I was you, ma’am, I’d have them buried in the common grave. It’s very nice, really, you know; there’s a very nice ceremony, and they’re all buried together, with a Union Jack put on their coffins, so it’s a proper ceremony, very nice, and it’ll save you all the anxiety and trouble and at the same time be much nicer for you to look back on, afterward; the ceremony, you know, and the flag.”

“Oh, yes, yes,” she said quickly, “I didn’t know they buried them so nicely as that, oh, yes, yes, that is a nice idea.”

A nice idea to have one’s only two children buried with the Union Jack, a nice idea, with a ceremony, I thought, as I scurried into the p.m. room, my throat suddenly rigid with a great hard lump, and the mother left in the yard discussing her children’s funeral with the policeman. And in the p.m. room our inquest case lay perched high and singular, white and cleanly naked, on the porcelain p.m. table above the litter of dusty, tattered bomb casualties, among them, if I had searched, two children who were to be buried with the flag.

Everyone working in the mortuary had now assumed the stiff, impassive, chill expressions that the English assume when they are in a crisis and seething with emotion. MacKay didn’t talk any more, he just barked instructions, and CKS dictated to me in a frozen, beautifully detached style, as though he were reciting Shakespeare in ice. In short, everyone was brokenhearted and furious.