Murder on the Home Front (30 page)

CHAPTER
24

Murder at “Charley Brown’s”

Poplar Coroner’s Court and mortuary stand in Poplar High Street, just past the bowling green. To find them you drive along Commercial Road into dockland, along the West India Dock Road into Chinatown—or what the Luftwaffe left of Chinatown—and turn left at Pennyfields and thence into the High Street. Here new blocks of fine flats and little prefabricated houses jostle with old, slummy, sooty buildings between which blow winds tangy with dockyard water.

The name Chinatown is still one which journalists like to write with a shudder and detective writers mouth with glee. Chinatown—it conjures up everything that is murky and mysterious, and vicious. But Chinatown today is really very mild. Most of it was bombed out of existence and the parts that are left are most respectable.

You still see notices and posters in Chinese on the street walls, and Chinese signs outside the little shops and laundries. There are many Chinese restaurants, one or two of them famous among Chinese gourmets, and there are little Chinese seamen’s hostels, very clean and well kept, and Chinese seamen’s missions, and small, dark houses with broken-down backyards where you may espy through the cracks in the fences rather Oriental-looking ducks and fowls squatting around in interesting Chee Yang attitudes. But all this is a mere shadow of what Chinatown once was, and the shadow is fading and may well one day be gone. For, I am told on excellent authority, the Chinese of Chinatown in recent years have indulged greatly in intermarriage, and now there is only one pure Chinese family left in the district, the family of a famous restaurateur.

Nevertheless, when Chinese witnesses turn up in court they still insist upon taking the oath in Chinese fashion, with a little pile of saucers to break and much rigmarole. (The coroner’s officer used to complain that with saucers getting to be the price they were, Chinese witnesses were becoming an expensive luxury.) And still, as you go through Chinatown, Chinese voices come from doorways and courtyards, singsong, light and strange, the language which has sounded for so long in this peculiar little corner of London, a corner once so fabulous and fearsome, and still full of memories.

It is interesting that during all the years I was with CKS we did only one postmortem on a Chinese. This was a man found hanging in a bombed-out house in Chinatown. He had been hanging there some months before anybody discovered him, and he had become quite mummified. He was plainly a suicide, but the police were unable to learn anything about him. Was he some tragic sailor who had returned to find his home and family blown to dust and had decided that life was no longer worth living without them? Nobody will ever know.

The Coroner’s Court and mortuary were built just before the war to replace out-of-date premises. By a miracle they escaped any grave damage by bombs, which dropped all around in a charmed circle, but always just missed the domain of HM Coroner, Mr. W. H. Heddy.

The Coroner’s Court is Tudor in design, with much old oak paneling and heavy beams. The mortuary is startlingly contemporary in design, a bit like the South Bank Exhibition. The p.m. room is mainly of glass and porcelain tiling; the walls are mostly vast windows, and there is subtle strip lighting in the ceiling. It might well be a chic Paris atelier. An excellent idea in a less hectic era, but during the war years this mortuary was either wide to the winds of heaven or windowed with thick blackout paper. From time to time it would be boldly equipped with new glass: “All shipshape again, Dr. Simpson,” the mortuary keeper would proudly announce. Next morning there he would be, sweeping up the glass…

The gray and pale-blue décor of the p.m. room is tasteful and restrained. There is an office for the doctors, paneled and furnished in light oak, businesslike and dignified, but in those war years very drafty and dusty because it too had no windowpanes left. There is a fine, glittering cold-storage room with vast, smooth-humming refrigerators. But the pièce de résistance of the mortuary is the viewing room, the little room to which relatives go to view and identify their dead.

Imagine an ornate alcove, rather than an actual room, with a big window for the said relatives to look through at…ah, yes, at poor old Joe, or Liza, or Harry, stretched out on a magnificent bier between two giant standard lamps, against an exotic backcloth reminiscent of the painter and stage designer Léon Bakst. Dramatic concealed lighting heightens the effect. It is certain that Joe, Liza, and Harry never lay in such splendor all their lives; rickety old beds, seedy bedrooms, were no doubt their lot, drab and uncomfortable. But now that death has robbed them of all feeling and all pride here they lie, in the most sumptuous style imaginable.

The relatives of the deceased invariably express immense gratification.

Opposite the viewing room is a little room for the Jewish watcher.

Jewish custom demands that the dead must be watched; the body, until burial, must be attended by a guardian, a mourner. This body watcher must not, under Jewish religious law, be a relative of the deceased. So a professional body watcher is hired.

These watchers are often old women, either very stout or very skinny, dressed in a collection of shabby garments apparently collected over the course of years and donned in bulky layers. They sit in their little rooms in the mortuaries, if not actually watching the dead at least very close at hand, and they brew and drink unspeakable tea, and snooze, and knit knit knit, through the long and weary hours when everything in the mortuary is dark, and silent, and still.

Armed with their knitting they always made me regard them as cousins to those old women who used to squat at the foot of the guillotine during the Terror. There was one at Poplar whom I would have liked to have asked if she did not find the mortuary at night rather creepy, but I could not summon the courage to question her. She was not an inviting personality.

The watchers are well provided for at Poplar, however, with a little room exactly opposite the viewing room, across a narrow passage, and a window of their own to peek through exactly facing the viewing-room window. So the watcher has only to raise her eyes from her knitting to be able to cast a vigilant glance at the corpse under her care.

The assistant mortuary keeper at Poplar in those days was a long-faced, lugubrious man who meandered vaguely about, dropping things and losing things and saying “Righty-o” to everything. As he bent over the bodies, sewing them up, he always crooned, “You Are My Sunshine…”

Once, when CKS was in a great hurry, I rushed into the p.m. room, snatched up what I thought was my white p.m. gown, and began putting it on. But the strange, sour-sweet odor of the dead made me stop and take a second look at the garment; it was a shroud. I gave a shriek and tore it off. It was a horrid experience for me, but it gave “You Are My Sunshine” a rare and hearty laugh.

He thought I was very prim and choosy. When he stripped the bodies he would drop their clothes in piles on the floor, and when these unsavory garments were scattered around my feet I used to sniff and give him looks. Once when I had a very low chair and asked if he could find me a cushion or anything similar to sit on he picked up a bundle of clothes he had just taken off a very dirty-looking army deserter and trotted up to me with them, rolling them together into a cushion-shaped bundle as he advanced. I refused point-blank to sit on them. “You Are My Sunshine” was definitely miffed. He considered me a spoiled type, I could see.

The coroner’s officers, PC West and the late PC Hyde, presided over this Tudor and twentieth-century outfit. They had a Tudor office next to the front entry and here they maintained a gorgeously cozy, never-failing fug. They had a nice little fire in the Tudor fireplace, two tables, two phones, a map of Europe with Hitler’s intended conquests marked in black, another map which West studded with flags showing the Allied advances against the enemy, a collection of framed family snapshots, a huge Victorian pincushion in which Hyde kept his pins, a kettle on the stove, tea things, and a cupboard crammed with stacks and stacks of Spilsbury p.m. reports, all written in the Great Man’s illegible and inimitable hand.

In this office cups of strong, sweet tea were dispensed to a host of callers ranging from Scotland Yard chiefs to police constables, Home Office pathologists, local newspaper reporters, lawyers, undertakers, seamen, mission workers, Oriental interpreters, firemen, clergymen, and a small child who used to pop in two or three times a day for “weeties.”

PC Hyde was a big, quiet, gentle, charming man with a deceptively languid smile and quick, perceptive eyes. He and I were
sympathique
. One day when I charged in, grabbed a history sheet with a brief “Thank you” and charged for the door again, Hyde’s slow, slyly humorous voice came after me, “Ah, Miss Molly, and just to think that Nature really intended you and me for the coach-and-wagon days.”

Hyde had been born in Bedford and came to London as a shy, simple country boy, as he put it. He had joined the Metropolitan Police and spent thirty years in East London, becoming an expert on the district. Despite this he had retained his round, ruddy country face and a certain deliberation and simplicity of manner. He was kind, helpful, and when he died he had friends who missed him everywhere.

His partner, West, was as truly a Londoner as Hyde was not. Nervous energy exuded from him in all directions; his face was pale, quick and witty, his humor cynical and on the dot, his comments caustic. When the bombs fell he was very resigned. “Hitler’ll get me. Of course he’ll get me. I’m one of his targets. Know where I ought to be, don’t you, Miss Molly? Marked up there on that map, in black.”

Dr. Simpson didn’t believe in cups of tea during working hours, but on slack afternoons he would make an exception in favor of Hyde and West, and together we would all settle down in their office to a good strong brew and conversation. Being policemen, they of course adored chatting, and their chat was most interesting. They knew the district inside out, and could talk knowledgeably about everyone from Clement Attlee to Comrade Phil Piratin, from these two political gentlemen to the local night-blooms of the district, past and present, and of the local “fences,” missionaries, doctors, and murderers. But best of all CKS liked Hyde to reminisce about the East End of thirty years back; an East End abounding in thieves’ kitchens, notorious rooming houses, opium dens, and the like. Hyde would tell, a trifle nostalgically, of a Chinatown that really had been Chinese, of “Old Charley Brown’s,” that celebrated Limehouse tavern which in the good (bad) old days had been a jamboree of foreign sailors, strange tongues, loudmouthed brawls, knivings and beatings up, stuffed alligators, little live black bears on chains, cursing parrots, wonderful Oriental carpets, joss sticks, samurai swords, Japanese lanterns, brass gongs, sharks’ teeth, and a profusion of other marvels. “And he ruled over it all like a dictator,” said Hyde. “He didn’t stand for no nonsense, old Charley Brown. He was famous throughout all Limehouse, and it really was Limehouse then. We hadn’t cleaned it up. The police didn’t walk about singly in those days, you had to go about at least in pairs, and then you wasn’t really safe.”

And Hyde would sigh. “Ah, but it’s all altered now. Old Charley Brown wouldn’t recognize the place now.”

Old Charley Brown, of course, has become one of Chinatown’s legends. Hyde really had known the legend when Charley was king of the West India Dock Road, accepting astonishing gifts from seamen from all parts of the world and piling these gifts in his bar, so that it was a museum-cum-zoo-cum-bazaar.

Old Charley Brown had been dead for many years when Hyde was recounting to us these nostalgic tales, but Young Charley Brown, Hyde explained, had moved the business to fine new premises in the eastern suburbs and had decorated this new “Charley Brown’s” with part of his father’s astonishing seamen’s collection.

“They say it’s quite worth going in to see,” said Hyde. “But of course he gets an altogether different class of customers from what his father had to deal with,” he added with a twinkle.

The old pub was still standing on a corner of the West India Dock Road, and we passed near it every time we drove to the mortuary. It had been knocked about a bit in the Blitz and looked weary and dilapidated. It was, however, still open to the denizens of Limehouse, and although it had passed out of the hands of the Charley Brown clan it was still invariably referred to as “Charley Brown’s.”

One blustery March morning, several months after dear old Hyde had gone to join Charley Brown in a last, long rest, PC West phoned us with a message that had an old-time ring about it. “There’s been a murder at ‘Charley Brown’s.’”

Dr. Simpson said he would go down right away, and within twenty minutes or so we were scurrying up the steps into the little Tudor office of the Coroner’s Court.

Hyde’s place in this snuggery had been taken by PC Marshall. (It was a trifle confusing that we had a PC Marshall, and, of course, a West, at Southwark as well.) Poplar’s Marshall was a cheerful man, a great one for Keeping Fit. PC West assured me wryly that Marshall did physical jerks in the mortuary yard.

On this particular morning West and Marshall were busy in their office serving tea to several CID men, and West smuggled me a quick cup while Dr. Simpson went to the p.m. room to take a brief glance at the murdered man, who had already been brought in. While the tea was being finished, a small car drew up outside the mortuary and from it stepped a very tall, broad-shouldered man with thick, wavy hair, a face thoughtful and authoritative, and heavy horn-rimmed spectacles. This was Area Superintendent George Hatherill, and at sight of him everybody put down their tea and snapped to attention.