A Commonplace Killing Read online

  “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.”

  “They ain’t no friends of mine, Mr Cooper.”

  “Really? We’ll see what they have to say about that.” Cooper turned to look at the scowling kid, fixing him with a penetrating gaze for as long as Johnny met it. “Well,” he said, as the spiv looked away first, “I shan’t keep you any longer, Johnny. I know how busy you tycoons are.”

  He motioned to Policewoman Tring to move on.

  “It makes me sick, spivs like that getting away with it,” she said, as she changed gear and sped a little faster along the empty road towards Nag’s Head.

  “I suppose you’ve never had a pair of stockings or a lipstick from a blacketeer?”

  He felt a little caddish, but moral indignation always made him tetchy.

  She was quiet for a few moments.

  “The world’s in a pretty bad way, isn’t it, sir?” she said.

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  He watched the dusty misery of Seven Sisters Road slip past the window, marking the back alleys, the pubs with their grimy saloon bars, the cafés with their fly-blown sugar bowls: he knew it all with an unseemly intimacy and it had touched him, insidious, infecting. He sighed. It was too late now for insight. The fact of it was he was tired of it all, and the future was not any longer his problem.

  6

  Making herself presentable for the baker took some considerable amount of time; for, although she enjoyed catching the attention of men, she was always careful to avoid being seen as the sort of woman whom men regard as a “possible”. In any case the baker was a respectable married man whose daughter helped in the shop: she just wanted to look her best for him, so that he would be inclined to be good to her, in an under-the-counter sort of way. She wasn’t going to give herself for a loaf of bread, like those German housewives selling themselves on the streets.

  Her girdle was on its way out and the suspenders were unreliable, so she slipped a tatty old garter over her leg. There was nothing worse than having your stockings hanging down. A wave of despair washed over her. People shouldn’t have to live like this, she thought. And for a moment she wondered if she might actually cry. If she started she might never stop, so she pulled herself together and put on her skirt and jacket and inspected herself in the mirror. Motherhood had not ruined her figure, like it did for so many other women; when she was dressed – ideally with a good foundation garment – she still had the semblance of a good figure.

  She tied a patterned scarf around her hair in a sort of artistically arranged turban. It was hard to believe that there had ever been a time when she would no more dream of going out without a hat on than she would of flying to the moon and back; the war had caused so many standards to slip. She checked that her seams were straight and slipped on a pair of high-heeled black and white calf shoes; a pair of white lace gloves and the pigskin handbag completed the look. She checked the whole ensemble in the mirror. Coo, what it is to have sex appeal, she thought as she went downstairs.

  The hall w
as damp and gloomy: brown linoleum worn at the edges, ochre wallpaper. The whole house was hideous, dingy, a dead or dying thing, breathing a redolence of shell-shock, abandonment, neglect.

  “I’m off!” she cried. Her voice resounded in the indifferent silence. She stood there for a moment, at the top of the stairs, acknowledging the turmoil of her nerves, her frustration; the injustice of her situation. She closed her eyes telling herself that she could scream. Curiously, the thought settled her.

  Outside was bright and warm, the breezeless air thick with gasometers and railway smuts. In the heat there was the smell of something decaying. As she walked along the road, she thought how there was a terrible loneliness about the abandoned houses; how it was impossible to believe that things might ever be nice again. As she prepared to cross towards Nag’s Head, she could see that the line of badly dressed women formed outside the baker’s shop already extended past the tobacconist’s and the draper’s. Some people have nothing better to do than to stand in a queue all day, she thought. A few of the women, the narrow-minded ones, were looking her up and down as she took her place at the back of the queue. They were thinking how there was nothing austerity about her: how the powdered nose and the slick of black-market vermillion marked her out as one of those women who had had “a lovely war”. How she pitied them, with their headscarves tied under their chins like Russian peasant women and their patched and darned stockings kept up with threepenny bits. A bus passed by on the other side of the road, a flash of red breaking the monotony of the greyness of everything else. Muswell Hill, it said on the front, and briefly she wondered what it would be like to cross the street and board it; she was picturing herself alighting somewhere that had been largely untouched by the war, somewhere green and airy: somewhere nice. She could find a nice little room somewhere and a job in a hat-shop. On Saturdays she would go to the pictures. She would have lunches in nice places. She would meet gentlemen for cocktails. Nice men; handsome men, who were looking for a little harmless diversion. It would be just like the war again, only without the bombs and the filth.