Dead of Winter

3

‘John Madden ?’ Lofty Cook looked sceptical. ‘I saw the name, of course, but it didn’t ring a bell. Are you sure it’s the same bloke?’

‘It’s him all right.’

‘Your old guv’nor?’

Billy Styles chuckled. He’d just had a flash of memory: himself as a callow young detective-constable, pink-cheeked, and with a waistline that was now only a memory. And of the man he’d been assigned to then. All of twenty years ago it was now.

‘I’d hardly call him that,’ he said. ‘We only worked together the one time and I was wet behind the ears.’

‘Still, he gave you your chance, didn’t he? Melling Lodge! What a case to kick off with. But then you always were a lucky devil.’ Cook glanced down at his colleague, grinning. Recently promoted to detective-inspector, he stood a couple of inches over six feet and was called Lofty by his pals, of whom Billy was one. They had joined the force at the same time, right after the last war, but though Billy had advanced more quickly — he’d been an inspector for half a dozen years now — it hadn’t affected their friendship, and Billy had been pleased to see his old chum’s familiar hatchet face split by a grin when he’d climbed out of the radio car that had brought him from the Embankment up to Bloomsbury.

Although the gale had abated overnight, its icy claws could still be felt gusting down the narrow street and the pair of them had taken refuge in the doorway of a stationer’s shop. Across the road from where they were standing, two detectives from Bow Street were busy searching the spot where the young woman’s body had been found. The area, marked with tape, lay at the edge of a small unfenced yard that backed on to a bomb site, a building that had taken a direct hit at some time in the past and was now, like countless other tracts of ground all over London, a gutted ruin. An assortment of debris had been piled up in the cramped, cobbled space — bricks, mortar, sections of plastered wall — and the corpse had apparently been left on the fringe of this refuse, with the legs protruding on to the pavement.

‘What happened to Madden, then?’ Cook asked. He offered Billy a cigarette from his packet of Woodbines. ‘After Melling Lodge, I mean? After he quit the force?’

‘He got married to a lady he met while he was on the case. She was the village doctor.’

‘Must have been something special,’ Lofty observed. Cupping his hand, he struck a match and lit their cigarettes.

‘Special …?’ Billy considered the remark, drawing on his fag. ‘Yes, I reckon you could say that.’ He smiled to himself. ‘Anyway, he bought a farm down there, Madden did. Same farm where this girl was working. Which explains why I’m here. The chief inspector wants the full story. He and Madden are old friends.’

‘Fair enough.’ Cook pursed his lips, exhaling a plume of tobacco smoke into the frosty air. ‘But there’s not that much to tell. A case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, if you ask me.’

It was an opinion Billy had already heard voiced, and by the chief inspector himself when he’d been summoned to his office not half an hour earlier.

‘Odds on it was a casual assault, a crime of chance.’Sinclair had shown him the initial Bow Street report. ‘I’ve just spoken to John. The girl had only been with them for two months. She’d been given the weekend off and come up to London to see her aunt. Find out what you can. But don’t spend too much time on it. Just determine the facts and report back.’

The chief inspector had not thought it necessary to refer to the case Billy had been working on, a tortuous investigation into the sale by a black-market ring of petrol and heating fuels stolen from military depots, which had ended only the week before in a successful prosecution; nor the few days’ leave he’d been promised. With the shortage of staff that had prevailed for several years now, detectives were expected to put aside their personal lives as and when occasion demanded it.

‘And just so you’re clear in your mind, I’m not looking for an excuse to take this off Bow Street’s hands. We’ve enough on our plate as it is. Just see to it there are no loose ends.’

These last words had been spoken with a scowl, as though his listener was known to be contemplating just such an outrage, from which Billy, armed with his sleuth’s intuition, had deduced that the old boy’s gout must be playing up. In spite of his awesome reputation, the chief inspector had his critics at the Yard and the suggestion had been made in more than one quarter that it was time he was put out to pasture. Billy, though, would have none of it. Having come under Sinclair’s eye early in his career, and in circumstances where his inexperience might have cost him dear, he had never forgotten how the chief inspector, for all the sharpness of his tongue, had forgiven him his mistakes. And allowed him to profit from them.

He’d been more than content, too, with the orders he’d been given, particularly when he’d found out who was in charge at Little Russell Street. The Yard’s habit of interfering in other divisions’ business, of keeping plum cases for themselves, was often a sore point and he was glad he could tell Lofty that the investigation was still his to conduct. Given the rawness of the morning, neither of them had been disposed to dally and Cook had quickly shepherded him to the shelter of the stationer’s doorway, where Billy learned that the body of Rosa Nowak had been removed to the mortuary at Paddington overnight after the pathologist called to the scene had examined it by torchlight.

‘Who was the sawbones?’ he asked.

‘Ransom, from St Mary’s. He thought it most likely she was strangled but said he’d give us a definite opinion later today after he’s had her on the slab.’ Cook stamped his feet to keep warm. ‘It took us a while to discover who she was. We didn’t find her wallet until it was light.’ He nodded towards the two plainclothes men who were busy searching the rubble. ‘She must have been carrying it in that basket.’ He pointed to the object which was lying tipped over beside the white silhouette formed by the tape. Billy could see some apples lying loose there, mingled with the remains of broken eggshells. ‘The wallet ended up under a piece of corrugated iron. It had her identity card inside.’

‘What’s your opinion, Lofty? Do you think it was a sexual assault?’

‘Looks that way to me.’ The Bow Street inspector nodded. ‘She was lying on her back when we found her. Mind you, I don’t think he got very far. Her coat was still buttoned up when we found her. It occurred to me he might have killed her by mistake.’

‘Oh …?’ Billy lifted an eyebrow.

‘Squeezed too hard, maybe. Then run off when he realized he’d topped her.’ Cook shrugged. ‘But that’s only a guess.’

‘I read it was a WPC who got here first.’

‘That’s right. Name of Poole. Lily Poole.’ Cook grinned. ‘She’s stationed at Bow Street. Keen as mustard. She was walking back to the station after her shift when she heard the warden blowing his whistle and came over here to see what all the fuss was about. Didn’t waste any time, either. Went straight up to Great Russell Street — there’s a police call box there — and rang the station. By the time I got here she was already knocking on doors. But it didn’t do any good. This isn’t a residential street. Just shops and businesses. We spoke to one or two people who’d heard the warden’s whistle, but nobody who saw anything.’

‘Do we know when she was killed?’

‘Almost to the minute. It was a little after ten o’clock. That’s thanks to the warden. Name of Cotter. He’d bumped into her earlier. They had a chat. The last he saw of her she was walking down the street from that corner.’ Cook pointed to his right. ‘Twenty minutes later he came back — he was on his way home — and he tripped over the body.’

Billy nodded, taking it all in. He waited while a group of women dressed in dun-coloured overalls under their coats, and with their hair tied up in scarves or handkerchiefs, went by. They were trailed by a pair of WAAFs, who craned their necks to look at the two detectives bent double in the yard and at the uniformed constable who was standing guard there.

‘Maybe all he meant to do was rob her?’ he suggested.

‘I thought of that. But it doesn’t seem likely.’ Cook blew on his fingers. ‘Her wallet may have disappeared when she dropped her basket. But he didn’t go through her things.’ He gestured at a suitcase bound with cord that was lying on the pavement beside the yard.

‘I understand she was on her way to visit her aunt. Does she live nearby?’

‘Just round the corner, in Montague Street. A Mrs Laski. She’s a widow, quite an elderly lady. Naturalized. Been living here since the Twenties. She’d sat up all night waiting for her niece to arrive, then rang the station this morning. By that time we’d found the girl’s wallet, so I had to take her over to Paddington to identify the body. Poor woman. Rosa was her only family. She got here soon after war broke out, but her parents were still in Poland, and they’re gone now most likely, or so Mrs Laski reckons.’

‘Gone?’

‘They’re Jewish,’ Cook explained. He caught Billy’s eye.

‘Anyway, she worked for a couple of years in the Polish community, Rosa did. Looking after refugee families, that kind of thing. But she wanted to be in the country — she grew up in a village — so she joined the Land Army. Her first job was on a farm in Norfolk, but that packed up earlier this year when men invalided out of the services came home looking for work. That’s when she was sent to Surrey. To Mr Madden’s place. This was the first time she’d come up to London. She was planning to spend the weekend with her aunt and then go back on Monday.’

The inspector’s face split in a yawn, and Billy wondered how much sleep he’d been getting. It was a problem everyone faced these days, a sort of national disease. After five years of war, five years of rationing and restrictions, a deep fatigue had settled like snow on the whole population. It could be dangerous, particularly in a job like theirs, his and Lofty’s. It was easy to miss things.

‘What about men friends?’ he asked.

‘None, according to the aunt. When she came here from France at the start of the war she travelled with a Polish boy, but he was just a friend, and anyway he joined up and was killed in North Africa. She was shy with men, Mrs Laski says. Old-fashioned when it came to the opposite sex.’ Cook shrugged.

‘In other words, she wasn’t the sort of girl who would have picked up a man, say. Or let herself be picked up.’

‘Out of the question. Or so her aunt reckons. I put it to her myself. Had to. Anyway, the girl was alone when the warden ran into her. That’s for certain.’

Billy grunted. He trod on his cigarette. ‘Are you done then?’ he called out to the two men who’d been busy in the yard. One was named Hoskins, the other Grace. With more than twenty years on the force, Billy had made the acquaintance of just about every plainclothes man in London at one time or another, and worked with a good many of them.

‘Finished, sir.’ It was Hoskins who replied. Plump, and purple in the face despite the gelid air, he’d been making heavy weather of all the bending required by their task and stood breathing heavily beside the taped barrier that he and his partner had just erected at the edge of the yard with the help of a pair of iron stakes salvaged from the rubble. They were busy decorating it with a police notice on which the words KEEP OUT were printed in large capitals.

‘Let’s see what you’ve got.’

Trailed by Cook, Billy crossed the street and went down on his haunches to examine the objects the pair had retrieved and laid on a strip of cardboard. Besides the apples spilled from the basket they’d found two brown paper parcels, each containing a plucked chicken, three jars of homemade jam and a crock of honey.

‘She must have brought those up from the country,’ Joe Grace remarked. A thin, hard-faced man with the rank of detective-sergeant, he’d been one of a team of which Billy had been a part that the Yard had set up before the war to deal with the smash-and-grab gangs active in the capital at that time. ‘There are two loaves of bread and a round of cheese jammed in at the bottom. We left ’em there.’ He nodded at the basket which still lay beside the taped outline of the body. ‘We also found these.’ He indicated three matched buttons lying separate from the larger items, one of them still with a curl of thread attached to it. ‘They were on the ground, near where her head was. Must have come from her coat.’

‘No, they couldn’t have.’ Cook intervened. ‘The buttons were all done up when we found her. There were none missing.’

‘Where’s it now?’ Billy asked.

‘At the mortuary. She was still wearing it when they took her away.’ He turned to Grace. ‘Is that all?’ he asked.

‘Pretty much.’ The detective shrugged. ‘The rest was just odds and ends.’ He pointed to a handful of items deposited near the edge of the piece of cardboard which included an empty bottle of lemon rum, a broken comb, two hairpins and the chewed stub of a lead pencil, all coated with dust. Completing the haul were four charred matchsticks, which Billy examined with interest. He noticed that although their tops were blackened the stems beneath had hardly been touched by the flame.

‘Looks like someone was trying to strike a match in the wind,’ he remarked. ‘And lately. The wood’s still fresh. There’s no sign of weathering.’ He rose, stretching his cramped leg muscles.

Cook spoke to the two plainclothes men. ‘You can put all this stuff back in the basket and take it to the station. Her suitcase, too. I’ll deal with them later. We’ll have to put up posters in the area. We need to know if anyone saw the girl earlier. Other than the warden, I mean.’ Yawning, he glanced at Billy. ‘Well, what do you think?’

Billy reflected. So far he’d heard nothing to suggest that Lofty wasn’t right in his assessment. It seemed likely the girl had encountered her killer by accident in the darkness of the blackout. If so, it was a crime of chance, just as the chief inspector had supposed. But he wasn’t ready to make his report quite yet. Sinclair’s caution about leaving no loose ends was still fresh in his ears.

‘What about slipping over to Paddington?’ he suggested. ‘I’d like a word with Ransom. He should be done by now.’

The corpse lay on a steel-topped table, hidden from sight except for the head and shoulders, which the orderly on duty in the mortuary had exposed by drawing back the white cloth covering it. Looking down at the lifeless face, so pale it seemed drained of blood, Billy recalled the photograph Lofty had shown him in the car coming over, a snapshot of Rosa Nowak which he’d obtained from her aunt. The dark-haired girl pictured in the snapshot had faced the camera with a remote and sorrowful expression, no trace of which remained now.

‘Well, there she is, poor lass.’

An elderly man, one who’d either been retained like many past retirement age, or volunteered to do what amounted to war work, the orderly offered his opinion unprompted.

‘Hardly looks dead, does she?’

It was true enough, Billy thought. Apart from a swelling on one side of her neck and a faint, livid mark in the same area the girl might have been asleep. As though it only needed a touch to awaken her. Glancing sideways at Cook, he saw the Bow Street inspector bending lower to peer at the white throat.

‘Can’t see that she was choked,’ he remarked.

The two detectives had arrived at the hospital only to discover that the man they’d come to see wasn’t immediately available.

‘Dr Ransom’s busy with another autopsy,’ the receptionist informed them. ‘A buzz bomb came down in Wandsworth last night, but they only dug out the bodies this morning.’

Left to their own devices, they had found their way downstairs to the mortuary, a grisly sanctum whose green-painted walls exuded a clammy cold unaffected by the change of seasons, where the orderly, at their request, had brought out Rosa Nowak’s remains from one of the refrigerators built into the walls of the echoing chamber.

‘You can wait if you like,’ he told them. ‘The doctor should be here any time now.’

Billy had been looking around. ‘Are those her clothes?’ he asked, pointing to a pile of women’s garments on a table in the corner.

The orderly nodded. ‘Dr Ransom said you might want to see them.’

Billy led his colleague over to the table and together they quickly solved the mystery of the loose buttons found at the scene of the murder. Examining the girl’s coat, which was made of dark blue wool and might have had a naval past, they found it was fitted with a removable hood of the same material attached by buttons sewn on to the collar. Only two of these were still in place. Loose cotton threads showed where three others had in all probability been ripped off.

‘I’d forgotten about the hood,’ Cook admitted. ‘We didn’t see it at first. It was hidden beneath her body. I only noticed it when the ambulance men picked her up.’

Other signs of deft needlework were visible on the young woman’s underclothes, which were undamaged but had obviously been darned and patched more than once. The embroidered blouse she’d been wearing, on the other hand, looked new, and to both detectives’ surprise proved to be made of silk.

‘What’s that?’ Billy’s eye had been caught by a saucer standing on a shelf above the table. He took it down.

‘Looks like a matchstick.’ Cook peered at the charred fragment of wood which was all the saucer contained.

‘Wonder what it’s doing there.’ Billy was still examining his find when the swing doors behind them opened and Ransom strode in, thrusting an arm into the sleeve of a white physician’s coat.

‘Sorry to keep you, gentlemen. We’re like the Windmill Theatre here. We never close. I’m afraid there’s another cadaver awaiting my attention, so this’ll have to be brief. Hello, Inspector.’ He nodded to Billy. ‘I didn’t know you were on the case.’

‘I’m not, strictly speaking, sir.’ Billy put down the saucer and went over to shake hands with the pathologist. ‘Mr Cook’s in charge. But the chief inspector has an interest in it. I’m to report back to him.’

‘Sinclair, eh? Then we’d best be on our toes.’

Ransom blew out his cheeks. A heavy-set man with jutting eyebrows, he had a reputation in the Met as a joker, famous for his bons mots.

‘You’ve seen the corpus delicti, I take it.’ He moved over to where the wheeled table stood. The two detectives followed. ‘There was little in the way of injuries to record. I dare say you noted the lividity on her neck and the swelling’ — he pointed to the slight disfigurement on the slender column of the throat. ‘The only real bruises I found were on her knees. She must have gone down when he grabbed her. See …’

He pulled the cloth off the girl’s legs, showing the purple marks on her bare kneecaps.

‘But that’s all, really. There was no evidence of a struggle. She didn’t get a chance to fight back. There was no skin under her nails, nothing of that sort. It was quick and clean.’

Billy glanced at Cook, thinking he might want to handle the questioning, but found that his colleague had chosen that moment to fall into a doze. Lofty’s lack of sleep had finally caught up with him; he was swaying on his feet, his eyelids fluttering.

‘No evidence of a struggle, you say?’

‘That’s right, Inspector.’

‘He didn’t sexually assault her, then?’

‘Good heavens, no.’ Ransom frowned. ‘Why on earth …? Oh, yes, of course.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘It did look that way last night when we found her. The inspector and I discussed the possibility.’ He nodded at Cook, who’d come awake with a start. ‘I checked for it, of course, when I made my examination, even though her underclothes weren’t disturbed. But she wasn’t touched. Not there, at any rate. In fact, she was virgo intacta. Not that it makes any difference now, I suppose.’ He shrugged.

‘But if he strangled her …’

‘Strangled?’ Ransom’s bushy eyebrows rose in exaggerated amazement. ‘Did I say that?’

‘Yes, sir, you did.’ Angry with himself for having drifted off, Cook spoke sharply. ‘Last night, at the murder scene.’

‘Then I apologize. It was a hasty judgement.’ Ransom spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. ‘Put not your trust in pathologists. Particularly those called out in the blackout and made to examine bodies by torchlight. No, she wasn’t choked. Her neck was broken. It’s clear from the evidence. Let me show you.’ He removed the cloth from the girl’s head and shoulders again. ‘Do you see the swelling on her neck and that mark on the side? It shows that the killer grabbed her from behind, slipped his right arm around her neck and snapped her spinal column. And to anticipate your question, yes, he was a strong man, but it wouldn’t have required any special skill, particularly if she wasn’t expecting it. Just a good wrench of the head. The whole business would have been over in a second.’

He covered the girl’s head and shoulders again and then waited to see if the two detectives had any questions. A frown had appeared on Cook’s face as he’d listened and he caught Billy’s eye.

‘So what you’re saying is, he must have meant to kill her.’

‘It would seem so.’ Ransom shrugged. ‘It’s hard to see what other purpose he could have had in mind.’

‘But … but that doesn’t make sense.’ Cook spoke before he could stop himself.

‘Possibly.’ The pathologist looked owlish. ‘But that’s your department, Inspector, not mine. Now, if you’ve no more questions …’ He stood poised to leave.

‘One moment, sir.’ Billy spoke up. ‘That matchstick on the shelf over there. The one in the saucer. Where does it come from?’

‘What matchstick where?’ Ransom’s eyes swivelled in the direction of his pointing finger. ‘Oh, that. Yes, I found it tangled in her hair. Blown there by the wind, I dare say. She’d been lying on the ground for some time. Why do you ask?’

‘We found others at the scene. It looked like somebody had been trying to light one.’

‘The killer, do you mean?’ Ransom showed renewed interest.

‘Perhaps. But we can’t be sure.’ Billy glanced at Cook. His jerk of the head suggested it was time they too departed.

‘Yes, but … but why would he have done that?’ The pathologist was clearly intrigued by the notion. ‘If it was him, I mean.’

‘I’ve no idea.’ Billy’s shrug was noncommittal. ‘But he may have been looking for something — something he thought she had on her.’