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- Herausgeber: Allison & Busby
- Kategorie: Krimi
- Serie: Blitz Detective
- Sprache: Englisch
First Published as Enemy Action. September, 1940. With London having endured the Blitz for nearly a month, people are calling for vengeance, but once again the night heralds more destruction. In Custom House, anxious residents dutifully head to the nearest public air-raid shelter as the warning siren wails. When dawn brings the all-clear, people disperse, but one man remains - he is dead, stabbed through the heart. Detective Inspector John Jago discovers that the victim was a pacifist. But why, then, was he carrying a loaded revolver in his pocket?
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Seitenzahl: 469
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020
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THE CUSTOM HOUSE MURDER
Mike Hollow
For my parents, who are not here to see this book but whose world and war this was
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
Broken glass slipped and crunched beneath his boots. It made him feel queasy – like when the rain brought the snails out onto the pavement and you trod on one in the dark. Only this was like stepping on a thousand snails, all the way down the street, and it felt peculiar because it wasn’t how things were supposed to be. This glass he was walking on was people’s front windows, smashed all over the road.
And yet he couldn’t help but find it exciting too – exciting in a bad way. Breaking windows was something you got told off for – as he’d discovered playing back-yard cricket the summer before last – but now windows were being shattered everywhere, every day, and people took it as normal. Everything was changing; rules didn’t seem to be rules any more. He kicked some of the glass to one side, just because he could. All in all, war seemed to be quite a lark. So far.
Not for his mum, though. She was poorly, and he began to worry he might have left her on her own for too long. It wasn’t the same as when he’d been little – if he woke up with nightmares then, she’d be there in the dark by his bedside, like a fairy, singing him gently back into peace, her voice fading into a whisper as he drifted away to sleep.
Now he was big enough to be out on his own, and she was the one who didn’t like the dark.
She said she was glad he hadn’t been born a girl, because men did bad things to girls in the dark, but she never said what. At night, when the warning sirens went and they were alone in the flat, her eyes would twitch round the room, looking for somewhere to hide, and she’d cling to him – not like she used to, holding him tight to comfort him, but more like the way you’d cling to someone if you’d fallen in the river and couldn’t swim.
He came to a corner. This would be how all that glass got smashed – as far as he could make out, the street he’d just come down was one house shorter than it used to be, possibly two. Some of his friends reckoned they could tell from the damage what size bomb it had been, a fifty-pounder, a five-hundred-pounder or whatever, but he wasn’t sure whether they were making that up. All he could tell was whether it was an incendiary or an HE – if an incendiary landed on the roof and wasn’t seen to it could burn the place out, but high explosives would blow it to bits. This one looked like an HE, because all that was left was a mountain of rubble and splintered timbers, littered with the smashed-up remains of what had been someone’s home – a kitchen sink, a toilet seat, a twisted iron bedstead. He hoped no one had been in the house when it was hit.
Mum had been asleep in the street shelter when he slipped out this morning, dozing at last after probably being kept awake half the night by the noise, but he’d been longer than he should have. It would be light soon. He didn’t have a watch, but it felt like he’d been out for a good half-hour. Quite a profitable half-hour, though.
It was a boy he knew from school who’d given him the tip. The best time for nicking things was to nip out of the shelter just before dawn, he’d said, and he was right. There was no school any more, of course – the council had closed it down when war broke out so it could be used by the Air Raid Precautions people for the wardens’ post and what-have-you. But that advice had been a good bit of education.
Not that he’d popped out for nicking. Definitely not. He could’ve done – there was plenty of stuff on offer in that last hour or so of darkness, when the bombs had done their worst and the sites hadn’t been cleared up, but he knew what it would do to his mum if he got caught.
He’d come out to get shrapnel. You could find it all over the streets if you were out early enough, and you could swap it with the younger kids. They thought it was bits of German bombs or aeroplanes, but it wasn’t – Dad said most of it was just what fell to the ground when our own anti-aircraft shells exploded, and Dad knew, because he’d been a soldier in the Great War.
Shrapnel was good for swapping – he used it mainly to get cigarette cards. The best were from just before the war – famous cricketers, cars, warships – and they were worth more now, because the paper shortage meant the cigarette companies weren’t giving them away any more. Sometimes if you swapped a set that lots of kids wanted – speedway riders or RAF aircraft – you could even get something like a Dinky Toys car.
He had a grimy hessian sack stuffed inside his jacket. Mum was going to use it to make a rag rug for the hallway as soon as she had enough bits of old cloth, but she wouldn’t be needing it yet. Besides, she used to tell him off for ripping his trouser pockets by putting shrapnel in them, so he reckoned it was fine to borrow it for carrying today’s haul. You had to be careful, though – if a copper saw you prowling round in the blackout with a sack over your shoulder he might jump to the wrong conclusions. So he kept an eye out, and if anyone in authority came close – which these days basically meant his dad and anyone else wearing a tin helmet – he’d drop it smartish and run like the clappers. There wasn’t much chance of anyone old catching him.
The sudden interruption of the all-clear siren made him jump, as it always did. Not quite as creepy as the warning signal, but even so, such a dismal sound. You’d think they could’ve come up with something a bit more jolly to let people know the bombers had gone. A week or so ago they’d had the sense to cut it down from two minutes to one, but it was still a dreary moan. He dropped a last couple of decent bits of shrapnel into his sack. Now his mum would definitely be awake – he’d have to get a move on.
He started to head back home. On both sides of the street the rows of gloomy old houses looked spooky in the morning twilight. They reminded him of the one the family used to live in – dark, poky little places that always smelt of boiled cabbage and rising damp. Where they lived now was much nicer. The council had put them into one of the new flats off Prince Regent Lane when he was little, when their old house in Canning Town had to be demolished to make way for the new Silvertown Way. A road to the empire, that’s what they called it, because now it was easier for lorries to get in and out of the docks and factories. Before, everything had to go across the old swing bridge over the entrance to the Royal Victoria Dock from the Thames, but now the Silvertown Way flew straight over it, on concrete legs. It was the only road he’d ever seen that went up in the air. His dad said it was the first one like that in the country and it would be great for the borough, even though it meant thousands of people had to have their houses knocked down.
The flat was all clean and modern, with plenty of light. The only problem was that you didn’t have your own back yard, which meant there was nowhere to put an Anderson shelter. True, they weren’t much use from what he’d heard – just little tin boxes, really, half buried in the ground, and in Custom House they always got water in them, because it was marshland, lots of it below high-tide level on the Thames. But at least an Anderson was your own, and you could make it a bit homely, with beds and blankets and an oil lamp. If there was an air raid and you lived in the flats you had to run to the nearest public shelter, the brick-and-concrete ones built on the street, and squash in there with fifty other people all night. There’d be babies screaming, old ladies crying, and people with smelly feet and clothes all in together, and no beds or lights either.
Where he lived, the nearest ones were in Nottingham Avenue. There were three of them in a row, and he’d left Mum in the one at the far end from where he was approaching. She usually went straight home when the all-clear sounded, to see if the flats were still there, but sometimes she might stay for a chat with a neighbour. He put a couple of pieces of shrapnel in his pocket ready to show her, just in case she asked what he’d been up to, but then he stowed the rest under a bush in front of an empty-looking bomb-damaged house. He could pick it up later – he didn’t want her seeing how much he’d got and telling him to put it in the salvage collection.
He reached the last shelter and looked inside. It was darker in there than outside on the street, and his eyes took a moment to adjust. It was empty. She must’ve gone home, he thought. He’d go too, but first he’d have a look round in here and the other two shelters. Most people rushed away as soon as the all-clear had gone, especially if they had jobs to go to, and if there were no ARP wardens around you could sometimes find some good pickings on the floor. He’d once found a cigarette case that must have been dropped and then kicked under a bench.
No such luck today, it seemed. There was nothing in this shelter, nor the next. He came to the third and went in, again waiting for a moment so his eyes could adjust to the gloom. It was the same as the others – nothing but the bare brick of the walls, and wooden benches along them where people had spent the night trying to pray the bombs away.
But this time there was something else. He peered into the far corner. It was a sack or something, right at the end of the bench. He switched on his flashlight and went closer, then stopped. It wasn’t a sack – it was a man, sitting, leaning with one shoulder against the wall, looking like he was asleep. Or maybe he was drunk. You didn’t go flashing a torch in the face of drunks in a place like this – like as not they’d give you a clip round the ear as soon as look at you.
The boy slid his thumb onto the button to switch the torch off, but stopped. There was something else. The man’s coat was open, and there was a dark patch on the front of his white shirt that glistened as the beam of light passed across it. Slowly, cautiously, he moved the light upwards, and then froze. He could see the man’s face right in front of him – it was set in a contorted grimace, and the eyes were staring straight at him.
He felt his own eyes blink several times before he realised the man’s had not moved at all. They were wide open, but he wasn’t looking at anything.
CHAPTER TWO
Detective Inspector John Jago pushed open the door to his bathroom. It was small, but a luxury to be thankful for when he thought of the old zinc bath that had hung on the back of the kitchen door in his childhood. That was what many people in West Ham still had to make do with, taking it down on bath night every Friday and laboriously fetching hot water from the copper to fill it – unless the fire had gone out, in which case there was none to fetch. He was lucky, with hot water from the tap whenever he wanted it.
His back was stiff from another night in the Anderson shelter, and a soak would do it good. All he had to do was get the geyser going. He struck a match and tried to light the gas, but nothing happened. One of the night’s bombs had probably broken the gas main somewhere, and when the Gas Light & Coke Company’s men might be able to mend it was anyone’s guess. He’d just have to wash in cold water, but he’d done plenty of that in his time. Should’ve had that back boiler put in, he thought. If he’d done that a couple of years ago, as he’d planned, he’d be heating his water with coal now, not relying on the gas supply. One way or another, though, he hadn’t got round to it. There was no chance of getting anything like that done now the war was on, and what was the point if you might be bombed the next day? Anyway, the country had already had a taste this year of what the government liked to call ‘short-term rationing’ of coal, so there was no knowing how long that would stay available.
It was Sunday morning, and he’d woken at precisely six-fifteen. Before last September, in what increasingly seemed to have been the good old days, he used to wind up his bedside clock on a Saturday night but switch the alarm off, in reasonable hope of getting a lie-in the following morning. Sunday was still his day off, as far as it could be for any police officer, even in peacetime, but there was precious little hope of sleeping in nowadays, even when he’d remembered to push the alarm button firmly down. Who needed an alarm clock when you had the sirens? The all-clear had woken him today, just when he’d dozed off after lying awake for what felt like hours.
He decided to go for a walk to loosen his joints. The park wasn’t far away, so he headed there – it ought to be quiet at this time of day, especially on a Sunday. It was the twenty-ninth of September 1940. Soon they’d be into the second winter of the war, he thought, and if the air raids went on things would be a lot grimmer this year than last.
He’d put his overcoat on as he left the house and was glad he had – there was a definite chill in the air. It looked as though the Indian summer that had warmed the weeks since the Blitz began was over. All around, the leaves were starting to fall, except where bombs had already blasted all the foliage and half the branches from trees in what had once been quiet residential avenues. Now there was only the usual damp autumn to look forward to, and after that the fog and frosts of winter.
The park was a tonic. The sun, still quite low in the sky, was gleaming through the trees, and the grass smelt sweet with early morning dew. He enjoyed the space, the openness of it, and the fresh air began to lift his spirits. It could still be a good day.
He walked once round the park, thinking back over the weeks since the Germans had launched their first big raid on the seventh of September. West Ham had suffered grievously, with the docks in the south of the borough seemingly the main target, and the whole world had been in turmoil. There was nothing much to celebrate. But then his thoughts turned to Dorothy – meeting her had brought a bright light into the darkness that seemed to swirl around him, and getting to know her had begun to change him.
He’d realised how much he liked being with her, and in that realisation he’d had to admit to himself that he found her very attractive. There was a strength about her that seemed to spill over into those around her, and he felt as though she’d brought him back to life after twenty years in an emotional limbo.
He wondered what she’d be doing today. At this time of the morning he hoped she’d still be sleeping peacefully in the safety and comfort of the Savoy Hotel, unless the Luftwaffe had chosen to roam over that way in the night. And later on? He pictured her in her grey woollen suit, sitting at her typewriter, pounding out a story for some hungry editor on her newspaper across the sea in Boston, or scribbling notes with the telephone receiver wedged under her chin. The one thing he couldn’t imagine was her lounging about doing nothing – she had such energy that she would surely be working.
It wasn’t just this morning in the tranquillity of the park that his mind was on Dorothy – she was increasingly filling his thoughts. And yet there was also the constant presence of someone else in the picture, or perhaps more precisely just out of it. It was as if Eleanor were there too, looking over his shoulder and seeing what he saw. The woman who’d been physically absent from his life since 1918 inhabited his memory still as the nineteen-year-old nurse who’d cared for him in a hospital in France, a bittersweet distraction now elevated beyond human frailty and shorn of imperfection by the passing of time.
His circuit of the park brought him back to the gate where he’d started, and he wondered whether his thoughts had done nothing more than meander round in a big circle too. He decided to head for home and breakfast, trying to make plans for the rest of his Sunday on the way – plans that if he had his way would not include the investigation of crime on K Division of London’s Metropolitan Police. He wasn’t accustomed to having a whole day to use as he pleased. Ever since he’d been a detective his working day had started at nine in the morning – earlier when required – and regularly gone on till ten at night. Perhaps he would just go home and sleep.
He reached the main road and waited for a red double-decker bus to grind its way past before he crossed. It reminded him of the tram ride he’d taken along the Embankment with Dorothy, and the pledge he’d made to himself to break free from the restrictive tramlines on which he’d been content to let his life run. He began to wonder whether the unseen presence of Eleanor might itself have been one of those tramlines, steering his life over the past two decades. If that was a fact, it was a hard one to face.
He tried to push the spectre of Eleanor out of his mind and refocus his thoughts on Dorothy, but thinking of her was troubling too. It was madness. He was surely too old to fall for her, in fact too old to fall for anyone. And yet it wouldn’t go away. Would he have to tell Dorothy what he felt about her? He paled at the thought – some things were just too difficult to contemplate. It was all so complicated – and yet there remained the simple, undeniable facts, like the strangely warm feeling he got when he thought of her gentle laugh and her smile.
He was still lost in these thoughts as he approached his house, head down, eyes on the pavement at his feet. He got to his front gate, lifted the latch and looked up to find a uniformed police constable waiting on his doorstep.
‘Sorry, sir, but you’re wanted. Suspicious death in an air-raid shelter down in Nottingham Avenue. Shall I tell the station you’re on the way?’
Jago sighed, nodded, and went into the house to find his car keys.
CHAPTER THREE
The night’s damage to buildings and roads alike was substantial, and it was five to eight by Jago’s watch when he arrived in Nottingham Avenue. The road ran along one side of the West Ham Greyhound Stadium in Custom House, down in the south-east corner of the borough, close by the docks. He peered at the shelter through the windscreen of his Riley Lynx. Like the other two identical structures farther down the street, it was about twenty feet long, nine feet wide and eight feet high, and had been built in the road, leaving just enough room for vehicles to pass on one side. It looked strangely out of place, as if a householder had decided to flout all rules and regulations and erect a large shed in the roadway to save taking up space in his garden. Jago’s mouth felt dry as he cast an eye over the squat building. There was something brutal and ominous about its windowless walls – more like a tomb than a refuge.
It was one of the public shelters that he tried to avoid – built on the surface and exposed to blast, with a flat concrete roof in danger of collapsing if the walls gave way. Death traps, he called them.
He parked the car a little farther down the road, where it wouldn’t obstruct the traffic, and walked over to where he could see Detective Constable Cradock standing by the shelter doorway, waiting for him.
‘Morning, guv’nor,’ said Cradock. ‘Didn’t expect to see you today.’
‘Nor I you, Peter. So much for our day off. How long have you been here?’
‘About twenty minutes, sir. They tried phoning you at home from the station, but apparently there was no answer – so they ran me to ground in the section house. I wasn’t long out of bed and I’d just made myself a bit of breakfast in the mess room but I had to leave it and come straight down here, so I expect one of my dear colleagues will have scoffed the lot for me before I get back.’
‘So you’ve had about as much breakfast as I have. The station must’ve been phoning when I was out for a walk.’
‘Yes. I told them to send the local PC to wait at your house until you came back, and to get the police surgeon down here – oh, and I told them to contact the pathologist. He should be here soon.’
‘Good. And where is the police surgeon?’
‘Been and gone, sir. You just missed him. Wasn’t too pleased to be called out so early on a Sunday morning as far as I could tell, and I don’t think that was because it’d make him late for church.’
‘So he’s tucked up in bed again at home by now, is he?’
‘Couldn’t say, sir.’
‘All right for some. I’ve never met a poor doctor, but some of them do seem to work harder for their money than that man. He did manage to certify death before he went, I suppose?’
‘Yes, sir, that’s right. He says he reckons it’s death from a stab wound to the chest.’
‘That sounds fairly straightforward. Let’s have a look, then.’
Cradock led the way into the gloomy interior. Once they were inside he sniffed the air and greeted it with a loud expression of disgust.
‘Hope it won’t take long, sir – it stinks in here.’
‘Not a patch on my local park, that’s for sure,’ said Jago. ‘And these places might be a bit more tolerable if the council had put some electric lighting in them. Give me that flashlight of yours.’
He took the flashlight and swept it round the inside of the shelter.
‘The body’s over there, sir, on the bench,’ said Cradock.
They walked to the far corner of the shelter and stood over the corpse. Jago shone the light onto the dead man’s face. He appeared to be in his twenties and was clean-shaven, with dark hair, shiny with cream. His hair was ruffled and at one side it hung down over his forehead, but not far enough to cover what looked like an old scar above his left eye. His black overcoat was unbuttoned, revealing a grey jacket, a white shirt, and navy blue flannels. As the beam passed across his chest, a large patch on his shirt glistened. Immediately above this a gash about an inch long was visible in the fabric.
‘I haven’t touched anything,’ said Cradock, ‘since the pathologist hasn’t had a look yet, and as far as I could see the police surgeon didn’t disturb the body – he just had a quick look at the wound. You can see the blood on the shirt there.’
‘Yes, and plenty of it,’ said Jago, taking in the scene.
‘There’s a bit more on the floor, too.’
Jago pointed the flashlight to the area at the dead man’s feet and saw the blood, splashed over an area about two feet across. At the edge of the pool of light he noticed something else. It was a man’s hat – a black fedora. He stooped to pick it up and turned it over in his hand.
‘Hmm,’ he said, examining it with the torch. He judged the hat to be a medium-priced example, the kind a professional man on a tight budget might buy. It wasn’t new, but apart from the dust and dirt it had picked up from the floor it was in decidedly better condition than his own battered fedora – possibly an indication that this man had spent less time out in the recent bombing raids than Jago had. He ran his finger round the sweatband. It felt greasy, and one sniff confirmed the oily smell of Brylcreem. He couldn’t see the point of slapping on hair cream every day himself, but half the male population did.
‘I reckon this was his,’ he said, placing it on the man’s head. ‘Knocked off in some kind of struggle, do you think?’
‘That would make sense if someone attacked him. And there’s no weapon to be seen in here, so it looks like he didn’t kill himself.’
‘We might assume murder, then. Who found him?’
‘A boy, sir. Local lad. We’ve got him waiting outside.’
‘Let’s go and see him.’
Jago left the shelter, followed by Cradock, and took a deep breath of fresh air.
‘There he is, sir,’ said Cradock, pointing across the road.
Jago followed Cradock’s finger and saw a boy sitting on the pavement, his feet in the gutter. He looked about twelve or thirteen and was wearing a shabby dark jacket, threadbare trousers, and scuffed boots. He jumped to his feet as the two men approached, his face apprehensive.
‘Hello, sonny,’ said Jago. ‘I gather you found the body in there.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What’s your name?’
‘Jimmy, sir – Jimmy Draper.’
‘Address?’
‘7 Barrington Road – a turning up the road there.’
‘Telephone number?’
Jimmy laughed.
‘Not likely – we use the box round the corner if we have to make a call, and that’s not often.’
‘So tell me what happened.’
‘Well, I went in there and saw that man sitting all on his own. At first I thought he was asleep, but then I realised he must be dead. I ran out and found a flattie – a constable, I mean – and told him, and he said wait here, so I did.’
‘And how old are you, Jimmy?’
‘Thirteen.’
‘What school do you go to?’
‘Don’t go to any. I used to go to Custom House School in Russell Road, but then the war started and the council closed it down – made it into an ARP post. I got evacuated out to some place in the country.’
‘But you didn’t stay evacuated?’
‘Not for long, no. My mum needed me back here, so I came home.’
‘And you haven’t found another school you can go to?’
‘No. When I came back there weren’t any proper ones open. Some of the teachers that hadn’t been evacuated said I could come to these classes they’d set up, but it wasn’t with my mates – it was down some draughty old mission hall and only half a dozen kids in the class, so that didn’t seem like much fun to me. Besides, it was only about an hour and a half a day, so I wasn’t going to learn much, was I? In any case, I’ll be fourteen soon and I’ve got a job lined up – my uncle’s got a stall up Rathbone Market, and I’m going to work for him. Fruit and veg, you know.’
‘Tell me more about what happened. Were you in this shelter overnight?’
‘No, I was in the one up the end there with my mum, all night.’
‘Until the all-clear sounded?’
‘Not quite. I nipped out a bit before that when it was getting quieter outside – for a bit of fresh air, like. It was smelly in there.’
‘What time was that?’
‘That would’ve been about half past five, I suppose, but I haven’t got a watch, so I can’t say exactly.’
‘And how long were you out for?’
‘I don’t know – an hour or so, maybe. I know I was still out when the all-clear went, because I heard it.’
‘That’s a long time for a bit of fresh air.’
‘Yes, well, I collect shrapnel, see. Lots of my mates do, and we swap it sometimes – we have a little competition to see who can find the best bits.’
‘And what happened when you came back?’
‘I popped in to see if my mum was still in the shelter. She wasn’t, so I had a quick look at the others. When I went in that one over there I saw a bloke curled up in the corner, and it looked like he was dead.’
‘So how long after the all-clear siren was that, do you think?’
‘I reckon it was half an hour, not more.’
‘Did you recognise the man?’
‘No, never seen him before.’
Jago heard footsteps coming from behind and saw the boy glance past him. He turned round to see a woman approaching. She looked perhaps forty and walked with a kind of poise that struck Jago as perhaps not elegant but certainly self-possessed. She wore a tailored overcoat with an ARP armlet on one sleeve, and a white steel helmet with a black letter W painted on the front. A duty respirator was slung over her shoulder.
It seemed to Jago that for a moment she glared at them, her lips pursed and her brow knitted in an expression of hostility. The boy looked nervous and keen to be gone.
‘All right, my lad,’ he said, ‘you can be off now.’
Jimmy turned and hurried away down the street. The woman watched him go, then strode over to Jago and looked him in the eye.
‘Good morning,’ she said. ‘Are you the police?’
‘Yes,’ said Jago. ‘And you are?’
‘I’m the post warden. They told me you were here and that someone had found a body, so I thought I’d better look in. My name’s Hampson, Mrs Maud Hampson.’
She removed one glove and held out her hand to shake his. Her gloves, close-fitting and made from brown kid leather, looked as though they might have been expensive, but now they were scuffed and white with plaster dust.
‘Good morning, Mrs Hampson. I’m Detective Inspector Jago of West Ham CID, and this is Detective Constable Cradock. Which post are you in charge of?’
‘Post 1Q, at Custom House School. We cover the area from here down towards the docks.’
‘Thank you for stopping by. Tell me, that boy who’s just gone – do you know him?’
She looked again in the direction by which he had gone.
‘No, but I know his sort.’
Jago waited for her to elaborate, but instead she sighed, moving her hand across her brow to tuck a lock of hair back under her helmet. He noticed that this movement left a faint streak of grime across her forehead.
‘Look, Inspector,’ she said, ‘it’s been a busy night, and I still have a lot to do – I’ve got nine of these shelters in my area and I’ve got to finish doing the rounds for my damage report before I can go off duty. I just wanted to check whether you need any assistance.’
‘Thank you, but I think we have everything in hand.’
She stepped past him and peered in at the entrance to the shelter.
‘Don’t go in there, please,’ said Jago. ‘I don’t want the scene disturbed.’
She stopped and turned back to face him.
‘Very sorry. Just instinct, I suppose – one gets to feel very responsible for these places. Mind you, if you’ve stuck your nose in there you’ll probably have realised it’s pretty disgusting.’
‘Yes, it was a little unsavoury.’
‘That’s a nice way to put it. To be honest, it’s a disgrace, and it makes me very cross.’
‘What’s the problem?’
‘Bad planning before the war started, that’s the problem. I blame the government – they decided in their wisdom that if we ever had air raids they’d only last an hour at the most, so these public shelters were just for people caught out on the streets who couldn’t get home. It seems no one imagined hundreds of local residents would end up spending all night in them, every night, so as a result there’s no lighting, no heating, no lavatory, and most people have to sit on newspapers on the floor. There’ll be trouble if something’s not done about it soon, you mark my words.’
She paused, as if sensing she might have said too much.
‘Forgive me, Inspector, I’m sure you haven’t come down here to listen to my gripes. Is there anything you actually do want to know before I go?’
‘There is one thing, yes – were you by any chance in this shelter during the air raid?’
‘No. We have an unwritten rule in the ARP service, you see – a warden doesn’t take shelter during an air raid. I was at the post quite a lot of the time, because there always has to be someone there to answer the phone, and apart from that I was roaming around here and there wherever I was needed.’
‘Well, if anyone reports seeing anything suspicious here in the early hours of this morning, please get in touch with me at West Ham police station, if you’d be so kind.’
‘Certainly, I shall. But now if that’s all I can do for you I’d be glad to get back to the post.’
‘Of course. May I just take a note of your address, and your telephone number if you have one?’
‘Yes, I have a flat at the top end of Freemasons Road – number 213. No phone there, I’m afraid, but you can generally find me at the post – I’m on duty six nights a week and on call for sirens all day too.’
Jago closed his notebook and slipped it into his pocket.
‘Thank you, Mrs Hampson. You’ve been most helpful.’
‘Well,’ she said with another sigh, ‘that seems to be my job – being helpful to everyone. Nine months ago people were calling us the Darts Brigade, a bunch of army-dodgers and busybodies getting paid for doing nothing. Now they expect us to save them from the bombs, hold their hands, clean the filthy shelters for them, and be at their beck and call day and night. I’m tired – all I want to do now is help myself to a bit of sleep.’
She turned and walked away. As she did, Jago wondered briefly about the faint smell of whisky he’d caught on her breath when she sighed. Still, he thought, she can’t be the only one who needs a bit of Dutch courage to deal with a night’s bombing.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Right, let’s get back in there and have another look round – if your nose can bear it,’ said Jago as Mrs Hampson disappeared round the corner. He and Cradock entered the shelter again.
‘One more check of the floor,’ he continued, ‘just to make sure you’re right and there isn’t a weapon lurking somewhere.’
The concrete at their feet was littered with cigarette ends, crumbs of food and dog-eared sheets of newspaper.
‘That post warden was right,’ said Cradock. ‘They’ll have rats in here soon if they don’t keep it a bit tidier than this.’
‘Nothing of interest for our purposes, though, I think,’ said Jago. ‘Let’s take a look in his pockets – see if we can find out who he is.’
They returned to the corner where the corpse was still seated on the bench. Cradock carefully reached into the dead man’s coat pockets and pulled out the contents.
‘Not much here, sir,’ he said. ‘A wallet, a diary and two keys on a ring. No sign of a national identity card, though – that’s a bit unusual.’
‘Yes, but there must be lots of people who forget to take it out with them sometimes, especially in an air raid – and they get two days to produce it at the station before it’s an offence.’
‘He’s not going to be doing that now, is he?’
‘No, and we shan’t be sending him to the magistrates’ court either. Now, pass me that little diary and check the wallet. And let’s go outside – we can see better there, not to mention breathe.’
They stepped outside into the early morning light. Nottingham Avenue itself seemed to have escaped the bombs, but the noise coming from a nearby street suggested not everywhere had. They could hear sounds that a year ago would have been out of keeping on a Sunday but had now become commonplace: baskets of rubble being dumped into the back of a truck, and shouts from rescue workers coordinating their efforts. Then, abruptly, the shouting ceased, everything fell quiet. Listening for someone trapped in the wreckage, Jago thought. He’d seen it several times – the men digging would call for a brief silence in case anyone buried was making their presence known. He found himself instinctively listening too, even though he was far from the scene. As he listened, he became aware of birds calling and responding from tree to tree, and for that moment only it could have been a normal Sunday morning after all. Then the noise started again.
He opened the leather-bound pocket diary and found a name written inside the front cover.
‘Right,’ he announced to Cradock, who had crouched down beside the shelter’s wall and was examining the contents of the wallet. ‘His name seems to be Paul Ramsey, assuming this is his diary. No address here, though. I wonder what he did for a living. Any clues in that wallet?’
‘No, sir,’ said Cradock. ‘There’s not much in here at all. Just some cash. Two pound notes and a few bob in coins. But if his money’s still here, I suppose we can rule out robbery, can’t we?’
‘On the face of it, yes,’ said Jago, ‘unless perhaps it was an attempted robbery that went wrong. But not many people would kill for a couple of pounds in cash, would they? And the keys?’
‘They look like Yale door keys to me. Probably the keys to his house, I shouldn’t wonder.’
‘Good. If we can find out where he lived and it turns out he was local, we should be able to take a look this afternoon.’
Cradock took that to mean that the rest of his day off had just disappeared in a puff of smoke.
‘Yes, sir,’ he replied, trying hard to disguise the weariness in his voice.
Jago opened the diary at the ribbon page marker.
‘Here we are,’ he said. ‘This looks like the most recent entry – two days ago.’
He passed it to Cradock, tapping the right-hand page with his index finger. ‘What do you make of that?’
‘Friday, eleven o’clock in the morning, “T. H. Hampson”,’ said Cradock. ‘A meeting of some kind, I suppose. With someone called Hampson – that’s the same name as that ARP woman’s, isn’t it?’
‘Well done, Peter.’
Cradock thought he noticed a touch of sarcasm in Jago’s voice, but wasn’t entirely sure.
‘Not her, though,’ he said. ‘Her name starts with an M. Could T. H. Hampson be a relative?’
‘It’s possible. Something else for us to find out. The only T. Hampson I know of is Tommy Hampson.’
‘Local villain, sir?’
‘No – he played in goal for West Ham back in the early twenties.’
‘Oh,’ said Cradock, nodding as if grateful for the enlightenment. ‘I was just a kid then.’ He hoped this might be a good enough excuse for the fact that he’d never heard of the man. Since working for Jago he’d formed the impression that the DI found his lack of interest in football strange. ‘Good, was he?’ he added, to show willing.
‘Yes, but not as good as Ted Hufton, so he didn’t get to play in the 1923 Cup Final, which must have been a disappointment for him.’
‘Oh,’ said Cradock again. ‘Yes, of course.’
He leafed back a few pages from where Jago had opened the diary.
‘There’s some more things written in here for September, sir,’ he said, his voice brightening. ‘Ah, yes – I think I may have found out what he did for a living. Look, there’s an entry here that says “staff meeting”, and another one a bit further back that says “start of term”. He must have been a teacher, don’t you think?’
‘Quite possibly – or perhaps a headmaster, but he looks a bit young for that.’
‘There’s something else here too, sir, for last week. It says “Drink with Shaw, POW”.’ Cradock’s voice reflected his puzzlement. ‘He went for a drink with a prisoner of war?’
‘Unlikely, I would say. I believe the government’s quite strict about prisoners of war, and in any case, the way things have been going I don’t imagine we’ve got many yet.’
Jago thought for a moment.
‘No, I know what that is – POW, the Prince of Wales. And before you ask, I don’t mean he went for a drink with the Prince of Wales, because we haven’t got one now – I mean the pub. It’s not far from here – down the other end of Prince Regent Lane, by Cundy Road.’
He glanced at his watch. It was nearly half past eight. He looked down towards the far end of the street.
‘Where’s that pathologist got to?’
‘He should be here soon, sir.’
As if on cue, a black Austin saloon turned the corner and stopped. A young man got out, clutching a leather bag, and strode briskly towards the two detectives.
‘Good morning, Dr Anderson,’ said Jago as he joined them. ‘I’m sorry we’ve had to drag you out so early on a Sunday morning.’
‘Think nothing of it,’ said Anderson. ‘I was up already, and it’s a fine morning, isn’t it?’
Jago envied the man’s energy, and could only assume the doctor had somehow managed to get a more peaceful night than he had.
‘Where’s the body, then?’ said Anderson, looking round the street.
‘In here,’ said Jago, gesturing towards the shelter entrance. ‘Young man, looks in his twenties, may have been a schoolmaster. The police surgeon says he died of a stab wound to the chest. There’s what look like traces of blood on the floor, by his feet, and we found a hat that fits him on the floor, so there may have been a struggle. No weapon to be seen, so we assume someone killed him. I’ll obviously be interested to know your view on what kind of weapon may have been used.’
Anderson followed him into the shelter and began to examine the body by the light of Cradock’s torch.
‘Yes,’ he said, pulling open the dead man’s shirt, ‘definitely a wound to the chest, as the police surgeon said, and that seems to be the source of the blood.’
‘And would you say he was stabbed with a knife?’
‘Rather than something like a chisel, you mean? It looks very likely, but I’ll be more certain when I’ve taken a closer look at him and his insides at the hospital.’
‘And he was murdered?’ said Cradock.
‘That’s for you to say, I think – I assume you wouldn’t rule out manslaughter at this stage, for example. But as the police surgeon said, it certainly looks as though this was the wound that killed him. I suppose you’ll be wanting to know if I can say how long he’s been dead?’
‘Anything you can tell us will be helpful,’ said Jago.
‘The short answer is not yet. If he’s died of a stab wound, it’s notoriously difficult to say. I’ll take his temperature in a moment, which may help me to estimate, and I might also have a better idea when I’ve done a post-mortem examination.’
‘This shelter would’ve been crammed full of people all night, so it’s unlikely he’d have been stabbed then, isn’t it?’
‘I suppose that’s a reasonable assumption. The assailant would have had to use some force, and if you’re right and there’d been some kind of struggle too one would imagine it wouldn’t have gone unnoticed, but obviously that’s not something I can establish. When was the body found?’
‘About a quarter to seven.’
‘And what time was the all-clear? I didn’t note the time myself.’
‘Quarter past six.’
‘So there was about half an hour between the all-clear and the moment the body was found. Was the shelter empty by then?’
‘Yes.’
‘So subject to what I find in the post-mortem, we might surmise that he was killed sometime during that period, between six-fifteen and six-forty-five, on the grounds that it would have been easier for someone to kill him when the shelter was empty rather than full.’
‘Could he have been stabbed outside and staggered in here looking for help, or been dragged in here if the killer wanted to hide him?’ said Cradock.
Anderson took the flashlight from the detective constable and directed its beam downwards, first at the floor by the body and then at the surrounding area.
‘As Mr Jago said, there’s blood on the floor beneath the body,’ he said, ‘but nowhere else. That would be consistent with the victim having been killed right there, where he’s sitting. If he’d been dragged in while he was bleeding we might expect to find some trace of blood elsewhere on the floor, but it doesn’t look as though there is any. As for staggering in here by himself, that would depend on how quickly he died. But in any case, I imagine you might ask yourselves why, if he was desperate for help, he would seek it in a shelter that was likely to be empty. Wouldn’t he have more chance of finding help outside? And which is the more likely place for the killer to attack him – out in the open on the street or in a shelter that was empty because the all-clear had sounded half an hour ago? Those are questions for you rather than me, but on the basis of what I can see I’d say he was killed right here.’
‘Is it all right for us to move him now?’ said Jago.
‘Yes, I’ve almost finished. I just need to take his temperature, then I’ll get the mortuary van to take him up to the hospital. I’ll have a more detailed look at him there and see what I can come up with. You can join me for the examination if you like.’
There were few things Jago enjoyed less than watching a pathologist cut into a cold corpse in an even colder mortuary, so he shook his head.
‘If you don’t mind, I think I’d rather join you when you’ve finished. I need to find out whether he has any family so I can get someone to identify him. OK if I join you in a couple of hours?’
‘That should be fine. Now, where’s my thermometer?’ said Anderson, rummaging in his bag.
‘I think I’ll leave you to it,’ said Jago. ‘Come along, Peter.’
He led Cradock out of the shelter as Anderson bade them a cheery farewell. Watching a pathologist taking a dead man’s temperature was another scene he had witnessed enough times already in his career.
‘Shall I get some men to search the area, sir?’ said Cradock once they were outside. ‘See if we can find the weapon? Dr Anderson seemed to think it was probably a knife.’
‘I’m not very hopeful,’ said Jago. ‘If the weapon’s not here the killer must have taken it away and could’ve tossed it anywhere.’
‘Chucked it on a bomb site, for example?’
‘Exactly, and then how do we spot it? There are knives lying around all over the place – how do we know what’s a murder weapon and what’s just the contents of some poor soul’s kitchen drawers scattered in all directions by a bomb? And blood too – in the old days we might’ve found a bit of bloodstained cloth, and that would’ve been suspicious, but now you can walk round the corner and find curtains, sheets, clothes and Lord knows what else all over the place, and blood on half of it. Besides, right now I should think every man we’ve got is likely to be looking after the living who’ve been bombed out of their homes last night or helping to dig out the dead.’
‘Still got to try, I suppose?’
‘Yes, you’re right. Just do what you can with whoever can be spared. And there’s something else you can do. I want to know if this Ramsey fellow really was a teacher, and if so what school he taught at, so find someone who knows, and get me the home address of the headmaster or headmistress or whoever’s in charge. You’ll have to speak to the council, but the only people they’ve got working today will probably be doing a duty shift at the ARP headquarters in Stratford High Street, so start with them. If you have to get someone out of bed at the council do so, and tell them we need to know now, not next Tuesday.’
‘Yes, sir,’ said Cradock, mentally adding an interview with a school head to the list of the day’s forthcoming pleasures.
‘And before we go, let’s pop back in and check his other pockets. Dr Anderson should’ve finished that temperature business by now,’ said Jago.
They went back into the shelter and found the pathologist wiping his thermometer with a cloth and replacing it in his bag.
‘All done, Doctor?’ said Jago.
‘Yes,’ said Anderson. ‘There’s just one thing I think might be of interest to you.’
‘Oh, yes – what’s that?’
‘I had to move him a little to take his temperature, and adjust his clothing, of course, and that’s when I saw his right-hand trouser pocket for the first time. It looked as though there was something quite bulky in it, so I had a careful look. But I didn’t touch anything – I thought I’d better leave that to you.’
Jago nodded to Cradock, who put his notebook down and stuck his pencil behind his ear, then eased open the pocket. He gave a low whistle. Using his pencil, he carefully removed a dull black object and held it up for the other two men to see.
‘It’s a gun,’ he said.
Given that they could now all see it, Jago found the comment superfluous. But to be fair to Cradock it was unusual to find firearms in air-raid shelters, or indeed anywhere on the streets of West Ham, so he let it pass.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘A revolver.’
He took a step forward and examined it more closely.
‘A Webley Mark VI, by the look of it.’
‘You know your guns, then,’ said Anderson.
‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m no expert, but this one’s easy to identify – it was standard issue to British Army officers from 1915.’
He took the pencil from Cradock and scrutinised the weapon.
‘If you look down there below the cylinder, just above the trigger, it’s stamped on the side – “Webley Mark VI”. See? And those little arrowheads mean it was for military use. I had one myself when I was commissioned – it saved my bacon more than once.’
Jago pulled a clean handkerchief from his pocket and covered his hands with it as he lifted the weapon off Cradock’s pencil. With one hand holding the grip and the other round the barrel, he pulled the hammer down and broke the gun open with as light a movement as he could. He showed it to Cradock: all six chambers were loaded.
‘Right,’ he continued, tipping the rounds out of the cylinder and handing the gun back to Cradock, ‘keep this wrapped up so no one touches it. When we get back to the station, make a note of the serial number, then pack it up properly with the cartridges and send it off to the fingerprint boys at Scotland Yard. And take this dead man’s prints and send them too – I want to know if anyone else has handled this gun apart from him.’
‘Will do, sir. I wonder how he got his hands on this – not exactly a toy, is it?’
‘No – it’s a deadly weapon in anyone’s hands. But there must be hundreds of them around, if not thousands – so many men brought them home when the war ended.’
‘Even so, sir, it’s not what you expect to find in a place like this.’
‘On the face of it, no, it’s not.’
‘Especially loaded. Do you think that means he was planning to use it?’
‘We don’t even know if it was his – someone could’ve put it in his pocket after he died. And if it was his, it doesn’t necessarily mean he intended to fire it – he might’ve just wanted to frighten somebody.’
‘Or maybe he was frightened of someone who might want to harm him?’
‘Yes, or perhaps he just found it in the street and was going to hand it in to us – who knows? Whatever the reason, it didn’t help him much today.’
