No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (8 page)

She rang Pip Magnus at the Silverhurst Road nick and got the runaround so she used Tommy’s name and rank so the CID Department finally patched her through. Yes, of course he’d do that. With the girls – his word – the damage was all off the faces and they could hide the vivid extra mouth the bloke had developed where his throat had been cut. ‘Nothing to it at all, guv. When d’you want the prints?’

‘Yesterday but first thing tomorrow’ll do.’

‘You want them delivered to the Yard?’

‘I’ll send one of my boys in for them. Coming down your way tomorrow anyway, Pip,’ pause, ‘and Pip?’

‘Yes, guv.’

‘Don’t publish in the local gossip column or I might just reciprocate with some jolly stories of your time at Camford with that old lag Harvey.’

‘Right, guv.’ No shame.

Tony Harvey, one-time detective inspector, now doing an unpleasant stretch in the Scrubs. A copper who was bent as a bradawl, and had been caught bang to rights, in spades.

*   *   *

In room thirty-six of The Royal Victoria Hotel, hard by Sheffield’s Victoria Railway Station, Tommy Livermore stretched and thought, for a second, how nice it would be to get out of his clothes and settle down in bed. No chance of that. His old acquaintance ‘Razzy’ Berry, head of Sheffield’s CID – amazing how the old-boy network oiled everything official – waited for him downstairs. Over at the nick they had two men helping with their inquiries into Doris Butler’s death: Kenneth Craig and Pete Hill, both close friends of the late Mrs Butler. Close friends and possible murderers. Could be either of them.

For a moment, Tommy had a picture, vivid in his head, of Doris Butler lying spreadeagled in her little kitchen with her straw-coloured hair matted dark red and brown, and her head twisted at an unnatural angle. On the small dresser there was an apple with one bite taken from it, the flesh in the bite starting to brown, a packet of Bisto and another of powdered egg nearby.

Tommy Livermore had a golden rule with murder investigations: always get close to the victim and try to forget his or her faults. Doris Butler (née Haynes) had been silly: silly to have got herself married in 1938 at barely seventeen years of age; silly to allow her instincts to remain out of control; silly to encourage her men friends to disregard her marital status; silly to continue seeing other men in 1940 when her husband, Roger Butler – later Corporal Butler of 1
st
Hampshires (only in the Army could a lad from Sheffield find himself in the 1
st
Hampshires) – went off to war to be killed four years later on D+2 when his head was neatly removed by a passing shell fired from a German tank. Doris by then was already dead, battered to death in her kitchen by, Tommy was certain, one of her many other lovers. She was, as Ron Worrall succinctly put it, ‘cock happy’ a term with which Tommy wholeheartedly agreed.

It had been Ron who had first alerted Tommy to the area of half a dozen beech trees and undergrowth just outside the Butler’s little garden, on the edge of the scrubby meadow – Blue Fields as it was erroneously called. The trees afforded an excellent view of the house, and in its early June foliage the tiny oasis provided good cover that had obviously been used well by some watcher. The ground was trampled and scuffed, there was a selection of cigarette butts trodden into the earth (they counted fifteen in all) and the bark of one of the beeches had been picked off like somebody nervously picking a scab from a grazed knee. When he stood in this natural hide, Tommy saw that the bark would have been almost level with an average man’s waist. He pictured a faceless person standing, silent and unmoving with murder in his heart, fingers scratching at the crusty bark.

Doris would have told this shadowy lover, ‘Don’t be silly. He never touches me. Might not even be married.’ And the man would watch as Doris and Roger chased each other round the house and, maybe in this warmer weather, even leave the bedroom window open at night so that the observer could hear the sounds of the marital sport and so be driven into a frenzy of jealousy. Frenzy was the right word. Tommy had seen the results of sexual jealousy many times. Sex was a mainspring of murder. Many a nice young man or woman had been led fatally astray by sex which had the power to drop a bomb of madness into the brain.

On their first visit to the little semi-detached house in Bluefields Road, number 65, Suzie had done the door to door with Dennis Free and Shirley Cox, turning up a file full of rumours, hints and innuendoes: ‘No better than she ought to have been,’ was the common thread. ‘Had a number of men friends – mind you I’m not accusing her of anything wrong,’ cropped up a lot, and everyone said they, ‘didn’t really know her, Doris. Not really. Kept herself to herself.’ She never went down the Star and Garter, the pub at the end of Bluefields Road where the Butlers had lived since their marriage in ’38: the fields almost devoid of grass, wasted, like a burnt piece of desert, blackened and ravaged by the railway that passed by on its way to London, and on some days slick with the smoke from the steel works.

Even the next-door neighbour, Phyllis Carter, said she hardly ever saw Doris, but she had once successfully borrowed two chairs from her, the night her husband, Martin – a wopag with the Fleet Air Arm, currently in HMS
Formidable –
had been home on leave and they’d had a bit of a knees-up. ‘I arsked her to come and join us, but she never took no notice.’ When Suzie had looked puzzled she told her that a wopag (pronounced Wop. A.G.) was a Wireless Operator Air Gunner. ‘Brave buggers them wopags.’

Tommy, in room thirty-six of The Royal Victoria Hotel, glanced in the mirror, straightened his tie and put on what Suzie called his charming face. He was ready to go out to work in the interrogation rooms down the nick. Charm he considered was half the battle. Charm beat badgering, hectoring and brutality hands down. Mind you, Tommy believed that in every charming man there was an intransigent bastard crying to get out. No wonder the newspapers of Fleet Street called him Dandy Tom.

Yet all in all, at that moment, tired and about to face a possible killer, Tommy would have given a great deal to be with Suzie Mountford, though he’d never let her know.

*   *   *

In the nick, Pete Hill was what they called medium height, late thirties, running to fat with a sulky face and shifty eyes. Ron and Laura Cotter were already with him in an interview room reeking of uneasy silence. Big elegant Ron Worrall with his Roman coin cufflinks and the highly polished brogues which he wore like a badge of office, and little Laura, perfectly built with a penchant for the poems of A E Housman, her thoughts shaped to Housman’s thoughts –

Mine were of trouble,

And mine were steady,

So I was ready

When trouble came.

*   *   *

‘Hallo, Pete.’ Tommy smiled at him. ‘Sorry to have bothered you, but we think you may be able to help us.’ The direct approach, using Pete’s Christian name like an old friend. People didn’t do that on first meeting, even in a holding cell or, as in this case, an interrogation room, and it threw Pete a couple of degrees.

‘Aye.’ A shade to the left of taciturn.

For the first twenty minutes or so it felt almost like a casual conversation in a bar: Tommy relaxed and pleasant: Pete anxious to assist. Starting off with the whens and wheres.

‘We’re inquiring into the death of Doris Butler.’

‘Aye. Tha wants me to help wi’ inquiries. Sarn’t said,’ nodding towards Ron Worrall.

‘Good.’ Tommy sat himself down facing Pete. ‘You were, I believe acquainted with Doris Butler?’

‘Aye, ’course I knew her. She were—’

‘A close friend?’ Tommy cut him off.

‘My younger brother was at school wi’ her. That’s how I met her. I were two classes ahead of her.’

‘Then you were at school with her as well.’

‘Aye, a’were.’

‘When did you last see her?’

‘Wha’, our Doris?’

‘When did you last see Doris, yes.’

‘Saturday night the end of week before D-Day. Before invasion.’ He really said, t’invasion, but the t’ was silent.

‘And where would that have been?’

‘St Giles’ Hall. Dance. Dance there most Saturdays. I said to Alf Binns that there weren’t so many military people about. Not so many uniforms.’ Touch of a vulpine grin that was not very attractive. ‘Now we know, don’t we? They’d all gone south, ready for t’invasion. Bloody marvellous.’

‘And you saw Doris Butler at the dance?’

‘She’s there most Saturdays.’

Ten minutes on Doris and the dancing, then Tommy slewed onto another subject:

‘Why aren’t
you
in uniform, Pete?’

‘Me?’

Tommy nodded. ‘I’m not talking to anyone else.’

‘On account o’ me leg.’

‘What about your leg?’

‘Broke it. A fracture t’doctor said. Fractured me leg in 1937 and it wasn’t set proper. Mum said stay in bed and it’ll be all right: I mean, we wasn’t paid up on panel then. But it never set proper.’

And on to hammer in on Pete’s present employment.

‘Where do you work? What profession?’ This last a bit of a stretch. Tommy was half convinced that Pete Hill was involved in something dodgy. Wrong, Tommy.

‘I’m a qualified electrician wi’ me own business. Hill and Ashworth. Electrical maintenance. No job too small.’

‘And you go out and about?’

‘Aye.’

‘You climb ladders; you wriggle through attics; you adapt to difficult and different exigencies?’

‘Aye, I do, if that means what I think it means.’

‘And you manage to dance?’

‘After a fashion, aye. Can’t run, though. Can’t run and can’t march. Have difficulty climbing. Have to do a lot of marching in t’armed forces.’

‘So I’ve been told, yes.’

‘Very keen on marching they are. Never understood t’reason mesen’. I mean you’re there to fight, en’t you? Not to march, unless you’re on ceremonial stuff, like in front of Buckingham Palace.’

‘When you’re out on a job, wiring say, don’t you have to climb?’

‘I’m gaffer. I get others to climb if I can’t.’

‘You danced with Doris on that Saturday night, Pete? A week before the invasion?’

‘No.’

‘Had your own girlfriend, did you?’

‘Danced wi’ a girl called Eileen Shanty. We been seeing each other regular. Fat Eileen they call her, but she pleases me. I favour girls you can get hold of.’

Tommy Livermore muttered, ‘Let me have girls about me that are fat,’ then appeared to be lost in thought, trying to make up his mind about some profound problem.

Finally Ron Worrall leant forward and spoke for the first time, ‘Pete, would you be willing to have an X-ray?’

‘X-ray? X-ray where?’

‘See if you’ve got a bone in your leg, Petey.’ Tommy’s face in a hideous grin.

Pete Hill looked as though his nose had been poked into a skunk’s tail. ‘Look, now. Wha’…?’

‘We want to make sure you’ve got a bone in your leg, Pete.’ Laura almost giggled.

‘Now wait a minute. I came along to help. Tha’s what the’ wanted, and … You can’t think I … Oh no.’

‘Oh no what, Pete?’ Tommy’s face wasn’t even creased.

‘Wha’s this about? Tell me that.’

‘What d’you think it’s about, Pete?’

‘Well, obviously, Doris. I mean you said so.’

‘Yes. And…?’

‘And she’s been done in. Murdered. Some bugger stopped her clock.’

‘Yes, and we know you were a regular visitor to her house, Pete. You went to see her at least every third night when her husband was away. That’s what we wanted to talk to you about.’

‘By heck. You think I—’

‘Want to eliminate you as they say, Petey,’ Ron explained. ‘Eliminate you from our inquiries.’

‘But I was looking out for her. You must know that. I’m poor Roger’s cousin after all. He bloody asked me to look after her. If he was still alive I couldn’t bloody face him.’

‘His cousin,’ Tommy stated flatly. Not that it made any real difference of course, but it would have been nice if someone had said something. Some ninety-five per cent of murders were committed by a member of the family.

‘Aye. Roger’s mother and my mother. Sisters. So we’re first cousins.’

‘You didn’t think to mention this sooner?’

‘Well, everybody knows, just like they know Doris was a bit of a tart. Shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but it’s true. Never was close to her, not until Roger went off, got hisself called up. I tried to tell you, but you shut me up.’

‘You simply said you knew her.’

‘That’s what you asked. Did I know her? And what’s all this about X-rays?’

‘My sergeant’s sense of fun,’ said Tommy already forming a few sentences in his head: what he’d say to old ‘Razz’ Berry’s CID. Relationship of one of the suspects. Aloud he asked Pete Hill where he was on the night of 5
th
/6
th
June.

‘I were in London.’

‘Really?’

‘Aye, really.’

‘Anyone see you there?’

‘Three American officers and three or so other representatives from electrical firms. I were appearing in front of a board wi’ Cherry Ashworth my business partner.’

‘She’s not in HM Forces either?’

‘It’s a he and no, seeing he’s in his late sixties, near seventy. Was a sleeping partner until war started up. We shared a room in this American place out towards Rutland Gate: answering questions and showing off our knowledge to t’Americans,’ soft
t
again, unheard. ‘So’s they would use us as civilian contractors in their military hospitals and places. We applied for it; all official. We do it anyway for t’Army, Navy and RAF, but the bloody Yanks seem to have to test us out first. Make sure we’re fit enough to do it for them. Yes, I were with them having me breakfast on t’Monday when news of t’landings came out.’

Tommy thought a small vulgar expletive. Am I wasting my time? he wondered, then told Hill that he was free to go.

‘But stay in Sheffield; we’ll need to talk again.’

‘I can’t promise. The work I’ll be doing for them Yanks’ll be down south. In t’badlands.’

‘You’ve got a car and a special petrol allowance, no doubt?’

‘Aye.’