3
YOU RASCAL YOU

Monday, 9 February 1942

She lay on her back in the gutter that ran across the middle of a surface air-raid shelter in Montagu Place, Marylebone. It was so cold a final resting place that Greenaway could see his breath hanging on the air in front of him as he stooped into the doorway, squinting at the scene in the pallid glow of electric lantern light.

The photographer and the Divisional Surgeon had already done their work, had left the throng of police that currently surrounded the building to develop pictures and write reports. In the few moments between their departure and the arrival of the next officer called to the scene, Greenaway hoped he might be allowed enough peace to think.

A green woollen cap lay across the threshold of the shelter. Slush fell from his shoes as he carefully stepped over it to approach the tangled form beyond. It had been bitterly cold the night before, snow swirling over the city, but for once the Luftwaffe had not come calling. There was no reason for this woman to have come here.

Her feet pointed towards him, her right leg slightly raised, her skirt pulled up to her thighs. A fawn camelhair coat lay rumpled beneath her, her arms still inside the sleeves, though the garment was open, revealing a green jumper that matched the discarded cap. She probably knitted them herself, Greenaway thought, as he knelt down beside her. Now her careful work lay in savage disarray, the jumper pushed up to expose her right breast, the white vest she wore beneath roughly torn away.

Greenaway opened up his murder bag. He extracted a pair of rubber gloves and pulled them on, breathing in the iron scent of blood. The woman’s head was propped upwards against the wooden bench that served as a seat, her final scream muffled by her own silk scarf, now wound tightly around her nose and mouth. Her eyes had turned glassy, unseeing, but the horror of her end still registered from the dark dilated pupils, from the swollen tongue protruding between her teeth and the gag, from the livid bruising on her neck.

Her tormented features could not show him for sure, but Greenaway did not take her modest garb and undyed, dark brown hair for that of the kind of woman who would have come in here to entertain a serviceman.

The only jewellery she was wearing was a plain wristwatch on a brown leather strap. No necklace broken in the struggle, no rings on her fingers, no brooch pinned to her coat. Just a matchbox, a powder compact and a packet of Ovaltine tablets lying by her side. Her torch had rolled a couple of yards away from her.

This woman doesn’t belong here, Greenaway thought, someone had to drag her here. Someone who thought himself clever, a bit of a card – someone who had gone to the trouble, after his frenzy was through, of picking up her gloves and placing them on her chest, palms outwards in an inverted prayer, the fingers pointing towards her face.

Greenaway felt a throbbing at his temples.

“Any sign of a handbag?” he asked the D Division copper who had made the call-out just before nine that morning, when an electrician on his way to a job had found her here. The thin young man stood just outside the doorway, arms crossed and blinking against the wind.

“No, sir,” the PC answered, turning his head. “Not in here. But there’s a squad of men out there looking.”

“Good,” said Greenaway, his eyes travelling around the entrance of the shelter. Loose mortar lay all over the place, fragments of which could easily find their way into the tread of a boot or shoe. He picked out some sample bags from his kit; he’d need to bag some of that up for evidence. And this …

Her watch had stopped at one o’clock. But when Greenaway lifted her wrist, it began to tick again.

“Ted.” Another shadow across the doorway, and the voice of Detective Chief Superintendent Fred Cherrill, Head of the Yard’s Fingerprint Division, a hangdog face under a bowler hat, regarding him with solemn brown eyes. Greenaway was glad to see those familiar, morose features. His comrade’s mind was an encyclopaedia of villainy rendered in lines and whorls, prints more vivid than any mugshot to him. Despite his senior rank, he insisted on always working murder scenes himself and nothing escaped Cherrill’s gaze. If this killer was somebody they already knew, he would be indexed in Fred’s mental rogues’ gallery. If he wasn’t, the DCS would find a sure-fire way of putting a noose around his neck.

“Fred.” Greenaway got to his feet, short stabs of pain in his knees as he rose from the concrete floor. They shook hands and Greenaway stepped back outside, exhaling the bitter aroma of death from his nostrils as Cherrill set up his powerful crime-scene lamp and went immediately to work.

Greenaway’s eyes roamed up and down the street, and on to the bare branches of the trees in Regent’s Park behind them, stark against the sleeting sky, and the barrage balloons that hovered over them all, like great grey elephants somehow floating in the air. Around him, workers hurried along with their heads down, wrapped and muffled up against the cold. Greenaway wondered if this Johnny could possibly be amongst them, if he was the type who liked to come back and hover around his masterwork, as the boastful arrangement of the woman’s gloves suggested he might. Without thinking about it, he lit a cigarette.

Inside, Cherrill crouched down beside the body, raised his magnifying glass.

Greenaway turned a slow circle, taking in a 360-degree mental snapshot of the terrain and everyone within it. Then he fished his notebook out of his pocket, jotted down his first impressions and all the questions that sprang to mind. Finally, dropping the butt of his cigarette into the gutter, he turned his gaze back into the shelter.

“Anything?” he asked.

Cherrill, seemingly lost in his inspection, said nothing for a while. Then he looked up, eyebrows raised. “Seems to have been a left-handed job,” he said, nodding.

“Chief Inspector, sir.” Another constable approached Greenaway, an older man in the uniform of a reservist, a pair of bottle-thick glasses resting on a nose threaded with red veins.

“Stokesby, sir, Marylebone Lane – the gaffer said I should report to you.”

“Oh, yes, constable?” Greenaway took in greasy grey hair, spots of egg on the lapels of a jacket shiny with wear.

“I was on Number 13 beat last night, that is to say, Marylebone Road, Baker Street, York Street, Seymour Place and here.” Stokesby waved a notebook earnestly.

“Right,” Greenaway opened his own again, licked the end of his pencil, “and what did you see here, constable?”

“Nothing,” the reservist replied. “Well, nothing suspicious, any rate. I passed by here first at 11.30 and I always take a look inside. I did last night. I shined my light up and down, but didn’t see anyone in the shelters at all. Well, there weren’t any call for it, was there? I think if anyone had been lying on the floor round about then, I would have noticed them.”

Greenaway watched the darting little eyes behind the magnifying lenses. The reservists were usually retired policemen, but he wondered how much worse things could get for a force strained by the departure of so many younger men to the war, if myopic volunteers were all that were left to do this kind of legwork. “Did you hear anything, then, any sounds of a quarrel, a fight?”

“Nothing unusual, sir,” Stokesby scratched his head. “It was a very quiet night, last night, not many people about. No moon neither. It was very dark out here. But … what people there was about were soldiers. Four or five times I got asked where the Church Army Hostel was, so I directed them to Seymour Place.” He flapped his arm for emphasis. “Got called over to Baker Street just before midnight, reports of some shady types coming in and out of a doorway. Well, they must have pushed off before I got there, no sign of any breaking and entering on the premises. Took me lunch from 1.15 to 2.15, and I must have passed by here two or three more times during the night.” Stokesby shrugged. “Still didn’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

“No vehicles parked up here?” Greenaway suggested. “Or any driving away?”

“None that I recall. I didn’t see a sentry on duty either,” Stokesby looked as if he had surprised himself with this last remark. “Well, like I say, sir, it was very dark.”

Greenaway closed his notebook. “Thank you, constable,” he said. “That was very helpful. Give my regards to your gaffer, won’t you?”

The throbbing in Greenaway’s head was more insistent now. He rubbed his temples, hoping for it to clear. Watching Stokesby shambling away in the direction of his station, he felt acutely aware of his own years. Greenaway was a veteran of the last war, who’d taken his skills as a radiographer from the Navy to the Met and risen swiftly up the ranks, thanks to his luck on the racecourses. Swaffer had been right about his ambiguous feelings towards this new role on the Murder Squad.

The men that worked the rackets he could understand. He had grown up with them, after all, knew exactly how their calculating, chancy minds worked and therefore how to deal with them. Takes one to know one, maybe. But this pointless death, this brutal, ugly end of a woman who had managed to survive Christ knows how many air raids before she ended up dead in a shelter on a night when there were no bombs, how could he get into the mind of a man who did things like that?

“Excuse me, Chief Inspector,” the younger PC broke into his thoughts. “We’ve located the lady’s handbag, sir. It was just round the corner, on Wyndham Street.”

Greenaway looked down at the constable’s gloved hands which held the remains of a black handbag treated much the same way as its owner – left wet, torn and empty.

“Fred,” he called to Cherrill. “Something else for you here.”

Cherrill, only a few years Greenaway’s junior himself, stooped his way out of the shelter. He appraised the sorry artefact with a frown.

“Doesn’t look like I’ll be able to get much out of that,” he said. “But we’ll see what comes up when it’s dried and dusted. I’ve done all I can here, better get her over to Spilsbury, now, see what he makes of it. Poor old boy,” Cherrill added to himself. “I don’t suppose he’ll like it much. What’ll you do now, Ted?”

Greenaway snapped his notebook shut. “Go house to house,” he said. “Try and find out who she was first, what she might have been doing here. And who she might have been knocking about with.”

Cherrill nodded. “Well,” he said, “we’re looking for a left-handed man, I’m sure Spilsbury will confirm it. Good luck, Ted.”

“And to you,” said Greenaway. “Hope you find him before I do.”

For his own sake, he added, mentally.