MIND YOU, HER AT NUMBER 58, SUCH GOINGS-ON
WPC Suzanne Fillmore was also on the fingerprint detail, teamed up with a fingerprint technician called Edward Blacklee, who seemed pleasant enough but had absolutely no conversational skills whatsoever, so she spent the entire shift in virtual silence apart from the brief instructions given to those being printed. She had tried to talk to him, asking about his job, his home life, did he have children, none of it elicited any sort of response at all, so in the end, she gave up. Blacklee seemed proficient in his job, but even then, he barely said a word, merely to give his instructions, right hand please, thumb, forefinger, etc. Nothing beyond that and Suzanne found it so frustrating.
She had tried to ask him about fingerprinting techniques and fingerprints and although she found the subject boring, she felt she ought at least to take advantage of the experience to increase her professional knowledge, but even then, Blacklee was not forthcoming, ‘just printing, isn’t it.’ At that, she gave up.
None of that stopped her from doing her job as efficiently as she could. Not that it took a genius to take down somebody’s name and address on a postcard, hand it to Silent Ted, and take it back from him when he had completed the prints. Not rocket science.
They were working Effington Street, a row of terraced houses, built in 1910 according to the date carved onto a stone plaque set into the brickwork just below the gutter line of the first house of the row. Each house had a double bed size front garden, most of which were well-kept with blue and pink hydrangeas the most popular flower along with roses and geraniums. A few were overgrown, clotted with weeds and tall wild grasses. And one of the houses had a rotting mattress dumped, no doubt a cosy home for rats and mice, and Suzanne shivered, hoping that they did not have to call there.
Suzanne guessed that most of the houses would be rented, probably owned by distant landlords, and every Friday night the rent collector would make his rounds to collect his dues.
She consulted her list. There were 17 males of specified age who lived on Effington Street, with another 14 on the adjacent Effington Road.
It was a Saturday afternoon and it was expected that quite a few of those on the list would be at home as the pubs were closed, Garside Rovers were away at Accrington Stanley and the weather was not conducive to walks in the park. It was overcast and chilly, and Suzanne was getting more and more irritated. Not only with the walking corpse she had to work with but doubly irritable because her period was due and that always made her extra tetchy.
She consulted the list of names and addresses. Of the seventeen addresses on Effington Street, they had so far visited 12 houses. Of those 12, 8 had answered the door, and Malcolm Swindlehurst, Colin Black, his brother Charles, Fred Cunningham, Norman Knight, Albert Fish (not the New York murderer who killed and ate his victim), and Bernard Laidlaw, had been at home and were printed. At the other two houses where their knock was answered, the male they sought was not available, and Suzanne arranged to call back later in the evening, together with those houses where there had been no response.
Number 46 Effington Street was the next on the list. The door to No. 46 had once been green, but now the paint was cracked and faded, the lace curtains at the window looked as grey as a November fog, obviously had not been taken down and washed in years, and the front doorstep not donkey stoned in a decade. Suzanne rang the bell, hearing the chimes echoing along the hall. After a minute or so, the door opened, and a blowsy-looking blonde, possibly in her forties, difficult to tell, opened the door.
Even though it was mid-afternoon, she was still dressed in her housecoat, a burning cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth.
‘Oh!’ she said when she saw it was the police at the door. She peered out over the doorstep and looked up and down the street, obviously expecting somebody else. ‘Yeah, what is it?’ flicking the ash from her fag onto the pavement and taking another deep drag before tossing the butt away where it fizzed in the damp gutter before extinguishing.
‘Mrs. Deacon is… your husband, Paul, at home?’ Suzanne asked.
‘Nah, whatchoo want him for?
‘You must have heard of the appeal. The appeal for all males between 16 and 65 to be voluntarily fingerprinted? We’d like Mr. Deacon to give his prints if he is available.’
‘Yeah, did hear summat like that, it’s about that little girl what got murdered, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Emily Black.’
‘She were raped an’ all, I hear, weren’t she?’ Well, it can’t have been Paul as done her,’ Pauline Deacon responded.
‘I’m sure not.’ Suzanne responded warily.
‘Know why?’
‘No doubt because he was with you that night or has some other watertight alibi.’
‘Nah, s’not that. It’s just that he’d rather fish than fuck.’
Suzanne blushed with shock at the word ‘fuck,’ she knew what it meant, although not from personal experience, but had never heard it spoken out loud like that before. She knew male officers back at the nick swore, or at least she presumed that they did, but their language was mostly circumspect when females were around, the odd ‘bloody’ or ‘bleeding’ or occasionally ‘shit’ but never ‘fuck.’
Pauline Deacon seemed to relish her shock and turned to Edward Blacklee, ‘How about you, love. What would you rather do?’ and burst into a cackle of ribald laughter, delighted at his discomfiture. Blacklee, in turn, blushed with embarrassment and said nothing.
‘You’ll find Paul down on Victoria Canal, fishing,’ she said after catching her breath, ‘but he’ll not be best pleased if you disturb him, reckon the sight of coppers’ll scare all the fish away. Not that he ever catches owt anyway, the useless bugger.’
‘We’ll come back later, this evening, try to see him then.’
‘He’ll be at the pub, Saturday isn’t it? Saturday he’s at the pub, playing dominoes with his pals. They play for money and he always loses, useless prat,’ she answered, scratching her armpit, causing her heavy breasts to bulge alarmingly against the fabric of her housecoat.
‘How about tomorrow, will he be available then? It really is very important that we see him.’
‘Tomorrow he’ll be at his allotment, on Townside Bank there, tending to his leeks. You’ll maybe get him there.’
‘Leeks?’ said Blacklee, virtually the only word he’d said all day. Blacklee is a leek man, at home in Wakefield he had an allotment, but it must be said that he is not very successful.
‘Ah, leeks, big ones,’ and Pauline Deacon held her hands about eighteen inches apart. ‘This size, mind you, I could do with something like that myself,’ she said, her voice full of sexual innuendo, giving Blacklee a leer.
‘We’ll try and catch Mr. Deacon tomorrow,’ Suzanne said, backing away, anxious to get away from the coarse-mouthed Pauline.
‘Aye, do that, number 84’s his allotment, up at the top side,’ she said dismissively, looking up and down the street again.
Suzanne and Blacklee moved on to the next house on their list, number 62 where they hoped to find Charles Fallon at home. Effington Road was deceptively steep, relatively gentle when it emerged from Gladstone Street to the south but began to climb steeply the further up the road you went. Consequently, they were feeling somewhat breathless when they got to number 62, wishing they had brought the van up with them.
Pauline watched them go and lit another cigarette before going back indoors.
Slag, thought Blacklee, and who’s to say he is wrong?
Charles Fallon was not at home either; in fact, nobody answered the door, which was another call they would have to come back to in the evening. As she turned away, Suzanne glanced over at number 67, further up the street on the other side, another address at which they had to call.
Movement! She thought she saw some movement from behind the curtain in the upstairs front room, but she thought nothing of it, just about every house on the road had twitchy curtains as nosey residents followed the movements of the fingerprint squad as intently as though watching an interesting film or as if some exotic species of wildlife (pigs?) were wandering up and down the road.
So, when they came to number 67, Suzanne fully expected that someone would answer the door to their knock, but there was no response.
She knocked on the door again, rattling the door knocker as hard as she could.
She bent down, pushed open the letterbox, and peered inside. The house was eerily quiet, but she was certain she had seen movement upstairs. ‘Hello, police,’ she shouted through the slot of the letterbox. ‘Can you come to the door please? Police. It’s important. Police!’
‘Nothing,’ she said to Blacklee, ‘but I’m certain I saw somebody upstairs.’
He just grunted something which sounded like ‘Could be.’
She hammered on the door again. ‘I’m going round the back, sometimes folk don’t come to the front door.’ Suzanne walked down the arched, dank passage into the rear yard, shared by eight houses. She counted down to the third house, number 67. She knocked on the back door as hard as she could. Then she cupped her hands about her eyes and pressed them to the kitchen window, trying to see inside but she could see nothing.
It rankled with her, the more she thought about it, the more convinced she became that she had seen somebody at the upstairs window and, not given to flights of fancy, she did not think it was a ghost. She ran through in her mind what it was she had seen. It was an indistinct figure in her sightline, standing to the side of the window as if trying not to be seen. The curtain had not moved; it was not that which had caught her eye. Was it a burst of late afternoon sunshine, low down in the sky, that had briefly illuminated the window? She could not say, but the certainty grew on her that someone – somebody – had been at that upstairs window looking down, looking at her. Looking at her! The thought made her shiver.
Unwilling to give up on her conviction, she decided to ask at the house next door. The door opened almost as soon as she had finished knocking.
‘Yes, love?’ the occupier asked. She was a very small woman, bent further with age, wrinkled of face like a cherry red prune but with the sharp eyes of a falcon.
‘Sorry to bother you, Mrs…?’
‘Jenks, Lilian Jenks. Why are you calling at all those houses?’
‘It’s in connection with the killing…’
‘Oh aye, of that poor young lass, Emily, Emily Black,’ Mrs. Jenks interjected. ‘It’s nowt to do wi’ me,’ she added indignantly. ‘We’re not on that list, are we?’ pointing at the clipboard that Suzanne was holding.
‘No, no, nothing like that, I just wanted to ask if you knew if there is anybody in next door?’
‘I’m not the sort of person to go nosying about my neighbours if that’s what you’re thinking,’ she said, but there was a gleam in her eye that said otherwise. ‘Keep myself to myself.’
‘I’m sure you do, Lilian, but I just wondered whether you had seen anybody coming or going from next door, not that you were being nosey or anything like that but just in passing?’
‘Well, I did see her go out, she works at Co-op you know, but I ain’t seen him, nor do I want to. Nasty piece of work he is, swore at me once, used that word, you know, told me to… you know… off. If I’d been his mother, I’d have washed his mouth out with soap and water.’
‘And there’s just the two of them, mother and son?’ Suzanne asked, checking from her list.
‘Aye. The other son, David, he was in the Navy and was lost on one of those Arctic convoys to Russia during the war. I think it was to Russia, anyhow, he was lost somewhere at sea and Wilf, her husband, he died a while ago, emphysema, terrible it was, you could hear him hacking and hawking away, trying to clear his lungs, now you take my Jack, 76 years old and as fit as a fiddle, he never drank you see… not a drop.’
‘Does he work, the son, do you know that, if he works?’ Suzanne asked hurriedly, before Mrs. Jenks got too far off the subject.
‘Aye, his Ma tells me he’s got some sort of job with the baker’s. Ansells Bakers in Meadowlane. Can’t say I like their bread too much, gives me wind. I prefer the Co-op bread, it’s cheaper and besides I get my divi there.’
‘Thank you, but you don’t know if he’s home at the moment?’
‘No, like I say, I don’t make it my business what other folk get up to, mind you, her at number 58, such goings-on, and the rows…’
‘Thank you, Mrs. Jenks, thank you, you’ve been most helpful,’ Suzanne said as she backed away, not wishing to get caught up in Lilian Jenks’ gossip about ‘her at number 58’, whoever she might be and whatever the goings-on there might be.
She hammered on the kitchen door of number 67 again, without success, and as she got round to the front, she shouted once more through the letterbox.
Frustrated and annoyed, she allowed Blacklee to lead her away and continue with the other calls they had to make. Technically, he was the senior of the two of them, and so she had to obey, but it continued to rankle with her, both that she had been unable to get a response at number 67 and that Blacklee had been so disinterested. After all, she had established that the mother was out of the house, and if she had seen somebody at the upstairs window, and she remained convinced that she had, then the son must be at home and refusing to answer the door.
She wanted to know why.
All through the remainder of her shift, she thought about it and ran the scene through her head again and again to try to establish what it was that disturbed her. Like one of those film shorts screened in the smoky Garside Empire before the main feature, she ran the loop through again and again, searching for that elusive image that had subsequently so disturbed and irritated her.
As they left the foul-mouthed Pauline Deacon at number 46, she had checked her list of houses still to be visited and noted the position of number 67 on the other side of the road. They walked up the road to number 62. Charles Fallon had not been at home and it was then she had glanced across the road to number 67. What had she seen? A flash of sunlight, a breeze flicking the curtains, or somebody standing there, away to the side, not wanting to be seen?
Movement, she had seen movement, if whoever had been there had kept still, she would not have noticed anything. Somebody behind the curtains had suddenly moved away, and that was what had caught her eye. Thinking nothing of it at the time it was only when there was no response to the door that she became suspicious.
Suspicious that there had been somebody in that upstairs room. Somebody who was watching her who had then jerked back when, whoever it was – caught sight of her glancing up at the window and she wanted to know why. It had to be the son, the son who was definitely not on their list. She would be back at number 67 Effington Street, no doubt about that.