A Capital Crime (31 page)

Chapter Forty-Four

The floorboards from the centre of the room were stacked in front of the fireplace. Looking down, Stratton saw that one of the joists had been sawn away to make room for body number four, which was encased in a flannelette blanket, lashed at each end and covered with a dusting of earth. When the photographer had finished, Canning and Tillotson removed the body with an effort and stood back for McNally to do his work.

‘Definitely a Boy Scout … Safety pins as well, this time. Perhaps he ran out of rope.’

Like the previous two, the head was wrapped, this time in what looked like part of a sheet. The body, which was considerably stockier and heavier than the others, was naked apart from stockings. It was covered on top by a nightgown, with what appeared to be a dress lying beneath. McNally lifted the nightgown, exposing the heavy breasts and belly. The skin was hard and mouldy like the outside of a cheddar cheese. As with the other two bodies, there was a garment of some sort stuffed between the legs. ‘That first one …’ said McNally, ‘he must have been interrupted before he could do all this, so he just stuck her in the cupboard as she was. This one’s a good bit older than the others,’ he added. ‘Both in terms of age and of how long she’s been here.’ Ballard and Stratton exchanged glances as he began unwrapping the material from the head. Suddenly, the reek of putrefaction hit Stratton like a blow to the face, making him gag.

‘Damp air getting in somewhere,’ said the pathologist in a matter-of-fact voice, as if giving a lecture. Forcing himself to turn his head, Stratton saw that while the right side of the woman’s face was dry, and covered with the same mould as her body, the left side was decomposing wetly so that the features appeared to have slipped and melted down the side of the cheek.

Fighting rising nausea, Stratton turned to look at Ballard who, although so pale in the face that he was almost translucent, seemed steady enough on his feet. He could feel the stink wrapping itself around him, clinging to his clothes like smoke. Better you smell of dead women than live ones, Jenny’d once said, in an unusual moment of black humour – except she wasn’t there to care what he smelt of … Still, he’d better give himself a good scrub before— Oh, Christ. The bloody party. Pete. He’d never be able to get back in time – he’d have to telephone Doris later. Pete would understand.

‘Cause of death?’ he asked the pathologist.

‘Not sure yet. There are some grooves here,’ McNally pointed to the neck, ‘but the condition of the skin …’ He shook his head.

‘Can you say how long?’

‘At least a couple of months, I’d say.’

‘The neighbour said Mrs Backhouse had been away for about three months, sir,’ said Ballard quietly.

As they followed the draped and stretchered corpse outside to the ambulance, Stratton was aware of a low, expectant hum, which stopped as Canning stepped backwards out of the front door with his end of the load. Following with Ballard, he stopped on the threshold and stared out at the crowd of mainly women and children who stood in a half circle around the ambulance, three and four deep. They were being kept at a distance by two policemen, helmeted and wearing overcoats, who were watching over the vehicle with the proprietorial air of shepherds guarding a flock.

Judging by the numbers Stratton thought it was a fair bet that, as well as neighbours, the usual collection of ghouls were present,
who’d thrill to carnage and catastrophe of any kind. In fact, Stratton often thought that given the speed with which they turned up in such situations, they must somehow be able to sense it. You could tell who they were by their gawping; they were avid and shameless. The other faces bore degrees of shocked or guilty fascination and some of the kids had a slightly distracted look, as if they couldn’t concentrate wholly on what was unfolding because they had to be on the lookout in case their parents caught them at it. They needn’t have worried: from what Stratton could see most of the parents – the mothers, at least – were in the crowd as well. Some of them, he realised, must have been here when they’d come for Muriel Davies; but if anybody did recognise him, they were keeping it to themselves, which was a relief.

Still, you couldn’t blame the neighbours for coming to see what was going on. I’d be out here, too, if I lived next door, he thought, I’d want to see what the next turn-up would be. And that, he thought, as a police van pulled up in front of the goods yard wall and men in overalls began unloading spades, sieves and stacks of wooden boxes, was anybody’s guess.

Scanning the crowd once more, he spotted, towards the back, an anxious-looking coloured couple who must be the ones from the top flat. Several feet away, a slatternly woman whose hair was quilted by metal curlers stood talking to a couple of solid-looking men in fawn mackintoshes. Coarse-faced, they had a brazen look about them which, in Stratton’s experience, meant one of two things. Either they sold stuff on commission or – far more likely in the circumstances – they were journalists. Well, they could whistle for it, because they weren’t getting a peep out of him.

He looked past the crowd, down the short length of the street with its row of mean, bay-windowed front rooms surrounded by grimy brickwork. As the day started to draw in, a glum, grey pall seemed to shroud everything in view.

‘Paradise Street,’ said Ballard wryly. ‘Evidently someone’s idea of a joke.’

‘Ha-bloody-ha.’ Stratton was standing right beside the side pane of the smeary front window of number ten, and, as he spoke, he peered into it, almost expecting to see Backhouse’s face, bespectacled and ghostly, hovering behind the net curtain.

To his left, he could hear the monotonous thrum of traffic and to his right, chugging and clanging from the railway tracks; the sounds of life continuing as normal. ‘It’s ordinary,’ he said. ‘Ordinary life in an ordinary street. I keep imagining him pottering around this house, brewing tea and taking bloody …
kaolin and morphine
for his diarrhoea, and all the time …’

‘Do you think Mrs Backhouse knew, sir?’

‘Back in nineteen fifty? She was very much under his thumb, so …’ Stratton shook his head wearily. ‘I just don’t know. The whole thing is just …’ Unable to think of a word that would accurately describe what it was, he illustrated it with a small, hopeless gesture.

‘Inspector, if I might just …’ Turning, he found himself confronting one of the journalists, who must have edged around the back of the crowd. Close to, he recognised the man as one who’d badgered him before, sidling up and offering to buy him a drink (or, as he put it, ‘a gargle’) on a number of occasions, always in the creepily confidential manner of a false friend. Now, the voice was goading, aggressively cheerful. ‘What about Davies now, Inspector? Still think he’s guilty?’ Revolted by the brutal breath and the predatory eyes, the man’s whole air of gorging himself on misery, Stratton said, ‘I’ve got nothing to say.’

‘But surely, Inspector—’

‘Piss off.’ Stratton turned his back and, muttering, the man went to rejoin his colleague.

He shouldn’t have said that – the man was bound to find some way of sticking the knife in … ‘Stupid,’ he said to Ballard. ‘You should never lose your temper with them.’

‘Quite understandable, sir, in the circumstances.’

‘Yes, but he won’t see it like that … It’s all very well for them,’
Stratton added, sourly. ‘For them it’s just the next sensation. Here and then gone, and they never have to worry about the consequences.’

Ballard was staring past him down the street. ‘I think DCI Lamb is about to arrive, sir.’

Following the sergeant’s gaze, Stratton saw the official car nosing its way round the corner. ‘That’s all we bloody need. I’d better go and meet him.’

He’d assumed that Lamb would insist on arriving with a great fanfare of horn-honking, and was surprised when the car pulled up almost immediately and his superior emerged from the back seat unaided. Stratton, who was bracing himself for the full performance from righteous anger to bravely borne resignation, taking in disappointment and endeavouring to rise above it and Christ knew what else in between, reflected that at last there was no convenient surface for the forefinger-jabbing that always accompanied a high-grade bollocking. Unless – Stratton winced – Lamb was going to use his chest and prod him backwards down the length of the cul-de-sac. I’ll strangle him if he tries that, he thought savagely. I’ll put my hands round his neck and shake him till his eyes pop out, and then I’ll—

‘How many?’

Stratton blinked. Lamb’s voice was so quiet it barely reached him, and he looked not only defeated but stupefied. Watching him, Stratton’s dismay and anger was transformed into the same intensity of amazement. It was as disconcerting as if a dummy had suddenly reached out a real, flesh-and-blood hand. ‘Sir?’

‘In the house – how many?’

‘Four, sir, so far. I’m fairly certain that at least one of them is one of our missing girls. It’s possible that the other two are there as well, but it’s a bit hard to tell at the moment … We also think that the fourth body – we found her under the bedroom floor – might be Edna Backhouse. They’re making a start on the garden now, sir. It’s the usual drill – removing soil to a depth of two feet and sieving
for evidence. I don’t imagine they’ll be able to finish today, but we’ll station constables front and back overnight, and—’

‘This is a fucking shambles.’ Lamb shook his head in disbelief and Stratton, who had never heard his superior swear so harshly before, was as astonished by this as by finding himself entirely in sympathy with the man.

‘Right.’ Pulling himself together with a visible effort, Lamb said, ‘I suppose I’d better have a look.’

‘Yes, sir. This way.’

‘Any reporters yet?’

‘A couple, sir.’

‘For God’s sake don’t speak to them. I’ll have something sent out for tomorrow’s papers. If they persist, tell them to contact the station.’

‘Yes, sir. Thank you.’

Lamb was silent throughout the short tour, merely nodding at Stratton’s explanations. Finally, as they stood outside the washhouse, watching the team of men dig and sift in the garden, he said, in a tone of baffled wonder, ‘He was a special.’

Stratton, feeling it would be inappropriate to offer condolences of the anyone-can-make-a-mistake variety, and uncomfortable with the memory of enjoying a quiet gloat about Lamb being hauled over the coals after Backhouse’s criminal record came out, settled for, ‘Well, he was commended, sir.’ He knew, even as he said it, that he should have kept his mouth shut, but Lamb didn’t appear to have heard. Instead, he was staring at one of the diggers, who was gesturing from the far corner of the garden.

‘Something here, sir. Could you take a look?’

The digger was pointing to the corner where the rickety wooden planks of the back fence met the brick wall of the goods yard, and Stratton, approaching, saw something dirty white sticking out of the earth. Squatting down beside it, he saw that beneath the soil and grime was the smooth, rounded end of what looked like a
thigh bone. Judging by its fleshless condition, it had been there for some time and it was, he thought, too large to belong to a cat or dog.

‘He must have been at it for quite some time, sir,’ said the digger. ‘This must have worked itself loose somehow or other, because he’s been using it to prop up this end of the fence.’

Chapter Forty-Five

‘Those women in the lavatory at Piccadilly,’ said Diana. ‘They thought I was one of them. A tart.’

‘Why on earth didn’t you tell me what was happening, darling?’ Lally was sitting on the end of the bed, looking worried. ‘You were in such a dreadful state last night – a sort of faint. We didn’t know what to think … And the last time we saw you, you seemed so
happy
. I know that was some time ago, but I had no idea. I thought you were just … well, busy.’

‘I’m sorry, Lally. I didn’t mean to cause … you know. But I couldn’t tell you. You’ve been so kind to me. It wasn’t fair to keep on running to you for help, and I thought it would be disloyal to James.’ Diana lay back on the pillows. At some point the previous evening, Lally and Jock had returned and persuaded a reluctant Mrs Robinson to make up a bed for her. She’d been so exhausted that she scarcely remembered Lally leading her up the stairs and helping her into bed. Looking down, she saw that she was still wearing her underclothes. ‘I didn’t know what to do. I thought I could help him, but … He
told
me to leave him, Lally. I didn’t want to – or maybe I did. I don’t know any more. I’m just … just … It’s all such a failure. Guy, James, everything. My whole life. I should never have got married again – or not so quickly, anyway.’

‘I did wonder, when you told me you were going to marry him,’ said Lally. ‘But you seemed so in love and so
sure
and these things often do work, so …’ She made a face. ‘But you’re not hopeless,
and it isn’t your fault. James’s drinking wasn’t your fault, and neither was the rest of it.’ Lally’s tone was sharp, and Diana was surprised to see that her face was white with tight-lipped anger. ‘It’s the way we were brought up. We weren’t taught to think for ourselves. Beauty, compliancy,
complaisancy
. . . That’s all that’s ever been expected. No useful skills and precious little education – beyond what we’ve managed to scrape for ourselves, that is. What the hell
are
you supposed to do if you’re a cross between a … a … brood mare and an ornament? Especially as half the men our generation of girls married – or were supposed to marry – were killed in the war, and all those big houses we were supposed to run have either been knocked down or sold off as boarding schools or something because nobody can afford to live in them any more.’

Taken aback by her friend’s vehemence, Diana said, ‘It’s not that bad. And you seem to manage pretty well.’

Lally shot her a rueful look. ‘Sorry. I suppose that was a bit about me. But not everything in the garden is roses, you know.’

‘Better than no garden at all. I was thinking about those things – what you just said – when I was up at Hambeyn Hall … You’ve put it much better. We’re dinosaurs, really, and it’s hard to be any different, no matter how much you want to. You’d think, with the war, one would adapt one’s thinking, but somehow one just goes back – behaves as if nothing had changed … Or perhaps that’s just me. God knows … Anyway, thank you, darling, for letting me stay.’