Murders in the Blitz (10 page)
London, 1941
No-one had any idea that the milkman was missing until it was time to get up and face the day. Nobody noticed that he wasn’t on his regular dawn round. Most of his customers were tucked up in their beds, oblivious to everything but exhaustion following night after night of air raids and very little sleep for weeks on end. The attack of the night before had centred on the East End and the City of London. If the residents turned east from Shepherd’s Bush they could see the vicious mayhem in the distance, hear the thrump of high explosives and see flames billowing over venerable buildings. They heard no sirens locally, just relative silence. For once residents could sleep in their own beds rather than camping out in the Underground stations or the concrete public shelters, amidst the sights and sounds, and smells, of hundreds of other families.
On that Monday morning the first sign that something was wrong was at about six o’clock when Mrs Grant, who lived in a ground floor flat in Pennard Road, near the market, looked out of her front bay window, after removing the blackout curtains, and noticed a horse busily devouring the display of daffodils and wan tulips from the trough attached to the basement railings. Her fury drove her to put on dressing gown and slippers and brave the chill early morning to shoo the animal away.
‘Give over,’ she yelled as she hurried down the front steps, waving a walking stick she had grabbed from the hallstand. ‘Leave me flowers alone!’
Mrs Grant had invested precious time, money and energy trying to bring some springtime colour and even beauty to the street. Her efforts had not been spectacularly successful as the cold March air, the soupy atmosphere, full of sulphur, cordite and pulverised brick, the result of continual nights of bombing, did little to encourage even limited horticulture. The daffs’ bright yellow was mottled with a coating of brick dust and the tulips had wilted in pathetic defeat. Some collapsed completely, like weary convicts on hard labour, over the sides of the trough.
Approaching the horse, which had so far utterly ignored her protests and seemed determined to finish his breakfast, Mrs Grant realised that he was still harnessed to the milkman’s cart. The metal crates for the bottles were almost empty fortunately, because the horse had dragged the dray up onto the pavement causing it to lean at a precarious angle. The danger of spillage was obvious but not grave. Mrs Grant was surprised that the horse was tethered to the front of the dray, as regulations stipulated that horses left for any length of time had to be tethered facing their carts so that they couldn’t bolt in the event of a raid. Nowadays life was full of such regulations and, in spite of paper shortages, almost every postal delivery brought a new set of draconian and often petty instructions issued by the Ministry of Information or some other body formed to further the smooth administration of the war.
Grabbing the horse’s bridle, Mrs Grant tried to yank the animal away from her flowers, but the weight of the dray behind him prevented her from budging him more than a few inches, and in any case she quailed at the determined look in his eye and the size of the teeth with which he was munching her daffs. Stubborn as a donkey, he stood his ground.
‘Come on, move over, you daft bugger,’ she said.
Other residents had emerged onto the pavement by then and a couple of men, who knew more about horses than Mrs Grant, backed the dray into the road.
‘Where the hell’s Malcolm?’ someone that knew the young milkman asked. ‘He should be looking after his horse.’
‘Now someone had better take this lot back to the dairy.’
The men selected a volunteer to march the horse and dray back to the milk depot in Hammersmith, with instructions to complain about Malcolm’s dilatoriness in abandoning his responsibilities.
‘Probably in some lonely housewife’s bedroom, having a good time,’ one wag suggested with a bawdy wink, and most of the onlookers laughed. Several pairs of speculative eyes scanned the street, trying to deduce which house he might be in.
Mrs Grant recalled belatedly that she was standing in the chilly street with only her dressing gown over her nightdress and had even forgotten to take the curlers out of her hair. With a sharp cry of embarrassment she dashed indoors and was not seen again that day until her mortification had subsided. The mutilated flowers in the trough gave up their tenuous hold on life.
*
When Eve Duncan got up at seven thirty she was not aware that there was any problem with the milk or the person who delivered it. Pete, her boyfriend, had spent the night and left early for the police station. He would have waited until he got to work, just a short walk away across Shepherd’s Bush Green, to make a cup of tea. He knew by now that Eve didn’t appreciate being woken earlier than was absolutely necessary and he would have crept around, dressed in his uniform and slipped away quietly. Jake, Eve’s black and white terrier, was curled up, contented and gently snoring, at the end of the bed. Pete must have let him out, even if it was only for a few minutes. But Eve would have to give him a quick walk before she left for work at Mount Pleasant, in Farringdon Road, where she was a supervisor in the Censor’s Department.
Eve dreaded going to work. It wasn’t that she disliked her job - it was interesting and, since she was in charge of several other young women, rewarding and responsible. No, it was the journey to work itself that depressed her. Since the Luftwaffe started bombing London last September in the terrible remorseless onslaught known as the Blitz, the sights had become ever more upsetting. Every night, and sometimes during the day, the sirens sounded to alert everyone to the fact that a squadron of bombers was approaching to deliver its payload of high explosives and incendiary bombs on London. The epicentre of this aggression was the docks and the City of London. But many bombs landed in areas much further West, in the centre of London and in the suburbs. Nowhere was safe. It was a war of attrition designed to sap the will and morale of Londoners, but somehow it had had the opposite effect.
The Blitz assaulted all equally. Bombs did not discriminate between rich and poor, high and low. Mansions and cottages, venerable government offices, department stores and the meanest of small shops had all been attacked. A bomb had even hit Buckingham Palace. As a consequence the citizens of London were united in solidarity against the Germans and had developed a gritty determination to survive the bombings, against which they had little defence. Anti-aircraft guns strived to shoot down the bombers from atop the highest buildings, and barrage balloons hung in the air at strategic points to stop aircraft from flying low over the city. But none of this saved London from brutal devastation and hardly a street had escaped damage of some kind. But Londoners still carried on, going to work every day and carrying out their normal tasks. Their fighting spirit proved to be extraordinary.
The sight of the damage and the human cost filled Eve with sadness and on her journey to work she could not help witnessing some of the worst of the damage. She took the bus, sitting in her favourite seat on the top at the front, but it was often diverted to avoid newly fallen heaps of masonry littering the route. Shards of glass from windows broken by blasts surfaced the street, causing the tarmac to glitter like a jeweller’s velvet. Last week Oxford Street had been blocked completely. A shell had hit a double-decker bus and the bright red vehicle lay at a grotesque angle in the road, its rear wheels stuck in a giant crater and its front end inserted into the windows of a department store’s first floor. A crane was later brought in to remove it. Eve heard that all but two of the passengers, and the driver, had survived, but there had been many broken bones.
Eve grabbed Jake’s lead and took him for a brief dash around the nearest part of Shepherd’s Bush Green. The men were out winching up the barrage balloon over the lorry anchoring it in place. It was refilled each morning with the hydrogen gas that kept it afloat. Eve waved to the crew. After many mornings of seeing them at their work they were well known to her and they recognised her slight form and ginger curls as she walked her dog on the Green. Several of the men were quite elderly and she was not sure that they should be doing such hard work. But there were so few young men around now, with everyone called up, that anyone fit enough was recruited to do the labour necessary to keep the Hun at bay.
As soon as she returned home, Eve gave Jake food and water for the day. Charlie, Eve’s best friend, usually came in and took him for a walk later if his work allowed him the time. Charlie spent most of his working life in the market, trading from a variety of stalls, where he picked up information that might be useful to the police. The market was a magnet for the criminal element, fencing stolen or looted goods or selling black market contraband. Some people thought of Charlie as a wide boy, but Eve knew he had a good heart. She was in constant fear that he would be called up for active duty as, sooner or later she was sure, his paltry medical excuses would wear thin and someone in authority would insist that he joined his compatriots at the Front.
Before long Eve was on the bus. She preferred the front seats on the top deck from where she could see clearly what ruin the previous night’s bombing had wrought on her neighbourhood and on the route through the centre of the city. As last night’s raid had been more or less confined to the East End, there was nothing new to be seen today. She witnessed the clean-up crews working like swarms of ants, picking up rubble and salvaging what they could from the earlier wreckage and making the roads passable again. The air raid wardens directed operations, once the Fire Brigade had put out any fires caused by incendiary bombs. Some of them relished their power and indulged in extravagant displays of bossiness, but others showed more compassion towards those who had lost their businesses or, sometimes, everything they possessed, in the raids.
Even at the end of a full day at work Eve was still not aware that Malcolm, the United Dairies’ delivery man, was nowhere to be found.
Eve was looking forward to the evening when she would be going dancing at the Hammersmith Palais with Pete, so long as an air raid didn’t stop them. There had been occasions when, with the sound of bombs exploding in the distance, the customers of the Palais carried on regardless; the management allowing the clientele to dance for as long as they wished in a wild, hedonistic whirl. The band played on, their instruments producing as much volume as they could muster and the master of ceremonies forced to bellow over the racket outside to make himself heard. This continued for as long as everyone felt safe enough to remain or until the sound of the Luftwaffe’s bombers overhead drowned out the sound of the band. Then they would leave, in as orderly a way as they could manage, from the multiple exits and into the concrete air raid shelter nearby or down into Hammersmith underground station. Even there the atmosphere continued to be full of fun and collective bonhomie. Occasionally a professional musician or singer from the band would entertain them, or someone with a tin whistle or a kazoo would make music and the braver and more agile dancers would continue to gyrate on the platform or in the limited space in the shelter until they were stopped by people who wanted to sleep.
That Tuesday, when Eve arrived home from work, after greeting the leaping, joyous Jake, she put the kettle on the gas to make tea. She had just shaken off her shoes when the bell at her basement door sounded. That morning it had been dark when she left her flat and she had known it would be dark again when she got home, so she had left the blackout on the windows and as a result she couldn’t see who was at her door, but she assumed it was Charlie.
She opened the door and saw before her a very young uniformed copper wearing an expression of intense embarrassment. Eve had never seen this lad before and it crossed her mind that he seemed far too young to be a policeman. Maybe it’s a sign that I’m getting old, she thought.
‘Hello, Constable,’ she said. ‘How can I help you?’ She smiled, hoping to put the lad at his ease.
The boy shuffled his feet and mumbled, ‘Inspector Reed’s sent me, miss. He says he wants to see you. Please,’ he added as an afterthought.
‘Oh, is there a problem?’
‘He didn’t say, miss. Just said, could I bring you in to see him?’
‘I’ve only just got in from work. Did he say if it was urgent?’
‘No, miss. Just said to ask you if you’d come.’
Eve glanced back into her sitting room. It wasn’t long before Pete was due to pick her up for their evening out and she really needed that cup of tea. Putting on her glad rags and trying to smooth her hair into some semblance of sophisticated waves would have to be forgotten. She sighed with resignation.
‘All right, Constable. Go back to the station and tell the inspector I’ll be along in about ten minutes. If you see Pete Heller, tell him I’m going to be a bit late this evening, could you?’
‘I will if I see him, miss.’
The young constable left, a smug smile encircling his lips. Perhaps this is the first task that he had been asked to carry out, Eve thought. Inspector Reed had recently been trying to recruit more officers onto the local Police Force. As all the men over eighteen were now being called up he had been forced to take on untrained lads fresh out of school to take up the staffing slack. But if the war went on for much longer even those lads would be conscripted and sent to the Front. It was because of this manpower shortage that Eve worked as an occasional, and unofficial, assistant to the police. The inspector had come to value her help, especially after she had managed to bring a murderer to justice in September last year, just at the start of the Blitz.
The inspector had proved an understanding and encouraging mentor, although Eve was sometimes annoyed by the mundane and prosaic nature of the tasks he gave her, such as searching for lost dogs or checking Identity Cards. But the absence of any female officers at this nick, since the few that had once worked there had joined what they saw as more exciting wartime units elsewhere, meant that Eve was occasionally in demand as someone to hold the hands of victims of crime. She enjoyed this work as a respite from the routine tasks at the Censor’s Department and her boss, Fred Gibbons, was willing to allow her time off to help the police. She sometimes thought that she should give up her job altogether, but Inspector Reed did not have the funds to pay her a full time salary. The existing ad hoc arrangement seemed to work well for everyone.
Eve slurped back the tea, ran a comb through her unruly red curls and, with Jake on the lead beside her – she thought she may as well use the time to give the dog a walk – she set off across the Green. There were no street lights, but fortunately the kerbs had been painted white to guide pedestrians and keep them out of the road, but accidents still happened often. The route was familiar to Eve and she easily found her way to the gloom wrapped police station, without a chink of light showing through the blackout. Eve nearly tripped over a sand bag that had slid off the protective wall surrounding the entrance. She swore under her breath and entered the reception area.
Bert, the duty sergeant, was behind the desk.
‘Evening, Eve, what can I do for you? Pete’s left already. Isn’t it Palais night?’
‘The Inspector’s sent for me, Bert. Is there something up?’
‘Not much. He’ll tell you about it. Go through to his office. Do you want me to look after Jake for you?’
‘Thanks, Bert, that’s a great help.’ She handed Bert the lead and Jake, familiar with these surroundings and his friend Bert, who was generous with scraps of food, settled down behind the desk. Eve walked through to the offices at the rear of the building and knocked on Inspector Reed’s office door.
‘Come in,’ he called.
Eve entered the orderly room. The inspector was seated behind his desk, which held several piles of paperwork at the periphery and two black telephones within easy reach. His normally serious face creased into an affectionate smile.
‘Ah, Miss Duncan, I’m so pleased you could come in. I hope it wasn’t too inconvenient, but I can’t get hold of you during the day.’
Eve’s boss at Mount Pleasant didn’t take kindly to people telephoning his staff “at all times of day or night”. As Eve, in common with most people, did not have a phone at home, a note or a personal message, like tonight’s, was the only way of contacting her.
‘No, it’s all right, sir,’ said Eve, pushing all thoughts of dancing at the Palais to the back of her mind.
‘Don’t worry, I won’t keep you long. There’s just a little investigation I’d like you to help us with. I’ll ring your Mr Gibbons tomorrow and arrange it with him. It should only take a couple of days. It’s a matter of a missing person. I need you to do your magic and talk to people who know him and may have seen him.’
‘Oh, who’s missing?’ Eve was well aware that, in these days of relentless bombing, people did disappear, crushed or blown up in the Blitz or sometimes, if they’d had enough and could stand the tension of imminent danger no longer, they just upped sticks and ran away to some safe haven in the country without telling anyone where they were going.
‘It’s a local lad. You may know him, Malcolm...er...sorry, I can’t remember his surname. He’s the milkman - young lad of twenty one. Seems to have disappeared into thin air.’
‘I know him by sight. He delivers my milk, so I’ve seen him when I pay him. But I can’t say I know him. When was he last seen?’
‘Well, he picked up his float from the dairy in Hammersmith, United Dairies that is, at dawn yesterday morning. He seems to have delivered most of his milk for the day. But his dray and horse were found in Pennard Road at about six o’clock. It seems to have created quite a stir. He wasn’t seen again at the milk depot or at his home – he lives with his mother somewhere round here - and he didn’t turn up for work this morning.’
‘Maybe he’s gone off with a girlfriend?’
‘I would normally think that was a possibility, but it seems unlikely that he would abandon his float and his horse, which I understand he was quite fond of, in the middle of his round. The animal wasn’t tethered and it created a certain amount of havoc, I understand. There have been complaints.’ The inspector grinned. ‘But you needn’t worry about that. I suggest you start at the dairy and find out what you can about Malcolm, the details of his route and then try to find out from the householders where and when he was last seen. He worked very early in the morning, so I imagine most of the residents will have been asleep when he called, especially as it was a quiet night around here for once, and everyone was sleeping in their own beds. Anyway, see what you can discover. I don’t expect you to come in here in the morning. You can go straight to the dairy when you’re ready. I’m afraid it’ll have to be early as the dairymen have finished their work before most people go to theirs. I’ll sort it out with your boss.’
‘Thank you, sir.’ Eve was confident that, with his higher authority, the inspector would persuade Mr Gibbons to allow her the time off. Her staff were now well trained and the operation in the Censor’s Department worked smoothly. A day or two without her would not cause chaos. Her second in command, Elsie, took charge with admirable efficiency when she was away. ‘I’ll see you later in the day to tell you what I’ve found out.’
‘Thank you, Miss Duncan, I knew I could rely on you.’ Inspector Reed pulled a heap of files towards him and picked up a fountain pen. Eve was dismissed.