Authors: Rennie Airth
‘None that he’s found. She was topped, that’s all. Just like the other one.’
Florrie Desmoulins’s body had still been lying where it was found when Billy had arrived. Her flat was on the top floor of a narrow, three-storey house tucked into an alleyway called Cable Lane, off Dean Street, and he’d had to step over the corpse, which was curled in a foetal position in the narrow hallway and so close to the door it would only open a foot or two. The likelihood of a garrotte having been used had been mentioned in the report phoned from Bow Street, and when he crouched down Billy could see the red welt circling Florrie’s throat from which blood must have leaked earlier – there were streaks visible on her pale skin above the nightdress she was wearing. Her green eyes were wide and staring. He recalled her smile and the way she’d snapped her compact shut with a flourish.
‘Eh bien! C’est fini.’
That the flat had also been her place of business was confirmed by her landlady – for so she claimed to be – a woman named Ackers, who’d been convicted twice of running a bawdy house. Reassured by Cook, the first detective on the scene, that she would not be prosecuted on the basis of anything she told them she’d admitted it was Florrie’s habit to pick up her customers in Soho Square, only a few minutes’ walk away, and bring them back to the flat.
‘Last night she wasn’t busy. Said it was too cold out and there weren’t any men about. She brought one back at about nine and he left half an hour later. Florrie came down and told me she wasn’t going out again. That’s the last time I talked to her.’
Middle-aged and skeletal, with cropped brown hair, Mildred Ackers was being questioned by Cook on the cramped top-floor landing outside Florrie’s flat when Billy had tramped up the linoleum-covered stairs to join them. Wrapped in a brown cardigan that hung shapelessly about her, she had stood with folded arms staring into space.
‘A bit later Juanita came in with a man. He stayed for half an hour.’
Juanita de Castro, the other tenant of the building, lived on the first floor, Lofty had told Billy.
‘Though if that’s her real name, I’m the Queen of Romania.’
Juanita was lying down in her flat below at that moment, still recovering from shock – it was she who had let in the bobby sent by Bow Street to fetch Florrie that afternoon and had seen the body on the floor inside.
‘The girls had keys to each other’s flats. They sometimes worked as a team. Or so Madam Ackers says.’ Lofty had drawn Billy aside for a moment to bring him up to date. ‘Juanita’s bloke was a Yank airman. He took off about ten – we know that from her and from Ackers, who heard him leave.’ He took out a packet of cigarettes and offered one to Billy, who shook his head.
‘Ackers lives where? On the ground floor?’
Lofty nodded.
‘Keeps an eye on the comings and goings, does she?’
‘No question.’ Cook put a match to his cigarette. ‘That’s what makes it strange. Whoever topped Florrie got in and out without being seen or heard. Normally anyone turning up here would ring the bell and Ackers would let them in. Besides the men they picked up, the girls had regulars, blokes who’d come round to see them by arrangement. But there were none last night.’
Billy grunted. He looked at the woman, who was standing a step or two away from them. Her attitude hadn’t changed. She stood with folded arms, a vacant look in her eyes, waiting for this to be over so she could get on with whatever it was she called a life. Aware of his gaze she glanced up.
‘So you didn’t hear anything last night?’ Billy asked her.
Ackers shook her head.
‘What about the stairs? They creak, I noticed.’
The woman shrugged. I told you, I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Listening to the radio, were you?’
She viewed him with a leaden gaze.
‘Yes or no?’
‘I had it on some of the time.’
Billy turned back to Cook.
‘Better have the forensic boys look at the lock on the street door. He may have jimmied it. And this one, too …’
He bent down to peer at the Yale lock on Florrie’s door. Lofty joined him.
‘I can see he might have crept in,’ he said. But how would he know which flat was Florrie’s?’
‘By watching outside?’ Billy suggested. He stood up straight. He could have followed her down from Soho Square and then waited in the alley to see which light went on. Even with blackout blinds you can tell. But he couldn’t go in at once. She had a bloke with her, and then Juanita came back and she had a feller, too. He would have had a long wait. But once the girls’ lights went out he could have slipped in. If Ackers had her radio on she wouldn’t have heard him.’
‘Still, she might easily have come out into the hall.’
Billy shrugged. ‘Then he’d have done her too, this bloke.’
‘Hmmm …’ Lofty was still peering at the lock. ‘But once he got up here, couldn’t he have just knocked on Florrie’s door?’ he asked.
‘Perhaps. But would Florrie have let him in? She wasn’t expecting anyone. At the very least she’d have asked who it was. It’s more likely she heard him working on the lock and came to investigate. That would explain why the body’s where it is rather than in the bedroom.’
At that point Billy had gone inside, slipping sideways through the door and stepping carefully over the corpse, which he’d bent to examine. Beyond, in the bedroom, he’d found Joe Grace busy with two detectives from the forensic squad. It was after five, already dark outside, and the men had drawn the curtains and switched on two red-shaded lamps whose glow was reflected in a gold-framed mirror above the dressing table. Grace had been going through a chest of drawers filled mostly with underclothes, judging by the pile of lacy garments on the floor at his feet.
‘Nothing so far,’ he’d told Billy. ‘She must have got up to go to the door.’ He indicated the double bed behind him where the pillow was dented and the bedclothes pushed back. ‘I’m not sure he ever got in here. There’s no sign of it. Just did what he came to do and buggered off.’
Billy had looked about him. Hanging on the wall above the bed was a painting of a nude woman stretched out on a couch. Her cap of red hair suggested it might be an idealized version of Florrie herself, though Billy couldn’t see much resemblance. There was a second mirror, attached to the ceiling and positioned above the bed, and as he craned his neck to look up at it he heard Grace’s harsh cackle.
‘Now that’s what I call a bird’s-eye view.’
On the bedside table were two framed photographs, one of the Eiffel Tower, the other of a woman wearing a white apron and the sort of cap favoured by bakers. She was holding a little girl by the hand, and this time Billy thought he recognized the shape of Florrie’s catlike features in the small, grinning face.
At that point the sound of voices had signalled a new arrival and Billy had gone out into the short passage to find the familiar burly figure of Ransom crouched down over the body. As he’d watched, the pathologist had shifted on to his knees so as to peer more closely at the wound on Florrie’s throat.
‘Garrotted, beyond doubt. An expert job, by the look of it.’ Raising his eyes he’d caught sight of Billy. ‘Inspector! We meet again!’
‘Hello, sir. Expert, did you say?’
Billy had joined him beside the body.
‘That’s my impression. But I’ll want to look at her more carefully.’
Ransom had taken one of Florrie’s hands in his and was testing the finger and wrist joints. He glanced under the nails.
‘Rigor’s receding. She’s been dead more than twelve hours.’
‘We think it happened during the night.’ Billy glanced at Lofty, who was standing on the other side of Ransom in the half-opened doorway. ‘What we’re wondering is whether there’s any connection to the Bloomsbury murder.’
‘You’re referring to the young woman whose neck was broken?’
Ransom rose to his feet, grimacing. He flexed his knees.
‘I take it you’ve some reason to believe that. Apart from the medical evidence, I mean, which is far from conclusive.’
He stood pondering, his bushy eyebrows drawn together in a frown.
‘I mean, the method’s different, that’s obvious. Strangulation in this case – that’s assuming I don’t find some other injury – a broken spinal cord in the other. Plus here the killer had recourse to artificial means, which wasn’t the case in Bloomsbury. There the man used his bare hands.’
‘Yes, but we think he was caught unprepared.’ Billy continued to probe. He wasn’t expecting to encounter Miss Nowak that evening.’
‘And not even your habitual murderer walks around with a garrotte in his pocket just on the off chance. I take your point. He came here armed because he knew what he was going to do.’
Ransom mused a moment longer. ‘Look, from a medical point of view I can’t really help. There’s not enough basis for a comparison. But there is one thing that strikes me: the efficiency with which these two young women were dispatched.’
The pathologist paused. He cocked an eye at Billy.
‘Speaking as a doctor, I can tell you that’s rare. It’s much harder to kill a human being than you might think. I’m not speaking of bombs and bullets now. I mean by the use of one’s hands, whether or not one employs a piece of wire. Much harder. Both physically and psychologically.’
‘Unless you have the knack for it,’ Billy said. ‘Is that your point?’
Ransom shrugged. ‘I don’t want to mislead you. But if it does turn out to be the same man, then you’ll be looking for an exceptionally cold-blooded individual, and in all likelihood one who has done this sort of thing before.’
He bent to pick up his bag from the floor.
‘None of which, I hasten to say, will appear in my report, which will be business as usual. If you get her back to Paddington right away, I can do the post-mortem today.’
Leaving Billy to oversee things at the flat, Lofty had accompanied Ransom back to St Mary’s. They had both wanted to be certain what they were dealing with – to be sure that Florrie’s death, like Rosa Nowak’s, was a case of murder pure and simple – before moving on to the next step in the investigation, which would have to include the possibility that the two killings were connected.
‘The chief inspector’s going to want some answers,’ Billy had told his old pal. ‘Which won’t be easy, seeing as how we’re still scratching our heads over the other business. I’ll talk to Ackers again while you’re gone. And Miss Castro. She’s had long enough to pull herself together.’
Neither, however, had been able to add anything to the detectives’ sum of knowledge, scant as it was. Mildred Ackers had stuck doggedly to the account she’d already given of the previous evening. Florrie had gone upstairs a little after half-past nine and had not been seen or heard from again. Juanita de Castro had returned soon afterwards with a client who’d departed in due course. Thereafter, as far as Ackers was aware, the house had been quiet.
At that point, however, there’d been a new development. Joe Grace had called down the stairwell to Billy to come up. He was on the landing with one of the detectives from the forensic squad, a man named Myers.
‘Pete says this lock’s been fiddled with,’ Grace told Billy. ‘Here, have a butcher’s.’
He’d handed him a torch and Billy had got down on his haunches. With the aid of the beam he saw where a probe of some kind had cut grooves into the patina of grime coating the inner workings of the lock.
‘Just what I thought,’ Billy said. He was pleased with his stroke of intuition. ‘Now take a look at the street door. I think he crept in here while her ladyship was listening to Billy Cotton at the Starlight Room. I wonder if Juanita heard any footsteps on the stairs.’
The answer was soon forthcoming. Roused by Joe Grace, who had banged on her locked door repeatedly until the dishevelled woman appeared, she had denied hearing any sound at all after she’d gone to bed. Dark-haired, with a mole on one cheek and a small, crescent-shaped scar on the other, Juanita de Castro had emerged still fumbling with the cord of her robe, offering glimpses of a well-fleshed body beneath it. Her cheeks, smeared with mascara, had shown the tracks of the tears she’d undoubtedly been shedding.
‘It’s a bleeding shame,’ she’d said to Billy, with a glare at Grace, who had ogled her nakedness, grinning. She was a nice girl, Flo was. She had a good heart. What are you lot doing to stop this sort of thing, that’s what I’d like to know. Bugger all’s the answer.’
‘Here, that’ll do …’ An outraged Grace had shaken his finger at her, but she’d ignored him.
‘So why’d it happen?’ she’d demanded of Billy. ‘You tell me that.’
‘I can’t,’ he’d replied quietly, looking her straight in the eye, letting her know he was different from other coppers, a trick he’d learned during his time with John Madden all those years ago, the way
he’d
talked to people, only with Madden it hadn’t been deliberate. It was just the way he was. Different. ‘But I mean to find out and I’m hoping you can help me. Did you hear anything last night? Even the slightest sound … the stairs creaking … ?’
But she hadn’t, she told him. Once her customer had departed she’d gone to sleep and only roused herself at midday to go out for an hour or two. Soon after her return the constable sent by Bow Street had arrived in search of Florrie and she’d been persuaded to let him in to the flat above hers.
‘I saw her lying there. Poor Flo. She never did no harm to anyone. All it takes is one rotten bastard …’
Billy had let her go back into her flat and soon afterwards Lofty had returned from Paddington with a more detailed account of how Florrie had met her end and an assurance from Ransom that she had not been assaulted in any other way.
‘Same as the Nowak girl,’ Lofty said. ‘It’s got to be the same bloke.’
Myers, the forensic man, was just finishing his inspection of the front-door lock.
‘You guessed right,’ he said to Billy as he went out. ‘This one’s been fiddled, too.’
Billy told Cook about the upstairs door.
‘Either he followed her down here to Cable Lane, or he was waiting. It would have been easier to do her outside in the alley, but she had a man with her. He had to wait.’
‘Some nerve, though,’ Lofty said. ‘Tiptoeing up the stairs.’