The Marriage Certificate (2 page)

The duty officer took the call and
wrote down the details: ‘Stephenson Street, Leyton, you say … and what’s the
house called? …
Cambria
… number 59 … OK, we’ll get a patrol car round
shortly.’

‘George, can you take young Frank with you and go round to
Stephenson Street? Just had a report from a worried neighbour about the old man
who lives over the road from her. Bit of a recluse apparently and she hasn’t
seen him recently.’

‘Yeah, OK, sarge … hey, that’s a good one … a recluse and
she hasn’t seen him!’

Ten minutes later the two police officers drew up behind a
milk float parked outside
Cambria,
59, Stephenson Street. A milkman and
presumably the neighbour who had telephoned were waiting patiently on the
pavement.

‘OK, what’s the problem?’ asked PC George Palmer as he and
his new colleague, PC Frank Meredith, got out of the car.

‘It’s old Mr Williams,’ the milkman answered. ‘I can’t make
him come to the door. There’s two pints of sour milk in his porch. He only has
one pint a week. I’ve been on holiday and my stand-in must have carried on
leaving his milk. I opened the letter box to shout to him and the smell coming
out is awful … knocked me sideways it did … and there’s flies too, all over the
net curtains at the back.’

‘Right, come on,’ George Palmer said, indicating to young
Frank. ‘Let’s take a look.’ Together with the milkman, they went to the front
door. George rang the bell.

‘That’s not worked for years,’ said the milkman. You need to
use the door knocker … really hard. Mr Williams is a bit deaf.’

George tried the door knocker … there was no response from
within the house.

They stepped out of the porch and the milkman waited while
the police officers peered through the front windows.

‘Can’t see a thing,’ said George. ‘These windows haven’t
been cleaned in years … there’s more muck on the inside. What’s round the
back?’

The three of them made their way around the side of the end
of terrace house, negotiating with care several rubbish bags and a couple of
rusty fridges, all of which looked as if they had been thrown over the sagging
garden fence by fly-tippers. At the rear, they could see that all of the
windows were closed apart from one small fanlight in the upstairs bedroom. Downstairs,
the net curtains and the windowsills inside were covered with blowflies, just
as the milkman had described. The policemen tried to peer through the dirty
glass and nets into the rear sitting room.

‘No good,’ said George. ‘Still can’t see anything. You say
there was a bad smell when you shouted through the letterbox?’

‘Not arf,’ confirmed the milkman. ‘Didn’t arf hum … the
smell I mean, not the flies!’

They returned to the front door. George pushed open the
letterbox and peered inside. ‘Mr Williams! Mr Williams!’ he shouted, before he
fell back, bending double and exhaling every ounce of air from his lungs.
‘Dear, oh, dear!’ he gasped. ‘Just got a whiff … it’s putrid, absolutely bloody
putrid!’

The milkman looked relieved and a little smug. This wasn’t going
to be a waste of police time after all.

‘We’ll have to break the door down. Stand away everyone.’
Burly PC George Palmer put his shoulder close to the lock and forcibly barged
against it a couple of times before the doorframe started to splinter. Then he
stepped back and raised his boot to finish off the door. After one good stab,
it gave way and flew back on its hinges. A wall of warmer, stale stinking air
hit them in the face.

‘Stay back. Stay back for a moment. Let some air out and
mind the flies!’ ordered George. They waited for half a minute. ‘OK, Frank,
come on, you follow me. Mind how you go. Hold your arm up over your nose, like
this.’

George and Frank entered the house, stepping over a
scattering of junk mail before negotiating their way through a hallway
partially blocked by bulging black bags and bundles of old newspapers bound up
with string.

In the shabby nicotine-stained back room, next to the filthy
kitchen, they discovered the decomposing body of Harry Williams. He was sitting
in a heavy leather armchair, almost worn through in places, his head lolling to
one side, reading glasses on his swollen abdomen. His right arm was hanging
over the side of the chair, a newspaper strewn across the floor below. PC
Palmer noticed that three fingers were missing from the right hand. The nails
from the remaining thumb and index finger lay directly below on part of the
newspaper. It looked as if Harry Williams had been reading the paper and had
suffered a heart attack or a stroke.

For young PC Frank Meredith it was a particularly gruesome
sight and his first dead body. Maggots were crawling all over the exposed flesh
of the corpse. His boss looked across towards him and lowered his sleeve from
his nose to speak. ‘Sorry laddie … that your first had to be one like this.
Take in what you can and then we’ll be out, sharpish.’

Frank looked away from the body and glanced at the newspaper
scattered on the floor. It was the
Leyton Chronicle
, dated Friday, 28
June 1996, three weeks before. Had the old man been dead that long? Before
Frank could see anything else, George tapped him on the shoulder and inclined
his head towards the front door. It wasn’t a moment too soon. With rising
nausea and an intense desire to get out of the house, Frank stumbled behind his
colleague towards the exit and back out into the sunshine, where both were able
to inhale cleansing breaths of beautiful, cool, fresh air.

Rose took a horse-drawn omnibus to
Liverpool Street Station, where she caught a Great Eastern train to Leyton.
Fifteen minutes later, she stepped down onto the platform, well before her
eleven o’clock interview.

As she left the station, with time to spare, she decided to
use the opportunity to get a feel for the atmosphere of the town on her way to
Crockford’s
Drapery Emporium
situated at 41–48 High Street. It was a warm day in early
May 1898, with a good number of people out and about, bustling from one shop to
another. The town had a fair sprinkling of trades and a pleasing variety of
goods on offer. Rose strolled a little along High Street, noting two butchers,
a fishmonger, a combined poulterer and fruiterer, a chemist, two hardware shops
– their entrances festooned with a brushes and tin baths – a boot maker, a
piano and musical instrument seller, a book shop, a tea shop, a grand hotel,
and no less than four public houses. Centre place to all of these stood
Crockford’s Drapery Emporium.

Rose had carried an image in her mind, largely influenced by
her previous knowledge of the London department stores, so, it was with some
slight element of disappointment that she first surveyed 41–48 High Street from
the pavement opposite. She had to admit though that the building had quite an
imposing air, when compared to those around. It had three storeys constructed
of red brick, Georgian in architectural style, above four large glass display
windows on the ground floor, each dressed in a pleasing manner to show the
goods on offer to their best advantage. The sign ‘Crockford’s Drapery Emporium’
dominated the upper façade in white wooden letters three feet high on a black
background. In fact, the longer she looked at it, the more she felt her early
disappointment fade, replaced by a feeling of excitement, that she could make a
real start here, that this was an up-and-coming place and if her interview went
well, then who knows where she might eventually end up?

Rose took a deep breath and entered the shop.

‘Good morning, madam, may I be of assistance?’ The question
came from an older lady standing behind the haberdashery counter just inside
the door. Although polite, her manner was not especially warm.

’Good morning,’ replied Rose. ‘I have an appointment to see
Mr Crockford.’

The assistant’s expression darkened marginally. ‘Your name?’
she asked rather curtly.

‘Rosetta Ince … Miss Rosetta Ince.’

The assistant’s expression darkened further. ‘Please wait
here for a moment. I will ascertain if Mr Crockford is available.’

Rose looked around her and towards the recesses of the shop.
There were several customers at the different counters. In one corner, she
spotted a sign: ‘Gentlemen’s Department’ and it was in that direction that the
stern and rather formidable lady assistant had disappeared, presumably to speak
to the proprietor. She returned a minute later.

‘Mr Crockford will see you shortly. Please take a seat while
you are waiting.’ She pointed to a simple wooden chair placed at the end of her
counter. By then, one or two of the other assistants, all much younger than
Rose, had noticed her and she saw one of the girls cover her mouth with her
hand to make an aside to her colleague. The other girl stifled a giggle and
both quickly returned to their work following a glance full of rebuke from the
formidable lady on haberdashery.

Rose noted the orderly nature of Crockford’s, and the wide
variety of goods displayed and offered. A young porter, shouldering a large
parcel, passed one of the counters and stopped to listen to a whispered comment
from one of the young girls, before looking Rose’s way. As he passed by her, he
nodded and gave a cheery ‘Good mornin’,’ before winking and continuing on his
way out of the shop. As the porter left, Rose thought she detected a scowl from
the lady on haberdashery.

In just a few minutes, she felt she had gained a brief
insight into the order of seniority and the politics of working at Crockford’s.
She was not particularly perturbed however, and felt confident that her
previous work experience in a much larger enterprise and the prospect of
running her own department ought to mean that she would be equal to the task of
coping with the ‘dragon’ under whose stern gaze she was at that moment seated.

Rose noticed a lady approaching from the interior. She was
in her twenties, tall, slim, pretty, fair-haired and, Rose guessed, slightly
older than herself. She had an air of confidence and greeted Rose warmly
offering her hand.

‘Good morning, Miss Ince. I’m Louisa Crockford. My father is
ready to see you now. If you would like to follow me …’

Rose accompanied Louisa to the rear of the shop. Louisa
opened a door into a corridor and they proceeded to the end to a room marked,
‘Office’. Louisa knocked lightly and showed Rose in, where she was introduced
to Thomas Crockford.

Eric Huntley was the Empty Housing
Officer for Leyton Council. It was May 2000 and he was new to his job in
Leyton, but had over ten years’ experience with a previous council. He had
started the week before and had spent the first few days going through the
files in his office, familiarising himself with the district and finding out
where the empty properties on his books were located. He had decided to spend
the second week visiting each property, taking photographs, speaking to
neighbours and trying to discover any leads to track down absent owners. It was
his job to get as many of the empty properties as possible back into use. One
glance on drawing up outside
Cambria
, 59 Stephenson Street, was enough
to confirm that this had to be one of the worst cases of property neglect that
he had ever encountered.

The end of terrace house was in a dreadful state. The ground
floor windows and doors were protected with metal security shutters to deter
intruders. The glass in several of the upstairs windows had been smashed –
target practise by local youths. One of the bedroom windows was wide open and
the wind was pulling at the tattered remains of a faded blue curtain. The
windowsill had become a landing pad for a squadron of feral pigeons. A pair
were billing and cooing on the sagging gutter above. A downpipe had parted from
its fixing, permitting rainwater to soak into the wall, causing a notable damp
patch. The garden was strewn with overfilled rubbish bags and various unwanted
domestic items. In summary, the house was in a pitiful state. As nature
continued its attack, from the weather outside and from the mould, boring
insects and vermin inside, it was inevitable that unless something was done to
arrest the decay, it would ultimately become a ruin, fit for nothing but
demolition.

Eric’s secretary had briefed him on the history of the town.
She had explained that Stephenson Street was in the ‘Falcon Village’. It was
one of several streets built by the Falcon Foundry in the 1920s to house its
workers. The foundry had closed in 1982 making the workforce redundant. In its
heyday, it had built most of the steam engines that operated on the former
London North East Railway. Shortly after the foundry closed, the buildings were
demolished and the site now remained a large vacant plot.

Eric knocked on the door of the immediate neighbour and a
middle-aged lady opened the door.

 ‘Good morning madam, I’m the Council Empty Housing
Officer,’ he explained showing his identity badge. ‘Just wondered if you could
tell me a bit about next door, like how long it has been empty and who used to
live there?’

‘Are the council finally going to do something about it?’
she demanded. ‘Not before time.’

‘Well, I want to get something sorted out. It’s obviously
been empty for a while and it certainly lets down the other houses in the
street, yours included of course.’

The lady softened her attitude. ‘That house has been the
bane of our lives,’ she complained. ‘We’ve had problems with rats, vandals,
squatters, drugs – you name it, we’ve had it. Goodness knows what effect it’s
had on the price of our house. We can’t move, you know. Who’d buy a house with
that next door?’

‘How long has it been in that state?’ asked Eric.

‘Years! Harry Williams was the last occupant and he died in
1996, aged ninety-five, I think. The milkman found him, you know. He’d been
dead three weeks. We were away on holiday at the time. July it was, so we
missed all the drama, but the house was in a shocking state. He was a recluse
and he just let the house go, you know … no interest whatsoever in maintaining
it properly.’

‘So, if I could trace an owner, or failing that, get the
council to purchase it with a view to making it habitable again, you’d be in
favour then?’

‘In favour? That’s an understatement if ever I heard one.
We’d be delighted! As far as we’re concerned, the sooner that house is repaired
and reoccupied by a respectable person or family, the better.’