Death in the City Read online

  DEATH IN

  THE CITY

  J.R.L. ANDERSON

  CONTENTS

  IThe Seagulls

  IIThe Banker’s Tale

  IIIWinter Marsh

  IVAt Ingard House

  VA Visit to Stepney

  VIMiss Macdonald’s Story

  VIIA Matter of Teeth

  VIIIWinter Marsh Again

  IXThe Lighter

  XIn Downing Street

  XIThe West Buxey Buoy

  XIIThe Wildfowl Remain . . .

  About the Author

  Copyright

  THE J.R.L. ANDERSON COLLECTION

  The Peter Blair Mysteries

  Death on the Rocks

  Death in the Thames

  Death in the North Sea

  Death in the Desert

  Death in the Caribbean

  Death in the City

  Death in the Greenhouse

  Death in a High Latitude

  The Piet Deventer Investigations

  A Sprig of Sea Lavender

  Festival

  Late Delivery

  Other J.R.L. Anderson Mysteries

  Reckoning in Ice

  The Nine-Spoked Wheel

  Redundancy Pay

  For David

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The behaviour of politicians is often enough irrational, but the performance of the Minister of Fine Arts in this tale is so eccentric that I hope it cannot be taken even as a caricature of any real politician, living or dead. To avoid any suggestion of party-political bias I have given Britain a Coalition Government. If by some twist of the political roulette wheel Britain should actually have a Coalition Government while this book is in print, please, it is not my fault.

  Geographically, Winter Marsh belongs to the Foulness complex, but my Winter Marsh is a wholly imaginary extension of Foulness Island to the north-west, cut off from the real Foulness by an imaginary arm of the River Roach. The oysters of the area, thank goodness, are real, but it should be obvious that the peculiar operations concerning oysters in my story could not possibly relate to any real oyster fishery.

  I

  THE SEAGULLS

  AT LOW TIDE the Thames seems rather to let down London. The majestic river, bringing life from the sea to mingle with the fresh water coming from the wooded valleys of the Upper Thames, has withdrawn: it is like a very old face, once-beautiful skin shrunk and wizened, hollows and grey lines instead of rosy cheeks. Instead of water lapping the romantic old stone walls of wharves and warehouses, palaces and towers, there is mud – a pallid dark grey mud, littered with the dunnage of long-dispersed cargoes, bits of broken packing cases, carried up with the tide and brought down again, the rusted frames of worn out bicycles, the pathetic remnants of somebody’s pram, upside down, its upholstery all gone, motionless, futile wheels apparently beseeching something from the air.

  Yet Shirley Millings, walking across Southwark Bridge shortly before six o’clock on a June morning, rather liked the river at low tide. Somewhere in her thirties, long abandoned by a useless husband, and with two small children to bring up, she was not given to self-analysis. If she had been, she might have reflected that the Thames at low tide symbolises lost opportunities, the failures that are inseparable from other people’s successes, the blank misery that is too often the other face of the coin of commerce. But Shirley Millings, who left school at fifteen, didn’t think like this. And she was not unhappy. Indeed, she was conscious of good fortune in having at last got a council flat in Southwark, and in having good neighbours in the flat across the landing who saw that her children – a boy of nine and a girl of seven – ate their breakfast, and got them off to school. It was wonderful, too, to live within walking distance of her job as an office cleaner in a big building in Upper Thames Street.

  She’d had bad times before she got the flat, but with the flat and the job she felt herself well off. She worked from six in the morning to a quarter to nine, getting the offices clean and tidy for the staff who came in at nine o’clock, and for two hours in the evening, from six thirty to eight thirty. She liked the morning best, for it was then that she and the three other women who formed a team for one section of the building did the rooms, emptying waste-paper baskets, running a duster over desks, and vacuum-cleaning floors. In the evenings they washed corridors – that had to be an evening job so that the floors would be dry by morning and nobody could slip on them – and did out lavatories. It was a nuisance having a working day split in two, but on the whole the job suited her quite well. It wasn’t badly paid, and she could be at home when the children came back from school, and get their tea.

  She was in good time this morning, and could spend a few minutes on the bridge, looking at the river. She knew it in all its moods, the formless expanse of a dark winter morning, the bright sparkle of summer, when the water, however dirty it might be really, seemed to have the freshness of faraway springs. High tide, with the water welling round the piers of the bridge, and the buildings on the banks seeming to grow from water, was nice, but low tide, as on this morning, had a sort of beauty of its own. The old prams were not, to her, unsightly. She couldn’t, and didn’t try to, put it into words, but prams belonged to life, and an old pram on the mud gave the river scene a touch of common humanity. She liked to wonder how a particular piece of jetsam had got there. And there were more birds at low tide, gulls sweeping low over the mud, sometimes walking on it, leaving little lines of three-toed tracks.

  There was a flock of gulls now, wheeling and mewing just below the bridge. Something seemed to have excited them, they’d found something on the foreshore. What on earth was it? A bundle of old clothes – what would gulls want with that? My God, it wasn’t a bundle of old clothes – it had a face, and there was a hand, extraordinarily pale and white, stretched out on the mud . . .

  Mrs Millings’s first instinct was to run away. It was nothing to do with her, and whatever it was she didn’t want to be mixed up in it. Then she thought, ‘Suppose he isn’t quite dead?’ She ran out into the road and screamed.

  At most periods of the twenty-four hours, to run into the middle of Southwark Bridge would be to invite suicide in the stream of traffic pouring across it, but at that time of morning traffic was relatively light, and there were some gaps between the cars and lorries. Mrs Millings was doubly lucky, in that she ran into one such gap, and the approaching vehicle was a police car, with an extremely good driver. Even so, Police Constable Clifford nearly hit her, and it was only by a combination of his skill and the excellent condition of the car’s brakes that he was able to stop a fraction of a second before knocking her down. She had half fallen over the bonnet when the car stopped. She subsided into the roadway and screamed again.

  PC Clifford’s first thought was, ‘Mad woman trying to commit suicide.’ He and his mate both jumped out, he to go to the woman, his mate to stop other traffic on the bridge. Mrs Millings put his mind at rest about injuries by struggling to her feet. He put his arm round her shoulders, and said quite gently, ‘What do you want to do that for?’

  ‘It isn’t me,’ said Mrs Millings. ‘Look over the bridge! There’s a dead man lying there – or if he isn’t dead he needs help.’

  Leaving his mate to control the traffic, PC Clifford went with her to the parapet of the bridge. Yes, there was certainly a figure lying in the mud. While he was considering what to do, Mrs Millings walked away. ‘Hi! You can’t go off like that,’ he called after her, and ran to catch her up.

  ‘Course I can – let me go!’ she said. ‘It’s nothing to do with me, and I’ll be late for work.’

  ‘Look, Miss,’ he said, ‘my mate and I have got to get down to him, but you reported him, and I’m afraid you’ll have to tell us how you c
ame to see him. We’ll be as quick as we can. Afterwards I’ll take you on to your job in the car, and explain things to your boss – you won’t get into trouble. But please, don’t go away. It really is important to get your statement, but first we’ve got to see if we can do anything for the poor devil down there.’

  Mrs Millings was pleased at being called ‘Miss’, and the excitement of being taken to work in a police car was another pleasing thought. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’ll wait at the end of the bridge.’

  PC Clifford and the other policeman got into the car again and drove across the bridge to its junction with Queen Street on the City bank, giving a brief report of what had happened on the radio telephone before leaving the car. There were some steps going down to the foreshore near a riverside pub. The body was lying about fifty yards away, a little downstream of the steps. To get there they had to cross the mud, and sank in it to their ankles, but below the soft surface mud the foreshore was hard here, and although it was a filthy journey it wasn’t particularly difficult. One close look at the man was enough to tell them that he was dead, but PC Clifford felt his hand and cheek. Both were icily cold.

  ‘Can’t do much more here,’ he said to his mate, ‘and the CID will want to see the body as it is. They said they were sending along at once, so they should be here any minute now. If you wait here to see that no one interferes with the body, I’ll get a statement from the woman, and take her to her job, whatever it is. Don’t think you need actually stand in the mud, though – if we get back to the hard it will be all right.’

  A little group of people had gathered by Mrs Millings to watch the police activities on the foreshore. PC Clifford extracted Mrs Millings, and took her to the car. She hadn’t much to tell him – merely that she had stopped on the bridge for a moment to look at the river, had been attracted by the gulls and then noticed what was exciting them. She gave her name and address, and PC Clifford then drove her to the big office block in Upper Thames Street, just round the corner. She wasn’t more than a few minutes late, but PC Clifford kept his word. Although he was horribly conscious of his filthy boots, he sought out the supervisor of the office cleaning company by which Mrs Millings was employed, and explained that she was late only because she had been helping the police to investigate a river tragedy ‘like a good citizen’. The Supervisor, initially resentful of the extra floor cleaning brought by muddy police boots, soon found herself softened into liking this polite young constable, and ended by offering him a cup of tea. PC Clifford would have welcomed the tea, but said that he must get back to the scene of the tragedy.

  *

  Detective Inspector Ian Redpath had sufficient experience of the Thames at low tide to keep a pair of gumboots in his car, and the police surgeon, Dr Gillespie, was similarly well equipped. Dr Gillespie was about to examine the dead man when PC Clifford got back.

  ‘Get those gawping sightseers off the bridge,’ Redpath instructed him.

  While the constable urged the onlookers to ‘move along there, please’, Dr Gillespie made his examination.

  ‘Middle-aged man,’ he said, ‘anywhere between forty-five and sixty, more probably in middle or late fifties. Body seems in fair condition, own hair, not thinning. Ah, yes – depressed fracture of skull. That would be the cause of death, I think, heavy blow from piece of lead piping wrapped in sock, or some such instrument. Impossible to have been self-inflicted. I’m afraid you have a murder on your hands, Inspector.’

  ‘Can you say how long he has been dead?’

  ‘Only within wide limits. He’s been in the water for some time, clothing utterly soaked, whole body chilled. I can give you a better idea after the autopsy, from examination of the stomach contents. All I can say at the moment is not less than about six hours, not more than a couple of days.’

  ‘Can you do anything more here?’

  ‘Nothing. The sooner you can get him to the mortuary the better. Well, I’ll be getting along. I’ll try to carry out an autopsy later today, and let you have a report as soon as I can.’

  *

  A mortuary van drew up at the end of the bridge, and two men, carrying a stretcher, came down the steps. A police photographer finished the task of photographing the body and its immediate surroundings.

  ‘You can get him away now,’ Redpath said.

  The men laid the stretcher beside the body, and bent to pick it up. ‘God, he’s heavy!’ one of them said. Redpath was puzzled for the body seemed to him to be rather on the slight side. With a considerable effort the men got him on to the stretcher, and Redpath noticed that his trouser pockets seemed to be bulging rather curiously. They were stuffed full of rifle or machine gun cartridges. So were the pockets of his jacket, adding several pounds of dead-weight to the weight of the body.

  Redpath didn’t attempt any detailed examination on the spot. Telling the men to see that the body was left fully clothed in the mortuary until he could get there, he let them go. PC Clifford and the other uniformed constable lent a hand in getting the stretcher with its heavy burden up the steps.

  With the body out of the way, the Inspector closely studied the foreshore where it had lain. The shape was roughly indented in the mud, but little runnels of water were already seeping into the indentation, for the tide had turned. Soon there would be nothing left to see. There was a glint of something half buried in the mud, and Redpath extracted a cartridge, unfired, with bullet and cartridge case complete. He searched the area, but found nothing more. ‘Presumably fell out of one of his pockets,’ he thought.

  There was no sign of any sort of weapon, either a firearm related to the cartridges, or the kind of heavy instrument that might have caused the injury from which the man had apparently died. But if he had been in the water for some time, it was unlikely that he had been killed at the spot where his body had fetched up, and equally unlikely that the weapon which killed him was there to find. Feeling that he had done what he could, Redpath walked back to the steps.

  He wanted to get on with the job of examining the clothes and, he hoped, identifying the body, but he had another job to do first – to call on the River Police and give them such facts as he had.

  Inspector Redpath belonged to the City of London Division of the ordinary police, although he knew and loved the river and a good many waterfront cases came his way. But London’s river is also policed by a special force of River Police, expert rivermen, who have a distinguished place in the history of the Thames. The investigation of anything happening directly on the river would normally be the responsibility of the River Police, at least until such time as it might lead to inquiries inland. The foreshore at low tide was indeterminate territory, setting problems of similar complexity to those posed by property rights in the seashore below high water mark. Redpath had been called in because the body on the mud had been reported by PC Clifford from a land-based patrol car, but whether it was properly a land or river matter was a moot point. If the body had come there as the result of a crime that took place on the river, then the River Police with their specialised knowledge of tides and shipping were the obvious people to investigate it. But had it happened on the river? At present there was no means of knowing.

  The River Police Headquarters Building was not far from Southwark Bridge, and Redpath felt he’d better call there to put his problem, before getting involved in something that might turn out not to belong to his division at all. He asked for Superintendent Carstairs, who, happily, was on duty.

  The Superintendent knew and liked Redpath, who had worked with his own people on a number of cases. ‘Morning, Ian,’ he said. ‘Always glad to see you, of course, though I must say that I’d hoped to go off duty without any more trouble. And I can’t think that you’ve come round at this time of day just for a chat.’

  ‘Well, really, that’s just what I have come for, Super. But you’ll understand that it has to be a sort of business chat.’

  ‘That body on the hard, just below Southwark Bridge?’

  ‘So yo
u know about it!’

  ‘Ah, you don’t suppose anything can happen on our river without our knowing, now, do you? Yes, the body was spotted by one of our patrol boats, but it was low tide, you see, and not easy to get ashore from a boat just then. Anyway, before anyone from the crew of the boat could get ashore they saw two uniformed constables come down, and reckoned they’d leave them to it. Then your people telephoned a while back to say that you’d gone to investigate, so I was more than half expecting you.’

  ‘That makes it easier in a way, but I don’t know if it’s your job or ours.’

  ‘It’ll be work for somebody, anyway. Tell me what’s happened so far.’

  ‘The body was seen by a woman crossing Southwark Bridge on her way to work – she’s a cleaner at a block of offices in Upper Thames Street. She stopped a police car and pointed to it. PC Clifford, the driver of the car, got her name and address and a statement from her, though it doesn’t amount to anything more than that she was looking over the bridge and saw the body. Clifford and another constable who was in the car got down to the foreshore as quickly as they could on the offchance that the man was alive and needed help, but they soon saw that he wasn’t. Clifford reported to the station by R/T, and I went along with Dr Gillespie and a photographer. I also arranged for a van to take the body to the mortuary.

  ‘The man was lying in the mud, and the doctor couldn’t do much in the way of examination on the spot. He reckons that death was due to a fractured skull, caused by a blow on the head from some heavy but softish instrument – he suggested a piece of lead piping wrapped in a sock, but it might have been a sandbag, or anything like that. The blow couldn’t have been self-inflicted, so presumably it’s murder, or manslaughter, or some peculiar accident. Until we know a lot more about it, obviously we’ve got to assume that it may be murder. The doctor said the body could be taken away, and when the mortuary men were lifting it, something very odd came to light – the pockets were stuffed with live rifle bullets. I’ve got one here – not from any of his pockets, but from the mud. I found it more or less buried in the mud, underneath where the body had been. Presumably it had fallen out of his clothes.’