Death in Albert Park (2 page)

Householders in neighbouring houses, and later throughout the whole of Crabtree Avenue, were questioned but with little result. One woman, a Mrs. Sparkett, living several doors away at number 42, thought she had ‘heard something' adding that ‘you could not call it a scream, really, but definitely something'. Further cross-examination proved that this ‘something' had happened while Hester was still arguing with Grace Buller at the school.

Another would-be helpful resident, a man named Tuckman, had walked up the avenue an hour before the supposed time of the crime and had ‘seen someone suspicious hanging about'. Pressed for details he admitted that the only cause for suspicion was that he had never seen the man before, and that the stranger was only ‘hanging about' in the sense that he was looking for a house number. He turned out to be a chartered accountant searching for the home of a Mr. Goggins who lived at number 18.

The crew of every bus which stopped at the corner of Inverness Road at the relevant times were examined but these Jamaicans could supply little information, one saying frankly that all white people looked alike to him and another having an elaborate theory of the crime that he wanted to voice, but no details in the least helpful of the evening in question.

That the murderer had come in a car and left it somewhere in the district was a possibility which Dyke did not ignore but no car park attendant had noticed anything unusual. One had thought a man who drove off at about eight was the worse for drink, as he put it, but as Dyke was not at the moment concerned with a drunk-in-charge case this was not helpful. The murderer, with his cool aim and single downward stroke
had been anything but drunk. No car, not customarily standing there at night, had been noticed in Crabtree Avenue or its immediate environs, though round in Perth Avenue there had been a party which had brought a couple of car loads.

The wife of the caretaker of St. Olave's had come up to the school at about 6:30 and at first raised everyone's hopes by saying it was funny, that was the night she thought she saw someone under the trees at the top of the avenue. She could have
sworn
there was someone hanging about there as she came to the school gates. What kind of person? Well, that she couldn't say. She hadn't stopped to look. Further questioned she admitted that it could have been one of the girls waiting there, or a policeman on duty, or just a trick of light and shadow, or nothing at all.

The park-keeper was no more helpful. He had made his last rounds at 6 o'clock as usual before locking up at 7. The park was kept open later in summer, he said, but what was the good of keeping open in this weather? It only led to mischief and even now some of the young couples found a way of getting over the railings at night as he bad good reason to know from what he saw next morning. Yes, he had made his rounds and found no one in the park but an old gent who often came there in the evening and was, if you asked the park-keeper, a bit weak in the head but as harmless as a baby. Name? He seemed to think he'd heard him called Mr. Smithers, and somebody had once told him, though he couldn't be sure, that he lived in Cromarty Avenue.

Duly traced Mr. Smithers turned out to be the retired secretary of a charitable institution who had spent the evening playing bezique with his daughter-in-law. The park-keeper himself, an ex-soldier named
Slatter, lived in a lodge at the main gates of the park, which were on the side farthest from Crabtree Avenue, and had heard nothing.

Bloodstains were found at the scene of the murder but examination proved them to be of Hester's blood group. The weapon was missing but examination of the body confirmed that it was a sharp and powerful knife or dagger, wielded from behind the victim. Routine enquiries were ordered in connection with this but yielded nothing. There was also the possibility that bloodstains were on the murderer's clothes and this led to the usual alert to cleaning firms, but again with no result.

Everyone was, as usual, too anxious to be helpful, too full of details of no possible relevance. A couple of lunatics came forward, according to precedent, to confess that they had committed the crime, but one of these had been in Bristol at the time and the other had confessed to every major murder since the Green Bicycle Case. Local enquiries in fact failed to produce anything to go on and after an Inquest had found it was a case of murder against a person or persons unknown, Hester was buried in the local cemetery, the senior girls from St. Olave's, with express permission from their parents, attending the ceremony and weeping as they had never thought to do at the departure of “The Stark”.

Dyke's more personal enquiries led to little enlightenment. He found Hester's brother Eamon a particularly irritating man, not too intelligent but with an excellent opinion of himself. He had already given statements to every newspaper which would agree to publish his picture and to mention the name of the play in which he was appearing. His sister, he told Dyke, was a woman
of dominant personality but so far as he knew she had no enemies. Her only friend was a fellow-teacher at St. Olave's, a Miss Gerda Munshall, with whom Hester took her summer holidays abroad. There were no near relatives beyond the usual aunt in St. Leonards-on-Sea and a cousin of the father's, a rich woman called Dobson, from whom there were vague expectations. Eamon Starkey thought, as he airily smoked a cigarette, that his sister had probably been murdered by a sex-maniac and wondered that the police left such people at large.

Poor Grace Buller, a very large young woman with spaniel eyes and mighty calves, found it difficult to answer questions because she wept too easily and remembered that the last words she exchanged with Hester were bitter ones. She gave a full account of the quarrel and lamented that but for her motor-scooter failing to start she might have been on the spot to save Hester. She had, in fact, ridden home twenty minutes after parting from Hester and ‘must have passed the very spot soon after it happened'. More tears. Hester, she added gratuitously, was the last person you would expect to be murdered. Why? Well, she was. You'd never have believed it possible. She was so … self-possessed.

Dyke's toughest interview was with Miss Cratchley, the headmistress, a remarkable woman who had ruled the school for eighteen years and was not going to lose her poise over the murder of her senior assistant or the intrusion of a senior policeman. She gave Dyke an interview as soon as he asked for it but made it plain that it was to be on her own terms and in her own study. Long able to intimidate staff and parents alike, not to mention her pupils, she anticipated no trouble
from a Detective Superintendent and began by telling Dyke that he was wasting his time in making enquiries at the school.

“What in the world do you expect to find here?” she asked haughtily. “A plot by my senior girls to get rid of an unpopular mistress?”

“That's not quite the point, Miss Cratchley.”

“Then what is the point? The girls see you round the place and have quite enough
nous
to know what you are. It's liable to start the wildest stories. Already I have had parents ringing up to ask if their children are going to be questioned.”

“They may have to be,” threatened Dyke.

“Rubbish,” said Miss Cratchley, getting a deal of expression into her pronunciation of the word. “What on earth could the girls know about it? They were all at home long before Hester left the school that evening.”

“In a case like this …”

“May I ask if you've ever
had
a case like this, Superintendent?”

“Not exactly the same, of course, but we've had women being stabbed before in very similar circumstances.”

“Oh, you have. With no possible motive of gain? With no evidence of any sexual aberration on the part of the murderer? With no passion or jealousy or hatred involved?”

“As for those three, we have no evidence in this case either way. But they can supply a motive in the most extraordinary cases. A woman does not need to be young and attractive to rouse passion, or jealousy or hatred, as you name them.”

“I see. So you think poor Hester Starkey was a
femme fatale,
Superintendent?”

“I said there was no evidence either way.”

“But you infer that she may have been. You did not know her, you see. She was cold and utterly self-sufficient. A clever teacher, oh yes. A woman of some organizing ability, when properly directed. But no more capable of arousing passion of any kind than a brick wall. No, my dear Superintendent. You are barking up the wrong tree. Look outside for your murderer and remember that it was chance which made him pick on Hester. Pure chance. He is a man with a lust for killing, that's all. A Jack the Ripper. It is the only possible explanation.”

Dyke, who was already secretly inclined to agree with her, nodded and went on to routine questions.

But the name was out in his mind. Jack the Ripper. Or the Stabber, in this case. Someone, man or woman, with a lunatic urge to slay. Someone who left no trace because he had no motive connected with a particular victim.

If this were the case, the very ugly case, it was fairly certain that somewhere, not too far away or too long a time hence, he would strike again.

T
HE
second was Joyce Ribbing.

Her body was seen from the front window of number 18 Crabtree Avenue by Lionel Goggins the tenant. He was a big ponderous man and his deep voice was known to his neighbours for he had a way of shouting at anyone he met on his way to the station in the morning.

On the morning of February 23 he drew back the curtains across the bay window of his front bedroom and said to his wife—“There's something in the garden.”

The night had been misty and had turned to fine rain in the small hours but now, at 8:30, the visibility was good.

“What is it?” asked his wife, yawning.

“Well, it looks to me like a corpse,” boomed Mr. Goggins. “A woman's corpse.”

“Not another murder!” pleaded Ada Goggins.

“That's what it looks like. Unless the woman's been taken ill. I'll go down and investigate.”

“Wrap up well, dear. You don't want one of your chills.”

Lionel Goggins obeyed but it did not take him many moments to discover the truth.

“It's Joyce Ribbing,” he told his wife.

“Well don't leave her out there. It's raining.”

“She's dead,” said Lionel Goggins, and went straight to the bathroom to be sick.

His wife waited impatiently. Lionel was prone to fits of nausea.

“What do you mean ‘dead'?” asked Ada sharply on his return. “She can't be dead. I was playing Bridge with her last night.”

“She's dead,” repeated Lionel. “I must phone the police. She has been stabbed, I think. In the left shoulder.”

“Then it
is
another murder!” discovered Ada. “That's how that schoolmistress was killed a few doors away. It means there's a killer at work in this street. You'd better do something, Lionel. You can't leave her lying out there in the rain, even if she is dead.”

“She mustn't be touched,” said Goggins, “till the police have been. They'll see to all that.”

“Phone them, then. And phone her husband. He must be wondering where she is.”

To say that John Ribbing, the local doctor, was ‘wondering' was to put it mildly. When his wife had failed to return at eleven o'clock on the previous evening he phoned Mrs. Whitehiil in whose house she was playing Bridge and learned that she had left there two hours earlier with the intention as she had said of ‘running' home. The Ribbings lived in Perth Avenue, not three hundred yards away, and Joyce was an active woman in her early forties who should have covered the
distance in less than five minutes. Yet John Ribbing hesitated to call the police because of Raymond Turrell. This was a somewhat younger man with whom Joyce had been friendly lately. What John Ribbing feared, and almost believed, was that Turrell had been waiting in his car outside the Whitehills' house and had taken Joyce to his flat in Chelsea.

His indecision was ended by a call from Mrs. White-hill.

“Joyce back yet?” she asked briskly.

“No.”

“I thought I'd just ask. We feel rather anxious about it. She said she was going straight home.”

“Yes. I'm worried.”

“You see … I don't want to put ideas in your head, doctor, but there was that dreadful business of the schoolmistress a few weeks ago.”

“Good God! You don't think …”

“I don't think anything. But you should call the police, perhaps.”

He did so with the result that a squad car was soon outside his house and he was explaining to a sympathetic young detective sergeant. He felt he could not leave Raymond Turrell out of it.

“We'll soon settle that part of it,” said the young man. “Someone will call on Turrell straight away. Now is there nothing else you can suggest?”