No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (13 page)

Phyllis Carter was thin, all angles and sharp features, with light brown hair, bronze really, pulled back from her face, tied in a bun at the nape of her neck, severe, held in place with hairpins. She sat opposite Laura, but on the edge of her chair, as if the possibility of fully relaxing and putting her whole bottom on the seat was anathema to her.

‘I’ve told all I know,’ she said, whining a shade defensively. Frightened eyes, Laura considered.

‘I just came to see if you were all right.’ Laura tried her trusting smile, holding her hands wide apart, as if inviting Phyllis in for a cuddle.

‘I’m fine. The newspapers’ve stopped bothering me, oh, six or seven days ago.’

‘They’ll start again once we’ve made an arrest.’

‘You got someone in mind?’ Phyllis obviously lacked social skills, her eyes darted around the room as though searching for neglected dust, not sure if the room was fit for visitors.

‘We’re working on it.’ Laura sounded confident, like a poker player with a full house, aces on kings. ‘Just don’t want you worried, that’s all.’

This triggered a response. Phyllis seemed to draw back a little and her eyes became more wary. ‘Should I be worried?’ A mite out of breath.

‘Well, just thought you might be. Doris Butler had some unpleasant visitors, we hear.’

‘She had some pleasant ones as well.’ For the first time, Phyllis Carter gave a hint of humour, a tiny smile crossing her lips like a neon sign lighting up. Just for a second Laura saw it, then it was gone.

‘You saw some fanciable ones then?’

Phyllis gave a swift shake of the head. ‘I’m a happily married woman, Miss Cotter.’

‘Possibly, but you can still think, can’t you?’

No reply.

‘Particularly when your hubby’s away at sea in these dangerous days.’

‘I suppose so.’ Not an unqualified agreement, in fact not an agreement at all.

‘You’ve told us some names already…’

‘Two names, and one of them uncertain.’

‘Had any more thoughts?’

‘No. None. I seen quite a few blokes but never recognised them.’

‘And Mrs Butler…? You say you borrowed some chairs from her when your hubby was on leave. Did she stay friendly?’

‘Not really. A nod sometimes in passing. Doris was a strange girl; I doubt she’d even own to being at school with me.’

‘At school with you?’ That hadn’t come up before.

‘Oh, only at mixed infants. We were mixed infants, then still together at the C. of E. School for Girls.’ She stopped as if somehow she had said too much. Then she took an audible breath as though about to continue but nothing came of it.

‘You were friends as children?’ Laura asked.

She didn’t reply immediately, then didn’t answer the question when she spoke, going off on a riff of her own (Laura thought in riffs, jazz-lover that she was, listening to Django Reinhardt on
Jazz Club,
old records from Le Hot Club de Paris; BBC Home & Forces Programme). ‘Doris was kind of a snob. Went on to Sheffield High, out at Broomhill, them wi’ the brown uniforms: got a scholarship.’ Another pause. Wait. ‘Problem with Doris, she married beneath herself.’ Looked up under her eyelashes. Count of around ten. ‘Rog Butler was a bit of an oik really. I reckon she only married him because her mum and dad didn’t want her to. She was just man mad, Doris. Didn’t matter who they were really as long as they’d got the equipment.’ She thought better of the last remark. ‘No, no, I shouldn’t say that, but she did have the reputation of being a little tart. No shortage of money though, her dad being a chemist. Had a shop in the centre. Her mum had been wi’ him in the shop that day, when the bombs began to fall.’

Laura asked if she saw much of Doris after she went on to the grammar – Sheffield High School for Girls.

‘Used to see her on the bus sometimes. And out on a Saturday, buying war paint, powder and lipstick. Liked to tart herself up on the weekends.’

‘Special friends?’

‘She had a gang she used to go round with – Milly Hadrill – Millicent – Betty Cummin, didn’t know if she were coming or going, they used to say. Julia Archard, Georgina Howith, stuck up that one. That were Doris’s special friend, Georgie Howith. Went around like they were joined at the hip, never out of each other’s pockets.’ She smiled to herself and Laura had the feeling that Phyllis Carter didn’t have many people to talk to. Spent a lot of time with herself. ‘Look how they ended up, Doris in a three up, three down, with Roger Butler; and Georgie Howith now Georgina French. French, Summers and Landis, estate agents with a big place up Ecclesall. Could fit Doris’s house half a dozen times inside the French mansion, The Towers they call it. Showplace. I bet she didn’t give Doris a second thought once she got off wi’ Alistair French, though I’d like to know why he isn’t in the Forces: looks fit enough to me and that’s not a reserved occupation, estate agent.’

‘She still live there? Up Ecclesall?’

Phyllis nodded. ‘Wi’ all the steel owners, yes. You won’t catch Georgie round Woolworths make-up counter of a Saturday afternoon these days, oh no.’

‘The Towers?’

Phyllis gave a giggle, not particularly mirthful. ‘No, some people’s idea of a joke. No, I think it’s called Beeches, or Birches. Might as well be called Britches. That’s what Doris and Georgie were after most weekends.’

‘And you say she was clever, Doris?’

‘Oh, yes. But never really used it, except, perhaps, when she worked for the Army. The RTO at Victoria.’ The smile again.

‘Clever? How?’

‘I heard languages. They said she was good with foreign languages, but I wouldn’t know. Doris wouldn’t give me time of day even when she was still at school in her brown uniform.’

The conversation went on for another ten minutes. Laura knew about girls like Doris, boys as well. She’d been at school with a brilliant boy, well, he’d been at King Arthur’s Grammar and she’d been at St Anne’s. Danny Timson, got the best results ever in his School Cert, all credits and distinctions. Went into the Navy and invalided out in ’43. Could’ve taken his pick of jobs, gone to Oxford or Cambridge or both. Went on the buses. Conductor. ‘No ambition,’ her father said. ‘No will to succeed. Head stuffed full of facts, nothing to back them up.’ She wondered if that was true or whether he was a fish out of water, uncomfortable out of his own class, because class mattered whatever people said.

She untangled herself from Phyllis, told her to telephone the station if she had any problems, said she’d been a great help.

Next on the list was Eileen Shanty: Fat Eileen, Pete Hill’s girl – Pete the electrician who favoured girls you could get hold of; Pete Hill, Roger Butler’s cousin looking out for Doris.

And Eileen was certainly plump. You could have made three of Doris out of Fat Eileen.

‘Saw her at the St Giles’ dance that Saturday, Doris,’ Eileen told her, pleasing and smiling in spite of the excess flesh – had to be some thyroid disorder, Laura thought. But she was light on her feet and laughed a lot. ‘Yes, yes, Doris was often at the St Giles’ dance of a Saturday. Never brought Roger with her when he was home.’ Giggle. ‘Might’ve met too many boyfriends if she’d brought him. Bit leery, Doris. Though she did bring that lodger she had stayin’ wi’ her a few weeks before. Weren’t shy about
him.
No.’

‘What lodger?’ Laura asked. First time they’d heard of a lodger far as she knew, though the chief didn’t tell them all the good secrets.

‘He were wi’ the Poles, I think. Polish pilot or something, they said. Big bloke, always grinning and speaking fifteen to the dozen. Maybe not a pilot but definitely a Pole. Polish.’

Well I never, Laura thought to herself, and went off to pin down Georgina French, Georgina Howith as was. But there was nobody home at The Laurals – as it turned out to be – except a crisp woman in a starched pinny who told her that Mrs French was out for the afternoon and wouldn’t be back until six or later.

So Laura took herself back to the nick where Tommy had been in a high old temper that afternoon.

*   *   *

In the bundle of documents passed to Tommy Livermore under the heading ‘Doris Butler: Sheffield Murder Investigation’ were a series of reports by an eccentric detective constable named Horace Betteridge, known to his mates as Harry Betters.

Betteridge spent many of his duty hours on obbo, skulking around likely places such as Sheffield’s Victoria Railway Station, St Giles’ Hall and other interesting locations near the centre of the city, dodging trams and keeping an eye out for the shady side of the local populace: people concerned with thieving, dealing in illicit food or clothes coupons, food itself and people involved in matters illegal running from homicide to whoring.

He was a thin man, thirty years of age, five-eleven in his stocking feet, with a strange walk giving the impression that he was always negotiating steep stairs, even when he was on the flat. He also possessed a livid scar running straight across his forehead, the remnant of a collision with a large brick during an air raid in 1941. The brick had not survived; Betteridge had. Some said that his oddities dated from the impact of the brick. Sergeant Percival, one of the desk sergeants, had been heard to mutter in the vicinity of Harry Betteridge, ‘And some fell on stony ground.’

Many of this young DC’s reports bordered on paranoia or fantasy, but there were times when he managed to drag interesting facts into the light of day. The three reports in the Butler file had been made during the weeks leading up to her demise.

‘I have known Doris Butler since she was Doris Haynes,’ he began the first report. ‘On the face of it she is a well-brought-up girl, but she appears to me to be a young woman of somewhat loose moral behaviour and it strikes me that when loose morals show themselves a life of near-criminal folly cannot be far behind. I was, therefore, not wholly surprised to see her, from time to time, in the company of men who were neither her husband, nor male relatives.’

If Tommy had not known better he would have put Horace Betteridge down as a lay preacher attached to one of the nonconformist churches, or maybe a small extreme and strict religious sect. He was none of these things but, as Superintendent Berry often remarked, ‘Betteridge is a man who likes the sound of his own voice, particularly when he is making comments in writing.’ Mr Berry was not averse to mixing metaphors and, on this occasion, seemed to have done the mixing with a patent kitchen whisk.

Now here was Betteridge standing in front of Tommy Livermore, wraith-thin, head in the clouds and a strange expression on his pasty face. Turn sideways and he’d disappear.

‘Detective Constable Betteridge,’ Tommy started, formally and not unkindly because Ron Worrall was adamant that the man was an anomaly. ‘Odd, Harpic, right round the bend,’ he’d said. ‘Good at the straightforward stuff, but put him in a complex situation and he’s off with the fairies.’

‘Detective Constable Betteridge, I want to talk to you about these reports you made about men seen with Doris Butler during the three weeks or so before her murder.’

‘Oh, yes, sir?’ He had a high, not unpleasant, voice stuffed full of inflections that always seemed to be asking questions.

‘What drew your attention to these men?’ Smile, grin, switch off.

‘As strangers, sir, they were a matter for consideration.’

‘Strangers?’

‘I was brought up in a village, sir. Any strangers walking into our village were considered suspicious until they was proved otherwise.’

Tommy thought the man had finished and was about to frame another question. Wrong; Betteridge was off again. ‘My first DI understood. Like me he was always suspicious of foreigners. “Harry,” he used to say, “Harry, always remember that wogs begin at Calais.” I am even more suspicious these days, sir. Always suspicious of Johnnie Foreigner.’

Tommy Livermore stifled another smile. Jee-rusalem. Here we are heading towards the middle of the twentieth century and we’ve got idiot policemen talking about ‘Johnnie Foreigner’.

‘You suspected these men because they were foreign?’

‘Well, two of them was, guv.’

‘Just because they were foreign?’

‘They seemed very chummy with Doris, sir.’

‘And what was suspicious about that?’

‘Sheffield was all Doris knew, Mr Livermore. She’d never been out of the country as far as I knew – except maybe a day trip to Boulogne.’

‘And what difference did that make?’

‘She was on intimate terms with these men, soon as she met them. Well, intimate talking terms that is. Possibly the other as well.’

‘She was an attractive girl, wasn’t she?’

‘Very attractive, sir. But she was married an’ all.’

‘Tell me about the first man.’

‘Yes, sir. I finally approached them – him and Mrs Butler – and he identified hisself as a Frog called Maisondel. Henri Jacques Maisondel. Said he was staying at the Butler house – that semi they had up Bluefields Road. Doris chipped in and said he was an old family friend and was staying there all above board. All proper. Said he was just down from the north and going to report to Free French Forces HQ, in Duke Street, London.’

‘And you still felt suspicious.’

‘About Maisondel? Yes, sir.’

‘Why?’

‘I just felt there was something not quite right, sir. Something wrong. They seemed very close, him and Doris Butler.’

‘You’ve agreed that Mrs Butler was a most attractive woman.’

‘Indeed she was, Mr Livermore. Oh yes, price above rubies. Married woman, though. Wasn’t right the way she was carrying on.’

‘How
was
she carrying on?’

‘All lovie-dovie like, sir. Wasn’t seemly. And in French also. Good at languages, Doris.’

‘So what did you do about it?’

‘Passed it on to the MPs at the RTO, Victoria Station. And made the report that you have there, sir.’ He leant forward pushing a finger towards the papers in front of Tommy.

‘That was the sum total of it?’

‘Sum total, guv. Yes. Oh, there was one thing. The day I first saw Maisondel with Mrs Butler?’

‘Yes?’

‘That was the first day I became aware of Sergeant Mungo.’

‘Really, this was…’ Tommy turned to the top of the report. ‘This was 19
th
May?’