No Human Enemy (Suzie Mountford Mysteries) (20 page)

‘But you remained a fascist? You were a member of Mosley’s British Union of Fascists?’

‘Outwardly. I was asked to give that impression. Mind you, I believe this country requires strong leadership: people at the helm who you can follow with confidence. People with strength of character. Educated people who won’t jib at dealing with weakness and ignorance, who’ll keep the masses in line.’

‘You had given that impression for a number of years already, hadn’t you? Being a fascist, going to house parties with card-carrying fascists; mixing with them; on friendly terms with Mosley and his people, proselytising for a fascist government.’

‘Made it easier, yes. People in the Foreign Office wanted someone with his ear to the ground. Someone with credentials. I was that man. Ask them.’

‘Who? Vansittart’s people?’

‘Him, yes. MI5 as well. They’ll give me a clean bill of health. Individuals are another matter. You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, as a shrewd political operator said.’

Shrewd political operator? Suzie thought they didn’t come much shrewder than John Lees-Duncan. He had taken her in. Not just her but it was writ large in the records. More to it than that, she thought. His life was hardly an open book. There was something more that had come between him and his sons, or was there: maybe another problem that also engulfed Willow, and his wife, and possibly Dulcie Tovey as well. She still needed him to fill in the gaps: present the complete picture.

‘And you had no idea what happened to either of your sons after 5
th
May ’39?’

‘Heard Michael was in the United States later that year, and that Gerald was seen in London, March/April ’42. Told you that already.’

‘And you were willing to allow this rift to continue? A separation from your two sons?’

‘The difference between one political belief and another can be as vast as the difference between life and death. Doesn’t mean to say that I
liked
it! Or that I was
happy
about it. Of course I wasn’t, but what can a man do? In many ways I finally got the kind of fascism I approved of, with Winston and the generals handling the country’s affairs and the conduct of the war. That’s a great kind of fascism.’

She nodded. ‘And your wife. How did she take to separation from her sons?’

‘Isabel never had the head for politics. Brought up in the country – horses, running around among the hay and going to hunt balls. Had a sound schooling but what good did that do? Kept her end up at parties, knew how to handle servants, arranged the flowers well, planned the menus. Not a political animal though. Never really understood men either. Got itchy when I strayed – like all men stray. Liked the drink. Became a dipso. Own worst enemy. Look at her now: morning passes in a rosy glow, has to take to her bed around three. Gets up later. Another half-bottle sees her through dinner. Knows how to pace herself, I suppose.’ Total contempt in his voice. God help her, Suzie thought. John Lees-Duncan was possibly the most uncaring man she’d ever met, and if he was that, what price his children?

‘I go now?’ he asked, rising from the chair and stretching his legs, easing out the joints, pain in his eyes. It had been so easy, Suzie thought, too bloody easy.

Sit ’em in that chair and they’ll talk,
Tommy said; and Lees-Duncan had talked, spewed it all out with no hesitation, the reserve gone, no suppression, no side-stepping the questions. Too easy, she thought again.

‘You’ve been most frank, Mr Lees-Duncan,’ she said, knowing that he’d hidden more than he’d revealed, realising that was his job, being something he was not and living off it. ‘We’ll talk again.’ What she was really saying was, don’t go anywhere. I have plans for you.

‘Daddy rode over Mummy like a bloody traction engine rolling out the tarmac,’ Willow said later, when Suzie finally faced her with the big question. But before then she talked to a contact with MI5 and even managed a word with the man who she’d heard speaking with Lees-Duncan – B2. ‘We don’t tell old Woolly that much,’ B2 said. ‘Bit loose of mouth. Better let him think some of our people, like old Moonlight’re not quite kosher. Stirs up the Branch. Keeps them on their toes.’

She painstakingly wrote her report, typed it and put a carbon in an envelope addressed to Tommy, enclosing copies of the happy snaps of the dear departed.

A short talk with Willow unearthed nothing she either knew or suspected, so she left the WAAF officer in the charge of Shirley Cox while Dennis shepherded Lees-Duncan and his gardener to the private hotel they often used near Whitehall.

She walked into the flat in Upper St Martin’s Lane just after ten-thirty to the tinkle of laughter coming from the larger spare bedroom.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

‘Hold the front page, heart’ Tommy said, on the telephone from Sheffield.

‘You’ve got a scoop have you?’ Suzie had just finished talking to Willow Lees-Duncan: a long, frustrating session, it was twelve noon and she felt fed up and far from home.

‘May even have a result, heart.’ He sounded calm and loving. ‘Now this is what I want you to do.’

Her eyes opened wide as she listened. ‘But, I…’ she began.

‘Hear me out. Now…’

‘Didn’t I send all that?’

‘You sent the pretty pix and your report: four pages of it. Nothing else.’

Indeed, her heart had done a nice little arpeggio when she heard his voice on the telephone, but she went off him a bit when he began carping.

‘Tommy, you’re carping,’ she said.

‘Possibly, heart, but I think we’re nearly there.’

‘At your end, maybe, but I feel I’m fighting with a black man in a coal cellar at midnight here.’

‘Don’t get tetchy with me. Just do the job. Oh yes, I miss you like buggery.’

‘Good,’ she didn’t say aloud.

‘Just do it.’

‘Yes, darling.’

‘Rinky dink,’ Tommy said. Then, ‘Probably see you tonight.’

‘Tom, I—’ But he’d put the phone down.

For a moment she thought about the interview, glanced at her notes. The only intereresting exchange had come suddenly, unexpected. ‘Michael,’ Willow had said. ‘Funny, Michael…’

‘What was funny, Willow?’

‘He was such a rackety, devil-may-care boy except when it came to politics. He would laugh, joke, pull the most extraordinary japes and hoaxes, then if you turned to the politics of National Socialism he became totally serious, humour went and he was absolutely committed. It was like switching off a light bulb.’

Suzie wondered what Tommy would make of that, and wondered what he was up to.

In Sheffield he had started the morning by telling Ron Worrall to take a couple of DCs and do a final search of Doris Butler’s house and garden. ‘Turn over every blade of grass,’ he said. ‘We need a murder weapon.’ In spite of previous searches they hadn’t found a thing that could have been used to batter Doris to death.

Ron went on a bit because he’d already been up Bluefields Road twice, cleaning the place out, going through it like a dose of salts. ‘Once more won’t hurt,’ Tommy told him. ‘I’m off to see the RTO with that bugger Mungo.’

Dave Mungo was still not his favourite person; Mungo, the sergeant DCS Woolly Bear had sent over from the Branch, put him covertly into Sheffield nick; it really irked Tommy, who felt it had been done on purpose, not a word to him, not from either Chief Superintendent Bear nor the local DCS Berry whom Tommy thought of as an old friend. Some friend, wandering around with his eyes, ears and mouth closed tight as a badger’s armpit. Tommy Livermore was well put out and determined to cause Dave Mungo some grief.

‘It’s not Mungo’s fault,’ Berry had said. ‘I should have spoken up. Just didn’t cross my mind.’

‘Maybe it’s not Mungo’s fault, but life isn’t fair, is it?’ Tommy smiled his terrible smile and told Mungo that they were off to see the Wizard, ‘The wonderful wizard of the railways, and his little friends the Military Police sergeants.’ If the truth be told, Tommy was pretty much obsessed by the three shady servicemen who had attached themselves to Doris Butler in the days before her death. He was deeply suspicious of these men – the Frenchman, Henri Maisondel; the Pole, Stefan Korob; and, finally Gittins, Stanley Gittins, corporal in the 1
st
Battalion, Suffolk Regiment. The last had arrived in mufti which was most unusual. Tommy somehow thought they all added up to being sinister even though Mungo had told him they had been checked out by the MPs, giving the impression that they had proved to be clean as a bath full of Lux washing powder. Mungo, Woolly Bear’s man in Sheffield, had said the local Military Police had taken a good look at them.

MPs took a look and they came up smelling of roses?

You’ll have to talk to them, sir.

Who? The MPs?

The Frog and the Pole, and the corporal sir. The MP section at Sheffield Victoria followed them up. I think they’re Lux clean.

Tommy didn’t believe a word of it, that was why he was going over to Victoria Station, Sheffield, to check it out: taking Dave Mungo with him, watching him like a hawk and giving him a nasty case of the shakes if he had his way.

The Railway Transport Officer at Victoria Station was a little major with a voice like a turkey, all gobble, and a nasty squint which made him stare straight over your left shoulder when he was looking you in the eye. His name was Austin and he had some sort of power complex, monarch of all he surveyed, including his two Military Police sergeants who were big men, hewn out of off-cuts from Stonehenge.

‘You’re a civilian far as I’m concerned,’ he gobbled at Tommy. ‘I’m not obliged even to speak to you, let alone answer questions.’

‘Oh, I think you’ll find I can do all manner of nasty things to you if you refuse to cooperate, Major Austin.’ Tommy smiled, the seraphic smile this time, taking in little Adrian Austin and the two MP sergeants all decked up in their white webbing, red caps, lanyards, revolvers and all. He then used his twelve-bore shotgun method of questioning, swinging from left to right and scattering questions, blasting full on at both of the sergeants and the peptic major. The questions probed into their own knowledge of Doris Butler, their personal interaction with her, and the manner in which they viewed her during the time she worked as a civilian clerk to the RTO.

In all there were ten Military Police NCOs attached to the RTO Office, but it so happened that the pair on duty – Sergeants Carmichael and Thompson – had done a large percentage of daylight shifts, therefore coming into contact with Mrs Butler more than most.

Almost straightaway Major Austin revealed he had felt some suspicion when he discovered Mrs Butler was, as he put it, ‘a fluid German speaker’, information that exposed the unfocused major as a dimwit of proportions equal to his rank.

‘Didn’t just speak Kraut, either,’ Sergeant Carmichael volunteered. ‘What worried me was she began nattering in Frog and Pole to the two other geezers. Then, what followed, well…’

‘What exactly followed?’ Tommy asked.

‘Well, what we discovered. When we looked into the backgrounds of Maisondel and Korob,’ Sergeant Thompson said in a clever-pocket voice, his head wagging from side to side like a child who knows all the answers.

‘And what did you discover?’ Tommy caught sight of Dave Mungo’s face falling through several thousand feet to a low, dodgy area where they could shoot him down in flames.

‘Don’t forget the Official Secrets Act,’ Major Austin said quite quietly at which point sergeants Carmichael and Thompson clammed up so tightly that Tommy wondered how they managed to breathe.

‘I’m sorry, sir,’ Mungo added with a smooth shrug. ‘Mr Bear, sir.’

‘I’ll be back,’ he all but snarled.

*   *   *

Ron Worrall stood in the little clearing of grass and bushes on the north side of 65 Bluefields Road. There was a young elm tree among the bushes to the front, the tree from which the bark had been picked. Slightly to the rear a poplar stood to attention – one of five that ran proud in a line along the back of the houses.

Ron was fussy about his appearance, almost as fussy as Dandy Tom: liked to show a good inch of cuff, nice links, and the polished brogues which were, this morning, scuffed and dirty.

They had turned the house inside out, knowing it had all been done before: opening drawers, taking stuff out, then repacking, bottom drawer first like thieves so they didn’t have to close them straightaway. They’d rooted around under the stairs, gone through everything in the kitchen, cutlery, pots, pans, utensils; then the DCs cleared out the coal shed outside, just to the rear of the back door. DC Bones and DC Trickman.

He’d brought a pair of uniforms as well as the two DCs and they’d worn overalls to do the coal. ‘Not a sausage,’ Bones told him when they were done and knew they’d have to take scrubbing brushes to their hands to get out the ingrained coal dust.

‘I wasn’t looking for sausages, more like fire irons,’ Ron said, unsmiling.

Now they were traversing the lawn behind the house while Billy Bones examined the flowerbeds.

Ron looked around him, then up just as a breeze hit the poplar and sent the leaves shimmering enough for him to go on looking at what he first thought was probably an irregularity – a branch out of alignment, slanting straight up, the other branches folded back like a closed umbrella. He stepped sideways, still peering up, head back, neck aching. It was too thick to be a branch and seemed to be jammed close to the trunk some six feet from the tree’s base. Easy to overlook. If it was anything it had already been missed.

Poplars are not trees for climbing but Ron sussed out two of the lowest branches that would possibly bear his weight. Balancing on the balls of his feet he craned upwards then sprang, arms stretched out, hands clasping the branches where they forked from the trunk. He flexed his arms and pulled upwards so that his head came level with the slender branches.

Reaching up with his left hand, he grasped another branch two and a bit feet higher; then the right hand, feeling the strain of his weight, a grazing of his palms on the rough wood, flexing again and pulling his chest upwards against the springy branches and leaves. Again. This time the object was revealed and just within reach. It had no ornamentation which dated it after 1887 when truncheons decorated with coats of arms and individual markings were all recalled. This one was probably smooth crocus wood, around 15 inches long, a truncheon with a leather thong at the handle.