Ormerod's Landing (28 page)

I met her in New Caledonia,' I said. 'A few years ago.'

'Where's New Caledonia when it's at home?' he asked. 'Can't
say I've ever heard of it.'

'It's a French island in the Pacific,' I told him.

'Yes, she would,' he said thinking about it. 'She always said
she wouldn't be able to live in France unless it all changed.'

I nodded. 'She was a governess for a group of French families,' I said.

'How was she then?' he asked suddenly. He looked at me
awkwardly. 'How did she look?' There was almost an embarrassing tenderness about the question.

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'She was ill,' I told him carefully. 'In fact she had periods of
blindness. It was a temporary sort of thing, some tropical disease. But she was very nice. Small, neat. Like she was in
the days when they called her the Dove, I suppose,' I said that
purposely.

He smiled slightly. "The Dove,' he repeated. He took a
reflective drink from his tankard. 'You seem to have gone into
this a bit thoroughly,' he said. 'Did she tell you much?'

'A good deal,' I nodded. 'But I promised her I would do nothing about it while she was alive. I've been in France and
I've seen her grave, and I've been to the bell foundry at Ville
dieu and to Bagnoles de l'Orne and the Catacombs in Paris.'

At once he looked at me with some alarm. 'What do you mean you "wouldn't do anything about it"?' he inquired suspiciously. 'What's that all about? What are you thinking of doing about it?'

'I'm a writer,' I said simply. 'I want to write the story.'

'Christ,' he muttered. 'You won't get anything from me, son.
Not a bloody word.'

'Why not?' I pressed. 'It's all a long time ago. You came out of it with great credit. In fact, it looks to me that you didn't get the recognition you deserved. What's your objection?'

'To start with,' he said, his voice a hard monotone, 'it was
a complete balls-up.' He paused. His glass was almost drained.
He sensed that I was about to offer him a drink and he shook his head. 'I don't want anything written,' he said. 'And that's that. Final. I was married then to the same wife I've still got. She's a sick woman and I don't want to see it in print that I went to France and killed people and especially that I went with this other woman. That would upset her.'

'Even now?' I tried. 'After all this time?'

'Even now,' he said. 'A lifetime's only short. And for us it's not all that long ago. I don't want her to know. Understand?'

'How did you manage to keep it from her the last time?' I challenged hollowly.

'Told her I was going on a special police course,' he said.

Astonished, I said: 'You mean you could go to France, go
all through that, all the killing and everything, and come back
and act as if you'd been to school?'

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'I could and I did,' he said firmly. 'And that's how it's going to be.' He got up and I knew there was nothing I would be able to do to stop him going. 'If you want to write your story,' he said with almost a sneer, 'you'll have to wait until I'm dead too.'

For two weeks I left the matter to rest. There seemed little I could do. Then, as a last throw, I wrote to George Ormerod asking him to reconsider the matter, pledging that he could read the written manuscript and make any changes he wished to make, and offering him a thousand pounds for his cooperation. I told him that this would be a fee for his services, for I would need to have some extended tape-recorded sessions with him, but I guessed that, even knowing him as little as I did, his policeman's instinct would be to smell it as a bribe.

It was no surprise, therefore, when only silence followed the letter. I had to console myself with the thought that one day I would be able to write the story, albeit only from the version related to me by Marie-Thérèse and by my own inquiries in France. But even without his side of the story, that would have to wait until George Ormerod was dead.

Then three months later he wrote to me in the mannered way with which I was to become familiar. 'My wife died on Nov. 23rd,' the letter said. 'We had been married since September 7th, 1939, four days after the outbreak of the hostilities with Hitler. Since she has gone I have occupied myself with writing an account of what happened to me and to Madame Marie-Thérèse Velin in North France and Paris in 1940. It is quite long, about a hundred pages, and is true as far as I can properly remember. In those days, in France, of course I could not keep a diary in case I was captured by the enemy, but when I returned to England I privately wrote up the whole thing and kept it hidden. It is from the notes I made then that I have done this new account. I have also written up the circumstances which took place in this country before going to France in September 1940. There are also a few old photographs.

'My niece and her husband are coming back from Canada to buy a house at Chelmsford and they want me to go and live with them. I don't want to go to them empty handed and I

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don't have any money except my pension. So I will take the one thousand pounds you offer me in return for all the notes I have. But this is all there is and I do not want to make any tape recordings. If you agree, send the money and I promise to send the information by return. If you think it fair I would also like to ask for another five hundred pounds if the book you write is a success.'

It was a plain man's letter, very touching in its directness and simplicity. At once I sent a reply with a cheque and waited eagerly for the return package. It arrived within four days. I opened it. His account was held in a loose-leaf binder, a hundred pages of close handwriting. On the cover he had pasted a gummed label upon which was written: 'Journal of some Operations in German Occupied France 1940.' I held it as if someone had sent me the Holy Grail. Then two envelopes fell from the binder. The first contained a dozen or more photographs of himself, Marie-Thérèse and other people all taken in France. Almost breathlessly I picked them up one by one, touching the edges only. They were brown and not very expertly taken but they were more than I could have ever hoped for. Marie-Thérèse in a baggy dress carrying a sub-machine gun; Ormerod sitting at the entrance to a cave; Ormerod and Marie-Thérèse on Chausey Island sitting in the sun; and then, heaven help me, a friendly photograph of a cheerful German staff officer with the caption hand-written on the back: 'General Wolfgang Groemann at Bagnoles. Just before he was killed. A good man.'

The second envelope contained a brief note. It said: 'Thank you for the money. This is all the stuff there is. Please do not contact me again unless the book is a success and you want to send me the other five hundred.'

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two

George Ormerod's journal, from which I have reconstructed
the singular adventures of the Dodo and the Dove, began like
this:

'In September 1939, I was a Detective-Sergeant in the
Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police
(V Division) covering the south-west area of London, Wands
worth and Putney. When the war was declared I got married
(September 7th) to Sarah Ann Billington and right away volun
teered for the army. On 20th September I was called up to the Royal Artillery and I went to Woolwich for training and later to Aldershot to await drafting with the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front in France.

'Nothing very much seemed to be happening in the war (this
was called the Phoney War period) and in February of 1940 I
was discharged from the army because the London police force was finding itself short of experienced men and it was thought
better that I should be doing a job for which I was suited.

'So on February 8th, I left the army with a good character and went back to the CID. I got a flat in Fulham and Sarah,
who was working in a solicitor's office at Putney, and I settled down there. I was glad to be back in the police because I was
always devoted to the work. They used to say I was dogged and I still am. Once I get my teeth into something there is not much
that can make me let go. This is what happened in the case of the murder of Lorna Smith, but it is the way I am made and it
was the way I saw my work. In fact you could say that this
particular murder case became so important to me that it put everything else out of my mind for months, even the war.

'Lorna Smith was a decent girl of eighteen who was found dead in the mud on the banks of the Thames, not far from Wandsworth Bridge on March 18th, 1940. She had been
brutally raped and murdered, strangled with one of her own
stockings. I knew the girl personally and also her parents. They
kept a grocer's shop and dairy at Fulham. I have never seen
two people so distressed in my life. I thought they would never

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get over it. For myself, I was livid, plain bloody angry, that this
young girl's life should be snuffed out by some animal who
couldn't control himself. God knows there were enough whores
operating in London at that time, you could hardly move for
them in the West End, so why he had to take it out on a decent-
living kid like that, don't ask me.

'I got myself assigned to the case, on account of knowing the
family, and for weeks I hardly stopped working even to eat or
sleep. Sarah, my wife, got very upset about it. She thought it
was something else. (She was always a shade suspicious because
she'd had some dealings with the CID in her work at the solici
tors and she did not have all that high opinion of their morals.)
I remember she said to me one night when I got home pale and
played out: "Are you sure it's not a living girl that's taking up
all your time?" That was the nearest time I ever came to hitting
her in all our years of marriage.

'About the middle of May I got a strong lead. A soldier stationed at the camp in Richmond Park got drunk in the Queen's Head pub in Kingston-on-Thames one night and a barmaid overheard him say he knew who had done the killing
of Lorna Smith. She reported what she had heard and the next
night I went to the pub myself, bought this soldier three or four
Scotches (I said I wanted to do something for the war effort)
and then took him to Putney police station for questioning.

'He was a pimply little bastard called Braithwaite, a private in the Catering Corps, though I wouldn't have liked him to
cook my dinner. At first, naturally, even though he was drunk,
he denied ever making the remarks about Lorna Smith. Then he
admitted he had said it but was telling lies, just trying to make
an impression on his I listeners. I was not going to have that. I
had come too far to stop now. All I had to do was close my eyes
and see that girl lying on the mortuary slab and remember her
father having to identify her and my blood boiled.

'So I leaned on Braithwaite, not brutally (of course) but enough to make him change his mind again. He started to cry.
He must have been a great soldier, but I suppose they took all
sorts in those days. And he sobbed it all out. One night in the billet in Richmond Park, the soldier in the next bed had come in late and drunk and had fallen down at the side of the bed

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and started to pray to God for forgiveness for doing somebody
to death. Most of the others in the barrack room were asleep - it was a Thursday which was pay night and they'd all been out to the pubs - and only Braithwaite remembered it in the morning. Even he had not taken much notice until he read in the
Evening News
that the girl had been murdered.

'But he did not do anything about it, although he noticed
that the other man was very pale and unusually quiet for about a week. This man was a soldier called Albert Smales, twenty-
six, formerly a labourer of Preston in Lancashire, who, inci
dentally, had a long police record for violence against women and girls. About two weeks after the murder Smales had put
himself forward to volunteer for a draft to France with the British Expeditionary Force, was accepted and went within the next few days.

'Right away I applied for permission to go to France and see the man, but my superiors were all horror-struck. There was a war on, they pointed out, and a war that was just beginning to liven up. The Germans had begun to attack all along the front and they were breaking through in Belgium.
If we wanted Smales questioned then let the army Special
Investigation Branch do it. There was no chance of my going.

'In the end a request was put in to the SIB office of the
military police in France where it must have raised a laugh, because by this time the army was a bit of a shambles, pulling
back towards Dunkirk, and nobody knew where anybody was.
To try and pick up one man, no matter what he was accused of, was impossible and they said so. Very rudely I recall.

'All I could do was to fret around getting on everybody's nerves, my colleagues, my wife, and even, I regret to say,
Lorna Smith's parents. Everybody seemed to want to close the
business except me. I wasn't going to let it drop. In the end I
got permission to go to Preston to see Smales' family - a right
collection. All the male members had done time for something
or other, the sister was on the streets and the mother had a go at that when a customer turned up who was not all that particular. I obtained from them a picture of Albert Smales in uniform (well, truthfully, I lifted it from their mantelpiece, but I thought anything was fair with that class of people), and on