Ormerod's Landing (29 page)

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the way back south in the train I kept taking out that photograph in its frame and staring at it. A clergyman got in at
Crewe and, thinking I was looking at a picture of my soldier
brother, the silly old fool said he would pray for him. The bastard needed somebody to pray for him.

'To me Dunkirk was even more of a miracle than it was to most people. Here was fate bringing my quarry right back to
me, if he was alive, which I thought he was because they never
got themselves killed in battle, that sort. As soon as they began
to bring the soldiers back from the beaches I asked for permission to go down to Dover, Folkestone and other places on the coast to try and pick up Smales.

'This request was met with a very sharp refusal and all the
usual catch-phrases like "Don't you know there's a war on?" and they sent me out to look for German spies and para
chutists disguised as old ladies and vicars. (There was even a
ridiculous rumour went round at this time that the enemy had dropped midgets in children's clothes to act as saboteurs. Some lunatic seriously suggested that I should go around the playgrounds and the parks looking for Nazi dwarfs.)

'I was much more interested in finding a full-grown mur
derer. I tried again with my bosses but now they turned really
nasty and the Detective-Superintendent, a man called Lowe,
blew me up and said that I only had it on hearsay that Smales
had anything to do with it at all, now would I bugger off and look for fifth columnists.

'That decided me. I took some leave I had due to me and under my own steam I went down to the south coast where
there were camps for all the men who had disembarked from Dunkirk. You never saw such a shambles. If the Germans had
followed them they would have been in London by midday. And all the fuss! Everybody patting everybody on the back as if it were a great victory instead of a defeat. You'd have thought they had all swum back.

'Anyway for three days I had no dice at all. I went to all sorts of camps and army offices making my inquiries. The reactions I got varied from complete indifference to nasty tempers. How dare I look around for an ordinary, unimpor-

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tant murderer, when the whole future of civilization was at
stake? That sort of blind attitude. There they all were drinking their millions of cups of tea and eating their sandwiches pro
vided by middle-aged ladies who wanted to kill Hitler, but nobody knew nor cared about Private Smales.

'Eventually, on the last day of my leave, I had some luck. I discovered the unit he had been attached to and right away I found that some men from that unit were in hospital in
Canterbury. So off to Canterbury I went, taking with me ciga
rettes and apples, the sort of thing it was fashionable to give to soldiers in those days.

'I flashed my police warrant card about a bit but it was only
grudgingly that they let me into the hospital. They did not
think that any business I might have had could be important
enough. The war seemed to have dulled people's idea of simple
public duty. I know the murder of Lorna Smith was not as
glamorous as Dunkirk but, to me, it was more important. After
all Dunkirk had now all been cleared up. This case had not.

'But my luck had turned. There was a soldier in one of the
beds, a boy only about eighteen, who had what looked like a
nasty hole in the top of his arm, and it was he who told me
about Smales. "Didn't like him," he said after I had shown him
the photograph. "Nasty bully type of bloke. Throwing his
weight about, getting drunk, even reckoning he'd done people
in."

' "He said that?" I said, trying not to sound too eager. "Can you remember what he said about it?" He looked at me in a funny way and then shook his head. "No, nothing definite.
Nobody believed him anyway, just general bragging, like. And
he didn't hang around to do any of the killing when the bleed
ing Jerries arrived. He just hopped it."

' "Deserted did he?" I said. This gave me some sort of funny
hope that the military would give me a bit more assistance.

'"Yes," said the lad. "Cleared off about the third week in
May when it was getting nasty. I don't know how he got away or where he went. Paris, I expect. The dodgers always went to
Paris."

I talked to him for another half an hour, trying to get something more from him. But it was not much use and after

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that the ward sister came along and started to get shirty with me for plugging away at the boy. So I left him all the cigarettes and apples I had brought and made to go out. It was not much use because from the door I saw the sister taking
them away from him. She came charging down the ward after
me and shoved the lot into my arms again. "Take these with you," she said, really nasty. "He can't smoke and he can't eat apples."

' "Oh all right," I said, a bit hurt. "Why can't he?"

'She looked very annoyed. "Because he's got a bullet lodged in his lung, that's why," she sort of rasped at me. "If I'd known
you were from the police I wouldn't have allowed you to talk
to him at all. You've exhausted him.
You
ought to try being in
the army. Can't think why you're not anyway."

This was the trouble with people in those days, you see.
Unless you had a uniform they thought you ought to be tarred
and covered with white feathers. Nobody ever stopped to think
that if the police did not act normally while everybody else was playing soldiers then there would be a lot more Lorna Smiths lying dead in the mud around the country.

'As I went away with my apples and cigarettes I was feeling
disappointed, thinking that I was even further from getting Smales. Even if he had returned from Dunkirk then I had no more leave to find him. If he had stayed in France then he would soon be in a nice cosy prison camp for the rest of the war, doing fretwork and body-building. He wasn't the type to escape and certainly being inside was no change for him.

'I had to go back to everyday police work, checking up on stolen ration books, questioning people who were reckoned to be signalling to enemy aircraft by opening their blackout curtains. Thrilling stuff like that. And there was, of course, the
unending excitement of checking little old ladies and vicars to make sure they didn't have concealed guns or bombs.

'In July I managed to get permission, after a lot of trying,
to go back to Preston to interview Smales' family again. This
time the journey took the best part of three days there and back and I was only in their house for twenty minutes. But I got something for my trouble. His mother, who wasn't too sure what was going on in the world, being a touch simple, let

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it out that they had received word from the Red Cross that their Albert was a prisoner-of-war and in a military hospital somewhere in France, but she did not know where.

'After that there did not seem very much I could do. I mooched around the army camp at Richmond Park and in the pubs in Kingston but it seemed that everybody was getting fed up with me and Lorna Smith. We were being a nuisance. Nobody seemed to care but me. My superiors even told me straight out to drop the case until after the war. And, in addition, it was very difficult to go asking questions around anywhere that particular summer, especially at military establishments. Twice I was arrested by the army police on suspicion of espionage.

'Then came one of those twists of fate which change people's lives. In July 1940 there was a conference being held at the Military Staff College at Camberley in Surrey and all sorts of high-ups were there. Every day we expected the Germans to invade, although I personally did not, and this conference was to discuss resistance operations to be carried out if the enemy occupied Southern England. It seemed funny to think of the Germans taking over Kent and Surrey, although in the odd way I was thinking about things just then, it did cross my mind that if they did occupy this country then at least France and Britain would be under the same umbrella, so to speak, and it might well be easier to get Smales. I know it seems amazing now that I should have thought like that, but I certainly did, I remember clearly. Naturally I kept it to myself. If I'd have mentioned it to anybody I'm sure they would have put me in the Tower of London for treason.

'Anyway, at this Staff College conference there was naturally a lot of security and I was given the job of keeping an eye on a man called Brigadier Elvin Clark during the off-duty time. He stayed at the Staff College but he went out to Virginia Water to dinner in a hotel a couple of times and once he got off early in the afternoon to have a game of golf. I can't say I was looking forward to this a lot because it was my job to stay with him all the time and I didn't fancy traipsing around a golf course. But there was nothing for it so I set out with him and the caddy. There was nobody else playing and he said he

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did not mind because he quite enjoyed going around by himself. I made a bit of a joke about it, I remember, telling him that at least in that way you didn't get beaten. He asked me if I had played golf and I said I hadn't although I had played football for the Metropolitan Police team before the war.

'It was a warm July evening and it was strange out there on the green fairways to think that the Germans had been sending over bombers all day and the sky had been full of dog fights. Even now the vapour trails of the Spitfires and Hurricanes were drifting in the blue sky and a Nazi Dornier had crashed that afternoon only half a mile from where we were. The Brigadier never talked about the war at all (I suppose he was tired of it already) but only about golf and his home and his family in Scotland.

'After a while he began to ask me about my police work and, almost by accident it seemed (although in my state of mind it was more or less bound to come out, I suppose), I started to tell him about Lorna Smith and my efforts to get the man Smales. The Brigadier was a man who listened intently, I could see that, even when he was playing golf shots, which he did pretty well as far as I could see with an inexpert eye. Then, like the intelligence officer he was, he began to ask me questions about the case and my feelings towards it. It was like a cross-examination in the witness box and I had to think very carefully about my replies.

'"Where is this man in hospital?" he asked.

"I don't know," I said. "All I know is he's a prisoner and he's in hospital in France. He's safe for a while anyway."

'For a quarter of an hour he did not speak. Even I could see he knew how to play the game well and he did not take many strokes over the par. "And you'd still like to get at this man, would you?" he went on eventually, as if we had never interrupted the conversation. It was a statement, quietly put, more than a question. I thought it was just something to say.

' "I'd say I would," I answered.

' "Why is that?" he asked shrewdly.

I was a bit shaken. "Well... well to start with, I'm sure he killed that girl," I began. "I want to get him for that. I want him brought to court."

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' "But surely there are one or two murderers, maybe even more, running around loose today," he said to me. "And they're get-at-able, here in this country. Why not go after one of them?"

'I was not sure how to answer. "This is my case, sir." I hesitated. "And I don't like to be beaten. I think crime should be punished. I'm a bit of a puritan like that."

' "What about after the war?" he said, putting the ball right into the hole from all of twenty feet. He hardly paused in his talking. "Don't you think that with things as they are you ought to get your mind off it? After all the Germans could be playing this hole in a month's time." He paused again, then decided to go on. "Do you think it's a sort of frustration because you're not serving in the army?"

' "A sort of guilt you mean?" I said, knowing he did mean that. "Well it might look like that, I admit."

'He had played the last hole. He scratched his nose with his putter. "I mean," he said turning away, "how do you feel about
the war? Does it worry you?"

'The questions were confusing me. "Yes sir," I answered. "Of course I worry like everybody else. I read the papers and I hear the news. I mean, I wouldn't like us to lose."

' "But you're not actually taking much part." It was funny, I thought, he was so persistent. We were walking towards the club house and he asked me to go in with him for a drink. "Who
is
taking part at the moment?" I asked, probably a bit rudely because he had touched a tender spot. "As far as I can see we're all sitting here, just waiting."

' "Right," he agreed sportingly. "You've got a point Ormerod. Not many of us are fighting just now. Except the chaps up there in the Spitfires. But don't mind my saying so please -it just seems from what you've been telling me that the war itself is a trifle ... well ... remote ... yes, remote, from you."

' "You could say that," I agreed moodily in the end. Then I thought I might as well say it. "Albert Smales is my war."'

Two weeks after his conversation with Brigadier Elvin Clark,
Superintendent Lowe of Wandsworth police station called Ormerod into his office and amazed him by telling him that a

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confidential message had been sent to the division requesting
that Detective-Sergeant George Ormerod should report to a department at the War Office on the following day.

'What have you been up to?' the Superintendent said, eye
ing him cagily from the desk. 'All this top secret stuff. You've
got to see this Brigadier Clark. He was the one you kept an eye on during the Staff College conference wasn't it?'