There is an odd cab but you have to book it. I’m a keen theatre-goer. I get my complimentary tickets, you know, and if I can’t go I send a friend. I was asked to give a room to a young lady actress, but it couldn’t be done, the rooms were spoken for you.’
‘Who is it plays the piano?’
That’s Chris Mackenzie: he works in the theatre on the stage management side. An old theatrical family.’
‘And who is it who sings?’
‘Singing, is it?’ A shade passed over Mrs Lorimer’s face. ‘That’ll be old Lady Olivia. Have some more potatoes. I grow my own at the back so they can’t ration me there.’
Nothing more was to be said about Lady Olivia, John Coffin gathered. He wondered what her ladyship had done besides sing drunken, seditious songs. Probably been a terror with her blackout curtains.
His landlady interrupted his reflections. ‘There’s a message from your boss to say he wants to see you two this afternoon. You’ll need to go on the bus. 54s do you.’
The two young men looked at each other.
‘He’s a marvellous man. I used to fire-watch with him. We all took our turn. His wife was killed in that rocket at Woolworths in New Cross. Doing the Christmas shopping, she was. A tragedy, but we’ve all suffered.’
Her eyes fell upon John Coffin who had been blown up by a mortar shell and upon Alex Rowley who had a badly injured hand when a sniper’s bullet smashed across his fingers.
The two young men caught their bus, while Stella walked down the hill to the theatre. It was a Sunday, but a working day for them all.
Some weeks later they had had, all of them, a rough time.
John Coffin and Alex Rowley had discovered that Inspector Tom Banbury, perhaps in reaction to the death of his wife, was not an easy boss.
The current crop of post-war crime in Greenwich, Greenwich Wick and Greenwich Hythe was interesting and varied. Nothing major, but most of it time-consuming and exacting. Tom Banbury did not spare himself nor his juniors.
A boffin from Cambridge had committed suicide by taking an overdose of barbiturate drugs, then lying down under a tree in Greenwich Park as night came on. A park-keeper found him. He had left no suicide note; nor was there any easy answer as to why he had done it. No money worries, nor domestic crisis. His widow said she could not understand it. He had been working during the war near Bletchley but was looking forward to a return to private life. Then a man came down from the Foreign Office and a blanket of silence descended.
A lorry parked outside the Sunshine Café on the Greenwich High Road burst into flames and was burnt out. Investigation revealed that it had been totally empty at the time, its load of food and tins having been unloaded sometime earlier. The lorry-driver and his mate, both of a low IQ, were arrested. They had the money for the sale of the rationed food still on them. The black marketeer was not located. A watch on the Sunshine Café and also on The Padovani Italian restaurant (the same owners) failed to produce results. But the sessions at the Padovanis’ were highly pleasurable.
A woman, a known prostitute, was found shot dead in the caravan she inhabited on a bit of flat land down in Greenwich Hythe. She had been shot about six times, her body torn apart by large calibre bullets. Her death was linked with those of two people whose bodies were discovered a week later in their basement flat in Evelyn Street, Deptford; they had died together, probably about the same time as Connie Shepherd. Their son, recently demobbed, was missing. After a search he was found camping out in Epping Forest, where his only explanation seemed to be that it was his mother’s fault. Connie Shepherd’s error appeared to be that she was ‘too soft’. The ex-soldier had with him a German gun he had picked up in Cologne. Connie Shepherd’s young daughter who had lived with her was missing, and remained missing. The soldier claimed to know nothing about her, and so far no evidence one way or another had been found. It was a nasty case.
Both young men felt and displayed anger in this case as they worked, which was noted by Inspector Banbury. He too felt anger at the disappearance of the child but did not show emotion. The kid was dead, he knew it, everyone knew, but until they found her body, or what was left of it, there was no way forward. Inside, he wanted revenge for her, though.
Across the room on this warm spring day he could hear John Coffin taking a telephone call. ‘Lower Thames Street. That’s down by the docks. Right.’ He had flushed red, then the colour drained away.
There was a strange atmosphere in this police station, somewhat alien to police work and perhaps due to those long-ago scholars, generation upon generation of them. The school had started its life way back in the 1880s as a London School Board Elementary School: Boys on the top, Girls in the middle, and Mixed Infants on the ground. Then in the 1930s the London County Council had raised its status, turning it into a Grammar School. Status but not appearance. The architect employed by the old London authorities had a strong house style, a kind of modified Venetian Gothic, so that one red-brick London school closely resembled another. Banbury had gone to such a one himself. So had Connie Shepherd, so had her child. It made a link.
Coffin came straight across. ‘A workman digging on a site in Lower Thames Street found a foot wrapped in newspaper.’
The two men looked at each other. Alex had gone white.
Coffin said, ‘The foreman said a child’s foot.’
‘Get across. Both of you. I’ll follow.’
There was no denying that Alex Rowley had a way of showing awkward emotion. Banbury felt he needed a safety-valve. Marriage might provide it. He seemed the sort that might marry young.
He had seen them both with Stella Pinero in the Padovanis’ restaurant. Separately. Not together.
The foot found on the waste ground of Lower Thames Street was that of a child. It was probably that of Sybil Shepherd, but there was no proof. The foot had been severed at the ankle. The search continued. Nothing more was found on that site.
Shortages of all kinds impeded quick work. Severely rationed petrol meant that most leg-work was literally done on the feet. Lack of telephone lines cut into police communications, creating delays and frustrations.
Space was one of the shortages at Greenwich Wick police station. Privacy was at a premium. From where he worked in his own crowded corner, John Coffin could see both his boss, Tom Banbury and Alex. Likewise they could see him.
But at least he had a window. From his window he could see German POWs clearing the ground where a colony of new houses was going to be planted. There could be a bit of Sybil Shepherd there. Who knew?
He walked over it every day on his way to eat lunch at the Trafalgar Arms public house. He always looked now for evidence of unusual disturbance. Observation counted for so much in detective work. He was exploiting his sharpness of vision.
But it hadn’t helped so far with the Shepherd child. This search looked like their biggest problem, a harrowing and horrible one. He didn’t see it as more than that then.
He walked across the cleared ground on the way home.
His mind was burdened like a pack-horse with bundles of problems picked up in the day, a tightly packed box of private concerns carried with him all the time, and the odd perplexity that was a weight for a while, then put down and of no importance.
Today
