Bottled Spider Read online

  ‘Great.’ She grabbed for a pen and note pad. ‘Shoot.’

  The victim had been a thirteen-year-old girl called Marie June Davidson who had been found dead, and mutilated, in the family home at 4 Heartfarm Terrace, Nr Trumpington, Cambridge. Her father worked on a nearby farm, and her mother was in hospital, at Addenbrooke’s in Cambridge, following an appendectomy. It was the father, Norman Davidson, who had found her and, naturally, he had been the first suspect — quickly ruled out with a cast-iron alibi. Norman Davidson had been with other farm labourers from five thirty that morning. He had returned with a colleague who lived next door. Davidson had gone into his cottage and almost immediately called his colleague back, hysterical with what he had found.

  The kitchen door had been left open, victim strangled with a 2ft 6 inches length of piano wire, the ends of the wire sealed off with 4 inch insulating tape. The victim’s genital area was slashed with broken glass, some of it embedded deeply along the walls of the vagina, eyes were slashed straight across with a kitchen knife — one cut — and a large pan of water was boiling in the kitchen.

  There was a queried link to a similar case near Stratford-upon-Avon — the village of Snitterfield — in the spring of this year.

  Enquiries were directed to Detective Inspector R. E. G. Giddings at Cambridge Police Station.

  ‘And the Acton business?’

  ‘I’m coming to that. Barbara Bachelor. A couple of weeks shy of fifteen. Yes, she went missing overnight. I spoke with their CID. They suspect an uncle fancying her. ‘Bubbles’, they called her and I gather she was a handful. Father came back the next day, found her dead. Piano wire round the neck.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well there’s a DI in Acton seemed quite pleased you’d brought the matter up. DI Prothero. Ernie Prothero. Says thank you and he’s looking into it. Phone him if you want. I gave him your name, so he may just telephone you. Okay?’

  ‘Okay, thanks, Sergeant. That’s Acton nick, is it?’

  ‘Well it’s hardly likely to be Bermondsey if the offence took place in Acton, is it? The girl’s body was found at Fifteen Layer Street. Got it?’ Acton was way out the other side of Kensington. Not too far from Camford.

  DI Giddings was in when Suzie telephoned Cambridge.

  ‘Oh yes. I’ve been reading about you in the papers.’ He sounded amused and ready to take the mickey.

  ‘Don’t believe all you read, sir. I’m not in charge of this case.’

  ‘Glad to hear it.’

  Insufferable, she decided and got on with asking the questions. The family lived in one of four tied cottages belonging to the farm and Norman Davidson had cycled home with his colleague. ‘Went into the cottage. Bounced out again like a Jack-in-the Box,’ Giddings told her. ‘Bob Evans cycled to and from work with him every day. Lives in the next cottage. He was putting his bicycle away when Norman called him back. Marie June Davidson hadn’t been in long herself: she’d come back from school. Usually got home about quarter to five. Norman arrived back at ten past.’

  Marie June had been next door to see if a parcel had arrived for her father — the postman would leave it there if nobody was in at number four. Evans’ wife said the girl was fine, full of chatter about the school play and the summer holidays. She planned to work on the farm for part of the holidays, helping to get the harvest in when it was time. That was it. Norman Davidson arrived home, found the dead girl. Nobody had seen anything.

  ‘No strangers. Nothing.’ Giddings said. ‘I thought it was probably a casual. A tramp, or worse, a bloke from one of the aerodromes, but casual all the same. She put her bike away, went next door to Evans’ wife then straight back to the cottage.’

  Giddings thought the killer was probably there all the time, going through the place, seeing what he could lift. Old dodge, the boiling water. Villain’s trick. ‘They had one of those big ranges in the front room and a little kitchen like a cubby hole out the back. The whole place was small. A door to the stairs. Two bedrooms above. Bath night on Friday when they filled a big old tin bath from the copper out in the little wash house next door to the outside lav. No electricity. Gas lights and a hob. Wireless runs on a big battery. They have two. One they’re using and one down the garage getting juiced up. Change over Thursday evenings. Wonderful isn’t it? Modern times out in the country.’

  ‘There are a lot of people still live like that in the cities as well.’ Suzie said, but he did not respond.

  ‘All along I’ve thought it was a crime of opportunity — crime of necessity. She caught him at it and he killed her, then made it look really ugly with the cutting. Broke the bottle right there in the kitchen.’

  ‘What kind of bottle?’

  ‘Wine. They made their own wine, the Davidsons. Elderberry, damson, blackberry and a concoction they call Pear Brandy. Lethal stuff. Round here the farm labourers make a lot of wine — or, I should say their wives do. It’s the cheapest way of getting pissed.’ A short pause. ‘I’m sorry. Forgot I was talking to a lady.’

  ‘I’m not much of a lady,’ she lied.

  ‘Oh, well.’

  The murderer had smashed the bottle holding it by the neck then gouged it into the girl’s genital area.

  ‘Really very nasty. Vicious,’ Giddings said.

  ‘Post-mortem?’

  ‘Oh yes, she was well and truly dead by the time he did the nasties.’

  ‘And you’ve got absolutely no clues?’

  There was a long, slightly uncomfortable pause. ‘Not really. No, I think we missed out badly. Well, I missed out badly.’

  ‘Why so?’

  ‘Because I think he was there all the time. I know he was there all the time. I should’ve had the dog brought out ... If I’m honest I suppose I wasn’t quick enough on my feet.’

  She waited for more, and eventually he told her. They had been so puzzled that the next morning they brought one of the two dogs run by the Cambridge Police. ‘We had no ideas. No leads, and I thought what I’ve already told you: that it was a crime of desperation on top of a crime of opportunity. But nobody had seen a thing. No strangers, nobody lurking around, out of place. Nothing. The same people rode along there on the bus that do it every day.

  ‘The cottages have a few yards of ground out the back. About ten or eleven yards and as wide as each cottage. They grow potatoes, sugar beet, lettuce, carrots, peas, beans, you know the kind of thing. Running along the bottom, well it’s their sort of boundary really, is a line of poplars. We let the dog sniff around the kitchen and he was suddenly off up the garden. Behind the trees there was grass that had been trampled down. Someone had been stood there for some time. I’ve no doubt about it. When it was good and dark I think he wandered off the way he had come — across the fields. There were some cigarette ends there. De Reskie cigarettes — geezer with a monocle on the packet, right? Great long cigarette holder, all that. The killer came in that way, and waited in the trees after he’d done it, then made his way back to Cambridge or wherever. Slept rough and got lost. I still think he’s some kind of travelling man. Maybe a didicoi.’ There was another pause. ‘Except for the Snitterfield business.’

  ‘Tell me about that.’

  ‘Beginning of May. Just before the Blitzkrieg began. Eighth or ninth, you’ll have to get that from the Stratford nick. Snitterfield’s quite a small place, about three miles out of Stratford. Another girl killed in her kitchen. Well, not a girl. More a young woman. Twenty, I think she was. Just married.’

  There is no railway station at Snitterfield. You can get there by bus, but on the afternoon of that particular murder the only clue they had was a man seen on the two o’clock bus. He got off at the stop before the village. Then he was spotted walking across the fields. A stranger. Nobody had seen him before, or since.

  Giddings said they did not have a decent description, but two people saw obviously the same man. ‘Wore a scarf, muffling himself up, and a wide-brimmed hat. Dark overcoat. Some reckoned it was a navy blue raincoat, but yo
u’ll have to get the full strength from Stratford. All I recall is that the bus conductor gave a description. Also a woman walking her dog, saw him crossing the field. The bus conductor was in the frame for a while. The victim was on his bus. He was chattering away to her and couldn’t give a description of me-lad-oh.’

  ‘The times fit, though?’

  ‘The Snitterfield murder? Oh yes. Yes, right on the button though nobody saw him leave. It’s a kind of dead end, if you’ll excuse the expression.’

  ‘And the MO?’

  ‘Wire and the eyes this time. If it was the same bloke he didn’t do his Jack the Ripper thing.’

  ‘You thought that as well, did you?’

  ‘Yes, very much so. If you’ve read the descriptions of the Ripper’s victims you can’t really miss it. I thought of it straight away. As soon as I saw Marie June, I thought, Hello, it’s Jolly Jack. Now, anything else I can do for you, Sergeant?’ This last spoken very quickly.

  She couldn’t tell if he had been stringing her along about Jack the Ripper, but by his voice she thought he probably was. Having a little joke at her expense — ‘That tart with the Met,’ he’d tell his mates. ‘She give me a ring about the Marie June Davidson business. I really got her going; said it was just like the Ripper.’ And they’d all have a good laugh.

  ‘Yes, sir. Yes, did you get any prints?’

  ‘One set of unknowns. Could’ve been chummy, yes. Not one hundred per cent certain, but it’s possible.’

  ‘They matched them with Snitterfield?’

  ‘None at all on that one. Smudges, gloves, but all the other prints accounted for.’

  ‘Could you send the ones your chaps lifted, sir?’

  ‘Of course. Who do I send them to, your guv’nor?’

  ‘No, sir. Send them direct to me, would you?’ She parroted the Camford Nick details, thanked him, then got off the line. She felt that DI Giddings had been stringing her along on more than just the Ripper stuff. There was something else just out of reach. God these blokes really disliked having a woman doing the job. Women for them were good only for cooking and breeding: in the kitchen and up the spout, as she’d heard ‘the Prof’ say to his mates in the canteen.

  She tried DI Prothero at Acton nick, but he wasn’t around, so she spoke to his sergeant, a man called Simon Finton, who told her that his guv’nor was quite excited about her possible connection with the Cambridge, Stratford and Jo Benton cases. Alas, Finton did not sound as enthusiastic as Mr Prothero.

  Yes, he’d seen the body; no, there were no other intrusions — that was the word he used, intrusions. No, the eyes were intact, which was more than the girl was. They were waiting for the tests to come back but his guv’nor, and by association Sergeant Finton, thought she had been raped. She was certainly not a virgin.

  Finton’s money was on Bubbles’ uncle, Peter Bachelor. ‘Shifty,’ the sergeant said. ‘Dead shifty and rattled.’ That was about it. Suzie asked one more essential question. ‘What pan of water?’ Finton said. Yes, they’d keep in touch, and they would report progress.

  She really wanted Shirley to come to Richard Webster’s office with her, but she didn’t have permission to drive the Wolesley either, so it had to be Magnus. It was either Magnus or go by tube and she knew which would be better.

  Webster and Broome had their offices deep within the warren of streets that ran between the Strand and Covent Garden. There was a polished brass plate by a non-committal door straight off the street. You went up a flight of steep linoleum-covered stairs to a tiny landing and a door with a typed card that said, KNOCK AND ENTER, WEBSTER AND BROOME.

  ‘Like a tart’s parlour, I bet,’ said Magnus and looked visibly surprised at the carpet, leather chairs and smart secretary manning a reception desk.

  Webster was in his mid to late fifties. Smooth as a baby’s what’s-it and — as Magnus put it later — sleek as owl shit.

  He wore an obviously bespoke suit, more suitable for the country, Suzie thought, with a classy yellow waistcoat sporting brass buttons. His shoes were ox-blood, the socks matched the waistcoat, and the tie was also a yellow silk. Sulka, Suzie bet herself. Yellow with a red pattern.

  He waved them into chairs, offered them cigarettes from a silver box, and asked if he could get them something to drink.

  ‘I’m knocking off. Lunchtime, so I can allow myself a teeny gin and it.’

  They declined in the time-honoured manner of police officers.

  ‘I should offer my condolences,’ Suzie began. ‘You’ve lost a good client.’

  ‘I don’t know about good —’ he flashed her a quick smile, there and gone in a second — ‘but, yes, we had great hopes for Jo. Expecting trouble, mind you, but nobody thought it’d be as serious and as final as this.’

  ‘What kind of trouble, sir?’ Suzie asked.

  ‘In my business there are two staple troubles.’ He lit their cigarettes with a table lighter that looked like real silver. ‘Two staple troubles. Money and sex. If it isn’t one it’s usually the other.’

  ‘And there was a money problem?’

  Richard Webster looked at Suzie with an amazed, slightly stunned expression. ‘No. With Jo it was sex.’

  ‘Ah.’ Suzie did not know what to say until she heard more. ‘Sex?’ she asked, feeling the colour rush into her cheeks.

  ‘She was trailing around young Fermin, who was bound to find out in due course. When I heard you had him in for questioning I thought he’d found out and killed her in a fit of pique — only pique would be a shade extreme for young Steven. I can’t think why the silly girl actually said yes to him. She told me it was to seduce him, but here we are, months after the event, poor Jo’s in her grave, well almost, and Steven hasn’t laid a hand on her. From a sexual point of view, I mean.’

  ‘Let me get this straight.’ Suzie was conscious of her jaw drooping, and Magnus was leaning forward as though he was about to learn the secret of life. ‘You’re saying that Jo Benton ... er ... well ...’

  ‘Put herself about?’ Webster leaned back in his chair and laced his fingers behind his head.

  ‘Yes, I suppose that’s what I’m asking.’

  ‘Twenty-four hours a day,’ the agent said without a smile. ‘If a male swam within her ken and was the least bit respectable then she had him. The engagement didn’t seem to slow her up either. In short she was the BBC bicycle and I can’t think how Steve Fermin didn’t know it.’

  ‘Husbands and fiancés,’ Magnus muttered.

  ‘Quite right.’ Webster nodded. ‘Last to know.’

  Suzie felt completely ineffectual. I just haven’t got the experience, she thought. I haven’t got any real experience of life, or of this job. I shouldn’t be sitting here. I’m probably drowning.

  Nine

  ‘She was a ticking UXB.’ Webster settled back in his chair.

  ‘D’you know, it’ll be a relief to talk about things now she’s gone. She could’ve pulled the plug on so many people.’ He looked up at Suzie. A coy kind of look. ‘But of course she wasn’t that kind of girl.’

  ‘You mean she could’ve blackmailed people?’

  ‘Oh, the full works. If ever a girl had dirt to dish it was Jo Benton. The problem was that I was her agent and agents are known to be the receivers of secrets. Now I know most of what she knew, and that makes me rather uncomfortable.’

  ‘I have a list of some of her friends. Can we start by going through that, Mr Webster?’

  ‘One minute, Skipper,’ from Magnus. ‘I don’t know if I’m slow, but I’m not sure I follow all this. Mr Webster, are you saying that Jo Benton was some kind of — what would you call it? — a nymphomaniac?’

  Suzie frowned: I thought I was thick and inexperienced, but Magnus really is a plod.

  ‘I don’t know that I’d call her that, Mr ...?’

  ‘Magnus, sir.’

  ‘I’ve known some nymphomaniacs, Mr Magnus. They’re rather sad people who get no real enjoyment out of life. They certainly don’t enjoy what
they’re after most of the time. You couldn’t say that of Jo Benton. No, she really enjoyed what she did.’ He smiled and appeared to be thinking back to times now gone for ever. ‘I warned her,’ he said.

  ‘In what way, sir?’

  ‘Jo had this — how can I describe it? — this lust for sex: it wasn’t the itch that nymphomaniacs seem forced to scratch, an addiction. And it wasn’t about bragging — showing off, kissing and telling. I think I’m the only person who shared all her secrets, but I suppose she was still playing with fire. If she fancied a man, she’d have at him and wear him down — in very little time as a rule.’ He took another long pull of his cigarette and blew out a stream of smoke. ‘But with the exception of one or two special friends, that was it. She’d have them once and never again. There were some ugly scenes because people did fall in love with her. Some of her targets couldn’t understand how she could have an inspired three or four incredible sexual hours with them, then wave goodbye. There were some who got pretty angry, thought they had done something wrong, offended her; thought they’d let her down sexually. Played havoc with some men — and not only men —’

  ‘You mean women —?’ Suzie began.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he nodded. ‘Most definitely, yes. In one case I know of anyway.’

  Magnus still looked puzzled, while Suzie thought she really ought to take a course in sexual encounters. She didn’t even know what it was like, because she’d never done it. Now she felt her virginity was shining blankly from her eyes.

  ‘I saw it in action,’ Richard Webster continued. ‘I remember giving her lunch one day at the Savoy. A very famous American film star was at the next table — I won’t mention his name.’ Webster flashed his shy smile again. ‘When he got up to leave, the movie star, Jo excused herself and followed him out. I didn’t see her for three days. I phoned her at work, but she’d called in sick. I saw her again on the fourth day when she turned up uninvited in this office. Insisted we go out to lunch during which she gave me a blow by blow account — if you’ll excuse the expression.’