A Lesser Evil

  ‘Oh, go to work,’ Fifi said irritably. ‘Stay and do overtime too! You wouldn’t be any good to me anyway, you haven’t a clue how I feel.’

  ‘Haven’t I?’ he said, arching one eyebrow. ‘Just because I’m not a bloody psychiatrist doesn’t mean I’m stupid. It’s just a few hours, for goodness’ sake! Go back to sleep now, then go and make your statement. I’ll be back as early as possible.’

  Fifi turned her face into the pillow. She could hear him getting dressed, and then he made a cup of tea. She ignored him when he put her cup on the bedside table, and stiffened when he tried to kiss her goodbye.

  ‘I love you, Fifi,’ she heard him say from the doorway. ‘I’m not doing this because I want to, but because I must.’

  It was his slow, heavy step on the stairs that pricked her conscience. He usually bounded down them two at a time, and so it was clear he was troubled at leaving her. One of the reasons she fell in love with him was because he was so uncompromisingly masculine. He saw his role as that of sole provider and protector and he wouldn’t take a day off work even if he had a raging temperature. But although she admired his strength and sense of duty, she still thought that in this case he ought to have put her needs first.

  She must have fallen asleep again soon, for the next time she looked at the clock it was after nine. It was another hot day, and it seemed almost obscene that the sun should still be shining when something so awful had happened, but she found she wasn’t cross with Dan any more. He couldn’t make anything better by staying home with her; with or without him the pictures in her head were going to be the same, and perhaps it was wise to keep his boss sweet.

  She had a quick bath, put on a plain blue dress and fixed her hair up in a ponytail. She was very pale, and her eyes looked awful, piggy, with dark circles beneath them; they still felt kind of tender from so much crying. But she supposed she’d be crying again once she had to tell everything again at the police station, so there was no point in putting on any mascara.

  The interview room at the police station was small, hot and airless, painted a hideous mustard colour, and it stank of stale cigarettes. Detective Inspector Roper had a young policewoman with him to take down her statement, and without any preamble he asked Fifi to start right at the beginning when she first got up on Saturday morning.

  Fifi related everything carefully. Now and then Roper would ask her to explain something a little more clearly, who she’d seen or talked to, the exact time of day, and the policewoman wrote it down.

  By the time she got to the part when she entered the Muckles’ house and made her way upstairs, it was already noon and so hot she had perspiration running down her face. When they had a break for a cup of tea and for her to go to the lavatory, she was actually glad Dan hadn’t come with her. There really would have been no point in him sitting outside the interview room just waiting for her.

  As they resumed the statement and she got to where she opened the door to the room where Angela was, she broke down. It was too much having to go through all that terrible part again. Roper got her a glass of water, and the policewoman comforted her. Roper waited patiently until she’d composed herself before continuing.

  But finally it was over, she was given the statement to read herself, and she had to sign it to confirm it was an accurate account of the day’s events.

  ‘May I go now?’ she asked, very relieved it was over.

  ‘Just one more thing before you go,’ Roper said. ‘You said Mr Ubley was out all day?’

  ‘Yes, he went to visit his wife’s grave, and then to see his sister,’ Fifi said.

  ‘What time did he leave the house?’

  Fifi shrugged. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Well, was it straight after he came up with your milk and said you could sit in his garden?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know. I got washed and dressed and that took some time. He was gone by the time I went down to his garden.’

  ‘So you didn’t see him walk up the street?’

  Fifi thought that a very odd question. ‘No, otherwise I would’ve known when he left, wouldn’t I?’

  ‘But it was after you saw the Muckles leave?’

  ‘Yes. No. Oh, I don’t know,’ she said irritably. ‘He came upstairs with the milk before the Muckles went off, but I don’t know when he left the house. Why are you asking me about him anyway?’

  Roper shrugged. ‘In a case like this we have to find out where everyone around was, and at what time, that’s all.’

  Fifi couldn’t see why Frank’s movements should interest them. After all, they hadn’t asked her about Eva Price or Mr Helass, who had also been out in the road that morning.

  ‘Where are the other Muckle children?’ she asked.

  ‘They’ve been taken to a place of safety,’ Roper said. ‘Don’t you worry your head about them.’

  That sounded a little patronizing to Fifi, and she bristled. ‘I just hope you don’t let any of the adults back to their house, they’re likely to be lynched,’ she said tartly.

  Roper nodded but made no reply.

  ‘How did Angela die?’ Fifi blurted out suddenly. ‘Was she strangled?’

  ‘No.’ He paused as if considering whether to divulge the cause of death or not. ‘Unless something else comes up in her post mortem, we think she was suffocated, probably with a pillow.’

  ‘Really!’ Fifi said in surprise. ‘Do you know yet what time she died?’

  ‘Between eight-thirty and ten-thirty a.m.,’ Roper said tersely, as if she had no business to ask.

  Fifi wanted to ask a great deal more but didn’t quite dare. ‘What will happen now? Will I have to be a witness in court?’

  ‘Almost certainly,’ he said. ‘But don’t trouble yourself about that now, a trial is a long way off.’

  Fifi thought ‘a trial’ was a very vague statement, almost as if he hadn’t yet decided who had murdered Angela. But then she knew from her work in a solicitors’ office that police and lawyers always hedged their bets and were careful to be seen to be impartial.

  ‘Thank you for coming in so promptly, Mrs Reynolds,’ Roper said, getting to his feet to signify the interview was at an end. ‘I know this has all been very distressing for you, but do try not to let it prey on your mind. Obviously if you should decide to move away from Dale Street, please let us know your new address so we can contact you.’

  It was even hotter outside the police station than it had been inside. Fifi bought a newspaper, then went into a café for a cold drink. As she flicked through the daily paper a headline on the second page caught her eye: ‘Child murdered in Kennington’. Her stomach lurched; she hadn’t expected it to be in a national newspaper.

  The report said very little, just giving Angela’s name and age, and stating that her body was discovered by a neighbour during yesterday afternoon, and that the child’s parents were being held for questioning.

  Fifi guessed that at the time the paper went to press, that was all the information available. But by now journalists would be sniffing around, and there would be dozens of people only too willing to tell them everything they knew about the Muckles, and indeed which neighbour found Angela.

  She wasn’t concerned so much that reporters might pester her, she could always refuse to say anything. But they might name her, and her parents might see it. She could just imagine what her mother would say. ‘This is his fault. He took my daughter to live in a place where that sort of thing goes on!’

  No one would be able to convince Clara Brown that ‘that sort of thing’ could happen anywhere.

  Dan did come home early, bringing with him some ham and salad stuff for their tea. After a quick bath he prepared the meal and suggested they went out for a drink later, just for a change of scene.

  He didn’t apologize further about going to work, nor did he ask her much about making her statement. Fifi wanted him to, she needed some kind of outlet for her feelings, but without some prompting from him she felt unable to begin. He wasn’t at all
sulky, just quiet, and after they’d eaten the salad and cleared away and she said she thought they ought to stay in, he didn’t argue, but began tinkering with an old clock he’d found in a junk shop.

  What she had meant was that she wasn’t sure it was appropriate to go out and drink so soon after Angela’s death. She supposed she wanted his reassurance it was okay, and she certainly didn’t want to sit there watching him playing with a clock or being reminded of the child whenever she looked out of the window.

  It was hot and airless in the flat and Fifi wanted to suggest going to Hyde Park for a walk. She thought she’d feel better getting some fresh air, seeing grass and trees, but Dan seemed to be engrossed in his clock and quite happy to stay in.

  Around eight, Fifi glanced out of the window and saw a couple standing outside number 11, looking up at it.

  ‘Do you think they are journalists?’ she asked.

  Dan came over to the window and looked. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘More like pathetic horror seekers.’ He grimaced in disgust and went back to his clock. ‘I suppose we’re going to have lots more of them,’ he added a few seconds later. ‘I really wonder at the mentality of some people. What do they hope to see? A corpse hanging out the window?’

  Fifi went into the bedroom and lay down on the bed, convinced then that Dan had already put the matter behind him, and he thought she should too. But she didn’t see how she could ever put it behind her.

  She didn’t hear Dan get up the following morning. She woke at eight to find he had already gone to work, and she felt hurt he hadn’t woken her to say goodbye.

  By eleven the heat in the flat was oppressive, the police were over the road again and she was feeling very weepy, so she decided to go down and talk to Frank.

  From the hall she could see through to his kitchen, and as the back door to the garden was open, she knew he was out there.

  ‘Frank,’ she called out. ‘Could you stand a visitor?’

  ‘Come on out, Fifi,’ he replied.

  He found him perched on a stool mending a pair of old boots, and right away she knew he was upset too because he didn’t get up to greet her or ask how she was feeling.

  ‘Are you feeling miserable too?’ she asked, putting her hand on his shoulder. ‘It’s awful, isn’t it? I still can’t really believe it’s for real. But you must have got such a shock when you came home on Saturday and were told about it.’

  ‘You can say that again,’ he said dolefully.

  ‘Thank you for the brandy you sent up. It helped,’ she said. ‘But I can’t keep on drinking to numb it. I don’t know what to do with myself today. At least yesterday I had my statement to make.’

  She spoke about how hot it was in the police station, about it being in the paper and how she supposed her mother would read it, then suddenly became aware Frank was barely listening. He seemed to be in a world of his own.

  ‘What’s up?’ she asked, kneeling down beside his stool.

  ‘Nothing,’ he said.

  ‘There is,’ she insisted. Normally he would have made a fuss of her, made her tea, even given her a fatherly cuddle. But he had gone right into himself, the same way she’d been all weekend. ‘Tell me, Frank, we’re friends, aren’t we?’

  ‘You’ve got enough on your plate without my worries too,’ he said.

  ‘Is it something to do with your daughter?’ Fifi asked. ‘Did you get a letter from her today?’

  He sighed. ‘No, it’s nothing to do with her,’ he said. ‘It’s just the bloody police.’

  ‘What have they done?’

  ‘They came at midday yesterday. While you were still down the nick.’

  ‘Well, they would come, they talk to everyone when something like this happens.’

  He just looked at her, and it seemed to Fifi that any moment he was going to cry. It was clear something had been said that was worrying the life out of him.

  ‘Just tell me, you’ll feel better if you share it.’

  ‘It’s that evil bitch Molly,’ he hissed. ‘I reckon she’s told them it was me who killed Angela.’

  ‘Oh, Frank.’ She half smiled. ‘I don’t doubt Molly has tried to blame half the people in the street, but the police aren’t going to believe her, not about you. You wouldn’t hurt a fly, and anyone around here would vouch for that.’

  ‘I’ve been tempted to kill Molly several times in the past,’ he said brokenly. ‘She knows that, and now she’s up to her neck in this, she’s trying to wriggle out of it by pinning it on me.’

  Fifi might have laughed if Frank hadn’t sounded so completely serious.

  ‘I think you’ve misunderstood what the police said –’

  ‘That slag told them stuff about her and me,’ Frank interrupted her before she could finish. ‘She told them we’d been having an affair and that I wanted her to leave Alfie. She reckons I killed Angela because she turned me down.’

  Fifi did laugh then, she couldn’t help it. ‘I’m sorry, Frank,’ she said, putting her hand over her mouth. ‘I didn’t think anything could make me laugh today, but that is so absurd!’

  ‘It might make me laugh too if it wasn’t for the fact someone else told them that I was overheard saying I was going to kill one of her children so it looked like Alfie’s work.’

  Fifi sat down heavily on a garden chair. ‘No, Frank, no one would say something like that about you!’

  ‘It wasn’t a lie, it was true, at least partly.’ Frank hung his head. ‘It was a sort of joke with Stan. We were in the pub the night after Dan was attacked, everyone was saying Alfie must have been in on it and that. I said I’d cheerfully kill any of the Muckles, even their kids. Stan said something about we could kill one of them and let Alfie get blamed for it.’

  ‘Who told the police this?’ Fifi asked.

  Frank shrugged his shoulders. ‘God knows, someone who was in the pub that night, I suppose. It were just a joke. I can’t stand any of that family, not even the kids, but I wouldn’t kill them.’

  ‘Of course you wouldn’t,’ Fifi said soothingly. ‘Everyone around here makes remarks like that. I’ve even heard Mrs Jarvis saying she wished someone would set fire to their house with them all in it. If the police took all the death threats made about the Muckles seriously they’d need the entire London police force here in Kennington to deal with them. But you mustn’t worry about this, Frank. The police like to shake people up. It’s the way they get information.’

  ‘Well, they shook me right enough,’ he retorted. ‘I mean, if they can find out about a joke you made a few weeks ago, what else can they dig up? I’m really worried about it.’

  ‘You mustn’t be. For a start, if they thought you’d had any kind of hand in this, they’d have taken you down to the station for questioning.’

  ‘But they asked me stuff about being in the Army during the war. I got the idea they wanted to know if I’d ever killed anyone.’

  ‘Had you?’

  ‘I don’t know for sure. You fire your gun and you see men fall, but there’s lots of others shooting too. You don’t know if it was one of your bullets necessarily.’

  ‘Well, Angela wasn’t killed with a gun,’ Fifi said. ‘Did they tell you how she was killed?’

  Frank shook his head.

  ‘Well, they think she was smothered with a pillow. That’s hardly the work of an old soldier, is it? Now, let me make you a cup of tea.’

  Fifi made the tea, and sat down again in the garden to drinks hers. She wanted to go now, Frank’s gloom was making her feel even worse than she had before. But her customary curiosity wouldn’t quite let her excuse herself and leave. She could see there was something more on his mind, and she felt compelled to winkle it out of him.

  ‘Tell me what’s bothering you,’ she said after a little while. ‘You know what they say, “A trouble shared” and all that.’

  ‘If I tell you, will you promise to keep it to yourself?’ he asked.

  Fifi promised.

  Frank stumbled,
faltered and at times stopped altogether as he told her the story of how he’d met Molly on the night of VE Day in Soho. Fifi forgot her own troubles as she listened, hardly believing that staid, rather prim Frank could have sex in a back alley with anyone. But as his story unfolded and he told her of the coincidence that he’d come to live right across the road to the woman, who then blackmailed him, all at once she knew it was entirely true.

  ‘She snatched everything from me,’ he said bitterly. ‘My savings, the chance of happiness with my daughter and grandchildren in Australia. I could just about forgive all that if she’d left me with peace of mind while June was dying. But she never let up taunting me. Every day I expected that she’d tell June and break her heart.’

  ‘Are you saying she told the police about this?’ Fifi asked incredulously.

  ‘Not the truth, so I had to tell them. Like I said before, she said we’d had an affair and I asked her to leave Alfie and run away with me. She claims that I never stopped pestering her, and then when she wouldn’t do as I asked, I got bitter and kept making trouble for her. She reckons I saw them go out for the day and I slipped round the back and killed Angela to spite her.’

  ‘That is the most preposterous thing I’ve ever heard,’ Fifi exclaimed. ‘But you really mustn’t worry about this. The police know what Molly’s like, and they’ll see this story of hers for what it is, a desperate attempt to blame someone else. If they really thought you’d done it they would’ve arrested you.’ She felt very sorry for Frank and gave him a hug, saying that the police would have to find his fingerprints or some other evidence to prove he’d been in that house.

  ‘How were you supposed to know they were going out for the day and leaving Angela behind anyway?’ she said firmly. ‘Even if you had known, and wanted to kill her, you weren’t likely to risk going in there first thing in the morning when so many people might spot you.’

  He didn’t respond to that, just sat there with his head hanging down, a picture of misery.

  ‘You’ve been very kind, Fifi,’ he said eventually. ‘But leave me alone now, there’s a good girl. I don’t want to talk about it any more.’