‘No, they couldn’t have.’ Cook intervened. ‘The buttons were all done up when we found her. There were none missing.’
‘Where’s it now?’ Billy asked.
‘At the mortuary. She was still wearing it when they took her away.’ He turned to Grace. ‘Is that all?’ he asked.
‘Pretty much.’ The detective shrugged. ‘The rest was just odds and ends.’ He pointed to a handful of items deposited near the edge of the piece of cardboard which included an empty bottle of lemon rum, a broken comb, two hairpins and the chewed stub of a lead pencil, all coated with dust. Completing the haul were four charred matchsticks, which Billy examined with interest. He noticed that although their tops were blackened the stems beneath had hardly been touched by the flame.
‘Looks like someone was trying to strike a match in the wind,’ he remarked. ‘And lately. The wood’s still fresh. There’s no sign of weathering.’ He rose, stretching his cramped leg muscles.
Cook spoke to the two plainclothes men. ‘You can put all this stuff back in the basket and take it to the station. Her suitcase, too. I’ll deal with them later. We’ll have to put up posters in the area. We need to know if anyone saw the girl earlier. Other than the warden, I mean.’ Yawning, he glanced at Billy. ‘Well, what do you think?’
Billy reflected. So far he’d heard nothing to suggest that Lofty wasn’t right in his assessment. It seemed likely the girl had encountered her killer by accident in the darkness of the blackout. If so, it was a crime of chance, just as the chief inspector had supposed. But he wasn’t ready to make his report quite yet. Sinclair’s caution about leaving no loose ends was still fresh in his ears.
‘What about slipping over to Paddington?’ he suggested. ‘I’d like a word with Ransom. He should be done by now.’
The corpse lay on a steel-topped table, hidden from sight except for the head and shoulders, which the orderly on duty in the mortuary had exposed by drawing back the white cloth covering it. Looking down at the lifeless face, so pale it seemed drained of blood, Billy recalled the photograph Lofty had shown him in the car coming over, a snapshot of Rosa Nowak which he’d obtained from her aunt. The dark-haired girl pictured in the snapshot had faced the camera with a remote and sorrowful expression, no trace of which remained now.
‘Well, there she is, poor lass.’
An elderly man, one who’d either been retained like many past retirement age, or volunteered to do what amounted to war work, the orderly offered his opinion unprompted.
‘Hardly looks dead, does she?’
It was true enough, Billy thought. Apart from a swelling on one side of her neck and a faint, livid mark in the same area the girl might have been asleep. As though it only needed a touch to awaken her. Glancing sideways at Cook, he saw the Bow Street inspector bending lower to peer at the white throat.
‘Can’t see that she was choked,’ he remarked.
The two detectives had arrived at the hospital only to discover that the man they’d come to see wasn’t immediately available.
‘Dr Ransom’s busy with another autopsy,’ the receptionist informed them. ‘A buzz bomb came down in Wandsworth last night, but they only dug out the bodies this morning.’
Left to their own devices, they had found their way downstairs to the mortuary, a grisly sanctum whose green-painted walls exuded a clammy cold unaffected by the change of seasons, where the orderly, at their request, had brought out Rosa Nowak’s remains from one of the refrigerators built into the walls of the echoing chamber.
‘You can wait if you like,’ he told them. ‘The doctor should be here any time now.’
Billy had been looking around. ‘Are those her clothes?’ he asked, pointing to a pile of women’s garments on a table in the corner.
The orderly nodded. ‘Dr Ransom said you might want to see them.’
Billy led his colleague over to the table and together they quickly solved the mystery of the loose buttons found at the scene of the murder. Examining the girl’s coat, which was made of dark blue wool and might have had a naval past, they found it was fitted with a removable hood of the same material attached by buttons sewn on to the collar. Only two of these were still in place. Loose cotton threads showed where three others had in all probability been ripped off.
‘I’d forgotten about the hood,’ Cook admitted. ‘We didn’t see it at first. It was hidden beneath her body. I only noticed it when the ambulance men picked her up.’
Other signs of deft needlework were visible on the young woman’s underclothes, which were undamaged but had obviously been darned and patched more than once. The embroidered blouse she’d been wearing, on the other hand, looked new, and to both detectives’ surprise proved to be made of silk.
‘What’s that?’ Billy’s eye had been caught by a saucer standing on a shelf above the table. He took it down.
‘Looks like a matchstick.’ Cook peered at the charred fragment of wood which was all the saucer contained.
‘Wonder what it’s doing there.’ Billy was still examining his find when the swing doors behind them opened and Ransom strode in, thrusting an arm into the sleeve of a white physician’s coat.
‘Sorry to keep you, gentlemen. We’re like the Windmill Theatre here. We never close. I’m afraid there’s another cadaver awaiting my attention, so this’ll have to be brief. Hello, Inspector.’ He nodded to Billy. ‘I didn’t know you were on the case.’
‘I’m not, strictly speaking, sir.’ Billy put down the saucer and went over to shake hands with the pathologist. ‘Mr Cook’s in charge. But the chief inspector has an interest in it. I’m to report back to him.’
‘Sinclair, eh? Then we’d best be on our toes.’
Ransom blew out his cheeks. A heavy-set man with jutting eyebrows, he had a reputation in the Met as a joker, famous for his bons mots.
‘You’ve seen the corpus delicti, I take it.’ He moved over to where the wheeled table stood. The two detectives followed. ‘There was little in the way of injuries to record. I dare say you noted the lividity on her neck and the swelling’ — he pointed to the slight disfigurement on the slender column of the throat. ‘The only real bruises I found were on her knees. She must have gone down when he grabbed her. See …’
He pulled the cloth off the girl’s legs, showing the purple marks on her bare kneecaps.
‘But that’s all, really. There was no evidence of a struggle. She didn’t get a chance to fight back. There was no skin under her nails, nothing of that sort. It was quick and clean.’
Billy glanced at Cook, thinking he might want to handle the questioning, but found that his colleague had chosen that moment to fall into a doze. Lofty’s lack of sleep had finally caught up with him; he was swaying on his feet, his eyelids fluttering.
‘No evidence of a struggle, you say?’
‘That’s right, Inspector.’
‘He didn’t sexually assault her, then?’
‘Good heavens, no.’ Ransom frowned. ‘Why on earth …? Oh, yes, of course.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘It did look that way last night when we found her. The inspector and I discussed the possibility.’ He nodded at Cook, who’d come awake with a start. ‘I checked for it, of course, when I made my examination, even though her underclothes weren’t disturbed. But she wasn’t touched. Not there, at any rate. In fact, she was virgo intacta. Not that it makes any difference now, I suppose.’ He shrugged.
‘But if he strangled her …’
‘Strangled?’ Ransom’s bushy eyebrows rose in exaggerated amazement. ‘Did I say that?’
‘Yes, sir, you did.’ Angry with himself for having drifted off, Cook spoke sharply. ‘Last night, at the murder scene.’
‘Then I apologize. It was a hasty judgement.’ Ransom spread his hands in a gesture of appeasement. ‘Put not your trust in pathologists. Particularly those called out in the blackout and made to examine bodies by torchlight. No, she wasn’t choked. Her neck was broken. It’s clear from the evidence. Let me show you.’ He removed the cloth from the girl’s head and shoulders again. ‘Do you see the swelling on her neck and that mark on the side? It shows that the killer grabbed her from behind, slipped his right arm around her neck and snapped her spinal column. And to anticipate your question, yes, he was a strong man, but it wouldn’t have required any special skill, particularly if she wasn’t expecting it. Just a good wrench of the head. The whole business would have been over in a second.’