The investigation I’ve just completed took me back nearly twenty years to the early ’60s. I knew Jilly O’Sullivan was dead before I arrived at 104 Cambridge Gardens, and in many ways I considered it a miracle she’d succeeded in reaching the age of thirty-five. I’d first come across Jilly in 1962 when she was a naïve young teenager and I was a fresh-faced police constable. I’m still a PC because rather than striving to rise through the ranks, I long ago opted to take horizontal promotion by becoming a coroner’s officer. This job brings with it substantial unofficial perks, and I’m not the only cop who’s avoided vertical advancement since that makes you more visible and therefore less able to accept the backhanders you deserve.
Returning to O’Sullivan, when she arrived in Notting Hill she rented an upstairs flat on Bassett Road for five years before moving to nearby Elgin Crescent in 1966. The bed in which Jilly died was but a few minutes walk from her Notting Hill homes of the ’60s. I’d first called on her at Bassett Road after the force was informed that one of her brothers was hiding out there. My colleagues and I knew parts of the O’Sullivan clan like the backs of our own hands. The family was involved in both burglary and protection. Jilly and her brother had grown up in Greenock, but headed for the Smoke as teenagers. Jilly was doing well back in the early ’60s, making good money in a high-class Soho clip joint, and at that time she even had a pimp with a plumy accent and public school education. Jilly’s brother was eventually nicked alongside a couple of his cousins while they were doing over a jeweler’s shop and that’s how I learned he’d actually been hiding out with his gangster uncle in Victoria. After he’d served his time in a civil prison for burglary, Jilly’s brother was sent to a military jail for being absent without leave from the army. By the mid-’60s, when her brother was finally let out of the nick, Jilly was the black sheep of the family. It wasn’t prostitution but an involvement with beatniks, hippies, and drugs that alienated O’Sullivan from her kith and kin.
If Jilly had been smart she’d have married one of her rich johns and faded into quiet respectability. She worked with a number of girls who had the good sense to do just that. Jilly was a good looker, or rather she’d been a good looker back in the day — anyone seeing her corpse would think she was in her late forties. That said, right up to her death O’Sullivan’s eyes remained as blue as a five-pound note. When Jilly was a teenager, these baby blues had men falling all over her petite and innocent-seeming self. O’Sullivan’s eyes looked like pools of water that were deep enough to drown in, and naturally enough, she made sure her carefully applied makeup accentuated this effect. O’Sullivan lost her looks through hard living, and since I knew the story of her life, I didn’t need to take many details about her from the woman who’d found the body.
I didn’t even bother to ask Marianne May how she’d got into Jilly’s flat; I’d already heard from Garrett that he’d left the door to the basement bedsit open after finding O’Sullivan dead in bed and making a hasty exit. Being a dealer and a pimp, Garrett considered it wiser to disappear than inform the authorities of his girlfriend’s death. Even if he wasn’t fitted up for his Jilly’s murder, Garrett figured he’d get busted for something else if he stuck around. After I’d got the call to go to the back basement flat at 104 Cambridge Gardens to investigate a death, I’d headed first for Observatory Gardens, where I found Garrett nodding out with Scotch Alex. Garrett lived with Jilly, and since only one death had been reported, I’d figured that either one or both of them would be in “hiding” at Observatory Gardens. Before I got to Scotch Alex’s pad I hadn’t known who’d died, and I’d entertained the possibility it might have been one of their heroin buddies.
Garrett told me what he knew, which wasn’t that much. He’d gone home after cutting some drug deals and found Jilly dead in bed, so he’d left again immediately. Garrett was inclined to think O’Sullivan had accidentally overdosed, although he considered it possible she’d been murdered by some gangsters, who’d threatened to kill her after she ripped them off during the course of a drug deal. I told Garrett not to worry about a court appearance, since I wasn’t about to drag him into my investigation if he was cooperative. He got the idea and handed me a wad of notes, which he pulled from his right trouser pocket. I patted down the left pocket of Garrett’s jeans and he realized his game was at least partially up. He removed another wad of notes from the second pocket and gave them to me. After I’d prodded his abdomen he stood up and took more bills from a money belt that was tied around his waist. I then made Garrett take his shoes and socks off, but he didn’t have any cash secreted down there.
Satisfied with my takings, I told O’Sullivan’s pimp that in my report I’d state that Jilly was living alone at the time of her death. I didn’t tell him that I’d have done this even if I hadn’t succeeded in shaking him down, since recording that O’Sullivan lived with a heroin dealer would make matters unnecessarily complicated for me. Although Garrett was scum he wasn’t stupid, so I didn’t need to tell him it would be a good idea if he found a new place to live. Likewise, I had absolute faith in his ability to find some fool to rip-off in order to provide PC Lever with his cut from the drug money I’d purloined and cover various other debts he simply couldn’t avoid meeting if he wished to remain alive and in reasonable health. While I was in Observatory Gardens I also took the opportunity to touch Garrett’s junkie host and co-dealer, Scotch Alex, for a few quid.
Marianne May, the woman who’d called the authorities to report Jilly’s death, was middle-class and respectable. What Marianne had in common with Jilly were some bizarre New Age religious interests. Aside from this she was the ideal person to have found the body since she created the impression that O’Sullivan’s friends at the time of her death were middle-class professionals. In all likelihood, prior to Marianne’s arrival, a stream of junkies had called at the flat hoping to score, and having found the door open and Jilly dead in bed, departed without telling the authorities there was a corpse stinking up the bedsit. Garrett wouldn’t have left his drug stash in the pad, and there probably wasn’t anything else worth stealing. If there had been it would have disappeared long before my arrival.
There wasn’t much I needed to ask May, but for the sake of appearance I had to make it look like I was doing my job properly. I told her to wait upstairs with Jilly’s neighbors while I made some further investigations. I was able to go through the flat and remove used needles and various other signs of drug use before the medics arrived. I then examined Jilly’s body. As you’d expect it was cold to touch. O’Sullivan was lying on her side, naked on the bed.
After the corpse had been loaded into an ambulance I went upstairs and told May she could go home, saying I’d contact her if there was anything further I needed to ask. I had no intention of troubling Marianne again, but since she was a middle-class professional, I had to make it look like I was doing everything by the book. May had fine manners and excellent verbal skills, so there was an outside chance that if she was moved to make a complaint about my investigation, what she had to say would be taken seriously.
Because Jilly certainly had traces of heroin in her body, it was important I arranged things so that any need for toxicological analysis was avoided. That said, since I knew O’Sullivan was an intravenous drug user, there was nothing to worry about in terms of a purely visual inspection of the body. Indeed, even in instances of suicide brought about by the ingestion of pills, evidence of a drug overdose is only visually detectable in fifty percent of such cases. Likewise, there is necessarily a good deal of mutual understanding between all those involved in the investigation of a death, one which is sometimes greased by the circulation of used fivers. I have many good reasons to request a particular result from a pathologist, and the croaks I work alongside know this without my having to spell it out. Aside from anything else, I don’t have time to properly investigate the circumstances surrounding every death that occurs on my beat. It would waste a considerable amount of taxpayers’ money and my time if the circumstances in which every miserable junkie overdosed were fully investigated. Every pathologist understands, regardless of whether or not a fistful of fivers are being pressed into their greasy palms, that the police know what’s for the best.