Ormerod's Landing Read online

  His eyes lifted and he started to say something, then stopped as if he could not frame the words. Then he said 'Bugger off,' and closed the door in my face.

  From my reporter's experience I knew that a second knock would either go unanswered or would result in an even ruder dismissal. I went away. For an hour I sat in the pub, The Antelope, and thought about it before retracing the way to Abacus Court. I rang at his bell and he came to the door angrily as if he had been waiting in ambush.I told you to bugger off ...' he began.

  Quickly I said:I have seen Marie-Thérèse Velin.'

  That stopped him. His face changed. My hopes rose. He glanced behind him into the room. 'Can you come out?' I suggested quickly.

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  'Of course I can,' he replied roughly. 'It's not a bloody prison.' His voice went quiet. 'There's a pub called The Antelope. I'll be in there about seven tonight.'

  I heard a woman's voice from within. He closed the door on me without a further word.

  By seven o'clock I had been in The Antelope for half an hour. I was sitting in a corner but Ormerod spotted me as soon as he came in. I started to get to my feet but he ignored me and went straight to the bar and ordered a pint of ordinary bitter. The barman recognized him and nodded a 'good evening' but he was obviously known as a customer who did not indulge in a lot of conversation. The beer was drawn and Ormerod, after taking a first drink from the top of the tankard, turned and came directly towards me. He sat down and put the drink on the table in front of him. He did not look into my face. Staring to the front he said abruptly: 'All right. When did you see her?'

  'Some time ago,' I replied cautiously. If I had told him how long ago I thought he would probably have got up and walked out. 'I'm sorry to tell you she is dead now,' I said. 'She is buried in France. In Normandy.'

  He nodded. 'At St Luc-au-Perche,' he said, pronouncing it awkwardly. 'Yes, she would be.' He drank some beer. 'She wasn't very old,' he said thoughtfully. 'She was nine years younger than me, you know.' He added a nostalgic word -'Then.' His more conversational tone gave me hope. It was his first sign of friendliness.

  I met her in New Caledonia,' I said. 'A few years ago.'

  'Where's New Caledonia when it's at home?' he asked. 'Can't say I've ever heard of it.'

  'It's a French island in the Pacific,' I told him.

  'Yes, she would,' he said thinking about it. 'She always said she wouldn't be able to live in France unless it all changed.'

  I nodded. 'She was a governess for a group of French families,' I said.

  'How was she then?' he asked suddenly. He looked at me awkwardly. 'How did she look?' There was almost an embarrassing tenderness about the question.

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  'She was ill,' I told him carefully. 'In fact she had periods of blindness. It was a temporary sort of thing, some tropical disease. But she was very nice. Small, neat. Like she was in the days when they called her the Dove, I suppose,' I said that purposely.

  He smiled slightly. "The Dove,' he repeated. He took a reflective drink from his tankard. 'You seem to have gone into this a bit thoroughly,' he said. 'Did she tell you much?'

  'A good deal,' I nodded. 'But I promised her I would do nothing about it while she was alive. I've been in France and I've seen her grave, and I've been to the bell foundry at Villedieu and to Bagnoles de l'Orne and the Catacombs in Paris.'

  At once he looked at me with some alarm. 'What do you mean you "wouldn't do anything about it"?' he inquired suspiciously. 'What's that all about? What are you thinking of doing about it?'

  'I'm a writer,' I said simply. 'I want to write the story.'

  'Christ,' he muttered. 'You won't get anything from me, son. Not a bloody word.'

  'Why not?' I pressed. 'It's all a long time ago. You came out of it with great credit. In fact, it looks to me that you didn't get the recognition you deserved. What's your objection?'

  'To start with,' he said, his voice a hard monotone, 'it was a complete balls-up.' He paused. His glass was almost drained. He sensed that I was about to offer him a drink and he shook his head. 'I don't want anything written,' he said. 'And that's that. Final. I was married then to the same wife I've still got. She's a sick woman and I don't want to see it in print that I went to France and killed people and especially that I went with this other woman. That would upset her.'

  'Even now?' I tried. 'After all this time?'

  'Even now,' he said. 'A lifetime's only short. And for us it's not all that long ago. I don't want her to know. Understand?'

  'How did you manage to keep it from her the last time?' I challenged hollowly.

  'Told her I was going on a special police course,' he said.

  Astonished, I said: 'You mean you could go to France, go all through that, all the killing and everything, and come back and act as if you'd been to school?'

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  'I could and I did,' he said firmly. 'And that's how it's going to be.' He got up and I knew there was nothing I would be able to do to stop him going. 'If you want to write your story,' he said with almost a sneer, 'you'll have to wait until I'm dead too.'

  For two weeks I left the matter to rest. There seemed little I could do. Then, as a last throw, I wrote to George Ormerod asking him to reconsider the matter, pledging that he could read the written manuscript and make any changes he wished to make, and offering him a thousand pounds for his cooperation. I told him that this would be a fee for his services, for I would need to have some extended tape-recorded sessions with him, but I guessed that, even knowing him as little as I did, his policeman's instinct would be to smell it as a bribe.

  It was no surprise, therefore, when only silence followed the letter. I had to console myself with the thought that one day I would be able to write the story, albeit only from the version related to me by Marie-Thérèse and by my own inquiries in France. But even without his side of the story, that would have to wait until George Ormerod was dead.

  Then three months later he wrote to me in the mannered way with which I was to become familiar. 'My wife died on Nov. 23rd,' the letter said. 'We had been married since September 7th, 1939, four days after the outbreak of the hostilities with Hitler. Since she has gone I have occupied myself with writing an account of what happened to me and to Madame Marie-Thérèse Velin in North France and Paris in 1940. It is quite long, about a hundred pages, and is true as far as I can properly remember. In those days, in France, of course I could not keep a diary in case I was captured by the enemy, but when I returned to England I privately wrote up the whole thing and kept it hidden. It is from the notes I made then that I have done this new account. I have also written up the circumstances which took place in this country before going to France in September 1940. There are also a few old photographs.

  'My niece and her husband are coming back from Canada to buy a house at Chelmsford and they want me to go and live with them. I don't want to go to them empty handed and I

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  don't have any money except my pension. So I will take the one thousand pounds you offer me in return for all the notes I have. But this is all there is and I do not want to make any tape recordings. If you agree, send the money and I promise to send the information by return. If you think it fair I would also like to ask for another five hundred pounds if the book you write is a success.'

  It was a plain man's letter, very touching in its directness and simplicity. At once I sent a reply with a cheque and waited eagerly for the return package. It arrived within four days. I opened it. His account was held in a loose-leaf binder, a hundred pages of close handwriting. On the cover he had pasted a gummed label upon which was written: 'Journal of some Operations in German Occupied France 1940.' I held it as if someone had sent me the Holy Grail. Then two envelopes fell from the binder. The first contained a dozen or more photographs of himself, Marie-Thérèse and other people all taken in France. Almost breathlessly I picked them up one by one, touching the edges only. They were brown and not very expertly taken but they were more than I
could have ever hoped for. Marie-Thérèse in a baggy dress carrying a sub-machine gun; Ormerod sitting at the entrance to a cave; Ormerod and Marie-Thérèse on Chausey Island sitting in the sun; and then, heaven help me, a friendly photograph of a cheerful German staff officer with the caption hand-written on the back: 'General Wolfgang Groemann at Bagnoles. Just before he was killed. A good man.'

  The second envelope contained a brief note. It said: 'Thank you for the money. This is all the stuff there is. Please do not contact me again unless the book is a success and you want to send me the other five hundred.'

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  two

  George Ormerod's journal, from which I have reconstructed the singular adventures of the Dodo and the Dove, began like this:

  'In September 1939, I was a Detective-Sergeant in the Criminal Investigation Department of the Metropolitan Police (V Division) covering the south-west area of London, Wandsworth and Putney. When the war was declared I got married (September 7th) to Sarah Ann Billington and right away volunteered for the army. On 20th September I was called up to the Royal Artillery and I went to Woolwich for training and later to Aldershot to await drafting with the British Expeditionary Force to the Western Front in France.

  'Nothing very much seemed to be happening in the war (this was called the Phoney War period) and in February of 1940 I was discharged from the army because the London police force was finding itself short of experienced men and it was thought better that I should be doing a job for which I was suited.

  'So on February 8th, I left the army with a good character and went back to the CID. I got a flat in Fulham and Sarah, who was working in a solicitor's office at Putney, and I settled down there. I was glad to be back in the police because I was always devoted to the work. They used to say I was dogged and I still am. Once I get my teeth into something there is not much that can make me let go. This is what happened in the case of the murder of Lorna Smith, but it is the way I am made and it was the way I saw my work. In fact you could say that this particular murder case became so important to me that it put everything else out of my mind for months, even the war.

  'Lorna Smith was a decent girl of eighteen who was found dead in the mud on the banks of the Thames, not far from Wandsworth Bridge on March 18th, 1940. She had been brutally raped and murdered, strangled with one of her own stockings. I knew the girl personally and also her parents. They kept a grocer's shop and dairy at Fulham. I have never seen two people so distressed in my life. I thought they would never

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  get over it. For myself, I was livid, plain bloody angry, that this young girl's life should be snuffed out by some animal who couldn't control himself. God knows there were enough whores operating in London at that time, you could hardly move for them in the West End, so why he had to take it out on a decent-living kid like that, don't ask me.

  'I got myself assigned to the case, on account of knowing the family, and for weeks I hardly stopped working even to eat or sleep. Sarah, my wife, got very upset about it. She thought it was something else. (She was always a shade suspicious because she'd had some dealings with the CID in her work at the solicitors and she did not have all that high opinion of their morals.) I remember she said to me one night when I got home pale and played out: "Are you sure it's not a living girl that's taking up all your time?" That was the nearest time I ever came to hitting her in all our years of marriage.

  'About the middle of May I got a strong lead. A soldier stationed at the camp in Richmond Park got drunk in the Queen's Head pub in Kingston-on-Thames one night and a barmaid overheard him say he knew who had done the killing of Lorna Smith. She reported what she had heard and the next night I went to the pub myself, bought this soldier three or four Scotches (I said I wanted to do something for the war effort) and then took him to Putney police station for questioning.

  'He was a pimply little bastard called Braithwaite, a private in the Catering Corps, though I wouldn't have liked him to cook my dinner. At first, naturally, even though he was drunk, he denied ever making the remarks about Lorna Smith. Then he admitted he had said it but was telling lies, just trying to make an impression on his I listeners. I was not going to have that. I had come too far to stop now. All I had to do was close my eyes and see that girl lying on the mortuary slab and remember her father having to identify her and my blood boiled.

  'So I leaned on Braithwaite, not brutally (of course) but enough to make him change his mind again. He started to cry. He must have been a great soldier, but I suppose they took all sorts in those days. And he sobbed it all out. One night in the billet in Richmond Park, the soldier in the next bed had come in late and drunk and had fallen down at the side of the bed

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  and started to pray to God for forgiveness for doing somebody to death. Most of the others in the barrack room were asleep - it was a Thursday which was pay night and they'd all been out to the pubs - and only Braithwaite remembered it in the morning. Even he had not taken much notice until he read in the Evening News that the girl had been murdered.

  'But he did not do anything about it, although he noticed that the other man was very pale and unusually quiet for about a week. This man was a soldier called Albert Smales, twenty-six, formerly a labourer of Preston in Lancashire, who, incidentally, had a long police record for violence against women and girls. About two weeks after the murder Smales had put himself forward to volunteer for a draft to France with the British Expeditionary Force, was accepted and went within the next few days.

  'Right away I applied for permission to go to France and see the man, but my superiors were all horror-struck. There was a war on, they pointed out, and a war that was just beginning to liven up. The Germans had begun to attack all along the front and they were breaking through in Belgium. If we wanted Smales questioned then let the army Special Investigation Branch do it. There was no chance of my going.

  'In the end a request was put in to the SIB office of the military police in France where it must have raised a laugh, because by this time the army was a bit of a shambles, pulling back towards Dunkirk, and nobody knew where anybody was. To try and pick up one man, no matter what he was accused of, was impossible and they said so. Very rudely I recall.

  'All I could do was to fret around getting on everybody's nerves, my colleagues, my wife, and even, I regret to say, Lorna Smith's parents. Everybody seemed to want to close the business except me. I wasn't going to let it drop. In the end I got permission to go to Preston to see Smales' family - a right collection. All the male members had done time for something or other, the sister was on the streets and the mother had a go at that when a customer turned up who was not all that particular. I obtained from them a picture of Albert Smales in uniform (well, truthfully, I lifted it from their mantelpiece, but I thought anything was fair with that class of people), and on

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  the way back south in the train I kept taking out that photograph in its frame and staring at it. A clergyman got in at Crewe and, thinking I was looking at a picture of my soldier brother, the silly old fool said he would pray for him. The bastard needed somebody to pray for him.

  'To me Dunkirk was even more of a miracle than it was to most people. Here was fate bringing my quarry right back to me, if he was alive, which I thought he was because they never got themselves killed in battle, that sort. As soon as they began to bring the soldiers back from the beaches I asked for permission to go down to Dover, Folkestone and other places on the coast to try and pick up Smales.

  'This request was met with a very sharp refusal and all the usual catch-phrases like "Don't you know there's a war on?" and they sent me out to look for German spies and parachutists disguised as old ladies and vicars. (There was even a ridiculous rumour went round at this time that the enemy had dropped midgets in children's clothes to act as saboteurs. Some lunatic seriously suggested that I should go around the playgrounds and the parks looking for Nazi dwarfs.)

  'I was much more interested in finding a full-grown murd
erer. I tried again with my bosses but now they turned really nasty and the Detective-Superintendent, a man called Lowe, blew me up and said that I only had it on hearsay that Smales had anything to do with it at all, now would I bugger off and look for fifth columnists.

  'That decided me. I took some leave I had due to me and under my own steam I went down to the south coast where there were camps for all the men who had disembarked from Dunkirk. You never saw such a shambles. If the Germans had followed them they would have been in London by midday. And all the fuss! Everybody patting everybody on the back as if it were a great victory instead of a defeat. You'd have thought they had all swum back.

  'Anyway for three days I had no dice at all. I went to all sorts of camps and army offices making my inquiries. The reactions I got varied from complete indifference to nasty tempers. How dare I look around for an ordinary, unimpor-

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  tant murderer, when the whole future of civilization was at stake? That sort of blind attitude. There they all were drinking their millions of cups of tea and eating their sandwiches provided by middle-aged ladies who wanted to kill Hitler, but nobody knew nor cared about Private Smales.

  'Eventually, on the last day of my leave, I had some luck. I discovered the unit he had been attached to and right away I found that some men from that unit were in hospital in Canterbury. So off to Canterbury I went, taking with me cigarettes and apples, the sort of thing it was fashionable to give to soldiers in those days.

  'I flashed my police warrant card about a bit but it was only grudgingly that they let me into the hospital. They did not think that any business I might have had could be important enough. The war seemed to have dulled people's idea of simple public duty. I know the murder of Lorna Smith was not as glamorous as Dunkirk but, to me, it was more important. After all Dunkirk had now all been cleared up. This case had not.

  'But my luck had turned. There was a soldier in one of the beds, a boy only about eighteen, who had what looked like a nasty hole in the top of his arm, and it was he who told me about Smales. "Didn't like him," he said after I had shown him the photograph. "Nasty bully type of bloke. Throwing his weight about, getting drunk, even reckoning he'd done people in."