The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  In the gloom, Harriet realized now, they had passed through a narrow entrance to the foyer with, beside it, what must have been a ticket-collecting desk. She looked over to the far end of the room and saw, as she had expected, that there was no way out there. So, again, what she had gathered from the bulked-up pages of Who Killed the Preacher? seemed right enough. No one other than the seven people entitled to be waiting outside the ballroom could have entered it unnoticed.

  She turned to the hotel’s former general manager.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘what access to the ballroom is there, other than those three sets of double doors over there?’

  ‘Aha, I thought you’d ask me that,’ Mr Popham proudly replied. ‘It was the first question Chief Inspector Kenworthy put to me. And I was able to give him the answer he required straight away. Yes, there is an emergency exit at the far end of the ballroom. But it was my practice then, in order to make sure we got no unwanted intruders, to keep it securely locked until the ball, or whatever other event the ballroom was to be used for, had actually begun. I saw to that myself. Invariably.’

  Harriet turned right round now to look more closely at the four small doors spaced at intervals along the opposite side of the long foyer.

  ‘Where do those go?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, as you can see from the signs on them, dreadfully obscured as they are — I don’t know what my successors thought they were doing, I really don’t — the two at either end are the Ladies and the Gents. The middle two lead to small rooms we used to hire out for meetings when the ballroom was not in use. There’s a table in each of them. Or there used to be. And chairs. As many as were required. But there’s nothing beyond them, nothing at all.’

  ‘I see,’ she said, thinking that here again, if some of the seven had made use of these smaller rooms at various times, the opportunity for one of them to enter the ballroom itself would have been all the greater.

  She looked back at the three sets of wide doors that gave access to where the Boy Preacher had been strangled. Each consisted of a pair of double doors, in all some eight feet across. Easy enough to imagine, in Mr Popham’s heyday, the crowds of men in evening dress and women in floating silks and trailing brocades making their way towards the spirits-raising music of a big band. And it had been through one or the other of these doors that someone had quickly thrust themselves, prepared out of sheer vindictiveness, or so Michael Meadowcraft claimed, to end the meditating Boy’s life.

  Yes, some good has come out of ploughing through all that Meadowcraftian verbiage. I do now have a reasonable idea of what the situation was on that evening so long ago.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘can I go in?’

  ‘Yes, yes. To where the murder actually took place, though who that murderer was has never yet been found out. So, yes, go through any one of the double doors there and you’ll see it all. But, if you don’t mind, I won’t come with you. It may be silly of me, but I’ve always felt the place has — Well, an atmosphere. I used to go in often enough while dances were still taking place, of course. But — But somehow, now that it’s all deserted, I don’t quite like ... ’

  ‘I understand,’ Harriet replied. ‘Don’t you worry. I shan’t be long in any case.’ She gave him a smile. ‘I don’t suppose I’ll find the vital clue lying on the floor, not after all this time. If it ever was there.’

  ‘No. No, you won’t find anything like that, that’s for sure. Chief Inspector Kenworthy was a remarkably efficient officer. If there’d been anything worth noticing in there then, you can be sure he’d have picked up on it. Yes, you can be sure of that. But, no, I won’t come in. You’ll find me waiting here outside when you’ve seen enough. I’ve not got much to do these days, only wait.’

  *

  The sight of the ballroom struck Harriet the moment she pushed open one of the leaves of the middle set of doors — it gave a screech of agony — as altogether extraordinary. The whole enormously high room was lit from a long tunnel-shaped glass roof, through which the strong sunshine of this bright May day was pouring unimpeded. Only here and there did some windblown piece of debris make a black shadow on one of the hundreds of panes.

  Under this in-pouring of light the elaborate decoration of the walls all round stood out clearly. Thirty years earlier the light would have come from huge chandeliers hanging from bars across the foot of the glass tunnel above. But now just one was still in place, its long fall of glass slivers glittering in a ray of sunshine that just caught its edges. But sunlight now illuminated scores of tile-pictures of luscious nymphs and lusty gods twined together in amorous, but still decorous, writhings, of distant dancing maidens and shepherd boys playing their pipes. And each picture — they rose one above the other to the very top of the walls and stretched from one end of the long room to the other — was surrounded by tree or column shapes in colours of light blue and light yellow tangled over by swathes and swags of every sort of flower and foliage.

  I wonder, Harriet thought, that all this tumbling, absurd stretch of decoration hasn’t been, like those missing chandeliers, ripped out and sold off. To America even? But perhaps such fantastically ridiculous decor is no longer wanted anywhere, not even in the palaces of Central European dictators. Art nouveau, I suppose it is. All those curvaceous tree-trunk pillars supporting nothing and merging here and there into semi-human figures, equally serving no discernible purpose. Made of earthenware of some sort, I imagine, twisted and twirled into those curls and coils and then painted and fired with glossy yellow and blue.

  C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas my taste.

  But enough of that. What I need to see is the exact scene of the crime, dust-thick and obscured though it may be.

  She strode rapidly down the length of the huge room towards the small dais at the far end. If what Meadowcraft had said was right, it had been there that the Boy had sat, cross-legged and oblivious of all the chairs that must have been ranged in front of him, while — What was that purple passage? — with secret dread steps his killer had approached, in their mind the worst thought that any human being can have about another, their hands already claw-like, gripping in imagination the throat they were intent on choking into eternal oblivion. Something like that.

  With steps clacking loudly out Harriet in her turn advanced on that little platform. She halted at its foot.

  So this was where it happened, the murder thirty years ago that I still can’t really get into my mind as anything other than an event from the past. Yes, Mr Newcomen told me about it, preached his DNA sermon on it. And, yes, I read about it as a thrilled schoolgirl. And, yes, again, no doubt when I’m established in this office I’ve been promised at Headquarters I’ll be able to read the Crime File which DCI — what was his name? — yes, Kenworthy compiled. Solid facts. But only facts on paper, and perhaps some of them, for all Mr Popham’s praise of the DCI, distorted by prejudice and misconceptions. And, yes, if Mr Newcomen has it right, there’ll be a fact to be gained from the DNA analysis of one of the garments preserved in the Headquarters evidence store. A fact that will, so Mr Newcomen asserted, state unequivocally that a certain one of the seven suspects was showered with spittle as they leant over the Boy to throttle the life out of him, saliva that could have come only from the mouth of their victim.

  But still the scene doesn’t come to life.

  Yes, the Boy must have sat, probably cross-legged indeed, at just the centre point of the dais here. And, yes, it is the very spot where he was strangled. A process that, unless his murderer managed to hit at once on the carotid arteries, would have taken possibly two long minutes, even more.

  But there’s nothing to be seen here that means anything to me. Here’s a low dais, a now tattered carpet still on it, and nothing more.

  She turned away.

  Walking slowly back up the length of the huge room, she let her gaze wander once more over that once dazzling, now dust-obscured setting. All those corkscrewing pillars serving no purpose but to frame clumsy til
e-work scenes of locked-together lovers and arm-waving dancers in a supposed age of antiquity.

  And yet ... And yet ... she thought. However appalling the taste of the designers here in — what? — the early years of the twentieth century or the last years of the nineteenth, there was about the whole huge room a magnificent confidence. This is how it should be, the man — almost certainly a man in those days — who had conceived the decor of this extraordinary room had stated. He had stated it in twisty pillars, in horrible unlikely tile-pictures, even in the huge expanse of polished floor at my feet.

  Into her head then, willy-nilly, there came the music of a waltz. And in her imagination she danced all the way along the remaining length of the huge room. Until, with a sudden shock, she came to those three sets of double doors, through one of which ...

  Cautiously she tugged at the right-hand leaf of the middle one, only to create again the long, horrible screech it had made as she had entered the room.

  And there, standing puffing at a cheap-smelling cigarette, was Mr Popham, caretaker now, but holder of a far grander post at the time the Boy Preacher had been killed.

  Then, swiftly as a searchlight flicked into life, the rank smell of that cigarette brought back to Harriet the odour that had been so familiar to her in her sixties and seventies schooldays: the smell of men smoking. Gardeners, handymen, tradesmen, the school doctor, happily puffing, as well as such masters as the school employed. Every male she had encountered during her life within privileged boarding-school walls had smoked. And with that sharp, nostril-irritating smell there had come, by what mysterious process of the mind she could not say, full belief in that murder thirty years earlier.

  Yes, she said to herself. Yes, this is my case now.

  Chapter Four

  Right, Harriet said to herself, standing outside the great gloomy bulk of the Imperial, I’m damned now if I’m going to hang about all weekend doing nothing. Time to get down to it. I don’t know what Pansy Balfour was making such a hoo-ha about. Surely I must be able to get into that Headquarters office I’ve been allocated. And, once there, I can get those garments that DCI Kenworthy took from the seven suspects and send them over to the Forensic Science lab at that place near Lincoln. Come to that, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t get hold of Kenworthy’s notes from Records. A police officer’s account of the murder should be a good deal more down to earth, and accurate, than the purpler-than-purple ramblings of Who Killed the Preacher?.

  Yet she found herself, as she waited to cross over to her car, recalling the words Michael Meadowcraft had spattered out in describing the very scene now in front of her at the hour he supposed the murder took place. Imagine what different thoughts were in the heads of that group of Sunday-night young men, most of them over-eager disciples of the god Bacchus, as they went rolling past the great hotel singing the popular ditty ‘You’ll never walk alone’ But inside the Boy Preacher had just walked, all too alone, to his horrible death.

  Which is all very well, she thought. Except that Mr Popham told me the Boy’s meeting had been postponed from the original Sunday to the Monday, for some reason or other. Meadowcraft, though he does his best to pretend he was there, must actually have been far away. Only when he realized that here was a chance to add yet another over-heated volume to Cold Steel and Spilt Blood or The Men They Asked Inside or to Death in Pale Pink Pyjamas would he have hurried to the Imperial to begin acquiring, or imagining, the juicy details.

  But, she thought, taking advantage of a gap in the traffic to dart across, what I was looking at just now was the real world of today, dull, grimy twenty-first-century Birchester. But a Birchester where it’s possible that the killer of the Boy Preacher is walking the streets, untouched. And, like any other criminal, they should be brought to justice.

  My job.

  Harriet got into the car and drove off towards the Headquarters building at the edge of the city. She found herself in her eagerness going rather faster than was perhaps wise.

  As soon as she had managed in the becalmed Saturday afternoon atmosphere of Headquarters to get hold of the key to her office, she realized why Pansy Balfour had been in such a state about it. Quite obviously the place had been, until the Big White Chief had re-allocated it, no more than a small store room, hardly a step up from a broom cupboard. It did possess a window, though it was very small and looked as if it was sealed fast with encrusted dirt, and it had been marginally equipped as an office. There was a small wooden table, one hard wooden chair behind it and in front another, a dangerously leaning typist’s cast-off Mercifully, there was at least a telephone. But no computer.

  Damn it, damn it, damn it, she thought. This is Newbroom’s doing. The man has deliberately deprived me of the investigative tool no detective nowadays can manage without. Does he mean me to go to him and beg?

  I’m buggered if I will, though. I’m simply going to forget about his notion of what a doomed-to-fail senior detective deserves as accommodation. I’m going to get to work to resolve this case he’s thrust on to me, with or without the equipment I ought to have. If I need something a computer will tell me quickly, I’ll just get the DC who’s going to be attached to me — whenever they appear — to go and use someone else’s.

  So, right, a word with the Evidence Store. Get the bags of clothing that Newbroom told me are there off to the Forensic Science lab.

  She picked up the tatty, stapled-together internal directory that had been left beside the phone, scrabbled through its greasy pages and stabbed out the number.

  No answer.

  She let the phone ring and ring. At last she put the handset down and carefully jabbed at the buttons again. Still nothing.

  All right, try Security.

  Success here. But, no, the man on duty stolidly informed her, bar exceptional circumstances, the Evidence Store was always closed at weekends.

  ‘It’s the cuts, ma’am.’

  The cuts. It always was the cuts. Except in criminal activity.

  So, what next? Yes, right, Force Records. At least get hold of DCI Kenworthy’s files and see what he made of the case. Unless Records, too, shuts down from Friday night to Monday morning.

  Buttons jabbed. Then — hooray — a voice answering, if a faint one.

  She identified herself, and asked if the Boy Preacher murder files could be sent up to her.

  ‘Well ... ’ the quavering voice replied, with a discernible trace of worry. ‘Well, you see, that might be a bit difficult.’

  ‘Will it, indeed? And why is that?’

  ‘It’s not that the files aren’t here all right. I happened to turn them up last Saturday, as a matter of fact. There’s not often a lot going on here at weekends, and I’ve always been interested in that case.’

  ‘Then why can’t I be sent them? Now?’

  ‘I’m here on my own,’ the voice almost wailed, ‘and I can’t leave without getting the whole store locked up.’

  ‘Right, I’ll come down.’

  *

  Slightly regretting her sharpness — the man in Records had seemed pretty ancient, probably a part-timer — she made her way down to the basement. And, after all, the old chap had said the case interested him. He might even have some useful memories of the time. The time when I was still at school, eating Tennis Court cake and chattering about the latest sensation in the newspapers.

  Her guess about the clerk proved right. He was a shrivelled-up fellow, who could even be into his eighties. A full head of white hair, but no better shaved than Mr Popham had been at the Imperial. A big pair of tortoiseshell-rimmed National Health spectacles kept slipping down his fleshless nose.

  ‘We’re looking into a few of these old cases where we never got a result,’ she said to him, conscious of Mr Newbroom’s security ruling. ‘Just to see if any of them might benefit from the advances in DNA techniques these days.’

  ‘Well, I hope this is one of ‘em. It was a bad business. A very bad business.’

  ‘You remember it then, do yo
u?’ she asked, as, with hands that trembled a little, he pushed the bulging files across the counter towards her.

  ‘Oh, yes. Yes, I remember it well.’

  ‘You said it was a bad business. The victim not one of those who perhaps deserved it?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know about that. No, the case caused a lot of fuss but that’s not why I still believe it was a bad business. Don’t know why people got so excited about that Boy Preacher at the time. Perhaps just because he was young, and foreign with it. I don’t hold with preaching myself. Not a lot of use in telling people to be good. What you’ve got to do is stop them when they’re bad. That’s what the police are for, isn’t it? I served my thirty on the beat, and reckon I know what’s what.’

  ‘So why is it then,’ Harriet asked the long-retired constable, a spark of curiosity flicking through her, ‘that you said the case was a bad business?’

  ‘Cos that killer was never brought to court, that’s why. He was never found guilty, and he was never hanged for it.’

  The old man glared at her through his dulled-over glasses.

  And, good heavens, yes, she thought. Back in those days, the death penalty had not long been abolished. A die-hard like this old fellow would still be thinking bring back the rope. And perhaps the Hard Detective, if I’d been a serving police officer then and not an idealistic schoolgirl, would have echoed that. And what about the officer who had tried to find out who the murderer of the Boy Preacher was? Would he, too, if he’d made his arrest, have felt it wrong that hanging no longer existed?