The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  But neither of them found much in their wordy pages, nor in the innumerable glossy extras that had tumbled out on to the lawn. So, soon John picked up the book he had presciently also taken out with him, not Who Killed the Preacher? but his current reading, a biography of Dong-with-the-Luminous-Nose Edward Lear. Harriet simply contented herself with lying back and letting the sunshine pour on to her.

  Except that before many minutes had passed she found herself churning over the circumstances of that murder thirty years and more ago. What, she asked, would those seven people, waiting just outside the Imperial’s ballroom when the Boy Preacher was strangled, have been doing on that May Sunday, one day before the Boy’s meeting?

  Bubsy Willson, the ugly girl, for instance, would she have been lounging at home in a frowsty bed? And in it would she have been thinking about the Boy’s injunction as recorded by Michael Meadowcraft, not to bring children into the world without the care of both mother and father or, in the doubtless more accurate Indian expression DCI Kenworthy had meticulously noted, Do Not Bring into World Whatsoever Child Without Ma-Bap? Or would the lumpy creature be day-dreaming about the sorts of adventures that had brought her, as Kenworthy’s checking of the suspects’ records had revealed, into court on fourteen separate occasions on charges of soliciting for immoral purposes? Another thing Michael Meadowcraft had been inaccurate over. It was not on charges of indecent behaviour that Bubsy Willson had somehow always escaped fine or prison.

  Right, zip up the social scale. To Mr Lucas Calverte, barrister and Undersheriff for the county of Birrshire. What about his Sunday morning? Not very likely he would still be in bed at eleven o’clock. No, more probably at church in the village where he had a house. I wonder whether, on that day so long ago, he found the sermon improving? Or unnecessary? But perhaps he was no church-goer, and had spent the morning doing a little gardening while Mrs Calverte — No, this was the sixties — while Cook prepared a roast-beef Sunday lunch.

  But, as he uprooted an unruly dandelion, had he been thinking that, for some yet-to-be-discovered reason, the Boy Preacher had also to be eliminated? Yet for what reason? What possible reason could a man who was chairman of the Birchester Immigrants Welfare Council have to kill a harmless young preaching Indian?

  And zip down the scale again. To Barney Trapnell, crippled watch repairer. Difficult to see why, lying in bed that Sunday morning or perhaps already busy at his bench, he should have had murder in mind. All right, apparently his connection with the Boy lay in his having great strength in his arms, enabling him, despite his callipered leg, to hoist the young preacher’s slight form here and there when needed. And, incidentally, why should that office have been required? What, if anything, had been wrong with the Boy? Kenworthy’s notes don’t ever indicate what it was. Room for a famous lateral leap here? Can’t see there really is, though.

  No, the only possible, and highly unlikely, reason for rough-and-ready Barney Trapnell to strangle the Boy would be the envy of the unsuccessful and the crippled for the suddenly tremendously successful preacher he sometimes had to carry in his arms. And, to me, that hardly holds water.

  All right, the wild card next. Marcus Fairchild, feature writer for the mighty London Times, according to Kenworthy’s interview notes.

  All unaware that he had less than a year to live, was he lying in bed with the Sundays in whatever Birchester hotel he had booked into? Hah, had the Times put him into the Imperial? And had he chosen to make a bit on his expenses by staying somewhere more modest? Meant to be the journalist’s way of life. But as he lay there — hope the mattress was as lumpy as the ones we had at school back then — what could he possibly have been thinking about the Boy who was to die only shortly before himself? He could, I suppose, have been wondering about the preaching youth he had, presumably, been sent to Birchester to write about? Well, he might have been. But I don’t see a journalist, however good his description of aspects of the life of the day might be, devoting every idle hour to polishing his prose. So, what? So, nil, nothing, zilch.

  On down the list. Right, can’t dodge it any longer. Little Harish Nair, whom Meadowcraft blatantly lined up for the dock. But it was DCI Kenworthy’s balanced interview notes that made me ...

  ‘... like him. And I do. I just like him.’

  ‘What’s that?’ John said, looking up from Edward Lear

  ‘Oh gosh, did I say that out loud?’

  ‘You did. Whatever it was.’

  ‘Well, it was just that I like one of my suspects.’

  ‘The Hard Detective eliminates one out of seven? Were you asleep and dreaming, or actually awake?’

  ‘God knows. Betwixt and between, I think. But no, of course not. I haven’t even in a dream decided who cannot have killed that poor Boy. No, I was just thinking, or dreaming, that I liked the sound of the Boy’s cousin, Harish Nair, as a person. He comes over as a nice, nice man, even in DCI Kenworthy’s solid notes. And since Meadowcraft manages to get his knife into the poor fellow, I’ve all the more reason to think he’s a really decent chap.’

  ‘Picking favourites without any evidence? You want to watch out for that, or you’ll lose the title of Hard — ’

  ‘Get back to the Dong with the Luminous Nose, damn you.’

  John, with a little smirk, returned to his book in silence.

  And Harriet thought.

  Right, Harish Nair has undeniably made his way into my affections. A man of such simplicity and goodwill, so modest in his claims on life, can he really have strangled his lodger, Krishna Kumaramangalam, there in the empty ballroom of the Imperial Hotel? Would he, small as he is, actually have hands physically capable of the swift act? If Kenworthy did look at them with that in mind, he certainly made no note of his observations. So, is that one of the things an investigating officer with the ability to employ lateral thinking would have done? And that Kenworthy did not? Right, if Harish Nair is still in the land of the living, I’ll take a damn good look at his hands. Even after thirty or more years it should be possible to see whether they were once strong enough to effect rapid manual strangulation.

  And if they were, what would have been the motive that drove the little man — Kenworthy had put his height at five foot four — to dig them into the boy’s neck and hold them there till he could no longer breathe? Leaving on whatever garment he was wearing on that warm May evening the spittle the boy had spewed out as his life came to its swift and ugly end? Certainly nothing that leaps to mind. But there may have been circumstances in that small household at — what’s it? — 17 Lower Church Street, that no one knew about. Were they what caused Harish Nair to change from an outward lamb into an inward raging lion? Could the outlandish idea suggested to Kenworthy by DS Shaddock be right? That Krishna could have attempted to make love to Mrs Nair? Could it really have been something like that? Kenworthy had, conscientious as ever, probed the possibility when he was interviewing Mrs Nair, and had come to the conclusion that there could be nothing at all in it.

  But there might have been something else. Anything’s possible when two human beings come into close contact. But beware of liking little Harish Nair too much.

  Who’s still to come? Right, the other woman who was there walking up and down that ballroom foyer for two long expectant hours, perhaps going into the Ladies once or twice, perhaps going to sit for a while in one of those two little meeting rooms. Miss Priscilla Knott, teacher. Right, May is in term time. So, on a Sunday morning would she, as a conscientious young woman, be busy preparing for her next day’s teaching, cutting up coloured paper for her children to make into little lanterns, or whatever? And certainly, from what Kenworthy says about her, and Meadowcraft echoes, she seems to have been conscientious. But church for her first, I think, nodding away in agreement with any pulpit denunciations of contemporary behaviour. By this time of the morning, though, perhaps she’d be sitting with a pile of exercise books. No, wrong, her pencil would jab down in a margin. Or, How many times have you been told how to write BED?
Or, worse, See me after class.

  All right, say, lifting her head from imposing a particularly fierce red-pencil mark, she finds herself, whether she wants to or not, thinking about the Boy. Why would her thoughts be of murder? Surely, if she found anything gravely amiss with his conduct, she would simply have preached him a ferocious sermon, in return for all the mild ones she must have heard from him. A good woman, to judge by Kenworthy’s notes. If an unyielding one. So what motive for murder could she have had? Answer: you never can know the secrets of the human heart — if that doesn’t sound too much like the author of Death in Pale Pink Pyjamas.

  Okay, last man up, and hop from the good to the bad, or at least the regularly presumed to be bad. To Sydney Bigod, street trader. And no difficulty in finding a motive here, or a motive of sorts. Money. And, yes, Kenworthy found there was money awash in the Boy Preacher’s wake, and not all of it easily accounted for. A good head for figures, old Peter Kenworthy. But all his work, aided by the small Greater Birchester Police fraud team of those days, had not been able to show how much of that, if any, had got into Sydney Bigod’s hands before he decided to return to his native Norfolk.

  And his Sunday morning thoughts on the day before the murder? In bed, very likely. Unless there was a penny or two to be made in some Birchester side street, which wouldn’t have been anything so likely as it would today. The Lord’s Day Observance Society was in full career back then. No universal Sunday openings, and probably precious little other commercial activity. So, plotting and planning? That’d be it. Sydney Bigod plotting how to make a few extra bob, all unconscious of the fact that in twenty-four hours’ time his life was going to be dramatically changed by murder. Unless he himself had some reason to shut the Boy Preacher’s mouth, and was working out how to get away with it.

  ‘You know,’ John said, suddenly looking up from his book, ‘there’s a lot I never knew about dear old Edward Lear.’

  Harriet came to with a start.

  Jesus, she thought, what have I been doing, on what’s meant to be a Sunday without any thoughts of the task I’ve been landed with? At least I wasn’t thinking about Mr Newbroom. Name never crossed my thought-lips, John, dear.

  ‘Oh,’ she managed to say, ‘there’s something you actually didn’t know?’

  He smiled.

  ‘If you’re not the Hard Detective,’ he said, ‘then I don’t see why I should be the Walking Encyclopedia.’

  ‘Right, truce from now on. And what was it you didn’t kn — What was it you found interesting about “pleasant to know” Mr Lear?’

  ‘Well, right at the beginning it emerged that he wasn’t quite so pleasant, for one thing.’

  ‘Oh? I always thought that that was the thing about him, what a nice man he was. You’re not going to tell me he had thoughts about committing horrible murders, are you?’

  Her mind flipped back at once to the notions she had been pondering when John had interrupted her.

  ‘Well, as a matter of fact,’ he said now, ‘the lady who’s written the book, Vivien Noakes, who seems pretty acute, says, with good backing from Lear’s diaries and correspondence, that there was a mysterious figure in his childhood days. He wrote of whoever it was as a “particular skeleton” who had done him some evil affecting him for all the rest of his life. I think he might well have wished a nasty fate on whoever that was. But, no, what I really didn’t know about Lear was that he was an epileptic and had fits throughout his life, though he felt he always had to conceal them. Epilepsy was not to be spoken about in Victorian days. Any more than homosexual yearnings, which he also suffered from.’

  ‘But however did he manage to actually hide those fits?’

  And what similar secrets, she said to herself, might Meadowcraft’s Seven Suspects have had to hide?

  ‘Oh, you get some warning of the fit’s onset, apparently,’ John replied. ‘I looked it all up, as a matter of fact. You get what’s called the aura epileptica. It gives you time to go somewhere out of the way, hide in Lear’s case, and have your short spell of rigidity and then your convulsive jerking about before you pass into a coma and then into a brief sleep.’

  ‘Poor old Lear. What a wretched life it must have been for people with something like that, in those tuck-it-away times.’

  ‘True enough. Not that all times don’t have their horrible aspects. Look at the period you’re busy investigating right now. One of those people who could have got into the ballroom at the Imperial must have been going through an appalling time, for some well-concealed reason or another.’

  But which of them, Harriet said to herself in a swift blaze of fury. Which? Which? Which? And if I do learn a name from the lab at Cherry Fettleham, my troubles will have just begun. After all, it’ll need more than a report on some DNA work to bring a defence-proof case to court.

  Chapter Six

  Arriving at her office at exactly nine on Monday morning, Harriet found that things were looking up a little. There, standing a few yards away from its locked door, was a short sturdy man in his late fifties with a pointed snow-white beard and head of tufty hair. A fawn linen jacket and light-green cotton trousers both showed signs of age. But an air of alertness in his bright blue eyes made her guess at once that here was her promised DC.

  Responding to her look of assessment, the fellow made a sudden little rush towards her.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Martens?’ he jerked out.

  ‘That’s me.’

  ‘I — I’m — I’m the DC attached to you for ... ’

  His voice dropped away.

  ‘The inquiry into the Boy Preacher murder,’ Harriet snapped, thinking the fellow could hardly have been allocated to her without being told about the investigation.

  ‘Yes. Yes. I suppose — I mean, I imagine even after the DNA lab gets a result there’ll be inquiries to make.’

  ‘If they get a result.’

  ‘Oh, I understood — Well, I understood there wasn’t going to be much doubt about that.’

  ‘Then you’ve more faith in forensic science than I have. It could be, you know, that the people down there will eventually tell us there was nothing for them to find.’

  ‘So what — what, er, then, ma’am?’

  ‘A lot more interviews, unless all the supposed suspects turn out to be dead. And then a good deal of disappointment for Mr Newcomen.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’

  The little white-bearded detective looked as if he would like to say more. Harriet turned to her door, unlocked it and waved him inside.

  ‘You haven’t told me your name, DC,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, no. No, I haven’t. I — It’s Steadman, ma’am. Steadman.’

  ‘Spelt S-T-E-A-D or S-T-E-D?’

  ‘S-T-E-A ... The first way, ma’am.’

  ‘Well, I suppose as the two of us will be working together I’d better call you by your forename. When I don’t call you DC. What is it?’

  ‘It’s — er — Phillip, ma’am. Phillip. But — But, well, I’m generally called Pip. Pip. I’ve always been that. Pip. Pip Steadman.’

  She was beginning to find this perpetual hesitance more than a little irritating. Perhaps, she thought, a degree of informality may reduce it. Provided it didn’t make him get above himself.

  ‘All right, Pip,’ she said, sitting herself at the room’s wretched wooden table and indicating to him to take the lurched-over ex-typist’s chair. ‘Tell me about yourself.’

  It was a mistake, if the object had been to eliminate the hesitant manner.

  ‘I, er, I — Well, ma’am, perhaps I ought to tell you that I’m only just back from — From sick leave.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And what was that for?’

  A gulp. And silence.

  What the hell have I been landed with? Is this another of Newbroom’s little exercises in tyranny?

  ‘Ma’am, it was a — Well, a nervous breakdown, actually.’

  Right, a nutter. Thanks very much.

  ‘I — Well, let me
tell you a bit of my history, and then you’ll perhaps understand.’

  His two bright blue little pippy eyes looked up at her, as if they ought to have been big, deep brown, pleading dog’s eyes.

  ‘You see, I haven’t been in the service all my working life, er, ma’am. I was in advertising to begin with. I’m — I used to be something of a dab hand with words at school and the job appealed to me, and — And — Well, I thought that by doing it I’d be also doing some good in the world, telling people what were the best products at their disposal. And I did quite well in the job, down in London actually. But — ‘

  He came to a slap-bang halt.

  But. But. Oh, yes, bound to be a but. Harriet allowed the thought to rip out in her head. But kept it in bounds.

  ‘But then — Then one day I, I, er, thought about what it was that I was actually doing. I was telling people what they should eat or drink or wear, but not because I believed it was in their b-best interests any more. Oh, no. No, I knew by then that it was only in the best interests of the people manufacturing the food, or drink, or clothing. I — I was the devil’s preacher.’

  Going it a bit. The devil’s preacher. Though I suppose ...

  She remained silent.

  ‘So I quit. I quit, ma’am.’

  ‘And then what? Did you go straight away and join the police?’

  Pip Steadman looked wounded.

  Oh God, Harriet thought, I’m going to have a fine time working with this idiot if he looks like that whenever I bark at him.

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, ma’am. I suppose that’s what I did do. You see, I always believed one ought to do something that was for the good of one’s fellow human beings, and I — I thought a job in the police back in my home town would give me opportunities to do that. Helping people in trouble, putting young offenders back on the right track, that sort of thing.’