The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘I sweet-talked the Stores people, ma’am,’ he said. ‘All those advertising techniques I learnt still pay off sometimes.’

  ‘Right. I see you’re going to be more use to me than Mr Newcomen perhaps thought.’

  ‘I, I, I hope so, ma’am. And — And — Well, I have managed, actually, to track down all but one of the six remaining suspects. I haven’t had any luck with that fellow Sydney Bigod. He left Birchester shortly after the murder, you know. Went back to Cromer, I gather. But, when I phoned Norfolk Police, they told me they’d lost all trace of him.’

  ‘Right. Then we must just hope our DNA wizards down in Lincolnshire don’t find he’s the one with traces of saliva on that awful shirt he wore. Otherwise we’ll have a lot of thankless work digging our Sydney out of wherever he eventually went to ground.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Though I suppose ... ’

  ‘Yes, what do you suppose?’

  She could see Pip positively nerving himself up to give her a contradictory reply.

  ‘Well ... Well, I was thinking that really — Really with a name like Bigod he shouldn’t be too difficult to trace. I mean — well, not really, should he, er, ma’am?’

  ‘Unless he’s changed that rather unlikely name, DC. Or, rather, unless he’s changed back from the unlikely name, which, by the way, I think you don’t actually pronounce as By God.’

  ‘Oh. Oh, I’m sorry, ma’am.’

  ‘What for, DC?’ Harriet could no longer refrain from snapping out. ‘For not realizing a name can be changed? Or for mispronouncing it? It’s actually a Norfolk name, I happen to know. I spent a sightseeing weekend there once when my husband was in Norwich for his work. All the early Earls of Norfolk were Bigods, though in those days they seemed to spend most of their time rushing about fighting whoever it was the King wanted fought.’

  By the end of her little history lesson, she noted with relief, Pip seemed to be beginning to regain his composure. But she thought it better to plough on a bit.

  ‘Yes, I gather from Mr Kenworthy’s notes,’ she said, ‘that, although he saw no reason to detain Bigod, he did put the fear of God into him over his borderline legal activities. So, no doubt, he was all too ready, when he was let off the hook, to skedaddle back to Norfolk and report to the police there.’

  Now, she saw, Pip was on an even keel again, all twitching gone.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘so let’s have the list of people you did track down. Remarkably quickly, too, let me say. They all still alive?’

  ‘Well, no. No, ma’am. I mean, not Harish Nair. Nair’s dead.’

  Harriet felt a jolt of dismay. Poor little Mr Nair, the man who had been, as DCI Kenworthy had noted, a Christian non-conformist lay preacher before he had generously given way to the much more charismatic talent of the young relative who had come to lodge with him. He was someone who, from all I’ve learnt about him, seems to have been as nice a man as you could hope to meet. All right, I’ve recognized that prejudice of mine, and pledged myself to discount it. But somehow, although I knew any one of those people in that ballroom foyer might well have died in the intervening years, I’ve thought all along of Harish Nair as being a person I was going to meet. I’d even looked forward to it.

  But, now, dead.

  Dead, and possibly having taken with him the secret of why he strangled his young cousin.

  ‘And have any of the others gone from us?’ she brought herself to ask.

  ‘No, ma’am, no. All still alive, and actually all still living in Birchester. Except — ’

  Another of those awful disconcerting up-against-the-buffers pauses.

  ‘Yes, DC. Except what?’

  A little blush appeared on the knobby cheekbones above the pointed white beard.

  ‘No, no, ma’am. It was just — Just that I meant Mr Lucas Calverte actually lives a little way out of Birchester. Near a village called Westholme.’

  ‘Right, I know Westholme. What’s the name of his house there?’

  ‘It’s called Travellers, ma’am. Travellers. I don’t know why.’

  ‘Never mind that. But, if I go to see any of these people before we get a report from the Forensic Science lab, I think someone like Undersheriff Lucas Calverte, a barrister — ’

  ‘Retired, retired,’ Pip Steadman broke in unstoppably.

  ‘All right, retired barrister. You do seem to have turned up a lot of facts this morning. Nevertheless I think a former barrister is the one most likely to be able to tell me anything useful about that two-hour wait outside the Imperial’s ballroom thirty-odd years ago.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, ma’am, I’m sure — ’

  ‘Never mind that. You got all their addresses, you said. Are all of them actually still where they were living at the time of the murder? Except Bigod, of course.’

  ‘Well, Bubsy Willson isn’t at her former address, the one on the list you gave me. It turns out she’s married now. But still called Bubsy, I understood from the witness I asked. She’s Mrs Barbara, or Bubsy, Brownlow. But she’s here in Birchester all right.’

  ‘Good. And Priscilla Knott, of the hurriedly reclaimed pink, scalloped-neck blouse. Is she married? I doubt somehow if she is.’

  Pip blushed again.

  ‘But — But — I’m afraid you’re wrong there, ma’am.’

  All right, all right. I’m not God Almighty, you know. I can make a guess that turns out to be incorrect. And I don’t mind being told I’ve got it wrong, either.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Or, no. Well, yes.’

  ‘So Priscilla Knott did get married, you say. What’s her name now, then?’

  Yet another blush rising up on the knobby cheek bones.

  ‘It — It’s Knott, ma’am.’

  ‘I’m not going to ask Not what, DC. But I’d like to hear why, though married, she’s still Patricia Knott.’

  ‘It — It’s quite simple, ma’am. She did get married,

  to a Mr Joseph Johnson, a fellow teacher. But they’re divorced now, and she’s reverted to her maiden name. She’s a head teacher, actually, much respected. At St Peter’s Primary in the Boreham area.’

  ‘Now that doesn’t surprise me. Mr Kenworthy’s notes on his interview with her actually complained that the lady — in her early twenties then, remember — kept trying to tell him how he should be doing his job. So, yes, a head teacher, married but divorced. Then that just leaves the cripple, Barney Trapnell. Is he married?’

  ‘No. No, ma’am. And he’s actually living at the same address that he was thirty-odd years ago. It’s a shop. Of sorts. Watch repairs. But he must be different from what he was at the time of the murder. He’s very, very crippled now. I saw him at a distance. He — He — Well, poor devil, he goes about looking like — Like-Well, some sort of awful three-legged table, if you know what I mean.’

  Harriet thought, lips pursed.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, after a little, ‘I do think I know what you mean, DC. You draw a vivid picture.’

  ‘Yes, well, yes, I sort of — Well, I sort of felt for him. I mean — I — Well, I hope those DNA tests don’t prove he was the one.’

  ‘Charitable, Pip. But not to be encouraged. You may yet have to question him, and a purely objective approach is the only possible one.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, ma’am. Yes, you’re quite right. It’s a fault, I know that. I mean, that was why — Why I made that mistake before.’

  Perhaps it’s a good thing, though, Harriet said to herself, that little Harish Nair is dead. If I’d had to question him, would I have succeeded in being — a wry smile — the Hard Detective I warned Pip here never to call me?

  Then, yes, she answered herself. Yes, I would have been as objective with him as I would be with any other suspect in front of me in an interview room. No point in putting myself down. Yes, I’d have been hard with little Harish Nair, whatever I felt about him. There’s some truth, after all, in that wretched tag the media plastered on me. As a police officer I am hard. I believe I ought to be, never mind what s
oft, sentimental thoughts I indulge in when off duty about people who seem as nice — Yes, that’s the soppy, sloppy word, nice — as that little Indian tailor.

  She sat up straight on her hard wooden chair.

  Right then, I’m going to see barrister Lucas Calverte.

  Chapter Eight

  Harriet found Lucas Calverte, grey-haired, scrawny of neck, dressed in baggy corduroy trousers and an open-collared check shirt at work this sunny May afternoon in the garden of Travellers, his large cottage a couple of miles outside the village of Westholme.

  Lucky, she thought, to have caught my ex-Under-sheriff in an informal moment, and a good idea to keep things as casual as possible. That way it’ll be easier to stick with Mr Newbroom’s plan to keep the inquiry strictly hush-hush till his hour of glory arrives. If it does.

  ‘I’ve risked finding you at home, sir,’ she began after she had introduced herself, ‘because we’re looking at any unsolved crimes where the recent advances in the technique of DNA analysis might make it worth going into again.’

  Abruptly Lucas Calverte straightened up, with a sharp little groan, from where he had momentarily stooped to tug out a stray clump of grass from the well-kept flower bed beside him.

  ‘The Boy Preacher murder,’ he said. ‘That’s it, isn’t it?’

  He looked at her with an expression she found hard to analyse. Was it simply an outward reflection of what was obviously a decidedly acute mind? Or was there in it a touch of suspicion? Even the tiniest hint of fear?

  ‘But,’ he added quickly, ‘it must be thirty years or more since that terrible day. Are you sure, Superintendent, there’ll be anything more to learn now than the police at the time managed to find out?’

  Harriet gave a casual shrug.

  ‘It would be a long shot,’ she said. ‘But the case is one of the ones where the possibility of new evidence exists, though, as I say, we’re doing no more at present than look into the prospects.’

  ‘Well, Superintendent, I’ll certainly tell you anything I can. But I doubt if I’ll be able to help. I should have thought, you know, that the Greater Birchester Police would have had more urgent matters in front of them. The sights one sees in the streets, on the rare occasions I still visit the city in the evening, are, frankly, disgusting. One cannot go anywhere without seeing drunken youths rioting about, and girls, too, girls who ought to know better. Those appalling short skirts and naked midriffs. Can’t you do anything to keep them under control?’

  In his gnarled old man’s hands the clump of long grass he had pulled from the bed was twisted and twisted.

  Harriet thought for a quick, bitter moment of the efforts she had once made in her ‘Stop the Rot’ days to keep at least the worst of Birchester’s streets under control. But evidently the former Undersheriff had taken no notice of the campaign, or had forgotten it. He must, after all, be well into his eighties, though Michael Meadowcraft’s pen pictures of his Seven Suspects had failed to give any details of his early life.

  She gave a somewhat dramatic sigh in reply to the old boy.

  ‘We do our best, sir,’ she said. ‘But the spirit of the times is against us. Life today, as you must know, is very different even from what it was at the time of the Boy Preacher’s death.’

  She had hoped, in this way, to steer things back to what she wanted to hear, whatever Lucas Calverte might have to say about that long-ago time. But again she was to be balked.

  ‘Oh yes, yes, I know all about that. I dare say you saw my letter in the Chronicle a few months ago. I took advantage of it being the true start of the twenty-first century, not that Year 2000 nonsense, to make a number of observations about the decline in moral standards we’re witnessing. And to make some suggestions about how to enforce better ones. In my young days you could be birched for the sort of behaviour you see everywhere now.’

  Harriet snatched at all this huff-and-puff preaching to bring things back to where she wanted them.

  ‘Yes, indeed, sir,’ she said with deliberate ambiguity. ‘How much better life would be if people heeded the message Krishna Kumaramangalam had for the country back in those days.’

  And it worked.

  ‘Indeed, indeed. You know, Kumaramangalam was a truly remarkable young man. I came across him first through the Birchester Immigrant Welfare Council, of which I was chairman at the time. I have always had a particular interest in India. I was out there in the Indian Army in my younger days. And so I went once to hear the boy preach, frankly as a matter of duty. But I was, well, absolutely bowled over. And, as you perhaps know, I interested myself thereafter in the administration of his affairs, which, I may say, were being grossly neglected. Grossly. The people who had insinuated themselves into his entourage were, to speak plainly, a pretty wretched lot.’

  The bundle of mangled grass was tossed aside into the nearby hedge as if such a fate was the least the people in the Boy’s inner circle deserved.

  So, Harriet thought, would a man who had been so ‘absolutely bowled over’ go on to kill the preacher he had admired and supported? And, yes, she answered. If Lucas Calverte was, in fact, the person who had strangled to death the Boy Preacher, then he would, thirty years on, still be portraying himself as someone who could not in any circumstance be guilty of the Boy’s murder. And addressing me as if I were a public meeting.

  What was it Michael Meadowcraft had said when writing about him? Yes. Who can probe the depths of the human heart?

  But the public meeting was still being addressed.

  ‘No, Superintendent, a great deal of work had to be done to see that Kumaramangalam’s message reached the very widest audience. His preaching would have affected, I don’t hesitate to say it, the well-being of the whole country. A message of such simplicity and purity. And, until I joined those people round him, there was certainly a grave danger of that message being lost for lack of a few elementary steps being taken. Yes, a feeble lot. The only one of them I gave tuppence for was Kumaramangalam’s cousin. You know about him?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, sir.’

  Harriet wanted nothing to halt the flow of information, wrapped up in Mandarin-speak though it was. But, all the same, she waited with some apprehension to hear the Mandarin’s verdict on her nice Harish Nair.

  ‘Yes, nothing much wrong with him. A thoroughly good-hearted little man, with all the right ideas about life. Yes. But — But, you know, a certain lack of personality.’

  Which, by implication, is not your failing, Undersheriff.

  However, now’s my chance to get a different view of that entourage of the Boy’s.

  ‘That’s very interesting, sir. And I’d appreciate, actually, having your considered opinion of each of the other people who clustered, as I understand, round the Boy.’

  The old man’s lips puffed out in an expression of angry suspicion.

  ‘I don’t know ... I don’t really know, Superintendent. It was — It was all a long time ago, you understand.’

  ‘Yes indeed, sir. But, if we do find the case is suitable for DNA analysis, that is likely to be my difficulty, too. I shall need, if it comes to it at all, to make my assessments of each of those people who, it seems, were the only ones who could have entered the Imperial Hotel ballroom at the time the Boy was strangled. So any assistance I can get will be, if you look at it this way, a matter of public duty.’

  The appeal to tell the public what it ought to be told proved as hard for Lucas Calverte to resist as she had intended it would.

  ‘Very well. Whom do you want to hear about first?’

  Harriet made a small daring leap.

  ‘Shall we say the person you yourself think must have been that murderer?’ she said.

  The old man’s tanned face seemed to grow a degree more sternly fixed.

  ‘I, I, well, no, Superintendent, I do not think it would be right for me to make any sort of accusation. No, no. I might be opening myself to an action for slander. No, I don’t think I could do that.’

  All of which
means, Harriet thought to herself, that there is a name you could produce. Unless it’s your own that I shall eventually have to reveal. However, there’s no chance I’ll get a killer’s name out of you now.

  ‘Very well, sir,’ she said. ‘Let me list those people with access to the ballroom in, shall we say, alphabetical order?’

  Lucas Calverte nodded stubbornly reluctant agreement.

  ‘Right then, Bigod. Sydney Bigod.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I dare say a man of that sort might well commit murder, though let me hasten to say I don’t accuse him of this murder, any more than I accuse anyone else. I hope I have made that clear.’

  Of course you have, you pompous old idiot. Or gasbag. That’s what we would have called someone like him when I was at school. A gasbag.

  ‘Of course, sir,’ she said. ‘Quite clear.’

  ‘Very well then. I had reason to believe the fellow might well have been making away with the funds that the Boy’s mission had caused to accrue. Reason to believe, but, no, nothing that I could prove. And I understand that when the police looked into that aspect of the matter later, they too failed to uncover any provable defalcation.’

  ‘Yes, sir, that’s so. But have you any other comments you would like to make about Mr Bigod?’

  ‘About a person of that sort, Superintendent? Well, no. Frankly, no, I paid him as little attention as I could.’

  Harriet felt a strong wish to extend that answer into what the gasbag had seen of Sydney Bigod in the foyer of the Imperial’s ballroom on the evening of the murder. Had he paid any attention to Bigod’s activities as the seven of them prowled about waiting there? Would he remember now something he had not been able to bring to mind when DCI Kenworthy had interviewed him? But, no. Asking as precise a question as that would show only too plainly that a new investigation of the thirty-year-ago murder was actually under way. Out of Newbroom bounds.

  ‘So, F for Fairchild,’ she said hastily. ‘Mr Marcus Fairchild of, as I understand, The Times!’

  ‘Ah, yes. Yes, that not very prepossessing gentleman. An odour of alcohol permanently on the breath, you know, and indeed a glass of, I believe, Guinness very often in the hand. You know, I had my doubts about the fellow at the time. Not altogether what I should have expected of a representative of The Times. I had intended, if I remember right, to look into the gentleman’s antecedents. Yes, indeed. But then — Then that terrible thing ... ’