The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘No? Well, never mind.’

  She sat down, feeling the suddenly aroused hope fizzle out of her as rapidly as air from a punctured tyre.

  And found all her appetite had gone.

  My wonderful piece of luck, she thought, when Mack turned out to know someone who had worked for Time Will Tell, has run out. The luck that, in an instant, justified my stupid dash down to London.

  And with its disappearance, it seemed, her initiative had run out too.

  But I can’t not eat these, she said to herself, looking down at the three still sizzling sausages Mack had ladled out for her. He’s so nice, so enthusiastic about everything, it’d be a miserable thing to do, to get up, pay, and leave the plate where it is.

  She jabbed her fork, its tines a little splayed from long use, into the first of the sausages and cut off a piece.

  But I was so near. So near. And surely old Miss Wetherleaf would have been able to tell me things I need to know. Am I right in my guess that the Trufflehound was actually dead Marcus Fairchild? She could confirm it in a moment. And, if I am right, I might learn that Meadowcraft’s mysterious journalist had, somehow, a stronger motive for killing the Boy than any of the others. That was one of old Kenworthy’s difficulties, after all — that none of them had any obvious motive. And I might have learnt from this former Time Will Tell copy typist that Fairchild had had some particular reason which took him to Birchester, and eventually into the ballroom foyer in the hours before the Boy was strangled. At the very least I might have learnt how many pieces he had written about Birchester for Time Will Tell, and then I could have got hold of copies — the British Library newspaper collection would do it — and perhaps hit on some fact about one of the other six which Kenworthy never knew.

  But, no. No, Miss Wetherleaf is — Wait. No, no, no. Wetherleaf. That altogether unusual name. She could be traced, surely. Telephone directory, Register of Electors, something.

  No, better than that.

  She tugged her mobile from her bag and called her office back in Birchester. A roundabout way of finding out what she wanted to know, but probably quickest in the end. And she was fired again with hope.

  Pip Steadman was there. She stopped him from reciting the success or otherwise of his morning’s inquiries and got him to go as quickly as he could and find a computer terminal such as the one her office ought to have had, and to search on it in the London phone books for the name Wetherleaf.

  ‘W-E-T-H-E-R-L-E-A-F. Probably spelt like that. But try any alternatives. Anywhere in London. And call me back. Straight away.’

  The sausages tasted even more delicious than they had smelt. The tan-brown tea was sharp on the tongue, sharp as it ought to be. She ordered another cup.

  Chapter Ten

  Good Lord, Harriet thought, I’d no idea a place like this existed. I thought in my Met days I knew central London, but I was absolutely unaware of this.

  She looked round her once again.

  The Peabody Trust Wild Street Estate. An enclave. An extensive courtyard surrounded by a dozen or more six-storey blocks, starkly flat-faced in yellowy London brick. Saying Private at every lace-curtained window. A village, inward-turned, self-sufficient, and respectable.

  Into her mind came the forbidding notices she had seen on the estate’s locked, black-painted outer doors as she had made her way towards the arched entrance, beyond which, Pip Steadman had told her, lived one Wetherleaf, Miss M. DO NOT Dump Rubbish Here!! and Don’t be LAZY!! Use the BINS PROVIDED!! Real hellfire preaching. Cleanliness next to godliness.

  And, she thought, standing there, the whole sturdy village-like community is settled here within a stone’s throw of the West End’s temple to pride and wealth, the tower-topped marbled bulk of Freemasons’ Hall.

  Right, now where’s Block M?

  Another sweep round and she had located it. Rapidly she walked across to where she had seen that incised letter above its stone doorway. There was a row of bellpushes at the entranceway. A steady pressure on the one marked simply 11.

  From the microphone grille above the buttons came a voice, prickling with suspicion.

  ‘Who is it?’

  Harriet gathered herself together.

  ‘Detective Superintendent Martens, Greater Birchester Police. I am making inquiries in connection with a case some years ago, which we are currently investigating. And I have reason to believe, Miss Wetherleaf, you may have some information concerning the time you were employed by Time Will Tell magazine that might assist us. May I come and talk to you?’

  A long pause.

  But then at last the tetchy voice emerged again from the grille.

  ‘Very well.’

  The lock of the black-painted door in front of her clicked open. Cautiously she pushed the door wider. In front of her she saw right-angled flights of bare stone steps, a plain iron railing leading upwards beside them. She began to climb.

  The door of Flat 11 was open when she reached it, and standing formidably upright within the frame was a lady of some eighty years of age, white hair drawn back ferociously from her head, face deep-cut with wrinkles, spectacles glinting in the dull light. She was wearing, despite the warmth of the day, a woollen dress in a shade of reddish purple. It came down almost to her ankles.

  ‘What exactly is it you want?’ she demanded of Harriet.

  Harriet took a mental step backwards.

  This was it. The moment she had with such difficulty reached, and on what had seemed the flimsiest, dream-directed grounds.

  ‘I am anxious to learn as much as I can about a writer for Time Will Tell, a journalist, Marcus Fairchild, who was killed in a traffic accident some thirty years ago.’

  ‘Mr Fairchild’s death can be of no interest to the police in Birchester. He was killed here in London in perfectly ordinary, if disgraceful, circumstances. If you wander the streets in a drunken condition it is to be expected that you will meet with an accident.’

  Harriet, with an inward sigh, persisted.

  ‘We are not inquiring into the circumstances of the death. We understand, however, that shortly before he died he had an assignment in Birchester for Time Will Tell. I believe at that time you were engaged by the magazine as a copy typist?’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Then could I perhaps come in and ask you if you knew anything about what he wrote during that assignment?’

  She could easily refuse, Harriet thought to herself. A cantankerous old person of her sort could quite easily take it into her head to decline to say anything at all about someone who had been working for the gossip and scandal magazine. Very likely she is ashamed of her own connection with it, however marginal it was.

  But, to her surprise, Miss Wetherleaf took a step back, turned and led her inside.

  The room she stepped into was small but not oppressive. Its ceiling was high which, coupled with the light that came in through the two narrow but tall windows, was enough to give it a feeling of some spaciousness. But countering that, in the exact centre of the room, there stood on heavy carved legs a large table with, massively present on it, a big, sit-up-and-beg typewriter. This altogether dwarfed, just behind it, the room’s one concession to the twenty-first century, a small TV perched on a wooden stool in the corner.

  A black-and-white set, I’ll bet, Harriet thought. We’re far removed here from the computer era, further back even than the day before yesterday’s little electronic typewriters.

  Opposite the looming yesteryear typewriter there was a plain oatmeal-coloured place mat with a green embroidered border. Two knives, a fork and a spoon were meticulously laid for lunch, with a napkin, matching the mat, in a thin silver ring on the side plate and a plain tumbler for water at the top right-hand corner.

  ‘Oh, dear,’ Harriet said, ‘I’m afraid you were just about to eat.’

  Miss Wetherleaf looked across to the clock — it read ten to one — on the low cupboard under the room’s two windows. To either side of it there were Staffordshire figures, a
shepherd and a shepherdess. Beside the shepherd, a black telephone with a dial stood where it must have rested year upon year, its surface greyed with age. Beside the shepherdess, Harriet could not help noticing, with a momentary twinge of pity, there was a glass dish of prunes in their deep brown juice.

  To be taken every day. Regularity of the bowels.

  ‘No, no,’ Miss Wetherleaf answered. ‘I do not eat until half-past one. But I like to have things ready earlier. Please sit down, and I will endeavour to answer whatever questions you may have.’

  On each side of the fireplace, which now housed the pipeclay white pillars of an ancient gas fire, there were well-worn upholstered chairs, one narrow and with arms, the other low and armless. Harriet made for that one.

  But when Miss Wetherleaf had seated herself in what must be her own familiar chair, Harriet sat for a moment or two in silence. It might be better, she thought, not to fire out my questions about Marcus Fairchild, otherwise known as the Trufflehound. A roundabout approach may produce a more sympathetic atmosphere.

  ‘This really is a remarkable place to find tucked away in the very centre of London,’ she said at last.

  A tiny flush of pleasure appeared on the deep-wrinkled face opposite her.

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, it is. To tell you the truth, I am quite proud of living here. Of having lived here, indeed, for nearly fifty years. It is not, of course, the first of the dwellings that Mr George Peabody, that excellent American philanthropist, caused to be built. That was, I believe, in Spitalfields in 1864. However, this estate is one of the oldest, and, I think I may say, one of the most established. There have been children born in these flats who have then lived all their lives here and, indeed, died here.’

  ‘Remarkable,’ Harriet murmured.

  ‘Of course, things have altered over the years,’ Miss Wetherleaf went comfortably on. ‘I dare say you saw all the motor cars there are in the courtyard now. They were none of them there thirty years ago. Then there were just swings and little roundabouts for the children to play on. But times change, times change. If not always for the better.’

  Harriet saw this harking back to a different past, a past in fact of thirty years ago, as her opportunity to steer the conversation into the waters she wished it to swim in. It had arrived sooner than she had expected.

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m afraid the days I have come to talk to you about have gone, and they were, in many ways, pleasanter and, indeed, better than today.’

  ‘You say in many ways, er, Superintendent. And you are right to do so. But I am well aware that life thirty years ago as well as its pleasures had its unpleasantnesses. And among those, I may say, was the publication my circumstances constrained me to be associated with. A deplorable periodical, I acknowledge that. However, I found after some consideration that working for it did not go altogether against my feeling for what is proper, provided I confined myself to visiting the office once a week and taking away recorded material to type.’

  A sudden full blush on the withered cheeks.

  ‘But I must confess there were times when the words I heard on the machine they lent to me were such that I was happy to think no one else was present to hear them.’

  Harriet wondered for a moment just what terrible words Miss Wetherleaf had dutifully typed on the ponderous machine still on her table. But she had been given an unexpected way in to what she needed to know. And she took it.

  ‘And, tell me, did you ever type out articles Marcus Fairchild had recorded?’

  ‘The Trufflehound,’ Miss Wetherleaf said with plain scorn.

  ‘Yes, I believe that was the pseudonym he used. And you typed his work?’

  ‘I did, almost all of it. I was contracted to do so. But, let me say, there were occasions, not a few occasions, when I realized all too clearly why he needed to record his work. There were the slurred sentences and the muddled repetitions. And interruptions. Interruptions I prefer not to enlarge upon.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I understand. But can you remember anything about what he wrote during the visit he made to Birchester? I have learnt from the Birchester Chronicle of the time about one article he wrote, but was there a second one? You see, if you remember that there was, I could perhaps find it in the British Library newspapers collection at Colindale.’

  ‘I can do better than that,’ Miss Wetherleaf said, a touch of pride in her voice.

  ‘Yes?’

  Without another word she pushed herself up out of her chair and went over to the mantelpiece above the unlit gas fire. From a small yellow enamelled box she took a key. With it she went over to the low cupboard under the windows, stooped in a series of little jerky movements, inserted the key, turned it with difficulty — a harsh little squeak — and opened the cupboard doors wide.

  Harriet, with a feeling of incredulity, saw inside row upon row of big reels of recording tape, such as she had not encountered since they used to be inserted in the state-of-the-art machines of her schooldays.

  ‘Are — Are those,’ she said in wonder, ‘really the reels Time Will Tell supplied you with? Are they all there? Really?’

  ‘Every one.’

  Miss Wetherleaf stood upright again, with the same series of painful jerks.

  ‘I think, however,’ she added, ‘that I will ask you to look for the ones you may want to hear. I labelled each one as I received it. The people at Time Will Tell were appallingly careless. But I find bending down that far rather awkward nowadays.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ Harriet hastened to say. ‘Even at my age I sometimes find stooping unpleasant.’

  ‘And you will have to take out the recording machine,’ Miss Wetherfield said. ‘I’m afraid it’s altogether too heavy for me. Dear me, it must have been in the cupboard there for more than twenty years. Ever since Time Will Tell suddenly ceased publication. I waited then for someone to come and collect the machine as well as the reels for it, which I had, after all, only on loan. But no one came, and in the end I thought I had better put them all away.’

  ‘You must have had some difficulty finding room for them,’ Harriet said, seizing her chance to demonstrate some sympathy. ‘Did you have other things in this cupboard?’

  ‘I did. I used to keep my bedlinen there.’

  A note of censoriousness. Directed, Harriet hoped, at Time Will Tell rather than her intrusive self.

  ‘And did you find somewhere else for that?’ she asked.

  ‘They are in a large suitcase, under my bed.’

  A fact about her personal life, Harriet guessed, that would not have been told to a male detective.

  She saw the machine now. It was stowed in the furthest corner of the cupboard’s lower shelf. And she recognized it. In the music room at school there had been its counterpart, the latest thing on the market. Kneeling down, she managed to tug it out, not without grazing two knuckles.

  ‘Thank you,’ Miss Wetherleaf said. ‘Perhaps now you could put it on the table. Just next to the typewriter. The wire on its plug will reach the electric socket if it’s put right at the edge.’

  So, Harriet, still kneeling by the cupboard, said to herself, am I really going to hear coming out of this relic of the past the very words dead Marcus Fairchild uttered, all that time ago, about Birchester? And possibly too, just possibly, what he had to say straight after the night of the murder?

  *

  ‘Like any other reasonable person ... ’ To Harriet’s astonishment words were emerging from the long outdated machine, miserably hard though they were to make

  out under the spittings and crackles on the ancient tape. ‘I have always distrusted, and indeed disliked, the people who take it on themselves to preach to their fellow men, whether from the pulpits of long-established churches or from the hustings seized upon by the itinerant hot gospellers who from time to time undertake to crusade among us, many of them from that land of we-know-best America.’

  Here’s something about Marcus Fairchild I hadn’t realized, she thought. Something, t
oo, that I suspect DCI Kenworthy hadn’t taken in. Fairchild is plainly a man who can hate. There’s a vindictive side to him. A vindictive side? Purple-prosed Michael Meadowcraft’s sweeping conclusion about the Boy’s killer came back into her mind. There can be no possible doubt that sheer vindictiveness lies at the heart of this atrocious crime. Something like that.

  Don’t tell me that awful man got it right. Marcus Fairchild with some injury done to him that so hurt him he had felt compelled to kill the Boy Preacher? No, it just isn’t on. It isn’t. But then, it’s obvious even from these first words that he was capable of a good deal of viciousness, at least with a pen, or a symbolic pen.

  But listen to this stuff. Listen. Damn it, the machine may cease to work if we run the tape again.

  ‘... went to Craven Cottage football stadium to hear the latest recruit smother us in pious flannel, one Krishna Kumaramangalam, a young, an exceedingly young, preacher of as I had gathered, a brand of mystical flimflam even more excruciatingly banal than the wild war-blings of the flatulent gurus India has long delighted in

  exporting to bloat the ever open ears of the credulous westerner.’

  Right, he lets his readers have it, no holds barred. But ... But do I detect, coming up, a however?

  Ah, yes.

  ‘However, imagine my feelings, as amid a crowd of several thousand I lent half an ear to those warblings, when something about the Boy Preacher struck me. It was hard at first to analyse just what it was. Was there something in the total stillness he had achieved as he had waited to speak and as he spoke? Or was it the tone of voice he used, or rather the voice that issued from him? Certainly, it was hardly the content of his message, which in truth was little less banal than the ferociously earnest mouthings of his American predecessors on the credulity circuit. But, as I paid him more attention, I realized that, simple as his exhortations were, they had in them a core of plain truth. “Do not be one friend to Mammons.” Quaint enough words. Yet it’s true after all that many of the ills of this nation today can be squarely put down to being “friends to Mammons”.