The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘And hearing those words delivered in that pure fluting voice, which yet seemed to be the only way they could be delivered, with the impetus of Truth, no less, behind them, I found myself, professional cynic that perhaps I am, saying Yes. It was one of those sickening moments, no, more than sickening, mind-shattering, when the beliefs of a lifetime are all in a single moment turned topsy-turvy. Yes, I said to myself jammed tight in that mass of sweaty, unthinking humanity waiting to be offered the pleasure of wailing and gnashing their teeth, yes, there are men and women occasionally making their appearance upon earth who stand out from all this.

  ‘I thought of the prophet Mohammed, of Mahatma Gandhi, of Winston Churchill, of, in quite another way, that extraordinary person, the cellist Jacqueline du Pré. Only for the last of these have I any personal liking. But I recognize in the others the presence in our world of human beings of super-human status. And so yesterday I came to Birchester where the young preacher is to hold what, I gather, is the hundredth meeting he has conducted.’

  So, Harriet realized, all this must have been written, or rather spoken into the microphone of his own recording machine — with, yes, at least one unmissable belch breaking in — in the piece about Birchester published in Time Will Tell before the postponed meeting when someone — which of them? Which? — put their urgent hands round the meditating boy’s throat and choked the life out of him.

  And, yes, now he’s moved on to his reflections about the city in general. Interesting enough, but not what I want to hear. No, what I must hear now is the reel — it’s here on the table — that Miss Wetherleaf conscientiously labelled all those years ago M. Fairchild — 24 May, 1969.

  Chapter Eleven

  ‘No,’ Miss Wetherleaf had said. ‘No, Superintendent, I am sorry but, as I told you earlier, I eat my lunch at half-past one. There is no time now to listen to this next reel.’

  Harriet had felt a plunge of disappointment.

  ‘Yes, I understand,’ she had replied, fighting to make herself sound truthful. ‘After all, you have your life to live, and you must find at your — And, when one is getting on, it’s important, I know, to have as regular a life as possible. So I’ll leave you. I’ll leave you now, but may I come back this afternoon?’

  ‘Yes, of course. If you want luncheon yourself, you will find there is an Indian restaurant just across into Great Queen Street at the top of Wild Street. I do not care for that sort of cooking myself, but I know many people these days seem to enjoy it. Perhaps you would care to return in about an hour?’

  Harriet, relieved and still comfortably full of her late breakfast sausages, hardly wanted another meal, Indian or not. But she found somewhere to have a cup of coffee, and at two-thirty precisely she was ringing Miss Wetherleafs bell once more, possessed of an entirely irrational feeling that something would have happened to prevent her hearing Marcus Fairchild’s second tape. Altogether irrational it proved when, entering Miss Wetherleafs sitting room again, she saw at once that the new reel from thirty-years-ago Birchester was already loaded into the creaky old recording machine. She saw, too — she could not help it — that the level of dark-brown liquid in the bowl of prunes had been reduced by a good half-inch. All well within, then.

  *

  ‘I have just witnessed a murder. The Trufflehound, though in his time he has scented out more than a few crimes, even if the powers-that-be have almost invariably looked the other way, has never yet been faced with a brutally inflicted death. But last night I was. And it was a death we all could well have been spared. The death of young Krishna Kumaramangalam, otherwise known as the Boy Preacher.’

  Witnessed? Witnessed the murder? For a moment Harriet felt the blood racing through her.

  Did Marcus Fairchild, almost prototypical journalist, deliberately keep his ‘story of a lifetime’ from DCI Kenworthy’s ears? His scoop? Am I going to hear now who it was he saw strangling the Boy? But, no. No, of course not. If Fairchild’s a typical journalist it’s only in the way he puffs up whatever it is he writes.

  So, no, all I’m hearing at this moment is his account of his own feelings there on that evening thirty years ago.

  ‘... of last Monday’s events will be known to almost all my readers before this appears. But I cannot refrain from telling you of my reactions to what was, as it happens, my first encounter with a murdered body. I had been waiting in the foyer of the ballroom at Birchester’s Imperial Hotel for almost two hours while the Boy, as I learnt was his custom, stayed inside preparing himself by meditation. I was among a motley, even dubious, crew who had collected round the Boy during the time of his crusade, if that pretentious word fits those preaching tours of his, always modest despite the vast crowds who attended.

  ‘Just as some hotel staff were about to pass through the closed barrier into the foyer to make the final preparations for the meeting, which had been postponed because the Boy had had some minor illness, one of the sets of doors leading into the ballroom was violently thrust open. I turned at the loud screeching sound it made, and on the far side of a hideous clump of pampas grass planted in a huge pot I heard one of the women in the entourage — I could not see which exactly — shouting at the top of her voice some totally incoherent words. It was not long, however, before I gathered their purport. Krishna Kumaramangalam was dead. Killed, it soon emerged as questions were shouted to and fro, by strangulation.’

  So, far from being a witness, Harriet thought, Marcus Fairfield didn’t even see who had come out of the ballroom shouting. He implies it was one of the two women present in the foyer. But it could have been any one of the others who had thrust open that noisy door, that still made its screeching sound when I opened it on Saturday. The woman he heard yelling out might simply have heard someone — But who? Who? — say in a quiet voice that the Boy had been strangled. No wonder poor old Kenworthy had to admit defeat at last.

  But listen to the tape. If I have to run it back, I’ll be lucky, ancient as it is, if it doesn’t snap.

  ‘ … my way into the ballroom, ran down the aisle between the ranks of red plush chairs up to the dais. And there I saw that small body, already seemingly shrivelled yet smaller, the deep red marks of the throttling fingers that had killed him all too plain to see on his neck. I am not ashamed to say I turned and ran back into the foyer where in the lavatory I was comprehensively sick.’

  Yes, I suppose DCI Kenworthy, or one of his detectives, will have obtained proof of that vomit having been there. But was it proof that Fairchild did no more than go into the ballroom, look, turn away and, sick at the sight he had seen, run for the door, the door I saw myself on Saturday, the one labelled Gents. Or had he vomited only after he himself had come racing out of the ballroom where it had been his hands that had been round the Boy’s throat? And was all that talk about hearing someone come out and announce that the Boy was dead no more than an alibi for himself, made with all the pseudo-authority of print?

  But listen. Listen. There may be more.

  ‘But before I go on to describe my somewhat pusillanimous reactions, I must offer one exception to that description “dubious” with which I have labelled all the Boy’s inner circle. It fits all but one of them well enough, but the Boy’s much older cousin, Harish Nair, I found as I got to know him, is, despite having once stood Sunday after Sunday in a pulpit, by no means tarred with the particularly odious preacherly brush. No, if the word “decent” has any meaning in these indecent times, then it altogether suits the little Indian tailor. He may be no great intellect. He may have little head for figures. But I am as certain as I can he that he is an honest man and a man filled with simple goodwill.’

  Hooray, I’m right. Harish Nair, now dead these many years, was, as I thought, a decent fellow. But ... But, what if, when I see the report from Cherry Fettleham, it states with full scientific authority that the shirt of his which I had Pip Steadman send down there yesterday is impregnated with the spittle that sprayed from the Boy’s mouth as he died?

  ‘Filled
with goodwill is not something I can say, however, about any of the others in the Boy’s entourage, and if my words bring this journal yet another action for libel, so be it. The Trufflehound is there to nose out the truth.’

  Oh, excellent, at least I’m going to hear now a different assessment of the five suspects who are, as it happens, still alive. Even if it’s through Trufflehound’s cynical eyes. They’ll certainly be better than Meadow-craft’s gooey ones. Better, too, perhaps than DCI Kenworthy’s police-blinkered ones. And even better, again, than my own imaginative ones on Sunday morning as I lazed and pondered out in the garden. Perhaps now I’ll get some idea of what motive one of the Clique, as Meadowcraft delighted to call them, could have had to kill that simple young man. Because, unless I have that, I’ll have more than a little difficulty getting together a watertight case for Birchester assizes. DNA evidence alone, however convincing it is to Mr Newcomen — and to myself, to be fair — is hardly going to be certain to convince a jury. Not after a good defence team has done its worst.

  ‘So, who to snuffle into first? Let’s take some prime hypocrisy material. The Undersheriff for the county of Birrshire, Mr Lucas Calverte. Let me tell you straight away that there is something to he dug out about that gentleman. What it is I have not yet had time to discover. It may be something perfectly innocent. But I have seen in my time too many people high up in the world who have a secret in their past not to know the signs. And on the face of Lucas Calverte, of the distinguished title and the distinguished name, the signs are there.

  ‘But at the other end of the scale — I almost said down at the other end of the scale, but where’s up and where’s down? — there is one Sydney Bigod. Odd how the two ends of the social scale often prove very much alike under the skin. Sydney Bigod is another man who, I’m willing to bet, has a shady past, as well as a shady present and, no doubt, a shady future. I am willing to bet, too, that he has not always gone by the name of Bigod.’

  Yes, I won’t offer you odds on that, Trufflehound.

  I said as much yesterday to little Pip.

  ‘But Bigod, or Bydevil, here’s a fine specimen of what you might call the honest cheat. I have also watched him at the street stall he stands behind. I noted there the quickly moving eyes in his head. And I know that whatever he was selling was not what he claimed it was. However cheekily honest-sounding his claims may be, “Straight off the back of a lorry, ladies and gents”, they are designed to conceal a sharper dishonesty. Those goods, as likely as not, were the whole of the lorryload. I would not be at all surprised to learn that, within two or three days from now, Sydney Bigod will no longer be seen in the markets of Birchester, and a Sydney Whoever, a good deal richer than he ought to be, will be shouting his wares somewhere else.’

  Yes, but did you have proof of that, Trufflehound? Mr Kenworthy thought he could safely let Sydney Bigod go back to his native Norfolk, and he would hardly have done that, old-style detective that he was, if he had had any hard proof that Bigod was milking the Boy Preacher’s funds.

  Miss Wetherleaf, Harriet noted, had now gone over to the nearer of her two windows and was looking out at the block opposite as intently as if she had spotted a cat burglar making his way up its blank face. None so deaf.

  ‘Or take the entourage’s representative of the moral incompetents who surrounded me as I first listened to the Boy preaching. “Do not be drinking any wines,” that limpid voice had exhorted me. Well, I still am, if Mr Guinness’s brew can be called “wine”. But, believe me, if I had heard the Boy preach once more I’d have abandoned the habit of years, knowing full well that I’d be all the better for it. So what is it, I ask, that Barney Trapnell has abandoned at the Boy’s behest? And for how long will he stay away from whatever vice, whether genuinely wicked or merely deplorable, that he formerly clung to?’

  All right, before long I’ll see, thirty years later, how well Trapnell did manage. And I wonder what that vice was. Could it have led him, for some reason, to throttle the voice that had preached at him to give it up?

  ‘The Trufflehound has had no opportunity to nose away at that little secret, and, to tell the truth, not much inclination. Not even now when, I suppose, it may lead to a discovery of which of the seven of us prowling up and down that wretched foyer, grimly decorated in the worst of taste, was the one who succeeded — it would not have been difficult — in slipping into the ballroom and strangling the Boy Preacher I’m happy to leave that sort of factfinding to the police, who are good at it, if not so good at many other things!

  A thunderous belch out of the machine. At the window Miss Wetherleaf’s bony shoulders rose and fell.

  ‘But here is one fact I have unearthed about another of the seven of us, though it did not require a very long nose to get at it. Miss Barbara Willson, Bubsy to all her friends (of which she has many in the lower reaches of the Birchester proletariat), is not a prostitute. You might well have thought that she was had you been there in the ballroom foyer during those two weary hours, watching her in that appallingly blatant multicoloured nylon blouse she was wearing, open far enough down to put before the world the better part of her breasts, sweat-glistening and powder-caked, that she made a living working the streets of Birchester. But that notion could only have occurred to you if you had contrived to avoid looking at her face because, alas, that face is as ugly a mug as it has ever been my pleasure to see, and if you were also prepared to ignore the stains and splashes decorating that fearful blouse. Even while we were all pacing up and down out there she had succeeded in spilling most of the cup of tea from the urn we had been provided with all down her front. Nevertheless many kind voices around the Boy were quick to confide in me that prostitution was her profession. But I think not. No, Bubsy Willson may be a dubious member of the dubious circle round the Boy, but a working prostitute she is not. She is, to put it frankly, too unsavoury even for the lower depths of that profession.’

  A little too ready, Trufflehound, to believe in his own judgments, if you ask me, though he may be right about Bubsy. A man, after all, would be a better judge of sexual attractiveness. And how many of his comments on Bubsy, and on the others, eventually survived the blue pencil at Time Will Tell? Perhaps listening to these clicks and crackles will have given me, after all, an advantage.

  And Miss Wetherleaf there, I do believe she’s blushing now. Yes, she really is, and after she has actually typed all this out word for word, though it was so long ago. And, also, after what she can hardly help knowing, with that TV set there in the corner if nothing else, about the willingness of young women today to put themselves about.

  ‘And so to the last, the seventh wanderer to and fro in that dreary foyer, one you would think was as far from being dubious as could be. She is a primary school teacher, Miss Priscilla Knott, a young woman who radiates, at first glance, purity and light. But glance again. She radiates those two virtues but she directs them, two piercing rays, into anybody and everybody she meets. Be pure, she instructs us. Do as I say. Follow the light when I tell you what the light is. Oh, yes, if the Boy is a preacher, Priscilla Knott is ten times, a hundred times, more of a preacher. What she thinks you ought to do, she tells you that you must, and she needs no pulpit to do it. The world would be much, much better off without persons of that sort. But the preachers we have always —

  With a sudden loud click the tape did now break.

  *

  Miss Wetherleaf, touchingly eager to help the police, had fretted away wondering how the two ends of the tape could be joined together. She had suggested Gripfix — ‘But you can’t get that nowadays’ — and going round to one of her neighbours ‘who is very good about repairs’. But Harriet had firmly stated that what she had already heard had been enough.

  Marcus Fairchild, plainly, had not seen which of his six fellow members of the Boy’s entourage had succeeded in getting into the ballroom without calling attention to themselves. The faint hope she had possessed had been extinguished with the snap of the breaking tape. And
, she thought, each one of the six who were with him in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel ballroom had been put through the harsh mill of his judgements. What he had said about one of them might, one day, prove useful in getting together subsidiary evidence for the court. But there could hardly be anything more on those lines that would be worth hearing. So, with effusive thanks to still twittering Miss Wetherleaf, she had left.

  ‘Are you quite, quite sure, Superintendent?’

  ‘Yes, quite sure.’

  No, little to do now but wait for the Forensic Science lab report. To go back to Birchester and talk to the still-living suspects would risk giving warning to whichever of them the results from Cherry Fettleham were going to point to. Then, when it came to the interview room, there could well be, by their side, a solicitor skilled in prompting them to profusely repeat No Comment. Or even, as with someone like Sydney Bigod, otherwise Fairchild’s Sydney Bydevil, there could be no suspect to be found.

  One piece of better news Harriet did find when she got back to her poky, ill-equipped office. Pip Steadman, unable to refrain from stroking his neat white beard in glee as he spoke, told her that he had located Harish Nair’s widow.

  ‘She’s in an old folks’ home, ma’am. It’s called Restholme. It’s out in Boreham, a nice-looking place. I’ve asked and you can see her there whenever you want.’

  ‘Good work,’ Harriet said.

  But she had some difficulty in sounding as enthusiastic as she should. She had seized on Fairchild’s summing-up of little Harish Nair as ‘decent’ and ‘honest’ to cross him mentally off her list. But, since that moment of elation listening to the crackly tape, other thoughts had moved in on her. All right, Harish Nair had seemed to Fairchild, who must have talked with him at some length, not to be a man who could have murdered the Boy, and she had been quick in her mind to echo that. But how many times in her life had she repeated to herself the always-to-be-remembered detective’s adage assume nothing?