The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  So there was a flaw in Dr Passmore’s report.

  But it had not occurred during his tests on the clothing. It had arisen even before DCI Kenworthy had arranged for the garments to be taken from those seven people in the ballroom foyer.

  And that means — she found she had unconsciously put her foot down and the car was once again going dangerously fast — I can now safely allow Mr Newbroom to see the report.

  *

  She arrived back at home — she had decided it was hardly worth going into Headquarters — in a state of elation, and at once told John what she had discovered.

  ‘Calm down, calm down. You’re right, actually, about the Boy’s symptoms, especially smelling those non-existent sweet odours. They do all add up to pretty clear evidence he was an epileptic. I’m surprised, in fact, that nobody knew all along. But, I suppose, thirty years ago, and in a traditional Indian community, such a thing might well be kept secret. As poor old Lear’s epilepsy was.’

  ‘So why your rather preachy instructions to calm down? I should have thought I’d every right to be a little excited.’

  ‘A little, yes. But I rather suspect you’re on such a high because you think you’ve won your fight with your Chief Constable.’

  ‘But I have, haven’t I? I’ll be able to go to him tomorrow and — ’

  The phone, at her elbow, shrilled out.

  With a frown she picked it up and gave her number.

  ‘Ah, Miss Martens. So you’re there. And not in your office.’

  She put a hand over the mouthpiece.

  ‘Bloody Newbroom,’ she whispered. ‘Bad penny.’

  ‘Yes, sir, I am at home. I had to go over to Cherry Fettleham because their report, when I saw it, had an apparent flaw in it. I wanted to clear the matter up immediately.’

  ‘The report? It’s come? Why wasn’t I told? What did it say? Who — Who was it, after all these years, who murdered that boy, the Preacher?’

  ‘I didn’t consider there was any point in showing you a report that appeared to have a plain flaw in it, sir. But, now that I’ve dealt with that, I can tell you at once that its conclusion was that there were identifiable traces of Krishna Kumaramangalam’s saliva on just one shirt, the one that had belonged to his older cousin, now dead, Harish Nair.’

  ‘Got him. I told you, when I tasked you with the inquiry, that DNA, as it is today, would give us the answer. A wonderful advance. Did you see the paper this morning? There’s a very interesting piece saying that bones, discovered somewhere in Scotland — Stirling, Stirling — are about to be identified as those of King Richard the Second by just these new DNA techniques. After more than six hundred years. Six hundred years. I’ve been trying to show you the account all day.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I haven’t actually seen a paper. I went to my office too early, and then, when I saw the report, I realized I needed to speak to the people at Cherry Fettleham about it before I could take any action.’

  ‘Very well. But now you can take action, Superintendent. I know that fellow Mair, Nair, is dead. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t up to us to inform the public that we have resolved the case. Even after thirty years.’

  ‘Of course, sir, we should do that. But there is a complication. What I discovered after I had fully informed myself at Cherry Fettleham was that, though their work on the DNA was beyond reproach, the shirt on which they had identified Kumaramangalam’s saliva had also been worn by Harish Nair the day before when Kumaramangalam, who was an epileptic, had had a fit. In the course of that fit he may very well have spat out saliva on to Nair’s shirt. So there is no sound evidence for stating Harish Nair murdered the Boy.’

  ‘But-But-’

  Then Harriet made her mistake.

  Exasperated at hearing Mr Newbroom groping for some reason to doubt her freeing of Harish from suspicion, she interrupted him.

  ‘So I’m afraid, sir, this means we really shall have to abandon the re-opened inquiry. There’s no proper DNA evidence now against any of those seven suspects.’

  She was conscious as she spoke that she was not exactly telling the whole truth. Hadn’t Dr Passmore mentioned that there were possible traces of saliva on one, no, two, of the other garments, although not enough, he had said, to produce as evidence? But the chance of calling it quits in her battle with her jealous boss was too good to fumble.

  ‘Abandon the inquiry, Superintendent? Certainly not. Let me say that such a suggestion is yet one more instance of the slackness I see pervading the whole of Greater Birchester Police. A slackness that I intend to root out to the last — To the last — To root out completely. A good police force should periodically reexamine any case that has not been closed. I gather that the dust, the dust, has been allowed to settle on the Boy Preacher inquiry for years. Years. That is why I have tasked you with it now. And I see no reason why you should come to me claiming the matter should be abandoned. No, Superintendent, it has not been properly re-investigated. I want you to complete the task you have been assigned. I want to be told who killed that Boy, and I want to be told within one month. Maximum.’

  The sound of a handset being thumped back into place.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Next morning Harriet found Pip Steadman waiting in her office and decided it was time he should be told how her phone conversation with Mr Newbroom had changed the situation. She sat herself behind her wretched table and launched into an explanation.

  ‘That’s it,’ she concluded eventually. ‘Mr Newcomen is determined that Greater Birchester Police should resolve the murder of the Boy Preacher. He thought DNA would do it. If it could find where King Richard’s body was buried six hundred years ago, he believed, it could do anything. But, now it’s come to it, DNA hasn’t produced his answer for him. It turns out that the evidence he hoped would be found, deeply impregnated in some cotton or woollen fibres, could quite possibly have got there twenty-four hours before Krishna Kumaramangalam was killed.’

  Pip, heartened it seemed by hearing he was not the only person in the world to have come a cropper, looked much less nervy than he habitually did.

  ‘So, ma’am,’ he asked. ‘What are you going to do?’

  ‘Only one thing I can do. I’m going to interview all the people still alive who were in that foyer outside the Imperial Hotel ballroom on the evening of May the twenty-second, 1969.’

  ‘Yes ... Yes, I suppose that’s all there is to do. So ... Well, who are you going to see first?’

  Harriet thought for a moment.

  ‘Barney Trapnell,’ she said. ‘After all, it was on his shirt that Dr Passmore down at Cherry Fettleham found what might have been the hint of a trace of some alien DNA. Not much to go on, but better than a complete blank. So Barney Trapnell it is.’

  A quarter of an hour later she was standing once again beneath the swinging sign that read, if barely visibly, Clocks and Watches Mended. If hard questions could produce even the smallest hint that the crippled watch mender had a black secret in his head, then she would ask those questions with all the force she could.

  All right, I’ve been given an impossible task, and one given me deliberately to fail in. But I’m not going to fail. Somehow I am going to beat Newbroom at his own game. And if Barney Trapnell stands in my way, he’s going to find himself down in an interrogation room, sweating and sweating till I’ve sweated every last drop of the truth out of him.

  She pushed open the little shop’s door. Its old-fashioned bell clanged out.

  ‘Good morning, Mr Trapnell,’ she said loudly, leaning forward on the dark shop’s narrow counter. ‘Detective Superintendent Martens.’

  Barney Trapnell, already at his bench, turned lumberingly round.

  ‘You,’ he said. ‘What you want now?’

  ‘What do I want? I told you when we talked before that I would come to you again if I found even the smallest piece of evidence that indicated you had not been telling me the whole truth. And here I am.’

  And I told you I’ve
forgotten all about that night, and all about that preaching boy who somebody strangled.’

  ‘Yes, Mr Trapnell, somebody strangled that boy, that preaching boy as you called him. And I am beginning to wonder if he was strangled because he was a preacher. Because somebody violently resented being told by him what they ought to do, how they ought to behave.’

  ‘Dunno what you mean.’

  ‘Oh, but I think you do. I think, though you’ve tried to hide it even from yourself, that thirty years ago the Boy had words for you that you did not want to hear. Did he tell you that you were wrong to resent the surgery that had resulted in your wearing the first of your callipers. Did you not tell me you couldn’t remember what you had felt about it when they said to you as a child that you would have to wear it all your life long? I think you have remembered that moment many, many times since then.’

  Think what you like. And get out.’

  ‘No, Mr Trapnell, I will not get out. I told you before, I don’t take that sort of retort for an answer. And I said that I would come back for better answers if I had any reason to believe I was owed them.’

  ‘Well, you ain’t got any reason. The police back then didn’t have no reason to think I’d killed that Boy, and you can’t have thirty years on.’

  ‘But I can, Mr Trapnell.’

  Any glint of fear there, of secret knowledge? In the darkness of this shabby hole it was impossible to make out.

  She waited. At her elbow on the counter now she became aware of the slow soft ticking coming from an old slate-encased clock, hitherto hardly to be seen in the gloom beyond the bench light.

  Then Barney Trapnell broke the silence.

  ‘Don’t you try to trick me. Bloody police, all the same.’

  ‘No, I’m not trying to trick you. I mentioned to you before, there have been extraordinary advances made in DNA analysis in the last few years. And I was down at the Forensic Science laboratory in Lincolnshire yesterday when I learnt that, on a certain collarless shirt, there were traces of spittle that might have come from Krishna Kumaramangalam’s mouth as someone throttled him to death.’

  Curse this gloom. Stuck behind the counter here, I can’t really see his face. Should I have got him into the nearest police station? Under the cold scrutiny of neon tubes?

  ‘I don’t know nothing about your collarless shirts.’

  ‘No? What kind of a shirt did you used to wear thirty years ago?’

  ‘What sort of a question’s that? I don’t know what I used to wear ten years ago, five. How should I know what I wore thirty years ago?’

  ‘Then I’ll tell you, Mr Trapnell. Thirty years ago the shirt you were wearing on the evening you marched up and down in the foyer of the Imperial’s ballroom, waiting while the Boy Preacher meditated inside, was a thick cotton one with a thin red stripe in the material and no attached collar. And how do I know that? Because Detective Chief Inspector Kenworthy had that shirt taken off you and placed in an evidence bag in case there were any signs on it that you had been inside the ballroom. At the time there was little chance of finding anything. Methods of analysis were still fairly crude. But now the tiniest drop of spit from that boy’s mouth, if it got anywhere on to your shirt, could tell us with all the certainty of science that you were there leaning down over the Boy. And that shirt, in its sealed evidence bag, has been kept all this time by Greater Birchester Police.’

  And still no sign that the shot had gone home.

  ‘Well? Well? What have you got to say now?’

  Almost crouching there in front of his bench in the darkened shop, with the light of the lamp all but obscuring his hulking shape, Barney Trapnell simply let out a sound between taut-grinning teeth that was as much an animal growl as anything.

  ‘I asked you, Mr Trapnell, what do you have to say about that shirt you were wearing that evening in 1969? That shirt which has been subjected to analysis at the Forensic Science laboratory?’

  ‘Nothing. I got nothing to say about that, and I got nothing to say about that preacher boy or about who killed him. Nothing, nothing, nothing.’

  Harriet stood peering at him in the gloom. The clock at her side seemed to tick more loudly.

  Hammer at him again? Or take him at this moment under arrest to the nearest police station?

  But I don’t have enough grounds really for charging him with murder, any more than I might have for any of the others still living, thirty years after the Boy Preacher was strangled. And all that my hammering has done so far is to reinforce that steel cuirass he has wrapped round and round himself over all these years.

  So ... So what?

  So, one last threat of further questioning, hopefully deeply unsettling, and leave him to stew.

  *

  Back at the office Pip sighed at her news. And Barney Trapnell is simply claiming he’s forgotten all about that evening?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, that’s just what he’s doing. And, since I’ve been mulling over it, I’m not so sure that what he said may not be the simple truth, cussed though he was in coming out with it. After all, when last Monday I rather cautiously asked Lucas Calverte for his views on the people with him at the Imperial, his reaction was much the same. He said he could hardly remember a thing about that evening.’

  ‘You believed him then, didn’t you, ma’am?’

  ‘I suppose I did. Even though I had a feeling there was something — I don’t know — odd about him. If I were a romantic, like that splendid author Michael Meadowcraft, I’d have said he had a dark secret to hide.’

  Pip did now produce one of his I’m-taking-a-risk blushes. Harriet thought she could see it extending right down beneath the curly white hairs of that triangular beard.

  ‘Well, you know, ma’am,’ he said, ‘experiencing some tremendous emotional shock, such as I imagine being in the ballroom foyer that night must have been, can drive the whole surrounding circumstances right out of one’s mind.’

  Harriet was about to jump on that as a piece of pop psychology. But then she realized, just in time, that the little detective must be thinking of his own state of mind when he had heard that the wife-murderer in whose favour he had given biassed evidence had gone on to kill his own two children.

  ‘Yes, you could be right,’ she said, and then thought of Barney Trapnell as he had been an hour or so earlier. ‘You could be right, if the person who truly forgets a terrible experience is basically a sensitive individual. But I doubt if Trapnell comes into that category, not from what I’ve seen of him. And, come to that, I don’t think my Mr Calverte is all that sensitive. You should have heard him sermonizing away about the youth of Birchester today.’

  ‘So you think, ma’am, Calverte might be worth tackling, as it were, with the gloves off?’

  Harriet weighed this up for a moment.

  ‘I don’t see why not,’ she said. ‘After all, there’s nothing left for me to do but interview each of the people outside the ballroom that evening, little hope though there is of getting anything out of any of them. But I think I’ll go now and see, why not, that dubious lady Bubsy Willson.’

  ‘Well, ma’am, you’re right, of course, about interviewing them all. But I — Well, I think perhaps you should leave Mrs Brownlow, that’s Bubsy Willson’s name now, to the last. I gathered from my inquiries that she’s not at all well at the moment. I don’t know whether she’s just got that so-called summer flu, or whether it’s something worse. And she must be pretty elderly now, too.’

  For a moment Harriet wondered if she should show that much consideration for any of the four remaining suspects. But there seemed to be no good reason to see any one of them before any other.

  ‘Right,’ she said, ‘I’ll go and visit Mr Calverte again.’

  ‘Do you want me to come with you?’ Pip asked, almost shivering with excitement.

  ‘No. No, I don’t think so.’

  She saw the jaw-dropping look of disappointment on the little man’s face.

  Hell with him, she thought. If I
take him with me to Calverte’s his nerviness is more than likely to irritate the man. All that stopping and starting, blushing and wriggling, will only serve to annoy an ex-Indian Army stiff-upper-lip type. And I need to have him concentrate on what I’m saying.

  But then she thought it worthwhile to do what she could to bolster Pip’s fragile self-confidence.

  ‘If I can’t physically transport myself back to the time the Boy was murdered,’ she said by way of a sop, ‘the next best thing is to talk to a man who was there on the case at the time. So what I want you to do, still, is to find DCI Kenworthy’s Sergeant Shaddock, if he’s yet in the land of the living. We’re going to need every scrap of information we can possibly dig up. And Shaddock may turn out to be — you never know — our way to the answer.’

  *

  This time Harriet, when she drove up to Lucas Calverte’s cottage, Travellers, did not find the former Undersheriff in his garden, tearing out intrusive clumps of grass. When she knocked at the sturdy oak door, the old gasbag, as she thought of him, opened it himself and ushered her inside.

  ‘Well now, Miss Martens, what can I do for you?’

  ‘I’m afraid I have to tell you that our investigation has met with something of a setback,’ she said. T think I told you, when we met, that we were hoping the newest methods of DNA analysis would provide us with evidence with which we could proceed, even after thirty years.’

  No sign of any reaction. No hint of relief.

  Does that mean he never had anything to fear from what new DNA techniques might reveal? Or is he simply a man who by long training, even from childhood days, has learnt to stay tight-lipped in all circumstances?

  We’ll see.

  ‘But, no, sir, unfortunately the Forensic Science people were unable to find significant traces of Krishna Kumaramangalam’s saliva on any of the garments that, you will remember, were taken from you all under Detective Chief Inspector Kenworthy’s instructions.’