The old gasbag gave a faintly puzzled frown.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I do seem to remember that happening. Or I think I do. I told you before that I find I really have almost no recollection of that evening. Do you mean to tell me that the police have retained some garment, or garments, of mine all this time?’
A feeble little laugh.
‘I suppose I should claim them back now whatever they were.’
‘There was a waistcoat, sir, a dark grey waistcoat, a white shirt and a tie, a club tie of some sort.’
‘Indeed? Well, I don’t suppose that the suit the waistcoat went with is still in existence, and I wouldn’t have much use for the shirt now, or for the tie. Whatever club it came from I’m bound to have resigned from it now I so seldom go anywhere. So, no, Miss Martens, Greater Birchester Police may do what they like with them all.’
A chuckle.
Rather a put-on chuckle, Harriet thought. Can he still be uneasy?
‘But I mustn’t keep you standing here. Come in, come in. Come to my study. I could offer you a cup of coffee. But, to tell the truth, my daily lady isn’t here, and my own attempts to make coffee are by no means invariably successful.’
Again some chuckling.
And again Harriet asked herself, is the old boy uneasy? Why should he be this uncomfortable in the presence of a police officer, especially one investigating a case he claims he can no longer remember?
She followed him into the room. It was, she saw, all one might expect of the study of a former Undersheriff living in an ancient cottage that, from its name, had probably once been a travellers’ inn. Oak beams, gnarled with age, ran across the low ceiling. Diamond-paned windows looked out at the well-kept garden. In the fireplace the ashes of the last fire that had burnt there were still heaped. There was a settee and an armchair, covered in cretonne in a pattern of cottagey flowers, both sagging with age. A sturdy oak table served as a desk, the leather-cornered blotter with its white paper unsmirched.
‘What a nice room,’ she said, dutifully.
‘Well, yes. Yes, it is. My late wife, you know ... ’
‘And you’ve lived here a long time? All your life even?’
A little gentle probing may be worthwhile. I still feel there’s something not quite right about him.
He gave her a hesitant smile.
‘Well, no. Not my whole life. Not quite. But we’d been here a good time before my wife left me.’
And it was plain in every syllable that she had left not for the milkman but for a better place.
Probing checked, whether consciously or unconsciously.
‘So, sir,’ Harriet was constrained to say, ‘I would like, if I may, to try and bring back to you the circumstances of that terrible evening of May the twenty-second, 1969. I know you have put it all out of your head, very understandably. But, you see, the only chance now of clearing up the whole business is for me to reconstruct as exactly as possible what happened during those two hours while the seven of you were waiting outside the ballroom at the Imperial. Someone must have quietly entered, strangled the Boy — two minutes would very possibly have been long enough — and then quietly come out again. Or perhaps, and this may be more likely, have come out shouting that they had discovered the Boy’s body.’
‘Well, if that’s what happened, I’ve no doubt you’ve got on to it, Superintendent. But, no. No, I cannot confirm, or indeed correct, any of it. I have simply no idea who told us the Boy had been killed.’
‘You can’t remember if someone said later, or implied even, that they had found the body?’
A pause for thought, brow creased.
‘No. No, Superintendent. I have absolutely no recollection of that.’
‘Right. So may I go back further and ask you this? Perhaps it will start up a train of thought that will lead us on. Do you remember arriving at the hotel? It was, of course, in the evening or late afternoon of the day after the meeting was originally going to take place. Do you at all remember that?’
Lucas Calverte stood there looking down at the soft grey ashes in the fireplace, once again in obvious cogitation.
Too obvious? The old gasbag could be someone acting in a play, rather badly. He really could. But then a good part of his life, certainly in his Undersheriff days, must have been spent play-acting. After all, what else does an Undersheriff do but play a part in an outdated charade?
Then, still with that touch of theatricality, the ex-Undersheriff rose up from his reverie.
‘Superintendent,’ he said, ‘I must tell you that I have no remembrance whatsoever of arriving at the Imperial that night. I have, of course, vague recollections of what arriving there was like. You know they’re knocking the old place down now? I saw the hoarding all round it just yesterday. Of course, I had occasion to go there time and again in the old days. Various occasions, you know, various occasions. But that particular evening, terrible as it became, I cannot remember at all.’
*
Harriet had left him then realizing that, whether of set purpose or not, Lucas Calverte was not going to tell her any more about what had happened there in the Imperial Hotel on that May evening thirty years before.
Back at Headquarters she found, to her surprise, a transformed DC Steadman.
‘I’ve found him, ma’am. I’ve found him.’
His excitement positively bubbled up.
For a moment Harriet was tempted to say chillingly Found who? But she told herself that Pip’s fragility ought not to be played with.
‘So,’ she said, ‘ex-DS Shaddock, within our sights at last.’
‘Yes, ma’am, yes. It was all so simple in the end. I got on to the police pensions people, and they told me they were still sending cheques for him to an address in Gloucester. A hotel there.’
‘And you didn’t ask the pensions people before? You should have done, you know.’
Slack work could not be allowed to go uncriticized, even if the one responsible was in a precariously nervous state.
‘Yes. Yes. Well, I’m sorry, ma’am. I — Of course I
should have thought of that first of all. But — But I didn’t. Sony.’
Ah, we’re improving. A little criticism accepted. ‘Right. We’ll go and see DS Shaddock. And let’s hope he remembers rather more about the case than Undersheriff Lucas Calverte.’
Chapter Eighteen
‘You — You didn’t get any more out of Lucas Calverte than before, then, ma’am?’ Pip asked once they had settled themselves in the car on their way to Gloucester.
‘Even less, if that was possible. And yet, you know, I still got the impression that there’s something not right about that man. He was play-acting a lot of the time, I’m sure of it. Going into a big deep-thinking act when I asked if he remembered this or that. It was plain enough to me.’
‘So ... So, you’ve got him in your sights for it?’
‘Hardly that. But I’ll enter my thoughts in my Policy File, definitely.’
‘And — And, well, ma’am, will you also be noting that it’s possible that Mr Calverte is simply in denial of an event that made a terrible impression on him at the time? After all, the Boy Preacher seems to have been a sort of pet of his.’
Harriet sighed.
‘Yes, DC. I will include that notion in my Policy File, and give you credit for suggesting it to me. But what I won’t do is use that piece of half-baked psychiatric jargon in denial.’
Oh God, she thought at once, will that criticism send him into another stream of babbled apologies?
It did not, though for nearly all the rest of the trip he was suspiciously silent.
*
By stopping at the main Gloucester police station, under the shadow of the city’s ancient prison in the street called Bearland, they were able to find without difficulty the Laurels, a private hotel on the far outskirts of the city looking across to the tall tower of the cathedral glowing golden in the late sunshine.
The hotel, by contrast, was b
y no means a pleasing sight. A gaunt weather-worn building with two gables in patently mock ‘oak’ beams, its broken-tiled path led up to cement-repaired stone steps and a dulled red-painted front door. The only thing that validated the name The Laurels Hotel on the faded board running across its front — hotel seemed a grave misnomer — were the bushes that crowded the small front garden. Dusty and drooping, despite this being the full flush of spring, they were at least laurels.
‘Right,’ Harriet said, pushing open the iron gate, once also painted red, now rust-pocked. ‘Let’s see if former Detective Sergeant Shaddock can transport us back to the days when he was DCI Kenworthy’s bagman.’
Pip, carrying with care the tissue-wrapped bottle of whisky they had stopped off to buy in the city’s Eastgate shopping centre, offered no comment.
Harriet pushed hard at the grudging button of the doorbell.
No response.
But on the door itself there was an iron knocker, again with signs of once having been painted red. She seized it, hauled it back and then thumped. Once, twice, half a dozen times.
At last the door was pulled open. A big blowsy woman in apron and slippers stood there.
‘Yes?’
‘We’ve come to see ex-Detective Sergeant Shaddock.’
‘Oh, you have, have you? Well, you can see him, I suppose, though whether you get a word out of him’s another matter. But he’s there in his room. Hardly out of it. First floor, on the right. Number three.’
Harriet pushed past and tramped up the thinly-carpeted stairs, wrinkling her nose at the odour of stale food seeping up from some basement kitchen. At the top she turned and waited for Pip.
‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I hope when our time comes to be thrown on the dust-heap neither of us lands up in a place like this.’
Pip now produced his quick little smile.
‘I hardly think that’ll happen to you, ma’am, though I wouldn’t like to be as optimistic about myself.’
‘Oh, no. I see a good career ahead for you, Pip. And there’ll be a nice soft job in Security at the end of it.’
Pip’s head dipped until Harriet could not see whether another smile had divided white moustache from white beard.
‘All right. Room three. And there it is.’
She stepped across and gave the door a brisk tapping.
‘All ri’, come in, damn you.’
She gave Pip a glance, mouth down-turned. And thrust the door open.
The man who must be ex-Detective Sergeant Shaddock was lying sprawled on the unmade bed, one flabby hand above his head grasping a bar of the black-painted headrail. He wore only a shirt, open almost to the navel to show a slobby mound of belly, and a pair of baggy blue serge trousers wide open at the waistband. His large slack-cheeked face was covered with enough white stubble to make it a toss-up whether he had been growing a beard or not shaving.
And the whole room smelt so strongly of whisky, and of something else which Harriet could not immediately identify, that the odour of stale food outside was utterly banished.
Harriet thought she could at least try to get something out of the fellow.
‘Mr Shaddock,’ she said sharply. ‘I’m Detective Superintendent Martens from your old force.’
She had seen herself, after reciting some such words as these, introducing Pip and getting him to offer the gift of whisky. But now, instead, with a quick jerk of her head, she sent Pip and the tissue-wrapped bottle back out on to the landing. There had been altogether too much whisky — she glimpsed an empty bottle that had rolled halfway under the bed — in the room already.
‘Mr Shaddock, I have been tasked by the Chief Constable with re-opening the investigation which you conducted under DCI Kenworthy into the murder of Krishna Kumaramangalam, known as the Boy Preacher.’
She waited to see whether the news that the inquiry was alive again would cause the flaccid body on the bed to stir.
It did not.
‘Mr Shaddock, let me ask, do you at all remember that case from thirty years ago?’
‘Preacher.’
It was an acknowledgment of a sort.
She ploughed on.
‘Mr Kenworthy, as I dare say you know, has been dead for some years, and, though I have his excellent record of the investigation, with I may say some very useful suggestions from yourself ... ’
She paused to see if that blatant flattery might produce the response she had so far not succeded in arousing.
It failed to.
‘Mr Shaddock, you can see, as the sole officer remaining from those days, that you may have memories which would be extremely useful to us. I may tell you, frankly, that the latest DNA tests, on which the Chief placed his hopes, have produced no evidence we can rely on. So — ’
‘DNA.’
That and no more.
‘Yes, Mr Shaddock, the extensive DNA tests made at the Forensic Science laboratory eventually all came to nothing. So it’s back to old-fashioned policing.’
Again she waited, this new piece of flattery dangling thinly from her line.
‘No good, DNA, lotter nonsense.’
‘Yes, a good many people share your view. And that really does make it all the more important for me to hear what you can recall of the investigation back in the old days.’
And now the bulk on the bed did stir.
Is this ... ? Have I managed ... ?
But all that happened was that the hand that was not grasping the rail above his head moved fretfully to and fro among the tangled yellowish sheets.
‘Can I help you?’ Harriet asked. ‘Is there something you’re looking for?’
Could it be a diary? A diary dating back thirty years? No, not in the bed here.
‘Sugar aim — ’
What’s he saying?
Wait. Yes, the other smell I noticed when I came in here besides that reek of whisky. It was the sweet perfumed smell of sugared almonds. I’m sure of it. It must have been. Sugared almonds. I haven’t set eyes on them, surely, almost since the days of the Boy Preacher.
Now suddenly the flabby hand groping over the surface of the bed rose up. In it there was grasped a little crumpled white paper bag. Two fat fingers plunged inside, moved about. And a groan. What might have been a heart-rending groan.
‘Bloody gone, bloody empty. Could of sworn ... ’
A tear slid out of the rheumy left eye in the big bloated face.
*
Harriet had left him then. She had had an idea.
‘Pip,’ she said when she found him standing at the top of the stairs. ‘Where would you go to buy sugared almonds?’
‘Gosh, I haven’t seen a sugared almond for years.’
‘Neither have I. But I need one, I need a whole bagful. Now.’
Pip stood thinking.
‘Well, I suppose an old-fashioned sweet shop. If there are any like that any more.’
‘Right. There must be. Whisky-sodden old Shaddock in there had a bag of them. He must have got it from somewhere.’
‘But does he even go out?’
‘I suppose he must sometimes. But, I tell you what, we’ll ask that awful woman who opened the door for us.’
‘I heard that.’ The voice came floating up from the foot of the stairs. Floating, or roaring. ‘And whatever you want to ask, you can forget about it. I’m not going to tell you nothing.’
So they were reduced to patrolling the nearby streets in the car. It took them nearly an hour, and all that they found was a small general store. Closed.
‘Down in the town,’ Harriet said. ‘I think there’s a little souvenirish street somewhere. Forget what it’s called. But I was there once, when my twins were seven or eight. Looking for the supposed shop of the Thilor of Gloucester. It might ... ’
‘Oh, yes, I used to love that little book when I was a kid. Beatrix Potter. Takes me back.’
‘No, you take me back, fast as you like to the town centre.’
They found the little alley. They spotted the Ta
ilor of Gloucester place. And then Pip pointed out a sweet shop.
A man in a brown shop-coat was just putting the shutters across its window. But he happily left them where they were, went inside and emerged, less than a couple of minutes later, with a large bag — ‘As many as you’ve got,’ Harriet had shouted — of pink and white, sweet-smelling, sugar-coated almonds.
*
When they got back to the Laurels Hotel and hammered once more with the knocker on its faded red-painted door, they turned out to be in luck. The door was opened, not by the blowsy creature Harriet had unwittingly insulted, but by a morose-looking man wearing a napless green baize apron.
‘Thank you,’ Harriet said. ‘We’ve come to see Mr Shaddock. We know where his room is.’
They were watched, with suspicion, as they climbed the stairs once again. The smell of greasy cooking was as strong as ever. Though more fishy than oniony, Harriet thought.
Once again she tapped on the door of room three. And it seemed that Shaddock’s short spell with neither whisky nor sugared almonds had benefited him. His voice now was noticeably less fuzzy.
‘Who’s that? If it’s the rent money, you can sing for it. You’ll get it when I’ve got it.’
Harriet interpreted this as Come in.
She saw the former detective sergeant was slumped now in the room’s single battered-about armchair. He was looking much as he had a couple of hours earlier, though he had managed to hook together the two sides of his trousers and to get most of the buttons of his shirt through the buttonholes, if not always the right ones.
‘Good evening, Mr Shaddock,’ she said. ‘It’s Superintendent Martens back again. And this is DC Steadman. We’ve brought you a little present.’
Shaddock had been blinking at her throughout the introduction, and she had begun to wonder if he had any recollection of seeing her earlier. But when Pip stepped forward holding open the big bag of sugared almonds he sat forward at once, eyes glowing with greed.
Harriet decided she would let him have just one of the softly glossy sweets before she began asking about the Boy Preacher. But his podgy, trembling fingers had succeeded in getting the bag out of Pip’s grasp altogether. Dipping in it, he had extracted three of them and in instant he had shoved them all into his mouth.
The Dreaming Detective Page 16
