The Dreaming Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  So she waited, checking her impatience, until she heard from inside that slack cavity the crunching of one of the thin sugar shells.

  ‘Mr Shaddock,’ she said then, firmly as a schoolmistress, ‘you will remember that I wanted to talk to you about the Boy Preacher murder, which you investigated thirty years ago under DCI Kenworthy. I told you earlier that, owing to the failure of DNA testing, we are having to go back to Mr Kenworthy’s inquiry itself if we are to have any hope of getting a result.’

  Shaddock, his mouth full and teeth still crunching, was unable to answer in words. But she saw in his eyes an acknowledgment that he had taken in what she had said.

  ‘Very well. So, first, tell me if you have any recollections of working on the case.’

  ‘Yer.’

  And a small cascade of pink and white sugar chips.

  ‘Good. Then it’s worth asking you, first of all, whether Mr Kenworthy confided in you anything he couldn’t put on to paper due to lack of evidence. Did he tell you perhaps that he had an idea which one of the seven possible suspects was the killer?’

  ‘Nah.’

  ‘Very well, if he did not, he did not. But you yourself, at the time did you have some idea who the murderer was?’

  ‘Idea? You don’t want to go on ideas. That what they do nowadays? Wrong way. Stupid way to go about it.’

  Still chewing hard and noisily, he managed to add, ‘Old Kenners could of told you what you ought to do.’

  ‘Kenners? DCI Kenworthy? What could he have told me?’

  ‘One who found the body. Old rule.’

  Harriet suppressed her fury. How dare this worn-out idiot preach to her about the way a murder investigation should be conducted.

  ‘Yes, DS,’ she answered. ‘I’m well aware that the person who reports the finding of a body does automatically become the first suspect in any investigation. My trouble is that, after all the time that’s elapsed, no one I’ve questioned has been at all clear about who did find the body.’

  A glint of malice in the bloodshot eyes looking up at her. And fat red fingers fumbling at the bag on his lap.

  Harriet sighed.

  But I mustn’t call it all off. I can’t have come all this way for nothing.

  She began again.

  ‘Mr Shaddock, do you remember Barbara Willson?’

  She got a better response, just.

  ‘Bubsy. Bubsy, that’s what she was called. The whore. Bloody lucky not to have had a swarm of little bastards at her tail, ask me.’

  ‘Yes, Bubsy Willson. One account of what happened in that ballroom foyer indicated that Bubsy, whether or not she was the one who found the Boy’s body, had at least yelled out that he was dead.’

  Two more sugared almonds, one white, one pink, transferred one after the other into the gaping, blacktoothed mouth.

  Harriet wondered for an instant if she should jump in, snatch the bag away and make its return dependent on getting better answers. But, as quickly, she decided that the risk of making the uncooperative old man even less helpful was not worth taking.

  ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘Bubsy may or may not have been the person who found the Boy’s body. But if she didn’t, I’ve no idea who did, any more than Mr Kenworthy said he had thirty years ago. His report concluded that the events in the foyer were so confused there was no hope of getting firm evidence that any one of the possible suspects had entered the ballroom. But did you have an idea, Mr Shaddock? An idea you either failed to put forward to Mr Kenworthy, or that, if you did, he decided was not worth recording?’

  Shaddock, lolling back in his grotty old chair, barely grunted.

  ‘Mr Shaddock, I asked you a question.’

  He sat up a little more straightly.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, I suppose I didn’t never have an idea about that. You should have heard those people there, each of ‘em as bad as the other. There was that little schoolteacher, snooty nose. Wasn’t going to give me the time of day, and not much better with old Kenners. Then, if you’re on the snooty line, what about that Undersheriff. Undersheriff? Believed everyone was under him, far under. And that bloody reporter. From The Times, wasn’t he? Gave you answers all right, but he took bloody good care they meant fuck all. And that cripple they had there. Couldn’t give you an answer if you shook him. Little Indian was no better either. He’d answer you all right. On and on he’d go, and at the end you didn’t know nothing more than when he’d begun. And as for the whore, well, no use listening to anything a whore tells you, right? And the same goes for that market trader, what’s-his-name. Bigod? Well, by God, there’s another who’ll never come to no good.’

  For a moment Harriet thought of telling the unpleasant old man in front of her that Sydney Aslough was now a prosperous car-showroom owner in Norwich. But, no, game not worth the candle.

  And, damn it, she said to herself, I don’t think the game of coming lickety-split down to Gloucester has been worth its candle either. Yes, nasty old ex-DS Shaddock does remember the case. But it’s pretty evident, from what he’s just been saying about those seven, that he never gave it much attention at the time. A typical just-get-by detective. On the point of reaching his thirty, that looked-forward-to day when enough years of service have been accumulated to attract the full pension.

  So — what’s it my father used to say? — it’s Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.

  Chapter Nineteen

  It was not until the next day that Harriet, after her fruitless trip to see former Detective Sergeant Shaddock, was able to advance her inquiries. Only two of the seven people who had been in the foyer of the Imperial Hotel ballroom remained to be seen: Bubsy Willson and Priscilla Knott. Pip Steadman had said that Bubsy, now Mrs Brownlow, was possibly too ill to be interviewed. So she told him they would visit head teacher Priscilla Knott, waiting until the lunch break at St Peter’s Primary School.

  They arrived shortly after midday, to be confronted by chaos in the sunshine. The playground on the far side of the tall black-painted gate was a mass of screaming, running, leaping, cavorting small children.

  Pip, at the sight, plunged his hand into a pocket, drew out a squashed pack of cigarettes, stuck one in his mouth and lit up.

  ‘Come on,’ Harriet snapped. ‘What’s there to be afraid of? Even though you’re not married and not a father, you must have had dealings with noisy kids when you were on the beat.’

  ‘But — But — But, well, ma’am, in those days I could handle them. I managed very well, actually. But-Well, now ... ’

  ‘Now you’re accompanying me to see Priscilla Knott, head teacher, Mrs Joseph Johnson until she reverted to her maiden name. And, let me remind you, she was the only one of those seven people asked to surrender their top garments thirty years ago who demanded to have hers back, that mimsy pale-pink blouse.’

  Perhaps being reminded that the woman they had come to see had once possessed a mimsy blouse made Pip pluck up his courage. He stepped forward now and rang at the bell in the pillar beside the locked security gates.

  They did not have long to wait for a response.

  A large, markedly upright woman broke off from talking to another teacher and looked with suspicion over to the gate. Sternly grey-haired, dressed in a severe grey skirt and, billowing forth, a pink-striped shirt that could not by any stretch be called mimsy, she advanced towards them.

  ‘Our woman, I’ll bet a shilling,’ Harriet said, finding herself reverting to the language of the pre-decimal days in which her investigation was rooted.

  Miss Knott, if it was her, pressed a little silver-coloured device she had taken from where it had been clipped to her narrow leather belt. The gates swung open.

  Harriet stepped inside with Pip at her heels.

  ‘Put out that cigarette.’

  It was more than a command. It was a one-phrase sermon on the evils of tobacco.

  Pip dropped the cigarette as if it had been a fork-tongued snake and trod it firmly to extinction.

  �
��And kindly pick that thing up. I will not have my playground contaminated in that way. There are children here. You have set them an appalling example.’

  Blushing like a child beneath his neat white beard, Pip obeyed.

  Harriet stepped forward to screen him from further wrath.

  ‘Miss Knott?’ she inquired, holding up her warrant card. ‘Miss Priscilla Knott? I am Detective Superintendent Martens and this is Detective Constable Steadman. May we — ’

  ‘A detective superintendent?’

  Miss Knott gave them both a glare.

  ‘Let me say at once then that I expect a better standard of behaviour from members of the police.’

  She gave poor Pip another look of cold disapproval.

  ‘Miss Knott,’ Harriet said, with some force. ‘I am here making inquiries in connection with the murder, some thirty years ago, of one Krishna Kumaramangalam, known as the Boy Preacher. May we see you somewhere in private?’

  ‘Some thirty years ago? I think, as a detective police officer, you should achieve a somewhat higher standard of accuracy. That event occurred in 1969, on May the twenty-second.’

  Ah ha, Harriet thought, brushing aside the reproof she had received. Someone who’s going to remember what happened that night. At last.

  ‘Yes, you are perfectly right,’ she said. ‘May the twenty-second. I am glad to find your memory is as fresh.’

  ‘And why should it not be? But I cannot allow this discussion to take place out here. Little pitchers, you know, have sharp ears. Something I have more than once had to remind my staff about. Some of them make little effort to control their language.’

  Following this dragon into the school building, Harriet reflected that, for once, Michael Meadowcraft had got it more or less right. As he had written in 1969, Miss Knott certainly appeared to be someone who was prepared to do whatever she felt necessary to keep what she saw as the evils around her ‘under proper control’. She had been such at the time of the murder. She was such today.

  ‘Zoe,’ came the stern voice, ‘we do not pull up our skirt like that, even if we have grazed our knee.’

  The poor little seven-year-old with the blood-red patch on her knee abruptly ceased her snivelling.

  Miss Knott moved on, a cruise liner among rowing boats.

  ‘Nathan. I will not have fighting. Come and see me after school.’

  Pip, Harriet saw as they entered the head teacher’s study, looked as apprehensive as the boy called Nathan had moments before. And even into her own mind there had come a long-buried memory of the matron at her first school who had had an obsession about not allowing the cuticles at the base of the girls’ fingernails to be apparent. She felt a twinge now as she recalled having her own rigorously pushed back out of sight.

  Other days, other creeds.

  In the study they were instructed, rather than asked, to sit. Harriet took one of the two chairs facing the immaculately tidy desk, noting with approval that Pip had slid on to a child-size chair in the corner, almost behind Miss Knott. There he had discreetly perched his notebook on one knee.

  Opposite Harriet, Miss Knott spread her hands flat on the desk.

  For an instant Harriet recalled Mr Newbroom sitting at his desk in his Headquarters suite when he had tasked her with the inquiry. The fingers of his hands, too, had pointed at her like so many attacking aircraft.

  Seizing the initiative, however, she spoke out.

  ‘Miss Knott, can you tell me why it was that, unlike the rest of the people who were requested to surrender their upper garments after the murder, you asked to have back the blouse you had been wearing?’

  For a long moment Priscilla Knott was silent.

  ‘Superintendent,’ she said at last, ‘all that was a very long time ago.’

  ‘Yes, as you reminded me, it was on May the twenty-second, 1969.’

  Again, a silence.

  But now Harriet ended it.

  ‘Miss Knott, I am sure that, however long ago that murder took place, you can remember all the circumstances connected with something that must have deeply affected you. So could you, please, tell me why you requested to have your blouse returned? Let me remind you, it was a pale-pink cotton blouse with scallopped edging.’

  ‘I remember it perfectly well, thank you.’

  ‘So, why then?’

  Opposite, Priscilla Knott drew in a breath deep enough to swell yet more her full bosom.

  ‘The blouse was mine. It was a favourite. I saw no reason not to have it back.’

  ‘Very well. It wasn’t then because you feared some traces from Krishna Kumaramangalam might still be on it, despite any forensic examination it may have undergone?’

  ‘Superintendent, that is an outrageous suggestion. I deny it absolutely. And, let me say, I have a good mind to report it to your superior officer.’

  ‘Miss Knott, however offensive that suggestion may seem to you, it was one it was my duty to ask. I am conducting a murder investigation.’

  ‘Then, let me tell you, you are hardly conducting it in the way I would have thought it should be carried out. You told me you were glad to find my memory of that dreadful night was still fresh. Yet you have failed altogether to ask what I do recall.’

  Harriet suppressed an urge to shoot back some sharp comments on how a school should be run. With some sympathy for the children.

  ‘Very well,’ she replied, conscious that she had been reduced to taking the one piece of advice that slobbery DS Shaddock had given her. ‘Perhaps you could tell me who it was who emerged from the ballroom at the Imperial Hotel and announced that the Boy Preacher had been strangled.’

  No answer came back at once.

  ‘Well? You were there, Miss Knott, who did you see?’

  ‘I — I am afraid I cannot give you an answer that would be absolutely correct. Any more than I succeeded in answering that question when that man Inspector Kenworthy put it to me.’

  Harriet refrained from restoring to DC I Kenworthy his proper rank.

  And why was that?’ she said sharply.

  Miss Knott gave a little exasperated snort.

  ‘For the very simple reason, Superintendent, that I happened not to be near any of the doors leading from the ballroom at the moment someone shouted out that the Boy was dead. However, from the way that word was, I might say, yelled, I assumed it was the woman, Barbara Willson. But I would not be prepared, as I was constrained to say in answer to Kenworthy, to give evidence to that effect in a court of law.’

  ‘I must accept that,’ Harriet said, irritated once again by this disrespect for solid DCI Kenworthy. ‘But, you did tell me in the playground that your memories of the evening are still fresh, so can you explain exactly where you were when you heard that — what did you call it? — that yell?’

  Miss Knott’s hands, still pointing towards Harriet on the far side of the desk, contracted into loosely held fists.

  ‘You are asking a good deal, Superintendent. You expect me to say exactly where I happened to be at one particular moment during a stay of a full two hours in that large foyer?’

  ‘Yes, but I am not asking about a moment that was indistinguishable from all the others during those hours. I am asking about the moment you heard someone shout out that the Boy Preacher was dead. You have just told me you were not near any of the three sets of doors into the ballroom. So where were you?’

  ‘I — I was — As a matter of fact, I was just leaving the Ladies.’

  ‘I see. And from near the door there — I saw it for myself just the other day — could you, or could you not, see the exits from the ballroom?’

  Miss Knott straightened her already straight back.

  ‘Very well, Superintendent. I could see the set of doors which were nearest the entrance to the foyer. I suppose, had I turned my head far enough, I could have seen the set at the other end. But what I could not see, because there was a large clump of pampas grass in the middle of the round bench at the centre of the foyer, was the middle set
of doors.’

  ‘Good. What you have said does establish for me that it was from the central doors that the person who found the Boy’s body emerged. My congratulations. No one else that I have questioned was able to do that.’

  Miss Knott’s loosely held fists slowly lost the last of their aggression.

  ‘As I said, Superintendent, my memory of that appalling night is crystal clear, as everyone else’s should be.’

  ‘Should be, but, perhaps naturally, is not. Time blurs the edges, and indeed with some of those I have spoken to it had the effect of blotting out all recollection of those hours.’

  Miss Knott gave a snort of derision.

  And Harriet, though she had not meant to put her next question as bluntly, leant sharply forward.

  ‘And did you, Miss Knott, enter the ballroom yourself at any time that evening?’

  ‘Certainly not.’

  Pistol shot for pistol shot.

  ‘And did you see anyone else enter?’

  Miss Knott glared back again with defiance.

  ‘Had I done so, Superintendent, I would have told that man, Kenworthy, thirty years ago. And then he might not have let this matter remain a mystery for so long.’

  A picture of walls, stubborn wall after stubborn wall, came into Harriet’s head. But had there, she asked herself, been a tiny chink somewhere in one of them? If there was, she thought, I’m damned if I can see it now. Perhaps Pip, sitting quietly with his notebook on that ridiculous little chair there, will have done better. But for now I think I’ve got as far as I can get.

  Right, one last question. See if I can get a hint of whatever motive this terror of a woman might have had.

  But how to get to it? Ah, yes. Yes, this may be it.

  ‘So can you tell me, Miss Knott, what was your exact standing thirty years ago in the circle that surrounded the Boy?’

  Miss Knott’s lips tightened into a hard line.

  ‘My standing, as you choose to put it, was, I am happy to say, entirely of my own making. It so happened that the Boy Preacher had been invited to enter the pulpit at the church I normally attended. I cannot say I approved of allowing such a privilege to one who was not a member of the Anglican communion, but I nevertheless felt it my duty to go and hear him. And, I will admit, I found his message not unworthy.’