The Hard Detective (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 1)

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘So you haven’t any address for him? But what about her? She didn’t by any chance say where she’s living now?’

  ‘Nay. Not a word did we get about herself. And I were glad. I’d heard all too much about the death of that unborn babe. Nay, as I said, she would go on about nothing but George an’ his gamekeeper job. What he did. Was it by day and by night? Did he meet with many poachers? Did he have a gun? Had he been shot at himself? On and on, till my head were whirling wi’ it.’

  ‘I see. And she had just turned up at your door? On the last Sunday of last month? March the thirtieth, would it be?’

  ‘If that were the last Sunday in March, it were then.’

  A date that fitted.

  ‘Right. And did she say at all why she was paying you this unexpected visit?’

  ‘Nay. She said nowt about herself. An’ that were a change, if you like. No, nowt but about what she were calling George’s new job. Not that it were new. Six year he’d been gamekeeper for Colonel Timperley.’

  ‘But she asked him all about his work? Do you remember anything she asked in particular?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny, now I think on it. But she were asking a lot about snares an’ that. An’ hardly any time’s gone by when my George goes catching his foot in that snare right at the far end of his walk.’

  But stolid Mrs Studley seemed not to make the connection.

  As Harriet had. Cop Killer was not the bogeyman the Evening Star, and the nationals too, had been so eagerly painting. Cop Killer was definitely — catching out Dr Smellyfeet was a pleasure — a woman. A woman by the name of Grace Brown. Who had, some eight years ago, been injured in the eye by a police officer attending a violent demonstration outside an abortion clinic. And who, possibly in consequence, had lost the baby she had been carrying, possibly again at an age when she was unlikely to have been able to conceive another. Who, too, had been so badly affected mentally by this that she had been sectioned under the Mental Health Acts and had spent years in confinement. But who had recently been released. And then had started a campaign of revenge, long planned. Dr Smellyfeet was right there. A campaign that had started with a life for a life, the murder of wretched, innocent, rule-flouting PC Titmuss. Had then moved on, relentlessly, to the blinding and death of WPC Syed, another innocent. To the killing of Froggy Froggott and the wrenching away of one of his long yellow fangs. Then to the luring into the British Legion yard of young Mickey Chatterton, drugged and unable to resist till he had had his hand cut off and been left to bleed to death. And now on again to the killing of former PC George Studley, foot caught in a snare.

  But that relentless career was not going to go one step further. No police officer was going to die in some fire, burning for burning. No police officer was going to be killed, wound for wound. No police officer was ever going to be somehow flogged to death, stripe for stripe. The Exodus litany was at an end.

  The killer was Grace Brown, and within reach.

  Chapter Nine

  Only Grace Brown was not within reach. The identity of the Evening Star’s Cop Killer had been established, but the hunt turned out to be by no means at an end. Grace Brown had to be found. And she could not be found.

  Mrs Studley had had no address for her, but Harriet had been sure there would be little difficulty in finding one. A single look at the Electoral Roll at City Hall might, she had thought, be enough. Or a discreet enquiry. Discreet, because it was important not to let Grace know that the police, whom the radio, the TV and the Evening Star daily described as hunting for a man, were aware the person they were seeking was a woman. However, neither the Electoral Roll nor a visit to the city Housing Department by DI Coleman produced a result.

  And time, Harriet was only too aware, was not on her side. Grace Brown had fulfilled her maniac desire to kill a Birchester police officer by cutting off his foot, if in a less than perfect way. No — it was certain as night follows day — she would have set her sights on some other officer, to be killed burning for burning.

  But, however much at her daily briefing Harriet urged the investigation forward, there was an absurd, awkward fact they were up against. The name the detectives had been tasked with finding was Brown, the commonest in Britain. There were, they soon discovered, more than a thousand known Mrs Browns in Greater Birchester, even a few hundred solo Mrs Browns. Nor was it by any means certain Grace’s name would be on any official lists. She could be living anywhere in Birchester. Even if she was within Dr Smellyfeet’s psychological cup-shaped area centred on Queen Street still no record of her seemed to exist. Was she a temporary lodger somewhere? Or living almost anonymously in some hostel, under a different name? She could be sleeping rough, even. She was, after all, a discharged mental patient.

  Tracing her through her stay in hospital under the Mental Health Acts, again discreetly avoiding saying why inquiries were being made, eventually proved a little more rewarding. There at last a trace of her was found. She had been admitted, as Harriet had worked out from Mrs Studley’s not altogether precise recollections, eight years ago, and had been released into the community, as the authorities cheerfully said, shortly before Christmas something over three months ago. But almost at once she had left the address she had been registered at to disappear into the anonymity of the metropolis. Part of her well-thought-out plan, if Dr Smellyfeet’s Profile had it right.

  At Westholme Sergeant Franks, when Harriet had sharply questioned him, had agreed George Studley’s shotgun had been lying on the ground as if pointing tauntingly at his foot-trapped body. But, as she had come to expect, no useful prints were found on the gun’s triggers, nor anywhere else on its surfaces. Grace Brown, the planner, had left only the smudgy marks of gloves, marks so greasy that the Fingerprint Bureau had at once declared the gloves, like those that had left only smudges on the laser pen PC Wilkinson had picked up, had been much too thick and dirty for there to be any hope that, with all their most delicate techniques, they could raise even a few hopeful whorls.

  So after foot for foot was there inevitably to come burning for burning? There could not be much doubt that the intent planning brain that had conceived the drugging of Cadet Chatterton and the killing of George Studley would be capable of contriving the death of some Greater Birchester Police officer in a fire somewhere. Perhaps a plan for it had been worked out well before young Mickey Chatterton had met his end. Perhaps plans for wound for wound and stripe for stripe were already lodged in the madwoman’s head.

  Harriet, with a groan, put in a call to Birchester’s Chief Fire Officer. She told him she must be the first to know about any and every fire within the city boundaries. Even if her mobile rang every ten minutes.

  The only good that had come out of at last knowing Grace’s identity, she thought, was the quashing of a faint, unanalysable idea she had had, or had hardly had, that the mystery figure might be none other than Inspector Rob Roberts. As finder of the first body when he had claimed rather oddly to be out at that very hour just for a walk, he could have been, she now openly admitted to herself, Dr Smellyfeet’s Mr Man. As Head of the Personnel Department he had had, in fact, access to the knowledge of where and even how PC Titmuss, Rukshana Syed and Froggy Froggott could be got at, as well as later Cadet Chatterton. And there had been, too, his prompt recitation of those damning words from the Book of Exodus. But the unexpected visit Grace Brown had made to her cousin had put a fat full-stop to all such half-thought thoughts.

  Abruptly then the recollection of Rob producing that rolling Bible indictment there at her house sheltering from that shower under the veranda porch, provided her with the solution to the minor mystery she had promised the Chief Constable to investigate as soon as the hunt was over, the leaking to the Evening Star of Sir Michael’s foul agenda. Plainly, the one man knowing of it who was not in her sworn-to-secrecy team had been responsible. A blabbermouth, Rob Roberts. Given no direct order to keep silent about the link between the killings and the biblical list, he could in justice hardly be blamed f
or talking of it. And somewhere what he had said must have filtered through to ears-ever-open Tim Patterson.

  One complication dealt with. And one error, her own, in not including Roberts in the strict order she had given about the Exodus link. But no point in breast-beating. Stick, unswervingly, to the real task.

  Plenty of other complications remained. To be answered only when Grace Brown had been traced down. If before then she had not succeeded in putting her deadly seal on yet another Greater Birchester Police officer. Burning for burning.

  The black-heavy thought of all the days ahead when her pursuit of Grace Brown might mean doing nothing more positive than picking up her mobile to be told of some chimney fire out in a suburb lit up again in a corner of her mind a tiny warning light. Something needing clearing up. Some part of her thinking grating at a small malfunction.

  Got it.

  Teeth thoughtfully biting underlip, she rang Dr Smellyfeet and asked him to come round, and by the time he appeared she had the bulging file of his Profile open in front of her.

  ‘Listen,’ she said, ‘there’s something here that doesn’t gel. All this about your subject being such a planner.’

  ‘An obsessive planner I said. Doesn’t mean Grace is someone of obvious intelligence, if that’s what you’re getting at.’

  ‘Oh no, I’ve grasped that factor, thank you. No, it’s this. Why if Grace is such a planner, a looker-ahead for snags and difficulties, why did she kill poor old Froggy Froggott when and where she did? Think. She didn’t wait till she could get at him in some out-of-the-way spot — and Froggy went wherever it occurred to him to go barging in — but she attacked him right outside his house on a public road. All right, as it so happened at that early hour no one came by. But anyone might have done, a milkman, an early jogger. Grace was even lucky that Mrs Froggott didn’t look out of her window earlier than she did, wondering why she hadn’t heard his car roaring off.’

  ‘All right. Yes, point taken. And I think you’ll find if you read my Profile carefully that I do say somewhere, if not particularly explicitly, that even obsessive planners don’t always succeed in planning everything. Page seventy-five, I think, if you’ll look.’

  ‘Okay, be right if you must. But that doesn’t affect my point. Grace can’t always be a planning killer. She hardly was when she went for Froggy.’

  ‘No. No, I grant you that. And I think I know why she did that, now you’ve brought it to my attention. I was questioning Detective Inspector Coleman the other day about any extra details he could remember from the scene of Superintendent Froggott’s death, and he happened to mention how ironic it was that Mr Froggott had been saying in a Greater Birchester Radio interview just the evening before that the deaths of Constable Titmuss and WPC Syed could not possibly be connected. The idea couldn’t be more rubbish if it was fished out of a municipal waste-truck, he’d remembered the words.’

  So do I, Harriet thought. They hurt then. Stupid bastard, Froggy.

  ‘So, you see—’ she began.

  ‘Yes, I see all right,’ Dr Smellyfeet went pouncing on, ‘Grace must have had access to a radio. When she heard her deliberate revenge against Greater Birchester Police was being ignored she would have felt impelled there and then to kill one more officer, and an important one. Mr Froggott sealed his fate, as you might say, at that very moment.’

  ‘Oh, yes. And it’s quite possible, too, I suppose, that if Grace had known her message had been understood, that she had taken a life for the life of her born-dead baby and an eye for the loss of sight she had suffered, she might have been satisfied then. And no other police officers would have died.’

  A sobering thought. But, let me point out, that in fact what you’ve just made plain actually makes my Profile stand up all the better. Grace Brown is now obsessive beyond any point of reason.’

  ‘So at any moment that mobile on the desk here will ring with news of a fire and it will turn out that one more police officer has been killed?’

  ‘No, it won’t be at any moment. You won’t hear more of Grace till she has planned this next move of hers down to the very last detail. Take it from me.’

  But it needed only one day, as it turned out, for something more about Grace to come to light. How, Harriet had asked, had it happened that police records, gone through day after day from within hours of it being accepted that WPC Syed had been murdered eye for eye, had not turned up any papers relating to a rejected claim for compensation made by a Mrs Grace Brown? At Westholme Mrs Studley had talked about her cousin being in ‘a rare taking’ when she had failed to get compensation for an injury to her eye that had led to the loss of the life within her womb. So why had the searches found nothing?

  She had spoken personally to every one of the searchers on her team, and in no gentle way. It was only when days later she located someone who had failed to find a records entry that should have glared out that the answer appeared. Rob Roberts had been the man who had missed Grace’s name.

  ‘I— I— Yes, I skipped past it. It was a simple mistake. It— It had never occurred to me that the person the papers were calling Cop Killer could be other than a man. When I was going through the records if I found a woman’s name at the head of any document I— I just passed it over.’

  She gave him a long look of barely repressed rage, half directed at herself.

  ‘You realize what this might have meant? If I hadn’t happened to go and see that man George Studley’s widow, we might never have been able to put our hands on the woman who’s been murdering, one by one, officer after officer of the Greater Birchester Police. And, let me tell you, you may have other deaths on your conscience yet.’

  She turned on her heel and marched out.

  The hard justified rebuke.

  Leaving an utterly mortified Rob Roberts, Harriet found herself asking with renewed sharpness a question that had lain dormant in her mind while the hunt for the killer had been at its most urgent. How was it, if Roberts with all his knowledge of police personnel and routines was not after all the killer as she had half-thought, that Grace Brown, former mental patient, a woman without resources, lurking in the byways of the city, had got to know as much as a police officer with all the information from the Personnel Department files at his fingertips? Nothing she could think of produced even a shadow of an answer.

  With a sigh of exasperation she turned to asking herself the more urgent simple question: where is Grace Brown? A question she had to avoid even thinking of at her daily press conferences. The only slight advantage she had over Grace was her not knowing she had been traced at Westholme and her identity was known. Try as she might to keep her answers to the milling pressmen as limited as possible — What do they know about crime? About policework? — she had to suffer moments too near to being humiliating for comfort.

  Then, out of the blue at her Monday conference, came another disquieting question, one she had hoped she would not hear at all until Grace Brown was safely in a cell.

  ‘Superintendent Martens, is the Evening Star correct in understanding that Cop Killer has now committed a fifth murder which the task force under your command has been unable to prevent?’

  What has bloody Patterson got on to?

  ‘What the Evening Star understands is hardly something I can comment on.’

  ‘Can I take it that is an admission?’

  ‘No, you cannot.’

  ‘But then would you like to comment on the fact that you yourself recently visited the village of Westholme?’

  ‘I can see no comment to make about that.’

  Tabby little Sergeant Sumpter was pulling surreptitiously at her sleeve, worried stiff that his friends in the press would be upset by her abrasive attitude. She jerked her arm free.

  ‘And I suppose you have no comment to make on the death at Westholme, reported in the Evening Star, of a gamekeeper who was shot after his foot was trapped in a snare?’

  ‘I understand there is to be a post-mortem in that case. Until the resu
lts are to hand no one in the Greater Birchester Police can possibly say anything.’

  ‘But do you agree that the death could be the work of Cop Killer? That the murder of Mr George Studley, a former officer of Greater Birchester Police, can be put down as one on the biblical list, foot for foot?’

  A sharp buzz of thwarted interest now from the less well-informed reporters at the words former police officer.

  Harriet grimaced in fierce vexation. And instantly regretted it. Two TV cameras had their vicious little red lights on.

  ‘I think the Evening Star is putting two different twos together and hoping they can be presented as making four. Not for the first time.’

  Another tug from Sergeant Sumpter.

  Harriet repressed an impulse to turn and deliver him a public rebuke.

  ‘I don’t know about your arithmetic, Superintendent,’ Tim Patterson lunged on. ‘But in mine when you add this to Cop Killer’s four murders, each plainly linked to words from the Book of Exodus, you get only one answer. Do you recall those words, Superintendent? The Evening Star jogs your memory from time to time, doesn’t it?’

  ‘That is a matter that I cannot possibly comment on at this stage.’

  It was the best she could do. She slapped her two hands down on the big table with below its rank of microphones pointing at her, shot to her feet, turned sharply away and marched out.

  Why the hell have I got to deal with bloody buzzing mosquitoes like Tim Patterson, she thought, when at any moment I may be told some police officer somewhere in Birchester had been burnt to death. Burning for burning. The command from the Book of Exodus must be thrusting and throbbing inside Grace Brown’s demented head.

  She envisaged her there, sitting tensely, face contorted in concentration, plotting and plotting how, despite the fact that everywhere in the city police officers were going about in inseparable pairs, she could still entrap one of them into a place where they could be burnt to death. But where was the there where Grace was to be found? For all the confirmation Inspector Roberts’ records had at last provided of her attempt to gain compensation for her eye injury, matters had hardly been advanced. Her address at the time she had made her claim — rejected as being not the result of police action — was where she and her former husband had lived. But she had left the house to go into the mental hospital eight years ago, and her husband had sold it soon after. Not surprising that such former neighbours as could be located had no newer address.