The Hard Detective (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 1)

by H. R. F. Keating

‘Perhaps there’s nothing to tell. But whether there is or there isn’t, you’re not going to hear.’

  ‘Not even if I think it’s relevant to the advice which Sir Michael, who to tell the truth seemed to be in something of a panic, asked me to give you when he phoned last night?’

  ‘And what advice would that be?’

  ‘If I had my way, it would be to go on TV tonight and say that, at the urging of the well-known forensic psychologist, Dr Peter Scholl, you have decided not to pursue your challenge.’

  ‘Ha, ha.’

  ‘Yes. Well, I didn’t expect you’d listen. After all, you’re the one who believes she’s always right.’

  ‘Back to that, are we? Nevertheless, I still think I am right to be doing this. Okay, I know that I’m not equipped to see into the mind of a madwoman like Grace Brown, and I don’t really know what this will do to her. But I do know that I can’t ultimately lose. If it does bring her out from her hole before she acts on whatever plan she has to kill one of the Greater Birchester Force in some wound for wound manner — and I had some confirmation yesterday from her ex-husband in Australia, whom we’ve at last managed to contact, that she always was a planner — then I’ve won. If it doesn’t, then at least I’ve acted. I’ve tried.’

  ‘Oh, yes, you may succeed in bringing her out from wherever she’s hiding. But it’s all too likely that it’ll be at the cost of the member of your Force she kills being Detective Superintendent Harriet Martens.’

  ‘All right, at that cost. But, remember, this is relying on your advice.’ She tapped with a crooked forefinger on the blue cover of the Profile, as ever on her desk. ‘Grace, the planner, will have long ago thought out how she can bring off a wound for wound murder. But now with a new target and challenged to act immediately she’ll have to improvise, and there she may come unstuck as she could have done when she hastily went for Froggy Froggott. So, though, yes, I’m offering myself as a sacrificial goat, if you like, I’m not such a fool as to do it out of any sort of damn silly bravado. I told Sir Michael last night that I was a hard detective, and this is what being hard means. It doesn’t mean simply being stupid.’

  *

  Harriet had refused to give Dr Smellyfeet precise details of how she actually intended to make good her challenge. She was too aware that, if he or anyone in the Force knew exactly what she proposed, they would almost certainly mount some kind of surveillance on her. And she had too much respect for Grace not to believe that, cunning as she was, she would detect the presence of police shadowers however skilful.

  In her head she recited the litany of her enemy’s successes of the past. And of the future, if she was not stopped now.

  Life for life

  Eye for eye

  Tooth for tooth

  Hand for hand

  Foot for foot

  Burning for burning

  Wound for wound

  Stripe for stripe

  She knew — she, too, could make plans — just where it was that she was going out to meet with Grace. If Grace was going to respond … If, hiding as the Profile had forecast somewhere within a cut-off radius centred on the Queen Street police station, she had been able to get hold of the Evening Star, if she had heard Greater Birchester Radio … If in fact she had actually been goaded into changing whatever plan she had made to attack some other police officer wound for wound.

  The chosen site was the towpath of the Birchester–Liverpool Canal.

  There was, Harriet had reasoned, really only one place inside Dr Smellyfeet’s circle where Grace could count on meeting her without any other person present: the section of the canal that ran through the area of Greater Birchester Police B Division. It had for long been largely derelict. The huge warehouses, which had once loaded their goods on to barges to chug their way, or be pulled by lumbering horses, to Liverpool and the markets of the world, were almost all empty, patched with estate agents’ boards grown all but illegible from years of beating rain and months of scanty summer sun. The rolls of barbed wire on the tops of the high brick walls of the mills, put there for the short time the buildings were expected to be vacant so as to keep out intruders with an eye on movable objects, had long ago been rusted into near extinction. Even the occasional graffiti of later years — Up the Rovers on the far side walls, United Rule on the Queen Street area side — had faded almost to nothing.

  The towpaths on either bank did provide short cuts between areas of the city, but few people seemed to need nowadays to make those journeys. In the early mornings and at the evening rush-hour a few hunched men on bicycles would skim along the gritty black paths swerving round the places where scrawny bushes had established a hold in the sour earth below. But otherwise the towpaths were almost entirely deserted. Boys sometimes attempted to fish from them, though the canal’s sullen greeny-grey water smelling faintly of things chemical was hardly encouraging. Only the really desperate love-makers occasionally risked the dank and unlovely stretches on either bank.

  Altogether the best and likeliest tilting-ground for an encounter. Perhaps a life-and-death encounter.

  At 3 p.m. Harriet, after having gone home and changed from her customary dark-grey suit into uniform — How else will Grace know who I am? — began her vigil, pacing the gritty towpath of the bank on the inside of Dr Smellyfeet’s cut-off circle, with the sharp spring breeze reddening her cheeks as she strode into it. She carried no gun, despite being entitled to do so and despite Grace Brown still possessing, presumably, the knife she had used to kill PC Titmuss. But she scarcely thought that joining combat with as elderly a woman required a firearm. However, she had put into the pocket of her uniform jacket a set of brass knuckles, a souvenir kept somewhat illegally and sentimentally from the first arrest she had ever made.

  Grace Brown, the woman who had succeeded in killing five police officers and one ex-policeman, was not an adversary to be taken altogether lightly. Yet Harriet, fit and with her early training in self-defence and arrest techniques by no means forgotten, felt confident in taking the risk of doing without the back-up that might all too easily alert Grace, the cunning wild animal.

  Otherwise she had in her shoulder-bag, its flap unfastened, the mobile phone no senior officer on duty could be without.

  It squeaked now.

  Harriet looked up and down the bleak length of the canal before she took out the phone. No one in sight.

  ‘Superintendent Martens here.’

  ‘Harriet, it’s Peter Scholl. Where are you?’

  ‘You know damn well where I am. I’m somewhere inside the Scholl Profile circle, waiting to meet somebody.’

  ‘Oh, well, I just hoped I might trick you into telling the truth. I’m pretty anxious about you as a matter of fact.’

  ‘I dare say. But much as I appreciate your concern you’re not exactly helping me to look as if I’m a defenceless target. Which is the object of the exercise.’

  ‘But, Harriet —’

  Phone aerial rammed hard down.

  Relentless march resumed. All the way along beside the lightly stinking water, ruffled from time to time, when the wind gusted, into looking like a miniature sea. To the far end of the Profile’s flat-topped circle. Then on for a hundred yards or so beyond, to halt in the deep shadow beneath a bridge that had once linked two mills on either bank of the canal, a tunnel of blank sheets of rusty corrugated iron.

  Further along came the Chapeltown area where in days gone by streets of labourers’ housing had clustered round a single large, resolutely impressive Nonconformist chapel. Batley Street, where Grace Brown had set her fire trap, lay at the far end of it, and Harriet suspected she was still hiding somewhere among the rows of little back-to-back houses, as many empty and falling to pieces as occupied. But so far none of the search parties she had had sent out each day had found even the least clue to her lair. It was the nearness of the area to the most deserted stretch of the canal that had finally made her choose this as the place for an encounter.

  Wait four or five
minutes under the blind bridge, looking with apparent carelessness this way and that. Resume march in opposite direction.

  Fifteen minutes’ slow walk, eyes from time to time flicking towards the gaps between the huge looming warehouses or to the rusty doors that had once given access to the towpath. Then she had reached the far end of the line which the canal formed flattening Dr Smellyfeet’s circle based on Queen Street police station. Further along, towards the municipal calm of Waterloo Gardens, lay the area where the towpaths on either side achieved a semblance of life. The City Council had decreed a canalside walk here and placed benches at intervals, neat wastebins decorated with the City arms beside them. Narrow lawns had been created behind the paths, dotted now with the rain-battered, yet still more or less colourful, remains of late purple and white crocuses. Here disused warehouses had been turned into blocks of smart flats, even though the view from them was still of semi-stagnant greenish water.

  No longer likely territory for the skulking, gaunt presence of Grace Brown, who, if Dr Smellyfeet had got it right, would for this encounter be wearing her shapeless blue woolly hat.

  Soon dusk added shades of dull grey to the warehouse walls as Harriet marched to and fro between the Walk and the blind bridge. Harder now to see if a figure was lurking in the narrow gaps between the towering dilapidated buildings. In a few minutes, no doubt, a handful of cyclists would come whirring rapidly along towards tea and television, creating an interval when no sudden attack was likely. And then … in the fully gathered dusk?

  Harriet extracted a small torch from her pocket, ready to direct its light to the ground at her feet and to reflect upwards enough to show the person using it was wearing a skirt in regulation police blue. When it was altogether dark would a tall, gaunt woman come running out from one of the yet darker gaps, eight-inch-long kitchen knife raised to strike? Wound for wound?

  A rat scuttled across the path and she decided to switch on the torch. Head moving from side to side, if less theatrically than before, eyes kept away from the reflected glare, she strode on, peering in the now almost complete darkness towards the least sound — a drip-drip-dripping from some broken pipe — the faintest glimpse of movement.

  She was within a hundred yards of the blind bridge once more, and wondering whether it might be sensible to end her vigil there for this first trial, when, piercing the cold silence, her mobile beeped.

  Aerial up.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Superintendent Martens, ma’am?’

  ‘Yes? What is it?’ A mouth-tight mutter in the night air.

  ‘Ma’am, another murder.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  Grace Brown, it turned out, had not committed her seventh murder. But she had severely wounded an officer on point-duty. Police Constable Venning had been stabbed in the side of the neck — much as PC Titmuss had been at the start of the series of killings — as he stood on his own, in accordance with the modification of the order for officers in uniform to be paired. He had been directing traffic at the point where it infiltrated from Market Place into Queen Street, barely two hundred yards from the police station. The very place — the thought had at once entered Harriet’s head — where WPC Syed had been blinded, eye for eye.

  When she reached the scene there was little indication that anything had happened. PC Venning had been rushed to hospital and his place taken by another officer, looking more than a little apprehensive as he directed the traffic jostling past again at the fag-end of the rush-hour. Almost the only signs of the attack were the uniformed officers going about among the hurrying crowds attempting in the early dark to find witnesses. DI Johnston, the inspector from her team who had got to the scene first, explained that apparently Grace had darted across to where PC Venning stood, stabbed him, and then had darted as quickly to the far side. Only when Venning was seen lying in the roadway had people become aware of something having happened.

  While Harriet was still getting the facts one of the officers drafted in to look for witnesses, Sergeant Grant, from the Queen Street rape unit, brought up a twenty-year-old girl, her face blotched with tear stains.

  ‘Evening, ma’am. I think you’ll want to hear what this young woman has to say. She may be about the only good witness left to us. She’s been in shock since it happened, but I think she’ll give you a decent account now.’

  With a little murmuring encouragement from Sergeant Grant, the girl at last brought herself to speak.

  ‘She come rushing just past me, biffed me elbow. That was— That’s why I sort of took particular notice. We’d been waiting to cross, a whole lot of us. I was at the back and I thought I’d missed me chance, with the traffic revving up to move off again. And then, there came that sort of rushing from behind me, this tall old woman in — what? — one of them donkey jacket things with a kind of blue-like hat on her head. I dunno, but I had a feeling she’d been standing in the doorway of Boots the Chemist just behind where I was. They’d been closed about ten minutes. I know because I’d wanted to — Well, needed to— To buy some you-know-what’s— sannies.’

  ‘Take a deep breath and begin again,’ Harriet said sharply.

  ‘Yes. Yes, sorry, officer. But I —’

  ‘This woman came rushing out from the doorway of Boots, and what happened?’

  ‘She went rushing past me. And — the cars there were just moving off — she was half across the road before you could say Jack Rob— I mean, in just sort of half a second. And then I saw she had this knife in her hand. A sort of— Well, just a kitchen knife really. But a big one, the kind you use for cutting up meat for a stew. Well, my mum does.’

  ‘Right,’ Harriet bit in, ‘she had a large kitchen knife. In which hand?’

  ‘Which hand? I don’t— Yes, in her left. Yes, the left.’

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘And then— Then— Oh, God, it was just awful.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what it was she did. It’s important. It’s going to help us find her.’

  The force of the words made the girl bring herself to a calmer state.

  ‘Yes. Yes, I’ll try. She— Well, that was all really. She just raised up that knife and went for him, the copper there directing traffic. She sort of jabbed it at him, the knife. In his neck. In the side, sort of, of his neck. Well, more than jabbed. She was strong. Strong. Was it the one the papers call Cop Killer?’

  ‘I dare say it was.’

  And wearing once again, almost certainly, the donkey jacket she had put on when she hid at the back of the dead-end passageway in New Street and darted forwards to kill PC Titmuss, illicit cigarette between his lips. As well as the blue hat which, according to Dr Smellyfeet, Grace Brown wore only when she was intent on revenge for her supposed injuries.

  ‘And after she stabbed the constable in the road there what happened?’

  ‘I dunno. I mean, I was —’

  ‘Yes, you do know. You were there. You saw that woman stab the constable. You must have seen what happened after that.’

  The girl stood there in front of Harriet, suddenly struck into rebellious silence.

  ‘Come on, what happened next?’

  ‘Please. Please. No. Well, yes. Yes, she pulled out the knife. There was blood on it. I could see the blood on it in the street lights half across the road from where I was standing. I’ll never forget it. Never. She didn’t wipe it nor nothing. She just sort of put her head down, run across to the far side and— And then sort of just walked away.’

  ‘Where was she going? Which direction?’

  ‘Oh God, I don’t know. Leave me alone, can’t you?’

  ‘No. If we’re going to find her we must know where she was heading for. Think. Remember. Tell me what you saw.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, she went back along Queen Street. I remember now, I was sort of surprised. I thought she’d of gone the other way. But, no. She went back along Queen Street. I saw her — she’s tall, you know, tallish anyhow — I saw her sort of blue hat, woolly, bobbing past the people coming dow
n the street towards her. I don’t think they’d even realized — I mean, how could they know what had happened? It was all so quick.’

  ‘And that was the last you saw of her? Her blue hat bobbing along up Queen Street? In the direction of the police station, yes?’

  ‘Yes, towards there. She wasn’t going to give herself up, was she? I mean, if she’s mad she might of …’

  ‘No, I don’t think she was going to give herself up.’

  ‘Can I go home now? I— I’m feeling sort of sick.’

  ‘Yes, all right, go. But give the sergeant your name and address.’

  ‘Yes, yes. I will. Yes.’

  The girl turned away, free from the clutches of the demanding figure she had been put in front of. And showing her relief even as Sergeant Grant led her away.

  ‘You heard all that?’ Harriet turned to DI Johnston.

  ‘Aye, ma’am, I did, the silly wee creature.’

  ‘Silly she may be, DI. But she’s told us something we may be grateful for yet. If Grace Brown wasn’t heading for the nick to beg to be arrested, where was she going? Why did she make off in that direction? The girl was perfectly right. You’d have expected her to go the other way, where the pavement’s wider and the crowds begin to thin out.’

  ‘Aye, I suppose so,’ the DI said. ‘And, true enough, there’s Turner’s Alley just there. Running between Queen Street and —’

  ‘And Lime Street.’

  Harriet tugged out her mobile, streamed out orders.

  Lime Street. Leading almost straight down to the canal. The road where the carts used to bring up the limes from the Liverpool barges, directly from the West Indies. And just off to the left at the far end, Chapeltown. Row upon row of half-ruined labourers’ houses. Somewhere there a place where Grace has been hiding.

  And we’re going to find it. And her. Before the day’s out.

  It might, just might, be possible to get enough officers there in time to catch Grace. Out in the open before she manages to wriggle back into whatever hiding-place she has.

  In time, she thought. But will we be in time? In time to stop Number Eight. Stripe for stripe.