The Hard Detective (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 1)

by H. R. F. Keating

  She flung herself forwards into a half-upright crouch. For a moment they faced each other.

  Grace, she saw, did have the knife in her hand now.

  Knuckles.

  In a moment they were round her right fist.

  And Grace must, even with her single useful eye, have seen their gleam. And decided a struggle on equal terms was not for her.

  The sound of scrambling, running feet.

  Harriet stayed where she was just long enough to suck in a single deep reviving breath, and set out in pursuit of the fleeing figure ahead, its arms held high, hands clawing the misty air, knife flashing. But she knew it would be touch and go. With every step she was having to fight back an urge to vomit. At every yard she gained she was unable to prevent herself swaying dangerously from side to side. At any moment — a half-felt fear jutted into her — she might find herself toppling into the cold, clammy waters down at her side.

  But the mist-wreathed, wildly gesticulating figure ahead seemed to be making no better progress.

  Sweat thick on her face, the blood from her nose salt in her half-open, air-sucking mouth, brass knuckles just thrust away banging awkwardly at her side, stomach pulsingly sore, on she ran.

  Grace was within five yards of her now.

  She breathed in great sucking gasps. Felt the tears in her eyes.

  Yes. No, no.

  As she swayed more wildly than ever, for an instant she seemed to see the water of the canal immediately beneath her. With a desperate lunge she flung herself inwards. A counter-sway outwards as she plunged on sent her back again within inches of the stone edge.

  And arms came round her, firm, protective, obstructive.

  She was brought to a full halt. She glimpsed Grace moving joggingly further and further away. Turned and saw whose firm arms had wrapped her round. Dr Smellyfeet’s.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Grace Brown disappeared into the far mistiness. Dr Smellyfeet unwound his arms from Harriet. A ribby black cat emerged from a nearby tangle of dead willow-herb, regarded the pair of them with baleful eyes for a moment, erected its tail and stalked away.

  ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’ Harriet demanded.

  Dr Smellyfeet looked down at her through his drizzle-blurred glasses.

  ‘I happened to be ringing you on a small matter,’ he said, ‘and, when your secretary told me you had gone out just saying you could be contacted in an emergency on your mobile, I put two and two together. Not difficult, actually.’

  ‘And having made five, you came traipsing down here with the object of preventing me arresting Grace Brown. That it?’

  Dr Smellyfeet pushed a large pink hand through the rain-damp tangle of his black curls.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I did make five. I made four. I worked out, not only that you had gone to lay yourself open to attack from Grace, but where it was you would most likely be doing it. Somewhere near that tunnel bridge. I got to know this area pretty well, you know, when I was researching the Profile. All part of the picture.’

  He achieved a twisted smile.

  ‘And, if I may say so,’ he added, ‘it was a good job I did come down here. Or at this minute you’d very likely be trying to haul yourself up on to dry land here.’

  Harriet looked down at the canal’s now black-as-night water.

  ‘All right, yes, you may have saved me from going in there. But on the other hand very probably I’d have saved myself. And then at this minute, as you put it, I could be arresting that seven-times murderer.’

  ‘Six, actually. Your PC Venning hasn’t died. In fact, that’s what I was ringing you about. I’d been on to the hospital. Where they told me, incidentally, that you hadn’t enquired after him.’

  ‘No, I hadn’t. You may think I’m a hard bitch, and perhaps I am, but I didn’t see there was any point in doing the all-pals-together, sentimental thing. If he does die, they’ll be quick enough to tell me.’

  ‘Okay, I suppose. But, as a matter of fact, he’s out of intensive care now and recovering well.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. I really am, if you must know. Why should I wish the fellow any harm? He’s a useful copper, so Rob Roberts told me on the phone when he’d looked him up in his precious files. Which I did ask him to do, see if he had a wife, kids.’

  ‘Yes, well, okay. Still, I’m glad in any case I did come here. All right, you might have managed to save yourself going over the edge there, but from the way you were swaying as you ran I’m not so sure you would have done. And there’s another thing …’

  ‘What?’

  He gave her an assessing look before speaking.

  ‘This: if you had caught up with Grace, and if I hadn’t been here, what, as a matter of interest, would you have done?’

  ‘I’d have arrested her, of course.’

  ‘And treated her properly? She’s a human being like the rest of us, you know.’

  The thought of the brass knuckles still weighting her jacket pocket came briefly into Harriet’s mind. And the added thought of what she had resolved to do if mad Grace had proved to be the better fighter: the splash as the heavy knobbed strip of brass went into the canal.

  ‘As far as I’m concerned,’ she said, looking Dr Smellyfeet straight in the eye, ‘Grace Brown is a lawbreaker, a six-times — right, six times — murderer and as such it’s my duty as a police officer to arrest her whenever and wherever she is to be found.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t question that. But what I have wondered, if only at the back of my mind while I’ve been collaborating with you on her case, is what sort of treatment Grace was going to get when she came into police hands.’

  ‘Have you never read the Police and Criminal Evidence Act, 1984? You should have done if you were going to go poking your nose into murder investigations. It happens to lay down very stringent provisions about the handling of suspects under arrest. Too stringent, perhaps. But the provisions are there, and it is as much my duty to abide by them as it is my duty to effect an arrest in the first place.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I have read the Act, and I do know what a police officer is supposed to do. But I sometimes have my suspicions that corners get cut and regulations even boldly flouted. Not by every police officer, but frankly sometimes by those with a reputation for wanting to stop the rot by whatever means they can.’

  ‘And I, let me tell you, sometimes have my suspicions about people who are not police officers, who are not — I was talking about this at my press conference just this morning — engaged in the state of war that exists between the forces of law and the forces of criminal disruption. Aren’t they— Aren’t you, Peter Scholl, too damn soft? Aren’t you one of the people who believe fundamentally that the world’s a nice place? Against all the actual evidence, don’t you, consciously or not, deny that there are people who are not nice? You still hope that somehow deep down everybody is good. Well, I know different. I know that there are people about who are a hundred per cent self-centred. Who believe they’ve some sort of right to do just what pleases them, whether it’s to seize hold of anything they take a fancy to, provided it’s not being clutched tight by someone bigger than themselves, or whether it’s sticking a knife into someone they take a dislike to. Such people exist. And they’ve got to be checked. By using tougher tactics than they can rise to. I know it’s an unpopular view. I know what most people want is to have a nice, easy, comfortable world. But they can’t.’

  She paused for breath, cursing herself for, in her vulnerable state, saying more than she had meant to.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she went on however, ‘and there are moments when I’d like to believe the world’s like that myself. It would make life a lot easier if it truly was and I could act as if it was. But it isn’t. It is a foul and nasty place, despite the bits here and there that are different, good, nice. But, while I know there are a hundred per cent selfish shits in existence, then I know it’s my task, like it or not, to put my foot down on them hard.’

 
But at last she managed to regain the sense of proper behaviour that under the stress she had undergone had deserted her.

  ‘Right, I can’t stay here arguing,’ she barked out. ‘I’ve been head-butted by that damn woman. I’ve been kicked in the stomach by her. And I got soaked marching up and down here waiting for her. So I need to get home. Goodbye.’

  ‘But, Harriet, are you all right to be left on your own? Shouldn’t I be seeing you home?’

  ‘No.’

  She waited there, deliberately declining to move, despite the shivering fit she had not succeeded in staving off, till Dr Smellyfeet at last went tramping back in the direction of the blind bridge. And, when she was sure he was out of hearing, she slipped the brass knuckles from her pocket and slid, rather than threw, the heavy metal strip into the canal. There was hardly a splash as it disappeared beneath the water.

  All over. And out of it not too badly.

  But, although she drove all the way to her house without too much strain, as she stepped up on to the porch veranda she did for a moment have to clutch at its sturdy railing to prevent herself from falling.

  *

  ‘Are you all right?’ Marjorie spluttered excitedly, as Harriet came into her office next morning. ‘You’ve got a terribly bruised nose.’ Luckily her impromptu murmur about ‘walking into a door’ was interrupted by a ring on her phone. She picked it up.

  ‘Harriet, are you all right?’ Dr Smellyfeet.

  ‘Peter.’ She drew in a long breath. ‘It’s kind of you to enquire. But, yes, I am okay. Nothing worse than some damage to my nose that’s given my secretary an excuse for girlish palpitations.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad to hear. Not about the palpitations. But about you. Look, I’m sorry I said what I did when I did last evening, I should have thought. It was hardly the time to produce the sort of arguments I did. But …’

  ‘I think I gave as good as I got. Said more than I meant, actually. So forget about it, yes?’

  ‘Well, okay. But there is something else I do want to say about Grace.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘About what she’s likely to do now.’

  ‘As a matter of fact, I thought while I was getting dressed this morning that I ought to ask for your opinion on that. What is she likely to do? How will she have reacted to yesterday? She felt she’d been tricked, you know. That I hadn’t really been seeking a confrontation. More, that I’d arranged a trap. She must be blaming herself for having let herself alter course.’

  ‘Yes, you’re right. She’ll see herself, I believe, as weak in having been deflected from what she sees as the right and only way she must go.’

  ‘Yes, she said as much down there at the canal. In so far as she was making sense at all.’

  ‘So, well, the first thing to realize is that she’ll be back more rigidly than ever to wanting to give out stripe for stripe.’

  ‘And how, from your reading of her, do you think she’s going to go about that?’

  ‘Look, Harriet, I’m not a clinical psychiatrist. I don’t specialize in aberrant human behaviour. I haven’t the qualifications.’

  ‘Okay, okay, I know all that. But I have come to have some sort of trust in you. And I want to know what your informed guess is. Damn it, you’ve been thinking about the wretched woman for weeks now. You must have some ideas.’

  ‘Well, I have. But you’re not to take whatever I say for gospel.’

  ‘No, no. You’re all ready to back down at the slightest indication you may be wrong. We’ll take that as read. Now, what do you think?’

  ‘Thanks for your confidence.’

  ‘Peter, what do you think? I asked. I want to know.’

  ‘Well then, I’ll go out on a bit of a limb. I’ll bet — I gather at your briefing yesterday you had all the sex shops in Birchester asked to report any out-of-the-way sales of whips — well, I’ll bet that a report comes in before this day’s out. Or, well, by tomorrow at the latest.’

  ‘That’s what I like: someone who’s definite in his opinions.’

  ‘I’m sorry. But this isn’t something I like doing. If I told you that Grace is even now putting finishing touches — obsessively going over and over every detail — of her plan to kill some Greater Birchester Police officer by somehow using a whip, that would be fair enough. We’ve known that in essence for weeks. But to go on, to go further, would be almost total guesswork. I mean, I could say that her likeliest target is you. You. The now doubly hated figure. But, as I say, it would be guesswork. I can’t give you any sort of worthwhile analysis without having gathered the facts. And then having compared them with what I’ve learnt already.’

  ‘And in the meantime Grace Brown will have murdered another police officer, and then gone and done what? Committed suicide? Gone into hiding down in London, or somewhere where most likely she’ll never be found? Anyhow, escaped justice.’

  ‘That’s the sort of attitude I was on about yesterday. I know you feel you’re justified, and I accepted a great deal of your arguments then. But you really ought to try to see things from a wider point of view. It isn’t all about justice all the time, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Look, Peter. In my book it is. It is about justice. There are people out there who are doing wrong. I don’t care whether it’s as much wrong as Grace Brown has done, or as much wrong as someone does who puts a brick through a car window for fun. They’re doing wrong. And I’m there, as a police officer, to stop them. And that’s all there is to it.’

  *

  Dr Smellyfeet’s bet almost came off. It was during the next morning but one, only hours after the latest time he had fixed on, that a report of the sale of a whip landed on Harriet’s desk in the Incident Room. There had, it said, been a call from the All You Want To Know sex shop, saying that an old lady looking like she was a scarecrow off of a farm had prowled round for five or ten minutes — no other customers in so early, thank Gawd — and, with a twenty-pound note pulled from inside the front of her dress, had bought a whip. Questioned, the shop manager, after hastily saying the whip was only a fun thing, you know, I mean people are entitled to play games if they want, ain’t they?, had described her purchase as being some five-feet long and made from plaited strips of black leather.

  Harriet, passing this on to the detectives present, silenced the guffawing laughter it evoked.

  ‘No, not a fun thing. Something that could be, in the hands of Grace Brown, plainly dangerous.’

  ‘So what do we do now, ma’am?’ DI Coleman asked, anxiety not altogether kept out of his voice.

  ‘We do not let that woman flog any member of Greater Birchester Police.’

  From the officers sitting round there came a sound which was not quite a disbelieving How?, but not far from it.

  ‘You’ll tell me we didn’t succeed in protecting Cadet Chatterton,’ Harriet snapped. ‘You’ll tell me former Greater Birchester Police officer George Studley wasn’t kept out of that madwoman’s clutches either. And there I’ll say How could we know he at least was in any sort of danger? But I won’t make any excuses over the death in that blazing house of PC Strachan. We knew some sort of burning for burning death was being planned. We failed to prevent it. I failed to prevent it. I dare say you all know that PC Venning is now expected to make a total recovery. I’m glad of it. But I’m unrepentant about putting him into such danger as I did. A police officer has to risk his or her life on occasion. And with PC Venning, to an extent, we did not fail. We forced Grace Brown to take a real risk, and in doing so at least she lost her hiding-place.’

  She waited then for a moment for this to sink in.

  Should she say anything about the chance she had deliberately given Grace yesterday at the canal? Had what had happened down there become common knowledge, at least among the officers there in front of her? All right, she had fended off enquiries about her bruised nose, and Peter Scholl could be trusted not to go talking about it, but some patrolling constable might have seen something and gossiped.

&nb
sp; But, no. There was silence in the big room. Her failure to hold Grace still a matter that need never be known about. So, no reference to it.

  ‘Right. DI Coleman has asked what’s to be done to protect every member of the Force from a possibly deadly assault by a whip-wielding fanatic of a woman. And my answer is: nothing.’

  A stir from the intent hearers.

  ‘Yes, nothing. Think. What could I do? What could anyone realistically do? Wrap each member of the Force in protective sheeting? Issue guns all round? No. The initiative, for better or worse, is with that woman with her whip. But, to use it, she has to take risks, big risks. And that’s when we’ll get her. So it’s a question of total alertness. But it’s not just — all right, this is a pun — your own back you’ve got to watch. You’ve got to watch the officer who Grace Brown makes her target. And get to Grace before she gets to them.’

  She saw glances go from one of her hearers to another.

  It was working. Despite the long period they had been engaged in the sterile hunt, they were now — it was easy to see — reanimated. If Grace came into the open she would be caught, if it was humanly possible.

  ‘And all that doesn’t mean to say,’ she went on, ‘we won’t continue actively to hunt that woman. I’m still pretty sure she’s hiding somewhere in the Chapeltown area, and incidentally Dr Scholl, whose advice I respect, confirms that. We almost got her moving her hiding-place after her attack on PC Venning when in DI Johnston’s immortal words the bird had flown.’

  A titter of nervous laughter.

  Which evidently served to irritate Johnston.

  He jumped to his feet at the back of the room.

  ‘There is another thing, ma’am,’ he said, something like a glare on his face. ‘I don’t know if you want this mentioned. But I definitely think it ought to be.’

  Has he, after all, heard some canteen gossip about the notorious Hard Detective being seen staggering away from the canal with blood on her face?

  ‘Spit it out, DI. I don’t want any festering anywhere in my team.’

  The glare increased.