‘Quite a feather in the cap of the division, as I mentioned.’
‘Yes sir, you said.’
‘Once I’d got you to actually concentrate on the proper job in hand, it worked like a charm, didn’t it? We got Ramscar.’ For the first time Yardbird got from behind his desk. He kicked the wheel of the invalid chair as though to make sure it was safe. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘As I’ve said before this is all good experience for you.’
‘Great experience,’ agreed Davies.
‘How long will it be?’ He pushed his expression in the general direction of Davies’s injuries. ‘Couple of weeks?’
‘Two months, they say,’ said Davies. ‘And a bit of convalescence just to get the feel of my legs again. I may go to Stoke-on-Trent.’
‘You’ll like that,’ muttered Yardbird absently. ‘In the meantime perhaps you’d like to give your thoughts to the business of who stole that brass bedstead from your lodgings. And the antique hall stand. That landlady of yours, what’s her name, Mrs Brownjohn?’
‘Mrs Fulljames,’ said Davies.
‘Yes, her. Stupid old cow. Button-holed me at the Chamber of Commerce Dinner the other evening and demanded that something be done about it. It does look a bit bad, I suppose, actually having a CID man in the house and having unsolved crime hanging about. Have you given it any consideration at all?’
‘I’ve thought of very little else,’ replied Davies. It did not appear to penetrate. Yardbird appeared submerged in worries.
‘And there was another thing, while you’re here. That idiotic dog of yours. It bit three policemen during the raid on the farm.’
Davies nodded. ‘I know. It doesn’t like coppers. It’s had a go at me before now.’
‘Well you must control it, you know. If not, have it put down. Might be the best way in the end. Get you into no end of bother.’
Davies said: ‘Right, I’ll see he behaves. And I’ll think about the brass bedstead. Can I go now, sir? My arms get tired.’
‘Yes, yes. Off you go. I’m busy as hell. And … Davies …’
‘Sir?’
‘Keep out of aggravation, eh?’
As he went through the corridor Davies could clearly hear Yardbird laughing at his own joke.
Father Harvey trundled Davies in his wheeled chair alongside the canal. Davies was glad of the privacy because their progress through the High Street had been approaching the triumphal. People he did not recognise, but who clearly knew him intimately, approached to inquire about his injuries and to shake his hand. Mr Chrust appeared at the door of the newspaper office and had shown him a copy of the Citizen embellished by Davies’s chair-borne photograph, while from the upper windows the sisters-in-law waved in bright sympathy. Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith hooted greetings from her door and shouted clairvoyant encouragement: ‘You’ll be better soon. Your lucky colour is blue! Blue!’ Even his wife Doris, shopping with Mrs Fulljames, had come out of the baker’s and given him a jam doughnut. ‘It’s getting like the Entry of the Queen of Sheba,’ commented Father Harvey.
Josie joined them at the canal bridge and helped to get the wheeled chair down the inclined path to the canal bank. She walked with them hungrily nuzzling a lunchbag.
‘I hear through my excellent intelligence services that a police award is to be made to you,’ mentioned the priest. ‘So your wounds will not have been entirely in vain.’
‘Listen, Yardbird wouldn’t recommend anyone for a sick pass let alone an award,’ observed Davies. It was a nice day for that town at that time of year. Ducks followed the fitful sunshine on the straight water. Josie emptied the crumbs from her lunchbag into the canal. The ducks clamoured as though it were already spring.
‘Somebody over the top of Yardbird has put you up,’ said Father Harvey. ‘I get to know these things. The confessional is not merely for the telling of sins, you know, Dangerous. It is useful for handy tit-bits of information.’
‘How’s the confessional box anyway?’ inquired Davies over his shoulder.
‘The new one is fine. Never heard better confessions. But the one I built myself was more frail than the parishioners, I’m afraid. Mrs Bryant, who becomes a trifle histrionic during the unburdening of her soul, put her elbow through one of the panels. So I rang the bishop and kicked up bloody hell and they’ve sent a new portable effort, in plastic you’ll know, pending the arrival of a proper replacement. It was there, in that plastic shell, that I heard the whisper of your impending award.’
‘Award?’ Davies grinned. ‘I’m the mug who did it all wrong. If Josie hadn’t telephoned the police to say I was on my way to Bracken Farm I’d still be there now. Buried under the cowshed.’
His voice slowed as they approached the footbridge, the three of them, the priest, the policeman and the poppet, and fifteen yards away, beyond the allotment hedge, Celia Norris was buried. He glanced at Josie. She was devouring a yoghurt from a small tub. ‘I thought you’d have the sense to go with other coppers,’ she said. A strawberry blob squatted on her chin, like Celia again. She wiped it away. ‘I thought even you would have the bleeding gumption to do that, Dangerous. But then, when I got in the house, I thought probably you wouldn’t have the bleeding gumption. So I rang nine-nine-nine.’
Although they talked, Davies’s awareness of their location and his sadness because of it, seeped to the others. They turned at the bridge and, now silent, went back the way they came. The ducks, spotting their return, queued up hopefully. A water rat dropped without fuss into the brown depths. ‘Dangerous,’ said Josie suddenly. ‘How old is Doris?’
‘Doris? God knows. Thirty or thereabouts.’
‘And Mod?’
‘Mod’s in his forties. I think.’
‘You think. Do you know the age of anyone in that house of yours?’
‘No … no, I don’t think I actually do.’
‘Father Harvey,’ she pursued. ‘How old do you think I am?’
‘Ah, it’s a game,’ decided the priest. ‘Well, let me see. Oh, you’re a young girl. What nineteen, twenty or so.’
‘It’s funny,’ she said thoughtfully. ‘When my father died the other week, I didn’t know how old he was. And I’m not sure about my mother. I’m seventeen.’
Davies was eyeing her. ‘What are you getting at, Josie?’
She laughed. ‘Blimey, you look like Chief Ironside in that chair, Dangerous. On the television.’
He did not pursue it then. The priest got the invalid chair up to the road and then left them. Josie was to push it along the street to the library for the afternoon and Mod was to propel it to The Babe In Arms at the opening time and then to ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens. The sunshine persisted uncannily. Around the power station cooling towers played small cherubs of steam. ‘What was all that about people’s ages?’ he asked.
Josie waved to a friend in the street. Then she began speaking as she pushed. ‘It was just you said a funny thing, Dangerous. Before all the farm business, when you told me all about Celia. Or you reckoned you’d told me all. You remember when we went all through your notes? All on that school notepaper.’
‘Yes, of course. What did I say?’
‘About that old Mrs Whethers. You’d written down everything you remember her saying, right?’
‘Right.’
‘The old man. Mr Harkness. How old did she say he was when it all happened with Celia?’
‘Seventy-six,’ he said. ‘And that was twenty-five years ago.’
‘But according to her, she hardly knew him. She’d just heard that he’d seen something that night and she knew he’d been ill. But to know that he was seventy-six, twenty-five years ago is very odd. Not seventy-five, nor anything else. Exactly seventy-six.’ She had halted the chair in the middle of the shopping street now and Davies was painfully half-turned around to her. She went around to the front of the chair and knelt, pretending to rearrange the rug around his legs.
‘What did she say, exactly, this Mrs Whethers?’ asked Josie. ‘Have you
got those notes?’
Davies hurriedly thrust his hand into the deep inside pocket of the overcoat. ‘My favourite reading,’ he said. He began to turn over the crammed, scrawled pages of school paper. ‘Here, it’s here,’ he said. ‘Mrs Whethers. Ah, yes. She asked me how long ago the Celia business was and I said twenty-five years and she said …’
‘Mr Harkness was seventy-six,’ Josie concluded. ‘She knew his exact age, but she didn’t know how long ago the murder was. What a funny thing.’
‘She calculated it by deducting the twenty-five years. She was in no doubt, either. Seventy-six.’
‘All I’m saying,’ said Josie – she had gone behind and begun to push the chair again – ‘is that it’s strange she knew his right age, but she didn’t know him well. We’ve just tested you and Father Harvey out. People hardly ever know other people’s ages. Sometimes not even their own family and friends.’
‘So,’ he said. ‘There’s got to be something special about Mr Harkness, so that she is quite sure of his age.’
She nodded. ‘You’ve tumbled. I reckon he’s still alive, Dangerous. And he’s a hundred and one.’
Nineteen
Mod pushed him all the way from the library to the Kensal Green Old Folks Club. It was the hardest afternoon’s work he had done for twenty years.
The ancients were doing a paso doble, stamping worn feet and cracking rheumy hands over their heads, led by the fat and fiery dancing teacher. Mod was astounded at the activity. ‘I wondered why none of them ever gets to the library,’ he said.
They all stopped sympathetically when they saw him in the chair. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ said the dance teacher. ‘Whatever have you been up to?’
‘Practising,’ said Davies.
‘I knew you’d do yourself an injury,’ she replied confidently. ‘Altogether too unsupple. No rhythm.’ She returned to the elderly class. ‘Right old people,’ she called. ‘Finish for today. Let’s all have one good clap and leave it there.’
They banged their hands together and those that had not already stiffened up during the pause stamped their feet a few token times, then spread out about the hall for teatime. Mrs Whethers, clucking sympathy, brought a free cup of tea for Davies but Mod had to pay for his own. They sat down in a triangle.
‘Mrs Whethers,’ said Davies. ‘I’m sorry to bother you again but I wanted to ask you one more thing.’
‘Fire away,’ she said jovially. ‘I didn’t do it.’
‘Indeed not. But, Mrs Whethers, is there any chance that Mr Harkness is still alive?’
She looked at him in astonishment. ‘Of course he’s still alive!’ she exclaimed. ‘I took it for granted you knew that. He’s a hundred and one. It was in the local paper back in the summer. He lives in Bristol with his daughter or somebody but she sent the bit of news to the Citizen.’
‘He was seventy-six twenty-five years ago,’ nodded Davies. ‘That’s how you knew his exact age. Because of his being a hundred and one.’
She smiled in an old way. ‘I always was good at sums,’ she said.
‘And I thought we were talking about somebody who was dead,’ he sighed. ‘I must go and see him.’
‘You’d better get those wheels turning, then,’ she laughed. ‘At a hundred and one you don’t know where you’ll be from one day to another. How about buying a ticket for the raffle?’
St Fridewide’s Church had a van, fitted with seats for use on parish-outings and it was in this, with Father Harvey driving, that Davies journeyed to see Mr Harkness at Bristol. Fortunately the centenarian lived in a ground-floor flat and with Mod, who had never been to Bristol but had eruditely lectured on the place throughout the journey, pushing, the invalid chair was manoeuvred through the small entrance hall and into the old man’s sitting room.
‘He’s still getting dressed,’ his elderly daughter said. ‘He takes his time at his age, you understand, but he won’t let me help him. He says I’m too old to dress myself.’ She was a grey tub of a lady. Davies wondered what her father would look like.
It was a pleasing apartment, its expansive front window framing the choppy water of the Bristol docks, with the enclosing land easing itself up from the shore on all sides. They could see the hull of Brunel’s fine old ship The Great Britain lying in her special berth.
‘That ship and my father are both over a century old,’ she said. ‘They sort of keep each other company.’
She asked them if they would like coffee. Father Harvey had parked the van and gone to visit a retired priest, a drinking companion of former days.
‘Mr Harkness will be very glad to see you,’ smiled his daughter. ‘He was very excited when I told him you had telephoned. He loves to talk over old times. I told him you were a policeman and he seemed more taken with the idea than ever. This is quite a big day for him. He’ll probably wear his red velvet jacket.’ She went and listened at the door and then returned. ‘Normally that’s for birthdays only, his velvet jacket, although I don’t suppose, at a hundred and one, he can hope to get a great deal more wear out of it now.’ They were aware of a movement in the passage outside the room. ‘Ah, I think he’s arrived,’ said the lady. She turned warningly. ‘One thing I must tell you. Mr Harkness is deaf.’
Through the door shuffled the centenarian, almost pixie-like in his smallness, a jovial pointed face, bright china eyes, and pink-cheeked. A little dewdrop dangled like a decoration from the tip of his nose. He wiped it away with the sleeve of his red velvet jacket. ‘Hello, hello,’ he greeted them. ‘I’m Charlie Harkness. I’m a hundred and one years old.’
His very presence made them glad. Davies smiled, so did Mod. The daughter looked pleased.
‘Sit down, sit down,’ called the old man blithely. ‘I’m a bit on the short side. They won’t have to dig out much earth for me.’ He cackled at his joke. They sat down grinning. He said he would like his morning milk with a few drops in it.
‘I’m supposed to be deaf,’ he confided when the lady had gone from the room. ‘But I’m not as deaf as I make out. I only pretend to her because otherwise she rambles on all day, and I don’t want to listen. You know how women get when they’re knocking on in years. But if you get close enough to my left ear I’ll be able to hear you fair enough. And I’ve got all my nuts and bolts too. So I’ll know what you’re talking about.’ Davies had a mental picture of him in the witness box.
Mod was looking at one of a series of sere military pictures on the wall. ‘You fought in Zululand, then, Mr Harkness?’ he remarked.
‘Zululand? Oh, yes I was there. Fighting. Not that it did much good. They’re all in Bristol now, you know. Last summer I went out for a bit of a stroll and there’s blackies all over the place! I thought to myself at the time, last time I saw a Fuzzy-wuzzy as close as that he was stuck on the end of my lance.’
His daughter brought in a tray with the cups of coffee and the beaker of milk. Mr Harkness sniffed the milk to make sure she’d splashed the scotch in it. ‘I heard what you said,’ she reproved. ‘About blackies. You can be sent to prison for saying things like that, these days. And Mr Davies is a policeman.’
‘Blow it,’ returned the old man. ‘There’s not a prison could hold me.’ He stopped and considered Davies. ‘Oh yes, you’re from the force. I’d forgot that. What are you after, young man?’
Davies felt relieved that he had been saved the approach. ‘It’s something that happened a few years ago,’ he said, moving close to the ancient ear. ‘And I wondered if you would remember something about it. Back in London. Do you remember a girl called Celia Norris …?’
The name did not register. Davies could see that. ‘Oh I’ve known a few girls in my time …’ began the old man with customary joviality.
‘She disappeared,’ continued Davies. ‘In fact it seems she was murdered.’ He saw the alarm jump into the woman’s face and she began to move forward protectively. But Mr Harkness pushed her away excitedly. ‘Ah that. Oh, I remember that, all right. The night I fell in the can
al.’
‘What can you remember about it?’ called Davies, relief warming him. ‘Tell us everything you can remember.’
‘Oh, I remember, I remember,’ said Mr Harkness, making a little song of it. ‘I used to drink a little drop in those days. Well, I was a youngster then, in my seventies, I suppose. But that night just about put the end to my drinking, my big drinking anyway. Because I fell in the bleeding canal and I went home in wet things and I got bronchitis and pneumonia and all the rest of it. They thought I was going to collect my cards, I can tell you.’
‘That was when I took him firmly in hand,’ interrupted his daughter. ‘I nursed him better and I kept him away from the bottle. My husband had just passed away and Mr Harkness was all I had. I’ve kept him well. Well enough to see a hundred and one.’
‘For Christ’s sake, don’t go on so, Dulcie,’ said Mr Harkness, irritated. ‘They’ve come to hear me, not you. Why don’t you take the cups out?’
‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’d like to hear what this is about. It all sounds a bit unpleasant to me.’
Davies nodded to her. She sat down and folded her hands in her rounded lap. Mr Harkness ignored her. ‘Yes, I remember it.’
‘Mr Harkness,’ said Davies, creeping close to the fragile ear. ‘What exactly did you see that night? Did you see a girl?’
‘I’d been to the Labour Club,’ recalled the old man, determined to tell it his way. He closed his eyes reflectively. ‘We used to have some very good times there at the Labour Club. You could get pissed there for a couple of bob in those days. Easy.’ Dulcie drew in a deep breath but Davies’s hand asked that she should not interrupt. The breath softened to a sigh.
‘And that night I was drunk as a monkey. Hot summer that was and I’d taken on a load of ale, I can tell you. That’s why I tumbled in the canal. Blind drunk. Blotto. I used to go home along the canal bank, like it was a short cut for me, and I was leaning over, I remember, trying to see myself in the water. Just where that lamp is on the bridge. Or was, I don’t know whether it’s there now.’ He stopped. He seemed breathless. Davies turned to his daughter. ‘Is he all right?’ he whispered. ‘I don’t want to distress him.’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 25
