His area of operation, if it could be termed that—his ‘manor’ in police parlance—spread out in a ragged hand from London to the north-west. Fortunately his efforts there were reinforced by many other policemen.
It was a choked place, a great suburb of grit and industrial debasement. Streets spilled into factories and factories leaned over railway yards. A power station, its cooling towers suggesting a touch of Ali Baba, squatted heavily amid the mess like a fat man unable to walk a step further. In winter the air was wet and in summer the sun’s brightest and best was rarely more than bronze. Spring might bring an inexperienced cuckoo in from the country but he soon fled for there was nowhere for him. Trees and flowers were born to fight and lose.
There were factories for the making or assembling of soup, dynamos, home electric organs, rat poison, bicycles and boot polish, conglomerated in all their various grimes. Smoke hung about and the dust had no time to settle on Sunday before it was stirred again on early Monday. In the old days the district had been quite famous for its watercress.
Lying amid it all, like an old man’s outstretched arm, was the Grand Union Canal, grand in no way now. Its greened unmoving water divided the whole region, its modest but still ornate bridges pinned the banks together. Almost parallel with the canal there were several main, mean, shopping streets, jointing in the way a drainpipe joints at a change of direction. The people of the place were Irish, Indians, Pakistanis, West Indians, Africans and some of the original British. Few of them liked it. It was somewhere to be, to work.
It was evening by the time Davies left the Casualty Department of the hospital with his stitches, his black eye and his aching head. He reported to the police station, where his injuries hardly raised a glance, and then walked to a public house called The Babe in Arms where it was his homegoing habit to drink as much as possible with his fellow lodger and friend Mod Lewis, a Welshman named Modest after Tchaikovsky’s brother. Mod was happy to be known as a philosopher. His great talent was loyalty (he had been faithful to the same Labour Exchange for twelve years) and he knew many unusual and useless things, for he had read half the books in the public library.
Mod viewed his smoked eye with resigned sympathy. ‘Been leading the charge again, have we,’ he sighed.
‘Once more into the breach,’ agreed Davies heavily. He examined his eye and plastered forehead in the mirror across the bar. ‘The eye is nothing,’ he said. ‘You ought to see my body. Covered in coppers’ bootmarks. I’m a sort of human drawbridge. They have me knocked down and then they all run over me.’
Although it was not dole-day Mod bought him a beer and he drank it gratefully but not without some pain.
The public bar was as tight as a ravine, only narrowly escaping being a corridor. Along the windows on to the street was frosted glass, curled with Victorian designs. At that time of the evening, with the lights still on in the fronts of the shops across the road, the homeward figures of the workers passed like a shadowgraph. A rough woman came in and put a coin in the juke box. She played the same tune all the time, ‘Viva España’, and when she had taken a few drinks she would sing and dance to it as well. She winked at Davies as though they shared some private love, joy or secret. The sound of the record overcame the cries of Job who dolefully sold his evening papers at the corner crying: ‘Tragedy tonight! Tragedy tonight!’ It was a statement never challenged and indeed frequently true.
‘You know,’ said Mod the philosopher, pulling his pint glass from his face with a slow strength that suggested it might have been glued there. ‘Injured as you are, you’re a lovely drinker, Dangerous. Lovely.’
Davies thanked him seriously.
‘No, but you are,’ pursued Mod. ‘I’ve been watching you lifting that pint. It’s like a bird in flight.’
Davies was accustomed to the poet’s fancies. He acknowledged it with an encore of the drinking movement which Mod duly stood back to admire further. The demonstration drained the glass and Davies ordered refills.
‘It’s a pity to see you in such a poor way, especially since your jug-lip has finally healed,’ remarked Mod, accepting the beer gratefully as though it were an unexpected pleasure. ‘It looked very nasty. Just like a spout. It was painful to sit at the table and observe you attempting to drink soup.’
‘It’s the first time you’ve mentioned it,’ said Davies, pulling down his lip and examining it in the mirror across the bar.
‘Well, I didn’t like to before, boy,’ said Mod. ‘And neither did our fellow lodgers. Indeed it’s nothing very new to see you come injured to the dinner table. Tonight they will have a new array to intrigue them.’
‘Part of the job I suppose,’ shrugged Davies. ‘I seem to have spent half my police life looking up from the floor into the face of somebody intent on murder.’
Mod sniffed over the rim of his beer. ‘If you ask me that’s why they keep you. You’re no detective, I can tell that.’
‘You’ve mentioned it before.’
‘No offence, Dangerous. But even you must realize that. When did they last give you a decent, wholesome crime of your own to solve? They either have you trekking around knocking on doors or leading the charge up the stairs to some madman’s door. For example, where, may I ask, did you come by the jug lip?’
‘A disturbance of the peace,’ said Davies. ‘A fracas. The sort of thing you’re bound to get in this sort of place. Have you ever thought how many people around here are actually at war with each other? We’ve got two religious lots of Irish, hostile African tribes, Indians and Pakistanis, Jews and Arabs. That’s how I got the lip, the Jews and the Arabs. Some fool at St Saviour’s Hall got the bookings mixed up and let the place to the local branch of El-Fatah and the Jewish Lads’ Brigade on the same night. And I got in the middle of it.’
He pulled down the lip again and peered over to the mirror. ‘It’s gone back all right, though,’ he said. He began to think of dinner. ‘What time is it?’
‘The clock just above your head says six-thirty,’ observed Mod.
‘Oh, yes, the clock. I forgot that was there.’
The rough woman had drunk enough to inspire a trembling of her heels and heavy calves. She began to emit small Iberian cries. The record of ‘Viva España’, which she had already played twice, swooped again on to the turntable at her touch of the selector button.
‘Let’s go before Flamenco Fanny starts splintering the floor,’ suggested Davies.
‘Indeed,’ agreed Mod. ‘My stomach, if no other part of me, draws me to Mrs Fulljames.’
People were gratefully going home from work, tramping in tired quiet lines along the dusty fronts of the small shops. It had been a warm autumn day, and the industrial sky was gritty, glowing red over the cooling towers of the power stations as the sun quit. The roofs of the terraced houses hung like parched tongues, smutty privet hedges enclosed tight little gardens, dull windows sat on low windowsills. Many of the people who passed were West Indians, Indians or Irish. The lights of the Bingo Hall began to glimmer promptly at seven.
‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens, was a larger house, ponderous Victorian with a monkey tree in the front garden. Mod used his key to open the door and they walked in on the rest of the residents already sitting with gloomy expectancy at the evening table. Doris, Davies’s wife, was staring at her bread-and-butter plate in the manner of one expecting invisible writing to materialize; Minnie Banks, the thin schoolmistress, sat head down like a safety pin; while Mr Smeeton, The Complete Home Entertainer, was dressed in the leather trousers and braces of a Bavarian smack-dancer, in readiness for a later engagement. It was rarely a festive board but tonight seemed even more subdued than usual. To Davies it appeared that they had been awaiting him. He and Mod muttered general greetings and sat down into the silence. Then Mrs Fulljames came powerfully from the adjoining kitchen. She regarded Davies with controlled contempt.
‘I thought you’re supposed to be a detective,’ she began truculently, thrusting her jaw at him. ‘That’s w
hat I thought.’
‘It’s a general misapprehension,’ said Davies, removing his face.
‘Don’t be rude,’ Doris said to him from the opposite side of the table.
‘I take it from whence it comes, Mrs Davies,’ sniffed Mrs Fulljames. She revolved heavily towards Davies again. ‘A detective,’ she repeated.
‘What seems to be the complaint?’ asked Davies.
‘Complaint? Complaint? Crime, more like it! And right under your nose. Detective indeed.’ Her bosom soared as though steam was being pumped into her.
‘I’ve rung the police station and they said to tell you when you got in,’ the landlady continued tartly. ‘I could hear the idiots laughing like girls. They said no point in sending a copper around if there’s one in the house already.’
With deliberation Davies took out his notebook and licked the end of his police pencil. ‘You can put that rubbish away,’ rasped Mrs Fulljames. ‘There’s no time for writing things down. There’s a suet pudding done in the kitchen.’ She glanced suspiciously over her shoulder. A skein of steam was coming from the open door like a ghostly hand trying to attract her attention. She wavered between polemic and pans and decided the pans could not wait. She revolved rather than turned and pounded into the cooking regions. Davies put his notebook away. He glanced earnestly around the table. ‘What seems to be the trouble?’ he inquired.
Doris, as though doing a reluctant wife’s duty, said: ‘There’s been a theft in the house, that’s what. A theft.’
‘Good God, I didn’t think there was anything worth nicking here,’ replied Davies honestly.
‘The brass bedstead,’ said Doris, trumping the remark. ‘The antique brass bedstead in Mr Sahidar’s room. It’s gone. Antique.’ She was someone who always needs to add an extra word.
Davies checked around the table. ‘And I perceive that Mr Sahidar is also no longer with us. Am I right in deducing that he and the bedstead went together?’
‘Both gone,’ sniffed Doris. ‘And right in the room next to yours. I wouldn’t mind, but it’s right next door. It makes me feel small, I can tell you.’
‘Mrs Davies,’ said Davies. ‘You can hardly expect me to keep vigil through the night in case a fellow guest makes off with his bed. It’s not something that you cater for. In any event I spent last night in the comfort of the cemetery.’
‘All we know is it’s gone,’ sniffed Doris. ‘Mrs Fulljames went in there this morning and all she found was a pile of bedclothes and the smell of incense. That bedstead was worth a hundred pounds. It used to be Mr Fulljames’s bed.’ She performed her customary pause, then added: ‘When he was alive.’
‘A relic, indeed,’ muttered Davies.
‘Antique,’ put in Mrs Fulljames, arriving from the kitchen with a frightening cannonball of suet on a steaming plate. It looked so heavy that she gave the impression of pushing it rather than carrying it. ‘Antique, Mr Policeman.’
Mrs Fulljames attacked the suet pudding with a murderous knife. Davies edged away, half expecting it to scream. She served everyone else first and smashed the final lump on his plate. She went to the kitchen and returned with boiled potatoes, carrots and a jug of Oxo. ‘Priceless,’ she muttered. ‘That bed.’
No one answered. Minnie Banks looked frightened, Mod knocked the suet pudding around his plate and the leather-costumed Mr Smeeton stared upwards as if in dreams he saw the Bavarian mountains. Suddenly Mrs Fulljames dropped her face into the steam of her dinner and sobbed among the vapour. ‘It belonged to Mr Fulljames!’ she cried. ‘The late Mr Fulljames.’ Doris leaned across to pat her hand but the sentimental moment soon flew. ‘How?’ she barked at Davies. ‘How?’
Davies fought to dispose of a hot mouthful of suet and meat. He felt it drop burning into his inside. ‘I don’t know,’ he said bitterly. ‘How do I know? Mr Sahidar was a Persian. Maybe he flew it out of the window!’
Mrs Fulljames regarded him fiercely, an expression helped by half a carrot protruding from her lips like the tongue of a dragon. ‘I take it,’ she said, taking the carrot out with her spoon and laying it among its friends on her plate. ‘I take it you will carry out a serious investigation. Tonight.’
‘In one hour,’ he promised. ‘I’ll have this place swarming with police.’
Chapter Three
Inspector Vernon Yardbird looked sourly across the threadbare rooftops from his office on the fourth floor of the police station. In thirty years in the force, and in that same division, he had viewed the same area, although he had during that time ascended from the Police Constables’ room in the basement, next to the cells, to his own elevated office.
He considered he should have gone much further. Not upwards but sideways, in the direction of Scotland Yard. He had always considered that he had a Scotland Yard name. After all, top policemen always had Scotland Yard names. Hatstick of the Yard, Harborough of the Yard, Todhunter of the Yard. What better than Yardbird of the Yard? It had a sound to it.
Unfortunately others had seen his prospects differently. He had always been a painstaking policeman, even pedantic, but generally thought to be lacking in imagination. Today he was awaiting a visit from a man from the Special Branch. He did not approve of the Special Branch.
During the summer it had not been unentertaining to look from his window for there was a students’ hostel across the first bank of roofs and the girls used to lie out sunbathing on the hot, gritty days. He did not approve of students, but he did not mind having them under surveillance and to this end he had brought a pair of racing binoculars to the office. But now their disporting was done. They had retreated with the sun and even a brief burst of Indian summer had not brought them out again. Now, after a few fine days, dank autumn was spread over the roofs. He did not approve of autumn.
Downstairs the desk sergeant was attempting to placate an old but vibrant widow who had come with a complaint that her neighbours were terrorizing her with almost incessant use of their lavatory chain. He saw the Special Branch man walk in and politely interrupted the catalogue of flushings to speak to Inspector Yardbird upstairs. He told the Special Branch man to go up.
Yardbird did not know him. Detective Sergeant Herbert Green. What a name for the Special Branch. It was packed with upstarts, anyway, and this upstart had the name Green. He had no time for them these days. Some of them even came from Universities. He did not approve of the Universities.
Green turned out to be a pale and diffident young man, almost apologetically placing a file on Yardbird’s desk as soon as he came in, ‘Ramscar,’ he said. ‘Cecil Victor Ramscar. Aged forty-five.’
‘I know him, I know him,’ sniffed Yardbird impatiently. ‘He was born around here, baptized, went to school, joined the scouts, and did his first bank robbery all within a couple of square miles.’
‘Good,’ said the Sergeant easily. ‘Then you’ll know who to look for.’
‘He’s back, is he? The bastard. I thought we’d got shot of him, for ever. He slung his hook a few years ago.’
‘Right. He’s been in Australia and in America. Getting his fingers dirty with various things, but he’s come back. He didn’t come in through any normal channels or we would have spotted him quicker. But we think he’s back on your manor, Inspector. He’s gone to ground around here.’
‘What do you want him for?’
‘We don’t know.’
Yardbird looked up petulantly. ‘That’s a bloody good start, I must say.’
Green shrugged. ‘It’s no start at all,’ he agreed. ‘But we’ve got nothing on him. Nothing. We might get him for illegal entry, if we could find him, but we might have trouble in sticking that on him.’
‘In that case, what d’you want?’
‘We just want him located. And tagged.’
‘For nothing?’
‘It’s nothing at the moment. We think it will be something.’
A thick banging came at the door, no sharp knock with a hand, but a dull contact with the wood. Yardbird called a
nd in came a canteen woman with two cups, thick as chamber pots, sitting on equally substantial saucers. Green saw the mildly red mark on her forehead and knew that she had banged the door with her forehead. They took the tea and the woman shuffled out.
‘What’s Ramscar up to then?’
‘We think he may be going fashionable and doing a little bit of abduction, hi-jacking, hostaging or something like that. He’s been involved in some fairly major league things in Australia and in California and he hasn’t come back to London for nothing. We think he’s lined up in partnership with a dissident group. For money, of course, not ideology. We think he could be the heavy man in a political kidnapping.’
Yardbird sniffed. ‘You don’t know very much, do you? There’s a hell of a lot of ifs and buts and maybes.’
‘That’s all we have,’ shrugged Green. It was not all they had but he was not telling Yardbird any more. ‘What we’re asking,’ he said, ‘is that Ramscar is located.’
‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ asked Yardbird. ‘You’ve got enough people in your office, surely.’
‘We could have a couple of men going around this district,’ agreed Green. ‘But it was thought better that somebody local should do it. Somebody who knows his way around.’
‘It was thought better?’ inquired Yardbird. ‘Who thought it better?’
‘The Commissioner,’ smiled Green, laying down a good card.
‘Oh, I see. Well in that case he’s probably right.’
Green drank his tea at one attempt and replaced the heavy cup and saucer on Yardbird’s desk. ‘Christ,’ said Green. ‘They need to have thick cups to keep that stuff in.’ He smiled in a confiding way at Yardbird. ‘It won’t matter if absolute secrecy is not possible in this,’ he said. ‘In fact I think that in a way the clumsier the inquiries, the better. If they can be conducted in such a way as to stir up Mr Ramscar, worry him, make him break cover or play his hand hurriedly, then that might be what we want.’
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