Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  ‘And he’s so interesting,’ echoed Doris, still with a hint of guilt. ‘He’s done so many things.’

  ‘He’s eaten my fucking Smarties for a start,’ grumbled Davies bitterly.

  Mrs Fulljames held a restraining arm like a point duty policeman. Some rain, as if retained by capillary action in the creases of her pink plastic sleeve, now drizzled on to his sheet. ‘We will send some more,’ she said in her final way. ‘So stop being a misery. You don’t look as though you could manage a Smartie anyway.’

  ‘I expect they feed you by tubes, don’t they?’ agreed Doris. ‘You’d never get a Smartie down a tube.’

  ‘Anyway, you know what you did, don’t you?’ asked Mrs Fulljames.

  ‘I gather,’ said Davies wearily. ‘That I got a dustbin put over my head, was then bashed about something fearful, and finally knocked in the canal.’

  ‘You also left the front door open,’ said Doris frostily. ‘Your key was in it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘And somebody walked in and stole the hallstand.’ Mrs Fulljames finished it for her, perhaps afraid Doris might not achieve the right emphasis. ‘My antique hallstand.’

  ‘Antique?’ queried Davies. ‘That object was antique?’

  ‘It belonged to Mr Fulljames,’ muttered Doris, indicating that was a mark of authenticity. ‘The late Mr Fulljames.’

  ‘Perhaps that Persian bloke—the one who nicked the bed—has been on the prowl again,’ suggested Davies dismally.

  ‘You’re being frivolous,’ said Mrs Fulljames haughtily. ‘I’ll bet you’re laughing all over your face behind that mess. Anyway we didn’t come here to argue. How long will you be in?’

  ‘Christ knows. The embroidery class is coming back tomorrow. I reckon they’re going to try and keep me as a demonstration model or something.’

  ‘How long?’ insisted Doris. ‘Tell Mrs Fulljames.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ He managed that most difficult of all vocal achievements, a quiet shout.

  ‘Do you want your room kept? That’s the point.’

  Davies was horrified. ‘My room? You wouldn’t let my room?’

  ‘It’s economics, Mr Davies. That’s how we have to live. Surely even you know that.’

  ‘Jesus wept. Don’t let it. I’ll keep paying.’

  ‘In that case, all right,’ sniffed Mrs Fulljames indicating a load had been taken off her mind. ‘We’ll discuss the hallstand at some other time. I don’t feel up to it now.’

  ‘Nor me,’ muttered Davies trying to slide under the sheet.

  She produced a newspaper from her plastic folds. ‘I brought you this,’ she said as though they had reached a truce. ‘Evening News. Last night’s. But in here it makes no difference, I suppose.’

  ‘None at all,’ he agreed defeatedly. ‘The world hardly exists.’

  They backed towards the door. Then Doris, unexpectedly, gave a little birdlike dart forward and kissed him on his sore cheek. A final minor cascade of trapped rain escaped from her hat on to his face. ‘Bye, then,’ she said, then anxiously: ‘You’ve, you’ve got your insurances all paid up, haven’t you?’

  Mod Lewis came through the door like a felon. ‘I’m not all that keen on this place,’ he explained on tiptoe when he reached to the foot of Davies’s bed. ‘I was a porter here once, you know, during the crime wave. Someone kept stealing the patients’ false teeth. By night, see.’

  He rolled his eyes melodramatically. ‘Everybody was suspect, boy. Even the consultant surgeons. Everybody got left with a nasty taste in their mouths. Especially the patients.’ He advanced around the side of the bed to Davies, as though his experience as a porter had given him some professional knowledge. ‘Aye, that’s better,’ he said, surveying the swollen face approvingly. ‘Nice job they’ve done there, those sutures. It’ll all go back in place eventually. It’s subsided even now.’

  ‘You’ve been in to see me before?’

  ‘Oh yes, man. Course I have. The first morning, as soon as I heard. It was a good excuse for not going to the library. But you looked very poorly, Dangerous. Never saw a face like it. Your head was all swelled up. Reminded me of the old globe of the world we had at school. That was knocked about too. I sat with you for an hour or more. You were right out and since I had nobody to talk to I amused myself by tracing the major rivers, sea and air routes on your face—and the railways, of course, most interesting.’

  ‘That’s one thing about me, I’m never boring,’ said Davies. ‘Do you think you could get a message to a young woman for me.’

  ‘Josie,’ said Mod confidently. ‘She’s coming in tonight. She read it in the local paper and she came into The Babe in Arms. Nice little girl. Bit skinny. Bit young for you. She wanted to come this morning but I said I’d come first. Just to see you were passable.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Passable,’ nodded Mod, but with some doubt. ‘You’re sort of going down from when I last viewed you. Who did it?’

  ‘Ramscar, his lot. It must have been,’ said Davies quietly. ‘Out to kill me, I suppose.’

  ‘Davus sum non Oedipus,’ quoted Mod, looking at him glumly. ‘Publius Terence, Roman poet.’

  ‘What’s it mean?’ asked Davies.

  ‘I am a simple man, no solver of riddles,’ obliged Mod. ‘I read it yesterday and I thought how fitting it was.’

  He had been standing but now he pulled the small visitor’s chair confidently to the bedside. ‘But you must be standing on somebody’s toes, that’s for certain,’ he said.

  ‘In my blundering sort of way,’ agreed Davies.

  ‘Ever thought that’s maybe why you were put on to the Ramscar business in the very beginning?’ suggested Mod. ‘Maybe they didn’t want anybody who’d be too…well… subtle.’

  ‘Everybody who comes in here is so kind,’ sighed Davies. ‘Is anybody feeding my dog?’

  ‘Mr Smeeton, The Complete Home Entertainer,’ Mod told him. ‘I tried to feed the foul thing but it bit me. So I sent Mr Smeeton. He went along in his dog outfit, on the way to one of his performances. He says he is coming to see you.’

  ‘Not in one of his costumes, I hope.’

  ‘Probably,’ said Mod. ‘He said he’d come by on the way to work. So you know what that means. One of his extravaganzas.’

  ‘I can’t wait.’

  A silence dropped between them for a moment, as it does at hospital bedsides. Mod wanted to say something. ‘You’ve heard about the hallstand being nicked, I suppose,’ he said eventually. Davies sensed that he had intended to say something else.

  ‘They came in, you know,’ he replied. ‘Mrs Fulljames and Doris. It was terrifying. She even gave my Smarties away.’ He looked at Mod through his bruises. ‘What else was it you were going to say?’

  ‘Well, nothing really. I was just wondering…not prying into your business as a police detective or anything. I was just wondering how it was going. The Celia thing.’

  Davies had spent his prostrate hours going through it all portion by portion. ‘I keep turning up stones, and finding wiggly things underneath. Very odd things some of them too. Very nasty, some. But they don’t seem to have any connection. A couple of hours before I was buffed up I thought I’d found a good lead, something that’s been reeking for years and, sure enough, out it came.’

  Mod continued thoughtfully. ‘Perhaps, begging your pardon, Dangerous, perhaps blundering about like you’re apt to do, you’ve stirred up more than one dirty pond.’

  ‘Listen Mod,’ Davies said. ‘When I feel more up to it, I’ll tell you what I’ve found so far. It’s a lot, but it’s nothing, if you see what I mean. You might be able to see something that I can’t.’

  The Welshman nodded. ‘That’s more than probable,’ he accepted. ‘In the meantime, I’ve done something thing on your behalf. I thought while you was stuck in here I’d take over on the case of Celia Norris for a few days.’

  ‘And what?’

  ‘Oh, I’ve done nothing really. Nothing at all.
And I don’t want to interfere, if you understand me, casting aspersions or anything. But I did notice something. I’m not going to tell you what it is because it would be putting ideas into your head—and at this stage they might not be the right ideas. They certainly wouldn’t be very welcome ideas, take it for gospel. I’ll point you in the right direction and then you’ll have to make the same conclusions yourself.’

  Davies stared at him. ‘All right. What is it for God’s sake?’

  ‘I’ve just looked up the account of the Norris murder in the files of the local paper, in the Citizen. I take it you’ve done that?’

  ‘One of the first things,’ confirmed Davies. ‘The press cuttings are all in the dossier. I read that right through.’

  Mod got to his feet. ‘Well, when you get out of here go and take another look in the files. See if you can see what I think I saw. All right?’

  ‘Can’t you tell me now? Come on, Mod. You’re supposed to be my pal.’

  ‘Thank you, but no. Have a look yourself. I’m not being the cause of any unpleasantness. Goodbye, Dangerous. Hope you’re better when I come in next time.’

  ‘Rotten bastard,’ muttered Davies. But Mod just laughed and went out.

  Mr Smeeton, The Complete Home Entertainer, materialized at the ward door that evening, as Mod had forecast, his feet hoofed, his chest chestnut and a life-sized horse’s head tucked beneath his arm.

  ‘I’ve taken on a partner,’ he confidingly said as he came across the floor. Visitors’ conversation in the ward stopped. ‘I’ve left him outside. He’s the back-end.’

  ‘Where else?’ agreed Davies. ‘Nice to see you’re branching out. Taking on staff. You’ll have to be a bit careful, though, won’t you, about who you employ for the arse. It seems to me that could be a bit risky.’

  ‘It’s a clean show,’ said Mr Smeeton primly. ‘And I employ only clean people.’ He put the horse’s head down on its ear on the bed. It grinned at Davies glassily. Mr Smeeton carefully examined him. ‘Nasty,’ he breathed eventually. ‘Very nasty. I knew a bloke in a knife throwing act who went off with his partner’s wife. I remember going to the hospital. He looked just like you.’

  ‘I do an act with a dustbin,’ said Davies. ‘Followed by a spectacular dive into icy water.’

  ‘So I understand,’ said the entertainer morosely. ‘And you left the front door open and the hallstand was stolen. We’ve had nothing but moans about that around the table ever since you’ve been here. She’s a hard woman that Mrs Fulljames. She would never make the grade as a theatrical landlady. No kindness in her. Somehow I can’t see her lifting a midget up to the lavatory chain.’

  The face ached as Davies grinned. He adjusted it again. ‘No, somehow Mrs Fulljames doesn’t fit that picture,’ he agreed. ‘Thank you for feeding Kitty, by the way.’

  ‘Glad to help,’ said Mr Smeeton kindly. He stamped his hooves on the floor. They sounded real. People looked up again. ‘I’ll have to be going. Our show begins at eight. I hope you’re out soon.’ He picked up his horse’s head from the blanket and swivelled one of its eyes. ‘See you then. Toodle pip.’

  As he reached the door, the head wedged awkwardly under his arm, Josie walked in. Her small face looked very pinched. Her stride was jerky. ‘I suppose he’d been to see you,’ she guessed. ‘Him with the horse’s head.’

  ‘Right,’ nodded Davies. ‘They keep trying to make me laugh.’

  She looked at his face. Then she sat down heavily on the little chair, took both his hands in hers and began to cry on them.

  Chapter Ten

  As it was Sunday evening it had begun to rain. The Salvation Army band formed their circle, their small Stonehenge of faith, outside their Citadel, and turning their blue backs on the rest of the town and the world began to play inwardly.

  It was the wrong season for it to be anything much more than a private gathering. In the summer they often had people in the dry street, loitering, offering advice or ribaldry, while they sang their songs of love. There was, at that season, a man who contrived to do a cockney soft-shoe shuffle to their tunes. But now, in the dumb autumn dusk, there were only two outside the circle who took any notice of their burly playing or heard the hope in the words they proclaimed.

  The first man was always there, at any time or term, an active simpleton who enjoyed conducting the band behind the true conductor’s back. He had followed every sweep of the hands and arms for years and, in truth, performed them faithfully and well. This shadow had also acquired a Salvation Army cap from an Army Surplus Store and it gave his corded face a certain peak of religious authority. Sunday night was the gladdest night of the week for him, not because he heard and accepted their salvation, but because it was the only night of the week when he was not alone. The other witness was Dangerous Davies.

  They had discharged him from the hospital with the well-meant advice to be more careful in the future. He had walked painfully that evening to the police station to write the required official report on the attack and his comrade officers had gathered around him, inspecting his injuries, poking him as though he were some manner of specimen, and discussing among themselves various wounds suffered by policemen in the past. He was grateful to return to the rain. He had walked under it in the direction of the shuttered High Street and heard, through the veil of the evening, the sounds of the Sabbath band.

  Davies had always admired and enjoyed the Salvation Army. Even on this evening, drear and dun, they seemed to puff out warmth, as though the fervent breath emitted through the oompah instruments was pumped from some special Christian boiler. Standing there by the telephone box, on the second day of his two-day convalescence, the street lights through the squared post office panes making a guard across his damaged face, he remembered years ago how his mother had dearly wanted to join the Salvation Army. But his father had disliked the bonnet and had forbidden her to wear it. They were both dead and gone now and he wondered idly whether part of his father’s purgatory was to sit and watch his mother wearing an eternal hat of Booth’s blue and red.

  Davies was observing Andrew Parsons, pumping warm low notes through a tuba. He was a cubed man with a serious and solid face (which anyone who plays a tuba must have since it is an instrument which precludes a smile), level shoulders, legs planted surely astride; a long way travelled from the bag-eyed lad who had stolen ladies’ garments from half the washing lines in the neighbourhood. Davies approved.

  The commandant of the little band stopped the music for a prayer. Presumably as a privilege of rank he was handed an umbrella, ringed with the army’s blue and red, and clutching it between his hands in the manner of some different faith with a crucifix, he said a compendium of prayers. He then commenced a sermon, taking predictably as his text (and not for the first time, Davies imagined) the assurance about where two or three are gathered together in His name, there will He be also. Now that they were not playing their instruments, the band seemed to sink lower in the street almost as though the drizzle was quietly melting them. The sermon was too long for the liking of the pseudo-conductor outside the circle and he began shouting: ‘Get on with the hymns!’ and ‘Stop the bleeding rabbiting!’ which finally provoked a bassoonist to turn and threaten, in a thoroughly unchristian fashion, to close him up for good.

  Likewise Davies found that wisdom and water were poor mixers, so he slyly slotted himself into the telephone box, pretended to be making a call, and observed Parsons from there. The commandant, he perceived, seemed to shout all the louder for his benefit, or perhaps to cast his words to the windows of the street, alight and uncaring all around. His mouth opened so wide that the rain dropped in. But nobody heeded. He was a wilderness crying in a voice.

  Eventually the band played again and, as if God were also relieved that the sermon was ended, the rain eased and the faces of the bandsmen dried out. At the end came a prayer and Davies emerged from the telephone box to meet the demanding eyes of Parsons who was making the collection in his hat.

  �
��Hope you’ve enjoyed it, sir. Would you like to contribute something?’ he asked in a way that indicated that Davies owed an admission fee. Davies looked down at the floor of the hat. The simpleton had placed two milk bottle tops in there and Davies added the twopence which he had held in the cause of realism during his bogus phone call. Parsons, who, from experience, had accepted the milk bottle tops without argument, stared at the two pence and then at Davies, shaming him into putting a further ten pence piece. The coin lay like a silver moon in a black sky.

  ‘Thank you, sir,’ said Parsons, looking down into the black-bottomed hat. ‘We’re saving up for a new concert hall.’

  The money was, nevertheless, religiously counted and after another humphing hymn and a prayer, so quiet it was almost an aside, the cordon bleu broke and its members went off through the damp dark, nursing their instruments like infants. The banner was examined and Davies heard the portly woman who had borne it, sigh, ‘Sopping wet again. Take all week to dry.’ He turned and followed Parsons through the streets.

  ‘Pity there weren’t a few more of us there,’ he observed chattily, catching up with the square, striding man. Parsons looked round quickly and grinned grimly. ‘Can’t expect it this weather,’ he said philosophically. ‘It takes all our faith to keep us out there. Be much easier in a nice warm citadel.’

  ‘Still it was enjoyable even in the rain,’ said Davies. ‘I couldn’t see the Catholics having High Mass in those sort of conditions.’

  ‘No, that’s true enough,’ agreed Parsons thoughtfully. ‘You couldn’t burn incense or candles on a night like this, could you.’ He walked a few more yards and then asked, ‘Are you a Christian?’

  ‘No. I’m a copper.’

  Parsons showed no surprise. He continued walking and nodded quietly. ‘Yes, I thought so. I’ve seen you around. Your face seems to have changed, though.’

  ‘It’s old age,’ answered Davies. They had reached some untidy steps leading up to one of the narrow Victorian houses. There were odd curtains in every window. ‘You live here?’ he asked.