Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  ‘It’s a noise a turkey makes,’ said Davies.

  ‘Oh, Christ. Stop it. I wanted her to take it in her mouth, But she wouldn’t.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ said Davies. He had become outwardly even more calm. ‘I wouldn’t like to give you a gobble either.’

  Boot’s head was trembling in his palms. ‘And that was it. She got all ratty and slapped my face and I caught hold of her wrists to stop her. I was only playing, really, but she took it all seriously. Then she, kicked me, hard—very nastily too—and rushed out. I saw her get on her bike and she went. That was the last I saw of her.’

  ‘Leaving you with her bloomers. Something to remember her by.’

  ‘That’s the lot,’ said Boot miserably. ‘That’s all. Make what you like out of it.’

  Davies stepped back and sat on one of the seats. ‘All those years ago,’ he said shaking his head at the wonder of it. ‘And you can still remember how hard she kicked you. And all over a little thing like a gobble…’ Boot squealed as the big man jumped at him. Davies picked him up and thrust him back against the swaying curved walls. Three times he banged him against the wall. Then he turned and threw him half the length of the carriage again. Boot lay on the floor, moaning. He got up as far as his elbow. ‘You…you fucking hypocrite,’ he howled. ‘You only do this because you’ve never had a gobble in your bloody life!’

  He was saved from almost certain death by the lurch of the train. Davies stumbled and stopped. He sat down heavily on the cross seats not doing anything. Suddenly he felt very cold. He could see fingers of rain hitting the windows and extending down. ‘Look at that,’ he called to Boot at the far end. ‘It’s pouring. We’ve been nice and dry in here, anyway.’

  One of the doors communicating with the next carriage opened noisily and an overalled and undersized man poked his head through. He took in the scene as though it were not entirely unfamiliar. ‘’Ere,’ he inquired. ‘What you doin’ still on the bleeding train? This train is in the washing shed.’

  He made a short bow, like a man having delivered a brief but important oration, and vanished behind the closing door. He returned in five minutes with two other longer men. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s them. Look, that one’s got blood all down him. They been having a fight.’

  Davies had, by then, fixed Boot in the seat beside him and had put his arm affectionately about his shoulder. ‘L’il disagreement,’ he informed the trio. ‘Few drinks then the argy-bargy. But we’re all right now. Mates again, ain’t we, Booty?’ The head in the arm nodded as it was powerfully squeezed. ‘And we’ll go orf ’ome quiet. Thank you, gentlemen.’

  ‘This way then,’ said one of the men ungraciously. ‘You got to go right through the train to the end. You can get out there. And don’t be sick, somebody’s got to clean this train. You’re trespassing anyway, you know that?’

  ‘I know it, but I can’t say it,’ grinned Davies stupidly. ‘Come on, old mate. Let’s get going. We’ll wish these kind gentlemen a fond goodnight.’ He lifted Boot out of the seat with his one enclosing arm and then staggered with him along the central aisle and into the next carriage. The London Transport men followed them at a carriage-length. Davies and then Boot, in response to another squeeze of the arm, began to sing drunkenly. ‘Dear old pals, jolly old pals…Give me the friendship of dear old pals.’

  Chapter Twelve

  He and Mod had a profound drinking session in The Babe in Arms the next evening. Mod held forth vigorously and variously on the flaws in Darwin’s Theory of Origins, produced a logical explanation of the miracle of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water, and related how, in Edwardian times, it was a common embellishment to have goldfish swimming in the plate glass lavatory cisterns of great houses. It was not until they had been deposited, like two clumsy sacks, on the wet midnight pavement by the Irish publican and two eager barmen that the matter of the murder was mentioned.

  ‘Is this an opportune moment to inquire as to whether you pursued my investigation into the local newspaper coverage of the late melancholy event?’ Mod asked in the posed manner he often affected when drunk. He struggled up from the pavement, confident he could stand and at once toppled again. Davies was leaning against the wall of the public house spread across the bricks as if he feared it was about to fall. He looked at the horizontal Mod. He seemed a long way down.

  ‘You get yourself in a bloody deplorable state, Mod Lewis,’ Davies reprimanded. ‘Why are you wallowing on the pavement?’

  ‘Because I can’t get up, Dangerous,’ replied Mod practically. ‘I do believe my legs have finally gone. After all these years. Oh, I shall miss them a terrible lot. They’ve been good pals, these legs have.’ He looked at Davies and measured the distance between them. ‘Friend,’ he inquired calmly. ‘Do you think you could get over here and lift me?’

  Davies calculated the yards also. ‘No,’ he decided, ‘I don’t think I could make it. Not that far. But…now listen Mod, don’t despair…If you crawl over here and I hang on to this drainpipe, then you can hoist yourself up, using me and the drainpipe to hang on to. Once you’re on your feet you’re generally all right.’

  ‘Lovely idea. Brains, brains,’ murmured Mod. He eyed the gap between himself and Davies’s feet like a careful coward about to opt for unavoidable heroism. He used his head to count the pavement stones, nodding a greeting at each one. He dared not take as much as a supporting finger away. ‘Do you really think I could make it, Dangerous?’ he whispered fiercely.

  ‘Mod,’ said Dangerous, clutching the drainpipe. ‘I know you can, boy, I know.’

  ‘Faith,’ muttered Mod, ‘can move mountains. I’m but a mound of flesh. All right, I’ll give it a whirl.’

  He did not whirl, but moved over the cold stone squares on hands and knees, stumbling twice, even from that lowly posture, before reaching the neighbourhood of Davies’s ankles. From there he began to climb, perilously, like a man attempting the Eiger’s North Face, hanging on to the pockets, belt and loopholes of Davies’s commodious brown overcoat.

  ‘Watch the coat,’ warned Davies seriously. ‘You’ll ruin the bloody thing.’ Mod’s face drew level with his neck and he knew he was as upright as he would ever be. ‘Now grab the drainpipe,’ instructed Davies. They hung together like men on a ledge with a thousand-foot drop beyond their toes. Mod’s hands touched the rough metal of the downward pipe and grasped it hungrily. It moved under the additional weight (it was already supporting 20 feet of rotten guttering plus Davies) but Mod thought the unsteadiness was within himself.

  ‘Another hand and I’m there, old friend,’ he muttered courageously. ‘One more swing.’ Davies encouraged him to make the attempt. He did so, staggering across the front of Davies and hanging violently onto the pipe with his other hand.

  It was a sober drainpipe but old and infirm. Under the force and weight of the four grasping hands it sagged and sighed as it came away from the wall of the public house. Davies and Mod felt it at the same moment and identical cries issued from each of them. They looked up and saw the entire upright pipe and its attached guttering from the roof toppling from above like an avenging cross. It hung wobbling, apparently trying to regain its ancient balance, while their appalled faces looked up. Then, uncompromisingly, it crashed, snaking like a metallic rope right across the road. The old cast-iron made a fine noise as it shattered. Davies and Mod cowered to the pipeless wall. Lights went on in the windows above the shops, sashes were pushed up and, more disturbing, from behind them in the saloon bar they could hear someone fighting to open the chains and locks. Some fool across the street shouted: ‘Shrapnel! There’s shrapnel on the road. The guns have opened up. The guns!’

  With that mysterious power, the drunken man’s adrenalin, that disaster or danger brings to those who were previously incapable, Davies and Mod ran away. They even had the restored wit enough to dodge around the side of the public house and make up a brief alley that joined it to a parallel street. Over the housetops they could hea
r voices and very soon the yodelling of a police car. ‘They’ve got the boys out of bed,’ observed Davies. ‘Somebody must have thought it was a smash and grab.’

  They began to walk towards Mrs Fulljames’s lodging house, bow-legged but now beginning to laugh. They sniggered at first, in the schoolish manner of the inebriate, and then let it go, bellowing, howling into the ear of the urban night.

  As they approached ‘Bali Hi’ their natural caution became restored and they stopped laughing and slowed their pace cautiously. Ahead, in the dark, they heard something and almost at once up the street came the nocturnal wandering horse of the rag-and-bone man. It approached in the welcoming manner of one who is warmed by meeting a fellow creature on a dank night.

  ‘Should be tethered,’ said Davies heavily, looking along the black hill of the horse’s elongated face. ‘Constitutes a danger to traffic.’

  ‘Now, whose door knocker will it be tonight?’ inquired Mod secretly. ‘The same as before?’

  ‘No. Somebody else,’ whispered Davies.

  ‘Dangerous,’ grinned Mod, the idea flooding him. ‘Why not Mrs Fulljames’s?’

  Davies smiled a serene smile in the dark. ‘We’ll have to clear off quickly,’ he said. ‘But it’s a lovely idea, Mod. That woman is cruel. She’d take the last Smartie out of your mouth.’

  Mod gave a schoolboyish jerk of his head, as much to the horse as to Davies, the trio mooched along the privet hedges until they reached the door of ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens. Then Davies noticed the horse had no halter.

  ‘Bugger it,’ he swore. ‘We’ve got to have something to tie it to the knocker.’ He looked about him.

  ‘Wait,’ cautioned Mod. ‘Hold fast a minute. Why just tie him to the door? Why don’t we push him inside?’

  The great pleased look that dawned on Davies’s face almost shone through the dark. ‘What a bloody fine thought,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll shove him in and clear off quick.’

  Drunkenly they fumbled until Mod found his key. They tiptoed to the door and the horse, as though eager to enter into the conspiracy, seemed to tiptoe also. The key was revolved and the big Victorian door swung into the entrance hall. Davies gave the horse an accomplice’s nudge, and seeming to know what was expected, it tiptoed into the passage. They closed the door after it and escaped, first at a drunken walk, then a trot, and then a wild hooting run. They staggered and ran, overwhelmed with the enormity of what they had perpetrated, until they came to The Moonlight Serenade, an all-night coffee stall hard by the railway station. This was owned by a man called Burney who divided his time between serving coffee there and serving time in Wormwood Scrubs. He and Davies were old friends.

  ‘If necessary,’ said Mod cautiously to Davies, ‘I expect Mr Burney would provide us with an alibi.’

  Davies shook his head, doubt hanging from his face. ‘Nobody would believe him,’ he decided. ‘He’s past the credibility stage. He’s priced himself out of the alibi business.’

  Mod drank his second mug of coffee. ‘Mind you,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I know where we could get a genuine alibi. Someone anybody would believe. Mr Chrust at the local paper. I think you ought to go there anyway. Remember what I told you. About the report of the murder?’

  ‘He lives above the office,’ agreed Davies, still rocking on his feet with the laughing and the drink. ‘He won’t like being got up. But if we say it’s an important inquiry. And there’s nobody would doubt his word about us being there. And who is going to check the time by the minute? Yes, let’s go and see him.’

  ‘Mod,’ said Davies as they thumped along the echoing street. ‘I had a good look at the cuttings again, old friend. Read them right through, minutely. Nothing. I couldn’t see a single thing. Are you sure you weren’t pissed again and read the wrong murder?’

  ‘Listen,’ said Mod stopping in mid-stride. He let his foot drop gently to the pavement. He was still drunk and so was Davies, but the helplessness was wearing off. The coffee was still comfortable within them. ‘Listen…and I mean listen. I told you the files of the Citizen, not the cuttings. You’ll never make a detective, you know. Not as long as you’ve got a hole in your arse.’

  ‘That’s anatomy,’ protested Davies mildly. ‘And don’t keep insulting my professional ability. Or do you want a fight? Fists?’ He doubled his big fists and swayed uncertainly.

  ‘No. Not now. We’re nearly there anyway.’

  He nodded ahead to the North-West London Citizen office, in its converted house in the High Street. It had a bayed shop window full of photographs, pinned grinning civic dignitaries, un-noteworthy amateur opera singers and triumphant school prizewinners. The newspaper’s photographer was under a standing instruction to include as many people as possible in every photograph he took, since more people would want to see themselves in the paper, thus sending up or, at least, keeping up, the circulation. The photographer, a man who understood orders—if focuses were occasionally a mystery—once missed a vivid picture of a smash-and-grab raider escaping with his loot. He had failed to press the button because he felt there were not enough people about to make it worthwhile.

  ‘He lives upstairs then,’ said Mod, meaning Mr Chrust, the editor and proprietor. ‘Let’s hope he’s not deaf.’

  Mr Chrust was not. They had scarcely finished their fourth ring on the front door bell when the windows above them became squares of light. The curtains of both squares were pulled away and both sashes went up. Two middle-aged women, both wearing mob caps, looked out. Even from the ground level Davies could see that each potato face bore a resemblance to the other. ‘Excuse me, ladies,’ he called up. ‘Is Mr Chrust at home?’

  ‘Who wants him?’ they inquired together.

  ‘Police,’ Mod replied for Davies. Then, not wishing to be accused of impersonating an officer, he pointed at Davies and added: ‘That’s him.’

  Both heads went in as if pulled by the same string and the voices could be heard encouraging Mr Chrust to get from his bed because he was wanted by the police. Mr Chrust apparently took some time to be convinced or to be dressed because the two doughy faces again appeared at the windows and looked down on Davies and Mod for a full two minutes before Mr Chrust appeared. Then, like obedient handmaidens they vanished, leaving him to conduct the dialogue from the sill.

  ‘Mr Davies, isn’t it?’ he said peering down on Dangerous. ‘It’s really a police inquiry then?’

  ‘It is, Mr Chrust,’ confirmed Davies, not very firmly for he was beginning to regret the venture. ‘Sorry to have disturbed you and…er, Mrs Chrust.’

  ‘We aren’t disturbed, we aren’t disturbed,’ Mr Chrust replied ambiguously. He was a peanut of a man, with short bristles protruding from his face and otherwise bald head like the airy white fluff of a dandelion clock. ‘I’ll just be down.’

  Through the fanlight of the front door they saw a procession of shadows follow a fitful light down the stair. Then the bulb in the hallway went on and the door was opened. Mr Chrust stood there in a dressing gown across the front of which a Chinese dragon snarled. With him were the two ladies in woolly dressing gowns and mob caps.

  ‘Mrs Chrust passed away last February,’ said Mr Chrust hurriedly once they were inside. He seemed to want no misunderstanding. ‘These are her sisters. It’s a very big flat upstairs you know. They look after my wants.’

  Davies nodded to the twin moons of Mr Chrust’s firmament. It occurred to him that the editor might think that the visit was in connection with immorality charges so he hastened to ask if they could look at the newspaper files for 1951. Mr Chrust beamed with patent relief and the bristles danced blithely on his face.

  ‘If you just show us where they are,’ said Davies. ‘We’ll just take a quick peep and be off. It was most urgent, you understand. Please go back to your bed…beds.’

  ‘Of course, of course,’ said Mr Chrust agreeably. He began to push the nightdressed ladies up the stairs like a lean sheepdog nudging fat ewes towards an upland meadow. He turned after t
hey had waddled away from the landing. ‘I don’t wart to pry, Mr Davies,’ he whispered. ‘Not into police inquiries. But naturally, we of the press like to know what’s going on, under our very noses as it were. Perhaps, when you are free to do so, you will drop a hint of it in my ear.’

  ‘With pleasure, Mr Chrust,’ answered Davies. The drink was still loitering around him. ‘Now you go off to bed before you get lonely…well, cold. Good-night Mr. Chrust. We’ll close the door when we leave.’

  ‘Please do,’ nodded Mr Chrust backing up the stairs. ‘The sisters get nervous.’

  He went up the staircase and the excited noises of the ladies, which had been filling the upper part of the building like the chattering of fat pigeons in a loft, were stilled. Davies and Mod counted three separate twangings of springs. Mod raised his eyebrows and said: ‘I bet he’s got a story he wouldn’t print in his paper.’ Davies hushed him and ran his unsteady finger along the bound years of the newspaper fixed into shelves along the wall of the back office.

  It stopped accurately on 1951 and he and Mod pulled the great cardboard slab out between them and eased it on to a table. A new excitement was added to the qualms of the drink. His fingers fumbled and Mod helped him to fold sheaves of pages until they arrived at the date of the week they were seeking.

  Carefully Davies turned the front page. Celia Norris’s young, faded face, the likeness aged, with the paper, looked out of the page. The narrative took up a modest six inches of print under the heading ‘Local girl missing.’ Davies read it carefully again. There was nothing new he could see.

  ‘It’s the same cutting as we have in our files,’ he protested to Mod, who remained standing back. ‘What’s it you can see?’

  ‘It’s not the cutting,’ insisted Mod still withdrawn behind him. ‘It’s the page. Look at the little morsel in the last column. At the bottom.’ Davies did. It said unarrestingly: ‘Policeman’s Farewell’. Beneath it sat three dull paragraphs describing the retirement of an apparently popular policeman, Sergeant David Morris and a farewell function held for him at the local Sturgeon Rooms.