Davies grinned wryly. ‘I might as well apply for promotion to detective chief inspector,’ he said. ‘Anyway, I’ve changed my mind about that, Mod. I don’t think she’s in the cemetery.’
‘Why not?’
‘She was seen walking down the alley by the pawnbroker’s—towards the canal—with a man in a dark suit. That night. I’ve got a witness.’
‘Jesus! A witness?’
Davies held out his hands for restraint. ‘Well, he was a witness. A Mr Bernard Whethers. He’s gone where he can’t give evidence, unfortunately. He’s dead. There was somebody else too. An old man called Harkness, but he’s dead too. He was seventy-six then, twenty-five years ago.’
‘They’re not going to say much now,’ agreed Mod morosely.
‘Mr Whethers made a statement, his widow says. He didn’t volunteer it, but rumours get around and apparently a copper turned up on the strength of these rumours. It doesn’t take long for things like that to get to our ears, not when we’re searching around. But that statement was never recorded at the police station I know. I made another check and it’s not in the file, or ever mentioned.’
Mod looked at him across the books. ‘Miasma from the police station again,’ he said.
‘The man Mr Whethers saw with a girl he thinks was Celia was wearing a dark suit. So he said. And no hat. It need not rule out a policeman, our friend PC Dudley for example, because it was almost dark and Mr Whethers was some distance away. The uniform would look like a dark suit and he could have been carrying his hat, or even left it in the police van. They teach you at police school, you know, to take your hat off if you want to gain somebody’s confidence.’
‘Do they now?’ said Mod interested. ‘The only time I’ve had dealings with a copper without a hat is when I knocked it off. What good’s a statement of a dead witness anyway? Especially when it’s not been recorded at the police station.’
He looked up and whispered, ‘Watch the knickers.’
Confused, Davies failed to act in time. A stony lady library assistant, journeying past the table, saw the green gingham lying there. Quickly Mod picked up the little garment and pretended to fiercely blow his nose with it. He then folded the books in a muffled way on the table and, stretching himself indulgently, announced that he believed he had worked enough for the day. With casual familiarity he turned out the table lamp and unerringly returned the volumes to their various places on the shelves. Studying him, Davies could not avoid the impression that he would shortly open a cabinet and pour them both a drink from a comprehensive selection of spirits.
Members of the library staff nodded affable goodnights as he and Mod walked towards the door.
‘Hadn’t you better remind them to lock up?’ Davies suggested.
Mod sniffed potently. ‘You may well take the piss,’ he said quietly. ‘But it’s my presence here that, to a great extent, justifies the continued operation of the reference section of this municipal library. I am the doyen of the place, you understand. Every now and then a deputation of councillors comes snooping and I have to hurry out and get a few friends in from the streets to sit and peruse the books for a while. That’s why I’m appreciated here, Dangerous. There’s no waste of the ratepayers’ money while Mod Lewis is studying.’
Davies let the perverse logic roll over his shoulder. He pointed to the policeman’s helmet in the foyer. ‘Did you, by any chance, dent that?’ he inquired.
‘General Strike,’ recited Mod without a second look. ‘Attack on police at the Clock Tower. No, I was not present, owing only to the fact that I was yet unborn. Otherwise I would have been there. I like a good attack on the police.’
Davies said: ‘Listen, let me talk this whole thing out to you, Mod. Right from the beginning. And let’s walk from the Catholic Church to the cemetery, along the High Street, then down to the canal and along the bank. Just to see if it does anything.’
Mod acquiesced thoughtfully. ‘Right,’ he nodded having apparently made some mental calculation. ‘Even walking slowly—and thinking—that ought to see us at The Babe in Arms as they open the gates.’
‘We’ll keep to that,’ promised Davies. They walked. A pinched wintry dark had overcome the town. Window lights and shops lights shone bravely but only a few feet above the ground the pall of late November had laid itself inclemently across the roofs. The first of the home-going cars were on the roads, there were thickening queues at the bus stops. Davies, not for the first time, wondered what economics inspired West Indians and Indians to come and live, and queue for buses, in such a clime. They stood, with the natives, their faces merged in the gloom, not a snake charmer or a calypso singer among them.
Davies turned his huge coat collar up. It was like a giant’s arm about his neck. Mod pulled up the stumpy collar of his sports jacket and thrust his hands into his shallow pockets but did not grumble.
Turning from the main road they continued as far as the Catholic Church. It was uncompromisingly shut and dark, as though the faith had gone bankrupt. But there was a modest parcel of light coming from the window of Father Harvey’s house and, at first, Davies made towards it, going down the gravel path with Mod hanging behind. Mod did not like the vicinity of religions. It had been Davies’s half-intention to talk briefly with the priest before they began their thoughtful journey, but on looking through the window they saw that he was engaged in hammering together some large sections of wood. His hammering was violent but not more so than his expression. His holy robe was hitched around his waist like the skirt of a washerwoman. Davies thought that a tap on the window would probably cause him to hammer his own thumb, so he began to turn again.
Mod, peering around his overcoat, saw the interior industry also. ‘What’s he making?’ he whispered as they went away. ‘An Ark? Do you think he knows something we don’t know?’
‘It’s a do-it-yourself confessional box,’ Davies said confidently.
‘I would have considered that the confessional was one of the things you could not do satisfactorily by yourself,’ said Mod, pensively. ‘Like making love or playing shuttlecock.’ He thought again. ‘Not that I have a great experience of either.’
Davies pointed to a square roofed shadow beyond the church. ‘That’s the youth club,’ he said. ‘It’s a new building but it’s on the site of the old one. So we can say that Celia Norris began her last bicycle ride from there. Her cycle would have been in the yard and she would have come out through this gate and made off towards the cemetery to get her mum the flowers.’
They began there and followed the trail, humped as a couple of slow bloodhounds. At the cemetery entrance they were inevitably confronted by the graveyard keeper who peered through the gloom and the gates. ‘Oh, Christ, it’s you again,’ he said regarding them as he might have regarded Burke and Hare. ‘I hope you haven’t got that stinking dog with you.’
Davies immediately worried that they had discovered the missing bone. It was still, violently gnawed, in the back seat of the Lagonda. Every time he had attempted to recapture it Kitty had growled spitefully. ‘No, no,’ he assured. ‘No dog today. Just taking the air. This is Mr Modest Lewis.’
‘Funny place to take it,’ said the man, ignoring Mod. ‘The air around here.’
‘Mr Lewis is a famous pathologist,’ added Davies trenchantly. The graveyard man was at once impressed. ‘Oh, very pleased to meet you,’ he said in the manner of one greeting a worker in the same trade. He pushed his hand white as a bat in the winter darkness, through the bars of the gate. Mod, never unready to assume a part, took it, examined it carefully and let him have it back.
‘That’s a cold hand,’ he said, frowning professionally.
‘Is it?’ said the man with a hint of worry. ‘Is there…is there anything I can do for you, Mr Lewis? We don’t have that many pathologists visiting us. Anything you’d like to see, perhaps?’ He sounded as if he were quite prepared to start digging.
‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ replied Mod carefully. ‘But you just look after your hand
s. They’re very cold.’
‘I will, I will,’ promised the man apprehensively. ‘I’ll warm them in front of the fire.’ He hurried away with his palms thrust beneath his armpits.
Mod grinned in the dark. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said as they continued their trail. ‘I’ve always thought I might like to be a pathologist, you know. No one gets nearer to the human being than the pathologist. Imagine, one day, performing a post-mortem—and finding a man’s trapped soul! Fluttering away there like a snared butterfly. Now that would be a thing, wouldn’t it, Dangerous?’
‘If you’d like to start on the ground floor,’ observed Davies wryly, ‘I can give you a human femur. If I can get it out of Kitty’s jaws. He nicked it from the boneyard last time we were here.’
‘Dear, dear,’ said Mod shaking his head. ‘That dog will get into trouble yet. Just imagine some poor soul limping through eternity without a thighbone.’
They had paused beneath the cemetery wall. Somewhere there PC Frederick Fennell had found the abandoned bicycle. It was a ragged patch of ground, a gathering place for tufted grass and weeds, although sweetened by daisies and dandelions and visited by occasional desperate bees in the summer. The light of the street lamps touched hanging ears of ivy on the brick wall. ‘That ivy must have been here then,’ said Mod knowledgeably. ‘If it could only talk.’
‘I’d be glad if some humans would talk, never mind the ivy,’ grumbled Davies. He began to walk again in the direction of the main shopping street. The lights were going out all over the World Stores, David Greig’s and the Home and Colonial. Men dodged into a small furtive shop for cigarettes and at the corner Job, the newspaper seller, called mournfully, ‘Tragedy tonight! Big tragedy!’ as he peddled his gloomy wares in the gloom.
As they walked Davies related the events, as he knew them, appertaining as he officially put it to the disappearance and undoubted murder of Celia Norris. Mod walked beside him grunting and listening. They turned eventually down the alley path between the pawnbroker’s and the ‘Healing Hands Massage Parlour’, and plunged into the damp darkness of the canal cut. Davies climbed the bank of the allotments and surveyed the darkened rows of cabbages and sprouts. A platoon of bean poles stood guard in the dark. He got down again and they paced the towpath carefully, Davies still talking, Mod leaning over to look into the oily water as if hoping some clue or inspiration might still be given up from there. They walked the half mile length until they reached the road bridge that transversed the canal. Their journey had been frowned upon by the rears of warehouses and shops and a few terrace houses with their backs to the waterway. Somebody had even parked a little boat by the dead water. There were romantics everywhere.
Back on the road Mod’s nose began to twitch towards the distant junction light of The Babe in Arms and they hurried towards the early evening brew. After their customary three pints they repaired to ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens where Mrs Fulljames had created tripe and onions for dinner and Mr Smeeton was appropriately disguised in Breton costume. ‘French Club tonight,’ he mumbled enigmatically. Mr Patel was explaining a metallic bending of a fork to Minnie Banks and Doris who were looking on entranced.
After dinner Davies went to his bedroom. Covering the bedside lamp with a vest (Mrs Fulljames did not approve of lights burning in all parts of the house) he wrote down with great care everything he knew about the case of Celia Norris. Then, on another sheet of paper, borrowed from Minnie and headed ‘Kensal Green Primary School’, he wrote everything he thought he knew, and on a third, the things he wished he knew. He folded his work and put it inside a shoe (an odd shoe, the survivor of a battle at an Irish goodwill party) in his wardrobe.
At ten o’clock he thought he would stroll to The Babe in Arms before it closed. It had become misty merging on foggy. He spent only a few minutes in there chiefly because of the woman who sang ‘Viva España’ and then returned back to Furtman Gardens. Half-way down the foggy street, beneath its only tree, he was violently attacked by three, possibly four men. He was struck on the head and was aware of blows coming from all directions. Even in his pain and confusion he thought he detected the familiar blow of a pick-axe handle. He fell to the pavement and was then gratefully aware of a distant panic among his assailants. At once the blows ceased. He thought they were running away and there was another sound of heavier running, then hot, smelly breathing into his battered face. It needed all his strength to open his eyes once. He found himself looking up into the worried face of the rag-and-bone man’s horse.
Chapter Seventeen
As he hung across a stretcher in the Casualty Department at the hospital Davies opened his eyes and smiled a grating smile at the young doctor nosing over his injuries. ‘Could I have my usual room, please?’ he asked. He was aware of another figure prostrate on a trolley-stretcher a few feet away. He half-turned and even to his blurred vision the face looked familiar. The man seemed to sense he was looking and scraped his head to the side so that he could face him. It was Josie’s father.
‘Hello, Mr Norris,’ muttered Davies. ‘What are you in for?’
‘Same as you, you fucking berk,’ said Mr Norris unkindly. ‘I told you to lay off.’
‘Ramscar as well, eh?’
‘It wasn’t Father Christmas. I told you what would happen. I hope they’ve duffed you up good.’
The young doctor looked annoyed. ‘Will casualties please stop quarrelling among themselves,’ he said petulantly. ‘It’s not a mothers’ meeting, you know.’ He turned as two orderlies came into the area. ‘This one,’ he said pointing at Davies. ‘Dressings and observation.’ Then he nodded at Norris. ‘That one, theatre number two. In half an hour.’
Davies’s heart fell. He thought at once of Josie.
‘Sorry, Mr Norris,’ he whispered.
‘So am I. Ramscar will nail you, you just bleeding wait. I’m staying inside here for as long as I can. By the time I’m out maybe you and the rest of the berks will have got him. I bloody doubt it, though I doubt it.’
Davies was beginning to personally doubt it himself. He ached from the waist up, but he knew they had not hurt him as much as before. He decided to buy the rag-and-bone man’s horse a complete cabbage once he was released from hospital.
It was his last conscious thought until next day. He awoke in the early afternoon when a pale, round nurse asked him if he would like a bedpan and some custard. He declined the custard.
Mercifully neither Doris nor Mrs Fulljames came to visit him. That would have been beyond his patience. But Mod did, sitting moodily watching his bandaged face with doubt and consternation.
‘I suppose,’ remarked Mod with Welsh solemnity, ‘that a powerful police dragnet is at this very instant closing around the perpetrators of this new outrage against your person.’
Davies grinned and winced. ‘I have no doubt that the Metropolitan Police have been moved to vast inactivity,’ he said. ‘They sent a sergeant over here to get all the thrilling particulars and the cops’ doctor came and looked me over. It’s been terrific, believe me. My God, by now they’ll have enough men in the hunt to throw a cordon around a phone box.’
‘A disgraceful situation,’ grumbled Mod. ‘They seem to have no regard for you at all. Still, I suppose they’re so accustomed to seeing you bashed about that the novelty’s worn off.’
Josie came to see him too. She sat by the edge of the bed regarding him sorrowfully but saying nothing. He felt like an archer looking through a small slit window. ‘You’ve got a job lot to visit now,’ he joked with difficulty. ‘How’s your old man?’
‘In a mess,’ she shrugged. ‘Worse than you, and that’s saying something, that is. Christ, you must have three miles of bandages round your head.’
‘Sorry, Josie,’ he mumbled. She looked lost. She put her hand on the bedclothes. ‘Don’t you go blaming yourself, Dangerous,’ she replied softly. ‘He’s been skimming around in that mucky pond for years. First with Ramscar then with others like him. Some time or another he was bo
und to get done. And you were doing your job as a copper. What else can anyone say?’
‘What about your mother?’
‘She’s got the wind up. It was she who found the old man on the doorstep. He’d gone to the door. I’ve shoved her off to her sister’s in Luton.’
‘Is Luton far enough away?’ asked Davies. ‘From Ramscar?’
‘It’s got to be. The next nearest relative’s in Australia.’ She laughed making the joke, but her face was crowded with fear. ‘It’s got to stop some time,’ she said. ‘Or else somebody’s going to get killed. And it looks like you’re favourite, Dangerous.’ She suddenly laid her head against the white bedcover, her face small and pinched. He touched her thin shoulder with his fingers and she put her hand up to hold them.
‘Do you think it’s just Ramscar?’ she asked, still with her head on his legs. ‘Or is it something to do with that Celia thing? Somebody trying to stop you.’
‘It could be both,’ he sighed. ‘Maybe they’re the same thing. Maybe Ramscar did it after all. The more I find out the less I know, Josie. Do you think your father knows where Ramscar is hiding out?’
She laughed wryly. ‘If he does there’s no bloody way he’s going to tell anybody now. Not the state he’s in. It’s a miracle they managed to sew him together again. He’s like a patchwork quilt. It’s sodded up his looks for good, and he never looked much, anyway.’ She looked up from her crouching position, slowly, then quickly, as though awakening after a nap. ‘Dangerous, have you found out anything about Celia? What happened to her.’
He had never told her. He paused a moment now, then he said, ‘I’ve got her bike, Josie, and I’ve got her pants.’
He thought she was going to fall off the chair. ‘You’ve got what!’
‘Her bike and her pants,’ repeated Davies carefully.
‘Christ! However did you…?’
‘Listen,’ he said. He tried to lean forward but it hurt too much. ‘Listen, Josie, I’ve turned up all sorts of things. I’ll tell you soon, promise. Not now, because it’s too public here, and I feel too rough right now. But I’ll tell you before long exactly what happened to your sister. Perhaps I’ll know who did it too.’
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