Last Detective

by Thomas, Leslie

  ‘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 began 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.’

  Chapter 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,’ 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 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 canal.’

  ‘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.’

  ‘Are you still listening?’ demanded the old man. ‘I’m just getting to the interesting part.’

  ‘Still listening,’ nodded Davies.

  ‘Well listen, then,’ said Mr Harkness. ‘Next time you come I might be dead and gone so I won’t be able to tell you a sausage, will I?’

  ‘Please go on.’

  ‘Where was I? In the water? No, looking down at it. Anyway in a trice I was in the bloody water. I just fell in. That sobered me up a bit. I can still feel the cold now. It stinks too, that canal. Everybody’s shit goes in there. Dead cats and everything.’

  Davies nodded agreement.

  ‘And it was while I was in the water, hanging on to the bank actually, that I saw them.’

  ‘Them? Who?’

  ‘The policeman and the girl,’ said Mr Harkness patiently. ‘On the bank. I was in the dark, hanging on to the bank and they was on the path at the side. At first I thought I was in luck there being a copper handy. I mean, generally you can never find one when you want one. But there he was and there was me in the canal. But I was just about to holler and I saw he was kissing the girl. I thought, oi oi! There’s little of what you fancy going on here. So I stayed with my head out of the water and they were on the bank. At first I thought they was cuddling, but I couldn’t be sure about that. Because he sort of pulled her away towards the alley that goes up to the pawnshop.’

  ‘Towards where the old Home Guard blockhouse used to be?’

  ‘That’s it. That’s just it. I forgot that was there. I think they’d knocked it down by then, but it used to be just there.’

  ‘And you’re sure you saw all that?’

  ‘Sure? Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t be telling you would I? I thought somebody would come around to see me from the police station because I told Dulcie here what I’d seen. After all the fuss about the girl, I mean.’

  ‘I thought he was rambling,’ said his daughter. ‘He was ever so ill. Bronchial pneumonia. He wasn’t far from dead. It was a year before he was really right. That’s when we moved out here to Bristol. I’m glad we did. Bristol air’s kept him alive.’

  ‘How dark was it?’ asked Davies. Mod was sitting staring at the photographs of the Zulu wars. He got up to inspect one closely as though he did not want to listen to what was not his business.

  ‘Not very dark,’ said Mr Harkness thoughtfully. ‘Except under the bleeding water. That was smelly and dark. But it was summer, like I said, and it was quite light really. And there was the light from that lamp on the bridge.’

  ‘So you’re sure in your own mind,’ ventured Davies, ‘that it was a policeman and a girl. Not just a courting couple?’

  Mr Harkness smiled felicitously. ‘Oh, it was a copper all right. I’d been in court for drunk and incapable so many times that I knew a copper when I saw one. I even saw who it was.’

  He paused. Davies, tight as a drum inside, stared unbelievingly. Mod was standing and staring too. With my luck, thought Davies in deadpan panic, Mr Harkness will now drop dead.

  ‘Well,’ said Mr Harkness, more alive than any of them. ‘Do you want me to say who it was?’

  ‘Er…yes, please,’ nodded Davies with stiff calmness. ‘That would be most helpful.’

  ‘Well I knew him because he’d run me in so many times,’ said the old man. ‘Some of the young coppers were all right, but
he was a miserable bugger. Yardbird, his name was. Police Constable Yardbird.’

  All the way home in the back of the church conveyance Mod had to keep hold of the wheeled chair to prevent it careering carelessly about when Father Harvey took a bend, accelerated or applied the brakes, all three of which he was inclined to do with some violence and a degree of after-thought. On the outward journey to Bristol an abrupt halt at some traffic lights had resulted in Davies being propelled fiercely from one end of the vehicle to the other. After that Mod held tight to the chair.

  ‘Yardbird,’ Davies kept saying. ‘Yardbird. Christ, whatever are we going to do now? He might just as well have said it was the Prime Minister or the Archbishop of Canterbury.’

  ‘Your duty is clear,’ Mod said ponderously. ‘You must walk into his office and formally charge him with murder.’

  Davies grimaced at him. ‘Apart from not being able to stand up, let alone walk, at the moment, I doubt if I’d ever be able to say the words. Not to him.’ He tried in a quivering voice: ‘Inspector Yardbird, I charge you that on the night of July 23rd, 1951, at Canal Towpath, London NW10 you did murder Celia Norris…’ He shook his head miserably. ‘He’d have me in the bloody cells before I could finish it off.’ Mod rocked the invalid chair minutely to and fro like a nurse with a worrying child. ‘Mr Harkness would make a grand witness,’ he said without conviction.

  ‘If he lives that long,’ grumbled Davies. ‘If he can hear, if they’ve got an oxygen machine handy. Christ, Mod, he’s a hundred and one and the betting is about the same odds. A couple of nifty adjournments by the defence, a sharp draught coming through the courtroom door, and our witness is no witness because he’s dead.’

  Mod nodded his sympathy. He stood and opened the small aperture to the driver’s cabin. Father Harvey was singing a Gregorian Chant, a difficult task while driving at speed along the motorway. Mod closed the panel without saying anything.