by Tony Cape
Smailes reflected that this was probably his last visit to the room before the family came to dispose of the belongings, and took out his notebook to sketch the relative positions of the furniture in the room, and the position in which he had discovered the body, which he would need for the inquest. He considered going further, making a list of the contents of the drawer, the briefcase and the file cabinet, but felt no enthusiasm for such a fruitless task. Besides, the notes on the Kennedy murder had aroused his curiosity. How was it that Bowles had described Ruby? “Seamless venality uncluttered by any concern . . .” Pretty florid prose for a math student. Needing to kill time, Smailes reached back into the file drawer and removed the first Kennedy file, the one called The Geometry of a Murder.
By the time Klammer arrived forty five minutes later, Smailes hardly heard the knock on the door. He was completely engrossed in Simon Bowles’ exposition of the events in Dealey Plaza, Dallas on November 22, 1963. Through Bowles’ depiction, the detective felt that he was there at the scene, hearing the gunfire roar, flinging himself to the sidewalk in panic, rushing up the grassy knoll with the other cops, finding nothing. Despite the awkwardness of Bowles’ writing, he painted a vivid and gripping picture of the physical circumstances of Kennedy’s murder. He had made many drawings of the configuration of buildings, cars and people on that Friday lunch-time, and the relationship between these components was stated in terms of geometric and algebraic equations that Smailes could not understand. Bowles’ notes however were typed and were relatively easy to follow. Occasionally they presumed some knowledge about the Kennedy assassination that Smailes did not have, but more often they presented a patient, step-by-step description of his conclusions. Smailes found the reconstruction quite fascinating, his professional curiosity engaged by Bowles’ painstaking reasoning. It seemed that Simon Bowles, by claiming to apply strict mathematical and physical rules to the known evidence, concluded that three gunmen fired on Kennedy that day. Didn’t the official account state conclusively that Oswald was the lone gunman? Smailes wondered if anyone else had ever subjected the assassination scene to such laborious mathematical analysis. If Bowles was right, his theory disproved the accepted version. As the detective sergeant considered the implication of this discovery, he realized that the soft tapping behind him was in fact the lab officer knocking at the door. He hurriedly replaced the file in its drawer and let Alex Klammer into the room.
The two policemen completed their work with little discussion between them. Klammer was an industrious man a little older than Smailes, whose professionalism seemed to have a barb to it, as if confronting Detective Sergeant Smailes with his unorthodox reputation by soundly repudiating it. His technique was thoroughly proper and unhurried, and his manner respectful and distant. Smailes also knew that Klammer and his wife were neighbors of Yvonne and her new husband, that they played whist or something together, and the connection made him uncomfortable. Klammer had completed his work on the typewriter and other objects on the desk and was standing on the chair dusting the plant hanger.
“Nothing but smears, Sergeant,” he said, squinting at the plastic pot, with his back to Smailes. “It’s either been wiped or handled recently with a cloth.”
Typically, Klammer had not attempted to move the evidence at all, but was holding it lightly with his surgical gloves. Smailes concealed his annoyance that his own brusquer handling of the pot might have obscured good prints, saying instead that he had figured as much, that the file cabinet might be better. Klammer climbed down carefully and proceeded to work on the cabinet in his absorbed, self-conscious way. As Smailes imagined, there were some good lifts from the case and drawer fronts, but nothing from the knurled metal pulls of the drawers themselves. The lifts from the typewriter would be the best; he knew, and he reassured himself that he had done the right thing, even if it was second thought, by bringing in the fingerprint officer. As Klammer was methodically returning his instruments to their case, he felt a momentary concern that the labman might have parked a marked car in the college’s restricted car park, and thereby given his presence away. If Klammer was offended by the question, he carefully concealed it, answering casually that he had parked at the foot of Trinity Street and walked to the main entrance, heedful of Smailes’ wish to keep his visit secret. He had not been challenged entering the college, he explained. Was that all, he wanted to know?
Klammer’s deadpan manner must be an asset at the card table, Smailes decided. He asked the officer to call through to the coroner’s DC, and make sure that prints were lifted from Bowles’ hands before the undertaker’s people got hold of the body, if possible. Such a procedure was not always routine in a suicide, and Klammer was to refer any objections to him personally. He asked how long it would be before Klammer could run comparisons, and confirm any unknown prints.
“Oh, a couple of days, Sergeant, depending on the quality, you know. Are there any others we need to take, for elimination?”
Smailes had already thought of this. Hawken had said no one had touched anything, which meant there had only been himself and the scenes of crimes and coroner’s officers in the room. The others had touched only the belt, he guessed.
“Let’s wait and see. Maybe mine,” Smailes grinned. If Klammer thought the remark was funny, he did not show it. He told Smailes he would get him a report as soon as possible, and left unobtrusively, leaving Smailes alone once more in the bleak little room.
There was something about the willing efficiency of Detective Constable Klammer that Smailes found depressing. It was the same with Ted Swedenbank—a sort of uncontrived eagerness, a buoyancy that Smailes himself was unable to muster. He knew at times his colleagues on the force thought his manner stuck up or conceited, that his cynicism and humor were in some subtle way designed to put them down. He honestly did not think this was fair, and it hurt him when these rumors got back to him. The fact was, he thought they were dishonest, the Klammers and Swedenbanks, who denied ambiguity and uncertainty with their bright professionalism. How could you not be somewhat cynical if you took two seconds to look around you? After all, they worked for the police, not the church. If cops couldn’t laugh at the contradictions of their work they were a pretty pathetic institution, in Smailes’ view. He simply was not a true believer, he realized, and it pained him. It meant he could never fully belong, or fully relax with the rules. And while he felt a certain defiance in the superiority of his judgment, he also sometimes felt dejected and isolated. He looked at his watch, noticed it was well after five, and decided it was time he went home.
Much later he decided it was his mood after Klammer left that afternoon that was decisive in the unravelling of the whole extraordinary business. He was not sure whether it was characteristic or uncharacteristic, but he went back to the third drawer of Bowles’ filing cabinet and removed all the typed summary files from the Kennedy file, which together made up a manuscript five or six inches thick. He put them under his jacket and raincoat, and held them against his body with his hand in his coat pocket, and then left the room, locking it carefully behind him. He met no one in the corridor or as he strode around the two courts on his way back to the lodge. However, as he spoke with the duty porter behind the counter and handed back the pass key, he did think it strange that in his inner office, Paul Beecroft was listening intently to Bunty Allen, Bowles’ bedder whom Smailes had questioned that morning. The detective could not hear what was being said, but Mrs. Allen looked considerably more animated than earlier that day, as she emphasized a point with a thrusting motion of her hands. Blue smoke curled from a cigarette parked in an ashtray in front of her as Beecroft, impassive, leant on the back of a chair which held his suit jacket, listening. Smailes was surprised because he distinctly remembered Hawken telling her to go home for the day, many hours ago.
The dogs strained at their leash and the young man could barely restrain them as they pulled him along the street. A sharp wind made his eyes and throat ache, and his shoulder socket felt wrenched and
damaged. The houses seemed to stretch for ever, and at every opening in a wall or hedge, the whippets would pull more fiercely to explore the terrain inside. The sky was a sickly purple color.
Suddenly the animals found a narrow aperture beside a gatepost and surged through into the garden beyond. The young man braced his shoulder against the concrete post to stop them, and began pulling them slowly back into the street. Their squirming strength diminished and became a leaden mass. He pulled and pulled, and saw at the end of the leash a leather belt. And then, inexorably, the head and shoulders came into sight. He saw the thin, fair curls, and then he saw the awful grimace on the face of Simon Bowles.
In the courtyard at the base of Bowles’ staircase, Hawken and Beecroft were speaking to two ambulancemen who held a stretcher between them, pointing to the far side of the court and the exit to Great Court and the street beyond. Their gestures unfurled in slow motion, and though their mouths moved, there was no sound beyond the soft swirling of the wind. The wind stirred the hair at Hawken’s temples. Beside them stood Ted Swedenbank and Bunty Allen. She held a yellow cloth duster and wore a scarf on her head, a familiar green scarf with a check pattern. Smailes looked more closely and saw it was his mother’s scarf, and the woman was not Bunty Allen but in fact his mother, who seemed to be crying noiselessly as she leant against Swedenbank’s arm. He glanced down at the stretcher and the covered body it held. The wind began to stir the cream-colored sheet that draped the corpse. A sudden gust lifted the top of the sheet into the air, and inert on the stretcher he saw the face of his father, blue with toxemia. The myocardial infarction had already shut down his heart. He saw his mother cup her face in her hands in despair. He woke up and snapped on the light.
He sat up and listened to the pounding of his heart and the faint sound of rain on the roof of his neighbor’s shed. After a minute his eyes adjusted to the light and the faded roses of the bedroom wallpaper solidified into their familiar pattern. He reached for the packet of Marlboros and lighter on the nightstand, lit a cigarette and inhaled deeply. He got up to fetch the ashtray from the top of the dresser, and felt a damp patch of sweat at the base of his spine. He sat up again in bed and saw that his hands shook slightly as he raised the cigarette to his mouth.
The dream was a variation of one which he had had for nearly ten years now, but less frequently of late. It always involved the dogs and the feeling of being pulled out of control by them, and then the discovery of something unspeakable at the end of their leash. The part with his father on the stretcher had been a new embellishment.
His heartbeat began to still but he guessed it would be hours before he felt like sleep again. He took his ancient tartan dressing gown down from the back of the door, stepped into a pair of rubber sandals and padded out into the hallway and into the tiny kitchen. He coupled the kettle into its lead and wandered into the living room, snapping on lights as he went. He went back to the bedroom for his cigarettes, put a Willie Nelson album on the turntable and sat down in the lounger. A feeling of dread still gripped at the muscles of his chest, and he felt an oceanic loneliness.
Derek Smailes looked around himself at the living room. He liked the featureless bachelor conformity of his small, one-bedroom flat. He had moved there five years ago, the second place he had had since the divorce, choosing it because it was closer to the station and far away from the neighborhood in which he had grown up and lived after his marriage. The houses of the gray terraced streets off Mill Road were so different from the development where his parents had lived in their police house, or where he and Yvonne had begun their marriage in their small police flat. The houses made no pretense at middle class expansiveness, had no gardens front or back, and were relieved in their uniformity only by the occasional brightly-painted door or defiant window-box. The place had come furnished, and Smailes had accepted wholeheartedly the jumble of cheap furniture, the tasteless faded wallpapers and fitted nylon carpets that went along with the lease. The landlord was Les Howarth, a fish shop owner in Histon Smailes knew vaguely, who left him completely alone. Les himself had the lease on the upstairs flat, which Smailes knew he kept to cavort in the afternoons and the occasional evening with a shapely blonde whom Smailes had met a couple of times in the hallway. Smailes would know they were up there when he heard strains of Englebert Humperdink or Frankie Vaughn drifting through the ceiling.
He remembered with distaste the arduous succession of meaningless choices which his marriage had seemed to require. Should they choose the folding Habitat dining chairs, or the conventional oak set from Eaden Lilly? What about the bedspread and the sheets, or should they choose a duvet, more expensive but more efficient? Yvonne had wanted blue in their bedroom and yellow in Tracy’s room, what did he think? In truth he did not care a damn about any of these issues, but could not say so or Yvonne would get upset, so he stroked his chin in feigned reflection and gave considered, thoughtful replies. What a relief to escape such pretense! Now his furniture was naugahyde, his color schemes unmatched, his environment untended. He adjusted himself in the vinyl recliner that he had inherited with the place, and looked over at the wooden clock on the tiled mantel shelf above the fireplace that held the gas fire. It was twelve forty-five. Willie’s low wail felt apt, companionable. He bent down and turned the dial on the side of the gas fire, the single pillar of flame appearing with a low hiss. He thought again of Simon Bowles, the luminous intellect extinguished, the sadness and the waste. Almost without thinking he reached for the manuscript which he had left on the green plastic footstool when he retired for the night, and began reading again.
Smailes had finished The Geometry of a Murder chapter and had started on The Hall of Mirrors before he had gone to bed. This second chapter detailed Oswald’s potential intelligence links and was as meticulously researched as the earlier work. The detective had been impressed by Bowles’ analysis, the combination of biting scientific insight and common-sense fairness that made his interpretations particularly persuasive. It was plain that Bowles discounted the theory that Oswald acted alone, but he also dismissed the claim that Oswald might have been an active intelligence agent of any government. He was intrigued by Oswald’s links to volatile Cuban exile groups on both sides of the empassioned Cuba debate, and speculated that the theatrical Oswald might have been manipulated by agents from one of the opposed camps. Separate accounts placed Oswald in the company of a stocky Latino man at different sites before the assassination, and Bowles was obviously frustrated by his inability to identify the presumed Cuban. The young mathematician clearly had an encyclopedic grasp of the issues surrounding the murder and of the research and theories that had been advanced to date. Smailes found himself steadily more engrossed as Bowles’ reconstruction of the extraordinary events surrounding the assassination unfolded. He drank several mugs of tea that night to keep himself awake as he made his way to final, frustrating chapter, titled Conundrum. At times he wondered whether Bowles had prepared the manuscript for publication, the material was so scrupulously organized and presented. But as the first wash of light began to seep into the room he realized that this was impossible, since Bowles’ work had failed in the same way he criticized all previous analyses. While proving to Smailes’ complete satisfaction that Oswald could not have performed the feat required of him that day, the manuscript was frayed with countless loose ends and could not answer the simple question that if Oswald had not shot Kennedy, who had, why, and how? In fact, the final Conundrum chapter was simply a succession of tantalizing questions that remained unanswered after twenty years, that Bowles had simply succeeded in restating with telling force. If Bowles had claimed to Davies that he had solved the Kennedy murder, then it was not apparent in the work Smailes had just spent most of the night reading.
He heard the ghostly whir of the milk wagon in the street and the chink of bottles as he tossed the manuscript down on the footstool in disgust before heading back up the hallway for a few, insufficient hours sleep. He was angry at himself for staying up s
o late, and, despite a grudging admiration, angry at Simon Bowles for disappointing him. Bowles had set himself a question that he had been unable to answer, despite the brilliant analytic and investigative technique. Smailes reflected that if a mind like Bowles’ could not crack the Kennedy mystery, maybe no one’s could, but it was a thought from which he drew no comfort.
Chapter Seven
ACTING DETECTIVE Constable Edward Swedenbank was pleased. He now had official instructions from Chief Superintendent Dearnley to leave the Bowles inquest preparation to Derek Smailes, and to work with Detective Sergeant Godfrey Howell on the cigarette lorry theft. Howell had his hands full with at least two other cases, and was likely to leave a lot of the investigation to him. And he wasn’t such a peculiar bastard as Smailes. Not that the sergeant bothered him as much as he bothered others in CID, but you never quite knew where you stood with him. Howell was a type he understood better, a cop who had served with the army abroad before joining the force. Stickler for the rules, not much sense of humor, but that didn’t matter much.
Now they had a report that the lorry had been found abandoned in Walthamstow, in East London, empty of course. The owner of a gas station had called in with a claim that his attendant had noticed three men waiting in a parked car around the side of the cafe in the hour or so before the theft was reported. The men were all wearing turbans, which made them Sikhs, he guessed. The implications were significant. These new circumstances meant that not only would he have to deal with the Metropolitan Police about the discovery of the lorry, but maybe even the Yard or Special Branch. If Sikhs had pulled off a big lorry theft, it might well be connected to all that political trouble happening over in India. The Sikhs were usually a law-abiding lot, let’s face it. They were probably after money for weapons for the lads back home. At least, it was a possibility. However the case turned out, it looked like he was going to rub shoulders with the brass from town and if he pulled off his end of things all right, well, he could chalk off this probationary period and get the bloody “acting” out of his rank.
