A Detective in Love

by H. R. F. Keating

  ‘No, no. No, I didn’t. I was asleep. Of course I was. Sound asleep in my own bed.’

  A note of protest? But why? If this young woman has nothing to conceal she has no need to protest. Something to watch.

  But the young woman was going on in full flow.

  ‘For God’s sake, wasn’t it six in the morning? It’s all very well for Bubbles to be up at that godforsaken hour, but I was never that sort of a person, even at school.’

  ‘Where you were together, I understand. Where was that?’

  Another proud chin-raised look. And isn’t she taking Bubbles’ death extraordinarily calmly? But some people do react like that, refuse almost to admit what’s happened. So, is she transferring feelings she’s bottled up into an urge to take it out on me? Anyhow, answer.

  ‘It was a place called Grainham Hall. If you’ve ever heard of it.’

  ‘I have. I work in Birchester, so it’s not all that far away. Famous for all sorts of athletic activities, yes? Scholarships for boys and girls likely to boost the sporting record, or, like your friend, bring in publicity when they did well afterwards?’

  ‘Yes, that’s about it.’

  A somewhat sullen reply. So jealousy there? Extending possibly to hatred? Go carefully.

  ‘But you weren’t one of the sports scholarship girls?’

  ‘Good God, no. Daddy had money — But you don’t want to hear about that. What can I tell you to help find the person who killed Bubbles?’

  ‘Well, if you weren’t up at six and didn’t see any stranger outside, then I don’t think there’s much you can tell me at the present time. So I’ll leave you to get on with your work. I’ve a notion you’ll have floods of inquiries now, so — Oh, wait. Yes, there is one thing. Bubbles Xingara. I suppose she’s gets the Xingara from a former marriage of her mother’s. But what about the Bubbles?’

  ‘Oh, she’s always been called Bubbles. At school we used to tease her unmercifully about that when she first came, until she began to win all the cups. But her actual given name is Barbara, though hardly anyone knows. And, you’re right, the Xingara comes from the man Aimée was married to when Bubbles was born. Or, I’m not actually sure, she may not have been born until after Mr Xingara had disappeared from the scene. You know how it is in that sort of world.’

  ‘That sort of world?’

  A look of dismay, or mock dismay.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have said that. She is the mother of my employer. Or even my employer itself now, I don’t know. But I suppose it’s the truth about her, after all. Put it this way. She comes from a very different world. Always talking about King’s Road, Chelsea, in the sixties. You know, anything-goes time.’

  ‘I think I know what you mean. But I won’t keep you now. If you do remember seeing somebody who shouldn’t have been there outside this morning, you will let me know, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. Yes, of course.’

  The door shut, Harriet echoed that Of course in her head. Of course, she won’t, she added. She won’t tell me anything she doesn’t think I’m fit to know, that stuck-up voice, stuck-up attitude. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if she actually was up and about at six this morning, even if she has nothing to tell me. Up and about, leaving Peter Renshaw in the spare room and making her way quickly back to her own. Or had he been in her room? And when he left did she wake?

  Or, had he just perhaps said something at that near-dawn hour that had suddenly caused her resentment of Bubbles to burst, like a pus-compacted boil? Could she have gone then, hurrying out before her lover was there, and let that suppressed venom have its outlet at last? The girl who had humiliated her by offering her a well-paid job after her father — Daddy had money — but you don’t want to hear about that — came financially unstuck, perhaps when all those Lloyd’s Names were caught wrong-footed. It could have been. Wasn’t there that word murderess? Perhaps not so much an intended put-down but a tiny Freudian slip?

  Timing a bit dodgy, though. Who had got up first? Peter Renshaw or Fiona? Who had gone to a bathroom first? But at that early hour no one would be carefully consulting their watches. Dodgy, but perhaps just possible. But what was the weapon she had used? And where was it now? Will the searchers in the house here bring the case to a conclusion in the next half-hour?

  Was I, in fact, hearing a half-hidden confession just now? And should I have seized on it? Followed it up? Pressed for an answer? For answers?

  But, no. No. What’s that Sherlock Holmes thing old John’s always quoting at me? A mistake to theorize without the data. No, a capital error. Well, perhaps it is. However much we’re inclined to do it. So wait to find concrete evidence. If it’s there somewhere to be found.

  Chapter Five

  Sgt Wintercombe’s bumblebee-buzzing searchers came up with nothing, neither outside the house nor in it. Nor had there been a single useful report from a necessarily belated alert Harriet had had put out over a wide area round Adam and Eve House on both Greater Birchester Police territory on one side of the Leven and that of the Leven Vale force on the other.

  Well, she thought, neither search was all that likely to have brought a result. Can’t expect miracles. So now — how many hours is it since someone thrust that thick spike into Bubbles Xingara’s throat? — it looks as if in all probability the long, long haul really does face me now. There’s the possibility, of course, that Fiona Diplock’s odd behaviour means Bubbles’ death was a strictly personal affair. But as for Old Rowley, I can’t believe, especially after what I learnt from Arthur Fairley, that he’s our man, however much toothy Mr Tarlington would like a quick result. May have to box a bit clever there, but I’ll be very surprised if ten minutes in the interview room with Rowley later on won’t bring to light whatever comparatively innocent reason he had for being out here this morning.

  Then, like a jab of pain from a troublesome tooth that had seemed to have cured itself, the thought shot into her mind of Anselm Brent and how he would be at her side while she questioned the old layabout. And with it a bright, horribly bright, picture of Anselm himself. Of that calloused right palm of his, that thatch of fair hair, those somehow innocent forget-me-not blue eyes. And, yes, of the tangy smell of his sweat.

  Anselm. What has happened to me? And why, why, hasn’t it gone away? For God’s sake, I’m his superior officer. I’ve got a job to do, and one that’s going to make the fullest demands on me. And he’s younger than I am. Ten years younger, even. I’ve no right to be thinking of him. No right whatever.

  And that pencil, chewed in the disgusting way it was. He’s like a schoolboy, really. And, God, he’s sweet. Sweet.

  So, when I’ve driven back to Levenham, am I going to say he shouldn’t sit with me when I interview Rowley? Right, in fact it might even be better if he didn’t. He’s got that streak of sympathy for the bumbling old pervert. Something I know all about. I’ve felt something similar for dozens of pathetic or charming criminals in my time. But I haven’t ever let it influence me. Criminals are criminals. Yet can I say the same for Ans — for DI Brent, comparatively inexperienced, a Levenham man dealing with another Levenham man?

  So, yes, get hold of somebody else to assist me.

  *

  Taking her place in the interview room beside Anselm — why did I change my mind? — Harriet felt as if she, too, was one of those pathetic, plainly guilty criminals she half-wanted to get lucky and survive her questioning. As they never did.

  In a moment Old Rowley was brought in. Anselm set up the recorder, recited the preliminaries.

  She leant forward and looked the stinking old reprobate full in the eye.

  ‘Now, let’s get this business of what you were doing out at Adam and Eve House this morning over and done with.’

  ‘Please, I wasn’t doing nothing.’

  The defiance of that first interview was no longer there. It was plain any truculence he had managed to summon up then had been leached out of him by his hours in a solitary cell.

  ‘All right
, perhaps you weren’t doing anything. But you’d had odd jobs at the house there in the past, hadn’t you?’

  ‘How d’you know?’

  A rheumy glint of something in the old man’s eyes. Of relief?

  ‘I know because I’ve been talking to Arthur Fairley and he’s told me about you.’

  ‘About a job?’

  ‘A job? You wanted a job from him this morning, didn’t you?’

  ‘I never ...’

  ‘You never? You’re saying you never went up to the house in the end?’

  ‘No. I didn’t, not never. I mean ...’

  ‘You thought Mr Fairley would be angry with you? You made a mess of whatever he’d given you to do last time? Was that it?’

  All right, I’m making it easy for him, practically putting the words into his mouth. If somehow it turns out after all that he did kill Bubbles, I’ll look a total fool. But he didn’t kill her. Just looking at him now, it’s easy to see the shaky old idiot wouldn’t have had the determination to plunge in that missing weapon. So the quicker he’s cleared out of the way the better.

  ‘Now, why don’t you tell us everything? Take your time, and just say bit by bit what happened.’

  ‘It were her.’

  What’s this? What the hell is he saying? Not Bubbles? Oh, no. Surely not Bubbles. God, this isn’t going to be the confession?

  ‘Her? Who are you talking about?’

  ‘Her. Maggie.’

  ‘Maggie who?’

  ‘Where I got a room. When I’m not in the gaol.’

  Now Anselm, uninvited, joined in.

  ‘You mean, Mrs Appleyard, Tim? That widow lady? The one whose address you give when we have you in?’

  ‘Yeah. She told me. She told me last night. I couldn’t ...’

  ‘Couldn’t what, Tim? Come on, cough it up.’

  ‘Couldn’t have no nice time wi’ her. Not ’less I got work. Wasn’t right I got me dinners, an’ — an’ me that, if I never had no work.’

  Harriet gave Anselm a quick nod to say Get him to spell it out.

  ‘Let me get this straight, Timothy,’ he said. ‘You sometimes sleep with Mrs Appleyard? Sleep with her? Is that right?’

  ‘’s nice.’

  For a brief moment Harriet allowed to enter her mind the thought of the disgusting, high-smelling old man engaged in the sex act with a widow, of whatever age. What was it John said this morning, all those hours and hours ago? A hunchback, a cripple — they all have the trigger?

  She swallowed.

  ‘So,’ she said to the now-revealed unprepossessing lover, ‘you went over to Adam and Eve House to get a job because your landlady had told you that you had to. But when you got there, you were afraid to go in. So you went and sat in the shade of that hedge to think about it, and you fell asleep. Is that what happened?’

  ‘Yeah, ’course.’

  ‘And you never entered the grounds of the house? Tell us the truth. If you don’t, we’ll find out, you know.’

  ‘Jus’ didn’t want ter go in. He mighter kicked me out, Mr Fairley. He mighter done.’

  The slack-bellied old man looked all round him, staring-eyed, as if peaceable Arthur Fairley was there with a blackthorn cudgel raised in anger.

  ‘All right, all right. Calm down. Now, let’s get this finally right. You’re now telling the truth, the whole truth, about everything you did out near Adam and Eve House this morning? Yes?’

  ‘As God’s my.’

  Harriet let out a sigh of exhaustion.

  ‘All right, you can go now.’

  Leaning forward, Anselm gave the old man a smile that Harriet would have liked for herself.

  ‘And you can tell Mrs Appleyard,’ he said, ‘you did your best to get a job this morning, and you’re going to go to the Job Centre tomorrow and say you want work. All right.’

  Old Rowley heaved himself up, with a good deal more vigour than he had shown so far, and shuffled hurriedly out.

  Anselm turned to her as she gathered her notes together.

  ‘Well, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Young Jonathan’s friend may not have thought the Hard Detective’s autograph worth keeping, but I’ve got a different view. I thought I knew Old Rowley through and through, but I’d have never sussed out why he didn’t go into Adam and Eve House, never for a moment. But, well, I reckon you’ve saved us a lot of useless work.’

  Compliment indeed. And one only a fellow as naive and as nice as Anselm here would pay me.

  But I wish he had not.

  He’s right, though, about work saved. We’re all the better for not pursuing a lead like that. In all probability the signs now point to murder by a stranger. But how exactly did it come about? Someone by chance down there by the Leven at that early hour this morning? Not impossible, of course. But surely more likely that the killer had some link with bright, carefree Bubbles. Did she somewhere, somehow say something that had so enraged someone, someone lost now behind those successive misty screens of somewhere and somehow and something, that they tracked her down to Adam and Eve House? Thrust home that spiked tool, there beside the summer-shrunken Leven?

  And, God knows, will we ever hustle into a cell this unknown person?

  Then, yes, she answered herself. Yes, we’ll get him, or perhaps we’ll get her. Police work will do it. Unrelenting, never-give-up police work. The efforts of dozens, scores of detectives, examining every possibility untiringly, eliminating, correlating, questioning, filing and cross-filing. In the end that will do it.

  Right. Next step, hold a briefing.

  But an unexpected interruption greeted her as she made her way through the station’s wide entrance-hall to the small top-floor office that had been put at her disposal. There, standing looking quietly about, was her husband.

  ‘John. What are you doing here?’

  He smiled.

  ‘The bearer of good tidings, I hope. Or, to be exact, fresh clothes.’

  He glanced across to the row of benches lining the wall opposite the duty sergeant’s counter. On one of them was her own soft green-leather suitcase, still with smears of dust on it from where it had been kept on top of her wardrobe.

  “Trust you to be thoughtful. But how did you know I’d be here?’

  ‘Phoned around. Not difficult.’

  ‘I suppose it wasn’t. Listen, bring the case up to my office. I’ve got to hold a briefing in a bit, but we can talk for a minute or two.’

  Up to the office on the very top floor of the heavy old building.

  ‘So how’s it going then?’ John asked.

  ‘Oh, you know what it is at the beginning of a case. You’re totally occupied finding out just what’s happened, just who the people involved are.’

  ‘Not much different from me, arriving in Rio or Johannesburg or wherever. You getting any useful help from the — what’s it? — Leven Vale force?’

  And suddenly she found herself faced with a temptation. Tell John what had happened to her, there beside Bubbles Xingara’s body, when the useful help from the Leven Vale Police had shown her his calloused right palm? After all, John was the great theorist of the feeling of amorousness coming like a thunderbolt out of the all-covering cloud. See what he makes of an up-to-the-minute example?

  But she drew back.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she answered. ‘As a matter of fact the DI I’ve had assigned to me seems very much on the ball. Bit clodhoppy, I thought at first. But, no, he’s a good man.’

  Then, to her internal fury, she found herself anxious to change the subject.

  ‘But — But, you,’ she said. ‘All well with you? You haven’t felt the need for the — what was the word? — alivio of a Birchester whore or two?’

  John chuckled.

  ‘Hardly. My needs were thoroughly dealt with first thing this morning. With the best will in the world there’s hardly been time for the great god Eros to have whizzed down a sex-bolt from his hovering cloud.’

  ‘Eros?’ she said. ‘What’s this now?’

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, just another way of looking at my theory of the ubiquity of the sexual impulse. It’s the way the ancient Greeks, who knew all about ubiquitous sex, chose to view it. To put it all down to a god.’

  ‘Apt quotation coming up? Or is there something in one of your pockets copied from somewhere?’

  ‘Pockets empty. Suit from Brazil went to the cleaners, which was what made me think that, if you’re not coming home till tomorrow or the day after, you might be glad of a change of clothes. But let me tell you about Eros. The Greek god, not of love, as is often said, but actually of simple lust. Those old fellows had got it pretty well taped, you know. First, Eros strikes. You suddenly feel a crude desire for sex.’

  God, she thought, he’s actually describing that moment, Anselm’s hand. Has he somehow ... ? No, he can’t have done.

  But John, in full spate, was tumbling on.

  ‘And in the general way it’s after Eros has struck that on occasion Aphrodite, risen from her sea-foam, comes coiling in.’

  Head-deep in her suitcase seeing what clothes John had selected, or to save herself from admitting to the thoughts that had plagued her ever since she had seen Anselm’s hand, Harriet just grunted, ‘Sea-foam?’

  ‘Yes, yes. Aphrodite was imagined as having been born in that way, the sort of way Greeks always appeared on the scene. You know that Botticelli painting, naked lady standing in a big shell, sort of balanced on the sea? Well, that’s her. Only Botticelli called her by her Latin name, Venus.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, surfacing not so much from the sea as from a man-selected jumble of clothes in a sea-green suitcase. ‘Yes, know the one you mean. Pale body and long, long hair, gracefully concealing the private parts?’

  ‘Yup. That’s her. But, I was saying, get caught in her coils, or, if you like, in those impossibly long golden tresses, and you’re in real trouble. Ah, wait. I have got one quote in one of my pockets, now I think of it. Scribbled it down while I was driving over here. Hang on.’

  Left-hand pocket of his old fawn summer jacket. Right-hand pocket. Inside pocket. Then, at last, two scissoring fingers into the handkerchief pocket. And half a card-bookmark pulled out.