A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  Thrusting that unpleasant memory aside, she told Mike Watson she would go and get them caffe lattes. Then, without any other preliminaries, she settled down to telling Watson what it was she wanted him to do. At the end of twenty minutes’ careful explanation, accepted much more easily than Pat Murphy had done, he agreed to go with her directly to Wistaria House in the Meads in the hope of finding H.E Grigson at home and, if it looked as if her suspicion was correct, arresting him there and then.

  And at Wistaria House they found him. Watson had agreed that when his notoriously retentive large red ears had recorded evidence enough, he, not being a potential witness, would be the one to make the official arrest. So it was left to him to announce them both as police officers and to flourish his warrant card.

  Grigson had opened the door to them himself, shambling and stooped in a shabby brown tweed suit that looked almost as elderly as he did, his dully pallid face marked out by a nicotine-stained grey moustache.

  Looking at him hard, Harriet detected no sign of anxiety at this unexpected visit.

  ‘So, what can I do for you, sergeant?’ he said. ‘Has there been more of this loutish vandalism? I had occasion to report something of the sort some months ago, but I hardly expected to hear the culprits had been brought to trial.’

  ‘No, sir. We’ve come about another matter. There are some questions we’d like to ask you.’

  ‘Oh, are there? Then we had better go into my study.’

  He led them, without another word, into a room smelling strongly of pipe tobacco, with a roll-top desk against its far wall, a solitary leather armchair, a carpet so threadbare there was no telling its original pattern or colour, and on the walls sepia photographs of Greek and Roman ruins together with one, above the mantelpiece, of an infantry officer of World War I days.

  There was a pair of what looked like discarded dining chairs beside the desk, both piled with ancient, cracked-spine books. H.F. Grigson, the Heffalump, lifted these up, dumped them on the floor and, rather awkwardly, pushed the chairs more into the centre of the room.

  Harriet, all this while, had seen no sign in him of any uneasiness.

  Have I got it wrong about him? The thought rose up in her mind, a threatening torpedo-ready submarine. Was John right last night? Was Pat right, there in his office? Is my mind still affected by my experience? Have I been led astray by sheer wishful thinking?

  Too late now.

  Sitting herself on the nearer to the Heffalump of the two chairs, she waited while Watson asked him some preliminaries about his full name and the length of time he had occupied the house — ‘Ever since I was a boy, as a matter of fact, sergeant’ — and then she came in with her own first question.

  ‘Mr Grigson, I understand you were formerly a master at St Aldred’s School here in Birchester. Is that right?’

  ‘Yes. It is.’

  A faintly puzzled look appeared on the pallid, wrinkle-marked face as he leant against the back of the worn leather armchair.

  ‘What did you teach there?’

  A little deeper puzzlement.

  ‘I was the classics master, though in the school’s latter days it fell to me to teach whatever was needed: mathematics, French, a little science even.’

  Ah. So he may have known enough at least to concoct whatever emetic he had poured into Sir Billy Bell’s champagne and into Alaistair Ames’ beer at the Three Donkeys. Perhaps I haven’t got it wrong after all.

  ‘I see. So, as a teacher of Latin, you will be familiar with such phrases as partem et circertses and Et in Arcadia ego?’

  Now a look of wariness had appeared in the faded blue eyes beneath the jutting grey eyebrows.

  ‘Well?’ Harriet barked. ‘Can you translate those phrases for me?’

  ‘What is this? Why are you asking me to perform such a ridiculously easy task?’

  ‘Oh, because they’re Latin expressions I read in that first letter in the Evening Star signed Mentor. I wondered exactly what they meant.’

  ‘But they never printed panem et — ’

  He came to an abrupt halt as he must have realized what he had said.

  ‘No, Mr Grigson, the paper replaced that phrase with a rather ugly English version, which took away some of the sting, didn’t it?’

  The Heffalump’s slack grey face coloured up into a dull red.

  ‘One more wretched instance of the stupid, ill-bred young idiots in charge of our newspapers,’ he spat out. ‘It oughtn’t to be allowed. There should be a law against it. There should be more responsibility exercised by those whose fortunes allow them to obtain ownership of organs of opinion. Look at that disgusting Sir William Bell. Billy Bell. Billy Bell, he took delight in calling himself. A man not fit to own anything, and he goes about buying up shop after shop to sell those appalling, noise-blasting gramophone records. He acquires a perfectly respectable cinema down here in the Meads and turns it into a place showing the filthiest pornography. He made life hell in Birchester for anyone with any sort of a decent education. A hell, I tell you. He deserved to die. A dose of a good emetic was what he needed, and he got it. He got it.’

  The words had poured out in a chaotic, unstoppable, careless-of-everything rush.

  And they were enough.

  When the screaming diatribe at last came to a halt, Harriet gave DS Watson a nod.

  ‘Herbert Fitzwalter Grigson,’ he said at once, ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of having caused actual bodily harm to Sir Billy Bell and to Alastair Ames. You do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

  Herbert Fitzwalter Grigson chose not to say a word.

  *

  Pat Murphy, tucking into the large steak that John had cooked for the three-person celebratory dinner he had arranged for Harriet, paused for a moment.

  ‘I think I recall,’ he said, ‘that DS Watson was one of the team you took down to London, Harriet, when you carried out that corruption investigation.’

  Harriet looked at him, smiling amiably.

  ‘Yes, as a matter of fact he was.’

  ‘I wondered where he got that “from information received” stuff. You wouldn’t think any B Division snouts would have had much contact with an old schoolteacher like Grigson.’

  ‘No. No, one wouldn’t.’

  ‘Oh, come off it, you two,’ John put in. ‘I’m happy to give my wife credit where it’s amply due, even if she wants to be modest. And you, Pat Murphy, haven’t any need to be so determined to know nothing.’

  Harriet put down her knife and fork, leaving almost half her steak untouched, her appetite not very much better than it had been a fortnight after her return home.

  ‘The question is,’ she said, ‘are you any more inclined now, Detective Superintendent Murphy, to listen to what an officer on sick leave might have to say to you?’

  ‘Don’t let her bully you, Pat,’ John put in.

  ‘When have I ever?’

  ‘All right. But you’re bloody well going to listen now to what it is I’ve been thinking since, with Grigson charged, I’ve been able to concentrate entirely on the proper Poisoner.’

  ‘I will so. Never let it be said I don’t take heed of anything you tell me, sick or well.’

  He raised his wineglass to her.

  ‘Pat,’ John said, ‘just take a look at what’s left on that plate there. Remember, she still is ill.’

  ‘But not so ill I’ll let anybody stop my mouth, John Piddock.’

  ‘Okay, say what you’ve got to say. We know you’re going to.’

  ‘All right. This comes from something Peter Scholl told me just after our friend, Mr Rance, sent him packing.’

  ‘If it’s that mop-headed fella — ’

  ‘Yes, Pat, it is. And you just sit on your prejudices till I’ve finished.’

  ‘Ma’am.’

  ‘Now, what Peter said to me was that anyone trying to nar
row down the hunt for the Poisoner should take a good look at each of the poisonings to see if any sort of a pattern emerged from them.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Harriet, what do you think I’ve been after doing, day and night, ever since this all began? Amn’t I thinking and thinking what could be your man’s motive?’

  ‘Oh, yes, Pat, I know the sort of hours you’ve been working, and I can guess how much of that time you were asking yourself what could be behind the poisonings. But what you didn’t have, and I’m quite serious about this, was any backing from a forensic psychologist like Peter Scholl. So you weren’t actually looking for a pattern not obviously connected to the actual crime, were you?’

  ‘If you’re wanting to put it like that, I wasn’t.’

  ‘So hadn’t you better listen at least when I tell you about the pattern I think I’ve found?’

  ‘I’m listening.’

  ‘Right. This came to me actually while I was standing outside the Roxy cinema in the Meads, wondering about a small boy who looked as if he was playing truant. The Roxy was advertising a film called Seven Swimsuits and One Murder with a huge poster showing a posse of young women hardly wearing any swimsuits at all. Then I suddenly realized that the boy — it was Jakey Welland, of course — was being extremely sick into the gutter, and at once the memory of John lugging me into the loos at the Club came rushing back to me.’

  She gave John a wide smile.

  ‘Which was it in the end,’ she said, ‘the Gents or the Ladies?’

  John laughed.

  ‘Do you know, I’ve completely forgotten.’

  ‘Never mind. Let me tell you the thought I had when I eventually recalled that moment, after the Grigson business had been cleared up.’

  ‘It was ... ?’ Pat asked quietly.

  ‘This. That all but one of the Poisoner’s murders had occurred in circumstances parallel to the sight he must have had of all those naked beauties on the Roxy poster.’

  ‘I’m not as familiar as Pat with all the details of the murders,’ John said, ‘though I can see that naked female flesh did feature to some extent in most of them. You, lying there at the Club in that scanty bikini, darling, and hadn’t that young man at the Virgin and Vicar been watching a strip show? And — ’

  ‘And,’ Pat broke in, Tommy O’Brien was lying there in the sun outside the City Hall, all but undressed. I know just how naked she was; I had to go and look at the body. Poor kid. And you could add that lesbian lady in the march down in London, plenty of flesh on show there, the reports said. And, right, at that pub in Nottingham, a very warm evening and most of the drinkers there students. Plenty of nakedness again. You’re right so far, Harriet. If this means anything.’

  ‘No, what about the woman who was poisoned at the tea shop out in Boreham?’ John asked. ‘I can hardly see her sitting there without any clothes on.’

  For an instant Harriet acknowledged to herself that the pattern seemed to fail in Mrs Sylvia Smythe’s case. But it was for an instant only. Her recent recall at the Meads Starbucks of that awful morning with Miss Earwaker in the coffee shop had brought something back to her mind. Miss Earwaker, in her distress at misunderstanding the noisy young Italian man there, had twittered about how much nicer old-style tea shops were, where they had ladies serving and little vases of flowers on the tables. And she had mentioned Mary’s Pantry. She used to go there for tea, she had said, while the children she was in charge of had been looked after by some excellent fellows at the nearby public swimming baths.

  ‘No, listen,’ she said. ‘My friend, Miss Earwaker, told me once she used to take children from the school she taught at — perhaps even Graham and Malcolm, John - to some public baths near Mary’s Pantry, where years later Mrs Smythe had aconitine put in her teacup. Well, why had the Poisoner gone out to Boreham? To watch, licking his lips, girls parading in swimsuits and bikinis at those self-same baths, yes? But the baths nowadays are closed on September the first. So going there to watch on — let me see — yes, as late as September the sixteenth, he was thwarted. Thwarted, and so went, probably while waiting for a bus, to nearby Mary’s Pantry. Where he suddenly saw his chance.’

  ‘All right,’ John said. ‘Just.’

  ‘No, I want to go on from that. Look, the Poisoner, an inadequate of some sort — Peter said he might well be — is strongly attracted by displays of women’s flesh, right? And he somehow couples his feelings about that with exercising his power of life or death, putting what he’s made from the tubers of monkshood into the first neglected drink he comes across in conjunction with a display of flesh. And, listen, I can tell you where there’s going to be, in the immediate future, a monster display of flesh that the Poisoner knows all about. It’s — ’

  ‘I know,’ John broke in. ‘Ive seen the posters all over the city. “Birchester’s Biggest Beauty Contest. At the Roxy. Saturday October 27-7 p.m. to midnight — Bring Your Swimsuit — See Seven Swimsuits and One Murder”. Something like that. I suppose you could call it Sir Billy’s last will and testament.’

  ‘Yes,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve seen that ad in the Star, full page, and I’m certain the Poisoner will have done too. Seen it and taken note.’

  ‘No, damn it,’ Pat exploded. ‘You mean to go there, Harriet, don’t you? But it’s all just fantasy, piled up till it’s spilling over. And I’m not saying that because I think it’s a lot of psychological ta-ra your Dr Smellyfeet passed on to you. No, I’m saying it’s just one more of your own special eejit ideas, like the ones you’ve had in your head ever since you came out of St Ozzie’s.’

  ‘No. No, Pat, it isn’t. Look, John thinks I’m right. Why can’t you judge it all as sympathetically as he’s done?’

  ‘Well, remember,’ John said, ‘I’m no more than an insurance company executive. And Pat’s a senior detective. You can hardly expect him, with all the experience he has, to kow-tow to my off-the-cuff judgement. In fact, if there’s any kow-towing to be done, it ought to be the other way about.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, I’m sorry, darling, but I feel it’s actually yes. Thinking it over, I have to admit I was being rather too sympathetic towards you when I seemed to endorse your idea. All I really did was to jump in and add a few extra bits.’

  Harriet, at this betrayal, felt an almost overwhelming impulse to get up from the table and storm out. With an effort she checked herself. Storming out would only underline the frailty of her mind.

  Wait till I get John to bed tonight, she thought, letting a lava trickle of anger run through her head.

  Until she abruptly remembered that John had not shared their bed since he had brought her home from St Oswald’s in that expensive ambulance. And, too, that she had felt no desire, in all the weeks that had gone by, that he should do so.

  Perhaps, she thought then, I am really still far away from my normal state.

  An ever-thickening sense of dread entered into her.

  Perhaps John, and Pat too, has justice on his side. Perhaps I really have failed to be rigorous enough in sorting out the logic of what’s happened, the logic of what’s been going on in the Poisoner’s head. Perhaps I have done no more than seize on an attractive idea and then build it up into —

  Into another of those castles of suppositions that Pat rebuked me for claiming were real.

  ‘Yes,’ she said at last, making the least concession that she could.’ Yes, I suppose it is possible that I’ve allowed myself to be carried away. And, as you said to me when we talked before, Pat, I am in the habit these days of building up towering castles that can be toppled just as easily. So, thank you for knocking another one down.’

  Pat raised his glass to her again.

  ‘Fully admitting,’ he said, ‘that in the last instance Castle Grigson turned out to be built solid.’

  So they parted friends.

  But in the solitude of the night Harriet had fully to acknowledge that she was not now the Hard Detective any more. She was for the time being only, she hoped, t
he Soft-headed Detective.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Yet again Harriet was woken by the clamour of the phone beside her bed. Blearily she looked at the little green figures of the digital clock.

  Good God, 9.57. John must have gone hours ago.

  She clamped the earpiece to her head.

  ‘Yes? Yes, what is it?’

  And to think that for years I never answered the phone except with our number and no more. Yes — the ugly fact fleetingly came back to her — I am, now at least, the dangerously Soft-headed Detective.

  ‘Miss Martens?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is.’

  I’ve heard that voice somewhere before. And bloody irritating it was.

  ‘Miss Martens, it’s Mrs Woodruff, children’s almoner at St Oswald’s, again.’

  Christ, bouncy little Jakey wanting another visit? Finished his box of fruit-shaped sweets? Ridiculous woman.

  ‘Miss Martens, I’m afraid it’s bad news.’

  Then she knew. Not a box of sweets. No, Jakey must be — It couldn’t be anything else.

  ‘Jakey’s dead. It’s that, isn’t it?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is. Mr Hume Jones says that, though he wasn’t expecting it, it could have happened at any moment. He called it Sudden Death Syndrome. He said after a major trauma it does sometimes occur.’

  Harriet managed to mutter something, perhaps ‘Thank you for letting me know,’ before she dropped the handset on its rest and let herself fall back on her pillow.

  For a long time, fifteen minutes or more, her mind stayed perfectly blank. Then, one by one, thoughts presented themselves to her.

  This must not have happened. It must not.

  It’s intolerable. Intolerable.

  A boy like that. An innocent, for all his street wisdom.

  He should not have died. He should not have been poisoned to death.