A Detective at Death's Door

by H. R. F. Keating

  The poor little bastard, he didn’t deserve it.

  He was a nice kid. A bright kid.

  What we want in this world is kids who’ll grow up into people who do things.

  Christ, yes, even if he turned out, with his background, to be a clever housebreaker.

  No, cheeky little devil, he’d be a con man.

  Or, other side of the coin, in the police.

  Yes, make a first-class detective, an eye for a lie, Mr Jones.

  Poor little sod.

  Damn it, he’s gone too far this time, the Poisoner.

  He’s gone too far.

  By God, I’m going to get him. I will. I will. I will.

  *

  A few minutes before seven on Saturday evening Harriet marched into the Roxy, eyes alert.

  Though how, in God’s name, I’ll know him when I see him I can’t think. I haven’t even any mental image of the Poisoner. An inadequate? Very possibly, if Peter Scholl’s off-the-cuff judgement is to be relied on. But what the hell does an inadequate look like? On the other hand, although I didn’t have a name for the Schoolmaster, I suppose had I seen an old fellow in an elderly brown tweed suit somewhere about in the city I might have wondered about him. Might even have followed him and eventually got on to H.F. Grigson. But any retired schoolmaster might well have a nicotine-stained grey moustache and —

  Two sudden thoughts came into her head, jostling for preference.

  Prodger. Prodger at the scene of poor Jakey’s poisoning; hadn’t he said the man who gave Jakey that Coke had a white moustache? About the only thing I managed to screw out of him before Rance and his brakes-squealing cavalcade arrived.

  And, equally insistent, a flashed vision of something black and white had appeared. Flashed and, this time, flashed and flashed again.

  My malfunctioning brain? No. No, something telling me that as I lay there at the Club on that slightly uncomfortable wooden recliner about to fall asleep in the sun, someone, a man, came towards me ... or, no, had stood not far away looking at me. A man, not very tall, with, yes, a full white moustache and, oddly in contrast, a head of tufty, black-as-black hair.

  Him. It must have been him. The Poisoner.

  She pushed her way further in through the crowd of young women and their noisy boyfriends, the girls almost all scantily dressed on top of sometimes visible bikinis.

  Where will he be? Here? Can’t see anyone answering that description, though I have him in my mind’s eye all right now.

  Push further in. Where it’s most crowded. Where he’s most likely to be looking for his prey.

  The bar there. Plenty of glasses about, hardly guarded.

  She fought her way into it, eyes probing. Black hair, black-black hair, anywhere in sight?

  The dozens of patrons’ backs clamouring to be served.

  Then, as one of the lucky lads swung blunderingly away, a beer-spilling pint glass in each hand, a head turned in anger. And revealed ... him. The man with the puffy white moustache and that tufty, grease-gleaming cap of black, black hair.

  Even as she squeezed and pushed her way towards him another answer came into her mind.

  He’s an albino. What did that old man out at Halsell Common say? Yes, like one o’they pet rabbits, the white ‘uns. Yes, it fits. That thick white moustache, that all too plainly dyed black hair. And, yes, though most albinos — one in every 20,000 of us, didn’t I once read somewhere? — deal with their lack of one normal pigment well enough, for a few it will be a burden. A burden turning them into — Peter’s word — inadequates.

  Yes, the Poisoner, the man who perhaps even as a white-haired oddball schoolboy, listening to Keats read out in class, found the words ‘neither twist wolfsbane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine’ had lodged in his head. He’s here not seven or eight yards away from me.

  But those few yards are an almost impenetrable jam of pushing humanity.

  And, if I do manage to worm and fight my way through to him, how can I deal with him when I get there? Christ, I was a fool to set out alone. I could have asked Mike Watson to come with me again. No, no. No, I couldn’t. He’s already risked a lot of trouble arresting Grigson for me. But Pat? Surely I could have persuaded Pat, in the light of day this morning, that I’m right. Or could I? Probably not. Almost certainly not.

  No, I have to stay here where I am and keep my sights on that black-headed, white-moustached figure until it’s nearly time for the show and the crowd here clears.

  No sign of that yet.

  And, damn it, with all the pushing and shoving up against the bar, it’s impossible to watch those hands of his at every instant. A few moments ago, even, if he’d been slightly less jammed in, he could have slipped from his pocket whatever he carries his monkshood juice in and tipped it into one or the other of that blundering man’s slopping pint glasses.

  Wait. If I move a bit to the left, I may —

  He’s doing it. He’s hauling his arm free. He’s going to plunge it into his trouser pocket, pull out ...

  Must get to him.

  She put her head down and, without consideration for anybody, man or woman, torpedoed her way forwards, eyes fixed on the hand of the arm now freed from its jammed-up position.

  Dimly she heard protests. A man swore at her.

  But the packed bodies were yielding.

  No, his hand’s still in his pocket ...

  Push, push.

  Must get here. Must. Will.

  And, yes, I’m right. His hand’s out now, and in it ... what? A metal tube? No, something silver, small as a pencil stub.

  Get there. Get there. I must. He’s picked a target. Glass on the bar? Anything.

  I know. It’s a scent-bottle. Victorian. We had Granny’s one back at home. Memento.

  And I can’t get to it. I’m too far off.

  ‘Out of the way!’

  She had screamed it.

  And had been obeyed.

  There was a path now, narrow, jostled from each side, between her and the bar. And, yes, he was wrestling with the tiny glass stopper of the phial inside its silver casing, a finger and a thumb attempting to twist and twist.

  And out. The tiny stopper out. The poison ready to tip.

  A plunge. All but a dive.

  At full force she shot her arm out ahead. Her stretching fingers just connected. The little silver scent-bottle went scuttling across the drinks-wet surface of the bar.

  The Poisoner wheeled round. And, it was plain, he had set eyes once more, after long months, on the woman he had failed to kill on that sun-blazing day when the impulse to murder, kept in delicious check for so long, had at last burst through. His unnaturally pale face was contorted in tensed-up rage.

  He hurled himself into the gap Harriet had created with her frenzied scream.

  Unbalanced, she could do nothing to defend herself.

  She was on the point of actually falling into his seeking, clawing arms.

  And she was knocked flat to the floor.

  She sensed a heavy foot thumping down almost right beside her head. A thick blue shape shot over her The Poisoner was enfolded in two massive arms.

  Then she heard a familiar voice.

  ‘Begod, it’s Fredericks, Leon Fredericks, no less. I had you as a Peeping Tom maybe twenty years ago, and now I’ve got you as a poisoner.’

  A Few Words of Explanation, If You Need Them

  Leon Fredericks, under questioning, confessed with almost embarrassing readiness. It turned out that Harriet’s lightning guess, as she had fought her way towards Fredericks in the jam-packed Roxy cinema, was pretty well correct. He had been fascinated as a much-bullied schoolboy by Keats’ lines about poisonous wolfsbane, read out aloud in class. He knew that the plant, under its name monkshood, grew in his parents’ little garden — the one thing that flourished there. And he had experimented on, of course, the family cat. Thereafter he had gone about always with the scent-bottle, which he had picked up somewhere, filled with poison. On August bank holiday
Monday, sneaking through the back of the house that had once been St Aldred’s School to glut himself on the female flesh on display round the pool, he had seen Harriet half-asleep on her recliner, stretched out and defenceless. The sight of her had at last converted long-hugged temptation into action.

  Envoi

  Pat Murphy had insisted that it was his turn to hold a quietly triumphal dinner. He had chosen to incorporate it in his family Halloween celebration out at his house in Boreham, a place he rented from the Police Authority after they had bought it from the widow of the senior officer who had been murdered in the road outside.

  So round the table there, while in the darkness outside fireworks exploded and trick-or-treat youngsters shouted and screamed, were seated Pat, his wife Maire, and their two neat-headed boys, a solemn eleven and twelve. Solemnity a little spoilt by murmured objections when they saw Maire bringing in the first course.

  ‘Oysters, yuck.’

  Their mother quickly shushed them.

  ‘If you don’t like the thought of oysters, you’ll have to make do with the good soda bread there beside you. But dear knows what protein you’ll be getting tonight. You know what follows on Halloween.’

  The younger boy’s eyes glistened.

  ‘Did you ever eat — ’ he began to chant.

  His brother unceremoniously clamped a hand over his mouth.

  ‘You mustn’t ever say it till it’s come to the table.’

  ‘So what’s this all about?’ Harriet asked, sipping at the glass of creamy Guinness Pat had poured to go with the oysters under their topping of glowingly orange cheese sauce.

  ‘Ah, you’ll have to wait along with the youngsters for the answer to that.’

  Pat looked at John then, with a sliver of doubt in his embedded blue eyes.

  ‘Sure, I hope you’ll care for it when it comes,’ he said. ‘As you’ll maybe have gathered there’s no meat to it at all.’

  ‘Well, at least Harriet’s good friend Mrs Pickstock would approve of that.’

  Soon enough Maire left her chair and re-entered the kitchen. She came out clasping an enormous bowl of green-flecked mashed potato, a deep little well in the middle of the mound swimming with rich yellow melted butter.

  ‘Off you go then, boys,’ Pat said.

  And off they went, chanting verse by verse one after the other.

  Did you ever eat colcannon When ‘twas made with yellow cream,

  And the kale and praties blended Like the picture in a dream?

  Did you ever take a forkful And dip it in the lake Of heather-flavoured butter That your mother used to make?

  And now Pat and Maire leapt in.

  Oh, you did, yes, you did,

  So did he and so did I.

  And the more I think about it Sure, the more I want to cry.

  God be with the happy times When trouble we had not And our mothers made colcannon In the three-legged pot.

  Much to her surprise — grimly bitter kale was a pet hate of hers — Harriet found that the big helping on the plate in front of her seemed to be disappearing more rapidly than anything she had eaten in all the months since she had swallowed that last drink of Campari soda.

  Either it’s some sort of Irish magic, she thought, or I must be rapidly getting better.

  Evidently the two youngsters were as eager colcannon devourers as she found she had become herself. In no time their second helpings had disappeared. Bowls of delicious blackberry mousse vanished yet more rapidly.

  ‘Oh, the secret of it,’ Maire said, in answer to John’s lip-licking inquiry, ‘is you have to pick the blackberries at their very best before they get nasty and woody or, as we say at home, before they have the devil in them.’

  ‘Right, boys,’ Detective Superintendent Murphy commanded when the very last traces on their bowls had been scraped up, ‘it’s bedtime for you this minute.’

  And, like well-drilled cadets, the two of them, voicing polite goodnights, were on their way upstairs.

  ‘So it’s really over now,’ Harriet said, the moment she saw the door shut.

  ‘Yes,’ Pat answered, ‘we’ll not hear much more of Leon Fredericks. He’s so far off the scale of normal behaviour, the wretched fella, he has to be classed as mad. Almost to a certainty he’ll be put away safe for the rest of his days.’

  ‘Over indeed then,’ Harriet echoed. ‘No one armed with death hovers now above the good citizens of Birchester.’

  She gave a bit of a laugh.

  ‘But will they be aware of all the other ways death may come to them with no warning?’

  ‘No, they won’t,’ John answered cheerfully. ‘After all, who is aware of that? Look at how we contrived, when we thought World War III was going to break out almost any day, not to go on thinking from dawn to dusk about the atomic bomb. Probably, you know, when all’s said and done that’s the best way to deal with all such threats. Just to get on with things.’

  ‘Sure, let’s drink to that,’ Pat said, taking from the sideboard a bottle of whiskey — Irish, needless to say — and pouring generous measures.

  ‘But what I want to know,’ John went on, ‘is why, Pat, after everything you’d said the other evening at our place you still decided to go down to the Roxy and, yes, save Harriet’s life?’

  Pat grinned.

  ‘Didn’t I say that night, too, that she could be right in her castle-building, occasionally? Like when she fixed on that poor fella Grigson, who’s likely to be another one found unfit to plead. Sure, I knew well she’d go down to the Roxy that Saturday whatever I’d said. And the thought that she might be right about your man being there niggled away at me, till suddenly I decided to take a look. Simple.’

  ‘Simple, but wonderfully good of you.’

  Harriet’s turn now to raise her glass.

  She had prudently declined whiskey but found her Guinness was once more full to its deep-white frothy head. More Irish magic.

  ‘And what I want to know,’ she went on, ‘something I’ve never found a chance to ask you, Pat, is just what did Commander Rance say to you before he went buzzing off back down to London?’

  ‘Ah, I can tell you that. It was few enough words at parting. I think I have them right. “I told you, Mr Murphy, that this wouldn’t take long to clear up.”’

  ‘Let’s all drink to that,’ John said.

  *

  Harriet, who had contrived not to take too much of her Guinness, slid into the driving seat of John’s car when at last they had said they ought to be on their way. It was a very different trip from when she had gone, on her own, to meet a rebellious Pat by the pond in Waterloo Gardens. Fifteen minutes, swift, efficient and smooth, saw her putting the car neatly into the garage alongside her own.

  She slept that night, John beside her, without any hint of a nightmare. And at seven in the morning, her usual time, she woke to find she knew with simple inner certainty that she was back again to her old state of health.

  Gone the Soft-headed Detective, no longer near death’s door. Back in place, ready to go, the Hard Detective.

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