Injury Time

by Catherine Aird

  There was.

  As Millicent, his late wife, would have said, it was just like Norman to spoil the ship for a ha’p’orth of tar.

  A FAIR COP

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Inspector Harpe flatly. ‘I just don’t believe it.’

  ‘It’s true, Harry,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘It’s no good. You’ll have to pull the other one,’ said Inspector Harpe, who was from Berebury Constabulary’s Traffic Division. He was known throughout the Calleshire County Force as Happy Harry because he had never been seen to smile. He, on his part, maintained that there never had been anything so far at which to smile in Traffic Division.

  Today, he would have held, was no exception.

  ‘Look here, Sloan, I’m ringing from the girl’s father’s house and there’s no way I’m going to let Chummie go until I’ve charged him.’

  ‘And I,’ repeated Sloan, who was Head of the tiny Criminal Investigation Department at Berebury, ‘am telling you, Harry, that there is nothing that you can properly charge him with.’

  ‘I’ll find something,’ growled Inspector Harpe, ‘if I have to throw the whole ruddy book at him.’

  ‘If you do,’ warned Sloan, more of a veteran of the courts even than Happy Harry, ‘you’re laying yourself open to being done yourself for false imprisonment and arrest.’

  ‘He’s imprisoned, all right,’ said Inspector Harpe with a certain amount of satisfaction, ‘in the girl’s car …’

  ‘It doesn’t matter where …’

  ‘And I’m not letting him out of it until I’ve charged him,’ said Harpe with considerable determination.

  ‘Be it on your own head, then.’

  ‘What I want you to tell me is what the charge should be.’ He sounded aggrieved. ‘You’re crime, aren’t you?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan, beginning to lose patience with his old friend and colleague. ‘I am, Harry, and I’m telling you that you’ve got no case …’

  ‘Listen,’ said Inspector Harpe. ‘There’s this young girl Julie something—little slip of a thing, doing nursing up at the hospital, on some sort of funny split duty in the evening.’

  ‘Twilight,’ supplied Sloan. ‘I know.’

  ‘Comes off duty at half eleven, which is bad enough for a girl to be out late like that on her own …’

  ‘Where have you been for the last twenty years, Harry? You’re out of touch.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

  ‘Try telling any girl over the age of consent that she shouldn’t be out alone any time she wants to—day or night—and she’ll make mincemeat of you, Harry.’

  ‘I reckon this one might change her mind about that now.’

  ‘That’s as may be,’ said Sloan.

  ‘What happened,’ said Harpe, determined to have his say, ‘was that when she came off duty she collected her car from the nurses’ car park. That’s well lit, all right, and there was nobody about except the rest of that shift going off duty at the same time.’

  ‘They used to live in nurses’ homes,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, reminiscently, ‘with a regular battle-axe as Home Sister. She locked ’em in after work.’

  ‘They were let out for the Police Ball,’ said Inspector Harpe, married man now but bachelor once.

  ‘And we were invited in for the Nurses’ one.’ Sloan sighed.

  There was a slight pause for the happy remembrance of things past and then Inspector Harpe resumed his narrative.

  ‘She gets in her car and starts out for home—she lives with her parents right out in the country the other side of Larking.’

  ‘Quite a drive on your own at night,’ observed Sloan. ‘Cross-country with a vengeance.’

  ‘Exactly!’ Happy Harry seemed obscurely pleased with this remark.

  ‘So?’

  ‘You know Carr’s Bottom?’

  ‘Of course I know Carr’s Bottom, Harry,’ said Sloan with pardonable irritation. ‘I may not be in Traffic but I do know my Calleshire roads.’

  ‘Where you come down the hill and there’s a bend at the bottom before you get to that little bridge over the water there. Hammon something.’

  ‘Hammon Penne,’ supplied Sloan. ‘A penne is a managed stream.’

  ‘Just there,’ said Harpe tensely. ‘Well, this girl Julie comes down the hill on her way home from the hospital, drives over the bridge and then has to stop a bit sharp because she sees there’s a big cardboard box in the middle of the road.’

  ‘Which is particularly narrow there?’

  ‘I’ll say,’ Inspector Harpe endorsed this warmly. ‘Too narrow for her to get past anyway. She can see the box is empty and reckons it’s fallen off the back of a lorry …’

  ‘Quite a few things do,’ said Sloan with quiet irony.

  ‘What’s that? Oh, yes, of course …’ Happy Harry acknowledged this and hurried on. ‘Well, naturally the girl gets out of her car and goes to shift the obstruction out of her way.’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan drily.

  ‘No problem there. It’s quite lightweight and she lifts it off the road and goes and gets back into her car.’ Harpe paused impressively. ‘That’s when her troubles began.’

  ‘Tell me,’ said Sloan unnecessarily.

  ‘While she’s been doing all this another car—a big one—comes down the road behind her and slows down. She starts off as quickly as she can because of course he can’t overtake her on account of the road being so narrow there.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘The trouble was, she says, not only that he wouldn’t dim his headlights but that he drove right up close behind her after she started off.’

  Sloan gave it as his opinion that this was always difficult and bad driving into the bargain.

  ‘That’s what I would have said first, too,’ said Harpe mysteriously. ‘So as soon as the road got wide enough for him to overtake she pulled over to the left of the road and slowed down for him to get on with it.’

  ‘And he didn’t?’ said Sloan, since presumably there wouldn’t have been any story if he had.

  ‘Too right, he didn’t. He just clung to her tail. The girl—I said she was called Julie something, didn’t I?—started to get more than a bit worried then.’

  ‘I don’t blame her,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan, who had seen quite enough bodies of girls in ditches in his time.

  ‘And when he followed her when she turned off the Carr’s Bottom road down the long lane along the valley towards Almstone—you know, Seedy, where the wood comes right to the edge of the road …’

  ‘I know. Hammon Lane …’

  ‘… she began to be really scared.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sloan moderately. ‘I can see that she might.’

  ‘As you know there aren’t any houses along that road that she could have pulled into for help—especially at that hour of the night.’

  ‘It is lonely there,’ conceded Sloan.

  ‘But there was nothing she could do to shake him off or get him to put his lights off. She went fast and she went slow and she flashed her own lights on and off …’

  ‘But he didn’t take the hint?’

  ‘You could put it like that.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘She tossed up between trying to drive right into the middle of Berebury into the Police Station yard …’

  ‘She might just have found somewhere to park there,’ observed Sloan bitterly, ‘seeing it was practically the middle of the night, but I wouldn’t have counted on it myself.’

  ‘… or driving straight home, which was in fact by this time a lot nearer.’

  As the police professional in Calleshire most involved with murder, Detective Inspector Sloan would have been the last man in the world to subscribe to the view that ‘East or West, Home’s Best’ since home was where most victims of murder met their end. This instance, he was prepared to concede, might just be the exception that proved the rule.

 
‘Be it ever so humble,’ he said, ‘there’s no place like home.’

  ‘She knew her father would be in, you see,’ said Harpe.

  ‘So …’

  ‘So she made for Larking as fast as she could.’

  ‘Other driver still in hot pursuit?’

  ‘Right behind her,’ said Harpe. ‘Headlights still turned up and he wouldn’t be shaken off, no matter what she did.’

  ‘Alarming,’ agreed Sloan.

  ‘I’ll say,’ Harry Harpe endorsed this vigorously. ‘Anyway, she gets to Larking and turns into her own entrance and blow me, this chap turns in, too, and pulls up right behind her …’

  ‘Headlights still on?’ said Sloan.

  ‘Full. The girl leaps out of her car, locks the door and dashes inside, shouting for her father.’

  ‘What does the other driver do?’

  ‘Nothing at all,’ said Harpe impressively. ‘Just stays in his vehicle.’

  ‘Funny, that,’ mused Sloan.

  ‘Exactly!’ said Harpe triumphantly. ‘Now, listen to this. The father comes straight out of the house breathing fire. He goes up to the chap in the car …’

  ‘Who hasn’t moved and who hasn’t switched his headlights off …’

  ‘Right! The father stands by the driver’s door and asks him to kindly tell him what he thinks he’s doing, or words to that effect …’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Blow me the chap isn’t fazed at all. Says that before he blows his top would the father like to take a look on the floor in front of the back seat of his daughter’s car and, by the way, not to unlock the car door until he’s sent for the police.’

  ‘Chummie?’

  ‘Crouched on the floor, trying to keep his head down out of the light,’ said Inspector Harpe. ‘He’d been hiding in the ditch beside the bridge at Carr’s Bottom when the girl stopped her car to lift the cardboard carton out of her way.’

  ‘Which Chummie’d put there in the first place,’ contributed Sloan.

  ‘The car driver behind saw him climb in and Julie get back into the car without being aware that he was there inside.’

  ‘Tricky for him,’ said Sloan.

  ‘He did a bit of quick thinking and reckoned that if he kept his headlights on Chummie wouldn’t dare lift his head above the skyline or harm the girl—not all the while he knew the other chap had spotted him.’

  ‘And if he’d stopped to ring us,’ said Sloan realistically, ‘there would have been no knowing where Chummie and the girl might have got to by the time we found them.’

  ‘Or in what state she would have been in,’ said Harpe. ‘Nice girl,’ the Traffic man added irrelevantly.

  Detective Inspector Sloan scratched his chin. ‘I still don’t see what you’re going to charge him with, Harry.’

  ‘Something,’ said Harry flatly.

  ‘He wasn’t carrying any scarf or piece of string, was he?’

  ‘Don’t know yet,’ said Harpe. ‘He’s still inside the car with one of my constables keeping an eye. Why?’

  ‘If he’d been carrying it with a view to garrotting her, then you might get away with charging him with carrying an offensive weapon but on the other hand, you might not.’

  ‘It’s worth a try, seeing as you can garrotte anyone with almost anything.’

  ‘And you can be charged with fitting up more easily than you might like, Harry.’

  ‘I’m not letting him go.’

  ‘I don’t know that you’d get away with a charge of criminal intentions either,’ said Sloan. ‘Some clever dick could argue that he’d been offered a lift by the girl. The other driver doesn’t come on the scene, remember, until Chummie is actually clambering out of the ditch and into the car.’

  ‘I don’t care what I do him for,’ said Inspector Harpe with an admirable devotion to justice and a reprehensible lack of concern for the letter of the law, ‘but I’m going to do him for something even if it’s only civil trespass or even Breach of the Peace. I should have thought it was conduct liable to put a citizen into a state of fear or alarm.’

  Detective Inspector Sloan thought for a long moment. ‘The only thing I can think of, Harry—’ he began, but he was interrupted.

  ‘I just want him in court. I don’t mind what for. When the Press hear the whole story, they’ll make his life a misery for the rest of time. And,’ he added righteously, ‘it might save some other young thing from a fate worse than death.’

  ‘Listen. Take his fingerprints, and get those on the cardboard box, and if they match then charge him under one of the oldest Statutes of the Realm.’

  ‘Which one?’ asked Harry suspiciously.

  ‘Wilful obstruction of the Queen’s Highway,’ said Sloan, adding gently, ‘You should have thought of that, Harry. You’re Traffic, aren’t you?’

  DOUBLE JEOPARDY

  ‘Come along in and sit down, Sloan,’ commanded Dr Dabbe, ‘and save your legs.’

  ‘Yes, doctor,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan. He was anxious to collect an urgent report from the pathologist.

  ‘Varicose veins are an occupational hazard in the police force, you know.’

  ‘Thank you, doctor.’ Detective Inspector Sloan accepted the pathologist’s invitation with alacrity, although no one could have described the office attached to the hospital mortuary as exactly cosy.

  ‘That report you’re waiting for’ll be along in a minute. My secretary’s doing you a copy now.’

  ‘Never stand when you can sit,’ observed Detective Constable Crosby sententiously from somewhere near the door. ‘And never sit when you can lie down.’

  ‘You can lie down if you like, Crosby,’ offered the pathologist. He jerked his shoulder in the direction of the mortuary door. ‘Plenty of slabs next door. All empty except one—there’s an old chap on that who’s died from a very old disease. I shouldn’t share with him if I were you.’

  ‘No, thank you!’ said the Detective Constable with vigour.

  ‘A very old disease,’ mused the pathologist. ‘I’ve been wondering what they treated him with.’

  ‘If he’s on your mortuary table,’ remarked Detective Inspector Sloan logically, ‘whatever treatment he had doesn’t seem to have done him all that much good.’

  ‘In my father’s day,’ said Dr Dabbe reminiscently, ‘there was an old and dangerous treatment to go with this old and dangerous disease.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Sloan, since it sounded to him very like a case of Hamlet’s ‘Diseases desperate grown by desperate appliance are reliev’d, or not at all.’ He said so to Dr Dabbe.

  ‘More like “His dissolute disease will scarce obey this medicine”,’ said Dr Dabbe. He winked. ‘I’ve always thought The Merry Wives of Windsor knew a thing or two.’

  ‘Like that, is it?’ said Detective Inspector Sloan.

  ‘The medical treatment—therapy was not a word then in such common use—for gonorrhoea,’ carried on Dabbe, ‘was to give the patient a high fever.’

  ‘A hair of the dog that bit you?’ enquired Detective Constable Crosby insouciantly.

  ‘The deliberate infection of the sufferer with the disease caused by Plasmodium falciparum malaria,’ said Dr Dabbe impressively.

  ‘Well, I never!’ said Crosby, whose mother had even had trouble with him when he was vaccinated.

  ‘The rationale was—well, let us say,’ amended the pathologist, ‘enquiring medical minds had postulated—that the rigors, to say nothing of the rigours, of the malarial infection would destroy the delicate Niesseria gonorrhoea organism.’

  ‘And did they?’ asked Detective Inspector Sloan, since they had time on their hands.

  ‘I only heard of the one case myself,’ said Dr Dabbe, ‘and that was from my father, although I did read that someone had recalled in fiction the causing of a very high fever therapeutically in those suffering from primary syphilis.’

  ‘“A good book is the precious life-blood of a master spirit”,’ quoted Crosby, since it had been printed on th
e inside cover of one of his school-books.

  ‘Yes, well, as it happens, it’s life-blood that we’re talking about,’ said Dabbe, ‘and that’s always precious. This was in the Second World War. An old mental asylum had been commandeered by the authorities to be used as an acute general hospital.’ He spun round suddenly. ‘Do you two know what a padded cell is like?’

  ‘I’ve heard of them,’ said Detective Inspector Sloan cautiously. The exigencies of constabulary service had not led him into one as either patient or policeman.

  So far.

  ‘We don’t have them down at the nick,’ said Detective Constable Crosby.

  ‘The padding on the walls of the cell where this particular medical drama was played out,’ said the pathologist, ‘served two purposes. One was to deaden sound and the other was to stop the patient injuring himself.’ He pursed his lips and added, ‘Or herself.’

  ‘Quite,’ said Sloan, unsure whether this was a blow against Women’s Lib or not.

  ‘There’s usually a small high window there—out of reach, of course …’

  ‘Of course,’ chorused the two policemen.

  ‘And barred, too,’ said Dabbe, ‘leaving just what Oscar Wilde called “the little tent of blue which prisoners call the sky”, which is there to let in light and air but not to let out the patient.’

  ‘And not,’ said Sloan fairly, ‘to let in the gaze of people outside.’

  ‘You’ve got the idea, Sloan,’ said Dr Dabbe warmly. ‘The floor’s sometimes of cork tiles to deaden sound …’

  ‘Like the house of that French writer who went on and on?’ suggested Sloan, who had often wondered how that particular author would have got on doing his writing if he’d had to do it as Sloan had to, down at the unquiet police station.

  ‘Just like Marcel Proust, Sloan,’ agreed Dabbe, ‘but the main thing about a padded cell is that the door only ever has one handle, and that’s always on …’

  ‘The outside,’ said Sloan for him. Some things were the same down at the police station.