Harriet could not help intervening.
‘But you must have been very young at the time. Surely scarcely into your twenties?’
‘I do not see that my age should be an issue. I had my view of what was fitting then, as I have my view of what is fitting now.’
As that poor bloody-kneed child Zoe has just found out, Harriet registered.
‘However,’ Miss Knott steamed on, ‘I also found, at that time, that the majority of the people in the Boy’s circle were by no means fit to be there. The only one of them with something to be said for him was Mr Calverte. But, though he was a man of some distinction, he lacked the determination to put things right where they had gone wrong. Look at the way he allowed that disgraceful drunken man from The Times to infiltrate the Boy’s circle. As for the rest of them in it, what was there? A street trader with the most vulgar manners. A wretched cripple watch mender with no other qualities than some muscular strength in his arms. Then the Boy’s cousin, with some good intentions but none of the will to put them into effect. And finally that girl Barbara Willson, a creature of the very lowest sort.’
‘So you decided you ought to take the Boy under your wing?’ Harriet said, keeping back with some effort the words despite being almost as young as the Boy himself.
‘He was worth it.’
A simple declaration.
Harriet was unexpectedly struck by it, coming, as it had, from someone who had regarded every member of the Boy’s circle with all the uncompromising disparagement of a hellfire preacher. She found herself filled with a new determination to name the person who had deprived the world of a preacher the very opposite of hellfire.
*
‘Well?’ Harriet had demanded, almost before Pip had closed the car door and pulled the seat belt round himself.
‘No. No, sorry, ma’am, I didn’t hear any sort of giveaway, not once. Perhaps — Perhaps I shouldn’t have been taking notes. I should have been just listening instead. But — But — I didn’t hear anything at all that made me — Well, sit up and think.’
‘If you didn’t, you didn’t. When I come to read your transcript I may find something you were too busy scribbling to respond to. Or I may not. In the meantime, have you got an address for the ex-husband — Johnson? Joseph Johnson?’
‘Yes. Yes, ma’am. I have. I have. It’s — ‘
‘Just take me there, DC.’
Joe Johnson, who, Pip had told Harriet, now worked as a jobbing gardener, was eating lunch between visits to two of his regular customers. He was sitting in the dining room of the boarding house where he had settled after the break-up of his marriage. He was the only one of the lodgers, it appeared, who ate a midday meal there. So the bare room, lino underfoot, a skimpy cloth on the table, was at Harriet’s disposal.
‘I’ve just been talking to your former wife about the murder thirty years ago of the young man they called the Boy Preacher,’ she said as soon as she had taken a chair on the other side of the table, with Pip beside her. ‘I dare say you’re aware of the case.’
‘Aware of it,’ Joe Johnson responded cheerfully. ‘I heard about that business in some way or another on every single day of my marriage to that woman.’
‘Did you? So you must have got a pretty clear idea of what happened during that long evening outside the ballroom at the Imperial Hotel?’
Joe Johnson laughed, waving his earth-smeared hands wide.
‘Not at all, not at all. Do you think if time after time you’d been told about all that, and each time told exactly what everybody else involved ought to have done, you’d have remembered a single detail of it?’
Harriet experienced a slight descent of disappointment, though it was nothing, she guessed, to the abrupt loss of hope Pip’s face was expressing.
‘You mean nothing?’ she asked. ‘Really nothing?’
‘Honestly, yes. And, even if there was anything, in the past couple of years I’ve succeeded in putting out of my mind almost every single thing that woman ever said to me.’
‘That woman? That’s twice you’ve used those words. Surely that’s a little harsh, if your divorce was as long as two years ago?’
‘Two years, one month and twenty-eight days.’
‘Right. And how long were you married?’
‘One year, seven months, seventeen days.’
‘So, if I ask you for an assessment of your former wife’s character, I’m not going to get anything like a true picture?’
Joe Johnson, across on the other side of the table with an almost emptied plate of eggs and chips in front of him, pondered for a moment or two.
‘No,’ he said eventually. ‘No, I think, if I restrain myself, I can give you a pretty fair assessment of Priscilla.’
‘Then do.’
‘All right.’
He stopped and thought for a moment.
‘Well, how shall I put it? She means well. She always means well. That’s the first thing. I really do believe she’s a good woman.’
‘A good woman?’
‘Yes, absolutely. That was why I married her, in spite of my doubts.’
‘Your doubts? Doubts that she really was, as you put it, a good woman? Did you ever feel she might have been capable of actions that were less than good?’
‘Ah, I know what you’re getting at. You’re wondering if she could actually have been the one who strangled the Boy Preacher.’
‘Right. I was.’
‘Well, yes, after we were married I did sometimes think she would stop at nothing if she’d really taken it into her head that someone had done something unforgivably wrong. But — ’
‘No, wait. Answer me. Did you ever think that, for some reason, she could have decided the Boy had done something unforgivable?’
Again Joe Johnson sat in front of the neglected last few thick, glistening chips and thought.
‘No. No, I never did. As far as I can remember she always spoke of the Boy in glowing terms. In fact, towards the end of our marriage I had worked up quite a hatred of him, simply because she would keep praising him, glorifying him.’
‘Understandable. But, tell me, now that it seems you’re beginning to think about her a little more impartially, was there any one particular person outside the ballroom there whom she spoke of in such a way as to make you think she believed they had killed the Boy?’
A longer period of thought. A hand even, unthinkingly, stretching out towards the plate and fingering the longest of the congealing chips.
‘No. No, there never was.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Sure? How can I be? I told you I’ve tried to put all that right out of my mind. I’m not too pleased, in fact, that you’ve come here and tried to push that woman back in, though I suppose that’s your job. But why you can’t let it be forgotten after all this time, I can’t see.’
‘Justice, Mr Johnson. Justice ought to be done.’
‘Now you sound like that bloody preaching woman. I think you had better go.’
Harriet sat where she was. Was there more to learn? But, before she could tell Joe Johnson that, preaching or no preaching, she would come back if she needed to, her mobile twittered out.
‘Excuse me.’
She put it to her ear.
‘Martens. Yes?’
She listened intently, snapped the little machine off, stood up.
‘I must go. Come along, DC.’
There was enough suppressed urgency in her words to make Pip leap to his feet and hurry out of the house after her.
Standing beside the car, she explained.
‘That was a message from a detective from C Division. He’s at the shop owned by Barney Trapnell. The shop that was owned by Barney Trapnell. He’s dead. Left a note mentioning my name and hanged himself. Pip, get in the driving seat and take me there, just as fast as you can.’
Chapter Twenty
Barney Trapnell had hanged himself over the narrow stairs at the back of his dark little shop. In the cruel light of
the high-intensity lamps rigged up by the Scene-of-crime team his body could be seen in full unlovely detail. His neck was drawn out by its weight in such a way that Harriet could not thrust from her mind the thought of a plucked chicken in the window of a butcher’s shop. His head, the face engorged, the swollen tongue protruding, lolled above the rope biting into the neck like that of a discarded puppet. And, curiously more affecting than anything else, his feet were bare, just perceptibly swinging only a few inches from the highest stair tread.
He must have unburdened himself at last, Harriet thought, of the confining callipers he had had to wear all his life. She felt a stab of pity.
But did I do this?
She stood where she was in the shop doorway, still holding the warrant card she had flicked at the constable on guard outside. In her ears were the reverberations from the clanging doorbell which, when she had first heard it, had reminded her of jaunty bustling Mack, whose sausages were ‘the best’. And she could not help but ask herself that question with new insistence.
Had Barney Trapnell hanged himself because, thirty years after the Boy Preacher had been murdered, he had felt persecuted by —
By the Hard Detective?
And — a new thought came rushing into her head-was this the end of the trail? Had whatever persecution the Hard Detective employed driven the murderer of the Boy Preacher to take his own life?
‘Who’s there?’ she called up into the darkness beyond the dangling body.
‘Is that you, Superintendent Martens?’
A man’s shape appeared in the dazzling light behind the hanging body.
‘DC Jones, ma’am. When I found his note with your name in it I thought I’d better let you know.’
‘Quite right, DC. Have you got the note still?’
‘Left it where it was, ma’am. Evidence. It’s on the counter just next to the clock there. Hang on, I’ll give you some more light.’
From behind the body, DC Jones manoeuvred one of the Scene-of-crime lamps until it shone more directly on to the shop’s narrow dusty counter.
Harriet looked down.
Next to the old slate-cased clock, which she remembered had softly ticked away the last time she had been here and still ticked now, there was a torn scrap of bright green card. She guessed it was the back of some advertisement — takeaway pizzas? Cure-all medicines? -that had been hopefully thrust through the letter box.
On it there were just a few words written in blue ballpoint. That Martins super. And then on the next line, the sole next line, Cant stand it no longer.
Somehow what struck Harriet as the most pathetic aspect of it was the contrast between the crudity of the words, with the misspellings and the missing apostrophe in can’t, and the extreme neatness of the writing. But of course, she thought, this was written by a skilled and practised watch-mender’s hand.
And then she asked herself again: did I drive this simple cripple to take his own life?
The bell just above her head clattered out.
Pip, who had been having a word with the constable securing the site, entered.
‘Christ,’ he gasped as he saw Trapnell’s oscillating, stretched-neck body.
‘Yes,’ Harriet said, yielding to the internal pressure before she could stop herself. And what I’ve got to ask myself is, did the way I questioned him make him do that?’
‘But-But-’
‘Oh, don’t bother fudging your way round it. Think what happened. I saw him on Wednesday. A not particularly rewarding interview. So I threatened to come back, if I found any new evidence to link him with the Boy’s death. And this morning I did come back and I threatened him again. Then, just an hour later, perhaps not as long, perhaps a little longer, the poor bloody cripple unstraps his callipers and contrives to hang himself from some hook or other up there.’
Little Pip drew himself up, triangular beard jutting out.
‘No, ma’am,’ he said, more forcefully than Harriet had ever heard him. ‘No. You may have put pressure on him, but I’m very sure it was no more than it was your duty to do. Nor can it have been more than the sorts of pressures he was subjected to every day of his life. From my ex-colleagues in the advertising industry, from the media, from life in general. You tell me if I’m not right.’
Almost reluctantly, Harriet brought herself to say to him that, no, the pressure she had applied to Barney Trapnell, as a suspect, was no more than was proper. And perhaps, too, Pip was right in saying it had been no worse than the daily, hourly pressures Barney was used to.
‘But what if he was the one who strangled the Boy all those years ago?’ she asked. And my coming here tipped him into — Into doing what he’s just done?’
She made herself look up again at the slowly twisting and turning body in the unrelenting glare of the Scene-of-crime lights.
‘You didn’t have any definite evidence pointing to him, rather than any of the others?’
‘Well, no.’
Harriet could hear the indecisiveness in her voice. Angrily she shook herself free of it.
‘Right. There’s one thing to be done straight away. I want a thorough search of the whole premises. There may be something he left behind that he’s been hiding all this time. Some indication that he did commit murder back in 1969, a diary, an unsent letter, even some sort of sick souvenir.
‘Can we have more light down here?’ she called up to the invisible officers at the top of the stairs.
In a moment the lamp that DC Jones had adjusted so that she could read Barney Trapnell’s wretched last words was swung further round and the whole little shop was revealed in all its long-accumulated grime.
And then Harriet saw, just jutting out from the base of the tick-ticking slate-cased clock, a tiny rim of green. The same colour as the note Barney Trapnell had left, pathetically, behind before he had mounted those narrow stairs, taken off his constricting callipers, put his neck through the noose and, barefooted, shoved himself into the air.
‘Just tilt this clock up a little for me,’ she said to Pip. ‘Mind you touch it as little as possible. There may be prints. But I want to see if anything more is written on this scrap jutting out here. The writing on the note comes right up to where the top’s torn. There may be something more above it.’
Pip quickly pulled one sleeve of his ancient linen jacket down as far as he could tug it. Then he was able safely to lift the clock up, and Harriet, with a ballpoint pen, edged the thin strip of card fully into the light.
And, yes, there was more writing on it. In Barney Trapnell’s neat hand. Three words. It wasnt me.
Harriet at once called off the search. There could be no reason, bar some freak of psychology, not to believe those three words. It wasnt me. Barney Trapnell’s last testament must mean that he had not, thirty years ago, strangled to death the Boy Preacher.
‘So,’ she said to Pip as they got back into the car, miraculously untouched by the juvenile riffraff of the neighbourhood, ‘we can be pretty certain now that, of our friend Meadowcraft’s Seven Suspects, only five remain, whether dead or alive. Plainly Marcus Fair-child, the Trufflehound, was never a real possibility, once we knew who he really was. And now poor Barney is off the list too, whatever reason or half-reason he may have had for — ‘ She came to a full halt. ‘For doing what he did.’
She took a breath.
‘Right then, now we’ve got, among the living, the censorious Miss Knott, the somehow slightly wrong ex-Undersheriff Lucas Calverte, that dodgy car salesman over in Norwich, Sydney Aslough or Bigod, the lady you told me is ill, Bubsy Willson, now Mrs Brownlow, and, I must add to them, the other dead suspect besides Fairchild, Harish Nair.’
And will he, she asked herself, despite his widow’s fierce denial, prove after all to be the one? She quickly and sternly told herself that the little Indian was as likely a suspect as any of the others.
‘So which of them do you think it was?’ Pip asked, newly emboldened.
‘It could be any one of them, couldn’t
it, for God’s sake?’ Harriet snapped, still weighed down by the thought that Trapnell’s suicide might have been triggered by her unyielding tactics. ‘How can we get evidence of any sort now the lab at Cherry Fettleham has produced its dusty answer?’
*
Harriet had felt too depressed and exhausted to want to go home. So it was somewhat later than her usual time — unless an ongoing investigation had detained her — that eventually she arrived there. The large whisky and ginger John poured for her, appropriating the bottle of Black and White she had not needed to give to sugared-almond-gobbling ex-DS Shaddock, did something to revive her. Soon she was able to tell him about Barney Trapnell.
He listened in silence, pondered for a little, and then delivered much the same verdict that Pip Steadman had.
‘From what you’ve told me, and I can’t see the Hard Detective sliding in any neatly extenuating circumstances, I wouldn’t say you’ve really anything at all to reproach yourself with.’
She felt a wave of genuine relief. And decided to forgive him for that Hard Detective.
So she was able to go on to tell the story of her dash down to Gloucester and visit to the Laurels Hotel, and even made it decently amusing.
‘All the same,’ John said, ‘whizzing off down there at a moment’s notice? I still think you’re over-reacting to your Mr Newbroom’s demands.’
For a moment or two she forced herself to consider this.
‘No,’ she said at last. ‘To tell you the truth, I think I’ve hardly given the man a thought all day, though now that you’ve put him into my head ... No, but honestly, I’m quite clear about this. What’s motivating me now is simply a determination to find out who it was who, thirty years ago, strangled that really remarkable young man, the Boy Preacher.’
‘All right. But you can’t tell me that haring off to Gloucester the way you did has helped get you any nearer to finding that person.’
The Dreaming Detective Page 18