‘Well, no. No, it didn’t. Or not unless I’m going to take to heart that old drunk’s advice to pin it on whoever it was who found the body. Nice little Pip Steadman, before I packed him off to the place where he has lodgings, did try to persuade me, too, that we hadn’t quite had a wasted day. He said he’d remembered something one of our suspects, Miss Knott, the ferocious head teacher, had said when we were interviewing her. He thought it might be significant.’
‘Oh ho.’
‘Well, I don’t know how Oh ho it really is. I can’t logically give much credence to it. But what Pip claims is that she was altogether too vehement in talking about Bubsy Willson and the way she had yelled out that the Boy was dead. And I suppose he may be right. I am actually quite inclined to trust his judgment. Certainly ferocious Knott spoke of Bubsy as a creature of the very lowest sort. And though, from all I’ve heard, Bubsy used to look pretty much like a street-walker thirty years ago, I don’t think she actually was one. All right, DCI Kenworthy’s notes said she had been up in court for soliciting. But in fact she’d never actually been convicted. And, damn it, I know there are prostitutes who are far from being obvious sex objects. But, from what everybody who’s described Bubsy told me, she really was so ugly to look at that, well, no male was likely to give her a second glance.’
John raised an eyebrow.
‘No. No, I’m right about her appearance. Too many people have commented on it. So Miss Knott’s moral condemnation was hardly justified, especially coming from a so-called good woman who ought to have been more charitable. Her ex, whom I also saw today, actually called her that, a good woman. And that was despite his having left her because he couldn’t take being preached at day and night.’
‘But that’s all your DC Steadman was able to produce?’
‘No, he said a little more. He pointed out that, the moment I appeared to have left the subject of Bubsy, Miss Knott’s hands on her desk visibly relaxed. Did I tell you that her hands had pointed at me in just the same aggressive way Newbroom’s had when he first saw me?’
‘You told me about them,’ John put in. ‘But it’s my belief the chap probably just likes to rest them on his desk that way.’
‘If you say so. But you weren’t there to see them. I was.’
‘All right. Go on, though. What was it your once disparaged DC Steadman told you about Miss Knott’s hands?’
‘Oh, just that he wondered if it was possible that Miss Knott wanted to say she actually did see Bubsy come out of the ballroom, but that she couldn’t quite bring herself to accuse her of killing the Boy. I don’t know. As I said, I can’t altogether believe in it. Not even taking into account something she told me about when DCI Kenworthy interviewed her. She claimed that she said to him she would not be prepared to state in court who it was she had seen coming out of the ballroom, or whether she had seen anybody.’
‘Well, then ... ’
‘Oh, yes, I know, it sort of adds up. But what she said back then, as a twenty-year old girl, damn it, may well have just been her telling DCI Kenworthy how he should do his job. She was capable of that, you know, even at that age.’
‘So it seems. I’ve definitely got the impression from you that the lady still preacheth too much. But — ’
‘She certainly doesn’t preach with any of the sweetness everybody says the Boy did. Not one bit, I’ll tell you that.’
‘But apparently she had her limits, if it’s right that she refused to point the finger at Bubsy Willson, despite what she believed about her immoral life.’
‘Ah, but you see, that’s where it doesn’t quite gel for me. On the one hand there’s her readiness to condemn everybody everywhere. You should have heard the tongue-lashing poor Pip got over the fearful crime of smoking a cigarette within the sacred limits of the school playground. On the other hand, there she is apparently refusing to name a woman she may well believe killed the Boy. It doesn’t altogether add up.’
‘But do I gather, all the same, that you’re beginning to have your sights on possibly immoral, ugly Bubsy?’
‘Yes. And no. For one thing, I’m not at all sure about her alleged immorality. She got married, you know, soon after the murder. And, so Pip says, is reported as being still happily married today.’
‘But are you going to go and talk to her tomorrow? To see if you can discover something that will get it to add up?’
‘Yes. Yes, I am.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘She’s ill, you know,’ Pip Steadman said the next morning as they drove up to a terraced row of narrow houses. This was the edge of the police area covered by B Division, where once Harriet had run the ‘Stop the Rot’ campaign that earned her the now much-disliked title, the Hard Detective.
It was perhaps because of this reminder that she abruptly felt at odds with the world. So now she turned sharply on the little white-bearded detective.
‘Yes, I do know that she’s ill, DC. You’ve told me often enough. And it’s thanks to your soft outlook that I haven’t, up to now, so much as seen the woman who, according to you, may well have been the one who strangled the Boy.’
Pip positively shrank away.
But Harriet refused to let this renewed onset of timidity affect her.
‘Right,’ she said. ‘There’s the house. In we go.’
She briskly manoeuvred Pip into preceding her up the short strip of path and then stood watching him as he pressed the button in the centre of the door. From inside she heard the loud buzz it produced. But no one came to answer. The minutes passed. One. Two.
‘Buzz again, buzz again. If she’s as ill as you say, there must be someone in.’
Pip pressed the little white plastic button once more, keeping his finger on it as he gave her an anxious look over his shoulder.
‘All right, that’s — ’
But the door had been pulled open.
The man who stood holding it was jovial. It was, Harriet thought as her bad temper slipped away at the sight of him, the only word to use. His large round face, skin glowing red from the top of the forehead to the depths of the neck, radiated goodwill. The eyes behind a pair of cheap tortoiseshell-rimmed spectacles beamed with irrepressible cheerfulness.
‘Mr Brownlow?’ she asked, finding it hard to believe this could be the husband of a seriously ill woman.
‘Yes, yes. Ted Brownlow. What can I do for you?’
Harriet showed her warrant card.
She might have expected an abrupt shutdown to the welcoming grin. In this part of Birchester it was almost the universal reaction to a visit from the police. But, if anything, the grin broadened.
‘So, who do you want to see? We’ve got the whole boiling here just now. Me, the wife, two daughters-in-law. Let alone all the kids, every one of ‘em our grandchildren. Bless ’em.’
‘We-’
Harriet felt a certain hesitation.
‘We’d like to see Mrs Brownlow,’ she said. ‘That is, if she’s well enough. I understand she’s been ill.’
‘Oh, aye. Well, she is ill, poor Bubsy. But just now she’s better. Been on her feet yesterday and again today. Bright as a button, and you should see her with the grandkiddies.’
‘Then, yes, we’d like a word with her. But in private, if we may.’
‘Oh, right. Don’t want to frighten the little terrors, do we? Not that they wouldn’t frighten you, the tricks they get up to. Tell you what though, come through and I’ll settle you up in my little greenhouse tacked on over the kitchen. Then I’ll fetch Bubsy in. She’ll be able to see the kiddies from up there, and that’ll keep her happy.’
They followed Mr Brownlow — even his back in a big blue cardigan seemed to pulse out goodwill — through the house, up a flight of stairs and into a tiny glassed-in extension looking down on to a small garden.
‘All my own work,’ he said, ushering them in. ‘E. Brownlow, building repairs promptly executed.’
‘It’s very nice,’ Harriet answered, swept up in his undisguise
d pleasure. ‘A very clever piece of work.’
‘Right you are, right you are. I’ll just fetch the old girl, and then you can have your little chinwag in peace.’
He went bouncing down the stairs.
‘Did you know he was like this?’ she asked Pip in some amazement.
‘No. No, ma’am. I never called at the house, just made inquiries at the neighbours. You said we had to be discreet.’
‘Quite right. It would never have done to reveal Mr Newcomen’s secret plan.’
She felt, at once, that she should not perhaps have allowed herself such lese-majesty. But Ted Brownlow’s exuberant outlook was catching.
‘In any case it looks as if the neighbours were exaggerating the seriousness of Bubsy’s illness,’ she said. ‘Certainly from what her husband’s been saying.’
‘Well, ma’am, I did — ’
She cut him short. Enough apologizing.
‘No, Pip, it’s understandable. There are people who love to turn even an early summer cold into a matter of imminent death.’
She turned to look down at the little garden below. It was, she realized, almost alive from one end to the other with small children. There must have been at least a dozen of them, all Brownlow grandchildren if what cheerful Ted had said was correct. Three or four were babies at the crawling stage. Others were walking, though apt to fall over and need picking up. Another three — or was it four? — were apparently of school age. And there in the middle of them, sitting in a cane-work armchair that must have been taken out of the house for her, was the woman they had come to question.
It was difficult to see her properly from above, just a head of grey hair and a substantial body dressed in a bright pink summer coat. But, though she was sitting well back in her chair and resting her arms on its sides, she did not otherwise seem to be very ill.
Harriet looked on as Bubsy’s husband emerged from the back door and went over to her, leaning forward to speak.
Will she react to the mention of police officers, Harriet asked herself. But there was no sign that she seemed in any way disturbed. Slowly, pushing with her hands on the arms of the chair, she heaved herself up.
Harriet had expected her to come straight in. But instead she stood where she was, holding out her arms to one of the toddling grandchildren. And when he — if it was a he — staggered into them she attempted to pick him up and hug him. Then, it seemed, she had trusted too much to her returned health, because she had to drop to her knees before she could clasp her arms round the little red-faced laughing object.
Nor was that the only delay. As, solicitously helped up again by her husband, she made her way slowly indoors there were more halts to pat a head or, bending low, coo an endearment.
‘Well,’ Pip said, looking down from beside her, ‘I must say after what we’ve heard about the lady I didn’t expect to find someone like that. All those kids, well, smothered in love. That’s what I’d have said if I was concocting an ad back in the old days. Smothered in love.’
‘Yes, a good slogan. And it makes the interview ahead one layer more complicated than I’d allowed for.’
The comfortable grandmotherly figure below was shepherded into the house at last by her cheerful spouse. Then there came the sound of slow, heavy steps on the stairs.
Now I’m about to find myself face to face with Bubsy Willson, Harriet said to herself. Bubsy, described by that indefatigable assigner of blame, Michael Meadowcraft, as he elbow-nudged her into second place as the Boy Preacher’s murderer on the grounds of her being an unsavoury young woman. Bubsy, whose black-and-white photo falling out of DCI Kenworthy’s file had revealed, faded though it was, the unmistakably suet-faced young woman. The woman whose gaudy blouse had failed to provide Dr Passmore with enough DNA to pin it down as harbouring the dying Boy’s spittle. Bubsy, cheerily referred to by Sydney Aslough as ‘that tart’, even though Marcus Fairchild, Trufflehound, had declared firmly that she was ‘not a prostitute’. And, finally, the Bubsy whom old DS Shaddock had called a whore ‘lucky not to have collected a string of little bastards’, and Miss Knott had contemptuously dismissed as a creature of the very lowest sort.
*
A last few heavy steps on the stairs, and she was there in the doorway, puffing hard from the effort of climbing up to this first-floor eyrie. And at once Harriet saw that, in spite of the passage of more than thirty years, Bubsy Brownlow was every bit as unattractive to look at as she had been when she was Bubsy Willson. Her face was still an almost featureless, flat, suetty surface, with, yes, two or three stubs of wiry hair protruding from it, thickly black even now, despite the scanty grey on her head.
Harriet’s first thought, one which she wished at once she had not had, was to wonder how cheerful Ted Brownlow had come to marry her so soon after the time of the murder.
‘You’re the police,’ she puffed out now. ‘What — What d’you want?’
‘Come in, Mrs Brownlow, come in,’ Harriet said. ‘Do sit down. You sound exhausted.’
She led the elderly woman — realizing as she did so that, in fact, she could not be much over fifty — to the sole chair in the little greenhouse, a cane-work twin of the one in the garden below.
Waiting till Bubsy had settled herself, still breathing heavily, she answered her question, What d’you want? by using the unalarming formula she had produced so often before.
‘Mrs Brownlow, Greater Birchester Police are looking into a number of unsolved crimes where recent advances in the techniques of DNA analysis might make it worthwhile to go into them further.’
Bubsy Brownlow looked baffled.
And was there something more? Harriet asked herself. Had there been even a tiny flick of fear in those dulled brown eyes? Nothing I could see. Nothing at all.
‘I don’t really understand,’ Bubsy said at last. ‘I think I must of read about that stuff, DNA, somewhere, ‘fore I got ill. But I can’t remember.’
‘It’s the substance in our genes, all our genes, that makes us what we are,’ Harriet explained carefully. ‘Back in 1985 scientists discovered that by using it they could identify who had left any small quantity of bodily fluid, hair or flakes of skin on any particular surface. And recently they have managed to improve their techniques to the point where very, very small amounts of, say, spittle left on some garment could, even after many years, identify the person it came from.’
Not until she had come almost to the end of the explanation had she made up her mind to drop into it the detail that might set alarm bells ringing in the head of the heavily breathing woman sitting in front of her. Then she had used that single word spittle and watched, hard as a laser beam, to detect the least reaction.
She saw nothing. The big, lard-coloured moon of a face showed not a twitch. The big inexpressive brown eyes stayed as dull as they had been all along.
‘Have I made it clear to you?’ Harriet asked at last. Tm afraid it’s rather complicated. Do you understand now?’
‘S’pose so.’
Again there was nothing in the two reluctant words to indicate whether the explanation had sent Bubsy’s mind back to that night when the Boy, as he was being throttled to death, had spat out what might yet prove to be a clue to his murderer.
And Bubsy had been pointed to, more than once, as that murderer. Her garish nylon blouse of thirty years ago had held a minute unidentifiable trace, lost among the tea stains on it, of what might have been the victim’s saliva. The probing had to go deeper.
‘Very well. Among those unsolved crimes from the past there is the one that you were involved in yourself, if only because you were there when it happened. I’m referring, of course, to the murder of Krishna Kumaramangalam, known as the Boy Preacher.’
And, yes, now at least, a reaction.
The slumped form in the battered cane-work chair heaved forward. The moon face looked up.
‘Shouldn’t never ... ’
Harriet waited to see if that sentence was going to
be comp
leted. Shouldn’t never ... Shouldn’t ever have ... what? Put my hands round that slender brown throat?
Or, perhaps, kept silent about ... About who?
But the eyes in the suetty face, which had gleamed momentarily with light, had dulled again now. It was as if in Bubsy’s brain, slowed by illness, events of long ago were being slowly dragged to the surface and turned over and over.
Harriet waited yet longer.
Then she guessed that, if she left it for even half a minute more, all that had happened that night might sink back into oblivion.
‘Mrs Brownlow, what is it you feel that you should never have done?’
The question put gently as a blanket being laid on a cot.
Bubsy looked up again.
‘I shouldn’t,’ she said with thumped emphasis on each word, ‘not never have listened to that boy preaching that day, that Boy Preacher.’
Harriet stayed standing above her for two seconds of silence. Then swooped.
‘Why shouldn’t you have listened to him, Mrs Browlow? Thousands and thousands of people did. And they went away the better for his preaching.’
‘No.’
‘No? You don’t think people gained from hearing the Boy preach? People have told me that they truly did.’
‘Not me.’
An ambiguous answer. Harriet quickly considered it. And decided it might be best to move on by taking its less obvious meaning.
‘No, Mrs Brownlow, you have not told me that, like those others, you gained from the Boy’s words. But did you in fact gain from what he preached?’
The heavy body leant fiercely forward. The old chair creaked sharply.
‘No, no, no. I told you I shouldn’t never have listened. Not that day when he was there standing up on the steps of that church in Chapeltown, there in the sun. That lovely summer day. That black, black day for me.’
The voice, harsh with undirected anger, came to a sudden halt.
‘A black day for you? But why was it so black?’
‘‘Cos I listened. That’s why. I listened to him and ... And he had me caught. I had to find him again, to hear him. But I shouldn’t of. I shouldn’t. That’s why that day was black.’
The Dreaming Detective Page 19