The Hard Detective (A Harriet Martens Thriller Book 1)

by H. R. F. Keating

  Right, leave it. When I’ve got this killer safely locked away, I will investigate.

  More to the point, what is seeing these words blazoned across the front page of the Evening Star going to do to the creature methodically working through that primitive list? And, if he — or she — is living in the city, within Dr Smellyfeet’s famous flat-topped circle centred on Queen Street, almost for a certainty they will see the Evening Star. And have probably been lapping up, too, the taunts printed in its pages about police failures.

  Harriet picked up her phone, got through to the office allocated to Dr Scholl and urgently summoned him.

  ‘The Evening Star, Doctor?’ she shot out as he entered. ‘You’ve seen it?’

  ‘Yes. And it’s not what I’d have wanted to see.’

  ‘You think it’s bad for us, then? I was afraid of that.’

  ‘Yes. If ever anything was wanted to feed this killer’s obsession it will be seeing those words set out where everyone can read them.’

  A verdict from Dr Smellyfeet she could not quarrel with.

  She sat for a second or two staring down at the words from Exodus in their set-aside panel on the billowing, dismembered Evening Star.

  ‘One thing,’ she said eventually. ‘This removes any temptation I may have had to issue some sort of personal challenge.’

  ‘Yes, I hardly think we need anything more just now to stir him up.’

  ‘Or her.’

  More of a jibe, in anger at what had happened, than any reinforced belief that Mr Man was a woman.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she added quickly. ‘Shouldn’t have said that. Only confuses the issue. And that is, quite simply, what will seeing this list’ — she gave a quick stab at the spread-about paper — ‘make the killer do?’

  Dr Scholl did not need time for reflection.

  ‘I’d stake my reputation,’ he said, ‘on the plan for the next one, for foot for foot, being already well worked out. It may be, though, that this will make him act more quickly than he had intended. And, if so — a big if, mind — then it may give you a better opportunity to catch him, if he takes more risks than he’s planned. But, on the other hand, his plan might as yet have been only in embryo. And then, though he may speed things up a little, he almost certainly will make all the more certain of every step he’s going to take.’

  ‘So it’s wait and see which way the cat jumps? That’s all?’

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t do better than that. We’re not magicians, us psychologists, you know. However much some sections of the media like to portray us as such.’

  ‘No, I don’t think you’re magicians. And I rather suspect that, in saying what you have, you’ve already gone further out on a limb than you should have done. I don’t see, really, what else you could have told me that would help. All I can do is repeat everything I’ve told the team so far, issue yet another warning to every patrolling officer — to every officer in uniform — to be on their guard against a maniac wielding that same butcher’s cleaver that hacked off poor young Chatterton’s hand, and— And hope.’

  *

  It began to seem, as the afternoon stretched into evening, that the killer knowing the police had had the Exodus quotation in front of them all the while was not going to rush into action. No report of anything suspicious came in from the redoubled patrols, all of them now in possession of the ominous words foot for foot.

  The early evening local television news made almost as much play with Exodus as Tim Patterson had done in the midday edition of the Evening Star. So there could hardly be any doubt that the killer must be aware that the police had all along been alert to the Book of Exodus. Even if the killer was illiterate — and Dr Smellyfeet’s profile had argued well for a fair degree of intelligence — they could not now but know that the police they hated were ready for their next move. Foot for foot.

  In the end Harriet went home earlier than she had done on any night since she had found herself in charge of the hunt. She had done everything she could think of. The only thing now seemed to be to wait for the killer to attempt to murder some Greater Birchester Police officer somewhere, almost certainly by hacking off a foot as he had hacked off Cadet Chatterton’s hand, and to trust that the warnings she had issued would frustrate him.

  Rage had boiled up in her at the impotence forced upon her. Action. She wanted action. Thoughts of the days, not at all long ago, when she had been running Stop the Rot came enviously back to her. She had been active then at every moment, taking the battle to the enemy, taking every least little skirmish to the wrongdoers, at the sharp end herself often as not, stopping every least infringement of the law.

  At home in her early bed she had needed all the willpower she possessed to make herself relax, peer with closed eyes for such harbingers of sleep as her subconscious might send flicking up from the depths, odd, unaccountable, ridiculous, but presaging useful oblivion.

  Though in the end she had dragooned herself into six hours of restorative sleep, next day they seemed hardly worth having had. There were no demands on her that she could not have responded to had she gone without rest for forty-eight hours.

  At 10 a.m. she had taken the briefing. But she had not been able to bring to her team any new development that might give them a fresh impetus. There had been no developments to bring. In the final minutes she referred shortly to the leaking of the Exodus quote, taking as she did so a covert look round at the faces in front of her. But, so far as she could tell, there was not a glimmer, not a tightening of the lips, not a quick glance down, that indicated guilt.

  She left it.

  Each morning at ten in the days that followed she took her briefing. Every day at eleven or twelve she met the media. A camera from the local TV was always there, waiting with its little red eye to pounce if there was any sort of sensation. The national press had ceased to take much interest when each day there was nothing new to say. But the Evening Star sent Tim Patterson faithfully morning after morning and always he had his maliciously delivered questions designed to find some new stick with which to beat Greater Birchester Police.

  Six days a week, too, the paper printed the death-dealing litany. For three days the panel had appeared on the front page, though such theological comments — adroitly taking the sting out of the uncompromising Old Testament words — that Canon Walter Smith, writer of the paper’s Saturday Sermon, had made on its first appearance were not repeated. After that the panel was relegated to Page Two. But always in the same accusing shape.

  And each day Harriet made herself look at it.

  Ten days after its first appearance it was sharing Page Two with a few other items of Birchester crime, many of which, Harriet thought, would not have come into existence if she had been there to keep Stop the Rot going as unremittingly as it should.

  Then, on the eleventh day, a comparatively small headline there caught her eye.

  Chapter Eight

  All the small headline had said was Fatal Step. But, full as Harriet’s mind was with the thought of the fatality she expected, she attacked the three short paragraphs below as if each line might hide a secret she had to discover. The fatal step, she found however, had not been taken by a police officer. The paragraphs simply told of the seemingly accidental death of one George Studley, a gamekeeper, from a village called Westholme, some fifteen miles from central Birchester. Out at night patrolling the woods, his foot had caught in a snare and the shotgun he had let fall appeared to have accidentally discharged, wounding him in the head. He had not been able, apparently, to free himself and had been too far from the nearest houses for his shouts to be heard. Only when his wife found he had not come home from his night patrol was he discovered, dead from his injuries.

  It was surprising, Harriet thought, that the item had been allowed to appear on the same page as the paper’s continuing campaign centred on their Cop Killer’s foot for foot threat. But no doubt somebody at the paper had made the connection and had then made sure there was no reference to i
t in the story. The dead man’s family would be justifiably distressed at any claim the death was other than accidental.

  Yet …

  Harriet decided, however much the Evening Star had disallowed the foot for foot coincidence, it was something she could not let pass altogether. A call to the outlying Greater Birchester Police station covering Westholme would set her mind at rest.

  Yes, Inspector Young said, the report in the Evening Star had got the facts right.

  ‘For once …’ she murmured.

  The sergeant who had investigated had been satisfied — a post-mortem had yet to be held — that it was an accident, though he had thought loss of blood from the deep cut the snare had made rather than from the shotgun wound had been the actual cause of death. He had been surprised, however, that George Studley, a steady, careful man, had let himself be caught in a snare. He had known him well back in his days in uniform when he had the police house at Westholme —’

  ‘What? What’s that you’re saying? This— This George Studley was a former village constable?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, ma’am. He was out at Westholme right up until the reorganization when we began policing the village from here. Studley resigned then, bought the police house for himself, and found a job as game-keeper for Colonel Timperley, the local landowner.’

  ‘Inspector, I’m coming out to you. Make sure the sergeant who went to the scene of Studley’s death is there to meet me.’

  A police officer, or at least a former policeman, killed when he was caught by his foot in a snare. Foot for foot. Exodus, xxi, 23.

  *

  George Studley’s widow, when Sergeant Franks introduced Harriet to her, proved to be a solid woman of sixty or so, stunned into almost complete silence by her husband’s death. She sat on a flowered-print sofa in what must once have been the office in the former police house, knees apart, big weather-reddened face inexpressive, body immovable as a haystack.

  Harriet offered her condolences. When her few words evoked no response she went in bluntly with the question that should give her the answer, yes or no, to the possibility that had brought her all the way out to Westholme.

  ‘Mrs Studley, tell me, were you surprised that your husband caught his foot in that snare?’

  The newly made widow was not put out by this direct approach.

  ‘I was,’ she said, woodenly. ‘Still am. Not like my George, that weren’t. Why I’m pleased police are taking proper notice now.’

  She turned her head to give Sergeant Franks a long steady stare.

  Harriet took in the full implications.

  So it was Yes. Or certainly not No. Move on then, move on.

  ‘Your husband had been a gamekeeper for Colonel Timperley for a good many years? He knew the woods well. Is that it?’

  ‘Aye.’

  ‘Are many snares set in the woods, do you know?’

  ‘Nay, I suppose a poacher might set one. But my George never said owt. Or not till Cousin Grace kept asking, when she came here.’

  A different bell suddenly beginning to ring, if still far off.

  ‘She paid you a visit, your cousin? Does she come often?’

  Mrs Studley grunted out a laugh.

  ‘Come? She’s not been here for years.’

  The bell ringing a little more loudly.

  ‘When was it that she came then?’

  ‘Last month. Must’ve been.’

  ‘Last month? Was that by invitation?’

  ‘Nay. I’d never invite her, cousin though she be. Not the way she is. And my George never did care for her. Too much of the I’m right about her for him.’

  Harriet dismissed that.

  ‘But you weren’t pleased either?’ she said. ‘Why was that?’

  ‘Who’d be pleased to have a loony come knocking at their door? Looking like she’d been living in a dustbin. An’ smelling like it, too. No coat to her back. A dress you couldn’t tell whether it were green or brown, hanging down from her like a great long strip o’ carpet. A great big blue woolly hat on top o’ her head.’

  A blue woolly hat. Something more clicked in Harriet’s mind. The description the bus driver whose vehicle had crushed WPC Syed had eventually given of the only witness he had noticed. She was, he had said, a tallish old duck with a blue sort of hat. So if after all the person they were hunting was, as she had postulated, a woman, could she be this woman who had come unexpectedly visiting here? Only shortly before the former Greater Birchester Police constable who lived in the house had been found dead with his foot deeply cut by the wire of a snare?

  Yes. It was her. It must be. The Evening Star’s Cop Killer, Dr Smellyfeet’s Mr Man, Mrs Studley’s Cousin Grace.

  ‘Oh, aye,’ Mrs Studley was ploughing on, a straight furrow. ‘Looking like a loony. And being one. Grace were that, all right. She were in the bin for years. And I don’t know as how any of ’em gets cured proper, for all they say.’

  ‘And she suddenly turned up here? Do you remember just when?’

  ‘End of last month. Be last Sunday in March.’

  Bell ringing steadily now. Saying something that had been altogether unexpected. If just guessed at earlier.

  ‘Right. Your Cousin Grace— What’s her full name, by the way?’

  ‘Grace Brown. Grace Yelland, as was. Same as me, though we’re far enough apart as family. Married Jack Brown at seventeen she did. A’ course he’s left her.’

  ‘Oh. Why was that?’

  ‘She couldn’t be lived with, that’s why. Not after losing the baby.’

  ‘She lost a baby?’

  Life for life. This must beyond doubt be …

  ‘Aye, she did that. An’ it were her last chance, so I heard tell. They’d wanted and wanted, but none came. Not till this ’un, when she were almost too old for it.’

  ‘Tell me, do you know how she came to lose the baby? Was it because of some accident?’

  The question she hardly dared to put.

  ‘Aye. You’re right there. An accident it were. The way of it was this, as I heard. She were always over-gone in religion, you know, the way some are. The one time I visited there, it were prayers before, prayers after, and as many in between as she could put in. Her Jack weren’t so keen on ’em, but she never stopped. And it were when she were out protesting over summat to do wi’ religion that she got hit and lost the little ’un.’

  Bells almost blotting out all thought. The answer. The absolute answer.

  ‘Do you know more details of that?’

  ‘Well, I don’t know about details. I’m sure we never heard all the rights and wrongs of it. I don’t rightly know if I even should say anything, seeing as how you’re the police.’

  ‘Police? It was something to do with the police? But you can tell me. I’m more than used to hearing the police abused.’

  ‘Aye. Well, this is what we heard. Mind you, it were a long while since. She never said no more about it when she come last month.’

  ‘No, but never mind. Just tell me what it was that you did hear.’

  Mrs Studley, sitting with huge solidity on the flower-print sofa, seemed as unfazed by repeated questions as she would have been outdoors by a passing shower of rain.

  ‘It were one o’ your police that hit her, that’s what I heard.’

  ‘Hit her? How? You said it was when she was protesting over something? Do you know what it was?’

  ‘Babies, of course. She was one of ’em as believe you should never stop babies coming, an’ there were a lot of ’em there o’ the same opinion. Well, more than opinion, more like We be right, and you be wrong. There they were, so we heard, outside one of they abortion places. An’ kicking up a right rampage. Stone throwing, an’ all. I don’t know what.’

  ‘Yes? And your cousin was there, you say. And in the course of the protest she was hit? Hit by a police officer?’

  ‘Oh, she was that all right. That was when she got blinded in her eye, that was.’

  There. It must be it. The killer identi
fied at last. Not Mr Man but Mrs Woman. Mrs Grace Brown.

  Now, more to ask.

  ‘And your cousin losing her baby? That was a result of her injury?’

  ‘So she said. So she always said and swore it. Before they took her away. Any time I saw her — an’ in them days I saw more on her than I’ve seen these past five or six year — she were going on about how she’d suffered so an’ was getting not a penny compensation. In a rare taking every time we met, she was. A rare taking.’

  ‘And then she was admitted to a mental hospital?’

  ‘Into the loony bin she went, aye.’

  ‘And then, after a good many years — How many years ago was it that this happened? Can you tell me?’

  The silence of careful thought.

  ‘Well, it must have been more than six year when we got to know. Aye, six and a whit more. It were while my George were still police constable. I remember him telling an’ telling me the like of it would never have happened wi’ him.’

  ‘And how long before you got to hear about it had it happened? Do you remember?’

  ‘Nay, you can’t never ask a body to remember that far back an’ get it right.’

  ‘But what would you say? Vaguely?’

  ‘Well, it must have been a good year before we got to know. A good year. I do recall we were surprised to know it had happened, an’ we not so much as hearing a word.’

  ‘So could we say eight years in all? About eight years ago?’

  ‘Aye. I suppose.’

  ‘And then she suddenly turned up here? Where had she come from? Was it her old home?’

  ‘No. No, it couldn’t have been that. Jack sold when she were put in the bin. Before he went off to Australia. To forget all about it, poor chap. To forget, if he could, all about her. And to forget about us, too. We never heard one word from him after.’