Davies had few notions about locating Ramscar. It appeared obvious that if he were in hiding he would hardly visit his once habitual haunts, although he would undoubtedly contact old associates. Davies thought if he walked about loudly enough and asked a great many random questions then Ramscar might come to him.
In the afternoon he went to Park Royal greyhound races and backed four spectacularly losing dogs, one at evens. He made conversations with a number of shifty men, mentioning Ramscar and showing his picture but it appeared to mean nothing. In the toilet he approached a fellow urinator and waved the photograph but the man, white-faced, retreated, still making water, and with a quaint leap-frogging motion along the troughs. As soon as he reached the door he ran and reported Davies to a policeman.
It was not at all a promising first day. At five o’clock he returned to the police station and, unable to help himself, almost mesmerised, he again took down the file on Celia Norris. He kept looking over his shoulder, experiencing the same sensations as when he had, as a boy, secretly examined the illustrations in First Aid to the Injured, fearful that his mother would catch him enslaved by a drawing of a woman receiving artificial respiration. He felt contracted inside reading through the unfinished story again, looking at the photographs. He found himself making a stupid little movement with his hand trying to brush that nib of ice cream from the laughing girl’s chin. He reacted with horror when he realised what he was doing. Eventually, unable to help himself, he returned the file and very secretly went out and began to walk the twenty-five-year-old trail of Celia Norris.
Although there had been demolitions and developments on the London fringe of the district, the area of the High Street and the canal were all but unchanged. The cemetery occupied a good many acres at the base of this region and that was as immovable as cemeteries generally are. The canal formed a wedge through the centre and provided another hard argument against change. On the far side the small workshops and bigger factories had been so busy making goods and money during the nineteen-fifties and sixties that few thought of making any improvements. Now they had slowed with the recession, those who operated them were unwilling to finance re-planning or expansion. The High Street, grey and crowded, ran roughly on the same line as the canal, although it curved quickly to cross the waterway at its uppermost end before the power station. It was locked between the immovable and the immutable. To the south the cemetery, to the north the power station, to the west the canal and to the east the solid, three- and four-storey houses of the original Victorian town, including ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens (formerly called ‘Cranbrook Villa’ but renamed after Mrs Fulljames had fallen in love with Rosano Brazzi in the film version of South Pacific). It would be half a century before anyone thought of pulling those down.
And so the stage remained largely as it was that close night in July, 1951, when Celia Norris began her cycle journey home from the youth club. It was now a gritty October evening. Davies left the police station and after courteously declining the offer of a free intercourse from Venus, the evening star, he set off on foot for St Fridewide’s Catholic Church.
The youth club had been in the grounds of the church, indeed it still was, and the girl would have cycled from the main gate. He walked thoughtfully from there to the junction with the southern end of the High Street. The cemetery occupied about ten acres, fronting on the main road, at that point, all dead land. He went at a steady pace (he would cycle it, he decided, at some later time) but increased his step past the graveyard gates because he did not want to be forced into making an explanation to the miserable keeper about the misreading of the word ‘tomb’ for ‘bomb’. The man was bound to be uncharitable. He should introduce him to Mrs Fulljames one day.
At the conclusion of the cemetery there was the customary stone-mason’s yard with a nice display of crosses and weepy angels, to catch the passing trade, and from this the haphazard High Street began its course. The smart, big, bright stores that grew up in the years of plenty, in the sixties, had found their home in other easier thoroughfares in Kilburn, Paddington and Cricklewood, leaving this street to the small grocers, the tobacconists, the fish-and-chip merchants, the humid cafés, the bright, cheap clothes shops, the betting shops, of course, and several long stretches occupied by the showrooms of second-hand car dealers, the vehicles and the salesmen smiling identical smiles from the open fronts of the premises.
The local newspaper, the Citizen, was uncomfortably accommodated in a house, once the residence of the neighbourhood’s only famous son, Miles Shaltoe, a writer of somewhat dubious novels who enjoyed a vogue in the early nineteen hundreds. There was a plaque commemorating his occupation under the fascia which proclaimed ‘North West London Citizen’ and in smaller letters ‘Every Friday’. There were also several ladies’ hairdressers, one boasting the title Antoinette of Paris, Switzerland and Hemel Hempstead. There were numerous public houses interpolated along the street, with The Babe In Arms occupying a favoured position adjacent to the public conveniences, two cinemas, the more palatial of which now only featured Indian films, a West Indian Bongo Club and an English Bingo Club, a pawn shop, its avuncular balls first hung in 1896, and The Healing Hands massage parlour, an establishment of more recent roots.
Despite attempts with paint and plastic to brighten it, the Street was decayed and tired, sighing for the euthanasia of the demolition man’s flying ball. Davies walked along it, as he had many times in his past five years in that town, but now examining the upper windows and wondering if any eyes had looked down from their vantage on the final journey of Celia Norris.
The upper floors, while mostly curtained and closed, with lights behind them at this time of evening, had the occasionally noteworthy difference. There were the premises of Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith, High Class Fortunes Told, the Winged Victory Ex-Servicemen’s Club, the ubiquitous snooker hall, and the Quaker Meeting Room, undoubtedly reeking with the rising odours of the Take-Away-Curry shop underneath.
The husky evening itself was layered with odours of Guinness, chips, work and dirt. There was a municipal tree at the junction with Jubilee Road, one of the Victorian offshoots. It was donated by the Rotary Club – and had a plaque to prove it – to commemorate the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and, despite being protectively caged in an iron waistcoat, it was stricken as though by some long-term lightning.
Davies walked the length of the High Street twice in forty minutes. It was busy with buses and homeward cars now, and with people scurrying from their work, thinking of freedom, food, television or possibly love. He ended his thoughtful patrol at The Babe In Arms and went into the elongated bar. Mod was predictably peering into half a pint, which he had purchased with his own money. He was glad to see Davies for he was anxious to know further about his private murder case and his glass was running low.
‘I’ve started,’ said Davies when they were drinking. ‘I’ve started on the case.’
‘How far have you got?’
‘Nowhere.’
Mod nodded at his beer and at the logic of the reply. ‘Will you keep me informed, Dangerous?’ he asked. ‘I have a lot of time to think, you know. I may just come up with something.’
‘I’ll tell you,’ promised Davies. He glanced up and down the bar. ‘She’s not in then? Flamenco Fanny.’
‘No,’ confirmed Mod. ‘I think she must have broken her ankle last night when she fell down. With any luck.’
The door opened on cue and the rough woman, her untidy leg in a hammerhead of plaster-of-paris, stumped in supported by a massive walking stick. ‘Olé!’ she cried.
‘Oshit,’ said Davies.
Even with the annoyance of the rough woman stumping around all night in the bar on her enormous plaster cast it was only with some difficulty that Davies managed to entice Mod to leave and to walk with him to the canal bank.
‘If I am to be your Dr Watson, I wish you could arrange for our investigations to be outside drinking hours,’ complained Mod. ‘If you don’t mind
me saying so, I can’t see how any clues to this conundrum – there, I said it too, beered as I am – are going to be lying around by the canal twenty-five years after the event.’
A man loitering in a shop doorway opposite saw them leave the bar and, after allowing them fifty yards clearance, walked in the shadows behind. He watched them make for the entrance to the alley between the pawnbroker’s and the massage parlour, then hurried down a service road alongside some neighbouring shops and climbed a fence to reach the canal bank. He ran through the towpath mud, passed a man fishing in the dead of night, and turned up the alley from the canal end. Davies and Mod were wandering towards him.
‘It’s not clues, it’s geography I want to be sure about,’ Davies was saying patiently. ‘On her way home she might have cycled down this cut and gone along the towpath to the road bridge. I just want to cover the ground, that’s all.’
The man who had followed them now approached from the foot of the alley. They looked up from their talk and saw him come, coat-collared, towards them. Davies felt an instinctive touch of nervousness as the silhouette came nearer, as though his new role had given him a sharper edge. They had almost to touch to pass each other and, as people do in such awkward circumstances, they muttered almost into each other’s faces as they passed.
‘Goodnight,’ said Davies.
‘Nighty-night,’ added Mod.
‘Night,’ responded the man, a short blast of beer emitting with the word. Davies saw nothing more of him than a pale triangle of face jutting from the collar and pinpoint eyes squinting through rudimentary spectacles. The man had gone to the upper end of the alley before Davies realised that there were no lenses in those glasses.
The alley performed a mild curve and beyond the angle the limp lamplit water of the canal came into their views. The damp, rotten smell was at once heavier. They stood and took in the confined scene. If the girl had gone that way she would have had that same view in the same light as she rode carefully on her bicycle. The helmeted lamp had hovered above the bridge for many years. It was as if it had lost something in the water and was taking a long time to find it.
Davies and Mod were contemplating the chill view, hearing the bored glugging of the water against its old banks when, dramatically, a figure ascended from behind the elevated hedge on their right. They jumped like a pair of ponies. The figure squeaked nervously. ‘Oh … oh … ever so sorry, mates …’ he said eventually. He stood upright against the edge five feet above them because of the variant in the ground levels. Davies and Mod regarded him as they would have regarded the appearance of Satan.
Davies contained his voice. ‘Don’t worry,’ he laughed hollowly. ‘Didn’t see you there, that’s all. Made us jump.’
‘No you wouldn’t, not from down there,’ acknowledged the man. ‘Completely hidden from down there I am, I bet.’ He performed a brief demonstration crouching behind the hedge and calling to them. ‘There, can you see me now?’
‘No, not a thing. Can’t see you at all,’ obliged Davies.
‘What you doing anyway?’ inquired Mod, more to the point.
‘The allotment,’ said the man, rising and nodding over his shoulder into the vacant darkness. ‘Only chance I’ve got of getting down here. By the time I get home from work and that. I’m just getting a few veg.’
‘Good job you know where everything is,’ observed Davies.
‘All in nice straight lines,’ said the man. ‘I’ve got a torch but the batteries went. I’ve done now, anyway. Finished.’
They continued looking up at him. He was like a politician with a small audience. ‘Any good, these allotments?’ asked Davies.
‘Not bad. Not as good as the power station plots, but not bad either. Here it’s always dampish, see. Because of the canal. But the power station stuff gets the spray from the cooling towers. But you get good stuff in both.’ He began to heave a sack over the hedge. Davies and then Mod moved forward and helped him to bring it to the ground. He thanked them, wished them a cheerful good-night, then shouldered the sack and went towards the top of the alley.
‘He must have a lot of mouths to feed,’ observed Mod.
They continued to the end of the cut, the air closing damper with each step. The canal water, near black by day, was in its night-time guise, appearing in the streaky light of the lamp as limpid as a tropical pool. Sitting on the bank, quite close to the bridge, was Father Harvey, the priest of St Fridewide’s. He was fishing.
‘Now I’ve seen the lot,’ Davies said to him. ‘Up there was a chap digging his allotment in the dark, and now you fishing. Caught anything?’
‘If I do I’ll have you as witness to a holy miracle,’ murmured the priest. ‘I am only seeking peace. Unfortunately canal banks have become areas of suspicion and a bachelor priest might find it embarrassing to merely walk or stand along here at night. So I fish.’
Davies grinned in the dark. ‘I was thinking of nicking you for poaching, father,’ he said.
‘Chessus, now, I never thought of that,’ replied the priest. ‘I suppose I could always plead that I was fishing for souls.’
‘You’d need communion bread for bait,’ suggested Mod. Davies told Father Harvey who Mod was and the Father nodded up and Mod nodded down.
‘We passed a man up there in the alley who was wearing glasses with no lenses in them,’ said Davies.
He heard the priest sniff. ‘There’s a lot of poverty about,’ he observed.
‘Or maybe it was a disguise.’
‘It could have been that,’ agreed Father Harvey. ‘There’s that place of degradation the council have allowed them to open at the top of the alley – the so-called “massage parlour”. Hell masquerading as hygiene. He might have been going there and not wanting anyone to recognise him. The pawnshop and the massage parlour are both full of the unredeemed.’
‘Good point. You should be in the force.’
‘Thank you, my son,’ said the priest laconically. They were silent for a while, watching the deadpan water as though expecting a pike to bite at any moment. Then the priest said: ‘I take it you haven’t found out who burned down my confessional box?’
‘No,’ admitted Davies. ‘We haven’t got very far on that one. But I don’t see it as an act of desecration.’ He could see the priest’s nose profiled like a triangle.
‘I might have told my flock it was a sign from Heaven, or Hell,’ said the priest. ‘But experience tells me it was boys smoking in there.’
‘It won’t be easy to find out,’ interpolated Mod. ‘You won’t get it out of them at Confession because you haven’t got a confessional box. It’s like the chicken and the egg.’
The priest showed no outward reaction. He appeared to be trying to analyse something in the water. ‘You know, Dangerous,’ he said, coming to a conclusion, not turning his head. ‘I can’t help thinking that you’re not really cut out for being a detective. If you could cut your drinking by half, I’d suggest the priesthood.’
‘That’s a pretty general opinion,’ agreed Davies, with doleful sportsmanship. ‘But, it happens, I am on an important inquiry at present.’
‘Oh, and what would that be? Or can you tell?’
‘I think I can. After all you’re a man of secrets.’
‘It goes with the job,’ agreed the priest.
Davies crouched on the dank bank. Mod remained standing at though keeping watch. Davies asked: ‘Father, do you remember Celia Norris?’
‘Celia Norris,’ nodded the priest. ‘The girl was apparently murdered. A long time ago.’
‘Twenty-five years,’ said Davies. ‘I’ve reopened the case.’
‘Chessus,’ said Father Harvey. ‘It was when I first came here. In fact I only knew the girl a few weeks. I can’t even remember her face.’
Davies could. ‘It was never cleared up,’ he said. ‘It was just left.’
‘You didn’t come down here looking for footprints, by any chance, did you?’ asked the priest.
‘Not quite.
But I thought I would just wander along and see if I could get any ideas.’
‘She was at the youth club. And they never found anything,’ said the priest.
‘Her clothes,’ said Davies. ‘They found those. Except her … underpants.’
‘Ah, her knickers,’ agreed Father Harvey. ‘Yes, I recall that fact.’ He gave the fishing line a few ruminative jerks. ‘Perhaps, now, she wasn’t wearing any.’
‘Father!’ Davies said it. Mod began to whistle in the night.
‘Well, like I said just now, there’s a lot of poverty about. Twenty-five years ago it was no better.’
Davies considered again the priest’s nose. In silhouette it appeared a lot longer than in daylight. ‘Do you know where Mrs Norris, her mother, lives these days?’ he asked.
‘Yes, yes. Let me see. Hunter Street, by the power station. She still comes to church, sometimes.’
‘Dave Boot,’ said Davies. ‘Remember Dave Boot, the youth club man, father? What was he like?’
‘Muscles,’ said Father Harvey decisively. ‘All muscles. He did all this training nonsense. Chessus, he used to make me feel envious. I had a few muscles myself in those days, but I was required to hide them under my cassock. One of the sacrifices of spiritual life, you see. But there were times, I must confess, when I would have swopped all the vestments of a bishop for a string vest.’
Davies laughed sombrely in the dark. Mod, who did not have a top coat, shuffled in the cold. Davies took the hint.
‘We’ll be going then, father,’ said Davies.
‘Right you are,’ sniffed the priest. ‘I wish you well with your mouldy old murder. This one’s not only dead, it’s been dead a long time. Cold ashes, Dangerous, cold ashes. You might find it’s better left like that.’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 5