She regarded him seriously. ‘Dangerous …’ she said. She bit fiercely into her sandwich. She had a sharply pretty face and gentle hair. She had opened her coat and her small breasts just touched the surface of her sweater. The sun blew across her colourless urban face.
‘Yes, Josie?’ he said.
‘Dangerous, you really want to do this don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘Why? I mean, why all of a sudden? I don’t believe all that cobblers about some bloke talking in prison, even if my mum does.’
‘I don’t like to see something left,’ he replied defensively. ‘Just abandoned. Don’t you think I ought to find out?’ He hesitated. ‘If I can.’
‘Who is it in aid of, Dangerous?’ she asked quietly. She opened the top slice of her sandwich and said to herself, ‘No pickle in this one.’ She returned her small face to him. ‘Who is it for?’ she repeated. ‘Is it for Celia or my mum? Or is it for you?’
He felt a shaft of guilt. ‘It’s not for anybody,’ he protested. ‘All I know is that somebody is walking about free today – with blood on their hands.’
‘Dried blood,’ she sniffed. ‘He’ll hardly remember it now. Have you ever done a murder case before?’
‘No.’ He did not look at her. ‘This is the first.’
‘Did your inspector, or whoever it is, tell you to do it? Or are you just doing it off your own bat?’
‘On my own,’ he mumbled. He examined the sandwich in his hand and, carefully selecting a site, bit into it.
‘I thought so,’ she said. ‘It’s like a hobby, then.’
Father Harvey had said that. The repetition of the word stung him.
‘It’s not a hobby!’ he said angrily. ‘I’m going to find out who killed Celia!’
‘Don’t get out of your bloody pram,’ said josie. She was looking at him calmly. ‘I don’t know whether it’s going to make anyone better off, that’s all. I might as well tell you, I’d have nothing to do with it. But my mum seems to think you can do something.’ She looked up and then held his sleeve. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘That little boat’s turned over, Dangerous. The bloke’s in the water.’
‘They do it all the time,’ answered Davies looking up. ‘People ring us and the fire brigade and God knows who else. But we tell them not to worry because it’s part of the sport. They enjoy it.’
‘You leave them be, then,’ she said pointedly.
‘We do,’ he said. ‘One day one of them will drown and everybody will moan and say why didn’t we do anything.’
She sighed sadly and threw a whole sandwich at a loitering bird. It flew away in fright, but then returned cautiously, hardly able to believe its luck. ‘How far have you got?’ she said. ‘Anywhere?’
‘Bits and pieces,’ he shrugged. ‘It will take a while. Do you want to help me?’
She eased her eyes. ‘All right. But don’t let it bugger up my mother, will you. She’s had twenty-five years of it.’ She seemed undecided whether to tell him something. ‘Even now, and this sounds mad I know, even now she seems to think that somehow you’re going to bring Celia back – alive!’
‘Oh Christ, no.’
‘Oh Christ, yes,’ she said. ‘You can see what I’m getting at. I was a sort of replacement for her, you see. I’m a sort of secondhand Celia. They had another baby after she went but it was stillborn. That didn’t help.’
‘I bet,’ nodded Davies. The man had righted his dinghy and was climbing back aboard. He was wearing yellow oilskins and a life-jacket. Davies said. ‘You said a funny thing about your mother …’
‘About Celia giving her something to live for? Yes, it sounds funny, I know, but that’s just how it seems sometimes. If it had not happened, her disappearing, Celia would have grown up like anybody else, got married and cleared off. In a way she’s been much more of a daughter for my mum, since she’s been dead. If she is dead. No matter what I do, Dangerous, I’ll never make up for her.’
He patted her hand with his half-eaten sandwich. ‘I see,’ he nodded. She smiled in her young way. The sun was still on them. ‘It’s a pity you never knew Celia,’ he added.
‘Knew her!’ Her laugh came out bitterly. ‘I’ve spent my whole life with her, mate.’
‘You don’t like her very much do you?’
‘There’s nothing to like or dislike. You can’t dislike a ghost. I never saw her, did I, or ’eard her speak. She’s just a name to me. But it’s a name that keeps coming up if you know what I mean. If my mum could do a swop, me for our Celia, she’d have ’er every time. I’m stuck with that, see.’
Davies nodded. ‘I see.’ He waited. ‘Do you think your mum knows who did it?’
‘I think she thinks she does,’ said Josie, wiping a stray morsel from her chin.
‘How about Cecil Ramscar, for a start?’
‘She’s never said as much.’
‘What do you think?’
‘Christ knows. I wasn’t around twenty-five years ago. But he could have. He sent a wreath.’
Seven
He went back to the police station thinking about Ramscar. When he reached there he discovered that the Ramscar file had been locked in a cupboard with the divisional sporting trophies, the supply of tea bags and the tear-gas cannisters. The keys were with an officer who was attending the magistrates’ court so Davies walked around there.
It was a busy day in the court and as was usual a lot of ordinary innocent people had come in to sit and watch for a while. There were loaded shopping baskets and loaded expressions in the public seats. He entered as stealthily as he could, falling over a wheelbarrow which was being used as an exhibit in the case being heard. Everyone turned to see him. The public laughed, the police and the magistrates sighed, the man in the dock pointed a stare at him, a look threaded with uncertainty. Davies nervously recognised him as the man he had helped with the sack of vegetables over the allotment hedge a few nights previously. He sidled out of the accused’s sight.
The prisoner was being called from the dock to give evidence on his own behalf in the witness box. He dismounted one stand to mount the other, reading the oath in a suitably earthy voice. Davies looked around for the sergeant who had the key to the police station cupboard.
He saw him squatting at the end of a row of policemen waiting to give evidence in the court’s crowd of cases. Davies advanced with dainty clumsiness, hunched low in the way of a soldier moving under fire, until, squatting in his piled overcoat by the officer, he persuaded him to surrender the key. He was aware of the court proceedings freezing all around him. He looked up to see the Godlike faces of the magistrates high on their dais regarding him sourly. The rest of the people were either standing or leaning, trying to get a view of the dwarf in the voluminous raincoat who had wafted so clumsily across the floor.
‘Mr Davies, is it?’ asked the chairman of the bench, knowing perfectly well that it was.
‘Yes, your honour,’ replied Davies still crouching criminally.
‘Will you be long?’
‘No sir. Sorry sir. Just getting the key to the police station cupboard.’ He looked up beggingly to the uniformed sergeant, who, red to the cheekbones, searched and eventually found the key and delivered it to him. Davies began to retrace his progress through the court still at his midget’s crouch.
‘Mr Davies,’ called the chairman. ‘There’s no need for you to continue with this impersonation of the Hunchback of Notre-Dame. You may walk normally.’
There was laughter in court. Davies, hung with embarrassment, rose to his proper height and bowed at the bench. He backed away and was about to collide with the wheelbarrow when he was pulled firmly into a vacant seat by the court warrant officer. ‘Sit down for a bit,’ said the exasperated official below his breath. ‘Just sit down.’
Davies gratefully sat down. The case proceeded. From the witness box the prisoner was making a histrionic plea. ‘That allotment, your lordship, has been in our family for years. My father and my grandfather ’
ad it. Then me. It was like our heritage. I took it on, carrying on the tradition, but then I was on the sick for months and I couldn’t keep it up and the council comes along and takes it off me. After all those years …’
Davies found himself nodding sympathetically. ‘They gave it to some other bloke,’ said the accused brokenly. ‘My land.’
The chairman leaned over logically. ‘So you think that entitles you to go in the darkness and steal his produce?’ he suggested.
‘I manured that allotment,’ said the man bleakly.
The courtroom door opened to Davies’s right as someone came into the chamber. The duty officer nudged Davies and he took his cue and shuffled out. As he did so the garden gangster was returning to his accused place in the dock. Davies did not know why, but he let himself take a final glance.
When Davies returned to the police station his way was barred by a rowdy phalanx of boys, all noisily disputing the ownership of a ravaged-looking tortoise which squatted neutrally before the desk sergeant on the counter. The sergeant silenced the din with a single shout. Davies ducked and felt it go over his head.
‘Now – who found this ugly bugger in the first place?’ demanded the sergeant. Through the conflict that followed he called to Davies. ‘There’s another file of Ramscar stuff come from the Yard, Dangerous. The Inspector said to look through it and then go up and see him. It’s in your locker.’
Davies fought his way through the squabbling lads. Several of the smaller ones had begun to cry. He shut the door of the CID Room behind him. A policeman who had been concerned with traffic duty for as long as Davies could remember, was sitting masticating over the collection of pornographic pictures which Detective Sergeant Myers had been investigating.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ said Davies in his deepest police tone. ‘Looking for suspected traffic offenders, eh?’ The policeman grinned sheepishly but rose and put the pictures back in a cardboard box. ‘It’s all right for you lot, Dangerous,’ he sighed. ‘All I see all day is idiot bloody motorists and lollipop women.’
He went out sadly and Davies took the new Ramscar file from his locker and set it out on the table. It contained reports and photographs from Australia and from America. He went through the material conscientiously, sniffing along the lines of the written summaries and examining the photographs, taken over a period of years, with Ramscar getting thicker and more prosperous as time elapsed.
There was a photograph in a separate envelope marked ‘Return to Criminal Records Dept., New Scotland Yard, London.’ Davies opened it. To his surprise he found himself looking at a wedding-day picture of Ramscar. He attempted a whistle, another accomplishment beyond him. Nothing but hushed air came out. On the back the picture was stamped ‘May 14th, 1965’. Davies turned it over slowly. It was an immobile wedding group, everything fixed from feet to smiles, with Ramscar, then in his thirties, hugging a big clouded blonde, whose hair, hat and bouquet were being dragged away by what appeared to be a near-gale. The trousers of the men in the group blew out stiffly like flags. Ramscar had a flower in his lapel and another waggishly between his teeth. Grouped around him were a team of London criminals and their loved ones. Mrs Norris was there, clay-faced, and next to her was a furtive man who, he correctly guessed, was Albert Norris. In front of the group was a dainty girl in a bonnet holding a posy and simpering as small girls do at weddings. At first Davies hardly noticed her but then he looked, and put the photograph under the magnifying glass he once more quickly borrowed. The expression was unmistakable. It was Josie.
He eventually folded the file and carried it up four flights of stairs to Yardbird’s office. He knocked and waited for the customary two minutes before Yardbird answered. He had been by the window for there was new cigarette ash on the floor and there was a girl standing on the flat roof of the students’ hostel looking out over the streets. But now he was back behind his desk and trying to give the impression he had been working heavily there all the time.
‘I’ve been through these, sir,’ said Davies, putting the file on the edge of the desk. ‘Ramscar’s new file.’
‘Did they tell you anything?’ asked Yardbird without looking up from the report he was ostensibly writing.
‘This and that,’ shrugged Davies. ‘I’ve got a pretty good picture of him now. All I have to do is find him.’
Yardbird said with off-hand tartness, ‘That’s all you had to do from the beginning, Davies. We don’t want you to write his life story, we want to know where he is.’
‘I’ve been making inquiries, sir, as well. All over the place. It won’t be too long before I run into him, I expect.’ He paused, then decided to go on even though Yardbird was still writing, his eyes fixed down. ‘He’s been in bother everywhere, hasn’t he,’ said Davies.
‘We all know that,’ sighed Yardbird. ‘All sorts of villainy. I told you that at the very start.’
Davies rose and took the file from the desk. ‘I’ll keep this then,’ he said. ‘I’ll keep it with our own file. There was enough in that to hang him.’
Yardbird eventually looked up. ‘What are you going on about, Davies?’ he asked wearily. ‘Christ, you gabble on like an old woman, sometimes. Can’t you see I’m up to my ears in work?’
‘Sorry,’ said Davies, moving towards the door.
‘What was it anyway? You were just saying?’
Davies kicked himself afterwards, but it seemed to come out of its own volition. ‘He looked fair game for a murder charge, once,’ he said. ‘Remember the Norris murder?’
‘He’s been close to murder … which murder?’
‘Norris. Celia Norris. Seventeen. July nineteen fifty-one. Never solved.’
Yardbird put his pen down. ‘Now listen, Davies,’ he said angrily. ‘Don’t let’s have any of your usual frigging things up. I sent you to find a man, not scratch about with bloody history. I had my doubts about your ability to handle this Ramscar thing, and I should have had a few more. I can see that now.’
‘No, sir,’ protested Davies. ‘I’ll find Ramscar.’
‘Well find him then. Get out and find him, man. And stop mucking about with things that don’t matter any more.’
Davies went outside. ‘Fuck you for a start,’ he said below his breath. ‘It matters to me.’
It was a chill afternoon for anyone to be stripping. Davies felt a pang of pity for the girl on the apron stage as she went through the traditional ritual of her work. Her face was distant, her movements never quite synchronised with the music that wheezed from somewhere amid the coloured light bulbs that fringed, but hardly illuminated, the performance. There was little style about the audience either.
There were three overcoated businessmen, curled like moles. A fourth snored voluminously. There was a butcher’s delivery man, whose pulpitted bicycle Davies had observed parked outside. He sat in his blotched and striped apron, watching the girl almost professionally. There were two lank-haired youths both of whom Davies recognised from their appearances in court. Sitting on one of the unkempt chairs, also, occasioning in Davies a certain surprise, was a Red Cross nurse.
‘What’s she for? In case anybody faints with excitement?’ Davies asked the bouncer.
‘Nah, she ain’t a real proper nurse,’ replied the guardian. ‘She couldn’t stick a plaster on your arse. She’s part of the show.’
‘What does she do then? The kiss of life?’
‘Nah. She takes ’er duds off, don’t she. You know, black stockings and that gear. Nurses strippin’ is a favourite.’ He nodded disparagingly at the tableau of watchers.
A small, featureless man with dangling arms had been despatched to find Albert Norris. The messenger now returned ambling across the stage, passing within an inch of the performing girl’s ramshackle bottom, and approached them like an obedient chimpanzee. ‘’E’s gorn,’ he said. ‘Just gorn out the back way.’
Davies stepped between the turgid customers, whose trance he failed to disturb, and strode briskly onto the stage, excusing h
imself with a bow to the occupant, and then went out into the street through an exit situated within inches of the plywood wings. He failed to close the door fully and was followed by a howl from the girl: ‘The door! Shut the bleeding door!’ He mumbled an apology and turned but she, naked as she was, emerged half way through the opening into the street, made a violent remark, and slammed the door.
He was in a long road, a service access, behind some shops, and he immediately saw Norris, who had reached the end and was turning into the main road. Davies went at a hurried amble after him. Norris, a small man, was, however, wearing a check overcoat and was an easy target. Davies reached the junction with the main road just as Norris turned to see if he was following. Norris paused, then went into a cinema, following a series of pensioners waiting to pay their reduced afternoon prices at the box office. By the time Davies had reached the foyer Norris was inside.
Davies paid for a ticket. He stood and as his eyes came to terms with the surroundings he could see that the place was ranked with empty seats with an island of twenty or so patrons gathered together, as though for mutual protection, in the centre. Davies trod cautiously towards them. When he reached the small colony he saw that it consisted of old age pensioners, softly chewing, faces rapt, spectacles reflecting the spectacle which was now dawning on the screen. The exception was the chequered figure of Albert Norris sitting incongruously among them. There was an empty seat in the row before him.
Davies pushed along the row of sharp knees and hands and sat in the seat. He turned immediately and looked at Albert Norris. ‘Can you see all right?’ he inquired politely.
‘What you following me for?’ asked Norris bluntly.
‘Shush.’ ‘Shut up,’ chorused the aged people.
‘Sorry,’ apologised Davies generally. He watched two minutes of the film then returned to Norris, the weasel face set among all the small rabbit faces.
‘I wanted to have a chat with you,’ he said at just above a whisper.
‘Shush.’ ‘Hush.’ ‘Shut your mouths,’ complained the old folks. The crone next to Davies dug him in the ribs with her spiked elbow. He kept looking at Norris.
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 8