Eventually Boot had told everything he knew or remembered or cared to relate. He had not been looking even occasionally at Davies’s face. Few people do when they are telling something difficult from their past. When he thought he had come to the conclusion of the story, he did glance up as if he thought Davies might have dropped off to sleep. But the big, scarred face was still watching him. The brown overcoat had settled around the policeman’s shoulders like a mound of damp earth.
‘We’re moving,’ Boot said, nodding at the darkness that was stumbling by the window. ‘God knows where we’re going now.’
‘It’s no bother,’ yawned Davies. ‘These things find it difficult to get out of London. You hadn’t finished had you?’
‘Yes,’ hesitated Boot. ‘I think I’ve told you everything, officer.’
Anger gathered in Davies’s face like an extra bruise. ‘Don’t you fucking “officer” me, Booty,’ he threatened. He stood up and grabbed the other man’s lapels, lifting him from the seat. ‘Tell us about your boxing days then,’ he said. Boot’s face stretched tight and he began to say something. Davies, however, picked him up and threw him the length of the carriage. He landed, half-sitting in the open area by the doors. ‘It’s all right, inspector, I can vouch for him. I’ll see he pays his fare,’ Davies called up after him. Boot, his features drained, looked along the seats from his place on the floor. ‘You’re out to get your own back for that,’ he whispered. ‘You’re like all of those police buggers. All for yourself in the end. You’re going to do me over because I made you look small.’
Davies at once beamed into a real smile. ‘No, I wouldn’t do that, Booty. Not to you. Not while we’re having such a useful talk.’ He walked over and hauled Boot up from the floor with excess gallantry, brushing him down and replacing him in his seat. ‘But,’ he said when they were seated again. ‘But, I want to tell you something. For your own comfort and convenience. If you don’t think of a bit more of that story, the bit you’ve left out, I’m going to chuck you down to that other gangway next time. That furthest one up there. And then I shall come and stamp on you for taking the piss out of me in front of all the football fans. All right. You’ve got that clear?’
Boot’s head went up and down as though it were on a hinge. ‘What else then?’ he asked.
‘The night, Booty,’ said Davies, his nose almost in the man’s ear. ‘The night of July 23rd, 1951.’ His face dissolved and he broke into a fragment of song. ‘That perfect night, the night you met, there was magic abroad in the air …’
‘Celia?’ said Boot.
‘Too bloody right, Celia,’ confirmed Davies quietly. A little smoke of excitement began to rise within his heart. Boot watched his fists close. ‘That night.’
‘We had it,’ said Boot. ‘Sexual intercourse, that is. She pestered me. They all did. Christ, I was on the point of exhaustion sometimes.’
‘Rotten lot,’ murmured Davies.
‘And she kept on at me. It was her turn, she said. So … so … that night I told her to come to the store after she had told everybody she was going home. And I saw her there.’
‘Why did you kill her Booty?’
‘I DIDN’T KILL HER!’
His shout echoed strangely through the carriage. The train was clattering and curving on its nameless journey. Davies reached for the lapels again, picked up Boot and flung him the distance to the far doorway. He lay on the ribbed wooden floor looking around him, trying to find his breath.
‘There, I told you I could do it,’ Davies remarked. He walked, swaying with the train towards Boot. Boot sat up and hid his head in his hands like a frightened boy in a school playground. Davies hung above him on the straps. ‘Now,’ he said. ‘Do you want me to throw you back again?’
Boot spoke from his sitting position, his face still enclosed in his hands. ‘I had her knickers,’ he said. ‘I got rid of them after. But I didn’t kill her, Davies. Straight I didn’t. She was all right when she went from me. She went off on her bike.’
‘Leaving you with the prize pants,’ said Davies. The smoke within him had become a small fire of triumph. He had solved something!
‘She ran off without them,’ muttered Boot. ‘We’d had a row, a dispute …’
‘About what, Booty?’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake. It’s twenty-five years ago …’
‘What about?’
‘I wanted her to do something, you know what I mean, and she wouldn’t. She suddenly turned all Catholic and said it was a sin. And I started to kid her about it, just kidding, and she got wild as hell … and …’
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Davies. ‘You said I’d know. But I can’t even guess. What did you have the fight about?’
‘You are a bastard,’ muttered Boot. ‘You just want to hear me say it, don’t you.’ He looked up as he felt the damp sole of Davies’s shoe pushing him in the shirtfront, an inch below his Adam’s apple.
‘That’s right, I want you to say it,’ said Davies. ‘My imagination is a bit limited about things like this.’
‘I wanted her to … give me a gobble,’ said Boot, his head going back to its hiding place between his hands. He looked up and his expression collided with Davies’s look of outraged disbelief. ‘You know …’ Boot mumbled. ‘A gobble. You know what a gobble is.’
‘It’s a noise a turkey makes,’ said Davies.
‘Oh, Christ. Stop it. I wanted her to take it in her mouth. But she wouldn’t.’
‘I don’t blame her,’ said Davies. He had become outwardly even more calm. ‘I wouldn’t like to give you a gobble either.’
Boot’s head was trembling in his palms. ‘And that was it. She got all ratty and slapped my face and I caught hold of her wrists to stop her. I was only playing, really, but she took it all seriously. Then she kicked me, hard – very nastily too – and rushed out. I saw her get on her bike and she went. That was the last I saw of her.’
‘Leaving you with her bloomers. Something to remember her by.’
‘That’s the lot,’ said Boot miserably. ‘That’s all. Make what you like out of it.’
Davies stepped back and sat on one of the seats. ‘All those years ago,’ he said shaking his head at the wonder of it. ‘And you can still remember how hard she kicked you. And all over a little thing like a gobble …’ Boot squealed as the big man jumped at him. Davies picked him up and thrust him back against the swaying curved walls. Three times he banged him against the wall. Then he turned and threw him half the length of the carriage again. Boot lay on the floor, moaning. He got up as far as his elbow. ‘You … you fucking hypocrite,’ he howled. ‘You only do this because you’ve never had a gobble in your bloody life!’
He was saved from almost certain death by the lurch of the train. Davies stumbled and stopped. He sat down heavily on the cross seats, not doing anything. Suddenly he felt very cold. He could see fingers of rain hitting the windows and extending down. ‘Look at that,’ he called to Boot at the far end. ‘It’s pouring. We’ve been nice and dry in here, anyway.’
One of the doors communicating with the next carriage opened noisily and an overalled and undersized man poked his head through. He took in the scene as though it were not entirely unfamiliar. ‘Ere,’ he inquired. ‘What you doin’ still on the bleeding train? This train is in the washing shed.’
He made a short bow, like a man having delivered a brief but important oration, and vanished behind the closing door. He returned in five minutes with two other longer men. ‘There,’ he said. ‘That’s them. Look, that one’s got blood all down him. They been having a fight.’
Davies had, by then, fixed Boot in the seat beside him and had put his arm affectionately about his shoulder. ‘L’il disagreement,’ he informed the trio. ‘Few drinks then the argy-bargy. But we’re all right now. Mates again, ain’t we Booty?’ The head in the arm nodded as it was powerfully squeezed. ‘And we’ll go orf ’ome quiet. Thank you, gentlemen.’
‘This way then,’ said
one of the men ungraciously. ‘You got to go right through the train to the end. You can get out there. And don’t be sick, somebody’s got to clean this train. You’re trespassing anyway, you know that?’
‘I know it, but I can’t say it,’ grinned Davies stupidly. ‘Come on old mate. Let’s get going. We’ll wish these kind gentlemen a fond goodnight.’ He lifted Boot out of the seat with his one enclosing arm and then staggered with him along the central aisle and into the next carriage. The London Transport men followed them at a carriage-length. Davies and then Boot, in response to another squeeze of the arm, began to sing drunkenly. ‘Dear old pals, jolly old pals … Give me the friendship of dear old pals.’
Twelve
He and Mod had a profound drinking session in The Babe In Arms the next evening. Mod held forth vigorously and variously on the flaws in Darwin’s Theory of Origins, produced a logical explanation of the miracle of Moses striking the rock to bring forth water, and related how, in Edwardian times, it was a common embellishment to have goldfish swimming in the plate glass lavatory cisterns of great houses. It was not until they had been deposited, like two clumsy sacks, on the wet midnight pavement by the Irish publican and two eager barmen that the matter of the murder was mentioned.
‘Is this an opportune moment to inquire as to whether you pursued my investigation into the local newspaper coverage of the late melancholy event?’ Mod asked in the posed manner he often affected when drunk. He struggled up from the pavement, confident he could stand and at once toppled again. Davies was leaning against the wall of the public house spread across the bricks as if he feared it was about to fall. He looked at the horizontal Mod. He seemed a long way down.
‘You get yourself in a bloody deplorable state, Mod Lewis,’ Davies reprimanded. ‘Why are you wallowing on the pavement?’
‘Because I can’t get up, Dangerous,’ replied Mod practically. ‘I do believe my legs have finally gone. After all these years. Oh, I shall miss them a terrible lot. They’ve been good pals, these legs have.’ He looked at Davies and measured the distance between them. ‘Friend,’ he inquired calmly. ‘Do you think you could get over here and lift me?’
Davies calculated the yards also. ‘No,’ he decided, ‘I don’t think I could make it. Not that far. But … now listen Mod, don’t despair … If you crawl over here and I hang on to this drainpipe, then you can hoist yourself up, using me and the drainpipe to hang on to. Once you’re on your feet you’re generally all right.’
‘Lovely idea. Brains, brains,’ murmured Mod. He eyed the gap between himself and Davies’s feet like a careful coward about to opt for unavoidable heroism. He used his head to count the pavement stones, nodding a greeting at each one. He dared not take as much as a supporting finger away. ‘Do you really think I could make it, Dangerous?’ he whispered fiercely.
‘Mod,’ said Dangerous, clutching the drainpipe. ‘I know you can, boy, I know.’
‘Faith,’ muttered Mod, ‘can move mountains. I’m but a mound of flesh. All right, I’ll give it a whirl.’
He did not whirl, but moved over the cold stone square on hands and knees, stumbling twice, even from that lowly posture, before reaching the neighbourhood of Davies’s ankles. From there he began to climb, perilously like a man attempting the Eiger’s North Face, hanging on to the pockets, belt and loopholes of Davies’s commodious brown overcoat.
‘Watch the coat,’ warned Davies seriously. ‘You’ll ruin the bloody thing.’ Mod’s face drew level with his neck and he knew he was as upright as he would ever be. ‘Now grab the drainpipe,’ instructed Davies. They hung together like men on a ledge with a thousand foot drop beyond their toes. Mod’s hands touched the rough metal of the downward pipe and grasped it hungrily. It moved under the additional weight (it was already supporting twenty feet of rotten guttering plus Davies) but Mod thought the unsteadiness was within himself.
‘Another hand and I’m there, old friend,’ he muttered courageously. ‘One more swing.’ Davies encouraged him to make the attempt. He did so, staggering across the front of Davies and hanging violently onto the pipe with his other hand.
It was a sober drainpipe but old and infirm. Under the force and weight of the four grasping hands it sagged and sighed as it came away from the wall of the public house. Davies and Mod felt it at the same moment and identical cries issued from each of them. They looked up and saw the entire upright pipe and its attached guttering from the roof toppling from above like an avenging cross. It hung wobbling, apparently trying to regain its ancient balance, while their appalled faces looked up. Then, uncompromisingly, it crashed, snaking like a metallic rope right across the road. The old cast-iron made a fine noise as it shattered. Davies and Mod cowered to the pipeless wall. Lights went on in the windows above the shops, sashes were pushed up and, more disturbing, from behind them, in the saloon bar they could hear someone fighting to open the chains and locks. Some fool across the street shouted: ‘Shrapnel! There’s shrapnel on the road. The guns have opened up. The guns!’
With that mysterious power, the drunken’s man’s adrenalin, that disaster or danger brings to those who were previously incapable, Davies and Mod ran away. They even had the restored wit enough to dodge around the side of the public house and make up a brief alley that joined it to a parallel street. Over the housetops they could hear voices and very soon the yodelling of a police car. ‘They’ve got the boys out of bed,’ observed Davies. ‘Somebody must have thought it was a smash and grab.’
They began to walk towards Mrs Fulljames’ lodging house, bow-legged but now beginning to laugh. They sniggered at first, in the schoolish manner of the inebriated, and then let it go, bellowing, howling into the ear of the urban night.
As they approached ‘Bali Hi’ their natural caution became restored and they stopped laughing and slowed their pace cautiously. Ahead, in the dark, they heard something and almost at once up the street came the nocturnal wandering horse of the rag-and-bone man. It approached in the welcoming manner of one who is warmed by meeting a fellow creature on a dark night.
‘Should be tethered,’ said Davies heavily, looking along the black hill of the horse’s elongated face. ‘Constitutes a danger to traffic.’
‘Now, whose door knocker will it be tonight?’ inquired Mod secretly. ‘The same as before?’
‘No. Somebody else,’ whispered Davies.
‘Dangerous,’ grinned Mod, the idea flooding him. ‘Why not Mrs Fulljames’s?’
Davies smiled a serene smile in the dark. ‘We’ll have to clear off quickly,’ he said. ‘But it’s a lovely idea, Mod. That woman is cruel. She’d take the last Smartie out of your mouth.’
Mod gave a schoolboyish jerk of his head, as much to the horse as to Davies, then the trio mooched along the privet hedges until they reached the door of ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens. Then Davies noticed the horse had no halter.
‘Bugger it,’ he swore. ‘We’ve got to have something to tie it to the knocker.’ He looked about him.
‘Wait,’ cautioned Mod. ‘Hold fast a minute. Why just tie him to the door? Why don’t we push him inside?’
The great pleased look that dawned on Davies’s face almost shone through the dark. ‘What a bloody fine thought,’ he whispered. ‘We’ll shove him in and clear off quick.’
Drunkenly they fumbled until Mod found his key. They tiptoed to the door and the horse, as though eager to enter into the conspiracy, seemed to tip-toe also. The key was revolved and the big Victorian door swung into the entrance hall. Davies gave the horse an accomplice’s nudge and, seeming to know what was expected, it tip-toed into the passage. They closed the door after it and escaped, first at a drunken walk, then a trot, and then a wild hooting run. They staggered and ran, overwhelmed with the enormity of what they had perpetrated, until they came to The Moonlight Serenade, an all-night coffee stall hard by the railway station. This was owned by a man called Burney who divided his time between serving coffee there and serving time in Wormwood Scrubs. He and Davies were
old friends.
‘If necessary,’ said Mod cautiously to Davies, ‘I expect Mr Burney would provide us with an alibi.’
Davies shook his head, doubt hanging from his face. ‘Nobody would believe him,’ he decided. ‘He’s past the credibility stage. He’s priced himself out of the alibi business.’
Mod drank his second mug of coffee. ‘Mind you,’ he said thoughtfully, ‘I know where we could get a genuine alibi. Someone anybody would believe. Mr Chrust at the local paper. I think you ought to go there anyway. Remember what I told you. About the report of the murder?’
‘He lives above the office,’ agreed Davies, still rocking on his feet with the laughing and the drink. ‘He won’t like being got up. But if we say it’s an important inquiry. And there’s nobody would doubt his word about us being there. And who is going to check the time by the minute? Yes, let’s go and see him.’
‘Mod,’ said Davies as they thumped along the echoing street. ‘I had a good look at the cuttings again, old friend. Read them right through, minutely. Nothing. I couldn’t see a single thing. Are you sure you weren’t pissed again and read the wrong murder?’
‘Listen,’ said Mod, stopping in mid-stride. He let his foot drop gently to the pavement. He was still drunk and so was Davies, but the helplessness was wearing off. The coffee was still comfortable within them. ‘Listen … and I mean listen. I told you the files of the Citizen, not the cuttings. You’ll never make a detective, you know. Not as long as you’ve got a hole in your arse.’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 15