Davies felt his heart plummet. ‘Oh, I’m sorry about that.’
‘He’s not. Loves it. Every minute. He thinks he’s Peter the Great. Well, he did last time I went to see him.’
‘When was that?’ asked Davies.
‘Last year,’ she cut into the bread fiercely. ‘Twelve months ago.’
‘Why did you stop?’
‘Reasons.’ She seemed to be gritting her teeth, trying not to cry. ‘I couldn’t stand it. All the horrors in there. I couldn’t stand hearing him giving orders to the bleeding Russian court and the like. I couldn’t face it. I stopped going.’
She stopped cutting the sandwiches. It occurred to Davies that the foxes were in for a feast that night. ‘It’s horrible in that place,’ she said. ‘So horrible I can’t tell you. You’ll see if you go.’
He got up. The smell of the fresh bread and the cold beef was overpowering. ‘I’ll be off then,’ he said. ‘What shall I say if he asks when you’re going to see him?’
She hesitated, then cleaned the crumbs from the knife with her fingers. ‘Tell him … tell him I’ll come after the Revolution,’ she said. ‘That’ll do.’
Immediately he went beyond the gates of St Austin’s Hospital, Davies experienced the guilt of the sane going to visit the insane. He drove the Lagonda with consideration through the arched gatehouse and nodded in an agreeably humble way to everyone he saw. At first he was in a wide expanse of playing fields and woodland, but it felt different; it was as if he had entered a strange country. In the distance he could see the bent backs of the buildings among greenery like giants kneeling at a game of dice. He realised that this was a no man’s land. There was another, higher wall ahead.
Autumn was thinning the trees and through a belt of white and shaky birches he could see moving coloured figures. Some men with ropes were sawing loudly in an oak tree around which the road curved. They waved to him from their perilous branches and he gladly waved back. As he turned the curve he saw that a football match was being played ahead; a proper match with goalposts and nets, corner flags, and with the players decked in correct shirts, shorts, socks and boots. A referee, in regulation black, danced around controlling the game. The scene pleased Davies immensely. It was Wednesday morning and he was glad to see them playing at that time of the day and the week.
He slowed the car, stopped it almost opposite one of the goals, a few yards from the touchline which, he was again glad to see, was being overseen by a proper linesman in black shirt and shorts holding a bright orange flag. The linesman smiled at Davies and proceeded to pretend he was walking a tightrope along the whitewashed line. Davies laughed heartily at his joke and called: ‘Good match?’
‘First rate,’ responded the linesman soberly, balancing on his imaginary tightrope. His arms went out like stabilising wings and he prepared to spin slowly and go back the other way. ‘Two good teams,’ he added before revolving. ‘Best teams in the world.’
‘Oh,’ said Davies uncomfortably.
‘Brazil and England,’ said the linesman secretly. ‘Playing for the World Cup.’
There came a burst of action in front of the adjacent goal. A heavy forward of the yellow team trundled the ball through and, having unceremoniously pushed the advancing goalkeeper away with both hands, scored easily and went dancing joyfully down the pitch to the arms and kisses of his teammates.
Davies shouted from his driving seat. ‘Foul! Foul!’
The linesman turned with worried, white face. ‘You think so?’ he inquired.
‘He just pushed the goalie out of the way,’ Davies pointed out.
A player in the red team standing near the touchline heard him. ‘No goal!’ he bellowed across the pitch. ‘Afoul! This man says it was a foul!’
An icy fear caught Davies’s heart. The linesman was staring at him drop-mouthed, and across the football pitch twenty-two shouting, arguing, pushing players charged at him with the referee and the other linesmen funeral figures far to the rear.
Kitty, sensing something important was taking place, looked out from below its tarpaulin and, seeing, the advancing shirted horde, howled dismally. The sound jerked Davies into fortunate action. ‘Must be off!’ he shouted handsomely, jabbing the accelerator. ‘Play up!’
The Lagonda ran forward quickly. At a safe distance he looked in the mirror and saw them standing in a coloured bunch all shouting at each other. The referee was sitting alone under a tree, one linesman was kicking the ball and the other was still tip-toeing the line.
He found he was trembling. Kitty burrowed below the tarpaulin once more. The road was leading towards a great wooden gate, set in a formidable wall, it curved to an apex like the entrance to a castle or a prison. Set into it was an infant door. Davies stopped the car and walked to it. The sadness of the place was settling upon him. There was a silence too, holding everything, the walls, the peeping roofs, and the grimy sky. Against the inset door was fixed an iron ring-handle, inhospitable to the hand. He turned it and, somewhat to his surprise, it opened without resistance and the little door swung easily in.
Davies was confronted with a framed scene, much as Alice was through her looking glass. Stretching as far as he could see were desolately well-tended lawns and flower beds, set out in squares and oblongs. They appeared perfectly cultured and kept but looked as though no sun ever shone upon them. Set into this there was a solitary human figure, a woman, a bent back and downturned face overlooking some minute job at the corner of the border just beyond the gate. Unhappy, Davies stepped through.
There was no sign or notice of the way he ought to follow. He was within a few feet of the woman, enthralled by a few daisies she had dug from the flower bed with the prongs of a table fork. ‘Oh, excuse me, madam,’ Davies said.
Her face came around first, old but ageless, bright-eyed. It was followed by the muzzle of a gun, a pistol of nasty aspect, which she held secretly against her blue overall. ‘Stick ’em up,’ she demanded quietly.
Davies raised his hands above his head. The blood seemed to run down his arms and into his stomach. He stared at the gun. It looked real. ‘I saw you,’ she said, rising slowly from her knees. ‘I detected you coming in.’
‘Oh … oh, yes,’ nodded Davies stiffly. He felt, arms up as he was, that his trousers might fall. ‘I’ve come to see the superintendent, Doctor Longton. Do you know …?’
‘Keep ’em up,’ she warned grimly. ‘And walk.’
He looked wildly about him. There was no other person in the entire walled garden. It was as though it had all been prepared as a trap for him. She nudged him with the gun and he began to march with his hands held above his ears.
She nudged him through another archway and into a stone corridor, wide, with windows and doors on either side. A man came out of an office with a clipboard in his hand. Davies tried to say something but the man walked by, studying the clipboard and taking no heed of the gunwoman or the man she pushed before her. Other people appeared, some in white coats, but his extraordinary progress along the corridor aroused no interest whatever. Some actually wished his captor ‘Good Morning’. Eventually they turned into a large hall where a physical training class was taking place. An instructor was demonstrating a bend to thirty or so people who watched and then bent with dedication. The woman marched Davies right across the floor at gunpoint and still nobody made a mention of it. Eventually they arrived in front of a short tubby woman with a steady, red face.
‘Matron,’ said the gunwoman. ‘An intruder. He wants Dr Longton.’
The matron hardly glanced at Davies with his hands still hovering in the air. ‘He’s in his office,’ she said. ‘Hurry and you’ll catch him.’
The muzzle of the gun banged into the small of Davies’s back and he was forced to jog across the floor to a further corridor and the entrance to an office. The gunwoman reached around and knocked at the door with the butt of the weapon. A pleasant voice, the voice of someone happy with his work, called out: ‘Come in, come in.’
&nb
sp; Relief had replaced consternation in Davies by now and he stood sheepishly with his arms still up as his captor ushered him into the room. Doctor Longton smiled understandingly. ‘Ah, you came in the back way, I see,’ he said. Then to the woman. ‘It’s all right, Marie. I’ll take over. Thank you very much.’
The woman went out without a word. Davies said: ‘Can I put my arms down now?’ He lowered them. ‘That looked like a real gun to me.’
‘Oh it was,’ the Superintendent said. ‘She needs it. We tried giving her a toy but she wouldn’t accept it. So we got that one, and she’s happy with that. We’ve taken a few parts out of it of course, and she has no access to any ammunition. It’s her status symbol, if you understand.’
‘Yes, I see,’ blinked Davies. He introduced himself and they shook hands. ‘It was just a bit of a shock, that’s all. Unexpected.’
‘We expect the unexpected here,’ said the doctor as though that was the limit of the discussion. ‘You’ve come to see Mr Fennell?’
‘Yes, I went to see his wife …’
‘It’s a pity she doesn’t come to see him,’ said the other man. ‘He misses her terribly.’
Davies nodded unhappily, knowing that he was treading where he would prefer not to walk. ‘She said she won’t come,’ he said.
Dr Longton scratched his nose. He was slim and gently bent like a feather. ‘A thousand pities,’ he said.
‘I think she found it too much for her,’ said Davies. ‘The whole thing.’
‘Most people do,’ said Dr Longton. ‘But not as much as the patients.’
‘Yes, I can understand that,’ nodded Davies.
‘Mr Fennell is not too bad now, though. He has very good days. It seems to be arrested. His delusions of grandeur, being royalty and suchlike, are less pronounced. I think he would like to see you, Mr Davies. And if you get a chance perhaps you could get his wife to come and visit him. It would make his life much brighter.’
Davies nodded uncertainly. ‘I’ll go and see her again,’ he promised. ‘I’ll see what she says.’
‘Good. I’ve arranged for you to see Mr Fennell away from the ward. If the others saw you talking they would all want to tell you their troubles. They became stored-up, as it were, here. There’s a small consulting room where you can talk.’ He hesitated. ‘Without prying too much into police business,’ he ventured, ‘would it be possible for you to tell me something of what this is about? I’m thinking of the patient, you understand.’
Davies nodded. ‘Of course. I see that. Actually it’s a murder inquiry. It’s not quite so dramatic as it sounds because it happened twenty-five years ago. Mr Fennell was a police constable in the area at the time and had some part in the inquiries.’
‘You want to see if he remembers,’ said the doctor. He seemed to be considering it. ‘I’d be grateful if you could tread carefully,’ he said. ‘Be very careful with him. If he doesn’t remember I’d be glad if you’d call it a day and not press him.’
‘I will,’ promised Davies gently. ‘I don’t want to mess anything up.’
‘Thank you. And don’t make it too protracted, if you don’t mind. It’s a big day for him, you know, having a visitor and it could be emotionally tiring.’ He stopped and thought out the points he had made. ‘Right,’ he concluded. ‘I’ll take you along there.’
They went on a short journey as near to a nightmare as Davies had been in waking hours. Each door they reached was double-locked and unlocked, each corridor seemed to go deeper and deeper into the throes of the building. He heard screams and shouts, and faces, faces pallid with amazement, appeared at side windows as they walked by. Eventually they reached a door set apart from the others.
‘He’s in here, waiting,’ said Longton quietly. ‘Something I forgot to ask, Mr Davies. Does he actually know you?’
‘No,’ replied Davies. ‘We’ve never met. He had left the police before I arrived in the division.’
‘I see,’ said the doctor. He knocked courteously and a voice inside bade them anxiously, ‘Come in.’ Even from behind Davies knew that Longton was smiling as he entered. He could tell by the wrinkles at the nape of his neck. An ashen-faced, ancient, shaking man sat on a wooden chair by a plain table. ‘Mr Davies to see you, Mr Fennell,’ announced Dr Longton.
Fennell stood irresolutely. His face trembled and, as though it could not hold them, finally crackling into gigantic tears. ‘Oh, thank you for coming,’ he said to Davies holding out his hands. ‘My old friend, thank you for coming.’
Fourteen
Madame Tarantella Phelps-Smith, High Class Gipsy Fortune Teller, was a flitting figure in the town. Over the years less had been seen of her, not merely because she made her outdoor appearances infrequently, but because she seemed to be getting smaller as her life went on. Beryl Adams, as she was before she was touched magically by a Gipsy Soothsayer at a fair on Hackney Marshes, had once lent an exotic touch to the labouring surroundings of the district. She flowed about in robes that moved like a coloured sea. She had rings on her fingers and bells on the long curly toes of her embroidered shoes. Davies had always thought of her as a tall person; even her face seemed to be tall, a high forehead and a deep chin; her eyes were vertically elongated, her eyebrows aloft and arched and her mouth a perpetual upright oval as though she received an amazement every moment of her life.
She used to be seen in various parts of the town dispensing ready magic and telling the futures of the inhabitants who, in that hard and gritty place, always hoped that things might improve. But the years had dimmed her eye and her ambitions and by the time she came to Davies’s professional notice she contained her outside forays to dashes to the off-licence and the fish-and-chip shop. By this time her back had bent, her tall arms hung and swung almost to the pavement, and her shoulders were forever hunched.
‘It’s the years I’ve spent leaning over this bloody crystal ball,’ she complained to Davies. ‘It’s a risk of the job I suppose. Like miners get that disease, whatever it’s called, soothsayers get bent backs and hunched shoulders.’
‘You get a lot of business?’
‘No, but I have to practise, otherwise you get rusty.’
‘Policemen get flat feet,’ he sympathised. ‘And a pain in the neck. I went to see Fred Fennell yesterday.’
Madame Tarantella seemed unsurprised. ‘Fred Fennell,’ she mused as though only days had passed since she last read his palm while they lay unclothed in her patchworked bed. ‘Dear Fred. How is he? Getting old now, I suppose.’
‘He’s keeping pace with the rest of us,’ agreed Davies. Her room was above a men’s plain outfitters, Mr Blake’s, who had clothed half the working force of the district, mostly by weekly instalments. As they sat there, Davies could hear the sturdy clothes being moved from their racks which were fixed just below Madame Tarantella’s floor. Madame Tarantella herself sat in what she called her driving seat, the little bentwood chair seeming to cling like a child around her skirts. The room was professionally dim with drapes and tassels on the curtains and the signs of the Zodiac on illuminated panels around the wall. On the table with the crystal ball was a used coffee cup, an ashtray full of massacred stubs and a copy of the daily paper, open and marked at the racing page.
‘You ought to be on a winner every time,’ observed Davies nodding at the newspaper. He was sitting in the client’s chair, his overcoat opened because of the closeness of the small room.
‘Horses? No damn fear,’ she sighed. ‘If I could see the winners, I wouldn’t be sitting here now, Dangerous. When I try to focus it on Epsom or Sandown Park it turns rogue and gives me one of the back-markers. A gift’s a gift but it won’t get you rich at fifty-pence a gaze. The only fortune that comes up here is somebody else’s.’ She looked at him speculatively. ‘You wouldn’t like to have a consultation while you’re here, would you?’
Davies smiled solemnly. ‘I’ve already met two dark mysterious men,’ he said. ‘I’ve still got the scars.’
‘You’ll meet th
em again, beware,’ she warned abruptly. ‘But you will be saved by a beast. Do you have a police dog?’
‘Not a police dog. I’ve got Kitty, a damn ratbag of a thing that spends its life sleeping in my car.’
She nodded. ‘Ah yes, I’ve seen the beast. You should give it a wash sometime. Look after it, Dangerous. You will need it.’ She seemed tempted to take a quick plunge into the crystal but she resisted. ‘And what did Fred Fennell have to say?’
‘You … you knew him pretty well a few years ago? So he told me.’
‘Oh come on, Dangerous,’ she replied good-humouredly. ‘You and me are in the same basic business. Knowing about people. You know he was my lover or you wouldn’t be in this room now. But it was donkey’s years ago.’
‘He’s not so bad … physically. In the circumstances.’
‘It’s a mental hospital then,’ she said quickly. ‘I felt he was ill, but I didn’t get a fix on a mental hospital.’
‘Well he is. At Bedford.’
‘Oh my. Poor Fred. He was always the big virile policeman, you know. I’ve seen him standing in this room many a time wearing nothing but his hobnailed boots. A fine sight.’
‘I bet,’ said Davies. He wanted her to go on.
‘What about that wife of his then?’ she said. ‘Cruel bitch, she was. She had a thing about animals. She’d go out and poison cats and dogs at night. The family had to use force to keep her away from the zoo. Apparently she was in somebody’s house once and she tried to strangle their goldfish.’
‘That’s not easy,’ conceded Davies. ‘Well, she must have reformed because she feeds foxes now – on beef sandwiches. Unless she spreads poison with the butter. I hadn’t thought of that.’
‘Dreadful woman. Fred used to weep about her. I liked him, Dangerous. But I couldn’t see a future for us together.’
‘If you couldn’t, who could?’ acknowledged Davies. ‘Do you remember, years ago, the case of Celia Norris? She vanished.’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 17