‘What … what’s that mean?’ asked Lind.
‘Forget it. How did you come by these?’
‘I found them,’ said Lind simply. ‘Straight up, Mr Davies. In the saddle bag of my bike. The day after she vanished. I opened it up and there they were.’
‘How did you know they were hers?’ inquired Davies.
‘Ah, you can’t catch me like that,’ said Lind. The denial was made with something near waggish triumph. A finger came up but he stopped short of shaking it. ‘I’d seen her in the club, like playing table tennis and netball and that, and all the boys used to have a look. See a flash of the girl’s pants. You know, like lads do …’
‘Yes, yes, they do,’ agreed Davies solemnly. ‘But you were her boyfriend, weren’t you, Mr Lind? Her regular?’
‘Well sort of,’ said Lind doubtfully. Davies could visualise him wearing swimming-trunks in the bath. ‘But that’s not the reason I know they were Celia’s. It wasn’t like that, see. I was a bit of a little gentleman, you understand, and I liked to be decent about things. I still do. I thought of her in a … well, pure sort of way.’
‘Except when she was playing table tennis or netball. Then you had a look with the other lads?’
Two small red spots, almost like those of a clown, appeared on Lind’s white cheeks.
‘Now, now, Mr Davies. I didn’t come here to have you accusing me,’ he said primly. ‘I came because I wanted to help.’
‘It must be a long walk,’ commented Davies dryly. ‘It’s taken you twenty-five years. Why didn’t you take this article to the police at the time, Mr Lind? You knew they were looking for her clothes.’
‘Not right away, I didn’t know. Because it was some time before they started to get really worried about her,’ said Lind hurriedly. ‘I kept them first of all because I knew they were hers and I just … wanted them. I wanted to keep them. Can you understand that?’
‘Why didn’t you go to the police at the time?’ insisted Davies heavily. ‘You must have known it was the proper thing to do.’
Lind put his face against his fingers. He had strangely effeminate hands for a capstan operator. ‘I was scared to. The coppers … the police came and took statements and I was frightened out of my life. I thought if I’d shown them these they would have jumped to the conclusion that I did it. And they could hang you in those days, Mr Davies. I didn’t want to hang by mistake. So I didn’t tell them … I’m beginning to wish I hadn’t told you now.’
Davies ignored it. ‘Where have you kept them?’ he said. ‘Hidden.’
‘In the loft,’ said Lind. ‘In an old suitcase, with a lot of other stuff.’
‘You live in a flat,’ said Davies. ‘How long have you had a loft?’
‘At my mother’s place,’ said Lind smartly with that little touch of triumph recurring. ‘You didn’t give me time to tell you, did you? In my mum’s loft. That’s where they’ve been. I spend quite a lot of time at my mum’s. In fact I may go there for good soon. My wife’s getting on my nerves, you see. A couple of weeks ago she was actually fighting – fighting with some man on the stairs outside the flat. None of the neighbours think she’s any good, Mr Davies.’
Davies tried not to swallow hard but he did. He retreated into the overcoat to hide the lump as it went down. ‘How did this garment get in your saddle bag then?’ he asked.
‘Somebody put them there,’ said Lind simply. ‘As a joke or something. Before they realised that something had happened to her, I thought she’d done it herself. It was the sort of teasing thing she’d do.’
Davies said, ‘She was a bit of a … teaser, wasn’t she?’
‘I would never say that,’ sniffed Lind. ‘I didn’t think like that. And I still don’t. I used to think of her very purely. That was the trouble.’
Davies nodded. ‘Very gallant I’m sure. Right, it looks as though I’m going to have to get all this down in a statement at some time. Is there anything else, Mr Lind?’
He had asked the question with no hope, but immediately he was overjoyed he had put it. Lind half decided to say something, then thought not, then, looking up to see Davies’s eyes jutting out at him, he ventured: ‘Yes, there was, sort of.’
‘Well, what, sort of?’
‘It might be nothing, Mr Davies. But my mum reckons that about ten or twelve years ago she was sitting in one of those shelters in Glazebrook Park, you know the little round shelters, kind of divided into compartments. She was sitting there, having a rest walking back from the shops, when she heard two women talking in the next bit, the other side of the wooden dividing piece.’ He glanced up to see if Davies was interested. The policeman’s eyes were on him. ‘And my mum says she heard one woman saying to the other that her husband had seen Celia walking along the canal towpath with a man. And this bloke had his arm around her. And this woman reckons her husband told the police, when they was asking for information, but she heard nothing more about it. Don’t you think that’s funny, Mr Davies?’
Davies closed his eyes as if it might stop his heart beating so loudly. ‘This woman,’ he asked. ‘Did your mother know who she was?’
‘She saw the two women as they got up and walked away,’ said Lind. ‘And she knew one of them slightly. But she didn’t know which was the one who had said it. The woman she knew was called Mrs Whethers, and she lived somewhere down by the Kensal Green Empire, that was. It was years ago mind. She might not be there now.’
Sixteen
Guiltily Davies filled in his required official report at the police station, borrowing a Yellow Pages Directory, for suitable addresses, bookmakers establishments, drinking clubs and the like, where he might have been expected to go in quest of Ramscar. Indeed he had been moved by conscience to pursue some genuine inquiries but these had proved predictably pointless. He believed Ramscar might come to him in the end. In the meantime he found it impossible to think beyond Celia Norris. He filed the report for Yardbird, wondered glumly how long it would be before the inspector began to complain, and then left the station to find Mrs Whethers.
Mrs Whethers was a comfortably heated-looking lady, a flush occupying her face as she hobbled out into the afternoon air on her journey to the Over Sixties Club in the Kensal Rise Pavilion. A transfixed fox stared glassily from around her neck as if it had jumped there and died. She carried it like a hunter bearing his prey. She had a substantial coat which she had worn for many years but which seemed to have thickened instead of thinned and now had the texture of compressed wood shavings. It banged solidly against her elderly legs as she made her familiar journey down her street.
Davies observed her leave her gate and followed. She reached a bus stop in the main road and stood there substantially. Davies then approached her. ‘Mrs Whethers,’ he ventured, ‘I wonder if I could have a word with you?’
As some people get old their curiosity seeps away and nothing matters. She seemed not very surprised or interested. ‘If it’s insurance, the Conservatives or Jehovah’s Witnesses, I don’t want to know,’ she said firmly. ‘Or soap powders.’
Davies smiled. ‘None of them,’ he replied. ‘Are you going to get a bus from here?’
She sniffed hugely. ‘No, I’m waiting to see if Lloyd-George comes along. I haven’t got time to talk to you, young man. I’m on my way to my club.’
‘Perhaps I could come with you.’
She regarded him with doubt. ‘It’s over sixties,’ she decided. ‘But you look a bit threadbare so I expect they’ll let you in. Where, for God’s sake, did you get that terrible coat?’
‘In a sort of auction,’ he replied lamely.
‘You were done, son,’ she told him firmly. ‘Diddled. What did you want anyway?’
‘I’m a policeman. Plain clothes.’
‘Plain clothes is the word,’ she agreed, surveying the garment again. ‘Never saw plainer.’
‘Here’s the bus,’ he said, glad to change the course of the talk.
‘I don’t need the bus,’ she said bri
skly. ‘I’m just having a breather. I’m off now. It starts at half past two.’
She hobbled away at a large pace and Davies hurried after her. ‘I wanted to ask you something, that’s all.’
‘I’ve got nothing to fear from the police,’ she said. She was puffing a little. ‘And I want to be in time for the dancing lesson.’ She stopped and faced him, as though knowing that walking and talking together were too much for her. ‘So if you are making police inquiries you’d better come with me and when I get a spare minute I’ll see if I can answer them.’
That was definitely that. She slung her bad leg forward and he had to be content to lope along beside her until they arrived. He did not mind very much. He was glad to have found her. He was relieved she was alive.
The Over Sixties Club was in a corrugated iron church hall, its roof pointed timidly to heaven, its well-used door touched by a simple stone tablet which said: ‘Mary Ann Smith. Laid by the Grace of God. December 15th, 1919.’
With some doubt Davies followed Mrs Whethers into the hall. It was jolly with old people, limbering up for a dancing lesson about to be expounded by an extensively-built woman in her fifties, wearing a rose in her hair and a long feather boa which curled affectionately about her neck and big, blunt bosom.
‘Gather round, gather round,’ instructed the lady, flapping her hands at them. ‘Today it’s the Argentinian Tango.’ The old people all breathed ‘Aaah!’ The lady’s skirt, for the occasion Davies imagined, was cut like that of a girl gaucho. It reached to the middle of her short shins. She had legs like logs.
The old folks, about twenty women and seven smug-looking men, shuffled forward so they could see the demonstration. Their skins were folded and used, their hands shaky, their understanding uncertain, but their eyes were bright. Dancing was a popular afternoon.
‘Gaiety, that’s what we must have, gaiety,’ announced the instructress. ‘And élan! That is what the Argentinian Tango is all about. So I want you to abandon yourself to the music and the romance. Mr Bragg, the gramophone if you please.’
Obediently an ancient man broke away from the eager crowd and edged painfully towards the wind-up gramophone. He looked so feathery that Davies felt inclined to help him with the weight of the record. He managed that, but puffed out his cheeks violently as he wound the handle. Into the wintry room, with its exhortation to ‘Love Thy God’ emblazoned on the far wall, seeped the wheezing sound of South America, played below distant stars many, many years before.
The instructress demonstrated first the basic tango step, the forward glide and the dip of the foot and the body. Davies, standing largely among the small old people, was not difficult to see but she was apparently not surprised at his presence. Now she paused in her Latin progress and asked him to step forward. He felt himself go pale under his coat but the old folks began to shout raucous encouragement and he was pushed forward firmly to the centre of the floor.
‘Perhaps it would be better,’ suggested the lady, surveying him, ‘if you danced without the er … garment.’
‘Yes, yes … all right,’ agreed Davies. He peeled himself out of the coat. The frail Mr Bragg stepped forward to collect it and at once fell to the floor under its weight. Two other men came forward and bore the coat and Mr Bragg, who kept shouting that he was all right, from the arena.
Davies was instructed to enfold the stumpy lady in his arms. She rolled her eyes provocatively. He had to bend into a question mark to embrace her and this impeded his first-ever attempt to dance the Argentinian Tango even more than would have been the case. For a short woman she was very powerful and she dragged him along like a shunting engine with a heavy load. He somehow concluded the sequence with one knee on the ground in an attitude of gallantry.
‘You are most clumsy,’ she said loudly, rejecting his clutching hands. ‘For a young man, most clumsy. What are you doing here anyway?’
‘I’m a policeman,’ he muttered helplessly. They all heard him and hummed and tutted between themselves about the well-known clumsiness of the police. He vacated the floor with the single applause of Mrs Whethers, who apparently felt some responsibility towards him.
‘Most of this lot couldn’t do any better,’ she confided. ‘Silly old sods.’
There was further instruction and then the elderly watchers were told to take their partners for a trial tango. The seven old men were grabbed like prize gigolos and Mrs Whethers claimed Davies and pulled him on to the floor. The dusty rhythm began again and he rambled and stumbled with her, staggering like someone trying to dance in a storm at sea. There was a familiar smell about Mrs Whethers. Mothballs.
There was a good deal of jolly laughing and clapping after the dance and cheerful cups of tea were passed around. The dance lady put on her coat and went out, her stint done, and Davies found himself sitting on a Sunday School chair almost knee to knee with Mrs Whethers.
‘All right, then, what is it?’ she said.
She had quite a powerful face for an old lady, not pink and fluffy like some of them, but girded with deep straight lines as though her head were held on with string. The tea they drank was in enormously thick cups. He wondered whether elderly people, gnashing their teeth perhaps or trying to reassure themselves of their strength, bit through more delicate china.
‘Celia Norris,’ he said. ‘Do you remember?’
‘I remember,’ she said without showing surprise. ‘Never been found. Not a sausage.’
‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘Now I’ve got the job of digging the whole thing up again, Mrs Whethers.’
‘How’s that?’ she inquired, enjoying her tea with a serene sucking sound. ‘It’s been a long time.’
‘Sometimes these things take a long time,’ he said, attempting to sound wise. ‘Anyway, I’ve heard whisper that your husband made a statement to the police.’
‘My late husband, Bernard,’ she agreed. ‘Yes he did. He was willing to swear it on oath too. But he never heard another thing from them, not a word.’
‘Raffle.’ The disembodied voice came from behind his shoulder. Mrs Whethers began wrestling with a handbag the size of a cat and produced two ten-pence pieces. ‘You’d better get some tickets as well,’ she advised Davies. ‘They don’t like it if everybody doesn’t put in.’ She said it as if they were a foreign tribe indulging in strange insular customs.
Davies burrowed into the pockets of his overcoat. The wasted lady who stood behind him held the book of tickets threateningly like a witchdoctor with an omen. Davies handed her two ten-pence pieces. ‘You have to give something as well,’ Mrs Whethers advised. ‘A packet of tea or a tin of beans or some cake mixture.’
‘I forgot to bring them,’ said Davies. ‘I knew there was something …’
The ticket lady said: ‘Well, you’ve got to give something. Them’s the rules. Right, Mrs Whethers?’
Mrs Whethers nodded grimly. ‘If you don’t put something in you can’t have anything out, even if your ticket wins. Have you got a pound note?’
Davies began reaching into what appeared to be the very fastnesses of his body. ‘Yes,’ he affirmed. ‘Yes, I’ve got a pound.’
‘Good, put that in. It’s a good prize. They’ll like that.’
Davies gave the hovering lady the note and turned again to Mrs Whethers. To his annoyance she had risen from her seat and was hobbling up and down like a lame sea captain pacing his bridge. ‘I’ve got to do it,’ she explained over her shoulder on the outward run. ‘It goes dead. My funny leg. I have to get the blood moving again.’
Davies sighed, got up and began walking alongside Mrs Whethers. She pushed him away. ‘Sit down,’ she said brusquely. ‘It will be circulating in a minute. You can wait until then with your questions. And after the raffle.’
Davies sat down impotently. He could sometimes understand how police officers were accused of intimidating witnesses. Mrs Whethers returned to her seat, her perambulations accomplished, and thrust out a sturdy but damaged leg at him. ‘Feel that,’ she invited. �
��Feel the blood moving through it now.’
He obliged patiently. ‘Oooooooo Mrs Whethers! There’s a nice young man!’ bawled a gummy old hag in the next tribal circle. ‘Ask him to give me a rub of mine!’
The old ones swayed with merriment but the raffle mercifully intervened. ‘Eyes down, look in,’ called a limpid pensioner in a gravy-stained jacket. He called the numbers and the old people pressed forward eagerly to claim the prizes they themselves had provided. ‘Ninety-seven, red,’ he called and Davies looked down to see he had the number in his hand. ‘Go on,’ urged Mrs Whethers. ‘See what we’ve won.’
The raffler was holding the pound note which Davies himself had contributed. When he saw Davies coming towards him he quickly switched the prize to a large tin of garden slug pellets. ‘You can’t have the pound,’ said the stained man firmly. ‘If you put it in, you can’t take it out.’ He turned to the ancient tribe. ‘It’s the rules innit?’ he said.
‘It’s the rules,’ they chorused in return. Davies went back with his slug pellets and sporting applause.
‘You should have slipped the ticket to me,’ whispered Mrs Whethers. ‘You’re a bit slow for a copper.’
‘That’s what they all say,’ agreed Davies. He leaned forward. ‘Now tell me about what your husband saw.’ Around him the groups had dissolved into conversation, the pound having been miraculously won by the raffler himself. Mrs Whethers at last looked businesslike.
‘My husband, Mr Whethers,’ she said formally, ‘was walking home at about ten o’clock on that night, whenever it was. It still wasn’t quite dark because it was in the summer. And he said he saw that girl going down the alley towards the canal with a man.’
Davies nodded gladly.
‘A man,’ she nodded firmly. ‘In a dark suit. And not wearing a hat. And he had his arm around the girl’s waist. That’s what he saw.’
‘You say he made a statement to the police to that effect, Mrs Whethers?’
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 20