The Complete Dangerous Davies

by Leslie Thomas

  ‘As soon as all the fuss started and it was in the papers, my Bernard said what he had seen, but he didn’t go to the police. He was a great one for minding his own business. He liked to live and let live. But the rumour got around the neighbourhood, like the one about what Mr Harkness saw, and this policeman turned up out of the blue and took a statement. But he said the law would take its course or one of these things policemen say. And that’s the last that came of it.’

  Davies felt his heart move again. ‘Mr Harkness,’ he said. ‘Who was Mr Harkness?’

  ‘A very old man. We told the police about him too but he was very ill then, and he used to drink, so I don’t suppose they took much notice of him. I mean – how long ago was it now?’

  ‘Twenty-five years,’ said Davies.

  ‘Well, he would have been seventy-six then, old Harkness. So I don’t suppose they put much store by him. But he was reckoned to have seen something. But he was ill and old …’

  ‘Did he have family?’ asked Davies. ‘Around here now?’

  ‘They moved. To Bristol or somewhere. I didn’t know any of them very well. I just heard.’

  All around them the encampment was breaking up, the elderly tribe gathering its chattels and making for the door. A man approached and asked Davies if he needed the slug pellets and on hearing that he did not, relieved him of them. Davies went towards the door with the hobbling Mrs Whethers.

  ‘Mr Whethers and me,’ said Mrs Whethers. ‘We always wondered why we never heard any more. Not a dicky bird.’

  At three o’clock on almost any afternoon he knew where to find Mod. He went to the public library, warm as a loaf in the middle of the chill November afternoon. Davies had been into the library on other occasions but he had never appreciated how comfortable as well as improving it was. Mod had studied there for years.

  The entrance hall served also as a small museum where were displayed various objects of local history. A fragment of mosaic, Roman, an axe-head, which had an air of late Woolworths about it but was sworn to be of the Middle Ages; a spade used by minor royalty to plant a commemorative tree which had died a good many years before its planter; a set of tradesman’s ledgers from the seventeenth century, and a policeman’s helmet which Davies noticed was significantly dented.

  On the walls was an assortment of iodine-coloured photographs, none of them hanging straight. They were of groups of councillors with mayors in Nelsonian hats and attitudes; the official opening of several buildings including the library itself, celebrations for coronations and jubilees, a scene of wartime bomb damage in the High Street and the local company of the Home Guard crouched at the side of the canal apparently in the strong belief that Hitler would launch his invasion of Britain via that waterway.

  There was a potted palm at the library door, the only hint of exotica for miles about. On such a winter’s day it was pleasant to brush against it as Davies went into the library. His overcoat immediately caught the assistant’s notice and he knew he was under observation as a possible book thief. He saw Mod sitting snug beneath a benevolent reading light over a table at the far end of the Reference Room.

  ‘Lovely,’ he sighed, approaching Mod. ‘What a fine bloody life.’

  ‘Hush,’ said Mod with the traditional library caution. ‘Would you care to sit down?’ Davies sat at the opposite side of the table. It was like visiting some senior businessman in a large office. Mod leaned forward attentively, his elbows on the table, his fingers touching thoughtfully. ‘And what can I do for you?’ he inquired in a library whisper.

  ‘Christ, you sound like the Chairman of Shell International,’ muttered Davies. ‘It’s a great life, I must say. Sitting here in comfort, drawing the dole, while the likes of me traipse the streets in the rain.’

  ‘I’m studying,’ explained Mod simply. ‘This world is enriched by study, not by tramping the streets.’

  ‘You could be right. What is it?’ he nodded towards the books, their pages open like the palms of many hands on the table.

  Mod leaned over conspiratorially. ‘There are still courts in this country,’ he whispered, ‘which can impose the punishment of the stocks or a journey in a cart of dung. Have you ever come across anything so amazing?’

  ‘Frequently,’ muttered Davies taking Celia Norris’s knickers from his pocket. He took them out of the plastic bag. ‘How about these?’

  Mod was stunned. ‘Good God,’ he said. ‘You’ve found them!’

  Davies sniffed. ‘Quite a collection we’re getting,’ he said. ‘We’ve got her bike and her pants. All we want now is the body and the murderer.’

  ‘Where did you get them?’ asked Mod, his voice hushed with wonder and the requirements of the library. ‘They sniff of mothballs.’

  ‘The whole case does,’ commented Davies. ‘Our friend Bill Lind. He decided to come clean after all these long years. He says they were put in the saddle-bag of his bicycle and I think he’s telling the truth. You can bet your life that they were put there by Dave Boot. Our Bill’s had them hidden away all this time in his mummy’s loft.’

  ‘Why did he keep them?’ asked Mod. ‘A sort of relic?’

  ‘He says not.’

  ‘Why do they smell of mothballs, then, Dangerous? He must have meant to preserve them.’

  ‘He says they were in a trunk of old clothes in the loft and the mothballs were among the clothes. You know what people are like around here, not ever throwing anything away.’

  ‘What are you going to do now? Apply for those eight exhumations orders?’

  Davies grinned wryly. ‘I might as well apply for promotion to detective chief inspector,’ he said. ‘Anyway I’ve changed my mind about that, Mod. I don’t think she’s in the cemetery.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘She was seen walking down the alley by the pawnbrokers – towards the canal – with a man in a dark suit. That night. I’ve got a witness.’

  ‘Jesus! A witness?’

  Davies held out his hands for restraint. ‘Well, he was a witness. A Mr Bernard Whethers. He’s gone where he can’t give evidence, unfortunately. He’s dead. There was somebody else too. An old man called Harkness, but he’s dead too. He was seventy-six then, twenty-five years ago.’

  ‘They’re not going to say much now,’ agreed Mod morosely.

  ‘Mr Whethers made a statement, his widow says. He didn’t volunteer it, but rumours get around and apparently a copper turned up on the strength of these rumours. It doesn’t take long for things like that to get to our ears, not when we’re searching around. But that statement was never recorded at the police station I know. I made another check and it’s not in the file, or ever mentioned.’

  Mod looked at him across the books. ‘Miasma from the police station again,’ he said.

  ‘The man Mr Whethers saw with a girl he thinks was Celia was wearing a dark suit. So he said. And no hat. It need not rule out a policeman, our friend P.C. Dudley for example, because it was almost dark and Mr Whethers was some distance away. The uniform would look like a dark suit and he could have been carrying his hat, or even left it in the police van. They teach you at police school, you know, to take your hat off if you want to gain somebody’s confidence.’

  ‘Do they now?’ said Mod, interested. ‘The only time I’ve had dealings with a copper without a hat is when I knocked it off. What good’s a statement of a dead witness anyway? Especially when it’s not been recorded at the police station.’

  He looked up and whispered: ‘Watch the knickers.’

  Confused, Davies failed to act in time. A stony lady library assistant, journeying past the table, saw the green gingham lying there. Quickly Mod picked up the little garment and pretended to fiercely blow his nose with it. He then folded the books in a muffled way on the table and, stretching himself indulgently, announced that he believed he had worked enough for the day. With casual familiarity he turned out the table lamp and unerringly returned the volumes to their various places on the shelves. Studying him, Davie
s could not avoid the impression that he would shortly open a cabinet and pour them both a drink from a comprehensive selection of spirits.

  Members of the library staff nodded affable goodnights as he and Mod walked towards the door. ‘Hadn’t you better remind them to lock up?’ Davies suggested.

  Mod sniffed potently. ‘You may well take the piss,’ he said quietly. ‘But it’s my presence here that, to a great extent, justifies the continued operation of the reference section of this municipal library. I am the doyen of the place, you understand. Every now and then a deputation of councillors comes snooping and I have to hurry out and get a few friends in from the streets to sit and peruse the books for a while. That’s why I’m appreciated here, Dangerous. There’s no waste of the ratepayers’ money while Mod Lewis is studying.’

  Davies let the perverse logic roll over his shoulder. He pointed to the policeman’s helmet in the foyer. ‘Did you, by any chance, dent that?’ he inquired.

  ‘General Strike,’ recited Mod without a second look. ‘Attack on police at the Clock Tower. No, I was not present, owing only to the fact that I was yet unborn. Otherwise I would have been there. I like a good attack on the police.’

  Davies said: ‘Listen, let me talk this whole thing out to you, Mod. Right from the beginning. And let’s walk from the Catholic Church to the cemetery, along the High Street, then down to the canal and along the bank. Just to see if it does anything.’

  Mod acquiesced thoughtfully. ‘Right,’ he nodded, having apparently made some mental calculation. ‘Even walking slowly – and thinking – that ought to see us at The Babe In Arms as they open the gates.’

  ‘We’ll keep to that,’ promised Davies. They walked. A pinched wintry dark had overcome the town. Window lights and shops lights shone bravely but only a few feet above the ground the pall of late November had laid itself inclemently across the roofs. The first of the home-going cars were on the roads, there were thickening queues at the bus stops. Davies, not for the first time, wondered what economics inspired West Indians and Indians to come and live, and queue for buses, in such a clime. They stood, with the natives, their faces merged in the gloom, not a snake charmer or a calypso singer among them.

  Davies turned his huge coat collar up. It was like a giant’s arm about his neck. Mod pulled up the stumpy collar of his sports jacket and thrust his hands into his shallow pockets but did not grumble.

  Turning from the main road, they continued as far as the Catholic Church. It was uncompromising, shut and dark, as though the faith had gone bankrupt. But there was a modest parcel of light coming from the window of Farther Harvey’s house and, at first, Davies made towards it, going down the gravel path with Mod hanging behind. Mod did not like the vicinity of religions. It had been Davies’s half-intention to talk briefly with the priest before they began their thoughtful journey, but on looking through the window they saw that he was engaged in hammering together some large sections of wood. His hammering was violent but not more so than his expression. His holy robe was hitched around his waist like the skirt of a washerwoman. Davies thought that a tap on the window would probably cause him to hammer his own thumb, so he began to turn again.

  Mod, peering around his overcoat, saw the interior industry also. ‘What’s he making?’ he whispered as they went away. ‘An Ark? Do you think he knows something we don’t know?’

  ‘It’s a do-it-yourself confessional box,’ Davies said confidently.

  ‘I would have considered that the confessional was one of the things you could not do satisfactorily by yourself,’ said Mod, pensively. ‘Like making love or playing shuttlecock.’ He thought again. ‘Not that I have a great experience of either.’

  Davies pointed to a square-roofed shadow beyond the church. ‘That’s the youth club,’ he said. ‘It’s a new building but it’s on the site of the old one. So we can say that Celia Norris began her last bicycle ride from there. Her cycle would have been in the yard and she would have come out through this gate and made off towards the cemetery to get her mum the flowers.’

  They began there and followed the trail humped as a couple of slow bloodhounds. At the cemetery entrance they were inevitably confronted by the graveyard keeper who peered through the gloom and the gates. ‘Oh, Christ, it’s you again,’ he said, regarding them as he might have regarded Burke and Hare. ‘I hope you haven’t got that stinking dog with you.’

  Davies immediately worried that they had discovered the missing bone. It was still, violently gnawed, in the back seat of the Lagonda. Every time he had attempted to recapture it Kitty had growled spitefully. ‘No, no,’ he assured. ‘No dog today. Just taking the air. This is Mr Modest Lewis.’

  ‘Funny place to take it,’ said the man, ignoring Mod. ‘The air around here.’

  ‘Mr Lewis is a famous pathologist,’ added Davies trenchantly. The graveyard man was at once impressed. ‘Oh, very pleased to meet you,’ he said in the manner of one greeting a worker in the same trade. He pushed his hand, white as a bat in the winter darkness, through the bars of the gate. Mod, never unready to assume a part, took it, examined it carefully and let him have it back.

  ‘That’s a cold hand,’ he said, frowning professionally.

  ‘Is it?’ said the man with a hint of worry. ‘Is there … is there anything I can do for you Mr Lewis? We don’t have that many pathologists visiting us. Anything you’d like to see, perhaps?’ He sounded as if he were quite prepared to start digging.

  ‘Nothing, nothing at all,’ replied Mod carefully. ‘But you just look after your hands. They’re very cold.’

  ‘I will, I will,’ promised the man apprehensively. ‘I’ll warm them in front of the fire.’ He hurried away with his palms thrust beneath his armpits.

  Mod grinned in the dark. ‘I enjoyed that,’ he said as they continued their trail. ‘I’ve always thought I might like to be a pathologist, you know. No one gets nearer to the human being than the pathologist. Imagine, one day, performing a post mortem – and finding a man’s trapped soul! Fluttering away there like a snared butterfly. Now that would be a thing, wouldn’t it, Dangerous?’

  ‘If you’d like to start on the ground floor,’ observed Davies wryly, ‘I can give you a human femur. If I can get it out of Kitty’s jaws. He nicked it from the boneyard last time we were here.’

  ‘Dear, dear,’ said Mod, shaking his head. ‘That dog will get into trouble yet. Just imagine some poor soul limping through eternity without a thighbone.’

  They had paused beneath the cemetery wall. Somewhere there PC Frederick Fennell had found the abandoned bicycle. It was a ragged patch of ground, a gathering place for tufted grass and weeds, although sweetened by daisies and dandelions and visited by occasional desperate bees in the summer. The light of the street lamps touched hanging ears of ivy on the brick wall. ‘That ivy must have been here then,’ said Mod knowledgeably. ‘If it could only talk.’

  ‘I’d be glad if some humans would talk, never mind the ivy,’ grumbled Davies. He began to walk again in the direction of the main shopping street. The lights were going out all over the World Stores, David Greig’s and the Home and Colonial. Men dodged into a small furtive shop for cigarettes and at the corner Job, the newspaper seller, called mournfully: ‘Tragedy tonight! Big tragedy!’ as he peddled his gloomy wares in the gloom.

  As they walked Davies related the events, as he knew them, appertaining as he officially put it, to the disappearance and undoubted murder of Celia Norris. Mod walked beside him, grunting and listening. They turned eventually down the alley path between the pawnbrokers and the Healing Hands Massage Parlour, and plunged into the damp darkness of the canal cut. Davies climbed the bank of the allotments and surveyed the darkened rows of cabbages and sprouts. A platoon of bean poles stood guard in the dark. He got down again and they paced the towpath carefully, Davies still talking, Mod leaning over to look into the oily water as if hoping some clue or inspiration might still be given up from there. They walked the half mile length until they reache
d the road bridge that transversed the canal. Their journey had been frowned upon by the rears of warehouses and shops and a few terrace houses with their backs to the waterway. Somebody had even parked a little boat by the dead water. There were romantics everywhere.

  Back on the road Mod’s nose began to twitch towards the distant junction light of The Babe In Arms and they hurried towards the early evening brew. After their customary three pints they repaired to ‘Bali Hi’, Furtman Gardens where Mrs Fulljames had created tripe and onions for dinner and Mr Smeeton was appropriately disguised in Breton costume. ‘French Club tonight,’ he mumbled enigmatically. Mr Patel was explaining a metallic bending of a fork to Minnie Banks and Doris who were looking on entranced.

  After dinner Davies went to his bedroom. Covering the bedside lamp with a vest (Mrs Fulljames did not approve of lights burning in all parts of the house), he wrote down with great care everything he knew about the case of Celia Norris. Then, on another sheet of paper, borrowed from Minnie and headed ‘Kensal Green Primary School’, he wrote everything he thought he knew, and on a third, the things he wished he knew. He folded his work and put it inside a shoe (an odd shoe, the survivor of a battle at an Irish goodwill party) in his wardrobe.

  At ten o’clock he thought he would stroll to The Babe In Arms before it closed. It had become misty merging on foggy. He spent only a few minutes in there chiefly because of the woman who sang ‘Viva España’ and then returned back to Furtman Gardens. Halfway down the foggy street, beneath its only tree, he was violently attacked by three, possibly four men. He was struck on the head and was aware of blows coming from all directions. Even in his pain and confusion he thought he detected the familiar blow of a pick-axe handle. He fell to the pavement and was then gratefully aware of a distant panic among his assailants. At once the blows ceased. He thought they were running away and there was another sound of heavier running, then hot, smelly breathing into his battered face. It needed all his strength to open his eyes once. He found himself looking up into the worried face of the rag-and-bone man’s horse.