‘Christ! Not the old man with the pram!’
‘Still him. I was going to come and see you. But you’re off home now.’
‘Yes, I am.’ The security man took the key from him and operated the rising gate.
‘Could I have your home number? I’d like to give you a call some time.’
Williams scowled. ‘Well … I don’t see … oh, all right. It’s in the book anyway.’
Davies wrote down the figures as he dictated them. Williams turned without saying anything further, and drove through the gate.
‘He wasn’t all that pleased, was he?’ observed Curl. Another car drew up outside the gatehouse. Davies could see Mrs Harrer glinting at him through the passenger window. Harrison was driving. He went down the two steps to them. The big woman lowered the window.
‘Overtime you work,’ she observed sourly.
‘Devotion to duty,’ Davies smiled brokenly. ‘I wonder if I could bother you both for your home telephone numbers.’
‘Why is this?’ demanded the woman. The German in her voice thickened. ‘What is this business?’
‘I might need to call you after hours,’ he said pleasantly.
‘Mine’s here, on my card,’ said Harrison impatiently, handing the card across. After a moment’s hesitation, Mrs Harrer gave him a card. ‘Mine also. Do not ring when it is not convenient.’
Curl operated the gate and waved as the car jerked out into the traffic. ‘You really upset people, don’t you,’ he observed, returning to the gatehouse.
Confidingly, Davies said: ‘Let me give you a professional tip, Edwin lad. It might come in useful. People don’t like being asked for their home phone numbers. It worries them, upsets them.’
‘I see,’ said Curl. ‘I wouldn’t mind that Mrs Harrer’s number. I really fancy her.’ He looked a little ashamed at Davies. ‘All my women are big,’ he mumbled.
Davies said: ‘I’d like to take a wander around all the premises on this site.’
‘Now?’
‘Now. By myself.’
‘Yes, well, it’s all right, I suppose. I mean, if I can’t trust you, who can I trust?’
Ten
The many colours, creeds and cultures wedged into that north-western corner of London had over the years borrowed a little of each other’s life, and nowhere was this more apparent than in the restaurant owned by Monsieur François Ramchand who came from Auroville near Pondicherry in what was once French India, and who had been trained as a chef in Calcutta, Paris and Hendon. It was called Côte du Ganges.
It was Monday night and there was a table available, big enough for eating the house curry and for spreading out the cards which Mod had brought with him. They were library index cards and upon each of them Mod had printed the scanty clues.
‘It’s like Happy Families,’ summed up Davies pessimistically. Jemma said: ‘Except nobody fits anywhere.’
They shuffled and tried again, and again, but no sequence emerged; no connection was apparent. ‘Unless,’ said Mod ponderously, ‘we put this one with this …’ He rearranged the sequence. ‘… and this one with this. This gives us a story that Mrs Harrer had a father who was a guard at the prisoner-of-war camp in Silesia …’
‘She’s like a mountain,’ said Davies thoughtfully. ‘The Jungfrau.’
‘And her father,’ continued Mod, ‘murdered the real Lofty Brock, and became a bosom pal of Sergeant Major Bing and then lived happily ever after at Clacton-on-Sea, curing his coughs with Doctor Collis Browne’s Mixture.’
Moodily, Davies tapped the card upon which was written: ‘A present from Clacton-on-Sea’. ‘The cow cream jug and Chelmsford Prison, thirty miles apart, are the only links of any sort. The rest …’ He scattered the cards over the table. ‘… don’t add up at all. We’ve got the prison picture of the nameless lady. But all the records of Chelmsford Women’s Prison were destroyed by a German bomb in the war …’
‘… Dropped by the Jungfrau’s Luftwaffe uncle,’ mentioned Mod.
Mod gathered up his cards, they left the restaurant and went into the windy street. It was March now and moonlit, and the steam from the power station cooling towers blew like long silver hair in the sky. Mod trundled to The Babe In Arms and Davies walked Jemma home.
‘Have you thought of the possibility that none of it does add up?’ suggested Jemma, putting her coated arm into his.
‘You mean that I’m making up a mystery, a case with no crime; I’m playing at being a big detective when I’m only a small one,’ he said gloomily. ‘You’ve been talking to Mod.’
‘Since the art of detection is logic,’ she pursued, ‘would you not agree that Lofty Brock might have had an interesting, even a criminal past without it necessarily catching up with him on the canal tow-path that night? Perhaps, for all his secrets, he just fell in.’
‘He wasn’t Lofty Brock,’ Davies pointed out grumpily. ‘He was somebody else. He became Lofty Brock in the prison camp – for reasons of his own.’
‘That, as you were told by the old soldier, happened in any number of cases. Men took advantage of the confusion to disappear and reappear as somebody else.’
‘Shiny Bright,’ said Davies doggedly, ‘saw and heard something by the canal that night.’
She pouted. ‘Shiny Bright,’ she observed, ‘is scarcely reliable.’
‘Somewhere,’ said Davies, plodding on at her side, ‘there’s an answer. There’s something smelly in that trading estate. I had a good look around.’
‘People don’t like being investigated,’ she pointed out firmly. ‘They get anxious, they do odd things, they look at you in a funny way. That doesn’t mean they’re murderers. What would happen if Harrison and Harrer, or Shurrock or Williams, went to your superiors and complained about harassment?’
‘Don’t,’ mumbled Davies, closing his eyes. ‘Don’t.’ He stumbled on a broken paving stone. They were almost at her door. She turned and quietly wrapped her arms about him. ‘You’re like Don Quixote,’ she said. ‘Perhaps fighting imaginary wrongs.’
He glared at her, but his expression melted at her smile. ‘Maybe you’re right,’ he sighed. ‘I’m really cut out for the detection of petty pilfering.’ His head went against her chest. ‘Have you got any lodgers?’ he asked.
‘Not tonight,’ she smiled. ‘There is a vacancy for bed-and-breakfast.’
They kissed and he said, ‘Thanks.’ They went into the passage as the telephone rang. She picked up the receiver. ‘Okay,’ she eventually said. ‘If I can help …’
She turned to see him crestfallen. He stood against the wallpaper in the passage. ‘It’s all right,’ she assured him. ‘I think it’s being taken care of. It’s a gypsy family.’
‘Oh,’ said Davies. ‘Perhaps they’ll bring their horse.’
‘Shut up,’ she laughed, walking into the room. ‘Why don’t you get us a drink.’
He watched her go into the bedroom. There was half a bottle of Scotch on the sideboard, and he poured out two glasses and added water. She came back in a pale robe. He handed her the Scotch and they drank and embraced. ‘It’s getting towards bedtime,’ she said.
‘Right,’ he agreed. ‘The gypsies may turn up any minute.’
She giggled again and turned into the bedroom. Putting her glass down, she began to take off his pullover, shirt and tie. ‘I’ll do the next bit,’ he said, unlooping his braces. ‘Get an eyeful of these.’
He let his heavy grey trousers fall and stood posed in his long johns.
‘Blue!’ exclaimed Jemma. ‘And not baggy.’
‘Skiers wear them,’ said Davies proudly. ‘So the man said.’
He sat on the bed and, pushing her away a little, he provocatively began to peel down the elongated underpants while whistling the refrain of ‘The Stripper’ through his teeth, revolving his eyes, rolling the blue flannel down each ashen leg until he finally flicked them off with his big toe.
‘Oh, Dangerous!’ Jemma collapsed laughing across the bed. Her pale robe f
ell open as she arched one of her legs. He climbed up beside her and embraced her. ‘You’re so funny, Dangerous,’ she said, her voice trailing off.
‘And you,’ he said seriously, ‘are so beautiful. You’re like winning a gold clock.’ Their arms went about each other. The telephone rang.
‘The raggle-taggle gypsies-o,’ chanted Davies.
‘Leave it,’ she said. ‘Let them ring back.’
He kissed her softly. ‘Answer it,’ he sighed. ‘They’ll hate being kept waiting.’
Keeping her eyes on him she picked up the receiver from the bedside table. ‘It’s for you,’ she said, handing it across. ‘It’s Mod.’
‘Dangerous,’ said Mod. ‘I’m in The Babe. Are you busy?’
‘No, not at all,’ answered Davies. ‘I was just getting bored.’
‘The undertaker, Wally Pitt, has been in looking for you. He’s found out about the wooden screw.’
Davies sat up. ‘He has? What does he say?’
‘He didn’t. He wants to tell you.’
‘Right. I’ll …’ He glanced at the naked Jemma. ‘I’ll ring him in the morning. Thanks, Mod.’
He replaced the phone. ‘Wally Pitt …’ he began.
‘I know, I heard,’ said Jemma. She began to laugh again. ‘God help me,’ she said. ‘The last thing I want to hear about now is a wooden screw.’
‘Wally?’
‘This is Walter Pitt, Funeral Directors.’
‘Is Wally, Mr Pitt, there? It’s Detective Constable Davies.’
‘From the police?’
‘Er … yes.’
‘I’ll get him. He’s with a customer.’
Davies was alone in the CID room. A thin shaft of spring sun sidled through the dusty window. Davies moved his backside to meet it, manoeuvring until it fell wanly upon his face.
‘Dangerous, it’s Wally.’
‘Oh, hello Wally. Sorry to call when you’re busy.’
‘It will wait, Dangerous. It often will in this business. I think I’ve had some joy about that strange wooden screw.’
‘So I hear. What is it?’
‘I still don’t know myself. But there’s somebody who can certainly help you out. We had one of our quarterly get-togethers, just the trade. We have a sort of quiz – a question-and-answer session – and I took the wooden screw with me, showed it around, and asked if they’d seen anything like it before. Now I thought, naturally, that if anyone knew the answer, it would be on the cabinet-making side of things. But a burials chap from Paddington, Ben Phipps, said he remembered his father, who was in the business before him, having several of these screws. As far as Ben remembered, they fell out of a corpse.’
Davies felt his own mouth fall open. ‘A corpse?’ he repeated. ‘They fell out?’
‘That’s what he said. He couldn’t remember much more about it. It was years ago.’
‘Thanks,’ said Davies. ‘It’s something anyway. I’m not sure what.’
‘I had a think about it when I got home,’ went on the undertaker. ‘And I believe there’s a chap who might give you some more on it. He came to one of our meetings too. Last year. Gave us a talk on the Black Death. His name is Kinlock, Dr Christopher Kinlock. He’s a medical historian. He lives somewhere in the docks area – the bit they’ve all smartened up. You should be able to find him all right.’
Dr Kinlock himself answered the door. There was an oddly shaped knocker. ‘This house,’ he said, ‘was used by an apothecary two hundred years ago. I’m very pleased to have it now.’ He indicated the curved steel knocker. ‘That,’ he said proudly, ‘is a third-generation artificial hip, a prosthesis; makes a wonderful bit of door furniture, don’t you think?’
Davies said uncertainly that he did. The doctor led the way through a panelled hall, beyond glass doors into a room where a gas fire was burning boldly.
Around the walls were showcases containing items of human anatomy. Davies could see a library through another door with an encased skeleton grinning at nothing. There were other skulls, bones and nameless things in jars. The death mask of a bald man occupied another container. ‘Unusual room,’ mentioned Davies, accepting the doctor’s Scotch.
‘An unusual facet of Dockland development,’ smiled Kinlock. ‘It’s not all fancy former warehouses.’ He was a small Scot with ginger eyebrows. ‘It’s been a fine opportunity to gather interesting specimens from medical history. I’m adding to it all the time. The death mask is of Mikhail Bakunin, the father of modern anarchy, one of only twelve made. One day, I would love to buy Napoleon’s testicle.’
‘That,’ agreed Davies vaguely, ‘would be worth having.’
‘Now, you had a little poser for me,’ said Kinlock. ‘Not much of one because, even from your telephone conversation, I think I know what we are talking about.’
‘These,’ said Davies. He had taken a further two screws from Lofty’s box and reclaimed the first from Walter Pitt. He held the three wooden screws out in the palm of his hand.
Kinlock picked up one with a musing smile. ‘Cunningly made, aren’t they,’ he said. ‘You’d have a job having something like this turned today. They needed to be the hardest wood, and of course, non-toxic.’
‘What,’ asked Davies, ‘were they for?’
‘Orthopaedic,’ said Kinlock brightly. ‘Screwing together bones.’ He twisted one of the screws as he turned and led the way into the further room. From a shelf he eased a heavy red book and, perching a pair of rough glasses on the ridge of his nose, turned the big pages. ‘Developed,’ he paraphrased, ‘in the nineteen twenties. A revolution in orthopaedic surgery.’ Once more he twirled the wooden spiral. ‘Cunning,’ he said again.
Davies asked cautiously, ‘How … common were they, at the time?’
‘Not so very. It wasn’t long before a stainless steel screw was developed, obviously an advantage because this little lady was very finicky and very costly to make.’ He looked quizzically at Davies. ‘I have, incidentally, only a very vague idea why the Metropolitan Police should want to know. Is it very secret?’
‘Not at all. I’m sorry. I could have explained it first.’
‘Would you like another Scotch?’
‘I would. I don’t get down to the docks often.’
They returned to the other room and while they drank, Davies told Kinlock of Lofty and his box. The doctor shook his head: ‘I’ve never heard of them being used in carpentry, I must say, but why not. It would be a somewhat expensive box, that’s all.’
‘Unless,’ said Davies, ‘you had the screws available and there was no further use for them. And you liked making boxes.’
‘Ah, agreed. As I say, the practice was not widespread because the period of their use was relatively short and it was an expensive operation. Let’s see who was in the bone-business at that time. Someone prominent who would be likely to be an innovator.’ He rose again and Davies followed him once more to the library room. ‘There were also fewer orthopaedic specialists in those days,’ he said. ‘Let us see.’
He took the same volume from the shelf. He read the entry again. ‘There are some names here: Mr Bernard Helmer, Mr John Cope – Cope was a great character – Sir Thomas Hands, Sir Cyril Linder, Sir John Stanton.’ He wrote the names in a pad as he said them. ‘Now, let’s cross-check in the medical Who Was Who. They’ll all be in there. I imagine they’re all gone by now. You don’t get to be Sir Cyril Linder until you’re fifty – at least they didn’t in those days.’ He turned the pages. ‘Cope,’ he read. ‘John Grey.’ He moved the heavy book towards Davies. ‘You read them,’ he said. ‘Something may occur to you.’
It was ten minutes before he reached the entry for Sir Cyril Linder. Then he read: ‘Residence: Cape House, Frinton-on-Sea, Essex.’ Then, later: ‘Hobbies: natural history and archaeology, antiques, cabinet-making. President: Eastern England Archaeology Society. President: Essex Conservation Association. Life-President: The Prisoners’ Rehabilitation Scheme.’
‘That’s him,’ said Da
vies quietly. ‘I think.’
‘Splendid,’ said Kinlock. ‘I’m glad we found your man.’ He left Davies to make detailed notes. Then they had a final Scotch. As they went to the door, Kinlock said diffidently: ‘I wonder, when you have completed this matter, if I could have one of those wooden screws for the museum. I’ve never actually seen one before.’
‘Take three,’ said Davies, handing them to him. ‘There’s others in the box. You’ve been very helpful. You might as well have a set.’
A new singing season had begun and Jemma was rehearsing for a performance of ‘Zadok The Priest’ at an Easter choral festival in Cricklewood. She agreed to Kitty being moved temporarily into her flat and the great dog was soon sprawled contentedly across the armchair previously occupied by Edie, the scratching man and other itinerants. There had, however, been a rash of mini-burglaries and other time-consuming investigations in the division, and it was ten days before Davies could take enough time off to visit Frinton-on-Sea.
‘Old-fashioned but exclusive,’ recited Mod from the guidebook as they motored eastwards in the Vanguard.
‘A bit like you,’ said Davies. On the rear seat was a valise containing Lofty Brock’s wooden box.
Cape House, the pre-War home of the surgeon Sir Cyril Linder, was now, according to telephone inquiries made by Mod, a small hotel. One of the family, however, Bernard Linder, Sir Cyril’s son, retained a flat there.
The hotel was closed for the winter but Mr Linder had instructed them to persist with the doorbell. After they had been doing this, hunched in the February rain, for several minutes, a long dressing-gowned figure could be discerned moving like a wraith among the interior glass doors.
There was a series of doors to unlock, and they watched him through the wet front panes as he did so. Eventually, he arrived directly before them, a blanched figure in a tall paisley dressing-gown. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ he said quite heartily once he had opened the door. ‘Been waiting long? I normally don’t get up until Easter.’
They followed him into the damp and empty reception area of the hotel. Last summer’s postcards were curling in a rack, keys hung in dead rows. Most of the furniture was covered with drapes and the chairs in the glass-doored dining-room were standing on the tables as if they were afraid of the mice.
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 37