‘Always the detective,’ she smiled. ‘You love digging around in the past, don’t you. Turning over old ashes. You’ve always been at your best doing that sort of thing.’ She glanced at the elderly walkers now progressing in the other direction. ‘And there’s plenty of past around here.’
‘It’s full up with it,’ he agreed. ‘There’s whole layers of the past in a town like this. I bet we’ve walked by a few mysteries, one or two nasty secrets, in the last fifteen minutes. Who can go through a lifetime and hand on heart swear they have never wanted to commit a murder, tried to commit one or actually did.’
She studied the passers-by with new interest. ‘And everyone looks so sedate and decent,’ she said.
Davies sniffed as though testing the air and the atmosphere at the same time. ‘One of the books Robert Louis Stevenson wrote in Bournemouth was Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde,’ he observed.
As they waited for the InterCity from Poole, Davies told Valentine about the railway engines that used to be. The boy refused to believe they ran on coal. Then he said: ‘What I want to know is why that old dear ’ad a white stick.’
‘Which old dear was that?’ inquired Davies, tentatively. Jemma glanced at each in turn.
‘The one in the ’otel. She ’ad a stick when she was sitting down in the dinner room but when we got there first, to the ’otel, she was reading the paper.’
‘That’s right,’ confirmed Jemma. ‘She was. But I didn’t see her with a white stick.’ She returned to Davies with a touch of amusement. ‘Did you?’ Davies shook his head.
‘It was leaning against ’er chair. An’ when she got up she took it out wiv her.’
The snub yellow nose of the train eased into the platform, the sound of its entry drowning the station announcement proclaiming it. ‘You ought to be a copper,’ Davies said to the boy once more. Again Valentine replied that he would rather not.
They shook hands gravely and the boy said: ‘Fanks for the castles and everything.’
Davies said: ‘I’ll have to build them on my own now.’ As he said it he realised it was true. He was going to be by himself again. He kissed Jemma and she whispered: ‘Try and last beyond Wednesday.’
‘I’ll be brave,’ he said.
The train went, vanishing metallically into the darkness of late afternoon. Davies found himself trudging as he went from the station. It was not far and he decided to walk, collar up and face down against the thin rain. Washy lights were showing in the various hotels along the way and he looked up and saw a window with smudges of people gathered in what he thought must be a cocktail bar. He trudged on.
These days he was not often lonely. But now, suddenly, he had neither Jemma nor Valentine, nor Mod, only his dog. Loneliness was the lot of policemen. They were like sailors in a way, often unaccompanied, in the dark, hardly knowing where they were going.
He had always realised that his own solitariness had made Doris, his wife, lonely too. Even when they were living together, as distinct from living in the same boarding house as they did now, a separateness had happened, a division, a mutual barrier. Poor Doris, he thought. She was young once. So was he.
He tried to console himself with the thought that he still had his dog, moody though he was. He reached the hotel and brought Kitty down from the room for an evening walk. The rain had thickened and he was glad to find a pub where there were no other dogs. He bought a pint and wondered how long he could stand being on holiday.
He was much cheered by the morning. A bland and blameless sky, the sea made almost blue with clean neat waves coming up the beach, and the sun giving Bournemouth, he thought, a little of the grand aspect of Nice, where he had never been. He had a cheerfully large breakfast, read the Daily Mail and the Daily Express, folded them beneath his arm and went down to the shore with Kitty.
Even his dog seemed to benefit from the bright morning. He ambled along, sniffing at the wet patterns left by the tide, smelling deeply into the plastic neck of a washed-ashore detergent bottle and jumping optimistically at the most adjacent of the swooping gulls.
Davies breathed deeply as he strode, his eyes watered and he began to feel warm in his overcoat. An elderly woman in a track suit, done up like a pink bundle, approached from the promenade. She was swinging a tennis racquet. As he watched, and the dog sat down and watched also, she took something from a paper bag and bringing the racquet back in a serving action, propelled it into the air. The gulls squawked and fought over the projectile. Davies looked at Kitty and the dog returned the puzzled glance.
‘It’s a new way of feeding the birds,’ Davies told him.
The woman saw his attention. She took another piece of bread from her bag and whanged it into the air among the wheeling gulls. ‘It combines sport and humanity!’ the woman shouted. She struck a third crust and then putting the racquet below her arm, strode past him down the beach, the harassing gulls following her.
Davies led his dog up the promenade. The benches were well populated with people, mostly elderly, enjoying the pale sun and sniffing the ozone. He wished some of them good morning and agreed that it was a fine day to be alive. ‘Every day is,’ one elderly man called after him. He took the dog back to the hotel. Kitty appeared exhausted by the open-air activity and sank gratefully with not even a growl into his basket. Davies went to an Indian newsagents and bought a Sporting Life for he thought he might occupy some of his time by selecting possible winners. He also purchased three picture postcards and wrote messages to Jemma, Valentine and Mod while he had a cup of coffee in a snack bar.
Standing in the queue at the post office he realised that three places ahead was the short sturdy form of Mrs Dulciman. She had a ring of fur around her neck and a jaunty little hat with a feather. A young man left the counter and the post office girl called after him. ‘Your change! You’ve left your change!’
The youth did not hear her but in a moment Mrs Dulciman was pursuing him and having caught him outside the door, brought him back to claim what was his. He thanked her shyly. Not bad, very swift off the mark, Davies thought, especially for an old lady holding a white stick.
Four
There was a horse called Winter Season running that day. Bertie, the porter, was in his glass enclosure when Davies returned to the hotel, his newspaper open at the racing page. He wore an expression of wrinkled doubt.
‘Fancy Winter Season?’ asked Davies. ‘Good name.’
‘Might, sir. But might not,’ replied Bertie. He opened the curious little window in the cubicle and pushed his head through like someone with a secret. ‘Never go by the names myself. Playing into their hands, I say.’
‘What do you reckon then?’ asked Davies. He squinted through the glass at Bertie’s paper spread on the polished shelf. The porter sniffed. ‘Winter Season’s as good as anything,’ he agreed. ‘It’s soggy underfoot and they say in here …’ He nodded towards the newspaper. ‘They say he likes that. Five to one’s not too bad.’ He looked up, his forehead expanding benignly. ‘Do you want me to put it on for you, sir. I have arrangements.’
Davies felt in his back pocket. ‘Thanks. Will you. Fiver each way.’ He glanced up to see how the amount registered. Bertie reacted with a considered nod. ‘That’s about what it’s worth,’ he said. ‘Come and watch if you like. It will be on the television. I’ll be watching.’
Davies said he would. It was still only eleven so he went to the room and brought Kitty down on his lead. The dog had taken to the life of the hotel. He came down the stairs swinging his great tail and sniffing at the dining-room door from which a remnant of the smells of breakfast still drifted.
‘Looks as if he could run in the two-thirty,’ suggested Bertie sizing up the animal.
‘He’s big enough,’ conceded Davies. ‘But lazy.’ Kitty looked around with what appeared as a smile.
‘Why’s he called Kitty?’ inquired Bertie leaning through his window. ‘A he?’
‘A mistake,’ shrugged Davies. ‘I was never able to get near eno
ugh to find out.’
Persuading the dog away from the dining-room door, he took him through the back entrance of the hotel and onto the beach. It was a flat day, dove-coloured sky and sea. The beach stretched wet and almost vacant but the lady he had seen propelling bread to the birds with a tennis racquet was doing it again. Kitty jumped hopefully towards the whirling gulls. The woman had exchanged her pink track suit for one of turquoise. He greeted her affably and admired her accuracy with the bread. ‘An ace service every time,’ he smiled.
‘That was once,’ she replied blithely. She paused in mid-serve and looked reminiscent. ‘A long time ago.’ She projected another crust into the sky and the crying gulls. ‘But then, most things were.’
The gulls screamed greedily. ‘You never see a happy gull,’ she said philosophically.
She lowered the racquet. ‘You should drop in at the Moonlighters Club,’ she said as if she had come to a decision. ‘It all happens there, you know.’
‘So I’ve been told,’ he agreed. ‘I’ll make sure I do.’
Kitty was tugging at the lead and he was forced to follow him. ‘Let the dog off,’ the turquoise woman called after him. ‘It’s not really allowed but you can’t go through life just doing what’s allowed!’
‘No,’ he agreed half-heartedly. ‘No, I suppose you can’t.’
He saw Mildred, the receptionist, coming from the hotel bouncing studiedly over the sand. ‘Let him off,’ she agreed. ‘They can’t hang you for it.’
She did it for him, bending and unclipping the dog’s lead. Kitty gave her a swift grateful glance and took off, running wildly along the fringe of the water, head down, bounding and yelping, until he was a dun dot in the distance.
‘Sod it,’ said Mildred dully. ‘That’s typical, that is.’
It was pointless chasing the dog. Glancing towards the promenade for anything in the shape of authority, Davies lowered his head and began to walk after the animal. Mildred stepped beside him.
‘I always like it down here,’ she said.
‘Bournemouth?’
‘The beach. Just being on it.’
‘Do you come down here at night?’
Mildred looked startled. ‘How do you know?’
‘I saw you. I think it was. The other night. Early hours really. There was a moon.’
‘Oh, yes. Well sometimes I don’t sleep and I only have a small room. It seems to close itself around me, trying to grab me. I have to get out somewhere.’ Hardly pausing, she said: ‘Mrs Dulciman wants to see you some time. She’ll be in this evening. She says she wants to ask you something.’
Phineas, the big one-legged man that Davies had met at the swimming bath, was wedged against the club bar.
‘The club’s called the Moonlighters because that’s what the smugglers around here were called in the olden days,’ he said. He swept his hand across the breadth of the window, the iron-grey sea running across it like a curtain. ‘All this coast, infested. What they call The Chines, you know, the gulleys running down from the cliffs to the beach.’
He lifted his tankard and Davies did also, minutely timed like two large puppets on the same string. ‘All them, The Chines, was contraband paths,’ continued Phineas with a smuggler’s wink. ‘There wasn’t really any Bournemouth then. They only built Bournemouth because they thought it would make dying people healthy. They still do.’
He drank deeply. In one movement he could, Davies saw, impressively dispose of almost half the pint tankard’s content. ‘Moonlighters,’ he repeated profoundly.
Davies looked around the big, shabby room. There were tables and round chairs, polished by years of backs, there were some desultory flowers on a table in the corner, a television set staring blankly from an alcove, and black-and-white photographs on the walls near the door. A silent man and a watchful woman sat in one corner each with a tiny unsipped glass of sherry. Davies looked out of the damp window to the grey background of the English Channel. Conversation had ceased. A moan of wind came from beyond the window. ‘Bournemouth lost on Saturday again,’ mentioned the barman reappearing.
‘I could play better. With one leg,’ said Phineas.
‘Who are they in the photographs?’ inquired Davies attempting to add to the conversation.
‘Members,’ croaked the man of the sherry drinkers.
‘Most of them dead,’ put in the woman.
Phineas followed Davies to the door and balancing his stump on a chair of convenient height, pointed to individual photographs with his stick. ‘They don’t go in for colour pictures a lot,’ he said. ‘Not here.’
‘Black and white shows people’s characters,’ suggested Davies, still attempting to contribute.
The sherry drinker said: ‘Hah.’
‘Life’s black and white,’ philosophised his companion loudly.
Davies scanned the photographs, pretending detailed interest. There were groups of mostly elderly people smiling raggedly, some standing artificially upright, others not bothering, men shaking hands, women kissing. There was a party outing with the coach in the background, and a croquet competition where the wind appeared to be about to blow away the participants, and several formal dinners and dances. ‘Who’s that?’ he asked, pointing to a straight-backed man dancing with a lady in a long frail dress, leaning back as though she was about to fall.
‘Vernon Dulciman,’ said Phineas.
Davies felt his heart move. He had the uncomfortable feeling that a mystery was trying to find him. It had happened before. It was like a medium attracting a restless and undesirable spirit. ‘Good dancer, Vernon,’ continued Phineas. ‘But there, he was in submarines during the war.’
‘Oh,’ blinked Davies.
‘Made him neat. Said he used to practise dancing on the submarine.’
‘Everything he did was neat. He was a neat man,’ put in the woman sherry drinker.
‘Neatest thing he ever did was to vanish,’ said her companion.
Bertie had just turned on the racing when Davies knocked on his door at the hotel. The room was like a storehouse, boxes and containers stacked around the walls, behind the baggy settee and armchair, and with suitcases lined up as though in some lost-property office.
‘Most of it’s mine,’ explained the porter apologetically. ‘As I’ve moved around. Never been one for throwing things away, me, so I’ve carted it with me wherever I’ve been working. Some of that stuff I haven’t opened for years. I reckon I’m here for keeps now, though, it’s been ten years, so I don’t expect that junk will be moving again.’
He frowned towards the television screen. ‘Sit down, sir,’ he invited. He was in the big chair himself so Davies sat on the settee feeling it groan and give under his weight. Bertie opened a box of matches and took out a spent match which he pushed into one of a series of small holes in the tuning panel of the television. The picture flickered and contracted before filling the screen adequately. Horses were being led into an enclosure. ‘Match of the day, I call this,’ said Bertie ponderously displaying the matchstick. ‘But it does the business.’ He peered closely at the image. ‘Now which is Winter Season?’ Without taking his eyes away he said: ‘I put your fiver each way on. I did the same for me. Maybe you’re lucky.’
‘Not generally,’ admitted Davies.
‘Maybe today,’ said Bertie. ‘Would you like a drink? Anything. Beer, vodka, creme de menthe. I’ve got it all here.’
Davies said he would have a whisky if there was one. Bertie got up and went to a cabinet which lit up garishly as he raised the lid to display ranks of coloured bottles.
‘Any preference?’ he asked.
‘Any one.’
‘What about a nice malt. Got several malts.’ The porter glanced over his shoulder. ‘Working like I do has got its perks,’ he added.
Davies had a malt whisky and they settled to watch the screen. ‘He looks all right, Winter Season,’ mentioned Bertie. ‘All four legs working.’
They watched in comfortable silence. Davies
was aware of occasional traffic outside the semi-window, half below ground. He realised it was getting dark. The room was close and homely. Being a porter was not a bad life.
‘The job’s got its ups and downs,’ said Bertie as if reading the thought. ‘This is the cushy time of the year. Summer’s murder. Rowdy kids all around the place. Now, when you’ve only got a few people … residents …’
‘Like Mrs Dulciman.’
‘Nice old lady. She’ll probably stay until she dies. Now he’s gone.’
‘Where’s he gone?’ asked Davies deliberately.
Bertie looked away from the screen even though the horses were under starter’s orders. ‘Who knows?’ he said. ‘Gone somewhere. Five years ago.’ His attention returned to the screen. ‘They’re off,’ he said without excitement. They watched. At the third fence Winter Season fell. ‘He’s come a cropper,’ said Bertie mildly. ‘Like Mr Dulciman.’
*
Apart from the direct physical assaults that had long been part of his work experience, Davies enjoyed good health. The onset of any ailment, the Willesden willies, a canal cold, toothache, even a hangover headache, he would tackle with a couple of double scotches, one swiftly following the other, and followed by another as a safety measure, at the bar of the Babe In Arms. His body had grown to understand this simple cure and to react dutifully to it.
But, late that drizzling night, as he was tugging Kitty along the promenade for the dog’s outing before bedtime, he felt the touch of something new. Kitty was not keen to promenade in the wet and was irritable. As they stumbled through the chill, thin rain with the midnight breakers dim and thundering, Davies was aware of a constriction in his throat.
His face was beaming hot despite the sheen of damp and there was sweat underneath his vest. His eyes rolled as though seeking help along the empty sea front. Yellow street lamps fused into omelettes. He was ill.
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 52