Davies turned on him but his anger dropped at once from his shoulders. He sighed: ‘Hello Percy. What’s your problem?’
‘They done my bike again, Dangerous,’ said the grey man, his face twisting. ‘The same buggers gone and took it.’ He was pleading. ‘If I ’aven’t got my bike I can’t get to the ’llotment, can I?’
‘Who’s nicked it?’ He could feel the desk sergeant grinning.
‘Them what calls themselves the Angel Bruvvers. Lives at the end of the street. I know they got it, Dangerous. Get it back for me will you, mate.’
With a glance at the sergeant, Davies muttered: ‘I’m glad somebody needs me.’ He put his arm on the man’s shoulder. ‘Let’s go and sort them out.’
‘It’s only round the corner,’ said Percy when they got into the street. ‘They does it just to get me upset. Reckons I’ll ’ave one of them ’eart attacks then they can have the bike for good.’
They went into the cowering street. ‘End house,’ said Percy, his voice dropping to a whisper. ‘I’m afraid, Dangerous,’ he said timorously. ‘I’m scared of them.’
‘Go down to your house,’ Davies told him calmly. ‘I’ll bring the bike down in a minute.’ He looked at the man’s twitching face. ‘Now, you’re sure they’ve got it? You haven’t just lost it?’
‘They got it, all right,’ said the man emphatically. ‘I seed them take it. I got digging to do on the ’llotment.’
‘Right, push off home then. I’m just about ready for the Angel Brothers.’
He was too. Inside he felt like a kettle, boiling and confined. He went to the door and banged on it fiercely. It opened at once. Both brothers, in their late teens with a string of convictions behind them, came to the door at once. They more than filled the frame. ‘Don’t bang the fucking thing down,’ complained one. He saw who it was. ‘Oh, it’s you,’ he said.
‘It’s ’im,’ his brother confirmed grimly. ‘What you want then?’
‘Percy’s bike,’ said Davies. He stepped forward and put one finger of each hand up their respective nostrils. ‘Get it now.’
The youths, looking frightened, made honking noises and backed into the tight hallway. Davies put his foot in the door. ‘Get it,’ he repeated. He patted his overcoat breast. ‘I am an armed officer and I’m going to shoot you bastards if you don’t get that bike.’
He could see that they thought he had gone mad. Both began to back away. ‘One of you,’ he ordered getting hold of the shirt collar of the nearest. ‘You stay with me.’
The brother who was free backed into the dimness of the hall. The other rolled his eyes at Davies. ‘You ain’t supposed to come around shooting people,’ he grunted. ‘You ain’t allowed.’
‘I am,’ Davies told him. ‘I’m licensed to kill, I am.’
The first youth reappeared in the passage. He wheeled the bicycle towards Davies. ‘We found it,’ he said.
‘Before it was lost,’ Davies growled at him. ‘All right lads, wheel it down the road to Percy’s house and give it to him. Tell him you found it. He’ll be very grateful.’ He took each pair of eyes in turn. ‘Both of you.’
They glanced at each other and each nodded. Docile as choir boys they wheeled the bicycle between them along the pavement to the house at the other end of the terrace. ‘You knock,’ said Davies pointing to the brother nearest the door. ‘Nicely.’ Grimacing the youth did so. Percy’s frightened face appeared.
‘Hello, Percy,’ said Davies blithely. ‘These two nice lads found your bike. They’ve brought it back to you.’
A great smile filled the man’s tatty face. ‘Fanks,’ he said taking the bicycle indoors. He looked gratefully at Davies. ‘Fanks,’ he repeated. He closed the door.
‘Now you two run off home and watch children’s telly,’ said Davies to the youths. He touched them each on the shoulder. ‘One thing you ought to know is that Percy is an SPP – a Specially Protected Person. He was in MI5 during the war. If he gets hurt then there’s big trouble. So leave him alone. Now piss off.’
‘Christ,’ said Davies morosely. ‘I thought he was going to go straight through his ceiling. He went bloody berserk. You’d think I’d let a murderer get off the hook instead of getting one on it.’
Jemma patted his hand on the table in the Babe In Arms. Mod nodded deeply. ‘And the top dog will take all the credit,’ forecast Jemma.
‘You can bet on that,’ said Davies. He sighed. He was so upset Mod had to buy the drinks. ‘I told him that I wanted to check it out first so that I wouldn’t be wasting his valuable time.’ He glared at both faces. ‘And because I wanted to do it,’ he said doggedly. ‘God, I’m the one who turned it up.’
‘He was not the least grateful,’ said Mod in his studied way. ‘Not a man who is sure of his position. I knew a librarian like that once.’
Jemma silenced him with a glance. ‘Not a grateful man at all,’ agreed Davies. ‘Shouting about me wasting valuable time. Russian Mike would be a million miles away by now. In South America somewhere. All that crap. Was I for the high jump if he slipped through the net! Christ, they didn’t even have a bloody suspect – and now I’m being accused of perverting the course of justice.’
‘Well, it wasn’t South America,’ observed Jemma looking again at the Evening Standard. The headline said: ‘Wormwood Scrubs body: Man detained’. Her eyes went down the item. ‘South Harrow,’ she said. ‘And Detective Superintendent Harvey making a nice guarded, self-congratulatory, puffed-up statement. I bet you’ll never get a mention.’
‘That’s a racing certainty,’ said Davies.
‘Speaking of which,’ put in Mod in his diversionary manner, ‘the horse you had me bet on the other day at that betting shop …’
‘It won,’ nodded Davies. ‘I saw. Evens.’
‘There were expenses, of course,’ warned Mod. ‘I had to go back to the shop to collect my winnings. Five pounds sixty. And you know how much bus fares are these days.’
‘But they’re not a fiver from here to Marylebone,’ argued Davies. ‘What about the rest?’
‘I used it to buy these drinks,’ pointed out Mod.
Davies said grimly: ‘Well, they can have their glory. Take all the bloody credit when the villain goes back to the Scrubs for life. I’m going down to Bournemouth at the end of the week.’
Jemma eyed him. ‘At least’, he said, ‘that’s my own case. My own murder.’
Fourteen
By now it was April. ‘April airs are abroad,’ quoted Mrs Dulciman. She held onto Davies’ arm as they strolled along the promenade.
‘Certainly are,’ agreed Davies sniffing the salt breeze. The sunshine was thin but there were already people in deck-chairs, sheltered by wind breaks, on the sands. More were sitting on the seats along the beach railings. Mrs Dulciman suggested that they should sit there too. They found a bench and sat observing the sea. An unspeaking old couple were already on the beach taking in the same bland scene. ‘Would you mind leaving us alone,’ Mrs Dulciman asked them precisely. ‘We have private things to talk about.’
Davies was astonished and even more so when the couple nodded understandingly and moved away. ‘Very subservient, some people,’ said Mrs Dulciman with satisfaction. ‘It depends entirely on their upbringing.’
They sat in silence. ‘The season does not really begin before Whitsun. Then the grockles come,’ said Mrs Dulciman eventually. She half turned to Davies and squeezed his arm. ‘What have you found out, Mr Davies?’
‘A few things,’ he said. ‘If I didn’t keep ending up in hospital I’d be almost there by now.’
‘Really. How clever of you. Do you know what happened to him?’
‘I will soon,’ he replied. He regarded her seriously. ‘Mrs Dulciman, I have something to tell you. It may come as an unpleasant surprise.’
‘Oh,’ she said mildly. ‘And what is that?’
He said bluntly: ‘I’m afraid Mr Dulciman was engaged in the pornography racket.’
She burst out laughing.
A man passing by with his dog turned sharply at the laugh. ‘It’s all right,’ she said waving him away.
‘Pornography,’ repeated Davies lowering his tone. ‘You do know what I mean?’
‘Know what you mean? My dear boy, fifty years ago I was one of the best pornographic models in the business.’
All Davies could say was: ‘You?’
‘Me,’ she confirmed. ‘That’s how I met Dulciman first. I was not aware that he had taken it up again when we came down here. But then, he never told me much.’
She turned to him smiling sweetly. ‘I do believe you are shocked, Mr Davies.’
He rubbed his chin. ‘Well, it was a bit of a surprise.’
‘My mother was famous for it,’ she said almost gushing. ‘Before the First World War. And during, of course. That’s when she made her money. Then there was an unfortunate accident. In Paris. They used to use those magnesium flashes that exploded so that you could take the picture. Somebody’s hairs caught fire. Most unfortunate.’
Davies stared out to sea. He had thought that he was past being astonished at anything. From the corner of his view a pink figure progressed down to the shore. In was Nola Cloudsley-Clive swinging her tennis racquet. The gulls began to bay in anticipation. She threw up a piece of bread and struck it with the racquet.
‘Old idiot,’ said Mrs Dulciman with scarcely subdued bitterness. ‘Look at her, done up like a flaming flamingo. What a way to serve out your life.’
She appeared unconscious of the pun. Davies said: ‘She’s serving the gulls now.’
‘Dulciman knew her, of course. You’ve found that much out?’ It was a question as though to test him.
‘Er … yes,’ he nodded still watching the scene on the beach. ‘She lent him some money, I believe.’
‘She and goodness knows how many others. And “lent” is scarcely the word. They gave him the money – gladly. He was that sort of man. He didn’t ooze charm, he poured it out. By the bucket. When he had his own teeth he was even more devastating.’ The reference served to remind her. ‘Did you ever come to any conclusions as to who might have sent his teeth through the post, by the way?’
‘Not really,’ he lied. ‘If I knew that I might be well on the way to solving the whole caboodle.’
‘In that case’, she said almost hugging herself, ‘I must tell you.’
‘You know?’ he asked managing to appear astonished.
‘I certainly should do. It was me! I sent the teeth to myself!’
‘Why would you do that?’ he asked looking as if everything was becoming too complex for him.
‘To encourage you to take the case, of course, silly,’ she enthused. ‘A kind of bait.’
‘Well, well. Who would have thought it,’ he said shaking his head. ‘Just to give me the come-on. Well, it certainly worked. You’re a devious woman, Mrs Dulciman.’
She giggled with pleasure. ‘I’m so pleased to hear you say it. Sometimes it is difficult to acquire new skills when you have become less than young, or more than young, whichever it should be. Deviousness is a skill, I think.’
‘Oh, I agree,’ he said. ‘You certainly had me fooled.’
‘Those teeth were sitting around for five years. I kept them in the first place in case he came back and needed them. But then I had this bright idea. And, as I say, it worked.’
Davies nodded. ‘Here I am working on the case. Amazing.’ His tone changed. ‘How come he left his teeth behind when he went out for the last time? Were they a spare set?’
‘Reserve teeth,’ she acknowledged. ‘When he went out to the Moonlighters Club that final evening he was wearing his best set. Perhaps he had an assignation.’
‘His business, the pornography business, was run with Pengelly.’
Now she was surprised. ‘Was it now? That’s most interesting. I thought Pengelly had to make a living at something. He was no good as a detective.’
‘Apparently they knew each other in London, when Pengelly was called something else, and they set up the studio and the models and everything then. But things went wrong. Some of the London gangsters began to lean on them, I suspect, and that is when your husband decided to quit and come to live down here.’
She nodded thoughtfully: ‘I always thought we decamped a trifle hurriedly,’ she said.
‘Then, at some time, Pengelly contacted him and suggested that they should start up again in a quieter way, out of London, and that’s what happened. They used young people from this area, most of them out of work, for the models. But once again it became too successful. Dulciman had borrowed the money to start the whole thing up from people like Mrs Cloudsley-Clive out there …’ He squinted into the lowering sun at the tall angular woman still swinging the tennis racquet, ‘… with no intention of repaying it. But, once more, the London gang or gangs got to hear of it and they began to put the squeeze on again.’ He looked at her sadly. ‘I’m afraid, it is a possibility that Mr Dulciman’s fate may well have been tied up with that situation.’
‘Poor Dulciman,’ she sighed but with no great feeling. ‘That might have been nasty.’ She returned the expression. ‘You think he might be down somewhere helping to hold up the motorway?’
‘It’s a possibility.’
‘Well, I hope he didn’t suffer too much,’ she said.
Father Ignatius O’Rourke was sitting in a deck-chair behind the Catholic Church reading Woman’s Own when Davies found him.
‘So many of my problems are with women,’ he said. His expression altered. ‘Not directly, you understand. I have kept to my vows if others haven’t. But women are always coming to me for advice. The only way I can give it is to read the experts, the Agony Aunties, don’t they call them, in journals such as this. They seem to have all the answers.’ He was a small, wispy man, with a red-button nose. ‘I would not like you to think I have taken up knitting,’ he smiled.
Davies introduced himself. ‘A private eye,’ echoed the priest after the policeman had told his semi-lie. ‘Now there’s a thing. What is it, a murder?’
‘It might be.’
The priest looked as if he were trying to think of a suitable recent case. He failed. ‘Now who would that be?’ he asked.
‘At present it’s merely a missing person,’ replied Davies.
‘Ah, one of those. They often come back dead, don’t they?’
‘Yes, they often do. This concerns a Mr Dulciman. He disappeared about five years ago.’
Father Ignatius looked puzzled. ‘Not a missing person I know,’ he confessed. ‘But then I was not here five years ago.’ He brightened. ‘I have just had audience with the Holy Father, you know. In the Holy City.’
‘I heard,’ said Davies.
‘Who told you?’ asked the priest a trifle concerned.
‘I had some inquiries made and you were away,’ explained Davies. ‘How was the Holy Father?’
‘In good health by the look of it. He spoke to us only in German, unfortunately. I went with an ecumenical group from Salisbury and apparently through some mix-up they decided that we had come from Salzburg. I did not understand a single word he said. Nor did any of the others.’
‘Life’s like that,’ said Davies. ‘Full of misunderstandings.’
‘And mysteries,’ said the priest. ‘Now what was your particular mystery?’
‘It really concerned your predecessor.’
‘Who now, I trust and hope, knows the answers to all mysteries.’
‘Yes, I understand he has died.’ Davies allowed a proper pause. ‘But I believe he ran a Catholic youth club and the members were involved in the campaign to keep the local beaches tidy. They wore special caps and T-shirts.’
The priest appeared a little surprised but said: ‘Oh, they did too. I was asked to carry on with the good work, but I declined. I have enough concern trying to cleanse souls without having the beaches to worry about.’
Davies nodded. ‘I need to find one, just one will do, of the young people who took part in th
e campaign five years ago. One of them found a pair of shoes.’
‘Ah, your clue,’ said the priest with satisfaction. ‘Did your man walk out to sea then?’
Davies glanced at him appreciatively. ‘He may have done. Or he may have just wanted to give that impression. Or somebody else may have wanted to give that impression.’
‘The malefactor,’ agreed the priest with a small smile of satisfaction. He rose from his chair. ‘Father Fergus did leave records,’ he said. He folded his Woman’s Own carefully. ‘Come on, I’ll show you. He was a great man for keeping files in order. Unfortunately, I am not.’
He led the way into the house, nodding his head rhythmically like a closely shorn donkey. ‘Now fancy there being a murder,’ he ruminated. ‘And all that time ago.’ He turned sympathetically at the door. ‘The trail, if that is the word, must be a touch cold.’
Davies nodded. ‘I’m trying to breathe some life into it,’ he agreed.
‘But then after a while, a few years even, I expect people tell you things they would not mention in the first instance. They don’t think there is any harm in saying them then.’
‘Exactly,’ said Davies. ‘That is one of the great plusses. Not that what people remember is always correct, far from it, but it’s given them time to come to opinions. They don’t think it’s so important to hide embarrassing things.’
‘Their perspectives have changed,’ agreed the priest. He led the way into a dim and extravagantly unkempt study. Books were piled on the floor, in one instance to replace the missing leg of a chair. There were piles of newspapers and pamphlets, half a dozen plastic coffee beakers, a pile of grubby towels on the desk, and in a corner a slide projector throwing a bright picture of a large white bird with a vivid yellow neck onto the screen.
Father Ignatius tutted. ‘Forgot to turn it off,’ he said, now doing so. ‘I burned my last living to the ground, although that is a secret we must share. It was officially unexplained.’
‘You’re interested in birds,’ said Davies looking at the now dark screen.
The Complete Dangerous Davies Page 68