The Hard Detective

by H. R. F. Keating

  She was still at her desk late at night when, working her way through the standard reports, she came across a complaint from the manager of a butcher’s shop in Market Place that a cleaver had been stolen from the cutting block behind the counter of his shop.

  At once she knew — though she had no logical reason to believe it — that this was the instrument the killer was going to use to hack off the hand of his next victim.

  She picked up her phone.

  ‘I want calls to go at once tonight to every patrolling officer,’ she snapped out. ‘They’re to be doubly alert for any approach made to them by a man who might have concealed, under his coat or in any sort of bag, a butcher’s cleaver. And they’re to watch their hands if anyone approaches them. Watch their hands as if their lives depended on it. As they very likely do.’

  She went on to order an active search. ‘Into every dark corner. Anybody suspected, anybody at all, is to be tackled. But both patrolling officers are to act together. Always. Ready for an attack on themselves.’

  But it may be too late, she thought. It may be too damn late.

  Or will we have to wait? To go on and on waiting till this man chooses to strike again? Hand for hand.

  She had the orders repeated to every police station in the city, and told the control room she would be in her office all night.

  She was dozing in her chair, Froggy Froggott’s big tilting black leather one, when the shrill sound of the phone at her elbow brought her crashing back to reality.

  Daylight, she noted, just. A glance at the clock. 5.37.

  ‘Ma’am, some bad news.’

  She almost snapped out, Froggy-style, I don’t want a bulletin, I want action.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s another officer killed. Or, actually not an officer. A cadet. Name of Chatterton. One of the B Div patrols found him behind the British Legion club in Queen Street. They said— They said— Ma’am, his hand had been cut off.’

  ‘Right. I know the place. It’s only a couple of hundred yards from my old nick. I’ll be there in ten minutes. Oh, and I suppose you’d better ring Dr Scholl at his hotel. You’ve got a number for him? Get a car round there to take him to the scene. Right?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am.’

  In the yard behind the British Legion club, on the far edge of B Division’s territory, glaring white lighting had chased off the pale glimmer of dawn. The big Scenes-of-Crime van was parked in the street opposite, a bright orange cable stretching across from its quietly rumbling generator. Someone was staggering across the road with another tall light.

  ‘I see you got here on time this once,’ she greeted Inspector Palfrey, his lateness on the scene of PC Titmuss’s death not forgotten.

  ‘I’ve been ready for something like this, ma’am,’ he answered tersely, before adding with something of a pointed look, ‘and, by God, I hope it’s the last one.’

  And let’s hope to God, she thought, that this time something has been left at the scene that gives us a lead. Or it won’t be the last one. There will be foot for foot … And then more.

  Cadet Chatterton’s body lay on its side, half-twisted round the seatless dry bowl of a disused outside toilet in the corner of the yard. A seventeen-year-old boy in police uniform. The right hand appeared to have been hacked from the arm with two or perhaps three blows. The wound had bled copiously and almost the whole of the toilet’s dust-grained concrete floor was black-stained. Yet the youngster’s face, despite the terrible manner of his death, looked almost uncannily calm.

  It was, Harriet thought, for all the world as if he had chosen this unlikely spot to lie down in and take a quiet snooze.

  ‘You know,’ she said to Inspector Palfrey standing almost accusingly behind her, ‘I believe he must have been drugged. Somehow drugged. Doesn’t it look like it?’

  ‘Well, yes. Yes, ma’am, you’re right. It sort of does. That expression on his face, it’s been puzzling me all along. But him being drugged could be the explanation. Yet how … ?’

  At once Harriet thought she knew. Into her mind came the rape case that had been one of the last of her concerns before leaving B Division and Stop the Rot.

  ‘I think I know how, or can make a damn good guess,’ she said. ‘A Rohypnol tablet, a Roofie, in something the lad was offered to drink. God knows when or how. But you must know the effect Roofies have. Plenty of canteen culture jokes about putting girlfriends into a trance-like state. If this poor lad was fed a Roofie, it’d be easy enough to have led him round here, settled him down in this quiet corner and then perhaps suffocated him before using that cleaver.’

  She looked down once again at the crudely hacked-off stump. A defeat. But, by God, it would be the last.

  Chapter Six

  Harriet decided to wait for the Area Pathologist, whose immediate presence at the murder scene she had insisted on before leaving her office. If he could give her on the spot a good approximate time for the death, it would be that much quicker to find out where young Chatterton had been when a Rohypnol tablet — high time they brought in that Government order to put blue dye in the damn things — had been slipped into his drink. If that was the case …

  A narrowed-down search. A loophole of light.

  Soon one of the Scenes-of-Crime searchers came up, holding between his transparent gloves a bundle of pale fawn-coloured cloth blotched with darker stains.

  ‘Pushed well in behind that pile of empty casks, sir,’ he said to Palfrey.

  He let the bundle fall out to its full length.

  ‘A raincoat,’ Harriet pounced. ‘Our man must have had to leave it here because of those bloodstains. Must have left in a hurry, too, if the best he could do by way of hiding it was to stuff it behind there. This may be his first real mistake, provided Forensic can tell us anything definite about it.’

  A surge of hope. Put together the three things, the chance that some passer-by might have seen someone hurrying away from the club’s backyard, the possibly narrow field of opportunity to administer a Rohypnol tablet, and what could be learnt from the raincoat, and hand for hand could be the last of the murders. Unless, of course, the bloodstained coat turned out to belong to someone else altogether, left in the yard after a fight of some sort, and it so happened as well that it was impossible to fix on the moment Cadet Chatterton had been given a Roofie.

  A car drew to a halt in the street outside and Dr Scholl came striding into the yard, dewily fresh-faced as ever even at this hour.

  The Area Pathologist, Harriet thought, was the one who would be really welcome. Someone who could produce hard evidence. But in the meanwhile …

  She led Dr Smellyfeet over at once to the tumble-down toilet.

  Let’s see what a little real blood does to him.

  To her disappointment, he simply stood there minute after minute looking not so much at Cadet Chatterton and his oddly peaceful face as up and down the cobwebby little lean-to where he lay.

  ‘Well?’ she said, when with the arrival of the pathologist, a deputy, a woman Harriet had never met, he at last broke away,

  ‘There’s nothing I can tell you here and now,’ Dr Smellyfeet answered. ‘You’ll have seen, of course, that the poor fellow must have been unconscious before that hand was cut off. Drugged, I imagine. But I’d like to incorporate what I’ve seen in my Profile, which as a matter of fact I was going to bring you today.’

  ‘I’ll be glad to see it, when I’ve time,’ she said. ‘But at the moment I’m more interested in the possible evidential value of a bloodstained raincoat we’ve found. Provided it belonged to the killer, of course.’

  ‘Can I see it?’ Dr Smellyfeet said eagerly. ‘There’s often a lot more to be told about a coat than anything forensic scientists find on it. I might be able to deduce a good deal about Mr Man from the way his coat seems to have been worn, if it just hung loosely or was always tightly belted, how many pockets it has, the general style that attracted him in buying it in the first place.’

  ‘It’ll ha
ve to go to Forensic first, but I suppose you can have it when they’ve finished, if inquiries at the club haven’t turned up some drunken brawl that ended with a coat lying on the ground here and then stuffed away.’

  ‘Thank you, Superintendent,’ he said, not without dryness.

  Harriet turned to the pathologist and concentrated her full attention on what she was finding.

  *

  Back at her office with such facts in her head as the pathologist — typically cautious — had been willing to tell her, Harriet put in a call to CID at Queen Street. Should be someone in by this time, she told herself.

  There was. And happily it was Sergeant Grant, the officer with most experience of Rohypnol as used by thuggish young rapists.

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ she replied, with a hint of a sob in her voice, when Harriet jabbed out her news. ‘I did know Mickey Chatterton. Poor devil. Poor little devil. In fact, I had him under my wing, as you might say, most of yesterday.’

  ‘You did? Right then, tell me everything he did up to, let’s say, seven o’clock. Unless that close-mouthed bloody pathologist changes her mind about the approximate time of death when she’s done her p.m., seven would be the latest time for him to have been given that Rohypnol.’

  ‘Ma’am. Well, I had young Mickey out with me — your order: go about in pairs when in uniform — still on house-to-house round Queen Street for witnesses to WPC Syed’s death. No luck, of course. So, when it was about half-past six, I decided the lad had been on the go long enough. I told him we’d head back to the nick, get changed out of uniform, and call it a day.’

  ‘You were with him all the time till you got back to the station? He didn’t stay behind somewhere towards the end, offered a cup of tea or something?’

  ‘No, ma’am. He was with me all afternoon and right up until we walked into the nick. I said I’d meet him in the canteen then, soon as I’d been to the loo. But when I got back — I’d taken a few extra minutes to get out of uniform while I was at it — he’d gone. I wasn’t particularly worried. Thought a kid like him’d prefer to go off with his mates.’

  ‘So you didn’t see him again after — what? — seven thirty?’

  ‘More like seven fifteen, ma’am.’

  ‘You realize he was wearing uniform when he was found?’

  ‘No. No, ma’am, I didn’t. The stupid— He shouldn’t have. He should not have. I’d distinctly said to him that we’d both have to change. Your order’s very clear. No one to be out in the streets in uniform unless accompanied by another officer. And, you know, Mickey wasn’t a lad to disobey orders just to be clever. That’s what hit me so badly — him being a really good and useful lad — when you told me just now.’

  ‘Well, whatever reason he had, or didn’t have, he was in uniform when he was killed. I suppose, in fact, if he’d obeyed orders he’d be alive now. As it is, we’ll have to go to every pub, every café, every amusement arcade in the area to see if we get a sighting of him.’

  And all the time the Evening Star’s famous Cop Killer will be looking for his next victim. Perhaps he’s waiting somewhere even now. With that cleaver. Waiting for a chance to cut off some officer’s foot and leave him, leave him or her, to bleed to death the way young Chatterton did.

  Unless that bloodstained coat in the yard there turns out to have some solid evidential value. Unless, the best hope surely, we do find just where Chatterton had that Roofie put in his drink. Or unless Dr Smellyfeet’s Profile comes up with some startling insight. Startling and accurate.

  Her phone buzzed.

  ‘Superintendent Martens?’

  The Chief Constable. Another of his increasingly anxious, urgent and pointless calls?

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘I’ve been thinking, Miss Martens. I take it we’re all agreed this man is a lunatic — or whatever we’re supposed to call them nowadays.’

  ‘There can hardly be any doubt of that, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Well, then, I’ve been wondering if he might be susceptible to an appeal. He must have— He may have periods of lucidity. And if in one of them he reads, or sees on television, a reasoned appeal to him to give himself up … If we say something on the lines of Come forward now. You plainly need help … We should get that Press Officer, what’s his name …’

  ‘Sergeant Sumpter, sir.’

  ‘Yes. Yes, he could decide on the exact wording, or whether you should give an interview on those lines yourself, or someone else should.’

  Rob Roberts? If you want the human touch … The bloody sight too much of the human touch.

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll certainly give it my consideration. Or, perhaps, I could talk to Dr Scholl about it?’

  ‘Good idea. Yes, excellent. Do that.’

  Putting down the phone, Harriet realized it was almost time for the daily briefing. And, tired and battered by events as she was, fighting the fatigue of an almost sleepless night in Froggy Froggott’s big black chair, how was she going once again to impress her will on the men and women under her command? In face of the bleak, black news she would be updating? More than a few of the officers might have known young Chatterton at least to talk to. His sort of keen youngster would seize every opportunity to question real detectives. How, with the pitifully few forward-pointing facts she had got to give out, could she force into each one of the team the determination within herself?

  Some new facts she did have. Reports had been coming in to her from the moment she had got back to her office. Negative reports, however Young Chatterton had been seen in the Queen Street canteen at somewhere between quarter past seven and half-past the evening before. And, so far, from then onwards until his body had been found at twenty-eight minutes past five next morning by two patrolling constables, obeying her own order to look into every dark corner for a cleaver-wielding maniac, he had not been seen by anyone anywhere.

  So where had he been when someone slipped that Rohypnol tablet into something he was about to drink, she asked the circle of intent faces in front of her.

  She got only the merest floating suggestions. And always the thought came dragging back to her that the individual Dr Smellyfeet insisted on calling Mr Man had now with this death hand for hand clearly launched into his whole crusade aimed at the officers of Greater Birchester Police. If originally his object had been to do no more than take a life for a life and to kill once eye for eye, with the rebuff he had had when Froggy Froggott had scorned the idea that those two deaths were a joint revenge he had, it was clear now, embarked on fulfilling the whole uncompromising Exodus injunction.

  So now at once foot for foot must be in his mind. If in contriving this it might seem he was setting himself an unnecessarily perverse and complex task, the same could have been said of his arranging a murder to put into reality hand for hand. Yet he had done it.

  But how? How? Where in the last few hours of his life had Cadet Chatterton accepted a drink from a stranger?

  Yet the briefing, she thought as at last she left the room, had in the end gone better than she could have expected. There had been no need to infuse any extra determination. The killing of yet another one who had ‘worn the cloth’, even if he had not done so for more than a few months, had been enough to tauten faces as they looked up at her, to bring questions and suggestions that eventually had crackled with frustrated energy.

  Now, the thought came dully into her head, in less than half an hour I’m faced with the daily press conference, with accounting to the hungry and querulous media for my failure to stop ‘Cop Killer’ before another death had been added to the toll. And no point any longer in concealing that WPC Syed’s death had been one in that toll. The coincidence would be too much.

  There came a brisk knock on her door.

  ‘Come in.’

  Dr Smellyfeet.

  All I need.

  ‘Well,’ he said, exuding a cheerful confidence the more irritating for showing no sign of his having been called out of bed before six, ‘here we are at last. The Profile. I’m
sorry I’ve been so long over it really, but it wasn’t until late last night I got enough in my computer back at the uni to produce a properly robust theory.’

  He tapped with long pink fingers at an enormously thick blue cardboard file held precariously under his left arm.

  ‘Look,’ Harriet said. ‘I’ve got a press conference in twenty minutes. This will really have to wait.’

  ‘Well, it could. Of course, it could. But I rather think you’ll be a good deal better armed for what they may throw at you at that conference if you listen to some of the things I can tell you. My whole theory is here, of course, the lot, maps, graphs, tables. But I could give you a quick run-down of the key points.’

  Patience. At least for a quarter of an hour. No, ten minutes.

  ‘All right. Take a seat. And shoot.’

  ‘Yes. Now, the first thing is I’ve established the area in which, in all probability, Mr Man lives.’

  ‘Well, where?’

  ‘Very simple. All four crimes, with the accountable exception of Detective Superintendent Froggott’s death, occurred within a circle with a radius of less than half a mile. A circle which actually has its centre more or less where your Queen Street police station comes. Or, to be strictly accurate, it’s a sort of flattened circle. Because across the northern edge of it there runs the Birchester–Liverpool Canal. Look at this sketch map I’ve made.’

  He planked the fat file on her desk, scrabbled in it for a moment and produced a thick sheet of paper.

  ‘Look, here’s the circle with Queen Street police station at the centre. But there, along the top of it, there’s a straight line cutting off the upper segment. That’s the canal. So the area I’ve picked out is a sort of cup shape. Okay?’