But would it be the same check again? A lair found, and no one in it?
Not unlikely. Grace, the planner, must have been prepared for an immediate police reaction to the lightning attack on the point-duty officer she had plotted. Perhaps she had calculated that, by getting away after it not in the obvious direction, she would be able to reach safety. And, except for the chance of that one witness being so shocked she had stayed there paralysed and seen, without seeing, that shapeless blue hat bobbing away, Grace might have disappeared cleanly as if she had been banished by a stage conjuror. As she might vanish yet.
Then, as the minutes went by without a sighting, a new thought seated itself in Harriet’s head. Grace Brown was every bit as much of a challenger as herself. An avenger wanting the world to know she was killing police officers because she believed, at the obscure beginnings of it all in a mini-riot at an anti-abortion protest, the life of her unborn, last-hope child had been taken by the action of a police officer.
Then why — another thought presented itself — why had Grace not accepted the challenge that had screamed at her from the front-page headline of the Evening Star, from the excited voices of radio reporters? Why, this afternoon at the stretch of canal so near Chapeltown instead of darting her lightning attack on PC Venning, had she not come out there, with that kitchen knife? Why from somewhere between two of the great tall dilapidated buildings on the towpath had she not leapt with knife upraised? Why as dusk had fallen and there was only the occasional sigh of a gust of wind, the scuttle of a rat, the sudden inexplicable dripping from some broken pipe, had Grace not come, shapeless blue hat on head, for that confrontation?
Had she perhaps, fixed in her long resolve, simply dismissed the notion of meeting head to head the woman leading the hunt for her? Were the planner’s plans so set in stone that nothing would alter them?
If so, had all the contrivance of getting that challenge issued gone for nothing? Had the risk willingly taken, but not without counting the possible cost, been not in any way worthwhile? Had the real possibility of disciplinary disaster, no less, if that gamble had gone awry, proved to have been to no purpose?
And, worse, when the passing minutes had turned to hours and the phone calls obstinately repeated nil results, the thought grew sharper and heavier: was there now no way of preventing Grace reaching to the end of her long catalogue of death? If she had in her fixed determination been able to ignore the challenge thrown down to her, was there any way, except to hope for some lucky chance, of preventing the death of yet another Greater Birchester Police officer?
She looked at her watch. Midnight would be the time to sign off hope. Half an hour to go.
And then her mobile sounded, and DI Johnston’s voice crackled in her ear, dourly keeping down the excitement he was plainly feeling.
‘We’ve found her place, ma’am. One of the patrols — I was just about to call them off, and then —’
‘Grace Brown? You’ve got her?’
‘No, ma’am. No, the bird had flown, as they say. But—’
‘How long before? Any sign which way she went?’
‘No, ma’am, she must have left right after stabbing PC Venning, from the look of it. But she can’t have gone far, even if she has succeeded in hiding herself away again. With all the uniforms I’ve had going up and down the streets, she’d have been bound to be spotted if she’d tried to get right away.’
‘Inspector, I’m coming down. Where are you?’
*
It was not even inside a house. DI Johnston, a little miffed at having his triumph abruptly set aside, had been waiting for her at the doorless doorway of an almost totally derelict narrow, two-storey dwelling — ‘Bulldozers in next month,’ he had muttered — and had led her through to a shed in the tiny yard behind, the beam of his torch pointing to a missing floorboard here and there as they went.
The shed, still in a reasonable state of repair, door intact, an open padlock hanging from the hasp, took up almost a third of the space of the yard. Inside it, DI Johnston’s slowly moving torch beam revealed little beside an old mattress on the floor against one of the shrivelled wooden walls with a rucked-up grey blanket on it. And, yes, surely, too, an old royal-blue donkey jacket.
‘Shine your torch on that jacket, DI.’
‘Ma’am.’
In the strong beam of the torch, held close, it was easy to see on the greasy cloth a dark stain that could well be old dried blood.
‘Yes. Get this to Forensic and they’ll find it’s Titmuss’s blood on it. Bound to be. So we’ll have some evidence — if we ever get the woman to court.’
Over the shed’s one grimy window another piece of blanket had been draped, although the chance of the light inside being seen must have been absurdly remote. The planner planning for every last contingency, even the absolutely minimal risk from the gleam of the stub of a candle fastened by its melted wax to the floor. Beside that there lay a tin plate with, still there as evidence of recent occupation, half a crust of a sliced loaf. In the far corner some scraps of paper, including the wrapper from the loaf, were the only other indications that it had been here that Grace had evaded all the police searchers’ efforts.
‘You’ve looked through that pile?’ Harriet asked.
‘I have, ma’am. Turned it over myself. It’ll be bagged for Forensic in just a minute. May be a print or two on something, for what it’s worth. But otherwise nothing of any significance.’
‘Could you tell where she’d been buying her bread?’
‘No, ma’am. Everything only what you might get at any little corner shop.’
‘All right. So, what about that?’
Harriet pointed to an object on the floor half-hidden by the shed door. A battered little plastic transistor lying on its back, made almost invisible by engrained dust.
‘Yes, I did see that, ma’am. But it’s plain it was thrown down there long before the former occupants left. Three, four, five years ago. Judging by the look of it.’
‘Does it work?’
‘Work? I shouldna’ think it was working even five years ago.’
Harriet picked up the dusty, cracked object with her gloved hands and flicked at the volume switch. It had been in the ‘on’ position, but when she clicked it to and fro a tiny crackling could be heard. But no more.
She turned the little box round and, with one probing finger, peeled away the damp-soft, hole-punched cardboard sheet on the back.
‘Shine your torch in,’ she said to the DI.
By its light she was able to see the pair of dry cells that had powered the thing.
‘Yes. Batteries not five years old, not by any means. But I rather think these must be exhausted. Step outside, and we’ll try them in your torch if they fit.’
The DI had caught on by now.
‘You’re saying she’s been toting that old radio round with her, ma’am? And left it here just because it’d gone kaput? She’s been keeping in touch with police activities that way?’
‘Thanks in the first place to our friends in the media. Ever helpful.’
A little fumbling in the faint light from a cloud-covered moon and it was confirmed that the transistor had been run until its batteries were all but dead.
‘And that accounts, DI,’ Harriet said, unusually communicative in the pleasure of her discovery, ‘for Grace Brown seeming to decline the challenge blared out at her on radio, on TV, in the Evening Star. You realize there was no newspaper among that pile in the corner in there?’
‘Yes, of course, ma’am. So, do you think she’d have had a go at you somewhere, if she’d known?’
‘Let’s say I’m pretty sure of it.’
At home at last, in her silent, empty house, she resolutely put into practice her system of sleep-going. Relax the body, feet, legs, small of back, chest, arms, hands, neck, facial muscles. Close eyes. Wait for the sudden paradoxical chips of vision from the subconscious. Turn over. Oblivion.
Chapter Sixteen
&nb
sp; Out of the short night’s oblivion one glimmer of hope manifested itself as a waking thought. Might there be a way, even now, of putting that challenge before the madwoman still intent on murder? Even if Grace had had to abandon the dust-dark plastic radio which had helped her to out-plot the best efforts of Greater Birchester Police? Even if, perhaps, she no longer risked going out to buy an Evening Star, like the one left in the Sullivan Street house? If that challenge was plastered on newspaper bills all over Chapeltown’s grimy, now rain-soaked streets, could it reach her even at this late moment?
Top Cop’s Challenge — Cop Killer Challenge — Top Cop Seeks Meeting — Killer or Cop Who Will Win?
Harriet imagined them.
Would bills like that take the situation back to where it had been twenty-four hours earlier? By the end of the day now would a second solitary march up and down the deserted stretch of the canal bring about the sudden onrush from the shadows she had expected before? Or would it need another day before it came? Two more days? A week of unwatched pacing that length of towpath?
But perhaps the pairs of officers she intended to have go through Chapeltown today, rain or shine, poking into every such empty house as the one where DI Johnston had found Grace’s latest lair would, even in two or three hours’ time, have brought the hunt to a whirl-of-action conclusion.
Still, before leaving home she made a telephone call.
‘Queen Street police station. CID Room.’
‘Superintendent Martens here. Who’s on duty now?’
‘Oh, good morning, ma’am. Or rather, rotten rainy morning. DC Sparks here.’
For an instant the recollection of Froggy Froggott’s I don’t want a weather report: I want action came back to her.
But what she wanted now was co-operation.
‘And who else is with you?’
‘Well, ma’am, there’s only just the two of us here this early, me and DC Brewer.’
‘Right. Good, good. I’ll have a word with Brewer.’
Brewer was one of those detectives who never aspire to rise higher than the lowest rank in the CID. But, once he had been transferred into plain clothes, he had been in his element. Sources of information collected up and down the B Division area, a list of informers the envy of any detective of any rank, friends and acquaintances everywhere, and a few enemies. A happy record of arrests, even if almost all for the lesser crimes.
Bill. Yes, that was his name.
‘Bill, good morning.’
‘Ma’am?’
A touch of caution. Unused to hard-woman Detective Chief Inspector Martens — as she had been when he had come directly under her — unbending to this extent.
‘Tell me, do you happen to know anybody in the Evening Star printing works?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised if I did, ma’am. Print workers are generally pretty fond of a pint.’
‘Good. So let me, when I can, buy a drink for you and any friend of yours there, if you can bring one to mind.’
‘I never say no to an offer like that, ma’am. Or not unless I think I’m being asked to step too far out of line.’
‘Ah, no. Nothing of that sort. It’s just that there is something I want doing. Without those nosy bastards of Evening Star reporters reading anything into it.’
‘Then I dare say I could help you, ma’am.’
*
Before she had to stand in front of yet another press conference, Harriet, wearing uniform in anticipation of an encounter at the day’s end on the bank of the deserted canal, took one more step in her struggle with Grace Brown. Wound for wound had been reached in Grace’s Exodus tariff. Reached and paid for. But one more bloody exhortation remained: stripe for stripe. How was Grace to be thwarted, if somehow she failed to see the renewed newspaper bill challenge DC Bill Brewer should be quietly getting organized? Or if, in her one-track determination, she ignored it?
What plan now must the plan-maker be making? There was one obvious obstacle Grace would have to overcome. Stripe for stripe plainly implied a Greater Birchester Police officer being somehow flogged and then killed. One of the reporters from the nationals had even, at the conference after the death of PC Strachan, taken the opportunity to ask a lip-smacking question about the hunt for Grace Brown not being over before a woman police officer was whipped. But if Grace was going to attempt something of this sort, and after her killing hand for hand of Cadet Chatterton and her yet more perversely ingenious murder foot for foot of ex-PC Studley no one could doubt she could do it, she must first of all get hold of the necessary implement. And, thanks to the way she had been successfully harried, she almost certainly no longer had access to anywhere that, well in advance, she might have hidden a whip. So it was altogether likely now that she would have to attempt to get hold of one. And, in late twentieth-century Birchester, whips were no longer everyday purchasable items. In fact, probably the only place to get one would be at a sex shop.
So, at her briefing she tasked half a dozen members of her team with visiting every sex shop in Birchester — they were mostly to be found in the city’s sleazy quarter, Moorfields — to get the staff, warned not to attempt to detain this unlikely but dangerous customer, to report at once any purchase by an elderly woman of any sort of whip. At the last moment, too, against all her feelings about letting no infringement of the law however minor go untouched, Harriet added a rider. Some indication could be given that co-operation would be rewarded with less police attention.
Then off to meet the press, the red-eyed TV cameras, the waving stubby microphones. With the secret comfort of thinking that, probably before it was over, thanks to Detective Constable Brewer, newspaper bill after newspaper bill would be on their way through the city’s rain-slicked streets to Chapeltown to be pasted on blank walls — plenty of those down there — or stuck up in front of all the remaining little shops still open among the black-windowed, deserted houses.
‘Superintendent, can you tell us what precautions were in place when PC Gary Venning was stabbed while on point-duty, alone, in Queen Street last evening?’
It was Tim Patterson, once again.
‘The normal precautions when there is a repeat murderer uncaught.’
‘Can you tell us what those precautions were?’
‘Certainly not. The woman who attacked PC Venning is still at large.’
‘Then can you say what attempts were made to apprehend her last night?’
‘Yes. Thanks to diligent work under Detective Inspector Johnston the place where we suspect the attacker was living was discovered.’
A gratifying murmur of interest. Something reflecting credit on Greater Birchester Police at last going to appear in the papers?
‘But no clues were found there that got you anywhere?’
Tim Patterson well informed as usual. One day his source will be worth discovering. And punishing. But, no, there won’t be any words of praise for good police-work now.
‘If we have found helpful evidence it naturally will have to be kept confidential.’
Another reporter bobbing up. And about time. One of the nationals by the look of her.
‘Superintendent, I understand that an order for Birchester Police officers in uniform not to go about on their own was rescinded, and then put back in place. Can you explain how it came about, then, that Police Constable Venning was exposed to an attack that might well have been fatal, when he was entirely on his own?’
Yes, gabby enough to be a national paper reporter being given a try-out on us poor provincials. And easy enough to answer.
‘PC Venning was hardly entirely on his own. He was on point-duty in what, at that hour of the evening, is perhaps the most crowded area in the whole of Birchester.’
Slap.
But, no. Tim Patterson up on his feet again. And practically shouting.
‘Crowded the Queen Street area may be, Superintendent, but it wasn’t exactly crowded with police officers when Cop Killer struck again. Wound for wound as the Good Book has it — and as
you must surely have been expecting.’
‘Is that a question, Mr Patterson? Or an extract from one of the Evening Star leaders?’
Mistake. Keep patient.
‘Well, this is my question then: why was PC Venning left exposed like that?’
Mistake punished.
Harriet drew a breath.
‘I’ll tell you why. Policing is a matter of war. The police, the forces of law and order, are at war with the criminals in our midst. We are. We always have been. And I dare say we always will be. You, Mr Patterson, as a crime reporter, should be well aware of that. But perhaps you are not so aware of this. That in a war commanders have to give orders that endanger the lives of the men and women under them. They know they are endangering them. And they still have to give those orders. I knew that PC Venning, like all the other officers sent on point-duty on their own, was there at some risk, even some considerable risk. But it was a necessary risk. The city of Birchester cannot be policed by officers in pairs day after day, on and on, and everywhere. So I modified the order that any officer in uniform must go about with another. Point-duty was one of the exceptions I made. And I stand by that. Unhesitatingly.’
*
Late afternoon was the time Harriet had fixed on as being the earliest she could expect Grace Brown to go dodging through the dingy streets of Chapeltown to the deserted canal, still the likeliest place for her to respond to the challenge. If, in yet deeper hiding somewhere after her attack on PC Venning, she had even seen the newspaper bills. If she was not at this moment, blaring bills seen and ignored, simply slipping through the early rainy dusk to Moorfields, its porn bookstores, sex-trap clubs and garish sex-shops, a little hoard of money tucked somewhere among her nondescript clothes, nothing diverting her from her progress to a death stripe for stripe.
The Hard Detective Page 15